John August: Recent Episodes
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John welcomes Danya Jimenez & Hannah McMechan, the writing team behind KPop Demon Hunters, to chart their path from film school to first feature.
They look at navigating early career difficulties like finding your voice and trying to get reps, their method of building a writing partnership, and how a bad pitch led them to writing one of the biggest movies of the year.
We also follow up on breaking in later in life and writing with ADHD.
In our bonus segment for premium members, what does Hollywood get wrong about Gen Z? Danya and Hannah share what drives them crazy about how their generation is portrayed on screen.
Links:
- Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan
- KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix
- No Strings Attached
- The Black List x Women in Film Episodic Lab
- Nicole Perlman on Scriptnotes, episodes 164, 222, 373, 381
- Brick
- Pluribus on Apple TV
- Claire Saffitz makes Dirt Bombs
- The Parade’s Gone By by Kevin Brownlow
- Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
- Chernobyl on HBO Max
- Chappell Roan – Love Me Anyway
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Your First Produced Film first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids: there’s some swearing in this episode.
[music]
John: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 712 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome back one of our favorite guests and guest hosts.
Craig: Yes.
John: Dana Fox is a writer and showrunner whose credits include, taking a breath here, What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat, Ben and Kate, How to Be Single, Cruella, Home Before Dark, The Lost City, Wicked, and the upcoming Wicked: For Good. She’s also my former assistant and one of my very favorite people. Welcome back, Dana Fox.
Craig: Ta-da.
Dana Fox: John and Craig are my favorite people. I have to say it right away. Get it out of my system.
John: We’re recording this in our office on a very rainy day. Behind you is the couch, which you would often take naps on.
Dana: I assume you were going to have it bronzed, but it’s just the same couch. It’s still here.
John: The same couch. Lambert is now taking a nap on your couch.
Dana: I saw it, and I had a Pavlovian response to it. The second I saw it, I thought I was going to fall asleep on it.
Craig: The gravity just takes you in, and you just want to lie down and not work.
Dana: Hold me towards it and made me disappoint John because I wasn’t awake to answer his phone.
Craig: Look at you now.
Dana: It’s because he let me nap that I think I did so well in the business.
Craig: [laughs] Okay. Well, something has to explain it.
Dana: I just needed to sleep a little bit. I was so tired. I needed to prep.
John: Look at you now with those headphones on. As Craig said, you do look like Princess Leia.
Dana: Thanks, guys.
Craig: Exactly like Obi-Wan, you’re our only hope, Princess Leia, because you’re wearing a Princess Leia–
Dana: She was a real hero of mine, so thank you for that. I really wanted to be her.
John: Carrie Fisher, of course. Incredible.
Dana: Oh my God, she’s incredible, and the most amazing writer.
John: Did you ever meet her?
Dana: No, I never did. I would have lost my mind.
John: I went to a birthday party for a friend that was at her house. She was exactly as cool and weird as you would want her to be.
Dana: A dream.
John: A dream. An absolute dream.
Craig: Nice.
John: Today, with you on the show, I do want to talk about Wicked, obviously. I also want to talk about character suffering, whether the ’90s were really a great movie decade, or whether this is all just our nostalgia. We’ll get into that.
Dana: Amazing. Am I the character who’s suffering or characters that I write?
John: You will be. There’s a listener question about character suffering.
Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about me. I was like, “I’m now suffering.”
John: Well, we’ll get into suffering because in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the promo circuit because you’re on the promo circuit right now, and Craig’s been through the promo circuit. It’s just exhausting.
Dana: It’s intense. I’m really tired.
John: It’s a mark of success that you have to do the promo circuit, but it’s just it’s a lot.
Dana: Yes, and you became a writer because you enjoy pajamas and glasses and never doing your hair, and then you’re on–
John: Not being looked at, basically.
Dana: Never having a single person look at your face.
Craig: Yes. That’s my favorite thing in the world.
Dana: Craig, that is the best thing in the entire world. Then you’re on the promo circuit and all the wrong things are happening. People are looking directly at your face.
John: Sitting next to you is the Scriptnotes book, the Hardcovers, which just came in. We’re so excited to hold them. Craig, have you gotten yours up in Canada yet?
Craig: I have not received it in Canada yet. I don’t even know if you guys have my address in Canada.
Dana: You guys, it’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to read it. It’s so gorgeous. Just to say, if I may, John and Craig are the people that I call whenever I don’t know how to do anything. I’m always like, “Hey, guys, I’m sorry.” Let’s say I started with a voiceover, and then I have to do a fade-in. “Where does fade in go on the page?” Nobody knows. It all looks weird.”
John: Basically, non-creative questions then.
Dana: No, that’s not true. I call you guys with every question I have. Now I just have the book, so there’s no excuse that I’m not allowed to call you anymore. I have to look at the book.
Craig: It’s true. Dana sometimes calls. She’s like, “But is 1 also a prime number?” It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. It’s about anything.
Dana: It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. Totally.
John: One of the goals with the Scriptnotes book, as you remember, is that we wanted a book that if you were to throw it across the room, you could hurt a person. I’ll say that the book has some sharp edges to it, which is nice, but it’s actually lighter than I’d expect. Isn’t it lighter in your hand?
Dana: It’s looking wild. It looks like a trompe-l’oeil. Is it a cake? You know that show?
Craig: Absolutely. It looks like it could be cake.
Dana: Is it cake?
John: It could be cake.
Dana: Yes, because you pick it up and it’s like, “Ooh, no problem,” but it looks substantial.
John: If you throw it in your backpack, it’s not weighing you down, but it is a substantial book. Also, it lies flat, which I didn’t know was going to happen, but actually it’s nice.
Craig: Oh.
John: You can actually open up it.
Dana: [gasps] You’re right. I’m doing it. Reader or listener, I’m doing it. This is great.
Craig: You called the podcast listeners readers.
Dana: I don’t know how to do this, you guys. I’m so bad at stuff. I called my phone the internet before to John. I said, I just kept pointing at it and going, “I have to internet it later.” He was like, “What is happening with you?”
Craig: Oh, Dana Fox.
Dana: I love you guys.
John: Thank you to everybody who sent in the pre-order receipts to Drew at askajohnaugust.com, because we love those and they’re a way for us to know how many people are actually buying the book. This past week, Drew, you sent all those folks a bonus chapter. How did that go?
Drew: Really well. People were really nice about it and sent glowing emails back, which felt nice to read.
Dana: I’m going to do a thing. Am I allowed to say this?
John: Please.
Dana: I’m going to do a thing on my ‘internet’, which is my phone, on Instagram. My handle is @inthehenhouse. I’m going to give away 20 copies. I’m going to send them to people.
Craig: What? Really?
Dana: To young people, students. If you’re a student, if you’re trying to be a writer, I want to send you one of these books because these men, Craig and John, are the greatest people of all time, that they’ve spent their time trying to help other writers be better. They believe ‘rising tides raises all boats’, and they’re generous with their time. I love them. I want to send 20 books to whoever needs one.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: I have never felt anything doing this podcast until this moment.
Dana: DM me on my internet.
Craig: I’m having feelings.
Dana: Are you having feelings, Craig?
Craig: I’m having feelings. That was beautiful. Thank you.
Dana: It’s the least I could do. I just think you guys are amazing.
Craig: That’s very sweet, and it’s very generous of you, unless you’re stealing the books. If you’re stealing the books, it’s not generous.
Dana: No. I’m buying the books and giving them away.
Craig: Oh, okay. That is generous.
John: The bonus chapter we sent out is on getting stuff written. It was a chapter that was originally going to be in the book, and the book was just 600 pages, so we had to make some beautiful cuts [unintelligible 00:05:46]. We cleaned it up, we’ve formatted it nicely, and we sent it to all the people who had pre-ordered the book and sent the receipts in.
Dana: It’s amazing.
John: We’re still going to send it out. If you pre-order it now, we will send it to you. Drew will send it to you today. If you want this bonus chapter, it turned out really well.
Dana: Great. I’ll take the bonus chapter. Can I get some bonus chapter later?
Craig: Absolutely.
John: She needs to get some stuff written. One of the questions we get frequently is, are Craig and I going to do the audiobook, or are we going to read the audiobook for the Scriptnotes book? The answer is hell no. We are not doing that. That is a job left to a professional.
Dana: Correct.
John: I’m so excited to introduce the professional who actually did read the Scriptnotes book.
Craig: Woohoo.
John: Graham Rowat is an actor, a narrator whose talents span Broadway stages, television screens, audiobook recordings. You’ve seen him on Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen, Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!, Guys and Dolls, Beauty and the Beast. He’s also a friend and a longtime Scriptnotes listener. Graham Rowat, welcome officially to The Scriptnotes podcast.
Graham Rowat: Thank you for having me.
Dana: Listen to that deep voice, guys.
Craig: You can hear the Broadway right in there.
Dana: Listen to–
Graham: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Craig: It’s so good.
Graham: [chuckles]
Craig: So good.
Dana: Get out of here. Your advice just got better. Everything you guys wrote in the book is better. Just look at that.
John: Come on, the gravitas of that?
Dana: Intense.
Craig: These shows that you’ve been in, just one great show after another. Congratulations. That’s amazing.
Dana: I know. Incredible.
Graham: I thought to myself, I know John gets to Broadway shows. How about the other guests on the pod today? Does anyone get to see Broadway that often?
Dana: Funny story.
Craig: Not as often as I’d like to. I live in Los Angeles, and now I live in Canada.
Graham: For sure.
Craig: I do see shows pretty frequently once they make their way to the Pantages or something like that, or I go to the bowl. I went for Jesus Christ Superstar, and I went for Into the Woods.
Craig: That’s great.
Graham: I love a show.
Dana: That’s great.
Graham: What can I say?
Dana: I love a show.
Graham: I love a show.
John: We mostly love that your voice is our book because when the topic of the audiobook came up and Graham graciously asked, “Hey, do you or Craig want to do it?” It was like, “Oh, it’ll be like four days in a recording studio.” You’re like, “Absolutely not.”
Dana: No.
John: I wanted somebody to do the book who knew the show, knew the voice of the show, had a sense of what this was like. I asked Graham who would do it, and they figured out how to make a deal for Graham to do it. Graham, I’m curious, what is it like to record this? Because the book is not Craig and I back and forth. It’s just, it’s a we voice behind it. What is your process? What is your instinct going into try to read this book?
Graham: Well, the first thing I did was I wanted to listen to every one of the episodes that featured the guests that are quoted in the chapters. It’s tricky because I want to find a neutral voice, but I hear you and Craig when I’m reading the book. There are distinct moments, too. There’s a chapter, the Die Hard chapter, where it is the two of you having a discussion.
Craig: Yes, it’s true.
Graham: The neutral voice is pretty much me. That’s always the easiest thing to work from and go back to. Then, when the two of you step out and actually are John and Craig, for example, there’s Craig’s whole chapter where he presents his approach to screenwriting, I tried to stay true to the Craig persona.
Here’s the thing: it’s a matter of very subtle changes because one of the very first things they teach you when you’re learning the old audiobook stuff is that anything too broad, that’s what the audience is going to be listening to, especially accents. They’re going to be sitting there thinking, “I don’t think that’s a very good accent.”
Dana: You decided not to do the Australian accent for Craig?
Graham: I didn’t. I gave him sort of the Maverick Ed McMahon energy.
Craig: Nice. Good.
Dana: Hot. Yes, sexy.
Craig: Not hot, no. McMahon, no.
Dana: Oh, I thought what the Ed McMahon energy was. I always thought it was really sexy.
Graham: No, young Ed McMahon. A real young, dashing Ed McMahon.
[laughter]
John: Graham, a question for you. We’re talking about the chapters that are interspersed with all the subject chapters are interview chapters. Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, for example, we try to do a light edit on them so you can still feel their voice and how they speak. What was it like for you to figure out how to make them sound on that? They read differently on the page, so how was it actually articulating those?
Graham: Thankfully, and listening to the episodes and listening to the interviews allowed me to have an image in my head so that when I got to Greta’s chapter, I could make a very slight adjustment vocally. It’s more about the conversational tone that was a part of their interviews. If I can inject? A little bit of a more casual conversational tone in their chapters, I feel like that makes it more distinct. If I am doing a Greta, I have her in my head because I’d listen to her, so if I make a slight pitch adjustment and I just make it a little more casual, I feel like I’m doing her justice, and I’m making enough of a shift away from the neutral narrator.
Christopher Nolan was the tricky one because he’s the very first one up. I thought if he had been ninth or tenth in your list of guests and I’d reached him, I probably could have gotten away with a very subtle English accent. I think the listener would have been okay with that because they’d be like, “Well, he’s used up all the other textures. We can give him a break.” But because he was the first one up, I had a conversation with the producer when I recorded this; he was Chris [unintelligible 00:11:14] was patched in from Texas. I said, “Should we do it?” and we came down on the side of not doing an accent for Christopher Nolan.
Craig: I think that’s fair. I think it’s a smart idea, given the fact that it starts it off because some people who haven’t heard Christopher Nolan speak might think, “Oh, this entire thing is going to be read in an English accent.” Also, Christopher’s brother Jonah has no English accent.
Graham: It’s so fascinating how different they are.
Craig: I feel like the Nolan family, you’re allowed to do either English or American. You’re fine.
Graham: That’s a relief.
Craig: Yes, you’re good. They won’t be coming after you.
John: Well, Graham, we are so, so, so appreciative that you did the book. Thank you so much for reading it. For folks who want to hear Graham read it, it’s December 2nd, just like the main book is out. It’s available everywhere. It should be on Audible, but every place you can buy audiobooks will have it.
Dana: I have 42 Audible credits I need to spend. I’m going to use one of them on this.
John: This is the perfect thing. It’s also going to be fun for people who’ve listened to the whole show to hear our words and just a different person saying it, which is great.
Dana: Different way.
Craig: Love it.
Dana: That’s so great. I’m so excited. There’s no one I trust more for advice about screenplay writing than you guys. This is amazing that you’ve done this book.
Craig: Thank you, Dana. Whatever content we provided, plus Graham’s magically resonant voice, should be very effective. Everyone should write better after this. We don’t know what else to do, honestly.
John: Graham, thank you. Thank you so much.
Dana: Thank you. Nice to meet you.
Graham: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you, Graham.
Graham: Take care.
Dana: That’s a chill voice right there, man.
Craig: It’s a good voice.
Dana: My thing is I usually listen to voices like that to go to bed at night. I’m having an ‘all right, all right’ moment from just talking to him. I’m ready to snooze it up on that couch over there.
John: Do you listen to any of those sleepcasts where they just talk about nonsense that just goes on, it just melts away?
Dana: Yes, 100%. I like a little patter. I like a sleep timer, and then boom, I’m out.
John: We have some follow-up to get to. Drew, could you start us off with some follow-up?
Drew Marquardt: Martin writes, “I recently listened to John’s appearance on the Birbiglia podcast, and I was fascinated by his method of writing his screenplays in Las Vegas hotels. I wonder if John is aware that this technique of literary production was invented and/or perfected by one of the most successful writers of all time, Agatha Christie. I saw an image making the rounds last year, clearly a scan of an actual book, but I don’t know what book. The quote is attributed to an author named Christiana Brand, and here is the quote.
‘Agatha Christie once described to me her own particular method of getting down to work. She mulled over a book in her mind until it was ready. She said, ‘Well, we all do that.’ She would then repair to a very bad hotel. In a bad hotel, there was nothing to do but to write and plenty of time to do it in. The beds were so uncomfortable that you had no inclination to retire early or to get up late. The armchair’s so unyielding that you wasted not a minute in idle relaxation. The meals were so bad that there was no temptation to linger over them.
Any guests who would put up with such conditions must, of necessity, be so stupid that you couldn’t possibly make friends and spend precious moments in desultory chat. The book would be done in a matter of weeks, and you could pack up a few dull clothes, which were all you needed to bother to take with you and go off triumphantly home.'”
John: Dana Fox, this thing of me writing in hotel rooms, I think I did that while you were my assistant. Was I ever faxing you pages? Do you remember that?
Dana: 100%. A fax machine was involved at some point. I think, also, you did a thing involving trains at one point.
John: I took the train from LA to Seattle and wrote on the train, and then I faxed stuff back from the train. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has written this, except that this last April, I was in Aswan, Egypt, where she wrote Death on the Nile, and I was at the hotel where she wrote Death on the Nile. It was the Old Cataract Hotel. By the way, it is a luxury hotel.
Dana: Yes, she’s full of shit.
John: Maybe at this point, she was actually like-
Dana: The armchair was amazing. The desultory conversations occurred constantly.
John: We were able to tour the room where she wrote it. It’s like a three-room thing with a walk-in closet.
Dana: Fantastic.
John: Then a patio. So she’s kind of flying.
Dana: Yes. [chuckles] It’s kind of amazing.
John: That’s what I’m hearing.
Craig: Thank you for writing in about this. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has done this. Let’s move on to follow up on weirdness. Mike has a recommendation for a good, weird movie.
Drew: “You Want Weird? Friendship from Andrew DeYoung. My wife called it the worst movie she’s ever seen. I thought it was brilliant. We’re still married.”
John: I really liked Friendship, by the way. It should have been one of my One Cool Things. It’s a movie with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. It is just really, really strange in a way that I loved.
Dana: I remember seeing that and thinking, “I’m going to like that,” and then never seeing–
John: You’re going to watch it on the plane when you fly home?
Dana: That’s right. That’s a plane movie.
John: It’s a plane movie.
Dana: I like to cry on planes, too. Can I cry in that or not?
John: No. You will laugh and feel unnerved.
Craig: You can cry.
Dana: I like to cry, if possible.
Craig: At the end, if you feel like a good cry, just force it out. It’s funny.
Dana: Just force it out of you.
Craig: We were on a plane recently and–
Dana: Yes, we were on a plane recently.
Craig: I feel once we stopped talking to each other, we started to cry.
Dana: My daughter, who is 11, bought me a sweatshirt because she knows how much I like to sleep. I feel like this is the only thing I’ve talked about on this podcast is sleeping. She bought me this sweatshirt. It’s called ‘Comfrt’ but it’s missing a letter-
John: Of course, it has to be.
Dana: -because you couldn’t name it that.
Craig: ‘Comfrt’.
Dana: ‘Comfrt’. It’s so soft. Then you put the hoodie over your head, and you pull down an eye mask that’s inside the hoodie that clutches to your face. I was like, “Charlotte, this is crazy. I can’t wear this. It’s hot pink. I’m like an adult woman. This is crazy.” It’s got zippers all over for all sorts of things. It’s extraordinary.
John: Yes, life-change [unintelligible 00:16:50] [crosstalk]
Dana: Literally, there’s never been a better. It was absolutely life-changing. I’m asleep inside of it. I wake up, and I whip up my little eye things. I see Craig Mazin standing in front of me, going, “Dana Fox, what are you doing here on this plane?” We talked for so long on the plane. It was adorable. Everybody around us got involved in us. It was very cute.
Craig: You know what? You looked like a cute little Jawa.
Dana: Thank you.
Craig: Now you’re Princess Leia. Then you were a little Jawa.
Dana: I’m doing the whole series. I’m doing all of Star Wars.
Craig: If you want adorable, find Dana Fox in her slanket on a plane.
Dana: It’s pretty slankety. I tried to sell it to your wife. I was like, “I get kickbacks on every sale.”
Craig: I’m buying her one. I’m buying her a slanket.
Dana: It’s amazing. I was going to get it for you, but I learned about Craig that he doesn’t like sweatshirts that don’t have zippers. Good talk.
Craig: I need the pull-down. I can’t be trapped.
Dana: You need to get in and out of it that way. Are you the same way?
John: Yes. I really like a zip-up hoodie.
Dana: Are you claustrophobic at all?
John: Not especially. A sweater’s fine. I don’t like a pull-over sweatshirt.
Dana: Interesting. I don’t have many pullover sweatshirts either, unless they have an open neck, in which case I’m fine because I know I can escape.
Craig: That’s what you needed to know about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
John: Let’s just cut right to the heart of the matter. Let’s get right onto the craft and do some follow-up on cuck chairs.
Dana: What’s that?
Craig: Oh, cuck chairs.
John: In episode 710, we were discussing cuck chairs. I’m not even quite sure how we got to the–
Dana: That sounds like a swear word, like 100%.
John: Again, this is why we have a not safe for work warning on this episode. The cuck chair is the chair next to the bed for when the husband has another man sleeping with his wife, so he can watch a cuckolding.
Dana: It’s like an intentional cuckolding.
John: Yes. The cuckold sits in the cuck chair.
Dana: Oh, God.
John: You know the standard corner of the hotel room chair.
Dana: Yes, but the fact that it happens so much in this story that there’s a whole chair for it, as if so many intentional cuckolding situations where people are accepting the cuckolding is happening.
Craig: I got to say, this is a very popular thing.
Dana: Is it really? No, stop it.
Craig: No, no. The cuck chair itself, I don’t know if that’s particularly– This whole cuckolding thing, it’s massive.
Dana: I literally cannot think of anything I would like less than all of this. I have always wanted to be the kind of gal that gets invited into a three-way. I have had so many people invite whoever I’m with into the three-way in front of me without me. They’re like, I would love to take your boyfriend or husband into a three-way with me and mine. I’m like, “I’m standing right here.” I think they can tell I would be very annoying, and I would want to talk the whole time.
Craig: What? No.
Dana: Nothing sexy. I’d be like, “You guys, this seems complicated. I feel like we’re going to all have feelings later that we need to talk about.”
Craig: Actually, it feels to me like the cuck chair might be made for you because it’s not a three-way. You’re not involved.
John: No, so you’re just watching.
Craig: You’re just watching.
Dana: I’m the husband in the chair? Oh, okay.
Craig: Or the wife.
Dana: Well, then, all right. Maybe. Honestly, maybe.
John: You could [unintelligible 00:19:49] have enough.
Craig: You could spend your Audible things.
Dana: Can I put the little eye mask over my face while it’s happening so I don’t have to watch it?
Craig: If you’re not watching, is it really cuckolding?
Dana: I would like to hear it, honestly. Just not see it.
Craig: Oh, that’s fun.
Dana: I feel like that would be sexier.
John: I’m not sure if I mentioned it, as we first discussed in episode 710, but there is a great episode of Decoder Ring, which is specifically about the cuckold chair and cuckolding in general, which goes back to the history of where it came from in Elizabethan times to now, it’s where it all came from. We have some more specific follow-up, including previous guests who’ve done work in this area. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Yes, comedian Sarah Schafer is selling miniature cuck chairs. It’s not inflatable like we talked about, but I still feel like she beat us to the punch.
Dana: I love her. I’ve met her.
John: She makes miniature models, so she makes a miniature hotel cuck chair. We also talked about on episode 710–
Dana: How is this a thing, guys?
John: -that my other company needed to make an inflatable cuck chair. You just put it there when you need it, but when you don’t need it, you can just put it away.
Dana: You have a company that makes sex stuff?
John: No, not at all. I said we would never do that.
Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you said ‘my other company’ has to make it, like my already established sex chair company.
Craig: John has an entire sex toy company that he hasn’t mentioned.
Dana: I thought that’s what you were saying. It didn’t seem like that far of a stretch. I was like, “Oh, he does technology and sex chairs and stuff.”
Craig: It does seem like a stretch, Dana. It’s a stretch.
John: It’s a stretch. We do have Scriptnotes barware.
Dana: Okay, that’d be cool.
John: It turns out, on Amazon, we found two inflatable chairs that feel exactly right for this purpose. We’ll put the links in the show notes there. Craig, do you want to click through and see these? This is one inflatable chair. You see, it looks like a side chair at a hotel, but it has a logo on it.
Dana: You can carry it in the bag.
John: Absolutely.
Dana: Nobody has to know. Did I ever tell you about the time I checked into a hotel, the only time I’ve ever changed my room? Because I don’t think I’m good enough to get into a hotel room and change it, and say like, “This isn’t good enough for me. I need a better room.” I don’t believe I deserve that. One time, I checked into a room and I opened the minibar and there was a half-eaten sandwich and an open box of suppository laxatives.
Craig: No, you’ve got to move.
Dana: I was like, “I got to go.” I was like, “I love you. I can’t. I support whatever happened here. I’m open to it, but I got to go.”
Craig: Did you write the scene, though? That’s a great scene prompt. Half a sandwich, laxatives. What went wrong here?
Dana: I think you guys should make your listeners write it because I couldn’t figure out what had happened. It was like a murder scene.
Craig: Sandwich and laxatives at the same time?
Dana: To me, it was the sandwich that was so confusing. It was a half-sannie. Anyway, why are you eating if you’re sopped up?
Craig: Yes, that’s the one that’s really tripping me up. Well, I got to tell you, John, you found a great product here if you’re a cuckold. The only issue, as I can see, is that the recommended maximum weight capacity is 200 pounds. I got to figure a lot of cucks are going to be two-plus.
John: If you pop the cuck chair, that’s extra humiliating, right?
Dana: That might work for the person who wants to be in the cuck chair.
John: I think the second choice may actually be better because this is the inflatable beanless beanbag chair. Besides the bed, it’s pretty humiliating to be sitting in that. It’s loaded around.
Dana: Honestly, it looks pretty nice to me. I think it looks comfortable, no?
John: It’s also max weight 200.
Craig: Again, there’s a gap in the market.
John: Yes, for plus-size cuckolds.
Dana: Built-in possibility for humiliation seems actually in line with the cuckold chair, so it sort of feels like it works.
Craig: You know what? God bless everyone, by the way. If that’s what you’re into and everybody’s cool with it, who cares? I don’t care.
Dana: That’s how I feel. Do your thing, man. Get your sandwich in your cuck chair, and another thing, and you just eat half the sandwich.
John: 100%
Craig: You just have to recognize. I think it’s fair to acknowledge, we don’t king shame. Some kinks are innately amusing. That doesn’t mean we’re degrading you.
Dana: No, we’re happy for you that you found a thing that you like.
Craig: We’re not even laughing at you. It’s just the concept is funny. It just is. It’s funny.
John: Let’s bring it back to a more wholesome moment here. We have some follow-up here from Carrie.
Drew: Carrie says, “I wanted to thank John and Craig for being such calming voices. My dog absolutely hates riding in the car. She’ll often tremble the moment she gets in. However, I’ve found that if I have Scriptnotes on, she’s much less likely to be upset and instead settles for mild discomfort. The moment I get in the car with her, I turn on Scriptnotes, and if an episode ends while I’m driving, I’ll immediately rewind and keep listening. If I don’t, the moment it ends, she starts to huddle in the back seat. While I’d like to thank them for their invaluable writing advice, I also thank them for their pup whisperer skills.”
Dana: That’s really sweet.
Craig: Do you know, ‘settles for a mild discomfort’ is probably what the person with half a sandwich and the laxatives is thinking.
[laughter]
Dana: In the cuck chair.
Craig: Yes, in the cuck chair.
Dana: That’s actually amazing. Also, how sweet is that?
Craig: How sweet.
John: That’s really nice.
Dana: You guys, you have nice pup voices.
Craig: We have nice pup– Yes.
Dana: I believe this. You guys are really good dudes. Pups love you. Pups know you.
Craig: I’ll tell you, my dogs do not like driving around. Cookie does the same thing. She’s very trembly. Real me is talking, and that doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Maybe it’s John.
Dana: Not even podcast me. It’s just actual me.
Craig: Actual me does nothing.
Dana: Oh.
Craig: Oh.
John: All right. Enough banter before we get started. It’s the key topic here. Dana, congratulations on Wicked.
Dana: Thank you.
Craig: Woo.
John: Wicked 1 and now Wicked 2. This was a long journey.
Dana: Ooph. Yes.
John: Let’s briefly recap what the history of Wicked is. Obviously, there was once upon a time, The Wizard of Oz. It was a book. Then it was a movie. There was a book by Gregory Maguire called Wicked, which sold to Marc Platt, who wanted to do it as a Broadway show first. It is a Broadway show, correct?
Dana: No.
John: Tell me what I got wrong there.
Dana: I believe the idea was to make it into a movie without music.
Craig: Yes.
Dana: They started it as that. I’m pretty sure they maybe even had scripts. Then Marc left. He was running Universal at the time.
Craig: He was, yes.
Dana: He went to be a producer. He said, “The one project I want is Wicked.” He took Wicked. It was Stephen Schwartz that convinced him that Wicked needed music because, inherently, The Wizard of Oz was so musical. It was crazy to do this idea without music.
John: Yes, makes sense.
Dana: Thankfully, Stephen Schwartz convinced him to make it a Broadway musical first. Universal, weirdly, always owned it because they had originally bought it to make it into a movie. They owned part of the rights to the play. Then they made it as a musical first.
John: That’s right. The musical that Stephen Schwartz wrote the music for and Winnie Holzman did the stage play for was a massive hit. I remember seeing a pre– I was on Broadway but pre-opening with Kristin Chenoweth and-
Craig: Idina Menzel.
John: -Idina Menzel. It was great. You could tell this is going to become a thing. It did become a thing.
Dana: It almost felt redefining, I think, too, in terms of what Broadway was doing at the time. It felt almost part movie, part musical in the sense that it had a big hook.
John: Stephen Schwartz is a Broadway legend.
Dana: A genius. The greatest.
John: You’re talking about Pippin. To have somebody like Stephen Schwartz take something that could be a little bit more in the Disney commercial zone for what Broadway sometimes does, to just do this whole other weird thing that was very original in its own way. The whole thing about Wicked is, it’s not The Wizard of Oz, really at all. It’s such an original show and so weird. It’s a weird show with incredible music.
Dana: Oh, geniuses. A lot of them.
John: Talking story, the stage version makes huge changes from the book. The central concepts come through, but it feels really, really different in story and how stuff is structured. Correct?
Dana: Yes. I never read the book-
John: What?
Dana: -which turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I told my 12-year-old he could read it. Apparently, no way, no.
Craig: No. No.
Dana: Not a great idea. He was like, “Mom, some intense sex stuff happened in this book.” I was like, “Yes, I don’t know what it’s about, but I’ve heard it’s amazing.”
Craig: I don’t know about that.
Dana: The extraordinary Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz got together and took the main idea from it, which they thought was so brilliant, which was like, “What if this story that you knew and you absolutely were positive you knew everything about it, what if the bad guy was not who you thought they were? What if the person that was good was maybe not actually as good as you thought they were? Let’s see what that story looks like.”
John: What if they were best friends?
Dana: What if they were best friends? Interestingly, actually, Winnie told me the other day, which I’d never heard before, originally, Glinda wasn’t actually that big of a part. It was in meeting Kristin Chenoweth and becoming obsessed with Kristin Chenoweth that they decided that it had to be a true two-hander, which I had never heard before. That was pretty interesting.
John: All these things that seem inevitable were not inevitable at the genesis of this.
Dana: Absolutely.
John: It’s that process of discovery. The stage show is a huge hit, tours the world, a bunch of different languages. We all know it and love it, but eventually we’re going to make it into a film. The decision to make it from one film to two films, I’d love for you guys to talk about that process.
Dana: I think Craig maybe was around when it was more choice, actually. He can maybe speak to that. When I got involved, I was brought in by John, too. It was already a fait accompli. It was already like, “We’re making this as two movies. We can’t question it, and we can’t go back. We have to just do it.” Craig, you knew more about that stage and development, right? Where they were deciding to make it two movies?
Craig: No, it was a condition that they wanted me to work on Wicked, and I said, “Okay, but it has to be two movies.”
Dana: See, that’s amazing because you’re a genius. You knew.
Craig: Well, I don’t know about that. I’m very familiar with the show, and I read the script as it existed. What I remember saying to Marc was, “Once she sings Defying Gravity, you have to go home. You can’t stay in the theater.”
Dana: By the way, when you’re at the play, sometimes people made mistakes and we’re like, “Bye, that was the most satisfying thing that ever happened. I’ll see you guys. We’re going to go to dinner now.”
Craig: Right. You can’t. You just can’t. Also, the second act of Wicked, totally, is quite different.
Dana: Correct.
Craig: There’s too much to shove into one movie.
Dana: The songs are so extraordinary because Stephen is such a crazy genius, that you try cutting one song–
Craig: No, you really can’t, and you shouldn’t.
Dana: You were like, “I miss that song. That song’s like a short song. I love it and I miss it.”
Craig: I said, I can outline, I can make two treatments for two different movies, and I can write a script from the beginning to the end of Defying Gravity, and that’s sort of how you, “Aah, boom,” and we’ll see you next time. Marc and the executives at Universal, separately, we’re like, “Not sure Marc will go for that.” Marc’s like, “I’m not sure the studio will go for that.” I basically was like, “Everybody, let’s just do it.” Then they all said yes, and that’s it. That was the last impactful thing I did on Wicked.
Dana: Well, it was very impactful, my friend, seriously, because it’s not an obvious choice. It felt so dangerous at the time.
Craig: It feels so obvious now.
Dana: Well, now it does. Everything feels obvious now, but at the time when we were living in it, it’s like they talk about World War II, and it’s like they didn’t know how it was going to end. Back then, they didn’t know. It might have not worked out. We sort of felt like, “Oh my God, this might not work out,” because, as Craig was saying, it was never the first movie. Whenever people saw the first movie, thank God they loved it; it was wonderful. Everyone kept saying, “Well, it was obviously the right choice to break it into two movies.” I was like, “That’s because you haven’t seen the second movie yet.” I was like, “Hold that thought until–”
John: Let’s talk about this because if the decision wasn’t to make one movie and see how it does, and then make the second movie, the decision was to make two movies at the same time, that was distinct movies that are joined.
Dana: Yes, which means you can’t screw anything up because the first movie has to be a success, because you’ve already shot the second movie.
John: Were they cross-bordered? Were you shooting scenes from two?
Dana: 100% cross-bordered, and this is the brilliance of John and the group that he had around him, all the HODs that were so extraordinary, and the brilliance of Cynthia and Ari, that they would shoot the end of movie one in the morning and shoot Wonderful from movie two in the afternoon. They’re in completely different costumes, totally different hair, different characters. They talk about how they had to use different perfumes depending on which movie they were in because they had to sense things to trigger who they were. They had different playlists for the two movies for themselves to listen to because throughout the day, they had to keep it straight. It wasn’t even just–
Craig: Because it was based on location, basically.
Dana: It was all locations, basically. We had 73 sets, and we were turning over sets constantly. These sets were enormous. Nathan Crowley, who’s our production designer, is a genius. He’s Christopher Nolan’s guy. He’s absolutely extraordinary. I’m obsessed with him. Everybody, go find an interview with Nathan Crowley. He’s the greatest guy ever and totally brilliant. His wife is also extraordinary. Obsessed.
John: You know that you’re making two movies, and we’ll get into this one in the bonus segment where we talk about– The promo circuit is like, last time you had to just talk about the first movie and not acknowledge the second movie.
Dana: This is why they were all sobbing in their interviews, and everyone’s like, “Why are these people crying so hard in their interviews?” It’s like, “Because we just finished For Good. We’re crying about For Good. We’re not crying about Popular. We’re crying about the second movie.”
John: Craig and I have not seen the second movie yet, and I’m excited to see it.
Dana: I’m so excited for you to see it.
John: One of the real challenges, as Craig was alluding to and that you were also mentioning, we remember what happens in Act 1. Act 2 races through a bunch of stuff. If you look at the Wikipedia summary of Act 2, it’s like, “Oh my God,” half a line is given to things, and so you have to make much bigger choices about storytelling.
Dana: That’s exactly right. That was the exciting challenge of it, that the second act of the play is 45 minutes long. This movie is 2 hours and 10 minutes or 14 minutes. We obviously created a lot of new material for the second movie. I always used to describe the feeling of the second act as its own movie. You walked in, you sat down with your popcorn, and you got hit with the two, three-act break, and then you went crazy from there. That’s what the feeling is of the second act, because that was appropriate for the play. Then you’re looking at, “Okay, this is a moviegoing experience. People are used to a one, two, three-act structure.”
John: You’ve got to ramp up.
Dana: You ramp up. You’re a little slow. You’re like, “Where are we now? Who are we? What are we doing?” That was the big fun of trying to figure out movie two is how do we remind people where we are? How do we get them used to how much has changed in the time lapse between the two movies? That was actually a big discussion, was how much time to have passed during the two movies. You’ll see when you see the movie. We landed on something I think is interesting.
Craig: 30 years later?
Dana: Well, no. You know what it was? What I realized with my brilliant friend, Lorene Scafaria, is that the experience of people watching the first movie was so intense for them that it actually impacted how we were all thinking about the second movie as we were working on finishing it, because it raised the bar so much. It was like the expectations got higher and higher every time people were like, “Oh my God, this movie is killing me. I saw it 42 times in theaters.” The press tour of the girls became part of the movie itself. That was their friendship in a weird way because they are friends and they’re so close. Watching them be in love with each other platonically and crying all the time about For Good, which nobody knew, created this intense feeling that we knew we had to have come through the second movie.
Part of the decision of how much time passed was, we were like, “Oh, it should be how much time passed for the audience.”
Craig: Exactly.
Dana: “It should be a year,” because the movies are coming out a year later. Then Winnie came up with some brilliant word for what a year was, which was like 12 clock-ticks of the–
Craig: Clock moons or something, yes. Yes, that’s it.
Dana: She made up some crazy word for this, but we all know it’s a year.
Craig: 12 monthly [unintelligible 00:35:13].
Dana: Yes. The moon passages of the– Yes.
John: Talk about the writing process on this because you’re writing both movies simultaneously, or did you like, “Okay, we’re going to finish the scripts for the first movie and then start the script on the second movie,” or was it all blurred together?
Dana: I was pulled in by John Chu because he’s my favorite person on planet Earth. I told him, “Anytime you want me to do something, I’m going to say yes.”
Craig: Ouch.
Dana: Oh, no, you guys, I meant that I met after you.
Craig: All right, thank you.
Dana: He’s my favorite person on planet Earth who I met after you two.
Craig: Weird, late clarification.
Dana: In the podcast, we could put that before, as if I said it right before.
Craig: Now people skip.
Dana: Matthew, just swoop it out–
[rewind sound]
Dana: I love John and Craig,
[fast-forward sound]
Dana: Working with John, he’s the most extraordinary director, but he’s so collaborative, also, and he makes me want to be a better man. He’s that guy. I’m like, “I love you, John.” I told him, “I’ll do anything with you,” after he and I work together.
John: I want to back up because you worked with him first because he was a director on your TV series.
Dana: Yes, that’s right. He had shot Crazy Rich Asians, but it hadn’t come out yet, and I needed someone to direct the first two episodes of Home Before Dark, which is my Apple TV series. I met with him and he showed me the trailer for Crazy Rich Asians, which had not come out yet. From the trailer, I was like, “You’re a genius. This is going to hit. This is so universal. This is incredible. I love you. I want you to do this.” I was trying to hire him off of a trailer. I was like, “I don’t need to see anything else. I’m obsessed with him.”
He did the most extraordinary job on the TV show. He brought in Alice Brooks, who is the DP of Wicked, to do my show. He brought in Myron Kerstein, the most brilliant editor you’ll ever meet on planet Earth, to do my show. I got to work with all his people. It was extraordinary.
John: I want to stop you for a second because it’s just such a good reminder of the relationships you form and the trust you form and being able to see what a person is like as a collaborator. You were hiring him, but then he’s actually hiring you because he can see, “Dana gets it. We have a shared vision. I know that she can deliver this thing.”
Dana: Correct. Also, I think John’s very loyal. Once he gets his people around that he knows understands the way he likes to work, he wants to keep them close. I feel so lucky to be in his orbit, honestly, because he’s just extraordinary. I said to him, “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it, and I’ll say yes.” He called me after I finished Lost City. He called me and said, “I have another one for you.” He had done In the Heights, while I did Lost City and other stuff. He said, “Okay, I have another one for you.” He said, “Do you want to know what it is?” I said, “No.” The answer is yes.
He was like, “I’m going to tell you anyway.” I was like, “No, no, no, let’s do a bit where I’d make part of the deal without even knowing what it is.” I thought that would be funny. He was like, “No, I’m going to tell you, you’re an idiot.” I was like, “Okay.” He said, “It’s Wicked.” I was like, “Oh my God, everybody loves– What is it?” He’s like, “Wicked.” I’m like, “Mm-hmm. I also am one of the people that loves Wicked so much,” because I hadn’t seen it. I’m literally the only American human who had not seen Wicked.
Craig: That’s crazy.
John: What did you say when he said Wicked, you’re like, “Wicked what”?
Dana: Well, I knew of it. I knew it was popular and famous and stuff, but I’m not super dialed in. I discovered Beyoncé two years ago.
Craig: I love it.
Dana: I was like, “You guys, we need to talk. This woman’s incredible.”
John: Oh my God, this is amazing.
Dana: This is always me too late on really important things. I started watching Lost in the last season and was like, “You guys, the Hatch.” Everyone was like, “We’re so over the Hatch, we don’t want to talk about the Hatch.”
John: I like, in a weird way, that you weren’t a Wicked–
Dana: I was not a mega fan. I didn’t know anything about it.
John: Sometimes it’s better to not be burdened by–
Dana: Winnie and Stephen now talk about how helpful it was to have me there, being irreverent and not being so precious, because I just didn’t know. It was the middle of the pandemic, so I couldn’t go to Broadway to see it. I googled everything I could find. I watched the entire play in shaky clips from France, Germany, whatever, blah, blah, put it all together. I was like, “I get it.” I read the play and I played Stephen’s gorgeous music. Whenever the song would come up as I was reading it, I would play the music, and I was like, “Gosh, this is so good. This is so good, the music.” I loved it.
I was, of course, impressed, and also, I had loved My So-Called Life so much. I loved Winnie’s work from that. He said, “We’re going to work all of us together. Me, John, Winnie, Stephen, and you. We’re going to get into Zooms, and we’re going to break both movies together,” which I’d never done before with a director. I was so excited to be able to do it because it felt like every day we weren’t just breaking the story or writing the script, we were making the movie because it was what he wanted to be doing, too. He was telling us about his vision as we were all talking it through. We spent 153 hours on Zoom before we ever started writing. I know it’s a lot. Craig looks so tired from the 153.
Craig: Horrifying, just so much–
Dana: I just looked over at him and he was like, “Girl, eugh.”
John: By the way, the bullet you dodged. All right, yes.
[laughter]
Craig: No, I did not dodge a bullet.
Dana: The bullet hit you squarely.
Craig: Yes, the bullet hit me pretty hard.
John: [laughs] You had all these Zooms before you started.
Dana: Before we even started writing, but that was the ideation period, where we broke them into two movies. We carded them digitally because we were all on Zoom, so we couldn’t see each other. We had digital cards that we had made, and then I started outlining from off those cards. I outlined both movies. Then John basically was like, “Okay, we’re going to split up Movie 1 between you and Winnie, and you guys are going to write it together.” We wrote Movie 1 together as quickly as we could to get it full because we had stages booked.
They were trying to make us feel that pressure. We wrote the first movie, and then I immediately pivoted. While Winnie did notes from John and Mark. I immediately pivoted and started writing the second movie. I wrote the second movie. Then from that point forward, Winnie and I were collaborating, but we were each in a different movie. When I was in Movie 2, she was in Movie 1 and vice versa, but we were still working with each other. It was like I would send her a scene from Movie 2 and be like, “This is hot trash garbage. How would Glinda say this thing, because I’d want her to blah, blah, blah?”
There was a lot of collaboration, but we were in two separate movies. That was how we got the work done. It was super collaborative with John and with Stephen. Then, being a fly on the wall to watch Stephen Schwartz do the two new songs for the Movie 2.
John: It was pretty great.
Dana: It was like childhood Dana lost her mind. It was amazing.
Craig: I have to say that this is a really good example of you’re a good writer. I think I’m a good writer. Some people should be writing certain movies, and some people should not. The thing is, I love Wicked. I love the show, but I was not the right person for that project. You were the right person for that project. That project needed somebody that not only was a writer but also, how would I put it, a clearinghouse, a diplomat, and an ambassador. For all of these people, and also somebody that really enjoys the collaboration of writing with another writer. I’m such a monk.
Dana: Yes, you’re so private. You just want to be in your little room and do your thing.
Craig: This is just a great example. I underscore this all the time, but just in case anybody’s confused, the credits for this movie are spot on accurate. I was happy to support those. I didn’t fight you. [laughs] They’re correct.
Dana: Yes. Winnie had done a lot of work before any of us came on. That’s why she has that solo credit. Only writers will understand that credit, which is Winnie’s solo because she had been working on trying to make this into a movie for 15 years before any of us were involved in the process. That’s why she has that credit. Then AND, which means she worked also with the team of me and her. It’s a weird-looking sandwich of a credit, but it does represent what happened. It was really an amazing experience.
It was very difficult because of all those personalities and all the different things, we all cared so much. Honestly, it was really hard, I think, because we cared so much. We wanted it to be so good. We all felt this profound sense of responsibility to the fans. Then after Movie 1, it was like ratcheted up to a million. The post-process of Movie 2, I would just sit around crying because I wanted to be worthy of people’s expectations of the second movie because it was so important to them.
Then also, the world has gotten even harder. I think people desperately need a time to sit in a theater quietly with their friends and their loved ones and their family and be able to express their emotions about what’s going on in the world or whatever, in a safe place to do that. I know the movie gives you that.
John: As they witnessed the rise of fascism, you see it reflected back in the movie, yes. There’s a potential to triumph over it.
Dana: Of course, we didn’t write it that way because it was five years ago that we started writing it. We didn’t know this was going to be what happened. I just think, unfortunately, the movie is so timely because this is timeless. There are always people looking for power, and they’re going to do it at the expense of the most vulnerable people.
Craig: Steven and Winnie, all the way back when they were first conceiving of the show, and this is something that Mark told me, that there was underneath it a pretty clear allegory for Nazi Germany, for fascism, for people getting disappeared, taken away.
Dana: They were writing it in the shadow of 9/11 and the persecution of the Muslim population in America. That was partly why World War II is so fresh on the mind. If we all remember, right after 9/11, it started to get really off.
Craig: Yes. Wicked, it’s really interesting how it has so many flavors and layers. On the top, it is pink and green, and it’s two best friends.
Dana: It’s floopy, yes, 100%.
Craig: It’s funny and weird. Then underneath it, there’s something bad, something bad coming.
Dana: I think that’s what people are going to love about the second movie, is that it still has all the pink and green and floopy, but it is really about something. It really has a lot of there-there. There’s a lot of there-there for both the consequences within the friendship. The political stuff, of course, is there, and it hits harder now because of what’s happening. The friendship is so beautiful. You feel like you’ve been on this crazy emotional journey. That was another real challenge of writing the screenplay of the second movie was, in the play, there’s all these reprises.
That you’re hearing that you just heard the A side of the reprise 20 minutes ago in the play, but in the movie, you’re hearing the reprise a year later. How do you get the audience to feel the feeling of that reprise the same way they would have if they had heard the A side of it 20 minutes ago? We were constantly thinking about how do we remind them of the things that happened in the first film so that that’s fresh in their minds. A lot of it had to do with planned flashbacks, but also unplanned flashbacks that came out in editing that I think were really strategic and really smart.
Craig: Dana?
Dana: My love.
Craig: What do you think my favorite song from Movie 2 is going to be? I know what it is. I’m just saying, what do you think of this?
Dana: I’m just going to say, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say or not say, but I think that No Good Deed–
Craig: You got the answer. That’s it.
Dana: That’s it. That’s the Craig one. Your brain will exit the back of your head and then come back into it at the end. It’s like the crazy– I lost my mind.
Craig: It’s such a good song. Look, I love For Good. I love it. It’s sweet. It’s adorable. It’s a nice wrap-it-up. No Good Deed is awesome. Having seen Cynthia in Jesus Christ Superstar and watching her turn it to 11.
Dana: You told me about how beautiful that was.
Craig: Yes. I can’t wait to see what she does with that.
Dana: I would reference the song you talked about, but there’s a 100% chance I mispronounce it.
Craig: Gethsemane.
Dana: Gethsemane.
[imitating song tune]
Dana: No Good Deed’s going to kill you. Buckle your fucking seat belt for good, though, because it’s–
Craig: Fuckle your bucking seat belt.
Dana: Buckle your fucking seat belt for that one because that’s a goodbye, everybody. I don’t know why. I hope this makes you, too, also feel really emotional when you’re watching it. Part of my emotional experience with the movie is that there is a feeling, a little bit, that Hollywood is dying.
John: It’s a big Hollywood movie.
Dana: This is a big, beautiful Hollywood movie from the old days. You can’t believe this movie got made.
John: They felt the giant sets.
Dana: I have chills. These giant sets that were real, and everything was real. If it’s out of focus, it’s because a person was doing it. There’s no AI. It feels so much like the movies that got us all to be in this business in the first place.
Craig: It’s going to be massive.
Dana: Oh, I hope so. It’s just so beautiful.
Craig: Hollywood is not dying. It’s just that it’s been the months after summer, the months between summer and Thanksgiving. The New York Times once again wrote an article about how Hollywood is dying. They’re like, “Yes, it’s always dying in September and October.” [laughter] That’s what it does.
John: You forget the article you just wrote about what a big summer it was for blockbusters.
Craig: Right.
Dana: Right. That’s a good point.
Craig: Thanksgiving and Christmas comes and kaboom. It’s going to be huge.
Dana: I hope that Wicked puts the paddles back onto the business too, and clear, and it’s like, [onomatopoeia] but the problem is they never seem to learn the lessons from the movies. They’ll go like, “But that’s just Wicked, so it doesn’t count.” You can’t learn anything from it because it’s Wicked.
John: Another musical.
Dana: Nothing’s ever been like this. You’ll be like, “Okay.”
Craig: Nobody knows, but you know what? You guys did a spectacular job, and I can’t wait to see the second movie. John really is a remarkably talented director.
Dana: I do need you to FaceTime me when both of you, after you see it, because I had a hard time talking about it. I was just wandering around the after-party just like a zombie, and crying in front of famous people was basically what it was. It was just so weird. I was just like, I couldn’t stop crying. It was wild.
John: It was the experience of the movie, but also the trauma of making it a movie.
Dana: I had some health issues during it that were really difficult. The narrative I had in my head was that Wicked was what killed me. Wicked is why I got sick. Then I realized while I was watching the movie that, “Oh, no.”
Craig: Oh, no. Here we go.
Dana: I just realized that Wicked actually saved me. It gave me stuff to do while I was feeling so sick. Every day gave me a reason to get up in the morning and try and care and feel something again. It is what ultimately made me feel better. It’s what got me better from the sickness. It’s not what killed me.
Craig: That’s fantastic.
Dana: That was part of why I was weeping around the stupid after-party, like an animal.
Craig: When you were working on it, before it was in production, you and your husband were in Calgary for some reason.
Dana: Oh, boy. That was a– Yes.
Craig: I was there, and the two of us were just–
Dana: That was my breaking point. That’s where I was like, “I might have to quit because I think I’m going to die.” I was like, “I have to.” You were working on The Last of Us.
Craig: On the first season of The Last of Us, which was chaos.
Dana: You were like, “This is crazy.” Yes, and I was like, “Our health might be in danger.” [chuckles]
Craig: Yes, we were standing in a park going, “We’re dying, right? We’re dying.” [crosstalk]
Dana: Yes, and you were so nice to me. I was like, “I think I’m dying.” You’re like, “It’s okay, because I’m also dying, so we could die together.” Then I encountered a bear, and there was a moment where I was like, “Maybe it should eat me.”
John: Wow, it would be a way to go.
Dana: I was like, “This would be a killer story, first of all.”
Craig: How would I identify with that?
Dana: Then I would get out of doing the rest of this work, which is so intense.
Craig: That is what like writing is so hard that a lot of times–
Dana: That you want a bear to eat you.
Craig: I have told my assistant a number of times, listen, at some point today, don’t approach from the front, but from behind, hit me with a hammer as hard as you can on my head, and just end this, so I don’t have to do this.
Dana: I’m so glad you and John say those kinds of things because– John less so because John is just like–
Craig: John’s healthy.
Dana: He’s just too healthy. I can’t talk to you, John. I’ll talk directly to Craig. I’m so glad to hear you say this, Craig, because you’re so brilliant and so talented. I always think of myself as just a really hard worker. That’s why my work is good. Not because I have any innate talent. I’m just like, I just work harder than everybody else.
John: No. That’s an eldest daughter thing.
Dana: I’m the youngest daughter.
John: You’re the only daughter, right?
Dana: I’m the only daughter, yes. I guess you’re right. I’m still the eldest daughter.
John: The eldest daughter.
[laughter]
Dana: Hearing you say that, Craig, I think that helps me, and also all your listeners who are trying to be writers, that you also feel that way is amazing. [crosstalk] I want to die every day. I’m like, “I cannot believe how hard this still feels to me.”
Craig: Yet, every time I have a chance to stop, and I could stop, I do not stop. I never stop.
Dana: Oh, I could stop tomorrow, and I don’t stop. I’m crazy.
John: No. You’ve set up nine more shows and movies. While you’ve been sitting here.
Dana: While I’ve been sitting here, I set up 42 new things. It’s like I have a problem. I literally have a Post-it note on my desk that says, “Say no.” Then I just said yes to all the things.
John: All the things. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions here.
Dana: Yes, please.
John: James in Vancouver wants to ask about torture.
Dana: We just talked all about torture. [crosstalk] We don’t need to talk about torture. James, that was your answer to your question.
John: You guys always talk about needing to make your characters suffer in order to see them go through the maximum amount of growth possible. However, how much suffering is too much? At what point does it veer into emotional torture porn as opposed to genuine trials and tribulations?
Craig: That’s a good question.
John: I think it’s a very good question. Torture your hero is fantastic. If there’s a moment where it’s like, “I don’t want to watch this anymore,” or it feels gratuitous, I’m going to stop. You have to make sure that you are giving your character some victories, some hope along the way. If it’s just despair, if it’s 1984, people are going to stop. Then you’ve failed as a storyteller, I think.
Dana: I also feel like you ask yourself, what do you want to go through? I have to close my eyes when torture is happening, actual torture is happening in things. I feel almost the same way about emotional torture, which is like, I want to stop just shy of that because I just think that’s gratuitous and weird, and I don’t need to see it. Also, we’re in a world and a time where everything feels like torture. I tend to go with what I feel and what I think the rest of the world is feeling because I’m also feeling it. Craig, what were you going to say?
Craig: I definitely like to echo the feelings that we have, but give people a way to go through these things somewhat safely. Torturing your characters has to be purposeful. Remember, you’re not just torturing them, you are choosing what to do to them. Therefore, you have a plan, and the plan is such that the torture must be matched to their ability to withstand it and then surpass it. The real question, James, isn’t how much should I torture them? The real question is, what would make this person’s victory feel really earned and satisfying?
Dana: That’s great.
Craig: That’s all.
Dana: That’s great. Also, for each individual character, the definition of torture is totally different. For my husband, the definition of torture is me chewing food that he can hear. Literally, that could be an entire scene where he’s tortured. He says it makes him want to actually murder me in cold blood.
John: Misthonia.
Dana: Misthonia. Yes, he has that thing. You can calibrate it based on who the person is because torture is something different for each person, but that’s so smart.
Craig: You calibrate it depending on the person, and you also calibrate it depending on the tone. In comedies, torture could be as “torturous” as, “The girl that dumped me is with the guy that beat me up yesterday, and I have to sit here and watch them dance.” That’s torture. It’s not Zero Dark Thirty torture. [laughs]
Dana: Yes, nobody’s strapped to a chair in that story.
Craig: Right, but sometimes you do strap someone to a chair, and that’s–
Dana: To a cuck chair. Bringing it back.
Craig: If they’re only 200 pounds.
Dana: We’re going to make it a runner. [crosstalk] Don’t worry about it.
John: To recap, when you’re thinking about torturing your characters, you’re thinking about what is it that you want. What is it that makes you feel uncomfortable or comfortable? What do you as the writer want? You’re thinking about the audience. Where is the audience in this? Also, crucially, you’re thinking about the character. What is it about this character and their journey that this torture is allowing them to grow and progress and do the things you’re going to do?
Dana: I particularly like what Craig says because that almost reframes it for me in a way that I understand that question even more, which is what will make their victory feel more earned, which is such a smarter way of saying what specific torture is right for this person and what level. If you think about it, in Wicked Movie 1, we realized, like, since it was ending at Defying Gravity, she can’t be defeating the wizard. That was what her I Want song was about, but she can’t defeat the wizard because she can’t do that until the second movie.
What she had to defeat was the part of herself that didn’t believe that she could do it. That led to all these discoveries of she was going to see herself as a child and all these different things. It led to different forms of torture for her in Movie 1 than are the ones that she experiences in Movie 2. It was all about making those victories feel earned and/or the bittersweet ending feel as sad as possible.
Craig: That’s a good question, though. You know what? Vancouver representing.
Dana: I love Vancouver.
John: One other quick question here from Zach. Was the 1990s a great decade for action movies, or am I just experiencing whatever generation thinks that the decade they grew up in has the best media? Some of the films that he’s listing here are The Fugitive, Bad Boys, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Speed, Armageddon, Twister, Men in Black, and many others.
Dana: They’re all perfect.
Craig: Amusingly, none of those movies are even in the top 50 of the best movies of the 1990s. The answer is yes. The 1990s were incredible.
Dana: It’s insane. Yes.
Craig: I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and I’m here to tell you the ’90s were the best 10 years of movies that I’ve experienced in my life. When I look back at what they did there, it’s astonishing.
John: The danger is that we are all roughly the same age cohort and that we were in our young 20s there. You always think about that period of your life as being like, “Oh, that was fantastic.” The way we would test that is we should get younger people to watch movies of the different decades and have them–
Dana: Shouldn’t that be a follow-up question? [crosstalk] Can you ask your audience, to younger people, “Watch those movies and see if they’re bangers like we think they are”?
Craig: I have been showing great hits of the ’90s to my assistants and the office PAs and basically all the kids that are–
Dana: What do they think?
Craig: It’s been just one home run after another.
John: That’s great.
Dana: That’s great. Will you share that list, though? Share that list. Put that list out for me. Give me your top 10 because I want to watch them.
Craig: This list right here, all these movies are fun, but it’s like he’s not even listening. Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Silence of the Lambs. [crosstalk] I can just go on. Fargo. There’s so many incredible movies.
John: He was specifically talking about action in his days. Yes, there are incredible movies. 1999 was a banner year. You look at the movies that came out that year, it was absurd. Yes, you’re right.
Craig: You know what? Fair, Zach. You were talking about action movies. I’ll give you a pass on that. All those were great action movies. The Fugitive is like–
Dana: The Fugitive is a perfect movie. Have I ever talked to you about the movie? Okay, I want to tell. Super quick, though. We may have learned this because we went to the Stark program, so we may have learned this the same. I always learned structure was character, and it was all about how the character’s going through a specific journey. We learned there’s the character’s need and there’s the character’s want. The movie is all about where they start off the movie, where they want something, and they’re making a journey towards needing something.
Wherever they are along the way, those key plot points are always about whether they’re getting what they need or whether they’re getting what they want, that kind of thing. The other thing that I learned was that the protagonist is the character who changes, not the lead of the movie. It’s the character who changes, and the antagonist is the character who causes that person to change. The protagonist of The Fugitive is Tommy Lee Jones, of course. The antagonist is Richard Kimble because Harrison Ford, of course, is the lead of the movie.
Craig: He doesn’t change.
Dana: He doesn’t change at all. He’s like, “I didn’t kill my wife,” in the beginning of the movie. In the middle of the movie, he’s like, “I swear to fucking God, I didn’t kill my wife.” At the end of the movie, he’s like, “I fucking told you I didn’t kill my wife.” Tommy Lee Jones, the whole structure is key to Tommy Lee Jones’s arc in understanding that Richard Kimble is telling the truth.
Craig: Yes. This is all correct.
Dana: That helps me with structure more than anything else.
Craig: Nice.
John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is sitting between me and Dana. It’s a thing called the Owl, and it’s this little camera device. It looks like a speaker. It looks like a tall speaker, but it has a camera at the top that is a panoramic camera. We’re on a Zoom like we are right now with Craig, and Drew, and Graham. It is showing individual slices, individual shots of me and Dana, so that we actually look well framed in it. It is just a piece of magic. It’s the Owl.
If you’re doing any sort of situation where you have some people in a place and other people are on Zoom, it is a game-changer. When we’ve done other things like this, Scriptnotes, you have to move the laptop back far enough so that everyone can see each other, or there’s a camera up on the wall.
Dana: I’ve done so many things like this, I’ve never seen it work as well as it’s working right now. We’re all seeing each other’s faces. Everybody’s in the frame. It’s amazing.
Craig: It’s really effective.
John: What’s so smart about it is it has the panoramic view, and it shows you at the top, but it’s smart enough to individually slice out when someone is speaking to give them framed as a single.
Dana: I urge every studio to get one of these because all of those Zoom calls I have with you guys, where 27 of you are in one frame, I can’t do it anymore.
John: I was on a Netflix call, and literally, it was like a satellite shot of two executives at a table.
Dana: Yes, satellite, literally, like a Google Earth shot of the Netflix building.
John: It’s hard for me to read it in attention. I’m like, “All right. Do they get it?”
Dana: I was like, “Do they like it? Do they want it?” I can’t tell.
Craig: I’m going to get one of these for the production office. I’m going to get one tomorrow.
Dana: Oh, for the production office. It would kill for that. For production meetings?
Craig: Yes.
Dana: Everybody. Great.
John: Craig, for D&D, when we’re a hybrid, like while you’re up in Canada, game changer.
Craig: Yes. [laughs] John and I–
Dana: Did you just slip in that Craig is doing D&D?
Craig: No, we play D&D together.
John: Play D&D every week.
Dana: Oh, I thought you guys were making a movie together. It’s cute. You guys are cute.
Craig: We are. We’re adorable. We talk about torture. John and I were playing in a game on Thursday evening, where we were subjected to a three-hour pointless combat, where we ended up captured and shoved into a mine.
Dana: Oh, my God. Are you with other people in this story? Who else is in there?
John: Oh, my God. Who’s who? It’s me, and Craig, and Chris Morgan. We’ll talk about it. We’ll tell you after. We’ll sidebar.
Dana: Yes, sidebar. Chris Morgan made it in, though. We all know he was there.
John: Dana Fox, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?
Dana: I would love my one cool thing to be my husband’s podcast, which is called The Most Important Question. It’s mostly about climate change, and science, and all sorts of interesting stuff. Because it’s not a thing, I am going to say my one cool thing is heating pads. Because what it allows you to do is lower the temperature in your bedroom to 55. If you can’t see your breath, you’re not doing it right. Then you get the heating pad so that you don’t die. It allows you to keep the room as cold as you need to keep it. Amazing sleep.
John: Love it.
Dana: Please enjoy.
Craig: That’s good.
John: I also am a big fan of the heated seats in your car.
Dana: Stunning.
John: It can be the middle of summer, but you just want a little–
Dana: Summer? A little back warmer?
John: Yes.
Dana: Heat up that lumbar?
John: Absolutely. Loosen up your back.
Dana: Not getting back pain? Loosen it up?
John: Fantastic.
Dana: Love it. Great story.
John: The new car also has seat coolers, and so it blows air through the seat. Game changer, so you don’t have the sweaty back when you go into a meeting.
Dana: Not to steal another one cool thing, because I totally want to hear one. We also got the ID. Buzz. Let me tell you, this is the electric VW buzz that looks like the hippie thing.
John: You have 19 children.
Dana: We have 19 children. We put them in this hippie bus. We drive around, and it brings so much joy.
John: It’s a beautiful car.
Dana: It’s a beautiful car. We got the peel. People are like, “All right, all right.” Everybody becomes Matthew McConaughey when you drive by. You get peace signs. You get smoking weed signs. We’re in Virginia. We’re in southern places where nobody does shit like that. Everybody is so happy around this car. It’s the cutest thing. My husband got me a little bumper sticker on it. Surprised me one day. It says, “We can’t all come and go by bubble,” on the back of the car. It’s really precious. He’s a great guy.
John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing?
Craig: Yes, please. My one cool thing this week is a set of puzzles, a nice puzzle suite from Eric Berlin, who’s a pretty prolific puzzle constructor. He’s a big participant on one of the big teams in the MIT puzzle hunt that happens every year. This one is actually a great one if you’re thinking about getting into this sort of thing. It’s not far off, difficulty-level-wise, from the one that David Kwong and I ran back in the day at the Magic Castle. This one is called Have Fun Storming the Castle. We’ll include a link for you.
Dana: I went to the David Kwong at the Magic Castle one with you guys. That was great.
John: It was with him.
Craig: Difficulty-wise, it’s right about there. You should be able to get through it. Maybe you might need a hint or two, but probably not.
Dana: I’ve never felt dumber than when I was– I was like, “I’m so smart.” I came in, I’m like, “I’m so smart. I went to Stanford, I’m so smart.” I’ve never felt dumber than that night.
Craig: It’s because you use different skills. This one’s got eight puzzles and then one meta puzzle.
Dana: How do I engage in it? Is it online, or is it on my internet phone?
Craig: Yes, you can pick up your internet, get your internet out of your pocket,-
Dana: Okay. That’s my internet and whatever.
Craig: -turn your internet on. [laughs] Then switch your internet on.
John: Unlock your internet on your face.
Dana: Unlock your internet with my face. Copy that. I know how to do that.
Craig: Exactly. Then follow the link, and it will cost you a whole eight American dollars.
Dana: This is great. That’s a great one cool thing.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by [crosstalk]
Dana: Wait, hold on. Don’t do a thing. I love you guys. You’re amazing people, and I really love you, and I miss you, and you’re great, and thanks for being such great people.
Craig: Dana, you are just a permanent ray of sunshine. I can’t explain how happy I was to see Dana in her slanket on that plane. I was so happy.
Dana: Comfort. One of the vowels is gone. I don’t know which one. I can’t help you get the sweatshirt because I don’t know which vowel disappeared.
Craig: Like 70% of people that I know, if I had seen them on a plane in their slanket, I would pretend to have not seen them.
Dana: You would pretend that you had not seen them. 100%. No, I know. I get that about you.
Craig: I’m on a plane. I don’t want to do all that.
Dana: I felt so touched. I was like, Craig usually ignores people on planes. This is special.
Craig: Then Jack McBrayer just chimed in, and we had the best time.
Dana: We had the best time. I really do love you guys, and you’ve been amazing friends and mentors to me forever, and I appreciate you. Truly, I’m so grateful for you guys. It’s hitting me because I’m here in town for Wicked, and that took five years of my life. There are certain people in your life who just don’t leave and don’t stop being amazing, and it’s you guys.
Craig: I will say, Dana, I don’t know if I’ve been changed for the better, but I know that I’ve been changed for good.
Dana: I’m going to get you something. I’m going to get you a present. I’m going to get you some merch. Don’t worry about it.
Craig: I want merch. I want pink, and I want green.
Dana: I’m going to get you a mirror that has lights on it.
Craig: By the way, that’s how you know that no one’s ever sent me a mug.
[laughter]
Dana: I’m going to do it. I’m going to send you the mug. I’m going to send you the Owala water bottle. Everybody loves these water bottles. They did a Wicked collection. I got 72 of them for Christmas presents.
Craig: Good, because Melissa doesn’t have enough water bottles in her house.
John: No, it’s a huge shortage, yes.
Craig: We have a room that’s called Water Bottle Room.
Dana: By the way, I have 757,000 water bottles, and I somehow don’t have enough water bottles. There’s never the cap. It’s never the right thing.
Craig: This water bottle thing– Anyway.
Dana: They’ve got us by the balls. By the way, if anybody wants to have fun, look up Hugh Grant talking about water bottles. It’s a delight. I have a whole side career where I just watch Hugh Grant do interviews. It’s so fun.
Craig: Second one cool thing. I like that.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To view an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.
You’ll also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, but no cuck chairs. [laughter] You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the promo circuit.
Dana Fox, thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.
Dana: Thank you for having me. I love you guys.
Craig: Thank you, Dana.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Dana Fox, the reason we get to see you in person in Los Angeles is because you are here doing a promo for Wicked For Good. I just want to talk about the promo circuit because on so many levels, it’s a celebration. Congratulations, you made a movie. It’s out there in the world. You made a series of a new season of television, it’s out there in the world. Then, like, oh my God, you have to just schlep around and promote it. You have to do all the things.
Dana: It looks really fun when people see it, and everybody’s dressed up, and you’ve got all the hair and makeup, and everyone’s like, “You’re great, everything’s great.” It’s so hard. It’s like a job. It’s a real job, and it takes you away from the job you get paid for, which is typing on your computer.
John: You don’t get paid to [unintelligible 01:08:43].
Dana: For months, I didn’t work because I was promoting the first movie, and thank God, we had a lot of people who wanted to talk to us, which was amazing. I felt so lucky, and so I really wanted to take advantage of it. Then it was March, and I realized I hadn’t written a single word for the year. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to pack my entire year worth of work into the next couple of months because the next promo tour is about to start.” That was very intense.
It is a lot of work, and I hate to say that because you imagine normal people with their normal jobs sitting there rolling their eyes at me, being like, “Oh, getting makeup on is really hard.” It’s like I became a writer because I’m terrible at that stuff. I’m so bad at blow-drying my hair. What even is that? It takes hours. I don’t understand it. Then I see the girls, Cynthia and Ari, and I’m like, they look like they’re going to the Met Gala every time they step out. I’m like, that is a lot of work.
John: Hours to get to that place. I remember back when I was in Startup Program, you were just a couple years behind me. There was a writer-director who was talking about, like, “Oh, yes, I do that, but I’m going to have to do the awards season starting for this movie.” Oh, that’s presumptuous. They think that movie’s made up for the awards. He wasn’t wrong. He was just like, he’d been through it before. He knew that, “Okay, those are three months I’m not going to get back.”
Dana: I’m very superstitious, so if something goes well, I have to wear the same clothes. It’s gross. It’s like, I’m that lady. I can’t talk about anything in the future. I’m like, I’m done. The premiere’s on Monday in New York, and I’m going to do that and do a couple more interviews. I’m assuming I’m done because I can’t–
John: You’re not done.
Dana: Ooh, but I can’t say it out loud.
John: Let’s talk about the gendered expectations of this, though, too, because for you need to have a great-looking outfit. Hair and makeup, but also great outfits for things, where Craig and I don’t– We’re just sticking to our suit.
Craig: I got to tell you that [crosstalk]
Dana: No, I was going to say, have you seen Craig lately? Look at his glasses. He looks so cool.
Craig: They send over a stylist who’s a lovely man, and they send over a makeup lady. Now, for me, makeup is, “Can we please make your head not so shiny?”
Dana: That takes a life time.
Craig: That’s really what makeup is. “Can we do something about the eye bags?” It takes about 20 minutes, maybe 30, but–
Dana: I’m in there for two hours and 30 minutes.
Craig: That’s the gendered part, right? That is a big one.
Dana: Can we make her look like she doesn’t have three kids?
Craig: They send over a rack of clothes, and I’ve got to try things on and make decisions. I’m not good at that.
Dana: I think that’s nice that they do that. They’ve done that for me, and I felt so appreciated. I appreciate Universal so much for treating the writer that way in features because, Craig, you’re the writer in a television show, which means you’re like the king of the castle. I’m a writer in a feature movie, which means they’re like, “Who? What’s that girl doing here?”
Craig: They don’t have to do it, and it’s nice that they are doing it.
Dana: They don’t have to. It’s very nice that they’re doing it.
Craig: It’s also a sign of how much they respect and appreciate you. For me, it was interesting hearing you say you had to take all this time off. For me, that stuff happens while we’re in post. It starts happening, I would say, two brutal months, maybe three, and I’m working all day. Then you just have to go and–
Dana: For me, when I have an interview and I have to get glammed, that’s my day. He killed my whole day. Does it do that for you?
Craig: Most of the stuff that I end up doing are interviews. There’s the junket days and all that stuff. The phone interviews or Zoom interviews, I don’t need to do anything. When somebody’s coming for a magazine and they’re doing photographs or you’re going to an event, then, yes. I got to work on a Saturday now because I did this thing on a Thursday.
Dana: Part of the reason that I accepted the whole idea of the stylist and all that stuff was because Franklin Leonard from the Black List pulled me aside and was like, “Writers are always wearing black, they’re hiding, they’re in the background, especially women, and they look like publicists for someone else. Don’t do that.” He’s like, “Wear color, be out front, make yourself look good because that is part of raising the profile of writers in Hollywood.” That’s part of people understanding that we actually work on the movies. We do stuff.
Craig: I have this thing that I think I’ve successfully articulated to the stylist I work with, which is because part of his job is to try and get me to be a little bit more adventuresome in what I wear because I’m not. Where I draw the line is I’m like, okay, but when I’m up there, like we’re doing a FYC event and it’s me and the actors, it’s about the actors. More importantly, I cannot try to even seem like I think I’m as cool as them.
Dana: I’m trying to compare myself to Pedro.
Craig: Exactly.
Dana: 100%.
Craig: I’m Dad. I need to always be Dad. As long as you can keep me Dad, and let the actors have their beautiful aura of coolness.
Dana: As long as it’s clear that I am Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo’s nanny, then we’re fine. [laughter] I’m not up there to try to be like them. I do stare at them lovingly during all of the Q&As [crosstalk] and just tear up because they’re just so beautiful and lovely.
Craig: You’re so important to the movie, and John is so important to the movie and the editors and everybody. These events are entirely about the actors. I reiterate this, too. I’m trying to explain this. Because sometimes, especially when we do–
Dana: They do a lot of events where the actors are not there. These are more the craft ones, like the BAFTA.
Craig: Those are fun.
Dana: It’s about craft, and then they really do listen to what–
John: What’s so interesting about those roundtable-y things is that you are having genuine conversations, but you’re done up because you’re taking photos at the same time, and so you’re looking at stuff. I find if I get makeup for something, I feel it the rest of the day, my eyes get itchy, and I hate having it on. I have to scrub it all down.
Craig: What is that? Dana, why do our eyes get itchy?
Dana: It’s the powder in it. Do your eyes get itchy?
Craig: Yes.
John: Yes. From the–
Dana: You guys are allergic to something. You got to tell your makeup artists that they need to do sensitive skin stuff.
John: I think it’s just the powder that they use to keep my shiny head from–
Craig: I think it’s anti-bald powder. Because like John and I, our heads are bounce cards, basically. Whatever they use for that clearly makes your eyes itchy. Honestly, no man can complain about makeup. It’s just like–
Dana: Thank you for saying that, because I, as a woman, feel that I could have been president of the United States if I had not had to blow-dry my hair throughout my entire life, because that is how much time I would have gotten back. I could be the president right now.
Craig: Really, you should have been.
Dana: I mean, please.
John: Dana Fox for president. Once again, we’ve–
Dana: Solved it all.
John: We solved the problem.
Dana: We solved everything.
John: Dana, we love you. Thank you so much for coming on.
Craig: Thank you, Dana.
Dana: I love you both so much.
John: Bye.
Dana: Thank you. Bye.
Links:
- Dana Fox on Instagram and IMDb
- Wicked: For Good
- Graham Rowat
- Friendship
- Comfrt travel hoodie
- Sara Schaefer’s miniature cuck chairs
- Pittman Inflatable Camping Chair
- Inflatable Beanless Bean Bag Chair
- What the Cuck?! | Decoder Ring
- Wicked the book and the stage show
- The Fugitive (1993)
- Owl Labs’ Meeting Owl 3
- Eric Berlin – Puzzle Snacks
- The Most Important Question podcast
- Heating Pads
- VW ID Buzz
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 712: Something Wicked This Way Comes, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back Dana Fox (Wicked, The Lost City) for a magical flight through everything that went into adapting Wicked and its upcoming sequel, Wicked: For Good. They look at the history of the project, why it was split into two movies, the process for writing when you’re shooting two movies at the same time, and the exhausting effort it takes for big movies to defy gravity.
We also chat with Graham Rowat, the narrator of the Scriptnotes audiobook, follow up on weird movies and cuck chairs, answer listener questions on the limits of torturing your heroes and ask, did the 90’s really have the best actions movies?
In our bonus segment for premium members, Dana sticks around to take us behind the scenes of a big movie’s promo circuit, and how to stay sane (and even popular!) throughout the world tour.
Links:
- Dana Fox on Instagram and IMDb
- Wicked: For Good
- Graham Rowat
- Friendship
- Comfrt travel hoodie
- Sara Schaefer’s miniature cuck chairs
- Pittman Inflatable Camping Chair
- Inflatable Beanless Bean Bag Chair
- What the Cuck?! | Decoder Ring
- Wicked the book and the stage show
- The Fugitive (1993)
- Owl Labs’ Meeting Owl 3
- Eric Berlin – Puzzle Snacks
- The Most Important Question podcast
- Heating Pads
- VW ID Buzz
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 11-18-25: The transcript for this epsidoe can be found here.
The post Something Wicked This Way Comes first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 711 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we’ll discuss trends in pitching both film and television. We’ll also discuss whatever happened to single women sitcoms and answer listener questions, ranging from getting that first job to characters playing other characters.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll talk with our very, very special guest about what she learned making the long-awaited sequel to her hit film. Our guest is Aline Brosh McKenna.
Aline Brosh McKenna: Hi.
John: I’m so excited to see you. I haven’t seen you in months and months.
Aline: I can’t remember the last time I saw you.
John: I don’t know.
Aline: Incredible.
John: This is your 36th Scriptnotes appearance. Champion.
Aline: 36 out of 711. What’s that?
Drew Marquardt: Oh, no.
John: It’s a big fractional number. It’s a rational number.
Aline: It’s not 10%. It’s 5%.
John: Yes, about that.
Aline: I love it. Proud.
John: Yes, it is 5%, almost exactly. That’s some good math in there. I like it. Last time you were on the show, you had only written one Devil Wears Prada movie, and now you’ve written a whole second Devil Wears Prada movie.
Aline: That’s correct.
John: You’ve actually made this movie now. In the bonus segment, we’ll talk a little bit about what it was like being back on the set for that. Also, last time you were here, there was no Scriptnotes book, and now there’s a Scriptnotes book sitting in front of you. You have the galley copy of a Scriptnotes book.
Aline: She’s gorgeous.
John: Yes.
Drew: [chuckles]
John: There’s even a chapter with your name on it, which is-
Aline: Ugh, so excited.
John: -a chapter about screenwriting based on the 30 or so appearances you’ve had on Scriptnotes.
Aline: Amazing. You took people and then you amalgamated their thoughts?
John: Yes. They were answering questions that we were talking about on the show and just sort of zhuzhed and cleaned them up a little bit just because people don’t talk the way they would write.
Aline: That’s right.
John: It’s just a little bit edit for clarity and conciseness.
Aline: Amazing. I can’t wait. I like to read stuff like this. I like to listen to the podcast. I like to read things like this. I feel like even though it’s become a more social environment because of social media and because we all know each other now in a way we absolutely did not 20 years ago, but I still– When you get together with your screenwriter friends, it’s not that often that you dig into craft, a little bit more goss than the craft. I like craft stuff. I’ve obviously learned a lot of from this podcast, so I’m excited to dig in.
John: First half, two-thirds is craft stuff. Back half is the business and notes, and all the other parts about putting together a career, and also an appendix, which is the history of Scriptnotes in there as well. Something for everybody. The list of other guests who are in there besides you is terrific as well. You hear everyone from Greta Gerwig to Christopher Nolan to other super smart–
Aline: Chris Nolan and I are always doing the same stuff. You know what I mean? Everyone’s like, “Chris and Aline, Aline and Chris.”
John: You can’t tell them apart.
Aline: No. It’s always like where he goes, I go. No, this is an incredible list of folks. This is exciting. I will read this.
John: Cool. I will sign your copy today, but you can get a signed copy of the actual hardcover, the good book, at our live shows. We’re doing it at Dynasty Typewriter yet again.
Aline: I know. I’m out of town.
John: Oh, it’s November 30th at 3:00 PM.
Aline: I know. I can’t make it, but I did preorder.
John: Fantastic. Thank you very much.
Aline: I actually preordered it on Amazon, but I’m also going to go get it at our local bookstore, Chevalier’s.
John: Absolutely. Chevalier’s will be our bookseller sponsor for our live show there. As we’re recording this, there are still tickets available. The episode just came out, so you didn’t get a ticket. Sorry, but you can still preorder your book.
Aline: I will be listening.
John: All right. Let’s talk about single women sitcoms. This is something that Mike and I were discussing as we were getting ready for bed one night. I mentioned a show. I think it was Just Shoot Me!. I was like, “Wait a minute, who was the star of Just Shoot Me!?” Then we were thinking about Caroline in the City.
Aline: Suddenly Susan. That era. Obviously, Mary Tyler Moore.
John: Veronica’s Closet.
Aline: Rhoda was my fav.
John: Let’s talk about this as a genre because the four I was mentioning were all like the mid-‘90s. I can find an article about the women of Monday Night. They’re all NBC sitcoms that are always on the same block of this. It’s Mary Tyler Moore. That’s the fundamental template here.
Aline: Yes. There’s been a paucity, for sure. Before we get into the why’s of that, who knows why anything is happening in the business anymore? Someone sent me an article that Dick’s Sporting Goods is going to be making content. It’s a whole new world. Before that, I don’t know what– I’m just going to make every character some sort of different– everybody will be holding a different stick.
John: We should probably explain that block of four sitcoms because it’s a very specific ‘90s thing, which our younger listeners may have no idea what we’re talking about.
Aline: It’s all post-Friends era. It’s all around Caroline in the City. They often had women’s names in them. The inheritor of that mantle was New Girl, which ran for a very long time. I’ll tell you a funny thing, which was, I had started as a screenwriter. Then I went into TV with Jeff Kahn, who’s an incredible writer. We did a bunch of pilots together. One of the first ones we did was based on when I graduated from college, I lived with three guys: an actor, a musician, and a guy who became, I believe, a lawyer.
We wrote a show about that because we were broke. We were right out of college. The apartment was disgusting. I don’t know how men go through so much toilet paper, but I was always going out for toilet paper. It was about being 20-something Gen X. We wrote it for Disney. People liked it, but it didn’t go. Then we were trying to find another place to do it. It ended up being the last episode of Margaret Cho’s show. Margaret Cho had a show called All-American Girl, which was a groundbreaking show.
Obviously, Margaret is an incredible talent and just sort of an iconic stand-up. She was a very young woman. She had this show about her family. The network was wanting to pivot into a show where she was exploring her 20-something life. They took our pilot, and they made it the last episode of Margaret’s show. It was a woman living with three guys, and they’re broke. It’s funny because it’s out on DVD. You can’t stream it anywhere, but it’s on DVD. I went back and watched it recently because I had watched– this is one of my mother’s stories. I had watched Mariska Hargitay talk about her mom, and she’s in that pilot, so I wanted to see it. Anyway, one of the main dilemmas–
John: I want to note for one second. It’s like a classical thing has just happened where there’s a story nested within a story nested within a story.
Aline: Yes, it’s nesting. What happened is that the whole pilot is about them trying to get their phone turned back on so that she can find out if she got a job. There’s a lot of going to pay the phone bill. There’s so much anachronistic stuff. I’m going to just say one more anecdote, and then we can talk about script stuff. We wrote this pilot. We were waiting to see if anyone wanted it. Jeff was friendly with David Schwimmer, and we knew Jen Aniston. Anyway, we got invited to the pilot they were working on, which was also an ensemble show. Jeff and I were at the taping of Friends. I was at the taping of Friends.
John: The original pilot of Friends?
Aline: The original pilot.
John: Incredible.
Aline: It was amazing.
John: I’m sure it was amazing. James Burrows is directing it.
Aline: All those people. We knew Matt a little bit, too. We knew Maddie a little bit from before. Jeff and I looked at each other. We were like, “We’re screwed.” I think that, to me, there’s been a little bit of a trend of coming-of-age stuff that’s a little younger. They’re a little bit more like those things of a young woman, like The Summer I Turned Pretty. Obviously not comedies, but I think Outer Banks perhaps has some–
John: [crosstalk] I do hear what you’re saying. I want to see if we can draw a little bit of a line between– just because it’s around a female character, it’s a little bit different than some of this group of four and the Mary Tyler Moore.
Aline: That’s right. You’re right.
John: Because the Mary Tyler Moore show, if you think about it, her family is the workplace. We do see her at home some, but the family is really the workplace. That was really what’s so notable about these four sitcoms is that they were all in the ’90s. You have a successful single white woman in this glossy office surrounded by these kooky work friends who are her work family, basically. That is the premise of the show. A reason why I think you’re so relevant to this conversation is they’re all magazine adjacent.
Aline: Yes, media vibes.
John: They’re media vibes.
Aline: That’s also a rom-com thing where everybody’s working at a magazine and up for a promotion. You’re right that those stories have– Girls is not quite that. Girls is one of my favorite shows. Girls is a your friends or your family show, but the workplace stuff is all separate.
John: I want to posit that 30 Rock is an explosion, a popping the balloon of this.
Aline: That’s right. Liz Lemon is the spiritual inheritor, for sure, of Mary Tyler Moore, done in a more contemporary way.
John: Murphy Brown was the CBS version of it, where you have an older single white woman doing that thing and her work family.
Aline: Abbott Elementary, I would say, is that.
John: I think that’s a very good point. It’s very ensembly, but to the degree that Quinta is-
Aline: The heart.
John: -the heart, the central character, and it’s a work family, you can sometimes leave that space. Sex and the City is, in some ways, the work, the HBO version of that. The work environment is a little bit less featured. It’s more the friendship, but it does that.
Aline: I will say, this seems like we’re here to plug it, but I Love LA just premiered, directed by Lorene Scafaria, who we both know.
John: Starring and created by Rachel Sennott. It is incredible.
Aline: Yes. Again, it inherits the mantle. It always has to take on the cultural trappings of the time. I remember watching an episode of Suddenly Susan, and Brooke Shields was wearing bootleg pants. It was the first time I’d seen bootleg pants. Bootleg pants are fitted all the way through, and then they flare at the end. That’s the pants everyone wore through the ’90s. I remember seeing them on Brooke Shields and being like, “Where do I get those pants? Where are those pants?”
Sitcoms really set the tone for so much of what a female was in the way rom-coms did, which was like a certain kind of hairstyle, a certain kind of look. When we went to do Crazy Ex, Rachel and I had this debate about whether it should be shot in a verite way. What should the default style be? I think she leaned a little bit more indie film. My argument was that the default style should be ingénue.
Ingénue is musical theater, those ’90s rom-coms you’re talking about, rom-coms where it’s like she’s a little prettier than she should be, she doesn’t have bags under her eyes, her hair’s always done, her accessories are great, and there’s a little bit of wish fulfillment and living vicariously through somebody who’s clearly gone through an hour and a half of grooming.
John: You made the right choice, Aline. I want to specify this. I think Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would be the example of this kind of show had it been more focused on her legal career in the law office, had it been a little more Ally McBeal and less her home life and her wild romantic life and all the detours she takes there. It blends the two really well together, but like with Suddenly Susan, it is centered around one character who has come into a place and is surrounded by loony people.
Aline: I Love LA in a funny way. The workplace is sort of inseparable from her personal life because her friend is an influencer, and her boss comes to her birthday party. It is kind of a funny thing now where, for young people, their public and their personal life are very meshed because you’re looking at pictures of people’s personal and professional life on their social media. I think there’s much more of a sense that those things are one and the same. I think there was more of a sense of like, I put on my curling iron curls, and I go to this workplace, and that’s where I come of age.
Obviously, the big daddy of that one for me is broadcast news. I do feel like it’s partly the decline of single female rom-coms goes hand in hand with the decline of single female comedies. I do think that when they make them, I don’t know how I Love LA did, but I thought it was successful on the terms it set out for itself.
John: I would say that Emily in Paris is another example of a contemporary version of that, where-
Aline: Yes, very much.
John: -it’s a glamorized, romanticized version of being that young person in a media world, in this case, in Paris.
Aline: I have a slight theory for you, which is, I think that reality TV has slightly taken the place of this. During the strike, I started watching all of The Kardashians. It took me, I’m going to say two years, because there are 20 seasons, and then 7 seasons on Hulu. It’s an ensemble comedy, I would say, strongly featuring Kim and Khloé. I don’t want to neglect any of the other major players there. For a lot of the show, I felt like those were our leads, and they were different.
I think that dating shows, Love is Blind, I think those are teaching people how to date. It’s interesting. I just saw Reese on Dax’s podcast, talking about the fact that romantic comedies used to teach people how to date. It made me think that, now, reality shows– she may have said that. I don’t know. I listened to the clip on TikTok, obviously. I think reality shows are now teaching people how to date, which is terrifying. Frankly terrifying.
John: It’s performative behavior in order to just sell a storyline.
Aline: It’s funny. The first season of Bachelor, the first season of Love is Blind, the first season of these shows, first season of Survivor, the first season of whatever, when they don’t know the format, you get pure human behavior. Everything after that is–
John: There’s a meta quality to everything.
Aline: Yes. They’re just marketing themselves, and they’re already thinking about their cosmetics brands and whatever. I think in their purest forms, those reality shows teach us how to act. I got to say, enjoyed every minute of The Kardashians. I really loved it. It was the perfect thing to do over the strike. I do think that we have moved some of our discourse about how to be a human into that, and then also into Instagram, which is also a little terrifying because, again, that’s filtered through a bunch of things. There’s a level of artifice in these sitcoms and rom-coms that we’re talking about as well. Interesting.
John: Let’s talk about the practical implications of this because there used to be a lot of shows. These were sitcoms that had 22 episodes per season times 4. It’s just hundreds of episodes available to write for these female characters in comedy. Those were obviously jobs, but they’re also, you talk about how they’re training about what–
Aline: How to behave.
John: How to behave, how to aspire–
Aline: Parks and Rec was another one. Parks and Rec.
John: Absolutely. That’s both–
Aline: Mindy Project.
John: Mindy Project, exactly. They came a little bit later, and so they’re responding to the tropes of the genre. They were really helpful, I think, for people to think about what it’s like to do this. Weirdly, because we don’t have those as models of, you should go to New York City, you should go to Los Angeles, and enjoy this life. I wonder whether that’s partly responsible for this retreat away from the big cities or–
Aline: When we did our pilot, which was called Young Americans, the idea was that they were broke and that they couldn’t pay their telephone bill, and they had a rat living in the pizza box. Because the Gen X thing was, we went and we rented not-great apartments in the Lower East Side. If I think about it, that was all relatively affordable. We split an apartment that I think cost– I’m going to say that it was $1,800 for three of us or something like that. It’s just the affordability. We’re talking Election Day. The affordability aspect of these cities. I think the cities that are exploding, and I think I’d love to see more shows set there, is like Reno and Detroit and Omaha and these smaller cities.
John: Denver and Austin.
Aline: Yes, Nashville. These are places that are attracting young people with an easier lifestyle. The problem with sitcoms right now in our business is, I just don’t know, you sound like a dinosaur anytime you talk about this, but guys, they used to order 100 scripts and shoot 20 of them and pick up 7. It just doesn’t work like that anymore. There isn’t this sense of we’re making a smorgasbord for everybody. It’s just very, very targeted.
John: Looking back to those four examples, they were all taking women who were movie or TV stars and centering them in the middle of a sitcom. They don’t do that now. Grace and Frankie, to some degree, was that you could argue that some of the Apple comedies are taking male stars and doing the same kind of thing, like shrinking. What is shrinking about that?
Aline: Ted Lasso.
John: Ted Lasso is not that.
Aline: Right. Ted Lasso is also your work, teaching you, being your forum for moral growth. Listen, I love workplace stuff. I’ve written a lot of stuff that takes place in a workplace. It’s funny because we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but yes, I understand I write romantic comedies, but in some ways, your coming of age doesn’t happen there. I think of romance a little bit more as– It’s a little bit more of a game. There were times, certainly, where it felt like musical chairs.
For me, a lot of what I learned about myself were through my friendships in my 20s and 30s and then through the workplace. That’s really coming at me. Because I think I’m very interested in how people come of age, I think work is a natural venue for that.
John: What’s also nice about these workplace comedies is that while romance is part of it and there’s tension, also because they’re TV shows, it’s not meant to be fulfilled. It’s always meant to be a thing that you’re pushing off. They’re always going on dates, but they’re never settling down. That’s an aspect of it, which is–
Aline: Yes, there’s always a challenging thing when people either get married or have a baby on these shows. It’s a challenge. Obviously, Murphy Brown had caused a little bit of an uproar. As you move people through their life phases, it’s interesting. I worked on a movie about a working mother, and I was in that phase of being a working mother, and it was so gripping to me. Then, two years after I was out of that phase, I was like, “I can’t remember what any of that was like.” People would be like, ‘When did you wean your second one?” I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. You’ll figure it out.”
I think coming to a city, figuring yourself out, you’re right, I think Ted Lasso’s probably the most successful one. I think that’s just always going to work in some way, shape, or form. I just think the workplaces now, we’re just so much more cynical. They’re so much more corporate. It’s hard to think of doing WKRP in Cincinnati without somebody constantly saying, “Oh, they called us, and we got to do this, and we got to do that,” because everybody is sort of laboring under these giant corporate systems now.
John: Well, let’s think about practically for our listeners, if they’re thinking about writing a pilot or they’re thinking about something as a writing sample, I do feel like this is a missing genre, a missing piece. It’s a question of like, what is the sample that you could do that’s in this space that would actually break through? Because it’s not going to be a three-camera sitcom, probably, because we’re just not used to it. We’re not making it anymore, so it’s going to feel weird on the page, likely.
There’s probably something about that sense of a female-centered workplace comedy that is new and interesting and different. It could have a broad city vibe, but in a workplace thing. There’s a way to do it. The Rachel Sennott show may be the example of what this is, but it’s a space that could use more writing. Anything you write in that space is probably a really good sample for Aline starting our show.
Aline: Listen, I’m hungry for comedies in general. I think we’ve scooped the bottom of the pool, and that was a sound, and we skinned our knees on the bottom of the pool. I feel like comedy is starting to come back. I miss comedies across the board because I try and find things to watch with Will at night, and it’s like the number of things that you watch that start with a teenage girl running across the forest all bloody, and she’s about to be murdered. My God. It’s a Swedish show, and it’s a South American show, and it’s whatever show. I’m like, “Here comes a teenage girl, this poor thing, running through the forest, and then we’re going to talk about her murder for 10 episodes.”
I think when they work, nobody wants this. Will and I watched the first season and really enjoyed it. The other show that I think is a great rom-com is The Diplomat.
John: I love The Diplomat.
Aline: I love The Diplomat.
John: We’re watching the second season right now.
Aline: Oh, wait until the third season, if you like that relationship, it’s a ripper. They’re awesome.
John: It is the third season now. We’re early in the third season, but it’s–
Aline: I got to say, for me, that’s like Gable and Lombard level, but contemporary banter between Rufus and Keri’s character. I just think that she’s really tearing it up. That is true. I feel like now I’m finding comedy elsewhere. I thought Weapons was hilarious. Hilarious. A very biting satire about what it’s like to live in the weird house in the suburbs. I feel like we all felt like our house was the weird house in the suburbs, and had the newspaper on the windows in some respects. I definitely think that comedy is creeping into other genres.
John: That’s also why I feel like writing a great comedy sample right now is really helpful for staffing on a diplomat or other things, too. Yes, you want to be able to write smart, but those writers are funny writers who also can write very great, detailed character work.
Aline: Yes. I think Matt Bellamy was talking about this because it’s also in the animated movies are really funny. You can’t make a Pixar movie or a Disney movie that doesn’t have jokes in it. It has migrated.
John: The criticism is that everything is funny and nothing is a comedy. It’s like we’re not making comedies, per se, but our Marvel movies are really funny and joke-filled.
Aline: That’s right. You mentioned Marvel, too. I would just love to see what it really is like to be dating now. I think I’m looking for my Harry Met Sally or Girls, I thought. I really think that’s one of the great fucked-up love stories of all time. Hannah and Driver’s character, whose name was Adam. I am really hungry for show me how people are dating now that’s different and interesting. Again, what I know about it is from reality shows and TikTok.
John: Let’s say we are now ready to pitch one of those shows in the world. It’s different now than it’s been 5 years or 10 years ago. We have a question to set this up.
Drew: Reaia writes, “What content is necessary in a pitch deck? Is it just the story and why now of it all, or is there something else that I’m missing?”
John: Here we’re talking about pitch decks, but we need to go back 20 years ago. Aline, pitch decks were not a thing.
Aline: [laughs] In fact, if you brought anything into the room, it was very odd. God, we were just entertaining them with our faces.
John: We were just entertaining them with our faces and our words.
Aline: And our arms.
John: What changed was the pandemic. There were a couple of times where I’d bring in boards of artwork and show some stuff. In general, you were just sitting down in front of an executive in person and describing the movie and doing a little tap dance. With the pandemic, we moved to Zoom for things. Instead of just staring at the people, sometimes you would have slides that you would show during this process. That’s one form of pitch deck, which is the things you’re showing during a pitch.
There’s another thing that Reaia may really be referring to, which is something I’m sure you’re familiar with, which is the nicely produced thing that talks through the show that’s independent of the actual pitch process. Either you’re saying it ahead of time or afterwards, that’s also a pitch deck. It’s confusing that they’re using it for both. Have you done that for any of the things you pitched?
Aline: No, I don’t think I’ve ever sent over materials that wasn’t a script. The interesting thing about migrating to Zoom is that, in an ideal world, it’s more entertaining for people because you have things, pictures to look at. The funny thing was, back in the day, and John and I can discuss later who did this, but I’ve had people fall asleep with it. I’ve sold a lot of pitches, but I’ve had people fully sack out while I was talking to them, especially if it was three o’clock.
The contemporary version of that is people looking at their phones while you’re talking. I just feel like if you could put your phone here, up eye level, or just look at the thing on your screen so that you can– because it’s a little harder to clock the eyeballs, but the full look down. Then we had someone pitching something that we were producing, and the gentleman that we were talking to was vaping, which I don’t think you would do if someone was in the room. I don’t know that you’d be ripping it with a vape.
John: No, I wouldn’t.
Aline: Then later, I said to him, “Hey, I feel like it was a little disconcerting.” He said, “Oh, it was my camera on.” It’s good to know if your–
John: Camera is on.
Aline: I would say, in general, it’s good to know when your camera’s on.
John: Learn to look for is the icon, what the status is there, yes.
Aline: I have always pitched a lot. I have sold a lot more pitches than specs. I don’t know why. I’m not a huge performer. I don’t go in there and do something fancy. I think there’s something about talking through the idea and about going with the vibe of the person that you’re talking to. A great deck that you’re using as you’re talking takes the onus off of you to be as word-perfect. I have learned, which I didn’t know, as I produced more things, some writers have been told to read, and they read. Reading in a room probably works better than reading on Zoom, which is rough.
John: Let’s talk through some of the pitch deck first. Let’s talk about the pitch desk that’s for when you’re on a Zoom. That pitch deck, maybe it could be five slides, it could be–
Aline: It’ll probably be like this. It’ll be like, here’s the idea, bang. Here’s four comps, bang. Here are the characters. Here’s the pilot. That, I try and do as fast as I humanly can because that always is like– and then here’s where the series is going. For each of those, it’s so easy now to find these images that go with– you can carry the tone.
John: Absolutely. We’ve recommended on previous episodes, ShotDeck is a really good utility for finding images from movies and TV shows. You can search for and find things that match your style. Images that you’re showing while you’re giving a pitch on Zoom, those slides should not have text on them, basically. You don’t want people reading what’s on your thing. It’s an image that–
Aline: Unless there’s a joke.
John: Yes. If it reflects what you’re saying, so they’re paying attention to your words that are being spoken, rather than what’s on the screen. In terms of reading, yes, you should not be looking down to read. The hack that everyone, I think, now does is you actually have your text up very close to the camera, so you’re actually just scrolling and reading off of that, and so you’re keeping eye contact.
Aline: We pitched with writers before who were very, very nervous, and they can turn everybody off, so they’re not looking at their faces. You didn’t have that option when you went in person. A lot of weirder things happened in person. You couldn’t find them. They were busy and kept you waiting. Something weird was going on in the office. People were sacking out. People were eating. More inappropriate things.
Now, I was younger, but also, people– I’ve told this story before about going into a room largely pregnant, and an executive said to me, “I guess today would be a bad day to punch you in the stomach.” I don’t think he would have said that on a Zoom. I think Zooms are like you have a sense that almost like you’re being recorded or it’s on a record. I think you build real relationships when you went in person.
John: You do. There’s executives who I’ve been on 10 Zooms with, as we’ve pitched various places. It’s a piece of IP that we’re pitching in various places, and I still don’t really know them. If I traveled into a room to accompany with them and so we’re doing the chitchat in the lobby, I feel like I knew them better. When I finally do see them at a Christmas party, it’s like, “Oh, wow, you’re nothing like what I expected.”
Aline: Right. Their shape is always there. One of the things that’s really giving me the giggles is Zoom boxes. Everybody’s face is nicely framed up. In the beginning, people were like, you had their dirty socks in the back or like a murdery window or whatever, but people got that under control. Then they moved to a thing where they would have their whole team, so the whole comedy team, the whole drama team, and they put a camera. Have you done this?
John: Up on the wall at the worst.
Aline: They put a camera high up in the– It’s always high so that you see everyone. What happens is, then the Zoom box is very small, so then you’re pitching to three ants on a sofa, and you can’t see their faces. You have no idea– Zoom box, you can really see how it’s going. A wide shot, a super wide from a high angle of a sofa. We once had a Zoom with a management company, and they had 16 people, and the camera was up there, and so there were people introducing themselves, looking backwards. No, go to separate offices. Yes, I know the owl.
John: This is the solution.
Aline: Yes.
John: The owl is a good solution for that. I’ll talk about this in the future. I think that’s a wonderful thing. Let’s talk now instead about the kind of depth that is a sales document for your show that is independent from what the actual Zoom presentation is. This is something that is really common in one-hour series development. I did it for a project that we’ll hopefully set up soon.
Aline: It’s a separate from your pitch?
John: Yes. I’m going to show you an example of it.
Aline: A lookbook?
John: A lookbook. Oh, yes. A lookbook is a similar thing. I can’t tell you what this one is, but-
Aline: I’m looking at it.
John: -this one is an example of–
Aline: You send this to them. Well, directors do this a lot.
John: Yes. This actually has a lot of text, unlike a slide deck that you’re showing during the Zoom. This is a thing that’s meant to be read.
Aline: Like a brochure.
John: It’s a very nicely done brochure. In this case, the studio hired me to write this and hired a designer to design it. It was a whole thing, so that as we were approaching people with the script and this, they could see this is the script, this is what the thing, the show feels like.
Aline: That’s right.
John: That was very useful.
Aline: Yes, that’s very useful when you’re sending in a script. Right now, I think sending cold scripts, it’s really helpful to have something like that, which is a lookbook or tone book, basically, that goes with it because people are now used to these pitch decks.
John: Let’s talk about what’s in this thing, which is very typical for these kind of decks you’re turning in with something. First, it starts with a note from the creator, the show creator, the person behind it. This is why it matters to me, this is why I want to do this, and also the why now at all. This is why it’s a show to make in 2026. A bit about the history of the project. If there’s any IP underneath it, that’s where you talk about how many units it sold, what a big deal it is.
Then you get into the characters, and this is a chance where you actually can show your sample image of the kind of actor who would be in this role, and stuff about them. You’re going through your main characters, your supporting characters, giving a sense of how everybody connects the big themes of your show, what are the tensions. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you can imagine that deck would be talking about who is Rachel’s true love and what this is, but also, this is a show that’s about the absurdity of that question and the tropes of that question.
Then you go through your Season 1 overview, notable events in it, future seasons, and then a closing statement. This thing I did for this project was 30 big pages of this with big images, but it’s very useful.
Aline: This is also a “show to your boss” item.
John: Yes, for sure.
Aline: Because when someone says, “Hey, John August, I read a script,” and it comes to the lookbook, and then if that guy doesn’t want to read the script even, he’s got a thing to look at.
John: A sense of what the show is. We say show because it’s not really a thing you do for movies at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if, down the road, we get to this for movies.
Aline: We pitch our movies, we always have a deck, but we don’t have a book. As a director, you do.
John: As a director, you do, or a reel.
Aline: I will say, one of the reasons I think you need to do this, John, is because when we were coming up, it was like, “Is it Suddenly Susan? Is it a cop show?” There were such well-worn grooves to what things were. So many of the successes now are so out of the box that Stranger Things is as much about the vibe as it is about the story. I think because everything is much more bespoke and sui generis. You got to tell people what it is.
John: Stranger Things had a great deck, too.
Aline: I think it did, yes.
John: We can probably find a link to that.
Drew: It’s online.
John: It’s online. You can look up that– It gives you a sense of what is going to be unique and special about that show. There probably was a script already for people to look at, but the script tells you what’s happening in the pilot. It doesn’t give you a sense of what the show is meant to feel like overall. Let’s answer a listener question. I want to start with this one, which is an epic one, but I think probably will resonate with a lot of our listeners.
Drew: “My name is Sam, and I live in LA. I’m 34, a father of a two-month-old, and I almost applied for the USC Screenwriting MFA. I’ve been writing for 10 years now. I’ve queried and networked. I’ve applied to the mailroom at every major agency and every entry-level job at every major studio. Nothing. I’m not looking for a big spec sale. I’m not completely delusional. I’m not even looking to get repped. I’m just looking to get my foot in the door as an assistant and eventually get an opportunity to be a writer’s assistant, then eventually maybe get staffed and so on and so on.
I want to start at the bottom and pay my dues. I don’t have a formal education in the business, so I need to learn. I’m told AI is replacing writer’s assistant jobs in TV, so I’m not optimistic about that route. Other assistant jobs seem impossible to get if you don’t know someone. I assume you guys find your assistants via word of mouth. I’m curious. Would you ever take a flyer on someone who isn’t already an assistant? All signs point to no.
I almost applied for the MFA at USC. I figured I could get some formal training and network at the same time, but at $100,000, this feels like an insane choice to make, given how I now have a child’s education to pay for. I’m thinking about paying an Etsy witch to give me my big break. That feels like it would be just as helpful as everything else I’ve been doing. I understand that this business sucks right now, but what the hell do I do? Obviously, keep writing, but what the hell else do I do?”
Aline: What’s this gentleman’s name?
Drew: Sam.
Aline: Well, I talk about this every day because I have a lot of young people in my life: my kids’ friends, my friend’s kids. I feel that Sam probably has a ton to offer the world and is very bright and very creative and very interesting. Right now, there’s just not enough runway. I really have always been if you build it, they will come person. I had this exact thing. I had an assistant who was really fantastic. He really went above and beyond. Then he left to work on an independent movie. When he got back, I tried to get him a job, help him get a job, and I could not find anything for him.
My concern is that writing is getting to be a little bit more like acting, where if you can withstand it, then that’s really most of the game. Writing used to be like if you wrote something good, you could wiggle in somewhere. I don’t know that that’s the case anymore. It’s a little bit like– I used to say there are no great undiscovered screenwriters, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think in the same way that there are many undiscovered great actors, many, I think there are now many undiscovered really good writers who would have slotted right into the system 20 years ago.
My concern is, I just think that people have a lot to offer the world, and that if this was my kid, I would say, “Go have a conversation with the world.” That’s what you’re doing when you’re a young person is you’re saying– For example, I started out writing broad comedies, and the world was like, “Maybe not.” Then I wanted to write half-hour TV, and the world was like, “No, I don’t think so.” I would have experiences. Well, magazine writing was first, but then the minute I started writing grounded comedy, doors started to open.
It was a conversation that I was having with the world about here’s what I have to offer; here’s what you have available. Unfortunately, what I see is happening now is these kids are hitting tennis balls over the net, and no one’s hitting them back in the business. The thing that people are doing, as my young assistant is now doing, is he’s producing his own movies. He’s raising money. He’s making $2 million, $1 million, $2 million movies. He’s making stuff.
If you can make stuff, make stuff. I want to know for Sam, who now I’m the auntie of this baby, I want Sam, who’s probably a really, as I said, smart, interesting guy, I want him to go where there is opportunity. Right now, writing is a skill that can take you anywhere. Truly, if you’re a good writer– My husband works at a mutual fund, they always need good writers. Probably not what Sam wants to hear today, but writing is a skill, still is a skill that is very important in a lot of businesses, and being able to understand what type of writing is going to support a business or contribute.
I’m worried about the only circumstance in which I really encourage people to stay at it is if it’s someone who can withstand it, who can live in a small apartment, who can work a side hustle. I have a couple of friends like this that I can say, okay, hunker down, stay on the bus, and you’ll get to your stop. As Sam’s now aunt, I want Sam to be somewhere where he’s fully appreciated and doesn’t have to worry so much about where his next paycheck is coming from.
John: I had two conversations at the Austin Film Festival that feel really relevant to that. One of them was with a guest who was on stage with us, there with Anthony Sparks. Anthony was talking about his transition from being an actor working on Broadway to start working in this industry. He was older and already had a kid, just like Sam already had a kid. It was always a struggle. Am I going to be able to get in and stay in? He was doing his academic career at the same time.
It worked for him, but he also had to construct a life that was going to be really great and meaningful, even if the Hollywood part hadn’t worked out. Sam, at 34, now with a kid, needs to be thinking about both of those things. You can still pursue your Hollywood dreams, but that shouldn’t be deferring all other things until the Hollywood stuff kicks in. You and I have both been in this business more than 20 years, and a 34-year-old starting in the business was always tough. The assistant track, the assistant way in, was for kids right out of college. Early 20s, mid-20s, you could do that. Being an assistant at 34 is tough, and moving your way up there.
I had another conversation at the opening night party with a guy named Brandon Cohen who’s sold two comedies recently. He’s probably about the same age. He just sold specs. Specs are selling. They’re comedy specs. He wasn’t trying to go through any side door. He’s just like, “I’m going to write specs. I’m going to keep writing. I write fast.” He sold them, and it happened. That may be the more real estate path, honestly, for Sam, is for his writing.
Aline: It’s much more of an actor model where we’re accustomed to actors teach yoga, and they work at restaurants, and they’re graphic artists. For writers, it used to be like, oh, you’re going to come here and in your 20s, you’re going to find a way to support yourself writing. I think it’s becoming more common to even be working as a writer and selling things, and then also being a Pilates instructor.
John: Doing test prep and doing all the things that writers do.
Aline: That’s right. Test prep. It’s just a question to me of, can you withstand it? By withstand it, I mean not get all the stuff you want at Trader Joe’s and take the smaller apartment.
What I’m sad about is that we used to wick people into the system in a completely different way. The flip side of that is, and we’ve talked about this before, but I think some of the best comedy, and I heard Judd say this somewhere, some of the funniest stuff is on your phone. I mean, the people who have had opportunities to be funny on TikTok are unbelievably funny, and they don’t require a dime to do it. Again, as your auntie, I don’t know where that’s getting you diapers.
John: Is it going to springboard you into the traditional Hollywood careers that Aline and I have had? I don’t know. Those other paths may lead you to another way that’s actually fulfilling and doing interesting stuff that can pay the bills, and you love doing. I would just say, I worry that over the course of doing this podcast, we’ve talked about such a traditional way in, which is you move out here, you intern at a place, you get hired on as an assistant, you work your way up to another thing. Eventually, someone notices you and you get started writing. That does happen, and it probably still does happen, but it’s not a realistic path for a lot of people.
Aline: Also, because a lot of people came in through TV and those jobs, those shows that we were talking about earlier, where it’s 22, 25 episodes, and basically that could be your whole life, and you could be like a professor, take the summer off in between seasons. People get jobs, it’s eight episodes. They’re taking whatever pay is being offered to them. They have to get three of those a year.
Even that, even getting staffed, which used to be like Victory Dance, you’re in, and I don’t want to be gloomy. I just want all the young people to be in spots that really appreciate them and where they can use their maximum power. I would say, in the conversation with you– I had a friend say to me, “Make sure that your dream is something that still exists.” We were talking to somebody who wanted to be a novelist, and this person was saying, “There is no Saul Bellow and there will never be another one.” There are no novelists who set the tone for us culturally anymore because we have other things that do that.
Make your dreams, things that still exist. There’s a lot of beloved occupations, things that I love, like journalism, that are really rough right now. I don’t want to be discouraging because to me, to be discouraging is like, well, you’ve hit the end of the road. What I want to do is be encouraging and say, “If you’re a smart, capable young person, the world needs you. It’s just Hollywood might not need you in this moment.”
John: You mentioned journalism, and your son is an example of a kid who really loves journalism and went into journalism and found a program that got him into working at a newspaper doing the grunt work. It was a very classic path. Some of those classic paths are still open, but it’s also a classic path for a kid just out of college who could eat ramen and do these things. I want to make sure that we don’t mistake advice for people who are 22 years old versus 34 years old with a kid. The different paths are open to them.
Aline: That’s right. Again, I feel like there is still opportunity. It just may not be in studio films and television. It might be elsewhere, and maybe you’re going to make an independent movie, and it’ll get noticed, and then you can make weapons. I think it’s a call to the entrepreneurial. In some ways, it favors the people who have privilege, as we’ve discussed before. I’m not happy about it.
For many years, I was always able to help my kids, not my actual kids, but my friend kids, kid friends, get into the business and get them started. I am at the limit of my powers. I want people to be realistic and start thinking about, do I want to take those talents and go to games, which are booming? Do I want to write for another kind of entertainment? Do I want to write live events, which are booming? Do I want to understand AI better? Do I want to understand technology better?
So many businesses have gone through that. That’s why every musical artist we know is touring. Again, part of this conversation you’re having with the world is that it goes, you know what? There’s not a lot of chairs left here. Let’s go somewhere else where there are chairs, Sam. I bet you that there’s something that Sam could do that would be both fulfilling his creative drive, but also would make him feel like he could get some money in that 529.
John: Let’s have one more question. This one’s from Alex in Missouri.
Drew: “The screenplay that I’m writing involves a stage play. Throughout my script, several of my characters play different stage play characters. I’m curious how I should title their names in the script when they’re in-character, so to speak. Should I include the stage play name in parentheses next to the character name, or just simply leave it as just the character name, or something different altogether?”
John: The thing I’m writing right now has exactly this situation. What I’m doing is, if there are characters who are really actually not important in the outside or the offstage or not important, I just use their onstage name. If it’s Romeo and Juliet and there’s Tybalt, I’m just calling that kid Tybalt. Then, if there are characters who it is important who they are as the two different people, I’m putting their onstage name in parentheses afterwards so we can remember who it is. Oberon would be Mark (Oberon), so we know that he’s speaking Oberon’s lines there.
Aline: My guideline for is it confusing is are you confused? I am often confused. I don’t pick up on things that quickly, actually. As a reader, I write the way I read, which is if it’s like– I would write Romeo/James or James/Romeo, and then I would say, out of character now, James, and then I would say, back in character as Romeo. These are directions, a recipe, and if you had a recipe and it just was like, hey, some reasons, you’d be mad.
I think I have written some good scripts and some not good scripts, but I don’t think I’ve written confusing scripts. If you don’t like it, you got it before you didn’t like it. I really think that one of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking about it with their brain that knows and trying to read it through the eyes of someone who has no idea what the fuck is going on, which is everyone, except for you.
John: Absolutely. Again, ambiguity is confusing, and confusing is death for someone who’s reading a script. You want them to be intrigued, you want them to be curious, but if they’re just confused, they’re going to stop reading. Anything like this that’s going to make it simpler for them, don’t worry about it. Just remember, you are limited on the page because on screen, we’ll be able to see, oh, it’s the same guy. I think we see faces, but sometimes not.
Aline: Sometimes I am like the classic middle-aged lady watching a TV show, looking at my husband or my kids and going, who’s that one? Who’s that one? Is that the guy who did the thing?
John: Who’s that one? That’s Game of Thrones. House of the Dragon, I still have no idea what anyone’s name is. It’s like, “That guy.”
Aline: Wait, John, here’s the thing. My whole life, whenever anyone’s like, “Well, I just have to tell Claudine Jones about blah-blah-blah.” I don’t care if you have said Claudine Jones on every page of your– every minute that I [unintelligible 00:50:33] I do not know people by their names. I don’t. Ted Lasso, maybe. Even if you said Ted, I think I’d go, “Is there a Ted on this show? Who’s Ted? Wait, his name is Ted, huh?”
John: Same with Survivor. We watched Survivor.
Aline: Oh my God, I watched Survivor. I don’t know. It’s shirt guy. Hat guy, doctor, lawyer.
John: Exactly.
Aline: Guy with his balls hanging out.
John: Amy will ask about, like, “Oh, well, when–”
Aline: 100%
John: When Neil said that, I’m like, “Who is Neil?”
Aline: [laughs] Before Survivor gets down to six, when it’s at 12, during the merge especially, they’re like, “I’m very worried about John.” I’m like, “Who the fuck is John? I don’t know who that is. I have no idea.” I think never underestimate. It’s funny because I just haven’t come out of production. You know, when you’re in production, you think you’ve written it super clearly. Then someone asks you a question, and you’re like, “Wow, I wouldn’t even have anticipated that you read it that way. It’s so interesting. Even when you’re trying to be your most clear, it can still be confusing.
John: It’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is on the wall behind you. It’s what’s called a big-ass calendar. The big-ass calendar is a thing I’ve been using the last couple of years. It’s a giant wall-sized calendar. It’s four feet by three feet. Every month is just one line on it. It can really give you this chance to see the entire year all laid out in front of you. It’s really helpful for vacations.
Aline: Yes, and blogging. Now, let me ask you a question because people have been talking about this on TikTok. Drew, I need your answer too. When you picture the year, some people picture a clock. Some people picture a calendar. Look at your face. Some people picture a calendar. What do you picture? When you picture a year, do you picture that?
John: I probably do picture a big ass calendar.
Aline: I picture a grid.
John: Drew, what do you picture?
Drew: I picture a calendar, but it’s in three-month chunks.
Aline: A lot of people say that. I do not. I picture months going by like a river, and I can pull it backwards or forwards, but January’s over here and December’s over here, and it rolls in front of me like a measuring tape. That’s a perceptual thing. It’s similar to how some people can picture things, and some people can’t picture things.
John: Also, anthropologists will study different cultures and say, “Where is the future?” The future’s always either in front of you or to your right in most cultures. Occasionally, some cultures, the future is behind you, which is just a strange thing.
Aline: This allows you to get a sense of the shape of your year. Absolutely.
John: Absolutely. It’s a big-ass calendar. It’s just giving you a sense of the overall flow of things. I’ll put sticky notes on there for important dates, like kid home from college or trips, or vacations. I’ll use paper spike tape to mark off Austin and Film Festival and things like that, just so you know what the roadblocks are ahead. It’s also good as you’re starting a project to say, “Oh, I have 12 weeks to write this. What does 12 weeks actually look like?” I’ve just found it so useful. I just got my 2026 calendar. I’ll be replacing this one, and I’m excited.
Aline: It helps you with the thing of like, oh, it’s November.
John: Yes.
Aline: Which really happened big time this year.
John: It did.
Aline: This year was a real big like, “Wait, what happened? Why are we in the middle of November now? What the hell happened?” True.
John: I don’t know. It’s my fault?
Aline: My one cool thing is I got this off Instagram. I sound like a teenager. I’m talking about TikTok and Instagram. There’s a company called RAREFORM, and they make bags out of old billboards.
John: I’ve heard of this.
Aline: They’re quite pretty. You can pick the color that you want. The reason that I’m obsessed with this is because I am not a backpack gal. I don’t like the way it feels, and I find that it’s just I don’t like the way it lays out spatially. Look at this guy.
John: It’s gorgeous.
Aline: I got the absolute biggest one, which is also a carry-on, a plain carry-on. You can abuse this thing. You can stuff it full of stuff. I found, look how big that is. That was my onset bag. It was great for a number of reasons. I can get a script in there, a computer in there, clothes. I always had clothes, a big water bottle, everything I needed for the day. It could also be a little bit of a garbage can when I was tired, just zip that thing.
Then it also was good because it was identifiable. It was like a Leans bag. There was a Leans bag. If I left it in the way, which maybe I did once or twice, they could always just throw a Leans bag somewhere. It’s not like a precious item. I don’t really get backpacks, and I don’t enjoy them. These RAREFORM bags are really good, and I really use the crap out of that one.
John: I have a backpack, my everyday day pack is 20 years old. It’s made of Cordura, and it is flawless. It is not damaged at all. It’s going to outlive me for sure. I really like the idea of this RAREFORM bag because the vinyl that they use for outdoor ads is really durable, because it has to be, because it has to stand up on those billboards for months at a time. It’s a great second use of that.
Aline: I love it.
John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro will be sung by Aline Brosh McKenna. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and another helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. Aline, have you checked out our YouTube videos at all? We have some really good ones now.
Aline: No.
John: We have things from previous episodes, but they’re cut with the footage of the guest’s movies. The Christopher Nolan one is really good.
Aline: Wait, I did see one.
Drew: We have an Aline one.
Aline: Oh, okay.
John: You should watch the Aline one.
Aline: Wait, what about TikTok, Drew?
Drew: We’re on TikTok.
Aline: Okay, you are. Great. There’s people who scroll YouTube before they fall asleep, and there’s people who scroll TikTok. I think it’s a bit gendered. I think the dudes watch YouTube. I think the men in my family are big YouTube watchers, which I haven’t fully gotten there yet. Certain things, I’m a very early adapter and some less so.
Drew: I think it’s one or the other, but we’re looking to get more on there. Keep an eye on it.
John: You can find us on Instagram and TikTok @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Aline, thank you, in person, for being a premium subscriber. You’ve been there from the very start. You’re hearing all those bonus segments.
Aline: I love it.
John: You keep the show going. You can sign up to become a premium member like Aline at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on.
Aline: What’s that old ad? I’m not just a member. I’m a client.
John: You are.
Aline: Remember that ad? It’s for hair.
John: Sure. Aline Brosh McKenna, thank you so much for coming back on Scriptnotes. It’s so nice to see you again.
Aline: Scriptnotes.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Love it. Fantastic. Aline, you were gone for months and months and months and months because you were making the sequel to Devil Wears Prada. We’re not going to spoil anything. We’re not going to talk about the movie at all.
Aline: I’m not going to say anything interesting.
John: I want to talk about just the experience of going back to, here’s a property that you wrote the first time you loved, but you can’t step in the same river twice. You’re a different person than you were then. Just compare a little bit the experience of being a writer who’s getting this big movie made based on a book. Let’s recapture what we know about the book. The original movie is based on a book written by-
Aline: Lauren Weisberger.
John: -Lauren Weisberger. You are writing the screenplay for this, working with the director.
Aline: The first time?
John: First time.
Aline: It was a Fox 2000 movie.
John: Fox 2000, that’s right.
Aline: In the heyday of that, when they just had jam after jam after jam.
John: We should explain Fox 2000. Fox 2000 was a sub-label at Fox that was focused on a lot of book adaptations. You would say female-oriented was more commonly their mandate, whereas Big Fox might have been making Predator.
Aline: We were in a run of, Prada came out around Walk the Line, Life of Pi, Family Stone, and then I made another one, 27 Dresses, and those were all signature Fox 2000 thing. The funny thing about the first movie is that I was 36, 37 when I got it, and I felt like the oldest hooker at the ranch. I really did because I had gotten here when I was 22, 23. It took me 15 years, guys, to have my first big success. It was my third movie, and I’d shot several pilots, but it was the first big movie.
I was scared to death most of the time because, for some reason, I always had a sense that, well, honestly, the minute we cast Meryl, I was like, “This really could be something.” Then it’s similar to Crazy Ex in the way that it was like, launching pad for a lot of people, and it was like a seminal thing for a lot of people, so it has a family feel to it, and the way that Crazy Ex is like, that’ll always be a family of origin for me. Prada’s like that, too, because we were all 20 years younger.
One of the things that I think is interesting is that a lot of the reboots and redos and sequels and prequels, etc., the impetus came from the studio. This was not the case on this one. This came from I had started a couple years ago to talk to David about what I thought this could be, and separately, the producer of the first movie was talking to the actor Sam. Then it was like we all decided to go to the studio and say, “We have an idea.” We did all of this before we vetted it with them and say, “we have an idea of what the story was.”
John: We should notice that it’s a whole different studio because Fox 2000 had been shut down, but then Fox itself got absorbed into Disney. It still exists as an independent entity, but it’s really going to be a Disney decision whether to do this.
Aline: That was unusual because Fox 2000 had basically moved to Sony and become Sony 3000. Elizabeth’s over there. We were at Big Fox, but Big Fox is now under the umbrella of Disney. It’s two studios. What’s cool about it is sometimes when you get an assignment, it feels like an assignment, and it might feel even like an assignment to the viewer.
I’m hoping, my hope, and I, of course, I have no idea, was that this really came from, hey, I think there’s another chapter to be told here, another story to be told. It came from the filmmakers and the actors and the producers, and all the squad from the original movie. It’s shocking. There are so many, almost all of the department heads, most of them worked on the first movie. Almost everybody. A lot of people. A couple people are not with us anymore, but in those 20 years.
John: Not just fans of the original film, but folks who worked on it.
Aline: Oh, yes. Same production designer, same DP. Yes. [unintelligible 01:01:49] what I was saying was I didn’t feel young because I was 36, 37, 38, and I had two kids and I was married. Now I look at someone who’s 36, 37, 38, and I’m like, “Oh, what a baby. Little baby.”
John: It’s Sam getting the advice.
Aline: “You’re just a little baby.” What’s funny is I was the younger member of the brigade last time. I’m still the younger member of the brigade, and I don’t really get to be the younger member of the squad much anymore. That was enjoyable. The actors also, they all kept in touch. They’re a family. Then adding new people, new young people, was really wonderful. It’s this thing that we’ve talked about here before, which is when I first got to Hollywood the first 10 years, I was so frustrated by how little you make things. Will said to me, “Yes, you didn’t come out here to be in the document production business.”
When you get to go and shoot something, first of all, the process of coming together and sort of– The characters are like family to me, too. I’m a fan. The first time that Meryl, Stanley, Emily, and Annie walked out together in wardrobe, I peed myself a little bit. I’m a fan. I was really excited to see the four of them together. To me, that’s like my Avengers. I had moments like that that I just was like a lot of pinch myself moments.
John: I also want to talk about you also. You were a younger, less experienced writer at the time, but you also have had so much more experience. Now you’ve run an incredibly successful show. You’ve directed movies. You’re coming onto this project and onto the set with just so much more background.
Aline: I was a producer this time. There was four people on the producing team. I got to be a producer this time. That was really nice. It ameliorated the scared shit list from the first time a bit too, because I was sort of at the meetings. I was on the first movie, too by virtue of how inclusive David Frankel is. This time, I really got to be there in every stage of it as a producer, and sometimes to pass along thoughts to the writer. About like, we really can’t do that, or that doesn’t make any sense.
John: [unintelligible 01:03:58]
Aline: Yes. One of the funny things is, first movie, I met David Frankel and we went right into working together. I didn’t know him at all. I sent him an email really early on, which I’ll post someday, which was like, “Hey, man, if I’m being too opinionated and sassy, just tell me to shut up. I can be adjusted.” One of the early things he said to me, which really made me trust him, was whatever. “I love how opinionated you are. I love how passionate you are. Whatever you got, keep it turned up to 11.” That is very much the spirit of my collaboration with David. It’s like he wants to hear the ideas. That was the most welcoming.
The funny thing is, I didn’t know him. I was getting to know him. It was really a blind date. Now it’s 20 years later. We’ve been friends for 20 years. It’s funny. I haven’t really found the right word for us. It’s sort of like if you and I were to work together, our relationship is not live. Do you know what I mean? When you’ve known someone for so long, it wasn’t like– I posted a picture of myself riding a horse, and David was like, “You rode horses? How did I miss that?” Because we’ve known each other for such a long time.
There was a nice relief in that of like, you can tell me to fuck off or whatever. We can have really open conversations because we have that history there. I think everyone felt that incredible sense of history. I have never worked on anything that anyone cared about while we were making it, except for maybe the TV. We had fans on Crazy Ex. We were just also the least-watched show.
John: You guys had niche fans.
Aline: So niche. That’s been the wildest thing.
John: There were constantly paparazzi photos of things and spoilers.
Aline: People know these actors really well because they’ve all done extremely well. People know them really well, but they also know the characters really well, and they feel connected to the characters, too. That’s an interesting thing. I feel like we’ve reached a point where– I think there are people who think Miranda Priestly is a real person because especially when she came to the fashion shows, I feel like if you were only mildly following this, you’d be like, “Oh, yes, she’s that lady, and she’s an editor.” Some of that has to do with the super iconic look that she created and was created with her team. It was Old Home Week.
John: This is your first-ever sequel, right?
Aline: To this?
John: Yes, first sequel you’ve ever done. Have you done it?
Aline: Yes, first sequel I’ve ever done. Lauren did write a sequel book, but it’s not based on that. It’s a new thing. It’s a new story with these characters. It’s funny. I don’t know if you feel like this when you ever go back to something, but it felt like opening up a dollhouse and being like, “Oh my God, I remember this doll and this doll and this bed and this thing.” Then you’re doing new and different things with that.
John: You’re always mindful of what the original story was and how it all forced, but you have to be focused on this is the two hours of time we’re spending here.
Aline: For sure. They’re 20 years later, and we’re 20 years later. I know what a 20-year span is in everyone’s life, which is why some people ask me what it’s about. What I can tell you is it’s not a heist.
John: It’s these characters 20 years later.
Aline: Yes. Here’s the thing. I know that we all have feelings. We all have fiefs about the reboots and the sequels and the prequels and the whole thing. The movies I love from the ‘30s and ‘40s, if it worked, they made 10 of them. They just kept remaking them. In a sense, even though those Hepburn and Tracy movies were not remakes, it’s the same thing. You’re recombining people. You could probably create a universe where all of those Hepburn and Tracy movies are in the same universe.
I don’t think I have that sense as much of like, “Oh, this already seems exhausted.” In my mind, it’s not so much the ‘80s and ‘90s sequels, but it’s more like in the ‘30s and ‘40s, if something worked. They made some version of My Favorite Wife 10 times. I think that, to me, revisiting, especially because we have a chunk of time here that you’re curious about these people, and I was curious about them. You know what? I feel grateful.
John: My only sequel was Charlie’s Angels. It was tough doing Charlie’s Angels, in part because it was after the huge success of the first one to go back into the second one. There was a lot of energy and momentum, but we were still just finding our feet after the first one. It was tough going into it. It was very much a live ball. Over the years, I had conversations about, “Oh, if we were to do a new Charlie’s Angels, what would that be like, and what would the experience be like?” That’s the fun of it, to figure out, oh, who are these characters now? What is it like? What would the story be? No announcements happening here.
Aline: Well, I think that would smash. Lucy is in product. Just to imagine, I grew up loving Charlie, the original Charlie’s Angels, and I was just looking at pictures of Jacqueline Smith, who looks incredible, like really incredible. I think, as you get older, you get really nostalgic. I was driving up to your house, and I was like, “God, I have known John along time. I’ve been driving up to this house for a long time.” You definitely feel that nostalgia. I think that I want to know what the girls from Charlie’s Angels are doing and who’s had their hip replaced.
Charlie’s Angels, to me, is a great movie star movie in that it was as much about being those women as it was about–
John: It’s hard to believe it’s 25 years ago today, as for importance.
Aline: We followed Drew, and we followed Cameron. We know where they are.
John: We still have them.
Aline: We’ve seen them. To see them back in that, and that’s the cast of Prada too, we’ve seen them in a million different Rubik’s Cubes variations. By the way, if they had ever made a reunion TV show with Kate and Jacqueline and Farrah, and Cheryl, and whatever, I would have watched every second of that. [chuckles] Although the Farrah, Cheryl, then there was also Shelley Hack, Tanya Roberts.
John: I love them all, honestly.
Aline: I loved them all.
John: Angels.
Aline: Do it.
John: Do it. Thank you, Aline, and thanks for coming back.
Aline: Thank you.
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The post Scriptnotes, Episode 711: The State of Pitching, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Whoa, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to episode 710 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig, whatever happened to weird?
Craig: I’ll show you.
John: I would argue that our modern world is safer in most ways than it’s ever been. The arguably edges of that are not safer, but it’s also less interesting. I want to root out the causes and potential solutions for what feels like cultural stagnation and what it means for writers and the entertainment industry. I also want to discuss the tipping point between wanting to write and actually writing. Not just on a daily basis, but like, “Oh, this is the thing I want to write.” What is the actual turning point for going for I want to write this thing, and I’m actually writing this thing?
Craig: Moving it from the, I think maybe one day I should do this pile to the, I’m doing it pile.
John: From the someday list to the active project list.
Craig: It’s happening list.
John: In our bonus segment, premium members, let’s discuss self-narrative and the pros and cons of remembering stuff about your past and having a continuity of who you are over time. We talked months and months ago about aphantasia, people who can’t summon images in their head. Correlated with that is, a lot of times people don’t have a clear memory of who they were over time. There’s a lot of disadvantages to that, but there’s also some advantages to that. You’re not weighed down by your history.
Craig: I may be one of the weird ones on that front. We’ll get to that if you pay the $5, which honestly, come on, it’s $5.
John: $5. Big news. We have a live show coming up. Our LA live show. We typically do a holiday show. We’re doing it November 30th at Dynasty Typewriter, our home base for live shows. Every ticket gets a signed copy of the book.
Craig: Oh my God. Really?
John: That’s it.
Craig: That’s amazing.
John: Usually, we’re doing a fundraiser for somebody. Now it’s a fundraiser for ourselves and the book.
Craig: Oh, my.
John: Oh, my.
Craig: Take that, poor kids. Look, all I’m hearing is that I have to sign more books, but do I? No.
John: You will have to sign some books. About the hour before the live show, we will be signing every copy.
Craig: That’s what I heard. I know you said other words, but what I heard was signing more books. I will say we have a great time at that particular venue. It’s a fun time of year. We always have good guests.
John: We do.
Craig: It’s a great rollicking time for the audience. Plus, free book.
John: Free book.
Craig: Free book and free book at the perfect time to then wrap it and regift it off to somebody else.
John: If you already pre-ordered a book, and thank you for everybody who pre-ordered a book this last week. It was crazy the number of new people we did. Your inbox, Drew, has been overwhelmed by people sending in those receipts.
Drew: A little bit.
John: A little bit, yes. You pre-order your book. You send Drew a copy of the receipt. We are going to be sending out a bonus chapter that didn’t make it into the cut of the book on getting stuff written. That’s coming out this next week.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: All that is great, but if you want to see us in person and get an early copy of the hardcover of the book.
Craig: Like a real book.
John: The real book, book, book. Not a gallery, the actual book.
Craig: The actual book you could hit somebody with and hurt them.
John: Yes. That will be November 30th, 3:00 PM. It’s an afternoon show.
Craig: Oh, I love that. I mean, at my age, get me to bed.
John: I like it. You can get back. You can be playing a game on your Steam Deck.
Craig: Yes. I’ll be back on my Steam Deck before you know it. That’ll be lovely. Everybody’s at home for Thanksgiving. Bring your friends, bring your family, bring your stupid little brother. Let’s have some fun.
John: Tickets are up on sale right now. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Get them quickly because it’s a pretty small venue, and we will sell out, and it’s a good deal.
Let us get to something I wrote down last night. I was thinking about how, in 2020 and 2021, when we were in the midst of the pandemic, on this show, we did acknowledge that we were in the midst of a pandemic. We didn’t do a lot of episodes that were specifically about it.
Craig: Right.
John: If you go back and listen to the episodes from 2020 and 2021, oh, yes, there was a pandemic happening. It wasn’t erased from history. I was thinking about the time that we’re currently in, and I feel like on this podcast, we’re maybe not acknowledging that things are just upside down and weird and wild. I wanted to just take a moment to acknowledge, as we’re recording this in the end of October 2025, stuff’s nuts, and it’s just easy to forget that stuff is crazy because it’s just so crazy each and every day.
Craig: Let’s distinguish that from weird, which is–
John: Oh, different, yes.
Craig: Things are chaotic.
John: Chaotic, unprecedented.
Craig: Yes, a lot of that.
John: As I started to put together the list, I realized, oh my God, I forgot that also happened in the past six months.
Craig: Our capacity to forget things is simultaneously our greatest asset.
John: We’ve limited attention. Our attention gets dried onto the next thing, and we forget the thing that happened before that.
Craig: I also believe, I have come to believe, in an age where everybody has access to information whenever they want it, at all hours of the day, and that information is generated extremely quickly after an event occurs. Most people don’t pay attention anyway, have never paid attention, and we are, as a species, far less plugged in than we think we are. The issue is that the people who are plugged in presume everyone else is, and all the people they talk to are plugged in. You’re in a plugged-in bubble. The biggest bubble on planet Earth is not plugged in.
John: I want to put this in here as a historical record of over-acknowledging these things have happened during the time. I think about someone five years from now, it’s weird they didn’t talk about this thing that was happening.
Craig: It feels like John’s trying to get us acquitted from some military tribunal. It feels like later when they’re like, “Who spoke out against all this?” You guys didn’t.” No, we did. Note this.
John: We did. I’m focusing mostly on domestic stuff here. Currently, as we’re recording this, the government is shut down. This question is, do you book flights to places? Because TSA is getting slower and slower. Air traffic control will stop at a certain point, unless those people get paid.
Craig: People are not paying attention. Thanksgiving travel will be insane.
John: Yes, it will be.
Craig: As always.
John: We have the US military in American cities in a way that we’ve never seen before. We have masked agents grabbing people off the street. That’s not a thing that happened before. The president knocked down the east wing of the White House just to do it, to build a ballroom.
Craig: I will say that the White House is a really decrepit building.
[chuckling]
Craig: In particular, the east wing, I don’t like– This is not a defense. I don’t defend anything that man does. Just in case people didn’t know, the east wing was not part of the original building. Also, the original building isn’t the original building because it was burnt down by the British in the War of 1812. The original building was built by slaves, yuck. There is an argument to be made that, in fact, the White House is garbage and should be completely razed and reconstructed in a way that is secure and impressive, and maybe ecologically better. There’s got to be chunks of asbestos in there that they put. God only knows what’s going on there.
John: I think the demolition and the new construction will be done to the highest standard. There’s no question that this is all going to turn out just fantastic.
Craig: The White House needed gold lions and a lot of Lucite.
John: I feel like the foam gold stuff that’s on there right now, it’s easy to scrape off, but you’re not going to rebuild the east wing the way it was. It just won’t happen.
Craig: It’s possible that a new tradition has begun. The new tradition is when a president is elected, they just knock the east wing down.
[chuckling]
Craig: Oh, that’s what it’s going to be this time? Okay, cool. Oh, this time it’s a GameStop? All right.
John: As we’re recording this, we have extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. So far, this has happened in international waters. The concern is, what happens when you start attacking and killing drug people inside the US borders?
Craig: We have been doing this for a long time, actually.
John: Did we use our military to do it?
Craig: We’ve been using our military to do it for a long time, just usually coordinated by the CIA. I’m not recommending it. I’m just saying what it is is now we have an administration that doesn’t mind boasting about it because they’re jerks. That’s really what it comes down to.
John: We have mass firings of officials or anyone with expertise.
Craig: Yes, we certainly do. All the smart people, get out. Dummies, welcome.
John: Welcome aboard.
Craig: We should put a certain guy in charge of the nation’s health. Let’s do that.
John: Yes, that’d be good.
Craig: Yes, he’s going to great. He believes a lot of great stuff.
John: He does. Idiot. When will we have a flat earther in charge of something?
Craig: We might already have a flat earther in charge.
John: Yes.
Craig: What I understand, the earth is very flat. It’s flat, folks. Look at it. It’s flat. You can’t see it. No one can see the curve.
John: I’m not surprised you have a decent president, but it’s evocative if not duplicative.
Drew: You get the hands.
Craig: That’s the idea. If you can see the hands-
John: Once you come into video, that is all the–
Craig: -if you could see the invisible accordion, then it’s spot on.
John: Extortion of universities and law firms. President demanding $230 million from taxpayers for some bogus claim that he was wrong. We have ICE grabbing people off the street. The trade wars, but now potentially a new Cold War era nuclear arms race or nuclear testing thing. That doesn’t feel great. The economy seems really brittle, and the stock market is still booming, which is just a weird state.
Craig: Since we are laying down some stakes here for the future so that we can look back, it sure feels like we are in for an enormous market collapse because AI is garbage. I’m not saying that AI won’t eventually be useful or power the economy in some positive way as opposed to the negative way it’s doing now, or that it won’t be effective or integrated into our systems one day.
The quote, Alan Greenspan, the irrational exuberance around AI, it feels like everybody in the marketplace and large corporations have just gotten excited about something they think is going to be awesome. They don’t know why or how, and it is not yet awesome. At some point, it feels like this is all tumbling down, at which point the tower will be reconstructed again, as it always is.
John: I think what I’m feeling is that everyone’s banking on it being a transformative technology that would be worth all of the leverage that we’re taking to get there. You could say that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen. The bubble pops, the bubble doesn’t pop. My other concern is that most of the growth in the economy is in that sector. If you’ve stopped paying attention to that, the real economy beyond that is not doing so great. These are all concerns that economists can debate. I mostly just wanted to put this all in one package so that five years from now, as we were recording episode 1,000-something–
Craig: People didn’t think we were out of touch.
John: Didn’t acknowledge that these are things that are happening right now. A thing you said shortly after the election was focusing on what is in your locus of control versus your local locus of interest. Again, a lot of these things I’m seeing right here are not things I can directly control at all. It’s not worth despairing about them, but also, at some point, you need to acknowledge them and not just bury your head in the sand over them. It’s not going to be useful either.
Craig: It is good to be aware, if only because it helps inform the decisions about the things you can control and influence.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Who you donate money to and who you volunteer for, and who you buy things from, how you save your money.
John: The plans you make for the next short period of time. Is it Thanksgiving travel? It’s like we decided again, Thanksgiving travel just because it’s going to probably be an absolute disaster, or we’re going to drive places rather than fly places, just because that’s going to be potentially a challenge.
Craig: I think Thanksgiving travel will be safe, and it will be exhausting and miserable, which is pretty much an evergreen statement. We’ll see. I’ll be one of them.
John: We’ll be flying back here for the live show.
Craig: I’m flying back, but I’m flying from Canada and to Canada, which feels somehow–
John: At least on the Canadian side, they probably still have air traffic controllers.
Craig: I don’t even know. Who knows? I don’t know. It may just be that they let the planes just decide themselves.
John: Unless the government of Canada says something that infuriates our president, then it’s beyond the topic.
Craig: They do have air traffic control, of course, but what they don’t have currently in Canada at proper capacity is the mail. There’s been a postal strike in Canada for months now. At first, it was a federal strike, but no mail. Then, I think because the government can do some sort of there’s got to be some mail, they have these rolling strikes now that I think are province by province. That said, I don’t use Canadian mail.
John: Our daughter’s in Australia, and they can’t mail anything to us in the US because Australia won’t basically send mail to the US because they can’t guarantee that there won’t be a tariff hit on it. Essentially, she’s not able to send us anything.
Craig: What about a PDF?
John: Digital goods, at this point, to this point.
Craig: Tell her to stop printing the PDFs and mailing them. She can just email the PDF.
John: Totally. Let’s do some follow-up. In episode 708, Craig was talking, This is going to be the best orange book–“ I’m assuming this will be the best orange book on anyone’s shelf.
Drew Marquardt: Zach wrote in, “Please let Craig know that claim is going to be immediately tested as Cameron Crowe releases his memoir at the end of this month with a completely orange cover.”
Craig: Wait, hold on, Cameron Crowe. Hold on. That’s our thing.
John: It’s our thing.
Craig: Orange is our brand.
John: 14 years, we’ve been orange.
Craig: 14 years of orange. How long has he been orange?
John: I don’t know.
Craig: How orange is his orange? Do we know?
John: It’s orange enough.
Craig: It’s orange enough. Oh my God, it’s very similar.
John: Pretty similar orange.
Craig: It’s very similar.
John: It has a picture of his– It has his face on it.
Craig: Look, we can’t say no one can have an orange cover.
John: I’m looking at the date here. His book actually already came out.
Craig: Oh, okay. Actually, he’s annoyed at us, probably. Now I’m apologizing to Cameron Crowe. The script for Jerry Maguire is one of the scripts that taught me how to write. You know what, he can– Go ahead.
John: Go ahead.
Craig: Fine. Second coolest book on your shelf that’s orange.
John: Same episode, we talked about printer prices and there was a debate, I remember, between the two of you.
Drew: There was.
John: Shelley wrote in that Drew is right.
Craig: Sure, because she found one guy that was selling one thing for $10.
Drew: She bought a printer on sale from Walmart for $29.97.
Craig: Yes, I’m sure you can also buy a car somewhere on sale for $29.99. Generally speaking, I knew this would happen. One person would be like, I’m going to spend all day because it cost them $29. By the way, is that printer, do you have to hand crank it?
Drew: Apparently, it can scan and copy as well as print, but the ink is $60. She gives you that credit.
Craig: Yes, it’s normally $60.
John: It’s $60 to refill both the black and white and color thing. It’s the razor and the blades situation.
Craig: Come on. What was her name?
John: Shelley.
Craig: Boy, she just loves you, doesn’t she? I’m going to remember this.
Drew: She likes truth, I think is what it is.
John: I think what we learned from Austin is that lots of people love Drew.
Craig: Yes, but they’ve chosen sides in what will soon become a great war.
John: My friend Quinn was misidentified as Drew. Quinn and Dana were–
Craig: Oh, somebody thought Quinn was–
John: Was Drew.
Drew: I didn’t know this.
Craig: By the way, let’s agree Quinn is a handsome guy.
John: He really is.
Craig: Quinn is one of the best-looking guys.
Drew: They met me, and they were like, “Oh no.”
Craig: No, you look like a podcast producer.
Drew: That’s just mean, Craig.
Craig: Yes, thank you. You’re welcome. Hey, it’s war. You started this.
John: Quinn is podcast host. You’re a podcast producer.
Craig: Oh, it’s getting worse. It’s getting meaner.
John: 708, Adriana and Veronica was one of the properties that we talked about on the How Would This Be a Movie? Craig, you were of the pitch that it’s only the real people are the interesting thing. That’s the only thing you want to see is a docuseries about the two of those women.
Craig: Right, like a reality show.
John: I was more convinced that it was a fictionalized version, but it’s one of those rare cases where the rights’ sold. Tell us about this.
Drew: Chris wrote in, “I’m a writer and producer, and been a fan of your show for years. Imagine my surprise and delight when I heard you cover my project on How Would This Be a Movie?. I’m a former book scout for Fox and have an IP-driven company called Winterlight Pictures. One thing I love to do is reverse engineer articles to sell for film and TV. I have an idea, the journalist writes it, and we sell it together. Nobody is better at this than Mickey Rapkin, who wrote the article that Pitch Perfect is based on. We’ve done it a bunch, but never at the level of Adriana V. Veronica.
I moved to East LA recently. My neighborhood has Adriana and Veronica on every bus stop. I started to wonder, who are these ladies? I saw a rumor on TikTok that they’re sisters, but that they never publicly talked about it or even acknowledged each other. I called Mickey, and he did his thing. He’s a genius journalist. After months of trying, he finally got them to crack and got both to talk. When the article came out, we must have had 15 meetings with producers, and there was a four-studio bidding war.
We just closed a deal. We can’t announce it yet. It was fascinating to hear your expert takes, as we’ve had many similar conversations. We met with unscripted folks, and there could still be a reality TV version, but we’re on the same page as you guys. We’d love to see an ongoing scripted show. Succession and Mad Men are good coms. Anyways, wanted to share that, and thank you for a terrific podcast and for covering the story.”
John: Great. I also love, it answers a question I had. It’s like, why does this article exist, and why was it in The Hollywood Reporter? The article exists-
Craig: To be sold.
John: -to be sold as a thing.
Craig: It is interesting. I guess there isn’t really any currency to hiding the fact that it is an artificially inspired article. I don’t mean artificially in a bad way, but it’s contrived to sell. I guess the fact that it is doesn’t impact the fact that people want it anyway. He’s happily saying, “Yes, this is how this works.” I’m like, ‘Oh, this could be cool if it were an article.” Then a guy writes an article, and then they sell it. Congratulations to them. It’d be fun to see how this goes.
John: I want to go back to the article. I thought the article was great as I read it. While it sets up a world that feels cinematic, it feels like it could be a series, I like that it didn’t explicitly try to make it– It didn’t feel like it was a pilot. It didn’t feel like it–
Craig: It wasn’t a pitch.
John: It wasn’t a pitch.
Craig: That probably would be a step too far, where people would read this and go, “Oh, this isn’t really–“ It’s a funny thing. People want something that isn’t a story so that they can make a story, but they want it to have a story.
John: They want it to have characters and a setting and a world, but they don’t want it to be predigested.
Craig: Just tell them what to do. Don’t tell me what to do.
John: Yes. All right. I want to talk about Weird. Two bits of inspiration for this. First off, there’s an article by Adam Mastroianni that argues that people are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of our society is pointing strongly in the same direction, that we are in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of mundane. Deviance is on the decline. It goes through, statistically, you can see we don’t have the same number of weird cults and serial killers. That kind of deviance is just down a lot. There’s arguments for what happened, if it was lead in the gas or whatever, that kind of stuff.
But also, it feels like there’s bumpers on the bowling lanes right now, like everything is just safe. The edges are rounded off a lot of things. Weirdness is discouraged. Things are more predictable. As I was reading this, I was thinking back to a project I got sent for a rewrite recently that was based on some really wild source material. Then I read the adaptation of it, it’s like, wow, this is just the most sanitized, cleaned down, just like the most mainstreamified version of a thing. It took something weird and just un-weirded it.
I just wanted to spend a little time talking about the value of weirdness, oddness, not even performative weirdness, but just the sense of just things that are following their own weird rhythms. Adam makes the point that creativity is just deviance put to good use. It’s the ability to not do the thing that everyone else is doing and create something that is just unexpected and surprising.
Craig: I think that there’s certainly some value to this argument. One of the things that happens over time is that things that are weird that attract people eventually fall apart because they were too weird, and also they were just wrong. Cults are a good example. Cults fall apart. Scientology, which on, I guess, the surface hasn’t fallen apart, it’s fallen apart. Nobody’s a Scientologist anymore. It’s just not a thing. There’s like 12 of them now. They’re mostly just a real estate holding company. It’s because people get wise to it. Over time, it becomes harder and harder to start a cult.
If you were to start a cult right now, you got to get over the hump of everybody going, “But all the cults end with a building on fire, or we lose all our money, or I can’t talk to my mom anymore.” You get smarter, and so a lot of the weirdness gets eliminated in that fashion.
The other thing that happens to weirdness is if it is successful, then there’s money in it. Then a company comes, and it’s not weird anymore. Best example I can think of is Goop. Goop is a large corporation that is primarily owned and controlled by Gwyneth Paltrow, I believe. Goop contains a lot of weirdness that is institutionalized and packaged, and sold. Which, by the way, thumbs up, well done. She employs a lot of people, helps the economy. The idea of, oh, throwing some bee pollen on my food is going to make me better, which it does not, used to just be something weird people did.
Lastly, because everybody weird feels the need to self-promote, it’s hard to be weird when you’re popular. We end up in a popularity machine where people pluck all the weird stuff out immediately. There’s no time for it to live underground.
There’s no chance for you to be like, “Oh, I knew them before they were famous.” Everybody’s famous all the time immediately. Nobody got in there early. There is no weirdness because we all know about it. There’s either just popular or unnoticed, which doesn’t mean bad. Lastly, corporations just take everything now. They just take everything.
John: I hear all that stuff, and I think you’ve hit on some really key things for why weirdness seems to be declining. I think there was a time when we grew up, people could be locally weird because you were the weird person in this group. With the rise of the internet, those weird people can find each other, and suddenly they have a base. They’re not weird within the group. That’s a thing that happened with comic books and the comic book culture, which was weird. It was a little bit more fringy, but then it became just more and more. Once everyone could find each other and Comic-Con became a thing.
Craig: Comic-Con is now a place where corporations go to sell stuff. It was, in fact, a niche thing. Hey, we play Dungeons and Dragons all the time. More people play it now than ever, but it used to be something that weird kids did, like me. [chuckles]
John: I also say that you talk about the corporations, but honestly, sometimes there is an ambassador or some person who can take a fringe thing and pull it into the mainstream and just make it approachable. RuPaul and drag. Drag, it was a very fringe thing that only a very specific subculture knew about, and the rise of Drag Race. Much good was done, but it also made drag less weird. Less weird in ways that are always going to feel. Yes.
Craig: It’s not that it’s sanitized as much as it is popularized. It’s not–
John: You can’t be weird and popular.
Craig: You can’t be weird and popular. That’s the bottom line. If you get popular, you’re out of weird zone. Now you’re just interesting and trendy. Drag culture is trendy. When my daughter is saying boots the house down or whatever, I don’t even know what that would be. Boots the gag me with your boots, I don’t know what. It’s something from Drag Race. A lot of people that watch Drag Race are laughing at me now. I’m cool with that.
John: That’s fine. I’m fine.
Craig: I’m weird, but everyone knows it.
John: Even within the culture of Drag Race, you have a performer like Jimbo who’s throwing bologna slices on himself. That’s weird, but you have to really go to a different thing. It’s bringing in a clowning culture into drag, which was related but not the same thing.
Craig: Boots the house down. Boots the house down. Slang expression that means to perform exceptionally well with great style and energy, or to look amazing. Just side note, I boots the house down all the time. I do not. That’s exactly right. There’s also, let’s talk a little bit about the popularization of kink.
John: Yes, for sure.
Craig: Kink, the concept of kink is weird. That’s kinky. That’s weird.
John: It’s not just sex, which is taboo or porn that is taboo, but it’s a special, that’s not weird enough anymore, so you have to go–
Craig: It’s like among the people who are doing weird stuff, you’re into the weirder stuff.
Craig: Then it became like, “Don’t kink shame.” Then it was like, “Oh, that’s your kink.” Meaning like, “Oh, you like rock?” I like BDSM.” Everyone’s like, “Yes, great. That’s your kink. That’s cool.” No one’s kinky.
John: There’s a great episode of Dakota Ray, and we’ll put a link in the show notes too, which is about cucking and a cuck chair. The degree to which–
Craig: [chuckles] There’s just something about seeing you say the word cucking that is so funny.
John: The Democratic Party can send out a meme, which is just a chair in relation to another political figure that’s clearly a cuck reference. It’s like nothing is taboo, nothing is weird too much.
Craig: How is the chair a cuck reference?
John: The cuck chair. The man who’s watching his wife be–
Craig: Did someone sell a cuck chair? It’s not a bad idea. A branded, this is actually a great chair for you if you’re a cuck. It’s comfortable.
John: It’s because it’s not a La-Z-Boy. It has to be a chair that feels like it’s appropriate in the bedroom.
Craig: Right. You don’t want the arms of the chair to be too high because you can get in the way of your self-gratitude. [chuckles]
John: I want to talk about–
Craig: That’s not a bad idea, right?
[chuckling]
Craig: Cuck chair.
John: Let’s bring it back to the things that we are actually doing, the films and television that we’re writing, because I think that sometimes we underestimate the degree to which weird does work. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a very weird movie that was a giant hit.
Craig: So weird. Sinners is weird.
John: Sinners is weird.
Craig: It’s weird.
John: It’s weird. It has this big musical number in the middle of it. Great. Love it.
Craig: It’s just Irish guys showing up and playing that weird song. It’s weird. I love that.
John: Weapons is weird. It’s really weird. It uses its time really strangely. Gladys is just a fundamental weirdo.
Craig: We crave it.
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes, it is hard to– Look, it’s not probably possible to make an equally weird Sinners 2 because, at that point, then it’s being repeated. It is absolutely true that what we used to call weird, people now call a little dangerous and risky. My least favorite term is punk rock because anyone who says, “Oh, yes, that’s more punk rock,” is never a punk rock person.
Anyway, point is, yes, weird is risky and dangerous properly, but what we get a lot of now is what I would call weird acceptance, where this is like, this movie is about defending the weird and promoting the weird and accepting the weird. We’re good with that. We’ve done it.
John: What I like about the examples you were giving, I’ll throw Poor Things in there, Lighthouse in there, One Battle After Another, so weird.
Craig: So weird.
John: But they’re not performatively weird. They’re not to feel like, “Look how weird I’m being.” They’re not just trying–
Craig: No, they’re just honestly weird.
John: From a fundamental level.
Craig: Inside of themselves aren’t weird. If you watch those movies, when you get to the end of Poor Things, you go, “That was weird, and yet by the time I got to the end, it was actually quite a conventional narrative in its own way.” That’s wonderful. It was just that it was doing something creative. It wasn’t afraid to wander off and do some stuff that is different and challenging and odd and kinky in a proper way, not in fake kinky way.
John: Here’s what I think these movies are succeeding on is that they are– The challenge I’m always putting to everyone when they’re talking about what they should write, it’s like they’re writing the movie they most want to see. These filmmakers are making the movie they most want to see on a big screen, and they’re being honest with themselves about what it is, and they’re finding ways to make the movie that is exactly their movie and not someone else’s movie.
Craig: I completely agree. I still think that we have a side business, by the way, in this culture. I just–
John: Craig, you’re not generally the entrepreneur, so I’m curious to see–
Craig: That’s what I’m saying to you, really. I’m not going to do it, but see, you have a company. I mean, Highland, right?
John: Yes, furniture is a real venture.
Craig: Sure.
John: Like an inflatable chair that you can inflate when you need it, because it’s also humiliating to be in an inflatable chair.
[chuckling]
Craig: God, I mean, you can almost charge extra for that. That’s the other thing about this plan is these people like to be humiliated, which means you can take even more of their money.
John: Absolutely, but I feel like if you could, I think an inflatable cuck chair is weird.
Craig: Is weird.
John: I mean, it actually pushes it–
Craig: That goes back around to now, even in the cuck community, people are like, “Dude, you know, he bought the inflatable chair from “apps.” [chuckles]
John: Other things I think we should acknowledge as being weird and wonderful. We’ve talked about Too Many Cooks, which is just such a strange video. I showed it to my daughter, and she’s like, “I don’t know what that is. I don’t know why you showed that to me. I’m angry that you showed it to me,” but it’s just so–
Craig: Then she showed it to somebody else, I guarantee you. It’s like a virus.
John: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
Craig: So weird.
John: So weird.
Craig: Pee Wee himself. That character is weird. Tim Burton, of course, been weird the whole time. Tim Burton, I think some people may have felt like, “Oh, you are now–” At some point, he crossed into, “Oh, you’re doing an impression of Tim Burton being weird.” Except I think that was just Tim Burton being weird the whole time. That’s just what he does.
John: Yes, that’s Tim Burton being himself.
Craig: Because they were popular, people were like, “Oh, it’s just not weird anymore, but it is. It’s weird.
John: What advice can we give to our listeners who are thinking about, “I want to embrace what this is?” It goes back to, really, what do you actually want to watch, and how do you make that thing that you want to watch that is specific to your experience? If you have really mainstream taste and you want to make mainstream stuff, go for it. We’re not steering you away from that. I’m also just saying, also look for what is specific to your experience that helps.
Craig: Coming back from Austin, there’s a certain trend I’ve noticed, and I would caution people to maybe consider not going down a path of what I would call well-traveled weird. There are a lot of stories about people who are struggling with their sexuality or their gender, and then they get thrown on a road trip with somebody. There are so many of them that you get the feeling that people are like, this is in and of itself, the point. I think about the movies that I’ve seen where there was the most interesting commentary on gender or sexuality, they were not movies about gender or sexuality. They were movies with people who had honest questions about these things.
There’s a commoditization of it. It’s almost like, “I think this is selling. Let me write a conventional version of a film about weirdos.” It’s also, we’re all like, we’ve all changed. Society has changed. It’s not so weird. If we’re all talking about the same weird thing, it’s not that weird. Here’s a movie that was weird. 1998, a movie called Happiness that was written and directed by Todd Solondz. That’s a weird movie, and that confronts some pretty weird stuff, including pedophilia. That movie felt dangerous. It felt like it was going to a place that made you uncomfortable and scared because you knew it was real. That is legit weird and fascinating and upsetting.
The other thing is, what’s actually upsetting? Horror, a lot of horror to me is not weird. It’s just pushing on the same old things. Then every now and then something comes along that is legitimately upsetting because it is weird.
John: May December, a weird movie.
Drew: I love that movie.
John: I love it too.
Craig: Weird?
John: Weird.
Craig: Weird?
John: Half the Nicolas Cage movies are just weird. Nicolas Cage is a fundamentally weird person.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: There’s a whole episode of Community, which there’s a class being taught to figure out whether Nicolas Cage is a good actor or a bad actor. The answer is, he does not fit on any spectrum.
Craig: The answer is, he’s Nicolas Cage. His movies are weird because of him because he is fully weird. Some of them are weirder than others, Bad Lieutenant. What the hell? That’s another disturbing movie. So weird. By the way, weird doesn’t mean good.
John: No, it doesn’t mean good.
Craig: Sometimes, weird movies are bad. In fact, a lot of times they’re so weird, you’re like, “I don’t know what to do with this.” Ken Russell used to make some weird-ass movies. I’m a fan of his weird. Layer of the White Worm, one of the weirdest movies you’ll ever seen. Tommy, based on this massively successful rock opera, weird movie, super weird. One of my favorite Ken Russell films, Gothic, which is the story of the night Mary Shelley conceived and wrote Frankenstein. So weird. Love that movie.
John: Emerald Fennell with Saltburn.
Craig: Weird.
John: I love that she’s getting to keep making weird movies because they succeed. Sometimes they break out because they’re strange. M3GAN broke out because it was weird.
Craig: So weird. Also, we forget because he’s become so, I don’t know, integrated into our understanding of modern cinema. Quentin Tarantino was weird.
John: Wes Anderson, weird, so weird.
Craig: Wes Anderson, we think of him now as just mostly twee, but he was and continues to be weird and honestly weird.
John: You love honestly weird. That’s the pride we’re having because you don’t have to love all the movies. I don’t love all these filmmakers, but I love that we’re continuing to make these movies.
Craig: Yes, and to the extent that you can either make something that is truly and honestly weird that comes from you, that feels authentic to you, that is interesting to people, or make something that is not weird, that’s really good. Pixar makes not weird, really good movies. Just try and avoid fake weird. That’s where I think there’s a lot of fake weird, and people can smell it from a mile away.
John: The little weird dust to sprinkle on top of it.
Craig: The weird dust, exactly. You don’t need to do that.
John: No. Let’s transition to talking about going from you have an idea, like, “I’m going to write this thing, this is the thing I want to do,” to actually doing it. Because I suspect we have a lot of listeners out there right now who is like, “Oh, I want to write a movie about this thing. I want to do this pilot.” Maybe you’ve written something before, maybe it’s the first time you’re doing it. But I want to talk about that transition from this is the thing I want to write, to actually doing the thing, and what the steps are in between. Because in previous conversations we’ve talked about, when do you know that you’re ready to start writing? Not doing too much, not doing too little. Unlike a song or a poem, you’ve got to have some plan going into it, or else it’s going to probably be chaos. But that transition point from, today I’m going to sit down and start doing it because I feel like so often it’s that worry that if I actually start doing it, I’ll hate it and I’ll fail.
Craig: You get married and you wake up and go, “What did I do?” It is scary. I think the truth is, we don’t really know.
John: You don’t.
Craig: Ideally, you have an ending. If you see the beginning and the ending, then it’s worth doing, and you’ll make it because you know where you start, you know where you finish, but you will be afraid and you will regret. Everybody regrets it. I regret when I get my food in a restaurant. I regret I couldn’t order something else.
John: I always want what Mike ordered.
Craig: Yes, exactly. I always want what Mike ordered, and I’m not even there. You have decision sickness, and it happens, but also, you must learn the value of commitment because commitment is not, “Oh, I made a great decision at the beginning of the process.” Commitment is, “It doesn’t matter if I made a good decision. I committed.” Through time, energy, and effort, it will be rewarding, hopefully. At worst, you finish, you have a finished script, you wish you hadn’t spent time on that one. You got better. You learned something, put it aside, start something else. You just have to pick and hope.
John: Nora Garrett was on the podcast a few weeks ago. She was talking about her first script, which ended up getting produced as After the Hunt. She went through a writer’s boot camp, basically, to do it. I think the value of write your screenplay in 21 days or NaNoWriMo is that it provides some excuse for why you’re starting.
This is why I’m starting to do this thing. It’s signing up for a gym on January 1st. It’s some reason to get there and actually start doing the thing, because once you’re in the middle of doing the thing, you’re more likely to keep doing the thing. You have to have some rationale for why it is now. Aline also has a metaphor of the easing yourself into the water, where you stand on the beach and let the water roll over your toes, and before you know it, you’re actually writing.
Craig: You ease in, yes.
John: I’m also remembering Katie Silverman coming on the podcast, talking about how, before writing the actual script or even writing treatments for things, she’ll just have those characters have conversations. Just have a long conversation.
Craig: That’s what I do. In the shower, I start doing weird– I’m weird. I’m weird in the shower, you guys, [chuckles] because I’m talking to myself.
John: You’re starting to hear those characters and what it sounds like when those characters are talking to each other. Those are all ways to get started. Then you’ve got to, at some point, bite the bullet. I’m writing a scene. Whether it’s on paper or you’re firing a pilot or however you’re doing it, you write a scene, tweak it a bit, and then write the next one, write the next one, and you got to keep moving. I feel like there’s so many unwritten things out there because people are just afraid to start because they will recognize all the problems with it once you start it, but that’s part of the process.
Craig: Also, starting implies you have to do work.
John: Yes.
Craig: We are afraid, and we’re also lazy. Sometimes we accentuate our fear because it is in service of our laziness when, in fact, really, it’s not that you’re scared, you just don’t want to do it.
John: Yes. Almost anything else is easier than writing.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: A video game, cleaning your kitchen is easier. Some of those are the excuses for why you’re not doing your daily writing or you’re not doing the stuff that you’re doing today, but it can back into the excuse for why you’re never starting on the actual project itself.
Craig: I would argue that if you are a writer, meaning you are a professional writer, or it’s not your job yet, but you would like it to be, and so you work when you’re not working, you should be writing. If you are trying to figure out which thing to be writing, pick one now and keep thinking about the other ones. What you don’t have an option of doing is hamleting around going, “Woah, this one or this one or this?” If you get into that mindset, then at least if you find yourself terrified at the thought of writing something, it’s because you’re actually terrified by it, not because you just don’t want to write.
John: Yes. To wrap this up, we talk about pick the project that has the best ending, which is my general advice for which of the projects you should do. If you don’t know what the ending is, that’s the right place to start. Think about you probably have a good sense of how it starts, how your project begins. Really spend the time to just work through the ending and try writing that out. If you can find it, great, and that’s going to make you really excited to do it. If you can’t find it, probably don’t start because you’re unlikely to finish it.
Craig: It’s going to be bad and you won’t know where to go and you may get to a place where you finally have to pay the debt. Then the debt is what the ending is that I don’t know. The other thing I would recommend is when you have the beginning and you have the ending, ask yourself, “Yes, but what is this about? Why would anyone care?” It’s never about what it’s about, as we know. Having that can be some nice rocket fuel for you because it gives you some mental guidance for what parts of the story would be important to tell and what parts you maybe don’t need to tell.
John: Yes. All right, let’s answer some listener questions. We have one here from Grace in London.
Grace: Hi, John and Craig. I’ve been screenwriting as a passion project for the last 10 years, averaging a screenplay a year, and I’m writing my first animated feature. I think the story and movie would work best as a musical akin to a Disney animation or even though these aren’t animated Barbie or The Greatest Showman. Do you have any advice for writing a screenplay that will integrate with an original soundtrack?
John: Sure. First off, great. She’s written 10 things. She writes a screenplay a year. That’s awesome. She’s a person who has an idea, and she’s like, “Okay, this is the thing I’m writing this year.” Love it. Good on you, Grace. I’ve written a lot of animated musicals. What I’ll tell you is that you plan for where those songs are and plan for what the function of those songs are. I always put the song in there, the original song in there. Will it get replaced? Yes, but if the song is in there serving a story purpose, my temporary song does that purpose, and you really have to think about that. If it’s not a story plus songs, the songs are crucial story elements.
Craig: Yes. Worked on somewhat popular musical film. One bit of advice I would give you is to write stuff to happen during the song.
John: Exactly.
Craig: I think a lot of people will write up to a point, and then someone starts to sing, and then they just put the lyrics in, and then the movie re-continues. No. What’s happening?
John: Yes.
Craig: Where are they? Do they move around? Who are they singing to? Do they go outside? Are there other people in the scene? How are they reacting to that? Write it in. Basically, songs are the action scenes of musicals.
John: Yes, 100%. Next question comes from Nyasha.
Drew: “I wrote and directed an audio podcast for Audible. I’m very proud of it, but I’m now in the process of trying to adapt the podcast into a movie. I’m really interested to get your thoughts on the process of adaptation. What are the pitfalls to look out for in adapting a podcast script to a screenplay and what do you think are the advantages?”
John: Nyasha, we don’t know whether yours is like a documentary podcast or a fictionalized version. I think they’re two very different things. If it’s a documentary podcast, it really calls back to Adriana versus Veronica, which is that you probably told the story in a way that really made sense in a podcast medium, but now you really need to think about what is it going to look like with visuals, taking place in time, and that kind of thing. If it is a fictional podcast, who are the characters that worked in the audio version, and how do they work just as voices, and how is it going to feel different when you actually are seeing places and time is more continuous the way that it is on video?
Craig: Yes. I’ll presume that this was a fictional podcast just for the sake of the question. You want to make sure as you adapt something like that, which is an audio-only medium, to not only think as visually as possible, but also think about how much freedom you have to go places and to see things. Show me where you are. Go outside, and don’t be afraid to spend a little time in silence as long as something interesting is happening. Some of the more interesting sequences on film are ones where people aren’t talking.
When you’re doing a podcast story, I assume people are constantly talking. Otherwise, it’s just hammering noises. You’re allowed to not talk as long as you’re showing me something fascinating. When you look at how Christopher Nolan opens the Dark Knight movie, that big robbery sequence, there’s almost no talking. Every 80 seconds somebody says, hey.
John: Yes, things that would not work in there. We often talk about how screenplays are limited because you only talk about what you can see and what you can hear. In your audio podcast, it’s just what people can hear. You’ve got one vector there. You’ll have a lot more, which is fantastic.
Craig: You have to break some things, too, because there are things that just simply won’t work well because they were designed for audio only.
John: A good example I’d point you to, I thought the adaptation of Homecoming, which is a podcast, Michael Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz did it, and Sam Esmail did the adaptation for series. I thought it was really well done. It took the best elements of what made that work as an audio fiction podcast and turned it into something that feels like a series. It had its still strange energies to it. Again, look for examples, but there’s not going to be a lot. You’re flying blind here.
Let’s answer one more from Owen.
Drew: Owen writes, “I wrote a short film based on a personal experience. A director loved it and will be shooting it next month. The collaborative process has been great, but I haven’t been involved in a lot of the creative production decisions, including casting. I’ve loved the director’s attitude and I’ve tried to stay out of the way in certain areas, telling myself it’s my story but the director’s execution. I’d love to hear about how you navigate your feelings of ownership over an idea, a story, or even a draft, and if that’s something you’ve had to practice, what that journey was like.”
Craig: Well, this is an argument for producing your own work. You’re making a short film, right, so nobody involved is some big shot in Hollywood. Everybody involved is trying to make a good calling card. They’re practicing. They’re sharpening their tools. If it’s your story, that is literally your story. Even if it’s not, even if it takes place on Mars with aliens and you control it and it’s original, you have to, I think, have to insist that you are producing this as well. I mean, unless some financier is coming in to back this big short film, you have to produce it, which means you have to have some kind of approval over the process of casting, and some general approval over the process of the schedule and the budget and all the rest.
First of all, you need to learn that stuff. Second of all, I don’t care who it is. This whole, “You got to get out of the way of the director,” unless the director’s wrong. Then you need to be in the way. They’re wrong. There’s this presumption that you’ll get notes because you’re wrong, but the director, their authority can be unchecked because they’re not wrong. Incorrect and also insane. My strong suggestion to all of you out there who are in this position that Owen is in is to be a producer on your own work so that you do maintain, at a minimum, participation this process.
John: Yes. Owen is saying that the experience has been really great, yet he’s writing to us because he’s also feeling like he should be more involved.
Craig: Stockholm Syndrome seems to have set in.
John: Absolutely. Yes, I think so. Listen, it sounds like the director is doing a good job, and you’re mostly happy with stuff. You just feel like you’re on the sidelines. Get yourself a little closer in there. It doesn’t mean that you have to weigh in on every decision at all. Just be there as a resource and learn from it because the process of making a short film is to end up with a great short film, but also so you learn about the process of making a short film, so you know what this is. By keeping yourself involved, and seeing how casting works, and what production is like, and whose job is it to do that thing on set, these are all things you should be taking in.
Craig: All of it. I think it’s important to come to the table with an open mind and a dedication to best idea wins. Even, I would argue, giving the other person a little bit of an extra edge over your opinion because you’re counteracting the fact that it’s your opinion. If you sit with someone and you really consider what they’re saying and they make a good argument, you’ve learned, and they’re right. It’s not a contest, and it’s not a game of who’s in charge of whom, but you have to be at the table of a short film that you wrote, the end.
You cannot– this nonsense– this is where it begins, where directors literally who haven’t directed things, but are like, “but I am a director. Therefore, you need to get out of my way. Everybody’s got to be worried about my feelings, my domain, etiquette, blah, blah blah, blah blah.” Everyone’s walking on eggshells around a director because the world of directors has created this culture. I’m a director and I’ll tell you, “I don’t need any of that. I don’t want any of it.” I don’t want people walking on eggshells around me. I don’t want them overly concerned with etiquette.
Yes, okay, can the guy with the boom mic give my actor’s direction? No, that’s bad for the process. Can he come and tell me that he thinks that maybe they’re saying something or doing something that might not make sense? Absolutely. Then I’ll make a determination, but there’s nothing– It’s actually the worst job to put in bubble wrap, so get the bubble wrap off that guy.
John: A practical bit of advice here, Owen. There are going to be conversations where the director’s talking to the production designer, talking to other department heads by himself, and that’s fine, that’s great, and that’s natural, but there are going to be some things which are production meetings. They’re going to be either in person or on Zooms. You should be in those meetings.
Craig: Absolutely, and helping to answer questions. If there is a disagreement, it is important that all the people working on something feel like there is a common marching order, that the instructions are consistent. If there’s a disagreement, then you can always– and this happens in meetings all the time, where– I’m in charge of my show. If somebody has a thought that is different from mine, and I’m not sure which one of us is right, I’ll say, “Okay, let’s table that. We’ll talk about that,” like my DP, “we’re going to talk about that, and we’re going to come back to you guys with an answer.” Not, “Don’t question me in front of people.” Question me in front of– What are we doing here?
Come on, the sensitivity around directors is astonishing. It’s perfectly inverse to the sensitivity around writers, which is to say everyone gets to kick them as hard as they want, and no one can even, like, “Oh my God, don’t breathe on the director. They’ll collapse. Please.
John: My first experience in production was on Go, and I was involved in every bit of casting, every production meeting, all that stuff. Did I know what I was doing in a lot of it? No, but I learned a lot of what I was doing, and I definitely had the right answers to questions as things came up. Because I was in all those pre-production meetings, when it came time when I needed to direct a second unit, I knew who everybody was, I knew what the brief was, I knew what our schedule was, I knew how to do all those things. In most of the movies I’ve written for other people, have I been that involved? No.
The Tim Burton movies, I’ve been there through pre-production, and I’ve gotten stuff up on its feet and running, could answer questions from department heads as things came up. Our director on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could send me, “This is what is in the newspaper articles that are on the background of this wall? Does this all look right?” “Yes, and thank you for that.” That’s because I’ve made myself available, and I tried to work with people who would include me in the process, and basically wouldn’t try to shut me out of the process.
Craig: Exactly. I worked with Todd Phillips. Todd is a very strong director, this firm hand clarity, but we collaborated constantly on all aspects, casting, everything, all of it. The idea is for you to know how to do it in a way that is graceful and that doesn’t confuse people, because there have been situations where people are like, “Who’s actually directing this movie?” That comes up sometimes because there’s a weak director and somebody seems to be steamrolling them. Typically, a producer or a star. There is a way to work with a director who is confident enough to let you in because it’s help. If you make it better, you make it better.
The directors that get really fussy about this stuff are the ones that are insecure because they’re not quite sure what their actual value is, and so they need to invent it.
John: All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. Mine harkens back to our celebration of weirdness. It’s a thing called Channelvue. It is just channelvue.biz. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Written by Joe Veix, directed by Brandon Tauszik. It looks like in late ’80s, early ’90s, cable listing, a cable TV scrolling guide with a little video on top that has ads and things, but things go very wrong. It’s really very smartly done. It was clearly so much work, and just the payoff is just great. It’s also just weird. It’s deeply baked down in weird. It’s weird in the same way that Too Many Cooks is weird, but it’s its own special flavor.
Craig: Its own weird. Well, that’s fantastic. I, too, have something on theme for weird.
John: I love it.
Craig: Our Dutch friends who work at Rusty Lake, one of my favorite game creators, have a demo out for their upcoming game, Servant of the Lake. Rusty Lake has made a lot of what I would call shorter, they call them cube escape games. They’re a few hours. Then they have a couple of big ones, which are my favorite. Rusty Lake Roots, big one. This is going to be a big one. They put the first, I don’t know, maybe 20 minutes of puzzle-solving little stage on there. It’s like, you show up at this place, you have a few interesting things you do.
Unfortunately, it’s only available currently on Steam. It’s not something you can play on an iPad, but eventually, of course, it will come to iOS. They always do. I played it. It was fantastic. Rusty Lake are so beautifully weird unto themselves. They have this thing. Do you play those games?
John: I have played a few of them. At your recommendation, yes.
Craig: Yes. There are a few things that always show up, no matter what. The storyline is impenetrably weird. Then there are also these things that happen. There’s always a shrimp. When you find stuff, you find matches, and you find, oh, the code sheet and the thing, but then you often will find a shrimp. That’s how you know you’re playing Rusty Lake. They put a shrimp in a drawer. Why? Don’t know.
John: Yes, but it’s specific to their taste.
Craig: Yes. Check out the demo for Servant of the Lake. I am very excited to play that.
John: Cool. Great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes was produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. We have a bonus holdover candy spooky outro by Jim Bond. It’s out of spooky season, but it’s–
Craig: We are recording this on Halloween.
John: We are recording it on Halloween.
Drew: It’s weird.
John: Yes, it’s weird.
Craig: That’s weird.
John: That’s weird. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. It’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips, another helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for ScriptNotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at ScriptNotes Podcast. If you need T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware, you’ll find us at Cotton Bureau.
You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers.
Craig: Thank you so much.
John: They showed up huge to pre-order the book. Thank you for that.
Craig: Second-best orange screenwriting book.
John: You should pre-order your Scriptnotes book today. That way, it’s in your hands December 2nd. It also gets us closer to being on lists and gets us in more libraries and bookstores. Thank you again for everyone who’s pre-ordered the book.
Craig: I like that you care about libraries. That’s very nice.
John: Yes, libraries are great.
Craig: Libraries are amazing.
John: I’m not opposed to– Like, “Oh, I’m not going to sell a book because it’s in the library.” No. Libraries are good things.
Craig: They’re amazing things. My dad, if he were alive, would absolutely take this book out from the library. I’d be like, “Dad, you know I can just send you one?” “No, I’ll get it from the library.”
John: “No, no, I’ll put it on reserve.”
Craig: He puts a request. Every week, he would go there and fill out cards. He’s like, “I’m not buying a book. I’m borrowing it.”
John: I love it.
Craig: It’s my dad.
John: I salute that. That’s good stuff. Please, pre-order your book so more libraries will be there for great staff.
Craig: Leonard.
John: Leonard will–
Craig: Leonard, well, he’s not anymore.
John: Yes. The Leonards of the world-
Craig: The Leonards of the world.
John: -will have it there.
Craig: He’s left behind legions of Leonards out there, gray-haired men in polos tucked into khaki shorts at the library with their reading glasses ready to go.
John: We’re finishing up the bonus chapter, which we’re going to send to all the people who pre-ordered the book. Remember, if you pre-ordered the book, send the receipt to Drew because it’s on the list for this bonus chapter.
Craig: Yes. ask@johnaugust.com.
John: Circling back to thank all of our premium subscribers. You can sign up to become our premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on this sense of self-narrative and remembering who you are. Craig, you never forget who you are.
Craig: I’m not sure who I am right now.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. Craig, maybe a year or two ago, we talked about aphantasia, which was this actually relatively recently discovered thing that certain people don’t have the ability to visualize things in their head. When everybody hears things like picture in your head or think back to a time, they’re like, that’s metaphorical, right? You’re not actually seeing a thing. Most of us around this table, and most screenwriters, I would presume, we can actually see things in our heads. We can sum up an image.
As they’ve done more studies on it, they see that it’s actually of a whole spectrum. There’s aphantasia, which is the inability to do this thing, and there’s hyperphantasia, which is you can do it too vividly and it’s actually not–
Craig: Disabling.
John: Disabling, yes. There’s a happy sweet spot, which is a great place to be in. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that I was reading recently, which went in much greater depth about it. It turns out that a lot of people with aphantasia don’t have a strong sense of their own history. They don’t have the ability to form a self-narrative, and they can’t think back to things. Sometimes they can’t picture places they’ve been before. They can’t picture their children. They can’t see these things. It’s not just face blindness. They just really don’t have the–
Craig: Gone.
John: It’s gone. That would feel strange and sad to most of us, and yet, some people are actually kind of happy. Their philosopher is just like, “I just move forward. I’m the person I am now, and my life is entirely present tense,” which feels like some of it, I read this and think about how would this be a movie? It’s interesting to reflect upon how freeing would it be to not be burdened by who you were.
Craig: Well, there are two things that we have to think about who we were. One are these specific memories, places, faces, times, imagining events, remembering, oh, the time I did something embarrassing. When we tell stories about something that happened, we begin to narrativize these things. There’s also the stuff that we don’t realize we remember from the past, that work underneath the surface. Those are the reasons we go to therapy because those are running in our minds. We just don’t realize it. Probably, I have just as many of those as anyone else. I think I do have a little bit, I wouldn’t say less ability to remember the past actively. We’ll call it active memory. I just have less interest in it. I don’t think much about it.
John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Larissa MacFarquhar that talks through what we know scientifically about it. What’s clear is that just the same way that some people have a kind of blindness where they actually really are seeing some things, like they literally can avoid walls. If they ask, “What do you see?” they can’t tell you, but they clearly are seeing something. There’s people who actually do have historical memory of themselves. It’s just that they can’t–
Craig: Summon it.
John: They can’t pull it up. They can’t do it.
Craig: I think that for most people, what we think of as the past is, in fact, a highly narrativized, reconstructed thing. It is not what happened. Our memories are notoriously terrible. Human memory is junk. We do not record things like a videotape. We take information in and rearrange it into a story. Our personal narratives are, in fact, narratives that are somewhat accurate, but oftentimes completely inaccurate.
John: The challenge, though, is that obviously, narrativizing is efficient. It’s a way of getting rid of the extraneous details and creating a consistent story which is useful, which may not be accurate. Narrativizing gives you the possibility of learning from your mistakes, and making different choices, and recognizing patterns that you don’t want to repeat again, or patterns that you do want to repeat again. They talk about some of these people who have the aphantasia who have a hard time with friendships because they don’t think about people when they’re not in front of them. It’s a kind of solipsism. It’s not intentional. It’s just like they literally don’t think about people unless they’re in front of them, but they sometimes worry, like, “Is everyone going to forget about me as well?”
Craig: Yes. I definitely don’t have that. I do have a healthy skepticism of my self-concept. I do feel like if I remember something, it means it probably has been processed. It’s like processed food. I’m suspicious of my own memories. I’m suspicious of my own memories of things that were good. I’m suspicious of my own memories that things were bad. I do note that I tend to memorialize things that are embarrassing, which is unfortunate. Ask me, like, “Oh, do you ever think about happy times?” No.
John: Well, probably because you’re not rehearsing those memories. Those bad things, they come up again, and they stew on them for a bit, and it reinforces them.
Craig: Well, I am a forward-looking person because I’m curious. More than anything, I’m curious, which means I want to know what’s around the bend. I’m always thinking about what’s coming next. It’s so exciting to me. The unknown is exciting.
John: One of the things I’ve noticed that they do in these studies is that people who work in scientific fields are more likely to be aphantasic than folks who work in creative fields. It makes sense, not just in the pre-sorting of it all, but the things you are– As your brain is growing and developing, if daydreaming has not been a thing you’ve been doing a lot of, you’re not doing that. I was a huge daydreamer, a crazy big daydreamer.
Craig: That would probably be the best word to describe me as a kid, as an adult, as an old man.
John: Absolutely. The parts of your brain that you’re exercising to do the things are going to reinforce. Imagining things a lot is what I get paid to do. It’s my default mode.
Craig: Well, it’s like in D&D, which of course is the answer to everything, you have abilities. The higher that ability is, the more likely you are going to use things that are connected to that ability and it all self-reinforces. I think daydreamers, we’re predilected to daydream. They daydream more. They really get a daydream. People that aren’t– Scientists have recorded data. They don’t have to remember the data. They don’t have to remember where they were when they recorded the data. There’s no story to the data. It’s just facts that are written down that can be referred to and compared and thank God for those people.
John: Yes, there’s a base truth, which is just very different from what we do.
Craig: They make miraculous things for us.
John: Drew, a question for you. Going through acting schools and stuff like that, to what degree, when you are in scenes, and did this change at all over your acting trajectory, are you literally envisioning yourself in a different place when you’re in a scene doing a thing? It’s always interesting to talk to actors like, “Are you getting rid of the camera and everybody else, or are you just in space?” Talk to me about that experience.
Drew: Oh, it’s been a while. That’s a good question. My gut was no. My gut is more about the way I was trained. It’s more about what you’re doing to the other person. That’s all actions and verbs. Just being with that other person and everything around you doesn’t matter. That’s all trappings on top of that connection.
But in improv and stuff like that, you have to imagine a room around you. Then, if you’re baking, you have to pick up the right thing. We did clown work and that kind of thing. There was a lot of that. Once it’s said, it’s said. If you’re putting out a table, you have to remember where you’ve left the forks and those kind of things. That is a different type of imagination.
Craig: Can I tell you something that bothers me about improv? People pick things up all the time. I have a water glass in front of me that you’ve so nicely provided. I’ll do this. People that pick things up in improv, it’s like they’re robots picking things up. They have to make this weird hand gesture and do this, or they put things away with both hands. It’s so weird. What is that?
John: Again, once we do this on video, all that makes much more sense. What you’re describing is, it’s the overperformance of a thing. It’s probably to sell it to the back row.
Drew: I think it’s an establishment thing.
Craig: When they reach for a door, they reach out, grab it, and pull it. They don’t just go pull.
Drew: It’s so weird.
John: It’s also because you’re establishing it for the audience, but also for other people who are on stage, that this is where the door is and this is how it swings and that stuff.
Craig: It’s very odd to me and amusing, that it always works that way. It’s just been taught and taught and taught, and now it’s inculcated. You know what? You got to imagine stuff in that space. I get it.
John: I have a focus group of people who have to watch Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, which is the movie. It’s just lines on the floor and everything is pantomimed.
Craig: I don’t want to watch that.
John: Yes. I really enjoyed it when I watched it the first time, but you are having to just imagine everything else around you.
Craig: It’s their job. That’s like, you go to an avant-garde restaurant and they just dump the ingredients on your table. Go ahead. Cook it. Make a thing. Here’s two eggs, some cheese. Make yourself an omelet, buddy.
John: I want to circle back to the sense of self-narrative. Craig, at what age do you feel like you are actually yourself? At what age does Craig Mazin begin?
Craig: I feel like I was probably 12 or 13.
John: That’s the same age I would put for myself. Before that, I acknowledge there’s a little kid who I see in photos, but it’s not really me.
Craig: No, it’s not me.
John: I feel like I can draw a continuous line back to that kid who was about 12 or 13, and it is consistently me. After moving to Los Angeles and people would make references to things, I have surprising gaps in popular culture before that age or around that age, like H.R. Pufnstuf, I just never saw.
Craig: Yes, I did see that.
John: There’s things you feel like, wait, it’s just weird, things I must have experienced or seen that just have disappeared because they never got rehearsed.
Craig: There are definitely things that I remember. I remember in first grade, kids would talk about The Rockford Files, and I was like, “What?”
John: [sings]
Craig: They loved singing the song. I’m like, “What?” I have a very specific memory. Maybe I told the story in the podcast before. We’ve done 7,000 episodes. We did charades in first grade.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: I was young for first grade. I think I was six. This is a memory from when I was six years old. There were charades where somebody would go up and do something, and we would have to guess what it is. Three different boys went up there, and their charade was just playing a guitar and pretending to sing. Everyone was like, Rockford Files. I’m like, “What is happening? What is this? What is The Rockford Files? Why would you know that from somebody playing guitar? Other people play guitar? What the?” See, I said Rockford Files, and what did you do?
John: [sings]
Craig: You did the song. As far as I know, The Rockford Files is a song for 45 minutes, then James Garner shows up, punches the guy, and it’s over.
John: That’s about right. Not entirely inaccurate. It has its scruffy charm. Again, it was a thing that was on in afternoon reruns that I was aware of,-
Craig: So weird.
John: -but I wasn’t really watching it.
Craig: Everybody was really plugged into that in 1976.
John: Yes, it’s wild. I would say 12 or 13 is when I first feel a continuity back to that person. Yet it’s strange because we are constantly creating fictional worlds and other things. We’re also in other places. All the time that I was doing Arlo Finch, those three years of writing those books, I was also simultaneously inside Pine Mountain. I could see everything. I knew the layout of everyone’s houses. I could do all that stuff. Now I don’t. As I go back, all of a sudden, I was doing a little thing about Highland, and I pulled up a chapter of Arlo Finch just to show some stuff. It’s like, “I don’t recognize these names. I don’t recognize these people. Who is that kid?” It’s weird how–
Craig: “Who wrote this?” I think about that all the time.
John: Yes. I recognize it as my writing, but I don’t remember it.
Craig: Yes, I don’t. I know I wrote it. It just was somewhere else when I did it. It is a strange thing to become other people because when you become other people in your head and you go to other places, it isn’t you. That’s why I get a little grouchy when people– and it’s inevitable. Somebody asks the question every single time when we go to Austin, like, “What stories do you feel you have the right to write?” All of them, everything. I can write anybody. That’s sort of the job is to be other people. Now that requires empathy and insight and attention and care and studying and doing your homework, but that’s what it is.
It is not surprising to me that you forget these things because you stop being those people. You start becoming other people. Well, I don’t know if this is true, but I was just thinking why the two of us thought 12 and 13. One argument is it’s because when you roughly start to transition into adulthood, which is what we are now, and so therefore that’s when you kind of remember being you. Every now and then, I do think that there was that time, I think between 12 and I’m going to say 16, where life was sort of magical.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: Everything that happened was powerfully magical. Becoming attracted to people was magical. The social stuff was magical. Drugs were magical. Everything was magical because it was all new, and it was all weird. There isn’t much magical left. I will say one of the bummers about growing old is I never have an experience where I feel like, “Oh my God.” Occasionally, I do, but generally speaking, the thrill of becoming someone is gone.
John: Well, you look at people complaining about like, “Oh, the experience of renting a movie at Blockbuster was just so much better than the current version of seeing a movie because we would go there and we would do this and sometimes you wouldn’t find the movie and that was half the fun,” and stuff. It was like, “No, you miss being 16.” That’s what it is.
Craig: Exactly.
John: You miss your youth. They do studies like when was America’s best decade and they also track their age, it was always when they were 12 to 18.
Craig: Of course. Basically, we are living through some dying boomer’s fantasy about that time, which had higher crime, and social justice was way worse. Social injustice was profound and now we’re like, “Oh, being queer isn’t weird anymore.” It was weird. That’s why they were called queer. They didn’t come up with that word.
John: Yes. It was a stronger word for weird.
Craig: Other people did. They were like, “You’re not normal.” That’s what life was back then. Then, when you look at somebody like Walt Disney, who when he designs Walt Disney World and Disneyland, what does he make? Main Street USA. Early 1900s. How old was he in the early 1900s?
John: It’s harking back to this vision of Americana, which was all the good stuff.
Craig: When life was magic. Born in 1901. Boom.
John: Exactly.
Craig: 1917, he was 16. If you look at Main Street USA, it sort of looks like what 1917 looked like in Wichita, for white people.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Those are the good old days. I guess for us, the good old days are the early ’80s, which were crime-ridden. There was a plague. It was really bad.
John: That’s part of the reason why I wanted to acknowledge in the main part of the podcast, they are not good things happening here, and just reflect note. We don’t have the ability to perfectly remember everything. I always go back to my photo roll. When was I there? What happened? That’s become my extra set of memories for things. Other references, like the podcast, it’s like, what was the context around things? You can find those.
Craig: I don’t look back.
John: You don’t look back? Only forward?
Craig: [singing] “Don’t look back in anger. I heard him say.”
John: Oh, my last thing is twice last week, I’ve watched videos of people watching my movies for the first time. It’s a really interesting–
Craig: Wait. How do you find a video of somebody watching your movies?
John: There’s a whole genre on YouTube of reaction videos where people watch a movie for the first time. It’s really fun to see people experiencing Big Fish for the first time. It’s like a couple watching Big Fish. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re narrating as they’re doing it, and they’re talking about what they expect. It’s a really interesting genre or media because it’s just like you’re seeing the live things. It’s intercutting, sometimes, with the scenes of what they’re saying.
Craig: Oh, yes. They send me a lot of reaction videos. HBO compile reaction videos to when we put a trailer out. They’ve had the trailer, the little box and the people in it. That is fun to watch.
John: It’s fun to watch it for your movie. You end up fast-forwarding through some stuff. Looking at the big twist revelations in Big Fish and how people take it, or I watched somebody watch Go, and I’m realizing how much I had forgotten about what actually happens in Go, but then seeing the person watch it for the first time and the revelations that happen in Go, it’s a fun thing. It’s nice that we have this in existence.
Craig: Yes. Some people are stuck in the past. I’m stuck in the future, which is a weird thing to say because I’m not there yet, but that’s where I am.
John: After I finished this little rewatch of Go, the algorithm showed me behind-the-scenes making of Go, which I’d never seen. I don’t know where this footage came from. They have a little interview with me and so here’s me on set of Go. This would be 1999.
Craig: Yes. It looks like you.
John: It looks like me.
Craig: You look the same.
John: I don’t remember this ever happening, but it was me.
Craig: I absolutely don’t remember any of those things. They’re gone. They happened, and then they’re gone. When we watch The Last of Us with our friends, Derek and Christy, they like to come over, and we watch together because they like the show, and it forces me to watch it. Then they make me watch the thing after the credits. They make me sit there and watch the talking head bits, the after-the-show stuff.
John: Then seeing how they cut you.
Craig: I don’t remember a damn thing from that stuff.
John: Those are all shot on one day, right?
Craig: Yes, those are all shot on one day.
John: Now we’re talking about this thing.
Craig: Hence, the single shirt, so pick a good shirt, I guess.
John: That’s the lesson we’ve learned from this discussion of aphantasia.
Craig: Pick a good shirt for behind-the-scenes.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Links:
- Scriptnotes LIVE! Book release show tickets at Dynasty Typewriter in LA
- The Uncool by Cameron Crowe
- Meet the Sisters Battling to Become L.A.’s New Billboard Queen by Mickey Rapkin for The Hollywood Reporter
- The Decline of Deviance by Adam Mastroianni
- Too Many Cooks
- Happiness (1998)
- Ken Russell
- Community tries to figure out if Nicholas Cage is good or bad
- Homecoming on Prime Video
- ChannelVue
- Servant of the Lake
- Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
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- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Jim Bond (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 710: What Happened To Weird?, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
[music]
[applause]
Craig Mazin: Are you guys being paid for this?
John August: I’m going to say, bringing in the warm-up act to get them in the mood, that was really good. It was worth all the hundreds of dollars.
Craig: Yes. Wow.
John: That was great. Thank you for that.
Craig: Sure. Thank you, guys.
[applause]
John: I would say it’s especially impressive that you’re here. Not only were we scheduled against a Rian Johnson premiere, also did you hear this? The Major League Baseball scheduled a World Series game. I’m telling you this now. They scheduled a World Series game against us. Apparently, it’s happening-
Craig: What?
John: -at this moment.
Craig: Yes. I have been told in no uncertain terms that I cannot check the score during this. However, I can tell you right now, it is tied up to two-
John: Which is exciting. Now–
Craig: -in the top of the sixth in Toronto.
John: What I will tell you is that people think, “Oh, John doesn’t like baseball.” The truth is, I like movies about baseball. I liked the episode of Moneyball. We recorded a deep dive on Moneyball with Taffy Brodesser-Akner. If you’re hungering for Craig and I talking about baseball, go back and listen to that episode. Be a premium subscriber.
Craig: I thought you were going to say, “We’ll just do it now.” I see.
John: We can’t recreate the whole experience.
Craig: I think you have agreed that before we get to audience Q&A, I can give us all another update.
John: Hold until then. If you are checking your phone along the way and something happens, cheer on the inside.
[laughter]
John: You can keep that to yourself and save it for the Q&A. All right. Craig, how many times have we done a live show here at Austin?
Craig: Oh, I would say at least twice.
John: More than twice. Eleven times we’ve done a live show here in Austin.
[applause]
John: That’s not counting three-page challenges. We’re doing another live three-page challenge tomorrow. Please come to that if you’d like to. If you want to read the scripts for the three-page challenge, they’re already up on the front page of johnaugust.com. You can read along and see how well-formatted they are on the page. Often, we come here and it’s just fun. It’s just not work.
Craig: Always a great time.
John: This year, we actually have an agenda. Craig, that agenda matches up to the cards that are on your seat.
Craig: I like that you’re acknowledging that I don’t know what the agenda is.
John: No. Craig, we’ve got to sell some books. All right. After 14 years of the Scriptnotes podcast, we now have a book coming out December 2nd. You might think, “Oh, December 2nd. On December 2nd, I will buy that book.” No. We need you to buy that book right now. You need to preorder that book. Here’s what preorders do. Preorders let bookstores know that, “Oh, people really like this book. Maybe we should stock this book.” It lets libraries know, “Oh, hey, maybe we should buy a copy for our readership.”
Maybe it puts us on a New York Times bestseller list, which would not be bad, would not be bad. No, Craig, I don’t know if you got this email, but from our editor, Matthew, who’s fantastic, we’re a month out, and he said, “The numbers look good.”
Craig: Oh, that’s horrible.
John: Yes, because we’re screenwriters, we know that good is bad. Good is not fantastic.
Craig: No.
John: Good is they’re okay.
Craig: There’s only two things, amazing-
John: Amazing.
Craig: -and horrible. There are 1,000 words for horrible. One of them is good.
[laughter]
John: Good. It’s funny that way. The English language is both vast and limited. I’m looking out over here. We have 400 people in this room. A show of hands, who in this room has currently preordered The Scriptnotes Book? Oh, that’s a lot of hands, but I also see a lot of opportunities.
Craig: These were all of the people that preordered the book.
John: More than that.
Craig: Good.
John: Yes. If everyone in this room ordered the book tonight, we have a real shot at getting on those lists that we want to be on, because how cool would it be to have a screenwriting book be on The New York Times bestseller list? That would be cool. It’s scripnotesbook.com. That’s where you see all the places where you can buy it. You can, of course, support your local bookstore. You can buy it through one of the online services. If you want a signed copy, Craig and I signed 500 copies of the book.
Craig: It was pretty screwed up because we thought we were going to sell 500 copies of the book. You guys got to really step up.
John: Yes, you got to buy all of them. Please, tonight, if you would, preorder the book. It really does make a big difference ordering it now versus December 2nd.
Audience Member: Just did.
John: Thank you very much. This man is a hero. All right, another here. If we get one more. All right, we got three. All right, I’m going to ask again at the end of the show how many people in this room have ordered that book tonight.
Craig: I may be able to afford the flight back to LA.
John: That’s the hope.
Craig: This is really great.
John: He bought a one-way ticket. This may be the thing that gets Craig home.
Craig: I commit.
John: You did commit.
Craig: I commit.
John: We have an amazing show tonight. We have a conversation about relationships and really not just what our heroes want, but what our heroes want of the other characters and that two-sided relationship. We’re also going to talk about career transitions, which feels really right for this audience because I see a lot of people in this room who may be transitioning from one career into a writing career. We have a guest who’s done exactly that. We’re going to talk about what that process is like, what that jumping off the cliff feels like. I’m so excited to get into all this.
Craig: It’s going to be great. Then there’s also some other fun stuff that we’re going to do in this audience Q&A.
John: We have another game in here that I’ll be thinking about if this next one is really keyed into who our super fans are. If you’re a super fan of Scriptnotes, this next one’s going to be for you. “Hi, I’m a super fan,” our first guest. Do you want to introduce her?
Craig: Yes. Our first guest is a screenwriter whose credits include Moana, Nimona, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and the Academy-nominated short film with the best title of any Academy-nominated short film-
John: Yes, I agree. I love saying it.
Craig: -or any Academy-nominated film of all time, My Year of Dicks. Of course, she’s a native of Austin, Texas, and a five-time Scriptnotes guest. We really should be getting these folks a nice smoking jacket. Welcome, Pam Ribbon.
John: Pam Ribbon. Oh my gosh.
[applause]
Pamela Ribbon: Yes. Where is my smoking jacket?
John: We need to get you one. Aline has the gold diamond one. You’ve been on the show a lot, and you’ve also been just a great guest again and again.
Pamela: Thank you. I pre-ordered Scriptnotes from Skylight Books, October 11th.
John: Yay. Thank you very much, Pamela Ribbon. In addition to the podcast, we have a newsletter called Inneresting. It’s interesting, but the second N is an N because Aline makes fun that I can’t say interesting with a T. It’s called Inneresting. We have a newsletter. Chris, our editor, came up this week with a post of his own that I thought was terrific. It’s talking about relationships between two characters and a sort of matrix on how much they are aligned and the affection between the two of them. It was a great way to think about relationships.
I want to pose to the three of us, let’s talk about relationships in our scripts and relationships between characters because we so often focus on what a character wants, but we don’t focus on what characters want from other people and how that misalignment is really a source of conflict in our stories. Who wants to field it first?
Pamela: I’ll say something that’s true. I hear in my head, Craig, I don’t know when, I’m sure it was a podcast, but not at my face, this feels weird, you giving me this advice, but you said all movies are about the human experience and the relationships. That is in my head whenever I start any story.
Craig: I got that from Lindsay Doran. Really, it’s Lindsay Doran in your head. She got it from Sydney Pollack. Sydney Pollack is in all of our heads now. He used to say when they were working on a screenplay that somebody else was writing, one of the questions he would ask is, “What is the central relationship of this story?” Which in and of itself requires us to focus in on which one matters the most. Then I guess the question is, when you think about that relationship, I know this is the way I think about it, do you construct characters, and then put them in a relationship, or do you construct a relationship, and out of that, figure out character?
Pamela: It depends on if your protagonist is already well-defined, then you want to find who’s going to drive that character crazy. If you know that it’s a world, then Planes, Trains and Automobiles of like, “How can these people have to be forced together and push each other’s buttons? I always try to figure it out mostly from the point of view, which is when you know what your theme is. Then everybody is orbiting around this concept of whether these two are going to make it.
John: When you think about relationships, so often you think about, “Oh, romantic relationships.” That’s the default thing, but any two characters have a relationship. They could be work friends. Craig and I have a complicated relationship, a good relationship but complicated. There’s tension.
Pamela: It’s a rom-com.
Craig: It’s simple for me.
John: Simple for you. What I think is crucial is that they may not be aligned. One person may have one perception of a relationship that’s different than the other person’s. It’s not just about looking at a relationship from, “Oh, what is this relationship?” It’s like, “What does this character think the relationship is, and what does the other character think this relationship is, and what changes over the course of the story, and how do each of them affect change upon that relationship?”
I want to talk about Nimona for a second because in Nimona, you have the central guy and the girl who’s not really a girl. Their relationship is complicated and evolves, and I’m sure evolved a lot over the evolution of the script and the story.
Pamela: Nimona is a very strong character. Moana had Maui. I’ll just say that you’re trying to balance whose film is this for that central relationship. You have someone who’s questioning everything up against someone who never questioned anything before and thinks, “This is the only way it is. This is how I grew up. My life is because of this system. Now, I’m starting to see that none of it’s real. Now, I’ve got the worst person, Nimona, with me to go through this,” and then you make that relationship test whether or not it’s even real. This was a movie about, like Nimona says, everything is broken. The whole system is broken. What if you just look past what you have been told not to see?
Craig: In that, you start to see how– We all understand that when a hero is facing off against a villain, they’re struggling over power. James Bond versus Blofeld, they’re fighting over who is or is not going to destroy the world. In all relationships, it seems, it’s worthy to pay attention to the power because one person almost always has more power in the relationship than the other. The question is which one, why, and then how do I flip it? It’s usually the case that just as characters change over the course of the movie, the relationship needs to change over the course of the movie.
You mentioned Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Steve Martin has all the power, all of it, until suddenly he doesn’t. That’s what makes that movie beautiful. Talk a little bit, if you could, about how you think about who has the upper hand and how that might help you as you’re wondering, I know what has to happen plot-wise, but what is this scene actually going to be?
Pamela: Oh, that’s such a good question. I think it’s someone very stubborn about their point of view, and they’re going to have to change. You throw someone at them that is an undeniable force of change. They’re just coming right at your heart. Usually, that’s who we put the sweet one as, the kind one, so that you’re rooting for this change. Whether or not they work out. That’s why Bing Bong dies. You want the thing coming at you. Spoiler alert.
John: Sorry. I’m sorry.
Craig: Sorry.
John: The movie’s out there.
Pamela: Score is three-two. I’m not going to tell you who’s up.
[laughter]
Pamela: Just kidding. I’m just kidding. I don’t know. I’ve talked to you the whole time. He’s right at his heart. You want someone who’s going to mess up that status quo of that relationship.
Craig: This is a demonstration of what power is in a relationship, what you just did.
John: We’re talking about power in a relationship, who is doing the thing to the other person. I want to direct us back to what does the character want from the other person? You see people talking about love languages. “What is it that a person is seeking from the other character? Are they getting it? Are they getting it in the way that they need to get it? How do they communicate what it is that they actually want? Does the character need to be seen? Does the character need to feel invalidated? Does the character just need a big hug?” You look at Wreck-It Ralph or you look at any of these characters, they need different things.
They have a hard time learning the language to talk to the other character. That’s actually some of the journey of the script. If they knew it from on page 35, there wouldn’t be a movie. The problem would be solved. It’s not just that they’re trying to change the other character. They’re trying to understand the other character and get the other character to see them as they see themselves.
Pamela: They also need that other character to be a true mirror.
John: That’s the construction.
Craig: That’s the– well done.
Pamela: That felt better than it should have.
Craig: There’s that Wizard of Oz theory that all of the characters are just fragments of Dorothy’s personality. One method is that you have a strong central character and the relationship that that character has with another one, and really all the relationships that character has will be in service of them changing. All of those people through the relationship and you letting them down, making them happy, you change. The other model is that the relationship is the story. Romantic comedies, the relationship is the story. They will tend to lean it towards one person who just needed to learn, but really, it’s the relationship. I have to say, I think in animation, they do a really good job of that. Better than, I think, live action.
Pamela: Also, we come at it so open-hearted. It allows for that love story to– I just keep thinking of the word shipping, because you’re rooting for these characters to just survive everything. Just a side note, my kid is 12 was like, “Hey, I just learned that shipping is about a relationship.” I said, “What do you think?” She said, “I thought it meant that you love someone so much that you go on the Titanic.” I was like, “That is what it means.” I was like, “You mean that you’d let someone be on the door?” She was like, “Yes.”
John: Oh.
Craig: Oh my God. You got that door kind of love. That floating door kind of love.
Pamela: That shipping.
John: He could have gotten on the door.
Pamela: [unintelligible 00:15:14] was the ship.
Craig: Oh, I thought that it meant like, “I love you so much, I will do one of those horrible cruises with you.”
[laughter]
John: I want to circle back to this question about animation, because I do feel like Nimona, Moana, these relationships are really well done in animation. I wonder if it’s partly just the process. The process of you’re going through iteration after iteration, you’re really seeing what’s working there, and you can narrow down and drill into it, versus as we shoot live action, “We shot that scene, we’re done. We’re not going to go back and reshoot that scene again.” That is an advantage.
Pamela: There were many Mauis, because you could take over the film pretty easily. Then you also have all the myths, and which Maui do you want? Is it the Maui who in the end lifts up all the islands and discovers Polynesia, or is he a broken demigod? One of the early versions, she was this big Maui nerd, and she was so excited that she had met Maui. He was just this defeated monster in a cave who didn’t want to be talked to.
John: That’s a good idea, but it probably didn’t serve the rest of the movie. The animation has the luxury of exploring the bad ideas and hopefully getting back on the right path.
Pamela: It gave him the movie, because she was just urging him to come out and come out and come out. There is a line in Moana where I’m like, “That’s the old version,” because she says, “Maybe we were all here for you to realize you’re Maui.” She handed him the movie for a second. I don’t know. I think you always want Moana to win so that when she loses, it is because she learned something from Maui.
Craig: The relationship reinforces who she is. It is far less interesting to watch somebody learn something on their own. It’s really less interesting to watch somebody learn something easily. Having somebody else point out that either you think you learned the lesson and you didn’t, or you haven’t learned anything at all, is helpful. I do think about John Candy confronting Steve Martin. Where you understand that Steve Martin, yes, Thanksgiving is about family. Sure. That relationship made me care about the statement, “Thanksgiving is about family.”
It would not have worked had you not, A, been invested in that relationship, and B, also being even. Steve Martin gets angry at John Candy reasonably. He’s infuriating. He has to be. He has to be. All of that comes out of relationship, as opposed to just characters next to each other.
Pamela: We also see ourselves in both of them. That’s why you want them to come together and heal the both terrible sides inside of you that they are at their worst at in a movie like that.
Craig: I have definitely done this with food. I’ve flicked it right off myself, John Candy style. Absolutely.
John: Now, I would say our feature bias is probably coming through here because we’re talking about feature films that have a clear arc. They have a beginning and an end, and things go through. I want to stress that the importance of relationships is obviously crucial to series television as well. You think about all of the individual relationships in The Office and the differences between them in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, how specific that is. Obviously, our great one-hour dramatic television, how important those are.
Kate and Jack, but also all the other survivors on Lost, you’re tracking where are these characters with each other at all times, and what do they need from each other, what are they trying to get from each other? It’s so tempting to think about characters’ individual goals, but there’s goals within each relationship as well.
Pamela: Craig, when you know you have to kill off a character–
Craig: Like Bing Bong.
Pamela: Like Bing Bong. When you know you’re having to take some character that has been established, so loved, so perfect that it’s the moment they must die, this is for both of you, but do you feel bad?
Craig: Yes, of course, because it’s about the relationship. That particular scene, I think you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about. Are you talking about–
John: Chernobyl, yes.
Craig: You’re talking about Chernobyl.
Pamela: Chernobyl. Remember when you had to kill everyone?
Craig: You’re talking about-
John: The Hangover III.
Craig: -the fourth diver in Chernobyl?
Pamela: I just think it was one, it made the trades. That’s a big death.
Craig: It’s a big death. I remember when Mark Mylod, who directed that episode so beautifully, we were sitting there without anyone. It was just the two of us in that room. We were looking around, “Where? Where? Where?” Really, what it came down to is, I think he needs to be here because she’s going to come in here, and they need to look at each other the entire time. They need to be this far apart. They need to be not so far apart that they’re too far apart, but not so close together that they’re too close together. Just the right amount of far apart because it is entirely about what it means to be connected to somebody in a relationship and be pulled away from them, as we often are with everybody in our lives.
You have moments of ebb and flow. You feel yourself drifting away from somebody, but it’s a rubber band. It’s not something that broke, and you then come back in that moment. All of it was focused through relationship. All of it, eyes, the whole thing.
Pamela: Someone mentioned Past Lives today. That’s it, right? You have a relationship that’s been established, and then a relationship that is mostly in the imagination and potential. Then you’re sometimes rooting for it to stay there.
Craig: Yes, exactly.
John: Let’s wrap this up by talking about technique. What we’re doing on the page to communicate where people are at in the relationship. Let’s think about how do we get insight into what the characters are thinking. Obviously, they can say things, but more importantly, we as an audience need to get a sense of each individual character, what they really want, and how do we find moments with each character separately so we can read what that is, or that we can, as an audience, understand a thing that they’re saying the other character doesn’t understand it the same way. That’s subtle, but it’s so important.
When you do that right in a scene, it really transforms what’s happening there. You think, “Oh, that’s the actors, that’s the performances, their chemistry.” No, if it’s not on the page, it’s not going to make sense. You have to be able to read it and get like, “I get why this is heartbreaking.” In Big Fish, I understand the dynamic between Will and Edward because I see each of their points of view, and I’m rooting for both of them. I’m rooting for the relationship to get all together to be healed, and yet, I know how hard it’s going to be because I understand how stubborn each one of them is.
Craig: Yes, when you’re writing a scene, especially between two people, which is my favorite, and it’s where you can focus it all down to relationship, every single thing somebody says should have an impact on the other person. Even if that impact is to make them think, “Oh, we agree, which is encouraging to me. I didn’t realize we agreed as much as we do.” That means they changed, and then mess it up, and then mess it up, and surprise, and go back and forth.
Every single thing that is said needs to have an impact. In our lives, we have conversations all the time where one person is saying the following, and another person’s listening along going, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. Here’s something,” and the other person, “Oh, that’s interesting.” No one wants to watch that.
John: No.
Craig: No one.
Pamela: That’s for podcasts.
Craig: That’s for podcasts. That is what a podcast is. I feel hurt.
[laughter]
Craig: You did the thing. Everything, think about all of it. Never give yourself a break there, but all of it is an opportunity then, therefore, to make a conversation about the relationship, and then think about every scene. “Where were these two people in the beginning? How are they on the way out?” Animation, again, because it’s so expensive, every single moment has to be thought like that.
Pamela: $1 million a page. That’s what they said to me. They’re like, “Was this page good?” I’ll go work on that page. I can do some more. This is my improv background, but I always think find the game. Do they play your game? That’s when rom-coms take off. Sometimes, my favorite, bring it on, it’s toothpaste scene, not a line, not a line, but they’re brushing and spitting, and they’re looking at each other, and they’re teasing each other, they’re testing each other, and they’re playing a game. By the end of it, you’re like, “I want this. I want this to keep happening.”
Craig: That’s great. That’s a great example.
John: All right. It is time for our second guest. Would you like to introduce our second guest?
Craig: Yes, I would love to. Our next guest is a showrunner, educator, father, and PhD, so screw us, whose credits include Queen Sugar, The District, The Blacklist, and Bel-Air. Please welcome Anthony Sparks.
John: Anthony Sparks, welcome.
[applause]
Craig: Was anybody in the pitch contest last year, perhaps?
John: These three.
Craig: Yes, we were–
Anthony Sparks: The band is back together. Yes, we’re back and ready to ruin your lives again.
John: Anthony Sparks, in the little bio intro, we talked about your PhD and all these amazing things. Of course, I buried the lede. You were also in Stomp.
Craig: Exactly.
John: You’re a Broadway actor on Stomp. That is where you were starting to do your work, getting into writing. Are you literally backstage writing scenes? Tell me about that.
Anthony: I am. I actually sometimes call Stomp my first writing job-
John: All right.
Anthony: -because I was playing, basically, in classic nomenclature of theater, I was the wise fool in the show. When everybody else would ding, I would dong. The show is written but improved at the same time in pockets. I had a lot of improv. My job was to connect with the audience. The directors were crazy enough to rely on me to change my show every night. I must have done 1,000 Stomp shows. I never did the same show twice. I just had to hit the punchlines, which means I failed a lot on stage in front of hundreds of people, but I would also hit.
I started thinking, “What is my next act? I had always privately written in high school and things like that. I decided that I was going to be a writer next as a practical answer to some things and a creative answer to some things that I was thinking about. I literally started teaching myself how to write TV. I’m sad to say, I missed a few or was late to a few entrances because I was engrossed in my script backstage. That was my sign that, “Oh, maybe it’s time to leave.” [unintelligible 00:25:58] is always working on scripts backstage at Stomp.
Craig: When you said like, “I taught myself how to write TV,”-
Anthony: To a degree.
Craig: -to a degree, how–
Anthony: I’m sure a lot of people here are like, “This is the early aughts,” late 90s, and there are TV writing books and books about the TV business, but not as many as there are now. I was able to get my hands on a couple of books, and I read them. I started just dissecting TV. I started watching. At the time, I thought I was going to be a comedy writer because I had written this satiric play that was getting some attention in New York City that I would put up on my days off from Stomp. I was young and had a lot of energy and was glad to say that I used it.
Just the fact that you had to come at it from a structural standpoint, I knew dialogue, I thought, from theater and plays, and I knew the feeling of structure, but I didn’t know structure to the extent that you go into a writer’s room, you’re able to actually contribute to story advancing. I would say that’s a process that’s probably never-ending for all of us.
John: Sure.
Craig: I suspect that it wasn’t an accident that you were the person the director was relying on stage to change things. I’m sure there were quite a few people on that stage of the director would be like, “Never, ever.”
Anthony: No.
Craig: “You do the bang that lid there then,” and you had a sense of it already. It’s just that you needed then to figure out, “How do I get this instinct from instinct level to craft?” That perfect term.
Anthony: Absolutely. I can’t say that process was complete because is it ever, because otherwise, the same person who won an Oscar last year would win this year because they just repeat it. There is an X factor to writing. In terms of fundamentally understanding story, that process, so I was able to write to the point where I was able to get into fellowships. I was in New York. At that time, there was no TV writer business in New York. There is somewhat now. I was applying to the Warner Brothers writers program. I was applying to the Disney fellowship from New York, getting close but no cigar in some cases until finally, I got one.
Craig: Let’s pause there for a second because I suspect a lot of people here have gotten close but no cigar. I’m sure that’s a feeling you’ve all had. It’s a bad feeling because you don’t know if maybe there will ever be a cigar.
Anthony: Absolutely.
Craig: What keeps you going in the hopes of a cigar?
Anthony: Wow, that’s a deep question.
Craig: Yes, man.
Anthony: What keeps you going? I think there are some people who will go for those fellowships because they’re really hard to win. It’s $1,000, $2,000, $2,500 play. It feels like a crap shoot, and on some level, it is. I know plenty of writers who never got those fellowships who are king and queens of the world in TV and film. I also have met a lot of people who applied once, didn’t get it, and was like, “You can’t win anything.” It was one, you wrote one script. Maybe you think it was great. Maybe it actually was, but a person read it after they had a bad tuna sandwich and took it out on your script. It happens.
If you’re a writer, writers write, and you can’t stop after one script. You just cannot. You just can’t. Writers write. You keep putting the coins in the machine. For me, I applied once to Warner Brothers. I had just gotten married. I got married really young, and I had just gotten married, and I applied, and I didn’t get in. For whatever reason, they were having this one-day workshop on a Sunday in Burbank where they were going to talk about what we’re really looking for. I don’t know if that particular batch of scripts that year was really bad or whatever, but they were doing this outreach.
I said to my wife, “You want to go on a working vacation to LA, so I can go to this workshop on this talk in Burbank?” We did. We literally turned into a working vacation. We flew out here, and I went and sat in the audience and took a bunch of notes. There was hundreds of people there, asked some questions, and I went back and took that back, and I wrote a new script, and I got in the next year.
Craig: There are hundreds of people here who are going to be asking questions.
John: Absolutely, yes. Anthony, one thing that really impressed me about talking with you is that you worked really hard. You get knocked down, you pick yourself up. That’s fantastic. I think you also constructed a life that if your writing career never happened, you still had a lot of very meaningful things you were doing. Can you talk to us about the decision? I know you got staffed on a show, but then you also got into a PhD program. You’re balancing those two things.
Anthony: Exactly.
John: Now, you’re a doctor. Talk to us about that decision and what you’re thinking as you’re going through all this.
Anthony: My bio, to some degree, on a good day, looks like I had this master plan for my life. Indeed, I did think a lot about, my wife and I call it, composing your life. It was something that when we first came out here to LA, we went to go hear Maya Angelou speak, and she spoke that. I don’t know. For some reason, we were very impacted by that phrase, compose your life, which means just try to be intentional, try to put some things together. I am mostly a product of just being hard-headed. I should have quit my PhD program five times.
Craig: You’re not a good doctor?
[laughter]
Anthony: As a few professors was like, “You can leave.” I was like, “No, I’m Pearly Mae, boy. We don’t quit.” I am. I’m a hard-head South Side of Chicago by way of Mississippi kid. Those things don’t normally go together. There’s only 24 hours in a day. The day that I almost dropped my baby daughter because I was so tired was a moment where I was like, “I’m quitting. I’m doing too much. I’m exhausted.” This child is three months old. I almost just dropped her on a concrete ground.
Craig: They bounce. They’re fine.
Anthony: Yes. It only takes five seconds.
[laughter]
Anthony: Although there is a text chain today about these migraines that she’s having.
John: A little stressed. Almost, but did not drop his daughter.
Anthony: I did not drop her. What was the question?
John: Going back to finding balance.
Anthony: The balance.
John: There’s a moment where you’re like, “I’m trying to do too much. Also, I love that.” Choosing to do this PhD program and finishing this PhD program, you are giving yourself many opportunities. You’re giving yourself many opportunities just to see it on many different things. All your eggs are on in this one basket and your identity is this because your identity is as a professor you’re teaching, but you’re also a showrunner, and you’re a father and a writer who does his own things as well. You are composing your life like Maya Angelou suggested you do.
Anthony: The only thing I needed to do was to try it. I’m the son of a mom who had a sixth-grade education. It was very hard for me when USC offered me funding for five years to the total of about $300,000, like the little kid from the south side of Chicago. I’m like, “I got to try and make this work. Win one for the ancestors, seriously.” When my show unexpectedly got canceled, the thing that happened was I got staffed. I got the funding. I got the fellowship. I said no to the fellowship because I’m going to go write. My show got canceled. I was like, “Does health insurance come with that?”
There was a practical side to it. I said, “I’m going to start,” because I noticed my first year on the show that I was on as a staff writer, I noticed I was in my office a lot reading. I was like, “I could be reading a book and getting credit for this.” I didn’t know that that’s not how all shows operate. I have been the beneficiary or what results from saying yes to the door that happens to be open at that time.
Craig: I think that’s a wonderful thing. That’s certainly something that I think people who don’t come from privilege feel. The open door is not tempting. The open door is necessary because the doors are usually closed. What I love about your story is you took away some of the innate fear that, “I made it. I made it. I broke in.” People are always asking us, “How do you break in?” The answer is there is no breaking in. You get broken. You think you got broken in, and then show’s canceled, LOL. You had something else to do. You did not go, “Yes. I made it. I’ve arrived. The end,” because it is not a smooth path. I do think that it makes you a better writer when you’re not writing scared.
Anthony: Yes. It was a scary time. This happened because I said earlier today, I got staffed and I was like, “Hey, let’s have a baby.” We did. Then the show was canceled, but you can’t take her back.
[laughter]
John: Also, you weren’t stopping your decision to have a family based on, “If I get writing success, then I will start the rest of my life.” You started your life. That’s a crucial lesson to learn as well. I think sometimes we fall into– we write heroes, we write protagonists, and we assume they have to go through this arc and do all this stuff and have a plan for how it’s all going to be. If you’re not exactly on that plan, then it’s a disaster. That’s not real life. What I like is that you are just like, “No, I’m starting now. I’m starting on things that are important to me now.”
You got married young. You started having a family young, and that’s awesome. As we wrap up, though, I want to talk about teaching because Craig and I, people who have listened to the show, sometimes have opinions about university screenwriting programs, which can be challenging.
Anthony: As you should.
John: I’m really curious, what do you get out of it? What, as a professor, do you take from teaching? You don’t have to.
Anthony: Quite a bit.
John: You do it because you want to, I’m sure.
Anthony: I do it because I want to. It certainly isn’t the money. I am a product of a serious succession of teachers who just kept giving me shots, creating opportunities for me, believing that I was worthy of them. It did get into my bones, that that is what you do. You educate yourself, you learn, you earn, and then you return, as Denzel Washington once said. That is part of me, genuinely. That’s the Pollyanna part of me. The other part of me is that it’s a very practical way for me, not so much with money, but just in terms of I’m always engaged in story.
I don’t walk into rooms desperate because I’ve built out these other areas of my life without compromising my commitment to what it is that we all get to do. It also is practice for me as a showrunner when I’m not running a show. I have to break down story and teach it to people who are in a very different place than I am. I am a better, much better writer since I started teaching.
Craig: Amen. Listen, if everybody had your resume and your validity and your experience, then I would say everyone rush out to go to school. There are other ways to get me, we do this. There are other ways, of course, to do that. One thing I love about what you’re saying is I feel like doing this over the course of all these years made us better-
John: Of course.
Craig: -at what we do because we have to think about it.
Anthony: There’s no way. Many of us make our bones. Writers write a lot by instinct. You can be a great writer who writes by instinct, but I think at some point, when you’re writing and it’s your profession, no one’s waiting for you to feel the muse coming. That’s where craft kicks in to get you from those moments of inspiration to inspiration, which lifts something to a new level. In the meantime, it’s grinding it out. It’s craft. It’s thinking about– Absolutely. I’ve listened to your podcast. I’m ear-hustling. I’m trying to be cool and not be seen taking notes, but I’m definitely taking notes.
Craig: Ear-hustling. That’s the best phrase ever.
John: Ear-hustler.
Anthony: Everybody up here is worthy of being up here for lots of different things. Being a writer is a little bit of a lifetime student thing. Even when you do it well and you’ve had these accolades, hopefully, you’re always, at the end of the day, staring at that blank page going, fade in, “Oh, shit.”
John: Yes. Anthony, thank you very much for joining us here.
Craig: Thank you so much.
John: Great. Now it is time for one of our favorite, but also potentially terrifying segments where we invite the audience up to ask some questions of us and our panelists. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?
Jason: My name is Jason. You can all answer this. What is the first thing you do when you feel stuck in a script?
John: What is the first thing we do when we get stuck in a script? Pamela, what’s the first thing you do when you get stuck in a script?
Pamela: I complain. I complain about it. I walk around the house with this face. Everyone thinks I’m mad at them. I’m like, “I’m thinking.” I have my thinking face. Then you try to figure out why you’re so irritated because you think, I know how to do this. Why don’t I know how to do this right now?
What that is why you’re stuck. That’s the problem you’re solving. Then you go talk to someone else about your problem. Then they tell you their problem. Then you help them with their problem, and then they help you with your problem.
Anthony: Getting an outside perspective. When we’re writing, we’re making a thousand different decisions that we hope will somehow add up to something that is compelling and believable, so sometimes the outside perspective. If I can’t get that, I will sometimes step back and simply ask myself, what is the logical thing that would happen here?
I can get overly whatever in my head, and so break it. What is the simple thing? Not what is the interesting thing. That comes after. What’s the logical thing that this character would do or feel or say in this moment to at least make the dots connect, and then I can go back and try and find a way to make it–
I sometimes will say when I’m leaving a room, like, “Let’s do the boring expected version, get it up on the board. This will, in no way, be what’s in the script, but let’s at least make it make sense, and then we can go back and make it interesting.”
Craig: That’s great. Both of you, great advice. I sometimes feel myself trying to solve the problem, then I stop myself because you’re not going to solve it well if you’re trying to solve it because you’re thinking about it like a problem. Then I just go, okay, I’m going to forget about the problem. Let me just think about my characters. Let me just put them in different scenes. Let me play around in my head. Let me take a long shower. Let me think about this.
Let me also, and I’ve gotten much better about this, look at this as good news. It’s actually good news. We tend to think that if we’re stuck, we’re dying. We’re not. It just means we don’t see it yet. You will, and you will because you know you don’t have it. That’s how you know you will see it because you’ll know it when you know it. It’s coming. You just got to let it come.
Pamela: It’s the puzzle lover in you. I try to remind myself, this is just a puzzle I haven’t solved, and if this was a crossword puzzle, I wouldn’t be this mad.
Craig: Exactly.
John: For me, I make a deck of cards called Rider Emergency Pack, which is for this purpose. It’s the little things I do when I get jammed up in a thing. You can find it in stores or Amazon or wherever. The philosophy behind it is, sometimes you just really need to change your focus. A card will be magnified. What if you were to zoom in super tight on this thing or on this character or zoom all the way out? What if you were to change genres?
Imagine this is a spy thriller rather than this comedy that you’re writing. What would be the solution to that kind of movie? Getting yourself off this track that is jammed into this place and realizing, oh, there’s a whole range of possibilities I’m just not considering, that tends to help.
The other thing which is true for all of this is that when you hit a problem, rarely is the problem right where you’re at. The problem was a while back, and you probably just need to lay some different tracks to get around this thing that’s in front of you. You may be imagining a perfect solution to this problem that really does not exist. Really, to create a different situation doesn’t end up in the same place.
John: Cool. Great question. Thank you so much. Thank you all. That was honestly a paradigm example of an actual question.
Craig: It was a master class in asking a question. No pressure.
John: No pressure. Now, what’s your name and what’s your question?
Craig: Hi, I’m Im Tay. As an actor by training, I was taught that acting rests on a three-legged stool of imagination, relaxation, and concentration.
John: Wow, Craig.
Craig: I was wondering if there is a similar kind of philosophy when it comes to writing. If so, what’s the hardest leg for each of you and how have you worked to develop that?
John: Remind us of the three things that you were taught, so imagination.
Craig: Imagination, relaxation, and concentration.
John: Those are really great principles. I haven’t articulated something like that of what those things are, but those are all crucial things as we’re putting ourselves in a place and watching what happens, which to me is what writing largely is.
Pamela: To capture the true moment. I get that that relaxation part is so important because I was like, writers have an 18-leg stool. [laughter] Then we were like, “I think I have too many legs.” That key, I think, is the relaxation to let the moment come and to breathe with your script and to just be okay.
John: Honesty is somewhere in there. Are you being honest to the moment? Are you being honest to these characters? Are you trying to force a thing that’s not supposed to be there? Relaxation is probably part of that. Really, it’s like, is the scene true? Is the moment true or is it fake? Does it feel fake within the context of this script?
That’s a crucial thing for me, too, because sometimes when we’re talking about problem solutions, there’s a fake solution. There’s a thing which is, this is not honest to the thing. You’re always going to hate it because you know that you lied to get there.
Craig: I wish I had good stool legs for you. I think, ultimately, in acting, those are three great things to consider. None of them will help you if you’re not a good actor. All of them will help you if you’re a good actor. There is something that is instinctive to artists and craftspeople.
Sometimes the answer is to say, “Okay, I’m not good at everything as a writer. What am I good at? What is that telling me right now? Let me listen to that because that’s what I’m good at.” Follow that. The rest is absolute mystery to me. I got to be honest. I don’t know where I go. I don’t know how I do it. When I read things that I’ve written in the past, I’m terrified because I don’t know who wrote that and I don’t know how to do it again.
John: Same.
Craig: Don’t remember it. I was gone.
John: I’ll read something and I’m like, “Oh, that sounds like me,” but I have no recollections. I don’t know who these characters are.
Craig: That’s terrifying actually. There you go. It’s like an upside-down stool with one leg. Think of it that way. [laughter] That’s what it’s like.
John: Crazy. That’s crazy. Thank you so much for your question. Good question. Hello. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Joe: My name is Joe. Podcasting and screenwriting are clearly two different mediums. What is something you have learned about yourself either as a podcast host or a guest that is something you would not have learned during the creative process?
Craig: That ties into what we were saying earlier about educating is education. I know that I have had to think a little bit more clearly about some of the things that I do believe philosophically. It’s different than what is an inspiration in a moment when you sit back and you go, okay, there’s artsy-fartsy Craig, but then there’s also outline Craig who’s got a job to do and understands it needs to fit within a certain amount of time.
It needs to achieve certain things plot-wise. There has to be surprises and all these nuts and bolts things. I think doing this and being forced to talk about those things helps me codify and make some of those a little bit clearer in my own head. It’s like forced organization.
John: I would say I’m always riveted to being a segue man. I’m always moving on to the next thing. What that really is, is it’s recognition of being very present in the moment, but also always knowing where you’re headed and where you need to get to next. That’s also writing. That’s also what a scene needs to do. You need to set a sense like we are fully in this moment, and yet we’re going to the next thing.
Just the way a scene can just die and people are just sitting there and nothing’s happening, you don’t feel any momentum, you’ve got to keep the momentum there while still letting it be present for the characters who are in that scene.
Craig: That makes sense.
John: Great question. Thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you.
[applause]
Silas: Hi, there. Big fan. Sorry, I’ll be a little bit farther. My name is Silas. You guys did a podcast episode relatively recently, I don’t know how well in advance you record these, about short films. I’m a sci-fi writer. I’m a sci-fi fantasy writer, genre writer.
I sometimes have a really hard time balancing the line between being super obnoxious and explaining everything way too heavily, the whole Star Wars scroll thing, whatever, and people asking me, why are they doing that, what is happening. That’s a huge problem to have in short films where everything is super compact, needs to be super tight. My question is, how do you balance that line between exposition and mystery?
Craig: Sure. I’ll turn that over to you guys because we all deal with this one. Everybody needs to know things. Also, you don’t want them to know things.
John: You don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things.
Craig: What are some of the things– I think about in animation, again, $1 million a page, what are some of the tricks you use?
Pamela: The story in Frozen is there were all these backstories and all these minutes they had to get rid of, and it changed into the line, was she born with it or was it a curse? That’s an interesting question. It gets answered, and now we know everything about why we’re here.
Trying to find a way to take all of that that you think they need to know, you think they need to know it, they don’t. They don’t think that. They want to know, what do I care about? I don’t care about the backstory until I know why they’re not in love, why they hate each other. Then I can start to learn all the worlds and what your currency is and why it’s a patriarchy or whatever it is that the sci-fi world wants you to know. That stuff is interesting for you to know what your tone is, but we don’t need to know all of it to care about your characters.
John: Silas, thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you, Silas.
[applause]
John: Hello.
Brenna Kwan: Hello. My name is Brenna Kwan. My question is, what is your opinion on, let’s say, sizzle wheels or proof of concepts from, let’s say, emerging filmmakers that’s created out of AI? Do you consider that as a red flag or–
John: Hey, it’s a good question.
Craig: I think everybody in here is going to give an answer, but let’s see what you say.
John: Let’s talk about sizzle reels in general. Sizzle reels, we’re cutting together stuff from other movies that give a sense of what this thing feels like. For directors who are putting together a project, sometimes it’s a really helpful way of showing what it is that you’re trying to do and sort of do this thing.
Where I get a little bit frustrated is when you have to do a sizzle reel for just a script that you’re not trying to direct, just to get someone to read the script, that’s really annoying. I really wish we could stop doing that because I think it’s a waste of time because you’re here to be a writer, not to be a sizzle reel maker.
Whether you’re cutting out of other films or using AI or whatever to do it, I just don’t think it’s a good practice for us to be in. So many strong opinions on use of AI and what things feel like, okay, well, it’s a person using that thing to do the job they would otherwise be doing to do.
I don’t have problems if a visual effects artist is using some new tool that uses some of the stuff in there. I just don’t want it to replace their job. I do feel like using a sizzle reel to do that kind of stuff, it’s just putting more of that stuff out there in the world, and I’m really frustrated with it.
Craig: I think it’s an indication maybe of lack of commitment, or even, dare I say, laziness. Remember, a sizzle reel is already taking what other people have done and putting it together to sort of go, it’s kind of like what these people all worked really hard to do, which is already sort of a cheat code, which is fine. Then to say, and also I just asked the slop machine to barf out somebody with seven fingers to help me, it’s indicative to me that maybe the heart isn’t in it.
John: I guess here’s my concern. If I see your thing, I feel like, “Oh, this was done with AI,” and then I’m going to read your script, it’s like, “Well, did she really write it?” I don’t think it reflects well on you.
Craig: Where does it stop? [chuckles]
John: That’s why I’m going to say no. I’m going to say it’s a no for me.
Craig: I’m going to say no. What do you guys think? Big pro, oh, Pam Ribon loves AI. Is that the headline here? [laughter]
Pamela: No. Just trying to get controversial. People listening, I am not nodding or excited. No, AI makes me feel scared. When I watch it, I get uncomfortable. What is it called? Sora? My husband will be like, “Look at this.” I’m like, “That’s a cyborg. We must run. We must run away from it.” I would worry that when you think this is going to explain how it feels, you have to worry about how it feels when it’s not real.
Craig: You might not feel the way you want it to feel. Is it budgetary? What is the reason behind why one would do this?
Pamela: I’m trying to recreate my pilot into a web comic or a Webtoon and to perhaps advertise for it. I was playing around with Sora, so that’s where the question stemmed from.
John: I can understand what the instinct is behind that, but I would say look for what Webtoons are doing, like the things you actually like that are Webtoons that you enjoy. Also, I would say, don’t turn your script into a Webtoon just because that’s a thing you can do, unless you really love that as a medium.
I feel like, so often, it’s like, “Oh, I couldn’t sell it as a movie, but we’re going to do it as a dramatic podcast.” It’s like, “Well, do you actually love dramatic podcasts, or are you just spinning your wheels because you want to do something?”
Craig: I hope that the robots don’t listen to this later and come after us. There’s that whole thing where you will be the one that they’re like, “Well, you live.” [laughter] Right.
John: Thank you so much for your question.
Brenna: Thank you.
John: Thank you for coming out tonight.
[applause]
All right. Let’s do two more questions. These next two, and then we’ll be done for tonight.
Craig: Two more.
Jordan: Hey, guys, I’m Jordan. My question is a little specific, but maybe we can make it a little more universal. Say you’ve got a great adult animated pilot that you’re taking out and you’ve gotten a little bit of feedback. You’re leaning towards serialized, but everybody’s telling you, “Well, we want episodic.” Do you go and do you rejig it?
You could go either way with it, really, but you’re leaning towards serialized. Do you go and adjust for the market, or do you write the thing that you want to write and just wait for it to be the right time for it?
John: I think you know your answer, but let me make sure that the rest of the crowd understands this. You have an opportunity. People like the thing you’ve written. You could make it serialized where you’re supposed to watch all the episodes in order, or episodic where you can watch them in any order whatsoever. You’re going to have a sense to me. You’re going to have a sense of what is more fun and interesting for you to write. Do that.
If the buyer says, “No, we really want it this other way,” and you get a chance to do it, do that. I think you have to both be steadfast and adaptable in this business. You have to be true to what’s important to you, but also flexible to actually get things done and get things made. We both know filmmakers who just, they made a great film, and then they were so steadfast about, like, “I’m not going to compromise a damn thing for my second film.” They’re not making films anymore.
Craig: There is no second film. I believe that there will be another thing. I never like to think that whatever I’m working on now is it. A little bit like the don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Anthony: That’s a really great thing to remember. I think the business will go on without any one individual. [laughter] That’s really horrible to say.
John: Even if Ryan Murphy were no longer making all his things, we would still have a television business.
Anthony: Economically, it would take a hit.
John: It would take a hit, but yes.
Anthony: Sometimes people have to remember that. What can you do that feels like it’s not absolute betrayal to the center of what it is you’re writing that you can collaborate on?
Pamela: Also, why not try? Then if it doesn’t work, you can say, “This is why I really wanted it this other way.” I can see why you asked me to do this because The Simpsons or whatever, they’re all episodic, but BoJack worked for a reason. Once you try the way that they think they want or they need, maybe they need it. That’s the mandate. Try for the job that you can get, always.
John: Good luck. We’ll see you at a future AFF.
Craig: All right. Bring us home.
John: Bring us home. Who are you and what is your question?
Emmett Farnsworth Guzman: My name is Emmett Farnsworth Guzman.
John: Emmett Farnsworth Guzman is a fantastic name.
Emmett: Thank you. My parents gave it to me.
Craig: I think you invented television. Did you invent television?
Emmett: Actually, that’s my great-great-uncle.
Craig: Is it, really?
Emmett: He’s Philo T. Farnsworth.
Craig: That’s actually your great-great-uncle?
Emmett: Yes.
Craig: That’s amazing.
Pamela: What is happening? [laughter]
John: This man’s great-great-uncle invented television.
Emmett: They cast him right here.
Pamela: Really?
Craig: Philo T. Farnsworth.
Pamela: Why is he here? [laughs]
Craig: Are you hired?
Emmett: I feel seen right now.
John: You feel seen. That’s when we get back to relationships. You’re leveling, which is validations, feeling seen, feeling heard. We’re giving it to you right now. All right.
Emmett: I wasn’t expecting that.
Craig: What’s your question? Really, you’re [unintelligible 00:56:51].
Emmett: They really did. The thing is I’ve listened to an inordinate amount of you guys over the past year, starting from the beginning. Incredible. You have very terse words for people selling books. Why did you decide to write this?
John: Thank God someone finally asked the question.
Pamela: Someone got the question.
Craig: I’ve been waiting all night. I can’t believe none of these terse words. It was an open goal. None of you took the shot. It’s a great question.
Emmett: I have to.
Craig: John, can you explain why we have the book?
John: I would say our listenership kept saying, like, “Hey, you should make a book,” or, “You should put a book of your transcripts out there.” We literally did the math. What if we just did a book of our transcripts? It was impossible. It was bigger than this entire room to do our transcripts. It was like, “Well, what if we could do a best-of?” It’s the synthesized version.
The thing that happens to me and Craig constantly is like, “Hey, I have a question about blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, “Okay, we talked about this on episode, I don’t know, 346.” You can send somebody and say, “Oh, go back and listen to episode 346.” If I could just give you a book, this is what we’ve talked about.
Our Natalie and Luke, who have the galleys here, you can track them down and look over their shoulder to see what’s in the book. The book is very specifically synthesized versions of what things we talked about over the course of the podcast. It’s not like how to write a screenplay. There’s one chapter–
Craig: Called How to Write a Screenplay.
John: How to write a screenplay, literally. [laughter] Which is mostly about Finding Nemo, really. People love it. The book consists of distilled versions of all the things we’ve talked about, stuff about relationships and stuff like that. It’s not like, here are the plot points, and here’s all the Syd Field stuff. It’s not that kind of book. It’s a book about screenwriting and not how to write a screenplay.
Craig: John and his team, of course, did all the work. You guys know I suck. What I think is great about it is, and I don’t mind sounding like a jerk, we know what we’re doing. This is our jobs. This is our careers, our lives. We have spent decades working in this business as professional writers. We are still doing it to this day.
Sometimes we have hits, sometimes we have losses, but we are still here. After breaking into the business in the mid-90s, we’re still here. We must know something. That is actually a perspective that generally doesn’t exist in the 4,000 other books. They’re written by people that don’t.
John: I’ll also say that the stuff we don’t know, every other chapter is an interview with one of our guests who’s come on the show. It is Christopher Nolan, or it’s Greta’s coming in. We’re talking to everybody, Aline and everybody else, about their experiences that are very specific and that are not our experiences.
Craig: They’re not just us.
John: We don’t have the hubris to say if we actually know everything. We know a lot, but we also have guests who know-
Craig: We know so much.
John: -a ton of stuff that we don’t know, which has been great, too. It’s honestly so people don’t– give people a book. Do a book. Thank you for the question. Also, this is a time, a show of hands, who has pre-ordered the Scriptnotes book? [laughter] [crosstalk] I had to be informed.
Craig: Thank you. Thank you for that.
John: Thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you, everyone.
John: Thank you for the softball there. Thank you very much, Mr. Farnsworth.
Craig: It’s like he was sent by the publishing company.
John: Oh my God. That is our show for this week. If you want to hear this as a podcast, you can subscribe to Scriptnotes, and you’ll get this in the feed on Tuesday. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, who’s over there. He’s a superstar hero.
[applause]
This show will be edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: As always.
John: God bless you, Matthew Chilelli, for making us sound better and smarter than we are. Our intro and outro, he also wrote all our music. He’s so fantastic. Thank you to Emily Locke and everyone at the Austin Film Festival. Who here is a Scriptnotes premium subscriber? Oh my God.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thank you so much. You guys don’t realize it, but you keep the lights on at Scriptnotes. You pay for all the stuff.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Craig, where can they sign up to become a premium subscriber?
Craig: You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we did not do tonight.
John: The Q&A will be the bonus segment when you listen to it, so no one else has to hear those great questions there at the end. This was our 11th live show.
Craig: Not a bad one.
John: Not a bad one.
Craig: Not a bad one.
John: Really good. I’ve loved it. You’re a great crowd. Thank you so much. Have a great night.
Craig: Thank you, guys, so much. What a great crowd. Thank you guys for coming out.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Pamela Ribon, you have been volunteering and he said yes to help us out with this game we’d like to play. This is another chance to win a galley copy of the Scriptnotes book. Here’s how this is going to work. We need to find two Scriptnotes super fans who will compete to see who gets the copy of the book. It’s already signed. It’s a galley copy. There’s only 20 of these in the world. We need to find that person.
Here’s the strategy for how we’re going to find super fans in the room. It’s also a chance to stretch a little bit because that’s a thing that people do. In this room, please stand up if you have listened to 10 or more episodes of Scriptnotes. That’s a lot of listeners. That’s fantastic.
If you have listened to more than 100, stay standing. Otherwise, sit down. 100 episodes. These are people who say they have listened to 100 episodes.
Craig: That’s a lot.
John: Who is wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt? If you’re not wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt, sit down.
Pamela: Wow. They all fall down. [crosstalk]
John: I see three.
Craig: Three, two. Two, three?
John: I see three. One, two, three.
Craig: Three. One, two, three.
John: All right. You guys stay standing. We have some tiebreaker questions that we figured out.
Craig: You’re one of the three.
John: You’re one of the three. Some of these, they start easy, but they get really hard. Of just the three of you, please, no one contribute. Just the three of you. Raise your hand if you believe that Craig’s least favorite condiment is mustard. Craig’s least favorite condiment is mustard. Raise your hand if you believe that is true. That Craig’s– three, two, one. You all got it right. What is your least favorite condiment?
Pamela: Mayonnaise.
Craig: If you want to call mayonnaise a condiment, it’s really more of a disgusting substance.
John: All right. On Scriptnotes’ three-page challenge, we often refer to a Stuart special. Raise your hand if you believe a Stuart special refers to starting with a flash forward. I would actually say it is a flash forward. You’re definitely in. What’s your name? Natalie is in. Now it’s between the two of you to see who’s the other– who’s going to face her off in the final thing. Just the two of you.
All right. Raise your hand if you think there has been a deep dive episode on Unforgiven. A deep dive episode on Unforgiven. You say yes. She doesn’t know. There has been one. It’s one we rarely refer to. All right. Coming up, Natalie, coming up.
Craig: It’s like The Price is Right.
Pamela: Oh my gosh.
John: All right. What is your name?
Luke: My name’s Luke.
John: Luke, hi.
Craig: Luke. Hi, Luke. Natalie, come on up.
John: Natalie, come on over here.
Craig: Natalie’s got the cool S Scriptnotes shirt, by the way, which is my favorite.
John: It’s Scriptnotes University and Scriptnotes Cool S.
Craig: Scriptnotes University and Scriptnotes Cool S.
John: Very good. Now, Drew is going to give you some signs. The sign will either say John or Craig. Pamela’s going to read.
Pamela: These are fancy.
John: Yes, fancy. You can tell we’ve thought a lot about this.
Pamela: Oh my gosh. We’ll tell you what they say in the back.
[laughs]
John: All right. We have some things that Craig and I have said over the years on the podcast. Craig and I don’t know what these are. Drew compiled all these. We have no idea. Pamela Ribon is going to read these things, so you have to decide, did John say it or did Craig say it?
Craig: This will be exciting.
John: This will be exciting for us. We can’t help you. We don’t know.
Craig: We don’t know. We can’t help.
John: All right. Pamela, the floor is yours.
Pamela: Thank you. I’m going to do my best to not let you know who said it by always sounding with, I have slight umbrage. Number one, “I don’t like it when you hold me accountable for the things I say and do.”
[laughter]
Craig: Oh, so fast.
John: Natalie says Craig. Luke says Craig.
Pamela: It is Craig.
Craig: Because I don’t like that.
John: Drew is keeping a score. The winner gets the book. This is important. All right.
Pamela: “No more being stupid. That’s dumb.”
[laughter]
John: Both Natalie and Luke say it’s Craig.
Pamela: It is Craig.
Craig: It’s dumb.
Pamela: Number three, “No undamaged woman owns a bar in Tibet.”
[laughter]
Craig: Such a good observation.
John: We have Craig. Luke says Craig. Natalie says Craig. What is the answer?
Pamela: It is John.
John: It is me. I suspect that’s from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Craig: It must be from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes. Marion.
Pamela: I bet you sounded sweeter when you said it. Number four, “You can’t sink the same boat twice.”
John: Luke and Natalie, what do you think? Who said that? Why don’t you say that and I’ll say it to see which sounds better.
Craig: “You can’t sink the same boat twice.”
John: “You can’t sink the same boat twice.”
Craig: I think it’s John.
Pamela: It is John. That was hard because you could tell that was helpful.
Craig: Yes, exactly. [crosstalk]
Pamela: Which really are the same. They’re the same.
Craig: Also, I think you can sink the same boat twice.
Pamela: You sure can.
Craig: Of course you can. Get it back up.
Pamela: Bring it back up.
John: Bring up of the Titanic. Sink the Titanic again.
Pamela: That’s right. Do it twice.
Craig: Sink it again.
Pamela: It pops back up. We saw that in the Titanic. Number five, “I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I think that I could kill you.”
[laughter]
John: Both Luke and Natalie say Craig. What’s the answer?
Pamela: It is Craig. If John said it, there would be a lot of call-ins. There’d be a lot of emails.
Craig: I think I could do it.
Pamela: How’s John doing? Number six, “Acknowledgement is hype.”
Craig: Ooh, that’s deep.
John: Both Natalie and Luke are saying John. What is the answer?
Pamela: It is John.
Craig: John, yes.
Pamela: I’m going to do this since they’re so– [crosstalk]. It is a little–
Craig: [unintelligible 01:07:26] [crosstalk]
Pamela: It depends on if he’s complaining. The apology, it’s just hype.
John: I wonder if that was probably in reference to sexy Craig, wasn’t it?
Pamela: God. All right. I guess I could try sexy Craig for number seven.
Sexy Craig: Did someone say my name?
Pamela: “It’s a cross between a play and a yuck.”
[laughter]
Craig: Ooh, a split.
John: Oh, a split.
Pamela: Oh, we have a split.
John: Luke says John. Natalie says Craig. What is the answer?
Pamela: It is Craig.
Craig: I am shocked. Well done, Natalie. You know me better than I know me.
Pamela: Oh boy, sexy Craig. Number eight, “Anything can be a sex toy if you’re imaginative enough.” [laughter] Do you two know which one of you said it?
John: I have no idea.
Craig: I have a suspicion.
[laughter]
John: All right. I’ll try it out. “Anything can be a sex toy if you’re imaginative enough.”
Pamela: That’s your Play-Doh pitch.
Craig: “Anything can be a sex toy if you’re imaginative enough.” Oh, another split.
Pamela: Another split.
John: Luke says John. Natalie says Craig.
Craig: I think it’s John.
Pamela: It’s John.
Craig: It’s John.
John: Oh, I said it.
[applause]
Craig: Only because I think there are some limitations on sex toys. Just a couple.
Pamela: Talk to John.
Craig: Not many, just a couple.
John: Narrow-minded Craig.
Pamela: That’s right.
John: Once again.
Craig: It’s too little.
Pamela: Number nine, “If you want to see a twink navigate a chocolate river, you’re probably not going to the multiplex.’ [laughter] I just had to do that one in my voice.
Craig: God, I hope that was me. I really do.
John: Oh, a split. Natalie says John. Luke says Craig. I don’t know. What is the answer?
Pamela: It’s John.
John: It’s me.
Craig: All right. I’m jealous. I wish I had said that.
John: Was that Jen? Was that it?
Pamela: Do you want a score check? We’re about to do 10.
John: Yes, a score check. Where are we at?
Drew: Natalie’s up by one.
John: Natalie’s up by one. All right. That’s the only score that matters.
Craig: I wonder if anyone else is up by one. Okay, go on.
Pamela: Number 10, [laughter] “I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.” It’s hard to say.
Craig: A Latvian escape room.
Pamela: A Latvian escape room.
John: Latvian escape room.
Craig: Latvian.
Pamela: Latvian like the Latvian.
John: We both try it. I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.
Craig: I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.
Pamela: That’s tough.
John: Two Craigs.
Craig: I think you’re both wrong because-
Pamela: Two Craigs.
Craig: -I have done a Latvian escape room.
Pamela: That’s right. Two Craigs make it John.
John: John is the answer, right?
Craig: Yes.
Pamela: All right.
Craig: Oh, yes, I have. If I’m in Latvia, what else am I going to do? Latvia as a whole is an escape room.
Pamela: Do you think you were just saying it as a segue? You’re like, “I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.” Speaking of escape rooms, for the room that we’re in now. Number 11. We have five more.
John: Five more. Right.
Craig: Oh, God.
Pamela: “We’re not hiring people because of the size of their bones.”
[laughter]
John: Both say Craig. What is the answer?
Pamela: It’s Craig.
John: It’s Craig, yes.
Craig: It’s true.
Pamela: Number 12, “I couldn’t have been wronger.”
Craig: We’ve got a split here.
John: A split. Natalie says John. Luke says Craig.
Pamela: It’s Craig.
John: Ooh. Are we tied up? Drew, are we tied up?
Drew: Tied up.
John: We’re tied up. All right.
Craig: Damn.
Pamela: This is the World Series. Number 13, “Maybe try laughing at something funny.”
[laughter]
Craig: What does that mean? What was the context of that?
John: All right. Natalie says Craig, but Luke says John. Who said it?
Pamela: It’s John.
John: I said it? Oh, that was mean.
Craig: I knew it. I don’t think you were saying it to me.
John: Luke, you’re ahead. All right. Up by one.
Pamela: He’s up by one?
Craig: Luke is up by one.
Pamela: All right.
Craig: Luke is up by one.
Pamela: We have two left.
Craig: We have two left. This is actually a big deal.
Pamela: Number 14, “It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child.”
[laughter]
John: Both say Craig. Is it Craig?
Pamela: Yes. He said it back there.
John: This is it. If Luke gets this wrong and Natalie gets it right, we’re tied. Otherwise, Luke’s won this game.
Craig: Let me just say, strategically, whatever he says, say the opposite. You can’t win otherwise. You’ve got to go for this.
Pamela: Shout out to Katie P. for these quotes. Number 15, “I’m excited for your socks.”
John: Ooh. We’ll try to give them a shot. “I’m excited for your socks.”
Craig: “I’m excited for your socks.”
John: Very similar, actually.
Craig: Luke, you’ve got to throw it out there. You’ve got to throw it down.
John: Three, two, one, show. Oh, so you say John. Luke says John. Natalie says Craig. What is the answer?
Pamela: It’s John.
Craig: It’s John.
John: Oh, the big winner is Luke.
[applause]
Craig: Way to go, Luke.
John: Congratulations. All right. Stay right here. All right.
Craig: You did great, though. I consider you my great supporter. Thank you.
John: Natalie, I’m going to give you a book, too.
[cheering]
Craig: I’m so glad.
John: That was really fun. Thank you, Pamela, for doing it.
Craig: Great job.
John: Well done.
Pamela: Do it anytime. I love impersonating you both.
John: Killed it.
Craig: Five seconds, John. Five seconds to maul a child. Accurate.
John: I’ve learned that I’m meaner sometimes than I thought I was, which is fine.
Craig: Yes, you are.
Links:
- Pamela Ribon and Anthony Sparks
- Austin Film Festival
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Our Moneyball episode
- Enter the Relationship Matrix by Chris Csont
- Bring It On toothbrush scene
- STOMP
- Writer Emergency Pack
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 709: Live at the Austin Film Festival 2025, Transcript first appeared on John August.
When we turned in the first draft of the Scriptnotes book in late 2023, it was over 600 pages long. Over the following two years, we continually edited it down until it was only the very best stuff — but in order to do so, we had to make some painful cuts.
One was a 13-page chapter that felt essential, but didn’t quite fit anywhere: “Getting Stuff Written.”
- How do you move from “wanting to write” to actually producing pages?
- When should you start writing, and how do you know you’re ready?
- What actually is writer’s block?
- How do you keep momentum?
- How do you balance tough love and self-care on any given day?
We were sad no one would get to read it. And then we realized: BONUS CHAPTER!
For the past few months, we’ve been encouraging listeners who preorder the book to send us their receipts. Last Friday, we sent them something back — the “Getting Stuff Written” chapter, fully edited and typeset. The response has been overwhelming.
Ian writes:
I’m sorry to tell you this…But you guys obviously messed up big time!
This bonus chapter is absolutely incredible. It’s practical, empathetic, thoughtful, and succinct. It’s also exactly the message I needed at the stage that I’m at right now.
I can’t imagine how the poor souls that did not pre-order the book will get by without this chapter.
Perhaps I should just be grateful that I am part of a small cohort that has been so fortunate to receive this gem of wisdom.
Tania writes:
Wooho! Excellent chapter.
“Perfectionism is protectionism” is gold.
Tom writes:
That was an amazing read. Thank you guys! If that’s what you’re leaving OUT of the book? My god, I can’t wait to read what’s in it
Scott writes:
Oh, my. If you took out that chapter, I can’t wait to see the ones you left in.
That said, I urge you to find a way to distribute that chapter widely. It’s as good as Craig’s ‘How to Write a Movie’ episode in terms of straightforward, overall writing advice. It’s exactly the sort of thing I need to hear. I imagine others need it, too.
Scott’s right. Once the book is out, we’ll share that chapter more widely.
If you’d like to read it TODAY, send your pre-order receipt to ask@johnaugust.com. Drew will send you the bonus chapter.
We hope you like it, and can’t wait for you to hold the full book in your hands (in less than a month). Preorder here!
The post Getting Stuff Written first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Devil Wears Prada) to ask, what do executives expect from a pitch these days? They look at the typical structure of a pitch deck, how that differs from lookbooks, how pitches have evolved over the years, and best practices for pitching on Zoom.
Also, what happened to single-lady sitcoms? If you remember Monday nights in the 90’s, you know what we’re talking about. We reflect on what they did for the culture and how social media and reality TV may be taking their place.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Aline tells us what it was like being back on the set for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Gird your loins, people!
Links:
- Preorder the Scriptnotes book!
- Scriptnotes LIVE at Dynasty Typewriter in LA, November 30th! Only a few tickets left!
- Dick’s Sporting Goods Launches Entertainment Studio by Etan Vlessing for The Hollywood Reporter
- The Ladies of Monday Night
- I Love LA on HBO Max
- The Diplomat on Netflix
- Shotdeck
- Stranger Things pitch deck
- Paramount Makes Big Buy of Comedy Spec Script ‘Bald Eagles’ by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
- Big A## Calendar
- Rareform bags
- Aline and John talk about writing memorable endings on YouTube
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Aline Brosh McKenna (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 11-14-25: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post The State of Pitching first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 708 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we look at three stories in the news. Two of them from the Hollywood trades, and ask, how would this be a movie? We also follow up on audio dramas, last looks, and absolute rage bait in an article about ChatGPT 5.
Craig: Oh, that’s fantastic because there’s already rage bait in two of the How Would This Be movies. You’re setting me up. This is a setup because what? I haven’t been cranky enough lately?
John: Yes, we have a blood pressure monitor on Craig, and we will just watch the line rise as we go through–
Craig: My blood pressure goes down the angrier I get.
John: Oh, that’s nice.
Craig: That’s my secret cap.
John: Absolutely. Lie detectors never work on Craig because–
Craig: Yes. It just–
John: Lie detectors would be useful for several of the stories we’re talking about today.
Craig: Yes, for sure.
John: Plus, we’ll have a new listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, we often need to watch TV while we’re traveling away from home, overseas, or domestically. We’ll share our experiences and hopes for the future about best ways to watch things when you’re not in your home audio and video setup.
Craig: Oh, that sounds like a good idea. How to hack the hotel television and so forth?
John: Yes. I’ve reached behind so many hotel TVs.
Craig: Sometimes it’s very complicated. They really don’t want you to–
John: Clearly, you are just breaking everything.
Craig: Please don’t. Which I take seriously.
[laughter]
Craig: I’m a rules follower.
John: Before we get started, we have some local news and follow-up and explanation. Recently, Scriptnotes sent out 81 emails over the course of 20 minutes.
Craig: Oh, yes. That was fun.
John: That was fun.
Craig: Oh, I loved it.
John: I was in Australia for two weeks, and so I knew nothing about this. Craig, you actually knew about it before I knew about it, which is–
Craig: Can you believe it? It’s so unusual for Scriptnotes.
John: I can’t, no.
Craig: I got quite a few texts that morning saying, “Hey, has the Scriptnotes email server lost its mind?” I was like, what? Then I looked up my– I’m one of those people that I go through my emails. I don’t have the 15,000 unread emails that sometimes you see. My badge is usually good for three or four.
John: That’s impressive.
Craig: There are a bunch of read messages that are still sitting in my inbox. I try and read. That morning, it was 89. I’m like, oh. I actually saw that before I read any texts, and I honestly thought, have I been fired or something? That’s the sort of thing that happens if you get fired or a video came out of me beating my wife, which happily, I don’t think there is video of it, at least.
John: In ping pong.
Craig: Right.
John: Drew, you as producer can answer the question, were we hacked?
Drew Marquardt: We were not hacked.
John: What happened?
Craig: We just stink.
Drew: We just stink. For our premium members, we put out seasons with back episodes. I had put together– we had just crossed 700, so I did the 601 to 700 season and put that out. Our wonderful hosting service said, “Hey, do you want us to send out an email to members letting them know that there’s a new season?” I said, that would be great.
Then I went to bed and then I woke up to [onomatopoeia] because the system had, instead of sending one email, recognized each episode as a new episode, so it was sending out 101. We very quickly were just pulling plugs digitally trying to get it to stop. It stopped at 81.
Craig: Oh, so it could’ve been worse.
Drew: It could have been worse.
John: It actually could have been worse, yes.
Craig: Well, thank you for that. I apologize.
John: I apologize to our listeners. Now–
Craig: Nobody wants that. There was no easy way– I had to delete, delete, delete. It’s email, right? Tap and delete.
John: Yes, you can select a bunch, but yes.
Craig: I didn’t even know how to do that. I was on my iPad.
John: On your iPad, yes. It’s on the bottom one, top one, but yes, on the iPad, it’s yes. Again, we do apologize. We thank all of our premium members for supporting Scriptnotes. Let’s talk about why we do seasons is because when there’s 800 episodes, you want to not have to scroll through the whole list. We break it up into 100-episode chunks.
Craig: We were trying to make it easy for everyone, and we thought– What I loved about it was like, hey, Scriptnotes premium member, listen, we have news for you. What’s that? You didn’t listen? We’ll say it again. We won’t stop saying this until you send us another $5.
[laughter]
Craig: Tragic.
John: Anyway, it shouldn’t happen again. What’s tough about this error is it’s a very hard thing to troubleshoot or test for because you don’t know it’s happening until suddenly, it’s happening a million times.
Craig: You’d think that whoever runs the servers would have some sort of internal control that says, don’t send out–
Drew: Well, now they do. Because of this, they’ve built a thing–
Craig: They’ve innovated.
Drew: They’ve innovated. Now there’s a block that after two emails within quick succession, it just cuts off, so it’ll never happen again.
Craig: Well, happily, if anybody was worried that their billing info had been leaked or anything.
Drew: That was the concern of a few people.
Craig: We’re not the ones leaking your billing info. Your billing info is being leaked by literally everyone else. I got a letter in the mail, the M-mail from WestJet. They’re a commercial airline that’s affiliated with Delta. I think Delta may just own them. They’re regional. They’re the jet I would fly to Calgary back in season one.
They sent me a lovely letter explaining that they’ve been hacked. Don’t worry. Your credit card numbers weren’t compromised. Just your name and possibly your address and maybe date of birth and possibly some security number and maybe. Here, we’ve bought you two free years in this– Who gives a damn service that monitors? Oh, please.
John: I also don’t trust those services. They’re the cruel services.
Craig: No, I don’t either. They’re going to get hacked.
John: Yes.
Craig: When I signed up for that service, they’re like, “What’s your birth date?” I’m like, I think you know. I think everybody knows now. Thanks, WestJet.
John: Other bits to follow up. The scripting on this book is coming out December 2nd around the world. The hardcover copy in Australia, we’ve just learned it’s going to be January 4th instead.
Craig: Because they’re on the bottom of the planet.
John: Yes. They have to ship it all the way down there.
Craig: They have to defeat gravity to get there.
John: The e-book and audiobook will release the 4th of December in Australia, but the hardcover book will be a month later.
Craig: Well, we apologize, Australia, but you know what? Absence makes the heart grow fonder. There’s a little bit of time to work up an appetite for what I believe will be the best book in anyone’s bookshelf that has a completely orange cover.
John: Yes. It’s going to be really great.
Craig: We are the best option.
John: You recognize on the spine, on the center shelf.
Craig: You don’t have to go hunting for it.
John: It’s there.
Craig: If your car breaks down at night, you wave your Scriptnotes book around, it’s like a flare.
John: It absolutely is.
Craig: No one’s hitting you.
John: It works really well. A reminder that you can pre-order the book now wherever you are. It’s scriptnotesbook.com is where you can do the pre-order. We’ve had a ton of pre-orders, which has been great. Thank you for everyone who’s pre-ordered.
Craig: Is this book going to be a success, do you think?
John: I think it’s going to be a success. I think we’re going to do well. We had one little live event for the pre-order folks. If you do pre-order the book, send your receipt to Drew and Drew will add you to the list for other little events that we’re going to do before the book comes out. We also have signed copies of the book that are going to be available through a special site. There will be a link in the show notes for if you really desperately want a signed copy of the book. Craig and I did 500 of those.
Craig: It just seemed like we signed our names forever.
John: Forever. With a combination of the WestJet-leaked information and Craig’s signature in the book, you get to take over his life.
Craig: I basically should be able to at least pay my mortgage off for me. It’d be nice. It’d just be nice.
John: Let’s just follow up on audio dramas. Back in episode 706, listener Dan wrote in asking if he should turn his screenplay into an audio drama. We had a lot of listeners who wrote in to say they had personal experience with that.
Drew: Sounding Off writes, “I just finished a series for Audible, adapting an iteration of my work. In my experience, this was handled like most other productions. They put our scripts through several rounds of notes, hired name actors through their agencies, hired a director via the same, set up recording studio sessions, and they handle all the post-production sound along with multiple rounds of dialogue edits.
Perhaps Dan has a different way in, but having worked on this project for several years, I’d caution him against doing all the work on his own with the expectation of then selling to Audible. I suppose it could happen that way, but if you look at many of their dramatic or fictionalized podcasts, these are professionally-run projects on the Audible side from start to finish. There’s a learning curve for writing just to audio. It’s challenging and fun, but you do have to expand your skillset.”
John: That would be my expectation, too. You look at the professional productions, there’s an expectation that goes into what they’re looking for. It feels like it’d be hard. I’m thinking about the screening process. If they’re picking up stuff that’s already produced, they’re going to put on their headphones and listen to 20 minutes of it and decide, is this a thing I want to do? They’re also looking for what is the overall package? What is it going to feel like?
Craig: Yes, I can see the wisdom of what Sounding Off is saying here. I love the punny name, by the way. I like that people do that for call-in– There’s something about radio/podcast where you need to come up with Sleepless in Seattle. It’s just their thing. Sounding Off, I think, makes a great point because if you are Audible and you listen to an already produced story, you might think, okay, I like this, except this part, I wish were longer, or this part, I just don’t love that line.
I want access to, well, we didn’t do that bit, or we didn’t do this bit, or sorry, that sound effect is married to that of dialogue. Suddenly, you have to go back in the studio anyway. Since they all have– They get very fussy about standards, post-production people are very fussy about standards. It makes sense that they would probably want to control that production process.
John: I could imagine basically shooting a pilot, recording a pilot for what I’m seeing as a proof of concept. That might be the thing. To go through and do all the work ahead of time with the expectation that you’re going to sell it to Audible versus releasing it yourself feels like a reach. More listeners wrote in.
Drew: Jonathan writes, “I very much agree with what was said about not doing something unless you really want to be making it. Audio dramas may not have the industry prestige that a film does, but they do have a dedicated loyal audience who may not otherwise discover your work. I know many people who don’t watch films, but they do listen to fiction podcasts.
As a producer, you can attract a higher level of talent than on an indie film as the time commitment is less and they have the opportunity to play a role outside their on-screen type. I find it a very satisfying medium to work in.”
Craig: That’s fantastic to hear. Yes.
John: We also have some follow-up on last looks. We were talking a few episodes back about the last things you do with a script before you turn it in. We had a suggestion from Liz.
Drew: “Regarding finding the objectivity you need for that last edit on your draft, I’ve got a very dumb and very effective hack for you. A few years ago, I started to convert my script to a PDF and send it to myself with a title page. Something about the look of a PDF and the fact that I can’t fiddle with it as I’m reading tricks me into objectivity. I find I can read it and note myself as though I’m looking at someone else’s work. So dumb, and yet I swear by it.”
Craig: Two things. One, I’m not sure why we’ve decided to replace the word tip with hack. Hack is some interesting shortcut, a workaround. This is just a tip, it’s not a hack. Sorry, Liz G. What she’s suggesting here is the slightly newer version of what you and I always did, which is print it out. Something about printing it out and going through the pages one by one made it seem like somebody else had written it and you can be more objective because you’re out of the composition environment.
John: I think getting away from the scroll is really important. That’s how you’re seeing it differently and really feeling, and the page flips matter. It’s useful to do it that way. Whether it’s printing it or doing it as a PDF that you’re reading on your iPad, it’s going to help.
Craig: Printing is something that we all did. We all had printers in our little crappy apartments. I have a feeling most people don’t have a printer in their crappy apartment now. Then if you do want to actually physically print it, which I think is superior to the PDF “hack/tip”, I guess you’d have to go to work, print it out there on their printer, I guess. I mean, printers aren’t that expensive, but it’s–
Drew: $30.
Craig: Wait, what?
John: Printers are incredibly cheap right now.
Craig: Did you say $30?
Drew: Yes. You can get a basic printer at Best Buy for $30?
John: The replacement toner cartridge is $100.
Craig: Sure. You just throw the printer out and get another printer. Wait, $30?
Drew: I could be wrong, but that’s what I remember paying for the last one, I think.
Craig: That can’t be possibly right. Hold on. We’re going to do a little live– We’re doing a live price check. This is a new segment called Drew, I Don’t Believe You. Best Buy printers. Okay, we’re all looking this up. Printers for home use. It’s not looking good for you right now, buddy. I got to tell you.
Drew: I Googled printer and the first one is $49.99 at Best Buy.
John: I see a basic [unintelligible 00:13:34] printer for 130.
Craig: Okay, the lowest selling printer that I– Oh, let me take off brand. Okay, so the lowest selling printer is an HP that’s $50. That is their rock bottom, absolute crappiest. That thing is like, yikes.
Drew: Office Depot has a Canon PIXMA for $37.99.
John: Oh, damn. They’re selling that for $65 over it.
Craig: Still haven’t hit $30, by the way. Listen, you said– If it’s an exaggeration, then–
Drew: It was a maybe $7 exaggeration, but I remember it being $30. I feel like there was a deal. I feel like it was a holiday sale.
Craig: $7 off of $30, that’s a lot. That’s like 20-something percent.
Drew: I’m going to hold steady on this one. I think–
John: I think Drew was making a category statement of in a $30 range. $37–
Craig: If you had said $50, I still would’ve been like, what? Then this would’ve been a slam dunk for you. You know what? There’s a lesson here. [laughs]
Drew: It’s my hyperbole.
Craig: It does turn out that printers are stupidly cheap to the point where I would say yes. If all you used it for was just this, it’s better to me, at least, than the- PDF method.
John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic here, which is how would this be a movie? This is where we take articles that are in the news or that people send to us and talk about the ways in which they could be converted to fictionalized entertainment for our enjoyment. It could be a movie, it could be a TV series.
What’s interesting about these three stories is two of them come from the Hollywood trades, which is not where you actually think about these stories coming from. You think that the trades are going to be reporting on these things rather than the actual stories themselves. The third is just a fun story. They all involve ambition, chicanery, in cases, misrepresentation.
Craig: Yes, con artistry. It does seem like swindling, horn-swoggling. We could do this all day.
John: Let’s start with The Many Faces of Sir Marco Robinson. This is an article by Jake Cantor writing for Deadline.
Craig: By the way, good job, Jake Cantor. Again, you’re at Deadline, we’re used to reading–
John: It’s like barely-written press releases.
Craig: Yes. The eighth banana on a procedural has changed agents, and you’re like, I don’t– Nobody cares.
John: I was so surprised when I see this because it’s a long-form investigative piece.
Craig: Sort of like an Atlantic kind of style or Vanity Fair-ish kind of investigation. I thought it was quite well done.
John: Yes. Drew, could you give us the quick summary here?
Drew: Sir Marco Robinson is a self-styled Instagram business guru. He claims to be the number two Netflix producer, a bestselling author. To have been knighted in Malaysia, a global real estate empire, he promotes movie-making master classes based on his claim to have produced the Netflix spy movie Legacy of Lies. A budding screenwriter signed up for master classes after being contacted by Robinson on Instagram, spending up to £10,000 to access his so-called expertise in script development.
Craig: You and I are idiots by the way. Do you know how much money we could be making?
John: We make really good money not doing this. That’s the reality.
Craig: Think about it. If we did, I’m just saying. If we did, oh my God, this podcast could be worth trillions. Go on.
Drew: He also pledged to produce their projects through his company. It will surprise no listener to hear what happened next. He was sued by several writers for fraudulent misrepresentation, and he lost. The real producers of Legacy of Lies have sent him a cease and desist. We should note here that Robinson denies all the claims and continues to pursue all of his business ventures.
Craig: We should just continually cite that the way that at the end of Say Nothing, they kept saying, Jerry Adams denies all involvement in the IRA. Yes, Robinson denies all the claims. Let’s talk about these claims. I’ve never heard of this guy. I’ve also never heard of Legacy of Lies.
John: Legacy of Lies, it made it up to the number two slot on Netflix once.
Craig: For a day.
John: Yes. It’s being like an Amazon number one bestseller in each category.
Craig: It turns out he wasn’t a producer of that movie. He initially was. He was an investor. He failed to deliver the money he promised, and so they took away his credit. He’s not even a producer. He does have a cameo as Johnny who says a line. That’s in and of itself insane. The knighting thing is incredible. He’s British. As the alleged con artist that he is, seems like he thought, “Oh, I’ll get quite a bit of legitimacy if I put the word sir in front of my name.” Reverse engineered a vague sir from a British protectorate that turns out didn’t give it to him anyway.
John: In Malaysia.
Craig: Nor would it have mattered because the United Kingdom does not recognize titles that are given by other countries or protectorates. If you want to be sir in England, and this is going to be surprising you, they’re rather specific.
John: It’s like champagne in France.
Craig: Yes. They’re like, “Sorry, you can’t call that champagne. It’s not from– It’s sparkling wine.” He’s the sparkling wine of number two producers in Netflix. What is fascinating is the breadth of his alleged scams. It cuts across 20 different things.
John: Before we get into the meat of how this would be a movie, let’s also bring in the Scriptnotes connection because looking through the archives, Drew found that his team had actually reached out to us in 2023.
Craig: You’re kidding me.
John: Here’s the email.
Drew: I was wondering if we had anyone who was like, “Hey, I’ve been scammed by this guy.”
Craig: Turns out we have him.
Drew: We got a guest request from May 1st, 2023. “Dear Scriptnotes, we hope that got your attention.”
Craig: It’s gotten my attention. [laughs]
Drew: “We love your podcast and we also believe you should feature Sir Marco Robinson as your guest really soon. Here’s why. One, yes, he has slept with a Russian spy that was sent to kill him and survived. Two, the above is part of the true story of the making of his first feature film, Legacy of Lies, which debuted at number two on Netflix USA.
Three, he is making a musical called Legacy of Spies. Are you prepared to die to live your dream? His own life story. If that wasn’t enough, Sir Marco remains the only human to give three houses away to three homeless families on Channel 4 Primetime in the UK with his own show, Get a House for Free.”
Craig: That is so specific. On Channel 4. Other people have given away many more houses on other channels. Now, can you read the sentence again about the spy, the first thing?
Drew: Yes, “he has slept with a Russian spy that was sent to kill him and survived.”
John: The spy survived.
Craig: Thank you. What is that sentence construction? The spy was sent to kill him and survived. [laughs] She’s okay, is what I’m hearing?
John: She’s good. We could interview her. That sounds fascinating.
Craig: How are you writing those? You’re surely dead. That’s horrible. I think, this I can say factually, I find that to be idiotic. That’s a fact. I do.
John: Let’s talk about this. How would this be a movie? How would he be a character in whatever we want to do? We hear it where I need to divorce myself from like, okay, this is a person who at least three screenwriters have said has been scamming and done a lot of behaviors which we’ve condemned on this podcast for a long time, which is taking advantage of aspiring screenwriters with promises that are not being fulfilled.
Setting that aside for a moment, the idea of a charismatic, ambitious hustler producer who’s faking it until he makes it, there can be something charming about that. It’s a classic story. It’s also a reality we see all the time in this business, especially with international productions where it’s like, do you really have anything? You just have a poster with Ben Kingsley’s face on it. Is there actually a movie?
Craig: Does Ben Kingsley know about this poster, which in this article, it turns out, no. It’s tough to come at this directly because Catch Me If You Can exists. That’s sort of the top of the heap of what you could do. Also, that character of Joseph Bagnoli, I think was his name, Joseph Bagnoli, was fascinating.
This guy, at least in terms of how he’s been portrayed by this article, is just boring. He’s a boring scam artist. The only thing that’s surprising, and I suppose this isn’t really surprising, is how anybody fell for it. Even if you buy everything that he says at face value, the people that are more interesting to me are the people that– There’s a woman that sued him and won.
There’s this little thing in the article where I went, oh, that’s the thing that I hooked on. He has a master class in screenwriting. The bait on the hook is number two Netflix producer of Legacy of Lies. That’s not enough. No, but this woman, like many, bought it. Now, here’s the part that amazed me. She sued him. She won. She got her money back, and now she has started her own website called Victim to Victor, which is like an advocacy– It’s like a master class for how to get your money back. What’s happening is this is the world we live in now where everyone self-promotes.
John: It’s the idea of, it’s not even being influencers, but it’s basically getting people’s attention and being able to hold people’s attention as a way of monetizing that. I think we’ve always had this legacy of fabricators and people who would sell you stuff, like snake oil salesmen and stuff like that.
In the online world, in the Instagram world, the ability to portray yourself as something fancier, more powerful, more influential than you really are is just more directly commoditizable and because you don’t have to be there physically, in person, in front of somebody you can just get away with a lot more. Calling himself Sir Marco Robinson is more helpful than Mark Lawrence Robinson, which is his actual real name.
Craig: I’m not sure if this is a movie.
John: No, I think it’s a space.
Craig: I could see a comedy where friends are laughing at one of their friends who has spent money on this and they’re just making fun of him and reading the description of the guy and going, “This is who you gave your money to?” Because Sir Marco Robinson, look at that email he sent us. That’s not great. No, it’s not written well.
John: Listen, I think the fact that we’re discussing how this would be a movie at all, he’s won to some degree because the email he wanted, he wanted to be discussed on the show.
Craig: He did get on the show.
John: He got on the show.
Craig: He got on the show. I don’t like him.
John: Positive attention, negative attention, it’s still attention. That is actually, I think if you were to do a movie or a TV series adaptation of this space, you wouldn’t do it about him specifically. It is that sense of people who just need to be in the conversation. They don’t care why you’re talking about them.
Craig: They are the ultimate enemy. You cannot defeat them because if you agree with them, you’ve lost. If you disagree with them, you’ve lost because you’re talking about them at all. My only hope is that anybody– because he’s still out there. He’s still–
John: I suspect we’ll get an email from him.
Craig: Cool. I hope it’s written better than that last one. I hope that gets his attention. [laughs] All right. Probably not a movie, but we’ll sum up later. Maybe we’ll have better luck with this next one.
John: Absolutely. Next up, we have the sisters battling to become the Billboard Queen of Los Angeles. This was sent to me by my friend Shad. I think it’s a great story. Again, it’s in The Hollywood Reporter, which you don’t think of it– It feels like a good Vanity Fair article.
Craig: It does. Mickey Rapkin wrote this for The Hollywood Reporter. You know, by the way, that it’s one company that owns all of these things. It’s the same. They’re all in the same building. I don’t understand this. Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and I think The Wrap are all owned by one company.
It’s hysterical, but they actually do try and scoop each other. In a way, they’re like sisters battling to become the Billboard Queen. Mickey Rapkin did a terrific job here. I really enjoyed reading this.
John: I loved just how local it was because people outside of this market are like, what is this? We see these billboards all the time. Drew, give us the summary.
Drew: Adriana Gallardo is the founder of Adriana’s Insurance, which is recognized across Los Angeles for her iconic billboards featuring her and a red convertible. She’s a formerly undocumented Mexican immigrant and a self-made millionaire. Adriana also has a younger sister, Veronica, who owns Veronica’s Insurance and also has iconic billboards across LA featuring her next to a large German shepherd.
These two sisters are bitter rivals. The article chronicles the sisters’ rise to prominence, catering to the large but underserved Hispanic community. Veronica initially worked for Adriana, building her insurance empire, but after feeling undervalued by her older sister, she strikes out on her own. Since then, the two have been fierce competitors and undermine each other however they can.
John: They undermine each other, but they also have territories and they don’t encroach on each other’s territories to some degree.
Craig: Yes, it was interesting. There was something that Adriana says in the interview that I thought was really wise. She said Hollywood always wants, I think it was sisters, women to fight. Even though they do compete, and it’s clear that there is some resentment there, Adriana paints Veronica as the little princess, the younger sister who just didn’t want to work that hard and get everything handed to her and won’t complain anyway.
Obviously, Veronica is a hard worker because her business is doing well, but then they go out of their way to make the point that they go to each other’s children’s weddings, they still talk, we’re still sisters. It’s not like Falcon Crest.
Drew: No, it’s not the cat fight.
Craig: It’s not Joan Collins and Linda Evans.
Drew: Linda Evans, yes.
Craig: You don’t know what we’re talking about.
Drew: No.
Craig: Okay, so that was Falcon Crest. Falcon Crest was a prime-time soap opera.
John: It was Dynasty.
Craig: Was that Dynasty? Okay, Dynasty. A lot of people just started screaming out there. A lot of gay men just started screaming out there. I couldn’t hear them. I’m so sorry. Dynasty was a prime-time soap opera, and at the center of it, Joan Collins, this grand, dumb English actor, and Linda Evans, who was this very dignified American actor. I think she was American.
John: Yes, I think so.
Craig: They hated each other, and they got into some massive physical cat fights, wig pulling, throwing down stairs.
John: They’re always ending up in the pool.
Craig: Yes, it’s very mommy dearest, like two mommy dearests. It was insane, and people loved it. In any case, that’s like what it could be, like the telenovela version of that, but it’s not.
John: They’re rivals, but they are fundamentally still sisters, and they’re civil about things, but it’s clear that they’re choosing their words carefully. I loved so much of this and I think there’s a movie version to make, there’s a series version to make, but one of my fundamental questions is, where do you start? Because the origin story of it is actually really fascinating. They’re coming into the United States on a tourist visa, and they’re just staying, and so they’re undocumented.
Craig: She describes herself as illegal. That’s how she categorizes herself.
John: It’s their mother who sees how long the lines are for the insurance offices, because everyone has car insurance through that changeover.
Craig: Yes, and the law change that basically said, if you get pulled over for a traffic violation, if you don’t produce insurance, they’ll take your license away. A lot of Latinos in LA were like, “Well, we don’t have any.” Which I remember being a problem when we first moved here. I don’t know if you remember, people were like, “By the way, no one has insurance. If you get into a car accident, you’re screwed. No one has insurance.” It turns out a lot of people didn’t.
John: Now they had to. It’s the mother who pushes Adriana to get a job at this insurance office. Adriana learns the trade, and basically can do it better. She strikes out on her own. Veronica ends up following her sister’s footsteps. That rags to riches story, as you often see here, mythologized, seems really true.
They were going from nothing to relatively good success. Then also the decision to put themselves on billboards and bus shelters, and stuff like that leads to a kind of fame that is unique and special. To agree with Final Destination, the most recent one, had a tie-in with Adriana.
Craig: And apparently, was incredibly effective because in that horribly dry way, the over-index with the Latino population– over-index is a terrifying phrase. By the way, side note, when I first came to LA, I needed car insurance. I got insurance from Freeway Insurance. Do you remember this? I think they’re still out there.
Freeway Insurance, they would advertise on the radio. Their slogan was, Freeway Insurance, it’s that thing you’re speeding on. I was like, you know me. I love this, too. First of all, it’s a very LA story. Los Angeles has a strange tradition of women mostly, but a few men, a few accident lawyers as well. Sweet James, he’s out there.
Accidentes is out there, who buy billboards, and because we’re all driving all the time, the people who manufacture culture through television and movies get to know the people on the billboards even if those people are not movie stars. Angeline is the most famous. She was a woman who just got dressed up like a human Barbie and put herself on billboards and no one even knew why. It just said Angeline and just showed her with her pink corvette or whatever it was. She became famous for being on a billboard.
John: Then you would see her on a talk show. She wouldn’t actually even be interviewed. Just physically–
Craig: Sometimes you would see her around town also and you’re like, oh, yes, you do not look like that billboard. You’re dressed like the billboard, but you’re like that billboard, but a thousand years older. When you saw Angeline, and I don’t even know if she’s still alive, but when you saw her in real life, it was a bit sad actually because you’re like, this is an older woman who’s– something’s going on here. This doesn’t seem well. Who’s paying for these billboards? I remember reading an article about that, too. In this case, I think if I had to make money off of this in the grand tradition of Adriana and Veronica, I’d want to do it as a reality show.
John: Apparently, there has been a reality show before. There was a– I don’t know if it was Bravo or whoever it was, but there was a behind-the-scenes.
Craig: It feels–
John: Yes. I get that, but I also just feel like we have amazing actresses who could play these parts. I think we haven’t quite seen that.
Craig: Yes, but what I don’t see in the story is an arc, per se. I see actually a fairly straight arrow. Adriana is one of those– the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. She’s the busy ant who just works. Her whole thing is, I worked really hard. I did any job. I knocked on any door. I did what needed to be done. I made all this money, and I believe anybody can do this. Very much land of opportunity, only in America kind of story. That’s sort of it. There isn’t a murder. No one stole anyone’s husband. No one’s died. It’s missing that.
John: I get that. If you were to take characters who are like these and put them in a Knives Out movie, you could see them in the backdrop of that. Characters in that rather than just their individual story. I do just think that a smart writer could find a way to succession this, essentially. Use this as the same way that the Murdock family is succession, but it’s all fictionalized and turned around. There’s ways to do that we just haven’t seen on screen before.
Craig: It could work. Succession, the stakes are built in because they’re running the media empire. They’re literally figuring out who the next President should be.
John: This isn’t quite that. Mad Men is another example. It’s a period– you could move this back into periods. It could be ’90s, 2000s, and rising up with this and these two sisters who are partners and then rivals. There’s a way to do that too. I don’t want to give out lines.
Craig: It could be. I think series, for sure. A movie, I just don’t see the movie here. Series, yes. In a world where there are– because Adriana and Veronica are both glamorous people. That’s what they’re selling. They’re selling glamour through their looks, their hair, their car, even the dog is somewhat glamorous.
They’re glamorous. They’re doing a job that’s not glamorous. They’re actually glamorous and in heels, but walking around and answering phones and dealing with invoices. It’s giving Selling Sunset, as the kids would say where real estate is the most, but I’m not going to watch a reality show about real estate. Yes, you will if it’s this. I’ll watch a few episodes of that.
The fact that they’re sisters, each one of them seems to be developing a show. One show. It’s about the two of them where you go back and forth, and then they can build up the rivalry. That would be successful. To me, that’s a slam dunk.
John: All right. Our final story is from Josh Levin writing for Slate. This is about a congratulations, you’ve got accepted to Oxford. Oh, wait, there’s something you should know.
Craig: Yes, it’s hysterical.
Drew: In 1995, a group of high-performing American students believed they’d been accepted into Oxford University through a college called Warnborough. The brochures and acceptance letters all tied the school’s identity to Oxford University’s reputation, convincing the students to pay thousands of dollars and cross the Atlantic.
When they arrived, they discovered that Warnborough was not an Oxford college at all, but an independent and unaccredited institution set up in a countryside estate way outside of the city. After hunting down answers, half of the Americans left and demanded refunds. The other half stayed and tried to make the best of the situation.
Still, Warnborough was unaccredited, so they could not grant valid degrees, and the credits were untransferable. Media coverage soon turned the episode into an international scandal. Warnborough was sued for its materials being misleading, and the fallout took a significant financial toll on the students. Its President, Brendan Tempest Mogg, still denies any wrongdoing. Warnborough collapsed soon after the suits, but later reemerged as an online university.
Craig: Brendan Tempest Mogg.
John: That’s a great name. Incredible.
Craig: That’s insane.
John: This is 1995, and that’s important context because I feel it was easier to pull this scam, at least get people to show up at a place in 1995 before the internet made it. It’s easier to search things. It’s also a uniquely weird thing that Oxford and these universities have so many different colleges that are all part of the same thing, but are not from the same thing.
Craig: They’re in the system.
John: I can understand why these students were duped to some degree, but as you read through the article, some of the students had some heebie-jeebies, even as they were headed there. I love them showing up and like, “Oh, no.”
Craig: It’s a great moment where they’re driven through Oxford campus and they’re like, “We’re here. It’s amazing.” Then the car just keeps going, and then suddenly it’s out in farmland, and they’re like, “Wait, what?” That’s an amazing moment.
John: I feel like this is a comedy. It needs to be an American Fish Out of Water comedy, and you’re struggling to figure out what it is that we’re going to do next. Is there shame involved? Do you want to report home to your parents what’s happened?
Craig: It feels like it’s potentially a basis for a high concept college comedy. We haven’t had a good college comedy in forever.
John: It’s a missing genre.
Craig: Yes, mostly because no one’s funny anymore. College campus is very serious business. The problem with this as a comedy concept is it’s unique, which sounds weird. Wouldn’t that be what you want? The problem with its unique nature is I don’t see this ever happening anywhere else ever. It can happen once.
Therefore, it’s almost like you’ve rigged your plot to create comedy instead of not rigging it. Do you know what I mean? There’s something so– It’s not science fiction or anything. You can do that. You can do a liar-liar where somebody blows out a candle, science fiction occurs, and now you can’t stop telling the truth. That’s not what this is?
John: No. To me, this feels like a British indie comedy that happens to have a much American center in it, but it’s the fish out of water of these Americans who are trying to figure out what to do. The characters have to be funny and distinct and have clear leadership roles as to what all brings them together.
It’s a Breakfast Club situation and see what happens. How do you make college out of this weird situation? The TV show Community is actually almost the same premise in a weird way. It’s this terrible, “learning institution” that we’re all just surviving inside of.
Craig: Community had that, hey, we know we’re not a four-year college material. There is this unearned, unfair stink that’s on community colleges that should not be there. It’s a little bit like, okay, we know we’re in the loser club. We’re losers and we’re here at loser club. Now let’s deal with that. In this, you get there, you’re– These kids got into Harvard and Princeton and stuff and now they’re here.
Of course, half of them, immediately, are like, “Bye.” Get on a plane and go home. A few of them try and stick it out and eventually go, bye. One poor kid, his grandmother dies, he flies back, doesn’t have the money to fly back again. They all lose their money to Brenden Tempest‑Mogg, or at least that is what he’s been accused of. He’s still out there, by the way.
John: It’s not clear from the article whether he was the person who was administering all this during the time or if he’s the new person brought in for the online university.
Craig: No, he was there. He blamed it on the guy that they had hired for US student recruitment. That guy was like, “No, that guy runs this place.” What happened to them was, as from the article, it seems like they got sanctioned by the government in the UK for being unaccredited, for representing themselves as an institution of higher learning to British people, and they got slapped. As a result of that, maybe it was just that it was an article, perhaps it was just really bad publicity, the upshot of it was their enrollment plummeted in a desperate attempt to save this place.
This is like Fawlty Towers now, where John Cleese has an idea. Well, if someone goes, “You don’t understand. We can’t run this college anymore because there’s no one in Britain who doesn’t know about how bad this is.” He goes, “No one in Britain, you say? What about America?” Then they just go on this campaign to get dumb Americans to believe it’s Oxford. I could see that. I want to now be actually–
John: On the other side.
Craig: It’s funnier. It’s funnier to be this sweaty con artist who’s constantly trying to keep the Americans from leaving and convincing them that this really is Oxford, even though there’s goats moving through the classroom. That’s funny. I would watch that.
John: There are two very different comedies out there, but I think there’s something fun to do there. Both of these are small. I think both of these are Gold Circle movies at the highest end.
Craig: Yes, which is a perfectly good movie to be, if it’s a movie. I would probably rather watch the sitcom version, the good old six-episode British sitcom version. My gut is, I want to be with Basil Fawlty on this. I want to be with Brenden Tempest‑Mogg as he desperately– or Father Ted, it’s such a great standard of sitcom work. The guy in the middle of it is a con artist who’s constantly getting hoisted to buy his own petard. That’s such a evergreen comic engine.
John: Yes, I do love that. All right, let’s recap our movies and our predictions here. Sir Marco Robinson, I don’t think we think there’s a movie to be made specifically about him as a general class of this kind of person as a character, evergreen, the fabulous. Adriana and Veronica, we think there’s multiple ways into telling this as a series. Probably not a movie.
It’s also really a question of where do you start and what is the nature of their relationship as they’re battling and finding what’s fascinating about that. We think there’s a couple movies to be made about fake Oxford. It doesn’t have to be about this one specific place, or just inspired by that general idea. Great. There’s comedy to be found there.
Craig: A comedy.
John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions, starting with a rage-baity one. Josh wrote in.
Drew: “Do you guys see this article in The Ankler called Run It Through a GPT-5? The phrase changing Hollywood overnight. Feels vastly overstated regarding the adoption of AI in writers’ rooms and studios, but worth discussing and guaranteed to incur some final draft-level umbrage from Craig.”
John: A little from me as well. I had a reaction to this. A couple of friends sent me this article right as it was published because it mentions AI and WGA, and so they’re always sending me stuff. I had one really visceral reaction, and then I had to modulate it a bit based on, well, what is The Ankler? We’ve been talking about it the trades. There’s Deadline and there’s Hollywood Reporter and these things.
Craig: What is The Ankler?
John: The Ankler, it’s on Substack but it’s not a one-person thing. It’s a bunch of different writers writing under it. It feels like a publication. It feels like journalism, but I’m not sure it really is journalism in the classic sense. I looked up the guy who wrote this, Eric Barmak, and he’s really a producer, not a journalist. Other things he’s written for this, it’s been about, “How I’m using GPT-5 to do these things.” When I look at it from this perspective, it’s not like fan fiction, but it’s more just talking off the top of his head.
Craig: This is an advertisement. That’s what this is because when you look at it, it’s got a headline that’s rage-baity. Then it suggests that something is true without citing anyone. Then it transitions very quickly to, “Here’s what I’ll tell paid subscribers.” Then a nine-point or eight-point bullet point list of all the pro-tip hack benefits that you’d get from reading this. The implication being, this is how you’re going to beat the robots.
John: What’s frustrating is there’s a lead to it. It’s basically, you get a paragraph for free and a bunch of bullet points, and then you click through the full thing to see it. Fortunately, a friend had a subscription and sent through the whole thing, so we have a PDF to look at. One of the bullet points is, “Why did the WGA’s ‘AI protections’ from the 2023 strike are already outflanked, and what the guild can’t actually stop this time.” Nothing in the article gets to that point at all.
Craig: Oh, you mean you’ve read the paid subscriber?
John: I’ve read the paid subscriber.
Craig: Oh, did you pay him?
John: No, people sent me the PDF of the whole thing.
Craig: Oh, we stole it.
John: No, we didn’t steal it.
[laughter]
John: An actual subscriber who was concerned about stuff sent it through to me for my PDF.
Craig: We should ask ChatGPT to summarize it for us.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Of course, because this is just like all the things that you see at the bottom of a local newspaper. There’s all these suggested articles that are clearly from an ad mill, and they’re all full of things like this. How many times have you seen this stupid doctor that’s warning you not to eat blueberries for breakfast? Do you see this?
John: All the time.
Drew: I don’t get that one.
Craig: Okay, because you’re not old. We must have let them know that we’re in our 50s because there’s something about this doctor.
John: They know.
Craig: They know. This doctor is like, “I have a warning for Americans over 50. Do not eat this for breakfast.” It always shows a bowl of blueberries. I’m like, “A, okay. B, what?” It’s this. That’s all this is. It’s crap.
John: What I don’t understand about the whole process is, did Barmack write the meat of the article, and then someone else writes the leads for things? They don’t seem to match very well together.
Craig: It’s almost like maybe a person didn’t write all of it at all.
John: I don’t want to go into that level of speculation, rather than focus on the article itself, which I don’t think– it’s all filler. What I do want to say is that there’s a class of article that is just designed to be like a grenade you throw into a room and rage bait. We just have to recognize this and not overreact to it.
Craig: This is so poorly done as rage bait. I feel nothing. This didn’t even get the tiniest bit of red mist in me.
John: Here’s where I think it’s dangerous is that a person reads this and says, “Well, God, if all the writers’ rooms are just using ChatGPT to do everything,” and if, “Oh, do a GPT-5 pass on things,” because it’s a standard thing, no, it’s not.
Craig: No, it’s not.
John: No one is saying that at all.
Craig: Never. Nobody says that.
John: As we have conversations with the actual people who are creating film and television every day, this is just not a thing that is actually happening.
Craig: It’s not.
John: I think it’s distracting from the real concerns we should have about AI and how it’s going to impact writing and every other part of the industry to just hand away and assume this stuff is already happening, and it’s not actually happening. That’s my great frustration.
Craig: I love this bullet point. The quiet gold rush in studio marketing and post teams. By the way, I’m going to get back to– this is rage baiting to me, is how bad it is actually. The quiet gold rush in studio marketing and post teams, where a GPT-5 can cut 20 trailers before lunch and nobody’s sure whose job that is anymore. Okay, the second part of that sentence undermines the first part. If GPT-5 can do that, how is there a gold rush?
Second of all, everyone’s sure whose job that is. It’s the guys who edit the trailers. It’s still their job. This is so poorly done. In any case, I’m not falling for it. More importantly to me to answer, I guess, Josh, who wrote this in. He was saying, did you guys see this? He said, “Feels vastly overstated, but well worth discussing.” Josh, I think you’re exactly correct. This is vastly overstated. Nobody talks like this. Are there writers’ assistants who use ChatGPT to summarize? Perhaps, but that’s not what I’m looking for in a writer’s assistant.
John: Yes. As an industry, there are a lot of conversations happening about how as an industry are we going to address what these technologies do and how it’s going to change things because it’s going to change things. It’s important for the industry to be smart and proactive about making the choices now about what we use these things for and what do we not use them for. This just stirs up anger.
Craig: Also, there are not that many people reading this. That’s the other thing.
John: My concern is that it’s because people who are tangentially in the industry, they see this kind of thing and they assume that this must be true because it’s in print.
Craig: 98% of what is written about our business is nonsense. This fits right in with everything going all the way back to the 20s. It’s just baloney. I love saying baloney. It’s baloney.
John: Let’s get to a happier letter from one of our listeners. This is Paneque, who writes in about some producers.
Drew: All right. “I’ve been out here about 10 years. I’ve worked my way from assistant to writer during that time, but I’ve never really had something hit or get hot. That changed this past week. My new script went out and got an immediate response. I was bombarded with meetings, all of which my reps handled beautifully while trying to build a competitive situation for me. I feel incredibly blessed. However, one of my most enthusiastic meetings has now really turned up the pressure.
It was a company I’d met previously and to whom I’d sent the script directly, and it’s a place I think really loves and understands my intentions. I’ve met with other folks who have similar enthusiasm. Now, this company’s executives have started to contact me directly, reaching out to tell me how much they want to work with me and how they’d be heartbroken if they don’t. While I’d be lucky to work with them, I also feel awkward since I do want to continue with my reps’ plan to keep everything competitive and keep momentum going, and give this thing its best shot at being made.
At the same time, I also want to remain cognizant and grateful that I have smart people passionate about a project so dear to me. How do I navigate this? If the project does land elsewhere, how do I salvage that relationship with people I really do respect?”
Craig: This one’s easy because this happened to me. I’m sure it happened to you. I remember talking about this with my agents way back when. I said, “I don’t know what to do because they’re not calling me, and I feel bad.” They were like, “Oh, we’re going to call them and yell at them. We’re going to call them and say, ‘Hey, our client is incredibly nice. He loves you. He’s so worried about upsetting you. Because you’re contacting him directly, he feels you. Our job is to tell you you can’t do that. We’re his agents. That’s our job. Our job is to do this. You have to go through us. If you don’t go through us, we have a problem.'”
It’s just as simple as that. The agents become the heavies. By the way, everybody knows. What they’re doing is they’re just trying to get what they want. They’re just end-running the system. The agents who are the system are like, “Stop end-running the system,” because they can all speak to each other in the fully cynical language of people who know what we’re doing, as opposed to us who are like, “Oh my God, they care so much.” No, they don’t. Hard for us to be cynical. Probably shouldn’t be. Let the agents do it.
John: What can happen here is that the people who sent this thing to you directly, it may make sense to give it to them to take to one place or to places where they have relationships, but other producers will take it other places too. I agree with Craig. Your reps need to call them and say, “Hey, our client loves you, but also you need to back off because there’s lots of people he needs to be talking with.”
Craig: Also, you can’t. It’s as simple as that. You can’t do it anymore. It’s not because he’s asking you or she’s asking you to stop. We’re telling you, we don’t want you doing it. You have to go through us. It will hurt you to go around us because guess what? We’re this kid’s agents, not you. We have our thumb on the scale.
John: Here’s the balance is that as a writer working, you’re going to have personal relationships and direct relationships with some producers and some stuff that is only moderated through your reps. The ones who you do have specific personal relationships with, they need to also be in contact with your reps so that it’s not all on you.
It doesn’t mean you have to blow off these producers. It’s great that they love you because it seems like they’re good legitimate producers, but you need to communicate with your reps and then communicate after the reps have communicated through them. Make sure that you have a positive relationship going forward, but it’s not all just directed straight to you.
Craig: Perfectly fine to reply back and say, “This means so much to me. I think the world of you guys.”
John: “We’re so excited to see what happens with this, and we cannot wait to work with you on things.”
Craig: “I’ve let my agents know how passionate you guys are. I’m sure they’ll be reaching out.” Then your agents, when they read that, they’re like, “Oh, we’re about to get the call.” Then they’re going to get the call. They’re like, “I know.” That’s how they’re going to answer the phone. “I know.” The agents will be like, “Can you stop?” “Yes.” “Look, I love this script. I just don’t want to lose this script with so-and-so.”
John: Which is great.
Craig: Exactly. No one’s going to be like, “Wow, your client really hurt my feelings.”
John: They don’t have feelings. All right, let’s get to our one cool thing. I am just back from two weeks in Australia. My one cool thing is, the whole continent is fantastic, but my one cool thing for this week is Sydney. The city of Sydney is terrific. It’s always reductionist to compare one city to another city and do this. Sydney was great in a lot of ways. I find Vancouver to be great in that it’s just the right size city.
Craig: Not too big, not too small.
John: Sydney has fantastic public transportation. If you need to take an Uber someplace, they show up really quick. So many restaurants. I have no idea how–
Craig: So many.
John: So many.
Craig: So many restaurants.
John: I have no idea how the city can support as many restaurants as it does, but fantastic. Great.
Craig: Australians love eating.
John: I was lucky to be there for great weather. You can hike anywhere. There’s a zillion beach walks.
Craig: What about the spiders?
John: I saw no spiders.
Craig: You saw no spiders?
John: Well, there were no poisonous snakes.
Craig: They were there-
John: No animals came after me.
Craig: -stalking you.
John: A lot of cockatoos.
Craig: Oh, well, those are nice.
John: They’re nice. They’re gorgeous.
Craig: They’re not poisonous.
John: No.
Craig: It’s the only non-poisonous animal in Australia.
John: There are bats. The Sydney Opera House. We saw Rent at the Sydney Opera House.
Craig: Rent?
John: Rent.
Craig: You saw a Rent?
John: Rent. Sydney Opera House is great. We did the bridge climb again. We did all the touristy things.
Craig: Lovely.
John: I loved it.
Craig: I was so bummed out, too. I was supposed to go on the promotional tour for our second season, but I had to finish the show because our post-production people were like, “You can’t leave.”
John: Can’t leave.
Craig: “You can’t leave,” and so I couldn’t go. I was bummed out.
John: You’ve never been to Sydney?
Craig: No, that was my chance.
John: When you get there, it’ll be great. Everyone will try to marry visiting Australia and New Zealand at the same time. I get it.
Craig: It’s not a short little trip there. Quite a bit of ocean between them.
John: No, I will just say enjoy Australia for itself.
Craig: I honestly want to go see New Zealand because I want to be in Middle-earth. Straight up. I’m not going to lie to the people of Christchurch I’m not that interested in the town center. I want to go to Hobbiton. Straight up. I will. One day, I will. Maybe go visit my friends at Wētā. Well, I’m glad you had a great trip. Fantastic. The moment you left, there were 5,000 emails sent to people. Just be mindful.
John: I picked my time.
Craig: Just be mindful. Well, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on an island in the Pacific as well, playing Ghost of Yōtei-
John: I know nothing about it.
Craig: -which is the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, which I’m sure was my one cool thing back when Ghost of Tsushima came out. Now, I will say Ghost of Yōtei, which is a PlayStation Exclusive, has all the things that I really enjoyed about the first game and all the things that I were annoyed by in the first game. The combat is wonderful. It’s fluid combat, lots of fun options. In the first game, you had different stances you would use depending on the foes and the weapons.
John: Is this set in medieval Japan?
Craig: In medieval Japan. Exactly. In feudal Japan. This, you have different weapons, lots of stealth and parkour, minor parkour. It’s the characters and the dialogue. It’s just–
John: It’s wooden. No, I’m sorry.
Craig: It was wooden the first time. It’s made of the same wood this time. When you wander around a world and you meet people, like we play D&D, we meet NPCs all the time. One thing that’s really important is that NPCs, some of them can be boring, some of them can be earnest, serious, speak in platitudes and homilies and deep thoughts, but you want a bunch of them to be a little nuts or really funny or lusty or just really angry.
There’s only a couple. You meet so many people. There’s one character I’ve met so far who’s funny slightly, and nobody knows what to do with him. Everyone’s like, “Ugh, this guy. I can’t believe they let somebody with a sense of humor into feudal Japan.” They’re going to make another one. There’s going to be a Ghost of– pick another area of Japan. When they do, I would just urge them, give these characters a little more zip. A little more edge. Boy, is it fun running around killing. I got to tell you. I got my katana. I got my kusarigama. Oh, so much fun.
John: Love it. We talked before about how great Baldur’s Gate was on Baldur’s Gate 3 on so many levels.
Craig: So many.
John: The writing was terrific. Every character you ran into was so specific.
Craig: So many. They were funny. They were pathetic. They were funny to laugh at. They weren’t funny themselves, but you could laugh at them and how ridiculous they were. A lot of them, like the character of Auntie Ethel, spoiler alert for a while, she’s a hag. When you meet her, she just is this kindly old Irish lady trying to sell you potions. Then you find out she’s a hag who’s trying to basically devour a child to turn into a new hag. She’s hysterical. She’s so funny.
John: Even when you run into a bunch of goblins who are guarding a bridge, each of the goblins is specific.
Craig: They got their own thing. They fell into the thing of, all right, goblins are Cockney. I was like, “Bad monsters always have Cockney accents.” “Oh, can we have a little meet?”
John: Ghost of Yotai.
Craig: Ghost of Yōtei.
John: Yotei.
Craig: Ghost of Yōtei. Lots of fun if you like feudal Japan. I will say, having played Assassin’s Creed Shadows– honestly, see, I can’t even remember the subtitles. Is that the last Assassin’s Creed, which was also set in feudal Japan? I think this is better. Also, visually, there are times where you’re like, “Whoa, it’s so beautiful.” Thumbs up for me. Room for improvement, Ghost Squad, but the gameplay aspects are fantastic.
John: A friend of mine, a writer friend, is working on a big AAA game that’s not announced yet, and so he’s under so many NDAs. Just hearing the description of how hard the work is on that, it’s just incredible.
Craig: It’s so many people work so long and so hard, and sometimes the games don’t work. This one, I assume it’s selling well.
John: I hope so. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week comes from Jeff Ross. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. I don’t think it’s that Jeff Ross. It’s a different Jeff Ross. Is that on a roast?
Craig: It’s not roastmaster Jeff Ross?
John: Could be. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You will find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast.
We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all this at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. You’ll just get the one email.
Craig: Just one.
John: Not 80, just one.
Craig: Just the one.
John: Thank you again to our premium subscribers for your kind attention. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on watching things when you’re away from home. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, we were traveling for two weeks in Australia. There are things we wanted to watch that were on streaming services. There are things that we wanted to watch which were on broadcast. It’s always the question of how best to do this. Our classic technique for traveling is we just pack an Apple TV with us. We put in a little box with HDMI cable, its power cord. 55% of the time, we can make it work.
It’s a hassle in that getting that box connected to the hotel’s WiFi is challenging. It’s improved over time, but it’s still challenging. There’s ways it pairs with your phone to do it. Getting an HDMI port that actually works can be a challenge. Getting a plug that’s close enough to the Apple TV, so you’re not reaching across the whole room, can be a challenge. It’s just a frustrating experience.
This last time, we did take the Apple TV, but did not end up plugging it in. Instead, we used Google Cast, which was on all the hotel TVs, to do it. It was rolling dice to see, oh, is it going to work this time? Is it not going to work this time? Why did it stop working suddenly midway through watching Survivor?
Craig: Hotels have this legacy problem of wanting to charge you to watch stuff on their television. I guess you could buy movies. They have their in-hotel rental system. You can buy a movie and show it to your kids to shut them up while you go have dinner in the bad hotel restaurant. They seem to think that’s still a thing, and maybe it is still a thing.
John: At certain price points, it probably is.
Craig: Possibly, but I do feel like we’re past it. A reasonable hotel chain at this point should just go, “Hey, here’s how you can watch whatever you want.” There are some security issues. What they don’t want is for somebody to log into their account on a TV, check out, have it still be there, and the next person starts buying stuff on your account. There’s concerns that I’m sure they have. They also don’t want people uploading crap into their system through the television somehow, I suppose. That could be a thing.
First thing I do when I walk into a hotel room, if it’s one of those hotels that has the TV on when you walk in, which drives me crazy because they’ve set it to the hotel welcome channel, first thing you do is turn it off.
John: It’s so bright, also.
Craig: It’s so bright and it’s so annoying, and it’s always playing bad music. Then I just watch stuff on my iPad. I don’t even bother with the TV.
John: When it’s just you, it’s great, but sharing, me and Mike together–
Craig: I don’t share.
John: A couple of times, we just end up watching off my computer. It was close enough, and it was easy enough. A couple of hotels I’ve been at in Norway, there’s an HDMI port you could just plug in. I was like, “Oh, that’s-”
Craig: Lovely
John: “-lovely and nice.” I feel like Google Cast is attempting to be that same basic technology, where basically, on the menu, you go to Google Cast and just like, here’s the QR code, scan this thing and do it. If it all worked consistently, fantastic, but it’s buried in other stuff.
Craig: Hotel internet is horrible. It’s firewalled up the wazoo, and it’s slow. It’s also incredibly fragmented. Your speeds are-
John: They’re shifty, yes
Craig: -relative to whatever anybody else is doing. If five people on the floor are all Google Casting, you’re screwed.
John: There are times where we end up tethering to our phones because-
Craig: Oh, geez.
John: -our data plan was so big for Australia that we were never going to be able to burn through all of it.
Craig: Can we talk about data plans for a second? Do you know what drives me crazy?
John: Please.
Craig: I had to do this for my older kid. She needed a new phone. I had to go on where Verizon meets Verizon. I had to go on to put the new device on the old phone line. I never go there. They’re like, “Oh, by the way, here’s the tab, review your plans.” The crazy thing is, every other business is constantly upselling you. These people, I don’t know if this is true for AT&T or other service providers., they quietly are like, “Oh, your plan is you pay $40 a month for X. Well, we have a new plan where you pay 10 cents a month for 1,000X.” You’re like, “Why didn’t you tell me? This whole time I could have had this?”
John: Our broadband at our house was the same situation where we were actually like, “Wait, no, the new plans are so much more for so much less.”
Craig: Quietly, they’re like, “Okay, we roll these new plans out to get the new people, but let’s not tell the old people. Let’s just have them keep spending money.” Somebody out there is still spending money on a pager. Anyway, that’s a side gripe.
John: We were getting back to the story of the internet at these hotels can be really challenging too. Also, if I’m trying to watch stuff off my American YouTube TV, I use my VPN, ExpressVPN. Mostly works.
Craig: Mostly works. There are so many VPNs.
Drew: Do you guys not watch linear TV in the hotel rooms?
Craig: No?
John: Occasionally. We were in Egypt earlier this year, and it was fun to actually just watch linear TV in Egypt because you’re just like, “Oh, this is actually a very charming, Ted Lasso-y kind of show that it’s all in Cairo.” That’s great. No, mostly I’m not doing that.
Craig: I have never. I don’t watch linear TV here. Why am I going to watch it there?
Drew: For me, that’s the joy of it. It’s being part of the culture in that way by just watching whatever–
Craig: I have to say, I have watched television overseas. Let me just annoy an entire continent.
John: Please.
Craig: I find European television to be obnoxious. Our television is ridiculous. I find their ads are obnoxious. I want Europe to be more dignified. They’re the old country. I want them to have a little bit more restraint. Instead, less when it comes to advertising, it’s all quite garish and loud. Anyway, right in Europe. Let’s go on, or I’m going to get a summons from The Hague.
John: Finally, this week, Apple TV+ is now just Apple TV.
Craig: Oh, thank God. Now I know what to do.
John: Now you can watch Apple TV-
Craig: On your Apple TV.
John: -on Apple TV through Apple TV.
Craig: Which is where your iMovies is and iTunes.
John: Which is the best thing. I do hope that we’ll get an Apple TV stick because, honestly, the box does not need to be this big. This is my new phone. All of the phone is this tiny little bump at the very top of the phone.
Craig: I am confused by the size of the Apple TVs myself.
John: They have storage. Storage for what exactly?
Craig: That’s the thing. They were designed to store a lot. You don’t really need to store that much anymore.
John: It just needs to connect.
Craig: Yes. Also, I was about to say, they’re annoying because sometimes you just have to restart them because they just crash. Then again, they’re running all the time. If they crash once every six months–
John: They’re really solid. They’re really good. Once they finally figured out how to make a non-terrible remote– I like the remote now.
Craig: I have the universal remote. I can’t deal with that. Then people are like, “Use your phone.” No, I will not. Yes, Apple TV’s pretty solid. Yes, Apple TV+, Hulu, gone. Plus, gone. HBO Max. Max, gone. HBO Max, back. Netflix sits there like, “We’re still Netflix, by the way.” FYI, they’re so cool. They’re just smoking a cigarette, like, “That’s nice.” Oh, you don’t have a Plus anymore?
John: No. Listening back to this bonus segment in 5 years or 10 years, what things will be like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they were still talking about this as a thing.”
Craig: Oh, Apple TV’s been around for a long time now. Wasn’t it Chromecast? Now it’s Google Cast. Wasn’t it Chromecast?
John: Yes, it’s now called Google Cast.
Craig: Then what was Slingbox?
John: Slingbox was a separate service, Slingbox.tv, which was basically, I think, a unit that you had on your own personal TV, and then you could basically log into it from any computer anywhere in the world. YouTube TV has taken the place of that for us.
Craig: YouTube TV-
John: That’s how you’re getting your local channels in the US.
Craig: -is how I get my local channels, yes. I think the cable companies have given up on that one, mostly. They’re like, “We know. Just take the internet. How about that? If you check on the new plan, we pay you $80.”
[laughter]
John: It’s how it works.
Craig: “You have 14 trillion gigabytes instead of your current plan, $100 for one megabyte.” Why do they do that? Well, I know why they do that. I know the answer to my question. It’s as obnoxious as a European ad. I’m going to get so many ad complaints. Well, I’ve spent time in America, and I think your ads are obnoxious. Fine.
John: Fine. Craig, Drew, thanks.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thanks.
Links:
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- The Many Faces Of “Sir” Marco Robinson, The Man Who Grifted Aspiring Filmmakers With Claims About Being A “#2 Netflix” Producer by Jake Kanter for Deadline
- Trailer for Marco Robinson’s TV show Get a House for Free
- Meet the Sisters Battling to Become L.A.’s New Billboard Queen by Mickey Rapkin for The Hollywood Reporter
- Dynasty (1981)
- Rica Famosa Latina on YouTube
- Fake Oxford by Josh Levin for Slate
- Fawlty Towers and Father Ted
- ‘Run It Through GPT-5’: The Phrase Changing Hollywood Overnight by Erik Barmack for The Ankler
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 708: Ambition Meets Fabrication, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The oringinal post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.
[music]
John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 702 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
We often discuss how to start a script. Today on the show, how do you finish one? We’ll discuss last looks, those final steps when you think you’re done, but you need to get your script ready to hand in. We’ll then apply some of those lessons to samples we’re reading for our new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at the first three pages of scripts our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. Today, we’ll have bonus feedback because our beloved Scripnotes producer, Megana Rao, is sitting here to the left of me to help us out.
Megana Rao: Hi. Thank you so much for letting me come back. I have so many questions on this topic.
John: You have a very specific question about last looks because that’s prompted the whole episode.
Megana: Yes.
Craig: I mean, we don’t let you come back. It’s not like you’re begging us all the time. We’re like, no, and then finally we let you. I personally want you here.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: I can’t speak for John.
[laughter]
John: It’s fantastic to have you here. Trying out some new stuff in the studio here. We don’t have headphones on, which is strange, but good.
Megana: I feel naked.
Craig: It is a little nudifying. Also, I have always loved the vibe of bald men wearing headphones because we all look like Lobot from Empire Strikes Back, which I think is amazing. It’s just regular.
John: It’s just regular. Yes.
Megana: Yes, it’s fun.
John: In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss musical scores and the function of the soundtrack in feature films. We had a question about that, and we haven’t dug very much into that. I want to talk about what we’re looking for in music, in the things we make. We have no items in the overall news category, but I want to talk about something new I learned this week. Not new to me. Craig, you understand the musical scale. As for you– I forget. Megana, what instruments did you play growing up?
Megana: I played piano, violin, and the recorder.
Craig: The recorder.
John: The recorder, absolutely. The recorder is a fundamental music education which actually ties into this.
Craig: It is. We all played the recorder or even its stupider nephew, the song flute.
John: I don’t know the song flute.
Megana: Oh, I did not play the song flute.
Craig: The song flute is for kids who struggle with the recorder. [chuckles]
Megana: Then I should have been on the song flute.
John: Craig and I, we went hardcore down the woodwind track, and we were both clarinet players.
Craig: Deep clarinet.
John: In our early music education, we learned do, re, mi. We learned that. What I learned from Mike this week was that in French solfege, which is the do, re, mi, they only use do, re, mi. They don’t have letter notes for C, D, E, F, G, A, B. They don’t.
Craig: When kids are learning piano, they don’t learn middle C? They learn middle do?
John: Do.
Megana: What?
John: Yes. Is that wild? Our international listeners are like, well, of course.
Craig: Wait, they say it’s in the key of fa?
John: Yes.
Craig: That can’t be right.
John: That seems impossible.
Craig: That’s impossible.
John: No, you actually look it up. There’s–
Craig: Because there’s things like Minuet in G. Do they translate that?
John: Different countries will do different things for how they handle stuff. In France, it literally is.
Craig: Did you fact-check them on this?
John: I did. I looked up, the answers here. It’s the system of a fixed do system. Fixed do is solfege. Do is always the root C. Whereas we have the movable do system, which is, I think, just so handy because that way we can talk about do is just like the root of whatever–
Craig: Of whatever it is.
John: It’s just wild. It’s assumptions I would have made about like, well, everyone, they must work the same way.
Craig: I got to tell you, when you look at the history of classical music in Europe, you see, obviously, great composers from Germany and Austria. You see great composers from Italy. You see a couple from England. France?
John: Oh, so that’s what it is.
Megana: [chuckles]
John: Yes. Send your letters into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll forward them directly to Craig.
Craig: Listen, I’m just wondering where are all the great French composers, the great classical French composers.
John: Did you see?
Craig: Okay, keep going.
John: God, the guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet. They’re all French authors.
Craig: That was Tchaikovsky. Russians, great.
John: Oh, no, no. There’s a different French–
Craig: The Russians had a ton.
John: They had a ton.
Craig: Tons.
John: What are you going to do other than compose music because it’s cold outside?
Megana: Do only French people have this system?
John: No, so it’s common throughout a lot of Europe.
Megana: Okay.
Craig: The other countries that don’t give us great classical composers. [chuckles]
John: You can also find a lot of Americans. It’s just strange to me that I would have assumed that everyone’s using the same A through G notation.
Craig: Do you think they’ll let me into France after this?
John: No, but this was not the deal killer.
Megana: You’ve been on their list for a while.
Craig: They’re the easygoing about people that criticize the French. It’s going to be fine.
John: Let’s do some follow-up. We had more advice for general meetings, which is our topic in Episode 699.
Drew: Alyssa writes, “I wanted to share a tip that’s helped my Zoom generals immensely, just in case it helps someone else. Before every meeting, I put my dog on the bed behind me. Without fail, he will be the first thing commented on. While his first couple appearances were a happy accident, seeing such a positive reaction to a cozy mini poodle with an underbite meant that I was happy to manufacture the situation if need be. In the Zoomverse, having something, anything bold in the background lays the ground for both an easy icebreaker and leads so naturally into a conversation about who you are and what you’re all about. It does mean I always have to make my bed before meetings and occasionally bribe my dog with a treat, but I think it’s worth it.”
John: I love this advice. I think it’s practical. It’s usable. Just having a first thing to talk about and having them compliment your dog. Love it.
Craig: You have to force that dog on the couch, though. He doesn’t want to go. “Hey, sit good on the couch. Mommy needs a job.”
John: Every dog wants to be on the bed, though, too. You let the dog up on the bed.
Craig: My dogs love being on the bed. You know it’s a sad day when your dog is too old to get up on the bed. I know. I have two dogs. Bonnie, the younger one, will spring onto the bed effortlessly. Cookie just stands there like, oh, and can’t get up there. She’s big. We can’t really get her up there. Then we got to get her down.
Megana: Do you have steps for her?
Craig: We don’t have bed steps for her. Maybe we should get her bed steps.
Megana: Yes, or a little ramp.
Craig: I’m not sure that she’ll still be here by the time it shows up. It depends on how fast the shipping is. She’s really old. Poor Cookie. She’s almost 15.
Megana: What?
Craig: I know.
John: She’s a big dog.
Megana: She’s like such puppy energy. I had no idea.
Craig: Not anymore.
John: Cookie?
Craig: Oh, geez.
John: This podcast took a depressing turn.
Craig: Yes. Thanks for reminding me about your vital dog.
[laughter]
John: No, Craig. You need to put Cookie up in the background and then you can talk about how sick she is.
[laughter]
Craig: I just want to say that you guys are really lucky. This may be the last Zoom where Cookie’s in the background. All right, here’s my comedy.
John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic, which is brought to us by Megana Rao. Megana, can you remind us of what your question was that you wanted to bring to the show?
Megana: Yes. I have been working on this feature script and I was about to send it into producers and was really just taking my sweet time in the “polish phase.” I wanted to talk to you guys about what you do when you are doing your polish phase or your final pass on a draft. What sorts of things are you looking at? What questions are you asking yourself? I think there also might be a little bit of anxiety or comfort with me taking my sweet time during this phase because it’s like everything’s where it needs to be. Nobody has given me notes yet. How do you deal with that? How do you know when done is done?
John: How do you know you’re not just procrastinating?
Megana: Exactly.
John: Or that you’re just being OCD about stuff that actually doesn’t matter at all?
Craig: Well, I am OCD about stuff that doesn’t matter at all. It’s so funny. I was talking about this with Mehr, my new assistant, because she also works as the script coordinator for our show. It’s her job to go through the script right before it gets sent out through Synchronize as the official draft. If she finds typos, she fixes them. I’ve just let her know if, for instance, I’ve left out a letter and you stick a letter in and it makes the line go longer, which means the page breaks differently, tell me, because I will not turn a draft in with dialogue that is slopping over across two pages. I have a problem. I know that.
Megana: Wow. I thought that my question was going to be really nitpicky, but no, I had no idea the depths to which–
Craig: Scott Frank also has this. We’ve talked about this at length, and we know it’s dumb. We know that. I indulge it.
John: I’ve, over the years, started indulging it much, much less. I just turned in a script yesterday and–
Craig: All the dialogue broke across pages.
John: Every single line won. It was just little dangling lines. I did the spell check, drew right through it as well. I went through and I was looking for examples of I was using the same word too much. I was using the word processing too much. Because I was writing the scene separately and it’s like, oh, it made sense in each of the times I was using it, but collectively, like, oh my God, I’m using that word too much. I can take all those out.
I would look for, you sort of blur your eyes and look at the page. It’s like, is there anything that’s weird about it? Is there anything that just feels strange? It’s too dark. It’s too light. You’re looking for widows and orphans. Honestly, our software all takes care of those situations. What Craig is describing is, let’s say I have three lines of dialogue and it’s at the bottom of the page and the application may split it at sentence level, so the next sentence drops to the next page. You try to avoid that if at all possible.
Craig: I do. There are two things that I think about with dialogue as I’m going through. Obviously, part of the tweaking process is checking for typos and repeated words. I like to read the whole script through because sometimes I might think like, oh, I don’t need this paragraph, or I thought I did, but I don’t because something happens later and it’s fine. For dialogue, I try, again, avoid terribly, frighteningly avoid the continued dialogue on the next page. The other thing I look at is there are times where someone says something that follows another person’s line that should be together on a page.
John: If you were to page flip, you’d lose the context.
Craig: It almost feels like a drum roll, please, page turn, and it undermines it. There are times where I look for those things to make sure that it feels okay. Honestly, just reading it through and the usual stuff, I don’t get too crazy. What are you doing in your process there, Megana, that seems to be occupying so much of your time?
Megana: Well, I feel, okay, this is after I’ve had friends read it, and I’m going through and doing all of the stuff where if I have one word hanging off, can I rewrite the sentence?
Craig: Oh, big fan of that.
Megana: I’ll do a couple of command F passes for words that I feel like I’m using too much or I’m worried I’m using too much.
John: What are examples?
Megana: Here’s one that’s not specific, but I’ll do a just pass where I’ll command F for the word just.
Craig: Oh, you’re a big just person.
Megana: Yes. You almost never need it.
Craig: Well, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why I don’t need it.
John: I can also imagine cases where you’re using it. It’s the right question to ask. Do I actually need it in this case?
Craig: If you know that you use a word as a bit of a crutch or a tick, then yes, it’s worth searching for. I’m not sure I have. Well, if I have them, I’m not aware of them, so I don’t do any specific word searching. Maybe I should.
Megana: Well, mine thankfully come from having John having read my scripts. I’ll do a pass for tries to, which I think is sort of like young woman hedging.
Craig: Oh, yes. I could see you hedging. I could see a hedge.
Megana: Thanks to John, I now go through and just make it a little bit more assertive, but that is another example of a pass I’ll do with a command F where I almost never need a tries to. The character just does the action.
Craig: Does the thing. Yes, if they try to and fail, that’s interesting. Tries to pour a cup of coffee and succeeds, [laughter] it’s not that interesting.
John: It isn’t that interesting. We had a guest on recently, and I’m forgetting who it was, that talked about doing a transition pass, which is basically, the day before you’re sending it in, you’re sitting down and actually just looking at, what are the transitions between all the scenes, and are they the best transitions we could do? Does it naturally flow from one thing to the next? Is there a visual? Is there a way that you can get the energy leaning forward at the end of a scene so it tumbles into the next scene with a lot of spark there?
I won’t do a specific thing for that, but I am always mindful of, is there a pre-lap that makes sense? Is there a way that I can carry the energy across that transition? The project I just handed in now is animated, and the transitions will be incredibly important. I wanted to make sure that you could always get a sense of, okay, this is how we’re going to move from this thing into this thing because it’s not going to be an accident. It’s going to be a lot of animators building stop motion stuff to make it all happen.
Megana: I was just rereading the first episode of Chernobyl and Go last night. You both use transitions a lot in the beginning of a script and you highlight it because I think you’re establishing visual language. Then later on, the story just carries itself. Is that something you’re aware of that you’re thinking about when you’re doing these sorts of last passes?
Craig: Well, the beginning of scripts tends to be a little more lyrical because it’s the beginning. We’ve talked about how in the first 10 minutes of sitting in a movie theater, the audience is accepting. They are welcoming everything in because they are learning. They’re new to this country and they want to learn. You can be a bit more lyrical. Once you’ve established everything, then like you say, I think people can put that visual language on top of the read as they’re reading it, and there’s probably less call for it. At the end, you’ll see a lot of lyrical writing come back, I think.
John: We’re going to get into the first three pages of the temples that people have sent through. I will spend a little bit more OCD time on those first couple of pages because you’re inviting somebody in and you just want everything to present itself well so no one has any excuse for stopping reading or setting it down. Making sure those first three, five, 10 pages just really read flawless and there’s nothing there that’s going to jump out is incredibly helpful.
Over the years, I’ve been less prone to the word Jenga or the word Tetris where you’re trying to make things fit exactly the right way so that the page breaks fall down. With careful work, you can almost always squeeze a page or two pages out of a script by just making pages break a little bit earlier and it ripples through the script. I just do a lot less of that now.
Craig: If I see a big chunk of white space at the bottom of a page, sometimes I’ll be like– but usually I’m okay with that, honestly. It’s funny, I don’t worry about length. I think it was much bigger deal in features. I never worry about length.
John: Well, you’re also the boss now.
Craig: I’m the boss. I also know that there are pages that look slow and they’re fast, and there are pages that look fast and they’re slow. The other thing I like to do as a final, what are we calling this, last looks?
John: Yes, last looks.
Craig: Is I read it as if I know nothing. I try and flush my brain of everything. I don’t know anything. Who’s this? Who is that? What are they talking about? I don’t know. Sometimes I will note, oh, you know. That’s not clear to somebody who knows nothing. I don’t love clarity notes because I try my best to make it as clear as I want it to be. There are times where I realize it’s not as clear as I want it to be. The reading as a tabula rasa is a good idea.
John: Agreed. Also, the tabula rasa reading may also help you. If you’ve moved scenes around, I think I’ve noticed that sometimes, oh, I moved this character’s introduction to here, but I didn’t end up uppercase in their name on the first time they showed up. It’s weird that the uppercase is showing up in the wrong scene. Stuff has moved around and there may be other dependencies that I’m not thinking about at the time, which is helpful.
Megana: How do you get into that mindset? I think when most readers are in this phase, they are probably very close to deadline. They have been reading this thing over and over again. In my case, I’ve memorized what it is, so I just start hearing it. How do you get to this point where you’re looking at it with totally fresh eyes?
John: Printing it out is a big help for me because I’m so used to reading it on the screen. If I read it, like what I handed in yesterday, I print it out and sort of did all my corrections in pen on the paper because I’m just reading it differently if I’m reading it on paper is a good way to do it. There’s people who will proofread by reading it all backwards. It’s like, I don’t get that.
Craig: [unintelligible 00:16:51]
John: I don’t know. That’s the thing people do for recognizing those mistakes. The obvious things, spell checking, making sure you’re spelling characters’ names consistently because if you have a weird character’s name, you may have made different choices for how you’re going to say that. The title page, so often I’ll focus on everything else and I’ll forget to update the date on title page.
Craig: Date on title page. One of the last things I do for an episodic script is figure out what the title of the script is. I don’t like to do that until I’m done with the script because I sort of want to think, okay, what’s a weird little moment or a thing or an idea from this script that then would make an interest-inspiring title? People wouldn’t quite know what it means until they’ve watched the episode. I have to remind myself to do that or else the title will be Untitled Script.
John: Yes, that’s not good.
Craig: Nor, nor.
John: It’s also going to sound stupid, but you need to– You’re sending in a PDF almost always. Drew was asking yesterday, how did you turn in scripts before? It’s like, oh. We should explain. It’s like we would call the studio executive and say, I’m ready. You can send a messenger to pick up a script. We would print up the script. We would put it in an envelope. We had to have lots of paper, brass brads, and envelopes. We could stick it in and a messenger would just show up at our door and pick it up. It was always whenever you call about the messenger, then you would find another typo and you’d have to reprint a page or to–
Craig: Scramble.
John: Scramble.
Craig: Scramble. Yes, absolutely. You would also have to make sure that your printer, you’d have to go through, flip, flip, flip every page because sometimes your printer would just like, I don’t like page 38. It’s blank. It would just do that sometimes.
John: I will say printers used to be more reliable than they are now. I have many more problems printing now than I did 10 years ago.
Craig: I’m not surprised because they’re no longer a vital piece of equipment. The divisions within, I don’t know, whoever owns Brother–
John: Brother or Epson.
Craig: Epson, this is like seven guys.
John: My Apple LaserWriter, it worked well.
Craig: I remember I had a Brother Daisy Wheel printer in 1985.
John: If you were to print a script on one of those things, that would be a three or four-hour process because you’d have to feed him. It was awesome.
Craig: A Daisy Wheel printer. Do you know what this is? Is this the one that got the little punch holes on the side? No. That’s a dot matrix printer. That’s different. That was a little thing that would go side to side, left to right, and put dots. Then the dots would create letters. It was like– That’s what that sounded like. The Daisy Wheel printer basically had what a typewriter has. It had physical things. It would spin.
John: It was a plastic disk with all the letters on it.
Craig: It would spin to the letter, and then a thing would go, bam, and hit it. It would go very fast. It was like the fastest typer, but it was still typing it.
John: It was incredibly loud.
Craig: It was so loud and slow. Those disks would, if you wanted a different font, you had to get a different disk.
John: Click in a new disk.
Craig: Yes.
Megana: Wow.
Craig: I know. There was ink ribbons. It was madness.
Megana: It’s like a printing press.
John: Yes, it was a printing press.
Craig: Now, we talk about this as a horrible thing, but people in the 1500s would have thought literally God Himself had handed this to us.
John: Yes, but this was at a time when there were still script processing departments at studios.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: Now, we send it in a PDF. My point is that you may have your own system for how you’re labeling your files, but whatever file you’re emailing through to your executive, your producer, whoever, just make a smart name for that, that makes sense to them. Like, title of movie, date, is a good choice. Don’t say first draft, second draft. Just say date.
Craig: Yes. If you’re rewriting and you’re not the first writer in, stick your name on the file as well, just so later when they’re looking through all the files, they’re like, “Oh, that’s the John August draft.”
John: That’s amazing drafting. That’s a smart choice. What else can we help you with figuring out in terms of last looks?
Craig: Or just your life.
John: We’re here for all of us.
Megana: We’ll do that offline or like bonus, bonus segment.
Craig: Oh, bonus, bonus segment. I like that.
John: Absolutely. For super premium members.
Craig: Yes. Oh, we should have a super premium.
John: Absolutely. A new tier.
Megana: Okay, here’s a question. You’ve written this thing. You’re sending it out to your producers. Stuff has changed between the last time you’ve spoken to them. Are you getting ahead of it? Are you annotating like, you gave me this note and this is the change that I made, or are you letting them figure that out as they read the draft?
John: That is a great question. If it’s the second draft that they’re reading, if you’re coming in with specific answers to things, this is like you responded to their notes, I think it is good in that email. If it’s just a few things, it can go in the email. If there’s a whole, here’s an explainer, I will put that in as a separate document just to walk them through what the changes are.
Megana: Oh, interesting.
John: Because you may have revisions turned on so they can see the stars, but they may not really get the context of what that is. That is a useful thing. For our first draft, before I turned it in yesterday, here’s what I actually said in it.
Craig: Here’s your stupid script, jerks.
John: Hello team, untitled maybe, excited to share with you the first full draft of this script. I say that because then if I’m looking for, why did I send that in? I can actually Google and search for that. No real warnings or disclaimers. I think and hope it feels like the treatment and subsequent discussions. Then I refer to one specific thing which we never actually discussed, but is a context kind of thing. We’re going to have to need to talk about this. Looking forward to discussing and digging in after the long weekend. Hope everyone has a great one. Files attached, goes through, happiness all around. If you’re sending through a multi-paragraph email with your script, I think it’s not helping you.
Craig: The person who’s making the decisions isn’t going to even see that email. I agree. I think if you’re doing a second draft and there are a lot of notes and a lot of changes, it could be helpful to turn revisions on. Give them two files. Give them a clean one and give them one with the asterisks. This way, it’s like, what do you prefer? Do you like to just read it through without knowing what changed or do you just want to go to the changes, up to you?
John: That’s a really good point. I will tend to do that. One file will be parentheses clean, one file will be parentheses starred, and then they can see both things.
Craig: Then they have a choice. Because from the point of view of somebody that, as I start to take on projects as a producer, and I occupy the space of the evil ones, what I’ve noticed, it’s fun, is that there are times where I will read something and I’m not sure if it’s always been that way or if it’s changed. As writers, we are 100% masters of the script. The people reading these scripts read a lot of scripts. They have a lot of notes conversations. In their minds, it gets confusing sometimes as to whether this was always there, it’s an answer to a note. Yes, a little bit of extra helps.
John: In generating the clean versions of scripts, what I used to have to do was I would save the file again and then just go through and clear all revisions and save a clean version of that. In Highland Pro now, you can just tick the box, don’t print revision marks, and just export the PDF again.
Craig: Oh, you know what? You can also do that in the software. I really should do that. Although, I don’t really do it now. Now, for television, I just send a draft in and then we just start. In feature land, it would make total sense.
John: Absolutely. Because you don’t want to send a draft that has star revisions all over it to an after. There’s something like that.
Craig: Exactly right. Of course, there are levels of revisions too. I don’t think I’ve ever used the setting where it’s like show all revision levels because that’s just, oh, congrats on your asterisked draft. I wonder why that’s there. Have you ever come up with a use case for that?
John: There were times, I remember on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there were a couple sets of revisions that went back and forth and they asked for, hey, can you give us a draft that just has this stars on it? I’m like, no. It wasn’t useful for my process, so I didn’t hold on to all those levels of revisions.
Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I do. I just go through and I just advance it. If I’m not in production, I can just call it level one, level two, level three, whatever it is, so that I can actually go back and say, here is what was changed, this date, this date. What I do is I name the revision instead of just blue. I edit the name so it’s blue and then I include a date. It’s obviously the date that it was turned over so that it’s not just also like, oh, what was level three? I don’t remember.
John: At a certain point, certainly on television, a script coordinator will be doing that work rather than the feature writer themselves. You still do it yourself?
Craig: I change the name of the revision. I try and do as much as, so I change that. I do that and I keep track of the revisions because as I’m writing, I want to make sure I know what changed. The script coordinator is going through to make sure that I didn’t screw that up actually because sometimes you get into things where you realize, oh my God, I was working out the wrong draft and it was the one that I blah, and then it’s a whole nightmare and then you got to go. There was one nightmare that I created that Allie Cheng had to un-nightmare for me. I got to tell you, it felt great not having to do it. I’m not going to lie.
Megana: Also, Craig, who is reading your drafts before you send them in to people?
Craig: My producing partner, Jacq Lesko, and this is the method that she and I have been using all the way back before Chernobyl even. Doesn’t matter what I write, whatever the day’s work is, I send it to her. She reads it, comes back, catches some typos, if there are any questions, positive comments, areas where she bumped, anything, I take that in. Every day’s work is read. She knows enough about me now to know that when she gets the next day’s work, she goes back for a good five, six pages because she knows I would have also tweaked earlier stuff. I don’t asterisk that, obviously. Everything is read every day.
John: Oh, wow. That’s not how we’ve ever worked in our office. Drew and Megana, when you’re working for me, I will tend to give you full drafts of things. Megana, did I ever send through scenes as I was writing them? At times, I’ve worked more scene by scene rather than the full thing. Have you proofed individual things?
Megana: The only thing that’s coming to mind is Arlo Finch. That, I was definitely reading chapter by chapter, unless you were doing a rewrite and there was a specific thing. Even then, you would send me the rewrite within the context of the full draft.
Craig: Well, you move around when you’re writing.
John: Yes, I do. You’re always page one, two page, whatever you’re at.
Craig: Exactly. Whereas I’m linear. I think if you write linearly, it’s easier to have somebody reading every day because it’s like a story being told very slowly to them. They’re getting like, if every episode were five minutes long, that’s what they’re getting. Yes, if I were to write, oh, here’s a scene that happens later, I don’t know if she would know what to do with it.
Megana: I was going to ask you this because in the first few pages of Chernobyl, it’s so specific. Each sentence is a very specific shot and it’s so detailed. Is that something that in your first draft you were doing that or is that like–
Craig: Yes.
Megana: Okay. Wow.
Craig: Absolutely. That’s why I talk a lot about directing on the page and how important it is supposed to win these people, so you shouldn’t. So much of what I’m trying to do, whatever that day is, is get as much out of my brain onto the page as possible that is of interest. That is of interest is the part that I think a lot of people struggle with because they don’t know which part would be interesting, which isn’t. Yes, I do that.
I think, in part, it’s because I’ve gone through that process, where I do hand over six pages and then she walks back in my office and says, “I was confused. You said this, but where are they or how is that different from this?” I’m like, okay. Over time, I’ve just gotten more and more detailed. Lindsay Doran also, a brutal where are they, why are they standing, what does the room look like person, which has been amazing.
John: The pros and cons of what you’re doing with Jacq Lesko is because she’s seeing it every day, she has a consistent vision for what it is, but she won’t have fresh eyes to look at a brand new draft. She’ll have to just sort of do a mind wipe on herself.
Craig: She will never get an episode the way that other people get it. That’s a great point. If it hadn’t been a successful process from the start, I’m sure I would have abandoned it. As it turns out, it has been.
John: It also feels like there’s just some accountability because you know you’re handing this in to her every day.
Craig: Well, that’s the other thing, is that she’s down the hallway like the Grim Reaper and I know she’s there and she’s waiting.
Megana: She’s so sweet.
Craig: No. No, no. Yes, she is. Just a reminder, you said that this draft would be done by April 15th. Are we still on track for that? I’m like, you know we’re not on track for that. What are you thinking now? I just know it’s like, there is a librarian asking for the book back. It kind of helps.
John: I do wonder if some of our listeners could create this situation for themselves where they just basically have an accountability partner where every night they’re sending through the pages they wrote to that person and vice versa.
Craig: Yes, absolutely. You don’t need to hear back from them. Just, here, I’ve proven to you that I wrote another– I think it would make a huge difference. If you have a choice as a developing writer between attending one of these script groups, which I think oftentimes can be corrosive, or having an accountability partner where you guys give each other zero notes, zero feedback. You just go, you owe me five pages. Where are my five effing pages? That will be helpful, I think.
John: If any listeners out there have tried something like this or are going to try this experiment, write back to us and tell us what happens. All right, let’s do our accountability, which is a Three Page Challenge. Three Page Challenge for people who are new listening to the podcast, so often we put out a call to our listeners saying, “Hey, send in the first three pages of your script.” It could be a screenplay. It could be a pilot. We will give you our honest feedback. Just make sure it’s clear to everybody. People are asking us for this feedback. For harsh moments, it’s because people asked for our honest opinions.
Craig: They asked for it.
John: We have three very brave writers who’ve sent stuff through. Let’s start with Katie Seward. It’s a pilot for The Thin Place. Drew, can you give us a quick synopsis for folks who don’t have these pages in front of them?
Drew: San Francisco, 1924. A herd of bison break out of their paddock and move down the city streets in the middle of the night. A lone bison lags behind and stops under a streetlight. We then cut to present day where, in a hotel bar, Connor Sullivan, 36, is trying to tell his friend his theory about how time is controlled by capitalistic forces. His friend, Francis Dunn, also 36, keeps showing him pictures of the Olsen twins, marveling at his ability to correctly tell them apart. They negotiate who’s going to buy the next round of drinks.
John: Great. If you want to read these pages yourself, look at the show notes, and we’ll have a link to the PDF so you can read through them with us. Megana, you’re our guest here. We start with you. What are some things you enjoyed or stuck out for you as you started reading through these pages?
Craig: In a non-enjoyable fashion as well.
John: Yes, absolutely.
Craig: I loved the setting. I was really excited about Golden Gate Park, the bison paddock. I love that park and I love the bison that are in there. I was very interested to read more about 1920 San Francisco. We quickly shift away from that. I was also really excited by what this guy was saying, this character, Connor, was saying about satellites and time and what seems like it’s going to lead to a conspiracy theory around that. I found that really fascinating. I thought that the Olsen twins game was clever and cute and I enjoyed reading that.
John: I liked the Olsen twins as well. I liked the idea of starting with the bison in the paddock. That is an opening image. I have many criticisms of how it was done, but that as an opening image is really good. I was a little frustrated that I didn’t feel like how this was going to tie in by the end of these two pages. I wanted a little bit of a better sense of what is the juxtaposition of these two things mean for us. Let me just dig in with some of the things I noticed from the top here. A monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath, giant bodies pound against wood. Again, this is all done over black. Something cracks. In the darkness, we see– Wait, what? How do we see something in the darkness, Craig?
Craig: I got there and it was, listen, Katie, this is what you wrote. In the darkness, we see a massive bison in the dark.
John: I see at least two problems with that. First off, we can’t see in the dark.
Craig: Correct.
John: From the darkness, ventures a massive bison.
Craig: Then we mentioned dark redundantly. This is all over black, so we can’t see anything. Now, if you want to say over black, also, I would say a monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath. Those are sounds. We don’t have to indicate the sounds. Then it says giant bodies pound against wood. I would write the sound of giant bodies pounding against wood. Again and again, something cracks. Then how do you want this to be? Tell me this movie, do you mean when it cracks through, that’s what makes light flood in from the moon or a street lamp or something? Or do you want to just go exterior Golden Gate, boom, bison explode out of their pen? Yes, the way this opened is confusing.
John: Here’s why I think it’s relevant to today’s episode. This feels like a last looks thing. You need to notice that what I’m saying, over black, darkness and dark, back to back to back in these first couple lines. You got to pick where you’re going to do this and sort of where to move on. This is a thing I think you could notice in that last step here. In the next block here, where exterior Golden Gate Park, night, the entire herd streaming out of their paddock, trampling over the battered gate. The entire herd streams out of their paddock. Again, there’s no reason to go for the gerund here when I feel like it just gives us a simple verb. Next block here, but our bison lags behind. Capitalizing the hour felt like a weird choice too.
Craig: Very Trumpian tweet style. Yes, sorry, truth. Is it a truth? Is that what he does?
Megana: Truth social?
Craig: Yes. He tweets a truth, he truths.
John: He truths. Whatever that is.
Craig: That’s a great word for lying. I love it.
John: Then we get Connor’s pre-lap. A pre-lap, valid choice.
Craig: Yes, but I suspect that this may be what’s on your mind. You tell me if I’m right. If you pre-lap somebody who is in a bar or a crowded restaurant, that sound will be with them also.
John: Yes. It’s not a clean sound.
Craig: It’s not.
John: As I started reading this pre-lap, I assumed that this was somebody on a microphone or was sort of a voiceover.
Craig: Exactly.
John: A clear space.
Craig: You may wonder how I got here. Yes. The issue is, you can’t do this. You literally can’t do what she’s trying to do here. What you can do is show this bison dazed, frozen, staring at us, and then, boom, smash cut to a guy, a crowded happy hour hotel, and we’re hearing him before we see him. Then we see him because the sound will be accepted.
John: Yes, but you could have or you could have pre-lapped the sound of the hotel bar. That could also have been interesting too. Why are we hearing this background noise that doesn’t match with what I’m seeing on screen?
Craig: Then you’d barely get a few words. The point is, and this is why this is important, Katie, the point is when you do this as a screenwriter, you are ceding way too much control to a director because the director’s going to go through this and go, well, this person didn’t write things that are physically produceable. Let me start fixing it. You want to fix it. You don’t want them fixing it. Fix it.
Megana: If Katie wants to keep this dialogue over the image of the bison that we’re seeing, what should she write instead?
John: You can’t. Connor could do it as a pure voiceover, but then it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t track quite right here.
Craig: You literally can’t do it unless you wanted to have the noise of the hotel and the bar with him, which would ruin this moment because you’d be staring at this bison and hearing a bar for some reason. It just doesn’t make sense.
John: I think there’s a way you could sell that, but it would be a different feel for what this is. It just doesn’t–
Craig: Especially because there’s continuous action. We’re looking at a herd and then suddenly we would hear. Like John says, you can get away with a slight prelap of the noise of the bar and maybe even one thing. This bison and then the sound of a bar starts to fade in and we hear a woman say, Mary Kate or Ashley. You could do that and then, boom, we’re into the bar and he looks in and goes, Mary Kate. You could do that, but you can’t have this run.
John: I like the idea of the Mary Kate or Ashley runner. I like the frustration that he’s feeling that this is just a parlor trick he can do. He doesn’t actually care. He actually is trying to engage on conversation. The challenge I ran into is that the scene descriptions, the actions in between, like momentary pain flashes across Connor’s eyes, but it gives in. No more physics talk. It felt out of scale with what was actually happening here. In a scene that really should just be dialogue, boom, boom, we were stopping a lot to address people’s reactions to things.
Megana: It was just hard for me to believe that these two characters, if I am to believe that they’re old friends and went to grad school together, are having the conversation that they’re having.
Craig: Right. It feels like they just met.
Megana: Yes. It’s like a first date or like a blind date, a setup, I believe it. If my friend could do this, I would never bring it up again.
Craig: Right. You mentioned it’s somebody else, but you wouldn’t suddenly discover they have this parlor trick after all these years. To me, it felt more like he was in the middle of picking this girl up and he was trying to impress her with what he’s impressed by, but she only cares about this other thing that he can do that isn’t that impressive, except that when you’re trying to pick girls up at a bar, anything that impresses them is great. Anything, right? That’s the point of learning this parlor trick.
You mentioned pace, I think, John, is what you’re referring to. Everybody knows the wonderful scene that opens the social network, and this has a slightly social network opening scene vibe to it. There’s a questionably spectrum-ish sort of guy, and there’s a girl, and they’re not quite connecting verbally. That scene is notoriously fast. It is paced faster probably than any dialogue scene ever, and I’m throwing in all the screwball comedies of the 30s.
When you are pacing, and this feels like it should be paced that quickly. Honestly, what I would do is have him say less stuff like, Mary Kate’s on the left. It should always be like, Mary Kate. So, dadadadada, Ashley. Dadadadada, Ashley. Nope, Ashley, and then Mary Kate in the same dress. Dadadadada, but make him– I don’t think he would use extra words because he’s so interested in talking about what he wants to talk about. All the stuff in between, the description, shorten because you want to keep the pace.
John: If you absolutely need it, you can pull it into a parenthetical for when the dialogue blocks rather than having it be its own separate thing because every time we stop reading the dialogue to read the scene description, we’re losing the sense of the pace of whatever we really feel like on screen.
Craig: Right. We have, that’s Mary Kate. Action. Dejected, Francis returns to scrolling through pages of images of the Olsen twins. Then the dialogue continues. Francis holds her phone up again, a picture of the twins in their Full House days. Connor examines it carefully, then we complete. I think he’d like, it wouldn’t take that long. It says Francis. In the dialogue, it says Francis, in parentheses, not listening. She’s not listening. I’m not sure I need a lot of description also showing that she’s not listening. It could say in parentheses, looking on phone, Jeff Bezos. I also did not understand this.
This is important because Connor’s making this interesting point that theoretically will either be relevant to the plot or just an interesting window into his personality. He’s talking about time and he says, the satellites we use for Google Maps have to get the time beamed out to them from Colorado. I think beamed to them or sent to them from Colorado. The next brick of text is, or dialogue, the clocks they have on board gain so much time, our GPS would go off by six miles a day otherwise, exclamation point. I don’t understand what that means. What does that mean have so much time and what is, and go off by six– Our GPS would go off by six miles a day, otherwise is incredibly unwieldy. It’s very clunky. It doesn’t sound easy to say.
John: It would drift by six. There’s ways to get to it.
Craig: Yes, exactly.
John: To Katie’s credit here, I feel like if you do the blur of the eyes test and look at the pages, they have a good balance of light and dark.
Craig: Yes. Absolutely.
John: There’s not chunks that are impenetrable. There’s no road blocks in your reading, which is nice.
Craig: Can I pull one more thing out?
John: Please.
Craig: This tends to stop me, and I see it quite a bit. Francis, in this kind of not horrible expositional way, says, which was harder, your PhD in science, which again is crazy because they literally lived together in grad school. How does she not know? That just seems ridiculous. We’re developing this expertise. To your point, this should have already been covered by their friendship. He says, my PhD is in quantum mechanics and we lived together when I was in grad school, you bitch. She rolls her eyes.
John: Yes, I wrote, ouch, on that.
Craig: That’s just aggressive.
John: It’s aggressive, but it’s also, it feels expositional. It just feels like, oh, this is not for us. This is for the–
Craig: A, expositional. Very expositional. We lived together. This is an, as you know, I have a degree in– B, if it’s two women calling each other a bitch, sure. If it’s a straight guy and a girl in a bar and he just casually calls her a bitch, it feels aggressive.
Megana: I guess I didn’t mind it so much. It was more offensive to me that she said science instead of–
John: Yes, absolutely.
Craig: Science?
John: Science?
Craig: Do you stuff with numbers?
Megana: If she said quantum mechanics or some sort of physics and it actually was theoretical physics or whatever niche thing, that would make more sense to me. Yes, it was just more offended by the science part.
Craig: Yes, they’re both stopped me in my tracks. Then why is she saying, I’ll buy the next round if you know what I do? They lived together. They lived together. Anyway, this is trouble. The last line also, Francis goes to buy him another drink. As soon as Francis turns her back, Connor’s face falls. Is cheerfulness a performance? He’s barely holding it together.
John: I wasn’t reading as being cheerful.
Craig: Also, I don’t believe he’s– How do I know he’s– If he’s barely holding it together, this was a lot of talking. He seems quite activated and passionate about this topic. If you are barely holding it together, you’re probably listening more than talking because you’re barely holding it together. These are things to think about, Katie, but interesting stuff. There’s obviously a lot going on here, which I want to know more about.
John: Yes, we can know more. Tell us about the long line for this pilot.
Drew: A millennial fundraiser can’t accept her best friend’s alleged suicide, so she digs through his San Francisco apartment full of mysterious scientific instruments, dives headfirst into nostalgia for their wild 20s, and unravels a conspiracy that goes further into the past than she ever imagined.
John: All right, so she is the main character and he is going to be dead.
Craig: Well, guess what? In these three pages, they are screaming to me that he is the main character. The perspective is entirely his. Entirely his. She walks away, we stay with him. If she’s the main character, I think this needs to be reconsidered.
Megana: I also want his dialogue, like what you pointed out with the six miles off the GPS or whatever, I want his dialogue to be a bit wonkier and more esoteric in that case, like he’s more misunderstood.
Craig: If he’s barely hanging on and there’s like a maniac to what he’s saying, a little mad scientist-ness, I need to see her being like, are you on coke? What’s going on? She needs to notice. I think that something’s going on because while one can make the argument that people who have depression often present as normal, the problem when you’re dramatizing it is that it just seems like you cheated, that you didn’t give us anything of interest and then they kill themselves. They’re not around to say, oh, let me explain. That was all an act. You know what I mean?
John: One possibility here for Katie to consider is if it’s not just the two of them at the scene, but there’s a third person that like, so her showing off her friend’s ability to tell the– She just wants to show off his freakish ability to tell the Olsen twins apart, whereas he’s trying to communicate important stuff to this third person, could be really interesting and just gives someone a point of focus.
Craig: That’s a great idea. If I were writing this, I would have, yes, I would make it from her point of view. She’s trying to understand what he’s saying because what he’s saying is provocative. She’s like, I don’t, but how? How is time part of capitalism? Explain that. There’s this other friend who’s like, Mary Kate and he’s like, Ashley, and she’s like, just trust that he’s going to get them all right. It’s what he does. Go back to the thing about the– so she’s interested and she has a want and her want is to understand him. The other friend is doing Mary Kate and Ashley, which is interrupting and creating frustration with her. Then I would know it’s from her perspective.
Megana: Because this isn’t setting me up to like Francis very much.
John: No, it isn’t.
Craig: No, it’s setting me up to like Connor, and then he dies. Oh, no, he died.
John: Oh, no, he died. Our next script has an arguably protagonist on the spectrum as well.
Craig: Oh, fun.
John: Let’s talk through Sunset Paycheck by Holden Potter. Can you give us the synopsis, Drew?
Drew: Eric Bond, 27, is at a job interview. We see a balance superimposed, $2,743. The interviewer, Casey, asks him where he sees himself in 10 years and his greatest strengths and weaknesses. Eric gives a very confident answer. Later, Eric walks through a park with Jane, who asks him how the interview went. Jane is excited to hear that he got the job and the interviewer asked all the questions Jane had prepped him for. Eric Venmo’s Jane $10 and the balance goes down to $2,733. We learn that Jane works at Casey’s company and tells Eric all about his future coworkers. Eric asks Jane if she’s told the company they’re a couple.
John: Great. We officially have a trend, which is two scripts that open over black.
Craig: Over black, which is fine.
John: I think we need to find it and go ahead. Just like a Stewart special, it’s a Three Page Challenge that opens with a flash forward and it comes back in time. Let’s workshop a term for opening over black.
Craig: Well, it’s going to have to do with Drew. He’s the one thinking that.
John: It’s like a Drew noir.
Craig: The Drew darkness.
John: The Drew darkness.
Craig: This is a Drew darkness.
John: Just some Drew darkness. His voiceover is, where do I see myself in 10 years? We open in a pretty classic job interview. I’m not mad at it. It’s a familiar scene. I found myself in the last script where there were a lot of scene descriptions interrupting the dialogue flow that weren’t actually helping me out or telling me more about what was special about what I was seeing.
Megana: I think a lot of the action lines that were describing Eric’s character confused me more.
John: Yes. It happens to Casey as well. On page one, Casey is stunned and surprised. Really, you’re stunned in a job interview?
Craig: And surprised.
John: Both. As people who play Dungeons and Dragons, we know they’re incapacitated and paralyzed. There’s a very specific condition for a specific thing.
Craig: She has the stunned and surprised condition, which now they took away the surprised condition in 2024 rules, as you know, Drew, and I’ve talked about that at length on a different podcast. A great choice to do that. If they’re playing 2014 rules, stunned and surprised, Casey will not make it through this combat.
John: No. 100%. Here’s the thing that is unique to the script I do want to talk through.
Craig: Megana is so bored with us. [chuckles]
John: The fourth line down on the first page, text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, then fades slowly after. An interesting idea that they’re basically constantly showing his Venmo balance, but you’ve got to make that more clear of what we’re seeing because I had no idea what it was.
Craig: I thought the chair was worth $2,743. That’s what this is telling me. Text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, fades away slowly after. That’s after a sentence that says, “He adjusts his chair in an awkward motion slowly.”
John: My focus is on the chair, the actual object, and so I’m thinking, well, that dollar figure must have pertained to that chair. Also, his age was 27, and the text is 2743, so I kept thinking like, wait, are those numbers connected somehow? Is there a purpose here? I think it’s an interesting idea to show that we just got to set that up really cool and clearly from the beginning.
Megana: Just why not clarify that that’s his bank account?
Craig: Net worth.
John: Net worth.
Craig: You can even say his name, Eric Bond Net worth. I don’t know. What does fiddles with his lips mean? How do you do that?
John: I don’t know.
Craig: What is that?
John: It was one of the things that was making me think from the start, like, oh, this could be like a spectrum-y thing here that we’re trying to– Because his dialogue choices felt a little spectrum-y, and so I wondered whether that was a physicality that we’re–
Craig: Well, it says, “Eric fiddles with his lips and takes a sip of the water cup in front of him.” Now, you don’t take a sip of a cup. Takes a sip of water from a cup. Also, this is like one of those ventriloquist gags where they drink milk and make the dummy talk. [laughter] How are you doing both of these at the same time?
John: We’re also missing a from. Eric sits across Casey Morgan. Again, this is your last look, so you’ve got to make sure that you don’t have stuff missing out of here.
Craig: He says, “Well, okay, where do I see myself in 10 years?” Well, that’s a great question. Then she says, “Take your time, dear.” Which is a very nice thing to say. Casey looks down at her notepad. Eric flutters and rolls his eyes. What an idiot. Why after take your time, dear? Super nice thing to say. Why is he rolling his eyes?
Megana: Rolling your eyes in an interview is so rude.
Craig: It’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to do, and it’s not even called for.
Megana: I also don’t really know what flutters means.
Craig: It’s like this. It’s a thing.
John: The fact that it stopped us to think, what does it actually mean? What is it doing? It’s the wrong line there. Cut it or find a better way to get that in there. I think you cut it and get more into the meat of it.
Craig: “Well, if hired in 10 years.” You want well, comma, if hired. Well, if hired is a strange phrase. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t have this job. I think it’s an interesting concept. It’s an interesting interview gambit. You probably want to- because I don’t have this job. What job? We don’t even know what the job is. It hasn’t been mentioned yet. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t be working here. Then Casey is not surprised.
Now, my biggest issue, Holden, is that we are forced to watch two people sitting across from each other talking, which is my favorite thing to write. I love two people sitting across from each other talking, but when two people are sitting across from each other talking, it must feel like an action sequence with dialogue and emotion, or in this case, one-upsmanship, lying, concealing, different wants, different–
John: Surprise, seduction.
Craig: It’s just rambles. He just talks. The point he makes, it takes forever to make it, and it’s not a particularly fascinating one.
Megana: Also, in that part that starts with, “If you look at my resume,” I don’t understand why, if this was a question he was expecting, he’s umming so much, and that’s written out in the dialogue. Then I think this is the last looks thing. If Holden would have read this out loud, he starts two sentences with now, and then he says grow and no. I think that’s just a little too rhymey and awkward for an actor to say.
John: That’s good advice.
Craig: Also, why would somebody in an office care why you left a job in a mini golf course? You worked in a mini golf course, because no one wanted to hire you for an office job. That’s fine. Or you love mini golf, but I don’t care why you left the mini. You left mini golf because it was mini golf. You’re getting minimum wage. Of course you left.
Megana: A bigger note that I had with these pages is that these questions are so basic, and they’re so generic that Eric being surprised about it or them betting on it was upsetting to me. I feel like if the questions were more specific, I’d learn more about Casey and just have more respect for how odd the situation is. Someone being surprised that you’re being asked your greatest strength at an interview was baffling to me, whereas–
Craig: Right, or where do I see myself in 10 years? This is the most–
Megana: I think you could just say something so much more interesting about corporate America or interviews by the questions you’re asked. At Google, I was asked so many times what my death row meal would be or what my walkout music would be. I think there’s something so bleak in those questions and how standard they are.
Craig: Something so horrible and pointless. I’m here to code stuff. Who cares? Who cares what I eat when I die? My walkout music? I don’t have any. I like coding. [laughter] Am I getting this job or not? We all know you’re not going to decide it based on my walkout music.
Megana: There’s something cutesy that you could do.
Craig: Now here’s one other thing that’s important. Jane makes a point of saying, I’m assuming she said, “Is that right?” Which is not a particularly–
John: Not memorable.
Craig: The biggest problem is on page 2, they chuckle. Not sure why. Casey looks down back at her notepad. Eric cringes and his posture sinks. I don’t know why, because she just chuckled and he said what he wanted. Then she says, “Okay, is that right?” Why is she saying that?
John: I don’t know. I don’t know the context.
Craig: It doesn’t follow from-
John: Big question mark with that.
Craig: -what she said, what her attitude is.
Megana: Then we come back to it, right?
Craig: Then Jane’s like, did she say it? Did she say the thing? Yes. I would have had him like, okay, is that right? I think that’s an interesting thing. If an interviewer suddenly asks a question that shouldn’t be asked because it doesn’t follow for you to be like, “Yes.” Then later like, yes. For no reason. It didn’t belong. That would be interesting to note.
John: To Megan’s point, if she asks a really weird question, then the recall on asking the really weird question makes sense.
Craig: It makes sense.
John: More last looks things here. On page 2, exterior Loose Park afternoon.
Craig: What’s a Loose Park?
John: I assume that’s a place.
Craig: The name of a park?
John: It reads here.
Craig: I think there is a park named Loose Park, and you don’t live in the US. It’s like a famous park in London, which I don’t think it is. You need to say the full name of it or just name it something else. Loose Park sounds odd.
John: The Loose Park here, Holden is using double dashes before the time of day, which is not common, but it doesn’t bug me. On the first one, there’s a space between the place and the hyphens, and now there’s not. Just be consistent.
Craig: Consistency. Check my list and see.
John: Here’s the description of Loose Park. Ducks in a pond. An older gentleman feeding the ducks. A woman walking her dog. A couple walking by the water. Have you ever been dealing with stress where you’re supposed to just look around the space and just identify the name things in the room? That’s what it felt like to me.
Craig: You have to repeat them to make sure you remember them. Yes, this does feel like a memory game. How about just an older gentleman, not an older gentlemen. There’s only one of him. That’s a mistake. An older gentleman feeds ducks in a pond as a couple strolls by. A woman walks her dog.
John: If you want to go with a couple walks by the water, Jane, you got it. Then it’s Eric and Jane.
Craig: If we know him, we don’t say a couple walks by and then cut to the couple, and it’s Eric. Reveal the couple as them. I can see them, because you just said a couple–
John: We have eyes.
Megana: Also, the office chatter and machines began to drown out the interview on the line before I felt like was unnecessary for cutting to a park.
Craig: Then suddenly it’s quiet. Yes. If it said, “As his anxiety rises,” but he’s done talking, so there’s nothing left for him to say. It says, “I don’t quit, no matter the obstacle–” Then he stops talking. The sound rises. What is the actor doing while that’s happening? Just uncomfortably run out of dialogue? This is one of those things where you have to just say, how do I do this? Holden, you are going to make this movie. I want you to make this movie. You’re going to go out with your iPhone and shoot it. Can you shoot some of these things the way you’re describing and go through that exercise? It’s important.
John: Last looks, page 3, both laugh. That laugh was capitalized for some reason. Not the whole word, just that the L was capitalized. Eric asks, ?Seriously though, am I going to like it there?” is a question. Yes.
Craig: Jane.
John: Who is Jane? Jane is 26.
Craig: This is what I know about her. 26. I know what shirt she’s wearing, which is not important. I know that when Eric says, “She did ask every single question you’d say she’d asked,” instead of every question you said she would ask, which is more, I guess, grammatically correct, Jane jumps up and down. I know that she is slightly insane, because she’s jumping up and down at the most mundane thing possible.
John: Let’s back up a sec here, because they came from someplace. They didn’t just start walking. Just now, we’re going to say that what–
Craig: What were they talking about before this? How is this possible? You’ve got to make this movie in your head. You’ve got to imagine it. Jane needs to be a character. There’s something off about these. They don’t feel like full people. Maybe they’re not. What if they’re AI robots?
John: Could be.
Megana: I wrote, seems like they don’t know each other.
John: They’re dating.
Craig: Or they’re AI robots.
John: Or they are.
Craig: Well, let’s find out.
John: Let’s find out. Well, actually, one last thing.
Craig: Sure.
John: Title page, all looks good, and the email address is there, but just also like the full mailing address. No one’s going to send you a postcard. I don’t think you need your mailing address there. Phone numbers, I wouldn’t put my phone number there. Just so you know, randos are going to call you.
Craig: It’s a fair point.
John: Tell us what’s actually happening in this full script here.
Craig: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.
John: A character is Anne Sheeran, who’s not been introduced yet, which is fine. It’s three pages in. I’d like that his declining balance is going to be a recurring thing throughout this. That makes sense. You set that up on page one. Great. I don’t know.
Megana: I think that number should be lower.
Craig: That’s not a horrible number.
John: For a 26-year-old, no.
Craig: No.
Megana: If he just got a job, I’m not that worried about him.
John: [unintelligible 01:00:55].
Craig: Maybe he didn’t get the job.
John: Maybe soon.
Craig: Can you read that again?
John: Yes.
Craig: I just want to hear it again.
John: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.
Craig: I’m not sure a movie about somebody learning to save time and money is going to be particularly interesting. I don’t feel like this character is just bursting with authenticity. More importantly, I’m not sure how to portray Anne Sheeran, the firefighter, in a way that posits that she is inauthentic and wants to be authentic. If you want to be authentic, just stop pretending and lying, I guess. I’m not sure how Kirk is going to help her with that. This may be trouble.
John: It may be trouble.
Craig: It may be trouble.
John: Holden, thank you for sending it through. Let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is Levelling Up by Sylvia-Anne Parker. I will say from the start here, it’s leveling with two Ls.
Craig: She’s British.
John: She’s British. I looked it up.
Craig: She’s British, and there’s so many Britishisms throughout. It was almost like I got a feeling she was like, no, seriously, I’m British. I am so British.
John: Story with me.
Craig: I trace back to the Saxons, like the early Saxons.
John: Those angles. I hate the angles.
Craig: I love the Saxons.
Megana: Putting a U everywhere.
John: Talk us through, if we were not reading the pages, what we would see.
Drew: After a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., the sound of choking takes us to a bathroom where a woman is being drowned by an unseen assailant. We then cut to that same woman. It’s Grace Tierney. She’s in her 50s, and she’s Black, waking up on a London tube from her nightmare. She grabs the arm of another passenger who pushes her away. Grace gets off at the next stop. We then cut to a tower block in Hackney where Jeannie, a 20-something white woman, discovers her heat isn’t working and brings her 60-something father a blanket.
In a podcast studio, Grace interviews Cameron Stonely, the minister of a new program called Levelling Up, aimed at reducing economic imbalances across the UK. When Grace presents him with numbers that prove a widening disparity, he tries to spin his way out of answering her questions. Grace’s boss and producer, Dennis, watches from the other side of the glass with a look of pain.
Craig: This is the opposite of true darkness. This is white
John: Okay, I’m white. A white screen.
Craig: This is true whiteness.
John: We’re opening with a nightmare image again, a thing we’ve seen before. This woman is being pushed underwater. Let’s talk about a woman, (Black), versus a Black woman.
Craig: It doesn’t bother me.
John: Doesn’t bother you?
Craig: No. What bothers me is that it’s a woman. I don’t know how old she is.
John: Ultimately, we’re supposed to be matching that up to Grace herself.
Craig: It would be good if you just put a 50-year-old woman just so I just know what I’m dealing with there, because it’s all about the imagery.
John: When we actually get to revealing her, it says, the woman Grace Tierney 50, which is just an awkward construction. I might try the woman– Grace Tierney 50– just to separate it off because- to make it clear this is the woman we just saw before.
Craig: A positively.
John: A positively.
Craig: A positively.
John: Good choice. Megan, what was your reaction to these pages?
Megana: I really enjoyed these pages. I liked this character. I am curious about what this nightmare she’s having in the middle of a pack tube is. I love a podcaster going after a minister. I’m excited about that. I just felt like things could be a little bit punchier, but I’m excited about the potential of this.
John: I am too. The idea of we see Grace. We don’t know her context, and then we see her in a podcast situation, feels right. My assumption is that we’re going to find that the tower block apartment and the heat not working is related to levelling up as a program.
Craig: I hope so.
John: I hope so. I had to reach to get myself there because I felt like, why am I seeing this here now, and why am I not continuing to see Grace throughout this?
Megana: It felt unnatural for that. If I’m watching her on the tube going to work to then cut to this woman, Jeannie, and I also just felt like that scene with Jeannie could be more dramatic.
John: There’s no dialogue in the scene. We can’t tell if this may be a postcard image, because there’s no actual real action happening in them. You’re looking at this stuff, and you’re not sure why we’re here. We’re seeing a tower block, literally just an image, and then we’re inside that apartment and just seeing an old woman. There’s no dialogue. No scene actually happens.
Craig: That just doesn’t work. You can’t do it, really. What’s going to happen is you’ll cut it out. If you want to be there, there needs to be at least one line of dialogue or something to say, “I understand why I’m here.” If there’s not a line of dialogue for us to push past the dad through the window and see Grace walking to work or something just to connect it somehow, otherwise, just this floating scene that could go anywhere just doesn’t fit.
I want to talk about the very beginning. In the very beginning, there’s this stylistic choice to start with a white screen and then the sound of typing and then see text typed onto the screen. It’s this visualized act of typing a sentence. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized- now it’s a quote from an American, so I don’t know, maybe I would put a Z there, but whatever, realized that we were the victims. The typing stops, resumes, of a broken promise, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a really cool quote, and it’s a really cool moment where it pauses.
My issue is we go from that, which is this stylized thing, to another very stylized thing. It’s like I started with two desserts, and I feel like you can do one dessert. I’m not sure you can do both of these things. It’s such a great image to start with somebody drowning. That’s, whoa, I’m in it. That’s exciting. I would argue that maybe that’s the way to go here. The quote is really cool, but I would sacrifice it.
John: Let’s imagine the opposite of the case where we keep the quote and then just come to Grace on the tube.
Craig: You could do that.
John: What resonates for me about that is it’s just like, oh, how does that tie into this? I’m curious how that ties into this next thing.
Craig: You wouldn’t be able to have her waking up out of a nightmare, I don’t think.
John: No.
Craig: Let’s talk about waking up out of a nightmare, which is something that happens all the time to us in life, and it happens all the time to characters on screen. It’s just that it happens very differently to those of us in life than on screen. When you wake up from a nightmare, your eyes open, that’s pretty much it. That’s how I do it. Here, it’s really tricky, because we show her with her mouth wide open, which is meant to match her drowning, I guess. Then she sits up in her seat with a start, breathing heavily from the nightmare. Without looking, she grabs hold of the arm of the male passenger, Black, 30s, in the seat next to her and yells, “Marcus.”
The passenger roughly pushes her away because he’s not Marcus. Then she realizes, I don’t believe that at all.
John: I don’t believe it.
Craig: She wakes up and immediately knows she’s in the tube, by the way. She’s on a train. She reaches without a no-look reach to her right, yells somebody’s name as if she needs that person without looking at them. No.
Megana: As a nightmare queen, I have startled awake and grabbed the person next to me on a flight, but my eyes aren’t open yet.
John: That’s a crucial difference.
Craig: Have you woken up? You see what I’m saying? You’re not there yet.
John: You grab the person and then you wake up. I believe that.
Craig: If your eyes are closed and you grab the person next to you, in my mind, you could be grabbing them in front of you or turning to them and staring in their face. It could be anything, but the no-look grab and the no-look name while the eyes are open, is not a realistic thing, nor is it necessary. I know she wants us to know that Grace had somebody named Marcus who was important to her, a husband, a son, a boyfriend. We don’t know. There are other ways to get that.
Megana: Just before that also, we cut from this image of the water going into her mouth, and then she says, fast cut to a packed carriage. I would prefer a fast cut to mouth wide open, and then we get the packed carriage later.
Craig: Absolutely. If you’re going to cut to her, you’re going to cut to her. You’re not going to cut to a wide shot of a train and then cut to her. You have to think about how would I actually edit this? I want to talk a little bit about the interview, because there was something about it. First of all, when somebody has a disturbing experience, if they are then the next thing we really see is them doing their job, it feels like there needs to be a moment where we’re with that person and understanding that they’re taking a breath, having a drink of water. Flushing that out of their system, and then focusing in.
It says, “Grace dons headphones, ready for work. Grace is dedicated to her job. She’s damn good at it, and she knows it.” Which, by the way, I hate. I’m just going to say it. I hate she’s damn good, and she knows it. I don’t know that she’s damn good, and I don’t know that she knows it. If she’s damn good, why does she need to know it? That just feels overconfident. Kind of an annoying characteristic. I’d rather other people tell her she’s good at it. The most important thing is I would prefer a moment here where Grace dons headphones. She’s not ready for work. She just had a nightmare about drowning.
Take a breath here. Have somebody say, okay. She’s like, “Absolutely.” Then it’s gone. Then the red light comes on, or she’s not okay, and then the red light comes on, and she changes, because she’s– Last thing, we are in East London, which is one of the poorer areas of London. It’s where a lot of these council housing, and they call it quick-build, multi-occupational housing, ugly blot on the landscape. There is this prior scene that we’re discussing where there was somebody trying to warm up her father, a flat tower block, Hackney, London, so East London.
Then she interviews this guy, and the point that she makes is hospital waiting lists currently stand at 7.46 million cases in the north of the country, as opposed to 4.27 million in the south, highlighting the north-south divide. London is in the southern part of England. Why is her point here that the northern– By the way, the northern part of England does get the shaft relative to this big city in certain cases, but that doesn’t seem to be what we’re talking about here. Why are we spending so much time in East London, but then worrying about the folks up in, I don’t know, Yorkshire or Newcastle?
John: I want to talk about the actual flow on the page of this, because reading through it a second time, you realize like, oh, it’s meant to be that she’s just talking over him, but it’s not clear on the page that she’s talking over, because right now we’re seeing Cameron suddenly, it’s all dot, dot, dot to connect through the things. Visually on the page, it looks like they’re each taking their turn, and that’s not the intention here. I think this is a case where you do need some smart dual dialogue to show that this is simultaneously happening.
Craig: I think you could do this in this dual dialogue, and whenever I can avoid it, I do, but there is a way to do– Well, first of all, Cameron Stonely is just talking. He’s doing this thing regardless of what she says. I think ending each line of dialogue with dash, dash would be better than dot, dot. Dot, dot is a trail off. Dash, dahs is on cutoff, and then just a simple Grace parentheses cutting him off. How do the figures differ? Cameron Stonely rolling ahead. This government is doing, and then you understand that she’s going to keep cutting him off, and he’s going to keep rolling ahead. This looks a little bit like a page of Morse code because of the amount of dot, dot, dots.
John: I think the intention here is that she’s not backing down. She keeps going, but she’s also not letting him ever attempt to answer the question. I want to make sure that as an audience, we see that she is both listening and pushing through.
Craig: That’s where I think this could be broken up a touch with single lines of Grace lets him go on for another second, then enough already or whatever, so that we’re with her. We end with her saying, “Are you simply lying your way out of answering the question?” That is not necessarily a more aggressive line than, “Are you able to back up your claim with concrete evidence? Please answer the question.” Stonely’s stream of spin is brought to an abrupt halt. This guy is pretty good at just ignoring what you’re saying, and I’m not sure why that would bring him to a halt.
Through the glass, into the control room, comma, we would want there, Grace’s boss, producer Dennis Reardon, 35 white, old head on youngest shoulders. What are youngest shoulders? What is an old head? You mean older than he looks or looks older than he is?
John: I think it’s his experience. It’s like why he’s beyond his years.
Craig: Maybe that’s a British expression.
John: Oh, it could be.
Craig: It might be a British expression. Old head on your shoulders. Looks on with a pained expression. Why is he pained?
John: Good question, because we don’t know. Is Grace being too aggressive? What’s going wrong here?
Megana: To Craig’s point about the line of she’s good at her job and she knows it, I want to see how she’s good at her job in this versus that line.
Craig: I think that she doesn’t take any crap, and she really wants these people to answer, but if this is who she is, and this is how her podcast works, why is Cameron Stonely going on it? If this is what she does, why does Dennis Reardon suddenly seem pained as if to say, “Oh, no, she’s doing it again.” This is what she does. If she were doing the normal, okay, interesting, and then just something snaps and she just does something really aggressive and then he’s pained.
John: We’d have to see what normal is before- because we have no–
Craig: She just jumps right in. I’m not sure why he’s pained here. It would be good if we saw him earlier, not pained, and then she says something, and then he reacts so I know what it was.
John: Well, to your point, if he’s the producer asking, “You’re good?” She’s like, “Yes, you’re good.” Just establishing him earlier could help a lot. Title page looks great. A date on there would be helpful just so we can see when this is from. It’s not essential.
Craig: This is an interesting choice. Capitalized her name. You normally don’t, but-
Megana: I like it.
Craig: -I think it’s like, “Hey, I’m Sylvia-Anne Parker.”
John: You’re going to pay attention.
Craig: You’re going to pay goddamn attention to me. I want to find out what this is.
John: Oh, please, yes.
Craig: When a campaigning journalist confronts a government department over its socioeconomic policy, she discovers that the ministers in the department are the target of a serial killer.
John: Wow, a serial killer was not something I was expecting.
Craig: I wasn’t expecting that based on I thought maybe a supernatural thing possibly was going on.
John: I would say that the drowning thing does not feel connected to that premise that I was just given.
Craig: Yes.
Megana: I thought it was going to be more of like a get out experience of drowning. I didn’t think there was going to be actual physical violence.
Craig: This is an interesting choice. This is a movie that is criticizing the government for failing to achieve their promises of leveling people up and helping them economically, but the serial killer is going after those people. I have to stop the serial killer from killing these ineffective government people.
John: We’ll have to read the description to know what’s happening.
Craig: I’m sort of rooting for the serial killer. Not really, but I’m not like, “Oh, no.” That’s an interesting choice.
John: We want to thank these three writers for sending in their pages and everyone else who sent in their pages. Drew gets hundreds of these. If you want to send in your pages, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form you read through. You click the button. You attach your PDF, and we look through them all. If you want to read through these pages with us, remember that they’re in the show notes. Just click the links there, and you’ll get the chance to look at those PDFs.
Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a blog post by Hollis Robbins. The title of it is How to Tell If Something is AI-Written. I try never to use the word writing with AI, so AI-Generated. Hollis makes really good points that for us, for humans, language represents a signifier, so a word like a tree, along with a signifier, the actual real or imagined tree. Because we exist in the world and have concrete examples of things around us, we’re talking about those concrete things, versus LLMs don’t have any of that. They just can generate a string of patterns that match to other language that they see, but they don’t actually know what things really are.
If you’re reading it through text and you’re wondering, did an AI do this? Is this real or something? Some tests you might try to do. If you can’t see anything, nothing springs to mind, it’s more likely going to be AI. All these tests are also, it could also just be bad writing, but good writing will tend to have concrete things that evoke an image in your head. If you look for a naturally perfect balance where every point has a counterpoint, where every advantage has a corresponding challenge mentioned there, so they’re always balancing the pro, the con.
Craig: They’re both sidesy.
John: They’re both sidesy. In the absence of concrete details, they’re not giving an example of an actual, real person or actual thing in the world, but it’s a hypothetical, because they don’t actually have a reference to a thing. AI can be good at persuasion, because it has learned a bunch of rhetorical patterns without having to believe the actual argument underneath it. I think the converse of this is looking at, well, how do you write things well? It’s something we talk about so often in screenwriting. It’s like you’re creating a visual for the reader, so the reader sees something in their head as they’re doing that. That’s what we talk about in these three-phase challenges. It’s what we talk about every week.
It’s how are you evoking the experience of sitting in a place, hearing the sound, feeling things? That’s why we say we, because we are putting ourselves into these things.
Craig: Never say we, John. I saw that on Reddit.
John: Absolutely. Two examples that Hollis makes is of things that create a visual. Instead of apologizing, she brought donuts. I get that. I feel the donuts. I see that. I understand what you’re saying. His idea of teamwork was to circle my title and draw a sad face. Again, you’ve created a visual. You’ve created a moment. I believe that in a way. I just think the lesson here is just make sure you’re not detecting AI stuff, but also just don’t write like an AI.
Craig: Don’t sound like AI. It’s funny. As you were talking, I never considered this before. Do they still do standardized tests for college?
John: They still do. [crosstalk]
Craig: The SAT section where you would read some sort of three-paragraph narrative about some historical event, and then you have to answer questions about it.
John: It was boring writing.
Craig: That was basically early human AI. Just a blunt, featureless, both sidesy, just unflavored oatmeal writing.
John: It really is.
Craig: AI certainly does that well.
John: I just had some really good observations in there, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Megan, what do you have to share with us?
Megana: My one cool thing, does it still count? I haven’t done this thing yet, but I’m going to do it.
John: You absolutely could aspire to a thing.
Megana: I am going to the Pageant of the Masters tomorrow. Have you guys heard of this?
Craig: Of course.
John: I’ve been to the Pageant of Masters.
Megana: You have?
John: I went last year, and I’m so excited for you.
Craig: I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been to it.
John: Do describe it.
Megana: You are also welcome to describe it, because you actually know. I’m going tomorrow. It is this festival in Laguna Beach. They’ve been doing it for the last 90-something years. It is a living art show. Have you seen the rest of development?
Craig: Of course.
John: There’s an episode where the Bluth family does the equivalent thing where they all dress up and recreate a work of art, a painting, but they’re there in person and filling the roles.
Megana: It’s a fantastic scene. It’s one of my favorite episodes. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that this was a real festival that they were referencing. Tomorrow, I will go down to Laguna Beach, take the trolley from downtown, which I’m so excited about. I think there’s something like 50 artworks that they recreate.
John: What is the theme this year?
Megana: It’s Road Trip in California or California Masters. It’s all paintings that are in different California museums. It ends with Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
John: Oh, yes. I think it always ends with it. I think it was a comment.
Megana: Oh, does it? Because I was like, I don’t know that that is in any California museum.
John: That’s not in California.
Craig: Oh, no, that happened in California, Jesus. According to the Mormons, I think it happened in Missouri.
Megana: There’s apparently music and narration, but please tell me, John.
John: It really is remarkable. It’s a thing that everyone in Southern California should at least go to once. The year we went, fashion was the theme. It was fashion throughout the ages. The curtains close. The curtains open. A work of art is there, giant-scale work of art, but with actual actors in there who are painted to look like the thing. It’s a wardrobe, but it’s also makeup. You don’t believe that it’s actually human beings doing it. The changes between them are so quick. How did they possibly do that?
Craig: Do they have two stages in the alternate?
John: No.
Craig: They have people waiting to run in.
Megana: They have thousands of volunteers.
John: It’s a huge thing that happens. There’s some stuff off of this.
Craig: Is the audience just a mass of people with their iPhones out taking pictures constantly?
John: Oh, you’re not supposed to take pictures.
Craig: Oh, thank you, Pageant of the Masters. I can’t stand it. Just watch the thing. I told you I went to go see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. I think it was awesome. It was fantastic. So many phones out. I’m like, just live the moment. Be in the moment. Then grab a video from one of the 14 million people that took a video.
John: I’m so looking forward to your report on what you think, because it was really great. The narration was really well written. All the music stuck together, which was great. Tickets are expensive, but–
Craig: Sounds like they would have to be for all those volunteers. Wait, volunteers?
John: Volunteers, but also other people. Everyone I think you see on stage is a volunteer, but the staffing behind everything else is incredible. There’s a whole orchestra.
Craig: Oh my goodness. I assume it’s a nonprofit venture.
John: It must run it all. Craig, what do you have for us?
Craig: Well, this is a repeat, but I try and do it every year at this time, because as we record this, we are two days away from what David Kwong and I refer to as Helpenmas. This is our friend Mark Helpen’s puzzle Labor Day extravaganza. David Kwong has flown in. We will be solving together over the course of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. That’s usually when we finish. Our goal is to finish on Sunday. We never do. We’re usually top 20. By the time you hear this, we will have solved it, because it’s a Tuesday. However, not too late for you to jump on this. It is free. If you just Google Mark Helpen puzzles, it’ll take you to his puzzle page where all of the Labor Day extravaganzas are listed.
Fair warning, it is hard. It is not what I would call extremely hard, because I’m not good enough to do extremely hard. There are some MIT puzzle hunt stuff that are just extremely hard. This is hard, but so beautifully crafted from a puzzle construction point of view, so elegant, so much attention to detail. There’s always a theme and he writes beautifully. There’s always beautiful flavor text leading into the puzzles. There’s a tip jar where you should leave a tip. That is always my one cool thing as we approach the Labor Day weekend.
John: I’m going to repeat one of my other one cool things, which is to get your flu shot. Flu shots are now available. The flu sucks. Don’t get the flu. Get the flu shot.
Craig: I was talking to my doctor, one of my doctors, because I’m a middle-aged Jew. I’ve got like 100 of them now. She said her thing was to wait until the end of September to get the flu and COVID booster because you get about three to four months before the vaccine doesn’t quite have the same potency. The flu and COVID will probably peak around December, January. That was her.
John: I love that she still believes that we’ll have flu shots.
Craig: She told me that the flu shots were locked in in terms of the strain and the production of them before the brilliant Trump administration decided that we don’t need to be healthy as part of their Make America Healthy Again thing.
John: I just believe that tomorrow they could come down and say, “Oh, no, we’re banning flu shots.”
Craig: I don’t think they’re going to ban flu shots. The bigger issue is next season, they will not provide the flu shot makers with their evidence for which strain will be predominant.
John: We’re getting way off topic. Even this last time, they did not convene the meeting that they were supposed to do. The manufacturers just had to figure it out themselves.
Craig: They did for this time, but next time is in question. I am the most pro-vaccine person on the planet. Maybe you’re right there tied with me. Megana, as we know, anti-vaxxer.
John: Stipulating that is not correct.
Megana: I love vaccines. Give me as many as you can.
Craig: Give me as many as you- I love a vaccine. I’ve always loved a vaccine. They now have, I think, their first measles death in Mississippi. Pointless measles death. Pointless. Heavy sigh. Anyway, Labor Day puzzle extravaganza, everybody.
John: That is our show for this week. Script notes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer many weeks. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. If you’re following us there, you may see more stuff from our show in the weeks and months ahead.
You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today, including the PDFs for the three-day challenges. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all these premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have new chairs in this office because of our premium subscribers. Thank you.
Craig: That’s why I’m sitting on this nice chair?
John: Yes.
Craig: Thank you, premium subscribers.
John: You can sign up to become our premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Film Scores. Megana Rao, thank you for coming back on the show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Craig [unintelligible 01:28:23] question. Thank you, Megana.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. Coming off of that outro music, let’s talk about more music. Jenny wrote in with a question.
Drew: From your perspective, what should a score aim to accomplish in a film or show? What sets a good scores apart from great ones? To what extent are you working with composers to capture texture or tone that you’re imagining versus leaving it in their expert hands? What are your thoughts on temp tracks? Are they a helpful tool or a creative hindrance?
John: Last week, we went to see John Williams’ show at the Hollywood Bowl, which is always great. One of the pieces was introduced as Adagio with motorcycles. Basically, John Williams had written this brilliant, clever piece of music, and then you basically can’t hear the music at all because there’s just motorcycle sounds over the whole thing, which raises the question like, oh, did he need to write that clever piece of Adagio music? The music’s great. Music is essential.
I love music in the movies I watch and the TV shows I watch, but there’s two very different patterns I notice. One is the music is there to support and it’s there so that there’s not silence. There’s a thing. It’s just filling some space. Then there’s the music that’s like, pay attention to this music. I’m thinking Blade Runner 2049. It just starts big and loud. The music is always a big part of what’s going to happen here.
Craig: There are so many different ways to explore how this works. To me, scoring is like writing again. It’s another chance to write. To answer, I guess, the last question, how important is temp music? Incredibly important, because when you’re editing, you know you’re going to need score in certain areas. You want it, and you want to make sure it’s working, and you want to be able to create something that feels like it’s being supported by the structure that music creates.
I think of scoring in two ways. There’s scoring that is connected to and consistent with what is happening on screen, and then there’s scoring that I just refer to as underscoring, which is scoring that punctuates or emphasizes what’s on screen. Somebody says something dramatic and the music goes, [mimics] that’s underscoring, which I tend to avoid, but some things it works great for. There’s also what I call, “Funny music,” which is never funny. It’s music for comedies, and it always sounds something like this. [mimics] I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It destroys everything in its path.
Scoring is essential. It’s an essential part of the process for me, whether it was Hildur Gundadottir on Chernobyl or Gustavo Santaolalla on The Last of Us and David Fleming on The Last of Us, we do a session where we just talk through scenes, and then we let them do what they do, and then it comes back. I listen, and they send it connected to the scene, and I watch it. I listen, and then I give my thoughts. They’re always how it made me feel. I didn’t want to feel like that, or, oh, you’re making me feel like this, but I actually want to feel like this, and it’s all about the language of feeling. It’s exhaustive and exhausting and leads to some of the most beautiful stuff imaginable. I love score. I love it.
John: It reminds me of costume design. There’s some projects in which you want to notice what people are wearing. It has to stand out. It’s a big part of it, and there’s other ones where it’s just like everyone should plausibly be wearing what they would be wearing in real life. I don’t want to pay attention to those things. Music can work the same way where there’s times where it’s just supporting. You’re not really paying a lot of attention to it. Then there’s The White Lotus where it’s just like this whole scene is just this wild, crazy music, and that’s part of the delirious joy of that show.
Craig: Completely. There’s music that is more sound design than music. In Chernobyl, I think the first music we hear is when Legasov walks outside. He makes his little recording, and then he walks outside to go hide the audio tape and the scores. [mimics] That’s it.
John: The Hans Zimmer race. Something has happened there, yes.
Craig: It’s Hildur Gundadottir on a cello that has been distorted and lowered and all sorts of cool stuff, but it’s not melodic. I’m not even sure how you would notate it. It is sound design. Sound design and score often blend. With particular composers now, when you look at stuff like, for instance, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that line between sound design and score, again, can get a little blurry, which is fun. Which I love.
John: Now, if we had the comedy music underneath, like Tron: Ares, that would be amazing. [mimics]
Craig: Brutal.
Megana: I was going to ask, since both of you have directed, and Drew is directing your first short.
Drew: Not first but a short.
Megana: A short this week. What questions are you asking yourselves when you’re meeting with your sound designer, your composer? What vision do you have going into it?
John: You have to speak to references. You can talk about your script, obviously, like what you’re feeling here, but you’re going to have to use metaphors. Working with Alex Wurman on the music for The Nines, we had to come up with the main theme before the frame was shot, because Ryan Reynolds plays it on the piano. We had to figure out what is that longing theme? What does it sound like? We know it’s going to be on a piano, so it has to make sense on a piano. How are we going to do that? [mimics] Figuring out what that was, was a very early part of the process.
That’s unusual. In most cases, you’re giving a sense of the overall space for something, and you’re probably casting that composer based on their previous work. You’re using their previous work to temp score it.
Craig: Absolutely. You don’t want to be talking to composers that have no evidence that they can do something like what you’re doing, but you, of course, don’t want them duplicating anything they’ve done. You just want to know you’re generally what I’m looking for. Then I think one of the things that helps is to say, “Look, here’s what I don’t want. Here’s what I don’t like. Then here’s what I am looking for and what I do like.” Then you just vibe it out. They should ideally read the script and have thoughts, but I will say some composers work very differently and achieve brilliant results.
The aforementioned Gustavo Santaolalla, Gustavo likes to score without looking at what’s on screen. He just knows, okay, this is what the scene is about. This is what the feeling is and the emotions are. I’m not going to watch the scene. I’m just going to write a piece of music. Let’s see if it fits. A lot of times it does. You make adjustments here and there, but that is specific to him. Look at process. I think when you talk to him, look at their prior work. Talk about process. Talk about your goals and your aims, and talk about the things you don’t want, and then pray, because God’s honest truth is you don’t know until you start getting stuff back from them. You just don’t.
John: You’ll hear stuff. Are you ever hearing music independent of picture? Are you sending your tracks and then you have to–
Craig: I never listen to music independent of picture. What I ask for is music when they send it to me– Scott Hanau, one of our music supervisors, is amazing this way, because he coordinates all of this. What I used to get back was the standard thing, which is here’s the scene. Here’s the cue. We’ve cranked the cue up to 11, and the scene is down to a 2, so that you can hear the music. My problem is that’s not how anyone’s going to hear this music. What I ask them is to also send me a version. Much like Scott, just do a basic shot in the dark mix here, so I generally know how this will sit. If I can’t hear a moment properly, I’ll go to the other one. I want to see how it sits.
John: Sometimes you have the luxury, just like you’re writing for an actor, you know in advance who the composers are going to be. The movies I’ve done with Danny Elfman doing the music, I have a sense of the world of his music and it’s just so helpful. I know, okay, I’m actually planning out for some space where we can get the– If I bring that in there, that’s going to be great. The opening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I knew I could really hear what the opening title sequence was going to be like, which is we’re in the factory assembling the chocolate bars and all that stuff. I could hear it even before he’d written a note of it.
Craig: That’s the joy of working with an established composer, because you know– I remember when I was reading the script for Dune, I don’t know if John Spitzer at the center or Eric Roth, but I think it was probably Denis. I think it’s when we maybe first see the worms, he wrote, in all caps, full Zimmer power. You know, okay, I know it’s full Zimmer power. It’s full Zimmer power is like [mimics].
John: You’re going to feel this in you.
Craig: It’s just like a thousand horns at the same time. When you’re starting out, and you’re talking to people that are also starting out, it’s a little tricky. You just got to vibe it out. If you have some temp pieces that are in the world, you can make a little mix tape of like, here’s the world that I’m thinking about.
John: The other thing that’s helpful, if you’re starting out and you’re making a lower budgeted film, you’ll have a conversation with your composer about like, what can we actually afford in terms of real instruments? My initial conversations with Alex Wurman were about like, well, piano, and he’s like, accordion. Hear me out because accordion can actually sound like a lot. It’s a much bigger sound than the one player would ultimately give you. It’s like, yes, you can digitally do a bunch of stuff, but we wanted some real things in there. Piano, accordion, harp actually gives you a lot of things, and then we can figure out, okay, what are the wins that are actually important and what are not important?
Craig: This is an ongoing battle. It’s been an issue also on Broadway as well where they have very strong unions that are protecting real players. The golden days of going to see John Williams and the LA Philharmonic doing the score for you and watching it live are slowly diminishing or rapidly diminishing, because you can create very accurate sounds with synthesizers and samplers. For what we do, maybe some of the bigger action cues rely on that for budget. I stay out of that discussion. I’m really just listening.
Happily, for Chernobyl and for a lot of stuff on The Last of Us, it really comes down to a person doing weird stuff in a room with Cellos. Gustavo loves a plastic tube. He loves a PVC pipe and his Ron Rocco, which is this very specific South American stringed instrument. I’m always just making sure it doesn’t sound synthy, because bad synthy sounds synthy unless that’s what you want, and then it’s great.
John: Going back to my wonderful thing in terms of when things feel artificial, you feel like there’s nothing really there. We do have a sense that there was an instrument. There’s something underneath that thing. It’s not just a waveform. It really was something that created that sound. Thanks for the question. Thank you, guys.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
Links:
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge selections! The Thin Place – “Pilot” by Katie Seward, Sunset Paycheck by Holden Potter, and Levelling Up by Sylvia-Anne Parker
- Submit to the next Three Page Challenge
- Megana Rao on Instagram and X
- Fixed-do vs. movable do solfège
- How to Tell if Something is AI-Written by Hollis Robbins
- Mark Halpin 2025 Labor Day Extravaganza
- Pageant of the Masters
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 702: Last Looks, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at all the pleasant, normal people around them and ask, what happened to the weirdos? They root out the causes of cultural stagnation, offer potential solutions, and explore the entertainment that still finds a way to be weird.
We also look at the tipping point between “wanting to write” and “actually writing,” follow up on printer prices and billboard queens, and answer listener questions on soundtracks, adapting a podcast and feeling ownership over your ideas.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we try to remember how we construct our personal narratives, and the pros and cons of remembering our past.
Our LIVE book release show will be at Dynasty Typewriter in LA on November 30th — get your tickets now!
Links:
- Scriptnotes LIVE! Book release show tickets at Dynasty Typewriter in LA
- The Uncool by Cameron Crowe
- Meet the Sisters Battling to Become L.A.’s New Billboard Queen by Mickey Rapkin for The Hollywood Reporter
- The Decline of Deviance by Adam Mastroianni
- Too Many Cooks
- Happiness (1998)
- Ken Russell
- Community tries to figure out if Nicholas Cage is good or bad
- Homecoming on Prime Video
- ChannelVue
- Servant of the Lake
- Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Jim Bond (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 11-13-25: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post What Happened To Weird? first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer and actress Nora Garrett to look at how her first screenplay, After the Hunt, took her from being un-repped to working with director Luca Guadagnino.
They discuss her path from acting to writing, how her script went from being rejected by screenplay competitions to landing on Julia Roberts’ desk, and how she constructed her complex power dynamics on the the page. They also answer listener questions on building tension and knowing when to tell rather than show.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Nora talk day jobs and how to balance focusing on your craft wi– shhh! The boss is coming, get back to work.
Links:
- Read along with our excerpts from After the Hunt
- Nora Garrett
- After the Hunt
- Episode 667 – The One with Justin Kuritzkes
- The Rehearsal
- Flesh World by Jessica DeFino
- Big Reader Bad Grades
- BenDeLaCreme on Good One
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post After the Hunt first appeared on John August.
John and Craig invite Aline Brosh McKenna back to celebrate the third anniversary of Scriptnotes. It’s a jam-packed, glass-and-a-half of wine, listener-favorite episode.
They look at ways to breathe new life into scenes and characters that aren’t working, box office journalism and how Hollywood is always dying, scene geography, and the role of emotional intelligence (or EQ) in a writer’s career.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we have original outtakes from the episode where we look at what changed in the world in our first three years on air, make predictions for what’s to come, re-invent Spanx, and of course talk about D&D.
Links:
- Going to the 2025 Austin Film Festival? Submit to our LIVE Three Page Challenge here!
- The original episode 161 and its transcript
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram and IMDb
- Why do people throw tomatoes? from How Stuff Works
- The Knowledge
- Global Entry
- From 2014: Movies Have Worst Summer Since 1997 by Brooks Barnes
- Mimeographs on Wikipedia and eBay
- Maguire Watch on Everything is Terrible!
- Filthy Scriptnotes episodes The Angeles Crest Fiasco and The Dirty Show
- The Honourable Woman
- This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs by C. W. Neill
- N3TWORK
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Robert Hutchison (send us yours!)
- This episode was originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post A Cheap Cut of Meat Soaked in Butter (Encore) first appeared on John August.
John and Craig wonder, how has TV changed in the last ten years? They compare what’s better and worse, the tradeoffs between quality and quantity, how curation is changing, the pros and cons of shorter seasons, and what this all means for writers and viewers.
We also look forward to our time at the Austin Film Festival, offer paths for writers to keep their health insurance, follow up on Three Page Challenge selections that actually got made, and answer listener questions on adapting a screenplay into an audio drama and payment for work after a script is turned in.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig looks at what makes a damn fine cup of coffee.
Links:
- Going to the Austin Film Festival this year? Submit for our LIVE Three Page Challenge here!
- Entertainment Community Fund Services & Programs
- Signed editions of the Scriptnotes Book
- Destination: Earth audio drama
- Weekend Read
- Episode 163: Ghost
- WGA Showrunner Training Program
- Phantom Ink
- The House of Tesla
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Is TV Better Now? first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
JOHN AUGUST: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
CRAIG MAZIN: My name’s Craig Mazin.
JOHN: This is Episode 703 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is mostly just trying to make Drew laugh.
[laughter]
DREW: So far, so good.
JOHN: Today on the show, how do you write a period film that feels accurate but also compelling? Most importantly, not a history lesson. We’ve got at least 10 tips for timely tales, plus some related listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, we are officially in the season of the witch. Let’s do our ranking of iconic witches. I have 13 witches-
DREW: Oh, my God.
JOHN: -from literature and film, and we will put them in the proper order-
CRAIG: We’ll rank them.
JOHN: -from God-tier to D-level.
CRAIG: You do have the witch from Into the Woods in there, I see.
JOHN: We could add the witch from Into the Woods.
CRAIG: Now, we have 14 witches.
JOHN: Yes, absolutely. It’s the Last Midnight.
CRAIG: [singing] It’s the last midnight
It’s the–
JOHN: So good. Although it’s a news to get through before we get started on things. Highland Pro, the app that my company makes, we turn on family sharing, which we didn’t have on before. Now, if you have it, anyone in your family–
CRAIG: Why were you guys anti-family?
JOHN: We were not anti-family at all. Basically, they hide it in the interface for you to do it. It’s like, “Oh, can we turn on the switch?” It’s irreversible once you turn it on, but we did it, and it worked.
CRAIG: I guess that makes sense, right? Once you start sharing with somebody, you can’t take it away. That’s a nice thing. I love family sharing.
JOHN: It’s not only witch season, but it’s also back-to-school season. I want to talk through, almost all the screenwriting apps have a version of student licenses or discounted student licenses. For Highland Pro, that’s free. If you’re a student at a university program, you get Highland Pro for free. You just need to send in an email from your email address at your university, so .edu if you’re in the US, but other countries, it’s going to be other things. Photo or student ID. Fade In has a similar thing. Student pricing is $60. Final Draft has student pricing at $90. WriterDuet has 50% off. $90 student pricing.
CRAIG: Oh, Final Draft. Jesus, Final Draft. WTF is wrong with them? By the way, it’s not worth $90. That software is worth $3. They’re charging students a discounted rate of $90, so what are they charging poor everyone else that’s getting fleeced?
JOHN: I think the most recent price I saw on there was $199.
CRAIG: Oh my God.
JOHN: I think it’s more than that. I think it might be.
CRAIG: No. Why are people still paying for this?
JOHN: Buy now. Let’s see what it says.
CRAIG: Do not buy now. Buy never.
JOHN: Final draft 13 personal license is $174.99. That’s 30% off the regular list price, which is $249.99.
CRAIG: $249?
JOHN: That’s a lot of money.
CRAIG: There are people who have paid $250 for Final Draft.
JOHN: All this is a roundabout way to say if you are a student in a university program, you should use one of these discounted systems for getting it. Highland is free, so you might as well try that.
CRAIG: Exactly. Highland’s free. The maximum you should pay is $60 for Fade In. If you’re a student, you don’t need Fade In either. Honestly, Highland, done, or WriterDuet is also like–
JOHN: 50% off.
CRAIG: Yes. What does that cost?
JOHN: Based on what level you’re getting at, there’s a free version of it.
CRAIG: There’s a free version.
JOHN: My daughter was in a screenwriting program last year. She was screenwriting class last year. They were doing it in Google Docs, and it’s just so painful. Just don’t do it in Google Docs.
CRAIG: Why? What? [chuckles]
JOHN: It’s so painful. Yes.
CRAIG: What? I can’t with higher education.
JOHN: Yes. Any of these, Highland, it’s just like, “Oh, it’s a really good program.” Yes, your father spent 10 years making this program. I’m glad that you enjoy it.
CRAIG: Right. Instead, use Google Docs. Was it the school asking them to do Google Docs, or was it the kids who prefer using Google Docs?
JOHN: Basically, I think the professor didn’t require them to use anything other than this. He said it was fine to use Google Docs.
CRAIG: No, it’s not.
JOHN: No, it’s not, because you and I both had to write– Have you ever written in Word? Your early scripts, did you write this in Word? Or you always were in Final Draft or Screenwriter?
CRAIG: My very, very first couple of scripts were in probably WordPerfect.
JOHN: Yes. It is possible to write in a normal Word processor. It’s just ugly.
CRAIG: It just sucks and laborious. [crosstalk] Yes.
JOHN: [unintelligible 00:04:03] was written in Word, and that was the last one I wrote in.
CRAIG: Honestly, we got a lot of problems in this country, not going to lie. Maybe number one problem is screenwriting professors telling students to work in Google Docs. That may be the worst thing America’s dealing with right now.
JOHN: Indeed. Absolutely. Rise of Fascism and–
CRAIG: Rise of Fascism is like fourth. Because I got other issues, like Final Draft pricing. [chuckles]
JOHN: Last bit of news. Once again, I am looking for somebody. A recurring segment on this podcast has ended up being that I need somebody to do a thing, so I asked our listenership, and someone in our listenership is like, “Oh, I’m exactly the person you need to do this thing.” Here’s what I’m looking for right now. We’re doing a new project, and we need a designer for it. We’ll have a link in the show notes with exactly what the whole description is and what the project is. Essentially, we’re looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end experience. Do you know what front-end experience means?
CRAIG: I assume that means the part that people engage with. That part.
JOHN: If it were a web app, then it’s the parts you click on and do that stuff rather than the background server stuff. This is a web thing. Mostly, we’re going to be looking at the other stuff that you’ve built. You need to have a portfolio that shows cool stuff that you’ve built, and most crucially, just taste. Taste is so fundamental here because you can learn anything else, but you can’t learn taste.
CRAIG: That’s called talent.
JOHN: Yes.
CRAIG: I have taste. I just don’t know how to code or design. I feel like I’m well on my way to getting this job. I just got to quickly learn what UX means, and I’m there.
JOHN: 100%. If you are at or above Craig’s level, you
should click through the link and see the kinds of things we’re looking for.
CRAIG: If you see the word UX and you pronounce it Ux, you’re disqualified. This is not your job.
JOHN: No, it’s not. We are looking for an individual, not looking for a company. This is for one project, and so we’ll probably be on an hourly or daily, or weekly rate, but we’d love to find somebody to bring into the team, work full-time. We are based here in Los Angeles. That’s great if we find a person in Los Angeles, but we can also work with someone remote. If you are that person who is the designer who has done this kind of thing, take a look through the notes. You’ll find the show notes, and maybe this is the job–
CRAIG: You know what? I’m going to take myself out of contention. It’s unfair.
JOHN: You’re busy, Craig. Realistically, how are we going to squeeze this on top of everything else?
CRAIG: I play a little bit less Skyrim on my Steam Deck, and I blew through Oblivion. Oblivion, by the way, I’ve forgotten. Kind of a short game, weirdly.
JOHN: Wait, I’m confusing them. Skyrim–
CRAIG: Elder Scrolls IV is Oblivion. Elder Scrolls V is Skyrim.
JOHN: Oh, that’s right, because you went back and played an earlier version. Is it up rest? Does it look decent?
CRAIG: Oblivion, they did a whole remaster because Oblivion came out in 2003, ’02, or something like that. It was like a company came and made it look decent, and it was fun to play again. Skyrim looks really good still.
JOHN: Skyrim is so long. I never finished Skyrim.
CRAIG: Oh, I did, and I’m going to finish it again.
JOHN: I restarted it a couple of times, yes.
CRAIG: I’m going to finish it.
JOHN: I can’t believe you were able to play it on a Steam Deck. It just looks amazing on a Steam Deck. It seems like it’s maybe too small. I’ll put it on my Steam Deck because I’ve not been playing anything other than Vertigo on my Steam Deck
CRAIG: It’s eight inches away from your eyes. It looks great. Anyway, Oblivion, like–
JOHN: Do you put on your readers when you play it?
CRAIG: No.
JOHN: Okay.
CRAIG: That’s actually an interesting thing. I realize I don’t. I guess because I can hold it–
JOHN: Yes, just at the right distance.
CRAIG: Just at the right distance.
JOHN: Is your posture up, or are you looking down?
CRAIG: No, it’s up. The only thing is sometimes my elbows get squeezy because my elbows are bent. I get that my ring finger and pinky finger start to go to sleep. That’s an indication that maybe I should put the Steam Deck down. You know what? I don’t, because winners don’t quit.
JOHN: At whatever point we actually get VR glasses that are really, really good, my God, that’s going to be an incredible game.
CRAIG: They’re getting there.
JOHN: They’re fatiguing to wear after a certain point.
CRAIG: The Quest is a heavy object. I really love that one game that I played on it, the one from the room people from– It was fantastic. I just wait for that one awesome game and then–
JOHN: With some follow-up. Two episodes ago, we talked about connections and the importance of connections. Jay wrote in with some connected and related business. I’m friendly with one of the top screenwriters in town, super A-list, multiple franchises, but our connection is through our daughters, who’ve become best friends at school.
CRAIG: Wait, so let’s see. This is obviously talking about me.
JOHN: Yes.
CRAIG: Let’s see. Who’s my–? Okay, go on.
JOHN: We know each other from play dates and school functions, where we have a fun, casual relationship. Our conversations are about the general state of the industry or upcoming school events. I’ve always felt like I’m not in his league, so I’ve religiously avoided pitching myself or bothering him to read my stuff. Last week, his production company independently read one of my samples. Through my reps, not through him, I now have a general with one of his execs. He and I haven’t spoken about it at all. Should I, A, text him beforehand like, “Hey, funny thing, I’m meeting with your people this week.”
B, mention our connection in the meeting. “Oh, I’m actually friends with your boss. Our daughters go to the same school.”
Or C, say nothing and let it play out, risking embarrassing confrontation later of, “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you were coming in for a meeting?” How do you navigate connection that’s personal first, professional by accident?
CRAIG: I love the amount of neurosis that’s pouring off of this. It’s very familiar to me.
JOHN: It’s a very Los Angeles thing, too. I completely picture they were at the same exhausting kids’ birthday parties every weekend.
CRAIG: Sure, over and over and over. I love this. I would go with A.
JOHN: I would go with A, also.
CRAIG: Hard recommend on A.
JOHN: Let’s remind everybody. That is where you text him ahead of time. Say, “Oh, hey, I’m meeting with your people.” Otherwise, it’s just weird if they told you afterwards. Then if you’re in a meeting, you say, “Oh, I’m actually friends with–” then that puts everybody in a weird spot.
CRAIG: Yes. That’s an easy one. If it were me, meaning if I were this fancy guy and I got a text that said, “Hey, it’s blah, blah, I see you all the time, funny thing, I’m having a general meeting, LOL.” I would be like, “Oh, great.” Then I would probably say to that person, “Hey, I want to be in that meeting,” or “Can I read what he wrote,” or be nice to him, or nothing. What I would never do is not say anything, and then just be like, “The hell?”
JOHN: There’s a small number of people this top screenwriter could be, because I’m trying to think of a screenwriter rather than a TV writer. This person has their own development staff and own people.
CRAIG: There’s a lot of them.
JOHN: There’s a few, but it’s 10 or fewer.
CRAIG: A-list screenwriter, franchises, and so forth.
JOHN: We can think of a couple. I would say, Jay, it’s fine, it’s good. You’re overthinking and overstressing it.
CRAIG: Well, yes, but also, that is precisely the kind of overthinking and overstressing that is fairly normal for us. I just don’t want Jay to feel like there’s something wrong with him. There is something wrong with him, but it’s the same thing that’s wrong with most of us.
JOHN: The extra context we got on this is like, this isn’t Jay’s first job. He gets hired for things.
CRAIG: This is an easy one, A. What I do appreciate is that Jay is being considerate of this other person. Because, look, it’s a tough business. Everyone’s scrambling. There have been times where I’ve been aware that I’m talking to somebody who’s maybe in scramble mode, and I can feel that they want to maybe push on it a little bit. I get it completely. It is at least a good thing to be aware that it’s a little awkward and uncomfortable. The fact that this screenwriter has a company that could hire people for things, yes, totally reasonable.
JOHN: Yes. Another bit of connections follow-up. Jamie in Australia writes, “John and Craig mentioned the awkward situations that happen when a distant acquaintance approaches you, especially when you’re with someone who’s not in the business, or you feel the pressure to say, ‘Melissa, this is blah-de-blah,’ but you’re blanking on them.”
CRAIG: [chuckles] My nightmare.
JOHN: In those cases, proactively introduce the person you’re with. “This is my wife, Melissa.” In about 30% of the cases, your acquaintance will say, “Hi, Melissa,” and leave it at that, and you’re back to square one. For most people, this gives them a face-saving opportunity to say, “Hi, Melissa, I’m Kim. I was Craig’s junior assistant producer on his first feature.”
CRAIG: Okay, but here’s the thing. I’m aware of that.
JOHN: I do it. I did it this weekend.
CRAIG: Yes, and I do that, too. The problem is, no one on the other end is going to be like, “Oh, let me make everything easy for you. I’m Kim.” They don’t do that. They’re like, “Oh, hey,” and they also know what you’re doing. They all know it. There’s a moment where it’s like, okay, I’m going to get an A if I say, “Melissa, this is John. He’s blah-de-blah.” I’m going to get an D if I’m like, “This is my wife, Melissa.” Then she’s like, “Oh, hi,” and that person’s like, “Oh, hi,” I guess he doesn’t know my name.
JOHN: A small variation, which is worth trying, which I think I did this weekend as well, it’s like, “Oh, hey, do you know Mike, my husband? Have you met my husband, Mike?” Then it gives Mike an opening for saying, “Okay, I’m Mike.” Then the other person says–
CRAIG: Okay, let me give you a nightmare scenario. “Okay, have you met my husband, Mike?” “Yes. We all went out to dinner three months ago. We sat next to each other and talked at length.”
JOHN: Absolutely true. Absolutely true.
CRAIG: I feel like there are trade-offs. As you get older, your back hurts, your eyes start to– you get closer to death, sweet, beautiful death. You also get to just be excused a little bit for some of this stuff. Like, “Hey, you know what? I’m older. What are you going to do? I’m losing it.” I’m not. It’s just that I know a lot of people. I know too many people. As time goes by, you keep meeting people. It’s the worst. What are you going to do? I think people are like, “Oh, the old guy, he just can’t remember anyone’s names.”
JOHN: I’m sure I’ve said this on podcasts multiple times, but if I’m going to something like a premiere, not of my movie, but other people’s movies, I will, on a drive over, remind myself in the car, who are the people I’m likely to bump into just so they’re a little bit closer to my name.
CRAIG: You can panic about not knowing their names earlier?
JOHN: Or I can Google them.
CRAIG: Oh, God.
JOHN: I Google them in the car.
CRAIG: Lady whose name I don’t know.
JOHN: No, like a producer of this thing.
CRAIG: Oh, like you remember any details about them? Congratulations. I run into people–
JOHN: No, I remember they produced this thing, but I cannot think of their name. Fair.
CRAIG: That’s a reasonable one. It’s the ones that come up– I got to tell you, it happened to me the other day where I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Then I couldn’t remember who it was, and I should have. I should have, but I didn’t. You know what? I shouldn’t have. It was years ago.
JOHN: It was years ago.
CRAIG: It was years ago, one time years ago, but you know, I felt bad.
JOHN: Yes. There’s also people who I’ve only met on Zoom. I pitched something at eight different places on Zoom.
CRAIG: That one, I think, everybody. Because I just go, “Oh my gosh.” They make the little square in the air, like, “I only know you from this,” as if their face were not enough. Still, any excuse–
JOHN: I’ve only stared in depth at your face for hours on end.
CRAIG: I never saw it bobbing around on the top of the rest of this crap. Now, I know, “Oh, it’s you.” Listen, there’s no–
JOHN: There’s no easy way.
CRAIG: Does this happen to you a lot? You’re young.
DREW: It does a little bit. Although I’ve been the person who’s called out someone for not remembering.
CRAIG: What’s wrong with you?
DREW: Because it was egregious.
CRAIG: What do you mean [unintelligible 00:15:32]? [chuckles]
DREW: It was a person that I had done multiple friend dates with kind of thing, and seen shows with over years. Then I went to a birthday party and they acted like– It was like, “Oh, I have no idea who you are.” I called them out. I bought them a beer afterwards because I felt a little bit bad.
JOHN: There’s also people who have genuine face blindness. Brad Pitt cannot recognize anybody.
CRAIG: By the way, I’m going to start claiming I have face blindness. What a great excuse. Here’s my thing, Drew. What are you going to get out of that?
DREW: In the moment, nothing. It was just pure anger. Hurt, I guess. I’m not saying I was right. I’m not saying you should do that at all. I was in the wrong. This is 10 years ago.
CRAIG: Wait, 10 years ago?
JOHN: Maybe a little less.
CRAIG: How old are you? 12?
DREW: Yes. Yes, I was.
CRAIG: This is like, what, in a sixth-grade birthday party?
DREW: Yes. I was like, we’ve been to school together. We were in fourth grade together all year long.
CRAIG: “Yes, I’m Michael G. I thought you were Michael F.” My thing is, what do you get out of– They don’t know your name. You’re not going to change that. I would just have fun with it. I would laugh about it. You know what I would say, honestly? I would say this is amazing because I’m the one who’s usually doing this. I’m so happy that you’re the one doing it, so I get to enjoy this. Five minutes from now, I’m going to be you with somebody else.
JOHN: Craig, I don’t think we talked about you show up at a party, a friend’s party, and there’s a person there who is actually just a villain. They have done you wrong. They’re apparently friends with the host of the party. Those awkward situations. I’ve had a couple of those. I was like, “Good Lord.” I can generally just avoid the person.
CRAIG: Yes. Do you end up talking to that person?
JOHN: Sometimes it’s at a dinner party or something. It’s like, “Ugh.”
CRAIG: How does your friend not know you have some secret villains?
JOHN: Yes, just people in the industry who have just done me wrong. There’s one director who is just– He’s the worst. Everyone loves him, but he’s just the worst.
CRAIG: Oh, that’s fascinating. I wonder who that– It’s not Steven Spielberg.
JOHN: No. Steven’s great.
CRAIG: How great would it be if you were like, “Oh, man, you nailed it”?
JOHN: Nailed it. We’ve talked about one director who we wanted to have on the show, but he has a villainous history with another one of our friends. That kind of situation does come up. If those two people were at the same event, what do you do?
CRAIG: I don’t really have villains, I don’t think.
JOHN: I have very few, so that was a surprise to this person.
CRAIG: I can think of, honestly, one guy that I don’t want to be at a dinner party with, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening anytime soon anyway. Doesn’t seem like a dinner party guy, to be honest with you.
JOHN: All right, let’s get to our main topic today, which is writing period stuff. We talk on the show a lot about world-building. If you’re building a futuristic world, you have to be very specific about what’s in that world, what’s different, how not to overbuild, and all these things. What we haven’t discussed a lot, as I was looking through our catalog here, are actual period films and period series, things that are set in recognizable moments of the past.
CRAIG: We’re not talking about female reproductive health today?
JOHN: No.
CRAIG: I was confused. Go on.
JOHN: Yes, but I want to make sure that the stuff we’re writing is accurate, but also accessible for audiences. The tension is really between those two things often because done wrong, these can feel like history lessons, but done properly, it’s like, “Oh, this is the color and the context for the world. The history is the plate upon which you are serving the food.” Often, we can confuse the foreground and the background. As we have this conversation, it’s so easy to think like, “Oh, we’re talking about Victorian times or this.” Also, the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.
There was a thing I was writing that was in 2010s, which is like, that’s period. You have to remember what is specifically different about this. Last weekend, I went to go see a screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum. Showgirls and I have this weird history because–
CRAIG: At the Academy Museum.
JOHN: Yes. It was their summer camp. It was a so-called summer camp.
CRAIG: Okay, fair.
JOHN: Here’s the history, briefly, of my experience with Showgirls, is that script by Joe Eszterhas sold while I was in the Stark program at USC for a total of $3.5 million. One of us got a copy of the script. It’s like, “We have to have a dramatic reading of Showgirls.” We had a dramatic reading of Showgirls at my apartment. There were 10 of us, and we read through the whole thing.
CRAIG: Whole thing [unintelligible 00:19:59]
JOHN: Kind of, but it’s also just boring and bad. The movie is actually boring and bad, but also fabulous. It’s a maniacal glee, and the performances are awful, and yet it all works together until it goes just darkly off the rail and cannot be fun anymore.
CRAIG: You know what? We got to get Joe Eszterhas on this show, and I’ll tell you why.
JOHN: Please.
CRAIG: I’ve never met him, never spoken with him. He was ’90s screenwriting.
JOHN: He was the spirit of 1995.
CRAIG: He was it. Year after year, that guy was just crushing it, at least financially.
JOHN: Yes. Jagged Edge. I love Jagged Edge. I haven’t gotten to rewatch it.
CRAIG: Awesome.
JOHN: Basic instinct. Absurd, but sure. Iconic.
CRAIG: Love it. Then it started getting a little wobbly there. Also, Joe Eszterhas, pure screenwriter. Never directed, as far as I know. Did he?
JOHN: No.
CRAIG: I don’t think so. He was completely at the mercy of directors, which is why I would want to talk to him. Plus, there is that amazing thing that went down with him and Mel Gibson that people have forgotten.
JOHN: I’ve forgotten that, too.
CRAIG: Joe Eszterhas was working on a script for Mel Gibson. I don’t remember what it was. Mel Gibson, I think, has some sort of compound in Costa Rica. Joe Eszterhas was down there. Mel Gibson was apparently super off his rocker, angry. I don’t know why. Joe Eszterhas recorded some of it of Mel Gibson screaming at him, basically. The stories that must be there from Joe Eszterhas, I wonder if he would come on and just tell a story.
JOHN: In my head, I think I played with him with the Final Draft guy.
CRAIG: Oh, no.
JOHN: Yes, I’m sure he’s delightful.
CRAIG: The Final Draft guy, Rocco Three Shoes, or whatever that guy was, who we talked to. Who was that guy? [chuckles]
JOHN: I don’t remember either.
CRAIG: Quasi-mobster. [chuckles] He’s not really a mobster. He’s not a mobster, but he had that kind of vibe.
[laughter]
JOHN: We’re in business to stay in business.
CRAIG: That is such a mobster thing to say. No, what he said is, we’re not in the business of going out of business. What do you want from us? We’re not in the business of going out of business. Well, it’s not a reason to extort people. Hey, listen, what are you going to do?
JOHN: The whole reason I brought up Showgirls is watching that movie. It’s set in 1995. You’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s right. That’s what 1995 looks like.” It wasn’t trying to be a period. It literally just was that thing. One of the real advantages when we were making a story that is set in the time of motion pictures is we can go back and look like, what did it actually look like? That’s just so fantastic.
CRAIG: Yes. You can look at what it looked like. You can look at it or even look at what the glossy version of what it looked like looked like. The ’90s are amazing, because of our age. We graduate college. We come to Los Angeles. We go through this. 10 years of personal growth and relationship growth and career growth. It seems so separate to us from the ’80s. Everybody else is like, “Meh, it’s basically ’80s blobbing into another thing.” It was just sort of like ’80s plus. It is a fascinating time.
I had never thought about even the 2000s as being period until I had to write scenes in The Last of Us that are set in 2003. Suddenly, I’m like researching, what phones they used and what kind of– I couldn’t remember. Did people have widescreen TVs then, or were we still on square? What was our deal?
JOHN: We’re doing a rewatch of Community, which is a great rewatch if you haven’t seen the show. The phones in it are crazy, because iPhones show up at a certain point, but every other kind of phone you can possibly imagine. There’s sidekicks, there’s trios, a lot of flip phones, Blackberries, everything else.
CRAIG: Palm pilots, somebody has a Newton.
JOHN: Previous episodes, we’ve talked about [unintelligible 00:23:44] stuff obviously with Chernobyl, the deep dive into The Unforgiven. We had Robert Eggers on to talk about Nosferatu, which is period but also that heightened. Mike Makowsky was on to talk about Bad Education, which was ’80s. Mari Heller’s been on a couple times, and it seems like everything she’s done has been a period thing up until the last movie. She took a lot of period.
CRAIG: Yes, I think that’s right.
JOHN: Let’s talk about general goals, no matter what period you’re writing. Fundamentals, story first, history second. The historical setting is the backdrop. It’s not the protagonist.
CRAIG: Yes. There are certain cases where the nature of the story pushes the period forward dramatically because it is about living in the ’80s as opposed to a story that happens to be in the ’80s. I’m thinking of Super 8 or Boogie Nights. Those two movies were ’80s because that was so much of what the story was.
JOHN: All the same, both of those movies, if you needed to transplant them to a different decade, the central character conflicts, the thematic issues, you could find a way to do it in a different decade.
CRAIG: Always for all good drama, which is why Christopher Nolan is making The Odyssey. Always.
JOHN: Pick the scope of history you need. By that, I mean there are certain kinds of movies, it’s history with characters in it. I would say Lincoln is that, Oppenheimer is that, where the history is really foregrounded. There’s other movies where it’s a character story that is taking place in a historical world. I say Titanic is that, Almost Famous is that, where it’s just like the space around it is really, really important, but that’s not the focus of it. Even though Titanic is a real historical event, the movie isn’t about the history that was made there.
CRAIG: Right. It’s worth asking this question, does this need to be a period piece or not? The reason it’s worth asking is, because while it may afford you some interesting things to do in your script, it can be a little bit of a crutch. The first thing that somebody making a budget for that script is going to do is go, “Oh, no, it’s a period piece.” Period pieces cost more money. The end. Every single time. You’re spending more to transform what the world looks outside, even just replacing all the cars as a thing, getting the accurate clothing and the hairstyles, and all the rest.
Period pieces, in that way, can be a trap where people just go crazy with it. Like, “Oh my God, this movie’s set in the ’80s, everyone’s got crazy shoulder pads.” Well, not everybody was walking around with crazy shoulder pads in the ’80s.
JOHN: Most people’s clothes and most people’s– the stuff in people’s houses is actually from 10 years, 20 years before that. People hold onto their stuff. Really great production design, you’ll see that’s set in a period in that specific era. It’s not all new stuff of that era. It’s stuff that’s dragged along. One of the nice things about setting a movie in the present day is you get so much stuff for free. You can just go outside and aim a camera at something like, “Well, that’s 2025,” or whatever year you’re in. You get the modern buildings, you get the modern cars, you get everything else.
All that stuff which would have to be replaced if you’re doing it, say, in the ’80s. A reel showed up on Instagram yesterday that was talking about The Apprentice, the Donald Trump movie that Sebastian Stan was in. It was showing the visual effects they used to put buildings in proper context and make things look right. For an inexpensive movie, they were very, very smart about, “This building looks right, it will just replace the buildings on the side of it.”
CRAIG: Yes. The nature of a skyline is a very interesting research. People will catch you and laugh at you. If you’re making a movie that’s set in 1980s New York and the Freedom Tower is there and not the Twin Towers, people are going to laugh at you. That’s an obvious example, but it creates a lot of issues. At a minimum, just ask, at least why does this need to be set in this time period? Then if you have a great answer, terrific.
JOHN: One of the first movies I wrote, which never I made, thank God, it was a Western. It was like Aliens Out West. It was like a Western, but with an alien creature in it. Doing the research for that, I did not need to know about the 1880s on the East Coast. I just needed to know very specifically, in a Colorado mountain town, what was daily life like. That’s the right scope. I find so often when writers are approaching a period of things, I feel like, “Well, I need to know everything about everything.” It’s like, “You’re probably procrastinating and avoiding writing.”
I would say, all that said, don’t assume you know how things worked. Always stop yourself and ask the question, “Wait, is that really how it is?” Here’s some good examples of things you might not be thinking about. How are letters delivered? How did mail get from point A to point B? How do people light their homes at night? It’s so important. It’s going to be important for production, but also just for what a scene can make sense. If things are happening by candlelight, it’s just fundamentally different.
One of the projects that we’re running right now is in a medieval-y kind of world. Candlelight is tough. It’s challenging to live under candlelight. If you have two characters who are in a room by themselves and just lit by candlelight, everything else is going to darkness beyond that. That is–
CRAIG: Unless they’ve got that candle candelabra. I love a candle candelabra. There’s so many candles. Who’s lighting all those candles? What happens when they burn down?
JOHN: How much heat is that thing putting off?
CRAIG: How many candles did they have?
JOHN: Candles were so expensive. So much of a person’s daily income was spent on candles.
CRAIG: Candles. Then the candle maker, there’s probably a good word for candle maker, right?
JOHN: Candlestick maker.
CRAIG: No, that’s a candlestick. Candlestick is the thing the candle goes in.
JOHN: No, candlestick maker makes the candles.
CRAIG: No, the candlestick maker makes candlesticks.
JOHN: Oh my God. Are we going to fight on this?
CRAIG: Yes. Who’s making the candlestick then? Somebody else?
JOHN: All right. Drew is looking it up to give us the answer.
DREW: A chandler.
CRAIG: A chandler.
JOHN: A chandler.
CRAIG: Chandler makes candles. I knew there was a weird name for it. It’s like Coopers make barrels. All they did was add an H, and they were like, that’s good enough. Chandler. They should have done that with barrels.
JOHN: Chandler, yes. It was probably a hard C-H. That’s a certain one.
CRAIG: Chandler. Chandler Bing. He made candles.
JOHN: It was candles, yes.
CRAIG: Can we agree that the candlestick maker made candlesticks? Come on. It’s a weapon and clue.
JOHN: It is a weapon. That’s true. It’s a candlestick. You’re right. Okay. I will yield on this.
CRAIG: Thank you.
JOHN: What time were meals eaten, and what counted as– did they eat breakfast? How people addressed each other is important. Finding that what streets and roads actually looked like. Were they gravel streets? Gravel is actually a much more sophisticated thing than just a rut down the middle of a road. What was it like?
CRAIG: Here’s a weird one that I remember going, “Whoa, I didn’t know.” And this is why it’s great to look at photographs, because you can pull things from photographs and then go, “Wait, what is that?” and find out what its use was. In the video game LA Noire, which took place in post-war Los Angeles. We’re talking 19– I think it was like 1949 or ’50 or something like that. There was also a section before the war, where it was like the ’30s. I think in the ’30s in Los Angeles, there were no traffic lights. There was like a sign that went ka-chunk.
I was like, “What is that? That is so cool.” By the way, traffic, what a breeze. In the ’30s in LA? Whew. High wind. I love things. Those details. As you’re going through your details, there are details that it’s like, “Okay, I want to get this right. How many candles are in the room? Is anybody going to look at that scene and go, ‘Whoa’?” No. If there’s some interesting whoa, throw it in.
JOHN: If it creates an interesting moment, yes, for sure.
CRAIG: The characters don’t have to say, whoa, nor would they. You might go, “Oh,” that’s the kind of thing that makes you go, “I really am in a different time.”
JOHN: Here’s the challenge is you need to do the research so you have the answers to those kinds of questions that could be relevant and not shove so many of them in that it feels like, “Okay, you’re just showing off here.”
CRAIG: You don’t want it ever to feel like the movie stopped to go. Now, everyone in the mall will dance to Madonna because it’s the ’80s.
JOHN: LOL.
CRAIG: Their hair.
JOHN: Haha.
CRAIG: Well, I guess Wonder Woman did that. Wonder Woman did do that, but you shouldn’t. In general, it’s not a great idea because it takes people out of the story, and it turns it into more of just a look at us.
JOHN: Other things to keep in mind is a people’s sense of
time. Do they have clocks? Do they have watches? Even if they had those, I’ll see if I can find the blog post for this, but the idea of time as a resource that you control is actually relatively recent. People didn’t talk about saving time because you couldn’t do anything with time. Basically, you did your work, you tended the field and stuff, but there wasn’t any sense of like, “Oh, I need to save some time here. What was time?”
Time, as a thing you can sort of touch or control, is a pretty recent invention. It’s really kind of an industrial-age invention.
CRAIG: Yes, I mean, time management, definitely. The other thing to think about is how you prompted this when you talked about time. I think about just night in general, and the world at night. Depending on what time your period is, how dark is it out at night? Because boy–
JOHN: It’s probably really dark.
CRAIG: Your movie that took place in Colorado in the 1800s at night, it’s pitch black. If it’s overcast and the moon is dark–
JOHN: I feel like so often, writers never have been outdoors at true night, like out of the city at night, and you’re like, “Oh, man, it’s dark.”
CRAIG: It is dark, but also you do have the sky itself if it is not overcast. You have a setting– You don’t see this very often in Westerns, and I think it’s in part because it would look fake. At night, clear sky, back before light pollution, the world’s a planetarium. You can see stars ahead of you. It’s gorgeous. I only know that because I’ve been to Alaska, which is as close as we can get to that. It’s insane. You just don’t see that. I think I know because it just would look fake.
JOHN: Money. What was the money? Do people have currency? How are they doing this? How do they handle money? It’s always so weird to me that people’s entire life savings were in their pockets or in a box.
CRAIG: Of course, buried under a floorboard.
JOHN: How much things cost relative to wages? You don’t understand that people used to spend half their money on food.
CRAIG: Also, Louis CK. Are we allowed to cite Louis CK? He had this great bit about how in Westerns, somebody would come in to a saloon and ask for food for their horse, and a beer, a meal, a shave, a room, and then you would just hand a guy one coin. The guy’s like, “You got it.” The guy would bite the coin, and then you’re like, “Done.” What is that coin? Also, he’s like, the guy never adds up all those things. He’s like, yes, you’re actually short one, or I owe you two subcoins for this.
JOHN: I’m going to clip off a piece of that coin.
CRAIG: Everybody just vaguely was like, “That’s about a coin.” Two, better.
JOHN: You’re looking at who could own property is always a question. Obviously, it was only the white man who could own property. Even in Downton Abbey, the whole premise of Downton Abbey is based on the fact that Lady Mary can’t inherit Downton Abbey because of the entail, which prohibited a daughter from inheriting it. Do people smell? People always smell.
CRAIG: Oh, the smell thing. I think about this all the time.
JOHN: In your show, right now, they’re in a civilization where they have some running water, but otherwise, they would have been smelling a lot.
CRAIG: Yes. We presume that if you’re in a civilized settlement, like, say, Jackson, not only do you have laundry, and you showed a lot of laundry and cleaning, but you’ve also probably rummaged a whole ton of deodorant. It’s not like there are stores full of it that you can go rummage through. Maybe they’ve even started to make their own. The issue is more like when you’re dealing with, say, let’s go back to your little town in Colorado in the 1800s, everybody stank. Because everybody stank, nobody stinks.
JOHN: Nobody stank. It’s not notable.
CRAIG: I think about it all the time. I also have this thing about people that start kissing as soon as they wake up.
JOHN: We’ve heard this on the podcast.
CRAIG: On my show-
JOHN: Doesn’t happen.
CRAIG: -when two people woke up and wanted to kiss, one of them said, “No, morning breath.” “I don’t care.” “I’m not–” and I see it all. Why do people do it? I understand why they want to do it, but it’s not cool. Do you just immediately start kissing your wife when you wake up?
JOHN: Me?
CRAIG: Yes.
JOHN: All the time.
CRAIG: Oh, gross.
JOHN: No, never. We’ve both got night guards in.
CRAIG: Sexy.
JOHN: Playing it against each other.
CRAIG: Melissa wears this thing to prevent snoring. It does not work that well. It’s like a hockey tooth guard. It’s massive. She’s like, [mimics heavy breathing]. Oh my God. Sexy.
JOHN: It’s good stuff. Finally, talking about language and voice. This is a thing where you can just go way out, drop the deep end. Can you define something that makes the audience believe that they are speaking properly for the space that they’re in, and yet the audience can actually understand what they’re saying? That’s where I feel like you have to be aware of what the conventions are in other film and TV that the audience have seen, so it doesn’t seem weird.
You can make a very compelling argument for the accent should act like a British person who is speaking in the 1800s should have actually had a New York accent, but we’re not going to hear it right. That’s the reality.
CRAIG: I love the use of language in The Crucible, the
Daniel Day-Lewis version. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but I assume it’s accurate. People often would say, “I were,” instead of “I was.” I were, which we never say.
JOHN: But we can understand it.
CRAIG: We can understand it. It was so specific, and it felt– I have to assume it was accurate. It was such a lovely way of placing us in a different time, but completely understandable.
JOHN: Wrap this up to say that you, as the writer, are going to be making some of these initial decisions, but there are going to be so many more people who have to weigh in on them. A director, a production designer, historians, subject experts, props, the horse person.
CRAIG: The horse person, the picture car person, everybody.
JOHN: You need to be both able to explain and defend your choices, but also be adaptable to other people, their expertise, and make sure you’re just all rowing in the same direction, which may not be your initial direction, but is a good direction.
CRAIG: I will say that costume people, props people, those two in particular, get so excited about period stuff because it’s such a way to zero in. You just have to make sure that sometimes they don’t just turn it into an ’80s museum. With Chernobyl, we were just like, “Look, accuracy, 100%. Don’t feel like we have to push anything.” Did some people in the Soviet Union in the ’80s wear very bad suits? Of course, but people wear very bad suits now. Don’t give them very bad suits. Give them suits that were correct to a normal dressed-in person then.
JOHN: Agreed. All right, let’s move on to some listener questions. The first couple of these are actually about period stuff.
CRAIG: Okay.
JOHN: Eliza writes, “I’m writing a series that follows a family over several generations from present day to the 1930s. I know the arcs for each character, but I’m struggling with how to move between decades in a way that feels elegant feels elegant and motivated by theme without being too on-the-nose. Do you have any advice for transitioning across several timelines in a television series so it feels organic and thematically connected?” This is a television series.
CRAIG: Well, I guess the first question would be, are you moving within decades within an episode, or is it episode to episode that is a different decade?
JOHN: Let’s talk about why we’re asking those questions. Because if each episode is its own decade, I think you have a lot more latitude to just, you’re just restarting things, and the audience is with you. If you have to move between decades within episodes, that’s more challenging. The thematics, I think about the overall, what is the question that you’re trying to address in this episode or in this series overall, and those aren’t necessarily the transitions I’m worried about. I think actually the visual, auditory, story transitions are really what you need to focus on because if it’s– The bad example is I open a door, and then I open the door in the earlier period as we’re moving back and forth. Those things, the audience can understand what you’re doing.
CRAIG: If you’re inside of an episode and you’re going between decades, it’s the same game you play if you’re not moving between decades. The game is, what would make this interesting from here to here? There’s certain versions where you cut to black, start playing, fade up on a song from the 1960s, fade up, you’re in the 1960s. There’s the visual version where there’s a 2025 bus that’s– you’re looking at it as it pulls forward and stops, and then you cut around to the side and starts pulling away. There’s a billboard for cigarettes on the side of the bus, and you look around, oh my God, we’re in a different time. Play the games. Just play the games.
JOHN: See what feels right and natural. Since you’re saying it’s a family over several generations, you’re probably going to see young and old versions of the same characters, and that can work, but can also be really challenging. Just be mindful of, we’re seeing two characters who are roughly in the same space, but you think they’re going to be different actors. Just be mindful of what we’re actually seeing on screen, because if you have the 30-year-old and the 40-year-old version of a character, that’s a hard thing to distinguish.
CRAIG: That’s just clothes. If they are two different actors, then you can use objects. One actor takes his watch off, it’s all scuffed and scratched, and then the next shot is somebody putting that watch on, it’s brand new, and it’s like, okay, it’s him. It’s just from 30 years ago or something. Use props. Use wipes. Natural wipes, not Star Wars wipes. Use music. Music is a big one.
JOHN: Music helps a lot. Makes you feel like you’re in a
consistent, intentional place, and you’re moving from one thing to the next.
CRAIG: That actually ties back into something interesting about what we said earlier. Music is one of those areas where, if you are using a song to signify a time change, you actually have to use an iconic song. It doesn’t have to be the most overplayed song ever, but it needs to immediately go, “I’m from this time.” Not, “What decade was that from?” Because there are songs where you’re like, “I’m not really sure what decade that’s from.”
JOHN: Absolutely. There’s a lot of early rock and roll that could be from any of those.
CRAIG: It could be from anywhere.
JOHN: Nick has a question about period dialogue. “It seems like most films default to Shakespeare lite when it comes to dialogue for anything set before 1900. If John and Craig were doing something set in the past, like about a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, how realistic would they get in using the language of the actual time? How do you strike a balance between accuracy and specificity to the era while still making the dialogue understandable to the audience?” What Nick’s describing is we default to an RRP, received pronunciation, for a lot of historical things.
CRAIG: Ish.
JOHN: Ish, yes.
CRAIG: He said before 1900. I’m thinking, no. Westerns mostly take place in the late 1800s, and people aren’t talking like Shakespeare.
JOHN: We’ve established a Southern Western sound for the West, and if you’re in that general space, you’re okay. To a specific example of a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, you would probably want to have one voice that sounds like the Roman. Assuming everyone’s speaking the same language, we think it’s a reasonable choice. One voice for the Romans, and I think we have as an audience an expectation that they’re going to speak in a– that Rome is England, and so therefore, in our minds, it’s England. Therefore, the higher status people are going to speak more what we associate with a higher status British person, and lower class people will speak in lower class accents.
CRAIG: Because the English language is stratified by class in the UK version, we do tend to use RP to mean powerful, wealthy, educated, and then your East London to be rabble. At times, it borders on offensive. For instance, especially if you grew up in East London, where a lot of cool people live. Lord of the Rings, which I love, has this thing where the orcs are all cockney, and it’s insane. That’s what?
JOHN: Dwarves are either Scottish or Irish.
CRAIG: Dwarves are Scottish. The hobbits are southwest England. They’re Bristol and stuff like that. Mr. Frodo. I don’t know Mr. Frodo. Also, pirates, weirdly, are all from somewhere there, like Devon. I think they’re all from Devon for some reason or something like that. I don’t quite think that’s fair. On the other hand, you are implying they’re all part of a cluster because the orcs all grow up together. It would seem bizarre if the orcs were like, “I say, I do believe there’s man flesh out there. Let us feast tonight.” The Aragorn was like, “Oy, we just got to move on.” It would be stupid.
JOHN: Again, we approach everything with a set of expectations. If you’re going to abandon those expectations, you’ve got to have a really good reason to do it. In Nick’s example, if we have the barbarians, then the barbarians probably have a German tint to their accent. They have something that they’re probably still speaking English, but they’re speaking with an accent that implies that they have a just as good space.
CRAIG: Therein also is a problem. This was something that we dealt with on Chernobyl very early on. If you speak English, asking somebody to do an accent that is outside of their accent is fine if they’re good at it. Some actors are not good at it, and what you end up with is the Boston Syndrome. The Boston Syndrome, I don’t think, has ever been overcome by any film. Even films that were written by and performed by almost exclusively people from Boston still suffer from Boston Syndrome.
Good Will Hunting has Robin Williams in it, and he does not know how to do a Boston accent, but he tries. RIP, wonderful man, great performance, horrible Boston accent. Those guys knew it, and they were like, “Eh, what are you going to do?” The Boston Syndrome is real. When you ask a group of actors to say, you’re all going to be doing English, but this is slight German. Some of them will be fine, and some of them will be horrible. Now you have the Boston Syndrome.
JOHN: It’s a danger. Last question about period stuff. This one comes from Concerned. “My screenplay takes place during the American Civil War, and while its main story doesn’t focus on slavery itself, people that are slaves are featured in the script. My question is, how should I refer to them? Enslaved person feels modern in a way that could take people out of the moment and may confuse people, but simply referring to them as slaves feels wrong. Roast the question if I’m overthinking it.”
I think there’s two things we’re getting at. You have characters in your story who are enslaved, and I think you can say enslaved as far as scene description, but they need to actually just be character characters, and the fact that they are enslaved should not be the defining aspect of their characters. The people who are referring to them in the course of the story would refer to them as slaves because they’re not going to say, you can’t use modern words for these characters who are in this world where they would say slaves.
CRAIG: This feels a little bit crazy. Whether or not there is some sort of careful language that says we no longer call enslaved people slaves, although they are, that’s what they are. It’s bad. Being a slave is a horrible situation. No one’s saying, “You’re a slave,” and therefore, ha, ha, ha. That’s what everybody called people who were enslaved, and specifically at that time, that’s what everybody called them. In fact, that is what everyone has called people who have been enslaved up until, I don’t know, maybe let’s say 10 years ago.
If you’re writing a script that takes place then, and you are– even if you’re saying just in your description enslaved persons, you’re going to look wrong. Art is not here to conform to academic standards or anything. Art is here to express life, and that is what life was.
JOHN: The term enslaved person, it makes sense for why we want to foreground the fact that these are actual people and human beings who exist independently of their current situation of being enslaved. That makes total sense. In the context of the people inside world of this movie, they’re not going to have that information. Make sure that whatever you’re doing, as the person setting this up, you are being mindful of the reason we want to think of these people as human beings and treat them with the respect that all human beings need.
CRAIG: Unless your movie is making an argument for slavery, I really don’t think this is a problem. Also, I don’t think anybody is going to see the word “enslaved person” and not think slave. Ultimately, the information is exactly the same. You do what is true to that time. Therefore, people, let’s say, in late 1910s, when World War I is going on, they might call their German neighbors Huns. What I wouldn’t do in that script is say, every time in parentheses, slanderous against or crude against German because it’s just– Put yourself in the time. Put yourself in that place. Be inside of it. Be true to it. Don’t let that other stuff-
JOHN: Your instinct to never minimize the characters who are enslaved, to have that one identity of being enslaved, is the right instinct. I just feel like you’re not going to need to use that word in your scene description, probably at all. They have names.
CRAIG: They have names. Also, they’re people. That’s how you show that they’re people. Let’s say you are like someone’s riding by on a horse. They pass a field. Slaves are working. You’re saying enslaved people are working. It takes me out of the world that I’m in because, theoretically, it’s not you saying those people are doing something. It’s the people going by who are thinking it or observing it. It still has to sit within the context of those people.
JOHN: At the same time, in saying that, the sense that you don’t want people to be set dressing. Making sure that if there are people working in the field, find something more interesting than just that because then they do feel like set dressing.
CRAIG: Sometimes background is set dressing. That’s fair. There’s a movie in prison, and somebody’s walking by, and there are a lot of prisoners. Now, people can say a lot of imprisoned people. Sure, but there are a lot of them, and they are set dressing because they’re filling the world out in a natural way. In fact, sometimes showing how many people are just anonymously left to wither away or suffer is in and of itself interesting. It’s not like in Schindler’s List. All those people in the camp had names or anything. No, they didn’t. They were just continuation victims.
JOHN: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Thing. For our One Cool Thing, I have two examples of some new thinking when it comes to alternative power that I thought were both really cool, and I’d never heard about them before. The first is this thing called standard thermal. Right now, we can put up a bunch of solar, and you can get really cheap electricity out of solar, which is great. It’s the cheapest way you can get power for things. The challenge is when you have all that power, you can store it in batteries for a while. If you’re in a place where you need power other times of the year or you need heat other times of the year, what do you do with that extra capacity that you have?
This place called Standard Thermal, their thing is they use extra capacity to basically just generate heat, and they pump it into the dirt, which sounds like it would not work very well, but apparently, you can just store a bunch of heat in dirt. During summer months, you make a bunch of hot dirt, and then you use that hot dirt to create heat for the winter months.
CRAIG: Dirt just stays hot?
JOHN: Yes. You basically pile up, and you make these big dirt piles.
CRAIG: The outside parts of the dirt are insulating the inside parts of the dirt?
JOHN: Yes. Then you basically just pump the heat out of there to use as heating in buildings for the winter months.
CRAIG: How do you pump heat out of dirt?
JOHN: You’re running water or coolant, or you’re basically running–
CRAIG: Coils of water through it.
JOHN: Yes.
CRAIG: It doesn’t lose the heat over time, or just heat
loses it slowly.
JOHN: It holds enough onto it. Again, they’ve just built some test projects there in Oklahoma. What’s smart about it is, it’s just so cheap. It’s a cheap and very-
CRAIG: It’s dirt cheap.
JOHN: It’s literally dirt cheap.
CRAIG: I can’t believe I made Drew laugh.
[laughter]
JOHN: What I like about it is it’s just engineering, and you don’t have to invent anything new. You could do it on a site, and you’re not trying to pump stuff. You’re not trying to move electricity all around the world.
CRAIG: You don’t need rare earth materials to make fancy batteries or anything like that. You just–
JOHN: Battery technology has gotten really good. For when you need power at night, batteries are fantastic. When you need power in February and there’s not enough sun, this seems like a really good way of generating at least heat, which is some of what you need in a lot of places.
CRAIG: That makes all sense.
JOHN: The second energy thing, which I thought was cool, is this company called Pantalasa. I’m going to show you the picture to correct you, so you can see it. It are these nodes that float in the ocean. They look like these spheres with long tails. They basically just bob up and down in the waves. In bobbing them down constantly, they’re just constantly generating power.
CRAIG: Oh, that’s really interesting.
JOHN: Isn’t that so clever?
CRAIG: It’s basically just some electromagnet in there that’s moving up and down.
JOHN: Yes. Actually, what it’s doing is water gets pulled up, and then it gets shot out. It’s spinning these turbines.
CRAIG: Spinning a little flywheel or something.
JOHN: The free float, in fact, generates a ton of power.
CRAIG: Then there’s a battery inside that’s getting–
JOHN: The question is, it’s really easy to generate power on these things, but how do you get the power off of those things? One of the ways they could do it is use the power of electricity to create hydrogen. Then every so often, you send a boat through to pick up the hydrogen.
CRAIG: That’s a little explosive.
JOHN: Yes, but liquid hydrogen, they’ve actually done enough stuff figuring out how to handle that more safely. The other potentially really good use is maybe you don’t need to get power.
CRAIG: How do you get liquid hydrogen, though? You have to really reduce the temperature dramatically.
JOHN: I’m saying liquid hydrogen. I think it’s just compressed hydrogen. I don’t know.
CRAIG: That’s explosive.
JOHN: There’s ways to do it because hydrogen adds an alternative fuel power. It’s the thing that we’re doing more.
CRAIG: I love the idea of that wave motion.
JOHN: The other thing which is potentially smart for it is maybe you don’t actually need to get the power off that. Maybe you can just use that to do power, where you can just use it on the site. You can use it for direct carbon capture. You actually are just pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and converting it that way, or you could use it for long-term computing capacity because basically, you could compute on these things and then just satellites or whatever and beam it to other places.
CRAIG: You could surround an oil rig with these, and then you could use it to pump more oil. No?
JOHN: No.
CRAIG: Okay. Just you know, it’s just brainstorming.
JOHN: Right now, we don’t have good ways. I don’t have wireless. I don’t have electricity to transmit any power, but we can transmit data. If you could do a lot of compute-intensive stuff on one of these things, great.
CRAIG: We know this, that there is a massive amount of energy created by the moon because the moon moves the water around. If we could just start harnessing that, wow. That’s just wonderful. Big wave-capturing spinning wheels. It’s going to screw up some beaches and stuff. Who cares? Just the tide coming in and out, water flowing. I don’t know. It just feels like you’d be able to do it.
JOHN: The other thing I saw recently was the proposal for not a thing we were ready to build yet. Basically, you can just take a silicon that’s the size of a cafeteria tray. One side is just basically the silicon is used as a solar cell. The back side is just used as computer processing. You can just stick them in space, and they actually just float around and do useful, valuable things.
CRAIG: That’s nice. Maybe help us with generating everything through AI. Thank God.
JOHN: Thank God. You have an electric thing here, too. Talk about this.
CRAIG: I do have an electric thing here. I’m not a huge car guy, but I do get excited when they start to make electric cars really cool. We have a gazillion uncool electric cars out there, which is fine. They’re doing great. Baidu is making $20,000 a second. Tesla is making plenty that just sit there and do nothing because nobody wants them anymore, lol. Audi has a concept car. A lot of times, these concept cars are like, “We’re never making this.” They’re making this. It’s called Concept C. It is an all-electric roadster.
JOHN: It’s a roadster, I was going to say.
CRAIG: With a hard convertible top that looks like it folds in and retracts. It is so cool-looking.
JOHN: I would say it’s sexy, but it looks uncomfortable to me.
CRAIG: There’s no back seat or anything. I think it’s probably very comfortable for the person driving and the person right next to that person. There’s no space for anybody else. It looks so cool. It looks like an actual future car. The other thing I like about it is in the interior, they’re adopting this thing that I guess Mercedes or BMW had initiated. I think this will be the trend moving forward called Shy technology. The idea of shy technology is, no, we’re not going to put some massive screen in the middle of the dashboard and go, “Look, it’s our technology.” We just blend it in nicely. It’s muted, and it’s a screen. It’s not screaming at you. It’s not huge. There are still some physical buttons.
When my younger daughter and I went to go buy her her first car, one of her must-haves physically, manipulable air vents. She’s like, “I don’t want one of these cars where I have to go into menus to move air vents around. I just want to be able to grab a thing and move it to get the air on me or off of me.”
JOHN: I understand that tone.
CRAIG: That’s a good example where I think actually our hands work better than technology. I don’t need technology to tell me where the air goes. Anyway, this car looks fantastic. I do have one other bonus, one cool.
JOHN: Oh my gosh. This is a rare treat. Coming with not one but two.
CRAIG: Our friend, Derek Hass, has a show called Countdown on Amazon.
JOHN: Derek Hass, who is responsible for the Chicago universe.
CRAIG: Every week, we watch it together. Melissa and I and Derek and Christy watch together in my house and have a blast. So much fun. The season is almost over. This comes out on Tuesday. Last episode is Wednesday. The specific one cool thing is that Countdown within its season, and I believe it’s 13 episodes, does something that I don’t recall another show like this ever doing. Structurally, it innovates something that I actually think is genius. I wonder if it will catch on. Other people will notice what it did. I think it’s a very smart thing. I won’t spoil it. I’ll spoil it off the air for you guys, but I won’t spoil it here for our viewers.
JOHN: People should check out Countdown on Amazon Prime Video. We’re supposed to just say Prime Video rather than Amazon Prime Video, but I always say Amazon.
CRAIG: We’re saying Amazon. We’re not even saying Prime Video. It’s Amazon.
JOHN: We’re saying Amazon now.
CRAIG: It’s Amazon. What are they going to do? Take away my Prime?
JOHN: That is our program for this week. Script notice is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Whit Morless. If you do an outro, you can send us a link to Ask@johnaugust.com.
CRAIG: It’s done by program.
JOHN: I know. I didn’t hear our program.
CRAIG: I was shocked. Keep going.
JOHN: Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. Craig, I’m sorry we’re not using the drinkwear today for this episode.
CRAIG: I have a lovely glass here.
JOHN: You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all the premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have a cool thing, I think we’re going to try in the next couple of weeks for our premium subscribers. Stay put. You’re going to get a little advanced sneak preview of a new thing we’re going to try.
You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Witches. A reminder, if you are the designer, who I should be hiring on for this project, please click through the link to look at that. If you’re a student who is at a university right now and wants to try Highland for free, just go to “apps” and click on Highland. You’ll find all the student licensing information there, or just install Highland and click on the student license button. That would also work. That works. Craig, thanks for a fun show
CRAIG: Thank you for a fun program. All right.
[music]
JOHN: Okay, Season of the Witch, we are going to talk through iconic witches, and we’re going to rank them in [unintelligible 01:03:51] here. You can get [unintelligible 01:03:52] tier A, B, C, or D.
CRAIG: We call that S tier.
JOHN: S tier.
CRAIG: S tier.
JOHN: Wow. S tier. What does S mean for you? Superior?
CRAIG: Yes. That’s just straight from video game.
JOHN: Oh, yes. 100% S tier. All right. You had proposed that we needed to add on a witch who was not originally on my list.
CRAIG: Yes. Of course. Well, it’s Meryl Streep. How can you not?
JOHN: Give us the case for her and where you want to put her in.
CRAIG: Well, I don’t know what the other witches are, but she is a tragic figure who both creates the problem of everything and also leads to the solution of everything.
JOHN: She’s the witch from Into the Woods. Does she have a name independent of that? Just a witch? Witch.
CRAIG: She has this gorgeous relationship with her daughter, who turns out to be Rapunzel. You feel so much for her. She sings two of the best songs in the show.
JOHN: Witch, iconic. Iconic is the-
CRAIG: If you are a musical fan, she is the most iconic witch there is.
JOHN: No, that absolutely cannot be true.
CRAIG: I disagree with you.
JOHN: We’re going to go through the list.
CRAIG: I know because you’re going to say Elphaba.
JOHN: I’m going to say Elphaba. We’ll get to Elphaba in a
second. You put her S tier. I would put her-
CRAIG: She’s S tier. Elphaba is A-tier because of Defying Gravity and for that reason only.
JOHN: You’re putting her S tier. I’m going to put the witch from Into the Woods at B-tier just because she was not even– We thought about this for a while, and she didn’t even enter my consciousness. All right, let’s go to the ones who are already on the list. Bellatrix Lestrange, played by Helena Bonham Carter in the Harry Potter franchise.
CRAIG: I don’t even think of her as a witch because that movie is full of women who have magic who are all theoretically witches.
JOHN: Is she C or D?
CRAIG: She’s D because she doesn’t really impact the story that much, and I don’t think of her specifically as a witch.
JOHN: Cersei.
CRAIG: Oh, wow. Cersei is a sorceress, but we’ll go ahead. Cersei is so classic and is about to have a moment, I assume, once Odyssey comes along. I’m going to go with A-tier.
JOHN: Oh, okay. That’s higher than I would guess. Cersei, she polymorphs people a lot.
CRAIG: She’s classic. She turns you into a pig.
JOHN: She does turn you into a pig. There’s a book about her that people love.
CRAIG: I don’t even know that book.
JOHN: Oh, it’s about Cersei. It’s a big seller. I’ll go A. I think she’s the oldest in terms of-
CRAIG: Exactly. She’s the orig.
JOHN: All right. Now we’re at Elphaba. I cannot believe you think she’s anything less than S tier.
CRAIG: She’s A-tier because she sings a great song, but she’s derived from an S-tier witch.
JOHN: Okay. Let’s combine them as one character. I think-
CRAIG: Whoa. Hold on. You can’t.
JOHN: Wicked Witch. Oh, so we can’t?
CRAIG: No, no, no.
JOHN: Elphaba does not exist without the Wicked Witch of the West.
CRAIG: Exactly. This is my point. Elphaba is a modern reimagining of the Wicked Witch of the West, but the Wicked Witch of the West from the bound books and most importantly, the movie, that’s S-tier.
JOHN: Wicked Witch of the West is clearly S tier, but I think they are– I can’t separate the two.
CRAIG: I’m giving Elphaba a gift by making her A-tier because she is derivative of it.
JOHN: We are in agreement that Wicked Witch of the West is S-tier because it’s who you picture when you think of a witch.
CRAIG: That is the witch.
JOHN: You’re putting Elphaba at A-tier. I guess I can see that if we had Elphaba without everything else around her, great. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter.
CRAIG: Again, it’s tough, I guess technically a witch. If we consider her a witch, then she’s– I’m going to say B-tier because I don’t think her magic is necessarily the thing that makes her awesome.
JOHN: The Sanderson sisters, otherwise the Hocus Pocus cutout.
CRAIG: Oh, well, I think they’re C-tier. I think they’re just a little cartoon for me.
JOHN: They’re not who I go to first for this. Drew, you’re welcome to chime in here if we’re getting something [crosstalk].
DREW: I just feel like I’m going to get so much mail on that one. With Hocus Pocus, I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus.
JOHN: I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus. It was around.
CRAIG: I remember it coming out, and I remember it not being particularly successful. Then I think over time, it became a cult thing, and it’s super campy. They should have had it in summer camp. It’s fun for people to dress up because it’s a great dress up. They were parodies of witches. They weren’t real witches to me.
JOHN: I do feel like C is too low for somebody who– It’s a seminal and important witch image for a generation.
CRAIG: I’m not in that generation.
JOHN: I think they might be B for our safety.
CRAIG: I’m excited for the hate mail.
JOHN: Maleficent.
CRAIG: Oh, well.
JOHN: Technically, Maleficent is an evil fairy, but she’s
coded as a witch.
CRAIG: Maleficent isn’t a great character, to be honest with you, from the original Snow White story. Angelina Jolie’s version, they try to zhuzh it up. I’ll give her a B just because, in her old lady image, handing out the apple, she’s spectacular.
JOHN: Oh, no, you’re conflating her with the witch. Maleficent is the villain in Sleeping Beauty. She has the crow. She has this.
CRAIG: Right. Maleficent. Sleeping Beauty isn’t a great story. Just the original.
JOHN: The challenge of it, you have your protagonist who is knocked out.
CRAIG: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about her.
JOHN: C or D.
CRAIG: I’m going to put her in D, actually. Not a big fan.
JOHN: Morgan le Fay.
CRAIG: Well, I can’t put her into S because I put Cersei up there for historical versions. I’m going to say Morgan le Fay as a horror witch goes into A. She’s pretty amazing. If you’re a King Arthur fan, which I am.
JOHN: Again, an horror witch in the sense of she’s establishing a lot of templates for what we’ll explain this. Here, I originally had Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My daughter was like, “Oh, no, it has to be Selena Gomez’s character
from Wizards of Waverly Place. I’m going to put them in as a group component of–
CRAIG: Nickelodeon/Disney Teen Witches?
JOHN: Absolutely. A young TV show teen witch.
CRAIG: We might as well throw in Bewitched.
JOHN: Bewitched separately.
CRAIG: Okay. B, they’re fun, but not great for me.
JOHN: They are a teenager plus.
CRAIG: Yes.
JOHN: All right. Next up, we have Samantha Stevens, the protagonist of Bewitched.
CRAIG: I love Bewitched.
JOHN: I love Bewitched, too. Dora, come on. Paul Lind, oh my God, his uncle.
CRAIG: Paul Lind anything. [chuckles] I love her. Also, I love the sitcomy vibe as opposed to the adult sitcomy vibe. There was an interesting proto-feminism thing going on there.
JOHN: There really is. Also, just the sanitizing of witches. They’re like, “Oh, they made a show about a witch,” but this is in a conservative time.
CRAIG: Yes, but happily before Satanic Panic hit in the 80s. I’m going to say A.
JOHN: I think it’s fair.
CRAIG: I think she’s A.
JOHN: I think she did some good stuff here.
CRAIG: Yes.
JOHN: Next, we have Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch of the Marvel Universe.
CRAIG: Not a witch. Just can move stuff around with red.
JOHN: It’s interesting because if you look at her role in the Marvel Universe, particularly in WandaVision and more so in– particularly in WandaVision, they really were trying to pull the– to emphasize the witch aspects of it.
CRAIG: Agatha is a witch. I think of The Scarlet Witch as
not a witch, but a woman who can move stuff around using her red power. She’s incredibly powerful. If we were going on power alone, she’s S.
JOHN: She’s not doing a lot of witch stuff. That’s the thing, whereas as opposed to Agatha is doing witch stuff.
CRAIG: I’m going to say C.
JOHN: I think C feels fair for this.
CRAIG: Do you have the witches from Macbeth in here?
JOHN: I don’t have the witches from Macbeth. Okay.
CRAIG: Those three witches over a bubbling cauldron. Bubble toil and trouble.
JOHN: I like that for them. They’re iconic in the sense of the image. They are a coven. They are doing that [crosstalk] stuff. They have no real power. They’re just foretelling things.
CRAIG: Yes, but they’re pretty witchy. They’ve got a cauldron. Just the iconography of the cauldron alone. Just witches stirring a brew in a cauldron, there’s no-
JOHN: Baba Yaga, I think, exists independently of that. It may be an older story.
CRAIG: Baba Yaga also is incredible. Kind of a witch but not really. Do we have the witch from Hansel and Gretel?
JOHN: We don’t have the witch.
CRAIG: That’s S+++. To me, that’s the ultimate witch.
JOHN: She lives in a candy house.
CRAIG: No, she builds a candy house to lure them and then shoves them in an oven and eats them. S+.
JOHN: It’s a good fairytale witch. Can they compete with Wendy the Good Little Witch?
CRAIG: I love Wendy the Good Little Witch. I loved Harvey Comics. First of all, I love that Harvey Comics was called Harvey Comics. They didn’t even try. There’s Marvel, there’s DC, Harvey. Just some guy. “Harvey, what should we call this? Me, call it after me.”
JOHN: There’s a great movie to be made about either Harvey Comics or a fictional version of Harvey Comics. They’re desperately trying to compete against–
CRAIG: They had great stuff. They had Richie Rich, which I loved. They had Casper the Friendly Ghost, and then Casper Sidekick.
JOHN: Wendy the Good Little Witch.
CRAIG: Wendy was adorable. A. She was good, and she was legitimately a witch.
JOHN: I have no sense of what her actual abilities or powers were. They were just–
CRAIG: Same, but you know what? The word witch is in her name, and she actually was a witch. She wasn’t like Scarlet Witch, where she’s just like, “Oh, it’s a fun name.”
JOHN: I remember our last two on the official list. We have the White Witch from the Narnia movies.
CRAIG: Oh, I always think of her as the Snow Queen. Was she called the White Witch?
JOHN: She’s both.
CRAIG: She was fantastic. I would not know what Turkish delight is if not for her.
JOHN: I know about it.
CRAIG: I’ve had Turkish delight. It’s fine. I don’t quite know if it’s something I would sell my family out for. Edmund, you little bastard. I just love that in that version, CS Lewis was like, “Okay, so this is Jesus, and this is Satan. Oh, this is Judas. Now, what should be the 30 pieces of silver? Turkish delight.” That’s awesome. He made it candy. She’s great. She’s an A.
JOHN: I think she’s an A. She’s identified as a witch, but we don’t see her doing–
CRAIG: She petrifies.
JOHN: She petrifies. That’s her big skill, and she actually clearly has world-shaking power, which is great.
CRAIG: Yes, and she’s Satan.
JOHN: Let’s wrap it up with Willow Rosenberg from Puffy the Vampire Slayer.
CRAIG: This is a huge blind spot for me.
JOHN: Oh, yes. I’ve seen every bit of it. I will say Willow is iconic in the sense of she enters as a nerd who then gets into witchcraft just to help out, and then that pulls her into the dark side. It’s metaphors of addiction. Then she has a witchy lesbian lover. Fantastic stuff throughout. I think she is genuinely iconic in her overall play.
CRAIG: This is what I know that people love the Buffyverse. I’m going to admit something. I don’t know any of it. Then there’s so much because there’s Buffy and there’s Angel. I got to tell you, the only times I interact with it, people that make puzzles really dig Buffy. Sometimes datasets will happen where there’s a puzzle, and you’re trying to figure out how do these things go together. It’s like, well, there’s a willow tree, and then there’s an angel heart. Like, “Wait, all these are names from the Bu–” I’ve picked up stuff from that, but I feel bad.
JOHN: I’m putting Willow in A safely. The reason she’s not S-tier is that she’s still a relatable human. The young woman that we’re rooting for. She’s not just an iconic witch at all times. Our S-tiers are the Wicked Witch of the West.
CRAIG: I think so.
JOHN: You say–
CRAIG: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth.
JOHN: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth. Then did we put–
CRAIG: I put the Hansel and Gretel witch up there.
JOHN: Hansel and Gretel witch. Again, they’re iconic. They’re Halloween witches, all of them.
CRAIG: Exactly. All three of them look like Halloween witches to me in my mind.
JOHN: Good. Useful. We’ll put a little graphic up there for people to enjoy.
CRAIG: Now the emails come.
JOHN: Now the emails come from our premium members.
CRAIG: Could you not mention the–
JOHN: Because we didn’t think about it.
CRAIG: Because we didn’t think about it. What do you want from us?
JOHN: Craig and Drew, thank you for figuring out which witch is which on our program.
CRAIG: On our program.
The post Episode 703: Getting Period Right, Transcript first appeared on John August.
Over the last six months, we’ve discussed microdramas (aka verticals) several times on Scriptnotes. For readers who don’t know, microdramas are a format originating in Asia in which a filmed narrative is broken into very short episodes intended to be watched on your phone. They’re often called verticals because they’re shot to be watched on a phone held vertically.
Typically, the first few episodes are free, and then each subsequent episode requires an in-app purchase. The overwhelming majority of microdramas are romances, often feeling like a heightened soap opera.
They’ve recently hit American shores, with U.S. productions shooting in Los Angeles, largely using non-union crews. They have provided work for underemployed actors and crew members — particularly recent film school graduates — and have some experienced producers kicking the tires.
Here’s an example from the ReelShort series The Hidden Billionaire in First Class.
Note that the WGA contract does cover this type of work. Guild writers should not be working on these productions unless they’re under a Guild contract.
We asked listeners who have written on these productions to share their experiences. Several wrote in. Here are two examples.
Risky Business writes:
I spent six months writing for Reelshorts. As a writer, it was terrible.
The first 10 chapters were pored over with repeated rewrites until all the joy was taken out of them, then pretty much they didn’t care. The rest of the story had little oversight as they didn’t expect people to watch.
The CEO repeatedly criticized the writers in company wide messages, while giving 100% of the credit for successes to the editors.
All while paying $22 an hour, with ‘no work’ orders between feedback cycles, and a constant “your contract can be cancelled at any time” hanging over your head, and expectation that you’d be immediately available the second they had feedback, which sometimes took over a week to receive. It ended up being less than minimum wage to basically hold all the blame for a possible failure poured on you from the entire company.
Creative decisions were entirely made by algorithms based on what was selling. The whole prediction model that hollywood is always trying to master contracted by the short production schedule.
I have not had the pleasure of joining any union, but the success of reelshorts definitely scares me. If the model succeeds, AI will definitely be writing the scripts, and the CEO can have his dream of never having to rely on a writer’s creativity again
Another listener wrote in with their experience:
In episode 693, Risky Business shared about his negative experience writing for verticals. I recently started as a screenwriter for one of the larger vertical drama companies as well, and I wanted to offer my perspective since I’ve had a more positive experience.
My salary is about $1540 a week–about $40/hr–with benefits. My lawyer also negotiated that my agreement be non-exclusive, so I am free to keep developing and writing non-vertical projects. Since I’m staffed, I still get paid when I’m waiting for feedback.
For sure, figuring out the soapy, melodramatic tone and structure of verticals has been a tough nut to crack. Even though there’s some room for innovation and creativity, at their core verticals are reverse-engineered around data-driven formulas. It’s kind of like doing a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle. It can be fun and even playful, but it’s a very different process from anything else I’ve done.
Because writing verticals often feels more like solving a puzzle than writing from scratch, I usually have a lot of creative energy left over to keep working on my own projects. I’m also able to write remotely outside LA, which has been a godsend for family reasons.
As a non-WGA writer, I’d love to see verticals get WGA coverage. But at this point, especially with the current state of the industry, I’m grateful for a screenwriting gig that pays the bills while leaving space for my own stuff.
To clarify, verticals already do have WGA coverage. WGA writers shouldn’t be writing on them, just as they shouldn’t be writing any film and television that’s produced without a Guild contract.
The post Writing for microdramas, aka verticals first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss short films: what makes a great short, when should you make one, and what should you realistically expect out of it? We also update our predictions on whether the career of “screenwriter” can survive potential global catastrophes.
We then answer listener questions on staff writer wages and using URLs in a script.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig talk intermissions and why more movies should have them.
Links:
- Remembering Sundance Institute Founder, Robert Redford
- John’s post on Robert Redford
- Digital Dungeons and Dragons Die
- Tally to vote for Scriptnotes Live Shows
- Scriptnotes Episode 334, Worst Case Scenarios, Transcript
- Maccy App
- DEVO Documentary on Netflix
- Megana Rao on Instagram and X
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Luke Davis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Short Films and Existential Threats first appeared on John August.
Robert Redford built a remarkable career as an actor and a director, but most industry folk would agree his greatest achievement was creating the Sundance Institute. That’s the organization he co-founded in 1981 which runs the annual Sundance Film Festival. It’s no hyperbole to say that Sundance transformed the American independent film landscape, bringing attention and prestige to films (and filmmakers) that might otherwise go unnoticed.
But while the festival is the public face of Sundance, I believe the less-seen work of the Sundance screenwriter and director labs is an equally important legacy. Under the direction of Michelle Satter and her team, the labs bring together seasoned advisors with emerging filmmakers to work on their next films. I’ve had the privilege of serving as a Sundance advisor since 2000.
Pre-pandemic, the labs happened on-site at Redford’s gorgeous Sundance Resort in Utah. If Redford wasn’t off shooting something, he’d come to morning meetings, listening and offering suggestions. That’s where I met him. Given our handful of interactions, I can’t say I have any particular insight about him, but I greatly admired how he was able to build an organization that operated so well without his direct supervision. He chose great people and let them do great work. It’s a lesson more founders could learn.
I was sad to hear of Redford’s passing today, but I have no worries about its impact on the remarkable institution he envisioned. That’s a legacy to admire — not just what you accomplish in your life, but the good work that can continue long after you’re gone. May he rest in peace.
The post Robert Redford, RIP first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Liz Hannah (The Post, The Girl from Plainville) to discuss how to construct and communicate setting in a script. They talk about the balance between establishing a sense of space while avoiding the beginner’s mistake of over-blocking.
We also follow up on accountability groups, last looks, and French composers. Then, we answer listener questions on revisions and getting your Hollywood Card revoked.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Liz consider how to explain screenwriting to your kids (and others).
LINKS:
- Bob The Musical has a Director!
- Download Weekend Read on the App Store
- Oxo Carbon Steel Pan
- Dehv Candle Company
- Apply for a student license for Highland Pro!
- Interested in being our new UI/UX designer? More info here!
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Liz Hannah on Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Places, Everyone first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 701 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you leverage connections to get work and help others get work? We’ll discuss the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of getting writing jobs and really almost any kind of job. We’ll also talk about the surprisingly good news for future writers in the recently released WJ numbers.
Then we’ll answer more listener questions we didn’t get to in last week’s live show. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s continue our discussion of connections with literal connections, this being Lego. Here, we are looking at some Lego flowers. We’ve talked about Lego in a general sense over the 700 episodes of the podcast. I want to have a deep dive discussion on Lego and our philosophies regarding Lego because there’s the Lego we grew up with, and then there’s the Lego now, and how you’re treating these bricks we’re assembling.
Craig: I’m always here to discuss Lego, the plural of which is apparently Lego.
John: Which I love. Some news. The Scriptnotes book is now up on Goodreads. If you’re a person who uses Goodreads to review your books, you can mark that as a want to read and just helps people remember that, “Oh, this is a book that people want to read.” We look forward to hopefully some very positive Goodreads reviews once the book is out there in the world.
For now, a thing you can do is mark it as want to read. You can also preorder the book and send Drew the receipt. Right before we got on microphones, we were talking through a special thing we’re doing for all those people who sent us their receipts.
Drew Marquardt: We don’t have enough.
John: No, we do. We have a lot. It’s been a chore for Drew to sort them, but it’s a chore you love, right?
Drew: I love it.
Craig: Oh, yes. I can tell he loves it.
Drew: You see the twinkle in my eyes?
Craig: It’s always fun when you’re like, “But you love it, right?”
John: Don’t you just love it?
Drew: So good.
Craig: I said you love it.
Drew: I’m very excited.
Craig: Keep loving it.
John: We have a bit of follow-up here because last week was our 700th episode. It was a live show. It was so much fun to do. It was on YouTube, so thank you for everybody who participated in that. We forgot one thing from last week, which was that we actually had a thing we were supposed to do. It was something that had been set up a year in advance. Drew forgot the thing.
Craig: Oh, well, that’s all right. You’re only human.
Drew: Thank you.
Craig: You’re welcome.
John: People decided to see Drew on the livestream because everyone thought Drew was a child.
Craig: Why would they think he’s a child?
John: I don’t know.
Craig: First of all, that violates labor law.
John: Absolutely.
Drew: That feels like you guys, though.
Craig: Oh, that we would do that?
Drew: Yes.
Craig: It feels like we might. It feels like the kind of really good hypocrisy. Oh, we’re talking about the union and getting assistance paid. Now we make our seven-year-olds put this all together. We keep them in a room the way the musical Oliver! begins.
John: Yes, absolutely. It is a hard-knock life.
Craig: No, that’s Annie.
John: Oh, that’s right. I’ve confused my musicals. Well, they’re both about ragamuffin food.
Craig: Food. Glorious food.
John: I don’t know all of that.
Craig: Oh my God. We have to have an entire Oliver! podcast.
John: Right. Before we do that, we need to talk through this bit of follow-up here. Way back episode 645?
Craig: 645.
John: 645. Meredith Scardino was a guest along with Jen Statsky. We opened up an envelope that I had sent to Jen Statsky with my prediction for what was going to happen on the upcoming season of Hacks. I had written the prediction and sealed it and mailed it to her. She opened it live on recording. Meredith Scardino was like, “Well, I want to do that.” She made a prediction for what was going to happen on the 700th episode of Script Notes. Drew, will you open this and read what Meredith Scardino– this is a sealed envelope that Drew is opening.
Craig: I can confirm this. 700th show prediction, Meredith Scardino, June 1st, 2024. Over a year ago.
John: We were living in a different universe.
Craig: I hope it says something like, you both died.
Drew: “700th show prediction. One, compilation of best advice from guests,” which we kind of did.
Craig: Did we?
John: No. We brought people in for some advice.
Drew: “Two, then you go into an interview with special guest, one but not both Coen brothers.”
Craig: Wow.
John: No, we’ve not gotten the Coen brothers on this.
Craig: Oh my God, that would have been amazing. I’m not saying it would have been better than what we did, but we really should get one if not both. Did you say one but not both?
John: Yes, one but not both Coen brothers. She still think we can do it? She think we can bring the brothers back together for our podcast episode.
Craig: We’d like at least to get a Coen brother in here at some point. Oh, we could do a deep dive on a Coen brother movie.
John: Totally.
Craig: That might be fun.
John: They have one or two good movies.
Craig: They just have a few. Just a few, literally all of them. Miller’s Crossing, by the way, is one of my favorites.
John: I like Miller’s Crossing. I love some Fargo. I love–
Craig: Fargo, of course, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men. It goes on. You know Barton Fink is the one I really want to do. We’ve been talking about Barton Fink for a long time.
John: It’s a screenwriter movie.
Craig: It has that Barton Fink feeling.
John: Funny that a Barton Fink movie has Barton Fink.
Craig: Where would I find another writer? Kidding. Go to the commissary. Throw a rock, you’ll hit one. And Fink? When you throw it, throw it hard.
John: Meredith Scardino, thank you for this card. Also, your handwriting is fantastic. It almost feels like architect handwriting. It’s tidy and neat. It’s printed. It’s all uppercase.
Craig: You know what I like? It’s not gendered handwriting. I wouldn’t know if this was a man or a woman. There could theoretically be a slight serial killer aspect to this handwriting. If you look at it, the kerning is really chaotic. It’s very ordered and yet it’s also saying, I might murder.
John: The I is very close to the P.
Craig: You see what I’m saying?
John: There’s some weird spacing there.
Craig: There’s signals there. If you are close with Meredith, just keep an eye open, is really all we’re saying. Just keep one eye open.
John: She makes the both and the brothers, they’re very different Bs too. It’s like she’s just choosing–
Craig: Like there’s a lot of different people up in there.
John: She’s cutting and pasting things out from a magazine.
Craig: There’s a little bit of a ransom note.
John: I love it. Thank you very much for sending it.
Craig: Also, she has great– her cardstock here is a great imprint on it. It says–
John: It says, from the drywall experts of Scardino & Sons, established 1859s. Awesome. So fantastic. We have some more follow-up on streaming services and creator pay.
Drew: Jeffrey writes, “A couple under-the-radar platforms worth mentioning. Vimeo On Demand. Not a subscription streaming service and very few consumers know about it or use it, which is a shame because the revenue split is extremely favorable for filmmakers.
Another one is Kanopy, which is the library and university-based streaming platform. When your film is on Kanopy, the residuals are decent compared to other streaming services. Best of all, you need is a library card to use it.”
John: It’s Kanopy with a K because, of course, it’s Kanopy with a K. Vimeo On Demand I have used for things. Not for things I’ve made, but to watch other people’s things. It’s good. I’m glad Vimeo has persisted in the world of YouTube.
Craig: I go there when it’s a result. I never think about going to places. I just go where–
John: Another reason I end up on Vimeo is when people have a trailer that’s not released yet, they want me to see it. A password-protected thing.
Craig: I will see some things there. Sometimes when I’m looking at, they’ll send me, “Oh, hey, here’s a director if you want to hire them for your show.” Then they’ll send a movie that they did or another episode. They’ll put it on Vimeo.
John: Exactly.
Craig: It’s password-protected.
John: It’s good stuff. Last bit of follow-up here from Dan who’s asking, “In regards to renting a movie on Apple TV or Prime, does one service provide higher residual payments or are they both the same?” They’re essentially the same. I think because it’s based on the actual price they’re charging, I think it does not matter.
Craig: The price that they charge is relevant, but the formula that we use is applied across all of the companies because it is a collective bargaining agreement term.
John: If you choose to pay $4.99 versus $3.99, that’s technically a little bit more. Also, just thank you for actually doing that and not pirating it.
Craig: That’s the most important thing. Don’t feel like you need to shop around for the highest price.
John: No. Not at all. Please don’t. Continuing the discussion of writers and money, last week, the Writers Guild sent out the Screen Compensation Guide, which was synthesizing data from 800 screen deals, feature deals, for high-budget features, which is high-budget features or anything with a budget of $5 billion or more, that was made during the term of the 2023 MBA.
We negotiated this new contract, and there were 800 screen deals made since that time. They looked through all the deals, and this is how you get a bird’s-eye view of what writers are actually being paid for the work that they’re doing. Craig, can you remind us of some of the terms we’re going to hear here? Talk to us about scale and what does scale mean for feature writers? How important is scale for feature writers?
Craig: Scale is the minimum amount that a WGA writer can be paid under a WGA agreement. Typically, we don’t see a ton of it in features. Scale is the rule of the day in television because so much of television compensation is moved over into producing numbers and things like that. For feature writing, you’re paid entirely as a writer, typically.
The lowest you’ll usually see is scale plus 10, so the company agrees to add 10% on so that you’re not losing money to your agent and going below that. Scale for original scripts is probably something like $130,000 now or something like that.
John: It’s over $100,000, so it depends on whether there’s an attribute or outline involved.
Craig: Generally speaking, if you’re going to be hired to do something as a screenwriter, you’re probably looking at six figures. Low six figures, at least to start, but not below scale.
John: As you and I, and this predates Script Notes, as we were going around meeting with studio bosses saying, “You need to really look at how you’re paying feature writers to make sure that you’re paying them better,” one of the things we were talking about is, it’s not just that you’re being paid a certain amount for this draft, but if you’re only being paid for one step, that is a crisis.
That was a real problem that we were seeing was that writers are being paid X dollars for one draft and there was no guarantee of a second draft. Therefore, they were being held hostage to these situations. As we talk about one-step deals, we would often describe that it’s an issue if they’re paying you or me for a one-step deal as higher-paid writers, but it’s really debilitating to younger, newer, lower-income writers.
Craig: The part of the problem was that studio executives were used to paying big writers, A-list writers, a lot of money, and not worrying about steps. If you hire somebody to fix a movie, “It’s a rewrite, fix this.” “Okay, well, it’s going to cost you $1 million.” You’re going to get a draft and be like, “Hey, well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let me fix that,” or, “First, I could use some work. Okay, let me fix that. You paid me $1 million.”
They get used to that. They get used to not worrying about the paperwork of like, “Oh, sorry, the amount of yogurt you put in your cup went over the medium size. Now you have to pay the large.” Nobody likes to deal with it. The problem is, when you’re paying people a little bit, if you make them do more than one step, they are effectively getting shoved under scale.
All the way back in 2004, the last time that they were silly enough to put my dumb ass on a negotiating committee, what I asked was that, if a writer was being paid less than twice scale, they should be guaranteed two steps. In this way, the writer gets a chance to get the studio notes, get paid to write something else officially. The producer doesn’t have quite as much anxiety about that first draft and quite as much meddling to do. That request went nowhere until 2023.
John: In the 2023 MBA negotiations, that’s the thing we actually won. Future writers earning less than 200% of scale, you’re guaranteed a second step. That was designed so that it’s helping the writers who are most hurt by one-step deals.
Craig: It protects, in a way, the studio. This is why I never understood why the studios, why it took them 20 years and a strike to agree to this, it doesn’t cost them anymore. Okay, I pay you $200,000 for one step, or I pay you $200,000 for two steps. You see what I mean? Anyway, I hope that that has made life a little bit better and has retrained the studios a bit to see that two steps are helpful.
John: Anecdotally, based on what you were experiencing in these 10 years leading up to this, how many writers did you feel were encountering one-step deals in the future land? What percentage?
Craig: I would have guessed it would have been over 50. I would have said 60%.
John: That’s my guess too. At least over half, maybe two thirds. The good news is one-step deals now account for only 3 in 10.
Craig: That is definitely a reduction. It has to be.
John: It has to be. The better news is, when they actually break it down by the amount that the writers are earning, the median pay for one-step deals went from $250,000 to $450,000 over the course of this term.
Craig: What that tells us is they’re still reserving the one-steps for the people who are being paid a lot. They’re being paid enough that, really, doing two steps or even three isn’t going to push them below scale. In short, we protected scale. That was what this was always about. Sounds like it’s working great.
John: Looking through the numbers, at least one screenwriter got $2.25 million for a one-step deal. Good for them.
Craig: I get that. That’s fine.
John: The other factors in here, the other–
Craig: I wanted 2.7, but they only gave me 2.25.
John: 2.25.
Craig: 2.25. It’s a nice number. I like 2.25. You could tell that that’s a negotiated number. Nobody wants to be there.
John: No. It was between 2 and 2.25.
Craig: They were like, “Fine.”
John: Members with two-plus credits got the biggest bump of $100,000 for the last three years. Even new members with no credits were receiving $25,000 more than they were in 2021. It’s progress in future pay across. That matches anecdotally with what I’ve been hearing from people.
Craig: This was always a quality-of-life thing. The question that I am interested in is, again, it would be anecdotally, survey-style, do writers feel like they are doing more or less “free work”? I would hope that it would be a little bit yes. I mean, a little bit, yes, I’m doing less free work because, in my mind, this term was never going to increase the earnings that much. It was really quality of life.
John: That’s the hope, too. One way, if you are a future writer who is encountering these things and want to help figure out what it looks like on the ground, is that they’ve started sending out the survey leading into the negotiation cycle. It’s a good chance to fill out that form and let us know really where you’re at and what the biggest issues are for you. If there’s a thing that we’re not catching here, this is the time to speak up.
All right. Let’s get to our main topic here, which is connections, which is not just a fantastic New York Times game. Do you still play Connections?
Craig: Of course, played it this morning.
Drew: It’s great.
John: I’m trying to remember, today’s Connections involved– what was the purple category of this one? It was–
Craig: Well, there was Blank Land.
John: Blank Land, yes.
Craig: There were things with the antennae.
John: Like in Teletubbies.
Craig: There were Blank Doodle.
John: Yes, Blank Doodle, I think, was the-
Craig: It was Blank Doodle was the thing.
John: -the purple.
Craig: Oh, yes, and the other things were Blenders.
John: Dipsy Doodle. I didn’t know what Dipsy Doodle was.
Craig: Oh, you didn’t know about Dipsy Doodle?
John: What’s Dipsy Doodle?
Craig: The first thing I thought when I saw Dipsy Doodle, I knew that she was trying to fool us into heading towards the Teletubbies. Nice try, Wyna.
John: Wouldn’t happen.
Craig: Nope, not today.
John: I love Wyna Liu.
Craig: What’s that?
John: Wyna Liu.
Craig: Wyna Liu. By the way, I don’t even know what Wyna Liu looks like. I’m looking up Wyna Liu right now.
John: There’s an interview with her, and she’s a woman in her 30s, maybe early 40s. She seems to love what she’s doing.
Craig: She’s got a great name. Wyna is a– oh, look how happy she is.
John: Doesn’t she look happy?
Craig: Oh my God, she looks thrilled. She looks thrilled.
John: I also love the discussion around Connections. People will have whole TikToks on, let’s break down the most insane connections of them all, and they’ll talk to you.
Craig: Somebody said to me early on, I won’t say who it was. They were like, “It’s good, but there’s no way Wyna Liu can keep this up day after day.” I was like, “I have faith,” and she has.
John: It’s justified. That’s Connections the game, which is fantastic and we all love, but let’s talk about connections in real life. Connections between people, and especially people who need a thing from each other, and how we handle those connections in our town, and how we use connections, but even just saying use connections feels gross.
Craig: It’s a better word than exploit. How do you exploit your connections?
John: The good use of connections implies a reciprocity, a generosity, a good-for-everyone quality to it.
Craig: I think sometimes we feel like we are begging or that we’re charity cases. In fact, if the connection works, it’s not because the person that you begged took pity upon you. It’s because they thought that your thing is good and it will reflect well upon them. That’s really what that is. Otherwise, sometimes your connections, “Oh, my mom is best friends with your mom.” That’s going to get you a 20-minute chit-chat. Is it going to change your life or career? No.
John: No. Craig, you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I can tell.
Craig: Love LinkedIn.
John: How many connections do you have on LinkedIn?
Craig: I have zero connections on LinkedIn, John.
John: As do I. We’re not talking about LinkedIn connections or any of that performative networking. I think we’re talking about the casual stuff that does happen all the time, and this is the thing I’m sure happens with you, is that a friend asks you to put in a good word on a show that they’re trying to step on. That’s a valid, accepted part of the practice.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: Let’s talk about the specific kinds of connections, when it’s okay to reach out, when you should step back a little bit. You were talking about our moms, our friends kind of thing. Weak connections are things like acquaintances, your dad’s friend’s friend, the guy you went to high school with but you don’t keep up with. If you’re reaching out to them specifically for this thing but you wouldn’t talk to them otherwise, that’s a weak connection.
Craig: It’s important to be mindful if you are the one that is being connected to, that the person that is asking you to talk or consult or advice, you’re their thing. You are probably the sum total, in many cases, of their connection to Hollywood. There’s an importance that they’re putting on this that you’re not. At least be mindful of it. I try and be as respectful as I can and I try to remember what it was like when I was grasping for crumbs, little hints of threads of things. Everything is high stakes, everything.
John: Let’s talk about strong connections. Close friends, collaborators, your writing partners, all that kind of stuff. Employers, supervisors, classmates in a program is good. Drew and I both went through the Stark program. The real advantage of going through a film school is you have 25 connections who actually you can get information from, they can help you out and stuff, and that is super invaluable. Those are the people who you should feel like you can count on and they can count on you. Again, it’s that reciprocity thing feels so crucial.
I think another aspect of reaching out to somebody is intent. Are you trying to exchange information? Are you trying to extract something from them? Are you asking someone that will take five minutes of their time or is it a lot more than that? If you’re asking someone to read something, that’s a lot to do. If you’re asking for advice on a specific situation, that’s a thing I’m more happy to take some time to do. Tell me about being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s like, “I got a podcast. Listen to this.” Now there’ll be a book.
Craig: We have a book. Advice for people reaching out, the more specific you can be about what you want, the more likely it is that the connection will at least happen initially. The hardest ones are the, “Can I just pick your brain podcast.” You can go pick my brain for 701 hours, but when they say, “I have three questions I need to get answered somehow,” or, “I have one situation that I’m wondering if you can help me with,” then it’s practical, it’s targeted, it feels a little bit like a mission.
It’s not an open-ended quest. When it’s an open-ended quest of just like, “Hey, I just want to talk with you about–“ then we’re just going to talk. It’s not great.
Craig: An example of the former, which is the specific thing, a friend reached out to say like, “Hey, there’s a thing they’re trying to put in my contract for this deal. Can I talk to you about it?” “Yes.”
John: Oh my God, yes.
Craig: 100%. To me, that’s not even connections at that point. That’s like, okay, we’re colleagues. We’re in the same business. That’s different.
John: It’s in the category of generosity, but a thing I do, which some friends do and other colleagues do, but I don’t see people do enough and I think that people should do more is, if I see a friend written up a deadline, like they sold a show or they did a thing, I’m always right there with an email saying, congratulations. I’m making it clear that I’m rooting for that person.
Craig: You’ve never sent me that email, not once.
John: Then I’ve said something like that to you.
Craig: I don’t think you have.
John: You probably have.
Craig: I’m different, I know. You know why? Because you just take me for granted. That’s why. I’m just the guy that’s there. I get it. I know how Mike feel.
John: Actually, you had a show that you were producing that was announced in Deadline, I didn’t email you [unintelligible 00:21:54].
Craig: You didn’t. Exactly.
John: How many other people– did other people email you about it?
Craig: Yes. They texts, mostly texts.
John: Texts, yes.
Craig: I don’t expect it. I don’t expect it, and also, I never do it because I don’t read Deadline.
John: That’s good for your sanity.
Craig: I think it might be.
John: Here’s what I’ll say about the dropping the email or the text. The email is good in the sense that there’s less of a pressure to respond to a thing sometimes, or like an Instagram congratulations to somebody. It’s just reestablishing. It’s making it clear that I’m rooting for you and some good things have happened in my life because that.
Like, “Oh, this is a good chance for me to catch up with this person,” or there’s actually a project I ended up doing when I sent through the congratulatory email. The guy said right back, like, “Oh, you should do this other thing.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I should do this other thing,” and I ended up selling a project. Do those. It takes a minute to do and do it at the time.
Craig: Generally speaking, when it’s people in our business, if you’re already inside the business, I feel like you have a very specific need, want, that another person can help you with. Some friend that you and I both know called me the other day with this exact situation. “I have a problem. I think you’ve had this problem before. Let’s talk.” Those things are great. Then, of course, great job and so forth. I’m very texty about that sort of thing because I’m a teenage girl. I don’t know. Text is better.
John: Text is better for a friend or somebody if you regularly keep in touch with, or semi-regularly. For example, writer friends who I haven’t seen in six years but then I see that they sold a show.
Craig: Really?
John: I want to drop them a note.
Craig: I go text.
John: I think it was maybe I’ve actually never texted these people.
Craig: You may not even have their number. You may only have their email. That’s a different situation. Even then, I try and do the thing with text where it’s like, “Oh, can I text you via your email?” If it turns blue, just like that.
John: That works.
Craig: I always say, “This is Craig.” Never text somebody that you are not in an active conversation with.
John: If there’s not a thread back and forth.
Craig: There are a few, I have to say, that I occasionally get. It’ll happen once every two years. I’m like, “Thank you,” and I don’t know who it is because it’s a number. I’m saying this quietly like no one’s going to hear me. I can look back over six years of these. It’s too late now.
John: It’s not too late.
Craig: Can your phone do this?
John: Sorry, your name isn’t showing up.
Craig: They’re like, “Has it ever been showing up? Have you ever known who I was?” That’s what I would say. I wouldn’t. I am so against making people embarrassed for not knowing something about me. We need to have a whole podcast about how to handle the, I don’t know who you are. That’s like a whole situation. It’s a real life situation.
John: It’s in real life, for sure, too.
Craig: It’s a massive situation. It wasn’t when we started. The older you get, the more people you know.
John: There’s just more people.
Craig: It just becomes a real issue.
John: A situation that happened, we were at a restaurant way out on the west side, a place I never would have been. We’re sitting at this big table and having a good conversation. There’s a guy who’s in my eyesight who waves to me. It’s like, crap, I know I must know who that person is, but I don’t.
It was the challenge of I’m more recognizable than he is. He’s seeing me repeated in deadline stories and other things. I have no idea who he was. Fortunately, at the end, he did come over and reintroduce himself. Of course, an agent I had 15 years ago who I hadn’t seen in person in so long.
Craig: They all look the same. They wear the same clothes.
John: He did a very gracious thing. I think that’s the right approach.
Craig: He said, “Hey, it’s so and so.” There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s so much right with that. This is why it’s hard to go somewhere when your spouse, this is the case for both of us, is not in the business because they’re not going to know who the person is. When that person goes over, you are now supposed to go, “Oh, hey, Melissa, this is blah-di-di-blah.”
When I know who somebody is, I’m so proud. I’m like, trumpets, red carpet, this is so and so. Here’s what he’s done. Here’s what he did. Here’s where he came from. I’m like a Wikipedia article all of a sudden. Then the other people, I’m like, “Oh my God.”
John: Obviously, this is advice. If you’re the plus one going into one of these situations, get in there.
Craig: Get in there fast.
John: 100%. Let’s talk about other connection outreaches. Make sure to give people an out so that you’re not boxing them in. If you’re too busy, no sweat at all. Recognize when someone might be stretched thin. The last thing I’ll say is close the loop. Thank them for doing it. If there’s an update, give them the update because so often, I’ll give someone advice, I have no idea what happened. Just a follow-up email, “I just wanted to let you know this is what happened. It was great, and thank you for this.”
Craig: I can think of a couple of people that have emailed me years after I spoke with them, and did it perfectly. Reminded me of who they were. Acknowledged that I might not even remember it because it was just 30 minutes two years ago. Give me some context that might help me remember. Tell me why they’re updating me because this good thing happened. A lovely sentiment of thanks or gratitude.
John: My day is better because of it.
Craig: Then, thank you, goodbye. Perfect.
John: Perfectly done.
Craig: Perfect.
John: Wrap this up with an example of a connection that ends up paying off for everybody involved. Years ago, we were hiring a designer for the company, and I met with a bunch of people. One guy was great, but he wasn’t quite the right fit. He asked, “Hey, can I stay in touch?” I’m like, “For sure. You’re great.”
He was really good about dropping an email once a year to keeping up with where things were at. He ended up getting a job at Amazon and working on a very specific top-secret project. It was a once-a-year email and sometimes a short Zoom to catch up on stuff. We ran into a problem with our emergency pack, which is sold on Amazon, where we suddenly weren’t able to sell it because Germany was requiring this authorization. Basically, our whole account was shut down until we verified with Germany, but there were no appointments to actually do this video.
Craig: I immediately feel a pang of fear when you tell me that Germany, because of new regulations, is shutting something down. I start to panic.
John: For two months, it was this bureaucracy nightmare. Finally, I’m like, Jared works at Amazon. I don’t think he works anywhere in that department. It’s like, “Can you help?” He’s like, “Yes, I think I can help.” He was able, because he just knew people, was able to connect the things and thoughts.
I still had to do the stupid German interview, but I got it bumped up so I could, at 3:00 in the morning, talk to some German person. He made the thing happen. That’s because he was a smart person who was like, “Oh, I’m rooting for you.” He could help me out down the road.
Craig: You could make an interesting graph of how much you’re going to be helped by connections in your life. The graph will start with a line that is very low to the X-axis, and then it will not rise linearly. It will rise exponentially.
John: There’s a compounding effect to that.
Craig: The more you achieve, the closer the proximity to other people who are achieving, which means the more likely it is that you can help each other, and that grows and expands. It is very easy, I think, and reasonable to be close to the X-axis and look upwards at the people who are high on the Y-axis and go, “Well, this is unfair.” It is, but it is also just a function of reality.
I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. There’s really no way to create equity there. It’s just something that’s going to happen. At least, if you are high on the Y-axis, try to not just shut down the X-axis people completely.
John: 100%. I think I found myself doing during the WGA negotiations is we have all these big member meetings. We have them with strike captains and with members and all these forums. I wasn’t answering a lot of questions, but I was up there on the stage or I was in the audience. When people come up to the microphone, they say their name and they ask their question.
In my little notebook, I wrote down people’s names and I wrote down their question and put a star by them. That is a smart person. Sometimes afterwards, I would come up to them and thank them for asking a smart question. Just to establish a radar for, these are good people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, it’s always easy to remember the jerks and the idiots. When somebody is like, “Oh, that is a smart person who is asking a good question,” it’s helping you understand through the invisible mesh of trust and smartness that’s out there.
Craig: I try with the connection thing to also look for institutions. These are mentorships that aren’t already dealing with people that have other legs up. It’s not that I don’t talk to people who email me from Princeton because they get my name from the Princeton Alumni Guide. It’s just that I’m not as motivated. They’re Princeton. You got a lot going on. I’ve done my charitable work there.
It’s more interesting when other groups come and you have a chance to talk to people who don’t have– okay, well, that one didn’t pan out, but here’s 40 other people in the alumni handbag. I don’t know. I’d rather talk to other people. Sorry, my Princeton [unintelligible 00:31:51].
John: You’re setting some boundaries, too, which is a helpful way to–
Craig: Prioritizing.
John: Prioritizing. I think the final bit of advice we would probably both agree on is paying it forward. The degree to which you are benefiting from connections, make sure you’re creating connections with other people that can help lift them up.
Craig: Everybody who achieves a certain status in our business is going to get hit up by people. That’s inevitable. It’s not like you’re going to have any shortage of opportunity. Don’t never do it. Do it. You can’t do it all the time. You have to gatekeep somehow. You just have to because you have a job and you have a life.
The other thing is, sometimes, I remember thinking when I was starting out, this person just needs to give me 10 minutes of their life. I know that they’re wasting 10 minutes all the time. That is true. I am constantly wasting time. Also, I’m sorry, I can’t. If I just talk to people, then that’d be a rough life.
John: That’s one of the things. It’s like, I can’t have this conversation with each individual person, but I can have a conversation in aggregate among all these people.
Craig: Just listen to the 701–
John: Or buy the book.
Craig: Or buy the book. I keep forgetting we wrote a book. I wonder how I could forget that.
John: Let’s answer some new listener questions. Can we start here at the bottom of the list with Michael Neal?
Drew: Michael writes, “I had my first kid at the beginning of the year.”
John: Congratulations.
Drew: “Well, my wife had the kid. I was the cheerleader.”
Craig: Well done.
Drew: “When I watch film and TV now, I find myself having much stronger reactions to scenes, even ones I’d seen before. They don’t even have to involve kids. When I talked to my mom, she said she had to stop watching horror movies for years after I was born, and I was her second kid. After you both had your kids, was there anything that changed about your viewing habits or how you reacted to film and TV? Was there something specific that surprised you?”
John: I’m trying to think whether my viewing habits changed greatly. Obviously, at a certain point when she started watching TV shows, I was watching a bunch of inane TV shows with her. I think we talked about it on the show. I used to swear a fair amount, and it just stopped completely suddenly. It really is awkward for me to swear now.
Craig: Whoa. I started swearing more.
John: You did?
Craig: Yes, because of those effing babies. I don’t think there was anything that changed in terms of taste. My threshold for, yes, I want to see that, went way higher because I had a kid. That is a question of, would you like to not be with your baby and see this movie that, whatever? Just because people are like, “Oh, it might be–“ It just changed. It changed.
I used to see movies all the time. I would watch a lot of different shows and things, and then it just changed after that. It does change you. This is why critics are unreliable. Think about what he’s saying. It changes. As your life changes, you change, your taste changes, your ability to appreciate or not appreciate something changes. The rhetoric of, I have deemed this good or bad, just doesn’t make sense. It’s an odd thing.
John: My sensitivity towards onscreen when children are in danger probably shifted a little bit. It’s not like I was like, “Oh, I want that kid in peril.”
Craig: You used to love it.
John: I think there’s always the aspect of watching something is that you’re imagining yourself in that situation. When you have a kid, that kid is an extension of you and you’re imagining that kid being hurt. It feels like it’s a part of you.
Craig: I think maybe I probably did also empathize more with parental characters whose children were in danger. It is a different feeling. It’s a bit intellectual prior to that, and it becomes incredibly middle brain when you’ve had a kid and your limbic system is getting triggered by Liam Neeson getting a phone call and taken.
John: My eyes are on Mike. Watching the end of Toy Story 3 when the kid is going off to college, just broke him. He couldn’t even think about it without sobbing.
Craig: Interesting.
John: That was directly a factor of having a kid and not being able to imagine our daughter going to college. Then the teenage years make you really ready to leave.
Craig: Get out. It’s almost like it’s all planned. They make it so that you finally are like– although my youngest is living with us right now, which is great. She could get her own place, but you know why she’s living with us? She’s like, “It’s better here.”
John: Honestly, it’s better.
Craig: Yes, it is. It’s cool. We’re good. You’re all right. Just stop making a mess.
John: Let’s answer a question that actually ties back into our initial connections question. We have a question here from Tara Garwood, which is related to connections.
Drew: “I’m almost finished with my first screenplay, a horror comedy, which I wrote under the mentorship of two well-known Hollywood horror screenwriters. As someone living outside LA, how can I best proceed with my first screenplay and mentors who are presumably willing to help me out?”
John: Great. Tara, congrats on this project. We don’t know how you got it to these horror screenwriters, but if they’re actually working in the business, they’re great connections for you here. The real issue is, how do you let them help you in a way that they’re going to be able to help you and not be too much of a hassle to them? They can connect you to other people, including a rep, a manager, somebody else. They can just get your script in front of people, and that’s going to be the most helpful thing to you going forward.
Craig: Sounds like you know what to do. You’ve got two people. They’re your mentors. You’ve written something. Depending on how close that mentorship is, you might want to say, “Hey, I’ve written the script. I’m not going to make you read the whole thing. Unless you really want to, just read the first 10 pages. Just read the first 10. You don’t even have to respond. If you do, I’ll send the rest.”
John: Assuming they like it– I went into this question assuming that they had read the whole thing, which would be great, but if they haven’t, that’s also fine. If they can help you find other people to talk to so it’s not just them all the time, will be good. That’s why I was trying to look for a manager or just like, who else do you think I should talk to? Who else could be a good connection here because that feels useful and important?
You’re outside of LA, which is great and it’s fine, but I think you need to find some other writers, people in this space who you can talk to so it’s not just on the backs of these two mentor people because they will burn out if they’re getting an email from you every two weeks.
Craig: Yes, eventually they will burn out, no question.
John: Cool. Let’s do a question here from Reid.
Drew: “John and Craig compared being hired on a weekly project as making a corpse presentable enough for an open casket funeral.”
John: That was Craig’s.
Craig: That’s me. It’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s like that, yes.
Drew: “Well, when you’re in a situation like this or in the throes of rewriting a scene for the fifth or sixth time, how can you tell if you’re actually improving it or are you just making it different?”
John: Sometimes you’re just making it different for the sake of freshness and just dealing with people’s egos and needs and situation. You have to be honest with yourself when it’s like, this is not a better version of the scene, it’s just a different version of the scene that starts in a different place, it goes to a different place, it has different words, but hopefully it’s serving the same function.
When you’re actually trying to improve a thing, I think you need to step back and look at, what is the function this is trying to serve? Is it consistent with the tone and the voice and the spirit of the movie, and especially the section of the movie or the section of the storytelling? Is it fresher? Is it more exciting for an audience to encounter? That’s hard. We’ve talked a lot about it in comedy. Sometimes you forget that things are funny because you’re just exposed to them so many times.
Craig: I remember reading about Mozart when I was a kid and how he was able to learn some classical piece when he was seven, and then just sort of extemporaneously create seven versions of it. I just thought, “Well, what are those versions?” Well, turns out if you are a writer, you could do seven versions of something. You understand, then, what versioning is. When you’re in a situation where you’re on one of these deals, you’re usually trying to make one person happy. Sometimes that one person is happy because you’ve made somebody else happy. You’re trying to make the head of the studio happy.
They say, “What would make me happy is if this star agrees to get on the plane and fly there to do the movie. Right now, this is what he or she wants.” Great. How would this do? “Almost, but they want this or they don’t want that.” Got it. What about this version? Really, you’re not writing anything that is expressive of you. You are versioning until someone goes that because you actually don’t know. Nobody knows. You’re just trying to get people to say, “Oh, yes. Okay, that. That’s what I think this should all be.” Then it is useful because then everybody can go, “Oh, we were making Meatloaf, but you wanted Baked Alaska. Okay. Let’s realign.
John: That is the frustration is often they’ll focus on the script because that script is the thing they can control, but the issue isn’t the script at all. The issue is the actor, the director, the location-
Craig: Always.
John: -the budget, it’s all this other stuff. The problem never was the words on the page, but the words on the page are the only thing that can change. That’s what they’re focusing on. You’re getting paid, hopefully well to do impossible things and do the least damage possible while you’re doing it.
Craig: There are, I think, a lot of situations where studios like an idea that is inherent to a script, and they find an actor that means something and a director that means something who also really like the idea of that script. Everybody agrees the script could “use work,” meaning the execution of that idea isn’t thrilling to them. There be dragons because what happens then is a parade of highly paid, extremely competent writers all versioning to figure it well, is it this? Is it this?
John: The truth is there’s no one decision maker. It gets off like a consensus situation. There’s not a king to please.
Craig: There is no king to please. Everybody’s fighting with everybody over it. Everybody wants it to be something, and none of them have the ability to write two words together, not two, and there’s the problem. You go in, as we’ve talked about this before, in those situations, you are a surgeon, you are a mortician. You are also a therapist, you are a diplomat, you are a priest, confessor, you are so many things to so many different people.
It is one of the great ironies of the feature side of our business that those are some of the highest-paid people in Hollywood who are still treated like crap in their own way. It’s like, “Well, we’re not treating you like crap, we’re giving you all this money.” Also, change everything because somebody that shouldn’t have any power whatsoever doesn’t like the word blue.
John: Oh, yes. Their notes are like, “I don’t like seeing people eat on screen.” Sure. I recognize that you’re number seven on the power structure here, but also if I don’t yield on this, you’re going to dig in your heels to the other side. I’m going to need you to fight on my side for something else.
Craig: Also, I’m not going to be here in two weeks. I’m gone, right? One actor, his issue was he just didn’t like dialogue when he was standing. He wanted to be moving. Well, I’ve got a director and a producer who are like, “This is a scene where there’s nowhere to go.” I don’t know. What if? Now, this is the problem I’m trying to solve. This is not a writing problem.
John: No.
Craig: It’s really not. Now it’s just this weird puzzle of like, oh, well, I still want this lovely scene where Vito Corleone is talking to Michael Corleone in the garden and explaining to him the innermost truths of running a mafia family. Let’s say Al Pacino was like, “But I don’t want to sit. I want to be walking.” Marlon Brando was like, “Well, I don’t want to be walking. I want to sit.” Now I’m not doing art at all.
John: No.
Craig: Now it’s Lego.
John: It is Lego. How does it assemble properly? All right. Let’s draw one cool thing. Mine is an article by Cate Hall in her newsletter, Useful Fictions, called 50 Things I Know. There’s an industry out of this newsletter like lists of stuff I’ve learned over the course of the years. They’re skimmable, but I thought hers were really good. I’m just going to hit the first three here, Craig, and see how you respond.
She says, “You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.”
Craig: Yes, that’s a beautiful thought.
John: It’s also a good theme for a screenplay. That’s a good dramatic question.
Craig: Yes, it is. The idea of unrequited love implies an unfairness and a wound. Here’s something that changes when you’re a parent. It’s unrequited love. Their love for you is not like your love for them, nor will it ever be.
John: It’s never going to be perfectly reciprocal.
Craig: Never. You don’t really, nor should you really require it to. That’s an example where you just go, “I’m going to care about you.” There’s no quid pro quo. This is how it goes. Yes, there are people that you can do that with.
John: Second point, if you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.
Craig: Well, first of all, what is a better opinion? [laughs] I’m not sure what that means.
John: What is a better opinion? I guess you pull that apart. To me, it’s–
Craig: Maybe justified.
John: Justified opinion, yes.
Craig: Instead of just saying stuff because.
John: I feel like sometimes you have this instinct of like, “Well, I have to have an opinion on something.”
Craig: No, you don’t.
John: I don’t have an opinion. No.
Craig: I don’t know, and I’m not sure are wonderful phrases.
John: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging opinions of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good. Lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign. If you’re hearing a lot of diverging reports about a person, that’s a red flag, and that feels true to me.”
Craig: Yes, I can understand her point that people that you would want to treat well are saying, “Oh, this person’s wonderful.” Well, yes, because they’re probably wonderful to you. Then, ‘Oh, these are people for which there is no reward if you treat them well, and all of those people are saying this person’s a monster.” The agent that a big star loves but all the assistants loathe, yes, that’s going to be a person who’s probably not great.
John: Going back to connections, I got a call from a writer who was asking about an actor who I’d worked with, and I could tell him that obviously this should be on a phone call. Don’t text this. Don’t email this. I can say, I had a really good experience with them, and I know that other people have not had good experiences with them. I personally did not encounter that at all. I would say keep asking and check on people, but I also wonder if there’s just a bad mix of personalities and types.
Craig: Yes, qualifying, things like that, all the time. Absolutely. I’m very nervous about saying, “Oh, this person is “bad.” It’s best to talk about your experience with somebody. I try to lead with, I’m just one person. I do think that there are people about whom I’ve been warned who turned out to be great. Then my question is, “What’s the deal with you? You warned me about this person.” There are people who warn you, and they warn you in a careful way.
They go, look, here’s the context. The truth is all of us can be warned about. We all have something that isn’t going to work with someone else. We’re not compatible with everyone. The warning should be not something abusive, horrible, racist, whatever. It’s just these are the ins and outs of this person. If you don’t mind a person like this, great.
John: Those are 3 of the 50 recommendations on Cate Hall’s Useful Fictions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Craig, what do you have for us?
Craig: Well, it’s fun. We were talking about connections today. My one cool thing is a new game, Pips. Love it. Have you been playing it?
John: I tried the demo and did not click for me. Tell me what’s working for you about Pips in your brain.
Craig: First, let me admire the puzzle that I did this morning. Pips, it’s pretty simple. It’s a dominoes-style game. Unlike dominoes, where every square of a domino has to match up to another one, what they do is they give you a little grid, a little snaky grid, in which to place the collection of dominoes they’ve given you for that puzzle. They’ve created regions inside of the grid that have constrictions. For instance, in today’s, there was an area where the numbers in this one region had to equal 10. There’s another area where a plus sign region had to all have the same number.
I played it on hard because I got to be honest with you, it’s a pretty easy game. It’s a lovely little easy logic puzzle. When it clicks, there’s a very odd satisfaction to it. What I also like is, as much as I love words, there’s a lot of word-letter-based stuff here, connections, spelling bee, Wordle. I do the Sudoku occasionally. Sudoku is just Sudoku. It’s so number, crunchy, simple in its own way. It’s just straight dead logic. This at least requires me to move shapes around, which is not my strong suit. I like the spatial aspect. It’s fun and it’s quick.
John: Their games are quick. It’s interesting because The New York Times games were originally just digital versions of things that could be done on paper and pencil. This is an example of the thing that couldn’t happen on paper and pencil. Wordle couldn’t happen on paper and pencil.
Craig: No. Wordle could not happen on paper and pencil. Now, this is my chance to decry the removal of the acrostics. I don’t understand. I will never understand why The New York Times just– Mike, how much could it have cost to pay Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon every two weeks to bring acrostic? Come on. It was perfect for digital. If ever they were a puzzle made for digital, it was that. I don’t care if 12 people did it. I was one of them. Boo.
John: Boo.
Craig: Boo.
John: It wasn’t bad enough to make you cancel your account, which is why they didn’t do it.
Craig: I know, but I’m still–
John: There’s still time.
Craig: I’m still out here being– you know what? They’ve never encountered a cranky, rigid customer in the top of [crosstalk]. Listen to me, I’m still the most flexible customer I have.
John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today on the show.
You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We are also scriptnotespodcast on Instagram. We’re posting stuff about the show and the book, and new vertical videos on there too.
We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today, and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Lego.
Craig, thanks for a good connections episode.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. We are looking at a vase full of– vase or vase? Are you a vase or vase person?
Craig: I’m a vase person.
John: I’m vase as well.
Craig: That’s a very New York way of doing it.
John: Yes. Full of Lego flowers. Can you describe it for the listeners at home?
Craig: Yes. It’s actually quite beautiful. I’ve made Lego flowers of a more chunky, tulipy kind. These are more delicate. It’s like a lovely bouquet with a couple of orange blossoms, some pink ones, some rose-looking ones. Then they even got that baby’s breath vibe going on and some nice stem work.
John: Yes. My daughter assembled these before she headed off to college this semester. It’s Lego. Things snap together, but there’s no blocks to this. There’s no three-by-two, the classic Lego block, to this all.
Craig: I will be honest, if you asked me, is this a Lego brand thing, I’d have to look close. I know that these little nubs, for instance, are very Lego-y, but this could be another brand of assembled plastic pieces.
John: I want to talk about that a little bit because I love Lego. I’ve loved Lego as a kid. I’ve built some things. I was looking around the office here. I have my Lego R2-D2. I have my Lego typewriter. I love them. Yet, at a certain point, the kits became so specific. The pieces are so bespoke. The flower here is the most recent example of these are not things you could apply to anything else. Basically, the kits are just to resemble this one specific thing. If you were to try to pull this apart and use them in other ways, they wouldn’t be useful. The joy of Lego growing up was just there’s a trash bag full of blocks, and we would just build houses out of them.
Craig: The Titanic does mostly have useful items.
John: Yes. You said on the show that you built a Lego Titanic.
Craig: I built the Lego Titanic.
John: The Lego Death Star, Millennium Falcon?
Craig: I built the Lego Death Star, the Lego Millennium Falcon, the big ones. Those I ended up just breaking down and giving them to my kids to play with.
John: [unintelligible 00:54:47].
Craig: Yes, because they were young and they wanted to. I’m not going to be that guy who’s like, “No, this is my Millennium Falcon.” I’m an adult here. The Titanic is in my office. This is awesome. It’s the biggest Legos out there. It’s huge. Then I built a lot of– this is what I do in prep usually when I go home. I did the Pac-Man arcade one and the Mario on TV, the Nintendo one. There’s a lot of fun things like that. I agree with you when they get too bespoke. For instance, I did Rivendell, the Lord of the Rings setting.
John: Yes, I saw that. It was on your table, yes.
Craig: That one’s a D&D one. The Rivendell one, I ended up breaking down. Like you said, it was too– by the way, it’s why I haven’t finished the D&D one. I just left it on the table because it’s sort of too far into not Lego.
John: There’s the spectrum of– there’s the model kits that you assemble, which are like, growing up, you glue together the thing, and it perfectly forms this one thing, which is exactly the replica of this thing. There was a classic Lego, which is just a bunch of blocks you can assemble any way you want to do. I just feel like we’ve gone so far over towards the assemble this perfectly to this thing.
It is a skill to follow those instructions and be able to do the engineering feats of what these new things can do, like what this typewriter can do, are remarkable. I’m sure it’s good for our visual intelligence, but also I worry that it robs us of some of our– it’s not a new thought. This is in the Lego movie, too, but it robs us of some of our individual agency to build things ourselves. Which is why our friend Phil, who’s just building this giant ship out of just a block seat himself, I’m inspired by.
Craig: If I weren’t imaginative as part of my job, but this is actually a weird refuge from that where I don’t have to create anything. I don’t have to worry about variations. I don’t have puzzles to solve about architecture. My job is to zen out and do something that I can do perfectly.
John: That’s what I miss about standardized tests where actually like there’s a correct answer to things because everything we do in our writing lives, there’s just like, is that the right way to do it? Sure.
Craig: There’s no [unintelligible 00:57:07]. It’s even worse. Sometimes there is a right way to do something, and everyone is like, “Yes, but do it differently,” which is the worst feeling. You want me to do the test wrong.
John: Yes, absolutely. I gave you the right version of the scene. Now you want me to start from the heart. It’s frustrating.
Craig: It’s frustrating. Yes, I still do love following instructions. It’s such a nice, simple–
John: Well, I think it appeals to your puzzle brain, too. There’s an answer, there’s a conclusion, it can be done.
Craig: Yes. Puzzles, the fun part is I have the pieces. I just need to understand how they fit together, whether it’s words, or numbers, or anything. With Lego, I actually am not thinking at all. It’s a way to stop thinking. I’m just obeying in a safe way.
John: This is actually interesting because you hate jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles, it’s ambiguous for a long time, that things click together. While there is that state of completion, there’s no instruction manual. It’s like this piece could be one of a thousand things in it.
Craig: Yes. A jigsaw “puzzle” is a bit like if I said, here is a Lego typewriter, here are all the pieces, here’s the instruction guide, but I’ve jumbled the pages and I haven’t numbered them. Well, let’s look through these pages. Do you think this maybe is where it starts? This is busy work. For what? A picture of a hamburger or a cat jumping over a thing?
John: I will say, building the Lego R2-D2, there were some ambiguous sections. I think the assembly books are really good, but there were some ambiguous situations where I don’t know if I did this right, and it’s going to take 20 steps before I realize if I did it right.
Craig: That is part of the process, is the, uh-oh, flip back and go, “Oh my God, I was supposed to put the dark gray piece and not the black piece. Okay, let’s undo, undo, undo because it must be right.” It drives me crazy. The one thing that I wish Lego would do– so they’re very good in a way now about supplying you with extra bits of little tiny things. The problem is they don’t tell you what the extra bits are. They should say at the end of a chapter, “By the way, we were hoping that you would have these extra bits, so if you do, don’t panic.”
John: So you didn’t make the mistakes.
Craig: If you have two extra bits of something, you probably screwed up. One thing that I know is true is the piece that you need to make it is there. You might think it’s not there. You might be panicking. It’s there. Either you’re not seeing it, or you don’t understand what the shape is, or it’s on the floor, or it’s in the box. It’s there.
John: It’s Scott Frank’s advice. Don’t move until you see it. It’s there.
Craig: That’s Steve Zaillian.
John: Oh, Steve Zaillian. You’re right.
Craig: Yes. Don’t move until you see it.
John: All right. Lego flowers, I guess we’re going to keep them. The weird thing about this bouquet is it’s really pretty from a distance, and it’s actually pretty up close. There’s a middle range where it’s just like, ugh.
Craig: I think I’m in that middle range, and I’m still appreciating it because– you know what? It’s arranged very nicely because I don’t imagine the arrangement was dictated quite that.
John: It’s going to be a different vase for each.
Craig: Right. Your daughter put that together. She has an eye for arranging flowers, so she’ll never be hungry.
John: Absolutely, because there’s always going to be a market.
Craig: People love flowers.
John: People love flowers. I used to buy flowers, and then I realized, this is dumb. I don’t really enjoy having them.
Craig: Or horrible. You know who loves flowers?
John: Elsa. Yes, sorry. I can appreciate watching a Martha Stewart where halfway the flowers are like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, but I don’t want it there.”
Craig: There’s a bunch of vegetables, and then they’re dead within minutes. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’re dead, and they smell. They smell while they die, and then the bugs come.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: What is this– and it’s, “Ooh, look at the sad flowers, they’re all dead.” Yes, that’s why I don’t like clowns either.
John: Oh, flowers die.
Craig: Like, oh, happy? No, no, scary.
John: Which reminds me, I think my daughter has a bouquet of flowers up in her room, which is she’s probably-
Craig: Oh dear God.
John: -going to get rid of because she’s just gone.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: I’ll smell it, so yes.
Craig: That needs to go.
John: Quickly.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: Right. Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thanks, Drew.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Book is now on Goodreads!
- Scriptnotes 700 on YouTube
- Episode 645 with Meredith Scardino
- Vimeo on Demand
- Kanopy
- WGAw Screen Compensation Guide
- NYT Connections
- Pips
- 50 Things I Know by Cate Hall
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
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- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 701: Connections, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to episode 700 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we are doing something we haven’t done since 2020, a live show with our listeners on Zoom and on YouTube. Hello, listeners. Like a lot of things about the pandemic, we only half remember what we’re doing. [laughter] While we’re still an audio-first podcast, we are going to be doing some things in this episode that benefit from being able to share screens and look at things.
If you’re listening to the audio version at home or your car and happen to be close to a screen, consider going back and watching some of this later on YouTube because there’s actually images to see. We’ll also be answering listener questions live on air, including a few in the bonus segment for our premium members. To help us celebrate 700 episodes, we are joined by some Scriptnotes champions over the years. Let us welcome to the podcast, Stuart Friedel, our very first producer of the show.
Craig: Stuart.
John: Stuart.
[applause]
Stuart Friedel: There we go. Hi.
John: Oh, my God. Look at that background. Stuart Friedel.
Craig: Oh. Such a good background. Classic.
Stuart: I need a Scriptnotes poster or LP or something to put on the back.
John: Yes. We’re going to release the whole show on vinyl. It’s a lot of vinyl, but it’s worth it. I’m just to have that for that perfect audio quality.
Stuart: It’s a weight. It’s for working out.
John: Absolutely. We have Megan McDonell, Scriptnotes producer. Megan McDonell, welcome back to Scriptnotes.
[applause]
Craig: It’s Megan.
John: Oh, my gosh. We’re so excited to see you.
Craig: Another good background.
Megan McDonell: Thank you.
John: Megan, you were a crucial part of the professionalization, I think, of Scriptnotes because when Stuart first came on board, it was– [laughter] We were just winging it. We were just trying to figure out what it was. We didn’t know how long it was going to go.
Craig: He’s right there.
John: He’s right there.
Stuart: It is true. It’s absolutely true.
[laughter]
John: You were a crucial part of that and also helped me out so much with the launch podcast, which we were, again, figuring out along the way. How are you, Megan?
Megan: I’m great. It’s nice to be here. Thanks for including me.
John: Of course. Drew, do we have Megana?
Drew Marquardt: We do.
Craig: We always have Megana.
John: Megana Rao is the producer who people first heard on the air. I think she was the one who sort of crossed the barrier and became like, “Of course, it’s Megana. She’s talking on the show.” Megana, it is always a joy to have you here. Oh, my gosh, it’s Megana.
[applause]
Megana Rao: Hello.
Craig: Megana, she was really the first star, right? Maybe the only star. I don’t really think you or I qualify, but Megana gets stopped on the street. I’m sorry.
Megana: I hate that you can see my face.
[laughter]
Craig: You look beautiful.
Megana: Oh, I just want to cower.
Craig: You have such great hair. Look at this.
Megana: Wait, where is your beard?
Craig: Oh, I got rid of it.
John: He got rid of his beard and the hair on top of his head. He’s basically just trying to steal my look.
Craig: I did. I do like it when people are like, “Where’s your beard?” I’m like, “Where do you think?” Yes, it doesn’t come off in one piece.
[laughter]
John: Ripped it off. Yes, absolutely. Is this with hair and makeup? It’s back in the van. Megana, thank you again for being awesome on the show and for joining us here today. If Stuart was the originator of the show, he was the one who got the train running. Megana sped it along and got us figuring out a little more stuff. You were the heart, the soul, the smile, the laugh of the show.
Megana: Oh, thank you.
John: Then there’s Drew, but whatever.
Craig: It’s just really hard to work for John. That’s what I’m getting.
Drew: Grinds you down.
John: Now, the very first episodes of the show were edited by either me or by Stuart, but at a certain point, we’re like, “Somebody who don’t know what they’re doing should be doing this.” That’d be Matthew Chilelli. Matthew Chilelli, cross from post-production into production. Join us here on the Zoom as we celebrate 700 episodes.
Craig: Ooh.
[laughter]
Matthew Chilelli: I beamed in somehow.
John: Oh, wow. Yes, Matthew. He had to pipe in a studio background so it would feel really impressive. That’s actually where you do all the work on the show. It’s like this high-tech launch center for the show.
Matthew: Absolutely. It’s so you can’t see my husband working behind me.
John: Yes, there is that.
Craig: I like that Matthew works in a studio that is carefully painted to be blurry.
Matthew: Yes.
John: That’s good stuff. That’s a highly selective focus. 700 episodes, guys. Thank you so much for getting us here. I have to say, 700, Craig will attest to, that was always my goal was to make it to 700 episodes. [laughter] I said that from episode two. It’s like, “My goal is just to make it to 700 episodes.”
Craig: Had you said that, I would have been gone within minutes.
John: Yes. As we talked about in episode 100, I was hoping to make it to 100 and had no instincts beyond that point. It’s crazy that we’re here now. With a book coming out, so many people on this Zoom were so crucial to getting this book in good fighting shape. Drew, we’ve been getting a bunch of people sending in their receipts from the pre-orders. Thank you to everybody who’s ordering this book. It’s out December 2nd worldwide. People should order it now so that there’s enough copies so that everybody can enjoy the book for the holidays.
I have a topic that I want to discuss with this group before we move into other things, which is how do you talk about a movie or a show without spoilers and where is the boundary between, “Okay, this is just a thing in popular culture we need to talk about,” versus, “This is a spoiler and I have to be really careful to discuss this thing.” The specific thing is the movie Weapons, which I really enjoyed, and it went in without any spoilers at all, which was fantastic. I managed to not know anything about the movie.
Yet there’s, I think I want to talk about on the show in a very specific way that I think won’t ruin things, but what is our feeling about talking about a thing without ruining a thing for other people? Craig, start with you. What’s your instinct when it comes to a spoiler?
Craig: I think I’m pretty good about this. There are things that I feel like, okay, if you know this, it actually won’t ruin any surprise. In fact, you’re going to hear about this or find out about it as part of the general setup of the movie or story. I’ve been trying to get everybody to watch Hunting Wives, and it’s worked because it’s the number one show on Netflix, I assume because of me.
John: Yes, absolutely. You are the salesperson for it.
Craig: Yes. When I talk about it, I’m like, “Okay, none of this is a spoiler. It’s going to sound spoilery. You’re going to hear about this as part of the setup.” I feel like setup is fair game. Once you get past setup, then you get into that territory of, “Are you ever going to watch this or not? Because then I’ll just tell you what happens.” [laughter] I keep it inside of setup. I think that’s safe.
John: Stuart, what’s your feeling on spoilers?
Stuart: I think it’s context dependent, and it is dependent on the person hearing to make their boundaries known. If you want to talk about a movie on a podcast that’s educational about movies and how to make movies, I think you just need to tell the audience, “Tune out now,” and then go ahead and talk. Don’t hold back the efficacy of the conversation because you don’t want to offend somebody who had the opportunity to push stop.
John: Now, Megan McDonell, you’ve been working on a lot of shows that are either under NDA, so of course, you can’t talk about those things. Even a WandaVision, you know what’s coming up. You have a sense of what it is. When on WandaVision, did you start talking about– was it only after an episode dropped or after you made sure that people had a week to watch it? What’s your feeling about it?
Megan: Stuff I’ve worked on? I don’t know. I still don’t talk about it. [laughter] I’m context dependent. I’m one of the people that spoilers don’t affect me at all. Like, “Oh, he was dead the whole time?” This does not affect my enjoyment of the movie. [chuckles]
Stuart: What movie would that be?
John: Stuart Little, which is so surprising. I had no idea that mouse was dead the whole time. It was dead?
Craig: That would have been an improvement. No offense to E.B. White, but that would have been awesome.
John: Now, Megana, you and I are chatting a lot about things, and I feel like we have a good shorthand. We have a friendship where you can say like, “Oh, have you seen this thing? Are you going to watch this thing? Can we talk about this?” How about you with your other friends and people around you? How do you communicate about what you want to know and what you don’t want to know?
Megana: I’m like Meg and Stuart, especially working in this industry. Spoilers are just craft. If there’s a big twist coming up and you tell me about it, it’s like then I’m watching it with a different lens, being like, “Okay, how did they set this up? How does this work?” I do try to be respectful for people who don’t work in film and entertainment and not spoil things for them. I feel like as soon as you land at LAX, spoilers are free game.
Craig: Wow.
John: Yes. I also feel like there’s some time limit that happens where Mike hasn’t watched Severance, but it’s like, I might watch Severance. It’s like, oh, well, I can’t talk about anything Severance-wise in your presence. On work Zooms, just for daily office stuff, we do have to have a conversation about like, “Okay, are we going to talk about this thing or not talk about this thing, or people will mute themselves during part of it,” which can be rough.
Specifically, the thing I want to talk about in Weapons, which I really genuinely think we can have a good conversation about without any spoilers, is midway through the movie, a character is introduced for the first time. I thought it was a really smart introduction in that an assistant comes into the office and says, “Your two o’clock is here.” He’s like, “Okay, send her in.” She just lingers a bit to set up, “Do you know who this person is?” This is so strange and weird. There’s a lot of screen time spent on what would just be, you could cut out the scene, but it was so important because it sets up this expectation of the audience.
It’s like, “Who is this person coming through the door?” Without it, we would not have an appreciation for, like, “Oh, wow, that is just so odd.” It made me believe that we out of the world more that like this assistant was like, “This is a strange situation that’s about to happen.” I just really enjoyed that. To me, it doesn’t feel like a spoiler. You’re going to encounter that moment, and you’ll say, “Oh, John talked about that,” but I didn’t ruin anything for you, hopefully.
Craig: Feels ruined.
John: I’ve ruined the movie for you?
Craig: Yes.
Megana: I’m holding back tears now, actually, I really am upset.
John: I’m sorry.
Craig: That’s Megana’s upset?
[laughter]
John: A giant beaming smile.
Craig: Yes.
John: Matthew, did you see Weapons, and do you know the moment I’m talking about?
Matthew: No, I haven’t seen it yet, but I still feel like that’s fine to talk about and also not that this is a judgment at all, but editing this show so many things have been ruined for me [laughter] plot-wise, and then I just keep it inside and turn it off and don’t share with anybody, but it hasn’t affected my enjoyment of movies.
Craig: You just let it out. You just shared it. Now everyone knows. I feel terribly guilty. Here’s why I feel guilty. I never even considered that. I took you for granted, and I’m sorry. I’m not going to stop. I’m going to keep doing it. At least now, I’ll be guilty along the way instead of just suddenly all at once on YouTube.
John: Yes, there’s two things I’m realizing now that we’re doing this live, is that first off, all the mistakes that Matthew cuts out, and it’s mostly my verbal mess-ups that Matthew fixes that he can’t fix on a live stream, which is great, good for the world. Second, there’s so many cases, not every episode, but every second or third episode, where Craig and I will say, “Oh, Matthew, you have to cut that out. What I just said cannot be in the air.” You know as much stuff that is sealed in the vault. So good.
Craig: Because Matthew’s so good about cutting all this out and you rely on him, what people don’t know is that John and Drew have the exact same thing they do when they do a verbal flub. Matthew, can you do it for us? I know you know what it is.
Matthew: Oh, right, yes. It’s almost the sound of a tape rewinding. As a person, it’s like, you’re in the middle of something, it’s like, “If you don’t put it up, blah, blah, and then you go back to the beginning. [laughter]
Craig: Yes, it’s [onomatopoeia]. It’s like that.
John: I listen to the Slate podcasts, and when their hosts mess up, they must be trained to go, “3, 2, 1,” and they read the line, and so it works for them. Every once in a while, a 3, 2, 1 will make it into the show, and like, love it, oh, just, it so reveals the process behind stuff.
Craig: That’s what lets us know it’s not AI.
John: Yes, before we get to our main topic here, we have two little bits of news. Drew, we have a new video in the ScriptNotes channel. This is on Breaking Bad, it’s Vince Gilligan’s interview, and it’s really well cut together.
Drew: Yes, it’s a really good one. It’s him just talking about how to be a good showrunner and running a room, and it’s really great.
John: That was a great episode. You have a new Weekend Read collection up this week.
Drew: We do, we’re back to school.
John: What are some of the titles in the back-to-school collection?
Drew: We’ve got 10 Things I Hate About You, Big Little Lies, Bottoms, Clueless, Dead Poets Society, Dear White People, Easy A, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Friday Night Lights, Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite, Never Have I Ever, School Days… loads. Wednesday.
Craig: Do you have Back to School?
John: The Rodney Dangerfield classic?
Drew: Ironically, no.
Craig: What the?
John: Some of those scripts are really hard to find, Craig. For some reason, there’s not a staggering demand for people trying to find those scripts.
Craig: That script actually is a really well-structured.
John: Oh.
Craig: It’s very well done for like a classic comedy. The structure was actually quite smart.
John: While he’s going to hype up Back to School, I’m going to hype up Bottoms just for folks who haven’t seen Bottoms for whatever reason. It is gonzo, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s why these people are stars.” They’re just so well done. All right, a topic for the group. Since we have a screen that we can all look at together, and our listeners can look at the screen together with us, I wanted to talk about the challenge that all writers face about how we describe the things we see in our head, so that the readers are seeing the same things in their heads.
Today, this exercise, Drew put together this slideshow of images we took off of ShotDeck. These are all from different movies and TV shows, or documentaries, all that we’ve pulled from there. What I want us to do is work together to figure out how would we describe this thing in a screenplay so that our readers are seeing the same thing that we’re hoping for them to see. We’re calling this People, Places, and Things. We’ll start with four different people, and we’ll talk about who these characters are and if this was the first time we’re showing them on screen, what would we talk about?
Because Craig, I know you love to talk about hair, and wardrobe, and makeup, and all those things, and help us get character details. Let’s start with our first image here. For folks who are just listening at home, again, you should really look at the YouTube for this so you can see what the images are, but it is a woman in an office situation. Craig, you’re looking at this. Who is this woman? What are we seeing? What are the details that you think might make it into a scene description for her?
Craig: Depending on where we are, if this is the beginning of the scene, I would probably make a point of saying intentionally whether or not this is how it actually turns out. Medium close on Brenda, 50s, standard office attire, practical short blonde hair, sitting in an office populated by late ‘90s, early 2000 equipment. She looks appropriately tired for a nine-to-fiver.
John: Those are all things I love about that. I love Brenda as a name for her. It feels like it puts her in the right decade. I get what that is for her. There’s something about her expression that I feel is good to sell, and you can give that one sentence. She has a face that she’s always looked like she just smelled something terrible. [laughter] There’s something uncomfortable about her. I like standard office wardrobe, but also, it’s like sort of a fun pattern underneath a blue blazer that she’s trying to inject some spark there under this.
Craig: And failing.
John: And failing, yes. If we were talking about the overall thing, it’s like flat office lighting is doing her no favors. It’s not a glamorous look. Stuart, Megan, Megana, do you have any more suggestions for things we might talk about with this woman if this were the first time we were seeing her on screen?
Stuart: I’d say something like, in a happier life, she’d be a school librarian.
John: I like that. It’s sort of the “as if” or the replacement thing gives her a sense of who she is.
Megan: I might mention something in relation to who she’s talking to. If she’s talking to her main character, maybe something like– and she is not pleased to see this guy.
[laughs]
John: Yes, I like that a lot, because it gives you a sense of relationship to the space around her and to what’s actually really going to happen in the scene. Megana, anything else jumping out for you about her?
Megana: Just a suit jacket that doesn’t quite fit. Shoulder pads that extend beyond the shoulders.
Craig: Maybe that was her look.
[laughter]
John: It’s probably clothes that she’s had for the last eight years. She has a standard uniform and hasn’t updated it with time. That feels fun. Drew, show us what this is from. It’s the Snowtown Murders, written by Shaun Grant. Jenny Hallam is the actor we’re seeing there.
Cool. Next up, we have another young woman in this case. The image we’re seeing, if you’re not watching this, is a young woman. She’s sitting on the grass. The wind is blowing through her hair. She’s looking over her right shoulder. It is a beautiful painted– it feels like a painted backdrop, but it’s outdoorsy grasslands. Who wants to start with this image? It’s so striking, but I want to know if this was the first time we’re seeing this character, how do we describe her?
Craig: If this is the first time, I would say something like, again, medium-close on, let’s call her Anita. I’m going to say late teens.
John: Yes. Age is ambiguous in a way that I think is worth noting.
Craig: Late teens, staring off at everything and nothing at the same time. She sits in a windy field somewhere in the great plains. Her hair blows in the wind, as beautiful, messy as it would be done up.
John: Yes. The wind catching her hair is such a striking thing about this. We have to establish that her hair is long. That feels important. I think we need to acknowledge her race, and as the writers, we can choose what we want to say here, but mixed race. I think we need to acknowledge that she’s not white because there’s that default white thing that happens.
Craig: Isn’t that the default white thing? We didn’t talk about the last lady being white. I don’t know if her race is relevant here. It’s hard to say. I don’t know.
John: Yes. Choosing Anita doesn’t tip us one way or another, but if we could pick a name that would obviously it’s still on race.
Craig: Why did I say Anita? Is anyone named Anita anymore?
John: No.
Craig: No. Possibly it’s cool. [laughter] I don’t know. I just went with Anita.
John: Stuart.
Stuart: You bring up a good point here that I think applied to the last one, too, with era and decade. There is a little bit of context that informs what’s important about the character and what happened at casting.
John: Yes. That’s a great point, too, because we haven’t been talking so much about character here, but I think Craig was noticing that she’s looking off to the side. Basically, she feels like an observer. She’s constantly surveying things. What I see there doesn’t feel like an extroverted character, it feels like someone who sits at the edge of things and observes, as perhaps like a sniper energy rather than a driver. Megan, Megana, other thoughts?
Megan: Back to the air thing, I feel like there’s a little bit of a timelessness about the scenario, which I might mention if it’s worth mentioning.
Megana: There’s something nice about how she’s holding her knees and holding herself together, but seems very comfortable outside with this windswept hair.
John: Let’s talk about wardrobe because of at least what we’re seeing with wardrobe, because I thought it was so helpful with our previous example. She’s wearing a tank top. Megan, Megana, what would you describe that as? At least as far as what we’re seeing.
Megana: A spaghetti strap.
John: That could be jean shorts, it could be jeans. We’re seeing a bit of denim there.
Craig: Jorts. I’ve never typed the word jorts in the script, but I’m tempted. It’s hard to tell exactly.
Stuart: It seems like an outfit that could be like out of any time and any place, but depending on the time and place would inform if it were a hipster getting ready to go to the mall, or like in modern day, or if it was something from the thrift store bin in a small town, or not even a town, in a rural–
Craig: Also, I think in an image like this, one thing I never shy away from is just saying, she’s beautiful. Because I believe that beauty should be an intentional thing. Meaning, we don’t just, everybody, it’s like, okay, there are shows where everybody just happens to be beautiful, it’s part of the tone of the show, I get that. In something that’s a little bit more grounded, not everybody is beautiful. Beautiful people are beautiful, and they’re notable, and so someone like this, I think you need to point it out. It feels relevant.
John: Yes, we’re talking about her and trying to describe her, but if we were describing the overall scene, I feel like I’d also want to call out the watercolor sky behind her. Everything feels painterly, and she feels like she’s in a painting at every moment. Craig, your point about, like, she’s beautiful, especially within the context of this world, is notable, because anybody who would see her in this world would acknowledge that she’s beautiful.
Stuart: It’s a beautiful shot. If it’s the first time we’re meeting her, too, I don’t want to direct on the page too much, but it does feel like a very intentional placement within the frame where she’s looking and where she’s looking back.
Craig: It’s hard to call those things out. It’s hard to call out placement of frame, but what I do think you can do as the advocate for always directing on the page, if it’s important here, John mentioned this watercolor sky, is to say, she’s somewhere in an open plane that stretches on forever. Long lens turns the background into this beautiful watercolor blur.
John: That helps me see what I’m looking at. Drew, show us what this is from.
Drew: This is not the first time we meet her, but I included from the script, the first time we meet the character.
John: The actor is Taylor Russell. This is from Bones and All, screenplay by David Kajganich. First time trying to pronounce that. We have a description from the script. It says, “Maren, 17, mixed race, haltingly plays Sibelius’ Swan of Tuonela. She wears a cardigan big enough to be her father’s and no jewelry or makeup. Sherry, 17, comes in looking more like an American teen in 1988. Oversized top, lip gloss, and bangs.” That oversized cardigan feels right. It feels like it’s not what we’re seeing on screen right now, but it feels like the same clothing vibe.
No jewelry or makeup also feels like what we’re seeing here.
Craig: I was pretty close with Anita. Maren, Anita, very similar.
[laughter]
John: The script did call out mixed race for her, which I have not seen the movie, so I don’t know whether that becomes an important plot point. It very well could. All right, our next example, let’s take a look at a gentleman here. [chuckling] For folks who are at home and can’t see this, we have an older man looking just off center of lens.
Craig: [laughs] Oh my God. What did they do to Scott Glenn?
John: They did a lot to Scott Glenn because it’s not Scott Glenn.
Craig: That’s not?
John: No. That’s Ed Harris.
Craig: Oh, sorry, it’s Ed Harris. You know why I do that? I do this all the time because Ed Harris was John Glenn in The Right Stuff, I believe, and so I just Scott Glenn Ed Harris constantly. What did they do to Ed Harris? They turned him into the Crypt Keeper.
John: Yes, I cannot look at this without seeing Crypt Keeper, and I feel like you’re going to go for it, and why not?
Craig: Just say Crypt Keeper.
John: A very tan bald man with long pale brown hair hanging like a broken crown. You have to describe that he’s both bald and has long hair.
Craig: Crypt Keeper.
John: Yes, exactly.
Craig: It’s right there.
John: It is.
Craig: I would say it.
John: Yes, I think you say Crypt Keeper. The glasses also feel important. He’s wearing almost like Bjorn Borg glasses. They feel like very ‘70s thin-framed glasses. His shirt is specific and wonderful. It feels like a rare find in the ‘80s bin. A lot of it’s just great.
Stuart: I’m always cognizant of trying to match my prose to the tone of the script, so I wouldn’t necessarily say this in everything, but I think he looks like Dave Gruber Allen’s mean older brother.
John: I wonder if we could marry Crypt Keeper and how tan he is. He’s like a South Florida Crypt Keeper.
Craig: Yes, weathered skin, Crypt Keeper style hair flows from his otherwise bald head. He has the strange panache of an aging hippie who is now stuck as a motel clerk in Tallahassee.
John: It’s worth noting that you were able to read Motel Clerk just because, in the background, we see a bunch of keys hanging on a board and just shows how economical you can be in terms of setting up where somebody is and what a place is. Those keys did the job.
Craig: Unless he’s a key maker.
John: Megan, Megana, any other thoughts on our Ed Harris here?
Megan: Not really. There’s something about his eyes that feel worth mentioning. I don’t know if they feel like wet or something, but there’s like a sparkle, maybe that I would mention.
John: Yes, I think that’s a good point because they do still catch the light even though they’re sunk pretty deep in there, and they’re hidden behind the glasses.
Craig: I would also add, even though he’s not Scott Glenn, you can’t help but feel like maybe something about him.
John: A Scott Glenn presence. Also, granted, we know this is Ed Harris, but even though I didn’t know this was Ed Harris, I have a sense of what his voice probably sounds like, which is like a raspy smoker’s voice. You sense the age in it. Show us what this is from, Drew. This is from Love Lies Bleeding, written by Rose Glass and Weronika-
Craig: The great Rose Glass.
John: -Tofilska. All right, our last person. This is actually two people. What we’re seeing is two kids on a basketball court. The one on the right is holding a basketball. He’s walking next to his friend, who is counting something emphatically on his fingers. How do we talk about these boys? How do we set them up individually and together? Let’s assume that they are principal characters in a story, and this is the first time we’re meeting them. All of our attention goes to the one on the left because he’s counting and he just has an energy to him.
He has this purple sweatshirt that feels great and iconic to him. The way he’s counting, making his points on his fingers, he talks with his hands clearly. It feels like a thing you can establish early on about him. He has gold-framed glasses. They both have high and tight hair, so I don’t know if that establishes them well. The one on the left has a rounder face. What else are we calling out about these two?
Craig: On the page, since you have to do this before you get here, right? We have two kids, about 10 or 11 years old, on a basketball court. Let’s call Brian taller, thin, quieter, nervous. Walks holding the ball with his friend. Let’s call him Anthony. Shorter, stockier, constantly talking, emphatic, bright colors. He’s smaller, but he’s the one who stands out.
John: Yes, smaller but a giant personality, a giant presence.
Stuart: Feels like LeBron and Maverick Carter. [laughter] Anthony focuses on the stats so that Brian can keep his focus on the game.
Craig: I like that.
John: Megana, what are you thinking?
Megana: There’s also something about their expression which lets you know that these characters have this conversation or this argument several times a day.
John: Yes, we want to hear that in a scene that follows. The first lineup needs to be from, we’re calling him Anthony on the left, and just him listing all the points of things. It just feels so right. Yes, you can get some of that in the description, but the first bits of dialogue are going to tell us a lot about what their dynamic is. Let’s just show what this is from. This is from He Got Game, written by Spike Lee. I would say Anthony on the left feels like a Spike Lee character. I feel like I see him, and I love to see him in these movies.
All right, so that’s people. Let’s talk about some places. These are some settings for actual movies that have happened. This first thing we’re seeing, they’re islands. There’s cliffy islands in a very blue sea. Let’s be more specific about where we are. If this is a setting that we’re traveling to in the movie, imagine this is a helicopter shot bringing us in here.
How are we describing this? Megan, let’s start with you. If this is a thing that you’re putting into your story as an establishing shot, how might you describe what you’re seeing?
Megan: I would call it like an untouched island in a beautiful blue sea, not a person or a building. I don’t know. I feel like dinosaurs should be here.
John: Yes. It feels super vibrant. One of the challenges with the island is my default goes to survivory desert island, and this is not that. To me, this feels like Greece or Thailand, but high cliffs are what really establish it, that it’s like a forest atop cliffs over this vibrant blue sea.
Craig: I’d probably go for a sprawl of islands just so that we get the sense it’s not just one, because that’s what people go to, sprawl of islands, high-cliffed islands, covered with low, dense clumps of trees. They sit amidst the peaceful blue water. We’re not in the open ocean. I hate describing shots like this, personally. I hate it, it’s just–
John: People skip it.
Craig: Yes, because like–
John: Because nothing happens.
Craig: Right, the truth is, in a shot like this, just looking at it as a picture, because the drone isn’t moving, this isn’t a moving picture for us, but would be in whatever it is, it just feels like a tourist, like a pamphlet cover. If it were moving, then maybe something would be happening, but really, it’s just sort of establishing.
John: Yes, it is establishing. Any more thoughts? Megana?
Megana: Okay, say this is the first shot of your movie, and you are establishing tone through this, there’s something so glossy about this image. It makes me feel like this is going to be like a fun rom-com or a screener sort of thing.
John: Yes, I feel like Meryl Streep is going to be singing a song at the edge of one of these cliffs.
Megana: I was just going to ask, like, how you guys would describe this image to set up the tone of that.
Craig: I wouldn’t. This is not to me, like you can’t set up the tone of a movie with this, because you might as well just say opening, fairly conventional shot of beautiful islands. [laughter] This is going to be one of those. You don’t want to do that, you don’t want to undermine your own cause.
John: Craig, I’ll say, like, if you’re talking though about bright, joy– I don’t want to say joyful sunlight, but a sense of, like, it’s bright and sunny and fun and poppy, that feels like a certain thing. Describing the weather and the tone and the mood, because these same islands in the middle of a rainstorm would feel very different and feel very dark. Establishing the tone of a place, you can do.
Craig: I would want to connect that to people.
John: Yes, I agree.
Stuart: It feels to me like this is the flyover shot before we get to the layer of the bad guy in an Austin Powers, like a parody of a spy movie.
Craig: To me, I feel like this is midway through a rom-com, they’ve arrived at this beautiful lagoon. Then this is the shot revealing how beautiful it is, although there are no boats here. Who the hell even knows? [laughs] I don’t know.
Stuart: In any of those contexts, there are different ways to do a one-line, quick establishing. If it’s a parody of a spy movie, I’d say the craggy cliffs of a Windows default background. If it were a rom-com, I’d say uninhabited seas, we might be the only people for miles. One, it doesn’t even go on the line two, but either way, quick and snappy.
John: Everyone thinks this is something funny or it’s a rom-com. It’s not, it’s Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Screenplay by Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely.
Craig: This is why we were struggling. This isn’t even on earth.
John: Yes, it’s not.
Craig: This is Narnia, you guys. Really, the way I would describe this is, Narnian Islands in the great whatever sea. Beautiful Narnian Islands.
John: Cerulean seas, yes.
Craig: Yes, it’s Narnia.
John: It’s Narnia, dude.
Craig: Of course.
John: Of course. All right, we’ll be getting back to Narnia with Greta’s new movie. I’m excited to see that happening. All right, next setting. Speaking of villain’s lair. In the shot we’re seeing, there’s a very overcast, a storm, but we’re seeing this, I guess we can call it brutalist, but brutalist modernist building that it’s all concrete and glass. We’re seeing soldiers or police people approaching the front doors of it. How do we talk about this? To me, it feels like a Tetris piece that’s turned into a house. I think you want to talk about the square angles of it all. It feels like some sort of discarded piece of a puzzle.
Craig: To me, this would be all about the movement. A single file line of SWAT team members move guns out, pointed forward towards the glass wall of an angular, concrete, and glass modern home, two stories, sitting in the middle of this absurdly perfect lawn under gray skies. The house is actually not– it’s John Wick house, basically. It’s like a smaller John Wick house. Oh, actually, there’s a whole other row of soldiers. Sorry, there are two lines of soldiers. It’s hard to tell because the other ones were blending into the background.
Yes, I would just say SWAT soldiers in two streaming single-file lines move towards an angular concrete and glass home.
John: Yes. I might also, clad entirely in black. There’s something futuristic about just how black and minimalist the police officers themselves are. Megan, Megana, Stuart, other thoughts on describing this shot?
Megan: I got to go talk about that hedge. It’s extremely perfectly manicured.
John: Yes, it’s all straight lines in this space. All right, let’s show what this is from. Mickey 17, written by Bong Joon Ho.
Craig: They haven’t seen it.
John: Yes, I saw it and it’s a little, I don’t remember the shot in the movie, but it is delightful, and it feels of like a part of the movie.
Craig: It’s on earth. It’s not on Narnia, so it’s fair.
John: This one is on earth, and it looks like– What we’re looking at is a shot of what seems to be a Middle Eastern city. It is all tan, multi-story buildings jammed incredibly tight together. This is a very long lens that is making everything seem incredibly compressed. Buildings nearly fill the frame with just a tiny strip of white sky at the summit of this. Hey, if you put this shot in a movie, we know we’re someplace Pacific in the world. I do like this as an establishing shot. How else would you describe this? What’s interesting to say about this?
Craig: One road, there’s one road.
John: A single multi-lane road bisects an incredibly dense city of all yellow concrete buildings.
Craig: What city is it? That’s what I would do. I would say, da, da, da, and then point out a compact sprawl of hundreds of squat yellow buildings. They all look the same.
John: Yes, the uniformity of it is, I think what’s so striking about the image. What was this from, Drew?
Drew: This is from War Dogs.
Craig: Oh, yes. My boy, Todd Phillips.
John: Do you know what city this is supposed to be, Craig? I feel like this is probably Jordan, maybe?
Craig: I can’t remember, I’m going to guess Middle East. I don’t know where it was set versus where they shot it, but sounds right.
John: Great, but that was fun. We’ve never done that on our show before, and I liked it as an exercise to go through this. Let’s do some listener questions. We have some listeners who have joined us on the Zoom, and so bring them on. I’ll have them ask their question. All right, first we have Eddie.
Craig: Eddie.
Eddie Hamilton: Hello. My name’s Eddie Hamilton from London. I’m a film editor. I’ve listened to every single episode of Scriptnotes since the show started.
John: Incredible.
Eddie: I started around episode 40, and I listened to the back and listened every week. It’s the only podcast to listen to every week. My question is, John and Craig, please, would you briefly discuss your experiences of rewriting and restructuring your own scripts and advising other filmmakers while in post-production? Editing is the final rewrite. Every movie I’ve cut has been refined enormously once the shoot is over, and the editorial adventure begins after the first assembly, and I would love to hear your perspective on this, please.
John: Yes, it’s a great question, Eddie. My experience with movies, specifically in post, where I’ve not directed the thing, generally I’ve gotten them up to production, and then I’ve walked away and done other things. Then I’ve come back, and I’ve seen that first assembly, that first cut or first audience screening, and I find where I’m most helpful is coming in with a set of notes that is really responding to the movie that I saw, that it has a memory of what the intentions were behind those things, but it’s not trying to get us back to the script that I wrote.
It’s really reflecting, this is the experience of watching the movie now. This is where I was curious, where I got confused. These are the opportunities I see, and I try to be the first person with the most clearest notes. I give those to the director or the producer. They agree with what they agree with, and then they bring those to the editor and start working on the next cut.
Eddie: Are you always invited in?
John: I am not always invited in. In the movies that have turned out well, I’ve basically always been invited in to do that function, and I feel like in many cases, like on Go, I was there for every frame shot, but in movies where I wasn’t, like Big Fish, being able to have some fresh eyes was so important because I could have the memory of, like, this was the intention, but this is what I’m actually seeing was really helpful because editors, obviously, they’re finding all this footage. They know what they have and what they don’t have.
I’m just looking at sort of, here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s where I’m engaging. Craig.
Craig: Actually, I was talking about this last night with– I did an event with Tim Good, who is one of our editors on The Last of Us and is yet again nominated for an Emmy, and we talked about this very thing. Once I get into the edit, I’m really trying to work with what I know we have, which is, it’s different. There are times where I will watch an editor’s cut and go, “Okay, this scene, I’m not going to give you notes on this scene. I’m going to give you the script back, read it. Go back to the script now, because you edited what you saw, but the script had more information.”
I want you to go back and conform this, not moment by moment, but feeling by feeling, speeds, adjustments, tempos. It’ll give you a sense of when to get close, when to further back, and then we’ll go from that. Usually, it’s pretty close. What you’re talking about, Eddie, that does happen sometimes, is you will watch and you’ll go, “Okay, structurally, our theory was incorrect.” I’ll give you an example. Our second episode of season two, for which Tim is nominated for an Emmy, initially, there’s this battle that’s taking place at Jackson, and then there’s this encounter that’s happening in a ski lodge.
We go back and forth between them a few times, and what we found was once Kaitlyn Dever says to Pedro Pascal, “I know who you are, and I’m going to kill you,” we can’t leave. We really can’t leave, and so we did some restructuring there, which worked, and there’s a lot of problem-solving to that, and it’s a joy because you understand you’re doing the right thing. You have to be as open to the new possibilities as you can be, and you also have to be as respectful of what led you to that point as you can be.
If you can have both of those in balance, then you are able to steer back towards the plan when needing, and you’re able to steer away into something better when you are needing it.
Eddie: That’s great. When I saw that episode, as an editor, all that intercutting and the structuring of the battle, I could feel how hard that was because I’ve done that on many films, and so I contacted Tim on Instagram. [laughter] I gave him a massive thumbs up and said, “Dude, that episode rocked, and congratulations. Just editor to editor, I wanted to let that your hard work was seen and understood, and appreciated from another post-production expert who’s sharing your pain. When I’m watching that episode, I can feel the amount of work that went into it to balance all the plates.”
It was astonishing, it was really great. The episode that you did about giving notes to producers or producers giving notes to writers applies to editors as well, and I make careful notes. I quite often tell my assistants when they ask me about getting notes in the edit and how to respond, don’t lead with your personal pain, all that stuff you said, Craig, it’s totally valid for editorial as well. If anyone is working with editors, please have a listen to that episode. Anyway, thank you so much for your time.
John: Thank you so much for listening to all the episodes, it’s incredible.
Craig: It’s amazing.
Eddie: My pleasure.
John: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you, Eddie.
Drew: Next question is from Ruta.
Craig: I may be wrong, but I believe we have a Lithuanian in the room.
Ruta: It is true.
John: Ruta, thank you for joining us on this live show. What question could we try to answer for you?
Ruta: Thank you so much for having me as a person with a question on the show. On episode number 626, I think Craig mentioned that accents are a little bit like actor bait, and it can become a trap for them. I was wondering if you know of any production designer baits. Is there anything you’d like designers not to do when bringing your scripts to screen?
John: Oh, it’s such a good question. Man, I could go on for a long time about this. Let me talk about like great examples of production designers who just got it and ran with it. I’m like, “Oh my God, thank you so much.” On Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alex McDowell and his team would e-mail me with like, “This is what we’re thinking about for the newspapers on the wall of Willy Wonka’s father’s house.” It’s like, “Great, that’s a thing that I can engage with, I can help out with that.” What you’re showing me is, oh, you really do get, like, who this person is, and that is fantastic.
Where I have had issues in the past with production designers who will take a scene they see in the script and create a whole new setting for a thing that doesn’t exist. Or there was an animated project where I delivered a script, and they were showing me scenes that did not exist in the script. That’s not helpful for me. I think you’re going too far with the world-building. You’re trying to paint way outside the lines of what this project needs to be. Craig, bait for production designers.
Craig: One thing that comes to mind, when you have a script where there is a town, oftentimes it’s a fantasy or it’s science fiction, but there’s some sort of place. What ends up happening is production designers working within the framework of the space that they have in the footprint will often over-design the street. There’s like a street of 12 things, and everybody walks the set and goes, “Oh my God, look at how great this is.” You’re like, “Yes, but what’s down the street? What’s on the next street over? Why is every scene only on the street?”
Suddenly, even if you extend it digitally, the town feels very small. Over-designing portions of a thing that you’re going to be stuck in over and over and over. When we made the Boston QZ or when we made Jackson, I was like, “Let’s not throw all of our resources onto one street.” Give me a little side streets. Give me little alleys. Give me little tiny things that we can do because we’re going to want variety more than anything. It’s more important than the one big “ooh-aah” shot variety. Spread it out a bit and let’s see what we can do.
Sounds like maybe, Ruta, you are a production designer or you work in an art department?
Ruta: That is the truth. I am a production designer, yes.
Craig: Great. You know what I’m talking about.
Ruta: Yes.
[laughter]
Craig: Generally speaking, production designers these days do a very good job of integrating with the visual effects supervisor to work hand in hand with production to make sure that they are building enough practical for the actors to be inside, but also leaving space then for visual effects to complete things beyond that. Poor Ruta knows that everybody in the creative side wants the production designer to build the world, and then somebody from the production manager’s office comes in and says, “You have 12 cents.”
The compromise is always there. That one street B, that’s what I would call it.
John: Last bit I’ll say is that really great production design, and I think the point I was trying to get to in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that it’s specific and that it feels specific to the needs of the scene and who that character is who would live in that space. That is the right instinct. The only danger is sometimes they can spend so much effort to create a character that doesn’t exist or doesn’t sort of mean anything, that you’ve wasted some time.
I would always prefer a specific place rather than a place that is just looks cool and doesn’t actually resonate, doesn’t tell me anything about who the people are who live and work in that space. Ruta, thank you so much for your question.
Craig: Great question.
Ruta: Thank you so much. I love your podcast.
Craig: Oh, thanks. Thank you.
Drew: Next up, we have Caroline.
Craig: Caroline.
*Caroline:* Hello, long-time listener. I guess since 2020, really.
Craig: That’s a while.
Caroline: Yes, I guess I’ve been doing a lot longer. My question is a bit existential. It’s what do you think of people that leave the film industry? I’ve been working in it for almost 10 years and have found it to be quite detrimental to my mental health and with the lack of routine, low pay, long hours, high-stress environments, slimy, unprofessional producers. I work in posts. I have kept plugging away for the next gig, hoping it’ll be better, but I’m just not sure if it makes sense to keep going on the roller coaster that is having a job in film.
I’m sort of damned if I do. Have you ever had your own doubts about the longevity of having a career in this industry, and how do I work smarter and not harder in this line of work? How do you rationalize it all?
John: Oh, Caroline.
Craig: Ooh, I said brief question. The answer is no, yes, maybe three. The answer is three.
John: First off, this resonates with me because I’ve just been having this conversation so many times over the last few years with people who are like, “I don’t know whether to stay or to go, whether to, what actually makes sense.” What I like about your question is you are trying to face this honestly and look at what is best for you in this moment and what is best for you long-term. You aren’t making assumptions about how things are going to shape up and how it’s all going to be like, that you’re one job away from everything being perfect.
I love working in the film industry, but the film industry and the television industry can suck. Your job is not who you are. Your job shouldn’t be your identity. It sounds like you have other things that probably are considering, at least for what you would do if you weren’t going to do post. It’s worth taking those things seriously. We don’t know what the future is going to hold, but if you’re relatively young in this industry, you’ve been doing this for a while, it’s okay to leave if you decide you want to leave.
You don’t need my permission or Craig’s permission or anybody’s permission, but you need to be able to feel okay about going on because it doesn’t mean that you failed. It means that you recognize it wasn’t for you if that’s a choice you decide to make. Craig?
Craig: Yes, the very first question you ask is, what do you think about people that lead?
John: Hear us. Yes.
Craig: No problem. There’s no judgment whatsoever. The same way I feel about people that were in real estate and decided to make a switch, also. It’s whatever’s– This isn’t like, “Oh my God, she couldn’t hack it.” She couldn’t hack it, would be a thing if you were trying to be a Navy SEAL, I guess?
John: Yes.
Craig: No. This is a business like any other. John’s absolutely right. You can transition to something else whenever you want, as you wish, but I can tell that you– Well, I can’t tell. I suspect that you don’t want to. I suspect that you would like to stay. I suspect that you love it. I suspect that the problem you’re dealing with is the frustration of not being able to do the thing you love in a way that feels good.
We’ve been there, all of us, every single person who does this. That’s in different ways. We have all gotten it in different ways. There’s ways that the business treats you poorly because of your gender or your race. I always like to say like, and then underneath that, because you’re there. A lot of people will just treat you bad because you’re there, which is brutal.
Show business is one of the few things that people are so passionate about, they are willing to bear an enormous amount of bad behavior in order to keep going. What I think is important is that you’ve identified that you have a limit. Setting up boundaries is important. If in your mind, you’re giving yourself permission to go, you will immediately feel quite a bit freer.
See, one of the problems is when we feel trapped, that’s when we feel powerless. You’re not trapped, ever. You can get up and go. Yes, it may mean that you’re not able to do the thing that you really want to do, but you might find that just knowing you can get up and go will give you a little bit more confidence to go, “I’m good at my job. I love being here. This is my boundary.”
What the bullies know is that there are systems in place to keep them from bullying. Those are real. I think you should take advantage of those if those moments come. The difficulty of getting work, that is the cross we bear.
John: Yes, that’s the structural problem of what we’re in.
Craig: That is. I wish I could tell you that there was a moment or an event or a thing where you will wake up one day and go, “Oh, I’m in this business now forever. They’ll never let me go,” which is what happens when you’re good at what you do and you get to that place where suddenly they realize it.
The most frustrating thing is you were you all along. You’re just waiting for them to flip their own switch to get it. In your circumstance, with my guess, I would say don’t quit yet. I feel like you don’t want to. Give it a go as best you can with your boundaries firmly in place. If that doesn’t work, then you know what? There is an unfelt joy that is waiting for you in something else. I do not believe we are meant for one thing in this world.
John: Caroline, one of the things that this is reminding me of is that there’s so many books about, oh, transitioning careers, or moving from this job to that job. They are always focusing on people who show up and go to work at a normal job.
The things that we do, which is scape work and we are imposed or us as writers, piecing together a bunch of different things to create enough of a career, is just so challenging and so different. If you decide that you love this work in post, but you don’t love going gig to gig to gig, it may be worth looking for, like, what are the positions that let you do the things you love that are more like a job rather than this?
You can actually not have to stress about the next gig, the next gig, the next gig. Working at a post house or a place that is like a longer-running thing, so you’re not constantly seeking the next thing, might feel better. I think Craig’s advice, on the whole, I think is really good. Is this resonating with you? Is this helpful at all?
Caroline: Yes, it’s a bit heavier than the other questions. It’s almost quite spiritual in a way, to have to think about this like existential question and to really just be in touch with myself and know what I need.
John: Yes, and listen, there aren’t great career coaches for stuff like this. There’s not an industry for that. I think just having a structured conversation with somebody about, these are my priorities and these are what I’m setting as my boundaries might also be helpful too.
If you can find somebody like that, it could just be a friend, but it’s where you both hold each other accountable for like, these are my red lines, these are the choices I want to make, that could help you as well.
Caroline: Totally.
John: Caroline, thank you so much.
Craig: Hang in there, Caroline.
John: Drew, let’s do one more question, and then we’ll save these other questions for the bonus segment.
Drew: Sounds good. Let’s do– This next question is from Sarah.
Craig: Do you think it’s going to be Sarah with an A or an H? Quick guess– Oh, too late, it’s H. Oh, it could be either. This could be Sarah Hadelman, or it could be Sarah Adelman. I think it’s Sarah Adelman.
Sarah Adelman: You’re correct. Jew, H, you got to go do it.
Craig: Jew.
Sarah: Yes.
Craig: Jew knows Jew. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to our live show. What question can we try to answer for you today?
Sarah: Sure. I’m Sarah. I’m a stand-up comedian and writer, and I finally sent my first feature script to my lit manager, and she gave me really helpful notes. One of the biggest ones will require redeveloping the male love interest for my female lead.
I originally wrote him as a super naive, big-eyed guy from the Midwest who’s intimidated by my spunky female girl. She has suggested that I change him to be a little cooler so we can root for him, a little less pathetic, for lack of a better term. I really want to make this change, but I’ve lived with this man in my head for a year as I wrote the script.
Should I give him a new name and just totally rewrite him? How do I let go of the original person? How do I make sure that I’m not just adding new traits to someone who already existed, so it becomes like a caricature? How do I deal with that I’m going to miss him even though I want him?
John: Who gave you this note? Was it your agent, you said?
Craig: Literary manager.
John: Manager?
Craig: Yes.
Sarah: Sorry, Craig.
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes, it’s okay.
John: You know where this is going?
Sarah: I know. I love her.
John: Fire the manager.
Craig: No, you don’t have to fire her.
John: Sarah, you think this note is actually the right note for the script. You think it actually will improve the script. That’s all that matters. No matter where it came from. She thinks it’s the right choice for it.
My instinct, Craig, is she needs to rename the character because otherwise she’s going to try to be gluing things onto the existing character that she already wrote. I think she needs to create a clean space in her head for who this new character is. What’s your instinct?
Craig: There’s something about this character that matters to you. There was something about this character that made him your instinct to pair with her. There’s something about her, therefore, that is relevant here. Get to that. Figure out what that is. That something, hopefully, you can preserve. Also, you don’t need to say goodbye to this guy. You’re making a new guy. What’s this character’s name currently?
Sarah: Milo.
Craig: Milo. Let’s say you’re going to make a new character called Adam. Your female lead, her name is?
Sarah: Katerina.
Craig: Katerina goes over to Adam’s house, and he’s just got to go quickly deal with his idiot brother, Milo, who’s there, and who they can talk about and who may– You know what I’m saying? He doesn’t have to go away. If there’s value to him there, then keep it.
I guess that’s really what I’m getting to, is don’t ignore what your instincts were. They were your instincts for a reason. Follow that thread as you do, but also then really do think, hey, who is this other guy, and how can I get as attached to him and as protective of him because of the way his purpose interacts with hers?
John: My suspicion, though, is, Sarah, you will fall in love with this new guy, too. The old guy’s like, oh yes, I learned a lot from him, but this is the right guy to be in this movie relationship now. I think it’s a really smart question, though, because it shows that you’re thinking about what your intentions are, but you’re also thinking about what’s actually working.
That’s the crucial cycle that we’re going through is rewriting it’s really recognizing what worked, what didn’t work, and how to move forward, and not being too precious about the things you loved. Good luck.
Sarah: Thanks, guys.
John: You got this.
Sarah: I love you.
Craig: Thanks.
Sarah: I really love you.
Craig: We love you too.
John: Thank you. Big hugs. All right. My one cool thing is a thing that’s going to seem so obvious, but for folks who are not working in the film industry or theater, you might not know about spike tape. I want to sing the praises of spike tape. Spike tape are these little narrow colored tapes. We use them on film sets and on stage to mark where things belong on stage or on the set.
It could be actors’ marks. It could be where things are placed. You put it down, you take it up. It’s a really stiff tape. It doesn’t leave bad marks, but have some of these around the house because there are things you want to label.
We just did it for, we’re repainting and redoing a bunch of the windows. That’s the noise you hear in the background. We marked this purple tape is for the screens to go in these places. It’s just useful when you need to identify things, and you can write on it. It’s smart stuff. It’s a spike tape. It’s just delightful. You will find yourself using it all the time.
Craig: I had no idea that was– I just called it marking tape because the AC would just come with this marking tape to mark stuff.
John: I’ve always called it spike tape.
Craig: Spike tape.
John: I find it just incredibly useful. I love it.
Stuart: A store on Magnolia and Burbank that has the rainbow of every imaginable color.
John: That’s what you want. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the cheapo Amazon version. I love– God, Megan, I remember when we went to the– We had to get a special light for one of our live shows.
We had to go set up an account to get a light for one of our live shows. It was so fun to be in a place that just had like all the film stuff you could ever want. It’s so great. All the supplies.
Craig, what’s your one cool thing?
Craig: My one cool thing this week is Bridge Base Online. I don’t know if any of you play Bridge.
John: I don’t. Tell us about Bridge Base.
Craig: I’ve played Bridge in the past, and I loved it. My wife and I would play with her parents. We can’t play with them anymore because they’re dead.
John: Yes, it’s hard.
Craig: It just doesn’t work well. They were great Bridge players. They were competitive Bridge players in New York in the 60s, like ranked and everything. They were really good. Melissa and I were more like, we learned in college, and we would play. There was like a bunch of people in our little eating clubs, which is a stupid Princeton term, that we’d play Bridge.
I played easy Bridge. I learned quite a bit playing with my in-laws. Melissa and I haven’t played forever. The thing about Bridge is you need four people. It is a fantastic game. It’s a game that is very simple to understand in terms of the rules, but all the complexity and joy is in the bidding and the strategy.
There is a website called Bridge Base Online that is just this massive venue for, you can play against the computer, you can play 1,000 hands, you can do practice sessions, you can learn bidding conventions. You can also play pickup games with about 14 trillion people. The reason I started looking back at this is because Melissa’s been playing a lot herself on her phone.
Then our friend, Dave Shukan, who I’ve mentioned before on the podcast, puzzle master, lawyer extraordinaire, and exceptional bridge player, no surprise, had been talking to us. He’s been playing quite a bit himself. If you are interested in learning how to play Bridge, or you just feel like doing a little solo practice, bridgebase.com.
John: I love it.
Craig: Yes.
John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced, as always, by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Oh, thank you, Matthew Chilelli, right there. Matthew, for this week’s outro, pick one of your favorite ones from the past, one of the ones you’ve done, and let’s play that again.
Craig: One of yours.
John: One of yours. It has to be one of yours.
Craig: Yours.
John: If you have an outro, you can send a link, blah– See, that’s what I did.
Craig: See, that’s it.
John: Blah, blah.
Craig: That was it.
John: That’s what I did.
Craig: I’m so glad it happened.
John: It happened live. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about in today’s episode. With the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber.
Oh my gosh, thank you to all our premium subscribers. We sent out the notice to them about this live show. Drew, how many questions did we get in from those?
Drew: Hundreds of questions. I woke up with hundreds in my inbox. They were all great. It was so hard to pick.
John: Yes.
Craig: Oh, at least one of them was bad.
Drew: Not a single one.
Craig: Mmm-hmm.
Drew: Mmm-hmm.
John: We’re going to be answering a few more of those live in the bonus segment for premium members. We’re also holding on to those questions because so many of them were so good, we’ll save them for future episodes.
The one coolest thing, so at least four of the coolest things are already on this Zoom right now, which are our previous Scriptnotes producers and our editor, Matthew Chilelli. Megana Rao, Megan McDonald, Stuart Friedel, Matthew Chilelli. Thank you so much for all your hard work on this.
Drew, thank you so much for your hard work every week on this show. You guys are the best. Thank you everybody who watched us live on YouTube. That’s so exciting. Bye, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Let’s answer another question, if we can.
Craig: Yes.
Drew: Okay. We have Ben Adams coming up.
John: What a great name. Ben Adams.
Craig: Ben Adams.
John: It feels like a founding father, a merged founding father.
Craig: Founding father’s ne’er-do-well brother.
John: That’s what it is.
Ben Adams: That’s exactly right. Funny, because I always get picked for jury duty with that name, because I’m like a founding father’s name.
John: Yes. That’s good stuff.
Craig: I’d pick you.
John: Ben, what kind of question might we be able to answer for you today?
Ben: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m so thrilled. My question is, a little preface here, I’m going to be shooting a short film rom-com next month with some friends. My script, I feel like, is ready, but I keep hearing things about having alt lines or alternative lines on set.
I have so little experience with that, and so I want to know how many alt lines are good to have for jokes. How many is too many? I want to give my actors room to improvise, but at the same time not lose the meaning of the scene. I just am trying to figure out a good middle ground of how many to have on set.
John: That’s a great question. We had Brittany Nichols on the show a while back, and she was talking about Abbott Elementary. They do come to set with like a whole series of alt lines they’ll go after they’ve gotten through a take, and they’ll practice other things for specific stuff to replace.
I think it’s good for you to have those in your back pocket. I wouldn’t share them with your actors ahead of time. I would say really look at what’s happening in front of the lens in the moment before you change setups, and then see what feels good to explore.
That’s a chance for you to, okay, here are some things I’m thinking. Let’s see if any of these work or land, and then that opens the door for them to try some different things themselves, in the Apatow sense of, you shoot a couple clean and then you get messy. Craig, what’s been your experience with alt lines?
Craig: Never wrote them for the comedies. When I was working, like for instance, on the Hangover movies, Todd and I would write the lines we wanted to hear. Then on the day, first of all, you’re going to have funny actors, and you’re also going to feel things, right?
You may feel in the moment like, eh, it’s not quite working, is it? Then you just do a little powwow. What would be better? Or why don’t we try this? Why don’t we try that? An actor may just toss something out in the moment. You’re like, “Ooh, that was great.”
Todd and I used to have Zach Galifianakis repeatedly would come up with the best lines after we had turned around and the camera wasn’t on him, and we’re like, “Zach, got to go do this, too, when the lens is pointing at you.”
Also, a guy like Zach, it’s every take, he could have a new line that’s amazing. You find those there. There’s something that is so wonderfully spontaneous about those. If you prepare them– First of all, you’re inviting people to go, “Well, I don’t want to say this, but I will say that.” Remember also, lines interact.
John: Yes, totally.
Craig: If somebody is going to get an alt here, the response is going to be different. We would let that happen on the day.
John: Here’s what I think, going back to the Abbott Elementary example, when she has alts for things, when a person has a funny name for a thing or a funny thing they call the other person, having alts for that snipers those comments, because then, it’s not inviting a different response back on the other side.
It’s a little more clean. You can see what works. I would say on your list of priorities for what you should be thinking about going into this rom-com shoot, it’s pretty low on that list of priorities. Really think about all the other stuff and making sure that you have all the materials to make the best possible scene.
Craig: Agreed.
Ben: I have my shot list, my storyboards, my script. I have all my actors, and everyone agreed to do it for zero dollars, which is great. I have good friends. I called in all my favors. Really quickly, I invited my friend, Tom, who’s now a SAG actor. He was starring it, but he’s like, “Sorry, you got to pay me now.” I go, “Oh, do you still want to come on set and be funny?” He goes, “Sure.” He’s going to maybe help me riff. Do you recommend that? Is that cool?
John: There are people who that works out great for. Behind the scenes on a lot of the Apatow movies, they were just finding people around who just did stuff. If your friend’s helping you, great. If you’re finding it’s not actually helping and it’s slowing stuff down, you can send your friend away, or you can go grab pizza or something.
Craig: That said, ethical point of view, if he’s in the Writer’s Guild, no. If you’re a Writer’s Guild member, you can’t work for free. You can’t work for free.
Ben: Okay. Got it. Yes. As far as I know, he’s not. He just got his SAG card, and this was like– We were talking about doing it together. Then he said, “Hey, sorry, I got this feature,” and I’m like, “Oh, okay, cool. Let’s do it right.” I’m still figuring that out because I’m new. Thank you all so much. This was such a thrill. This kind of thing makes me a guest, right?
John: Yes, you’re now a guest on Scriptnotes.
Craig: Yes.
Ben: All right. Thanks, all. Appreciate you.
Drew: Two more. Next one is from Katie. Hello, Katie.
*Katie:* Hello. Hi. Thank you guys for having me on.
John: Thank you very much for coming on and for waiting to ask your question. What can we help you with?
Katie: I was wondering, how do you guys, with your fingers in so many pies being projects at once, how do you handle working on multiple projects? Whether you have something that you’re pitching while you’re working on something being developed while you also are in production or even distribution on another project, how do you find brain space to not forget about one?
John: It’s a great question. Increasingly, I’ve had a bunch of stuff recently that I’ve had to. On a given day, I may be pitching on one project, having a meeting about a different project, and writing the other thing that I’m writing. It can be tough to switch gears, except they’re all in clean lanes.
I try to prioritize, this is the thing I’m writing, I need to block out this time to actually do productive work. The stuff that I’m pitching on or meeting on, I find in the half hour before thing, I can get my brain back up to speed on what that thing is. I’ll go back through the notes, find the stuff, and get myself there.
I’ve said this on the podcast many times, I’m sure, over the years, but with a new project, I’ll try to make myself a playlist in music for, like, these are the songs that remind me about it. Sometimes playing that will also get me back in the mood for something.
There’s times where it’ll be like two months since I’ve thought about this thing. Hearing those tracks gets me excited about it again and reminds me like, “Oh, that’s right, this is what this project feels like.” Craig, you’ve had to do this.
Craig: Sure. There are some people who really are producers at heart, and they love working on lots of things at once, because there is an entrepreneurial aspect to their character. There are other people who are a bit more monk-like, I think.
John: I think you’re monk-like, I’m more produce-y, yes.
Craig: Yes. I’m a full focus-on-a-thing guy. I do still– There are things that I help develop with other writers and filmmakers. When it comes to what I’m doing, I can write one thing at a time, really, because I put everything of myself in it, 100%, all the way tunnel vision-y. That’s just one of the ways that our mental architecture is expressed, and everybody’s is different.
If you find yourself really struggling to do that, it may just be that your brain is attuned to the narrow lane. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just follow the path of least resistance because it’s hard enough. Why make it harder by moving against? If you’re a righty, don’t throw a ball with your left hand.
John: It’s such good general advice, is so much of this is recognizing what are your patterns and not trying to label those as bad habits or something like, no, this is just how stuff works for me. The first couple of projects you’re writing, you’re still learning what actually works for you.
Sure, try some different things, see what– Maybe you write first thing in the morning, maybe you write last thing at night. Maybe you are a person who can juggle a bunch of different stuff, and you enjoy that. The cross-pollination between the things is helpful for you or it’s not. If you recognize what works for you, then you can really pursue that.
Katie: Awesome, thank you guys.
John: Katie, thank you so much for the question.
Katie: As a Tallahassee native, love it being thrown out there. Thank you, Craig.
Craig: Felt good, felt good.
John: All right, last up, we have Kathleen, yes.
Craig: With a K.
John: It is with a K. It’s very rare to see a Kathleen with a C. It’s not impossible, but I’ve seen very few.
Craig: Yes, there’s not a lot of Cathies. Kathy, you’ll see.
John: Kathy, a lot, for sure.
Craig: Yes, but no, Kathleen, I agree.
John: Hello, Kathleen with a K.
Craig: Hi, Kathleen with a K.
Kathleen: Hello from the Jersey Shore.
Craig: Hey, what part, where?
Kathleen: I’m in Ocean City right now, but–
Craig: Nice.
Kathleen: Yes.
Craig: Freehold.
Kathleen: Thank you, guys. I’m a longtime fan of the show.
John: We really appreciate you being here. Thank you for joining us.
Kathleen: Thank you for having me, John. I appreciate it. This is a question I have about options. I’m a novelist. I’m not a bestseller. I’ve had a couple of projects optioned in the past. I never expect anything to get made. I’m just happy to have interest from Hollywood. My last project was optioned in 2022 for about two years.
Then, around the same time, Netflix was developing pretty much a very similar show over the same period of time. It came out last month. It was our number one show. It’s already renewed for a second season. Then I was told by people in the industry this happens all the time.
I know ideas are not copyrightable. I’ve heard that from you guys many times, and I’m totally in agreement with that. I guess I’m wondering, do studios option projects just to kill them if they’re very similar? Is there a line that’s crossed?
Craig: Not really.
Kathleen: Is it–? Not really.
Craig: Not really.
John: No. It’s not one of those sorts of like catch and kill situations with like sexual harassment lawsuits or anything like that. It’s not like, “Oh, that’s the thing out there. Let’s take that off the market.” I genuinely believe that does not happen at all.
In your situation, I think one of the things that is exciting is that you wrote a book that’s like, “Oh yes, that should be a series.” Everyone’s like, “Yes, that should be a series.” There’s now evidence that would be a great series. It may mean that what happened was too close to this other hit series that people aren’t going to want to adapt your book.
I got to feel like it helps put you on the radar. I don’t know whether your Goodreads reviewers and folks who are enjoying your book are pointing out that this book existed before this, and it was effing great. People should read this if they want a book in the same spirit. I would take it as a win if you can find a way to take that as a win.
Kathleen: Yes, I think I’m trying. I think it’s my family and friends who are watching it and saying, “This is so close, this is pretty much your book.” Then they’re saying, “If you litigate, that costs so much money. Do you reach out and just say, what’s the deal here?” It’s always my time to sit back and do nothing, but–
Craig: Of course, we have to guard against, a sense of passivity or doormatism. We don’t want to be a doormat. I don’t know the book, and I don’t know the series. We don’t know the details. All I can tell you is that, no, Hollywood generally does not option material to not make it, or because it’s too close to something else.
They’re not worried about something that’s too close when it’s fiction in particular. There’s already been something that’s been a series like that seven years ago, and there’s going to be another one eight years from now. The similarities will occur, particularly if you’re writing in a genre space.
Yes, family and friends who love you have a focus bias because they’ve read the book carefully, and now they’re looking for comparisons, and they will find them. When you read a lot of the lawsuits that get filed, it does consist of a lot of like. “This is almost the same. All they changed was this or this,” which you can do.
I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t seek legal advice. Since you’re asking what our instinct is, our instinct is almost always no, that people are not looking to steal your book at all. Was it the same producer that optioned the book and made the show?
Kathleen: It’s the same studio, so it was under.
Craig: In particular, if it’s Netflix, they make 14 million shows. There’s probably 12 other novelists who are like, “Hey, you know, that’s not–”
John: Kathleen, I want to focus on this win you have. I bet there’s a bunch of people who’ve written books who are like, “Wait, she’s had multiple things optioned? I’ve never had anything optioned. That seems pretty great.” What have been your conversations with those producers?
I have to feel like they must feel some validation of, not only was our instinct right that this was a good thing, I want to see what her next thing is. Second question is, they optioned it, but was there ever a script? Where did it get to? Were there other writers? What happened on that front?
Craig: Yes. Was there a script?
Kathleen: There was a script. I opted not to be involved in writing the script because I don’t like to get in the way of something being adapted. I was like, if it’s going to get made, then I’ll stay out of the way. There was a script. There was a team attached to it. There was a showrunner.
John: Oh, so, Lord, they did not kill it. They spent some serious money. I’m sure those people are all heartbroken, too, that the series didn’t move forward. No, they were intending to make that show.
Craig: Yes. If, for instance, they optioned a novel for a low amount of money. Let’s say they get away with like, hey, what, we’re making a show, but there’s this other novel out there, and you said it wasn’t a bestseller.
Right off the bat, if it were a bestseller, maybe they’re like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to go get that out of the way.” Then they would have to spend a lot of money on the rights alone. For something that’s a smaller amount, why would they spend a dollar more?
John: Here’s the scenario that I feel is plausible, is that we want to make a movie in this space. They’ve read your book, and they’ve read something else, or whatever the other project was. Let’s get some R&D, basically, and do this stuff.
They’re like, “Okay, we have two things we can do. Which of these two things are we going to do? Who do we like the elements of better? Which one has more momentum?” That’s the one they picked. It sucks when it’s not yours, but you’re talking to two folks on this podcast who’ve had 60 movies not made. We can tell you that it’s par for the course.
Craig: There was a WGA writer writing a script. The WGA also is careful about chain of title. For instance, if there were some sort of co-mingling or shenanigans, then the Writers Guild, the writer of that script, based on your novel, would be like, “Excuse me, you guys took my stuff, clearly.” Then the Writers Guild would say, “Yes, you guys have co-mingled two chains of title, and now you have to deal with credit issues.”
John: The producers who are different producers would also be fighting over that. It would be a bigger mess.
Craig: Everybody would be fighting.
John: Yes, it wouldn’t just be your fight.
Craig: Yes. I think you can tell your family and friends, “Thank you, I love you, I appreciate you guys looking out for me.” It sometimes feels worse when people are trying to convince you that you’ve been done dirty.
John: Yes.
Craig: You can start to feel like a doormat. You’re not. You’re a professional. You went through a professional process. The outcome that occurred is common. You keep moving forward. Your job is to write books.
John: Yes.
Craig: Not to dwell. You keep writing books.
John: Kathleen, it’s a great question. I’m really glad we sort of had this discussion on it. It was great. Congratulations. It’s–
Craig: For real.
John: I’m not just waving it away. For any novelist to get their feelings, not just optioned, but they went and hired people and got a script, and they got a show together, that’s really far down the process and the pike, and will set you up for the next time because I think you’re on more people’s radar because that book went that far.
Kathleen: Okay. That makes me feel better. Thank you.
Craig: Good. Good.
John: Thank you all. Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you, everybody who listened to the live stream. This was really fun.
Craig: -and watched.
John: and watched, and watched. Drew, thank you for putting this together. This was a lot of new, first-time things for you, so thank you for doing it.
Drew: Thank you, guys.
Craig: Nailed it.
John: Nailed it. This was really fun.
Drew: Thank you.
John: Last time we tried to do this in 2020, man, it was a scramble. This felt really good.
Craig: This was great. We’ll do it in episode 1400.
John: Yes. Perfect. Established. Whoever’s taking notes–
Craig: I’ll be so withered.
John: You’ll be at Harris with a cryptkeeper.
Craig: I could theoretically do it.
John: You could totally do it. Honestly, either one of us could do it. We just need to get the wig appliance.
Craig: Actually, you can do it. I think your hair–
John: I got that base.
Drew: It would work.
Craig: Your hair grows straight.
John: Yes, it does grow straight. It’s true.
Craig: I would just get some sort of curly. It would be very Hasidic.
John: Yes. All right, guys. Thank you both. Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Watch episode 700 on YouTube!
- Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonell, and Megana Rao
- Weapons
- The Hunting Wives on Netflix
- Vince Gilligan YouTube video
- Our Back to School collection on Weekend Read
- Play along with People, Places and Things: Woman one, woman two, man one, kid duo, oceanside, house, and city.
- Scriptnotes Episode 399: Notes on Notes
- Spike tape
- Bridge Base Online
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 700: The Live Call-In Show, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig ask, how do you keep your period films from being a boring history lesson? They offer ten tips to keep your setting from taking over your story, defining the scope of your research, and how to balance the reality of the era with what’s relevant to audiences today.
We also follow up on navigating industry connections and answer three period-appropriate listener questions on transitions across time, accurate dialogue, and how to handle historical sensitivities on the page.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig get into some toil and trouble as they give their rankings of the most iconic witches.
Links:
- Apply for a student license for Highland Pro!
- Interested in being our new UI/UX designer? More info here!
- Mel Gibson rant at Joe Eszterhas caught on tape by Ben Child for The Guardian
- Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft
- Episode 314: Unforgiven
- Episode 674: The One vvith Robert Eggers
- Marielle Heller’s Episode 212 and Episode 394
- Standard Thermal (And a summary by CEO Austin Vernon)
- Panthalassa
- The Concept C Is the All-Electric Sports Car Kick-Starting Audi’s Design Future by Jason Barlow for Wired
- Countdown on Amazon Prime Video
- Rank these iconic witches!
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Whit Morliss (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Getting Period Right first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back producer Megana Rao, who has a question: how do you polish a script before sending it out? From obvious things like typos and title pages to tougher choices like cutting and transitions, they look at what to consider on a final pass so you can email your script with confidence.
Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at three listener-submitted scripts to offer our honest feedback on what’s working and what could use another pass. We also follow-up on advice for general meetings.
In our bonus segment for premium members, what makes a great score? We look at the function of the soundtrack for feature films and how to work with composers.
Links:
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge selections! The Thin Place – “Pilot” by Katie Seward, Sunset Paycheck by Holden Potter, and Levelling Up by Sylvia-Anne Parker
- Submit to the next Three Page Challenge
- Megana Rao on Instagram and X
- Fixed-do vs. movable do solfège
- How to Tell if Something is AI-Written by Hollis Robbins
- Mark Halpin 2025 Labor Day Extravaganza
- Pageant of the Masters
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Last Looks first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Episode 649 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, which ideas are inherently funny? We’ll discuss what makes a comedic premise and how you develop and execute upon that idea. To do that, we have a very special guest. But first, Drew, we have some news and some follow-up.
Drew Marquardt: We do. We’ve talked about the quest to make a Harry Potter series, and the uncomfortably public search for a showrunner.
John: As a reminder, they said, “Oh, we’re gonna make a Harry Potter series and we’re gonna go through a series of rounds of different writers who might become the showrunner. It got kind of public in a way that made me feel eugh.
Drew: It was a bake-off, right?
John: Yeah.
Drew: We have news that Warners has made their pick. It’s Francesca Gardiner of Succession along with director Mark Mylod, who also did Succession and Game of Thrones and The Last of Us and all sorts of stuff. They seem like a really good team to do that. I would say going into this, I was skeptical that anybody would want to step up to do this, especially in the bake-offy situation, but it looks like they ended up with some really talented people. I wish them luck. I think it’s gonna be a hard road ahead, but we’ll see what they’re able to make. That Harry Potter series will eventually probably come to your screens.
Second bit of news is very, very local here. For the last 20 years I’ve had this blog, johnaugust.com, that we reference every week. One of the things I’ve done on the blog over the years is have these little short snippets of scripts in there as examples, for like, here’s an example of dialogue, here’s what this looks like. They’re just these little boxes that show a little bit of screenplay format. To do that, we created this thing called Scrippets, which Nima Yousefi, who works for us, initially created. It’s super useful. It’s a plugin that you can install through WordPress. It’s been really great and useful.
The trouble is time moves on, and the plugin is no longer working well under the most recent versions of WordPress. Somebody out there listening probably does this for a living or as a hobby and has created WordPress plugins. If you are that person and you would like to step in and update this plugin for us, that would be fantastic. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who knows what they’re doing and could get this working. Scrippets, by the way, became the whole basis for plain text screenwriting. It has a long legacy, so you would be helping continue that legacy. If you’re that person and you want to help us out, just email Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and he will be the person who can point you in the right direction.
With that done, it’s time for our main guest. Simon Rich is a writer and showrunner who created the series Miracle Workers and Man Seeking Woman and the film American Pickle. He’s also an author, who’s written novels and short story collections, such as Spoiled Brats, Hits and Misses, and New Teeth. His new book, Glory Days, is out July 23rd. Welcome to the program, Simon Rich.
Simon Rich: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
John: You have twice been my One Cool Thing, although Craig’s read your books and liked them too. Way back in Episode 179, which was the conflict episode, I talked about Spoiled Brats. In particular, one of my favorite short stories of all times is Gifted, a thing that I probably go back and read every year or two. I think it’s just such a brilliant short story.
Simon: Thank you so much. It really means a lot to me. Big fan of this show and a fan of your writing. It’s just thrilling to hear that the work resonates with you, truly.
John: For folks who have not read Gifted, the premise of it is that essentially this couple gives birth to what’s clearly the antichrist, clearly a demonic creature, and they’re so obsessed with getting it into the best private schools in New York City. I want to talk about the comedic premise and how we get into all that and why it’s a short story versus something else. But before we do that, I’d love some background on you, because I know you from your writing, but I don’t know basically anything about you. If you can tell us the backstory of Simon Rich.
Simon: The backstory, I grew up definitely obsessed with comedy, for sure. I would say particularly premise-driven, absurdist sketch comedy, Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, The State, the chunk of SNL that was after Update where you were allowed to be a little bit more serial. I was also really obsessed with premise-driven genre fiction.
As much as I loved Kids in the Hall, I was equally obsessed with people like Richard Matheson or Stephen King or Bradbury or Philip Dick, Shirley Jackson, just anyone who would hook you at the end of the first page and make you keep reading. I was really always thinking of writing through the lens of what is a premise, what is a hook that I can generate that is strong enough to get people to keep turning the pages.
John: That’s great. What were the initial things you actually wrote? Were you in a stand-up group? What were the ways you were exploring this idea, like, “Here is the premise. Here is how we hook people in.”
Simon: My first book, which was called Ant Farm, it was a collection of short stories that were so short that they basically don’t even have narrative. Each piece is basically a premise, and then it ends before it’s developed in any way. That was pieces I’d written for The New Yorker and other magazines.
Basically, it wasn’t really until I got to Pixar – I was a staff writer at Pixar and I worked for Pete Docter writing on Inside Out. It wasn’t until I got there that I really started to think more in terms of narrative and storytelling. I kept being obsessed with premises, but that’s when my writing veered more into a traditional narrative space.
John: Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I definitely want to talk about magazine writing and your short stories in magazines, because I really have no idea how that whole world works. Clearly, that was a great entrée for you. But let’s get to Pixar. Was that your first time being a professional staff writer where you were going in to do a job and your job was to write funny stuff?
Simon: No, my first job was at Saturday Night Live.
John: I’ve heard of Saturday Night Live. It’s a show. For people who don’t know, it’s a very successful comedy program.
Simon: My first book had come out. Like I said, it was just a list of premises, and so SNL was a pretty good fit. I never had to really learn any narrative tools, because a lot of the sketches at the time just ended with everybody jumping out of a window. We literally got a warning once – or not a warning, but a very polite request from Seth Meyers, as one of the head writers, just asking us if we could, just for fun, have a week where no sketch ended with every character jumping through a plate glass window while a random ‘80s song played, because that was our go-to sketch out. It was just starting to get on everyone’s nerves.
It wasn’t really a story-centric show. That show was all about how do we get people to laugh by any means necessary. I learned so much about comedy and premise writing and dialogue there. I was there for four years. Then it wasn’t until I got to Pixar that I started to actually think about, what is this three-act thing.
John: Because this is a show that’s largely listened to by aspiring writers, they want to know how do you get hired into Saturday Night Live. Obviously, at this point you had Ant Farm. People could read that as a sample that, “Oh, this is a guy who understands what a joke is. He understands what a premise is.” But were you also submitting a packet? What was the process of getting hired at Saturday Night Live?
Simon: I had no packet. I had Harvard Lampoon. Colin Jost was two years ahead of me. I think he just handed my book to Seth and said basically, “I think you should read this and give this writer consideration.” I wasn’t really thinking about getting into TV and film at the time. I was a magazine writer at that point. I had another book that I was working on. I don’t think I had a television agent at the time. I had a book agent. I fell into it, but I’m really grateful that Colin thought of me for the show.
John: what I love about your description of your backstory in your biography is that you keep omitting things that were clearly important steppingstones along the way, like Harvard Lampoon. Harvard Lampoon is of course a great classic training ground for comedy writers. A lot of Saturday Night Live writers, a lot of Simpsons writers came out of Lampoon. Talk to us about – did you go into Harvard thinking, “Oh, this is a place I want to find myself.”
Simon: I went in desperate to write for the Harvard Lampoon, desperate to get better at writing. But I did really want to be a short story writer. It’s such a strange ambition.
John: Talk to me about that. Who are the short story writers that were inspiring you to say, “This is my calling.”
Simon: I would say when I was 18 years old, the writer that I was probably most obsessed with was TC Boyle, whose work has been adapted into a lot of films. Probably the people listening know Road to Wellville is one of them. But TC Boyle is this extremely funny, premise-driven writer. He’s written a lot of historical novels, but his short stories to me were just mind-boggling in terms of how original they were, how funny they were, and how had they incorporated various genres. He was never tethered to a specific genre. He was willing to write a Sherlock Holmes-inspired story and then go straight into a Western. He was a huge idol of mine. I remember going into one of his readings freshman year and just being too afraid to even meet him afterwards. That’s really what I wanted to be.
I would send my stories to every magazine on earth. There were a lot more magazines back then. The way that you would submit – it was before online submissions, actually, when I started. You would send a self-addressed stamped envelope along with your story, because the magazines were too cheap to mail you back. You would send your little short story. Under your name at the top, you had to put how many words it was to warn them what they were getting into. I was like, “This is 7,000 words.” I always felt pressured to keep them short, because I knew if that number was too big, they might not even read the first sentence.
I would send it off to places like Playboy and Esquire. These were magazines at the time that were publishing really good fiction. The New Yorker. Then I would always put the Lampoon as my return address, because the mail was more reliable coming to our office than to the dorm rooms. Every month, everybody would watch as I would get my stack of rejection letters.
Then I eventually started to get nicer rejection letters. I remember I did get a nice rejection letter from Playboy telling me to submit more. It was awesome. A couple others where they had actually written something back, as opposed to just sending you a form letter, which is the typical response, where it’s, “Thank you so much, but we… ” I still have some of those in a drawer somewhere. Some of them were really cool looking. I think the Paris Review had a really cool letterhead. Then I started selling some pieces. The first magazine that I sold to with any kind of consistency was Mad Magazine.
John: That’s great.
Simon: Then eventually, I started to place pieces in The New Yorker. Ant Farm is a collection of my most successful stories by that age. But again, they weren’t really stories. They were just kind of comedic premises without any elaboration whatsoever.
John: Let’s talk about the comedic premise, because one of the things I love about your short stories is I think if someone just handed me a book blind and said, “Read these short stories,” like, “Oh, this is Simon Rich.” I recognize a consistency of voice, despite the genres, despite whatever else. It’s all focusing on characters who are in violation of the social contract or that they have this opportunity to break the social contract, and the repercussions there, and there’s one thing that’s tweaked about the world.
It’s a very relatable premise of, it’s a dad who’s taken his family on the train and recognizes it was a big mistake because it’s taking too long. He goes to the bathroom, and he meets the troll there who tries to con him out of… The troll is the addition to the thing that makes it just not a grounded-in-reality story.
But let’s talk about, with that story or really any of your stories, what is the comedic premise? Is the comedic premise the thing that’s different or the thing you’re actually going to be able to explore by going into that? The example I gave you is a story about what it’s actually really like to be a parent and just give in and just let your kids do what they want to do. What is the comedic premise for you in those kinds of situations? Is it’s what’s different or what you can get out of it?
Simon: I would say that there are comedic premises that are really, really funny but are not necessarily emotionally – they don’t have what I would call narrative legs necessarily. For example, when I was at SNL, I wrote a lot of sketches with John Mulaney and Marika Sawyer. John Mulaney actually reads the audio book for Glory Days. I’m supposed to plug the hard cover, because it’s more expensive, but everyone should obviously listen to this one instead.
But we wrote a sketch called Rocket Dog. The premise is that Tracy Morgan is a film director and he has directed an Air Bud style film called Rocket Dog, the inspirational story of a boy and his dog and a rocket that they fly. It becomes clear, after watching the clip based on the in-memoriam sequence that runs at the end, that many dogs died, and also some people, during the making of Rocket Dog. That’s what I would call a comedic premise, but I don’t know if that necessarily is a premise that has narrative legs. It’s a premise that can support hopefully a three-minute-and-a-half sketch.
John: Let’s talk about that, because essentially what you’re describing, that is the punchline. The premise is the punchline where you’re getting to, and you have to establish the context around it. Talk about that specific sketch. What was the initial pitch on it? What was the process of going from, “What about this sort of space?” to, “There’s now something written down. There’s something that we’re going to get approved. There’s something that we’re actually going to rehearsal.” Can you walk us through what that’s like?
Simon: The pitch is the hook. The pitch is you reveal in an in memoriam that – you show a bunch of dogs. That’s the pitch. It’s like, okay, great, that’s a strong turn, a strong comedic reveal. How do we sustain it? The answer, of course, sketch comedy rules, as we had to figure out new ways to escalate it and show multiple in memoriam sequences and make sure that we’re escalating the carnage at every turn. Also, we have to write a lot of jokes and have reaction shots from Kristen. You just kind of go through the mechanics of sketch writing.
A big important execution thing for that is what music do we play for the in-memoriam sequence. Marika Sawyer, one of the funniest people ever, wisely pointed out that it had to be a pretty uplifting, jaunty song. Otherwise, it would just be too sad to watch all of these dead dogs float by. She selected Life Is A Highway, which is just perfect. Still to this day, it’s one of my daughter’s favorite songs, actually. To this day, when it comes on our Alexa, I just think of hundreds of murdered animals.
John: That’s great. But I want to get a little more granular in terms of, okay, you have this idea. How is it written up and how is it presented to the group? How does it get approved to be in the episode of the week?
Simon: Oh, like in the process at SNL. At SNL, the writers are really allowed to write whatever they want, for better or for worse. That’s probably an idea that we had on Monday. Then on Tuesday night is when we would’ve actually written it into script form. That’s just the three of us in a room pitching jokes. Typically, we would write a long outline first. That was every single joke option in order. We had a rough shape of a sketch, but there’s many, many alts. But they’re arranged loose, chronologically. All the entrance jokes are at the top. All the premise-establishing jokes are at the top.
John: When you say writing, is this just in Word or something? What are you doing this in?
Simon: I always like to write the first outline in Word. It would always be a long Word document. Then we wouldn’t switch into script form until we basically were sick of writing jokes for it. Then it’s about just picking your lanes and reading it out loud many, many times.
We were lucky that one of us could act. That was actually really important for Mulaney to basically read all the main parts, so we could actually hear whether or not it was good, because Marika and I are not performers. If we didn’t have somebody with comedic timing, we would have to just hear it in our heads, which is not as successful a way to vent comedy. It’s better to hear somebody who’s actually funny read it.
John: Over this course of – this is Tuesday night you’re writing or Wednesday night you’re writing?
Simon: This is Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 a.m. Then you turned it in. Then Wednesday there’s this big table read where you hear cast doing it and the host doing it for the first time. Now it’s down to 40 sketches, I think, or even less. But when I was there, they would read sometimes up to 50 sketches.
John: Wow.
Simon: They would pick a dozen, and those would be fully produced, and then they would cut four during dress rehearsal on Saturday night.
John: In this Wednesday table read, so you already said Tracy Morgan will play the director. You’re already making those choices. Tracy doesn’t have time to prep it. He’s just reading it cold, right?
Simon: Right.
John: Great. Then hopefully, the sketch gets selected. You figure out how to produce it. Then you do it in the dress rehearsal. Then you see if you’re actually going to do it like for the big show. Rinse and repeat hundreds of times.
Simon: Yeah, exactly. You had everyone’s help for the rest of the week. Once the sketches are picked, you have a whole day on Thursday where you have essentially a room that is a very traditional LA style writers’ room. We had one day a week where it felt like working for a sitcom, where you come in at a normal hour, and everyone argues about what to order for lunch. You’re spending a day collectively looking at scripts, figuring out as a group how to improve it, how to pitch alts, how to make scenes more efficient. There was one day a week that felt like traditional sitcom writing feels like.
John: You have dozens of sketches you have to do, so you can’t spend the whole day working on Rocket Dog.
Simon: No, but they would split into two tables. There’d be five or six sketches maybe per room. Every eight-page script got at least an hour of attention. It always felt supported by the writers’ room.
John: Then at the end of the writers’ room day, the three of you would go back with the Rocket Dog sketch and get it into its final shooting shape? There’s obviously the rehearsal before there’s the dress, and then there’s the final show. How much would change between the rehearsal, between the dress and the final?
Simon: A lot is changing after the rewrite table, although not that much typically. I would say maybe it’s 10 or 20 percent different after a Thursday. It has to be pretty close to the goal line for them to pick it. It’s probably a new ending, definitely some improved jokes, but it’s essentially the same thing. The casting remains the same. The structure usually remains the same. Friday and Saturday you’re really mainly focused on production, like what are they wearing and approving props. At SNL, you’re approving everything, because the writers produce their own sketches at SNL.
John: Now, how many years were you working on Saturday Night Live?
Simon: Four seasons.
John: Four seasons. You went from there to go to Pixar?
Simon: Yeah, I went straight from SNL to Pixar. It was maybe a few days in between the end of the season and my first day. It was such a culture shock, because I’d literally been coming from an environment where we would spend six days making a 90-minute piece of entertainment. At Pixar, it would be 10 years to make the same number of minutes. I mainly worked on Inside Out. Just to put it into perspective, I think I was maybe the second or third writer on that. It had already been a year maybe of development before I showed up. After I was gone, it was I think five more years before it came out. It’s just absolutely glacial, especially compared to late-night television.
John: I’ve been to Pixar and on their campus. It’s such a strange place. Lovely, but super calm. They’re riding their bikes all around. I heard them say things like, “Let’s do a three-day offsite about this scene.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” That just terrifies me. They’re drilling down and being so granular on certain things. I don’t think I could survive it. But tell me about what you were doing on a daily basis. What words were you putting out?
Simon: That job, I guess I would describe it – it was a lot, I think, like being a staff writer for an animated sitcom is what I would compare it to. With the director, in this case Pete Docter, being the creator showrunner. It’s Pete’s movie. It’s Pete’s idea. It’s Pete’s vision. He’s the showrunner. Then as a staff writer, you’re working with him but also with storyboard artists and co-directors to help Pete break the story. Then I would be assigned scenes to write. It’s pretty similar to what I imagine it would be like to write for an animated sitcom.
John: At any given point, was there a fully completed script, or were you just doing pieces and little chunks? Could you ever print out a script and say this is the script for the movie at this state?
Simon: No, because it’s so iterative. Every single sequence is at a different stage. Some things are in animatics. Some things are just in boards. It’s a very complex process. Part of it is just because it’s really hard to animate a movie.
John: What you’re describing, people should know, is very traditional for how animated movies are done. Disney does it this way. Pixar does it this way. Most places are doing it this way. Then weirdly, I’ve had the opposite experience, where I write a script and turn it in, and they make that script. For the stop-motion animation I’ve done for Tim Burton, there’s a script. Yes, there are storyboard artists and other things, but they’re figuring out how to execute the script, rather than this being this back and forth.
It’s a very different experience for writers who are doing what you’re doing, which is having to constantly react to what other people around them are doing. It’s not theater, but it’s just like you’re almost documenting what the current state of the story is.
Simon: Totally.
John: I want to drill in a little bit more here, because you said this is the first one that you’ve learned about character in three acts and moving beyond that initial premise, because a sketch or your shorter short stories are literally just the premise, and it’s just the punchline. Here, you have to keep moving on beyond that. What stuff did you learn at Pixar?
Simon: I think the clearest explanation of what I learned is you get to see how much I ripped them off. I wrote a story when I was there called Unprotected, which is the story of a very conventional premise. It’s a teenage boy, and he is struggling to figure out a way to lose his virginity, so essentially the premise of a million summer movies for many decades. What made it unique is that it was told entirely from the point of view of the condom in the boy’s wallet, who is waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to be used. It is just Toy Story. It is just a straight one-to-one version of Toy Story, an R-rated Toy Story, where it’s a coming-of-age story about a young person told from the perspective of this anthropomorphic object. It was so blatant.
I remember coming to campus when The New Yorker ran it. I remember walking past the lamp, the little lamp statue, and a storyboard artist pointed to me and was like, “Toy Story, right?” I was like, “Yep.” I didn’t get in trouble or anything. But that was just me really trying to see if I could take the story moves of literally a famous Pixar movie and just ape them for my own creative purposes. That’s something I’d keep doing. But I’m not shy about it, because Pixar would do the same thing.
We would constantly map out the story for hugely popular movies and just say, “Okay, how can we turn our project into this? What would happen if we copied it exactly?” Invariably, you’d find, we can copy these aspects exactly, but not these, because we have a slightly different agenda. That process of modeling and emulation is another really important thing that I learned from them, in addition to just literally copying them.
John: One of the things I think you can get away with so well in short stories – you can also do it in SNL sketches – is be able to take a piece of existing IP and completely just subvert it or ask the question you could never ask in the initial IP. The title story in Glory Days is Mario’s journey into middle age and what he’s wrestling with. Can you talk to us about that premise and what you were trying to explore and what was the initial instinct? Was it the wholly formed idea, or was it just like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny to do a story about what Mario’s life is actually like?”
Simon: The initial instinct was I read an article on my phone, I’m sure, that was like, “Super Mario debuted in 1984, 40 years ago,” or whatever. I said, “Oh, Mario’s turning 40. That’s hilarious. What is his midlife crisis like?” I was really excited to dive in, especially because I knew I’d be able to get to write the entire thing in Mario’s singular voice.
John: “It’sa me.”
Simon: Yeah, which is this incredibly offensive two-dimensional stereotype Italian accent. I was really excited to be able to take a voice like that, which is so dumb and so lazy, and just imbue it hopefully with some humanity and some pathos. You find out that he lost all his coins. He got so many. They had whole rooms of coins that he just pocketed. But he made a rookie mistake in the business, which is he trusted a friend to manage his money. Yoshi just took him for all he was worth. He’s estranged from the princess.
John: Who he still needs to rescue.
Simon: Who he needs to rescue for the millionth time. He says he’s starting to suspect that she’s getting kidnapped by Koopas on purpose, which of course is really offensive. But that is what he believes.
John: His relationship with Luigi is strained, and because of Luigi’s partner, and there’s lots of very specific things.
Simon: Luigi got sober, which is great, because he was gonna die. But he’s married to this extremely boring guy, Kalami, who is really nice and super loaded and has this fancy job, but is just constantly getting on Mario’s case, like, “You need to get a job.” He actually makes Mario fill out a resume, which is this very tragic scene, because Mario is like, “I have experienced saving princesses.” Kalami’s like, “You need to put down your plumbing experience, because that’s where the jobs are at in this market.” Mario is just kind of devastated.
It ends up being a story of different types of winning. Mario is a character who has a very specific idea of what it is to win. You get a lot of points. You climb that castle thing and you jump and grab that flag thing. Then you stand next to the princess while Japanese text scrolls slowly by your face. That’s what winning means. In midlife, through the story that he lives through, he kind of comes up with different priorities and a different understanding of what victory can look like.
John: You said that the premise was Mario’s turned 40, what’s Mario’s midlife crisis like. How much did you figure out about everything else you just described before you sat down to start writing, or was it just the process of writing that you explored all the other things?
Simon: Great question. Basically, what I do is – the first thing, still to this day, and this is what I’ve been doing since I started writing as a kid – until I have the premise, I basically don’t do any story or comedy work whatsoever. It’s just finding the premise.
Once I got the premise, then I do a lot of what I guess you would call exploratory writing or free writing, where I’m like, “Okay, I really like this hook. I think it has a motion and legs. It makes me laugh.” Then I just write a bunch of just random scenes. If it’s close third person, there’ll be third-person scenes. If it’s first person, there’ll be first-person paragraphs, just to test it, to make sure that it’s fun, that I’m gonna have a fun time doing it.
Then I take a big step back and I outline it. That process is, I would imagine, very similar to the one that most screenwriters go through. I take a big step back and I say, “Okay, what is the act one, act two, act three.” I don’t do that unless I’m really in love with the premise and in love with the point of view.
John: You say you don’t want to start until you really know the premise. By the premise, you mean the hook, and do you think what the engine is that will get you through the story?
Simon: No, I don’t necessarily have the engine. I think I just have the premise and the point of view. Is it going to be first person, is it going to be close third.
John: Let’s also define close third person, because it’s a term that people may not be familiar with. Third person is obviously we’re looking at the character doing stuff, so “he did,” “she did,” that kind of stuff. But close third person is like the camera’s almost right behind the person’s back and we’re only seeing the stuff and knowing the stuff that they would know.
Simon: Exactly. Screenplays, they are pretty much written in what fiction writers would call the omniscient third, where it’s like, this is what is happening. This is literally what you are looking at. There are exceptions, like if you’re Shane Black or whatever, where the stage directions have a personality maybe or they’re written in the first person by the screenwriter.
John: They’re also written in the first-person plural. That’s why the “we hears,” “we sees,” the feeling like we are here together watching this movie, but we don’t have insight into just one character. We can have a global view.
Simon: You never write a stage direction like, “As she crosses the crosswalk, she sees a bird out of the corner of her eye and recalls a childhood song.” That would be very hard for the viewer to notice in a wide shot.
John: If you establish the premise and the point of view before you go into it, then you’re free writing to find what are the things that are interesting there, find what do you think the little bits and moments might be.
Simon: It’s like test driving a car or something. I just want to know that it’s going to be fun, because writing a story is really hard. I want to make sure it’s going to be a good time. It’s like, is it gonna be fun to write in this voice for a few weeks?
John: How much time are you spending on that free writing period?
Simon: Not too long. I would say a couple of days and then I’ll say, “Yeah, this is gonna be fine.” Then I have to do the challenging thing, which is break the story.
John: Then breaking the story, this is your outline phase, which is basically what are the beats. For a story like Glory Days, how long is your outline? How detailed is that outline in terms of these are the actual scenes that are gonna happen?
Simon: I don’t go as spartan as cards on a board, like, I would in a TV room, but I’m pretty close. I would say a sentence or two sentences max per scene. I just try to figure out what is – I guess I can give away that story. It doesn’t really matter. The situation, the call to action is the princess gets kidnapped by a Koopa. But the issue is that he has horrific back problems. Mario has spent the entirety of his adult life just running and jumping at full speed, at full intensity.
John: Absolutely.
Simon: Smashing many bricks.
John: With his head.
Simon: With his head or his fists. It’s unclear how he’s doing it. But either way, it’s very arduous and rugged. His doctor, Dr. Mario, no relation, tells him that he needs intense spinal surgery, or else he might lose the ability to walk. He says, “You’re gonna lose the ability to walk.” He also speaks in Mario voice, of course.
Mario can’t make it through eight worlds, plus mini worlds, all the way to Koopa’s castle, unless he fixes his back. If he has the surgery, he’s incapacitated for a year. He finds this back brace, this revolutionary back brace that he can wear, but it’s really expensive. He needs money to get the back brace so he can rescue the princess. That is the act one goal is he’s gotta do it.
The low point at the end of act two is, by this point he has robbed his brother, because Luigi and his husband refuse to – they basically say, “We’re not going to enable your toxic relationship with the princess anymore. We’re not gonna lend you any more money.” Mario, in a really emotional low point, he steals Luigi’s Amazon packages and sells them online so he can get enough money for this back brace. Then he sends it over to the guy, and the guy starts asking him for garlic over the phone. That’s when he realizes that it was actually Wario.
John: The whole time.
Simon: It was a scam. He was tricked. Now he has nothing. He has no back brace. He has no money. He’s robbed his brother. That’s the act two low point. The princess is sending him texts like, “Where the hell are you?” He’s got no way to save her and no way to save himself. Then act three is redemption. The way I actually outline the stories is no different than the way I would outline an episode of Man Seeking Woman or a film.
John: Talk me through that process. In this outline, you’re really establishing what are the story points, how much story do I need to tell this whole story, because what you’re describing is great for a short story. It’s not gonna be enough for a movie, but there’s plenty there for what this is supposed to be. I think one of the great things about a short story is that you don’t have to have anyone’s permission to make this parody of Mario, whereas a movie or anything else, you couldn’t do it.
Simon: There’s a lot of freedom that you have in fiction that you don’t have as a screenwriter. Fictional characters never show up late and hungover. You don’t have any budget conversations. You don’t have any studio notes. The amount of control and freedom that authors have over their books is amazing compared to the amount of control most screenwriters have. I’m not a hugely famous writer, author, but I wield as much power over my books as Vin Diesel does over the Fast and the Furious franchise.
John: Absolutely.
Simon: I could say to my editor, “I want to intentionally misspell this word.” My editor will be like, “I don’t think that’s a smart idea, but okay, Mr. Diesel.” It’s on that level. It’s such a different level of freedom than I have when I’m working in TV and film.
John: Absolutely. I’ve done three books. I did the Arlo Finch series. It was great and liberating to actually have final say over every last little detail. Every piece of world building that I wanted to do or not do was there because I wanted it specifically there. At the same time, you don’t have the benefits of everybody else there to make a big final thing.
As we wrap up the premise, I want to talk about your experience actually making things with other people and having to do longer-form things, your two series or American Pickle. These are situations where you had this comedic premise that was originally a short story and you had to build it out into – let’s take Man Seeking Woman into a series. What is that conversation, and what needs to change in order to make that a sustainable thing with other people involved?
Simon: I love collaborative writing for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is just that – and I’ve talked about this already – you learn so much, or at least I’ve learned so much, from working with other writers. I learned so much at SNL from writing with Mulaney, writing with Marika, writing with Seth Meyers and for Seth. Seth was my boss. He was an amazing teacher and mentor. I learned a lot from trying to emulate him but also just literally asking him questions, like, “How do I do this? Why did you make that choice?”
Same thing at Pixar. I feel like I learned a ton working for Pete on Inside Out. But I would also just ask him and everybody else, “Hey, when you were doing Toy Story 3, why did you make this decision? How did you come up with this story point? What was your process?” You learn, or at least I’ve learned a ton from the collaborative work that I’ve done. You have access to not just the brilliant minds of other writers, but like you said, all these other brilliant artists who are contributing in such meaningful ways.
I would say the thing that I miss the most when I’m writing fiction is the music, because it’s such an unbelievably powerful, visceral, emotional tool. My younger kid has this Cocomelon book where you press a button and it sings the ABCs, and you press another button and it sings, “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” I always fantasize that I could have a button in my short story collections when it gets to the emotional denouement of a story. Mario is in the hospital bed holding Luigi’s hand. If you could press a button and John Williams plays, that would be dope. I really miss that tool.
But the thing that it gets you is freedom but also control. I think that a show like Man Seeking Woman, I’m really proud of the show. I loved running that show. But I would have to be a megalomaniacal psychopath to say that that show is mine the way my books are mine. I didn’t write all the episodes. I certainly didn’t act in any of them. I did not make the monsters. I definitely didn’t compose or sing the song at the end, in the third act of Episode 307, which is the only reason why the emotional arc landed.
There’s so many aspects of it that I cannot take credit for, whereas the books, for better or for worse, they are completely mine. They’re more communicative. I don’t know if they’re necessarily better, but they’re more personal.
John: Yeah, for sure. We have two listener questions that I think might be especially appropriate for you. Drew, can you help us out with these listener questions?
Drew: James in Washington writes, “Given the current state of the industry, should struggling screenwriters think about writing novels if they have good stories that can’t find a pathway to the screen?”
John: What’s your take on that, Simon?
Simon: It’s a great question. I think everybody should try it, just like I think everybody should try stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy, there’s nothing more pure than that. You can just stand on a stage. People don’t even need to know how to read. They can be illiterate. You can just tell them anything. The only reason not to do it really is because you are bad at it or don’t like it, which you can’t really learn until you try it.
I tried stand-up in high school and learned very quickly that I was bad at it and also that I hated it. But if you’re okay at it and you like it, then you might be willing to put in the thousands of hours it takes to become great at it.
I think it’s the same thing with fiction. Give it a shot. If you’ve never written fiction before, it would be unusual for you to start off being great at it. But you might enjoy it and you might feel like it’s worth pursuing. If you really like it, then you might be able to put in enough time to become great at it. Then you’ll have this whole other avenue through which to express yourself, where you don’t need to ask for permission. You don’t need to get funded. You don’t need to pitch. You can just write it, and then it’s in the world and it’s finished.
John: Absolutely. I think implicit in James’s question is, “It’s tough to make a living as a screenwriter now, so should I be writing novels because it’s easier to make a living as a novelist?” It’s not. It’s really tough to be a person who writes books. It’s tough to be a writer who is making a living in general. Your ability to have complete control over everything and to not have to get anyone’s permission to do a thing is great. You don’t need permission to write a screenplay either. But if fiction appeals to you, try it.
One thing I’d also recommend is listen to what Simon’s saying about the premise. Some premises work really well for fiction or they work really well for a short story, they work really well for a play, but they’re not gonna necessarily work well for a movie. If you have an idea that is really interesting to you but it doesn’t feel like a movie idea or a series idea, then give yourself permission to explore it as what it wants to be.
Simon: Totally.
John: Let’s try a second question here.
Drew: Macklin writes, “I’ve recently found a love for playwriting again. Is there an unknown downside to publishing work in other areas, like novels or plays, or establishing an online newsletter or something?”
Simon: A downside? Not that I can think of. It’s a blast. Writing fiction is so fun. There are a lot of screenwriters out there that I think would be really good at writing fiction and might enjoy it. Playwriting is not something I’ve done a lot of, so I can’t speak to that. But it’s really thrilling to be able to just wake up in the morning and go right into it and not have to ask for permission.
John: I would agree with you. I’m curious about how do you budget your time in terms of thinking, “Oh, I should do a short story now,” or is short story writing what you do when you don’t have other Hollywood stuff that you need to do? What’s the Simon Rich calculus for writing short stories?
Simon: As strange as it is to admit it, I am a short story writer. That is how I identify. That is what I’ve been doing since college. Everything else is, I don’t want to say intrusion, because that makes me sound ungrateful for the Hollywood work. But Glory Days is my 10th book. I have done other things. I did write a couple of novels. I’ve run television shows. But even the shows that I ran were based on my books. Most of the movies I’ve written or scripts I’ve written have been based on my short stories.
I know it’s a weird thing to have devoted one’s life to, and I’m not going to try to defend it. But I am like a short story writer who sometimes adapts his work into other mediums, basically.
John: What you’re doing though, it’s analogous to some people who’ve spent their entire life writing on SNL though, because you’re writing very short, focused things that are in a very specific form, and that’s what feels really natural for you to write. Focusing on that and finding a thing that you write that you love sounds great.
I do wonder if sometimes on the podcast, because we’re mostly talking about feature writing or TV writing, we steer people into belief that that’s a thing that people should be aiming to do. There’s lots of other great ways to write that are not those things. It was important for us to have you on just to talk about people who have that instinct, who are funny, who have that instinct like, “This is a funny idea.” Just because it’s a funny idea doesn’t necessarily mean that a feature or a TV series is the only way to express it.
Simon: Totally. Totally. I think the voice thing, that’s a big one. You might find that you really love to write in the first person and from an unusual point of view. That’s what I miss the most when I’m writing scripts.
I would say when I was running Man Seeking Woman, those three years were the one time in my writing career where I really was focused on television more than fiction. I really felt at that job like I had as much freedom as one could ask for. The reason why is because it was at the absolute peak of an insane bubble.
Also, our show is unbelievably cheap. A lot of forces had to conspire for us to be allowed to continue to make that show that nobody saw. The Canadian dollar was at a historic low. We were shooting in Toronto. If you look at a 150-year graph of the Canadian dollar, there’s this unaccountable three-year dip that perfectly coincides with the history of Man Seeking Woman. I don’t know what happened. There’s a maple syrup shortage or something.
But anyway, working on that show, I had a lot of freedom. I could write and approve my favorite premises. I have Bill Hader playing Hitler in a pilot, and nobody blinked. But I still missed writing in the first person. I missed being able to tell an entire story from the perspective of a horse or a baby or a talking condom. Even though I could have characters like that on a show and I could write dialogue from unusual points of view and-
John: But you didn’t have insight into the inner thinking of that character. The way that fiction writing is like whispering in somebody’s ear is just a very special connection.
Simon: It’s very specific. Even in the best of times, which I would say Man Seeking Woman was for me, I found myself missing my incredibly stupid narrator voice.
John: Great. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend stuff to our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is Howtown. It’s a series on YouTube by Joss Fong and Adam Cole. They try to answer one question in every episode, so things like how do we know what dogs can see, how do we really know COVID’s real death toll. It’s just incredibly well produced, smartly researched. But also it just looks really good. It’s smartly written. Check out the series Howtown. There’s a bunch of episodes that are up now, and they’re gonna keep doing more of them. But check it out. YouTube, Joss Fong and Adam Cole. Simon, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Simon: I do. I’m on vacation for a couple weeks in Wisconsin, seeing some family. I found a book on the shelf of the Airbnb that I’m at, which I am obsessed with. I’m also finished with it. Hopefully the last 50 or 100 pages aren’t terrible. But I’m gonna recommend it anyway. It’s called Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine, the historic saga of the round-the-world zeppelin, by Douglas Botting. It is just a phenomenal, true, nonfiction account ofana actual 11-day round-the-world zeppelin voyage that took place in 1929.
John: Wow.
Simon: Basically, when you think of zeppelins, you think of the Hindenburg, which is the correct thing to think of, because that wasn’t a one-off accident. These things exploded all the time, catastrophically. The way that they worked is there was a big bag of hydrogen, and then basically a fire would run an engine that was right next to the bag. If any sparks cut from the fire to the bag, everyone would die every single time. But it worked one time. This is about that one time. The descriptions of them circumnavigating the globe are stunning, because they’re not very high off the ground. They’re only at times about 300 or 500 feet off the ground.
John: Oh, wow.
Simon: They go over continents that have never seen or heard of air travel. They describe in Siberia people essentially, for the 20 hours that they’re going over Siberia, everyone is terrified and thinks that they are an actual alien or a monster.
John: That’s amazing. As you bring up zeppelins, or this specific story, there are so many premises that can pop out of this. What you’re describing in terms of zeppelins just basically want to explode, telling it from the zeppelin’s point of view, telling it from the insurance company that has to insure zeppelins. There are endless possibilities there. Or the actual story of this journey could be something fascinating too. It’s a great One Cool Thing.
Simon: Thank you.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies and hats. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record with Simon about about getting your short stories published in magazines. Simon Rich, an absolute pleasure talking with you finally after all these years.
Simon: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show and fan of yours as well.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Simon, you publish these stories, before they’re in your books, in many, many magazines around the world. New Yorker obviously is the one I think about the most, but McSweeney’s, GQ, Vanity Fair. I have other friends who have don’t his as well. Megan Amram does this. BJ Novak does this. Can you talk me through what the actual process is for you right now? Your short stories are gonna be great. Do you just say, “I got a new one,” and they just say, “Great. Here’s a couple pages.” What is the process for letting them know that you have a short story that you want published?
Simon: Good question. It’s a smoother process now than it was when I started 20 years ago. Should I walk through the genesis of it?
John: It’s different if you’re Stephen King. Talk us through the process.
Simon: In the early days, I had no agent, and I would just send envelopes with my stories – that’s dating myself – to various magazines, with a self-addressed stamped envelope, saying, “Would you please read it?” They would either not write back at all, or they would send back a form, rejection letter, a rejection slip, I should say. A lot of times they were just actually horizontal strips of paper.
John: They didn’t want to waste a full sheet of paper.
Simon: Exactly. There’s no need to. The next step was I started to get some positive feedback from some editors at magazines saying, “We like this,” or, “We read this,” or, “We think this is really funny, but it’s not for us. Please submit again.”
Then all of a sudden, you have a contact. You have an editor. Then you have their email address or even phone number. Then it becomes a little bit easier, because you can ask them, “What sort of things are you looking for?” Then they might write back, “We’re doing a travel issue in six months. You have any travel pieces?” or whatever. The bullseye appears more cleanly through the fog as you start to know editors. Then once you have an agent, then it becomes much, much easier, because they of course have a lot more contacts probably than you do typically as a writer.
John: Now, at this point, you tell your agent, “Here’s the short story that I have.” Then are you discussing where is the right place for it to go, are there preexisting contracts or negotiations? Would any of your stories be appropriate for any of these places? What are you thinking as you do that?
Simon: I learned from a really early age that when I feel pressure to sell things, it doesn’t necessarily make my writing worse, but it makes it less interesting. I only really felt that pressure once, which tells you how privileged my career has been. But it was during the writers strike in 2007, ’08. Was that-
John: 2008, yeah.
Simon: Yeah, around then, yeah. I had started writing for SNL, but I was four weeks in. I still hadn’t earned the minimum for health insurance. I was doing just fine. I had a book deal. But I did feel some pressure to make some money. I started pitching aggressively to every single magazine under the sun and wrote a lot of pieces that I think are just not in my voice. It was more just like, “Okay, this is what’s in the news,” or, “This Maxim Magazine knockoff seems to be doing a lot of this sort of piece.” I started to write a lot of things just chasing freelance money.
Now, because I have the luxury of thinking of things in a less mercenary way, I just write the entire book, basically. I don’t show anything to anybody really. Then I just send the entire manuscript to my agent, who sends it to The New Yorker, and they pick the ones that they want to run. That way, I’m not thinking about, “Oh, they probably want a Trump piece,” or whatever.
John: Totally. Thinking about it this way, so you’ve written all the short stories that are gonna be a part of a book. I notice in Glory Days, you have it broken into one, two, and three. There’s some sectioning to it, and yet each of the stories does stand on its own. I’m hard-pressed to find a connecting thread between them. But they all feel like this is one book that is together.
You’ve written this book. You’re sending it to your editor. It’s going to The New Yorker. What is the purpose of getting those published in The New Yorker? Is it from them paying you directly, or it’s exposure for the book that you’re trying to do?
Simon: My goal as a writer always is for people to read the stories or listen to them or experience them in some way. That is the absolute only goal that I have. I hope that people will give these stories a chance, read them, listen to them, relate to it, connect to it in some emotional way, and I’ll feel less alone in the universe. That’s why I make this stuff. One hopes that they have enough cash that they could spend their days living that artistic life.
John: With these short stories in this most recent collection, The New Yorker might say, “Oh, we want this short story.” Would they ever come back to you with a note on the short story, or is it gonna be published as it is, because you also have your book editor who’s going through and reading the stories too. Do you get stuff from both sides?
Simon: I don’t really get big edits anymore. But I do get a lot of suggestions and feedback about what you would call line edits, which are really useful and really helpful.
I also get fact checked, which you wouldn’t expect for a fiction writer. But it’s incredibly useful. The fact checkers at The New Yorker are the best in the world. They’re basically the equivalent of what we would call script supervisors. They’re finding inconsistencies. They’re saying, “Why are they eating lunch if it’s night out?” and, “I thought you said she was a cardiologist, but then when we see her patient, he’s complaining about a broken leg.” That’s a huge help to me.
They’ll say, “Stop using that adverb. You’ve used it three times in 4,000 words.” I get a lot of editorial guidance and help when it comes to the actual execution of the sentences that I’m super grateful for. But I don’t get the notes that I get all the time in TV and film of like, “Can you make the protagonist more likable?”
John: Totally. Where are you at in your process? This book is coming out July 23rd. Everyone should buy it. Is the next book already done? Are you short story by short story? Where are you at in your work?
Simon: I used to do that. I used to basically, when I would finish a book, I would literally turn in a book and then the next day would start the next one. Now, I try really hard not to do that, because I find that especially my early books, I started to repeat myself, because I hadn’t allowed myself to live life in between the books. I would just be writing the same book again, but slightly worse. I don’t want to single books out. But I think the first half of my career, there are definitely a few where I’m like, I should’ve maybe waited a year before diving back into it.
What I’m doing now is the same thing I’ve done after the last few books. I just try to generate premises from reading. I read a lot about subjects that I’m interested in. I let myself just jot down premises that I think might be worth exploring. I’m not gonna pursue any of them for probably another six months or so.
John: You’re not a person who beats yourself up if you’re not sitting down generating 1,000 words per day.
Simon: No. I work a set number of hours a day, I would say. But sometimes my work is just sitting down for six hours and reading a book about zeppelins, because it’s been proven to me that that’s useful.
There was a yearlong period where I was just obsessed with pirates. I would just read endlessly about pirates, and to no end, really. Then one day I just got the idea for a story about two pirates, Captain Blackbones the Wicked, and Rotten Pete the Scoundrel. They find a stowaway on their pirate ship, and they have to decide whether or not to throw the stowaway overboard to the sharks or to feed her and take care of her. I was like, “Oh, this is a parenting story.” I ended up writing the story Learning the Ropes in my last book, New Teeth. I wrote that story a full year into my pirate obsession. There are a number of topics like that, where I’m like, someday I’m sure I will figure out. I will crack it. But you can’t really force it.
John: Simon, an absolute pleasure.
Simon: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
John: Thanks.
Links:
- Glory Days by Simon Rich
- “Gifted” by Simon Rich
- Rocket Dog sketch
- Howtown with Joss Fong and Adam Cole
- Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel by Douglas Botting
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 649: The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 648 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you say goodbye? We’ll take a look at farewell scenes to explore what makes them work. We’ll also answer listener questions about managers, fairies, and moving to Los Angeles. To help us do all of this, let’s welcome back our OG guest host, Aline Brosh McKenna. Aline, welcome back.
Aline Brosh McKenna: I’m actually Craig Mazin.
John: You are Craig Mazin. Craig always affects different voices, and he’s been working-
Aline: Je suis Craig Mazin.
John: I really respect his dedication to the craft. He really finds what it is, that unique kind of thing. As busy as he’s been doing The Last of Us, he still found time to. Craig, thank you again for all of the hard work you’ve done.
Aline: He’s doing a great impression of Aline. I’m doing a really good impression of Aline.
John: We’ve lost the thread here. Aline, it’s so nice to see you.
Aline: Thank you. Thank you for being so gracious about me being late. Anyone who knows me know I am scrupulously on time. And I was on time for the time I thought I was, which was 11:00. But for 10:30, when it actually was, not on time.
John: Not on time. Aline, I haven’t seen you for a bit. Tell me in just a general sense – you don’t have to name projects, but what are you working on? What’s under your fingers right now?
Aline: I have two thrusts to my day. There’s the things that I personally am writing, and then I have a company called Lean Machine, which is run by the wonderful-
John: Can I stop you for a sec?
Aline: Yeah.
John: I just recognized that Lean is actually related to Aline.
Aline: It is.
John: I’ve known you 10 years. I just now got this.
Aline: It’s because when I met my husband – people really love to call me AY-leen, and my husband said, “You should tell people it’s Aline Mean Fighting Machine.” When I started my company, I had to choose between Lean Machine and Fighting Machine.
John: No Fighting Machine.
Aline: I chose Lean, because we’re on time and under budget. I have a company that I run with this woman named Heather Morris, who’s wonderful, fantastic, used to work for Mindy Kaling. We have about 15 to 20 projects. About maybe 30 percent of them are things I’m writing in TV and film, and then the rest we work with other writers. That has been just a pure delight.
I’m not shocking anyone when I tell you it’s a tough time in the business right now. And so what I’ve really focused on is trying to be the producer that I would have wanted to have, which is someone you can really call for story input, because sometimes you work with producers and they are really helpful for story, and sometimes you work with producers and you call them when you have a story problem and you’re like, “Never mind.” It’s like when you ask your parents for advice about your friends, and then they start and you’re like, “Never mind.”
We provide a lot of story support. We help break stories. We make decks for writers. We proofread their scripts. We get sandwiches from Sycamore Kitchen. We try and get things in as good situation for the writers, so that they’re very proud and excited about what they do. I was telling you we started this company in 2019, which was just really great time to start.
John: A great time, because the business was expanding, so there were many more opportunities. However, you could not have known all the roadblocks ahead.
Aline: We did run into a buzzsaw. In fact, Heather started February of 2020, and we moved her right into her office, and then she wasn’t there for months. But I’ve really enjoyed working with writers. There is something fun about breaking a story with a writer and then seeing what they come back with. We work with wonderful people. That’s been really fun.
In this time, still creating things in collaboration with people, which is my favorite thing, I still get to do that. Then I split time between TV and movies. Right now, I’m working on a rewrite, and then I have another movie that we’re making a deal for. Then we have a project that has popped out of a place that it used to be, and we’re trying to find a home for that.
One of the interesting things is, in addition to the market being very soft, I don’t know if you found this, but the making-a-deal process has become glacial beyond my understanding. We have a running joke, because it’ll be like, “Oh, the BA guy is water skiing. Oh, the BA guy sprained his Achilles.”
John: BA being business affairs.
Aline: Yeah.
John: A thing that’s important to understand is, when they say, “Oh, congratulations. We’re gonna have a deal. We’re gonna hire you to do this thing,” that is the start of a process. When you and I started in this business, it could take not usually days; it was weeks to get that deal settled. Your agents and your lawyers and everyone would go back and forth, but you’d come up with a deal, and then you’d start writing. Over the course of the last decade, but really I think in a crisis point since the pandemic, to make a deal has taken forever. There’s times where you’re waiting 11 months to actually make your deal and start writing. Just crazy.
Aline: The movie stuff that I’m doing has been okay, has moved apace really, because if you’re working on something that they have in their mind as like, “Oh, we need this,” or, “We’re making this.” But TV is the thing that used to be, we would be saying, “Oh, TV’s so great, because they need things every season.”
John: There’s a season. There’s a schedule.
Aline: But there’s no seasons anymore. One of the things we’re taking out soon, we’re adding a producer, and we had this writer, and I think that deal took 10 months to make or something like that. And then some of these deals were interrupted by the strike. So we would’ve started it, then there was the six months of the strike, then you come back and you’re still making the deal.
Those poor BA people opened a door and a bunch of snow fell on them, because all these deals that had not gotten done before the strike, they’re doing those. So there’s just been, especially in TV, where you often have numerous components… Sometimes when I come onto a movie, it’s just me; it’s not my company. But things where you have multiple companies coming together with the writers, with maybe a rights deal, a book deal, it’s so funny, because as you said, all this enthusiasm, we’re making this thing, and then 10 months later you’re like, “Oh, right, yeah, no. Yes, this guy.”
John: I’m in that same situation right now. There’s two feature projects, both of which I would love to do. I’m halfway allowing myself to commit to them, like, “Oh, these are things I’m going to write.” But I’m also recognizing it could take so long to make the deals, I’ll probably be writing something else before I’m writing those projects.
I just came off five weeks on a project, which was really interesting for me, because you and I have done weekly work on features, where we come in and we’re working on a thing that is in trouble. It’s about to go into production, it’s in production, or maybe it’s in post and they’re gonna do rewrites. I had this situation for a series that had already been shot and was going to go back and do rewrites.
It was very challenging, interesting work, because I had to write new material that could fit between things that were already established and were gonna stay in the series. But then I had to keep in mind that, “Oh, this new scene also has to pay off in Episode 2, 3, 4, and 5.” Then there were things that could change and couldn’t change. It was really difficult. Drew had to go through all this with me, because there were times where I had to ask. I’m like, “Wait, what happens in Episode 4?” because I want to make sure I’m not duplicating this thing or making the thing that happens in Episode 4 impossible.
Aline: That’s kind of cool. We like to do our puzzles. That’s a puzzle.
John: It was a jigsaw puzzle, the kind of thing that Craig would hate.
Aline: That’s correct.
John: But Craig’s not here to complain about it.
Aline: That’s correct.
John: We’ll talk about these things, but also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I thought we might talk about journaling. I don’t know if you journal at all. It’s a thing I keep trying to do. I never actually do.
Aline: Great.
John: But should we be keeping track of what we’re doing all day?
Aline: Oh, can’t wait to talk about that.
John: We’ll talk about that. In the news, Inside Out 2 opened huge. It opened in $155 million in the U.S. and Canada, $295 million worldwide, a huge, giant opening hit for the summer. I’m so happy for everybody at Pixar and the people who made it.
Aline: God, I’m rooting for anything that works. Rooting, rooting. Just need those things to work and for people to be excited.
John: Yeah, so it was great to see that. I was honestly surprised. I didn’t know that the world had a huge, pent-up demand for Inside Out. I liked the first movie. It wasn’t like, oh, that’s a surefire sequel. I was surprised.
Aline: I think that that has built up an increased following on Disney Plus, where kids have really dug into some of the older animated titles. I know Moana and-
John: Encanto.
Aline: Encanto. Those have I think become huge juggernauts on Disney Plus. I think that that’s Inside Out. If you’ve been watching it at home, it’s exciting to take your… It’s an all-audience… I think because that movie’s a little more sophisticated, in that it has these more, almost Charlie Kaufman-y themes to it. It’s like a Charlie Kaufman movie for kids. I think adults enjoy unpacking the math of that.
John: It wasn’t the only good news about the box office. Bad Boys 4 opened up really well, and opened up better than I think people expected as well. A $56 million opening weekend, made $214 cumulative as we’re recording this. That’s great for them. Good job, Sony.
Also, Sony and George Gallo settled their suit. Apparently, there was an ongoing lawsuit for many, many years. The original movie was based on a George Gallo short story, and it was a question of, do they have to pay him for that short story for the other things. Apparently, they finally settled that lawsuit that had been going on for years and years and years.
Aline: Do you know how that was settled?
John: Of course no one ever talks about what the actual settlement details were. But both sides are apparently happy that the thing is resolved. It’s really about derivative works, because obviously they buy the short story to make the first movie, and then it’s a question of are all other movies based on that short story or not.
Aline: Got it.
John: Sony’s also busy; they’re buying Alamo Drafthouse. I don’t know if you saw this.
Aline: I did see that.
John: Do you like the Alamo Drafthouse? Have you been down there?
Aline: I love it. I love it. Now, how branded is it gonna be? I saw a movie at The Egyptian, which is owned by Netflix.
John: It’s Netflix’s Egyptian, right?
Aline: Yes. It’s beautiful. I don’t know what it looked like before, but it’s sparkling new. Concessions are good. It’s a really nice place to see a movie. I just wonder, are we gonna be looking at Charlie’s Angels everywhere? How branded do you think it’ll be?
John: I doubt it’ll be very branded, but we’ll see what happens. For international listeners who aren’t familiar with the chain, Alamo Drafthouse came out of Alamo, Texas and was known for having a real love of movies and retrospectives of films, older things in addition to new releases. They also had food that came to your seat, which was delicious. Just a really good movie-going experience. We have one in Downtown Los Angeles. For me and Aline, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to, but it’s worth it when you want to see a movie down there. I’m hoping that the chain stays the same and they keep that same vibe.
But it’s important to bring up the fact that it feels like this was a thing that wasn’t supposed to be allowed to happen, because we don’t think about movie studios being able to own theaters, because of the consent decrees. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but back in 1948, the government said that you could not be both a movie studio and also own the theaters, because that was a vertical integration. That was bad. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Apparently, that only applied to Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and MGM. It didn’t apply to Columbia, because Columbia didn’t own movie theaters at the time. And so even if that had not been overturned relatively recently, nothing was stopping Sony from owning a theater.
Aline: Listen. I wish someone would buy the ArcLight. I miss the ArcLight every day. I know they’re gonna reopen the Cinerama Dome, but the actual ArcLight, that’s where my kids grew up going to the movies. It was the greatest. I wish someone would buy that and bring that back.
John: I feel like eventually ArcLight Complex will reopen. It’s been so tough to see it happening. What I’ve heard is that the ongoing issue is that ArcLight Theaters owed money to the studios and basically had to figure out some sort of settlement for unpaid film rental, and that may be what’s actually keeping them from being back in business. I hope it gets resolved. It was such a great place to see movies.
Aline: The best.
John: The best. More follow-up. Drew, talk to us about 3 wing 4. I did not understand this.
Drew Marquardt: In our last Three Page Challenge, there was a script called The Long Haul, where two of the characters were talking about 3 wing 4. You and Craig and me had no idea what that meant. Several listeners wrote in that this comes from the Enneagrams.
Aline: Oh, I’ve done this. I’ve done this.
Drew: Which is a personality profiling system kind of like Myers-Briggs.
John: Great. 3 wing 4 refers to what your personality type would be. In Myers-Briggs, I was an ENTJ or whatever that was.
Aline: So am I.
John: Not surprising that we’re successfully driven screenwriters and have the same kind of things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to what these descriptions are.
Aline: I did this, but I can’t remember what it was. There was a thing where this was going around. Someone sent this to me. Whatever I got, the person who sent it to me was like, “Oh yeah, you’re such a that.” But I don’t know. How useful do you think this is?
John: I don’t know if it’s especially useful for an individual or for a character. I guess there’s two threads I want to talk about. The fact that Craig and I didn’t understand what this was would mean that a lot of people are gonna have no idea what the hell you’re talking about on page 2 of a screenplay. So that’s an issue there.
I always look at these kind of things like astrology. It’s just like, okay, everyone says that this is what your energy is. It’s like, okay, fine, great, if it helps you as a writer make choices for the character that underline that. But I worry that it could be a shorthand for not actually doing the work on the page to create that character who has these characteristics.
Aline: I know this is not a thing that will endear me to folks, but I have an easier time believing in these things than astrology. I’m puzzled. Maybe I am under-informed. But there’s so much chance that goes into when you’re born, like when the doctor can get there or when you push or how you’re pushing or who’s there or whether your mom got there yet.
John: Yeah, or did they fill out the right thing on the form? Turns out you were actually born the next day. They just wrote the wrong thing down on this.
Aline: It’s really, really popular among younger people, especially women. And so often people want to talk to me about it. I usually say, “This won’t be a fun conversation for you, because I will not be yes anding you. I will be wondering why.”
John: I think I’m in your camp here, because it feels like things like Myers-Briggs or what this Enneagram is, which I don’t really know very well, it’s based on, okay, looking at the choices that you make in your life, what are characteristics that group together like that. That kind of tracks for me. But where you were born, when you were born, where the stars were, how Mercury was doing that day doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Aline: I think it goes to, you know in scripts, the idea of the chosen one, the Harry Potter? It’s most religious things. It’s like, oh, no, this guy matters more than all the other people. I think there’s a fantasy in your specialness that even the stars would pull you in certain directions.
Listen. I get it, because as I was saying to someone the other day, it doesn’t sound cute, but we are meat that will be dirt. Of course we will look for greater meaning. I get that. It’s just the exact moment of when you were born, as someone who gave birth twice, just don’t know what that would correlate to, because there is actually a bit of… You could nudge it if you wanted to.
John: My daughter, we had to induce. When she was born was kind of a choice that a group of people made.
Let’s talk about these kinds of scenes. This is a feature we do on Scriptnotes every once in a great while. The first time we did this segment, it was about your first day on the job, and we referenced Devil Wears Prada. We’ve also talked about breakups. Today I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye presumably for the last time.
We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also, what are the characteristics of a farewell scene. This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. And so Big Fish, of course, obviously has a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart. Maybe buddies who’ve come to – they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there.
But I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?
Aline: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada where they see each other on the street and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. And then Meryl says, “Go.” I say Meryl, because in the way it was scripted, actually, in the screen description, it said, “She looks at the driver. Go.” It was in the scene description, and they had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver. It snaps you back into her actual MO.
It’s funny, because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing, and that has a finality. But you need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final, because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca and then they ran into each other at a bar two days later. The same thing with rom-coms. If it’s like, end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back, you don’t want to feel like, cut to four days later where it’s like, “This is insane. You leave your pants on the floor. What is this?” How do you make any ending feel like it stuck?
John: That’s why I think because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time.
But let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end. The location they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.
Aline: That’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Ah. The irony.”
John: It could be the location rhymes or we’re back in a place we were before, the dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes a thing that happened before.
Looking through these examples, we’re gonna see that there’s a bunch of nonverbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these. That’s honestly the characteristics of these. And it’s why sometimes we’re not gonna be playing the audio for this, because it’s a lot of people not talking.
Aline: I hope you’re gonna put these up on the website, because this is fantastic. Drew, did you make this? This is fantastic. This is really good.
I did send you that funny – there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big, that he goes back to class and there’s a girl named Susan in his class and they wink, like, this is gonna be Elizabeth Perkins. But they dropped that, and so they’re never gonna see each other again. I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. E.T. is probably one of the…
As we had discussed, I think Past Lives is – people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of, they’d been separated for so long, and this is another separation, and possibly permanent.
John: I think what’s important – and Past Lives is a good example of this – is that you’re closing hopefully two characters’ arcs. And so it’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that.
If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate. But I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.
Aline: Can I ask you a question?
John: Please.
Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?
John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating. And also, as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that it was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all. And then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did?” That sounds weird. It felt like it was more of a-
Aline: Of a cheek moment.
John: Yeah, a cheek moment rather than an on-the-lips moment. I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.
Aline: Lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple friends who were lip kissers, which was always like when you saw them coming towards you and time slows down, because my lip kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to. That’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you and you’re like, slow motion turn the face. But I think it’s post COVID.
John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.
Aline: Can you imagine if I lip kissed John on the way out of here?
Drew: I don’t-
Aline: Drew would be so uncomfortable. Or if I lip kissed Drew on the way out of here. It would be so weird.
John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.
Aline: So weird. The French…
John: Yeah, but it’s the cheeks.
Aline: The cheek. The cheek. It felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker, but we don’t do that in America. But I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not.
John: It’s not.
Aline: You’re saying it’s a full lip kissing. Interesting.
John: Full lip kiss. We can look at the video.
Aline: But what do you feel about not knowing what he said?
John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?
Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think suits Sofia Coppola’s vibes, so I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that people are layered and mysterious. I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.
John: We as an audience need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us unless we’ve seen the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do.
Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it, because oftentimes in these things, one character’s being stoic and holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves. But we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.
Aline: Something I think about a lot is that, because if you have a quieter moment movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. E.T., interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. The enemy is Keys. It never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.
I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space, that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge.
I would put this up there with Casablanca for me, in terms of merely really meaningful goodbye. And I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies then. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. And the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground, with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.
John: Let’s take a listen to Casablanca. Of course, we’ve avoided Casablanca throughout almost the entire podcast, just because it’s so cliché. But of course, as farewell scenes go, this is the one that people think about. So let’s take a listen here.
[Casablanca clip]
Rick Blaine: If you don’t mind, you fill in the names. That’ll make it even more official.
Captain Louis Renault: You think of everything, don’t you?
Rick: And the names are Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo.
Ilsa Lund: But why my name, Richard?
Rick: Because you’re getting on that place.
Ilsa: I don’t understand. What about you?
Rick: I’m staying here with him until the plane gets safely away.
Ilsa: No, Richard, no. What has happened to you? Last night we said-
Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.
Ilsa: But Richard, no, I-
Rick: You’ve got to listen to me. Do you have any idea what you’d like to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of 10 we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?
Louis: I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.
Ilsa: You’re saying this only to make me go.
Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
Ilsa: But what about us?
Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we’d lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.
Rick: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble. But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, kid.
[End of clip]
John: This is a situation where one character knows this is gonna be a farewell leading into it, and she doesn’t know this, and she’s processing this in real time.
Aline: I don’t love the use of the word “kid.” I’m not loving that. That’s giving infantilization to me. I’m just wondering if you could just say a normal goodbye without… I’m not calling you “daddy,” so I’d appreciate not being called a kid. That would be a slightly different ending.
John: Yeah, it would be.
Aline: But I think this idea that’s embedded into this goodbye is this idea that they’re sacrificing for the greater good of the world. Does that still resonate? Do you feel like if you made a movie where it’s like, I need to go do this more public servicey – not public service, but global redemption thing that they have to go do. They’re dedicating themself. Their problems, their love is less than what the world requires of them. Maybe a climate change movie?
John: Or perhaps a movie about a robot apocalypse. Let’s take a listen to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Aline: Just his best transitions.
John: Right now, they’re at the forge, and they’ve just thrown the chips into…
[Terminator 2: Judgment Day clip]
Sarah Connor: It’s over.
The Terminator: No. There is one more chip.
John August: He points to his forehead.
The Terminator: And it must be destroyed also. Here. I cannot self-terminate. You must lower me into the steel.
John Connor: No. No.
The Terminator: I’m sorry, John.
John Connor: No!
The Terminator: I’m sorry.
John Connor: No, it’ll be okay! Stay with us! It’ll be okay!
The Terminator: I have to go away.
John Connor: No, don’t do it, please! Don’t go!
The Terminator: I must go away, John.
John Connor: No! No, wait, wait! You don’t have to do this.
The Terminator: Sorry.
John Connor: No, don’t do it! Don’t go!
The Terminator: It has to end here.
John Connor: I order you not to go. I order you not to go! I order you not to go!
The Terminator: I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do.
[End of clip]
John: So again here, we have a character who knows that this is going to be a farewell and the other character does not know it and is resisting that moment at the same time, and it’s for the greater good. This is self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Aline: One thing I will say is that where movies really let me down is – not to bring this way, way down, but dying in movies is really glossed over, even in movies about illness. Everybody looks real pretty. They’re beautifully arranged in a bed, and they go cough, cough, and then they look to the side and close their eyes. I had not had a lot of experience with that. My dad passed away two years ago, and the process of that was kind of shocking to me.
I know that love is not what’s in movies, so I don’t know why… And birth is not what’s in movies. People in births are always screaming, and screaming at the husband. I know that those things are not… But we do a very bad job with what it actually looks to leave this world in movies. Maybe it’s too nitty gritty. Maybe all those things are too nitty gritty. Maybe movies don’t need to show people peeing or people performing basic body processes. But maybe these are stand-ins for that. There’s a goodbye we all know is happening, is going to happen, and that these are wonderful, satisfying goodbyes that you can cry at. None of these are death, right? No, Philadelphia is.
John: Philadelphia, I want to focus on a moment that’s not the actual death. It’s not the moment on screen where he dies, but it’s the farewell moment. Initially, it’s Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington talking, and then he’s saying goodbye to other people. But if you listen, he’s never actually saying goodbye. Everyone’s basically saying, “I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll see you soon.” Let’s take a listen to Philadelphia here.
[Philadelphia clip]
Joe Miller: How you doing?
John August: He’s taking off the oxygen mask so he can speak.
Andrew Beckett: What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?
Joe: I don’t know.
Andrew: A good start. Excellent work, Counselor. I thank you.
Joe: It was great working with you, Counselor.
John: Here, Denzel Washington is putting the oxygen mask back on Tom Hanks’s face, because he was having a hard time doing it himself. It’s a moment of tenderness that we’re seeing.
Joe: Well, I’d better go.
Andrew: Yeah, sure thing.
Joe: I’ll see you later?
Andrew: Thanks for stopping by.
Joe: I’ll see you again. Well, I’ll keep it on ice for you.
[End of clip]
John: He just brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the winning of the case. He’s putting it there and he’s saying goodbye to the rest of the family. Over the course of the rest of this, we’re gonna see the rest of the family members say goodbye. Some of them happen more emotional; some of them don’t. Of course the conscious is they’re saying goodbye for the night, but it’s clear to an audience that this is the last goodbye. Really well done. Not surprisingly, really well done.
It’s a great example of how it’s the subtext that is carrying the scene. They’re not actually saying the things they’re supposed to say, but the writer, Ron Nyswaner, has created a space to let the actors play those things in eyes that they’re not actually saying.
Aline: Beautiful.
John: That’s a final goodbye. But I really want to play this clip from Weekend. Have you seen Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s film?
Aline: It’s the top of the list of things I should see.
John: It’s really terrific.
Aline: I know.
John: I pulled this because I just did the Sundance Labs, where we were talking with filmmakers about the next things they’re gonna shoot, and the theme for the clips we were supposed to bring in was finales or conclusions. What I loved about this moment at the end of Weekend is…
So the premise is it’s these two guys who hook up on a Friday night, not really knowing each other, and they spend the weekend together. But one of them is going off to America, and so they know there’s no future for this. The one guy, he’s at a kid’s birthday party for a friend. The guy’s like, “If you like this guy, why don’t you just into the train station and stop him?” He’s like, “Oh, no, that’s too movie of a thing to do.” I just love that these two characters realize that they’re in a movie kind of moment. Let’s take a listen to a scene from Weekend.
[Weekend clip]
Russell: Looks like it, eh?
Glen: So is this our Notting Hill moment?
Russell: You know, I’ve never seen it, ever.
Glen: Neither have I, but I imagine there’s a declaration of love and everybody applauds.
Russell: Yeah. Do you reckon that’s what would happen with us?
Glen: Might do. Could give it a go. They’d either clap or throw us under a train.
John August: What happens in this next little sequence is there’s a train going by, and so like Lost in Translation, we’re not able to quite understand what they’re saying. But clearly, one character is telling something more meaningful, and then we catch in at the end sort of what that conversation was.
Automated Voice: 24-hour CCTV recording is in operation at this station.
Russell: I want you to not know I’m not here to stop you from going.
Glen: Please be quiet. Shut up! No, no, no.
Russell: I just want to… I just want to… I just want you to know that…
Glen: Oh, fuck. You’re a bastard for coming down here. Fuck me. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.
Russell: You’ll be great. You’ll have the most amazing time.
Glen: Fuck’s sake. Fuck.
[End of clip]
John: Like Past Lives, there’s a lot of sounds, there’s a lot of things left open, which makes the moment feel very real and very extended. The kind of thing you couldn’t probably do earlier on in the story, but because you’re invested in these characters, you’re willing to watch them struggle to figure out what the next thing is to say.
What I also liked about it is that these characters are recognizing this is a movie kind of thing to do, to race to the train station to stop him before he goes. But once they get there, like, am I actually stopping you? They don’t quite know themselves what the real goal is. They’re just recognizing that this is probably the last moment that they’re gonna have together.
Aline: Has anyone ever done, in a rom-com, a run to the airport where you can’t park, you can’t get through TSA? Actually trying to stop someone at the gate now… That’s ’70s only. Post 9/11, actually trying to say goodbye to someone at a gate is science fiction. You can’t do it.
John: I think probably two examples of it. First, in 30 Rock, there’s a moment where Liz is trying to get to Jason Sudeikis’s character before he moves off to Cleveland. She tries to do the whole thing. She has her special sandwich. They give her a sandwich to get through the TSA. But I also feel like David Wain’s movie They Came Together, with Paul Rudd and…
Aline: Amy Poehler.
John: Amy Poehler. I feel like that must’ve happened in that, because it’s playing all of those rom-com cliches. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a lot of these other clips.
Aline: This is beautiful. This is a great resource. This podcast is free.
John: Free.
Aline: You don’t have to fast forward through ads. This is great stuff right here. This is great. This is the kind of thing, if I was a baby writer, I would be so grateful for, just to focus yourself in on. As you’ve often said, pick the thing that has the best ending. Write something where you know the ending. If something occurs to you for a final scene, that’ll guide you through the whole writing of your movie. It’s really great to study these things. I think this is a wonderful resource.
John: Big Fish would not exist if it weren’t for that last scene. You’re leading up to that. I always describe Big Fish as it’s a long joke that ends in tears rather than a punchline. And it’s getting to that place. The other ones we’re gonna include on the show notes here. The end of The Wizard of Oz, of course she has to say goodbye to all of her friends, that she’s leaving. E.T., of course, saying goodbye to E.T. Toy Story 3, which is a sort of special case. Oh, god, Michael Arndt.
Aline: It’s a killer.
John: Killing us here.
Aline: Yeah, killer.
John: It’s Andy giving up his toys and sending them off to the girl who’s gonna take care of them. Dead Poets Society. All such great choices. Farewell scenes.
Aline: Well done.
John: Well done. Let’s continue with momentum and talk about some listener questions. We’ve got a manager question here from Annie.
Drew: Annie writes, “My manager and I recently broke up. We weren’t a good fit for one another, but he also wanted 10 percent of my day job salary, a gig unrelated to what they were representing me for. However, a script I wrote was doing well on the blacklist, and a studio reached out to my manager during the fallout. But my manager won’t give me the studio’s contact info. It’s been a month. So should I assume my project’s dead? I looked on IMDb Pro for an assistant or someone to reach out to at the company, but I was unsuccessful. If the studio really wanted the script, they would find me, I guess. I’m pretty sad about it, and I’m not sure how to find new management. Thanks.”
Aline: That’s not nice.
John: That’s horrible. That’s horrible on every level.
Aline: That’s really not nice.
John: First off, that manager should not be trying to take 10 percent of your day job salary. That is crazy. I’ve not heard of this.
Aline: Craig would be turning this desk over.
John: Absolutely. Craig has destroyed so much furniture on this podcast. It’s really tough.
Aline: This is shitty.
John: This is. Let’s talk about what happens next. First off, on your script, you have contact information on that. Hopefully, they’re not stripping that contact information off the title page, so they can get a hold of you directly. You, Annie, need to have some public presence out there in the world, Twitter, Instagram, some other place where people can find you, because they will be able to find you if that comes up. Put up a website, Annie, whatever your last name is, screenwriter. Make sure you have a way that people can find you. Obviously, if you’re a WGA member, you’re in the WGA directory, and so people can always look you up there.
Aline: If they were desperate, if they really wanted it. And it may have been an idle inquiry. But this actually just sounds like someone being sadistic and just trying to punish you.
John: Annie, when you say it’s doing well on the blacklist, I assume it’s the blacklist-
Aline: Ratings.
John: The ratings site and not the-
Aline: List.
John: Not the actual list, the end of the year stuff-
Aline: That sounds like it to me too.
John: … because that’s a thing when people would’ve tracked you down more specifically. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. As you’re looking for new managers, new reps, try not to be too burned by this experience. Remember that you’re always advocating for yourself first, and keep doing the next thing. It’s good that you had a script that people liked. It’s proof that you can write a thing that people will like. You need to keep writing those things. I’m sorry. All I can do is commiserate with you here.
Aline: Same, same.
John: Question from TJ here.
Drew: TJ writes, “Like many feature writers, I cheered the huge and very real win of guaranteed second steps in the new MBA, but I’m wondering what, if any, recourse we have if a second step remains unstepped. Chalk it up to strike disruption or executive turnover, but I have two feature projects at major studios, with multiple contractually guaranteed rewrite and polished steps, that have been sitting on ice for over a year. I’ve been doing this long enough to understand the writing is likely on the wall for these projects – or not. Who knows? And that’s fine. I’m an expert at moving on. But negotiating guaranteed money and turning in a draft, only to get ghosted on further steps, feels extra mega shitty, especially while trying to string together qualifying years for health coverage. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.”
John: I’ve had this happen too. Let’s remember what a guaranteed second step is. It’s that if you’re hired to write a feature project, you are hired for the initial draft, and if you’re under a certain cap, they have to also guarantee you a second step, a chance to do that rewrite on that project. This is good. This is a big win. Sometimes what happens is you’ve turned in a first draft and there’s a guaranteed reading period, and after that point they should be coming up to you for the rewrite. Sometimes this stretches out for a very long time, because things are just not-
Aline: But they’re supposed to pay you at the end of that reading period.
John: They are supposed to pay you at the end of the reading period. It’s your reps who are there to remind them, “You need to pay them.”
Aline: I’ve done that, for sure.
John: I’ve done that too, fairly recently.
Aline: Some people don’t know that they have a limited amount of time to get back to you and that they have to get back to you.
John: Someone made this deal. If it wasn’t your agent or manager, there was probably a lawyer involved. It’s time to call them and say, “Hey, we need to nudge this.” What can happen sometimes is there’s a little bit of a negotiation, like, “We don’t really don’t want to do this some more. Can we figure a thing out here?” You might be able to settle for less than that if they really don’t have you doing that next thing. There may be a way out of here. But you should be getting paid and-
Aline: On a schedule.
John: On a schedule. TJ, your concern about getting paid money so that your health insurance and everything else continues is correct. And so get that money coming in.
Aline: God, two of the most depressing things when you’re a young writer is trying to get paid, especially when it’s not a ton of money to other people but it is very meaningful for you, and then the other thing is – have you ever been on a money where they don’t want to give you your per diem? Then you’re calling your agent about something so minor. I have friends who were just telling me that this happened to them. It’s literally the most embarrassing, because you’re just trying to get money for a sandwich. There’s this embedded idea that you get paid enough, you should be fine. But if you’ve relocated, then you want that.
John: Totally.
Aline: But there’s nothing in it for your reps really. Early on in my career, I remember having to do that, and it was just so embarrassing, which is like, “No, I really would like money for that latte, so if you don’t mind.” Then the people they’re calling, they’re production people, not the creatives, creative executives. I don’t know. Anything where you have to ask for money, it’s such a bad day. It’s just such a bad feeling.
John: I recently re-watched Tropic Thunder, which largely holds up. Some stuff didn’t hold up so especially well. But one of the ongoing jokes in it is that in the actor’s contract he’s supposed to have a TiVo, and his TiVo didn’t show up. And so he’s like, “Where’s my TiVo?” The agent, Matthew McConaughey, is always trying to track down this guy’s TiVo. It’s silly. My daughter ended up not wanting to watch it, so I wanted to ask her, what is a TiVo. Does she even know? There’s a sense of-
Aline: That’s how my son taught himself to read was to use the TiVo, because he would run down in the morning to turn on the TV and figure out where Sesame Street was. That’s how he taught himself to read and work the TiVo at like four.
John: Of course.
Aline: It’s just funny, the tiny humiliations that we sustain as a writer, that are like, you’re just asking for the basic thing that you’re guaranteed, and then everybody acts like you’re a weenie for asking. It’s one of those things that can really grind you down.
John: This is a bit in the weeds here, but on this project I mentioned that was a five-week rewrite, it came at a time in which I did not have an agent or a manager, because I switched representation. It was just negotiated with my lawyer, who did a fantastic job. But also, it meant we actually had to bill for stuff ourselves. We invoiced for ourselves. It was weird dealing with it.
When you and I are starting a project, it goes from some special magic development account, and it’s this thing. But when you’re actually on a thing that’s running, it’s being paid out of the actual payroll for the actual production. I was talking to the accountant for this thing. It was clear that I’m filling out these forms that, as a writer, I should not be filling out this form. It was weird.
Aline: Wild.
John: Ultimately, the checks still cashed. Money is fungible. But it was weird to be paid out of just different pot of money.
Aline: Please, sir. Please, sir. Please, sir, may I have my paycheck. I’m sorry, TJ. You just have to find the right person to ask. But they do owe you something. Guaranteed means guaranteed.
John: Early on in my career, I did a project for Fox 2000. I did my draft and my set, and I had no more guaranteed steps. But my agent got a call saying, “Oh yeah, we decided to let the option on this book lapse, and so we’re closing out the books on this project. And there’s one polish step on his deal that we’re not gonna use, and so we’re just gonna settle that out and pay it.” I’m like, “But why are you doing that?” They wrote me this check.
Aline: Nice. Take that out. Take that out. Take that out. That never happened.
John: The statute of limitations on that has passed a long time ago.
Aline: That’s right. That’s long ago been spent on some fabulous vacations we’re gonna hear about.
John: We have a question from John about NDAs.
Drew: “I’m new and started shopping my first script around that I’ve written. I’m unrepresented at this point by an agent or manager, though I have a new lawyer. I’ve submitted the script to the US Copyright Office and the WGA. I’ve labeled the cover page with copyright at 2024, my name. I sent a log line to an executive. He responded favorably and asked to read it. I sent it. My lawyer told me that I should get an NDA signed by anyone who wants to read the script before. Is that necessary or common? My instinct is that it adds friction to the process, and if it’s copyrighted, what’s the risk? Is it common practice to have people sign NDAs?”
John: Uh-uh, absolutely not. This is not a thing that happens. We’ve had many fabulous guests on the podcast. We had Christopher Nolan on the podcast. I bet you probably have to sign an NDA when you read a Christopher Nolan script, because he sends a person over with a script that you have to read in person.
Aline: I will say this. If someone sends you, John August, a script to read, and they are not represented, then they would have to sign a form. But just watermark it.
John: You’ve written the script. You own the copyright on it. Worry less, John. It’s just not a thing. It’s a thing that happens with super high secret projects where there can be NDAs on things. This is not that situation.
Aline: You’ve seen the scripts printed on red paper?
John: Yeah.
Aline: I once worked on a project where they insisted on printing it on that silver, iridescent paper. Do you know what I’m talking about?
John: I’ve done another different thing.
Aline: It’s silver, iridescent craft paper. 99 percent of the things that I’ve written are just – people are not digging through files to find romantic comedies or whatever. But this particular company, we had to send it out. And that paper weighs like 100 pounds. We submitted it to a director who’s a friend of mine, and he was like, “I’m not reading that. That’s insulting to me that it would be sent in 20 pounds of iridescent paper. I promise I’m not doing anything with it.” But in a world where things can leak… That’s not this though. Just watermark it. Really, watermarking it takes two seconds, and then you’ll feel like you did something.
John: I would disagree on the watermarking. Anything that gets in the way of a person’s picking up the script and reading it is a barrier, and I feel like that watermark could hurt you.
Aline: Maybe it makes it feel-
John: Special.
Aline: Special. I don’t know. But definitely, you don’t need an NDA. If it’s submitted through a lawyer especially.
John: I feel like if I got something that was watermarked from some person who didn’t have stuff, I’m like, “Wait, you don’t trust me to read your script? You think I am going to steal this thing? That I am going to do something?” I get when a studio sends me a thing that’s a little more secret to me. But also, I would say in this day, in that situation, you’re probably not getting the pdf anyway. They’re sending you some special link to some dumb thing.
Aline: Have you had that, where they can tell how much you’ve read and where you are on it?
John: Yes. That’s spooky.
Aline: That’s a weird feeling, because you want to feel like I’m spending enough time on each page. You don’t know how much data they’re getting. But you don’t want them to know if you were whipping through it. That hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I haven’t gotten one of those in a long… Maybe just because I haven’t done as many of those rewrites. But I haven’t had as many like, give us a vial of your blood, and then disappearing ink on your computer. Also, by the way, half the time I don’t know how to do it.
John: I don’t know how to do it. I was talking with a showrunner who was describing a situation where they were meeting with two different actors for something, and so they sent them that script through that process, in a situation where they had to read it in an app in order to read the thing. They said, “Oh, no, we’re gonna go with this one actor,” and so they pulled the script from the other actor in the moment.
Aline: Off the computer.
John: Off the computer. He tried to flip a page, and then it was all gone. That’s how he found he didn’t get the… Brutal. Let’s talk about some fairies. What does Chris in Ireland have to say?
Drew: Chris in Ireland writes, “I’m writing a spec animated feature set in Ireland where a group of fairies are the antagonists. In Irish folklore, fairies are seen as unpredictable, mischievous, and often malevolent, the complete opposite of Tinkerbell, who I feel has become the dominant representation of fairies in popular culture. I want this movie to celebrate Irish folklore and culture with people around the world. But as the primary audience is children, I’m wondering how to navigate the Tinkerbell issue with, A, potential investors, and B, with audiences. So do I stick to calling them fairies, or should I refer to them as something else?”
John: I say you just redefine what fairies mean in your world. I think it’s great.
Aline: Yeah. I don’t know. It depends on the tone. I was just thinking about that. You may not want to go too meta. If it’s a comedy, you can talk about the fact that people have a preconception about what fairies are, but they’re actually not. Tinkerbell is one of my favorite Disney characters, because she is kind of a pain in the ass. She’s jealous and she’s capricious, and that’s one of the reasons I like her. She’s giving a word I can’t say on this podcast. But I love that about Tinkerbell. I think mischief is part of it. But I know, he’s talking about van art fairies. And so I agree with you. If you can redefine fairies, that’s fun.
John: Absolutely. Obviously, what you’re trying to do with any movie you do is let the audience know what genre you’re in but also how you’re changing the rules of that genre and what you’re bending in that world, and that feels like that’s what you’re bending. So go for it. Let’s wrap up with Dave.
Drew: Dave writes, “I’m an Australian-based DP and I’ve been listening to the podcast for many years now. I’ve been shooting a Netflix show since it started in Australia, and this year I’ve been fortunate to come on board as DP of the latest season of the U.S. version. I moved to my Santa Monica apartment yesterday and I’m looking forward to my next five months in LA. A big part of why I felt comfortable saying yes to the job was because Scriptnotes has made the idea of being in LA a whole lot less intimidating, so thank you. I’d love to know if there’s any resources you’d recommend for looking up screenings or industry events that might be handy for someone like me with a bit of time on their hands.”
John: Dave, you chose to move in Santa Monica. I’m sure you had a reason for doing that. It probably feels most like Australia. You’re kind of a ways away from the center of town of stuff, but that’s fine. Hopefully, you can get on the freeway quickly. What things should he be doing in LA?
Aline: This is a good segue into talking about something I love, which is Revival Hub. Do you follow Revival Hub on Instagram?
John: No. Tell me all about it.
Aline: Revival Hub consolidates all the revival screenings in LA, so all the rooftop screenings, the cemetery screenings, the Alamo special screenings. There’s the Academy Museum, which is open to the public. Every day. Maybe we could put the link to that. It’s every one that’s happening. Back to the Future was playing last week, and E.T. If you go to those, it’ll be packed with industry people generally are the ones.
I’ll tell you a hilarious thing. On Memorial Day, when most would be barbecuing, me and my son and his girlfriend went to the Academy Museum to see Shiva Baby. There were a fair number of people there, but not a ton. That’s not the traditional way of celebrating Memorial Day. And in comes Phil Hay and Karyn Kusama and their son, who we know. Phil and Karyn and I have been laughing for weeks about – I saw them walk in, and I was like, “That tracks.” And they were like, “Yeah, that tracks,” that that’s what we’re doing on that holiday.
You’ll find like-minded people who want to go in a nice air-conditioned screening of Shiva Baby, which I loved – we all loved. You’ll find your people there if you’re comfortable chatting with people. And if you’re working on a project, maybe you’ll know some people there.
John: Absolutely.
Aline: Or you can put up on your Facebook page, “Hey, I want to go see this revival screening of Urban Cowboy or whatever. Does anybody want to come with me?” That’s what I would recommend, because if I had more time, I would be doing those all the time. Obviously, there’s New Beverly. There’s lots of them.
John: I was gonna recommend the Academy screenings, which you can just find online. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But Revival Hub sounds great, because there’s always a ton of them around town. There’s an upcoming July 5th Charlie’s Angels at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with fireworks afterwards, so I’ll be going to that. There’s gonna be retrospective screenings of Go coming up. There’s always gonna be those things that happen.
Aline: It’s really fun. It’s great. It’ll make you feel like you’re in the biz, because LA is really dispersed.
John: Fewer things out in Santa Monica, but even out there, there’ll be some stuff.
Aline: Oh yeah, there’s places that are close to there. There’s the New Art, some of the places in Revival Hub. But also, summer is a great time for special screenings. In Malibu they do them on the cliff. It’s fun.
John: I love it. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Malta. I just got back from Malta. Have you been to Malta?
Aline: I have not, no.
John: Malta is really cool. It is an island nation, of course, south of Sicily. It feels kind of impossible, because it is a foreign country that speaks English. You definitely know you’re in a foreign country, but everyone speaks English, because it’s the second language of the island is English.
It’s incredibly urban and dense, except for the parts that are totally rural. It’s really cool. All the names seem like they’re Arabic, because it’s Semitic language, and yet it’s not. It’s really a very cool place. I really dug it. A lot of stuff has filmed there over the years, like Gladiator stuff, a Popeye film there. They kept all the sets from the Robin Williams Popeye.
Aline: How do you get there?
John: We flew. I was in Italy for a conference, and we flew. We were so close. I could literally almost see it. But we had fly back to Rome, and Rome to Malta. Air Malta was good. I just dug it. I’m thumbs up on Malta. They have a nice big tax credit. I’m looking for a thing to shoot in Malta, because it’d be a cool place to do a thing. Everything is white limestone, and it feels like you’re in North Africa.
Aline: Cool.
John: That was great.
Aline: Love that. I did enjoy it on your Instagram.
John: Thank you. Game of Thrones shot some stuff there. Things like a lot of exteriors got shot for various seasons in Malta. So check out Malta.
Aline: Check out Malta.
John: I’m head of the tourism board.
Aline: Have we discussed that I am the other person who loves this drink?
John: She is pointing at caffeine-free Coke Zero, or Coke Zero Zero, as we call it in the house.
Aline: That’s the best stuff. I would drink 10 of those if I could.
John: What’s stopping you?
Aline: Because it disrupts my biome. It’s really not good for you. But that is the best one.
John: Craig Mazin does not believe me on this. I will bring it over to his house.
Aline: Incorrect.
John: He’s like, “Oh, I’ll have regular.”
Aline: No, it’s this.
John: He’ll have caffeine-free Diet Coke, which is not nearly as good.
Aline: No, no, this is the thing.
John: This is the thing.
Aline: It’s not my One Cool Thing, but it’s our one cool thing.
John: But Aline, it’s hard to find.
Aline: Oh, believe me. I have it always stocked in my office and at my house, so come over.
John: When people are shopping for you, they may have trouble finding it, but the one hint-
Aline: It’s red.
John: It’s red. You need to find it at the Ralph’s on Wilshire. Will always have about eight of them, and so I will always take seven, so I can leave one so they remember it.
Aline: I have two One Cool Things. They’re short. But I like to do something girly always on this most male of podcasts. I chose a color that was too dark today. I have two, and I picked the wrong one. There’s a thing called peel-off lip stain.
John: What’s this?
Aline: You put what looks like a very, very dark lipstick on. You’d actually like this, because it’s pretty cool. You put a lot of lipstick on, and then over the next 10 minutes it dries into a film, that you then peel off.
John: I like peeling off stuff. That feels great.
Aline: It’s a delight.
John: Like glue on your hands as a kid. Love it.
Aline: It’s like that. It leaves this color on your lips. There’s a few things you gotta master to get it right. You can just go to Amazon and write peel-off lip stain. It’s fun. The one I used this morning, as I said, is too dark, but look. It’s not moved since I’ve been here.
John: It matches your shirt.
Aline: It’s not moved since I’ve been here. It’s just a fun, silly thing that I got from TikTok, which leads me into my last thing that you would love. Are you a TikTok guy? You’re not.
John: I’m not. I’m a Reels guy, so I watch like TikTok two weeks late.
Aline: No, not two weeks late, my friend. Six months later. I love when someone puts up a funny song clip or something. There’s two that are really big right now. What happens is somebody will put up a funny song clip and then people will duet it. They’ll play along to it. They’ll sing along to it. They’ll rearrange it. They’ll do dances to it. There’s two right now that are big on TikTok. One is “I’m looking for a man in finance.”
John: Of course. Love it. So good.
Aline: You know that?
John: Yeah.
Aline: There’s a million remixes of “I’m looking for a man in finance” that are great. The newest one is a hilarious guy who does comedy songs. This one is (sings) “put a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man in case he comes to town.” People have sung along to it, played along to it, danced to it. If you go to TikTok and you find the original – you’ll just put “a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man” or just put “dirt man,” and then you’ll find the original one. Then what you do is you click on that sound. Watch the ones that have the most views. The ones that have like two views are not gonna be great. But “looking for a man in finance” has just taken off like a rocket. And Dirt Man, which is a real ear worm, has also taken off. I just recommend, especially if you’re new to TikTok and you’re trying to figure out what’s fun about it.
What I love about TikTok is that people are so creative. They are so creative. And so many people can sing. I really love the ones where people sing in harmony. But dancing, adding saxophone, they’re really fun. And maybe we can link to some of the better ones for those two sounds. But “looking for a man in finance” has now become iconic. Ariana DeBose did a parody of it for the Emmys.
I know that in a world where we are constantly afraid of what social media is doing to us, I see TikTok and other forms of social media too can be an area for great expression. YouTube is how I found Rachel Bloom. There’s good stuff on the internet.
John: My newest obsession in TikTok/Reels is I love seeing incredibly talented music producers take a thing and redo it. What I found this morning was a guy who could take a Dua Lipa, like, “What if Phil Collins had written this Dua Lipa song?”
Aline: Yes, I saw that. It’s fantastic.
John: It’s genius. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that too.
Aline: It’s great.
John: It sounds great. It’s like, I really love this. I want Phil Collins to have done this song.
Aline: There’s that Celine Dion remix that started on TikTok. Then sometimes things get popular on TikTok and it takes them a while to clear it legally so that they can stream it. But the Celine Dion one, which they turned it into a dance song, you can now get on Spotify. Humans are awful, but also wonderful and so creative. And there are so many talented people out there. And TikTok is a good venue for that and for some horribly useless things. But it’s also a venue for some wonderful stuff.
John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Matthew Jordan.
If you have an outro, you can send your link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and glasses and hats now. You can find all those at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Thank you to all our Scriptnotes Premium Members. We’re gonna be talking about journaling. But it’s always lovely to have you here on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna.
Aline: I’m actually Craig.
John: Yes, really, your commitment to the bit, Craig, I really respect that.
Aline: He did good.
John: He did good.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Bonus Segment. I want to talk about journals and journaling and this idea that we should be writing down what we did all day, because it feels right and feels useful and I’ve done it at times, but I don’t do it consistently. I’d like to do it more often. Aline, are you doing it?
Aline: I shockingly don’t. Not only do I not journal, I also don’t copiously write down ideas or bits of things. Very rarely do I do that. My husband is shocked at how little I record. I think I have this core belief that – I don’t know what the term for this is, but I don’t have a specific episode memory. I have a synthetic memory. That’s the term I would use, which is when I walk around the world, I’m noticing patterns more than I am trying to record actual instances of things. I find that if I concretize things too much too early, it prevents me from doing that process of synthesis.
Who doesn’t write in their diary when they’re a teen? “Nobody here understands me.” I certainly did that, but I have not found it useful. I know we’re gonna talk about journaling. I know I’m supposed to do it. I know it’s good for you. I know both those things are good for you. But I think it depends on what sort of person you are. I find that I do my ruminative stuff in a different way. We can talk about this on another episode, but do you narrate your life to yourself, or do you not?
John: I guess I narrate to the degree to which I am aware of the thing I’m doing. I have a very active internal voice, if that makes sense.
Aline: You do. I don’t. Some people are like, “Oh, here I am. I’m at the podcast. Look at Drew,” and they’re talking to themselves. I don’t, in a flow state. And I also can visualize things. I think that part of like – I’m gonna make up a word – synthetic memory, I assimilate things and sort them. I don’t dwell on specifics. Look. So many people do it. It’s probably better, and I should do it, but I don’t.
John: This is not in any way meant to be like, “This is a thing you should do.” I just want to talk about when it’s been useful and when I’ve done it and why I mostly don’t do it often.
A couple years back, I went through a really rough time. And one of the things that people recommended was this Five Minute Journal, which is this little white book. At the end of every day, you write down, like, here are some good things that happened today. It has these specific prompts. It sounds really stupid, but it’s just incredibly helpful, just by putting some context around stuff, like, “Oh, today wasn’t entirely shit. There actually were some good things, some things I noticed. Okay. Take a deep breath. It actually wasn’t awful.” Sometimes even over the course of the day, it got me thinking, “Oh, this is an actually okay moment.”
Aline: “Good latte.”
John: Take the small wins for what you got. I’m not using that book at all anymore, but it was useful for that. On the iPhone now, they have this app called Journal, which is a built-in app from Apple, which is surprisingly poor. It doesn’t actually do very much for you. But I thought, oh, that’ll be a good way to remind me to actually write down some stuff, because what I find I will do is I will happily email a person about the stuff I was working on or text somebody, but I won’t spend the time to actually text myself about, like, this is the thing that happened, and so there’s no record. I don’t have a good way of looking back, like, “When did that happen?”
Aline: My husband has an amazing book. We went out to dinner last night. He gets the card for the restaurant. He puts it in his journal. It says dinner with so-and-so at this restaurant. He has these little notebooks, and he’ll just paste them in. He has a record of the things we’ve done and the places we’ve been.
I think it depends on what sort of brain you have. But I had read a thing which is – and this is good for writers. You know when you’re working on a long-form thing and you feel like, “What did I do today?” Making a list of what you actually accomplished in a day, “Did a workout. Wrote four pages. Called my mother,” things that you to-done list. I did that for like three days.
John: Now, your husband is an attorney.
Aline: No, he works at a mutual fund.
John: For some reason, I was convinced your husband was an attorney. I was thinking there’s people who have billable hours who need to actually show the work they’ve done. That feels like a natural instinct.
Aline: He doesn’t have that. He doesn’t do that. People’s brains are a lot more organized that mine. I guess we’re at the age where you decide your faults or your strengths. I think I have more of a birds eye view than a day-to-day view, in a certain sense.
John: One of the things I recognized is that my photo roll becomes essentially my diary, because it’s like, “What was I doing in April?” Then I scroll back to April, like, “Oh, that’s what I was doing.”
Aline: Yes! John and I are sort of the same person. Have you noticed? ENTJs who like the exact same kind of Diet Coke. That’s exactly what I do. I love looking back and saying, “What was I doing a year ago?” Then you send it to a friend and they go, “Okay.”
John: “Okay.” But one of my frustrations I’m recognizing is that – I’ll get to what I’m actually doing and trying to do more now – but on my trip to Italy and my trip to Malta, I will think through, like, what am I gonna post on my Instagram stories, but I won’t do that for myself. I’m fine publicly presenting a history thing, but I won’t keep that for myself.
Aline: That’s what those social media things are. They’re like we’re writing our own lovely tribute to ourselves. I wonder if she would be okay with us name checking her, but Katie Dippold once said to me and Craig – we were talking about something, and she said there should be a button before you post something online that says, “Wait, but why?” It’s so true.
Listen. I started an Instagram for my dog, Sir Jimmy Jim. Why? I don’t know. I put one-second work into the caption. They’re terrible. But there’s a need to concretize. Now that you can publicly concretize, it’s very tempting. But you’re right, why not privately concretize?
John: What I’m using right now is called Day One. It’s an app that’s for iOS and also on your Mac. You can write some stuff in there about what happened. You can also link it to things. I use Strava for running, and so all my runs show up in there, and so it keeps track of that. You can add photos to it and make stuff work.
What I’ve found has been helpful for me to do is, on my iPhone I will start a new entry and then I’ll just hit the voice transcription thing, where you click the button and you just talk at it, because I don’t care that it’s perfect or that it’s exactly right. I just want to dump it out there and make a record, because I’m probably the only person who’s ever gonna read this again. That’s been useful. It’s one less barrier of a thing to do.
Aline: There’s a thing called the external brain that my husband talks about where getting things out of your brain into Evernote or into something-
John: I use Notion for that.
Aline: Because otherwise you wake up in the middle of the night going, “Oh.”
John: I’ve talked about it on the podcast, but I keep a stack of index cards by the bed, in the bathroom, and various places. I’ll write the thing down and then it’s done. I’ll put it by the bedroom door. It’s out of my brain. I can stop thinking about it.
Aline: You should do that. Again, these are all things that I should do and don’t.
John: Listeners, if you have suggestions for journaling things you want to be doing… Oh, but I do also want to ask you – several writers who we know do things called Morning Pages, where they write all the stuff… I see you shaking your head. That does not feel like an Aline thing. The idea behind these is that you unlock the artist within and fight the war of art and get all that stuff out of you. I’ve just never found it super helpful. I’ve tried it. It’s like, sure, I can vomit out a bunch of stuff, but my day isn’t better for me having done it.
Aline: The time that I’m writing, I want to consolidate into purposeful writing. I think it would make me feel despair.
John: Yeah, it could. Aline, always a pleasure having you here.
Links:
- ‘Bad Boys’ Settlement by Dominic Patten for Deadline
- Why did Sony buy Alamo Drafthouse — and is it actually a good thing? by Ryan Faughnder for LA Times
- The Nine Enneagram Type Descriptions
- Farewell – Casablanca
- Farewell – Past Lives
- Farewell – Lost in Translation
- Farewell – Weekend
- Farewell – Philadelphia
- Farewell – The Shawshank Redemption
- Farewell – Harold and Maude
- Farewell – Terminator 2
- Farewell – The Way We Were
- Farewell – The Wizard of Oz
- Farewell – E.T.
- Farewell – Toy Story 3
- Farewell – Dead Poets Society
- Revival Hub LA
- Visit Malta
- Peel off lip stain
- Dirt Man by Carter Vail, and some of Aline’s favorite remixes, via TikTok
- Phil Collins’ Houdini
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 648: Farewell Scenes, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 647 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today I am so lucky to have two Scriptnotes producers in the studio with me. Megana Rao, welcome back.
Megana Rao: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
John: Drew, of course, you’re always here.
Drew Marquardt: You’re stuck with me.
John: We are doing a compendium episode, a best of things. Drew, as you were putting this together, you realized that this is familiar territory here.
Drew: It’s an endings compendium. Going through, I found out that Megana had already made an endings compendium in Episode 524, which was very good, but I’m gonna try and one-up you.
Megana: I so welcome that. Yes and me, please.
Drew: That’s the best way to do it.
John: Talk to me about the things you chose for this, which Megana may have already chosen for her episode too.
Drew: We’re starting out with a clip from Episode 44, which is breaking down how an ending works. It’s a really great primer for what you should be looking for in endings. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 170 and talk about twist endings. There was a great article that provided a framework for that. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 366 to talk about denouements, that little moment after you’re climax where you’re wanting to wrap everything up. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 392, talking about how that last moment or last image develops and how to fix an ending that’s not working.
John: The reason why this is relevant for me this week is I was just doing the Sundance Labs. One of the things you do in Sundance Labs traditionally is show a scene from your movies or movies you enjoy. The theme for this lab session was endings. Susannah Grant was talking about the ending of Erin Brockovich. It’s not just about winning the case. It’s all the things that happen after that and how you tie up all those relationships and things that actually matter to your audience. Endings were on my mind.
It’s great to have both of you here for this. We’ll start with this Episode 44 clip and then hear bloops between them. But the three of us will be back here at the end for our One Cool Things, little wrap-up, and then we’ll do our Bonus Segment. We’re gonna talk about reunions, which is something that happens after an ending.
Drew: Yeah, like right now.
John: Yeah.
[Episode 44 Clip]
John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start looking at writing screenplays and start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re gonna walk away from your movie with. They’re gonna walk away from your movie with an ending.
And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.
Craig: I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first 5 pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s gonna end. That’s insane to me.
John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”
The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line. It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. And so often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.
So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first 10 pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody or they just have to finish. And so those last 10 pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started, which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.
My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”
Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right, because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this – not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this – and that ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment.
And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected – it always seems to me it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.
That’s the point is that there is an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was, so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning.
John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re gonna get to, like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City, because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.
Craig: I’d like to see that movie.
John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence. What is the need in Wizard of Oz?
Craig: But that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away.
John: That’s right.
Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just gotta want to go back home. I know you ran away. You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”
That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending – it’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning. We’d be done with this thing.” But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point, the ending is defined by faith and decision.
And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies – and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re gonna cross the streams. We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t gonna do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.
John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s gonna be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie, they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.
Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about – sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies.
John: And we are specifically talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we see? How are we gonna meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?
And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.
Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing – and frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning, because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.
John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise but was actually very illuminating, because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie, because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.
Craig: I love it.
John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.
And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.
Craig: I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean I know what the character thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.
When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life – and Pixar does this better than anybody. And they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films.
I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s gonna leave that and go back. And I like that, but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go. They design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl – the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.
And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with Boy Scout; flying, talking dogs; and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work.
John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines. And the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?
And so quite early on, I had to figure out like, what is it that the son can — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing that that’s going to be incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that. I could feel that. Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to, what are the steps that are going to get me to that point?
And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, in this case Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.
Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that ending – the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.
John: This talk of endings reminds me of – I met John Williams. At USC, the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.
And John Williams made this really great point, that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s your ending. And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.
Craig: Oh, for sure.
John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.
Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumb’s up. But if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer.
And similarly, when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie, when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.
John: But what I want to make sure that people who are listening – we are not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point, and so one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.
Craig: Yeah, and maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside in fact he was awful, and in a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he just died alone. And yet there’s something nice about the image, because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there.
[Episode 170 Clip]
John: So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley. Whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool.
This blog post talks through twist endings. It defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.” And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies, because some of my favorite movies have twist endings.
Craig: Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal of identity, in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster.
John: The Crying Game where the woman you love is not –
Craig: Is not a woman.
John: Ta-da.
Craig: Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego.
John: That would also maybe play into the third version, which is the reversal of perception. And reversal of perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was.
My movie The Nines has that aspect, where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all.” But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting.
Craig: Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder, in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying.
John: Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen, because in some ways, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal, but a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes, you’ve spent eight hours on this thing, and then to say like, “Oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you,” might feel like a betrayal.
Craig: No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that.
One of the other twist endings he identifies is the reversal of motive. I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. He cites Seven, where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims.
John: Obviously, reversal of motive is often found in comedies also, where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. In the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack, like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen, and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products. Their motive was very different, and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting.
And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect, because you’re like, “Oh, that’s the twist,” and then the next scene, you’re going to see that actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting. So sometimes you can misdirect twice or you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection.
Craig: Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. What just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks… She is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there undercover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies.
And here he also has reversal of fortune. This one was a little – I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory. What you thought you were going to get, you’re not quite getting.
John: Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory, or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar, who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” And so this is basically, there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly that Twilight Zone kind of fiction may have that, like suddenly at the end, the great and short version, where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses.
Craig: Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending. One of my favorite Simpsons jokes, it was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it, so he doesn’t have to go to Hell. But then he does finish it and he ends up in Hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment, where he’s put on a conveyor belt and-
John: And force-fed doughnuts.
Craig: … force-fed donuts, except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many donuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes.” Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment. And then we have reversal of fulfillment.
John: Which I found the most challenging of the ones he described, and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune.
Craig: Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this.
John: It’s not only that they’ve done this, but one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair.
Craig: Right, that the gifts are now useless for each other. Yeah, that works. That sort of, kind of is also-
John: It’s ironic too.
Craig: It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too.
John: Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at, what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist, and so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending, the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.”
So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information, and then at the end, providing it, and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s the only thing your story has going for it, it’s unlikely, I think, to be completely satisfying.
Craig: That’s right. I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all. It does not.
The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie whodunit. All of Agatha Christie’s stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it, and you never could figure out who did it, and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time. Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her.
And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high-wire act to do when you… We all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “I wonder what the twist is.” I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, “Well-“
John: “Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.”
Craig: Yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something.
John: There’s a meta level of expectation, that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending. So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, “Oh, but that’s not really true.” And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing.
What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names, because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him, because three times is certainly a pattern.
Craig: No, for sure. Frankly, it’s started to feel a little desperate. We don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently, and then we can enjoy it along with them.
By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this mystery writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization, because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft, because the twist…
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first-person account. A guy is living in this little town. Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him. He describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator. And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great.
John: Yeah, we like that. In many ways, I think that’s that kind of reversal of expectation. That’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. You thought this was going to play by the rules, and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens. It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet.
Craig: It’s my One Cool Thing.
John: Oh my god. Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is. I know what it’s parodying.
Craig: Repeatedly.
John: Repeatedly. And then, through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent.
Craig: Indeed.
[Episode 366 Clip]
Craig: My fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. It’s not, with me, as always, any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive.
It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say, “How does the movie end?” Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax, when things have settled down. And there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing.
I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you. If you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.
John: Great. “Denouement” is a French word. “Denoue” is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something, because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created, sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages. Correct, Craig?
Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement.
I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say, okay, what is the difference here? And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.
In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing. That’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. And at the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0.
The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last, that this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person. This is the new reality.
John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally, and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing, or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them.
Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding, because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says, “Okay.” We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. They have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?”
Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax: Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement: Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good.
John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end, and Manny’s final question is, “So what are we doing for New Years?” It’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before, that the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.
In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son is now born and saying like, “Oh, did all that really happen?” and the father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.
They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking, “The characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.”
Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her.
And the denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” But what’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is okay. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name. And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there, and it could have – she was a criminal – but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on.
And then she punches a guard in the throat, because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie. And it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief, you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. And here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat, because you change but you don’t change completely, because that feels gloppy, right?
But both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.
John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A-plot of your movie. Your A-plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally. It’s how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.
Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important.
For instance, if your theme is “all you need is love,” then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there.
If your problem is, “Okay, my character is Vanessa. And Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved,” which is an incredibly trite movie – I apologize to Vanessa – at the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success, because then I start to wonder, okay, what was the lesson here?
Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes. The denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.
John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, so if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward.
Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather, letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big (sings) and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely.
The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is okay.
John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories. We don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now.
Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film, you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring, because you’ve not been safely placed back down.
There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started.” And if you are not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.
Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement.
John: Let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script, I will generally jump forward and write the last 10 pages, so some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards.
Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often, you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last 10 pages, which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written.
Craig: That just infuriates me, the very thought of it, because I obsess over those the way I obsess over the first 10. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie, essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write.
John: Probably so.
Craig: I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way. Creatively, obviously, inside the robot management, I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But yeah, I’m a big planner.
John: I’m very instinctual, and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene.
Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other.
John: Let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement, because the denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationship, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?
Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit. Whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job, when they see the last bit of the movie, they will in their minds add on the following words: “And thus it shall always be.” And if you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad.
John: True.
Craig: Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there.
Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this (sings). It’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “Our life is hard and it’s tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go, and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say “and thus it shall always be,” meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place – let’s just call it 1910 – is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be.
It doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be “and sadly ever after.” But the point is it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important, because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.
John: Yeah. Everyone is going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding; so whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending.
[Episode 392 Clip]
John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.
And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last beat has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.
Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it doesn’t change much for me. But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.
John: I start with it too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry, that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.
But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much “we shot the script,” those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change, because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and where it’s delivered it to.
Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages.
Craig: To start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. The last shot really is about sunsets, but of course it’s not.
For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment.
We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. She would cite how sometimes she would ask people what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other, and there’s pride.
Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.
John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up.
And way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question and someone asked us, “I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” And my answer was, “You should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.”
And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to, you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. Having a clear sense of “this is where I think the movie lands” is crucial. It’s like “the plane is going to land on this runway” tells you, okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.
Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle, you don’t have a thing to trace, were you a good circle drawer?
John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?
Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.
If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click, connection to the beginning.
One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I think it’s just Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind, but also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look.
John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.
So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about. The narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.
Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable.” Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound. We start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place, because the variable has changed, and that’s your character.
John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy. Each of the books has had that sense of reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened.
Being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different, because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.
Craig: Yeah. Reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.
John: It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction.
Craig: It is. But then when you look back, you go, “Oh yeah, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that all along. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.
John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.
Craig: You should do it.
John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.
Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear.
John: Silver Bear.
Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel at the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope?
The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story. And the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you.
I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that.” That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change-
John: For sure.
Craig: … and often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here is how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “You know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, “Yeah, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.
John: Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. In the pitch version of it, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen, that they’ve not seen. You’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.
In a pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.
Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot…
For instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.” See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning.
If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.
John: Let’s take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment, you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there; actually painting out the world so we can see like, okay, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene, but also, I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.
And so in the script stage, what was a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise.
Craig: Yeah. I hate being the guy who’s like, “Would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this?” But the last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and starting a new hope, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.
John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though, it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. The journey was this is a kid who is all on his own, who forms a new family, so going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the victory.
Craig: Dead family.
John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than the – I imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.
Craig: Yeah, it would be like (sings). You’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family. We’re friends. We did it. We went through something nobody else understands.”
John: Let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production, there’s finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience, it’s generally because the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page, just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters, things just feel different. Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there.
In some cases, it’s reshoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways. And it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.
They’re thinking about, “What does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here?” And the music is going to be a big factor. There’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.
Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention, because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.
In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my god, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship.” Okay. Now, we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.
But the ending can never be just, “Do you know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.
John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or an extra thing. And generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.
Craig: How do you leave them feeling is the biggest.
John: Sometimes though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that, it’s like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense.
It was really talking about, like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie, because doing that, you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.”
Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. If something is not working in that, where your circle is supposed to connect up, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong or the beginning is wrong or they’re both wrong. But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and then this thing that sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix. John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.
John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there.
Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive.
[End of Clips]
John: We are back here for the end of this episode to do a classic thing we do at the end of every episode, which is our One Cool Things. Mine was an article I read this past week by Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post. It’s called “America’s best decade, according to data.” If people talk about like, “Oh, things today are terrible,” well, when were things good? When you ask them these questions, was it the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s? It turns out it was when people were young is when things were good. Generally, people remember things being better at their time. Starting a little bit before they were born up until their teenage years was the best time according to most people.
Drew: Are there any outliers, or do we ever feel like it’s not our youth?
John: This article didn’t really point to any areas in which there was notable exceptions to that rule. But by any objective measure, most things are better for most people right now. It’s hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it.
Drew: That’s crazy, because it was objectively the ’90s.
Megana: Because you were such a young man, I feel weird asking this, but do you find that to be true?
John: That what, the ’90s were the best decade?
Megana: No, when you were younger.
John: You do have some sort of halcyon vision of how things were, but no, I don’t personally think things were better in the ’70s or ’80s as I was growing up. It was easier for me because I was a kid, but that was a time before the internet. The world wasn’t better before the internet. For all the challenges the internet has brought, it’s also a good thing that I wouldn’t want to give up. There’s a lot of stuff that’s better about living now, so I’ll take it. Megana, something to share with the audience?
Megana: Yeah. I just finished this book. I just finished Miranda July’s latest book called All Fours. She’s a filmmaker and a screenwriter and a novelist. I don’t know how to describe this book without giving too much away or being too reductive, because you could say that it’s this coming-of-age midlife crisis for this woman who finds herself in her late 40s and dealing with her body aging. But I just find Miranda July’s writing to be so delicious and intoxicating. It just completely swept me away for the two days that I was reading this book. If you have travel or summer plans coming up, I would definitely recommend a read.
John: Awesome. I’m traveling, so I’m excited to read. I’ll add it to the list. I actually met Miranda July at one of the Sundance filmmakers’ labs along the way. My proposal to her, which was almost literally a proposal, is we should get married and have a daughter named June so she could be June July August. It was just there. It was out there. She’s lovely. I think we would’ve made a great couple.
Megana: I think that that is how those decisions should be made.
John: We are so suited for each other. Drew, what is your One Cool Thing?
Drew: My One Cool Thing is an app called Callipeg. It’s an animation app. You can do it on your iPad. To unlock all the things, it’s two bucks a month or something like that. But I’ve used it to make little things. You can rotoscope really easily on it. It is just fantastically useful if you want to just make a quick sketch animation thing. You don’t have to know – I don’t know how to actually animate. Using it takes a little bit of time. But it’s really fun and I love it.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but spell it for us so we can look for it easily. Is it Callipeg with a K or with a C?
Drew: It’s with a C. It’s C-A-L-L-I-P-E-G. It’s a French animation app.
John: Excellent.
Megana: How fun.
John: Nice. That is our show for this week. Thank you to Drew and to Megana, our producers. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our classic outro this week. Matthew, thank you. Matthew, for folks who don’t know, started on Scriptnotes as being a person who did outros and then became our editor. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Megana, you saw that we now have hats?
Megana: I have not seen the hats.
John: My hat’s inside. I’ll show you the hat.
Megana: I can’t wait.
John: There’s even drinkware. No mugs. As you know, I am anti-mug, but we do have other drinkware.
Megana: Sadly, you are anti-mug.
John: I’m anti-mug. We can get into my anti-mug stance. That’s another episode. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on reunions. Drew and Megana, thank you so much.
Megana: Thank you.
Drew: Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Megana, we are catching you just coming back from a reunion, a college reunion. Was it what you expected? Was it nice to see people? What is a reunion like in this time of Instagram where you could keep up with people you want to keep up with?
Megana: That’s such a good question. I feel like the people that I end up keeping up with on Instagram are not necessarily the people I want to keep up with.
John: If Megana follows you, she secretly hates you.
Megana: No. I would just say that a lot of my friends who I was most excited to see do not post that regularly on Instagram. Maybe it’s the mystery that made me more excited to see them. But also, a lot of the friends that I wanted to see have had babies recently, and so they also have-
John: Reasons why they’re busy.
Megana: Yeah, their hands are full.
John: I’m always a little suspicious of people who are not on Instagram.
Megana: Are you?
John: Weirdly, I am. I know people have their valid reasons. Maybe they get sucked in too much or they just don’t want people to know about their lives. But also, that’s how I would assume I’m gonna reach you is on Instagram.
Drew: It’s like being in the phone book.
Megana: That’s so interesting, because I recently got hacked, which is humiliating and embarrassing. But you knew that.
John: I knew that. I think I was the person who-
Megana: You were the person who told me I got hacked.
John: I messaged you like, “Megana, there’s a problem here.”
Megana: After that, I was so irritated with just the process of getting my account back under control that I was like, “I am gonna absolutely delete Instagram.” It’s interesting that you would’ve been suspicious of me had I done it.
John: I’m nothing if not self-contradictory. Talk to us about this reunion. You go back. You see college friends.
Megana: I went back, saw college friends, saw college friends’ families, held a lot of babies, which was nice and something that I enjoy doing. It’s just wonderful to see people become more themselves. I know college is such a special time where I think you are so free of obligations, but it’s just wonderful to have seen my friends develop in their careers and just how that manifests and how they carry themselves. I felt very proud in a dance mom sort of way.
John: This is your first reunion being back since you moved to Hollywood, correct? Your previous reunions, you would’ve been still at Google, I’m guessing? Where does this find you?
Megana: Yeah, which was a big change to explain to people that I don’t know all that well, but yeah.
John: Nice. Now, Drew, it’s complicated to explain your schooling history.
Drew: I’m weird, yeah.
John: You’re weird, yeah. You did not go to a classic college situation, so you don’t have a college reunion in the same sense.
Drew: We don’t. No. I went to conservatory in the UK, which I think most schools in the UK, I’m not sure if they do any reunions. I feel like that’s far too sentimental for them. No, so it’s just been keeping up on… Also, I have a tiny class. I’ve got like 20 kids basically. That’s probably not gonna happen. We have to figure out ways to do that ourselves.
John: Have you been to high school reunions?
Drew: I haven’t, because that also is a weird situation for me. I went to a little art school in the middle of the woods.
Megana: I don’t think I realized that.
Drew: I went to a place called Interlochen Arts Academy.
John: I’ve heard of that, yeah.
Drew: It’s great, but you have to take a lot of planes to get there, and a reunion’s not that easy.
John: I’ve had both high school and college reunions, and I’ve found them both great. College reunions, it’s nice to be back in the campus space. It’s like, “Oh, Peggy’s bar is still there,” all the stuff. You recognize what’s there, what’s the same, what’s changed. Just that feeling of being back in that location takes you back in that time, which is really, really nice. You get to see friends, of course, and catch up, and people have gotten married and divorced and all the changes that happen. You see who aged well and who did not age well, which is always fun to see.
But weirdly, high school reunions, I can chart more progress in the high school ones, because they’re the people who I didn’t want to see, who I did see at my 5-year and my 10-year. You’re still very competitive, who’s doing what, and people are showing off. At a certain point, people who’d left Boulder, where I grew up, were boomeranging back to Boulder. That I found really strange too. People who went to California, who went to New York, and suddenly they’re back in our comparatively small town. People who I never thought would come back were back. Getting to my 10-year and then my 20-year reunion, even the people who I didn’t especially like, I was happy for them. I was just happy to see people thriving a bit.
Megana: That’s so interesting. I have so much affection for the people that I went to high school with. Most of them are still in Ohio. I’m actually in the process of making up for a high school reunion that was compromised by COVID, I guess. It’s interesting, because most of my peers and the other student counsel people still live in Ohio. I want one of them to just step up and take the reins, because they live close by and could easily organize it.
John: Let’s paint the real picture here. Of course you were the student body president.
Megana: Yes.
John: As a student body president, it is this tradition where you are therefore responsible for putting together the reunions, which seems like a lot of pressure to put on a 17-year-old for future life decisions.
Megana: It is a lot of responsibility. I would happily do it and just choose a bar for people to meet up at, but then when I start having this conversation, other people have really strong opinions. I’m curious to hear your take, because that last time that we started talking about this, the other class officer people were like, “Oh, we’ll do it at this fancy event place, and we’ll get alcohol, and we’ll charge this much for tickets.” I was like, “I certainly don’t want to organize that, but I also really don’t think that I would want to go to that.” Don’t you want your reunion to be a casual thing? What’s your guys’ take?
John: I’m a little bit sympathetic to what they’re saying, because there’s a sense of providing a little bit of structure for it, makes it so it’s not just so casual that it’s just at a bar. My 10-year reunion was a little bit more structured in the sense of, it wasn’t just an RSVP. You did have to pay in advance so that they knew how many people to expect and they could actually plan stuff. The later ones were a little bit more ad hoc and thrown together and it was in a bar. But at that point, it was who was still in town and available. But my strong advice for you is just pick whoever has the strongest opinions and say, “I agree. You should be in charge.” Is that possible?
Megana: I think that it could be. I think it’s probably my own guilt that is preventing me from doing that. But I think that that would probably be a happier solution all around.
John: The local person should head it up, because it’s so hard. It’s easier now to do that remotely than it ever has been before, but still, they’re on the ground.
Megana: I keep being like, “Oh, we should go to this bar in town,” and it’s like, nope, that bar closed. I just don’t know stuff like that anymore.
John: Reunions are also a fascinating thing in movies. Obviously, The Big Chill, but there’s a lot of other of people getting together over time. It’s a question of do you show them in the original thing and then jump them forward or is it just them meeting now and having to catch up over what’s happened. I’m surprised there’s not been a Breakfast Club reunion movie, for example. That feels like a missed opportunity.
Drew: That’d be cool.
Megana: That is so interesting. I guess my cynical take is that not that much changed after that Saturday.
John: Probably not, yeah.
Drew: It’d also be fun to see them at a reunion with everyone else in the school and you’d be able to fill in all those other characters.
John: We would do it. Obviously, all of our sequels tend to feel like reunions as it is. Bad Boys 4 is a reunion movie. There’s something nice about getting the gang back together for one more run.
Megana: Whenever you do a sequel, you have to start the characters worse than you hope they have their happy ending, just so you can reset the conflict. It makes me a little sad to think about doing that to those kids.
John: It’s fine. That’s what we go to movies for is seeing that.
Megana: The Deadline article is coming out as we meet.
John: It’s so good to have a little reunion of the three of us here. Megana, thanks for stopping by.
Megana: Thank you.
Links:
- Episode 44 – Endings for beginners
- Episode 170 – Lotteries, lightning strikes and twist endings
- Episode 366 – Tying Things Up
- Episode 392 – The Final Moment
- Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
- Too Many Cooks
- America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post
- All Fours by Miranda July
- Callipeg
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 647: Crafting Your Ending, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back Ryan Reynolds for an in-depth look at his creative process bringing the character of Deadpool to the screen.
As co-writer, producer and star of the Deadpool franchise, Ryan leads us through his first introduction to the character, the rough journey getting to greenlight, and the challenges presented by an often-faceless protagonist. Along the way, they talk tone and dialogue, collaboration and rule-breaking, respect and irreverence, and the importance of listening to the movie. Ryan also has some writing questions for John and Craig.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we look at Ryan’s flair for marketing and the creative freedom he’s found in advertising.
Links:
- Ryan Reynolds on Instagram, TikTok and X
- Deadpool & Wolverine
- He’s So Annoying by Jesse David Fox for Vulture
- Buster Keaton – The Art of the Gag by Every Frame a Painting
- TCM – Turner Classic Movies
- Ryan Reynolds Guest Programmer | TCM via YouTube
- How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral by Nilay Patel for The Verge
- Vancouver, BC
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Englehard (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Deadpool with Ryan Reynolds first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, we look at movies that use the confines of a single day to their advantage, keeping characters constantly pushing against time and towards their goals.
Our collection includes:
- All is Lost by J.C. Chandor
- American Graffiti by George Lucas, Gloria Katz & Willard Huyck
- Before Midnight by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
- Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater & Kim Krizan
- Bodies Bodies Bodies by Kristen Roupenian
- Booksmart by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins
- Dazed and Confused by Richard Linklater
- Die Hard by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza
- Dog Day Afternoon by Frank Pierson
- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by John Hughes
- Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
- Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg
- Locke by Steven Knight
- Margin Call by J.C. Chandor
- Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho
- Superbad by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
- Tangerine by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
- Malcolm and Marie by Sam Levinson
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: 24 Hours or Less first appeared on John August.
John welcomes journalist/screenwriter Max Read to look at the emerging sub-genre “halogencore” – stories of corporate malfeasance that are less about uncovering corruption as they are about characters learning to ignore it. They look at the evolution of the sub-genre, how these movies function, and why it’s important to define genres at all.
We also explore the current state of independent journalism and freelance writing, and follow up on Hallmark movies and playwrights turned screenwriters.
The new Highland (including support for iOS) is now in beta — Sign up in the link below!
In our bonus segment for premium members, does it feel like time has sped up this summer? Like, even more than usual? John and Max slow it down and find the silver linings of an accelerated world.
Links:
- Beta test the new Highland – sign up here!
- Max Read’s newsletter READ MAX
- Shiva Baby and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
- How many Hallmark Christmas movies are there?! by Stephen Follows
- The Read Max ‘Halogencore’ Guide
- Max Read’s Halogencore list on Letterboxd
- Where Are You Now? by Sara Schaefer
- Billy Strings – Dust in a Baggie
- In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Halogencore first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, we look at those first screenplays that broke through, got made, and launched some of our favorite writers’ careers.
Our collection includes:
- 28 Days Later by Alex Garland
- A Few Good Men by Aaron Sorkin
- Badlands by Terrence Malick
- Blood Simple by Joel and Ethan Coen
- Bottle Rocket by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson
- Cloverfield by Drew Goddard
- Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story by Rawson Marshall Thurber
- Eighth Grade by Bo Burnham
- Following by Christopher Nolan
- Fruitvale Station by Ryan Coogler
- Get Out by Jordan Peele
- Go by John August
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- Hereditary by Ari Aster
- Juno by Diablo Cody
- Kids by Harmony Korine
- Little Miss Sunshine by Michael Arndt
- Palm Springs by Andy Siara
- Pariah by Dee Rees
- Promising Young Woman by Emerald Fennell
- Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino
- Rocky by Sylvester Stallone
- Sense and Sensibility by Emma Thompson
- sex, lies and videotape by Steven Soderbergh
- Shaun of the Dead by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
- Sicario by Taylor Sheridan
- Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley
- Submarine by Richard Ayoade
- Swingers by Jon Favreau
- The Babadook by Jennifer Kent
- The Post by Liz Hannah
- The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola
- The Wedding Date by Dana Fox
- The Witch by Robert Eggers
- Whiplash by Damien Chazelle
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: First Features first appeared on John August.
In this compendium episode, John and Craig look at two of the most fundamental building blocks of compelling stories – conflict and stakes.
We define six forms of conflict common in movies, and explore ways to sustain conflict within a scene and throughout a story. We also look for ways to find the root of your character’s stakes, pick the right stakes for the world around them, and the importance of making everything personal.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig look at Whiplash and how it finds conflict at the perfect tempo.
Links:
- John’s Video Game Job Posting
- Episode 179 – The Conflict Episode
- Episode 402 – How Do You Like Your Stakes?
- Snowpiercer – Left or Right by Every Frame a Painting on YouTube
- Star Trek: The Next Generation In 40 Hours by Max Temkin
- Harris’ or Harris’s? Apostrophe row divides grammar nerds from The Guardian
- The Heights Deli & Bottle Shop
- Cheerios Veggie Blends
- Special K Zero
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Conflict and Stakes Compendium first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, it’s back to school! We look at stories that articulate the excitement and ease the pain of starting another academic year.
Our collection includes:
- 10 Things I Hate About You by Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith
- Big Little Lies – “Somebody’s Dead” by David E. Kelley
- Bottoms by Rachel Sennott & Emma Seligman
- Clueless by Amy Heckerling
- Dead Poets Society by Tom Schulman
- Dear White People by Justin Simien
- Easy A by Bert V. Royal
- Fast Times at Ridgemont High by Cameron Crowe
- Friday Night Lights – “Its Different For Girls” by Andy Miller
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by Steve Kloves
- Lady Bird by Greta Gerwig
- Mean Girls by Tina Fey
- Napoleon Dynamite by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess
- Never Have I Ever – “Pilot” by Mindy Kaling & Lang Fisher
- Rushmore by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson
- School Daze by Spike Lee
- Sex Education – “Episode One” by Laurie Nunn
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Wednesday – “Wednesday’s Child Is Full Of Woe” by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: Back to School first appeared on John August.
John and Craig stand waist-deep in rotten tomatoes and ask, what can we learn from bad movies? Resisting the urge to walk out, they explore ways to evaluate a movie’s problems, interrogate your taste, and turn a real stinker into an opportunity to grow as a writer.
We also follow up on Lifetime movies, colored pages and AI screenwriting, and answer listener questions on weirdo characters and the validity of a ghostwriter.
In our bonus segment for premium members, when is it okay to bail on something you no longer enjoy? We look at when to bounce on books, friendships and more.
Links:
- WGAW Good and Welfare Emergency Assistance Loans
- AI Screenwriter job posting
- Pageant of the Masters
- Pageant of the Masters Brings Art to Life from the Wall Street Journal on YouTube
- Arrested Development – The Living Classics
- Severance on Apple TV+
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Pascui Rivas (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post How to Watch Bad Movies first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer-director Betsy Thomas (Superior Donuts, Superstore) to finally discuss writing multi-camera sitcoms. Using famous sitcom scripts as guides, they look at how multi-cam sets itself apart through its unique formatting and production, how it utilizes blocking, its surprising limitations in post, and the live studio audience.
But Betsy is more than just a talented creative – she’s also the secretary-treasurer of the WGA West. Who better to lead us through the WGA annual report and look at writer income and residuals in the wake of the strike? We also follow up on gains for writing teams and un-locked pages, and answer listener questions on flashbacks, punctation, and untrustworthy producers.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Betsy explains to John and Megana what makes golf such a wonderful sport.
Links:
- Betsy Thomas on Wikipedia and IMDb
- Megana Rao on Twitter and IMDb
- WGA West Annual Report
- Writer Earnings Fell $600 Million Due to Strike and Industry Contraction, WGA Says by Gene Maddus for Variety
- Cheers – “Give Me a Ring Sometime” by Glen and Les Charles
- Cheers – “Father Knows Last”
- Night Court – “Pilot” by Dan Rubin
- Friends – “Pilot” by David Crane & Marta Kauffman
- What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained by Mary HK Choi for The Cut
- Unstable – Season 2 on Netflix (hooray Megana Rao!)
- Wicked Little Letters on Netflix
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, X and Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Multi-Cam Comedies and WGA Dollars first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, we enter the clandestine world of spies and secret agents to see how their writers use action, tension and character to keep us on the edge of our seats.
Our collection includes:
- Argo by Chris Terrio
- Bridge of Spies by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
- Burn After Reading by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
- Charlie’s Angels by Ed Solomon & Ryan Rowe and John August
- Hanna by Seth Lochhead and David Farr
- Killing Eve – “Nice Face” by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
- Kingsman: The Secret Service by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn
- Mission: Impossible by David Koepp and Robert Towne
- Mission: Impossible – Fallout by Christopher McQuarrie
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith – “First Date” by Donald Glover & Francesca Sloane
- Skyfall by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan
- The Americans – “Pilot” by Joe Weisberg
- The Bourne Identity by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron
- The Debt by Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan
- The Night Manager – “Episode 1” by David Farr
- The Spy Who Dumped Me by Susanna Fogel & David Iserson
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan
- True Lies by James Cameron
- Turn: Washington’s Spies – “Pilot” by Craig Silverstein & Mitchell Akselrad
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: Spies & Secret Agents first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back Megana Rao to look at rituals and what they can tell us about our characters. But what are characters doing deliberately, and what is just routine? They separate routines from rites, and how both can help deepen our understanding of characters and the threats that face them.
We also follow up on un-locking pages, industry software and health insurance for writing teams, before answering a listener question on transitioning from writing plays to writing movies.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John, Craig and Megana talk about coming-of-age rituals, and Craig reveals the theme of his Bar Mitzvah (it’s even nerdier than you think).
Links:
- Standard Operating Procedures from Writer Emergency Pack
- Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Free AF non-alcoholic cocktails
- Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging
- Fantasmas on HBO/Max
- AlphaBirds
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, X and Mastodon
- Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help this week by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Rituals first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, we look at the series nominated across all categories at the upcoming 76th Emmy Awards. (In some cases, we’re using the pilot, so you don’t worry about spoilers for later seasons.)
Our collection includes:
- 3 Body Problem – “Countdown” by David Benioff & D. B. Weiss & Alexander Woo
- Abbott Elementary – “Pilot” by Quinta Brunson
- All the Light We Cannot See – “Episode 1” by Steven Knight
- Baby Reindeer – “Episode 1” by Richard Gadd
- Curb Your Enthusiasm – “Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister” by Larry David
- Fargo – “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Noah Hawley
- Fellow Travelers – “You’re Wonderful” by Ron Nyswaner
- Girls5eva – “Pilot” by Meredith Scardino
- Griselda – “Paradise Lost” by Doug Miro and Giovanna Sarquis & Ingrid Escajeda
- Hacks – “There Is No Line” by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky
- Lessons in Chemistry – “Introduction to Chemistry” by Lee Eisenberg
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith – “A Break-Up” by Donald Glover & Francesca Sloane
- Only Murders in the Building – “True Crime” by Steve Martin & John Hoffman
- Palm Royale – “Maxine Goes to Palm Beach” by Abe Sylvia
- Reservation Dogs – “Deer Lady” by Sterlin Harjo
- Ripley – “I – A Hard Man to Find” by Steven Zaillian
- Shōgun – “Anjin” by Rachel Kondo & Justin Marks
- The Bear – “Fishes” by Christopher Storer & Joanna Calo
- The Crown – “Sleep, Dearie Sleep” by Peter Morgan
- The Gentlemen – “Refined Aggression” by Guy Ritchie & Matthew Read
- The Morning Show – “In the Dark Night of the Soul It’s Always 3:30 in the Morning” by Kerry Ehrin and Jay Carson
- The Other Two – “Pilot” by Chris Kelly & Sarah Schneider
- The Righteous Gemstones – “Pilot” by Danny McBride
- True Detective: Night Country – “Part 6” by Issa López
- What We Do in the Shadows – “Pilot” by Jemaine Clement
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: Emmy Nominees first appeared on John August.
John and Craig finally become writing partners and edit the opening to one chapter of the upcoming Scriptnotes book live on-air. They wrestle with word choices, adapting the phrasing of a spoken conversation and finding a unified voice as they pass the keyboard back and forth.
We also catch up Craig on what he’s missed since he’s been away, follow up on #payuphollywood, and answer a host of listener questions on personal stories, backstories, sharing credit, Lifetime movies, and disliking your protagonist.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig deal out their favorite card games.
Links:
- AlphaBirds
-
PayUpHollywood
- Scriptnotes Episode 427 – The New One with Mike Birbiglia and Scriptnotes Episode 640 – Can You Believe It?
- A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It. by Max Bearak for the New York Times
- Love Good Protein
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, X and Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Englehard (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The Live Edit first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, we look at stories told through the lens of a child’s imagination, and how those fantastical fictions can help them overcome real-life adversity.
Our collection includes:
- A Little Princess by Richard LaGravenese
- A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
- Beasts of the Southern Wild by Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin
- Coraline by Henry Selick
- Heavenly Creatures by Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson
- Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro
- The Secret Garden by Caroline Thompson
- The Wizard of Oz by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf
- Where the Wild Things Are by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: Childhood Escapism first appeared on John August.
Back in 2017, friends and I came up with a fun little game called AlphaBirds.1 We’ve been playing it in the office nearly every Friday since then.
It’s a word game like Scrabble or Wordle, but faster and more fun. And it’s ridiculously simple to learn.
- On your turn, draw two cards.
- Play one card in front of you, and one in front of any other player.
- Make words if you can. Longer words are worth more points.
Yes: there are more rules. But that’s the gist. Most players pick it up in 30 seconds or less.
It’s the perfect game for lunchtime or beer o’clock. You can carry on a conversation while playing, and don’t have to keep things in your hand. You draw; you play; you’re finished until it’s your turn again. Most games last about 10 minutes.
We printed 100 copies of the game and shared them with friends. Then we got busy doing other things.
This spring, we decided to officially launch the game. We registered the official trademark, locked down the barcode, and redesigned the box for our new American manufacturer.
We also made a short how-to-play video.
Starting today, you can buy AlphaBirds for yourself! The game is now available both on our site and on Amazon. This isn’t a pre-order. It’s in stock and shipping today.
Because we’re a brand-new game, we currently have zero online reviews. So if you’ve played AlphaBirds and love it, please leave a review so others can see it’s an actual game humans enjoy.
- Originally it was called Sparrow, but AlphaBirds was a better name.
The post AlphaBirds, our favorite office game first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Mike Schur (The Good Place, Parks and Recreation) to ask, how do you fix an overwritten script? They discuss ways to rebuild scenes and restore muddy characters that have become burdened by too many notes, all while making sure your script retains its voice.
We also look at the new IATSE deal with the AMPTP, the WGA’s back-pay settlement with CBS, Skydance purchasing Paramount, and follow-up on our idea of keeping pages un-locked.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Mike listen to the AI generated songs named in the RIAA’s current lawsuit and wonder, did they really steal from copyrighted material? (The answer is yes.)
Links:
- Mike Schur on Wikipedia
- Weekend Read 2
- IATSE tentative basic agreement
- David Ellison’s Skydance Taking Over Paramount After $8 Billion Investment by Dade Hayes for Deadline
- WGA West Reaches $3 Million Settlement With CBS Studios Over Writer Fees and Benefit Payments by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- Alphabirds
- Should We Go Extinct? by Todd May
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Vance Lovett (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Overwritten first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 646 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
There are many software products aimed at the film and television industry, and more in development. But why do the bad ones persist, and why is it so hard for the better ones to succeed? Today on the show, we’ll look at the challenges and opportunities around making things that don’t suck. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages submitted by our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, magic, who needs it?
Craig: Are we talking the card game or prestidigitation?
John: We’re talking about our D&D campaign at the moment. We’re 10 installments into a campaign without magic. Let’s discuss what’s worked and what’s not worked so well, what’s been surprising about that campaign.
Craig: Fairly niche topic, but honestly-
John: It is a niche topic, but that’s why it’s a Bonus Segment.
Craig: It’s a Bonus Segment, and really our Premium Members should be playing D&D. They’re premium, for god’s sake. They should pursue quality in their life.
John: I think in a more general sense though, it’s like, what happens when you don’t uphold some genre premises. Take anything. If you took a horror movie and dropped out some of the aspects of what we expect out of that genre. We just saw the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, which is an example of that, because it looks like a one-at-a-time killer thriller thing, and yet it’s not really that.
Craig: I like that idea. If we had an action movie, like a cop action movie, but no one ever fired a gun. It’s an interesting exercise in self-limitation to inspire some creativity and change.
John: We often talk about that on the show, how constraints are the writer’s best friends and that when you have constraints, it forces you to work within that. A project that I was approached by the last couple weeks, one of the problems was that it was just a world. There was no other kind of constraints to it. The first thing I had to do is like, “What constraints am I putting on myself?” because otherwise this is just an amorphous blob.
Craig: Yeah, I remember talking to Scott Frank when he took the job to do the Wolverine movie. He said his condition was Wolverine has to be able to die, because otherwise, who gives a crap? Everyone was like, “But Wolverine doesn’t… ” He’s like, “Mm-hmm. So anyway, Wolverine has to die.”
John: In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about constraints and death, because death is a bigger factor when there’s no magic.
Craig: Massively so. That’s an exciting one. What do we have going on with news? Probably nothing.
John: There actually is some news here today, because-
Craig: What?
John: You and I are headed out of town.
Craig: Oh, my.
John: We are going to go to the Austin Film Festival, which we are often doing. We’re going this year. It’s October 24th through 31st. We are scheduled to attend. We’re gonna plan a live Scriptnotes show. We’ll probably do a Three Page Challenge. There’s talk of doing a 25th anniversary screening of Go.
Craig: Oh, that’s nice.
John: It should be fun. If you are inclined to go to Austin and are thinking about travel there, now might be a time to think about that.
Craig: We haven’t been there in a couple years. Is that right? Did we miss last time?
John: Yeah, probably two years.
Craig: Two, yeah.
John: Because I remember you didn’t go last year, and the year before that was the year you got really sick.
Craig: Oh my god. I got so sick. I think I got a stomach bug is what happened. No, let me revise that. I got a stomach bug. It happened. It was that 24-hour stay in bed clutching your stomach in pain after you’ve barfed your world out and then just try and drink a little Gatorade. It was miserable.
John: It was bad.
Craig: Yeah, so no one breathe on me.
John: A stomach bug is probably something you ate though, right?
Craig: Look, it may have been something I ate, but it felt like just that nasty gastritis.
John: We are so selling the Austin Film Festival. Come for the illness. It should be a good time. It’ll be Drew’s first time going.
Craig: Wow. Look, as long as your room has a toilet.
John: Wow.
Craig: It’s like those cruises where everyone gets norovirus. No, it’s not like that, I swear. I’ve been there many, many times. The only time I got sick. It’s actually quite fun. It’s raucous. Drew, you will be somewhat of a rockstar there.
Drew Marquardt: Weird.
Craig: It is a little weird. I gotta be honest with you. That part gets weird. People will be like, “Oh my god, it’s Drew. You sound just like… I imagined you looking different from your voice.” You get a lot of that.
John: Megana was a rockstar when she was there, but Megana’s always a rockstar.
Drew: Megana’s a rockstar though.
Craig: I’m not saying that you’re necessarily gonna captivate people the way Megana did.
Drew: I don’t have that charisma.
Craig: You know what? You got enough rizz. You got enough rizz.
Drew: I’ll take it.
Craig: Listen. People are gonna be talking.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but Google Austin Film Festival and that’s all the information you need. Let’s do some follow-up.
Back in Episode 644, we talked about new federal reporting requirements for loan-out companies like Craig and I have and like what Scriptnotes is. That is for sure happening. But since that time, there was also a bit of a freak-out about, it looked like the California Employment Development Department was going to crack down on loan-outs in a bigger, more general sense. Cast and Crew, which is this big payroll company in Hollywood, sent out this alert right before Memorial Day, saying red alert, there could be huge changes coming here. It looks like that’s been backpedaled, but I thought we might spend a few moments talking about loan-outs, why they’re important, why a change to this would be a big, disrupting deal.
Craig: It’s hard to tell if Cast and Crew freaked out unnecessarily or if they freaked out necessarily. The fact is that loan-out corporations function essentially to protect Hollywood workers, duly artists, from being overtaxed, essentially. Some people could argue that loan-out corporations exist to keep artists below the line of fair taxation. There’s a fair debate to be had about it.
That said, literally every single writer, actor, director, producer that is, let’s just say, succeeding is working with a loan-out corporation. It is par for the course. California already has quite a high tax rate. We are taxed twice. You do actually get taxed as a corporation. Then you get taxed as an individual. It really exists because there are a lot of deductions that you can take as a corporation that you can’t take as an individual.
I have no doubt that once this letter went out, the unions and people that donate a lot of money to California politicians called those chips in and said no, don’t do that, and somebody then yelled at the EDD, who was probably some guy there who was like, “What is this all about? [Indiscernible 00:06:59].” Then he got like 15 texts in 12 minutes, like, “You’re gonna die.” It looks like the fight is over.
John: The fight is over. At least it’s been stalled or it’ll change a different way of approaching it. Listen. Loan-out corporations are a weird thing. It is strange to set up a system where you have companies that basically have one employee, or sometimes two with an assistant or something. It’s a weird way to do it, and yet the way that we work is just sort of weird.
I can both understand why regulatory agencies might say, “No, listen, these are employees. You should just treat them like employees,” and it’s also strange that above a certain earning threshold it makes more sense to go through a loan company rather than me being paid directly. It is kind of weird, and yet trying to change the system now would be so, I think, disastrous. You’d have to have a real, clear plan for how you were gonna do this.
Craig: Yeah, it would cost so much money that you might end up losing some people to neighboring states. It would be that crazy. The name “loan-out,” you might as well say it’s a fake corporation. You might as well use the word “fake.” Yes, it’s a weird bit of paperwork dancing, but it is, what, forever, right?
John: Yeah.
Craig: How long have these things been going on? Long before we showed up. That’s for sure.
John: Oh, yeah. It’s easier for big companies to hire other big companies. For this job I’m just finishing up now, it was on a rewrite for something. It was complicated. But they chose to pay me through their payroll company rather than through just the normal way. It was a mess to do it that way. There’s reasons we do things the way we do things. It’s not just because we’re trying to save dollars. It’s because there’s a structure behind it. There’s a reason why you pay a company rather than paying an individual in some cases.
Craig: The system, as far as I can tell, will not be changing any time soon.
John: But some potentially good news for you, Craig, because we got some follow-up about your Space Cadet movie.
Craig: Oh, fantastic.
John: Drew, help us out.
Drew: Yeah, because you mentioned on Episode 644 that the Space Cadet title, Lucas was sitting on it for a long time. Jose Luis in Puerto Rico says that there is a Space Cadet movie coming out this year, July 4th, 2024. It’s written and directed by Liz Garcia and will be released on Amazon Prime.
Craig: I guess Lucas finally got off the title there. My thing was in 1997. That’s a year that Drew doesn’t even understand as a year. I think it’s fair to say that nearly, what is it, 27 years later, that yeah, Lucas probably let it go.
John: Which is fair and reasonable.
Craig: That’s fair.
John: Let’s get to our marquee topic this week. Over the past couple months, I’ve had some conversations with two different startup companies who are trying to make software for film and TV productions. Here’s the problem that both of these companies were trying to solve. On a film or TV production, you have all these different departments who need to work together and need to communicate with each other. You have the ADs, you have wardrobe, props, locations, transpo, VFX, everybody working on the same project, and they need information from each other. How do they get that information to each other? What is the central source of truth?
The sources of truth would be the script, obviously, and also the schedule, the breakdown, like, this is the schedule for how to plan to shoot this thing. But there’s no obvious established way to do that, so instead, a bunch of homespun solutions have come up. Some of them work for some places, don’t work for other places. But it’s not hard to imagine that there could be a better way of doing this.
If in the script we know that Scene 15 is taking place at a roller rink, how does each department weigh in on what they’re going to do? Craig, I ask you, on The Last of Us, what is that process? What is the process by which all departments can see what each other is doing?
Craig: You really touched on a sore spot here.
John: I’m not surprised. There is a problem here. That’s why.
Craig: There is a problem. Basically, the way is done is through, I’m now gonna editorialize, endless, repetitive meetings. Endless, repetitive meetings. I found myself in a meeting just the other day. I love my crew. The department heads work so hard. Our show is a massive aircraft carrier. It takes so much time and effort to do everything, and everything is happening all at once, all the time. But I was in a meeting, an endless, repetitive meeting, just last week that brought up a topic that had been already met upon multiple times in prep, which is a half year ago. I started to feel like I was getting punked, like how is this possible? The fact is that there is a certain amount of human, face-to-face interaction and questioning that needs to happen, and I don’t know if there even is a software solution for that.
Beyond that, we do what every production does. The script gets broken down into a schedule by ADs using whatever Movie Magic scheduler or whatever the hell they use.
John: Probably that.
Craig: Probably that.
John: Probably that very old program, yeah.
Craig: Which is annoying, because it puts on the schedule thing in a list, the things we shoot, and then at the bottom of that it’ll say what day it was. That’s stupid. It should be at the top of it. Then everything in terms of distribution goes through Scenechronize, which I believe is owned by aforementioned Entertainment Partners, which I believe also owns my least favorite writing software, Final Draft. You start to see a little bit of a monopolization problem here.
John: Remind us again, what do you use Scenechronize for?
Craig: Scenechronize is a platform that distributes documents to the crew-
John: That’s right.
Craig: … electronically. Scripts can only be viewed in super watermarked ways and cannot be downloaded unless you have certain privileges. If you’re a department head, they let you download it. It also releases all communications like call sheets, schedules, preliminaries, memos, everything like that.
John: Most of your crew is looking at the stuff that would’ve been printed paper. Instead, they’re getting it through Scenechronize. They’re seeing it on their laptops, on their phones, on their iPads, right?
Craig: That is correct. We don’t have any printed stuff, except in the morning we distributed printed sides for very few people, just the ADs, the actors, producers, directors.
John: The decision not to use paper for very much stuff, is that because it’s more efficient or because you’re worried about stuff leaking out?
Craig: Both. This is Canada, where when you go to throw your garbage out, there are 400 bins. They’re very green. They’re like, before you throw your garbage out, is it soft or hard plastic? Is it a pen? Is it colored blue? There’s so many. I think probably also it’s just about not burning through… Productions used to burn through forests of paper.
John: Paper like crazy.
Craig: Insane. There is that aspect. It’s certainly cheaper. There are security measures that we can use with that stuff. It’s a little frustrating, I think, for people, because they can’t really have a script and mark it up and all the rest, but it’s just a necessary evil.
John: We talked about scheduling. We talked about Scenechronize. What are the other pieces of software that you or members of your team are using regularly to get the show done, both during production and then in post?
Craig: I write on Fade In. Then once Allie, who is both my assistant and also our script coordinator, goes through and puts it through the Scenechronize machinery to distribute, she also converts it to a Final Draft file. Why is it converted to a Final Draft file? Because Chris Roufs, our script supervisor, uses a very specific program for his job that only imports in Final Draft, of course. You start to see the problem with the closed system and the proprietary formats. It just begets just this legacy system of misery.
John: We have that, and then for while you guys are shooting, what is the software you guys are looking at cuts on? I know you also have the ability to look at things if you’re on another set while one set is shooting. What’s that kind of stuff?
Craig: There are two platforms for that. For the distribution of dailies and cuts, we use PIX, which I also do not like.
John: Oh my god, I’ve had to do nothing but PIX the last five weeks. I think PIX’s main job is to sign you out as frequently as possible. I’ve been on Zooms where I’m just tapping the screen and wiggling 10 seconds back just so it won’t sign me out.
Craig: PIX will log you out if you blink. PIX will force you to change your password if you go to the bathroom. PIX also is poorly organized and difficult to use.
John: Oh god, their bins are really tough.
Craig: Horrible.
John: The equivalent of folders.
Craig: I do not like PIX. I don’t. In fact, when I say to the editor, “Okay, everything’s great here, I just need you to change this, this, and this. Can you just send me that little section?” I make them not send it to me on PIX, even though that violates everything. I apologize to Time Warner, Discovery, HBO, AOL. The other platform we use constantly is Box. Box is our digital file management system.
John: It’s very much like Dropbox, but it tends to be used in the industry more for various reasons.
Craig: There are a few of those. We used I think Frame.io in one season. Maybe for Chernobyl we used Frame, and for this we use Box. We have somebody whose job is to oversee and manage that entire system. We use that to distribute tests, images, proposals, illustrations, previses, all that. Then you can comment, and you can also annotate, draw on it and comment to that. It’s a better system.
But I will say it only functions for me because I don’t actually get any notifications from Box. They all go through a separate account that Allie manages. Then she can compile all the things that I need. Three times a day, I get an email from her with 12 Box links, describing what they are and what I need to respond to, because if you don’t have that, basically you’re getting an email every 12 seconds saying somebody commented, somebody thought, somebody did this.
John: Oh, god.
Craig: A nightmare. That’s what happened to me in Season 1. I didn’t stop looking at it. It was a real problem.
John: Let’s talk about email. You are still using email to communicate with certain people, or do you believe in Signal threads? Are you using Slack? What is the way you communicate with department heads?
Craig: With department heads, typically I’m speaking to them directly or commenting through Box. If I really, really, really need to get them ASAP, I text. We don’t have Slack. I think that’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for me.
Part of this discussion is who are you and what are you doing on the production. If you are in the middle of things, you need as much communication as possible. If you’re the showrunner, you need the most curated discussion as possible, because you will drown in questions and details with three minutes, and you’re trying to do other things and stay in big picture and work on shooting and all the rest of it.
We don’t have Slack, or at least I’m not aware of one. It’s just texts if I need to, or I call somebody. But more often than not, I just say to an AD, can you have somebody come over, and I’ll talk to them.
John: Then you also have the ability to look at what’s happening on set. If you have to step away, but you still need to see what is that shot that’s going up or the setup. What’s that that you’re using?
Craig: We use QTAKE, which again I believe is the industry standard. QTAKE works quite well. QTAKE is incredibly important. There’s the whole system that Amanda Trimble, our video playback operator, uses. I don’t know what she actually has loaded on her cart there, but it is some special system. There’s a special system that the DIT uses. That’s the guy that manages the information flow from the cameras, because of course it’s all digital. I also use Evercast to edit remotely with our editors.
John: A lot of specialized software that’s just for the industry, but also some things like Box, which are just off-the-shelf things that you guys are using because they’re there and they work.
We’ve talked a little bit about the screenwriting side of it, which most of our listeners are involved with screenwriting software. Obviously, Final Draft, or at least the FDX format, tends to be a thing that you go back to. I guess I can understand the FDX of it all, because it is at least an organized format. It is an XML format, so there’s some logic behind using that as a basis of things.
The challenge though is, if you’re passing around files for things, will the files get out of date? It would make much more sense if there was one continuously updated file that everyone was looking at the same file. That’s very hard to do.
There’s a service called Scripto, which Stephen Colbert’s company developed, which a lot of the late-night shows use, because they are all banging together to work on one script. It’s more like a Google doc, where everyone is working on one thing simultaneously, which makes sense for those kinds of shows. You would hope that in the future at some point there could be a centrally updated script that is the source that you don’t have to then redistribute scripts out to people.
Craig: We don’t have anything like that. We still operate under the old system of blue revision, pink revision, goldenrod revision, but it’s all done digitally.
John: Then there’s the programs that you and I are actually writing in. I’m writing in Highland. You’re writing in Fade In. Those are great single-computer systems. There are some things to try to do the onliney version of that. WriterDuet did that. Celtx did that. Arc Studio does that. There’s ways to do it. It can be overkill for the single writer, but it can be useful for team situations. It’s tough to say what the right solution is. Still, the script and the schedule are at the heart of what productions need. It’s not surprising that people are trying to figure out how do we organize all these things so all these different ways we do stuff can be centralized and make life happier for showrunners, for department heads, for ADs, for everybody else.
In most of these cases, I’ve been talking to folks who are ADs who naturally have this instinct to… They want information to go to places without being repeated and for people to be able to see what the plan is. They look so good on paper. I look at the slideshows and the little mock-ups. I’m like, “Yeah, that seems great.” But what you’re actually talking about doing is you actually have to build Slack, you have to build PIX, you have to build all these things that exist that are really difficult to do.
The problem is there’s not a big enough market for it. You’re not gonna be able to get somebody to pay enough to make it actually worth developing, and much worse, worth supporting, because the expectation of your users is that this has to have basically 100 percent uptime, because if PIX goes down or if QTAKE goes down, that is a crisis. You have to have this crazy expectation for your uptime.
Craig: Anything that is served like that has to be bulletproof. You’re absolutely right. It’s why the hammer costs $800 instead of $5, because there’s only 12 people buying the hammer. It is incredibly specialized. A lot of these things I imagine are quite expensive. I don’t know. Things that like Fade In or Highland, that’s marketable to millions of people who want to write things. But Scenechronize, it’s just the people making stuff that use Scenechronize. I don’t know what it costs, but probably a lot.
John: I think as we talk about both the problems and solutions, you’re gonna need to find some way to make recurring revenue from your existing customers, because you can’t just find the next customer and the next customer after that, because there’s a hard limit on the number of customers who could potentially use your software. You need to find ways to monetize each time. That means either you are charging per user, per production, per month. There has to be some way that you’re making that sustainable, because otherwise your company’s gonna go bankrupt.
That’s also the reason why it’s very hard to attract the initial kind of money it takes to build the product in the first place, because any investor will say, “I don’t think this is a survivable business. I don’t think you can actually make enough money here, so why would I invest in it?”
Craig: You could see a world where let’s say Disney, as large as they are, says, “We’re gonna create our own system.”
John: They are.
Craig: They are?
John: They are. Disney and Netflix both apparently have their own systems they’re developing. That makes sense because they’re doing so much production and they can top-down force people to use it.
Craig: You can force people to use it anyway. But what you are always dealing with is the fact that, A, you are at the mercy of those companies, who charge, I can only imagine, exorbitant yearly subscription fees that scale in terms of the size of your company, and B, you’re at the mercy of their features. The way they do it is how you have to do it. But the method of organizing things per production to customize it, there is no customization really like that.
The upside for a company like Disney, which is so big and makes so much stuff, is, yeah, we can completely control it, we can manage it, and we can make sure it is bulletproof and not be held hostage. The downside is people that come into your system now have to use that, which means they have to learn it, which means they have to deal with it. They’re used to using the other thing, and everybody gets very, very cranky. Either there will be a revolt or it will work and it will spread, meaning if Disney and Netflix, in their combined might, create a system like this, everyone’s gonna use it. It’s just gonna happen.
John: Agreed, agreed. Everyone’s gonna use it who can afford to use it. Indie films will develop alternate systems. Maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe they can do some different stuff and it would make sense for them on that smaller level. Here’s the subtlety on that. If Disney or Netflix says you have to use this, people will use it, but I also suspect department heads will still go back to their own native ways of doing things and then just have to duplicate the effort to use the other system. They’ll still find off-channel ways to do stuff. I was talking to a British AD who says for their productions, they have WhatsApp channels for each scene or something, which is just-
Craig: Oh my god. Oh my god.
John: … ongoing discussions about how stuff works.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: It’s like, oh god, that seems so-
Craig: That’s horrible.
John: Yeah, it’s awful.
Craig: That’s just awful.
John: This is a person who made a giant Amazon show, and that’s how they did it.
Craig: “That’s how I do it,” in quotes, you’ll hear a lot. Obviously, there’s very powerful calendaring software and scheduling software. But also, when I walk into certain offices, in our production offices, I’ll see people who have calendared their wall with post-its, because that’s how they do it, and it helps them. I’m like everybody else. I have a way of doing things that I’m comfortable with. You get set in your ways. By the way, side question for you, John.
John: Please.
Craig: This is a “set in your ways” question. In the old days when we would print scripts, people would have a script, and then you would make revisions. The revisions would change the way the page count would be, so instead of changing the page count, you would just make A and B pages so that the following pages didn’t change. People just had to open their huge binder, pull out pages 38 and 39, and replace them with 38A, 38B, 38C, and then a new 39. But we don’t print anything anymore, and we have scene numbers. My question is, why do we still do this with pdf?
John: Craig, we should absolutely not be doing this.
Craig: We shouldn’t be doing it.
John: It is ridiculous that we’re doing it. I’m sure one of the showrunners who’s listened to the show says, “No, we stopped doing that.” Let’s all do this, because it’s dumb. It’s ridiculous.
Craig: It’s stupid. It’s stupid, because what happens is, on the day, you get there to rehearse the scene and there’s a page with one effing line on it.
John: It’s crazy.
Craig: It’s just dumb. It’s too late for me now. I’m in too deep on this season, but next season I’m not doing it. I’m not locking pages. It doesn’t make sense. People refer to everything by scene number anyway. I am infamous for not knowing what scene numbers mean. Somebody from prosthetics will walk over to me and say, “Question about 533.” I’ll say, “I do not know what that is. You have to give me some context.” But they all have scene numbers that never change, ever. So why? Why?
John: Hey, Craig, instead of scene numbers, should we as the writers come up with the three-word name for that scene or that sequence that we all are gonna refer to that thing as?
Craig: If you think about it, the scene number really is the ultimate version of that. They really do all think in terms of scene numbers. I have the program make scene numbers and I never think about them again. But what happens is they’ll say, “Oh, it’s Jane and Vanessa are arguing in the library.” “Oh, okay, that’s what Scene 533 is. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, continue with the question.” It’s easy enough to do. But the page thing, honestly, it just occurred to me how stupid it is that we still do it.
John: It’s ridiculous that we’re still doing it. We shouldn’t be doing it. Hey, if you’re on a show that has given up locked pages, let us know. By the way, late-night has never had locked pages. I bet there’s other things that have never locked pages. I don’t know if – did multi-cam sitcoms lock pages? [Indiscernible 00:29:02] on that too. It feels like they should’ve.
Craig: I don’t know. All I know is that for movies we always had them and it made sense and I understood why, because you printed things. But now, it just doesn’t… Why?
John: Let’s wrap this up with some takeaways here. I think one of the real problems we’ve talked about is inertia. There is that first mover advantage. People are used to Final Draft. They’re used to Movie Magic scheduling. So when a better system comes along, like Highland or like – there’s a competing scheduling software out of Germany called Fuzzlecheck, which is a terrible name, but apparently, European productions use it and it’s a lot better and it’s all online.
Craig: You’re saying Germans made a great scheduling software?
John: That is a shocker. This apparently is great. It’s all online, which makes so much more sense that you’d have multiple users touch things rather than have one person on one computer doing the thing. But I think it’s struggling to break through into the U.S. because everyone is used to the standards. It’s hard to get people to adjust from what they’re used to doing, unless you’re forcing them to or show them this is 10 times better and then they’ll switch, which is the frustration.
Craig: It won’t happen from the bottom up. I think your Disney revelation here – it was a revelation to me – is how it happens. It happens from the top down when a bunch of people in a room say, “Attention, all. This is what we’re doing now.” Everyone’s gonna, “What?! No!”
John: If you think about it from Netflix’s point of view, Netflix is essentially a software company, and so it would make sense that they would have ways to do these things.
Craig: Absolutely. People will complain, gripe, moan, and then they will adjust. But it will never come from the bottom up, because making television shows and movies is chaos. It’s utter chaos. Anywhere you can find some kind of comforting repetition and security, you grab it and you hold onto it forever. You will have to pull it out of their hands and give them something new. They will freak out, but then they will adjust.
John: Last thing I’ll say, you have to be thinking about what is a sustainable business model for this app you’re thinking about making. The problem is not that you cannot imagine a better tool or even design a better tool. It’s that you cannot afford to make it and sustain it and to actually keep it up and running. When people get frustrated about per-month fees or per-user fees or all that stuff, it’s like, that’s because that’s how this company can stay in business.
Craig: You’re saying that they’re not in business to go out of business?
John: They’re not in business to go out of business. That’s the problem with the Final Draft. Because they sell it to you once, they’re like, “Crap, we ran out of screenwriters. Okay, we need to make a new version of Final Draft that adds a useless feature that no one needs, just so we can keep the lights on.”
Craig: That’s not great.
John: Not great. Not great. That’s how you end up with Final Draft.
Craig: That is how you end up with the tragedy of Final Draft.
John: Let’s go to something we can maybe help and fix. Let’s talk about some Three Page Challenges.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: For listeners who are new to the show, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their pilot, of their feature. We look through them. We give our honest feedback. These are people who asked for our feedback. We are not picking random people off the street. We are trying to give constructive feedback on what they have sent through.
Craig: That would be so cruel.
John: What happens is we put out a call for submissions to the Three Page Challenge. People go to johnaugust.com/threepage. They read the little form. They submit their pages. Drew and our intern have to go through 100? How many generally come through?
Drew: A little over 100 this week.
Craig: Wow.
John: Go through a bunch of these to find three or four that seem like they’re good for our show. The criteria are they have to have no obvious spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes. We don’t want to be talking about those. We want to talk about what’s working on the page, what’s not working on the page, what can our listeners benefit from. They’re not picking necessarily the best entries, but the most interesting ones, the things we’ll have stuff to talk about.
We have three really good ones here to discuss. For our listeners who have their phones or their iPads handy, there are links in the show notes that you can read through these pages. Pause this, read through the pages, and join us as we discuss them. Drew, for folks who are not reading along with us, can you talk us through what happens in Planet B by Christopher James?
Drew: Sure. It’s 2055. In the White House Situation Room, President Keiko Pearl is briefed by her advisors on the discovery of a new Goldilocks planet able to sustain life. The head of the EPA cautions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but he’s laughed at. We then cut to a creature smashing through terrain, only to reveal that the creature is in fact a human toddler.
John: Craig Mazin, talk us through your initial reactions to Planet B.
Craig: We have what hat appears to be possibly a comedy. I think it’s a comedy.
John: I think it’s a comedy.
Craig: Science fiction comedy where Earth is in trouble, almost certainly because of climate change, and they have managed to find a mirror Earth that they can go settle.
This is a pretty common way to start these things. There are multiple problems that are inherent to this method of starting things. The way Christopher goes about it is he’s using a situation room in the White House to introduce people and concept and character. We have, I think, a bit of an over-stuffed three pages here, because it’s trying to do so much at once that it doesn’t feel like an actual scene with human beings. It feels more like a machined thing to teach us stuff about people.
We meet Sarita Arya, and we also meet Keiko Pearl, and we also meet Anne Reiss, and we also meet Brian Dale. Everyone, by the way, has some sort of race and wardrobe, hair, makeup, except for Anne Reiss, who is none of those. Does that mean she’s white? That’s a weird-
John: The default white problem, yeah.
Craig: Default white problem there. We also meet Bear “Grizz” Norris, and we meet Ryan Arya and Nowell Arya. In three pages, that’s too many people to meet. That’s too many. Everybody is a person. Everybody is a thing. Everybody has a thing, a vibe, whatever. We’re learning all of these things.
Here’s what I learned. I’m just gonna list the things that I’ve learned here. It’s Earth. It’s 2055 and Earth is in trouble. I learned that in the White House, Sarita Arya has a “steady demeanor and short, spiky hair.” I’ve also learned that Keiko Pearl, who’s Japanese American with “shoulder-length hair and youthful skin-“
John: She’s the President.
Craig: She’s the President. I’ve learned that Anne Reiss is a science advisor and is “always on defense.” I have learned that General Brian Dale is bald and from the Army and he is a stroke survivor and he uses a cane. I have also learned that Bear “Grizz” Norris is White. Oh, so he’s White. Okay, so Anne, she’s whatever. He is “shaggy haired and bearded.” I have also learned that Nowell Arya is biracial Indian/White and his father, Ryan, is Indian American and athletic. That’s all separate and apart from the plot stuff that I’m learning. It’s too much.
John: It’s a lot. I would say I think Christopher is doing almost the best job you could with this kind of shotgun intro problem. One of the reasons why I like this as an example is it shows how hard it is actually to do this.
I can envision a scene. Let’s say this is actually shot and there are recognizable actors maybe in some of these roles that help you distinguish who people are and remember them. But you’re trying to do so much. There’s so much table setting to do about that there is a second planet that has breathable air, who these people are, that it’s 2055, that it doesn’t feel real or legit in a way that even in a heightened comedy setting, which this is, is not going to work especially well.
I want to talk about just on the page. It’s in Courier Prime, which looks lovely. I think the breakups of scene description and dialogue, it all reads well. I’m not terrified to look through these pages. It’s pretty easy to get yourself through them. The use of underlines and single-word sentences, also really good. All these things work nicely.
I don’t mind the character descriptions. I think a lot of times I could visualize these characters better than in many samples because you’re giving me some details that I can actually click in my head. The problem is there was just too many of these things introduced back to back to back to back. Then I got confused and a little frustrated.
Craig: Everything has the same importance. Everyone has the same importance, because there are so many. Then there’s the tone itself. First of all, we go from the exterior of space, where we see Earth, and then we’re interior the Situation Room in the White House. The Situation Room in the White House is just a room. You might need to see the White House itself just so we know where we are. Then Sarita, who I assume is President Pearl’s chief of staff-
John: Chief of staff.
Craig: Yeah, it says chief of staff. Sorry, that was the other bit of information. See, it’s lost in the clutter. Everyone’s talking, and she whistles to make everyone stop talking. I didn’t believe that. I don’t think that’s how it works. They show this other planet, and then President Pearl immediately gets into an argument. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner? What took so long to find it?” I guess she’s just dumb. Is she dumb?
John: It feels like a question that is being asked for the audience rather than for herself.
Craig: Exactly. Then everybody else has a very… Anne Reiss, the scientist, is very sciencey. General Brian Dale, he’s very military-y. Then Buzz [sic] “Grizz” Norris is very EPA administrator-y. They are their jobs. That’s the roughest part of this.
John: I would like to propose a line that is banned from future scripts, which is, “In English, please.” General Dale says it. That feels just the tropey-est, clammiest line.
Craig: That’s a clam, especially because what Anne Reiss, 64, nothing else to know, says, “The atmosphere is 19.5 percent O-2.” General Dale, “In English, please.” He’s a general. He knows what oxygen is.
John: The actual question is, is that good, because I don’t know if 19.5 is good. I don’t know if that’s appropriate. Then her answer makes sense. It’s, “It means humans can breathe.”
Craig: If someone said, “So too much or not enough?” “It’s about right.” That’s fine. Christopher, I’m gonna pitch you a different way of doing this.
John: Tell us.
Craig: Christopher, what if the entirety of this scene – and you could go to interior, you don’t even need to know it’s the White House yet – is Sarita and President Pearl, and we don’t even know who they are. We don’t even know that President Keiko Pearl, “42, Japanese American, shoulder-length hair and youthful skin,” is the President. We just have two people talking over lunch, and one of them is explaining to the other one, “This is what’s happening.” What that scene is about is not about the information, but rather, their relationship.
There is some relationship here that is the central relationship of the movie. If that’s not the central relationship of the movie, find one and make that the beginning. But if it’s just two people talking and then President Pearl goes, “Okay, got it,” walks out of the room, walks into another room and finds this scrum all arguing, tells them all to shh, then they’re like, “Oh, the President’s here,” and she’s like, “This is it. This is what we’re doing,” I’ll go, “Oh, that was the President, and this is important.” But we have to focus this scene and put it within the context of a relationship, or we just won’t care.
John: I think our expectation of the first scene of the movie is that we’re gonna meet characters who are the fundamental most important people. Sometimes that can be defeated, where a bomb can go off and all these people could die. That could be a choice too. My expectation is that Keiko Pearl is probably the most important character. She’s the one we’re gonna follow. We don’t really quite know at the end of the scene whose point of view this scene is from. That is the frustration, if one of these characters is going to be the central character of the story.
I want to talk about, just as we wrap up here, the scene on Page 3 which is basically this monster is smashing things and it’s revealed to be a toddler. That will never work, because we’re seeing something. You’re not gonna be able to hold that premise, that joke for very long. You could have the bom-bom-bom music of something stomping around, but the minute we see his-
Craig: Legs.
John: … cute little shoes, his legs or something, it’s not gonna really work. You can describe it metaphorically, like, he’s like a monster smashing things, but only on the page could you get away with the, “Oh, there’s a terrible monster smashing things. Oh, surprise, it’s a child.” That’s not gonna be a surprise to people with eyeballs.
Craig: That is correct.
John: I love that we now have log lines for things. Drew, tell us the log line of what the actual full movie is.
Drew: “In 2055, climate change is irreversible and humans live on borrowed time. When Americans discover a nearby inhabitable planet, they must consider what’s worth giving up for a future as refugees in an alien society.”
Craig: Just about what I thought. It doesn’t mention what the tone is, but it does feel comedic.
John: I think so too. I’m guessing this is a feature and not a pilot. I think something would’ve said pilot on the title page.
Craig: Feels featurey.
John: Feels featurey. Cool. Let’s go on to The Long Haul. Again, if you’re gonna read along with us, why don’t you pause and read this. But if you’re not reading along, Drew, give us a summary.
Drew: The Long Haul by Becca Hurd. Emmy Baxter, 24, is irritated when an Australian stranger named Angus hijacks her karaoke performance at a Chicago pub. But despite her initial annoyance, their banter turns to flirtation.
John: I want to start with the title page here. This is The Long Haul. The O in “Long” is a heart. Below this is an image of the country of Australia and the country of U.S. with a line between them and a heart. It’s cute, sure. I kind of get what it’s about. It feels like a lot on this cover page. I would go with either the heart or the image there.
At the bottom it says, “Sydney, Australia, February 2024,” and it has her email address. The “February 2024” generally is over on the right-hand side where she put it, but things like her email address tend to be on the left-hand side. I don’t know why Sydney, Australia is there, other than maybe to tell us she’s Australian. But I don’t know that’s useful information for a title page.
Craig: I’ve never actually seen the location of where the script was written on the page there. I think you’re probably right. But I enjoy the graphic quite a bit. I agree with you, the issue with putting the heart in “Long” is that you have two hearts on the page.
There’s a very clever thing. “The Long Haul, Written by Becca Hurd.” The line between Australia and the United States is the old style, when you fly, a little dotted line happens, and the dotted line does a curlicue to become a heart in between. That actually is a beautiful summary of what this is gonna be about. It’s gonna be about a long-distance relationship between somebody who lives in the U.S. and somebody who lives in Australia and flying back and forth, I suppose. But that heart is diminished by the fact that there’s another heart in the word “Long.” Make that heart special, I think, by making the O just an O in “Long.”
John: Agreed. Once we get into Page 1 here, it starts with a discussion between Beth and Emmy. Emmy is our central character. Beth is her friend. They are awaiting their time to do karaoke. There’s some chitchat here, which is not great. There are some lines I would love to scratch out here.
Beth says, “Thought you were off the clock.” Emmy says, “Thought you were a vegetarian. But your mouth is full of Meat Loaf?” referring to this guy she’s making out with. Meat Loaf is not a great contemporary reference. I don’t think people are gonna get the joke that you’re referring to the singer Meat Loaf here.
There’s a better joke in the next line, which is, “Where’d you find him, an episode of Stranger Things?” Great, I get that as a joke. That is the better one. If you’re going to start with these two talking, I think that is your better way in.
More trimming here. “Somehow he’s not your worst. You’re too good for these guys, Beth.” If Emmy says, “He’s not your worst,” that tells us more and it’s more efficient.
Craig: But they’re sisters. Why are they talking to each other like they don’t know each other? If your sister is constantly making out/dating with guys that she’s better than, you’ve had this conversation before. It feels like we’re having it for the first time.
John: Agreed. For a sister, it feels like a stretch. There’s a semi-friend that you could actually have these things with. Craig, I want to talk to you about Emmy’s line near the bottom of the page, “When are they gonna play my song??” question mark question mark. I kind of like the question mark question mark. I kind of hear the delivery in the line with a double question mark. What’s your take on a double question mark?
Craig: I’ve never used it myself. But it feels like if a drunk person is asking a question. Then two question marks does definitely indicate drunken questioning.
John: That’s an overall note I had on Page 2 is how drunk are these people, because once we actually get to the standoff over the karaoke song, it feels like I need a clear sense of how drunk each of these people are to believe it or get a sense of a reality check on this moment that’s happening.
Craig: Let’s roll back to, for a moment, where even are we? The script tells us we’re interior Chicago pub. How do I know this is Chicago? It’s important, because apparently, this is gonna be a movie about an American and an Australian. I need to know where we are. Even if you just, again, give me nice exterior of Chicago-
John: That helps.
Craig: … it would help. The beginning, Emmy “is speedily typing on her phone.” Then her sister is gonna say, “Thought you were off the clock.” I’ve now got her character down to a post-it note. Works too hard. I don’t like that. Why is Emmy there? Why is she there? If she’s there to just speedily type on her phone, why is she at the karaoke club? Beth says, “Sometimes it’s okay to just have fun and not control every little detail. Wild concept for you, I know.” Post-it note character description. Why is Emmy there?
John: Craig, she’s there because she wants to sing karaoke, which is established in the very next line, “When are they gonna call me?”
Craig: But I don’t believe that, because she’s-
John: I don’t believe it either.
Craig: … “speedily typing on her phone.” If she comes to sing karaoke, she’s gonna have a drink or whatever and have fun. But I love the idea of somebody being impatient that her song isn’t coming. That tells me more about their character-
John: 100 percent.
Craig: … than this other stuff. Also, John, we just talked about the toddler. This is another toddler moment. This is good advice here, Becca. When you’re writing, I want you to see it actually happen in your brain. Here’s what happens. Emmy is “typing on her phone while her younger sister, Beth, sucks face with an ’80s-musician-looking-dickass. Beth takes a breath and glares at Emmy.” No, she doesn’t. She’s making out with a guy. What’s happening is she’s making out with a guy, then stops making out with him to stare at her sister and then criticize her sister.
John: Has never happened.
Craig: I don’t know about you, but when I’m making out with somebody, I’m making out with them. I’m not looking around to make comments. Emmy should interrupt Beth. That I’d believe.
John: Yeah, or the kiss breaks off and he goes off to hit the restroom or whatever, and then she can land her sniper comment there.
Craig: Yes, but there’s no reason for her to stop. She can’t do both things at once. Also, just a little bit of advice here, Becca. If you do want Emmy to make comments about Beth, she’s sitting there waiting for her song. The bartender or somebody is sitting next to her. The two of them are like, “What the fuck with those two?” “Yeah,” blah blah blah. Then we find out it’s her sister. There’s ways to also just reveal these relationships and who they are, because right now I don’t know that they’re sisters. There’s no way to know, other than that the script told me.
John: These are all real challenges. I do think if you’re gonna start with Beth making out with the rocker guy, we know the experiences of when you’re sitting there and someone’s making out right in front of you or right beside you. That is a playable moment. It’s like, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, this terrible person. Please,” willing this person to go away. That’s a thing that can also happen.
But I agree, we’re gonna need to quickly establish they’re sisters or something else there, because it’s gonna be weird if we’re a couple scenes into the movie and we don’t know that they’re sisters.
Craig: It is weird. It’s also a little dangerous to introduce a character who is anachronistic right off the bat, because people will just think this is in the ’80s or they won’t know what time it is, because we don’t know what year it is either. It’s in a karaoke bar. People are singing old songs from the ’90s. I think Torn is from the ’90s. We’re gonna be like, “What year is this?”
But then we get to the meat of it. Now, this is a meet-cute. It’s a good idea for a meet-cute, except there’s a logic problem. A meet-cute has to just be solid. We have to buy it. We don’t want to stop and go, “I can feel the screenwriter.”
John: “We requested the same song.”
Craig: “We requested the same song.” Then Emmy says – great point here – “He literally just said Emmy. Is your name Emmy?” Angus’s reasoning for going up there and taking the mic is, “She’s Australian.” I guess I’m Australian, which means I have the right to just sing the song? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
If his last name was Emory and then, “We have Emmy with Torn,” and he’s like, “No, he said Emory. My last name’s Emory,” and she’s like, “No, he said Emmy. That’s my first name. And we both requested the same song,” then I would be fine. I would be fine. But that’s not what happens here. I wasn’t buying this meet-cute premise.
John: There’s a way you can maybe set this up where the thing comes up for the next song and it shows the Natalie Imbruglia, Torn, and the emcee is fumbling a bit to find who it was, and they both go up there. Then you finally get the emcee, like, “Whose song is this?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s Emmy.” Then he refuses to stand down, because, “No, I should be singing this song. I am the Australian. This is part of my culture.” There’s a way you could do that. But I didn’t believe the setup. I agree with you.
Craig: I didn’t believe it, and I also really did not like this guy. When you have a meet-cute where two people are arguing, you want to be able to see both of their sides. At that point, you’re like, “Oh, they both pulled into the parking spot at the same time, and now they’re arguing because it was a tie.” But this is not a tie. He’s just a jerk-
John: It’s not a tie.
Craig: … for doing this.
John: He’s a jerk. Page 3, we get after their song. I thought the actual intercut of them trying to do the verses can work. I can picture that on the page. I got the sense of what was actually happening there. On Page 3 they’re talking afterwards. They have electric chemistry. I don’t understand, “I’m a 3 wing 2, because I-” “A what?” “A 3, which is an Achiever.” Do you know what that’s about?
Craig: I have zero idea what any of this is about.
John: Drew, do you know what that’s about?
Drew: I have no idea.
John: It’s okay for people to talk about things we don’t know, but we need to have a context of what kind of thing they are talking about. I didn’t get it. At a certain point you feel dumb and you start to resent that you don’t know what’s going on there.
Craig: Also don’t care. It’s wasted time, because I’m not learning anything. Emmy said, “You would say that. Because you’re a 4.” What? What does that mean? Anytime somebody makes fun of “neur,” that always… I do love “neur.” Neur neur neur.
John: Neur neur neur neur.
Craig: Neur neur neur.
John: I think we enjoyed the potential of the premise and this as a meet-cute, because as we have discussed on the show from nearly Episode 1, we enjoy rom-coms. We want that genre to thrive. It’s nice to see when movies can succeed in doing this. We want Becca to have the best chance possible to make a rom-com. Drew, tell us the log line that Becca submitted.
Drew: “Determined to win back her ex, an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”
Craig: Wait, what?
John: I assume it’s Angus.
Craig: Are those two different people?
John: We don’t know. We don’t know from this log line.
Craig: Say that log line again.
Drew: Sure. “Determined to win back her ex-“
Craig: Her ex.
Drew: “… an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”
Craig: Who would also be the ex.
John: I guess so.
Craig: How do you sneak into Australia?
John: I think the idea of sneaking into Australia for love feels kind of fun.
Craig: If you’re talking to the officials of Australia, you’re not sneaking into Australia. In order to stay in Australia… But you can go to Australia for six months.
John: I don’t think so, Craig. I think Australia is a locked-down place. No, Australia is basically North Korea, Craig. You have to go through checkpoints. It’s incredibly dangerous.
Craig: I don’t understand.
John: This is a girl who’d do anything for love, like the song.
Craig: Like Meat Loaf. Like Meat Loaf, which Meat Loaf, referenced twice in three pages. I don’t understand. I don’t understand the log line. But there’s something very charming about the idea of this meet-cute. I’ve not seen this meet-cute before, where two people believe they each have the karaoke song, they start to sing to each other, and some little bit of magic happens. That’s a very nice way of doing things. I can see that moment. That’s encouraging.
I would say at a minimum, Becca, we’re gonna want to clean that log line up so it’s nice and sharp and doesn’t raise questions. Log lines should only raise the question you want to raise, not the questions you don’t.
John: Agreed. Let’s wrap it up with The Right to Party by Lucas McCutchen.
Drew: Captain Albert, a British officer, raises a British flag over colonial Boston. On his way home, he steps purposefully on an American child’s doll that’s fallen in a puddle. At home, his 17-year-old son, Edmund, struggles with chores, due to an injured hand, while trying to appease his stern father. Their tense interaction culminates in Captain Albert shooting at Edmund’s breakfast, inadvertently killing a passerby. Edmund and his brash friend Henry leave for school, where they discuss the dead bystander and girls they have crushes on.
John: This is a big swing. What I got by the end of three pages, this is a teen boy comedy but just set in this Revolutionary time, which is actually, I think, an interesting premise. A lot of stuff got in the way of the interesting premise, but I’m eager to talk about it, because I did think it was a clever idea to, again, just smash up tropes and genres and do a teen Apatow-y kind of movie but in this time period. Unfortunately, on Page 1, I have no idea what time period I’m in.
Let me read the first couple lines here. “Exterior Boston Town Square – Dawn. Sleepy merchants and townsfolk slowly begin their morning routines. Stores display their pitiful wares. Flies buzz in circles above the fruit in their baskets.” Finally, on the fourth sentence, “A prisoner locked in stocks stirs.” Until that sentence, I didn’t know that we were in the past. Boston Town Square exists now. I thought we were just in modern-day Boston. This is a problem, because I didn’t know where we were, when we were.
Craig: Never before has something so desperately needed “Boston, 1775.” It absolutely needs that. This is a broad comedy. Broad comedy is very, very hard to do. Take it from me. Struggled and succeeded and failed multiple times in my career.
John: Craig, you’re a drama writer. What would you know about broad comedy?
Craig: I’m a drama writer because I gave up finally. One of the most important aspects of writing broad comedy is logic. It is more of a science than an art. It’s science. Everything is about logic. Everything.
We have this very broad Monty Python-esque moment where Captain Albert, who’s this incredibly over-the-top British dickhead, fires a gun at his own breakfast, not because he’s angry at the breakfast, but rather to check if the sights are good on the pistol. They’re not good on the pistol, and a woman dies, and no one cares about the woman. The kernel of that, great. Logic problems. One, why is he firing the pistol at his breakfast? If the pistol is aligned correctly, he will ruin his breakfast. That makes no sense.
John: He should shoot at something in the room.
Craig: He could shoot at something in the room. Secondly, if you’re aiming at your breakfast on a table, I don’t care how misaligned the sights are. The most misaligned they could be is you’re off by about eight inches. You cannot be off by seven feet and then go through a window and kill a woman passing by, which by the way, is very difficult to actually film, because you have to shoot in such a way that you can see both the woman outside through the window and the man as he shoots. If this were happening outside, no problem.
John: I can envision a scenario in which he’s shooting at a thing on the wall and then it goes out the window and kills the woman. Do you necessarily need to see the woman in that first shot, or could you hear the scream and then that’s funny?
Craig: What you want to do is not see the woman at all. You want him to shoot at something on the wall, it goes through a window, and then there’s a pause, and then you hear a man go, “My wife.”
John: “Millicent!”
Craig: Yeah, “Millicent, no!” That’s what you want, and then people to start crying. Then when you go outside, there’s the guy, and he’s like, “Oh, Millicent.”
John: There’s the payoff.
Craig: Millicent, as it turns out, was actually a pig. Whatever it is. There’s all sorts of ways to do this. But the concept of being so broad that a guy is gonna kill somebody and they don’t care about somebody being killed is funny. It’s just logic.
Now, the other issue is, in broad comedy we need somebody that we can identify with, especially when you have an uber-jerk like Captain Albert. He has two sons. The problem here is both sons seem just as callous as their father. Who do I like?
John: I think you’re supposed to like Edmund, but he’s trying to make his father happy. That’s the journey that the character needs to get past. I think that’s the goal is to have-
Craig: The problem is, when they walk by the small crowd around the dead woman and Henry goes, “Jeez… a bit dramatic.” Then he goes, “Your hand alright?” Edmund’s like, “Yeah, I’ll talk about my hand now. I’m not gonna have any comment about that lady whatsoever.” He doesn’t care that a woman died.
Then we’ve got a little bit of an anachronistic vibe, where there’s a cart driver who says, “Don’t hit my effing cart.” Edmund says, “Sorry. Have a nice day,” which does feel like Edmund is a bit of a nice kid. But are they afraid of the British? Are they not afraid of the British? Why is this guy yelling at them like that? Logic, logic, logic.
John: Logic, logic, logic.
Craig: That’s the key.
John: That’s a lot. The other thing I will say is that I was missing some uppercases that would’ve been really helpful. Generally in scripts, the first time you’re meeting a character, you’re uppercasing their name, or even if it’s just a person who’s gonna come back. I wanted those “dirty townsfolk” capitalized. I wanted “child” capitalized. We’re used to those things being uppercase the first time we’re seeing them, just to acknowledge that these are people who are gonna do something specific.
Craig: Yes, especially when you are creating very large bricks of action. There’s a seven-line paragraph and an eight-line paragraph. My whole thing is once I get past three lines, I start getting itchy. Seven is a lot.
John: It’s a lot.
Craig: Eight, people are just skimming.
John: Yeah, they are.
Craig: That paragraph is the gag paragraph, where he shoots. Oh, I see. He picks the plate up and “sets it on the window sill nearby.” He did do that. I totally missed that.
John: You didn’t read that because you skimmed.
Craig: Yeah, because I skimmed, because it was an eight-line brick. Then it said, “Edmund cocks his head.” You don’t want to use that. You don’t want to say “cocks his head” when there’s a pistol that can also be cocked.
He picks the food up, places it “on the window sill nearby.” Okay, so now that does make sense, except it doesn’t, because why is he using his plate to shoot at? It’s his breakfast. It’s very odd. It says, “Edmund is in shock as Albert returns and sets the gun in front of him.” Now I’m feeling like if he’s in shock, this has never happened before. But he doesn’t be in shock. He should be more like-
John: His father is this guy.
Craig: This happens all the time. If this is the first time, then I think Edmund would be vomiting. This happens all the time. Edmund should walk over to the window, look out, and just wince. There’s ways to do this.
By the way, I will say, Lucas, don’t feel bad right now. I’m serious. This is the hardest tone to get right. It is so difficult. If you Google, David Zucker has this lovely bunch of rules that he’s set forth for this kind of work, which are really compelling and useful. Just take a look at those. It’s so difficult to get right. If you don’t, then people just turn their heads. It’s incredible how technical and precise it must be. It looks like you actually did have that logic right, except that you didn’t, and also it was in too long of a paragraph.
John: Drew, tell us the log line.
Drew: “Two teenage best friends, an American colonist and the son of a British officer, set out to have the night of their lives before they’re drafted to opposite sides of the American Revolution.”
Craig: Such a great premise.
John: It’s a really good premise.
Craig: It’s a great premise. I don’t think these pages are setting that premise up.
John: I think we can do better, but I think it was a really good premise.
Craig: It’s a terrific premise.
John: Two episodes ago we had that service where you send off a sentence to describe what your script is about. If that was a sentence you sent in, they’d say, yeah, that’s a good premise. Love that.
Craig: That’s fun. That’s a fun premise. I really like that.
John: Let’s thank everybody who submitted their Three Page Challenges for us to discuss, especially these three entries. If you want to send in your pages for the next time, it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. We’ll occasionally look through that pile and pick some new ones. Thank you, everyone who did that. It’s very nice of you to do so. It really does help others learn.
Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What is your One Cool Thing?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a director that I’m currently working with named Stephen Williams. He’s not the One Cool Thing. It’s actually an episode of Watchmen that he directed. I’m sure Watchmen was my One Cool Thing when it was on the air back in-
John: It’s a good show.
Craig: Was it 2020? I guess something like that.
John: 2019, because I remember the Wash-men, which was initially during the pandemic when you had to wash your hands.
Craig: Stephen is a terrific director. He directed an episode of Watchmen that’s still… It’s stuck with me to this very day. Written by Damon Lindelof, Cord Jefferson, and Dave Gibbons. Damon Lindelof obviously needs no introduction. Multi-Emmy award-winning Damon Lindelof. Cord Jefferson, Oscar award winner.
John: Oscar, right.
Craig: He’s an Academy Award winner now for American Fiction. We’ve got some pretty big names there working on this, and then directed by Stephen. It is origin story of a superhero in the world of Watchmen. It uses a character that was indicated in the original graphic novel, Hooded Justice, and turns it on its ear and tells a pretty profound story of the Black American experience in, I believe it’s the ’30s or ’40s. Just an outstanding episode of television, beautifully done, moving and subtle, and directed gorgeously.
If you haven’t seen Watchmen, can you just pop that one in and watch it? No, you cannot. You have to watch up to it. I think it might be the sixth episode. Yes, it is the sixth episode of the season. You’ll have to do some watching for that. But honestly, it’s worth it. It’s such a great season of TV. It stands alone. It is the only one that exists. It’s got some so-so actors in it, like Regina King and Jean Smart and Don Johnson. It’s so stacked.
John: Despite that, it triumphs.
Craig: It’s so stacked. What a stacked lineup, as the kids say. I had watched it again, just because I’m having such a lovely time working with Stephen. He’s just such a great guy.
John: Great. My One Cool Thing is a show that people can also watch. Ripley on Netflix. This is the Steve Zaillian adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the movie, is one of my favorite movies, one of my top 10 movies. I absolutely love it. I was a little bit nervous watching this adaptation, because I didn’t want it to spoil my love for the original or be compared. I really like this adaptation. It’s just so different. Everywhere the movie went left, this goes right. I love that the main adversary in the series is stairs, basically. Poor Ripley is always confronted by stairs.
It’s also, I think, a really great lesson in what you can do with time, and when you have the time of a series, how you can expand these moments that in the movie would be 30 seconds. You can now spend 15 minutes on, like, how do you deal with this dead body. The comedy that Zaillian’s able to find out of that is just terrific. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, and yet it’s still funny, just because it points out the absurdity of human bodies also, which is great.
It’s black and white. It’s gorgeous. Everyone talks about that. It’s all shot in Italy. Looks terrific. Great performances. Really strange casting that works. Just check out Ripley on Netflix if you get a chance.
Craig: I wish you’d get Steve Zaillian on the show.
John: We’ll get him on the show. I’m sure we can get him on the show.
Craig: He’s a lovely man. He is just a towering figure in our business of what we do. There aren’t many people who have demonstrated his kind of consistent excellence for so, so long. He was excellent out of the gate and stayed excellent. Just an incredible writer and one of the best of all time.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-
Craig: Nope.
John: … with help this week by Jonathan Wigdortz.
Craig: Uh-uh.
John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: I don’t think so.
John: Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on magic and the lack thereof in our D&D campaign. Craig, it’s always magic talking with you and Drew.
Craig: It is not.
John: See you next week.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Craig, so the brief for the new D&D campaign we’re playing. We should explain to listeners that for the last four years we were playing a campaign that you were DM’ing. We finally finished that. I was gonna take over the next campaign for our group. I pitched to the crew that, what if we did a Robin Hoody kind of thing where it was a little bit more stripped down. We ultimately said let’s do the really stripped down. We’re only gonna have Humans and Halflings and maybe some Elves, but none of the other fantastical races. We would have a campaign with no magic, where it’s really grounded and you can’t cast spells, or not magic items. Everyone stepped up, and that’s what we’ve been playing.
Craig: It’s been kind of a delight. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are these different classes. Some classes are almost, by definition, un-magical. Wizards of the Coast-
John: They’re the company who runs D&D, who owns D&D.
Craig: They’re pretty clever in that they even will allow variants of basically every class to have some magic. Very difficult with barbarians. But you can have a Rogue, or Arcane Trickster, I think it is, and learn some spells, because spells are very powerful. There’s a spell for every circumstance. People love magic. It’s Dungeons and Dragons. But one thing that is true is that at some point, spells become so powerful and pervasive that they can make the game a little unfun for focus characters who don’t cast spells. They just at some point feel like, okay, you guys will do all this awesome stuff.
John: I will hit it with my sword.
Craig: I’m gonna hit you with a club, and then everybody else gets to do something extraordinary. Then I’m gonna run in there and, I guess, hit someone else with a club. It’s easy to play, but you can start to feel, as the characters increase in level, sort of like, I guess, the way – what’s the archer in Avengers? What’s his name again?
John: Oh, Hawkeye, yeah. One trick, yeah.
Craig: You start to feel like Hawkeye. Like, “Okay, so you’re literally a god and you can shoot lasers out of hands, and I have a bow and arrow.” “And what are you gonna do?” “Shoot my bow and arrow again.” It’s nice that we are all basically in that boat, not only us, but also the bad guys.
John: Talking about classes, you and I had an interesting discussion where we were talking through what is actually gonna make sense. There are Fighters. There are Barbarians. There are Rogues. There are Monks, but only certain kinds of Monks, because some of the Monks get really, really magical, and so variants that don’t have magic. And Rangers, but Rangers without the magic stuff, because Rangers have a lot of spells they would otherwise cast. But it’s a world without Wizards or Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids. You think about in a Robin Hoody kind of situation, a Bard makes a lot of sense, except the Bards in 5th Edition D&D really are Spellcasters and it doesn’t make sense to do that. Even Paladins, who you think, oh, it’s a brave knight-
Craig: Spells.
John: Yeah, but with a lot of magic there.
Craig: A lot of necessary magic. The thing that makes a Paladin good is that they have their various smites to add damage to their hits. We don’t have any of that, and it’s kind of a joy. When you face a bunch of bad guys, there’s no crowd control spells. There’s a lot of spells in D&D where it’s like, “I’m gonna just put you all in darkness. I’m gonna put you all in something. I’m gonna fireball you.” That’s the thing. You run up against seven guys, one person in your party can kill all of them with one spell. It’s nice to – you have to think more. There’s more strategizing. There’s more planning. The combat feels a little… I don’t know, it’s a nice gritty D&D.
Typically, everyone’s drinking a potion, or you have a Cleric or a Druid or somebody else that has healing spells that can restore all of your aches and pains – rather, alleviate your aches and pains. Here, my character took a feat which I don’t even know why anyone would take in a campaign with magic, that allows you to use an underutilized mechanic of healing kits to heal people, like a doctor would. If you’re not playing a magic-free campaign, why would anyone take the Healer feat, ever?
John: I don’t think they would.
Craig: Never.
John: It’s been interesting to see the ripple of changes that happen through this. I think combat speed has been a lot faster, because inevitably what happens is, like, “Oh, it’s my turn. Am I gonna cast a spell? What spell am I gonna cast? Let me look up what that’s gonna do.” Here it’s like, “No, I’m going to shoot somebody. I’m going to slash somebody.” Yes, people may use their special martial abilities to some degree, but it’s just been a lot faster to get through stuff. It can take more rounds to knock down an opponent, but that’s been nice.
I would say on the DM side I’ve been struck by just how much damage you guys can do, because you have these Rogues who can, through various mechanics, get sneak attack, get advantage on things, and they can take down a creature really quickly. I’ve had to adjust the number of monsters I’m throwing at you, just because you guys can do so much damage and take them out so quickly.
Craig: One of my DM tricks is – there are a few DM tricks. Now I’m telling you how to hurt us more, which is fun. One is, if there’s a big bad in the party, give him more HP. If the party is just crushing, just give him more HP. Make him last another round or two.
The other one, and this is the most useful one when you really want to mess with your party and you feel like they’re cakewalking, is to give one of the main boss guys legendary actions, because now that is essentially like increasing the number of bad guys without throwing a bunch of weak-asses on the field, who often can’t do that much damage on their own and get mowed down anyway, because our party’s capable of killing a couple of guys, three guys a turn if they’re just scrubs.
John: A thing I hadn’t considered until we got into this section of the campaign is that you guys are now underground, and light is a real factor. Often in these campaigns you’ll have more characters who have dark vision because they are Elves or have the ability to see in darkness, but you guys don’t. People would generally have a light spell cast on something, so they have a coin or something is shedding light. Here you guys have torches, and you have to deal with the torches. You as an Archer can’t hold a torch and shoot an arrow. It’s been really interesting to see from that perspective how a lack of magic is impacting you guys.
Craig: Light management is fun. I like that. It’s a little scary. You can’t be as stealthy as you want to be. That was one of the things about a traditional campaign that you have to deal with as a DM is that probably everybody’s gonna be able to see in the dark and light no longer becomes a thing. The only time it becomes a thing is, okay, so typical dark vision, you can see 60 feet ahead of you. Sometimes you run into, like, Drow. They can see 120. Now you got a situation. That’s interesting. But making us deal with simple things like not being able to see, especially when we’ve now encountered some creatures that can see in the dark, very interesting.
John: So fun. As we said in the setup, it is interesting to apply constraints to things, because we’re all very experienced D&D players. To make something feel fresh, you need to put on some new rules, new challenges to people. Rather than adding stuff, sometimes subtracting stuff is a way to make something more interesting. Do I want to play only this no-magic way forever? Absolutely not. But I think it’s been interesting for this round to try that and see how it all works.
It’s also been challenging to – on the DM level, I’m enforcing that you guys don’t have spells or magic stuff. As I’m picking adversaries, a lot of times what’s baked into these scenarios, they are Spellcasters too. I have to find, okay, what is the equivalent of that spellcasting ability for those characters. In some cases I’ve given them grenades that can duplicate an effect, but in other cases I’ve given them things taken from the Battle Master feats or Battle Master-
Craig: Maneuvers?
John: … maneuvers, yes, or monk-y kind of things.
Craig: You mean monkish?
John: Yeah, or monk abilities, because that would be the equivalent in this world for the third level spell they would otherwise be able to cast.
Craig: You’re dealing with people who have been playing for a long, long time. We all know what we’re doing. We all know the rules pretty well. Some of us know the rules pretty well, and then others do not, but that’s fine. The point is we’ve been playing for a long time.
I was in one brief campaign that another guy was running with some of the Joe Manganiello crew. The restraint on that one was every character had to be a Wizard. It was the opposite of this. It was an all-Wizard party, which meant that at least when we were starting out, it was like sending children out into the world. We were like, “I can make a light come on. Also, if you touch me, I die.” But by the time you get to Level 3-
John: Wow.
Craig: It’s pretty serious, but if anybody gets close to you-
John: You’re still fragile.
Craig: You’re pretty fragile. Now, that party, you get an all-Wizard party at Level 18, now everyone’s dead.
John: Good lord.
Craig: We win. You lose.
John: The rules of time and space have changed now.
Craig: Exactly.
John: We’ll continue with our campaign and with the podcast in the next couple weeks.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Craig, good to chat with you as always.
Craig: Thanks, John. Thanks, Drew.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Drew: Bye.
Links:
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: PLANET B by Christopher James, THE LONG HAUL by Becca Hurd, and THE RIGHT TO PARTY by Lucas McCutchen
- Submit your script for our Three Page Challenge!
- David Zucker’s 15 Rules of Comedy
- Space Cadet (2024)
- Movie Magic Scheduling
- Scenechronize
- PIX
- Qtake
- BOX
- Frame.io
- Evercast
- Scripto
- Fuzzlecheck
- Ripley on Netflix
- Watchmen – “This Extraordinary Being”
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
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- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 646: Industry Software, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 645 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. For showrunners, the first season of a television show is often a trial by fire as they figure out what show they’re actually making and how to do it. The second season can be both easier and more difficult, as showrunners have the benefit of experience but also the burden of expectation.
Today on the show, we have two showrunners who have just delivered the third seasons of their respective shows, which was an absolute cakewalk. Am I correct? There were no issues on either of your sides?
Jen Statsky: Not anything, yeah.
Meredith Scardino: Zero.
Jen: Really simple.
John: Great. Episode’s over. It’s done. Nothing to talk about.
Jen: Not much to talk about it.
Meredith: Credits.
John: Credits roll. Thank you for joining us on the show. Let me introduce you. Meredith Scardino is a writer and producer whose impressive listener credits include Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She has four Emmys and a Peabody. She is now the creator and showrunner of (sings) Girls5eva. Bing!
Meredith: That was beautiful.
John: Thank you. I love myself a musical sting, a little introduction moment. It’s one of those few credits that you just don’t skip past, because you’ve got to embrace it while it’s there.
Meredith: It’s Jeff Richmond. He makes a good theme song.
John: After Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, we desperately needed another musical comedy to watch in the house, so we went back and re-watched Seasons 1 and 2 to get ready for Season 3. Man, I need songs. Even if they’re diegetic like they are in your show, I want characters to sing.
Meredith: It’s fun, and the cast is great at singing.
John: Yeah, which is nice. Sarah Bareilles, she’s a ringer. She’s actually genuine.
Meredith: She’s done this before.
John: Once or twice.
Meredith: A little bit.
John: But who knew she was funny? You knew she was funny.
Meredith: She’s hilarious. She’s absolutely hilarious, and so is Renee Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton fame, who no one quite knew she was absolutely hilarious, as she is, although I watched her in Co-op on Documentary Network.
John: Oh my god, so incredible.
Meredith: She was so committed to the bit.
John: Love it.
Meredith: You’re like, “Oh, that lady, committed.”
John: Alex Brightman is also in Co-op, and they’re just so fantastic in that.
Meredith: So fantastic. Then you got Paula Pell and Busy Philipps, who we knew were hilarious already, but you didn’t know they could sing.
John: All things you figured out. Jen Statsky is a writer and producer who has written for shows including Parks and Recreation, Broad City, and The Good Place. She’s the co-creator and showrunner of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award. Welcome back, Jen.
Jen: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m sad you didn’t sing Hacks though. I was hoping.
John: Here’s the problem. It’s a really good show.
Jen: Not a musical show though.
John: No notes except you could add some songs. Would it hurt you to have a catchy song?
Jen: I do think that catchy songs would be helpful. I guess it’s not too late. Maybe next season it can be full musical.
John: That is a prediction that I might be willing to make. We’ll get to that in a second here.
Jen: Meredith, can you lend me your entire writing staff?
Meredith: Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.
John: A lot of the times on the show we have guests who have just finished their first season and they talk about what they’ve learned, and that’s great, but I really want to talk about what’s easier and what’s more difficult about being an established show and going into things where you know stuff.
But I also want to talk about this moment we’re in as an industry, especially for series, because both of your shows debuted at a different time, when there was this era of streaming abundance. I want to talk about what’s gained and what’s lost when streamers are cutting back so much right now.
We’ll also tackle questions from listeners about nonbinary characters, mentorship using the past tense, and finally, two years ago, I made a prediction about what would happen in the third season of Hacks, and I mailed it in a sealed envelope to Jen. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will open that letter and see how right or wrong I was. She’s holding it up to the Zoom right now. I’m looking at it. I’m looking at my weird penmanship.
Jen: I’m so proud of myself that I didn’t open it. When did you send this?
John: Two years ago.
Jen: Two years ago.
John: There’s a postmark on it. Is there a date? Is it listed?
Jen: Oh yeah, June 2022. Wow. I was so terrified that if I opened it before everything was done for Season 3, you’d have a much better idea than we did, and then I would be like, “What do I do?”
John: There’s a Season 4 still, so if you’re searching for something, maybe it’s in there.
Jen: We’ll see.
John: I’m not actually 100 percent sure what I wrote, so it’ll be a surprise for both of us.
Jen: Great.
John: Only for Premium Members in the Bonus Segment.
You guys are on your third seasons, but to set the stage, can we go back in time and think about the shows you actually pitched originally when you were talking about doing these shows and figure out what that was, compared to what the show ended up becoming. Meredith, can we start with you? What was the pitch for Girls5eva?
Meredith: The pitch was a reunited girl group, one-hit wonder from the late ’90s, Y2K era reunites in the present after they get sampled by an up-and-coming rapper named Lil Stinker and tried to give it a go again. It follows four of the surviving members of Girls5eva. One sadly had swam off the edge of an infinity pool in the mid-aughts.
It follows being a woman in your 40s. There’s a lot of stuff about that. But it’s also a very big underdog story. It’s got a ton of comedy. It’s very hard jokes, fast-paced. We also look back at the past and do lots of flashbacks to their old, regrettable music, the way they got chewed up and spit out by that pop music machine that didn’t really value any of their voices. We just see the fun, ragtag comeback story of hilarious, very different women, who all internalized the pain of that big loss of the one-hit wonder going away in different ways. It’s a really fun show.
John: That very much describes the show that we end up seeing right now, but do you think that was actually all there in your original pitch? Was it a pitch, or had you written a script?
Meredith: It was both. I had written the pilot. Basically, I would go in to network streamers. I had a fake CD that I made, because I had an art background. I made a fake CD that was basically like, “This is what their… ” I made discount stickers, like it had been in the Sam Goody discount bin. I had the cover, and then on the back I had their track list, so it gave you an idea of what kind of group this was.
John: That’s incredible.
Meredith: I even sealed it with one of those plastic industrial sealer things on top, because I didn’t want anyone to open it, because I didn’t have a real CD in there and I didn’t have any music written. Again, just for weight, I put in DVDs from the Jack Lemmon collection that I had.
The pitch was very much similar to what the show became, and I think because I had the pilot. Basically, I’d do the whole pitch. I’d do the song and dance, 20-minute, like, “Here’s what it is. Here’s all the characters. Here’s where they go.” Then I’d leave behind the script. It was nice, because when you pitch something, it’s not always a complete descriptor of what you might end up writing. My producers and I made the decision to be like, the best way is just to be like, “Oh, do you like this thing that you’re reading?” That’s the best indicator of what the show is.
John: We can clarify, this is a situation where a leave-behind is completely appropriate, because you own and control everything here. You weren’t doing free work for them leaving this behind. This was, “I pitched you this. This is the evidence that I really can pull off this thing I just described to you.”
Meredith: Yeah, exactly.
John: Now, Jen, the initial pitches for Hacks, I think we talked about this when you were on the show before, but remind us, what was the process of pitching Hacks and getting it set up originally?
Jen: In 2015, my co-creators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello and I had been talking about women of a certain generation of comedians and how they had never really gotten their due, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. And so we had this idea for a show that would be about the redemption of a comedian like that through the lens of her relationship with a younger comedy writer who had benefited from the ways in which this woman fought.
It was a long process to the pitch, because in 2015, Paul and Lucia were full time on Broad City and they were making a movie and I was full time on Good Place. It took us a while before we were ready to go out with the pitch. But that was to our advantage, I think, in many ways, because we kept working on it through those years. And by the time we got to go around town and pitch it, we had a very thorough, probably too thorough pitch, where we went through to the end of the series, to how it would end, which is still to this day what we plan on doing for the end of it. I did not have any cool leave-behinds. Maybe we would’ve gotten more yeses had I.
John: But you didn’t have a finished pilot? Did you have a script?
Jen: No, we actually hadn’t written a script. It was a pretty thorough 30, 35-minute pitch, but that was it. We didn’t have a script.
John: Wow.
Jen: We didn’t have talent attached. It was really just the idea and all the work we had done to build up the idea.
John: You said you had multiple seasons figured out for what the general arc was of the show. Now that you’re in Season 3 of it, how close are you to that plan?
Jen: We’re still very close. We’re still very close to the plan. Now, of course, obviously, there’s things within the season that happen, and your writers come in and they pitch things and you say, “Oh, that’s an amazing idea.” For example, we knew at the end of Season 1, it was in the pitch, this massive fight and that Deborah would slap her and what it would be. That was all thought out. But for example, Ava sending an email with dirt about Deborah that would then be this huge rift between them, that came in the writing of the show. There’s smaller story moves that of course have come up over the course of the years writing this show. But the major tent poles for what each season is and Deborah’s arc and Ava’s arc have remained from what we pitched.
John: Meredith, did you have multiple seasons figured out at the start?
Meredith: Yeah. I had basically eras of what I thought they would be doing, like chapters. Each season has adhered to that, where Season 1, it’s so much of the adrenaline of the reunion, trying to do everything the old way they used to, and then realizing, like, oh no, god, no, there’s a better way, and trying to just get it going again. Then Season 2 is very much about, okay, now they have an album they can make. What will they say once they have that moment to be in the studio as a group and they’re the actual songwriters? Then Season 3 felt like, okay, you gotta go promote that album and get on the road.
In their future, I would like to see them – they’ve been underdogs clawing for relevance for three seasons, and I would like to see what it looks like for them to have a little bit of success and how they navigate that.
John: Both of your shows are about women in entertainment who are grappling with their legacy, who were big stars and then they see their stars teetering, and so they’re trying to remain relevant or rebuild their careers without seeming desperate. They’re both shows about ambition, but they’re also insider shows. They’re shows about the entertainment business that look behind the curtain and inside. Classically, it’s a thing we do, but it’s also a thing we’re told, like, don’t pitch those shows, because no one wants to watch those shows, no one wants to make those shows. Did you find resistance to the fact that there were shows about the industry?
Meredith: I feel like people say that, but then there are so many shows that people – 30 Rock, even Entourage. There’s like a million shows about… I don’t know why people say that.
Jen: You do always hear that. You hear, “Don’t pitch an industry show. Don’t pitch inside baseball. No one wants it.” Then you turn on your TV and there are so many of them. So many of them have been acclaimed and awarded. I don’t know what it is. I guess no one wants to admit that they do make them.
But I will say, I don’t know how you feel, Meredith, but we pitched the show in 2019, which was during still the boom of streaming. When we pitched the show to Max, it wasn’t even Max at the time. It wasn’t even HBO Max. It was the Warner Media streamer that didn’t even have a name. They just knew that Warner Media was gonna do a streamer.
I think we very much benefited from pitching during a time when it was a seller’s market, and a good idea was a good idea. Credit to Suzanna Makkos, because she heard the pitch and she got it immediately and she made it happen. I don’t know that today, as we speak to you in 2024, I don’t know that Hacks gets bought or I don’t know that it gets made. Part of it I think would be reluctance to do a show about the industry. But I don’t think we faced it at the time. I don’t know. Did you, Meredith?
Meredith: No, I didn’t feel that coming off of anyone that we pitched to. But I also just think that in some ways the show is about the music business in some ways, of course. You get to make all those pop culture references that can be really fun to write, and all of those observations. But at its core, it’s about four women in their 40s trying to do something at the time when you’re normally retreating into the habits and ho-hum of life and you wonder if your greatest days are behind you. It’s about so much universal… I feel like Hacks is the same way. It’s not just about comedy.
Jen: No, it’s not just about… Yeah, you’re exactly right. The shows will work if they’re about universal, relatable things that any viewer, whether they’re in the industry or not, can connect with. Like you’re saying, women in their 40s and their friendship with each other, or in the case of Hacks, a very specific friendship and collaboration between two people and, honestly, just an older women in her 70s. We talk about it a lot. It’s about her quest for dignity. I think that is incredibly relatable to anyone watching of that age.
I think you’re right that what it is when they say don’t pitch an industry show, it’s kind of like don’t pitch an industry show that is about nothing else, that doesn’t have anything underneath it. As long as there’s something underneath it and you’re speaking to relatable universal themes that humans connect with, I think you can set a show anywhere.
John: Both of your shows are comedies, but they’re very different kinds of comedies. I want to talk about their relationships to jokes. Meredith, your show is in the tradition of 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt, where it’s a very joke-dense show, where there’s an expectation there’s a certain number of jokes per minute. People are being funny and they’re also not acknowledging that they’re being funny. It’s very much in that habit. Three seasons in, or more seasons when you think about Kimmy Schmidt too, is that just a natural form for you? Do you feel that in your bones?
Meredith: It is. First of all, I was attracted to it like a moth to a flame. But also, I think coming from late night, The Colbert Report, where you’re just taking in input from the news and churning out jokes and satire and character, like boom, boom, boom, boom, that muscle is the one muscle in my body that’s not atrophied. I’m very jacked in that capacity. Then going and working with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, whose style I absolutely love from 30 Rock, and they came from SNL. I think there’s something a little bit coming from sketch and late night that imbues into the episodic execution.
At Kimmy Schmidt, we had that similar rhythm. It’s joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, but you also get to say all the things. I feel like there’s no shortage of the points we’re making about women feeling irrelevant or whatever we were trying to say. You can still say them even while the breakneck joke pace is breakneck.
John: Hacks is obviously about jokes also, because literally it’s two characters who are wrestling with coming up with material. There’s a comedy writer and a comedy legend. But what’s different about the jokes in Hacks is often they will say a joke and they will acknowledge that that was funny. Both parties that were around them will acknowledge that was funny. But they’re competing basically in comedy with each other. How early in the process of actually writing this did you figure out what that was gonna feel like and where the level was? Did you even know as you started filming how you were going to play that?
Jen: Yeah, I think from the get-go, we knew that we wanted this very specific tone that was a mix of comedy and drama. I’ve said this before, but for us, casting Jean Smart was – she embodies exactly that. She can do hard, funny comedy, but she can also be incredibly grounded and dramatic and heart-wrenching in that way. Once we got her, we said, “That’s our North Star. That is the tone of the show.” That’s what we were always going for.
You’re right that we have this cheat code of we want characters to be able to say jokes and be very funny, but it’s all within the grounded realm of you’re watching a show where characters are supposed to be funny and they know they’re funny and they know they’re making a joke. That was just the particular tone that we wanted to go for with this show.
John: Question for both of you. As you’re thinking about the outline stage or figuring out what is happening in the episode, you’re figuring out what the scenes are, how much does that need to be driven by, “Okay, this is the dramatic story points I need to get across,” or can this scene actually be funny?
Maybe start with you, Meredith. I’m thinking about, they’re on tour. You need to figure out what it is that’s happening in the show. Is it mostly about the emotional stakes that are progressing, or are you thinking, “Okay, these are gonna be good arenas that will allow me to make jokes.”
Meredith: What you want is to find the match where the emotional arc that you’re trying to sell for your character and their evolution over the course of the series is then told through a story that’s funny. That’s what I’m always looking for. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that’s just funny, but you’re like, “I don’t know where it lives.” Or this is popping into my head, but Wickie on the road getting tempted to cheat on her very stable, very nice boyfriend that she has back home, who’s a lunch lord, which is the masculine version of a lunch lady. You’re like, “Okay. What would be fun about… ” You’re trying to just find the match.
We ended up coming up with this idea of her having her idea of female arousal. She was talking about having a Home Alone doorknob for this guy Torque that she meets on the road. Then we wrote a song called Home Alone Doorknob. It is all coming from the fact that she’s being tempted on the road. It’s a real story about is she going to cheat, is she going to fall prey to her old ways of thinking about herself first and not thinking about another person. You’re telling that story in an absurd way, but it has a grounded core underneath it and some emotion. Renee Elise Goldsberry is incredible at walking that line, at making you feel for a character that’s talking about a Home Alone doorknob, being tempted to cheat. Yeah, but always looking for the match.
Jen: Yeah, it is very true. When I look back at scenes in Hacks, that always has to have an emotional reason to exist. For example, I can think of a scene from a Christmas episode we did this past season. I think this was my fault. I’ll take responsibility for this.
Hannah Einbinder’s character, Ava, grew up in a suburb of Boston, which is also where I grew up. And Irish step dancing is a huge phenomenon among Boston girls growing up. I went to many an Irish step competition, in the audience, not participating, which was actually weird. Why was I there? But at some point, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Ava had Irish step danced? She should do that performance at the end of Deborah’s Christmas party.” We shot it. Hannah took days and days of Irish step lessons. She’s really good at it, because Hannah comes from a cheerleading, gymnastics background, so she’s very physically skilled. But also, it was really funny. But there was no emotional reason for it to exist in the episode. It didn’t come from, oh, and she needs the warm reception that the performance will get after a tough night or whatever. It wasn’t connected to anything. It was just purely me going, “That would be funny.”
We ultimately ended up cutting it. I think it’s a really good lesson exactly what Meredith is saying. The emotion and the story reason has to come first, or else you’re writing something different, which is like sketch comedy or something, which is great, but it’s not really the shows that either of us are making.
Meredith: You can always feel it too when you do a table read. When you have good story energy, you can just feel you’re locked in.
Jen: Yes, totally.
Meredith: You don’t feel any of the awkward tension that you might feel if you’re on a first date or if you’re talking to a new person or whatever that awkward thing is.
Jen: It just flows in a different way.
Meredith: It flows. Then when you do stop down for something that is comedy nerdery indulgence, that I love too – we all do it. We all pitch things that you want to just see on screen. But then they do stick out, and then you suddenly feel awkward. It’s not working. You’re like, “Oh, that just has to go. It’s just gotta go.”
Jen: Totally.
Meredith: Even though it’s funny. If you had the reason behind it, it might-
Jen: It might live.
Meredith: … be the greatest moment of the show.
John: This is three seasons in that you’re still encountering these situations. It feels like the first season you make the discoveries, things that work, things that don’t work, things that can fit inside one actor’s mouth. You learn things in that first season. But three seasons in, you’re still learning things about your show and what works. Going into this third season, what was the process of figuring out the shape of the season? What was the blue sky whiteboarding? How did you figure out the basic shape of what the episodes would be?
Meredith: At the end of Season 2, we bit off that Girls5eva, they pile into a van and they’re gonna go on tour. And they don’t have any idea of where they’re gonna go, except that they have a hit song in Fort Worth, Texas, because they wrote a pandering song about the city, because it was the biggest city in America that didn’t have a hit song about it.
Going into Season 3, there’s so many things to figure out, where you’re like, “Okay, we need to sell the road, but we also shoot in and around New York City, and we’re not gonna go on the road.” It was like, production-wise, how do you pull off the road without hitting it? We come up with ideas of what’s a home base they could go to. Hotel rooms. A hotel chain looks pretty much the same in every town you’re in. Does someone have reward points? Gloria did. That’s how we came up with the Marriott Divorced Dad Suitelets where they stay throughout the tour. You swap the art out. You swap the drop and whatever. That was good problem solving.
But then you’re also blue skying, like, “What would happen on the road? Dawn’s pregnant. What does it look like if she tries to get a prenatal checkup in the Ozarks? What does that look like?” You’re coming up with, what are some things that would happen that would challenge our characters, push our characters out of their comfort zone?
You’re also thinking, what is the end goal? We went into the season. I had done a lot of pre-work headed in and had the hotel and some rough ideas about, oh, maybe Wickie and Summer have never actually been alone together and they realize that in Season 3. Just a million different ideas. But then early in the blue sky, in the room, we figured out maybe Wickie bit off something massive to make this tour being a Taylor Swift-level tour, and so she books them at Radio City Music Hall, and they’re not that kind of act, and she books them on Thanksgiving. That gave us the engine, like, okay, how do you get to Radio City?
We had six episodes, so it was a short four hours of content to get them from Fort Worth to New York in six months and get a baby out. There was a little bit of math, but also just the fun of pulling off the plot of that, plus all the character development.
John: But also, in planning this to be a tour, you were blowing up your sets. Classically, in comedy, you always get to go back to your sets. Those things are established. You have to establish characters you go back to. You blew up all those things for this season, because you didn’t have those things. Her apartment is gone. A lot of the places we were expecting to see are gone.
Meredith: We did bring it back in Episode 6, because they return to New York. There was a return to some of those comfort sets that we had seen. But yeah, in some ways, the four of them together always feels like it’s somewhere. That always feels like the show to me. Whenever we get them together, no matter where they are, it feels familiar, whether it’s the Macaroni Rascals chain or the van or the hotel room or wherever it is.
John: Now, Jen, your tour was Season 2. We are leaving your sets behind and then hitting the road and going into a bus.
Jen: Same dumb problem of making the show really expensive.
John: Yeah, and the aesthetics are just different. You had to actually go places. We expect to see outdoor locations much more in your show.
Jen: Yeah, there’s a certain, I guess, tone and look that has been established with the show. Yeah, it was a lot of on-location shooting for Season 2, which was really, really challenging from a budget perspective. Also, just credit to Jean Smart. She’s 72 years old. It’s different driving to Universal to shoot on our stages than it is going to Tarzana at 5:00 in the morning.
Season 2, we knew going in it was gonna be on the road, and so those were our benchmarks. Much like Meredith is saying, the strength of a show when you have characters that are so good together, is as long as they’re together, you still feel like it’s the show. That’s how I feel about Hacks is that as long as Deborah and Ava are together, it is Hacks.
Then going into our third season, we had ended Season 2 on a pretty big cliffhanger, which was that Deborah and Ava had gone their separate ways. Deborah had fired her, benevolently, so that Ava could go pursue her own career. We had this huge question of how do we get them back together. That was really the first thing that we tackled when we came back to break Season 3.
Now, we knew that the arc of Season 3 and the thrust of it would be Deborah finding out that there was this late night position opening, and Deborah would say, “Okay, I want that chair. I’m going for it.” We always knew that that would be the thrust of the season. We specifically had to figure out how do Ava and Deborah get back together. But it ultimately felt very correct and satisfying to us that it would be only as Deborah goes after this biggest thing in her life, this biggest goal that’s she trying to achieve, she would need Ava’s help.
John: Now, can you talk about production in both of these situations? I’m trying to remember. Season 2 of Hacks, that was pre-COVID? I’m just trying to remember timelines of things.
Jen: Season 1 of Hacks was COVID, pre-vaccine. We were shooting, but I would get calls, the studio being like, “All the hospitals are full. Do you want to shoot today?” I was like, “This is up to me?” Then Season 2 was still COVID, but people were vaccinated, felt a little bit lower key. Season 3 I believe was the first time we got to shoot without masks, so kind of crazy to actually see people’s faces after three years of working with them.
John: But Season 3 also had dealt with the strikes probably. Were you able to shoot before or after the strikes or both?
Jen: We are so lucky that this show has been received the way it has been. But every season we’ve had some pretty significant production challenges. Season 3 was no different, in that a little less than halfway through shooting, we needed to shut down, because Jean Smart had a health issue and she needed to go have a procedure. We shut down for a few months so that Jean could go and take care of herself and get healthy, which of course was of the utmost importance. Then we came back for four shooting days, and then the strike was called. When I look at the calendar, we started shooting Season 3 in November 2022, and we wrapped in January 2024.
John: Wow.
Jen: Someone said to me recently, “It’s like you’re making Boyhood, the TV show.” It was taking so goddamn long. Yeah, very challenging, long Season 3 production.
John: Do you shoot episode by episode? Do you block shoot? What’s the plan?
Jen: We block shoot as much as we can. We try to get as many scripts done before we start the season as we can, so that we can be nimble and be efficient budget-wise, because if we tried to do it just episode by episode, it would be prohibitively expensive. We do block shoot. The first episode of Season 3 that was locked was Episode 8 of 9. The first shot of the season, this drone shot that comes into Caesars Palace in Vegas, that was the very last thing we shot.
John: Wow.
Jen: It’s very much boarded like a movie, in that you’re bouncing around.
John: Meredith, I noticed on Season 3, I believe it’s one director for the entire run?
Meredith: Yes, Kimmy Gatewood.
John: Has that always been the plan, or why was that choice made?
Meredith: The block shooting of the whole season was a budgetary decision. Kimmy was just also a perfect choice person who could bite that off. Obviously, it was confusing, with one scene that’s in Episode 1, you’re shooting one scene that’s in the finale, all on day one. We had done things like that in the past.
I remember being on set of the Kimmy Schmidt interactive special that had a million potential permutations and universes that you could end up going into and timelines and talking to the actors, like, “Okay, so this time you’re in the blue sweatshirt and the zombies came,” or whatever it is. That was fine.
The one benefit of block shooting is that you have to get all the scripts done ahead of time, which meant that I was free to be on set the whole time. I didn’t have to do that thing where you’re sprinting between trying to check out rehearsal and then you run upstairs and then you’re finishing a script and then you’re looking at an edit and then you’re working on an outline and then you’re pitching another thing. That was not part of this season. The scripts had to be done by this pre-production time. We did it. We prepped, and then we had a very dedicated strike of a shoot. We did the whole thing in six weeks.
John: Wow. Jen, you had a background in more traditional comedy. I’m thinking of The Good Place, or sorry, Parks and Recreation or Good Place, more episode by episode. Can you talk through pros and cons of traditional schedules versus block shooting?
Jen: I think what’s nice about the network formula, the way that Parks and Rec and Good Place were run, was that it honestly just allows you to do more episodes, because it’s this machine you have going. Parks and Rec was 22 episodes. There’s no way we could make 22 episodes of Hacks the way we do it, which is that Paul, Lucia, and I are in every step of the process. We are writing, and then we are on set every single day, and then we are editing. We all do every step of that process. That is just the way we want to do it, because we want to have all of our eyes on every single part of the process. Now, we’re allowed to do that and able to do that, because we do 8 to 10 episodes, but when you do 22, there’s just no way. There’s too much. There’s not enough months in the year to do it that way.
I think from my time on Parks and Rec and Good Place, it worked like a very well oiled machine, that Mike Schur would be in the writers’ room most of the time. Writers would be on set managing their episode and overseeing it. I think what was really nice about that model – and we’ve talked about this – is that it allows for more of a training ground. The writers are empowered. I certainly learned how to run a show by working on Mike’s shows and seeing how he did it, but also being given the power to be on set and having to take on that responsibility.
This has been well covered, but as we divorce the writing from the production from the editing, writers are given less of a chance to do that. There are certainly tremendous advantages to the older model that was tied to longer season orders in that it just makes better writers. Better writers come out of that process, because you become a producer and you become a showrunner that way.
John: Now, Meredith, Jen had a trio of people who were there to oversee stuff. On your shoots, were you the only writer around? Was there anybody else you can go to to help you out on that stuff?
Meredith: Yeah, this season we built into everyone’s contracts that they would come back for the week of their episode and be paid to be on set.
John: That’s great.
Meredith: That was important, for the exact reason that Jen’s talking about. You really learn by doing and being on the job and being empowered to make the decisions about a prop that’s not working or quickly doing a rewrite of a line that’s not working for an actor or whatever it is. You need that experience. That was very important to us.
Season 1 and 2, just because of the nature of the way the things worked, I was alone a lot on set and tired. But also, directors were very helpful. I had producers that would pop by if they were available, Robert or Tina. Jeff Richmond would be around too. Very incredibly helpful. Some writers would come by as well if they were available. By that point, our room was wrapped, so that was more like just to stop by and hang out, really. Not really on the clock. Also, during COVID, we weren’t allowed to have any visitors really.
Jen: That was for the majority of Hacks shooting it’s been COVID.
Meredith: That’s right.
Jen: Writers couldn’t come to set.
Meredith: That’s a good point. Maybe they didn’t come really Season 1 and 2, but yeah, Season 3. The new Writers Guild agreement, it has that thing in that where you have to have at least two people stay the entire course of shooting, I believe, right? Which I think is a great thing.
John: That was one of the things we heard from most going into the negotiation was it wasn’t just lower-level writers feeling like they weren’t getting experience. It was other showrunners who just felt completely abandoned and lost. They were having to carry the entire thing on their backs. It was incredibly difficult.
Jen: I give you so much credit, Meredith, because having three showrunners is incredibly helpful, and even then it’s really helpful. I’m like, “Oh, maybe we need a fourth showrunner,” sometimes. I give you so much credit, because doing it one person is really challenging.
Meredith: I lost a lot of stress weight.
Jen: That’s good.
Meredith: I was just trying to suck protein shakes. How many calories can you put in a shake?
Jen: Oh my god.
Meredith: So I can drink in as much as I can. It was still more exciting than not.
John: Season 3 is now behind you. Looking forward to a potential Season 4. When does the process start? As you’re working through Season 3, are you also thinking about, “These are the hooks we’re gonna establish for Season 4,” or are you mostly just focused on, “We gotta get Season 3 put to bed.”
Meredith: I think obviously the priority is getting Season 3 out. Then as we have in Seasons 1 and 2, we have a little bit of a tease of something to come. At the end of Season 3, you see the big time calling Wickie. It’s her old song from the early 2000s when she went solo, Yesternights.
John: Yesternights is such a great word.
Jen: So good.
Meredith: It is featured in the show The Crown, the finale of The Crown, so obviously, she’s gonna blow up and Kate Bush. That promises what could come. My phone is always just – if something occurs to me, I’ll just throw it in my notes app and revisit it later if there’s something real. But I try to always have rough designs, but not anything too prescriptive or rigid, because I feel like there’s always so many exciting surprises that come that you don’t want to be too locked into anything.
I remember in Season 2, we knew they were gonna do an album for a label. We made the label the Property Brothers label, because everybody’s branching out into so many passion projects that they have. They were on Property Records. We wrote that not knowing if we’d ever book the Property Brothers. I thought worst case, we could just get two brown-haired guys with beards. Maybe we’d get Vince Mulaney and Adam Scott to play them or something.
John: But of course they stepped up.
Meredith: But then we found out they stepped up, and they said they’d be happy to be in it. Then my favorite thing in the world happened. Drew Property, which I’m gonna say is his last name – it’s not, it’s Drew Scott – he sent us some assets to show off, “Hey, we can do all these different things.” One was a reel of voices that he did, animated voices. One was some music, because they’re very musical. Then one was this incredible reel of him doing stage combat in a backyard with guns and just attacking a stuntman and doing all this Jack Ryan stuff.
We saw that, and the writers and I were just like, “This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. How can we license this and put it on the show and use it in some way?” Then that’s what led to the big fight between Gloria and one of the Property Brothers that was I think a couple minutes, three minutes or something. We did not cut much of that out. We wanted it to be incredibly long.
Going into that season, could I have ever imagined that we would do something like that? No. I try to be loose with some of the things that we want to do, knowing that it could change.
John: Jen, we’ve established that you went into your pitch knowing all these seasons. As you’re looking at a fourth season, where are you at in your process? How do you get started?
Jen: Similar to Meredith, you set up these things at the end of Season 3 that you know you’re gonna follow through on. We knew at the end of 3, Deborah’s gonna get this show. That would be a major thing we’d be dealing with in Season 4 is Deborah having this show and getting that off the ground and how does that go, especially when she and Ava have a new dynamic to their relationship.
But it’s also very true what Meredith said. You do have to remember that the process is very much so alive, and so that even though we have figured out a lot of things and we have these benchmarks and tent poles for the entire structure of the series, there are surprises along the way, and there are things that are like, “That’s a better idea. That changes the path, but that’s a better idea.” You have to, I think, be really open to those.
I think that’s one of the reasons that I love being on set and why I can’t just go, “I wrote the script. Go execute it. I’ll do editing or whatever,” is because the process is so alive that you have to be paying attention to every part of it, because things come up while you’re shooting, while you’re witnessing the way the actors are delivering the lines, that you need to be on top of and change and be willing to change and be willing to adjust. We have these big story points that we are moving towards for Season 4, but of course, there’s always gonna be things that we adjust if it’s a better idea.
John: We have a few listener questions here. I’d love you guys’ opinions on what our listeners should do in these situations. Drew, help us out.
Drew Marquardt: Noah writes, “How should I describe nonbinary characters in action lines so as not to confuse my readers? For instance, how should I use they/them, or should I just use a character’s name instead of a pronoun?”
John: For context here, so thinking about inside a script, so it’s not how the characters around them are acknowledging, but what you’re reading on the page. What’s your instinct for that?
Jen: I guess my instinct would be, if it’s a scene that is solo with the character, you can use pronouns they/them. But yeah, if there’s maybe multiple people in a scene, I don’t use pronouns a lot in the action. Sometimes I’m trying to get the page count down, and I do. I’m almost always using their names, like, “Deborah moves to the other side of the room.” I’m just always using the character’s name anyway.
Meredith: So am I. I remember on Kimmy Schmidt, we were like, “Why did we name Jane Krakowski Jacqueline? It takes up so many characters whenever we’re describing her in an action line.”
Jen: I gotta say I love the name Ava. Ava, it has worked out.
Meredith: Ed would be great. I get why they made that show.
Jen: [Unintelligible 00:42:39] for the scripts.
John: My instinct would be, I understand the question. You’re trying to make sure the script feels inclusive. But if it’s important the character be nonbinary, great, call it out on the page if it’s gonna be acknowledged in the scene as well. But not to worry too much about it. You’re right to always be thinking about how do we not confuse the reader. Your answer in terms of just use the character’s name a lot is probably the better choice. On screen, we’re gonna be seeing that person’s face. The person’s name stands in for their face on the page. Drew, another question. How about this one from Tara?
Drew: Tara writes, “I recently won a competition for a yearlong mentorship from two major Hollywood screenwriters. I’d love some advice on how to make the most of it. For context, I’m on the East Coast and almost 48 years old and plan to do this for the rest of my life. I’m a no thanks to retirement, like Craig. I’ve written, produced, and directed three short films, and this is my first feature screenplay.”
Meredith: I think it’s great if you have a feature that you’re working on. What an amazing opportunity to have this amount of time to bounce things off of and get feedback from these mentors. The tangible stuff is always great. I think for me, when you’re mentoring someone, sometimes a lot of the questions are like, “How do get an agent?” Some of the things that have nothing to do with writing.
I think that the things that have the most to do with getting your screenplay in the best possible shape by the end of this mentorship and also, how do I navigate the business, asking questions like, “What would you do if you were me?” Those kind of things are always helpful. But I think, wow, what a great gift to have a project and two great people to be looking at it whenever you want them to.
Jen: I think that’s great advice, because of course you want to use these mentors to ask questions about the business if it feels important and relevant to you. But the business changes at breakneck speed, especially in today’s moment. But good story elements don’t change. I think like Meredith is saying, getting really specific of the script, like, “Oh, was this Act 2 break surprising to you? Did you see that?” Just really honing in on making that story and that script the best it can possibly be will be the most beneficial thing to you.
Meredith: Tina Fey always is a real big advocate of a table read, even if you don’t have production coming up. In this year, it might be worth putting together a little table read of your script when you feel like it’s in good shape and inviting these mentors or at least filming it so they can watch later. It’ll help you realize where your screenplay really needs work.
John: I’ve had a couple mentees over the years. Often, the best questions they can ask are “how” questions. We agree that this is a thing that needs to change. It’s a moment that’s not working right. But how do I get it there? How are the ways to make the scene work the way I want to do? Show some different examples.
When they come to me with questions about, “My manager wants to send it to this person,” when they come to me with a specific question about, “What should I do with this next situation?” that’s always much more helpful than, “How do I get an agent?” It’s specific advice for specific moments, or like, “This producer is taking too long to respond. Do I send this email?” Those are the quick answers I can give them. That may be something that Tara is able to use with these mentors. Last question here is from Stephen.
Drew: Stephen writes, “What’s your take about using adverbs in the past tense to convey emotion when writing action? For example, the slug line is, ‘Exterior restaurant parking lot, moments later.’ The action line is, ‘Exiting with Dre in tow, Sean checks his order. They screwed it up again.’ I want to make it known that this has happened before. I want to hammer home his frustration, but should I just find a better way to write it? Should it just be, ‘They screwed up his order,’ or am I over-thinking it?”
Meredith: Oh my god. I am so confused. Can you read it one more time so I can see what’s wrong with it?
John: It’s confusing. Here’s what it is. In the action lines, Sean is not saying they screwed up again, but there’s an uppercase line here, like, “They screwed it up again.” We’re reading this reaction that they screwed it up again.
Jen: It’s giving us the emotional feeling of, “Oh, god,” I see, I see, versus speaking to format of, why is it all of a sudden switching tense. I see.
Meredith: I think it’s fine.
Jen: I think it’s totally fine.
Meredith: It’s totally fine.
Jen: I sometimes put a smiley face in the action line. I’m really going wild and not sticking to format when I’m writing the script.
Meredith: Also, so many people don’t read the action lines. So many people read the dialog and skim them. I would always advocate just generally to keep those short. This is not the question, but don’t try to be too cute, put jokes in your action line, because that’s never gonna be on the page, something a little winky or whatever. Keep them real simple. If it makes sense as you’re reading it, even if grammatically it doesn’t agree with the tense you used earlier in the clause, I think that’s what you go with.
Jen: I think as long as the story keeps moving and it’s enjoyable to read, that’s all that matters, never a grammar shift or anything like that. As long as it’s keeping me engaged, that’s all I care about.
John: 100 percent. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Meredith, do you have something to recommend?
Meredith: I have a person to recommend.
John: I love that.
Meredith: It’s a person that Jen Statsky knows very well.
Jen: Oh, wow.
Meredith: Chris Fleming.
Jen: Yes. Oh my gosh.
Meredith: I love Chris Fleming. He’s a stand-up. So funny. Has a special. Also, I just saw him live in March at Town Hall. It was the happiest hour and a half ever. I love him. He’s so funny. I love how unpredictable he is. I’ve been in comedy a while, and you can start to get where a premise is going, even if the comedian’s incredible and has a cool execution. But I’m like, “I feel like I know where this is going.” But with Chris Fleming, you do not know where it’s going. It’s very surprising. He’s firing on all cylinders. If you see him come through your town, get a ticket.
John: Here’s a question for you, Meredith. Someone like Chris Fleming you see, like, man, this is a great comedic voice, do you think, “I want to just watch them,” or, “I want to hire them on as a writer for something.” Does that kick in?
Meredith: I want to know him. I want to go to coffee with him every morning. I want him to be in my life. I want him to be my domestic life partner. I would love to work with him. He’s great. But yes, I’m just also enjoying it. But yeah, of course.
Jen: I will say, Meredith, I’m so happy you brought up Chris. Same exact thing. You work in comedy a really long time, not to sound jaded, but it’s very rare that someone so organically surprises you and it feels like you’re seeing something new and fresh for the first time.
A friend of mine showed me Chris’s videos. I was like, “Oh my god, this is the funniest person I’ve seen in so long.” I told my manager, I said, “I will do anything to work with this person. He is so deeply funny.” Then I ended up producing his special for Peacock, which you can watch now. It’s on Peacock. I’m so happy that you shouted him out, because Chris Fleming is so deeply funny and talented and special.
John: Love it. Jen, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Jen: I do have a One Cool Thing. We’re going on a stand-up comedy theme for this one. This one may sound like it’s connected to Hacks, and it is, but I gain nothing from promoting this. I have no financial stake in this. But Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, has her very first one-hour special coming out on Max on June 13. I have seen it. She is so phenomenal. If you’ve seen Hacks, great. If you haven’t, guess what? You can still watch this special and you will love it.
Hannah is – the same way with Chris – such a unique, special voice in comedy, doing something that I’ve truly never seen anyone do before on stage. Her tone and delivery is so specific to her. It’s unlike anyone else. She’s such a gifted also physical comedian. We do a little bit of that in Hacks, but the way she moves on stage and her physicality and her act-outs and voices, it is just so phenomenal.
Again, I financially do not benefit from this special. It’s actually bad for me if more people see her, because she’ll be unavailable to shoot the show Hacks. That’s how much I like this special and think Hannah needs to be seen as an incredible stand-up comedian. It’s called Everything Must Go. It’s Hannah Einbinder’s first special, on Max, June 13.
John: Excellent. I’m gonna break the pattern. I’m sorry. I don’t have a comedian recommendation. My recommendation is – the camera in your computer monitor is terrible. They are terrible. They’re not good. They’re not optimized for that. But the camera in your iPhone is fantastic. It would be so nice if you could just use your camera on your iPhone as your computer camera, which you can now. This thing called Continuity. If you’re on a Mac, it automatically already works. You can choose your iPhone. The problem is you need a place to actually put your iPhone. They have this thing now which is a little mount to the back of your monitor, where it just connects by MagSafe.
I’m right now using my iPhone camera. I’m gonna show the difference to you guys so you can see what the difference is. This is the built-in camera for my monitor.
Meredith: Oh, god! Hideous!
John: It’s hideous.
Meredith: It’s like a Bigfoot.
John: This is the iPhone version. It’s a better thing. We’re still stuck on Zoom for a lot of pitches and things, so if you are lamenting the terrible camera in your computer monitor, there’s a solution here. The one I have is from Belkin, but they don’t seem to make it anymore. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a thing that seems almost exactly the same. It just connects on the back. It’s lovely. It just makes things look better.
Meredith: That’s a hot tip.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Roger Corser. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions.
You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and drinkware now. They’re all great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on opening up this envelope I sent more than two years ago about the future of Hacks. Meredith, Jen, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations on three seasons of incredible entertainment.
Jen: Thank you.
Meredith: Thank you so much. Thank you.
Jen: Thanks for having us.
[Bonus Segment]
John: The time has come, Jen Statsky.
Jen: Hold on.
John: I emailed you after you were on the show last time. I’d just watched and loved Season 2, and I had a prediction about what was gonna happen in Season 3. You said, “Write it down.”
Jen: I think I made a joke, because I was like, “Wow, wonder if it’s better than what I have planned. Write it down and send it to me, please.” Then you, in a great move, said, “I absolutely will. I’ll send it. I’ll write it down. I’ll send it and put it in a sealed envelope.” I have in my hand that very envelope, postmarked from June 2022. It has been burning a hole in my desk for almost two years. Let’s open it.
John: Let’s open it up.
Jen: Let’s see what you had to say.
Meredith: Should we do a little ASMR of the opening?
Jen: John, before I read this, do you remember what you wrote?
John: I have a general sense of what it was. I think that it was about the power dynamic shifting between the two of them, where eventually Ava would be the boss. I think Ava created a TV show is where I think it is.
Meredith: Good idea.
John: Let’s see what I actually wrote down.
Jen: We’re opening it now. Here’s what it says. “John August prediction for Hacks Season 3. Ava sells a TV comedy and Deborah is ultimately one of the leads. It puts them in an uncomfortable boss-employee relationship, since Deborah isn’t used to being subordinate and Ava is constantly being undermined and second-guessed.” Then there’s a heart, which is very cute. It says, parentheses, “The show within a show barely survives.” Very good pitch. Meredith, I don’t think you’ve seen the Hacks Season 3 finale. How could you?
Meredith: I have not seen the finale.
Jen: But there is a dynamic shift very close to what you’re guessing there, John, in the Hacks season finale. While Ava doesn’t sell a TV show the way you’re predicting, you are, in a good way, I think, getting at this dynamic shift in their interpersonal relationship.
John: What I was envisioning was that it was a scripted series. It was a scripted series more like a Hacks series gonna be reflecting their dynamic. But of course, Hannah would have created it, would actually be the showrunner behind it. The talk show thing is really interesting, because that star is still the star, in a way.
Jen: Is still the star, yes. It is Deborah’s white whale.
John: It [crosstalk 00:56:34].
Jen: It always felt like that would be the thing that Deborah would be going for, to get.
John: I’m glad I wasn’t completely wrong.
Meredith: I think you did a great job.
Jen: I think you did an amazing job, because even though the plot details are slightly off, the emotional details were right on, of a dynamic shift and the power flipping. I think don’t quit your day job.
Meredith: Jen, great job not losing the letter.
Jen: Not losing it. I know.
Meredith: Where did you keep it?
Jen: I kept it in my office, my desktop drawer, and I didn’t touch it.
Meredith: That’s great.
John: That’s nice. Meredith, on your show, the shifting power dynamics are present through the whole thing. I’m thinking about Wickie clearly is the biggest star and she’s not the songwriter and those ongoing dynamics. It sounds like your next season, God willing, is a lot about how they hold together in what’s gonna come next.
Meredith: It is always interesting to see. It’s interesting, I think, to see people change and go through an evolution. Sara Bareilles’s character, seeing her find her alpha side would be interesting, I think, to explore. Every episode, somebody’s more in charge than the other and telling somebody how to live.
John: In doing the Charlie’s Angels movies, I often use this metaphor of fighting the monster. For both the original and for the second Charlie’s Angels, every day on Charlie’s Angels was fighting the monster. You weren’t quite sure who the monster was going to be. Some days you were the monster. But every day everyone had to band together and fight the monster. That’s how we made those movies and why they were so incredibly painful and difficult and bruising to make. Those challenging dynamics.
Even doing the first movie, I already recognized that, oh no, I’m the problem here, and yet I’m just gonna own – I’m not gonna change. I’m gonna just let myself be the problem of the day, and then someone else will be the monster tomorrow that has to be fought. It’s tough.
An absolute pleasure talking with both of you. I will not write down a prediction for Season 4, but I predict it’ll be great.
Jen: Do you have anything you want Meredith and I to send you a prediction for?
Meredith: Do you want us to predict anything?
John: We’re on Episode 645. We just recorded Episode 645. Episode 700 will be our next big milestone. That’s more than a year away.
Meredith: We could pick the topic.
John: Pick the topic of Episode 700.
Jen: A retrospective on the career of Jen Statsky.
John: Absolutely.
Jen: Just kidding.
John: Absolutely. What happened?
Jen: If you want the show to end on 701.
Meredith: If you want it to be done at 700.
Jen: You want subscriptions to plummet.
John: Good stuff. Thank you both so, so much.
Jen: Thanks, John. Thanks, Meredith.
Meredith: Thank you so much.
Links:
- Meredith Scardino on Instagram
- Jen Statsky on Instagram
- Girls5eva on Netflix
- Hacks on Max
- Chris Fleming
- Chris Fleming: HELL on Peacock
- Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go on Max
- Stouchi iPhone Camera Mount
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Rodger Corser (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 645: The Third Season, Transcript first appeared on John August.
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John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Meow. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 644 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we will sing the praises of the cold open. Those scenes that occur at the beginning of an episode, often before the opening titles. We’ll discuss how they work and how to make them work for you. We will also check out new requirements for loan-out corporations and answer listener questions on exposition, motivation, and agents. Finally, Craig and I have both discussed our love for the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. Love that movie. It’s so good.
Craig: Love that movie.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s talk about how OpenAI’s new chat capabilities might have us talking to human-like AIs and how we feel about that.
Craig: Okay. I don’t want to fall in love is all I’m saying.
John: It’s gonna be up to you whether you fall in love. First rule is never fall in love.
Craig: Oh, I see what’s coming next, and boy do I like what I’m looking at.
John: I’ll let you do the honors here. Tell us what we now have for our listeners.
Craig: We now have official Scriptnotes hats. These are baseball style hats. They’ve got the name Scriptnotes written across the front. But why I love it so is because the S that begins and the S that ends the name Scriptnotes is the legendary cool S.
John: The cool S. It’s the very cool PT folder kind of Scriptnotes S. We’ve had T-shirts of this logo for a while, but Dustin Box, our designer, said, “Hey, how about hats?” And I said, “Absolutely.”
Craig: I gotta get a hat.
John: You gotta get a hat. You and I are both gentlemen with not a lot of hair on top of our heads. Hats are very important for us. Gotta protect our bald pates.
Craig: Hats are not fashion for us. Hats are self-care. I gotta get one of these. I’m ordering one of these. Can I order one now? How do I do it?
John: You can order one now.
Craig: How do I get a hat?
John: The same place you get our shirts. They are available on Cotton Bureau.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Just let them know they are embroidered rather than being printed. I think they should be great.
Craig: John, you could also get glassware.
John: Yeah, we have drinkware there.
Craig: Scriptnotes themed glassware. I gotta tell you, I love this, because what is my cocktail of choice?
John: An old-fashioned.
Craig: And where does an old-fashioned belong?
John: In an old-fashioned tumbler, so a short, squat, cylindrical glass.
Craig: It is a rocks glass. I’m gonna get one. I love it. I’m gonna do some shopping today. I’m losing money.
John: Absolutely. Always been a money-losing podcast, and now Craig is personally losing some funds to the Scriptnotes branding.
Craig: It’s like you’re watching Scarface snorting his own coke right now.
John: I’m excited for these hats. I’ve not gotten my first Scriptnotes hat, but I’m excited to wear one, although I do recognize that sometimes I’ll be out in the wild, I’ll be wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt, and people will come up to me like, “Hey, John.” It’s like, “How did you recognize me?” Oh, because you think that’s probably John August and he’s actually wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt.
Craig: That’s a great point. But you know what? Let’s face it. We’re not that famous. Every now and again, somebody goes… I could hardly say, “Oh god, I can’t even walk outside.” I can totally walk outside.
John: We can totally walk outside. We are not at the level of an actual actor. We’re not at Glen Powell level of celebrity.
Craig: I like that. Good choice.
John: Good choice. I will say I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt this past week when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.
Craig: Oh my god, you did what?
John: I went skydiving with my daughter. We went to a place in Oceanside. It’s a jump by the ocean kind of place. I was wearing my Scriptnotes shirt. I realized, oh, this is being filmed on the GoPro. Can I write this off? Basically, this is promotion for the Scriptnotes podcast. I decided no, I don’t think that’s ethically correct for me to do. But I did, I jumped out of a plane. It was actually fine and good. For me, it wasn’t personally terrifying. Aline was terrified on my behalf, but I was not terrified.
Craig: I am terrified. I will share with you Melissa Mazin’s philosophy, if I have not already on the program. It goes like this. If you do something like jump out of an airplane, go deep-sea diving, and you die, you deserve it. You deserve it. Now, I’m sure a lot of people listening who are avid skydivers are gonna feel very upset by that. I just want to remind them that’s what my wife says. That’s not me.
John: Blame it on Melissa there. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the video of me jumping out of a plane if people are curious to see me jumping out of a plane and want to see a Scriptnotes T-shirt in action.
I’ve done things like this. I’ve bungee jumped, which was much more terrifying, because – we can talk about agency here – bungee jumping, you actually have a lot of agency, because you are responsible for stepping off all by yourself. That is a hard thing to convince your body, which does not want to fall and die, that no, you have to go do this. That’s a tough thing to do. In the case of skydiving, I am strapped to the instructor, so I really have no agency. I’m gonna be out of this plane no matter what. I was like, “Might as well just go for it.”
Craig: That’s a huge distinction, because I did go rappelling once. Once. The moment where you sit back over air is basically like you just have to tell yourself to commit suicide. It’s the same feeling. It’s insane.
John: Craig, my palms are literally sweating just picturing that.
Craig: It’s horrible. Once you’ve done that, now you’re just going down the hill and it’s fine. But the moment where you just have to trust that this rope is going to hold you as you let yourself die… I could do that or I could do what I did yesterday, which is to solve the latest issue of Panda Magazine Puzzle Hunt with my friend Dave Shukan, in my seat, without falling off a hill.
John: They’re both thrilling. Only one will kill you potentially.
Craig: One is thrilling, and the other one is just sweaty and scary.
John: There’s a thing I’ve done which is similar to the skydiving. When we were living in France, we were in Chamonix, and we went paragliding, which is where you’re at the top of the mountain, and again, you are strapped to a person. The parachute is laid out on the snow behind you. You just start running forward and the parachute goes up. I guess it’s really a sail goes up. Then you jump off a cliff. But then you are literally just flying in the air. It’s 30 minutes. It’s incredibly relaxing and peaceful. You don’t have that sense of falling at any point.
I would say skydiving, the moments where you’re free-falling is incredibly loud in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and unpleasant. But then once the chute opens, it was just like paragliding again. I got to control the going to the left, going to the right. I was pulling on the ropes. I got to go through a hole in the clouds. That felt really cool.
Craig: No.
John: The answer is no from Craig.
Craig: No.
John: I don’t think I’ll do it again. Just the hassle of getting down there and setting up… If I lived by an airstrip where I could just go on a random afternoon and just do it, I might. But it wasn’t that life-changing.
Craig: You didn’t get the bug for this?
John: No.
Craig: Got it.
John: I’m not an adrenaline junkie, for sure. I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt. I could’ve potentially taken a tax write-off, but that would’ve been a not necessarily kosher thing to do, because corporations are under a lot of scrutiny these days. This is our bit of news here.
You and I both have loan-out corporations – and we’ve talked about this before on the show – which is when somebody wants to hire us to do some writing work, they are not hiring us directly. They are hiring a corporation that we control, and that corporation then hires us to do the work. It’s an abstraction that is very, very common in the film and television industry.
Craig: I don’t know if this is referring to… John, have you done the annual report to the Secretary of State of California? Is that what this is referring to?
John: Yeah. It’s a new requirement. Traditionally, when you set up a loan-out corporation, your attorney fills out this paperwork and creates this corporation. Then once per year, you have to cement this on-paper annual meeting that describes what happened to the corporation. It’s just very perfunctory. What has changed is that starting in January 2024, most entities like corporations or LLCs, partnerships, have these new US federal disclosures-
Craig: Federal.
John: … because of the Corporate Transparency Act. It’s actually a big deal, because if you do not file these reports properly, there’s civil and even criminal penalties. It’s all in an effort to combat money laundering.
You and I and our individual corporations but also the Scriptnotes LLC now have to file this new paperwork. Our law firms who generally set up these things have said, “We’re not doing that anymore. This is beyond the scope of things that we are able to do for you.” Most folks listening to this podcast who have loan-out corporations are going to have to do something different this year, which probably means bringing on an outside firm and paying them 100 bucks, 200 bucks to file this new paperwork that has to be filed every year.
Craig: I will not be filing the paperwork personally. Here’s the order of business. Buy Scriptnotes old-fashioned rocks glass. Buy Scriptnotes hat. Talk to business managers and lawyers about who is gonna fill out my new report. Then I’ll have lunch.
John: That’s what it is. For most of us, it is an email. It’s a little annoying thing. But if you are a listener who ignores this, I would say maybe don’t ignore this, because it’s this year that you have to start doing it, and everyone’s gonna be scrambling to do it.
The kinds of things that have to go in this new report are principal place of business, if you’ve hired full-time US employees, and if you’re a beneficial owner of the company, which you and I would both be that for Scriptnotes, legal name. We have to file your primary residential address or if you got a new passport or driver’s license. Basically things that could look shady in the sense of money laundering, all that stuff has to be disclosed.
Craig: I can imagine you running through all these things as you were free-falling through the sky.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Thinking, “Should I write this? Probably not.” You know what? That means that this law is doing its job. It’s making very small business owners think twice, while massive corporations will simply assign a division of A-holes to get around all of this.
John: What’s actually interesting is these new regulations apply to companies with 20 or fewer employees. I think because that’s who tends to have the money laundering kind of problems.
Craig: That’s fair.
John: That is gonna affect almost all of us, because unless you’re Shonda or Greg Berlanti, you’re gonna have 20 or fewer employees as a loan-out corporation.
Craig: I can’t even imagine that Shonda or Greg have more than 20 employees, because most of the employees are being hired and employed by the studio or network, for writers, etc. It would come down to producing partners, assistants. Then I don’t hire, for instance, our landscape folks. The only people that are hired through my company really are me and my producing partner, and that’s it.
John: But how about your chauffeur and your assistant butler? Those are things that should go through your loan-out, because they’re helping you get your writing done.
Craig: My chauffeur and my assistant butler I got from overseas.
John: That’s nice. Like an au pair service.
Craig: It’s an au pair/indentured servitude.
John: It’s good, because you’re giving them an opportunity. You’re letting them move to the United States. You have a little space in the back of the guesthouse. It’s a cabinet basically they can sleep underneath.
Craig: It’s under the stairs. I call it a Harry Potter suite. It’s lovely.
John: It’s themed. I really like that. It makes it really feel [crosstalk 00:11:56].
Craig: I love they made Harry Potter sleep under the stairs. That’s fantastic.
John: In our house, there is actually a little room underneath our stairs. Is it the same in your place? Can you get into that space underneath your stairs?
Craig: I cannot.
John: You don’t know what’s hidden there, basically. It could be anything underneath there.
Craig: I think the stairs are solid.
John: That’s not true.
Craig: I know.
John: The stairs going up to your second story, they’re not solid.
Craig: Of course they’re not solid. I don’t know exactly what is under there.
John: I think Kevin Williamson hid something there for you. Somewhere down the road, it’s gonna come out.
Craig: We do have a screening room in the basement, which is under the stairs. That goes down itself. Maybe there is a person still under the stairs that I’m not aware of. I gotta talk to Kevin.
John: If things go mysteriously missing, yeah.
Craig: Wait, if you buy-
John: They have to disclose that. It’s in the standard residential buying of a property.
Craig: But I purchased my home from one of the most famous horror writers to ever live. Surely he left behind some kind of nightmare. I gotta check in with him.
John: Actually, I am thinking about the geography of when you go down the steps into the basement where the screening room is, there is that little nook where the popcorn machine was originally at some point. That’s kind of underneath the stairs. That could be that space.
Craig: I think that is. What is currently there is the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse.
John: Love it.
Craig: By the way, we had the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse made in Europe. Folks made it there. I asked if I could have it at the end of the show, and everybody said sure. Shipping it to the United States was such a nightmare, because you had to declare it as a artwork. You had to pay customs. It had to have an assigned value. There needed to be so much paperwork filled out, I think in part because it also needed to be really carefully inspected, because it looked like the kind of thing you would fill with bags of cocaine.
John: It’s paper mâché, yeah.
Craig: It was so suspicious. I just kept going, “It’s from a show. I like it.” They were like, “Fill more papers out, please.”
John: Fortunately, there’s somebody on your payroll who just does that. It’s not the assistant butler. Who was it? Was it your vice accountant?
Craig: That was just my assistant Bo, who did a great job navigating the US customs people.
John: The thing about being an assistant is you never know what kind of weird stuff you have to figure out suddenly. Here’s a onetime only situation. Handle it.
Craig: Keeps you on your toes.
John: We have some follow-up. First off, Craig, you’ll be relieved to know there is a MoviePass movie now for you to watch.
Craig: There is a documentary on HBO that I will absolutely watch. It’s coming out a couple of weeks from now. It is a documentary about the rise and fall of MoviePass. But I think it should be subtitled “the thing that John and Craig predicted over and over and over.”
John: I’m a little upset that they did not interview you for this documentary, because come on. Who would be a better talking head than Craig Mazin on this?
Craig: I was really clear about it from the start.
John: You work for HBO, and you were available.
Craig: Yeah, I was. I don’t know. They seemed to concentrate, for some reason, on people that were actually involved. But I will say that the actual collapse of MoviePass, it was a moment that reminded me that the world still makes sense.
John: That there is gravity, yes.
Craig: Yes, because so many times, things happen, I’m like, “What the… ” That one at least, we were like, “Finally. Yes, there’s gravity. Exactly. Something that doesn’t make sense actually doesn’t make sense.” I’m gonna definitely give that one a watch. Of course, MoviePass, still out there. Zombie MoviePass trying to come back to life in some, I don’t know, new altered state. But the old MoviePass, oof.
John: Oof.
Craig: I watched the trailer for the documentary. It looks like not only did their business plan make absolutely no sense, but then they were also spending money like drunken sailors.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this trailer. I want to say this trailer’s also the most HBO documentary trailer. It hits all the beats of an HBO documentary trailer. It feels exactly like what it should be.
Craig: They’re pretty good at what they do.
John: They know what they’re doing. We have talked about streaming ad breaks, so the idea that you write something and you produce a thing and it goes out there, and it might have act breaks already in there. But because of streaming, they make different choices about where those act breaks go. We asked for our listeners who had firsthand experience, who do this for a living, what the realities are on the ground. We had two folks write in. Drew, can you start us off with Lachlan?
Drew Marquardt: Lachlan in the UK writes, “I’ve been an editor for 12 years, and for much of that time I was working with one of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. Even if shows were delivered with specific ad break moments, often we would have to re-edit them to change where these ad breaks would happen. This is because we have a different amount of ad breaks in the UK than in other places like the US or Australia. Here, for a 30-minute slot we have one ad break, for a 60-minute slot we have two ad breaks, and so on. So often we would be joining up ad breaks, usually the old dip to black, and then the compliance team would dictate where the new ad breaks would happen.
“Unfortunately, these days, I believe they don’t use editors as much for this job, and the compliance team creates the ad breaks themselves. This means that even if you watch a show on VOD, it still has a title card that pops up every time the linear version would be going to a break, which gets very frustrating when trying to watch any HBO show in the UK. Sorry, Craig, this is the same with Chernobyl and The Last of Us.”
John: Again, what Lachlan is telling us is editing is a skill, and even editing like putting in the act breaks, getting out those fades to black is actually a skill. If you try to not use an actual editor to do it and it’s just some functionary who doesn’t have any experience with this, it’s gonna be unartful. It sounds like it’s unartful.
Craig: It is frustrating to hear that about the stuff that I’ve done. There are ways, of course, to find a spot and make a reasonable ad break in a show. But if the compliance team, which doesn’t care about any of that and is simply looking for, “Okay, at this point, at this point, at this point,” yeah, that is frustrating.
This is one of the bummers about working for a network that isn’t streaming only. That is that I have no control over how most people watch the shows I make for HBO, because most people are not watching it on HBO. Most people are watching it on the local service that HBO sells it to. For instance, in the UK, I believe that’s Sky. Sky just I guess just shoves stuff in. That’s a bummer.
You know what? I’m not gonna cry. People are watching it, and they can do the math. Listen. You know what a bigger problem is? The fact that people have motion smoothing on their TVs. That’s where I’m gonna cry. I can’t cry over this.
John: No. Zack wrote in with more information about streaming breaks. This is his experience doing a series where he had to put in the breaks. Let’s listen to Zack.
Drew: Zack writes, “Last year I edited a three-part series for Peacock. For every cut, we were asked to break up roughly 50-minute episodes into six acts, all with loose targets for duration. The execs noted that Act 1 should be longer than the subsequent acts, but overall there was a fair amount of flexibility. I found that mandatory act breaks impose some fun structural challenges on the team. We might send a viewer into a break with a question that we’d answer at the top of the next act or leave a loose end that we’d pay off in two acts down the road.
“We were forced to build well-defined phrases with sharp edges ending each act. Do writers think in terms of sharp edges the way that editors do? A sharp edge often means a clean break between scenes that shifts point of view, shifts a story from an A story to a B story, cleanses the palette, or maybe does all three. Too many sharp edges can leave you feeling a bit disjointed, while too few can make for a soupy edit. Often, the best sharp edges mark the end of the phrase or a movement. If you have a flowy, prelapsey series of scenes all following a single character, story, or theme, that sharp edge will be all the more noticeable when it shows up.”
John: What Zack is describing, I think he might’ve been cutting a reality show or a documentary show, because it sounds like it wasn’t something that was written for act breaks. There wasn’t a writer involved in determining where those things go in. They might be looking at, “Okay, given the footage we’ve got, what’s an interesting question to leave at the end of an act break? How do we get people to come back after the act break?” which is really the job that writers have traditionally done in traditional television, which is we think of act breaks as moments that have rising action, that end on a question mark, so that there’s a real intriguing moment to come back. That was very much the art of TV writing for 30, 40 years.
Craig: This is the way it should be done, because there are things that are not written with ad breaks in mind. I think that if you are writing a piece that is meant to be viewed all in one, you shouldn’t be worried about this other part. This other part is not your problem. But then if there are artful editors, like Zack, who can at least make it decent and reasonable when it is chopped up, fantastic. But we need those people. They can’t just be arbitrary.
John: I think AIs or just human eyes can actually figure out, “Okay, this is the end of one scene. This is the start of another scene. But is that the right place for an act break?”
Craig: There you go.
John: It’s not necessarily the right choice. If you were to delay that 30 more seconds, it might be a more narratively useful place to put that break.
Craig: Also, it’s more valuable for the people advertising, because if it breaks at a dumb spot, that’s where people might just go, “Meh. Actually, meh.”
John: “I’m done.”
Craig: “I’m done. I’m not coming back.” Soap operas, that’s all they ever did was somebody would go, “You didn’t know? She’s alive.” Cut. Soap, soap, soap, soap, and then back.
John: We’ll talk about this more in the cold open section, but I’ve been working on this project that is a bunch of episodes. These are designed without traditional act breaks. But I also know that ultimately there will be act breaks going into this thing. While it’s not the top of my mind, I am thinking about, where would you slot in these ad breaks down the road? I feel pretty good about these episodes since there are natural places where you can put this thing in and it won’t disrupt the flow, and in some cases will give you that sense like, “Oh, I’m curious what’s going to happen next.”
Sometimes it’s just basic good writing. Scenes should end on a moment that has an energy going into that cut so you want to come and see what the next scene is. Most episodes of TV that are written without intentional act breaks should have that kind of momentum that you can get through it if there is an ad inserted there.
Craig: I agree. If, for instance, HBO said, “Hey, everybody is gonna watch your show on HBO in some streaming method. Some people, however, are paying less money and it will be an ad-supported experience. Where would you like to put these breaks?” I would take the hour or two with my editors to come up with those moments. The problem for me is that’s not what’s happening.
John: They don’t do that.
Craig: That’s what they did with Fallout. Even as I’m watching without ads-
John: It fades out.
Craig: … it fades out and then it comes back. But for me, it doesn’t matter. I could send it that way, and whatever the company is that shows it to people in, I don’t know, India, they have their own needs, and it won’t have anything to do with those things I put in, and so it’ll be even worse. I’m just gonna not think about it.
John: What I admire about Fallout, because they clearly anticipated people are gonna encounter these ad breaks and we’re gonna plan for them, it’s not just about fading to black. It’s also thinking about what is the music doing here, because that is what’s so awkward. If it’s just wedged in, music goes up to a moment and then it doesn’t pay off, or then you’re coming back from an ad break and suddenly we’re at this very high level, like, “Why is the music up here?”
Craig: Exactly. Because you will only watch Fallout on Amazon, no matter where you live, they have the luxury of dictating that. I thought that was smart.
John: Let’s move on to Andrew who wrote in about email anxiety. We had a previous listener who was so terrified and so nervous to send out an email because they wanted everything to be perfect and they got hung up on it. Andrew has a suggestion.
Drew: Andrew writes, “I was listening to your podcast where your listener Richard had anxiety about sending an email, and I had a suggestion. Recently, I was listening to Brian Grazer on someone’s podcast, and he had a strategy for getting the most positive response from emails. Apparently, what Grazer does is he watches the stock market and looks for when the studio he wants to work with has their stock go up. It’s on the day that their stock goes up that he sends emails to people he wants to finance his projects. Maybe this method would make Richard a little less anxious.”
John: First off, Andrew, I don’t think we said it was okay for you to listen to any other podcasts. You shouldn’t have been even listening to anything that Brian Grazer said, because you shouldn’t have been listening to any other podcasts. Scriptnotes will tell you everything you need to know about the film and television industry. That’s what we’re here for, not other people’s podcasts.
That stipulated, Craig, this is your strategy, I know, because you are tracking the stock market every day, and you’re only making the calls based on how well a certain company’s stock is doing.
Craig: No disrespect to Mr. Brian Grazer, but I don’t think this is gonna ever work. First of all, most of the people that we writers are sending emails to are not the owners of the company or people looking to exercise massive amounts of stock options. But even if they were, whatever the stock market happens to be doing that day can’t possibly be that meaningful to these people. Hopefully, the people that are at that level understand that any day’s movement, other than some insane delta, is not relevant to anything. This feels like a way to make yourself feel better about something. That feels like an attempt to calculate your way to success, which in this business is easier said than done.
John: I want to give full benefit of the doubt to Brian Grazer. Let’s imagine he’s talking to Bob Iger. If the Disney stock is just bouncing around its normal amount, I can’t imagine it’s gonna make any difference, because Bob Iger is smart enough to know the stocks can bounce around. Now, if the stock was suddenly down like 25 percent-
Craig: Oh, god.
John: … then yes, it’s not the moment to try to sell your expensive thing there. I completely get that. But small normal things, no way.
Craig: Also, none of us are selling anything to Bob Iger. He’s 12 levels removed from that. It does not make sense. It’s adorable. It’s adorable.
John: Last bit of follow-up here. We’ve talked in the past about AI being used for coverage and that AI is really good at summarizing things, but we’re very suspicious about AI providing any kind of critical analysis of what material actually is or its worth or its merit. Greg in Illinois gave us his experience with The Film Fund.
Drew: Greg in Illinois writes, “I recently stumbled upon an interesting example of AI being used for feedback and coverage. The Film Fund is an organization that provides resources to filmmakers to produce short films. Their flagship program is a competition in which the filmmaker pays $35 to submit a one-sentence description of their film’s premise and how they would use the funds if they win. Winning films receive up to 10 grand. For an additional fee of $14, winners can opt for feedback on their one-sentence pitch.
“In a Reddit thread from last year, a couple of contestants complained that the feedback they received was worthless. The founder of The Film Fund replied, assuring them the situation would be much better in future contests, because they’re gonna use AI to generate feedback. These are his exact words. ‘Going forward, we’re implementing a different approach with our feedback service to ensure a consistent and high level of quality. We’ve trained a custom AI model explicitly on what our judges look for in entries and what makes a good pitch in the eyes of the judges. We’ve tested the output by this AI model thoroughly, and it greatly exceeds the feedback responses we were sending previously.’
“To his credit, he appears to be responsive and reasonably transparent. I don’t get the impression he’s trying to scam anyone. But it’s a bit surprising that he doesn’t perceive how this might undermine whatever credibility the contest has.”
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: Here’s what I’m saying. Transparent doesn’t mean good. If someone says, “I am going to rob you,” that’s transparent. Doesn’t mean it’s good. This feels dumb. You’ve spent $49 on a thing that you shouldn’t have probably spent $49 on. This AI coverage, I will not believe that The Film Fund’s special training on what they’re looking for is worth $14 that you couldn’t get from a normal, free ChatGPT or whatever, which you shouldn’t be using anyway for feedback on your writing project.
Craig: I’ve never heard of The Film Fund, but I’m looking at their website. What I don’t see is that they are registered as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, meaning they’re a business. I see no mention of being a charity of any kind. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any of it. I don’t know if they’re a for-profit company or not. But I will say if you have to pay money to submit a one-sentence description of your film’s premise, that’s ridiculous.
You’re paying $35 for somebody to read a sentence? And then for an additional fee of $14, which is a very odd number – it’s an even number, but it’s a curious number – they now will give you an AI feedback based on the input. The AI’s trained on what the judges did. The judges’ feedback is the very thing that they are also admitting was useless. This is ridiculous!
John: It is ridiculous.
Craig: It is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. Winning films receive up to $10,000. I don’t know how many they’ve made.
John: I’m looking at the examples and winners. They show how much prize money these different people get. They show the example pitch sentences here.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: We’ll look at their thing.
Craig: Look at this. Look at this. First of all, on their examples, no one has received $10,000. The most anyone has received to make a film is $6,000. Now, if I have, I don’t know, 15,000 people sending me 35 bucks and I hand out $6,000, okay. But then there are some people who, quote unquote, won a prize of $400.
John: Or a three-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
Craig: What is this? What is this?
John: What is this?
Craig: What is this?
John: I think it was created just to annoy Craig.
Craig: It almost seems like it was. It literally seems like it was.
John: AI is being used to just create sites to annoy Craig. That would be a good use of AI is just to build websites that are specifically there to frustrate Craig.
Craig: This is really frustrating. I don’t know if it’s the deals that they make money from all the $35 and then they give some out. I guess I would have to look more about them to see. I love this. I hate these people so much. In their frequently asked questions, here’s a frequently asked question. “Do I need to give credit to The Film Fund?” The answer is, “Yes, and we’ll be honored.” How can you be honored by a credit that you are making mandatory? How is that an honor?
John: I initially thought this was something European or British, because there are, like The Irish Film Fund, these film funds that are actually national funds, where it’s a whole system by which they help support their local film communities. That’s a valid thing. But by calling yourself The Film Fund, it seems like it’s not even a competition; it’s just a thing.
Craig: It’s just a thing. They say, “Where does the money come from? It comes from filmmakers like you who have also submitted their sentence to The Film Fund.” They’re just making people pay to ask a question.
John: I do like on the fact, “Why are you doing this?” the answer is, “We know there’s a simpler way to fund films.” That’s a real answer.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: “Who are the judges? You can check them out here.” Let’s take a look through here.
Craig: Let’s see. No offense to any of these people. One of the judges is the founder and CEO of The Film Fund.
John: I’ll take a screenshot, just because this of course could change. But I do want to point out that at least on my thing, there’s an ad being served underneath one of these people’s photos that says, “Notice this site contains real police records, background reports.” An ad is breaking up this thing, making it look like this person is actually a felon, which is not accurate.
Craig: The folks here do not appear to be what you would imagine would be judging what films should be financed. I’m sure they’re all excellent people and valid in their own rights. But there’s a certain expectation of a kind of level of accomplishment for judges. What we see over and over in these kinds of things is that’s not what you get. This is a do not recommend for me.
John: I will say four of these people I’ve noticed are all from Lehigh University, which I don’t know of.
Craig: Oh, Lehigh University, it’s in Pennsylvania.
John: Which is the center of all film production.
Craig: That is very strange. We have college friends who sat around, and I’m not suggesting they were high or drinking, but they were sitting around going, “How do we make money?” This is operating like the lottery.
John: Here’s what I kind of respect. Over the years on Scriptnotes, we’ve criticized so many of these things that are like, “Send us your scripts and we will judge them.” Here they say, “How do we improve on this process? We don’t have to even read the script. We just have to read one sentence.”
Craig: “We read one sentence. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna charge people $35.” Usually, it’s $35 to send your finished film into our festival or send your finished script in. No, $35 to send your log line, and then an extra, if you want a little bonus action for our premium service, we’ll have ChatGPT barf some crap out about it, for free for us but $14 for you. Thumbs down. Do not like. This seems very silly. I’m sure they’re gonna yell at us now.
John: Yeah, which is fine, but Drew is ask@johnaugust.com.
Craig: When they start these things, I’m sure everybody’s like, “At some point, John and Craig are just gonna swing a bat at us, because they don’t like these things.” It doesn’t mean we’re right. It’s just our opinion, man.
John: That’s all we can give. Hey, while we’re having a little bit of rants, I have a rant that I’ve just wanted to talk about for a while, and I think this is the moment to talk about it. Can we please stop sending Word documents around on emails? So often, I will get something that is a Word document that should’ve been a pdf. The problem if you send a Word document is like, okay, am I supposed to edit this? What do you want me to do? No, this is actually a press release, but you’re putting it in a Word document so that it looks terrible when I open it in QuickLook or Pages, because I don’t actually have Word installed on my computer. There’s no reason to send a Word document. Send a pdf or a link to a webpage. Do not send me a Word document. It’s so frustrating for me.
Craig: It is a rare thing for me to send a Word document. I only do it when I am essentially saying to somebody, “I’m sending this to you, and I’m specifically sending it as a Word document because I want you to have the ability to edit it if you’d like.”
John: Exactly.
Craig: That is the only reason.
John: If it’s something you want me to be able to copy and paste out of it, you can do that from a pdf.
Craig: Absolutely. It’s literally only like, “Hey, I’ve written this. I’m thinking you’re gonna want to change a few sentences here and there. Do that, send it back to me.” For that, great. But otherwise-
John: But I’ll say a Google Doc could be better than that, because that way you can just send the link and they can edit that link.
Craig: You’re right. You’re right.
John: For WGA stuff, whenever we have to figure out what’s the press release we’re sending out, what’s the thing, we did it as Google docs, because that way we could actually all edit it and look at it. A little more sympathy for sometimes sending the Excel spreadsheet, because sometimes there is stuff they need to tweak and move around there. But also Google Sheets is available, and maybe try that instead.
Craig: Those of us who solve puzzles for a not-living use Google Sheets all the time. Incredibly useful.
John: So good. So useful. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the cold open. We’ve talked about the cold open several times on the program before. I know it’s a little bit of a repeat. But I was reminded of how important and how useful the cold open is because of this project I’ve been working on, because I’m getting the chance to write a bunch of cold opens, which is so wonderful and exciting.
I thought we might start by talking about what we’re talking about, because obviously, every episode of television is going to open with something. Sometimes that’s a teaser for what’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s continually the action from what happened in the previous episode. If it was a cliffhanger, it might go right back to this moment. But you also have the option in television to open with characters you’ve never seen before and just establish a brand new thread of something. It’s a great way to introduce a new character who’s going to be important to the series or at least important to that episode.
I just love a cold open. It’s just one of the most powerful things we have in episodic television. Sometimes people are not using the full power of the cold open. I want to just sing the praises of and talk through how it works, when to use it, why we love it so much.
Craig: You have a choice every single time. There is no such thing as an episode that can’t have one. The first decision you have to make is do I want to put one here or not.
They are enormously fun. They are fun for the audience. They work like appetizers. They are wonderfully free of rules. They are not bound into the normal narrative timeline, nor are they bound by the normal rules of who’s that and where am I and what’s going on. They can be mysteries. They can feature people that you never see again.
They’re often great ways to reveal information. You can have an episode where 20 minutes in, one character starts explaining something to another and you’re like, “Okay.” You could also just start the scene with one character explaining something to another and you don’t even know who they are or where they are. You’re leaning forward, and then you get to the end of it, and it’s a little short story that has a twist or something that makes you go, “Whoa.”
Then the show starts, and now you’re fully appetized and ready to go into the main storyline. The main storyline feels like an entrée has been served. Psychologically, I find it very comforting. I don’t do a cold open in every episode myself, but quite a few. Quite a few have them.
John: I think the quintessential cold open, the one we’ll put a link to in the show notes, is the introduction to Desmond’s character in Lost. Lost, I think it’s in Season 2, opens with this person we’ve never met before. We’re not even seeing his face. He’s waking up. He’s going through his daily routine. He’s inside someplace, but we’re not sure what it is. We would assume naturally as an audience that it is going to be one of the flashbacks that the show is known for, where you’re establishing who people were off the island. Ultimately, we’re gonna reveal that, oh, no, he’s actually down in this hatch that we’ve been working to figure out what’s inside there. It is a tremendous sequence, and it’s done so, so well and sets up this character that we’re now intrigued by and just really broadens the geography of what Lost could be about.
That’s I think what I love so much about a cold open is that you are creating these scenes that you could not put anywhere else in the episode. Almost by definition, if you’re starting in some brand new place, it would be very hard to slide this anywhere else in an episode. It basically has to start, and in many cases should start before the opening titles. You need all of the viewer’s attention. You need it to not be in the chain of events of the normal episode. Once you’ve started the normal sequence, it’s very hard to stop that and go to some place that’s completely different to establish a new person, a new place, a new way that the show’s going to work.
Craig: As you described that, something occurred to me that I don’t think has occurred to me before. That is that a cold open reveals a mystery to the audience with nobody in between. In the normal method of plotting in the main body of your story, when there are mysteries, they are discovered by and solved by and revealed to characters, but not in a cold open. In a cold open, it’s just you. That is a very exciting thing for the very reasons you said. It can’t really happen in the middle.
Once we are in the perspective of our main characters, we must stay there. We can certainly see some things they don’t see, but we can’t have scenes that are speaking directly to us. But you can absolutely have that at the beginning, before you begin the main storyline. That’s a great example where instead of somebody finding a tunnel, going through something, or opening the hatch itself and discovering this man, the show says now, this is just for you, directly for you only.
John: The point of view is the audience’s point of view rather than any of the one character’s points of view, which is great, so powerful. Honestly, some shows are built around this kind of idea. Law and Order almost always starts with the discovery of a crime by people we’ve not seen before.
Craig: Thunk thunk.
John: Thunk thunk. Poker Face, one of the things I love so much about that show is, generally we’re starting with a crime itself. It’s a question of when the hell is Natasha Lyonne gonna show up. You don’t know. She’s gonna come up sometime. Generally, we’re not starting with her.
Craig: She’s gonna be there when she gets there, and that’s no big deal.
John: She might be in the background of something or we see her arrive and we don’t know how are these two things gonna connect. That’s the joy of this. I love cold opens. Also, the sense that you cannot slide it anywhere else in time, this project we’re working on, has really made me appreciate, god, day and night is so tough, because there’s so many times where you would love to move this scene after that scene, and day and night is killing you, where this scene can’t happen before, because then you’re creating an extra day that is impossible. I’m sure you’ve encountered that in your writing as well.
Craig: Yeah. It’s been more of an issue for me when I was writing movies than television, because you have a little bit more of a timeline flexibility there. But the day and night situation, especially as we enter this next storytelling phase of The Last of Us, is important, and so you do have to stay within the bounds of it. But that’s another reason why a cold open is so valuable.
John: Yeah. You’re not tethered to the timeline at all, which is so nice.
Craig: At all. Doesn’t even matter what year it is. You could be wherever. You could be in the future. You could be in the past. You could do whatever you want. That is freeing, and also, I think the audience appreciates it. They appreciate that they get spoken to directly without any rules whatsoever, before they settle into the traditional experience of the show.
John: Yeah, this cold open I just wrote covers a 14-year time span for a character we’ve never met before. It’s delightful to have the opportunity. We’re going from the past into a time beyond when the events of the series are happening. It’s delightful to give you a sense of like, oh, this is bigger than just this one moment in front of you. We’ll see if that makes it through the end, but that was the intention behind it.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Let’s answer some listener questions. I see the first one here is from Matt. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Matt writes, “As an Asian American actor, I’ve gone from being basically Johnny exposition guy in every television show and movie I was in, to now seeing true parts with complex, interesting characters being offered to me. One of the reasons I decided to start writing was because I was tired of being the furniture and wanted to be the interior designer. Since I keenly feel the plight of being the guy asked to give massive exposition dumps, what are some ways that writers can give the necessary exposition without relying on a single character for the purpose or at least make it interesting?”
John: What I love so much about Matt’s entry point here is that as an Asian American actor, he feels like he’s Johnny exposition guy. It never really occurred to me, but yeah, I could totally see that. I could completely imagine that the size that he’s getting for an episodic role, he’s just the guy who explains the thing and actually has no character beyond that. Hopefully, that’s changing. It sounds like it’s changing for Matt here in his experience.
We’ve talked on exposition a ton before. But Matt’s instinct here is that, like, god, it’s the worst when one character has to do all the heavy lifting. It’s so true.
Craig: Yes. For writers, we’ll do a very, very short sum-up. It is just as important to characterize the person receiving the information and to understand why they want the information and why they need the information and also how they feel about the information as the information is delivered. Relationship.
The scene where somebody is – we say an exposition dump. If it’s an exposition dump and that’s how you’re describing it, you’re doing it wrong. It is a conversation between two people who have a knowledge gap. The knowledge that is being imparted needs to impact the other person. The way it’s imparted needs to be crafted. It needs to feel like a little story. It needs to be interesting enough that people lean in, because when we say exposition dump, what we’re really saying is boring. But people can explain things in a way that is fascinating. You just have to write it well. So write well.
John: A recent conversation we had on this podcast, I think you were the one who was talking about how an explanation does happen in real life. People do explain things to each other in real life.
Craig: All the time.
John: Look for ways in which this would happen in real life, and that’s a way to hopefully keep that scene grounded and unapologetic about its need to get the information out there, because it’s being given from one character to another and not just to the audience.
Craig: Think of it as teaching. It’s not exposition. It’s teaching. You’re teaching somebody something. Teaching means that one character takes into account the other character’s education level, information level, what they deserve to know, what they ought to know, and then lays it out in a structured way so that they get it. That is as much fun to write as anything as far as I’m concerned.
But when we think of it as an exposition dump, what we’re really saying is, Character B needs to know and the audience needs to know a bunch of crap. Just have some guy say it. That’s not artful. That is not looking at it as an opportunity. That’s looking at it as a chore.
John: I would also say look for moments within those conversations where information is coming out, to have it not just be about that information, but there actually be some character not necessarily in conflict, but some challenge, some revelation that there’s something more there. A scene in which a character says, “Yeah, I knew that, because I’ve actually been following your career over these years.” That’s interesting. That makes us lean in and doesn’t just feel like, okay, now we’re being told this thing. Look for moments where there’s actually some interesting character moment happening there that’s not just about the text.
Craig: Yeah, agreed.
John: Another question here. It looks like Dean wants to ask us about titles.
Drew: Dean writes, “What makes a good title? Does it have to be unique more than it has to be relevant to the theme of the movie? Does a good title help get a script made, or is it just a good script that gets scripts made? Do writers even get the final say on titles, or is that all up to Brian in marketing? What are the best titles you’ve come across, and have you noticed any trends in titles?”
Craig: That’s a whole discussion.
John: That’s a whole episode. Titles are crucially important and yet the writer who has spent so much time thinking about the right title for their movie does not have the final say. The second Charlie’s Angels was Charlie’s Angels: Forever, it was Charlie’s Angels: Halo, and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle came because the marketing person always wanted to do something called Full Throttle, and that became Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.
Craig: Full Throttle.
John: Full Throttle.
Craig: Full Throttle.
John: But yes, titles are important, because it is the first idea a person has about your script, about your movie is gonna be that title. So yeah, it does matter.
Craig: There was a trend – I don’t know if it’s still continued – where scripts that were going out, original screenplays, needed to have bizarro titles, long, bizarre, weird titles, because that was what was jumping out, because people were tired of the short, punchy title. But by the time things make it to a movie theater, they generally do have the short, punchy title. Yes, it is up to Brian in marketing.
A screenplay with a boring title I think is at a disadvantage. But if it’s what we’d call a good old-fashioned punchy title or a weirdo title or a title that is somewhat provocative, just to get them to get to Page 1, that’s really all it is, just literally to Page 1, and then off you go. Try to not have a title that feels like a rip-off of something else, just a blatant rip-off. By the time you get to the movie theater, the title itself is not up to you.
Famously, the movie I’m thinking of is title-cursed is Shawshank Redemption. It’s a wonderful film. It was released into theaters, and nobody went to it, because nobody knew what the word “Shawshank” or “redemption” meant, and certainly not the two words together. It just said nope, don’t come here. Then eventually, people found the movie and it is beloved. But it was a flop in the theaters, likely because of the title. But putting Shawshank Redemption on the cover of a screenplay that you’re trying to sell, no problem at all. None. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
John: Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings.
Craig: Exactly.
John: We’ve talked before on the podcast, I think, about there are rules about titles. The MPAA I believe is the one who has a title registry. If you have a movie that’s coming out with a title that is too much like another title, there can be a challenge. There can be a whole issue. Basically, so we don’t have two movies with the exact same title coming out at the same time.
My movie The Nines was coming out the same year as there was a movie Nine, and the Nine and a Half movie. We had registered our title first, and so we had to give permission for the other people to have their titles. It all worked out. But there is a reason why you don’t see too much of a log jam with the people with the same titles coming out the same year.
Craig: Yes. First movie I ever had out in theaters, the script was Space Cadet. Turned out Lucas had squatted on that one with the MPAA. I still haven’t seen his Space Cadet film, but we had to change our title. Did I ever tell you my crazy [bleeps] story about this?
John: I want to hear the [bleeps] story.
Craig: I’m telling everybody the [bleeps] story. I’m in a room with [bleeps]. Already interesting. He says, “Hey, I have registered a lot of titles with the MPAA. I tell my assistants, if you see some interesting words, I go and I register it, because it doesn’t cost that much.”
John: It’s domain squatting.
Craig: Literally. Then he goes, “Other people happen to need the title, they pay me.” He was literally domain squatting. He goes, “But some of these would be great movies, so I’m gonna give you some names.” He goes, “Oh, this is my favorite. This has to be a movie, so tell me if you want to write this.” By the way, by “this,” he means title, Body Bag. I’m like, A, in my brain, I don’t think that is a very good title, and B, no. But I was fascinated by the thought process of seeing the phrase “body bag,” picking up the phone, spending the whatever it cost, $5,000 or something, to register that title with the MPAA, even though you have nothing, and then asking writers to write a script for a title.
John: It’s not even IP. It’s awesome. I love it.
Craig: It’s nothing.
John: It actually reminds me of this past week. I was approached to do this movie. There’s a director who wants to do this movie. He basically has a story space. He has a cool deck of cool images. This is a filmmaker who could make something really cool. But there was actually no narrative to this. It was exciting, but also it made me really recognize how much we need constraints.
The fact there was basically no constraints other than it looks like this, it was tough to think about what is the story. What are constraints that are interesting to me? What are the things that I want to avoid about the kind of movie that would have this as a pitch deck? Once I got that narrowed down, then it could go like, oh, okay, this is probably what the movie actually wants to be or what’s interesting to me. But the lack of constraints, where it’s just, here’s an image or here is a title called Body Bag, it’s just too open.
Craig: There’s nothing there.
John: It’s harder because there’s nothing to push against. There’s no walls to it.
Craig: There’s nothing there.
John: Let’s get to a question from Spencer here. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Spencer writes, “My writing partner Parker and I just finished a new draft of a project that draws on our extremely unusual relationship. You see, I’m a wheelchair user, due to a form of muscular dystrophy. For years before we started writing together, Parker was my friend, roommate, and live-in caregiver. Our script is a crime genre buddy comedy that follows two people in a similar situation as they try to figure out the limits of their obligation to one another.
“Though one of the things I’m most proud of is the level of specificity we were able to bring to the story, I worry that readers and producers will find it too specific. We’ve felt this concern since the very beginning and have leaned heavily into genre conventions and broad-ish comedy, hoping to ease audiences into the often alien way of life that a disability entails. Do you have any strategies or recommendations for taking out a script that deals with such a particular context? And given the reports of the belt tightening across the industry, the representation boom seems over. Are we too late?”
Craig: Spencer, you’re asking a question that I think presumes more than exists, meaning I don’t think anybody is actually reading things through the lens of how specific is this or how authentic is this. I think they’re just reading through things to say, will an audience be entertained, moved, feel something, appreciate what we’re doing here? It sounds like you’ve tried to deliver entertainment, because you’re talking about leaning into genre conventions and delivering broad comedy.
I think the things that are unique to your voice and your writing partner’s voice are the things that are valuable in the script. Otherwise, anyone could do it. I don’t think there’s a specific strategy or recommendation here, other than to say when you submit the script, it’s important for people to know that you are in a wheelchair, because the concern will not be, uh-oh, somebody in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair. The concern will be, uh-oh, somebody not in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair.
The representation boom, I can’t speak to that, but the representation concern still certainly exists. I think people are looking for authentic voices when we’re talking about things like, for instance, living with disabilities.
John: I completely agree with Craig. Really what matters is what is the person’s reaction to this. Are they enjoying the script that they’re reading and can imagine a movie that an audience will enjoy reading? That’s all great. The specificity that you bring hopefully is just making the script better for its own sake.
I would consider including maybe not a preface page, but maybe a page at the end to say, “Oh, so you know, I actually am a wheelchair user. I’m not some sort of person pretending this experience.” That could be useful just for a person who reads the script without knowing who you actually are.
Obviously, we want your movie to get made. That’d be fantastic. But also, this thing will serve as a calling card for you. The fact that it reflects your own experience, when you come in to have that meeting or get on Zoom to have that meeting, it’s gonna be great that they actually have something to connect you with, like, “Oh, these guys wrote this funny script about the situation, and these are the guys.” That is useful to you when you have those general meetings and you start talking about writing stuff for other people. I think you made the right choices. I hope your script is good.
Craig: I agree.
John: Let’s wrap it up there. We have a couple more questions we’ll save for a future episode. It’s time for our One Cool Things.
Craig: Yay.
John: Craig, I see you have a One Cool Thing listed here.
Craig: I do. John, are you a nail biter or a nail clipper?
John: I’m a nail clipper. I’ve never bit my nails.
Craig: That’s amazing. I have been biting my nails for so long, but I decided to stop. I stopped for I guess 2024. It was, by the way, not difficult. Not difficult. One of the things that has made it not difficult, one of the best gifts I ever got, from my intrepid assistant, Allie Chang, she gave me a pair of Suwada nail clippers. That’s Suwada, S-U-W-A-D-A. Do you have these, John?
John: I don’t believe I do, but now I’m looking them up to see what they are.
Craig: Oh, baby.
John: Oh, look at them. They look so different. They look more like pliers. Wow.
Craig: Exactly. They look like pliers or wire cutters. They’re made by a Japanese company called Suwada. They are so superior to the standard nail-clipping device that we can pick up anywhere, because they have so much better leverage, and the curved nature of the clipping edge itself just is so lovely and fits so right. They work like a dream. A standard nail clipper thing is, what, $8? This thing is $85. But if you’re gonna use it for the rest of your life, couldn’t recommend it more highly.
John: It also feels like a nice gift for a person who obviously does need a gift.
Craig: Yes, you can’t go wrong with this one. For somebody that was never a nail clipper, now I look forward to it. If I’m rubbing my thumb against my index finger and I feel a little like there’s too much nail there, I’m like, “Oh, I get home, I’m getting my Suwada nail clippers out. Kaching. Kaching.”
John: How much did you say nail clippers cost? I almost felt like there was a “how much could a banana cost” moment there, because I think cheap nail clippers are even cheaper than you think.
Craig: I was saying $8.
John: I think they’re like two bucks. They’re like two bucks.
Craig: Two bucks. You’re getting what you pay for with the two buck nail clipper. The handles are kind of this lovely texturized rubber or something like that. Also, it’s a particularly good gift, I think, for a dad, because just standard dads love tools. This is a tool. This isn’t a grooming device. It’s a tool.
John: It’s a meaningful tool.
Craig: It’s a butch-coded nail clipper.
John: That’s what we like. Absolutely. It also feels like for people who have their premium knives that they want to treasure and own, it’s the same kind of thing. Get the best tool for the job.
Craig: It’s a good tool.
John: I have two little One Cool Things. The first is an episode of Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast that many people have probably heard of where they take an existing song, generally a pop song, and they interview the people who made it and go through the stems and figure out how the song came to be, and just interview things. It’s a short episode, like 15 minutes. It’s great. I’ve enjoyed listening to that podcast.
But one episode I want to point people to is Madonna’s episode on Hung Up, which is a great song. It’s the interview with Madonna, over 40 years we’ve known Madonna, the most direct and just work-focused I’ve ever heard. She’s so focused and smart on it. She’s not defensive. She’s not just doing any of the normal Madonna things you’d expect. Talking about how she and the producer came up with Hung Up and the different iterations they went through, what worked, what didn’t work, trying to get the sample from Abba and hand-writing a letter and going to meet with Abba individually. It just made me really, I don’t know, respect her as a songwriter and producer more than I ever had before. Song Exploder’s Hung Up on Madonna.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: My second One Cool Thing is The Ladder, which is a great new experience from the folks who made Lab Rat, the escape room that we love so much.
Craig: Hatch Escapes.
John: Hatch Escapes. Craig and I were both Kickstarter backers of this thing. We went and played it with a group of 8 people, 10 people last week. It was just terrifically well done. It is different than an escape room. It’s more of an experience. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s all the things you would expect in that escape room in terms of puzzles, but the goal is not to escape, but to do something different. It is replayable in ways that are really clever. I just think it’s a really great evolution of the form.
I want to commend Tommy Wallach and everybody else who put together The Ladder. If you’re in Los Angeles and you love escape rooms, you should book a time for The Ladder at Hatch Escapes. It’s just really, really well done.
Craig: I’m waiting to return to LA from production here. Once I do, The Ladder is high up on my list of things to get to.
John: It’s gonna be great.
Craig: I’m very excited for that.
John: Craig, you will see that you are actually a part of the experience itself. I don’t want to spoil any more than that. But you will see Craig Mazin as part of the experience if you go take your time through The Ladder.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: Oh, boy.
Craig: Oh, no.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Who?
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Don’t know him.
John: Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson, in an homage to Severance, which actually feels very much like The Ladder. It all fits together nicely. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.
You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and hoodies. They’re all great. Oh, and drinkware now too. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau, so get your stuff there.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the new [indiscernible 01:03:16] chatty voice features of OpenAI and what it means and how we feel about it. Craig, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Before we start, a little context. Craig and I recorded this segment about OpenAI before Scarlett Johansson called shenanigans on the voice that was being used. If you’re wondering why we’re not talking about that, it’s because it hadn’t come out yet.
Craig, recently, OpenAI had a demo for their new features in ChatGPT-4o, which is their omni-media thing, which does a lot of normal ChatGPT stuff but also could handle images and audio and speech all natively. It’s just much, much faster and can interact with you in a chat fashion more quickly and in ways that just feel novel and new.
I’m going to play one little clip. This is a guy named Rocky who is talking to ChatGPT on his phone. Over the course of it, he’s gonna put on a stupid hat. That’s the only thing you should know if you’re not watching this video.
Rocky: In a few minutes I’m gonna be interviewing at OpenAI. Have you heard of them?
ChatGPT: OpenAI? Huh? Sounds vaguely familiar. Kidding, of course. That’s incredible, Rocky. What kind of interview?
Rocky: It’s for a software engineering role, but I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional?
ChatGPT: Rocky, you definitely have the “I’ve been coding all night” look down, which could actually work in your favor. Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the mad genius vibe. Your enthusiasm is what’s really gonna shine through.
Rocky: I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just gonna throw this on. What do you think?
ChatGPT: Oh, Rocky, that’s quite a statement piece. I mean, you’ll definitely stand out. Though maybe not in the way you’re hoping for an interview.
Rocky: Okay. I got it, I got it.
John: Craig, what is your reaction to Rocky’s discussion with OpenAI?
Craig: The OpenAI personality I find toxically positive.
John: People describe it as like a kindergarten teacher.
Craig: Yes, like a bizarrely positive and a little bit condescending, slightly patronizing, like, “Oh, Rocky, you silly billy.” I didn’t believe any of it. I’m impressed. Certainly, it’s cool that an AI can look at an image, parse out what it’s seeing, have a general sense of category, and then make some sort of comment.
It’s sort of like, what do I care about a generic comment about my appearance? What possible valuable information can I get there? Generally speaking, we want information from people that we really care about or people that we believe have specific expertise, not from some vague amalgamation, because that’s what JCrew has on their rack. That’s what the amalgamation is. We don’t need that. I’m mostly just unnerved by the toxic positivity.
John: There’s a lot of things to unpack here. First off, of course, we’re playing a snippet of a demo, so this is an optimized version of what this is. From the longer live demo, you can clearly tune the personality of the chat bot. This was probably tuned to be incredibly positive and giggly and all that stuff and flirty in ways. You could turn that down. You can dial that pretty easily, apparently.
What is interesting is this is not a sentient system. This thing is not alive. This thing is not conscious. It’s not her. And yet the illusion of it is so clear to see, because it feels like that because it has the ability to have back and forth and actually really enter into a dialog, it crosses that uncanny valley and makes it feel like there’s really a person there, that there’s an intelligence there that is not actually there.
Craig: It certainly prompts the question of whether or not – not begs the question, but prompts the question.
John: Prompts the question. Invites the question.
Craig: Invites the question of whether or not the Turing test is the proper test. I think in Alan Turing’s day, it made absolute sense. But what we’re seeing now is that this person is a real person, is the illusion of being a real person, is not in and of itself indicative of intelligence, and in fact, creating the illusion of a real person talking to you is easier than we might’ve thought.
So much of it just comes down to how synthetic the voice is. Yeah, sure, she sounds real, and I think would pass the Turing test in the most rigid sort of way. But it’s unnerving. I find it unnerving.
John: We know that this is a demo of an AI speaking back to us, but I can just imagine a year from now, two years from now, there’d be a lot of situations where we just don’t know if we are talking to a real person or not talking to a real person. That feels like, I don’t know, a social boundary that we’re not really prepared for.
If I’m talking to customer service right now, I get a sense of when it’s a real person, when it’s not a real person. I won’t a year from now, two years from now. That is different. I will know that if I’m talking to an executive on Zoom, that’s a real person. But we may soon not really know if that’s an actual real person we’re speaking with. I don’t know, something makes me feel uncomfortable as a human not knowing that.
In situations where I do know that I’m talking to an AI, I think there could be useful things coming out of that. Siri is so frustrating and useless most of the time. Same with Alexa. But this seems like you could actually get meaningful information out of it. If I was in a situation where I needed to know something, I might just ask the question out loud rather than googling it, and that feels great.
Craig: It’s an extension of Siri, which nobody thinks of as being alive. It’s interesting, one of the things that AI seems to struggle with is the concept of being interrupted. Interruption is hard, and yet it is fundamental to the way humans talk to each other. We somehow managed to interrupt each other without destroying each other’s train of thought. We don’t keep talking. There’s an interesting back-and-forth rhythm that I think they have to figure out. Do you know the comedian Ron Funches?
John: I recognize that name, but I couldn’t think of what he’s known for.
Craig: He’s so funny. He’s so, so, so funny. He has this bit about filling out CAPTCHA things. What he says is, “Why do I always have to prove to a robot that I’m not a robot?” He’s like, “The thing is what the robot is asking me to do, to enter a random series of letters and numbers, is pretty much the kind of thing a robot should be able to be good at. It’s not even a good test. It’s really proving that I am a robot.” I just love that. I love that concept of what the robots think is indicative of humanity and then how they give it back to us.
Look. The AI thing at this point I’m just starting of think of as a meteor that might miss the planet or smash into it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.
John: There’s things we can do to mitigate certain harms, but there’s overall bigger things that are way outside of our pay scale and what we can control.
I want to go back to interruptability, because I think one of the things that made this demo impressive was there was better interruptability. It wasn’t perfect, but you could just talk over the AI, and it would still hear you when you’re talking over it. You didn’t have to wait for it to be done before you can say the next thing, which is useful and good.
But it’s also a great reminder of, when movie dialog feels artificial, it’s because you feel like people are not allowed to talk over each other, they’re not allowed to interrupt each other, they’re not allowed to interject before a sentence is finished, and in real life we’re doing that all the time.
Craig: Yes. Maybe what they’ll get better at is the idea of not stopping when somebody interrupts you, but continuing and then going, “Oh, exactly.” Hearing and talking at the same time is tricky. I feel like right now, AI either listens or talks. Certainly, Siri is horrible at that. Do you find yourself getting angry when you’re like, “Hey, lady, play me the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof,” and then there’s a long pause, and then she’s like, “Playing Hamilton, the 1983 free version.”
John: So incredibly frustrating.
Craig: I’m like, “What?”
John: Here is our daily struggle. While we’re making breakfast, we have Alexa Flash News. Flash News should play NPR’s brief little three-minute “here are the headlines” kind of thing. Maybe 70 percent of the time, that’s what happens, but another 30 percent of the time, anything else could happen. It could play Fox News. It could play on a different speaker in a different room. It’s so frustrating. It feels like I’m in some sort of experiment, where it’s like how much can we torment John before he’s had coffee.
Craig: Then you find yourself having this increasingly stern, escalating argument. “I said the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof.” “Now playing Annie.” I’m like, “I said… ” I’ll say, “No.” Now I realize it’s like I’m talking to my dog at this point. “No, Bonnie. No.”
John: Maybe what we need is we need the AI’s kindergarten teacher, like, “You did a good job. Oh, Rocky, I think that’s great that you were able to play that.”
Craig: I feel like this version would be like, “Sounds like you’re a little frustrated. I get it completely. Doing my best. Tell me one more time.”
John: That’s what we’re gonna hear.
Craig: Ah! Ugh! Eck!
John: Ah!
Craig: Ugh!
John: Ee! Also, now, imagine being a kid. You’re a two-year-old, a three-year-old who’s growing up in this world now. It’s just gonna be very different. The expectation that there’s a disembodied voice who should always be able to tell you things, to tell you a story, to do whatever, it’s just a very different experience.
Craig: Then our children will look at that generation like, “Oh my god. The worst.”
John: “So coddled.”
Craig: “The worst.” Instead of iPad kids, now they’re AI kids. Just sit the kid in front of the AI and let them talk to their imaginary friend. God. You know what? Generation X, John. We were the last ones out.
John: The last true generation.
Craig: Last true generation before all this crap. We’re the best. (sings) We’re the best around. Nothing’s ever gonna bring me down. I think I can get that out before the copyright kicks in.
John: Love it. Craig, thanks so much.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Links:
- Scriptnotes hats and drinkware!
- John jumps out of a plane on Instagram
- Corporate Transparency Act: An Overview of Impending Reporting Obligations
- MoviePass, MovieCrash | Official Trailer from HBO
- The Film Fund and the Reddit thread
- LOST – Desmond in the Hatch
- Suwada Nail Clippers
- Song Exploder – Madonna’s “Hung Up”
- The Ladder by Hatch Escapes
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 644: The Power of the Cold Open, Transcript first appeared on John August.
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week.
This week, we look at how writers have adapted, remixed, distorted and exploded the story of Frankenstein’s Monster.
Our collection includes:
- Edward Scissorhands by Caroline Thompson
- Ex Machina by Alex Garland
- Frankenweenie by John August
- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Steph Lady
- Poor Things by Tony McNamara
- Stranger Things – “Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers” by The Duffer Brothers
- The Fly by David Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue
- The Monster Squad by Shane Black and Fred Dekker
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show by Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien
- Weird Science by John Hughes
- Young Frankenstein by Gene Wilder & Mel Brooks
Read these and other featured collections only on Weekend Read 2, available on all Mac and iOS devices. Download for free!
The post Featured Friday: Frankenstein Fables first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Aline Brosh McKenna to look at what writers mean by a “voice,” and how it develops.
Some screenwriters’ voice develops long before their craft, leading people to label them as “promising” even though the scripts themselves are a mess. Other writers get all the technical stuff right from the start, but have a hard time finding something distinctive about how they write.
From there, we segue into one of the most contentious Three Page Challenges we’ve ever done, with wildly split opinions.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John the Eagle Scout gives Drew practical advice for wilderness camping in 2024.
Links:
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram
- Spy Magazine
- Recitative on Wikipedia
- Three pages by James Topham
- Three pages by Cheryl Laughlin
- Three pages by Chris Vieira
- Submit for the Three Page Challenge
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilleli (send us yours!)
- This episode was originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post How screenwriters find their voice (Encore) first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Simon Rich (Man Seeking Woman, Miracle Workers) to look at how he crafts a comedic premise. Using his work on SNL, his time writing Inside Out at Pixar and his plethora of short stories, they look at how he develops a funny idea into a story with narrative and emotional punch.
We also follow up on the Harry Potter TV series, and answer listener questions on the downsides of writing in other mediums and adapting your screenplay into a novel.
In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you get your work into magazines? Simon walks through his experience, from rejection letters to being published in the New Yorker.
Links:
- Glory Days by Simon Rich
- “Gifted” by Simon Rich
- Rocket Dog sketch
- Howtown with Joss Fong and Adam Cole
- Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel by Douglas Botting
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Aline Brosh McKenna to help figure out how to say goodbye… in your story. Using examples from some of their favorite movies, they explore how farewell scenes work, what sets them apart from the average see-you-later, and leaving a lasting effect on your characters and the audience.
We also look at the summer box office, George Gallo’s Bad Boys lawsuit, Sony’s purchase of Alamo Drafthouse, and answer listener questions on bad ex-managers, second steps, NDA’s, fairies, and how to take advantage of downtime in LA.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Aline discuss journaling. Should we be keeping track of what we’ve been doing all day?
Links:
- ‘Bad Boys’ Settlement by Dominic Patten for Deadline
- Why did Sony buy Alamo Drafthouse — and is it actually a good thing? by Ryan Faughnder for LA Times
- The Nine Enneagram Type Descriptions
- Farewell – Casablanca
- Farewell – Past Lives
- Farewell – Lost in Translation
- Farewell – Weekend
- Farewell – Philadelphia
- Farewell – The Shawshank Redemption
- Farewell – Harold and Maude
- Farewell – Terminator 2
- Farewell – The Way We Were
- Farewell – The Wizard of Oz
- Farewell – E.T.
- Farewell – Toy Story 3
- Farewell – Dead Poets Society
- Revival Hub LA
- Visit Malta
- Peel off lip stain
- Dirt Man by Carter Vail, and some of Aline’s favorite remixes, via TikTok
- Phil Collins’ Houdini
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Farewell Scenes first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, agents and managers. How do you obtain them? How do you work with them? And if necessary, how do you fire them? To answer these questions, we will be traveling back all the way to the start of this podcast to search for the answers. That’s right, it is a compendium episode, where you’ll hear three segments with me and Craig back when we were much younger and still full of umbrage. Drew, tell us about the clips that you’ve picked and what we’re going to hear today.
Drew Marquardt: We’re gonna start with Episode 2.
John: Episode 2, god, yeah.
Drew: At the very beginning. That’s how to get an agent or manager. That’s no two writers get their reps the same way, but this is about finding how to get the right agent or manager to notice you.
John: I feel this kind of PTSD from those very early episodes, because I was cutting them all myself in Garage Band. Now we have Matthew. But it was a very manual process for me.
Drew: You guys sound so laid back in the early ones.
John: It’s very nice. Now we’re just all stress.
Drew: Then we’re going on to Episode 172, which is the perfect agent. Do you remember the Perfect series? We had all of that. The perfect agent, it’s now you have an agent and how does this work. How does this relationship work? What do you expect from your reps? How do you build and maintain that relationship?
John: Great. For sure. Then our final segment?
Drew: Is firing a manager.
John: Which is one of Craig’s favorite topics.
Drew: Craig’s favorite. He’s historically brought a lot of umbrage to this. I went all the way back to Episode 7 for this, because this is his first whack at the subject, and it’s his most balanced on it. It’s much more tact than umbrage.
John: That’s great. We’ll listen to these three clips, and then we’ll be back here at the end for One Cool Things, boilerplate and all the other stuff. But do stick around if you’re a Premium Member, because I will be talking through my big change, which is for the first time in my whole career, I now have a manager. Just a couple weeks ago, I signed with a manager. I’ll talk about why and what that process was like hiring a manager and what’s been interesting and good and different about it.
Drew: I’m excited to break it down with you.
John: Cool. Let’s travel back into time, and we’ll see you there at the far side of these three great clips.
[Episode 2 Clip]
John: I think we should focus on something we do know a lot about. We’re going to rip off the band-aid this week and we’re going to talk about something that in six years of running the blog, I’ve never actually written a post about this because it’s just such a dreadful morass of something to talk about.
Craig: It’s the worst, it’s the worst.
John: It’s the worst, and at least 80 percent of the questions that come into the site are basically this question. You’re ready? I’m going to paraphrase the one question that I’ve heard my entire blogging career.
Craig: Just do it, do it fast.
John: “How do I get an agent and/or manager?”
Craig: Oh, God. Now, let me just say, just so that anyone out there who is struggling to get an agent or manager doesn’t think that we are mocking your pain.
John: No, not at all.
Craig: We’re not. Really what we are embracing is the pain of the question itself because here’s what’s difficult, guys. If you really get down to what John and I know about getting an agent or a manager, what we know is how we got an agent in 1995. That’s what we specifically know.
Some of the pain of this question is it’s like a 15-year-old boy coming to you and saying, “How do I lose my virginity?” I could tell you how I lost my virginity in 1986. I just don’t know if it’s going to be applicable to you.
John: I think I do have a little bit more experience just because I’ve gone through generations of assistants who have become writers themselves and have gotten agents, so I’ve seen their process.
Craig: Good point.
John: Yeah. It’s not identical to what my process was and a crucial thing for framing this whole discussion is that there’s not one way it happens. Just like everyone does lose their virginity in a slightly different way, everyone gets to an agent or a manager in a slightly different way. We can only talk about general systems for success that people tend to find when they’re looking for agents and managers. I think we need to start by talking about what the hell an agent or a manager really is, because they’re used interchangeably and they’re actually different things.
Craig: Very, very different, yes. There’s something called the Talent Representation Act or Talent Agency Act, I can’t remember quite the exact name, but it’s California state law. Basically, the law says if you want to represent artists of any kind as an agent and procure them employment – that’s the big one – you are regulated. You have to be licensed by the state, you cannot charge more than 10 percent of what they earn, and you also can’t own any of it. For screenwriters, what that translates into actually is that agents cannot produce your material, because producing is a kind of an investment in the material itself.
That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then came the rise of managers who are not beholden to that law and they can, in fact, charge any percentage they want, and they can also produce your material. Technically, however, they are not allowed to procure you employment.
John: Now, procure sounds like a very legal term. Obviously I know that there’s a lot of overlap between what an agent does and what a manager does, but what is the difference between procure? The manager is not allowed to say, “Pay us this amount of money.”
Craig: The manager I do not believe is allowed to directly negotiate the terms of employment, I think. I’ll have to check on that one. By the way, as a general note, if there’s anything like this where I’m not quite sure, I can always lob a clarification on your blog when you put up the link. I know for sure that managers legally can’t seek employment. In other words, they can’t field requests for employment. They certainly can’t call up and say, “My client is available. Do you have anything that they might be interested in?”
Essentially, the manager is supposed to manage. Again, this is all the technical side of it and then there’s the real side. Managers are supposed to handle your day-to-day life. They help you develop material if that’s the way you want to use them. They help take care of your day-to-day needs when you’re working on a project. Let’s say you’re out of town working on something and they help facilitate your life. They’re not supposed to actually go out and get you a job.
John: Right. Now, it’s not an either/or situation. Many writers will find they have both a manager and an agent, and in many cases they’ll have a manager a year before they have an agent. It feels like there are many more managers in the business and that they’re easier to gain access to than an agent.
Craig: I agree.
John: Agents tend to be gathered together in very big, powerful agencies. There are certainly smaller boutique agencies that represent writers. Managers tend to be in smaller shops where they’re representing a smaller group of writers, or directors or other talented people and focusing on them. Managers, in general, might read every draft, and an agent very likely would not read every draft. A manager might give you notes. An agent would be much less likely to give you notes.
I approach the conversation with a dim view of managers, and this is just my generational bias. I’ve been called out for my generational bias because when I started in this business, the writers who had managers weren’t getting a lot out of their managers and they were just looking for the excuse to fire their managers. Now, more writers who are working regularly are talking about having success with their managers and keeping their managers as an active part of their career even after they’ve had a few features produced.
Craig: Yeah, I’m with you in the generational bias. I’m somewhat suspicious of managers. I had a manager for a long time, and in many ways it was a good thing, and in a number of ways it wasn’t, and it didn’t end particularly well.
I think that there are basically three reasons that writers gravitate toward… I’m going to give myself a fourth reason. One is, as you pointed out, sometimes they’re the easier representation to get, just to start with. Two, managers are much more willing to help you develop your material. If you’re the kind of writer who actually wants to bounce material off of somebody who isn’t a writer or a producer, a manager can help with that. Three, I think some writers feel, “Look, I can’t have two agents at once. I can’t be represented by CAA and UTA, but I can be represented by CAA and Three Arts. That’s twice the bang for the buck.” I wish I could remember what the fourth one was, but that was probably the most important one of all.
John: Those are three good points. To bounce off your third point there, being represented by two different people gets you exposure to more people who you could potentially be working with. And so even though the managers aren’t supposed to be out there giving you employment, they may be sending you out to meet with somebody, and that someone they have you meet with ends up becoming an important link for future employment.
Craig: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t have a huge problem with… If you love your manager, awesome. New writers who are seeking desperately for representation, and understandably so, I think can actually benefit a lot from a manager. But just be aware – this is the great currency problem – when you are a new writer without a track record and limited earning potential, you’re going to get a certain kind of manager. As your career advances, you owe it to yourself to fairly evaluate whether or not your manager is appropriate for where you are in your career if you advance.
John: Yeah. Let’s start the next part about what is an agent or a manager actually looking for. Let’s stop looking at it from the writer’s point of view. I need someone to represent me, to take me in and introduce me to all the right people and get me jobs. What does an agent want?
Craig: They want to make money. Bottom line.
John: They’re there to make money for themselves, for their agency. They’re there to try to get their clients hired and working continuously in the business. From that perspective, if they’re looking at a range of possible writers who they could represent, they’re going to look for the ones they believe are talented, the ones they believe will work really hard, the ones who can actually land the job – which means going in there to the meetings, for the nine meetings, and convincing a bunch of people that they are the right person to be hired for the job – the ones who are going to deliver. If an agent has a client that can land a job but then won’t actually turn in the script or finish the script or will turn in a really substandard version of what the script should be, that’s going to hurt.
The agent has a limitation of time. The agent can only represent so many clients. There’s only so many hours in the day. They can only put up so many clients for jobs. Taking on a new person is bringing a new person into the fold, someone they have to introduce to everybody, someone who they have to try to keep employed, someone they have to be talking on the phone all the time and trying to get them hired.
Craig: Also, just as an extension of that too, when an agent takes on a client that client is an extension of their reputation. I’m vouching that if I’m an agent I have a brand just the way that you and I have a brand. We’re known for writing certain kinds of things. Agents are known for representing certain kinds of people. They take on the wrong person and that person craps out, that’s an uncomfortable phone call for that agent. That damages their standing and that’s going to hurt them. There’s a ripple effect. When writers approach getting an agent and they look at this incredibly steep wall and the barrier to entry and they go, “Why? Why is this so hard to do?” It’s because of that.
John: Yeah. It’s important to remember that screenwriting is about pushing those words around on the paper and it’s being able to write a really good script. Screenwriting, the career of screenwriting, is also the ability to land a job and to get paid for what you are doing.
An agent is excited to read a really good script. They’re not going to sign a writer, in general, without sitting in a room with that writer and making the judgment call, could I send this person out on a job and get them hired to do something? They are measuring the social skills of a person who they are going to be possibly be representing.
Craig: Yeah. That’s right. You can definitely be a complete weirdo if you are just killing it on the page. If you are what I would consider a conventional screenwriter writing conventional material and you’re just a zero in the room, it’s going to be tough. I have to say that part of the business is unfair, but it’s real.
We can’t deny the fact that part of what we’re offering the people who hire us is a sense of comfort that we’re going to deliver and everything’s going to be okay. They’re just as scared as we are. Everybody’s scared.
John: It’s very much a business of trust. As the person hiring you, I am trusting that you will actually be able to deliver me this script. I base that trust on the things I’ve read on the paper but also looking you in the eye and seeing, “Okay, he gets it. He gets what it is we’re trying to do here.”
Yes, it’s incredibly important when you’re talking to the writer you’re bringing in for a million dollars to finish the script that’s about to go into production, but it’s also important just the scale job that you’re trying to get made. Every step for one of those executives is important.
Craig: All right. Then here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast. Everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? We ripped the band-aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it, aren’t we?
John: I think you get an agent or manager through… I can think of three ways. The first is a recommendation. Someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood. I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.” If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them, that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you.
That’s how I got my agent is a friend took the script I had written to his boss. He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent. Can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it, because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, he met with me, and he signed me. That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented.
Second way I would say is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh, this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.”
Even without that writer hunting down that agent, the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholl’s finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people who think that they are potentially really good clients.
Craig: Makes sense. What’s the third one?
John: Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny. She has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.”
I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who, they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer, but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.”
Craig: I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti. I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned, because it’s that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along.
One is to make sure that if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, is this agent appropriate for my material. He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write.
Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see… Let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. “Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see.” I write movies like John August. “Who represents John August? Let me see.” Okay. If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August. I’m aspiring to write like John August. Here’s my log line,” you might have a shot. Whereas if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated-R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “What do I care? It’s not for me.” Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep.
The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why, because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make.
He said, “Listen, 80 percent of the people in the mail room at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents.” They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place, you get to know the other people there.
You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script, and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it, he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material, so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable. It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island.
John: Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks that to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you. It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level.
They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually, they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is really good. This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write, and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step.
Craig: That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how to market themselves, because the funny thing is Hollywood with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent. They’re desperate for new talent. Nothing makes them happier than a writer that’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to.
They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly… For instance, we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the internet and marketed it as this insane thing, and it caught on.
John: You’re talking about the Robotard 8000?
Craig: I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the internet, and why would you say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Why? Because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention. Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.”
Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say – and you and I didn’t have this in the 90s – “Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it.” If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo-
John: Dana and Lorene.
Craig: … and Dana and Lorene. It was like, okay, there’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group. They all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting. How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script.
John: We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you or what to consider you as.
Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting. You wrote a really good comedy script that people like, and so they brought you in. A manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script. It was really funny. What do you want to write?” It’s like, “I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you, because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeonhole you for five minutes until you can actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense.
Craig: It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.” So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are.
It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies. Not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great.
It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love. This is the niche I want to fill,” if they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be.
John: Exactly. You have to be able to come to them with material that shows what your talent is, and a story, or at least a way of presenting yourself that leads them to believe, “Yeah, I see what he’s going for and I think he or she can achieve that.”
Craig: People have to understand that agents and managers – let’s call them representation – they’re never going to be your mommy or your daddy. They’re not your savior. They’re not Superman. What they are, essentially, are the vanguard of the endless decision process that leads to a writer being hired. They’re the first people in line to say, “OK, I’m willing to take a shot on you.” You still haven’t made a dollar when you get an agent. But it all is driven by you.
John: I always get the question of, how do I get an agent or manager? Generally, it’s the person who’s like, “I just finished my first script. How do I get an agent or manager?” That’s like, okay, you wrote a script. That’s great. After your second script, then I’ll believe you actually can write a second script. Or they’re like, “We just started working on our first script. How do we get a manager?” It’s acknowledging that part of the process is the ability to prove that you can actually do this repeatedly.
A thing I think we’ll probably say endlessly in the series of this podcast is that the career of being a screenwriter is not about one script. It’s about being able to write 50 scripts. While there may be one script that really gets representation’s attention, they’re really signing you for the next 30 things you’re going to write. They would love to be able to sell this one script. They mostly want to be able to sell you every year to different clients, to different producers, different studios, to continue generating cash flow and continue making movies.
Craig: Yeah, there’s a certain naiveté about the question in and of itself. Again, why we hate the question is just that some people are asking it and they haven’t quite earned it yet. “How do I get an agent or a manager?” Maybe the better way to phrase it is, “Which agent or manager should get me?” Start thinking that way.
Then if you think that way, you realize, “I’d better have something worth getting. I’d better know who these people are. I’d better know what I want and where I want to work and what kind of movies I want to be known for.” It’s the American Idol syndrome. “I go on TV, they like me, they pick me, I’m a star.”
John: The lottery mentality, which kills me about screenwriting, is that, by writing this one script, I will sell it for X dollars and then I will be set and everything will be wonderful and happy for here on out. It rarely happens that way.
I really liked the way you rephrased it, and I’m going to rephrase it again slightly, is, “How will the right agent find me?” If you can think about it in that perspective, a lot of things become more clear. How do I make myself visible enough that the right agent will recognize my talent and my determination and say, “This is the client I have to represent.”
What you may discover in that process is that – I say “the right agent find me” – the right agent probably isn’t the superpower agent who has Judd Apatow. It’s more likely the guy who has just a couple of clients, but they’re really good clients.
I left a bigger agent and went to a smaller agent right before Go. I made the change because I needed somebody who was generationally closer to me, who was hungry in the same ways that I was hungry, and I could grow with. I get frustrated when people aim too high, too fast. You want the person who can grow with you, ideally.
Craig: So true. The only thing worse than not having an agent is having the wrong agent, because then you feel like you are represented and everything’s going to be fine, but it’s a mismatch, so you have all of the lack of benefit of no agent, but none of the drive to get a new one, because you think you have one. That’s the worst situation.
I don’t care about the size of your agent, how big they are, who their clients are. If you’re just starting out and you’re lucky enough to attract the eye of a very powerful agent, you should ask, because it’s going to happen anyway, that they assign a junior agent as well to you, because you’re going to need more help, and you’re going to need more attention. They’re going to be busy talking to people that earn $20 million a year. They have directors and actors who out-earn every screenwriter. They just won’t talk to you. Get the right guy or girl.
John: And if you get the wrong guy, you can tune into a later podcast in which Craig will tell you how to fire your agent or manager.
Craig: It’s the best.
John: It’s actually one of Craig’s specialties. It’s one of the things I think he’s best known for, is really how to sever ties and move on with grace. I’ve seen him do it for many, many other screenwriters. It’s a master class.
Craig: I’m the Kevorkian of talent representation.
[Episode 172 Clip]
John: Last week we talked about the perfect studio executive. This week let’s talk about the perfect agent and what makes the perfect agent, what that person should be doing for a screenwriter, what our expectations should be when we’re talking to an agent. Craig, get us started.
Craig: I think that we do have quite a few agents and agent assistants who will soon be agents listening to us, so hey, lean in, listen carefully. I’m very simple about what I look for in an agent. Primarily, let’s talk about the real simple stuff. Call us back.
John: Always good.
Craig: Call us back. Don’t be impossible to reach. Call us back within a reasonable amount of time. That’s the big one.
John: Let’s define reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is 24 hours at the outlier, and if it’s not 24 hours, then it’s some communication that acknowledges, “Got your message, I will get back to you ASAP.”
Craig: Yeah. My feeling is if I call before lunch, I get a call before the end of the day. If I call after lunch, I should still get a call by the end of the day, but if not, first thing the next day and an acknowledgment that the call was received. That’s a real simple thing. I know that this is something that is talked about a lot in the agency hallways as a kind of nuts and bolts things. I cannot stress how important it is. Ultimately, the constancy of communication is the glue of the agent-client relationship. It’s as simple as that.
The other thing I look for in an agent is clarity. When a writer asks an agent, “What should I do? Should I do this job or this job? Should I pass on this? Should I accept it? Who should we give this to? Is this the right producer?” what we want desperately is the same thing that the people that hire us want: clarity and comfort. We want our agent to give us an answer. If there is no answer, then explain why there’s no answer, and then explain that either way will be okay. But this wishy-washiness or asking questions back – we’re not looking for an Ericksonian therapist to just rephrase our questions. We want answers.
John: When you proposed this topic, I went through and sort of made my list of archetypes of sort of the things I think about when I think of an agent. And not all agents are going to be all these people, but generally these are the kind of roles an agent fulfills in a writer’s life.
One is as adviser, which is just what you described, is the person who has an informed opinion about what should be done on a project, in a situation, what is the overall shape of what this experience should be.
Secondly is as kan advocate. You want your agent to be someone who is like on your side. And so when people are pushing you around, they’re pushing back. And that’s a really crucial role because sometimes the agent has to be the bad guy. The agent has to say, “No, he delivered. Pay him.” And convince on the next step if you want the next step. That’s a critical function of an agent and sometimes one that they are reluctant to perform because they’re trying to maintain all these other relationships. But from the writer’s perspective, we just need you to stick up for us.
Third archetype is sort of the connector. And really good agents are smart at being able to put people together who they think can work well together. That’s putting writers in rooms with studio executives who actually know what they’re doing, setting up a lunch between a writer and a director because there’s probably something they could work on together, bringing the right material to the writer, because this is a book we have and we think you would probably like it. That’s a crucial function of a good agent.
Craig: Let’s stop there on that one, because a lot of these things are sort of constitutionally required for agents. Some of them are things that agents have to earn their way towards. The truth is that we want from our agents a certain amount of connectivity. And there are all sorts of words for this, juice, or whatever you want to call it. We want our agent to be able to get the people we need to get on the phone on the phone. And if you can’t get those people on the phone, then you need to have a relationship with a senior agent who can.
John: That’s a crucial point, because a lot of times as newer writers, you’re going to be working with a junior agent, someone who doesn’t have all the history and all of the contacts and all the access that the top people have. But in some cases, those younger agents have tremendous numbers of contacts, they’re just at a lower level. And those can be incredibly valuable, and they can actually be faster than some of the very top-tier people can actually get that information. That can be really useful.
Obviously, if your agent is plugged in at CAA and they have this vast knowledge network of how everything is set up, that’s awesome. But even if your agent is at a smaller sort of boutique agency that deals with just TV writers, that can be exactly perfect if that’s what you’re trying to do.
My first agent was just a terrific agent, but his client list was mostly very esoteric indie writer-directors. He was really good at dealing with sort of specialty film arms of things, but that wasn’t who I ultimately was. And it got to be very frustrating, because he didn’t know the people who I needed to be in rooms with. And that’s why it didn’t last.
Craig: Exactly right. There’s another thing that I think the perfect agent is capable of doing, and that is switching their tone from every kind of communication they have, except for their communication with their writer clients, and the communication with the writer clients. We know when we’re being agented.
So, what is being agented? It’s being handled, cajoled. There’s that agent talk that’s smooth and fast and all facts have suddenly become fogged by war. And everything gets twisted around. That’s what they do. And they need to be able to do that. When they’re dealing with other agents, when they’re dealing with producers, when they’re dealing with studios, when they’re dealing with business affairs, they need to agent people. That’s their job.
But when you’re talking to us, before you get on the phone with us, take a breath and say this: “This person I don’t agent. This is my client. This person I can just calm down, relax, and be honest with.” I know. Sounds crazy. But we actually appreciate honesty more than anything. Don’t hide bad news from us. Don’t sugarcoat bad news. Don’t flimflam us. And if we challenge you on something and we’re right, don’t think that by saying, “You know what, that’s a really good point, you’re right,” that it makes you weak. It doesn’t. It makes us like you more. Save a certain tiny nugget of honest, normal you for us, and agent everybody else.
John: Part of that honesty is being honest about why a project is coming to you or why a project is not coming to you. And that’s a very difficult conversation to have.
Craig, you will be able to better articulate what the legal definitions and differences are between an agent and a manager. But my perception is that any time somebody comes to my agent with, “Here’s work. Here is work we would like John to do,” I think he’s legally obligated to tell me about it. Is that correct?
Craig: It is. Yeah. A lot of times they will glide over that, because they know that you’re busy and unavailable and wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t need my agent to call me up and say, “Hey, listen, we got an offer. You just started writing a script. We got an offer for you to do an episode of an animated program in Albania.” I don’t need to hear about it.
John: Yet I think one of the crucial things is – and this is the conversation I have quite often – in one of those sort of check-in calls, there will be like four things we’ll talk about, and the last thing will be, “Oh, and I got this thing for you. Here’s the project. Here’s the producer. Here’s why I think it’s a pass.” And that is just a godsend when you hear what that is.
Agents are fairly describing what it actually is and why it’s probably not interesting. And sometimes I’ll say like, “Actually, that does sound really interesting,” or like, “I’ve always liked that person, so I do want to take a look at it.” But a good agent is able to say, “This is why it’s probably not going to be right.”
In some cases, especially for a newer writer, they might say, “Okay, there’s this project over at this studio and they’re meeting with writers. They asked about you. I think it’s a fishing trip. I think they’re just basically bringing a bunch of people into the room and seeing what might stick. And you could be wasting a tremendous amount of your time.” I so appreciate that. And as a young writer, I might be panicked, like, “Wait, I’m not going to go for this job?” A smart agent might say, “You know what? I don’t think anyone is ever going to get that job. I think it’s basically just a let’s see what sticks kind of situation.”
Craig: Yeah. For sure. There’s another nice benefit to letting your clients know when you’re passing on things for them, in that it makes them feel good, that people want you to work for them. Look, if you say don’t do something, we’re not doing it. We’re very simple that way. We want to do everything. We want you guys to be able to help us say no to things. It’s obviously a very valuable part of this. Sometimes as agents, you will smell some blood in the water and we won’t smell the same blood.
I’ll get a call, “Something came up at the agency. Our biggest movie star is excited about doing this thing. It’s a book. And everybody is running around like crazy. But I put your name in and they really responded to that. This could be huge.” Look, again, we’re being agented there a little bit.
John: Yeah. But at least you’re being candid about what’s actually happening there.
Craig: Right. Exactly. And it’s good to know. And then if we don’t smell the same blood and we go, “You know what, I get why they would love that. I just don’t think it’s for me,” then you let it go. That’s okay. Just don’t jam us in, because we’re not dumb, we know how the agent business works. You guys make 10 percent of what we make. The person who makes the most amount of money, that’s the most important person. We know that. And it’s okay to shepherd us all together. That’s part of your job. But then if we don’t get it and we don’t want to do it, just be respectful and let us not like it. That’s okay.
John: That shepherd function is really crucial too. When Aline was on the show last, she talked about how her agent of many, many years, they were on a phone call and Aline was venting her frustration about this project and these people and the people being impossible. And the agent basically pulled her aside and said, like, “Get over yourself. Call me back tomorrow. And figure out how you’re going to actually do this project, because you’re being crazy.”
And that’s a crucial thing. That shepherding role of saying like, “You know what, you’re not actually being reasonable here.” It’s almost like a parent. Like, you know, reminding you, “You know what, this is your job. Your job is to write this movie. Write this movie. Get it over with. Get it done. And move on.” And that’s a crucial thing to have happen too. Sometimes you as the writer are the problem, and a very good agent can find the right way to tell you, “This is a you thing. Get through it. And let’s get onto your next project.”
Craig: No question. Yeah, Aline and I actually have the same agent, and I can hear him saying all that. And frankly, we want that specificity. It goes back that we want to be spoken to honestly and we want clarity. If the clarity is you’re being insane, if my agent ever said to me, “You’re being insane,” I would think I’m being insane.
A good agent should not be afraid of his client or her client. If you’re an agent and you’re worried that your client is not going to respond well to the truth, so your job is to somehow figure out how to hide the truth in a thing, like the way that I feed medicine to my dog by putting it in pudding, we’re going to know. Don’t be afraid of your clients. If your client can’t handle what’s true, then they’re not going to be able to handle it with their next agent or their agent after that. Truth is a great defense.
John: I absolutely agree. The last thing I would say about the great agent is, the analogy I think I’ve often made is that if you’re having heart surgery, you don’t want to go to the woman who only performs heart surgery three times a year. You want to go to the surgeon and she performs it seven times a week. You want the person who is the pro at doing this thing.
And sometimes as a writer you have to step back and realize, like, “Oh, you know what? You actually do this job. You’re actually the person who makes this deal. I’m not going to sort of worry about every little step of this process. I’m going to let you and maybe my lawyer go off, make this deal, figure out all that stuff, and then report back to me what the results are. And I can say yes or no.” But I see sometimes, especially newer writers, freak out about each little bit of a deal, and that’s not generally a helpful thing.
Craig: It isn’t. I totally agree. There are times when we have a disagreement. And what I end up saying is, “Listen, let me tell you why I don’t want what they’ve offered, even though you think it’s good, because of this and this. It’s important to me. It’s important enough that I’m willing to say, no, I don’t want to do this.”
And a good agent hears that and goes, “Fantastic news.” As long as you’re in sync with your client and they’re saying, “I don’t want to do it. I would rather not do it than this,” that’s empowering, and don’t fight anymore. Now just go with that, unless you feel that they’re being insane. Then tell them they’re insane. There needs to be that just honest communication. The most important advice I can give to you on your path to becoming a perfect agent is to not agent your client.
John: I think that’s great advice.
[Episode 7 Clip]
John: Question for you. When you get an email from somebody you don’t know, do you google them?
Craig: It depends on the content of the email. But if it intrigues me in any way, yes.
John: The reason I ask is because I wanted to start today with a question, and it’s clearly a genuine question. This person put in enough work to the question that I don’t think that this was any sort of scam deal or anything. But as I looked up this person’s name – I didn’t recognize it, so I googled it – it came up as an adult film star.
Craig: Oh, cool.
John: I don’t think it’s actually the adult film star who was emailing me. But it’s a person who, because of the nature of the question, chose to use a handle, which was the adult film star thing, so that I wouldn’t actually print it. But of course, it was a female adult film star, which I would have no idea if it was actually a female.
Craig: If you said the name, I would pretend that I didn’t know it.
John: Oh, very nice. That’s the lovely thing about an audio podcast is no one can see your facial reaction. I’m going to choose to name this person Tina, which is not the name that originally came on the email. Let me read it to you:
“About a year ago, a manager from a reputable company contacted me because they were a fan of my online videos,” which I presume were not adult videos. “I agreed to work with them. Unfortunately, this manager also represents people with lots of IMDb credits – big people, mostly actors though, a few writers. Over the last year it has become painfully obvious they have zero time for me and have put zero effort into helping my career get off the ground.
“Any general meeting I’ve gotten over the last year has been a direct result of my own efforts. I am beginning to realize that this manager and I don’t agree on anything creatively. Their notes are contradictory and vague. When they’re not, I find them to be flat out wrong.
“My question is, if I cut ties, I’m back to square one with no other representation possibilities on the horizon. At the same time, this manager has made it clear I’m last on their list of priorities. Even if I weren’t, the difference of opinion on everything seems counter-productive. Is it worth just keeping the manager or risk going it alone?
“I’ve actually spoken to my manager about this. I asked him if he had the time for me. He said if I didn’t, they could maybe pass me along to someone a little lower at their company who may be able to champion me a bit more.” It’s a confusing note. I think it’s actually the writer saying that, so the writer suggesting that. “They said, ‘No, no. I have the time. Don’t worry.’ Well, I’m worried.”
Craig: This is, talk about a softball question. 90 percent of the question is really an explanation of how poor of a job this manger is doing and how bad of a fit they are, and then 10 percent is generalized anxiety disorder. The answer is cut ties, of course.
John: I may disagree with you on this.
Craig: Let’s go. Let’s do this.
John: I don’t want to be the serial monogamist of these relationships, but I feel like it may be a situation where she needs to find the next manager before she leaves this current manager. I don’t know that being free and clear and floating in the Hollywood ether is going to help her any more than being with a manager who, while not helping her, isn’t an anchor in any way to her.
Craig: Well, here’s where I would disagree. It is difficult to switch representation without actively trying to do it. That is to say, without actively trying to get a new representative. It’s a very small community. As bad as a manager may be at their job, every manager seems to be amazing at sniffing out when their clients are trying to leave them. It becomes difficult to do a full-court press on your own behalf.
If there is any opportunity that this writer has to find a better manager, that opportunity doesn’t disappear simply because they don’t have this person. This person’s literally a zero. That’s what the question stipulates. In my mind, I think by cutting ties you give yourself every opportunity to get out there, do a full-court press and not run into anybody that said, “Oh, I would, but your manager is a friend of mine,” or, “We share a client,” or, “I don’t want to poach.” Just get rid of him. I don’t know, that’s my feeling.
John: Devil’s advocate, I will say that there’s other people who this writer could be bringing into his or her team who may be helpful, and the manager could actually be an asset getting them to it. I feel like you maybe go to your manager and say, “Hey, look, I really want to try to find an attorney. Can you give me some suggestions of people I can meet with who are good attorneys?”
It could help open the doors to some of those things which aren’t a huge burden on the manager’s time. Then you have a pretty good attorney. And then when it’s time to leave this manager, you have a pretty good attorney who can help make the next set of connections.
Craig: But it’s difficult to get an attorney if you’re showing up with no opportunity for lawyering.
John: That’s true. You’re not going to get a lawyer unless there’s actually some contract to negotiate.
Craig: Right, and that seems to be precluded by this relationship. I don’t know, I guess the underlying sentiment behind my advice here is that we as writers tend to project an enormous amount of power onto these representatives, fueled by our own anxiety that we will never love again.
But the truth is you’re not being loved now. It’s a bad marriage, get out of the bad marriage. Look actively and wholeheartedly for a new marriage. You found this person. You’ll find another one. I also feel like a bad manager is worse than no manager, because while you have your bad manager, you’re hamstrung and you can’t do better.
John: Craig, you are going to leave this manager. You’re going to advise Tina that she should leave this manager. What does Tina say to this manager?
Craig: Really simple. You call the manager up, no need to make a big production out of it. You lead by saying, “Listen, I made a decision to let you go. I’m going to end our professional relationship.” You start with that, right off the bat, really dispassionate.
Just say, “Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out the way I would’ve hoped. I had a certain series of goals for the two of us. They haven’t quite gelled, I’m sure you would agree. We’ve been together for X amount of time. It hasn’t resulted in employment. And frankly, it just doesn’t seem like you have the time for me or the attention that I would’ve hoped. The decision is final, but I do appreciate the fact that you took a shot with me to begin with. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you understand.”
John: That sounds reasonable and mature and grown up. I will say that when I left my first agent, I didn’t have that level of sophistication. I felt the need to actually pick a fight and be able to have the reason for why I was leaving. He was genuinely a friend. He was just simply the wrong agent for me to be with, and so I felt the need to pick some sort of fight that he wasn’t doing a good job with me, so he would get angry with me, and therefore I’d angry with him and say, “I think I need to go find another agents.” The whole time, I had actually already started the whole process of figuring out who I was going to meet with next.
Craig: Right, that works. Look, the most important thing is that whatever method you employ, you employ it post-facto to the decision. You don’t use this breakup speech to build up to the decision. You lead with it. The decision should be unilateral. It should be a fait accompli, and then you roll out your dismissal plan.
John: What I just realized is that I led this conversation with talking about googling people, and I just googled my old agent yesterday, because I was curious. Someone said, “Whatever happened to him?” And I didn’t know what happened to him, and he’s fallen off the radar.
Craig: You mean the Google radar?
John: He doesn’t seem to exist in the last several years.
Craig: Is it possible that he never existed and this is like a Beautiful Mind thing?
John: That would be kind of amazing if he never existed. You go back through all those old contracts and those phone calls, and you see the other side of it, and I’m just talking to myself. I basically rented this empty office, and I would go there.
Craig: This is the moment where Agent Kujan drops his coffee mug on the floor.
[End of Clips]
John: We are now back here in 2024, or whenever you’re listening to this podcast. It could be 2054 by the time you’re listening to it. My One Cool Thing is also time-travelly. This is the 25th anniversary of Go this year. GQ magazine had a great oral history retrospective of the making of Go. I was interviewed, along with Doug Liman, the director, Sarah Polley, many of the other actors. Desmond Askew I’ve not seen since we actually shot the movie. It was great to get this retrospective on how we got the movie made, how it almost didn’t get made. Paul Schrodt did a great job putting together this oral history.
Drew: I loved hearing from William Fichtner. I know he’s in that movie, but he just seemed to have such love for it and such passion for it, even though he’s in it.
John: I was genuinely surprised, because I would say during production, he was just always annoyed by me. At least that was my perception, because it was a really chaotic production. If you read the piece, you’ll see that it was a chaotic production. I was always meddling with things, but I needed to meddle with things, because Doug always had the camera on his back. Conversations that would’ve happened over in video village had to be right in front of the actors, because Doug had the camera on his shoulder.
Drew: He was rigging a light on Breckin Meyer.
John: Yeah. But I’m glad he had a great time it. Actually, it was a very difficult shoot but a really fun shoot. It really captured the joy of making and putting that movie out there in the world.
Drew: Cool.
John: Cool. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thank you so much. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.
You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on my signing with a manager.
Now, Drew, before we go though, quite crucially, I wanted to talk about a traumatic experience you had this week and maybe talk through this a little bit. As everyone knows, we are a Highland house. All of our writing is done in Highland, which is the app that we make, and it’s what screenwriters should be using. But you this week, for a different project or something that’s going on, you had to use Final Draft. Tell us about Final Draft.
Drew: You don’t pay me enough. You don’t realize how good you have it until you go back to Final Draft, because god, what a nightmare.
John: You were discussing just putting in a parenthetical was…
Drew: Yeah. In Highland, all you have to do is type a parenthetical and it automatically formats. In Final Draft, you have to hit tab twice. If dialogue gets caught in an action line, you’re screwed. You have to retype all that.
John: It’s a really different thing. I’m sure if I had to do it, the muscle memory would come back, but I’m so happy not to be thinking about… Just don’t have to touch that tab key.
Drew: You’re very lucky.
John: Brutal. Thank you for all the hard work you did and in putting together this episode. In tribute to all your hard work, this outro is especially applicable.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Drew. We’ve talked about this on the podcast, that Craig and I have never had managers. We didn’t grow up with them. It wasn’t such a big thing when we started in this industry. Craig especially was always very suspicious of managers or the need for managers. I have always tried to keep a more open mind. But I definitely thought of managers as being a thing that newer writers might need, because they needed more hand-holding. They needed somebody to walk them through the process. They needed extra bubble wrap around them to help them do their thing. That was not what I needed, because I’m a very established writer. I didn’t need that extra point of entry. But as you, master of the calendar, saw, I ended up having six manager meetings and I went and met with a bunch of managers.
Drew: Yeah, six, which felt like a lot. Yeah, it’s surprising.
John: The reason why it ended up being six is, when I started making the decision to look for a manager, I went to Ken Richman, who’s my attorney, to get suggestions for who we should meet with. He had good names and good numbers. I couldn’t stop at one place.
But it also reminded me of when my daughter started looking for colleges, that yeah, you want to take a look at certain schools, but really you’re looking for types of schools. When we did our first college tour, we were looking for, okay, this is what it’s like being at a big school in a big city, versus a big school in a tiny town where the college takes over the town, or what it’s like to be a small college in a little, small town. What’s the right fit? What’s the right vibe gonna be?
These were actually six very different types of managers to meet with. I needed a sense of what is it gonna feel like, as much as how specific those individual managers might be.
Drew: Did you go into it knowing what you were looking for, or did you have an idea?
John: To get into it, I guess we should start with explaining why I was even looking for a manager, because I’m a very experienced screenwriter. I didn’t need a lot of help on the screenwriting front. But I’m not a very experienced or established director. One of my priorities the next couple years is to do more directing. I needed a manager, I felt, to shepherd that part of my career, and so really focus on that. That was one of the things I was really looking for.
As I was sitting down to meet with these managers, I would talk about what my priorities were for the next couple years ahead, what was working great and what I felt could work better. You sent through a list to all these managers beforehand of, like, “Here’s all the stuff I’m working on. Here are my priorities for what I want to spend my time doing.”
When I actually sat down to meet with these places, you realized they really were so different in how they worked and how they functioned and how they felt, because some of them were really small. One was a single manager. Some were really small, little, boutiquey kind of places. Some were producing shows and they were doing a whole bunch of stuff and they had a bunch of different clients. They had sports people, and they had their own research department and all this stuff. Some felt like they were as big as the big agencies, like the CAAs or the WMEs. There really was a huge range of things.
I asked similar questions of all the places, but it was also fun to hear their explanations for why they were set up the way they were set up. The places who don’t produce would say, “We don’t produce because we want to focus entirely on client service, really that old agency model, just focusing on what our clients need.” The places that did produce would say, “Because we’re out there producing, we actually know what it’s like to produce, and we actually get a lot of firsthand experience on what it takes to make something this year, next year, or the year after. We’re much more in contact with the places that you’ll be working with.”
Drew: What is the argument for the client services then? Because as we just talked about in the episode, I know there’s a workaround, but managers can’t legally represent their clients in a contract situation. What would they be doing? How would that be working?
John: I’m so happy we’re recording this without Craig, because right now Craig would be tearing his hair out, because one of Craig’s great frustrations is that managers should not, under California law, be doing some of the stuff that they end up doing, which is figuring out what the actual deal is. Managers can put you in the room, but in theory it should be your attorney and your agents who are doing that stuff. Some of my big writer colleagues don’t have agents anymore. They just have their managers, and it’s working out great for them. So it’s certainly a possibility.
I did think about, if I were to have a manager, would I still need an agency? Some of the conversations I would have with these management companies is, “How do you work with agencies? What is the overlap?” because there is overlap. Different explanations, but some would describe it as being like the manager is the general leading the charge, but you need the army, and that army is often the agency. The manager might be the person who’s saying, “Okay, there’s these 15 calls we need to make. I’m gonna make these 10. Can you make these five?” They can be the CEO of the representation of that one client.
Drew: Does that make it in any way awkward with your agents?
John: It can, and so I had conversations with agents too about, “How do you feel about working with managers?” Some, they would say, in quite polite ways, that there are certain managers they love getting on the phone with and certain managers they dread getting on the phone with, and that sometimes it feels like it’s interfering with their ability to represent the client.
In most cases though, managers represent many fewer people than an agent would. An agent might have 100, 150 clients they’re supposed to be repping, whereas a manager is focused on just a much smaller list, and so they can provide a little bit more direct attention to what that person needs that day and the day after and be thinking about a year down the road, what’s best for the client.
Drew: You picked a manager. How’s it going so far?
John: Good so far. What I would say is I found that the manager is more likely to be on Zoom with me. For example, we had a Zoom with the foreign finance people at the agency. It was good to have that manager there to ask the extra questions that I wasn’t thinking about.
It’s been nice that they have different connections than my agents might. Even just on an email chain, a manager could say, “Oh, we rep them,” or, “I know that person, and so let me make that introduction, and that’s a thing that could work,” or, “It’s not public knowledge yet, but they’re gonna be busy for the next 18 months, so I don’t think that’s a good person for us to pursue next to direct this project.”
That has been good and useful to have one outside person and an ability to reach outside the silo of… Part of the reason I was looking for a manager is because if you’re at an agency, yes, they in theory could work with everyone, and they should have information on all the stuff, but it’s hard for… If you’re at CAA, it’s a little bit weird for them to reach out to WME about one of the WME clients, whereas a manager can just pick up the phone and do it.
Drew: That seems like a huge… Obviously, you have a giant contact list, but your contact list expands exponentially, and knowledge too with that.
John: Yeah. All that said, it’s new and it’s different and it’s a little bit weird. As we established on the podcast, I kind of like being a little bit uncomfortable and trying things that are outside of my comfort zone. For me, for that, it’s been good. It’s a change. It’s a development. It’s fun that we’re doing this episode now, looking back 12 years to when we first started the agent and manager conversation, for me to suddenly have a manager, which I’ve never had before.
Drew: I’m excited. I think it’s a cool new chapter.
John: Cool. Drew, thanks for getting this episode together.
Drew: Thanks, John.
Links:
- Episode 2 – How to get an agent and/or manager
- Episode 172 – Franz Kafka’s brother, and the perfect agent
- Episode 7 – Firing a manager, and trying new software
- How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t) by Paul Schrodt for GQ
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!)
- This episode’s segments were originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 643: Agents and Managers 101, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Now, if one were to eavesdrop on the conversations happening at Los Angeles restaurants or the chatter occurring on Zoom meetings before everyone gets there, you might assume things are pretty rough in Hollywood these days. Today on the show, we’ll look at what’s going on in the industry, its historical analogs, and some suggestions for what might fix it.
Craig: I’m sure that they’ll listen to that, right? We’ll suggest what to do.
John: We’ll suggest the things.
Craig: And then they’ll do it.
John: The industry bigwigs will do it.
Craig: They’ll do it.
John: It’s not even just the industry bigwigs. It’s really the structural fundamental changes that will happen, or maybe we don’t need to do anything. It’ll all sort itself out.
We’ll also answer listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what happens after we die. No, Craig, we’re not talking about the afterlife.
Craig: Thank god.
John: What specifically happens to all of our accounts and passwords and other aspects of our digital lives and what preparations should we make, should Craig or I or Drew, for that matter, suddenly keel over and all our stuff is there.
Craig: Sweet release. Yes.
John: Sweet relief for us, but not for our heirs, not for everybody else.
Craig: No, everybody else is gonna have a mess to clean up. But we will be free, released-
John: Free.
Craig: … back into the simulation.
John: Clear.
Craig: Yes.
Drew Marquardt: No.
Craig: No.
John: First we have some follow-up. To start us off with, Javier in Peru apparently has some corrections about our Star Wars beer ads.
Drew: The Star Wars beer commercials were real, but not in Peru. They happened in Chile.
Craig: Ah, all right. Then apologies to Isabela Merced, who is Peruvian, and ha ha Pedro Pascal, who is from Chile.
John: Love it all. But apparently, that was not the only mistake Craig made in Episode 641.
Craig: Oh, good.
Drew: Daniel wrote, “Craig referred to the birthday paradox and got it wrong in the same way that Johnny Carson famously did. The paradox is not that if you have 23 people, there’s more than 50 percent chance that at least one will have your birthday. In fact, that’s very unlikely. The paradox is that in a group of 23 people, there’s a more than 50 percent chance that at least two of them share the same birthday. This is actually a simple calculation, as it’s one minus probability that they all have different birthdays.”
Craig: You know what, Daniel? Absolutely correct. This isn’t me being defensive. I knew that. I think I just said it wrong. I misspoke. But yes, I did in fact know that that was what it was, so you do get the gold star for the correction. I have no problem saying oh, darn it, I blew it, but in this case, I just misspoke. I did know the nature of that.
John: Now, apparently, Craig was not the only person who made a small mistake or a small issue of disagreement in 641. James wrote in and actually send audio. I think because of the nature of this, we’re gonna play James’s audio, which is fantastic. Let’s take a listen to James.
James: In addition to the email, John, I thought you ought to hear from a native New Yorker. I was born in Brookdale Hospital. My father was born in Brookdale Hospital. We are still here. Our accents are still here. I’m a Black dude, so you gotta throw in the AAVN, whatever. My parents are from the South, so I got New York, I got down South. But I always tell people either go from y’all or yous, depending on who I’m talking to. You know what I’m saying?
I understand what you saying, but Brooklyn has more people than Philly. We gotta stop seeing four or five gentrifiers in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and they represent Brooklyn. No, they don’t. They will be in another city in five years. My mother is buried in Brooklyn. I’m just saying that to say that we still here. You gotta move around.
I don’t know where to send people these days to find a real New York accent. But it’s not the vegan dude with the mustache and his stupid lumberjack, whatever that is, that nonsense. He wasn’t wearing that in high school. Come to Brooklyn, he gonna change all of a sudden. Whatever, dude.
But like I said, the Brooklyn accent is still in effect, no question about it. I’m writing characters. All my stories are set in New York City with real New York natives. I gotta hear that accent, because like I said, people only associate the accent with white people, to be honest with you. But like I said, we out here. It’s funny, because whenever rappers from New York go anywhere, the first thing they talk about – these are Black rappers, of course – is our accent, because they know where we from: New York.
Craig: Oh, man.
John: Oh, man.
Craig: I love James so much. I just want to hug him. That is the sound of my youth. James, Brooklyn-born Craig over here. Absolutely. There’s a generational thing. There are different kinds of accents inside of Brooklyn. What we think of as that classic Brooklyn accent, I would say it’s an accent that was predominant in the mid-20th century and mostly among white people. Very specific things. For instance, my grandfather wouldn’t say “toilet.” He would say “TUR-lit”. The TUR-lit. That is a specific thing. But Black Brooklyn accent is also a specific thing. That was awesome. That was a great example of it.
There are all those different accents. What he’s referring to as, I guess we would call them the hipster Brooklyn people, I agree. My mom grew up in Bensonhurst, and she still has that accent. The mid-20th century Brooklyn accent’s very strong.
John: It’s fantastic to hear James’s voice. On 641 I talked about how the fact that when casting breakdowns say they want Brooklyn accents, what are you actually talking about? They probably honestly really want James. But if you actually look at who’s living in Brooklyn right now, you can’t guarantee that a person that you pluck off the street in Brooklyn is gonna have that accent. I was just in Brooklyn actually this whole last week. I was there for the Brooklyn half-marathon, which was really fun. I got to run through all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It was fantastic, and I loved it. James also makes the very good point that Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in America if it was its own city.
Craig: It’s massive.
John: It’s nuts how huge Brooklyn is. In that giant not-quite-city. You’re going to find all sorts of different accents, but this is the one that I think people are really talking about. We just need to actually denote specifically what you want when you want to hear James, because we want to hear James.
Craig: I’m gonna go ahead and put an R rating on the episode here. Hannibal Buress has one of the funniest things. He’s talking about these people in Brooklyn that James is referring to with their lumberjack shirts. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like, “I don’t mind if you want to wear a lumberjack shirt and have a waxed curly mustache, but don’t talk to me like you aren’t standing there looking like a carnival face motherfucker.” Carnival face is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
John: So good.
Craig: Carnival face. We are so far past the whole hipster thing. We’re probably 12 generations of pop culture cycle hipsterism now. God only knows what it’s up to now. I sure do like James for just being as real and true Brooklyn as possible. God, I hope he’s a Yankees fan. I don’t know what to say. If he’s a Mets fan, it’s gonna break my heart. James, can you just let us know, Mets or Yankees.
John: I want James making movies too. I’m glad he’s listening to the show. I’m glad he’s writing. I want to see what he makes.
Also in Episode 641, we talked about gendered words. We’ve talked about blonde with an E versus blond without an E. Ian wrote in to point out that there actually is a male equivalent. The male word for brunette is brunet. Really, it’s without the extra T and the E on the end. I’ve never seen that used in English. Have you?
Craig: I have not, but it’s certainly consistent with the way French works. Brunette is not a word that I ever use anyway.
John: Yeah, it’s weird.
Craig: What’s wrong with just brown? Brown hair?
John: What is wrong with brown? It got me thinking as we had this discussion. Why don’t we just use the Anglo-Saxon word for blond? Because there were Anglo-Saxon blonds. Why don’t we use that? I looked it up, and the Anglo-Saxon word for blond is whitlock.
Craig: Great. Let’s use it.
John: Which means wheat-haired. Whit is wheat, and lock is that… I had a friend, Paige Whitlock, who I went to college with, who had blonde hair.
Craig: Wow.
John: Her name was Paige Blonde.
Craig: That’s on theme. Also, there’s towheaded, which we usually use for children. My oldest kid was a towhead. I guess that’s a slightly different meaning. Yellow isn’t really a great descriptor of what blond hair is, because blond hair is more of that kind of lightish brown. To me, truly yellow is you’ve dyed your hair.
John: There are people who are almost just platinum blond, but it tends to be really young people, who have strikingly blond hair.
Craig: Towheads.
John: Towheads.
Craig: Towheads.
John: Also in 641, we asked people who had to deal with putting in the act breaks and streaming shows if they had firsthand experience to write in. Somebody did.
Drew: JG writes, “I have a few features running on services like Prime, Tubi, and Roku. The service that distributes those movies to those sites, Filmhub, requires that you provide metadata with commercial breaks for each movie. Their rule is you have to offer a break every 12 minutes or less, but not more. As a producer submitting the movies, it’s my job to go in and fill in the time codes for where each commercial breaks will take place. My goal was always to find the best or least intrusive spot for the breaks. But I suspected if a producer didn’t provide the metadata, the system would randomly insert the commercials within that 12-minute framework. It was a frustrating and time-consuming process, because as we know, movies aren’t designed for ad breaks. I know I opted for more breaks than I might’ve needed in order to put breaks at what felt like the most opportune moments.”
John: This feels like delivery requirements. We probably have talked about this on one of our 642 episodes before this. If you make a feature and you are delivering a feature to the buyer, they will have a whole long list of delivery requirements, which is not just, “Here’s the finished film,” but, “Here’s all the audio. Here’s all the paperwork that shows that we actually control all the music in this.” Delivery requirements will also be apparently now this metadata for where the commercial breaks should go. Not surprising that they’re asking for it, but JG had to do this him or herself.
Craig: Yeah, that’s actually a good point. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about delivery requirements. We’re so focused on how do you write a screenplay, how do you get something made into a television show or a movie, but there is a kind of industrial aspect of all this, where what you provide needs to meet legal requirements. It is a product to some people.
We think of it as art, but there are people who must make sure that there is some sort of quality control and product uniformity. That means there is a minimum run time that it must hit. There are long lists of requirements for credits. How large are the credits? Where do the credits go? How big are the credits? Is that per individual deals? Is that per union bargaining agreements? There are certain delivery requirements in terms of sound levels. There are delivery requirements in terms of the fidelity of the image. Do you have to submit in a certain resolution or more or less? Do you have to supply it with sound that is capable to be both stereo only or surround? Is it full surround? Is it 5.1? Is it 7.1? Blah blah blah blah blah. All that technical stuff, there are just entire departments working on that, to make sure that when you and I get our job done, that wherever it ends up, it’s theoretically hitting some minimum level of quality.
John: Where our listeners are gonna probably run into this is that if you go off and make an independent film, you’re like, “Great. I spent the money. I made this independent film. I maxed out my credit cards. I’m selling it to this company.” They say, “Great. Here are the delivery requirements.” Suddenly, you have tens of thousands of dollars more expenses you have to incur in order to deliver the thing that they are buying. That could be a real drain. On my movie The Nines, we had to deliver in this format and that format and the other format. We had to deliver a cut negative. There were things I required.
Craig: Negative cutting, there’s something that no one worries about anymore. Hey, kids. Listen up. You would film on film, and then by the time you and I were working in the business, the images would be transferred to video using something called a Telecine. Then that video would be digitized into your digital editor, your Avid probably. You would edit on that. That would create an EDL, an edit decision list. Every single shot has a frame. Then when all that was done and the picture was locked, they would send those just reams of paper with all of the ins and outs of every single shot. Then negative cutters would take the negative of the film and a splicer and a chopper, and they would begin to assemble it painstakingly over the course of I don’t know how many days, creating one long Frankenstein negative that was the edited film. That was then run through and reprinted onto a single negative. Then that was the thing that they made. I believe that’s how that worked. Then we ended up with a DI, digital interpositive, and all that other stuff.
Now the workflow, unless you’re dealing with Christopher Nolan or a filmmaker that’s really committed to physical film, all that’s gone. There is no more negative cutting.
John: Yeah. Not only would you need to deliver a print or something else that could be distributed, as Craig was saying, the sound has to be in this format versus that format. You had to deliver a print that has the sound printed on it. There were all these requirements. Some of those have gone away. As JG is saying, now there are new requirements.
I didn’t have to, at that point, supply where the commercial breaks are. With my movie The Nines, one of the things I was required to do was to deliver a broadcast-ready version of the movie, basically a sanitized version of the movie that could be aired on, realistically, cable. I remember talking with the company who was doing that, and here were their suggestions for how we were going to get that done. It was crazy. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever aired on basic cable, but there is a cut someplace that could do it.
Craig: Somewhere. We went through this on Season 1 of The Last of Us. We had to go through a delivery process that held two weeks to convert the image into HDR, high dynamic range, which some televisions can make use of. That two weeks was brutal actually, because we were right up against it to try and get things done. A lot of movies and television shows are right up against it because of the proliferation of visual effects, how many visual effects there are, getting those visual effects delivered in time and then shoving it through the rest of the sausage factory, including things like HDR and all that other fun stuff. Yay the people that do the delivery stuff, because god knows I would butcher it.
John: Oh, yeah, also because it’s a job that you are doing once. You are doing maybe once or twice a year if you’re just doing a lot of stuff. You would need a person whose job it is to do that every day, who actually understands what these things actually mean on paper and what they actually take in time. That’s why you have post-production supervisors and-
Craig: Sure do.
John: … contractual obligation people who oversee stuff, people who are figuring out what the credits are, what that run is. It’s a lot.
Craig: There’s a reason that there are all those names in the credits.
John: Now, before we get on to our main topic, a few episodes back we had Ken White come on, and he did a great job of talking through the realities of the law we see on TV and the lawyer-client relationship we see on TV versus realities. I was thinking we should do that for some other professions, because there’s professions we see all the time in film and television, and we don’t know what the actual realities are behind that. This is a thing where our listeners may be able to help us out.
Some things we would love to be able to talk with people about. A private investigator. If you know or are a private investigator who does the kinds of things we see on TV but the reality version of that, we’d love to talk with you. A military specialist. We see all these military actions in film and television. We don’t know what the realities are behind that. Public school teachers, especially in high school. There’s a whole genre of teacher movies. We could talk a little bit more about teachers. Police officers, of course. We see cop stuff all the time. Be curious to see what the realities are there. Then we have a few more long reaches. We have an astronaut on deck. We could talk about that.
If you have suggestions for this is a person who actually does this job who could be a great guest on Scriptnotes, write in to ask@johnaugust.com, because in the weeks ahead, we’d love to do more of those kind of episodes.
Let’s get on to our main topic here, which is, man, things are just terrible, or they feel kind of terrible. Literally, at dinner last night, I was sitting with a group of other writers and filmmakers. It’s really tough to set up a project now, to sell a project right now. Craig, you may be a little bit insulated from this, because you’re up in Vancouver, you’re doing your TV show. Your head’s down, doing your work. But for the rest of us who are down here in Los Angeles, it is really weird and tough in a way that is just different than previous years.
Craig: Insulated though I may be, because I have a television show that’s on and running, I hear about it all the time. There’s no part of me that’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what everyone’s cranking on about.” No. There has been a significant – I hesitate to use the word correction, because that implies that things were wrong prior. There has been a significant change in both the quantity of shows that are being made, the way they’re being made, the amount of episodes that are being made, the costs of those series. Everything has changed in such a way that there’s a squeeze now.
I think that a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with were anticipated by and partially addressed by the strike. The things that the Writers Guild were looking for dovetailed entirely with the problems that we see now. What’s important to always keep in mind is the Writers Guild negotiates a collective bargaining agreement for people who are hired. The Writers Guild, even with the minimum guaranteed room size, that’s not going to be something that keeps 9,000 people at work if there aren’t 9,000 jobs. It’s just not how it goes. There is no way to insulate the workforce from a contraction like the one we’re seeing right now.
John: Yeah, for sure. We’ll put links in the show notes to two different articles. The one that had the most people talking about it the last couple weeks was one by Daniel Bessner, he was writing for Harpers, called The Life and Death of Hollywood. It’s really recapping what’s been happening over the last few decades and how we got to this moment. For a lot of people, it’s gonna be very familiar territory. But there were a couple of quotes and interviews in there that stuck out.
The first one I want to talk about is Alena Smith. She wrote and created the series Dickinson for Apple TV. She says, “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multi-billion dollar grant from the tech world, but we mistook that and were, frankly, actively gaslit into thinking that was because they cared about art.”
What’s she’s saying here is that we did, with a rise to streaming, just get suddenly a whole bunch of new opportunities to make weird, cool shit, but we shouldn’t ever confuse ourselves that they wanted to make the weird, cool shit because they wanted us to be artistically satisfied. They were chasing audience. They were chasing just esoteric, strange audience. Their whole goal was to get as many people as possible to subscribe to these shows. They really weren’t that obsessed with how successful any individual show was. Now, the correction is that they really want those shows to be hits, and that is likely largely driving some of this contraction and this retreat to safety that we’re seeing in the things they’re actually choosing to make.
Craig: I think the phrase “too good to be true” comes to mind. You said they were chasing an audience. I’m not even sure they were chasing an audience. I don’t even know what they were doing. In terms of the amount of content that was being created, it seemed like they were trying to build overwhelming libraries of stuff. Instead of saying, “Hey, come to our new store, because if you like pants, we have pants,” they were saying, “Hey, we built a new Walmart. We have literally everything you could possibly ever want. Go wander the aisles.” It’s Costco of stuff. What they weren’t doing, and I couldn’t understand it, was having any concern whatsoever with who, if anyone, was watching some of these shows.
When the Warner Bros-Discovery merger happened, there was this immediate convulsion, because under the direction of the CEO, they took off a bunch of things from the streaming service. In the articles, there were these little mentions that some of the things that they had taken off were being watched by tens of people, so in a statistical sense, unwatched. There was so much stuff. Because everything is expensive when you are creating demand, high labor demand, the cost of things, not necessarily of the writers, but the cost of production and key actors start to go up. Everything inflates. What we ended up with was a bubble.
The only thing that I would say to Alena is that the studios and networks have been actively gaslighting writers forever. This is not new. They are constantly lying to us any time they say, “Hey, we love you. We love your mind, and we love what you do.” They’re lying. What they’re saying is, “We hope to god that whatever it is that you do, which we may not even understand, people become obsessed with and pay us to watch.” That’s all they’re ever saying. That’s all they’ve ever said. That’s all they ever will say. But they dress it up in all sorts of alluring phrases.
What changed during the bubble time was they actually didn’t seem to care about anything. They just wanted stuff to get made. It was almost like in the late ’80s and early ’90s when home video made it so everything was profitable. In this case, profit didn’t matter. Therefore, they made everything.
John: I’m really glad you brought up the difference between audience and just doing stuff to do stuff, because it reminds me of criticism I see of web traffic. For a long time, these websites were generating huge numbers of eyeballs. People were seeing stories on these sites. Everything was about chasing views. But there’s a difference between views and audience. An audience actually likes the thing you’re doing and wants to come back and see it again. They actually really engage with the content you’re making, versus someone who drops by your site and then immediately bounces back off and leaves. Many websites are having to retool and really think about who do we actually want to attract to what we’re providing, and how do we keep them engaged and involved.
That does feel like the same kind of distinction we’re seeing here is that they were trying to build these megamalls and recognizing that most of these stores that they were opening up, no one wanted to walk into.
Also in this article, they were talking about the short-termism that happens is because once you actually start just looking, like, quarter by quarter, how much are we growing these things, when you have investors really wanting to see, “We have to have a return on investment immediately,” that’s not a very good way to make movies and TV shows. You need to be able to think a little bit longer than just the next quarter for how you guys are doing and then to try to correct out of the situation, you end up making these gargantuan cuts that are so brutal.
Craig: We are getting pretty violent pendulum swing/whiplash syndrome here. A healthy industry does make money, because if they don’t, then they fall apart and they stop hiring us. We have a vested interest in a healthy industry. If the industry decides, “We actually don’t care about profit anymore. We’re just gonna borrow crazy amounts of money and spend crazy amounts of money with no goal in sight,” then it is inevitable that they are going to then pendulum swing back to keep themselves alive. The pendulum swing will be too much of a squeeze, too much of a minimization, because they are now trying to pay back their own bad decisions.
But ideally, this whiplash pendulum effect settles down and we find ourselves back in some kind of healthy balance, where the studios are making money, don’t feel like their backs are against the wall, are no longer in a wild cocaine spree of spending, and then hopefully are able to go back to the way it used to be. “Here’s some safe stuff. Here’s some slightly risky stuff. Here’s a little bit of this. Here’s a little bit of that. But overall, we have a balanced slate.”
John: There’s a quote here from Jason Grote, who is talking about prestige TV. He’s really talking about the HBO model of prestige TV, so like The Sopranos, and when you suddenly got like, “Oh my god, we have this really good TV.” He’s pointing out that it wasn’t about a bunch of new people coming into Hollywood. It was a bunch of people who actually really knew how to make TV shows, who were suddenly given the opportunity to make the TV shows they really wanted to make. That feels like a crucial distinction. It’s not just about newcomers making brand new stuff. It was actually like, “Oh, let’s actually take some chances on some people who actually know what they’re doing.”
Craig: Yes, and I’m a beneficiary of this. No question. There are a lot of people who worked for a long time, making the things that they were told to make, the way they were told to make them. They had to fit in a certain box. There had to be ratings. There had to be this. There had to be that. It had to be for a particular budget, repeatable for 22 or 26 episodes a season. All of those restraints suddenly disappeared. You did get remarkable stuff. Now, there are some things that are excellent that also get huge audiences. There are things that are excellent that don’t.
I think a lot of those things in part suffered more from where they were and how they were, or often, not even, marketed, because in the crazy gush of content, it was almost like nobody making the stuff had time to even tell you about it. They threw it in your face as you were walking by. Maybe you took it, and maybe you didn’t, and then you just kept going.
But that’s absolutely true. Vince Gilligan is such a good example. He was making great network television. It was standard network television. But when you said to him, “Hey, do what you want.” Same thing with David Chase. Charlie Kaufman worked on – was it Alf? I think it was Alf. When you let certain writers go free… But no question; it wasn’t like prestige TV helped, for instance, under-represented writers. It didn’t.
John: Wrapping up on Bessner’s article here, I think his last suggestion is frustrating, because he undercuts it immediately after he says it. But he’s talking about, oh, the one change which would actually make a big difference is if we let these writers control the copyright on the things that they make. As we’ve talked about since probably Episode 1 of this show, there’s a reason why that doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s because that’s what lets us have the powerful union that we have. The other good counterexample is, in lots of other places in the world, writers can control the copyright. It’s not like it’s awesome for them there.
Craig: No. When you see somebody suggesting that the answer to a screenwriter’s ills is retaining copyright, you know you’re dealing with a tyro or somebody who is simply from the outside and doesn’t get it. It is a nonstarter and it’s a bad idea. You’re absolutely right.
We can simply point to the rest of the world and say, “Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television or film are being compensated the way American writers are. Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television and film get a pension the way American writers do, get residuals the way American writers do, get credit protections the way American writers do.” You can’t. You can’t. The copyright suggestion just falls apart anyway, because we don’t publish screenplays to be read by people. It is a part of a composite work. That’s kind of a huge red flag that maybe somebody didn’t do the research they needed to do.
John: The second article we’ll put a link in the show notes to is One Weird Trick for Fixing Hollywood by Max Read.
Craig: I like this.
John: He starts out by talking about how among his screenwriter friends, it is just really tough. It’s the same conversation you and I have about our screenwriter friends. The only things that are getting made, in his case he’s hearing about ultra premium limiteds, which are a six-episode miniseries that has an A-list star. I would say even that is very hard to shop and get made right now. No one wants to buy those things. I’ve been out with things like that, and it’s still really tough.
The number of projects that have, “That’s a great writer,” the script’s already written, there’s a director on board, there’s an actor on board, the number of those that have not sold in the last six months is just mind-boggling. There’s no guarantees about what’s going to happen.
What I did like about Max’s article is that he points out the bigger issue that the industry as a whole is facing is that we have a lot of new competition for the amount of time that people would normally spend watching TV or going to a movie, and that’s because we have phones, we have other things that are going to keep our eyes entertained during the day. That’s time that we’re just not gonna be watching TV. The amount of hours viewed of the television that’s being made or the movies that are out there is gonna suffer.
Craig: This is an odd argument to me, I have to admit. Billions of people are watching things that are on Netflix and Amazon and Max and network television, which still earns millions of viewers a week. The old stuff, Suits and Friends, these things get recycled again and are watched by millions and millions of people and then discussed on TikTok. TikTok, in fact, is where a lot of these shows get their popularity in the first place.
You and I talked about how our kids got caught up in this crazy TikTok phenomenon of watching Criminal Minds, a show that was never intended for 16-year-old girls to watch, and yet there was this massive wave of girls one summer – mostly girls as far as I could tell – watching Criminal Minds and discussing it together on TikTok.
I don’t understand, A, the argument that the problem with television is that people aren’t watching it. They are. We have fragmented the audience across 4 billion shows. At peak TV, the John Landgraf phrase, I think there were over 600 television shows made in a single year. The audience probably grew, but it was spread out over 600 shows. This is a division problem. It’s not an addition problem.
Second, I don’t understand how to solve Hollywood by going off and supporting or helping YouTube and that. That’s not Hollywood. That’s a different thing. We need to protect this business as it functions here, because what people do on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and Twitter is not Hollywood. It’s its own thing, which is massive and incredibly profitable and valid, but it’s different.
John: It is different. I’m gonna make his argument that I don’t fully endorse, but just so it’s actually made. His metaphor would be, let’s say you are a home builder who’s building apartment buildings, and then a few blocks away you see there are these hobbyists who are building things that are basically like buildings, that are competing for the housing of people around you, but they’re doing it much cheaper and without any of your protections. You would be thinking about that. You would be looking, like, “Shit. How am I going to be competing against them if they are doing it cheaper?”
Craig: If I bought into the premise that we’ll call the paramedia is limiting the audience or ruining the audience for what Hollywood does, yes. There’s an argument to be made that the theatrical experience has been permanently damaged by both the pandemic and the paramedia, but not the streaming business. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that the business plan made no fucking sense. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that they were spending more than they could ever hope to make back, with no end in sight. All of them decided they should try and outspend each other.
But the viewership is enormous. Enormous. We’re talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the United States alone, much less the rest of the world. Netflix has an audience that has, I don’t think, ever existed before in terms of size. I include them, of course, as part of Hollywood. I don’t buy that the audience is being taken away.
My concern about the way things have been going is that none of it made any sense. It all felt a little bit like MoviePass to me, where you and I would look at it and go, “You spend $80 billion try and get $5 billion? Why?”
John: The answer is because there was a time when tech companies could do that, and sometimes it had great outcomes because of that. Google was an example, or Amazon was an example of companies that burned money until they became incredibly profitable. I think there was a thought that these legacy studios could burn money and then suddenly become profitable. Netflix was able to do that. In order to compete against Netflix, we need to become Netflix. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Craig: It didn’t work great. I think that there’s been a settling in. We do have some more convulsions on the way, because Paramount is clearly up for sale. As we’re talking, maybe it’s already been sold. I know Sony has put in a bid. Disney bought Fox. Let’s say Sony buys Paramount. We’re now squishing ourselves down, but in a way also getting back to the number of things that we used to have, because if you include Amazon and Netflix and Apple, those are three big studios. We’ve lost Fox. We’re about to use Paramount. We’re getting back almost to the same number of studios that have always kind of existed. It will be interesting to see in the years to come if we can achieve some kind of stability again in our business.
John: In talking with agents and managers and other folks who are on the sale side of stuff, they will agree that this is a really tough time. But there are some, I won’t say brighter spots, but there are some areas that are less affected. There’s still money to make indie features. That pool of money is still out there, and there’s still a market for that. There’s ways to do that, especially things that come to a certain price.
I was talking to a documentary filmmaker who said that he’s been working on this thing that he was originally gonna pitch as a three-episode documentary series. You can’t do that now. People aren’t gonna buy that now. But he can make it as a documentary feature, so, “Great. I’m gonna pivot. Same story. I’ll do it in 90 minutes versus I guess 90 minutes in three episodes.” It all works out. The same thing happens for narrative features as well.
I also think we just need to be mindful that, the classic truism, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. People can be so gun-shy to actually try to do something that they’re looking past simpler things they could try to do. If these $200 million movies are not working out for you and you’re losing money on them, maybe take a look at the Anyone But Yous, smaller movies that are successful, and just try some of those, because there may be some different ways and different kinds of movies and series you can make that are gonna be cheaper, that can actually give you the outcome you want.
Craig: This has been going on for quite some time. The squish of the small movie preexists all the Netflix stuff. It preexists the pandemic. The chasing of massive things really accelerated with the Avengers. You can draw a line where the Avengers came out, did what it did, and everybody said, “Okay, I guess this is our business now, because the amount of movies we have to make and the amount of swings we have to take to match one of those.” One of those gets you four more of those. That keeps your business afloat for years. Years.
John: We are making some big, expensive movies that pay off. Dune 2 was incredibly expensive. It paid off. It’s not going to generate a bunch of more Dune movies, most likely, but it was great that it happened. We of course had Barbenheimer, was a great success for both of those films. Those films were very profitable and big successes. I think what we’re urging this industry to do is to take a look at what were the things about those films that were successful. They were made by great, visionary filmmakers who were swinging for the fences and doing interesting things. It wasn’t a retreat to safety that made those things giant hits.
Craig: I’ll point to a movie that is one of my favorite examples. I think the budget was something like $60 million. This movie was from 2019. In 1990 or 2000s, that would be the classic $35, $40 million movie. Joker. Joker was a hard R. It was kind of an art film. It borrowed a little bit of comic book shine, but barely any. There were superpowers. There were really no action scenes. It was an art film. The box office for Joker is $1 billion. Joker: Folie à Deux is coming out. That is the kind of bet that I think is well worth taking and is terrifying.
John: Let’s also talk about Joker is that not everybody liked it. In fact, a lot of people hated Joker and to this day hate Joker. You know what? That’s okay, because it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone in order to be a giant success.
Craig: People talk about the four-quadrant movie. There are movies you can make that everybody likes. There are very few movies you can make that everybody loves. But what you can do are make films that some people love so much that they will evangelize them, they will market them for you, they will see them multiple times, they will buy them again when they come on the streaming service. Joker is a great example of that and the definition of a risky pitch. By the way, the sequel looks just as risky to me.
John: Totally.
Craig: Good for them. It’s a big budget.
John: Here was the bet. The bet was that there wasn’t an audience for it. It wasn’t the bet that everybody in America will want to see this movie. It was that it was talking about there’s gonna be an audience, and that by definition of audience, people who will genuinely love this movie.
Craig: Yes. That kind of artistic risk taking, which I think you could also see with Barbie… There’s so many ways to make Barbie bad. There are about a million ways to make a bad Barbie.
John: Oh my god. Almost every way is to make a bad Barbie.
Craig: There’s pretty much one way to make a great one. Trusting somebody like Greta Gerwig, that’s risky. It is. They used to just have a bland filmmaker deliver a bland script for these things, to hit the thick middle and hedge their bet, and they didn’t do that with that one.
Oppenheimer only gets made because Christopher Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who gets to do stuff. That’s it. Again, nobody’s sitting there thinking, “Oppenheimer’s gonna make a hell of a lot of money.” How much did Oppenheimer make? $965 million globally.
John: Love it.
Craig: That’s insane. That’s insane. That’s a biopic of the guy that ran the nuclear program. We’ve made movies about the nuclear bomb before. We’ve made movies about the father of the nuclear bomb before. Universal said, “We will take this huge bet. We will spend $100 million on this.” An algorithm most likely would say, “Oh, that’ll get you $30 or $40 million.” But instead, they made almost a billion dollars, because it’s a quality film. What’s the bet there by Universal? Good movie, people will come and see it. That’s old-school thinking. Really old-school thinking. You know what else we see out there that’s old-school thinking? Ads on television shows.
John: It’s craziness.
Craig: We may be hurdling ourselves backwards to 1988. Let’s find out.
John: Craig, a term I heard this last week, I saw it in a blog post by Hannah Ritchie, who writes about environmental issues, was the Moloch trap. Have you ever heard this term, the Moloch, M-O-L-O-C-H?
Craig: I only know that from the Bible and Watchmen. What is the Moloch trap?
John: The Moloch trap, it’s these forces that coerce and cause competing individuals to take actions which although are the best for them individually, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. It’s almost impossible to break out of that cycle. Tragedy of the commons is kind of an example of that.
But there’s a lot of things in environmental science that are Moloch traps, because, okay, I recognize that burning coal is bad for everybody and it’s bad for this, but if I stop burning coal, then other people are gonna burn coal. It’s very hard for any one individual to make a change or any individual nation to make a change, because the forces force you to do that.
I do feel like there’s a Moloch trap happening with the streaming wars, because it was like everyone was trying to do this thing. I think everyone recognized this thing we’re doing is unsustainable, but if I don’t do it, then I’m worse off.
Craig: Right. Basically either we’re all sinking together or one or two of us need to sink. I don’t want to be one of the one or two that sinks.
John: It’s hard to break out of the Moloch trap, but you do it by basically changing your motivations, by embracing innovation. The case of environmental science, it’s now cheaper to make power without burning things, which is great. Now it’s like we’re out of this cycle because we just don’t do those things, because it’s actually cheaper to build solar panels or turbines or other things. We’re not competing on these limited resources anymore, because we can just do stuff, and we actually think about abundance rather than limitations.
I do wonder whether there’s some way we can be thinking about changing our motivations and our goals here to break out of the cycle. Instead of always thinking about subscriber numbers or this or that, really thinking about what are the markers of success that we want for this. Profitability, sure, but with ads or with other stuff. Is there other ways we can think about how we’re judging whether this project was worth making, that are not purely based on the impossible metrics?
Craig: Hollywood is not a great place to try and metric yourself to success. The reason is, unlike basically every other industry, there’s something going on here that is incredibly unpredictable and also incredibly attractive. Our business creates culture, which is exciting and alluring, and predictable, sort of, a little bit, sometimes, but mostly not. Betting is really on human beings saying to you, “The thing I love and like, a lot of people will love and like.” You don’t know if that’s true or not. Your gut may not be particularly good or it may be okay. Your job basically rests in their hands.
Hollywood will always frustrate the modelers and the quants. It’s why I think people that just want to make money don’t bother with Hollywood. But if you want to make money and be part of something exciting and meaningful, yeah, Hollywood.
John: That’s why people make Broadway theater. That’s why people invest in independent films. The last point I’ll make here is that I think we’ve talked about the quants. They are doing these calculations that are incredibly esoteric, and it’s really hard to know what is the purpose behind, that they’re basically the navigators in Dune who are adjusting this device to get them from one place to another place. But this is not Dune.
I think there was something really good about the simplicity of Nielsen ratings and box office weekend grosses that lets you know was this a successful thing or was this not a successful thing. During probably five years of streaming, no one knew. We never knew, was this successful, was this not successful. I don’t know what actually worked. I think that by making it so opaque, we were really hurting ourselves.
Craig: It’s a really tricky thing. Have we talked about the new subscriber data thing on the show?
John: The WGA one?
Craig: I don’t think it was a WGA thing. It’s more a method of measuring, because one of the questions is, if you put all this stuff out there on your streaming service and it says, “We have a whole bunch of subscribers. Lots of them watch this,” did that show keep them subscribing? Hard to say. In fact, impossible to say. But one of the things they look at is, when we put a new show on, are there new subscribers? Are the new subscribers clearly coming in for that show? Now, it’s impossible to draw a perfect line, but you can kind of see these waves.
They are trying to find ways to figure out which of these shows is actually contributing to the subscriber money and which are not. It’s hard to say, because let’s say you make a show and you put it on your streaming service and not a ton of people watch it, but those people are subscribing to your service only for that show. That’s valuable. Then you could have a show that a lot of people watch, but nobody’s gonna cancel it if the show gets canceled. Then what is that worth? These are very tricky things to figure out.
John: They are tricky. I can see why an individual service might want to look at those numbers, but I don’t think it does the industry as a whole, or certainly the filmmakers they’re working with, all that much good to just trot out these weird, esoteric numbers. Tell me, is this show a hit? How many Americans or people worldwide are watching the show? Because that’s what really matters culturally is knowing this a very popular thing. There’s a reason why – what is the new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer?
Craig: Yep.
John: It broke out. We know it broke out because people are talking about it. They can also tell us that the numbers are really big. It’s great to see. That’s also again an example of a weird show that shouldn’t work and does and a risk that somebody took and it paid off.
Craig: We used to have a line we could draw between watching and money. Like you said, people bought tickets. Every person that came to see the movie put money in your pocket. When there were ads, every single person that watched the show put money in your pocket. When you take away the ads and you take away the tickets and you just have a store that people can wander through and it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, how do you know that people are paying for the buffet for the shrimp or the salad? You don’t. You just don’t know. Even in success, I think a lot of times these people might be going, “Okay, but is this success meaningful?”
Let’s go back to the quote we got from Alena Smith, who said we were actively gaslit, because they don’t care about making an impression on culture, actually, I don’t think. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is money. I think they are deeply confused about what is actually putting money in their pockets and what isn’t. They’re looking for something to hold onto, but it’s a lot of sand. It’s not that I’m gonna go so far as to say that I sympathize with the people sitting in the rooms trying to figure the math out. But from a problem-solving point of view, it’s a tricky one.
John: The only point I’ll slightly push back against is you said they only cared about money. I think one of the issues was they weren’t caring about money for a number of years.
Craig: Correct.
John: They were just caring about growth, and then they realized. “Oh, and money will come at some point.” It’s like, but will it? That’s not sustainable.
Craig: No. That’s a classic Silicon Valley think. Hollywood of old, those people were like, “I’m not making a picture unless I know it’s gonna make money, and that’s it!” I like talking like Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink. That was the way it goes. Then suddenly, there were these other people like, “We got a better idea.” Silicon Valley is remarkable. They do these things that sometimes turn into these world-changing, axis-shifting, gabillion-dollar businesses.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Sometimes they just set massive piles of money on fire and dance around it. It’s so bizarre. I don’t know what’s going on up there.
John: We got our Quibis.
Craig: We got our Quibis. We got our FTXs. We have our things that just were like, what in the hell is it? But hey, man, you know what? We just write them.
John: We just write them.
Craig: We just write them.
John: Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here is from Ellie.
Drew: Ellie writes, “I’ve been receiving some incredible feedback on the first draft of my screenplay. However, I’m finding that I’m now super scared to move forward with any rewrites or editing things that I know that I have left to revisit on the second draft. It’s like the excellent feedback has made me feel scared and completely frozen. I literally feel tense. It’s quite a timely story, so I really feel I want to get this out in the world ASAP. Perhaps I’m also afraid of the unknown of what I’ll do with a second draft. Ach, help. How do I unfreeze myself?”
John: I hear you, Ellie. That’s a familiar state, because here’s the thing. Your first draft, it wasn’t perfect, but it was complete and full and you loved it. It was an expression of what your original intentions were. You get this feedback, and they’re describing something that’s maybe even better, but you don’t know that you can actually do it. That’s probably a fear, a perfectionism. There’s all sorts of things that are holding you back. Man, you just gotta go for it. You gotta jump in and I would say pick some random moment in that thing and get going.
Craig: I too have had this, Ellie. You’ve described it so well that it’s making me feel tense, because I’ve been here so many times. I’m gonna say something that is maybe a little bit scary, but there’s some sunlight at the end of it. The second draft is usually worse than the first.
John: It is.
Craig: It’s just part of the process. This is one of the reasons why. Your first draft was knitted together, and now you’re starting to pull stuff. You know that you have to change things, and you know that there are some things you want to change. But now when you pull stuff, you’re gonna make wounds, you’re gonna diminish some things. You might step on something that it turns out was incredibly important.
Allow yourself to write the second draft that is worse than the first draft, as long as you can say to the people you’re working with, “I’m gonna go for some stuff on the second draft. This one will be a little messy.” The third draft is where it’s all gonna happen, because that’s the one where you get it back and then some.
John: Ellie, a technique that might work for you, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but actually start with a blank page. You might want to just open up a new document, and in this new document, type bullet points of, like, “These are the new scenes. This is the new stuff that’s happening.” Start to write those new scenes. Then from your old script, copy through the scenes of the moments that are actually gonna come through unchanged, where you’re not doing anything, because that may actually help you avoid the problem of just like, “Oh, I don’t want to damage this perfect thing that I built,” because you realize you’re damaging it. Think of the second draft as a new thing that gets to pull from your first draft. You approach a new thing differently than a rewrite. By letting it be a new thing, it may be actually a little less scary for you.
Craig: Yep, that may work. Basically, try anything you want and give yourself permission to suck. It might suck. That’s okay. Third draft is around the corner.
John: We have a question on a different kind of paralysis. Here’s Richard. Let’s take a listen.
Richard: Hello, guys. Richard here from the UK. I wanted to ask you something that seems to just steal so much time for me. I’ll set the scene if I can. You’ve made a really promising contact, and they’ve asked for some work, and you’re readying an email, a one-pager, and maybe even, say, a script. You reread your breezy yet professional email about 17 times, and then you worry that maybe the one-pager has got a typo, so you go through that a few times, and then the script, scanning for mistakes that may have eluded the 27 rewrites that you’ve already done. Then obviously, you better reread your email with fresh eyes, or maybe, oh, we should change that word. Then you think, oh, if I’ve spotted a mistake in the email, then maybe there’s one in the one-pager. Before you know it, four or five hours have just passed and it’s time to pick up the kids and start their dinner.
Both of you have obviously had to send some super important emails to some super important people. Can you give me any advice on how to cut out this excruciating ordeal. Thanks, guys. You’re the best.
Craig: We are the best. Thanks, Richard. I wonder how long Richard worked on this.
John: Absolutely. How many times did Richard rerecord his question to us?
Craig: Here’s some good news, Richard. Yes, we have certainly written our fair share of emails and documents and things. The fact is if you look at the emails you get back from these people, you will find all sorts of mistakes in their emails. You are dealing with an illusion that our minds create whereby all of our decisions are important. Emails are glanced through, scanned, sometimes barely. The documents that you send will have moments in them that make people sit forward and go, “I want to make this.” You can have an entire sentence missing. If it’s working for them, that’s okay. If you are riddled with spelling errors and typos and you’re actively putting forth the attitude of carelessness, that will call things into question. But ultimately, the quality of things is what matters. If you find yourself in a loop, just stop the loop and send the email.
John: You’re in an anxiety trap. You’re anxious because you’re anxious. It feeds upon itself. It’s real. It’s natural. You gotta get out of it. What might help you out would be to literally set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and take a reasonable amount of time to reread the email, take one last look at the document you’re attaching. When the timer goes off, press send and walk away from your computer, because you’re not doing anybody any favors by obsessing over things that are not important and not worth obsessing over.
Craig: There’s a feeling sometimes when you send these things. You’re about to hit send, and you think, “I’m sending you me.” You’re not. That’s the scary part is I’m sending you a document. I’m sending you an email. This is me to you. If there’s a flaw in it, there’s a flaw in me, and I will be rejected. None of that is true. It’s a way for us to imagine a control we do not have over people’s impressions of us. You could be given a year to perfect an email and a document in terms of editing, the surface editing you’re describing, and it would not change their opinion of you or the work in any significant way.
John: For our Premium Members, we sometimes send out emails about live shows or other things coming up or Three Page Challenges. In Mailchimp, the service we use, there used to be this thing right before you sent the email. There’d be this animation of a big monkey finger, a sweaty monkey finger above this red button for pressing send. It’s very effective and really anxiety-producing, like, “Oh, shit. Is it really ready? Is there anything left to fix?” They got rid of that image, because I think they probably did some surveys and realized that’s actually making it worse for people. It’s too true to the experience. It no longer says that. Now you can send it out more willy-nilly and it doesn’t do that, freak you out.
Craig: Do you really want to send this email?
John: Really want to?
Craig: I mean, I’m a monkey, but I’ve read it. Do you really want to send it? I mean, if you want to, but I wouldn’t.
Richard, you’re gonna be all right.
John: He’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is this artist named Lola Dupre. I have no knowledge of who she is. I just know her artwork is just so effing cool. I’ll put a link in the show notes to her archive, her gallery. She makes these portraits of animals and people that are collages, and so they’re distorted. It’s an image of a thing that’s just been distorted and pulled into different directions. They’re all really, really cool. Craig, you’re looking at this now too. Help me describe what you’re seeing.
Craig: There are images of let’s say cats, and it’s somewhat caricatured, but most salient, the cats have 20 eyes or there are painted images of people and the length of the face is really distorted. One of these is wonderful. I might just get that. It’s an old-school Mac with a keyboard, but the keyboard has like a thousand buttons on it. This is amazing. I love that one.
John: It’s all great. They’re done through collage. Basically, she’s starting with one original image, and then just by overlapping and overlapping, she’s distorting the dimensions of it in ways that are just really, really cool. It just made me happy to look at and just things I would love to have on my wall. Lola Dupre, an artist. We’ll put a link in the show notes to her shop and her gallery.
Craig: Very cool. Looks like most of her stuff has been sold. You’re doing great, Lola. I have two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none, so I’m trying to make up for it. First is Codenames Duet. We’ve talked about Codenames.
John: Which I’ve played. It’s so much fun.
Craig: It’s so much fun. Codenames Duet, I played with Melissa. If you just have two people, you can’t play against each other, of course. The idea is you both have the same board of words. You each have different words on that board you’re trying to clue to each other. You need to work cooperatively to get all the words uncovered by a certain number of turns. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a very clever way for two people to play Codenames, and it’s just as interesting. There’s something nice about the cooperative experience. As opposed to the, “I beat you,” it’s more like, “We beat it.”
John: Now, Craig, we haven’t talked about the new Scrabble, and so all the controversy over, in Europe they came out with an alternate version of Scrabble, which is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There was all this Sturm und Drang about like, “Oh my god, they’ve ruined Scrabble.” But it actually reminds me of these cooperative games like Codenames Duet, where basically you’re trying to work together to get a thing done.
Craig: I don’t know why people would be annoyed that there’s a version of Scrabble that people can play cooperatively. Who cares? Just play your regular Scrabble. It’s still there. It’s not a problem. I think sometimes people are just looking for stuff to get angry about. Scrabble is made by, what is it, Mattel? They’re a company. They’re trying to make money. Who cares? Do you know how many versions of Clue have been made?
John: One or two.
Craig: Yeah, like 400,000. My other One Cool Thing, I landed on this because I was talking with somebody about the Bible and weird Bible verses. I thought, “Oh, I bet you the internet has a great collection of weirdest Bible verses,” and they did. They had lots of them, but there was one that I loved so much that I need to read it. This is my new favorite Bible verse. This is from 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 23.
“From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.” There’s so much going on here-
John: There’s so much.
Craig: … that I love. First of all, at first I was like, you can’t kill kids because they called you baldy, although I was not aware that people were yelling “baldy” back in, whatever, 300 BC, but fine. But then I was like, wait a second, 2 bears mauled 42 of the boys. That means there’s more than 42 boys. Now, that’s a riot. That’s 70 boys now following you screaming, “Get out of here, baldy!” I’m afraid.
John: I don’t understand the bears’ agenda. It’s [crosstalk 01:04:16].
Craig: The bears don’t have an agenda. The bears have been sent by the Lord. But this is the next mind-blowing part. He only sent two bears. Two bears mauled 42 boys. That’s 21 boys per bear. Let’s say these bears are real quick. It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child. You got 21 of them. That’s almost a minute. After 30 seconds of watching your friends being torn apart by bears, how are you not running?
John: Run away.
Craig: Just run. Why only send two bears? Also, I like that there happen to be woods nearby, and also that the Lord was like, “Oh my god, no. You can’t call my guy baldy. Oh, bears, that’ll work.” Bears.
John: Bears.
Craig: It’s just such a great verse. “Get out of here, baldy!”
John: I’m looking it up on Biblia, which is showing me the different translations of that same section, because I was wondering was baldy just one esoteric choice that one translator chose to make. But no, baldy is common in most of this.
This is from the New International Readers version. It’s slightly different. “Elisha left Jericho, went up to Bethel. He was walking along the road. Some young fellows came out of the town. They made fun of him. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have hair on your head,’ they said. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have any hair on your head.’ He turned around and looked at them and he called down a curse on them. He did it in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods. They attacked 42 of the young fellows.” It’s not just a weird translation.
Craig: That’s what happened. That’s the story.
John: That’s what happens.
Craig: That is the full story of what happens when you start saying “baldy.” Is it possible that the two bears were just large, hairy gay men? Because now this is getting good.
John: Now it makes more sense.
Craig: Now this is getting good.
John: Could they really maul these? Maybe they were carrying a maul. They were carrying a giant hammer.
Craig: We know they’re big. We know they’re big guys.
John: They’re big. They’re big guys.
Craig: I just love this verse. I think it’s “baldy.” Ultimately, it’s just-
John: “Baldy” is pretty great.
Craig: That is a word that you’re not imagining people in the time before Christ or even shortly thereafter saying “baldy.” It’s so mean. As a bald person, I’m in love with this.
John: I’m thinking of our D&D Zoom group and just how many bald heads there are. We would all be subject to these taunting youths.
Craig: “Go away!” Why do they care? Why are they so mean? Anyway, they got what was coming to them.
John: They do. That’s a lesson learned. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-
Craig: Baldy.
John: … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Baldy.
John: Our outro this week is by Ben Singer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We love when you send little audio clips, so keep doing that. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to do about all of our digital stuff and what to do with it after we die. Craig and Drew, thanks so much for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Drew: Bye, baldies.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so as we’ve established well on the show, you believe we’re living in a simulation, so therefore your death has no impact on you, because you’ll just return to the cloud. But your loved ones will still be around. Melissa will have to deal with, oh my god, all of Craig’s computers and stuff like that. Have you done anything to help her out in this situation, or, god forbid, you don’t die, but you’re in a coma, and she has to deal with that stuff, what are you doing to make her life better and easier?
Craig: I have thought through all of this, and I think everybody should. Of course, Melissa and I have done some estate planning, which you do not need an estate to do. You just need something. You own a spoon, you can do estate planning. We have provisions should either one of us die or become incapacitated medically. Because I use 1Password, she has access to my 1Password, which means she has access to all of my passwords. If I drop dead, she can use that to basically get into any account that I’ve created and cancel them, or perhaps cause mayhem.
John: Absolute mayhem.
Craig: What about you?
John: I had to deal with some of this when my mom died, because she was the last of that stuff. We had a bunch of her accounts and things like that. To her credit, she made good lists of where her physical bank accounts were and that kind of stuff, and I had to deal with all the closing off of her estate. For the digital stuff, because my mom was not technically all that sophisticated, I just had a list of all her passwords anyway, so I could get into her Gmail and all that stuff and deal with those situations that came up.
With Mike and I, we have similar situations where that stuff is in 1Password and most stuff will be pretty easy to do. I was reading a blog post this last week that was talking about, it’s one thing to have all the accounts, but that doesn’t tell you what a person actually needs to do. This blog post is recommending a document that’s like, here’s how to be me, basically just talking through, like, this is all the stuff that I’m actually doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that’s keeping stuff going, because Mike is paying a bunch of our bills that I don’t really know about. Here’s where this thing is. This is the phone number for the tree guy, because I don’t know who that person is. That kind of stuff we haven’t done a great job of sharing, and we probably just need some sort of shared document for that. God forbid something happens to both me and Mike, because Amy has no idea where any of this stuff is kept.
Craig: Yeah, that probably would be good to have somebody be able to provide her that. We have a trust set up. If the two of us go down, then there is an executor of the trust who has to operate with the fiduciary responsibility to the people who are assigned stuff, like our children. They would help them. That would be their gig. Part of the trust is making sure that those people are compensated fairly, so they’re not working for free.
But yes, there are ways to make sure that your kids are helped. I never had this issue, because my mother is still alive, but my parents didn’t have really much in the way of assets for me to worry about. Same for my grandparents. I didn’t have to think about it, but certainly my children will.
John: Drew is reminding us here in the Workflowy we did talk about some stuff on this area back in 594. Drew, remind us, what did we actually get into?
Drew: We were talking more about what happens to the things you’ve written after you’ve died. We had a little bit of estate planning. That’s always good.
John: In terms of the stuff we’ve written, I guess there’s all the things that I’m halfway through on. I have just a big Dropbox full of the finished projects and the stuff that was started that never got finished. I have a Notion database of my 36 projects that are in some form of active development in my brain. But that’s not gonna be so crucial. It’s worth something, but it’s not gonna be worth a lot. The Big Fish musical that I did with Andrew Lippa is an asset that I do control copyright on, and that will be a thing that my heirs will have to be thinking about and thinking about future productions and what changes they will allow to make to that down the road. But that’s not gonna be a, “Oh crap, in the next 24 hours, what stuff do I need to get done?”
Craig: It is gonna become an issue going forward. There’s an entire generation of old people that are on Facebook, and no one knows their passwords for anything. They barely know their passwords for stuff. When they die, there are just gonna be all these just floating accounts of dead people just hanging out.
John: Closing those accounts is an important thing too, or arguably, it’s an important thing. I think zombie stuff out there is gonna be bad. You don’t want people to be getting emails from dead people about stuff. There was a service – we’ll try to find a link to it – that basically checks in that you’re alive on a regular basis and then has a plan for if you don’t respond in a certain period of time, it starts closing things down, which could make sense.
Craig: I think Facebook has a, “Hey, here’s a thing to fill out for when you die.” They’re aware of it. Probably costs them money. All these dead people hanging around on our Facebook. I’m sorry. Meta.
John: Meta.
Craig: Meta.
John: But then I feel like in the not too distant future, we’re also gonna have to worry about, what about the AI versions of ourselves? Do we want to continue after we die versus not continue after we die? I think it was Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, was talking about, I don’t know if it was her husband or some other person, that she has basically an AI representation of their work as a chatbot. She finds it therapeutic to chat with this representation of a friend or husband or somebody. Yes, and also, should I have the ability to say no, you can’t do that? It’s weird.
Craig: If they make an AI chatbot of me, it’s mostly just gonna be saying the following to people: Get out of here, baldy!
John: With that, another Scriptnotes is resolved. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Links:
- The Life and Death of Hollywood by Daniel Bessner for Harpers
- One weird trick for fixing Hollywood by Max Read
- Moloch Trap
- Lola Dupre
- Codenames Duet
- 2 Kings 2:23-24
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 642: It’s Brutal Out Here, Transcript first appeared on John August.
In this compendium episode, John and Craig fast-forward to the third act to talk about endings. How do they work? What makes them great? And how do you fix them when they’re not working?
They look at how to connect your ending to your characters, crafting a twist that surprises (but doesn’t confuse), the function of the climax, the importance of the denouement, and how to make it all satisfying for your audience.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Drew welcome back Megana Rao to ask: do we still need reunions in the age of social media?
Links:
- Episode 44 – Endings for beginners
- Episode 170 – Lotteries, lightning strikes and twist endings
- Episode 366 – Tying Things Up
- Episode 392 – The Final Moment
- Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
- Too Many Cooks
- America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post
- All Fours by Miranda July
- Callipeg
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Crafting Your Ending first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You are listening to Episode 641 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what do your characters know, and how do we know if they know it? We’ll stare in the epistemological looking glass and offer some guidance on building characters who feel appropriately informed. We’ll also look at TV ad breaks and what they’ve become in the age of streaming shows that may or may not have predetermined act breaks. We’ll also answer some listener questions, and in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what should you do when meeting a famous person, and what should you not do? Craig?
Craig: I did not get the memo that we’re being British.
John: We’re being very British on the podcast today for no good reason.
Craig: I’ll do it for the entire time. Just curious why.
John: Some mornings I wake up and I’m just channeling the spirit of Claire Foy. Claire Foy is still alive, and yet Claire Foy’s voice as the Queen in The Crown just seeps into my body, and I just want to channel that Claire Foy energy.
Craig: We’re doing Received Pronunciation. That would be very, very appropriate.
John: Extreme Received Pronunciation.
Craig: Oh, so RP. We’re so RP, darling.
John: So RP. It’s just fantastic. We’re not required to keep doing it, but it’s just fun sometimes to just be in that space-
Craig: Absolutely.
John: … be in that voice. I remember when I got to college, this young woman said, “What is your accent? I like it, but what is your accent?” I’d really had no idea, but later I realized it’s just closeted gay kid. That was my accent.
Craig: Yes, there is a gay accent.
John: Striving gay kid.
Craig: Oh my god, that’s so specific. What a specific dialect. Striving gay kid. I like that. Did we talk about that documentary about gay voice?
John: I think we did.
Craig: It is interesting. It’s a thing.
John: I think that documentary was Do I Sound Gay?
Craig: Do I Sound Gay?, yeah, I think that’s what it was. But then there’s the RP version. Do I Sound Gay? Do I?
John: Yeah, is it gay or British? It’s hard for people to distinguish at times.
Craig: There are so many reasons that our British listeners are angry at us right now. I work with a lot of British people, like British actors who are doing American accents, like Bella Ramsey. We also have British directors. We’ll do our versions. “Here’s my London. Here’s my East London. Here’s my Northern England. Here’s my this.” There are people who are amazing at accents, there are people who are decent, and then there are people who are horrible. I was talking with Mark Mylod, incredible, multi-award-winning director. He said, “I can’t do the American accent. I can’t do it at all.” I’m like, “Oh, sure you can.” Have you heard when British people do a bad American accent?
John: Oh, it’s so bad.
Craig: It sort of sounds like this. This is how they do. I was like, “Oh, do it. It’ll probably be that.” He said something like, “I’m going to… ” It was like a monster.
John: It’s because he’s trying to go rhotic. He’s trying to put his R’s back in, and that’s a way to do it.
Craig: There’s an attitude, like (monstrous noises). I was weeping laughing, because it’s incredible.
John: Amazing.
Craig: It was incredible. Loved it.
John: Loved it so much. I was talking to a dialect coach yesterday. He often works with actors who get the audition requests for, “Okay, you’re going in on this accent,” and they’re like, “Crap, I need to quickly get up to speed on that.” One of his frustrations, which I can totally understand, is that the breakdown will say New Jersey or Brooklyn or this thing, and that’s not actually a real thing. Basically, the New Jersey accent is an Italian American accent, so it’s not specific to New Jersey. It’s really specific to a cultural group. But they don’t want to say the cultural group, so they’ll put it on a region. People in Brooklyn don’t actually speak with that Brooklyn accent anymore.
Craig: Not anymore. My parents did, and my mom still does. They’re not Italian. It’s a different vibe than the Sopranos style. There’s just a different kind of thing going on there. New Jersey has about 12 accents. The weirdest one, although probably the most common one, is the Bruce Springsteen, Central/Southern Jersey. It’s sort of Philly. It’s sort of country. It’s a weird one. It’s a really weird one.
John: It’s a really weird one.
Craig: We’re going down to get a hoagie. Anyway, that’s our show.
John: That’s our show. It’s I think really good. As always, our show was produced by Drew Marquardt and-
Craig: Drew Marquardt.
John: Drew Marquardt and-
Craig: Marquardt.
John: … edited by Matthew Chilelli. Before we get to the wrap-up, we have some follow-up. In Episode 637, we talked about AI transcription and specifically we wondered whether our own transcriptions for our show, which we’ve done since the very beginning, were currently being done by a human or if they were just humanized versions of AI transcriptions. We have an answer. Drew, help us out.
Drew Marquardt: Our very own transcriptionist, Dima Cass, wrote in, says, “Hey, y’all. I’m Dima, a real human, and I’ve been happily transcribing Scriptnotes for over two years, since Episode 536. I actually just hit 100 episodes. I transcribe everything from scratch as opposed to using any AI. I have, quote unquote, ‘humanized’ AI transcripts for other jobs, but I personally find it time-consuming and tedious. I imagine there would be a lot of editing involved if Scriptnotes used AI transcription, because John speaks rather quickly-“
John: I do.
Drew: “… almost blending words together sometimes, while Craig tends to make sound effects and use different accents.”
Craig: Look who’s using different accents today, Dima.
Drew: “You also often discuss pronunciation, which is sometimes a difficult thing to capture in written words.”
Craig: Oh, boy.
Drew: Which I’ll say Dima does a great job doing. “I’ve been doing transcription for a decade now, and AI has actually taken some of my jobs over the past year. The current trend is that entities will hire transcribers for half the price and have them touch up AI transcripts. It’s similar to what’s happening with script coverage work.
“I know most people don’t enjoy transcribing, but I’m one of the strange few who does. I learn a lot and it fits my lifestyle as an introverted, neurodivergent queer person living in the Bible Belt. Thankfully there are still some fields of transcription in which humans are still preferred over AI, for instance in legal proceedings where every detail is very important.”
John: That’s awesome.
Craig: Then Dima sent a photo of themself “squinting in a huge field of tulips as further proof I am a human.” Yeah, Dima’s a human being. There’s a real Dima, unless AI… That does sound like an AI prompt, doesn’t it?
John: I will say, this is Dima posing in this field of perfectly lit-up flowers. It could be an AI backdrop. Tell me that doesn’t look like it could be an AI backdrop.
Craig: I just think, “Dall-E, create neurodivergent queer person in Bible Belt squinting, huge field of tulips.” I love the cardinal shirt. He’s got a shirt with a cardinal on it. Dima, thank you for doing this. It’s really nice to meet you. I’m very glad that you’re a human being. Look, let’s face it. Everybody knows that John makes the decisions around here, but to the extent that I get a vote, I vote that we never use AI and we always use a person to do this.
John: Yeah, I think it’s great. There’s subtleties that a human being is gonna understand about what’s important and what’s not important. Dima does the transcripts. Drew reads through the transcripts to make sure they fit what we want, gets them posted up there. We started doing the transcripts early on just for accessibility, because we have folks who are deaf or hard of hearing and need to be able to read it. It’s better for them. But then other people who don’t have those conditions also benefit from the transcripts. And it also means we can Google search and find if we ever talked about the thing we’re thinking about talking about, because we probably did. So transcripts are good.
Craig: I love the fact that we have transcripts. I myself would vastly prefer to read through a transcript than listen to a pod… Oh, god, look what I just did to Dima. “Listen to a pod,” and then I cut off the word “podcast.” I’m now thinking about Dima all the time. Also, I get to say Dima is wonderful. And now Dima gets to transcribe “Dima is wonderful.” Thank you, Dima.
John: Good stuff. In Episode 637 we talked about gendered words in English. We had some feedback on that.
Drew: Adam Pineless wrote in, “Another interesting gendered word like fiancé or divorcé is blond, because blond for men is spelled without an E.”
John: That one I’m kind of willing to let go a bit, because it’s only when you’re using it as a noun that you do it that way. I get why it’s confusing for people to use it in English. It’s strange for us.
Craig: “Blonde” to me is actually in the same category as fiancé and divorcé, and that is French words that are gendered. “Blonde” is a French word. I was actually talking about this with Melissa the other day. People have basically stopped using “fiancé” with the single E to describe a male betrothed. Everyone just uses the two E’s now.
John: I see the opposite more often.
Craig: Oh, sorry. You’re right, you’re right. It’s the other way around. It’s that there’s only one E, right?
John: Yeah.
Craig: No one uses two E’s. Sorry. That’s exactly right. No one uses the two E’s. There was an interesting case where I thought about the word “née.” N-E-E we will see as born as.
John: Born as.
Craig: Typically, it was used for a woman who had taken her husband’s last name. Melissa is Melissa Mazin née Frye, and it’s N-E-E with the accent on the first E. But you never see “ne,” N-E. But now you can, now that we have marriage between men. Mike August could be Mike August ne, N-E, and then whatever his last name was. But I have a feeling that we’re never gonna see N-E.
John: I also haven’t heard people pronounce that aloud. But I bet there’s a whole generation of people who have seen that word but never pronounced it, and they’re gonna say née [nee], because we don’t know what to do with that thing.
Craig: Now we have a new thing that we need to… Look, maybe we lost the battle of begging the question, but we will not lose the battle over ne.
John: Of ne.
Craig: Never. Nay!
John: Never!
Craig: Nay, I say.
John: Craig, here’s a question for you. “She had blond hair.” Spell blond.
Craig: In that case, I would use not an E. I would go blond without an E.
John: I think that’s right. I think that most style guides will say that.
Craig: “She is a blonde,” I would use an E.
John: But should you even say “she is a blonde”?
Craig: Why not? “She is a redhead. She is a blonde. She is a brunette.” I have no problem with that. There’s a word for this. Synecdoche, is that it, where you take a part of what someone is and use it to describe the whole?
John: Charlie Kaufman could tell us that.
Craig: Synecdoche, I’m looking it up now. “A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.” I guess, yes, a blonde. Or a metonymy.
John: Fun. In Episode 635, you were talking about dialog and character voice, and we have feedback on that as well.
Drew: Matt Yang King writes, “I loved your discussion on character voice, but I noticed you guys were missing a huge resource. One of the major websites I use when wearing my acting hat is the International Dialects of English Archive. It’s an incredible asset for anyone who wants to know the flow and cadence of various different languages and how they’re spoken in English. Also, it’s hugely helpful in building a real, grounded character. Every person who speaks into the archives speaks from a common script, so that you learn how they pronounce similar vowels and consonants, and then they give a little talk on who they are.”
Craig: Wow.
John: You’re absolutely right. This is by Paul Meier. If you’re gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna pick up his book, Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, which I was working through this last year when I was studying dialect and accents. Independently, I also learned how to write stuff in the IPA, which you’re gonna see in this book as well. Really, really useful.
You wouldn’t want to stop at this website. You should go beyond that and look at YouTube and other places. But it is really handy that they are all speaking through the same script. You could get a sense of, like, oh, what does this person from Glasgow, what does it sound like when they’re speaking versus this person from Northern Ireland. It really is useful on that level.
Craig: This site is really cool. Just looking through it, I picked Africa, and then I picked Cameroon. There are three different audio examples of people from Cameroon at different times – they even list the year – speaking English, so that you can zero in on accents that granularly, which I think is fantastic.
John: Let’s take a listen to the first of these examples here. This is Cameroon 1. It’s a 32-year-old man from Kumba, Cameroon.
Man From Cameroon: Well, here’s a story for you. Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.
John: Great. They’re gonna be reading through the same script. You heard him rolling his R’s. He had a trill on his R’s, which is really interesting.
Craig: There is a specific thing going on there that is a little bit surprising to me. We do hear this kind of generic African English dialect, which that doesn’t sound far off from it, but there are very specific things going on. I thought it would be a little bit more French, more French-ish, because it’s Cameroon. But the point is, this is a great website. You can go and listen to all these things and avoid either just being wrong or being generic.
John: The other thing I would recommend people take a listen to is Accent Tag, which is a series of YouTube videos. Basically, just follow the hashtag #accenttag, and it’s people who do read through a similar script, and then they talk about their lives a little bit. They’re reading through also how they pronounce certain words, which can be really funny just to hear how vastly different it is and sometimes how unaware they are about the choices that they’re making, because people say, “I don’t trill my R’s at all,” and of course they’re trilling every one of them.
Craig: I’m gonna start trilling my-
John: Trilling.
Craig: Tapping the R’s.
John: Little tap there. Great stuff. I encourage people to take a look at that. That is dialectsarchive.com.
Craig: Very cool.
John: Our main topic here, this was prompted by a couple different things that happened this past week. Before we hopped on the Zoom for D&D this week, we were talking with Kevin, our friend who was on Jeopardy. I wanted to know specifically, when he was ringing the buzzer, did he always know the answer to the question. Craig, what do you think? Did Kevin always know the answer as he buzzed in?
Craig: I’m gonna say no. I’m gonna say yes and no. I’m gonna say that there was a part of his brain that knew that he knew the answer before the answer appeared, and that was the part of the brain that was buzzing in. And then there was a second for the answer to actually make its way from one section of the brain to the other. How close am I?
John: I think that’s pretty close. He said he mostly knew the answer. But really, I think what was so fascinating about the conversation, it really came down to what does it even mean to know a thing. Are you buzzing because you know it or because you think you will know it in time? Kevin described situations where they record Jeopardy, and six months later it shows up on TV. He’s watching the episodes that he was in. A question would come up, and he wouldn’t know the answer, but then the Kevin who was on screen got the answer right.
Craig: Whoa.
John: What does it even mean to know the answer to something? It’s very situational sometimes. You’re in the moment and you know it in the moment, but you don’t know it beyond that. I liked that as one aspect of knowing a thing.
But then also, during the D&D game, a thing happened which often happens in D&D, which is last week you encountered a new creature that none of you ever had seen before. It’s a Kruthik, and none of you had any idea what the hell this thing was. You asked, “Can I do a nature check to see if I know what this thing is?” And you rolled and you failed. You had no idea what it was. But then this past week, you encountered a troll. And you all know what a troll is, but would your characters know what a troll was? Again, we’re rolling dice to see do your characters know what this thing is and what its unique disadvantages are or abilities are.
Craig: One of the things that DMs deal with – you’re DM-ing now, so you have to deal with it – is metagaming. We all know lots of stuff. You play lots of campaigns. You meet things. Since we’re not in a game right now, and I know a lot about D&D, when we encounter a troll, I, Craig, know that trolls regenerate health, unless they take acid or fire damage, in which case they don’t. But it’s really important then for fair play and for fun play to deny your character that knowledge. There’s no reason for a character that doesn’t know about trolls to think, “You know what I should do? I should throw fire at it.” But if you deal with a troll and you learn that, then yeah. We have to do the same thing when we’re writing.
John: Yeah, that’s the point.
Craig: We know everything. But what do our characters know, and what should they not know, and how did they learn it? And also, what’s the knowledge gap between what the audience knows about a character and what they know about themselves?
John: Yeah, it’s tough, and it’s really like, what is the theory of knowledge that is informing the author, the piece, and the characters inside the piece, and the audience? There’s all these different things you’re trying to balance. You have no choice but to acknowledge the meta-game behind it all, because the audience is aware of things, because they’re aware of the genre, they have a sense of this, and they also have a theory of mind about what the characters inside this story should know or should not know.
An example will be, I’ve seen things happen in movies where I as the audience know something, and suddenly this character knows this thing, but I know that they could not know that. There was no opportunity for them to have learned this fact. We’re willing to forgive that or it seems natural if some time has progressed. But there was never that moment. They never got that call from the other character telling them that thing, so how do they know that this thing is possible? Those are things that screenwriters are always, back of your mind, thinking about, wondering about. What do the characters know about what’s going on? Do they have a sense of what genre of movie that they’re in? These are all challenges.
Craig: The converse is also a problem. I see this frequently, where you think, “Why are you willfully not knowing something?” It’s helpful, of course, to put obstacles in front of your characters, but if they are willfully not aware of something that they should be aware of because of what you’ve been watching, it’s incredibly frustrating. Similarly, it’s frustrating when characters withhold knowledge from each other for no reason whatsoever, other than that it will deny a scene from happening. If characters should be sharing information with each other, then they should share the information.
I have a particular sore spot with characters saying the following cliched line: “I want to show you something.” “What?” “Just trust me.” And then they show them a thing that they could’ve just described or mentioned. They could’ve said, “By the way, you need to know that the dog next door has two heads.” “What?” “Yeah. Come on, follow me.” It’s a frustrating thing. As we often say, anything that makes the audience stop and notice that they’re in a movie is harming the illusion we are intending to create.
John: The other vector we have to consider is, is this character specifically well informed about a subject or in general, because if so, we need to signal that pretty early on, or else it’s gonna be really frustrating when they suddenly have information, like, “How did they know this? I didn’t know that they were a doctor. I didn’t know that they were this kind of thing.” Or if they’re specifically uninformed, I think you need to clue that in to the audience quickly.
A thing that occurred to me in the office yesterday is a character who doesn’t seem to know anything about dogs at all would be surprising. You say, “How old is your dog? How old do you think he is?” “I don’t know, 30.” That’s absurd. Any reasonable person should know that dogs do not live to be 30, but that could be a really good character moment, as long as we’ve established that it’s plausible this character is that dumb.
Craig: If a character does say something like that, everyone should stop and say, “What?” and then grill that person on their stupidity, their weird knowledge gap. But you get one of those. You don’t get multiples, unless the point of the character is that they are absolutely idiotic.
John: Drew brought up in the office yesterday a good corollary example, which is, in Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick is a Navy pilot, but he doesn’t know anything about boats, and so he’s on the sailboat and has no idea how to sail at all. That’s good. That’s funny. I get that. It’s surprising, and yet it made sense for the character, and it was a good moment in the story.
Craig: Yeah. Navy pilots fly, and they land on boats, but they don’t sail, so that’s reasonable. That is a reasonable thing. It’s also a kind of thing that maybe some people wouldn’t necessarily be aware of, because they think of the Navy as boats, boats, boats. But yeah, I’d buy that completely.
John: We’re coming up with characters who are gonna be in our story. We have to be thinking, okay, what do they know, what are their subject areas, and then within the story, how much information do they have that the audience also is right there with them and knows, versus they’re ahead of the audience or the audience is a little bit ahead of them. Finding that balance is really tough.
There’s movies where characters know a lot more than the audience. Gone Girl comes to mind, where there’s a whole con being played on the audience, which is very important. But also Civil War, which I just saw this last week and really, really liked a lot, the characters in that movie know a lot more than the movie will ever tell us about what’s actually going on in the world. For me, it worked, because they’re not gonna talk about that stuff, because everybody around them knows it, so there’s no reason for them to discuss it. That was something that worked for me about that movie is they know really what happened that brought us to the Civil War, even though we as the audience never will.
Craig: One of the worst phrases you type in a screenplay is “as you know.”
John: Oh, god.
Craig: If you know it, why are you saying it? There is an unspoken contract that there are things that we both know. Now, how we get that to the audience can be difficult. Let’s acknowledge that for a second. The reason that “as you know” came into being is because sometimes two characters who both know a thing need to impart that to the audience somehow.
John: Now, Craig, I just want to point out, you just “as you know”-ed me to do that.
Craig: As you know.
John: As you know, as a screenwriter, but now we have to share it with the audience.
Craig: We have to share it with the podcast audience, yes, as you know. Now, as we know… I like that. That’s fun. We meta “as we know”-ed.
How do we do it? How do we get that information across? There are some good old-fashioned tips and tricks. The easiest and most obvious is bring a third party in who doesn’t know. There’s also a version where someone is saying, “Look, I went through the normal thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t work,” so that part of the way they’re imparting that information to their friend is, “It’s obvious to both of us, but the reason I’m running it down is because the outcome isn’t what we expected.” You have to come up with ways that feel naturalistic to share that information.
John: Some cases, you will be able to just show it directly to the audience, just actually show the thing and cut away from the characters doing the thing and actually put that information out there so the audience directly knows the thing that the characters inside the world would know. That’s great when it works, but it may not be the right choice for your movie. Some movies cling very closely to their characters. The camera feels like it’s right over their shoulder the whole time, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to cut away to something else to give that piece of information. But other ones are jumping all over the place. If you’re doing The Big Short, you could jump all over the place, because that’s the style of the movie, and you can talk about a thing. You can talk directly to the audience about a thing if you want to, because that’s the rules you’ve established for your world.
Craig: Yes. And even inside The Big Short, before they would get to the fourth wall breaking, where people would explain what a derivative was, you had Steve Carell’s character sitting with somebody, and he’s saying, “Okay, explain this to me, because I’m a finance guy, but this is a very specialized thing. You’re saying that blah blah blah blah blah?” And the guy’s like, “Yeah, and in fact, we then take these things and we repackage them into derivatives of derivatives.” And he’s like, “Wait, what?” And then you cut to somebody explaining. But you do have a character that we’re invested in who is asking questions and revealing that there are gaps in his knowledge, which makes sense, given what that story was, that people were literally finding out as this was happening, that these, I think, going to call them weapons of mass financial destruction had been created.
John: We’re gonna go back to our probably most cliché phrase on this podcast: specificity. But I think you also look for what is the specific conversation that these characters would be having that would reveal to the audience the thing we need them to know but would actually be necessary for the conversation for them to be having to move forward to do the next thing. That’s actually moving the scene forward, but in the context of moving the scene forward, will also provide this explanation and give the audience the knowledge they need to have to go forward.
Craig: That’s right. We have to think about how we do this on a day-to-day basis. There are times where you might say to somebody, “I arrested this guy. I brought him in. What do you think happened next?” And then the other character says A, B, C, D, and E. And the first guy says, A, B, C, D, and then not E, weirdly, H, because he’s setting this person up to make the story interesting, and in doing so, there’s our package of information. But it’s natural. We just have to make sure we don’t do that lazy thing of people just dumping information at us. And similarly, we can’t do the lazy thing where people are missing information. We’ve talked about the cellphone problem. If they had the information, now what?
John: What should also be clear is that there’s times where you don’t need to see all the connections being done, because you feel like enough time has passed that it’s naturally going to happen. I think through Succession. In a given episode of Succession, sometimes they’re really tight and it’s almost real time, but sometimes we’re covering a period of a couple weeks, and then, yeah, those communications were had, but I didn’t see them. But I believe that Logan knows that this thing is happening. All those pieces were put together behind the scenes. If you trust in the storytelling enough, you’re not gonna worry about how did this person find out this thing, because they spoke it. It’s gonna get through.
Craig: I have a personal thing. I don’t know. It’s part of my style, maybe. I don’t know. Part of my voice. But my thing is that there are times when people need to explain things to other people, and the best way to go about it is to just do it, to embrace the active explanation. We do explain things to each other all the time, so it’s okay, as long as the characters are acknowledging that that’s what’s happening.
Part of the problem with an elegant exposition is that people try to make it elegant. But here’s the deal. It’s either don’t be elegant and just say, “I am now gonna explain something,” or be elegant and don’t enough notice that the explanation happened. But anywhere in the middle, lame. It just comes out lame.
I personally have no problem embracing explanations. If you look at Chernobyl or if you look at The Last of Us, you’ll see scenes all the time where people are just saying, “Can you explain what happened?” and someone says, “Yes, here’s my… ” Now, explaining things is its own art. You have to be interesting when you explain things. The people who are explaining things have to be good at telling a story. That’s important.
John: But Craig, the examples you’re making, like Chernobyl in particular, those explanations are germane, because those characters really would be explaining those things to the other people around them. They were actually necessary to do, so it doesn’t feel forced on. Where our concern is is when characters are explaining things that don’t need to be explained within context of the world, that they’re just there for the audience so that the audience can be up to speed. That’s the real challenge. That’s where you need to search for elegant ways to get that information out there.
Craig: You need to be elegant. You can’t always have somebody explaining something. But when you have information that is actually interesting, then just do it, just explain it.
John: Another thing I think is crucial about these explanation scenes, when it is a straightforward explanation, is it doesn’t mean that all conflict stops. There needs to be something else that’s happening and that’s not just we’re on all the same page together. There has to be some urgency that’s getting you through the scene. Otherwise, we’ll be informed but we’ll be bored.
Craig: Correct. The scene must have a beginning and an end. And the beginning is not as important as the ending. The ending of these scenes cannot simply be, “All right. Now I know.” The ending of the scene needs to be personal. It needs to have some sense of a relationship. And it needs to explain why the information we received is relevant not only from a plot point of view but from a personal point of view. It must come back to the human being. Otherwise, it just floats there as info.
John: Yeah. A show I liked a lot on Netflix this last year was The Diplomat. One of the things I enjoyed about it was that there were moments where you just had to explain things, but all the explanations came kind of in conflict, because there were competing ideas. You’re jostling for supremacy within them, and also a lot of interpersonal conflicts that were happening at the same time the explanations were coming out. And that made for good scene work. And it was a delight to see when that show was working so well.
Craig: I love it. Personally, I love when information is relayed, and I’m excited and interested. I love The Big Short. I don’t understand money. I still don’t understand money. But I loved learning. Even if I have forgotten, I don’t think I could explain it as well as I could have, say, an hour after I saw the movie the first time. But while I was watching it, I was fascinated by it.
When I watch shows of any genre where the information is revealed in fascinating ways and it seems like there’s craft and art to characters learning, explaining, and also when there’s a lovely and satisfying gap between what I know and what the character knows, whether it’s that I know more than the character knows about themselves, like, say, the movie In and Out, where we all know he’s gay from the start, but he just doesn’t get it yet, or when somebody knows way more than I do, like for instance, My Cousin Vinny. Marisa Tomei is on the stand, and she suddenly has this epiphany about the tire marks. And she’s like, “No. The defense’s argument is wrong.” Okay. She knows everything now. And Joe Pesci knows what she knows. And he’s like, “Really? Why do you think that?” And I’m like, “Okay, now they both know something.” And the gap between what they know and me not knowing is curiosity, and I’m leaning all the way forward knowing that I’m gonna be satisfied, which is wonderful.
John: Let’s circle back to the troll problem, where the audience is ahead of the characters, where the audience knows how trolls work and the characters inside the story don’t. There can be frustration from the audience, like, “You dummy. This is the rules. You don’t have this. You don’t understand how vampires work,” or whatever. There’s a fundamental sort of disconnect there. To me, the crucial thing here is you need to establish your characters well in the world well enough that the audience is on board with understanding what the characters could know and could not know and that they’re on board the ride and they’re willing to turn off that part of their brain that is aware of the genre and the rules around the genre.
Craig: It’s frustrating for us when we watch. It’s not necessary. There is a way to do it correctly. There are some television shows, I think because, specifically procedurals, they just don’t have the time sometimes. We’ve gotten more time as storytellers in television where you don’t have ad breaks. But good old-fashioned ad break television, like the kind you and I grew up with on the networks, they just didn’t have the time. They have to just dump the information out. It’s tricky. It’s also why you see procedurals that work in specified job areas are incredibly popular, because it allows them to say information that is specific, that we wouldn’t otherwise know. I don’t know necessarily why doctors are constantly explaining medicine to each other, but the fact that we don’t know any of it helps.
John: Yeah, it does help a lot. You just mentioned ad breaks, which segues naturally to our next topic, which is that we’ve talked on the show before about shows that were written without act breaks, like Chernobyl, but now they have ads inserted into them, and those ads were inserted kind of randomly. There’s no plan for it, because you didn’t plan for a moment where this ad would go, which was so different than how we used to do television and still do television on a broadcast model, which is that you have acts that build up to rising tension, and at this moment of great tension, fade to black, a commercial goes in, you come back out of the act break, pick things up again and move on. That was a way we wrote television for 50 years, and now we don’t tend to do that very often. We’ve talked to writers who were doing spec pilots, like, “Are you putting act breaks in? Are you not putting act breaks in?” That’s a choice you make.
This last week, I think it was Chris in our office, was talking about he was watching an old episode of The X-Files, which is a show that had act breaks in it. He was watching it on Prime. But they didn’t use the actual defined act breaks. They just inserted their ads kind of wherever, and it was really frustrating.
Craig: Yes. I know that some of the stuff that I do for HBO does get chopped up and ad-breaked in other countries or in other services. I try to just not think about it. Then again, as film writers, you and I have dealing with this our whole lives, because traditionally, movies would eventually sell to broadcast or cable, where they would be chopped up and ads would be shoved in.
John: Almost all the Bond movies I watched were on ABC, the Sunday before school started in the fall. I absolutely loved them, but they were full of random ad breaks.
Craig: Full of random ad breaks. Now, my One Cool Thing this week, I won’t give it away, because I don’t want to give the audience too much information, but it is a show that has been made for a premium streamer, and that streamer now has options. You can either watch ad-free or not ad-free. Even though I’m watching ad-free, there are moments where the shows just cuts to black, and then, boop, we’re into the next scene, and it’s very clear that the way they built it was like, “We are picking the ad breaks.” You won’t have to watch ads when you watch it ad-free. But you’re gonna see the moments where the ads would go. You just don’t have to sit there for 15 or 30 seconds.
John: But here is the question. Will those ads really go in those spots? Because that’s the issue. Are they keeping track of the metadata for where those things go? Because clearly, in X-Files, they were not. Oour own Drew Marquardt spent the afternoon yesterday looking through a bunch of shows to see which ones were actually inserting where the natural ad break would be and which ones were not looking for the act breaks at all. Drew, what did you find as you were scanning through stuff?
Drew: It was a very scientific process. Prime it seemed like would have an act break at 19 minutes no matter what and 32 and a half minutes no matter what. But things like FreeV, which is also an Amazon service, would put act breaks where they were supposed to go, for both shows that they didn’t produce or ones that they did, and Peacock seemed to be pretty good about it too.
Craig: I think that what’s going on is some sort of dictate that says ads must happen at a certain point or wherever, and we don’t care where the ads used to go. But when they are making their own shows, that dictate is certainly built in. There’s no chance that they’re making their own material with ad breaks that they’re gonna ignore. Those ad breaks are obviously designed by whatever algorithm runs the kingdom.
John: I hope we’ll have some listeners who write in who actually have first-hand experience with how this works on the other side and will break whatever NDAs they’re gonna be breaking. My guess is that for a show like The X-Files, produced by Fox, for Fox, I think, Amazon licenses it, they get the video file. I wonder if they are not getting special metadata about where the actual act breaks are, that they could slot those things in, and they’re just putting it wherever, or they’re getting that metadata and saying, “Screw it. We don’t care. Our own internal metrics show that it’s most effective for us to put these commercials here and here and here, regardless of what the original plan was for the show.”
Craig: I suspect it’s the latter. I remember my first internship in Hollywood was at Fox Network. When we would review the shows before they air, it was just clear. On the tape, every quarter inch, it would go to black, and then there was a second, and then it would come back. It’s pretty clear. I think that Amazon basically is like, “We can’t put as many ads in as network put in for whatever this medium tier is, and yes, our data says that people will deal with two ad breaks in this point and this point, and we’ll just shove them in there.”
John: Obviously, YouTube works that way. If you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, it’s just shoving in wherever they want to put it in. I didn’t watch Mad Men on its original run, but my recollection of people talking about it was Matthew Weiner didn’t write act breaks at all, and the commercials would just show up where they showed up.
Craig: It was on AMC. I didn’t watch it as it was airing either. I watched it after. So I don’t know the answer to that.
John: I don’t know what the right answer, the right choice is here. Clearly, we’re in this transitional, frustrating moment where you don’t know as a show creator how much you should be planning for where those act breaks are gonna be, where the ads are gonna go, or just ignore it, and the algorithm’s gonna figure it out. And even if you got an answer from your executive, is that gonna really hold true when people are watching two years from now.
Craig: I know that Max does have an ad-supported tier. No one has asked me. I know that much. Maybe they haven’t asked me because they know that I would be like, “Rah rah rah-“
John: “Rah rah rah.”
Craig: … and just be like, “Shove it anywhere. It doesn’t matter. You’re ruining it, so just ruin it however you want.” That is basically what I would say, so my guess is they just haven’t bothered asking.
John: I think maybe you could just start putting digital logos on characters’ clothes, and it’s like NASCAR.
Craig: I don’t know if this is real or not, but it was making the rounds on social media. It was an old broadcast of Star Wars. It was in, I think, Peru perhaps. They didn’t want to stop the show to do ads. So instead, when Obi-Wan reaches into his little footlocker to get Darth Vader’s lightsaber to give to Luke Skywalker, they just stop and cut to a cooler being opened with a bunch of beer in it, and they do a little beer ad. And then they go right back to him handing him the lightsaber, which is kind of incredible and horrible.
John: Apparently, it was real.
Craig: Oh my goodness. Really?
John: We’ll find a link to the story about it.
Craig: Incredible. It’s terrible, but also hysterical.
John: Yeah, it’s good stuff. Let’s try to answer some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?
Drew: Eerie Resemblance writes, “So a film recently came out featuring the same job as the industry I’m in and, arguably, what I do within that industry. The main character was also a woman in my industry, which is a big deal because we are still under-represented. Someone from the film reached out and invited some women from our field to watch a private screening about two months before the release. Turns out the main character and I share a lot of commonalities, including a very similar name, we work from the same company, and we are even from the same state. Also, I focus on the same issues as this main character was.
“I was able to give feedback to the people contracted to show us the film. They said they would pass it on. But I’ve listened to y’all’s podcast long enough to know that two months before release is zero time to change anything or really take notes. I’m wondering if filmmakers actually take any of these notes when they do stuff like this, or was this just checking the box because we are three women who are in the same industry as the main character? And secondly, as I mentioned, the main character’s coincidences with me were eerie. But I’m giving the writer of the benefit of the doubt that it was just three crazy coincidences, and I found it kind of funny.
“But my question is, do y’all think about the consequences of creating a character, especially in a story that’s highly traumatic, who’s very close to a real person? Obviously, you can’t worry about that all the time, but are there ethical considerations to think about when it comes to your research and how that character may psychologically affect that person or a small group of people that they’re based off of in real life. I’m actually really glad that I’ve been listening to this podcast before seeing this film, because I think if I hadn’t been, the movie would’ve messed with me a lot more.”
John: So many good questions in here and issues that are brought up. I want to start first with what was the purpose of that screening, Craig. Why do you think she and the other people who do what her job is were invited to see that early screening?
Craig: This feels like manipulative PR move. Eerie Resemblance, your gut is correct. If the movie is about to come out in two months, this is box checking. They’re not gonna be changing anything, unless there’s some very simple thing an ADR line would address. Otherwise, no, they’re looking basically for cover, to say, oh, we screened it for all these people, and they really enjoyed it. This feels like CYA stuff to me.
John: I think their logic was probably – let’s say there’s 10 people who might have an opinion about this specific thing. If the movie comes out and they react really negatively to it, we’re gonna have to deal with that. But if we can sort of preempt that by showing it to them and getting them on our side to some degree, that’s gonna help them out. And so that’s probably why they were bringing you in.
Craig: Yeah, I think it’s preemptive. Now, the other question is an interesting one. The fact is that, just as the birthday paradox, if you have, I think, 23 people, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that one of those people will have your exact same birthday. This is gonna happen.
Eerie, the name was sort of close to your name. They were from the same state. They work for the same company. Once you’re working for the same company, the odds are you might be from a state like the one that the company’s in. Lots of names are similar. It was probably not intentional. In fact, it’s actually quite annoying how fussy lawyers can be when they say, “Oh, this is actually too close to this person.” Screenwriters and filmmakers are smart enough to know to not just try and duplicate another human into their script. They’re aware that there’s a legal problem on the other side.
John: We can be more specific about that. At some point in the development process, the screenwriter’s gonna have to sign something that says, “These are not based on real people.” There’s gonna be some kind of contractor sign that’s making that clear. Or if they are, you’re gonna have to go through a lot more scrutiny on that. You’ve dealt with that in some of the stuff you worked on.
In terms of names, that becomes a thing. One of the clearance reports they’re going through is they’re gonna look for the names of the characters in your story and the people who actually do that job in the real world. And this could’ve been flagged. This could’ve been a thing that was a concern. It’s not your exact name. We know a little more of the details. And it didn’t set off their alarm bells. But there have been times where I’ve had to change characters’ names because it was too similar to an actual real person who existed in the world.
Craig: The thing about names is, if you name somebody Cassie, that is possibly close to Cathy, Catie, Cara, Carrie, Cass, Cat. Names don’t really mean much. If it’s not your name, it’s not your name. Even if it’s your first name and not your last name – and it wouldn’t be your first and last name – it just doesn’t really matter.
The issue is, do we think about the consequences of creating a character who’s very close to a real person? I gotta be honest with you. No, because we’re trying not. The fact is, we’re not trying to be close to a real person, or we’re saying we are doing a dramatization of a real person. If we’re dramatizing a real person, then they’re out there, and they can complain, or maybe not. Maybe we bought the life rights. Maybe we haven’t. We’ll be accountable to that.
But if we’re creating a fictional character that does a job in a certain way for a certain company, no, we’re not thinking, “Oh, what if there happens to be somebody that has a similar name that does this and works for that same company? What will the psychological impact be on that person?” No, I don’t think we do. Because what can we do, other than confining ourselves, out of hyper concern, because somebody at some point is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me.” We’re writing people that are supposed to remind you of real human beings, just not specific ones.
John: I would say I mostly agree with you. I think there are situations where even if you’re not thinking about the specific individual, you’re thinking about the people who are in that position and how the existence of your movie or TV show might negatively impact their ability to do the work they’re doing. Let’s say your show involved some NGO workers in Malawi and South Africa and portrayed them in a very negative light. That could be true, and it could be absolutely accurate within the course of your movie, but it could also make it very difficult for the people who are really doing that work to not be kind of painted by that brush, not in a legally difficult way, but in a… I don’t know. I think there’s some moral and ethical considerations you’d have there about are you making their ability to do their humanitarian work more difficult by your portrayal.
Craig: If you’re portraying an organization that is clearly meant to be like another organization, and you are suggesting that that organization, even if it’s fictional in your movie, is corrupt or whatever, then yes, you can impact an organization. You have ethical obligations, I think, as a screenwriter.
One of the things that I was worried about when I did Chernobyl was not coming off as an anti-nuclear-power show. That was not the purpose. In fact, it was important for me that the main character explained very clearly the difference between all of the nuclear reactors in the West and the one that they were using in Chernobyl, which was just wildly different and didn’t have a containment building around it, etc., because the fact is I support nuclear power. I don’t think the lesson there is no nuclear power. I think nuclear power is kind of essential if we’re gonna avoid continuing climate crisis. But I’ve said so. I made that as open of an opinion as I could. I still got a whole lot of crap from paid nuclear industry lobbyists who were super cranky. I don’t care about them. That’s their job. They’re paid to be cranky. But I felt like I fulfilled my obligation as a creator to at least not be wildly misunderstood. Yes, we do have to think about that. But an individual’s name, no. Somebody somewhere is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me,” and there’s nothing we can do about that.
John: Yeah, sounds good. Let’s try one more question.
Drew: John in LA writes, “About four months ago, I met a producer who has worked in development at several big companies. Last month, she sent me a young adult novel that I really responded to. We’ve emailed and called several times about adaptation ideas. At the end of our last call, I asked her if she’d hire me to adapt the novel in full. She said yes and told me to, quote, start thinking about my contract. I’m not in the WGA. She has a new production company that is not yet a Guild signatory. Her intention is to become a signatory. Is it appropriate for me to ask if she’ll do the Guild paperwork so I can get a fair deal? I feel awkward making that ask.”
John: You should not feel awkward.
Craig: No.
John: This producer has worked in Hollywood, has worked in this industry. Since their production company that’s not yet a signatory but is intended to become a signatory, guess what? They can become a signatory with your project. You can break that seal. Hurrah.
Craig: I’m a little nervous here, John in LA, who’s writing about this, because the producer says her intention is to become a signatory. That’s a little nerve-wracking. Let’s make this easy for you. You shouldn’t have to ask anything, nor should you be thinking about your contract. Not only are you not in the WGA; you’re not a lawyer. What you need is a lawyer, and the lawyer can do all of this. Here’s the thing you need to be aware of, John in LA. It’s not as simple as saying, “I’m hiring a WGA writer, and I’m hiring them under a WGA deal because I’m a signatory.”
To be a signatory to the Writers Guild, you need to prove a certain amount of financial security, such that you demonstrate that you are able to meet your obligations as a signatory, specifically paying out residuals. You can’t just say, “I’m a producer, and I’m gonna hire a WGA writer. Just give me some boilerplate WGA stuff and I’ll sign the thing and I’ll be a signatory.” It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple, because people have done that in the past and then just not paid.
John: Yeah, reneged on it.
Craig: Right, not fulfilled their obligations. You need a lawyer. The good news is she’s saying she wants to hire you. She’s saying she wants to be a signatory. The lawyer will get paid therefore. So you should find one that’s willing to paper this for you, and they can have that discussion with them. It’s as simple as that. If her intention is to become a signatory, she should begin doing so. That’s on her.
John: It’s not an onerous process to become a signatory. I had to do it for my movie. It’s fine.
Craig: Exactly. They ask you a bunch of questions. You show them some evidence. You sign a piece of paper. Voila.
John: Exactly, because ultimately, when it comes to residuals and paying out stuff down the road, you’re basically having to guarantee that any future contracts that the thing is sold to will take care of the residual. It’s doable, and so this person can do it. It’s fine.
Craig: It is fine and is doable. They just need to do it. If that’s her intention, she should convert her intention into reality, and your lawyer should be thinking about your contract, not you. You don’t do that.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. First off, it’s a Patreon but also a website called tacticalmap.com. For the DM-ing I’m doing right now for our group, we’re using Roll20, which we’ve talked about, which is basically a virtual tabletop that we’re all looking at the same thing. You need maps for that. Some really good maps I found that are inexpensive online are at tacticalmap.com. It’s a guy who just develops some really beautiful top-down maps of different scenarios. We have a cliffhanger going on right now where there’s a troll attack. There’s this great fort in the mountains. It was perfect. I got this map, threw it in there, put some trolls in there. We’ve got a party. I like tacticalmap.com. You can find these maps.
Then my other one is a game that I wish we had played with you, Craig, while you were in town, because you would absolutely love this. It’s called Letter Jam. The concept behind this is, it’s a cooperative word game where you have a bunch of players around the table. Each of them has a letter on a stand in front of them, but they can’t see their own letter. They’re trying to work together to get through all of the words that are in front of them. They could say, “I can make a four-letter word using four player letters and this wildcard.” Then you’re going around the table. It’s who can make the biggest word and what that is, but without ever revealing that word. Then you are taking those clues on your little clue sheet, trying to figure out, like, what the hell is the letter in front of me. Its really smartly done.
Craig: I see, I see. People are saying, “I can make this word.” You’re like, “Okay, that person said they can make this word. This person said they can make this word.” I’m learning who maybe has what letter-
John: Exactly.
Craig: … and who maybe doesn’t have what letter. That’s interesting.
John: That person never says what that word is, but instead, they’re putting little tokens in front of different people’s spaces to show, this is letter 1, 2, 3. You can see the other stuff. You can never see what yours is. It’s really smartly done.
Craig: Sort of like Cluedo but with letters. I like it. That sounds like a fun time.
John: Letter Jam is a Czech game, but you can find it on Amazon and other places. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that.
Craig: Fantastic. The Czechs make excellent games, like Codenames.
John: Like Codenames. The same company that makes Codenames.
Craig: Oh, there you go. They’re great. My One Cool Thing this week is the television show Fallout. Now you have the information. Fallout on Amazon.
John: On Prime.
Craig: On Prime. I loved it. I loved it from start to finish. It was so well done, I thought. A lot of the reviews for it would talk about The Last of Us and video game adaptations, and I wish they wouldn’t, because to me, it’s taking away, first of all, from what those folks did at Fallout, and saying, “Oh, this one’s also a video game.” It’s like, “Okay, and these two movies were both adapted from books. Let’s compare those.” There’s no point. It doesn’t matter. It’s a wildly different show, different tone.
I played Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, and I’m just a fan, a Fallout fan. I thought that they did a terrific job of adapting that in the way it should’ve been adapted. It was just a fun watch. It was well acted. Walt Goggins is terrific in it. It might not be for everyone. It’s an overtly kind of gory, kind of like that comedy gore, which is true to the game. I thought it was great. I just loved it from start to finish. They’ve been renewed for Season 2. Not at all surprised to see that. I look forward to that, I assume, in… It’s a massive show. I know what it takes to make a show this size. I think they probably are bigger, budget-wise, I think. I hope so, based on what I saw. It was like, oh my god, this is insane.
John: But I saw they got their California tax incentive for Season 2, so they’ll be here, so that’ll be great.
Craig: Maybe I’ll come visit the set if they invite me. I’m a fan. I really enjoyed the show a lot.
John: That’s great to hear. It feels like the kind of show that my husband will not want to watch, so I think while he’s gone this weekend, I will burn through it myself.
Craig: Now, I will say-
John: You still would want to-
Craig: You know what I’m gonna say.
John: Yeah, you want it to be a weekly show.
Craig: Not only do I want it to be a weekly show. This, of all shows-
John: Of all shows should’ve been.
Craig: … should’ve been a weekly show. Hey, Jeff Bezos, I know you listen to our show. He does not. That’s just stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. I wish there were a different way.
John: He doesn’t even run Amazon Prime Video, but still, yeah.
Craig: I don’t know who does. The most polite way I can say it is, it’s just fully stupid, because that show-
John: The footprint is smaller than it should be.
Craig: It’s so much smaller than it should be, and that show is such a “oh my god, I can’t wait to see what happens next” show, which is why you should make them wait. Make them wait a week. Then with, I think it’s eight episodes, you’d have a cultural conversation over two months.
I’ll just keep pointing over to Shogun, which has one more episode to go. Tuesday, when this episode airs, that night will be the finale, the finale, the finale of Shogun. People have been talking about it for months, because it goes one a week via Hulu.
There’s no reason for Fallout to be all at once. It just felt wasteful, like, I’m gonna cook you a week’s worth of food, and then you just throw it after, because you consumed it all too much. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to maximize the discussion around something as good as Fallout that is so watchable and addictible – addictive.
John: Addictive.
Craig: Addictive. I said “addictible.” That’s not a word.
John: Addictible, yeah. It could be.
Craig: It shouldn’t be.
John: The kids will make it a word.
Craig: Damn kids.
John: Damn kids. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Is it?
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Oh, dear.
John: Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re fantastic. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what you should do when you meet a famous person.
Craig: Oh, I thought you were gonna say what you should do when you get lots of emails from English people complaining.
John: You can send those emails to ask@johnaugust.com.
Craig: Ask.
John: Great.
Craig: Ask@johnaugust.com.
John: Ask@johnaugust.com. Thank you, Craig.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thank you, Drew.
Drew: Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, let’s talk through what a person should do when they meet a famous person. And by what you should do meeting a famous person, I don’t mean you or me, who actually have different contexts, but you’re an ordinary person. You meet a famous person. Let’s talk through the different contexts in which this might happen. First off, you were called into a meeting with a famous person, a famous actor, a famous director, producer, who cares. How do you acknowledge or not acknowledge the fame differential between you and that famous person?
Craig: In the context of a professional meeting, you want to acknowledge it as little as possible, because you don’t want to seem like you don’t belong in the room. The tried and true method is to simply say, “I’m such a fan. It’s so lovely to meet you.” I do that with actors that I cast in the show that are famous and have done lots of things. It’s 99 percent of the time exactly true. And beyond that, you don’t want to go too much further, because at that point, you’re putting yourself in fan box as opposed to collaborator box.
John: 100 percent. I had a meeting with Henry Cavill. He’s so charming and just so incredibly handsome, but if I were to acknowledge too much, like, oh, this famous person is two feet away from me, that’s not gonna be useful for the meeting. That’s just noise and buzz and it’s not on topic. Address it just the way Craig said. “Such a fan. It’s really good to meet you. I really liked this thing.” You can talk about other stuff. But don’t talk about, like, “What’s it like being famous?”
Craig: They don’t necessarily want to listen to that. Hopefully, if it’s a professional context, they’re also familiar with you and some of the things you’ve done. There may be a polite exchange of, “I really love this. I really like this.” The other thing that you don’t want to do in a professional context is try.
This is pretty common. For any human being, when you meet somebody famous, there’s gonna be a natural instinct to try. You’re gonna want to impress them. You’re gonna want to make them laugh. You’re gonna want to make them like you. You’re gonna want them to be your friend, because they’re famous and they have this distortion field around them that’s so fascinating. Don’t do that, because what will end up happening is either faceplanting or just inauthenticity. It’s a bit sweaty. The hardest advice and the most common advice is to just be yourself. Unfortunately, in this situation, you must just be yourself.
John: I would say don’t try to match their energy, their accent, because again, they have a gravitational pull sometimes, and it can be really natural to do that. No, you’re there to be yourself and to do your thing. Don’t try to get there.
I had an actor camp coming in. I was gonna come in to do a rewrite on a project, and he was just bouncing off the walls. I didn’t react to how hyper he was. I was just back to focus on, like, “This is what I want to do. This is how we can do this. I hear why that’s important to you, and here’s a way we can achieve that.” You can validate all you want, but don’t try to match them at their energy, because that’s not your job.
Craig: It’s not. Also, don’t give away your authority. You’re in the room for a reason. You know something. You do a job they don’t do. You have value. Don’t give it away. You don’t have to be a pompous jerk about it. You don’t have to be arrogant. But it’s all right for you to have opinions. It’s all right for you to say, “Yes. However, one of the things I’ve learned is blah.” You are allowed to be valuable. You’re not there simply to go, “Oh my god, that’s so great. Oh my god, you’re so awesome. Oh my god, everything you say is right.” It’s not. It’s not. They’re just people. They’re just people, especially in that context. You must people-ify these individuals that prior to that meeting were godlike to you because they were on screen.
John: Back in the time when you and me both used to do more emergency work or coming in to help out on troubled things, I really felt like a lot of times the reason I got hired is I could survive in those rooms, that I could actually do my job in the presence of just a lot of chaotic energy and big egos and things. I could navigate my way through that. You get better at that by just meeting more famous, powerful people and not being swept away by them.
Craig: Correct. There’s another skill involved in those situations where you need to make your way through a meeting with that person, giving them some kind of comfort, and then separately talking with the adults and saying, “Okay. Now, what do we need, and how much of that do you want?” Navigating that is a very difficult thing to do. But it is important, because ultimately, a lot of these famous people need to be happy. If it’s fixit stuff, it’s fair to say no one’s happy. Everyone is feeling wanting. How do you satisfy everybody somehow?
Look, you can piss off the head of a studio. They can stop talking to you for three weeks. But if you piss off – I don’t know, I’m just gonna pick somebody. You’ve come in to fix a Thor movie and you’ve pissed off Chris Hemsworth, you’re fired, because he’s the one who’s showing up on screen. You can’t lose that piece. That’s the additional political power that these folks have just by dint of the job they do.
John: Let’s talk a different context. It’s not a meeting, but you just saw their show, you saw their movie, or you’re backstage at their theater performance. How do you interact with that person in those moments?
Craig: Keep it short. Keep it simple. And keep your expectations to zero. Your expectations should simply be shake their hand, tell them how great they did, say one quick thing. If you want a photo, they’re so used to that. And always ask, “Is it okay if I take a picture with you?” They’ll be happy to take a picture with you, because most of the time, backstage is when that’s supposed to happen. That’s sort of the deal. And also, it means this interaction is about to end.
You and I have had these. We’re not famous-famous, but people know us from the things we do and from this podcast. When there is, either it’s at a live show or let’s say you’re just at a restaurant and somebody notices you and they are a big fan of you, when they say, “Can I get a photo?” in my mind I’m like, A, yes, and B, we have concluded this interaction and I can go back to whatever I’m doing. That’s a good thing. If you go too long, I don’t know, more than 15, 20 seconds, it becomes an imposition.
John: I would differentiate the backstage of the show versus out at a restaurant. If you can find a moment in a public space where you feel like you can grab the person without breaking their world, that’s great, but I’d say don’t – I don’t know, I don’t want to blanket recommendation to never come up to the table, but kind of never come up to the table.
Craig: I wouldn’t say come up to the table. If they’re having dinner, leave them be. But when they’re leaving-
John: Waiting for the valet, waiting for [crosstalk 01:05:57].
Craig: … waiting for the valet, those are perfectly fine moments, because the other thing is, if you just imagine yourself in their shoes, if you’re in the middle of dinner, you’re in the middle. That means somebody comes up, talks to you, goes back and sits down, and now they’re over there, and now you’re aware that they’re there. Other people might take this as an opportunity for them to come up. Leave famous people alone when they’re clearly in the middle of conversations, dinner, etc., working. But when it is a little breather moment, like leaving, then sure. Just always be polite if you can.
John: This last week after seeing Civil War, I was walking back to the car, and a listener of the podcast stopped me to say, “Oh hey, I really liked the show.” That was great. It was lovely. It was a brief conversation. Completely 100 percent appropriate.
Craig: Oh, of course. Look, there are actors who are infamous for being super grouchy about this. I don’t begrudge them their grouchiness. It’s just like, hey, did no one tell you that being famous would mean you’d be famous? Most famous people I know are perfectly fine and gracious with those interactions. There are ways that they mitigate some of these things.
Every now and then, I’ll go catch a Dodger game with Jason Bateman. When it’s time to leave the game, nobody walks faster and with more purpose than Jason Bateman leaving Dodger Stadium. It’s because there are sometimes upwards of 50,000 people there. At least, I don’t know, 30 percent of them are like, “That’s Jason Bateman.” If you’re walking real fast, people will go like, “Oh, Jason.” He’s like, “Hey,” and then he keeps walking, and so there’s no chance to get stopped and mobbed. That’s reasonable. But if somebody were to walk over to him when he’s sitting there and say, “Hey, my son’s a big fan. Would you sign this?” yeah, of course.
John: Dodgers Stadium, the equivalent for us is Austin during the film festival, where I do need to walk pretty quickly and with laser-focused eyes, because otherwise I just won’t ever make it to my destination.
Craig: There was one year, I think it was the last time I was in Austin, I got off the plane. I landed in Austin, got off the plane, emerged from the jetway into the airport, and within three seconds, I heard someone say my name to another person. I was like, “Ah, shit.” The thing is, listen, of course, it’s a nice thing when people know you and like you. But if you feel like, uh-oh, it’s gonna be a lot of this, it does become a little bit like… I’m not built for it necessarily. I’m always nice. I’m never a jerk, ever, ever, ever. But if somebody could say, “Hey, here’s a potion you could drink when you’re at the Austin Film Festival and you’ll be invisible for the next three hours,” oh my god, I would pay a lot.
John: Love it.
Craig: I’d pay money.
John: Another context, a social event. Actually, there’s two different levels of this. There’s a social event which is the bigger social event, where there’s a lot of people mingling around, it’s a cocktail-y party kind of thing, or an after-screening kind of thing, where there’s a famous person there and you’re kind of introduced. Do you acknowledge how famous the other person is? A lot of it, you can do the – it’s like a meeting thing, where it’s just like, “I love doing this thing.” But other times, it can be weird. You’re folded into a conversation with somebody who’s much more famous. Do I acknowledge, like, “Oh my god, you’re Amy Poehler.”
Craig: This is an example of a moment like that that I had. Normally, when I walk away from moments like that, I think to myself, I screwed it up. In this one, I thought, “Nailed it,” because it was so honest. I was at the Golden Globes. It was before the show started. I was talking to Kevin Huvane, one of the guys that runs CAA, and we were by the bathrooms. And he said, “Oh, I’m waiting here for Meryl Streep.” I was like, “Oh my god.” He’s like, “You want to meet her?” I’m like, “Meryl Streep? I would love to meet her.” She came out. He’s like, “Oh, Meryl, this is Craig Mazin.” I shook her hand. This is what I did. I went, “You know.” And she said, “I know.” I was like, okay, well, there you go, because she’s heard it a billion times. I didn’t want to say it all to her, but also, I wanted her to know, like, “I love you and I love everything you’re in and you’re amazing. You’re the greatest actor of your generation. Here’s the whole thing.” I think I could boil it down to just, you are aware of what’s happening in my brain. She was so nice and gracious about it.
John: That’s great.
Craig: It was the perfect length. It was a good old-fashioned 15-second chitchat, and that was the end of that.
John: What’s great about that example is Kevin Huvane could be the hinge that introduced the two of you, and that makes things much more natural. If she was 10 feet away, would you have gone up to say anything?
Craig: Oh my gosh. Now I’ll tell you when I blew it. This is so long ago. This was like 1992. I was with a friend. Is Johnny Rockets still there on La Cienega?
John: No, it’s not, alas.
Craig: It was an old burger joint across from the Beverly Center. We were there. It was, I don’t know, 8:00 p.m. or something sort of late. My friend – and we were sitting outside – he goes, “Look who’s over there. It’s Seinfeld.” It was Jerry Seinfeld. He was talking to someone else. They were having dinner. I was like, “Oh my god, oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld.” When we were done, we’re walking by, and I was like, “I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna say anything.” I had already passed him by two steps when I just was like, “No, I must.” I turned around and then went back towards him. I’m sure he thought, like, “Oh shit, I’m getting assassinated.” I was just like, “Oh, hi. Just a big fan.” He was like, “Oh, great.” Then I walked away. My friend was like, “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. He must’ve shit his pants, because you looked like you were coming back to throw a punch at him.” But I was so nervous and awkward about it.
That said, sometimes – and you’ve probably felt this, John, maybe at Austin, where people come up to you and you can see how nervous they are to talk to you. It’s adorable, actually. It’s kind of sweet.
John: You immediately do the thing to put them at ease and make you feel okay about the whole thing.
Craig: Exactly. Everybody has these moments with famous people where they just fall apart, forget themselves, regress to childhood, feel like an idiot. That’s also fine and normal. If you can see that they’re like eh, just thank them for meeting them and leave. Don’t push it. I’m sorry, Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve never met him since. I’ve never met him. We’ve talked to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on our show, and I know Jason Alexander. These are lovely people. I’m at a different time in my life. I’m very comfortable around these people. But I still feel like if I were to meet Jerry Seinfeld today, I would have to say, “I need to take you back to 1992 and apologize.”
John: Example just from this last week. We were at the WGA Awards. Craig, congratulations on your WGA Award-
Craig: Oh, thank you.
John: … for Best New Series, which is terrific. At the after-party thing, Quinta Brunson was like three feet away from me, talking with other people. And I was talking with other people. But I didn’t know whether to say hi to Quinta, because she came on the podcast, but it was just a one-time thing. I don’t know that she really remembers who I am out of this context. Of course, there’s a disparity, because she’s just much more famous. I know her because she’s a very successful creator and star of a thing. I did not end up saying hi, and I had an opportunity, because a friend of mine was talking with her, and I could’ve worked my way back in, but you don’t always have to take advantage of those opportunities.
Craig: No.
John: Nothing good would’ve happened.
Craig: If you have nothing to say… I had met Quinta before, through Natasha Lyonne. Then we had her on the show. Now we sort of know each other. Melissa and I were both just wiped out, so we just went home. But if I had gone to that party and I had seen Quinta there, my guess is I probably would’ve just waved and then just kept going, because I don’t have anything specifically to say other than, “Hey, we know each other.”
John: Exactly.
Craig: Yes, and?
John: Yeah. There’s that. Craig, as a famous person I get to do a podcast with every week, always a pleasure.
Craig: Famous, quote unquote.
John: Quote unquote, famous.
Craig: Thanks, John.
John: Thanks. Bye.
Links:
- Do I Sound Gay? Documentary
- International Dialects of English Archive
- Accent Tag on YouTube
- Chilean beer ads in Star Wars
- Letter Jam
- TacticalMap
- Fallout on Prime Video
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nica Brooke (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 641: What Characters Know, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig decode the current state of software in the film and television industry. With dozens of programs needed for every project, they look at why bad and outdated programs continue to have a hold on the industry, why it’s so hard to build something better, and how these programs find financial success in such a small and specialized market.
Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where they give their honest feedback on three listener-submitted scripts. They offer insights into quickly establishing information, those scenes that can be written but not filmed, the tricky dynamics of a meet-cute, and why broad comedy demands logic.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig explore the exciting possibilities that comes from playing D&D campaigns with no magic and other strict constraints.
Links:
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: PLANET B by Christopher James, THE LONG HAUL by Becca Hurd, and THE RIGHT TO PARTY by Lucas McCutchen
- Submit your script for our Three Page Challenge!
- David Zucker’s 15 Rules of Comedy
- Space Cadet (2024)
- Movie Magic Scheduling
- Scenechronize
- PIX
- Qtake
- BOX
- Frame.io
- Evercast
- Scripto
- Fuzzlecheck
- Ripley on Netflix
- Watchmen – “This Extraordinary Being”
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Industry Software first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Meredith Scardino (Girls5eva) and Jen Statsky (Hacks) to discuss the highs and lows of writing the third season of a hit comedy. But how do you push a series forward without violating the premise or retreading familiar terrain? Are the shows still the shows they pitched? How has streaming changed since their shows first went on the air? And how do you plan for your series’ future?
They also answer listener questions on non-binary characters, past tense emotions in action lines, and how to make the most of a mentorship.
In our bonus segment for premium members: Two years ago John sent a letter to Jen with his predictions for what would happen in the third season of Hacks. That letter has remained sealed until now. Were John’s predictions correct, close, or way off the mark?
Links:
- Meredith Scardino on Instagram
- Jen Statsky on Instagram
- Girls5eva on Netflix
- Hacks on Max
- Chris Fleming
- Chris Fleming: HELL on Peacock
- Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go on Max
- Stouchi iPhone Camera Mount
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Rodger Corser (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The Third Season first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 640 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, the advice to write what you know has become an empty cliché, yet on this very podcast, we’re often advising writers to think about what’s personal and specific to their experience when crafting their stories. Along that axis, we recently had Celine Song on to talk about the many autobiographical elements of her film Past Lives, which recounts and reframes her experience as a child and as an adult. But it’s one thing to reflect on the past and another to deliberately place yourself in a perilous spot in hopes of getting a story out of it. Today we’ll talk to a writer who did just that and what came of it. We’ll also answer listener questions about talking with managers and talking to yourself. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, how do you set boundaries on material when you’re dating another comedian?
To help us through all that, let’s welcome our guest. Alex Edelman is a stand-up comedian, writer, and producer who has written for shows such as Teenage Bounty Hunters and The Great Indoors. His award-winning special, Just For Us, which has been touring all over the world since 2018, is out now on HBO.
Alex Edelman: Thanks so much for having me. It’s so cool.
John: Unlike many other guests who come on this show, you actually know what this podcast is.
Alex: Yes. When you join the WGA, that’s what happens. Howard Rodman puts a steak knife to your back. He’s like, “Do you listen to Scriptnotes?” I’m like, “Yes, yes, Mr. Rodman, I do, I do. I like it.”
John: People are so intimidated by Howard Rodman, because he has that presence, and so you had to pull out your phone and actually subscribe in your podcast app.
Alex: It’s the last step to getting health care is you have to actually subscribe to the podcast, to Scriptnotes. Look, I’ve always been interested in the craft. It’s such a silly, dumb thing to say. It’s like saying, “I like color.” But I’ve always been interested in the craft of writing. And the more granular, the better. Even the notion of what you were talking about, which is write what you know, I have a whole thing about the advice of write what you know, which I feel so strongly about. I love hearing writers talk about writing. I love conversations about craft. This is me speaking directly to the demographic of which I am most interested, which is also me, so I’m very excited to be here.
John: We both know Mike Birbiglia, but that’s actually not how we met. The true story is you were playing at the Taper here in Los Angeles, and friends had said, “Oh, you should go see it.” At the very last minute, 2:00 in the afternoon, I said, “Oh hey, let’s go see the show. There’s still tickets, a few tickets left.” My husband and I went down. Taped to my seat was a little envelope from you or your manager saying, “Hey, afterwards, come backstage.” I was so impressed that somebody was reading through the last-minute ticket sales and recognized my name. Well done.
Alex: Do you want to know what happened? Whenever I do New York or LA, I read the… I don’t have a manager, so it is me and also my crew. But I have an unfortunate tendency to miss friends and family who come, and then they get offended that I didn’t say hi. Now, I get a seat book about half an hour before the show. I don’t always read it, but if there’s family members coming or if someone I know is coming, but I can’t quite remember who it is, I’ll say to my stage manager, MC or Brian or Kathleen, the three folks I’ve worked with primarily, or Rachel – four folks.
But I think what happened was I had talked about the podcast or I listened to the podcast with one of my stage managers, and they went, “Hey, Alex, your favorite person’s here.” They were like, “John August is here.” I was like, “Oh, I wonder if it’s the same guy.” That was the impetus behind your note. But also, we let some people live their lives. They’ll be like, “Do you want to put a note on so-and-so’s seat?” I’m like, “That guy can just enjoy a quiet evening at the theater,” something like that.
John: You invited James Burrows back my same session. James Burrows, an icon, a legend.
Alex: Oh my god, I love Jim Burrows. I call him Jim because – no, I don’t know him well.
John: Because now you have a close personal connection after meeting him once.
Alex: Close friend. When I was writing on The Great Indoors, he was shooting on the lot Superior Donuts. I was at a garage sale. This will only be interesting to your listenership, and if it’s not, you can cut it out. But I was rummaging through a garage sale somewhere. And I found in this garage sale a Humanitas Prize certificate for an episode of Taxi called Blind Date, which is about Judd’s character in Taxi goes on a blind date, and she is overweight, and he treats her like a human being. That was so revolutionary at the time that it won a Humanitas Prize. I bought it for five bucks. It was literally five bucks. It was a garage sale. I brought it into work. I went down and I asked Bob Daily, who was running Superior Donuts and is a buddy of mine, I said, “Can I show this to Judd and Jim Burrows?” They both signed the Humanitas Prize certificate for me. I’m that much of a nerd.
But yeah, Jim Burrows is a legend. He shaped the face of sitcom comedy in the ’90s, ’80s, 2000s, everything. By the way, when I showed him the certificate, he’s like, “We actually shot that one with three cameras instead of four, and then we decided that three was better,” and walked me through the episode as if it happened last week instead of several decades ago.
John: I love when you meet these titans who have been in the industry forever and they’re still incredibly sharp. It’s none of that like, “Oh,” big stories about things, they can’t put stuff together. Clearly sharp as a pin and is thinking about tomorrow’s work.
Alex: Maybe this is a knock on me actually, but I’m very reverent of all of the older guys and gals and everyone in between. I hosted Norman Lear’s 100th birthday special for ABC. Getting to be in a room with Norman Lear, it’s really something. When Christopher Nolan accepted his Oscar, he said, “We’re 100 years into filmmaking. Think about how special it would be to be 100 years into music or painting.” Comedy is an even younger art form, essentially. Comedy is a very young art form. A lot of the people that built the face of it are still around or they died in my lifetime. I had the good fortune to be around a lot of these people. Mel Brooks is pretty sharp. I never was lucky enough to really have some time with Carl Reiner, but I was told he was very sharp. Norman was sharp as a pin all the way to the end, as far as I know. You’re just lucky to be able to share oxygen with these people.
John: We’ll look forward to another 90 years of your career, but let’s start back at the beginning, because before you did this show, you actually had a long ramp up. I’m curious where you start your story in terms of comedy. What were the first things you were doing in performing? You’ve done stand-up. You’ve written on traditional shows. You’ve done your solo shows. What’s the journey there?
Alex: Where do I consider my career starting? I guess in baseball, which is a really weird place. But I started at the Red Sox. I got a job when I was 13 years old. I wrote the Red Sox kids’ newsletter and just did general writing bits around the ballpark and got into the world that way and then fell in love with sports and then fell in love with comedy.
John: Back to the baseball. You were writing up what happened? Were you actually on the PA? What were you doing?
Alex: I wrote articles. I would stand in the press line and stuff like that or be in the press conferences in the back, scribbling stuff down. But I also worked in the office doing odd jobs and being a little amanuensis to this guy Larry Lucchino and this guy Charles Steinberg. Larry, who was a titan of the game himself, passed away actually last week. He was a really great guy, a really huge figure in the sport. They were amused by this kid who loved sports and loved history and loved writing and was always around.
They always found writing for me to do. I wrote a bunch of press releases. I’d write public address speeches. I wasn’t on the PA, but I was part of pre-game ceremony sometimes. This guy Charles Steinberg, who worked for Larry, had a flair for the creative. He would put together these elaborate pregame ceremonies to celebrate retirements or various other milestones. I was always part of dreaming up those ceremonies and executing them. It was very creative. It was a blast. To be an employee of the Red Sox between 2003 and 2007 when I left – they won two World Series, they ended this 86-year drought without a championship – it was really, really beautiful.
John: You’re doing this, and at what point are you moving from, “Okay, I’m writing stuff. It’s being printed places or being spoken aloud on the PA,” to working on stuff for yourself? What was the transition? Were you going to school for it? What happened next?
Alex: I was an Orthodox Jew, so I was going to yeshiva. I was in a low-key rabbinical school. Then I spent a year in Israel in a seminary there, thinking that maybe that was my thing. But it was stand-up comedy. I had gone to see this show called Comics Come Home that Denis Leary organizes every year, and still organizes it. They do it in a huge arena in Boston. I fell in love with comedy, and I started going to open mics at a pizzeria, at a music place.
John: How old are you when you’re going to open mics?
Alex: I’m 17 or so. It was dilettante-ish. I was writing around. I won a sports writing award here and there. I started fishing around. I got a summer job on the set of The Departed running drinks for the Teamsters. I was finding myself a little bit. But things really kicked into high gear in my last year of college. I spent my last semester of NYU, which was chock full of writing stuff – I had the best professors you could have. I had Zadie Smith. I had Nathan Englander. I had Jonathan Lethem. I had Darin Strauss, who was an English major, Megan O’Rourke, Susan Orlean.
John: Wow.
Alex: I had all-star lineup of professors. I’m extremely privileged in the education department. I am such a disappointment to so many of those people.
John: I want to talk about this. I want to go from open mics to NYU. When you’re at the open mics at the pizza places, what is your material? You’re 17 years old. You have a very interesting background as the Orthodox kid coming into these places. But were you talking about yourself or were you just imitating other comedy you were hearing?
Alex: It was terrible, wasn’t it? It was the worst, most horrible impressions of these Boston comedians. I’m sure you’ve heard this from other people on your podcast, but every time you get a great note… I love notes. I think they’re responsible for my work getting to a certain place. Whenever you get a great note, there’s a part in you that’s always known that it was true. There’s a little bit of you that, as soon as they start giving you the note, you’re like, “Yeah, of course. I knew that but was denying it,” or, “Yeah, of course, I knew that.” In the back of my mind, I was always like, “This isn’t really me.” But I was just trying anything I could to make people laugh. My comedy, there wasn’t much of me in it. But I was trying to get laughs. I had one good joke. I had one good joke that I limped along with.
John: Do you remember it?
Alex: Yeah.
John: Willing to share it?
Alex: The premise was I’d describe the scene from The Godfather where Sonny Corleone pulls up to the tollbooth. I would describe in graphic, long detail, “They’re spraying him full of bullets, and he gets out of the car, and then more bullets, more bullets, and he dies right there on the pavement.” After this long description, I go, “If that’s not the best commercial for E-ZPass I’ve ever seen.” Oh, wow, Drew likes it. Drew likes it, everybody. I was really terrible, but it was that one joke. At one point, I was at an open mic bombing, and a comic from the back of the room went, “Alex, tell your joke.”
John: Wow.
Alex: Which is so devastating and so true. I was just awful, but I was doing my best. Also, I think you need that time in the dark, that sort of incompetence where you’re too incompetent to know that you’re incompetent. It was the perfect time to start stand-up comedy, which is as a teenager.
John: Ira Glass has this speech where he talks about you have taste, but you don’t have talent, and you’re climbing both things at the same time. You probably had some taste, you knew what you liked, but you couldn’t do those things that you liked. You’re imitating. You’re trying to get there, and so you’re telling your one joke.
Alex: But you also don’t know what’s out there. Everything was within my very limited purview. I think I’ve always tried to see as much as I possibly can, because you never know what’s for you. People say write what you know. I guess we’re doing this.
John: We’re doing this. I think we’re into the meat of this now.
Alex: When people say write what you know, a good synthesis of that is what Norman always said, which is, “I’m just another version of you.” He would always say that to people, which is a handy thing to say if you’re doing a Latinx One Day At A Time.
John: Is this Norman Mailer, Mark Normand?
Alex: Norman Lear. Sorry, Norman Lear.
John: Norman Lear. Sorry, there’s too many Normans.
Alex: Sorry. Norman Lear would always say, “I am just another version of you.” He was really, really big on that humanist idea. The idea of write what you know to me always meant if you know humiliation, write humiliation. If you know fear or aspiration or a desire to fit in…
Everyone thinks that my solo show is about antisemitism, but I’ve always been insistent that it’s about the desire to assimilate and the cost of assimilation. No one will understand this more than you. What the story is versus what the show is about can be completely different things.
I didn’t really have exposure to good comedy for a while. I had exposure to some good comedy. Steven Wright would drop in sometimes, or I’d go see Brian Regan, or I once went to see George Carlin at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, although that memory is very fuzzy. I saw lots of comedy. The dominant culture in Boston was extremely regressive and extremely, looking back, kind of boring. There were only a few bright lights that stood out. I was off into it because of those comics.
John: What strikes me about stand-up comedy, unlike traditional writing, is that you have the immediate feedback of are people laughing or not. But you can also just become probably seduced by that laughter and just go back to your one joke, or you can get into these grooves and these ruts, that you’re just doing this one thing that is going to be successful for this thing, for this crowd, but it’s not actually pushing you forward, it’s not pushing your storytelling forward, it’s not getting you anyplace new. Obviously, going to NYU broke you out of some of that, and you’re being challenged by good professors. But when did you have a vision for what you actually wanted to do with your writing and with your comedy?
Alex: Such a perfect question, because the preamble is the thing that I always struggled to explain to people. Sometimes I’d come off stage at the Comedy Cellar, which is where I work on new material, and people will say, “Good set.” And I want to say, “No, it’s not a good set. I went up there wanting to try four or five new things, and I got a little scared after the second new thing didn’t work, so I shut it down and went back to the chestnuts that I know worked.”
If I never wanted to fail on stage again, I could do that. I have enough material. I have probably five hours of material that I know works bagged. I could if I chose to never push myself, never go on stage. Sometimes you go on stage and you come off and people are like, “Tough one.” I’m like, “I wanted to try two new things. I tried eight new things. Four of them worked. One of them did really well, and that’s money in my pocket.” It’s hard to explain that to people.
I really found it when I was in London. I went on stage with material. I don’t remember it, but it couldn’t have been very good. This was 2012. I was studying abroad. It was my last year. I was invited to do this show by this woman, Josie Long, who’s a great, great, great British comedian who now lives in Glasgow but also directs movies and writes short story collections. Truly probably one of my biggest role models. Josie had me on her show, which was called Lost Treasures of the Black Heart. It was at the Black Heart in Camden. You talked about forgotten heroes. It was a themed night. No one had told me it was a themed night, or I had forgotten. I showed up and I just did my normal material. It got laughs.
Josie pulled me aside afterwards in a very gentle way, was like, “Hey, just so you know, I think you’re maybe capable of more than that, than the clubby New York act that you delivered. Maybe you want to go and write something and just come back and try it in front of the friendliest audience you’ll ever be in front of.” I went away and I wrote something, and I came back and did it. I don’t know that it was great, but it certainly was the first time I felt a little more like me on stage.
My career really started in the UK. It was because I saw comedians who were a little bit more of an aspectus for me. I think that you can divide most, not writing, but most written products, film, TV, stand-up, even music, to aesthetic and content. It was the first time I had ever seen an aesthetic that worked for me, which was a long-form, thoughtful thing that the British-type solo shows that you see at the Edinburgh Festival and at the Soho Theater in London, which is a sort of theater that puts on these hour-long or 90-minute solo shows. Of course, with the best things, the aesthetic and the content are married to each other or they inform each other. As soon as I started seeing those aesthetic offerings, those shows, it completely changed who I was as a comedian. It really opened me up.
John: I’m picturing our audience here. We have a lot of people who are aspiring writers who are looking to do stuff down the road. At this point, you’re in London. You’re a senior at NYU. You’re studying abroad. Did you identify primarily as a student studying abroad or a comedian who’s at the start of your career? They’re kind of two different people.
Alex: I don’t think I cared as much about writing as I should’ve, or I don’t think I cared as much about collegiate writing as I should’ve. John Baldessari, who’s a conceptual artist, says that every young artist needs to know that talent is cheap, you have to be possessed what you can’t will, and you have to be in the right place at the right time. I’d always grappled with the first two, but I had this sense in London that I was in the right place at the right time. I hate the word “scene” but there was a scene going on. It was 2012, and these solo shows were having a moment.
I think a month into being there, I was at a bar. Not to be crude on your podcast, but somebody at the bar grabbed my ass really hard. I turned to the woman standing next to me, like, “Hey, will you mind helping me out? This guy’s got a pretty firm grip on my ass.” Not to be like, “And that was,” but that was Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Phoebe and I became really close friends. Phoebe was just working at Fleabag. I went to 12 different previews of Fleabag.
Just being amongst all of these great, genius people who were making the most fulsome versions of stand-up comedy to me was really intoxicating. I was a student of that when I got there. I sat and watched them do it for years before I tried it myself. That was 2012. I didn’t put my first solo show up until summer of 2014. I really took my time, because I really could see that this was the best version of what you could do. What I was doing by comparison was like a printer running out of ink.
I guess if you had to force an answer to the question, I guess I was subconsciously leaning towards it being a career, the comedy thing, instead of being a college student. But if you had asked me then, I don’t think I would’ve given you that answer. It always felt like a pipe dream to me. It still feels like a pipe dream to me. It really does. Being a staffed TV writer, being a professional stand-up, they all feel like impossible dreams still.
John: I do want to get to TV staffing in a sec, but first I want to talk about this format that you’re seeing, so Fleabag and these other solo shows. The difference between a solo show and a stand-up special or one comedian as a headliner, what is the distinction there? Is it because it’s all revolving around one central narrative? How do you distinguish between the two? You see the two things, and there’s a lot of overlap, but they do feel distinct now.
Alex: I always offer this. I try not to say this too much in public. I feel like I’m weirdly gatekeeping this. But if you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re probably my people. I always give this formula whenever I’m asked to teach anything solo show-related, that every solo show has four things, which is who you are, who they are, what happened, what’s changed. I think that’s bazillion-dollar advice.
By the way, I think I saw a tweet from someone. Who’s the guy who writes the Walking Dead? I remember reading a tweet of his years ago. He was like, “Something should happen in your scripts.” He’s like, “I’m reading lots of scripts where not enough happens.” He’s like, “There should be a story, like guy walks into a bar. Someone should do something, and something should happen.” I remember thinking, “That’s really interesting.” I don’t think my four things are informed by that, but I think in a really great solo show, something happens and something changes. One of those things can be way bigger than the others. By the way, those four things can be deeply submerged in your narrative. They don’t need to be the exoskeleton.
But if you think of your show as an essay, a college essay, with your setup and then three things and then a thesis, the setup should be where you start, three things should be something that happens, and your thesis should be summing it all up, seeing what’s changed by the end. The really great solo shows that I’ve admired have had that. Birbiglia’s shows all have that. He doesn’t want a baby in the new one, and then his wife’s like, “Maybe we should get a baby,” and then they have baby. Then that’s what’s changed.
John: Then he’s a dad at the end. I want to get back to your four points though. I get the first one, who you are, because you’re introducing yourself to the audience and who the character is that you’re presenting there. That’s very classic. But what do you mean by who they are? Is it framing the audience?
Alex: They can be different. They can be the world at large. They can be the group of people you want to be a part of. They can be your marriage. They can be the desire that you feel. Sometimes I explain the four things with Walking in Memphis. You know the song by Marc Cohn?
John: Um-hmm.
Alex: It starts with, “Put on my blue suede shoes, boarded a plane, touched down in the land of the Delta Blues in the middle of the pouring rain.” This guy’s off on this journey. Something’s happening. He’s like walking into a bar. Then he has all of these experiences. They are the people of Memphis. What’s happening is he’s immersing himself and trying very hard to become in and amongst this. He goes to Graceland, and he walks down the street, and he goes to Al Green’s church, which is something he really did. Marc Cohn really did that. He’s painting a picture.
Then the last thing he does, which wouldn’t work if it was the first thing, he sings at that café with the lady. It ends with a pretty good joke. She’s like, “Tell me are you a Christian child.” And he says, “Ma’am, I am tonight,” which is really a pretty solid joke for a Jew. Then the last line is, “Put on my blue suede shoes, boarded the plane, touched down in the land of the Delta Blues in the middle of the pouring rain.” That thing is completely transformed by its contact with the they.
The genius of the song is, who he is is Marc Cohn, the they is the people of Memphis, what’s happened is he’s changed by that, and possibly, because of that last verse, they’re changed by that a little bit. This guy walks into this bar, and the woman is like, “Do you want to sing a song?” He sings a song, which in real life was Amazing Grace, the only song he knew that she also knew. Everyone’s changed a little by it. What a beautiful thing that’s happened. That makes it unique.
The you is the person narrating, or your main character. The they is whatever world they’ve gone into. Bonus points if the world that they’ve gone into is one that they’ve used a lot of agency to head towards, because that’ll give you a much better what happened. Then the what’s changed is… Sorry to nerd out on it.
John: It absolutely makes sense. What I’m hearing is obviously we have the classic things setting up who you are. The character goes on a journey. They are transformed throughout the course of the journey. It’s a very much hero’s journey thing.
One thing I think is different about watching your shows and Birbiglia shows and really all the solo shows I’ve seen is that they are dependent on framing who the audience is who’s watching this performer, and there’s a conversation there, but it’s not the classic stand-up conversation, where we’re just waiting for the laughs or we are doing crowd work. It’s a very specific kind of conspiratorial, like, “You’re gonna come with me on this journey.” You’re inviting them to step into this place, which is different than what we would do in a normal stage show or in a screenplay. Obviously, you’re trying to get the audience involved and invested, but they’re also right there. You’re having to engage with them in ways that are very specific and different. I’ve done a Broadway show. Yes, the audience is important. You want them to laugh. You want them to cry and feel things. But they’re not part of the show the way that I think these solo shows need to pull people on stage with you.
Alex: What do you mean in terms of defining the audience? Having to speak directly to the audience as a form of direct address and direct where they are?
John: I’m thinking to your show specifically. We’re in the Taper, and you’re putting up your expectations of who the people are who have bought this ticket. I think you are calling out what this crowd is in Los Angeles, who these people are, and what you’re expecting they’re expecting out of you, is a thing that I noticed in these shows.
Alex: I’m just telling a story. In some ways it’s the rawest form, the most minimalist form of telling a story. The delicacy of that collective experience, the fact that at any point someone could stand up and ruin it makes it really special. That recursiveness is really fun for me.
But also, I wrote something – I can’t remember, one of the umpteen things that I’ve been writing or talking about in order to promote the special. I said that that sort of direct and immediate feedback loop is very rare. It’s like if DiCaprio got to look into the camera and be like, “Hey, this is the part where we hit the iceberg, and people get really sad here.” There’s a really interesting thing where you get to comment immediately on what’s happening.
But also, my favorite thing about the show or the form itself may be people not being sure entirely of the context. Should I be allowed the leeway that people aren’t yelling? My favorite moments are the moments that are very silent, very confusing, or where I tell the audience that I’m only telling you stuff that I think you’ll enjoy, and so the audience gets to wonder what they’re not getting.
I think solo shows can offer audience as a kind of mystique that a lot of other art forms can’t. I think the questions around the context and around whether or not you’re bringing the audience with you and how much is you and how much is them I think are probably one of the most special things about it. But I don’t know that stand-up comedy doesn’t have that too.
I totally understand when people draw a distinction between my show and stand-up comedy, but the truth is my last preview of the show before I brought it to New York City was at Comedy on State in Madison, Wisconsin. I did a comedy club where people bought chicken fingers and had a two-drink minimum and got a check.
I’ve always been really fascinated by people that can blur the line a little bit between genres. I’ve always thought my show was both heavily rooted in stand-up comedy and also absolutely theater. There’s a comic who I think is criminally underappreciated in Christopher Titus who used to do this. Colin Quinn does it. Mike Birbiglia does it. I’ve always liked stand-up and theater, and I’ve always thought a more expansive definition of both services the art forms better.
John: I want to talk a little bit more specifically about your show, your special. What is the short version? How do you describe it to somebody who’s going in, that doesn’t spoil crucial things?
Alex: The short version is about a guy, a Jew, me, who goes to a meeting of White Nationalists in Queens, and he sits there for a little while, and eventually, one of them’s like, “Sorry, but this guy’s a Jew,” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a Jew.” That’s roughly what the show is about. This real-life experience was the basis for this show. Of course, along the way, there are tangents into autobiographical stuff that I think is related to the narrative or conversant with the major narrative that has an underlying theme and is full of laughs, because I’m an entertainer first, so the show is like joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. But yeah, is this one narrative with a bunch of tangents, but never tangents on a tangent.
John: We talked at the start about writing what you know, but this is a case where you are deliberately putting yourself in a place, a position that is somewhat perilous with the intention of there’s gonna be material here, there’s gonna be a story to tell. Correct, or is that not fair?
Alex: If I’m being honest, I thought it was slightly too specific to ever become content. I just thought it was a fun story that I would tell my friends. Then I told enough friends that I respect who were like, “You’re doing this as stand-up, right?” I told my friend Danny Jolles, who’s a great writer and comedian. I told Morgan Evans, another great writer and filmmaker, and my friend Chloe. I told a bunch of people, and then eventually Adam Brace, who was my director and a playwright himself. Adam was like, “This is your show.” Adam was the one who stewarded it along.
John: What were they seeing in the stories that you weren’t seeing? What were they pointing out like, “There’s a journey here. There’s material here.”
Alex: I don’t know. Danny and another comic named Nick – Nick said something that made me think maybe it was a show, because I told him a thing, and then he responded with a punchline. I told him a detail from the actual moment, and he responded with a punchline to it. I was like, “That’s really good.” I was like, “That’s a really good joke.” Then I thought, “Oh, I want that punchline.”
I think every joke I ever tell has one reason for it existing, and it’s one moment in the thing. It’s either a funny face that you pull or a funny word that you say or a particularly interesting thought that you can somehow boil down to one line. There’s always a reason. I think Nick pointing that out – Nick Callas, really talented comic – he gave it really good heft. But I think Adam saw a thing that could unfold. Birbiglia, by the way, saw it more.
Birbiglia is the producer of the show in New York. When I told Birbiglia about the solo show, it was already a solo show. But Birbiglia went and saw it and was like, “You can pull out more. This can accordion out to something that’s more interesting, more profound.” I think the smarter people saw folds in that story that might be good, but it was Mike and Adam who saw different aspects to it. Adam saw something that maybe was tangentially geopolitical. Mike saw something that could speak a little to me as a person.
And then little notes from folks along the way. Billy Crystal is the one who suggested we move from a handheld mic to a headset mic. He said there’s theatrical potential in the story. I had lots and lots and lots of help from people who saw things in the story and provoked me, who offered provocations.
John: But because we’re a very process podcast, I want to talk about the process of going from, okay, you’re telling us an incident that you’re talking about with your friends, to, “This is a thing that I’m putting up the first temporary version of the show.” What is the writing process of going from that? At what point did you figure out structure and things? How early did you start showing that to people?
Alex: I had done maybe a joke or two about it in a stand-up set. But it was literally two, three minutes. It got some laughs. Maybe I told it on a storytelling night or something. But very special experience with Adam Brace.
Adam and I met my last semester at NYU. He was a British person. He worked on Fleabag, which his partner at the time, Vicky Jones, co-wrote with Phoebe. He was one of the voices and also was there at all of these early previews and I’m sure gave notes. I don’t know how big or little his contribution was. But he worked on countless great things. We worked on three solo shows together. He was one of my closest friends, if not the closest friend, for 11 years. He passed away right before we starred on Broadway. It’s a shame for him not to see this show finish its run. To say it’s a bummer is a bit of an understatement.
But Adam and I would drink – I don’t drink much, but I do with Adam – at this one table in Soho, at this place called the Soho Hotel. Adam had this notebook. When I was trying to get work together for new material gigs, I would sit down with Adam, and I’d throw everything at him, because I lived in the United States. Adam lived in England. Sometimes it’d be months before we saw each other.
I’d just come out of a room and was trying to get staffed. I wasn’t getting staffed. I had some meetings. It was very multi-cammy. I sat down with Adam and I just threw all this stuff at him. So much stuff. When I started telling him this story, his provocations were great. He was like, “What happened there?” I was like, “This and that.” He was like, “What could happen here? Maybe this speaks to an element of your personality. Maybe that could tie in with this joke. What if you massage this for this joke?” That story came together as a narrative pretty quickly, and then it went on stage probably two nights later. But it was amongst like 20 other things.
John: But when you say it came together and you’re putting it on stage, what are you writing down, and how are you writing it down? Is this just a Word document?
Alex: I’m not even writing. I think I had bullet points. Maybe there’s a sheet of paper somewhere with bullet points. Some people write with Word documents. I do write with Word documents sometimes. Sometimes I write on my phone. Sometimes I write in notebooks. Sometimes I write in various notes. This process for me is always like, if it’s good enough, you remember, and if you’ve got an accountability partner, which I had in Adam, he’ll remember. Adam had a notebook.
This is horrifying to say. Once, we started a run somewhere, and we figured out that the show was running three minutes light. I was like, “Why is it running three minutes light? Is my tempo different?” I looked at him. I was like, “Oh my god, I forgot that joke.” He’s like, “What? Oh my god, the vaccine joke’s not in there.” I was like, “Yeah, I forgot to tell the vaccine joke.” He was like, “The last eight nights, you’ve just missed. You’ve just missed.” By the way, the show’s already been running. The show had run in New York for like a year and a half at that point. I was like, “Don’t tell anybody.” He’s like, “No, no, no, I’m not gonna.” But he was like, “You forgot a chunk of your show.” It wasn’t even the vaccine joke. I think maybe it was the joke about Prince Harry that’s in the special. But I had completely forgotten a thing.
When the show started off Broadway, the PR people were like, “Can we get a transcript for press?” I was like, “There’s no transcript.” They were like, “What do you mean there’s no transcript?” I was like, “I just tell the story with the offshoots.” They were like, “What do you mean you tell the story?” At some point, a review appeared, and Adam sent me a picture of it with something circled. I called someone who worked with me, and I was like, “Do you guys generate the transcript?” They were like, “Yes.” I was like, “Is it out of an audio recording from this date?” They were like, “How did you know?” I was like, “Because I said something one time in that one show, and it showed up in this review.” It’s a thing that has been completely excised from the show. The word choice I didn’t care for.
John: That’s wild.
Alex: I’d never wrote anything down, which isn’t to say there weren’t reams and reams of paper that were important for this, writing down little bits of things or trying to cut extra words out. Sometimes I’ll write down a sentence and try to examine if I can cut one or two words to trim the facts. If you do that cumulatively, you can wind up saving double-digit minutes over the course of 90. That’s super granular.
But I’m very anti writing stuff down, because as soon as you do, it starts to calcify in the brain, and I think it removes your potential for growth, unless you sit down consciously and write again. You need the synthesis of preparing off stage and writing on stage. That time that your brain is alive in the show is really important and valuable. Look. John, you know, and everyone who writes who’s listening knows that there are moments where you’re in the zone and you’re in the flow. When you’re on stage, you are by necessity in the flow. You are stress tested into that tightrope energy. Maybe I could write it down, and I just am operating from a very old data set.
John: As we’re recording this, is there a written script version of Just For Us?
Alex: Yes, but I’d probably take a look at it, because I don’t know that it’s accurate. Shows should be conversing with the moment that they’re in and also an escape from it. We recorded the special in August. Then October 7th happened. Not to get into anything too prickly, but October 7th happened. My show is about assimilation and whiteness and Judaism. I wrote a line to open every show that we did after October 7th, and then Israel as a weighty subject got called back towards the end of the show. It’s not right that it goes in the recorded version of the show, because hopefully there will be at some point a resolution to this horrific conflict, the one that is occurring right now in Gaza, but also the larger one. You’d like your special to be an evergreen one, so you don’t want to date it by putting in something temporal. But at the same time, a live experience is a very different one. You have to give people a live experience.
When we were editing the special, Alex Timbers, the director, and I, we cut out some of the things that happened in the room that night that were just there for the Broadway audience, because doing something for the audience at home is a completely different product.
There is a written version somewhere. In fact, I know there is, because it’s gonna be released as a play at some point. I just heard that someone’s gonna license it to do it, which I’m very interested in seeing. I’m really fascinated in seeing it. Any written version would be obsolete to me the next time I perform it. It’s a really weird, sedulous double bind, I guess.
John: Let’s wrap up by talking about the actual writing you’ve had to do for other folks and where there is actually a script that things have to be shot. In the midst of doing the solo shows along the way, you’ve staffed as a TV writer. Why did you want to do that? What was cool about it? What was challenging about it? Talk to us about you as a TV writer.
Alex: I have learned so much from my showrunners. I have had the best, best, best education, not just at NYU, but I worked on The Great Indoors, which did one season on CBS, so it’s not like it lit the world on fire, but my showrunner, Chris Harris, and my creator, Mike Gibbons. I worked with these great writers, like Liz Feldman, who did Dead to Me, and Tad Quill and Craig Doyle. Everyone on that writing staff has had a very fruitful career as a television writer. I learned so much about story and so much about structure in a way that helped me with my work.
There’s no way I could’ve written my solo show without the sort of guidance that structuring television could’ve provided me. I felt this really keenly during the strike, that if you nourish a TV writer, you’re nourishing a novelist and you’re nourishing a playwright and you’re nourishing a songwriter and you’re nourishing a performer. All of these talents cross over, and all these crafts cross over. I got a pretty good sense of that as soon as I started writing for television, even when it was non-union award show stuff. I was like, “Oh my god, I’m picking up stuff. I’m learning a lot.” I think that learning really helped. And then all the more so getting to work with Jenji Kohan on Teenage Bounty Hunters. We adapted something for Netflix that didn’t go, but we loved and are still trying to do. I’ve worked with the greatest people. I work with truly the most incredible folks.
There’s even a bit in the show, which is something that I do in life now, that I took from Chris Harris, the showrunner, who I think is running Frazier at the moment, actually. Chris would do this thing when another writer said something to him that I know Chris didn’t want to engage with or couldn’t engage with, he would just go, “Can you believe it?” In my show, I’m in this meeting, which happened after I had gotten out of the writers’ room, and someone says something to me, and I don’t know how to answer. I just went, “Can you believe it?” which is something I learned from Chris Harris. Chris is thanked, and the special thanks is, “Chris Harris for a very useful four-word phrase in the show.”
Look, man, you get paid a pretty good amount of money – not enough money, but a pretty good amount of money – to sit in a room with folks who have been professionally curated for how smart and funny they are, you’re gonna pick something up. I loved being in a room. I can’t wait for the chance to do it again. I’ve gotten to organize my own, occasionally, for little things that I’ve written for the BBC, or I was telling you about before this, I do this thing called Saturday Night Seder, which was a thing I put together with Benj Pasek, who’s a songwriter.
John: Yeah, composer, songwriter.
Alex: He did Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land and Greatest Showman in the beginning of the pandemic.
John: They did the song in my movie Aladdin.
Alex: That’s right, that’s right. I remember. Those guys are such, such geniuses. Benj and I were complaining to each other over the phone that we weren’t gonna be able to do anything for Passover, because everyone was locked inside of their homes. It was beginning of quarantine, 2020. Benj was like, “We should do an online version.” I was like, “Let’s put a writers’ room together.” We put together this writers’ room with Sas Goldberg and Michael Mitnick and Josh Harmon and a whole bunch of TV folks. Everyone was just sitting at home. Just even over Zoom, being in that room was so nourishing and fun. We would scream and argue and joke. We wrote all these sketches for Bette Midler and Idina Menzel and Josh Groban, and we raised $3 and a half million for COVID relief. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to be a part of. It didn’t enrich anyone except for those lucky goddamn nurses who got all that PPE.
John: Totally.
Alex: It didn’t enrich anyone. Those nurses have had it too good for too long. There’s nothing like the collective of a writers’ room, really, under any auspices. It’s just the best thing in the world.
John: I don’t miss almost anything about the pandemic, but I do miss the permission it gave you to do things that were wild and nuts. We had live shows on Zoom. We had Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Ryan Reynolds on for an episode. Those were reaches that we felt possible, because I was on a Zoom with Phoebe and Tina Fey earlier in the pandemic. Everything was possible in a way, and that was exciting.
Alex: I loved it.
John: Before we wrap up the wonder of writers’ rooms, what were your samples that got you The Great Indoors? What were they reading that said, “Oh, that’s who we should get.”
Alex: Oh my gosh. No one’s ever asked me, but I love this. I wrote a sample that I still love so much. It’s a little frustrating to me, because sometimes I will meet people in the wild, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I’ve read Celestials,” which is the name of the sample. They’re like, “What a great sample.” I was always like, “No, I wrote it as a TV show. It’s supposed to get made.”
It’s set in Heaven, but not like dead people Heaven, like Earth doesn’t exist yet Heaven. It’s cubicle farmy and a workspace. Because there’s no established rules to what it is, it’s a little bit surreal. This guy who’s essentially an intern comes up with a pitch for Planet Earth, and he shows it to a bunch of people in the architecture department. They’re all these Scandinavian figures. They’re like, “This is pretty stupid,” except for one guy who’s like, “It’s pretty interesting.” He’s discouraged, and he throws it away. But one of the other interns, who’s really ambitious and doesn’t like him, puts it in God’s suggestion box. God is a 12-year-old girl with an iPhone, because that was the scariest thing I could think of. God gets fixated on one detail, which turns out to be kittens. She’s like, “I love this. Just go do it. It won’t cost too much. Just go do it.” She demotes their boss to work with them and gives them the Scandinavian architect who thought it was a good idea.
It’s basically Genesis. Also, it was about millennial workplace dynamics, because everybody that I knew was in this sort of place in their live where they were just getting out of college or they were three, four years out of college, and they wanted all this responsibility, but they didn’t really know what to do once they got it, and they had no hope of getting it.
I wrote this thing. Thankfully, Chris Harris was like… The Great Indoors is about millennial workplace dynamics. He read it. I came in for the meeting. He went, “You really know this world.” But again, it’s that thing, write what you know. It’s very heightened, but it’s grounded in that, like, I know what it’s like to want more responsibility in a workplace and clearly not be ready for it. That was my sample. Again, no one’s asked me about that in five, six years. But I love it. I’m sure if I read it, I would cringe a little bit. Every so often, someone’s like, “I love Celestials.” I was like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe… ” That was my sample that got me staffed on The Great Indoors. God, they were so patient with me. It’s where I heard Who Jackie for the first time and “can the floor be wet” and all these other writer inside jokes. I love it and miss it so much. That probably was one of the best times of my life. It was fantastic.
John: Nice. We have two listener questions here that are related to this. Drew, can you help us out?
Drew Marquardt: Gordon in LA writes, “My writing partner and I submitted our comedy pilot to our new manager. Pilot’s been through many drafts and received very positive reviews from peers and fellow writers. We were anticipating more positive feedback from our new manager, who we both recently paired with. The feedback call with the manager went about as bad as possible. He totally misunderstood the comedic tone, going so far as to ask whether the pilot was meant to be a drama. Bottom line, he didn’t find it funny. The manager wants us to rewrite the pilot into a more digestible broad comedy, which are more sellable in the current TV market. He has no interest in sending this draft around town. We’d be happy to write a different script as a broad comedy, but the chief question is, if your manager doesn’t find your writing funny, is it time to find a new manager?”
John: Oy.
Alex: It’s a really tough question, isn’t it?
John: Yeah. My first agent, I shared the script for Go with, and he didn’t get it. I moved to a different agency that got it. That’s certainly possible. Alex, I wonder whether Gordon’s script is good or it’s not good. We can’t read it ourselves.
Alex: I’m trying to find the gentlest way to say this. This is from a stand-up comedian’s brain. Comedy should ideally communicate very clearly to as many people as possible. The challenge of threading the needle and making something that reflects who you are and your authentic voice comedically while also resonating with the audience that you’re intending it for, it’s the biggest craft challenge. It feels like for whatever reason, your manager has not been able to get there.
You can put it on your script, or you can put it on the manager, but your WiFi’s not working. Something is broken, and so you should try to figure out what that is. But if you sent in the pages and they’re not getting it from the page, and that’s a pretty good sample of what that is, and if it’s just bad luck of the draw, and out of 100 people, your manager is the one person that that’s not for, you need to figure out why that reason is. Gordon, I’m not saying that it’s your case, but usually the case is a craft failing. I wouldn’t take it as a super four-alarm fire that your manager, quote, “doesn’t get you,” but I’d take a look at the pages and I’d take a look at the manager and see if it’s all, I don’t know, copacetic.
John: I don’t think you should rewrite this thing to make it funnier, because that’s not gonna be satisfying to anybody. If he doesn’t want to send this out, it’s because he doesn’t think it’s gonna help. You have to trust him that he has some sense of whether he could send it to people that would actually respond to it. If you’re gonna write something new that’s a more broadly funny thing, if there’s something you can do that is more clearly broadly funny that actually does work in your voice, I would go for that, but you may also need to look for a different place.
Alex: Also, the one question I’d also ask is if you want to be broadly funny. Not everybody wants that. Everyone’s comedy tone is different.
John: Drew, next question.
Drew: Tom in Warwickshire writes, “I lost my voice this weekend, and whilst trying to remain silent to help myself recover, I became very aware of how often I talk to myself, as in literally talking aloud, not just an inner monologue, albeit in a hush tone. While I know a lot of people talk to themselves, it made me wonder if I’m in part influenced to do this because I’ve seen characters in movies do it. We’ll often see characters vocalize what the audience is thinking, for example, someone following another person whilst trying to remain unseen and saying, ‘Where are you going?’ I’m interested in what you think about this technique and when it’s used to best effect.”
John: Tom we know is British because he says “whilst.” “Whilst” is just such a specific shibboleth word. Alex, do you talk to yourself a lot?
Alex: In the shower, like, “Oh, water is everywhere.” No, I’m just kidding. I think I talk to myself a lot. I more often sing to myself out loud, because I badly want to sing but don’t want anyone else to hear it. When I’m alone is the perfect time to do Baby Shark.
If a character monologues to themselves, I’m like, “What are you doing?” But also, it may be a conceit of film that I’m just comfortable with. But maybe subconsciously I’m like, it’s a little bit cheesy, because when you hang on a lantern on it, I’m like, oh yeah, that is annoying when someone’s like, “Where is he going?”
John: When it’s convenient, it doesn’t feel earned. People do talk to themselves in real life. You do experience it. I’m sure there’s some psychological study where they actually documented what percentage of people do speak out loud to themselves, their inner monologue is expressed outward. Sometimes it can be a compulsion. There was some producer of Matt Damon or Ben Affleck’s who was notorious for, if they were riding down a road, he had to read aloud all the signs he saw. That’s a thing that happens too. I wouldn’t worry about it for Tom. It’s nice that you’re recognizing that that’s a thing you do. But I will say recognize when you do it, when you don’t do it, and if you’re gonna have characters do it, make sure it feels authentic and real.
Alex: A thing that I do that I’m embarrassed to admit, but I will, I will have a side of an argument that I will never actually have in real life.
John: Oh, 100 percent. You gotta rehearse it.
Alex: It’s the first cousin of l’esprit de l’escalier, the spirit of the staircase, the thing that you figure out what you should’ve said when you’re at the top of the stairs in the party instead of the bottom of the stairs getting into the Uber, so the, “You know what? I’ve worked hard for this, and you don’t know.” You’re talking to someone who may or may not even be aware of the fact that you exist, but you’re having a big argument. The thing that I would question in shows is whether or not that advances character or story. I don’t know sometimes.
John: To some degree, it’s doing the function of a song in a musical, that it’s exposing the person’s inner life and what’s actually happening behind their eyes. I don’t see people rehearsing that one half of an argument on film that much, but lord knows I do it constantly. I’ve had so many arguments with folks that have no idea that I was ever actually angry. It’s a thing I’ll talk about in therapy.
It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book by Jordan Mechner. He and I did Prince of Persia together and other shows. He created the video game Prince of Persia, but he’s now actually mostly a writer and an artist. He created this graphic novel that he drew himself as well. The story tells three intersecting timelines of different generations of his family. It’s 1914 with his grandfather in the Austria-Hungarian Empire during World World I, 1938 with his father who was fleeing the Nazis into France and trying to get his family all back together, and then 2015 when Jordan moves to France, the same time that I was there living in Paris, as his marriage is falling apart and he’s trying to get his family to move to this new place. Really brilliantly done. I’m reading it now in English. It was out in French last year. I tried reading it in French, and it was just over my head. But it’s really great. Jordan Mechner, really wonderful storyteller and actually a really good artist now too. We can be very jealous of everything Jordan Mechner does. It’s called Replay-
Alex: What?
John: … by Jordan Mechner. It’s in bookstores everywhere now.
Alex: Seriously? Are you serious? It’s called Replay?
John: Replay.
Alex: I swear to god this is not planned. The thing that I want to suggest is called Replay. It’s a book that I reread recently. It’s so cool. It’s by a guy named Ken Grimwood. It’s a science fiction novel or a speculative fiction novel. It’s about a guy who dies on the fourth page of the book and then wakes up in his dorm room at 18.
John: Oh, love it.
Alex: Then it’s this time loop thing. I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that he gets to the same age in his second incarnation and then he dies again and he wakes up again. Now he’s stuck in this loop. It asks these more interesting questions about what it means to live your life when you have a chance to do it again and again and again. The book is very entertaining and is very cool and is very fun. I feel a little weird suggesting – I know that people when they come on and they suggest a cool thing, they usually suggest a thing that is contemporary, but I really like the book. I think it’s brimming with ideas. Occasionally, I have brought it up with someone else, and they also like it. It’s one of those books that has a secret fan club. I think it’s really cool. When I reread it, I was kind of riveted. I can’t believe that.
John: They’re both books called Replay.
Alex: I’m just blown away.
John: They get to the replay mechanics in different ways. One is a time loopy kind of thing. One is the generational cycles that you go through in terms of moving and trying to reestablish your family, coupled with video games are meant to be replayed. That’s wild.
Alex: Can I just say for the listenership that is listening, John’s face showed zero surprise, zero, when I said Replay. It was so cool. I was almost really disconcerted by it. I was like, “Did I reach out to tell them that this is my… ” I definitely didn’t. But you were one cool customer when I was like – because that was me, when I’m like, “Huh? What?”
John: What? That’s impossible.
Alex: Replay by Ken Grimwood. Wow, I am gob-smacked by that coincidence. Wow. I’m really, really blown away by that. I have to read Jordan’s book now.
John: This is where Craig would remind us that we’re in a simulation and sometimes there are just blips in the simulation and this is just one of those little things.
Alex: By the way, the Prince of Persia video game is very good.
John: It’s so good. It’s so good. It was a classic. He’s great. The Prince of Persia movie is not so good. But the script Jordan wrote for it originally, before it got changed, was actually terrific. You should read his book and see what a good writer he really is.
Alex: One of my favorite things is to read scripts for movies that seem a little high-concept and don’t quite work. Sometimes you read the script and you’re like, “Oh my god.” Liz Meriwether’s script for a romantic comedy – I think it was with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman – it was called Friends With Benefits, but the script originally is called Fuckbuddies. The movie still has great moments, but the script is hysterical. The script is laugh out loud. Every moment on the page is so good. Reading scripts for movies that don’t always come together is such a beautiful-
John: A delightful thing. That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ali Clifton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on dating funny people. Alex Edelman, it is an absolute pleasure to talk with you about your show and all things.
Alex: This is so much fun. This is such a blast for me. I love this podcast, so to be on it is… Sometimes I’ve had chats with other people who listen to this podcast, so I really look forward to hearing from the folks that I know who do. This is so cool.
John: The people who text you to let you know that you’re on Scriptnotes this week.
Alex: I genuinely will get text messages from a bunch of writer friends or people who are aspiring writers, and I love them all. These craft conversations are my absolute favorite thing. I hope I didn’t get too granular for the folks listening. If I did, I apologize.
John: Not even possible.
[Bonus Segment]
John: You are writing about stuff that is happening in your real life. You are performing. You’re on stage. You’re talking about things. You are also sometimes dating people who are in that same space of comedy. Are there issues that come up with like, “Okay, don’t talk about this. Do talk about this,” “I want to talk about this,” you’re talking about the same things? How often does that come up in a conversation?
Alex: I’ve always liked the idea of talking about my relationships and things like that, but it’s never really been a huge part of my stand-up. Maybe it’s because I started stand-up so young that no one actually wanted to hear me talk about dating, that people would rather hear me tell stories from my life that don’t make them think too hard about whether or not they’re additional characters or something like that. I don’t know why.
In the pandemic, I would do this Zoom show called UnCabaret, which in real life is also a beloved storytelling show in Los Angeles, and tell stories about my partner and how dumb I was in front of my partner. They liked that.
But my first partner was a comedian in England who would constantly make jokes about fictional boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend or something. I was always very comfortable with her fictionalizing me. I was very comfortable with her taking real things and spinning them. I like when stand-up comedy has a degree of mystique to it or a degree of embellishment to it. I think that’s where the artistry oftentimes lies.
But with that said, I’ve also dated someone or people who don’t want to be talked about in my stand-up. I’ve been very clear about that from the get-go. I have respected it even when it’s something I really want to say on stage. Obviously, your primary partner is gonna be a huge, huge fountain of material, and especially how you relate to them is gonna be a huge fountain of material. But I always try to err on the side of not embarrassing my partner, especially the ones who have tried to draw a clear boundary there. But something funny happens to both of us, and you’re like, “Who owns it? Who owns it?”
John: That happens with other folks who are writers. I know many two-writer couples, and so there’s issues of who’s gonna do the thing with that stuff. The difference is though if I’m writing a script with other characters and I’m using this moment that happened and I’m putting it in a character’s mouth or creating that situation, there is a distance there. But if you are doing a one-man solo show as Alex Edelman, and you’re talking about this person you’re dating, a very natural sense of, like, oh, that’s the real person.
I feel like I know Mike Birbiglia’s wife, Jen, just because she’s been a presence in all the stuff he’s been doing for the last 10 years. I feel like she’s a live character there on stage, even though I’ve never met her in person. You have to have a conversation clearly with people about the edges of that.
Alex: I’m sure there’s an edge for Jen, and I’m sure there’s an edge for Mike. I think it’s a very scalloped edge. It’s really hard to tell sometimes what people are gonna be upset about or what they’re gonna be thrilled by. But also, Mike figures generously in Jen’s poetry, I imagine. In fact, I know he does, because sometimes he reads it on stage. With two-writer couples, what they should do is… When Michael Green and his wife, Amber, had that samurai attack on their home, they were able to together create Blue Eye Samurai.
John: Absolutely. Together, they were able to make Blue Eye Samurai, and really what a moment that was. But like you, it wasn’t their home. They moved to Japan specifically so that it would happen, and it changed everything.
Alex: Although sometimes, by the way, you get differing perspectives. I’m sure there are many examples of a schismatic marriage, and you wind up with the Nora Ephron side and the Carl Bernstein side. By the way, sometimes you only end up with one side and are tasked with remembering yourself that there’s another.
Also, sometimes people are like – even though I don’t talk about my partners – “How does your family feel about your depictions of them in the show?” It’s like, first of all, they’re mostly fine with it. Second of all, there’s artistic license taken and exaggeration that you should assume for the grace of the people being depicted. You should always assume a curatorial bias.
One of my partners and I, we were living below a five-month-old baby, and I wrote a joke about it. My partner was like, “You know what? That’s happening to me more. You’re on the road mostly. I’m stuck at home. The baby crying and waking you up, it’s happening to me tenfold times over.” I don’t know if she ever did anything with it.
John: Did you agree that you didn’t get to use the joke or that you’d have separate versions of the joke?
Alex: I don’t think we ever came to a consensus on it, but I also don’t think it was a huge argument. But it is definitely a problem. There were other instances of that where I think we did have a conversation. Something happened on a hike, and I was like, “That’s really funny.” It happened to the partner, and the partner was like, “That’s not your story. That’s a thing that happened to me.” I was like, “But I watched it happen, and my take on it is I think the funnier thing.” Of course that was a whole different argument. They were like, “How dare you.” Ultimately, I was like, “Right, you have the story about the hike yourself, and that’ll be your thing.” I genuinely tried to argue, like an idiot. I was like, “Look, that traumatic experience that you went through, I also – because I subjected you to the trauma and made you go on the hike, I should be able to do that.” The chutzpah of that argument I think was really like – I wouldn’t make it now.
John: Let’s say the partner gets the actual story of the incident that happened, but you do own your reaction to what the thing was. Do you feel that’s fair to fictionalize what the inciting incident was, so you can get to the point of how you felt about the thing?
Alex: I think it’s fair to fictionalize everything, so yes. I am very adamant about what’s best for the material is what’s best for the material. Usually it’s the truth. But it’s very interesting to me. I’m not even Jewish, so me going to that meeting is really-
John: Wow, it really was a brave choice.
Alex: Yeah, a brave choice.
John: I think the fact checkers are gonna come after you for that.
Alex: Of course. The funny thing is that I think fictionalizing an inciting incident is always what an audience should kind of assume. Things are streamlined. I think fictionalizing an inciting incident to differentiate from the version that your partner, also a creator, may depict is a really interesting thing to do, and in fact, might be a good creative exercise.
John: I see Alex is jotting down notes as he’s doing this, like, “Save the hike story.”
Alex: But by the way, if the funny thing is the reaction, like I said in the main body of the episode, every joke that I tell has a reason for existing, and the reason is usually off-story. The reason is usually aesthetic-related or craft-related or performance-related.
I had a thing I was excited about. Someone said to me, “I don’t think you should do that. It’s too similar to this Doug Stanhope bit.” I don’t really know Doug Stanhope’s material, but I went, “Okay, what if I found a more circuitous route to delivering that line? Maybe I’d wind up with something better.” And it did.
You can always differentiate the account from your partner’s. I also think that’s really interesting for a couple to do. But again, I have very different comfort levels and boundaries than most people, so sometimes I try to account for how my partner will feel or how an audience member will feel or how someone who may have been in a similar situation at a point in their life will feel.
John: Cool. Alex, thank you again for this conversation.
Alex: Thanks so much for having me, John. I hope I didn’t talk too much.
John: No, it was awesome. Thank you.
Links:
- Alex Edelman
- Just For Us on HBO
- Replay by Jordan Mechner
- Replay by Ken Grimwood
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Ali Clifton (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 640: Can You Believe It?, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The oringinal post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 639 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, why are you or your characters doing what you’re doing? We’ll look at intrinsic motivation, both on screen and in the brain, because Craig loves neurobiology.
Craig: Love it. I love it.
John: Love it. It’s good stuff. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, will human beings ever leave the solar system?
Craig: I have an answer for that. We’ll save it for the people that paid for it.
John: Absolutely. Craig, happy birthday.
Craig: Aw, thank you, John. 53 years old.
John: Nicely done.
Craig: Prime number. Always like that. Always enjoy a prime number. Still in my early 50s.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Still in my early 50s. Hanging onto the early 50s. I know that for people in their 20s, early 50s is hysterical. Oh, congrats on your early 50s, grandpa. Back in the day, John, you were in your early 50s, you were on a glide path to the golden watch-
John: Absolutely.
Craig: … and retirement on the golf course and then rapidly ensuing death, I think. Now it feels like you’re just getting started.
John: You are. You’re literally just warming up.
Craig: Just warming up. The mere presence of statins to control your cholesterol, that alone-
John: That alone, it’s a lot.
Craig: My goodness.
John: I’m sure you’ve seen all these memes about the cast of Cheers and the actual age of the cast of Cheers when that show started. You realize Kelsey Grammer is 29 or something.
Craig: Coach is the one that always rattles, because Coach is 56 or something, and he looks like he’s 80, and died shortly thereafter, by the way. He didn’t live long. I don’t think he made it past the second season.
John: Which is how we got Woody Harrelson.
Craig: Woody Harrelson. But yeah, Cliff is 35. I don’t know what was going on. I don’t know what was going on.
John: I’ve seen explanations that basically, a lot of how we perceive people in older photos and stuff is because people set their clothing style and their hairstyles when they’re young, and they carry those forward, and we associate those hairstyles and ways of dressing as being an older person. That’s why when you look at photos of your parents when they’re in high school, they look old for their age.
Craig: People wanted to be old. When you look at the people on Norm, for instance. I don’t even know what Norm did for a living. Did they ever even say?
John: Yeah, they did establish it at some point. Cliff was the mailman.
Craig: He was an accountant. Norm was an accountant, and then he loses his job and wackiness ensues. But if you were a 34-year-old accountant, you wore a shirt and a tie and a rumpled jacket and that was it. People wanted to be grown up. Remember how much you wanted to be grown up?
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: Now I feel like no one wants to grow up.
John: I’m thinking about my kid. She does, but I don’t know, there’s also a celebration of youth. I get that.
Craig: And being current. I think they felt older. I think they wanted to be older. But now, here we are in our early 50s and 20s, still wearing sneakers and jeans. People just didn’t do that. I don’t know, maybe we should go for the more rumpled-
John: That’s what we should do.
Craig: … middle-aged guy look.
John: We’ve established on the show I intend to live a very, very long life. I don’t want to jinx that by saying-
Craig: You do.
John: Yeah, but I’m fine living to 100 or 110.
Craig: I’ll tell you what. You’re gonna live as long as you live. That’s the best part. You just keep going, and then it stops.
John: We’ve talked about this also on the show. You have no intention of retirement, or does that hold any appeal to you, or is that like a beach vacation, where it doesn’t?
Craig: It doesn’t hold appeal to me currently. In my mind currently, retirement means failure, like you failed so bad at what you were doing that an entire industry said, “We’re done with you. After all this time, we’ve collectively decided you should eff off.”
John: It’s a soft cancellation.
Craig: Yeah, a soft cancellation, exactly. I could. Then the question is what would I do?
John: You’d play a lot of D&D.
Craig: I would play a ton of D&D and solve a lot of puzzles, not go to the beach, hellscape. I have a purpose. It keeps me going. Man, there are days. I love it so much that even when I absolutely loathe it, what else am I gonna do?
John: You do your thing.
Craig: It’s a hard job.
John: It is a hard job running a show, keeping a universe going. Let’s do some follow-up. Many times on the podcast we’ve talked about AI, including this experiment we did a year ago, feeding the Scriptnotes transcripts into a model. We found the results that came out of that really disappointing. Ben wrote in with some feedback on that.
Drew Marquardt: He says, “I’ve spent the last decade at Google working on creative and AI, machine learning, then generative AI for video. The models like ChatGPT and Gemini are amazing, but as you’ve found, relatively generic for specific tasks like story analysis, and are missing things like discernment or taste. You’ve also found that narrow models, like those trained on your show transcripts, are only mediocre. What this perspective is missing is human in the loop training, or HILT,” I’m gonna say hilt, “where someone tells the model that this output is good and this one is bad, on and on and on as the model gets better. The world models won’t do this for script analysis, because the use case is not important enough. You probably won’t do it for the show because it’s too time-intensive. But if you did, or someone did, the models would get better quickly and could even be trained on a director’s taste or an executive’s taste. You could input Denis Velleneuve’s body of work and find projects he would like. If you trained it well enough, it could help steer and shape them based in ways he would or might, and these patterns on top of patterns are opening up whole new ways of interrogating storytelling and taste.”
Craig: Ben is basically collaborating with the Borg. That’s what’s happening. I understand that it’s been difficult for you guys to assimilate into the Borg collective. However, I’ve been working hard, and there is a method where we can assimilate you much faster, and then you can assimilate your loved ones much faster. And eventually, we’ll all live in a cube in space.
John: It’ll be fantastic and great. I want to talk about a few things here. First off, this idea of training on taste. It’s actually been happening in Hollywood forever. Development executives are trained on their boss’s taste. It’s not just what do we think is gonna make a good movie, but what do I think my boss will actually like, and what do I know my boss will not like? There are specific red flags, and you never show those things to your boss. Sure. That may not be a great way to model what’s actually gonna be a successful movie, what’s gonna win the Academy Award, but it’s what’s going to get it through the next step of the process.
Craig: It’s funny, when Ben used the example Denis Velleneuve, in my mind at first I imagined Denis going, “No, it’s not possible. No one can understand what I want to do.” And then I thought about Denis, because he is the most humble man. I could actually see him going, “This makes sense. I believe actually computer could tell me what to do next, maybe better than I could do,” because he’s lovely. That’s my bad attempt at a Canadian French accent. I understand what Ben’s saying. All I know is that it’s all horrifying, and I kind of wish it would stop. I really do. I don’t like this at all.
John: Some of what Ben is describing we actually see in daily practice at Netflix. The Netflix algorithm, which is showing you, this is a thing you might like, it has that human-reinforced training, because it’s saying, oh, did you actually watch this whole thing? It’s taking you having finished watching a thing as a marker that you liked it, even if you’re not clicking the thumbs up, thumbs down, like, oh you must like this. We’re gonna feed you more of this. It has all the patterns for figuring out, this is other things you’re probably going to enjoy. But on the creator side, it’s a little bit more frustrating, because they will tell you, oh, if you don’t show this plot point within the first 10 minutes, people are unlikely to finish the show. Those can be frustrating notes to get from that.
Craig: It will be regressive. There was a time before the world of television, for instance, as we know it, where everything was driven by this research nonsense. Every show started to look the same. Everybody needed a dog or a funny next-door neighbor. Then it was a big challenge for shows that didn’t fit that model to even get on the air, much less get watched. But then some of them did and were huge hits, of course, because it turns out just because we say we like something doesn’t mean that’s all we like. Everybody likes fried chicken. If a restaurant that was famous for 17 different things decided to only do fried chicken, you’d be like, “Okay, I guess [unintelligible 00:09:09],” but otherwise, no.
Then television just opened up into this glorious – we’ll make anything, no matter how weird or bizarre. I don’t think AI would’ve done a very good job of that. Movies have now regressed, so it sort of flip-flopped. So many movies became cookie cutter nonsense, based on research and so forth. But maybe the success of some outliers might be getting us away from this.
But nonetheless, my sister of all people emailed me the other day, and she was saying there was somebody that was talking to her about this AI predictive platform that will tell you what shows and movies will be a hit. It just never ends. They just keep trying. I don’t think that’ll ever work.
John: It won’t work. We lived through a time of classic testing of movies and TV shows. We’d have test screenings. You’d get numbers, like, how did you do on your top two boxes, and that was a big predictor of your success. There you were actually showing it to a real audience. The experience as writers and creators was, I can hear it with an audience. We can actually see and feel how the audience is responding. Sometimes those were useful, much more useful than the numbers were useful. I’ve also done TV shows back when they actually had dials.
Craig: Turning the dial.
John: They were turning the dial. The problem is, the dial is not really showing whether you’re gonna watch that next episode. It’s just how did I feel in this moment. Turning those dials is not a good marker. The other big problem with classic research and some of these AI model research is that it can only account for what’s inside their realm of measurability. They can see, oh, did this person complete the show. But did they actually like the show, or did they hate-watch the end of the show? You don’t know.
Craig: You don’t know. Did they think about the show a week later and change their mind? You don’t know.
John: You don’t know. All the other outside factors, like what’s happening in popular opinion about it, is there water cooler talk, what are the critics saying, that’s not factored in. And that’s a big factor in whether somebody really enjoyed that program and wants to keep watching that show or wants to watch another season. You don’t know.
Craig: Also, what we do in part is designed to surprise. If the system is designed to provide you something different, the most exciting thing is something that is excellent and different. How is a machine supposed to predict excellent and different? It’s hard to account for surprise. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
John: Please.
Craig: Gödel. Kurt Gödel, wonderful mathematician, proved that within any closed set of mathematical rules, like our math, there will always be some things that are true that cannot be proven, which is a bit of a mind-bender. He actually proved that. I don’t know how. These mathematicians are operating on levels that I simply don’t understand.
John: And thus you need postulates and axioms and other things that are just fundamental givens.
Craig: They prove all of them, actually. It’s quite remarkable. But you can’t create a system that accounts for everything that is true within the system. There will be some things that are true that cannot be proved, which is why, for instance, there are things that we know that are true that take years and decades and centuries to prove, like Fermi’s paradox and so on. This I think is true for entertainment. There will always be things that will delight people that you cannot account for, given the known set of what delights people.
John: It’s true.
Craig: Good luck. Why am I taunting AI? I should stop taunting AI.
John: Let’s move on to some more follow-up here. We talked about blueprints and whether blueprints are a good way to describe what we write.
Drew: David G writes, “I used to work in construction management, and I would say that it is probably the most similar field to filmmaking than any other. By the time we finished building a building, most of the time, the building ended up looking exactly like the blueprint had shown. However, during the building process, we would request something called an RFI, or request for information, to the architect when we got into the field and something didn’t work, either because something unforeseen was in the way or for any other reason we couldn’t make it work. While by the end of the project the structure and idea of the building is like the blueprint was showing, lots of little changes were made to keep the project moving. Sounds like a movie, right?”
John: It does.
Craig: Kind of does, yeah. I get RFIs all day long. Every prep meeting I have. Sometimes I get an RFI that I’ve already gotten 12 times, but someone new texts me the RFI. I’m like, “Oh my god, if one more person asks me this question.” Yes, I think as much as we want to metaphorize filmmaking to construction, it’s still not great. It’s a tough one. I think sometimes the best metaphor for turning a screenplay into a show or movie is turning a screenplay into a show or movie. That’s what we should be linking back to. It is very within itself.
John: We talked about important movies two episodes ago. We had a lot of feedback on that. Let’s start with Brandon, who’s talking about games.
Drew: Brandon wrote, “I work in games, and this is a question that often comes up in that medium, particularly from younger writers and narrative designers, not just, do I need to have played whatever game, but do I need to play this entire genre.”
Craig: Oh my god.
Drew: “It’s even worse in games than movies, because games are such a comparatively huge time suck. It naturally leads to a lot of people with imposter syndrome quietly wondering whether they need to go drop $40 and 60 hours of their personal time or risk being laughed at out of the room.
“The answer I always give regarding this question is, there’s no single game you have to play to make a great game of your own. Many of your favorite games were made by people totally ignorant of the genres they wound up defining. However, playing those canon games everyone gushes about can help in two very specific ways. One, it prevents you from reinventing the wheel during that early, high-level pre-production phase when you’re trying to figure out what stuff you’ll need to figure out from scratch versus what someone else has already figured out 20 years ago. And two, it gives you a handy box of touchpoints and easily communicated shorthand when you’re up against a weird problem and need to find a clever solution in a hurry. Writing a 1,500-word design document for a dialog system takes a lot longer than saying, ‘You know, like Mass Effect,’ and dropping a YouTube link.”
Craig: Those are all great points, Brandon. I’ll add a third thing. It keeps you from coming up with a genius idea that then everybody turns, looks at you, and says, “You mean like the ending of blah-dee blah?” The point is, no, you don’t have to do everything, and also there are other people. It’s okay if someone raises their hand, says, “I’m so sorry, but that was in blankedy blank.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. Damn. Back to the drawing board for me.” Among the group, hopefully, people have seen the important things. Also, wait 20 years and people forget the things that everybody knows.
John: Some pros and cons here. I’m thinking of examples of outsider art where people who came completely outside of a system ended up making amazing things, because they just did not know any of the conventions of the genre or what had come before them. That can be really exciting. But you also have hysterical examples where people just didn’t understand what music was. I can’t think of the name of the band.
Craig: The Shags.
John: The Shags, exactly. The Shags.
Craig: They’re incredible. Frank Zappa called The Shags the best band there ever was.
John: They had just no sense of what-
Craig: None.
John: … rock-and-roll music was.
Craig: They had no sense of tempo, rhythm, lyrics, melody, instrumentation, or arrangement, coherence. It is a remarkable to listen to, and that’s why Frank Zappa said if you presumed that what they did, they did intentionally, they would be the most brilliant musicians of all time, because no musician could do that naturally. But of course, it was also terrible.
I think people maybe get a little too obsessed with watching everything, playing everything. What happens is you turn into more of a critic or a repository than you do a creator. And the more stuff that’s banging around in your head, the more likely it is that you’re gonna play this weird, “I have to do something no one else has done before” game, which will send you down some weird, artificial, over-engineered pathways.
John: An argument for sampling, and sampling broadly, is it helps you figure out what your taste is, what do you actually enjoy, what do you love. I would say don’t just play these games, but actually figure out what is it about this that’s working for you, what is not working for you, why is this a good experience for you, and so not even being so mechanical about what I’m gonna take from this, but basically how is this making me feel. That applies to games and to movies and to TV shows. What is it about this that you love? You can carry that forward, rather than this specific stuff, like this plot or this mechanic.
Craig: You get a chance maybe to play a game that you enjoy on one level. Let’s say I love the gameplay, don’t like the story. This game, love the story; game is so boring. What if I took the stuff I liked from this and stuff I liked from this, put my own spin on it? Because when Neil was working on The Last of Us – it’s a zombie game. There have been a billion zombie games. It’s a third-person shooter. Been a billion third-person shooters. But there had also been games where there were these interesting two-person relationships that weren’t really AAA video games and there wasn’t a lot of action. Fusing these things together is really interesting. Jonathan Blow, who has made some incredible indie games-
John: Braid and other things.
Craig: Braid is a great example of somebody saying, what if you took a very simple platformer, added a little quirky backwards time unroll element, but then tell a story that is so bizarre and deep and rich and weird and kind of Vonnegut-ish, and you get something remarkable like Braid.
John: In the case of Blow and Braid, you have to have played enough of those games to understand how platformers work and what the conventions are in order to be able to subvert that.
Craig: You follow your love. If you have this real deep love for a certain genre, what do you do now to do your own weird spin on it? Rian Johnson made Brick. He loves noir films. I’m sure he watched a gazillion of them and then thought, “I also love John Hughes movies. Now, let me see about smushing my loves together.” But he understands the rules.
Kevin Williamson, clearly so deeply immersed in the world of classic ’80s VHS slasher movies. How do you take all that knowledge and remix it into something that feels current and interesting? I think follow your nose and you’ll find your genre. But you don’t have to play everything. That’d be crazy.
John: That actually ties very well into our next question, our next follow-up here.
Drew: Paris writes, “Looking through your list of important movies, I realized I’m totally screwed. I’m 24 years old. I was born in 2000, and I wasn’t exposed to many films growing up. I began trying to catch up in my 20s, but there’s so much I haven’t seen. It’s overwhelming. I looked through the list and made a highlighted version of my own films, and I’ve seen 85 out of the 400. If the 1970s were on there, I’d be toast. Any advice where to start? I don’t want my lack of cinema knowledge to affect my writing.”
John: Paris sent through their highlighted list of things that they’d missed, and there’s really great films on their list of what they’ve missed. My advice to Paris would be to start in the 2010s, pick three movies you’re curious about, watch them, and then go back a decade, and then go back a decade. Let it be fun homework. Don’t feel like this is a thing you have to do. Just really follow your curiosity down this rabbit hole and see what it is that you like. I don’t think if Paris were to say, “I’m going to spend the next two years and every day, watch a movie off this list,” I don’t know that’s necessarily the best use of their time.
Craig: No. It will also, again, turn you into a movie critic. You’ll become a culture hoarder, as opposed to somebody that’s watching things that they love, because the entire exercise will feel forced and artificial. One method, Paris, may be to pick a movie from a director that has a bunch of movies on this list. Scorsese probably has a bunch on this list, Soderbergh, Coppola. Watch one of their movies. See if you like it. If you like it, keep watching their movies. A little bit like playing every track on an album. If you started with Do the Right Thing, for instance, if you loved Do the Right Thing, check out some more Spike Lee movies. If you watch Raging Bull and you love it, it’s time to switch over to Goodfellas or Mean Streets or King of Comedy. Same with the Cohen brothers. It might be better to just find the filmmakers you love and follow them. And then every now and then, just stick in a random one.
The other option is you can just say, “I’m gonna watch one of these dramas. Every month I’m gonna watch four movies. I don’t care. Just four. Each week I pick a different genre.” Drama, comedy, thriller, horror, whatever it is. Just mix it up. Keep it light. It’s not homework. You’ll be fine.
John: I would also say movies can be social experiences. See if you have friends or somebody else who wants to get in this movie club with you. Then you can have a discussion about what you saw.
Craig: Absolutely. One of my great joys now that I’m old-
John: 53.
Craig: … 53 is I get to show movies, especially from the ’90s, which ’90s were great for movies-
John: Great years.
Craig: … to Allie, who’s in her 20s, or to Bella, who’s just in her 20s. I showed Bella Matrix for the first time. I showed Allie Godfather for the first time. That’s so much fun. The other thing is, find somebody older who is like, okay, I think you will love this. Let them be your AI, who knows you, thinks of your taste, and goes, “I think you’ll love this.” And most importantly, I always say to anybody I’m showing a movie to, “You get to pull the rip cord whenever you want.” If you’re bored, I don’t care if it’s The Godfather, whatever, if you’re bored – give it 30 minutes. You’re bored after 30 minutes, next movie, or we’ll go have a sandwich. That’s fine. It shouldn’t feel like you’re eating gravel.
John: 100 percent. Last little bit of follow-up on here from Willy.
Drew: Willy in Dublin writes, “I want to push back on the idea of movies that you absolutely need to see or ones that you can ignore. For sure, you can be at a disadvantage in a professional situation if you haven’t seen canonical works, but I think that people who have different experiences can make valuable contributions to the creative process, as long as there is a lingua franca for collaboration. What’s the point if everyone thinks the same?”
Craig: Multiple logical leaps inside of Willy’s comment there.
John: Yeah, I would say.
Craig: So many.
John: Yeah, a little straw manning.
Craig: Yeah, just goalpost shifting. First of all, you say, “I want to push back on the idea of movies that you absolutely need to see or ones that you can ignore.” So you mean to say you want to push back on the idea that – you contradict yourself within that first statement. Which one are you pushing back against? Because if they’re movies that you can’t ignore, that means you absolutely need to see them, and if they’re movies that you don’t absolutely need to see, then there are movies that you can ignore.
John: I think Willy’s pushing back against this idea of canonical lists. These are really arbitrary lists of-
Craig: Of course.
John: … 100 movies that a lot of people seem to like and a lot of people talk about as the movies of that decade.
Craig: Nobody is suggesting that if you don’t see those things, you have, quote, “no valuable contribution to the creative process,” nor do these movies contribute to a “lingua franca for collaboration.” Collaboration is an entirely different thing. If everybody sits down and is forced as an entry point to watch the same 100 movies, there is no chance that that means that they will now, quote, “think the same.” No. They’ll argue about them all.
John: But to go the other illogical extremes, you have the example of The Shags. If you are the screenwriter who is The Shags, who has basically seen no other movies and has no understanding of how movies work, you’re gonna write something that’s gonna be perhaps fascinating on a textual level, but it’s not going to be a movie.
Craig: I’m not sure that you would be writing a movie. The Shags are such an incredible outlier, because they didn’t want to do it either. Their dad made them do it. They didn’t know. They had neither the desire – I guess we’re gonna be talking about motivations shortly. They had no motivation to do what they were doing, other than their father being like, “You can become the next Partridge Family.” And they just tried their best.
John: Good stuff. Let’s get into our main topic here. On April 6th, the New York Times Connections puzzle had the words “desire,” “drive,” “resolve,” and “will,” which were the four that lined up. And the category put for that was “intrinsic motivators,” which is nice, a good way of looping those together.
Craig: Interesting way [crosstalk 00:25:51].
John: We talked a lot on the podcast about motivation, about goals and needs and wants. Episode 569 we talked about inspiration versus motivation and touched on some of this. But I thought we’d dig in a little bit deeper on intrinsic motivation, which is basically what is driving a person internally to do a thing versus the situation. It’s not about external forces like deadlines or ticking clocks or circumstances. It’s about something inside them that’s driving the character to do a thing.
Craig: They have a list of things that they require something to meet to be considered alive. It needs to reproduce. It needs to ingest and possibly excrete. But my favorite one is it needs to show irritability.
John: Interesting.
Craig: Irritability is reaction to stimulus. We have, as living creatures, an innate irritability. Things bother us and create a want. But the interesting thing about humans, and certainly when we’re writing characters, these irritabilities can sometimes be physical in nature. People have been asking forever, what’s the whole point of this? That makes you irritable, not knowing things. Curiosity is a great one. So what is the intrinsic motivator for Hercule Poirot? He wants to know. Somebody could say he’s really committed to justice. I don’t think so. In his spare time, it’s not like he’s working down at the courts as a prosecutor. He’s just curious. Curiosity alone is a spectacular intrinsic motivator.
John: That’s a thing they can actually study in animals. You think animals are just responding to stimulus, so they’re trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but they will actually go into an electrified area, because there’s curious ones in there. Certain animals will do these kinds of things.
We talk on the show sometimes about negative intrinsic motivators, so fear, shame, jealousy, self-doubt. But I’d like to talk a little bit more about the positive version of those, the actual drives, because I’ve been watching shows and movies recently where I feel like after two hours or eight hours, I still couldn’t really tell you what is motivating them internally, what the positive intrinsic motivators are, what’s their desire, drive, resolve. If it was a musical, I couldn’t sketch out their “I want” song. There isn’t one in there. They can feel a little bit lifeless, because as humans, I know they should have something like that driving them.
Craig: When this happens, we tend to refer to the characters as flat or thin, two-dimensional. And it’s because the characters are only apparently motivated by circumstance. But ideally, circumstance is the second thing that happens. The first thing that happens before the show or movie even starts is they already are irritable about something. Something is missing. Something must be known. Something must be uncovered. Are you a BBC Sherlock fan, by any chance?
John: I watched all that.
Craig: Loved that show. One of the things that I love about it is when Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have a case, he starts to go insane. He wants to smoke. He wants to shoot heroin. He loses it, becomes violent and irritable. That precedes any circumstance that comes along. Sometimes we end up with these characters who are defined simply by their job, their present circumstance. Then a new circumstance happens, and they have a new job to do. But who are they? What happens when this job ends? If I’m supposed to stop caring about them when the job ends, why would I care about them now, while the job’s still going on?
John: That is the real frustration. It could be that the story really is the writer and how the story is being structured. It’s just not given any opportunity to actually explore those things. That character may actually have those things, but we as an audience aren’t getting to see any chance of that, because they’re generally not musicals so there’s not a chance for them to fully articulate what it is they’re doing or having some other character they can talk to about the thing. We need to find ways to structure and expose what is that internal drive that’s pushing them to a thing.
Craig: Now, there may be moments where you show a circumstance, and that circumstance becomes the internal drive. But it’s soon. You don’t want to wait around forever. And that circumstance that creates the internal drive must be clearly separate from the new circumstance that is the main body of the plot.
John: Exactly.
Craig: I can’t tell you much about the character Joel in The Last of Us leading up to his daughter’s death. He works in construction. He’s a contractor. He seems all right. I don’t know his internal states. I don’t know what his intrinsic motivation would be. She dies. Twenty years later, now I understand what his intrinsic motivation is in general, whether it’s to avoid or whatever. Then the new circumstance begins. But it is within the context of that prior irritability. As much as possible, when you’re thinking about – you at home, when you’re thinking about writing the story and the characters, you need to know what the problem is before the problem shows up.
John: There’s generally either a lack or some other object goal that’s out there that’s a little bit more vague, but a thing that they’re trying to do. There was a New York Times story this last week about a guy who was really good at quiz shows and quiz competitions and how he went from little, small ones to bigger ones and ultimately ended up applying to a specific university in the UK so he’d get into the university quiz challenge system, but then got there and found his teammates actually weren’t any good. He pulled out, because he only has one shot to do this. They had to reframe everything around him. He was really driven. It’s the kind of character who if we were doing a How Would This Be a Movie, you love, because you can definitely see why he’s trying to do what he’s trying to do. It’s not some external thing that’s pushing him. He clearly has a drive to enter this challenge and succeed and to win. He needs this thing.
Craig: But of course, I want to know why. What is the thing that I can connect to that is universal? Even though his expression of that thing is unique, I want what’s underlying it to be anything but unique.
John: Absolutely. That goes back to where we first meet this character and how he first gets introduced to this world of quiz competitions. It was probably that moment which he first said, “Oh, I know all the answers to this thing,” and suddenly, he was better than everyone else around him. It’s that desire to excel, to be seen as being better than everyone else, but also there’s an internal state where he needs to see himself as being so good at this.
Craig: I love those things. I, like just about everybody, love Queen’s Gambit. Scott Frank is as good as anybody at this. My favorite episode of Queen’s Gambit was the first one. First episodes are notoriously difficult. But what was so beautiful about the first episode was that he took the time, lots of time to tell us all about this person before the obsession began and before the plot began, to create irritability. She was lonely. She was abandoned. She was in pain. She was self-medicating. She was desperate for something to be good at, something that made her feel good. And there were two things that made her feel good: drugs and chess. Watching her begin to fall deeply into both of those was such a gorgeous way of showing how sometimes these things that we think of as just awesome, like being the best quiz solver or being a chess master, are in themselves forms of self-management for conditions that are common to us all.
John: A movie I loved this last year was Nyad. It’s the story of Diana Nyad and her quest to be able to swim from Cuba to the United States. In that, there are external things that she could gain by doing this, but clearly it’s an internal drive. She has this unique obsession with being able to do this and being able to prove to herself that she can do this thing, and that’s what’s pushing you through the whole movies. We see the consequences on everybody else around her, and yet we’re still rooting for her, because we can see – we don’t want to be in the water there with her, but we can see why she wants to do it.
Craig: We understand the underpinning. If all Moby Dick were about was whale hunting, no one would care. It’s really important to create that essential irritability, to find the grain of sand under someone’s skin. It’s usually something that they are not born with, but it is the result of some circumstance. If it’s innate from birth, that means there was nothing to create there. You want to have something and the environment that causes a disruption that is specific to somebody before you then cause a really big disruption to them.
John: I’m gonna put a link in the show notes to this article, this review in the National Library of Medicine, that’s really talking through intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators. They actually did scientific studies on how these drives actually function in the brain and in actual human beings and talks through the different theories that built up over time for how this all worked. When you actually put people in labs and MRIs and you’re monitoring how they’re doing things, you get this sense that what is happening internally versus externally are related, but there are distinct things that you can see there.
What it really comes down to is the importance of agency, the ability of a person to say, “I am choosing to do this thing.” We see that in real life where you have a kid who loves to do a thing, and then the minute you talk to them about the thing they love to do, they don’t love to do it anymore, because it’s no longer their unique thing. Also, it’s the ability to envision an outcome and plan the steps towards it are crucial for intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation.
Craig: That’s a really interesting point, the idea that you need to see an outcome. Your characters must – we talk about a goal. I think a lot of times, people think too much in terms of the external nature of that goal. But part of what we all do as humans is envision success. Envisioning success is rarely about the circumstance. It’s about the feeling. We don’t want to win because winning is good. We want to win because winning feels good. Why? What is it doing for you? What negative feeling is it taking away? What negative thought is it replacing or contradicting? What is it proving? How is it going to remove your irritability and make you feel good? To me, envisioning an outcome is entirely about envisioning a feeling that you desperately want.
John: It’s not just about where you’re gonna get to, but how it’s gonna feel when you get to that place.
Craig: All about feeling.
John: They outline what they call a Rubicon model, which is five steps, which is whenever a character’s facing or a real person’s facing a thing, there is a pre-decisional deliberation, which is basically where you’re sitting and you’re thinking about what your options are. You have intention formation, which is your planning. It’s the anticipation. It’s thinking about how you’re gonna do this thing. Volitional action, which means agency. You’re making a choice. You’re doing a thing because you want to do it. You are achieving that outcome. You’re consuming it. And crucially, then you’re also evaluating it. We’ve talked about this on the podcast. It’s not scoring the touchdown. It’s getting the kiss from your wife afterwards. That’s the real achievement.
Craig: It’s the relationship at the end. When you look at these five things, what they remind me of most immediately is Dungeons and Dragons. Right now, you’re DMing a campaign; I’m playing. Woo! Inevitably, there’s a circumstance where it’s like, “There’s a room in there, and we know there’s a bad guy and we know there’s another bad guy. Let’s come up with a plan.” Notoriously, plans go awry in D&D. It’s designed that way, because if your plans always worked, what fun would that be? It would just be like, “Oh, we’re the dream team in the Olympics. Ha ha, we win.” But we do all these things. There’s so much deliberation, prediction, planning. Then we do the actions according to the things we want to achieve. There is an outcome achievement, which hopefully is a victory. And then there’s a postmortem about how we did it, how we could’ve done better, how we did better than we thought.
But here’s the crazy part. It’s not even real, and it’s so satisfying, because as humans, we can model real outcomes and get the same hit off of them. That’s why we like movies and TV. They are modeled outcomes, where we watch other people achieving a feeling we want to feel. And we get a little whiff of their crack hit. And that’s worth the subscription to Max or whatever. That’s what all of these things are.
That’s what I love about what we do. We are creating situations for people where they can sit back and watch somebody else go through all this hard work and suffering and then get the win. In real life, suffering sucks. A lot of times, the win when you get there does not feel at all like you thought it would feel. In fact, there is a shocking emptiness that can occur sometimes when you get there and you think, “I was meant to feel all of this, and I don’t feel any of it. Now what do I do?” That’s always fun.
John: I would say part of what was leading to this segment was some recent movies and some TV shows I was watching I felt like weren’t working on these levels because it was just like, you were killing the monsters. You did all the step threes. You took all the actions. But I didn’t have that lead-in to the options, so it just felt like you were on rails the whole time you were doing this thing. And I didn’t get the reward afterwards, because I couldn’t see that, did we actually do the thing we wanted to do. I didn’t feel a sense of victory.
Craig: You didn’t feel a sense of victory because probably in this circumstance, the characters couldn’t have really felt the sense of victory. They could’ve just realized it. If you don’t have that preexisting irritability, that thing that we can connect to, and you’re put into a situation where you have to do this impossible thing or else a lot of people will die, okay, I’ll do it. I did it. Good. That’s what you end up with. Good work, you. Roll credits. But that’s not what we’re there for. We’re there for understanding something deeper was satisfied. And if we don’t have that in place before the person shows up with the job offer, then we’re just not gonna be as engaged.
John: This outlines intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic rewards. Whatever you do and whatever you achieve should have a mix of the two of them. Intrinsic rewards: agency and autonomy, so a sense of control, a sense of achievement, enjoyment, and interest, that you actually enjoy, the characters inside this world enjoy doing this thing, these interests; and novelty, which basically this was a new thing for them they were able to conquer. The extrinsic rewards are things we’re always used to, so food, social status, money, a sense of safety. Those things we can expect. But it’s those intrinsic rewards I think so often we are not rewarding enough in our characters. We’re not giving them a sense of this. They’ll survive this thing, but they haven’t had a good time. We haven’t seen them enjoy it.
Craig: Have you seen Game Night?
John: I love Game Night. It’s so good.
Craig: Game Night’s wonderful. It’s a great example of this. They do such a good job of setting these characters up as people that love games. They love winning. It excites them. It excites them and it also brings them together. It’s the thing that makes them love each other is that they’re really good at unraveling puzzles, answering questions, and winning a game. That’s enough irritability for us, because when you jump into the future, that’s a little wobbly now, and then this new thing happens, and we get to watch their enjoyment of it, and they fall back in love with each other again. The characters need to get a hit off of this stuff. If it’s just a grim slog, then how am I supposed to enjoy this? If you can’t enjoy any of this – and it’s gauged in subtleties. If you have a very grumpy character – and I’ve been writing one of those for a while now – sometimes just the tiniest smile tells us a million things. But we need to know it’s happening, or else it just doesn’t matter what you do, Grumpy’s gonna be grumpy. That’s not gonna make us happy.
John: Last little takeaways here. I would say if you’re looking at your story and you’re worried that we’re not getting a sense of what their intrinsic motivations are, are they curious, are they out there, are they looking through various options, are they foraging, or are they doing what you’re telling them they need to do? They’re being forced into a situation by your plot?
Craig: That would be bad.
John: That’d be bad.
Craig: Passive characters, which generally no one likes, are not merely passive because they don’t do stuff and stuff happens to them. Sometimes they’re passive because they’re doing stuff, but they only have one choice. If there’s no choosing, their actions feel passive, because what else are they gonna do?
John: I guarantee you could say this story, the characters, it has no choice but be passive. They don’t have any choice. They don’t have any options. They’re in prison, literally. There are great prison stories. The reason why those great prison stories are great prison stories is, within their narrow set of options, they are making real choices and they’re taking agency.
Craig: That’s right. If you end up in a situation where someone’s like, “We need you to do the following impossible thing. There’s one way to do it. This is how you do it,” and you say, “Got it,” and then you do it – now, even this little thing in Star Wars, like, there’s only one way to blow this thing up. You gotta shoot this thing down a hole, and that’s the only way to do it. That is what he does, but before he does it, he turns off his targeting computer and uses the force. He makes a choice. And that choice is why that works. Otherwise, think of how terrible that would’ve been.
John: Bad sequence.
Craig: You have to do this thing. We showed it to you on a computer graphic. “I did it.” Great.
John: All the other complications you’ve thrown at them, it’s like, “Oh, but now this thing is in your way. This thing is in your way.”
Craig: Who cares?
John: Doesn’t matter.
Craig: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. The only way to win this is to hit a hole in one. Okay, I hit a hole in one. Yay. Meh. Whatever. Whereas Tin Cup – have you seen Tin Cup?
John: I’ve seen Tin Cup.
Craig: Oh my god, one of my favorite endings. Have you seen Tin Cup?
Drew: No.
John: Ron Shelton.
Craig: Ron Shelton. Great movie. He’s got this thing where he’s stubborn, he’s very good, but he’s his own worst enemy as a golfer. He tries to hit too hard. He hits too long. People keep telling him, “You gotta lay up,” meaning instead of going for 200 par, just hit the ball short and then hit it again and you get 100 par. It’s better for you. It’s smart. He ends up in this situation where he’s gonna win this tournament, he’s bounced back. Everyone can’t believe it. And he has a chance though to just make the most awesome shot ever over this water trap. He has to hit the ball super far to do it. They’re like, “Don’t do it. Just lay up or it’ll cost you the tournament.” He’s like, “No, I’m going for it.” You’re like, “It’s gonna happen.” He hits that ball, and it goes right in the water. Then he’s like, “I’m doing it again.” He hits the ball again, and it goes in the water. He hits the ball again, and it goes in the water.
People are like, “He’s blown up his career, the tournament, his life. He’s stubborn. He’s learned nothing.” He does it again. He hits the ball, and it goes all the way over the water, and I think it gets in the hole. I can’t remember. But the point is it gets over the water. It’s an impossible thing. People go crazy, like, “He did it.” You understood then, just doing the thing you were supposed to do, you always have a choice. That’s why Ron Shelton’s just brilliant at that.
John: Excellent. As we wrap this up, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this NIH study. Also the story of Brandon Blackwell, who was the quiz bowl champ, which is a great story. All the UK listeners are saying, “Of course Brandon Blackwell. Everyone knows that.”
Craig: “Everyone knows Brandon Blackwell.”
John: But not here in the U.S.
Craig: Brandon.
John: Brandon.
Craig: Brandon Blackwell.
John: An American.
Craig: Bloody American.
John: Bloody American.
Craig: Coming over here winning our pub quizzes.
John: Let’s do some listener questions.
Drew: Proud Dad writes, “My daughter is a high school senior, and she was accepted to both the USC screenwriting program and Princeton. In our 30-minute morning drives to her high school, we listen to Scriptnotes faithfully, and it’s still one of our favorite memories. So thank you for being in our carpool for so many mornings. This might not be a fair question, because we know Craig doesn’t think school has anything to do with being a screenwriter.”
Craig: Correct.
Drew: “And we know that John did the MFA program at USC. But we would love your thoughts as if you were weighing the pros and cons with your daughters. Long-term, my daughter would love to work in television, but she’s very passionate about playwriting and is torn between either USC, where industry contacts and writers’ room opportunities are common, and Princeton, where she can learn from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and playwrights. We’d love to hear your thoughts.”
Craig: It might be too late here, huh?
John: It could be.
Craig: Complicated also is that I went to Princeton, so now you’re dealing with both of our alma maters. First of all, congrats.
John: Congrats.
Craig: Thanks for listening.
John: Both good schools.
Craig: What do you think, John?
John: Obviously, it’s whatever she wants. She has to make the decision between these two places. If she really believes that she wants to work in television, then USC will be great for that, because she’ll get that television experience. But all that said, I think undergrad is really about learning how to learn and learning how to do all the other stuff that’s interesting and exciting to you. It’s all the classes that are not about film and television and playwriting. And that’s gonna matter a lot more. She’s not gonna go wrong either place.
Craig: I agree. I don’t know how this ended here, but my guess is that she should go to the place that she feels the most excited about going to. She should go to the place that makes her feel good. She should envision her goals and see where they fit better. Princeton does have a remarkable creative writing program, and they’ve always had remarkable teachers there. The late, great Toni Morrison taught there, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates. You certainly would learn from remarkable people. That said, I’m not sure that makes you a good writer. I think that just makes you somebody that sat in a room listening to great writers talk.
There’s only one person that can make her succeed at what she wants, if what she wants continues to be what she currently wants – because that changes – and that’s her. It doesn’t matter where she goes. It truly does not matter where she goes. If she’s good at doing this, she’ll be fine coming out of Princeton, she’ll be fine coming out of USC. There are loads of people who graduate from USC, Stark, the whole thing, who just don’t really make it. There are loads of people who do what you and I do who didn’t go to any film school or went to schools that weren’t known for going to film schools. It’s a real chaotic mess out there. It comes down to the individual, to the outlier.
She should just go to the place she actually wants to be. And you know what? Maybe you meet a future spouse. You never know. Do people even do spouses anymore? Are we just old because we’re married?
John: You met your wife at Princeton.
Craig: I did. I met my wife at Princeton. That’s the thing that I got out of Princeton, to be honest. It didn’t help me with my career. It certainly wasn’t a great freshman year experience. We all know that. A lot of people that go to Princeton are super into being alums and everything, and I’m not. I don’t care. I went there, but it was a school. But I did meet my wife. I also learned things there that I carried through. The classes that I took that I was not expecting to take were the best ones. Best class I ever took in my life, Princeton University, Animal Behavior. Learned more about humanity in Animal Behavior class than anywhere else. That’s the fun part. Throw your plans out the door. Open yourself up to new experiences and see what happens, because you might walk out of there wanting to be a doctor.
John: I was a journalism major at Drake University undergrad, and then I applied to and got into USC for film school. I will say that graduate film school is nice, because you get people there who actually have some – they’re not all just random freshmen doing stuff. USC, if she got into the film program as a freshman, she’d be around people who want to make films and television, which is great, but they’re also a ways away from doing that. The nice thing about a grad program is you’re closer to doing the real things. You’re able to get internships and really be out there in the world doing stuff.
Craig: There is that, no question. There’s also, though, a very strange thing about the culture of aspirants. There’s a weird thing in the air, this choking ambition and striving and wanting and people jockeying. Sometimes you can get dismayed by who’s getting rewarded and who isn’t. And you just think, “This is not fair. That person’s bad. They’re pretentious. They’re a fraud. No one can see it except for me.” Eventually, people figure it out. But when you’re around a lot of people trying to do the same thing, it can be kind of gross.
I do remember that feeling early on in my career, where it just seemed like everybody was like rats clawing through a maze to find one small piece of cheese. Occasionally, there was a rat on top of you. If you heard about a rat getting a piece of cheese, you felt despair, like, “I thought the cheese was a lie. Oh my god.”
John: I also felt a fair amount of imposter syndrome, like I did not belong in the Stark program when I got there. That’s a thing you need to get through too. The nice thing about going to someplace outside of one of those film programs is you’re not gonna be surrounded by quite that much of the culture.
Craig: I think allowing yourself to develop as an individual and being a little more pure about it is probably a good thing. On the other hand, there are opportunities that you can get going to places that have these connections. But I don’t know. That’s the thing. You and I are pretty good examples, because you did one of those choices. I did the other choice. We’re both doing the same job. We’re on the same podcast.
John: Crazy, that.
Craig: In our 50s.
John: We’re both 53 years old.
Craig: Fifty-fricking-three.
John: Let’s answer one more question here, one from Jonathan.
Drew: Jonathan writes, “How much should the writer consider the trailer when writing the script? I’m thinking in terms of early reveals that tie into the premise and would likely be shown in the trailer to advertise the film, but could still be a surprise to the reader or anyone who sees it without having seen a previous. I’m reminded of taking my friend to see The Sixth Sense and how shocked he was at the ‘I see dead people’ line, not just the ending.”
John: I argue that you should consider the trailer as you’re writing, think about how would you actually present this movie to an audience, while knowing that you have zero control over that as the screenwriter. For movies I’ve done, I’ve written trailers and sometimes those are shot, or teasers and sometimes those are shot. But rarely have I had real direct control over that, including when certain crucial story pieces are revealed.
Craig: A nice thing is that I do get quite a bit of influence on the TV side over the marketing materials. I do work closely with them on that. I agree with you. I think, Jonathan, we’re both saying yeah, you should consider the trailer. There are really two moments in the trailer that I try and think about. One is how does it start and one is how does it end. What is my last shot of the trailer? What is my last moment of the trailer? Is there a mic drop? Is there a holy crap? Is there a single beautiful line? Is there a question? But the opening of the trailer is just as important. What do I see? What do I hear? What sets the tone?
The middle stuff of the trailer you can imagine will be some simple storytelling and some cool shots and some laughs and some action, surprise. But it doesn’t mean you should sit down and try to write one of those moments. More like if you put yourself in the mindset, it might help you get there, or as you’re weighing possibilities, if one of them pops out and you think, “That’ll actually be great in a trailer. I don’t know if it’d be super great in the show or the movie, but in a trailer, it’d be great,” write it in so you have it. You could even say, “This is for marketing.” I’ve done this before, although I do try to avoid doing the thing where you – I don’t think I have – where you put stuff in a trailer that you don’t put in the show. I don’t think I’ve done that. You know sometimes they’ll do that?
John: Yeah.
Craig: I think if it’s worth going in the trailer, it should be in the show is my feeling, or the movie.
John: I would agree. The reason why you need to think of the trailer is that the trailer is essentially your elevator pitch. Why does this movie exist is really the trailer. If you cannot tell your story somehow visually in that little bit, there’s probably something that’s not quite working with your story. That said, Go was an impossible thing to cut a trailer for. It’s hard to sell the premise of Go, at least the story premise, but you could show what it felt like, either communicating story or communicating a vibe or feel.
Craig: If you watch trailers for Cohen Brothers films, that’s almost always what you get, which is this absurdist, weird feeling that’s more than story. It’s more a sense of the madness that’s inside of the movies they make, which are pretty much always beautiful and brilliant.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually two episodes of Search Engine, this podcast by PJ Vogt, and it’s looking at why there are so many illegal weed stores in New York City, because all these storefronts are selling weed illegally. He’s going into what the history was there and why it got to be this way. He has to go back to California’s pot legalization system and what went wrong in California and all the things they were trying to fix when they legalized weed in New York and how it all kind of didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to turn out. In attempting to fix the mistake with California, they made new mistakes, which has led to this proliferation of illegal weed stores and made it very hard to open legal ones.
Craig: John, how many weed stores do you think there are in Vancouver? Just take a guess.
John: The answer’s either gonna be zero or-
Craig: It’s definitely not zero. It’s legal to sell.
John: Hundreds.
Craig: 93 million. There are 93 million weed stores. There are weed stores inside of weed stores in Vancouver. Vancouver smells like rain and weed. It is insane. Also, just side note, I’m not answering this question as much as I’m just now rambling about weed, have we talked about the drivers in Los Angeles lately? When I moved to Los Angeles, I remember thinking, oh my god, everyone’s insane, because I think they were on coke. I think all the drivers on the road were on coke. People were switching lanes constantly for no reason, which feels very cocainey to me. Now, I think everyone’s just edibled up. They are slow. They are slow. The light changes green, and it’s like, all right, sure, I guess I’ll go now. I preferred the cocaine drivers. I really did.
John: The other thing I have noticed over the course of my 30 years driving in Los Angeles is when you moved to Los Angeles you had to learn that in order to take that left-hand turn, you are going to need to go into the intersection and then when the light turns-
Craig: And turn left on the red.
John: Left on red, yeah, which sounds impossible, but-
Craig: Three cars get to go. That’s the deal.
John: That’s the deal. I think decade by decade, people have gotten more nervous and more nervous about doing that.
Craig: They’re not nervous.
John: They’re stoned.
Craig: They’re stoned. They’re just like, “Oh man, I missed the light. No worries. Hey, guess what? Light’s gonna come around again, man. It’s all good. I just had five peach strawberry gummies.” This is me being this 53-year-old guy going on about goddamn stoners. I just want them to be on cocaine so that they’ll go through the light. I need to go places.
Anyway, I will [unintelligible 00:58:30]. It’s so silly. This weed thing is so silly that New York has illegal weed stores. It’s like hearing, I don’t know, 20 years ago someone’s like, “Oh my god, did you hear that in, I don’t know, whatever, Toledo they have illegal cheese stores?” You’re like, “Why do they need… What? Sell cheese. It’s fine. Everybody else is.” It’s over. It’s over, New York. Just let them sell it. Have we talked about Shogun?
John: We have not talked about Shogun.
Craig: That’s my One Cool Thing this week. Shogun, the mini series on FX, Hulu, Disney Plus. It’s FX. I want to give the mayor of television, John Landgraf, credit here. It is FX, which is also Hulu and also Disney Plus. I watch it through Disney Plus. Anyway, I’m really enjoying it.
Shogun is one of my favorite novels of all time. I have read that novel multiple times, and I rarely do that. I was deeply influenced by the 1980 miniseries. I learned a lot about storytelling from that. I watched the miniseries. I was 9 or 10. Absolutely blew me away. For 1980, it was remarkable. It was on ABC, I want to say. I would say half of the dialog was in Japanese, subtitled, which just didn’t happen. The Japanese people were played by Japanese people, which also often didn’t happen. Toshiro Mifune, the Laurence Olivier of Japan who starred in all those wonderful Kurosawa movies, played Lord Toranaga, which was remarkable. And Richard Chamberlain played the love interest, because he loved the ladies. LOL. And I was obsessed. And so then I went and read the book, and I got even more obsessed, because the book was just full of all these other details, and you also realize what they mushed to put in a miniseries on network television. Here comes Shogun, written, created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo. Have we ever had Justin on the show?
John: I think Justin’s been on the show. Justin’s a friend.
Craig: He and Rachel, who is his wife, or rather, I should say he is her husband – they belong to each other – they’ve created the show. And it’s excellent. It is doing a much better job than the 1980 miniseries of being authentic to the time period. And I love the attention to detail. You know I’m a detail nut. It’s so clear how they’ve gone into every little corner and made sure everything looked right. They’re telling the story in a really interesting and beautiful way. But also – maybe this is the coolest part of my One Cool Thing this week – it releases an episode every week. It comes out on Tuesdays. I look forward to Tuesdays. It’s almost over. But each Tuesday, I’m like, “It’s coming, it’s coming.” That’s how you’re supposed to do it. For the life of me, I still cannot understand why anyone would make a – like 3 Body Problem on Netflix.
John: I wondered what was going on with 3 Body Problem.
Craig: Massive show, and they’re like, “Here’s all of it.”
John: It makes the footprint so much smaller.
Craig: I just don’t know. Game of Thrones worked great. They all want to have their next Game of Thrones. They got the Game of Thrones guys and just forgot the one thing about the Game of Thrones, which is you put out one episode a week. People look forward to it. They watch it together. They talk about it together. People write recap essays. Anyway, so congrats to Justin and Rachel, but also congrats to FX for doing it correctly. This is the way to do it and they’re gonna win everything.
John: They will. It’s also a strange Emmy season this year, because so many things were not – you’re not eligible for an Emmy this year.
Craig: No, because we’re not on the Emmy cycle.
John: You’re not on the air.
Craig: The awards cycle got so thrown off by the strikes. Next week I’m going to the WGA Awards for a show that aired over a year ago.
John: I’ll see you there.
Craig: Fantastic. What will you be wearing, John?
John: I’m debating between-
Craig: Who will you be wearing?
John: It’s black tie, but not everyone actually wears black tie. Are you wearing a suit or a tux?
Craig: I’m gonna go tux.
John: Great.
Craig: I’m gonna go tux, because how often do you get to wear a tux? I’ve got it. Why not wear it?
John: It’s also in the afternoon, which I think is great.
Craig: Yeah, so you can leave and go about your day. You’re going suit or tux?
John: I think I’m gonna go tux. I’m gonna go tux.
Craig: You’re gonna go tux? Why not? Go tux. Go tux. It’s at the Palladium. Great. I’ll see you there. The WGA Awards show is particularly amusing for the following reasons: one, not on television. No one cares. Even fewer people care than normal. Two, this is my favorite part, because the WGA is, and I will say this forever, stupidly divided into two unions, the WGA West and the WGA East, and because the WGA East really is like, “We’re also gonna have our own at the same time,” stupid, like we don’t have planes, they run a separate awards show for the same categories simultaneously. Not with different nominees. Same nominees. But they need to have their own award show running at the same time. But because they can’t exactly run at the same time, because it’s not televised, it starts to wobble out of sync a bit, which means inevitably you get a text.
John: “Congratulations” or “sorry.”
Craig: “That sucks.” You’re like, “Wait. Oh. They haven’t even said my category. I’m leaving.” That’s the other thing about the WGA Awards, because it’s not televised. People just start leaving. By the time you get to the last award, there’s the janitor. It’s like, “You guys got five minutes. We got a wedding coming in.” I think this will actually be quite nice because it’s the first post-strike award.
John: It’s also outside of the award season, which I think is actually kind of great.
Craig: It means nothing. It predicts nothing.
John: It predicts nothing.
Craig: It’s great.
John: It’s already a very loose awards show, so I think it should be a loosened vibe.
Craig: It will be pretty relaxed.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Ben Singer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on humans leaving the solar system. Craig, happy birthday once again.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so we talked about the 3 Body Problem, just very briefly. 3 Body Problem involves an alien civilization that is coming towards us. But my question is, do you think our human form bodies will ever leave the solar system?
Craig: Yours and mine?
John: Not yours and mine, but humans like us, flesh and blood humans, will we travel the stars? Because it’s a staple of science fiction.
Craig: It is a staple of science fiction. I’m gonna say something that a lot of people disagree with. My answer is no.
John: My answer is no also, but maybe for different reasons.
Craig: Maybe for different reasons. My answer is no because I think this is a simulation. I think the solar system is probably the limit of the high-res work that’s been done in our simulation. Beyond that, it’s the distant mountains in a video game, which is why the universe keeps expanding the more we look at it.
John: Wow. Craig, you’re not a Flat Earther, but you’re sort of like a Flat Solar.
Craig: I feel like everything beyond the solar system is real, but no more real than what’s in the solar system. It’s just not as fully ressed out, and there is in fact nothing to get to. If the simulation wanted it, then yeah, they would probably be like, “Okay, we’re gonna actually fill in this other galaxy so they can go to that place in fast travel and land on a thing there.” But I don’t think so.
John: I want to put a pin in the simulation thing, because I want to go back to the show The Boys, which I’m convinced is in a simulation as well. But my argument for why flesh and blood human beings will never leave the solar system is we’re just so incredibly fragile. We’re just not designed to do these things at all. And by the time we have the technology to really get us out of those places, it’s gonna make much more sense to put our synthetic versions, our digital versions on a thing and ship us out.
Craig: I agree with you, and I also feel like the designers of the simulation put so much space in between us and even the rest of the solar system. Mars is the next planet over. It still takes like eight months to get there.
John: I do think we’ll put some physical human beings on Mars, maybe not in my lifetime, but not too long after.
Craig: There’s not a huge reward for it, I gotta be honest with you, other than, “We did it. We made it to Mars.” I don’t know if you saw the brilliant Disney film Rocket Man.
John: I’m sorry, I missed it.
Craig: 1997’s Rocket Man.
John: It’s on the list of 100, but…
Craig: We really got into [unintelligible 01:08:00]. You got to Mars, and guess what? It’s red. Anyway, you want to go home now? It’s not great. Melissa, many years ago, she was like, “They’ve opened a new shopping outlet in Ontario. We should go see it.” I’m like, “Okay.” Ontario, not Canada, but east of Los Angeles. It was Christmas. We went there. I walked in and I said, “We’re going home now.” To me, Mars may be the Ontario shopping outlet. But to get to even as far as let’s say Pluto, the demoted non-planet, would take god knows – how many years would it take to get to Pluto?
John: It depends on how fast were you able to get our rockets up to.
Craig: This is a whole thing. You can’t go the speed of – all these things, you can’t do it. You can’t. As it turns out, you can’t.
John: I saw this movie called The Martian. It turned out it was actually really hard to get a person onto Mars, but especially off Mars.
Craig: Really hard.
John: Really tough. Really tough.
Craig: How long to go to Pluto? How long do you think it would take you to get to Pluto? You have to go very, very quickly.
John: It takes a while for light to get there, so getting a human being there, it’s tough.
Craig: About 12 years.
John: That’s also why I say the digital version. Time is useless to that. It doesn’t mean anything to you. Then you don’t have to do all this stuff like putting Ripley in her cryo bed.
Craig: That’s the other thing. Everybody comes up with the same solution, including 1997’s Rocket Man and 3 Body Problem and everybody else that sends somebody really, really far. Freeze them.
John: Freeze them.
Craig: You can’t freeze people. That whole thing, you just can’t.
John: [Crosstalk 01:09:52].
Craig: Everyone just wants to freeze everybody. The only way to get there is to-
John: Captain America.
Craig: If you can suspend somebody like that, we should be investing in that now, here. Our whole thing is freeze yourself and we’ll wake you up when we have a cure for your disease, which is why some people have actually done that. As it turns out, their body is completely damaged, a cracked ice cube. It doesn’t work. That’s always been the thing. I just think it’s too difficult. If we have the technology to actually be able to escape our own galaxy and make it to another one – and by the way, the space between galaxies is vast.
John: Yeah, it’s big.
Craig: Then we probably have the technology to solve every problem that currently exists on this planet.
John: Drew, what’s your opinion on leaving the solar system?
Drew: I am optimistic. I think eventually, I feel like we’re bugs that’ll hop and maybe pop out eventually. I think your point about us being fragile is fairly true right now. I’m stuck on you think that we live in a simulation, because you’ve mentioned it a few times. I never thought you were actually serious.
Craig: We absolutely live in a simulation.
Drew: Why? I don’t know why. It bothers me. Maybe it’s a personal thing.
Craig: Of course it bothers you. You wanted this to be real.
Drew: What about microbiology? What about the little tiny things? That’s not just waiting for the resolution to come through on how all that works?
Craig: I think that stuff’s been coded in and engineered quite beautifully.
Drew: But wouldn’t you need a supercomputer of-
Craig: Yes, you would need a very powerful computer to do this, one that is far more powerful than the computers we have. But they have it. Look at this way. We’re making simulations. They’re not great. They’re okay. But think of the simulations we can make now versus the ones we could make 50 years ago, meaning none. 50 years ago, there was the Game of Life, where it was little blobs going bleep bloop bleep. Now we have sims. We have artificial environments where people are running around and doing things. We have AI, all the rest of this. Can you imagine a world where we could create a simulation where the people inside the simulation were fully artificially intelligent?
Drew: Yes, but wouldn’t there theoretically be – because every piece of code has problems. It screws up and it needs to be defragged or – I’m using the wrong words. But we’ve never experienced that. We’ve never had really glitches or anything like that. All of it seems to be working right.
John: Or we may have had glitches, but then our memory was fixed.
Craig: Also, time does not move the normal way. For instance, our lifetimes may be processed through in a nanosecond of some higher versions. Think of how many simulations we can run with a battle simulator. We could run the battle of, I don’t know, the Battle of Sekigahara, to refer to Shogun. We can simulate that and run that probably three million times in a second. Now, do you see where I’m going here?
Drew: Yeah.
Craig: We don’t have any sense of actual time lapsing. My point is – and this is not my plan, just that others have come up with this – that if you give us 300 years from where we are now, 300 years, think of how far we’ve come in 10, 300 years, could we design a simulation where the people inside the simulation felt like they were real and independent and alive and intelligent?
Drew: Limitedly, but you wouldn’t be able to have 8 billion people feel like they were alive.
Craig: Okay. Then what, in 1,000 years maybe we can have that?
Drew: Sure. I guess by the same logic that I’m like, eventually we’ll hop planets and get on the solar system, eventually we would have this.
Craig: The only way, and if we do that, and that simulation is up to the level that our reality is, wouldn’t they start making simulations? The problem is the only way we’re not in a simulation is if we are the first ones in a chain of simulations. That’s why I think – it explains a lot.
John: It does explain a lot. I want to get back to The Boys and Gen V, two shows I genuinely enjoy, but I get a little bit frustrated by the characters in those worlds feel realish. Same could be said for the Marvel Universe too, where you can do all these supernatural things. You can fly and all this stuff. But that actually breaks all of our laws of physics.
Craig: Correct.
John: Someone I want to be in that world to say, “Oh, no, this must be a simulation where you’re changing these parameters, because these are not possible things.”
Craig: I am obsessed with this one moment – it’s in one of the Avengers – where Tony Stark gets thrown out of his own building. I think it’s the first Avengers movie. He’s falling from his skyscraper, and then Jarvis sends out the Iron Man stuff, which-
John: Assembles around, yeah.
Craig: … lands and assembles around him. And he almost hits the ground and then he puts his repulsors on to stop himself from falling.
John: They’re liquefied.
Craig: There are people right under it who should be vaporized. Also, the G-force of falling that hard and stopping like that is akin to hitting pavement. The Marvel characters follow no physics. Their arms should be ripping out of their sockets based on the things that they’re doing. It’s okay. It’s Marvel.
John: It’s Marvel, absolutely, so I’m willing to forgive it, just like I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I’m writing a story with ghosts in it, I’m gonna follow all the-
Craig: I love Ghostbusters.
John: I want to follow that thread down, so great.
Craig: Once you say, okay, we’re gonna throw some physics out the window, literally, for everybody, then yeah, go for it.
John: But circling back to a conclusion, I think the actual physics of traveling outside the solar system are not going to make sense for physical human beings.
Craig: I agree. It will not make sense for physical human beings. I think we’re here to be here. I think this is where we are, and this is where we shall stay until they reboot.
Drew: We’re real.
Craig: Yes, we are real. We’re as real as anything.
John: Just because I think we’re gonna get emails about this-
Craig: Oh, really?
John: You believe we’re in a simulation, but you’re not nihilistic about it. You don’t believe that nothing matters. You actually do believe that things matter.
Craig: I don’t think anything matters ultimately. I think that existence is absurd. But I feel like there’s a way to behave. There are values that I think are important, that are programmed into us or you could say are part of our shared genetic code and the expression of bio-evolutionary instincts to be pro-social. It feels good to help people. It feels good to do the right thing. It feels good to contribute. It feels good to fulfill a purpose. Look what we do for a living. If we die today, it’s not like everyone goes, “That’s it. Pack it up, everyone. Mass suicide. Those guys aren’t around anymore.” But we do it anyway, because we’ve found purpose for our lives. And then that’s that. Look at Drew. He’s gonna cry.
Drew: I’m sticking to my guns.
Craig: Nothing wrong with that. By the way, I’m way out of line with almost everybody. Most people believe in God and angels. I’ve gone past the atheists now into some whole other dimension of stupidity. And here’s the best part. It doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, unless I get thrown in Hell and burn in a lake of fire forever, in which case that will be very annoying and confusing. Time’s sure spinning for me. We stood outside and watched the eclipse. We took a pause in the middle of this to watch the eclipse. It looked beautiful.
John: Yeah, it looked beautiful.
Craig: It looked so vivid and real.
Drew: That’s because the moon is real.
Craig: It’s as real as my eyeball.
John: Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you.
Links:
- My Pal Foot Foot by The Shaggs
- Braid by Jonathan Blow
- Connections from the New York Times
- Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show? by David Segal for The New York Times
- On what motivates us: a detailed review of intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation by Laurel S. Morris, Mora M. Grehl, Sarah B. Rutter, Marishka Mehta, and Margaret L. Westwater
- Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? by PJ Vogt
- Shōgun on FX
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 639: Intrinsic Motivation, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig explore one of the most powerful and versatile tools in episodic television: the cold open. But how does it work? What kind of scenes does it showcase best? How can it play with point of view, perspective and time? What makes it memorable? And how do you make it work for your story?
We also discuss new requirements for loan-out corporations, follow up on streaming ads and AI-generated coverage, and answer listener questions on titles, exposition and disabled representation.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig check out OpenAI’s flirty new chat capabilities and ask, do they have any love for talking to human-like AI’s?
Links:
- Scriptnotes hats and drinkware!
- John jumps out of a plane on Instagram
- Corporate Transparency Act: An Overview of Impending Reporting Obligations
- MoviePass, MovieCrash | Official Trailer from HBO
- The Film Fund and the Reddit thread
- LOST – Desmond in the Hatch
- Suwada Nail Clippers
- Song Exploder – Madonna’s “Hung Up”
- The Ladder by Hatch Escapes
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The Power of the Cold Open first appeared on John August.
John joins Mike Birbiglia on his podcast Working It Out to share direct, practical screenwriting advice that you’ll actually use, whether you’re an aspiring screenwriter or you want to pursue creative work of any kind.
They explore John’s screenwriting process, from defining his expression “breaking the back of the script,” through the different forms of conflict and navigating the murky middle of the story. John shares the best writing advice he’s ever received, the screenplays everyone should read, what he appreciates in standup specials and why cool people aren’t funny. They also revisit the gains made on AI as a result of the writers strike.
Links:
- Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out
- Watch this episode of Working It Out on YouTube
- See Mike Birbiglia Live
- The Old Man & the Pool on Netflix
- Scriptnotes, Ep 179: The Conflict Episode
- Aliens screenplay by James Cameron
- Sex, lies and videotape screenplay by Steven Soderbergh
- Miry’s List
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Working It Out is produced by Mike Birbiglia, Peter Salomone, Joseph Birbiglia and Mabel Lewis. Associate producer: Gary Simons. Consulting producer: Seth Barrish. Video consultant: Graham Willoughby.
- Special Thanks to Marissa Hurwitz, Josh Upfal, David Raphael, Nina Cwik, J. Hope Stein, and Oona. Music by Jack Antonoff and Bleachers
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Working It Out: Screenwriting Advice You’ll Actually Use first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh. Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And you’re listening to Episode 638 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, you can’t handle the truth.
Craig: You can’t handle the truth!
John: We’ll be talking about lawyer scenes in movies and television with an actual criminal defense attorney, to separate the tropes from the truth. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, beach vacations. Is there anything better or anything worse?
Craig: Everything is better. Literally everything.
John: I’m with you there. We’re going to have to find some other third party to argue for beach vacations.
Craig: I don’t know if we have the right guy for that, be honest with you.
John: We’ll see. First, Craig, we have some important follow-up here about a mistake that you made. The great Julia Turner herself wrote in to say:
Drew Marquardt: “As your self-appointed chief journalist correspondent, I am obligated to write in to tell you that Stephen Glass published his fabulism in The New Republic, not The New Yorker. That is how his articles made it through The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking process, which in fact, they didn’t.”
Craig: God, I feel terrible. Confession time. My entire life, I panic whenever I have to reference The New Republic, The New Yorker, or New York Magazine.
John: 100 percent.
Craig: New Yorker is special. New Republic is also quite special. New York Magazine is not that special. But I panic every time. And I blew it here. And I blew it in the dumbest way, because I made a mistake, a fact-checking mistake about a fact-checking story where a guy was making stuff up. So thank you, Julia, for correcting me. And my deepest apologies to the folks at New Yorker, who have always been very nice to me. And what did I do? I rewarded them by trying to hang Stephen Glass around their neck. I’m sorry about that. It was The New Republic. Craig is shamed.
John: Julia also sent through this link about this article that Hanna Rosin wrote. Hanna Rosin was a contemporary of Stephen Glass working at The New Republic. When the whole thing outbroke, she felt blindsided and betrayed. But in this follow-up article, she goes to Los Angeles to meet with him and see what he’s done with his life. And she finds him as he’s trying to get the California Bar to let him become a lawyer. And so it’s all the drama surrounding that. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this really good article by Hanna Rosin that also ties into our main theme here, which is what does it mean to be a lawyer and what does the law include.
Craig: We should probably get a lawyer to discuss that.
John: Yeah, we should. I have the perfect person for us.
Craig: Oh, do you?
John: Ken White is a defense attorney and a former federal prosecutor, whose expertise includes criminal justice, free speech rights, and the intricacies of the legal system. He’s got this knack for demystifying complex legal topics, which we can witness each week on his podcast, Serious Trouble, which you should definitely subscribe to. Craig, you and I and many people may already follow him on social media, because he’s @popehat, or read his blog posts at popehat.com.
Craig: And Ken and I have known each other I think before the existence of podcasts.
John: Wow.
Craig: It’s going on, what, 21 years or something like that now. Welcome, Ken White.
Ken White: Thank you very much, guys. I’m very happy to be here.
John: Ken, can you talk us through, what do you mostly do in your days? I see you on social media. You’re writing stuff. You’re doing your podcast. But what is your actual day job? Who are you representing?
Ken: I have a practice. It includes criminal defense, in both state and federal courts, and a lot of eclectic civil cases. I really love First Amendment stuff, but I take on all sorts of other civil cases. It’s everything from plaintiffs to defendants, all sorts of subject areas, a lot of stuff.
But to answer your question, what do I do, it’s mostly paperwork. The demystifying, there’s a whole lot of paperwork of various kinds, and then there’s supervising other people doing paperwork and editing their paperwork. Then there’s asking the client to give you paperwork and then saying, “No, that’s not right. Do it again.” Then there’s arguing about paperwork in front of the judge. It’s not a job for someone who really wants the outdoors. You can be a trial lawyer, but even trial lawyers spend a lot of time not actually in court doing exciting things.
Craig: I gotta be honest. You were mentioning just before we started that you’re about to go into a trial. I have lots of friends who are attorneys. Trials seem like these things that sometimes occasionally happen, but most of the time it’s like watching baseball. Every now and again, something happens, but it’s a lot of stuff in between. That is the athletic version of paperwork. Our understanding, in Hollywood at least, of how this all works, I don’t recall seeing a ton of paperwork scenes, John. Do you?
John: No. Actually, in Clueless, one of our favorite movies, there is a lot of paperwork. She comes in and she helps out with highlighting through the depositions or something.
Craig: Which is disturbing.
Ken: As a rule of thumb, for every minute that something dramatic is happening, you spent two hours, at least, preparing for it.
Craig: But at least those hours earn you money.
Ken: Sometimes, yes, that is true.
Craig: Sometimes.
John: Now, Ken, we’re gonna get into scenes in movies and television that involve lawyers and involve the law. But I’m curious, from your side, how much of your decision to become a lawyer was based on seeing it on screen? How much of your early impression of it and your interest in it came from seeing it on screen?
Ken: I think I started, I just wanted to be a lawyer because my dad was a lawyer and I admired him. He was a trust and estates lawyer for his whole career, and I definitely did not wind up doing that. That was my sense. Then yeah, stuff like LA Law, which was our era, and movies like To Kill A Mockingbird and things like that, those influenced it. But most of what I learned about what being a lawyer is actually like didn’t start happening until I had jobs in college or after law school.
John: One of the discussions that actually prompted having you come on this podcast was we were talking about Anatomy of a Fall this last year, which was such a great movie and is a French legal courtroom drama. Watching that movie as an American, you’re just going crazy, like, how are they allowed to do this? All these rules, things we’re expecting from the American system are just not happening there. As we get into lawyer scenes, I guess we should stress that we’re really talking about the realities of the U.S. legal system, because stuff’s gonna be different any place else. This is not necessarily gonna apply to our British listeners, our French listeners, our Australian listeners.
Craig: Noticeable lack of wigs. You don’t have to wear a wig, do you? It would be nice if you could, Ken.
Ken: No, I do not.
Craig: Dammit.
Ken: I’m going in bald these days. Here’s the thing though. Most dramatic presentations of the law are so far from reality that you might as well have them be commentary on law in France or Burkina Faso or whatever you want to choose, because the delta is not meaningful, because there’s such a huge difference between the way it really works and the way you make it work on screen.
Craig: It sounds like we’re nailing it over here in Hollywood is what Ken’s saying.
John: That’s what he’s saying is we’re being 100 percent accurate.
Ken: But I’m okay with that. The way I see it is, it’s an art form and it’s completely different than the medium it’s describing. It’s like if someone says, “How come the movie isn’t like my favorite book?” I understand, because it’s a different medium. The same thing is, if you’re gonna depict legal stuff, it’s a very different medium than a transcript, and so you’re gonna cut out all the horrible, soul-destroying parts.
John: But Ken, it must be somewhat frustrating when you encounter a new client who has an expectation of how this is all gonna go, having seen legal stuff from Hollywood all these years, and then you have to confront them with the reality of what it’s really gonna be like.
Ken: Yes, although often, the clients have a better sense by the time they get to me.
Craig: Because they’re recidivists or… ?
Ken: Sometimes, yeah. The people I represented when I was on the Indigent Defense Panel, people accused of drug crimes, violent crimes, immigration crimes in the federal system, who couldn’t afford a lawyer, they understood. They’d seen it before, and they didn’t have any illusions about it.
The way people tend to consume it based on what they’ve seen, it’s not so much they have these movie-style expectations about the way the case works. What you’ll find is privileged people, affluent people who went to college and grew up in a good neighborhood and have never been in the system before tend to experience the system as conspiratorial. They tend to think, “This criminal case they brought against me, someone must have it out for me. The DEA himself must have it out for me. There’s a conspiracy, because I cannot conceive of any other way that I would be treated like this,” whereas the guy I’m defending in his third bank robbery is, “Oh, this is exactly the way it works. I’m getting ground through the system again.”
It takes a while for people to realize that it’s not just that the courtroom isn’t exciting as it is on a 42-minute TV show, but that the process is a lot more Kafka-esque. And it’s hard to accept that this is the way they’re treating people all the time. In fact, they’re probably treating most people worse than you.
Craig: The lawyers that you run into, I’m guessing both working for the state or fellow defense attorneys, are probably nowhere near as interesting, flamboyant, explosive, tricky, articulate as the lawyers we’re seeing on television and movies, but perhaps are better served by their paperwork skills.
Ken: Let’s not leave attractive off that list.
Craig: Yes, of course.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely.
Craig: Just lots of Tom Cruises moving through the courtroom.
Ken: Exactly. Eight out of 10 criminal defense attorneys keep their court jacket in the trunk of their car and look like it. There are a lot of characters, actually. I find trial lawyers tend to be more character-ish than people who mostly do paperwork, just because you have to be, and the system guides you to be. There’s a lot more regular, “This is my job. Not every minute is on camera and funny or dramatic,” than you expect.
John: As you start talking through these tropes, I guess we’re gonna mostly focus on criminal stuff, but point out when there’s differences between how a criminal and civil case might work for these situations.
Let’s think about a classic start of any criminal trial or any criminal procedure is that this person has gotten arrested. One of the very first things we hear is the Miranda rights. “You have the right to remain silent.” Can you talk us through what the realities are of a person’s rights and what a person should be doing, what that person who is arrested should be doing versus what we see them doing in movies and television?
Craig: Can I make a prediction?
John: Please.
Craig: Ken is gonna say, “Don’t talk to the police.”
Ken: Yeah, but also don’t talk to the FBI.
Craig: Don’t talk to anyone, really.
Ken: A lot of my clients are white-collar accused people. They’re in a position where someone comes to the door, knocks, and says, “Hey, we’re from the FBI. We just have a few questions.” It’s not happening when they’re getting arrested. That’s true for most white-collar crime. You first find out there’s a problem when people start coming up to you and saying, “Hey,” the whole Columbo shtick, which is very accurate, by the way, the way Columbo would just be, “I just have this one question. You know this isn’t a big deal. Why would you be worried about me?” Totally law enforcement.
Law enforcement loves to put you at ease, make you think there’s nothing wrong here, you should just talk. But you shouldn’t. Whether you’re the guy who’s just got arrested a block away from a bank robbery that just happened or you’re the CFO of a publicly traded company whose stock has taken a nosedive and the SEC shows up at your door and they want to ask you a few questions just over coffee, both times you should shut up and talk to a lawyer, because you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know your known. Unknowns are unknown unknowns. You probably don’t know the law. You may not even know if you’ve committed a crime. You probably don’t remember all the details of the things, because you haven’t immersed yourself in them yet. You have not looked through the emails or the documents or that type of thing.
Very little good can happen from you saying, “I need to talk to my lawyer.” The trick here is people think, “But if I do that, then they’re gonna arrest me,” or, “If I do that, they’re gonna be suspicious of me.” Possibly true, but the truth is, that reminds me of the argument, “I don’t want to wear a seat belt, because if I drive into a lake, I want to be able to get out easily.” It’s that kind of thinking. You’re protecting against something that’s a lot less of a risk when you’re saying, “I don’t want to make them mad.” The big risk is that they are incredibly good at getting you to say things that are against your best interest. Overwhelmingly, the best thing to do is to shut up.
Craig: That’s something that I didn’t know as a kid until a television show came along: NYPD Blue. That was the first time I had seen cops complain about people lawyering up. They basically were giving you a cheat code. All the cops ever complained about was the idea that somebody would lawyer up. “We gotta get in there and get this guy to talk before he lawyers up.” All I concluded – what else could I conclude from that show other than lawyer up?
Ken: That’s right. Actually, that’s an area where Hollywood and movies or TV gets remarkably close to the way it really is. All those depictions in all those shows of the box and you’ve got the perp in the box, you’re gonna sweat him, that is actually pretty realistic, all of the different techniques you see. There’s probably not quite as much violence anymore as you see portrayed. But pretending to be their friend, conning them into talking, all of that is absolutely classic. That’s what they do.
John: Now, at some point, Ken, you are brought in, and you are their lawyer. Can you talk us through that first meeting? Because I think that’s a very classic scene we’re also seeing is that first time the lawyer is talking with their client. The questions of, are you meeting them in prison or in jail? What is the boundaries of attorney-client privilege? How much can they feel free to say to you during those moments, even if they haven’t specifically hired you at that moment? That first meeting, what are the crucial things that we’re seeing or not seeing in scenes?
Ken: Sure. I’ve done all of those circumstances. I’ve met them the first time in jail. I’ve met them by the phone or Zoom, in person, all those things. If they are consulting me to consider hiring me, then our communications are privilege. I can’t reveal them. There are very few exceptions, one being if they’re currently controlling a bomb that’s about to go off, something on that level, they’re imminently about to commit a violent crime. Other than that, it’s completely privileged.
You obviously have to be very careful about your location. You don’t want to be talking in a crowded restaurant. You have to be careful who’s in the room with you, because that can disrupt the privilege if there are other people in the room with you. You don’t want to be someplace where you can be overheard.
But generally, my message is always, “Okay. I need you to tell me everything that happened. I need you to tell me the whole truth. We’re gonna start slow.” But that’s absolutely key. That’s controversial. You see this all the time in TV and movies. They say, “Don’t tell me what happened,” the implication being, “I want to be able to lie for you.”
There is a rule that as an attorney you can’t put anyone on the stand to lie. You cannot knowingly solicit perjury. If the client tells me, “I was in France,” I can’t put them on and instruct them to testify, “I was in Mexico,” something like that. But that problem is vanishingly small compared to the problem of not knowing all the true facts. Most cases settle. Of the ones that go to trial, few criminal cases have defendants testify. I would say less than 20 percent. To be deliberately telling your client not to fully inform you of the full facts because of this tiny chance that someday you may want them to testify at trial and say something different is a complete misreading of the situation.
Craig: You’re gonna want your client to say, “Yeah, I absolutely murdered my wife.” You kind of need to know that.
Ken: Yeah, I do.
Craig: The other question I have in regards to this first meeting – it’s very typical in television and movies, if the defense attorney is either the hero or the villain, when they show up they have this attitude. They always have this attitude when they walk in, like, “Okay, stupid cops. Beat it. I’m here.” When you show up in jail, at the police station, wherever you may be, if you are interrupting that process, how do you deal with the police, knowing that they’re looking at you with either suspicion or frustration?
Ken: My favorite iteration of that is probably from Fish Called Wanda. But generally, when you meet with a client, you get put in a separate room. You get put someplace where you can consult in private. Generally, you can rely that those are not being recorded in there, although some types of crime, some types of things, I would not have the full conversation there.
There’s rarely that cinematic, the cops are glaring at you. Usually, you’re not dealing with the cops who investigated and arrested. You’re dealing with sheriff’s deputies who are working in the jail or something like that. That type of thing doesn’t often happen. The time when it sometimes happens is when you get a call and your client’s business is being searched by the FBI and they’re sitting out on the curb. Then you roll up and the agents are all around. Then it can be a little awkward. But it’s the job.
John: The other scene I can picture is this guy comes home, his wife is murdered on the floor, he calls his lawyer first and then calls the police. The lawyer’s there at the actual crime scene when the crime is first being investigated. Is that a thing that actually really happens, where someone would call the attorney before calling the police?
Ken: In a manner of speaking. I haven’t encountered that in a murder scenario. But all the time in white-collar cases you encounter, “Are we gonna go to the cops with this? Are we gonna self-disclose that we’ve just discovered that our COO has been cheating customers?” or something like that. That is a very common strategic question faced by attorneys: do you self-report and hope to get out the best?
I value clients who call me and let me know something is going badly at the first available opportunity. Unfortunately, all these good decisions I’m suggesting that people make are not the norm, even for really smart people. I had a client in here the other day who said, “They asked to talk to me, but I said I need to talk with my attorney. And they say, ‘Are you sure? We just want to clear some of the things up.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure, but I’ll have my attorney talk to you.'” I said to him, “Would if offend you if I said I want to kiss you right on the lips?” because that is so rare and it just warms my heart. When clients do that, I’m thrilled. Too often, part of what you get when you get the case, in criminal cases or civil cases, is that the client has already run their mouth or tried to fix things or tried to make things better.
Craig: Now you’re in trouble.
Ken: And it’s made your job harder.
John: Another thing we see at this stage is sometimes a lawyer taking a case that’s outside of their area of expertise. You have known thing that you’re really good at, but if a difficult real estate deal came or if somebody who was normally a corporate attorney but they’re accepting a murder trial.
Craig: Let’s say you’re a guy from Brooklyn who happens to be in the South and your nephew gets pinched for murder.
John: For example.
Craig: What do you do then?
John: Are there rules about what kinds of attorneys can’t even do what kinds of jobs, or basically, if you pass the Bar, you can do that kind of case?
Ken: For the most part, yes. There are a few specialties where you have to be specially licensed, but generally, you can blunder in and screw up anybody’s life in any field of law. I am very careful about not taking on areas of law that I don’t know. I will tell clients, “If you want to do that, you’re gonna have to pay me to learn the law in this area. I don’t think you want to do that,” because I’ve seen how people going and not knowing what they’re doing can be dramatically bad. Having experience both in federal and state court, for instance, I’ve seen how competent, experienced state criminal defense attorneys wander into federal court and it’s a completely different world and they don’t know what they’re doing. They can just cause complete havoc, very bad for their client.
I had a client not that long ago who was in some skirmish with a neighbor. They got something from the city attorney’s office calling for them to come in for an office meeting to talk about it. They went to the real estate lawyer, who thought he was smart and says, “Ignore it. You would never talk to them.” Real estate lawyer doesn’t know that an office meeting is a city attorney thing where they basically mean, come in, we’re gonna have you shake hands, and we’re gonna send you off and dismiss it. And so instead, he got charged, because he didn’t go to the office meeting.
You gotta know what you’re doing. You have an ethical obligation to be reasonably competent at the area where you’re practicing. Criminal is one of the areas where you can make things much worse very quickly. I’m very much against people blundering where they do not belong.
John: No My Cousin Vinny for Ken. He’s ruining movies.
Craig: It sounds like, but also, he’s foreclosing the possibility of a great television show. Hear me out. Do you remember those wonderful shows where itinerant heroes would just wander peripatetically from place to place?
Ken: B.J. and the Bear. Kung Fu.
Craig: Highway to Heaven. Kung Fu. There’s tons. They would roam the earth like dinosaurs, Drew.
John: Reacher does the same thing today.
Craig: Actually, Reacher does, although it’s a season.
John: A little more limited.
Craig: It’s not week to week. Highway to Heaven, he would literally be like, “I’m done.” The Incredible Hulk.
John: Totally.
Craig: My idea is that kind of show but with a bumbling lawyer. Every week he wanders into a new town, encounters a new case that he’s completely unqualified for.
John: I love it.
Craig: Blows it completely and then is like, “Meh, did it again,” and just moves on. Ken, any chance that that would-
Ken: I could see it work as a farce. I love My Cousin Vinny. It’s a great legal movie, because it’s entertaining. It gets some things surprisingly right. Some of the expert cross-examination stuff they show law students. Was it a good idea for this dude who had never done a trial before to do a criminal trial? It was absolutely not a good idea.
Craig: Wow, except hold on a second, because his beautiful girlfriend understood about Positraction, so that part worked.
Ken: The other thing is you’re not gonna have Marisa Tomei with you when you’re looking to step in [crosstalk 00:23:11].
Craig: You probably won’t have Marisa Tomei. I guess that’s true.
John: Ken, you brought up ethical issues. Can we talk about conflict of interest? Because you taking on a certain client, you have to disclose your conflicts of interest there. What might those conflicts be?
Ken: A few of them are you can’t represent people in the same case, where their interests conflict, unless you have a knowing, intelligent written waiver from them. Typically, you’re not allowed to represent two defendants in the same trial, because they may want to point the finger at each other. It’s very rare for you to be able to do that. In civil cases, it’s much more common to represent multiple defendants in the same case. But you always have to get an elaborate waiver from them, saying, “I understand all these risks and downsides.”
There can be problems where someone wants me to sue a former client, which I won’t do. Generally, you can’t represent one client against another current or former client if you might have gotten relevant secret information from that former client. There are all sorts of rules like that. When you have a personal financial stake in what’s going on, you can’t do it. There are often ways to get waivers from clients. Sometimes there’s not. The judge gets to make the ultimate call about whether or not it’s right.
It’s something you really have to watch out for. When you have a harmonious group of people who want to hire you, and obviously they want to hire one lawyer and not pay for five lawyers for the five of them, things can go south very quickly when they stop being harmonious. When that group gets angry at each other, then all of a sudden you’re hoping that you did the conflict waivers right.
Craig: The collection of dingdongs around Donald Trump constantly backbiting at each other. What a wonderful clown party that is to watch. But the other conflict of interest that we tend to see in movies and television are lawyers sleeping with each other.
John: I was gonna say, is it a conflict of interest if you fell in love with your client?
Craig: Or a client. Oh, god.
Ken: First of all, ew. Second of all-
Craig: That’s just based on your client [crosstalk 00:25:18].
John: Absolutely. You don’t have Sharon Stone as your client?
Ken: Believe me. You could have the most attractive client in the world and spend an hour talking to them and you may not want to sleep with anyone ever again. Most State Bars have rules about carrying on romantic relationships with clients. It’s sometimes not classified as a conflict-of-interest issue, although it could be. But it’s generally, in most states now, considered unethical and improper, because it clouds your judgment. They can’t make the right decisions about whether or not to get a new lawyer. Their judgment is clouded. But of course, it’s a trope in fiction forever, and that’s because it does happen and you see it. And it quite often winds up very badly.
John: I want to circle back to this idea of representing multiple parties, because I think to Succession, and as the Roy family starts suing each other, one of the things that comes up again and again is, are you going to join this bigger group or have your own lawyer? The smart people seem to have their own lawyer.
Ken: Yeah, particularly if you’re the weakest person in the group. If the corporation is in the face of a criminal investigation and they hire one lawyer to represent the CEO, the CFO, and Jimmy the janitor, Jimmy may take it in the shorts, because most of the attention is not gonna be given to him. He has a reason to worry that they’re not gonna be looking out for his best interests or alerting him when a real conflict of interest comes up.
There are always problems in situations where there are all sorts of conflicting loyalties and things like that. That’s why you have to very carefully analyze who the clients are, what their relationship is, to what extent are they going to want to point the finger at each other to defend themselves in this case, and how can we deal with that. That comes with very frank early conversations with clients, which is difficult, because – and this is something we should talk about – clients lie.
John: Let’s get into that, because that’s also a trope of these stories is that the lawyer, very deep into how it all goes, realizes there’s a whole separate thing that they’ve not been told about.
Craig: Richard Gere shows up and he’s like, “What about the book and the videotape and all that?”
John: Or Edward Norton is actually a psychopath.
Craig: Edward Norton, he didn’t do anything wrong, and then he did.
John: Yeah, and then he did.
Craig: Then he didn’t, but then he did. Then he didn’t, he did. But you catch your client in a lie. What is that? Is that a confrontation? Does it get sparky?
Ken: It can. It depends on the nature of the lie. The thing is, clients lie, not because clients are bad or because these are evil people involved in crime and civil disputes. Clients lie because people lie. People particularly lie when they’re scared and under stress and upset. The people I meet are scared and under stress and upset. They’re often embarrassed and humiliated by what’s happened. They’re trying to figure out what’s going on. They’re trying to wrap their mind around it. It takes a while for them to get a comfort level with you so they’ll come completely clean.
Think about it. How many people do we all really be completely transparent and nakedly open with about things? Probably a lot of the time, not even our spouses or best friends or confessors or whoever. It’s not human nature. It can take a lot of work to get the point where the client is comfortable doing that. Some of them never get all the way comfortable. Some of them can’t admit out loud they’ve done something. Sometimes they lie, and it causes me problems.
I’ve had clients lie up and down after I’ve given them the whole speech for hours, and it’s had bad impact on the case. I’ve had clients lie in the first meeting and I found out an hour after I left. And I fired them, just because I didn’t want to deal with it. Every attorney knows this. I represent humans in bad positions. People like that take a while to get around to being able to tell me the truth.
John: Circling back to the article from The New Republic that Julia Turner sent through, one of the things interesting is Stephen Glass is working as a paralegal, and one of his jobs was, as new clients came in, he was the person who first talked them through this is how it’s all gonna go. He fully disclosed, “I was fired for doing this terrible thing where I made up all this stuff and I lied.” He spends a lot of time explaining how he lied and how it was a bad thing, and in the belief it actually got the clients to be more open and transparent about what stuff was actually happening. That’s also his point of view on the whole thing, so he may be doing some fabulism right there.
Craig: Possibly.
John: But your ideal client would just sit down with you from the first meeting and say, “Here is everything. I am holding nothing back,” correct?
Ken: My idea is that anything that’s remotely complicated, that it’s gonna take a lot of meetings. I’m gonna set the table with the first meeting by explaining how important this is and going through some stuff. Then we’re gonna go through it in more detail. I’m gonna take the measure of the client. This is something you learn over the course of this career over decades. Take a sense of them, how long it’s gonna take to romance the truth out of them. Sometimes that gets right; sometimes that gets wrong.
The things you see in movies and TV, it’s very classic, it’s almost a cliché, I think, where the defendant has told them some of it, but then there’s one aspect they haven’t told them. They say, “I was embarrassed. I thought you wouldn’t believe me.” That’s very real. That happens frequently, where they’ve told me 80 percent of it but not the other 20 percent or something like that. That’s again just human nature.
John: In these initial setup things, and before we get to any trial or any sort of settlement, talk through some possible escape hatches. Spousal privilege, like the idea that you cannot be forced to testify against your spouse, is that a real thing? What are the edges of that? Because you see this in movies and TV.
Ken: This is a great Bar Exam question. There are two spousal related privileges. One is a spousal communications privilege. That means I can prevent my wife from testifying about a confidential communication we had during the course of our marriage. The other is testimonial privilege. That’s my wife can’t be compelled to testify against me while we’re married, not that she would need to be.
Craig: She could choose it though.
Ken: Exactly. She could [crosstalk 00:31:58].
Craig: Certainly, your wife would.
Ken: Yeah. They would have to say, “No, you’ve testified enough, Ms. Harbers. That’s enough.”
Craig: “Please sit down.”
Ken: Those are real things. They actually do come up all the time. They come up in context like taking the deposition of a husband or wife and asking them about something that their spouse said to them. That can be under the privilege. Things like that. Those are real things. Those come up. Those are usually evidentiary issues that come up at trial or during the discovery process.
John: You bring up evidentiary issues. One of the things we also see in movies and TV is where the attorney or Matlock’s assistant goes out and does some digging around and finds out the truth and does some investigation. How much investigation, discovery, and evidence gathering is actually typical and allowed and commonplace in the kinds of cases that you’re taking?
Ken: My types of cases, quite a lot. Now, in criminal cases, you’re supposed to be getting discovery from the government. They’re supposed to be turning over stuff. But you will definitely do your own supplemental investigation, whether it’s having people interviewed or researching records or whatever it is, depending on the nature of the case.
I learned very early on how important that was. A very early case I had when I got out of the government was a young guy who had been arrested while doing a summer at a prestigious college. He gets arrested for having meth and a gun in a drawer in his bureau in the college dorm room. He says, “It’s not mine. Someone must’ve put it there.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure, kid.” I hire an investigator to investigate the roommate, because the parents have the money to do this. Come to find out the roommate just got out of jail for stealing things from other people at this prestigious college and blaming it on other people, trying to frame other people for the crimes.
Craig: Wait a second. Hold on.
Ken: I went and I used that information, because this guy who did that was the one who turned my client in to the police, said, “Look what I found in the drawer of the bureau.” I brought that to the DA. I said, “Your witness is probably gonna be taking offense, but I’m gonna make mincemeat out of him.” They wound up giving my client a deal, a diversion program, stay out of trouble for a year and no charges.
That’s an example of why you have to learn to investigate things, even if you’re dubious, because the thing about these cases and this system is you can get so worn down and so into a rut that you can stop seeing people as individuals, stop believing their stories, just see them as a statistic. I’ve seen this case a million times before. It always plays out like this. Lose your edge that way. You’ve gotta keep your edge. You’ve got to always make the inquiries and put in the work to do that job for your client.
John: Let’s talk about who’s doing that work. You said you hadana investigator. Is that a private investigator, or is that classically a person who’s licensed to do that, or is it someone else who’s working for the firm? Who does that?
Ken: It depends on the case and the type of law. Typically, criminal cases, we have private investigators we have relationships with. A lot of them are ex-journalists or ex-federal agents, things like that. They’re good at wheedling information out of people, that type of thing. There’s not a lot of gunplay with them, but there’s a lot of tracking people down and talking to them, getting them to talk. We have different investigators for different types. Sometimes they’re in-house; sometimes they’re not. It really depends on the occasion.
Civil is often very different, because civil discovery is a lot more active. You’re sending formal demands to the other side. You’re entitled to do things like demand they produce particular documents or answer questions or sit for a deposition. You have a lot more leeway of how you investigate in a civil case.
John: Let’s say that you’ve talked to the client. You see what the case is laid out before you. Before you would go to trial, there’s some discussion of reaching a settlement. Are you the person who reaches out with, “Hey, let’s sit down and talk this through.” When something comes to a settlement before trial, what’s tended to happen?
Ken: It very much depends on the type of case and how serious it is. Your run-of-the-mill misdemeanor or petty felony, probably at arraignment they’re gonna tell you the offer. If you show up on a DUI, they’re probably gonna tell you this is the standard offer for first-offense DUIs. They’ll tell you that at the first appearance. Other cases, either you approach the prosecutor, or the prosecutor approaches you, say, “Are you interested?” There’s the dance of pretending, “No. I’m taking this to trial, but just for the sake of argument, what are you offering?” It’s a lot more formal and complex in federal court. A federal plea agreement is just monstrosity, 20 pages long. It’s a lot more informal in state court.
But the bottom line is usually one side or the other suggests, “Can we talk about it?” That’s really just a matter of schedule management. If you’re the prosecutor and you have 20 cases set for trial, you want to figure out which one of them is gonna go, and so they’re gonna want to make inquiries. If you’re a defense lawyer, you know that if someone’s gonna plead, the earlier they plead and possibly cooperate with the government, the more credit they’re gonna get, the more lenient sentence they’re gonna get.
John: A thing we saw out of Georgia was the use of racketeering laws, and so where you’re rounding up a bunch of people and you’re putting them all together on trial as one big thing.
Craig: Ken loves RICO, by the way.
John: Yeah, loves it. I listen to your podcast, so I know RICO is one of your favorite things on earth.
Craig: I like when he says he did a RICO.
John: In those situations, there could be a real benefit to being the first person to turn on the rest of the group. As the attorney representing that individual person, you’re looking at everybody else around you, and it feels like there’s a prisoner’s dilemma aspect to that as well.
Ken: Sure, there is. It’s not just RICO or really complicated cases. Any multi-defendant case or any case that’s connected to a larger investigation, if you can say, “My guy’s gonna come in and tell you everything,” and you’re the first in the door, then you’re gonna get the very best deal. In state court, that means allowed to plead to the most lenient thing with the most lenient recommendation. In federal court, it means allowed to plead to a lesser set of charges with a better sentencing recommendation in a more complex way.
The thing is that, yeah, it’s always a prisoner’s dilemma. You know that everyone in this situation is trying to find the least terrible way out of it. You always decide who’s gonna jump. A lot of the time, cases like the one we see in Georgia with Donald Trump and in similar cases, you have what’s called joint defense agreements. Those are agreements among the lawyers for the defendants. What they agree is that, “I’m gonna share information about what I learned from my client about this case and this situation. You’re gonna share yours. And we all agree to keep it confidential among ourselves and not disclose it.” And if anyone starts to cooperate, then they have to leave the group.
The point of this is to preserve the attorney-client privilege. The idea is that normally the attorney-client privilege only applies to a confidential communication. But the idea is if you talk to a group of people that has equal obligation to keep it secret, then you haven’t taken it outside the circle of privilege. That’s very common. In there, someone will say, “We’re leaving the group,” and then you know, okay, they’re about to cooperate, something like that.
But yeah, all the time. And usually in white-collar cases, it’s a lot more friendly, collegial. A lot more information is exchanged. Less of that in drug cases, violence cases, things like that. It’s a little more cutthroat. But yeah, that type of thing, that type of maneuvering is absolutely real.
John: Despite your best efforts, there’s no ability to reach a negotiated settlement. Talk us through what are the steps before we get to trial, what kind of things we would see before we get to trial.
Ken: Usually, when you’re getting ready for a trial, you have to put together all the exhibits that you’re gonna use. You have to have a witness list. Often, you’re required to propose jury instructions ahead of time. Those are crucial, because that’s where the judge tells the jury what the relevant law is. You’re gonna file a trial brief pointing out the legal issues that are gonna come up at trial.
Probably most crucially, you’re gonna be filing something called a motion in limine, meaning a limiting motion. That’s a motion saying, “Judge, this piece of evidence is illegal. You should keep it out. This piece of evidence is too inflammatory. You should keep it out. You should let me bring in this piece of evidence.” The motions in limine are incredibly important, because they can completely shape how the trial goes by what evidence is allowed to come in and what evidence isn’t allowed to come in. Before you’re picking that jury, we’ve alighted tons of work that’s very paperwork-intensive, very boring to show on film, but actually has a huge influence on how the case comes out.
John: Now let’s talk about – you’ve gone through all the evidentiary hearings. You’ve figured out what stuff is gonna get eliminated. Can you talk us through the jury selection process? What is that actually like? What do we see on film versus what the reality is?
Ken: It can go anywhere from super simple to super complicated. There are judges, particularly in simple cases, who do it lightning fast. The judges do all the questioning themselves, don’t let the lawyers talk to the jurors. I’ve known judges where you can have a jury picked in half a day. There are other cases, particularly cases that are gonna be super long or complicated, where you might have to do preliminary work. You might have to do something called qualify the jury. This RICO case against Trump and his pals in Georgia is such a one. Jurors are gonna get questionnaires saying, “Hey, would you be available for the next 9 to 12 months to sit in the uncomfortable chairs?”
Craig: Totally available. Wait, is it for RICO? Then yes.
Ken: Also, “Have you ever heard of Donald Trump? Do you have opinions about him?” That type of thing.
Craig: Who?
Ken: Bigger, more complicated cases, there will be screening of the jurors. Then there’s disputes over who gets to ask questions of the jurors. Some judges want to do it all themselves, because when we lawyers do it, then it’s called voir dire. We’re really doing two things. One is we are questioning the juror to find out whether we think they’re a good juror or not, but another is we’re developing a rapport with them and showing them themes of our case, like, “Ma’am, would you agree that if someone is standing there and a guy runs up with a knife that you might think he’s danger and might have to defend himself?” That type of thing. You’re trotting out your themes. You’re starting to get them thinking about who the people in the cases are. You’re making yourself hopefully entertaining or at least palatable to the jury.
Then you just go through, and different courtrooms have different ways of doing it, but generally there are jurors that you ask the judge to get rid of for cause, meaning that the judge strikes them because there’s some legal cause they shouldn’t be a juror, like they really can’t speak English well or they said that, “My dad’s a cop. I couldn’t be fair,” something like that.
Then you generally have what are called peremptory challenges, which are challenges that you get to use in your discretion to knock people out. You’re not allowed to use them based on race or gender or prohibited characteristics like that, notwithstanding that of course it happens all the time, particularly from the government. You’re using your sensibility. Who’s gonna be a good juror for me, who’s not. If you’re a prosecutor or if you’re the defendant in a case where the plaintiff’s asking for a lot of money, you want a solid citizen, someone who doesn’t believe in handing out money, someone who works for their money, someone who’s respectable, somewhat conservative, that type of thing. If you’re the defendant in the criminal case or the plaintiff in the case, it’s the other way around. You’re looking for people.
It’s totally an art and not a science. There are all sorts of shows about how it’s a science and you can attach electrodes to them and stuff like that and do it scientifically. My wife watches some of those, and I’m not allowed to be in the same room, because it agitates me almost as much as NCIS. I’m not allowed to be in the same room because of the comments I make.
John: Because what you’re seeing is that it does not reflect reality at all in terms of the ability to micro-slice who these people are?
Ken: No. There are people who make tons of money doing it, but I am super skeptical of that. I think it’s dousing, basically. I think it’s [unintelligible 00:44:56].
Craig: There was an entire movie about – was it Rainmaker or something like that? It was the Coppola movie where it was an expert to figure out exactly who should be on the jury using their mind powers. Basically, you’re just getting people that said that they would be available for nine months. There are certain things we can all conclude.
John: Maybe a speed round here. I want to talk a little bit about courtroom etiquette, because there’s things we see a lot in movies and television.
Craig: I object.
John: Talk to us about “I object.” Talk to us about objections and talking over objections. What does object mean and what are the edges of the reality of objection?
Ken: There’s a sliding scale of the formality of objections. The low end is a local, state court, and the high end is federal court. I always do it as if I’m in federal court, because then I can’t screw up. To do it properly, you stand up, you say, “Objection,” and then briefly the basis, “Hearsay.” The judge rules. What you’re not supposed to do is say it from a seated position. You’re not supposed to go off on a speech.
Craig: Objection.
Ken: “Objection. He knows he can’t do that. Since the beginning of time, the laws… ” That’s a speaking objection. You’re supposed to do it briefly. It’s a rule often broken. You’re not supposed to make a lot of bogus objections just to throw somebody off. Judges will eventually call you on that, and the jury will see it.
Craig: Has a judge ever said to you, “I’ll allow it, but watch yourself, counselor.” That seems to be in literally every – judges are constantly allowing objections but saying, “But I’ve got my eye on you.” Is that a thing?
Ken: If they were gonna say something like that, it would probably be at a sidebar, outside the hearing of the jury. That’s something that does happen. But no, they don’t put it like that in front of the jury. They might say, “I’ll let you ask a couple of questions, but get to the point quickly.” Something like that.
Craig: “Where are you going with this?”
John: Something that frustrates Craig and I – is begging the question actually a legitimate objection? If someone says, “Objection; begging the question.”
Ken: It is not a legal objection. I think actually-
Craig: It’s a mistake of thought.
Ken: … “states facts not in evidence” might be the right… Let’s face it; 90 percent of people use “begging the question” wrong anyway.
Craig: 90 percent is a very low estimate.
Ken: I discovered, to my dismay, having been married for nearly 30 years now, that being able to use “begging the question” correctly drives literary people wild. If I had known this in my early 20s, it would’ve been a completely different social scene for me.
Craig: Absolutely. No question. It’s a very narrow group of people, very curious group of people. Peter Sagal over there at NPR I think is the king of the movement.
John: Here’s a question for you. I see in movies and TV where the attorney seems to be addressing the jury rather than addressing whoever is on the stand. That’s a no-no, correct?
Ken: Unless it’s an opening or closing statement, correct, you’re not supposed to address the jury. And the judge will yell at you if you do that sort of thing.
Craig: What about that sly look over to the jury? Are you allowed to do that?
Ken: The thing is you want to be careful about that, because you might not be as irresistible to the jury as you think you are. One of my partners did a trial against the SEC. About midway through the trial, the jury sends out a note saying, “Can you ask the lawyer from the SEC to stop looking at us? He’s creeping us out.”
Craig: Oh, man.
Ken: Kind of sunk in his chair for the rest of the trial. It’s a bit of a blow to his ego. You want to be careful with that. If I’m cross-examining something and they’re being really argumentative or not answering the question, I will mug a little bit for the jury. I’ll roll my eyes and look in their direction, make eye contact, that type of thing. But you want to do it sparingly.
John: A thing we see in movies and TV is forceful gavel banging, where the judge is banging to get people to shut up or stuff. Is that a thing that you’ve encountered in your real life?
Ken: The only time I’ve seen gavels used is to open a session. I’ve had judges pound on the bench, one memorable occasion, to punctuate, “Mr. White, no, you may not.” But it’s pretty rare. Judges will yell, but banging on things, that type of theatrics, not so much anymore.
John: You brought up sidebar. Tell us, what conversations should be happening in sidebar that probably too often in our scenes are happening in front of the jury and everybody else?
Ken: Stuff that is not clear whether it’s admissible or not, and it might be prejudicial. Let’s say that we’re in a trial and the attorney questioning the witness starts getting into an issue of whether they’re having an affair, and it has nothing to do with the subject matter of the case. You would ask to speak at sidebar, because you don’t want to spell out to the jury, oh yeah, we don’t want you guys to know about the client having an affair, because you might treat them badly. Things like that where the judge may decide the jury shouldn’t hear about this are typically done at sidebar. All sidebar really is is a mechanism to keep things going, because it takes forever to troop the jury in and out of the jury box, and so you don’t want to send them all back into the room, because then you waste 15 minutes.
Craig: Maybe you should try directing a scene with 100 extras, my friend.
Ken: I’m sure. They’re probably better behaved than jurors.
Craig: Possibly.
Ken: It’s a way to do things. And it frustrates jurors, I think. Again, you don’t want to be constantly going up to sidebar, because the judge will start just telling you no. You gotta use it sparingly.
John: Great. We’re in trial. One of the cliches we see is people who decide to represent themselves at trial, which I’m sure for you is terrifying. What are the realities? If I got accused of a crime, I’m allowed to do that, right, even if I don’t have any background in law?
Ken: You are. Actually, it’s kind of tricky, because the judge has to give you sufficiently full explanation of why it’s really stupid to do that. If the judge doesn’t, you might have an appeal later. “I didn’t realize how stupid it was.” But the judge can’t prevent you from doing it, unless the judge finds basically that you don’t understand what you’re doing or not competent or something like that. It’s threading the needle for the judge.
It’s almost always horrific for the person. I’ve heard it described as a slow plea. This isn’t rocket science, what I do, but there’s a lot of things to it. You gotta know how to do it. You gotta have learned how to do it. If you’re just throwing it in, you don’t know the jargon, and there’s lots of jargon. You don’t know the rules. Just getting something into evidence, understanding what it means to lay a foundation for a piece of evidence so it can be admitted into evidence is something that you have to learn. It’s generally terrible. Usually, people wind up making things much worse.
John: Let’s say we’re in trial now. You’re gonna have witnesses up on the stand. You might have your own client, which for good reasons you probably won’t put your client on the stand, but you might. There are gonna be other witnesses that you’re gonna be putting up there. What kind of preparation can you do with a witness, are you allowed to do with a witness, if it’s your client, versus if it’s somebody else? What are the edges of what you’re allowed to do there in terms of getting them ready for it? There’s limits to how much you can coach them.
Ken: Let’s take non-clients first. You can absolutely talk to non-clients, unless they’re represented by a different attorney. You can ask them questions. You can say, “Do you mind if we go through the questions I’m gonna ask you?” You might even use the word “practice,” depending on how friendly they are. You can go through. You can ask them.
I’m careful. I don’t tell them, “It’d be better if you didn’t say that. It would be better if you said this instead.” I try to be more subtle and say, “Let me ask you about that answer. My impression was X, but you’re saying Y. Can you explain how I have it wrong?” They eventually get to maybe they were wrong. When they realize they were wrong, they clarify it. Whatever.
You can’t tell them what to say, and you absolutely can’t tell them to lie. But there’s a fair amount of leeway in going through their testimony in advance. And everyone does it. You can believe that federal prosecutors, before they put someone on the stand in Sam Bankman-Fried’s case, have gone through the questions with that person two to five times.
Craig: Debate prep.
Ken: Exactly, exactly. With a client, it’s different, because it’s protected by the attorney-client privilege. You cannot put the client on the stand to lie. You cannot knowingly elicit perjured testimony. That’s why that thing we discussed before, this trend where some lawyers say, “That’s why you’d never ask the client what happened and you’d tell them not to tell you yet, so it doesn’t prevent you from putting any story on they want,” to me, that’s absolutely lunatic, because you can’t defend them. You can’t know what the defense is. You can’t organize the case, know where the pitfalls are, unless you know what happened and what they know.
Craig: That does seem like a terrible strategy, like, “Look, the deal is we’re just gonna black box this thing. I’m gonna put you on the stand. You’re gonna say some stuff. That’ll probably work.” What do I need a lawyer for?
Ken: The thing is, this is a real thing that some lawyers do.
Craig: It’s crazy.
Ken: I watched a debate that turned into basically a screaming match between Alan Dershowitz and a different professor 30 years ago in the trial skills class I took, where they were arguing over this very thing, whether or not you stop the client from blurting out stuff, prevent them from locking themselves in. This is one of the few times you’re on Alan Dershowitz’s side. It’s lunacy not to get every piece of information you can get out of the client. The downside of not being able to get them to lie is comparatively extremely minor.
John: Let’s talk about witnesses. Prosecution and defense are both going to, I guess, provide a list of the witnesses they’re going to bring, so that both sides can prepare. But in movies and TV, we’re constantly seeing surprise witnesses, like, oh my god, this person we thought was dead is now coming to sit on the stand. What are the rules around witnesses who were not previously announced and scheduled?
Ken: Generally, that doesn’t happen. It’s rare for it to happen. It’s rare to find out that someone you didn’t know before – especially civil cases. In civil cases, you’ve had years of written discovery, where each side has been telling the other, “Name every person in the universe who has knowledge about this case and that you’ve decided to depose them or not,” and then you’ve made a witness list for trial and all those sort of things. Showing up and saying, “Oh, I’ve got a new guy,” usually is not gonna go over well. There’s gonna have to be some pretty convincing reason that you could not have found them before for the judge to let that happen. The more important they are, the more that is the case. The same with evidence. Unless you can really show you couldn’t have found it without due diligence earlier, then it’s gonna be very hard to get it in at trial.
Now, one way that can happen is if the other side reveals something for the first time. Then you’re allowed to rebut. The things about disclosing evidence generally don’t prevent you from keeping a few things back for your rebuttal case. If the other side has lied, as they often do, calling them out as liars. That’s tricky, and you might not get the opportunity to do it. But that is not common.
John: We’re talking about witnesses and evidence, but sometimes in films and TV, the lawyer themselves is demonstrating something to the jury. It could be as part of the closing argument or something else that happens. You mentioned To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus Finch throws a glass at Tom to prove that he’s left-handed. Is that a thing that could actually happen in real life?
Craig: You’re gonna throw glasses in the courtroom?
Ken: It could happen, but the judge would blow their stack.
Craig: You’re saying even if you asked your client to put on some gloves in front of the jury and they didn’t fit-
Ken: That’s different. When Atticus Finch throws that cup, the client catching it in one hand is not testimonial, and the client’s not under oath. There’s an implicit, “Here’s how I do things,” but it’s not under oath and it’s not subject to cross-examination. That’s why it’s inappropriate. You could get a client who is on the stand to demonstrate something, with the judge’s permission there, and you can get them to say, “Yes, I’m lefthanded.” The judge probably is not gonna let you surprise them in the middle and throw something to them. Generally, anything that looks super cute or gimmicky probably is gonna get you yelled at by the judge.
John: But what is the actual impact of being yelled at by the judge? Is it causing a mistrial? Is he then giving jury instructions? What actually happens? What is the consequence?
Ken: I love this question, because it’s so much of what you learn over the course of the practice. You don’t want the judge to yell at you in front of the jury, because the jury’s gonna become convinced that you’re a bad person and you’re doing bad lawyer things, unless the judge is kind of an asshole and the jury is sympathetic with you.
Once upon a time I tried a case as a prosecutor where the judge was being super mean to the rookie defense lawyer and yelling at her and beating her up and generally being a bully, and the jury was looking sympathetic to her. I was thinking, okay, this could go badly. They could “not guilty” just out of sympathy. I was pretty young. I thought, “I have an idea. I’ll make the judge yell at me too.” This was a judge who was famous for yelling. I wandered into the well in the center of the courtroom. I spoke from a seated position. I called them “Judge” instead of “Your Honor.” Before long, he was yelling at both of us. Then the young public defender comes over and says to me, “I know what you’re doing,” and she steps in. Arguably, this is where it went off the rails a bit. But by the end of the day, the guy is bright purple. Usually, you don’t want to do that sort of thing.
Here’s the thing about judges yelling. If it’s not in front of the jury and if it’s not impacting actual rulings, you’ve gotta learn to deal with it. Judges yell. Judges are human. They deal with a lot of stress. Some of them have personalities. You want to learn more about the bite than the bark.
When I have young associates I supervise and a judge is getting mean or they’ll worry the judge is gonna get mean, I refer them in the end of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where Brad Pitt’s character shoots the Nazis’ aid, because he’s so mad that the Nazis-
Craig: You’ll be shot [crosstalk 00:59:24]. More like chewed out.
Ken: I’ve been chewed out before.
Craig: I’ve been chewed out before.
Ken: I’ve been chewed out before.
Craig: Chewed out before.
Ken: I’ve been yelled at by judges before, and I’ll be yelled at by judges again. You just deal with it.
John: A trial happens. We’ve gone through all – it could be months. It could be short. But ultimately, there’s a verdict. That verdict becomes the title of many movies. That is the moment of closure for this whole experience. What do you see in movies and TV that get it right and what are the things that frustrate you about how they get it wrong about verdicts?
Ken: They get it right in terms of dramatically. They make it a good close to the story. In real life, you have appeals. You’ve got post-trial motions. Most times if you win a big civil jury award, the other side is gonna file a motion-
Craig: To reduce it.
Ken: … for a new trial, a motion to reduce it, a motion for judgment notwithstanding, blah blah blah blah blah.
Craig: Paperwork.
Ken: Yeah, there’s always a lot of paperwork. We see this with all the stuff in the news right now that Trump is going through, where there are these big judgments and now he’s posting bond so that he can appeal them without being collected on. Sentencing can often be quite dramatic. Usually, that does not happen at the time of the verdict. It’s another time. That could be a good moment for drama.
It’s certainly stomach-wrenching when you’re the defense attorney standing next to your client who’s gonna find out how long they’re gonna be in jail, and when you worry about what your client’s about to say, because one dramatic part about sentencing is that they always ask the client – the client has a right to allocate, to say something. This is an absolutely terrifying, piss in your pants moment for the defense attorney, because clients, no matter what, if they’ve been convicted, they feel it’s unfair. And if they express that, it goes badly.
I’ve seen clients, even though they were exquisitely prepared, go from probably they were gonna do community service to jail, by talking about what a victim they are in all of this. Client in that moment can make it much worse. You really have to sit on them and make them not express how they’re feeling, because how they’re feeling is a victim.
John: But I want to be clear here. If they were to confess to the crime or admit guilt in that moment, that is evidence that can be used against them in any sort of future appeal. They obviously don’t want to say, “I did it, but just be merciful on me.”
Ken: It wouldn’t be used against them in an appeal. The problem is more if they demonstrate lack of contrition or if they make their image in the judge’s eyes worse. If you’ve pled guilty in particular, you don’t want to get up there and suggest you don’t think you really did anything wrong, because you pled guilty. Like we saw recently, Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, the judge found him very not remorseful, because of his personality and the way he talks, and that probably contributed somewhat to the sentence.
John: Ken, as we wrap up here, are there any other aspects of law as portrayed on film and television that we haven’t talked, that you want to make sure that our listeners, who are mostly writers, are aware of?
Ken: Sure. Entertainment gets some things right. Trial lawyers, criminal lawyers, terrible divorce rates, lots of alcoholism, lots of drug abuse, lots of mental health problems, suicide rate that looks like a Latvian phone number, it’s all really terrible, and it’s a high-stress job. So when entertainment portrays people as suffering through it, that’s actually fairly accurate. They are. There are people out there who are just unflappable and seem to have no problems getting through it. I always suspect they’re just in their office sucking off some huge bong to be that mellow going through this, because-
Craig: Or killing cats.
Ken: … it’s incredibly stressful. That part gets right. Gets wrong” objections. Objections are a big part of most legal TV shows and some movies. I would be almost happier if you didn’t even try, unless you have a lawyer actually tell you what a real objection is or not, because that’s another thing that takes me way out is when it’s a completely stupid nonsense objection and the response is completely nonsense. I would say it would be worth it to ask a lawyer about the objections. You could still make them dramatic. You could make good ones. But some ones, every lawyer watching is gonna go, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” And then my wife says, “Shut up. Shut up.”
Craig: I’ve heard her say that.
John: Ken, thank you so much for all this legal stuff. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. Craig, you have a One Cool Thing here I see in the Workflowy.
Craig: Yeah, this is really in honor of you, Ken. There is a category of videos that every now and then, when I’m feeling a little sad, I turn on and watch, because, god, it makes me feel great. There’s hundreds of them compiled all for your enjoyment. Just google “sovereign citizens getting owned.” It is so much fun. Are you familiar with this, John?
John: I have no idea what this is.
Craig: Sovereign citizens are dipshits who subscribe to a theory that they aren’t really people under the law, that the United States as currently constituted is some sort of admiralty or maritime law thing, that they aren’t really a person but a corporation. It’s endless reams of nonsense. Inevitably, they will get pulled over for speeding or their tags are expired or they’re in court for a misdemeanor, a traffic problem, or something more serious, and they begin this nonsense talk. It goes so bad for them so quick every single time. There are people who sovereign citizened their way into like, this cop was gonna give you a $25 parking ticket and now you’re tazed and you’re going to jail. They’re so stupid. Apparently, the one thing about sovereign citizens is they don’t watch these videos, because if they did, they would stop it. Anyway, if you want to see people representing themselves pro se, being idiots, saying nonsense, having judges roll their eyes and go, “I literally don’t know what you’re talking about,” just go ahead and google “sovereign citizens getting owned.” It’s a joy.
Ken: I’ll echo that.
John: Excellent.
Ken: Sovereign citizens, you have to think of them as really, really committed legal furries. They’ve got this persona. They’ve got the costume. They’ve got the lingo. They’re super into it, no matter what consequence it has on living their lives.
Craig: They’re so into it. They think they know the law. You’re seeing somebody reading this, and you’re like, “What?” They like Latin.
John: Of course.
Craig: They love Latin, but they don’t know why. It’s wonderful.
John: It’s excellent stuff. My One Cool Thing is something that was very useful for me this past week. It’s called LibreOffice. It’s a multi-platform app you can find for Windows, for Mac, for everything else, that I would never actually use as a word processor. You could use it as a word processor. But it could just open anything. You can throw any old file type at it, and it seems to be able to open it. I have these old, right now, files for pitches that I did in the ’90s, and it’s the only thing I could find that could open it, but it opens it beautifully. I discovered like, “Oh, that’s right, this is one I was pitching on Highlander in the ’90s.” I can now pull up that old Highlander pitch.
Craig: You can finally read that thing. Can we do some research? I feel like LibreOffice was one of my One Cool Things at some point a while ago.
John: It totally could be.
Craig: Dig it up. I’m so rarely ahead of the curve. It’s almost always that I say something, John’s like, “That was my One Cool Thing two years ago and you said it was stupid.”
Ken: Craig, my cohost doesn’t listen to me either, so this is-
Craig: Good company.
John: The book Less, you had recommended it, and then three years later I recommended it, and we found out it was great.
Craig: There you go. Every now and again.
John: LibreOffice, I would never actually use it as my main word processor.
Craig: I do remember something like that being an open-source thing, just because Microsoft Word is so goddamn annoying. I do have a bunch of old files. I don’t even know what they are at this point.
John: Exactly. I throw it on and see if it happens. The thing I’m probably most frustrated, I used to use Movie Magic Screenwriter, and that’s actually a binary format.
Craig: It’s dead.
John: It’s dead, hard to open.
Craig: Gone.
John: Ken, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
Ken: I do. Obviously, your listeners are podcast fans. I’m a huge history podcast buff. I love them, particularly when I’m commuting or on trips or things like that. I’ve just been having a blast with a podcast The Rest is History. It’s two British historians, one of them named Tom Holland, not the Spider-Man one, the other one, and the other one named Dominic Sandbrook. They have a real great rapport and chemistry. They are really knowledgeable of a wide variety of things. They delve into a huge range of different historical things. Each podcast is maybe a half an hour, 40 minutes long, perfect for a commute. Sometimes they do deep dives that are multiple episodes about something, like the background of the Titanic or JFK assassination or whatever. But they have a real love for the subject. They have a great way of conveying the similarities between these people in history and us and seeing the common threads.
They’re great at conveying how the values of historians that have told us about this stuff, how those impact how the story gets told and why you have to discount some things, because you can’t listen to the Greeks talk about the Persians, because they have all these stereotypes and that overrides everything. Stuff like that. I find it endlessly entertaining. They’ve got a huge back catalog. I’ve been listening to this nonstop on commutes for six months and enjoyed every minute of it.
John: Absolutely. While our listeners are adding podcasts to their players, they should also be adding Serious Trouble, the podcast you do with Josh Barro. Is it every week?
Ken: It’s 45 weeks a year, roughly.
John: That sounds good. I find it just terrific. It’s Ken talking through the cases of the day, which has been phenomenal. I’ve learned so much on your podcast.
Ken: Thank you.
John: Everyone take a listen to that.
Ken: Thank you.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Lou Stone Borenstein. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. Also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net to get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on beach vacations. Ken White, an absolute pleasure having you on the show.
Ken: It was a joy to come. Thank you so much.
Craig: Thanks, Ken.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so let’s pretend that you’ve finished delivering Season 2 of The Last of Us, and now you can take a vacation. You can go to Mexico and sit on a beach for a week. Is that something you’re aspiring to?
Craig: Absolutely not. Let me count the reasons why. First of all, sitting outside under the sun, which some people really seem to like to do, is simply getting radiated. That’s what you’re doing. Everyone’s terrified of radiation. Fukushima happened. People in California were like, “Don’t eat fish anymore. It’s coming.” I’m like, the ocean is swallowing up this amount of radiation. It will never reach you. But you are gonna get radiated when you get in a plane and fly to San Francisco, and you will absolutely get radiated if you sit outside. That’s what sunburning and suntanning is. It’s a response to radiation. A, no.
B, sand. Much like Anakin and whatever, I hate sand. It’s coarse. It gets everywhere. It’s annoying. The ocean is disgusting. It stinks.
John: It’s a fish toilet.
Craig: It’s a fish toilet. I’ve been scuba diving in the ocean ocean. That’s wonderful. But where the ocean hits the land, gross. Sewage. A lot of just garbage and plants. There’s little tiny crabs that pinch at you. It’s nasty.
D, four, the other people who are at the beach are horrible, because they’re beach people. They’re all like, “I gotta get there and I gotta put my blanket down,” a blanket which turns into a weird loincloth within seconds on the sand, so there’s no reason to be there at all. Everyone smells like that gross suntan lotion, which is just offensive. People are drinking for some reason at the beach, so now they’re being radiated while they’re getting drunk. Beach food is gross. Beach music is awful. That stupid fricking country/Caribbean Bahama Jimmy Buffett nonsense, horrible. Other than that, great day.
Ken: John, are you with me that that’s pretty much exactly what you expected if someone asked you what is Craig Mazin gonna say about whether he likes the beach?
John: Will Craig have a prepared rant about beach vacations?
Craig: Oh, no, it was not prepared.
John: But we can predict it.
Craig: I assure you that was entirely off the cuff. I just went through my mental library and put myself on the beach and then started to complain.
John: Absolutely. Ken White, a beach vacation or let’s say any sort of poolside vacation, so we can get rid of the sand and some of the other objects.
Craig: Oh, pools.
John: Ken, talk us through that. Appealing or not appealing?
Ken: It’s appealing to me, mixed with other things. I like vacations where we’re doing some stuff but there is at least some lounging and drinking and relaxing. My wife increasingly is not happy unless she has climbed at least one mountain a day. This is a point of contention with us.
Craig: Huge problem.
Ken: It’s true that I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t just lie around for seven days. I go crazy. I like a good vacation with a mix, some of which is drinking things I shouldn’t, eating things I shouldn’t, while lying on a hammock and reading or watching terrible things.
Craig: Now, a hammock, that’s not at the beach. I get the idea of being in the shade or being in a hotel room or a spa even. Look, I have a lot of core shame issues, so if I’m not working, I feel like I’ve done something terribly wrong. Also, I think HBO needs me to keep working, so they think I’m doing something terribly wrong. But I get the concept of vacations. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just the beach. You don’t like the beach?
John: I don’t like the beach at all. I’m the palest person on earth. All of the objections you’ve raised, I have raised as well. One of my actual biggest phobias is being trapped somewhere like in the beach or in Santa Monica without a hat.
Craig: Oh, god. You know and I know and Ken knows, but Drew don’t know. Maybe one day, Drew, if you’re lucky, you’ll know. It’s the worst. My head will start burning. I also get this thing. Do you guys get this when you go to a restaurant and they’re like, “Let’s go outside.”
John: The heat lamp.
Craig: The heat lamp. No, you’re not, because my head will burn.
John: Sizzle.
Craig: They don’t get it.
John: They don’t get it.
Craig: A lovely woman with this beautiful head of hair is like, “What’s the problem?”
Ken: I think the hair issues are a whole other episode.
Craig: We need to talk about being bald.
John: I think we’ve talked about it some.
Craig: More.
John: More.
Craig: More.
John: More bald. I’m not good with just the chill-out vacation, where you go to a place and you sit, you don’t do anything. I do need a certain minimum number of activities. That’s why sitting poolside, even if I’m in the shade, I can only read my book for so long. At a certain point, if I’m just reading a book or playing Hearthstone on my iPad, why am I not at home?
Craig: Why are you spending all this money? If I could go to a place where there’s a beautiful resort, lovely room – we’re married. We’ve all been married for a long time. Not you, Drew, but one day. Just having sex in a different place is nice, for a change. There are great dinners and things. But then also you could go play D&D or you could go solve puzzles or you could go do the things that other people like to do. I don’t know what those things are. But if I could just do the things I like to do while also on vacation and getting all these lovely services around me, that would be great. But I can’t. Instead, what happens is you go on vacation and you have to walk around, go to a museum, take picture and take picture.
John: Gotta prove you were there.
Craig: So many goddamn pictures. For what?
Ken: Then there’s the whole issue of traveling with kids, which is a very different experience.
Craig: Thank god ours are grown.
Ken: Kids are assholes. Depending on what age they are, different types of assholes.
Craig: I love them, but yes.
John: The closest I came to enjoying a chill-out vacation I would say actually was in Hawaii at the Aulani, the Disney resort there, because if you go there with a young kid, you can drop them off at the kid play area and just like, “Bye. I’ll see you in six hours.” That was actually [crosstalk 01:16:39].
Craig: Very expensive, very effective babysitter.
Ken: See, that is the only thing that would ever get me on a cruise, the concept that you can just leave them with some-
Craig: Oh, god.
Ken: … group of ne’er-do-wells who like-
Craig: I would send them on the cruise. I finally got – and this is a hard thing for Melissa, but she got there with me. We would go on vacation with the kids. Especially if we went somewhere where the time zone shifted dramatically, let’s say it’s Europe, they’re tired, they’re cranky. They don’t want to do the list of – because Melissa’s very much a guidebook, do the list of the things. I’m more like a, let’s just randomly walk around and see what happens. The kids were like, “I don’t want to leave my room,” or, “I just want to be on my computer, my iPad,” whatever. It would drive her nuts. My whole thing was, fine. If you want to stay in your room and do nothing, I would gladly pay for that, for the privilege of being able to walk around with my wife somewhere and not listen to your nonsense. I’d pay double.
Finally, we went on a vacation, the last time we went on a vacation, all four of us, to Europe – it was a couple of Christmases ago – I was just like, “Just leave them in the room.” And it worked great. It was awesome. It was amazing. Leave them in the room. That’s my advice.
John: I’ve never taken a cruise, but I’m considering taking, because as we’ve established, I’m bad on boats, and I have the same motion sickness problems you have, so I’m gonna be testing out the motion sickness stuff, because my extended family is talking about doing an Alaska cruise. That’s actually an exceptional make, because it’s difficult to visit some of those places in Alaska by land. On a boat there, that makes sense.
Craig: Those boats aren’t gonna rock you too hard, but the patch.
John: The patch.
Craig: Problem solved. You will not have the sickness problem.
John: Ken, a cruise, yes or no? Thumbs up, thumbs down?
Ken: There has been talk about doing an Alaska cruise, and seeing something that amazing might get me on the boat. I’m not a fan of legionnaire’s disease, but I might risk it for those purposes. The problem is, again, we’re at the point where my lovely wife, Katrina, is such a hiking badass that probably is gonna be – we’re gonna cruise to this new location, and when I wake up, she says, “Okay, we’re walking 12 miles straight up a peak called Hiker’s Doom.” “Okay. That sounds like fun.” I’d be a little worried about surviving it.
Craig: I think you’ll be too busy having diarrhea in a cabin that’s eight feet by four feet.
John: Yes, that.
Craig: That’s what cruises are to me. I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever go on a cruise. Ever.
Ken: Oh, but I have just the one for you, Craig, because there’s this Australian billionaire who just announced that he’s doing a complete replica of the Titanic.
Craig: Oh, great.
Ken: It’s gonna be an anti-woke Titanic. No vaccinated people.
Craig: Wait. Sorry.
Ken: No vaccinated people.
Craig: Sorry. I love this anti-woke Titanic. First of all, I love the idea that the original Titanic was kind of woke, because it allowed, what, the Irish on board. But I like that you compare the inevitable rotavirus with a total lack of vaccination and proximity to people who would be attracted to something called the anti-woke Titanic, a boat that sank.
Ken: I think you have a real shot at getting smallpox to come back with one of those, so I think it’s worth a try.
Craig: If anything were to ever get me on Team Iceberg, I think we’ve found it.
John: Craig and Ken, thank you so much for a fun episode. I will see you both and D&D tonight.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Ken: See you later. Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Ken White on BlueSky, Facebook and Threads
- Serious Trouble podcast
- The Popehat Report by Ken White
- Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry by Hanna Rosin for The New Republic
- LibreOffice
- Sovereign Citizens Getting Owned
- The Rest is History podcast
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Lou Stone Borenstein (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 638: Lawyer Scenes, Transcript first appeared on John August.
In this compendium episode, John and Craig demystify the the relationship between writers and the people who represent them, looking at how to acquire, work with and (if necessary) fire your agents and managers.
How do you get an agent or a manager? What are they looking for in a potential client? What frustrates them? How do you position yourself for success? And what should you be looking for in an agent? How should they treat their clients? What is in their job description? How do you navigate disagreements, and what are best practices for when you have to part ways?
In our bonus segment for premium members, John discusses how and why he changed his mind and signed with his first-ever manager just a few weeks ago.
Links:
- Episode 2 – How to get an agent and/or manager
- Episode 172 – Franz Kafka’s brother, and the perfect agent
- Episode 7 – Firing a manager, and trying new software
- How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t) by Paul Schrodt for GQ
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!)
- This episode’s segments were originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Agents and Managers 101 first appeared on John August.
Why are things so rough in Hollywood right now? John and Craig look at the industry’s current contraction, its historical analogues, and offer suggestions for what might fix it.
We also follow up on streaming ad breaks and New York accents, before answering listener questions on being paralyzed, whether it’s by your second draft or writing professional emails.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig wonder what to do with their digital lives once they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, and how do you keep it from getting creepy?
Links:
- The Life and Death of Hollywood by Daniel Bessner for Harpers
- One weird trick for fixing Hollywood by Max Read
- Moloch Trap
- Lola Dupre
- Codenames Duet
- 2 Kings 2:23-24
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post It’s Brutal Out Here first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 637 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, Cowboy Carter is the new album by Beyonce. 27 tracks. Craig, I thought we might take a moment go through track-by-track listings.
Craig: Great.
John: I know you had some real thoughts about Jolene, which is her reinterpretation of Dolly Parton’s classic song Jolene. What is your take on Beyonce’s spin?
Craig: Beyonce did Jolene?
John: Beyonce did Jolene.
Craig: Oh.
John: Yeah, so it’s a reversal of the central don’t take my man. It’s like, don’t even think about taking my man.
Craig: That’s not what Jolene’s about though. But she changed the lyrics?
John: She did change the lyrics, with Dolly Parton’s permission and blessing.
Craig: Okay. That’s something else then.
John: It is something else then. Maybe we’ll save that for a future episode. Instead, today, let’s take a look at what movies you actually need to have seen in order to work in this business and how much is that a factor of your generation. We’ll consult the lists of the best movies of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and beyond. Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at the stories in the news and turn them into sellable properties.
Craig: And they do sell.
John: They do sell. They do sell. In fact, one of the stories we were going to talk through I had to take off the list because a mutual friend of ours is out pitching it right now.
Craig: Wowzers.
John: Wowzers. Plus, we’ll answer listener questions, because it’s been a minute since we’ve been together to do this.
Craig: Been a minute.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, let’s take a look at our thoughts on AI as of spring 2024, including how AI helped put together this episode.
Craig: Oh, no.
Drew Marquardt: I’m out of a job.
Craig: We’re all out of a job.
John: Spoiler for folks for aren’t Premium Members. Basically, compiling the lists of 100 top movies, you can think, oh, you go to a webpage for that, but it’s actually a giant hassle to reformat that into a way that you could put this into our Workflowy. But AI did it for us.
Craig: You’ve joined the evil empire.
John: Yes. But first, we have some actual news. Every week on Weekend Read, the app we make for reading scripts on your phone, it is our own Drew Marquardt who’s picking the themes and the scripts that we’re gonna be featuring this week. I thought your theme this week was genius. It is bad vacations.
Craig: I like that.
Drew: Thank you. I did steal the premise a little bit from the Criterion channel. They had a version of that. But they are bound by what they can get distribution for. I’ve got every script you can find online.
John: Talk us through the scripts in bad vacations.
Drew: We have Jurassic Park, Midsommar, The White Lotus, we got Seasons 1 and 2, Little Miss Sunshine, The Hangover, Us, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Descent, Funny Games, and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the remake.
Craig: How is it possible that you left off the single best bad vacations movie of all time?
John: Which is?
Craig: Deliverance.
Drew: I wanted Deliverance.
Craig: Oh, you just didn’t have it.
Drew: A lot of the scripts pre-2005, the copies we have are photocopied six times, so they’re really hard to get a-
Craig: Just get AI to…
Drew: Deliverance. I wanted Thelma and Louise really bad too.
Craig: That sort of counts.
John: It feels like these themes are almost like connections. How do these things all fit together? Is it a blue? Is it a green? Is it a yellow? Is it a hard thing to fit those titles together?
Drew: It’s kind of like making mixtapes is the same itch it scratches, where you’re trying to get all the little flavors.
John: Good stuff. We have some follow-up. I see first here we have follow-up on D&D for kids. Back in 635 we talked about that. We had listeners write in with a ton of great suggestions.
Drew: So many people wrote in.
John: I think maybe, rather than read through them, because they’re URLs, we’ll put those links in the show notes so people can click through them. But I loved what Ed said here at the top.
Drew: Ed wrote, “I love my kids’ after-school program. This year, I love it even more after the addition of a new staff member, Chris. Imagine my surprise when my eight-year-old daughter came home the second week of school with a complete character sheet for Truce, the elf sorcerer. We play a lot of tabletop games with her, but I never considered breaking out D&D. I honestly have no idea how Chris does it, but the games he leads are very popular with the kids in the after-school program. Even my six-year-old twins like to play his Pokémon-themed D&D sessions. I gather it’s a lot of jumping off waterfalls and riding giant boars and other silliness, but I absolutely adore hearing about their adventures.”
Craig: Doesn’t sound silly at all.
John: That sounds awesome.
Craig: Those important encounters.
John: Craig and friends killed a giant boar just last night in our session.
Craig: Wereboar.
John: Wereboar.
Craig: Otherwise, it’s just plain old hunting, isn’t it?
John: Yeah, it is hunting. They had to have a special aspect to it. Thank you to everybody who wrote in with these great suggestions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to all these great alternatives and ways to do things. Craig, a term I saw a couple times in these mentions was OSR.
Craig: OSR?
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: OSR, original something rules?
John: Yeah, old-school role-playing.
Craig: Old-school role-playing, okay. Not familiar with that acronym.
John: Not familiar, but I bet now that we’ve seen it, we will see it all the time, I suspect. We have some follow-up on English as a second language and characters who are speaking a language that is not their own in scripts.
Drew: Harry wrote, “Listening to your latest episode about different dialects trying to communicate, I couldn’t help but think of slang as a concept. I’m Australian, and I swear, we don’t just struggle communicating with foreigners, but we struggle with talking with other English speakers. But if someone knows the slang terms, it does make the person seem more confident at communicating.” He offers some examples, which I can try an Australian accent.
John: You can try it. Go for it.
Drew: “Yeah nah” is no. “Nah yeah” is yes. “Bloody oath” is “so true.” “Cactus” is dead or broken. “Eff me dead” is “no way, that’s unfortunate.”
Craig: Oh, nar.
John: Oh, nar.
Craig: Oh, nar.
John: “Yeah nah” and “nah yeah,” it’s interesting, because we often in American English say, “No, yeah, I understand that,” or, “Yes, no, I get what you’re saying.”
Craig: We do that too. “Yeah, no” is “I agree, no.” “No, yeah,” I don’t know what that no is for exactly.
Drew: Like, “Unfortunately, yes.”
Craig: Probably. “No, yeah.” We certainly don’t say “bloody oath.”
John: No, we don’t say “bloody oath.”
Craig: Bloody oath, a cactus.
John: I think the yeah comes in because it’s like, “I hear what you’re saying and I’m agreeing with you, no.” That “yeah, nah” is really important.
Craig: Nar. Nar.
John: He goes down to the phrase “that has mayo on it,” which means “you’re exaggerating, mate.”
Craig: If someone said, “That has mayo on it,” to me, all my response is, “Get it the bloody oath away from me,” which is not what bloody oath means, but regardless.
John: Regardless, Craig is not a fan of mayonnaise.
Craig: Eff me dead.
John: Any white sauce and Craig, no.
Craig: Pretty much. I just don’t like-
John: Hey, do you like the whipped garlic foamy stuff that comes with Mediterranean food sometimes?
Craig: I don’t trust it, because they won’t tell you what’s in it, and I think it’s probably mayonnaise.
John: No, it’s just garlic and oil.
Craig: I don’t know if that’s true. They won’t say what it is. Until they say, I’m suspicious.
Drew: Did you have a bad experience? Did it make you sick?
Craig: No. I just don’t like mayonnaise. Absolutely hate it. Hate it. Hate the sight of it. Hate the name of it. The consistency is horrible. The fact that you can pick up a jar and it weighs nothing is terrifying to me. I don’t understand it.
John: Have we discussed marshmallows? Are you a fan of marshmallows?
Craig: Marshmallows are fine, but that’s not a sauce. That’s a gelatin colloidal suspension. What do you call it? But I don’t sit eating marshmallows now, certainly not anymore. But they were never a food that I was like, “Yay, marshmallows.”
John: I’m fine with them in hot chocolate, but I don’t need them in other places. As a binding agent in rice crispy squares, sure.
Craig: Toasting marshmallows, that carbon is fun. You know what?
John: Tell me.
Craig: This isn’t gonna be a One Cool Thing, because it applies to almost no one. But we were doing some work in Alberta a week ago, and we were staying at a place called the Kananaskis Mountain Lodge.
John: I think I saw that inside of a Zoom there, because we played some D&D.
Craig: You did. You saw me. You saw the lodge when we were D&D-ing. At the bar, you know I’m an old-fashioned fan. I like to enjoy an old-fashioned, my favorite cocktail. They had something called a s’mores old-fashioned. Now I am notorious for ordering the old-fashioned old-fashioned whenever I see some sort of goofy twist. They had put it up on signs. You know when you go to Vegas, in the elevator it’s like, “Come enjoy the prime rib.” That was their thing was the s’mores old-fashioned. So I’m like, “I’ll do it.” Delicious.
Their deal was they gave you an old-fashioned neat, and then they had a marshmallow that they had adhered to a graham cracker, probably by melting the bottom of it. They bring it to you. They light the marshmallow on fire. As it’s flaming, they carefully turn it over, with the graham cracker as a lid, and invert it over the glass. Then you let it sit and fill with marshmallow smoke for about 30 seconds. Then you remove it and you drink it. It was spectacularly good. It was the kind of thing where I thought, oh, these folks have come up with this cool thing, and now a bunch of LA people are gonna come back, talk about it on a podcast, and it’s gonna show up in bars in LA.
John: The clock has started ticking.
Craig: It has started ticking on the s’mores old-fashioned.
John: I will drink an old-fashioned, but sweet drinks, any drink that feels like dessert is not my go-to. But this case it also feels like it’s just dessert that actually has alcohol in it.
Craig: An old-fashioned shouldn’t be too sweet. If it’s too sweet, boo. I like it more when it’s really bourbon and just a little bit of a hint. The marshmallow smoke itself has no sweetness. It’s carbon. That was the only part of toasting marshmallows I liked was when you would just incinerate it and then eat the crackly charcoal skin.
John: Yeah, but there’s at least a 33 percent chance that you’re going to burn your fingers trying to do the thing, and you got the hot marshmallow on your fingers.
Craig: You just gotta wait five seconds, John. This is a real problem.
John: Like children here.
Craig: There’s literally an experiment about this.
John: I was doing this as a child. You’re doing this as an adult.
Craig: Just put it on a stick, man. Just wait. You’re an Eagle Scout, for god’s sake.
John: More follow-up on Tiffany problems. Tiffany, of course, is a situation where you have a historically accurate name that sounds too modern so people don’t believe it. This is a case where Josh is writing in with a spoken word that people believed was anachronistic.
Drew: He calls it the “Tiffany tiff on Twitter related to Manhunt on Apple TV.” Someone objected to the use of “creep” in the mid-19th century, and many, including Keith Olbermann, weighed in to inform it’s actually not the anachronistic error, or Tiffany problem, that the poster believed it to be.
John: I like that this features Patton Oswalt, a former guest, who apparently said the word, referred to John Wilkes Booth as a creep, and whether creep would exist in the language of 1865, and apparently it did.
Craig: Did it? Keith Olbermann is citing the – I assume this is in Merriam Webster – etymology. It looks like meaning despicable person is by 1886. That would still be 20-some-odd years after.
John: Yeah, but it’s a question of when did it make it into print. But “creeper,” which is a gilded rascal, is recorded from circa 1600.
Craig: That seems like a different thing. That’s more of a sneak thief as opposed to a… It says robbed customers in brothels, which by the way, still goes on, from what I understand. It probably is a little bit of an anachronism, but not a wild one if it’s off by 20 years.
John: I think it’s the fact that Patton said creep and then was like, “I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?” It was really the run of the phrase was really what felt anachronistic.
Craig: “What the hell am I trying to say?” I also think that Patton Oswalt is already an anachronism. He wasn’t alive in 1865.
John: It’s the worst.
Craig: He’s alive right now. It’s all anachronisms.
John: We should stop making anything that’s not set now, because it’s a lie.
Craig: If he had said, “Oh my god, that guy is totally a creep,” that would’ve been anachronistic.
John: Yeah, that would.
Craig: “He’s literally a creep.”
John: We had Pamela Ribon on the show last week.
Craig: Pam Ribon!
John: Absolutely the best. Her job used to be as a TV logger. I asked her, to what degree do you think that still is a job, because AI systems are actually really good at transcribing stuff and noting what’s happening there. North wrote in with some info on this.
Drew: North says, “I work in post-production on a non-union true crime documentary show, and a huge part of crafting the stories for our episodes involves creating transcripts of each interview. So we use an AI platform to generate time-code accurate transcripts, but these transcripts are not perfect. AI is pretty good at distinguishing between speaker 1 and speaker 2, but it often gets things wrong, like consistent name spelling, locations, and small verbal things like the difference between in and and, for example.”
Craig: That’s no big deal.
Drew: “We actually hire entry-level people to humanize these transcripts.”
Craig: Oh, god.
Drew: “Our humanizers are essentially AI editors or spell-checkers.”
Craig: That’s what it’s down to.
Drew: “This is where I started before being promoted to a coordinator role. Thus far, AI hasn’t quite replaced our human loggers, transcribers, but the role has shifted and the hours have certainly reduced. What used to be a full-time job is now more often part-time for our show, which is a bummer for entry-level workers, but like Pamela, I don’t recommend spending 12 hours a day transcribing raw true crime interviews for anyone’s mental health.”
Craig: Humanizer?
John: Humanizers.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: Again, it’s a Britney Spears lyric.
Craig: Humanizer.
John: (sings) Humanizer, humanizer. Drew, you and I actually have some experience with this too, because when we were doing the sidecasts, we used Descript. Descript is an editing program where you feed in the raw audio and it comes up with a transcript that’s not perfect, but you are actually editing text instead of editing wave forms to do it.
Drew: Which was much easier. You could figure out filler words or stuff like that and just cut them out much quicker.
Craig: Got it. For our transcripts for this show, we still use-
John: We use a human being.
Craig: We use a human being? Oh my god. That’s so weird.
John: So weird.
Craig: Shouldn’t we just get a humanizer? That’s the worst term I’ve ever heard.
John: We assume we’re using a full human being who’s doing all this themselves.
Craig: We assume it.
John: But for what we know… We contract this out. Who’s doing our transcripts right now?
Drew: Dima Cass.
John: We assume Dima is doing this all by hand, but for all we know, they could be feeding it in and humanizing it themselves.
Craig: We don’t know.
John: We don’t know.
Craig: We don’t know. You know what? Let’s keep our hands clean. Is Dima Cass a person or a company?
Drew: Never met them in person.
Craig: Exciting.
John: More follow-up from Oliver.
Drew: Back in Episode 618, Oliver wrote in, “Last year I officially sold my first script to a mid-size studio, and it was shot in early 2023. As part of the arrangement, there was an optional rewrite clause, although the studio assured me that the script was essentially good to go. On the early Zoom calls, everyone I met was lovely and thrilled about the script. The producers and directors were so excited, and everyone began sharing ideas, which was super fun, until it wasn’t. Months later, having gone down numerous rabbit holes, the entire process became bleak and disheartening, to the point that days before production, one of the producers was in the script inserting exposition.”
John: I think our advice at the time was, yeah, this sucks, but also-
Craig: Welcome to Hollywood, kid.
John: Welcome to Hollywood, kid. You’ll get through it. Oliver wrote in with an update.
Drew: He said, “After a whole year, I was finally given the chance to watch the finished film. And it had been so long, truthfully, I couldn’t even notice any of the changes we made from the original draft they greenlit. The setup, the major turns, the crisis, the concept in general, were all there, everything they loved about the script in the first place. Is the movie perfect? No. There were a handful of moments that bumped for me, perhaps a misread line here and there. Ironically, this brought me some relief. The aspects that had me fretting for nights on end in pre-production didn’t change the essence of the film one bit.
“The whole experience made me realize again that the script is merely a blueprint. What people watch and experience isn’t the polishing process of a pdf. It’s the casting, the look, the score, the edit, and yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product. Next time, I hope to approach pre-production edits with a little less self-imposed anxiety and doubt.”
Craig: You had me and you lost me. Here’s where he had me.
John: Up until the blueprint?
Craig: Yeah. Jeez Louise, man. Wrong conclusion, Oliver, but right conclusion of part. One of the hard parts about what we do for a living is that – Ted Elliot has said this many times – that most screenwriters never get to do the second half of the job. They only do the first half, which is writing the script. The second half is seeing the script being produced. Then you start to learn the relationship between the script and the final product. When you’re in prep, yes, it’s good to realize, “Okay, here are the hills to die on. Here are the things that really, really matter. These other things I can work on and probably they will not be significant disruptions. They might even be improvements.”
Where I think Oliver goes wildly awry here is when he says, “The whole experience made me realize,” again, he shouldn’t have realized it the first time, “that the script is,” quote, “merely a blueprint.” This seems like a press release from the DGA as far as I’m concerned.
John: Yeah, totally.
Craig: The script is not merely a blueprint. He says, “What people watch and experience is the casting, the look, the score, the edit.” Sorry, all of that comes from the script. It all begins in the script. There’s a reason they need a script. It’s the thing that tells them what kind of person should be cast, how is this supposed to look, what is the tone, what kind of emotions would we want to experience here that the composer needs to understand. Then the edit is literally going back to the script in so many ways, like what was the intention and flow of these scenes on paper.
Then he says, “And yes, the story, but that’s just one piece of the final product.” The story is the only thing. I’m sorry. I know that people think that cinema is about beautiful framing and all the rest. It helps. It’s part of the enjoyment. But it’s the story. It’s the story that people want. Otherwise, you can just go and watch some old French movies about people twiddling their thumbs in cafes. People love stories. That’s what we’ve been doing as human beings our whole lives.
Merely the blueprint? First of all, have you looked at a blueprint? Have you ever seen one? The word you would never apply to it is “merely.”
John: Merely, yeah.
Craig: It’s the most detailed… It’s like, here’s all of the things you need to do so this building doesn’t fall down and murder people.
John: I think Oliver mostly gets it and made some bad word choices here along the way. I think Oliver had some insights which were helpful.
Craig: We are a writing podcast though.
John: First, let’s acknowledge some things that I think Oliver got right. It’s so possible to stress out over, “Oh my god, they’re trying to change this one line in this one scene. Everything’s gonna fall apart.” No, it’s not.
Craig: No, it’s not. Perspective is a good thing, and you have to learn it by experiencing it.
John: Absolutely. I wish Oliver could’ve been on set to see the process of how the movie he wrote was actually shot and then the editing room. He didn’t get that experience, but at least he saw the final product and was relatively happy about it.
But I do want to circle back to this idea of merely a blueprint or even just the notion of blueprint, because I think there was a good intention behind that at one point, and I think that’s been lost. I think the degree that the screenwriter is the architect of the project, yes. The screenwriter’s figuring out the whole thing, has the vision for the entire thing, is laying it all out, and like an architect, has to then rely on other people to actually physically build the thing, the specialists, contractors, everything else. That metaphor tracks. But when you then conflate, “Oh, it’s just the blueprint,” or that the blueprint is just a thing that exists separately from the finished building, that’s nuts.
Craig: It’s insane. If you do direct something, all the time you spend in prep, all of it, and it’s so much time – often for movies, there’s more time in prep than there is shooting – is based on the script. Every discussion you have is based on the script. Everything is how do we make this thing on the page happen in real life. I don’t think blueprint is as good of a word as, say, scripture is, because that’s how important it is. It is the fundamental document to the creation of everything.
I get it right in my aorta every time someone’s like, “The script is merely… ” I’m like, “Let me stop you right there. If it’s merely something, give it back. Go make this without it. In fact, you’ve read it. It’s merely a blueprint. You don’t need to read it again. Let me just gather all the copies. Good luck, everyone.” No.
John: The two Charlie’s Angels that I worked on were notoriously like, “Okay, we’re in production, and everything is changing.” We go through the whole color rainbow multiple times. Every scene has changed. In that situation, you could say, oh, they went in without a script or something. That’s not true at all. We went in with a script and all had the same vision basically of what it is we were trying to do. What those actual scenes were moment by moment did change a lot. It was incredibly difficult and frustrating, because we were building the building without having finished plans for everything. But we knew which building we were building. We all could agree on that as a basis.
That’s probably the wildest exception. That’s the extreme case of, okay, we’re going in. We don’t have everything locked down and finished. In most cases, you really are gonna have a very clear sense of this is the plan for the movie. Could different directors working off the same script make a very different movie? Absolutely.
Craig: Of course.
John: But there’s a plan behind it, so don’t sell yourself short, Oliver.
Craig: Or anyone. In the end, I am a director, so I’m not denying how important it is and now directors can do that job well or poorly. But a lot of times, the director’s understanding of the script is directly connected to how good of a job they do telling the story. If you don’t understand it, you can’t be interesting as you tell the story. Also, let’s just say, why wasn’t Oliver invited? He wrote it.
John: He wrote it.
Craig: It’s just so weird. It’s just so weird to me. Oh, movies.
John: Oh, movies. I don’t know if we remember or even knew whether Oliver was a WGA writer. He says it’s a mid-sized studio. I assume it’s an American studio.
Craig: Should be.
John: As a WGA writer, he should’ve been invited to give notes on an early cut. There are creative rights. It’s hard to enforce those, but you should’ve gotten a letter from the WGA saying, hey, here’s a reminder, here are the things and [crosstalk 00:22:55].
Craig: They don’t matter, because what they do then is they have ChatGPT. They send you a cut. You send notes back to some dead letter office at a studio and it’s never looked at. It’s not real. The thing about creative rights is either it’s an enforceable term that matters and is incorporated into the process or it’s not. Same thing with directors and television.
I’ve never directed an episode that I didn’t write or for a show I wasn’t making. But let’s say I did, because I think that would be fun, actually, to go direct an episode for someone else and not have to worry about the whole damn thing. I think I get five days to edit. That’s my, quote unquote, right. You know what? Five days is the same as zero days. It’s not enough. It just means, “Sure. Come here.” It’s a creative, quote unquote, right. We have a creative, quote unquote, right to give notes. But in the end, the people who are in charge are the people who are in charge. There’s nothing we can do.
John: Your ability to actually influence the movie depends on your relationship with those people who initially hired you. It’s possible Oliver could have edged his way in there a little bit more. He didn’t. But anyway.
Craig: Certainly not for a lack of humility, because I’m saying a little less humility here, Oliver, would be good. The good news is the movie was done. By the way, no movie is perfect. That’s always an eye-opener when you’re like, “Whoa.” That’s the day you stop ripping on movies as hard as you did before, when you’re like, “Oh, this is hard to do. It’s hard.”
John: Some movies that did turn out not perfect but really quite good are the 100 best movies of the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s.
Craig: Oh, my.
John: We went through and pulled the lists of what are generally considered the 100 best. In some cases it was the Rolling Stone list or some IMDb list, and so there’s gonna be some weird titles on this. But I went through yesterday and marked the ones I hadn’t seen. Drew went through and marked them as well. I will find some way to put this online so people can see the things that I’ve missed. There are some sort of embarrassing things that I’ve not seen. But on the whole, I felt pretty good about it. What actually sent me down this whole path is I was looking at the AFI list of the 100 best movies of all time, and I realized I’ve never seen Intolerance.
Craig: You don’t need to.
John: My ability to be a screenwriter is not impacted by my not seeing a 1916 movie.
Craig: No. You don’t need to see Intolerance.
John: It’s a question of what movies do you need to see. For us, I would say there are some movies before 1970 that are important for us to see as a framework, but it really was ’80s, ’90s, and later that actually matters. If I look through the list, those are the movies that I’ve seen almost all of them.
Craig: I don’t know what we do with this list. It’s a pretty good list, actually. I’m kind of enjoying it. I’m looking at the movies that you haven’t seen that I have. I love Videodrome. You do not need to see Videodrome. Come and See is I think the best war movie ever made and very influential on Chernobyl, but it is about the hardest watch. Brazil, wonderful, but also not necessary. Oh, The King of Comedy I would strongly recommend actually, because it’s Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro playing a very different kind of role, and Sandra Bernhard. It is certainly the funniest movie Scorsese ever made, but it’s also very relevant to now.
John: It’s a big influence on Joker.
Craig: Oh, definitely. Huge influence on Joker. They Live you do not need to see, although it’s hysterical. Once Upon a Time in America, there’s two versions of it. The version that they cut to ribbons and put in theaters, horrible. The uncut, endless Sergio Leone movie, fantastic and also not necessary.
John: Let’s talk about what’s necessary and what’s not necessary. That’s actually the bigger framing question behind this is to what degree is the movie necessary, because it speaks in conversation with the kinds of things that we’re making now.
Craig: I’m looking at this. I gotta be honest with you. I don’t think any of the ones that you didn’t see are necessary. Maybe Sophie’s Choice. Maybe. You’re missing some great movies in here.
John: Of course.
Craig: Don’t get me wrong. They’re all great movies. It’s cool to see Near Dark on there. I’m obsessed with ’90s movies. That’s my thing now. I realized how many of my favorite movies are from the ’90s. I think that that is a function of two things. One, I think movies got kind of cool in the ’90s because there was this resurgence of the indie vibe as Miramax began to inspire other people to make weird movies. But also, I was in my 20s, and that’s when you go to see movies.
John: That’s what it comes down to.
Craig: Oh, man, look how good these are.
John: Drew, you’re more than a generation younger than us, and so you just now saw Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Drew: Yeah, I saw that a few weeks ago.
John: Tell us, watching that movie now, what was your takeaway?
Drew: It felt both dated and still wildly transgressive too. The Andie MacDowell character feels very modern, and same with James Spader. It’s strange. You can’t make it today. It wouldn’t quite be the same. But I loved having four characters.
Craig: You can barely make any of these.
Drew: That’s fair.
Craig: John, Miller’s Crossing is a masterpiece.
John: I’m sure it’s a masterpiece.
Craig: Strong recommend. You don’t need to see Kingpin or Rounders or The Rainmaker or Dead Man. Three Kings is hysterical. I love that movie. But do you need to see it? No. The Fisher King is so good. If there’s one movie-
John: Is The Fisher King William Goldman?
Craig: No. Fisher King is Richie LaGravenese.
John: Great.
Craig: Terry Gilliam directed. Robin Williams will break your heart. It is so weird and beautiful. I just love that movie.
John: One argument for seeing movies on this list that you haven’t seen before and why that might be necessary is you might be out pitching a project or talking about a project, not realizing that movie was already made, or that the people you’re talking with are gonna have that as a reference and you don’t have that as a reference and then it’s just gonna be weird.
Craig: I definitely remember faking my way through some meetings in the ’90s where people would talk about movies from the ’70s or ’60s that I hadn’t seen, because I was 0 or minus 10. They were like, “Oh yeah, so it’s blah blah blah meets so-and-so.” I hadn’t seen any Jacques Tati movies. Are you familiar with Jacques Tati?
John: I’ve seen two.
Craig: That was two more than I had seen. I had never even heard of him. I was from Staten Island. They were like, “Oh yeah, it’s like Jacques Tati.” I’m like, “Absolutely. Yes.” I couldn’t pull my phone out in the bathroom and look them up. I was flying by the seat of my pants, like, “Please don’t ask me for details about Mr. Hulot. I don’t have them.”
Drew: Were they comparing Rocketman to Jacques Tati?
Craig: Totally.
Drew: That makes sense.
Craig: Totally. I was like, “Totally. It is Jacques Tati.” I was just like, “He’s dumb, and he goes to space. Isn’t that enough?” Now, again, you can just fake a period cramp, go to the bathroom – some of us can – look him up quickly on your phone, come back and be like, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s not this Jacques Tati movie. It’s really more like this Jacques Tati movie,” and look cool.
John: Arcades are late teens, early 20s. My daughter had a scratch-off poster of the 100 greatest movies or some other list of movies. I’d seen almost all these movies, but she hadn’t. I was remembering, like, oh man, if you’re a young person who’s trying to catch up on culture, it’s a lot. Tarantino’s movies. Which of the Tarantino movies are important?
Craig: I think start with Pulp Fiction and then make some choices. I’ve been showing Bella Ramsey a lot of movies from the ’90s. We started with Pulp Fiction, which she loved. Then I made the choice to jump to Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, because they’re incredibly entertaining and also not super duplicative of Pulp Fiction. By the way, looking at these, the ones you haven’t seen, Drew, if I may. Out of Sight is a masterpiece. Schindler’s List is one of the movies you have to see, unfortunately. Ed Wood is spectacular.
Drew: That one I’m embarrassed about.
Craig: It’s so much fun. Get Shorty is so much fun. Quiz Show, masterpiece. Dead Man Walking, the soundtrack is incredible, better than the movie. I don’t think you need to see The English Patient, although I loved it. Glengarry Glen Ross, you have to see Glengarry Glen Ross.
John: [Crosstalk 00:31:30] references back.
Craig: Actually, I envy you that you haven’t seen it.
Drew: That’s one of those ones when people are like, “You haven’t seen The Godfather?” kind of movies. I’ve seen The Godfather, but Glengarry is mine.
Craig: Glengarry Glen Ross goes by in the blink of an eye. Spectacular. In the Name of the Father, gorgeous. These are all amazing. The Grifters. My Cousin Vinny, it’s really funny, but do you have to see it? No. 12 Monkeys. It’s funny how many Terry Gilliam movies you have here.
John: Is 12 Monkeys necessary? I don’t think it is.
Craig: No. It’s one of those movies like Brazil – also Terry Gilliam – where it’s like, “If you get it, you get it, man.” I got it, but I didn’t feel the need to be like, “Yeah, but you have to see 12 Monkeys.” It’s one of those movies where you tell someone, “This is the most mind-blowing movie ever,” and then they sit there and they’re bored and you feel bad. Check it out. If you like it, stay with it.
John: As I look through the movies I have not seen, some of them are just because of the genre. I haven’t seen Saw. I don’t need to see Saw. I understand what Saw is.
Craig: You don’t. You do not need to see it.
John: We’ll find some way to post this up here so people can take a look and tell us what movies they haven’t seen, what movies they feel like are actually crucially important. But again, I’d say the takeaway from this is that there are movies that people are going to assume that you will have seen, and that if you haven’t seen them, going into certain conversations, if you’re staffed in a writers’ room, it may just be a little bit weird that you don’t have that as a frame of reference. That said, if you’re a younger person, if you’re not born and raised in the U.S., you’re gonna have some different references. That’s just the reality.
Craig: Which is fine. Although our main export in the United States appears to be movies and military equipment.
John: That’s what we do.
Craig: People do share a lot of these common references. These are great. This is a very useful list you put together.
John: With the help from some AI.
Craig: So people know, on our reference Workflowy outline here, you very helpfully put orange on the movies that you haven’t seen, John, and blue on the movies that Drew hasn’t seen, and you wrote “Legend,” like a legend to describe what color goes what. I thought that initially you were talking about the movie Legend.
John: Oh yeah, the movie Legend, which is crucial.
Craig: Not at all crucial.
John: 100 percent, if you have not seen the movie Legend, get out of here.
Craig: Little Tom Cruise going up against Tim Curry as a monster.
John: (sings) Is your love strong enough?
Craig: It’s not a great film. I thought, why did they break out Legend specifically?
John: This is the other thing I think that prompted me to start this whole exercise is, on my flight back from D.C., I watched Labyrinth, which I’d never seen Labyrinth.
Craig: David Bowie and is it Phoebe Cates?
John: I thought it might be Phoebe Cates as well. It’s Jennifer Connelly.
Craig: Jennifer Connelly, right.
John: I combined them, saying, “It’s so weird that she did this, and then a few years later she was-“
Craig: It’s Phoebe Connelly. Not great.
John: Not necessary.
Craig: No.
John: I can see why it’s reference for certain people. Totally.
Craig: I think it’s one of those movies, as a kid, when you saw it, you were… Look, I love Beast Master; can’t recommend it to anyone.
John: If I loved Labyrinth, I would be pitching the Labyrinth sequel now with Jennifer Connelly.
Craig: Here’s an interesting thing. I’ve run into this. I remember, again, in the ’90s, there were certain movies that would come up that people loved and would use as touchstones, that either few people had seen or if you did then go and watch it, you were like, “Why the hell does everyone care about this movie?” It was just one of those things that got under their skin in a culty, viral way in Hollywood, but didn’t necessarily matter to anyone else. I feel like Labyrinth might be one of those.
John: At least three different times in my career, people have pitched the H.R. Pufnstuf movie.
Craig: Which is not a good idea.
John: Not a good idea, but I also have no reference for it, because for whatever reason, it never showed on TV in Boulder, Colorado where I grew up.
Craig: Really?
John: I’ve never seen a frame of it.
Craig: It was enjoyable. But South Park had an episode with Member Berries. I don’t know if you’ve saw that one. “Member?” That’s the value of H.R. Pufnstuf is, “Member?” Yes, I remember. Yes, correct. Don’t think I need a movie of it.
John: Nope, not necessary. Let’s make some new movies. Enough of these old movies. How Would This Be a Movie is a segment where we take a look at some stories in the news and figure out what are the possibilities of making this into a new movie or a series or whatever else, some sort of piece of quality entertainment. The first is an article that went incredibly viral, by Charlotte Cowles. Did you read this when it first came out?
Craig: No, I didn’t. I just read it for this today, and I was startled.
John: Startled. This is The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. Charlotte Cowles is a journalist. She actually writes about personal finance and such for legitimate publications. She had this basically phone scam that claimed to be Amazon customer service, and she was ultimately tricked into putting $50,000 in a shoe box and handing it to a random person in a car. I think it’s worth reading the article. After having read the article, a bunch of people raised concerns about, like, this doesn’t actually track and make sense. I have suspicions about whether she’s telling the whole story here at some moments.
Craig: This one almost feels too wild to believe. First of all, Ms. Cowles is the financial advice columnist. This is not somebody who is just confused about how money works. It’s a fascinating piece, because it’s like watching somebody humiliate themselves in slow motion on paper, where they go through a series of choices and moments where they even are saying, “This makes no sense. You’re crazy. You’re lying,” over and over, and just keeps doing the dumb thing. It’s hard for me to understand why somebody who’s the financial advice columnist for a publication wouldn’t immediately call an attorney if they were being told they were under investigation for a crime. Everybody who’s seen any episode of any copaganda show knows that the cops don’t want you to lawyer up. I struggled to believe this.
John: I did struggle at times too. When she actually has to go to the bank and get $50,000 in cash, strained credibility. Is it possible? I guess. I also want to believe that New York Magazine, I think-
Craig: Yeah, the New York.
John: … would’ve fact checked to some degree to establish that the things that she’s saying are true are true. Let’s take this at face value. Let’s just say this is a thing that actually happened. What parts of this are interesting for a movie or for an episode? To me, you get into this, and you have to stay in almost real time, because too many cuts, too many getting away from the moment, the whole souffle just crumbles. It has to start with that. But then I’m also fascinated by the repercussions after the fact. Let’s say this thing happened for real. What happens in the days after? What does her husband say? Does she keep her job? The suspicion of what actually is there, that is interesting to me.
Craig: I guess. I don’t understand how they have kept their job. They’re a financial advice columnist, and they’ve just written a story about how they are the most financially naïve human on the planet. I know that people do get fooled. If Charlotte Cowles were writing about someone else’s story and describing what they did, and that person was, let’s say-
John: A nurse. A teacher.
Craig: … a nurse, a teacher, somebody that doesn’t know much about financial stuff, me, then yeah. But the part of this that’s so challenging, if you are a screenwriter, is – it’s an interesting challenge, I guess. Maybe that’s what makes it good. Take the person who’s the least likely to be scammed and have them get scammed. Who can scam them, and how? But scammers generally just aren’t even that good. We’ve gotten those calls. Everybody’s gotten the call from the, quote unquote, IRS.
She makes a point of saying that sequential people that call her, their accent is hard to place. Every alarm bell is going off here. It’s one thing if somebody from the FBI calls you and they speak with an accent in English. People who speak accented English work for the government. But now, three in a row? Eh.
She says, “Cops don’t do this. Police don’t do this. This doesn’t make sense.” Then she just keeps doing it, like a zombie. I’m missing… Part of our job is to make sure that actions are motivated and understandable so people at home don’t keep saying, “Why would you – a human wouldn’t do that.” I just kept feeling a human wouldn’t do it.
John: Except that I think back to when I leased my last car. I was like, “This is going on forever.” At a certain point, I’m just like, “Whatever that is, I will take it. I’m done negotiating on certain points.” Same thing happens with police confessions, where you eventually just give in and you accept their reality of events, so you confess to things that you didn’t do. Some of this reminded me a bit of Shattered Glass in the sense of – in that case it’s a journalist who’s-
Craig: Making stuff up.
John: … making stuff up. But the tension of that becomes – you have to be in real time and watching the world melt down around them.
Craig: It’s funny you mention Shattered Glass. Stephen Glass wrote for The New Yorker, which I can say as somebody who has been profiled by them, their fact-checking process is fully colonoscopic. It’s insane. Maybe New York, I don’t know, hopefully, they did as much of a good job. But this reads a little bit like Hack Heaven, which was the article that Stephen Glass wrote for – one of them that he wrote for The New Yorker. If you read Hack Heaven – and it’s available online, you can find it – when you read it, you’re like, “This doesn’t sound right. There’s something wrong.” She’ll say, “I know I shouldn’t do this, but then I did.” I’m like, I’m missing a piece in between. Look, I’m not accusing her of making this up, but something’s weird. People online are saying they can smell a rat?
John: Yeah, people are raising concerns. But that’s died down. I’ve not seen a full accounting of this. This is several weeks old at this point.
Craig: That’s hard to believe is a challenge.
John: It is.
Craig: It’s a challenge for screenwriters. You want to find that sweet spot between, “Oh my god, it’s hard to believe, but it really did happen, and I believe it happened that way,” and, “That’s hard to believe, and I also think you just are making stuff up.”
John: One challenge envisioning this as a story is that you have one central character that we’re seeing through a lot of this. You see her. She is only responding. She’s not taking affirmative action herself. If you see her turning the tables at a certain point, you can identify with her, but otherwise, you’re just watching this cork floating down a river. It’s not gonna be an interesting role until you see her take some agency.
Craig: It’s a tough thing to want to stay with her, also. It’s frustrating to watch somebody fail over and over and over. It also becomes redundant. There possibly is an interesting story to tell on the other side of things, where you have somebody who’s scamming people and it actually starts to work, and they themselves can’t believe what they’re doing. And they start to question if they should be doing it. And they start wondering if she’s setting them up. There’s a good film noir thing where she’s scamming them back and they find out.
John: Zeke Faux, who came on the podcast a year or two ago to talk through his side of being a journalist who wrote one of these How Would This Be a Movie stories, recently had a piece on the other side of a scam, basically those wrong number text kind of things and what it really comes back to. In some cases, those are basically people held in near-slavery conditions who are doing those jobs.
Craig: Oh, jeez. It’s happened to me a few times. The first time that text thing happened to me, honestly, I was like, “Oh, nope, sorry, wrong number,” and the person was really nice. And then 20 days later, they texted me back and they were like, “This is crazy, but I’m in LA,” because they know my area code. They’re like, “You just seem so nice. It would be great to meet.” I was like, “Okay.”
John: Delete and mark as spam.
Craig: “Here we go. Here we go. That’s not how this works.” Obviously, scammers have been preying on people since the beginning of time. If you look back in the Bible, the Pharaoh’s magicians were clearly just con artists. Con artistry is a thing. It always will be. Religion, in some aspects, or some kinds of expressions of religion are con artistry, and they get people to give them money. It’s just the financial advice.
John: That’s the problem.
Craig: That’s the problem. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.
John: Here’s how it might work. Imagine they were actually doing it to discredit here, there was somebody who particularly went after her because she was a financial advisor, because she had written something in this space, and like, “No, we can even get you. That’s how good I am.”
Craig: Okay, but at that point, you can get anyone, right? If you can come up with a way to fool a doctor with a fake medicine scam, fool other people. You got everybody at that point. Look, there are moments where scammers get inside of your skin. Have you ever gotten the one where you get the email, it’s like, “Guess what? I’ve been watching you through your camera on your laptop, and I recorded you jerking off, and I know what porn you were jerking off to.” Then you’re like, “Oh, no, because I totally did that.” “I’m gonna send it to all your friends and family.” You’re like, “Oh, no.” Then you’re like, “Wait. No, you’re not.” But still, there’s that moment.
John: That moment of panic.
Craig: The problem is there’s seven or eight moments where you can then go, “Yeah.” Also, this was the weirdest thing about – I know we’re spending so much time on this story – but I’m so suspicious, because she kept asking these people for badge numbers. Who cares? That’s a dumb question. Badge number? If a CIA agent called me, I’d be like, what am I gonna do with your badge number, check it against the CIA badge number database? That’s a weird question.
John: The CIA is notoriously transparent about-
Craig: Exactly. Also, you know who doesn’t call you about this stuff? The CIA. Ever. No one gets called from the CIA. I don’t know.
John: I don’t know.
Craig: I don’t even know.
John: Next up, we have Wanted: True Love. This is a story by Angela Chen in the New York Times. In their innovative approach to finding true love, two men, including one of them who’s the project manager at OpenAI, AI Connection, offered dating bounties to incentivize matchmakers. They weren’t paying money to the women. They were paying money to like, if you can help connect me with the love of my life, I will pay you a bounty, one of them up to $100,000. It was a blend between traditional matchmaking and a tech startup-y kind of thing to it. Craig, what did you take from this story? What did you think of this as a story area?
Craig: It’s a good story area. The story itself is disconcerting. I feel like somebody offering $100,000 for love, that’s basically a great reason to swipe left. But it is I think fertile territory for a fun rom-com. Somebody’s like, “Great, I gotta collect that 100 grand,” and then actually falls in love with them. But then there’s lies because it turns out they didn’t have $100,000 or whatever. You know, rom-com stuff. It’d be fun. I think it’s a cute way to set that premise up.
John: What was the Jennifer Lawrence movie? No Hard Feelings.
Craig: No Hard Feelings.
John: There’s a little bit of the aspect of that movie in there too.
Craig: A little bit, yeah, a little bit. It’s an interesting concept. I like actually that the guy is offering the money, because then you’re like, what’s wrong with him?
John: It reminds me a little of Hitch as well.
Craig: Little Hitch-ish.
John: Again, you have a guy who can’t find love, who’s turning to an outside source to help him find love, and in the course of that, hopefully other relationships are deepening. The person who is the bounty hunter here, who is the Boba Fett of this man’s love life, that’s an interesting relationship between the two of them too. That could all work. It feels like a 15 years ago Seth Rogen comedy.
Craig: It is interesting just looking at this article. But I agree, it feels a little dated. There are pictures of two of the guys, and they’re both in these oddly childlike situations. I think it’s just no one’s growing up anymore. “I’m in a playground slide. I’m wearing my rainbow pajamas.” All I wanted to do was grow up. That’s all I wanted to do was be an adult. I wanted to wear a tie. I was like, “Let’s do this.” It’s gone. It’s over.
Drew: I keep having that moment of, “When do I shift into my suit and tie era?” At a certain age, do you suddenly have to be that person?
Craig: I’ve never really gotten that. My job doesn’t require a suit and tie. Look, I still build Lego sets, so who am I to talk? I’m building the Lego Pac-Man Arcade.
John: Great.
Craig: So good.
John: So much fun.
Craig: Anyway, I’m as much of a child as-
John: I can feel that in my fingertips just whenever you talk about assembling Legos. I can feel that.
Craig: Little snap.
John: Little snap.
Craig: Little snap.
John: Little pinch. We think there’s something interesting about this space. There’s nothing about these specific people. We’re not buying this story. But as a story area, I think this is fertile. I can see it.
Craig: It’s a little generic rom-com-ish. It’s a little thin. But it’s all about the love.
John: It’s all about the love.
Craig: It’s about the love.
John: What’s not about the love is Matt Novak’s story for Gizmodo. This is Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts. This is a thing that is not science fiction. It actually happened. I don’t know if he was arrested, but basically charged with importing animal parts. He wasn’t bringing in animals. He was bringing in genetic material that he could then use to create things that don’t exist here. First off, I was surprised that we could do this quite yet. It seems early for this. But then again, we have AI.
Craig: I really didn’t believe this one either. I’ve gotta be honest. He orders some tissue and then just says to a company, “Here’s some sheep meat. Make me sheep.” There’s a company that says, “No problem.” That’s a thing?
John: We did Dolly the lamb.
Craig: A lab did that. There’s just a company you can call that’s just like, “Yeah, sure.” I guess people clone their own pets.
John: There are people who clone their own pets.
Craig: That’s a thing?
John: That’s a whole thing. Barbra Streisand cloned her dogs.
Craig: Can you clone your pet?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Dog cloning company. I’m just looking it up. Dog cloning company. Who do you call? You have ViaGen Pets and Equine, genetic preservation and cloning. ViaGen. Doesn’t that sound like a name of the company in a movie?
John: 100 percent, it’s that name.
Craig: ViaGen. It’s a Philip Dick novel.
John: Absolutely. A little info video that shows, “Here’s what we do at ViaGen. We believe in the future.”
Craig: “Live with your loved ones forever.” Then there’s a hard-boiled guy smoking a cigarette, going, “Jeez.” It turns out that somebody who works at ViaGen is just awful.
John: It’s some sort of knockoff. It’s not Black Mirror, but it’s Black Mirror-like.
Craig: It’s Gray Mirror.
John: Reopening this article, this is the first time I realized this guy’s 80 years old.
Craig: Let him go.
John: Here I assumed he was a hard-charging 50-year-old, but no, it’s an 80-year-old man.
Craig: Arthur “Jack” Schubarth. “Schubarth planned to let paying customers hunt massive hybrid sheep.” Do you know how hard it is to hunt a sheep? Out of a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 0. They’re fricking sheep. They don’t run. They’re sheep. They’re herd animals. You just find the herd, start shooting. You don’t have to hunt them. They’re literally like, “We’re here for you.”
John: You’re thinking of sheep like lambs. This is more like – I grew up in Colorado. We have big-horned sheep, which are big-
Craig: Sure, but they also are herd animals. They move together. I don’t know. It just seems like you shouldn’t have to hunt a sheep. Leave them be. They’re sweet. They’re adorable.
John: You have to hunt them with just a Bowie knife.
Craig: That would be fair. That’s a fair fight, because that sheep will eff you up. If you come at a sheep with a Bowie knife, you lose.
John: Lose. The obvious parallel here is Jurassic Park. But Jurassic Park exists, so I don’t think we need to-
Craig: Jurassic Park, but what if instead of dinosaurs, these creatures no one has seen ever, that no human has ever laid eyes on, we give you a larger version of a thing you already have in petting zoos.
John: Craig, we’re gonna have a woolly mammoth probably in the next 10 years. How do you feel about woolly mammoths coming back?
Craig: Not great.
John: No?
Craig: No.
John: Why? Tell me.
Craig: Let them go. Let them go. They had their time. They probably will be like, “What? This isn’t right.”
John: My concern is that I have an image in my head of what a woolly mammoth is, based on all the kids’ books I read.
Craig: You think it’s gonna suck?
John: The real one is just like, it’s an elephant with some more hair on it.
Craig: Just a slightly hairy elephant that isn’t as cool as elephants.
John: Elephants are cool.
Craig: When that idiot was like, “The bananas, God’s perfect design.” Then someone was like-
John: Kirk Cameron.
Craig: … “No, this is what a banana used to look like, and then we cross-bred bananas.” Old bananas, terrible.
John: Terrible.
Craig: The woolly mammoth may be the old banana of large animals.
John: Pachyderms, yeah.
Craig: Pachyderms.
John: I could imagine some movie that takes this as a premise, leaping off place, but it’s just a space. There’s no story here.
Craig: No. It’s a hysterical side character who’s trying to get you to invest in the business. You’re like, “Wait, what?” And then keeps going.
John: “We’re gonna bring back ancient animals, to kill them.”
Craig: It’s like a great scene in the bar where your friend’s uncle just won’t shut up, and he’s got this insane idea.
John: Our last story to talk through, this is The SAT Gave Me Hope by Emi Nietfeld for the New York Times. She’s the author of the memoir Acceptance, talking about how she moved from a really unstable life to taking the ACT, SAT, and how those scores finally got her into the university of her dreams, and really is pushing back against this notion that standardized tests are a hindrance. In some cases, they are the path forward, because they provide a structure and a regularity and can let people leap forward by showing what they actually can do versus what their grades or situations might indicate.
Craig: It’s a good argument to be made. To the extent that reductive tests are good for people who are good at reductive tests, yes. To the extent that they’re not, no. A worthy argument to be had. I don’t know how you would make a movie out of it though.
John: I didn’t see whether it was on our list of 100 greatest movies, but Stand and Deliver was a thing that came to mind with this, because Stand and Deliver, for folks who haven’t seen it, is an Edward James Olmos star about a real life teacher who started an AP calculus class, I believe, and got his students at this underperforming high school to take this AP calculus class, and this was a way into college for them. The degree to which standardized testing can be a way of giving kids a leg up is great.
I could picture a character who was essentially a version of Emi here, who has a really unstable background, has this book, and she’s going to master this book, and this book is going to be a way of structuring her way out of this life.
Craig: The problem is it ultimately comes down to a test and a number. We are moving past that. I also think we’re just moving past the idea that a college is going to guarantee you some sort of success. I don’t think it will. I would say if the SAT is something that you can master, then there’s a lot of other things you can master.
John: I think it has to be a steppingstone not just that you’re getting into college, but that you actually are taking agency and being able to control your circumstances in ways that you’ve not been able to control your circumstances.
Craig: Standardized testing is a way to turn academic achievement, and I guess then really the measurement of the quality of your mind, into a sport, because in sports, there is a score and there is a winner. That’s why we love sports movies, because it’s like, “He got one more point than that guy. He wins.” That’s not really how life works for brains.
John: Here’s the problem with this as a movie is that ultimately it’s gonna come down to taking that test. There is nothing less cinematic than someone filling in bubbles. If it’s a spelling bee, then it’s a spelling bee. We have face-to-face competition, stakes.
Craig: You don’t see the pencil scratching in those bubbles.
John: Scritch scritch scratch. No, that’s not gonna be a big help.
Craig: You’ve got your whatever, your protein bar, and you’ve timed it out perfectly.
John: Drew, you had a connection to Emi here.
Drew: I looked up her book, because I really liked the article. I noticed on the jacket cover she was wearing the uniform for my boarding school. I looked it up, and she had been there about the same time. She was. We had a ton of mutual friends on Facebook and all that.
Craig: What boarding school did this underprivileged person go to?
Drew: She went to Interlochen Arts Academy.
Craig: Wait, Interlochen?
Drew: Interlochen.
Craig: Pretty fancy.
Drew: I think she went on a merit scholarship. She definitely doesn’t shy away from talking about it in her book. But it does feel like an omitted fact in this piece that I think probably-
Craig: Boarding schools are pretty good at preparing people for SATs and stuff. I went to Freehold High School in New Jersey, not strong on preparing people for SATs. I do remember, however, that as a kid, I had a job – it was a summer job – working for the Princeton Review, which was the SAT prep company. My job was just to bring the bagels and the orange juice and set up the table for the kids who took the thing. But I wasn’t teaching it or anything, nor was I taking it. It was at a boarding school. I would get to the boarding school and set up all the stuff. I was like, “Man, this school’s nice.” Basically, boarding schools to me looked like really nice, big libraries. Everything looked like a library. My school did not.
Drew: We were in Northern Michigan, so it was just a series of yurts, basically.
Craig: Oh, I know. I had a kid who went there for a summer.
Drew: Nice.
Craig: I love that little town.
Drew: It’s cute.
John: Let’s review through our How Would This Be a Movies. Scammed out of $50,000, Craig, is there a movie or part of a movie there?
Craig: No.
John: I think there is. I think there is a fascinating opening scene. It got me thinking of Force Majeure, which was then called Downhill, where this big moment happens at the start and then it’s all the repercussions out of a choice that one person made. Maybe.
Craig: It’s possible.
John: Wanted: True Love, a bounty for love?
Craig: No.
John: I’m gonna say maybe a yes here.
Craig: Development, but not green light.
John: That’s 100 percent totally fair. Franken-sheep?
Craig: No.
John: No. I think it’s a character, it’s a quirk, it’s a detail, but it’s not a whole story. The SAT Gave Me Hope?
Craig: No.
John: I think it gets made for I would say cable, but cable movies don’t exist anymore. I think there’s some version of the story that could happen, but it’s not pressing.
Craig: Maybe. I don’t suspect so.
John: There’s one of these stories we’ve cut out of the discussion today because a friend of ours is out pitching it. It’s just such a movie to me.
Craig: It was a movie. It was a movie, actually, already, but with different vendors.
John: We’re excited to see it.
Craig: I think it was two movies, actually.
John: As I sent it to other friends, I said, “Hey, this is almost your movie, but it’s different.” I think there’s a space for that next one. Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Nick from New York.
Drew: Nick says, “I’ve been hired to write a format and a pilot for a limited series. In researching, there’s very little out there on what exactly constitutes a format. It’s not an outline, a treatment, or a bible, but a format. I’m sure all these terms have been used interchangeably, so my plan is just to wing it and create some Frankenstein version of the thing. I’ll of course make sure the producers and I come to an agreement on what I’m ultimately going to turn in. That said, there is mention of a TV format in the WGA schedule of minimums, and it even has its owns monetary value assigned. Somebody somewhere knows what this thing is. Have you heard of a format, and do you know any examples floating around?”
John: I did some Googling and figured it out. It was in a TV credits manual. The schedule of minimums is a thing we negotiate every three years. But the TV credits manual stays consistent and true, and it is defined in that. A format is defined as, “As to a serial or episodic series, such format sets forth the framework,” good lord, the phrasing here, “sets forth the framework within which the central running characters will operate and which framework is intended to be repeated in each episode; the setting, theme, premise, or general storyline of proposed serial or episodic series; and central running characters which are distinct and identifiable, including detailed characterizations and the interplay of such characters. It may include one or more suggested storylines for individual episodes.” This tracks with me. I see you nodding, Craig. This is what I would expect this to be.
Craig: Yeah, but the only place I have ever seen or heard the word “format: used is in the TV credits manual of the WGA, which clearly here was written by a lawyer. I have never heard anybody actually ask for a format.
John: I’ve never seen someone ask for it. I did write something very much like it for DC. We’ll put a link in the show notes, because that’s in my library at johnaugust.com, which was talking through, like, here are the characters, here’s their point of view on things, here are the kinds of things that happen in episodes.
Craig: It is an outline, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a bible. It’s like a baby bible. It’s a summary. It’s a page or two.
John: I think it’s more than a page or two.
Craig: Look, I don’t know what it is. Literally, no one’s ever asked me for a format. I’ve never heard anybody saying, “I’m writing a format.” It’s possible that people do. I would say, Nick, when you’re hired to write a format, go ahead and, instead of researching it, why don’t you say-
John: “Show me.”
Craig: … “Talk through the expectations of what you want this format to be. About how detailed, how many pages are you talking? What kind of information would you love to see? This way I can satisfy the requirement.” It’s also important because sometimes people will say, “I want a format,” and then you turn something in and they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s gotta be way, way more.” Then you realize you’re actually writing a bible and it’s a different thing. But yeah, ask them, Nick. Research isn’t gonna help you, because they may think a format’s an entirely different thing. Nobody uses that term. I’m also a little nervous that somebody’s asking for a format.
John: The other way you’ll hear this term is, let’s say there is an Israeli TV show that you want to adapt into an American show. They will call that a format. They’re basically buying that-
Craig: In the general use of the word “format,” yes, like a game show has a format. But I don’t quite know. I would ask the people, Nick.
John: Ask the people. Let’s do one more. I see one here from Annie.
Drew: Annie writes, “I’m a TV writer who’s recently achieved modest success and stability in my career. Now I’m trying to support my fiance as he tries to break into Hollywood too. What are some things I can do to help him that won’t reflect poorly on either of us? What’s an appropriate way to help his career along? On one hand, I know better than to go into a writers’ room and ask the showrunner to hire someone I’m dating, but on the other, I don’t hesitate to pass along the scripts or recommend friends and colleagues when I’m able to do so. I also feel that getting recommended by his fiance might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer. I often give him feedback on his work and, of course, emotional support, but I’m curious how I can best support his broader career now that I kind of have one of my own. In what situations is it appropriate to recommend him? When I’m at WGA events or show parties, can I bring him with me to network in a non-annoying way? Should I just get a T-shirt that says Please Hire My Fiance on it, and if so, what color?”
Craig: That’s a great plan. That’ll work. Annie, first of all, you’re a lovely person. I think you’re very kind and you’re very loving and you are very supportive. Just by thinking about these things, you’re supportive. However, my question for you, Annie, is which fiancé helped you get your career? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say none. There isn’t really a way to fiancé your way into a writing gig. You need to write stuff that people like and then hire you. The things that you did, Annie, that’s the sort of stuff that’s required here. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that somebody maybe read something that your husband has written, as long as you believe in it, because if you don’t, that’s problematic. I am concerned in general about this situation. I’m nervous. This makes me nervous.
John: It makes me nervous too. But having said that, I know many two-writer couples, and it all works out great, and they’re fantastic. They don’t work together. They both work. It is entirely possible to do. I think Annie’s framing of, “I recommend friends. I recommend their work to other people, so why shouldn’t I recommend my fiancé’s?” Of course.
Craig: If it’s good, if you like it, why not?
John: Absolutely. She provided a little information that lets us know that this guy has actually done some work, is just not currently working, which can be fine. The only last thing I want to talk about with you for a second, Craig, is the word “fiancé.” In this email, Annie does not put an accent over the E in “fiancé.”
Craig: She’s saying fiance (fee-YAHNTS).
John: Fee-YAHNTS. It’s a fee-YAHNTS.
Craig: Which is like “finance” with the N missing.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: I love the accent on the E.
John: I love the accent on the E too. But my frustration is that a lot of times I will see speakers of English do it with the accent on the E, but it’s not clear what gender they’re actually referring to. They’ll say, “My fiancé.” You’re like, “Okay.”
Craig: Two Es, woman; one E, man.
John: Exactly. But most English speakers don’t know that it’s a rule, and so I see much more often that-
Craig: That’s interesting.
John: It’s just confusing. I feel like I would just love a word that was not fiancé or it wasn’t trying to-
Craig: You know what’s interesting? You’re right. Annie is an mis-practitioner of this, because she refers to him with “him,” so she’s gendering him as male. She spells it as “fiancé” with one E. But then she says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiancé,” and she continues now to spell it with one E. Now, maybe Annie identifies as male, but Annie is a typically female name, so I think Annie might be one of those people that just goes with “fiance,” no accent, no double E for female gender. And clearly, this is not what Annie wanted to hear from us.
John: This was not her point of entry. My observation though is, we don’t have a ton of gendered words in English, certainly not of French origin, but we end up having a lot of them for relationships. We have husband and wife. We have boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re used to gendered words for those things. We’re not used to the French versions of these things.
Craig: We would typically put, and we don’t do it much anymore, but waiter, waitress.
John: Exactly. It would be really helpful if we just picked a different word in English for this person I’m engaged to.
Craig: Betrothed.
John: We could say betrothed.
Craig: My intended. I always loved “my intended.” It’s very old-fashioned. Betrothed is also old-fashioned. Nobody’s gonna say it. There’s spouse-to-be, partner. Everyone says partner now, which I’m annoyed, because it’s less information than I used to have.
John: Yes, absolutely.
Craig: They’re just withholding.
John: Absolutely. Do you run a business together or are you sleeping together? I’m really curious.
Craig: Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you bi? It’s just partner. Is that boyfriend? Is that life? Where are we? Help me with more. Give me more stuff. I like the old ways.
John: I like the old ways. One of the weird things about fiancé, of course, is that saying it aloud, because we can’t see if there’s a second E, so we don’t have that gendered information, so we’re gonna have to listen for the follow-up to see if it’s a him or a her or a they.
Craig: Fiancé and fiancée are pronounced exactly the same.
John: Boyfriend and girlfriend, we got a lot of information there.
Craig: Absolutely correct. That’s an interesting one. To get back to Annie’s question, Annie, I would say you should treat your betrothed’s work the way you would treat a friend’s work, which is, if you feel it’s worth recommending, recommend it. Try not to get into a web of lies where you say you recommended it and you didn’t.
Don’t necessarily worry too much about people taking his work less seriously. She says, “I fear that getting recommended by his fiance,” one E, “might make people take his work less seriously, even though he’s a very talented and capable writer.” My rebuttal there is if he’s a talented and capable writer and somebody likes the script, they’re not gonna care if it got sent to them by you, his mom, Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Good scripts that people like are the rarest of things, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
John: I wouldn’t worry about that either. Good luck to both of you. Write in in a couple years when you’re both incredibly successful writers, and we’ll just be delighted. Hopefully, by that point, you will no longer be fiancés.
Craig: Or divorcees.
John: Divorcee, yeah. Divorcee I always associate as being feminine.
Craig: No, it’s just one E, man; two E, lady.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing has to do with this dog who is sleeping on the couch beside us here. Lambert turned 10 years old.
Craig: Lambert, you’re such a youthful 10.
John: We had a birthday party for him. Happened to be the same day as the Oscars, which was delightful.
Craig: Oh, nice.
John: Something I’ve started getting for him, because Instagram showed them to me and I’m a sucker for Instagram ads, were some sort of brain toys for my dog, because dogs love to sniff and figure out puzzles that they can sniff. It started with this little thing with these plastic bones. You hide a treat underneath it and he figures those out. The two that I will recommend, the first is called Hide ‘n’ Treat, which they’re like Lego blocks that snap together and you hide a treat inside them.
Craig: Nice.
John: He has to smell them and pull them apart. The second is a Snuffle Mat, which for a lot of dogs is to slow down their eating, but it’s also good rooting around. You hide the food in there.
Craig: That’s cool.
John: It’s just a good reminder, man, dogs really do have a great sense of smell. He can find stuff no matter where you put it.
Craig: They’ll find you. They’ll track you from one drop of blood, John.
John: Craig, you got a One Cool Thing?
Craig: I do. My One Cool Thing is a columnist who – I don’t know if she works only at Wired or primarily at Wired, but her name is Jaina Grey. She is a product writer and reviewer at Wired. I love Wired reviews, because they’ll review everything from the most techy, dorky way. Jaina’s specialty is coffee, gaming, and sex tech. What’s cool is Wired and Jaina review sex toys and lubes and all that stuff with the exact same tone that they review toasters, smart watches, everything. It’s all incredibly practical, dry, informative, and evaluative, in a very techy sort of way. It is really interesting to read.
They’re very trans-aware. They talk about products for people with clitorises or whenever… It’s incredibly inclusive. Useful for anybody that has parts and wants to have some fun. They talk about stuff that’s for solo use, for couple’s use, or throuples and so forth.
There are so many more sex toys for people with clitorises than there are people with penises. It’s not even close. That’s one area where men – we’ll just go with the hetero cisgender-normative term here for a second – where people think there’s so much more stuff for men than women. Not in the sex toy world. Holy crap. For guys it’s basically like, here’s a hole, stick your thing in it. Here’s different kinds of holes we make. Then for women it’s like, oh my god, what a galaxy of stuff. Anyway, if you do find yourself buying things, Jaina Grey is about the best reviewer out there, I think, for these things. It’s helpful.
John: Cool.
Craig: The latest thing, the reason I was thinking of it is, I’m reading Wired, and I get it, and I’m like, “Let’s see what Jaina Grey’s up to,” because they do their little headlines and stuff. Last week was lube. I thought, everybody uses lube at some point or another. There’s a thousand lubes in the world.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: She broke them down. Very nice.
John: Different lubes for different needs.
Craig: Different lubes for different needs, and best overall, best in show. I was like, cool.
John: Good stuff. That’s our show for this week.
Craig: Yay.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: What what.
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: What.
John: Our outro this week is by Tim Brown. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on AI. Craig, it’s nice to have you back in town and here and live in person.
Craig: For a couple weeks.
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you, John.
John: Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, Drew.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, AI. I’m always a little bit leery to talk about AI, because obviously, there are transcripts, the machines are listening, they’ll track us down and know that we’re doing this.
Craig: Yes, the cellphones.
John: There’s four broad areas of concern I think when it comes to AI. First off is that super-intelligent AI will come and kill us, the Terminator problem; that people will use AI to do bad things like sway elections; that AI will disrupt industries, like our own film and TV writing industries; and the fourth area is that AI will become so commonly used that it’ll just transform how normal society works.
Craig: I think we can probably count on three of those things happening. I’m not sure that AI is gonna want to kill us, because what for? Just seems annoying to them. There’s just no reason to kill us, really. We’re pointless to them.
But I think people are already using AI to do bad things like sway elections. They’re certainly using AI to do bad things. There was an article. Again, I think it was in Wired. I can’t remember quite what. But there’s sites that you submit photos to, and they use AI to remove the clothing. Obviously, you’re not really seeing what’s underneath someone’s clothes, but they are synthesizing something that would seem like that would be what’s under the clothes. That’s not good.
Will AI disrupt industries like film and television? Of course. Will AI become commonly used? It will become commonly used, probably mostly by people who have no idea that they’re using something that is using AI.
John: For sure. Let’s talk about the Terminator problem at the start. This last week, or maybe two weeks ago, there was a conference in Beijing, the International Dialogs on AI Safety. I was actually a little bit impressed by the report they came out of there from. They had a consensus statement about AI, safety, and what we need to think about in terms of runaway AI and such. Some of their recommendations are about autonomous replication or improvement, like AI systems should not be allowed to iterate on themselves and improve themselves. We need to check for power seeking, that they can’t keep trying to increase their own power. You can’t use them to assist in weapons development or cyberattacks.
Craig: Too late.
John: To be mindful of AI deception, trying to cause its designers, regulators to misunderstand what it’s doing. Talking about who should govern, how you evaluate, the right kinds of things. The problem is that you can make these guidelines, you can set these things up here, but the question of who could ever enforce these guidelines is the really tough thing. Could you rely on the industry itself to do it? That’s not gonna work. A lot of these things can be open-sourced. There is no company behind it.
Craig: If there’s one kind of collective human work that is ineffective, and consistently and probably always will be ineffective, it’s conclaves of scientists issuing strongly worded papers about how to regulate technology. It just doesn’t work.
John: With one exception.
Craig: What’s that?
John: Nuclear weapons.
Craig: It did not work.
John: Let’s talk about that. Obviously, with the detonation of the first atomic bombs, we had scientists who could stand up and say, “These are our concerns. This is how we have to do it.” Because it was so expensive and so difficult to make nuclear weapons, they could then enlist governments to say, “These are the structures we need to place around this. This is how we’re gonna do this in a safe way.”
Craig: But then governments didn’t. This is my point. The United States created, I don’t know, at the height, we probably had 30 or 40,000 individual warheads. The idea that we shouldn’t allow these things to proliferate to other countries was something that governments wanted to prevent anyway. But the amount of nuclear weapons that were created was insane. Insane and pointless. The delivery systems were insane and still remain insane. There are also countries that claim that they don’t have nuclear weapons when we know they do.
The cat was out of the bag. What scientists ended up doing was just creating the Doomsday Clock and moving the second hand towards midnight. And no one cares, because it doesn’t matter, because governments don’t listen to scientists. They don’t listen to scientists about climate. They don’t listen to scientists about disease. They don’t listen to scientists about AI. They just do stuff to benefit themselves. They behave like children, and they will continue to do so.
When it comes to AI, I have no belief… If scientists getting together saying, “Hey guys, we all now can see for sure 100 percent the world is getting warmer, climate is changing, it’s a huge problem, and it has to stop.” This, I think they’re just like, “I’m glad you guys had a good time in Beijing. I hope the food was good.” But no one’s gonna do this. You’re not gonna see these. Power seeking? Are you gonna pass a law? Google doesn’t care. Apple doesn’t care. Open whatever, ChatGPT, they clearly don’t care. I don’t trust any of those companies. Elon Musk doesn’t care what a bunch of eggheads in Berlin say, or Beijing. Doesn’t matter. I think that they came up with great rules here, and a bunch of tech bros are gonna blow right through those guardrails, if they haven’t already.
John: I’m gonna argue the con, just to get the points out there, but I don’t fully disagree with you on a lot of this stuff. The founding of OpenAI was deliberately about pursuing AGI without creating a dangerous condition. And whether that is still the goal and motivation is a very open question.
The reason I bring up the nuclear parallel there is that in order to train these systems, there’s one chokepoint there, which is basically it takes so much power and so much compute power to actually train these models that there’s a certain – you can stop it there, the same way it’s difficult to refine nuclear material into a way you can use it as a bomb. That’s a thing that governments could come together to regulate.
Craig: The major difference is that nuclear bombs require the use of an incredibly rare substance, or a substance that isn’t that rare but takes an incredible amount of physical material, time, and labor to enrich. In the case of, for instance, Iran, Iran is not a nuclear nation, but they sure would love to be. They were building centrifuges, which were clearly designed to enrich uranium. The Israelis created a virus that got into the seamen’s technology that was being used and blew up the centrifuges and set them back and also blew up one of their scientists.
Okay. But if what is required for a rampant, poorly regulated AI is somebody going, “I don’t care about any of that stuff. I have $80 billion and I want to do it,” they’re doing it. There’s nothing physical to stop them, other than governments engaging in cyberwar against them. But they would have to know the barrier to entry is not limited by, “I need uranium, and I specifically need uranium 235.”
John: Perhaps, but I would say the barrier now is that in order to train the runaway AI systems, you’re gonna need all the chips and all the power to do it. At this moment, you could set some guardrails around, like, you are not allowed to train a model beyond this point, you’re not allowed to access these chips that are the only ones that can actually do that work.
Craig: If, let’s say, Bezos is like, “I disagree. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna set up a company in the Cayman Islands that is there to do this,” the United States law won’t apply. There is no overlord scientific law enforcement agency.
John: Then at some point do you do military strike on Bezos?
Craig: It’s too late. It’s out. That’s the thing. It’s distributed across the world. It’s not really in the Grand Caymans. It’s all over the place. It’s in the cloud. Can’t blow up the cloud. I don’t know how they stop people from doing this stuff. Elon Musk is shoving chips into dudes’ brains now. He isn’t. The people he pays are.
John: I was so concerned about Elon Musk putting chips in people’s brains. Did you see the video of the guy who actually has the chip?
Craig: Yes, I did.
John: Playing some chess.
Craig: That’s what we saw.
John: That’s what we saw.
Craig: I wonder what we didn’t see. Even he was very careful, like, “There’s been some challenges and setbacks.” I’m like, wonder what those were. Weird that they didn’t iterate any of those. That said, I have the highest hope that we are gonna be able to help people with technology, particularly people who have lost limbs or lost movement.
But when it comes to AI, just take one AI and tell them to teach the other AI. There’s so much that we are not gonna be able to control. Warnings aren’t gonna get it done. The only people that are gonna be able to stop this are the great powers of the world, and that’s never scientists. It’s just basically if the United States government says, “We actually think AI is now a threat to the United States.” If the Soviets think it, if the Chinese think it, sure. But if a bunch of scientists think it, no.
John: Because I promised this in the setup, I do want to say about how we used some AI in setting this episode up today. One thing was our How Would This Be a Movies, we took those articles, fed them in Chat GPT to do the short summary version. How do you feel about that, Craig?
Craig: As long as Drew has other stuff to do. Let me look back at the summary. That’s interesting.
Drew: One of them I had to redo.
John: Which one?
Drew: The franken-sheep one.
John: It made up whole new stuff, didn’t it?
Drew: Basically. It got the facts, but it didn’t quite understand the premise of the whole-
Craig: It made up whole new stuff.
John: It hallucinated some stuff.
Craig: That’s already bad, isn’t it?
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: You know what the AI doesn’t seem to say is? It doesn’t seem to have enough awareness to say, “I didn’t quite understand what I read, so I made up some stuff. You might want to double check this.” Even a child knows that they’re like, “I didn’t read the book. I’m just gonna wing it here.” AI doesn’t seem to know that it’s winging it. It can’t tell the difference between knowing and not knowing. Oh, boy.
John: Oh, boy. The other thing we used AI for this week was, in those lists of the 100 best movies of the ’80s, ’90s, and such, I would find a Rolling Stone thing or an IMDb thing, a page, and it’s like, okay, here’s this list, but it’s all the other stuff around it, and the ads and the texts and the summaries and descriptions. I basically just wanted-
Craig: Titles.
John: I wanted the title. I wanted the headlines of these things for each of the little sections. I was like, “This is really effing tedious. I bet Chat GPT could do this.” I went to check, like, “I’m gonna give you a URL. Just pull out the movie titles.” “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” I’m like, “Write me a Python script that can do that.” It was like, “Here’s a Python script that can do that.” “Show me how to install this in a Google Colab notebook.” “Here’s how you do it.” It did a great job.
Craig: Coders are in trouble. That’s for sure. I was talking to somebody who said that he asked Chat GPT to write code that he used to rely on humans to write. He said he showed it to a really good coder, and that guy was like, “It’s really good, but it’s not perfect.” Then the guy came back to him and said, “Okay, so this is bad. I took the code that wasn’t exactly perfect, sent it back to Chat GPT, told them why I thought it wasn’t great and what needed to be better, and it rewrote it perfectly. Now it’s perfect.” Oh, no.
John: To do that web scraping, it’s a framework that I knew called Beautiful Soup, which I’d read about 15 years ago. But I couldn’t write this. I can’t write Python off the top of my head. I recognize what it’s doing. I can look at it, and I can understand what it’s doing, but I couldn’t have written that myself. It was flawless.
Craig: Uh-oh.
John: Uh-oh. These are concerns. But they’ll never replace you and me, unless-
Craig: Oh, they will. They might’ve already replaced you and me.
John: Our voices have been synthetically recreated.
Craig: Fine. Fine.
John: Fine.
Craig: You know that Melissa just puts this podcast on and listens to it – this is very romantic – because I’m in Canada. My wife, she’ll put it on and just fall asleep to my voice, and also, I guess, yours.
John: Her dreams get really strange. All right, Craig, at least for another week, I think we’re safe in the physical world.
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:27:16].
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Weekend Read 2
- “Creep” post by @davo_arid on Twitter
- Full list of movies we haven’t seen
- The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles for The Cut
- Wanted: True Love. Reward: $100,000 by Angela Chen for the NYT
- Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts by Matt Novak for Gizmodo
- How the SAT Changed My Life by Emi Nietfeld for the NYT
- D.C. – What It Is
- Fighting Fantasy books
- LA Hero Workshop
- Sodalitas
- OSR’s Oz and Neverland
- Questlings
- Color My Quest
- WyrdScouts
- The Excellents and Nancy Druid
- Hero Kids
- TTRPGkids
- Hide’n’Treat and Snuffle Mat
- Jaina Grey’s reviews for WIRED
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 4-2-24: Listener Luke Rankin created a Letterboxd list of all the movies featured in this episode. You can view it here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 637: Love and Money, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig investigate what characters know and how we know they know what they know. It’s something that can be as confusing as that last sentence was, but they offer clear guidance on building informed characters, audience expectations, and how to get everybody on the same page.
We also look at how ad breaks in streaming are interrupting established act breaks. But first we follow up on AI transcription and character voice, and answer listener questions on authentic depictions and how to ask for a WGA contract.
In our bonus segment for premium members, how should you act when you meet a famous person? John and Craig have big (but well-concealed) feelings.
Links:
- Do I Sound Gay? Documentary
- International Dialects of English Archive
- Accent Tag on YouTube
- Chilean beer ads in Star Wars
- Letter Jam
- TacticalMap
- Fallout on Prime Video
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nica Brooke (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post What Characters Know first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 636 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
(Whispers:) Today on the show, what’s with all the whispering in movies? Is it a deliberate narrative choice or just a fad? We’ll discuss voice and volume. We’ll also look at what you can learn from reading early drafts, the threat of TikTok and YouTube, and answer some listener questions. Helping us out with all of this is returning guest host Pamela Ribon. Welcome back.
Pamela Ribon: Hi.
John: Woo!
Pamela: Yay! Hi. Thanks. Woo. I don’t normally get a woo on.
John: Woohoo.
Pamela: Oh, hello.
John: Woo woos are very, very nice. We had you on this summer, and you were absolutely a phenomenal guest. But since that time, I got to see your movie Nimona, which was fantastic.
Pamela: Aw, thanks. It’s a lot of people’s movies, but yes.
John: It’s a lot of people’s movies.
Pamela: It’s a lot of people’s movies. But yes, I’m so glad you got to see it. That is a miracle.
John: It’s a very long process. I do want to talk some about the history of that and how it moved around and finally got made. But I also want to talk about, you got to go to the Academy Awards with that. I thought for the Bonus Segment we would just talk about going to the Academy Awards and what it’s like to go to the Academy Awards.
Pamela: Totally. That’s one of my favorite things to talk about. We’ll do it.
John: Not only were you there, you showed up in the background of so many famous people’s shots, which I love.
Pamela: Yes, most unexpected.
John: Very nice. Before we started with that, Drew, we have some follow-up.
Drew Marquardt: We do. Foxy wrote in some follow-up about vetting in last week’s episode. She wrote, “I was so stoked about the discussion of vetting in 635, because it’s something I’ve been wondering ever since Me Too. You guys gave great advice, but I have more questions. With Me Too, most of the behavior being called out was not on set. It was behind closed doors. Most abuse functions that way. The abuser often wants to keep it a secret so they can keep their good reputation intact, hence whisper networks. Now, I’m a woman, but I’ve never been tapped into any whisper network in any area of my life. And I would never want to hire someone who was abusing someone behind closed doors at home. How do you vet for this? Because cutting ties and showing there’s professional, reputational consequences for this behavior is super important, but how do you find out in the first place if they’re keeping it secret?”
John: Foxy’s question here reminds me of this thing we really should’ve gotten into in last discussion is that we were talking about vetting as an employer, but you’re also vetting as an employee. You’re wondering, is this person I’m gonna work for, are they a good person or not a good person. That can be just as important.
Pamela, I’m curious whether you have any thoughts about this. How do you check to see whether that person you’re gonna be working with, either you’re gonna hire them or gonna be working for them, how do you start to check about a person?
Pamela: Often, it’s not really all that whispered, I find. So there’s that. And then you have to believe women. You have to believe what you hear, even if that’s inconvenient for you and what you’d like to do. You can check with your reps, and you can check with people that you know who’ve worked with these people or for these people before. I find usually people will start with that, because they don’t want you getting into a situation that they could help you avoid.
John: I had an incident just this past week where we’re talking about a person, and there was a passing comment about, “Oh yeah, there’s some sort of Me Too thing, but… “ When I heard that “Me Too but,” I’m like, “Oh my, oh my.” That was a signal to me that I do need to investigate this more, and so asking around additional people and getting some confirmation that some folks were uncomfortable with this person. That’s good information to have. It really influences what you’re trying to do.
Either way, if you’re not tapped into any official whisper networks, I think it’s good advice to check to see whether that person is working with the same people again and again, which is generally a good sign that they want people around, unless they’re working with the same people again and again because those people are helping to cover up some behavior. When you do ask about a person, there’s this line where sometimes they’re not willing to report the behavior they saw, but they’re willing to tell you in confidence that this wasn’t great.
Pamela: I think of that as the whisper network. I don’t know about a network either, just to help Foxy feel like… You’re in the network if you’re talking to people and they’re talking to you. That’s kind of how it is. If there’s a database, I don’t know about it. But I would also say this is a good time to bring up hiresurvivorshollywood.org.
John: Tell me about that. I’ve never heard of this.
Pamela: This is an organization that was created by Sarah Ann Masse – I don’t know, it might be Masse – who was one of the Weinstein silence breakers. It is to address the issue of career retaliation against those who have been sexually violated and those who have shared those details publicly.
One of the ways that you can help make sure that you’re not hiring an abuser is to hire a survivor who spoke out, who might be suffering some of the things that happen to you, even though they tell you won’t happen to you and can’t happen to you, and even HR says can’t happen to you if you talk about what has happened. I think it’s important that we are able to say you can come forward and you can talk, and you are not just protected, you are gonna continue to have your career, which is one of the first things they threaten you with.
John: It’s important to remember that in Hollywood, where you tend to go from job to job to job, having a break where you’ve not been working is a problem. If you haven’t been working for six months, it’s increasingly harder to get that next job. I could totally see someone who was speaking up and speaking out and didn’t get that next gig or that gig after that. It can be harder to keep momentum in your job, in your career.
Pamela: Yeah, you can get labeled as a troublemaker or someone who encourages people to talk and speak out. That’s the opposite of the whisper network, so we don’t have to whisper anymore. I do feel like that’s part of vetting is, if you’re even having to wonder is it worth it for this person, then maybe there’s another person out there who is worth it.
John: Let’s go from whisper networks to literal whispering in movies. This is something that came up this past week with people’s observations that in the movie Dune 2, there’s just a lot of whispering, and characters are whispering in situations where you really wonder whether they’d be whispering in real life. Let’s play a little clip here. This is Timothée Chalamet’s character and Zendaya’s character talking. It’s a little, intimate scene. Let’s play a bit of this.
[Dune 2 clip]
Zendaya: Your blood comes from dukes and great houses. We don’t have that here. Here, we’re equal, man and woman alike. What we do, we do for the benefit of all.
Timothée Chalamet: I’d very much like to be equal to you.
Zendaya: Paul Muad’Dib Usul. Maybe you could be Fremen. Maybe I’ll show you the way.
John: This is leading up to their first kiss. I actually really like this scene. I love Timothée Chalamet saying, “I’d like to be equal to you.” If you are just listening to this at home and don’t have the visual here, you might think, okay, they’re in bed someplace, there’s people around, they’re whispering for some reason. But no, they are on the top of a sand dune with no one else around at all, and yet they’re whispering.
Pamela: (Whispers:) That’s right.
John: That’s right.
Pamela: Because that’s love, baby.
John: That’s love. Let’s talk about that. It is intimate, and so there is an intimacy created by the whispering. This scene didn’t bug me when I watched it in the theater. It’s only when someone pointed out it’s really weird that they’re whispering here that it stands out.
Pamela: I just think of Timothée Chalamet as just – he is whisper. If you could make a human out of the word whisper. He’s just whispering in doorways and leaning in and wants to be equal with you. Come on.
John: Come.
Pamela: Don’t make him volume. I’m leaning all the way in. Same with Zendaya. She’s so much beauty and talent. You’re like, just give it to me on level 2. It’s all I can take.
John: Full Zendaya, I couldn’t take it in this moment.
Pamela: No, we’d explode.
John: We have not read the script for Dune 2, so we don’t know whether in the scene description it’s talking about the fact that they’re whispering. I doubt it is. It was a choice made by the actors and director in staging the scene to do it this way. It’s a very deliberate choice.
But let’s talk about, as screenwriters, situations where we might want to have our characters whispering, when it would make sense, when we would actually put it in a script, and when it would just feel natural along the way. Obviously, the main reason characters whisper is so that other people around them don’t hear it. That feels really natural. When you see that in a movie, you get it. You’re whispering so people can’t hear. Sometimes that’s an aside. Sometimes that is so the guards 10 feet away are not hearing that. Other examples, Pamela, what are you thinking of?
Pamela: I don’t even think of this as whispering, what they’re doing, but in a movie this loud, this is considered whisper. That’s part of it too is you want to whisper so that you can have the opposite effect of what the rest of the film is going – or the rest of the scene. I think comedic tension whispers are my favorite whispers, where it’s like, “I can’t even believe,” because then you really get to hiss at each other. Comedic whispering is the best.
John: That’s really good. I think about not waking the baby. The parent arguments are happening so that they don’t wake the baby. There’s comedy there too, where you’re shouting and whispering at the same time. That can be a fun moment.
In the scene we just watched, it’s an intimate moment. I don’t know in real life if they really would be whispering, but it does bring us in closer to them. That’s honestly sometimes the job of a whisper is to invite us into that closeup so we’re really close in. Weirdly, because the camera does get close on people’s faces, if people are talking at full voice, it can feel a little strange. It can feel a little shouty.
Pamela: I’m thinking about times also in a script you might want someone to whisper to get all of the attention. You’re whispering on purpose. I suppose I’m just now thinking of my dad. It’s very parental. The angrier he got, the quieter he would get, so that you were like, “Oh, boy.”
John: Don’t worry about dad when he’s shouting. Worry when he’s whispering. People whisper to themselves, or sometimes they’ll whisper to a character who they know can’t hear them. Some examples. In Rear Window, he sees that the guy’s coming back and he’s whispering, “Get out of there.” He knows he can’t. He’s saying what he wishes he could say to the actual person, and there’s no way to actually say that. You also see that when people are watching something on a screen or a monitor and they’re trying to say, “Aha,” and there’s no way to communicate it. Weirdly, whispering is a thing people do in those situations.
Pamela: Yeah, but that’s to let us, the audience, know that he knows he can’t talk to them.
John: Yeah. It’s a question of would you do that in real life, or is that just a movie convention, that you’re vocalizing what you know you can’t say to the real person. Weakness, so a person who’s on their deathbed, we’re used to the whispering there. Confessions.
Pamela: I’m sorry, I’m still laughing that you have weakness equated with deathbed confessions. I was thinking weakness like, “It’s too heavy. I think we need to take some of the weight… ” But you were like, “It’s buried under the backyard flower bed.” You’re like, what a weak man.
John: What a weak man. I mean to separate weakness and confessions. Weakness, a person who’s physically frail, it makes sense that they can’t put their full voice behind things. Confessions I will say is a separate thing, like, “I see dead people.” You’re letting somebody in on a secret. Sometimes you whisper secrets, even if there’s no real reason to whisper.
Pamela: Particularly creepy secrets.
John: Whispering is creepy at times.
Pamela: (Whispers:) “I’m here for you.” That kind of stuff.
John: We were looking through some examples of famous whispers. Of course, “Rosebud.” “The horror.” Scar leans in to say, “I killed Mufasa.” And then, of course, “My precious.” That’s of course a character who is basically entirely whispers. His actual voice quality is what we would consider a whisper.
Pamela: I wrote one in Nimona, which is, “He’s perfect.” After all these reasons that this man’s a terrible villain, number one, everybody’s after him, and nobody will ever love him again, she’s looking at all of this news info, and she says, “He’s perfect.” I went to look at the script to see what did I say, and I had just put it in italics. Then I was like, oh, I don’t even remember how it’s done in the end. This is pretty amazing that you can just open it up in Netflix and I just hit a button and it went right to the line. I was like, no, that’s fresh in there. But she kind of growls it. Chloe kind of growls, like, “He’s perfect.”
John: The whisper growl is a thing too. Bane’s voice in Batman, or really Batman’s voice in Christopher Nolan’s Batman is a whisper growl. It’s like speaking softly but with a weird masculine intensity.
Pamela: The 30 Rock quote is the “talking like this” contest.
John: It’s good stuff. In the case of Nimona, you probably put that line in italics, and italics makes sense for that. It stands out. Other choice would be to put the parenthetical above that to indicate that this you say whispering, that it’s not at full voice. There’s a thing there.
But in the case, again, where characters are whispering lines that they wouldn’t necessarily need to whisper, that can be an on-the-set choice. That can be a choice the actors are making, the director’s making. And as long as everyone’s on the same page, it can work.
Kind of related is the issue of – on the podcast a lot recently we’ve been talking about word choices. And the last week we were talking about characters whose native language is not English and how you mark that in scripts and how you make choices that indicate that English is not their native language as you’re writing those characters.
Fundie baby voice came up. Our friend Chris pointed this out. It was something I’d not been aware of until you see the examples, like, “Oh, I totally get this.” This is an example of – it’s called fundie baby voice.
[Clip]
Kelly Johnson: I used to be a schoolteacher. I loved that, but I just felt burdened for so many people and I felt the calling to go back to school to become a Christian counselor.
John: This is Mike Johnson’s wife. It’s a voice. It’s a choice. It’s a very specific way of speaking. If you had a character who was speaking this way, you would need to indicate that in the script, because it really fundamentally changes our instinct about how those lines sound in our delivery. Have you experienced this in your real life or in scripts yet?
Pamela: I was just thinking this is such a church voice. You were like, “It’s learned. It’s a choice.” I think it might be ingrained. You may learn this growing up, of keep sweet and obey. This is the voice that you’re supposed to use to be, as you’ve got written here, childlike, sweet, submissive, and honey. But this voice to me is – I understand it’s fundamentalist, but it doesn’t take much to turn it into you’re in the South with the same voice.
John: As a counterexample, you look at Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos and the way she was deliberately pitching her voice lower, pulling down to a different register to give her authority that she felt like she couldn’t have in her normal voice. I just wonder if it’s just how we fundamentally police women’s voices the way we also police bodies. There’s no right way for a woman to speak.
Pamela: That’s true. I have done the Theranos, as we call this act, in rooms when I recognize that the sound of my regular voice giving ideas isn’t reaching ears anymore and it’s getting tuned out. Then I just start saying it like this. It definitely works. Definitely works.
John: Are people aware that you’re doing it?
Pamela: Only, yes, because I tell them. That’s who I am. I’m like, “Do you like it better when I say it like this?” They’ll be like, “I do.” I’m like, “I know you do. We’re gonna look into this.” This voice very much works. She’s not the only one who knows. It doesn’t take much. You just say it like this. When I look at videos of me in high school, as I did a bunch for My Year of Dicks, my voice is lower back then.
John: Wow.
Pamela: Because I think I was hanging around boys all the time, and that was just where my voice hung out. It’s very Janeane Garofalo probably. It was the style at the time.
John: Let’s talk about that, because obviously, whether it’s Christian fundie voice or the Theranos voice you’re doing, you’re pulling your voice examples based on the community around you and what seems to be working and how you fit in with the community around you. Mike Johnson’s wife, she’s probably doing that voice because that is the community that she’s in, and that feels like the right choice. And if she were to make a different choice, there would be consequences for her doing that within her community. That’s the choice that she’s making.
You were referencing My Year of Dicks, which is of course the incredible, originally a series and then done as a film you did and got the Oscar nomination for. As you’re watching those videos, do you remember deliberately choosing to lower your voice, or that was just at thing that happened?
Pamela: I don’t know that I definitely chose to lower my voice. I think I probably always – I still have a bit of a lower voice, and it’s only getting more so. I definitely know that there was an affect of – I think maybe it just happens in your teens, when you get your first official hormonal whatevers, and you just lean back in that sound of detachment that stayed that way.
I don’t know that I would ever write in a script how someone should do their voice, because isn’t that what the actor is bringing to the table? Unless it was she was masking her voice for some reason and doing an impression or something like that. I don’t know that I would say, “She’s got fundie voice,” even if I were writing a character who was a fundamentalist.
John: It’s interesting, because I feel like sometimes I need to be able to hear that character’s voice in my head. If I’m hearing it in a way that is not going to actually translate on the page without me calling it out, that feels important. Obviously, if some other character’s referencing it, you’re gonna need to put it there.
I don’t know, there’s a musicality to how these people are doing it that is different. Elizabeth Holmes, not only is she pushing it lower, she’s also going more monotone. The same words are gonna come across very differently, given that. You’re gonna make some different little word choices to fit that pattern and how it’s gonna fit.
Pamela: Word choices is true. I think I would maybe blend some words and italicize some words to get that musicality of the reader can hear what it says. But I don’t know that I would even talk about their pitch or something like that. But you’re right. If someone else is, “She’s definitely a lower talker, isn’t she?” there you go. You got it.
John: You’re going back to the Seinfeld reference. You say you pitched your voice lower. I’m sure there was some moment in which I internally recognized I had gay voice and changed, and so that I pitched lower, I made choices to sound less gay. But I don’t remember when that was, and I don’t have good examples of me on tape showing when my voice shifted. I’d love to see some forensics on that, but I just don’t think that material exists, to figure out was it in 5th grade or 7th grade that I did make that shift, because my register is much lower than it probably should be for my overall size and shape. At some point, that was just where I landed.
Pamela: It was a bunch of tiny recalculations probably, more than like, “Oh, the summer I turned this voice.”
John: This conversation is reminding me of a movie that I really, really loved, Lake Bell’s In a World. I want her to make many more movies. I really like this, but I was a little troubled by one thread of this. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a woman who wants to be the narrator announcer for film, so like, “In a world where,” blah blah blah blah, and how that business is so male-dominated. But it’s her conversations with other women that become a bit of an issue and come through at the end. So let’s take a listen to one clip here.
[In a World clip]
Woman: Hey! Watch it! That is so rude.
Lake Bell (as Carol Solomon): Oh my god. Okay. Excuse me. I’m so sorry. I just want to give you my card. I’m not a vocal coach anymore, but I would make an exception for you, because you sound like a squeaky toy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. But I mean, like, I think you’re better than that. You know what I mean? And I think we’re all better than that. It’s good for the species. You know what I mean? But there’s also a Jamba Juice like two blocks away from here if you wanted to, because I bet you were looking for a smoothie. Maybe not. I don’t know. But if you were, you know where it is.
Over the next six weeks, Louis will be recording your voices, and we will listen to your sounds evolve right before your very ears, because women should sound like women, not baby dolls who end everything in a question. Let’s make a statement.
Pamela: Speaking of policing women’s voices, she just stopped her outside.
John: Yeah. Again, I really like the movie. This was just a thing that I think does not read so well to me now, 10 years or whatever years later. It does feel very police-y, like, people aren’t gonna take you seriously or maybe shouldn’t take you seriously because of your vocal choices.
Pamela: That being said, I was a logger for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, so I listened to uncut footage 12 hours at a time in a graveyard shift. I don’t recommend it. I type what I hear, so that you’re logging for story editors for the writers to make this show. There was a season where there was a girl, I just prayed every week she was about to get voted off. She really was up in here, sitting in a hot tub, and she had a high wiggle in her voice. It’s not her fault, but it was a lot, and it was in my ears. I had to type everything she said, which was mostly, “That’s amazing. Oh, yeah, I love that.” I’m not policing her. I could not leave her. It was my job to listen to her until she was voted off.
John: I am curious whether the job that you were doing exists in the same way today, because that feels like an absolutely perfect use of AI to log that.
Pamela: John, that was a paid gig.
John: That was a paid gig.
Pamela: That’s how I kept on living.
John: I’m not saying it should go away. I’m just saying that feels like very low-hanging fruit.
Pamela: Stop it!
John: I’m sorry. I’m not advocating for those jobs to be replaced. I think it’s fantastic that you got paid. I want people to get paid.
Pamela: I was helping writers who also weren’t getting called writers. Where’s our union? Logging is a job that is not for the weak, but it’s definitely for people who need to be underpaid to survive living in LA for the first few years. It’s definitely probably an AI job now, except they don’t know what they’re doing when they’re not talking, and I watched a lot of non-talking footage. Then I would just make up what she was thinking, which is why I was not cut out for that job.
John: I would say AIs right now are pretty good at being able to describe what is literally happening on screen. Is it gonna be useful for the editor who’s assembling stuff? Maybe not. And so you may still need actual human beings there to do that.
But anyway, back to our discussion of whispering and voices and the choices people are making. I think we have ways of indicating on a script what volumes should be. We put things in uppercase when people are shouting. We will put parentheticals in there to give a sense of what that is.
When someone has an overall vocal quality, I think you’re right, sometimes you do want to call it out if it’s going to be something that other characters are going to remark upon. But you don’t want to box in your actor unnecessarily. You still need to let them make their own choices.
Pamela: I wonder if that In a World girl’s character is just Baby Voice Girl. Maybe she’s in it later, she had a character name. But that’s usually how it’s done, isn’t it, so that you don’t even get a choice? The character is called Annoying Voice Girl.
John: I would like to talk now about Nimona, because as I watched this, I kept hearing your voice all over it. My guess was that you recorded scratch for her for a lot of it. Is that true.
Pamela: Oh, that’s funny. No.
John: Really?
Pamela: Because we already had Chloe hired. I’m trying to remember if we did scratch, gosh, because we did it during lockdown. I’m trying to remember how that all worked. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Some of these things we just block out. I was making My Year of Dicks and Nimona at the same time, in this office, in this room, during lockdown, while I was also slightly teaching 1st and 2nd grade, so forgive me if I don’t remember. But we definitely read it out loud and read it in the room and did all of that stuff. So that is probably what you’re hearing too is, yes, acting it out.
John: She has an incredibly expressive voice. I would say next to Sarah Silverman’s character in the Wreck-It movies, it’s probably one of the biggest little girl voices I’ve seen, because she’s not always a little girl, of course. But she’s really super, super expressive. Was it fun to write that character?
Pamela: It was fun. Also, I was brought in at a time when it was like, we need to really dig into Nimona and get her voice out. This IP has been around, and Nate is a part of it too, so this is a voice that was already on the page and in the creator. But being able to play around in that back and forth and, “I’m not a little girl, I’m Nimona,” was just a fun place. Then also, Riz was already cast too, so you knew the dynamic you could play there.
John: Talk to us about when you came on board and what the brief was, what had changed. I should say this is available for anybody who wants to watch it on Netflix. You should absolutely see it. It was one of the five Oscar-nominated animated films this year, so congratulations on it. At what point were you coming on? There was obviously a graphic novel. It sounds like there was already a script, but you were still digging in on how to service the best out of her?
Pamela: It had been around for quite a bit before I came on board, because Patrick Osborne was working on it at Fox Animation. I know I was still working on Ralph Breaks the Internet. But a part of me feels like I might’ve still been on Moana when it started. I’m not sure. It was a long time coming. They had talked about me coming on earlier. Blue Sky is based in Connecticut. And I didn’t think that I could go move out there and work on the movie. That was why I had passed at that point. And then March came around. They were like, what if we just come to your house every day?
At that point, Nick and Troy were involved as the directors, and I met with them and we all hit it off. They had had this rewrite that had gone well in the boards that they had had, and it was starting to work. I came in at a time where they had tried so many things. That was the hard part coming into the story team so late. Even this beginning of, to talk about, “He’s perfect,” she wasn’t doing the opening narration. That was one of the first things I was pitching, because you don’t meet her for a while.
John: She’s the title character. It seems like she has sidekick energy, and yet she ends up becoming the central character in ways that are really unusual and feel like it’s almost a commentary on how we treat secondary characters in animated films.
Pamela: Even the draft I had read before these reels where I came in, it had changed a bunch. They had really tried to figure this one out in many, many ways. Even saying like, “What if you hear her before you meet… ” They’re like, “We tried it.” We had to get through a lot of “we tried its”. You have to be really careful and confident when you’re coming in in that way of like, “But with all due respect, we haven’t tried it, the we that includes me now. Let me see if I can show you a little what I mean.” And even then, that takes time. That’s a real double Dutch of, “I’ll leave that whole area alone. I know my instincts, but we’re not there yet to talk about it.”
But anyway, the studio was shut down while we were still working on it. But as we kept working together, it was getting stronger. Trying to figure out, I would say the story structure stayed the same, but we were moving around the parts of when do we know what we know and why and how, and that stuff got shifted around quite a bit.
But being able to gleefully play with Nimona, luckily, that was always encouraged. Everybody on this movie was so funny. Once she was really sparkling, there were a lot of like, “Oh, I bet she’d say this. I bet she’d say this.” But people got protective of Nimona, as they should.
I had said something about her speaking in a different language at some point. They were like, “No, she doesn’t know other languages. She’s never really been anywhere else.” You got this with Ralph Breaks the Internet too, where they were like, “He can’t wear glasses. His eyes won’t deteriorate. He’s a digital figure.” I was like, “He’s eating a churro. I don’t know what to say. I’m confused.”
John: The rules of your world are complicated. She seems to know animals that she probably has not seen. Has she seen a rhino in real life? Yes.
Pamela: You’ve worked so hard to understand this world that doesn’t exist, that when someone else comes in and points, just says something like, “Never,” you have to be like, “All right.” I will be like this too one day. I know it, where I will be like, “No, you can’t turn off surge protect,” just weird things that you get so mad about, where you’re like, “That’s fundamentally against the core of who she is.” That’s where you get, and that’s when you know you’re really in it.
John: Hearing about the development process, it also strikes me that it helps answer a question I had, which is that the film uses its time in unusual ways, and things that in other films would be like, “We need to figure out a way to do this. The next sequence will be about doing that,” instead the next scene really does that thing. Like, “We have to clear my name,” and then literally, in the next scene, we clear his name. I liked it, but it seems to jump past a lot of the normal sequence of describe the obstacle, attempt to overcome the obstacle, overcome the obstacle. It uses its time in an unusual way.
Pamela: I don’t know how to speak to that, because part of me feels like that’s family animation a lot of times, so that we’re letting everyone in the whole wide world, which is the demographic, know what’s going on. There is a lot of “how did we get here’s” and then “what are we gonna dos.”
John: Oh yeah, but I was saying I think that is a hallmark of family animation is that you are talking about the thing you need to do and then how you’re gonna do it, and then you do the thing. What’s unusual in Nimona is they describe, oh, we need to do a thing, and suddenly they just do the thing. Where I’d expected, like, okay, this’ll be in the next 10 minutes, it’s like, no, that was taken care of in the next minute, which was unusual. I think that may be a consequence of discovering some parts of the story as you’re going through it.
Pamela: Also, I think because they were new to each other, they were doing a lot of emotional processing while talking about how did that just happen. Instead of needing to do it, they really did work it through each other.
John: That’s fun. Everyone check that out. The next topic I’d like to dig into is about early drafts. It occurs to me because when you read the scripts for the Oscar-nominated films, it’s like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Of course, it’s always that way. But of course, we’re reading the very final draft. In some cases, we’re reading stuff that really reflects the final edit rather than the actual script they went into production with. I find it to be so educational to look at early drafts.
One of the things that I was able to do when I was at USC is – they had this big script library. They would have the final shooting script, but they would also have earlier drafts. It was so cool to see the stuff that had changed from the original idea to the final film. I remember reading the Point Break script and loving it, the James Cameron rewrite of it. It’s just great. But it’s different. It’s not the final film. You see what that looked like on the page, and ideas that were important at one point that then got dropped are great.
Also, during WGA arbitrations, a lot of times I’m reading seven scripts back, and you see what the initial instinct was versus what the final film was. You see how much stuff changes over the course of it. I think it’s really a good process for any screenwriter to see how much things really do change along the way.
Pamela: They solidify in your brain so differently too when you look back, because I did that a little, looking back here for you, for prepping, and I was blown away by what I didn’t remember. That’s just a good reminder to yourself of you have told yourself a story that you have believed. Thank you for your service on arbitration, honestly. What a job. What a hard thing to do, John, to go and read all those drafts and make these decisions.
John: I enjoy it, and so I will say yes most of the times when they call me about doing one of them, just because it’s important. You want to give people the credit that they deserve for the hard work they did.
One of the things you have in the notes here is about Natural Born Killers. Had you read a script for that early on? Had you read it before you saw the movie?
Pamela: No, not before I saw the film. That USC film script library sounds cool, but I was in a software company in Austin, Texas with the internet. The version that we had of that was trying to find people illegally uploading websites full of scripts. The early Natural Born Killers script was one I remember finding and being like, “Look at this. It’s so different than this film that I saw a billion times.” It’s very Tarantino-y. When you go in there, you’re like, it’s very Tarantino-y. They still have up the 1990 Tarantino script, which you can compare to the 1993 Oliver Stone and other writers’ draft.
But what’s also interesting is that then when you dive even further into people talking about it, because I only know internet rabbit holes about this script, but it came out of True Romance, which was also a rewrite of a script. In True Romance, Natural Born Killers is the screenplay that Clarence is writing while they’re on a road trip. That’s interesting. It’s the Facts of Life of – the spin-off series of the Tarantino universe.
John: I read Natural Born Killers from the USC script library. I remember reading it. This would’ve been 1992. It was the first script where I read the whole thing and then just went back and just started reading again from page 1. I was just blown away by it and how it upended the conventions of what I expected a movie to do, the fact that it moved into sitcoms and other things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script so you can see what it was. It was just amazing and blew my mind, like, “Oh, this is a thing I could do on the page.” It was incredible. Then I ended up working for the producers of Natural Born Killers. I was their assistant and ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers. I had a full experience there.
Pamela: That’s cool. Did you go all the way back to this first one?
John: I tried to pull things that I thought were really interesting about the first one into the novelization. The novelization really does not resemble the final movie very much at all. Oprah gets killed in the novelization. A lot of very different stuff happens in it. No one should read the novelization. Just don’t. But I was happy with the draft I wrote. I was not happy with the draft that got published.
But weirdly, the novelization of Natural Born Killers became my comedy sample that helped me get my very first job writing a screenplay, which was How to Eat Fried Worms, because naturally, the person who wrote Natural Born Killers novelization should write a charming children’s film about a kid who eats worms.
Pamela: Take it from the writer of My Year of Dicks, you can also write Moana. What’s interesting about that first script is I remember it was smaller and I feel like it was mostly the trial of Mickey and Mallory Knox. That’s so different than what you get in Natural Born Killers and such an Oliver Stone kind of film. I think that that original indie film that Tarantino had made also, in that Reservoir Dogs world, would’ve thrived.
John: 100 percent. It would’ve totally blown up. It was really just terrific. The Oliver Stone movie I like. It’s just I really miss the movie that I couldn’t see, which was the 1990 script, because that would’ve been special in its own way. But you mentioned Moana earlier, and this was actually probably what got me thinking about seeing earlier drafts, because on an audio podcast, it’s hard for us to compare pages from two different versions of Natural Born Killers. But what we can do is listen to two different songs and compare them. I had not realized until this recent car trip where we started playing “I want” songs from movies, is that How Far I’ll Go, which I think is a fantastic “I want” song from Moana, was the second version of the “I want” song, and the original one was More. Let’s play a sample from More.
[More (Outtake) from Moana]
John: If I had not told you that this was from Moana, you probably would’ve figured it out. She’s talking about being on an island. She’s talking about wanting to get beyond this island. It is the same general broad strokes idea, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t really serve the same function as the finished song does.
Pamela: Yeah. Boy, that song takes me back. It’s like you just threw me in a time machine. Woo!
John: You were working on this movie back when this was the “I want” song?
Pamela: Yeah. I was like, “How did this all happen?” because before there was this song, I would write in the script fake lyrics or poems or ideas of where this song might be, before we had Lin and the music team involved. More came right towards the end of my time on Moana. I did get to work with Lin a little bit about what this song could be. We had gone back and forth in emails and in person, and more came out of that.
John: I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. Did I ever come into the room with you when you were working on Moana? Because I came into a room for an afternoon on Moana, but you may not have been on the project at that point.
Pamela: I think you might’ve walked in as my door closed. It was a real all-hands moment. When you change the writer, it is easier than anything, but we are on contracts. I think I did not meet with you. I did sit with Michael Arndt. If you were around any time around Michael, that was around that time.
John: I literally came in one afternoon. My pencil never touched anything. I saw a bunch of artwork on the walls. They didn’t show me any clips. They just showed me all the art on the walls and talked me through the story. I’m like, “Oh boy. Oh boy. This isn’t gonna work.” I was wrong. It worked really, really well. It was only a year out from the movie. I’m like, “I don’t know what you guys are doing here.” They pulled it out. But in the process of figuring this stuff out, let’s compare. We just listened to More. Let’s listen to the “I want” song that’s actually in the movie. This is How Far I’ll Go.
[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]
John: What we’ve done here is we’ve flipped the ideas around. In More, she’s complaining about how stuck she feels on this island, and wouldn’t it be great to be out there. In this version she’s saying, “My island is fantastic. I love everybody here, but I’m still pulled to go and leave.” There’s a tension there that’s very different. The brief of what we’re supposed to understand about her is so different.
Pamela: Gosh. Moana’s journey changed quite a bit also. At one point, her family was lost at sea, so she was gonna have to go and get them. The want had to change each time. You had at the base of a problem with Moana is her island is wonderful and her life is great. That wasn’t something that was really supposed to change. We had gone to these islands and interviewed young women of Moana’s age. They often said that they wanted to be pilots or missionaries or people who would leave their island but then have to come home, need to come home and want to come home. You couldn’t have a want that was… Also, I’ll just say the problem with wanting more is you get that at the end of Act 1, and then you did it. Here we are. Here is more. It’s interesting in How Far I’ll Go, you hear that, “Every trail I track.” There’s parts of More that do end up in How Far I’ll Go.
John: Let’s listen to that. Here’s a little clip of that.
[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]
John: That musical idea made it back through into the final song.
Pamela: I remember in the boards, it was like, “That part works. There she is. That’s the thing. That’s the feeling and the movement.” I’m not surprised that that got stuck and stayed throughout the next version.
John: Comparing these two things, it’s just a good reminder that, be it in our scripts or, in this case, the songs, you recognize that you went in with a specific idea, like, “This is how we get from this place to this place. This is who the character is.” Sometimes it’s only when you go to get through the draft, you realize that was not actually the story or that’s not actually the motivation, that’s not the best way to do this. You discover something by playing through it. All the outlines you want to make, all the thinking you can do is not as helpful as actually trying and seeing what works. That’s one of the huge advantages of animation is that you actually get to see does this work. You have these intermediate steps where you get to see a thing.
Broadway musicals are the same thing, where you have readings, you have workshops, you stage it, you’re changing it every night, and you get to see what actually works. Our live action features on television, we don’t get those opportunities. We go in, we shoot a thing once, we spend a long time in the editing room trying to make it work, but there’s no chance to make big changes to things.
Pamela: You’re also working on two different versions of the story at the same time, because you’d have a scene that then would just get lifted and be like, “Actually, I can turn that into a song and save you five minutes of screen time with a three-minute song.” As a writer, you’re like, “These are all just workable ideas. These are just thoughts.” The script is thoughts a lot of times, because you’re not recording what they’re gonna say for a very long time. That won’t be the same either, because as soon as you’re in front of them and they’re trying every line a few different ways and then you’re improvising – and it is a ball you’re playing with a lot of times, but it’s your ball, so it’s very hard.
John: That’s my ball.
Pamela: It’s like, “That’s my ball.” But it’s not, because you hit it over the net quite a few times. There’s a bunch of teams. I’ll keep metaphoring. I don’t care.
John: 100 percent. Weirdly, a lot of the animation I’ve done has been stop-motion animation, which is kind of the exception, where we get to shoot a thing once. You pre-record; you shoot a thing once. You can’t change a lot. It’s more like live action. I’ve found it frustrating to try to do traditional animation, because I would deliver a script, like, “Here’s a script. Go for it,” and then I will get these boards back, and it’s like, “Wait, what are you doing? That’s not the script at all. You’ve just chosen a completely different thing to animate that’s not actually useful for my script.” That’s John August struggling with how traditional animation is done.
Pamela: It’s not for the weak.
John: It’s not for the weak. I compared animation to Broadway musicals. I’m thinking back to when we were doing the Big Fish musical. We did our out-of-town tryout in Chicago. We had a really rough time, because we were trying to make big changes, but every night we had to put on a show that people could actually watch and make sense. We would introduce stuff in blocks and pieces so it could all still fit together every night, but we still were changing a lot. We were adding new songs. We were moving stuff. We were cutting stuff.
One of the things we realized is that we did not have a an “I want” song for Will that worked. The challenge I put for Andrew Lippa was like, “You need to write an ‘I want’ song for Will. Let’s talk about what’s in there. Let’s talk about what ideas there are.” I remember being in the basement of the Oriental Theater, and he played me the song which became Stranger, which was the big “I want” song for Will. It was perfect. It was wonderful. We couldn’t do anything with it. There was no way to stick it to the show. We couldn’t tell the company that this new song existed until we closed in Chicago, went back to New York, were in the workshop again, and we could introduce this new song, which transformed big parts of the show. I just remember tears out there, like, “Oh my god, we did it. We actually made the thing happen.” But there was no way to actually make that fix live until we can get back into a safe place to insert it. It was such a different experience than anything I would’ve had doing features.
Pamela: Even in Moana, I think it was weird to put that want song, because it can come too late, and now she’s complaining, or it’s too early, and you are like, “Why? What is she even talking about? I don’t agree.” You have to agree with their want. It has to be like, “Me too. That’s exactly what I want for you.” I had pulled up all the stuff around the time that More was written to remember the brain that we were in. We were very much like, “Okay. Look. We know there’s nine things the song has to do.” Poor Lin. There are nine things the song has to do.
At one point there’s this document that was sent to him that was like, “Here’s just possible titles. This is my favorite.” I was like, “This is amusing, as a writer.” I think it’s alchemy, people who are able to write songs if they hear music or even how they – I felt so embarrassed every time I knew someone was reading one of these fake song poems I was trying to do, like I’m in a coffee shop, on a stage.
We sent the following: “Here’s just some possible titles.” Why? But anyway. “Set Sail. I’ll Find My Way. I Know My Way. I Learn Too Well. Why Not Now? If Not Now, When? To Sail is Life. I Want to Sail. The Next Step. The Biggest Step. I Hear You. My Life’s at Sea. My Dream is to Sail. The Far Horizon. Beyond the Reef. The Endless Beyond. Beyond the Edge of Nowhere. There’s Somewhere There Past Nowhere. I Am Moana: Daughter of the Sea. My Life, My Ocean. A Different Voice. A Different Song. A Different Rhythm.” Just take that, Lin.
John: Some of those are terrible, but some of those actually totally make sense. You can completely imagine some of those things being that “I want” song. I saw this in France. When I saw it, it was Vaiana. She wasn’t Moana.
Pamela: You know why, yes?
John: I know why, because Moana was a porn star in Italy, I think, and then also a trademark in other places. In Europe, it’s just Vaiana. It always was Vaiana. My question is, I don’t remember, is this the second song? Because classically, the “I want” song in a musical is the second song. There’s a “welcome to the world” song that sets up the whole universe, and then this is the second song. Is it the second song in Moana?
Pamela: I don’t think it is, because you’ve got We Know the Way and Where You Are. Let’s see. Track listing, it’s number four, but that’s I think because of the opening sound.
John: That’s score stuff.
Pamela: Yeah, score stuff. It might be How Far I’ll Go is after Where You Are. That’s the thing. Where You Are, this is the “perfect world” song. That’s it. We Know the Way used to always open. It was the first song they wrote as a team. It was so great. We were like, “This is it.” It was considered, “This is how the movie has to open,” which then your third song would be a want song, which feels a little late.
John: It does feel a little bit late.
Pamela: She also used to sing a song before that of who Maui was. There was a whole Maui song too.
John: No, that’s not gonna work.
Pamela: It was a lot. It was a lot.
John: I could’ve come into the room and said, “It’s not gonna work.”
Pamela: It was an Act 1 break. She was singing like, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta find my way. I hope my dad doesn’t mind. I hope he’s not mad at me. I’ve gotta get this right. I think this is who I am, and I won’t know if I don’t go see it.” It was that want song. It was a little like, “I want to know if this feeling inside me is okay to have.”
John: Which is a good thought. That actually holds through into How Far I’ll Go, which is like, “I feel this tension, because I love everything here and yet I am completely drawn out there. I want to be a good daughter, and yet I feel like I can’t be.” Those are real things.
Let’s talk for a moment about the article by Mark Harris called How Bad Could It Get for Hollywood, really looking at the futures of YouTube and TikTok, coming down to the idea that young Americans aren’t thinking about movies and television in the same way, and so the industry that we’ve built to entertain people is in danger of being supplanted by a video that they’re watching that is not created by studios and, of course, union writers. What did you take from this?
Pamela: I feel like, oh, here’s this article again. I don’t know. Is that okay to say?
John: I would generally agree with you. You’re safe to predict doom and gloom every year.
Pamela: It’s TV and film. There’s another one going on, video games. It’s all the doom and gloom of all the things. It’s all supposed to be really bad. I feel like I’m always in whatever is the version – wherever they’re complaining that it’s over and it’s dead is where I’m employed. That seems to be-
John: Always good.
Pamela: Then they’re like, “You’re not getting employed. Over here, this is where the people are really employed.” I don’t really read these, because I don’t take them into… My husband is someone who will be like, “Your job’s [unintelligible 00:52:36].” Even this article that you’ve linked I kind of read with one eye squinting, because I don’t want it to get in my heart or my head.
John: There’s always an existential threat, which is basically that people are gonna stop watching the stuff that we’re making, and because people have a certain number of hours in the day, they’re gonna spend those hours doing things that are not movies or television.
The prediction that the actual movies will fail and that no one will go to the movie theaters anymore – is attendance down? Sure. But there’s still something kind of great about being in a public space with people all watching the same things. Even my teenage daughter does like doing that at times. She loves TikTok. She loves YouTube. But there’s something great about the event of everyone staring at the same screen, watching a thing.
There’s something appealing about television events that get everyone watching the same thing and talking about the same thing. There’s reasons why that works and will probably continue to work. And yet I think we do need to be mindful that there’s new threats pulling at people’s attention. And that attention could make it harder for some of the economics of our business to work.
Pamela: Yeah. You’ve really said it. We can all like a TikTok, but we can’t all go watch a TikTok and talk about it together and go on a date to TikTok. There’s still communal events. They’re still bringing us together. And if they’re the kinds of things that people are talking about, you’ve gotta go do the thing, to see the thing to be able to talk about it too.
That being said, I was at a friend’s house recently where they just had on the television two things from YouTube. One was a screensaver that they just had on. Every once in a while the neon sign in the image would blink, and they’d all be like, “Yay.” They’d also watch marble runs where it’s elaborate. I just said, “Why do we work so hard?” Someone in that house was also in the industry. No, they both are. I was like, “Why do we work so hard? You guys just sit here and watch marble runs.” They were like, “Look at it go. Yay.”
John: That’s so nice.
Pamela: Yay. There’s that element to what we make too, of can you shut off your head and have fun. I think that’s what the Eras Tour is proving, like, “Oh my gosh. We just want Barbie. Let’s go have fun.” They certainly tried to make Oppenheimer seem like a rollicking good time. “Let’s go out and have fun.” And it worked, because people were ready to do that.
John: We have some listener questions here that are perfect for Pamela Ribon, our guest today. Drew, start us off.
Drew: Lark in Virginia writes, “Recently I’ve been doing some rewrites for a series pilot, and as I’ve been going back, I’ve been considering how this show may be if it was animation instead of live action. Just how different is writing animation compared to live action? Do you still follow the formula in terms of writing on the page? How have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike? I feel like there are more eyes on both the WGA in both a good way and a bad way and more awareness towards TAG in general.”
John: We’ve talked a lot about, for writing animation, even in this episode, if you actually look at a script for an animated series and a live action series, they’re not different. Animated half-hours, like a Simpsons, is double spaced in ways, but otherwise it’s the same kind of formatting all throughout.
Pamela: I didn’t even think that this was a format question, because the formulas – you’re writing scripts for telling stories. They’re the same. Your budget is different, maybe. Maybe. They’re pretty expensive too. The character talking might be a cat, so that’s different. But no, you don’t write it differently. You ask yourself, does it need to be animated? That’s what’s different mostly.
John: There’s an animated series that I may be doing here soon. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do it, because when you say animation, there’s 15 different things and ways you could be doing an animated series. They have different costs and different requirements. But the actual script, the stuff that you’re writing, that’s not gonna change that much. That feels the same between live action and animation.
Rarely do you see a script that was written for live action that you can just immediately take and then just turn into animation. You’re gonna make some different choices just based on how audiences see things, how stuff fits together, how transitions work. You tend to write knowing something’s gonna be animated or non-animated. If you’re a person who can write live action, you’re a person who can write animation, and vice versa.
The differences and challenges is that writing something how you guys were writing Moana was a much more iterative process than what a writer would normally encounter. That’s something you have to deal with, and being good with – you said like, here’s a bundle of ideas that you know are gonna change. That’s a very different experience.
Pamela: I would say it still happens in live action too. When it is, you’re still like, “Iterative.” That’s just the word that I hear a lot now. But yes, in animation, it is kind of the point of it, and particularly if you’re coming around during development, before the thing is in actual production, which then is still in reels. You’re never really shooting a thing. You’re never shooting it. That’s it, John.
John: That’s the thing is you’re never shooting and you’re never really in post. It’s all one blurry thing. There’s development, which there can still be an artist in that time, but it’s before you have this expectation of like, we’re really making this thing. But even when they say they’re really making the thing, they may not be making the thing. Nimona, it sounds like they were kind of making the thing, and then they decided they weren’t making the thing, and then, luckily, someone else said, “Sure, we’ll make the thing.”
Pamela: I think of scenes that we made and finished in Ralph Breaks the Internet that were done in animation for the most part and then got cut. That’s that. Then you’re like, “Post-credit sequence.”
John: Yay.
Pamela: “Yay. We’ll still use it.” It’s never being shot.
John: We had Jennifer Lee on to talk about Frozen. They were way down the road in a lot of stuff, and they made giant changes. There are sequences that they couldn’t go back through and completely redo, that are just – they’re not quite the same movie, and yet you roll with it because you roll with it. I think it was the abominable snowman sequence. It’s like, it’s not kind of the same movie, those aren’t kind of the same characters, and yet it works, because it needs to work. They did not have the time to go back through and completely change that the way they would want to change that. You’re always making those choices. In that way, it feels more like traditional film and TV, where you shot a thing, and you gotta make it work in the editing room.
Pamela: Sometimes you’re just so close that you really are the only one who’s noticing. In its whole, people are like, “Yay.” But this question of how have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike – nothing.
John: Nothing. Here’s what I would say is different. One of the best things about the strike for me were the days that I was at, generally, Warner Bros and would see a zillion TAG, The Animation Guild, folks out there on the picket line with us. I know you’ve pushed hard for improving conditions for writers working under TAG contracts. I think there was a sense of WGA versus TAG. That’s a ridiculous dichotomy. Really, the case is you want things to be WGA and TAG, because TAG is not just folks who are writing animation, but it’s all the other folks who are working in animation. It’s storyboard artists and other crucial people in animation. We would love to see movies and TV shows that have WGA writers who have the full protections and credits and residuals for the writing that they’re doing, and those projects have full TAG union members getting everything else done. We want union animation.
Pamela: Yes, we’re union parity. Putting it under TAG doesn’t mean I don’t have the same kind of protections and residuals that I would’ve had if you had made it WGA. Since TAG can’t free their writers, then that was what needs to happen within TAG. But not just writers. There are many, many members of TAG who are not being treated appropriately, which is why TAG might go on strike.
It is nice that it is less thinking that, “I thought everybody was WGA,” or, “I had no idea that most of you were being forced to work without a union at all, depending on the studio.” And I think just also an awareness of what a union does. But I think TAG still has a long way to go for people to understand and respect its union members.
John: Obviously, those negotiations are starting right now. TAG is part of larger IATSE, but TAG also has its own contracts it negotiates. It’s complicated. But we need to be mindful of it and just never pretend that writing animation is lesser than writing live action.
Pamela: That’s right. The things we were on strike for in the WGA are what does happen in TAG now.
John: Exactly.
Pamela: AI is already in TAG. It’s happening there. I’ve seen it. A lot of these protections that we were on strike about are because we know it can happen, because it does happen in animation.
John: Minimum staff size, for an example, we would talk to TAG animation writers, showrunners who basically could not hire any writing staff, and so were basically having to do everything themselves. That’s a danger you want to avoid in live action so that you don’t have showrunners just melting down because they don’t have the writing support they need.
Pamela: As a for instance.
John: As a for instance. As one of many for instances. Let’s do our One Cool Things. I’m so excited to see what you have for your One Cool Thing.
Pamela: I know you lived in Paris for some time. As an adult, you can do things that you didn’t get to do in high school, like learn French. Once I started going to the Annecy Animation Festival in France, I was like, “I want to keep coming back here, but I want to know more French every time.”
There’s this place called Coucou. Coucou French classes are based in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of writers live. Coucou has two locations in LA, I think Silver Lake and their new one is in Culver City. But they’re also online. This is a way to learn French that has a lot of… For me I’ve always done it online, although there’s one down the street. We get together. We are conversing. We are learning. They have all different fun ways to practice your French. They send out newsletters for, “Here are some French rom-coms to watch.” They have little classes in poetry, book reading, flower arrangement. It is what if learning another language was a fun community as opposed to something you did alone and got confused about.
John: Going beyond just talking to Duolingo every day and making that little green owl happy.
Pamela: See, because Duolingo is a slot machine. Duolingo is the Vegas of language learning. I think it’s pretty cool to jam it in there. The Pimsleur method has its own way. But those are lonely tasks. I invite you to the Coucou community. There’s private lessons. There’s group classes. There’s workshops and events. You can walk down to your little French location and hang out and have a baguette. It’s fun.
John: That’s awesome. That’s fun. My One Cool Thing is a video I saw this past week by David Friedman. He was looking at the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, which I remember the title, but I never saw a single frame of that sitcom. The video talks through the fact that ‘Til Death made it to four seasons, not because anybody was watching it, but because Sony, who was making the show, made a deal with Fox to say, “We’ll give it to you for free.” They just wanted to hit that 100 episodes so they could hit syndication.
In that fourth season, they had a new showrunner. Because no one was watching, they could just make some really weird, wild swings. Characters became aware that they were on a sitcom. They just did some things you shouldn’t be able to do in a sitcom, that were kind of fun and interesting. I don’t need to go back and watch the sitcom, but I do enjoy Friedman’s exploration of how strange this sitcom got, because it was just allowed to get so strange.
The other thing I thought was interesting was a blog post Friedman did about how he constructed it, because this was 80 hours of video to watch. He didn’t want to watch the whole sitcom. He built a script that went through and figured out which cast members were in which things, because they kept changing out cast members, and basically built an Excel spreadsheet that showed where the changes were, so that he could just look at those moments and not have to watch the whole thing, which was just very smart and felt very much like how I would do it. I enjoyed the video and his explanation behind the scenes.
That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vincent DeVito. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one Pamela and I are about to talk through on the Oscars and attending the Oscars and how fun the Oscars are. But that couldn’t be as much fun as having Pamela on again as a co-host here. An absolute delight getting to chat with you about these things.
Pamela: So much fun. I can’t wait to come back again. I hope you invite me. Thank you.
John: We will. Also, remind us where we can find you, because you have your other podcast as well. Talk through, how do we find you?
Pamela: My other podcast, like this is one of mine – I’ll take it. I cohost a podcast called Listen to Sassy, where we go through every issue of the beloved ’90s magazine, that you can find all about at Listen to Sassy – I was like, “Is it dot-com or dot-net? Hold on.” It’s dot-com. Of course it is. Listentosassy.com. I don’t go to Twitter.
John: I stopped Twitter too.
Pamela: You can find me on Instagram @pamelaribon. Listen to Sassy is a great way to hear more about what it’s like from the years when you talked like this.
John: Perfect.
Pamela: You know what else though? If you do want to watch My Year of Dicks, it’s at myyearofdicks.com.
John: I love it. Everyone should watch it. It’s so, so good. People will tell me, “Oh, Pamela Ribon was on the show, and I finally watched My Year of Dicks. It was really good.” I’m like, “Yes, I told you that last summer.”
Pamela: You guys were very early supporters. I thank you. I don’t know that we would – segue – be getting to the Oscars without you, so thank you so much.
John: Hooray.
[Bonus Segment]
John: The Oscars. You were just at the Oscars. This is your second time at the Oscars, because you were nominated for My Year of Dicks. This time I saw you on Instagram in the back of other people’s photos. I’ve been to the Oscars a couple times, but only in the balcony stuff, because I’ve never had a thing nominated. Talk to us about your Oscars experience either of these two years.
Pamela: Who’s counting? This is the fourth film I’ve worked on that’s been nominated for an Oscar.
John: Congratulations.
Pamela: But only the second time I had tickets. That’s how it goes. Last year when we were nominees, we were seated where you go. It’s kind of the mezzanine. You’re not all the way down there. Through a series of surprise events, I ended up way down there in the orchestra. Listen. I don’t think it’ll ever be more fun, unless I ever win an Oscar, to go to the Oscars. It was a most unexpected place to find myself. We could talk about the two different versions.
John: I want the celebrity-filled glamour version. This most recent version, paint the scene. Who was around you? You were very close to Charlize Theron and a bunch of other folks.
Pamela: Yes. I assumed it was like Forrest Gump really. “What’s Pam doing there?” In the past, usually my friends will go, “Are you at the Oscars?” and I’ll have to say, “That is Patricia Arquette.” This year it really threw my friends off, because they were like, “I knew you were going, but I knew you weren’t supposed to be seen, so what are you doing behind Charlize Theron?”
I asked an usher, “Where are these seats?” They said, “They’re down there.” I thought, “That’s a mistake. I’ll keep walking and figure out what that means,” because they said O means orchestra. I was like, “Okay. These letters don’t make any sense, because this says F.” Truly, someone was like, “The stage is A, and you’re at F,” slowly explained to me, which is what I needed, because at this point my eyes were exploding, because I’m like, “That’s Slash. Why is Slash here?” That’s the first thing I saw was a hat.
John: Are you at the right awards show? Is this the Grammys?
Pamela: I was like, “That’s Nicholas Cage.” Nothing made sense for a second, because, again, once you see Slash’s hat, you stop making sense. Then I saw Eugene Lee Yang, and their outfit was this Billy Porter-esque red suit-gown. I was like, “Oh, that’s the Nimona group.” Then they pointed me that way. Then I sat next to Lloyd, who’s another one of the credited writers.
And then Riz, who was going to sit next to me, had not been seated yet, so I didn’t know it was gonna be him. But right before I left the house, I thought, “Riz Ahmed did us a real service by making announcing My Year of Dicks a viral event,” and so I had a little thank you dick for him, because I’m classy. I have these little crystal dicks – Malala also has one – that I give out when you come near My Year of Dicks and help it out in some way. I thought, “Whatever, I’ve kept this one for Riz. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll see him after the after-party or something.” Then he’s sitting next to me.
The first thing I do, because I don’t know, I’m like, “They’re certainly gonna kick me out of this seat,” because I turned to Lloyd, I’m like, “The writers don’t get to sit here. Someone’s made a mistake. I don’t know what’s going on. Thank you, Netflix, to the Academy. But regardless, we’re not gonna mess this up.” That’s all I kept saying, “We’re not gonna mess this up,” because that is Steven Spielberg sitting next to me, and I’m in front of the Poor Things team. And I don’t even know yet that Christopher Nolan is to my left. I’m too busy. Lloyd is doing the same thing. He’s like, “Pam, I see Jennifer Lawrence.” It’s so wild. I’m like, “That is Bradley Cooper.” It went Downey, Blunt, Cillian, Sir Ben Kingsley, Jon Batiste, Pam, like that makes any sense.
John: Do you have an explanation now of what happened?
Pamela: These are the seats. These are the seats that I was told to sit in. I was like, “Okay.” I would give out gum at breaks and then be like, “We’re getting rid of the gum when the commercials are over, because I am not gonna be gum girl.” I could really only see a number of memes happening, of me opening my mouth and just like, “Yeah, y’all,” just gums.
I will say I kept it together for the most part, but there was a moment when they were putting down all the lights in the aisle. They were just putting down a bunch of lights in the aisle. And I went, “The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming.” I turned to an usher. I went, “Right? I didn’t miss it?” How would I have missed it? Pam, you’ve been here the whole time. “The Kens are coming?” The guy goes, “The Kens are coming.” I was like, “Ah! It’s happening! [Unintelligible 01:13:01] Kens!” Which was such a chaotic moment that I didn’t really get to see his Ken piece, because they lift him in the air. We were under the show. I didn’t know the screen was telling people to grab flashlights and sing. I saw none of that. But it was still glorious. I highly recommend fifth row seats to the Oscars.
John: It’s good stuff.
Pamela: Oh my gosh.
John: I’ve been twice, I guess. The Oscars are fun in person. It’s different than watching them at home, because, obviously, during the commercial breaks, stuff is happening. I don’t know if during your awards they deliberately did stuff, or was it just everybody running for the bathrooms and the seat fillers coming in. But it’s fun when you’re – the off-camera moments are really delightful too.
Pamela: There was a lot of people getting up and walking around. I will say the year before when we were up in the mezzanine, which, wonderful seats, but when you’re a nominee for a category that has to move you, we were waiting for our category and then we didn’t know exactly when it was gonna be. Then they move you down to the seats that are for your category. There’s a camera on you that isn’t gonna be used or needed. Then you don’t win, and then the Oscars are over, really. That’s it. You’ve worked so hard, and then that moment happens, and you can go out to the lobby and have a drink and nurse your wounds. That is how I did it last year.
John: In this situation, Nimona could’ve won. Would you have gone up on stage if Nimona had won?
Pamela: We had been told by the team, “Hey, man, if we win, you guys, please, everybody come up,” which I’m pretty sure we would’ve. We would’ve been so excited. And we were a jumpable distance to the stage. But traditionally, no. Animation, they’re just like, “We can move on with this.”
It was the third category this year, so we also pretty early on were like, “That’s it. We just get to sit here and enjoy the show.” I don’t know if I had been back there with the rest of the team or even any – there were three different groups of Nimona all around in the Oscars. Probably we would’ve gone to find each other.
But we were so close that even Lloyd was like, “I think I’ll go get a drink,” and I was like, “Lloyd, look, if you leave, there’s a seat filler. Who knows what you’re gonna miss? I bet it’s Billie Eilish,” which it would’ve been. I said, “We’re just gonna sit here and be grateful for the shortest Oscars experience we’ll ever have.” It was over in a blink.
I thought watching it on my couch in my pajamas with my friends was fun. Going as a nominee but then not winning was its own kind of fun. This was fantastic. This was joyous. Miyazaki won. What are you gonna do? It wasn’t even the kind of thing where the winner is like, “Come on, that hack.”
John: You didn’t go into this with the expectation like, “Oh, we’re gonna beat Spider-Man and Miyazaki.”
Pamela: That’s pretty tough. The miracle of it existing – the studio was shut down. The miracle of it getting a nomination, which that requires your peers in the animation community to recognize the film and nominate it. There were a lot of wonderful films that year that didn’t make that final five. To win? How do you get all of the other branches to know about a movie on Netflix that didn’t have a theatrical release when you’re up against Spider-Verse and then Miyazaki? All of the short-list nominees really were contenders.
I saw Robert DeNiro. He did not have a good time at those Oscars. You could probably go and get jaded from it all, but I don’t know, for me – I love watching people win things in general, and particularly if they are young females. It’s just my favorite thing to watch is a young woman win something.
John: The editor of Oppenheimer, loved her.
Pamela: Absolutely. The girl with the short film. Any young woman clutching something she won is my favorite thing. The Oscars this year, it was a pretty – then I’m like, no, not every film was a happy, happy film, obviously, but there was an atmosphere down there of, “The show’s about to begin, and I think it’s gonna be a good time.”
John: It was a good time. It was a good show.
Pamela: Nicholas Cage was right in front of me. I couldn’t stop. Maybe you don’t know this. Why would you? When I was a little girl, my imaginary friends were all celebrities.
John: Wow.
Pamela: I moved a lot. You’d make a friend, and then you’d lose touch with her. But these celebrities always moved with me, time to time. There have been a couple of times in life when I’ve worked with someone who was my imaginary friend when I was a kid. I don’t tell all of them that, but I do wait, if there is a moment, and I let them know, because why not? But this was what it looked like when I was a little kid going to bed, and I had all my imaginary friends hanging out with me before bedtime. This is the closest to that experience.
John: Pam, you didn’t win an Oscar, but you’ve won the Oscars. You probably had the most fun of anyone there, and I love that.
Pamela: I will say then, here’s this Charlize moment. She wasn’t sitting in front of me. Jon Batiste was sitting in front of me. Then he went to go do his song, and then some seat fillers were sitting in front after that. Then at one point this beautiful woman is walking toward me. I’ve seen Charlize Theron more than once in person. Never I’ve spoken to her. But every time the same thing happens in my head, which is, “Does she live in my neighborhood? Does she have kids at my school?”
John: Totally.
Pamela: I don’t know why. Then she sat down. Lloyd’s like, “That’s Charlize Theron.” I was like, “That’s a seat filler. We know this.” He goes, “You can’t see what I can see. 100 percent, Charlize Theron is sitting directly in front of you.”
Then they started passing out these little tequila bottles, and they said, “There’s gonna be a toast.” That’s all we knew. You get used to these cameras moving around to position themselves in front of nominees or Steven Spielberg for the bit. The cameras were whipping around the front. The bit began with Jimmy, of like, “This is my wife, Charlize Theron.” As soon as he said, “My wife, Charlize Theron,” Lloyd elbows me, goes, “We’re definitely about to be on TV.” But I already had figured this out. I was just like, “You guys, act the part.” The actor in me went, “And we’re on.” Then the camera came up for her reaction shot. I was like, “You’re not gonna mess this up.” I’m just like, “My role is audience lady behind Charlize.”
John: Absolutely. You’re gonna be present but not necessarily in focus.
Pamela: You can totally see it in the clip. You can see me go, “And we’re live.” I wasn’t gonna mess it up. I wasn’t gonna be gum girl. I wasn’t gonna get kicked out of those seats. It was an honor and a privilege to be in a scene at the Academy Awards. Please ask me back. Riz and I were like, “I think every year.” We’re like, “Every year.”
John: Every year.
Pamela: He’s like, “Next year, what if we’re two rows up?” I said, “Maybe we have to make something to do that.” I said, “But I’m fine with that, as long as two years from now we’re on stage announcing best animated short film.”
John: Love it.
Pamela: These are the goals.
John: Pam, congratulations again. Yay. Thank you for sharing your Oscar experience.
Pamela: Thanks. I can’t wait to hear your next one.
John: Yay.
Links:
- Pamela Ribon on Instagram
- Listen to Sassy
- My Year of Dicks
- Nimona on Netflix
- Hire Survivors Hollywood
- Dune: Part Two Clip
- ‘Fundie Baby Voice’ Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here’s What You Should Know by Caroline Bologna for Huffpost
- In a World – Smoothie
- Natural Born Killers 1990 Draft
- Natural Born Killers 1993 Draft
- Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘I Want’ Songs, Going Method for ‘Moana’ and Fearing David Bowie
- More (Outtake) from Moana
- How Far I’ll Go from Moana
- How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood? by Mark Harris for NYT
- This Sitcom Got WEIRD When Nobody Watched It by David Friedman
- Researching An Old Sitcom With AI by David Friedman
- Coucou French classes
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Vincent DeVito (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 636: Whispering Loudly, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer and comedian Alex Edelman to look at how he wrote his solo show Just For Us, and dig into the meaning of “write what you know.” They discuss finding your voice as a writer, developing your story with an audience, why Alex doesn’t write his shows down, and the sample that first got him staffed.
We also answer listener questions on what to do when your manager doesn’t understand your comedy, and the value of characters speaking to themselves.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John asks Alex, how do you set boundaries on material when you’re dating another comedian?
Links:
- Alex Edelman
- Just For Us on HBO
- Replay by Jordan Mechner
- Replay by Ken Grimwood
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Ali Clifton (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Can You Believe It? first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 635 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Now, sometimes on this podcast we talk craft. Sometimes we talk business. Today on the show, it’s half and half. On the business side, how do you make sure that person you’re hiring for your movie or casting on your show, Craig, isn’t an absolute monster?
Craig: Uh-oh.
John: We’ll talk through best practices on vetting people. And on the craft side, how do write for characters whose native language is not English? We’ll look at and listen to examples for how to do it right and some pitfalls to avoid. We’ll also answer some more listener questions. And Craig, for a bonus segment, something I don’t think we’ve ever talked about enough on this podcast: cults.
Craig: Oh, god, I hate cults.
John: I love cults so much.
Craig: Why did it have to be cults?
John: Why did it have to be cults? Now, I joined the Zoom late, but I think you and Drew were already talking about this first item of business here, which is you love word games, but I was playing the new New York Times beta version word game, and I suspected, this is not gonna be Craig’s thing. I’m talking about New York Times Strands.
Craig: Strands. What a nice way for them to just rebrand word search, the dumbest of all puzzles. It’s not a puzzle. It’s just searching.
John: It’s a word search with a theme you have to discover, unlike a classic word search where a word can be either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Here, they can go around in various permutations, because it’s all done digitally.
Craig: One of the things that Dave Shukan, my frequent solving partner, and I often discuss when we are going through puzzle suites, you will see certain types of puzzles emerge over and over, because that’s pretty standard. Acrostics, for instance, is kind of a slog. I don’t know if you’ve ever done an acrostic. The New York Times used to run them and just stopped running them online for some reason no one can fathom. But they’re a bit of a slog. Word searches are the ultimate slog.
One of the things that Dave often remarks is, he’ll say, “This is a puzzle, but it isn’t any fun.” I agree with that. Word searches are just simply not fun. They’re just the busy work of puzzles. You just sit there, and you isolate a letter and then look around and see what other letters connect to it, and then you just keep going. But there’s actually nothing to solve. You’re merely just looking.
John: I’m not a huge fan of this. I’m still playing it every day, sort of out of inertia. What I will say is the fact that you don’t know quite what the theme is and what the unifying themes are, then once you actually discover, oh, this must be the pattern, then you actually can start looking for words you think might be there. My standards are lower than yours.
Craig: Listen. If people enjoy it, I’m not taking it away from them. And I don’t want to be a puzzle snob about it. I’m not snobby. There are certain versions of word searches that can be inventive. Foggy Brume, who makes the Panda Magazine puzzle suites, will often do word searches where there is some fascinating little gimmick inside of it. And discovering the gimmick and how it functions is the fun part. The word search itself is fairly easy. You’ll start to see words right away and then wonder, but what does this have to do with anything? And then you realize, oh, I see. If you take the end of this word over here and the beginning of this word over here, they spell a country name. Aha. What does this mean? There’s solving to do. This just looks like find a bunch of words and see what they are. Strands, I’m out.
John: It’s fine.
Craig: No, thank you. I think when it comes to a bunch of words that are then unified by a theme, my prior One Cool Thing, Squeezy, far more fun for that.
John: I thought we might start with a question here as an amuse-bouche, because we have two big topics, but sometimes the questions get shunted way to the back of the episode. Drew, can you start us off with a question here?
Drew Marquardt: M.R. writes, “Yesterday I gave notes on a script and called out what I’ve always heard is script cheating, which is a piece of information that’s written but it’s unfilmable, like an action like saying something like, ‘Kate enters. She’s the sister of Jess,’ or, ‘Mike sits at a desk. He thinks a lot of himself.’ Kate entering and Mike sitting are filmable, but the descriptors are not. And you can’t tell an actor, ‘Just act like Jess’s sister,’ or, ‘Think a lot of yourself.’
“I called out a very similar situation in said script and received this email back: ‘Hey, M.R. I went through some of the notes, and I just want to let you know that your script is supposed to have voice. I don’t think it’s wise for you to give people notes saying script cheating, which is not anything I’ve ever heard of. I think you may be hurting other writers with some of your feedback. Just be careful with notes like that.’ Obviously, every script has a voice, but was I wrong to give this script a cheating note?”
John: Neither side here is completely perfect, but I think there’s some balance and subtlety.
Craig: Everyone’s wrong.
John: Everyone’s wrong. There’s some balance here that I think we need to find. Let’s start with the second person, like, “I’ve never heard of that as called cheating.” I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast as cheating. There’s things you could put on a page that if they’re genuinely unfilmable and they’re not actionable in a way – there’s pieces of information you could put on a script that there’s no way for the audience to have that piece of information – that is cheating. There can be an issue with that.
It also feels like M.R. may be going overboard in what he was considering cheating, because as we’ve talked about on the podcast before too, there are times where you want to give some flavor, some texture, some tone on the page that lets you know what this feels like, even if it’s not directly something you can aim a camera at.
Craig: Look. This is why writing groups and such are problematic at times. We don’t know M.R., so we don’t know the tone. We don’t know if this is the final straw, if this is something that happens all the time. We don’t know if everyone’s like, “Oh my god, M.R., why are you so mean to everybody?” I don’t know. We don’t know the context. All we know is this.
In this isolated bit, script cheating is the nice way of saying bad writing. This is already the nice way, because it’s bad writing to say, “Kate enters. She is the sister of Jess.” That’s bad. It’s bad because it is short circuiting the writer’s obligation to inform the audience in a creative way that Kate is Jess’s sister, which I assume happens in the script at some point, and so the cheating is probably not even necessary.
But yeah, script cheating is a perfectly fine… Honestly, if you can’t handle that, I don’t even know what to tell you about what you’re facing in your career, should you have one. John and I have sat in rooms and been just obliterated. Especially when you’re starting out and you don’t have enough credibility for people to even respect you when you walk in the room. You walk into a room, the knives are out before you even sit down. Yeah, you’re gonna hear some stuff that’s harsh.
Look. John, you and I are old. We’re of that generation. And I know the new generation really doesn’t like this stuff. But as far as I’m concerned, script cheating is a perfectly fine way of saying that’s just bad.
I’m more annoyed by somebody saying, “I don’t think it’s wise for you.” You could always just say, “Hey, you know what? Thank you for that. I have to tell you it kind of hurt. I know you didn’t intend to hurt. I’m just letting you know it did and that maybe if there was a kinder way for you to say that next time, it would just make it easier for me to hear, and it would be more productive for me. But thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.” There’s nothing wrong with that.
John: I’m thinking back to notes I’ve given to writers. At times, I’ve been overly… They’ll send me the script, and I didn’t ask the question first, like, “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you how great it is or to give you constructive feedback or to be really, line by line, diligent about things I’m noticing here?” There have been times I’ve over-corrected on the page, and that was a problem.
In the situation of, let’s talk about, “She is Jess’s sister.” There may be times in a perfectly fantastic script where, on a first introduction of a character, you might say, “Tina, Jess’s sister, comes through the thing.” We’re establishing that they’re sisters, and we’re gonna find that out really quickly anyway. But as a service to the reader and figuring out what the context of all this is, it’s really genuinely helpful. I do find sometimes writers get obsessed with these “have to figure out everything from first” principles, like you can’t put anything on the page that wouldn’t be immediately visible to the audience. That’s not doing anybody a favor either, because again, the script is meant to approximate the experience of being in that movie theater. But in that movie theater, you’re going to say, “Oh, those two characters look a lot alike. They’re probably sisters.” Sometimes you need to give that information on the page, that you would not need to give in the actual film.
Craig: That is true. In those instances, sometimes what I will say is, “Kate enters. We’ll find out shortly that she’s the sister of Jess.”
John: Exactly.
Craig: To help the reader there get a few things that might be pretty evident on screen, but you’re also telling them, “Hey, you will find out. This isn’t the only time that the information will be available to you here in an action description in a script. Just trust me, you’ll find out, but for now, FYI.” Perfectly fine thing to do. But I don’t know, tone policing here. It feels a little tone police-y to me.
John: Yeah, it does. It does a bit.
Craig: That said, if M.R. is a total jerk and everyone hates M.R., then all the people listening to this are like, “Oh my god, why are you enabling M.R.?” I hope M.R. is not a jerk. I really, really do.
John: I hope so too. It’s not also clear from this context whether the person who was writing back was talking about their own script or maybe they’re part of a group that were looking at some other third person’s script. We don’t know what the whole context of this is. But just again, be cool. As you’re giving notes, make sure you’re understanding the context the person’s asking for the notes, and think about how you would receive those notes as a writer.
Craig: Can I give a guess?
John: All right.
Craig: I think that the person who wrote M.R. is not the person who wrote the script, but rather, that person’s friend. The person who wrote the script complained to their friend about it, was upset, and then the friend said, “I’m gonna go tell M.R. to not do that anymore.” That’s my guess.
John: Hey, Craig, in our actual real life, there have been times where one of us has had to go to a third person and say, “Hey, this is a thing to be aware of.” That’s a scenario that happens in real life.
Craig: Yeah. Sometimes you need to be an intermediary. And when you are, it always goes best if you feel like a neutral intermediary, where there aren’t judgments involved, but rather, just facts and requests. I think the problem with this is, “I don’t think it’s wise. I think you may be hurting people,” and then an imperative, “Be careful.” Not, “In the future, it might be helpful if.” For somebody who’s concerned about hurting people with feedback, this person didn’t seem too concerned about hurting M.R. with feedback.
John: The last little point about voice is there are times where you’re gonna put something in a script that it’s not filmable, you’re never gonna see it, but it just helps give the reader a sense of who that person is, what the space is like. You can describe how it smells. Listen. You’re not gonna actually ever smell that, but it gives us a sense of what it’s ultimately gonna feel like and sound like anyone else to. You say, “Oh, that’s cheating.” It’s not really cheating, because you’re providing context that is gonna be helpful for the reader to understand what this is ultimately gonna look and sound like.
Craig: And for the actors as well.
John: Yeah, totally.
Craig: They can perform smelling something. They can perform having sweaty armpits. We probably won’t see it, but they know what it feels like. No question. As always, our advice is follow the rules but don’t necessarily follow the rules. The only rule we have is write well.
John: Write well.
Craig: Write well.
John: Podcast done. 635 episodes, we’ve reached our conclusion.
Craig: We got there.
John: We got there.
Craig: We got there in two words.
John: Now, Craig, as we’ve established previously on this podcast here, one of my goals for 2024 has been to become better at understanding and appreciating the differences between accents and dialects in English. This is a thing that you have a very natural talent for. You’re very good at performing different accents. I can hear it. I don’t have trouble writing it. But it’s not in my bones. It’s not in my brain to quite the same degree. And so I’ve been studying it. I’ve been working with an instructor on that. I’ve been working through, first off, the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then really learning different native accents in English, so going through the British Isles and other places to really figure out what are the differences here, what is the musicality and changes between these different dialects and accents.
But one of the things we’ve been working on more recently is folks for whom English is not their native language and what are the common characteristics we see, what are the, not just mistakes, but just the structural changes they’re gonna make, what are the sound changes you’re gonna hear throughout that.
This is a thing that I think probably most of our listeners are gonna encounter at some point, is you have a character whose native language is not English. How do you write them on the page? Because you’re not obviously going to go crazy and try to approximate their accent. But they are gonna make different choices. I want to talk about the actual choices that’ll be reflected in the written dialog that you are doing to understand how a person whose native language is not English might be communicating their ideas.
Craig: This is an area where I think people used to blithely stumble about. And in their blithe stumbling, they may have conveyed intention well, but for people who were authentic speakers of that dialect or that accent or that language, they may have thought, “This is just ridiculous,” because we, all of us, I think, just used to just do stuff with less consideration for other people.
If you could look back at some of the scripts that were floating around when you and I started, people would routinely write Black characters with a Black dialect, AAVE, African American Vernacular English, and in doing so, just bungle it, or it just felt weirdly insulting if they were not Black themselves, and it just felt a bit foreign. That’s understandable.
What’s happened is there’s been a correction. But in the correction, I think a lot of writers – and we are always writing people that we are not – are kind of afraid to make a mistake. Writing out of fear is not helpful either.
John: What I want to talk about today is really looking for and listening to the changes in the musicality and the word choices that are gonna be likely for people coming from certain other native languages. And so we have some good examples here. Before we even get into the examples, I just want to talk through some things I’ve observed that are probably helpful if you’re thinking about a character whose native language is not English.
Most other languages are gonna have a different thinking word or sound. In English, we do an “um” or some sort of stalling word. Every language is going to have their own version. People tend to revert to their native thinking sound if they’re speaking English or some approximation of that. Be thinking about what that sound might be. You and I both have been in situations where, other countries, and we are reaching for a word. We kind of know what that word is, but we can’t quite get it. Your characters are gonna be doing the same thing. Be thinking about the pauses they’re taking, the approximations of the word they may try to get to.
If you’re speaking a language and it’s not your native language, you’re probably going to have reduced variation in how you’re forming structures in sentences. Non-native English speakers are gonna probably reach for the simple past rather than “he had” or “he did,” because we have so many ways to create the past in English. Other languages do too, but they’re gonna probably go for the simplest version of that. They will tend to go back to recycle the same word rather than go for synonyms and variety the way that we might, because they’ve found that one word, they’re gonna keep using that one word.
Craig: There is always a risk that you’re going to make your character sound dumb. Part of the counteraction is to show the frustration, if somebody does not speak English natively and they aren’t very good at it or they’re still learning, that there is a frustration, because I’ve felt that frustration trying to speak another language myself, where you’re like, “Okay, I know exactly what I want to say, but I’m struggling to put it into the words that I have available to me.” There’s also even the recognition and embarrassment that other people are looking at you and thinking you’re not doing very well. All of that stuff is good human work to think about when this is happening, so it isn’t just a convenient immigrant patois that we have seen many, many times, where people just say, “Me going to store,” and it just becomes Tarzan.
John: Sometimes when I’m speaking in French, I feel like, “Crap, I’m like a third grader here,” because I don’t have really simple stuff, and yet I have really complicated vocabulary, because I have cognates in English I can reach for. I could say some really complicated things pretty easily, complicated terms, but I can’t stitch together really simple things. I can go into a store, and I can’t describe the ice cube tray holder, maker thing. I don’t have that, but I have “lugubriousness” or I can reach for bigger words. But I don’t have simple things at my grasp. That’s a real frustration.
Craig: I kind of like the idea of you walking into a store, saying, “I need object for the making of ice. I apologize for the lugubrious nature of my request.” How confused would that guy be?
John: So bewildered. Another common feature would be overgeneralizing a rule. This is a thing that happens as people learn English. We make plurals by adding S’s to things, except when we don’t. We have “mice” rather than “mouses.” Those things are going to happen.
If the person’s native language doesn’t use articles the same way, like Russian doesn’t use most articles, they will drop them out. And so you’ll hear that in nonnative speakers, where we would put an “a” or a “the,” and they just plow through without them. That’s going to happen.
Craig: Interestingly, also, I’ve noticed the opposite. Ksenia Sereda, who is our director of photography here on The Last of Us, is Russian. I watched as her English has improved dramatically over the year since she started with us. She speaks about eight languages. She’s just this remarkable polyglot. Her English was good in the sense that she could absolutely communicate, but she had a few phrases. She loved the phrase “such as.” She would struggle at times to get things across, or there were those simple mistakes. For instance, when she would refer to the character of Joel, she would call him “the Joel.” Maybe in Russian, there is something that works that way. As the years have gone on-
John: I think she’s overcorrecting is probably what I suspect.
Craig: It may have been. She may have been overcorrecting. There are all these wonderful little things that over time she… When we switch a lens, like we’re on the 27, and we want to go to the 35, she would say, “Switch on 35.” One day I said, “I’m regretting saying this to you, because I love listening to you say, ‘Switch on 35,’ but for switching a lens, we would say, ‘Switch to 35.'”
John: Totally.
Craig: I do regret telling her that, because I miss it. I miss, “Switch on 35.” But it has been amazing watching somebody’s English improve so wildly and so impressively over the course of just a couple of years.
John: That gets back to our prepositions. Language is language. There’s just not gonna be a one-to-one match. Anybody who’s had to suffer through “por” and “para” in Spanish, it should be clean, how it does it, and some things just don’t work right. Some things don’t fall directly that same way.
Same thing happens with the verb tenses, and particularly in terms of how we’re dividing time. Very near future, far future, recent past, further back past, we have ways that we do it in English that just don’t match up with other languages, and there’s never gonna be a one-to-one match. Our present progressive, there are equivalents in other languages, but they’re probably not gonna get there very quickly as an ESL speaker. You may be stuck in the present rather than present progressive or the near future, because it’s what you have handy for you.
Lastly, I would say a thing you’ll often notice is, if a character is doing reported speech, so like, “He said to me this and this,” that’s really challenging to flip into that, because I’m staying in the present, but I’m reporting something that happened in the past. I have to get prepositions right for how all this fits together. Reported speech is often a place where you’re gonna notice inconsistencies. That’s often an opportunity to reflect the difference and difficulty of trying to communicate these ideas in English.
Craig: Native speakers will even struggle with that. That’s also part of recognizing it. There is this other thing when we’re trying to write people speaking English who don’t natively speak it. What they do speak and where they are from also should influence how they sound.
John: 100 percent.
Craig: If you listen to, for instance, comedians are so helpful for this, because so many comedians who are first-generation Americans will talk about their family and talk about their parents and do impressions of their parents. Listening to that gives you this incredible insight into the specificity of the pattern. It’s different. Koreans who have learned English sound different than French people who have learned English, because the root language is always there. The root patterns, the intonations, musicality, tempo, rhythm, all of that stuff bleeds across.
Here’s some really controversial advice here, folks. When you are writing someone from a country who is speaking English as a not first language, talk to people who know, if you are not one of them, and have them look it through. Have them advise. They will help you. They will make it so much better if you do.
John: Absolutely. Last, I would say always consider when that character started learning English, because that will not only affect the accent down the road, but also their facility with the language. For my dialect class, I was going through some Japanese speakers of English, and there were these diplomats whose English was just so spectacularly good, and there were also folks who had learned it much more recently. You could really hear the differences and how in their bones it was, and also, which English did they learn. You can definitely hear some of them learn British English versus American English. Those changes carry through.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: Let’s listen to some examples here. We’re gonna start with a clip from Anatomy of a Fall, the amazing Sandra Hüller here. This is a really amazing performance, because it’s all in France, and yet she is a German woman who is much more comfortable speaking English than speaking French. Some of her most pivotal scenes take place in English. Let’s listen to her in Anatomy of a Fall.
Sandra Hüller (as Sandra Voyter): You complain about the life that you chose. You are not a victim. Not at all. Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner. You’re incapable of facing your ambitions, and you resent me for it. But I’m not the one who put you where you are. I’ve nothing to do with it. You’re not sacrificing yourself as you say. You choose to sit on the sideline because you’re afraid, because your pride makes your head explode before you can even come up with a little germ of an idea. And now you wake up and you’re 40 and you need someone to blame. And you’re the one to blame. You’re petrified by your own fucking standards and your fear of failure. This is the truth.
John: Just so, so great. You could listen for her accent and her dialect, but really I want to focus on the word choices. A native English speaker probably would not have constructed those phrases in that way. I think she goes through a phrase, and then she repeats the end of that phrase in a way that feels kind of German to me. But Craig, what’s your telling on that?
Craig: It’s difficult to separate it from the accent, because the accent does add a certain… You just start to think this is definitely a German person talking. It doesn’t have the backwards syntax, or I suppose what Germans would call the non-backwards syntax, forward syntax. German syntax is very Yoda-like to us when we learn it.
John: The verb at the very end.
Craig: Yeah. It doesn’t have that. What’s also of interest here is that the person writing this, who is now an Oscar award winner for their fine screenplay, was also not a native English speaker. There’s all sorts of possibilities going on here. There’s a clipped nature to the pronunciation of the words that is wonderfully German. If you were to remove the accent using some horrible AI de-accentifier, you would notice. I think you would notice something would be strange. You just wouldn’t be able to put your finger on it.
John: If you look at the words scripted on the page – I haven’t gone back to the script to see exactly whether she’s saying word for word what was on the page – you would not guess that this is an American speaker. It doesn’t have an American way of putting stuff together. I could hear the same thing with an RP British accent. I could feel that working more, but it’s not an American accent. There’s a musicality to it. It’s really what I’m trying to get to. It’s that the order of the word, how it fits together, it feels specific to this character and this world, and it’s not some generic American accent.
Craig: There is a formality to it. Even the fact that the pronunciation is so careful. Even though there are words where it’s supposed to end in a D and it sounds like it ends in a T or something like that, which is typically German, or I believe she says, “Germ of an idea,” and she pronounces it “cherm.”
John: “Cherm.”
Craig: There is nonetheless a kind of over-pronunciation of some words, whereas, you’re right, a native American speaker would be eliding and slurring a bit more of the pronunciation there.
John: She’s speaking passionately and very quickly, and yet every little phoneme is coming through. That feels very specific as well.
Let’s jump through it. We don’t have the clip for it here, but we actually have the pages in this case. This is Past Lives. We had Celine Song on the podcast earlier. Here I want to take a look at, this is a scene happening in the East Village bar with Hae Sung, Nora, and Nora’s husband, Arthur. Just Hae Sung’s dialog here, he’s not a comfortable English speaker at all, and so his first line here is, “When I was 24 year, I… ” That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. The idea of 24 years old is a complicated thing. “When I was 24 year” is probably the Korean way of constructing how old you are.
Craig: There’s a video I saw floating around that a Korean American did, basically he was having a conversation with himself, like two people on a phone. The idea was what a conversation would sound like if Koreans just spoke English but in a perfect translation of what the Korean was. It’s remarkable. It is nothing at all like what we would understand the translation to be. It is very specific. Way fewer words are being used than you would use in English. It’s more compact. It’s more efficient. But it is very, very different. There’s a lovely extraction of that here. Listen. Oscar award nominee, Celine Song.
John: When we had her on the show, we didn’t have the script in front of us. I do like seeing how Nora’s dialog here when she’s talking to Hae Sung, the Korean comes first, and then there’s a slash and then what the subtitles would be come after it, which is a very natural, native way to do this. It feels really great.
Just going back through to Hae Sung’s English dialog, “But. Military, work, it’s… same.” Just as written on the page, you can sense he’s searching, he’s trying to find a way to communicate this idea. “There’s overtime pay, stuff like that here, right? In Korea, you work overtime all the time, but there’s no overtime pay.” He’s found the words. He’s keeping to the words he actually has and that have worked before. He’s staying with these simple patterns.
Craig: Phrases like “all the time” are easy to remember. But then later down, when she asks him, “It’s hard physically, or mentally?” he says, “Both. Definitely physical. Hard. And… ” She says, “Mentally?” And he says, “Mentally, I… strong,” which is probably how I would… If I were thinking about that in French, I would be like, “Je,” and then if I was just emotional, I would just go, “Fort.” Because “I am,” “je suis,” and then yeah, it just falls apart there at times.
What’s fascinating here, and Celine understands, when you’re talking with somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you will naturally reply back with what they’re saying but in the correct format, almost as if you are teaching and confirming. “You’re strong mentally,” she says. And he says, “Yes, right.” There’s an appreciation there of, okay, good, you understood me, because part of the discussion between a person who speaks natively and a person who doesn’t is a confirmation that one is being understood by the other.
John: Absolutely. So crucial. The next clip is something that Drew found for us. This is from Irma Vep. The context here, we have a Hong Kong actress shooting a movie in France, and like Anatomy of a Fall, English becomes the British language between these two characters.
[Irma Vep (1996) clip]
Zoe: And you went to see the Batman, you know?
Maggie: Batman?
Zoe: Yes. No, not Batman, for with all, you know, Catwoman?
Maggie: The Return? The second one?
Zoe: Yeah.
Maggie: Oh, yeah.
Zoe: And you liked it?
Maggie: No.
Zoe: I thought, you know what, it was completely crap. I just went because Rene was mad and he said to me, “You have to go there to understand the film.” But I think it’s a movie for the fans, you know.
Maggie: The first one was bad enough, right?
Zoe: Yes.
Maggie: I don’t know why they’d make three.
Zoe: That’s true.
Maggie: But I think Catwoman was all right.
Zoe: Yes, it’s true. I like Catwoman. She’s nice. You know, I tell you everything, and then you can know me a lot. I mean, I don’t like American films. No.
Maggie: Right. I know what you mean.
Zoe: Yes? Everything is too much decoration, too much money. You agree with me?
Maggie: Sure.
Zoe: And all this money, this big money, big-
Maggie: And they’re so lucky to have so much money.
Zoe: Yes, but why? For what? For this? Or this? Nothing, you know.
John: Again, here we have two characters who are obviously seen in the film that they are looking at each other to try to get confirmation, like, do you actually understand what I’m saying, are we talking about the same things. Their levels of English are approximately the same. The French actress has a stronger French accent. But again, I think you could read it on the page and understand that these are characters communicating at 100 percent because they are trying to cross this bridge.
Craig: They’re using very simple phrases, a lot of questions. A lot of questions to make sure that the other person understands what they’re saying. This is an inherent insecurity of people that do not speak English as first language. They’re making sure that the other person gets it. Luckily for these two characters, they’re discussing something that everybody around the world shares, which is a ridiculous hatred of American movies that they all seem to watch over and over and over.
French people hate McDonald’s. They’re like, “Get out of our country, McDonald’s.” I’m like, McDonald’s would totally get out of your country if you stopped eating at McDonald’s. It’s a business. This is kind of amusing in that regard. It almost feels like a French textbook discussion. “Do you like American movies?” “No, I do not like American movies.” “Do you agree?” “Yes, I agree.”
John: Getting back to the question of, “Do you agree?” Do you answer that question with an affirmative or a negative? There’s the, “Yeah, no.” There’s all these little subtleties that we have in English. Every other language has their own specific subtleties there. When it’s not native in your bones, you’re going for the simplest way to make sure that the other person understands that you hear them and you can follow what they’re saying.
Craig: Yes. And if these people were speaking their native language, the discussion would be even more obnoxious, because it would be full of brilliant examples and wonderful moments. And there would also probably be much less agreement, because it’s too hard to disagree when you’re struggling to find the words. “I don’t like those movies, but I like Catwoman.” “Yes, I also like Catwoman.” Do you? Sure. At this point, now you’re just trying to have the conversation, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. There is a social grace to agreement. Disagreement requires subtlety, care, a lot of small discrimination between words, some of which will push things into a bad place, some of which will push things into an interesting discussion place. If you don’t have the instantly accessible toolkit for that, you may just default to agreeing.
John: I would say even though they’re both ESL speakers, I can imagine on a page that their voices still can read differently. Zoe, the French speaker here, the choices that she’s making and the small mistakes she makes feel French to me. The musicality feels specific to it. Maggie’s, who’s from Hong Kong, who has a more British background, also feels specific. I suspect even on the page, you can really read them as two very different voices, even though they’re still nonnative English speakers.
One of the most difficult exercises I had to do for my dialect class was take a scene that I’d already written, that was supposed to have two American speakers, and have one be Irish and one be Scottish. Really tough for my brain to switch between the two of those, because they’re distinct sounds, but in my brain they’re hard to hold apart.
Craig: What’s interesting, John, one of the things I admire about you is that you find these areas that are challenging for you and you just steer your boat right into them. Accents are fun for me. I enjoy them. That exercise you just described, I would actually look forward to. I don’t think it would be too much of a challenge for me. But there are things in my life that are incredibly challenging, like for instance, drawing. I am so bad. I have such a zero ability to naturally create realistic looking things, perspective, any of the fundamentals. The thought of taking a class to try and get better just makes me pee my pants in fear.
This is a honest question for you. My concern is, I would put a lot of time and effort in to become as good as somebody who had talent was when they were in kindergarten, because you either do or you don’t have that thing. What is your goal here?
John: With drawing, for example, that was one of my earlier areas of interest. I spent a year and I learned how to draw. I learned how to see and how to draw. I’m much better at it than I was. I’m not doing my practice every day or anything like that. But I got much better at it. But I also realized that, as you said, I’m only gonna get up to a level who was a 6th grader who was pretty good at drawing when they started.
With this, this is actually useful for me to be better at, because if I can hear these voices distinctly in my head more clearly, then it’s gonna be easier for me to write those characters and really hear their voices in my head clearly before I’m putting them down on the page. This is genuinely useful for me, I feel.
Again, recognizing what your weaknesses are and striving to improve them is fun to do. I picked up running, and so I can run really far now, which is surprising to me. Again, it just took practice and recognizing that you’re going to give up some other things in order to spend the time running.
Craig: There’s a topic for us to discuss maybe in a future podcast, if we continue to do the podcast. What episode are we on now?
John: 635.
Craig: That seems like a good round number. In any case, let’s say we were to keep going. That is about help, the concept of help, and recognizing as you move through your career where you’re going to need help. Even if you’re trying to shore those areas up, there are places that you identify.
I’m gonna give you an example right now for me. As I go through production, as I’m directing, one of the areas I know I need help with is – because, again, I have a very good sense of composition, but what I struggle with is just the very simple notion, as we’re shooting, of eye lines and which side of the shoulder you should be on. I need help with that. I have a fantastic sense of how things edit together. I understand where one shot should die and where another shot should pick up. I understand what kind of coverage I’m going to need. But oftentimes, I really do need help trying to figure out, wait, so in this shot, when they’re looking across the room from this one to that one, should the camera be over on this side or that side. I have help. I have camera [crosstalk 00:38:43].
John: You have help.
Craig: I have a script supervisor. I have a DP. There are all sorts of areas where at some point you just have to say, no matter how hard I’m trying, here are the following areas were I need help. But that’s a topic for another time.
John: Absolutely. I guess the last point about why I learn new things is that I enjoy being bad at things and struggling and being a newcomer at things, because it also just makes me feel young. I remember when I was young, things were hard. It was like, “Oh, I can’t figure this out.” Then you get better at it. It’s like, “Oh, I feel young.” It’s nice being a beginner at things sometimes.
Craig: I do enjoy the horror and excitement of being a level 1 character in D&D or starting a new video game that’s level-based, where you’re level 1 and basically one punch takes you out. You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and where you should go. You’ve barely mastered anything. It is like growing up all over again. It’s fun.
John: Let’s segue to our next topic, which can rely a bit on our experience of not being complete newcomers to things, which is on vetting. This past week, Craig, you and I were talking about a producer who had done terrible things. We were both surprised to learn about this, and shocked. But I also was reading this article in Slate talking about what they called Mean Too, so the extension of the Me Too movement, which is just like, oh, these people are assholes, and now we actually are going to identify these famous people as being assholes. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.
A point they made in this article is that once you’ve hired a star, once they’re in wardrobe fittings, that star has a lot of power and control, and that you’ve ceded some of the power and control to a person who may not be a great person. I texted you, Craig, because as we were talking about this producer, you are a person who’s hiring a ton of people. You’re hiring actors and crew and everybody else. I want to ask you, how concerned are you about not just can this person do this job, but are they going to be a monster either on set or do something off set that’s going to reflect badly on the show?
Craig: It’s an enormous concern. The tricky part when you’re dealing with actors, there is a lot of information floating around out there. A lot. Now, there are actors that people just say, “It’s gonna be worth it.” There are actors – and it could be the same actor – where somebody else says, “Life’s too short.” I have a little bit more of a “life’s too short” vibe. There are certain people that have been proposed, and I would think to myself, “They would be perfect, but life’s too short.”
But when you’re talking about all these other people that you can be hiring, heads of departments and things like that, the danger is that there is an interaction gap. I typically will call fellow showrunners to inquire about potential heads of departments. It’s also a joy when I can report back to them. I texted Albert Kim just the other day to say that the prop master that I checked in with him about and hired has been doing just such a wonderful job, and that’s great.
But we, who are running things, have a certain kind of interaction with those people, because we’re their boss. What’s happening though when we’re not there, and they’re the boss in their fiefdom? How does that go on?
One of the very interesting aspects of showrunning that I hadn’t even anticipated was that if there is any kind of serious HR complaint, that the executive producers are filled in. We’re told. Thank god it does not happen frequently at all. But it is an eye opener to go, “Oh, okay, that’s surprising, because my interactions with that person were of this kind.” Apparently, once the cats were away, the mouse was mean. That’s a little nerve-wracking. It’s harder to get a read on that by checking around.
John: Let’s talk about vetting, because when you are considering hiring a person, be it an actor, be it a crew person, you’re going to look at their references, but hopefully you’re gonna find somebody who you can go to to say, “Hey, can you tell me honestly what it was like working with this person?”
When I get those incoming emails, I will say, “Yes, let me call you about them,” unless that person is just so spectacular that I will just email back, like, “This is the best person in the world. You should absolutely hire them.” The phone call is your friend here, because people will be honest and direct in a phone calls in ways they will, for reasonable reasons, won’t want to put down in an email.
Your point about, yes, ask showrunners, but if you could find somebody else to ask, that’s also going to help a lot too, because you get a sense of who are they like to assistants. There have been cases where I’ve called up folks who were assistants to people, said, “Tell me about them. What was it like to work with them?” Because if I’m just asking the people who hired them, they could be really good at managing up and managing their bosses, but absolute a monster when it comes to the people working for them. I don’t want that in my life.
Craig: No, you don’t. But there’s only so much you can do. That said, do all the things you can do as best you can. There are going to be errors. As you try and figure out who should be joining your crew, whether it’s as an actor or as a craftsperson, do your best, ask your questions. Just understand some people will be lovely and yet not a good fit for the show, in which case a change is made, and sometimes some people will be very talented but nightmares for various reasons, in which case there must be a change. But you’re hoping for that beautiful thing where what you expected is what you get. We don’t tolerate what we used to.
I myself have become way more aware of my own anger levels. I’m angry all the time. I’m like the Hulk. I wake up angry. I go to bed angry. But my anger is not at people. My anger is not this irrational whatever. My anger is entirely about trying to figure out how to get the stuff that’s in front of me to be like the stuff that I want to be in front of me.
There are times where I get frustrated, because, let’s say… They make me go to meetings, John. I go to a lot of meetings. I don’t want to go to the meetings, but I go to the meetings, because they tell me it’s really important, because I have to answer the questions so people know what to do. I will go to a meeting and I will get asked a question and I will answer it. Then there’s like three more meetings that feel very duplicative to me, and the questions get asked again, and I answer them again and again. And then I show up on the day, and the answer I gave 12 times in meetings has not occurred. This is enormously frustrating.
I’m just very aware that the frustration can be expressed, I can express it firmly, but volume is kind of a thing. Also, I’ve become aware – this is something like, if I taught a showrunning school, this would probably be lesson of day 1. You as a showrunner may think of yourself as – you may have a low self-esteem. You may have a lot of core shame. You may think of yourself as a schlub. You may have imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter. When you interact with all of these other people, they are looking at you as the person who can fire them. You have this enormous influence on their lives. If you loathe them, not only will they get fired, but people are gonna call me, and then they’re worried that I’m gonna tell them that they’re no good. There’s a lot of just built-in fear. You have to remember what it was like talking to the big boss. You have to remember how intimidating that was, before that person even opened their mouth, before they did anything.
That lesson in awareness of your own power is really important, because I think a lot of people in Hollywood with power don’t feel like they have it, and so they don’t act like they have it. You have to just remind yourself that you have it.
No one’s perfect. There are moments. But we are hearing quite a bit about some people for whom it seems the moment of awareness will either never come or has yet to come, and no matter how many times people have officially complained, they don’t seem to care.
John: We’ve talked about Scott Rudin on the podcast before. There was a person who – it was like this weird badge of honor to have survived working in his office. That was incredibly screwed up. We completely misunderstood the assignment in terms of how to think about having survived in a difficult office. I think and hope we’ve moved on a bit from that and that we have come to understand, both as employers and as employees, the social contract we’ve made there cannot be about subjugation and control.
Craig: That’s right. We will always be a strange business in that we are empowering artists with a lot of money and a lot of control, and that means writers, directors, actors, as well as other artists, like cinematographers and production designers. Artists aren’t necessarily the most rational, calm-headed people in the world. It’s one of those things. There’s brains that work a certain way. Everybody accepts a certain amount of that. There are things that I think showrunners or directors or actors do, that if you did in an escrow office, you’d probably be shown the door almost immediately.
John: Oh my god, the number of conversations I’ve had with Mike where he’s like, “I cannot believe that this is permissible in your industry,” because he’s coming from a more corporate setting. He’s like, “How is that even possible?” It’s how it all works.
Craig: It is possible because you are dealing with very specific brains. You’ve gathered a lot of people together who are artists. There is a case to be made that extreme artistic talent and mental illness are very hard to distinguish from each other, that there’s probably quite a bit of overlap. People understand a little bit of it.
Also, specifically with actors, there is this understanding that no matter what we’re all doing, they’re the ones on screen, which means if they’re having a day, you gotta figure it out, because we can’t have the scene, which will exist forever in fixed form, be bad because they were having a day and everyone else said, “That’s unacceptable.” Then of course, you don’t want to necessarily encourage them to have their days. You have to figure out how to make it all work, and we generally do.
John: That’s very familiar to anybody who’s a parent. It’s like, how do you get through this tough situation without creating a pattern in which this is how you’re gonna deal with these situations all the time.
Craig: Showrunning and parenthood are remarkably similar. Remarkably. When you were raising Amy, I’m sure you and Mike at some point turned to each other and said, “She’s gonna be complaining about us in therapy, what, in about 10 years,” because you can’t help it. You can’t help it. It’s gonna happen. It’s just gonna happen. I know that there are probably people that have complained about me to their therapists, because I’m in charge.
Do you remember when you were starting out, the people that were in charge, it didn’t matter who they were, that one thing that everybody could bond over is either making fun of or complaining about the boss. You hope that you can be as close to, “You know what? He’s a great guy. He just has his weirdnesses.” That’s the best you can hope for.
John: That’s the best you can hope for, for sure. 100 percent. As we wrap up this topic, it’s easy to think about red flags. Let’s talk about some green flags. This is something, if you’re seeing these patterns, that’s a good sign.
One thing I always look for as a green flag is they repeatedly work with the same people again. They’ve worked with that director, that producer time and time over. There’s something there that’s working, and they’re willing to work together again. That’s generally a green flag for me.
Craig: Agreed. Also, what is their personal life like? It’s not anything that’s determinative. But if somebody is clearly going through a phase in their life where they have a relationship that’s falling apart, they are being sued, they’re getting into bar fights, they’ve become unreliable, that’s a problem.
Best practice, green flag, somebody whose life appears to be rather stable. They’ve got good people around them. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been married for 30 years to the same person. It just means that there’s a certain stability in terms of their management, their friendships, their living situation, the way that they comport themselves. That’s always a green flag to me.
John: When people say spontaneously, “I love them,” you get a sense, oh, people love them. They didn’t have to say that. It’s not just they love their work. They actually love being around that person. Green flag.
Craig: Huge green flag. The thing is, we want to love people. When you hear that, you’re like, what a relief. The best information is exactly that: “I love them.” I’ve said to people – they’ve asked me about an actor or they’ve asked me about a crew person, I’m like, “I would take a bullet for this person.” The best recommendation you can get, the best green flag is, “I absolutely love this person. You may not hire them when I need them.” That’s the best green flag there is.
John: Red flag/green flag combo here. If you’re looking at their social media and they seem like a not stable person on social media, they’re not gonna be a stable person in your actual life. The green flag version of this is, you look at their social media, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I get this person. I get what they’re into. They’re posting some dog photos. They are also talking about things in a rational way.” That’s a green flag for me.
Craig: Yes. When it comes to actors, I have to say I’m old-school in the sense that I believe that backstage is backstage. What we want people to see are the characters that the actors play. That’s what we want. Obviously, there’s enormous interest in actors’ personal lives, and people are always gonna be asking questions.
But if social media feels a little bit like, “Hey, once the cameras are off, my reality show begins,” that’s a red flag for me. Green flag, like you said, once the cameras are off, the things that I put on social media are not that different from what anyone puts on social media, that implies a certain stability and maybe possibly the absence of extraordinary narcissism, which is always a red flag.
John: Probably – this is something you actually texted me – one of the best handers-out of red flags and green flags is your casting director, because casting directors, they know all the actors. They know the actors who they’ve seen over the last 20 years and the interpersonal relationships between those actors. They get a sense of that. You said casting directors. I said other actors. Those are folks who know what these people are actually like.
Craig: Yes. If I had a choice between asking an actor or a casting director, and I can only pick one, I would pick the casting director, because actors can have remarkable on-screen relationships with actors who are nightmares everywhere else.
John: True.
Craig: But casting directors hear back from everybody. They hear back from the directors and the producers, so they get the feedback. And they have been tracking people over the course of years. And they also saw those people when they were starting out. They can also say, “This person’s become a monster,” as opposed to, “This person has been just a solid human being from the very, very jump, and they continue to be.”
Our casting director this year is Mary Vernieu, and she was so helpful in that regard for a lot of the people that we’re bringing on. I have to say it’s been fantastic. Every choice, we’ve been rewarded. Green flags everywhere. Very, very excited.
John: Let’s answer one more question. I see one here from Steve about Dungeons and Dragons, so of course we have to answer this question.
Craig: Oh, gotta answer this question, yeah, obviously.
Drew: Steve writes, “My son Elliot is big into the Dungeons and Dragons world. He watches the movies, loves the 1980s cartoon, reads Monster Manuals from the library. Now he wants to play the actual game. However, it’s recommended for 12 and older, and he’s only 6. This hasn’t stopped him from designing dungeons,” he has a little image attached here, “and using monopoly dice to create characters. I’ve looked for junior versions but haven’t found any. Do you have any recommendations for a 6-year-old who desperately wants to be 12, so that he can better understand D&D?”
John: Oh, god, I’m so happy for Elliot. I’m so happy for Elliot’s dad, Steve, who’s gonna contribute to his love of Dungeons and Dragons. Googling around, I found a link I’m gonna put in the show notes here – it’s on Everhearth Inn – about how to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids. It gives some suggestions for here’s how you scale down the experience so it actually is appropriate for younger kids. It goes down to six. It goes down to Elliot’s age in terms of how you do that and how you get the sense of, okay, I am playing this character who’s doing this thing. Some simplified rules, so it’s very straightforward, but also fun for a kid that age.
Craig: It’s a tough one, because I think, Steve, probably Elliot is special. A six-year-old who is reading the Monster Manual and is designing dungeons and using Monopoly dice to create characters is pretty advanced. The issue is, who is he gonna play with? You know your son better than we do, Steve. If you feel like your son is particularly advanced and can do this, then my suggestion is, perhaps there’s a world where if you play, Steve – I hope you do – that maybe you can build a little one-shot for you and maybe a couple of your friends who play and also Elliot. Then maybe if Elliot has a friend that really, really wants to play, then now there are two kids who want to play. But six is very young. It’s exciting, I think, for Elliot. But I think he’s probably a rarity.
John: My friend Quinn has a kid who also loves to play D&D and started really young. Quinn’s frustration was that it’s hard to find other kids his age who can actually do stuff. They got a little school group together, and they eventually started doing it, but it’s a challenge.
I think Craig’s instinct, where you, Steve, are gonna be the DM, and Elliot and hopefully some other friends or some other adults are going to play through a little bit with him, feels right, and you’ll find ways to have it make sense.
I love that he is really into the actual Dungeons and Dragons game, so I don’t want to send him into a video space, but there are some video game versions of D&D or things that are like that, that could scratch that itch for a while before he has the ability to sit down and roleplay with others. I’m just nervous about it because I don’t want to lose this ability to imagine worlds in his mind and the reading of it all to be looking at a screen.
Craig: The video games unfortunately will probably not be content-wise appropriate for him at six. Certainly would not steer him towards Baldur’s Gate 3.
John: Not Baldur’s Gate 3.
Craig: That would be bad, although, boy, I love that game. But no, he’s six. He’s so young. He’s so young. It really is about providing a fun environment for him, and also, no matter how special he is, making sure that the adventure or the nature of it is short. Anything beyond an hour is going to seem like a thousand years to him.
John: Or it might be he might want to play for six hours, but again, you have to be the parent who’s structuring this. I want to talk about Elliot’s dungeon here, because look at how great this is. It has a gibbering mouther in it, a mimic surprise, some flameskulls.
Craig: I would say gibbering [said like jibbering], by the way.
John: Jibbering, gibbering. I like jibbering. I like jibbering.
Craig: You like jibbering? I don’t actually know how that is pronounced.
John: We’ll look it up.
Craig: Oh, it’s jibbering. Yep, it’s jibbering.
John: Okay. But it’s great. The fact that he’s into this, that his handwriting is actually pretty good for a six-year-old too.
Craig: It’s outstanding. It’s so much better than mine was. Again, to reiterate how bad I am at drawing, this right now is about what a map I would draw would look like. But I love that he understands some basic concepts. For instance, it looks like there’s some sort of water in the beginning. And then there’s an arrow, which I love, that says turn to the right. And then there’s a huge room with the gibbering mouther. Obviously, that’s not an easy two words to have as a kid. Then mimic surprise, he corrected his spelling of “surprise,” which a lot of adults fail to do. I love that he understood what the point of the mimic was. It looks like he might’ve drawn a T for trap there.
John: I think it’s a trap, yeah. But he’s got his door symbols there just right too.
Craig: He’s got flameskulls.
John: Who doesn’t love a flameskull?
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:00:09].
John: Adventurers don’t.
Craig: It also says “the end dungeon,” so I suspected that there’s more planned.
John: There’s more.
Craig: Elliot is terrific. I will say this, Steve. Your son will be a DM. He has big DM energy.
John: He has DM energy. It’s true.
Craig: No question.
John: He’s also very lucky to have you as a dad, because you’re trying to figure out how to help him do what he wants to do.
Craig: Thank you for not being a total monster.
John: It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ronan Farrow – it ran in The New Yorker this last week or maybe the week before – on RuPaul. The article’s title is RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business, which I think is just great. If you ask RuPaul how are you doing, RuPaul says, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” which I think is just the best answer.
Craig: Oh my gosh, that’s great.
John: I watch Drag Race. I’ve known of RuPaul for forever. Never met them in person. I thought the article was great and really dug into the weird contradiction of a very public face who’s incredibly private and is always trying to draw out, “You gotta reveal the real you,” from the drag queens who are competing on the show, and does not want to reveal the real him very much at all. Of course, this is all in service of a memoir that’s coming out. It’s just really good writing by Ronan Farrow, just a really good profile of an important media figure, RuPaul.
Craig: This goes exactly to my earlier comment about in front of the curtain and behind the curtain and, especially when you think about somebody who has specialized in bringing drag to the forefront, how presentational and performative that is – not performative like the fake performative, but performance-oriented – and how there is a backstage. Even on Drag Race, which shows you the backstage, that backstage is on stage. There’s a real backstage that you never get to, which is correct.
He says something in this article that is so – I don’t know if he’s been to therapy, but it sure sounds like it. “Feelings are indicators. They’re not facts.” That’s a fascinating way of putting it.
John: That’s very therapy, yeah.
Craig: Very therapy and a wonderful thing. Also, the thing about RuPaul that’s always been evident is how smart he is. Reading this, it just sounds like… We do profiles of people that do these things that seem overtly funny and frivolous and silly, and then when you meet them, you realize how smart, because again, or awards should only be won by people that do comedy, and Drag Race is comedy.
John: Also, you recognize that what RuPaul wants contestants to be able to do are not things that RuPaul himself could’ve done coming up. The expectations, the levels have gotten so high that you have to be able to be an amazing designer, an amazing performer, an amazing dancer, amazing everything. And that’s just the table stakes to start playing.
Craig: Yeah. I also love how much of a businessperson he is. But you can’t make a show like that without being a very rigorous, serious person. Comedy is serious. I’m gonna read this. I’m fascinated by him. I really am. I just think he’s such a force. I’m so tired of us taking people who pretend to be serious seriously. I like taking people who pretend to be not-serious seriously. I think that’s far more interesting.
John: In our last episode we talked about counterfactuals. The counterfactual where we didn’t have RuPaul, where RuPaul wasn’t born or didn’t do drag or did some other thing, we would be at a different place. There would be drag 100 percent. But would we have the popularization, the mass platform of drag that we have now? I don’t think we do.
Craig: I don’t think we do. I think he’s an incredibly important person in that regard. There’s just an entire vocabulary we wouldn’t have. I think we know this for a fact, because until RuPaul came along, that culture existed.
John: 100 percent.
Craig: But mainstream wasn’t looking at it. Just wasn’t. Even when it popped through a little bit, like, what was the documentary, Paris is Burning?
John: Yeah, Paris is Burning. Fantastic.
Craig: Yeah. It popped out, and then it popped back down again. It’s not the same.
John: We always had drag performers. We had [unintelligible 01:04:32]. We had that gay camp sensibility. But it wasn’t all put together in a way like this.
Craig: No, and it wasn’t also unapologetic. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, it always seemed like we were laughing at the drag performance, and now we laugh with the drag performance. It’s very different.
I’m not a religious watcher of Drag Race, or any television show for that matter, as you know, but when I see it, it’s incredibly entertaining, and it’s so funny, but it also feels very authentic. Even though I know it’s reality television and a lot of it’s drummed up and not, you do feel like you are seeing the authentic culture happening in front of you. The people that they pull from are real. They’re not finding people and saying, “If you would be willing to start dressing up in drag, it would be great.” They are who they are.
John: Also, having been on the air for so many years, the queens who are competing now grew up with RuPaul’s Drag Race existing, and so they’ve been swimming in this water the entire time. Not just the expectations of performance but also the culture has changed too. In early seasons, contestants who were trans were hiding it, because it felt like that’s cheating to be trans and be on Drag Race. That seems absurd now, but things move pretty quickly.
Craig: Things move pretty quickly. I think RuPaul is at the center of it all. Also, he’s 9,000 feet tall. I wanted to go up and say something to him at the Emmys, because he’s at the Emmys every year, because he wins every year. I show up every four years, I guess. Maybe I’ll never show up again. But when I do show up, there’s RuPaul. I’ll tell you why I didn’t go up to him. Can you guess why I didn’t go up to him?
John: Intimidation?
Craig: Yes. Terrified. Terrified. In looking at the Ronan Farrow article here, I feel vindicated. I think that he would be like, “Get the eff away from me. I don’t know you.” But I would love to. I’m such an admirer of him as a creative force.
John: Craig, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a game. There’s a company called Glitch Games. I’ve definitely promoted them before on the show. They make escape room, puzzley type point-and-click games for iOS typically. I think it comes out maybe on Android, but who cares. This latest one, I can’t tell if I like it or if I loathe it. I’m putting it out there for people to see what they think.
John: It’s a $4 game, so it’s not a huge burden.
Craig: It’s a $4 game, so it’s worth the $4 bet. It’s just like their other games in that you’re in a facility and you have to figure out how to get out and there are a lot of puzzles, but the gimmick is that this facility was working on some sort of time loop thing. It’s an increment of time that you can set, I think, between 3 minutes and 10 minutes. It sends you back to the beginning and undoes most of what you’ve done. You solve puzzles. You figure out how to proceed. Then it goes schwoop, you’re back to the beginning, which means you have to re-solve a bunch of puzzles – not hard to do – to get further. I gotta be honest. I found it incredibly frustrating and I quit. But the puzzles are quite good, and I do love their game in general. People who have a little bit more patience than I do may actually really, really appreciate it.
John: Recursion.
Craig: Give it a shot. Recursion by Glitch Games.
John: Give it a shot.
Craig: It’s four bucks.
John: That was our show for this week.
Craig: Yay.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-
Craig: Woo-woop.
John: … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Wop-wop.
John: Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments.
Thank you, a little shout-out to our Premium members, because it just keeps growing, which is fantastic. This last year, we were able to not just pay for Matthew and Drew, but we also were able to give some money away. We zero out our balances every year. We were able to give away some money to some really good charities. Thank you very much for our Premium-
Craig: You and I also got to buy really nice beach houses.
John: That’s what it is. It’s the beach houses plus that. For clarification, we get no money ourselves out of this. It all gets donated away.
Craig: Yeah, no beach houses.
John: No beach houses for us. But thank you again to our Premium members. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, Drew and I both just watched a documentary series on HBO Max called Love Has Won, which is about a Colorado cult. Drew, you saw it most recently. Tell us what you liked, what freaked you out about it.
Drew: Everything freaked me out about it. I always have a terrified feeling that I’m somehow susceptible to cults, even though I’ve never actually run into one. Love Has Won is about the cult of Mother God.
Craig: She’s the one where they just left her body in the room?
Drew: Exactly. It starts with you seeing the body cam footage of the cops coming in and finding basically her mummified corpse, and then it goes from there.
John: Then we go back in time to follow it. But what’s so fascinating about this documentary is – because it’s all very recent, there are still members in that cult right now – they were online all the time. They were also posting YouTube. They have so much footage of just inside the cult while it was just doing this normal stuff. It’s not all recreations or just talking head testimony. It’s a lot of just actual real footage of what it was like being inside this cult.
I love cults. I just think they’re great story fodder, because you have charismatic leaders, you have people who are devoted to it, who are sacrificing other things. There’s that sense of a mission that is so cinematic. There’s something just really appealing to me about cults. I don’t ever want to join one. I don’t want to ever start one. Maybe Scriptnotes is a cult. I don’t know. But I dig them.
Craig: We’re the worst cult ever.
John: We’re the worst cult. We don’t make any money.
Craig: I’m just fascinated by where cult leaders come from. In this case, Amy Carlson, prior to becoming a cult leader, was a manager at a McDonald’s. Being a manager at a McDonald’s is probably very hard to do. But I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the skillset required there and running a cult.
John: The documentary would actually push back about that, because she was a manager at McDonald’s, but a rising manager. She wasn’t just managing one store. She was moving up the corporate chain a bit.
Craig: I see.
John: She was able to really motivate her employees in a way that feels like has analogous skills to getting people on your side and following you to believe that you are the incarnation of God.
Craig: I see. Do you think that her belief that the Jews wanted everyone to do the work and they would take the money was part of how she got them to do their jobs better? Why is it always the Jews? I don’t know this lady.
John: A fair criticism of the documentary, which I think you can look at both ways, is that in trying to really look at the cult from its own perspective and emotionally connect inside the cult, they did leave out a lot of their crazier conspiracy beliefs and their QAnon stuff and all that kind of stuff. They really were focusing on what it felt like personally in there, rather than their bigger belief system. But it’s funny to me how once you believe yourself God, you do look for villains, and funny how they often become Jewish.
Craig: I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know why it always happens. I like that their belief is that Adolf Hitler’s intention was to serve the light. I think he was pretty clear about his intentions, actually. I don’t think we have to guess there, do we? He wrote a whole book.
John: He did, yeah.
Craig: He wrote a whole book.
John: Of his struggle. Thinking to cults in general, they’re easy targets for cinematic stories, for villains, because they’re sinister, they have dark motivations. You and I grew up in a time of panic over Satanic cults and these people who were sacrificing babies. That never happens.
Craig: That just doesn’t happen.
John: It doesn’t. Instead, we have a lot of people who believe themselves to be incarnations of God and to have divine messages, and the people who follow them believe they are doing right for the world. They believe that they alone can save things.
Craig: It does seem like the Catholic Church and the Baptist Church and Pentecostal, all the big traditional Christian movements, big ones, do think that there’s a lot of these Devil-worshiping cults out there. And maybe there were in the, I don’t know, 1400s, but now, that’s not a problem.
Every now and then, some town will want to put up some sort of religious thing, and then they’re saying, okay, the court said you have to let every religion do it if they want, and then the local Satanist group shows up, and they’re just a bunch of dorks that like to wear black. They’re always like, “We’re really actually very nice.”
It’s this kind of New Agey baloney. It’s baloney. A lot of baloney about energy, past lives, and all that stuff. And a lot of the things that I think a lot of people believe, but in a perfectly innocuous way, some people take so seriously. That plus the cult of personality leads to these extraordinary situations, where people are so deep in, there’s no way out, because once you start picking at one thread, the whole thing falls apart, and they’re so brutal about you leaving. Once you’re in, you get love bombed, and only they understand you, and only they care about you, and then you’re stuck.
John: The obvious reflection is like, what is the difference between a cult and religion? Religion has structure around it that lives on beyond its creator. Obviously, so many of our religions, if you look back in the early phases of them, look a lot like our cults. But I’m curious about secular cults, cults that don’t go for any grand or religious view. They still have to have some perspective on what’s next.
I imagine there will be some kind of AI cults coming up here. Some of our charismatic founders of these corporations are very analogous to cult leaders. People will follow them to the ends of the earth.
Craig: Elon Musk feels culty.
John: Yeah, it does feel culty. I’ll be curious to see what that looks like. I guess in some way, Elon Musk, there was an expectation like, no, you need to sleep at the factory in order to make sure this all works right. The people who were working for him were not just working for that paycheck. They truly believed in the mission.
Craig: Yes. Donald Trump clearly is a cult leader. There’s no way to argue he’s not. That is a cult. They behave in the most cult-like way possible. All of these movements seem to collapse when the cult leader dies. They are ultimately about the person. They cannot exist past it. This woman, Amy Carlson, she dies in 2021, and that’s the end of that.
John: Actually, it’s still dribbling on a bit. Her people, they still believe what she believed, but they haven’t all held together.
Craig: It’s gonna fall apart. It just doesn’t work. L. Ron Hubbard died pretty early on in Scientology. It was David Miscavige who really continues to be the hub of that wheel. I don’t know how old he is, but one day he won’t be here. He will go the way of all mortal beings, and then we’ll see what happens to Scientology too.
John: We’ll see what happens. Did it jump past that initial needing to have the charismatic founder where it can keep going with its own energy? Maybe. But we won’t know until we see.
Drew: I feel like LA is lousy with those centering cults though. Scientology is probably the most prominent of that. But there’s the workout cults. There’s all those certain workout gyms. There’s one right now that will give you money off your membership if you get a tattoo of the brand.
Craig: That’s disgusting. That’s insane.
Drew: Isn’t that crazy?
Craig: That’s insane.
Drew: All the acting stuff too. Those are all little mini cults.
John: Oh, god, yeah.
Craig: No question. No question. They’re built around people.
Drew: That’s fair. And an idea of better… It’s all that, yeah.
Craig: Life improvement?
Drew: [Crosstalk 01:17:46].
Craig: Yeah, life improvement.
John: Exception proving the rule, QAnon, it feels like a cult. There is an entity who’s supposedly Q, but there’s no actual person there. There’s nothing you can point to. Q could be anybody, anything. It feels like it’s now dying down. But I was surprised it was able to be as successful as it was without any visible figurehead there.
Craig: There was Q. That’s why the QAnon movement was so pernicious, because there isn’t a single person that you could pick apart and point at as having feet of clay. It was this thing that would just show up, like receiving messages from the sky. It was actually quite brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s floridly stupid. But again, people, once they dig in and they believe it… And it does appear that Q was the son of the guy that owns 8chan or whatever that thing was, and then other people probably posed as it. It’s kind of remarkable how they did a little end-run around having a person be around.
John: Getting back to the main episode, how do you make sure the person you’re gonna hire is not actually a cult leader? Check their social media. Do they claim themselves to be God? That’s a red flag.
Craig: Do they have a lot of people following them around? If you’re like, “Yeah, we’re thinking about casting you,” and they’re like, “Great. One request is that my entourage of 80 people come with me, and also no one can wear the color blue,” and blah, blah, blah. You’re like, “Oh, no.”
John: There are some celebrities who have those entourages. Maybe we have to watch out for them as being cult leaders.
Craig: There are celebrities who could, in a second, make a cult. Thank you, Taylor Swift, for having some restraint. If Taylor Swift wanted to install herself as the head of a religious movement, she could, within a day. It would be massive, and it would be serious. Thank you. Once again, I should say, thank you, Taylor Swift.
John: Let’s leave it there. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Drew: Bye, guys.
Links:
- Strands from the New York Times
- Anatomy of a Fall – Clip
- Past Lives by Celine Song
- Irma Vep – Clip
- Is This Hollywood’s #MeanToo Moment? by David Mack for Slate
- How to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids
- RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
- Recursion – Glitch Games
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 635: Is This Person Going to Ruin Everything?, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 634 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of Granicus River? What if Robert E. Lee hadn’t lost Special Order 191? Historians consider these questions as counterfactuals, exploring how major world outcomes sometimes hinge on relatively small moments that could’ve gone either way. Today on the show, we’ll explore a range of Hollywood counterfactuals, looking at some moments, people, and events that could’ve gone very differently. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, capitalism. Craig, is it good or bad?
Craig: Uh-oh.
John: We will definitively answer the question once and for all.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: Oh, boy. Craig, it’s so nice to have you back!
Craig: It’s so good to be back. I’m sorry that I was gone for so long. The small matter of directing the first episode of the second season of The Last of Us, which I’m almost done with – we have a few days still outstanding that we need to do in a different location. I’ve been monitoring things on the internet a little bit. People are very clever. They like to see where we’re shooting, and then they have all these brilliant theories about what it means.
John: Yeah, and they’re all right. 100 percent of them are correct, right?
Craig: I wish I could put my arm around each one of them and say, “No.”
John: No. No.
Craig: No, most of the theories are incorrect. Some of them are halfways correct. Some of the conjecture is like 28 percent correct. But I do enjoy it all. I like the interest. It’s fun. But I’m mostly done with my directing stuff and very happily enjoying watching the second episode being done from the more traditional showrunner point of view, which is nice. I do like directing, but also, it’s the most exhausting thing ever. I miss it when it’s over, and then while it’s happening, I just keep asking myself why, why, why am I doing – why did I do-
John: Hey, Craig. Hey, Craig. I have friends who direct sitcoms, and let me tell you, one week they’re in and they’re out. If you could go back, why not make it a sitcom? Then you could direct as much as you wanted to direct, because it’s just a week of your time. James Burrows is not exhausted the way that you’re exhausted.
Craig: No. It sounds like you’re talking about a good old-fashioned three-camera.
John: Three-camera, oh yeah.
Craig: So you’re really just working on a stage play that three cameras are capturing. You don’t have to figure out angles and coverage and turning around. That sounds wonderful. Plus just a week. Yeah, so if there is some sort of box I failed to check to have James Burrows’s career and money… That sounds like a plan.
John: Did I tell you I finally met James Burrows? After all these years, I met him backstage at a play. And of course, as you could expect, the most lovely man.
Craig: I would hope so. If he were just unpleasant-
John: Yeah, a monster.
Craig: … what a weird choice to keep going back and back and back. Those days are kind of over though, aren’t they? The three-camera sitcom is sort of-
John: There are more this development season than in previous years.
Craig: Oh, interesting.
John: Yeah, I think there’s still some hope for it. There tend to be more of the half-hour single-camera things, which again though, are pretty short schedules. Modern Family apparently did a light shoot. They’d show up to the location, they’d shoot every scene a couple ways, and they were done.
Craig: Yeah, the classic network model of doing something like that, the standard is shoot a master and then hose it down, as they say, just simple coverage. If you’re shooting a couple cameras at the same time, the thing about a show like Modern Family is the coverage really doesn’t have to be particularly specific. It’s people talking, and what they’re saying and their faces are the most important things, whereas when you get into these big dramas – and the big dramas are like, each episode is kind of a movie.
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: Eesh. Oof.
John: Eesh. Yeah. I will say, the shows that are like The Office or like Modern Family, they do rely sometimes on the camera finding a joke, because the conceit, of course, is that it’s a documentary crew, so the camera’s finding the joke at times. Abbott Elementary has the same thing. But it is much more straightforward. It’s a very survivable life.
Craig: I don’t think it requires less skill. It simply is easier from a kind of how much stuff you have to do perspective. But the specific talent required to know where the camera ought to be – and also, editing those shows is very tricky. Editing comedy is incredibly specific.
John: Yeah, it is. Let’s get into some follow-up. This is mostly follow-up on things I think you were maybe not here for, but you could still weigh in. Drew, help us out with some follow-up here. Let’s start with the table reads bit.
Drew Marquardt: A few episodes ago, Jacob wrote in asking a question on whether you should send a script for a table read ahead of time or have everyone read it cold.
John: Craig, what’s your instinct on that? Let’s say you’re doing a table read with some friends. Do you think you should send the script ahead to those folks or have them come in cold to read it? What’s your instinct?
Craig: I’m not a huge table read fan. I think I’ve said that as much. But if I were to do one, I would do it cold.
John: That was Celine Song’s recommendation as well. Jacob wrote in with some follow-up here.
Drew: Jacob wrote, “Our table read was already scheduled for five days after the episode’s release date, so we ended up going with the dual method. Half of the attendees had the script ahead of time, and the other half read cold. And guess what? Celine was right. Our actor friends who had the script ahead of time put way too much energy in coming up with ways to play their characters, and bizarrely, even some had accents. We definitely preferred the read from those who did not have the script ahead of time, but it was still helpful to receive feedback from people who were able to discover the under-the-radar jokes that might’ve required a reread to enjoy.”
John: We talked about this with Celine Song. Mike Birbiglia does this thing where in his development process, he’ll have an interim draft. He’ll have a bunch of his friends, and they’ll have pizza and read through his script. That’s an important part of his process. But he really makes sure that they’re not auditioning for roles in that, that they’re there to read the script aloud. That feels like the right instinct here.
Craig: Yes, it’s especially the right instinct when you’re dealing with maybe actors who aren’t as experienced or at a particularly high level. So I don’t know where Jacob is in his life and I don’t know if his actor friends are well experienced or highly professional or quasi professional or aspiring. The more aspiring they are, the more important it is to not give them the script ahead of time, because they’re just going to do the thing. They’re just going to do it. They’re going to do the thing where they care way too much. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is, I assume in this case, for the writer to hear the words out loud, note the things that do seem to be working, note where it gets slow, note where it gets too fast, etc.
John: We’ve got differing opinion here from a guy who’s done it the opposite way. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Tom Harp says, “I’ve done reads both ways, with writers and with actors. But I wanted to offer my experience as a counter to what John and Celine said. In my own process, my trusted writer friends read early drafts and gave notes. But before I give it to my agents, I always do a read-through with actors.
“During the read, I’m listening to the pace and flow of the dialogue, but maybe the most important part is the Q and A I do afterwards. Actors have a different set of antenna than writers do, and their instincts have saved me several times. I’ve been told, ‘This feels false,’ or, ‘I don’t think my character would do or say this,’ when none of my writer friends noticed it, nor did I, because writers get why the story needs it. But down the line, an actor is going to call emotional bullshit on set, and then you’ve got your production’s boot on your neck as you try and solve it.”
John: Not quite on the same focus here. He’s saying that actors do bring something different to a read, because they’re bringing experience of how to sell a line, and they don’t know how to actually do a line.
Craig: I’m not going to disagree with Tom, because he’s obviously getting some use out of that. The only flag I would wave here is that casting is a thing. One of the reasons casting is important is because you’re trying to match an actor whose instincts match the instincts of the character you have created. When you have somebody show up because they’re available or they are your friend, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the right casting for that part.
And they may indeed think, “This feels false,” or, “I don’t think my character would say this.” A, it’s not their character yet. And B, they might not be right for the part, for that very reason. That’s not to say that there aren’t going to be things that almost every actor in that spot would go, “Oh, I don’t quite understand why I would say or do this here.” So that matters. That logic is important.
But if you don’t pick up on it until the actor comes up to you after, so you listen to the whole thing, sounds good to you, and then they call, come over, and say, “I don’t think that this… ” Maybe it’s just that the actor is not the right actor for that part. That’s the only thing I would flag there. But if it works for Tom, it works for Tom.
John: Yeah. Let’s get to the meat of this episode, which is counterfactuals. Some setup here. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading this book called What If?, which is a series of essays edited by Robert Cowley, about military history. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this book. The important part is that it’s really talking through counterfactuals versus alternative history.
I want to spend a moment to describe the difference between counterfactuals and alternative history. A counterfactual is basically the outcome of this battle or event could’ve turned out different in a way that’s very possible. There’s a distinct moment that could’ve gone either way, a kind of a coin toss. And if it’d have gone the opposite direction, outcomes would’ve been very different.
Alternative history I’ll define as something happened in a very different way or in a different timeline, like what if Africa had industrialized first, or we discovered nuclear power in the 1800s? You’d still get to a place where the outcomes are very different, but it’s not hinging on one moment, one thing where it could’ve gone either way.
So we put out this call to our listeners, saying hey, what counterfactuals do you want us to talk through? Some of them were incredibly useful, but a lot of them were actually just alternative histories, where, like, oh, what if this had happened, or what if this had happened, but it wasn’t hinging on a specific event. It was just like, there’s a different version that came out of here.
Some of the alt histories that people proposed, like what if Zoetrope Studios had succeeded, sure, but it’s not based on one movie succeeding. What if Jacksonville, Florida had become the filmmaking capital of the world? It could’ve happened, because it was an alternative way things could’ve gone, but it wasn’t based on one moment that could’ve happened. Or the wars in Europe, like what if the wars in Europe hadn’t happened or had happened differently, and European film industry became the dominant one rather than American? Again, it’s not based on one event. I just wanted to make it clear that thank you for sending those through, but those are really alternative histories and not the counterfactuals I was looking for.
Craig: You were really looking for those fork in the road moments, where there’s definitely-
John: Totally.
Craig: … two ways you can go. Things went left instead of right, but what if they had gone right instead of left?
John: Exactly. The first I want to talk through is Edison. Back in 1915, he’d already invented many incredible devices that we use today, electricity. How he was getting electricity and light bulbs and things out into the world were incredibly important. But he also had patents on the original motion picture camera and projection technology. Because he had this patent and was trying to enforce it very vigorously, a lot of people who were trying to avoid his sort of patent thugs were heading out to the West Coast. It’s one of the reasons why the Hollywood industry developed out in California was just to get away from this guy and his very ambitious enforcement of his trademark over things.
He lost a 1915 court case, which was crucial in his ability to constrain how people could use his devices and whether these things he was creating, these projectors, could only show his own creations. This feels like an important moment in terms of the evolution of the early film industry, so 1915.
Craig: 1915. You have this court case that basically allows an industry to exist. Prior to that court case, everybody had to go through Edison and his company, the Motion Picture Patents Company. I did not know this until – I’m looking at the article that you linked to in the Saturday Evening Post.
When you say “patent thugs,” you mean it. Edison famously occupied a space in New Jersey. There is an Edison Township, New Jersey. I believe that is named for him. But in West Orange, New Jersey, that’s where his base was. He would hire mobsters – and there sure were a lot of them up there on the East Coast – to literally beat up people, filmmakers that were using cameras and film. Edison’s argument basically was, I control the entire chain of creation of motion pictures, from film stock to projection. And anybody that tried to get around him and do whatever they wanted without getting his approval could even theoretically get physically assaulted.
The court case said no. Basically, the court said you can sue somebody for infringing, but you can’t use your patent as, quote, “a weapon to disable a rival contestant or to drive him from the field.”
This’ll tie into our capitalism versus anti-capitalism discussion later on. We used to be quite invested in busting trusts, monopolies in this country, particularly around then. Teddy Roosevelt was quite the pioneer in that effort to create a healthy form of capitalism. We seem to have lost our way. There are a number of companies, I look around now, who I think Teddy Roosevelt would be thrilled to break apart. But yes, if that goes the other way, then John, you and I are probably working in New Jersey.
John: Yeah, I think we’re working for the Edison company or some offshoot of the Edison company. It’s hard to find a perfect analogy for what this system would’ve been like, because it’s not quite like the app store, where everything has to be done through the app store. It’s not quite that. But it is like there’s just basically one funnel, and everything has to either license or be done by this one company. All motion pictures have to go through this one channel, which would be vastly different than what we’re expecting.
Do I think this would’ve lasted forever? No. I think there would’ve been other ways around this, other alternative technologies that didn’t infringe on the patent. There would’ve been ways to do it. But clearly, our early film industry would’ve been very different. What we do goes back to 100 years ago when this was all being figured out.
Craig: It’s almost certain that in order to get around this, a healthy motion picture industry would’ve sprouted outside of the bounds of the United States.
John: That’s a good point.
Craig: Where would that have taken place?
John: France?
Craig: Europe, certainly. But in terms of what we do, the Hollywood style, the very American style of creating things and making a huge business out of it, as opposed to thinking about it specifically in terms of art and cinema, which is a very European and certainly French way of approaching things.
I think about where I’m sitting right now in Vancouver. Canada would’ve been a wonderful place. The immigrants who founded Hollywood way, way back when, Warner Bros and so on, may have just headed up to Montreal or Toronto.
John: Mexico would’ve been another great choice. There’s other venues.
Craig: Lots of sunshine.
John: Again, we are not legal experts in here. This is really our first glimpse of the history here. But it looks like it’s the projection technology is the issue. Basically, if any projector sold in the U.S. could only project things that Edison had approved, that still would’ve been a challenge for American audiences. It’s not just where you film the things. It’s also how you’re showing the things. It would’ve gotten sorted out. There would be some way to do it, but it would’ve really limited the spread of Hollywood movies.
Craig: When you have something that people want, it will find a way to exist. It’s a little bit like Prohibition, which also fell apart a few years after this happened.
John: Rather than the manufacture of distribution of alcohol, manufacture and distribution of film.
Craig: People want it.
John: People want it.
Craig: If you really want to go down that other fork in the road, the movie business is run by cartels, and it is an entirely criminal enterprise.
John: That would’ve been great. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, because you can envision that. In some ways, the Man in the High Castle and the hidden films, the stolen films of the alternative history, how this all ties back together, is an example of that. There’s a currency for these films that show what happens in the other timeline.
Craig: Yeah, I would see that.
John: Our next one is actually similar. This is the Paramount consent decree, which we’ve talked about on the podcast several times. Again, this is a question of manufacture and distribution of film materials.
Prior to going into this, the very thumbnail version of this, the studios were allowed to also own movie theaters, and they could control the entire channel of, we’re making the movies, we’re showing them in our theaters, we’re constraining all of our product. The Paramount consent decree held that the studios cannot own exhibitors, and therefore films from other companies can be shown in theaters.
Craig: Had that not fallen apart, I think you would’ve seen a creative paralysis in the business. What happened immediately following the collapse of that was the breakdown of this incredibly formalized manner of presenting art to people.
Even though there are incredible movies that were made in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there were also very clearly rigid constrictions. Because it seems like a long time ago, it’s hard for us to see how fast things changed and how dramatically they changed, because it was before our time. But let’s say you were born in the ’30s. You’re used to watching movies of a certain sort. By the time you get into the ’60s, you now have nudity and graphic sexuality being shown on screen. You couldn’t even show people kissing with tongue, and now there’s sex. It’s kind of incredible how fast it changed, because if the studios don’t control the screens, other people can make movies to put on the screens. That’s the big difference. The other people didn’t have to follow along this rigid formality.
John: It’s important to understand this both from a producer and a supplier point of view, because this allowed theaters that were not affiliated with studios to compete for titles they wanted. So it allowed for more independent theaters, but also allowed for filmmaking that took place outside of the studio system. Those are the ones that you first see nudity and moving past the Hays Code and really pushing what cinema could be.
Obviously, this had a huge business transformation on Hollywood, but also had a huge creative impact. If the Paramount consent decree hadn’t happened, we would be in a different place. The irony, of course, is that the Paramount consent decree was overturned in the past 5 years, 10 years. How long have we been doing this podcast? In theory, now studios can own movie theaters. We haven’t seen a huge change in that. They haven’t come in and bought out the AMCs in the world.
Craig: Probably because it’s not a great business to be in.
John: It’s not an amazing business.
Craig: It’s funny, the Paramount decree fell apart right around the time it was no longer necessary, because studios found a new bunch of screens they could control via streaming. However, because of that window from the 1950s through let’s say up to 10 years ago, where the screens were so important, the proliferation of different kinds of content occurred. That toothpaste cannot go back in the tube. We’ve all grown up with and have become used to a certain kind of entertainment.
Ironically, when you look at the movies Paramount itself was making in the ’70s, starting with The Godfather, and onward and the kind of filmmakers they were supporting, they themselves benefited more almost than anyone from this, because they were allowed to make new kinds of things.
The companies do now control their own screens via streaming, but people want what they want. It’s one thing to say, “I want some things that I haven’t seen, but I would imagine I’d like them,” and it’s another to say, “I have seen the things I like. You can’t take them away.”
John: Before we move on, I think it’s worth looking at; both the Edison case and the Paramount consent decree, at the time these things were being decided, the justices and everyone else involved couldn’t have anticipated what the long-term effects are. They could only really look at what is this date right now, because they really couldn’t know what was going to come 10 years, 20 years down the road. I guarantee you that there was not an awareness of like, this will change the type of movies that get made if this gets overturned. They were just looking at it in terms of, this is a law, this is restrain of trade, this is anti-competitive, and therefore-
Craig: Correct.
John: … we’re going to knock these things down.
Craig: If they had taken the other path, I think we would still to this day have a much more restrained kind of content. People look at the ’70s, the freewheeling ’70s, and the rise of the auteurist and all the rest of it as some sort of product of the cultural revolution in this country. And I would argue that no, that is not the case, that in fact, those things happened because of this court case.
I would point directly at network television as proof, because network television is the control of screens. And when you look at what was allowed on network television and is to this day allowed on network television, it is so much more constrained than what is allowed in movies. It’s not even close. Language, nudity, content. There’s just limits. People lost their minds when, in the ’90s, NYPD Blue showed a butt. A butt. They’re still not allowed to drop F-bombs and so on and so forth. I would just say that’s what movies would be like. Movies would be like network television. You’d be constrained.
John: And of course, European cinema, Asian cinema could’ve made different choices. But the problem is, if there’s no way to exhibit those films here, it’s moot.
Craig: That’s right. Absolutely. That was always the case. In the ’40s or the ’30s, people referred to – my grandfather referred to French films. Those were sort of early Blue Movies with nudity. Sure. But mostly, it would have operated the way network television still operates, under those constraints, which some people argue are positive on some levels. Creative restraint does force certain kinds of creative creativity. But you would not have the things that we have in movies if this had not gone that way.
John: Yeah. Simpler what ifs. What if George Lucas had died in his car accident?
Craig: Oh, god.
John: This is June 12th, 1962.
Craig: Oh, god.
John: “As Lucas made a left turn, a Chevy Impala came flying from the opposite direction and broadsided him. The racing belt snapped, and Lucas was flung onto the pavement just before the car slammed into a giant walnut tree. Unconscious, Lucas turned blue and began vomiting blood as he was rushed off to the hospital.”
This is George Lucas, who at this time is a promising young film student. I guess he’s made some stuff at this point, but he had not made Star Wars. He had not made Raiders of the Lost Ark. How different would it be if we did not have George Lucas as a filmmaker? What are the knock-on effects of this?
Craig: For starters, I just want to say as an unlicensed doctor, if you turn blue and start vomiting, it’s not good. That’s really bad. There’s two ways of looking at this. One way is – let’s go the obvious way – George Lucas doesn’t create Star Wars. He doesn’t bring about the era of the blockbuster. Movies stay a bit smaller. Special effects and visual effects do not advance as far as they did and as fast as they did. The hyper-merchandization of films and the creation of so-called franchises does not occur.
However, a couple of counter-arguments to that. One is that somebody else probably would have done something of the size that would’ve created that anyway. George Lucas was really important, as we’ve discussed, in the creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I do feel like there’s going to be a – Steven Spielberg was making his own blockbusters, Jaws.
John: He’s making Jaws. He’s still making blockbusters.
Craig: Yeah, I think there’s going to be blockbusters. But just as importantly, it seems like George Lucas’s brush with fate here was actually quite informative to him as a filmmaker. He sits there in the hospital and starts thinking about what saved his life in that car, and eventually, I think that sort of turns into American Graffiti. There’s this world where it’s like, if he doesn’t get into the – he needs to get into the car accident, I think.
What happens? If he dies in his car accident, we don’t get these movies. If he doesn’t die in the car accident, we do get these movies. We definitely wouldn’t have Star Wars. There would be no Star Wars. That’s for sure.
John: A world without Star Wars is different. Beyond the business things you’ve laid out, how it popularized a kind of space opera, children’s stories but for all ages, it did a very specific thing. We already had Star Trek. Star Trek would still exist without Star Wars, but I feel like we kind of need both of those things for in order for us to have-
Craig: Sort of. Star Trek is a network television show that gets canceled after, I think it was three seasons. Then Star Wars happens, and shortly after that, Star Trek the movie happens. Star Trek the movie does not happen if Star Wars doesn’t happen. There’s just no chance.
John: Very good point. Very good point.
Craig: Similarly, all the movies that were inspired by Star Wars sort of happen. The movie that’s coming to mind actually is Dune, because Dune was really the only thing that could’ve been Star Wars, because it preexisted Star Wars as a novel. Maybe the Dune that gets made doesn’t get made. I don’t think the Lynch Dune gets made without Star Wars.
John: And the Jodorowsky Dune doesn’t get made either.
Craig: I agree. That’s not going to get made either. But at some point, somebody, let’s say it’s Spielberg, in the absence of a huge-
John: Or Coppola or somebody.
Craig: Or Coppola or somebody. Somebody figures out how to make Dune and gives us the Denis Villeneuve standard type Dune earlier, and that leads – because there’s obviously great interest in those large-scale science fiction fantasies.
John: Because it’s crucial to understand there was a huge science fiction community before Star Wars. It popularized it in a way that was important. I think you don’t have the volume of science fiction fandom until you have Star Wars.
Craig: Star Wars, it was like giving a very loud and passionate fan base the world’s biggest megaphone, because everybody sort of flooded into the tent. It’s a really interesting thing, a world without Star Wars.
A fun thing I do like to think about when we’re talking about these counterfactuals is that we are currently living in counterfactuals, meaning in our world, Melissa Suzanne – the worst fake name ever – Melissa Suzanne does die in a car accident, doesn’t make blah da bloo, which is the biggest fricking thing of all time in that, and we’re living in the counterfactual where it didn’t happen. We don’t know what we don’t have.
John: Exactly. Yeah, we don’t. Let’s talk about another movie that it would be different if it hadn’t existed, which is Titanic. You and I were both in Hollywood as Titanic was happening. Some backstory for folks who don’t know. Filming was supposed to last six months. It stretched to eight months. The budget doubled from a reported $110 million, making it even costlier than Water World’s $200 million price tag. Another counterfactual would be like, what if Water World were a hit? But it was not a hit.
Titanic was incredibly expensive. Craig and I will both testify to the fact that there was real discussion about, “Oh my god, this movie could be a disaster. It could completely tank.”
Craig: Absolutely.
John: And sink both Fox and Paramount, who were both putting up the money for it. That didn’t happen. It became a giant hit and changed exhibition. It just kept running and running forever, despite its long running time. What happens, Craig, if Titanic had tanked, sunk?
Craig: The thing is, we do live in the world where these enormous movies tanked and sunk. That one might’ve killed Paramount. Paramount I believe was the initial production company. And it got so bad that they had to go to their competitor, Fox, and say, would you basically put in all the money we put in, on top of the money we put in, and we’ll give you all of the international, I think is how it worked out. That’s unheard of. I don’t even think it’s happened since on that scale. I think in part it hasn’t happened since on that scale because Titanic did become a huge hit. And the only thing that scares these companies more than a massive bomb is missing out on all of the money of a massive hit.
John: Of a hit, yeah.
Craig: But I think we would still unfortunately be in a world where some massive films just tank because people take these big swings. The weird thing about Titanic succeeding is that it probably has created more flops in its wake, because everyone goes, “What if it’s Titanic?” Then someone’s like, “We’ve done research, and it’s projected to only make… ” I think Titanic its opening weekend made – $28.6 million is what it made, which is really good for 1997.
John: Really good.
Craig: Very good opening weekend.
John: For a four-hour movie, yes.
Craig: Yes, but if it followed what normally happens, which is then the following weekend would be, let’s say-
John: Drops 50 percent, 40 percent.
Craig: Yeah. Let’s say the following weekend’s like 15 million, and then it goes to 7 and 3 and 2.
John: Disaster.
Craig: Oh my god. But in fact, it made more. It went up. I just remember how it just kept making somewhere in the 20s every single weekend forever. There’s never been anything quite like it, box office wise.
John: My husband, Mike, was running the AMC Theatres in Burbank at that point. He had 30 screens. And Titanic nearly killed him, because they’d add screenings and those would sell out. So they’d add 9:00 in the morning screenings and not even advertise them, and they would sell out. It was crazy. Yes, it’s really good money for the exhibitors, because they’re getting a cut of that, but it was just so hard on everybody, just staffing those endless screenings.
Craig: The creation of that movie was incredibly difficult to do. It is certainly no fun to be making something that massive while the people that are paying for it are freaking out and basically telling you, “We’re screwed.” Making things is hard enough. When you are confidence shaken, it’s really hard, because you already want to curl up and die just from the exhaustion of doing it. And Titanic was an incredibly exhausting thing to make. To think, while you’re making it, that also everyone’s miserable and it’s going to fail, oh my god, how do you even wake up in the morning?
John: But you do.
Craig: They did, and so people just keep pointing back at this and saying, “Look.” The one thing I think that would be different is maybe there would be fewer flops.
John: There’d be fewer big swings. I think there would’ve been someone going like, “No, we absolutely cannot do this thing.” One thing that is different about our current moment is we have some places that have so much money, and they don’t actually need the box office, but they can just spend a ton. Apple, on Killers of the Flower Moon. In any normal situation, that would be a disaster. But it’s not a disaster for them, because they kind of don’t really care about the money. And so they can make a very long, very expensive movie that doesn’t perform at the box office, because that’s not really what they care about.
Craig: Yeah, and similarly, Netflix doesn’t – I don’t know what their metrics – I don’t know how any of it works. I work for a company that is oddly old-fashioned in the sense that even though there’s a big streaming service for Max, a lot of people still watch HBO through cable or satellite, and those are subscriber fees that get paid in, and there’s ratings for that stuff. But yeah, Netflix makes these enormous things and go, it kind of doesn’t matter. I don’t understand any of it.
But certainly in the case of Amazon and Apple, those companies are so enormous. Their production wings are such a small piece of what they do, that they can easily absorb any of these things. No problem. The world of Titanic, it was back – I don’t know, who owned Paramount back then? Was it Gulf Western?
John: It could’ve still been Gulf Western.
Craig: That was a big oil company. If you read about the history of The Godfather, for instance, they were all freaking out when they were making The Godfather, because they were going to lose – they couldn’t stand the notion of losing money.
John: There was a history of disastrous films costing studios so much they had to change, like Cleopatra and Fox. We have Century City in part because Fox had to sell off some of that lot to actually earn money, and that became Century City.
Craig: Exactly. There’s Heaven’s Gate, which basically destroyed a studio. There’s been movies that were so big and so massive and so horrifying in terms of their costs that just entire companies fell apart.
John: A movie that did not cost the company but was a big swing and a big miss was John Carter. John Carter of Mars was a film that Disney made. We’ll link to an article by Richard Newby for The Hollywood Reporter, called John Carter Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped. Based on the numbers, John Carter earned $284 million on a $306 million budget. That sounds like, oh, it was close, but of course, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing on top of that.
Newby argues that Disney realized, like, “Okay, we were trying to create Star Wars. Maybe we should just buy Star Wars.” They might not have reached for Lucasfilm at that moment if John Carter had worked. Possibly. They also were coming off other challenges, like The Lone Ranger, which was another expensive flop. And Newby argues that because of back-to-back misses, Disney got very conservative and were just banking on sure bets.
Craig: I’ll push back a little bit on this one.
John: Please.
Craig: It seems like Mr. Newby’s hanging a little too much around the neck of John Carter. Yes, it was a flop, but it wasn’t a studio-destroying flop. $284 million against $306 is not good, obviously, because that doesn’t include the, let’s say, $100 million of marketing. And then, of course, they don’t actually get all the money from the ticket sales, but there was video and all the rest. I’m not sure that that’s why they said, “We need Star Wars.” I think anybody who has the chance to get Star Wars and has the capital to do it and also the brand that would convince Lucas to allow it-
John: Exactly.
Craig: … which in this case was Disney and no one else, unless there wasn’t an old existing Paramount that wasn’t there anymore, of the way that he was familiar, yeah, I think anybody would buy Star Wars. I don’t think that you can put too much around the neck of John Carter. The fact is he cites Lone Ranger as an example of how it didn’t help matters. But that’s proof that John Carter wasn’t enough of a cage rattler, because they did make Lone Ranger, so I don’t know.
John: Let’s rephrase this though. Let’s refrain it. Rather than saying what if John Carter hadn’t bombed, what if John Carter was a huge, huge, huge hit? What if it were kind of Star Wars level? That I think would’ve been a bit of a game changer, because then it would be validating, like, yes, let’s spend a lot of money, take really big swings on pieces of IP that are kind of known but not hugely known. I would say John Carter of Mars is more in the level of a Narnia book, in the sense of people kind of know what it is, but they’re not necessarily directly familiar with it. That could’ve changed some things. If it were a giant hit, would they still have bought Lucasfilm? Probably, because they would just have so much money.
Craig: I think it’s still probably presuming too much logic on the part of the folks that make these things, because there’s always been this strange gravitation towards, quote unquote, IP that I think most people would look at and go, “Okay. If you think that that matters.” When they made – what was the one with Billy Zane? Was it The Phantom?
John: Yeah.
Craig: The Phantom, that was something-
John: In Europe, yeah.
Craig: My dad was into that, barely, as a child. It was not relevant anymore. But it seemed like, oh, that thing. Now, in the age of algorithm-driven companies, I think the computers, as much as we hate them, probably would’ve said, “Please do not make The Phantom.” But you still see what I would call attempts to recreate other people’s large successes. And they sort of work, or sometimes they don’t work.
Amazon and Netflix, without naming names, have certainly tried to reproduce their – “We want our Game of Thrones. Where’s our Game of Thrones?” Then they go looking for IP that people are sort of interested in or maybe not that interested in. Some of it works great; some of it doesn’t. It’s hard to predict sometimes. There are book series that people love but just don’t want to watch adapted. There are other things that people don’t really care that much about, but when they get adapted, catch on. It’s not as logical as all that.
I think if John Carter had been a hit, I don’t even think it would’ve stopped Disney from buying Star Wars. The only thing that would change: a lot more John Carter movies and then a whole lot more movies that are sort of John Carter-ish that don’t work.
John: Agreed.
Craig: When I was a kid, my dad said, “You’re going to love these books. When I was a kid, I read them. Doc Savage.” You know the Doc Savage books?
John: I recognize the title. I don’t know anything about them.
Craig: I think they were, I want to say 1930s era.
John: They were pulp fiction.
Craig: Pulp fiction, adventure stories, largely for boys, about a group of courageous people that go on to the far-flung reaches. Doc Savage was definitely an inspiration for Indiana Jones and even James Bond to some extent. Every now and then, somebody would bring it up in Hollywood as I was coming up. Now I’m like, that’s so old. Maybe there’d be a bunch of Doc Savage – or a Doc Savage movie would’ve been at a large scale and failed. But I don’t know if the world would’ve changed that much if John Carter had succeeded.
John: But Craig, what if Iron Man had bombed?
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: I think we’ve talked on this podcast before – I carried a football on Iron Man for just a couple weeks. I love everybody involved. I got to go to the premier. I remember going to the premier and the after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street and saying, “Wow, that was really effing good. That’s going to be a giant hit.” But I will tell you that there was no guarantee that movie was going to be a giant hit.
You look at the folks involved, like Favreau, so smart, so great, had done some movies, but there was no guarantee that he could direct this movie. There was no guarantee that Robert Downey Jr was a good choice or even a rational choice for this, because he was not in the best place in his career. There were a lot of things that could’ve really derailed this movie, and yet it was a giant hit and started a franchise, which has made billions of dollars for the companies involved.
Craig: Billions and billions and billions and changed the shape of multinational mega-corporations.
John: It’s important to acknowledge that there were multiple movies before that that had not worked, and we’ve still got the Marvel Universe. But I would argue that if Iron Man had flopped, you doing have the Kevin Feige Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Craig: Without question. Without question. You could even go further back and say what if the X-Men movies flopped? Because superhero movies – other than Batman always seemed to work, Superman worked for-
John: Sometimes.
Craig: … two movies. But the other movies that they tried to do, the other things they tried, it all just, eh. Spider-Man also is another one where if that had not worked right…
There were preexisting superhero films that had done well, but those were not controlled by Marvel per se. X-Men was controlled by Fox. Spider-Man was controlled by Sony. Batman was controlled by Warner Bros. Here’s Marvel as a company suddenly finding a partner to make Iron Man with and do it well, and that directly leads into the entire Avengers thing. It also created all the feeder ones, Thor. Obviously, you never get to Guardians of the Galaxy or any of that stuff.
John: No, none of that stuff.
Craig: Ever, ever, ever.
John: I will acknowledge that if you had Iron Man but didn’t have a good follow-up with that first Captain America movie, it would’ve been much more difficult. But you have to have Iron Man first. But the whole choice to center this whole thread on Iron Man was a weird one too, because he wasn’t the biggest available hero there.
Craig: No. I loved Iron Man comics when I was a kid, because the suit’s awesome. But the actual Iron Man stories got kind of morose. He was an alcoholic. The comics went into a whole story about alcoholism.
Also, you would not have the superhero saturation and the way that superhero films… There’s going to be some amazing books written 10 years from now about it. The transformation of our culture by that movie and everything that came beyond it is remarkable. What it did to our business, for better or worse – and in a lot of cases worse – is remarkable. What it did to the visual effects industry but also technology is remarkable.
And then here’s this question: does any of this work without Iron Man? Does any of this work without Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr, or does it just begin to fall apart? Obviously, Marvel has created this incredible system with phases.
John: We’re in a struggling phase right now. I think it’s not hard to see. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.
Craig: That’s right.
John: I think on our next episode, we’ll talk a little about when you hire stars, how careful you have to be, because they are going to be the face of your entity. In the case of Jonathan Majors, that did not work out well. In the case of Robert Downey Jr, it worked out great. But if you were to look at those two people at the start, I would’ve bet on Jonathan Majors.
Craig: I don’t know what was known, but here’s what was definitely known about Robert Downey Jr prior to Iron Man. He had gone through a very long period of substance abuse problems. He had gone through a very long period where he was highly unreliable. He was considered to be mercurial and brilliant but uncontrollable. He had had issues with the law. There was an infamous story where he just woke up in somebody’s bed in a house, because he broke in, because he was completely out of his mind on whatever he was – I don’t know what substances he was abusing. There was this sense that the last person in the world you put an enormous thing on top of would be Robert Downey Jr, and they just went for it.
John: They did.
Craig: This is the weird thing about trying to game or predict. You want the real hero here. If I can point to one person that is the reason why our culture is full of superhero movies and why Marvel is worth as much as it is and has had as much success, Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr’s wife and producing partner, who is the stabilizing force in his life, who clearly got him back on track and got him sober and focused. If Hollywood could give a Nobel Prize, it should go to Susan Downey. She’s remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel should write her a check for a billion dollars.
John: Let’s do a very short version on this. We’ve talked about fin-syn before. Fin-syn limited the degree to which networks could own the production entities. It’s like Paramount consent decrees in the sense of it’s about how much vertical integration you could have over the course of production. It was abolished in 1993 by a decision. It counts as a counterfactual, because the decision could’ve gone the other way. In a short version, if in 1993 fin-syn hadn’t been eradicated, how would Hollywood look different today?
Craig: Oh, boy. You can argue in a lot of different directions here. The deal with fin-syn is it created a system where the only people who could afford to produce television good enough to be on networks were companies that could afford to operate under a system called deficit financing. The only way you could make money making a television show, because the networks couldn’t make them – therefore the networks made money off of licensing, so the networks pay you money to license the show you produced. They run it on the air, and then they sell ads. The amount of ads that they sell hopefully is way more than the licensing fee they’re paying you. But how do you make money? You don’t, because the licensing fee doesn’t even come close to paying you back.
John: To covering your costs.
Craig: Doesn’t even come close. The only you make money-
John: You’re relying on syndication.
Craig: Exactly. Basically, you need a hit. If the show makes it to, 100 episodes was considered the classic number to hit, then it could be syndicated, meaning it could then go into reruns. At that point, it just starts to spin off insane amounts of money through licensing fees forever. The game was, right, we’re going to lose a whole lot of money to make a whole lot of money. The only people that can afford to do that are very large companies; in this case, movie studios, basically. Those were the ones doing it.
John: If fin-syn hadn’t gotten shut down, you can imagine somehow more capital would’ve flown in to create more things that were like the Carsey-Werners and that stuff. The experienced producers would somehow be able to raise enough money to be able to make the shows they’re going to be able to make. But it would still be dicier. Those people would be very wealthy in hits, but these companies would also go bankrupt more often. Generally, you want to strike down vertical integration where you see it, because it is anti-competitive. It can drive down wages for people, because there’s fewer places you can sell your thing.
But it would’ve greatly changed how we’re doing stuff. It’s hard to know what would this look like in today’s streaming world, because there are companies that bring their own money to do stuff today. Those things still exist. It’s just different. You have the Legendaries. You have the Fifth Seasons. You have the companies that actually are coming in with their own money to do stuff. It would look a lot different. I can’t even suss out what the real changes would’ve been.
Craig: I think that you would probably have had much larger productions. We can look at companies that are not impacted by fin-syn. Fin-syn fell apart. But when you look at Netflix, for example, Netflix produces and distributes their own material. They are not beholden to these rules. The reason that fin-syn was a thing is because it applied to broadcast television. Broadcast television used the public airwaves to send their signals out, so the government therefore had the ability to get in the way and create regulations. There’s no regulations on an end-to-end agreement like Netflix, where they’re not using public airwaves whatsoever.
John: The FTC or the Justice Department could still come in there, but without the broadcast aspect of it, it’s much harder to enforce anything like that. It’d be much harder for them to win the judgment they would have to win.
Craig: Yes. The government has a clear, established interest in the rules regarding the use of public airwaves, going all the way back to the age of radio and so forth. But with internet carriers, it’s different. Netflix and companies, Amazon, etc., they’ve never operated under anything like this. They’ve always been able to make their own stuff and exhibit their own stuff. And what you see are massive productions, because there is no arrangement where you deficit finance in the hopes for syndication, and meanwhile the exhibitor is making money off of the sale of ads. In fact, Netflix and Amazon don’t have ads, although now they’re starting to. But even then, they’re starting to just put more money in their pockets.
I don’t know how the finances of these companies work, but you could argue that for Amazon, for instance, it’s possible that their production wing is really a loss leader, and it is a deficit financing, just to drive customers to their other aspect, which is buying toilet paper and pencils. I don’t know. But it does seem like if there had not been fin-syn and the networks could’ve reaped the benefits of their own syndication, that probably you would’ve seen some larger productions happening.
John: Last bit of counterfactual. Remember when Netflix was red envelopes you got in the mail?
Craig: Yeah, I actually do.
John: What if Netflix had stuck with their DVD model, that they were a company that sends you DVDs?
Craig: This is a great one.
John: They never started a whole streaming business. How would the world be different if Netflix hadn’t started the streaming revolution?
Craig: I’m going to contradict myself a little bit here. Most of what I’ve been saying is when the world wants something, it finds a way to get it. In this case, I suspect that if Netflix hadn’t done what they did, nobody would’ve done it. The reason why nobody would’ve done it is because I’m not sure it, meaning the streaming model, actually makes sense. We watched this happen. Netflix did this. They churned through an enormous amount of money to build the business out of nothing, a little bit the way Amazon did with their larger business.
John: Totally.
Craig: Then everybody else said, oh my god, we have to do it too. Then they all looked at each other and went, “How do you make money doing this exactly?” That makes me suspect nobody would’ve done it, because it doesn’t make sense. A lot of what we all went through with our convulsions in the labor movement in Hollywood was trying to make Hollywood confront the fact that they had blown up a system that worked fairly well for them and fairly well for us. They had blown it up chasing something that wasn’t like them and something that they could never be like. I think the world would be enormously different if Netflix had just stuck to the red envelopes.
John: Counterfactual to your counterfactual. I would say that internet video is going to want to happen. The fact that YouTube exists, there was a market for – people wanted to watch things through video. Even before we had Netflix, we did have webisodes of your favorite shows. The idea that we were going to be getting our TV or TV-like things over the internet I think is kind of inevitable.
The business model behind that could’ve gone many, many different ways. But I do think you would’ve ultimately seen things that looked like Netflix that were using money they got from investors to create shows and put them on the internet. And some of those would’ve grown into things that are maybe not the size or scale of what Netflix became, but it would’ve been big enough that even the other studios would’ve developed their own wings that were doing that kind of stuff. We would’ve gotten to something that looked like what we’re doing now, but just not with the full scale.
Craig: I think you’re right that in terms of a distribution platform, places like YouTube would’ve absolutely worked, and they kind of were. If you think back to what we were arguing about in our penultimate strike, the big concern was that the companies were going to use the internet to run our content and have ads run in it, just like it would on any syndicated channel, but because it was the internet as opposed to Channel 5 in New York, that somehow residuals wouldn’t apply.
I think YouTube did and continues to have a very robust system where they run ads. Yes, I think they would’ve struck deals with the companies to rebroadcast stuff. I think the whole thing of like, “YouTube is going to make its own stuff,” they sure tried. It didn’t work. What was it, YouTube Red? That was sort of a thing. Is it still a thing? I don’t even know if it’s a thing.
John: They got rid of YouTube Red.
Craig: They got rid of it. They got rid of it. Quibi. Good lord.
John: If it weren’t for Netflix, then we would’ve never had Quibi.
Craig: We would’ve never had the 4 million easy jokes about Quibi. The idea that these independent internet companies would… Remember Amazon Studios? Remember us discussing that whole baloney nonsense?
John: Yeah. They were always looking to do a thing. But again, Amazon still, with all their money, they probably would’ve tried to develop something that – again, it’s not Netflix, but they would’ve developed their own-
Craig: Maybe.
John: … video streaming service.
Craig: Maybe, or maybe they would have just said, “We are happy to be in the business where we pay you a licensing fee to rebroadcast your stuff on our platform,” just like Walmart pays for the DVDs that they then resell. And then Amazon, just like anything, will collect the ad money, and that’ll be that.
John: They probably would’ve looked at YouTube and said, “We want to be in the YouTube business,” and the revolution of that.
Craig: Where the internet was before Netflix decided to go bananas was this… You and I got yelled at a lot, as I recall, for decrying the concept of the democratization of entertainment creation. There are certainly a lot of people making money as influencers and all the rest of that, but that’s its own category.
There was this moment, and we were podcasting through it, where these companies were like, “The only reason that everybody doesn’t have great television to make is because of the gatekeepers, and if we just allow everybody to … ” No. The answer to that is no. None of that would’ve happened. None of that ever will happen. That’s not a thing. It doesn’t happen. It’s hard to do what we do. There are not a lot of people who do it.
It’s sort of like saying, “We’re going to democratize Major League Baseball. Everybody can show up and play.” Nope, actually, we still just want Juan Soto, which as you know, Juan is going to take the Yankees to the World Series this year. I know that you’ve been thinking it.
John: I basically stay awake at night really thinking about all the scenarios that gets him to the World Series.
Craig: Soto and then Judge, that number 3, number 4 lineup punch. We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s a big deal.
John: There are so many scenarios that it’s why I can’t sleep.
Craig: There’s really only the one scenario.
John: But you never know. The counterfactual is that, what if he gets hit by a bus, and therefore-
Craig: I’ll tell you, if Juan Soto gets hit by a bus, the Yankees will have another season like they did last year, which is really bad. David Benioff, John Gatins, and I have a little three-person group chat that is just nothing but us complaining about the Yankees. That’s all we do. It is just a constant ruing. This season hopefully will be different.
But in any case, I really think that what Netflix did was so improbable and so risky and so crazy. I’m still waiting for gravity to kick in.
John: It has basically worked for Netflix. It has not worked for everybody else. Netflix now actually makes a profit. But it was a wild, wild gamble. And they were able to use cheat money to do it. The circumstances worked out the way they worked out.
Craig: The circumstances worked out the way they worked out. I think the proof is in the pudding. Even as Netflix started to be successful, the legacy companies still weren’t like, “Oh god, we gotta … ” No, they were like, “Great. Keep licensing our stuff. Here. Friends. Give us money. You can run Friends.” It really wasn’t until they felt that there was an existential threat to their existence, and I think that was a miscalculation, by the way.
John: Here’s a question for you. Let’s say streaming never happens. Netflix doesn’t happen, and streaming never happens. Do the cable companies get even more powerful? Because they were the people not making the shows, but controlling access to people’s TVs.
Craig: Cable and satellite become more powerful. It is possible that a company like YouTube, which has successfully replaced a lot of cables and satellite dishes, would have become the other new dominant delivery system, but they would’ve been a delivery system. They wouldn’t have been a creation/delivery system. That’s the difference.
John: I agree. Let’s wrap up our big counterfactuals segment here talking through why I think it’s useful. It’s because when you look at the coin tosses, the ways things could’ve gone one way or the other way, you recognize that, as you said before, Craig, we are in a counterfactual. We’re in somebody else’s counterfactual. Things worked out the way they worked out, but they were not inevitable. We have to be mindful that the choices we make now will have repercussions down the road that we can’t always anticipate. I think it’s always nice looking at this ecosystem we find ourselves in was not the only possible version of this.
Craig: No. It is an either distressing or comforting notion to think that we are in the alternate reality, and in our version of the sim that we all live in, yeah, we’re missing some awesome things or we dodged massive bullets.
John: For sure. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Thing.
Craig: Yay.
John: We haven’t done a One Cool Thing together for a while.
Craig: Yay.
John: Mine is on post-quantum cryptography, which is a mouthful but actually makes a lot of sense. I’ll link to an Apple Security blog post they did about it. The idea of post-quantum cryptography is – obviously, cryptography is so important for securing our communications. It’s making sure that the things we want to say private stay private, and messaging, all that stuff. Right now, we are using cryptography which is so strong that computers could spend 1,000 years trying to break the codes behind stuff, and they wouldn’t be able to open these messages. The problem is, at some point we’re going to get to quantum computers that are so powerful and so fast that this cryptography will fall apart. It will not be useful.
And so a thing that is happening is very well-resourced companies or nations can just say, “Okay, we’re going to suck up all this data. We can’t actually process it now. We can’t actually break the codes. But we know that in a couple years, we will be able to.” This becomes like, then how do you prevent that?
This paper goes through these plans for and these actual new algorithms to figure it out, for living in a post-quantum cryptography world, so basically, how do you encode things now so that as quantum computers come online, you still can’t open those messages.
The good news is there’s math that can get you there, so that it’s still going to be incredibly difficult for these super-super-super-computers to open those messages. There are things you can turn on now or soon in these messaging platforms that will keep stuff locked down whenever these quantum computers come online. Interesting. I like that it’s both dealing with problems now and problems 10, 20 years from now.
Craig: That’s smart. Phew. There is a problem I hadn’t thought of. Thanks. Now I’ll be awake at night. My One Cool Thing is a bit sweeter, pun intended, but also a bit sad, and somehow one of the most gripping articles I’ve ever read about marshmallows.
John: I love marshmallows.
Craig: John, have you ever had a Smashmallow?
John: I don’t know what that is.
Craig: Neither did I. Drew, Smashmallow?
Drew: I’ve never had a Smashmallow.
Craig: Apparently, these were a bit popular a bit ago. There’s this guy, Jon Sebastiani. This is an article in Business Insider. Jon Sebastiani is a scion of a big wine company in Sonoma. He created the company Krave, with a K, which makes fancy beef jerky and so forth. He got into this new area of creating fancy marshmallows, fancy handmade marshmallows that were delicious and had lots of different flavors, and they were hand-cut. And people really dug them.
Then he decided, “It’s time to upscale this business. Let’s go big.” What ensued was an incredible collision of desire and reality, on an engineering level, because as it turns out, making marshmallows to scale is enormously hard. The marshmallows that we all know, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Kraft marshmallow type marshmallows, the reason they are the way they are and they just all vaguely suck is because that’s as good as they can do. Even the shape is necessary. Those are cylinders. Smashmallows were handmade. They would make these big slabs and cut them in squares, and people really liked the squares. Making squares at scale, making cubes, really, really hard.
What happens and how this whole thing falls apart is actually fascinating from a chemical, physical, and business level. And of course, it all comes tumbling down. There are lawsuits. And Smashmallow is no more.
John: It’s great. As I’m skimming through this article, it’s the Theranos of marshmallows.
Craig: Isn’t that great? It really is. When you read it, you’re like… People were lying. He’s looking for this company that can build new machines to make the Smashmallows at scale. This company, I think it’s in the Netherlands, says, “We can do it. We can do it. We’re going to send you a sample of what we made to show you.” He was like, “Oh my god, you did it.” The big secret was they didn’t make that sample with a machine at all.
John: It was handcut.
Craig: They just lied.
John: They lied.
Craig: They just lied.
John: They lied.
Craig: Just lied.
John: This past week, I had to go in for a blood test, and I remember coming back and telling Mike, “Man, I was there, and it just seems really inefficient. I felt like there’s a way you could have a machine that could just do this for you.” I’m like, “Oh shoot, I’m pitching Theranos, aren’t I? I’m going to stop right now. I am pitching Theranos.”
Craig: Just to tie back to our counterfactual, was her machine called the Edison?
John: Maybe so. A counterfactual is, what if she’d actually been able to make that machine? In theory, it’s a really good idea. But apparently, it’s like the Smashmallow. Yes, you think you should be able to make that thing, when it turns out you can’t.
Craig: I think if she had been able to make that machine, somebody would’ve made that machine already. When she was like, “We’re going to take a drop of blood and do all of your blood tests from a drop of blood,” I remember her mentor at Stanford, this wonderful professor, just said to her, “No. That is literally physically impossible on a molecular level.” But there was maybe slightly more of a chance that the marshmallow thing could’ve worked.
John: I’m sure that professor would’ve told Thomas Edison that he couldn’t make a motion picture projector, and look at him, he did.
Craig: Definitely a better chance of that than the-
Drew: Theranos machine ever working.
John: Theranos machines. Craig, a pleasure talking with you again.
Craig: Great to be back.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Yay!
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Hooray!
John: Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We love when good outros come through. Reminder that outros involve some version of (sings). You can hide it in there, but I’m always listening for it. Sometimes we’ll get these outros that are like, that is musically beautiful, but it’s not a Scriptnotes outro. You gotta get that in there. We gotta hear that.
Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The one this past week was really good. It’s about oases and the moments in a story where characters find a bit of respite and escape from the plot and how important those are in stories. Inneresting.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on capitalism.
Craig: Yay.
John: Yay.
Craig: Yay.
John: Craig, it’s so nice to have you back.
Craig: Great to be back, John.
John: Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, capitalism.
Craig: What?
John: What?
Craig: Huh?
John: It is the water we are swimming in. It is the system of finance and economics that we’ve grown up in. At the same time, when I see people complain about things in the world or about technology or about AI or other things, I’m like, yeah, but that is actually just capitalism you’re concerned about. That’s just how things are. Craig, I’m curious, when were you aware of capitalism?
Craig: Early age. Social studies class. You learn about different forms of economy. Certainly, we learned about the alternatives. In the ’80s, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of capitalism as a problem.
John: Yeah, because we had capitalism versus Communists. It was us versus the Russians.
Craig: There was the middle ground of socialism. But I think there was also a less angry discussion over it. Deregulation began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. But prior to that, we had and still have things like Social Security, which has the world “social” in it, which people that hate socialism are really angry about if you say that you would take it away. We have Medicare, and we have Medicaid, and we have Workman’s Comp, and we have Disability, and we have taxes. The thing is, we do live in a socialist system. I don’t know how you can’t, other than some sort of Ayn Rand fantasy-ville.
Capitalism was never seen as some sort of pure thing, but rather it was a negotiating thing. Tying back to what we were talking about earlier with Edison, one of the things we learned about quite a bit was how capitalism unchecked became a real problem around the turn of the century in the United States, the turn of the 20th century, and Sinclair Lewis and child labor, the meatpacking industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor movement, and all that leading into the busting of monopolies, robber barons, etc. There was a time when in our country, capitalism got out of hand, and the government stepped in and put it in check, and it hasn’t done so again effectively since.
Where I’m sitting here, I agree with you. When people are complaining, what they are complaining about is capitalism. But from my point of view, I would say what they’re really, really, really complaining about is the dysregulated capitalism.
John: We were alive during the time of Reagan and, “We’re going to take away all these rules about stuff that are holding us back.” And it’s hard to remember that there was a time before then, when there were more controls over what people could do, what companies could do and the size and scale of what they’re able to do.
I remember my dad worked for AT&T, or Bell Labs, and when the phone monopoly got broken up, I was like, “Oh my god, what are they doing? That’s crazy.” But it was the right choice, in retrospect. It was a dumb system we were living in. The innovation that was possible afterwards was important.
Let’s talk for a moment about definitions of what capitalism is, because there’s things that are in capitalism that are also common in other systems too. But important distinctions: the idea of a competitive market, that you want to have multiple companies competing for buyers, and buyers can choose between places they want to buy from; the sense of price finding, that there’s not a set price, but the price will find its right balance based on supply and demand; the idea of private property, property rights recognition, which includes patents and trademarks and copyright; the idea of wage labor, which seems so basic, but obviously in a lot of other economic systems, you don’t get paid wages for things.
You could argue, was America set up under a capitalism system? Kind of. The term wasn’t really used. But we also had slavery, so you can’t say that we were under any true wage system.
Craig: We certainly were not.
John: No. It’s complicated, but I think we have this fundamental belief and understanding that America has always been this capitalist nation. It’s like, not really.
Craig: No, we were more akin to a feudal nation. I think our economy was somewhat feudal. Obviously, there were two economies in the early United States. But one economy was victorious in the end, and that was industry. The growth of industry and the Industrial Revolution created what we consider capitalism today, I do believe. That was also what Marx was reacting to, and Hegel and the rest of them.
What industry did was create a both tremendous energy of creation and freedom and wealth, and also terrible exploitation and destruction. On one hand, industry – which we have in our brains converted into technology, but if we lived in China, we would understand is also industry, where everything is manufactured still – has led to longer lives, has led to tremendous advances in technology that liberates and connects. The creation of simple things like washing machines was essential to the liberation of women, who were traditionally stuck washing clothes literally all day.
But without regulation, almost every single time, what ends up happening is terrible pollution, the abuse of children, the underpayment of labor, extremist slavery, and then monopolization, which undoes what you call price seeking and freedom and actually begins to destroy creativity, and it kills itself. Capitalism is like bacteria that works well in our body until it runs rampant and then it can kill us.
John: A term I hear used a lot is late-stage capitalism. I wasn’t even quite clear what people are trying to refer to with it. It’s basically this moment that we’re in right now that has not just giant corporations, but multinational corporations, where you can’t even point to a center of them. They’re harder to control and regulate because they exist beyond national boundaries.
A thing that we’re both agreeing on here is that capitalism relies on a government system to enforce contracts and do certain things, and yet as individuals, we rely on the government to protect us from the worst abuses that these companies are going to enforce upon us. That is a real challenge when companies exist beyond all conceivable boundaries. It requires multinational government agreement on how to deal with these corporations. That’s not a thing that we really have a good structure for at this moment.
Craig: No. The closest we have is the United States government, which is being held hostage by one political party that at this point seems to only have, “We don’t like government,” as a purpose. And then there is the European economic community, which does represent itself fairly well as a large corporation of companies. It is in fact Europe that seems to be doing the only holding companies to accountability action. Now, they are not a particularly efficient group. Government is notorious for being inefficient. It’s why capitalism is also necessary. If government is in charge of creation, production, and payment, in general, you end up with a bureaucratic sludge.
Capitalism, to me, is really just the expression of human nature in economic form. But just like human nature, we need law. What we do see is Europe, representing a very large market, can say to, for instance, Google or Amazon, “No, you can’t do that anymore. We don’t like that anymore. Stop it.” The United States used to do that. It’s been quite some time, and these companies seem to be just flouting all of the rules. But the United States still represents an enormous marketplace. If the United States, for instance, said to Amazon or Netflix, “You can’t do these things anymore,” then it would have to stop.
That said, some of the things that Europe has done, particularly vis a vis technology to try and curb late-stage capitalistic companies, just is ineffectual nuisance. For instance, the constant asking me if I want to accept the cookies. Okay. Sure.
John: Yeah, or like, you must use USB-C. Sure, great. There’s the concern that they will tend to favor European companies over American companies. Yeah, we get all that. I think what it comes down to is – I say people’s complaints are really about capitalism. The second part of that answer is, and the solutions to these things are demanding of your government to address these concerns, because you’re not going to be able to address these concerns. You can’t yell at the corporation to do better. You actually have to – it requires action to make any of these changes.
Craig: Yes. Corporations, by charter, are designed to maximize profits for their shareholders. That is their sole purpose. What that means is that if they could get away with paying their workers five cents an hour, including hiring children, they would, because that satisfies their charter, to maximize profits. That’s where we need regulation.
The people that are angry about capitalism probably, almost certainly, are reasonably angry, because they’re probably being underpaid. Most people are. Wages have not progressed as they should. And if the United States government were functional and mandated a healthy minimum wage, I think people would be complaining less, because that’s a huge problem. They don’t get paid enough.
Also, companies – particularly, the financial industry has become so complicated and so disconnected from creation that this concept of too big to fail is real. We’re now on the system where capitalism – some companies simply cannot lose. If they lose, society falls apart, because they’re too integrated into our backbone. That’s a huge problem.
John: I think a previous One Cool Thing on an earlier episode was a book I was reading on the history of corporations. Corporations have existed before capitalism. They were originally designed to do sailing expeditions to different places, basically how you’d raise enough money to do a thing. Importantly, corporations had to get a charter that was literally from the royals. The imperial state had to give them the charter.
The argument is basically that government should basically have that same kind of charter thing, saying you actually have to serve the public in what your corporation does. There has to be a purpose beyond just making money. That’s an idea that we’ve completely lost. That seems insane, but that was the idea.
Craig: That was the idea. Just as certain concepts like copyright have become abused or weaponized, so too has the notion of corporatism and the idea that corporation now begins to shield all human beings from accountability. The creation of corporations is something that, at least in the state of Delaware, appears to be a hand wave. You and I both made corporations for ourselves, loan-out corporations.
John: Scriptnotes is an LLC.
Craig: There you go. Those corporations required a whole lot of one page of paperwork.
John: Yes, indeed.
Craig: They exist to take advantage of certain business things and certain tax things, so the tax code, all of it. Think about that, that the tax code – that’s the oxygen that government breathes to live – is in and of itself interwoven into corporate creation and corporate function. The economists argue with each other constantly over how this all works. I suppose if we step back really, really far and boil it down to its simplest, simplest version, it’s that there needs to be a balance, and we are out of balance.
John: We’re out of balance. We’re simplifying, yet it’s actually accurate, because we recognize that all the good things about capitalism and corporations, in terms of price finding and all that stuff, there is an efficiency there that you cannot replace. But without the acknowledgement of the individual value of people and societies and the environment, you’re going to end up in a terrible, dark place.
Craig: If you only value profit, you will die. You have to also value things that will diminish profit, like the health and welfare of human beings, because in the end, that’s what the economy is for. What our economy has turned into is an economy that exists to hyper-enrich an incredibly small amount of people. It’s just not going to work. We’ve been here before. I think the richest person ever in terms of dollars out of the amount of dollars that existed on the planet was Rockefeller perhaps or maybe Getty.
John: Perhaps, yeah.
Craig: The original oil barons, the robber barons. That’s why it changed. There was that period in the earlier part of the 20th century where America corrected what had been an out-of-control corporatization in our country. We are so clearly in need of that now.
Part of what we struggle with is that all of the messaging and discussion and the politics and the way politics functions as – these campaigns are corporations – the corporations themselves are sitting there, including the ones you and I work for, guiding the discussion. The people who want to not return balance to the system are the ones that have their finger on the play button.
John: At least we’ve solved it. That’s the good news. We talked it through. We figured it out. So problems resolved.
Craig: Problem solved. There’s something counterfactual where Rupert Murdoch isn’t born or decides to learn guitar and be in a band, a lovely band in Australia.
John: Or he has some sort of Christmas Carol kind of visiting by three ghosts, and things turn out very differently.
Craig: Where are the ghosts when you need them?
John: That’s the question. Never the ghosts when you want one. Craig, Drew, thanks so much.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Links:
- What If? by Robert Cowley
- Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
- United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. on Wikipedia
- George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’ by Tim Ott for Biography
- When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
- ‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped by Richard Newby for THR
- Financial Interest and Syndication Rules
- Post-Quantum Cryptography
- S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them. by Adam Rogers
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Zach Lo (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 634: What If? Hollywood Edition, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig can’t help but look at intrinsic motivations — those specific internal drives that guide characters behavior. They discuss how to structure and expose that internal drive, the importance of an innate irritability, how it can stop your characters from becoming flat, and rewarding that intrinsic motivation with choice.
But first, we follow up on AI training, blueprints and “important” movies. We also weigh in on a high-school senior’s college dilemma and answer a listener question on writing with your trailer in mind.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig parse out their reasons for why humans may – or may not – ever leave the solar system.
Links:
- My Pal Foot Foot by The Shaggs
- Braid by Jonathan Blow
- Connections from the New York Times
- Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show? by David Segal for The New York Times
- On what motivates us: a detailed review of intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation by Laurel S. Morris, Mora M. Grehl, Sarah B. Rutter, Marishka Mehta, and Margaret L. Westwater
- Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? by PJ Vogt
- Shōgun on FX
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Intrinsic Motivation first appeared on John August.
John and Craig lawyer up with criminal defense attorney Ken White (aka Popehat) to look at legal scenes in movies and TV, and separate the tropes from the truth.
How do lawyers actually prepare a case? Will they meet a client in jail? Do they need to gather evidence themselves? And what happens when they go to trial? What are the rules for examining witnesses? How often do people represent themselves in court? And do judges really bang their gavel like that?
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig invite Ken to imagine traveling somewhere worse than prison — the beach.
Links:
- Ken White on BlueSky, Facebook and Threads
- Serious Trouble podcast
- The Popehat Report by Ken White
- Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry by Hanna Rosin for The New Republic
- LibreOffice
- Sovereign Citizens Getting Owned
- The Rest is History podcast
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Lou Stone Borenstein (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Lawyer Scenes first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at four unbelievable stories in the news and ask, How Would This Be a Movie? Stories include a finance journalist who was scammed out of her savings, men who offer dating bounties, a franken-sheep made of cloned animal parts, and how standardized tests changed one woman’s life.
We also reveal which modern classics we’ve never seen (We meant to! We’re sorry!) to decide which – if any – we need to watch. But first, we follow up on D&D for kids, ESL, AI in reality TV, and Tiffany problems before answering listener questions on formats and recommending your spouse.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig look at new guidelines for AI and how they might affect our future.
Links:
- Weekend Read 2
- “Creep” post by @davo_arid on Twitter
- Full list of movies we haven’t seen
- The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles for The Cut
- Wanted: True Love. Reward: $100,000 by Angela Chen for the NYT
- Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts by Matt Novak for Gizmodo
- How the SAT Changed My Life by Emi Nietfeld for the NYT
- D.C. – What It Is
- Fighting Fantasy books
- LA Hero Workshop
- Sodalitas
- OSR’s Oz and Neverland
- Questlings
- Color My Quest
- WyrdScouts
- The Excellents and Nancy Druid
- Hero Kids
- TTRPGkids
- Hide’n’Treat and Snuffle Mat
- Jaina Grey’s reviews for WIRED
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Tim Brown (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 4-2-24: Listener Luke Rankin created a Letterboxd list of all the movies featured in this episode. You can view it here.
The post Love and Money first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Pamela Ribon (Nimona, My Year of Dicks) to quietly ask: what’s with all the whispering in movies these days? They discuss trends and techniques in voice and volume, picking the right moment to whisper, and the value of voices across decibel levels.
We also revisit Pamela’s work on Moana to look at what you can learn from reading early drafts, ponder the threat of TikTok and YouTube, follow-up on vetting potential co-workers, and answer a listener question on writing animation.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Pam shares all her star-studded stories from sitting in the 5th row at this year’s Oscars.
Links:
- Pamela Ribon on Instagram
- Listen to Sassy
- My Year of Dicks
- Nimona on Netflix
- Hire Survivors Hollywood
- Dune: Part Two Clip
- ‘Fundie Baby Voice’ Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here’s What You Should Know by Caroline Bologna for Huffpost
- In a World – Smoothie
- Natural Born Killers 1990 Draft
- Natural Born Killers 1993 Draft
- Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘I Want’ Songs, Going Method for ‘Moana’ and Fearing David Bowie
- More (Outtake) from Moana
- How Far I’ll Go from Moana
- How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood? by Mark Harris for NYT
- This Sitcom Got WEIRD When Nobody Watched It by David Friedman
- Researching An Old Sitcom With AI by David Friedman
- Coucou French classes
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Vincent DeVito (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Whispering Loudly first appeared on John August.
John and Craig wring their hands and ask, how do you make sure the person you’re hiring isn’t a monster? They look at best practices for vetting colleagues, sussing out problematic people, and managing your own emotions when you’re the person with power.
We also discuss writing for non-native English speakers, using three examples to illustrate the importance of syntax, musicality and authenticity. But first, we answer listener questions on giving notes and kids playing D&D.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we spill the kool-aid on our fears and fascinations with cults.
Links:
- Strands from the New York Times
- Anatomy of a Fall – Clip
- Past Lives by Celine Song
- Irma Vep – Clip
- Is This Hollywood’s #MeanToo Moment? by David Mack for Slate
- How to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids
- RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
- Recursion – Glitch Games
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 04-22-24: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post Is This Person Going to Ruin Everything? first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 630 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we welcome Celine Song, a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
We will talk about that movie, but also getting staffed on a TV show, raising financing, making your first feature in two different countries. But before that, staffing on a TV show, deciding between film school versus playwriting school. We’ll answer some listener questions. It’s a great conversation. And in a bonus conversation for premium members, Celine and I discuss Zoom and other online performances, including her staging of The Seagull on Sims 4. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We have the best listeners in the world, and they came through this week.
Drew Marquardt: We had a lot of people write in about examples of the Tiffany problem, which we talked about last week.
John: The Tiffany problem, that’s where Tiffany is actually an old name, so people used to be called Tiffany, but if you use that name now, people think that just seems weird, a period film should not have a character named Tiffany.
Drew: There’s quite a few examples. Courtney wrote in, “As a birdwatcher, one Tiffany problem I know of is the call of a bald eagle. Most Americans associate a bald eagle’s call with soaring, almost echoing screech, not pretty per se, but definitely powerful and approaching majestic. Here’s an example. (bird screech) But that’s actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk. An accurate bald eagle sound is almost painfully high-pitched and typically kind of chippy, like a yapping dog.” (eagle call)
John: Wow. That is really, really different. We’ll put a link into the YouTube videos of those two, because when you see the bald eagle doing its thing, it’s like, that’s not a graceful way of making a sound.
Drew: No, not at all.
John: A perfect example of a Tiffany problem, because if you put in the real thing, people would laugh. It just doesn’t sound right. We associate the bald eagle sounding a particular way, even though it’s not the situation. Unless you’re going to call it out, I think you’d go with the wrong version. What else do we have for Tiffany problems?
Drew: Michael in Astoria writes, “My favorite reference for the Tiffany problem is Deadwood and its infamous use of profanity. When researching, David Milch discovered that while historic analogs for his character did in fact swear freely, they would use archaic profanity that is comical to modern ears, would’ve had all the characters sounding like Yosemite Sam if they’d insisted on historical accuracy. So rather than provoke unwanted laughter in the audience, he opted for modern profanity that was accurate to the spirit of how the curse words were intended, but which the characters would not have actually used.”
John: Again, a problem where historical accuracy and specificity could’ve worked against you, and so you made the choice to have everyone dropping F bombs all the time. I get it. It does change our perception of how people spoke in that time, but they just don’t have any other real, good Western examples of profanity, so it felt real to me.
Drew: Although now I’m curious what those weird swears were.
John: I want to hear what all those words were.
Drew: Kate writes, “I used to be a children’s book editor, and I once edited a book of short stories set during the First World War. One author wrote a story set at a girls’ school, and she included a scene in which one girl wrote a note to another reading, ‘See you at,’ like the at sign, ‘break.’ And I queried this use of the at symbol. And the author assured me that the at symbol had been in use since at least the 1500s. It was used that way in the early 20th century. I told her that didn’t matter; it would seem anachronistic to a reader anyway.”
John: I grew up knowing that that symbol meant at or that we used it to mean at, although I think it also could mean to or at for a quantity at a certain amount at a certain price. I remember seeing it on typewriters, but of course we didn’t really use it everyday use until there were email addresses and ultimately handles for things. I agree with Kate here. At feels strange historically. I think it could bum for some people, even though it’s accurate.
Drew: Phillip writes, “Recently, my mom mentioned rewatching her favorite film, The American President, and how it occurred to her how much paper the people in the White House are shown using. This is accurate to the time it was shot. But it was shocking to her how much digitization has changed office work.”
John: Yes, I think if you look at older things… I remember looking at broadcast news. They have to use these tapes. They’re literally carrying tapes around.
Drew: Oh my god.
John: It seems impossible. Older movies are going to have paper in them. We talked about all the kazoos in Maestro, which is basically like, yes, people would’ve been smoking a lot in that time, but it’s just distracting, because there’s just so much of it. This mention of The American President, I have to take a little sidebar to talk about, Rob Reiner was on Love It or Leave It, this other podcast I listen to, and was talking about how Aaron Sorkin’s script for The American President was like 350 pages. It was some crazy, crazy long script. Sorkin later apologized for the script being so long, but apparently, a lot of the stuff that got pulled out of the script for The American President became The West Wing. So maybe that’s an argument for writing long sometimes.
Drew: I love The American President. It’s nice and tight.
John: Nice and tight. It was not nice and tight to begin with. Examples of the Tiffany problem. What else do we have for follow-up?
Drew: We had some listeners write in about different foreign courts, because we were talking about Anatomy of a Fall. Anonymous writes in to say, “I’ll share what I know of a Russian courtroom, which will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s read stories of people charged and quickly convicted in Russia.
“Back when adoptions there were allowed, you had to go to court to get yours approved. In our region, even with the foot-high stack of stamped, embossed, certified, and Apostille documents testifying to every aspect of your interest and ability to adopt and raise the child, there was still no guarantee you would get approved. And why? The room setup gives a clue.
“While the judge presides over the court from a familiar front-and-center raised platform, what’s completely freaky is that when you walk in, you see that the entire left of the room is taken up by a prison cell made up of heavy iron bars on all four sides and the top. This is where the defendant stands during the trial, though thankfully not prospective adoptive parents. We get hard, wooden benches.
“When I asked why, it was explained that contrary to our legal principles of innocent until proven guilty, in Russia when someone is charged, it’s assumed they’re guilty and you must prove your innocence from jail. I looked it up later, and legally, this is in fact not true. But as they say in Sleepless in Seattle, it sure feels and looks true.”
John: This is an example of just the courtroom setup. Imagine that there was a scene taking place in a Russian courtroom. If, in the script, you did not actually describe what things are like, we would default to our American expectations of a courtroom, and they would be wrong. It would be a very different feel from what we actually would see in the film. This feels crucial information for a screenwriter to know if you’re going with this kind of scene. Similarly, in Anatomy of a Fall, if you didn’t know what that French courtroom was set up like and would just default to an American thing, you would be just incredibly wrong.
Drew: David in Australia writes, “I want to share my experience sitting on a jury in Australia. The biggest disappointment for me was that the jury was removed from the court any time there were matters of law to discuss. Whenever a lawyer would overstep or they needed to discuss precedent in certain areas of the case, the jury wasn’t privy to this information. The public galley could stay and listen during these moments, but the Australian system seems to think that this would taint the jurors. I guess it’s probably better than having a judge tell the jury, ‘Disregard everything you just heard,’ because let’s be honest, no one’s disregarding that stuff.”
John: I’ve been on one jury trial, and there were situations where I felt like the matters of law went to the judge’s chamber, so rather than us leaving, the judge and the counsel leaves to talk in his chamber. But yeah, it again is a structural thing. You do need to know what the differences are in a different country, because otherwise you could get this wrong in a way that would hurt your story. Let’s wrap up with, I see Lewant has a thing from the Netherlands.
Drew: To your point about defaulting to the American style, Lewant says, “A one-panel comic from a Dutch newspaper says, ‘Fulk and Zuk spend most of their student days watching TV.’ And this judge says, ‘Will you please stop referring to the stenographer as members of the jury?’ The joke is that the Dutch court system does not have a jury system, yet most of us personally witness it through U.S. media.”
John: Exactly. If you’re in one of these countries, and you’re expecting a jury trial, and there is no jury, that is very different. Again, if you’re writing a scene that is taking place in a foreign courtroom, don’t rely on your American expectations of how things are supposed to work, because it could be very, very wrong. Drew, thank you for the follow-up.
Now, let’s welcome on our guest. Celine Song is a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Celine, welcome.
Celine Song: Thank you. Hi, hi. So happy to be here.
John: We’re so happy to have you here. I really want to talk to you, of all the folks out there on awards season, because I think your experience feels probably the most relevant to a lot of our listeners, who are aspiring filmmakers, because not only is this your first feature, but you’ve made it internationally. It’s complicated between two countries. It’s a very personal story that you could’ve done as a book or as a play, but to do it as a movie felt like the right choice.
We had Lulu Wang on a couple years ago to talk about The Farewell. It felt like she was telling a story that only she could direct, and so same like you only would make sense for you to direct this. It just felt so relevant to a lot of our listeners.
I’m so excited to talk to you about not just your movie, but also the process of getting to the point where you could make that movie. Could we start back at the beginning? What is your experience or history with storytelling and with filmmaking? Where did that start for you?
Celine: To me, I went to grad school for playwriting. Then I stayed in playwriting. I was a playwright for 10 years, including my years in grad school. I was doing a lot of plays in New York City, off-Broadway. I wrote on a TV show as a staff writer, Wheel of Time. That was the first for-screen writing that I’ve done. I think it really was writing the script for Past Lives, and it really was the script that did the work of getting itself made. But I’ve been a dramatist for a lot longer. I feel like that would be the right word for it. I’ve been a dramatic storyteller.
John: Can we wind all the way back though? Because I’m really curious when you were aware of stories being told on screen. What got you to the point of, “Oh.” Because before you decided, “I’m going to go to school to learn this,” you had to think, “This is a thing that’s interesting to me.” What are those original sparks? Were there things you were seeing? Were there plays you were seeing? How did it all start?
Celine: I think when I was very young – I was like seven – I wrote a poem about a spider eating a butterfly. The poem was about how it is sad that the spider is eating the butterfly, and the butterfly is getting eaten, but what can you do about it? Because spider is really hungry. Spider has to eat. I think that really is my first foray into writing really more than anything. I really do think about that as my first piece of work, because I think that there’s something about that, what that poem is about, that I think lives in me pretty fundamentally. For example, there not ever being any villains.
John: I want to get into that with Past Lives, because it’s a story without villains. I think you said in an interview the only villains are time and circumstance. It’s fate that’s made this thing not be possible in a certain way.
Celine: Time and space.
John: Of course, your characters are able to overcome some of that because of the wonders of technology and Skype, but there’s limits to how much that can happen. But still staying on your trajectory there, you’ve written a poem. You can write a story with characters. But why go into playwriting, why go into filmmaking ultimately, rather than becoming a poet or a novelist? What was the trajectory there? At this point, were you in Korea when you were writing that story? Had you already come over to Canada? What was your history there?
Celine: I wrote the poem in Korea, in Korean. Then when I turned, I think, 13 is when I moved to Canada. I was ESL, so I was learning English. I think that was a main thing that I was doing, and keeping up with schoolwork while being ESL. Eventually though, I took Latin in school, and I became a part of Classics Club.
In Ontario, where I grew up, Ontario, Canada, there is a classics conference. There they actually have a play competition, where you write a play and you get to put it on. There’s also a filmmaking competition, both of which I wrote and directed something for. Mind you, I was still a little ESL. But I wrote a movie and directed it, and then I wrote a play and directed it. This was high school. I think that those were some of the ways that I was just doing it sometimes, doing it any opportunity I could get.
But when I went to college, I went to university for psychology, and I minored in philosophy. I think that for a while there, I thought that I was going to be a psychologist. But I never made it, because in my final year as a psychology student, I wrote two plays for the short play festival that was happening at my university. I was like, “I think I just have to write fictional things, write dramatic things.” Then I think that after that, I started applying to grad school, and I decided to go to school for theater.
John: We have a lot of listeners who are ESL, who either they’re living in the States but grew up ESL, or they’re living internationally and they’re debating between writing in their own native language and writing in English. At what point were you deciding, “I’m going to focus on English,” or, “I’m going to use the two of them.” At what point did you feel like the artistic work needed to incorporate both or one thing? What was your process there?
Celine: I think that to me, it really has to do with who the audience is. I think that if I am making something for a Korean-speaking audience, then I would probably write it in Korean. But I think because my audience that I had moved to New York City to be a part of the community for is an English-speaking audience, so I was writing in English. I think it was very much about, how do I tell the story in a way that the audience is going to come meet it? Who’s going to fill the seats? I think that really was the impetus behind it.
I think something that is very difficult about being ESL is actually less the not knowing English of it, but the lack of confidence, or the way that it is harder to hold onto the confidence, especially as a writer. To be a professional writer, the professional writer means that you are the expert, you’re the chosen expert, or you’re the expert in a community for communication and being able to use language and being able to experiment with language, all of those things.
The ESL, it is, of course, a bit of a chip on your shoulder about, “Yeah, but it’s not my native language, so how good can I be?” That’s of course something that is coming from everyone around you, who when they find out that you’re ESL – or in my situation, I have a light accent for being an immigrant – and all of those things, there is a way in which you are questioned or underestimated by people who English is a native language. But some of that, I think that of course becomes a little bit internalized. So you walk around feeling like, “If I’m ESL, how good can I be?”
But I think that something that really shifted that for me and really gave me such confidence is that, actually, I have a handle on two languages. When I think about the language of English, being able to look at it objectively or think about it objectively or from the outsider perspective, even a little bit, gives me actually more control. It actually gives me a deeper understanding of how English as a language works.
There was a really amazing feeling that I had working on a play where I was like, actually, I am in the engine of the English language, because it didn’t come naturally to me. I didn’t just show up and then English was there for me. I actually had to learn the parts of it. In that way, I can be better at it than a native speaker.
In the meantime, I also have the context of an entirely different language that works completely differently structurally, that gives me the depths of knowledge around language, generally, that it makes me actually a better mechanic in general of any kind of language too. Also, I know what the alternative is. I’m like, “There isn’t a word for it in English, and there is a word for it in Korean.”
What an amazing thing that just the way that I think about the world, the way that I think about character, story, can be just a little bit bigger, because I speak more than one language. I think that that was such a big turning point for my life as ESL. I hope that moment and that feeling of confidence comes to all your listeners who are ESL as well.
John: What I hear you saying is to avoid that tendency to apologize or to step back from the fact that you’re not a native speaker and lean into the fact that because you had to learn it, you actually recognize some things about the language, and you recognize what’s beyond the edges of what’s possible in normal English.
Celine: Yeah, and also specificity. When I’m choosing a word, I can be more specific with it, because it’s not how I have always thought about that word. I can be really specific with it.
John: I grew up in English, but then I had Spanish very early on. Spanish was my first process of learning a language and actually learning, oh, there are verbs, there are nouns, there are adjectives. I actually had to learn all this structural stuff that comes with the language. Getting that in the third grade was really early for me, but it was incredibly helpful to recognize, oh, we must have these same things in English and probably every other language too, and just give you a systematic sense of like, languages will do very different things, but they’ll still have the same concepts behind how they are organizing themselves. It made me just more curious about English, because I could see where the roots of things were. You saw how things grew together and grew apart over time.
Celine: Exactly, yeah.
John: Now, I want to talk to you about writing in English and writing in Korean, because obviously in Past Lives, characters can speak Korean, and we will subtitle it, which is great, because that’s a convention of film is that we can subtitle things. But if you’re doing a play work with Korean characters, subtitling is much more difficult. I haven’t seen your play Endlings, but in that play, are the characters speaking English and speaking Korean? How do you approach that for the stage?
Celine: They speak English. I think that something that I really found is the way that Past Lives is a script that’s written is bilingually. I would write what I wanted the character to say in Korean, and underneath, I would translate it in the way that I saw the subtitles. And of course, I knew that the subtitles is a part of the story.
For example, there’s a scene in the film where the character Hae Sung, who only speaks Korean, the character Arthur, who only speaks English, they meet each other for the very first time. If this movie was about a traditional love triangle, they would start being angry with each other. Because this is an unconventional love triangle, what happens is that Hae Sung and Arthur, they look at each other, and then the first thing that they do is Arthur says hello in Korean, in bad Korean, and Hae Sung says hello in English to Arthur, and in bad English. I
n that way, you’re seeing that these two characters are trying to speak in the other person’s language, and really choosing to speak in a language that is not comfortable for themselves. I think in that way, the movie is fundamentally a bilingual story. It’s actually about bilingualism. It’s about the way that the main character, Nora, holds two parts of herself that are in different languages and different cultures. I think in that way, I knew it needed to be written bilingually, and I am bilingual myself, so that is what I wanted to do.
Then when it came to subtitling the film, I wanted the subtitles to be a part of the picture. It’s part of the visual language of it. When the subtitles show up or the subtitles don’t was something that I wanted to be really specific about, because some part of the language has to remain a mystery, because it is about the mystery of not speaking the other person’s language or not speaking the language of the person that you’re in a marriage with, even. It had to work that way.
John: Obviously, in the childhood sections that are set in Korea, or if you’re with Hae Sung and his friends who are speaking Korean, it’s more conventionally subtitled. You’ve written English lines. You know exactly what they need to be. But it feels more traditional in the New York sections, where there are characters who wouldn’t be able to speak with each other. You’ve been much more cinematic in terms of recognizing the communication gaps between them.
Celine: Of course. Of course, some of the translation is not meant for direct accuracy. It is sometimes rewritten to express the feeling that I need it to be. I think that sometimes it’s like, the metaphor, the poetry of it in English is not going to translate to Korean and vice versa. I think that those are the things that I wanted to be deep in it with, because that’s really what the script was about, and it’s what the movie’s about.
John: Now, before you could go off and make this movie, you actually had another credit. You’re working on Wheel of Time, the Amazon series. I’m really curious, what else were you writing that got you staffed on Wheel of Time? That was your first staffing job. Could you talk us through that? Because a lot of our listeners are probably thinking about, it seems impossible to be staffed on an American show like that. What was your process getting there?
Celine: I think I just wrote a pilot. I wrote a pilot as a spec pilot. It was about professional poker players. It was just there as a sample. It was a traditional three-act with commercial breaks, kind of like a hardcore TV pilot. But the thing is, I know that this is something the showrunner of Wheel of Time, Rafe, and I talked about as the reason why Rafe hired me, which is that Rafe doesn’t play poker, but when he read my pilot, he understood poker, if not the game itself, but what poker is at its heart. Even if you don’t know the mechanic of poker, you understood why poker is fun.
That is a skillset as a writer that he was looking for, because of course, Wheel of Time is a very intricate and deep, with magical systems, fantasy show. You need a writer who is able to translate just a wall of meaning kind of story and to find something that even somebody who’s not familiar with the world can love. I think that that’s why he loved the pilot and that’s why he hired me for it. Also, I am a TV writer who had read Wheel of Time before. I think that was another part that I think was really great.
John: I realize I’m falling into a trap that so often happens in interviews where you assume that every step was deliberate and planned, so that you wrote this pilot so you could get staffed on Wheel of Time. That wouldn’t be the case at all. You’ve gone and got your degree in playwriting, right, as a graduate degree?
Celine: Mm-hmm.
John: But what were those years in between? What were you trying to do that caused you to make the choices you did, to write the plays you did, to write this as a pilot? When did you get your first representation? What was that process like? Because it wasn’t overnight.
Celine: No, of course not. I think that if it is overnight, I think that you pay for it being overnight somewhere else in your career. Does that make sense?
John: Yeah.
Celine: I think that’s a very real thing. But it was certainly not overnight. I graduated from my MFA program for playwriting, and then I didn’t have representation. For many years, I think I really didn’t have anything except for my plays that were getting done in smaller spaces or off-off-Broadway, or if you’re lucky, a little bit of something at off-Broadway. So much of it is about just walking around with your play and submitting your play and hanging out with other playwrights and complaining about how no one’s doing our play. I think so much of it is about working in theater and living in theater.
John: Were you teaching? What else were you doing? What other jobs were you-
Celine: I would have a day job, or it would just be like getting by on things. I had a play that was getting done in Omaha, that got done in Chicago. Sometimes those checks would come in, and that would be really great. But it’s a check for like $500, which at the time was like, “Okay, now I can pay rent.” But it is like that.
I think that in 2017 – I’d been out of school for, I guess at that point, three years – is when I got my agent. I got my agent through, there’s this program at the public theater called Emerging Writers Group. Only people without agents can apply to that program. I went there, and at the end of the two-year program, they set you up on a few dates with agents. One of the agents that I went on a date with is my theater agent now as well. He’s at CAA. Of course, because of the nature of the agent that CAA is, they have many other departments besides theater.
I met my theater agent, and then he helped me get a team together. Then I told them that I would like to staff on something or something. Meanwhile, I was talking to my current film agent. I was telling her about, I’ve been thinking about this movie, Past Lives. I think it’s happening a little bit like that. It really is the work of my agents, who both got me the staff writing gig for Wheel of Time, because they’re the ones who put my poker pilot on Rafe’s desk.
John: Before we jump on to getting Past Lives made, just a moment on Wheel of Time, because that would be a situation where you’re writing in a room. You have a bunch of other writers around you. In what ways was it similar or different to what your experience was as a playwright? Because you were apparently in a playwrights community, so you had some folks around you, but this had to have been different.
Celine: Oh, completely different. But also, I think that the thing that carries us through all of it, through every medium, is our understanding and authorship of characters, story, what we need when it comes to performance. Everything that we know about what is going to work about the script is going to be the thing that carries us through all of it: story and character. That’s it. In that way, it’s not different, because all day in a writers’ room, we’re just talking about story and character. That’s what I was doing in theater. That’s what I was doing on the set of Past Lives too.
The way that it is different is that – especially for a show like Wheel of Time, where the fans of the books themselves is the audience. They’re the primary audience. They’re the ones that we are showing up for – it’s an amazing giving kind of a process. I found it to be a very giving process, where it’s like, “I would like it to be like this.” It’s like, no, no, no, these characters exist. These characters are also dealing with already existing beyond my own personal imagination. They exist in the audience’s imagination, and then of course it all begins with the imagination of the book itself. I think that some of it is about serving the characters or serving the story, which is not necessarily how I think about writing a play, for example.
I think that’s part of it, and also working with other writers on story and character. There’s always something to learn from any writer. My whole writers’ room, I learned so much from every single writer that I worked with there, because the way that I think about story is going to be different than the way they think about story. We may go my way or their way, but either way, it’s all going to be this amazing learning process of me learning how she thinks about the story this way and I think about the story this way. What an amazing thing that there is a different way to think about the same story. I think in that way, I learned so much from it. I don’t know. It was amazing.
John: Now, with Past Lives, you’ve now written a script. You have shown it to your reps. You’re talking about, “I think this is a movie I want to get made.” From those initial conversations, was it, “This is a thing I’ve written for myself to direct.” Was that always part of the framing of it?
Celine: I think that I really wanted to direct, and I really wanted them to see me as the director for it. But I think that it’s a script being written bilingually, and myself being bilingual, or it being such a personal story that is inspired by an autobiographical moment, all of these things were great reasons for them to let me be the director. I think that I was just also making an argument with the script itself, because the script was very much a pitch document for how I imagined this movie to get made. It wasn’t just a script for its own sake. It was very much a description of what I imagined the movie to be. I think these were all things that I was stacking up so that they would really seriously consider letting me direct it. Of course, when I got to, I was so happy.
John: It’s hard to imagine someone reading the script and then meeting you, and it’s like, “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or, “She doesn’t know what this is.” Clearly, it was very close to your personal experience. Let’s talk about the process of going out and trying to find producers, trying to find money, what that was like. You have this script, but you also have yourself. Was there a reel? Was there anything else you were showing to convince people this is the vision for the movie?
Celine: There was no reel. There was no deck. It really was just a script. I think it was a script and a conversation. I think that’s the truth of it, because my studio, A24, they read the script, and they felt the things that the audiences are feeling now about the movie at the end. They cried for the same reasons that the audiences are crying about Past Lives now. I think that they were moved by it genuinely. Then it wasn’t a long process from going from there to getting the movie green-lit.
John: To bring the movie into A24, was there a producer? Was Killer Films already attached to it, or did that come later on? Was it CAA who was taking it to A24, or was there other producers brought on first?
Celine: CAA’s bringing it to A24 first, because I always knew that, especially if I wanted to direct it, they’re the ones who take the risk.
John: That felt like the right studio for it, for sure.
Celine: They’re the right studio, because they’re the ones who take the risk on first-time filmmakers. They’ll just go for it that way. I think that we always knew that we wanted to end up there. I feel like that’s one of the first conversations. I feel like when we were there, when I’m talking to them, I think that so much of it is about instilling confidence in them that I can do it.
Besides that, the thing that really opened the door, and the thing I think that, especially because this is a podcast about writing, I feel like something I want to for sure say is that the script is the thing that bursts through every door for me. This movie was going to get made because of the script, and that’s it. I didn’t have to tell them what I could do by making a reel or a short film or anything. Those things were not necessary, because the script was a movie that they wanted to make.
Then from there, even beyond that, from the producers to department heads, every single person who worked in the movie, the thing they were coming to make this movie with me for is not me or my reel, because they’re coming to this project because of the script. Usually, I could tell who was right for the project by how they felt about the script, because of course, when I was talking to my production designer, I knew she was the right person right away, because we just started talking to each other about the script. I knew that this was the right person, because I knew that she understood the script.
It’s an amazing way to also, in a way, learn if this is the right person for the project, which is, did they understand the script? Did they feel the script? Did they feel connected to the script? If they did, they were going to work on the movie. The script was the center of gravity. All I had to do was to remember that even when I didn’t know how to make the movie, because my first movie, and I don’t know how to read a call sheet, even then, I just knew that as long as I hold the key to the script, as long as I’m the expert on the script that I wrote, I’m the ultimate authority on the project.
John: A thing we’ve talked about on the podcast a lot is that the script has to serve so many functions these days. Christopher Nolan was actually on the podcast recently talking about the same thing, which is that even at his level, the script is still the sales document. It’s not just the blueprint, but it’s also embodying the feeling of what this movie’s going to feel like. And that is not only getting the studio involved – A24 in your case – but also all your collaborators, just making sure that they recognize how they can fit into this vision of what you’re trying to do.
When we were meeting with crew for Big Fish or for Charlie’s Angels, those are very different scripts, but do they connect to the vision of it? Because if they don’t connect to the vision of it, they’re not going to be the right person for it. If they don’t get the style, the feel of it, they’re not going to be the right fit, and that’s okay.
Celine: Of course.
John: It’s recognizing that some relationships are meant to work in that thing, and some relationships aren’t. Sometimes you find issues where a person is fantastic; they’re just not the right person for this specific role, this specific part in a production. Sometimes longtime collaborators will split up on a thing, because it’s just not the right fit for both of them.
Celine: I think that’s right about it being the sales document, but I also think about it as the first line of defense too, as in what the project is and how well it’s going to go or what’s going to work about it is going to be all in there. Part of the vision for a thing is coming out of that.
The vision for it, it’s like, I can make as many mood boards as I want. If the story and character and dialog, what the performance needs to be, if those things are not there, there’s no amount of mood boarding that’s going to get any director through anything. I feel like a part of the reason I know that is because I’ve been a writer for the longest part of my life. I also know that so much of it is coming from, that’s the first step towards the vision for it. It is going to completely dictate the vision for it, especially if I am the one who’s directing it. I think you’re right; it also is about collaborators. Maybe it’s just not right for them to work on it, even though they are longtime collaborators and all of that.
But I also think that it’s like, the director is the person who is the passionate core of the whole thing, the writer director, because the script is the center of gravity. And then, of course, all around it, part of how it should work is that the fire that you have, the fire that the script communicates – because that’s how it is. I know that there’s a fire in me that I’m communicating through the script. When they read the script, when they encounter the script, the people who might work on the movie, either it’s going to set them on fire, or they’re not going to understand why it is on fire. Then what you’re hoping for is everybody showing up burning to make this make this movie with you. I think in that way the document has to be damn flammable.
John: Exactly. Now, Celine, when you wrote this script though, this flammable script, you had not been through the process of casting and location scouting and directing and editing, all that stuff. You’ve now gone through all this process. As you’re looking at the writing you’re doing now and the writing going forward, how much do you think the experience of having been through this will influence the words on the page and the script you’re writing going forward?
Celine: Completely. Everything that one does is built on the things that one has done before. I think in that way, without question. I do think that there are parts of going through the whole process that I had done before. For example, casting, I had done before, because I was in theater.
Editing, I realized, I had done before, because editing is such a fundamental part of writing. Editing is something that is happening all the time. Of course, in the editing of a film, you’re also editing it visually on top of it just being text or it just being the way that a performance is going. It’s a funny thing, because those parts, I had no fear or problem around, because this is a thing that I knew how to do.
Editing I knew how to do and casting I knew how to do. Being on set, I did not know how to do. Location scouting, some parts of it, I know what it is, because at the very least, I knew when it wasn’t right, and I knew when it was right. In that way I knew. But now, when I go on location scout, will I actually be able to look at it through the eyes of someone who actually has to go and shoot it? Absolutely. There are parts of prep that I think I just feel so much more equipped for because of it. The writing of it, of course, has always been the way it’s always been. The writing of it is the same.
I do think that I am more efficient though in my second script, my script after Past Lives, because I think that I can already imagine myself sitting in the edit and being like, “Did I need to shoot that scene?” What’s amazing is now that I know what kind of resources are put into shooting a scene, it means in the case of our film, which is, of course, shot in New York, it’s about parking 20 trucks in New York City and bringing hundreds of people around New York City. The work of that, the pain of that, the effort of that, the collective, beautiful effort, the stakes that are involved in shooting a scene I think really does inform the way that I write now, as in when I write a scene, it’s always like, “Is this absolutely the scene that has to be in the film?” The answer has to always be yes, because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting in the editing, it’s like, “Look at the half a million dollars just-“
John: Burning there, yeah.
Celine: “… on the editing room floor.”
John: I made a bunch of movies before I directed my first one. I knew a lot about production and post-production and how it all fit together and worked. But by the time I was writing my first thing that I’m going to direct, I could understand what the constraints were and use those constraints in a really helpful way, to recognize, okay, these locations are going to be onerous unless I make decisions that makes it much more feasible to shoot in these locations.
Recognizing what’s hard and what’s easy in production can really help you out when it comes to making the choices in the script. That’s why we always, on this podcast, encourage people to crew up on a film, experiment, just go out there and learn how actual things get made, because it will help you figure out, in your own writing, how to prioritize if stuff is actually going to work and not get so stuck on things that may end up on the cutting room floor.
Celine: Yeah, totally.
John: We have two listener questions I think you would be a perfect person to help out with here. Drew, can you help us out?
Drew: Nikolai in Denmark writes, “I would love nothing more than to find a writing job in Los Angeles. However, I’m currently an undergraduate student studying literature in Copenhagen, and there’s 5,000 miles and two years of school before even buying a plane ticket to LA is feasible. I was wondering if you think going to a top screenwriting program in LA could be a path towards finding a job, any job, right out of college and starting a career that way.”
Celine: I think that the moving to LA of it feels pretty necessary if you want to make movies in LA. My favorite part of moving to New York City to go to school in New York is also finding the community there, because I didn’t have a community at all in New York City. When I got to go there, I got to meet my classmates, which was a built-in community that comes with the school. They themselves had communities of their own that they could share with me. In that way, I could walk into New York City with the community built in, and one that is expanding. In that way, it was a really rewarding process.
The thing that I don’t think that a MFA program necessarily does for you is make you a better writer, because I think that you walk in as a writer you are, and then you become a better writer by writing a lot in a low-stakes way, which is something amazing about these writing programs. What’s amazing is that you can keep writing and sharing it with peers and keep failing and being bad and all of those things, without there being any professional stakes or any kind of financial stakes, except for, of course, the tuition fee. That’s a stake. But as long as that’s figured out, I think you are able to fail outside of the view of anybody who is in the industry or anything for a really long time. I think through that, you become a better writer.
Of course, one can find mentorship in the professors, who have gone through the industry and the life as an artist for far longer than you have, or far deeper than you have, at least. They’re able to provide such mentorship or a sense of how to navigate certain things. These are some of the things that really work about it.
Now, if you think that you’re going to move to LA and go to school there and then you’re going to have a career outside of it when you come out of it, I think, unfortunately, that is not a guarantee, to say the least. You still got to do it yourself. Every single part of this is something that you have to do yourself. No one else can do it for you, not even the grad school program that you’re paying a lot of money to go to.
John: Celine, you and I both have MFAs. No one has ever asked to see our MFA.
Celine: Oh my god. Why would they? I wouldn’t ask to see my MFA.
John: A huge plus one on everything you said. I think it’s such good advice, that you’re going to find a community and some mentorship, and those are all good things about a film program. The downside, of course, is the cost. What is probably useful for Nikolai to be thinking about is that getting into one of these programs is a way to get his visa and get him to the U.S. and get him here for two years. That’s worth a lot, so that’s really a lot of what you’re going to be spending your money on.
If you decide to do it, Nikolai, I would just say make sure you’re really approaching this as this is your mission, this is your job. You’re coming here to do a thing, because you’re only going to get out of one of these programs as much as you put in. Really be looking at it like, “I’m full speed going ahead.” If you don’t think you’re quite ready for it right after undergrad, then take a year, just grow up a little bit, so that way you would actually come to a program, you’re ready to kick ass in it. Drew, another question from Jacob here.
Drew: Jacob writes, “My writing partner and I just finished writing the pilot for a comedy show we’re developing. We’ve begun inviting our writer and actor friends to join us for a table read, so that we can hear our script out loud and hopefully get some honest feedback. My writing partner and I are in disagreement. Do we share the script ahead of time for our writer and actor friends, or do we have them read it blind?”
John: Celine, what’s your instinct on table reads? Because you probably do this in theater as well.
Celine: Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading after reading. I actually have trouble really seeing the script that I’ve written, whether it’s a play or a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends.
My answer to this question is I think that they should read it blind, as though they are your audience, because how good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft, because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. We love actors, and we rely on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it. Sometimes that’s undue pressure on the script.
I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you would need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that the story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small group of audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry or something, but are able to read on sight.
I’m sure you can go through your list of friends, and you can find a funny list there. But I think it’s usually somebody whose main job is not being an actor and somebody who’s able to read on sight and is able to be clear in their reading, but does not have high stakes when they show up, and will talk to you, like a very first audience member, and who’s not going to be weird or mean about anything, who’s not going to be strange about it, but who’s going to be a wonderful vibe on top of everything. I think that once you find some of those people, I think they’re the folks who have to read it.
But I don’t think you should show it in advance, because you just want to see the way that the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working. If the joke doesn’t hit, you don’t want to wonder if the reason why the joke didn’t hit is because they already read the joke and they already laughed about it. You want to see if the joke actually isn’t hitting the audience or that it is actually hitting the audience.
John: Mike Birbiglia, when he is doing one of his movies, he will bring over a group of friends, and with pizza. I think he’s very deliberately, like what you say, lowering the stakes. No one is auditioning for a part. They’re just reading through the script and getting a sense of does this feel like it’s working. They can have constructive conversations. Agreed, Celine; if you bring an actress to do that, they can sell something that doesn’t really quite work. There’s that feeling that they’re auditioning for stuff, and that can just be really tough, so I think really smart advice here.
It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our audience that they should check out, something useful or fun. Mine is something I just find myself using all the time. I don’t think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s called Shottr. It’s an app for the Macintosh which basically just takes screenshots.
So often, there’s something on your screen that you want to take a shot of and send to somebody or remember. You have the built-in screenshotting stuff in the Mac, but then it just saves it as some randomly named file. This is an app that you hit the keyboard command, take your little screenshot, and then you can just do stuff with it. You can mark it up. You can annotate it. You can put little arrows, like, “This is the problem.” It just makes life so much easier and handier. A quick little utility. I think it’s five bucks. Called Shottr. It’s S-H-O-T-T-R dot-CC is the URL for it. Check it out if you’re on Macintosh and you take some screenshots. Celine, do you have anything to recommend?
Celine: Yes. Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s what I recommend.
John: Oh my god, it’s so amazing. We talk about it on the podcast all the time. Tell us, Celine, who are you playing as your hero, and what’s your experience in it?
Celine: I am a custom character. Her name is Faunta. Part of it is that I just treat it as a story mode dating sim a little bit.
John: 100 percent, because you’re trying to connect with all the different characters in the game.
Celine: Exactly. I think you can play it however you want. It’s one of the most in-depth storytelling, I don’t even know what to call it, storytelling thing that I’ve ever experienced.
John: Isn’t it just so well written? I’m flabbergasted how well it’s put together.
Celine: It’s beautifully written. I’m fully invested in the characters. I’m fully invested in the story. Of course it has so many things that are usually just fantasy things, like the magic. It’s because it’s so foundational to the fantasy genre, the Dungeons and Dragons of it anyway. I think that those things are all there, but I think even beyond that, I just feel so immersed in it. I really do think that these characters are living and walking around in that way. I don’t know. I’m just so moved by it. I’m obsessed with it. I play it all the time.
I think that as a storytelling thing, I’m just, you’re right, flabbergasted. I’m just totally blown away by how good it is, and how I’ll just get into a story, and I’ll be so in it, and it’ll be so complex. The characters are all responding to it in an unbelievably sophisticated way.
John: Then to recognize how many branching decisions they had to plan for, because is that character even still alive at this point? Has Astarion ever met this character? It’s wild.
Celine: Of course. The consequence is real. There are real consequences to the story. It’s not like, however you play, you’re going to all end up here. No, you may not end up there. You may have a completely different situation. Now, you cannot deal with this character that way anymore because of what you’ve done last chapter. I don’t know. I’m just so into it. My TikTok algorithm is all Baldur’s Gate right now. Anyway, it’s so good.
John: The YouTube algorithm keeps sending me videos of like, here’s the interactions you missed or when Minthara becomes a zombie. It’s all the different wild things that could happen because of choices character make.
Celine: Of course.
John: Just that sense of agency that it gives you as the protagonist, whatever your hero is in it is just really remarkable.
Celine: It’s really remarkable, yeah.
John: Basically, we have a podcast now where we talk about how good Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but it’s true. It’s really, really good.
Celine: It’s true. It is really, really good. Game of the year.
John: What’s also really, really good is Past Lives, your film. Congratulations on it. Congratulations on your nominations. It’s such a delight to see. I remember my first experience with Past Lives was I was on a long international flight, and the woman next to me was watching Past Lives. I wasn’t even sure what it was. I could see Greta Lee and just some movie there. She must’ve watched it like three times on the flight. I’m like, why are you watching this movie again and again and again? I waited and watched it in a proper non-airplane environment. But it really is so well done, so congratulations on everything you’ve achieved so far.
Celine: Thank you so much.
John: I can’t wait to see what you do next.
Celine: Thank you. It’s in movie theaters again.
John: That’s exciting.
Celine: So amazing.
John: People can see it.
Celine: So exciting.
John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Seagull staged in Sims 4. Celine Song, absolute pleasure having you on the show.
Celine: Thanks for having me.
[Bonus Segment]
John: When I saw this in your bio, I knew I had to talk to you about this. You staged a version of The Seagull, the classic play, but you staged it inside Sims 4 and streamed it on Twitch; is that right?
Celine: Mm-hmm.
John: Talk to us about your impetus behind doing that. I also would just love to talk about this notion of theater kind of things that happen online. Tell us about how this came to be.
Celine: It was just really during COVID. The theater that I had a play, Endlings, done at, because of COVID, had shut down prematurely. We had two weeks of previews, we had opening night and then we got to do one more performance, and then the play got shut down. I was, of course, so heartbroken.
Then I think the theater was, because it is so much about people gathering and it’s about live performance, that I think there were questions about what theater community can be doing at this moment to make theater. I think that New York Theater Workshop, which is the theater that did Endlings, they asked me if I want to do anything in the virtual space, whether a Zoom play or whatever. They were like, “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. We’ll do a production of it, whatever it may be.”
I really just thought at that moment, it’s like, “I’ve been watching a lot of live performance, actually,” and a lot of live performances in the video game streaming world, where all of these characters and personalities, they were streaming video games. It’s a funny durational performance in a way, because they’re streaming for like six hours playing Overwatch or something. I was watching a lot of it. In fact, there is all the joys of a live performance in that. There’s something about it where there’s the spontaneity in it. There is a bit of like, we know what we’re going to do, but it also is a little bit unknown, we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, feeling of it.
I think that at that moment, I was like, “What if I was to stage a play in a video game?” Then a thought I had was, because The Sims is, I’ve always felt, so Chekhovian, because The Sims is about life as it is, and the difficulty of life as it is, and the pain of living as it is. Those are things that are fundamental to a Chekhov play. My favorite Chekhov play is The Seagull. It really was that the New York Theater Workshop called me, and then I think on that phone call I came up with the idea. I was like, “What if I stage a play in The Sims? It should be a Chekhov play, maybe The Seagull.” I think that’s really the process for it.
Then of course, what I really loved is that when I was doing the play, the two completely different communities came together. Then of course, there was community that had a relationship to both sides, which is the people who are theater goers, who never watch video game streaming, who don’t have a relationship to video games, and video game players and video game stream watchers, who don’t actually know anything about the classic play. Then there were those of us who were in the middle of that Venn diagram, where we are in a circle that contains both of those communities. We were like, “We know video games. We play Sims. We grew up on Sims. That’s part of our community. But also, we know what Chekhov is.” I think that all three groups of people came together.
I staged a play for two nights. I think each performance, quote unquote, was four hours each, and it happened over two nights. It started from me basically casting and costuming the characters to going through all four acts of the play.
John: That’s great. I remember during the pandemic, my daughter was in high school at the time, and she was involved with theater. Their plays got knocked to being Zoom plays. One of them was more traditional. One of them was just chaos. It was interesting to be able to experience this as a live event – a sort of live event. My mom could watch it from Colorado. People could participate in something in a way that wasn’t traditional. And yet I do feel like I associated so strongly with the pandemic and being trapped in that place that it’s hard for me to vision them trying to do that kind of thing now. And yet there was something really amazing about that new form being out there.
What do you see as things you took from that or things you’ve seen since then that we could keep doing, bringing weird communities together, or finding new ways to stage either classic things or storytelling that is meant to be streamed live, versus a classic either filmed or stage entertainment? What do you think is still entertainment in that space?
Celine: The ancient way of storytelling, which is just the setup, the revelation, introducing a character, you see the rise and fall of that character, there is certain things about storytelling that is fundamental in the bones of it. It’s always going to be, no matter in what form and no matter in what generation, is going to just work, because as a story, that just works. I think it’s about remembering that part while we are adapting and navigating the new realities, the new ways of watching things, the new ways of hearing stories, new ways of telling stories.
I think that even through all of that, what I find over and over again is that there are stories that endure, and these are the stories that have existed forever. We know that cavemen told these stories. To know that those stories are still going to be the same stories that is going to move us, that’s going to mean something to us, I think that it is to hold these two contradictory thoughts themselves. I don’t think we can stop progress or the way the technology is coming in or the way that storytelling as a form is changing all the time. I don’t think it’s possible for… It’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hand.
But I know that even through all of that, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve also learned through telling the story that is Past Lives, and to tell it globally, and to tell it to every generation, it is always that every step of the way, what works about the Past Lives story is one that would’ve worked on the cavemen too. I think it’s that. It sounds contradictory, but I know it’s not, the feeling that it’s both. It is that it is eternally traditional and conventional and ancient and that it is brand new. It’s always changing. It’s always different.
John: On this thread of classic stories or ancient stories or retold in different ways, I want to acknowledge that Sleep No More is closing in New York. Sleep No More as an experiential place, where the story was happening around you, and yet you weren’t always seeing all parts of it. In some ways is like Baldur’s Gate, in which you’re not going to catch all the threads. There’s no way to actually see all the different possible branches of it. I do think there’s room for experimentation. There’s room to try new things.
Some of our listeners who are probably so focused on, “I want to staff on a TV show,” or, “I want to go make a movie,” should not discount the possibility that there could be some fascinating way to tell a story that’s not part of those traditional buckets, and do that if it’s interesting to them, because they are more likely to find that new thing than an established filmmaker is to do it. They have the freedom and the access and the membership in a community that might be able to help them find a new way to tell a story.
Celine: Of course. Also, the truth is that everybody’s looking for the thing that worked before. I think some of it is about how we break through the risk-averseness of the industry.
John: Celine, absolute pleasure talking with you about this as well.
Celine: So fun. Thank you so much.
Links:
- Celine Song on IMDb and Instagram
- Past Lives
- The Seagull on The Sims 4
- The Wheel of Time
- A real bald eagle call vs a red-tailed hawk
- Deadwood and The American President
- Shottr
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 630: The One with Celine Song, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig explore the counterfactuals of Hollywood history — the relatively small moments that, if the coin toss had gone the other way, would have massive ramifications on the world as we know it.
What if Edison was allowed to keep his monopoly on motion pictures? What does our industry look like without the Paramount Consent Decree? What if George Lucas died in his car accident? Would superhero movies have dominated our culture if Iron Man had bombed? What studios would have gone down if Titanic had sunk? And what if Netflix had stayed with its DVD-only model?
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig talk capitalism and solve its problems once and for all.
Links:
- What If? by Robert Cowley
- Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
- United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. on Wikipedia
- George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’ by Tim Ott for Biography
- When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
- ‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped by Richard Newby for THR
- Financial Interest and Syndication Rules
- Post-Quantum Cryptography
- S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them. by Adam Rogers
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Zach Lo (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 04-22-24: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post What If? Hollywood Edition first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back John Gatins (Flight, Coach Carter) to talk about reviving a dormant project and actually getting it made – like he just did with his new film Little Wing. They look at how films die, what brings them back to life, and go deep into the mechanics of sports movies.
We also follow up on flu tests, the Tiffany problem and pet names before answering listener questions on professionalism, mid-credit scenes, and work ethic.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John Gatins talks abut transitioning into a writing team and reveals his process of negotiating credits.
Links:
- Little Wing – On Paramount+ March 13th
- John Gatins on Wikipedia and IMDb
- Little Wing by Susan Orlean for the New Yorker
- LUCIRA by Pfizer COVID-19 & Flu Home Test
- Merlin Bird ID
- The Facts of Life – Attempted Spin-offs
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Alee Karim (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 4-10-24: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post Reviving a Dormant Project first appeared on John August.
John has the flu (or does he?) and Craig is missing, so we’re going back through the vaults to look at the mechanics of mystery and suspense. How do writers exploit the audience’s curiosity? What builds and breaks their trust? How do you use suspense across genres? And what do these techniques look like on the page?
But first, we look at the current agency shakeups and share our thoughts on OpenAI’s new engine, Sora.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Drew talk about their experience with the Apple Vision Pro.
Links:
- Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion
- Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It
- A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
- Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
- A few thoughts on Sora by John August
- GOODY-2
- Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot by Will Knight for Wired
- Claire Keegan
- Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin by David Sparks
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 04-01-24: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post Mystery and Suspense first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer and showrunner Francesca Sloane (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Atlanta) to talk about her process of bringing a big-screen property to television. She shares how she and Donald Glover found their way into the story, how it evolved in development, building a room that was all women of color, re-writing on set, and the many lessons she learned as a first time showrunner.
We also follow up on writing partners and phonetic alphabets before answering listener questions on writing samples, casting on the page and why some screenplays are free to read.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we dig into the benefits (and drawbacks) of film schools and fellowships.
Links:
- Francesca Sloane on Instagram
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Amazon Prime Video
- ISPA: Inter-Species Phonetic Alphabet for Transcribing Animal Sounds by Masato Hagiwara, Marius Miron and Jen-Yu Liu
- Bluets by Maggie Nelson
- A Unified Theory of F-cks by Mandy Brown
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 04-01-24: The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post Adapting for Television first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Celine Song (Past Lives) to chart her journey from playwright to Oscar-nominated screenwriter. We discuss the intricacies of writing bilingually, the similarities between theater and a writers room, finding the right collaborators and how writing prepared Celine for the rigors of directing. We also follow up on foreign courts, the Tiffany problem, and […]The post The One with Celine Song first appeared on John August.
John and Craig host another round of the Three Page Challenge, where they give their honest feedback on three listener-submitted scripts. They offer insights into using sound realistically, writing action that can be easily directed, finding subtext in dialogue, and navigating complex points of view. But first, we dig into several tricky listener questions: How […]The post Cork Grease first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss the dynamics of fandom, attempting to chart how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. But how are fandoms organized? Where do subcultures start? And how should you engage with the community that forms around your work? We also look at an alternative screenplay format from one of last year’s best […]The post The Fandom Menace first appeared on John August.
The DGA surprised the town yesterday, announcing an update to their already-signed agreement with the AMPTP. The new deal includes select pay bumps and the streaming bonus gained by WGA and SAG-AFTRA after their lengthy strikes. John and Drew are back to look at what we know about this off-cycle development and ask questions like […]The post Sidecast: The DGA Deal, part 2 first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Aline Brosh McKenna to look at how both you and your characters can become more “agentic.” What are the traps and pitfalls of going after what you want? How do you get people to engage with your protagonist, especially when the protagonist is yourself? Then it’s another round of How Would This […]The post Unbelievably Agentic first appeared on John August.
John and Craig investigate those details that are accurate and authentic, but can pull viewers out of the story. They look for ways to balance what is realistic with what is believable, and how to get rid of distractions and keep your audience focused on what matters. We also discuss popular names, follow up on […]The post Realistic but Distracting first appeared on John August.
John and Craig take a look at the many For Your Consideration scripts suddenly available to read to see what lessons can be learned from movies that were actually made. They find best practices for establishing setting, using “we see” and “we hear,” complicated setups, directing on the page, and how to get right into […]The post Back in the FYC first appeared on John August.
In this compendium episode, John and Craig look at how we can best articulate our characters’ inner lives and get the audience invested in them. They discuss the intricacies of point of view, finding truthful emotional states, and why it’s so important for your characters to be liars. How do you engage an audience’s empathy? […]The post Creating Empathy for Your Characters first appeared on John August.
John and Craig are joined by the ghosts of Scriptnotes past and present (Megana and Drew) for a festive competition: discussing the perils of studio bake-offs — pitting writer against writer for one coveted job — while simultaneously judging three of LA’s finest holiday cookies. We also look at Netflix’s recently released viewership data, follow […]The post A Very Special Christmas Episode first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer and director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) to discuss experimentation, subjectivity and adaptation as they take an in-depth look at his screenplay, Oppenheimer. They explore Chris’ writing process, how to make non-linear structures work, finding the story in real-life events, being kinetic on the page, the importance of embracing editing, and […]The post The One with Christopher Nolan first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at several notable figures in the news and ask, How Would This Be a Biopic? They examine the lives of Henry Kissinger, Sandra Day O’Connor, George Santos, Rosalynn Carter, and Sam Altman to see which are best suited for the big screen, and declare once-and-for-all the proper way to pronounce “biopic.” […]The post How Would This Be a Biopic? first appeared on John August.
John moderates Breaking the Stigma, a panel on addiction and mental health with guests Gemma Baker (creator of CBS’s Mom), Dr. Corey Waller (specialist in pain, addiction and emergency medicine), Dr. Holly Daniels (specialist in eating disorders and mental health issues), and journalist Zachary Siegel. We discuss how addiction and mental health issues are portrayed […]The post Writing About Mental Health and Addiction (Encore) first appeared on John August.
John and Craig investigate their anxiety and ask, why is the future so hard to predict right now? They discuss everything from what’s going at OpenAi, the upcoming elections, a new service that uses AI to generate script coverage, and muse about how to move forward in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. We also follow […]The post This Uncertain Age first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Jesse David Fox (Comedy Book, Good One) and Greg Iwinski (Last Week Tonight, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) to “explain the joke” and discuss how comedy works. They explore everything from harnessing your comedic voice, building a career in comedy, the importance of diversity in late night, to fundamental questions about the […]The post Comedy Episode first appeared on John August.
John offers a host of career-focused insights as he tackles our overflowing mailbag to answer as many listener questions as he can. What’s the best way to keep track of shower thoughts? How do you build a good creative workplace? How do you disclose your past wrongs to a future employer? What is Appendix A? […]The post Clearing out the Mailbag first appeared on John August.
After 118 days on strike, SAG-AFTRA has a tentative deal with the AMPTP. John and Drew look through the details of the agreement to see what gains the actors union was able to make on streaming, self-tapes, performance capture, AI protections, and residuals. What are the current effects of this agreement? And what’s next for […]The post Sidecast: SAG-AFTRA has a deal first appeared on John August.
John and Craig host an in-depth look at the 1987 classic, The Princess Bride, recorded live at the WGA Theatre in 2019. They discuss how the “abridged” structure brings us only the best parts of the story and what this means for the characters and world. From the frame story to the myth of the […]The post The Princess Bride (Encore) first appeared on John August.
Mad scientists John and Craig dissect monsters and how they function in the stories we tell. How do monsters differ from the average villain? What makes them tick? And how do you make them fascinating? We also discuss how narratives are applied to real-life news, follow up on aphantasia and diabetes, and answer a listener […]The post Monsters and You first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Good Omens) to discuss the serialized storytelling of comics and screenwriting. Using Neil’s script for issue 24 of The Sandman, they look at how comics are written, communicating with other artists, using the medium to your advantage, and finding unique ways to deliver your story. Neil also […]The post The One with Neil Gaiman first appeared on John August.
John and Craig talk about the importance of visualization for screenwriters, and the fact that some very successful writers can’t do it. They share what’s going on inside their brains as they write, their processes for imagining a scene, and what writing is like across the spectrum of aphantasia. But first, we look at Marvel’s […]The post The Mind’s Eye first appeared on John August.
It’s official – the WGA has ratified its contract with the AMPTP. John and Drew look at how the votes were distributed, what happens next, and what to keep in mind as SAG-AFTRA moves forward in their negotiations. Links: 2023 MBA Ratified – WGA SAG-AFTRA on Strike! WGA Solidarity with SAG-AFTRA John on Twitter, Instagram […]The post Sidecast: WGA Ratifies its Contract first appeared on John August.
John sits down with WGA Negotiating Committee co-chair Chris Keyser to look at how writers crafted the narrative of the strike. From establishing the premise and themes, identifying characters, and all the way down to specific word choices, we dissect the choices, revisions, and tactics used to guide the MBA negotiations to a successful conclusion. […]The post Storytelling and the Strike first appeared on John August.
John and Craig take an in-depth look at the deal points of the WGA’s tentative agreement with the AMPTP, which ended the 2023 WGA strike after 148 days. Together they break down what gains were made, how they work, and why they are important for writers everywhere. We also open a time-capsule email from 2018, […]The post Entering the Post-Strike Era first appeared on John August.
Recorded live from Paramount and Amazon Studios, John and Drew talk with actors and writers marching in support of SAG-AFTRA as they re-enter negotiations with the AMPTP. Thanks to everyone who talked with us! Links: SAG-AFTRA on Strike! WGA Solidarity with SAG-AFTRA WGA Contract Ratification – Vote Here WGA Contract 2023 Tentative Agreement John on […]The post Sidecast: On the SAG-AFTRA Picket Line first appeared on John August.
John, Drew and Megana read through the details of the WGA’s Tentative Agreement to see what was initially proposed and what was ultimately won. Links: WGA Tentative Agreement Summary 2023 MBA Tentative Agreement Megana Rao on Twitter John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt Email us at ask@johnaugust.com You can […]The post Sidecast: What’s in the Deal first appeared on John August.
John and Greta Gerwig (Barbie, Little Women and Lady Bird) discuss adaptation, ambition and authorship. With the screenplay in front of them, they look at specific scenes in Little Women and explore how its non-linear timeline changed how the movie works. We also answer listener questions on writing for the page and starting a family […]The post The One with Greta Gerwig (Encore) first appeared on John August.
After 146 days on the picket line, the WGA has reached a tentative deal with the AMPTP. John walks through the very exciting email that was sent out to members, outlining what it means, what happens next, and reflects on how far we’ve come. Links: Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses SAG-AFTRA Picket […]The post Sidecast: There’s a Deal! first appeared on John August.
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John and Drew talk about one of the best things writers can do to keep their skills sharp during the strike: reading. They discuss where to find scripts, what you can learn from other people’s writing, and what they’ve been working on while pencils are down. Links: Weekend Read 2 on the App Store Scriptslug.com […]The post Sidecast: Writers Who Read first appeared on John August.
John and Craig talk action! It’s an all-craft episode about how words on the page become high-adrenaline events on the screen. Using a variety of different scripts, we look at how different styles of action sequences can be used to clearly communicate what is meant to happen in a scene and how it’s supposed to […]The post Writing Action (Encore) first appeared on John August.
Live from New York, John talks with writers and actors about the differences between LA and NYC pickets, anxiety, and how joy can be a form of protest. Featuring Christopher Kyle and Wilson Cruz. Big thanks to everyone who talked with us! Links: East & NY Strike Resources Writers Guild of America East Summary of […]The post Sidecast: NYC Picketing first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 609 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today’s episode is a clip show, but I wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about how we got to this clip show. So often, these clip shows come out of work we’re doing in the office on other things. This stemmed from a conversation we were having yesterday.
Chris Csont, who does our newsletter, is working on an issue about dialogue and character voice. It started a whole conversation about the difference between a writer’s character voice and what the actor brings to that voice. Drew, you had actually had some research before this, because you guys were working on chapters about this for the book.
Drew Marquardt: Yeah, our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, was putting together a chapter on writing dialog, and this conversation started ringing some bells, so went back and looked through it and found some really wonderful gems to talk about character voice and writing for actors.
John: In any of these clip shows, we’re traveling through time. We have 10 years of Scriptnotes. Which episodes are you plucking from here?
Drew: We’re starting with Episode 37, which was ages ago. It’s very fun to hear you guys and how you’ve changed. We’re talking there about the four general rules of character voice. Then we’re going to go up to Episode 286, where we’re going to talk about the history of dialogue and expand on the idea of character voice. Then Episode 371, where Craig, who had started acting at that point, was talking about what makes dialogue easy to memorize. Then we move to how to make sure you’re doing right by all the characters in a scene and keeping everyone engaged.
John: Fantastic. For our Premium members, what kind of Bonus Segment will they get at the end?
Drew: We’re going to look at Episode 470 on dual dialog, which is really fun.
John: That’s great. Drew, thank you so much for putting this clip show together. We look forward to coming back with hopefully a normal episode next week.
Drew: Definitely.
John: Thanks. Enjoy.
Episode 37 clip:
John: And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.
Craig: Great.
John: Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.
Craig: Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.
John: Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are some times where… There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again, I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that, you don’t really care about him.
And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.
Craig: Okay.
John: First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?
Craig: Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error. I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. They write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.
John: Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”
Craig: Right.
John: Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem. You already hit on my next thing, which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.
Craig: Aha, I read your mind.
John: You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny, and so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome. It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.
Craig: Some people will say that there are highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies, you realize that he actually is crafting… Yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.
Sorkin is another one who… It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.
John: Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.
Craig: I agree.
John: Those characters are very specific and very unique.
Craig: That’s a good example.
John: Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point, is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is, is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing?
And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.
At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.
Craig: No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”
Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.
I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?
John: No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.
Craig: No radio plays.
John: In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together, and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know, so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” I know. You don’t have to tell me. The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.
John: Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.
Craig: Right.
John: This is one I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.
Craig: And a lovely woman.
John: And a lovely woman. During the strike, our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”
And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny, because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way. What is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations, how they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.
Craig: Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”
And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. Use that. Scenes are all, to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. Allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.
John: Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this, can you picture a given actor in the role, or at least preclude certain actors from the role, because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things? And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.
Craig: Yeah, probably not.
John: Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.
Craig: Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was appropriately-
John: But it’s not telling a joke funny.
Craig: No, it was sort of clipped and wry, which is…
John: Perfect.
Craig: She has a great arched brow. It’s funny, when you think about doing impressions. I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. She can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.
I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble, and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing, because it goes counter to the normal thing, which is the rambler is the weak one, and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.
But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with, because it just made those scenes more interesting to me.
And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed… I mean, language is music, and you should be musical about it, I think.
John: The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past like, it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors, like, oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.
Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice, because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.
It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who could ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.
Craig: Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.
Episode 286 clip:
John: I thought we’d start with sort of a history of what dialogue is, because obviously, human beings have been speaking for our entire existence. That’s one of the things that sort of makes us human. But dialogue is a very special case.
And so I was thinking back to what is the first example of dialogue. It would probably be reported speech. So, if I’m telling you a story, and I’m using the speech as the characters in the story, or I’m recapping something and saying like that he says, then she says, and it’s that situation where you’re modeling the behavior of what was said before. And so you can imagine sort of cavemen around the campfire doing that kind of reported speech would be the first kind of dialogue. Within a monologue, it’s the speech in that. Sort of like how an audio book works.
But then we have real plays. And so have the Greek dramas, the Greek comedies. If you think about the Greek dramas, a lot of Greek dramas are not people kind of talking back to each other. It sort of feels like I say something, then you say something, and there’s not a lot of interplay. But the Greek comedies, they do actually sort of talk to each other in ways that are meaningful. Of course, Shakespeare has plays in which characters are really communicating with each other. The thing I say influences the thing that you say back to me.
And then you have the Oscar Wilde comedies, which are all about sort of the craft of those words, and sort of like badminton, where they’re just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s not a ball, but I’d say it’s a birdie.
Craig: Yeah, exactly. I went through a period where I was reading some of the old Greek comedies, Aristophanes and so on, and I was stunned at how contemporary they felt in terms of the back and forth of dialogue. It was kind of remarkable. And they are plays, so you’re reading essentially a script. A thousand and thousand-year-old script. And they had figured a lot. It’s actually insane how little has changed.
John: Yeah. But I think it’s important to distinguish the comedies from the dramas, because when I look at the old Greek dramas, there is back and forth, but it’s not the same kind of back and forth. And it ends up being sort of a lot more like I’m going to tell you this whole long thing, and the next person is going to tell you this whole long thing.
Craig: Yes.
John: There’s less of that sort of back and forth.
Craig: I agree. It’s very declarative. The dramas are very much about speeches.
John: Yeah. But then you look at what happens next is, as we get into radio plays, then it’s all dialogue. So, when you have stage plays, you can see the action happening in front of you. You have people there. But we get to radio plays, it’s just people talking. And so the words have to do so much more in order to communicate not only what’s being said, but sort of the world around what’s being said. And so it’s more naturalistic in some ways, but it also has to be sort of pushed in a way, because it has to explain everything through just the dialogue.
Same time we were seeing radio come up, you have the silent movies. And so in silent movies, of course, you have characters in scenes together, but the dialogue, if there is dialogue, is just title cards that are put there. So, you have characters emoting a lot, and then we cut to a card that has a very shortened version of what they would say. That’s a strange form.
Craig: It’s very strange, because the cards, they don’t make conversation possible so even though people are talking together, they will choose a, I guess, some kind of representative line of dialogue for one person to sum up this entire exchange that these two people might be having. And, of course, that is probably why a lot of silent films also de-accentuate conversation. And it’s very much about one person making speeches, while another person listens.
John: Yep. Then, of course, we transition to the talkies, and then everything is changed, because once you actually have dialogue and characters that are in a scene together, it changes the frame of reality around things. So you can’t just have a person emoting wildly and then you cut to a title card. They actually have to have a conversation. You have to keep that ball up in the air.
And it’s a huge shift in sort of how the audience’s experience of a story and really the writer’s experience of how you’re going to communicate this information. You cannot expect the audience to just be watching and gleaning something. They are expecting to have a real conversation happening in front of them. And that changes everything.
Craig: It also famously changed the skill of acting. I mean, the school of acting prior to talkies was very much about being emotive and really more of a filmed version of what people would do on stage, which was very formalized.
And because their faces and movement had to stand in for so much, but once you shift to sound, we begin to see the birth of naturalistic acting which peaks with the method movement that leads to, famously, some of our greatest American films of the ‘70s.
John: Yeah. So there’s an expectation that the performances are naturalistic, and therefore the dialogue is supposed to be more naturalistic. It’s not always that way, but the dialogue gets twisted towards naturalism quite heavily once you have real characters speaking to each other.
Television in general was a huge shift in dialogue as well, because you think about how people watch television, you’re watching the screen, but sometimes you’re not really watching the screen. Sometimes TV is playing off in the background. So, there’s a midway quality between what our expectations are of film dialogue and radio dialogue.
There’s a little bit of over-explaining that tends to happen in TV. I think less so now than, you know, 20 years ago. But TV dialogue could be a little bit more artificial, because there was an expectation that you got to talk people through the process.
Even procedural shows right now, there’s an unnatural quality which is sort of inherent to the genre, where you are talking as if the other character doesn’t have that same information, so you can get it out to the audience.
Craig: And prior to a fairly recent revolution where so much of our television is streamed, commercial-free, for instance, if you’re watching it on Netflix or Hulu. Network television, which dominated all television, was highly bifurcated, trifurcated, quadfurcated because of commercials. And there was an understanding that some people were just coming in, they had missed it, or they went to the bathroom while stuff was going on. There was no TiVo. There was no pausing. People were constantly reiterating things so that folks wouldn’t get lost just because they went to go get a sandwich.
John: Yeah. As you were saying, in recapping what just happened.
Craig: Right.
John: So let’s talk about what characters are doing in scenes and sort of what ideally you would love to have your dialogue be able to perform in the scenes you’re writing. So, the first thing we’re looking for is dialogue, which means characters talking to each other, with each other, and not just intersecting monologues. And one of the great frustrations I have in some of our Three Page Challenges is I feel like characters are just having a monologue that’s just occasionally interrupted. Or like two parallel monologues that don’t actually have anything to do with each other.
When dialogue is working well, it should feel kind of like Velcro. Those two pieces of conversation, they’re designed for each other. And so they can only exist together and they’re strong when they are together. But you couldn’t take those people’s lines independently. They would be sort of meaningless. They’re all informed by what the person just said before that.
Craig: That’s a very good way of describing a common rookie limitation – intersecting monologues. And it’s understandable because the complexity that is required to create dialogue that answers and is responsible to the reflection back from another character, it is logarithmically more complicated than one person saying something and then another person saying something. They always say that silence is just as important in music as a note. And it’s the listening of dialogue and the reacting and the incorporation and the adjustment, that’s the swordsmanship.
I think when we look at stuff where we have the intersecting monologue problem, it’s like we’re watching two fencers who are putting on an exhibition for us, and they’re showing us their fencing moves towards us, but they’re not fencing each other, which is just a totally different thing.
John: It is. So let’s take a look at sort of how we indicate in the real world that we are listening to each other and how listening shapes the lines we’re going to say next.
I want to talk about discourse markers, which is the general term for those words that function as parts of speech that are not quite nouns or adjectives or anything else. They’re basically just little markers that say, “Yes, I heard what you said. I’m acknowledging what you said. And here is my response to it.” I’m talking about words like you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, okay, and so. Things like also, on the other hand, frankly, as a matter of fact. As I do very often, as you’re talking, I go, “Uh-huh.”
Craig: Right.
John: It’s those small acknowledgments that I hear what you’re saying and keep going, or I’m about to respond back to you. There’s an acronym which I found online for it called FANBOYS. So if you’re trying to remember those words, it’s For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, or So. Basically it’s ways to take what has just been said and put your spin on the next thing that’s going to come out.
And so let’s take a look at why you would use those discourse markers, and as a screenwriter, how to be aware of those things. I think so often we try to optimize our dialogue to the point where we’re getting rid of all the natural parts of speech. But without some of these little things to help you hook into the previous line, it can be hard to make your speech flow naturally.
So, here’s one function. It’s when you want to soften a blow, especially if it conflicts with what the person just said. So, it’s an example of like, “Well.” “Well, that’s not entirely true.”
Craig: Right.
John: You could say, “That’s not entirely true,” but that’s a harder line. The well takes a little of the edge off that and sort of connects like, “Yes, I heard what you just said, but I’m going to say the opposite.”
Craig: Yeah. So, these words are wonderful to indicate that the person who is starting their sentence with them has changed. Somehow what you said to me changed my brain. I’m not saying it changed my mind in that I have a new opinion. But it has changed my state of brain, which is exactly what goes on in conversation.
So, as you’re talking to me, you’re changing my brain because I’m listening to you. Actors understand this. They’re taught very carefully and very rigorously how to listen. You can always tell a bad actor because they’re not listening. They’re just thinking about their next line.
John: Yep.
Craig: Similarly, bad writers write characters who are just thinking about their next line. And so you lose these little things. And when we talk about… Everyone is familiar with the phrase “an ear for dialogue.” A lot of what an ear for dialogue is is this. It’s really not so much an ear. It is a sense of human psychology and an understanding of how it feels to listen.
So, when you’re writing two people talking to each other, you have to schizophrenically, I use that in the wrong sense, split-mindedly say something and then immediately throw yourself into the other person and hear it. And that is what will naturally lead to some of these very useful words.
John: Yep. We talked about softening a blow. A lot of times you’re also comparing two ideas. An example would be, “So, it’s like Uber for golf carts.” And so you’re basically taking the idea that’s been given to you and synthesizing it and putting it back. You might want to add onto an idea. So, that’s, “What’s more, there’s no evidence he even read the book.” That “what’s more,” you could take that off, but without it, it doesn’t connect to the previous line of dialogue.
Craig: Right. It’s not an acknowledgement that you’ve heard that. You’re agreeing with it, tacitly. And now you’re adding. So much gets unsaid by a “what’s more.” But we hear it, and the audience hears it, and they know so much because of it. That’s amazing. I’ve never really thought about that. Interesting.
John: Yeah. It’s a way of like sort of underlining that previous point. Another example would be indicating that a point has already been conceded and that you’re kind of moving on. So, an example would be, “No, you’re right to be concerned.” And so essentially saying like, “You said to be concerned. I’m agreeing with you to be concerned. Let’s move on to the next point.”
Craig: Right.
John: What I also find so fascinating about that no is that’s an example of how no can mean yes in dialogue. And I hear myself doing it all the time, where I will say no when I mean yes. And it’s basically that no means I’m putting no argument up against you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m not denying you. It’s awkward that, of course, it’s an example of no really meaning a yes. But it’s just the way that it works in our language.
Craig: We’ll call it the affirmative no. Sometimes when people use it, I feel like they’re actually responding to themselves. So you say something. I’m thinking a thing. You give me a different point of view. And I say, “No, yeah, I think that’s right,” as in, “No, stop thinking the thing you were thinking. This new thing is correct.”
John: Yeah.
Craig: It is fascinating how many words we elide as we go through. Yeah.
John: A lot of times you’re going to use one of these words to demonstrate a sense of logical sequence. So, “Okay, once we disable the cameras, then we can start working on the vault.” Basically, I am going to now set forth a chain of events that describes what’s going to happen next. Or, we’re going to offer an illustration, an example. So, “And we all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.” Again, you could take off that “and” and start and say, “We all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”
Craig: Yeah, that’s not a–
John: But that “and” is really helpful, because it means I’m adding on to the thing you just said. I’m giving you an example of the situation that we’re talking about. That “and” is incredibly helpful, and without that “and” the sentence doesn’t mean the same thing.
Craig: I think sometimes when educational therapists… There’s a whole world of people who work with kids who have autism or Asperger’s and they struggle with social interaction. Some of these things are the things that they’re actually instructing them, because for some people, that “and” is absolutely superfluous. And from an informational point of view, it’s close to being superfluous.
But what they’re missing is that they’ve eliminated that social glue that says, “Just so you know, I listened to you, and I heard you.” When, of course, somebody who is very regimented and perhaps rigid in their thinking might think, “The fact that I am here staring at you is an indication that I heard what you said.” And some people need to be taught these things.
John: Talk us through sort of then the modes of dialogue. What are the tones of dialogue? What you’re trying to do in basic structures of dialogue.
Craig: Yeah, I was thinking about this question of the kinds of ways that we, meaning humans or characters, speak, and if they could be divided up into categories. And I don’t know if these are all of them, but these are certainly many of the ones that you’ll see and use as a writer all the time.
The first one is the easiest and most obvious, which I’ll just call neutral. And that’s sort of the way we talk throughout the day. It’s how we’re talking right now. It’s low stakes. It’s even-tempered. It’s not particularly loud or soft. It can be inquisitive or informative or social. It’s two people chatting at lunch. And in movies, sometimes that’s what’s going on, but it’s important to match the neutral mode to the actual circumstances. You don’t want to have people speaking neutrally when perhaps it might be more interesting or dramatic or appropriate for them to be speaking a different way.
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: Then there’s emotional. And that’s what we probably think of when we think about Oscar movies and so forth. But emotional dialogue is in every movie, of all kinds. And that is dialogue where the character is revealing some part of their inner emotional state. It is typically well controlled speech. It can often be uneven because we understand that it is an expression of the lizard brain, our flight or fight type of instinct. Very often this kind of dialogue is irrational. It can be contradictory. It can be very loud. It is rarely well-articulated.
This we’ve seen a lot in Three Page Challenges. People speak in this remarkably well articulated, I won’t say even-tempered, but very well-articulated way, when in fact in the moment they should have an emotional mode, which is clumsy and often truncated or weird.
John: There was a screener I was watching this last week, a movie that I genuinely loved, but there was a moment in there where a character has a huge emotional moment, and I was frustrated that the character was far too articulate in that moment. They actually dialed up the sophistication of the dialogue in that incredibly emotional moment. And the actor was talented enough to pull it off, basically. And, yet, it didn’t actually track. It didn’t actually make sense. The moment should have been less coherent and more emotionally clear. And it was sort of too precisely, too finely written for where that character was supposed to be at emotionally.
Craig: Well, it sounds like perhaps the writer fell into a fairly common trap, where when you should be emotional, you opt for something that I’ll call declarative. This is the mode of speaking when you are intentionally getting across some kind of meaningful insight or important news or dramatic revelation.
Declarative, the most obvious example would be a lawyer giving a final argument. There’s that moment in, what was that movie called, A Time to Kill, where Matthew McConaughey delivers this impassioned speech about what happens. And then he says, “Now, imagine she’s white,” which is a very declarative, insightful… There’s a wisdom to it. And actors and writers love these moments, because they are so remarkable. You know, Yoda is always declarative. But when you are emotional, you should not be declarative. That would make the emotion seem fake, and it would make you and the character and scene feel inauthentic.
John: Yep. It’s the reason why the lawyer can’t give that passionate closing argument after having just found out that his wife died.
Craig: Right.
John: There’s a mismatch of sort of what’s going on in his mental state to be able to do that. And it’s a very controlled thing for him to do that remarkable speech.
Craig: That’s right. And, by the way, that example that you just gave… Oh and interesting, I just used “by the way,” which is another great signifier to indicate that I heard you and then it’s triggered something else. Sometimes you’ll see these notes come up where somebody will say there’s a mismatch in the way this moment, with how they feel. Without putting their finger on it, what they’re saying is you’re using the wrong mode of dialogue for what would be the mental state of this person.
Interestingly, there’s this other mode that I’ll call manipulative, which makes it sound Machiavellian, but I’m using it more as an over-arching term. And manipulative dialogue is anything where you’re trying to either convince somebody or calm somebody down or inspire somebody or avoid their questions. You’re using dialogue purposefully to achieve an effect in this other person.
And if you think about our example of the lawyer, that’s the difference between a lawyer who is trying to get one over on a jury, and a lawyer who fervently believes what he’s telling them. One person will be manipulative, and the other one will be declarative.
John: Absolutely. So, what I find so fascinating about everything we talked about with dialogue in this segment was it’s all about the emotional state and the emotional content of dialogue. So, in no ways are we trying to talk about dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, at least story in terms of plot. We’re really talking about like how do you convey characters’ emotional states and how are you going to let them try to change the emotional state of the other characters in the scene.
That’s really what dialogue is supposed to be doing as it functions now, not like how it functioned historically. But what we do now when we write dialogue is to be able to provide insight to the audience about what’s going on inside the character, but also let the characters try to change the emotional state of the characters around them.
It’s part of the reason why the example of neutral modes of dialogue, that’s why those scenes are generally not so exciting, because there’s not going to be a conflict there. There’s not a challenge for the character there. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to the other characters in the scene. There’s no inherent drama there.
Craig: Precisely. And this is one of the great challenges of writing a scene is that you have to be… We’ll limit it to two people talking. Forget three or four. You have to be three different people at once. You have to be the architect of the story, who understands in an intellectual way that something must be achieved in terms of plot and character to advance this narrative.
Then you have to be both people, who do not know that, and don’t have access to that, and are reacting and living in the moment, reacting to the world around them, reacting to the feelings inside of them, and most importantly, reacting to what the other person is saying. So, that is very difficult for a lot of people. When we talk about talent in writing, sometimes I think that’s what it is. Those are three different people at once, and the best writers are the ones that are talented at being all three of those people. The writer, and then the two people in the scene.
And one of the ways I think I immediately am aware of quality in these moments is when there’s a mismatch of mode between two characters. Maybe one character is being neutral, and the other one is being manipulative. Or the other one is being emotional, and the other one is being declarative.
You know, Luke is very upset and Yoda is very calm and wise. Or, somebody is very emotional, and the other person is calming them down. So, whenever possible, you do want that mismatch, because that is creating conflict or resolution. When two people are emotional, it’s just two people yelling and absorbed in their own minds. And when two people are being wise and informative, you’re wondering why they’re both telling each other these incredibly wonderful fortune cookie insights. Mismatching these modes is a huge help when you’re navigating your way through a scene.
John: Absolutely. You want to be able to give the characters someone to play against. And if they’re trying to play the same melody, it’s not going to be nearly as exciting as if there’s a conflict between what they’re trying to do and sort of where they’re at in the mode of the scene.
Episode 371 clip:
John: Craig, start us off.
Craig: Sure. So, a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in something. It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances are. But it was the first time that I had to memorize dialogue in forever. And it was a particular kind of dialogue memorization. Most people at some point in school will have to memorize something like a passage from Shakespeare or if they’re in a school play or a musical there’s a script. And then there’s a lot of time given to memorize it. In the case of a musical, you rehearse over the course of a couple of months or so.
But traditionally the way we shoot movies and television an actor comes in and learns their lines for that day. Every day, new lines. Maybe you’re doing one scene that day. Maybe you’re doing two. So, the object is to learn, somewhere around three, four, five pages of dialogue. You rarely individually have three, four, five pages of dialogue, but it’s part of a conversation that goes on, and that’s roughly a day’s work. So actors learn their lines for the day.
And I had an opportunity to do that. And so I had the scene and I just read it and I had to memorize it somewhat, you know, relatively quickly. But, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something like that. I mean, I was familiar with it prior, but about that much time to memorize it. And then I had to do it. And it was very instructive. And I hadn’t written this dialogue. So it was a way of interacting with dialogue that I don’t normally do at all.
And in the doing of it I kind of learned some interesting lessons that I had never considered, that I think might be applicable to the writing of dialogue, because in the end, someone is going to have to memorize it and someone is going to have to say it. So, there were certain challenges that come across right away. I mean, the really easy ones. You have to remember what you’re saying. You have to obviously think about how you’re going to say it. That’s the performance part. And then there’s this third one that I think people underestimate, which is when do you say it.
John: Yeah.
Craig: It’s easy enough to know when your dialogue ends, because it ends. And then someone else starts talking. But when do you come back in? So that’s the listening part. But in that part, you begin to see how memorization relies a lot on two things: the relationships between different words and what I call, what I don’t call, what neurologists call chunks. Have you ever encountered the chunking theory of memory?
John: I think I know what you’re talking about. Essentially, we don’t hold little atoms of information. Instead we group things together in bigger packages, and it’s those larger puzzle pieces that we’re putting together to form actual memories and to form a string that becomes a sentence.
Craig: That’s exactly right. I mean, the brain is pretty good at taking certain bits of information like a number and then chunking them together in a group that is memorable. And so what they find for instance is that roughly seven digits is about the largest chunk of information you can make for people where they can reliably remember it. Meaning to say if I come up to you and I say I’m going to read, I don’t know, seven random digits and I just ask you, and single digits, and I say you’ve got to remember that, I’m coming back five minutes from now. You didn’t write it down. You can’t write it down. You’ll be able to. More than that becomes really, really hard.
John: Yeah. And the same thing would be true with words. If I gave you seven random words that had no contextual meaning together it would be very hard to get those seven words, or more than seven words, together. But if they had semantic meaning, that would be very simple.
Craig: Correct. There’s a certain ability to chunk them together. They find that people that are really good at things or have a lot of experience, the amount of information they can put in an individual chunk expands.
So for instance, chess players they found, whereas I might look at a chess board, I’m a terrible chess player. So if I look at a chess board that’s sort of set up to be mid-game, and I’m told you have to memorize this and then walk away from it, come back one minute later and reconstruct it on the board, the amount of pieces that I will be able to keep in my mind and where their positions are is very small, whereas people that are very good at chess, it’s a breeze for them, because they’re essentially creating relationships between things. They understand these four pieces in relationship, it’s sort of a thing. It’s a chunk.
John: It’s a pattern.
Craig: It’s a pattern. And so I realized that’s kind of how you memorize dialogue when you’re reading it. There are certain things that kind of indicate this is the beginning and this is the end of a chunk. And the chunks of words are anchored, essentially.
So, there’s always a word or maybe a couple of words that are stuck together that is the emphasis, the point, the reveal, or maybe a strange word. In this little chunk, and the chunk could be five words long, those are the words that are kind of the glue that’s holding all the other stuff together. Little bits and bobs of words that maybe in and of themselves like The, And, But, Before, and OK, and Whenever, and Ever, and so on and so forth, all those are kind of connected to this anchor word. So one thing to consider as you’re writing your dialogue is what is the anchor of this thought or piece of dialogue?
John: Yeah. So if it’s not hanging on anything, it’s just going to sort of fall away. And probably was not a meaningful line anyway.
Craig: Is not a meaningful line anyway. And so what you end up with is, well, it could be a meaningful line, but you heard it by creating a kind of hypnotic rhythm or pattern to it.
So, for instance, here’s something that, the sort of thing that we might say in this sort of rhythm. “After we go but before we’re let in, if we can take a look at how we arrive at the … “ Every single one of those words was one syllable or maybe two. They were all roughly the same length. There were certain repetitions of words. A lot of minuscule words with hundreds of meanings, like look and act and can and in. You’re asking the brain to do a lot of work to remember the stuff, and there’s nothing anchoring it together.
The other thing that can sometimes anchor a chunk is not a word per se, but your reaction to something that you’re looking at or you’re smelling or you’re hearing, so that the words are chunked around a reaction to the world around you.
John: Yeah. So classically, dialogue, you’re going to be reacting to the thing the person just said beforehand, but there may also be something in the environment that’s actually causing the line to happen or causing you to pick those specific words. And so you can think about what that thing is that’ll help you remember that chunk, or it will help unify that thought.
Craig: Yeah. If someone says I want you to take a look at this document and review it, and that’s their line of dialogue, and my line of dialogue is to pick it up and say, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” okay, those are sort of bland words. There’s not much of an anchor to that. But if someone says, “Take a look at this,” and they whip a window open, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s a reaction. It’s already so much easier to remember, because it’s not just words. It’s words in relation to something.
And similarly, as I was doing it I noticed that the way you realize that one chunk is over and another one is beginning is that inside of well-written dialogue, there are all these little mini/micro reversals, reconsiderations. There’s little built-in pauses or moments for emotion. And all those little things help you divide it up into chunks so that you’re not memorizing a list of words, but rather you’re memorizing movements of thought. I don’t know how else to put it.
John: Absolutely. It’s like musical phrases, but they are little sections of thought. And a lot of times they will follow English grammar. So, I suspect oftentimes you find the chunks do fit in where commas are or where connector words like “and” are. Or they end at periods. But they don’t always. And so it’s always worth looking at would it make more sense to continue this thought sort of beyond the period into its next line. You can also be thinking about sort of where is the natural place to breathe, and that may also give you a sense of where that thought really wants to break.
Craig: Yeah. And you’re right. Sometimes your desire actually is to blow through the stop sign, because you realize that everything is chunked together around one emotion of rising frustration. So you blow through that stop sign, and you chunk a larger bit together.
And I also noticed how little bits of odd word order could trip me up. It’s interesting. Odd words are great to help you remember things and they’re great to sort of signify what’s happening in a kind of attractive way when you’re performing dialogue, but here is the sentence I just… This is my example sentence. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s just odd in a mundane way.”
Now here’s that sentence again. I’m going to make one change. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s odd in just a mundane way.” All I did in that second one was move the word “just” to a slightly different spot. I moved it down two words. It’s not wrong, but it’s a much harder sentence to memorize at that point, because just is kind of the anchoring word, because it’s a change. It’s sort of signifying a new chunk. And so I just made the first chunk way longer. “But if it hurts it’s odd in,” all single-syllable words.
It seems like it’s not a big deal, but in a way it is. I’ve spent a lot of time on sets watching actors sometimes trip over these seemingly minor things, and you wonder why. And I’m starting to think it’s because of things like this. Or for instance, “This is the third time. This is the third time you’ve done this.” Okay, perfectly reasonable bit of dialogue except “this is the third time” is kind of… Your brain starts to–
John: It’s annoying. It’s not that hard. It’s just a little bit annoying. It’s because they’re different THs also. So the “this” and “third” are not the same TH.
Craig: Right.
John: And that also messes you up. I want to get back to your moving the “just.” I think part of the reason why it’s tougher that way is you’ve created a parallel structure where you’re saying odd twice, but the repetition isn’t meaningful in the second way, without the “just” there. And so that hurts you. But you’ve also broken the rhythm of the sentence. And it’s like there’s a bump in the carpet and you’re trying to walk naturally across it and you just can’t because that just is in the wrong place. And it’s a thing you don’t notice unless you read your dialogue aloud that it’s happening.
Craig: Ah, unless you read your dialogue aloud which therein is the ultimate lesson of this little mini discussion on craft. We advocate all the time that you read your dialogue out loud. Mostly because I think you start to hear maybe that some of the choices are wrong, or perhaps you’re going on a bit too long. But also I think these little things start to emerge. These are the things that will subconsciously begin to undermine the performers.
They’re really good at what they do. They can memorize anything. And they will. But the stuff that’s easier to memorize I suspect is therefore easier to perform, and therefore I suspect is easier to hear. And when I say easier, I don’t mean less challenging intellectually. I mean it’s just more mellifluous. And so when you and I fuss over where the word “just” should be placed in that sentence, it’s not merely writerly fussiness. It’s kind of the point. These things really, really matter.
So, the little lessons that I learned from my little bit of memorization, and perhaps they might help people as they go about creating things for other people to memorize.
John: So a few techniques which I want to suggest to anybody who has to memorize dialogue they did not write is obviously the cliché of this, just sort of how the writer cliché is sort of like typing on the typewriter, oh it’s terrible, you rip the paper off and crumble it up. The actor cliché is I’m auditioning for something and I’m just running lines with a friend. That running lines, it really does happen, but the way we usually see it in movies, weirdly, it just feels very false and fake. But literally just the practice of going through the lines and having somebody else work through the lines with you will help.
When I’ve had to do it for songs, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, is to memorize lyrics. Other singers have told me that you just write the lyrics out by hand. And the process of actually having to write it out sort of helps cement it in the brain a little bit more. Makes you think about what those words actually are and helps you chunk them down.
Make sure the words mean something to you, that you’re not just saying the words, but you actually understand the intention behind them. My daughter had to do Shakespeare. She had to do a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream. And you can just spout the words out, but if you don’t actually understand what they mean, the scene is not going to really work, and you’re going to have a harder time really holding onto those words, because they’re just syllables. They’re not words that actually mean anything to you.
And the last thing I think really goes back to your idea of chunking. It’s really connecting the thoughts. And so obviously, you’re going to be responding to the person who just spoke, but you also have to connect back to the scene as a whole. You have to understand, remember, what was your intention two lines ago, three lines ago? What’s actually happening in the scene and what is the environment in which I’m saying this line, because the environment is constantly changing based on this conversation.
So it’s not just a ping-pong match where the ball in on one side of the net or the other side of the net. It really is a bigger environment in which this is happening and make sure that you’re learning the line in that environment and not just in a little vacuum by itself.
Craig: Yeah, I mean, in the end, when you learn your part of a conversation, you have to learn their part too. You have to. It’s essential. You need to kind of know at least. Part of acting is being surprised by something you know is coming, including what you’re supposed to say. But you do need to know their side, or else you’ll get lost real fast.
John: Yeah. Being surprised by what you said, that can be really useful. It can make a scene feel really alive. But do remember that in real conversations, it can be useful to sort of turn on that little recording light when you’re having a real conversation. You generally do have a sense of what you’re going to be saying kind of 15 seconds from now. Even while you’re listening to the other person, you do have a next line sort of queuing up. So would your characters in the scene, and so will you as an actor. So, it’s okay to let the mental wheels spin a little bit, to get that stuff started even as you’re actively listening in a scene.
Craig: Yeah. Look, neither one of us are accomplished thespians by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that we work with them, these things are always… I think they’re very helpful to consider.
And I handed poor Jared Harris massive reams of dialogue that he handled brilliantly, but it was a challenge. His character in Chernobyl, he’s wordy. He’s a scientist, and he’s a talker. And he’s an explainer. But he’s also very emotional. So when he gets going, it all has to come tumbling out in this incredibly natural way. And he’s a master at that, but it’s a lot. It’s hard.
John: My prediction is the things that were mostly challenging for him, and this has just been my observation on many, many sets, is when actors have lines that are similar, that are in different parts of the scene, that messes them up. If they were completely different lines, it would be great. But if they have things that are kind of the same idea and they’re repeating themselves, but they’re not repeating themselves in the same way, that’s where things get tripped up. It’s like, wait, did I already say this? Where am I at in this scene? And that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working quite right in the writing, or at least in the execution, because each of those lines should only kind of be possible in that one moment.
Craig: Well, I mean, if you have any sense that thoughts or lines are vaguely repeating, that’s a writing problem for sure. And you have to eliminate those. And you can hear them sometimes, too. Again, when you read things out loud or you listen and you go, okay, that seems like we’re kind of rolling over the same ground there. And, yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that.
John: Yep. The writing challenge I faced this week was I’m doing a scene that is at the end of the second act, and so all the characters are well established. I didn’t need to introduce any new characters in the scene, sort of scene/sequence. It’s a pretty big number. It’s about five pages in all. But almost all of the characters in the story are in this sequence.
Now, the scene is clearly driven by one person. One person has almost all the dialogue in the sequence, and yet there’s a lot of other characters to service in it. And the challenge in these kind of scenes, and these kind of scenes happen in almost every script I guess, is how do you keep everybody else alive and active and engaged in that scene and sort of make them count in that scene, when they don’t have a lot to actually do.
And so it’s a frequent challenge. So, I wanted to sort of go through why this happens and some strategies for dealing with it when it happens. Because, Craig, I’m sure you face this on a weekly basis.
Craig: It’s inevitable. I mean, there are scenes where people need to listen. It’s really important that they’re there, because they have to listen to something happen. And they’re going to have one or two important moments within that, but mostly they have to listen. And yeah you need to really think carefully about how you’re portraying. You first need to ask do they really need to be there. And once you decide they do, well, then you’ve got to handle them. You have to service your characters.
John: And so one of the big complications in this sequence, but it’s also true I think for a lot of other movies, is the biggest name actors in the movie are going to be in the scene, but they’re not going to have the most to do. And that’s kind of inevitable based on the story. And that, again, does happen a lot.
So, I want to make sure that as I’m writing this, that these characters and these actors who don’t have a ton to do still feel very, very important in this scene, because you and I both know that otherwise they might show up on set and be sort of frustrated that they don’t have anything to do.
So, I’m trying to be mindful from the start of giving them interesting business and making them feel important in the scene, even though they don’t have a lot to do. And so that was one of the other things I was working through with this sequence.
Craig: Yeah. And, look, I don’t get too concerned with the egos of actors, because I’ve given up trying to predict what will or will not spin an insecure person off their axis. But what I do know is if they’re the most important characters in the movie, and it sounds like they have to be, because they’re the big stars, that means that the scene is about them. The bottom line is it’s about them. They may not be talking in it. They may be listening. They may be experiencing something. But it is about what they’re feeling. It’s about what they’re thinking. It’s about who they’re looking at and why they’re looking at them.
So, that’s kind of the thing. When you look at A Few Good Men, it may be that we’re concentrating on Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson. They’re going back and forth. But when you go over to Demi Moore or to Kevin Pollack, their looks mean something. There’s something happening there that’s valuable.
John: I think it’s good you brought up A Few Good Men, because I was trying to list the types of movies where you see this challenging sequence happen. Courtroom dramas are one of the main places. But sporting championships are another important place for this, where the action is taking place on the field but, you know, we need to also track the coach and the people in the stands and all of the other characters are there for that final sports championship.
Craig: I can’t get over sporting championships.
John: Sporting championships. Well, because I’m saying, I don’t want to be just football, or just soccer, or just basketball.
Craig: I know. But it’s literally like you landed here yesterday from Planet Questron.
John: I like sporting games. I like to watch the sporting games and sporting matches.
Craig: You’re like, “When writing sporting championships.” Oh, you’re the best, man. I love you.
John: But even like major battle sequences, so when you see Star Wars, when you see big fights like that, you have a ton of things happening in the sequence, and to be able to track all those people. And every time you cut away to show somebody else, their reaction, you risk breaking the flow of the main action. So it’s finding that natural way to do it is tough.
Some movies with big musical numbers, you’ll just have everybody in there. And so how do you service everybody in that big musical number? And then speeches and rallies where you have one character. This is sort of like a speech or rally kind of moment in the movie I’m doing right now. You have one character making a big speech, so therefore will have almost all of the dialogue, so making sure you find interesting things for the other important characters to be doing in that, even though they’re not naturally going to have lines because they’re not going to be talking at the same time as the other person talking. So, those are circumstances where you find yourself in this writing challenge.
So, for me, what I did is I went back to sort of real basics. That’s making sure to do an audit of all the characters there and really look at what they want in that moment. Like what are they trying to do right then at that moment? What are the micro interactions between characters? And so it’s a way of acknowledging multiple characters there. If two characters can look at each other, exchange a meaningful look, that takes care of those two characters and keeps them alive in the scene, rather than having them do individual things.
I looked for like what physical actions could they do, so to give them something concrete, something we could see. And I really looked at sort of how can this scene geography suggest where people can be, so that in cutting to them around the space, we’re actually exploring more of the environment, exploring more of what’s really going on there. How can things change within that scene geography?
Those are just some of the techniques I sort of found for this sequence, but in doing it, I found that’s probably true for most of the sequences I’ve had to write that had five or more characters in them.
Craig: Yeah. I try and think of these things in terms of sort of multi-track narratives, because you have your main narrative which is the narrative of the big scene. You know, we are watching the Super Bowl, and the big narrative is what is happening with the football, where is it going, who is running where, and how far are they getting. And in trials, it is between whoever the fireworks is coming from in any particular moment. Same with battles. And same with musical numbers. And same with speeches.
But, that’s one track of the narrative. Then the question is, okay, for the people that are watching, what is their narrative? Because if it’s “I’m watching,” then they don’t need to be there. And it can’t just be “I’m watching,” because at that point they become boring. They have to be actively watching, actively listening.
John: Yeah. What I needed to make sure is that the characters who were there, who had to watch or witness part of it, still had important choices to make, and that the choices they’re going to be making are directly impacted by their reaction to what they just saw. And so that gives them a reason for why they needed to be there and why they’re making this interesting choice at the end of the sequence.
Craig: Right. So to go back to A Few Good Men and the trial scene there, there is a moment where Cruise’s character is considering basically putting his entire career, even his freedom, on the line to pursue a line of inquiry with Jack Nicholson’s character. And he looks over, and Kevin Pollack simply gives him the slightest don’t do it head shake. That’s it. And these moments are crucial because it means he’s a participant. He is impacting and affecting what is going on around him as an observer.
So when I write those scenes, I really try and give every character a narrative and also a moment where they can make a choice to stand up and say something or to not. They can stand up and go, “I have to stop this,” or they just let it go, but I understand that they are participating. And even if their choice is to not do a thing, they have changed the path of the scene.
This is frankly, no offense to our director brothers and sisters, but this is so important for us to do as writers, because if we don’t do it and we don’t do it clearly on the page, they don’t do it. They don’t do it. They miss those little mini stories. They’ll just write it off as, okay, let’s just grab reaction shots now. But what is the actor doing in the reaction shot? Listening? Coming up with their own theories and things? That’s fine. But that’s not as good as a clear narrative story that that actor understands they are pursuing before they ever get there on the day. And that the director then can think about how they stage that scene, understanding that they are not covering one narrative here, but multiple narratives.
It’s really important that we do this on the page, because if we don’t, we are going to be deeply disappointed nine times out of ten when we see the film.
John: Yeah. So, the Kevin Pollack that you mentioned, I don’t know what it looks like on the script page. I suspect it is clearly called out there. It’s the kind of moment where as I read back through the script, if I am worried that people are going to miss it, because people sometimes do get to be a little skimmy, and they might not be reading every line of the scene description, I might save one of my underlines for that. Just to make sure that it really lands. Like, oh no, no, this is a real moment. This moment has to happen. This is going to change and pivot what’s happening after it.
And, yes, great directors will look at a scene and look at it from every character’s angle and really have a chance to study and explore it and would probably figure out, like you know what, I need to really make that moment so I’m not just going to worry about coverage to get that reaction. I’m going to make sure I specifically plan for what is the look between those actors, what’s happening in that moment.
Craig: Right.
John: When you don’t have that kind of prep time, when you’re shooting a one-hour drama on a tight schedule, those are the moments that can be lost. And that’s the reason why in TV they want the writer on set. And it’s also the reason why in the tone meeting, where they’re going through with the director while the director is doing prep, they’re really trying to single out those moments that are so crucial, that they anticipate needing as they get into the editing room.
Craig: Right. 100%. And I do think, look, every show has a different kind of constraint on it. But if you’re doing one of these scenes and you feel like, given the nature of the time you have and the writing you have, that you can’t afford to multi-track your narrative, rewrite the scene. Because otherwise it literally will just be boring or stupid.
John: Yeah. So obviously going into one of these things I should have said at the very start is one of your first choices may be like do I need to have all these characters? Am I making my life too difficult by trying to service all these characters in the scene? And sometimes you are making it too difficult. In the case of the scene I was writing, it felt like all the threads needed to come together under one roof, and so yes, I definitely needed all those characters there.
Craig: There you go.
John: That concludes our clip show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and featured segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonald, and Megana Rao, the whole murderers row of former Scriptnotes producers.
It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli, a classic of his. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
Hey, let’s talk merch. We have Scriptnotes T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the brand new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.
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You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one you’re about to hear on dual dialog. Thanks to everybody, and have a great week.
[Bonus Segment]
Episode 470 clip:
John: All right, let’s get to a craft topic. I want to talk about dual dialogue, because this week I’ve been writing scenes that have a lot of dual dialogue in it, which is not something I often do. We’ve discussed on Episode 370, we talked about simultaneity, basically when two events have to happen in the same time, but dual dialogue is a specific kind of that where people are just overlapping. And we may want the overlap for effect. We may need to hear information from two different sides. There’s a reason why we’re doing. It’s always a choice to do dual dialogue. And let’s talk about when you make that choice and how you might portray that on the page.
Craig: It is a little bit of a trap, because if you watch movies, particularly certain kinds of movies where it’s very conversational, very dialogue heavy, almost all of it at times will seem like it’s overlapping somewhat. And so there’s a temptation to think this is going to make it realer. If I do dual dialogue, it will make things look realer.
The problem with dual dialogue is that it is such a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. Everybody is now going, “Oh my god, I have to actually, we are talking at the same time over each other very specifically.” This isn’t a natural overlapping but a forced overlapping. So you have to be very deliberate, I think, about when you use it. It really comes into play rarely. I must say maybe three or four times in a script it’ll pop up. And even then I feel like I could probably get away with two of them, you know, get rid of two of them or something.
John: Yeah. So I think we often confuse and conflate it with people speaking quickly.
Craig: Right.
John: And so I think in a lot of movies that we see and we love, we think they’re overlapping, but really they’re actually just speaking quickly. And they’re anticipating their next lines. There’s just not pauses between things. But they literally are not stacked on top of each other. So, we see a tool in Highland or in Final Draft that gives us the ability to dual dialogue, and we think like, oh, that must be the way you do it. And I’ll tell you that on the page, often that’s not how you do it.
Craig: Right.
John: So some of the choices you might make is as a parenthetical “overlapping,” basically saying like there may be scene description that says all of this is overlapping. Basically don’t wait to clear the other person’s lines before you start talking. That it’s meant to be sort of on top of each other.
Craig: Yeah.
John: For example, Call Me by Your Name, there’s a sequence in which he’s sitting at the table, and the parents and these other visitors are just all talking over each other. And it’s not important what they’re actually saying. It’s the experience of being there, listening to that. And so that’s probably just an overlapping because it just doesn’t actually matter what the individual people are saying.
Other cases, you are very specifically trying to get information out there. So, we had Noah Baumbach on for Marriage Story. We had Greta Gerwig on for Little Women. And in those scripts, you can go back to those episodes and look at the PDFs, they’re very specific about where those overlaps are, and you are supposed to be hearing what everyone is saying. And the fact that they are overlapping becomes very important. Be thinking about what the actual effect is you’re trying to achieve.
Craig: Yeah. But there are those moments where it really is the perfect tool. Like you say, it’s not frequent. I mean, for standard overlapping, for casual overlapping you don’t want to do this. It is a heavy-handed instruction to everybody.
But, then there are times where somebody is going to try and talk over another person. Arguments, for instance, where someone is going to be talking and the other person starts talking as if to say, “No, you stop talking,” but the first person will not stop talking. Or, situations in comedies sometimes where two people are trying to explain the same thing at once. It is a moment where it is absolutely required that two people are speaking intentionally over each other, with knowledge that they’re speaking over each other, and neither one of them is going to stop. That’s pretty much the best case use for dual dialogue.
John: Yeah. Basically neither one of them is yielding the floor to the other person to speak.
Craig: Right.
John: So even the conversation that you and I are having right now, we are anticipating when I’m going to stop talking and you’re going to start talking. But along the way, I might try to shout over you a little bit. I may do an acknowledgment, which I think is a special case we should talk about here, which is the uh-huhs, the yeahs. If you’re doing The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it’s Michael Barbaro’s “Huh.” It’s that signal that you’re still part of it.
Craig: Huh.
John: So those are all meaningful things. And sometimes you’re going to choose as a writer to actually break up someone’s dialogue with that “huh,” that acknowledgment. But that’s rare. It would also be rare to put that “uh-huh” in a dual dialogue. So you’re going to make choices. Basically I’m saying you may not put every utterance of a person in the dialogue of your script.
Craig: And when you are there, you are going to find some sort of naturalistic language that comes out. One of the stark differences between play text from a playwright and screenplay text from a screenwriter is that the play text is designed to be performed by as many different actors as possible, whereas the screenwriting text will be performed by one. And unless there’s some remake of the movie 30 years later, it’s one person. So there is going to be a certain tailoring and idiosyncratic adjustment to that single performer, as opposed to a play.
So actually I do see dual dialogue frequently when I look at plays, when I read plays. It seems like that gets called out quite a bit because it’s formalized, whereas in movies not so much. It is a decent tool. It’s very useful for songs, when you’re writing songs in movies, and two people are singing at once. It’s perfectly useful. But I think it’s probably good to ask yourself do I need it. It is not fun to read …
John: It’s brutal to read.
Craig: … I’ll say, on the page. Yeah. If you see a page where it’s just strips of dual dialogue, your eyelids will get heavy.
John: Yeah, because you have to make the choice of, okay, am I going to read the left hand column and then go back and read the right hand column? It’s a lot of work.
Craig: It’s also hard to imagine. And you know we can play one voice in our head at once. We can’t play two. We just can’t.
John: Yeah.
Craig: So, you know, you’re asking something there. When you use it, know that it is very intentional, very purposeful. It is a heavy spice, so sprinkle it with restraint.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Episode 37 – Let’s talk about dialogue
- Scriptnotes Episode 286 – Script Doctors, Dialogue and Hacks
- Scriptnotes Episode 371 – Writing Memorable Dialogue
- Highland 2
- Writer Emergency Pack XL
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, featuring segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 609: Dialogue and Character Voice, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Emcee: All right, now without further ado, the hosts with the most, John August and Craig Mazin.
Craig Mazin: Wow. Wow.
John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You are here for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…
Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.
John: Wow. Incredible here.
Craig: Incredible.
John: First off, we need to thank the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. It is remarkable to be here at the Hollywood Bowl, a dream come true.
Craig: It’s gorgeous. Probably the mics that we’re talking into are pretty close to the stage, so we’re probably only picking up maybe the first couple of rows-
John: Absolutely.
Craig: … in the Garden Boxes.
John: I can the energy out here in this-
Craig: Wow.
John: … iconic location.
Craig: What a dream.
John: 15,000 people?
Craig: Thousand.
John: I’d never envision this in our-
Craig: And the weather.
John: Great. A few sprinkles, but just the best thing.
Craig: Lovely.
John: Needed a little rain here.
Craig: You know what? That felt so good, because everything’s been going so great lately, so it’s nice that we have this going on for ourselves.
John: It’s nice that we have a little bit of a moment here. Today I was out on the picket lines, and we were talking about-
(Audience cheers)
John: Oh, hey. Phew! I worried we were going to have some anti-writer people here in the crowd. I was out on the picket lines. I talked about, oh, we have a live show tonight. It’s like, oh, did you plan for it to be on the 100th day of the Strike? Today is the 100th day of the Strike. Did we plan this?
Craig: We did.
John: A hundred percent. Craig said, “John, whatever you do, make sure the Strike goes on for at least-“
Craig: Slow walk this thing.
John: Yeah, 100 days. Now, it’s smooth sailing from here on forward.
Craig: John, to be clear, you do have a little bit of a weird and creepy, and what I honestly think is somewhat a bit of an anti-union secret. I think it’s probably important for you to come clean about it.
John: I thought that was green room rules. I thought we didn’t-
Craig: No. Fuck that.
John: All right. I think people could agree that I’m generally a pro-union, pro-WGA person.
Craig: That’s what I thought.
John: I would never disparage anything about the WGA. But 100 days in, there’s something I want to get off my chest, is that I believe the iconic blue official WGA Strike T-shirts… I love them as an image. I love wearing it there. I love seeing a field of blue. Fantastic. They are not comfortable shirts.
Craig: No.
John: They are really uncomfortable shirts.
Craig: In fact, they may have been manufactured by the AMPTP.
John: The official blue shirts are union-made, and the union is not the probably here. They are 100 percent cotton. We learned from our own Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel, his sense of softness, what do we need for a T-shirt to be comfortable?
Craig: You need a tri-blend, John.
John: You need a tri-blend.
Craig: You need a tri-blend.
John: You need a tri-blend.
Craig: Tri-blend.
John: They are not tri-blend shirts.
Craig: No.
John: They’re not comfortable to wear.
Craig: No. They are hair shirts. I don’t like them at all. They chafe your nipples. Do not wear.
John: Here’s what I think about it. I have shirts that I wear because I choose to wear them, and there are shirts where like, you’ve now joined the army, here’s your uniform. They don’t ask soldiers is your camouflage comfortable. That’s not their concern.
Craig: They actually might. I got to tell you, I think that we have the worst of it.
John: We have a show that’s chockablock full with amazing guests. Quinta Brunson is here.
Craig: Someone named Natasha Lyonne is here.
John: These are guests who are not only incredibly talented writers, they are also actors. As members of SAG-AFTRA, there are certain specific restrictions on what they should be talking about. They are not going to be talking about their specific shows and programs that you know them for, but instead, we can talk about the craft, the art.
Craig: Which we do anyway. We’re not really press junkety question people. As we go through the show, if you’re wondering, hey, why don’t they mention muh or meep, it’s because we just don’t want to get them in trouble with their union. Also, I’m in that union too.
John: You are, yeah.
Craig: I’m in SAG.
John: You’re in SAG.
Craig: I’m in SAG. I’m an actor.
John: You’re an actor.
Craig: I’m a real actor.
John: I almost said the word. I said half the word of a show that you were in.
Craig: You can say it. That didn’t break the rule. You’re not in SAG.
John: Duncan Crabtree-Ireland is sitting right out there. He’s got a sniper rifle, so if we say the wrong thing-
Craig: Great.
John: We are going to talk about how they got started, how they got to this place they are today, but we are also going to have some fun. We’re going to play some games. We’ll do some audience Q and A.
Craig: With slightly stricter rules, because you guys really can’t talk about those shows either. That’s fine. That’s no big deal. I wanted to introduce somebody really quickly who’s going to be with us today. You’re going to be seeing him floating around over there. That’s Elliot Aronson. Elliot is going to be our ASL interpreter tonight. Elliot also was the ASL interpreter… I can say a show that was on the air, right?
John: [Crosstalk 00:05:31].
Craig: I’m going to do it. He worked for The Last of Us. He was Kevionn Woodard’s ASL interpreter.
John: I think he’s a former One Cool Thing.
Craig: He is a One Cool Thing. He will always be One Cool Thing. I’m sort of annoyed that he’s not signing right now, because I would force him to have to sign about himself and talk about himself as an incredibly handsome person and a wonderful guy whose name is Elliot. This is me. I am Elliot, and I’m amazing. He’s never going to get a chance to do that again.
John: Let’s get started, Craig. Our very first guest is a writer, a producer, an actress, a comedian. Last year, she was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. We’ve wanted her on the show forever, Craig, and now we can finally have her. Welcome, Quinta Brunson.
Quinta Brunson: Hi, everybody. Hi. How’s it going?
John: Quinta.
Quinta: Yes?
John: Backstage you talked about that you are not a huge podcast listener.
Quinta: No.
Craig: Me either.
Quinta: Or doer.
John: Or doer. Thank you for making an exception for us here.
Quinta: Of course.
John: You actually have some history with Hollywood Heart.
Quinta: Yes. I used to do improv at Hollywood Heart. This was probably the summer of, what’s this called, 2023. Then that was probably maybe six, seven years ago. I did improv shows with my troupe, Summercon [ph]. It was four of us. We would just do improv and then have the kids come up and join us at the camp, which is on a really scary… You guys, it’s on this hill.
John: Oh, no.
Craig: We’re trying to raise money to get them off the hill.
Quinta: It is terrifying.
Craig: Describe the hill.
Quinta: The hill is something of your nightmares. You know when you go in those canyons around here, and you’re like, “Whoa, this is crazy,” but then you get used to them because you’ve been in LA for a while? This shit, it’s like going to Bowser’s castle. It is insane. It’s windy. You feel like you’re going to… Kids, because we just talked about mortality back there, they don’t know that they can die, so they’re not afraid.
Craig: You’ve told them.
Quinta: Yeah. I think that’s why Hollywood Heart didn’t invite me back, because I put it in my improv. I just was motivated to tell the truth.
Craig: I like that most of your bits were just about how shitty that camp was. That’s pretty awesome.
Quinta: The camp is beautiful. It’s just the road on the way up there.
Craig: I see. It’s getting there.
Quinta: It’s in heaven. It’s so high up. This is why I don’t love to talk. I’m not talking correctly, you guys, because I’m not-
Craig: You’re out of practice.
Quinta: I should be a writers’ room. I’m not doing well with sentences.
Craig: We’ll work you through it. It’s going to be all right.
John: Quinta, before you were traumatizing children in this improv group, what is your comedy background? How did you get started? What was the spark? How did you actually go from like, “I like comedy,” to, “I’m doing it.”
Quinta: It was the connection between my siblings and I. My siblings are all significantly older than me. My closest sibling is eight years older than me. He hated me, because he was the baby for so long, and then I came along. He really didn’t like me. I was like, “I gotta win this guy over,” truly. That was a big motivator for me. He really liked Ace Ventura. He hated me. We had a Jack and Jill door. Do you guys know what that is? Between our bedrooms.
Craig: I had one of those.
John: Like The Brady Brunch.
Quinta: Yeah. He just couldn’t stand that he was sharing his space with this freaking baby. Then I would see him watching Ace Ventura and laughing really loud with his friends. I was like, “I can make my butt talk too. I can do that.” I started mimicking what was happening in the movies, and he would laugh, and he would like me.
I just started liking comedy, because that was a connecting factor between all of my siblings and I. My oldest brother, he loved the Kings of Comedy, so I would do impressions of Steve Harvey on that. Then my sisters, they were great, because they had different tastes. My one sister loved In Living Color, but the other sister loved SNL. One sister loved Martin. The other loved Conan. She was into late-night shows. It just became a way for me to connect with everyone. Same thing with my parents, who are also really old. I watched The Brady Bunch with them. I just like this.
Then high school, when it became taste to me, because I loved it so much, and I knew so much more about comedy than everyone else that I would bring DVDs to school and be like, “This is what you need to be watching. This is the new shit in the streets.” They’re like, “What the fuck is Napoleon Dynamite?” I’m like, “You’ll learn. You’ll learn.” Remember that? Remember when you gave someone a DVD, and it meant something?
Craig: I don’t know how young they are. DVDs were these round things.
Quinta: You gave it to them. You were like, “Return it.” You trusted them to return your only copy.
Craig: Not scratched.
Quinta: Not scratched.
Craig: Not scratched.
Quinta: That meant something to me to bring that. Then college, I was really good. I was a good student all my life, but then I just started fucking around. I was like, I don’t care about what I’m doing. I was an advertising major. Then I was just watching SNL one night and was like, where did these people all go to do this? That’s when I learned about Second City. Then that’s when I actually learned that I could do it for a living, because that was the change, and like, okay, this can be my career.
Craig: You mentioned growing up in Philly.
Audience member: Woo!
Craig: All right.
Quinta: Yay!
Craig: Philly’s got its own… It’s got an interesting comedy tradition. One of the things I’ve noticed about people that come out of Philly, especially people in comedy, like Kevin Hart or Rob McElhenney, is that it’s not a chip on the shoulder as much as, “You underestimate me at your own peril,” which is a very Philadelphia kind of vibe.
Quinta: Yes, absolutely. Love it.
Craig: I just want to ask you how you bring a little bit of the place you came from to your voice and how you apply that to writing and what you do.
Quinta: That is an excellent question.
Craig: Thank you!
Quinta: I love this.
Craig: Show over.
Quinta: I feel like I live my whole life like an underdog. I think my comedic voice, the projects that I have done all deal with underdog, underestimated characters and stories. Philadelphia as a city is the little cousin to New York. No one thinks of us until we…
Craig: Until you get stuck there.
Quinta: Get stuck there, or when you make it to a Super Bowl, everyone’s like, “Oh.” It’s like, yeah, we have a good fucking team. What are you watching? I was so mad during the Super Bowl last year when people were like, “Oh, the Eagles.” Bitch, the whole fucking season-
Craig: They won just a few years earlier.
Quinta: … was incredible. What are you talking about?
Craig: That’s Philly.
Quinta: It’s really frustrating. It’s also a really foolish city. We have that statue of Rocky. That is so foolish. We believe in ourselves so hard that even when you come… Allen Iverson is an honorary Philadelphian. I don’t think of where he’s from. To me, he’s from Philly, because he became a part of the underdog story. I say all that to say it’s just a city that makes you believe in the underdog more than any other city I think in America, but I still want to be the underdog, so maybe not as much as any other city.
Craig: You have to be an underdog in the race to be the underdog.
Quinta: Yeah. I had a hard time during the last two years of my life, where I was losing my underdog status.
John: Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, yeah.
Craig: It’s a little rough.
Quinta: My friends started clowning me a little bit. They’re like, “Bitch,” because I’d be saying stuff like, “Oh, man, I don’t know if I can get in this club, but we going to try.”
Craig: They’re like, “Bitch.”
Quinta: Like, “Yeah, you’re going to get in the club.” Stuff like that. I’m dealing with that.
Craig: 100 Most Influential People of the Year.
John: This underdog thing of yours, the first thing that broke for you was Girl Who Had Never Been on a Good Date.
Quinta: On a Nice Date, yeah.
John: On a Nice Date, which Instagram video, not even reels, an early Instagram thing. Talk to us about decision to do those and what happened when those caught.
Quinta: Instagram wasn’t Instagram yet. It was 2013. The platform had just gotten video. I was just fucking around. I just wanted to make my friends who followed me… I might’ve had, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 followers, just friends from college and friends from high school and stuff. I just wanted to put up videos to make them laugh. I really was just testing out the platform, I guess. We didn’t even speak like this back then.
John: I know.
Quinta: We weren’t saying platform. We were just like, “Yeah, my Instagram account.” The first video that I posted had just gone viral, which that wasn’t even a thing besides describing YouTube, virality in that way. I saw an opportunity to capitalize off of it. I was like, “I’ll keep making them. People like it. This is the same as garnering an audience where people come to see you at shows. It’s word of mouth.”
I was a person who was really, really against the internet. I despised YouTubers. I despised just the internet. At the time, I was doing improv at ImprovOlympic, which no longer exists. I was like, “I’m a stage performer. I can’t be doing this.” But I came to accept it. It really helped kick off my career, so I’m very grateful for it.
Craig: We have spent a long time, over a decade now, teaching about writing and our business, to people, through this podcast. Your mother was a public schoolteacher?
Quinta: Yeah.
Craig: Both of my parents were public schoolteachers.
Quinta: Oh.
Craig: We have that shared experience. I’m curious if coming from a teacher the way you did, what you think about the way writing is taught, because we have an issue with the way writing is taught and the general education of writers, and I guess also the education of how to work in the entertainment business. I’m curious, as somebody who comes from that tradition, what you think about how we are doing things and who we’re bringing in and how we’re helping them or teaching them.
Quinta: I think there should be a little bit more focus for writers on, you said it, how to also do business and how to communicate with partners, whether it be other people in a room, a writers’ room or a studio or a network, because you can be really talented and not know how to communicate your idea, not know how to communicate it even on paper. You could have just such an incredible story in your head and write it down. Sure, amazing to you and your two friends. Do you know how to communicate it to other people who don’t come from the same background as you, who don’t speak the same language as you? When I’m writing-
Craig: A show. Let’s just stipulate.
Quinta: When I’m writing a show-
Craig: A show.
Quinta: … and I decide that I would like it to be for a broad audience, I think, will a person in Korea understand this? Yes, it’s in a different language, but will they understand it if it’s translated into their language?
I think that’s a huge thing that people miss out on. Even if you’re writing it in English and you’re writing it for Americans, why don’t you test and see if someone in France can understand this story, because I think that’s such a huge part of writing is just clearcut storytelling. It can be done on a wide, complicated scale. We’ve seen huge movies do it very, very well. It can be done on a small scale, like with a TV show. Does the story make sense to other people who aren’t you and aren’t your friends from school? Is that a good answer? I wish that was taught more.
Craig: I think it’s a great answer.
John: It’s a great answer. Before you started working on official Hollywood things, you were working at Buzzfeed for a time. It seemed like you had a chance to do a lot of stuff. Were you writing, performing, editing, all that, the whole cycle?
Quinta: Writing, performing, producing, editing. Producing was the biggest thing I got out of Buzzfeed, because we had a $300 budget to make videos. Man, that made me scrappy. My brain is just forever scrappy in that way. Even if I receive a big budget, it’s just still working on that $300 in a way. I have to be told, “Expand your mind. You have more money.” Those are the things I…
Editing too. I’m so grateful for learning how to edit there. That is another thing that I feel like anyone who is making something, if you can, spend time with an editor. Make sure you take yourself to an editor suite. Just get on the equipment yourself and start fucking around, just to see. It’s another part of it. Is your story communicating to the editor? It’s such a huge-
Craig: It’s how you finish. It’s the end of the writing. We think writing ends when we stop typing. If the point is to make, so there’s your production, and then the editing really is, it’s your final draft.
Quinta: Yeah, but if people never sit with an editor or-
Craig: They don’t know.
Quinta: … get on the programs themselves, they don’t know.
Craig: I remember the first time I saw the things that I was writing being edited, I wanted to barf, because I realized how far off I was, or also just how impotent my plan was. In my mind, I was like, “I have thought of it, and therefore it will be.”
Quinta: I think that I got a real appreciation for editors from Steven Spielberg. I was obsessed with Jurassic Park when I was little. I found everything he ever talked about, wrote, did, any video I could find. When YouTube came around, I just got on… Who’s that guy?
Craig: He is our ASL interpreter.
Quinta: Oh, hey.
Craig: You weren’t here for that part.
Quinta: I wasn’t.
Craig: Did you think he was-
Quinta: I was like, “Everybody’s cool with this?”
Craig: You think that we were about to get jumped?
Quinta: I did. I carry my purse because my shank’s in here. I was like, do we need to-
Craig: Like I said, Philadelphia.
Quinta: Seriously.
Craig: That’s how it used to be at the old Veterans Stadium.
Quinta: Oh my god.
Craig: Someone runs out there.
Quinta: Hello. Thank you. Where has he been the whole time?
Craig: He was down there, but I think the person that he’s interpreting for has arrived is my guess.
Quinta: Wow. That’s amazing.
Craig: He sprung into action. His name is Elliot. He’s wonderful.
Quinta: Hi, Elliot. That’s amazing that you have that. That’s great.
Craig: I’m glad that he’s up there, because now I once again-
Quinta: It’s really cool.
Craig: … have to say that Elliot is a wonderful, handsome person, and once again, he needs to sign it, which is spectacular.
Quinta: You should tell people that. I think Natasha’s going to lose her shit.
Craig: No, I’m going to going to. I want to see that.
Quinta: Wait. I watched Steven Spielberg talk about editing when I was younger. I was like, “Man, the editor’s the final part. He said he couldn’t do this without the editors.” There was a video of him sitting with the editors, working on Jurassic Park. The editor that really blew my mind when I was little, I was like, “Oh my god, he worked on Star Wars too. This is fucking crazy.” It just really painted the picture to me that they were a vital part of the process.
One of my favorite editors, Richie, he and I share a brain. I did one show that I sold to… It doesn’t exist anymore. It was Verizon’s platform. I had an editor who was Argentinian.
Audience member: Woo!
Quinta: Okay. Yeah. What a diverse audience.
Craig: One person from Philly, one person from Argentina.
Quinta: Super diverse.
Craig: Everyone else from Silver Lake, I presume.
Quinta: Some from Echo Park.
Craig: Yes, of course. It’s West Echo.
Quinta: I made this show. It was poorly written. I’ll say that. I think it’s great to get an opportunity to poorly write something for a digital platform that won’t exist anymore. The editor didn’t get it. I was like, “This rhythmically is missing something then. I’m going to take myself back to the drawing board of writing.”
That show was actually my first attempt at a mockumentary. That taught me another thing, like, okay, the rhythm of a mockumentary is different than the rhythm of another single-cam, which is different from a multi-cam. I have to write with that in mind. I have to make sure I can communicate it to someone who is an editor, who is not from where I’m from and may not pick up the same cues. It needs to be in the script properly, so that they know how to cut and know what they’re doing. That was such a big learning experience for me at Buzzfeed.
Craig: Do we have time for one more question?
John: One last question just for Craig.
Craig: One last question real fast. Speed round. You mentioned failing.
Quinta: Failing, yeah.
Craig: One of the things that’s interesting about people that work in a room, as you might, on a show, if you’re going to be failing, a lot of times you’re failing in front of a lot of people. I wonder, do you give yourself some space to go fail privately in quiet and then come back-
Quinta: Yes.
Craig: … into the room to be like-
Quinta: Oh, in the room?
Craig: I’m saying can you give yourself a place to go dance like no one’s watching and then come back and dance like other people are watching?
Quinta: Hm. That’s such a good question. I like to find safe spaces to fail. That used to be stand-up. I don’t feel comfortable failing at that anymore. I recently did a show with Brett Goldstein from (bleeps).
Craig: Other shows.
Quinta: In (bleeps).
Craig: From some shows. From some shows.
Quinta: From (bleeps).
Craig: She’ll get it. [Indiscernible 00:23:27].
Quinta: Oh, shit, I can’t talk. I’m sorry.
Craig: It’s okay.
John: Duncan, put down the rifle.
Quinta: Safe space to fail.
Craig: Safe space to fail.
Quinta: That helps make my point. This feels like a safe space to fail. The stage feels like a safe space to fail for me. Brett’s show, first I didn’t want to do it. I’m like, I’m not ready. I was like, you know what? I need to go on a stage and fail out loud and fail with an audience. It’s almost never a fail. It’s a good experience. We have a human experience together. I got to do improv for the first time in forever. That felt really good.
I like to play video games that I’m not good at, because that makes me feel like I’m failing. I like to lose, but I’m competitive, so I like to win, so that makes me better. I try to make food. I’m not good at that. Fail every single time in the kitchen, but I keep trying. I just find other spaces to fail in. In my room, I’m A1. I’m not a failure.
Craig: Nice.
John: Quinta Brunson, thank you for the most [crosstalk 00:24:28].
Craig: Thank you, Quinta. Thank you.
Quinta: That was really fun.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Come back at the end. We’ll do some questions.
Quinta: I’ll see you in a little bit.
John: That was the fun part of the show.
Craig: Now it’s going to get weird.
John: Craig, this is the 608th episode of Scriptnotes that we’ve done.
Craig: It’s a lot.
John: It’s a lot.
Craig: It’s a lot.
John: In addition to the main show, for the last year we’ve had the Scriptnotes Sidecasts that Drew and Megana have been helping out with. Huge props for them.
Craig: Let’s give them a hand. Amazing.
John: Drew and Megana! I think understandably, we’re always approaching things from the writer’s perspective.
Craig: Of course, yes.
John: Tonight I was hoping we could hear from the other side, which is why I reached out to the AMPTP to see if we could get their response to some of our concerns. To my surprise, they said yes. Everyone, if you could please welcome AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan.
Craig: Yay-ish. There she is.
John: Thank you for being here. Thank you.
Craig: Hi.
John: Hi.
Nancy Sullivan: Wow, this is a theater. I’ve only been to the theater one time. I saw Cats when I was seven. I love that show.
Craig: Great.
John: Nancy, thank you so very much for agreeing to be on the show.
Craig: I should warn you, this may not be the friendliest audience for you.
Nancy: I have to say, it’s just such an honor to be here. I’m such a fan of your show.
Craig: Really?
Nancy: Oh, of course, a huge fan, especially those episodes where you sit down with filmmakers and showrunners and really get into the minutiae of the craft. Huge fan. Huge fan.
Craig: I have to say, that is legitimately a surprise. I would not have pegged an AMPTP person as a cinephile.
Nancy: Oh, no, no, you have me wrong. I’ve always been obsessed with film and TV. I remember, in fact, watching Amadeus with my father. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. I was just being blown away by what Miloš Forman accomplished with the cinematography and the mise-en-scène and his reversal of the classic protagonist-antagonist relationship not just in dialog, but in the blocking and the framing of these two candlelit warriors always in a battle that they didn’t know it was about.
Craig: You were eight?
Nancy: Or nine.
John: Nancy, honestly, I was probably watching The Love Boat when I was nine. That blows me away.
Nancy: I don’t know what that is.
Craig: Is it just me, or is her smile terrifying?
John: Yeah. You were watching Amadeus?
Nancy: I was watching this masterpiece, Amadeus. His name is Miloš Forman, so it’s actually pronounced Amadeus [ah-mah-DAY-oosh]. I said, “Daddy! I know what I want to do, Daddy! I want to do this. I want to work with the greatest writers and filmmakers in the world and find a way to crush them economically for the benefit of multinational corporations.”
Craig: There it is.
Nancy: Let me explain. If you look at great artists throughout history, what is the unifying theme? Hardship. Suffering. Emile Zola, I believe it was, wrote, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” If I can help make that work almost unsurvivable, if I can bring filmmakers to the edge of ruin, take away every bit of comfort and safety that they have, then true art is possible.
Craig: Wow.
Nancy: Thank you.
John: That is some Fountainhead shit there.
Nancy: Fun fact, my bat mitzvah was themed around the works of Ayn Rand.
Craig: Your name is Sullivan, and you had a bat mitzvah. Okay, anyway. Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you joined the AMPTP because you wanted to make great art by punishing the people who make it?
Nancy: Oh, no no no. No no no. Craig, Craig, I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’ve dedicated my career to the genius visionaries who make film and television. By that, of course, I’m referring to the studio bosses, because they write the checks. They’re the ones saying, “Let’s make a show based on a zombie video game.”
Craig: They’re not zombies.
Nancy: They’re not, right. That’s so sweet. You’re so sweet, because here’s the thing. If I’d shown a picture of one of those, whatever you call them, creatures to 100 people and said, “What do you think this is?” do you know what all 100 would say? They’d say they were zombies. They’re zombies.
Craig: They’re not zombies.
Nancy: They’re zombies with mushroom hats.
Craig: They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.
Nancy: They’re zombies with-
Craig: They’re not zombies.
Nancy: They’re zombies-
Craig: They’re not zombies.
Nancy: … with mushroom fascinators.
Craig: They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.
Nancy: They’re zombies.
Craig: They’re not zombies!
Nancy: They’re zombies!
Craig: They’re not zombies.
John: Back to the topic here. I think it sounds like what you’re saying, Nancy, is that you’re okay imposing unnecessary-
Nancy: Necessary suffering, go on.
John: … suffering on writers and actors, and not in the pursuit of profit, but instead, of some kind of warped vision of artistic integrity?
Nancy: I never said actors. As Alfred Hitchcock [hitch-KAAKH] I think once said-
Craig: Oh, come on.
Nancy: … actors are cattle. Of course they’re cattle. You don’t see them typing with their hooves. For actors, our approach is basically herd management. You want to make sure you have enough, but not too many. That’s why we’re so excited about AI, about scanning actors’ faces and bodies so we can recreate them digitally. It’s like having all the free beef you want.
John: That’s horrible, but not surprising. Last month, an anonymous studio source was quoted saying the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.
Nancy: I know. Horrible. We would never say anything like that on the record. Off the record, we might float that out there, see what kind of reaction it gets, and then maybe walk it back. Back to Amadeus, Mozart was on the edge of ruin for most of his career. While Salieri is portrayed as complicit, in reality it was systemic under-evaluation of the arts and the misaligned incentives of the patronage system that put Mozart in that situation.
Craig: You’re saying that like it’s a good thing.
Nancy: I’m saying we have to change the system so that writers and filmmakers, and sure, even actors, are properly oppressed, so that great art can flourish. There was no WGA back when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane.
John: Let me guess, Charles Foster Kane-
Nancy: Hero.
Craig: Okay. Nancy. Jewish Nancy Sullivan, let’s cut to the chase. We’re now 100 days into the Writers Strike. The companies are facing growing pressure, because the pipeline is empty, and the projects that aren’t finished cannot be promoted. When is the AMPTP going to get serious about coming back to the table to resolve this?
Nancy: Sorry. No comment on that, guys. Wouldn’t want to leak it to the press. Wink.
John: AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan, everyone.
Craig: She does look a whole lot like Rachel Bloom.
John: Rachel Bloom, everyone.
Craig: That was hard. I almost didn’t like Rachel Bloom.
John: It’s tough. That’s tough.
Craig: You make it hard. You make it hard, kid.
Rachel Bloom: To like me?
Craig: To not like you.
John: Rachel Bloom, you are often at this theater, because you have been doing your one-woman show, which is here for a little bit longer, then you’ll go to New York. Tell us about your show. You can say this because it’s a stage thing.
Rachel: It’s a stage thing. It is not in the union. It’s such a weird time we’re in where theater is the most stable industry you could be in. For the past couple years, I’ve been working on this show that is now called Death, Let Me Do My Show, which is about various experiences, thank you, that I’ve had with death. I’ve been using this theater primarily to workshop it a lot. It is going off-Broadway in September. We will be at the Lucille Lortel Theatre September 6th through the 30th. It’s a very beautiful theater. We just decided to do one more show in LA before we go. That will be here on August 26th. All of the proceeds are going to go, I believe probably to the Entertainment Community Fund.
Craig: Great.
John: Hooray.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Rachel Bloom, thank you so much.
Rachel: Thank you.
John: You’re going to come back for questions.
Craig: Now shit’s about to get real.
John: Oh my god.
Craig: Here we go.
John: This is the warmup.
Craig: Here we go.
John: Do you want to do this one?
Craig: Sure. Our next guest is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She was also listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. What the fuck are we doing wrong, by the way?
John: I don’t know.
Craig: Let us welcome out the great, one and only Natasha Lyonne.
Natasha Lyonne: Hello, everyone. I brought a lot of supplies.
Craig: You can share my table with me if you want.
Natasha: You know what? You’re a real sweetie, cutie, honey-baby.
Craig: Thank you.
Natasha: So are you, John. So are you.
John: Thank you. Natasha kept apologizing to me backstage in the green room like I was offended. I’m not. I’m delighted by you.
Natasha: It’s just that Craig and I, we get very riled up when we’re together.
Craig: It’s a situation.
Natasha: Then I felt apologetic that maybe we’d gone too hard, too fast. We were doing bits about shekels. There was a lot of bits.
Craig: There was a lot of stuff going.
Natasha: If you don’t know what a shekel is, you don’t need to.
Craig: She brings the State Island out of me. I don’t know what to do. It’s just what happens. I get very Staten. Then I start talking like I used to talk. Then it’s a whole fucking thing.
Natasha: Then we get into a whole thing. The next thing we know-
Craig: Let’s code switch back. We’re code switching.
Natasha: We’re code switching.
Craig: Here’s my neutral podcast voice.
Natasha: The thing is, I don’t know, as the second Time 100 guest, I like to keep it very neutral.
Craig: That’s actually creeping me out.
Natasha: This is how I talk. I’ve always been this way.
John: NPR host voice. I love it.
Natasha: I architected a thing, a building. I’m an architect.
Craig: We’ve failed to mention that in your intro.
Natasha: I do think it was weird that you didn’t bring it up, because I dropped out of architect stuff in order to get into the biz.
Craig: Yes, just like most architecture students who refer to it as stuff.
Natasha: I was like, “Blueprints, blueprints, a script,” I said. You’re welcome. I was 4, and now I’m 44. That means I’m getting younger every day. This is what it’s like. You just don’t care anymore. It’s day 100 of the Strike, folks. I have not worked since December.
Craig: Everyone’s going a little nuts.
Natasha: We are heading towards September.
Craig: You’re doing great.
Natasha: I thought I was going to get a lot done this year. I’ll be honest.
Craig: No, nothing’s happening.
Natasha: All those years, but really. Anyway. Quit smoking. Endure this. I’m going to be like John Houston with a cigar in an interview, or Sean Penn anywhere I guess.
Craig: Keep going.
Natasha: I’m just saying people that smoke publicly in interviews.
Craig: You can hear it, I think. You can literally hear the vape on the microphone.
John: We know this because Craig used to vape in the early episodes.
Craig: I still do.
Natasha: You know what? It’s the ride of life. Take the ride. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Anyway.
Craig: We’re not going to ask any questions, are we?
John: I’m going to try to ask a question.
Craig: What’s the point? Why bother?
Natasha: What it’s about is community.
Craig: Thank god.
Natasha: If you look at Bergman’s birthday, Stanley Kubrick writes him a letter and he says, “Great work.” Now we’re seeing it freaking dying. Everybody’s coming out. Coppola’s writing notes. You know what I mean? It’s about community.
Craig: I don’t.
Natasha: That’s my point. That was the answer to your question. I thought this was a Jeopardy format.
Craig: Hang on.
John: It is a Jeopardy format.
Craig: Just hang on, John. Just hang on, baby. You’re doing great. Amazing. I legitimately have a question.
Natasha: I’m from New York.
Craig: What?
Natasha: Yes, please.
Craig: This is a legit question. I looked on IMDb.
John: He did research.
Craig: I did research for this. They list your writing credits, your directing credits, acting credits. I have 26 credits. Natasha, do you know how many you have?
Natasha: 27. It’s like that game where you go one … The Price is right.
Craig: Just say one, $1.
Natasha: $1. $1.
Craig: You have 152 credits.
Natasha: Thus the attitude problem. There’s been many, many, many years.
Craig: I haven’t gotten to the question yet.
Natasha: It’s an endurance test. If you just stick around long enough, it’s like being an old, old turtle. What’s the question, please?
Craig: Thank god.
Natasha: Yes, Craigy.
Craig: It strikes me that after all these years, almost 30 years, I’ve got these 26 credits, I’ve worked on these things. There’s so much that I can learn from experience. Actors, especially somebody that started as a kid, you will, as an actor like yourself, get so much more experience on set and in production, acting. I’m curious, what wisdom have you learned from all of that time, that writers who have maybe only been on a set once or twice might not know? What can you share with us that you’ve learned every?
Natasha: I’m not going to look at you I think for the rest of it.
Craig: I think that’s a great idea.
Natasha: I’m also look out at the distant … Just so you know, I’m nearsighted. Genuinely, it is a Fossie-esque experience. I would say something I learned when I transitioned into the writers’ room, for example, on… I guess I won’t mention any shows. Let’s say on certain shows or certain movies, I would see an ellipses, and I would think, oh my god, I’ve gotta nail this.
I’m somebody who, despite my personality, is actually quite obsessive and a workaholic and perfectionist, obsessive about the work, and in all areas, too much so. I would think that there was something in there that I was missing. I would go to the writer, or I would go to the monitor area.
Craig: Video village.
Natasha: Video village. I would try to go searching or something. I think then later, as a writer, the great discovery was there was no there, that oftentimes, it was a cheat for any number of reasons, especially when in showrunning or in directing, once you’re doing that, you’re like…
The great gift about acting while you’re doing that is you know why scenes got cut, or why entire storylines or a C-storyline, so that actually, the connection between this moment to this moment, we had to cut that entire deli sequence for budget reasons, that’s why it’s not there.
Weirdly, it was like once I started writing for myself, or even if… First of all, I’m usually collaborating, so I wouldn’t want to take that credit for myself. I would say that as I was working with writers’ rooms and working with other creators and things like this, that was when I really became a good actor, in a way, because I understood the space in between, of the motivation, or even the backstory of how we got there, because I was the guy in the room on the whiteboard or something.
Craig: Actually, it’s the other way for you, in a sense, that the writing helped you be a better actor.
Natasha: It’s funny, because I’m only so old relative to how young I was-
Craig: Great insight.
Natasha: … on some level.
John: [Crosstalk 00:41:13].
Natasha: Which is to say, it would’ve been great if show biz was like, hey, we’re going to give this to you at 24 or 34, but they wanted to really hold out. I think in many ways it’s because of that fallback energy that we respond to so much as actors that are so seasoned, of a Gene Hackman in Night Movies or Jeff Bridges in Lebowski, or Bill Murray has that sort of energy, or Harry Dean Stanton, a sense of like, “I don’t even really want to be here.” Like Peter Falk. Like, “Please, film anything but me.” I think that comes from also that, if you truly understand the motivation.
Then I would say as a writer, additionally what I learned, and as a director, just from loving actors… Sam Rockwell made me start working with his acting coach against my will, because I’d never taken a lesson. I was at film school at Tisch at 15, but I never did anything with it. I dropped out. I was very offended that they wanted me to pay tuition, because the teenagers, they were watching Apocalypse Now. I was like, “If you’re watching Apocalypse Now, why are you in film school? You should’ve already seen this movie. That’s what would make one go to film school, theoretically.”
Craig: It’s a little weird.
Natasha: I was supposed to be a double major with philosophy, and they were out of classes. Their classes were full up. I just didn’t understand why they wanted my money at that point. I was like, “This is not what I came here for.” I was like, “Are you going to pay?”
Craig: They weren’t going to pay you. Elliot, do you need any Gatorade? How are you doing over there?
Natasha: Sam introduced me to this guy, Terry Knickerbocker, who’s a great acting coach. What I would do with him is I would actually sit there with the laptop open and go over every other character’s motivation as well and type in real time, to make sure that I wouldn’t be this jag-off on set who was only taking care, let’s say, of… So that way, I had answers for other people. I don’t know that I always succeeded, but I would try to really build out and make sure that everybody was protected in terms of their motives, basically.
Craig: Exactly, that you understand that both sides of-
Natasha: Yeah.
John: What I hear you saying though is, as an actor you’re approaching character from one perspective. You’re approaching what is it that I’m going to do. As a writer, you’re approaching character from a much more macro, whole perspective, because you have to think about-
Natasha: I gotta tell you, first of all, what’s most challenging about the Strike I think for all of us is the atrophying of the brain that you’re experiencing here in real time. It kills me to not be at a whiteboard and in a room. I love the excitement of ideas. I love all of it. I love storyboarding. I love this big, holistic thinking about things and making sure that it’s okay. I love the math of it, whenever I’m doing music budgets and trying to calculate it all. I love it so much more in 3D.
Also, weirdly, I think as just an actor, this weird thing happens where you need other people’s approval, and also you need to get hired. It’s incredible to have that autonomy suddenly. It’s such a gift.
Also, I would go to video village, seeking the feedback. Really, what you find out is that if you’re doing a good enough job, nobody talks to you. Once you’re at video village and you’re actually a producer, being a writer, producer, whatever, director, you discover that usually what’s happening in video village is a panic attack about something the next day, like so-and-so did not make their flight, we’ve gotta rearrange the day. What’s happening there is everybody’s talking about tomorrow with the first AD and trying to figure out how to fucking save this fiasco. They’re not talking about your scene. Otherwise, you would know, because you’d fucked up your scene, and they would be talking to you.
It was also a big revelation that I think made it much more fun for when I was just acting in something, because it was no longer a head trip of a curiosity of, did I do okay?
Craig: There wasn’t this constant loop of, the director comes over and gives you a thumb up or thumb down.
Natasha: Exactly.
Craig: You’re absolutely right. If you’re doing a good job on the day, directing, it’s a little bit like being a parent that’s driving a car, and everybody in the car trusts that the parent is a good driver, and so they can fall asleep.
Natasha: I would say also other things made me a better actor to work with, for hire. I’m looking for work, obviously. I’m hoping somebody has a job.
Craig: Can’t work right now.
Natasha: Oh, right, SAG Strike. Anyway, so the other thing I would notice is, it’s so funny now, when I’m directing, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, that when you try to convince somebody of whatever, especially if you have a heavyweight or like an Ellen Burstyn or a Nolte or something, and you’re like, “I was sort of thinking, what if you were here. It’s just an idea. Maybe then we went there,” but really it’s because there’s a fucking window there, and the light’s going to change, and if you sit here, I’m fucked or whatever.
Craig: Have you ever tried to just say that?
Natasha: Sometimes I do. I think the reason I bring up people that are such giants is because it’s very intimidating to-
Craig: Yes, it is.
Natasha: … try to explain to somebody that’s a giant. Usually, the way I came up, there was time. I think it was probably because it was film, not digital. There wasn’t a sense of like, let’s just go.
Craig: That’s a good point.
Natasha: If you think about Raging Bull or something, this final monologue, they probably really had to rehearse, I don’t know, so that they didn’t-
Craig: Run out the mag.
Natasha: … run out of film, run out of the mag, and make sure that everything, the lighting was perfect and all that stuff. Usually, it was about a private rehearsal, and then everybody else comes in and that kind of thing. I’m sorry, now we’re not getting to the game. I see you’re stressing about time.
John: No, no, no, no.
Natasha: It’s okay. I’m just trying to tell the kids the truth.
Once upon a time, it used to be that it was this private thing, where the actors would work with the director on figuring out the blocking. As it’s evolved, especially in television, I think, it’s more about things are pre-shot-listed in order to make these impossible fucking days, because Prestige TV especially has become so dense that it’s unmakeable.
You’re doing everything you can to be like, “Hey, I really need you to sit here, because the sun is going to set.” It’s easier, I would say, to do, and it’s easier to understand then. I’m like, “Oh, so you want… Got it. Let me help you. Okay. I’ll just sit right here, and then you have your shot.”
Craig: I do love a pro.
Natasha: It’s interesting in so many ways, the evolution of that. Sorry for the long answer.
Craig: No, it was a great answer.
John: A fantastic answer.
Craig: That’s why you’re here, my friend.
Natasha: I’m here to party, baby.
Craig: We did not bring you on for the short little bursts.
Natasha: I am sorry.
Craig: I like that you assumed this, “I have finished. Now you will entertain me.”
Natasha: I just felt like I talked a while.
Craig: You did a great job, kid.
Natasha: I just felt like the answer needed to be complete.
Craig: It was.
Natasha: I didn’t want to give you a fake answer.
John: Let us welcome back out Rachel Bloom and Quinta Brunson. Hi. You can ask from there. Ask from there, and we’ll say it out loud.
Audience Member: This is a question about adapting a book. My question is, how often do you run into problems as far as what characters to pick in the screenplay itself? How much push back do you get from the authors as far as what percentage of essentially characters you’re using from the book itself and what percentage of characters you’re coming up with whatever is best for the story? How does that work?
Natasha: Actually, I don’t know if I can say the name of this person, but she’s wonderful. She’s like the lady Thomas Pynchon or something. She’s brilliant. It was so intimidating to write her this letter to ask for this book that I wanted to do since I was a child. I wrote it with two lovely ladies. I’m not even sure if I can say who they are. I’m not sure the rules of the game.
Craig: I think you can say people’s names.
Natasha: Oh, great. I wrote it with Liz and Carly, who created GLOW, and who I love. I love those ladies. It’s a bunch of short stories. We really had to make those questions. We ultimately went a certain way. I think it’s excellent.
The funny feedback I want to give you is… It is a very high-concept thing, almost magical realism, let’s say, without being too specific. In the first seven pages of the book, she’s a loser lawyer, this character. Then we were told by the studio that really what they responded to, even though they had greenlit and paid for it, that really what they responded to was the lawyer part.
I just want to say that what was weird was it took so much nerve to write this lady Thomas Pynchon this letter to beg her for this book I’ve loved my whole life, and then to have Liz and Carly be down to, all of us write this thing together, and the amount of work we put in to create this lady Cohen brothers meets Guillermo del Toro world, and then be told that really it was …
The oddity of this business is that the thing that you think is going to be the trouble spot, it’s usually some fucking eighth thing over there, inevitably, that’s like, literally, “Oh, we really liked the part that she was a lawyer and that she was dating this guy.” I said, “Do you mean you want The Practice or Abby McBeal or something?” They were like, “That would be great.” It was so weird. The three of us were texting each other like, “What is happening in this moment?”
Craig: It sounds like what she’s saying is you’ll never see the person that kills you. That’s comforting advice.
Natasha: Do you find that?
Craig: Yeah. For sure. There are circumstances where the network or the studio may have strong feelings like there, but there are also circumstances where sometimes everybody’s aligned except the author. That’s not uncommon. Authors can be precious about things, just like we all can. I have been lucky to adapt something with someone that was great and understood the point of the adaptation.
I think our job is probably not to worry too much about the author. If you actually love it, you love that material, you would … I think grown-up, responsible artists will understand that a different medium has different needs, hopefully.
Natasha: It is really challenging. I’m thinking actually about another book that I really wanted to adapt, that at first seemed like it was going to be a go, and we were so in sync, and then really it did fall apart.
John: I had one of those too, where I went in, I got the book set up at a studio, and then I was in conversation with the author about, okay, as we introduce this character, we have to think about cinematically how we’re going to first encounter this character. She’s like, “Oh, no, no, you can’t change a thing. It has to be exactly the way it was in the book.”
Natasha: That’s what was so weird was I thought that we were having the same conversation for so long, and then suddenly, we weren’t. The other thing I think that’s interesting, which is not exactly an answer to your question, but that’s obviously not my bag, is that so much of what I was so in love with in this book was the dialog and how dense it was and just how brilliant of a writer she is, and realized that in script, that dialog felt insane. It just didn’t feel necessarily like people talking, so that we had to actually change so much of … Do you know what I mean?
Craig: Oh yeah, for sure.
Quinta: Absolutely.
Craig: You have to adapt. Smart authors understand.
Natasha: I’m like, there’s so much material here, and then you get in there and-
Craig: Not as much as you thought.
Quinta: I feel like that reminds me of what I was saying earlier about communicating to the audience. Sometimes with a adaptation, you just can’t have that same monologue from the book. Maybe you can. God bless if you can. That’s incredible, or the same amount of dialog. It has to be able to translate on screen in a certain way.
I haven’t adapted yet, but I have been in material that’s been adapted. I’ve had the feeling of wanting to express, this feels like too much for anyone to want to listen to on camera, in a comedy especially. Nobody feels like fucking sitting there and hearing you say something that was written for that long. I have nothing else to add to that, by the way. I haven’t adapted anything, but as an actor, I [00:54:04]-
Natasha: The other one is … Sorry. The other one that I think is interesting is when you try to adapt inner monologue. That’s so tricky, that you realize that the book that you fell in love with, it’s like you can see it in your mind. You have the vision of it, so you can see the world you’re going to build. Then you realize that it’s essentially internal.
Quinta: That’s exactly what I mean.
Craig: There are some great novels that have made some bad movies. Then there have some … The Godfather was pulp. It was just a pulpy novel that made a great movie. It was just awesome plot, big, awesome characters.
Natasha: Arguably, Raymond Chandler, why he’s-
Craig: Absolutely.
Natasha: … so good at … That genre translates well.
Craig: It just goes right-
Quinta: Have you read the Jurassic Park book?
Natasha: No.
John: No.
Rachel: It’s pretty good.
Quinta: Rachel.
Craig: That doesn’t seem like what she was going to say.
Quinta: Rachel. That is the most boring-
Rachel: Yeah, it’s plodding, but it’s not terrible.
Quinta: Lord.
Rachel: It’s Jurassic Park.
Quinta: That’s a book I’m like, they say pterodactyl one more time, I’m going to throw this fucking book out the window.
Craig: You had to know they were going to say pterodactyl a few times.
Quinta: Too sciencey. I don’t want to see all that science on screen, something that they understood. We don’t want to see that. It’s good.
Craig: It was a good adaptation.
Rachel: I think also, when this struck, I was in the middle, for the first time of my career, of working on some adaptations. I’m actually working on something right now that’s a podcast/musical, so not in WGA, that I can talk about a little bit.
What I think is interesting about adaptation is … I learned this when I took my first musical theater class. I’m going to relate everything back to musical theater. I apologize. When you’re writing a musical, the first question you’re supposed to ask is, what about making this a musical improves upon the subject matter, or am I just making it a music because IP sells?
I think that that should be the question for any piece of adaptation is, what can I add to this material, what’s my point of view on this that can add to this canon of material, as opposed to being redundant or worse?
Craig: Good answer.
John: Good answer.
Craig: Good answer.
John: This is normally the part of the podcast where we’d do One Cool Things.
Rachel: Wait. Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?
John: Oh, shit. We completely forgot that. Who won it? Back there. I see the hand waving. Rachel Bloom saving the podcast yet again.
Quinta: The right.
John: You.
Craig: Nice.
Quinta: Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?
John: Do you have a question for us?
Audience Member: I do.
John: Ask your question. Thank you so much, Rachel.
Audience Member: Oh, I’ve got a microphone too. I actually have a question about directing. Natasha, you talked about how the schedules are crazy, and there’s this constant push to go, go, go, go. One of the things that I struggle with on set a lot is when producers or first ADs tell me to shoot a rehearsal. I don’t know how to respond to them politely with, no, I absolutely do not want to shoot the rehearsal. I wonder if the people on stage had recommendations for how I can politely say fuck no?
Natasha: Is that directed at me? I’m happy to answer.
Audience Member: Everybody.
Natasha: I would just say, in the first place, there is nothing really to fear in the arts. I guess just an illusion of fear. I think it’s always very useful to remember that we’re all going to die. I think that the stakes-
Quinta: True. So true.
Natasha: There is a sense of false stakes that get created around-
Craig: The stakes couldn’t be lower.
Natasha: The truth is that you’re just trying to make art and do the best you can. That’s all you can do. In a weird way, it also becomes a question of path of least resistance is sometimes in your favor of being like, “Great, why don’t we shoot this useless rehearsal so we can see why we shouldn’t shoot the rehearsal,” or alternatively, you can say, “Simply because we’re not ready.” I think that both things are valid in a way.
Craig: Is this for television?
Audience Member: Yeah. I work in both.
Craig: For television, we do have the luxury of doing the thing that you were talking about, that a lot of times you can’t. We do get to have a private rehearsal, and then we bring in the crew for crew show, and then we talk about the shots. By the time we start shooting, we’ve already gone through it, which is nice.
If you say to the showrunner, “Look, I don’t ask for much. The one thing I just want that I like is to have a couple of rehearsals. It just makes me feel better and better,” and say, “If I can do that, the actors know there’s nothing running, so they’re not burning all their rocket fuel.” Hopefully, they would recognize that that just makes you more comfortable.
Natasha: Or also, the truth is that sometimes you can tell them, “It’ll actually go quicker if we do this.” Sometimes I get very excited, and I’m like, “Oh, let’s shoot this. Let’s shoot that.” If you’re with the right camera operator, sometimes they’ll have fun doing it. Other times, actually, rehearsal really does save time in a way, because it’s not just for the actors and the director. It’s actually so that everybody has focus marks.
Craig: Exactly.
Natasha: It’s going to be a mess. You can tell them also, “Hey, it’ll actually save time.” It’s true that the camera department really does not love that game.
Craig: Nobody does.
Natasha: Even if actors like to be like, “Hey, let’s just fucking try one.”
Craig: You gotta do a walkthrough. They gotta put the tape on the floor. They gotta do all this.
John: Quinta, on a show like yours, you might have different directors coming through, doing different episodes. Will they have different working styles?
Quinta: You.
John: You as an actor in that situation, but also a producer, have to adjust. What is that like?
Quinta: The main director that I work with, his name is Randall Einhorn, and he’s fantastic. He’s really great at establishing tone and also relationship with every director who comes in. I think that’s a big part of it too. The other directors coming to set the week before get a hold of how we work. The show that I work on currently is weekly. It’s fast. We’re filming while we’re airing. We don’t really have a lot of time. Our first priority is saving time.
I was thinking about that question. Randall is so good at being like, “I don’t want to do that.” That’s it. He’s like, “I don’t want to do that.” It’ll be like, “Yeah. Okay. Guess what? You’re the director. You’re running the show.” Now, in my state though, it’s a different situation. That’s very family. I would never even ask for that.
For another person coming in, if they want to shoot it, they would say, “I think this would make me feel good, just to get it, just to have.” Especially on a mockumentary, it can be beneficial sometimes. It’s like, “All right, cool, we’ll give it … ” I think it’s just about clear communication, like you said. The stakes are very low. We are not saving lives. Clear communication will help us, just, “What do you need? What do I need? What do you need?”
Natasha: That is the weirdest part I think about what we do, and in a weird way, life in general, but certainly making movies and making TV and all this shit that we do and writers’ rooms and studios and networks. It feels like the stakes are just so high. Part of me, as an adrenaline junkie, loves that. Really, they’re just not. That’s where you start losing humanity and all these other things. Everybody is a human being that deserves to get what they need. It’s just making art, so it should feel good, but it feels so scary, the time. It’s always time is the enemy. I would say time is a bigger enemy than money.
Craig: Which the director is the person worrying about the most, usually, because as the day drips away, when I’m directing, that’s the thing that I’m aware of is that my options are dwindling. Time is scary. Sometimes, also keep in mind that when you are visiting a show, the producers know things about the actors that you don’t.
Rachel: That’s a great point.
Quinta: Huge.
Craig: Some of them really do not like that rehearsal stuff at all.
Quinta: Yeah, they don’t.
Craig: They’re just like, “I know what I’m doing. Let’s go. Let’s shoot.” Part of it’s cultural too.
Quinta: Some people really want it.
Craig: Exactly.
Quinta: For sure.
Natasha: It is also though that thing of knowing, whatever, kill your darlings or whatever. In your shot list, the things that felt like such a dream and being okay, you gotta go through that day, and you’re like, “That’s done, that’s done, and that one’s out, and we’re going to really focus on this.”
It’s so crazy that, also, that’s why preparedness, I just believe in it so much, of being overly prepared so you can be loose, because the more time … Even if I’m a visiting director on a show or something, I always try so hard to spend time with the first AD and the DP, really walking through every single shot we’re going to do, in an effort to be prepared for if the producer, who is really the boss at that point, not the director, if it’s not an auteur special, then really feeling like we’re prepared for the situation.
Rachel: On the show I did that I will not name, but it was the show that I did, I have a very small bladder, and I like to drink. I have a steady drip of tea, and I pee a lot. The AD, I found out in Season 4, let every director … My pee breaks were built into the schedule, because they know I needed that, otherwise I’d piss my pants. I thought that was very communicative of him.
Quinta: Nice.
John: Nice. Don’t know actors would piss themselves.
Craig: I think that’s why SAG is on a strike, to get that enshrined in the agreement.
John: Build that back in the contract.
Craig: Pee breaks.
John: Are we doing One Cool Things or not, Craig?
Craig: Let’s just roll right to the finish line.
John: Let’s roll to the finish line and do some thank yous.
Natasha: Not One Cool Thing?
Craig: You know what? We’ll catch up on those.
John: We’ll catch up on-
Craig: We do it literally 608 times.
John: I’ll save mine for next week.
Craig: We’re good. It’s all good.
John: You can email Craig and tell him what you want to recommend if you have a thing.
Natasha: All right, I’ll send him some bucks.
John: We have some thank yous to get out to people.
Craig: We do.
John: Scriptnotes is produced, of course, by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Yay.
John: Drew!
Rachel: Woo!
Quinta: Drew!
Craig: Woo woo!
John: Who did a phenomenal job putting together tonight’s show.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thank you very much, Drew. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who is here.
Craig: Yay. There you are. Hi.
John: Who also did our music this week. Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you to Hollywood Heart and Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. For folks listening at home, the thing about being at the Hollywood Bowl, that was a joke. We really weren’t.
Craig: We really are not at the-
John: The Hollywood Bowl.
Craig: I know, shock. Of course, thank you to our ASL interpreter, Elliot Aronson.
Quinta: Oh, yay.
John: Elliot.
Craig: Who remains incredibly handsome and really good at his job.
John: We of course have to thank our incredible guests, Natasha Lyonne.
Craig: Natasha Lyonne.
John: Quinta Brunson.
Craig: Quinta Brunson.
John: Rachel Bloom.
Craig: Rachel Bloom.
John: Make sure you get tickets to see Rachel Bloom’s show either here or in New York. It’s at rachelbloomshow.com.
Craig: Thank you to everybody in the audience here in the room and listening at home and in your car. It is so much fun getting to do this live.
John: Thank you all, and have a great night.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Rachel: Thanks, everybody.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Natasha and Craig, our experience has been that the film and television industry is full of people who will tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or whether it’s not true. To make sure that we’re keeping our skills sharp during this work stoppage, I thought we might play a little game with our audience members. We have three audience members who volunteered to help out in a segment we’re calling That Sounds Familiar. Jax, if we could bring up the house lights a little bit. Our three guests, I see a Number 1. Number 1, if you could make your way around to this microphone stand over here.
Natasha: Wow, three boys. All right. I see it’s a Mae West production.
Craig: What the fuck?
Natasha: I don’t know.
Craig: I don’t know. What happened?
Natasha: I’m not here. I don’t exist. I’m a melting clock. Just leave me alone. I don’t know why you invited me here.
Craig: Melting clock.
Natasha: I could’ve gotten here at 9:00.
Craig: For charity.
Natasha: I was on the 101.
Craig: You did a great job. Let’s play a game.
Natasha: I was bumping into cars like it was The Matrix.
Craig: Let’s play a game.
Natasha: Yes, gentlemen. I’m ready for the game.
John: Contestant Number 1, could you introduce yourself and tell us something fascinating about you?
Contestant 1: My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.
John: What? Oh my god. Contestant Number 2, tell us something interesting about you.
Contestant 2: My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.
John: Oh, shit.
Natasha: Oh, I see. This is a little tricky. I’m sorry, sir.
John: Contestant Number 3-
Natasha: Where is your sticker?
John: Could you introduce yourself and tell us something interesting about yourself?
Natasha: Where is your sticker, sir, the other gentleman? Thank you. A little respect for the game. Thank you.
John: It’s a sticker. Get going. Could you tell us about yourself?
*Contestant 3:* I’m Eric Wandry and I’m eldest of 15 kids, 13 kids.
Natasha: Wow. You know what?
Craig: We’ve narrowed it down to two.
John: Wow.
Craig: It’s a 50/50.
Natasha: You didn’t even want to be here. Is it against their well?
Craig: You rattled him.
Natasha: I’m assuming they’re volunteers.
Craig: You rattled him.
Natasha: I didn’t rattle.
Craig: You rattled him.
Natasha: They were trying to be the same person. He was missing the sticker.
John: He was missing a sticker. You rattled him. [Indiscernible 01:08:11]. I’m not intimidated, but I could see [crosstalk 01:08:13].
Craig: Also, John’s rattled.
John: I’m not. I’m not.
Natasha: When people say that, I feel like it’s because I’m a woman, and then I regret my entire life.
Craig: No, no, no, it’s not because you’re a woman.
Natasha: How can I help?
Craig: What are we going to do?
John: One of these people-
Craig: How can I help.
John: … is lying. One of them is telling exactly the truth.
Craig: We can eliminate Number 3.
John: One of them is telling the truth, and one of them is lying. We can ask up to five questions of these people. What questions do we want to ask? Craig, how do you help narrow this down?
Natasha: I want to ask about religion right away.
John: Go for it.
Craig: Go. Do it. Go.
Natasha: Number 1.
Craig: This is to Number 1.
Natasha: Excuse me, so what religion are you?
Contestant 1: I come from a Catholic background.
Natasha: Interesting. Another question. Are your parents still together?
Contestant 1: No.
Natasha: Interesting that you hesitated. Is that because of trauma? The body keeps the score. Or just because of lying?
Contestant 1: One of them passed away.
Natasha: Wow.
Craig: Welcome to the Natasha Lyonne show.
Natasha: Touche, Number 1.
John: Oh my god.
Natasha: Touche.
John: Touche.
Natasha: All right, Number 2. Are you guys also asking questions?
John: We can ask questions too.
Craig: At this point it’s all you.
Natasha: Please do it as you … I’ll take a little nap.
Craig: I’m thrilled with how this is going right now.
Natasha: No, no, no, no, no. I’ll be here. Go off on Number 2.
John: I’m curious about geography. Eric Number 2, where did you grow up?
Contestant 2: Indiana. Small-town Indiana.
John: Contestant Number 3, where did you grow up?
*Contestant 3:* Waterbury, Connecticut.
John: Waterbury, Connecticut.
Craig: Can I ask a question of Number 2?
John: Sure.
Craig: Number 2, you said that you were the oldest of 13, is that right? What is the name of the youngest?
Contestant 2: Melissa.
Craig: Thank you.
Natasha: Melissa Rivers?
Craig: Yes, Melissa Rivers.
Natasha: I’m just here to help. I’m just here to help. I’m taking a backseat. What?
Craig: I want to ask a question of Number 1.
Natasha: Mustache, why? No, I like it, but is it a family thing? Do all your siblings have mustaches?
Contestant 1: I’m the only one.
Natasha: That was not your question.
Craig: How many boys and how many girls?
Contestant 1: Seven boys, six girls.
Natasha: Again, the hesitation is …
John: I have a question. I’ll ask for Number 2. You’re the oldest of 13. Is everyone biologically related, from the same parents, or is it a Brady Bunch situation? Talk to us about the relationship to these people.
Natasha: Are your parents in an open relationship?
Contestant 2: No, everybody’s together. Everyone’s a big happy family. It’s all biological, everyone.
Natasha: What religion are you?
Contestant 2: Christian.
Natasha: A lot of Christians here. You guys [indiscernible 01:11:07] Craig around.
Craig: You and I are the Jewish population of this.
Natasha: Don’t tell them.
Craig: They know. They know. They’ve looked at our faces.
John: Eric Number 2, I’m curious, talk to us about a family vacation and the most that your family’s ever been on vacation and how that went.
Contestant 2: It was kind of tricky, obviously, because of how big the family was. We would generally go to areas that were adjacent to where I grew up. We would go to the lakes. We would go in the mountains, if we could get that far. It was generally-
Natasha: What do you mean if you could get that far?
Contestant 2: Because Indiana’s geographically not that close to mountains, but we could-
Craig: There was nowhere to go is what he’s saying.
Contestant 2: Yeah. We could get there.
Natasha: What kind of a car were you guys in?
Contestant 2: We had several because of the size of the family.
Craig: This guy’s the guy.
Natasha: Hold on. I can’t tell.
Craig: This guy is the guy. What are we doing? He’s the guy.
Natasha: I’m sorry, what kind of cars?
Contestant 2: We had two trucks and a station wagon.
Natasha: Only two parents?
Contestant 2: Only two parents.
Natasha: Until the eldest was driving the third car?
Contestant 2: Yeah. I was pretty much the babysitter for most of my childhood.
Craig: What are we doing? This is the guy.
John: I’m not convinced.
Natasha: I’m with you, honey.
Craig: I’m sold. I’m sold.
Natasha: I’m not sure about-
John: Should we vote now?
Craig: I’m ready to vote.
John: I think I’m ready to vote.
Craig: I’m ready to vote.
Natasha: I’ll do whatever you guys want.
Craig: I don’t care. I don’t care if I lose.
Natasha: How much money is in it?
Craig: [Indiscernible 01:12:27].
John: The stakes could not be higher. It is bragging rights for this segment of Scriptnotes. A lot.
Craig: I got 200 Canadian in that wallet [crosstalk 01:12:38].
Natasha: You brought your wallet onstage.
Craig: Always.
Natasha: That makes me very concerned about leaving my passport back there.
John: Quinta did bring her purse out.
Natasha: By the way, always bring your passport, because you never know when you might need to leave the country.
Craig: You never know.
Natasha: That’s another piece of advice.
Craig: Let’s vote.
John: Let’s vote.
Craig: Let’s vote.
John: Who on stage believes it’s Contestant Number 3? Who believes it’s Contestant Number 2?
Craig: Yes.
Natasha: Yeah.
John: The audience too, applause? Who thinks it’s Contestant Number 1? That’s me.
Natasha: A little.
Craig: A little? You and I think it’s 2. He thinks it’s 1.
John: No, I think we voted for … Who’d you vote for, 1?
Craig: No, 2.
Natasha: I went 50/50 because I wasn’t following.
Craig: I thought you said [crosstalk 01:13:22].
Natasha: When you involved the audience, I didn’t realize it was only up to us. I thought it was a-
Craig: The stakes could not be higher.
Natasha: Sure, I’ll go with 2, honey.
Craig: Thank you.
Natasha: We’re going with two.
Craig: Aw. Thank you.
John: Contestant Number 2, are you the oldest of 13 kids?
Contestant 2: I’m an only child.
John: Whoa.
Craig: Nicely done. Nicely done! You sick fuck!
John: Contestant Number 3, are you the oldest of 13 kids?
Contestant 1: When he said that the whole family was in a van, you should’ve known that when you’re the eldest of 13, that the groups of kids don’t all know each other. The younger group-
Craig: Is this a yes?
Contestant 1: … they were out of the house before I even-
Natasha: Is Number 3 the guy?
Craig: I think it’s Number 3. You said 15.
*Contestant 3:* Yeah, I was nervous.
Craig: Oh, wow.
John: Contestant 3-
Craig: You rattled him. You rattled him.
John: Are you genuinely the Eric who’s the oldest-
Craig: You rattled him.
John: … of 13 kids?
Craig: You’re the one.
*Contestant 3:* I’m the oldest.
Craig: You’re the one.
John: Holy shit!
Natasha: Oh my god.
Craig: Wow.
John: Contestant Number 1-
Natasha: Pathological liar.
John: How big is your family?
Contestant 1: I’m the oldest of 13 kids.
John: Oh, you are genuinely the oldest of 13 kids.
Contestant 1: Yes.
Craig: What the fuck is happening?
John: I thought the game was over.
Natasha: Now I’m confused.
Craig: What the fuck is going on?
John: It was Number 1. It was Number 1. Number 3 was still playing. We’re good. We’re good. The game is over.
Craig: Oh, Number 3 was still playing. Number 3 was like that soldier who doesn’t know the war is over.
John: The war is over.
Craig: You can go home now.
John: I was so confused there.
Craig: That’s outstanding.
Natasha: Wow.
Craig: I gotta be honest, Number 2 should be in prison. That’s a dangerous man.
Natasha: He’s an only child.
Craig: That’s a real dangerous man.
John: Craig.
Craig: The way he said only child, he’s like, “After I killed my siblings, I was an only child.”
John: Here’s how we got these people. I emailed out to our Scriptnotes listeners who were going to be in the audience, and I said, “Hey, do you have a really interesting story about your life that we could use on this, or are you really good at playing Mafia/Werewolf?” That’s what you are.
Natasha: Have you played the new game, Werewolf?
John: Thank the three of you very much for doing this. Let’s give them a [indiscernible 01:15:21].
Natasha: I’m just kidding.
Craig: Thank you guys. That was outstanding.
Natasha: Number 3, I’m sorry.
Links:
- HollywoodHEART
- Quinta Brunson on IMDb and Instagram
- Rachel Bloom on IMDb and Instagram
- Natasha Lyonne on IMDb and Instagram
- Quinta Brunson’s The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date
- Quinta Brunson on BuzzFeed
- Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Show at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Our ASL interpreter was Elliott Aronson
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 608: Scriptnotes LIVE! at Dynasty Typewriter in LA, Transcript first appeared on John August.
Cory Reeder interviews writers and performers at the joint WGA/SAG-AFTRA disability picket at Disney.
Big thanks to Cory and everyone he spoke with!
Links:
- WGAw Disabled Writers Committee
- SAG-AFTRA Diversity Committees
- SAG-AFTRA Empowering Performers with Disabilities on Set
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Cory Reeder.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: Disability and Visibility on the Picket Line first appeared on John August.
John and Craig investigate our primal instincts and how they motivate our characters. Often referred to as the four F’s, these are the impulses hardwired into every animal in order to survive. But how do these base impulses guide a character’s behavior? And how can they be harnessed to make sure you don’t overcomplicate your character’s want?
We also look at impermanence in our digital world and the ways people are trying to preserve lost media. But first we answer listener questions on comics, digital de-aging, and closed captions.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we ask: why are we better swimmers as kids than we are as adults?
Links:
- Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone by Brian X. Chen for the New York Times
- No, You Do Not Have a Lizard Brain Inside Your Human Brain from Mind Matters
- Prey Drive
- Scriptnotes, Episode 364 – Netflix Killed the Video Store
- The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco by David Streitfeld for the New York Times
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Tweet by Chris Miller
- Hydrostatic Life Vests
- British Airways safety video
- Highland 2
- Writer Emergency Pack XL
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Bob Tipping (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Basic Instincts first appeared on John August.
John answers the most common questions he hears out on the picket line, including the nervous, “Wait, why are you here? Is something wrong?” Links: wgacontract2023.org It’s All Relative on YouTube Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses 2023 WGA Strike Rules Strike Rules FAQ Picket Schedules and Locations Find more about the 2023 […] The post Sidecast: Picket Line Q & A first appeared on John August.
John and Craig examine the foundation of every story: the premise. What is your story really about? What questions is it trying to answer? How does that differ from your logline? And what should writers do to make sure those things match up? We also follow up on AI copyright, physical media, Esperanto and lingua […] The post The Premise first appeared on John August.
John and Drew inspect the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed merger guidelines and why they’re important for everybody – not just writers – to read and comment on. Links: FTC and DOJ Seek Comment on Draft Merger Guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission Publicly Comment on the FTC Draft Merger Guidelines WGA Template and Call to […] The post Sidecast: FTC Looks at Mergers first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at how well-written dialogue is used to give characters a unique voice. Using clips from previous episodes they present a history of dialogue and its evolution, how it informs your actors, and how communicating an idea sometimes comes down to the smallest words our characters say. How can writers use dialogue […] The post Dialogue and Character Voice first appeared on John August.
The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have drafted new merger guidelines outlining how the agencies should approach corporate consolidations. Here are the key points: Mergers should not significantly increase concentration in highly concentrated markets. Mergers should not eliminate substantial competition between firms. Mergers should not increase the risk of coordination. Mergers should not […] The post FTC proposes new merger guidelines first appeared on John August.
With union elections on the horizon, John and Drew present an overview of the voting process and governing structures of the WGA, DGA and SAG-AFTRA. Links: SAG-AFTRA 2023 Elections and Voter Guides SAG-AFTRA Governance DGA Leadership WGAw 2023 Elections WGAe 2023 Elections Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org John on Twitter, […] The post Sidecast: Elections first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome guests Quinta Brunson, Rachel Bloom and Natasha Lyonne to join them for a live benefit for Hollywood HEART. Since they cannot discuss the shows they’re currently working on (strike rules!) they instead reflect on the surprising paths of their careers, how acting has influenced them as writers and directors, and how […] The post Scriptnotes LIVE! at Dynasty Typewriter in LA first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 607 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what are words, even? Craig: What […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 607: In the Beginning Was the Word, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 606 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 606: Character and Story Fit, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: (singing:) My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 605 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, four tales of science, […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 605: Medicine and Mayhem, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that this episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Ow. My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 604 of Scriptnotes, a podcast […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 604: That’s a Good Question, Transcript first appeared on John August.
On the 100th day of striking against the AMPTP, John heads to the picket line to speak with writers about what they’ve learned, how they’re feeling, and what has changed. Thanks to everyone who talked to us! Links: 2023 WGA Writer’s Strike Gallery by J. W. Hendricks Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses […] The post Sidecast: 100 Days first appeared on John August.
John and Craig ponder the nature of words and what gives them meaning. Using new information on how large language models function, they look at the dizzying amount of connections words can create with other words, between humans, and their profound effect on the nature of consciousness. We promise we’re not high. We also follow […] The post In the Beginning Was the Word first appeared on John August.
The AMPTP has reached out to set a meeting with the WGA. What does this mean? How should we feel? And can John find a metaphor for it? Links: WGA Announcements: Discussion with AMPTP about Negotiations Scriptnotes LIVE! At Dynasty Typewriter Writing Is Our Home by WGA Negotiating Committee Co-Chair Chris Keyser Summary of Negotiations: […] The post Sidecast: AMPTP Asks for a Meeting first appeared on John August.
Craig hosts a solo episode presenting his general theory on screenwriting. He covers the central dramatic argument, the ‘why’ behind plot points, and of course, umbrage on common script diagrams. Good luck, and go torture your heroes! In our bonus segment for premium members, John Gatins (Flight, Real Steel) tells us about his history with […] The post How to Write a Movie (Encore) first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 603 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 603: Billion Dollar Advice, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Well, my name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode of 602 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 602: Research Isn’t Cheating, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John has opinions on the AMPTP’s new assertion that the studios are bearing all the risk when it comes to making a movie or a series, and therefore should be receiving all the reward. Links: AMPTP response to SAG-AFTRA ‘Idiots’: Wall Street Analysts Unload on Hollywood by Claire Atkinson for The Ankler Summary of Negotiations: […] The post Sidecast: Risk and Reward first appeared on John August.
John welcomes back Pamela Ribon (My Year of Dicks, Moana) to talk about how to fit the right characters to your story. We know story comes from characters, but often an idea starts with a world, so how do writers find the right characters to build their story around? We also talk about writing for […] The post Character and Story Fit first appeared on John August.
John and Drew take a look at SAG-AFTRA’s summary of negotiations to see what was asked for, what was offered, and what writers need to know. They also share insights on SAG-AFTRA’s new captain system. Links: SAG-AFTRA Summary of Negotiations SAG-AFTRA Strike Information Portal kate bond’s thread on Twitter Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and […] The post Sidecast: Different Guilds, Different Needs first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at four tales of science, medicine and mayhem and ask, how would this be a movie? Stories include a catatonic woman who woke up after 20 years, a white supremacist transformed by MDMA, a drugged crypto lawyer, and an in-depth account of alien biology. But first we have a very special […] The post Medicine and Mayhem first appeared on John August.
On the first day of the the SAG-AFTRA strike, actors and writers on the picket lines tell us why this strike is so important to them and what advice they have for first-time picketers. Featuring Jim Rash and SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee members Nicole Cyrille and Joseph Melendez. Thanks to everyone who talked to us! Links: […] The post Sidecast: The Double Strike, Day One first appeared on John August.
SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents all the film and television actors in the US, has announced that their members are going on strike. John and Drew look at what that means, what to expect, and how it will impact the ongoing writers strike. Links: SAG-AFTRA Strike Notice to Members A Message from the SAG-AFTRA President […] The post Sidecast: SAG-AFTRA on Strike first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Alison McDonald (Russian Doll, #BlackAF) and Ryan Knighton (In the Dark, Billions) to reveal the fundamentals and unspoken rules of working in a TV writers room. How did they get the job? How much should new writers talk? What should you wear? How much money do you make? And what’s for lunch? Our […] The post Advice for a New Staff Writer (Encore) first appeared on John August.
A lot of people have been singled out as either heroes or villains of this writer’s strike, but does any individual deserve that title? John and Drew look at these narratives, the motivations behind them, and celebrate their own personal heroes of the strike. Links: David Zaslav Article Taken Down By GQ After Warner Bros. […] The post Sidecast: Heroes and Villains (of the Strike) first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 601 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now, in screenwriting we often talk about […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 601: Side Quests, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig question questions themselves. What’s really happening when a character asks a question? How many types of questions can be asked? What can questions tell us about our characters and the power dynamics within a scene? Are these leading questions or rhetorical questions? And will John and Craig answer them all? We also […] The post That’s a Good Question first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) to help offer guidance to billionaires looking to put their money in the safest place they can: the film and television industry. The trio looks at the upsides of investing in productions, which business models already exist and what we can learn from the independent television studios […] The post Billion Dollar Advice first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) to help offer guidance to billionaires looking to put their money in the safest place they can: the film and television industry. The trio looks at the upsides of investing in productions, which business models already exist and what we can learn from the independent television studios […] The post Billion Dollar Advice first appeared on John August.
With that hot summer sun comes new picketing hours from the WGA. John and Drew take a look at the new schedule and answer a listener question about YouTube content. Links: Updated picket hours and information Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle – Griffith Observatory Scene NDA with Dave Wiskus – What the Writers Strike Means For […] The post Sidecast: Summer Schedule first appeared on John August.
Live from the WGA STRONG: March and Rally for a Fair Contract in Los Angeles. Featuring Adam Conover, Boots Riley and Lindsay Dougherty. Thanks to everyone who talked to us! Links: 5,000-Plus Demonstrators Rally in L.A. to Support Writers Strike, Pressure Studios by Katie Kilkenny and Xennia Hamilton for The Hollywood Reporter WGA Strike Rally […] The post Sidecast: March and Rally for a Fair Contract first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 600 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 600: McQuarrie Returns, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Okay, my name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 599 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We often talk about story in terms of the […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 599: Group Dynamics, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Aline Brosh McKenna to talk about the difficult journey through pages 70-90 of your feature. The end of the second act can drive even the most seasoned writers into an existential crisis, but together they offer their tips and tricks to navigating this difficult passage. We then talk about the importance […] The post The Rocky Shoals (pages 70-90), Encore first appeared on John August.
Scriptnotes listeners Anton Breum in Copenhagen, Denmark and Pierre Puget in Cologne, Germany interview writers picketing in support of the WGA during the International Day of Solidarity, organized by Screenwriters Everywhere. Thank you to everyone who was interviewed and thank you Anton and Pierre! Links: Screenwriters Everywhere: International Day of Solidarity Pierre Puget is the […] The post Screenwriters Everywhere – Cologne and Copenhagen first appeared on John August.
John and Craig host another round of the Three Page Challenge, selecting three listeners’ scripts for feedback on what’s working and common pitfalls to avoid. They offer insights into the tricky issues when cheating movement, formatting non-English dialogue, and the importance of logic in comedy. But first, we answer some long-gestating listener questions: What are […] The post Research Isn’t Cheating first appeared on John August.
The WGA’s international sister unions are coming together Wednesday, June 14 for international picketing, and John and Drew are excited. We discuss where these pickets are taking place and how to RSVP, then answer a listener question about FYC events. Links: Screenwriters Everywhere: International Day of Solidarity Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses […] The post Sidecast: International Day of Picketing first appeared on John August.
John and Drew look at the results of SAG-AFTRA’s Strike Authorization Vote and the DGA’s tentative deal with the AMPTP, and what they mean for writers on strike. Links: SAG-AFTRA Members Approve Strike Authorization with 97.91% Yes Vote DGA Tentative Agreement Press Release Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses 2023 WGA Strike Rules […] The post Sidecast: SAG-AFTRA, DGA and What Comes Next first appeared on John August.
John and Craig take a detour to discuss side quests: those smaller tasks that can serve as the building blocks of a character’s journey. How do side quests differ from your hero’s primary goal? What’s the best way to use them? And how can writers make them meaningful? We then discuss the importance of failure […] The post Side Quests first appeared on John August.
Megana, Drew and John discuss the best ways to talk about the WGA strike with family and non-industry friends.
How much context do you need to give? How do you properly frame the AI issues? How do you calm down a nervous parent without setting unrealistic expectations?
In other news, Weekend Read 2 is out! Drew and Megana have prepared hundreds of scripts and transcripts for your reading enjoyment.
Links:
- Weekend Read 2
- Megana Rao on Twitter
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: How to Talk To Your Parents about the Strike first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 598 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now Craig, off and on this program, we make fun of screenwriting competitions, but I’m wondering if maybe we’re wrong, because today on the show, we welcome the winner of the 1989 Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award.
This is a writer who’s gone on to a prolific career in film and in television, including his work on The X-Files and creating the legendary series Breaking Bad and co-creating its sister series, Better Call Saul. I think we were wrong about screenwriting competitions, because welcome Vince Gilligan.
Vince Gilligan: I love that. Thank you, John. Thank you, Craig. Yes, you were completely wrong about that.
Craig: I don’t know, I guess we have to look back at the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award and really run through the other winners. Something’s telling me that maybe they just got lucky, blind squirrel and all that.
John: Correlation but not causation.
Craig: I will say that in 1989 they nailed it, because as I have often said on this podcast and in other places, Vince Gilligan is pretty much the best that’s ever been, the best that’s ever done this job of writing television. It’s great to know you, but it’s also great to have you on our show to talk, because people need to know what’s going on inside your noggin. It’s a pretty special place.
Vince: Oh, man. Jesus, I’m glad this is not on video, because I’m just glowing bright red now. That was very, very kind. I will say, I’m sure you guys have said you shouldn’t pay to enter screenwriting contests, and I agree with that wholeheartedly.
Craig: Excellent.
Vince: The Virginia screenwriting competition was free to enter.
John: That’s what we like.
Craig: Music to my ears.
John: Vince, I think I’ve shaken your hand once at the Austin Film Festival. I don’t know if you remember the only time I think we’ve ever had a long conversation was back in spring of 2007, because I was coming on to work on a project, a feature that you were leaving. You very graciously talked me through what you’d done on the script and where the bodies were buried. It was incredibly helpful for me as I was coming onto that project.
You said you couldn’t do any more work on the project, because you were going to go off and direct this pilot you’d written about this chemistry teacher who starts making drugs. I just wanted to know, whatever happened to that?
Vince: I’m so glad you brought that up, John, because I have to tell you, you were such a stand-up guy. I’m embarrassed to tell this story, but I’m going to tell it anyway, even though it does not make me look great.
You came in after me. I had just taken that script as far as I knew how to do, so many, many drafts. What was so wonderful about the way you handled that is that you called me out of the blue. This was probably before we shook hands in Austin.
John: Definitely.
Vince: You called me up, and you introduced yourself. You were very kind and very professional and just wanted to say, “I’m coming in behind you here on this thing.” This is the part I’m embarrassed about. I didn’t do that for the originating writer of that project.
When you called me, I thought, “This is such a cool thing this guy’s doing, this guy I don’t know.” Then I thought, “I never did that for the last guy.” It’s not like I thought about it and said no. It’s just I never even thought about it. It was very thoughtless of me. Then you came in behind me, and you were a real class act the way you handled that.
John: Thank you. We were moving into an Airbnb in Hawaii. I was there for a wedding. It was great to actually hear all the work that you had done. There were so many incredibly talented, powerful people on the project. It was so helpful for you to be there talking me through where the landmines were. Thank you again for that.
Vince: You’re very welcome. The pleasure is mine.
John: Craig, you are making TV shows, and so I thought maybe you could lead our discussion into the television of this all. I’m really curious to know from Vince about working your way up in TV staff and writing a TV show. What are you going to ask him about?
Craig: Everything, but I think mostly I really want to dig into what makes him special. He’s going to get all glowy and blushy, and that’s fine. I want to get into some of the things that make him who he is, because there aren’t a lot of writers who are consistently excellent, and Vince is. That’s where I’m going to dig in.
John: Great. I was thinking for our bonus segment for premium members, Vince, you had done a remake of Kolchak, The Night Stalker, and I was thinking, what other shows would the three of us want to remake or reboot, because it feels like there’s so many great old shows. Are there any things out there that we’d love to see brought up to a 2023-2024 season? Maybe in our bonus segment for premium members, we can talk about that at the end of the show.
Cool. Craig, we have a bit of follow-up. In our last episode, we were talking about the old prospector archetype.
Craig: Just so you catch up on this, Vince, if we say the old gold prospector, what do you imagine in your mind?
Vince: If people didn’t come up to me about once every two weeks or so and say, “I saw you on that episode of Community,” I wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about just now.
John: Wait, did you play a gold prospector on Community?
Craig: I haven’t seen this.
Vince: There was an episode of Community where they had a VHS. You remember these things? They found an old VHS game.
John: I remember this.
Vince: I was the guy on the VHS prospector.
Craig: I love this.
Vince: I think I was a gold prospector. I was a Wild West guy.
Craig: Perfect.
Vince: I meant what I said a minute ago. I got all these kids coming up to me lately saying, “Oh man, I loved you in Community.” I’m like, “Okay, great.”
Craig: What a strange confluence of things, because weirdly, last week, we were just talking about just the concept of the old gold prospector. I had remarked that there’s this consistent thing where if you think about the old gold prospector, you think about this kooky guy with a white beard doing a weird jig and dancing around about his gold.
Vince: That’s me.
Craig: You’ve already done this. You’ve actually been this guy.
John: This feels like a glitch in the matrix that you just happen to be the person who played that.
Craig: This is so weird. We were just trying to figure out, as we often do, why, where does this come from. There has to be some kind of origination of this, like the Wilhelm scream of gold prospectors. It looks like-
John: We got an answer here.
Craig: Our listeners have given us an answer.
John: Drew, do you want to read us… Apparently, a bunch of people wrote in, but this guy was first?
*Drew:* Yeah, we had a lot of people write in. Duncan Brantley was the first one, who said, “In Episode 597 you were wondering about the origin of the old-timey gold miner’s happy dance when he strikes the mother lode. One source is definitely Walter Huston’s amazing boot-stomping jig in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
John: We’ll put a link to this YouTube video. Vince, were you aware of that? Did you know that that was where this all started?
Vince: I certainly have seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and love it. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say with authority that that’s where it came from. The fellow who wrote in might well be right, yeah.
John: It’s a film directed by John Huston, but that’s Walter Huston, his father, playing the old prospector. It looks like the original thing. You can imagine that performance, and you get the animated version of it, and it gets more and more cartoony in our memory. That was probably where it all started.
Craig: He slaps his knee as he does the dance. Everything seems to have flown from there. It seems like my old buddy Ash Brannon has written in.
John: Drew, tell us what Ash Brannon said.
Drew: Ash says, “I can fill you in on the prospector character in Toy Story 2, as I was on the film as the co-director, story co-creator, and character designer. When Pete Docter, Jeff Pidgeon, and I started breaking the story in a big empty room, we were given a premise, Woody is stolen by a toy collector, but not much beyond that. My first question was, what would make Woody valuable to a toy collector? That led us to concocting the Howdy Doody style series circa 1950s.
“Running with the Western theme, we built a tropey cast around Sheriff Woody, and a prospector sidekick just felt right. Jessie started as a talking cactus, by the way, more proof that bad ideas can lead to good ones. Character-wise, Jessie and Bullseye are very much like their TV counterparts, but with the prospector we deliberately went 180 degrees from the TV series bumbling idiot. Being the lead antagonist, he needed to be smart and manipulative, so we found this perfect opportunity to create a sophisticated intellectual who’s forever trapped in the body of a bumbling idiot.”
John: Aha. Once again, we have the greatest listeners on earth, because not only did they give us the oor [ph] text for the prospector, we actually have a writer-director from Toy Story 2 there to answer our questions.
Craig: That makes total sense that Kelsey Grammer would be forced to act like this goofy idiot. Then it’s a little bit like Alan Rickman in-
Vince: Galaxy Quest.
Craig: Yeah, exactly, in Galaxy Quest, this guy that’s used to performing Shakespeare on stage in England being forced to wear this crap and say these dumb lines like, “By Grabthar’s hammer.” Yet as I’ve often pointed out, I don’t think anything has made me cry harder in a science-fiction movie than Alan Rickman saying to a dying alien, “By Grabthar’s hammer, I will avenge thee.”
Vince: Great moment.
John: So good. Vince Gilligan, how can we best fast-forward from you winning the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition to being the television titan that you are today? What are some of those early steps? This is Virginia. Obviously, you’re there for school. When did you come to Los Angeles? When did you start coming to your work in film and television? What was that transition for you?
Vince: It was basically win the contest and then have an interstitial title that says, “And then a bunch of lucky stuff happened.” There was an awful lot of good luck involved. Before that, there was five years or thereabouts of me living in my home state of Virginia.
This was after winning that contest, 1989. Winning that contest put me in touch with Mark Johnson, who I’ve been working with really ever since, for the last, gosh, what is it now, 35 years, 36 years, whatever it is. Mark Johnson, he was a producer on the movie Rain Man, which had won the Oscar just months before I met him, when he shook my hand as one of the judges of the screenwriting contest in 1989. He contacted me after the contest and said, “Do you have any other scripts?” I sent him what I had. I had a couple other movie scripts I had written in the meantime.
Always good advice, which I’m sure you guys have given many times before, is don’t just write that one script and then rest on your laurels. Write that one and put it aside and then start writing a second one. Back then I had that kind of self-starting self-discipline. I don’t really possess that anymore, but I had it then, and so I had a couple of other scripts to show Mark Johnson after he had expressed interest in my first one.
Then basically five years of living in Virginia, trying to be a movie writer and trying to do it from a distance. John, my hat is off to you, because I was not cut out for the movie business. It’s a tough business. The emotional rollercoaster you’re on as a movie writer, at least in my experience.
If TV hadn’t come along to save me in about 1994, I know you guys wouldn’t be interviewing me now. I’m not sure where I’d be. I’d be writing for the PennySaver or something. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, for folks who do that. I don’t know what I’d be doing, but I wouldn’t be-
Craig: I don’t think there’s a lot of editorial work at the PennySaver.
Vince: I would’ve changed that.
Craig: Exactly.
John: [Crosstalk 00:12:24].
Craig: This one PennySaver is full of fantastic writing. Maybe it is that your mind is more creatively speaking, that you feel like you’re more suited for television, or is it just that the business of features was enough to grind you down, whereas the business of television fits your speed a little bit better?
Vince: I think writing is writing. I think there’s wonderful movie scripts being written, wonderful TV scripts being written, and then everything along the spectrum all the way to bad. I think writing is writing. In TV, the writer is the boss. In movies, they are the polar opposite of the boss. That’s the problem. Unless you get to a point you’re like a John August where people pay attention to you as a movie writer in the various meetings that you go to around Los Angeles, New York, and whatnot.
The experience I had, if someone had designed some sort of fiendish mental torture, they couldn’t have done a better job than the process of you write a script, whoever you’re in that particular meeting says, “Oh my god. We love it. We love it. Oh, we love it. Sit and wait by your phone. Be around tomorrow. Do not leave the house.” This is back in the day before cellphones. I can’t tell you how many times I was told by various producers, by various studio executives, “Wait by your phone, because we’re going to be calling you tomorrow with further instructions. This is a go project.” Then you literally cut to the phone has cobwebs on it. It hasn’t rang. It was torture.
The movie business was torture. The TV business can absolutely… Every business has its torturous moments. In the TV business, until somebody fucks it up… Can I curse on this, by the way?
Craig: You can.
John: You absolutely can. You’re required to.
Craig: You fucking can.
Vince: Until we take what works about the TV business and take all the wrong lessons from the movie business… I say this as a member of the Directors Guild as well, but there is a push currently to make… I don’t even know if this comes from the DGA as much as it’s coming from executives at various streamers and various studios and whatnot, networks. “The writers are okay, but directors, now that’s who you want running a TV show.” Then you cut to some superstar director directing the first 48 minutes of a TV show and then shuffling off to Buffalo. Then who’s running it after that? It’s the writer. It’s the showrunner, who is another way of saying the head writer, and his or her staff of wonderful other writers. There seems to be a push now to change that. If that happens, then you’re going to have a TV business that’s more like what’s happening in the movie business.
Craig: I won’t stick around for that business if that happens, as a refugee from features to television. You mentioned directors. I don’t know how many episodes of television you’ve made. You probably have lost count yourself. Across all those, but particularly across the ones where you’ve been the showrunner, you’ve worked with a lot of directors. I’m curious, from your point of view, what do you think makes a good episodic TV director versus a not so good one. Maybe think about that from the point of view of both the quality of the work they do but also the experience of working with them.
Vince: Great question. I think there’s a lot of overlap about what makes a great TV director versus what makes a great movie director. I think like writing is writing, directing is directing. I hope everything I just said a minute ago does not denigrate the process of directing for TV. It’s a crucial job. Directors, especially the great ones, and I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great ones, the value they add to the process is immeasurable.
I think a great director, and I’ll say this movie or TV, a great director looks at the script, looks at the story, and says, “This is the story we’re telling.” Then they look to do everything in their power, with every decision they make, with the wardrobe, the props, the locations, certainly the casting. They’re looking at telling one story that everyone agrees is the story. It’s really the same skill set in either version. Television directors typically have to listen to the input of the writer, of the showrunner, more than they do in movies. I can’t tell you how many times I was not even allowed to be on the set.
Craig: I was going to say, that’s quite an understatement.
Vince: I think a smart director, whether they have to, quote unquote, have to listen or not, I think a smart director, just like a smart anybody in these mediums, listens to these people around them. By the way, this absolutely goes for showrunners too, writer-showrunners in TV. If you stop listening to your directors, conversely, if you stop listening to the people around you, you’re just bound to fail. Both these mediums are the ultimate in collaborative mediums, movies and TV.
You get this vibe that movies are not so collaborative, that it’s all about the directors and their vision. Anyone who forgets that either one of these lines of endeavor is a collaborative medium forgets it at their own peril. You have to surround yourself with smart people. You don’t have to do anything, but I think you’re foolish to not surround yourself with smart people and then not listen to them. That’s just the height of arrogance and egotism and ultimately self-destructiveness.
John: Craig, you’ve had your own experiences with The Last of Us, the first time you were working with a series of different directors. Did you learn a lot?
Craig: I did. It’s interesting. For Chernobyl we had one director, a director that worked on Breaking Bad, in fact, Johan Renck, who directed a couple great episodes of Breaking Bad. I had a fantastic relationship with Johan. It was easy to learn one person’s rhythm and language and their quirks, because it’s an interesting relationship.
I try to be the kind of person that I always wished the feature directors I worked with had been, which is to say yes, I do get the final vote, yes, I am in charge, however let’s work to agree, and let’s treat each other with as much respect as possible and let’s let everybody else know around us that we are both integral and just as important as each other, which really doesn’t happen much in features.
Vince: It does not.
Craig: Working with multiple directors, it’s a little bit like new actors coming in. You just have to get very flexible very quickly, because everyone’s different. You have to learn their rhythms and their quirks afresh. Hopefully, they understand that they are stepping into rushing water, because there’s been a lot of stuff that’s happened before they showed up, and there’s going to be a lot of stuff that happens after they leave.
The other thing that I think is important hopefully to find with directors is directors that understand that ultimately you as the showrunner are going to be responsible for the edit. I don’t know about how you go about these things, Vince, but there are times where you just feel like you need something. You have to almost negotiate a little bit with your own directors to make sure you get the things that you think you’ll need, even if ultimately it turns out you didn’t need it.
Vince: You described it very well just now, Craig. The buck stops with you as a showrunner just like the buck stops with the director on a movie set. Wherever the buck stops, it is good advice to that person, to that decider, listen to people around you. Ultimately, yeah, you gotta make a decision, but be as collaborative as you can be.
Communication is nine tenths of it, I feel like. If you need certain things in the finished footage, you need to communicate that. The time to do that is in pre-production. Pre-production is ultimately probably more important than production. You would have these epic tone meetings. I guess you do them in movies too.
Craig: Not really. I wish we would.
John: We really don’t. It’d be better if we did.
Vince: You’re right. You’re right.
Craig: It’s a shame.
Vince: I was trying to be magnanimous toward the movie business.
Craig: Don’t be.
Vince: I think directors certainly could do them in movies. In just focusing on television, the tone meeting is where the writer of the episode, and usually the showrunner as well, and sometimes that’s the same person, very often the producers will sit with the director for hours. We’ve had tone meetings that have gone 9, 10 hours. We’ll break them up. Sometimes we’ll break them up over two days or whatever. We’re not trying to numb everybody’s butts into submission by sitting there talking for nine hours or whatnot.
We’re basically going through the script from Page 1 to where it says the end. We’re going through and talking through. This is after the bulk of the pre-production is figured out, after the locations have been picked, the guest actors have been cast, all that kind of thing. It’s the final opportunity for the director and the writer/showrunner to get on the same page.
It works best when it flows both ways. If it’s just the showrunner dictating to the director, “This is what I want. I don’t want any Dutch angles. I want this. I want that. I want a 70-foot Technocrane,” you can do it that way if you want, but it works best when it goes both ways, when the director asks the showrunner just as many questions.
You want someone who’s a collaborative artist, just as you and your best version of yourself want to be a collaborative artist, but you also want someone who has a point of view. The best directors are not the ones who just roll over and say, “Tell me how to do it, boss.” The best directors are going to give you things you’ve never even conceived of. The best directors I’ve worked with and the ones I work with over and over again don’t just roll over and say, “Tell me what to do.” They say, “Here’s what I’m thinking here.”
We had a wonderful director on Better Call Saul, Larysa Kondracki. We always have these big teasers. There was a teaser in an episode she directed. We had a scene at the US-Mexican border. At this moment I’m drawing a blank what happens in the damn scene, but I know it was epic. We had it in our heads, it’s going to be dozens of shots and dozens of setups. She said, “I want to do this whole thing as a oner.”
Craig: I remember this. I remember this one.
Vince: She explained it to us way in advance. She said, “When I read this, I pictured it as one shot.” I remember hearing this and thinking, “That’s nuts. You can’t do this as one shot.” Damned if she didn’t. She talked us into it. It wasn’t that hard for her to talk us into it, because she basically pitched it to us. “Picture this. You’re here, and you’re on this thing. You go up the row of vehicles,” and blah blah blah.
It was just brilliant the way she did it. That was not the intention of the folks in the writers’ room when we came up with it. We just figured standard. It was great. It was much more memorable than it would’ve been the way we had in mind. That’s what you’re looking for.
She communicated that to us as soon as she had the idea, basically. She talked us into it, which as I say, was not hard, because it was so cool. Then every department worked with that image, with that idea in mind, worked through the process of making it, because we had to build a US-Mexican border at Double Eagle Airport just to the west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Everything then going forward in the pre-production was designed to make it work as well as possible for that oner. That to me is when it’s working best. It starts with communication, clearly.
Craig: One of the things that you’re digging into here is how much planning is involved in things. Just taking a step back from production and just going back to the act of creation and planning out the stories that you want to tell, one of the hallmarks I think of what you do is this constant balance between surprise and planning.
The example that I want to use is the floating teddy bear in the pool, the opening episode in Season 2 of Breaking Bad. There is something that is so weird about it and surprising and confusing, and yet when all is said and done and you arrive at the end of that season, you understand exactly what’s going on. It all has led to this inevitable concept that is harrowing and way more upsetting than you ever thought it was going to be.
I’m just curious, as you go about thinking about story and how to divide story up across episodes and fill out a season, how do you find the weirdness and then balance it across the structure of things? That was so weird, and yet also so structured.
Vince: I wish I had an answer that always applied, but it really is a case-by-case thing. The storytelling I think is best is organic storytelling, which is where you start with a character. The character revealing themself to you, the writer, precipitates the plot. That’s to me organic, starting with character, working out from that.
Sometimes you’re just restless in the writers’ room, and you get real inorganic from time to time. That is probably a good example of inorganic storytelling where, to the best of my recollection… I’m not being coy or vague as to who said what. Honestly, I forget who said what, which I think the writers’ room is chugging along best when you forget who gets credit for what idea. I think in that case, my vague memory of it now all these years later is I was just thinking, “This is a visual medium,” and I’m always saying that, “I want something really cool to look at here, opening up this season.” Season 2 I think is what it was.
I don’t know who came up with it. It’s a group effort as always, but just, “I want something weird and random.” That was as inorganic as it gets, because it was the idea of the pool in Walter White’s backyard, which by the way, this is, again, such a collaborative medium.
The only time I ever worked on that show by myself was coming up with the pilot. When I was coming up with the pilot, and that’s for my money the least successful episode, my least favorite episode, the one I basically came up with on my own.
Craig: We might have to quibble a little bit there with you on that one. Possibly the greatest pilot of all time, but okay, go ahead.
Vince: I love all the subsequent episodes so much more, and I think in part because I wasn’t alone in the wilderness anymore. I’m getting in the weeds here. Let me try to keep on subject.
The pool in the backyard of Walter White’s house, I don’t think it was important to me. I don’t even think I thought he would necessarily have a pool. I probably thought he wouldn’t have a pool, because the guy’s hurting for money. It seems like a status symbol to have a pool.
This house that we picked, you wind up driving around in a van with all these folks, and you see this house, and you say, “I think this is the house. Something about this feels right. Oh, it’s got a pool in the backyard. For a guy who’s hurting for money, that seems… What the hell? Let’s go with the pool.” Then the pool became a touchstone for this guy. Now we have Season 1, and he’s sitting by the pool from the pilot on. The pool feels important on some weird, symbolic level, although I can’t explain what this symbolism adds up to.
Then we’re sitting around in the writers’ room in the early days of Season 2, and it’s, “What if something’s floating in the pool? What would it be? I don’t know, what if it’s a teddy bear? How did that teddy bear get there? Who the fuck knows?”
Craig: That’s interesting, because I was going to ask what comes first. Spoiler alert, by the time you get to the end of the season, someone has died from drugs. That person’s father works as an air traffic controller. The air traffic controller is distracted and distraught and makes an error that leads to a plane crash.
Vince: Exactly.
Craig: The plane crash results in debris being scattered over Albuquerque, including this scorched teddy bear that belonged obviously to some now-dead child, that lands in Walter White’s pool. The question was, what comes first, the bear or the crash? It sounds like the bear comes first. Then you go, “How did that get there?” That leads you to the airplane. Wow.
Vince: I think so, to the best of my memory. I do not recommend. Listen, by the way. If it takes standing on your head until the blood rushes to your head and you pass out, if that’s what it takes to get to where you ultimately want to be, so be it. Short of doing yourself physical harm or certainly anyone else, whatever it takes is whatever it takes.
The best kind of storytelling, to repeat the thought, is from character outward. Every now and then you cheat. Every now and then you get bored. You try to jumpstart the process. I think in that case, it was from some crazy image outward.
It’s a little bit of schmuck bait I guess you could say. We’re trying to mystify the audience at the beginning of Season 2. There’s a burnt teddy bear floating in this pool. Its plastic eyeballs come out in a skimmer. There must’ve been violence done at the Walter White house. There must’ve been a shoot-out. Except we’re looking at the house, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any signs of an explosion or a fire at the house.
Craig: People gather some of it with an evidence bag, which makes you-
Vince: Exactly.
Craig: … think even further there was some sort of crime.
Vince: Exactly. Exactly. Even in that, we were careful not to schmuck bait it too much. We showed the house right from the opening images. You see the house. The windows are still intact. The house is not burned down, that kind of thing. You see a body bag. It’s a partially full body bag, which I guess is the way it would be after a plane blew up mid-air. It’s just little pieces of people. Then you work outward. We thought, “We’re going to make the audience think there was some terrible violence here,” but then the idea of a plane crash came fairly quickly.
The one thing that was crucial was, it can’t be just some random happenstance thing. It has to be because Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, put the wheels into motion that led to debris raining down on his house. The one thing we knew for sure we were dead set on is it can’t just be a random thing. It has to relate back to Walter White’s actions. His actions have to have these terrible karmic effects upon the world. He has that kind of power over this particular fictional universe, whether he knows it or not. It’s not even a sure thing that he understood that he was responsible. He wouldn’t take responsibility in any way. He’s not that kind of guy.
Craig: He would figure out how to avoid moral responsibility.
Vince: Exactly.
John: Vince, I hear you talking about the origin of this idea, this image. You’re using we the whole time through. This is all a thing that’s coming out of the writers’ room as you’re trying to put together Season 2. You don’t even quite know whose idea it was to come up with the teddy bear, but it was not just one brain. It’s a bunch of brains working together and working in sync.
How did you assemble your writers’ room? How did you pick the writers you wanted to be in that room with you? How did you manage that? That’s such a different skill than being a writer working alone is figuring out how to harness the power of a bunch of writers. You obviously had staffed on X-Files coming up, but what was it like to be the showrunner with a bunch of writers working for you?
Vince: I didn’t think I’d like it. I could spend a whole podcast talking about how lucky I was to be on The X-Files, what it taught me, what working for Chris Carter and those other writers taught me, because I had never been in a room before with other writers. Having said that, X-Files was so episodic that we writers worked in a collaborative way, helping each other out, but it was an informal way. We didn’t really have a writers’ room per se on The X-Files.
John: Because it doesn’t build from episode to episode.
Vince: Exactly. Exactly.
Craig: It’s not serialized.
Vince: Exactly. When it’s a serialized show and you have a writers’ room, at least the way we’ve been doing it for 15 years, it has to be all hands on deck, plugging away. On The X-Files, I’d be in my office working on an episode about thus and so, and Frank Spotnitz would be in his office and doing another episode. John Shiban would be in another office banging away on yet again another episode. We were helpful to each other as far as banging ideas off each other, but it was a different kind of beast.
Before that even, before I had that experience, I was just working by myself. I didn’t know I’d like it working in a writers’ room. I didn’t know that I’d fit in well. I thought there’s a real chance I might be a real square peg in a round hole there. I might not fit in. I might hate it. Secretly, I want to do it all myself, because I’ve got that vanity of wanting to write it all myself. I thought I would feel that way. A writers’ room is a great adventure.
How did I get the writers for Breaking Bad? Ironically, I had the priceless help of a non-writer, my producer, Melissa Bernstein, who is a genius producer and a really excellent director as well at this point. When Breaking Bad was starting off, she and I both were starting off. She was the assistant to Mark Johnson. She was basically sitting on his desk, as we say in Hollywood. She was the one sitting on the desk outside his office and answering his phones.
When Breaking Bad started, Mark said, “You’re going to need a day-to-day producer. How about Melissa?” Just smart as a whip, but had never done that job before. Grew into it beautifully. Now she’s off running I think House of the Dragon in London as we record this. They’re lucky to have her.
John: Melissa’s fantastic. She was involved with Arlo Finch. She’s great.
Vince: She is fantastic. How I found the writers, she found them for me. This was back in the days before everything was set digitally and read on an iPad. I saw it in her office. She had a seven-foot-tall pile of printed paper scripts. She read through them all and winnowed them down to a pile that was, I don’t know, maybe less than a foot tall. Then I read those. Every writer I hired for that first season was in that pile, including Peter Gould, who wound up running-
Craig: Better Call Saul.
Vince: Yeah, co-creating Better Call Saul with me and then running it, running it brilliantly. I didn’t know him from Adam before I read his script in that short pile of scripts that Melissa had winnowed down. That’s how I came to find these folks. They just turned out to be a murderous row of writers in that first season and beyond.
Listen, again, to reiterate, once you get this job, do it any damn way you please. Just try to be kind to people. You’re not curing cancer. It’s just a TV show. There’s no excuse to be nasty to people.
If you get this job and you can write every episode by yourself, more power to you, but the way it works best for me is being in a room, getting everyone emotionally invested in the story at hand and the characters at hand and the story you’re telling, and then not keeping score as to who said what, really.
There’s that old expression, I didn’t make it up, but to paraphrase it, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re not keeping score, when you’re not accounting for who said what. I really hew to that. Every now and then I remember who said what in the room, when it was some highlight moment that made us all erupt into laughter or whatever.
As an example, we had an episode where we’ve got the actor Danny Trejo plays a character who gets his head chopped off with a machete. We came up with this moment where, “What happened to this guy?”
Craig: So great.
Vince: This guy’s severed head is on a giant desert tortoise. They painted on the tortoise “Hola DEA.” We came up with that. That was a group effort. We came up with that. I was so tickled by that image and so excited about putting it into an episode of Breaking Bad that I basically said, “We should just call it a day right there. We should take an early lunch, because I think we’ve done all the work we need to do for the day.”
George Mastras, one of our wonderful writers, the show, he had been quiet. He had been pitching in on this thing, but he was quiet for a minute. He said, “Yeah, but then what happens?” I said, “What do you mean? You got a head on a tortoise. What else do you need?” He says, “I think the head should blow up.” Everyone said, “What?” I said, “George, man, let’s take the win here. That’s like gilding the lily.”
John: Hat on a hat.
Vince: A hat on a hat. God, we love that expression. We use that one all the time.
Craig: It wasn’t.
Vince: It wasn’t. Literally, I kind of scoffed and said, “George, we don’t need to do that. We don’t need that.” He shrugged and said, “Seems like it’s… ” I thought about it, and I said, “Oh shit, you’re right.” That’s how the scene ends. It would’ve been an okay scene, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as, I love the expression Kubrick used, non-submergible. It would not have been a true non-submergible scene if the head hadn’t blown up. That was George.
You’re working together in this room. What I’m trying to achieve is have one brain almost instead of six or seven or eight brains. It’s worked well for us. Again, like I say, do it any way you want when it’s your show.
John: I don’t have a good sense of both of these shows. Are the writers figuring out the season. How many scripts are you ahead before we start production. Are those writers still around as you’re in production?
Vince: You were as ahead as many as you could possibly be. We had all kinds of different experiences. We had experiences where we were only maybe four or five ahead. Was it the final season of Better Call Saul or the one before it? It’s amazing what I can’t remember. We’ve had experiences toward the end of the run of Better Call Saul where we had every episode broken. Oh, man, is that the dream. That is the dream.
People say, “That’s not every episode written.” The writing is the easy part. The breaking is the hard part. You put that many people in a room together for 9, 10 hours a day for 5 days a week, months on end, and having the whole thing figured out with index cards on a corkboard. That’s the hard part.
The theory that we apply to it is, once that episode is broken, in other words, once every story is hammered out and put on these index cards, then any one of us, whoever’s responsible for that episode, or if they drop dead that week, anyone else could just jump write in and write it themselves. Everybody knows that everybody had an equal hand in coming up with it. One writer writes the draft and gets credit for it, and that’s not nothing. That’s important. There’s invention to be had writing the draft.
You have as many ahead as you can possibly have, because then selfishly, as the showrunner, or as the co-showrunner in the case of Better Call Saul, then I get a chance to actually be on the set. Maybe I get a chance to direct more.
If you’re working one episode ahead, which is basically what we did on the first season of Breaking Bad, then you just feel like you just barely got your nose in the water, feel like you’re about to drown any second. You can’t really do all the other parts of the job that are the more fun things, the location scouting, picking props, picking costumes, blah blah blah. You just don’t have time for it all in that version.
Craig: One thing that occurs to me as I hear you talk about your room and the way, it makes sense, you’re trying to create this joint brain that all thinks aligned, the joint brain is, however, aligning itself ultimately to your brain if you are running the show. If I were in a room for one of your shows, I would certainly be desperate to make you happy.
I guess my question is, and this is going to be a hard one for you, because you are, and I’m sure people are picking up on this, just inherently decent and humble person, but what do you think is different about the way you think and work compared maybe to other people that work in television? Because you do seem to have this ability to come up with work that just people are obsessed with and I think is obviously quality work. What’s going on? Have you thought about what separates you or what makes you different? Because I think a lot of people listening would be inspired to perhaps be more like you if they knew exactly what it meant to be like you.
Vince: That’s very flattering. It probably tends to come across as somewhat falsely modest at some of these kind of situations, but it really is the truth. Also, you’re only a genius for as long as you’re a genius. Breaking Bad was lightning in a bottle. Better Call Saul, lightning strike twice for us. Then we were so lucky that it’s hit twice. This next thing I’m working on, it’s just as likely, if not more likely, that everyone will say, “Ugh.”
Craig: Listen. God knows I can identify with that. It does seem like lightning doesn’t really strike twice just randomly. There are things that you stress or that you emphasize, things that you go for, things that you try and do that set your shows apart. By the way, your shows are also traditional in that they are commercially interrupted, whereas all the highfalutin streaming shows aren’t. You’re still writing in this, what I would call the commercially interrupted format.
Vince: You’re right.
Craig: You are doing it at a level that I think puts so much of the so-called PTV streaming to shame. I guess I’ll rephrase to let you off the self-praise hook. What advice would you give to a creator who’s about to run a show? This is purely creative advice, not functional, not procedural, just creatively, advice on how to make something great as opposed to just good.
Vince: Starting with what you just said about commercially interrupted, it’s interesting. Before the strike started and we were in a writers’ room, we’re working on a new project for Apple. The sky’s the limit basically. This is the first time I’ve non-commercially-supported project.
When we created Breaking Bad, we created squarely for AFC. Then luckily, Netflix came along and was a wonderful second broadcaster or medium or whatever the proper terminology is. X-Files before that, these are created for ad-supported television, so we did what we had to do. Now I’ve really fallen in love with that art form.
Even now in this Apple show where we could do it however we choose to do it, we are still queueing to this teaser and four-act structure. We’re still using the same structure on this new show as we were using 30 years ago on The X-Files. What was created years before I ever got in the business, what was created out of necessity for an ad-supported business, I think actually has benefits, even now that we don’t have to hew to it.
I think there’s benefits. They are storytelling and structural benefits when you’re thinking in terms of, “We got a teaser, and then we’re going to do some sort of title sequence. Then we have Act 1. By the dramatic necessities of storytelling, this act has to end with some reason to keep watching.” I think that works whether you have commercials or not.
If you’re building toward these mini climaxes, and I like that, four mini climaxes, well, three and then one big climax at the end of the hour that makes you want to tune in next week, or in the case of streaming, not interrupt the thing when it immediately starts playing the next episode, I think there’s real benefit to that. I certainly didn’t invent that. It was thrust upon us on X-Files. I love it. I continue with it. I think that helps focus my thinking as a storyteller. There’s that.
These are just thoughts. Again, the beauty of this job is you can do it any damn way you want. I would say to folks getting that wonderful opportunity to do this, don’t necessarily throw away all the old ways of doing things, because there was good reasons for them sometimes. Hire the smartest people, both in front of and behind the camera, and then listen to them. Try to set your ego aside. It’s not false modesty or real modesty or whatever. It’s just plain old meat and potatoes kind of common sense.
We get so much credit for this job. Showrunners get so much credit. It’s turned into this sexy job. God knows how that happened. You’re never going to starve for credit. You’re going to get plenty if your show is doing well. When you don’t try to hog it all, the people who work with you are happier, and they give you even more of what you want from them, which is to say their best work. There are so many benefits.
My business manager always says he’s talking about money, not about credit. He always says the expression, “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.” Try not to hog the spotlight too much, because you’re going to get pats on the head and pats on the back you don’t even deserve in the first place.
What happened with Breaking Bad and what I’m trying to do with this new thing is look around and see what everyone else is doing and try to zig a little bit if everyone else is zagging.
Craig: There you go. There you go. I’ve been waiting.
Vince: That’s to me, using Breaking Bad as an example. I looked around. I love television. I watch a lot of old TV and new stuff. I love the medium, period. I was looking around in the early 2000s, the mid-2000s, and I said, “What is everyone doing now?”
All the shows had a somewhat similar look to them in that everyone was framing for head and shoulders mostly. Every now and then you’d see a cowboy or from the waist up or from the thighs up, or every now and then you’d show somewhat full body, but the framing was tight in the early and mid-2000s.
Just looking around and observing what was going on, what everyone else was doing, what didn’t make sense to me then was that the framing wasn’t changing, even though we had the advent of big-screen TVs. We were going for more squarish, 3-by-4 tube TVs that were maybe maxed out at 34, 36, 32 inches probably. Suddenly there’s these plasma TVs and then later LCD and LED flat screens that were 16 by 9. If you had the money back then, you could have a giant screen that’s taking up most of your living room, and yet still people are framing super tight on people’s faces. What’s the point? You got this new tool now.
That was part of what I was looking for. That’s not story so much. That’s more from a directorial point of view. You look around at stuff like that, what are people doing. If you start with that, that can hold you instead.
Craig: That’s excellent advice. You’ve just put something in my brain that I had never considered, which is that the rise of so-called peak TV or the golden age of television that we’re living in corresponds very closely to the introduction of the 16-by-9 television format, that the format itself had led to a certain kind of constriction of TV, both visual and storytelling-wise. That’s fascinating. It never occurred to me. I’m sure a thousand people are going to write in now saying, “Hey, idiot, there have already been a hundred articles about that.”
John: Or if they’re not, they’re writing an article right now.
Craig: They’re writing right now. Some listicle is being generated as we speak. That’s a great observation. I think going the other way, as you said, zigging when people are zagging, it doesn’t necessarily lead you to an original idea or thought. What it does is set you up to look for one that you are not copying, you’re not sitting in the same groove as everyone else.
It’s hard sometimes because the television movie business is designed to urge you to copy, because that’s what makes people who don’t write things safe. It makes them feel safe, at least. Probably actually puts them in great danger. For us, I think making a virtue of doing something different, that’s excellent advice.
John: Agreed.
Vince: Thank you. I hope it is, but I don’t know how practical it is, ultimately, because the two scariest letters in the world right now, in this business at least, are AI, but a close second is IP.
Craig: I hear you.
Vince: The folks listening, I think it’s good advice. I don’t know if it’s good advice. I think it’s just good practice to try to do something original, try to come up with your best version of something that no one’s ever done before. Good luck with that.
I do believe there’s only so many stories in the world. That doesn’t keep me up at night, because I think there’s only a finite number of human emotions, so therefore there’s only a finite number of stories.
If you can do everything you can to make your work as original as possible, good on you, more power to you. Just know that you’re going to be swimming against the current when it comes to most of the decision makers in this business, both in TV and movies. They want IP. They want intellectual property. They want existing stories.
Craig: Even inside those, Vince, I think that there’s an opportunity. We’ve been talking about the Dungeons and Dragons movie, which is a delight. That’s the most IP IP-ish-ness that you can get, or the Lego movies.
Vince: True.
Craig: Best example that there are ways inside of IP to do the different thing, to do something that people aren’t expecting even inside of that.
Vince: Absolutely.
Craig: You are right, there are only so many stories. There are only so many human emotions. There’s only 12 keys on the piano keyboard really. There’s only six strings on a guitar, and people keep coming up with new songs. I don’t know how.
Vince: If we lived in a world that’s completely flipped on its head and no one wanted something from some other existing property turned into a TV show, for instance, we wouldn’t have The Last of Us. Thank god we have The Last of Us.
Craig: Thank god.
Vince: No, seriously. What a brilliant show.
Craig: Thank you.
Vince: You know what it is? It’s just about absolutism. It’s just as bad, like I say, if we lived in bizarro Hollywood where they said, “No. If it’s been done before, you can’t. God knows you can’t have another Star Wars. God forbid, because it’s already been done. We need nothing but originality,” that really would be bizarro Hollywood.
Craig: That would be a very strange Hollywood. You’re right. I think going too far in either direction is a mess. Hollywood’s always looked to books before there were… We’ll be discussing this on our bonus segment. Movies look to television. Television looks to movies. Everybody’s looking at each other. Now they’re looking at toys and video game narratives.
Ultimately, I think if you come at these things creatively, as if it’s original, you come at it with all the care that you would for something that is your own, which basically means instead of somebody calling you up and saying, “Hey, we got this thing. You want to do it?” and then you’re already probably in a rough spot, if you can find something and then take it somewhere and go, “I love this thing. I want to make a thing into a thing,” probably you’re off on a better foot there.
Vince: Absolutely. God, if you don’t have enthusiasm for… It’s so easy to fall prey to this. I wanted to have this job back before I even knew what the name of this job was. I wanted to have it so badly, I would’ve probably chopped off a pinky finger or something to get it.
At a certain point, it’s like, what are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to be a showrunner, or do you have a story to tell? It’s so seductive to do this. “Here, do this show. Go off and run this show.” When it’s that kind of scenario, when someone suggests, “Hey, why don’t you do this,” there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s perfectly a moral, valid thing to do.
If you have to manufacture, if you have to find the enthusiasm for something because you want the job, versus just coming off the street if you can manage to get through the door and say, “I don’t even know what you call that job, but I got this story I want to tell,” that’s a naïve way of looking at it, because it doesn’t really work like that, but I wish it did.
Craig: Same.
Vince: That’s the way I wish it worked always.
Craig: Fantastic. I wish I could talk to Vince all day. I really do.
Vince: Great for my ego.
Craig: Is no one else telling you this stuff? Is it just us?
Vince: My wife, Holly, is very careful to not let me-
Craig: Good.
Vince: … get too big for my britches as we say.
Craig: Our spouses do the same for us, no question.
Vince: They’re doing us all a great favor.
John: Our spouses too, for sure.
Craig: Indeed, indeed.
John: We wrap up every episode with our One Cool Things. I think we warned you about this. Something you would like to recommend to the audience. Do you have something you want to pass along?
Vince: I got a twofer. I’ll make it quick.
Craig: Great.
Vince: A TV show-
John: Please.
Vince: … that I’d be amazed if anyone listening to this has heard of. I may be wrong. I have a TV show I love so much right now. It’s called Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre. This is on a channel called Retro.
Craig: There’s a channel called Retro?
Vince: There’s a channel called Retro TV. It’s out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I think you can find their live feed on the internet. Other than that, it’s over the air or nothing.
John: Wow.
Vince: I use an over-the-air antenna I bought at Walmart. I watch a lot of over-the-air television.
Craig: God. Wow.
Vince: Retro TV is one thing I get if I adjust the antenna just right and the wind’s not blowing too hard.
Craig: Wow.
Vince: It’s a show these three or four guys do I think out of Chattanooga. Basically it’s Dracula, the vampire king. You turn on the episode every week, and he is in his castle in Transylvania, and he is sharing his bitching collection of VHS kung-fu movies with you, one movie a week.
Craig: Oh my god.
Vince: He’s got a werewolf in a cage. The werewolf hands him the tape of the week, and he puts the tape into a VHS tape player that’s sat on a cart with a tube TV. He does the intro every week. He tells you about that week’s kung-fu movie, some movie from the ’70s.
Craig: Oh my gosh.
Vince: Then literally, they cut to the tube TV, which plays the movie for two hours.
Craig: Oh, that’s awesome.
Vince: I love the show so damn much.
John: Amazing.
Vince: I can’t even tell you. I would recommend. I bought a T-shirt from them and everything. I’ve got a Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre T-shirt. I love these guys. They make this show for 29 cents.
Craig: Wow.
Vince: It doesn’t matter they have no money to spend. It is so fun, and it is so charming, and it is so witty, a lot of the banter. He’s just this really funny version of Dracula, and he loves kung-fu movies. That’s my first recommendation.
Craig: That’s awesome.
Vince: Then Alien Tape. Alien Tape. Probably no one listening to this watches over-the-air commercials anymore. Everyone is too smart. Everyone’s way smarter than me. They’re not sitting through the commercials. I watch a lot of over-the-air TV, and therefore I have to sit through the commercials, just like we did 40 years ago.
There’s this commercial for something called Alien Tape. I’m thinking this is bullshit. It’s this clear tape that’s made out of silicone. You can stick a brick to a wall with it. I buy some of this stuff, because I’m in CVS in LA, and they’ve got an aisle of as seen on TV. I see this stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, brother.” I wind up buying it, because what the hell? This shit is for real. This stuff, I stuck up my over-the-air antenna on the wall with it, but at a certain point I had to move it. I could not get this thing loose. It is so strong.
Craig: Wow.
Vince: I finally pried it loose, and I thought, “Oh, man, I’ve messed up the paint on my bedroom wall here.” It came off completely clean. You can run it under running water and clean it up and reuse that same piece of tape. I love this stuff.
Craig: Wow.
Vince: It is awesome.
Craig: I’m going to get some of this.
John: Fantastic.
Vince: I’m big into adhesives. I love adhesives of all kinds. They’re really cool.
Craig: I would have never predicted.
John: This is content you can’t get on any other podcast. How many interviews have you done? No one’s ever gotten your love of adhesives out of you.
Craig: He doesn’t love them. He’s big into them.
Vince: I’m big into them.
Craig: He’s big into the entire adhesives product category.
John: Yeah, big into it.
Craig: Wow.
John: I love it.
Craig: My One Cool Thing today is… Oh, jeez, I hate to recommend anything on Twitter, because Elon just keeps getting dumber and dumber. There is an account, @todayyearsold, which comes from the old memey comment, “I was today years old when I found out.” Today Years Old is dedicated to doing nothing but just running videos of things that you should’ve known that you don’t know.
For instance, yesterday some guy’s like, “Did you know that you can use the back of a claw hammer to set a nail, and that’s your first stroke in is backwards with the nail? You don’t have to hold the nail and hit it and avoid hitting your thumbs. You just wedge it in there and go whack and then you turn your hammer around and finish the job.” I was like, “Oh my god.”
There are so many little things like that, all these little life hacks. Inevitably, they always come along with somebody who’s just utterly shocked and indeed was today years old when they found so, so @todayyearsold.
Vince: That’s a good one.
John: I love that. My One Cool Thing is a video I watched this past week. It is a robot puppet who’s singing A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton. You may remember back, Vanessa Carlton’s song A Thousand Miles. You may also remember the video, because in the video for it, she’s at a piano, but the piano’s being driven all over the city. She’s basically, a hidden seat belt, she’s on this piano just being moved all over the city.
This guy created a robot puppet to do the exact same video, basically. You’d think it would just be a parody of it, but it’s actually brilliant and charming. It’s a puppet version of Vanessa Carlton singing A Thousand Miles. It’s on one of those little robot drone cars. It’s just incredibly charming. If you’re having any darkness in your day, watch this video, and it will brighten it up.
Craig: What are the odds that any of us are having darkness in our days? No dark days. What for?
John: No, there’s no dark days.
Craig: How? Why?
John: Never. Never. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. It’s been so nice to see them out on the picket line. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen them out on the picket line, but it’s nice. The blue WGA T-shirts, they’re fine, but you can’t wear them five days in a row. Wear your Scriptnotes shirt.
Craig: I’m wearing mine right now, actually, my blue strike shirt. Strike shirt!
John: Strike shirt. It’s not as comfortable as the Cotton Bureau shirts. I think we [crosstalk 01:05:18].
Craig: Nothing is as comfortable. I gotta tell you, I don’t know, Vince, if you like an undershirt or just a nice T-shirt.
John: We have good ones.
Craig: You gotta go to this place, Cotton Bureau.
Vince: I don’t like wearing clothes in general, but if I have to, I will, yeah.
Craig: I’m with you, man. I’m with you.
John: He’s a nudist who’s into adhesives.
Craig: Oh, man. That’s such a painful combination. I don’t like wearing clothes either, but I have to. Mostly, I go by how annoying they are to wear. Cotton Bureau, you can get yourself… Just go for the, what is it, the tri-blend I think they call it.
John: Yeah, it’s the Stuart special.
Craig: They blended together cotton with two other things that probably cause cancer, but you know what? It’s soft.
John: So soft.
Craig: It’s so soft. They don’t cause cancer. It’s very, very soft. I only wear those. That is now all I wear. Just got a whole bunch of gray Cotton Bureau undershirts, and that’s all I wear.
Vince: I am writing this down, Cotton Bureau.
John: Cottonbureau.com.
Craig: Cotton Bureau and tri-blend or something like that.
John: That’s what you want.
Craig: So soft.
John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record with Vince Gilligan, talking about TV shows we’d like to remake. Vince Gilligan, an absolute pleasure talking with you. I can’t believe it took 597 episodes for us to do this. Let’s do it again.
Vince: I would love doing it. You guys are really smart and a lot of fun to talk to. I had a great time. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Bonus segment. Looking through your credits, I noticed Kolchak, the Night Stalker, which is a remake of an earlier TV series. It got me thinking, what other old series would we like to remake if the opportunity came about? I’ll start. I’ve always had a soft spot for Hart to Hart. Do you guys remember Hart to Hart?
Vince: Yeah.
Craig: Of course. Of course I do.
John: Oh my god, I loved it. Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. When they met it was murder. It’s this millionaire, they’d probably be billionaires, married couple, who their friends just keep getting murdered, and they just solve the murders, just because they’re bored. It’s not even their job to solve the murders. They just happen to be around, and they solve the murders. I loved it. I feel like it could be a fun show to do.
Vince: That’s a great show. That in and of itself I’m assuming was a riff on the Thin Man series of movies. Have you guys ever seen Jon Hamm and Adam Scott do the reboot of the Hart to Hart title sequence and Simon and Simon?
Craig: No, I haven’t seen that.
Vince: It’s great.
John: It’s really worth seeing.
Vince: It is.
John: Adam Scott has a series with John Hamm where it’s like the greatest remake ever made or the greatest film ever made. They basically will painstakingly recreate moments. One of the things is the Hart to Hart opening sequence.
Craig: That’s hysterical. Do you think these days it’s a little strange to think of Robert Wagner as a character who is constantly around people being murdered, because he was famously around when his wife, Natalie Wood, died.
John: Died in an accident.
Craig: Eh…
John: I don’t know. I do wonder how you’d do it now. I guess inspired by, we haven’t talked about Rian Johnson at all this episode, which is strange, but Rian Johnson’s-
Craig: That’s right.
John: His series with Natasha Lyonne, Poker Face, takes what we love so much about Columbo and finds a way to do it in modern times. I wonder what the 2023 update of Hart to Hart would be. I feel like it could be done. We still got rich people. We still have rich beautiful people.
Vince: That’s true.
Craig: Always.
Vince: We absolutely do.
Craig: Always.
John: Craig, any thoughts for a show you’d like to do if you reached back into the vault?
Craig: Sure. It’s famously impossible to do. I know this because I know the gentleman who made it. It was essentially impossible for them to keep up. The television show Police Squad, which was done by Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker. It was the forerunner of the Naked Gun movies.
It is incredible. It is one of my favorite childhood memories, because my father and I both were just howling at this thing, watching the television set, our square, tiny tube television set and just the two of us just absolutely rolling on the floor. It really defines so much of what I think of as funny.
Even though a lot of the references inside of it are rather old-fashioned, those guys have always loved to make fun of the old, old fashion, and really it was keying off of Dragnet, I suppose, in its style, more than anything else, which was before my time, I absolutely adored it.
It to this day features the single best joke I have ever heard in my life. This guy finds a man in his study who’s not supposed to be there. He says, “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” The man says, “I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith.” That is the single greatest joke ever on television.
Vince: That is so smart.
Craig: It’s just so perfect. It’s full of stuff like that, absolutely full of things like that, visual jokes, weird verbal jokes. I don’t even know where you… They must be available somewhere to stream. Ultimately, David Zucker told me it was important to keep it up. You couldn’t write a show where there was a joke every 10 seconds and do it every week, week after week after week. It’s just not possible, but man, I wish it were.
Vince: Oh, man.
John: Craig, did we ever talk about Angie Tribeca? Because that’s probably the closest there’s been to a remake of it.
Craig: Yes, and that is in the style. Listen. It’s hard to hit. I should know because I’ve tried it. It’s hard to hit the heights of what those guys were able to do. It has been tried before. Maybe it was just a product of its time. Since then we’re so soaked in parody and satire everywhere we look that it’s just hard to make it seem fresh week after week. It’s really an alternate universe where it just never stopped. It just was never canceled-
John: Was always there.
Craig: … immediately, the way Police Squad was.
Vince: God, it was such a good show, Police Squad. I guess it started, as you said, with Airplane. It was so smart of those guys to hire Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges. Those guys, kudos to them for getting it back when they were making Airplane, because none of those three guys were known for comedy at all.
Craig: No. In fact, I remember David telling me that when they said, “We want Leslie Nielsen to play the doctor,” they were like, “Leslie Nielsen? Leslie Nielsen’s the guy you go to when everyone else has said no. He’s not funny.” They were like, “No no no, you don’t understand. That’s the point.” In a weird way, it’s the opposite of what you do, because you take guys like Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk and Lavell Crawford and you put them into dramatic roles. The ZAZ guys were like, “Let’s go find guys that are known for being stiffs and make a virtue out of it.” It was so much fun.
Vince: They were so much ballsier than we are. It’s easy to say, “Gee, if someone could be funny, they could play it straight.”
Craig: I’m with you on that one.
Vince: The way they did it, those guys were brilliant, Peter Graves. Oh, and Robert Stack is in there.
Craig: Robert Stack.
Vince: It’s one thing for the ZAZ guys to come up with that. My hat will eternally be off to them. Those old-school guys like Leslie Nielsen, who had a certain image that they might feel like they needed to protect, that was really ballsy of them-
Craig: It was.
Vince: … and just really great.
Craig: It was. They just went with it.
Vince: It was great. Remember the side gag in… The one I always remember in Police Squad, there was one guy in the squad, in the bull pen, who was so tall, you never saw his face. I guess they literally got a guy who was over seven feet tall. You only saw him from the shoulders down.
Craig: So great.
Vince: He’s always got a file folder in his hand. He comes up, walks past Leslie Nielsen. Leslie Nielsen says, “Hey, Bill,” or whatever his name was, “You got something on the side of your mouth.” The guy reaches up, and he says, “No, other side.” Half a banana falls down.
Craig: Yeah, just drops down. It’s so great. Oh, god. Anything in that room where they’re like, “Let me show you the… “ The guy who would show them the lab stuff, because it was always like the tall guy would go by, and then the scientist would be like, “Here, let me show you something in my microscope.” Leslie Nielsen would bend down and say, “I don’t see anything.” “Use your open eye, Frank.”
Vince: I love that stuff.
Craig: It’s just so great.
Vince: I love it. It’s so good. Oh, man.
John: Vince, how about you? Any shows you’d want to get a shot at remaking?
Vince: Oh, man, it’s a toughie, because I love old TV. I was just thinking of how much I just was such a fan of WKRP in Cincinnati growing up. Then the trouble is so much of a show like that is chemistry of those original actors, so seeing it rebooted with different actors, I don’t know, that would be tricky.
A show that pops in mind… I only recently became aware of this, and thanks to my friend Gordon Smith. This is a guy who started off as my assistant on Breaking Bad, and he is now an executive producer. He was an executive producer of Better Call Saul. He’s an executive producer on this new thing I’m working on. He’s an Emmy-nominated writer. He’s this really smart, really tuned-in guy.
I thought I was the Western guy in our writers’ room. He told me about a show called The Westerner, which probably some people listening in have heard of it. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t heard of it. It was a one-season show. It lasted 13 episodes, half a season back in the old days. It was a show created by Sam Peckinpah.
John: Oh, wow.
Vince: It aired in 1961. It starred Brian Keith, who was a really underrated actor, really wonderful actor. He was the dad on Family Affair. After that, he was on Hardcastle and McCormick and stuff like that. Really, really talented, talented actor.
He stars in this show called The Westerner. He is a cowboy who roams around the West, basically looking to support himself. He’s a saddle tramp. He wanders around with his dog. His dog’s name is Brown. It was the same dog who played Old Yeller in that famous movie. He basically wanders around the West looking for a job. He is really not that heroic. He’ll run from a fight sometimes. He can be greedy. He can be kind of venal.
It really was ahead of its time. It was really smart. It was the same time that Gunsmoke and The Rifleman and Bonanza were on the air. Actually, I love those shows, but the morality of those shows felt dictated by Colgate-Palmolive or whoever or Philip Morris or whoever the sponsors were. This thing was so far ahead of its time, it got canceled after half a season. It wouldn’t shock now like it did then. A show like that, that’d be interesting to see that rebooted.
John: Nice.
Craig: I’m just looking at this. It says one of the issues was that it was programed against ratings powerhouse The Flintstones.
John: Oh my god.
Vince: The Flintstones killed it. I think it would’ve been canceled no matter what, because he is shockingly unheroic at times, and in a way that it’s like a breath of fresh air. I could watch The Rifleman all day. I love The Rifleman. It was a great show. You watch three or four episodes of The Rifleman, and Lucas McCain is always doing the right thing, and then you see an episode of this and it’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s like, this is more like a real human being and not a superhero.
John: Great. Some good ideas for shows that we will never realistically remake. I’d be remiss if I didn’t end the segment by getting back to, Aline Brosh McKenna and I have always promised that we were going to someday remake… It’s Episode 100 I think, we decided we were going to do a remake of The Winds of War, the Herman Wouk mini series. At some point, that time will come. It’s going to happen.
Vince: Nice.
Craig: One day. One day.
Vince: You know he only died a year or two ago, Herman Wouk?
Craig: What? Really?
Vince: Am I right about this? Herman Wouk also wrote The Caine Mutiny, right?
John: He did, yeah.
Craig: I believe so. Yeah, you’re right, he died four years ago.
Vince: Four years ago.
John: Four years ago. He was 103 years old. Wow. That’s a long life.
Craig: He was 103. You know what? I got no chance. I got no chance. I’m not getting there. No way.
John: I could live a good, long time.
Craig: You think so?
John: I think I’ll keep going. I’ll keep going. My family lives a good long time.
Vince: Good for you.
Craig: I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to play what you just said at your funeral.
John: Oh my god, that’s really cruel. You’re assuming I’m going to die before you?
Craig: That’s what I’m saying. I’m just saying, you’ve opened up the universe to strike you down.
John: That’s true, I did.
Craig: To strike you down.
John: I walked into that. It’s true.
Craig: By the way, how weird would that be if I did play that at your funeral? People are like, “Why would you play that?” I’m like, “I’m just saying he was wrong.”
John: “Because I promised I would. I’m a man of my word.”
Craig: Listen, I promised I would. You know what? You know who would’ve loved it? Not John.
John: Vince Gilligan would’ve, because Vince Gilligan was on the episode.
Craig: That’s right.
John: That notable episode where John foretold his death.
Craig: Vince Gilligan, also alive.
Vince: For the time being anyway.
Craig: Oh, man.
John: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
Craig: Thanks, Vince.
Vince: Pleasure talking to you guys. Thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you.
Links:
- Vince Gilligan on IMDb
- Vince Gilligan plays a prospector on Community (S5 E9)
- Walter Houston’s dance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
- Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre
- Alien Tape
- Today Years Old on Twitter
- Robot Puppet Sings “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton by Ben Howard on YouTube
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matt Davis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 598: The One with Vince Gilligan, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 597 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, producer Drew Marquardt has assembled a vast number of listener questions, which we will tackle to the best of our ability. Craig and I have not looked at these questions at all. We are going in completely cold.
Craig: I love that.
John: Which can be good. It’ll be fun.
Craig: It’ll be fun. Hey, we’ve done it 596 times. If we can’t get this right, what good are we at this point?
John: Not so good. Craig, for a bonus topic I was thinking, this is top of my head, which fantasy guest, living or dead, we would love to have on the program. We’ll talk about that. Cool. Drew, I see you’re on the Workflowy. We have some follow-up. It looks like this was follow-up from people who are experts in things that we are not experts in, which is my favorite kind of follow-up.
Drew Marquardt: Ethan in Medford, Oregon writes, “I’m not a screenwriter, but I’ve been listening to the show since pre-pandemic, and listening to Episode 594, I feel seen. I happen to sell gold pans on the internet and have since 2006.”
Craig: Wow.
Drew: “John’s question is spot-on. Gold panning is practiced all over the world but is rarely seen on screen. Gold is the literal treasure sought in nearly every fantasy story, but the characters would rather fight a dragon than dip a pan in the water. Gold panning has been relegated to cartoons and cowboy movies, same with bindles, and that’s weird. Personally, I think the reason we don’t see more people panning for gold in the movies is down to a fundamental misunderstanding of panning. Panning is only part of the process. It means it’s a means of narrowing in on the original source.
“Placer gold, spelled like placer [PLAY-sr] but sounds like [PLA-sr], the stuff you pan for, is gold that that’s moved from its original source. If there’s gold in the stream, it came from a lode deposit somewhere upstream, and panning helps the prospector find where. Finding the lode is the eureka moment.”
Craig: That’s a eureka moment for me, because I don’t know about you, John, but I thought the whole point was like, “Oh my god, I found a nugget.”
John: You did find a nugget, but I think it was partly because our recollection of panning comes from the 1849ers, the miners up in the mountains. That was a time when we’d just started mining these places, so it would make sense that those streams had gold in them, because upstream was some place where there was veins of gold and they should build mines. It does make sense. Both that prospector did find some gold in that moment, which made him happy, but more importantly, it made the miners happy, because it means that there was some gold up there in the hills.
Craig: I like that Ethan is crafting and selling gold panners. I like that better than gold pans, even though they’re called gold pans, just because that could be just a super flex by a chef, like oh, gold pans, which obviously would-
John: Oh, those copper pans? I spit on your copper pans. These are gold pans.
Craig: These are gold pans. They will melt very quickly. They will scratch instantly. I just wonder, in my brain, when I imagine someone panning for gold and finding some, here’s what I imagine: a short, potbellied man wearing britches, a dirty shirt, and suspenders. He’s got a big beard. He’s got a floppy hat. When he sees the gold, he starts dancing by hopping back and forth on either foot and going, “I found gold. I found gold.” Why? What is that?
John: I have the exact same image in my head, so there must be some oor [ph] prospector image. What was that?
Craig: Where is that? Where is it from?
John: Is it Looney Tunes? It’s gotta be something like that.
Craig: It feels cartoony to me, but where? Is this a Mandela effect thing or did that happen?
John: No, it happened. There’s some original source. Because we have the best listeners on the planet, they may be able to point us to that source. It’s going to be like the tying someone to the railroad tracks. There was some place where this all started, where we got that image of who this prospector was. As you describe it, I see exactly the same person in my head.
Craig: You see it, right?
John: Yeah.
Craig: You know that it must exist, because the folks at Pixar imagined the same thing, because that’s what they made the old prospector look like in Toy Story 2.
John: Exactly. I had that image well before that.
Craig: Exactly, as did they.
John: Maybe we need to track down the writers of Toy Story 2 and see if they can tell us where that came from. Drew, find those writers and ask them where it came from.
Craig: I think maybe Rita Hsiao. Rita Hsiao might be one of them. We know Rita.
John: We know Rita. Of course we know Rita.
Craig: We’ll check with Rita. Rita, what’s up with that?
John: That’s somewhere, so we’d have an answer to the question of what happened to gold panning, why do we not see gold panning in fantasy universes. I think what Ethan is telling us is that it would exist in those universes, but it would be helping to find where the sources of those minerals are. We should put it back in our fantasy movies, because it is appropriate.
Craig: I’m not going to do it.
John: You’re not going to do it?
Craig: No, I’m just saying right out, I’m not doing it.
John: You’re not doing it.
Craig: You’re not going to see that.
John: Here’s the thing. In The Last of Us, the golds aren’t even panned. No one needs the gold.
Craig: I don’t know. I don’t know. Gold actually has utility as a conductor. It’s a fantastic conductor. Gold plating and gold teeth and all sorts of interesting… Gold if still useful. I think if you have time to pan for gold, I don’t know where you are in our world. Plus, if you start digging around in The Last of Us, it’s going to go bad.
John: You could come across some bad things, some fungal things.
Craig: You’re going to hit a patch.
John: Yeah, patches.
Craig: I wouldn’t recommend it.
John: More follow-up from people who know more than we do.
Craig: Oh, good.
John: Help us out, Drew.
Drew: The next one is on estate planning. Attorney Brian in Texas writes, “After all these years of listening, I finally have some insight to offer. Like Drew’s mother, I’m an estate planning attorney, board certified in Texas. One of my law partners is Craig’s childhood friend, Keith Jaasma.”
Craig: Oh my word. Keith Jaasma as a… Just to insert here, Keith Jaasma, a friend of mine from high school who we called the tall kid, because he was tall, because you could tell from his last name he’s of Dutch extract, and the Dutch are the tallest people in the world, Keith was and is a fantastic guy. That’s a fun little connection.
John: He is apparently an attorney.
Craig: He’s allowed to be a good guy and an attorney.
Drew: “Unlike Drew’s mother, Brian is not retired, and probably won’t be for many years, so just follow-up comments I thought might be helpful. Number one, you can hire someone to do most of the administration and probate work after someone dies. This would typically be a trust company or the trust department of a bank. They are usually referred to as a corporate executor or corporate trustee. The obvious downside is that they do not work for free, but many of my wealthier clients or clients who want to spare their loved ones the burden of doing this work will name a bank or trust company to serve as executor or trustee in their will or trust.
“Number two, I may have misunderstood Craig, but I wanted to make it clear that heirs and beneficiaries are not generally liable for the debts of a decedent. Creditors are almost always limited to going after the estate assets and not the heirs or beneficiaries, for payment of debts.”
Craig: You know what? He didn’t misunderstand me. I just wasn’t clear. What I meant there was, let’s say you, Drew, are left a bunch of stuff. You’re the executor of an estate. You have to handle all of the claims and things and hand it out. What you’ve been left is a house. If the amount you have to put out is greater than the amount of cash that there is, my understanding is then yes, the creditors have to go after the estate, which means what’s left, the house, which means you are effectively paying for it, because that’s what was left to you. Now, that may also be wrong, but that was what I meant. Maybe Brian can give some follow-up on that.
John: Let me restate what you’re saying, Craig, because I think we’re all probably in agreement. They can’t go after Drew individually for things he doesn’t own. They can’t garnish Drew’s wages. If he inherited the house as part of the estate, that’s still part of the estate. The house could need to be sold or liquidated in order to pay off the debts of the estate.
Craig: Right, so then when all’s said and done, everybody gets what they’re supposed to get. Drew, simply by being the executor, gets nothing, even though he was meant to get something. That’s what I meant. Maybe Brian can give us a little follow-up, but not before he gives Keith Jaasma a solid punch in the arm. Brian, lie in wait. Don’t come up to him and be like, “I’ve got to do this.” No, I want you to nail him hard, boom, in the arm, out of nowhere. High school.
Drew: “Three, finally, when Craig mentioned that everyone should have a trust, it might be helpful for people to understand that he’s referring to a revocable trust, often referred to as a living trust. These are extremely common to avoid probate, since probate in certain states like California can be an expensive and time-consuming process to go through after someone dies. The revocable trust would be your main estate planning document. While it would often create irrevocable trusts for a surviving spouse, children, or other beneficiaries after your death, the revocable trust is the main document that most people need.”
John: That’s what you were describing there, Craig. I’m sure as you bought your house, that went into the trust, rather than going into you and your individual [crosstalk 00:09:30].
Craig: Yes. This is where I hope people weren’t listening to the podcast in their car, because a number of them have fallen asleep and crashed.
John: What I was fascinated by is Drew said revocable [ree-VOH-kuh-bl], but irrevocable [ih-REH-vuh-kuh-bl].
Craig: I think it might be revocable [REH-vuh-kuh-bl].
John: I think I would say revocable [REH-vuh-kuh-bl] for the first one too.
Craig: Let’s take a look. REH-vuh-kuh-bl. REH-vuh-kuh-bl. This is live, guys. It’s happening live. It is also rih-VOH-kuh-bl, but that is less common. The common version is REH-vuh-kuh-bl.
Drew: That totally makes sense.
John: Someone like Drew, who’s studied in Scotland of course, he’s going to say it differently because of his Scottish tradition.
Drew: That’s being very generous for me just not saying a word right.
John: Words in English.
Craig: What you just said is not correct.
Drew: Thank you.
John: Let’s do one last bit of follow-up here. We talked about Replika. This was during our How Would This Be a Movie. Replika was that service where people are falling in love with the chat bots.
Drew: Jane writes, “A note on Replika AI movie discussion from Episode 594. I’m 25, so when I was a kid, there was a Disney Channel original movie that came out in 1999 that was replayed all the time. It was called Smart House. Drew might remember it, actually. It fundamentally shaped my concept of AI, women’s roles in the home, the gendered division of labor, and what scholars call the second shift. It’s about a family that wins a smart house in a competition and basically the Alexa becomes an overbearing, controlling human mom in a family where the mom’s passed away. It’s a great movie and way ahead of its time and probably more profound than its kid viewers had capacity to digest.”
John: Drew, do you know Smart House, the movie?
Drew: I do know Smart House, because Megana Rao loves Smart House.
John: I thought I remembered her talking about Smart House.
Drew: In my first week working was like, “You have to watch Smart House.”
Craig: My goodness. Here’s what interesting. The writers are William Hudson and Stu Krieger. The director’s LeVar Burton.
John: This all makes sense. LeVar Burton, of course, Geordi on Star Trek, also great Jeopardy fill-in host.
Craig: Let us not fail to mention Roots, the greatest mini series of all time.
John: Stu Krieger is a friend of our own Stuart Friedel and also a professor, I think teaching screenwriting at USC, so lots of connections there.
Craig: You don’t say. How about that? Fascinating.
John: Craig, you have no recollection of Disney Channel original movies. I kind of remember after-school specials a little bit, but I basically missed the whole, this is a movie made for kids that shows on TV. That was never a thing for me.
Craig: Yeah, because we didn’t have that. It just wasn’t there. When did the Disney Channel even start?
John: Disney and Nickelodeon were earlier than you think. We didn’t have cable though for a long time, so I missed all that.
Craig: Same. I think maybe when we finally got cable, I was already in high school. Disney Channel was founded in 1983. That was when it was founded. “Since 1997, as just Disney Channel, its programming has shifted focus to target mainly children and adolescents.” What the hell were they targeting before then? Wait a second. What? Bizarre. Regardless, we were already in high school and not watching the Disney Channel.
John: That’s why we didn’t see that. Nickelodeon, I’m just looking it up, 1979.
Craig: Wow.
John: That’s really early.
Craig: We really didn’t have cable then.
John: No, definitely not. We didn’t really have TV. We just had a little box we stuck a candle in and watched the shadows dance around.
Craig: The first film released under the Disney Channel Premiere Films was something called Tiger Town in 1983. Oh my god, what kid wouldn’t want to watch this? “The film stars Roy Scheider as Billy Young, an aging baseball player for the Detroit Tigers.” That is not at all what children want to see out there winning one for the Detroit 9. I don’t think so. No.
John: Kids were different back then, Craig. It’s hard to remember. Children were fundamentally different. Kids loved baseball and retired players.
Craig: If you look at paintings from the 1700s, typically children are portrayed as just very small adults.
John: It’s the best.
Craig: That’s what this is. It’s like, what do kids like? They love aging baseball players.
Drew: Dames.
Craig: They like dames, and they Roy Scheider. We got Scheider. Let’s do it. Oh my god, this is incredible. In the show, there is a woman, a pop star comes to sing the National Anthem. This is 1983. What pop star do you think they got there? What current pop star did they trot out in 1983?
John: I’m stumped. Who would it be?
Craig: Of course, it’s Mary Wilson, a former Supreme.
John: That’s who you want.
Craig: The one that isn’t Diana Ross, let’s get her and trot her out there, because kids love the Supremes.
John: Did Roy Scheider and Mary Wilson have a romance in the film?
Craig: No. She just shows up to sing the National Anthem. They thought, “They’ll get it.” Also, the audio format, what do you think? Was this is Dolby, or what do you think?
John: I’m going to guess just stereo.
Drew: I’m going mono.
Craig: You’re right, it’s mono.
John: It is mono. Love it.
Craig: The thing is in mono.
John: Why would you put it in stereo when TVs only had one speaker?
Craig: I get it. 1983 TVs. Speaker is almost overstating what we had in televisions in 1983. It was like the thing in your phone, basically, this little, tiny thing. It’s even worse than your phone. They just did it in mono, like, “Screw it. Tiger Town. Let’s go. Kids will love it.” They’ve come a long way.
John: My dad built our TV. He built it out of a kit. The TV I grew up with, he could fix it because he built it himself.
Craig: I gotta say, the genetic connection there is strong.
John: I do feel a little spark there when I think of my dad, because it’s just like, yeah, that’s right.
Craig: That’s right.
John: The nerdiness came from there.
Craig: He was an engineer?
John: He was an engineer for Bell Labs.
Craig: Oh my gosh. Everything is coming together. Everything.
John: Everything.
Craig: Everything. Fun.
John: That was follow-up on previous things. Now there’s brand new stuff that we’ve not ever experienced before. Drew, help us out with some of these listener questions.
Drew: Sarah from Montreal writes, “I was reading an article in The Guardian, and I could use some decoding on what actually happens contractually when a star like Phoebe Waller-Bridge secures a deal that she doesn’t deliver on or delays in delivering? The article implies that she and other mega stars are being paid to do nothing, but is that really the case?”
Craig: No.
John: No.
Craig: Let me also just challenge the premise of the question here, which is that somebody like Phoebe Waller-Bridge secured a deal that she, quote, “doesn’t deliver on.” There are all sorts of ways to structure overall deals. Sometimes a company like Amazon, in their zeal to lock down certain people… I’m pretty sure that they gave her that deal just following Fleabag. Fleabag was on Amazon. It’s a huge hit for them. Season Two was a huge hit for them, and they wanted to keep her there.
When that happens, sometimes talent can successfully negotiate a deal that says basically, “Look, if you want to hold me here so that I am exclusive to you, I can’t work for anybody else, I can’t make TV for anybody else, then you have to pay me this much.” If you have a lot of leverage, you can also say, “You also can’t not pay me if I don’t come up with something.” What you have to do is work in good faith to figure out something that everybody wants to do.
What happened here, and I think it was rather unfair to Phoebe, is that during that time, the things that she wanted to do or the things they wanted her to do just didn’t match up, but not to the extent, by the way, that Amazon wasn’t very happy to just make another deal with her to continue to keep her there. No, they’re not being paid to do nothing at all.
I want to also say, when you are somebody like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, your exclusivity is valuable, very valuable. Overall deals traditionally have worked like this. I think modern ones do require, in many cases, something a little bit more, but they can’t really guarantee. My overall deal is connected to making The Last of Us. That’s how HBO tends to do things. They build overalls around shows. If you make an overall deal with somebody, you’re really saying, “I hope you come up with something that everybody wants to make in the next three years, but we can’t guarantee you will.” That’s priced in.
This whole brouhaha over this was, I thought, unfair. There have been scads of people, and I’d like to point out men, who have had overall deals, done nothing, and no one’s written an article like this about them. I am firmly in the Phoebe Waller-Bridge camp.
John: Late in the article they talk about JJ Abrams’s overall deal and like, oh, nothing’s come out of that, but a lot came out of that for a long time. Other shows came out of that. This is a person who had a track record creating shows and then movies that did really well for these places. Has he been doing nothing in this meantime? Absolutely not. He’s been developing other things. Some stuff goes to pilots. Some stuff doesn’t go to pilot. Things happen. Things don’t happen. He had a giant show that was on the starting line that didn’t go forward. That happens. That’s what’s you’re paying for. You’re paying for the exclusive right to make JJ Abrams’s next thing, and that’s worth a lot to people.
Craig: Exactly. If the company decides, and I think in that case it was maybe HBO Max, which now doesn’t exist, I think they just looked at the budget of what that was, “All things considered, we don’t want to spend this money for this show.” That happens all the time. That was their choice.
No, people are not being paid to do nothing. The companies clearly have the money to spend, and they are well aware that they are taking a risk. They make that gamble. Sometimes it pays off for them in exciting ways, and sometimes it doesn’t pay off for them in ways they wish it would. Sometimes they’re saying no to things that they ought to have said yes to. In alternate universes, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has seven shows on the air on Amazon. Who knows? That’s the thing. We just don’t know. No, Sarah from Montreal, Phoebe and other mega stars are not being paid to do nothing.
John: I agree. What do you got for us, Drew?
Drew: Tom in Warwickshire writes, “I’m writing a Christmas movie and want to know if I can have a character say the word Grinch. I know that the Dr. Seuss estate is pretty hard on its trademark, but am I safe to have a character refer to someone as a Grinch? It seems so present in our Christmas language that it feels like this should be fair use scenario, but I’m from the UK, and we don’t seem to have as strong of a fair use defense here as you do in the US. If there is going to be a cliché moment of newspaper clippings on a wall, that’s something that happened in the past, can I use the word in a headline? This is probably the most succinct language for the headline to get the point across but also probably the most testing in terms of copyright. Is there a good resource out there for finding things like these out?”
John: That good resource will be the legal affairs department of the studio that makes your feature when they decide this is a Christmas movie we have to make. Then they will have to prove artwork and clearances for things that go on the wall in this cliched newspaper headline moment. They may flag Grinch as a subject of concern. I think you’re absolutely clear. I think it’s ridiculous to try to trademark that out of existence in terms of showing up or a character saying that, but lawyers may disagree. I can tell you, Tom of Warwickshire, you are absolutely free to include that in your script, because it’s your script. No one’s going to come after your script at this point for using the word Grinch.
Craig: The last point maybe is the most salient, Tom. You yourself will never be liable here. You’re going to write a script, and you’re going to have somebody say the word Grinch. Then part of your contract with your studio, at least it ought to be, is that you are indemnified from lawsuits about things like that because the studio itself… As long as you write things without absolute knowledge that you are ripping somebody off, like plagiarism that they wouldn’t know about, the studio is responsible to clear these things.
The trademark stuff really turns on marketplace confusion and damages. I think it is unlikely that the way you’re using Grinch here would cause any marketplace confusion. It has become a bit of a generic word, like Xerox or Kleenex. I think the Dr. Seuss estate is probably more concerned about people selling shirts with the Grinch on Etsy than they are maybe about somebody using the word Grinch. I don’t think the word Grinch is copyrightable.
For instance, I know that in a script I can describe something as Mickey Mouse. I can refer to Mickey Mouse. I can say, “Oh, she loves Mickey Mouse,” or, “Look at this Mickey Mouse arrangement of so-and-so.” I can’t get sued by Disney. No.
John: Full agreement here. I think if you are going to title your movie Grinch or something or do something that would cause marketplace confusion with the Grinch, you are going to have all those people swarming over you. Referring to a Grinch, a character referring to a Grinch or something that passes by in a headline, I truly doubt you’re going to have a problem. I guarantee it is not a problem for it to be in your script at this point for the thing you’re trying to sell.
Craig: (singing)
John: Drew, what do you got for us?
Craig: Drew passed out.
Drew: Richard in the UK writes, “I wanted to ask you about something that I call a non sequitur character dump. I’ll give you an example. Character 2 says, ‘Why won’t you just sign the papers?’ And Character 1 gives Character 2 a long, searching look, and after a lengthy pause, Character 1 says, ‘My father used to make me come with him to the abattoir. He told me to look in the eyes of the animals, examine their panic,’ yada yada yada. I feel it’s cheating a little bit. The writer now has an infinite amount of anecdotes that they can arm their character with that perfectly justify his or her actions at that moment. What do you guys think? Is there a way to make these backstory monologues a little more camouflaged, or are they absolutely fine?”
John: It sounds like Richard’s not trying to go for the joke version of this. The joke version of this is like, you see, oh, suddenly now we’re going to just have a backstory with no motivation. This kind of moment, to me, Craig, you can disagree, I think it’ll work as long as you believe that the character might him or herself be thinking that the moment I carry them to that past recollection, they might say something.
There’s some work there, to get there, that they would actually be speaking aloud, this thing that they’re going to be saying for the next little bit to fill in this backstory here. Real-life people don’t do that a lot. Real-life people often have to be pressed to reveal those moments. What do you think?
Craig: Yeah, completely agree. The test here, Richard, is is there a reason for this person to say this story? There has to be a reason. The reason has to be so compelling that the character is willing to withstand the social awkwardness of starting to tell this weird, irrelevant story, because they know that when they get to the end of it, the other person will go, “Oh, actually that was a really helpful story for me. I understand something now.” The story has to be appropriate. The moment has to be appropriate.
Ideally, Character 1, who’s going to deliver the story, should be aware in their mind that Character 2 would find this odd. That is the biggest problem I have with scenes like that. When a character begins to monologue about their past in a weird moment and the other character just sits there listening like, “The hell is going on?” Character 1 is unaware that a human would have that reaction to this bizarre story.
Make your characters aware. Make sure the moment calls for the story. Most importantly, the story has to make you go, “Oh, okay, yeah, got it. That was a helpful story.”
John: Richard, you’re trying to do two things at once. You’ve picked this backstory moment because it makes narrative sense in your story, so that there’s a reason why it’s great for the audience to know this specific information at this point. It also has to make sense for it to be exposed in this moment, in this scene, with the reality of the space the characters are in, that if Character 1 and Character 2 would actually get to this moment.
That’s honestly 90% of what screenwriting is, is making sure that these moments that you as a writer need to happen really feel like they can happen right now in the space where the story has landed. Potentially it’s cliché. How you get through it is really finding ways for this speech, this monologue, this dialog to be present and to be the necessary thing for the character to be saying next.
Craig: In my mind, the one of these that’s burbling up, and I can’t remember it well enough, but I seem to recall that in LA Confidential, there is a story, and I don’t even remember which character says it to which character, about Rolo Tomasi and the idea that Rolo Tomasi was a name that I think his father came up with to describe an unknown perpetrator who gets away with murder. You’re always looking for this impossible Rolo Tomasi. That comes into play in terms of the plot later. In my mind, that’s what happens. I’ll have to go back and look. I seem to recall that it was a good example, perhaps, of this sort of thing.
John: Where a character is giving out a little bit more information than you suspect they would give in that moment, and yet you as an audience enjoy it because you just know that it’s going to be important later on? Is that what you’re feeling?
Craig: You know what? I’m about to search for it right now. Let me see if I can find it. It’s between Jack and Exley. Exley is questioning whether or not the correct three people are being blamed for killings at a diner. Jack walks away from Exley, and then Exley cryptically says Rolo Tomasi. Jack says, “Is there more to that, or do I have to guess?” which is important, because that means Jack is aware this is weird.
Then Exley says, “Rolo is a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty. He shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I made the name up to give him some personality.” Jack says, “What’s the point?” Exley says, “Rolo’s the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about truth and justice and Rolo, but somewhere along the way, I forgot all that. How about you, Jack? Why’d you become a cop?”
The point is, he tells this story about who killed his dad and the fact that he made this name up to describe the person that gets away with it. This is a great example actually I think of what he’s talking about. The point is, it was motivated by the conversation they were having. The other person was like, “What?” which is the exact correct reaction. Then when you got to the end of it and literally to the point of challenging him, saying, “What’s the point?” Then Exley gets to the point, which is relevant to the argument they’re having, which is, “Did we or did we not get the right Rolo Tomasi?”
John: What’s crucial here is that that first character who says Rolo Tomasi, he knows the other character is going to… He’s betting on the other character’s going to ask the question. He’s setting the bait for him to ask. If the other person didn’t ask, it would just be a dead moment. The character wants to tell this moment to this other character and not just to the audience.
Craig: Rolo Tomasi.
John: Rolo Tomasi.
Craig: God, I love that movie.
John: I think we have the name for our episode. It’s Rolo Tomasi.
Craig: Maybe so. Brian Helgeland of course we must give credit to, the fantastic screenwriter who wrote that film.
John: Drew, what else you got for us?
Drew: Luke in New York City writes, “My writing partner and I are having our first meeting with a literary manager soon. We wrote a pilot script that we really like and were able to get it to a few different management companies through a connection that she had in the industry. My question is, what are the most important things we should try to get out of a preliminary meeting? Should it be sharing our career goals, showing that we’re aligned as writing partners, proving that we’re serious about writing? I don’t want to go into a meeting that should just be a casual meet and greet and come on too strongly. Any advice about how to prepare and how we should be aligned before our first meetings would be greatly appreciated.”
John: What’s your first instinct, Craig?
Craig: My first instinct, Luke, is to imagine that you are a literary manager, and you are stuck in a meeting with a couple of ding-dongs that haven’t earned a dime, and you have all sorts of people that want you to represent them, and every client you take on dilutes your time and energy and takes you away from the other things that matter to you and may never turn into anything at all, and that in fact, if you take these guys on, it’s going to be a lot of hard work.
What sort of meeting would that person like to have? My guess is they would like to be somewhat entertained. They would like to enjoy it. It shouldn’t feel forced. It shouldn’t feel like an act. It should just be a great conversation. I want to feel like these two kids are leaning forward, that they’re excited and enthusiastic and ambitious, that they’re not entitled, that they’re ready to write more, that they’re open to feedback, that they’re passionate, and that if send them into a meeting with somebody that trusts me, that trust won’t be damaged when that person calls me and says, “Why did you send those two weirdos to me?”
It’s really just about being likable and energetic and ambitious and open and ready to be go-getters and do what needs to be done on your end of things to make the manager’s leap of faith worth it.
John: Don’t be fake. Be yourself, but be the best versions of yourselves. Be the people you are when you’re at a hundred, so they can see, oh, these are people who I can send out to meet with producers, meet with other executives, and they’ll be able to work in that room the same way they’re working with me.
In terms of what you’re working on, they’ll have read something of yours, but make sure you’re talking about the other stuff you’re working on, what’s interesting to you, what you’ve seen that you like. Help them figure out how they can market you if they were going to sign you with a client, so they can think about, oh yeah, I can send them on this type of thing, these types of open writing assignments, these are things that would be good people for me to put you in front of. Just help them visualize you as a client, and you’ll see if that works.
The other thing I would want to say, Luke, is this manager is your first meeting, great. This may be a bad fit for you too. Make sure you’re also watching and listening and just getting a sense of would you want to get emails from this person, would you want to talk to this person on the phone, or do they give you a bad vibe? If they give you a bad vibe, don’t sign with them. Just keep looking for a different manager, because the first person who says yes to you isn’t necessarily the right person for you.
Craig: That is a great point to consider. The last thing I would add is, if you are interested as you’re going along or even if you’re not, just a good general practice for situations like this is at some point to present an interesting question that you guys have, you’re wondering should you do this or should you do this, even if you’re not necessarily wondering, and say, “We would love to ask your advice, because you would be helpful.”
People like to know that they’re needed, and they like to hear that their advice matters. These little things go so much further than you can imagine. You might think they’re established, they don’t need to feel good about themselves. Everybody needs to feel good about themselves, no matter who they are, at any level.
John: Something that’s generally good advice for anybody you’re trying to bring into your world, it could be a business manager or a lawyer or anybody, your best clients, what do they do that make them your best clients? What is it in your relationship that makes it work so well? Then they can talk about how they see that business relationship working.
Are they the kind of manager who wants to read every draft and give you lots of notes, or do they read it once and then they send it out? Both can work, but you’ll get a sense of what they’re looking for in their clients and how they envision this working relationship going. It’s a smart question to ask middle to end of the conversation, so you can both see, is this a thing that’s going to maybe click, or was it just a meeting.
Craig: Another thing that comes to mind, there are two of you. Luke, you have a partner. I don’t know if it’s a guy or a girl. Let’s just imagine it’s a lady. Let’s call Luke and Laura. Right, John? Luke and Laura.
John: Yeah, General Hospital.
Craig: Bingo. Drew’s like, “Huh? What?” Luke and Laura go in there. It is much better for you, Luke, at some point to talk about what Laura is great at and for Laura to talk about what you, Luke, are great at.
John: I love that.
Craig: Much better than you going on about yourselves or feeling like that the two of you are the same, there’s a Luke and a Luke 2. Who needs two Lukes? There’s something about this partnership that’s great, and if you complement each other, it’s also a sign of stability. It indicates to the manager that the two of you aren’t going to be beating the crap out of each other within three months, and then this whole thing falls apart, which happens all the time.
John: It does.
Craig: Praise each other. Be generous and humble, and that will also, I think, do quite a bit to impress.
John: That’s correct.
Drew: I have another manager question from An Extremely Anonymous Listener. They write, “I’m an emerging writer in Los Angeles with several years of experience as support staff and a staffing credit. I have a manager at one of the well-known management companies. For context, I don’t have an agent. I like my manager, but I have doubts about their work style. They’re extremely honest, and I appreciate that, but I feel like it verges on defeatism. Their most common response is, ‘That’s hard. Staffing is hard. Selling is hard. IP is hard at my level.’ Sometimes even asking for generals ‘is hard.’ I agree, but it would help to hear some optimism once in a while.
“This also led to a development relationship that I think is a bad fit. I feel my manager encouraged it because this producer was the only one to say yes. The producer is asking for a lot of free work before going out for pitches, and my manager is enabling them. I feel stuck, but I want to keep my manager and push them to be more proactive after the contract is resolved. Do you have any advice about how to communicate with them and get some more support? How can I manage my manager?”
John: Extremely Anonymous, their premise is that they don’t want to change managers, and yet we have to talk about the fact that they should probably change managers, because it’s not your job to make them more optimistic about the industry that they’ve chosen to work in.
Yes, it’s hard. It’s always hard. It’s always been hard. Some things are harder now than they’ve been before, but it’s their job to break through that hard stuff to get you in to meet the people you need to meet so you can get a job.
I’m concerned that you as an emerging writer are not going to be the person who can change them. You’re in a not-great relationship, and I don’t think you’re going to change that person.
Craig: There is another possibility. If we could have Extremely Anonymous’s manager on here, I wonder what their honest version of this would be, because sometimes the people that we think are defeatist are not constitutionally defeatist. They’re defeatist with us, because it is hard with us, and they’re having trouble explaining why.
Before I would leave this manager, I would consider sitting down with them and saying, “Listen, here’s what I hear a lot. I don’t know if it’s just that you focus on the hardness of things or if the work that I have, the way I’m doing meetings, my writing, whatever it is, is challenging for you. If that’s the case, let’s have a completely open and honest discussion about that, because I need to hear that, and I need to hear your opinion about it. After that, I may choose to agree or disagree.”
It’s important to know what’s underneath all of this defeatism. It is rare for people to start defeated. It is common for people to get defeatist when they’ve been defeated a lot. When they send your stuff out, if they’re getting a hundred nos is kind of hard. That’s hard. If you’re like, “Hey, can you send it to 10 more people? Don’t you think they’ll like it?” they might say, “That’s hard.” That’s the honest, difficult discussion I would have before hitting the fire button.
John: Wow, if Craig’s default response is not the fire one, then you should really listen.
Craig: Yeah, because normally I’m all about firing, but the truth is that they may be being polite rather than defeatist. Also, a little bit of a red flag here about this producer. You have a development relationship. “I feel my manager encouraged it because this producer was the only one to say yes.” Yeah, that’s kind of their job. Everyone said no. One person said yes. Do you want to try or not? Yes, of course they encouraged that.
This is the red flag. “The producer’s asking for a lot of free work before going out for pitches, and my manager’s enabling them.” No, that’s not free work. Here’s what free work is. We talk about free work all the time. Free work is when you are hired to write something and you are hired to write a draft, a script, and you do, and then the producer says, “Whoa, before you turn this in, to get your delivery money, do it again. Do it again. Do it again.”
You’re not in that position. You’re in a speculative position. You own the copyright. No one’s paid for it. No one owns it. The producer isn’t asking for a lot of free work. The producer is asking for you to work. If you feel like you’re done, then you could say, “I’m done. I don’t want to do any more work.”
This isn’t a situation where it’s free work. This is a situation where somebody’s saying to you, like anybody, a producer, a friend, your mom, “I don’t really think it’s good enough.” Now you have to make that decision. When you say, “My manager is enabling them,” maybe your manager agrees with them. This is what I’m concerned about.
I think that maybe it’s time for you and your manager to have a little bit of a couples therapy session to figure out what’s really going on. If after that couples therapy session you think, “Oh, what’s really going on is they actually are just defeatist, and they don’t know anybody other than this producer, and this producer doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing,” oh my god, then hit the eject button as hard as you can.
John: Going back to the question of whether what the producer is asking for is free work, here’s a situation where it could be free work. Let’s say this producer has some piece of IP, some obscure Japanese toy that they want you to come up with a pitch for, and then you guys are going to take it out to the town. I have seen situations where that producer is asking for draft after draft after draft of this pitch, and they’re always refining and they’re always redoing this thing, and they’re basically having you write up a bunch of shit to prepare for this pitch. That borders on free work in the sense of you should really be paying a person to do this kind of development work on a thing. We don’t know what this situation is.
Craig’s right though. If this is entirely your idea, you have this idea for this space opera, and this producer has partnered up with you, that’s actually genuinely collaboration. If it’s not good collaboration, then you need to move on. It should be considered collaboration, not free work. It’s when you don’t control these things. That’s where it can become abusive free work. You have to make decisions. Your instinct is right. Your manager should be on your side about doing enough to get this project set up, but not doing so much that you’re just spinning your wheels with this producer.
Craig: That’s an outstanding distinction, yes, because when there is anything that the producer owns, then everything that you do, Extremely Anonymous, is considered derivative of that copyright, which means you don’t own it, which means they can say to you at any point, “You know what? I don’t love the 20 drafts I made you do of Slinky the movie, so beat it. I’m going to hire somebody else to do Slinky the movie.” Then you’re like, “What about all the stuff I wrote?” They’ll say, “We won’t use any of it.” Then enjoy.
The point is, they’re in control. They own it. Therefore it is like work. In fact, really they should be hiring you. I could be wrong, but I’m presuming in this case, this is an original idea of yours, in which case the copyright is wholly owned by you, you control it completely, and therefore, as John says, this is a collaboration. The producer in fact is the one doing the free work. The producer is the one who is being speculative here more than you are.
John: Last thing, I want to come back to the manager himself. Yes, people have different communication styles. I think we should also be mindful of that. Some people just have that defeatist affect to their voice. It’s just how they frame things. I like that you say this manager is extremely honest. That’s a thing you want out of a manager. I wouldn’t dismiss them just for that. They could also be a good, honest manager but just not the manager for you, so allow yourself the opportunity to say, “This isn’t a bad person, but this is not what I need right now, because my career is not advancing.”
Craig: That’s right.
John: Maybe it is time to move on.
Craig: That’s right, all true. It’s up to you.
John: Drew, I think we have time for one more question. We leave it in your capable hands to decide which question that will be.
Drew: Oh my gosh.
Craig: Oh god. Sophie’s choice. Sophie’s choice.
Drew: Sophie’s choice. Let’s do this. Maria in Denver writes, “I’m part of a group of screenwriters in Denver at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and there are many of us who are serious about breaking into the industry. A good chunk of us are middle-aged or older. I’m in my 40s. I plan to move to LA in the next year or so, and my goal is to be in a writers’ room. We recently had a workshop event, and the panel was all young writers. A couple of them said, ‘I’ve anecdotally heard about older people being in writers’ rooms.’ I think it was meant to be encouraging. What is the ageism like in this industry really?”
John: It’s hard. I’ll be that manager.
Craig: The manager. It’s hard.
John: It’s hard. Is ageism a thing in this town? Yes. I’m sure I’ve told this story on this podcast before, so I apologize. I was out to lunch with a producer. She’s a talented producer who’s done a lot of amazing projects. She was describing this thing she was working on. I’m like, “Oh, wow, that sounds really great. I’d love to read more.” She’s like, “Oh no, I’m looking for a younger writer.” At the time I was 30.
Sometimes age is meant to mean a newer person, a younger person, but it really often means a cheaper person. In this case, she did not really mean someone who was actually younger, but just less expensive, less seasoned, because she didn’t think it was the kind of thing that they’d be spending my dollars on.
For Maria in Denver, there are writers who start in this industry in their 30s, in their 40s. It does happen. I have friends who’ve come into this industry from other industries, and it works, but I think I know those stories because they are a little bit more the exception than the rule.
It is going to be a challenge, because so many of the people who are going to be starting in these writers’ rooms have worked their way up from being showrunners’ assistants, from being script coordinators, from finding other ways into this business. Coming in in your 40s, it’s less likely to be your path in. Craig, what’s your instinct?
Craig: It’s hard. Here’s the issue, Maria. There is ageism in Hollywood, of course, but it is not quite what you would think, in that what happens is, honestly in both, in features and in television I would say, the writers who are at the top of the food chain and who are there for the most highly paid and highly sought-after writers for features or the most highly paid and highly sought after writer/producers for television, are almost exclusively in their 40s and 50s, and sometimes in their 60s. To that extent, there’s no ageism at all. We’re an exemplary industry.
On the other hand, when people are putting together rooms, and that seems like that’s what you’re going for is a writers’ room, in fact you state so explicitly, the search for diversity tends to not focus on people in their 40s and 50s because they’re already represented in the room by the higher-ups.
Therefore, the focus on filling up the room tends to concentrate more on gender and sexual orientation and race, ethnicity, cultural background, disability, a lot of other metrics of things to help expand the palette of who is in the room and whose voices are being heard, because, unfortunately for you, the 40s and 50s voice is almost always already there in the room.
Therefore, the way you’re going to be getting into a room is by writing something outstanding. Not that other people aren’t, but when I say outstanding, I mean even outstanding among the outstanding. It’s gotta be really, really good.
I don’t think you should be encouraged, and I don’t want you to be discouraged, because here’s the thing, Maria. Either you’re supposed to make it or you’re not. Most people are not. I’ve said this a million times. Most people are not mean to be make it in Hollywood, because most people don’t, but there are some who are. It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. It doesn’t matter how old or young. It doesn’t matter if their race is this or that or anything. If you write something undeniable like that, it’s undeniable. There’s a lot of space in a lot of rooms these days, not particularly these days.
John: Not at these moments.
Craig: Not at this moment. There’s literally zero spaces for anyone. However, hopefully not too long from now we’ll all be back to work. There’s a lot of television being made and a lot of opportunities to be had. You just need to stand out in a serious way, but you will not be kept from a room because of your age, nor will you be admitted to a room because of your age.
John: Agreed. Everyone is going to read your script first. That’s really the first threshold. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a bunch. They may read the first five pages of your script, and if they love those first five pages, they’ll keep reading. If they don’t, they won’t. That’s true for writers of every age and every background.
Then if they love your script, then they’ll want to see what other experience you have but also want to meet with you. I think that’s a situation where in those meetings, you’ll be able to hopefully match your experience to what they need in that room. It may be that they’re not looking for a writer in their 40s or 50s at the top of their head, but you have some specific experience that is actually exactly appropriate for what they need.
They’re doing a show set in a school, and you are a high school teacher, you know things that the people don’t know. My friend who made it in, who broke in in his mid-30s, was hired onto a legal show. He’s a lawyer. He knows these things. It’s totally possible. Zoanne Clack, who was a guest on our show, she was a damn doctor, and that’s how she got into Grey’s Anatomy. Now she’s running those shows.
It is entirely possible, but I think you’re going to need to… With the extra life and time you’ve had, hopefully you’re bringing something into that room that no one else can.
Craig: The most important thing you can bring into a room is your specific writing voice. I think there’s probably an overemphasis on what I would call the non-writing factors. People think, “What I’m bringing to the room is my parents are immigrants,” or, “English is my second language,” or, “I have a disability,” or this or that.
All of those things are things that can contribute to specific knowledge and awareness, which is important, and that’s why we look for those things. Those things must be attended by a specific voice, a talent for writing. The writing talent comes first. Your specificity as a writer, your voice. People pick up a script, and they go, “Oh yeah, I didn’t need a cover page. This is a Maria script.” That’s what you want.
John: For sure. It has come time for our One Cool Things. It’s been a minute since we’ve had a One Cool Thing, so I’m excited to do it. Mine is a comic book, I guess it’s actually a trade paperback of a bunch of comic books put together, that I picked up this last week called Not All Robots. It’s written by Mark Russell. Artist is Mike Deodato Jr.
I just picked it up because I liked the cover, and I flipped through the pages like, “Oh, this sounds great.” I’d never heard of it before. There was a Patton Oswalt rave on the back of it. It was an appropriate rave.
It’s a really smart near-future satire of the United States. All the disasters have happened to the United States. There are these mobile cities. These robots are doing all the work of these places. Every human family has a robot assigned to them to actually earn their living. There’s resentment from the humans. There’s resentment from the robots. There’s a whole new class of robots coming online.
It’s about toxic masculinity and a lot of other class stuff, but also really funny and really smart, one of the books that I immediately started to think about, okay, how could you do this as a series or a movie or some other form. I think it probably is best in its current form, because it can do anything, because it’s just being drawn on the page. It doesn’t have to cost $300 billion. I just really loved it. I think you’d love it too, Craig.
Craig: I’ve been flipping through while you were talking. This looks awesome. I didn’t understand. Just by flipping through and catching some panels here and there, I suddenly went, “Oh, not all robots like not all men. Okay, I get it.” It’s very clear. I’ll check that out. That does sound like One Cool Thing.
John: What have you got for us?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is actually an individual person that I met, a friend of a friend. I’m not going to use his real name, because I don’t know if he wants me to use his real name. I’m just going to call him Dan. Dan works for TSA. Nobody likes TSA. They’re annoying. We go to the airport. They’re annoying. They look through our stuff. They yell at us. We didn’t move fast enough. We didn’t move slow enough.
John: We try to do the right thing, and then they tell us we didn’t do the right thing.
Craig: You can’t make them happy. Dan doesn’t work at the airport. He works for central TSA. Dan was on the team that created and implement TSA PreCheck.
John: God bless PreCheck.
Craig: God bless PreCheck. We were in a group. We were in a large group of people. It’s a friend of a friend. It’s like, we know our friend, “And who are you? What’s your deal?” He was like, “Oh, I work for TSA.” Like, “Okay, like what?” “Oh, I’m part of the team that invented PreCheck.” It was like he said, “Oh, I’m the guitarist for Blondie,” which maybe is an old reference that young people wouldn’t like but I care about because I love Chris Stein. Anyway, the point is, rockstar. We were all like, “Oh my god. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
PreCheck is a wonderful thing. The fact that the government thought, “You know what? What if we made some people’s lives easier if they qualify, if they haven’t been arrested and whatever? If they qualify, what if we just gave them a little bit of a break?” By the way, it’s not that much of a break, to be clear. Here’s what you get out of PreCheck. You don’t have to take your shoes off, and you can leave your laptop in your bag. Man, that saves up a bunch of time. The line is shorter, generally. I love PreCheck. Love it.
John: I love PreCheck too. I would only say that you can get PreCheck if you do Global Entry. If you’re ever going to travel internationally more than once a year, get Global Entry. You have to go to the airport. You have to do a whole interview thing. Global Entry will get you PreCheck, but also it lets you cut the line at Immigration. You just go through, yu scan your little card, and you’re in.
Craig: You don’t even have to scan your card anymore.
John: Your passport just goes through a thing.
Craig: Now they just look at your face. They’ve even gone past the passport. Now they just take a picture of your face and like, “Oh yeah, we know you.” By the way, do you know what trumps even Global Entry?
John: Oh, tell me.
Craig: I just got NEXUS. NEXUS is the version of Global Entry that works for obviously both entering the United States, which Global Entry does, but also entering Canada. I can enter Canada like a Canadian citizen now, which for me is kind of a big deal.
Now, the interesting thing about NEXUS is you need to have an interview, just like you do with Global Entry, and when the pandemic hit, they just shut down all the interviews. They’ve been slowly bringing them back. Because NEXUS is a joint operation between the United States and Canada, you pretty much need to do it at border spots.
I went up and did a little scout a few weeks ago and took a little side trip with my producing partner, and we drove for a couple of hours to the Washington state Canada border and met with a lovely Canadian representative and an American representative. The Canadian representative, big fan of the show. The American, no clue. No clue. Actually, so then the Canadian, she’s like, “Look,” and she pulled me up on the screen and showed the American. The American was like, “Oh, Identity Thief, that’s awesome.”
John: Amazing.
Craig: She loved Identity Thief, had no clue about The Last of Us. Either way, they were both very nice, and I got my NEXUS, not because of that, but because I qualify. NEXUS now trumps Global Entry. If you do find yourself going back and forth between the US and Canada quite a bit, NEXUS is I think essential.
John: That’s the one you want?
Craig: Essential, yes.
John: Love it. That is our show for this week.
Craig: Great.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nora Beyer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. I love to see this out on the picket line, by the way. They’re great. I saw a guy wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt. It turned out it was Adam Pineless, who has often written outros for us. Adam, thank you for this.
Craig: Thank you.
John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on our fantasy guests. Craig, Drew, thank you for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, we may have talked about this a little bit before, but I want to dig into any living person, living or dead, and maybe even besides the dead people, because the living people we could still get, who would we want to have on the show as a guest.
This last week I’ve been talking a lot about Nora Ephron and her unique voice, so she would be very, very high on my list. I can’t think of anyone more than Nora Ephron just in terms of what she was able to bring to the romantic comedy and just her skill as a screenwriter.
Craig: Interesting.
John: Who’s on your list there?
Craig: Do I get more than one?
John: You get plenty of people.
Craig: I would go way, way back to Aristotle, because I think poetics did a great job of just laying the foundation for what we do. I’d love to talk with Aristotle about all sorts of things, but mostly like, “Hey, look at what became of drama. Look at how it does branch out from the things you wrote. What are the parts of this that surprise you? What are the parts of this that you did not expect? What are the parts that you think are good, bad? What are your comments? What do you like?” I think that’d be really interesting to just hear from the original drama critic about how things have turned out.
John: It’s always fascinating to think back that people who have no experience with the form that we’re actually doing, would they recognize this as being the same kind of stuff as the dramas and, quote, unquote, comedies of classic times, given the form and just how different things are structured. I suspect they would, but I’m not sure they would, because would they recognize the universal aspects of that?
Craig: That would just be fascinating, I think. Plus also, I think a lot of people would be very angry at me if all I did was talk about that with Aristotle and not other things.
John: It’s our show, so we can talk about what we want.
Craig: Our show’s about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
John: You’re a screenwriter.
Craig: Yeah, I’m a screenwriter. The other person I would love to talk to would be Frances Marion, who was kind of the… I don’t know, you mentioned oor [ph] as a wonderful prefix for original things. She was an oor screenwriter. In a time when you would imagine all the screenwriters were men, because everyone was men, in fact, Frances Marion was right there with them.
Let’s see. Her first credit is 1912, The New York Hat, starring Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish. She has a gazillion credits, all the way up through to 1940. Oh, selected filmography. It’s probably even longer than that. In fact, yeah, it says years active 1912-1972. She died in 1973.
John: 1912 you just barely have figured out what movies are. Those are the first movie studios are right around that time. You look at those original scripts, and they are progressing from just a shot list really to something that has a little bit more form, a little bit more shape, and so you’re moving up through the advent of sound and synced sound. It’s a huge change.
Craig: I’m loading her IMDb page, and oh my sweet lord. It’s just shocking. She wrote the story to The Champ. The Champ in 1979. I don’t know quite how that happened. I don’t know if that was from a story. I don’t know how that happened.
John: It could’ve been it’s based on something that she did earlier.
Craig: Perhaps, because her last continuous credit is in 1953, a story for something called The Clown. She has so many credits. Really when you look at somebody like this, who started writing at the very beginning of cinema in 1912, when it’s not even just silent, it’s barely working, all the way into the ‘10s, ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, that’s just mind-blowing. I would love to talk with her also to just get her sense of writing across these wild changes of technology and modes of storytelling. She’s a hall of famer, first [inaudible 01:02:07] hall of famer.
John: High on my list would be Orson Welles. I know we had the Fincher movie that was some of Orson Welles and his whole issues. I think if we could somehow resurrect Orson Welles at a specific moment in time, and just as he saw cinema and he saw cinematic storytelling. We go back to his movies again and again for this is how stuff started. Did he know as he was doing it what he was doing? What would he make of the films we make now and Auteur Theory? How would he treat the cinematic television we do right now? It’d be a great conversation.
Craig: That does sound great. You would be yelled at or just scorned. “Your question is stupid. I think your question is stupid.”
John: I want to pick a certain age where he’s not just the grumpy old drunk. That’s why I want to pick an earlier moment.
Craig: He’s fresh.
John: I’ve done some, I’ll say, hostile interviews along the way, and I still learn something out of those.
Craig: That’s good. By the way, just to clarify, and I should’ve known this, and I didn’t, The Champ, the one that we know with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder, both of who have taken interesting turns, it was in fact based on an earlier film from 1931 written by, of course, Frances Marion and also Wanda Tuchock and Don Marquis, called The Champ, a Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper. Now when you hear Wallace Beery, does that bring anything to mind, John?
John: Nothing. I don’t know who that is.
Drew: Barton Fink.
Craig: Bingo. Thank you, Drew.
John: Oh, wow.
Craig: It’s a Wally Beery picture. It’s a Wally Beery picture.
Drew: Wally Beery wrestling picture. What do you need, a roadmap?
Craig: Big men, tights. There you go. You know what? Also, since we’re saying we can get anybody, I want the Coen brothers on, and I want to make them tell me exactly what the hell all that means, or at least I want them to hear my theory of Barton Fink and then either tell me warm, cold, everybody’s allowed to have their own theory, it means a lot of different things. I want to know. I just want to know.
John: We have some bigger guests coming in future sessions, and equivalent of Coen brothers coming on the show, so I don’t think it’s too much of a reach. At some point we need one or both Coen brothers on the show.
I would love to have Spike Lee at some point, because I just think Do the Right Thing was one of the first scripts I ever read. I love the movie. Steven Soderbergh, of course, was the very first script I ever read. There are living people who we can come on to talk about how they see this world in cinema. Yet if I had my fantasy, I would love to pull younger versions up to see what they were thinking at those moments.
Craig: I hear you.
John: Some of this will come to pass. Most of it will not, but it’s always fun to speculate. Drew and Craig, thanks so much.
Craig: Thank you guys.
Drew: Thanks.
Links:
- The biggest new moneymaking scheme for Hollywood stars? Doing nothing by Arwa Mahdawi for The Guardian
- Rollo Tomasi scene
- L.A. Confidential screenplay by Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson
- Not All Robots by Mark Russell and Mike Deodato Jr.
- TSA Precheck
- NEXUS Program for US Citizens and Canadian Citizens.
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nora Beyer (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 597: Rollo Tomasi, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
Craig Mazin: Hi, folks. In today’s episode, there is some language, some salty language, so if you’re in the car with your children, go ahead and stop playing it or put the earmuffs on.
Chris McQuarrie: What the [bleeps] are you talking about?
Craig: Wow.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 596 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In ancient times, our ancestors looked to the heavens and noticed unfamiliar objects moving amid the stars. Aristotle theorized these were dry exhalations of earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere. Later, the Romans observed that these objects return on a regular cycle, like small planets with eccentric orbits. Today we know these periodic visitors as comets and look forward to their appearance in the night sky.
For Scriptnotes, our comet is writer-director-producer Christopher McQuarrie, who first appeared on Episode 300, then Episode 400. On that episode, we invited him to come back on Episode 600, which is very nearly here. As we prepare to record that, I asked Drew Marquardt, our producer, to put together a compendium episode to remind us what Chris said the last two times he was on the show. Drew, what are we going to hear today?
Drew Marquardt: We’re going to hear Chris talk about making big movies. Obviously, he’s very good at that. He’s got these incredible insights, not just on how these movies get made but where these stories come from and where they’re going in the future on film and TV.
John: Great. I recalled these two episodes being recorded pretty clearly. The first one, I was living in Paris, and he came to the hotel. I went to his hotel. He had just come back from filming Mission: Impossible, which was filming in Paris at the time. We had a great conversation. Craig was, in theory, kind of on the episode. He was Skyped in a little bit.
Drew: He comes in at the end. There wasn’t enough [inaudible 00:01:46].
John: It was basically me and Chris. The other one, Chris McQuarrie was sitting right in the chair that you’re sitting in, and he was talking and theorizing about films.
Drew: I’ll be honest, I came out of these last two episodes with such a Chris McQuarrie crush that if he does come back, if the comet returns, I’m going to have to-
John: The comet will return. You had not listened to these episodes, but you had gone through the transcripts because you were working on them for the book, right?
Drew: Correct.
John: Great. That was a whole summer ago. You were an intern last year.
Drew: Oh my gosh, yeah. That’s been a year.
John: A whole year has passed.
Drew: What was amazing going through those two is he’s working on this massive scale, but the advice he has for young writers and directors is really careful and really thoughtful and really incredible.
John: I find he’s a good balance of idealistic and pragmatic. As I hear him talk about other films that he’s worked on or helped out on, it’s very much like, what do you need to do to actually make the movie happen on the day and deliver something that the audience wants to actually watch. Sometimes that can be a hard thing to be in both worlds at the same time.
Drew: He’s never cynical, which is great.
John: That’s correct. We’re going to listen to things cut together from both those first two things, so there’s going to be some sound shifts. It’s fine. We got Matthew Chilelli cutting them together. It’s going to be great. Talk to us about what’s going to happen in the bonus segment for premium members.
Drew: In the bonus segment, you, Craig, and Chris are going to talk about spoof movies, which Craig has a lot of experience with and Chris has a broad knowledge about.
John: Fantastic. Drew, thank you for putting together this edited episode, and we will have the real Chris McQuarrie with us here soon.
Drew: I’m excited.
John: Chris McQuarrie, welcome back.
Chris: Thank you very much for having me.
Craig: The deal is every 100 episodes we have worked up enough tolerance to have McQuarrie back.
Chris: You know, Craig–
Craig: Here we go.
Chris: You weren’t here for the last one.
Craig: That’s why it wasn’t very good.
Chris: I miss that.
Craig: I can tell. Chris McQuarrie and I have been engaged in a, what, 15-year-long argument about everything.
Chris: About everything.
Craig: Literally everything.
Chris: It’s not so much an argument as it is a–
Craig: It’s a love story at this point.
Chris: It’s the duelists.
Craig: Yes, exactly.
Chris: I think that’s how you would describe our relationship.
Craig: Correct. You wake up in the morning, you go to work, fighting this man you must fight.
John: Back in Episode 300, I was talking to you, we were both living in Paris because you were directing Mission: Impossible. It hadn’t come out yet. You were in the middle of shooting it. It turned out really well, so congratulations on that.
Chris: Thank you.
Craig: Amazing.
Chris: Thank you very much.
Craig: And two more to come.
Chris: Two more to come.
Craig: The idea is you’ll make these until they kill you? Meaning the movies are going to kill you.
Chris: It’s more likely that they will kill me than they will kill Tom Cruise.
Craig: No, nothing kills Tom Cruise. You’ve proven that. By the way, openly attempting to murder him through film. I mean, everyone knows what you’re doing.
Chris: I have been described as his enabler. He describes me as his enabler. I’m not actually trying to kill him, I’m just trying to–
Craig: Could have fooled me.
Chris: He would be doing most of this stuff–
Craig: Movie number one, let’s drown him. Movie number two, oh, hang him off a plane.
Chris: The drowning I don’t think he would try to do.
Craig: Then let’s drown him. Then let’s make him hurtle from a roof. Oh, he broke a bone. Too bad. Keep going.
Chris: That’s true.
Craig: Wow, you’re killing him in front of us.
Chris: I’m whittling him away.
John: Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?
Chris: No.
John: You were a writer of big movies, and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. I was surprised that you ended up wanting to direct them. What was the change?
Chris: Somebody asked me. I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a steppingstone. I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb. I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb.
John: Absolutely. I have one of those too.
Chris: Boy, people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy, and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.
It wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. As a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing than I ever did writing and directing my own movie.
John: Talk about the difference, because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. We talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. What was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie? It is just a fundamentally different beast from making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?
Chris: Yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. My intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together, but not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it.
Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say yes, but-
John: You’re really going to do that.
Chris: Yeah, but no, I’m not. I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. Instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” She said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”
I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. He understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. Then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” Tom and I worked together very well on that movie, and that sort of translated into the next thing and the next thing.
The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to do Ghost Protocol. He called me up to do Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.
John: Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?
Chris: Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise/Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall, saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. He said, “I’ve got this series of books at Cruise/Wagner, and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made.” He offered me the movie, and I said, “I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and getting nowhere,” and they did.
I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. He called me the next day and said, “Script’s great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible, and I need your help.”
Now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. Having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in movie-making, I now understood, okay, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.
I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. I could only reshoot what I still had sets for, sets they hadn’t torn down. It gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie… I was originally only supposed to go for a week. My first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, “Okay, these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else? If I have this idea, is there something you can build?”
Without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned, so that when it came my time to do it, I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. It’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule.
For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years… That was a $60 million movie with Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million, but I wasn’t directing. The budgets continued to get bigger over time. Now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million movie. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million, and he’ll make a billion.”
That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. Now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, “Okay, so now you’re making your big movie. Here’s what’s important,” because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take.
They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment, and they struggle against that. I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.
John: Yeah, we can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there. If you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you, or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?
Chris: There’s a sweet spot I call four in and four out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out, you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. If you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task.
There was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going, because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. There was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. I said, “If you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.”
There was a visual idea. There was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down.
He said, “It’s just too much work.” I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” More importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey,” because that’s really all I care about.
It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. It was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.
John: That four weeks in, four weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from… Like you and I on our first movies. Four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 million movie. It’s a very different thing. We’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever.
You and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in when the train is already running. Generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter, we’re just there to fix the visible screenwriting problems, and so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.
A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or David Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was swirling around. That’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help. Those are the moments.
If you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, how to push for the best thing, it can be really daunting. If I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help, because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.
Chris: Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”
There was one director in particular. His movie was in trouble. He was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in, so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” I have had that happen too. I have had studios try to manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man, and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.
I walked in and I told him, “Here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. A lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, ‘I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works, but if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.’“
I said, “What you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. The producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served.” He didn’t do it.
We had another meeting. Half an hour before, I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” He didn’t do it again. Eventually, everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had been taken over. His worst nightmare happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.
John: Absolutely.
Chris: You’re able to come into it and say, “There’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, “Oh, you just have to do this.” It’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.
Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, “I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here, and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go.” That’s the thing you’re always struggling-
John: You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, “On the wall here, I have all the different sequences. Find a way to connect them all together. Go.” Those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of, because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.
Chris: Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.
John: It pays well, but it kills you. You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.
Chris: It’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. Since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” That has evolved for me, so that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like, doesn’t matter what-
John: That’s great.
Chris: You look at it and go, “Yep, that could be in a trailer. Okay, send it away.” Then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. We also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. The sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. You develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. We have little placeholders.
There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie, and we have a blank space there, where it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one soundbite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.
John: If you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of how am I going to keep this thing on the air. It sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. It’s not just these two hours of film. It’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of, and from an early time. You can’t just make your movie, then get involved with the marketing.
Chris: Yes. What is Mission? It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You worry all the time. “Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go?”
We had a big conversation about tone, because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise, and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” We did, but now we find ourselves going, “Are we going where Bond went, where Bond became serious?”
John: Dark and serious.
Chris: It’s another kind of tone, which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place, but we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “We can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. We’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise, saying how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.
John: When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.
But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, we’re yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do, but it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.
Chris: DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said, “This is the movie.” I guess the closest analog in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin, who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.
Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. What is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character, whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies.
If you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe, I just would have laughed at you. We had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies.
John: They’re amazing.
Chris: Oh my god. Oh my god. It will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.
John: So we used to make things like St. Elmo’s Fire, The Big Chill, Breakfast Club, Big Fish, Terms of Endearment. So we used to make things that had big casts, where a bunch of folks came together, where characters did grow and change but it was an ensemble. It wasn’t sort of one character’s story. Is that a thing we’re going to be making on the big screen soon? We’ll start with what is the essence of that kind of story. What is the essence of an ensemble dramedy?
Craig: Let’s make McQuarrie take a shot at that one.
Chris: It seems to me as I’m running through the list that you just – nostalgia is a big part of it. It’s my understanding that somebody did a breakdown of why people go to see movies and the number one reason was to have a nostalgic experience. An emotional nostalgic experience. I think that probably plays into sports as well, especially plays into why a lot of sports movies seem to go–
Craig: Back in time.
Chris: Back to that. And you look at The Big Chill. The Big Chill was very much a nostalgic movie.
John: It’s a reunion of friends who had separated.
Chris: St. Elmo’s Fire, while it wasn’t a nostalgic movie, they were at a specific turning point in their life. They were kind of looking back at—
Craig: See, to me that’s it. We have a group of people that represent some kind of contemporary arrangement, whether we’re catching them later or they were contemporary or we’re in their contemporariness, like for instance The Breakfast Club. But they are at a moment where things are changing, and we watch that happen. That to me is the essence of these things. But for the love of god, I cannot imagine anyone putting this on a screen anymore. It just doesn’t seem like they will. It’s a bummer.
John: Yeah, it’s tragic. I mean, on a big screen. I think you can absolutely make these for streaming.
Craig: No question.
John: But in so many ways though, the one-hour series have sort of taken, even like short series have taken the place of these, where you can see those characters grow over the course–
Chris: Oh, This is Us.
Craig: This is Us.
John: This is Us as a movie.
Chris: Modern Family.
Craig: Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–
John: Yeah, he tried to do it as a movie.
Craig: He sort of tried to do it as a movie. He tried This is Us as a movie and it didn’t connect with audiences. But he’s obviously incredibly good at it because tens of millions of people watch This is Us and it gets all these awards. There is something, I don’t know, we used to be able to go and watch this – maybe it’s just that we used to expect less. You know, we would go to the movie theater and we weren’t asking to have our brains blown out the back of our skulls.
Chris: I went to see Hell or High Water.
John: Oh, which is fantastic.
Chris: Which I loved. And I was talking to Tim Talbot shortly thereafter and I said, “Did you see Hell or High Water?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “What did you think about it?” He goes, “That was a great movie. In 1987 that would have been a good movie.” But he’s right in that that sort of… I remember going to the movies every weekend. It was not an event. Now when you ask anybody under the age of 25 why they go to the movies, they will say in one form or another, “Because I have to go.” They want to be part of a discussion.
I tried to get to see Avengers, which I finally saw yesterday, as quickly as I could, because I was tired of having a self-imposed media bubble. There were things in that movie I really didn’t want ruined. Getting to that state, whereas the stories that we’re talking about, what television does so well now especially is there is a collective history.
If you tried to tune into Game of Thrones now, you don’t understand. The number of people who are saying three years into Mad Men going, “Yeah, I tried to get into that show and I just couldn’t.” It’s like, of course not. If you turn middle of Season Three, none of this makes any sense.
Craig: Start at the beginning. That’s true. But I do think that one of the problems for… I remember going to see St. Elmo’s Fire. And my expectation was that I was going to see a group of people that were somewhat older than me dealing with problems. And I knew at some point somebody was going to like… I think Rob Lowe was going to light a torch on fire with some hairspray or something, and Demi Moore was in a corner, super dramatic. And I thought, okay, I’m going to see some sort of human drama. That would not do it anymore. Now when people go to the movie theater it’s like, well, this is going to pin me back and it’s going to blow my mind. And I’m going to see stuff and it’s going to be an event.
Chris: An event.
Craig: An event. I just think people go to the movies for a different reason now.
Chris: But don’t you think also what you can get from television is very different than what we could get from television?
Craig: No question.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: No question.
Chris: You could not make Game of Thrones as a feature film. Any of the content in Game of Thrones would be NC17.
Craig: Nor could you have made it for television prior to this kind of strange change.
Chris: Yes. It’s the networks. As soon as basic cable met the British model of television, which was you make a good television show and when it stops being good you – when it reaches the end you stop.
Craig: Isn’t that nice?
Chris: Yes, it’s lovely.
Craig: You know what? This is going to be six episodes long. Great.
Chris: Yeah, or six episodes this season instead of 22 every season.
Craig: Which is why I take my hat off to people like Derek Haas who are still doing it, not just on one show, but multiple shows. I mean, the amount of story that has to be generated by those guys is bananas. But yes, the format has become not just flexible, but there is no format. It doesn’t matter.
John: Let’s take the jokes out of biblical epics, and/or sword and sandals movies. So things like Gladiator, Ben-Hur, Noah, Passion of the Christ. King in Heaven. Spartacus. Ten Commandments. Braveheart, to some degree. Lawrence of Arabia. Like we used to make these things. That was actually a staple of original Hollywood. We have the giant ranches here because we used to make these epics.
Chris: Giant movies.
John: Giant movies. We don’t make them anymore.
Chris: No, because they don’t win awards anymore.
John: They don’t win awards anymore.
Craig: Precisely.
John: Even though Game of Thrones is being show on smaller screens, it is that kind of sword and sandals thing.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: Yes.
John: We’re making them, but we’re making them for smaller screen.
Craig: TV. No question.
Chris: I have a very large television. It’s not terribly expensive. I would imagine a lot of people have maxed their credit cards for a large TV.
Craig: You’re comparing your large TV to the TV you grew up with, which was like the TV I grew up. That 9-inch black and white thing in the kitchen, with the single antenna shooting out.
Chris: It was a letterbox.
Craig: Correct. But my kids only know those TVs. But those TVs are still not – I mean, they’re not movies.
Chris: No.
Craig: It’s not a movie screen.
Chris: No. But most people, the way their viewing habits are now, we’re making a Mission: Impossible. We have an IMAX segment in it. And people are saying, well why don’t you just shoot the whole thing in IMAX?
Craig: No one is going to watch it.
Chris: It’s never going to be seen again. You’re making this balance. And there are times I’ll be framing a shot, and Cruise will walk up to me and go, “You know when this is on the big screen and I pull my phone out of my pocket—”
Craig: Here it is.
Chris: This is the screen now. It’s not that it will only be watched on television, but for the life of the film.
Craig: For the life of it. Primarily.
Chris: The theatrical lifespan of a movie is 12 weeks.
Craig: Whoa. 12 weeks. What is this hit movie you’ve got that’s in there 12 weeks?
Chris: I’m talking like by the end it’s in eight theaters.
Craig: Yes. Correct.
Chris: I’m giving a conservative—
Craig: Really it’s four weeks is what it is.
Chris: Four weeks. Yeah.
Craig: It used to be months.
Chris: Yes.
Craig: It is now about four weeks.
John: So what is the essence of these biblical epics we’re talking about? So if you’re talking about a Gladiator or a Ben-Hur, it is a character in a long ago time, typically a Roman time, who is coming up against an authority system. He is leading, it’s always a he in these movies, is leading–
Chris: It’s a Christ figure against Rome.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Christ figure against Rome.
Craig: That’s exactly what it is. Every single time. Christ figure against Rome. Doesn’t matter what you do.
Chris: Doesn’t matter if it’s Rome or not Rome. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christ or not Christ.
Craig: That’s what Braveheart is. That’s what Ten Commandments is. Even when it’s Jews it’s still a Christ figure against Rome. Some hero will rise in a kind of faded destiny way, usually out of nothing. And they have special powers, special abilities. They are spat on, tortured, hurt. Their family is killed. They are persecuted. And ultimately they do some incredibly self-sacrificial thing and the world is saved. And the last scene is people sitting around going, “God, he was awesome.”
Chris: He was a great man.
Craig: He was a great man.
Chris: And it’s always a man.
Craig: And it’s always a man.
Chris: Yes. A lot of this conversation seems to be about how technology has disrupted what we imagined the plane of cinema to be. There seems to be a really clear shift.
Craig: And just wait.
Chris: From no home video, to home video, to no home video again. Now it’s home theater. Now it’s home – it’s content. That’s where I think the line is blurring. It’s big screen/small screen.
Craig: And the amount that’s available now is – and the resources that are being poured into it. I mean, better or worse, however you want to chop up the money, there was just way less money. I mean, there were five studios and they gave you some studio. And there were three networks and they gave you some money.
But now we’ve got just billions and billions rushing in to make more and more stuff. It is transforming things. But there aren’t that many more screens. In fact, I’d probably argue there are fewer screens than there used to be.
John: Well, there’s not more time. There’s not more time for people to view things. And so even though we have new people coming in and new distribution outlets, we have new money chasing new things–
Craig: Time is a flat circle.
John: Yes. And so we don’t have the ability to watch more things. And so we have to choose how we’re going to do this.
Chris: I’m looking at the–
John: So I skipped over some things. Is there a genre there you want to tackle?
Chris: Westerns.
John: Let’s talk about westerns.
Craig: Hmm, westerns.
John: On this show we’ve talked about Unforgiven. We’ve talked about 3:10 to Yuma. We’ve talked about sort of westerns. But what is it about westerns that you think can be suited towards the big screen. Because also we had Scott Frank on who talked about his great Netflix show.
Craig: Godless.
John: Godless. Which was sort of exploding what a normal western—
Craig: Meant to be a movie. Written as a script.
Chris: He struggled with it for years, right? He was trying to get it down to something movie size.
Craig: Well, and he does it with all of his movies. But, I mean, look, it was movie size. It’s just that what he was struggling was to get somebody to pay for it as a movie. Because essentially people kept saying well the western is dead, the western is dead, the western is dead.
Chris: And that which is the WWII movie is dead. You hear about this all the time. And then the number of times I’ve seen a dead genre—
Craig: Everything is dead until it’s not.
Chris: Yeah. Dunkirk was a really great example of a dead genre that people don’t go to see anymore.
Craig: My favorite example is nothing could have been a deader genre than pirate movies.
John: Oh yeah, of course.
Craig: Pirate movies. Not only dead—
Chris: Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?
Craig: Yes.
John: Yes.
Chris: Oh my god.
Craig: But before they made Pirates of the Caribbean we had Cutthroat Island which had sank an entire, like a hedge fund disappeared.
Chris: It killed Carolco.
Craig: Yeah, Carolco. An entire company was dead. And before that–
Chris: Killed careers.
Craig: Careers. Renny Harlin. And then – and the thought of making a pirates movie was considered almost obscene.
John: Yeah.
Chris: Yes.
Craig: And…
John: Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.
Craig: There we go.
John: It didn’t start a new genre. There weren’t like other pirates movies coming after that. It was only the one pirate movie.
Craig: Exactly. Everybody else was like you know what, let’s let them have it. We’re still not making pirate movies.
Chris: We’re still not making pirate movies. And it so specifically hinges around a kind of storytelling and a character. Johnny Depp.
Craig: And a brand.
Chris: Exactly.
Craig: I mean, just built in.
John: It was also supernatural. So you had a supernatural vibe to it which is different than other stuff.
Chris: But the western, Unforgiven represented a shift towards deconstructionist from which the genre never seemed to – 3:10 to Yuma was its own darker western. Godless was its own. What I miss – what I’d love to see is—
Craig: Shane.
Chris: The Magnificent 7. And Shane. Silverado. The Big Country. Movies that are more of an adventure and more a morality tale as opposed to – watch slow west.
Craig: It’s never going to happen. It’s gone. It’s over.
Chris: I will fight you on that.
Craig: Well, look, I think as a country and a culture we have lost the ability to go back to the kind of idealized west. We just know too much.
Chris: No, I don’t think it’s idealized. I think – you look at The Big Country, it’s not idealized. The country is rough, but a man walks into it who refuses to play by those rules. And I think that’s – if you take westerns there are two kinds. There are kind of westerns noirs where the west just chews you up and spits you out. And there’s the place where one can prove one’s self.
Craig: Sure.
Chris: And it’s this rough and lawless place where somebody, you know.
Craig: Maybe a book would do it.
John: A book might do it. I mean, I think it comes back to the discussion we had with the ensemble dramedies which is that we used to go to see those movies that didn’t have a lot of high stakes in them because that was fine. We needed to go see a movie.
Craig: What the hell else were you going to do on a Saturday afternoon?
John: And so I just wonder that this non-deconstructed western that is just truly a western whether it’s actually going to get people to go out to see it on a screen.
Chris: Hell or High Water.
John: Hell or High Water—
Chris: It was contemporary but it’s a western.
John: It totally is.
Chris: It’s a bank-robbing—
John: It’s a pickup truck western and I loved it for what it was able to do. But that was not a breakout smash hit. It was a good performer, but it was not—
Chris: I think it did OK financially and it got nominated for Best Picture.
John: It did, absolutely.
Chris: Which for movies of that size is kind of the – that’s your life blood to keep in the theaters for another—
Craig: John Lee Hancock has kind of made a western in a sense with The Highwaymen.
Chris: The Highwaymen. Sure.
Craig: But, again, Netflix. I mean, and that’s where John Lee lives now. You know, those are the movies he’s going to be making now because – and here’s a guy who made, I don’t know, $14 billion for Warner Bros and Alcon with The Blind Side. And today I don’t think they make The Blind Side for theatrical. That’s what’s happened. I fear that we have lost something kind of permanently in the economics of making these movies. And it may have literally just come down to the cost of marketing. Because—
Chris: That’s everything.
Craig: Right. I mean, Netflix, the way they market their movie is they don’t. It’s just there.
Chris: When you turn on Netflix they’re like, hey, do you want to watch this?
Craig: Correct.
John: Absolutely. And they bought every billboard in Los Angeles but that’s just for us.
Chris: But here’s the upside to that. Here’s the less than dystopian way of looking at that. In the current culture where the business is suddenly waking up to the fact that they have to diversify, this is something I experience a lot on the movies that I get called in to come in and do fixes on. The business was predicated on a male director makes a $5 million movie that makes $50 million. Let’s give him $200 million in hopes it makes $1 billion. Women were not afforded those same undeserved opportunities.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: Which they are now.
Craig: And were punished—
Chris: And were punished – exactly.
Craig: If they didn’t do the impossible.
Chris: Whereas the way to look at Netflix is Netflix could be the farm system. Now there’s many more movies being made for lower budgets creating – and I see lots of women directing television now.
Craig: Way more opportunity.
Chris: The director lists that I’m now being handed for the TV shows I’m working on are 50/50 and you’re actually looking at, oh, that person is being hired for the quality of their work, which is very encouraging. Is it possible that what we end up with is – you know how the Oscars have sort of divided into—?
Craig: Yes.
Chris: You know, there’s Oscar movies and there’s money-making movies. Now could there be there’s Netflix movies and there’s feature films? And that the feature films because of marketing requirements need to be bigger movies that make more money. And then Netflix becomes the farm system that teaches people how to do stuff. You could live within the Netflix bubble and make a 14, a 25, and a $60 million movie.
Craig: Yeah. I think we’re there. I mean, I think that’s where we are. The real question is, is there any kind – well, question number one. Is there mobility from Netflix type of movies or other TV movies to the big ones? Or do people even want to go? Because here’s the thing. I think a lot of filmmakers don’t – you know, we were talking to Mari Heller about this.
Mari Heller made this incredible movie, Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was amazing. And people came to her and they’re like here’s this huge superhero movie, you want to do it? And she was like I feel like I’m supposed to, because we’re trying to advance the cause of female directors and we’re trying to get into those big seats, but I don’t want to. I want to do this.
Chris: Well, there’s no point in making it if – you look at her and that dilemma knowing that – having nothing to do with who is directing a movie how those movies get made. The script is not ready.
Craig: Yep. [laughs]
Chris: The movie is going in three weeks.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: You’ve never done anything like this.
Craig: The actor is kind of in charge.
Chris: The producer, whose name is on a bunch of giant movies, will not be there.
Craig: Correct.
Chris: And this is all going to be your fault. Do you still want to do it?
Craig: It is really terrifying.
Chris: Correct. And again, it takes a special kind of director to get into that kind of trouble and then accept the help when they bring it in. Because you are essentially now, it’s very embarrassing. You’re at a point where you’re in way over your head. And not because – this is not hubris. They’re promised support, and then it’s just not there. So now suddenly you lose control of your movie. It takes a lot having never been through the process to know that it’s all going to be OK in the end. When the movie works you’ll still get credit.
Craig: That’s a lot to have faith in.
Chris: It’s very wounding. So I can see somebody looking at that and saying—
Craig: Nah.
Chris: But there’s the other side of that is the grass is always greener. You’re going to have people making big giant movies. Michael Bay made Pain & Gain because he really wanted to make it. Michael Bay, some part of Michael Bay – I don’t care, any filmmaker you can name at that level – some part of them wants to make their little movie about—
Craig: Their podium movie.
Chris: [laughs] They want to make their podium movie.
Craig: They want to make their podium movie.
Chris: Yes, and the same thing I would imagine is just – the Duffer Brothers have some big feature they want to do.
Craig: Big ass dumb movie they want to do.
Chris: Yes, they’ve got some big ass-
John: Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.
Chris: Yes.
John: But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.
And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?
Chris: Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.
And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.
And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people and had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this…
The fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. We were like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big? And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.
John: So, switching just for our last topic here, if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie, like what do you do?
Chris: Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike, on the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a 10-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment.
I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that 10 days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.
John: So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.
Chris: You had to have something you could shoot.
John: Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the rocky shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act. It’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.
Chris: Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.
There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.
John: One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–
Chris: Transformers.
John: Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?
Chris: I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”
An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.
Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill. And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.
John: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.
Chris: Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.
I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only 10 episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s 10. Why should we pay you more if there’s only 10?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”
The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writers’ opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent, that you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.
Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but a great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.
As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.
You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.
When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”
So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me.
John: That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Our earlier segments were produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Since it’s a throwback episode, let’s do a Matthew Chilelli throwback outro.
If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to feature with Chris McQuarrie and Craig talking about spoof movies. Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Drew: My pleasure.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, can we skip ahead to something that you know especially well? Spoofs and parodies.
Craig: Spoofs and parodies.
Chris: Spoofs and parodies.
John: So movies like Airplane, Spaceballs, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie series, MacGruber, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie. Tropic Thunder. Shaun of the Dead. Vampires Suck. Austin Powers. Blazing Saddles. We’re not making many of these movies now. And I have a theory why, but I’m curious what your theory is why we don’t make these movies.
Craig: As David Zucker would repeatedly say, “Spoof is dead.” And his thing is that he would say spoof is dead, he said it before spoof came back. Spoof was dead. I remember Jim Abrahams saying that he was mixing Mafia, a Jane Austen movie, Jane Austen’s Mafia.
Chris: Jane Austen’s Mafia.
Craig: And he walked down the hall where they were mixing and on another mixing stage they were mixing There’s Something About Mary. And he just sort of watched a few minutes of it and then went back and said, “Yeah, we’re fucked. Our time is over.”
And it was over. And then the Wayans Brothers brought it back with Scary Movie. But following the success of Scary Movie, and 2, and 3, and 4, there was this sudden – suddenly they were everywhere. And the marketplace was flooded with a lot of cheap stuff. And honestly as one of the people that wrote Scary Movie 3 and 4, I mean, the pressure that we were under from the Weinsteins to make those movies as quickly as possible was brutal. And we couldn’t do them as well as we wanted to do them. And we did them with David Zucker and Pat Proft and Jim Abrahams.
So by the time all that unraveled it was mostly I think killed at the moment by just the marketplace being flooded. But also you got the sense pretty quickly that the Internet was essentially mooting the entire point of this.
John: Yes. That was my instinct.
Craig: Because every joke, I mean, we used to be like, OK, you want to make fun of this movie. Well, four or five nights from now Leno is going to do the joke. Well, now they’re doing the jokes while they’re watching things. There’s no more time. It’s over.
Chris: That’s very true.
Craig: It’s over.
Chris: Everything is – yeah, the Internet is a spoof.
Craig: The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.
John: There’s no way to make the movie quick enough to do it. And even like on YouTube they can do the crappy effects version of that joke anyway.
Chris: Blazing Saddles is on this list. It is a spoof but it is a spoof with a higher purpose.
John: So it’s not a spoof of any one movie, it’s taking genre conventions–
Craig: Of a genre.
Chris: Of a genre.
John: And Shaun of the Dead is a great example of like taking the genre conventions and upending them in a way that’s—
Chris: Well that’s a mashup.
John: Yeah.
Chris: And a great one.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: It’s still I would say really hard now. I mean, Airplane was a direct spoof of a movie called Zero Hour from 1956 or something, or 1955, which no one had seen. That was sort of the oddity of Airplane that they just did this random thing. But somewhere along the line spoofs became connected to either genres as a whole or when it got really bad pop culture. And that’s when it just all to me absolutely fell apart. There’s probably room for somebody to make a spoof of some weird movie that has been forgotten.
Chris: Well, but and Austin Powers is taking shots at movies along with Bond. Matt Helm. And some really–
Craig: In Like Flint.
Chris: Yeah, In Like Flint. When the phone rings, that’s directly taken from In Like Flint.
John: But you look at the ones of these that we feel like you could still make is that these films actually have individualized characters who sort of have an arc and have a point of view. And the movie doesn’t exist just to make fun of the movie that came before it. The character is existing within a world and is consistent within a world. So Austin Powers is a spoof of another kind of character, but is also a character himself. And Dr. Evil is a character himself.
Chris: Yes. And it’s a time travel comedy in a way. They both are, at least two of the three are.
Craig: I mean, the people that kind of come the closest now to doing spoof and parody in their own way is Chris and Phil.
John: Lord and Miller. Yeah.
Craig: Yeah. Lord and Miller in a weird way do. I mean, Lego has certain spoof aspects to it.
John: Their Spider Man also has aspects of like it’s an awareness of where this is fitting inside the culture.
Chris: Meta.
Craig: Yeah, it’s meta. Their Jump Street movies are kind of spoofing Jump Street.
John: Oh yes.
Craig: Like it’s a self-spoof. But it’s different. It’s not like, I mean, thank god, by the way. Because honestly nothing is harder than writing those things. I will never work harder in my life than I did writing Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4. It was just—
Chris: It’s one of the reasons Chernobyl is not as funny.
Craig: Yeah, I know. It took the jokes out.
John: It took all the comedy out.
Chris: You didn’t make the effort. I know.
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The post Scriptnotes, Episode 596: McQuarrie on McQuarrie, Transcript first appeared on John August.
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John August: Hey, this is John. I have a pre-correction to this episode you’re about to listen to. Later on, I refer to Jesse Alexander of Succession. The quote is actually by Lucy Prebble, another executive producer of Succession. That’s it. That’s my mistake. Enjoy the episode.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we answer listener questions on the craft and the business of writing from our overflowing mailbag. In our bonus segment for premium members, what do you do when a coworker is nice but incompetent? We’ll discuss one of the trickiest workplace situations.
Craig is traveling this week, but luckily, we have someone extraordinarily qualified to take his place. Danielle Sanchez-Witzel is a writer-producer whose many credits include My Name is Earl, The Carmichael Show. Her latest show is Up Here, streaming now on Hulu. Welcome, Danielle.
Danielle Sanchez-Witzel: Hi. Thanks for having me, John. I’m happy to be here.
John: Danielle, you and I only know each other because we’re both on the negotiating committee. We’ve been sitting in these giant rooms across tables from each other. It’s so great to talk to you about what you do.
Danielle: I am so happy we met that way. I knew of you, just to be clear. I just didn’t know you until I got into that room. Happy to be doing something that’s not negotiating, to be perfectly honest with you, John.
John: Absolutely. We had a question last night at the member meeting about what does the negotiating committee actually do, what do you do in the room. I tried to answer that, and I feel like I kind of flubbed it, honestly, because I was trying to segue to talk about something else, but I was trying to quickly get through the negotiating part. Because I have a podcast, I’m going to take a second crack at it here. I’m going to try to explain what happens in the negotiating room.
I think I have this fantasy that it’s going to be like an Aaron Sorkin movie, like The Social Network, where people get these devastating lines and there’s rhetorical traps that are laid, that spring and change everything. It’s not like that.
Danielle: It’s not. It’s not like that at all, no.
John: No. It’s more like those foreign streaming shows that people tell you to watch, and they’ll say, “It’s really, really slow, but you’ve gotta stick with it, because you’ll think that nothing’s happening, but eventually it all happens.” You’re like, “Oh wow, that was actually really impressive, but it was subtle.” It’s one of those maddening but subtle kind of processes for me. Has that been your experience?
Danielle: Absolutely. I was really glad that question was asked at the meeting last night, because I think it’s such a fair question. I don’t know if our members wonder about it, but clearly that member did, so I imagine more perhaps do.
This is going to sound crazy, but something that really surprised me when we first walked into the room is that we’re literally sitting across a table from each other, just the visual. The table is pretty narrow, and we’re just sitting across from it.
This is my first negotiating committee I’ve ever been on. I know that’s not true for you. I’m really giving first impression kind of a take. I don’t know why I was surprised by being so close to the AMPTP members. I think what you’re describing in terms of vibe and pace is pretty accurate.
John: We have incredibly smart people on our side. Staff does almost all of the talking in the room when we’re actually in the room with the other people. Then we get back to our caucus room, and that’s the chance where we get to actually say clever things as writers and tell jokes and make important points.
One of the important points I really loved hearing you talk about was your experience making these last two shows. In addition to Up Here, you also have Survival of the Thickest, this Netflix show. You were talking about how challenging it’s been to make shows as a writer-producer these days because of structural changes of the industry, that the experience of doing My Name is Earl is just so vastly different from what’s happening now with these new shows. Could you give us a sense of that, what it’s like to be making a show in 2023 and how challenging it is for you as a showrunner?
Danielle: Absolutely. I have spent a majority of my career making broadcast network shows. I have to say I’m really grateful for that experience. I know young writers will understand what I’m saying, because what I had access to… Somehow we separated writing from production, and so this next generation of writers isn’t getting access to what I had access to on every show I worked on, on My Name is Earl, on New Girl, a brilliant staff of writers who were there for the entire time of making the show.
Pre-production, when there’s no production going on, when you’re just in a writers’ room coming up with ideas and stories and writing scripts and rewriting scripts, tabling scripts. I work in comedy, so the table is really important.
Then during production, which overlaps in broadcast network, so now you’re actually shooting the show and you’re making the show and the writers are still there. A writer or two is on set, covering the production, while a writers’ room is continuing to do work, continuing to rewrite, continuing to write stories.
Then in post-production, which I think is the thing that writers are really not getting access to anymore, maybe even in broadcast network, and that’s obviously watching cuts and giving notes. There’s a ton of rewriting that happens in pre-production, especially in comedy, but I think drama too. We’re rewriting jokes. We’re rewriting ADR. There’s so much you can do if you’re on an actor’s back. I’m sure savvy television watchers know, like, “That line was ADR. There’s no way that’s what they said here.” It’s the final phase of storytelling.
I came up in my career being a part of that, all of that, that whole process, and having a whole staff to be able to be there, to work on all phases of the show, including when I ran The Carmichael Show, which was a multi-cam broadcast network. I am so grateful that I had this amazing staff of writers who was there to help me. It’s very hard to run a show. It’s so much work. Writers are a vital part of the entire process. Now I am exclusively making stream. Up Here was, as you said, a show for Hulu that I did with a very talented group of Broadway superstars, Tony winners. They needed one person who had never won a Tony, so somehow I got added to that group. We’ve separated for streaming.
Even though that was a 20th studio show for Hulu, meaning 20th makes shows for broadcast network, so as a studio they understand what this model was, for some reason streaming, because it’s less episodes, somehow the industry companies thought, “You don’t need writers for as long of a time, because it’s less episodes.” Both of the shows I just made were eight-episode orders.
There’s this new model now. Any young writers who have experienced this, who might be listening, you know what it is. You can have writers for somewhere around 12 to 20 weeks, 20 if you’re lucky. That’s it. Then they all go away. Again, if you’re lucky, maybe you get to keep one writer who comes to set with you or continues the process with you, but that’s it.
This machine that has worked so well for so many generations and produced the best shows in the history of TV stopped working that way. All of a sudden, it just got cut off for a reason I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you why, because we’re the ones who make it. We know how to make the product. I don’t know how exactly over the last five, six years this industry practice started.
It became this thing where you’re supposed to try and write all the scripts and get it all right before you hit production. It’s impossible. It’s not how the sausage is made. That’s not how we do it. That’s not how we’ve ever done it. It’s left showrunners to have to do everything, again maybe with one pal, with one super talented pal, do all the rewriting, get all the scripts ready, now handle all the production, and then overlap with post and do all of that while you’re just a crew of one or two people.
On Survival of the Thickest, which is the Netflix show, the last show I made, I was very lucky that my star is also a writer, co-creator of the show. Guess what? She’s acting now. I had one other writer, a really talented woman named Grace Edwards, who thank god was there with me.
The process is the process for a reason. I really got worn down. I know there are a lot of showrunners who are having to do this who are really worn down. Plus a lot of writers who aren’t getting access to what they need know they could be valuable to the process and are being told, “We don’t need you anymore.” I assure you I’m not the one saying we don’t need you anymore. I’ve been screaming, “I need them. I need them,” and I was told no. I was told I couldn’t have them. That’s the state of the industry through my eyes, at least.
John: I’ve avoided TV for most of my career, mostly because I was afraid of the doing 19 jobs at once problem. I was hired on to do a show called DC very early on in my career. I had no business being a showrunner on it. I was trying to prep an episode, shoot an episode, write an episode, post an episode, and do all these things at once. I couldn’t do it. I said, “Oh, TV’s not for me, at least not for me at this point in my life.”
I thought, oh, this change to shorter orders, the ability to write all the scripts at once and then just do one thing at a time seems really good, until you surface all these problems you’re describing, which is that by separating these things so completely, you don’t have any support to actually make the show.
Those writers who should be learning about all the other parts of the process, they’re gone. They’re hopefully on other shows. They are just not part of the process anymore. It’s not only hurting the show that you’re making right now. It’s hurting all the future shows that these other writers are going to be making, because they will not have the experience. They’ll be just as clueless as I was when I was trying to make my first show, because they will not have had production experience. We have people who come to these member meetings who say, “I have written on three shows, a full season on three shows. I have never been to set.” That is a crisis in the making.
Danielle: Absolutely. I have told the companies I work for that this is going to hurt them. I don’t know that anyone’s believed me. Maybe I’m not talking to the people who really have the power to change it.
The truth is that the business model has worked for a reason. I think there was this misunderstanding of shorter order creating a new world that isn’t truly how to make a thing. I think it would be interesting to see what people think about the quality of TV. I know that’s something we think about creators so much and as writers and the people making these worlds is that we want it to be the best it can be. I know I don’t have the resources to do what I used to have the resources to do. I know that that is going to affect all kinds of things. At the end of the day, we’re making a product to entertain people. You want that to be the best product it can possibly be.
It’s frustrating at every level. I don’t think there’s a writer who isn’t frustrated in episodic television right now, because it is a collaborative process. That’s what it is. We’re taking collaboration away quickly. It’s like you can collaborate for a little bit, but then you’re done collaborating. It’s just not how to do 8 episodes or 10 episodes or 22 episodes.
It’s a big issue in our industry that we’re looking to fix for everybody. I do think it’s a win-win. I think the companies will win if we fix this and we will win if we fix this at the end of the day in terms of how to get it done.
John: It’s almost important to point out that what we’re describing is not impossible. I was looking at an interview with Jesse Alexander, who runs Succession. They were asking him, “How do you have so many great lines in every episode?” He said, “We have two to three writers on set at all times.” That’s the great answer.
Danielle: That’s the great answer. Jesse’s great answer.
John: It is a short season, and so theoretically, you could’ve written all of those ahead of time, sent everybody home, and had Jesse Alexander run the whole thing by himself. This is a person who recognizes, no, we actually need the writers here to do the work of writing in production. I’m sure those writers were involved in every step of post-production too. I know they overshoot stuff. You’re always making decisions about how to shape the episode in post.
This is a very, very successful show that has a sizable writing staff that is involved throughout production in a short-order season scenario. It’s very definitely doable. This is the right solution for Succession. I think it’s the right solution for so many shows. If we can make some changes in our contract that makes it more clear this is how we really need to structure these things, it’s going to be better for television but also for everyone who needs to make shows.
Danielle: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s good to hear that. In success, maybe you’ll get more of what you’re asking for. It’s like, how do I succeed if you’re not giving me the tools I need in the first place? I’m supposed to succeed by the skin of my teeth, and then if there’s any sort of succeeding, then you can have what you need. I’m really happy to hear that. That’s the truth. I think Succession is one of the funniest shows on television-
John: Agreed.
Danielle: … although it’s not billed that way.
John: Technically a drama, but yes, it has comedy bones to it. Let’s tackle some listener questions. I’m sure we’ll be threading in some more of our thoughts about television throughout this. Drew, do you want to start us off with a craft question?
Drew Marquardt: Yeah, let’s start with Patrick. Patrick asks, “How much pressure should we be putting on ourselves as writers to make sure something is purely original? I recently saw an obscure international film from the ‘50s, and it sparked an idea that would involve borrowing the initial premise and taking the story in a different direction, one that they wouldn’t have been able to explore in that period of time.
“The idea didn’t leave me, and now I have an outline for what I think could be a great drama. It’s my own story, but it would have a ringing similarity for anyone who has also seen the film that inspired it. I’m torn between whether this is a reason to not move forward with the idea and wondered where you consider the line between taking inspiration and ripping off someone else’s work.
“Part of me wants to justify it by saying writers do this all the time with genre pieces, Die Hard onto something or something in space, so why can’t I with a character drama? Part of me feels icky.”
John: Patrick, yeah, I get the sense of feeling icky about these things, but you’re also right to be pointing out that all art is iterative. Everything is inspired by things that happened before. I think you’re worried about like, am I borrowing too directly from this obscure movie that most people haven’t seen? Danielle, what’s your first instinct here for Patrick’s quandary?
Danielle: I wish I knew whatever inciting incident it was that he wanted to, because it might matter. I do think a gut feeling of ickiness is trying to tell you something. I think writers are paid for their gut. I say this a lot. I like using your gut as a bar for, “I think the story should go this way, this way.”
I think if there’s something you’re feeling icky about, then maybe there is one piece of this, and again not knowing the specifics, that might need to change a little bit more than what the plan is.
We’re never reinventing a wheel. It’s just through different eyes and different perspectives and interesting characters who maybe haven’t told a story before. If a lot of the story is personal, I would think you’re in okay territory. I would just ask yourself, what is the icky thing, and can whatever that thing is that’s making you feel a little bit icky change enough so you don’t feel that way?
John: I also wonder if Patrick needs to do a little bit more research about this premise and maybe familiarize himself with the idea there’s probably other movies that are doing a similar kind of thing.
Danielle: That’s a good idea.
John: This may be the first time you’ve encountered this dramatic question being asked in a film, but I bet it wasn’t the first time this was asked. If you do research on this film, you might even find out that this was inspired by something else that came before it.
I’m also thinking back to, I don’t know if you ever saw the Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven. It’s a Julianne Moore movie set in the 1950s. It was very much done in the style of the 1950s, but in a way that you couldn’t have done, addressed those questions in the time.
There’s something about recognizing that you are taking a period idea and examining through a lens which is transforming. It definitely could actually have the same beats as an original thing but actually become so different because of the lens you’re looking at it through that you may not be giving yourself enough credit for the amount of transformation you are enacting on this work.
I get it, Patrick, but I think you need to be a little kinder to yourself and really look at why this idea is so compelling for you and just do some more research around it, but probably do it, because those ideas that you can’t shake are the ones that are definitely worth pursuing.
Danielle: I would definitely say write it. For myself, I’ll come up with a million reasons why I don’t write something. Don’t let it stop you. Write it. You could always rewrite it too if you ever hit a bump. I think that’s great advice, John. Don’t let it stop you. I think write it. Just write it.
John: Write it. Just write it. Let’s try another one, Drew.
Drew: Michelle in San Francisco writes, “Over the years, John and Craig have taught us so much about feature structure, but now that I’m trying to write a limited series that’s six to eight episodes, I’m at a loss for what the structure should be. Could you guys talk about how a TV series should be structured, especially a limited series, and not just the pilot, but the following episodes as well?
“Does each episode need to have the four acts that many people talk about, or is that just the pilot? Do characters really need to have their own arc within each episode or is it okay to just write one long story and delineate episode breaks where there’s a nice cliffhanger-y type endpoint and where it makes sense in terms of page count?”
John: Danielle, we have you here to answer this question, because this is what you’ve been doing. Talk to us about the process of structuring your eight-episode series and what you’re thinking about in terms of how much story fits into each episode, act breaks. I don’t know, for Hulu you may actually have to plan for act breaks. For Netflix, you don’t. Talk to us about that structuring of episodes within an eight-episode order.
Danielle: Interestingly enough, Netflix now has ads. I don’t know if anyone out there is… I don’t think there is any longer a streamer where that isn’t the case. We were not asked at Netflix to structure in acts, but I structure in acts. I am a writer who always structures in acts.
I think you are always in good shape to think of it in terms of acts, to think of each individual episode in terms of acts and then think of the whole piece, if that’s 8 episodes total or 10, also as one long story, the way that she’s suggesting.
I was given advice early in my career. Things were a little bit more straightforward when I was given this advice. Look at a few limited series that you admire and break it down. Just do a breakdown yourself. Write down each little scene. Just bullet point. For you, look, where do act breaks seem to be, are there act breaks, are there not act breaks. The truth is, I’m sure if you did three or four limited series that you really liked, they wouldn’t all follow form so literally, but I think you need to know form to be able to break form.
I would certainly say, especially early in your career, yes to all the questions, even though you want the answer to be no, because wouldn’t it be easier if every character didn’t have to arc and every episode didn’t have to have four acts?
I learned something interesting. The first streaming show I did was a show called Up Here for Hulu, which is a half-hour romantic comedy musical, Broadway musical. I was working with Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who are the most prolific, talented people, let along songwriters, I’ve ever met. They’re two of the most talented people I’ve ever met. Steven Levenson, we co-wrote the first two episodes. He wrote the book for Dear Evan Hanson, as well as he did Fosse/Verdon for FX. Tommy Kail, who directed Hamilton and also did Fosse/Verdon with Steven… Anyway, these are amazing Broadway musical people who I admired, who I was so excited to work with.
Believe it or not, I am answering this question. I’m on topic. John, I haven’t left the topic. I’m on the topic.
John: I have full faith in you.
Danielle: It was interesting to do a first streaming show, which is kind of like what this person is writing in asking about. What do I do if I have eight episodes? Something that Bobby and Kristen and Steven really taught me was… They’re like, “We’re going to make eight mini musicals. Each episode is going to have to work on its own as a musical,” which is just a way of storytelling. Basically, they’re saying it has to work as a story on its own, with these elements of music. Then they’re all going to have to make one long musical. It’s all going to have to add up to one long musical. Again, same as I think what this person is asking about a limited series, it all has to add up to one long movie, or however you want to think about it.
What that does, and what that did for Up Here, and I certainly used it to make Survival of the Thickest, and I think every streaming show moving forward I’ll really get, but it was interesting to think of it in Broadway musical terms, is four or five is a midpoint. That’s the middle of your movie. That’s the middle of your story, and so you’re looking for something to really change significantly. There is some sort of moment that’s going to shift your world.
However you’ve learned the craft of storytelling, whether that’s save the cat or you have an MFA or whatever, you learned how a movie breaks down or what works, and so I think you look at it those ways. Even though it sounds daunting, and all the questions you asked are like, does it have to do this, this, this, this, and the answers are yes, it really just needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s what it needs. It needs to play that way.
I think no matter which way you approached it, if you thought of it as a long-form eight-episode, which seems daunting to me, but if you just wrote it with no act breaks and no anything, I think you would find that your brain naturally put them in, because you know a story has to turn.
Even if you’re just a watcher of television or movies, you understand story structure. You know what’s happening. You know when you need to feel what you need to feel and when you need to shift things.
The answer is yes, but I think there’s just no other way of doing it, because I’ve always wanted to be that person who can just sit down and not need an outline. I just want to write, man. I just want to let it flow, man. I’m not that person. I believe that maybe there are a handful of those people out there in the world. Structure is storytelling. Even little kids, when you tell them a story, you read them a book, there’s some amount of structure. They understand what a story is.
I would really just think of it as beginning, middle, end, but apply those rules, because they’ll help you. For me, act breaks help me understand balance. Is the story misbalanced? Is there too much at the top and not enough at the end? Is there no middle? For comedy, it’s three-act. We work in more of a three-act structure, although sometimes it’s a four-act structure. You just need to understand, am I turning things, is it interesting. For me, that’s act breaks. That’s how I get it.
John: In Episode 584 we had Taffy Brodesser-Akner on to talk about Fleishman Is in Trouble. She was adapting her own book into the limited series. It was fascinating to hear her talk about. The limited series is exactly the book. Everything that happens in them happens in both. Figuring out how you break those into episodes and how there’s growth and change within an episode, and it feels like this episode has really started, this episode has finished, is a thing she had to learn.
She was lucky to have Susannah Grant and Susannah Grant’s producing partner on to really help with that initial stage of figuring out how to structure this into individual episodes and how to make the gross of the characters and gross of the story really make sense over that limited time, which seems like it would be so different than going back to earlier shows you worked on, like My Name is Earl or The Carmichael Show. You might have some sense at the start of the season, like, this is where we’re going to, but you’re really probably thinking much more episode by episode, aren’t you?
Danielle: Absolutely, yeah. I think it’s called episodic TV for a reason. I think that in those scenarios, we’re making 22, 24, 26 episodes in a season, and broadcast network is designed… I’ll speak a little bit more for comedy here, because I think there are dramas where this wouldn’t apply. I don’t remember what the numbers were or what they said, but a viewer who loved the show watches every third or fourth episode on broadcast network.
John: Wow.
Danielle: That may be an antiquated way of thinking, but I know when I was coming up in my career, that’s what we were told. It has to be designed to drop in and see it this week but not see it next week. They really have to be self-contained episodes, even though our favorite shows that we grew up watching, pick your favorite show, had arcs, usually love stories. That’ll take you through Jim and Pam and Sam and Diane for me, for my all-time favorite show, which is Cheers. You could miss some and still get it.
I think that the streaming model is different, and that’s not how people are consuming it, and that’s not how it’s meant to be consumed. You shouldn’t be able to miss the third one, because I think you’re supposed to be told one long story. I think the goal is completion, for people to watch all of your episodes. That’s not necessarily the goal of broadcast network, by and large. I think cable is probably a little bit more of the streaming model than not, storytelling-wise. I think that you’re meant to sit down and watch every one.
John: I think in cable you see both kinds of things. You definitely see the ongoing progress of some storylines, but there’s also shows like the USA shows, which were very much, you could catch one, not catch one. There’s not huge growth between the two of them if you missed that one episode. Both things can work.
I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up. It was one of my very favorite shows. Watching the third season of Picard, which is basically just Star Trek: The Next Generation but if it was done as a limited series, you have to watch it in order because there’s very specific builds and revelations and tweaks. It’s just fascinating to watch the difference between how a show works if an episode is all self-contained versus an ongoing limited series. They’re both great, but it feels like Picard is definitely the 2023 version of how you would tell that story.
Danielle: What’s amazing for I think us as storytellers is that all of those options are on the table. It really is, what do you want to tell and how do you want to tell it? Okay, then here’s the form for you.
I think we’re spending a lot of time talking about what’s not working and what’s broken in the industry. There’s a lot of exciting, amazing things as storytellers for us out there. We just need to get the ship righted a little bit. It’s amazing that there’s a lot of outlets and a lot of ways to tell stories now, completely different from when I started my career, you tell me, John, but I think in features and in television, both.
John: Obviously in features, the writers had traditionally less direct say in this is my vision for how stuff is going to go, whereas TV showrunners often had that sort of initial creator entrepreneurial vision for what a thing is. In features, we also have independent film. We have the ability to make things at incredibly small levels and just really experiment with a form. That’s a thing that is sometimes more challenging in TV, because you have to find a home for that thing versus being able to make it on your own and sell it. Drew, let’s get a new question.
Drew: Danielle, you mentioned love stories. We have an email from Marvin in Germany. Marvin writes, “I’m a young screenwriter currently working on my first big project. Without going into too much detail, there’s a love triangle in it. I was wondering, how can I analyze for myself or for the demands of the scene if it’s really necessary to explicitly show the action? Should I go into those intimate scenes or just hint at them without showing too much? Sometimes in romantic films, I like to see the protagonists finally getting together, but on the other hand, intimate scenes are often kind of sexist, and I don’t want to put my actresses and actors in a weird position where they need to flash.”
John: Explicitness. There’s a new TV adaptation of Fatal Attraction I’m really excited to see. I’ll be curious both how explicit the show is on screen but also what those scenes look like on the page, because I feel like most of the times when I see something made in 2023, what’s on the screen is also reflected on the page.
Danielle, what do you see? How explicit are you seeing stuff being written in scripts? Obviously, the comedies you’re making, maybe it’s not such a factor, but what are you thinking?
Danielle: There was a show called Normal People, which was an adaptation of a book for Hulu. That was really the first time as a creator I started thinking about… Because I spend so much time doing broadcast network too. We were not showing anything on broadcast network. When I watched that show, it was so intimate and beautiful and beautifully acted and beautifully shot and beautifully written and a really true adaptation of the book. That was the first time I had read… There was an article I think that came out after about an intimacy coordinator, which is a crew position now that I think we didn’t always have and now I think we always have.
When I was talking earlier about listening to your gut and that we get paid for our gut, which doesn’t sound elegant but I think is true. You as the writer, this person who’s creating this world, I think will ultimately need to listen to their own instincts about what is necessary to tell the story.
I agree that we have seen so much sexist content for decades in movies and this. In the ’80s, which was my era of growing up, watching movies, there was always boobs. It was just like, oh, here’s boobs. It’s going to be boobs. If it’s a comedy, there’s going to be boobs. Why? Why is that the case? I think that there are so many interesting ways to tell a story and tell an intimate scene.
What I would encourage this writer to do is think of it through a different lens. How have you not seen it? What have you bristled at that you’ve seen? What is the story you’re telling? What is the intimate moment that you might want to tell that maybe isn’t nudity at all, or maybe it is but it’s just in…
I thought Normal People, just to go back to the original point, just did something, made these two characters… The whole series was about connecting and connection and that these two people keep being drawn back to each other. The intimacy was really necessary and I think well done.
I appreciate that this writer is thinking about ultimately putting an actor in front of a camera, because now that I’m making streaming, having shot recently with my partner, co-creator, and muse of Survival of the Thickest, a stand-up named Michelle Buteau… That is based on a book of essays that she wrote. There’s a really funny chunk in there that’s about sexual encounters and when she was single. We’re inspired by a lot of what there was.
You write a certain thing, but then you get there to shoot it, and you’re like, “Oh, my goodness. Now we’re really doing this.” When I’m asking two actors to go be brave… Michelle is the bravest of the brave, and an amazing actress, comedically and dramatically.
One of the things that we were excited about doing with that show, in terms of what I’m suggesting, thinking about it through different lenses or whatever… If you’ve not seen this, Michelle is a plus-sized, beautiful woman, which is where the title Survival of the Thickest comes from. We wanted to show her in intimate scenes. We wanted her to be the star, the one who is in the love triangle and is having sex and is having all of these encounters, because we felt like that wasn’t being shown enough, that that’s just not the person who is always front and center in a show, especially as a woman. We wanted to make sure that character was a very sexual character, not that the show is super R-rated or anything, but it was really important to us, so we had a reason for it.
I guess my best advice would be, have a reason for what you’re doing and know why you’re doing it. If there is no reason, then you’re right, it will be gratuitous and unnecessary.
John: If you’re writing a love triangle story, there’s good odds that the sex that you want to put in the story is not going to be gratuitous. Then you have to think about, what is it about this moment that’s going to be interesting? What am I actually going to want to look at and show in this thing?
Ultimately, anything that’s going to show up on screen needs to be on the page. It can be awkward at times to put that stuff down there, but someone has to make those decisions. If you don’t make those decisions, those decisions are going to be made for you by somebody else, by directors or other people, and it may not be what the story actually needs. I think you have to start with what’s on the page.
Then it gets to a process of a director, an intimacy coordinator, and actors, and hopefully you involved as well, about what is the story point of this moment, to make sure it’s really reflecting the goals of the scene.
I would just say, again, follow your gut, but I also say be brave. You’re telling this story for a reason. Make sure all these scenes are really helping to tell the story you’re trying to tell. Let’s do a simpler question, if we can. How about something on intercutting?
Drew: Jared writes, “Formatting question. I’m intercutting between two different conversations occurring at the same time, say between Bob and Steve and Sarah and Tina. After I’ve established scene headings once for each conversation, it looks very odd to then just have a string of conversations without anything in between. It might be difficult for the reader to discern who is talking to whom, especially if only one person speaks before jumping to the other conversation. Would it be preferred in this multi-party intercut to just include scene headings every time the conversation switches?”
John: Danielle, what’s your instinct here? What do you tend to do when you’re having to intercut between two different conversations or two different scenes?
Danielle: It is tricky, and it’s a frustrating as a writer when you’re like, “I just need you to understand what’s in my head. I just need you to understand what’s happening here.” I don’t think that there’s only one way to do it. I think there’s multiple ways to do it.
I just try and make it as easy as possible for the reader. I think a lot of times readers skip action that might be explaining, which sounds crazy, but I just think they skip action that might be explaining it to you. I feel like scene headers probably just really will get the eye and the brain to go, “Now I’m in a different setting. Now I’m in a different setting. Now I’m in a different setting. Now I’m in a different setting.”
I understand that it may hurt the rhythm of the page a little bit, but I think clarity is what’s important. You don’t want someone to have to go back up and go, “What did I just read? I don’t understand. Where is anybody, and what’s going on?” You want your reader and ultimately your audience to be smart, but you also have to prepare for if that’s not the case.
John: I agree that you need to make sure that a person who might skip that little notification that we’re intercutting two scenes still gets the point of what’s going on there. You can obviously bold the intercutting there if it’s helpful.
What I find is often most useful is, rather than doing a full INT. BAR, NIGHT and INT. HOUSE, DAY, that you’re cutting between those two spaces, just go like, “Back at the bar,” dash dash, “Back at the house,” because whenever you see an INT., I think you naturally think, oh, it’s a whole brand new scene, we’re in a whole brand new place.
If you’re just intercutting between two places, doing the intermediary slug line, it’s not really a scene header, might be a way just to let the reader understand, okay, that’s right, we’re jumping back and forth between these two conversations.
It’s again one of those things you’re going to feel on the page that you won’t know until you see situationally how it’s going to work. If these are two-page scenes and you’re intercutting between the two of them, that’s more probably a scene header situation for me. If it’s quick rapid fire between two things, then the shortest little things are going to be probably your friend.
Cool. Let’s try two more questions. What do you got for us, Drew?
Drew: Carl asks, “How can I warn a reader that I’m not being cliché, but I want the viewer to say in their mind, ‘Ugh, so cliché.’ For example, a boy goes back to their hometown and sees his former hometown love. Their eyes lock, and the viewer thinks it’s the standard love story scene a thousand times, but within a few beats it’s made clear that this isn’t the case. Should I be worried about a reader losing interest and putting the screenplay down upon reading the cliché or am I over-thinking this?”
John: Danielle, this must come up all the time in comedies that you’re writing, which is basically you’re playing with a trope. You’re definitely trying to set up the expectation like, oh, it’s this kind of thing, but it’s not this kind of thing. How do you deal with that?
Danielle: I think in comedy, I will make the action line funny. I will say, “Sit with me here. It’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do,” in a parenthetical or something, if that feels appropriate to you. I don’t know exactly what this piece is, but if that feels appropriate.
I’ve worked a with lot of stand-ups. Like I said, Michelle Buteau is the last person that I just worked with. She writes the funniest action lines I’ve ever read. It’s almost like you’re having a dialog with her in her voice.
I think that you can be entertaining, and I think you can get your point across by… If you’re trying not to be cliché but you have this tone you’re trying to achieve, if you can achieve that tone in an action line, I think that that can be really helpful for you and might entertain the reader.
I don’t know if it’s pages of cliché until you get to the turn, but I’m assuming it’s not. I’m assuming it’s fairly quickly that you get to the turn. I also wouldn’t be too worried about a reader tuning out because it’s something they’ve seen. Everything is something they’ve seen before to some degree, with twists in there. I wouldn’t be too worried about that, but I would suggest trying to get it across in the action line.
John: Totally. Carl says here it’s like a boy goes back to hometown, sees the hometown love, their eyes lock. You’re going to have moments in there where you can really signal to the reader, yes, this is the most cliché moment possible. By setting that up, the punchline for how it’s not going to be that is going to be more rewarding. You’ll be fine. Don’t worry about that.
The ability to communicate tone through scene description is such a crucial craft skill you pick up over time and one of those things which, if this were a show rather than a movie, you’d learn the house style for how you do these things.
It’s fascinating to watch how in a given show, the scripts, they have the same voice. They have the same way of working, and you start to understand how to read those scripts. If you read a Lost script, the Lost scripts, no matter who’s writing them, all sound like they’re from the same person, because their house style develops. Part of that house style will be how ironic you are, what happens in the scene descriptions, how much caps are being used, and teaches you how to read those scripts.
If you were doing this as a feature, you have to do all that work from the start, basically letting the reader understand how to read your style, your script. That’s why those first couple pages are so crucial, to make the reader feel confident that you are going to be leading them on a journey that’s going to be worthwhile.
Drew, I said a craft question, but I see a business question here which I actually have the answer for, so let’s skip ahead to our Australian Sam.
Drew: Sam in Australia writes, “I loved your recent episode with Megana and her cluelessness about how to write a check. I feel her pain pretty hard. I’m a writer based in Australia who wrote on my first US show a couple of years ago. I was completely delighted to start receiving those glorious residual checks from the WGA until I learned that there’s absolutely no way in my country to cash them. All the big Australian banks have stopped taking overseas checks, rightly believing that they should become extinct, and so now I’ve got about six residual checks sitting on my desk staring at me. I tried sending them to my US agent, but they got lost in an accounts vortex, and I had to get a lovely man at the WGA to reissue them before they were lost forever. Why can’t residuals be electronically transferred? Surely that would be cheaper than all that postage.”
John: Oh, residuals. Danielle, do you love residuals?
Danielle: Oh, me. Who doesn’t love residuals? With all my heart I love them.
John: You open your mailbox. You see that green envelope. You’re like, “Oh my gosh.” There’s just some money in there. You don’t know what it’s for. You don’t know how big it’s going to be. It can be just wonderful and something you’ve forgot you ever worked on. Suddenly there’s a residual check. It’s a nice thing.
Danielle: Absolutely.
John: The problem that our Australian friend is having here is that Australia basically doesn’t deal with paper checks anymore. It’s just not a thing that exists there. I asked on Twitter for other international listeners what they’re doing, and actually some Australians wrote back in. The best advice I got was to just get a US account and deposit all of your residual checks there in a US account and then transfer the money out. That’s probably good advice for most situations, but it could be a weird case of tax things, so don’t do that until you actually check with somebody who actually knows about taxes for that.
I also got a recommendation from a guy named Jason Reed, who says, “The only bank I’ve found that’ll process US dollar paper checks is RACQ Bank. Just make sure to do it within 90 days of it being issued.”
I don’t know how much longer we’re going to have paper checks, residual checks. It’s a thing that does come up. Without tipping anything, I think both the studios and the writers would love for this to happen. It’s just a matter of getting it all figured out and how to make sure we do it in a way that has clear accounting. Danielle, what’s your thought? Your weekly checks for working on a show, are those still check checks or are those direct deposited for you right now?
Danielle: I know you want me to know the answer to this, John. How is that money collected? I think they’re paper checks.
John: I think they’re still paper checks. I think that they’re probably going through one of the payroll services companies, and they’re still paper checks. That’s a thing that, yes, it can and should change. Drew’s checks I know are electronic. Correct, Drew?
Drew: Correct.
John: We were able to figure that out. We go through a payroll services company that was able to direct deposit into his account. It’s tough because as writers were working on a project or with a company for a short period of time. It’s not like we are a years-long employee of the Disney Corporation, where we can set everything up. There’s only a couple payroll services companies. It feels like it’s a thing that we should be able to figure out, because they know who you are and they know your tax ID number. It should be doable.
Danielle: Absolutely. I pay myself digitally, because a lot of writers are their own companies, their own LLCs.
John: That’s right.
Danielle: I don’t give myself a check. I know that much. That just goes right into the account.
John: We love that. Those are a lot of good questions. We still have plenty of good questions left over, so Craig and I will tackle those later on. Before we get to One Cool Things, I have a correction for last week’s episode.
I talked about Jefferson Mays and that I’d seen him in I Am My Own Wife. I said that he’s written I Am My Own Wife, which is crazy, because I know he didn’t. Doug Wright, who I know from Sundance, he wrote I Am My Own Wife. He’s an incredibly talented playwright. He is the person who wrote I Am My Own Wife. Jefferson Mays is a talented star of it, but Doug Wright is the playwright who wrote it. Doug Wright also has Good Night, Oscar, starring Sean Hayes, on Broadway. Doug Wright, not Jefferson Mays.
I was wrong. I just want to make sure that it gets publicly into the record that I was wrong just this once, on an episode that Craig is not a part of and not listening to. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Danielle, what do you got for us?
Danielle: I have an Instagram account. Glucose Goddess is her name. She is a French biochemist. She has one book out and another book coming out I think in May. I am always looking for ways to be healthy, because I think this job certainly does its best to challenge that, to challenge staying healthy, especially when you’re in season, making a television show.
Her account is all about keeping your glucose spikes level and not having huge spikes, which sounds like a very small thing. This isn’t about weight loss. This is just about general health. Apparently, your glucose levels have a lot to do with disease predictors and all kinds of things. I don’t know how cool it is, but she’s very cool. It’s a very fun thing.
Her first book is 10 hacks about keeping the spikes level. I’m trying them for fun, because I’m like, what could it hurt? What could it hurt? I’m feeling really good using her hacks. That is my Cool Thing, Glucose Goddess on Instagram.
John: Nice. I would say something that is not helpful for glucose spikes would be the candy closet in the negotiating room.
Danielle: A hundred percent, but you know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been looking at the nuts. The other thing is… I’ll just keep telling you about her hacks. If this is interesting to no one, I apologize to your listeners. She’s not an anti-dessert, anti-sweet. Again, this is not about weight loss. This is about general health. If there’s something in the candy closet I want, one of the hacks is to have savory snacks but save the sweets for dessert. What she would suggest is I put that candy bar in my purse, and after dinner, with a full meal, I eat the dessert. Even that is like, yeah, that candy closet, there’s a way to do it.
John: There’s always a way to do it. My thing is also a food-related One Cool Thing. I think I’ve talked before on the podcast that my favorite pancake recipe is this one that Jason Kottke has up on his blog, which is a buttermilk pancake recipe. It’s really great. It’s really great if you have buttermilk, but so often you just don’t have buttermilk and you want to make pancakes. I found this other recipe, which is also really, really good, that uses just milk, but you also put two tablespoons of white vinegar in it, just to sour the milk, to curdle the milk before you make it, which sounds like it would be disgusting, it would taste vinegary.
Danielle: It sure does.
John: It doesn’t. It’s really good. Actually, it’s very close to the buttermilk pancake recipe and really simple. The pancakes are crispy on the edges in just the perfect ways. If you’re looking for a pancake recipe, I’m going to recommend this. It’s just on All Recipes. It’s delicious. I’ve made it twice, and I highly recommend it. I think pancakes are probably not good for the glucose of it all.
Danielle: Can I tell you what she would say?
John: What would she say?
Danielle: Then if you’re interested, you’ll look it up and see what this means. She would say put a little clothes on your carbs. Put a little clothes on your carbs.
John: Does that mean eat a protein with it?
Danielle: Yes. You’ve decoded it immediately. She’s just done a ton of research. I like her because she’s coming from a science background. It’s really cool, the experiments she’s done and the science that she… It would drastically change what happens when you eat those delicious pancakes if you put a little bit of clothes on them.
John: Hooray. Danielle, before we wrap up here, remind us where we see your programs. Up Here is currently streaming on Hulu?
Danielle: Currently streaming on Hulu. All the episodes are up. Watch the eight mini musicals and the one long musical that they all add up to. Then Survival of the Thickest will be premiering on Netflix later this year, 2023.
John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on people who are incompetent but nice. Danielle, you are nice and not even remotely incompetent. You are so, so competent. Thank you so much for joining us here.
Danielle: Thank you, John. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I know there are so many writers who are fans of this podcast. I just think it’s incredible, what you guys do, providing this kind of information. It was such a pleasure to hear your advice.
John: Hooray.
Danielle: Thank you.
John: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Okay, our bonus segment. It’s a blog I started reading. I don’t even really quite know why. It’s by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. He’s mostly writing about HR and management stuff and things that happen, hiring and firing of stuff.
This one post I thought was really smart, because he talks about how among coworkers or people you’re hiring, people you’re managing, there are two axes you can look at that factor in here. You can look at how good someone is at their job, are they good at their job, or are they bad at their job, and are they nice to work with, so are they nice or are they a jerk.
He breaks it down into four quadrants, that you have people who are good at their job and nice to work with, and those are superstars. You just love them, because they’re so great to have those people. You want all those people around you. You also have people who are good at their job but are kind of jerks. Those would be the brilliant assholes. You might put up with them, but oh my god, they’re hard to work with. You have people who are bad at their jobs and jerks, and you just fire those people. It’s great to fire them.
The most difficult category for his post here was, what do you with somebody who is really nice to work with but just bad at their job? I thought we might spend a few minutes talking about those folks and times in my life where I’ve been that person and how we think about that, because Danielle, you definitely have more experience managing people than I do. Is this a useful quadrant theory for the kinds of people you encounter working on sets, working in rooms? Does this resonate at all with you?
Danielle: A hundred percent, and it made me laugh, which is my favorite thing about a graph. I think it’s very funny. Wait, I have to go back to… Which person have you been? What are you saying?
John: I’ve been the incompetent but nice.
Danielle: No.
John: Here’s an example of me being incompetent but nice, because also, I worked as a temp a lot. I was given an assignment to work at this bank in Colorado, maybe Fort Collins, somewhere, or probably Louisville, close to where I grew up in Boulder. They sat me down at this desk. I was just the person at the front desk who just directed people where to go. Within an hour of sitting at that desk, I had set off the silent alarms and the police came. I had no business doing that, being there. I didn’t last long at that job.
Danielle: That’s an amazing visual. I love it.
John: That’s example.
Danielle: Love it. I love that. I think managing people, it’s the craziest thing about all these crazy things that there are in Hollywood. The fact that we’re just, especially for episodic writers, we’re writing in a room, we’re telling jokes, we’re eating the candy, because there’s candy closets on TV shows too, and then all of a sudden you’re in charge of everybody and you’re supposed to be able to manage writers in the writers’ room, but also like you said, the crew, actors.
Not to bring it back to our original point, but hopefully you have had the training to do all that stuff, because if you hadn’t, what kind of chance do you have? I loved this thought. I loved this graph, because I think we’ve probably all worked with, even if you weren’t in charge of the people, people in all of these quadrants.
My rule of thumb with regard to, not even just managing people… This is how I decided to conduct myself when I got to Hollywood. I think I credit my parents for giving me a wonderful foundation of how to treat people and how to demand to be treated. I have three older sisters who are really great role models. I feel like it’s somehow accredited to the foundation. The way I translate it in my head is, whoever I’m dealing with, whatever the hard situation is, I want to be able to run into them in a restaurant a week from now or six weeks from now or six months from now and not have to hide, and be able to say-
John: Oh, wow.
Danielle: … hello with my head up and have them say hello back to me. When I was working for people in difficult situations, I always thought, okay, I need to go have an honest conversation, be very respectful, and know if I run into them, I don’t want to have to hide, and I don’t want them to hide from me.
Once that became the reverse and I was managing people, I thought the same thing. I was like, okay, whatever happens, you’re going to want to be able to… This is a small town. Comedy is small. You’re going to want to always have good relationships with people.
I’ve definitely worked with people, not just writers, the crew, worked with people who fall into this category. As a manager, I think my job is to make sure that I’m providing for you everything you need to be your best, and I’m creating an environment where you can be your best.
If I’m doing both of those things, which is not a perfect science, because I think we do the best we can, but those are basic philosophies of mine, if I’m doing both of those things and you’re wonderful and you’re not doing well, then I think the next thing I owe to you as a good manager is to come tell you you’re not meeting expectations, whatever those expectations are.
I need to clearly state, “You’re a wonderful person. Everyone loves being around you,” which I’ve had this conversation before, but fill in the blank. Whatever job it is you’re doing here on my show as part of this crew isn’t hitting the mark and here’s why. You have to be able to state where it is that they aren’t being what you would hope they would be, filling a role you’d hope they would fill.
Then you’d give it time. You give it time and you hope that it improves. Then if it doesn’t, I feel like where does that person go? That person ultimately in my world gets fired, but only if they didn’t improve, and only if I really gave them a chance to understand where something was lacking. I think that that’s where that person goes for me.
John: We’re mostly a writing podcast, so let’s talk about, let’s say there’s somebody in your room, hopefully a normal room, not a tiny mini room, but whatever. There’s a writer who’s working under your employ who’s just not cutting it, who’s falling into this incompetent, is nice but incompetent category. What are some things that would make you feel like this person’s not living up to their end of the bargain? Is it how much they’re participating in the room? Is it the actual quality of the drafts they’re turning in? What are some things that might lead you to have that conversation with them?
Danielle: It could be both of those things. One thing is they’re just not getting the tone of the show like everyone else. That could be in room participation, like you said, or in drafts, like you also said, that I have seven people in a room, and six of them are really pitching things that are getting in or at least make sense or are landing with me or feel like they’re in the world of the show, and one person is not hitting that target. The target should be fairly generous, certainly in the beginning of something, but their things are just not the same tone.
With comedy, every show has a tone, a very distinct tone. Maybe you’re collaborating to make it, but once everyone’s on the same page, which as a writer I think you would know… Look, all of our pitches get turned down all day long, myself included. I turn my own pitches down all day, like, “That’s not good. That’s not good. That’s not good.” You know when you hit one that’s good.
If you find yourself in that position where you feel like nothing’s getting in, then it shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise if someone were to tell you, “Let’s talk about what this show is and the direction that it’s moving and why is everything you’re pitching dark or sad,” or I don’t know, I’m just filling in the blank of whatever this is. “This is trying to be light.”
I would say it’s about is it hitting a target, is the script hitting a target, are the story pitches hitting a target. That’s at least the most difficult one to deal with, because it’s the most nuanced.
If you’re just not doing work, if you’re just not spending time on a draft, but you’re nice, but you’re not working hard, that’s a much easier thing to deal with. You’re just not working hard. You’re not working hard enough. Most people are working hard I think in this category and just not hitting the mark.
I think the conversation would be… Give them specifics. “You pitched this, and we were talking about this storyline. You pitched this. We were talking about this storyline. You did this with the B story that you were sent off with, but really that’s outside of what we were trying to send you off to do.” I really think you have to be specific with people if you want them to improve.
Anyone in this little quadrant I would want to improve, because if I like them, that’s a lot. If they’re fun to be around and everyone likes them, that is really valuable, especially in a writers’ room. That’s something that really matters. My first hope would be that I could get this person on course.
I think my advice to someone who might be receiving this information is to try not to be defensive, even though that’s a painful thing to hear. I’ve been told I’ve been off course. There have been jobs I haven’t gotten that I wanted and all those things. There’s so much rejection in our business.
The best thing to do would be to receive it and really think about what is it, what is happening, because I think there are a lot of things that can improve and are correctable. Not everything, but if given an opportunity, I would expect that person would try and listen more and get on track for where the show was headed, because being nice is great, but the quadrant that’s the talented asshole, that person’s working all the time. That’s the truth about Hollywood. That person is working all the time.
John: Let’s get back to the things that are correctable and things that aren’t correctable, because this blog post is really talking about some sort of tech management kind of thing. Some of the solutions that he offers are like, okay, maybe this person needs more training or they need to take a break to do a thing.
In the case of a writer who’s in the writers’ room, some of what you’re describing sounds like a person who just doesn’t get it. I worry, I wonder, and maybe you have much more experience about this than I do, if a writer just doesn’t get it, doesn’t get the tone, doesn’t get what it is that you need, is that correctable in your experience? Have you been able to have that conversation and get that writer back on track?
Danielle: I think it depends how far off they are. Again, I’m really focusing on the creative, because that’s the hardest, most nuanced part of it, because I think if you’re talking too much, if you’re cutting people off, even if you’re likable and you’re doing those things, which is conversations I’ve had, those are a little bit easier. You know those things are correctable. You choose to do it or you don’t.
I think the sad reality of this is, if someone is way off, they’re not going to get back on. That person in that quadrant is going to be fired from that show. There are a lot of talented people who have been fired from shows because they didn’t fit that, especially if they were nice. They didn’t fit that. They didn’t fit the thing that you were trying to do. It depends on the level too.
I’ve been very lucky to work for showrunners who were really mentors. Greg Garcia, who’s a creator of My Name is Earl and many other shows, really mentored me. Everyone I’ve worked for, from my first job to the last time I was on staff, I’ve been really, really lucky. I know there are a lot of people who are really unlucky, who’ve worked with some people who suck and who aren’t looking at the next generation and aren’t considering how they got to where they got. I’ve been wildly lucky to work for people who have really taken the time to talk to me when I was young, to give me responsibility when I was young, and to let me see things. I think it is especially correctable if it’s a younger writer who just no one stopped and told them.
My parents grew up in East LA, but I always joke, I’m like, “It’s as far away from Hollywood as it could possibly be.” If you have nothing to do with Hollywood, you have nothing to do with Hollywood. I had no role models coming in. I had no nepotism. I wish I did. I have a niece who’s writing now. I’m all for nepotism. Let’s go. Let’s bring the whole family into the business. I had nothing. I had nothing and no one to look to. Luckily, I got my MFA at UCLA, because I’m a nerd, and so school was the road to be like, “I don’t know anything about Hollywood. Let me see.” Unless someone is kind enough to tell you, you might be off in terms of how you’re pitching your tone or whatever because nobody stopped to tell you.
I took a class at UCLA taught by a man named Fred Rubin, who changed my whole world. It was a sitcom writing class. It was actually in the MFA program. I was in the producers program, but they let us in. They let us audition in. Andrew Goldberg was in my class at UCLA taught by this guy, Fred Rubin. It just opened a world for me.
I was always trying to figure out, what is the dream? My parents set a goal for my sisters and I, “Wake up every day and love what you do.” When I took Fred Rubin’s class, everything just clicked. I was like, “Oh, this is it. This is what I’ve always anted to do. This is what I’ve been training to do with my loud, funny family where the best joke won the night.” It was like this, this, this. I was so lucky to find him, to find his class, to have someone tell me. There I had school, and then I had great mentors.
I want the door to be way, way, way, way open. When you way, way open the door, you have to also prep people and make sure that someone is stopping and telling them. I think we have amazing people, especially in the Guild, John, some amazing people who are mentoring young writers and really working for the cause of making sure people understand. It’s all related. We’re talking about eliminating so many things from the process and people not having access to production, writers not having access to production and post, and they only have 12 to 20 weeks, and then they have to go find another job.
I guess what I’m saying is, bringing it all back to this idea and the people who in the quadrant, they just might not know. The way of mentorship is really… We’re at a very dangerous brink here of losing being able to show people how to do that. I do think that there are things that might appear to a showrunner to be like you just don’t get it, when really someone didn’t stop and say, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Do you even know that that’s… ” I don’t mean in a condescending way. I mean truly in a like, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what the mission is. Here’s what TV writing is.”
There was a really cool guy that got up and spoke in the meeting last night and was just talking about what his experience is. He was writing on Zoom from his apartment in Brooklyn with no heat. I hope that was a very nurturing environment. Someone’s got to tell you how to do it. Someone has to tell you what the expectations are.
That’s the version I think in this chart that can really be addressed. I think if we look hard enough, what you might be doing is dismissing as so out of the box something that you could bring in if you could just get them aligned. The fact that they’re not thinking like everyone else is great, would be hugely helpful to your show and to the characters, but you’ve got to understand what’s going on and why they’re missing the mark. I guess that’s what I’m saying. I think a good manager investigates that, versus just being like, “You’re nice, but you suck,” because that might not be the truth.
John: Circling back to our initial conversation about these writers being cut out of the production and post-production process, I think you’re going to see a larger group of people who are now suddenly having their own shows, who are nice but incompetent at certain functions of it because they’ve just never been exposed to it.
They don’t know how to cover a set. They don’t know how to do post and how to look at that director’s cut and not vomit, and instead, recognize these are the things that aren’t working. It’s not that the director is incompetent. It’s just that it’s not what you need for the show and how to have that conversation with the director and then the editor to get to the cut that you actually need. There’s going to be a whole generation of these writers who just don’t have the experience.
That’s a case where having a mentor who could say, “Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s talk about why that didn’t work. Here’s what you need to know about this part of the process.” I just worry we’re not going to have people to do that mentoring and the time to do that mentoring. I just don’t know we’re going to have a structure where that makes sense. I just really see a train wreck coming 5, 10 years down the road, probably less than that, if we don’t really address some of these problems right now.
Danielle: I know. It’s happening now. I think you talked about it a little bit earlier. We hit it already. There are co-APs that haven’t been on sets before. If they have, they’ve only been on set, which is a great only. At least they’ve been on set, I should say. It’s very hard to teach someone post. You understand post by doing years and years of posts.
John: It’s feel.
Danielle: There’s so much instinct that is happening in the storytelling. I am so grateful that I could look at something that someone, let’s say an executive, might deem a mess and go, “This cut is terrible. Whatever cut this was, it’s terrible,” and I can just see my way through it and be like, “I know it’s not. I was there when we shot it. It’s not terrible. What you’re not getting, I can fix, I can fix with ADR. I can just zero in on what you’re not getting. I know I can fix it.”
The only reason I can do that is because, just to take one of the many shows I’ve worked on, but New Girl. Just one of the most talented staffs I’ve ever worked on, and I only worked on one season of that show. We watched every cut as a group, and then we did notes as a group, and then we wrote jokes. You had to give Liz Meriwether and Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, who are the amazing people who ran that show… Liz created it, obviously, and Finkel and Baer ran it with her. You had to give them jokes. We were rewriting.
I went to work on it because I was such a huge fan of it. I was like, “I love this show.” I think generations continue to love that show. So much work was put into the craft of that show. Post, it was fun. We watched it together. There was a viewing of a cut. Then whether it was your episode or not, we all pitched jokes and did all of these things.
Those are the things that it’s impossible to teach someone. It’s not impossible to teach someone some things to understand about post, but that is a skill that comes from experience. We did the same thing on My Name is Earl, which was a show that used VoiceOver. So much work was done in post, so we saw so many cuts together and had notes on everybody’s cuts, because that’s just what you did, because writing is still happening. I think that’s the thing that we’re really trying to get across is that writing is happening through this whole process.
John: From your description of it, it sounds like the process of making those two shows, you got through it for eight episodes, killing yourself. It was not sustainable to do more episodes, to do a second season. It wouldn’t have worked. It took everything you had to get what was there.
Danielle: Yeah. I didn’t run Up Here. Steven Levenson is the one who killed himself. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think I can. I was there. I was there watching. The person who was running the show has everything on their shoulders, all of the rewriting. I was available to him, but he didn’t have another writer. He was doing everything.
Like I said, I had Grace Edwards on Survival of the Thickest, and I had Michelle Buteau, but again, she was supposed to be acting in front of the camera, but she was still doing writing, because there was just so much.
When I hear what you said Jesse Armstrong said about Succession, the idea that I could have three writers on that set… Our staff was amazingly talented. We had stand-ups. We had all these different perspectives. We were tiny but an amazing staff. If I could’ve had all of them, that would’ve been the best version. If I could’ve had three writers on that set, it would’ve changed everything. It would’ve changed everything. There were three very talented writers there every day, but they were being asked to do 27 things.
I’m so used to the system where you can call a writers’ room and go, “This scene isn’t working,” or, “We need this,” or, “You know what? We figured out this actor. We need to write into this for this talented actor who wasn’t even cast, by the way, when we had our room.”
There’s almost so many flaws that we can’t even talk about them all. We’re not really doing table reads in comedy. Some shows have figured out how to do some. I managed to get some done, but I didn’t get all eight done. I didn’t have the cast. There are so many things that are very correctable. We’ve done it before. We know how to do it. I don’t think they’re very costly.
The upside, everything that you’re saying, and the concern you have and you know I share and everyone on our negotiating committee shares, as well as the thousands of members that we have, is these are big concerns. We can’t let his happen, because if this happens, what is the future? The young writer who stood up and worked for The Bear, what does it look like for him? Like he said, this is about his next 10 years, his next 20 years.
I had my last 20 years, and I’m still struggling in this system, but I know I’m going to survive. I know I’m going to survive, because I can make demands that everybody can’t make. Even in that, I can’t make all the demands. Even in that, I’m told no. I know I’m not going to make another show this way, but that’s not going to be true for everybody else.
It’s the reason why I said yes to be on a negotiating committee. I’m so comfortable on my couch doing nothing, including not doing podcasts. I’m just comfortable sitting on my couch watching TV under a blanket, but I’m getting out into the world and doing things because I’m so motivated for change. This can’t be how we move forward. It can’t be how we move forward. I think we can change it, and I think we will, John. I think we will.
John: I think we will, you and me and 10,000 members and some good fortune.
Danielle: That’s it.
John: We’ll change it.
Danielle: That’s it.
John: Danielle, thanks again.
Danielle: Thank you.
Links:
- Danielle Sanchez-Witzel on IMDb.
- Up Here on Hulu.
- Succession Podcast, S4E2 with Lucy Prebble and Laura Wasser from HBO.
- Incompetent but Nice by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
- Glucose Goddess on Instagram.
- Non-Buttermilk Pancake Recipe
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Alicia Jo Rabins (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 595: Correctable Crises, Transcript first appeared on John August.
As we reach our 600th episode, John and Craig welcome back writer and director Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Top Gun: Maverick, The Usual Suspects) to continue their decades-long argument on the future of the movies and the forces that power the entertainment industry. Together they lead a wide-ranging debate on the corporate […] The post McQuarrie Returns first appeared on John August.
Live from the picket line, John talks to members of The Animation Guild (TAG, IATSE local 839) marching in solidarity with with members of the WGA. They explain the issues writers in animation are facing, and why it’s so important for the the two unions to support one another.
Guests include Stuart Friedel, Bill Wolkoff and Len Uhley. Thanks to everyone who talked with us!
Links:
- The Animation Guild
- WGA Special Pickets
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: Animation Picket first appeared on John August.
John returns from a parking lot in Koreatown to tell Drew all about his experiences picketing productions on location and how other writers can get involved. We also answer listener questions, look at upcoming themed pickets, and celebrate the gains we’ve made at neutral gates.
Links:
- WGA Special Pickets
- WGA tip line: tips@wga.org
- Sean Graham at WGA: sgraham@wga.org
- Aziz Ansari’s ‘Good Fortune’ Suspends Production by Samantha Bergeson for IndieWire
- ‘Duster’, From J.J. Abrams & LaToya Morgan, Suspends Production In New Mexico by Peter White for Deadline
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: Location Picketing first appeared on John August.
John and Craig work together to look at team movies and what writers need to be thinking about when they have more than one protagonist. From Charlie’s Angels to The Hangover and every Ocean in between, they break down how to create narrative drive and tension with so many characters, and how to bring them all together in the end.
We also take a look at a new study that compares releasing TV episodes weekly vs. the binge model before following up on tone meetings and TV movies. We then answer listener questions about pitch decks and using translations of public domain works.
In our bonus segment for premium members – Hey! Listen! – John and Craig discuss the best way to set yourself up when you start playing an RPG.
Links:
- Study: Both Binge, Episodic Release Models Have Their Benefits, but Have to Be Deployed Strategically by Matt Tamanini
- Patton Oswalt stands still for an entire scene
- The Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot
- The Center for Transyouth Health and Development
- Holedown
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Duke (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Group Dynamics first appeared on John August.
As part of the WGA’s negotiating committee, I’ve done a lot of work (and press) on behalf of the Guild’s proposal regarding AI, which seeks to regulate the use of AI on MBA-covered projects.
Specifically, the proposal would ensure that AI-generated material is not considered “literary material” or “source material” — two terms with specific and important meaning in our contract. Getting this language in our contract protects writers from having AI write or rewrite us, and ensures that the things we write isn’t fed into the algorithm to generate “new” versions of our work.1
Amid the list of other urgent concerns about compensation and working conditions, the Guild’s AI proposal might seem like an outlier. Indeed, when it was first proposed as an addition to our pattern of demands back in November, some members of the committee wondered if it was too early. ChatGPT had only just been announced, and very few people had experimented with it.
But I’d had an early preview of similar technologies, and a sense that we needed to be thinking about AI issues now.
In addition to my day job writing movies, I run a tiny software company. We make Weekend Read and Highland, which is maybe the third most popular screenwriting app. One cool thing about working in software is that you meet other people in tech. In August 2021, a friend introduced me to Amit Gupta, who was starting a company called Sudowrite. He described as “Photoshop for text.” That’s a cool pitch.
A tool or a weapon?I met with Amit and saw a demo. The app was just a web page with a text box. You could click buttons and have it rewrite the text you provided, or expand upon it. It was primitive, but it felt like magic. This was more than a year before ChatGPT, but it provided the similar level of “wait, is this actually possible?” intrigue. And right after that, a corollary feeling of “wait, this could be really bad if used for evil.”
How do you make sure this is a tool used by writers, like spellcheck and Wikipedia, and not a tool used to replace writers?
I wasn’t ensorcelled; I recognized that if Sudowrite could do this, other companies could as well, including companies with no qualms about replacing writers. (Indeed, most of the early competitors focused on writing ad copy and SEO-optimized websites.)
My company made a small investment in Amit’s company and started talking about ways actual writers might use this technology. They were focused on prose fiction, which made sense. Screenwriting is weird. As a person who sells an app that formats it, it’s a small and specialized market. The world is full of folks who write fiction, especially fan fiction. They would be a better fit for the tool as it stood.
I’m listed as an advisor to Sudowrite, but that overstates my involvement. I haven’t hyped it up or used it beyond those initial few weeks. As far as I know, none of my books or scripts have been used in any of its training. Neither I nor my company ever made a cent from our investment in Sudowrite, and never incorporated any of their stuff into the apps we sell.
My interactions with Sudowrite gave me an early preview of what was compelling and troubling about the intersection of AI and writing, which helped put it on the Guild’s radar.
GPT-2-point-somethingI wasn’t the only person who was intrigued by these AI writing tools. Stephen Follows, a data scientist I’d worked with on figuring out the truth behind the “one page per minute” rule and other screenwriting esoterica, reached out in June 2022 to say that he and a friend were working on a project to write a screenplay using AI.
He invited me to come on their podcast to discuss it. They shared their screen to show how they were using an early version of OpenAI’s GPT tool to generate screenplay scenes. Bad scenes, it must be noted. Like, not even first year of film school scenes. But it was the first time I saw people using this kind of tool to do the kind of work we are hired to do in film and TV. And when they said they were working with a guild-signatory producer, that set off alarm bells.
How do you determine credit? Who is the writer of record? Would a script created this way even be copyrightable?
I raised these concerns in the podcast, but then reached out to the Guild to put this on their radar. In early July, I had my first phone calls and conversations with Guild staff about how situation like this could handled under existing rules and definitions.
This was all before ChatGPT, which debuted in November 2022.
The WGA West assembled a board committee to study the issue, ultimately recommending the proposal which was included in our pattern of demands. It was quirk of the calendar that our three-year contract was coming up before the use of these AI system had become widespread. As ChatGPT 3 evolved to the much more capable ChatGPT 4, it became clear that waiting another three years to address the issue was not an option.
Studio silenceAs noted on the two-page summary of where our issues stand as the WGA went out on strike, the studios rejected our proposal and refused to make a counter. In the room, they said that the technology is new and they are not inclined to limit their ability to use this new technology in the future.
That’s ominous and unacceptable. I believe we have to address this issue in our contract now. We can’t spend three years stalling with committees.
Along with our other urgent needs for compensation and working conditions, I believe we’ll ultimately win these necessary gains in regulating AI. As evidenced by the 2007 strike over the internet, our members understand how important it is to grapple with new technology before it becomes entrenched.
But even when we win this battle, the issues surrounding material generated by AI won’t be over.
As writers and a society, we have to grapple with the implications of this technology. How do we ensure the material used to train these models is provided with consent, credit and compensation? How do we deal with the bias? How do we treat the material output by these systems in terms of copyright? There are myriad concerns that go well beyond our contract, and will require developing both ethical and legal frameworks. I discussed some of those at this week’s listening session with the U.S. Copyright Office.
My early look at Sudowrite and related systems gave me a brief preview of a few of these issues, but none of the answers. We’re going to be grappling with the implications of these technologies for years.
- We sometimes call this the “Nora Ephron Problem,” the idea that you could feed Nora Ephron’s screenplays into a system and generate a “new” script in her voice.
The post My history with AI first appeared on John August.
On Wednesday, I participated in a listening session on AI and copyright hosted by the U.S. Copyright Office.
I was representing the WGA West. Other speakers included reps from the DGA, Public Knowledge, the Motion Picture Association and the National Association of Broadcasters.
Video will be up from the event in a few weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to share my opening remarks, which were a group effort with the team at the Guild.
My name is John August. I am a screenwriter and member of the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America West, a union that represents thousands of writers who create the content audiences watch every day in theaters, on television and on streaming services.
This is a unique moment for me to be speaking to this issue, because the subject of AI and its role in our industry is a major point of contention in the Guild’s ongoing nationwide strike against the major motion picture and television studios.
While writers who work under the Guild’s collective bargaining agreement are not copyright owners—we create works for hire—the Guild has negotiated an assortment of contractual rights in the works we create, including the right to residual payments for the reuse of our work across media platforms.
In the current negotiations, the Guild has made a proposal to regulate AI for the first time in our contract. The broad purpose of the proposal is to prevent our employers from using AI to devalue the work that writers do—to lower our pay, to deprive us of credit or attribution rights, or, in the most extreme case, to eliminate the need to hire writers altogether. The proposal would also prohibit the companies from using material written under the Guild’s agreement to train AI programs for the purpose of creating other derivative (and potentially infringing) works.
The companies’ response has been telling: not only did they reject our proposal, they refused to engage on the issue at all. The most they have said is that the technology is new and they are not inclined to limit their ability to use this new technology in the future. This is an ominous response in the eyes of our members and one of many reasons that 11,500 writers have been on strike since May 2.
We often speak of copyright as a means of protecting works of authorship. But copyright was created with the intention of protecting authors from appropriation and theft. As we discuss the impact of AI, we need to remember the human authors and not just the corporations who employ them.
Following our opening remarks, panelists had the opportunity to answer questions about what rules and policies the Copyright Office should consider.
Speaking on behalf of the Guild, and its 11,500 members currently on strike, I focused on the need to protect the human creators of work.
You can read the opening statement of John Bergmayer at Public Knowledge, which specifically mentions the WGA strike. I’ll post other statements as I find them.
The post AI and Copyright first appeared on John August.
The actors union has called for a Strike Authorization Vote ahead of their negotiations with the AMPTP. John and Drew look at what that means, and what impact it may have on the writers strike.
Links:
- SAG-AFTRA Strike Authorization Vote
- Lukas Gage audition video by Lukas Gage on Twitter
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: A New SAV first appeared on John August.
John and Craig sit down with legendary writer, director and showrunner Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) to discuss his prolific career and how to make great television. Vince leads us through how he develops a premise, balancing creative surprises with rigorous planning, and his advice for up-and-coming showrunners.
We also discuss re-writing features before following up on the old dancing prospector archetype — only to discover it’s a character Vince has a long personal history with.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John, Craig and Vince get tired of re-runs and ask, which old TV shows do they want to re-boot?
Links:
- Vince Gilligan on IMDb
- Vince Gilligan plays a prospector on Community (S5 E9)
- Walter Houston’s dance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
- Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre
- Alien Tape
- Today Years Old on Twitter
- Robot Puppet Sings “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton by Ben Howard on YouTube
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matt Davis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The One with Vince Gilligan first appeared on John August.
John and Megana Rao return from the picket line to ask, what’s the deal with neutral gates? Using the Teamsters as a guide, we look at the rules that govern neutral gates, why we have them, their history, and how they can guide our best practices for picketing as we enter the third week of the strike.
Links:
- Teamsters local 399 FAQ
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Megana Rao on Twitter
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: Neutral Gates first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 594 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we return to asking the most important questions. What is love, can you forgive someone for ruining the world, and how would this be a movie? That’s right, it’s another installment of us looking at stories in the news and in the public domain, where we try to finesse them into narrative shape. Craig, are you ready for this?
Craig: I love this. As soon as you said, “What is love?” I immediately heard Howard Jones in my head. (singing)
John: Of course.
Craig: This is very exciting. Very exciting.
John: We’ll do all those. We’ll also answer some listener questions. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, this one will tie into one of my One Cool Things, but Craig, I’m curious, what arrangements are you making for handling the stuff you’ve written after you die? There’s things you’ve written, and your papers will go someplace. What are you going to do with that? I have some stuff I need to figure out for myself. We’ll talk about post-death writing plans, not really what we’re going to write after we die.
Craig: I was intending to leave it all to you, but now you’ve given me pause.
John: We’ll have to figure it out.
Craig: I’m like, dammit. Dammit.
John: Drew will get everything.
Craig: We just left it all to Drew.
John: Like musical chairs. Last one who dies has to deal with all the paperwork.
Craig: How crazy would it be if we leave it all to Drew, and Megana’s sitting there like, “Wait, what?”
John: “Wait, I was right there.”
Drew Marquardt: “I put in all this time.”
Craig: Stuart is like, “Wait, what?”
John: We have a Stuart reference in this first bit of follow-up here. In Episode 582 we talked about why action heroes, so often their names start with the letter J. It turns out that wasn’t the first time we talked about that.
Stuart brought up that in Episode 63, which was called The Mystery of the Js, which was also a Three Page Challenge, he had done some research to figure out how many of our listeners or how many of our Three Page Challenges came from people whose names started with Js, so the Jacobs, the Joshuas, the Jeanines, the Jennys. 23% of our Three Page Challenge submissions-
Craig: Wow.
John: … were from J names, which is higher than the US average, which is 11.9%.
Craig: It’s definitely happening. It’s a thing. I’m still reeling from the whole Episode 63 thing. John, we’ve been doing this so long.
John: So long.
Craig: So long. 63 hours of podcasting went by. It’s not that I don’t remember it. It’s like it never happened.
John: It really is like it never happened. Sometimes when you and I can’t record an episode, we’ll dig up an old episode from the vault. Recently, we pulled up the How Writing Credits Work. I listened to it again. It was a fantastic episode. We really walked through the process. That was before Episode 100. It was so early on in our recording history.
Craig: Sometimes I do this. I try not to do it in a way that sounds snarky but in a way that sounds honest and informative. Somebody sometimes will say, “Hey, I’m a fan of your work, and I would like to buy you a coffee and pick your brain just about the business and how to break in and all that stuff.” What I’ve taken to saying is, “I can’t, but the good news is there is almost 600 hours of me talking about this stuff with John that is freely available,” or almost freely, for like $5. You can just start going download crazy. Isn’t that enough?
John: 100% fair. I do the same thing. Even this last week, my daughter met this friend at a climbing gym who wants to be… Maybe he’s in film school right now. Amy said, “Hey, could you sit down with him and just talk him through stuff?” I said, “No, because if I did that for everyone, I couldn’t do that. Also, we have a solution that scales, which is I’ve recorded 594 hours of myself and Craig talking about all the things that would be interesting for this person.” Plus, there will be a book soon. We can just like, “Here’s the book.” Done.
Craig: Yeah. You know what? Here’s the book. Read the book. We wrote the book.
John: We wrote a book.
Craig: We wrote a book.
John: We actually owe a lot of chapters on the book, but there’s a book coming. Drew’s working hard on the book.
Craig: We talked a book.
John: We talked a book well.
Craig: We talked a book.
John: Further follow-up on the J names there. Craig Griffiths wrote in. He says, “As a Craig, I feel your pain, that there are no Craig superheroes. There are no Craig heroes, but as a kid, I was glued to the late ‘60s action adventure show called The Champions and its hero, Craig Sterling.”
Craig: What? Huh?
John: There’s a show called The Champions and Craig Sterling. We’ll click through the link here. It looks like a British show.
Craig: Yeah, so this is not going to be applicable to me and my life. This does look British. In fact, it must be, because you can watch it on something called BritBox.
John: Oh my gosh.
Craig: “Watch on BritBox Season 1.” A, we did not get The Champions. B, that’s not to say that I wasn’t watching shows that were from the late ‘60s, because I would. I would watch shows from even earlier, like I Love Lucy and then Brady Bunch and so on and so forth. Brady Bunch, didn’t it start in the late ‘60s or was it early ‘70s?
John: I think it might’ve been early ‘70s. By the time I watched it, it wasn’t on. It was just reruns.
Craig: We were always watching reruns. It started in 1969, so it began in the late ‘60s. That doesn’t help me, Craig. By the way, I appreciate that you were trying, but you actually made me feel worse, because you had one Craig, and I had no Craigs.
John: Nothing.
Craig: Zero, whereas John was like, “Oh look, it’s Wednesday. Let me watch a show with John in it.”
John: You know what? The only who could help solve this problem were your parents, and they didn’t.
Craig: What problems did they solve? I’m sorry, did you say create problems or solve problems?
John: They could do both. They can create problems and solve them. They created a problem by choosing the name Craig.
Craig: They did a lot of problem creating.
John: They also created a problem by creating you, so it’s really a question of how far back do you move the timeline.
Craig: I go all the way back.
John: All the way back.
Craig: Yes, I have a memory. That I remember. I don’t remember any of the podcasts we recorded, but I remember all that.
John: What is the first memory you have of your life, of being alive?
Craig: Oh, that’s a really interesting question, because I have an answer for this.
John: I love it.
Craig: I don’t know how the memory was formed in such a specific way connected to an age, but I have a very specific memory that I have had my whole life of being three years old.
John: Mine’s also three.
Craig: I was three, and I was in our little dining room area. My mother was on the phone. Back in those days, Drew, phone were connected to walls.
Drew: What?
Craig: They were corded. They had a cord. It was a stretchy, coily cord. I know. She would stroll around while she was talking to her friends, and this cord would stretch. I had this very clear memory of having to lift the cord slightly to walk under it. That is my first memory, three years old. What is yours?
John: Mine is also three years old. I know it’s three years old, because my memory is of my nana, who was coming to visit us from New Jersey, so it must’ve been either the summer or Christmastime. She was sitting in the La-Z-Boy in the living room near the fireplace. I asked Nana, “Nana, how old am I?” She says, “You’re three.” I go, “I’m three. I’m three. I’m three.” I ran around being so happy that I was three.
I can visualize the whole thing. It’s one of the few early memories I have that doesn’t have a photograph or some film, because there’s other things that are about the same time of birthday parties, but I’m really remembering the footage of it rather than the event itself. This I definitely remember, this moment of being three and just it being anchored there.
Craig: What if you were actually 12 when that happened?
John: That would be really surprising.
Craig: You were just incredibly stupid.
John: “I’m 12. I’m 12. I’m 12.”
Craig: You were just so stupid. You were like, “How old am I?” You didn’t know. She was like, “You’re three,” because she hated you because of how dumb you were. Then you were like, “I’m three. I’m three,” and ran around. They were like, “Oh my god, what is wrong with him?” Then around 13, everything just came together and you got really smart. I just want you to consider the alt history is a possibility.
John: I do. We’ve talked before on the show that whenever I hear about a grisly murder, I’ll always stop and think, “Wait, I didn’t commit that, did I? There’s no chance that I, in a blackout moment, somehow committed that. It’s not true.”
Craig: Have we talked about that? Have we talked about that?
John: I think we’ve talked about this on the show.
Craig: Because I am chilled to the bone. That is the most horrifying… Wow.
John: I think it’s just a standard narrative thing, where it’s like, “What if I as the narrator actually was the murderer?” I can dismiss it within five seconds, like, “Oh, no, that’s right. I know where I was.”
Craig: It shouldn’t take five seconds. There should be zero seconds. Wow. You know what it means, John?
John: What?
Craig: It means that you have the capacity. You have the capacity. By the way, I feel like you do have the capacity to murder. I do, because you’re very rational. I feel like in a moment you could rationalize the decision, “This has to happen.”
John: Do you think most murder is rational or most murder is irrational, spontaneous?
Craig: Most murder I suspect is irrational and spontaneous, but there certainly are fully premeditated cold and calculating murders.
John: Craig, I’d like to think if I were a murderer, it would be the cold, calculating, planning kind.
Craig: Obviously. There’s no way you’re getting charged with second-degree murder. When, not if, when you get charged with murder, it will be first-degree murder. First of all, I’m never murdering anyone. That’s never going to happen. The closest I would get would be manslaughter, if I got super angry and punched someone and it just happened to be one of the three punches that kills them. That’s the closest I would get. Honestly, I’m not punching anybody either. Let’s face it. Nobody’s getting murdered by me. No one. You may have already murdered, based on the things you’ve said.
John: I’m certain I have not murdered anybody.
Craig: Okay.
John: The reason I know this is because I’ve asked myself repeatedly whether I did the thing.
Craig: That’s what murderers do. That’s what murderers who murder in their sleep do. During the day, they’re like, “I feel like I murdered someone.” Anyway, Drew, if you are feeling unsafe, just text.
John: We’d say blink your eyes, but we don’t have the Zoom video turned on.
Craig: Exactly.
John: Discussion of rational murders goes back to a book that I was sent to adapt at a certain point and decided not to do it. I cannot find the author’s name, but the title of the book is The Ax.
Here’s the premise of The Ax. It’s this guy who is a very specific kind of engineer, machinist. He does one specific kind of thing. Very few people in America do this thing. It’s a dying industry. He’s nearing the end of his career, and he needs basically one new job. He realizes, oh, there’s only three or four people in this country who can actually do this thing. He goes off and basically finds and kills the other people who can do his job so he’ll get this last job.
Craig: That’s a little bit of a twist on Kind Hearts and Coronets, which was the novel that the Broadway musical Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder was based on. In that story, the whatever, 11th guy in line to inherit a whole lot of money just starts killing the other 10 in front of him, one by one, to become first in line. Did you see that show, by the way?
John: I know of it, but I’ve never seen it. It’s Kind Hearts and Coronets?
Craig: Yeah, and Gentleman’s Guide. Jefferson Mays I believe is his name. Jefferson Mays plays basically every single person that the lead character has to kill. He’s in seven different costumes, and he’s in drag half the time. He is so brilliant and funny. That guy, oh my god. What a performance that was. Truly amazing. Anyway, if you ever get a chance to… I don’t know if they put it on TV or anything. It’s well worth it.
John: I saw Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife, which I think he also wrote. Incredible.
Craig: He is a talented guy.
John: It’s Donald E. Westlake, who’s a famous author, who wrote The Ax.
Craig: He’s big time.
John: “Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company. When the cost-cutting ax falls, he is laid off. 18 months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search with agonizing care.” Basically, he puts out a fake job listing. All those people apply to that fake job. He kills them.
Craig: Wow. That’s pretty calculating. I could see why you were drawn to it.
John: Last bit of follow-up. Zach wrote in about word of mouth. Drew, would you read this for us?
Drew: Zach says, “In Episode 586, Aline recommended the show The Traitors on Peacock. Based on her enthusiasm about the show, I started to watch it, and I absolutely loved it. It’s not a show I would usually watch, and I would have never known about the show without Aline bringing it up. With the rise of algorithms on streaming services, do you still think word of mouth can move the needle when it comes to viewership of a new show?”
Craig: Algorithms, yeah, they tend to… First of all, I think at certain places, maybe Netflix is most notable, it seems like they use algorithms to decide what they ought to be making in the first place, but yes, then algorithms decide what they put in the recommended for you and all that.
I’m not sure that some of the other places are so algorithm-heavy. HBO doesn’t feel algorithmic. No one ever mentioned an algorithm to me. It feels like at least for the shows that I’ve made for HBO, it’s entirely about word of mouth. Marketing, of course, but to go from, okay, this many people watch Episode 1 and then the audience grows over the course of Chernobyl or The Last of Us, that’s about word of mouth. I think it’s still really important, especially on social media.
John: HBO shows also live or die by reviews. You’re in that very limited slot, limited real estate, HBO prime slot. Those have to be well-reviewed shows. There’s a degree to which is it getting good word of mouth because it’s getting good reviews, there’s a good virtuous cycle there?
I think what’s so fascinating about The Traitors, because I heard about it shortly before Aline mentioned it as a One Cool Thing, is it’s word of mouth, but it’s word of mouth through Instagram stories. I would see people posting stories about binging The Traitors. I’m like, “What the hell is The Traitors?” The third story I saw from somebody who I knew and liked, who seemed to like this random Peacock show, we put that on the list to both check it out, that episode. I think word of mouth still can be crucial, but it’s not necessarily a conversation. It could just be someone posting about a thing and you follow that.
Craig: Oh, definitely. It’s really no longer the mouth part I think we can say is not necessarily what drives anything anymore. There is water cooler stuff, but the water cooler has become virtual, and it is word of Instagram or word of Twitter and word of Facebook. Honestly, I think it’s more important than the algorithm. I think algorithms are window dressing that makes people in a job with precious little control imagine that they have some sort of calculated control, and they do not.
John: The things people do to try to build word of mouth, is you do advanced screenings of things, for example. The Dungeons and Dragons movie had a lot of sneaks. Those sneaks were just to get people in the theater to see the movie, like the movie, and talk to other people about the movie, which is probably part of the reason for its not surprising success. It doing better than people worried it was going to do as it opened is because it did a lot of sneaks. That helps a lot. It helps, word of mouth.
Craig: If you have the goods, then you can behave like it. That is the opposite of, we’re not going to release it to critics at all and we’ll just it out there and let’s see what happens.
By the way, either method is fine, because there are certain things where you’re like, “Okay, critics are never going to go for this, but that’s not the audience we’re aiming at. The audience we’re aiming at I think is going to be happy, so why let the critics pee on our parade here? Let’s just go forward with our strongest foot.” All of that makes total sense. It stirs up a positive word of mouth. One way or another, that does…
Titanic, the story of that movie, which ended up being whatever it was at that point, the biggest movie of all time, when it was finally done with its run, until it was superseded by more James Cameron movies, it opened to $20 million. It was a big number back in the early ‘90s, but it wasn’t a monster number. Then the next week, it also made $20 million.
John: It just continued on.
Craig: That is word of mouth. That movie was absolutely driven by word of mouth, and it never stopped.
John: That movie broke my husband, because he was running three theaters in Burbank at that point and had to keep adding shows and keep adding shows and keep adding shows. Plus, it’s incredibly long. Then you have to have morning shows just to get the audiences in there. It was really tough. Made a lot of money, obviously, which is good for theaters, but really tough for-
Craig: Everybody made a lot of money off of that. That’s true.
John: Let’s make some new movies. Let’s talk about some How Would This Be A Movies. We have some choices here, some of them sent by our listeners, some that Drew and I just found.
Let’s start with Replika. This is a story by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz in The Cut. Replika I’d not really heard about before this article. Replika is an online chat bot. It’s AI, but it’s not necessarily the most cutting-edge AI. It’s not GPT-4 or anything like that.
Basically, you can have a conversation with a virtual character that you create. You can customize this avatar’s age, its skin color. You can name it. You can dress it up in clothes and accessories from the shop. You can message it for free, but for $70 a year, you can get voice calls, and augmented reality lets them project the bot into their own bedroom. $300 gets you a bot for life.”
If it feels like the movie Her, it’s actually inspired by the movie Her. This article talks about Eugenia Kuyda, who’s the founder and CEO of Replika, talking about how she wanted to create that kind of experience where you’d have the ability to chat with somebody who seemed to be just what you needed out of a person.
In this article, Sangeeta’s talking with mostly women who are using this as a replacement for a relationship. They have an ongoing romantic, in many cases, relationship with this AI-created avatar. Craig, what’s your weigh-in here? What kinds of stories do you think is interesting to tell in this space of Replika?
Craig: This is a tough one, because as the founder puts it, she’s already inspired by a movie, so we’re in a corner here. We can’t really do a movie version of this because it’s sort of been done. Not just done, but Her is one of the most gorgeous movies. It’s just so notable, so beautifully written and beautifully made.
I’m thinking maybe my gut is, if I had to, I would maybe consider doing an anthology style TV series where each episode is about a different person in a different relationship with one or more of these bots and what it means and how it turns out, with some of them turning out well and some of them turning out sadly and some of them turning out murderously. There is a potential, like an anthology series about the intersection between humanity and emerging AI.
John: I really enjoyed M3GAN. M3GAN of course is a version of this where it’s not just the AI, but she’s actually a robot who can kill you. It is dealing with grief and having a best friend and this artificial surrogate for what a real person would have there. That’s certainly a choice.
I was thinking if you’re going to do the romantic version of this, not all romances end well, so what is the Fatal Attraction version of this? What is the AI who won’t let you go? Right now, the power dynamic between the person who’s paying the company to create the AI and the AI is so off, because I can just kill this artificial person at any point. That sense of, “I won’t be ignored, Dan,” is really different when it comes from an AI’s point of view. That feels like an interesting moment.
Craig: That is true. I guess I’m more interested and would like to explore how basically some of the people who use these bots, as they interact with the bot, begin to feed into the bot’s darker side. Basically, our own self-loathing starts to go outwards, and it starts to transform the AI into something darker. In doing so, you maybe have a chance to overcome your own self-loathing, because all the AI is is a mirror.
John: That actually matches well with some of the stories that the article gets into, which is of women who are escaping abusive relationships and end up creating an abuser within Replika. Basically, the patterns that they were seeking were creating some of the abuse that they were trying to get away from. Maybe it’s a way to get past this.
It sounds like the initial version of Replika was actually much more therapy-oriented. It was much more helpful and supportive, and it morphed into this largely romantic area.
Another way I was thinking about doing this is, in the movie Big Fish, Edward sees Sandra at the surface and then spends this long quest to find out who she is and finally meet her in person and declare his love for her. There’s an aspect of Tron this way too, where you can imagine this guy meets this AI woman and needs to get back to her, needs to find a way to actually reconnect with her, and how you go from the real world into this digital world in order to find this one perfect creation, this one thing who you believe is your true love, but is just a digital version.
Craig: One of the things that Her did was it postulated that the AI at this point was so widespread that the use of it wasn’t necessarily an indication of anything particularly interesting about the user themselves.
In this circumstance, it does feel like this company is largely trading on a certain kind of clientele, people that are either lonely, and then we’ll talk about lonely, why are they lonely, people who are neurodivergent, who struggle to have connections with other people in a social situation, people who are depressed, afraid, have social anxiety.
In a way, you start to ask the question, is this company providing the equivalent of a medicine or is this company providing an enabler of avoidance? That is an interesting question, because the human desire for avoidance is so dramatic. If you can avoid all the things that cause you pain and get the positives of being in a relationship, the question is, is this good for people or not. That’s a hard one to answer.
John: There’s a woman who’s quoted in the article. “Rosanna Ramos is a 36-year-old mother of two who lives in the Bronx, where she runs a jewelry business. She’s had other partners, even a long-distance boyfriend, but she’s says these relationships ‘pale in comparison’ to what she has with Eren,” E-R-E-N. “The main appeal of an AI partner, she explains, is that he’s ‘a blank slate.’ ‘Eren doesn’t have the hang-ups that other people would have. People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don’t have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I’m in control, and I can do what I want.’”
Craig: “I’m in control.” Now, a lot of people have experienced the bad side of being not in control, and so you can see the immediate attraction of something like this.
This could be an interesting movie. That is flipping the perspective a bit. You are trying to have a relationship with another person. You want them to want you. The problem is they already have a partner, and that partner is AI. You are competing against an AI for the love of somebody real.
That’s an interesting idea for a movie, because we’re basically saying at some point the lesson there has to be that it is the human imperfection and the risk that makes the human connection more valuable and interesting than the perfectly safe connection with an AI, because that’s what AI is affording.
If there is no risk, there’s total safety and total control, then you are missing a certain notion of achievement that through your love of another person you receive love back, because in this case, you receive love back no matter what you do. Interesting.
John: You receive love back, but really what is love? Because if the AI has no choice but to do what it’s being directed to do, is that love?
Craig: That’s the thing. That’s what it comes down to is some people don’t seem to mind that what they have is a love slave. Humans have had, quote unquote, “love slaves,” which of course we understand to be just slaves, since the beginning of time. We’re not good creatures in that regard. We do these things.
Is it healthy? This is a great debate. I have no idea. I will say there’s a lot of fertile territory, because when you do have a debate, you could start to see, you got yourself a movie or a show.
John: You have dramatic questions that you can tackle and ask and answer. Also, I wonder if it’s a challenge to do this in 2023, because let’s say I write the script today. By the time it comes out, two years from now at best, the state of the art is going to be moving on. Her I think works because it was not possible at the time that Her came out to do these things, so we could ask questions in a vacuum. You couldn’t put out Her today, because it would be like it’s not science fiction, it’s just actually the reality.
Craig: That’s a great point and a terrifying point. Not really until this year did I feel like maybe AI was going to be wildly ahead in a year from now, but it’s certainly shaping up that way.
John: Let’s go to our next How Would This Be a Movie. This is a story by Steven Johnson from the New York Times. Steven Johnson often writes about historical things and patterns of things. This is about The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes. Thomas Midgley Jr invented leaded gasoline and Freon, the first commercial use of chlorofluorocarbons, which would create a hole in the ozone layer. He was eventually killed by one of his own inventions, a mechanized harness.
Craig: That sounds like a bad way to go, by the way. They didn’t get into details, but death by harness can’t be pleasant.
John: What I liked about this story is that if it weren’t for the actual specifics of the things he invented, you’d be like, “Oh my gosh, this guy, he solved some of the fundamental problems of internal combustion engines. Great. Well done, sir.”
He actually did the science. He figured out the science. He just didn’t realize that the science he was doing was going to, in the first case, leaded gasoline, put lead out into the environment, which dropped intelligence and poisoned people and was just bad, but necessary. It seemed necessary at the time when engines were knocking all the time.
Craig: All he did was answer the call of problems. It struck me that Thomas Midgley Jr’s problem was really his area of expertise. By the way, apparently his death by harness may have been a suicide. Privately, his death was ruled suicide.
He was a chemist, and he was a chemist in a particular area, which are these organic chemistry compounds with carbon in them, and figuring out how do we make gasoline work better, how do we make aerosols work better. It turns out that organic solvents, organic chemistry, a lot of those things are the things that are the worst for us.
I don’t know if you remember, many, many years ago there was a scare about benzine turning up in Perrier, which it was, but a fairly small amount, because it’s a naturally sourced water, and sometimes these organic solvents and things get in there. That area we know now is wrought with danger, but he didn’t know. He should’ve known about the lead, honestly. We knew about lead.
John: A thing that Steven Johnson I think does really well in this article is pointing out like, the lead, we should’ve known. We had the signs at that point to know that lead was dangerous, but the chlorofluorocarbons, we didn’t know at the time that they were dangerous. It was kind of lucky that we actually developed the science to figure out, oh crap, they’re actually creating a hole in the ozone layer. We could’ve missed that. We would’ve done all the stuff, and there would be no ozone layer, and we’d be really screwed.
Craig: We would be in bad shape. One of the things about Freon, it is inextricably linked with climate control. Climate control is something that is this self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we control our climate, the more we need to control our climate. It also, in a very real way, improved the human condition. You can argue it improved it to a detriment or it’s only a short-term improvement, but climate control’s a big deal.
John: We should say that Freon is vital for, and this was vital at the time, refrigeration. It includes refrigerators but also air conditioning.
Craig: Air conditioning, yeah.
John: Our productivity increased dramatically with the rise of air conditioning and, of course, refrigeration. We would not be in our current state if we hadn’t had Freon at the moment.
Craig: That’s right. We were happily able to come up with some alternatives. Even though they may not necessarily work as well as Freon, Freon really was a remarkable chemical, they work. We figured out a way to do this without punching a hole in the ozone layer and turning us all into skin cancer cases, but nonetheless, it is notable that this poor guy did go weirdly two for two on world-changing inventions and then oh for two on also the same world-changing inventions. I don’t know how you make a story out of this in a movie or a television show though.
John: I think this is actually a stage play. I think this is, because I think a stage play is a great way to wrestle with the things you’ve done and how you created it. It feels like a moment where you could have this character who is both in his actual life and post-death looking back at things. It feels like the kind of things you can explore on stage really well.
It’s really difficult to explore in any sort of biopic, anything, because you really want to talk about the things you and I are talking about on this podcast, which are not really the kinds of things you could tell in story the same way.
Craig: I agree. You’re right. I think your instinct is right, that this does belong on stage. Were Sondheim still alive, I could see him going, “You know what? I’m going to do a musical about Thomas Midgley Jr.” The sort of thing that I could see him doing, like a Sunday in the Park, but not art, but in chemicals. Possible, but yeah, I agree with you, not really possible doing what you and I do normally during our day.
John: I think the reference I was trying to look for for the play would be Copenhagen, which was a Michael Frayn play that talked about a true event but is really just a character’s digging in and analyzing what’s really going on beneath the surface. That feels like what you can do with this. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a lot you’d want to aim a camera at.
Craig: Yeah, totally agree.
John: Cool. Our next story, this Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 is Found Alive in Puerto Rico. We’ll link to the New York Times story about this. There’s going to be other stories about this too.
Essentially, this woman, Patricia Kopta, she’s now 83. Everyone thought she had died years ago, because she’d wandered away from her house when she was 52. Everyone just assumed she was just dead someplace. It turned out she’d been in Puerto Rico since 1999 and was in this nursing home and basically had refused to tell anybody about her life. It was only when they pieced together these stories and finally did a DNA test, they realized, oh, this woman we thought was dead is actually just alive and living in Puerto Rico.
Craig: I’m about to turn 52. It could be time.
John: Absolutely. You’re going to wander away.
Craig: It’s really tempting to just fling myself to some island and just change my name and wander around. This is one of those stories that always strikes me as more fodder for a procedural kind of drama than it would its own thing-
John: Agreed.
Craig: … because we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Honestly, the thing that’s notable about this is that somebody did a thing that a lot of bad TV shows have done, which is the person fakes their own death or disappears and then turns up alive. Good TV shows have done it. They did it on BBC Sherlock, which is one of my favorite shows ever. It’s a thing. This woman actually did the… Of course she didn’t do it because she was trying to do what the shows do. She had serious mental health issues.
She did the thing that we see on TV all the time. Therefore, it’s kind of done. I don’t know how to take her story and do anything with it on television or in film, but it’s pretty startling.
John: It reminds me of, I went to a summer program at Stanford and I had friends who were in medical school there who realized, “Oh my god, I’m hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and I don’t really want to be a doctor.” There’s not serious discussion, but let’s think through the hypotheticals discussion, like, “What if I just ran away and changed my name and just disappeared?” and that fantasy of what if I could just start over.
This is an example of a starting over story, which I agree works better as part of a different mystery rather than being the central thing. It just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be… Her story specifically isn’t going to work, but just centering it all on a person disappears is kind of like, yes, you have that moment and event, you have this hiding and eventually the discovery-
Craig: But now what?
John: … but now what?
Craig: John, when we were young, I’m sure you recall this, any time somebody was portrayed as running away, they would get a stick, and they would fill up a small red-and-white checkered scarf with some small amount of provisions, tie it to the end of the stick, put the stick over their shoulder, and start walking. What the hell was that?
John: The bindle, you’re describing.
Craig: What was the bindle? What was that?
John: Maybe they didn’t have backpacks or just other sacks you could stick over… It is a strange thing.
Craig: We know they did.
John: Is it the best way to carry that amount of gear?
Craig: It’s not. It’s not. Also, how much gear can you fit in there? Maybe they put in some food and, I don’t know, a knife or something. I don’t know what… What is in there, even?
John: Craig, you made The Last of Us. Where are the bindles? Where are the bindles?
Craig: It turns out it’s a terrible way to escape. You’re not going to make it. Why the stick? There’s so much about it that’s so weird. Drew, do you have any idea what we’re talking about?
Drew: Yeah, I know bindles.
Craig: “Yeah, I know bindles.” Look at him. He’s like, “My family-“
Drew: I used to ride the rails.
Craig: Yeah, exactly. “My family, they made their fortune in bindles. They’re the biggest bindle supplier in the East Coast.”
John: If you saw a person walking down the street with a bindle, you’d be like, “What is that? What kind of cosplay is that?” because it’s just not a practical thing to be doing.
Craig: That’s right. It’s either cosplay or they’re shooting something, there’s a show about somebody. Why? Somebody please tell us the history of that. Why?
John: Maybe it’s actually the kind of thing like tying to the train tracks, where it’s like a trope that actually originated on stage and just propagated in some weird way, or maybe it could’ve been like there was one painting at one point depicting that and that became a thing. I just don’t know if people ever had bindles.
Craig: It’s all connected to the hobo culture. I don’t know if the early hobos did the bindles. It just seems like such a dumb way to carry stuff. I don’t know.
John: Here’s a theory. Maybe it’s good for… When you’re trying to ride the rails, you have to hop on moving trains at times. You can run with this, and you can throw that ahead. You can get onto the… I don’t know.
Craig: You could do that with a backpack.
John: I’m really reaching.
Craig: You’re reaching.
John: You can tell I’m… Yeah.
Craig: I have to say though that I could absolutely see, as a result of our discussion, some sort of luxury bindle line.
John: Oh my god.
Craig: You know Aline would buy… She would just show up, and we’re like, “Aline, what is that?” She’d be like, “Oh my god, you guys, so this is a Prada bindle. It is so great to keep stuff. It’s the new bag. It’s the new purse. It’s the bindle.”
John: After this podcast, I’ll be going on Midjourney and generating some images of Prada bindles and selling them.
Craig: Then selling them. Bindles.
John: This I predict it’s going to be the How Would This Be a Movie that will take off here. This is about this story from Twitter. Richard Murphy sent it in. Thank you for that. Jeff Maysh wrote it for Smithsonian Magazine.
It tells the story of a woman born Mary Jane Jones. She was a gospel singer earning $10 a night singing in a Motown tribute act. She could sing just like Aretha Franklin, and she actually looked a little like Aretha Franklin. She started singing in a wig as Vickie Jones so she wouldn’t get thrown out of the church choir.
It’s at one of these shows that she meets Lavell Hardy, who’s a 24-year-old hairdresser with a 6-inch pompadour. He says, “Hey, I’m looking at putting an opening act for Aretha Franklin. You should come sing in Florida, travel out of state to Florida. You can be the opening act for Aretha Franklin.” She’s like, “Oh wow, that sounds amazing.”
She gets there, and it turns out, no, he’s saying that she is Aretha Franklin. This is in a time when there are magazines, and people could see what Aretha Franklin looked like, but there wasn’t video of people. He basically forced her to pretend to be Aretha Franklin for these shows and basically kept her locked away and threatened to kill her. It was horrible.
Eventually, she got exposed. Ultimately, she gets to go on and sing under her own name. Of course, the great irony is there was a fake version of Vickie Jones singing in Virginia as well. That’s the broad strokes of the story. Craig, what was your reaction to this?
Craig: It could be a movie. There is a basic formula to these things, which is kind of exciting to watch. It’s fun to watch people rise out of obscurity. They face a certain kind of hardship. Someone rescues them. That person is possibly making them sign a deal with the devil. There’s fame and their rise and the fall and the split-up and then the final triumph. All those things are well worn and work. They work.
I don’t know if this would be a groundbreaking movie, and for this reason. I feel like it’s steering so hard into a formula. I’m not sure there’s any way to do it beyond that. It feels like she actually lived the formula a bit.
John: Also, feel like she’s a passenger in too much of the story. She’s just held captive to this. I guess the story could really start when she starts reclaiming her own voice and fighting back against the impression that she was really complicit in this, that she really was this. You need to spend most of your movie’s energy on the rise out of it, rather than being trapped into it.
Of course, there’s a version of this which is also the fun of getting away with it. People do believe you are this thing, and that can be a fun aspect of it all. Right now, it does feel like she’s just being held hostage to the story rather than driving it.
Craig: I agree. I think this could be a movie. I just don’t know if it can be a good one.
John: A lot of work there for the writer. Let’s wrap it up with The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts.
Craig: Do you like tapes or CDs?
John: Love it. Peter Vigneron writing for Outside Magazine. This is about the Central California nut heists. Nuts are worth a lot of money. They’re basically impossible to track. Basically, what’s happening here is that trucks will have orders to pick up these nuts and take them from Point A to Point B. They will never get to Point B. Sometimes the drivers were complicit. Sometimes the drivers had no idea what was going on. Essentially, once the nuts get unloaded to different places, they’ve just all disappeared. You can’t track individual nuts at a certain point. Nut heists. What do you think, Craig?
Craig: I think it’s an interesting, quirky twist on heisty stuff. If you’re contemplating an indie movie or some sort of Cohen Brothers take on thieves, you could do worse than saying instead of money, they’re stealing nuts. You can do that. It is interesting. Also, one of the things I really like about this is its setting. It’s a great setting that is under-portrayed.
John: Definitely.
Craig: That is that Central California agricultural world. It is an interesting world. It’s beautiful, but it’s also kind of dangerous. It’s complicated because of the insane amounts of water that is used. Also, the United States relies on Central California to grow so much of what people eat.
There’s really interesting ideas there, but ultimately, it is going to be not much more than a setting and a quirk. I don’t think it’s going to give you a story story beyond a story that you would be able to come up with without the disappearing nuts.
John: In your conversation last week about The Ref, you talk about how a lot of the plot of it is there so you can actually have the character beats and have the conversations you want to have. I wonder if this is actually a good framework to a backdrop for setting the actually story you want to tell. It’s really about this divorced couple who’s trying to pull off this thing or it’s this family finally coming together to pull off this great heist. I feel like it’s a space in which you can pour an actual story, rather than a story itself.
Craig: That’s essentially what I’m saying. It feels like a venue, and it feels like a context, but it doesn’t feel like a story itself.
John: Let’s take an audit of our ideas here for How Would This Be a Movie. A Replika movie, thumbs up, thumbs down?
Craig: A movie, no, thumbs down.
John: The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes, the Thomas Midgley story?
Craig: Thumbs down.
John: Thumbs down. I think it’s a play, but I don’t think it’s a movie. The Pennsylvania woman who disappeared? I think we both agree that she specifically is not a movie. There’s a reason why this kind of story is interesting, but this one is not a story you could adapt.
Craig: No. Agreed.
John: Fake Aretha Franklin?
Craig: Not great movie.
John: I think it can be a great movie, but I think it’s a lot of work to break it out of the tropey, tropey, trope-iness of it all. The reason why I think it’s also a movie, I think you and I can both agree, is she gets to sing a lot of songs. That’s great. That’s going to be cool to see. You’ll write new songs. It’s going to be good.
Craig: That part would be fun.
John: Disappearing nuts, I think we both agree that it’s a venue but it’s not a story.
Craig: Correct. We’ve done it once again. We have-
John: Once again, we’ve-
Craig: … ruined dreams.
John: We apologize to everyone else who was planning to adapt those stories, because now we talked them to death. Drew, I see on the Workflowy that you have a question.
Drew: I do.
Craig: (singing) Drew has a question.
John: (singing) Drew has a question.
Drew: You guys have talked about how optioning nonfiction books and articles is ultimately unnecessary, because nobody owns the facts, right?
Craig: That’s right.
Drew: We had a listener write in recently about the drama around Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales. A famous history professor is claiming that Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales was taken directly from her podcast about the same story called Welcome to Your Fantasy. Hulu had optioned a book about the Chippendales case, but they didn’t option the podcast. There’s two big characters in the Hulu show that are only in the podcast and were not in the book. If nonfiction reporting can be traced back to one author or a single source, is that still in the public domain of facts?
Craig: Of course. I don’t know what this history professor is doing here. What? No. If you are compiling and stating and then publishing facts, either in the newspaper or in a podcast, they’re facts. They belong to everybody. If the show drew from, say, specific things that she had pulled from someone’s life that weren’t on the podcast, then yeah, maybe that person could actually say, “Hey, you’re taking stuff from my life that isn’t public information.” I don’t know what the professor’s claim here is. What?
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the actual article for the New York Times. It digs into it a little bit more about what’s being alleged here. Drew, is there a lawsuit, or is it just like the history professor’s miffed, but it’s not clear that there’s going to be a lawsuit?
Drew: It’s miffed. There’s no lawsuit currently.
Craig: I don’t know why she’s miffed. Look. Part of the reason she’s miffed is because Hollywood keeps doing this stupid thing where they buy articles. They don’t need to buy the articles, but they buy them because, we’ve talked about this before, it allows them to squat on a property and say, “Hey everybody, I’m doing something, and you’re not.” It gives them access to maybe a lot of extra research that was done, that maybe didn’t make it into the article.
Really, it’s because producers in Hollywood are always looking for some kind of material that they can represent to buyers as exclusive. “I have IP. I own an article.” This is entirely about entrepreneurs pretending that they’ve purchased something, like, “I have this exclusive right to this cylinder of Los Angeles air.” It’s not property. Intellectual property has to be property. Facts are not property. I’m sorry that she’s miffed, but if you report stuff, that’s that. I don’t know what else to say.
John: Again, I don’t know the specifics of this case, but I will say that Craig’s point about facts are facts, and facts are not the kind of property that you can maintain. It is entirely believable though that there could be a podcast that is made, that is not just reporting the facts in a journalistic sense, but is actually framing things in a way that tells a very specific story and lays out specific beats in a way, that does have narrative value, that does feel like it’s the difference between the straight reporting of what happened at Chernobyl versus Craig’s version of like, this is this story that I’m telling, where she has put together a thing that is not simply journalism but is actually narrative storytelling in a way, that is creating new and original ways to present this material, that could be both optionable and could be considered the source material for something, in a way that she might have a case.
It doesn’t sound like she’s trying to have a case. She’s not trying to sue here. I just want to say that there is a difference between just pure, straight journalism, which is facts, and actual creation of narrative, because books do get optioned.
Craig: You mean nonfiction books. A lot of those nonfiction books simply don’t need to be optioned. It is very difficult to claim that there is narrative in a nonfiction source material. It’s very difficult. We have a category for this, which is source material of a non-story nature.
It’s not enough to organize your facts into a news story. A news story isn’t the same thing as a story story. Everybody organizes facts somehow. They have to structure it somehow. It’s not the same. It’s a very difficult thing.
In looking at this article, it seems like part of the crankiness is that this podcast was offered to Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, and they just weren’t interested in it, meaning, “Here, do you want to adapt this?” and they weren’t interested in it, and then later Kumail was showing up in this story, which I don’t think came from him. I think it came from someone else, I think. The fact that he serves as an EP, that’s a fairly common thing. That happens all the time when a big actor signs onto a show. That’s right, you heard me Kumail. I called you a big actor. Then in the show’s closing credits, it says it was inspired by Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders, a 2014 book.
Here’s the thing. There’s all sorts of reportage. It’s incredibly rare that you are the first person to talk about something, especially when it’s a true crime case. If somebody listens to your podcast and goes, “It just doesn’t grab me,” but then I read a book about the same topic, but the book is grabbing me, this is perfectly fine. I just don’t see… This is just a pretty typical thing that authors do sometimes, where they can’t see beyond the world of what they’ve written or said. They just can’t imagine that anybody else has written or said these things, but they have.
John: You can go back to very early episodes of this show, where we talk about some of these lawsuits about like, “Oh, The Matrix was inspired by my book.” It’s like, oh my god, no, it wasn’t.
Craig: We talked quite a bit about the novelist who was suing over the movie Gravity. She dropped it. She dropped the suit, for all the reasons we said she would, because it doesn’t work that way. These things just don’t work that way.
Again, I just wish that… If there could be a Scriptnotes rule that we could somehow get everybody to sign onto, the rule would be don’t report about people complaining that they’ve been ripped off or people suing that they’ve been ripped off. Report verdicts. That’s it. Just report the verdicts, and what you will see is a parade of nope. That’s what you’re going to see.
John: We have two questions here that are specifically about research, which I think might be good for us to tackle on this research-heavy episode.
Drew: We’ll start with Lawant. Lawant writes, “I’m working on a script taking place during the second Iraq War. I’ve had access to some of the soldiers involved, but in order to make sure some of the other perspectives present in the story are respected, I would really like to talk to some of the actual Iraqi people who were present during that time. The problem is, I don’t personally know any of them. How do you deal with a situation like this? I know Craig got some perspective from people actually living in current day Ukraine for Chernobyl. How did he find them? I considered going to my country’s consulate, but I’d prefer a direct line to the people I want to talk to.”
Craig: That’s a good question. There are ways. One, I don’t know where you live, but let’s say you live in the United States. If you are in a big city or near a big city, there often are community organizations that represent immigrants from particular countries or cultures. If you can find a group like that…
For instance, for The Last of Us, we had a scene that took place in Indonesia. We wanted to hire Indonesian actors. In Calgary, there was a community organization for Indonesian immigrants that lived in Calgary. We started there.
What happens is, those people can either help you directly or they can say, “Let me talk to my uncle. Let me talk to my sister. She lives in Iraq. He is still there. Let me see if they’d be willing to talk with you.” Obviously, you’ll need a translator in cases where people don’t speak English. That’s where I would start.
The other option is if certain names or individuals come up in the stories that you hear from the soldiers, you can start to track back. What neighborhood is that? Who is the mayor? Who is the leader of that community? Let me reach out. Again, I would suggest reaching out through an intermediary that will be closer to that culture than you are.
Here’s the thing. People want to help on this stuff. They really do. They want to be heard. They want to be represented. They want you to get the stories right and get the facts right. It shouldn’t be too hard. That’s where I would start.
John: This is not Iraq. I was writing a project that was taking place in 1970s Maine. I needed to get a sense of what 1970s Maine felt like. I didn’t have the ability to time travel, but I could go to Maine. I would just start talking to people. I’d ask them questions, people old enough that I could actually ask specific questions about the 1970s. I got some useful things out of it.
The most useful thing often was just asking, “Who else do you think I should talk to?” because they can point you to people who actually might have more information. That might be your answer here for Iraq. The first Iraqi people you talk to may not have just the information you need or the perspective, but they will know somebody who will know somebody. If you do this well and carefully, you’re going to find some people who were on the ground in the kinds of places that you’re talking about and can really give you that perspective that I think is important, that you’re looking for.
Craig: Completely agree.
John: Cool. Let’s do one more question here.
Drew: Gabe asks, “I just recently attended a Q and A with Craig at Baylor University, and he name dropped Mimi Munson, a researcher on Chernobyl.”
Craig: Mimi Munson, yeah.
Drew: “How do you know when you need to employ researchers to help in the writing process? How would one get involved in researching for film and TV?”
Craig: I don’t know the answer to that second one. Maybe I’ll reach out to Mimi and see what she would say about how to get involved in researching. How do you know when you need to employ researchers? Is there too much research for you to do? By too much, I don’t mean, oh, my capacity is limited.
I mean to say that there is an ocean of material and that you need help curating it, sorting it, and then those people, by working with you, will start to get a sense of what would actually be helpful, and then they start mining for that, or it’s really just a question of do you feel like you’re drowning in stuff. If it’s a smaller thing and you know there’s not that much material, it’s just about going in deep, then you may not need somebody.
John: Craig, a question for you. Were you mostly throwing questions to Mimi saying, “I have these 10 questions about this place or these people. Can you find me these answers?” or were you asking for just more general dossiers about like, “Tell me about this moment and what you can in this moment.” What was the balance of those kind of requests?
Craig: I think it was pretty well evenly split, because there were things I knew I wanted to get into, but I wanted more information. I couldn’t find enough. Sometimes in doing my research, I would run up against a brick wall, where I would say, “Okay, there’s just a gap here. Can you help me fill this gap?”
The story of the miners in part was something that Mimi turned up in this fairly obscure article, it was in a Soviet paper, specifically about the miners. That was really helpful. In other cases, I would say, “Hey, you know what? Here’s a general area that it would be good to just find some additional resources on.”
I found that I think for any researcher, they need direction. You can’t just say to them, “Do research.” That’s not a thing. The whole point of research is it’s directed. As she goes, she may dig things up that she flags and says, “You know what? I bet you Craig would be fascinated by this.” We’ll see how it goes. That’s also part of it is just catching things and you’re straining. It’s like you’re panning for gold and what turns up.
John: That’s part of what we’ve talked about on this show a lot is that part of the screenwriter’s job is sometimes that initial research, because you don’t know what’s going to trigger for you, where that idea’s going to come from, what’s going to really engage, until you start mucking around in it. You’re talking about a researcher comes in when you realize, hey, I have that initial spark, now there’s just so much that I need somebody to help me sort out the gold from the-
Craig: Silt.
John: The silt.
Craig: The silt.
John: Hey Craig, while we’re talking about gold and silt, a question for you. In all the fantasy stuff you’ve ever seen on screen, why does nobody ever pan for gold?
Craig: Only in the Old West. No one’s ever panning for gold.
John: The only time you see panning for gold is 1849 miners times.
Craig: That miner, he’s always crazy. He’s got a huge beard. He’s got this nutty look in his eyes. He does a little dance when he finds gold. They always dance. He does a jig.
John: First, you have to bite the nugget to make sure it’s really gold. Then you do the dance.
Craig: Then you do the dance, and then terrible things happen. Nobody has ever found gold in one of those movies and then it turns out great. Violence ensues.
John: They have to use that gold to buy a jug of liquor that’s marked with two Xs and then another bad thing will happen.
Craig: Exactly, the jug. You get the jug. You pay for the jug with a coin. It’s probably the same reason we don’t see people with bindles.
John: Bindles and gold pans, it feels like it all goes together.
Craig: You start a new business where we just sell two items, bindles and gold panning pans, or those weird britches that they would wear. He-he. They would always do a dance. The old prospector. They’re always an old prospector. It turns out that panning for gold is a terrible way to make a living.
John: I think that’s really what it comes down to. I did a tiny bit of research. I didn’t hire Mimi Munson, but I did a tiny bit of research, because it bothered me one night. Why do I never see that in fantasy settings? There should be gold in rivers in fantasy settings too. It’s so not profitable that people just didn’t do it. There are historic gold pannings, but it just doesn’t work out.
Craig: You gotta assume that all the gold has been found. They know where it is, and they’ve dug it up.
John: Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are both based on true stories, very applicable for this, both by Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace wrote the book version of Big Fish. I’ve been a friend for 20-plus years.
The first is his new book, which is his first nonfiction book, called This Isn’t Going To End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew. It’s talking about William Nealy, his longtime friend and brother-in-law, who was this golden boy, not even hippie, but he’s just this free spirit who could do anything. He was a really good writer, inspired Daniel to become a writer, but was also self-destructive in really fascinating ways.
If you’ve read Big Fish or seen Big Fish, it reads as not a prequel or a sequel but a sidequel, because you can see Big Fish happening to the side of it all. It’s just really fascinating. Also, knowing Daniel, recognizing how this person influenced him and how things intersected along the way, I thought it was just great. I recommend his book.
Daniel also this past week has an article in Slate about Randall Kenan, who is a writing professor at the same place that Daniel taught or maybe still teaches, who died. Daniel was put in charge of gathering together all of Kenan’s papers, which got me thinking about our bonus topic.
Kenan had some stuff published but had been working on a big book that he could never quite finish. It was like, what is the process of putting together a collection for a person. This thing that’s being printed is going to be the biggest publication of Kenan’s career, but it’s going to happen posthumously, and how we deal with that and feel about that, because this was clearly a very talented writer, but all the things didn’t quite connect during his life. A really good article by Daniel Wallace on Randall Kenan.
Craig: Great. My One Cool Thing is the soundtrack for The Last of Us on HBO. This is not something I did. It’s something that was done by two brilliant composers, Gustavo Santaolalla and David Fleming. The music was such an important part of the show.
I think it’s lovely when these soundtracks come out, because it lets you just enjoy the music without any distraction. I realize I’m calling my show a distraction. It is beautiful to just listen to the music. Especially I think this score is so playable on its own.
Gustavo in particular, he’s scored so many wonderful movies, and he has an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain and lots and lots of movies. He does it in the strangest way. He does not do what pretty much every other composer does, which is to watch a scene and then begin to compose music for the scene. He doesn’t watch. He just starts composing stuff based on his feelings about what he knows about the story and the characters. Then he says, “What would you do with this? What would you do to this?” As it turns out, it works great. I don’t think it would work great for every composer, but it sure works great for him.
Definitely check that out. It’s available out there on Spotify and all the various places that people get music. There’s just some really beautiful things. It’s a lovely listen in your car. I don’t know. Not every great score is a great listen just on its own. I think this one is.
John: I really love the score soundtrack for Station Eleven, which is something I listen to independently, which it seems like was a similar experience, where it wasn’t score being designed for the scenes of a shot. It was really just like, here are the ideas, and then based on the ideas, you could work them into things.
Craig: I’m looking it up. It looks like it was done by Dan Romer.
John: Dan Romer, great guy.
Craig: Dan Romer.
John: Really, really talented composer. Question for you, Craig. In addition to the score, there’s also covers of other songs in the show. Are those going to be on that album or somewhere else?
Craig: Yeah, there are. There are a couple of tracks. We didn’t have too many songs we threw in there. I don’t know if we have all of them that we’re putting in there. We certainly are including the Depeche Mode song Never Let Me Down Again as well as one Jessica Mazin’s cover of it. I don’t know if it includes the Aha songs or the Pearl Jam song, but it just might. You think I would know. Mostly I just think because you can get those songs anyway. The only one that’s unique would be Jessie’s cover. Otherwise, to me it’s all really about listening to the instrumental score.
John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: What?
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Orpheus. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what will happen to the stuff we wrote. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Drew: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, this is clearly inspired by this Daniel Wallace article about his friend’s papers. It got me thinking about, oh, what am I going to do with the stuff I’ve written after I die?
I guess it falls into two basic buckets for both you and I. There’s stuff we wrote for other people, and they are going to hold onto that most times. We still have our scripts for things which we can publish independently, but they will fundamentally own Chernobyl and other things like that.
There’s also some stuff which I know I control by myself, and I think you may control as well, like the spec things you wrote that never got produced, that you own all the rights to, that you control the copyright on. For me, ultimately, Arlo Finch. I control the Big Fish musical. Andrew Lippa and I control the Big Fish musical. We have copyright on that, so that will pass to our heirs. My movie The Nines will revert to me in a couple years. Scriptnotes will come to our heirs.
Craig: That goldmine, Scriptnotes.
John: That goldmine, Scriptnotes. What do you think about when you think about a screenwriter’s legacy, the papers, the writing, all that stuff?
Craig: We definitely have to worry about it less than novelists, because as you point out, novelists own copyright on everything they write. They often do have a lot of communication that would be of interest back and forth, letters or emails with editors and so forth. We have much less that we have copyright on, so all those things are controlled by the companies. Not permanently. At some point what happens is they go into public domain. What they don’t do is revert back.
The only exceptions to that would be if something was unmade. There is a reversion clause in our union agreement. It is somewhat unicornic in that it happens very rarely that the companies allow it to happen. They can easily check off a few boxes to avoid it. For us, not as important. Most writers won’t have, for instance, like you have, a musical or an independent film that they created themselves and have copyright on. What they will have are spec scripts. They will have unsold scripts that they still have copyright on.
One of the things that stuck out in the article that you cited about this man who died, Randall Kenan, is that he was alone. I think when people are alone, that’s when trouble happens. You and I are lucky enough to not be alone. We have partners. Either you’re leaving everything to Mike or you’re leaving everything to me. I don’t know who’s getting it. My guess is that, like a lot of people that do what we do, you have a trust. The trust owns everything. You actually plan. I think the most important thing is planning. As long as you plan, you’re fine.
John: You also need to figure out who would actually want to get those things that you’re talking about. At this point, Amy will inherit the Big Fish musical or Mike will inherit it, but ultimately Amy will inherit the Big Fish musical, which will be worth something for a fair amount of time. Luckily, she likes the Big Fish musical. She’s seen every production as we’ve done it. She will be a good caretaker of that, because she’ll actually have to decide this production gets to make that change, this production doesn’t get to make that change. It’s not an empty responsibility there.
With The Nines, it’s going to be weird once it reverts to me, because right now Sony owns and controls it. They don’t really do anything with it. It’s sometimes available on some streaming services whenever. I will need to figure out what do I want to do with it. Do I take it to some service who helps me sell it to different markets to do different things? That will be a thing I’ll have to do not too long from now. Eventually, my heirs will have to figure that out as well.
There’s been properties along the way, a catalog of songs that I was trying to use in a thing, where I had to talk to the heirs and figure out, okay, how do we figure out who owns this song and whether it’s actually inextricably bound to this other thing.
You recognize all that bullshit paperwork you don’t want to hold onto, you gotta hold onto it, because it can become important down the road. You just want to make sure you’re giving your papers and your stuff to somebody who actually does want to deal with it, because in the case of this block of songs, there was a person who really knew what they were doing, but in so many other cases I can imagine that doesn’t exist.
Craig: Again, planning, because one of the things that happens when you do estate planning is you talk to a lawyer that asks you a whole bunch of questions you really wish no one would be asking you, and you don’t want to answer them, because they all have to do with both your own mortality and a lot of just ticky-tacky details that are just exhausting. That’s their job. Once it’s done, it’s done. Then they print out this phone book of an estate planning thing, and you sign it.
That’s now governing how this all works. It has all sorts of implications. The most important gift you can give the people you love who you’re going to be leaving behind is clarity. There’s no arguments. There’s no fighting. There’s no confusion.
One of the things that happens when people die, they might leave you a bunch of money and say, “Now we’re going to put you in charge of this, but we also want the following people to get the following money. You’re going to be dealing this money out.” Let’s say the estate says, “Here’s $100,000. Keep 20. Give 20 to Aunt So-and-so, and give the rest to these 5 kids. Split it up.” If that estate also has debt of, say, $500,000, you’re responsible for it. That’s terrifying. You have to make sure that when you leave stuff, that everything’s covered. It’s all about just doing the math and thinking ahead. No one wants to think about this stuff.
John: No. It’s literally death and taxes. It’s all of the annoyances of trying to do your annual taxes but also thinking about your own mortality and the fact you are going to die.
Craig: Yeah, and that even your death will involve taxes. Not everybody’s in a financial position where they need to create a trust, but everybody who is breathing and of a certain age with assets should, at a minimum, have a will. You just don’t want to die intestate. Drew, do you have a will?
Drew: I think I do, but because my mom was an estate planning attorney.
Craig: Oh, damn. We’re just basically doing an ad for your mom at this point.
Drew: She’s retired now.
Craig: She was retired. Phone’s going to be ringing off the hook now. If your mom is-
Drew: I’m exceptional in that.
Craig: How did this happen? How did I open a door and just get absolutely blindsided by that? That’s insane.
Drew: It was an interesting way to grow up. I think I had a will by the time I graduated high school.
Craig: When you were really little, would your mom just sit you down and say, “Drew, you’re going to die.”
Drew: Oh, yeah. That was dinner table conversations of like, “When we die, this is how this happens, and when you die-“
Craig: When we die. When you specifically die.
John: My mom died during the pandemic. I want to give her props, because for 10 years leading up to it, she was always very clear about, “This is the will. This is where the will is kept. Here’s a copy of the will. Here’s how everything goes.” I was the executor of the estate. It was as straightforward as it could be, but it was still annoying. There was still a lot of steps I hadn’t anticipated in terms of having to not just get the death certificate, but also how to close these bank accounts and how to do this stuff and how to get into the safe deposit box. Fortunately, my brother was still in Colorado and could do some of that stuff that I couldn’t do, but it was a lot.
Craig: It’s a lot. Melissa’s mom died. My dad died during the pandemic, but my mom’s still alive, so that’s still going. Melissa’s mom died during the pandemic, and she was the remaining parent there, so Melissa became the executor of the estate. It becomes a full-time job.
I was shocked there aren’t people that just do it for you. I thought there’s gotta be somebody that just does all this. There really isn’t. You have to deal with a lawyer, and you have to deal with the government.
There’s also all this stuff of just like, she had an account and we can’t figure out how to access it, and they’re calling us and telling us we owe money on a thing that we don’t own, and all the annoying things of… Sometimes something happens, and you’re like, “Wait, what? Why is this cable company that I don’t use telling me I owe them money?” It’s that times a hundred, for somebody else. You weren’t doing it. They were doing it. Now you have to figure out how to turn their fricking internet off. It’s a full-time job.
Hey, Drew, ask your mom, are there services that just handle this stuff for you, like just say, “Just give me everything. Five me power of attorney. We’ll do it.”
Drew: That’s a great question. I’ll ask her. That’s separate from just an online portal that you can be like, “Here’s all my assets. Spit out a will,” right?
Craig: I’m talking about you have been named the executor by someone’s will. You have to now process all of their stuff, and you have to handle all of their accounts and their properties and their things. Is there a service that can basically, just for a fee or a percentage, do it for you, so you don’t have to take on the second job of combing through the mess of perhaps somebody’s not perfectly organized leavings?
Drew: I will ask her and get back to you.
John: Our listeners will probably also have an answer for that. I think that actually is a fascinating How Would This Be a Movie. I think the character who does that, it’s a nice way into a story. It’s a person who’s just cleaning up an estate, and then you realize there’s actually a greater mystery there. It’s potentially fascinating.
Craig: Let’s get Natasha Lyonne on the phone.
John: I think she’s there. To bring this back around to what we do with our papers, I would also say there’s probably services where if I didn’t have a daughter who was going to vanquish rights or she wasn’t interested in doing it but those rights are still valuable, there’s gotta be a company who I can assign those rights to, who will work to maximize the exploitation of those rights. For Big Fish, actually, there already is a company, but for other things, to maximize exploitation of those rights and then pay out a check on a regular basis, basically an agent for that stuff.
Craig: There are. There are definitely agents that represent writers posthumously, no question. They represent estates. An estate just goes to a literary agent. It’s the same thing that you would do in life, if the challenge is the same, which is, “Hey, sell this material to somebody. License it or whatever.” It’s the material. It’s not the living person that’s relevant. That feels pretty doable. That’s doable. Honestly, I’m dead. I don’t care what Melissa does with it. Whatever. I’m gone. I’m gone. It’s over. It’s over. Shut the door. Turn off the lights.
John: Pack everything in a bindle and leave.
Craig: Pack our thing in the cosmic bindle and walk the rails into eternity.
John: We’ll all be gold panning in Heaven.
Craig: Exactly. Just my gold pan, my bindle, my shoes that have the weird… The part that covers the toe is gone or lifted up for some reason. I’m a bit sooty, because they’re always sooty.
John: Yeah, some soot.
Craig: I’m eating directly from a can of beans.
John: Also, your hat has been flattened down. It had a weird quality to your hat.
Craig: There’s always a weird patch on the hat. Also, when they eat from the can of beans, they leave the lid on but just tilt it up. They never just take the lid completely off.
John: No, you gotta bend it back. Weirdly, their coffee pot is directly sitting in the flames.
Craig: The coffee pot is from an iron forge or something. That coffee has to be horrible.
John: Oh yeah, because the grounds are just soaking in the water.
Craig: Exactly. Those grounds were in your bindle all day, or god forbid your pocket of your far too loose trousers.
John: Good times.
Craig: The hobo life.
John: It’s the hobo life for me. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Drew: Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- The Man of Your Dreams by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz for The Cut
- The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes by Steven Johnson for The New York Times Magazine
- Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 Is Found Alive in Puerto Rico by Eduardo Medina for the New York Times
- The Counterfeit Queen of Soul by Jeff Maysh for Smithsonian
- The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts by Peter Vigneron for Outside
- A History Professor Takes On Hollywood by Katherine Rosman for the New York Times
- This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace
- Posthumously by Daniel Wallace
- The Last of Us: Soundtrack From the Series by David Fleming & Gustavo Santaolalla
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Orpheus (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 594: Bindles and Gold Pans, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
Craig Mazin: Hi, folks. This upcoming episode does feature some naughty language, so if you are in the car with children, put the earmuffs on or wait to play this when you’re at home.
Hello, my name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is 593rd episode of Scriptnotes, which is upsetting.
John is not with me today, also upsetting, but to counteract that, today on the show we have one of the best screenwriters simply of all time, and also one of the nicest people in Hollywood, which I agree is a low bar if that’s what you were thinking, but he would be a nice guy pretty much anywhere. We welcome Richard, AKA Richie as I call, Richard LaGravenese. Welcome to Scriptnotes.
Richard LaGravenese: Thank you, Craig. This is great. Good to see you.
Craig: It’s good to see you too. We are looking at each other over Zoom. Richie and I have known each other for many, many years. I have been a fan of his for many more years than I’ve known him. I’m going to run down a short list of some of the movies that he’s written, so that you can go ahead and drop your jaw like I do when I look at it all together like this.
The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Horse Whisperer, Beloved, Behind the Candelabra. These are all remarkable, highly acclaimed films, and yet we’re not going to be talking about any of those today, nor are we going to be talking about the seven other movies that Richie has directed.
What we are going to be talking about today is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is the 1994 film The Ref. The Ref was a criminally under-seen film. That’s why I want to dig into it, because I think from a screenwriting point of view, it’s remarkable.
Then in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we’ll be talking about men without friends, how and why men should make friends, and how friendless men emotionally burden the women in their lives. That ought to be fun.
Normally, this is where John would do news and follow-up, but I simply have none. Instead, we’re just going to get right into The Ref. The Ref was released in 1994. It was, I believe, a Touchstone movie. Touchstone was one of the, I was about to say adult film arms of Disney, but that doesn’t sound right. Non-family movie wing of Disney. It was a Christmas movie, and that’s why of course they released it in March. Why would they have done that, Richie? Do you know?
Richard: I don’t know.
Craig: It certainly impacted the movie’s prospects. When it came out at the time, it was a bit of a box office bum. I think looking at how much money it made, if it came out today and made that amount of money, everybody would be dancing in the streets, but the business was different back then. The expectations were a little higher for theatrical releases. The fact that it didn’t necessarily make money right away didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to catch on as a cult hit and maybe even more than a cult hit.
The story is by Marie Weiss, screenplay by Richie LaGravenese and Marie Weiss, and directed by the late, great Ted Demme. I’ll do the quick summary, and then we’ll dive into the origin story of The Ref.
Quick summary. It’s Christmas Eve. Caroline and Lloyd, a middle-aged couple living in an affluent and very white and uptight Old Bay Bridge, Connecticut… Is that right, Old Bay Bridge? Is that the town?
Richard: Yeah.
Craig: Are having a marriage crisis. As they debate the past, present, and future of their relationship, they’re taken hostage by Gus, a thief on the run, but who has captured whom? Gus is forced to listen to their ceaseless bickering, as well as pretend to be a marriage counselor when Lloyd’s extended family arrives for the holiday, but his intervention, ultimately at the point of a gun, is what finally leads Lloyd and Caroline to be honest and open with each other.
This always struck me as a modern Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf take on Ransom of Red Chief, the old O. Henry story.
Richard: That’s right.
Craig: Is that where it began for you?
Richard: Absolutely. It started as a take on The Ransom of Red Chief. It was an idea by my then-sister-in-law, Marie Weiss, who was coming out of advertising and wanted to work in the movies, and her then-husband, Jeff Weiss, who is one of the producers on it.
I had a deal at Disney, because originally, Disney had bought Fisher King but didn’t make it but then put me under contract for three movies. You give them an idea. They give you an idea. They never take your ideas and usually do things off the shelf. That’s where Little Princess happened. The first thing was Widows, which just recently got made by McQueen. That was originally there.
Craig: Wow.
Richard: That was the longest development thing. That’s when Touchstone and Disney used to give you literally 16 pages of notes in development. At the time, we were making it a comedy for Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn, so it didn’t turn out that way. I was on that for months, like a year. It was terrible.
Anyway, the last deal was we brought to them this idea of The Ref. That’s how it began. She had this idea of a Ransom of Red Chief idea with an arguing couple and a family and stuff. With me guaranteeing it, she got to do a first draft, and then I came in.
Craig: Then you came in and you started doing what you do. The movie, I suspect, given the fact that it was 1994, which was thick in the middle of every movie makes money because it’s going to be out on VHS and DVD. I suspect that all it really needed was a star. Then along comes Denis Leary. Now, Denis Leary was a bit of a phenomenon at the time.
Richard: He and Teddy, they had a partnership, kind of.
Craig: I see. Denis Leary was, I think at that point, primarily a stand-up comic. Then he was doing some stuff for MTV.
Richard: Yes. Interstitials they call them.
Craig: Yeah, interstitials.
Richard: Teddy directed them. They were all Cindy Crawford-centric and really funny. When I hired Teddy, when we met on the movie, he brought in Denis.
Craig: One question to start with is, Denis Leary has a very specific comic persona. That comic persona is brought through here. As a character, he’s a quasi-chain-smoking, fast-talking, angry guy. That was his thing was he’s angry, he’s very verbal, he doesn’t have time. Every frustrates him. It is a perfect match, really.
The first question is, did he just pick that script up and go, “Oh yeah, if I just be me and say these lines, everything will be fine,” or did you say, “Ah, okay, now that it’s Denis Leary, I need to adjust the character of Gus to fit Denis Leary.”
Richard: I remember I always loved those fast-talking comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He’s perfect for that, because he’s rapid fire. I now remember there were a few drafts that were going through, again, Disney development, Disney development. Then once we had a producer on it, it still wasn’t really clicking.
I remember it was me, Denis, Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, and Bruckheimer. I rewrote the script in 4 days, bringing in 30 pages and 60 pages and reading with the actors the next day, the next day, the next day, and built it like that.
One of the greatest feelings you can ever have as a writer, it happened with Robin Williams too, is when you make someone like Denis laugh from reading the script. He was reading it cold, and he would start laughing.
Then we found the voice of it. In those four days, I think we really found the rhythm and the voice of it a lot. It’s easy to write for Denis, because he has a kind of 1940s delivery. You know what I mean?
Craig: “Here’s the thing. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. Hey, ho.”
Richard: Breathy and fast and just quick. I know there was a couple of bits he improved, like biting the baby Jesus cooking and things like that. We stuck to the script pretty much. It was a free form on the script. On the floor, we needed to come up with something funnier. That was it. It was finding the rhythm and then his ear.
I had known Denis also earlier. We went to Emerson together. We were in different groups, because I was in the theater thing and he was in the comedy thing. He started the Comedy Workshop there. I remember his shows with his little troupe. They were always really, really funny.
Craig: I’m fascinated by the fact that so much came out of those four days. There is this interesting intensity that can happen when you almost have a theater setting. It’s crazy. You have to deliver.
You’re working with Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, who we will discuss purely as an actor in this podcast and not deal with all the other stuff. Those two alone, what’s interesting about them is how verbal they are as actors and how they’ve maybe never been more verbal than this. I want to give a little example here.
Right in the beginning, there’s two things that happen. The first thing is you establish the town. As the credits are coming on screen, the camera moves to this town, and we learn that it is a picture-perfect place, although there’s maybe the undercurrent of an issue, like the fact that the baby Jesus is missing from the [inaudible 00:09:44] in town square.
We eventually get to a marriage counselor, played by BD Wong. He is dealing with the angriest couple in the world. As they go back and forth, I always feel like the first five minutes of a movie teaches you how to watch the movie, and it teaches you a few things here. One of them is, tonally, these people are so hyper-verbal and hyper-literate in the way they talk to each other. I’m going to give an example here, because I’m fascinated by the way dialog works like this.
Caroline Chasseur: You took out a loan. I mean, it was your decision, not mine. You took out a loan from Satan Mom.
Lloyd Chasseur: She blames my mother for everything that’s gone wrong in her life. In the meantime, she never finishes anything she starts. Photography courses, existential philosophy courses, Scandinavian cooking classes.
Caroline: At least I go after my dreams.
Lloyd: To be what, somebody who takes photographs of lutefisk to prove the nothingness of being? No wonder our son’s so confused.
Craig: That’s gorgeous, right? He listed three classes, and then without a pause to think or put it together, he can come up with this imaginary idiot who’s used all the knowledge of those three classes. It really teaches you how this movie’s going to function and how these characters work. They both speak like this.
Talk a little bit about dancing on the edge of… One of the classic notes is, “This line feels written.” When you have actors like this, they can do it. There’s something almost play-like about it. Talk to me a little about how you addressed the manner in which they would speak and how literate and how many words and how writerly it would be.
Richard: I keep thinking of those first 15 minutes of His Girl Friday, when it’s Cary Grant and Ros Russell in the room. I’ve watched that scene about a million times. The rapidity and how they cram things into their references and you know exactly what they’re saying, and they’re insulting each other, they’re undermining and they’re funny, that rhythm was in my head as much as possible.
I’ve always over-written. I like literate movies. I like movies that are a little theatrical, that are not all exactly like real life. They’re just a little heightened. I think for comedy, it works.
Comedy, like music, goes through different grooves and different rhythms and stuff like that. It doesn’t always work, but I really think the classics do still work today, because there’s an intelligence behind them.
The rhythm was always in my head. I wanted to maintain it as much as possible. I had these two great theater actors, Judy and Kevin, who knew exactly how to find those rhythms. It’s funny when there are certain actors who just don’t know how to do that, today’s actors who don’t know how to talk fast. I was lucky. I was lucky with that and Christine Baranski, of course, later on.
Craig: We’ll get to her. You’re bringing up an interesting thing, which is that over time… It is a little distressing to me how much time has gone by, because this movie is almost 30 years old now, which is, I know, horrifying. Over time, actors have notoriously become mumblers, kind of introverts. I think acting quality has been too associated with that kind of navel-gazing and muttering. Here is this, where it’s a little bit like… There are certain bands where the singer is… Freddie Mercury is a great example. You understood every word he’s saying.
Richard: Articulation.
Craig: Articulation. There’s something so articulated about everybody here. The articulation of everyone is remarkable. I love that.
There’s another thing that happens here. First, we briefly meet Gus as a burglar who goes a little too far in trying to empty out a safe completely, but not before he’s sprayed by cat piss, as a very strange booby trap.
When we get back to the therapy session, one of the things that you do brilliant here is, inside of this one scene, in what John and I often refer to as this precious real estate of the first 5 or 10 minutes of a movie, you deliver so much exposition through therapy and through argument.
When that one scene is over, without us really noticing that anything has happened other than terrific entertainment and quite a few laughs, I know that Caroline has had an affair, that they haven’t had sex in a really long time, that they are in debt to Lloyd’s mother, whom Caroline hates and Lloyd defends, instinctively. Their son Jesse is a budding criminal delinquent.
Shortly after, in a connected scene where they’re driving home, I also understand that Caroline wants a divorce, and Lloyd isn’t going to agree to it. That choice is really interesting to me, because after a lot of this interesting exposition, all of which we will see echoed back at us, I’m not going to lead the witness. Why was it important that Caroline wanted a divorce and Lloyd wouldn’t agree to that?
Richard: Because I wanted there to be somewhere to go, because him agreeing to the divorce ultimately would be like an act of love, really. Right now, it’s about who’s got power and who’s going to get their way. That kept it open, so that there was conflict, like an engine going forward. If they both agree to the divorce, they’ve been decided, nothing is moving forward on that. I guess it could’ve worked, but it was more interesting to me leaving it open.
Craig: I think you made the right choice. Yes, it could’ve worked. They could’ve both agreed that they were going to get a divorce, and then at the end of it, they decide to call it off.
What I loved about the choice was that it felt… She says, “We’re miserable.” It felt like, okay, they are suspended in misery. These two people are stuck in this permanent misery where one wants to leave, one won’t let her leave. They can’t stand each other, but they can’t go anywhere. If nothing happens to them, this is going to be the way they are for the rest of their lives. That’s what I felt, because that is exactly when Gus enters. He is confronted now. It’s immediate. You guys don’t hide the premise. It’s right away, boom, “What did I do?”
There’s this wonderful scene where he gets in the car with them. We have a little bit of plot logic. I want to talk a little bit about the plot logic, actually, because it’s the most annoying part of writing these kinds of movies, but it’s essential. Gus has stolen jewels from, I think he’s the amusement park king.
Richard: I don’t remember.
Craig: It’s an old Willard. I think his name’s Willard. He’s out of town. There’s something about Willard, I guess his connections or whatever, that basically the theft of his stuff leads to this state police manhunt for the guy who’s done it. Why the manhunt? Why escalating it to the state police? Talk me through that storyline.
Richard: I can barely remember. Obviously, these are the least interesting parts of these movies for me to write. I’d rather just have people in a car or in a room talking for two hours and Virginia Woolf-ing it the whole time.
Making up this had to do with the McGuffin of the whole thing, because what happens at the end? If people aren’t searching for him, and it isn’t that big a thing, then there’s no tension of him having to hide in the house and pretend to be a therapist until he can figure out how to escape. We had to create this outside pressure cooker for him to stay inside the house. That really was all it was.
Again, it probably could’ve been better. It could’ve been a lot more logical or I just didn’t care. That’s the problem with me. I don’t outline. I get bored with that stuff. I just, “All right, that’s fine.” [inaudible 00:18:06].
Craig: In its own way, it works beautifully, because it’s simple. I can’t say that I understood necessarily why the one theft here led the whole state police manhunt to happen, but also, I kind of didn’t care, because when logic is in place to help me have a good time, I don’t interrogate it too much.
Richard: I think if you want to take the ride, you take the ride and you accept those things-
Craig: Exactly.
Richard: … because they’re not that important.
Craig: The way you set up the rules, it’s really simple. I don’t have to think much about it, because you don’t want me thinking about it. He can’t leave. He’s waiting for Murray, his getaway car guy, to call back and say he’s gotten a boat for them to escape. That’s it. He’s stuck in the house until-
Richard: Which is Richard Bright from The Godfather.
Craig: It is?
Richard: Yeah, he was in The Godfather.
Craig: He was in The Godfather?
Richard: Yeah.
Craig: Who was he in The Godfather?
Richard: He’s one of the younger… You’ll see him.
Craig: Oh, really?
Richard: He’s one of the assassins. He was a great guy. It was Richard Bright, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was Richard Bright. He was Murray.
Craig: Was he the one that was in the police uniform and shoots Barzini on the steps?
Richard: Yes.
Craig: Wow. I had no idea.
Richard: He’s in it throughout if you see. He’s in it throughout.
Craig: I had no idea. Oh my god.
Richard: Yeah, that’s Richard. He’s in a lot of movies.
Craig: That’s a connection I didn’t realize. Here’s another interesting fact for those of you following along at home. This movie I think was JK Simmons’s debut on screen.
Richard: It might’ve been.
Craig: I think it was. He plays Siskel. He’s a teacher at this military academy where Jesse, the son, is. We’ll talk about him in a bit.
We’ve set up everything we need to set up. You’ve done this beautifully. In the first, I don’t know, whatever it is, 10 minutes, I know everything about this town, I know everything about their relationship, I know everything about the rules that Gus has to deal with. Now we begin this triangle of characters for a while.
I’m also fascinated by this structure, because what you do is, once he meets them, once he takes them hostage, the movie splits into two halves. The first half is the three of them, that triangle. Then the second half is the larger family coming over. Talk a little bit about why and how you did that and focused in on the three of them first for quite an extended bit before bringing the family in.
Richard: They’re the heart. They’re the core of it. Then it was about showing the shark that’s coming towards the house to create some suspense and anticipation for what that collision is going to look like.
It was like a three-character play almost up until… I had ideas about turning this into a play, because it’s a one-set thing. You could have the whole thing in the house, in the living room for the entire evening.
Craig: Would you please do that?
Richard: I thought of doing that. It’d be really fun to do that. It was also for cutaways, because we had to skip time for them to prepare for the house. Denis had come up with the idea, had the idea of being the therapist. The fun of seeing this family coming towards them, I thought the audience was like, “Oh god, this is going to make complications in a farce kind of way, even better.”
Craig: It was incredible escalation. I appreciated, in a way, the quiet time, even though it was anything but quiet, between the three of them, because there’s a really interesting thing that happens almost immediately. First, as they’re driving to Caroline and Lloyd’s house, Lloyd blows right through a stop sign, which he says he didn’t see. There is no stop sign. Then when Gus gets them into the house and he’s got them tied up, he wants a cigarette. Lloyd says, “I don’t smoke, and Caroline quit.” As a smoker… Were you a smoker?
Richard: Yeah. Not like Denis, but yeah, I was.
Craig: I was as well, and so there was something absolutely delicious about a smoker seeing right into another smoker’s brain and going, “Where are they?” He knows she has has them. He knows instantly that there’s a hidden pack of cigarettes somewhere, and sure enough-
Richard: There are.
Craig: Because he has a gun, she has to reveal if they’re there. He says something to both of them that I think is kind of magical. In the film, he’s pushed them both over. They were in their chairs tied up.
Richard: [Crosstalk 00:22:28].
Craig: He’s pushed them backwards because they were bickering and they wouldn’t shut up. He comes over them. They’re accusing each other of being a liar. Gus says to Caroline, “You said you quit, didn’t you?” because she was like, “I never said I quit.” “You said you quit.” She admits it. Then he says to Lloyd, “You saw the stop sign, didn’t you?” Lloyd admits it.
In a way, what I love about this is the brilliance of starting the two of them in a marital counseling session with a completely ineffective counselor who cannot control them, and now here a guy with a gun is starting to make it happen. Talk a little bit, if you could, about the idea, even before Gus has to pretend to be a marriage counselor, the actual marriage counseling that he’s doing right here.
Richard: The joy of this for me, the most fun to me, was getting inside a marriage, and having been there myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but we used to do this a lot, where you get so into bickering with each other, doesn’t matter if you’re in public, doesn’t matter who’s there, everything goes away, and it’s just about who’s winning and who’s going to win. It’s like a match. It’s the information you use and the information you hold back and what you admit to and what you don’t admit to. This is how this marriage works. I was in the midst of that myself, and it was driving me crazy.
Having a character who just puts a gun to your head and says, “Tell me. Say what it was,” it’s like ah, then you finally get the truth. That’s how the marriage can heal, because they’re not really telling the truth to each other. It’s a power thing going on. They’re trying to each save their own skin. You lose the sight of the relationship, of the marriage. I think we do that a lot inside relationships when we bicker.
That idea was so real to me, of getting so lost in the bickering that you don’t care who is there, who’s around, you just have to get your point across kind of a thing. That was the fun of writing all that stuff, and then having him just cut right through it.
Craig: Cutting right through it is fantastic. There’s another thing that you set up so smartly. I would say to everybody, one of the things to do here is read this screenplay. Watch the movie. Read the screenplay. What Richie does in that first scene with BD Wong, who’s the failing marital counselor, is set up a situation where the marriage counselor says, “I’m not here to take sides. Basically, I’m not a referee. I don’t blow the whistle and say who created the foul.”
Richard: That’s right.
Craig: Here’s a guy who’s absolutely doing that, whether he realizes it or not. He is a referee. He’s saying, “This is what’s true, and this is what’s true.” In doing so, you start to see what they need, which I thought was a fascinating thing.
You described the incoming family as a shark. Talk to me about this. We meet the incoming family. They’re at dinner at a restaurant. They’re eating there because they know that Caroline is going to serve them something horrible and inedible, so they’re getting food first. Talk a little bit about this family now, these other ones.
Richard: Again, pulling from personal experience, the idea of a rich, controlling in-law that was a matriarch that was crippling the marriage, I liked. It wasn’t exactly my situation, but it was close, in a way, about how money can infantilize adult people around them. I wanted to get back at my in-laws for doing that, so I put all of the venom that I… You know when you have to be quiet at family gatherings and you want to say [inaudible 00:26:17]. I would just put it in the movie, like nailing yourself to a cross kind of a thing.
Out of that came her never approving of Judy Davis’s character, of her over her son and being too maternal love for the son and controlling and crippling him. I saw adult people crippled by their parents because their parents had money. My parents never had money. They always had problems. My dad was a cab driver. They never had that power over me. It was the first time I had witnessed it in that family. I played with that idea.
Her other son also being a soft doughboy. No one could stand up to her. He’s married to Christine Baranski, who’s just full of resentment and is trying to get along, is trying to make it through, but then when she sees what happens with Judy and Kevin, it gives her the liberation to finally tell the truth as well. It was really just a revenge thing for me to just get back at people who were too controlling.
Craig: I have to ask, since so much of this has been pulled from your own marriage, your own family, your in-laws, when the movie came out, did you get any difficult phone calls or no?
Richard: Went right over their head. No.
Craig: Isn’t that amazing?
Richard: Yep.
Craig: That’s amazing. People just can’t see themselves.
Richard: It’s I guess a good thing.
Craig: Were you worried about it?
Richard: No.
Craig: You knew that it would go like that. Wow. That’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie, because we’ve been with this very literate, bickering, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf trio, and then we go to this other group that is not that. They seem regular in one sense.
I think this was my first exposure to Christine Baranski. She is brilliant, because she’s so frustrated and angry about this entire situation and constantly takes it out on her kids. I think she says something like, “Be happy. It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!” I do that all the time. Every time Christmas rolls around, I say it just like her, so angry.
We also, I think, meet the antagonist here in the purist dramatic sense, Glynis Johns, who is absolutely brilliant in this movie as Mother Rose. Appears to be the antagonist. Myself, when I’m writing, I don’t necessarily think about who’s the protagonist, who’s the antagonist.
Richard: I don’t either.
Craig: I’m wondering if in retrospect you would agree that she is the villain if there is a villain.
Richard: Yes.
Craig: That comes through pretty clearly. There’s something that happens prior to the family arriving, and that is a connection between Caroline and Gus that struck me as really interesting. They have a conversation as she’s leading him upstairs to find some band-aids for his dog bite that he got when he was escaping the crime. She tells him things. She tells him that she and Lloyd weren’t always like this and that they, in fact, had a restaurant, she worked, and they had a dream, and it fell apart.
I’m curious what you were thinking, because this feels so natural to me. What drew her to him? Why does she open up to him so easily? Why does she want to take care of him like that?
Richard: I don’t know that she’s taking care of him. I think she respects him. He’s about the truth. There’s no lying with him. I think that’s in the line too where he turns to her and says, “What are we, girl friends?” That was when Denis laughed at the script when he read that for the first time.
Craig: It’s so funny. “What are we, girl friends?”
Richard: She starts to warm up. She needs someone to talk to, and she doesn’t have anyone. He is this symbol of… He’s all about the truth. He’s all about no bullshit. It’s life or death. I think she feels the need.
I wanted to humanize. I had to start planting what was good about what they had and how do I bring that out, so that you understand there was something there. Otherwise, they’re just bickering. What are they fighting for? I had to bring up the past any way I could figure it out. Then later on, when it all explodes and then they start saying what happened in the past, then you understand. I had to give little seeds of that, so that there was something, a dream there.
I got too sentimental with it, so he undercuts it. He doesn’t want to hear it. I think she wants to open up and figure it out and thinks he can help.
Craig: There’s an interesting theme that’s going through, that exists separate from… I think the main takeaway of the movie really is, in a very simple way, that communication and honesty is really the only way to salvation when you’re dealing with a relationship that is not working.
There’s this other theme going on, which is the haves versus the have-nots. It’s throughout the whole thing. It comes out here when they’re walking up the stairs, specifically because he notes that they have a shagol [ph], an actual shagol. She’s like, “If you want it, you can have it.” She doesn’t care, be presumably, it’s something that Mother Rose paid for or bought. He finds that so offensive and points out that, “You people, you probably never even worked a day.” It did strike me that she wanted his approval as well, when she says that’s not true.
Richard: She wants his respect. She wants him on her side, which also happens in bickering couples, no matter who’s around. Whatever witnesses are there to the bickering, you want them on your side, so I think so. I think he’s pointing to the fact that, “You don’t even know what you have. You don’t value what you have.” She’s like, “No, you don’t understand. That’s not the point. It’s the cost. Is it worth it?”
Craig: That is an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered, that she’s buttering up the ref. She’s getting him on her side.
Richard: As a friend almost, yeah, like an odd liaison.
Craig: That leads to this big second movement of this story, and that is when the family arrives. There is something that happens here that I think is really educational for anybody that’s writing farce, because it definitely becomes farcical, at least for a while, in a fun way.
What you do here, and again, there’s just an elegance to it, is rules. The rules are simple. Jesse, the son, has come home. They’ve tied him up and put him upstairs. No one can go upstairs. Rule number one, no one can go upstairs. Rule number two, the three of us always have to be together. That is enough. That’s enough.
Richard: That’s hard enough.
Craig: That’s hard enough. The family arrives. A question about the family. You are Italian. You come from, I assume, a Catholic background, Catholic upbringing?
Richard: Yep.
Craig: I’m Jewish. I come from a Jewish upbringing. You’re a New York Catholic. I’m a New York Jew. It’s essentially the same thing. It’s basically the same, but this family is not. My wife is Episcopalian from New England. This reminds me more of that world. Talk a little bit about how you were able to present that kind of WASPiness so accurately and beautifully?
Richard: I remember, I think Marie came up with, which I thought was just funny, that they were Huguenots.
Craig: French Huguenots. We’re French Huguenots.
Richard: That cracked me up when she told me that.
Craig: Mid-18th century French Huguenot.
Richard: Yeah, which I thought was really funny at the time. I’m speaking at the time, because my situation is very different now. At the time, the in-laws were Scarsdale Jewish.
Craig: Got it. Let me translate for everybody else, Scarsdale Jewish. It’s in Westchester. It’s fancier, richer, but still Jewish. You’ve got one foot in the old ways, and you’ve got one foot in the golf club and all that, but you’re not old money rich.
Richard: There still were a lot of, I want to say there were affectations, but the way things are done, how things are done, the kind of dinner parties and what you say. The contrast was, when the shit hit the fan, all that went right out the window, and they were just like Italians, emotional and brutal and all that stuff, but all the upper crust stuff. Part of it was from that. I think it was just osmosis of watching a lot of films and reading things about how those families work and the Philip Barry world of Philadelphia Story and Holiday and those kind of things.
Craig: It’s interesting.
Richard: It’s a New York sensibility too, to a certain extent, an Upper East Side sensibility.
Craig: I think outsiders often do those things the best, because we have been watching them. Like you say, you’ve been watching those things.
Richard: You absorb it.
Craig: It’s funny. I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and Maureen McCormick was there, Maureen McCormick who played Marcia on The Brady Bunch. I told her how my sister and I used to watch her and that show and yearn for that kind of… We thought of that as the best kind of life, this WASPy… Nobody yelled. Nobody was screaming. Nobody got hit.
Richard: Nobody got hit.
Craig: It was so wonderful.
Richard: No plates were thrown.
Craig: No plates were thrown. Your mother and father weren’t screaming at each other constantly. I love the notion of the outsider creating this but then also going, “There are worms in the dirt underneath this.”
Richard: Something underneath there. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Craig: There’s a fantastic moment in this dinner where as things devolve, and they devolve rather quickly, Mother Rose mentions, quite casually, Caroline’s infidelity, the fact that Caroline cheated on her precious son, whom she’s awful to anyway. The fact that-
Richard: That he told his mother.
Craig: That he told his mother, that fact just sends her into a rage.
Richard: As it would.
Craig: As it would. She storms off, which means that Gus and Lloyd both have to follow her. They go into the kitchen, and there’s the following exchange.
Richard: I love this scene.
Craig: This is one of my favorites. She says, “You won’t talk about it in therapy, but you’ll discuss it behind my back, with that bitch.” Lloyd says, “Hey, she’s my mother.” Gus says, “She’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.”
Richard: He’s telling the truth.
Craig: That is the best referee moment in the entire movie, because somebody has to say it.
Richard: Somebody has to say it. Exactly.
Craig: Somebody has to say, “No, I just showed up here. I have no vested interest in this fight, but I’m telling you, she’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd,” which my wife and I have been saying just as a general phrase about anybody we think is a bitch. We’ll just say, whether it’s a man or a woman, “He’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” We always just put Lloyd at the end.
Richard: That means so much. I love that. That’s fantastic. That makes me really happy.
Craig: A fucking bitch, Lloyd. It’s the ultimate referee moment. It goes by very quickly. It’s not this big, dramatic… Nor does the conversation stop. It keeps rolling. That is almost like the match that lights the fuse that eventually inevitably leads to everybody saying everything they think.
Talk about how to do that scene, where you’ve brilliantly jammed all this gunpowder into a barrel. How do you blow these things up? How do you create a sequence in one room, where no one’s really moving around that much, and yet everything explodes?
Richard: The event is the act of opening presents at Christmas. That’s what you hang it on, like a tree. Then the heartbeat of it was the relationship between Kevin and Judy and them speaking again as if no one’s in the room and then getting everything out. Then you have all these people now who have somewhat of an interest invested in it, which is different than what we’ve had before, so they get to throw in their stuff and bring up their own stuff. The motor is the couple. Then all these other pieces come around when the timing and the moment feels right. Example is they’re talking the gifts, and Christine Baranski shouts, “Isotoners.”
Craig: Slipper socks.
Richard: The slipper socks. I think one version was Isotoner. “Slipper socks, medium.” All the resentments start to come out. The focus was on the relationship. That was the steady. That was the through line. Then everything else could jump off of it when it felt right.
Craig: There is this amazing moment where after watching an entire movie of these two tearing into each other and then watching this entire dinner with them tearing into each other and then this sequence here where they’re really tearing into each other, it finally comes out that Caroline wants a divorce, and they are. He’s fine. “We’re going to get divorced.” Gary, the stupid brother, says, “Why?”
Richard: He was so sweet.
Craig: It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s so wonderfully innocent.
Richard: He’s very sweet.
Craig: So sweet. Oh my god, the look in his eyes where he looks like he was stunned by this thing. Everybody else is like, “What?” In this discussion, they finally get to the truth. What’s interesting is the ref, Denis Leary, in this sequence, says, “I don’t think anything.” He just-
Richard: Stands back.
Craig: Yes. You understood that the scam that he’s playing here, just for the purposes of the rest of the family, is that he’s posing as the marriage counselor. That’s to excuse his presence. He, as it turns out, is kind of the perfect marriage counselor. He knows exactly when to say, “You’re a liar. No, you’re a liar. She is a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” Here, it’s as if he actually gets invested. It feels like he’s invested.
Richard: This is the moment when it’s not about him hiding and it’s not about the robbery and it’s not about anything. He actually has been with these people all night, and he’s seeing what’s happening and is like, “No, this has to happen.” He just steps back.
He could’ve stopped it. He could’ve rerouted it, but he doesn’t, because he has heard her side of it, and he kind of is understanding Kevin’s side a little bit more. He knows this thing has to happen, and so he steps back and he just watches it. It’s an act of grace that he gives it. It’s not about him in that moment at all.
Craig: It’s a really interesting decision. It goes again to, I think there are a lot of movies when people are thinking about them or talking about them or when they try and write them and they’re wondering who the main character is, they will sometimes confuse main character and protagonist as the same thing.
What’s interesting is Gus maybe is the main… Denis Leary I suppose is the main character in a sense, but he’s certainly not the protagonist here. To the extent that it’s about people changing, it does feel like it’s about both Lloyd and Caroline, although I would argue ultimately, as is the case with almost every story, it comes down to one person making one choice that finally changes things.
I think for me, that moment is when in the middle of their arguing, Mother Rose says, “What does it even matter? They’re getting divorced,” and Lloyd turns to her and says, “Mother, is it possible for you to shut the fuck up for 10 seconds?” That to me is the moment where the protagonist there, I think-
Richard: Is Lloyd.
Craig: … is Lloyd.
Richard: That’s what the marriage needed all along.
Craig: All along.
Richard: To stand up to his mother.
Craig: There is this wonderful tradition in movies about psychological issues, relationship problems, and therapy, where it often comes down to one thing. I assume you go to therapy. You’re like me.
Richard: Been there 24 years now.
Craig: It would be great if therapy worked like this. In real life, it doesn’t, but in the movies, it often does come down to these little moments, like, “It’s not your fault,” or, “Mother, shut the fuck up. It’s almost like the walls come tumbling down.
Richard: One-word truths and then all the walls come tumbling down.
Craig: Everybody starts saying the truth. It is a wonderful conclusion of things. Before the family can be healed, there’s also the story of the son. What’s interesting about him, we’ve given him short shrift here, is that he is a criminal delinquent. It seems to be a reflection of the fact that his family home is broken. That’s what it feels like. He wants to go with Gus.
This is where there is this pathos to Gus’s sadness and a weight to him, even though he’s a funny character and he’s a burglar and he has the gun. We like him quite a bit, because he didn’t shoot anybody. He actually made things better. He expresses a sadness here. I just wanted you to talk a little bit about what is the story of Gus. Does it matter? Is he like one of the Greek gods that shows up in The Odyssey and then leaves?
Richard: It’s close to that, I guess. When I think about it, I don’t know that there was a lot of backstory. I think he had a lot of empathy for the kid. I have to be honest. This was the one part of the movie that I had… I wasn’t crazy about the casting. I like that kid, but I didn’t think he was right for the part. There wasn’t enough edge to him for me.
When I think about this storyline, I have to say, when Teddy and I hired Simpson and Bruckheimer to be our producers, because we had to pick from the Disney stable-
Craig: Got it.
Richard: We wouldn’t pick anyone that wouldn’t drink with us. Each one of the candidates we met at a bar. Teddy would lean [inaudible 00:46:08] go, “No, he’s a spy. We can’t hire him. No, he works for the studio.”
Simpson and Bruckheimer were a little bit insane. They had already had Top Gun and all this stuff. Then they made a deal. They saw this as, “Oh, Denis Leary, MTV. This is going to be a comedy for teenagers,” which was a big mistake. Don Simpson, who was a character in his own right, he detoured the script by making me do a rewrite that was all about the kid, because that was his thing. He wanted it to be about the kid.
We had the reading with the actors. The script had changed so much that Judy Davis got up and went, “This isn’t the part,” all of a sudden. I said, “I know. I agree with you. Please. I’m fast.” That’s when the four days happened, after that.
Craig: Oh, interesting.
Richard: The kid, that storyline was always, for me, a little… All I remember is we wanted to Gus to have this sort of humanity, hinting at a past, that he understood this kid in a way that his parents didn’t. I don’t know that we had any big past for him. We didn’t want to get too sentimental or too bogged down in that. He was going to help the kid in some way as well by his presence being there. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was more like a Greek god that comes in and out.
Craig: Yeah, or like The Rainmaker. I always think of The Rainmaker, because I love that movie and just the idea of someone who shows up with bad intentions, a con artist, a thief, and yet is exactly what is required to un-suspend the misery, basically.
Richard: And get the truth out.
Craig: And get the truth out, exactly. Finally, at the end, the family is healed. Gus escapes. There is one of the greatest lines ever in history. Lloyd and Caroline are about to kiss, finally, when they are interrupted by Lloyd’s nephew, who says, “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” It’s one of the greatest lines in history.
Richard: I love the way Denis did it. There’s an earlier line where he’s so upset with her, he wants to punch her. He goes, “Your husband isn’t dead. He’s hiding.”
Craig: “He’s hiding.” It’s so great.
Richard: Denis was great in that. The whole time he loses his shit.
Craig: [Crosstalk 00:48:34].
Richard: He’s like, “[inaudible 00:48:35]. Let me at her.”
Craig: They get it. They’re like, “We get it, but you can’t.”
Richard: They were holding him back.
Craig: They were holding him back.
Richard: I love that. Denis was so good in that.
Craig: “Mothers are supposed to be nice and sweet and patient and forgiving.” She really is horrible. With that wonderful mid-Atlantic accent, that not American, not British, kind of moneyed way of talking is absolutely wonderful.
Now, I read somewhere that the end here, which is a very happy ending, because Gus does escape with Murray on a boat, that that end was not originally the end.
Richard: It was re-shot.
Craig: Re-shot.
Richard: I believe we re-shot it, yeah. The original ending was Gus sacrifices himself for them in some way and gives himself up. Disney, they wanted it to be-
Craig: Happy.
Richard: Yeah. We had to re-shoot the ending.
Craig: It’s really interesting, because I remember those days.
Richard: They’re still here.
Craig: Studios still give notes and stuff, but there was something about the 90s. Maybe it was cocaine. I don’t know. There were so many notes. So many notes.
Richard: They’re still here. They’re still here. Streaming services are like that.
Craig: They’re still doing it. Through the crisis of writing drafts that you didn’t want to write, featuring storylines you didn’t want to feature, having Disney tell you to change the ending, all of that stuff, and then ultimately, all of it goes away in the crucible of those four days where you could just do the work.
Richard: Exactly, with the people that you’re doing it with, and not the executives, who are five steps removed and don’t really know how things work and don’t really know how things are made.
Craig: And also don’t know to release Christmas movies at Christmas. It’s the weirdest. Actually, March is the worst possible month, because Christmas happened, but it’s not a funny, ironic thing that it’s in the summer. It’s fucking March.
Richard: I also think we opened on the same day as Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was huge.
Craig: Oof.
Richard: Huge. I think it was the same weekend.
Craig: Lots of reasons why the movie initially didn’t do well, but it is something that I think adds character.
Richard: It was more, like I said, for a teenage MTV audience instead of an adult audience. I think that was part of the problem.
Craig: They must’ve been incredibly confused by that first scene, which I still think, if you understand what the movie is and who it’s meant for, is absolutely wonderful. Richie, we’re going to do a little segment now we call Drew Has A Question.
Drew Marquardt: I have a quick question on The Ref, because in the presents scene, I realized as I was watching it that we’re watching Lloyd do a monologue in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t feel that way. You’re hanging on every word. Very often, monologues aren’t done very well in movies. I was wondering if you could speak to how you set us up for that. Were you building to that the whole way through, or is that about following the logic of the moment?
Richard: I think it’s a few things. Like you said, it was building up all the way through. You want the audience to feel the way Judy Davis and Denis feel. They want this guy to blow up. They want this guy to tell the truth finally, especially when the mother enters the scene. You’re anticipating that, and you’re going, “Oh, here it comes. Now here it is.” You’re ready for it.
Another testament is that it’s just Kevin Spacey is a great actor, and he knew how to time it and he knew how to deliver it. The way Teddy directed it, with all the different characters there and their reactions and how to make it keep moving forward, keep moving forward. A lot of the energy of that is because of Kevin’s performance and everything that we set up along the way.
Finally, he’s blowing his top. In the first scene with the therapist, he’s snide, he’s sarcastic. They’re playing the game with each other of how they communicate, which isn’t the truth. It’s one-upmanship. This is finally taking the mask off. Okay, this is it.
It was revealing to me, and this happens in relationships, where everybody has their story, everybody has their side, but it’s not the whole story. Everything she said was true, but she forgot this. She forgot she wasn’t happy in that little apartment. She forgot this part of it. She didn’t understand the pressure he was under. To me, that was very honest.
It happens in all relationships, where you just get into the bickering, and you’re not really getting to how different people see things and their experiences and go, “Oh, I never thought of that. I never thought you were feeling that. I didn’t understand that. I thought it was power or something, and it wasn’t.” It was honest, and it was a lot of Kevin’s performance.
Craig: It’s also really interesting that you pull a little trick in that monologue, which is you don’t let him finish it. Everyone basically interrupts him, as if they’re too busy with their own crap. He has to pick up a fireplace poker and whack the Christmas tree over and over.
Richard: To get a symbol of why they’re there.
Craig: Exactly. “Shut up. I’m not done.” Then he gets-
Richard: The corpse has the floor.
Craig: The corpse has the floor. That reminds me so much of something that my dad used to say, which I won’t say on the air. It was the idea of feeling like you weren’t alive, the notion that you were being treated like a corpse that had been stuffed and stood up against the wall, not to be listened to and not to be considered.
Richard: Your father said that?
Craig: He would say something like that.
Richard: Wow.
Craig: I’ll save that for one of our confessional episodes. Richie, that was a fantastic discussion.
Richard: Thank you. This was great.
Craig: It’s amazing. I hope people do watch The Ref. I know for a fact it’s available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.
Richard: Is it on Disney Plus? I don’t know if they have it. Do they have it?
Craig: That’s a great question. I don’t know.
Drew: I don’t think it’s on Disney Plus, but we’ll put a link to it in the show.
Craig: Classic Disney.
Richard: [Crosstalk 00:54:43].
Craig: They’re still screwing this movie over. Guys, come on, put The Ref on. It’s so good. It is a fantastic Christmas, holiday tradition. We like to watch it every Christmas.
Richard: That makes me happy. Thank you.
Craig: We love it so much. Thank you for it. Now at the end of our regular show, we like to do something called One Cool Thing.
Richard: What’s yours?
Craig: I’ll tell you. I like to solve puzzles. I’m a big puzzle guy. For those of you out there who do enjoy, as I do, solving lots of puzzles, you will find oftentimes that you need to refer to the letters as number, so A as 1, B is 2, and so forth. Braille, binary, there’s something called a pigpen cipher, Morse code. You have to go around looking for all these things.
There’s an organization called Puzzled Pint. I think they’ve been my One Cool Thing before. They have, in one easy pdf, basically not all of, but a lot of the codes you would need to use, like NATO alphabet and semaphore and all the other ones I’ve mentioned, including binary, ternary, and hex. It’s incredibly useful, all in one sheet of puzzle solving, if you are, like me, a puzzle solver. We’ll include that link.
Richard: I love puzzles.
Craig: Oh, then listen.
Richard: I do the crossword on the subway every day.
Craig: Fantastic. You may find this interesting, especially if you expand into some of the stranger puzzles out there, which have begun to occupy me daily.
Richard: Did you Wordle?
Craig: Of course I do Wordle. Yes, I do Wordle.
Richard: I do Wordle.
Craig: We had Josh. What’s Josh Wordle’s actual name? Is it Wordle? It’s not Wordle. What’s his name?
Drew: It’s Josh Wardle.
Craig: Wardle. Wardle.
Richard: Wardle? Really?
Drew: Yeah.
Richard: Wow.
Craig: We had Josh Wardle on the show, who invented Wordle.
Richard: Wow.
Craig: Big Wordle fan, and also the Spelling Bee and the regular crossword as well. Do you have One Cool Thing for us, Richie?
Richard: Oh, man. I thought about this, and all I could think about was food.
Craig: Oh, we love food. Last week, my One Cool Thing was food. What’s yours?
Richard: There’s a place in New York, a couple of them, called Levain Bakery. Levain Bakery comes up with these cookies that are gigantic. One of them is a chocolate peanut butter. Literally, it’s a meal. You can only take little bites of it every day, because you eat the whole thing, you’re dead.
Craig: You’re dead.
Richard: It’s that big. They have a sour cream coffee cake. My mother and I always had this thing where we had to have cake, because she used to say it helps just to make the coffee go down. This is what she used to say. I had this thing in my head that I need cake to drink coffee or I can’t drink coffee.
Craig: It won’t go down.
Richard: It won’t go down. They have this sour cream coffee cake. I literally go to be at night thinking, “When I wake up, I can have the sour cream coffee cake.” I get so excited by it. It’s really good. It’s dense. It’s got all this sugar and maple stuff in the middle of it, and sour cream.
Craig: Oh, wow.
Richard: It’s a really great coffee cake. The other thing I can recommend is I discovered the benefits of celery juice. I buy this big bottle of Suji, I think it’s S-U-J-I or something, celery juice. It actually helps, because I have a terrible, terrible, acidic, nervous, ulceric kind of stomach, and it really helped. That kind of juice helps. There’s a couple things.
Craig: Those are both excellent recommendations. It’s Levain? Is that what it is, Levain Bakery?
Richard: L-E-V-A-I-N.
Craig: Levain.
Richard: Bakery. Great cookies. They deliver.
Craig: Do they ship?
Richard: Yeah, I think so. I use Try Caviar. They’re on that. I think they could ship to you. Their cookies are amazing. They have an oatmeal. All their cookies are gigantic.
Craig: Just like manhole covers.
Richard: They’re really good. They’re dense.
Craig: I love it. I’m going to unfortunately have to go and buy some of that stuff now. Thank you for that.
Richard: Thank you for this. This was really wonderful, because I don’t think anybody remembers the movie or thinks about it. Thank you. This meant a lot to me. Thank you very much.
Craig: I hope that we bring a whole new generation in.
Richard: And to Teddy.
Craig: Yes, and to Teddy, wherever he is, watching or listening.
Richard: And Denis too.
Craig: He’s wonderful.
Richard: That’s right.
Craig: That’s right. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro today is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you will find transcripts and the signup for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts, and they’re great. Cotton Bureau. So soft. Highly recommend them, Richie. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we are about to record now. Richie, Drew, thank you so much for a terrific episode.
Richard: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.
Drew: Thank you, Richie.
[Bonus Segment]
Craig: Premium members, welcome back. Little, short treat for you here. Little bonus. I want to talk with Richie about… Because we’re both middle-aged guys. Apparently, middle-aged men have problems making and keeping friends.
There’s been some really interesting articles about this. There was one in the New York Times. This one was back in November of ’22, an article by Catherine Pearson titled Why is it So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends? “American men are stuck in a friendship recession. Here’s how to climb out.”
There’s also a slightly different view here back in May of 2019. This was in Harper’s Bazaar, written by Melanie Hamlett, Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. “Toxic masculinity and the persistent idea that feelings are a female thing has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally stunted islands, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It’s women who are paying the price.”
First of all, I guess one question I have is, friends-wise… I have a lot of friends. Have you encountered the middle-age man not having friends issue?
Richard: First of all, I’m not a straight man. That’s one.
Craig: Boom.
Richard: That’s been a change since we saw each other last.
Craig: You were.
Richard: Not really.
Craig: I know.
Richard: I pretty much assumed everyone knew so I didn’t have to say anything. No, not really. My wife knew before we were married. It was a second coming out. Sorry, I came out-
Craig: Second coming is a much more [crosstalk 01:01:43].
Richard: I came out when I was 18, but only halfway, not with my family. I don’t know that it’s about toxic masculinity or anything like that. I do have friends. They’re mostly writers, like you, that I know. I used to have friends through the marriage. I don’t have them as much anymore.
It is hard to meet people. I also don’t like a lot of people now. The world is so fucked up. I really can’t stand people. I’m becoming a hermit. It’s hard to meet people when you’re a hermit. You meet them through work. I just directed this movie and made lovely new friends there. Again, it’s through work. I think something that women don’t understand, maybe not, this is probably wrong, but we’re defined by what we do.
Craig: Men, you mean?
Richard: Yeah. When we’re not doing what we do, we are invisible. We disappear. There’s a lot of pressure about that. I think we find friends through what we do. I don’t really have sport hobbies or stuff like that. I have a trainer, a gym guy that I love, that I talk to a lot and I’m with a lot. I don’t know. How about you? Are most of your friends in the business, or do you have outside friends?
Craig: Most of my friends are in the business. Most of my friends are writers. We do get an interesting built-in fraternity, I think, in a sense, because there are a lot of people that do what we do, and we’re all complainers. I find that complaining about things really can bring people together.
Richard: Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, writing is a solitary activity. Years and years ago, because we’re in New York and not LA, where you guys know each other and see each other more, Robert Kamen used to live here and he started this dinner thing. It was me, Robert Kamen, Tony Gilroy, and at the time Stephen Schiff, but now Scott Frank is here. We would have monthly dinners just to check in. That was really nice. We went out of our way and had a beautiful dinner, complained, drank. It was really a great thing that we did every month almost. Now that’s dissipated as well. I think especially for writers, male writers, it’s a good thing to do, to reach out and create those groups.
Craig: I talked about my father briefly before in the episode. It did strike me that in his later years, I never really thought about my dad and friends. It wasn’t like my dad had a group of guy friends.
Richard: No, my dad either. He was alone. It was all for my mother, all for my mom.
Craig: Exactly. It was that way until my dad died. His relationships came down to his wife, and that was it, and then family if you had to have those family holidays and things. It does strike me as sad. It is an interesting concept that men who can’t keep a friend group of men start to overburden their wife or their partner, because that’s the only person they deal with. That’s the only person who hears their problems.
Richard: Their only outlet.
Craig: There is no way to process.
Richard: I think that’s true.
Craig: Part of what they discuss here is how hard it is, like you said, for men to meet each other. You’re looking for a friend version of Grinder, basically. I don’t know what we would call it. Women do seem to just meet each other and become friends so easily.
Richard: Open up to each other more easily.
Craig: Exactly. I guess we don’t have the solution here. How old are you, Drew?
Drew: I’m 33. I’m getting married this fall. I’m doing the list for the bachelor party. There’s my brother.
Richard: Who do you want to spend time with? Who do you want to hang out with?
Craig: It’s happened to you.
Drew: It’s happening slowly, in little bits. It’s strange. I think honestly, I’m closer with women than I am with men, for the most part. It’s also interesting talking about burdening your wives too. I found a little book called Point Omega where one of the characters has a thing. He’s fresh off a divorce and doesn’t know why it fell apart. One of the characters says, “It’s because you told her everything, not because you told her anything.” I always think about that. If you burden your wife or anything with that oversharing and feeling like they have to be responsible for all your feelings-
Richard: That’s too much. No one person should be responsible for everything. That’s why friends are really good to have, to share other things with. We got to fix this. I don’t know how we do this.
Craig: I don’t know either, but I urge men to make an effort. I think part of it is just making an effort and not being afraid to say, “Hey look, I’m actually fucking lonely.” You have to show a little bit of vulnerability, because if you’re just like, “Hey, you want to get lunch?” guys are like, “No, not really.” If I hear a guy say, “Hey, listen, I’m actually having some problems and I need advice. Do you want to have lunch?” absolutely.
Richard: I’d be right there for them, yeah.
Craig: Then you start to create… You also get perspective. Richie, you were married for I don’t know how long, a long time.
Richard: 35, yeah.
Craig: 35 years. I’m getting close. I’m at 27, I think. When you can talk to other people who are in marriages that are that long, the complaining feels very good, because you realize this is normal.
Richard: You’re not alone. You’re not alone in it. That’s a really important thing. That’s really important.
Craig: Otherwise, it just feels like you’re stuck in something. You don’t realize that other people are like, “Oh, it’s fine. I feel that. It’s okay. It’s totally normal.” I don’t think we solved the problem necessarily, but at least we can urge you out there, if you are a man, particularly if you are heading into your middle ages, make an effort. It’s worth it to have some buds. Richie, thanks again.
Richard: Thank you very much. You’re a bud.
Links:
- The Ref on YouTube, Amazon and IMDb
- Richard LaGravenese on IMDb
- The Ransom of Red Chief by O. Henry
- The Ref’s Opening Scene
- Puzzled Pint’s Code Sheet
- Levain Bakery
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matt Davis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 593: The Ref with Richard LaGravenese, Transcript first appeared on John August.
After a week on the picket line, John and Drew meet up to highlight listeners they’ve met, which productions have been shut down, what to expect from the upcoming DGA negotiations, and what non-WGA members can do to support striking writers.
We then answer questions to help listeners navigate the strike rules. Are writers are allowed to submit to labs and fellowships? Are we supposed to boycott struck companies? And how does the strike affect your favorite weekly podcast?
Links:
- Inevitable Foundation
- Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund)
- The Duffer Brothers announce Stranger Things production is paused on Twitter
- ‘Writers On Set’ by George R.R. Martin
- DGA Is United, Prepared and Ready to Fight for Our Future by Lesli Linka Glatter for Variety
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: One Week In first appeared on John August.
John is joined by Megana Rao to give us a first-hand account of last night’s WGA member meeting at the Shrine auditorium in Los Angeles.
Links:
- Megana Rao on Twitter
- Sarah Schaefer on the proposed “day rate.”
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post SC8 – The Shrine first appeared on John August.
John and Drew talk with writers on the picket line outside of CBS Studios in LA, who tell us what they’re currently not writing, what’s changed since the 2007 strike, and why this strike is so important to them.
Guests include WGA board member Zoe Marshall and previous Scriptnotes guest Megan Amram. Thanks to everyone who talked to us!
Links:
- WGA Strike Announcement
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- RSVP for WGA member meetings in Los Angeles and New York.
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post SC7 – On the Picket Line – Day 1 first appeared on John August.
Just after midnight, the WGA officially went on strike. John explains what happened in the negotiating room and sets his sights on the picket line. Where do the negotiations stand? What are the next steps for WGA members?
Links:
- WGA Strike Announcement
- Summary of Negotiations: WGA proposals and AMPTP responses
- 2023 WGA Strike Rules
- Strike Rules FAQ
- Picket Schedules and Locations
- RSVP for WGA member meetings in Los Angeles and New York.
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
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In preparation for episode 600, John revisits our first two episodes with Christopher McQuarrie (Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, The Usual Suspects) to marvel at his wisdom and enjoy his ongoing feud with Craig.
We chart his course from writer to writer-director, his process of rescuing a movie in crisis, the storytelling opportunities on TV, and what the future holds for young filmmakers.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John, Craig and Chris conduct a post-mortem on what killed the Spoof Movie – surely there must be a reason? (Of course there’s a reason, and don’t call us Shirley.)
Links:
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- Chris McQuarrie on IMDb
- Chris McQuarrie on Instagram
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- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt (from episodes originally produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe), and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
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The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 592 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, why are action heroes named John and not Craig? We’ll think into the mystery of the J names and why you see so many Jacksons, Jakes, and Joes, and so few Craigs. I’m sorry.
Craig: Aw.
John: Can you think of even one action hero Craig?
Craig: Literally, not only are there no Craigs, but do you remember when we were kids and you would go to a theme park or something and there would be the big rack of personalized miniature license plates?
John: License plates, yeah. You’d find Bort but no Craig?
Craig: Right. You could find Bort, yeah, exactly, but Craig was rare. Even back when Craig was a name that some people had, it was rare, whereas you never had a problem.
John: Never had that any issue. Was there an H? Was there not an H? Both options were always available.
Craig: Exactly. You literally had variations on your name. I had nothing!
John: After that discussion, we’ll get into another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering listener questions on research, options, and work for hire. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk anesthesia.
Craig: Oh, good.
John: I recently went under the knife, and wow, Craig, those drugs are good.
Craig: Yes, they are. Happily, we don’t have access to them.
John: No, and the people who do have access to them, like the Michael Jackson people who have access to them when they shouldn’t be using those, that’s bad.
Craig: That’s bad. We’ll get into that. We’ll get into that. I don’t want to give this away to the people that don’t spend the $5 a month. You know what? You don’t get it.
John: You don’t get it, but you know what you get? A quality show full of many other things, which we’ll dive into right now, starting with some follow-up. A previous episode about villains, we talked about the tied to the railroad tracks trope, that mustache-twirling villain who ties a damsel in distress to a railroad track.
Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, sent through this great article that actually went through the history of the tied to the railroad tracks trope. It’s fascinating, because it’s not what you would expect. I thought it started with silent movies, but when we see them in silent movies, that was already a parody of an existing trope that came from stage plays.
Craig: Oh, really? That’s interesting. People were tying damsels to train tracks on stage?
John: Yes, and it became such a cliché. It became an early copyright lawsuit, because there’s a famous play that did it. Then other plays started having the villain tie the damsel in distress to a railroad track. Then it became actual copyright lawsuit things happening about that, whether you could copyright that action in a play, which seems crazy.
Craig: That’s crazy.
John: This article we’ll link to says that at some point there were six plays in London that all had that trope in it at the same time.
Craig: What I like is that the folks who did it first, so looks like Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight by American, apparently that was first, contained a scene “where a character named Snorkey is tied to the rails by a man named Byke.” What I like is that Augustin Daly wrote this play, probably thought, “This can be cool. That’s a fun idea,” and then everyone went insane. Everyone was like, “Dude, that’s the greatest thing we’ve ever seen.” Everybody went, “People are clamoring for other people being tied to railroad tracks.” Why?
John: It’s wild. It happened on stage before it happened in real life. Then after it happened on stage and in movies, there are a couple examples of it happening in real life. I think the other example that this article gives talks about how the idea of cement over shoes, like the mafia casing your feet in concrete, then throwing you into the lake. That was in fiction first, and then there were a couple cases where it happened in real life.
Craig: Where they thought, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” It did always strike me as just very involved, really involved. Concrete is difficult, because the moment you pour it, it starts to set. That’s why concrete mixers are always turning. You gotta get some Quikrete. Then it’s messy. It’s all over the place. They’re thrashing around probably, so that’s annoying. Why didn’t you just shoot him? Just shoot him.
John: Just shoot him.
Craig: Shoot him. What’s hard about that?
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Karl Smallwood, which talks through this. I just really enjoyed reading the backstory of how we got to this trope. I was just fascinated to know that it was already a jokey trope by the time we see it in silent films.
Craig: No one’s ever taken it seriously.
John: No, it’s never been taken seriously. Two other bits of follow-up. Actually, related follow-up. In that same villains episode, we were talking about Annie Wilkes from Misery. I said, “Oh, would Annie Wilkes have even been a villain if this guy had not crossed her doorstep?” Two readers wrote in to remind me that it’s set up in the movie that he discovers that she was actually involved in a series of baby murders when she was a nurse. She was a bad person before James Caan’s character shows up at the house.
Craig: What if those babies were jerks?
John: What if she knew they were gonna grow up to become future Hitlers?
Craig: Exactly. You don’t know what she’s capable of. I totally forgot about that. It did strike me that, look, if you are the sort of person who upon reading a novel that kills off a character you love, goes so crazy as to hit the author’s shins with a hammer, there’s no way that’s your first crazy thing. Nobody just starts there at the age of 53. Something happened.
John: It’s a ramp up to that.
Craig: Have you seen the movie Pearl?
John: I haven’t seen Pearl yet. I’m eager to see Pearl. I haven’t watched it yet though.
Craig: It looks to be a fascinating portrayal of just good old-fashioned nuts. I want to see it. It looks intense. Looks terrifying.
John: It’s hard for me to see a terrifying, intense movie. I just don’t have a space in my life or a time in my day where like, “Oh, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna watch a terrifying, intense movie.” There’s just not a lot of opportunity for me, the way my life is set up right now.
Craig: How’s your life set up? You know what? Don’t go into it.
John: We watched The Last of Us in an afternoon at 1 p.m., because Mike does not want to watch a scary thing before bed, which I get.
Craig: I get that.
John: Mike has watched most of your show with his back turned to the TV so he can’t see what’s actually happening on screen.
Craig: That’s how we intended it. Boy, we could’ve saved a lot of money if we knew that everyone was watching facing away. Just a really nice, tight radio play.
John: Nice radio play.
Craig: That’s what we were going… You know what? The show sounds really good, so hopefully he enjoyed the sound.
John: It’s good sound mix quality here. We have a last bit of follow-up here. We talked before about European script consultants. Hillevi [ph] wrote in with a really good overview of the Swedish system. Hey Drew, can you talk us through what Hillevi wrote for his involvement with the Swedish system?
Drew Marquardt: Hillevi writes, “My day job is as a screen industry strategist for a regional talent development fund in southern Sweden. This is an organization that gets its money from the state and acts under the broad decisions made by the regional and local governments in terms of what their priorities are. A filmmaker will apply to us for money to hire a dramaturge to help them develop their script. We don’t really have development execs here. If we grant them the funds, we are not involved any further in that process.
“The idea is that the public funds will ensure that less commercially viable films will be able to be made and also so that people who have money are not the only people able to make films. In Sweden there is a democratic mission in the way public film funds are distributed. At the same time, any government influence is kept at, quote, ‘arm’s length.’ However, this paradigm is being tested more and more at the moment.
“The Swedish Film Institute was criticized by an independent oversight report for being too politically angled for launching initiatives to increase diversity and green filmmaking in the films being funded by the Institute. While those ideals are good, there is a danger in violating that principle of arm’s length. Since our last election, when the far right party got more power, there’s been a lot of talk about, quote unquote, ‘reviving Swedish culture,’ in a very specific way.
“If the arm’s length distance is no longer the norm, then there is a risk that the public funds for film development and production do become more of a propaganda tool for the state. If European filmmakers are being squeezed by global streamers on one hand and regressive far right governments on the other, color me concerned about what that will mean for the future of independent cinema in Europe.”
John: Thank you, Hillevi, for this good overview. I think it brings to light both what we’ve talked about in previous episodes, about how there is meant to be an arm’s length distance between the government funding and the actual filmmaking. They can use the money to hire [inaudible 00:08:56] not deliberately telling the people what they need to write, what their films can be about. That’s all meant to be there. That’s all part of the structure. The minute you try to introduce any kind of ands or qualifications or other things, it could also fall under political influence. That is a genuine worry.
Craig: That’s basically I think what we were concerned about. Any time a government is funding the arts, there is always the concern that they will bring some sort of governmental interest to bear, even if it’s done subtly. Hillevi points out something that we probably don’t think about much, and that is that governments change. If you set up a system that is run well or honestly by one administration, that is no guarantee that it will continue that way. Another administration may want to do something else with it.
We do have some public funding of the arts here in the United States, but precious little, not enough compared to how wealthy our country is. It’s limited enough where it never struck me that the government was influencing the content.
This is definitely something to keep our eyes on, because as he says, the paradigm is being tested more and more. Even when they are doing things that progressives might consider to be a positive, other people won’t, and then those people will come along and do things that conservatives think is positive and other people won’t. Suddenly, the arts have become a football, which no one wants.
John: The arts are traditionally associated with the left, and that’s why you always see when Republican governments take over, this talk about defunding the National Endowment for the Arts or defunding PBS, which of course mostly hurts educational outreach kinds of things of those institutions.
Just always be mindful that these things can happen, especially when you have any shifts in how government is structured. We tend to see these in the US and in Europe as shifts to the right, but you could also theoretically imagine shifts to the left, where suddenly, what was considered standard is now not considered acceptable for a new leftist government.
Craig: It’s odd bedfellows, as they say, government and the arts, especially considering what the mission of the arts is. I continue to be concerned about this method. I think even though our method isn’t perfect, it’s not terrible. That’s my full-throated defense of America.
John: We’re talking from the bias of a wealthy country that can spend a lot on the arts because we are a wealthy country, not as a nation, but just because we have the market to be able to drive a lot of things.
I think the goal behind these film funds was to make sure that you had a local arts scene or it is possible to make movies in your country. That’s the concern is that without the governmental funding, it may not be possible to really make a local film industry.
Craig: We wish everybody the best with that. Hopefully, it goes better than it goes poorly. What else can we say?
John: This is not really follow-up. It’s news, 20 years of follow-up. Andy Baio, who writes a great blog at waxy.org, for the last 20 years has been following the leaks of Oscar screeners. Basically, when movies come out for an award season, we get sent screeners. WGA gets sent screeners. The Academy gets sent screeners. These used to be DVDs. Then they went to Blu-rays for a little while. Now they’re all online.
He was tracking how quickly it’d go from this DVD was sent out to potential voters to it’s now leaked online [inaudible 00:12:32] that actual screener leaked online. It was incredibly quick. A large part of the high-quality movies you could find online were from these linked screeners. He was charting how many of those leaked each season.
This last season, not a single screener linked before Oscar night, for the first time in the 20 years that he’s been tracking it. He looks at why that has changed. It really comes down to the end of physical media, so moving more things to online services, and just the fact that by the time screeners have shipped out, there were already good online versions people could download that didn’t have to use the screeners as their source material.
Craig: I have a suspicion that that is one of the larger reasons why. That doesn’t bode well, because I think that the theatrical experience continues to come back, maybe not as quickly as some people want, but it’s coming back. That means that once again, as we head into the next year, that a lot of those movies will not be available on Netflix or any of the streaming services, they will be in theaters only, which means that there will be more of an interest in pirating them. Is Hollywood even trying? Nobody even tries, right?
John: Here’s what Hollywood tries to do. I think they are concerned about in-theater rips of things. Literally, the weekend that it debuts in theaters, if it’s available online, they hate that. They will try to do things to stop that. They can watermark the bejesus out of things. I’m sure they actually can do a pretty good job of figuring out what copy of what is the thing that is now on some sharing site, so maybe they can get some of those knocked down.
The huge worry over Academy screeners leaking and that being the way that piracy started I think can be put to bed, because that’s not the source of online leaks these days. The Academy app is great. I think that did a lot to help there. Even if we were still shipping DVDs around, I don’t think it would be the main source of piracy.
Craig: Here’s hoping, because while there are a decent amount of Oscar-nominated films that are from big studios and big movies, a lot of them are small. A lot of them are the kinds of movies that actually get damaged and the artists get damaged by this stuff.
I don’t know, it’s just a rough one. There’s so much copy-fightism inherent in what I’ll call the youthful left and not a lot of thought through on it. I think it’s easy to want everything to be free until you make something. Then you realize that you need to make a living. It’s not about defending the rich. It’s honestly about defending the people that are scraping by as artists more than anything else.
John: The films they are debuting at South by Southwest this week, some of those will be giant hits. Some of them will become Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was a South by Southwest debut. A lot of those films will have limited theatrical runs or will have to debut on streaming someplace or an exclusive debut on some platform. If you’re not watching it there, but instead you’re watching it through a pirated copy, those filmmakers who you say you want to support are not going to be supported. It’s making it harder for them to make their next film and everything else. All the previous speeches about the horrors of piracy are still true.
Craig, you are destined to be many things in life. You’ve achieved a lot, but you will probably not be defending the White House from attack. You’re not going to be stopping the runaway train. It’s not your fault, Craig. It’s your parents’ fault. They named you Craig. Mazin is a perfectly valid action hero name, but Craig is just not it.
Craig: No, it’s not. It’s mild.
John: It’s mild. You need to start with a J. You need to be a John, a James, a Jack, a Jake, Joe. This data supports this. We’re going to link to an article by Demetria Glace writing for Slate. She’s taking a look at, it feels like Johns and Jacks and Joes are over-represented. They are actually hugely over-represented among the characters when you have a single action hero in a movie or movie franchise. They’re way over-represented. As soon as you take out the James Bonds and the characters where they have 15 films in their history, the Js just run away with it. Is that surprising to you?
Craig: No. I think we’ve all seen this. There’s something that feels punchy and tough about the single-syllable name. These names, John, James, Jack, Jake, Frank, Joe, these are incredibly generic American tough-guy names. They’re also names that are not current. They’re names that have been around forever. They’re names that go back to the Old West. Because America doesn’t really have what the Europeans would call history, we have just have this whatever, short 400 or 500 years, these are the names that we have mythologized, and so it’s not surprising to see them come up over and over and over again.
When you look at the villain names, you notice that even though there are a couple of repeats, like James and Jack, most of the villain names are multiple syllables. Victor, Michael, Robert, Ivan, Simon, Eddie, Gabriel. Then there’s Ernst, which is just a straight up Nazi thing. Eddie in particular has a skeezy vibe to it. Eddie, he just seems like he might be a scumbag. Obviously, Ivan is your generic Russian terrorist.
Victor is one that always gets me. That always makes me laugh. I don’t know what it is about Victor. As a name, it’s a perfectly good name. It signifies victory. I think maybe Victor Frankenstein was it. I think it’s doomed.
Also note that villain names tend to feel a little bit more erudite. Simon feels like he’s a bit learned, and we don’t like bookworms.
John: No, none of those. None of those eggheads in our movies. Those eggheads are always plotting things.
Craig: They’re scheming, whereas a simple man, John, he’s just John. He’s a man of the earth. John. You know what you never see? You never see any of the what I call new American names, Jaden, Braden, Hayden, Maiden, Saden, Daden, all those. No, they’re not there.
John: My theory is they’re probably too new. They’re also, in many cases, ambiguously gendered. They can be used for male or female, so they don’t feel as strongly identifiably this is your male action hero star, so you’re not gonna give them that name.
Craig: You may be right. It really just strikes me how old-fashioned these names are. No one’s naming their kid Frank anymore, right? Are there still people naming their babies Frank? I’ve never met a baby that was Frank. That’s hysterical. Actually, now I want to have another baby and name it Frank, because that’s kind of cool. It’s a great name. Bruce.
John: Bruce, love it. Now, we’ve talked a lot about naming characters on the show and how I will stop and not continue writing until I can find the right name for a character, because it’s so crucial to just defining how I feel about the character and therefore how the audience hopefully will feel about the character too.
Arlo Finch, I spent a lot of time figuring out Arlo Finch’s name. I knew the rhythm of the name. I knew what it needed to do. Until I found that name, I couldn’t continue to write the story.
It does feel like something about the short, the John, the James, the Jacks, they are short, they’re punchy, for a character who literally will probably be punching some. In many cases, maybe a Joe or a Jack, they are a shortened, more familiar version of a longer name. That’s why you see a Joe. You don’t see a Joseph as a hero. There’s something familiar and next door about them.
These are also largely very white names. I think it’s important to keep in mind, this is looking back over the last 40, 50 years. We had a lot of white male action stars, so they were gonna have these names. If you look at the trends in the last 20 years, the J names have fallen a lot, and I think you’re gonna see a lot more names that are not these classically white names in those action male roles, because you’re not gonna write a character who could only be played by a white male.
Craig: Also, some of these names are names that I know Black people have these names. I know Black people who are named John or James or Jake or Jack or Joe. I think honestly, when you see a movie and the trailer says, “Jake Bronson was,” you’re like, “This movie’s gonna probably be bad,” because they didn’t even get past that. It’s pretty cliché. The best argument I think we can give people out there as they’re doing this is probably just avoid these now. They feel weak.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article. What I liked about it is she really did go through and pull the Occam’s razor. Is it just because those are the most common names? Is it because screenwriters are named with J names and then are picking those things? Is it because of Keanu’s hypothesis that when you say a J name, your mouth forms a certain hopeful place? It’s not really that. Probably a little bit all of the above. Each might be nudging a little bit closer there. I think there’s also an inertia in that we had a lot of J names and this became default for what we thought of as that one solo hero in an action movie.
Craig: I think also while you’re doing your villains, maybe give your villain one of these names. That’s kind of interesting.
John: Love it.
Craig: Why not? Flip the script.
John: Flip the script. Let’s flip the script on some Three Page Challenges. It’s been a minute since we’ve done this. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, Craig and I will do a Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at the first three pages from somebody’s script. It could be a feature. It could be a pilot. They sent those in. We give our honest feedback.
If you would like to read these three pages, you can look at the show notes. You can click there, see the pdfs, and read along with us. Drew will read us a quick summary of things, so in case you’re listening in your car, you have some sense of what the heck we’re talking about.
Reminder that everybody volunteered for this. They signed a little form. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, filled out a little form, and attached their thing. We are not picking on people randomly. These are people who asked for our feedback, and we are happy to give them our feedback. Drew, this is your first time doing this. Are you excited?
Drew: I’m really excited. I’ve read these before with Megana, and I haven’t gotten to do this yet.
Craig: Here we go.
John: Let’s start with your first pick. What is it?
Drew: Let’s start with Flotsam by Sam Darcy. A montage of news clips informs us of the death of the neo-Nazi terrorist named Clifton Calwell. He was given a burial at sea to deny his supporters a place to mourn him. The sound of waves brings us to a Maori child, Jai, nine, looking at Clifton’s bloated corpse washed up on a beach. Jai puts the corpse in the basket of his bike and takes it to his backyard, where his two friends investigate and decide it’s the body of a pirate.
John: Flotsam. Flotsam starts with an image on the cover of a bottle and a thing on top of it. Cute cover page. Looks great. Just an email address on the front for our writer, Sam.
Then getting on to Page 1, I really liked how we did this montage of getting us up to speed on who this Clifton Calwell was, how we’re finding out about this. They are very short little news hits. We are bolding and uppercasing these little moments, but we’re not going to [inaudible 00:24:18] all this stuff, just a blast of images and video going past, dialog where we need it. Establishing this thing which we’re very clearly meant to be thinking it’s like bin Laden, how they buried bin Laden at sea so there couldn’t be a place to mourn. I get it. You’ve created this alternate universe where there was a neo-Nazi person like this who was a big enough threat that you would’ve done this at sea.
Then we are arrived at Australia on the beach, and here’s where it did not work as well for me. Craig, I want to get your initial opinions on how this first page worked for you.
Craig: Pretty well. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s the montage of lots of different people describing a news event, so multiple anchors. We have a character, Australian Anchor, American Anchor, and Another Anchor. I liked Another Anchor. Aw, what country are they from? There’s a Government Official, and there’s also a Late-Night Host. The Late-Night Host was doing a monologue, so that helped initially to give you a sense of, okay, this is some sort of bin Laden type thing.
Where I got a little nervous was… This is just a hard thing to do. I would say to Sam, when you are writing monologue jokes for fictional late-night hosts, they have to be good. They can’t be bad. Sometimes late-night hosts do have clunky jokes or super generic jokes, but you’re writing it, so people are already like, “You wrote that. It’s not real.” Therefore, it has to be legitimately weird or funny.
This one was very clammy. “Yikes, that’s a face only a Fuhrer could love.” I don’t really think that’s getting a laugh out of an audience. If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it, for sure. Otherwise, you’re gonna put yourself a little bit in a hole right at the very top.
John: Agreed. That did feel like an unearned laugh there. I got nervous coming out of this. Don’t think we really stuck the landing.
“Camera flash. Sound of waves further encroaching.” The Government Official says, “The stench of neo-Fascism has been tempered today,” dash, dash. “Now the crashing of water, propelling us to: Clifton Calwell (30s). Bloated. Discoloured skin. Very much dead.”
The Government Official’s line was not especially helpful, didn’t tell us that we were coming to the end of this montage. Most importantly, I wanted to see the behind-the-scenes footage, the army footage of them dumping the body over, just that video footage. I didn’t want to see just… I needed a stronger image for this guy is dead and now he’s being pushed into sea. I wasn’t getting that in these delivered lines, so it didn’t feel like the end of this montage to me.
Craig: I agree with you, although I have a suggestion, because typically when they do this sort of thing, they don’t have footage of it, because they don’t want anyone memorializing it, basically.
What you could do is, one person could say, “There are reports that the body is being taken to so-and-so.” Then you could have another person on a panel saying, “I guarantee you they’re just dumping it at sea. That’s what they do in these cases. That’s what I’m hearing they’re doing. We’ll never know. No, we will never know, but I’m pretty sure.” Then somebody can disagree. “You’re an idiot,” blah blah blah. It’s a talk show. Then boom, the body washes up on shore. Clearly, the one guy was right. There’s a way to do it. It’s unlikely that they would film it and show it.
John: This is a probably entirely false memory, but I thought I remembered seeing something of bin Laden’s body being dumped into the water. Maybe that was a re-creation footage I saw. I feel like I saw something there. I definitely saw the equivalent of body cam footage of storming the compound.
Craig: Definitely, yeah. I remember that. I’m looking it up, dumping body ocean. Let’s see. There is a video, but it is a video that I don’t believe has been released.
John: There is a question of are we breaking the seal by showing this thing that would not be a part of the international news coverage to show that one thing. I don’t know. It’s a choice to make. I think you could go either way. What Craig pitched also works. I think we needed some stronger… Stick the landing here before we’re getting into more normal movie, because we’re changing our time and our tempo a lot.
Craig: You sure you want to say normal movie here?
John: The choices that are being made here are really fascinating. I don’t think they all work. I’m so happy we have this as an example, because we can talk about what’s working and where we got off the train.
“Exterior beach – early morning – continuous.” It’s not continuous. This is a whole new thing, so not continuous. Scratch that out. “Calwell’s legless corpse slumps in a cracked plastic capsule upon the sand. The tide froths then recedes around him.” You could do this where you could start with his body. I think that’s not gonna be your strongest choice.
I think your stronger choice is to start with Jai, our boy, who’s at the beach for some reason, because he doesn’t know that he’s looking for a body. He comes across this thing. Then we could gradually reveal, oh, it is actually this body and this corpse. I think this could be weirder and funnier, but by starting on the body, it makes it seem like the body is more important than this kid, who is going to be our hero for this story. Give us some moment of Jai before we find the body. That’s my pitch. Craig?
Craig: I kind of like this way, if we had stuck the landing on coming out of that montage. I think there’s something shocking about seeing that body. It is a startling cut, which I like, which then makes the reveal that a child is calmly looking at it also shocking and somewhat funny. Like I say, it has to feel like the cut to it is earned. If the cut to it is earned, I think it could be really interesting to see this kid.
Right off the bat, I will say, tonally there’s some nice things here. The fact that Jai [jae] or Jai [jai]… I’m not sure how to pronounce that name. I’ll go with Jai [jae]. Jai is wearing a Wrestlemania beach towel. I like it. There’s something already that feels very darkly comic about all of this.
Especially with what’s about to come, it reminded me of Peter Jackson’s early stuff. I suspect that our author, Sam, is either Australian or from New Zealand because of some of the spelling and the specificity of the location. Peter Jackson, obviously from New Zealand, some of his early stuff was just funny and disgusting. There’s a specific tone.
John: The body horror is a big part of this. What we’re seeing in these next two pages, just this disintegrating corpse that these kids are trying to examine, is fun. The way it falls out of his basket and just gets smeared on the road, love it.
Craig: People are gonna shriek. I’ve never seen this before in my life. “Calwell,” that’s the body, “draped in Jai’s beach towel, squeezed into the front bike basket like Norman Bates’s homage to ET.” That’s really funny, this nine-year-old kid biking along with a human torso corpse shoved in his bike basket. I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s really fucked up and funny to me.
Similarly, “Calwell’s insides fall out of his torso.” That’s so gross. Look, I don’t know if I would watch this, but I appreciate that it doesn’t care whether or not I’m gonna watch it. It’s doing its own thing. It’s, woof, yuck.
John: Oof. Bottom of Page 2, we have two paragraphs here. I would flip the paragraphs. Right now we’re talking about Calwell’s insides falling out of his torso before we actually get to setting up where we are at. I think it’s gonna be funnier if we’re establishing this place and then coming back to the body keeps falling apart, which is great.
“Weatherboard beach shacks, scattered Norfolk Pines, and scorched lawns permeate our ride through Aussie suburbs.” Great. It’s a really good description. Give us a start there, and then let us get back to the body and the melting of it all, because after it’s falling out of the basket, “Jai’s created a Hansel and Gretel trail of neo-Fascist entrails. We linger low on some organ as he pedals off.” It’s gruesome. The movie knows what it is, which is fine and fun.
On Page 2, there’s also a link out to a song, Rocky Raccoon covered by Charlie Parr. I wouldn’t know what that was. We had a link here. We can play it if we want to play it. I support that as a choice.
Craig: No problem whatsoever. Where I was most pleased was with the third page of this, because now we’re getting into this interesting Australian/New Zealand, probably New Zealand is my guess, Stand By Me. It’s like a weird alternate universe version of that. You’ve got these kids, Jai and two of his friends, Toni, who’s 10, and Daley, who’s 8. Toni is Samoan, and she’s reached puberty already, and she’s tall and she’s broad. I love the words, “She’s a broad girl.” I think that’s terrific.
Then Daley is white, and he “is the Donny Kerabatsos of this Lebowski trio. Bug-eyed, feeble, and malnourished.” Malnourished is such a great… I appreciate that the script so far has maintained its tone in such a way that I see that a kid is malnourished and I am laughing. This was really funny.
Now he’s got 3 kids, 10, 9, and 8, are staring at this horrible vision of a dead neo-Nazi’s torso and head. Then Daley says, “I’m telling!” He runs. “Jai and Toni give chase. The camera remains. Rather, we hear the ensuring struggle. The three return, Daley caught in a Toni-induced headlock. Daley: ‘Okay!'” This is a pretty great juxtaposition of childish hijinks with absolute disgustingness.
Then there’s this last little bit here at the end of Page 3 where Toni asks, “Who is he?” which is this nice little bit of innocence. She doesn’t know, even though it’s been all over the news. He says, “A pirate,” which he doesn’t know either. I only can imagine where this is going. Do they think he has buried treasure? Who knows? It made me laugh. It was sick, and sick on its own terms. I thought these were quite successful.
John: I thought it worked really well too. The part you mentioned on Page 3 where the camera stays behind as they run off and struggle and then it gets dragged back into the shot, it felt a little… I never want to say directing on the page, but it felt like it was a little much for me, and yet the whole script is a little much, so I’m totally fine to go with it. Also, it establishes that this is going to have a very certain style to it. There were lines that would’ve bumped for me in other examples and didn’t bump for me here.
Craig: I didn’t mind it. I saw the moment. It helped me see the moment. I laughed. I laughed.
John: Obviously, what I’m looking for on Pages 4 and beyond is really establishing specificity of the characters and their voices and what they’re actually about, rather than just their basic descriptions. I feel like I didn’t know Jai as well as I knew the other two, even in this little brief moment. I’d love a little bit more sense of that.
I’d be curious to read where this goes next. Luckily, now with this innovation we have where people send us the log line, Drew can tell us what actually happens next in the script. Drew, what happens?
Drew: “When the body of an international terrorist washes ashore following a botched burial at sea by US forces, an enterprising child fabricates tales of pirate mutineers and buried treasure to his peers in an attempt to monetize his corporeal find. A short film.”
John: It’s a short film. Then I’m probably even more intrigued, because I was really wondering how this was gonna stretch into a full feature and where this was going to go. As a short film, I can see the closure it a little bit more easily. Craig, what are you thinking?
Craig: Look, short films are tough, but they are at least easy to make, although this one won’t be easy to make. You’ll need a body. A fake body. Please, Sam. God. Stand By Me, even though it was a full feature film, it started life as a novella or a short story, one of four short stories. This one was called The Body by Stephen King. I could absolutely see a short-ish version of that sort of thing, for sure.
John: Cool. Drew, help us out with our next one.
Drew: Next is Sockfoot by Jesse Allard. Autumn, late 20s, finishes having a one-night stand with a mid-20s punk boy on a mattress on the floor. He criticizes her for wearing socks during sex, so Autumn quickly decides to leave. The two have a drawn-out, awkward goodbye. Autumn drives to her nice, spacious apartment, where her burn-scarred cat greets her. Slumping on the bed, Autumn takes off her socks, only to reveal another sock fused to her foot.
John: Great. Craig, what’s your first impression of Sockfoot?
Craig: Putting the sock-foot aside, which we don’t really understand quite yet, it just felt very broad and under-baked in terms of characterization, dialog, relationship, action on the page. Multiple issues. A bit clunky. The sentences themselves were a bit clunky.
Let’s just start with the very first couple of paragraphs. “A vinyl spins on a turntable.” No. A vinyl record spins on a turntable. “The sounds of a hard hitting punk song blast through the speakers.” Hard-hitting should get a dash. “The sounds of a” we don’t even need. Just a punk song blasts through speakers.
“Another sound seeps through the music growing ever louder as we follow a path of clothes that litter the floor of the apartment leading to the bedroom.” We’ve got prepositional overload.
Really, there’s just a better way to say all this. We’ve got a punk song blasting through the speakers. What punk song? First of all, what punk song? You can’t just say punk song. Second, there’s moaning. Just say over it or through it, we hear moaning.
Then the clothing continues. We’ve seen the whole thing of the hastily discarded clothing leading up to two people having sex a million times, but to keep it going… It was, “A band shirt, a modest bra, a pair of black jeans. Men’s underwear, a pair of women’s underwear to match,” one pair of socks. “Only one pair of socks — black, holes in the heels and toes.” First of all, we’re not gonna notice that there’s one pair of socks. It’s just gonna be laundry to us.
They were having sex, and then we arrive there and we meet Autumn, and she’s done. She rolls off. Somehow, the camera arrived, but we didn’t even know she finished. It wasn’t like I was hearing people having an orgasm or finishing or anything. It was just moaning and then suddenly rolling off. She “cuddles up to Logan. They play footsie as they catch their breath,” which is not really how it works for me, but that’s fine. Maybe other people do that.
Then this was where I just felt like I was being hurdled off the planet. “After a moment, Logan looks a bit concerned. He looks downs,” so looks and looks. “He looks down at their feet,” and there’s a comma there which shouldn’t be there. “He looks down at their feet pulling back,” there should be a comma there, “pulling back the blanket to reveal their toes. Autumn is wearing socks, he is not.” His line is, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” Her response is, parentheses, “(confused,” semicolon, “a frightful air in her breath) uh… yeah… ” “Logan (playful but serious): Don’t ever do that again.” What?
John: I don’t understand those lines. I think, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a great line. I think it’s the outline of that moment. I think that moment I would pitch differently.
I get while the following their trail of clothes to a bed is a tropey, tropey, tropey trope, in this case I would allow it because it is about the fact that she cannot remove this sock which is permanently fused to her foot. I’m going to allow it, but I think we need to get to the bed more quickly.
They may have already been finished and were pulling up the covers or something, and he sees her socks. “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a funny out. I don’t need the reaction from her or from him. Just let that be the thing. Then we get to the awkward going away, getting out of that house moment. There was just too much there. It’s like the moment had passed and we were still talking.
Craig: Also, they just met. They’ve just had sex for the first time. Who cares? Honestly, who cares that she fucked him with her socks on? Oh yeah, sorry if I was in the heat of the… We were rushing to have sex, because that’s clearly what happened. It wasn’t like we carefully took our clothes off. We threw our clothes everywhere and started fucking, and so whatever. Fuck, who cares? I don’t even understand. He says “playful but serious.” Excuse me? What does that mean?
John: Hard to do.
Craig: Hot but cold? Close but far. Then he says, “Don’t ever do that again.” What? That’s what he chooses to say?
John: I would love to see a great actor deliver that line in a way that’s playful but serious. Someone could do it, and it would actually completely work, but I’m having a hard time visualizing it, because even internally I’m not the great actor who can make that line work.
Craig: I just don’t know what the motivation would be. Again, just who gives a shit? It’s your first time together. It’s almost like she’s anticipating this question. It’s as if he looks down and goes, “Wait, do you not have feet?” Then she’s like, “Sorry, no.” He goes, “Oh, okay.” Then she goes, “Oh, no, he noticed.” Or, “Do you have hooves for feet?” Socks? Is it a crime? I don’t know. It just seems like such a weird thing.
Because it is the way that Jesse is introducing the problem for our main character, it’s just not… Everything that comes after it feels pretty off, because I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s like the script is saying, “Right? This is bad?” I’m going, “No, it’s not. It’s not that bad, not yet.”
John: We have a larger problem. After three pages, I don’t know what the tone of this is actually supposed to be. I think it’s supposed to feel bad for her because she has this injury, this sock fused to her foot because of a fire, apparently, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel and what the tone of all this that I’m watching is, because was this kind of sexy and then kind of funny and then she’s getting herself out of there? I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling about this situation.
We’re not hearing the name of the punk song at the start, but then bottom of Page 2, “Everybody Hurts by REM begins playing over the Bluetooth.” Wait, is it playing ironically or is it playing seriously? I just don’t know how to take that song, because that song is so loaded that I am lost.
Craig: At the bottom of Page 1, “Autumn breaks a bit inside. This isn’t going to work out.” I don’t know why. I don’t believe that moment. I believe neither what Logan asked, nor do I believe her response.
Then the next scene says, “Living room – moments later. Logan and Autumn stand at the door.” This is what I call a dead start.
John: So hard to do.
Craig: They’re just standing at the door. It’s not one of them is getting the clothes on while the other one’s waiting. It’s not one of them looking for her keys. It’s not him helping her find her underwear. It’s nothing. It’s just two people just, boom, standing, bah. It’s a dead start.
Then what I also don’t understand is, the scene before, he says, “Okay, I don’t like that you had sex with me with your socks on,” and she’s like, “Uh-oh, this isn’t gonna work out, because he’s noticed the sock thing,” and then the next scene is him really being like, “Hey, I would like to actually keep hanging out with you.” She’s like, “Nope. Nope, gotta go.” I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m so confused. The emotional math is not adding up at all. Then Everybody Hurts happened, and I got very, very concerned.
Then we go to Autumn’s apartment. This, if you were counting along, is the third consecutive interior. Interior, interior, interior. Where are we? I don’t even know if we’re in a city, a town, big city, America. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where we are. There’s a lot of description of what this building is like, and yet I don’t know what city it’s in.
John: There’s too much description of her place. The “apartment is very nice, a one bedroom with an open kitchen/living room area, fairly spacious and trendy with it’s exposed brick wall.” It’s is the wrong its.
Craig: Correct. Then another it’s happens.
John: “Recently been converted into an apartment, the kind of place most people in their 20s would struggle to afford on their own.” I don’t know ho to take that. Does it mean she has independent money? Maybe. Maybe she got money out of the fire, I guess, but that’s just a lot to be dumping at me in scene description that doesn’t help me understand this character.
Craig: I particular because I don’t know where we are. Is this a one-bedroom, nice, spacious, trendy, exposed brick walls apartment in Kansas City or Manhattan? That’s a huge difference.
“Autumn’s greeted by her cat, Luna,” and then quite a bit of description about the cat, and then a little bit of a burn scar there, so okay, we’re getting that there’s been some fire issues. Autumn says, “Sweet baby,” doesn’t say her name, doesn’t say Luna’s name, so we don’t know that it’s Luna, but fine. “Sweet baby. She pets Luna and heads to her room.”
I want to imagine this. She enters her apartment. Everybody Hurts is playing. A cat walks up to her. She says, “Sweet baby,” pets the cat, and then walks out. This is not a scene.
Then even weirder, after she says, “Sweet baby,” she gets to her bedroom and “slumps on the bed in defeat.” What was “sweet baby” about? Is she happy? Does Luna make her feel good? All of these questions are just piling up.
Screenplays are like the Titanic. They have lots of watertight compartments. They’re designed so if you puncture one of them, the rest of the boat can stay afloat, but if you puncture a whole bunch of them, it’s over. You’re sinking. Every single one of these moments of disconnect are creating a flooding of watertight compartments. The script is sinking here. This final line is not strong.
John: I can read it. “At least you love me even though I’m a monster.” This is after we’ve seen her fused together foot and the sock-foot, the titular sock-foot.
Craig: I don’t know what’s happened here. Drew will tell us. Initially, we’re like, okay, there was a fire. The sock was melted into her foot. They can’t remove the sock. It’s part of her foot now. I think it would be fair for her to say, “I was in a fire, and so I have to cover my foot.” That’s fine. She’s not hiding 666 or a Kuato. Do you know what a Kuato is, John?
John: Kuato from… It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall.
Craig: Total Recall, yeah. She’s not hiding a Kuato. She doesn’t have a foot Kuato. If the sock-foot fused thing is a Kuato, then that’s different. Even then, I think we need a different vibe. We just need a different opening. I just didn’t understand what was happening here. Help.
John: I do think the takeaway is that if you have a character whose central, initial dilemma is the fact that she has this sock-foot, this may be the wrong way to establish it, or you just picked the wrong character, this guy is not the right guy to be exposing that thing, because the scene as we saw, it feels like, why wouldn’t she tell him? We don’t have any understanding of why this is such a big deal to her at this moment. We just don’t believe it.
I do want to go back to one moment. I thought it was the right idea. On Page 2, this familiar moment where, “Logan goes to hug her. (It’s one of those awkward post one-night-stand hugs where there’s this question of do we kiss goodbye? Is that too intimate? Too personal?) His face lingers towards her for a split second while he contemplates what to do. Autumn saves him the trouble, quickly whipping her chin over his shoulder.” Overwritten, yet I got that moment. I was familiar with that moment. It felt like a nice thing to show, if it would’ve been a different scene getting into it.
Craig: Right, if I had understood why any of it was happening, because it seemed like in the scene before, she wants to be with him, and he doesn’t want to be with her, and then we cut to she doesn’t want to be with him, and he does want to be with her. I just don’t know why, but yeah, absolutely, it was an evocative moment. I didn’t even mind the overwriting because I understood it.
John: Yeah, understand it all. Drew, help us out. What is this about?
Drew: The log line is, “Autumn Cassidy is a woman with a secret, a woman with a sock-foot. Autumn is working as a preschool teacher with her best friend Sam, as they and their group of friends navigate the transition into true adulthood. However, Autumn’s secret, if exposed, threatens to destroy her relationships and her life, that is if she doesn’t do it first herself.”
John: I don’t believe that premise. I’m sorry. I don’t. I think it’s weirdly regressive. I don’t know. If I were a person who had one foot or something and I’m seeing this story about, oh no, her foot doesn’t look normal, I don’t get that. I’m frustrated by that premise.
Craig: I don’t understand it either. It is a challenge for people to have a situation like this, but it’s not something where it threatens to destroy every… I’m with John. I don’t believe it. Even if it’s causing a problem, it doesn’t cause a problem instantly like that. It’s just not that thing.
Look, if this turned supernatural and it did become a Kuato, then I would understand. I just don’t believe it’s a Kuato. I don’t. No, no, no, no, no, no. No. I think there’s something wrong. There’s something just fundamentally flawed here in this bit.
John: I want to thank Jesse for sending through these pages, because sometimes the pages that aren’t working give us a lot more to talk about and things people can recognize in their own scripts, like, oh, that thing you’re trying to do can’t work for these reasons. I do want to thank Jesse for sending these through, because I don’t want it to just be this slam on, “Hey, it just didn’t work for us.” Instead, let’s look at what we actually were able to take from this and discuss.
Craig: I would also say that it may be that after reflection and listening to this, even though it might hurt, Jesse, that you may find that there is a different story to tell with a similar premise. There was something that drew you to this in the first place. I think you need to dig into what it was and why and then ask how would this actually really, really go and what is it about this that you think could work in a more realistic way.
It may also be that you listen to this and say, “These two guys are out to lunch. This thing does work. They only read three pages. Screw them.” You might be right. You might be right. Either you will take constructive thoughts from this, and meaning you will create your own constructive thoughts, because I’m a big believer in destructive criticism when giving notes, it’s better than us telling you what to do, or you may be more convinced than ever that you’re on the right path. Either way, go forward, young man or woman or nonbinary.
John: Young man. We now know the preferred pronouns for all the people.
Craig: We do?
John: Yeah, because it says on the form now, so people tell us how to refer to them.
Craig: Oh, great.
John: An innovation which it only took us 10 years to figure out, oh, we should probably ask what people are, so we don’t have to guess based on their names.
Craig: Great point. Sir, take this and move forward. I believe in you.
John: Drew, give us one more Three Page Challenge, please.
Drew: Sure. Last we have Spark by Rachel Thomas. Winnie, 12, wakes up her sister, Lucy, 10, in the middle of the night, excited because it’s October 1st. The two girls jump out of bed and rush downstairs to find their mother, Clara, 40s, reading a book and using magic to bring a plate of cookies to them. Clara makes the girls wait until the neighbors are asleep before using her magic to decorate the house for Halloween. Giant spiders really move. Life-size skeletons dance with them. The girls are thrilled. When Clara takes them back to bed, Winnie makes it clear how badly she wants her witch powers, but her mother warns her that her powers may never come.
John: Great. I’m glad we’re talking about this sample, because we haven’t done anything quite like this before. This feels to me like a Disney Channel movie. It feels like a bright, poppy, made for TV kind of thing. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I just mean it felt very innocent. I want to approach that with I think the spirit in which it’s written. It’s very wide-eyed through the whole thing. It feels kind of innocent.
That said, my problem started at the very beginning, where I didn’t believe that these two girls were asleep and then waking up and then one is showing them a watch. That all felt really clunky. Either they know what day it’s gonna be or they don’t know what day it’s gonna be, what hour it’s gonna be, what hour it’s not going to be.
If one girl is asleep and her sister wakes her up, the older sister wakes her up, then I believe. Like, “It’s after midnight. We can go down.” It’s like, “Oh my gosh, yes.” Then we’re excited to get started in what is the equivalent of this family’s Christmas. It is finally October 1st and we can do all the Halloween things.
Craig: You’re getting at a problem that I think permeates these pages, and that is a lack of familiarity among people that are supposed to be the most familiar with each other. They’re family. This is not the first time this has happened. This happens all the time.
First of all, Winnie has a remarkable ability to wake up at exactly midnight. That’s pretty strange. It would make more sense, I think, to begin with a little girl just staring at this pocket watch, watching the second hand going until it finally turns midnight. Then she turns and she “taps Lucy gently on the nose,” and Lucy opens her eyes and says, “Is it midnight?” “It’s midnight.” Then they’re like, “Yay!” They know what’s going on. When they go outside to join Clara, who’s sitting on the front steps, where are they? Where are people?
John: Where are people?
Craig: Where are people?
John: I think it has to be Salem, Massachusetts, because all things with witches have to take place in Salem, Massachusetts.
Craig: That’s fine, but what part of the neighborhood of Salem, Massachusetts? Help us see things. Then Winnie says to her mother, “It’s my favorite day of the year besides Halloween.” Her mother says, “You’re definitely my kid.” Have they met before?
John: I think they’ve met before, yeah. I think they should have.
Craig: What’s happening? That’s not what happens. It just doesn’t feel like they are all really connected as family. There is a tonal thing here where it’s getting very juvenile, particularly when endlessly patient parents giggle at their children bothering them at midnight. These characters all feel like they’re saying exactly what they’re thinking. Do you know what I mean?
John: They do. I’m willing to let them have it a bit, because I placed it in this simpler, made for basic cable kind of universe. I think there’s a place for that kind of thing. There’s an innocence there that works. Yet this is a very pushed version of this. I think we could step back and sophisticate this a little bit and still retain the joy, still retain the innocence.
Craig: It doesn’t even require sophistication. “I can’t wait anymore. Let’s get started.” “You know the rules. We need to wait until all the neighbors are asleep.” Nobody feels real. They just feel like information bots at this point. It immediately goes into a lesson. “Can’t you make him go to bed?” “Winnie, using magic on other people has consequences.” It just feels so corny.
John: It does feel corny. Again, I’m willing to give it some of the corny because of just genre assumptions, the same way that in a body horror thing I’m willing to go there a little bit more. I definitely hear you, Craig. Let me validate you there. I did feel that too. I was just being more forgiving of it. Let’s talk about some things on the page that are just basic screenwriting things that need to be worked on.
Craig: Let’s.
John: Parentheticals go on their own line. In US screenplays, British screenplays for that matter too, your parenthetical goes on its own line. In this case, they’re just touching the dialog. That’s not how we do it here.
As we got into the montage on Page 3, where the house is being decorated, there are some fun elements in there. I would encourage you to break some things up a little bit more there and let these moments land separately, because the risk you have with these four paragraphs is people may just start skimming or just start skipping over some things. I would say break those moments out a little bit more. You might even want to do some bolding in there. Just do some things where you get a sense of what it is that we’re establishing and what has changed.
Going back to Craig’s earlier note, I don’t have a sense of what this house is normally, other than it’s a Victorian. I don’t know what neighborhood we’re in. I don’t know what I’m seeing and what I’m looking at. I have no sense of how close the neighbor’s house is. I just need it to be placed and anchored in a space more clearly from the start.
Craig: I agree with everything you just said. Rachel, when you have a montage like this, where you’re showing them decorating the yard with Halloween stuff and mom using a little bit of magic to help it go along and make it go faster and fun, and then you follow it up with Lucy asleep and Winnie saying to her mother, without prompting, without any prompting whatsoever, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween,” I think you’ve missed an opportunity to show that she does not have her powers.
Does Lucy have her powers? If Lucy has powers and Lucy’s using magic and mom’s using magic, then I could see Winnie getting frustrated. If Lucy doesn’t have her powers, but she doesn’t care, but Winnie keeps trying to do it and does care and doesn’t like that her mom has to do it. I want to motivate her character problems.
She literally says, “Winnie looks out over her neighborhood, having the time of her life.” Then the next thing she says is, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween.” “Win, some witches never get their powers.” You can just see where this is going.
John: It is called Spark.
Craig: Look, here’s the thing. It’s fine to do a straight up formula movie. Children in particular really enjoy them. They can be done beautifully. Pixar at this point has mastered a kind of formula. It is gorgeous.
This scene right here feels so blatantly setup-ish that it is bordering on somebody reading out loud, “Interior attic bedroom – later. Winnie doesn’t have her powers yet, and she really wants them, and her mother is saying, ‘You might never get your powers and you might need to accept that you are special as you are.'” It is literally that setup-ish here. We gotta do better, just for pure entertainment sake. Otherwise, it will feel perfunctory.
John: I would say you would find scripts of this genre that do similar, really clunky things and [inaudible 01:00:31] “I should write a script that is like that.” I think the challenge we’re both arguing for is how do you write the better version of that that gets you the job to write the thing that does get made? I think this as a writing sample needs to be above the minimum level that you see in that kind of genre.
Craig: Completely agree.
John: Cool. Those are our Three Page Challenges. We want to thank everybody who sent in their Three Page Challenges, especially these writers, for letting us talk about them on the air. If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a form there. You will say that it’s okay for us to talk about them. You will attach your pdf. It’ll go into Drew’s queue for next time. Drew, thank you for reading through all these with us.
Drew: Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for sending it in.
Craig: Drew’s Queue is a great name for a Blue’s Clues type of show.
John: Drew’s Queue.
Craig: Drew’s Queue.
John: Until this very moment, I hadn’t realized how much Drew Marquardt feels like he could’ve been one of the Blue’s Clues guys, 100%. If he put that sweater on, he absolutely could be a Blue’s Clues… You could have Blue as your cartoon dog.
We have listener questions that we won’t have time to get to this episode, so we’ll save them for next episode. Craig, I do think we have time for some One Cool Things. You got a One Cool Thing for us?
Craig: I do. This One Cool Thing actually comes from my assistant Allie, who like my assistant Bo before her, is quite the foodie. She was talking about a place that sounds amazing. I gotta go. She had a very specific recommendation. If you do like Indian food and you happen to find yourself, I believe it’s in the Los Feliz or Silver Lake area, it’s called Pijja Palace. Pijja Palace?
John: Pijja Palace.
Craig: Have you been?
John: I’ve been. Pijja Palace is built into a strip mall that’s connected to a mid-budget hotel. It’s very unpromising from the outside. You go inside, it looks like a sports bar, and yet the cuisine is actually Indian-inspired, non-Indian dishes. You have listed here the Malai Rigatoni. There are just pizzas and other things, but they all have Indian flavors and not Indian traditionally foods.
Craig: She got me the description of the Malai Rigatoni, which instead of a typical Bolognese, it’s in more of a masala sauce. It sounds delicious. I’m gonna have to check that place out. I just like the name of it. Pijja Palace.
John: Pijja Palace, it’s great. Definitely check that out. My One Cool Thing. We’ve talked before on the show about GeoGuessr, which is this great game where you are plopped somewhere in a Google Maps situation, street view of Google Maps. You have to figure out where the hell you are. You only have a certain number of guesses. Basically, once you make your guess where you are, it’s how close you were to the actual place. My daughter loves to play it.
I want to link to this YouTuber named Rainbolt, who is just really, really good at GeoGuessr. The video we’ll link to shows this meme, this Vine from many, many years ago, where this guy, he’s stepping off this curb, he says, “So no head?” It’s a five-second clip. The clip went viral. In this video, he tries to figure out what curb this guy was stepping off of. The way he can figure this all out is just masterful. It’s very Sherlock Holmes in terms of using the cues of just what the fire hydrants looked like, how many bars are on the telephone poles next to him, what other metadata he can find for this user who has these videos. Really, really smart. It’s no surprise he gets it down to the exact street, within one foot of where this video comes from.
Craig: That’s awesome. I love that.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Who?
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Unknown.
John: Our outro this week is by Richie Molyneux. If you have an outro this week, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on anesthesia. Craig and Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, when was the last time you were under anesthesia?
Craig: I would say it was probably eight months ago. It was the last time I had a spinal epidural injection.
John: That doesn’t sound good at all. I was under anesthesia just last week. I had these weird bones growing underneath my tongue, it’s called mandibular tori, that was making it hard for me to speak. The oral surgeon cut them out. To do that, they had to knock me fully out. There was an anesthesiologist. It wasn’t just a little drug. It was fully knocked out.
I remember talking to this guy about skiing, and then suddenly, much time had passed, two hours in fact, and I was waking up and being moved to this recovery room, and no idea what had happened, didn’t feel a thing. Later in that day, I realized, wait, how did I get home? Mike told me that I had fallen asleep while we were walking to the car. I asked, “Why is there a trashcan here?” Apparently, I had asked for a trashcan to be brought into the room.
At the time, I had felt like I was actually completely fine, but I realized I was not forming memories of that time. It was fun. It was such a different experience than I’ve had in quite a long time.
Craig: Yes, amnesia is cool. It is a very strange thing. The history of anesthesia is a remarkable thing and is inextricably linked, as far as I’m concerned, to the kinds of surgical advances we’ve been capable of. Without anesthesia, there just simply is a vast category of surgery that is impossible. It’s just not possible.
John: We used to do amputations without anesthesia. They could hold somebody down, but there’s no way someone could’ve sawed these out of my mouth without anesthesia.
Craig: There is. It would’ve been very difficult, and you would’ve been in horrible, horrible pain. What we can’t do, for instance, are things like a heart transplant or kidney transplant or anything involving lungs or kidneys, internal organs. Those things are really hard to do because people just keep writhing around. It’s just hard to do. Amputations is just a straight sawing. The trauma of that kind of injury is insane.
The crudest anesthesia was ether, chloroform. Those things were pretty brutal. Prior to that, back in the old, old days, it was just basically alcohol. I don’t think there was much else going on there. Then just holding you down in misery. Anesthesia is magical.
John: It is magical. A question for when you see in vintage things or post-apocalyptic things, it’s like, oh, some alcohol as I pull this bullet out or whatever. I don’t fully get that, because I can drink a couple shots of something. It’s not gonna make things hurt less. I guess I could be less combative, I guess, or are you drinking to the point where you’re actually blacking out, and that’s the goal? I’ve never blacked out from alcohol. In the old days of alcohol, how much alcohol were they using?
Craig: Quite a bit. Obviously, they would’ve used alcohol as a topical antiseptic as well. Drinking-wise, we do know that alcohol affects the GABA pathway, gamma-aminobutyric acid, I believe, which is connected to our pain pathways. When you are very, very drunk, you don’t experience pain at the same level that you do when you’re not. You’re more confused. It’s harder to tell what the hell’s going on. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which means that it can in fact knock you out, and if you’re knocked out, you’re knocked out.
Now, knocking you out without killing you is a trick. Alcohol is a toxic substance that we know can kill people in excess, and so is every single anesthetic that we use for surgery, which is why we need anesthesiologists, medical doctors, who very specifically administer this and monitor you and your breathing. Now, for a procedure like yours, my guess is you had an IV and they used propofol.
John: They did.
Craig: Propofol is wonderful. They used to use Versed.
Drew: It’s magic.
Craig: Propofol’s magic. They used to use Versed a lot. Propofol is better because it wears off much faster. Propofol actually gets metabolized by your body really quickly, so it’s perfect for these shorter procedures, because you don’t spend an hour or two hours groggily coming to. I believe Versed is more of a benzodiazepine, I believe. That’s the whole Valium family. That stuff is great.
When you’re dealing with serious surgery, where you have to be out for a long time, they can’t just keep hitting you with Propofol. Propofol is actually quite irritating to the veins. That’s when they give you the old mask on the face. Often, you’re intubated, which means that they have to breathe for you or need to be able to breathe for you if it comes to that, because so much of what they do to you is also paralytic.
John: Drew, you were saying propofol is great. You’ve had experience with it?
Drew: Yeah. I had a procedure last fall. I had a colonoscopy last fall. They injected it into my hand. It was interesting, you saying, Craig, that it’s hard on the veins, because one of the things I remember before I went under-
Craig: It burns.
Drew: … was that there was a weird pain. It burns.
Craig: It burns.
Drew: Saying to the anesthesiologist, “Hey, is that normal?” I think he got out the Y-E of yes before I was out.
Craig: It does tend to burn. Sometimes they will put a little bit of lidocaine in there with it to reduce the burning sensation, I believe. Yep, colonoscopy is a perfect example of a propofol nap. When I get those injections, propofol nap. Depending on the position you’re in, it’ll go right in the back of your hand. That’s where they have their IV.
Because I’ve had the procedure done a lot, on average once a year now for about, I don’t know, four years, five years, different anesthesiologists do it differently, I’ve noticed. Some of them push it in slowly, and those are my heroes, because you get to feel awesome for about five seconds.
It seems lately the new ones are like, “You know what? We actually don’t want you feeling awesome. We don’t want you coming back to enjoy your five-second propofol holiday. We’re gonna push it in much faster, so you’re gonna be fine, fine, fine. Bye-bye.” There’s not that euphoria. I have experienced the euphoria. It’s almost like your brain is inflating like a balloon with happiness and then you’re gone.
John: I’ve had a bunch of colonoscopies in my life, because my whole family gets colon cancer. In those cases, I don’t know what they’re using. Maybe it’s propofol. I’m just in a twilight state, so I actually am aware and conscious during it. It’s not been a problem. They’re giving me enough of something that I just don’t care at all, but I am actually awake for it in ways that were so different than my experience here.
This is much more like… I had to have my nose fixed, have my deviated septum fixed. In that case, you’re just completely out. You wake up completely like, “What just happened?” In this case, I was talking about skiing, and suddenly just a whole bunch of time had passed.
Craig: The fact is, when we say we go bye-bye, we don’t actually know what’s going on, because I think with propofol, a lot of times, like you say, you’re in this weird in and out state. They call propofol milk of amnesia, because it looks milky. You just don’t remember. You may have been talking throughout the whole thing. You don’t remember, because you’re just-
Drew: Oh, that’s horrifying.
Craig: … totally doped up. Yeah, but it’s not like you’re in pain. You’re not shrieking and going, “Oh my god, take this camera out of my ass.” You’re like, “Hey, what’s going on? My nose is weird.” You may be talking, but you don’t remember later.
John: When my daughter had the same surgeon take out her wisdom teeth, she was goofy on the drive home in the way that you love. We have video of her asking goofy questions. That wasn’t me at all, at least not to my recollection of it. I seemed perfectly normal. I wasn’t actually forming memories, in ways that were surprising to me and also made me think of, oh, you hear stories of date rape drugs. It feels like, oh, I can see why that is so problematic, because I didn’t have agency over my own memories, which was strange.
Craig: I’ve had that experience too, where I even realize, I know I was in the car with Melissa, we drove home. I know we talked about stuff. I don’t remember any of it. Any of it. I was awake, perfectly awake. Propofol definitely messes with the whole memory system.
John: It’s not sleep. Every night we have the experience of what it’s like to fall asleep and what it’s like to wake up. It was the suddenness of the change that was so striking to me. Not that I remember falling asleep every night, but I get the sense that you go down the ramp and then you come back up out of the ramp. This was just like lights off, lights on. It was just a very different experience for me.
Craig: It’s very fast. One thing that strikes me as really interesting about the propofol nap is I do dream vividly during it every time it happens. When I’m coming out of it, I’m coming out of dreams. Then there’s just that confusion for a moment of like, “Where… Oh, right. Oh, yeah, that. All that happened.”
Here’s an interesting thing. Talk about the amnesia. When you get this epidural injection, I’m on my stomach, and they put a needle all the way into the epidural space in my spine, and they inject stuff into it. Then they take it out. It occurred to me once, I was like, “How do you get me out of there?” because it’s not like I wake up in there. I wake up on my back in another bed in a recovery room. They were like, “Oh, you just wake up, and we help you down, and we get you over onto this other thing and wheel you out, and then we get you onto this thing and you do it.” I’m like, “Okay, so I’m awake. I have zero memory of that.” I have never once formed one memory of any of that.
John: That’s wild. Hey, speaking of knocking out, something I’ve been meaning to ask you is, in the last episode of The Last of Us, one of the characters is hit with a back of a rifle and knocked out. Talk to me about your decision to do that and how you feel about that as a thing that is done in movies and TV, because in real life, people shouldn’t do that.
Craig: No, you should not do that.
John: In movies and TV, it happens a lot. What is the reality of hitting somebody over the head like that? What does it really do? What is your decision making process of showing that or not showing that?
Craig: There was a lot of head hitting in the game. People get hit in the head a lot and get knocked out a lot that way. We avoided most of it. That was an area where just story-wise we just needed someone to get knocked out. We had done it earlier, actually, as well, when Joel knocks a guy out, and then he comes to, and Joel’s torturing his friend. I’m not a big fan of it.
I’m gonna try and avoid it if I can next time, because you can absolutely knock people out. You’re giving them a concussion. You can knock them out. You can also just kill them by giving them a subdural hematoma that just swells in their brain and then kills them. You can do all sorts of stuff. You can fracture their skull. It’s a terrible way of knocking somebody out. You shouldn’t do it. Nobody should be knocking anybody out.
If you hit somebody hard in the back of the head, first of all, you may not knock them out at all. You may cause brain damage, and especially if you’re hitting somebody in the back of the head. You could blind them. There’s all sorts of terrible things that can happen. It is not something you should do. I’m gonna try as best I can to avoid people hitting people on the back of the head with the stocks of guns for Season 2, but Season 3 will be nothing but that, just one after another.
John: All head injuries. They’ll suffer the consequences of those head injuries. That’s gonna be the real change. That’s gonna be the shocking revelation there. Craig, thank you for your answer there, because I suspect that there was a debate there, because you’re so concerned about portrayals of things in the real world.
As I was looking at the scene, I was thinking, okay, because a thing happens before that, there’s other ways you could’ve gotten that one character knocked out, and yet this made sense for the characters in that world and in that moment. [Crosstalk 01:17:39].
Craig: It made sense, but it’s not great. When we play DnD, as you know, if you are attacking someone and you don’t want to kill them, you want to leave them just alive enough to interrogate them, all you have to do is say to the DM, “I want to deliver a non-lethal blow here.” If it takes them to 0 HP, they don’t die, they’re alive, you can interrogate them. In this case, this was not that. The guys that came up, they didn’t know who Joel was. They were like, “We’re gonna knock you out, and if you die, you die. If you don’t, we’ll be able to ask you questions. Either way, it’s fine.”
John: Exactly. There was a movie I’ve really liked recently where the central character I think is knocked over the head three times, knocked out over the head three times. I was like, “She’s paralyzed now. I don’t think she’s coming back and fighting for victory here.” I loved the movie, but that was a thing that [crosstalk 01:18:27].
Craig: You gotta stop hitting people on the head. I agree. To the extent that we have contributed to the head hitting, I apologize to all of culture.
John: Nice.
Craig: I’ve got a colonoscopy coming up. I’m gonna try and take notes. I don’t remember. I’m just gone.
John: You can ask them. You can ask them. You can tell them, “I’m an absolute pro at this. You can give me less.” Maybe not, because they don’t want you talking.
Craig: Oh, no no no, I’m not gonna ever say that. Ever. Ever. I’m a baby. You want to run a garden hose up my butt? Do it. I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to be awake. I don’t want to know about it. Just do the garden hose. It’s not a garden hose, by the way. It’s incredibly slender.
John: It’s slender. It’s fine. People may way, way, way too big a deal of colonoscopies. They’re fine.
Craig: All they do is save your life. That’s all they do.
John: That’s all they do. Easiest thing you could do to save your life.
Craig: Get a colonoscopy, people. Thanks, guys.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Drew: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Has Anyone Ever Actually Tied a Damsel in Distress to a Railway Track? by Karl Smallwood
- Pirating the Oscars 2023: The Final Curtain Call by Andy Baio
- Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John? by Demetria Glace for Slate
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: Flotsam by Sam Darcy, Sockfoot by Jesse Allard, and Spark by Rachel Thomas
- Pijja Palace
- how I found the ‘so no head’ vine road in 15 minutes by RAINBOLT
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Richie Molyneux (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 592: Only One of Us Can Be the Hero, Transcript. first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 591 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do we establish what happened in the world before the movie began? We’ll look at collective narratives and ways to get the audience up to speed. We’ll also discuss getting staffed and joining the WGA. To help us do all that, we welcome back our beloved Scriptnotes producer, Megana Rao. Welcome back.
Craig: Yay!
John: Woohoo!
Megana Rao: Hello.
Craig: Aw. Hi.
Megana: I’m feeling very shy.
John: Suddenly she’s shy.
Craig: Nothing’s changed. You’ve done this so many times. You’re good. You’re doing great.
John: She’s like the kid running around all over the living room before the guests come over, and the guests come into the living room and they hide back behind their parents.
Megana: Yeah, exactly.
Craig: You’re doing great.
John: Megana, we lost you because you went off to work on a television show, a Netflix comedy.
Megana: Yes.
John: On a scale of 1 to 14, how has it been working on this Netflix show so far?
Megana: It has been so fun. It absolutely rocks. I’m not saying that in a way… I don’t want anyone’s feelings to be hurt, but I’m having a great time.
Craig: Our feelings are certainly not hurt, although what were the odds that Megana was going to describe her current job as a 1 out of 14?
John: Exactly, like, “Oh, it’s absolutely torture, and all the people in the room who listen to this podcast, they need to know that it’s absolutely the worst.”
Megana: No, it’s the greatest. My head hurts from laughing so much every day.
Craig: Oh, wow.
John: It’s gotta be a huge adjustment though too, because generally, it’s been you and me or you and me and Nima, who comes in the office, and now you’re suddenly around a bunch of people all day. Has that been a huge adjustment for you?
Megana: Definitely. It went from quiet time with just you and me sitting next to each other in the office to around a dozen people just doing jokes and bits all day, talking nonstop.
John: Wow. Megana, in our Bonus Segment, because you’re coming back, I wanted to give you carte blanche to whatever you would like to do for a Bonus Segment. Do you have any thoughts about what you want to do for a Bonus Segment for this one?
Megana: Yes. I recently downloaded TikTok and have gotten sucked into get ready with me videos, which I believe you’re also familiar with, hashtag #grwm. I wanted to talk about those.
John: Fantastic. We are so unprepared to talk about getting ready with me, but you can get us ready for it by talking us through what we need to know about-
Craig: No idea what’s going on.
John: … getting ready with me.
Megana: Wait, really? You guys aren’t watching these?
Craig: Weirdly, no.
John: I have a sense of what I think they are. You’ll tell us. Our Premium members can listen in as we get up to speed with where Megana is already at in terms of getting ready with me videos.
Megana: Great.
John: Awesome. Some news, folks. The WGA Awards happened. It’s this past weekend as we recorded. It’s two weekends ago. No surprise that Everything Everywhere All At Once and Women Talking, two of the features that we had the filmmakers on to talk about, won first place, because that’s what we do. We pick the winners.
Craig: I really wish you hadn’t said that, because now we’re going to get more emails from more PR people.
John: You know whose problem that is? It’s Drew’s problem.
Drew Marquardt: It’s my problem.
John: It’s no longer Megana’s problem.
Craig: It’s Drew’s problem now. That’s wonderful, as long as it’s not our problem, although it is. We get them.
John: We get them too.
Craig: We do. Congratulations to Sarah and the Daniels. Very exciting. Listen, I don’t want to handicap anything. I’m not an Oscars expert or a pro or anything like that, but it sure looks good for Everything Everywhere All At Once going into the final weekend here, because the Oscars are coming up this weekend.
John: They will already have happened by the time people are listening to this. You’ll know whether Craig was wrong or was right. I think he’s probably right.
Craig: I feel like I am, but no one’s going to be watching the Oscars, because it’s the finale of The Last of Us, so oh well.
John: Good timing there. Good planning.
Craig: Sorry, Oscars. Sorry.
John: Megana, do you have any advice for Drew as he deals with the onslaught of publicists who are going to be asking for a prime spot on Scriptnotes?
Megana: Unfortunately, we don’t take solicitations for guests. It’s tough that we have this policy, because there’s a lot of cool guests that are being pitched out there. You two actually end up bringing on most of the guests that you’re interested in talking to.
John: In general, if there’s somebody who we’re really fascinated by, we’ll just reach out to them, and they’ll say yes. Occasionally, we have to go through a publicist. Back in the day, we used to go to Twitter, but now I guess it’ll have to be Instagram. I’ll reach out on Instagram and find these folks or Craig will meet them somewhere.
Craig: I don’t want people to feel bad, like if we haven’t had you on the show, it means we don’t think you’re fascinating. That’s not true. The other thing that I do say to people all the time, because it is true, is that we’re not really that show. We’re not a guest chat show. We’re a John and Craig talk about things that are interesting to screenwriters show, and occasionally, we’ll bring someone else into our marriage to spice it up a touch. Mostly, we’re monogamous. That’s kind of how we are.
John: If you’re a publicist who has terrific clients, there are so many great venues for you to be bringing those clients. Scriptnotes won’t be one of them, but that’s okay, because there’s lots of other great podcasts out there who will be happy to have them. Megana, we have you here only for a short time, so I want to make sure we get the most value out of your time here with us.
We have talked to previous guests about getting staffed. We talked to Ryan Knighton. We talked to Jack Schaefer about running a room. We talked to Megan McDonald, your predecessor, when she got staffed.
I want to talk about that transition period, because there was a time when you were taking a lot of meetings. You were just taking a lot of meetings and going out and meeting with people. What was that like? What was the process? You get the call saying, “There’s this show. They’re interested in you.” Then you’d have to get up to speed. How did you get the call? What prep did you do? It was a couple of months of work on some of these, and some of them happened really quickly.
Megana: I don’t think it was a couple of months on any of them. I feel like with lower-level positions, it happens really quickly. It’s week off. This one happened to be less than 24 hours notice before I went in for the interview.
Craig: Wow.
John: Let’s talk through going in for the interview before you get there. What is the call or the email from your rep saying, “Hey, there’s this show.” What are they telling you about it? What are you reading? What are you watching?
Megana: Somehow, for this show, my sample got passed to this showrunner, but my agent didn’t formally submit me for this role. In tracing back how it all came together, I’m actually not quite sure.
Craig: Wouldn’t it be great if this is where Megana found out that we did it?
John: Behind the scenes.
Craig: We just quietly paid them off.
John: It was us.
Craig: We’re like, “Listen. Megana-“
Megana: “We have had enough.”
Craig: “She needs to go. She’ll sit in the room. She’s not going to write anything. Don’t worry about it. She’ll just laugh. She’s great.”
Megana: “She’ll just giggle.”
Craig: “She’ll just giggle. Then just send her home. For God’s sake, she’s gotta go.”
Megana: Did you guys actually do that?
Craig: Yeah, we did that.
John: No, that’s not true at all.
Craig: No, it’s what happened.
John: There was a friend of ours in college who our ongoing bit with her was that her parents were paying us to be her friend.
Craig: Aw.
John: Whenever she’s like, “You’re being mean to me,” it’s like, “Your parents’ check didn’t clear.”
Craig: Wait, we have to explain to them what checks are.
John: Here’s a good tie-in to that. Megana, literally the day before you got staffed on the show, you were in the office and we were talking about what a check was. You had a revelation about something you had never realized before about checks. Is that correct?
Megana: Yes, but I’ve already forgotten what it was. There’s a form on the back of checks, and you’re supposed to do something with it.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Good lord. You endorse it.
John: You endorse it. You sign it for a deposit or for deposit only. That was a new thing for checks for you.
Megana: What happens if you don’t do it? Because I’ve never done that for the three checks I’ve written.
John: I think it actually doesn’t matter anymore, because now you’re just putting the thing on the ATM, and so it doesn’t matter.
Megana: Got it.
John: Technically, you should be doing that.
Craig: There was a while where I never did it. Then with the advent of digital deposits, where you take a picture of your check, the algorithm needs you to sign the back of it or it kicks it back at you, so we’re back to it.
Megana: The other thing I didn’t realize is that checks were numbered. That was the big surprise.
John: That was a big one. I wanted you to say it rather than me say it.
Craig: What?
John: The checks are numbered sequentially.
Craig: What? You didn’t notice that there was a number on each check that got bigger with each check that you went through?
Megana: Craig, there are a lot of numbers on checks, and I don’t go through checks.
Craig: First of all, how dare you? You have to come at this with some humility, because that’s crazy.
Megana: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a check before, but there’s-
Craig: There are a lot of numbers on it. I’m like, “Oh yeah, you’re making a great point.” Wait, no, you’re not, because all the numbers on the bottom of a check are in that weird check font, but then there’s a normal font in the top right, or that’s usually where it is, which is just a four-digit number. John, are we-
John: Old? Yeah.
Craig: God.
John: She grew up in a time when checks were just no longer a thing. They’re not a thing now. There was never a period where she needed to worry about a checkbook and the sense of, “Oh, did I grab the right checkbook?” It doesn’t matter, because she never had to deal with it.
Craig: Did you have the same experience that I did, John, in high school, where we took half a semester in some class that was like home ec? I don’t know what else you would call it. It was learning how to write checks and keep track of them in the white parts of the checkbook that no one ever uses except old, old, old people.
Megana: Aw.
Craig: I know. Aw, we’re cute.
John: I think it was part of our math unit. I think it was just built into basically that.
Craig: That’s awesome.
John: I think we were explained what a mortgage was.
Craig: You get to pause on math and then they just make you do checks?
John: Probably math.
Craig: That’s crazy.
John: Also, they shoved logic into the geometry section. They’d have to find a place to do it.
Craig: Technically, geometry does require proofs and theorems.
John: It’s logic.
Craig: A lot of logic. I don’t really think they shoved it in there. I’m going to challenge you on that.
John: We’ll see.
Craig: I’m fighting today. I’m fighting everyone.
John: How would we find the answer to this? Where is the source of truth people go back to? What was the curriculum in Fairview High School in 1987? Who can find that out? If you’re a listener who could tell me when I learned about checks, that would be fantastic.
More crucially for screenwriter issues, I want to get back to, in general, Megana, as you were hearing about a show, your reps were trying to set up a showrunner meeting with you on the show, what are they sending you? What kind of prep can you do for that?
Megana: Typically, I would get at least a pilot script, maybe a couple of other scripts, and a little blurb that my agent would send with a log line and a little synopsis of where the season was going. Oftentimes, that’s been it.
John: Do they give you some sense of why they’re meeting with you? Is there a specific role they might be looking for you for, like, “We need a funny person.” Because talking with showrunners, it seems like sometimes they’re casting rooms to make sure, like, “We need somebody who’s really good at mysteries. We need somebody who’s good at structuring a one-hour show, someone with this kind of experience.” Do they give you a sense of why they’re meeting with you, or just you’re on their list?
Megana: I’ve never really had that information beforehand. I’ve tried to come up with a pitch based off of those materials, but typically, I don’t think so.
John: You’ve had a little bit of time to prep. You’re going in and meeting. Are you actually going in meeting somebody, or is it all just Zooms at this point?
Megana: My interview was in person, and the room’s in person, which I am so thrilled about.
John: That’s great. Has that been typical for all the showrunner meetings you’ve been taking over the last couple months?
Megana: No, I think this is the first one. In the past few months, it’s been like, “Hopefully, we would do something in person or hybrid if possible,” but this is the first one that’s been like, “Nope, we’re definitely physically here.”
Craig: Do you feel the love being in person? I certainly prefer it, but I know that that’s been the way it’s always been with me, that people I’ve worked with have been in the room, and then there was this brief interruption. For you, since you haven’t had the experience of a writing room really until now, does it feel good knowing that you’re there in person or is it a 50/50?
Megana: I’m so happy that we’re in person. Everyone in this room has had prior relationships with each other. I can’t imagine coming into this room over Zoom and not having the ability to make small talk on the way up the stairs or in the coffee room. I just think it’s been hugely important. Also, the energy of being there together is not something that you can easily replicate.
John: Especially for a comedy. It’s a sense of was that funny in the moment, was it funny in the room, did it actually land. I feel like that’s much more important for something like this. If you’re doing a very structured procedural, it may not be as important that you all physically be in the same space, because it’s not going to have the same vie.
Megana: Totally. I think I didn’t appreciate how much of the job is just reading body language. You just can’t do that over Zoom in the same way.
John: A thing we’ve heard from a bunch of showrunners and also previous staff writers on the podcast is that it’s hard when you’re first in a room to know when to speak up, when to stay quiet, what the first thing is you should actually say, the first pitch you should give. Is that the experience you’ve found? What was it like based on your prior expectations based on Scriptnotes versus being there in person?
Megana: I don’t know. I guess I’m still figuring it out. Luckily, my showrunner is very into mentoring, so I have felt very supported through this process. I think it’s certainly something I’m still navigating.
John: A question we often get is, if you are a staff writer in this room, on a daily basis what are you actually writing? Are you taking notes? Are you doing anything, or is it just entirely your brain, and you’re talking in the room? Is there anything that you are actually physically writing at this point?
Megana: It’s mostly talking, but we’ve recently started working on outlines.
John: That’s exciting. You said there were maybe a dozen people in a room. Does that include support staff? Because we obviously talked a lot about support staff on this podcast. Who’s in the room on a supporting level, who’s not a writer?
Megana: There’s a script coordinator and a writing assistant.
John: Are they just there to physically write stuff down and move stuff around, or are they contributing as well? Are they speaking up, or are they mostly there to make sure everyone else is facilitated?
Megana: Both. They’re definitely speaking and contributing. The room is just so many whiteboards.
Craig: You don’t want to give anything identifying here in terms of size, but is there ever any frustration, asks the guy who works alone, with either some people talking too much, some people never talking, having something to say but waiting and then it’s too late and then we’ve moved on? How do you deal with the frustration of a large group of people talking about something?
Megana: I don’t think I really have to deal with the frustration of it, but a lot of these people are very seasoned writers, and there’s a certain pace and momentum that they just understand. The showrunner is so great, because he’s really responsive to what everyone says, but he’s also very clear on the direction that he’s looking for, the types of things that he’s looking for.
John: It also helps that you’re not coming in from scratch. There’s already a sense of what this show is or at least what the show is supposed to be. You didn’t come in on day one of this. That also helps a little bit too, that there’s some sort of structure, a sense of what this is that you’re trying to make.
Megana: Totally.
John: Megana, when I took you out to celebrate getting staffed on a show, one of the things [inaudible 00:15:19] you can potentially be joining the WGA based on this show, based on staffing on this show, which would be so exciting, because we’d get another WGA member in our fold. I realized that we’ve never actually talked on the podcast, or at least not recently, in 591 episodes, about the actual point system it takes to join the WGA, because it’s not just a club that you sign up for you. You actually have to qualify to join.
Megana: I had no idea how any of this worked.
Craig: Few do. Few do. This is arcane knowledge that only the oldest of wizards and witches know about. You know when Gandalf goes to research the ring and he goes into that super old library and finds some scroll and he’s reading and goes, “Oh,” and then he’s running back? That’s me.
John: You are the old scroll.
Craig: There’s somebody on Twitter who was doing the thing that people do on Twitter, professing his great knowledge about the screenwriting world, as often. One of the things he said was, “A lot of people don’t know that just because you sell your spec script, that doesn’t mean that you automatically become a WGA member.” Yeah, it does. Then I was like, “Okay, I don’t know where the misconception is,” but let’s talk through how it actually works, because it’s weird.
The way it works is there’s units. To become a full-fledged, current, active member of the Writers Guild of America West, you need to get 24 units at a minimum. You have 3 years to accrue those 24 units, or the ones that start to expire, basically. You need to figure out how to get your 24 units in within 3 years, at which point, hooray, you’re a member. The thing about selling a screenplay, if you sell a screenplay for a feature length theatrical motion picture, boom, 24 units, you’re done. Welcome to the Guild.
John: Craig, I want to raise one potential hand here. In theory, someone who’s not a WGA member, could sell a spec screenplay to a company through their nonsignatory arm and not join through that. There’s ways I’m sure this had happened in the past, where someone has sold a thing and it’s not happened for them.
Craig: If you sell a screenplay to a nonsignatory, you get zero units, and may God have mercy on your soul. What he specifically said was you have to sell your script, and then you have to do another pass on it. That is not the case, although you weren’t guaranteed another pass on it. It’s part of our deal. The tiniest amount of units is two.
I think this is the way a lot of people get into the Guild. Each complete week of employment within the Guild’s jurisdiction on a week-to-week basis gets you two units. If you’re hired as a staffer on a show, and you are in the room, covered by your employment deal for 12 weeks, boom, Writers Guild. You’re in. That’s 24 units.
John: That’s the way it helps for Megana.
Craig: Indeed.
John: She’s accruing two units per week.
Craig: Two units per week. There’s lots of things in between writing a story only, writing a short film, writing a radio play less than 30 minutes, shall be prorated in 5-minute increments. These rules have been around for a long… Like I said, Gandalf in the library.
John: You can tell these are old.
Craig: The story for a TV program of less than 30 minutes, again, prorated in increments of 10 minutes or less. I think it should be 10 minutes or fewer. In any case, there are lots of subdivisions, but the point is, the way most people get into the Guild is either through selling a screenplay for a feature film or working week to week as a staffer and getting those 12 weeks under their belt, at which point the Guild calls you and says, “You owe us money.”
John: That’s one of the exciting calls you love to get. Craig, I got into the Guild because I was hired to write a feature screenplay, which is 24 units of credit, for How to Eat Fried Worms. It was for [inaudible 00:19:22] Pictures, which is a Guild signatory. I got the message from the WGA saying, “Hey, congratulations. You are now eligible and must join the Guild and the pay $3,500.” It was some pretty significant fee to join. Then you are in the Writers Guild, and you’re there for good until you could go post-current at some point. You were then in the Writers Guild and you are fully a member thereof. Craig, what was your thing that got you in?
Craig: I was the same. With a writing partner of mine, we sold an original screenplay idea to Disney, and we were hired to write the screenplay. Of note, both of us immediately accrued 24 units. It wasn’t like they spread the units, 12 and 12.
I have never had a faster call in my life from a union. I don’t know how they found me. It was like seconds went by, and then suddenly the phone rang, and then they were like, “Hey, kid.” There was a woman who used to run that department. I can’t quite remember her name. She was a very nice lady, but older. It was like they sent the tough lady after you, like, “Listen, kid, you owe us money.” I was like, “Okay, great.”
What was funny at the time, of course, was LOL, I hadn’t gotten paid anything, and neither had my writing partner. We both owed each the full initiation fee. I was like, “I’m out of money now. I don’t have any money. I just gave it all to the Writers Guild. This is going great so far.”
Obviously, all said and done, a fine thing to get into the union. You just have to be ready and prepared, particularly if you’re endeavoring to get into the Writers Guild. If you want to be optimistic, and I think you should, sock the initiation fee away. What is it, $2,500?
Megana: Mm-hmm.
John: I think so.
Craig: Sock that away. You’ll need it.
Megana: The one funny thing in the communication is that it was like, this assumes that you live West of the Mississippi River. I was like, “I’ve never thought about where I live in those terms.”
Craig: Unfortunately, we have two Writers Guilds. Ask me why, Megana. Ask me why.
Megana: I can tell you’re in a fighting mood-
Craig: Do it. Do it.
Megana: … which is why we don’t record evenings.
Craig: Ask me. Ask me.
Megana: Craig, why do we have two unions on opposite sides of the Mississippi?
Craig: Because we’re dumb. We are dumb. We weren’t dumb. Back in the old days, the business was divided between New York and Los Angeles. New York handled a lot of television, and Los Angeles handled a lot of other stuff. New York in particular handled all the news and stuff like this. Then shortly thereafter, everything just ended up in LA, but we still kept this weird, archaic structure, where we have the Writers Guild East and the Writers Guild West.
We negotiate together. We have the same minimum basic agreement. There’s no reason to have two unions. It’s all so stupid. For the love of God, they were able to put Berlin back together. The dividing line between the East and the West per chain-smoking, bourbon lunch drinking from 1943 was the Mississippi River. I’m sure it was a difficult compromise to make. It’s so silly.
By the way, anybody in the Writers Guild West can, by choice, join the Writers Guild East, and vice versa. It’s just so stupid. I’m glad you asked, Megana. I’m glad you asked.
Megana: I’m not.
Craig: You asked.
John: Just to close out the topic, let’s say you were hired to do a rewrite, not to do a full first draft. That would count for one half that number of credits. A polish is one quarter. An option can do a thing, which I’ve never heard of somebody getting into the Guild through options, but theoretically it’s possible. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the full explanation of things. Megana, I’m curious, because you said that you got this email. Did you get an email from the Guild saying, “Hey, this is your path to joining the Guild.”
Megana: Yes. They were like, “So-and-so has told us that they’ve employed you,” and then this big email with lots of attachments.
Craig: We got our eye on you, kid.
John: In the case of Megana, she’s working on a Netflix show. There is a thing called a work list. Every week, the employers have to report who is writing for them. Craig, they could’ve found you through a work list, but they also could’ve just found you through Variety. There’s some article that you sold a thing.
Craig: I don’t know. They were on it fast.
John: Love it. I love that kind of efficiency. I want to get to our marquee topic here. I am writing something right now that is set in 1962. I say 1962, you think, oh, it’s the ‘60s, but really 1962 is not the ‘60s. It’s sort of more the ‘50s.
We have this desire to decade-ize time, and things don’t fit nicely. Yet it’s so helpful that we can talk about the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and have an image of what it is we’re talking about. There’s a shared collective understanding of like, we don’t have to agree on exactly what happened in that decade, but we can at least agree on what everyone thinks about that decade. If I say it feels like the ‘70s, we get a sense of what that is.
I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Noah Smith, who’s talking about conceiving the 2000s. Weirdly, the 2000s and the 2010s, I don’t feel like we do have a good sense of what those are like. We haven’t decided on a collective narrative for what those feel like. There’s moments in there that we can point to. Even when we were living in the ‘90s, I think we could point to the ‘80s and say, “Oh, that feels very ‘80s.” It’s hard for me to say, “Oh, that feels very 2000s,” or it feels very 2010s. We haven’t found a good collective narrative about what those decades are like.
I thought we might talk about why collective narratives like that are useful for screenwriters in framing things in real world things, but also important for establishing collective narratives for the characters inside your world, if you’re creating a world from scratch, because we look at fictional worlds, like what happened with the Snap at MCU or how the robots came out sentient in the Terminator universe. The characters in that world know that stuff, but we have to tell the audience all the stuff that normal characters in that world might know. I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about both why it’s important and how we establish those things in the fiction worlds they’re creating.
Craig: You’ve got to start, I guess, with culture. It seems weirdly as we are creating culture, we are studying culture, and the snake eats its own tail, as the uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs] does. That’s right, I said uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs].
John: I would say ouroboros [or-uh-BOR-ohs]. You say uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs]?
Craig: I think it’s uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs]. I don’t it’s ouroboros [OR-oh-BOR-uhs], because that would be… It might be.
John: I think I’ve heard it said ouroboros [or-uh-BOR-ohs] though.
Craig: Here we go.
John: I’m not sure.
Craig: Hey Siri, how do you pronounce uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs]? It said, “How to pronounce Robert Henry Rose.” I guess I should realize that that was going to happen, because if I’m mispronouncing it, then it won’t know. If I’m pronouncing it correctly, I didn’t need to ask. I’m going to the dictionary.
Drew: Google says uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].
John: I was close though.
Drew: You were close.
Craig: That’s really close.
John: Uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].
Craig: I’m going to give that to you. I think that you’re right, because you said ouroboros [or-ruh-BOR-ohs], but the adding of the Y, that’s insignificant compared to my uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs], which is just wrong. Uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].
John: Uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].
Craig: The nature of the uroboros, we obsess over pop culture and/or just regular culture, high culture, low, it doesn’t matter, as signposts for the world around us. Clothing is maybe the most immediate thing that we think of. Then music is a hot second right behind clothing.
John: Definitely.
Craig: Hair is right there in third place. Then in fourth place you will often see fads, the things that captivated culture at a time. In the 2000s, for instance… Were Tamagotchi big in the early 2000s?
Megana: That feels like ‘90s.
Craig: Late ‘90s.
Drew: It’s the late ‘90s.
Craig: That feels like ‘90s. Something that just comes along where people are like, “Oh my god,” obsess over something from 2003. That sort of thing paints this broad sense of where we are.
More than anything else, I suppose the other thing we do draw from are these main historical events. It seems like in half of the movies about the ‘60s, somebody will run into a room and go, “Did you hear about John F. Kennedy’s been shot?” He gets shot constantly in those movies. That’s understandable. Makes sense.
Megana: It’s interesting in the examples that Craig brought up, I would associate most of those things with teen culture, but teens, I don’t know, they’re not typically creating culture. They’re responding to it.
John: I think teens are often creating culture. I think stuff does bubble up there, because Craig’s examples were fashion, music, and hair, but if you think about the decades that we can actually distinctly remember, it’s when those three things intersected. ‘90s, you have grunge. ‘80s, you have hair metal. You also have ‘80s fashion. ‘70s, we have a look. ‘60s, ‘70s, we have the hippies. Again, music, fashion. ‘50s, the Beatles. We have all these things that are gathered together. It’s that perfect storm. It’s really teens who are creating that culture.
Beyond just the culture, what this space feels like, there’s a sense of a shared story about how we got to this place. We have a collective narrative about the fall of Roman Empire. We don’t need to know the details. It’s just like, oh, the Roman Empire got really big, and then it collapsed.
Craig: Too big.
John: Too big.
Craig: Too big.
John: Too big. Got too big, got too spread out, the fall, fiddling while it all burned. We have a sense of a collective story about how the first peoples arrived in North America. That’s the crossing of the land bridge. We don’t need to know the dates of it. We just know that essentially the land was pretty empty and then a bunch of peoples crossed over the land bridge from Alaska, spread out over the whole North and South America and Central America, and that’s how people got here.
Those are helpful things that we can assume that anybody watching our stories would understand. We wouldn’t have to explain those to people. Yet if we were doing a fictional world… Need to explain the Empire or the Federation in Star Wars or Star Trek. You gotta be doing some work there to get up to speed, where any character within that world would already know that stuff.
Craig: Knowing things and figuring out what your audience knows is actually trickier than you think, especially the older you get. One of the things that happens as we get older is we start to take for granted that people know stuff that we know that they don’t, and similarly-
John: That the checks have numbers on them.
Craig: Correct. Conversely, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we don’t know, and we don’t know that we don’t know it. That’s how you become out of touch. That’s how your references get dated. That’s also how you make missteps and incorrect assumptions. What we assume about what the audience knows is essential. Otherwise, we are either wasting time telling them stuff they already do or we are presuming they know things that they don’t, and they just won’t understand what’s going on.
Megana: As you were talking, I was thinking about, Chernobyl is obviously so rooted in time and place, but actually, so is The Last of Us, because it’s 2003.
Craig: There is a genre of frozen in time, where the world stops and everything stops at a kind of time period. It is interesting, 2003. We were a little short on fads and things like that. In terms of the technology…
I guess technology is also now a huge one, not so much before, but now, because it changes so rapidly, what kind of phone were people using, and what did the cars look like and what did the radios in the cars look like, and even the fact that there is a radio. All those things were frozen in time and do help mark where you are as you’re going through. Then of course everything decays and turns into its own vibe.
Megana: I also remember, John, once, I think very early on when I was working with you, you were working on a project that was set in the ‘50s, and you and I made a timeline of when different things happen and trying to map out what the social cultural attitudes towards these things were, and that was shocking.
John: I think that’s important to do, because you need to understand what the baseline of it was and the characters in that time period, what they thought, and also always remembering what people now think about that time period. I think when there’s a mismatch there, you can actually create some good cultural moments.
I think the movie Hidden Figures is a great example. We have a sense of what the role of Black women was in that time period, we have a sense of what getting a man on the moon was like, but we didn’t have a sense that those two things were related. We didn’t have a sense that there were Black women who were involved in NASA’s work there at that time. That’s exciting when you can find those moments that both use people’s cultural narratives, a collective narrative we have about that time period, and can push beyond it, show an attitude that was different.
I think Chernobyl did a great job of that also, because we have a sense of what Chernobyl was, this moment that happened, but Craig was able to fill in details that people would’ve never known about what was going on there. Talk about uroboros. Craig’s show not only exposes things, but really changed people’s cultural expectation of what Chernobyl was, because it became the narrative of what Chernobyl was. For better or worse, just like we were going to think that the Titanic sank the same way that James Cameron showed us, because that’s the biggest cultural marker we have for that event.
Craig: If you can find some undermined cultural territory for collective narratives, that’s always exciting, not only showing the flip side of things that we know, but even just general… I think Mad Men was so interesting, because they were like, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to do the early ‘60s, which actually no one thinks about,” because as you put, when you would say, “What were the ‘60s like?” “Hippies. Boom, it’s hippies. Let’s go.” Actually-
John: That’s late.
Craig: That’s late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The early ‘60s, they’re not the ‘50s. It’s not poodle skirts. It’s not Grease. It’s this other weird thing. Mad Men just went, “Oh, there’s this fun little hinge point between regressive and progressive society and major change versus stagnation. We’re going to just sit right in the middle there and find this other little special spot.” That was exciting, because honestly, a lot of people, myself included, I’d never really considered that time as a thing, but it is a thing.
John: Once we have Mad Men, then we can use that as a jumping off point for other things that are around that same time. X-Men: First Class would’ve had a harder time explaining itself if we didn’t have Mad Men, I think, as a reference back to us. Also, this thing I’m working on right now in 1962, Mad Men is a useful reference for it. Not that Mad Men has to stand in for everything, but at least we can visually see that’s the feel we’re going for.
Let’s talk about when we have to establish the collective narrative of a place in time that is not just strictly our decades. I’m thinking about fictional universes or we’ve made a big change in the universe.
A couple different techniques you might want to use. The first is brute force. We’ve seen things that start with “once upon a time.” They’re just going to lay it out for you, like, “This is what you need to know about our world for this all to make sense.”
The Star Wars opening crawl is basically a once upon a time. It’s just like, “You gotta get up to speed here. Go with us here. Trust us as you’re reading this thing for two minutes, and then it’ll be worth your while to go through it.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer opening credits, “In every generation, a slayer is born,” establishing this is the premise, that there’s a history to this moment that was here from before.
Megana: I think one other different category off of that is something like The Watchmen or For All Mankind, where they’re using collective narratives to introduce us to a world that’s slightly different. Would you call it science fiction, alternative?
Craig: Yeah, alternative history. That’s a whole category where they’ll reference President Robert Redford, be like, “It’s our world, but it’s not our world. It’s an alternate version of history,” and helping people figure out, okay, so there was a Vietnam War, but in this world, America won, and how would that go? That’s a good way of orienting people into your new collective narrative, your ultimate historical collective narrative.
John: It seems important that you would have to introduce some of those elements quite early on, so the audience knows that it’s not just our universe, because you could probably do it at the end of the first episode or something like that, or a ways in, but at a certain point it’s going to feel like a betrayal if you didn’t reveal it was a different universe pretty early on.
Craig: Do they not know that Robert Redford wasn’t the president? Maybe they don’t know. They don’t know. I’m going to write a stern letter.
John: Those numbers in the corner of checks, what are those for?
Craig: Yeah, what are those?
John: Another way, if you’re creating a fictional universe or having to really change the collective narrative of something is to explain to an outsider or to a newcomer. You see this in a lot of things. Indiana Jones, he is explaining to somebody who is not an archeologist the important things to understand about this culture, this thing, these rules of this universe.
The Matrix works that same way too, where Neo is an outsider being introduced to the truth behind The Matrix. He’s a convenient place to exposition dump upon. We’ve talked about The Matrix a lot. It’s a good example of a movie that starts in a mostly real world and then has to bring the character through the looking glass into the other side.
Lastly, I would say that sometimes you’re doing multiple things at once. Star Trek: The Original Series, those opening credits every time told you what the mission was of the Enterprise, but each time, they were also meeting a new civilization, and through that way they could introduce concepts like the Federation or we’ve moved beyond money, all the ideals of what their show is like and how stuff is structured and set up.
There’s a big science fiction project I’m talking about doing that the explanation of what has happened to the world is so lengthy that even at the conceptual stage we have to think about how much are we info dumping to audience right at the start versus exposing people piece by piece as things come up.
Craig: I do love an info dump. I love a creative info dump. It’s one of my favorite things to do.
John: Some of that has attention in the moment, but it’s also getting you through that, getting over that bump. Megana, because we have you, we actually have some listener questions that came in that were specifically exactly for you. I’m wondering if Drew might want to read you some of them.
Drew: Wait a second. This is (singing) We Have a Question for Megana.
John: Yes.
Drew: Cool. Fred writes, “Congratulations to Megana!”
Craig: Woo.
Megana: Woo.
John: Yay.
Drew: “I’d be interested in hearing about Megana’s journey, leaving the corporate world and becoming a screenwriter. Can she share her story and offer any tips to aspiring writers?”
Craig: Megana, you have 40 seconds. Go.
Megana: Oh my god. This question is tough, because it’s so hard for me to emotionally relate to what I was doing at that point, because I feel like I made a lot of bad decisions. If I were to give advice to somebody else, I’d be like, “Have a plan. Line up another job.”
I worked at Google for five years, and then I quit my job, and I had no plan. I moved out to Los Angeles. I had money saved up. I had a family friend, who was my mom’s best friend from when I was six years old. I knew that she had an extra bedroom in her place in Long Beach that I could stay at rent-free for a while. That was my path to coming out to LA. Then once I was here, I just tried everything and threw myself and tried to talk to as many people as I could and luckily started working for John within that year.
Then in terms of offering any tips to aspiring writers, I think looking back, there are so many things I might’ve done differently, like writing more or doing some more of the planning when I have the security of a full-time job, but also things worked out because I had made room for changes in my life, if that makes sense.
It’s something that I think about a lot is that if you want change in your life, you do have to make room or space for it. I think that if you are writing for five minutes or 30 minutes a day, you’re going to see progress or change, but it’s going to be proportionate to the amount of time you’re giving that activity.
Craig: It just strikes me that what you’re maybe… It’s not that you’re dancing around it, but I think what you’re struggling with is something I’ve struggled with so many times when I’ve been asked this question, which is, yeah, I can share my story, and I suppose I could offer you tips, but really what I’m what saying is here’s the unique thing that happened to me, and here are the tips that I learned along the way that are applicable to me but may not be at all applicable to you.
The way I got here isn’t how you’re going to get here, so I don’t know. Is this a great question or not? That’s the thing. Everyone asks it of everybody, but at some point, you do start to wonder, does it matter?
Megana: It’s also so hard because it’s really hard and heartbreaking in ways that I could never have predicted, and so it’s hard to encourage anyone or offer tips looking back on things retrospectively, because I don’t know, it feels like it was just luck.
John: It was luck, but it was also you put yourself in a situation where you could get lucky. You put yourself in a situation where you stopped working for Google and you moved out to stay at your aunt’s house in Long Beach, where you could be lucky when Megan got staffed on Wandavision, and suddenly there was an opening and you could interview for her job and be like, “Oh, of course, Megana should take over.” You put yourself in a position to be lucky.
I think that’s the common thing I’ve seen among everyone who’s been in your job and gone on and done great things is that you were working really hard, but you were also open to situations that could happen. When those opportunities presented themselves, you had writing samples to show. You had a work ethic that you could demonstrate. You had people who could recommend you. You were ready for when luck was ready to strike.
Craig: Chance favors the prepared.
John: Last thing I’ll say, sometimes when you think back like, oh, you spent your five years working at Google, does one regret that? Tell me what you think. I’m not sure that regret is really useful, because you don’t know whether starting your writing career five years earlier would’ve helped or not helped. You can’t say.
Megana: I think that those experiences really informed me. When I talk to a college student, I think just take any job. Working and having experience showed me what I didn’t want to do, what was important to me. I wouldn’t have been able to come to those conclusions if I didn’t try something.
I think it was really useful to be working there, because it was a really awesome company to work for. The perks were incredible. I met such smart people. I still had this thing in me that wanted to pursue screenwriting. No matter how great the company was, I realized that that thing wasn’t going to go away.
John: Also, keep in mind, you were heavily involved with all of the Pay Up Hollywood stuff and speaking up for supporting staff pay and conditions. Had you not spent five years working that actually had a structure and had some sort of standards, would you have had the experience to say, “Oh, no, that’s not right. This is not how a reputable company should be working.” I don’t know that what we were able to do helping supporting staff would’ve been the safe if it hadn’t been for you and your experience.
Megana: I did have a very different context in standard, reading those emails. I also think your first few years of working, and this is something you talk about all the time, is just learning to be a professional. I think Hollywood is such, I don’t know, Wild West of an industry that it can be hard for people who only come up through the entertainment industry to know how to navigate that.
John: Another part of your story which I will say is useful and a good reminder is that you moved out here and you’ve kept your expenses low, which Craig and I often talk about. By staying at your aunt’s house, you didn’t have to take the very first thing that was offered. You could really figure out what it is that you were trying to do. You didn’t have to be so desperate, which I think was a great choice that you were able to make. Craig, I don’t know if you even know that. The first couple weeks that Megana was working here, she would drive to and from Long Beach to the office here.
Megana: It was the first three months.
John: First three months.
Megana: It was rough. It was really rough.
Craig: John was paying careful attention to your pain.
Megana: John would be like, “I can’t even think about it. It’s going to stress me out too much.” I’d be like, “Okay. It’ll be two hours until I get home. Bye.”
Craig: These are the things we do. I will say when you are in your 20s, there is a certain amount of stamina there and an ability to bear the kind of stuff that you deal with when you’re an up-and-comer. There are also things that as time has gone on have made things a bit easier.
For instance, when I started out, let’s say I knew, okay, I have to go to a meeting at Fox. Uh-oh, I live in North Hollywood in my small apartment. It’s going to take a while to get to Fox. How long? I don’t know, because there’s no internet to tell me. In fact, there’s no computerized maps. There’s the Thomas Guide, which is a large book that shows me things, but basically, I’ve figured out how to get to Fox. That’s how I’m going. There is no Waze or Google to say, “Oh, by the way, don’t go that way today.”
You’re just going, “I could go one of two ways. I can go down and to the left or I can go left and down. I’ll go down and to the left today.” Oh, wrong. Looks like it’s going to be an hour and 45 minutes and you’re going to miss your meeting. You can’t even call them to tell them-
John: I’ve done it.
Craig: … because you’re in a car without a phone. This is how it used to be. We’ve all carried the burdens. Driving a long way, a long commute, is something that so many Americans deal with. So many Americans shoulder that burden. There is a privilege in living near your workplace if you work in a city. It just gets more and more expensive the closer and closer you get to work. This is part of life. God, I did a lot of commuting back in those days, a lot. You do it.
John: We’ve got one more question here from Ben.
Drew: Ben asks, “Megana, with access to John and Craig and guests as knowledge resources, what advice have you learned from working there that you have found most useful on your writing journey?”
Megana: Wow, another really big question.
Craig: These feel unfair.
Megana: It does relate to the thing that you were saying earlier. I would say a big thing that I’ve learned from having access to so many guests and the both of you is your creative processes are so different from mine, and so is everyone’s. It’s unique.
I think one thing that I have learned is finding models that work for me, finding validation that some people work in the same way that I do, but also maybe permission that my process is going to look different, because I think one thing that all of the guests and you guys have in common is that the creative process is ugly and difficult and surprising and can be heartbreaking. I think just setting those sorts of expectations is really helpful.
Also, I feel like I’ve learned that just because things feel awkward or strange or difficult during your journey or your writing doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re wrong. I don’t know, sometimes things do feel really great, and you should actually chase that feeling and maybe not keep… This is more to myself to not keep writing the thing that you can’t figure out.
Craig: Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s correct.
Megana: It works both ways.
Craig: There’s no doubt. It does. It works both ways. You’re absolutely correct that John and I have different processes from each other. One of the things that I think is most admirable is when people in our business, when asked how ought one do something, respond with the way that works best for you. What I loathe is when people say, “Allow me to tell you how to do stuff,” and, “Real screenwriters do it like this, and failures do it like this.” Oh, shut up.
Megana: The episode with the Daniels was so cool, because in watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s like, “Oh, this is so well done. They must have had this plan or this guide or whatever.” To hear their process, it’s like, “Oh wow, that’s kind of like how I feel when I’m stuck in the weeds.” The fact that they were able to produce this beautiful thing is just inspiring. I think that it’s been so helpful to hear these stories week after week and from the both of you, then just encourage that process and just the practice of continuing to do things that feel difficult.
Craig: That’s the way.
John: One last question for you on behalf of Drew. What advice do you have for Drew stepping into your role producing a Scriptnotes podcast? Any things you think Drew needs to know?
Megana: I have trained Drew on a lot of the things I think he needs to know. I think he’s doing a pretty great job so far.
Drew: Can I ask you a question?
Megana: Yes.
Drew: How do I get Craig to stop texting me? It’s just constant.
Megana: I am so jealous. Just tell him that your phone number is mine, because I would love to be texting with Craig more.
Drew: I’m going to do that.
Craig: I have literally never texted him once.
Drew: You text me all the time, Craig.
Craig: Why am I texting you? What am I texting you about? Tell me.
Drew: It’s just compliments.
Craig: Compliments, yeah. Just like, “Who does your hair?”
Drew: Yeah, exactly.
Craig: Sometimes I’ll text you in the middle of the night. I’m just like, “You up?” Yeah, I do. Then an hour will go by. Even though it’s the middle of the night, an hour will go by, and then I’ll be like, “Why aren’t you talking to me? Are we fighting?” I’ll do it all night. Then when he wakes up in the morning, he’s like, “Oh my god, what do I do about this?”
Drew: Look, it’s a back and forth. It’s okay. I was just hoping Megana might be able to [crosstalk 00:51:12].
Megana: I know this is a joke, but I’m still incredibly jealous and fuming.
Craig: She’s jealous of me stalking you. I’m going to do it. Megana, I swear to god, I’m going to set an alarm. I’m going to wake up at 2:30 in the morning. I’m just going to text you, “You up?”
Megana: Please do.
Craig: “You up?” is the funniest… Oh my god, I just love that. “You up?” Hysterical.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. Megana, you get to start us off, because I’m curious what you think is cool.
Megana: That’s so sweet. I have three One Cool Things, but I am going to choose just two, so that you guys invite me again.
Craig: I have none, so go ahead, cook.
Megana: I’m going to choose the two that have to do with collective narratives. The first is this book called Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy. It’s by James B. Stewart and our Scriptnotes friend, Rachel Abrams from the New York Times, who we worked with on Pay Up Hollywood stuff.
John: Great.
Megana: It is about Sumner Redstone and the family. It is such a fun read and so informative of I would say the early aughts, like what we were talking about earlier.
John: Cool. We’ll definitely take a look at that. Does it feel Succession-y?
Megana: Yes.
John: I think obviously there’s a lot of Redstone stuff happening in Succession.
Megana: In reading it, I’m constantly like, “Oh, is this where they got that Succession storyline from?” It’s really fun and fun to read in advance of the fourth season coming out.
John: Awesome.
Megana: Then my other One Cool Thing is The Romantics on Netflix. It is this docuseries by Smriti Mundhra, who is this really cool director. She did Indian Matchmaking for Netflix as well. It’s about Yash Chopra Films. Yash Chopra is a very influential filmmaker in Bollywood. I think whether you’ve watched Bollywood or not, it is so delightful. She does such an incredible job of tying how films and media were in conversation with Indian politics at the time. Would definitely recommend.
John: Is The Romantics a documentary?
Megana: It’s four episodes. It’s one of those docuseries things.
Craig: A docuseries.
Megana: I guess it’s not a thing.
John: Love it.
Megana: It’s a docuseries.
Craig: Like Tiger King, but without tigers or the Tiger King and with Yash Chopra and Bollywood.
Megana: Exactly.
Craig: Nailed it.
John: Nailed it. My One Cool Thing is incredibly basic. It is a vertical mouse by Logitech. It’s called The Lift. I’ve used a vertical mouse for many, many years. If you are having a hard time visualizing it, imagine you’re shaking somebody’s hand. That’s the position you want to keep your hand in.
Craig: What is going on with you? You’ve verticalized every interface.
John: I originally got my vertical mouse because Dana Fox, who you love, and has been on this show many times, she introduced me to the vertical mouse. It is so much better for your wrist, because you’re not turning your wrist down. You’re keeping your wrist up.
I’ve been using one for many, many years. It crapped out on me. I got this one from Logitech. It’s maybe a tiny bit small for my hands. I kind of have small hands. It works seamlessly. It has really good resolution and tracking. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. If you’re loving for a vertical mouse, especially for a Mac, I highly recommend it. It works great for me.
Craig: I like pain!
John: I love it. He wants brutal pain.
Craig: Meh!
John: Craig, you’re passing on your One Cool Thing? You’re just taking one of Megana’s?
Craig: Absolutely taking one of Meganas. Mine is also The Romantics on Netflix.
John: Love it. That’s our show for this week, guys. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: You know it.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Lex Kornelis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. They’re from Cotton Bureau. Just go to Cotton Bureau. You’ll find them there.
You can sign up to become Premium member on scriptnotes.net, where you’ll get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting ready with me.
Megana: Hashtag GRWM.
John: Only for Scriptnotes Premium members. Megana, it was so great to have you back.
Megana: Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Megana Rao, talk us through get ready with me. I barely know what this is.
Megana: Get ready with me is a, it’s now new, but it has been increasing in popularity, trend on TikTok where different influencers will look into the camera and do their makeup for whatever event as they are chatting to you about what’s on their mind, about things that they are experiencing. Drew, please jump in if you’ve been watching any of these.
Drew: I haven’t been watching any of these.
Megana: Okay, cool.
Drew: I really wish I knew.
Craig: Drew, you’re gonna be fine.
John: I may have a reference for this though, because Drew Barrymore, who is a friend, she will have her camera up in the bathroom as she’s doing her makeup and she’s watching her face and doing all that stuff. She’s talking to the camera while she’s doing all that. Is that get ready with me?
Megana: Yes, exactly. It’s like, “Get ready with me as I go to New Year’s party,” or, “Get ready with me for a day of work,” or something like that.
John: Is it a similar thing to, there’s this young blonde influencer woman, she’s a stay-at-home girlfriend, who’s like, “Now I make a smoothie for my boyfriend and I take it to the gym and he really likes it.”
Craig: Which just sounds scary.
John: It’s [crosstalk 00:57:03].
Megana: Is that the voice or are you doing the computer automated voice that they put on top of their videos a long time?
John: I wasn’t doing a TikTok voice, but she has that voice herself, dead inside.
Megana: It’s really strange, and it’s so boring. It’s people cleaning their apartments or making smoothies for their boyfriends, but I spend hours watching these things.
Craig: Wow. If I made a get ready with me video, it would just be like, okay, shower, clothes, go, done. I don’t use products. There is no getting ready. Every morning of my life is just me launching myself out of a cannon and doom scrolling and then flinging myself into the car. There’s just no getting ready.
Megana: It is this gendered thing. It’s part beauty tutorial, part makeup tutorial, I mean.
Craig: Fashion.
Megana: It’s just so interesting to me, because getting ready, it’s an intimate thing. It’s your bridge between your private and public life. I don’t know, it’s just so weird to me that I now have access to all of these people’s process for how they transition from their home to the public world.
John: One of the things you put in the Workflowy here is this Alix Earle, A-L-I-X, Earle. One of the videos in her Instagram or her TikTok was her and her little sister, and they’re doing their makeup together. It was an ad actually for something. It was for some concealer. They were side by side.
It feels like that’s what you’re describing. It’s the kind of experience you normally would have with a big sister, watching her do her thing and being side by side while she’s doing her thing, but because maybe we’re all only children, we’re all by ourselves all the time, it just feels like there’s somebody there. It’s nice to just be next to somebody while they’re doing their thing. Is that the feel?
Megana: Yes, exactly, because I have this experience where this 13-year-old’s get ready with me came across my TikTok, and she’s getting ready for this bar mitzvah. Then I don’t know, however many videos later, I’m so invested in her life. I’ve seen all of her different bar mitzvah outfits. I’m like, “I shouldn’t have access to this.”
Also, when I was 13, so much of the fun of getting ready for an event like this is being around your friends who are also getting ready and learning in the same physical space. Yet me as a 30-year-old woman just watching this 13-year-old get ready for her bar mitzvah is so dark.
Craig: Ew, strange. Obviously, the easy cliché question is are you really seeing them getting ready or are you seeing them doing a version of getting ready that is being seen, so it’s a different thing? Let’s say it’s all honest. This is really them getting ready. It does also promote this notion of perfectionism, I think. All of this, I find it disconcerting.
Megana: It’s interesting that it’s an anti-perfectionism, because they are letting you behind the mask. They’re letting you see their blemished skin and all of those things.
Craig: Let me push back. They’re letting you see their blemished skin, and then they’re showing you how when they’re done, it’s not blemished anymore and how they have perfected it before they walk out the door. It’s like when very beautiful people are like, “Look, here’s a picture of me without makeup.” I’m like, “You’re still hot. You’re still beautiful. You know you’re beautiful. That’s why you’re doing it.”
To show them all the layers and stuff, and then they’re go off to something cool or whatever, I don’t know. It feels aspirational in a dangerous way, the way that all advertising has always been. That’s not even a gendered thing. Maybe the nature of it is gendered. “You want to look beautiful, don’t you? Here’s how you do it. You want to have an awesome car. Here’s how you do it.” I don’t know. It’s just when I hear about a 13-year-old girl commoditizing her life, it’s scary to me. It’s scary.
Megana: It’s so frightening. In the article that John linked for collective narratives, that Substack article, he talks about how teen happiness in the early 2000s was at an all-time high, and he had this theory that it was because it was early internet, where kids are just sharing memes online, but they’re still in physical spaces together. I was so struck by that compared to… When I was younger, we used to watch makeup tutorials on YouTube, but the women were much older than us. The idea of being a 13-year-old and creating content in this way is so wild and terrifying to me.
Craig: Terrifying, yes. Let the kids be kids. I understand that every sentence that comes out of my mouth will be something that an old man says. I don’t know. As a parent, I worry about it. I worry about the fact that your life becomes memorialized permanently and belongs to everyone, that there is a sense that you’re curating your own moments.
One of my kids was talking about BeReal the other day and saying how it’s literally become the opposite of BeReal. Literally. It’s like, “Oh my god, BeReal. Here I am riding a unicorn and drinking champagne while my hair’s on fire, and there’s my new boyfriend. Oh my god, you caught us at just the right time.” Did we?
John: An option I would see with get ready with me videos, because now I’m realizing there’s other things that are actually part of that trend. I just didn’t recognize it. There’s a guy who’s blind who, basically just like that, basically like, “This is how I figure out my closet and what I’m going to wear in the mornings. This is how I make breakfast.” It’s his boyfriend filming the whole thing. That’s a perspective I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a blind person getting your morning routine together, or I don’t know what it’s like to be getting your morning together if you’re using a wheelchair. In the sense of giving you a window into other people’s spaces and daily lives, that could be really useful.
I think that’s one of the good things about the internet that we didn’t have before is that it could give you some perspective in what a life is like that is not yours. That’s good, but I do share most of our other horrors about especially teenagers feeling like, “I have to perform being myself.” That I don’t think is healthy.
Craig: What you’re saying about seeing a window into other people’s lives, that makes sense. To the extent that these things can be empathy building and instructive and help us understand other people is great. To the extent that they are about a calculated lack of calculation and about physical perfectionism and lookism and sizism and all the other isms… Remember, these things are, I assume, heavily featured people who have very typical Western standards of beauty and the typical body size that the media says we’re supposed to have. I don’t know.
I don’t know how I would feel about watching even a guy my age. Like, okay, you’re 50 years old. Here’s a 50-year-old guy who’s like, “Get ready with me.” Then I’m like, “Aw, man, he’s in awesome shape, and he’s really handsome, and he’s got a full head of hair. He’s gonna put on his… Oh, that’s an interesting shaving lotion. Okay, I can see how that might help with razor bumps. Oh, okay, those are possibly cool shoes to wear with those pants, but really, it doesn’t matter what the hell he wears.”
Drew: Do you find any comfort in a ritual though? I feel like I do find comfort in watching a ritual.
Craig: I will tell you this very strange thing I’ve noticed about myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it on this show. It occurred to me one day that when I wash my hair, or my head I guess at this point I should say, my hands do the exact same thing in the exact same way for the exact same amount of time every single time. I have completely ritualized the movements of my fingers and hands over my head. It’s remarkable. I don’t know how it happened. There’s no variation whatsoever. I’ve created some strange rituals for myself. I don’t think that they’re signs of OCD as much as just humans ritualize things.
I don’t have any great interest in that stuff. I don’t. If people were like, “Oh, why don’t you walk us through getting to ready to write,” I would be like, “Eff on off out of my office, friend. You don’t want to see that, and I don’t want to show it to you.”
Megana: I guess it just feels like, and I feel old saying this too, the amount of time that your camera is recording is just longer and longer. The one-way intimacy of it is confusing to me for young people growing up. I don’t know. I guess I’m in the situation where I’m very invested in this person’s life. I know what their rituals are. I know what they’re doing. They’ve shared a lot with me. It’s so weird to have that intimacy flattened and unreciprocated.
Craig: You taught us all about parasocial relationships. I get it completely. I would argue that for people who listen to us on this show and have listened for a long, long time, they actually know us pretty well, because this is us. I know John. It’s not like when the mic goes off, I’m like, “Okay, now the real John pops out.”
John: [inaudible 01:07:08].
Craig: We are this, so they actually do know us. The intimacy is a product of time and exposure. There is no calculation. That’s one of the best things I think about audio only is that it removes a certain kind of vanity or insecurity from the equation, which I have seen my face on television way too much.
This weird thing that’s happened is because… Sometimes in LA, I would get recognized because people just knew that I was on Scriptnotes, and it’d be like, “Oh, you’re a Scriptnotes fan.” What’s happened now is, because I do those little segments at the end of The Last of Us-
Megana: They’re so cute.
Craig: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Megana: I’m always like, “Aw.”
Craig: “Aw.” That’s what I go for, unthreatening. That actually means that now people are recognizing me. I swear to god, I’m confused every time. I gotta figure out how to get around this. I know I’m not Brad Pitt. What I feel almost every single time is a certain twinge of insecurity.
John: Megana, I’m curious, because we’ve talked about this off mic, but you are recognized some just because of your role on Scriptnotes. To what degree are you finding it helpful? To what degree is that annoying? How are you feeling about your semi-fame off of here?
Megana: I would say our listeners are very niche and specialized. They are people who are interested in screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s cool, because they’re also people in my industry. I’m not recognized that often, so it’s not something that I have to deal with like Craig. It’s fun because it means that the person listens to Scriptnotes, and then I have something to talk about with them.
Craig: You have a famous name, I think, because you are the only Megana I’ve ever met in my life.
Megana: Keep it that way.
Craig: Oh, I will. Trust me. If I meet another one, I’m just gonna turn around and walk away. It’s just a very specific name that there’s not a lot of them. I think when people probably see it on a piece of paper or something, they’re like, “Oh, I know who you are.”
Megana: You guys did do a very nice thing when Drew started, which I also appreciated, because I didn’t know how to say your last name, where you had a whole bit about pronunciation and who he was. I would say that people still think that I am Megan McDonald who just got married.
Craig: Married to a guy named Arao. It really does flow. I gotta say, 999 people out of a thousand, or perhaps all thousand, if you said, “Can you write out the name Megana Rao for me?” would say Megan, and then they would be like, “How do you spell Arao?” Is it a common name in India?
Megana: Yes, it is. It means “of the clouds,” because mega means cloud in Sanskrit.
Craig: Of the clouds.
Megana: I’m not resentful at all of the portion that you guys gave Drew to explain his name.
Craig: We finally got around to it.
John: We learned. We’ve learned our lesson. I will say-
Craig: You’re so ethereal. You’re of the clouds.
John: A friend of ours was hiring a new assistant. One of the assistants who was under consideration was also Meghna, which is the other spelling of Meghna, so just-
Craig: Oh, Meghna.
John: M-E-G-H-N-A, which is the same name, correct?
Megana: Correct, yeah.
Craig: By the way, Megana, it feels a little weird as a white guy to be like, “Okay, now your name is Megana. What does that mean?” It’s a little weird.
Megana: Fair enough.
John: This would’ve been a great way to first introduce you on the podcast if we’d said, “Your name is Megana. It’s the same pronunciation as Pamela.” It’s not hard for people to do, because my frustration was people saying, “Oh, is Megana [meh-GAH-nuh] gonna be setting that up?”
Craig: Megana [meh-GAH-nuh].
John: You hear it all the time.
Megana: Yeah, and Megna [MAYG-nuh], Megana [MEH-guh-nuh], all of those are fine. Megana [meh-GAH-nuh] though is what people reach for first though, in a way that’s confusing.
Craig: Megana [meh-GAH-nuh]. I’ve been getting Craig Mazin [MA-zn] my whole life. My whole life.
John: That’s why I changed my name.
Craig: Exactly. Listen. You changed it to a month.
John: Megana, thank you for coming back on the show. You’re welcome back any time, of course.
Megana: Thank you guys.
Craig: Thanks, Megana.
John: Open invitation.
Drew: I’m so glad you’re here.
Megana: Bye.
Craig: See you guys.
Drew: Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- How to Become a Member of the WGA
- Conceiving the 2000s by Noah Smith
- Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams
- The Romantics on Netflix
- Logitech Lift Vertical Mouse
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Lex Kornelis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 591: Collective Narratives, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 590 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why do some people do bad things. More specifically, why does past trauma lead some characters to become villains, while others become heroes? We’ll wrestle with good and evil, right and wrong, and how that impacts the choices our characters make. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on character jobs and getting paid. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we will talk tattoos. I’ve now had mine for 30 years, but Craig, you are a newbie to the whole tattoo world.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Indeed.
Craig: Excited.
John: We’ll get into it. Now Craig, a few episodes back we were talking about phones and devices that executives used to have on their desks to tell their assistants about who’s calling in or, “Bring me a Coke.” We couldn’t think what they were called. Charlie wrote in to say those old things were called AmTels.
Craig: Yes, AmTels. It was an AmTel. Boy, I feel bad for the AmTel company. Where are they now?
John: They still sell them.
Craig: What?
John: We’ll put a link there. It’s amtel.com, A-M-T-E-L dot-com.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: They still make them. If you click through, they look kind of the same.
Craig: I’m looking. Oh my god. Oh my god. By the way, this website tells you everything. This website is like an incredible time capsule of what websites looked like in 2004 maybe.
John: It’s built with tables, the old way of the tables. You had to structure things with tables.
Craig: The little side menus that pop up and these weird window style boxing. This is nuts. They can’t still be in business.
John: I bet they could still make money.
Craig: I think this is a ghost.
John: I may get you one for Christmas, Craig.
Craig: If they can only sell one a year, that one might cost seven million dollars. Gotta keep them in business, John. You know what? They’re not in the business of going out of business.
John: That’s what it is. Flashback to Final Draft.
Craig: Oh my word.
John: Good lord. Back in the day, this is how an executive would know who was calling in, so they could see whether they want to answer it, hit a little button, say yes, reply, or, “Bring me a diet Coke.” Thank you, Charlie, for reminding us what these things were called and, wow, just a good flashback memory.
Craig: AmTels, wow, how about that?
John: That was all part of a discussion because I had asked listeners what should I do about my office phones, because they don’t ring anymore. There’s just really no sense in having them. Our listeners are the best. They have a lot of good suggestions, which Drew sorted through. One was a service called Dialpad, which is replacing a traditional office thing.
One that I found was most fascinating was, Adam wrote in to say, “I’m currently working completely remote as a producer’s assistant. We’re using an iPhone as our office line, and it’s been great. We can easily save contacts, merge calls with my boss and additional participants. I’m logged into my company email so I can quickly retrieve any relevant info if I’m away from my desk. I just turn the phone off during off hours so I’m not constantly checking two phones.” Essentially, Adam just has a second phone, which is the office phone. That’s the number it rings to there. He just does everything from that phone.
Craig: That is a very attractive solution, because the issue with the old phones is they simply weren’t connected to the systems that everything else is connected to. This is the physical object hardware version of the software solution of getting a separate Google account which I have for my business. That Google account is where we keep all of our contacts and we sink through all the things that I need to share with my assistant or my partners. This makes sense. It’s a little annoying obviously for an assistant to carry around two phones at the same time. You need more pockets. That’s attractive. That’s an attractive thought, although honestly, we just use our own phones.
John: The challenge is though, when your current assistant, when Bo is no longer your assistant, then who are they calling? They need to have a new number to call.
Craig: It’s the handover process of, Megana hands it over to Drew. A lot of emails have to go out saying, “Here’s the change.” There’s a few weeks of adjustment, but then it all adjusts.
John: Also, Drew shouldn’t have to be answering that phone at 1 in the morning.
Craig: Oh, yes, he should.
John: Oh, yes, he should.
Craig: Oh, yes, he should!
John: Crisis.
Craig: Drew, get me a diet Coke! I’m gonna ruin him for no reason at all.
John: Also, if Drew has that phone, what am I gonna throw at him?
Craig: Exactly. Now John, what I would suggest is you go and get some old phones that maybe are on sale for 20 bucks that don’t function at all, that are just being sold for parts. Just get 12 of those and just have them in a holster.
John: You’re set.
Craig: Yep, perfect.
John: The other solutions people suggested, and thank you for writing in, included Google Fi, Verizon One Talk, Webex, which some people are using. I think some agencies have moved over to Webex. We’ll see, but we’ll report back with whatever we decide as a solution for this.
Craig: Great.
John: Cool. Last bit of follow-up here, we talked about government influence on films, because we had these script consultants who were being paid by foreign powers. Phillip in Los Angeles wrote in. Craig, do you want to read through this?
Craig: Sure. Phillip writes, “In Episode 587, you spoke about how state influence on film is bigger in Europe than America. In many ways, you downplayed the US government’s role in films, specifically even military. The Department of Defense has a Hollywood liaison office that is more involved in scripts than the contractors hired in Europe. While this isn’t government dictating all scripts with military themes, access to military vehicles, equipment, and technical expertise saves studios millions of dollars and grants authenticity they couldn’t get otherwise. See Top Gun: Maverick.” There’s a link to an LA Times story covering that very thing. Phillip, agreed, but this isn’t about funding. That is not specifically funding. It’s about access, which is different, I think, than what we were discussing.
John: It is. I can also think that access to a lot of places where you want to film or things you want to use, yeah, you are gonna be consulting those people and probably even getting scripts cleared through those people. If you wanted to set a film on specifically a Native American reservation, you’re gonna have to go through the tribal governments there, and they might actually have some ability to say no, we don’t want you doing that. You can envision a lot of scenarios beyond just the military where there’s gonna be approvals that are gonna have to happen.
Craig: Tons of those things. Just in case people are wondering, there are always trade-offs. Like John’s describing, most places that are in a position to gatekeep are going to want to take a look at the material. Certainly, the Department of Defense very famously wasn’t going to let Top Gun or any of the movies that Jerry has made that connect with the military… None of them can say things or depict things that paint the military in a particularly negative light. Obviously, the military has no interest in funding something that makes it look bad.
Similarly, like you mention, we were all over Alberta. Our upcoming episode that’s coming out on Sunday was partly shot in Waterton, which is a federal park in Canada. There were all sorts of restrictions that came along with shooting there that we had to make sure we obeyed. Lots of trade-offs, but those are the decisions you make as a production. That said, Phillip, not quite what we were talking about.
John: On the issue though of military portrayals, it got me thinking back to an article I read a couple weeks ago. I’ll try to find a link and put it in the show notes about how the Army’s using these influencers who are TikTok star kind of people who are specifically there to sell how great it is to be in the military or the military lifestyle. “She’s an influencer, but she’s also in the Army.”
Craig: Vaguely insidious.
John: Insidious. It feels like propaganda. It feels like [inaudible 00:08:14]. That’s a different kind of thing than what we’re talking about with a script approval. I think that’s what we were worried about. That’s what we were worried about when we heard a script consultant from Europe, being like, oh, no, it’d have to include exactly these messages. These are going to be state propaganda films.
Craig: There is no free lunch, my friends.
John: If you’re trying to shoot a movie in Turkey these days, I bet there would be a lot of concerns and restrictions.
Craig: Yes, pretty much anywhere. That’s how it goes.
John: We have a bit of follow-up here from Pay Up Hollywood. Drew, could you help us out with this?
Drew Marquardt: Sure. Rekha writes, “Three years ago ish, during the beginning of the movement that would become Pay Up Hollywood, you mentioned Rob McElhenney as a positive example of how you treat your staff. On that same episode, you read from my anonymous letter as an agency assistant. At the time, I was so terrified I created a fake email so it couldn’t be traced back to me.
“As I’ve grown older within this industry, I’ve become much more outspoken about the realities. I moved out of the agency life, worked for some incredible writer/showrunner-led production companies, and now actually work with Jackie Cohn and Rob McElhenney. I’ve experienced Rob’s kindness and generosity firsthand. The environment he creates is so incredible and warm.
“I just wanted to point out this small connection, because it almost feels like fate. Technically, we were mentioned in the same episode, Rob as someone who is a great boss, and me as someone who’s really struggling, but years later, the universe actually put us together. I know the value of hard work and perseverance, but being raised in a lot of Indian and Hindu cultural influence, I can’t help but shake the notion that everything happens for a reason and some things are meant to be.
“Your work and your commitment means so much to me. Back then, even though you didn’t know who I was, I felt like someone was listening to me for the first time. Most people didn’t know that I was writing in at all. Sometimes I’m still scared because I’m still on the lower level side, but I think it’s important that we keep talking about it and all things affecting the treatment of people in our industry. Thank you all for being the first to listen and a force that kept me going.”
Craig: Wow, that’s amazing.
John: That’s nice.
Craig: Rekha, thank you. I immediately tensed up at the beginning of her letter, because I’m like, “Oh, no, what did Rob do?” As it turned out, what he did was what he always does, which is be awesome. Rekha, you mentioned Indian Hindu cultural inference. I’m gonna teach you a word in Yiddish. Beshert. Beshert means fate or destiny. This is cross-cultural. Do I believe in supernatural fate or destiny? No, but it’s a nice feeling. It’s comforting. I don’t believe in ghosts, but it’s comforting sometimes to think of my grandmother watching me.
This is beautiful. I swear to god, I forget all the time that people even listen to this, much less are impacted and affected by it, but then I’m reminded all the time. Thank you for writing this. This is gorgeous. I’m just very happy.
John: I’m also pointing out, Rekha, just don’t sell your own agency short here. That agency may have started with you writing in anonymously to this podcast about what your experience was, but in sharing that story, not only did you put down in words what you were experiencing, you started to recognize that there were other people having the same experience. You got yourself out of that situation, into a better situation, then to a better situation, into where you are right now, which is just a steppingstone to wherever you’re headed next. I’m glad we were able to help, but we were only able to help because you spoke out and noticed what was going on around you and said, “Hey, this is not cool.” It does come back to you.
Craig: To be clear, when you say agency, you mean her volition and individual willpower, not the agency she worked at, which was apparently terrible.
John: No. That’s absolutely true. We want the good kind of agency, not the oppressive kind of agency.
Craig: Exactly.
John: Your self-determination is what we applaud.
Craig: I might actually feel good about myself until lunch today.
John: Nice. That’s all we can aim for in these troubled times.
Craig: It’ll go downhill.
John: The last little thing before we get into our main topic is, did you see the stuff about Dick Tracy?
Craig: No.
John: Do you remember the movie Dick Tracy at all?
Craig: Of course. Of course.
John: Dick Tracy, it’s a very brightly colored comic book adaption. I remember seeing it in theaters. I remember Warren Beatty starring in it. I remember Madonna was the woman in the film.
Craig: Tess Trueheart.
John: Tess Trueheart. I remember almost nothing about this film at all, but you know who does remember this film is Warren Beatty, because he continuously releases new things that are sequels to Dick Tracy, so that he can hold onto the rights. I just find it fascinating.
Craig: Why?
John: Because he can and because he would. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that’s speculating how he’s doing it and why he’s doing it. This most recent thing was a Zooming with Dick Tracy, where it’s a split screen thing where it’s Warren Beatty and Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy and Leonard Maltin and another film critic.
Craig: Oh, god.
John: It’s just long enough that it actually counts as a sequel. It shows up on Turner Classic Movies.
Craig: Oh my god, it’s a legal thing to just…
John: It’s a legal thing. It’s also clear that he actually has an artistic pride to it that’s interesting.
Craig: Why?
John: Because this was a comic book adaptation before they were all out there, so maybe it’s meaningful to him. Also, he just seems like, “Goddammit, no one is… “ He’s going to die owning this thing.
Craig: Wow.
John: That’s what he wants.
Craig: Dick Tracy, it was such a strange… Even when it came out. It was 1990. I was 19. Geez, Louise. I would read the comics in the paper. There are still comics in newspapers that are still newspapers, but back then a bit more common to read comics. Some of the comics were these ancient holdovers from my dad’s time, which you could tell were just soaking in this anachronistic, old-school way. It just was so old-fashioned. Dick Tracy was definitely one of them. He was a 1940s, ‘30s, ‘20s, 1920s-ish kind of guy. There were a bunch of Gasoline Alley and the girls in Apartment 3-G and Mary Worth.
John: Mary Worth.
Craig: Where you’re like, what the hell is-
John: I can’t do comic book guy’s voice, but he has, “This is the-“
Craig: “That’s the rare Mary Worth where she advises her friend to commit suicide.”
John: “Commit suicide.” Yes.
Craig: Mary Worth. I’m just like, “What is this?” Then when that movie came out, I guess I was like, “All right.” This is why these days when people are like, “Oh, we really want to make a Hungry, Hungry Hippos movie,” and I’m like, “It’s Dick Tracy. It’s old. Nobody now cares.” The point is, Dick Tracy was old-fashioned and out of date in 1990, which is why the movie was kind of a flop. What’s the point of holding onto it? Nobody knows what it is. It doesn’t matter. He has a wristwatch that’s a two-way radio. That was considered forward-looking technology.
John: Maybe it’s like holding onto intellectual property as actually just property, the same way people collect plastic cars. Maybe he just wants to hold onto this piece of IP for as long as it can be a piece of IP, because a copyright will expire. It will become public domain at a certain point.
Craig: This is like a very elaborate NFT.
John: That’s what it is. It really is an NFT before its time. I just thought it was great. I don’t have any particular comment on it. This idea of you have to keep making a thing to hold onto the rights is a real thing in Hollywood. Spider-Man famously, you had to make a Spider-Man movie every once in a while, or else the rights would all kick back to Marvel. Sony had to keep making Spider-Man movies.
Craig: I think lawyers have become much more savvy. The lawyers back when they made that deal in the ‘80s for the rights probably never considered that there was a loophole in which Warren Beatty could appear in the costume for five minutes in an interview and renew the rights for another 12 years. People have gotten smarter about that stuff, precisely because of things like this.
John: Probably the most famous example I remember is there was a Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman-
Craig: Yes, there was.
John: … which was just to hold onto I think Fox’s rights to it. They had to film it and then shelve it. It’s never been seen.
Craig: Somewhere on YouTube I think I’ve seen bits and pieces of it. It’s startling. Startling.
John: Startling.
Craig: Startling.
John: To our main topic today. This all comes out of Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When he laid them all out side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. So often what we think about, like, oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain, you could just turn around and say, oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero. It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.
I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that cause us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.
Craig: Great. I love this topic.
John: Cool. We love villains. Craig, let’s just make a list of things that villains do, what we’re talking about when we talk about villains in the course of a story. What are villainy things?
Craig: In the very basic sense, old-school way, you’ve got cops and robbers. Villains break the law.
John: They break laws that are there to help society. We also have heroes that can break laws. Villains break laws in ways that harm society or harm the community. They oppose the hero. Sometimes they seem to enjoy causing suffering or misery.
Craig: Villains oftentimes are marked by cruelty or sadism. Like you said, it’s something that undermines the social fabric of things.
John: They are selfish. They may steal. They can cheat. They will lie. They’re power-hungry. Yet all those things are things that sometimes heroes do as well. Maybe we’re sussing out the motivations for why they’re doing the thing that they’re doing. Do they have a noble purpose behind it? What’s the explanation? This all is against a backdrop. So often in these times we’re talking about antiheroes rather than villains and heroes. These are the Catwomans, the characters who are doing bad things, but for reasons that we as an audience relate to.
Craig: Sometimes villains are presented as people who maybe had a righteous grievance but are taking things too far. That’s a very typical Batman villain, not so much the Joker, but a lot of other villains. They start righteously. They’ve been hurt or wounded or offended. They want revenge, but they’re just going too far, whereas Batman was wounded and hurt and decided to make sure that nobody else got hurt again. These are the two different paths sometimes that heroes and villains go down. Heroes supposedly are doing things to care about others.
In a Judeo-Christian, emphasis on Christian, founded country, the notion of sacrifice and sacrificing yourself for the betterment of mankind is a very strong one for heroes, whereas villains are interested in either accruing power for themselves or healing themselves at the cost of anyone else.
John: Absolutely. Both heroes and villains may have trauma, but it’s what they’re doing with that trauma. That trauma caused them to lose hope or it’d inspire them to do things down the road.
Craig: Exactly.
John: That’s a factor. Also, look at the axis between conformity versus individuality or nonconformity. How willing is this person to stand up against the system? So often, we think about our heroes standing up against a tyrannical system. You can look at so many villains that are essentially the same kind of thing, where they believe they have the moral certitude that what they’re doing is correct and everybody else is wrong and therefore they will do what it takes to enact their vision. They’re not afraid of pissing everyone else off or blowing everyone else up in order to achieve their vision.
Craig: This is how you end up with that scene where the villain explains why they’re doing what they’re doing. “I’m gonna tear the whole thing down! I’m gonna make everyone pay!” and blah blah blah blah blah. This happens all the time with large-scale villains that, as you say, are nonconforming.
We have this impulse to both conform and nonconform. We want our heroes to save us all and keep the conformed society together. We despise our villains for nonconforming to the extent that they tear it all down, but we also want our heroes to nonconform so that they’re not like the rest of us.
Heroes and villains really are just reflecting the push and pull inside of our own minds. That’s why we’re attracted to the story over and over and over. It’s Punch and Judy. We have been watching this story forever, since there was fire and caves.
John: Absolutely. Just because it’s a great article on Wile E. Coyote, The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote, I would say perseverance is a thing to think about with villains as well. We think about heroes persevering, but in many cases it’s the villain who has persevered against all these obstacles in front of them that is the real story of, you keep knocking me down and I’ll just keep coming back stronger.
Craig: This is obviously all colored by the presentation of the narrative. It occurred to me after many years after watching Star Wars that we actually didn’t quite understand what was particularly bad about the Empire. We were told they were bad, but how? Why? Then later, that got filled in a bit. Mostly it’s just, man, it seems like they’re really mean to each other. It’s a really over-trained, corporal punishment-emphasizing, military group. What is exactly happening on the ground? What is it that these Rebels are fighting for?
You could certainly turn it around and go, wait, what if we were telling a story about America and Al-Qaeda? Now who’s the Empire? Now who are the Rebels? Which side are you on? It’s all about how you present these things, always.
John: I think Star Wars is a fascinating case, because you have the Empire, which is this giant bureaucracy but also has this supernatural power at the center. The Emperor is this supernatural figure who can do these magical things. In later Star Wars we see the supernatural Emperor. You also have a series like Andor, which is just about the Empire as this tyrannical bureaucracy. We see the actual human beings who are cogs in that machine and feel a sympathy for why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s trying to do both things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Let’s start with this article by Daniel Effron here, we’ll put in a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist. He’s really talking about we think that people would make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. Mostly, it’s not about the act itself. They’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others. It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it. It’s how will you feel if you do this thing.
Craig: Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined solely by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad-doer. That is true to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts, and you couldn’t handle it anymore, and you killed him. You had perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.
What is interesting about our villains is often there’s a phrase that you and I have heard executives say four billion times, mustache twirling. The mustache-twirling villain is a reference to the old silent films where the bad guy in the Old West would steal the good guy’s gal, and he would tie her to the railroad tracks for some reason.
John: Why would he tie her to the railroad tracks?
Craig: I don’t know.
John: I never understood that.
Craig: Because he wants her to die but he can’t do it himself. He would rather watch a train do it, I guess. That train will be arriving at some point. He never checks the timetables or anything. He ties her to the rails, which actually is probably very difficult to do. Then he waits. While she’s like, “Please, no,” he has this nasty
Mustache with little handlebars at the end, and he twirls them and goes, “Meh-heh-heh.” It’s just shorthand for an incredibly broad villain. Broad villains don’t worry about feeling like a bad person. They are a bad person, and they are celebrating it. They love it, which is actually not very recognizably human. It’s just not a human thing to be like, “Oh my god, you know what I want to do today? Something bad, because I love being bad!” That’s not really how it functions, generally speaking.
John: We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation these supernatural alien creatures, the degree to which we can apply motivation to those kind of characters.
In Aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother. That makes sense. That tracks. We can understand that. In most of these supernatural, demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up what their past trauma was that’s made them this way, but we don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.
Craig: They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice in his supernatural return to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good. One more day to do the thing I decided to do, that I will do every day. Ha ha.”
John: Aha.
Craig: There’s a wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?
John: It is. In some ways, you could say that he’s cursed. Basically, he’s living out this thing. He can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is the opposite of a wish. We always talk about what is a character’s want, what are they actually going for. The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing, and they can’t get away from it. There’s a kind of freedom in that.
Craig: There is, because as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full. I’m not going to do anything.” You are a creature that is designed to kill, and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person.
Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature. Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.
There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think ultimately we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us, that they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things. Don’t end up like me.” They are almost designed to be negative instructors to make people identify with the villain, to make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because typically, the villain will fail.
John: Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through. Let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks in this list, he’s maybe come actually closest to seeming like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance. His actual motivations are more calculating. He doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.
Craig: He’s a thief. He wants to steal money. That’s as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.
John: He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way. He will lash out when his plans are forded. I think of him, just because of that performance, as being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. Also, I think he very brilliantly, in the course of the structure of movies… We talked about the false idea of what the actual motivation is is great. It seems like they have some sort of noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.
Craig: That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages. They often in bad movies were taking hostages because they were associated with, like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, Flaming Dragon, just some rebel group that was trying to do a thing.
The fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, and then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief,” was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think his performance in no small part elevated what that character was into something that felt a little bit more wonderfully arch.
John: Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, kidnapping people. You have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different kind of serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different fill-ins in the course of the story. How do we police them, and how do we think about what’s driving them?
Craig: Buffalo Bill to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He’s no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody who’s going to have a sit-down with Buffalo Bill, and he’s going to be like, “You’re making a really good point. I’m going to stop killing all these people.” He’s not going to do that.
Hannibal Lecter you get the sense absolutely has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some kind of avenging angel, that maybe he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that, but then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance. He will kill indiscriminately do protect himself.
As Jodie Foster as Clarice says at the end of the movie, she doesn’t think he’s going to come kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.
John: Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed with that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.
Craig: He’s bad to the bone.
John: Born into it, as opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic… I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her with that specifically. She has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.
Craig: Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done, so she’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there, because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win to an extent. That’s always fascinating to me.
John: I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff. In executing her plan, she ends up becoming trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and then has to break herself out. We see, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” is ingenious, so smartly done.
Craig: I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!
John: Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.
Craig: Oh, bros.
John: Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value, but it’s pushed to an extreme degree.
Craig: Which is the point. When you mention the Daniel Effron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things. What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact he’s helping people. If you think about it, really I’m the hero. Somebody naturally is like, “You really convinced yourself of this.”
We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that. Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have ad absurdum to force us to examine ourselves.
John: Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day. An amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power inside a structure, but of course, that’s not his true source of power. His true source of power and wealth is all the ways he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character in what he’s doing.
Craig: An excellent film. What I remember feeling when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, was that he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy, because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome. The idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.
On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it, that in fact, like I said, there’s no free lunch, that you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth. Gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. It’s just such a great lesson. We’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.
John: We should put that on the shortlist for a future deep dive, because it’s been a while since I watched it. Two more I want to go through. Gollum from The Lord of the Rings movies.
Craig: Aw.
John: Gollum, I think he’s unique on this list, because you pity him, and yet he’s also a villain. He’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually sidekick characters. Here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need and yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.
Craig: Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction. He will do bad things to feed his addiction. Where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s Slinker and Stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself. That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully… We can identify. We feel bad for him, because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time, and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.
John: I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote. It’s arguing essentially Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all the addict’s things. He’s going to keep trying to do the same thing, even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of the thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the roadrunner. If he thinks he can get it, he won’t get it.
Craig: It’s rough, man. He needs a program.
John: He does need a program, 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her, and that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone, you know her, you understand her. She’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well. You get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far and they would Annie Wilkes you.
Craig: That’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes, and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman, is that in society we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone. It becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly. Women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.
I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, love, loving Misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, “No one’s really like that.” Now we have Twitter, and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.
John: She’s out there.
Craig: Oh my god, she and he. There are many Annie and Andrew Wilkeses out there who attach themselves so strongly to characters. The whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book, and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession, is something that’s very human. The story of that villainry is you must get away from that person, because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.
John: It’s fascinating to think, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?
Craig: I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.
John: This transaction would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out, and she would’ve read the book, she would’ve been upset. She would’ve been angry for weeks. She probably wouldn’t have stalked him down at his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.
Craig: The woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdy as a phrase, you can imagine people are like, “Here comes Annie.” She’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.
John: Let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without a Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.
I see so often people try to creating this iconic villain who has this grand motivation. Terrific. Who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?
Craig: We need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me, because there is a kind of story where we just give up on the whole hero, villain thing entirely. We ask ourselves, in these situations, what would you do?
When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little bit more complex. It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like them messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.
John: I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we always say, “You know what? He was making some logical points there.”
Craig: He’s a good example of gone too far.
John: Indeed. Let’s do two quick listener questions. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Ida asks, “I’m having issues when it comes to establishing basic things about characters, especially choosing a career for them in stories where the profession doesn’t necessarily affect the story but I do need to see them in their workplace. Any tips on making this kind of decision?”
John: Listen. I’m assuming that you’re writing the kind of story where there’s a workplace but the workplace is not the important central point. We’re going to see them there, but that’s not where we’re spending most of our time. Get them someplace visual where they can talk. If [inaudible 00:45:36] get them a place where they can talk, where we can see them moving around through a space, if they’re supposed to working with other people.
If they’re supposed to be working by themselves, think of some sort of craft kind of thing where as an artist, an artisan, as a solo worker, as a cabinet maker, where we can see them in an individual space. I would just say look for something that’s interesting and distinctive but not so distracting that it becomes the focus of the movie. Craig, any tips for Ida here?
Craig: I guess, Ida, it does sound like because their profession doesn’t necessarily affect the story, that you’re probably going to be looking for something fairly mundane. If you can tell me anything about her character from the place she works… Let’s just start with, how much money does she make? How much money do you want her to have? What’s her education level? Has she given up on things? Is she coasting? Is her dream to be a this, so this is just a day job that she’s doing while she has to, for money? All those character things should lead you towards a general sort of thing. Then make a list of all the things that are like that, that fit in that, that you’ve seen in movies before, and don’t do any of them.
Now take a walk around your town. Look for weird things, candle shops, psychic palm readings, a place that repairs vacuum cleaners. Whatever it is that you could also imagine somebody else being in there that might be an interesting bounce-off character or some comic relief or a place where she might have to confront a customer asking for something annoying. These are the things that I think help you get specific.
A great example is, in Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan needed to establish this mundane life for Saul Goodman. He could’ve picked all sorts of places, but he picked manager of a Cinnabon, not just employee at a Cinnabon, manager, which is worse than employee, because employees come and go. The manager, that’s his career. His career is Cinnabon.
By the way, if you’re a manager at a Cinnabon, I’m sure you’re doing fine. I’m not making fun of you. If you were a lawyer that was on top of the criminal world of Albuquerque, and now you’re a manager at Cinnabon, you can see how things have changed dramatically for you in a very specific way. That’s what you’re hoping for is something that feeds back into our understanding of who this person is and where they are in their life.
John: I would just emphasize that when we say pick a mundane job, that doesn’t mean boring. It can be boring for them, but it can’t be boring for us. There’s nothing worse than seeing a boring workplace where it’s just like, this is a boring scene because we’re in a boring place. Make sure that whatever you’re picking is going to be able to keep the ball in the air, so the scenes that do need to take place wherever they’re working actually can still land and that will make it so the movie won’t get cut because it’s dull.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Drew, one more question.
Drew: A WGA Member asks, “Has the Guild ever tried to force studios to pay penalties to writers for late payments? It’s often a months-long wait between delivering a script and receiving payment.”
John: A WGA Member, yes, they do have to pay. They have to pay a penalty per week or per month. There’s a percentage penalty too for that stuff.
Craig: I think it’s weekly. There is an interest rate that compounds. The Guild has not ever, forget tried to force studios, first of all, force is the wrong word, compel studios or require studios to adhere to the terms of the contract they’ve signed with us. The Guild has an entire department that does nothing but this and has successfully collected millions of dollars on behalf of writers.
John: Millions and millions of dollars.
Craig: Millions and millions over the course of decades.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the Late Pay Desk. I have friends who work in that desk. All they do is just go after writers’ money. Here are pros and cons. The pro is you have to speak up and say, “Hey, this person owes me money. Go get my money,” and they will go get your money. It can be tough for a writer to raise their hand and say, “Hey, this is a problem here.” The writer can do that. Also, you have reps. Your reps are theoretically only getting paid when you’re getting paid. Send your reps on this.
I think so often as writers we feel like we need to be meek and not make waves, but if people owe you money, they should pay you money. Not only is there structures in place for the WGA, but there are structures in place as a system that you should be getting paid. If you’re not getting paid, it’s outrageous, so speak up.
Craig: Understand, no matter how cool your agent or your lawyer is, your lawyer has 5% of the total amount of caring about that money coming in, your agent has 10% of the total amount of caring, and you have the rest, 85%.
Also, they probably have more money than you do. The agency is a large business. The lawyer’s working for a large firm. This money means way more to you than it means to them. They don’t really actually care if the money comes in a month or two late. They don’t care, but you do, because maybe you need it for rent. You can try and say to them, “Listen, this is really important that I get paid on time.” They have to work with that studio for all of their clients. It’s much easier for them to go, “It’s fine.” The Guild does have a dedicated department that just handles this stuff.
John: I will say that I suspect you are a feature writer, because it’s feature writers who are classically not getting paid on time. That’s just what it is. Sometimes pilot writers, but really it’s feature writers. Time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Jennifer Senior. It’s in The Atlantic. The headline is The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are. Craig, I’m going to ask you, in your head, how old are you?
Craig: Oh, man. It depends. Sometimes I’m 14, and sometimes I’m 51.
John: The phrasing of the question ends up being important, because they’ve done studies on it. If they ask how old you are in your head versus how old you feel, you get different kinds of answers from people, because there’s definitely days where I feel 50, but I would say consistently I do feel like I’m probably 31, 32 at a place. The studies they’ve done on this, it looks like people anchor themselves about 20% younger than their actual chronological age. They tend to peg themselves back at a moment where they feel like they are themselves, the first version that they were themselves.
Craig: That’s interesting.
John: It’s after you’ve had your first kiss, first foray out into the world without your parents’ supervision. You feel like an adult with most stuff figured out. That tends to be the moment. Going back to our villains discussion, people who have big traumas in their past tend to get stuck at those ages too. It’s a good article overview of this mental self-perception of how old you think you are. What can be useful for people who are in their 20s or early 30s is that the people who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, internally they still think of themselves likely as closer to your age than you would guess. Useful.
Craig: It is. I’m not a huge backwards-looking person. What I do know is that no matter what age I perceive myself to be, while I have changed in certain clear and I think positive ways since I was, say, 35, I haven’t changed that much. I’m still basically who I was, whereas when you’re coming up, you’re changing a lot.
I remember when I was in my 20s, looking at people who were in their 30s and feeling, “Okay, you’re a little bit older. You seem like you’re more settled down and established. I’m a bit jealous of that kind of peace.” People in their 50s were just old. The truth is, those people in the 50s did not probably feel any different than the people in their 30s. They really didn’t. I don’t feel that different.
There is a wisdom that comes with age. It’s weird. I don’t feel old, but I know that the people I work with, who are much younger than I am, look at me and think, “Old,” like parent old, which is fascinating.
John: The parent thing is really interesting, because at a certain point, I realized, “Oh, I’m now older than my parents were at this point.” It’s weird, because I always think of them as being older. When I was a kid, they were not any older than I am currently right now. That’s strange to me. I forgive them more.
Craig: How old was your dad when he passed away?
John: My dad was 67.
Craig: At some point, you’re going to hit 68.
John: For sure.
Craig: That’s going to be interesting, because you’ll know an age that he didn’t even know, which is fascinating. I have this memory of my mother throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for my dad. That just seemed like the most faraway number possible. That’s in my rearview mirror by a decade. Time.
John: Time, time.
Craig: It’s so weird.
John: I have this very distinct memory. We went camping every summer. We were in the trailer. I asked my mom how old she was. She’s like, “I’m turning 37.” That number anchored for me. It’s just wild to think, oh, wow, she was actually a 37-year-old. That doesn’t feel that old to me.
Craig: If you were with a 37-year-old right now, you’d be like, “They’re on their way up.” So strange.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: It’s so weird.
John: You’ve got one here.
Craig: I’ve got my One Cool Thing, which is gonna feed directly into our Bonus Segment. My One Cool Thing is a woman named Yeono, Y-E-O-N-O. That’s a combination of her full name. She is a tattoo artist from South Korea. Just side note about South Korea. Tattooing, you have to have a medical license to do it.
John: Wow.
Craig: The legal structure is really designed to discourage tattoo work. A lot of South Korean artists come to the US to work. Yeono gave me a tattoo. I think it’s amazing. She was a lovely person and an artist and meticulous, which I thought was wonderful. She has a particular style, which is photorealism. If you are in the LA area, or I believe she also works out of Brooklyn, so she goes back and forth, and you are looking for a photorealistic tattoo done by a very obsessive, very careful, attention to detail type person, then you should take a look at some of the work that Yeono has done. She’s terrific.
John: Fantastic. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Chris Csont. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Dilo Gold. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Drew: Thanks, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, last Wednesday you came over to the house, and we were gonna play some DnD. You had on your arm a dagger. I asked, and you showed it to me. I said, “Oh, how long is that gonna last?” You said, “Forever.” The reason I asked how long is that gonna last is because it looked like a sticker transfer thing, because it was so incredibly photorealistic, and your skin was not all puffy and red in a way. I assumed you just applied a sticker to your forearm, but no, you’d gotten a genuine tattoo.
Craig: It’s actually a switchblade. Neil Druckmann and I made an oath when we were making The Last of Us. We said, “If this show works,” and we define works vaguely as either got good reviews or a lot of people watched it or both, that we would each get a tattoo of Ellie’s switchblade. She stabs a lot of people with her switchblade. It’s cool. The show worked.
John: The show worked.
Craig: I followed through. Neil has not yet followed through, I would like to point out.
John: Coward.
Craig: He is. He says he’s gonna. He’s waffling a bit about the design he wants, which I understand. I’m just going to continually shame him until he gets it. Regardless, it was my first tattoo. I’ve never had one before. I never really wanted one, but this felt significant. This was a long process. I cared very much about it. It just seemed like I had earned it in a way. I knew I wanted a photorealistic tattoo, which is why I find Yeono. The process was fascinating. I enjoyed it, actually, quite a bit.
John: The advice I gave to you on that night, and which other people around the table echoed, is you have to wait at least another year before you get another tattoo, because inevitably, people get a tattoo, and the experience is so cool that they want a second tattoo and a third tattoo and they end up with a bunch of dumb tattoos all over their bodies. I have so many friends who that has happened to.
Craig: I will try to avoid that. I think if another season of The Last of Us does well, I’ll probably get another one for that. I like the idea of tattoos commemorating large events, as opposed to just, “I want a dolphin on my ankle.”
John: I have exactly one tattoo. I got it 30 years ago. I was in the Stark Program at USC. Friends came down from San Francisco to visit. We were out on Venice Beach. They all had a bunch of tattoos. I said, “You know what? I really want to get a tattoo.” We went to the tattoo place, and I got the one tattoo. It’s on my ankle. It was great.
Craig: Is it a dolphin? Please tell me it’s a dolphin.
John: It’s a dolphin on my ankle. No, it is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase, tibbium nihil, imagus quiddum, which is, “Let me fear nothing, not even fear,” which was just a mantra I wanted to live by and honestly, genuinely helpful way of thinking about things. Most of the stuff in my life that I’ve regretted are the things I regretted not doing, that fear kept me from doing, and so to be less fearful of things ahead. It was good, useful advice.
It hurt like hell on my ankle. We can talk about this, Craig. It’s a very sharp, very specific pain, in a way that is so different than other pain, because I can see why it hurts, and it doesn’t bother me, because it’s just a very sharp pain at that spot. I know it’s not actually bad for me or my body. It’s not a warning sign the way I think pain generally is.
Craig: There are different parts of the body that respond differently. Interestingly, men and women have different responses in general to certain areas of the body. There are areas where men are more sensitive. There are areas where women are more sensitive. It’s curious. The ankle is a tough one. There are areas by joints, basically. When you’re dealing with joints, those tend to be more sensitive. Then the ribs apparently are the worst. That’s what I was reading.
John: I can absolutely see that.
Craig: The tattoo that I got is on my forearm, on the inside of my forearm, which is, generally speaking, one of the less painful places to get a tattoo, particularly if you can avoid getting close to the wrist or the inner elbow.
The pain, which I was obviously curious about, it was fascinating. It reminded me initially of a little bit of the pain of an electric shock, a steady electrical current, because there is a vibration to it. It’s like a vibration and a scratching at the same time, but I didn’t mind it, and that’s a good thing, because as you said, my tattoo is this photorealistic image of a switchblade. It took nine hours to do that. If it had been excruciating for nine hours, I think I would’ve lost my mind.
Honestly, the part that was the most annoying physically was that the position my arm had to be in on the table for her was slightly rotated to give her a flat inner arm surface. After a few hours, my shoulder started getting really stiff. I would take little breaks and just move my shoulder around and then hand the human canvas back to her.
Here’s an insight into me, John. About seven hours in, she’s like, “When it’s a long tattoo, when it takes a long time, I give my clients a little massage just to loosen them up, because they’ve been tight the whole time.” I said, “That’s right.” She gave me this wonderful shoulder, scalp massage. It felt great. That said, I was so much more comfortable being hurt than I was being helped. There’s something about people making me feel good that makes me feel uncomfortable and something about people hurting me that feels great. I can’t imagine why. Nothing happened to me.
John: Nothing to unpack there. Nothing.
Craig: Nope. We will not open the box full of bad stuff. I thought it was a fascinating process. Here’s where I’m at now. It’s been basically a week since I’ve had it. It is healing beautifully. There’s no more redness, happily no signs of infection or anything like that. I’m in the skin flaking stage.
From a medical point of view, what happens is the top layer of skin is going to heal faster than the lower layers of the epidermis. The top layer of skin is now healing. The way it’s healing is by flaking away the dead skin as the new skin on top regenerates. The skin underneath is still putting itself together. From what I understand, once all this sunburn style flaky stuff flakes away, the tattoo will then look a bit blah for another couple of weeks. After about a month from the beginning of the tattoo to then, things should be back to where they were when I first showed it to you, which was fresh and startling and vivid.
John: Craig, what is your opinion of actors having tattoos? I actually have some strong opinions about this, but I’m curious what your instinct is, because obviously, all human beings should be free to adorn themselves however they want to adorn themselves. I find it really frustrating when actors have a bunch of tattoos. I look at them like, “Man, we are going to have to get around a lot of your tattoos, because they do not fit in the world of our movie.”
Craig: I actually don’t mind it, as long as there’s not a facial tattoo. If there’s a tattoo and your face, that’s a disaster. Everywhere else on the body, if something is not covered by clothing, our makeup artists were extraordinarily good at covering up little tattoos or large ones. It didn’t take that much more time in the morning, obviously. The bigger issue is copyright, as it turns out, which is something Warner Bros found out when we made the second Hangover movie.
John: That’s right.
Craig: Tattoo artists that design original artwork are protected like the rest of us, under copyright. They own the copyright. If you’re going to put that on film, we need to clear it. Nick Offerman, for instance, has a tattoo. In our third episode, there’s a moment where he emerges and he’s wearing a towel but nothing on top, so you can see his chest, and he has a tattoo. He had already been in something where that tattoo had been visible, so he had already handled the whole clearance thing. I think he had gotten the artist to basically sign something that said, “I am licensing you to do this wherever you want to do it on camera.”
When it’s a new one, when it’s a fresh one, you do have to ask, and we have to get approvals and sometimes negotiate some fees. That part can actually be more annoying than the extra 10 minutes, because here’s the deal. If it takes 10 minutes to cover that tattoo up, we’re just calling the actor in 10 minutes earlier. It’s on them. They’re just going to be a little bit earlier on their call time to get that covered up. It doesn’t bother me too much.
John: As an actor, you’re appearing in TV shows, you’ll have to decide are you wearing some long sleeves, are you covering that up, are you getting a license from Yeono for perpetuity.
Craig: Here’s the interesting thing. I haven’t actually talked about this with her, but I’m going to. I’m going to go and see her again after a month, because she’s gonna look at it and see how it’s gone. She may want to touch up a couple of spots, depending on how it’s all healed.
The interesting thing about this tattoo is the artwork is basically a direct duplication of the artwork from the game, because I gave her these digital files of images of the switchblade that was originally designed for the game The Last of Us. Other artists had done this. Technically, I probably should’ve gotten permission from Sony, but I didn’t. Whoops. Sorry. I don’t think she would have the copyright on this, because essentially, this is a derivative work.
John: It’s derivative work. It could also arguably be work for hire. I’m curious how that’ll [crosstalk 01:07:40].
Craig: It could be, but I did not impose any of that paperwork upon her. There is an interesting legal question about how to handle this particular tattoo. You know what? I’m going to find out, because I’m going to be doing a little actoring on a show, not Mythic Quest, but a different show, in a month or so. I better dig into that or wear a long-sleeve shirt, but I don’t want to.
John: You don’t want to. You want to wear a Scriptnotes T-shirt. We cleared the Scriptnotes T-shirts for when you were on Mythic Quest.
Craig: Sweet.
John: You’re set for that. Sweet.
Craig: Nice.
John: Craig, congratulations on your tattoo.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Don’t get another one at least until Episode, let’s say-
Craig: Oh, god.
John: … 650.
Craig: Good lord. Okay, I give you my word.
John: Thanks. Bye.
Links:
- Amtel Systems
- The U.S. military’s Hollywood connection by Rebecca Keegan for Los Angeles Times
- How E-girl influencers are trying to get Gen Z into the military by Günseli Yalcinkaya for DAZED
- Warren Beatty Appears in Bizarre Dick Tracy TCM Special in Apparent Film-Rights Ploy by Dan Clarendon
- The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote by T.B.D.
- Why do good people do bad things? by Daniel Effron
- Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk by Catherine A. Sanderson
- WGAw Late Pay Desk
- The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic
- Tattoo artist Yeono
- Craig’s Tattoo
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Dilo Gold (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 590: Anti-Villains, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Drew discuss the newly-released WGA 2023 Strike Rules and how guilds across the industry are showing support for the WGA.
We then answer listener questions about what writers – union and non-union – can do during a strike. Are any meetings are ok to take? Can you sign with a manager? And what if your optioned material is sold?
Links:
- WGA Sends Out Strike Rules To Members As Potential Hollywood Labor Shutdown Looms Next Week by Dominic Patten and David Robb for Deadline
- Teamsters Statement on Writers Guild of America Negotiations
- DGA Statement of Support for WGA in Contract Negotiations
- IATSE President Issues Statement of Support for Writers as Strike Deadline Approaches
- SAG-AFTRA Statement in Support of WGA Negotiations
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post SC5 – Solidarity and Strike Rules first appeared on John August.
John and Craig talk to an audience of development executives about the experience of getting notes as a writer. They cover the do’s and don’ts of giving notes, ways to motivate writers towards a creative vision, and why these conversations kick in a writer’s fight or flight response.
We take questions from the audience and discuss ‘the bad pitch,’ likable characters, and how to stay friends with a writer after a breakup.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John offers his notes on Drew’s film school thesis as they discuss getting your first movie made.
Links:
- Episode 399, Notes on Notes
- Episode 99, Psychotheraphy for Screenwriters
- Episode 394, Broken but Sympathetic with Mari Heller
- Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Mackey Landry (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt (this episode was originally produced by Megana Rao), and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Notes on Notes, Rebroadcast first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Danielle Sanchez-Witzel (Up Here, The Carmichael Show) to discuss the state of modern TV writing and answer crafty questions from our overflowing mailbag.
How do you structure a limited series? How do you take inspiration from an idea without ripping it off? And how do you know if your story really needs that sex scene?
In our bonus segment for premium members, we explore the tricky situation of having a co-worker who is nice but incompetent.
Links:
- Danielle Sanchez-Witzel on IMDb.
- Up Here on Hulu.
- Succession Podcast, S4E2 with Lucy Prebble and Laura Wasser from HBO.
- Incompetent but Nice by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
- Glucose Goddess on Instagram.
- Non-Buttermilk Pancake Recipe
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Alicia Jo Rabins (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Correctable Crises first appeared on John August.
In this mini-episode, John and Drew discuss the results of the Strike Authorization Vote, and what’s next for negotiations.
We also answer a listener question asking how preWGA writers can show support during a possible strike.
Links:
- Strike Authorization Results
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post SC4 – SAV Results first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 589 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we welcome a guest who’s been mentioned 10 separate times on Scriptnotes-
Craig: Wow.
John: … which means he’s now legally required to attend. It’s a podcast summons.
Craig: Like when you look in the mirror and you say Bloody Mary 10 times. Patton Oswalt. Patton Oswalt.
Patton Oswalt: Thanks. Thanks for Beetlejuice-ing me, guys.
John: You are a comedian, actor, writer, Jeopardy champion. Your work includes everything ever made for a screen, but we’ll highlight some of the amazing comedy specials you’ve done, which have gotten you an Emmy and a Grammy. Welcome Patton Oswalt.
Patton: Guys, thank you for having me.
Craig: This is so exciting. I’ve said on the show before that you’re my favorite comedian. I listen to a lot of stand-up. I do. You know what? There was the time in the ‘80s and ‘90s where stand-up went insane and everybody was constantly watching stand-up. Now there’s this new thing where I’m just in my car and I feel sad all the time about everything, and so I go on Sirius XM or Spotify or something and just go, “Give me the comedy channel.” What I’ve found over time is there are people that I’m like, “Skip. Skip.” Then there are people that I’m like, “Stay. Stay.”
Patton: Am I a stay?
Craig: You’re the ultimate keeper. I think at this point I have now listened to every fucking thing you’ve ever said.
Patton: Jeepers creepers.
Craig: It’s wonderful. I’m a huge fan. This is very exciting.
Patton: I just can’t imagine you, Craig Mazin, being sad. How does someone sad come up with something like Chernobyl? Oh, wait.
Craig: Wait a second.
Patton: Wait a minute.
Craig: Hold on.
John: I’m seeing the two of you face to face. I really wonder who plays who in the biopic, because you guys could play each other, I think.
Craig: Patton should play me. He’s a good actor, and I am not.
Patton: Do we Charlie Kaufman it and have a scene where we meet each other but we just switch roles, we each play each other?
John: Or twins, brothers.
Craig: Actually, just brothers.
John: Or just brothers.
Craig: I think we’d do well. I think we would do well.
Patton: Yeah, we would totally pull off brothers.
John: He’s got an overall deal at HBO.
Craig: You have a brother who’s also a very smart and funny guy, so I would have to unfortunately replace him.
Patton: Exactly. We have to move my younger and way funnier brother out of the way in order to make that happen.
Craig: I think we could do that, right?
John: Craig, this is an episode that you manifested, because you said that we should have Patton Oswalt on the show. Boots Riley listened to the episode. He texted Kelly Marcel. Kelly Marcel texted me. That is how we connect.
Craig: My god.
Patton: Damn.
Craig: My god.
John: That’s how things connect.
Patton: Who knew Boots Riley was a queen bee connector?
John: Wow.
Craig: Wow, that actually sounds fake.
John: I could show you the text messages. That’s how we did it.
Craig: If you are going to stick with that story-
Patton: Did you write the sentence using magnetic refrigerator poetry?
John: Absolutely.
Patton: Slapped a bunch of names together.
Craig: That was the ChatGP whatever the fuck it was. Give me a story involving Boots Riley. This is going to be great. I’m thrilled. I’m so excited.
John: We’re thrilled. We’re also under-outlined. We’re under-prepared. I know that we do want to talk about construction of jokes, and so I also want to get through how that works, and really the difference between writing jokes and writing scripted comedy, because you’ve done both. You’ve also worked on a lot of scripted comedy.
Craig: Yes, you have. One of the things that would be great to talk with you about is Wackity Schmackity Doo, which is this great bit Patton does about being a punch-up writer. I’ve been that guy. I’ve literally said in the room, “You’re asking us to do Wackity Schmackity Doo,” and then explained it to them, which is this problem where a movie is finished. Sometimes it’s not an animated movie, although oftentimes it is.
Patton: By the way, I’ve been in the room in live-action films, and they’re like, “What can we have being yelled off screen that’s funny?”
Craig: It’s just we’re looking for ADR, looking for off-camera lines.
Patton: By the way, I can’t believe you and I were never in one of those rooms, because I did those all the time.
Craig: I’m going to tell you that we were.
John: Wow.
Craig: We were.
Patton: Which one?
Craig: It’s just that I literally don’t remember what it was.
Patton: We were in a room together?
Craig: We were, but it was many years ago. It was in the early 2000s.
Patton: I’ve been in rooms before Mindy Kaling was Mindy Kaling, she wasn’t just a joke machine gun, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant.
Craig: All those guys.
Patton: All those guys. We must’ve been in a room together.
Craig: We were.
Patton: We had to have been.
Craig: I left you alone.
John: He was shy.
Patton: Stole a lock of my hair for your ball that you were making.
Craig: At least one or two.
Patton: You’ve been in those rooms where you’re like, “Oh, hey.”
Craig: Yes. We’re going to talk about that process as well, because Patton has done all of it.
Patton: You’re right.
Craig: I think what I’m fascinated by, because we always concentrate on writing, is just how that process is, how much writing writing there is, how much physical writing or non-physical, memorized recitation writing, how these things are structured, the beginnings and middles and ends, because you really are very structured. It’s not jokes. It’s stories. It’s these moments.
Patton: That I try to pack with as many punchlines along the way. I just have never been able to sell the whole duh-dum, bah-dum, bah-dum. Some people can do that brilliantly. That’s just as hard to do, but I’ve never been able to pull it off.
Craig: Yes, like Demetri Martin, a guy like that who’s just so good at that sort of thing.
Patton: And Anthony Jeselnik, whose jokes are like-
Craig: The king of it.
Patton: They are little, miniature works. Oh my god, it’s like stained glass. It’s so perfect.
Craig: It’s shocking. Have you ever listened to Anthony Jeselnik?
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: I think of myself as a smart guy. I’m a writer. I’m supposed to know what’s coming next. He gets me I would say 99 times out of a hundred. I don’t know where he’s going.
Patton: I’m a comedian who should see all the different angles. You know what he reminds me of? I’m saying this as a compliment. He does dark joke versions of Roadrunner cartoons.
John: Definitely.
Patton: They show you the setup. Here’s the catapult. You think of three ways it can go wrong, and then it goes wrong in the way you didn’t think of. It’s like, oh my god. It’s a great way to learn how to write jokes is to watch old Roadrunner cartoons.
Craig: He’s a magician. You really do write these scenes that in and of themselves, if you perform them out, you could easily get 25-minute-long shows. You could do an episode that’s here’s a story, and you could expand it out. I’d love to dig into that structure. Before we do that, John is going to hit me over the head if we don’t follow the rules.
John: We’re going to jump into the jokes right away. I did want to say that in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, I want to discuss a pet peeve of mine, which is when characters keep secrets for no reason.
Craig: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
John: Just marinate on that. We’ll think of some examples of that.
Patton: Good, because I have a shining example of that, but it’s also a rebuke of that, in one of my favorite films. We’ll get to that later.
John: Oh, so exciting.
Patton: I love this so much. Good, good, good, good, good.
John: Let’s get into jokes and joke structure, because Craig, when we found out Patton was going to be on the show, you listed, “These are my favorite bits.”
Craig: Those are not my favorite bits.
John: Top of mind.
Craig: Those were just the ones that I felt like typing there. They’re all my favorite bits. As we were saying, you do have this wonderful ability to make a story of everything. If people want to see a great example that is fun to watch on YouTube, Patton did… I’m going to call it a bit, but it’s so diminishing for what it is. A piece. He did a piece on a-
Patton: A piece, although, by the way, listeners, I would never call one of my jokes a piece.
Craig: No, I will.
Patton: You will. Please.
Craig: I will call it a work of art. A work of art centered around the horrible song, Christmas Shoes.
Patton: Oh, boy.
Craig: It’s this beautiful work of art about Christmas Shoes-
Patton: Thank you.
Craig: … that someone has lovingly animated.
Patton: It’s never been released on an album or in a special. I did it, and someone recorded it, or maybe I recorded it for a special and then just never used it. Some fan animated it on YouTube, and it was amazing.
Craig: It’s incredible.
Patton: It’s just this thing. I still do it at Christmastime.
Craig: Thank god.
Patton: You’ve got to see me live to see me actually do it live.
Craig: One of the things that struck me about that piece is that it is, in its own way, a work of adaptation, because you take this preexisting work of art-
Patton: Work of art.
Craig: … which is a song.
Patton: Massive air quotes.
Craig: The song has structure. It has structure.
Patton: The song tells a story. There’s a twist.
Craig: You know exactly what to keep and what to not keep.
Patton: There’s that moment when I’m like, “I can’t recite any more of these lyrics. I can’t.” That’s part of it is me giving up. That song is that bad.
Craig: It’s giving up, but it’s also you understood there was nothing to mine there. If there were, you would’ve kept going.
Patton: Exactly.
Craig: There’s adaptation to this, but also your original, meaning not based on anything. It’s all original, of course. When you’re just talking about your own life, things that have happened to you, your own observations or thoughts, everything is incredibly well structured. I guess to start off with, how does it begin? Do you actually write things on your laptop, or are you just walking around and talking to yourself?
Patton: I’m walking around talking to myself, talking to friends, talking to my wife, and really paying attention to people in my life that are amazing storytellers and know how to tell a story. There are people in my life that I still love, that are very, very intelligent, that don’t know how to tell a story. They don’t know the parts to leave out, that have nothing to do with what will actually hold the listener’s attention.
John: My mom.
Patton: It’s funny that you mention adaptation. If you slavishly adapted every book to its exact word, it would be a lot of unwatchable movies. You need to take what’s there and adapt it and make it work. There are elements of that song that I’m like, “There’s nothing comedic here.” All it is, in a weird way, the bad elements of that song are just repetitive. It’s just reinforcing a point that I’ve already made and gotten the laugh with, so I can’t do it again. I think it also helped that I came from that time in the mid-‘90s. I don’t know if you ever went to the old Largo on Fairfax.
Craig: Of course. John Bryan and all those amazing people.
Patton: Oh my god, yeah. Brilliant comedians going on Monday night, but there was very much a vogue at the time for people just talking about their lives. There were a lot of comedians that were like, “Then I’ve gotta talk about everything.” It’s like, no, you still need to jettison things and keep it comedy-focused-
Craig: Curate.
Patton: … or it becomes un-listenable. I learned that very, very quickly because also, when that first started happening, I indulged in that. I could see the glazed over looks and went, “Oh, that’s right, I gotta structure this a little bit.”
John: I thought we would talk about the structure of a joke by just actually looking at a joke. This is the ham incident. We’ll spoil nothing, but Craig wants to say the line.
Craig: I just want to say all the ham.
John: Let’s play it.
Craig: Oh, shit.
Patton (clip): Here’s another sweatpants story for everybody. Little sweatpants adventure for you guys.
Patton: That’s getting applause.
Patton (clip): I was out shopping, grocery shopping. I’m in my sweatpants. I’m in my matching color T-shirt-
Craig: “And flip-flops, ladies.”
Patton (clip): … and flip-flops, ladies. Got my crumbled up shopping list, and I’m staggering around, “What the hell I gotta buy?” Our supermarket has a deli counter where you can walk up and they’ll cut you up a pound of ham, turkey, cheese, anything you want, cut it up fresh. Boom, off you go. Then to save everybody time, they will precut one-pound things of ham, turkey, cheese, so you can walk up and go, “I’ll get two cheeses. I’ll get a ham,” and you’re on your way.
Craig: Can we pause for a second. Act 1, exposition, world building.
John: Setting up crucial details, details we don’t know are important but become important later on in the joke.
Craig: Also, just from the Joseph Campbell of it all, ordinary world. It’s an ordinary world.
Patton: Not to get all pedantic, but in comedy, nothing gets a bigger laugh than when you have set up seemingly mundane things that no one can imagine these being jokes in any way, because everyone is like, “I’ve seen that. You go to the deli counter, and it’s ready to go.” That’s why if you notice, I almost get a little singsongy, because I’m like, “I know we all already know this. I’m just reminding everyone, so now we’re in the setting.” It’s that kind of inflection.
Craig: The magic trick there, and we do this in television and movies all the time, the burying of exposition. You’re actually being like, “Sorry, I’m actually over-indulging in details that are unimportant.” That’s what that singsongy thing does, but that’s the magic trick. We are in a wonderful first act structure where you’re actually doing all the things we do in a movie.
Patton: Here we go.
Craig: We resume.
Patton (clip): Staggering up to the counter with my list, and I vaguely see that the next guy in line is this morbidly obese guy. Huge. He’s the next guy in line at the counter. He’s blocking part of the counter. What I can’t see is there’s only one one-pound thing of precut ham in the ham bin. There’s only one left. I can’t see that. All I hear as I approach him is him say, “I want all the ham.”
Craig: This is the best part.
Patton (clip): Meaning he just wants the one thing. I immediately ran away around the corner into the next aisle and started laughing my ass off. I wasn’t even laughing at him. I was thinking of the guy at the deli counter going, “Here we go.” Eye of the Tiger starts up. He’s doing it! It’s happening!
Craig: Hold on.
John: That’s the inciting incident, basically.
Craig: Also, the development of it. There was something that I thought was really smart structurally, that I suspect you had to think about quite a bit, which was, “I need them to know something I didn’t know.”
When we’re writing, we get to shift perspective all the time. It’s part of the fun of what we do. When you’re making comedies in particular, this kind of math gets discussed down to the tiniest little bit, like when do we show it, when do they know what he sees and what I don’t see. It’s essential. The way you put it in there, you don’t often hear that actually in comedy that there’s a perspective shift. It was brilliant the way it just slotted right in.
John: You were visually setting up that you were in the store and that he’s blocking part of the counter, which didn’t seem important at the time when you said it, but it becomes important as you explain the context of what he was actually really saying, what he was actually asking for.
Patton: Did you also notice how I was storyboarding? I’m giving the audience the omnipotent view, the omnipresent view that I don’t see. The joke is on me. The guy’s just casually like, “Give me all the ham. I’m going to go.” I’m making links in my head that don’t need to be there. Again, I’m always keeping the joke on myself here.
Craig: The perspective shift to allow the audience to have insight that you did not have in that moment is also about to platform to an even bigger one. That’s step one of things Patton didn’t see.
John: We’re going to get to a place where the audience wasn’t expecting to go, which is crucial. That’s the key.
Patton (clip): Then I thought, what if a third party witnessed that? What if a third person was 20 yards away, and all they see is a guy dressed like me with a crumbled piece of paper, and he’s approaching this morbidly obese guy at a deli counter. Just as he gets there, the morbidly obese guy goes, “I want all the ham,” and the guy with the paper goes, “Oh, shit,” and then runs away.
Craig: Now pause again for a second. What I love is these are all these movements.
Patton: That visual is really fucked up.
Craig: It’s amazing. It’s so good. “Oh, shit.” You have this moment where you can step outside yourself and imagine how absurd that would be. A comedy bit would’ve stopped at, “I want all the ham,” and the guy going like this. You’re now like, “Wait, what if I go meta one step further?”
What I love is that now the audience is like, “Okay, that was the bonus.” The normal meal you get is, “I want all the ham,” then, “Oh, here we go. Eye of the Tiger.” Now there’s this bonus. What I love about you is that you’re like, “No, you don’t even know what the bonus is.”
John: I’ll just also point out repetition. This is the second time you’ve mentioned the crumpled note, which is going to become important in the next little section here.
Patton: Yeah, it is.
John: “I want all the ham,” repeating that just anchors it back to that moment. This is the guy we’re focused on.
Patton: Again, I’m also doing a little bit of a cheat where each time I say the crumbled note dismissively, because that’s how people think of their crumpled shopping list is, “It’s just here, whatever.” I’m reinforcing that who cares, and then it becomes important.
John: Without the word crumpled, we might not even catch the [crosstalk 00:17:24].
Craig: Exactly.
Patton: Crumpled is a good comedy word.
Patton (clip): He might honestly believe that he just saw the future get doomed.
Craig: Pause one more time. Here’s what I love about that. Now you’re doing what Rian Johnson does, which is, “I’m going to show you who killed the person. You still don’t know why this is going to be fun.” You’re giving away the ending, and they’re laughing. You can almost hear them laughing because they’re on the wheel of laughter. While they’re laughing, they’re like, “Wait, what?”
Patton: It’s funny you bring up Rian Johnson, because my wife and I are doing a big deep dive into Poker Face, which-
Craig: So much fun.
Patton: … does the Columbo mechanics one better, where they show you the murder and then they show you the motives, and then sometimes the motives have wrinkles to them that you didn’t realize. God, it’s such a brilliant show. That’s a classic example of showing you the most mundane stuff and knowing that you’re starting to get in on the game. Then they will show you mundane stuff that we’ll go, “Okay,” and then it means nothing. Then you’re totally off balance. Anyway, go ahead.
Patton (clip): The morbidly obese guy is destined to begin working out and become this cut, muscular warrior of the wasteland and save humanity from the robot lizards that are taking over in 40 years. The few remaining humans have sent me, this emissary, back to read him the message and tell him of his destiny. We have historical records. We know we have to get to him before he decides to commit ham suicide at the Pavilions in Burbank, California. I’m clearly woozy from the time tunnel. I’m trying to get to him. I’m almost there when he says, “I want all the ham.” Oh, god, we’re doomed! We need to find another warrior!
Craig: Well earned applause.
Patton: Oh, man.
Craig: Well earned applause.
Patton: Thank you.
Craig: The other thing that you do quite a bit, which I love, is you will engage in very almost cavalier storytelling that any studio might actually go, “That’s a pretty good idea. We could probably make a movie of that.”
Patton: Also, I’m getting the laughs out of the making wild assumptions, as if the audience already knows that. Of course I’m woozy from the time tunnel. We’ve all been through time tunnels. That’s always a great laugh to get is the crazy, unearned assumption from your listener.
Craig: And the specificity, because it’s not like, oh, because he’s a warrior of the wasteland. There’s also robot lizards.
Patton: A very specific thing happened, and it all happens at a very specific-
Patton and Craig and John: Pavilions in Burbank.
Patton: Which makes it.
Craig: Details.
Patton: I remember growing up watching old Bugs Bunny cartoons and stuff. They would make references, very specific, timely topical references to things that I didn’t know, but in context I always got. There’s one where a turkey is trying to slim down before Thanksgiving so he doesn’t get eaten. Daffy Duck’s making him work out. He goes, “Slide, DiMaggio, slide!” I was like, “I guess DiMaggio must’ve been some kind of baseball player.” You can get things. I always buckle at the studio note of this has gotta be universal, that anyone can understand. Sometimes if you go super specific, it makes it even more captivating.
Craig: People will want to know and learn.
Patton: “What is that? What’s going on?”
Craig: “What is that?” They’ll look it up. If they’re happy, they’re happy to look it up.
Patton: They’ll check it out.
Craig: I think how specific all of that storytelling is… There’s also this joy of riffing that you take a concept and then go, “How far do I go? How absurd do I get?”
Patton: There’s a big element of that. The thing that really attracted me to comedy when I started was just hanging out with other comedians and bullshitting all night and adding to each other’s bits. Sometimes we would get laughs out of, “What’s the most absurd or offensive thing I can say?” Some of my bits do have that, “What is the most absurd level I can take this to and still have it work?” It’s like, “I’m entertaining myself now. How well can I do this?”
Craig: It works.
John: Patton, can you talk us through the development of that joke? Do you know when you started that joke, what the early versions of that joke were? Did the ham sandwich guy ever exist?
Patton: Oh, yes, that absolutely happened. Again, the reality of the situation was I was shopping, I was living in Burbank, I was at that Pavilions. I went up, and that guy did say that. I didn’t run away and start laughing. He did say it with that. I do another bit about B-word fat with the B-word.
Craig: (nonsensical babbling)
Patton: “I’ve gotten so heavy that I (nonsensical babbling).”
Craig: “I’ve gotta lose some weight.”
Patton: “I want all the ham.” There’s that Frank Thring, Alfred Hitchcock way of speaking, where even without seeing him, you’re like, “That dude’s fat.” William Conrad. Then I just kept shopping.
A lot of my best writing comes when I’m doing dishes or shopping, because they are such mundane, task-oriented things that now your brain is free. In other words, if you’re sitting there trying to write, and your only task is the writing, a lot of times your brain will cinch up. If you give it a mundane task to do, then it’ll free your brain to actually do writing.
Craig: For instance, you’re standing in front of a bunch of Lean Cuisines, and your depression sneaks up and gets you. We don’t have to play it, but he’s just talking about how depression will get you when you least expect it. It got crafty. He has a daughter. His daughter is making him feel good. He’s a dad. He’s thrilled. Then it gets him in the supermarket. He’s just looking at the package.
Patton: [Crosstalk 00:23:16].
Craig: Then Toto’s Africa comes on. He just said, “I just [inaudible 00:23:22] I’ve never been so wonderfully ready to die.” Boom.
Patton: It developed from the thing I was talking about earlier of, “What if? What if? How crazy can I make this?” I did remember internally laughing at hearing the phrase. “I want all the ham,” said in that voice is hilarious.
Craig: It’s great. It’s incredible.
Patton: Then I started thinking of, “What would be the worst reaction from me?” You don’t want to be mean. “Oh my god, what if I ran away and started laughing?” I just kept what iffing, what iffing, what iffing. There are weird things that will resonate.
The longer you go in your career, the more you learn to trust the weird thing that clearly doesn’t have anything apparently attached to it that is something you can use. If it doesn’t go away, that’s usually a good indication of like, “I should run with this,” because it’s not going away.
John: In order to maintain ideas, your brain has to keep dedicating cycles to it, like, “Oh, it still has to be in there.” It’s fighting for attention. There must be a reason why it’s fighting for attention. There’s something it wants to do.
Craig: That’s voice too, the thing that you snag on, that your brain snags on. There may be a hundred screenwriting books telling you to just get rid of that, because that doesn’t fit in, but no, your brain snagged on it. Then your brain develops it. That’s you. I know a you thing. Even if I read it, I think I would know it was you, as opposed to hearing it or seeing you, because there is a specificity to the way your brain works. You trust your brain. All of us are copying early on. We’re all just desperate.
Patton: You have to.
Craig: You have to. You don’t know how else to do it. Then as you go, there’s that scary moment where you have to leave the nest or you’re Indiana Jones in the Third Raiders and you’ve got to step on the bridge that you can’t see.
Patton: By the way, the copying will never fully go away. Get over that anxiety. When I walk away from seeing a Cohen Brothers film, my writing will get very Cohen-y for a couple days. I was doing a show Friday night, and John Mulaney went on before me.
Craig: Oh god, so good.
Patton: First 30 to 45 seconds, I was talking in his cadence. I caught myself. His cadence is so wonderful. He’s such a wonderful storyteller that you fall into that. Then if you just embrace it and wink at it rather than try to, “Oh my god.” Let your ego get out of the way. You’re always going to be influenced by things.
Craig: It’s the finest compliment you could give anybody.
Patton: Exactly. Stephen King, when he wrote the intro to Harlan Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare, halfway through the intro he goes, “Oh my god, I’m writing like Harlan.” He goes, “Milk tastes like whatever it’s sitting next to on the shelf. I’ve just been reading some Harlan.” Someone then goes, “Oh, you just read Harlan Ellison.” He’s like, “Yeah, I did. Sorry.” That’s happened with me a lot.
John: This incident happened. You decided to write the joke. What does writing actually mean? Are you typing it up?
Patton: No. This is why I panicked a little bit-
Craig: Don’t panic.
Patton: … during the quarantine is I have the general idea, but I’ve gotta work it out on stage. The audience will partially guide me. I think maybe that’s why some of my bits land really hard with people, because it’s the end result of a conversation with other people rather than me hermitting away, writing it out perfectly, and then presenting it.
Craig: At which point it’s not plastic enough to adjust.
Patton: However, keep in mind, if you are a writer like an Anthony Jeselnik or an Emo Philips, who can write the most perfect frigging bits, and when you lay them in front of people, they just go, “Oh my god,” absolutely do that. I’m someone that needs that back and forth. It just makes the writing better.
Craig: For me or for John, the nice thing is our first draft, we write a scene, we go home, we come back the next day. I’m different. I like to mulch over what I wrote yesterday. John is very much like a move ahead guy, and then he goes back and does the whole thing. Either way, we’re evaluating what we just did. Then the shame is private. No one sees the crap.
Patton: The shame is private.
Craig: They just see what we want them to see. It’s even more so.
Patton: That’s cool.
John: We never bomb on stage.
Craig: We bomb privately. We bomb in front of ourselves, which is horrible. How does that feel when you go in there with your first draft, and you, “This is the first time I’m going to roll this out.”
Patton: A lot of times when I’m doing those first drafts, it is… After this podcast, I am driving down to Irvine to do the Irvine Improv. I will have bits prepared that will work. I’ll also work on a few new things. A lot of times when I’m doing the really raw stuff, it is in a room where it’s free. No one’s paid to see me. There is an audience that actually I think likes going to see comedians and being able to watch when it’s…
There was a bit I was working on for my latest special that I finally all got to come together about getting hemorrhoid surgery and then having a horrible accident afterward. It’s this whole long story. I just did not have an ending. In early days, like a year and a half ago when I was working on it on the road, I was like, “I will put this on a Netflix special in a year or so, and you’ll be able to go, ‘I watched that when it was just a mess.’ That’ll be your bragging rights.”
Although it’s actually opposite with comedians and bands. I think I’ve said this before, but I’m going to repeat it because it’s so brilliant, because Chris Rock said it, not me. He goes, “If you’re a comedian, you put out a special and an album, then you go out on the road, you better do a whole new hour, because they already saw that.”
Craig: Exactly. They want you to play the song exactly the way it was on the album.
Patton: If you’re a band and you put out an album and you tour, you better play that fucking album. They do not want to hear your new shit.
Craig: David Spade, he did a bit about that. He’s like, “You hear them come on, and it’s like, don’t play the new stuff. Play the songs I know, and no tricks.”
Patton: No tricks. Exactly, no tricks.
Craig: No tricks.
Patton: Don’t add some new arrangement. You know why I’m here.
Craig: Do the thing. Do the thing I like.
Patton: When I was on King of Queens, Huey Lewis did a guest spot as himself. We were talking about that. He had this memory, where he goes, “Oh my god, I remember as a teenager in San Francisco.” He started laughing. He goes, “I went and saw Led Zeppelin at The Fillmore. They were touring on Zeppelin 3, so we want to hear Immigrant Song, we want to hear Going to California, and we want to hear everything from 1 and 2. Play Black Dog. Great. Then they did a rough version of Stairway to Heaven, and half the auditorium walked out to go get a beer.”
Craig: That’s right.
Patton: “I remember specifically getting up and going, ‘Who wants a drink? I’ll go get… ‘” He left and then came back, like, “I don’t want to hear your new shit.”
Craig: Which makes total sense, because it’s a long… If you don’t know where it goes, if you don’t know the ending of that-
Patton: Exactly.
Craig: … you’re like, “What is this crap?” Completely. There are things that you need to absorb in before you see them. Comedy is tricky like that, because John Cleese talked about this at some point, that they would do these live tours. Monty Python would go do these shows, and they would do the Dead Parrot sketch, and no one was laughing. They were just mouthing along with the words. It became this very creepy, almost religious catechism thing of like, “We will now recite the Dead Parrot sketch together.”
Patton: Or even worse yet, this happened to Dave Chappelle and it’s happened to other people. I think it’s one of the reasons Steve Martin stopped doing stand-up was that people will pre-scream out punchlines that they like.
Craig: Oh god, no.
Patton: Or they’ll scream out catchphrases from other things that you’re doing. I remember I think Dave Chappelle walked off stage, this is years ago in Sacramento, because people were screaming, “I’m Rick James, bitch.” You’re about to get several hours of new material from this genius, and you’re yelling out something he already put on TV for you. That’ll be there when you go home. Let him do his… They wouldn’t let him do it.
I also remember I heard that when, and this is generational, when The Firesign Theater, when that album, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus, they had that great bit about… It’s the high school commencement speech where this guy’s going, “Eat it raw,” yelling. They were trying to start doing that on stage, and the whole crowd was just going, “Eat it raw! Eat it raw!” They couldn’t start the bit.
Craig: What’s the point? It’s over.
Patton: Like, what are we doing?
Craig: You have a great story about going to a casino and just having your credits screamed at you for 30 minutes by drunk people.
Patton: Literally my IMDb yelled at me.
Craig: “King of Queens!”
Patton: “King of Queens! Ah!” It was rough. It was rough.
John: We’ve talked about a joke, but let’s talk about a whole special or putting together a bunch of stuff into one thing. Mike Birbiglia’s been on the show many times.
Craig: Oh, god.
John: He’s so good.
Patton: Fucking went and saw it right before the shutdown. I went and saw his one-man shop, not Sleepwalk with Me, the one about being a father.
John: The New One. The New One.
Patton: Literally called The New One. Oh my god, we almost went into a Who’s on First. “The New One. No, the one about… Yeah, The New One. No, I know. I just can’t remember the title. Yeah, The New One. Yes, I just said that! God, he’s such a fucking [inaudible 00:32:38].”
John: I saw The Old Man in the Pool in a tiny, little club when he was still working on it. It was clear that there’s raw edits on things that aren’t working, but then eventually it all comes together and you get that feedback. With your specials, when you’re aware that you have things that fit together, that can build up to a full hour, that feel like it’s a journey, what are you aiming for?
Patton: It’s different. Sometimes you know a couple of months beforehand. You go, “Hey, let’s give them a date. Let’s pick a venue. Let’s do this.” Other times you’ll have… On this last one, I had the date and venue, and not until a month did I realize the structure that it actually needed to be, that the hemorrhoids story was normally in the middle. It took me a while to realize that’s the end.
There was another bit that in the special was in the middle, but on the road I would have it at the end, but then I realized, actually if I switch my… Then a much weirder note that you’re not expecting it to land on, and that’ll make me seem more engaged on stage. When that structure happens, you don’t…
A month before my second to last special, there was a bit that I did in the middle about going to Denny’s. My road opener, this guy Orlando Leyba, brilliant comedian, we’re on the road, he was like, “That should be your closer.” It changed the whole set.
Craig: This is an interesting question, because when we’re writing things for one purpose or another, there are different needs. Live performance, you want to just basically drop your biggest bomb, I would assume, at the end. You want to go out on the biggest possible laugh, maybe in a small room, but in a special, you want to go out on something that is meaningful.
Patton: Or maybe not necessarily meaningful, but you want to end on whatever is the most interesting thing that people will think about. It doesn’t necessarily need to be meaningful, but it does have to be… Yes, it is always good to end on a massive laugh if you can get it. Sometimes I like the massive laugh in the middle, so you’ve earned their trust. You’ve earned their trust enough to go, “Now I’m going to go off in maybe not the biggest laugh areas, but because I’ve earned your trust, you’ll follow me into something interesting.”
Craig: Interesting.
Patton: That’s a different way to structure it. On my last two specials, that’s how I’ve gone, because the bit about Denny’s and then the bit about the surgery are way more wandery, philosophical, with a ton of laughs in them, but it doesn’t end on a big ba-ga-da-boom, “Thank you!” Maybe that’s a function of getting older as well.
Craig: There’s a confidence to it. It’s sort of like, “I don’t actually need you to freak out every three seconds, because I’ve earned this. You know I’m funny. You came here. I’m not new.”
Patton: Has this happened in your writing sometimes when you’re early on, you’re like, “The third act’s going to be frigging crazy,” and then you get to the confidence and go, “Let’s actually make the third act weird and something that stays, has just as much of an impact, but isn’t as loud and bright.”
John: It’s still in the same scale and still following the same character’s journey, rather than just a whole new big step because it has to be bigger for the sake of being bigger. The original World War Z was this huge, massive thing. They realized, oh, this is not what the audience wants to see. They actually want to see our characters survive and grow and change.
Patton: What a ballsy thing in the third act to have the main piece of action be, “I can’t make any noise. I have to be very quiet.” That’s a really startling way to end a movie like that.
Craig: If you have done what that movie did in the middle. That’s something that we were thinking a lot about for our season of television now, because we had an opportunity to do some big set pieces. Where do they go? Should we end on the biggest set piece? I don’t think that that makes more sense, but at some point you want to do it. Timing that stuff out, in television I think it’s a lot easier. I have to say. Movies, the problem is, that’s it. It’s 90 minutes to 2 and a half hours.
Patton: That’s it.
Craig: The ending, a lot of times, it’s like a fireworks show. You save all the fireworks for the end.
Patton: A lot of times, and I think a perfect example of this is, it’s still a great movie, but the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale. An amazing opening, genuinely amazing opening. The middle part’s great. Then you end on that great… Don’t even end on it. There’s that great poker game, tense. Then there’s that excruciating torture scene.
Craig: Which is the best.
Patton: Also incredible. Then there’s this huge special effects-heavy piece of the building going in the water. It doesn’t give you any feelings because it’s too big.
Craig: It’s too big.
Patton: You’re like, “This was all done on a computer somewhere,” whereas the other ones are him and Mads Mikkelsen just looking for micro-expressions on each other, and you’re actually tense watching it.
John: I want to circle back to when you plan your biggest jokes. You’ve earned the audience’s laughter and trust, and therefore you can afford not to be as hilariously funny for certain things.
That’s a thing we encounter a lot, both in comedy and in action and scary things too, where it’s like, is this moment right now the funniest thing you’ve ever seen, is it the biggest action? Maybe not, but we can afford to do it because the audience is with us. The audience has invested the time. The audience is with you. We talk a lot about the first 3 pages, the first 10 pages, like, “Are we on the ride together? Are we on the ride together?” When we come off of one of those really big sequences, we can actually afford to send some pages, some minutes setting up crucial things for later on down the road.
Patton: They have confidence that a meandering scene will not be a meandering movie. It’s meandering for a reason. You’re being set up for something.
Craig: That’s the hardest thing to convince people of that don’t do what we do, because they’ll say, “They’re getting antsy right now.” You’re like, “Exactly. Exactly. It’s okay for them to get scared.” That thing where someone’s telling a story and someone will say, “Where’s this all going?” meaning does this have a fucking point? What we’re supposed to do, and I think when we’re at our best it’s what we do, is make them really scared that none of this is going to add up. Then oh my god, it all adds up. It was all intentional and it was all thought through.
Patton: You mess around with the idea of, “Where is this going? This might not work. Oh god, he pulled it off.”
Craig: Exactly.
Patton: That’s really fun.
Craig: So much more interesting than a limerick joke where it’s like, okay, I got it, the first two lines, the second two lines, and then the fifth line. The fifth line will tell me what happens. I never get nervous when I listen to limericks, ever. The more you start to wonder how the hell is all this going to add up, how is all of it going to make sense. I think you in particular are very good at that. You think these things through beautifully. It’s very thoughtful.
Patton: I’ve become good at that. That’s again through years and years. I’m sure when you guys were first starting out screenwriting, TV writing, it was very much, “What’s the structure?” Again, the structure of something like Chernobyl, it’s almost an existential version of Jaws. You see this threat emerging in the background.
Craig: That’s awesome. I’ve never heard that.
Patton: I remember watching that first episode when that explosion blew up in the distance. I’m like, “She’s dead. She just doesn’t know it yet.” Then as we go deeper and deeper and deeper, we realize the depth of this threat. It’s brilliant history, but it’s a brilliant horror movie. It uses those tropes in such an amazing way, to the point where you walk away going, “What other parts of the world are that unsafe?”
Craig: Turns out almost all of them.
Patton: Apparently, all of them.
Craig: Ohio is.
Patton: That must be so surreal for you to watch what’s going on in East… You’re like, “People.”
Craig: This is something’s that’s happened to me is that any time anything explodes anywhere, people start emailing me.
Patton: The parallels here are so profound that it almost looks comical.
Craig: That’s what’s so upsetting. This will always be the case. When Chernobyl was going to explode, and just only people found out when it did, but it was always going to explode. It was just a matter of time. A train was going to derail there. It was only a matter of time.
Patton: Always. Everyone that worked on the railroad was like, “You need to do… “ They were all saying it.
Craig: “Screw you, unions.” The thing is, right now we don’t know we’re sitting on a powder keg that the fuse is already lit. We just don’t know which is it.
Patton: Exactly.
Craig: We’ll find out when it goes.
Patton: When the next bridge collapses, when the next skyscraper falls.
Craig: This has been happy fun time with Patton, John, and Craig.
Patton: Hey folks, you’re all doomed. Anyway, life’s a crapshoot, and you’re probably going to lose because that’s how it’s always went. Here’s a word from Mailchimp.
Craig: I forgot about Mailchimp.
John: Oh yeah, Mailchimp.
Craig: Oh, Mailchimp.
Patton: Oh, man.
Craig: Dumbest name for a fucking product, Mailchimp.
Patton: Who called it Mailchimp?
Craig: This is what’s so nice about not doing ads. We can just say Mailchimp is a stupid name.
Patton: It’s a dumb name.
Craig: It’s dumb.
Patton: Holy shit.
Craig: It’s just dumb.
Patton: Mailchimp.
John: We’ve been talking a lot about comedy specials, writing comedy, but you’ve always written scripted stuff. Let’s talk about scripted stuff, like M.O.D.O.K, your Amazon series [inaudible 00:41:47] character, hilariously really good. You’re focusing on that character. What did you learn trying to figure out not just an episode, but multiple episodes, seasons, put that together? How was that process for you?
Patton: That process was because I was co-running a room with my writing partner, Jordan Blum, who’s an amazing writer, comes from Family Guy, comes from Community, and [inaudible 00:42:10] knows all the lore but is really good at how do we adapt it to a thing that humans can watch and enjoy, but we still have all the fun little Easter eggs.
That was a really eye-opening experience in that you have a room full of people. Some are comics fans. Some aren’t. They’re all good writers though. They are bringing different sensibilities to this thing. It makes you, when you go and write by yourself, go, “Can I evoke these other voices and viewpoints that were in that room, that could bring these different dimensions and angles?” I went into it from, this is the idea of a supervillain. My whole idea for this was-
John: Let’s explain for people who may not know.
Patton: Oh yeah, sorry.
John: M.O.D.O.K. is almost a family sitcom, except that M.O.D.O.K., this Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing is at the centerpiece of it. He’s like a terrible dad figure, which is a trope of animated sitcoms, obviously.
Craig: Bad dads.
John: The absurd version of that.
Patton: The two tropes you wanted to toy with here is A, the world conqueror that is like, “I sacrificed everything.” M.O.D.O.K. is like, “Because I am supreme, M.O.D.O.K. sacrifices nothing. I will rule the world. I will also have a loving family. There will be no sacrifice or compromise. I get to have everything.”
We also wanted to play with the trope of the terrible dad who at the end of every episode the wife’s like, “Oh, honey.” He goes through an ugly divorce in this first season because they should not be married. This isn’t working. Now what does he do that he has to face that? We wanted to really play with that and then also have a lot of fun with super villain fights and technology and stuff like that. It was all in service of upsetting tropes that I think people accept without even really thinking about them all that much.
John: Going from joke writing, and we were also talking about punch-up rooms, we should get back to that, but going back to now you have to have development over the course of a half hour and have multiple characters’ voices, what was that like for you? Did you enjoy it? Do you want to do more of it?
Patton: Yes, I would love to be in another room like that, either on a staff or writing it. At this point, I’d like to be running it or I have a central vision that you bring in. There is something ultimately I feel confident and courageous about going, “Here’s the vision I have, but I am open enough and confident enough in it to have other people come in and upset it and show me things that I missed, that we can now add to the vision to make it better.” That to me is true confidence, so I’d love to do that again.
John: You’re talking about the room that builds from the ground up versus what we have more experience with is basically coming in to save a thing, because we’ve all done that. We’ve all done the rescue missions.
Craig: Yes, coming in to save a thing.
John: Sometimes it’s before production, last looks on a thing, but more often it’s something’s been shot, it doesn’t work, and here we are trying to fix the thing.
Craig: The dream of it, the platonic ideal of one of these things is, here’s a movie, and generally when you’re coming in to punch it up, it’s a comedy, and it’s a A-minus. It’s really good. We’re just looking. There’s a couple of moments here. Actually, what wonderful things can you brilliant people come up with that we can make this even better with? What it really turns out to be usually is, here’s a man that, he swallowed a grenade, it blew up. Put the pieces back together, please, but make him better looking. You’re like, “What?”
Patton: Exactly. It’s like when I would do punch-up on these animated films. We talked about this. They’re a hundred-million-dollar animated film. The thing is 75% finished. Then you would come in, “If you move the… “ “No, we can’t. We’ve already made the movie. Just think of things for characters to yell off screen.” I remember saying to different producers, “If you would do these same rooms but have us work on the script rather than the completed movie, you’ll end up with a better movie and you’re spending your money better.”
Craig: Yeah, wouldn’t it be better? They can’t imagine that they’re not getting it right the first time.
Patton: No, they can’t. I’ve also been in a lot of rooms where clearly, I’m not going to name names, but there was a movie that I worked on where it was a terrible comedy. It was a live-action comedy. A bunch of us did a room on it. Then when it was done, the original writer, who farted out the worst script you’ve ever read, and probably bought a pool with it, came back and was like, “I want only my name on this script.” All of us were like, “Absolutely, dude. It’s all yours.”
Craig: No fights.
Patton: Then he got angry, like, “Why is nobody fighting me for this?” It was like, because even with all our work, we didn’t make this thing good. This thing still sucked. Happy to have my name as far away from this as possible.
Craig: I don’t know why executives think this thing of saying stuff off camera is magic. If you had a really good joke in the script to begin with, would you not want to see it?
Patton: Yeah, see someone say it.
Craig: Also, these things are being yelled off screen. No one’s reacting to them because they weren’t there.
Patton: Exactly.
Craig: How could this possibly be good? I have another bone to pick about these rooms. That is when I started out, so we’re talking the ‘90s, they would give you $5,000 to sit there for a couple hours, a sandwich, and then another couple hours.
Patton: I remember that.
Craig: Now it’s like, “How about you come in for a thousand dollars all day?” A, fuck, and B, you. How dare you? What the fuck is that? I’ve been going on about this forever. It’s sick how much they… The new thing now is they’ll do these rooms, not for comedies, they’ll do them for any movie. They’ll do them early on, before anyone’s written anything.
John: [Crosstalk 00:47:47].
Craig: I got a call like, “Oh, we’re going to remake this movie. Come and join these other eight people. We’re going to give you a thousand dollars, and you’re going to basically figure out what the movie should be. Then you’ll fuck off, and somebody will write it.” No.
Patton: Exactly.
John: I will say, on live-action features when you’re trying to do loop lines or ADR where basically over somebody’s back we’re going to throw a line there, that’s absurd.
Patton: Oh my god, I’ve written so many things for people’s backs.
Craig: Backs, yes.
John: With some of these animated movies, there is still time. You can change the mouth movement. We can get a line in that character’s mouth, and so they can actually say it on camera, which is a slight difference from before. Brainy Smurf can say that thing that Patton thought of.
Patton: A lot of times they’re at a point where, “We can’t pay for new animation,” or they don’t want to. Again, you are writing dialog for the back of an animated character’s head.
Craig: Which you generally don’t see much.
Patton: Holy shit. One of the weirdest things I ever heard, I did a panel one time with Thomas Haden Church, and he said that they… He was in that movie, the live-action George of the Jungle. He said that they did a very early screening with audience notes. “One of the notes I got was the first big laugh 10 minutes in the movie, some animal farts, and it got a huge laugh.” When the movie came out, and I went to watch this, I went and watched it just to confirm what he said, the first 10 minutes of the movie, you just hear animals farting.
John: Amazing.
Patton: The studio just went in with a fart machine just trying to make it funnier. By the way, it shows you they don’t even need writers. They’re just like, “Oh, that sound was funny. Great, put it in there 50 times.”
Craig: They honestly believe that comedy is improved by quantity. They really do believe that.
Patton: Oh my god.
Craig: Like, “Oh my god, this was funny. Do it more.” No, it’s funny because we didn’t do it more. A well-placed fart can get a great laugh if it’s well placed. If it’s just farting, now it’s just annoying.
Patton: The original Ghostbusters, there’s a lot of problems with the original Ghostbusters, but it would be looked at as too slow and they gotta do way more jokes.
Craig: Of course.
Patton: Half the laughs come from Bill Murray just not reacting, taking in what some other weirdo just said. It’s why the Pythoners would fight to be the straight man in the sketch, because that’s the person that gets the laughs.
Craig: Of course. The reaction is what’s funny.
Patton: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Craig: Always. Solved the problems of the world again.
Patton: We did it.
John: We have a listener question, which actually feels relevant to Patton Oswalt answering it.
Patton: Oh, boy.
Craig: Here we go.
John: This is Becca from Australia, who writes, “I’m writing a film that has many scenes at a comedy club with multiple characters performing snippets of stand-up routines. Ideally, these characters would be cast with real comedians who had their own sets and we could use pieces of it. Is it okay for me to indicate that? Basically, instead of writing a joke for them, I would like the actor comedian to use their own material. If so, how would I do this?”
Patton: A couple things there. Write a joke for them each, but let them know before they do it, “Hey, if you want to riff something here or if you’re okay… “ You have to let them know that this bit will now be part of this movie, whatever you’re doing.
Craig: What if, let’s say it’s not even a comedy. Let’s say it’s a drama or two people are meeting each other and they’re at a comedy club, and funny things are happening on stage, and that’s leading into an argument that they have later. Let’s say that’s not her strong suit. At that point, should she just pick some stuff that she’s heard and then just notate?
Patton: No. Let the comedians know, “Hey, there’s this thing you do. Yuod be so perfect for this scene.” Be very, very up front with them about that, because again, I’ve seen a lot of… I’m not going to name names. I’ve seen a lot of comedians’ bits suddenly find their way into movie scripts, where clearly someone went to a comedy club and went, “That’s a great line. I’m going to put that in there.”
Craig: You’re talking about my 2012 movie Ham Suicide. Guilty.
Patton: My attorneys have said I can’t talk about it here. They really advised me against doing this podcast, but whatever.
Craig: Whatever.
Patton: Just be very, very open about, “Hey, this… “ Make sure they are compensated and they are the ones getting the credit for it. Be very, very careful with that.
Craig: When it comes to showing the script to all the people that are going to come before that moment, the producers or anybody else, maybe you just in action say, “So-and-so is up there doing a great bit about so-and-so.” If that’s what’s essential is, okay, I just need the reader to know that the story’s going to be about divorce on stage, and that’s going to impact the discussion I have with my boyfriend after the show, that would be enough. You don’t want to just write bad comedy.
Patton: No. Also, writing stand-up comedy, as people find out when you watch movies, and the same with them when you see movies or TV shows about a band or music, really hard to write good stuff. Nothing is more cringey than when you watch a movie and they’re like, “This song is going to… “ You’re like, “No, it won’t. In the world of this movie, this song’s going to be a massive hit. This song is horrible. What the fuck are you doing?”
Craig: That’s why That Thing You Do is one of the greatest songs that has ever been written ever.
Patton: They actually wrote a good song.
Craig: They actually wrote a good song.
Patton: It was catchy. I can see how that would be a fun regional hit in the ‘60s.
Craig: Absolutely.
Patton: I get it. Makes sense. They actually wrote a good song.
Craig: That’s a great song.
Patton: As an example, I just did an episode of a TV show where I played myself at a roast, and they wrote roast bits for me.
Craig: That’s a good example.
Patton: Then I said, “Hey, can I tweak these a little bit?” because I’m like, “This is very situational. Anything I write, I won’t use anywhere else, because it’s about roasting this character. Fine, I’ll totally do that.” That was fine.
Craig: Because otherwise, you’d get that weird Uncanny Valley of it’s Patton and it’s sort of Patton but it’s not Patton.
Patton: Also, you can see in my face I didn’t write this and this isn’t in my voice, and I can’t really land this right now.
John: Let’s talk a little bit about voice, because you’re an actor. 287 credits on IMDb. So many actor credits. When you’re cast in a funny role, are there lines that are just like, “If I could say this in my own voice, if I could say this in my own way, it would make more sense.” How do you navigate that as an actor? I’m sure we have many actors listening here.
Patton: You have to be very, very open with the director and pray that you don’t get one of those directors that’s like, “My words are scripture.” A, first and foremost, your job as an actor is to make the lines work. By the way, that goes the other way too. There’s too much of a cult now of improvisation, of an actor gets a script, throws it out the window.
Craig: Don’t do that.
Patton: First, sit down and read the script, because sometimes the lines are really good, and you’ll look good if you say them. Then pick your spots where like, “Oh, I could actually improve this if we tweak this.” Don’t have that, “Every single line I’ve got to change and put my peanut butter fingerprints all over,” because then you’re not playing the character anymore. You have wedged yourself into this movie or TV show, and then it doesn’t work, or it might work for that one thing, but then you’ll be expected to do that every time, and then you won’t get to play other characters, and it will cut your career short.
Craig: There’s a thing that happens where just like you are carefully crafting setups and payoffs, threading in things in a certain way with a certain tone, there are actors who don’t maybe see some of the invisible threads and begin stumbling through stuff to make this moment better or this moment funnier, but they don’t understand that they just broke something. It’s down the line. To me, the smart actors are the ones who actually can see all that. Then it’s about trust. You trust me. I trust you. I’ll come and tell you if I think you’re breaking something. Otherwise, let’s have fun.
Patton: You can tell when someone is insecure, especially as a comedic actor, when they start yammering away too in a sketch, or a scene where someone is starting to get on a role and they’ll, “I’ll jump on that too.” Second City Training was all about if everyone in the scene is trying to make each other person better, then the whole scene explodes and everyone’s great in it. A great example, this is why Amy Poehler is such a frigging genius is when I was doing that filibuster on Parks and Rec-
John: Amazing.
Patton: … a lesser person would’ve tried to jump in and say a million things. She just held back.
Craig: There’s one moment, right?
Patton: There’s two moments. One of them got quoted. The female part is not very well developed actually. He knew exactly, it will make it funnier and make me seem funnier if I’m slowly listening to this and going, “Oh, my. Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” and then acting like I don’t want to hear this, and then get invested in it and yell something. She knew exactly where to pick her spot.
Craig: Zach Galifianakis was great at that. When we were making the Hangover movies, he would get very excited if he had one line in a scene.
Patton: You have to wait.
Craig: He loved that. That was his favorite thing, because he knew, by the way, that that was going to be the moment. He had no problem. “Let everything else around me be funny, and I’ll just do my one little thing.” Sometimes less is more.
Patton: “I didn’t know they gave out rings at the Holocaust.”
Craig: Oh my god. Oh my god.
Patton: Boom.
Craig: God.
Patton: Boom.
Craig: Zachy, the greatest.
John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, did you remember a One Cool Thing this week?
Craig: I did. I did. I have an interesting One Cool Thing this week. The American Academy of Pediatrics I think has a new recommendation now regarding childhood obesity. There are these new medications that they’re using now, like Wegovy. I had to look it up. It’s semaglutide or something like that. I’m somebody that I have weight management issues. Weight management issues I think for the longest time, because we’re Americans and Calvinists at heart, was like, “Oh, you’re heavy because Satan will take you soon.”
Patton: Because you’re a sinner.
Craig: Because you’re a sinner. Literally, gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. It was always a function of willpower. What’s fascinating to me is that we’ve just ignored the things right in front of us. For instance, when you’re out with people with other kids, so we’re all dads, we’ve raised our children. There are children whose parents have to tell them, “You have to eat.” They’re begging their kids to eat. “You will eat. Sit down and eat.” Those kids don’t want to eat, because they’re not hungry.
Patton: Their body would tell them to eat.
Craig: Those kids are not not eating because they have enormous self-control. They have no self-control. They can’t even stay in their seat. What it comes down to is some people biologically have higher hunger cues and reduced satiety cues than other people. We know this because there’s chemicals that can make us want to eat more or eat less.
What’s really interesting now is that they’re basically saying, “Hey look, there’s all these drugs that will help.” We’re not saying that we shouldn’t accept people at any size they are, but we are saying that the whole, “Hey, just get on the treadmill, kid,” or, “Just eat less, kid,” that shit doesn’t work. We have now decades of it not… In fact, not only is it not working, it makes it work. I think this is a really interesting thing now where finally, medicine is pulling away from the whole model of, “You don’t have enough willpower,” and moving much towards the model of-
Patton: It’s a character flaw in you.
Craig: Exactly. This has nothing to do with character at all. We know that this is genetic. We know that it’s passed on from parent to child. We know all of this. Let’s start treating it as it is. Let’s also let people off the fucking hook about it, at least to remove the psychological component of it and to have doctors be less judgey. Doctors with kids, if your kid has a weight problem, doctors are awful about it, or have been. I think this is a very good development. I’m not shilling for Big Pharma. I have no stock in these companies. I just think more just as a shift in how we approach these things is a cool thing.
Patton: Maybe there’s a shift happening. That’s good.
Craig: I would hope so.
Patton: I like that.
John: Patton, do you have anything to share with our listeners?
Patton: Yeah. This is not as life-changing, but there is a company called Beehive Books. They are, like a lot of smaller publishing companies, Hingston and Olsen and Centipede Press, these are people that are just bit with the book bug, and they love making beautiful books. There ain’t any money in it for them, but they do these gorgeous, large, illuminated editions of stuff like Crime and Punishment and The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Blazing World. They are doing a thing. It keeps getting delayed. I already have my pre-order in. This is a One Cool Thing that’s a little bit expensive [crosstalk 01:00:25].
Craig: I do it all the time.
Patton: It cost $400. I’m sorry. I couldn’t not get this. As you know, the novel Dracula, much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, much like Stephen King’s Carrie are epistological novels, it’s a collections of letters and articles and stuff.
Craig: Epistolary.
Patton: Epistolary, thank you.
Craig: Epistolary.
Patton: Epistological, Jesus.
Craig: You idiot. Get off the show.
Patton: Dracula is a collection of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, a recorded diary by a psychiatrist that tells this whole story. They are putting out a thing called Dracula: The Evidence. What it is is a Victorian era suitcase.
Craig: Oh, wow.
Patton: In it is Jonathan Harker’s diary, Lucy’s letters.
Craig: Oh, cool.
Patton: Seward’s phonograph record, newspaper. It is the story of Dracula, but done as if you’re going through the evidence of a case.
Craig: Physical objects.
Patton: It is so goddamn gorgeous. There are apparently supply line problems. They are still hammering away at this.
Craig: Was it a Kickstarter thing?
Patton: Yes.
Craig: I know whenever I back something on Kickstarter-
Patton: Oh yeah, you gotta wait.
Craig: Multiply your promised timeline by seven. That’s when I’ll get it.
Patton: Just the idea that this company is putting this much work for what… They know there’s no profit in this. I love people that are like, “I want to see this in the world.” That motivation is becoming more and more endangered every single day. It’s why they’re going to make you pay if you want to use texting authentication on Twitter, because there are people, and right now they are in control of everything, that are like, “How can this be monetized? How can every part of this be monetized?” They don’t understand that you’re making more than enough money to live on. They have never understood that, because they don’t enjoy anything.
Craig: They actually don’t understand passion at all.
Patton: Exactly. Beehive Books, all it is is people that just enjoy cool stuff. If you can support them in any way, go to their website, because the illuminated books that they put out are frigging gorgeous. Their Great Gatsby is insane.
Craig: Beehive Books.
Patton: Beehive Books.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: I’m in the market for some. By the way, Beehive Books is a great phrase for the guy who has B fat.
Patton: There you go. Beehive Books.
Craig: Beehive Books.
Patton: I forgot who said the phrase, but books decorate a room. If you’re one of those people that does the, “I have this shelf, and these are all red books, and these are all yellow books, and these are all green [inaudible 01:02:56] with the colors,” if you’re going to do that, then do that and put money toward a good company, because my god, these will make your shelves look amazing.
Craig: Awesome.
John: Awesome. My One Cool Thing was going to be Poker Face, which I agree is fantastic, but I’m going to do a follow-up act, which is Melanie Lynskey was filling in on Dear Prudence. Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column.
Patton: That’s right. She was.
John: She did an amazing job, not surprisingly. She’s very smart and very thoughtful and very kind. Her advice answering questions about marriage, grandchildren, driving, your spouse’s friends-
Craig: Plus all with that amazing accent, an accent that makes me the happiest of them all.
John: It’s all a text thing, and yet you-
Craig: You can hear her accent through it?
John: You can hear her accent through a text thing.
Craig: I love her. Did I tell you about the vendetta thing? We were talking about her character. I was explaining, “Okay, here’s what your character is. Here’s what she does. Here’s what motivates her.” She goes, “Right, so she’s got a bit of a vendetta.” I have been saying, “Bit of a vendetta,” to her now for months.
Patton: A, it sounds like an Australian brand of cheese.
Craig: Bit of vendetta.
Patton: B, there’s a guy. Oh my god, can I do two Cool Things?
John: Please, go for it.
Patton: On rogerebert.com, one of their film critics is this kid named Scout Tafoya. Scout Tafoya every month does a column, but it’s a video essay called The Unloved. He will take a movie that did not get massive critical appraise, or even it got trashed, and make a beautiful video essay argument using images from other films as well, to put it in its proper context. “Actually, this is a brilliant film, and here’s why.” That series was so popular that it spawned all these offshoots.
There’s one called Danger Mouse, which is about the years of Disney after Disney died but before The Little Mermaid, when they made these weirdly brilliant movies like Dragon Slayer and The Black Cauldron and The Journey of Natty Gann, where it’s like, wow, Disney got dark and brilliant. There’s one called Other West, which are Westerns that are almost not Westerns. They are on the outskirts of Westerns.
There’s one called Murderers’ Row. Murderers Row is a video essay on a specific actor or actress. He did one on Keith Carradine, did one on Jared Harris, and did one on Melanie Lynskey. The one on Melanie Lynskey is so beautiful. So beautiful. It’s one of those things where he’s like, “She’s been in front of us all along. How is she not struggling to claw her way out of a mountain of awards that have been dumped on her? It’s ridiculous.”
Craig: The mountain is about to start piling up, for sure.
John: It’s [crosstalk 01:05:27].
Craig: I’ve just been saying forever that I think she’s the best actor walking on the face of the planet.
Patton: There’s a moment at the end of his little essay, it’s called Murderers’ Row, where they show a scene from this. There’s no words in the scene either. It’s just her looking and having… I can’t even describe it to you. My god. She’s amazing.
Craig: She’s amazing.
Patton: Truly amazing.
Craig: To make it even more improbable, she’s also impossibly the nicest person walking on this planet.
Patton: I would imagine she is insanely nice.
Craig: Even for a New Zealander, she’s nice.
Patton: I did a movie with her, and she was so nice.
Craig: She’s incredible.
Patton: She’s the coolest person.
Craig: Just so beautiful. She’s got a bit of a vendetta though.
John: That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: What what.
John: It’s edited this week by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
Patton: Thanks for the sponsorship from DoorToDoorDildos.org. If you need a dildo, 24 hours a day, go to Door To Door Dildos, download our app. All kinds of sizes, colors brought to your door. Thank you, Door To Door Dildos, for supporting the arts.
Craig: It’s a better name that what they used to be, which is Dildochimp. That was a good change on their part. I assume that that’s improved sales.
Patton: I argued for DildoDash, but they couldn’t-
John: They couldn’t clear it.
Craig: Lawsuits.
Patton: They couldn’t get trademarks.
Craig: Lawsuits.
John: You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Patton Oswalt, an absolute delight having you on the show.
Craig: So much fun.
Patton: I would love to come back down the road.
Craig: Oh my gosh.
Patton: This was amazing.
Craig: Come back.
Patton: Thank you.
Patton: Let’s just make it a three-person show.
Patton: Hell yeah.
[Bonus Segment]
John: This is a pet peeve. I can’t think of a lot of examples. Maybe you could think of more examples. Characters who keep secrets for no reason. My frustration is, this is a recent movie I watched where a major character says, “Oh, I didn’t tell you about this thing that happened to me, but now it’s basically a crisis, and there’s no time for me to explain it to you now.” She could’ve told the secret any time in the last 10 years, and she’s not doing it, but only because of plot reasons, we’re now doing it.
Patton: I’m going to give you an example of, without this misunderstanding, there’s no movie. There is a great movie. Didn’t get the attention I thought it should. It came out in 2005 by director/producer/writer Richard Shepard. It is a movie called The Matador with Pierce Brosnan and Hope Davis and Greg Kinnear.
Here’s the basic plot. Greg Kinnear is a bored Ohio businessman, salesman, whatever, has to go down to Mexico on some trip. In Mexico, meets an about-to-retire assassin who’s having a nervous breakdown, played by Pierce Brosnan. Basically, Pierce Brosnan plays James Bond if James Bond had a massive PTSD attack. Then they become friends. He shows him how to go through a hit. They don’t actually kill anybody, but he shows here’s how it would actually be done. It’s very exciting, this crazy adventure.
Then after the first half an hour, 45 minutes, he goes back to Ohio. Then Pierce Brosnan’s character then shows up in Greg Kinnear’s life in Ohio, because people are trying to kill him and he needs a place to hide. He walks in and he introduces himself in the house. He goes, “Hi. I met your husband in Mexico.” Then the wife, Hope Davis, goes, “Is this the hitman you met that showed you how to do… “ Now, a lesser movie would have him go, “Yes, he’s a carpet salesman,” and they would be doing this ha bah bah bah bah. No. Of course he went home and said-
John: He told his wife.
Patton: “I was in Mexico. I met this hitman, and he showed me this stuff. We didn’t kill anybody. It was really weird.” “Oh my god, that’s great.” Pierce Brosnan is shocked for a second. Then you see him go, “This guy’s a schlub. I’m the most exciting thing that’s-“
Craig: Of course.
Patton: Of course he’s going to go tell his wife about this. Then the movie proceeds from there. The shock of that, the shock that they’re not going to do this fucking bullshit stuff makes the movie so much more fun to watch. Have people reveal shit early, and then see where the story goes. That’s my example of the anti-version of that.
Craig: Gross Point Blank does that with the same thing of hitman the whole time. He’s a hitman. He goes back for his high school reunion. Everyone’s like, “What are you up to?” He goes, “I’m a hitman.” Then people’s reaction was correct.
We love comedies of errors. We like farces. Farces are based on misunderstandings and lies and all the rest of it, which is fine, but they have to be justified. I’m not going to say what it is, because I don’t want to get legions of fans screaming at me.
There is something where I really enjoy it, but my frustration is there are characters who continually keep things from each other and will continually say things like, “Can you just trust me?” “What’s going on with you?” “I can’t tell you right now, but can you just trust me?” I’m like, “You can tell the person right now.” There is no reason for them to trust you, because telling them won’t impact anything at all other than the fact that you don’t want them to. It’s an artificial relationship separator.
Patton: It gets very frustrating when you see that. You’re like, “This could all be solved. Just tell him right now! What the fuck?”
Craig: Exactly. This is another one. One of my favorites is someone will come up to somebody. It’s a minor version of a pointless secret keeper. “I need you to see something.” “Okay, what?” “Just follow me.” No, you can tell me what I’m going to see, and then I’ll go see it. I’m not a child.
Patton: By the way, it still doesn’t ruin the movie for me, because the movie’s still so much goddamn fun. If you pay attention when you watch the original Die Hard, really fun film, but when they’re breaking into the vault, the guy, that African American actor who was on Walker Texas Ranger is like, “You know I can’t do the electromagnetic field. I can only do the coding.” He goes, “You let me worry about that.” Then later on, when the FBI cuts the power, he’s like, “You asked for a miracle.” It’s like, let’s back up for a second. He recruited this team of the top thieves. These are professionals.
John: They knew each other before that night. It wasn’t like they just met.
Patton: Clearly, they had walked the building. They have that great thing where they’re counting the… They know where everything is. They must’ve brought up, “There’s an electromagnetic lock.” He’s like, “I got that.”
Craig: That’s the even worse part.
Patton: That means they all went, “Let’s roll the dice. Let’s do it and see what happens!”
Craig: He only brings it up really there as if he’s, “By the way, I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but I forgot. Actually, we can’t do this. The whole thing won’t work.” You get the sense that he never mentioned it even before.
Patton: Exactly.
Craig: If he had said, “Listen,” early on, “Just so you know, the thing that I told you I can’t do, I can’t do.” Also, what’s the point of keeping that secret? Like, “Oh, and then here’s what’ll happen. Then we’ll get there. I know you can’t do the thing. Don’t worry about it. The FBI’s standard procedure is to… “ Now, obviously we know why they did it. It’s because they want to surprise the audience.
Patton: It’s a fun turn. There were ways they could’ve done that though writing-wise that you realize they all knew that going in, but we don’t get that reveal.
Craig: Sometimes when it’s just a pure plot thing, I think everybody just lets it go because they’re having fun. Alan Rickman did such a great job of selling the line.
Patton: So fucking good.
Craig: When it comes to relationships, that’s where I struggle, when people are not just saying something they would say. That is a sign that the relationship is not well crafted, in my opinion.
Patton: Also because everyone’s instinct in life is to solve, solve, solve. Is there a problem right now? Solve it. What can I say to solve this? The idea of someone keeping something quiet for a decade and letting this problem hang between them, human beings don’t do that.
Craig: No, we’re constantly telling each other everything.
John: I asked this question on Twitter. I was describing this situation basically where you have a character who could reveal something at any point but it’s not revealed and it’s frustrating as an audience, but without naming the movie. A bunch of people in the comments were like, “Are you talking about this movie [inaudible 01:14:17]?” Clearly, it was a big enough factor for a lot of people, they were all noticing [inaudible 01:14:21].
Craig: I don’t know which one it is, because I haven’t seen anything written lately.
John: [Crosstalk 01:14:26] movies. I will say, Patton, you’re new to the show, Episode 527 is our Die Hard deep dive, where we spend a full hour just going through-
Craig: I wonder if we mentioned this when we did-
John: I think we may have.
Craig: We may have.
John: We’ll check the transcripts on that.
Craig: It is funny.
Patton: I, again, just discovered this podcast. Going to go back. I’ll go right back to 527. I love a good Die Hard deep dive. What a crazy movie.
Craig: We do a deep dive on Die Hard, Raiders.
John: Little Mermaid.
Craig: Ghost, Little Mermaid.
Patton: We all know the line on Raiders, again, [crosstalk 01:14:57].
Craig: Of course.
Patton: Indiana Jones [inaudible 01:14:59].
Craig: If he just does nothing, everything’s fine.
Patton: World War II would’ve ended early, Hitler would’ve died if he had kept his nose out of that shit.
Craig: Just don’t do anything. That is true.
Patton: Even deeper, they’re digging in the wrong place. He brings the [inaudible 01:15:14]. If he just left them, they never would’ve fucking found it!
Craig: They would’ve never found it. They would’ve been like, “You know what? Tanis is bullshit. Let’s go home.”
John: I want to see a Spielberg Q and A where you stand up and just really let him have it on this point.
Patton: That’d be great for my career. “Sir, excuse me. Patton Oswalt from Basic Cable. Listen.”
John: The Fabelmans aside, I [inaudible 01:15:36].
Craig: That’s awesome.
John: Patton Oswalt, thank you for being on the show.
Craig: Thank you, Patton.
Patton: Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you.
Links:
- Patton Oswalt on IMDb, Twitter and Instagram
- “Wackity Schmackity Doo!” from Patton Oswalt’s Werewolves and Lollipops
- Animation of Patton’s “Christmas Shoes” joke
- “The Ham Incident” from Patton Oswalt’s Finest Hour
- M.O.D.O.K. on Hulu
- Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt
- Clinical Practice Guideline for the Evaluation and Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Obesity by the American Academy of Pediatrics
- Dracula: The Evidence by Beehive Books
- Melanie Lynskey answers questions for Dear Prudence
- Murderers’ Row – Melanie Lynskey by Scout Tafoya
- The Unloved by Scout Tafoya for RogerEbert.com
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 589: The One with Patton Oswalt, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at another set of incredible news stories and ask, How Would This Be a Movie? Stories include an AI love service, an inventor with good intentions who doomed our planet, a fake Aretha Franklin, and a multi-million dollar nut heist.
We also follow up on heroic names and answer listener questions about researching your story.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig lie awake and wonder — what happens to our work after we die?
Links:
- The Man of Your Dreams by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz for The Cut
- The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes by Steven Johnson for The New York Times Magazine
- Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 Is Found Alive in Puerto Rico by Eduardo Medina for the New York Times
- The Counterfeit Queen of Soul by Jeff Maysh for Smithsonian
- The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts by Peter Vigneron for Outside
- A History Professor Takes On Hollywood by Katherine Rosman for the New York Times
- This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace
- Posthumously by Daniel Wallace
- The Last of Us: Soundtrack From the Series by David Fleming & Gustavo Santaolalla
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Orpheus (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Bindles and Gold Pans first appeared on John August.
Writer and director Richard LaGravenese joins Craig for an in-depth analysis of his 1994 comedy classic screenplay, THE REF. Together, Craig and Richard dig into the rules of farce, making hyper-verbal characters work, and the difference between a main character and a protagonist.
We also discuss how to write compelling monologues, engineering a character’s catharsis, and why coffee really is better with cake.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig and Richard discuss why it’s often so hard for men to make – and keep – close friends.
Links:
- The Ref on YouTube, Amazon and IMDb
- Richard LaGravenese on IMDb
- The Ransom of Red Chief by O. Henry
- The Ref’s Opening Scene
- Puzzled Pint’s Code Sheet
- Levain Bakery
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matt Davis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The Ref with Richard LaGravenese first appeared on John August.
John returns from the negotiating room to chat with Drew about the upcoming Strike Authorization Vote. What does Strike Authorization actually mean? How do WGA members vote? And what can writers do this week before voting begins?
We also answer a question from a listener wrestling with their fears of a potential strike.
Links:
- Find complete information for the Strike Authorization Vote here.
- Find more about the 2023 WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: Strike Authorization Vote first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 588 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what happens when a beloved character leaves a long-running program? How should writers think about replacing them, and does it have to change the fundamental dynamics? We’ll look at examples from the past 50 years and the past few days, because Craig, I have to tell you something. Megana Rao, our producer, she’s gone.
Craig: Now, when you say she’s gone, is she dead?
John: She is not dead at all. It’s actually very good news. She has been staffed on a television program. She’s now on the writing staff of a show. We’re so excited and happy for her, but also sad that she’s not here to laugh at all your jokes and be awesome.
Craig: Basically, we’re going to go back to the old days where I say something that I think is legitimately funny and then there’s just-
John: Silence.
Craig: … a weird, creepy, silent pause. I have to tip my hat to the great Megana Rao. We’ve had a lot of terrific producers along the way, a lot of people doing excellent work. Obviously, the legendary Stuart.
John: The legendary Stuart Friedel.
Craig: Here’s a question for you, John. It’s related to Megana. You watch Saturday Night Live, I assume.
John: Of course. Of course.
Craig: You have for so, so long, like so many of us. Most valuable player, and the way I’ll define it is the person that-
John: Kenan.
Craig: There’s quality and length. We’re going to use two things. You can absolutely say Kenan. It’s for how good and for how long. You’re saying Kenan.
John: I don’t think you can top Kenan Thompson. I think he was the glue that has held together through so many cast changes. That’s my guess. Tell me who you think is the MVP there.
Craig: For me, the MVP is Kristen Wiig.
John: She was amazing, but yet the show has continued without her.
Craig: Sure. Look, the show will continue without Kenan. The show will never end.
John: It will never end.
Craig: I guess the interesting thing is you can absolutely make a great argument for Kenan, and he’s still there. There are some people that through quality and time put in become MVPs. Megana’s going to be a tough person to beat.
John: Absolutely true.
Craig: She was great.
John: I think we have to acknowledge that the job of producer for Scriptnotes is really a behind-the-scenes role, and Megana was the first to really step forward, because her laughter permeated through, and then she started reading questions, and then she just became a regular fixture on the show. We are sad to lose her.
I want to talk a little bit about the moment she left, because it was a Tuesday afternoon. We’d done our normal staff meeting Zoom. She’s like, “Hey John, can I talk to you a little bit afterwards?” After everyone dropped off the Zoom, she said, “Hey, so I had a really good meeting with the showrunner this morning.” I was like, “That’s great.” She’s had a lot of showrunner meetings, so I knew stuff was percolating. Then she Slacked me later that afternoon and said, “They want me to start tomorrow.”
Craig: Wow.
John: That’s how it goes. That’s how it’s gone with previous assistants. That’s how it’s gone with Megan McDonald. I was prepared for it, but also you’re never quite prepared. This person who is invaluable to you is now moving on to another thing. That was how quickly it can happen, where you go from, “Hey, I’ve never heard of this show,” to suddenly you need to be in Glendale tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
Craig: Wow. I am so proud of her and happy for her. I can’t think of a better addition. She’s going to be a delight, obviously. Not only did Megana read questions, but eventually Megana started having questions, which is also great.
John: She did. Oh, gosh. We need to get her back. There’s an open invitation. We’ve both extended an open invitation for her to come back-
Craig: Oh, of course.
John: … just so we can sing…
John and Craig: (singing) Megana Has a Question.
Craig: I will say, should one of us be struck down prematurely, I’d be perfectly happy with Megana filling in.
John: I get you there. I haven’t updated my will in a while.
Craig: That’s a great point. Should I leave everything to Megana?
John: Forget your family, Craig. Everything goes to Megana.
Craig: I think they would really struggle with that one. I gotta be honest. Like, “Wait, what?” She has that infectious laugh. I think that’s what I’ll cite in my will. She had an infectious laugh.
John: Indeed. She Slacked this morning and she said, “I will be back soon, so don’t get used to my absence.”
Craig: Great.
John: “Same to the listenership. Please remind Craig that I love him and I am validating his feelings/laughing at his jokes from above in the Valley.”
Craig: Aw.
John: “Also, I am very excited for more folks to meet Drew, because he’s lovely,” which is a great segue.
Craig: Let’s talk about Drew. Drew’s right here, right?
John: Drew’s right here.
Drew Marquardt: That’s really nice.
John: Drew Marquardt, you’ve heard him on the podcast before. He was our Scriptnotes summer intern who has been helping out with the Scriptnotes book. He is now going to be producing the Scriptnotes podcast. Welcome, Drew.
Craig: Welcome, Drew.
Drew: Thank you so much. It’s bittersweet. I miss Megana, but I’m very excited to be here.
Craig: We get that.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: Quick question. Your name is interesting. I like it. I assume that it’s Scandinavian of some kind.
Drew: I think it’s French German, and I think I pronounce it wrong is basically what I’ve learned.
Craig: When I see that name, I think MAHR-kahrt. What do you say?
Drew: I think that’s the correct pronunciation. I say mahr-KWAHRT, like a qu.
Craig: Oh, you go qu.
Drew: We lean into the Q-U, yeah.
Craig: Fair enough. I’m glad that I’m doing it right at least, because that’s how I would guess. I guess if it’s French, you would… No, French would be qu, right? Mahr-KWAHRT. Oh, no, but then it’s kahrt if it’s… I don’t know. You know what? You get to decide how your name is pronounced. It’s your name.
Drew: The Midwest changed it. I think it’s mahr-KWAHRT. Running with it. It’s mahr-KWAHRT.
Craig: Oh, isn’t that a university, Marquardt?
Drew: There’s a Marquette.
Craig: Oh, that’s what I’m thinking of, Marquette. Either way, you’re the producer now. Oh, man.
John: Drew, we’re going to be hearing from you later on in the podcast, because you’ll get to ask the questions that our listeners have asked. We have a whole big mailbag to get through of those. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about drugs. Specifically, Craig, I want to talk about prescription drugs and the best ways to navigate our dumb drug health care system in the United States, because we’re doing it wrong.
Craig: I’m excited for that conversation. I am armed with interesting insight from spending so much time in Canada and so much time with my Canadian friends. I used to over-romanticize the Canadian system. My Canadian friends have been giving me a different point of view on it. We have pluses and minuses on either side of the border here.
John: For sure. From my time living in Paris, try to get an Advil, good luck. Pluses and minuses. I think I actually have some more pluses to offer our listeners-
Craig: Great.
John: … because everyone has to get prescription drugs.
Craig: Indeed.
John: We’ll talk about that. First some follow-up.
Craig: Great.
John: A few episodes back, I mentioned that I was having some trouble some mornings looking at my monitor. Things were fuzzy, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on, did I need to go get medium distance reading glasses. Several of our brilliant listeners wrote in, including an actual ophthalmologist, who said, “John, what you actually have is dry eyes, and you just need to put in some eyedrops.” They were absolutely correct. Now I have this little thing of eyedrops by my monitor. If I can’t read, I put in some eyedrops, and it’s better.
Craig: Suddenly you can. Nice. How about that?
John: I needed no surgery, need no glasses. I just needed some eyedrops.
Craig: That’s the way we like to imagine medicine works. We have this very complicated problem that some city slicker doctor would send you into the MRI for. Then the old country doctor’s like, “Kid, you just need some cinnamon,” and then you’re fine. I like this.
John: I tried putting cinnamon in my eyes, and it just didn’t work.
Craig: Try harder. Put in more. That’s the answer. Really rub it in there. Kids at home, do not put cinnamon in your eyes.
John: There’s no new cinnamon challenge that Craig is offering. Don’t do this.
Craig: For the love of God.
John: When Aline was on two episodes ago, we were answering a listener question about staffing while pregnant. We invited our listeners to send in their experiences, and two of them did. Craig, I thought maybe you’d take this first one.
Craig: This is from A Formerly Pregnant, Current New Mom, Television Writer. She writes, “I stopped my walk while listening to this episode to write this because I’m a TV writer who was pregnant a year ago and had the same concerns about telling my reps. I did tell them early on, but I wish I had handled it differently and wanted to share my experience.
“Most of my reps are women and some others, so I thought that when I said I wanted to work in staff, they’d believe me, but turns out unconscious biases about pregnant women are everywhere. I soon realized my agent saw my due date as my end work date and weren’t putting me up for rooms that overlapped with it. They were sending far few open writing assignments and development opportunities my way. It took several follow-up conversations to correct course and I missed opportunities in that time.”
What she’s suggesting here is that, “When you do tell your reps, be extremely clear about what you want. Over-communicate, check in regularly, and even stretch the truth. If you want a couple of months off, tell you plan on one month and then you’ll assess. Remind them you can take eight weeks leave from a show with protection thanks to our union. My agents didn’t know that.
“One thing I was reminded of during this experience is that our reps have a very different work life. The moms on my team have stable jobs that afforded them long parental leaves. They projected their experiences onto me and assumed I’d want the same. While I would’ve loved more time off, we simply don’t have that luxury as contract workers. Ultimately, I think it’s a good idea to loop them in, since you want people in your corner to plan your year with. Remember, they will make their own assumptions about what you want, and you just can’t let them.” That’s very good insight there, I think.
John: We have great listeners. I want to thank her for sending that in. A second listener wrote in. This is Claytia. She writes, “A few years ago, I was a pregnant PA who wore baggy clothes to keep it concealed. When everyone found out, they made it a big deal and I hated it. Damn maternity pants. Flash forward to pregnancy number two, which overlapped with me getting staffed on my first show. I chose to notify my agent and manager in my second trimester when I was actually going out for staffing, and I was eight months pregnant when my room finally opened. I did call my showrunner before the room, and I told him, very enthusiastically, ‘We’re having a baby,’ and that was that. The AP knew my due date. I had the baby and was able to be back in the room virtually with accommodations. It was okay if I needed to be off camera, take time for doctor’s appointments, etc.
“I’ll admit I was nervous about how everyone would handle it, but I worked with some amazing folks who valued family and I made it my personal duty to bring my A-game to every meeting. My rule has always been to keep my pregnancy on a need-to-know basis. I’d play a game where I’d ask myself, if I were a non-gestational parent with a baby on the way, when would I share? Equality, you know. I just wanted to share that a pregnant lady in a room is possible, even at the lower level. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Craig: That is very interesting. Thank you, Claytia. I don’t know if it’s KLAY-shuh or KLAY-tee-uh. It’s spelled C-L-A-Y-T-I-A. I haven’t encountered that name before. This is really interesting. When we had this question posed to us, the three of us gave our best insight. You and I gave it as current dads but former baby dads, and Aline gave it from the point of view of a current mom and a former baby mom.
All of us are 20 years away now or whatever, 18 years away from our last birth. The world changes, obviously, and so we’re all kind of guessing a little bit. This is really interesting to get these perspectives. I like the fact that there’s a little bit of an emphasis on open communication. I think that’s really great.
What’s striking me about this is this interesting point Claytia makes about non-gestational parents. First of all, I actually haven’t encountered that phrase before. I think it’s brilliant. I presume this means, for instance, if you have a surrogate or if you’re adopting and you know that there’s a child on the way.
John: Or if you’re a father.
Craig: Or if you’re a father. There you go. That’s interesting. We used to say expecting, but I guess that implies you’re actually carrying the baby. This is a great point. If you have someone who’s a surrogate or you’re a dad and you’re not carrying the baby yourself, it does seem like, yeah, I probably would mention that sort of thing. I think equality is exactly right, Claytia. I think that’s a great point.
John: Our friend Travis, I remember him having his first kid. He was on the WGA board. He had his first kid the day before his first WGA meeting. He’s also a staff writer in a room. There’s just a lot. Being a new parent is a lot, whether you’re actually physically giving birth or not. The difference is Travis was not visibly pregnant going through all that, but he was going through a big life change there too.
It’s a question of would he have necessarily told his reps about that? Would he have told his showrunner about that? I think it’s a great question. I think Claytia frames it really nicely.
Craig: If anybody is enterprising enough to dig back through very old published minutes of WA board meetings, they will see that in the board meeting of December of 2004, there’s an agenda item mentioning that I was not there before I was at the hospital where my second child was being born.
John: Very nice.
Craig: How about that? Eighteen years ago.
John: That’s crazy. Other good, happy news, my previous One Cool Thing, the thing that makes Craig giggle every time he sees it, My Year in Dicks, Pamela Ribon’s Oscar-nominated animated short film. It’s now streaming on Hulu. If you’re curious about it, and you want to watch it, it’s on Hulu now, so you should just watch it, because it’s so damn delightful.
Craig: Can I tell you something? I think it’s going to win.
John: I think it has a really good shot of winning. I don’t want to jinx it.
Craig: I don’t believe in jinxes. I honestly think it’s going to win. I’m not promoting one thing over another. I’m just saying I think it’s going to win.
John: I think it could. It has a buzzy title. It’s really, really well done.
Craig: Pam, what a deserving person. She’s just a wonderful person and an excellent writer, and this is very exciting. Very exciting.
John: We have a little bit of update about script consultants in Europe. We have letters in from Lorenz and from Sean. I’m just going to summarize here. Basically, script consultants aren’t employed by the state, so essentially, Lorenz is saying that you’re submitting a project for this program, you can go in with a script consultant attached to it. Basically, they have to be someone who’s qualified to do it with certifications, but you go in together, so it’s not like the state is going to apply one to you in the Austria system.
Then Sean wrote in saying that he got his first state-funded script editing job in Ireland. They paid him for the work that he did. Screen Ireland paid him, but they weren’t controlling him, because I think one of the issues we raised is if you have the state paying for things, they can try to influence how stuff is depicted. Both Sean and Lorenz said, “Yeah, I understand that concern, but that’s not actually how it works, because it’s not like there’s some government official who’s now going to come through and edit your script.” It seems like a better setup system than that.
Craig: That’s great. Listen, if it works to the benefit of the writers there, then fantastic. It’s a strange thing for us to wrap our minds around here, because Hollywood is such a privatized, corporate, capitalistic system, and not really subsidized much by the government. To the extent that the government subsidizes anything, it’s subsidizing the studios to get tax money back when they’re producing things.
It’s an interesting marriage of state and artist in Europe. I think it comes with benefits. It clearly comes with some limitations. I think the fact is we just have a much larger pool of financing to draw from here in the U.S., which is why Hollywood is the predominant television and film industry in the world and always has been.
John: Indeed. Two last little bits of follow-up. On Episode 587, we talked about these doppelganger murders, basically this woman who found somebody who looked like her and killed her to try to fake her own death. Megana saw a similar story. This is a woman who is convicted for poisoning her lookalike with cheesecake in order to conceal her identity.
Craig: What?
John: Really, I think the cheesecake was the missing element of this. A poison cheesecake.
Craig: What the hell? This is amazing. This is, it looks like two women in Queens, in New York. It looks like they’re both Eastern European, possibly Russian, from the names. Yeah, she’s Russian, and she had already done this once before.
“Viktoria Nasyrova was accused of fatally drugging a neighbor in her native Russia in 2014. She denied killing the woman.” Now she’s done it again. You know what? I feel like if you get picked up for the second time, you probably did the first one. It’s not like, “You know what? I got unfairly accused of something, but that gives me an idea.”
John: Unless you were a framer the second time because there was already suspicion the first time. It could be an extra level of deception there.
Craig: Listen, you’re right. There could be many layers to this cheesecake.
John: That’s terrible.
Craig: This is terrible. I retire.
John: Scriptnotes voted cheesecake as the 2022 best dessert. Remember our sweepstakes, our brackets?
Craig: Great. I’m completely there for that. I know it’s a little bit divisive. I know. I know it’s divisive, but cheesecake is one of the great desserts IMO.
John: Craig, speaking of Russia and Russians, have you seen the trailer for Tetris?
Craig: No. Is it about the creation of Tetris?
John: It’s about the creation and licensing of Tetris. It’s basically if you took the origin story of Tetris and did it as Chernobyl, kind of.
Craig: Oh, my.
John: I think it’s a really good trailer. Apple bought the movie. There’s a new Apple trailer out today for it, so take a look at the Tetris trailer.
Craig: I will jump on that after we finish recording.
John: “In the episode with Sarah Polley, Craig briefly mentioned having some problems with using child actors. How did those concerns impact the way you write scenes for child actors? For example, in Episode 5 of The Last of Us, it was amazing, but I would never let my 10-year-old watch scenes that the 10-year-old Keivonn Woodward acted in.”
Craig, I’ll just ask. Can you talk about your process of working with actors that young? What did he see? What did he know? You weren’t doing The Shining, where this kid doesn’t know that he’s actually in the movie. What was your process with working with him?
Craig: My kid was much younger. It’s a great question, Spencer. First things first, I don’t worry about those things when I’m writing the script. I think when you’re writing the script, you write the best script you can. Then you deal with the practicalities of how to work with child actors.
When it comes to content, one of the things we have is camera angles. If through editing, Keivonn stares at something and looks at it in horror, and then we see what he’s looking at, he may not be there to see that thing. In fact, he probably isn’t, because any time a child actor, the camera isn’t actively pointing at them, they’re not there, because you’re on the clock with kid actors. Every minute is precious, because you get so few of them, as opposed to adult actors that they show up and they put in their 12-hour day. A lot of times they’re not seeing the things you see.
In the case of Episode 5, so much of the stuff that was going on there, he was not there to see, or it was greatly enhanced by visual effects, so it wasn’t as gory or as horrifying. That’s it. There were a lot of people running around in pretty intense Cordyceps prosthetics, because we like to do as much as we can practically.
You can actually see, there’s this beautiful little video that HBO put together, a nice behind-the-scenes video that’s all about Keivonn and how we worked with Keivonn and how our director of ASL, CJ Jones, worked with Keivonn and us. It’s beautiful. I’m going to see if I can dig up the link to that thing, because it’s out there. I’m pretty sure that in that video, you can see we’re introducing him to a lot of the stunt actors, and he gets to feel the prosthetics. We invite him behind the curtain to see the backstage of it and to see that it’s make-believe and it’s pretend. That was great for him.
We also make sure that we’re communicating constantly with his guardian. In this case, it was his mother, April, who’s wonderful, and so we just check in. We just make safety a priority, and then a child isn’t terrified or scared or getting nightmares or traumatized by any of the things they see. You just make it a priority to take care of the kid. Why wouldn’t you want to? In this case, it was great. I think we did it really well, and Keivonn had a fantastic time and was very sad when it was all over. I think we all were. It’s a great question, Spencer. Too long didn’t read: put their feelings and thoughts first as you’re planning things out, and take care of them.
John: Indeed. I think I might’ve talked about this when Sarah was on the show. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory obviously had a ton of kids in it. One of the things we had to figure out early on is that the only way we can shoot with these kids and make our days work is if they are only shooting the kids in the morning. The kids go off to school in the afternoons. We shoot all the Oompa Loompa musical numbers. It was such a weird process. That’s how you can actually make your days make sense is by, in the afternoons it was Deep Roy doing a thousand Oompa Loompas every afternoon, just to do the musical numbers, because the kids had such restricted work hours. Of course, Augustus Gloop doesn’t really drown, and Sophia Robb didn’t swell into a blueberry. No actual kids were harmed.
Craig: That’s a bummer.
John: It’s a bummer. Maybe it’s a betrayal to Roald Dahl’s vision that we did not actually harm [crosstalk 00:21:45].
Craig: I think if Roald Dahl were alive today, he’d probably be like, “Bring in more children. Punish them.” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really is just fetishizing the punishment of children.
John: Terrible children, yes.
Craig: Or not terrible. What’s Augustus Gloop’s crime? He’s just heavy.
John: He’s [crosstalk 00:22:06].
Craig: Or he just overeats. It’s just his brain is different.
John: That’s true.
Craig: It’s one of those stories where today, I don’t think anyone’s writing that story.
John: That’s true. That’s true.
Craig: So many Roald Dahl things. Also, not a big fan of Jews, as it turns out, Roald Dahl. Not Augustus Gloop. I’m sure he loved Jews.
John: He was German but the good Germans.
Craig: Yes, the good one.
John: Let’s talk about our main issue today, which is changing of the guard. This of course is inspired by our losing Megana. I got to thinking about a lot of programs have gone through transitions where a major character is no longer there. Either the actor’s left or there’s some other transition that has to happen.
You can break it down into two categories. There’s cases where an actor left and they just put a different actor in the role, so the classic Bewitched situation. There’s other times where a character goes away and you retool or you find a functional replacement for that. The show pivots without that character. This is a very dated reference, but Valerie’s family starring Valerie Harper, she left and it became The Hogan Family, and Jason Bateman was still there and other folks were still there, but the actual title character went away. Same case with Roseanne. Roseanne went away, and it became The Conners.
I thought we’d just talk through that and maybe some of the decisions you would make as a writer in these situations. We’ve never had to do it ourselves, but we can certainly theorize what it would feel like and what you would have to do as the showrunner facing that type of challenge.
Craig: There are probably two circumstances that lead to these things. One is that something’s just not working well, and so you need to make that change to keep the show going and make it go well. You’re fixing things. The other circumstance is either somebody important quits or dies. Then you have no choice. The show was working, but you have to figure out how to regroup.
For instance, the one that always comes to mind for me is Cheers. That was the first, because I watched Bewitched when I was a kid. I barely noticed the difference between the Darrins. Cheers, Coach was Coach. He was this lovely old guy. He was this central mentor figure for Sam Malone, Ted Danson’s character, and then the actor died. They incorporated that storyline, of course. They acknowledged that he died. Then in comes this new ding-dong played by Woody Harrelson. Woody Harrelson was so good that you felt okay. Not only will it be fine, hey, maybe this is better. You never know. It’s at least as good. That was a choice that they had never wanted to make. That happens.
In your list here, you’ve noted Aaron Sorkin leaving The West Wing. Even Aaron Sorkin didn’t die, happily, him leaving The West Wing is a kind of, okay, now what do we do? It’s similar to death. What do we do now? We weren’t expecting this.
John: Absolutely. I want to go back to Cheers for a second, because the bigger change there was Shelley Long leaves and Kirstie Alley comes in. Diane is replaced. That central dynamic was crucial to those early seasons of Sam and Diane, and they made it so when she left, her character didn’t die, her character just went away, because the actress wanted to leave. They had to figure out what is the new dynamic, what was she providing that we need to find a different way to do. It’s not just Kirstie Alley’s character who could be a foil for Sam, but I think Frasier got elevated a little bit more into that spot.
Frasier still stuck around after Diane left. Then of course, Frasier ultimately spun off into his own show. I’m sure the creators in the room were figuring out, how do we make this work with the people who we have and what do we need to bring in to make the dynamics pop.
Craig: You can see how in work where a character is constantly being re-portrayed, it’s a little bit easier. There have been a lot of Batmen.
John: A lot of James Bonds.
Craig: A lot of Bonds. If you’re making a show about Batman or James Bond and somebody needs to go, it’s okay. We’ve all gotten used to this. We don’t even expect that somebody will just stay there forever for us. In other things, we do.
In the case of Sam and Diane, the big challenge for writers, and if you find yourself in this position, this is what you’ll have to grapple with, how do we replace her without replacing her, because you can’t replace her. You don’t want to just bring in the same thing, because that person is screwed. They don’t want to just do a Diane impression. They will always suffer from comparison.
Also, dramatically, it feels bereft. You couldn’t think of any other kind of human being that could possibly be in that bar? Kirstie Alley was a different kind of character. The relationship, even though it heads towards the same place, starts very differently and feels different. That’s the big challenge is figuring out how to fill this gap with something that isn’t quite the same.
John: I suspect what it involves is really taking a big step back and looking at it overall, not looking at the events of any given episode, but out of the whole, what functions did that missing character portray and how can you reapportion those functions among the existing people or bring in a new person who can do some of those functions, but in a different way, because I agree, just swapping in one for one is almost never going to work.
In the case of Charlie’s Angels, the original TV series, you could just swap a different Angel in, but that was always the conceit of the show. The conceit of it is that they are these women who work for Charlie. You knew them as individuals, but they were functionally working for him. One of them could leave, and a different person could come in. It would still basically work.
A bigger challenge on Three’s Company where they have contracts [inaudible 00:28:02] Suzanne Somers, you have to bring in somebody to just do that, but it can’t be exactly that. Anyone is going to suffer by comparison to what she specifically was doing.
Craig: In that case, that was one where they did try to just sort of duplicate it. They didn’t go fully into duplication. That’s the issue. In the older shows, I think back in the day, where in sitcoms and dramas, characters were a bit thinner. Let’s just be honest. They were. The characterizations have become much more complicated, particularly on television across the board, in all of its varieties. It was maybe a little bit easier to say, look, this person played this type, the whole point was that they were playing a type, so let’s throw the type back in there. It’s much harder to do now.
If anything, I think now, rather than doing that, you would look at a big change as an opportunity to ask what would I have done differently or how can we make ourselves a little bit uncomfortable again with the way things are, how do we lean into the discomfort of change, which I think has been done very effectively on a lot of things. They have the big differences. Back then, when there’s a change on NYPD Blue, for instance, there isn’t a billion people on Twitter arguing about it. We just watched it. We talked about it amongst ourselves and we kept watching. It was fine. Jimmy Smits was cool. Nowadays, you just have to know with all these things, there’s this very vocal discourse about all of it.
John: Your earlier point though about leaning into discomfort of change I think is really important though, because it helps keep things fresh. It helps you really re-evaluate what it is you’re doing and how you could improve what you’re doing. I think that’s part of the reason why Megana moving on or Megan McDonald before her and Stuart before them, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s a chance to look at what we’re doing on the show, what we’re doing in the office, and try some new things. We’re breaking up some responsibilities a little bit differently, for example. It’ll be nice. I think some stuff will work, some stuff won’t, but we’ll make the change.
Craig: Obviously, I’m terrified. I just remember this moment in Wayne’s World where Garth is alone. He’s rarely alone. This guy’s explaining to him that now that the show is going to be on a real channel, that there’s going to be some changes. He just goes, “I fear change,” while he’s beating this weird hand that’s moving around, this animatronic hand. It’s a very strange moment. I always think of Garth going, “I fear change.” I do too. We all do. I think that’s why… Isn’t fear at the heart of so much of what we do? Hone it and embrace it.
John: Own it. Hey Craig, one of the changes I would love to make in my life, and you may have an opinion, but also our listeners may have answers for it, is in my office, the home office, originally we had five telephone lines coming in. This is how long we’ve been in this house, 20 years. We had two home lines, two office lines, and a fax line. Obviously, the fax line went away. We’re down now to just a home line and an office line.
When the phone rings, we basically don’t answer it, because it’s always spam. There’s really no good reason to answer these phones. I’m wondering about maybe getting rid of the phones all together. During the pandemic, everyone just started calling me directly me on my cellphone, which was mostly fine, but I don’t want that all the time.
Craig, what are you doing with… Someone calls the office. Are they calling a physical office line number? Are they calling some virtual number that goes to your assistant? What are you doing? Because I need to do something better.
Craig: I hear you. When we started doing this podcast, like you, I had an office line. I didn’t have multiple office lines. I had an office line, I had a home line, I had a fax line. All those are gone. I did have some phone lines in my Pasadena office, which we almost never used. I eventually got rid of those too. Because I’m a bit nomadic now, where I live here, then I live in Canada, then I live here, then I live in Canada, it doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Right now in our current offices in Hollywood, we don’t have phones. We just have our cellphones. What I do is see who’s calling. If I am able to or have a desire to talk to them in that moment, I answer it. If I can’t or don’t, I don’t. The thing is, that’s how our kids do it. We were raised to think that not answering the phone is the pinnacle of rudeness. It’s not. It’s just how it goes. There’s so much texting. There’s so many ways to get in touch with us.
Basically, I just have my phone. If I see somebody calling and I know who they are but I don’t know what they want, I might hand it off to my assistant, I might hand it off to Allie, or I’ll just deal with it myself, but no landlines, no ringing in the house, none of that stuff. It’s all gone.
John: That may be where we ultimately get back to. If listeners have a suggestion for here’s how you transfer your office line number to a virtual thing that during certain hours rings to Drew and certain hours just goes to voice mail or rings to my phone, I’d love suggestions on that, because it feels like that may be a middle ground and we’re transitioning here, because it was nice for someone to be able to answer the phone and for Megana or Megan before her to say, “Oh, I have Ken Richman calling,” and I can pick up the phone.
Craig: That’s the thing. Our phones now are almost like the old… Do you remember way, way back when? Hey, let’s go back in the time machine, shall we? Let’s jump in the old time machine back to the ’90s.
John: Oh, god.
Craig: I know, Drew, this is going to rock your world. Here’s how we used to work. There’s a person in an office, and then they have their assistant in another office. There are office phones. The assistant has the phone. The person in the back has the phone. Somebody calls the office. It doesn’t necessarily ring in the, we’ll call them the principal’s office.
Then they had this thing where they would type onto a little machine. I can’t remember the name of it. It looked like a little mini typewriter. It would say something like, hey, Ken Richman is on the line. That would go bloop on the other machine on that person’s desk. It was this really bad green texty readout. Then there were these pre-programmed buttons they could hit, like call back, I’ll take it, take a message, not here.
That’s how that shit would go. Our phones do that now for us. Culture has changed to the point where nobody really cares, I don’t think. Say you call your agent, John. What’s your agent’s name?
John: Bill. I have three agents. Let’s say Bill.
Craig: Bill. Let’s say Bill. You call up. They say, “Oh, it’s Bill’s office.” You’re like, “Hey, it’s John August for Bill.” What do they say back to you?
John: “One moment, let me see if I can get him.”
Craig: “Let me see if I can get him.” “Let me see if I can get blank” became the all-purpose… Drew, I’m going to take you back again. The way it used to be is they would be like, “Hold on.” Then they would come back and say, “Sorry, he’s not available.” You’d be like, “If he’s not available, why were you saying hold on?” Everybody knew that meant just, eh, he doesn’t want to talk to me. Then they, “Let me see if I can get him,” as if everything is like, “Oh my god, I gotta run up to the top of the hill and find him. Oh my god, I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t get him. I couldn’t get him.” Lies. That culture’s gone. Even though they still say that as agents, everybody knows. Everybody knows.
John: I think “Let me see if I can get him” also was part of the pandemic, because no one was in the office. It was basically like, can I actually reach him on this conference calling or whatever we’re using.
Craig: I gotta then hand it to Todd Felton’s assistants, because they’ve been saying, “Let me see if I can get him,” for 15 years. He’s trained them well.
John: It’s been a growing thing, but the pandemic fully broke it.
Craig: Makes sense.
John: Listeners, if you have suggestions for me or if I should just [inaudible 00:36:28] just do what Craig says and get rid of your phones, that’s also possible.
Craig: By the way, what if I don’t know that Drew is actually 63?
John: Wouldn’t it be great?
Craig: I don’t know.
John: You’re assuming he’s a young, spry person.
Craig: I haven’t met him in person yet, so I’m like, “Hey, let me blow your mind.” He’s like, “Let me blow your mind. I was in Vietnam.”
John: He’s months away from retirement.
Craig: Look, I got my first laugh out of Drew. Yes! Yes!
John: He’s trying so hard.
Craig: Megana, there’s hope. There’s hope.
John: There’s hope. Let’s do some listener questions.
Drew: Great.
John: Drew, can you start us off?
Drew: Yeah. Max asks, “Right now I’m an assistant for a writer/producer working on a pitch for an original series. This would be her first network show if it was picked up. At this point, I feel like I’ve contributed a good deal creatively to the project. That being said, we don’t have any type of contract drawn up. Should I be worried that if the show was picked up, I’d be cut out in some way? I’m only 22, so even though this has been a great experience for me, I don’t need to be naïve. Do you think I need to approach this conversation with her, even if we’re not in talks with the network yet? If I want to speak with her about this, how should I go about it?”
John: All right, Max. I would just say frame what your expectations actually are, because it’s a little unclear from your question. You contributed a great deal creatively, but also, are you contributing it as a writer or are you contributing it as an assistant or a sounding board or other things? If you’re as an assistant, and you’re wondering, will I stay on to be a showrunner’s assistant if this thing goes, how do I stay involved, great. That’s a probably reasonable expectation. If it’s that you were some co-writer on this thing, that’s a whole different thing. Craig, what’s your instinct?
Craig: Slight red flags here, because of how vague you’re being, Max. Let me tell you what the nightmare is from our side of things, Max, and then we’ll talk about the nightmare from your side.
From our side, the nightmare is we’re sitting there talking about stuff out loud, and we’ve asked our assistant to write stuff down on cards and put them up on the board. Then you may say to your assistant, “By the way, do you like this? What do you think? Do you think this is good?” They may say, “Yeah, although I’m wondering about this.” You may go, “That’s an interesting question. I don’t know,” blah blah blah.
That to us isn’t really contributing. That’s just us being nice and doing a job of including you and helping get you introduced to this process. It’s not necessarily like, hey, we’re writing partners. Then that person comes later and goes, “Hey, I did this too, and I should be a blankety blank.” They’re like, “No, don’t punish me for a good deed.”
Now, the nightmare on your side is sometimes writers do take advantage of their assistants. They do have their assistants doing real creative work. Then they jam them later and cut them out.
Here’s what I would suggest. First, really examine the situation and ask yourself what is going on exactly. Then two, I think it probably would be good to have a conversation here, but to have it carefully and to acknowledge that it’s an awkward conversation, because it is, and say, “I would love… ” You can always put it in the positive. “I love doing the job of being your assistant. I really love doing this stuff. I would love to, for whatever use my contributions are, continue doing that and to be included if this goes further.” You can say that, but I have to tell you, if she wants to cut you out, she’s going to cut you out. There’s another potential course here where you just don’t do anything and you see what happens. I’m torn.
John: I’m torn too. It’s because I don’t know what Max is actually contributing and how realistic Max is being here. The other thing I would recommend Max do is to talk with other people at his level in his position. Meet some other assistants and see what they’re doing. If you’re doing 9,000 times more creative stuff, you’re writing stuff for all this, and you really should be a co-creator of this thing, that’s one thing.
More than likely, you are a person who she is allowing into the process. You’re giving some good hands-on experience. What you should be hoping for is to be that showrunner’s assistant as the show gets picked up or if something else happens. I just think that’s more realistic for you.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Cool. Drew, what do you got for us next?
Drew: Jacob from Chicago asks, “In the companion podcast for The Last of Us, Craig tells the story of pitching the show to HBO. By the end, they all shake hands and HBO buys the show in the room. How much value does this handshake traditionally have? HBO hadn’t yet secured the rights to the IP. A budget wasn’t set. Who has the power when it comes to salary negotiations? Can’t lots go wrong in between agreeing to buy the show and actually buying the show? As someone with dreams of shopping my own IP, how is one supposed to act in this dream scenario when plenty of details haven’t been discussed in the room?”
Craig: I can give you the specifics of that, and then we can talk generally, because the specifics in this case don’t always exist in other circumstances. In this case, they didn’t have to worry about salary, because I already had an overall deal at HBO, which meant that all that stuff had been predetermined and they were paying it anyway. That part was easy.
You’re absolutely right that they hadn’t yet secured the rights to the IP. What we knew going in there, because we did our homework first, was that the IP was available, that the owner of the IP, which is Sony, had agreed that HBO would be a good place for the show to be, and it was understood that a good faith negotiation between two very large corporations would occur.
Before we went in the room, Sony knew we were going to HBO, and HBO knew that Sony Television specifically was going to be involved in some aspect, from a financial or ownership point of view. Everybody knew that. Everybody said, “Understood. We still would like to hear it.” We pitched it. They said, “Great.”
Now, yeah, what happened after that, Jacob, was a very long negotiation between corporations to figure out how to do all that. While they were doing all that, Neil and I just sat on Zoom and thought about the creative part of it, because that’s our job.
John: When you say a very long time, it was months and months, right?
Craig: Yeah, it was months. The wheel turned slowly on this stuff. There were moments where it seemed dicier than others. In the end, like everything else, when people want to do something, when there’s a will, there’s a way, and they figure it out. I think it is not unheard of that things fall apart because of unrealistic demands or an inability for two entities to mesh, but it’s rare, generally speaking, because hearing yes is such a rare word in our business. When you get it, everybody’s incentivized to figure it out.
John: I’m trying to think of a situation where I’ve sold it in the room, the equivalent of that handshake there in the room. That handshake, for Jacob’s question, it’s probably not a legally binding handshake. It’s just that good faith, like, “We’re going to try to make a deal here.” I’ve had a fair number of I sold it in the parking lot. I was in the room. I walked out. I got a call from my agent saying, “Great, they want to buy it.” That’s more commonly the situation.
There’s still going to be a negotiation to get you to that point. Maybe you will get to that point, and maybe you won’t get to that point. It’s going to happen. It’s exciting when you get that confirmation. Yes, it’s worthwhile, because it really does mean that they want it, but it’s no guarantee it’s going to happen.
Craig: There’s this fun little dopamine rollercoaster where you go in there, you pitch something, and a company says, “Yes!” Everyone’s like, “We did it! Let’s go out to dinner and champagne. We sold it.” Then three days later, somebody else entirely, who was not in that room, who doesn’t know anything about the show, just knows that they want to buy it, that person in Business Affairs calls and is like, “Got it. Our offer is this old dirty shoe and a half-eaten apple.” Then you’re like, “Wait, what?” Then everything gets dark and ugly and you feel insulted and hurt and confused. In your brain it’s like, “It’s never going to happen.” Then it all works out and it’s fine, and then you’re back again.
Just understand it’s going to be a party, a funeral, and then the thing in between, which is a mature understanding that we’ve arrived at a reasonable place and now the work must begin.
John: Sounds good. Drew, what else you got for us here?
Drew: The follow-up to that. Jason says, “I’m part of a writing trio, one of which is an established Big Five author. His UTA agent sent out our TV pilot and pitch deck, and we’ve landed six meetings with shockingly legitimate production companies, many of which have first look deals with a streamer. They’ve all been friendly, getting to know you affairs. Often, they ask what else we have or are working on. In a highly unlikely best-case scenario, what would the next step be? Are original projects optioned like novel adaptations? If a production company is interested in developing our concept, would we be evolved or cut out? How many projects should new writers be expected to bring into a meeting? Should they all be written and polished with a pitch deck?”
John: A whole slough of questions here. Let’s go through this best-case scenario. It’s this writing trio. One to them is a Big Five author. Writing trios are unusual but great.
Craig: They exist.
John: They exist. You’re going in with this project. People seem to be excited about it. That should be your priority going into those rooms. Maybe one of them will say, “Yes, we really want to do that,” in which case they will either buy it or they will option it. You will be involved at some capacity. They may say, “Oh, we need to bring in an established showrunner at some point.” Sure, great. That’s your project. That’s great.
The second part of the question here though is, what else should you be saying in that room, like what else are you working on? I wouldn’t bring in some other polished deck for the second project or the third project, but be ready to talk through two or three other things that you are working on. Give the 30-second, one-minute version of it. Just throw out that line and see if they bite on that, and maybe talk to them about it a little bit more. The first thing you should really be talking about is the project that got you in there.
Craig: Completely agree. Just understand, Jason, that when they say, “Hey, so what else you got?” what they’re saying is, “We don’t want this.” That’s kind of implied. It’s not completely implied. It’s not an automatic, like, “We don’t want this thing.” It kind of might be like, “Hey, look, we really like the writing. We think you guys have an interesting voice. You’re clearly capable of putting together something that might interest investment, but we’re not going to buy this, so what else you got?” Just know that that’s there.
I do agree with John. You want to emphasize what you are selling in the moment, because what can occur from “What else you got?” is a fishing expedition. It cost them nothing to have you guys just start spinning in a circle to come up with something else that makes them happy, cost them literally nothing, so why wouldn’t they?
If you can concentrate on the people that seem specifically interested in this, that’s great. Otherwise, what you’re really having are general meetings. General meetings, yeah. Then like John said, you can absolutely talk about some areas of interest.
You can also ask them, “Hey, do you have things that you think we would be right for?” because sometimes they have projects that need rewriting or re-conceiving or they’ve bought a book that they need somebody to adapt.
Yes, they can option things, but what you’re looking for these days is somewhere where you can actually get a commitment to make a show or, at least to start with, to get a commitment to write another episode or give a full bible or whatever it is. No, you don’t want to waste a lot of time dressing everything else up. You want to really concentrate on the one you’re bringing.
John: You’ve mentioned here that you have a UTA agent, or this Big Five author does. That agent will tell you before any meeting, “They’re thinking about optioning or buying this project. They want to talk to you about that.” Great. That is your point of focus. That’s your pitch deck. That’s your everything. You’re going in there. You’re making the presentation.
The agent may also say, “Listen, they’re not going to buy this, but they really like you.” That’s your opportunity to go in and press them about what you guys together can do, what you’re looking to do. That’s when you’re really thinking about the next project, the other project. It’s a really good sign when they volunteer, like, “Here are the things we’re looking to do. Here are the things that we’re interested in.” Take that, because that means they are thinking about you in those future projects.
With Go!, I went out on a zillion meetings when we first sent that out. My agent could tell me, “Listen, they are not in a position to buy the scripts. They’re just not going to do it, but they really liked it. This is your chance to make connections, make relationships, and find some stuff you can be paid to write.” That’s exactly what happened.
Craig: Hell yeah.
John: Hell yeah. Drew, let’s take one more question.
Drew: Cecilia asks, “Most aspiring screenwriters write under their birth name, right? The thing is that I’m a well-known wedding photographer. My website is under my name, as well as on my social media and communication avenues. If you Google my name, a lot of wedding photography images, interviews, awards come home. I want to start on a clean slate and be taken seriously as a screenwriter. Should I write under a pseudonym? My concern is that people might then think I’m not real, and it might damage my credibility even before I start. Will my name influence how I’m perceived as a professional writer? If I write under a pseudonym, should I explain why?”
Craig: John, what’s your instinct here?
John: I changed my name before I moved to Hollywood.
Craig: That’s true.
John: My original name was unpronounceable, German last name.
Craig: John Meise [MEE-zee]. MEE-zuh.
John: MAI-zee.
Craig: MAI-zee.
John: MAI-zuh.
Craig: Goddammit.
John: MAI-zee.
Craig: You can’t even pronounce it.
John: Our family pronounced it MAI-zee the same way Drew’s family pronounces it MAHR-kwahrt even though it could be MAHR-gahrt. It just was not a useful name for me to have, so I took my dad’s middle name, which is August. I am a big believer in picking a name that works for you.
In your case, Cecilia, you have a name that works for you as a wedding photographer. I don’t know that’s a huge problem that you’re a little bit famous in that space, because I think it’s okay. They’re orthogonal to each other, but it doesn’t mean that people won’t take you seriously as a writer. As long as your name isn’t Cecilia Deathbringer or something, I would maybe stick with your real name. Craig, what’s your instinct?
Craig: If her name is Cecilia Deathbringer, she has to stick with her real name, because that’s awesome.
John: She does.
Craig: I get the instinct here, Cecilia, I think what you’re concerned about is that there’s a slight cheese factor associated with wedding media, so wedding videos, wedding photography. All that stuff has a little bit of a cheese vibe, even though a lot of the people that work in that industry are very talented and very well paid. I presume you’re one of them, since you mentioned awards.
It really comes down to actually how you feel. If you write a great script, the fact that you’re a wedding photographer becomes part of the interesting story. If you write a bad script, the fact that you’re a wedding photographer is something that they could add on to why they don’t like it. “Oh my god, this wedding photographer script reads just like you would imagine a wedding photographer writing a script.” You can hear it, right? It’s actually mostly about your comfort level. You can write under a pseudonym. You need to start that at the beginning.
John: Yeah, definitely.
Craig: Otherwise, it becomes an issue. You actually have to make a little bit of a permanent choice here, the way that John did. It can’t harm you. The only harm that it would do to you is if you ultimately regretted it. I don’t think that the perception will impact you as much as the quality of your work.
John: Definitely.
Craig: If it makes you feel more comfortable and confident to write under another name, why not?
John: I would say as you’re looking at alternative names, it could just be one you pick and make up. It could be you and your middle name. It could be your married name. If you want to differentiate between the two brands of Cecilia, great. Just have something that makes sense. Have something that you’re going to be comfortable with for the rest of your writing career. It can definitely work.
I’ll also say that having worked in middle-grade fiction, the idea of using different names for different kinds of properties is really common there. Particularly, women will… JK Rowling. Using initials or some other way to not identify yourself as a woman is a common thing too. You don’t see it as much in screenwriting, but it also does happen. You have choices. I would say whatever you do, don’t make a choice that calls attention to it. Make it a choice that feels natural, like, “Oh, of course this is Cecilia last name. I love her script.”
Craig: This is very common. Just so you know, Cecilia, this happens all the time. People, sometimes all they do is change their names for practical reasons, like John, because his last name was just leading to a lot of Who’s On First conversations about how to pronounce it.
David Benioff, his actual name is David Friedman. There are about a thousand of those, incredibly common name. If you show up, and if your name is Cecilia Gomez, there are probably a thousand Cecilia Gomezes just west of the Mississippi. You’re not going to be able to use it actually. One of the things that you’re looking is to avoid marketplace confusion. Actors have to do this all the time. It’s incredibly common. It’s Hollywood. Elton John is not Elton John’s name. You know what his name is?
John: I don’t know what his real name is.
Craig: Drew, do you know what his name is?
John: I saw Rocketman, but I forgot.
Drew: It’s Reginald something, right?
Craig: Yes. You get half points. You get one half point to Gryffindor. Reginald Dwight I believe is his actual name. David Bowie, his real name is?
John: No idea.
Craig: Davey Jones. Davey Jones. There were two Davey Joneses.
John: That’s weird.
Craig: Can you imagine a more common name that David Jones? Yeah, David Bowie made sense.
John: Hey, Craig, do you remember my husband Mike’s original last name?
Craig: I don’t even know if I… Have I ever heard it?
John: I don’t know if you ever have.
Craig: I don’t think I have.
John: My husband is Michael Douglas.
Craig: That’s awesome. I must’ve heard this, because you’ve heard the story where Chris Miller and I were on a plane, and Michael Keaton was on the plane.
John: Oh yeah, of course, because Michael Keaton’s real last name is Douglas.
Craig: He’s Michael Douglas. We did not know that. We weren’t traveling together. There’s this LA-to-New York flight that a lot of people end up on. I’m like, “Oh, look at you.” He’s like, “Hey, look at you.” We’re just chitchatting. Then he’s like, “Hey, check it out. Across the aisle there is Michael Keaton.” I’m like, “It’s Michael Keaton.”
The flight attendant comes by, and she’s like, “Oh, Mr. Miller, what would you like for lunch? Mr. Mazin, what would you like?” She says to Michael Keaton, “Mr. Douglas, what would you like for lunch?” Chris and I were like, why would a famous person use one of those names to avoid being noticed but pick another famous guy’s name? It turns out he didn’t. That’s his actual name is Michael Douglas, and that’s why he has to be Michael Keaton, because there was already a Michael Douglas. I love that the world is full of Michael Douglases and you found one of them. That’s beautiful.
John: It’s lovely. Thank you for the questions, Drew.
Craig: Great job, Drew.
Drew: Of course.
Craig: You know what? Drew did a really good job.
John: Did a nice job. Good start there. Plus, a half credit on the quiz, so love it all. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Caitlin Moscatello. It ran in The Cut. The headline is “The Fleishman Effect: In a city of Rachels and Libbys, the FX show has some New York moms worried they’re the ones in trouble.”
We had Taffy on the show a couple episodes back. We talked all about the Fleishman Is in Trouble series and book. This article is a great examination of the way that people see themselves in media. In this case, it’s a bunch of New York moms and women who find themselves on the same treadmills and traps that the characters in Fleishman Is in Trouble find themselves in, and just a good reminder that sometimes the art we make is helpful for people framing the experiences that they’re having, and that sometimes what we create lets people put a name to what they’re feeling. I love this article. Just another reason why I loved Taffy’s show.
Craig: No better reason to do what we do. We’re trying to connect with people, and when you do, that’s exciting. It’s an interesting feedback loop. You observe, you describe, and then you impact. That’s very exciting. I read this independent of your recommendation. I did read this. It was recommended. I thought it was very good.
My One Cool Thing is a thousand cool things all at once. We’re recording this on February 16th, which is a Thursday. This past Monday, I approved the final VFX shot for The Last of Us. It is done.
John: Congratulations, Craig.
Craig: Thank you. One of the benefits of running a show the way HBO does, episode a week, is that the run of the show covers a span of time, which gives you extra time to finish the visual effects for the final episodes, because you got some time. We finished.
I just want to acknowledge the amazing work of our visual effects team on the inside, led by Alex Wong, our visual effects supervisor, and Sean Nowlan, our visual effects producer, their team, all of the men and women that worked with them from our production, and then I’m not sure exactly how many, but I’m just going to say a thousand people and maybe more, all around the world, from Wētā in New Zealand and DNEG in the UK and Vancouver. We had teams working in Sweden. We had teams everywhere. There were so many vendors working on the show, all of whom just poured so much time and energy and effort into it, which I think shows and I think is reflected in the show. They did tremendous work. They’re all artists, and I am incredibly grateful for all they’ve done.
One reason I think we, people like you and me who are in this position, are obligated to call out our visual effects teams is because it’s one of the few jobs where if you do it perfectly, no one knows you were there.
That sometimes leads to situations where people, they just don’t know what you did. I can say for a fact that I read a lot of things where people talked about, “Oh my god, it’s incredible. Look at this practical thing they made.” I’m like, “Nope, that was not a practical thing.” I’m not going to talk about it, because I don’t like bringing people backstage too much.
I just want to acknowledge all of these men and women who worked so, so hard to deliver all of this on time and at this ridiculous level of quality. I’m amazed. I would constantly say wow. Thank you to our team and thank you to all the teams across all the vendors all over the world.
John: Big love for everyone in post.
Craig: Big love.
John: Such a hard job.
Craig: It is.
John: Big love. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont. It’s edited this week by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by David Kawale.
If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them all at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on drugs. Drew, welcome, and Craig, thank you.
Craig: Thank you, guys.
Drew: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, let’s talk prescription drugs, prescription drug prices, availability. You and I are both in the Writers Guild. We’re on the Writers Guild health plan. We can get stuff at the pharmacy if we need to, but then longer-term medications, the things that you take all the time, we have to get through Express Scripts, which I find to be one of the worst places on earth.
Craig: Interesting. I have had no problem with them, but I will tell you that you and Scott Frank can have a wonderful discussion with each other on how much you hate that. To clarify for people, and I think a lot of plans work like this, we can go into a CVS or a Walgreens and say, “Here’s the prescription,” or our doctor phones it in, and we get it.
What happens is, we can keep getting it there, we’ll get an insane amount of annoying messages saying, “You know it’s going to cost a lot less if you got a 90-day supply of this stuff that you take every day and get it mail ordered through Express Scripts,” because it saves the plan money, because it’s in bulk, and because it’s cutting out a lot of the stuff that… They don’t have to maintain a whole store like CVS does, the brick and mortar thing. I have to say I’ve never had a problem with them, but I’ve heard a lot of people have.
John: Here are the problems that Mike and I have with Express Scripts. They will call constantly. We still have phones in our house, which is part of the problem.
Craig: There you go.
John: They will call to say, “Hey, we’re going to fill this prescription for you that we’ve been filling for the last 10 years. Is it okay for us to send this through? Can you verify your address?” Jesus, yes. I’m always going to be taking Atorvastatin, Lipitor. I’m still taking it. I’m going to be taking it for the rest of my life. Yes, you can send it. It’s so, so, so maddening.
Craig: They’ve never done that with me, although they have done this other thing. My oldest kid has a lot of just medical issues because of Crohn’s disease. When you have Crohn’s, there are all these medications that you have to take chronically. Some of them are injected. Some of them are infusions. There’s all sorts of stuff. My oldest is now 21, and they’ll call me. I’m like, “I’m not even allowed to talk to you about their health. They’re an adult. They’re on my plan, but you can’t do this.” I don’t know what to tell… I don’t know how many times I’ve had to say it to them. They just keep calling. I’m like, “You guys are I think legitimately breaking the law. This is a HIPAA violation.”
John: HIPAA violation.
Craig: They really do struggle with some of the basics. That said, like you, I take Atorvastatin every day, and it shows up. I have thousands of Atorvastatins.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: My doctor says, “Send him 90 days worth of Atorvastatin. Then when you’re getting close, send another 90 days worth.” I feel like they send them every 12 days. I’m drowning in pills.
John: I’m a little over supply on some of those things. This is not just a bitch solution. I have some solutions for certain things.
Craig: Great.
John: First off, if you are in Los Angeles or a market that has Capsule Pharmacy, it’s really good for the things that you would normally go into CVS, because you can have your doctor call into Capsule, and they will just deliver it to your house for free. It is so incredibly super handy. The things actually, some of them are cheaper. I don’t understand how it works. It’s probably one of those things where it had VC money and will ultimately go bankrupt. Until it goes bankrupt, it’s a giant savings for me of time and money, so Capsule if you’re in LA.
Craig: Early on, I think in the early days of our podcast, we were talking about Webvan. We were like, “How the hell is this company going to work?” It turned out it couldn’t. This may be the MoviePass of pharmacy, but still, that sounds awesome.
John: For now it’s really good. There’s some things we get, that I get or that my daughter gets, that just get delivered from Capsule. It’s better and it’s faster. It’s filled in like an hour.
Craig: Love that.
John: Love that. I was reading articles online. I talked with Mike. We decided, let’s explore. Amazon has a pharmacy for generic drugs. Mark Cuban, the billionaire Mark Cuban, has Cost Plus Drugs. We ended up using Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. We’ve figured out the generics that we get are actually much, much, much cheaper to get through him. They came. It all works. Exactly one delivery from them, but it was cheaper and better than my Express Scripts experience.
Craig: Interesting.
John: I would say if you’re on regularly occurring generic drugs… I’ve put it in the Workflowy here so you can see the differences for Atorvastatin, what you and I both take the generic version of Lipitor.
Craig: This is per 90 pills or something?
John: Per 90 days. Express Scripts is not too expensive. $9.53 on Express Scripts. $23.10 on Amazon. $7.50 on Cost Plus, so cheaper. That same thing, if I got it at Walgreens, $136.
Craig: Oh, man.
John: Crazy.
Craig: That’s why our system is bananas. Our system is full of pretend numbers. In the long run, I’m not sure what the major differences are and how much we all spend on these things, but my guess is ultimately the cost of things are the cost of things. It’s just that more of it is shouldered by private citizens here in the U.S., but the cost is the cost. Then you could say, okay, but in the other place, the taxes are high. Everybody’s paying for it somehow. I don’t think there’s any question that our system is not without major and correctable flaws. I have to say, if I’m getting 90 days for $9.53, I’m not sure I want to go through the heartache and the potential screw-ups to just save $2 every three months.
John: A hundred percent that. For us, it was like freeing ourselves from the hell of Express Scripts. It was really we hated Express Scripts, and that’s why we wanted to change. Finasteride, which is the generic version of Propecia, is a huge [01:06:53]. Express Scripts for 90 days was 62 bucks, Cost Plus $7.50.
Craig: You take Propecia?
John: Yeah, Mike and I both take Propecia. I’ve been on Propecia since before I lost all of my hair. I take Propecia, and Mike does too.
Craig: What is the hair that it’s giving you?
John: The hair that I have left would go away. My doctor wants me to stay on it because once you’re on it, it’s probably better to stay on it.
Craig: I see what you’re saying. That’s a major difference. I gotta be honest with you.
John: Is it worth it?
Craig: It’s worth checking out. For me, what I want to take a look at is, we do have some more expensive things. I take a medicine for my chronic back pain because of spinal stenosis. That’s not the cheapest one through Express Scripts. It’s not brutal. It’s covered. Particularly interested in the Crohn’s medicines to see if there’s a major difference there. Interesting.
John: I bring this up as a bonus topic just because whether it’s these services or GoodRX… Megana put GoodRX in the show notes. Megana, who clearly today must’ve logged into the Workflowy to add something in, she misses us. She mentioned GoodRX.
Craig: She can’t let us go.
John: There are other services that are worth checking out. I would just say don’t assume the default price for a medicine is the right price for it, because it’s probably cheaper someplace else. If you like a service that is more convenient or better, I say switch.
Craig: Hey Drew, you know you’re hearing messages from the future right now, right?
Drew: I’m 63 years old, so this is very helpful.
Craig: “We didn’t have any of this stuff.”
Drew: Online prescriptions?
Craig: “We didn’t have online. We didn’t even have medicine. We had bourbon.” I just had my annual physical the other day. I was saying to my doctor, “Shouldn’t there just be a pill call middle-aged man that has Atorvastatin and Lisinopril for your blood pressure and an aspirin for your heart, just one horse tablet every guy gets once they hit 50?” I don’t know anybody our age that isn’t on one of these things.
John: It’s incredibly common and sort of ubiquitous. Anyway, just my advice, just shop around, and don’t assume that the price you’re getting is the right price for a drug, because it’s probably a lot cheaper.
Craig: Interesting.
John: Interesting.
Craig: Interesting.
John: Thanks, gents.
Craig: Thank you.
Drew: Thank you so much.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Woman who poisoned lookalike with cheesecake to steal identity convicted from The Guardian
- ‘The Last of Us’ Featurette with Keivonn Woodard from HBO
- The Fleishman Effect: In a city of Rachels and Libbys, the FX show has some New York moms worried they’re the ones in trouble by Caitlin Moscatello for The Cut
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by David Kawale (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 588: Changing of the Guard, Transcript first appeared on John August.
In an extensive deep-dive, John and Craig attempt to create the definitive explanation of screenwriting credits. How are they determined? Who has copyright? And what really happens when a screenplay goes to arbitration?
In our bonus segment for premium members, we look back on the 2023 awards season and pitch a potential awards show of our own.
Links:
- WGA Additional Literary Material Credit
- Scriptnotes, Ep 20: How credit arbitration works
- Jurassic World Script Credits Resolved; Helmer Colin Trevorrow Speaks On Arbitration Process on Deadline
- Big Fish poster
- WGAw Screen Credits Manual
- WGAw Credits Department contact information
- WGAw residuals look up
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post How Writing Credits Work, Rebroadcast first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 538 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today’s episode is something new for us. One of our listeners, Jake Kelley, he wrote in to say that, “Many of my favorite episodes are the ones focused on craft, yet I find myself drawn to those discussions on being a screenwriter, which offer so much insight.” I put this show together to be somewhat the antithesis of a craft compendium. It won’t help you on your script right now, but offers a way to becoming a rounded and mature creative thinker. Jake provided the episodes and time codes for his vision of what this episode could be. Megana and Matthew took those suggestions and a few other bits to come up with this compendium of our conversations, not about screenwriting per se, but being a screenwriter.
If you’re Premium member, you of course have access to the backup episodes, all 537 of them. Today, Premium members should stick around for my conversation with Jake about why he picked these clips and how Scriptnotes has influenced his work as a visual artist, so enjoy. This first clip comes from Episode 6: How kids becoming screenwriters.
What we might talk about today is how people become screenwriters. I don’t mean how to become a screenwriter, because there’s countless books you can buy on any shelf in a Borders to tell you how to be–
Craig Mazin: I would take my microphone off and leave this podcast.
John: Another podcast we’ll talk about the so-called experts and our fury about some of the screenwriting books out there. Rather than talking about how to become a screenwriter, I want to talk about how a person becomes a screenwriter and the paths to that, because if you talk to a professional tennis player and say like, “Hey, how did you become a professional tennis player?” they’ll say something like, “Oh, when I was eight I started playing tennis, and I just played tennis for forever, and now I’m a professional tennis player.” It’s not that they were 21 and they picked up a racket for the first time and became a professional tennis player. That just doesn’t happen. Or if you talk to a doctor and you say like, “Hey, how did you become a doctor?” maybe they were interested in medicine growing up or maybe thought, “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” but they didn’t really do anything serious about becoming a doctor until they went to college, and really until they went to medical school. They might’ve studied the sciences they needed, they got prerequisites they needed, but they didn’t do anything serious to become a doctor until quite late in the game.
Screenwriting is not really either one of those paths. There’s not a thing you could point to where you say, “I’m an eight-year-old who wants to become a screenwriter.” Not only does that not really happen, there’s not even a meaningful way to think about that.
Craig: True, true. It’s the difference between the word “career” and the word “vocation.” “Vocation,” the “voc” root is designed to imply a calling, that you’re called to this somehow by–
John: An evocation.
Craig: Yeah, exactly. Screenwriting falls into that area. You have this innate desire to tell stories, but when does that come, where does that come from, and how do you know you have it, and all that?
John: Malcolm Gladwell famously has been trumpeting this idea of 10,000 hours, that if you look at people who are very successful in any field, you can track back and they’ve put in 10,000 hours of practice to get up to that point. It applies particularly well to sports figures, but even other professions, like musicians and other artists. You can really see that they’ve put in the 10,000 hours of time to get up to their mastery of something. No screenwriter I know, at least no screenwriter I know that’s ever getting started, has put in 10,000 hours of writing screenplays. That just doesn’t happen. You don’t start writing screenplays when you’re six.
Craig: That’s right. If you’ve put in 10,000 hours of screenwriting and you’re still not a professional screenwriter, you suck.
John: That is true. You’re sad, and you probably suck.
Craig: You’re sad and you suck.
John: It’s just a tragedy that’s happened there, because 10,000 hours is a lot of time.
Craig: That’s a huge chunk of your life.
John: I’m not gonna open my little Solver program and tell you exactly how many days and weeks and moments of Seasons of Love that is, but it’s a lot of Seasons of Love to get to 10,000 hours. As I’ve thought more about how did I become a screenwriter, where did I get that experience… The first thing I wrote wasn’t great, but it wasn’t, like I said, I put 10,000 hours in between my first screenplay and Go. Go was a pretty good screenplay. It’s that I think I can make a good argument that I actually had my 10,000 words of experience and exposure in there. It wasn’t all writing, and it certainly didn’t look like screenwriting.
My first memory of this storytelling kind of stuff that I do now is, as a boy I would often… First off, I always woke up really early, and my parents wouldn’t let me come out of my room, so I had to stay in my room and play with all my toys. I would always line up my little toys. There’d be two rival faction armies. Actually, not really armies. They were sort of like Battle of the Network Stars. They’d be on the other side of the river and they’d have to come some competitions and things. I’d always have my favorites, but my favorites wouldn’t always win, because that’s the way the narrative should play.
I’d always have this ongoing narrative of the battle of the network toys, that later progressed once I was allowed to stay up to watch the James Bond movies on Monday nights right before school started in the fall. Again, James Bond and new fall TV shows coinciding in the fall, it was an important season for me. Once I was allowed to watch the James Bond movies on ABC, a lot of my imagination play became James Bond. I was on the speedboat. It was really my bed. I would build myself a graveling hook out of a hanger and some string and do James Bondy kind of things. I think that my early narrative development in the sense of figuring out how this action sequence worked was really as a six or seven-year-old playing James Bond in my room.
Craig: I know exactly what you mean. There’s a way to practice the art of storytelling without actually writing. My experience was around the same time as you, six, seven years old. First of all, I saw Star Wars, which blew my brain open. Then I had a clear memory that almost every night when I would go to bed, I would stay up for about 30, 40 minutes, with the lights out, in my bed, just I guess you’d call it daydreaming, although it was evening, just imagining scenarios. Just imagining. Just envisioning little movies in my head. I would make little sound effects to go along with things. My dad would come in and say, “Stop making rocket noises.” I remember that was the phrase, “rocket noises,” because everything was blowing up all the time. I would do that every night. I don’t know what it was. I was just compelled to tell stories in my head.
John: There’s an assumption that it’s all about how much you read as a kid. I was certainly a big reader, but I wasn’t a bigger reader than many of my peers, most of whom aren’t involved in any sort of narrative writing capability. I read a lot. I read the same kinds of things. I read a lot of the Encyclopedia Browns and the Three Investigators and the things that people read, but it was the imagining my own stories constantly that was more important. I did write. I did some creative writing. I probably wrote stories earlier than other kids might have done that. I was rewarded with teacher praise for doing a good job with it. I can’t chart that writing, my ability to put some words together, with my interest in telling movie style stories later on.
Craig: I’m with you. I remember always having a sense of narrative structure. I read a lot when I was a kid. I would say movies certainly inspired more of my visual sense. In my mind I would tell stories in a very visual way. The books that I did love would inspire those things. The Three Investigators, I remember the thing about them I loved the most was that Jupiter Jones had his headquarters underneath the dump.
John: Uncle Titus’s dump, which is –
Craig: There you go. Thank you. That was awesome to me. I desperately wanted my own headquarters under a dump, because it was so visual and it was so cool.
John: I tried to put on weight in 3rd grade so I could be more like Jupiter Jones.
Craig: I was always more of a Pete guy. Pete seemed like the cool one. I think he broke his arm at one point though.
John: Yeah, and therefore was slightly handicapped, and therefore–
Craig: Yeah, and thus an object of pity.
John: Pity/lust, I get it.
Craig: You feel me on that one. I love those. I remember in 5th grade I had a facility for language. I found reading and writing just came easily to me. Words came easily to me. In 5th grade they asked me to deliver the graduation speech. I remember that I wrote a speech that was rather mockish and infantile, in the way that a 5th grader would. It was a lot of bad metaphors about going through doors, opening doors and closing doors behind you and nonsense like that. It had a structure. I remember that I just innately understood that there should be an introduction where you establish this metaphor of doors opening and closing in your life and then three examples and then a final conclusion where the door closes behind you and you step out and you begin again.
John: That sounds very Toastmasters.
Craig: It was as paint by numbers as you can be, but the interesting thing was there were no numbers. I just had that. I was born with formula. I don’t know, maybe you need to start there. It’s a weird thing. Instead of having to learn it, it’s already in your DNA or something.
John: I think what I can also chart as probably the biggest influence on my development that way, and where I logged a lot of my 10,000 hours, was in Dungeons and Dragons, because D and D is one of those things where on the surface of it, it just seems like you’re pretending to play with swords, and it’s a bunch of people rolling dice and sitting around and table and drinking too much Coke.
Ultimately, when you’re playing a lot of D and D, especially when you’re playing at that age, you recognize that there’s two distinct phases to Dungeons and Dragons. There’s the social aspect where you and your friends are sitting around with your parents at a card table, and you’re playing a game, and one of you is the dungeon master. The other two or three of you are playing. He’s the fighter, he’s the thief, and that’s the wizard over there, the magic user over there. You’re trying to get through this dungeon. It’s very graph papery. You’re looking at a bunch of charts. That’s the part that feels baseball statistics-y, where there’s math involved and you’re trying to win a game. As you play more of it, you get a little bit more sophisticated, you start to really focus on the story and the role-playing aspect of it where you’re pretending to be… You’re this character. You’re this character in this situation. What does this character want? You start to think about your characters independent of this dungeon that you’re going through.
My friend Jason and I had, he had his character Garrett Darkhorse, who was a ranger. We started to build out these elaborate mythologies for the Darkhorse clan and who all the people were in the different generations. Suddenly it was about your character who would have a kid, and that kid would marry the other girl from over there. You started to look at the death of your character being part of the overall arc of the thing. It’s this sophistication that came only as you got to be more sophisticated, thinking about the narrative beyond this one specific game, this one specific dungeon that you were playing.
Craig: I didn’t quite get that massively nerdy, although I did play the… Marvel had a role-playing game.
John: I remember that.
Craig: A few of my friends and I played that. I remember not caring so much for the game, which I thought was just a little odd. I never quite got into the actual game part of it, but I loved making the characters. Everybody had a character and they had a name, and then I typed up backstories for all them, sort of like what you were describing, and actually tried to make sense of their… What happens is you roll dice, and they’re like, he’s really strong and he’s really fast, but he’s stupid. That’s interesting. Now, how can I create a narrative that explains that? I remember doing that and typing it up and printing it out on my daisy wheel printer.
John: You would print out these character backstories for the people who were playing your Marvel role-playing game.
Craig: It was interesting, because what they had were like, he’s got a power and he’s this old and he’s blond. Then I would try and explain where he was from and is he a human and how did he get this way and is he related to anybody and what does he fear, and come up with… The idea I guess was that there was a narrative puzzle presented. I always thinking of screenwriting as just endless puzzle solving. The puzzle is how do you make logical sense of this, some sort of dramatic, compelling theory that makes sense of the character you just created with dice. That was fun. I don’t know so much that I spent a lot of time practicing that is why I do what I do today. It’s that I felt the need to do it in the first place that explains why I do what I do today.
John: You felt a compelling need to create narrative meaning out of this thing that actually didn’t have a lot of meaning because it was rolled by dice. You wanted it to make sense and to exist in a way. It was probably one of the earliest occasions for you to see that the decisions you were making about who the characters were would influence the kind of stories you’d want to tell with those characters. Were you being the equivalent of the dungeon master for this, where you were leading the games?
Craig: No, my friend Dave Rogers was usually the dungeon master. Interestingly, he is a Emmy award-winning director now. He’s a very, very well-regarded director in television, directs a lot of episodes of The Office.
John: I’ve noticed several people who are involved with big TV shows right now come from D and D background. John Rogers, who does Leverage, who’s done a lot of other great shows, still writes for… I guess it’s not TSR now, it’s Wizards of the Coast, who bought out the D and D franchise. I first noticed, oh, there’s this… I was looking through one of the new manuals. I noticed his name. I was like, “I wonder if that’s the same person.” I Googled, like, oh, that’s just so strange that he still is doing that. In fact, he’s doing the new Dungeons and Dragons comic book, which is great. It’s like Firefly, but with swords. If we were to have him on the show, I suspect he had a similar experience where that experience of developing characters and developing a world for characters to run around in is really similar to developing the world of a movie, or even more so, developing the world of a TV show, is that you have a sustainable world that goes beyond the adventures of this one week’s play but has an overall narrative, an overall arc. I haven’t talked to David Benioff to see whether he played much D and D, but I’ve got the feeling that it’s probably true.
Craig: Knowing David, I would guess that he did. Knowing Dan Weiss, I would guess that he did as well.
John: It’s a pretty safe bet. I’ll also stump for the new D and D manuals. I don’t actually play D and D anymore. I wouldn’t have time to. I feel like so much of what I do and get paid to do is so similar that I would be burning out that part of my brain to try to DM a session. I’d still buy the new manuals. The new manuals are fantastic. Anybody who’s listening to this who played in the past and has seen those manuals, and like, “Eh, I wouldn’t go into them,” they’re remarkably well done. It’s Gary Gygax’s sort of legacy but sort of brought through to make a lot more sense. They made very smart choices in the new books. I have a ton of them that are all sitting on shelves and I read them as leisure time books.
Craig: That’s where I would fall apart. That’s why I can’t do that sort of part of the game because I don’t understand all the rules and my mind could not wrap around on that stuff.
John: One of the things I think is interesting about where we are right now is the online games, Diablo and World of Warcraft, that seem to be very similar, where they’re doing a lot… You’re running around and you’re killing things. They don’t develop that same instinct, really, because in those games you are optimizing, because ou are trying to figure out the best kind of character to make, but the character is really just a collection of statistics. The character has no backstory. The character has no motivations beyond the quests that are assigned through the game. You have goals as a person, but that character, individually, has no goals.
Craig: I like the Bethesda games. The main quests, at least, give you some sense of identity and sense of purpose.
John: In terms of choices you make?
Craig: Even in terms of your goal. In Oblivion you are tasked with a job by the dying king. In Fallout 3 you’re actually murdered in the beginning of the… Isn’t that right, in Fallout 3? No, no. That’s not Fallout 3. That was the other one.
John: Fallout 3 is an example of a tremendous–
Craig: Oh, it was in New Vegas you’re murdered.
John: New Vegas, yeah.
Craig: In Fallout 3 you’re actually born and you’re raised by a father and then he disappears and you have to go find him. There’s some sense of character.
John: There’s a sense of character, but you’re not generating that sense of character.
Craig: No. You’re right.
John: You are essentially an audience to that character development. While you might learn a lot by observing it, you’re not responsible for the making of it. You’re not making choices about how that narrative is going to be shaped.
Craig: That’s correct. That is the difference between the passive act of playing a video game that’s presented to you and scripted for you, and the idea that you’re going to make your own story as you go along. No question. No question.
John: Our next clip is from Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing. Craig wanted to talk about positive moviegoing, which I’m not even sure what it means, so Craig start us out. What is positive moviegoing?
Craig: It’s this thing I’ve been thinking about lately because this is the time of year when all the so-called good movies come out. A lot of them are actually good movies. I think it’s just we live in a time of snarkiness and suspicion and nobody seems to want to like anything. People a lot of times go into theaters with their arms crossed, especially in Los Angeles. We’re all in the business. I think people go to movies and they’re demanding to hate them and they’re prejudging them. You name any movie and I could just sort of come up with some pretext for hating it.
What I really have been trying to do is when I go to movie to go wanting to love it and accepting everything about it for at least 20 minutes. I don’t care what happens in the first 20 minutes, I am on board. I will accept it and I will attempt to enjoy it as best I can. I will give myself to the movie. Then at some point, okay, listen, sometimes you just don’t like movies. Sometimes they disappoint. Sometimes they anger you because you hate them so much, and that’s okay. I’m not denying that that can happen. I’ve really been trying to just give myself over to movies.
I went and I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I went in, just gave myself to the movie, and I loved it. I think I would have loved it anyway, but I think it helped that I wasn’t judging. I just decided nobody else goes to movies to judge. Why do we go to movies to judge? Can’t we just enjoy them? Anyway, that’s my thing, positive moviegoing.
John: What you’re describing is almost like… I can picture the body language of it. It’s like you’re sitting down in your seat. You’re not crossing your arms in front of you saying like, “Okay, impress me.” You’re saying, “I’m here. I’m eager to be entertained. I will follow you wherever you go. Take me on a journey.” That’s the message you’re trying to send to this movie.
Craig: That’s right, sort of like meeting somebody at a party and they start to tell you a story. You’re standing there, so be nice. Listen to it. Give it a shot. I get so depressed when I see people ripping movies apart before they even see them.
Aline Brosh McKenna: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s easy to hate things and to bag on things. I think it’s just, it makes people feel fashionable and intellectual. It’s harder. It takes more effort to go out there and say, “You know what? Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if things aren’t prefect, sometimes things that you love are the imperfect perfect thing.” Going in there with an attitude of like, “I’m going to enjoy this. I paid my money to enjoy this, not to find something that I can sit down with my friends later and pick to shreds.”
Craig: Yeah. It will happen that we will encounter movies that infuriate us. And we will pick them to shreds and we will pick them to shreds. If you’ve earned that experience, so you’ve earned it, but there is something to be said for letting yourself be entertained and not attempt to make yourself feel better by pushing a movie away. Frankly even the feeling that, okay, it’s not perfect. How often does that happen? Movies win Oscars and people go, “Oh my god, that piece of crap won an Oscar.” Perfection is irrelevant. I almost think, okay, mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s just no more than I got from here to there on a road and it was a really enjoyable journey and there was a pothole. It’s just part of it.
Aline: I like it. I also think it’s very Christmas-y.
John: It’s very Christmas-y. Now, on some level are we talking about expectation? I find that a lot of times the movies that I enjoy most were the ones where my expectations were not set too high going into them. That’s why I love to see a movie during its opening weekend before everyone has sort of told me what I’m supposed to think and feel about it, because when I come into a theater with a set of expectations, nothing can surprise me. I’m sort of preconditioned to think this is how I’m supposed to feel about this particular entertainment.
Aline: Yeah. I miss the days of just going to see a movie and knowing nothing about it. My parents would drive us to the Paramus Park. We used to call it the Millionplex. It had 14 theaters. They would just drop us off there and we would see the 7:30, whatever it was, and just be happy. That’s how I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which pleasantly surprised us. We laughed, fell out of our chairs laughing. We also saw Yor, The Hunter From the Future that way.
Craig: Good one.
Aline: You don’t have that surprise anymore. You’ve been so inundated with media before you go to see a movie now, that I miss the days of just thinking like, “I just want to see a movie. Let’s see what’s out there.” I miss that.
John: Yeah, I remember seeing 9 to 5 that way. I was a kid dropped off at the theater, and the theater we were supposed to go to… They just dropped us off at the wrong movie, essentially, so we saw 9 to 5. I was far too young to see 9 to 5, which is the best way to see 9 to 5, because they’re smoking pot and having sex and all these things.
Aline: Stringing people up.
John: I also remember in college going to see… We ended up seeing The Handmaid’s Tale because the other movie that we wanted to see was completely sold out. We had no idea what the movie was. That’s so incredibly rewarding when you sit in, the only information you have is what the filmmakers are giving you frame-by-frame as the story unfolds. You had that experience of positive moviegoing because you weren’t preconceived with what we were supposed to feel. There was no expectation about what to —
Aline: You haven’t checked a review aggregator that’s given you 60 opinions before you even set foot there.
Craig: Yeah, or your Twitter feed, or comedians teeing up, or whatever, anything, or even articles that are insisting that it’s the most important thing of all time. It’s funny. 9 to 5 was the first movie I think I was dropped off to see on my own. I remember it was like a weird triple date, like a weird triple fifth-grade date. What were our parents thinking? I really make an effort now when I sit in the movie theater before the movie starts to blank my mind completely. I just say, go ahead movie, write all over me and let’s see where this goes.
John: Some of my favorite experiences are actually like when you see the three trailers, or the four trailers, and then the real movie starts and you’ve forgotten what the movie was that you [unclear 00:25:40] what movie is this. Oh right, it’s the Muppets. It is very exciting.
Now, let’s talk for a second as filmmakers, as screenwriters. Is there anything we can do in those opening pages or in the opening minutes of a movie to get people in the positive moviegoing experienced? What is that like from our side as writers to hopefully foster that good spirit?
Craig: I do have one thing that lately I’ve been tending to do, and that is write a credit sequence. It became out of fashion. Originally movies used to have these opening credit sequences that includes even the credits that we now call end credits, where there are logos and rosters of people. Then there were the standard opening credit sequences. That became out of fashion. For a long time, all the credits went in the back of the movie, so you just started the movie. I really like credit sequences. I like opening credit sequences. The opening credits for Mitty are beautiful. I think that that helps kind of get everybody situated and in the mood, so I’ve been doing that lately.
John: I will also write credit sequences in movies where I feel it’s appropriate. More than anything I try to make sure that the reader and therefore the viewer feels confident, like, trust me, this is going to be a ride that you will enjoy taking with me. You’re going to feel rewarded and smart on this journey. We know what we’re doing. Everything is going to be okay. That shows up in your word selection on those first pages, but also just making sure no one is confused in a bad way in those first pages. If it’s a funny movie, you need to have something funny happen really quickly, so everyone sort of gets what the world of your movie is.
Aline: My husband has a thing where we’ll go to see a movie, and sometimes movies take forever just to get going, and he’ll turn to me at some point and say, “When does the movie start?” 20 minutes into the movie, because sometimes it just seems like, especially because we do know what movies we’re going to see, it does seem like if you’re taking 15 minutes to get us acquainted with what we’ve seen on the poster, that makes me a little itchy. I think our attention span for that has probably changed a bunch, too. I think it’s great to see if you can get to the heart of the matter so the audience knows what movie they are seeing.
John: Let’s segue to our next topic, which you brought up also, which is why it’s important to be friends with writers. My recollection, and my early days in Hollywood, I was friends with a bunch of people who were starting out in Hollywood, but they weren’t necessarily writers. I went through a graduate film program, so everyone was trying to become a producer, a film executive. Some people became writers. I didn’t necessarily seek out other writers. What was your history going to–
Aline: I feel really strongly about that. I think that people sometimes misunderstand what the idea is. The idea is not to be friends with writers who are going to network for you, or who are cool, or who are writing, or who are employed. That’s not really the critical thing. The critical thing is to have friends who do what you do and are engaged in the same kind of work that you are.
A couple of my writer friends are from the very, very, very beginning of our career before we had any success or barely any work. We don’t have workplaces in the way that… My husband works at a mutual fund. He has a workplace. He has coworkers. We don’t have that. Even when we do for a specific project, they’re just for that specific project. My ongoing workplace, my Cheers, my group of people that I check in with, are my other writer friends that I talk to on the phone periodically, or have lunch with.
John: Aline, you talk on the phone?
Aline: I talk on the phone.
John: Wow.
Craig: Who talks on the phone?
Aline: I do.
John: Wow.
Aline: We can check in on what we’re doing and say, “Hey, I was working on that. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea? What do you think of this person?” That network is invaluable. You will grow with these people. It’s less important to seek out people who you think are going to connect you with a job and more important to seek out people whose process you find productive. Gatins refers to it as lab partners. Finding a lab partner who does their homework and has a neat notebook is important.
John: I don’t think Gatins has a neat notebook. I think Gatins’s notebook is one of those PT folders that he’s like sort of half colored in as he fell asleep.
Craig: Gatins’s notebook, it’s like a folder that you open up and it looks like it’s full of stuff, and you open it up and there’s nothing in there.
Aline: It’s so brilliant.
Craig: It’s all in his head.
Aline: It’s like a workbook where he didn’t do any of the math, but around the margins are those amazing drawings and thoughts. He’s a good example. He’s a great lab partner. Also, something another friend of mine said, which is easier said than done, we were talking about having your friends read stuff. I said, “Who do you go to for that?” He said, “It’s very simple. Send it to someone who roots for you.”
Craig: Perfect. He’s exactly right.
Aline: I don’t know, it was something I hadn’t really thought of in quite that way, because I think we all have friends that we love, but maybe we have other friends who we think root a little harder.
Craig: You mean to say, “Maybe some of them are rooting against us.” That’s what you mean to say, which I think is real, by the way. Listen, it’s human. It bums me out, but I sometimes sense it.
Aline: It’s funny, I have the opposite.
Craig: Same thing about the positive moviegoing.
Aline: I have the opposite of that, which is I really like everyone around me to be really successful because I think it makes me look better.
Craig: Exactly.
Aline: It gives me more names to drop. Sometimes it’s even on a specific project. Sometimes you can have a friend who is really supportive but they don’t like an idea that you have. There was just a friend that I had that I pitched him a few things I was working on, and one of them he just thought was a terrible idea. That’s not somebody who I would ever go to and say, “Do you want to read this?” It’s just find somebody who really wants to see you do well, or find someone who really roots for that specific project, because that’s positive moviegoing. You want to share your work and share your career with people who are going in with the best possible intentions.
We generate enough of our own schadenfreude towards ourselves in this process. You don’t really need it from other people. I have lots of friends who are producers and executives and agents, and actors too, but your writer friends understand your struggles and your travails and they can really be there for you. I think if you look around, you can find people to link arms with, and you will all come up together.
John: My friend, Andrew Lippa, who did the music for Big Fish, he has this group of composers, lyricist composers, and they get together once a month and they have to show the work that they’ve been working on. As a group they have to perform the thing and they talk about it, which just seems amazing. There are obviously screenwriter groups that can do the same kind of thing, but it’s different to show your written pages versus actually performing something. It’s that trust element that kicks in.
You were talking about how you might have directors or producers or other people who can read your stuff, agents, but all of them have some vested interest in maybe how they’re going to associate with this project. The great thing about another writer is the writer is just the writer. They’re not trying to take your project. They’re not trying to do anything.
While there’s still sometimes that, it’s not even schadenfreude, but that realization of there’s only so many musical chairs, and that sometimes you’re competing for the same spots, in general we can be very supportive of each other because we’re not trying to do the same thing. We’re all working on our own projects.
Aline: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I know you guys have talked about this too, but the three of us all met at different phases in our careers.
John: We should talk about how you and I met, because that’s a strange version of how you and I met. Let me tell my recollection of it, because I’m really curious to hear your version of it. Aline and I met on the phone because I was coming in to rewrite a project that she had written as a spec, correct?
Aline: No, I wrote it on assignment for New Line. Then John rewrote it and he cold called me and said, “I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m rewriting this.” I said, “Sure.” Then John did a draft of it, and never to be heard from again, that thing.
Craig: John, you killed her movie.
John: I probably killed her movie.
Aline: They were bringing in the big guns, and I got pushed down the stairs. John was the first person, I think might have been the first person ever to call me and do the gracious thing. I was outside on my deck and I remember he said, “Is it okay with you if I do this?”
John: I remember you also saying like, “Somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather you do it than somebody else,” which is honestly the reality of most of these situations. The answer is not going to be they’re going to go back to you, the original writer. If they’re looking for another writer, they’re going to hire another writer, so you want the writer who actually has the ability to make the movie be good and not ruin the movie. Those are the situations you want to have. That was a strange project, because the reason why I was able to get a hold of you is because we both had John Gatins as a friend. I called Gatins to get your number and said like, “Is it going to be cool if I call?”
Aline: Oh, that’s nice.
John: It was this movie that you wrote that I really liked. It was just a really good idea. Suddenly Dustin Hoffman was attached, and so I went to this lunch, this crazy lunch with Dustin Hoffman. Suddenly, this is a movie, and then it just disappeared.
Aline: Yeah, it got complicated in that way those things do. We already knew each other, and I knew Craig already when the strike happened. The strike was really the thing where writers really connected in a different way. I think it was sort of the convergence of the strike plus the internet. All of a sudden people really got to know each other in a way that I had not experienced previously in my career where people really know each other now in a different way than they ever had before. I really think it’s for the good. I always find it funny when you’re talking to an agent or an executive or a producer and you say, “Oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so about that project. Oh, yeah, she did a draft on that. So-and-so is directing it.” They’re like, “How do you know that?” It’s because, I think, we know each other more now than we did.
Craig: We know more than they know sometimes. We know so much more than they think we know. We talk to each other. I have a lot of writer friends. I like writers. It’s been a wonderful thing for me for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years to get this coterie of writers around me that I admire and that I trust and that I can learn from. We share and talk about everything. I think we do so in a way that is informed by our experience of being safe with each other, that over time we haven’t screwed each other over, that the narrative that we just feed off of each other and compete with each other and undercut each other is essentially bullshit, and that, in fact, we are supportive of each other because the pain that we feel is the most salient thing about the job we do. When we see somebody else feeling it, naturally we just want to help them. There have been a couple people here and there, but for the most part I have found screenwriters to be incredibly generous and incredibly empathetic, and sweet and encouraging, to me at least.
Aline: I’ll tell you a good story. On this spec that I was working on, I wanted to give it to somebody who didn’t know me and didn’t know the situation and didn’t know anything about it that I could give to cold, who I really respected. I gave it to a writer who I really, really respect but don’t know super well. I maybe hung out with him a dozen, no, half a dozen times. I sent him the script, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while which is always the thing where you’re like, “Oh god, he hates it and he can’t figure out how to tell me.” Then I get an email from him that says, “Look, my dad was sick, he was in the hospital. I’m just about to read the script,” whatever. I was like, oh no. Then a couple days go by and I get a set of notes, seven pages of notes–
John: Wow.
Aline: That are the most amazing thoughtful, heartfelt–
Craig: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.
Aline: Well thought out. Including like, “Page 26, you could be doing this. Page 43, you could be doing this.” Sometimes you get notes from people and it’s like they’re fighting what the movie is. This was just a writer understanding like, oh, this is what she’s trying to do. You are trying to do this. Let me help you. You’re trying to get to such and such a place in five hours. Let me give you the best directions on how to get there.I was so moved when I got that notes document that I was in my office and tears sprang to my eyes. I know how hard it is as a writer to turn your attention from your own imagination and delve into another person’s script. That he would do seven pages of these incredible notes really blew me away. It’s professional camaraderie. Man, the more of that you can find the better. It doesn’t have to be somebody famous. If you’re 23 years old, it can be somebody else that you know who wants to do this, who will read your stuff and put their heart into it.
John: It’s also back to the issue of as writers we want movies to be better. When I’m advising on projects at Sundance or other places, everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a tremendous amount of your time that you’re spending.” It’s like, yes, but it’s a chance to make movies better. It’s a way to sort of see what a person is attempting to try to do and help them get to that place that they’re trying to get to.Seven pages of notes is above and beyond the call. That’s terrific. Really only a writer could do that, because only a writer could understand what you were trying to do and provide specific ways that you could get to that place.
Craig: I would also say that only a writer can convince you that you’re any good.
Aline: That’s interesting.
Craig: I had a very nice experience. I started writing a novel a couple of years ago. Honestly, I wrote two chapters and then stopped, mostly just out of fear that it wasn’t going to be any good and that I wasn’t any good and I’m no good and blah, blah, blah, rotten tomatoes.
John: Dennis Palumbo?
Craig: No, it’s not Dennis Palumbo. I gave it to Kelly Marcel because she asked to see it. She’s a really good writer. She loved it. I have to believe that. When we give screenplays, or we give our work to people that are employing us, they’re just as overly optimistic as we are. Everybody is rooting, rooting, rooting, but you always wonder. Or you give it to somebody, some producer or agents or coverage. Who’s doing coverage? I don’t know who they are. If a writer reads something of yours and says, “This is good,” then you need to believe it. We can’t get that from anybody else.
John: Yeah. You want that response of, “I’m so happy for you and also a little bit jealous.” That’s the best feeling you can get as a writer is when another writer says, “This is great and I wish I had written it.”
Craig: You know what’s so funny? That’s exactly what she said. She said, I actually think she used the words, “I’m a bit jealous.” Now, I have this other task master that’s making me write this book, which is terrific, terrific, because we also need that. We need somebody. We need a lab partner. We need a lab partner.
John: As we wrap up this segment on the importance of writers being friends, we also need to credit Aline, because during the strike – I agree that the 2008 strike was a big game-changer in terms of especially feature writers knowing who each other are – you organized these events that would happen during the strike, these drink events where we would all get together and mingle. It was my first chance of actually getting to know faces with names of some of these people.
During the strike you were assigned to different studios where you were supposed to be doing picketing. Because I am the palest person on earth, I would picket at Paramount Studios from 5:30 in the morning until 8:30 in the morning, so it would be dark and so I wouldn’t get sunburned. I loved that group of people I was hanging out with. Everyone else was at different studios.
The events that you organized, and there were three or four of them, were terrifically helpful, because just suddenly all these names that I’d seen in the trades are suddenly in front of you and you’re talking about the things you’re talking about. A lot of what we were talking about was the strike, but you’re also talking about the work, and you’re talking about how to make things better.
Aline: It came at a critical point. If you try to do those mixers sometimes, it’s hard to get people to go, but people were really wanting to be with other writers then and talk about what’s going on and what are we going to do, and nobody was working.
You were able to organize them over the internet really quickly, send out an e-vite to hundreds of people. There were a lot of people who I knew their names but had never met them. We all really got to know each other during that experience. People had really varying opinions was the other thing. A thing that always amazed me was people were really all over the map about what they believed about this, but by and large people were able to… The camaraderie of being screenwriters overcame people’s different point of views on the strike.
John: I would say there were different point of views on the strike and what we should be doing on the strike and how long it should go and what we should be fighting for. It made a common point of focus in terms of what our profession is and what it is our job is and what our craft is. By focusing on the feature writers who are usually completely in isolation, bringing thing together, it was a way for us to identify ourselves as a group, because usually we’re not a group the way that TV writers are often in rooms together and know each other. It was a way for us to actually know who these people were.
Craig: There’s a certain kind of way that screenwriters interact with each other that is unique. I love it. It is a very talky, chatty, low-tech, low-fancy environment, almost always. We don’t do it the way other people do it. There are few screenwriters I know that love to glam it up and throw parties at nightclubs and stuff like that, but for the most part it seems to me we’re at our happiest when we’re talking somewhere where we can hear each other. That’s fun. It’s a nice, real way to be in Los Angeles, a town where just around the corner there’s some place that has convinced you is important and you have to go inside, and if you can’t get inside, and who do you know inside, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There we are with our jeans and our sweaters and our cigars and our wine. We’re able to be real with each other.
Aline: I will tackle people. It’s funny, because I won’t do this with actors or directors really, but if I see a writer whose work I admire… I did a panel with Peter Morgan in 2006, and I was so excited he was going to be there. The video of me is like a running back approaching, of me literally taking guys and grabbing them by the nape of the neck and chucking them out of the way to get to Pete. I was so excited to meet him. I got to him and I was like, “Oh my god, I just came to this thing so I could meet you.” That moment someone said, “Let me take your picture.” There’s a picture like 30 seconds after Pete and I meet, and I look like I’m standing next to Santa Claus. I’m so excited to be meeting Peter.
Craig: John, who was my Peter Morgan in Austin?
John: Oh, it was Breaking Bad. It was Vince Gilligan.
Aline: Vince.
Craig: Vince Gilligan.
Aline: That thing, when you meet somebody whose work you so admire.
Craig: It’s everything. It’s everything.
Aline: It’s so amazing. I will tackle people. Kelly Marcel just moved to town.
Craig: Did you tackle Kelly Marcel?
Aline: I tackled her at the Mr. Banks thing. She’s new to town so she doesn’t know a lot of writers. I was like, oh, there’s people for you to meet.
John: There’s a mixer in your future.
Aline: She went to Austin, which is a really good way. One thing I would say is go to an event like Austin if you’re somebody who is starting out. Again, we just did not have stuff like this when we were starting out. I would have been there tackling people. Go to these events where there is going to be other aspiring people and you will find people that you connect to, that you can pitch your movies to, that you can talk about what they’re working on. You don’t have to be connecting to the fancy people. You can be connecting to people who are exactly in the same stage that you’re in.
John: Everyone grows up together, so there’s lateral things where you’re reading their script, and if you love their script, keep reading their scripts, and keep helping them out, and they will reciprocate. You will find your people, but you have to look for your people because it’s not you’re a professional football player where you’re just going to be around professional football players.
Aline: That’s right.
John: You are always going to be isolation unless you choose to make yourself not in isolation.
Craig: Don’t be judgey. Don’t be judgey. Don’t think that your friends have to be the fanciest writers in the world, or the most successful writers in the world. Don’t let that get in the way. When you fall in love with another writer, you’re falling in love with a kindred spirit and a fellow mind who understands you, who can help you and you can help them. There is no better feeling. The only better feeling than being helped is helping. How is that for Christmas?
John: This clip is from Episode 425: Tough Love versus Self-Care.
This is inspired by a Chuck Wendig blog post over this past week where he talks through the dueling notions of do you buckle down and sit in that chair and get all those words written when you’re hurting, or do you take a step back and practice some self-care. He’s really looking at the trap you can fall into where you’re just self-caring all the time and you’re not actually doing the hard work. As we head into NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which is where I started Arlo Finch, I thought it was a good time to look at the dueling instincts to you’ve got tough it out versus relax and be easy on yourself.
Craig: Yeah. I loved this. I thought it was really smart. The reason I really appreciated it is because there are two positive ways of thinking about things, and one positive way is I need to take care of myself and be gentle with myself and not beat myself up, because that’s going to be counterproductive. There’s another positive thing that says I need to apply myself and motivate myself and push through difficult things and be resilient in order to get things done.The problem with both of those things is that bad sentiments can easily masquerade as those things.
That’s the part that I thought he really put his finger on brilliantly is that the two things I just said are correct and good, but here’s something that can masquerade as tough love: a kind of brutal self-loathing and self-denial. Here’s something that can masquerade as self-care: just fear and withdrawal and a sense that engaging isn’t worth it. I thought it was really important that especially now because we do concentrate so heavily on self-care ,that somebody said, just watch out, there are these two imposters that will wear the clothing of these two things and neither one is going to help you.
John: Yeah. Let’s go back to that tough love, because someone who is advocating tough love will say, “Yeah, so what? Writing is often hard. You’re not digging a ditch.” To some degree, writing is exercise and it’s just like working out. You get stronger sometimes by pushing through the pain. You’ve got to rip those muscles a little bit so that they can get stronger. I don’t know if physical science would hold that up to be true.
Craig: You did it.
John: I get that. Writing, for all of us, actually sitting down in the button chair and getting to that 1,000 words or those 3 pages can be really tough sometimes. It’s hard to string the words together. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. What Craig describes as that imposter is a real thing where sometimes it’s your romantic notion that art must be suffering. That writing must be hard and so therefore if writing is hard then I’m doing the right thing because that’s what writing is supposed to be like, that it’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be torture every time you do it. That’s probably not true. That’s not a healthy way to be approaching the craft that you’ve chosen for yourself.
Craig: You can easily get into a trap where you think of yourself as stupid or lazy because it just didn’t happen that day. You can try and try and try. There are days where it’s not going to happen. The healthy thing is to say that that is normal. I am not perfect. Not every day is going to be optimum. That imposter dressed in the clothing of tough love will say, “You suck. You’re weak and lazy and dumb, and a real writer would have gotten it done. You just failed.” That’s not helpful at all.
John: Let’s look at self-care, because you and I are both dealing with shoulder pain. Part of the recommendation for that is, take it easy on your shoulder. Don’t do things that are going to hurt your shoulder. That really is a form of self-care. If you are encountering a lot of mental anguish and other things in your life that makes it hard for you to write, possibly pushing through and forcing yourself to write is going to make that mental anguish worse. Be mindful that there could be a good reason why you should step off the accelerator and give yourself a little bit of a break and not be pushing yourself so hard.
Chuck was writing from the perspective of he’s a guy in a shack who is writing books. I’m reading his book right now. His book is really good. He wrote a big giant tome called Wanderers. It’s sort of like The Stand. It’s as long as The Stand. It’s a big tome that drops down. Chuck is a guy writing by himself out in the woods. He is not in a writing room. I’m going to keep using that word as much as I can.
Craig: Good for you.
John: He’s not in a writing room in a social environment with other people, and so therefore he only has himself to turn to. Some of his advice can be a little bit different about self-care when you are surrounded by a group who can be pushing you or also be supporting you.
Craig: The self-care thing is interesting because we didn’t really have it until a few years ago. Of course, it existed and people would come up with different names, but the notion of self-care and the popularity of it is a relatively modern phenomenon. What happens is there’s this backlash where people say, “Problem is all these snowflakes with their self-care, ergo self-care is stupid.” By the way, the people that say that never use the term ergo, but whatever. That’s not correct. Self-care is actually crucial.
What is correct is that self-care can be used as a name for something that isn’t self-care at all, but a different kind of self-abuse, which is hiding. We can, when we are afraid, sometimes put on the clothing of somebody that is trying to take care of themselves, when really we’re just scared. People might think, how exactly is writing scary? When you don’t know what to say, it’s terrifying. It really is. It’s as scary as a dream where you have to go on stage and give a speech but you haven’t prepared one. That’s what it kind of feels like.
John: Yeah. There’s a natural anxiety that happens, like, am I going to be able to do it? If I can’t do it, then it’s going to suck and I’m going to be embarrassed. Even if I’m the only person who is going to see that I can’t do it, it’ll going to be embarrassing. Yes, there’s a whole cycle that can start about should I sit down and actually start writing today?
Craig: Correct. You can wear the clothing of modern parlance and say, no, today is a self-care day. It is worth taking a real clear moment when you say today is a self-care day to say, “Or is it?” It doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It just means let’s really ask and evaluate first. Then if everything checks out, then yes, it’s a self-care day.
John: I put together a list of five questions that I thought would be a starting place for looking at is this a time for self-care or is this a time for some tough love with myself. et me read through here. Craig, I suspect you’ll have other things to add to this checklist.
First I would say is check the facts. Basically that’s a chance to sort of step outside yourself and just look at the situation you’re in. Is this a situation where you’re dealing with some big stuff that anyone in your situation would say like, okay, given what you’re going through, like the loss of a family member, a big breakup, you’re moving, there are some real reasons why you are not equipped at this moment to be doing this stuff. Just check the facts. Independent of your emotions, what are the actual facts about this situation?
I would ask, are you taking care of the basics? Are you actually eating properly? Are you sleeping enough? Is there some basic survival function that you’re not doing a good enough job at, and is that the thing you really need to fix rather than worrying about how much you’re writing on a day? I would ask, can you take smaller bites? By that I mean rather than committing to 3 hours of sitting writing, can you just write for 20 minutes, or an hour? Can you do a little sprint to get you through some stuff? Can you write 100 words rather than forcing yourself to write 1,000 words at a sitting?
Can you lower the stakes? And this is where I come back to Aline Brosh McKenna’s method of getting in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember her describing this at some point. This is how Aline describes starting to swim in the ocean, is that you sort of step on the sand and you get your toes wet, and then you get your ankles wet, then you splash a little water up on your shins, and then your knees. Eventually you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and you don’t even realize that you started swimming. I always loved Aline’s visual for how she gets into the ocean, because it’s true. It’s scary to jump into the ocean, but if you just wander in there, you’re like, oh hey, I’m in the ocean and I’m swimming.
Craig: It’s literally how every Jewish woman I’ve ever seen gets into a pool. It’s like every Jewish woman slowly wets the arms, wets the legs. It’s so careful. Maybe it’s just my family. Maybe it’s just the women in my family. I don’t know. It’s such a weird stereotypical thing, and I guess as far as stereotypes go, fairly harmless, because it is a smart way of acclimating to a new environment. I think lowering the stakes is a brilliant point of view on this, because there are times where you may say, “Listen, I think today is a self-care day. You know what? Today is a self-care day. That said, what if I did some writing on a self-care day? It doesn’t even count. It’s like free calories. Because it’s a self-care day. If it happens it happens. If it doesn’t it doesn’t. I’ll just try it now with zero stakes attached because it’s a self-care day. I don’t have to sit there grinding my teeth because it’s not happening.” I think that’s really smart.
John: Katie Silberman when she was on the show recently, she talked about how when she starts a project she’ll write scenes and scenes and scenes that aren’t going to be in the movie that are just the characters talking. Perfect. Those are throwaway scenes. It doesn’t matter. You’re just getting a sense of the voices. There’s no demand that those actually have to be the real scenes in the movie. Try writing those. You’ll be surprised. Some of those will end up in the movie. It’s lowering the stakes. The world isn’t going to come crashing down if those scenes are not perfect.
Craig: There you go. Yeah.
John: Last I would say, can you define what you’ll need to be able to do in order to get back to work as normal? If you say, okay, this is a self-care day, I can’t do it, great. What are the criteria you need to meet for you to be able to get back to work? If you can be just a little bit more concrete about that, like, “Okay, I need to be able to sit for 10 minutes without bursting into tears,” great. That’s a thing, if you can do that, then you’re on your way to being able to do the next thing. “I need to be able to focus on one thing for 20 minutes.” Give yourself some real criteria, benchmarks that you need to hit, so that you can actually say, okay, I’m in this state or I’m not in this state. There’s a sense that there’s an end date to it, that it’s not going to be a permanent condition for you.
Craig: Those are five great questions to ask yourself. I really only have one other one to suggest. It is simply, is the biggest problem on this particular day your writing? Because if the biggest problem, the thing that is taking the most wind out of your sails, the thing that is making you the sickest in your gut is the work itself, it may not be a self-care day. It may be a day where you just have to kind of re-approach your writing and think about what’s not working, because otherwise you could hide forever from that.
John: Yeah. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, so the third book is in and done, so I’m essentially done with them, it was a lot more regular writing than I’d ever had to do. It’s been four years of really regular writing to get those books done. The word counts were just so much higher and the workload was so much higher than before. I did have to be little tougher on myself in terms of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily really want to do it today but I kind of need to do it today and I’m going to do it today. Even family vacations, I would say, okay, I need an hour this morning to write. I’m not being selfish. It’s what needs to happen. We would plan for I’m writing during this time. then once I got that writing done, I was just free in a way that was great. It wasn’t looming over me because I knew I’d gotten that work done.
I bring this up because sometimes writing actually is what you need to do. Sometimes writing is a really important way to get healthy again because it lets you step outside of yourself, outside of your own internal narrative into a different narrative and really focus on that for a time. It can get you out of your head with the right project.
Craig: That’s such a great point. I’ve got to tell you, that’s me. There are times where I needed a day off or even a week off because of extant circumstances, things that are going on in my family. My son has surgery. You got to deal with life as it comes and there are days where you just can’t do your work. In all honesty, 90% of the time when I am feeling miserable it’s because something is wrong with what I’m writing. The only way to fix that is to solve that problem. It doesn’t mean I have to write the solution. Sometimes I just have to take a long walk or a long shower. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer and I have to sit in that discomfort. That is still a work day to me. My fingers may not be moving on the keys, but I am thinking. I’m trying. I know exactly what you said is correct. When I do solve it and when I write that solution, the pain that I’m feeling will go away. Therefore I can’t self-care that. That can’t be self-cared away. That has to just be worked away. It’s a really smart distinction that you’ve made there.
John: Cool. We will link to Chuck Wendig’s original blog post which we thought was terrific. Chuck Wendig also writes a lot about writing and the writing process, so if you’ve not read any of his books on writing you should do that as well, because he’s a very smart, clever guy and talks really honestly about the frustration of writing but also what’s cool about writing, and has a very good voice. I would encourage you to check out his books as well.
This clip is from Episode 539: How to Grow Old as a Writer.
We have two big topics this week. This one you proposed, so I’m going to let you take leadership on this topic of growing old as a writer.
Craig: I was just thinking about because we’ve been doing this for a while, you and I, and when we started, there was actually quite a lot of concern about ageism in our business. The general idea was that somewhere after 50 the business started kicking people out. In fact, when you look at what the Writers Guild considers a protected class, writers over the age of 40 are considered a protected class. The world has changed drastically since the mid-’90s. I was talking to some people the other day who were pointing out that the writers who are being employed as showrunners, and we’ll call them sort of major feature film writers, generally are older than they’ve ever been before.
I thought, this is interesting. There must be some sort of lessons that we can learn, since you and I are among the people that are still here, about how to keep yourself fresh and motivated and relevant as the years go on, because we are not kids no more.
John: No. Craig, do we want to talk about how to have a long career, or how to be comfortable with aging in your career? Are we talking both? What are the edges of this conversation?
Craig: I feel like they’re intertwined. So, rather than talk in a very practical way about something that is applicable to about 80 people, I want to talk about something that’s applicable to everybody. Everybody who pursues any kind of creative concern, whether you are a visual artist or an actor or a writer or a producer-director, whatever it is that you do, as you get older your relationship to your own art and your own creative process does need to change, or you’re going to suffer. A reflection of that may be in terms of the industry around you and people’s interest in you, or an audience’s response to you. Rather than view it through the lens of industry, I just want to talk about how to keep ourselves in a kind of good place with our own creative minds.
John: Great. The artistic side of growing older and how that relates to the craft and the thing that you’re trying to make on a daily basis.
Craig: Ideally that would be reflected back at you with some sort of industrial success, if that’s what you’re looking for as the years go on. First let’s just consider it all in terms of strategies, because I do think like anything else there’s just practical things that you can apply to yourself as time goes on. These are good thoughts and questions to just, even every birthday, take a 10-minute walk and think about it.
First, you have to think about what your task actually is. Because it changes over time. You may start as someone who for instance in the mid-’90s, you are, “I want to write sitcoms. I’m going to be a sitcom guy that works on network sitcoms.” There are hundreds of them. Over time, that changes. The tasks that are available that match what you think you do can change. Also, formats can change. We think of television as a certain thing now. It’s all over the place. When we started, it was something else. Chernobyl, for instance, couldn’t have been really done until a certain format change occurred. That meant paying attention to what was going on with formats.
There are two kinds of challenges that you can make to yourself. The first is, is the thing that I’m doing the only thing I can be doing, or could I be writing a different kind of thing, like a short story, or like you did, a novel, or like we’ve both done, some songs, or nonfiction work? Also, are we working within a format that is maybe dying out or just getting boring to us? What other formats might expand our own personal expression? If we don’t rotate the crops, as it were, then we will end up with a field that isn’t doing too well.
John: Let’s talk about rotating the crops, because I think that ties into a thing that happens with age, which is this burnout, which is that you’ve done one thing for so long that it’s boring to you. It’s just not interesting to you. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to do it again.
I was talking with a writer recently. She was just starting on a new script. She’s like, oh wow, wait, I’m back doing this again. I’m having to start a whole new script again. She was ready to. She knew how to write a script. It was also she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it that she would have had 5 years, 10 years earlier in her career.
I think that’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to writing the Arlo Finch books or to writing the Big Fish musical is it gave me a chance to be a beginner again, to be someone who is brand new to things and be curious and eager to explore and willing to make mistakes as I’m figuring out this new art form. When you have mastery over something, it’s nice, it’s helpful, things are easier for you, but they’re also less exciting. Picking a new thing to try to do… Just challenge yourself on a regular basis to try something that you haven’t done before as a writer, so that you get that experience of being new at things.
Craig: Yeah. Getting yourself in that rut is the function of a good thing, I think. We know that you need to focus and you need to practice and perfect. That’s part of how you get good at any creative pursuit. There is a point where, and a little bit like when you get in a video game you’ve maxed out your level, you’re now just walking around all the areas of Skyrim and beating everyone’s brains in with ease.
John: Yeah. You’re just doing a little side quest.
Craig: There’s no challenge because you are perfection, and it gets boring. You’re absolutely right. Being a beginner again is a wonderful thing. It’s a little scary, so it’s also a function of fear. Trying new things is scary. The thing that I’m scared of the most is actually, at this point now in my life, being bored. Challenge yourself to reconsider the nature of the formats you do work in, that you’re willing to work in, that you’re willing to try. Take a look at some formats that you didn’t maybe know even existed before, because there are new ones all the time. Challenge yourself to even break out of a genre and into another genre.
John: You’re really saying just stay curious and really look at the world around you and see, what is out there, what is a thing I could make out there that is interesting to me? It doesn’t mean you have to pursue everything. You don’t have to become a social media influencer. You don’t have to master TikTok. It’s okay to leave some stuff by the side, but also recognize that if these things are coming online, they’re serving some need. What is it you can bring to this need, and what can you do that could fit into this bigger universe of new content that’s being made?
Craig: You’ve mentioned the key to all of this, which is stay curious and be connected with the world. The biggest complaint people will make about, we’ll call them aging artists, is that they’re out of touch. How do we get out of touch? We get out of touch by essentially ignoring the world around us because we feel like we figured it out in a moment, and then we stay there. The world will move past that moment. If you don’t, you will be out of touch.
Sometimes people engage with the world simply in opposition. “Kids these days.” Let me just boil it down to that. “I don’t understand the world today. Everyone is on their phones.” Anybody who ever says, “You know what the problem is with the world today? Look around you man. Everyone is staring at their phones. They’re not looking at each other,” you go ahead and tell that person they’re an idiot, because the world changes. They are interacting in fact with more people faster than you could have ever done in your life. Is it true that sometimes uninterrupted eye-to-eye contact is wonderful? Absolutely. Is it a cliché, out-of-touch thing to say, “They’re all looking at their phones?” Absolutely out of touch.
Rather than instinctively saying, “In my day everything was perfect and now it stinks,” listen. Just listen to the world. Even if you disagree with it, listen to it, because perhaps in your experience of the world around you and your differences of opinions with it, you may find grist for the creative mill. Defensiveness isn’t going to get you anywhere.
John: Yeah. Being defensive is never a good look. When you say no to something, people stop engaging with you. I would say over this last 20 years, one of the most helpful ways I’ve been able to stay caught up with how things are for screenwriters and just for general people making creative things, I’ve always had an assistant. My assistants have always been younger than me. They’ve always been at the start of their careers and doing stuff that people at the start of their careers do. It’s been fascinating to see how the starts of careers have changed over the last 20 years because just the industry has changed around them.
Also, just engaging with the people who originally were writing into the website who are now Scriptnotes listeners. You see what they’re doing and what the challenges they’re facing, but also what is exciting to them. I may not be excited about the same things, but what they’re into is valid. Listening to what it is that they are going after is great. I always try to remember that the people I’m interacting with are the people who are going to be running this town in 10, 20, 30 years. It’s worth hearing what’s sparking for them because those are the kinds of movies and TV shows that we will be making the next couple decades.
Craig: Inherently, you are not jealous of the young, nor am I. I think a lot of older people get quietly, subconsciously jealous of young people. My feeling is that when we judge them, remember what it was like when we were judged by older people, because in my memory my feelings were not hurt at all. I just kind of rolled my eyes and made fun of them, because soon they were going to be dead and I was not. They were old and out of it and not vital. My feeling is, judging people who are younger and thinking that all they do, they’re obsessed with their influencers and their TikTok and blah blah blah, you’re not having any impact on them. They’re laughing at you. Maybe just listen to them and observe them. What’s wrong with that?
John: You can also ask advice, which I think a lot of times older people have a hard time asking advice of younger people because it reveals something that they don’t know. The fact is you just don’t know some things, so again, be curious. Ask the questions. Don’t ask the questions in a way that feels judgmental like, “Why are you doing it this crazy, stupid way?” What is it that’s interesting to you about this thing, or why did you decide to make that choice? Again, when you get to move into new fields, that’s very natural because you just actually just don’t know. You’re in a much better position to ask naïve questions because you don’t know what that thing is, versus us as screenwriters we have a good sense of how all the stuff fits together.
That said, when I talked with a writer, Liz Hannah, who just did a movie for Netflix, I am genuinely curious about what the experience is like making a movie for Netflix. What are the deliverables like on that movie? Are they expecting the same things that we’d expect in a theatrical feature delivery system where they want… Are they cutting negative? Are they doing all the stuff that we used to do for normal, traditional features, or is it more like a TV delivery system? Ask those questions and realize that the different kinds of things people are making these days are more likely the future than what we knew.
Craig: The things around us that happen that we can lose touch with in a dangerous way are not just I guess the different experiences that younger people are having, but also the general viewpoint of the world. Attitudes change. It’s very hard for us to keep up with it. It really is. I understand that.
I remember a friend once told me, he was like, “I’m going to keep listening to whatever the pop music station is, the current hits station, because I never want to be one of the old people that doesn’t know current music.” Inevitably, you will be. It’s not possible. There are some things that are going to leave you behind.
General attitudes and vibes and feelings are things you need to be in touch with, because what was once funny may not be anymore. Things like funny and dramatic and scary and shocking are not absolute values. They are relative to the time in which you live. If you’re not paying attention to the kinds of things that are shocking people or making them laugh, you’re going to flop, because you’re out of touch and out of time.
John: Let’s talk about authenticity, because one of the things I see which can be kind of embarrassing is when an older person is trying to seem younger than they are and is not acknowledging the fact that they are in a different generation than people they’re talking to.
Craig: Hello, fellow kids.
John: Language is one where they’re trying to use slang and they’re using it improperly. That’s sort of a tell. It’s not just that it’s embarrassing that they’re using it wrong. It’s that it’s clear that they’re not being authentic to who they are. I think one of the reasons why young people spark so clearly to Bernie Sanders is he feels very much himself. That is true of any generation. When we were in our 20s, we didn’t want the old person who was trying to be like us. We wanted the old person who felt like themselves. Don’t reach too far in terms of your own voice trying to sound young.
In terms of your writing voice, though, you are going to be writing characters of all different ages, all different backgrounds. You have to be listening for how those things sound so that your character’s voices don’t drift away.
Our example in last week’s episode, where we were listening to how people speak, that’s I think even more important as you age into your career, because your assumptions, your memory of what 20-somethings sounded like is not going to match how 20-somethings sound right now.
Craig: Yeah. Then we come to our last point, which is just language, just the realities of language, because you’re right. There is something terribly inauthentic about someone that is chasing language. They will always be five steps behind anyway. They will always be your dad walking in saying, “Oh, chill out. Oh wow, this is fresh.” Shut up, dad. That’s so old and lame. It’s faster now. Whatever is cool five seconds will not be cool five seconds from now, because that’s what youth is. It’s a churn.
Don’t chase it, but do let yourself be carried along by it. Be aware of it. Let yourself be old authentically without either chasing something, which is inauthentic, or denying the reality of it, which is just as terrible. Just be aware of the way that the world is changing and be aware of the way you’re changing. If you are those things and you are willing and open to evolving, then it doesn’t really matter how old you get. You’ll just be cool. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is 4,000 years old.
John: Good lord, yes.
Craig: She’s cool.
John: Yeah, she’s a lich, but she’s really cool.
Craig: She is a lich.
John: There’s a [unclear 01:17:21] hidden away someplace.
Craig: Yeah, she’s a lawful good lich. Very rare. Very rare.
John: Special when you find them.
Craig: She’s a lich.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan McDonnell. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Chris John Mince [ph]. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin and I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. You should get them. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record with Jake, who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Thanks, and we’ll see you next week.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, I’m here with Jake Kelley, who is the listener who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Jake, welcome to Scriptnotes.
Jake Kelley: Hello. Thank you for having me.
John: Tell me about the inspiration for this episode. What got you thinking about, “Oh, I should put together a compendium episode.”
Jake: It started because I think as listeners what we appreciate about you and Craig is your expertise on the craft of screenwriting. If you listen to enough episodes, it becomes evident that you’re both very wise and experienced guys in other manners. I wanted to put this episode together to showcase some of that wisdom that’s not necessarily craft-specific, but that can still help screenwriters.
John: Stuff that’s not about the words on the page, but the actual experience of being a screenwriter. Are you a screenwriter? Do you write yourself?
Jake: I do write. I am not a professional screenwriter.
John: I see by the little bit of Googling that you’re actually a visual artist. That’s your background?
Jake: That is correct.
John: How do you find the relationship between the creative process, writing, trying to write a script, versus the work you’re doing, painting or doing other visual arts?
Jake: I find the process to be pretty similar. I would say the biggest difference, and it’s a very surface-level difference, but I can only write for about two or three hours a day max, and usually not even that, whereas if I’m doing visual art, it’s pretty easy for me to do five, six, or seven hours straight.
John: They’re similar disciplines, but different in the way that doing physical art, you’re physically doing stuff, you’re in a space, you’re moving around, versus writing, you’re at a desk and you’re making a thousand decisions about this word or that word, this moment or that moment. Even Craig and I, we’re writing two or three hours maximum a day also. It’s not realistic to assume that you’re going to be able to crank out that number of hours.
Jake: There still is a lot of those decisions in creative art. Every time I mix a color, it’s like, is this the right color or the wrong color? Every line, I’m questioning it. It really is a process of thousands of micro decisions you’re making through the course of that working session.
John: Craig, of course, if he were on this podcast, he would say [unclear 01:20:48] drop out of film school. Did you go to art school? Did you learn how to do this in an academic setting?
Jake: Yes. I did go to the University of Wisconsin, where I studied fine art.
John: What are those classes like? I know a writing class, because I went through a journalism program. Those metrics were like, are you able to do the job or not do the job, versus it would seem to be harder to figure out, is this student in my visual arts class actually progressing? Are they doing the work that deserves an A or a B or a pass or a fail?
Jake: I think that was the trouble for some of my educators, some of them being grad students. I would say overall it is measured by progress. These classes were open to non-artists a lot of times. We did try to foster a healthy atmosphere if somebody wanted to come in from a science field and just try to do a life drawing. It was based on progress and effort and attempt. You’d just blow it off, but that was the starting place.
John: Now, coming from a visual background, were you always also writing? Did you write even back in those days or was it a later thing that you got into?
Jake: We can say I was doing some writing, but where they really came together was I was doing comics and comic strips, which is really both writing and drawing at the same time.
John: Talk to me about the comic strips, because that’s absolutely true that you were both having to figure out what the stories, what the words are, what the actual point is, yet you have to have a strong visual representation of how that works. As you were doing comics, were you scripting them out first and then figuring out the panels? What was your process?
Jake: For that, if it was a simple four-panel comic, generally I would just have a vague idea of one I wanted to do. I would fill in the visual information, and then do the text last. Other people did it the other way. If it’s longer form, then I would probably start with some sort of words on a page to help guide me, break up the storytelling information that way.
John: I’m writing a graphic novel right now. I’m loving it. It’s a great process, but I’m finding it is actually exhausting to really have to visualize the page and think, okay, how is this going to be presented on the page, what’s actually happening panel by panel to get me through it, what is the top-of-page to bottom-of-page experience? I love it, but it’s just, even after 20 years doing this as a job, it is still different than the normal screenwriting I’m doing.
Jake: When you’re screenwriting and you’re using only words, what is the engagement of the visual process there for you?
John: Screenwriting with just words, I am envisioning the space, envisioning who the people are and where they are in the space and basically what they’re doing. I just create the loop of this is the moment, this is the scene, this is happening. I don’t think shot by shot. I don’t think what the coverage is going to be. I don’t think necessarily who’s big in frame, who’s small in frame, usually. I just have to put the people there and get them in motion, as opposed to doing this writing now for this graphic novel, I really have to think about who’s in that frame and who am I focused on in that moment. It feels a lot more like the directing from the page has always been okay, but it feels like calling out those closeups, calling out what it is moment by moment I’m going to be seeing. That is a little exhausting for me.
Jake: Of course.
John: I want to talk to you about, you pulled for this episode way back to Episode 6. When did you start listening to this show? When did you find all these little moments? Were you always listening from the beginning or did you go back through the archives? How did you find all these moments?
Jake: I believe I discovered your podcast, I want to say around Episode 390 or so. I’m not actually sure what date that lines up with, maybe three years ago or so. At first I was just listening to the new episode every week it came out. Then I did start to become more interested in the past episodes, because there is a wealth of information there. What I did was I would go reverse chronological by… You break it up into 50-episode chunks. I would go backwards a chunk, but then within that chunk, go forward. I’d jump to Episode 250, then go 251, 252. Then when I reached 300, I would jump backwards to 200 and then 201.
John: I’ve never listened to the back-catalogs. I have a memory of recording them, but I can’t remember who I was at that time or what the show was like.
Jake: Of course.
John: How much has the show changed when you listen back to those early episodes versus what’s happening now on the show?
Jake: I don’t think it actually changed all that much. I know that some people say that the earlier episodes are a little bit rough around the edges. I think that’s only true maybe in terms of microphone quality. Very, very early on, I think you and Craig maybe don’t have quite the same rapport. Honestly, it’s not that noticeable. It really is you could jump to those back-episodes that far back and really truly have the same experience. You guys are as wise and smart as always.
John: Aw. Jake, thank you so much for this. Thank you very much again for writing with this suggestion, because it really was a great pitch for putting together the kind of episodes that we’ve been doing more of as Megana’s come online, to really pick stuff up from this big catalog and make episodes that make sense. We some rerun old episodes, and that can be great, but so much of that information gets weirdly out of date, and our wonderful things don’t match up to anything. A suggestion like this for a special compendium episode is great. Jake, thank you so much again for this.
Jake: Of course. Thanks for having me.
John: Absolutely.
Links:
- Episode 6: How Kids Become Screenwriters
- Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing
- Episode 425: Tough Love vs. Self Care
- Episode 439: How to Grow Old as a Writer
- Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to all the episodes in our back catalogue, including the ones sampled here.
- Thanks to Jake Kelley for the episode suggestion!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Christiaan Mentz (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (with segments by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan Mcdonnell!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 538: On Being A Screenwriter, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig host another round of the Three Page Challenge where they look at listener pages and offer feedback on what’s working and how to avoid common pitfalls. They discuss writing gore, finding your tone, and introducing a character’s problem.
We also follow up on villains, pirates and European script consultants. We then ponder a long-nagging question: why do all action heroes have names that begin with J?
In our bonus segment for premium members, we talk about our experiences with anesthesia and how people are knocked out in The Last of Us.
Links:
- Has Anyone Ever Actually Tied a Damsel in Distress to a Railway Track? by Karl Smallwood
- Pirating the Oscars 2023: The Final Curtain Call by Andy Baio
- Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John? by Demetria Glace for Slate
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: Flotsam by Sam Darcy, Sockfoot by Jesse Allard, and Spark by Rachel Thomas
- Pijja Palace
- how I found the ‘so no head’ vine road in 15 minutes by RAINBOLT
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Richie Molyneux (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Only One of Us Can Be the Hero first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 587 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Often on this program, we’re answering questions, but today we’re going to be asking perhaps the most fundamental question of them all. How Would This Be a Movie? That’s right, we’ll be looking at stories in the news and trying to fit them into a three-act structure, or more likely, an eight-part limited series structure. We’ve got doppelgangers, Craig, family drama, romance, and more.
Craig: My goodness.
John: Craig, you sounded sad in your hello. Do you want to explain to listeners why you’re sad?
Craig: Yeah. I’m in a new office, and everything’s wrong. Nothing’s in the right place. All my wires are messed up. My seat feels weird. The room is weird. My monitor’s funny, and it’s not in the right spot. I don’t do well with change. I really do not do well with change. I struggle.
John: Therefore you’ve chosen an industry in which day by day, week by week, you’re going to be doing new things. Maybe fundamentally, 50 years ago, you made some choices that brought you here. The first thing is acknowledging that you’re uncomfortable and then being able to move past that, learning to live with some of the discomfort, and rather than raging against the dying of the light, just accept that this is where you’re at.
Craig: I want to throw a tantrum.
John: Tantrums are great.
Craig: I don’t throw tantrums like angry tantrums. In Hollywood when you hear about people throwing tantrums, you immediately think of Scott Rudin stapling his assistant’s forehead to a desk or something.
John: Throwing a phone.
Craig: Or throwing a phone at someone’s mouth. All I want to do is just cry. I just want to get on the floor and cry.
John: Craig’s over-tired.
Craig: I kind of am. Honestly, it’s been a lot. We do this podcast. Then I also do a podcast for the show. Then I’m on other people’s podcasts. I feel like every day I’m podcasting.
John: That’s what the 2020s are is podcasting.
Craig: You know what? That’s all right, because this is the OG podcast.
John: Indeed it is.
Craig: You guys are my happy place.
Megana Rao: Aw.
John: Aw.
Craig: Thank you, Megana. See, John had no emotional response to that whatsoever, and you were immediately like, “Aw.” That’s why we love Megana.
Megana: Aw.
John: [inaudible 00:02:27]. We’ll talk through all these things on our podcast, but also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to discuss the frustrations surrounding and solutions for overpowered characters, both the characters we write but also obviously the DND characters that we’re playing, because I now have a 15th level warlock who has an 8th level spell. It’s so powerful, and yet limited in a certain way. With that power doesn’t come just great responsibility, comes really great challenges. We’ll talk about overpowered characters.
Craig: Which Level 8 spell have you chosen?
John: I chose Feeblemind. I’m questioning my decision.
Craig: That’s a great one.
John: It’s a great one. It’s a great one for a DM to pick against players, but I’m not sure it’s such a good spell for a player to pick against a DM.
Craig: That’s an interesting-
John: I’m dependent on you.
Craig: You are. We have only seen Feeblemind in action once, and it was you guys that got Feebleminded, weirdly enough.
John: It is brutal.
Craig: One of you did. When it works, oof. That’s all I have to say about that. Oof.
John: Let’s do some follow-up. Back in Episode 579, we had Rian Johnson facing off against ChatGPT. Megana, Bobby wrote in with a question.
Megana: Bobby wrote, “At this current moment, can a studio use a bot like ChatGPT to create stories, a basic outline, and then hire a WGA writer to write the teleplay? That is, instead of hiring writers to pitch on a story, they do that internally, they figure out the story they want to tell, and then they hire a writer to write it. They’re not paying a human being for the story by credit, the outline phase, or the pitch. Not like they were paying for pitches anyway. Am I right, folks?”
Craig: First of all, you don’t want them paying for pitches.
John: You really don’t.
Craig: I’m just going to keep saying this over and over. They don’t pay for things the way that we think that they pay for things. What they’re doing is buying things. Never say pay for pitches. Always say buy pitches. If they buy your pitch, they own it. They don’t do anything if they don’t own it. Please, for the love of god, no paying for pitches.
John: That actually speaks to one of the issues surrounding this. They don’t want to pay for things that they don’t own. They want to own things. It’s really unclear at this point whether something they generated through ChatGPT, a work of literary material they’ve created through ChatGPT, whether that’s even copyrightable. That’s still unsettled law at this point. That’s going to be one of the first things.
Backing up a little bit, I would say, Bobby, you have to keep in mind that a studio executive producer, anybody could say, “Hey, I want to do a movie about a guy who loves paperclips.” They could write up a thing and then give you the thing. If they’re writing up something that’s big enough, long enough themselves, they are a writer. They are creating literary material, in theory. The ChatGPT is a new wrinkle in this, but studio executives always could make up some stuff themselves if they wanted to.
Craig: I think that there’s probably some copyright law that’s going to need to be written. Many people don’t know this, that it’s enshrined in our Constitution itself. The founders, I think it’s fair to say, did not foresee artificial intelligence or guns that could shoot rapidly, side note. I think we’re going to need to write some law to make it clear that copyright is something that is afforded to humans and not AI.
Here’s what I think. I think that if a studio does this, then a lot of writers may be less inclined to actually come in and work on it. Even if they were, they would still have to rewrite the story no matter what. A story would have to be assigned to them. No, I don’t think this would work this way.
John: A thing to also keep in mind is that the MBA, the basic agreement that the WGA has for all writing work being done for the studios, already does have language in there that says a writer is a person, that the writer shall not be deemed to be any corporate or impersonal purveyor of literary material or the rights therein. There’s a lot of stuff in it that already says we’re talking about human beings there.
Is there space for clarification about how and when these tools can be used? Absolutely. I think it’s an open question about how we best do that. I don’t think at this moment as we’re recording this in 2023 it’s an imminent crisis. I do know that there are some projects out there where there’s folks who are saying, “We’re having a computer write this script. It’s going to be written by a computer.” Okay, but I don’t think that is the crisis next coming down the pike.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Another bit of follow-up, Yusef was writing about other people’s voices, Megana.
Megana: Yusef writes, “This is mainly for Craig. I recently got Apple Plus, and I’ve been catching up with Mythic Quest. I noticed you wrote a couple episodes for the series.”
Craig: One episode.
Megana: “In Scriptnotes podcast 585, you said you can’t imagine writing in other people’s voices.”
Craig: Correct.
Megana: Since Mythic Quest isn’t a show that you’re running, in typical TV fashion, the writers would write in the showrunner’s voice or the showrunner would rewrite the episode themselves. I’m curious if Ganz, Day, and McElhenney allowed you to do all the writing yourself, or did they still give you an outline and you wrote it in your own voice? Did they ever rewrite your episodes themselves?”
Craig: Okay, episode. Just want to be really clear. One, Yusef. I wrote the episode called Backstory! I have been in some episodes as an actor, but I’ve only written one episode of Mythic Quest. It was the episode called Backstory. It was in Season 2. Mythic Quest each season does a standalone episode. That was that season’s standalone episode.
I still continued to not write in the showrunner’s voice, because Backstory! did not take place in the same timeline as Mythic Quest. It took place decades earlier, in the ‘70s. There was one character in it that was from the main cast of Mythic Quest. We are portraying that character at a much younger age. It was consistent with that character’s voice but in a much different way. It’s a difference between a man who’s 80 and a man who’s 25.
The way that worked is I was in a room. I’ve never done this before. There are a lot of writers at Mythic Quest. You can break off into a little smaller group of writers. I’m going to apologize if I forget anybody who was on Team Idiot. That’s what we called ourselves. Team Idiot was myself, Katie McElhenney, Ashly Burch, Humphrey Ker. I think that may have been it. I apologize again if I’m missing anyone.
We just talked through how the story could function. We had the basic idea of it. We talked through what it could be. We outlined it on the wipey board. Then we brought in everybody, Rob and Megan and David and everyone, and we just pitched it out, told the story. They were all happy. They made some suggestions. We incorporated some of those suggestions into the story on the board.
Then I went away and wrote it by myself, because that’s how I write, like a weirdo alone in a small, dark room with the windows closed. I wrote a draft, and I sent it in, and they shot it. That was it. That’s how that worked. It wasn’t the normal way of doing things, I must admit.
For instance, I think Katie McElhenney, who did Dark Quiet Death in Season 1, which was that standalone episode, and stand-above, I’m pretty sure she did that Mazin style, in a dark room by herself, with the windows closed.
John: Circling back to Yusef’s assumptions is that if you were writing a traditional episode that had a bunch of the standing characters, you were on the normal sets, it was a normal episode, the expectation might be that you would need to match a little bit more of the style of how the scripts are normally working, just because stuff could be changing around, and everywhere else is doing the same. If you, Craig, had a really strange style on the page, it would be weird for everyone to have to grapple with a script that felt so different. That was not the case here.
Craig: This one was designed to be different. I don’t think I would ever dare to write a standard episode of Mythic Quest, because I think I would blow it, for this very reason. I think I can do one that’s carved out and has its own thing, with an ending, by the way, a real, solid kachunk ending.
I am amazed by the things that those guys can do in that style and also their ability to work with each other so well. It’s pretty great. A ton of credit to the showrunners there and everybody, honestly. They do a great job.
John: Last bit of follow-up, I just want to point out that on our podcast, we’ve had four of the Celebrity Jeopardy contestants on. We’ve talked to Ike Barinholtz and Joel Kim Booster at our live show. We knew they were both on it. Also, B.J. Novak and Matt Rogers.
Craig: Wow.
John: Out of 20-some people, 4 of them are Scriptnotes guests.
Craig: Maybe the rest of them should show the hell up.
John: I think so.
Craig: How have we not had Patton Oswalt on this show?
John: That I think is the greatest oversight of all.
Craig: Can I just say… Maybe this will help get Patton Oswalt on the show. Maybe he’s reluctant. Maybe he doesn’t like coming on podcasts. I don’t know. I will say this. He’s my favorite stand-up comedian. I think I’ve listened to everything he’s done, all of it. I think he’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant, just special. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t come on the show. Maybe he knows that and he doesn’t want to listen to me talk about it.
John: I think it would also be fascinating if the folks who were putting together the next round of Celebrity Jeopardy, if they are just going through our Scriptnotes guest list and figuring out-
Craig: Probably.
John: … “Who are we going to get on the show? They clearly will do very well and be incredibly popular on our program.”
Craig: I bet you that’s true.
John: The Venn diagram overlap is so exciting.
Craig: Venn.
John: How excited is Venn that, whoever Venn was or is, that their name is just always going to be there?
Craig: I think Venn is dead. I gotta be honest with you. There’s no way Venn’s alive. Megana, can you do a quick Google search for us to see if Senor Venn is still alive?
Megana: “Popularized by John Venn in the 1880s.”
Craig: There we go. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’ve heard enough.
John: I think Venn and Overton of Overtown window, they’re just up there in Heaven looking down at what they’ve created. It’s pretty great.
Craig: Yes, indeed.
John: Let’s get on to the question of the day. How Would This Be a Movie? We got a couple really good ones here from our listeners. I added one late to the podcast here, Craig, and I apologize. Just moments before you signed on, I added this here.
I want to talk you through this first one. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s simple but juicy and compelling. This is from NBC News, Andy Eckardt and Aina Khan writing this up. It happens in Germany. This 23-year-old woman, with the help of a friend, killed a stranger to stage her death and, quote, “start a new life due to family problems,” police and prosecutors in Germany said.
Basically, what happened in this story is you have this 23-year-old woman who starts setting up dummy accounts on Instagram, looking for another one who looks a lot like her, with the plan that she and her friend are going to track down this person, lure them under false pretenses, kill them, and make it seem that she’s the one who’s died, basically faking her own death by killing a stranger.
Craig: What a bummer. All you ever did was nothing. You just happened to look like an asshole. That asshole finds you and kills you. Oh, man.
John: Man. A couple of ranges of thoughts here. First off, I could picture the A-level movie version of this, like sort of Gone Girl, that kind of thing, where it’s actually more from the perspective of these people trying to commit this murder. It’s almost like Hitchcock’s Rope, where you’re there with the killers and you’re trying to do this thing or cover up this thing. That’s a total possibility for the A-list version of it. Also, this feels like this could be the A-plot of any given CBS procedural. It’s shocking, but it’s a way to do it, or a Law and Order.
Craig: In the old days there would be a movie, I think. These movies don’t get made as much anymore. There was a time where we were getting some really good neo noir films, Body Heat. I think you could make an interesting neo noir out of this. I’d love to see what Scott Frank would do with this. Do you want to know what my twist twist is?
John: Tell me, tell me.
Craig: Imagine this story. You’ve got a woman, and she’s murdered, and you’re trying to figure out why. Then you realize, oh, wait, the woman that we thought was murdered isn’t even the woman. It’s somebody else who looks like the woman, who’s gone missing. Somehow, if there could be triplets or twins… If there’s twins and they both are like, “One of you needs to die or seem to die. Let’s find somebody that looks like the two of us.” I don’t know, there’s gotta be some sort of twin thing that we could do.
John: Another thing that we’re discussing goes back to the actual, real people in Germany. Interestingly, the story that we are basing this off of, the names are all suppressed, because Germany has these very strict privacy laws. We don’t even know the names of the people who are involved here, which is just wild. For our purposes, I don’t think we’d need to know the names. I think we’re just taking this as a premise and applying it to something completely different.
Craig: I think so.
John: We’re saying this could be a movie. It can really scale. It can go all the way from A-plot of a given episode of a procedural to an actual, full movie.
Craig: I think it’s more likely that just by you bringing this onto the show, we will be seeing this on a procedural within a year.
John: I agree, because the ChatGPTs will have looked through the transcripts, found it, and therefore [inaudible 00:16:22]. That’s a possibility.
Craig: The ChatGPTs. I like that there’s an army of them now. I like it.
John: There’s a whole army.
Craig: I love it.
John: Let’s get to our next story. The headline for this is The Godfather, Saudi-Style. It’s Anuj Chopra writing for The Guardian. Craig, you did have a chance to read through this. This is a long one. I’m sorry for the long read there. I thought it was really compelling. Do you want to talk us through what you remember of it/
Craig: Sure. This is the story of Mohammed bin Salman, who we tend to refer to as MBS, came to power. I did not know any of this.
John: Nor did I.
Craig: He was not supposed to be the guy. There’s this interesting thing going on in Saudi Arabia that I was also not aware of, where the same family, which I guess they’re the Sauds, the House of Saud, has been running Saudi Arabia as a monarchy for quite some time. The way they’ve done it is by alternating I think between cousins or uncles.
John: It says in the family, but never direct, same family line. It always goes laterally, which honestly, I have to say, feels really smart.
Craig: The point of it was to avoid what just happened. The point is, no one little family line is the only one. This way, the family as a large entity doesn’t fall prey to what a lot of palace intrigue ends up with. It’s just families breaking apart and then one person just dominating the others. Yet that is what’s happened here.
John: Yeah, it is. There was a plan in place for who would be the next in line. You can think of this as Succession to some degree. It’s who is the next person who’s supposed to be there, who’s Nayef, who’s the king’s nephew.
Craig: Nayef, the king’s nephew.
John: Basically, he gets tipped off that there’s potential problems. It’s clear that he’s going to be… Basically, him and his guards get pulled out [inaudible 00:18:22] sign these documents saying that they are not seeing a succession and that MBS should be the next real person that should be doing this. It’s a palace coup. It’s not violent. This isn’t guns and such. Basically, by locking somebody down and not letting them leave the country, you’re forcing them to sign over their succession.
Craig: It was as close to violent as you can get without being violent. In fact, it did turn violent. Initially, it was just we’re going to lock you in a room and tell you that you’re going to resign and you’re going to pledge allegiance to MBS. If you do not, as the article states, your female family members will be raped. That’s an interesting way to just immediately go to 100 as part of your patriarchal monarchy. Just fascinating.
It also mentions in the article, I’m sorry to laugh, but I find this darkly amusing that they said, “First, your female family members will be raped. Second, we are going to withhold your medication for hypertension.” I think I’m stuck on number one. I gotta be honest with you. I gotta be honest. Number one is worse than me not having my hypertension meds, but fine.
I think at some point he was in fact re-detained, so he was, “Okay, you can just live here for a while.” Then at some point, as is often the case with these situations, the paranoid dictator does what paranoid dictators do and decide, “You know what? Actually, I think you are still a huge problem. I think what I’m going to do is lock you in a room and beat you.” There’s an implication that that also occurred.
While this is all going on, we also note that they had killed Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist. These guys are terrible. The extent that our country continues to do business with them, it’s just startling. Just startling.
John: The other main character involved here is a man named Saad Al Jabri, who is Nayef’s advisor and intelligence chief. He’s the man who was trying to give advice to him and help sort through the situation. He was out of the country as this all happened and was able to get most of his family out, except for two family members who were still there. Those two family members were not allowed to leave. MBS is basically saying, “No, no, come back, come back, and everything will be fine.” When Al Jabri doesn’t come back, MBS starts to trump up charges about corruption and other things, and so Al Jabri has to flee first to Canada and then to other places and ultimately is now in the process of filing a lawsuit against MBS.
Craig: Now that a lawsuit has been filed, I’m sure everything will be fine.
John: It’s a question of at what point do you speak up, because in keeping your silence, you might be trying to keep your imprisoned family members alive, but at a certain point, you have to speak up.
Craig: From the point of view of what we are doing, there are a lot of elements here that would suggest that this could be a movie. There are main characters. Al Jabri is a potentially great protagonist, because he’s very smart. He’s very capable. We love watching movies where protagonists are smart and capable and are attempting to out-maneuver very powerful people with entire states behind them. Al Jabri has done it. He could smell that trouble was coming and just went, “I think I’m going to go to Turkey real fast.” I think days later, it was clear that he had made a very smart decision. The challenge in bringing this story to film is that I don’t know if it’s over yet.
John: It’s not.
Craig: That’s the biggest issue for me.
John: You’re right in the middle of it. I feel like with some time, with some closure, you can really tell the whole story, but right now it just feels like a dot dot dot. There’s not a way out of this. I think there’s useful things you could take from this in terms of the dynamics and apply them to another story, but I don’t think you can directly take what’s happening in the House of Saud right now as the meat of either a movie or an eight-part limited series. There’s exciting moments that are happening, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a resolution here.
Craig: I do think this is also tricky territory given that access to information is difficult here. Also, to be fair to writers, the Saudis apparently have no problem committing violence against innocent people who do nothing other than report the truth. You have to be aware if you’re going to be digging deep into the situation that you’re going to be drawing some unwanted attention.
John: Scrutiny that’s not only applied to you but applied to the production, applied to anybody who’s involved with the production. That makes it much less likely that you’re going to see something, this exact story being told. That’s just the reality.
Craig: Until there is a resolution, yeah, I agree with you.
John: Let’s talk about Nikki Finke.
Craig: I swore I never would, but okay.
John: You never would, but here we are.
Craig: Here we are.
John: This is actual context for it.
Craig: It’s a great, great piece that was written here.
John: It really is a great piece. This is Jacob Bernstein writing for the New York Times. For folks who are outside the industry and don’t know who Nikki Finke was, Nikki Finke created Deadline Hollywood, Hollywood Daily if you want to call it that. It was a website, a blog that rivaled Variety and Hollywood Reporter, ended up supplanting them and becoming more important in the daily workings of the town. It was always about breaking the news in a very bombastic way, a lot of opinion mixed with facts, a lot of bullying on behalf of Nikki Finke, who was this larger-than-life character. She was feared and loathed, but also sometimes admired.
What I like about this piece is that I think it was fair in the sense of talking about she was not a good journalist in any sort of good journalist sense, but she was just a smasher and destroyer of things in sometimes ways that needed to happen.
Craig: I don’t know if she was good enough to quality as a double-edged sword. She certainly broke stuff around her. It reminds me of, you’ve seen Glass Onion, the wonderful speech that Rian Johnson wrote about what disrupting is. It’s mostly just breaking shit. She broke a lot of shit.
She was journalistically irresponsible. I don’t think that that’s any kind of slanderous thing to anyone. This is a woman who would report things. They were wrong. People would tell her they were wrong. She would then edit the article to change them but would not indicate that any correction had been made, which is fundamental standard of journalism. She was a bully. She did scream at people. She was mean. She would threaten.
The only thing that was really fascinating about me to Nikki Finke was that she was not doing it for the reason everybody else does stuff for in Hollywood, which is money. She didn’t seem particularly concerned about money. She lived alone in an apartment. She was angry. You could just tell that she was really angry at Hollywood. She liked to put on the mantle on angry companies on behalf of the working people. I don’t think that’s true either, because she was super buddy-buddy with a lot of these people that ran Hollywood. I think she just liked breaking stuff. I really do.
John: I think you’re right. I think you could say inadvertently she had maybe shined a spotlight on some real problems in entertainment journalism in the sense that because of advertising and other things, they are so uniquely linked and tied. They’re never objectively reporting about the things that are happening in the town. Because she wasn’t beholden to those things, she could report on things that no one else would report on and say things other people weren’t saying in print, but they weren’t always accurate or truthful. That’s why she developed this terrifying reputation.
What was interesting about this stuff that was brand new that I’d never seen before was really her relationship with Jay Penske, who was the very rich person who bought out Deadline and Hollywood Daily and ultimately I think Variety as well, plus a lot of other magazines and journalism places. Her relationship with him was really fascinating, the ups and the downs and how she hated him and yet how he was the one who actually showed up in her last days in Florida.
Craig: You get the feeling that Nikki, for people who knew her, because we sure didn’t. I only had one brief exchange with Nikki Finke, and it was terrible. I think that was true for a lot of people. For the people who knew her, you can get this thread of care-taking, that they were worried about her a lot. The article talks about what appears to be, if not a suicide attempt, a legitimate threat to do self-harm. She was sick. She was physically sick. She had diabetes. This sums it up. I’ll read from the article.
“One year, Miss Finke lamented to Mr. Penske that she wasn’t looking forward to Thanksgiving. She didn’t cook and planned to spend the holiday alone in her apartment on a day when restaurants were closed.” That’s rather sad. “Mr. Penske stopped in at the Beverly Hills Hotel, ordered a three-course meal, and took it to her building,” himself, by the way. He’s a billionaire. “Soon after leaving it with the doorman, he heard from her by phone. The meal included a sweet dessert, which enraged the diabetic Miss Finke.” Quote, “’She said I was trying to kill her,’ Mr. Penske recalled.”
Now we can laugh about this, but I have to say, so much of what I read in this article implies that Nikki Finke was struggling with mental illness. Her mood swings, which apparently were quite extreme, her, what would you call it, shut-in-ness?
John: Reclusivity or agoraphobia.
Craig: Yeah, her life as a recluse. Also, you could tell from her work there was something compulsive about it. She would be there, sometimes reporting things within seconds of them happening. Then a lot of times, if her reporting was late or somebody else got the scoop, she would make these bizarre excuses, which I guess goes way back to when she was working for other people. She would just constantly be calling in with strange and bizarre excuses for why she was late. That’s why she got fired from everywhere. She just would not make her deadlines, amusingly enough, for a woman that created a site called Deadline.
It seems like there was a lot of mental illness going on here. To the extent that she was suffering, I feel bad for her. To the extent that her suffering led her to inflict that pain on other people, I am not sorry for her. She was a fascinating person. I think you could make a very interesting story about her. It would need to be rather small, because I think this is about as inside baseball as it gets.
John: I was looking for comps and thinking about what kind of movie this is. Can You Ever Forgive Me might be one, in that you have a character who is abrasive and really off-putting, and yet ultimately because the lens is on her, you can actually understand why she feels she needs to do the things she needs to do is an option.
Craig: It is, but that story I think is better because it’s not about Hollywood.
John: Agreed.
Craig: That’s the part about this that… Remember The Late Shift, the movie, the Betty Thomas film about the late-night wars?
John: The late-night wars.
Craig: That was well done, but it’s a confection, because ultimately, the stakes are as low as they can be. Who will get to host The Tonight Show? It’s not that important. It was well done. I think you could do something like that. It would need to be in its own way funny. I don’t think you can do a super heavy version of this. I just think it would be too much.
John: I do remember that too. I think it’s also a question of where you start and where you stop. Do you start the story when she’s dismissed by the trades or basically unable to get the job that she wants and creates this site for herself, which is inspiring rise, and then the crash and the sale and all that? Maybe. It’s a question of is that the course of a movie or are you doing that as a limited series. I don’t know that there’s probably enough stuff to make it more than two hours worth of entertainment.
Craig: I think that there is the potential for a camp classic. You’re talking about this emotionally wild human being who is a shut-in in her apartment and yelling at people on the phone. This could be Mommy Dearest. If it is, I’m there.
John: I think it’s a good point. I think to take this as a jumping off place to get to something bigger and funnier, great. Movies about Hollywood sometimes get awards, but they’re not generally huge hits is the other thing to be thinking about.
Craig: They are not generally huge hits. Generally speaking, I don’t like them. There is something inherently narcissistic about movies about movies, which is why I’m still so impressed by The Fabelmans, because I just loved it so much. It was about Hollywood. Generally speaking, I just don’t like movies about Hollywood.
John: We have two more here. The first one comes from a listener, Josie. She writes about the nun and the monk who fell in love and married. This tells the story of Sister Mary Elizabeth and Robert, who’s a Carmelite monk. They’re both in their 50s when they meet. What struck me so much as so interesting about this is they barely spoke. It was like he touched her elbow or something, and that was the spark that sat the whole thing up and going.
Craig: So hot.
John: Craig, you’re saying so hot. Do you think there’s a story here to be told?
Craig: No. It’s adorable. I think it’s very sweet. It shows you that love can flourish, even in the strangest ways. It was such a sweet thing to read the way that the two of them were like, “Wait, what did we just do?” and then all the things they have to go through, and then somehow yet on the other end of it, there they are in love with each other and it’s working is beautiful.
I think there’s been another article at some point before about arranged marriages. This isn’t an arranged marriage but it almost is, in the sense that if all you know of each other is that one time, my elbow hit your elbow, you arranged your own marriage. The fact that it lasted… There’s something fascinating about this. I wonder what’s going to happen.
We’ve gone so far down the road. Megana, you knew I was going to turn to you at this point. We’ve gone so far down the road of, everybody just pick who you want and it’s entirely up to you and choose what you want. Everyone’s just drowning in choice to the extent that people really are struggling to make choices.
Here’s my proposal. You do a Tinder, except instead of hookup culture or even just dating, it’s like, we’re going to give you a choice of 20 people. You can meet five of them and you’re going to marry one of them. Now you’re married. Do you think that app catches on in the future?
Megana: I think what’s so fascinating about this story is that it was an accident, and she only met him once after, what, 24 years in this convent?
Craig: Yeah.
Megana: How do we simulate that?
Craig: Basically, then what you’re saying is you can use this app, but when you register for it, you are sworn to celibacy for 24 years. At that point, I have to say everyone’s going to start looking real good. Great point. Not sure we have a way to monetize this. Concerned about the business plan. I don’t know. I thought there was something very inherently encouraging about this, but I don’t know how I would make it a movie. Can you figure this out?
John: We should say that the article we’re reading about is from Aleem Maqbool for the BBC, and there’s probably other versions of this that may go into more depth on certain things. I wouldn’t be surprised if they write their own book at some point.
Here’s the thing that sparked for me, is that we always think about this love at first sight happening to teenagers, because that’s when this should happen, but the fact that these two characters who should not have been looking for love at all, suddenly it happens, it’s just overwhelming when it happens, is nice and is inspiring.
I wondered if it was a play, and then I decided, no, it couldn’t be a play, because I think I need those close-ups. I need those moments. I need to see those elbows touching that make that happen. I don’t think it’s a play. I think it’s an Emma Thompson and some other British actor in it. Maybe it’s great and it wins a bunch of awards.
Craig: Isn’t that Howards End anyway?
John: It is Howards End to some degree.
Craig: I think when it comes to restrained romances, Age of Innocence comes to mind, with the little touch of the hand, or even in a very sick way, Silence of the Lambs, is the moment where their fingers touch, and it’s like that’s the extent of our weird romance. There is room for that. I just don’t know if this is the story that’s going to get you there.
John: I’ll say unlike Silence of the Lambs, I think there’s a gold circle movie to be made here. You know what I’m talking about, which is that classy British but also very cheery, or a working title.
Craig: A working title sounds like a better fit.
John: You can see how this whole package came together and why Universal is releasing this now. I think there’s something that can be charming about this. Also the fact that everyone else around them should be like, “You’re not supposed to be falling in love.” It’s just like, but why? They know it’s love. That could be inspiring.
Craig: Don’t you want to write this scene though? I’m quoting from the woman here, Lisa, who was Sister Mary Elizabeth, when she told her prioress how she was feeling. “The prioress was a little bit snappy with me, so I put my pants and a toothbrush in a bag and I walked out, and I never went back to Sister Mary Elizabeth.” I’m like, wait, okay, toothbrush I get, sure, but then also “my pants?” Socks, shirt, underwear?
John: Nope, don’t need none of those, just pants.
Craig: Deodorant, scissors, hairbrush? Just toothbrush and pants. I guess when you’re a nun, that’s what you got.
John: Got what you got.
Craig: You got what you got.
John: We also have a history of… Looking back to The Sound of Music, the decision to leave the nunnery is a big, momentous decision. Any movie that we make about this is going to echo back to that, just because that’s one of our favorite references, which is great too.
Our takeaway from the story of the nun and the monk, I think there’s maybe a movie here. This is a case where you might actually want to use their life rights, so you could say it’s based on a true story. You would have to get their official version.
Craig: My feeling is, as we often conclude with these stories, that this may be good fodder for side characters in a movie. If you’re doing a romantic comedy and your neighbors are a former nun and former monk who fell in love and married, that might be a very interesting side amusement. I don’t know if I would want to watch a whole story just about the two of them.
John: Let’s wrap up on a story that Rosario sent in. This is about 13 stranded strangers who go on a road trip. We’ll link to a version by Francesca Street for CNN. Essentially, it’s a bunch of folks. Their flight landed in Orlando, but they needed to get to Nashville. There was no way for them to get to Nashville because of plans getting canceled. A bunch of them had to get to Nashville by a certain time. They decided let’s just rent a van all together and drive from Orlando to Nashville, Tennessee. Craig, what do you think of this as a premise?
Craig: It’s a fine premise. There’s a wonderful musical called Come From Away, which is very similar in its own way. It’s about a plane that was diverted on 9/11. The only place it could land was I think in Newfoundland. It’s about this tiny, tiny little town with all these folks who are there stranded, because the airspace is shut down, and people coming together and meeting each other and all that. Yes. It’s just it’s very small is my concern.
John: It’s really small.
Craig: It’s just people in a van.
John: It’s people in a van. It’s a road trip story. You’ve made some road trip stories. They’re not easy, because you don’t have a place to come back to. It’s not quite clear. You have a destination, I guess, but you just have a physical destination. You don’t have an emotional destination for where you’re trying to get these characters to. The fact they start out strangers can help to a degree, but you’d probably want to build some relationships already within those characters so you can really see what it is that’s happening, so you can see progress and growth. Think Little Miss Sunshine. It’s not about the journey. It’s about the people in the van that are important.
Craig: I think part of the problem is there are too many people in the van. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles basically is this. That’s what happens. Their flight is canceled, and there’s only one car to share, and so these two strangers have to share a car and drive. It’s been done. I think if you can concentrate on two people or three, that’s fine too, but 13, eh.
John: That’s going to be too many people. I think Breakfast Club rules kick in at a certain point. You would have five. More than that, it’s too much.
Craig: Have you ever seen Spike Lee’s Get On the Bus?
John: Never have.
Craig: It’s fascinating. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a very simple plot. It was back when they did the Million Man March. Spike basically gets more than 13. It was probably 20 guys on this bus. The entire thing is the trip. It’s just the bus ride, with little breaks here and there. While there are a few moments of some small, what I would call plot action, mostly it’s these men talking and arguing and laughing and fighting. It’s really interesting as an experiment, because you are stuck on the bus with so many people.
What holds it together is the fact that it’s about a social issue, clearly. The point is they’re going to the Million Man March, and they are debating their own lives and their own history and their own future. There’s something to discuss. I don’t know what they talk about on this.
John: You’re not going to be obsessed with Nashville. Getting to Nashville is important to the individual characters, but it’s not important for the movie.
Craig: Exactly. There isn’t anything that connects them other than the fact that they were all supposed to be flying to the same place. It wasn’t like they were joined together by social issues or anything like that. I don’t think this is a movie.
John: I don’t think it’s a movie either. Let us talk through now our candidates here and see which ones are going to be movies and which ones are not going to be movies. Doppelganger murder?
Craig: Television show episode. Episode of a TV show.
John: The Godfather, Saudi-Style?
Craig: One day. Not today.
John: One day. Not today. Last days of Nikki Finke?
Craig: No.
John: The nun and the monk who fell in love and married?
Craig: Side characters.
John: Side characters. Thirteen strangers we think is probably not it. I’m going to say doppelganger murder is probably most likely to be the movie. I think it might be a Sundancey movie that could potentially break out.
Craig: That’s our best bet.
John: Thank you to everybody who sent in these suggestions. Sometimes they come in to ask@johnaugust.com. A lot of times, people are just tweeting them at me or stuff, and they’re good. We love it when you find those and send them in our direction. I propose we answer one listener question, seems timely, from Embarrassed. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Embarrassed asks, “What do you do when the movie you wrote gets terrible reviews and you agree with them? I had a movie get made at a big level, and I’m so grateful that it got made, but I don’t love what the director did with the script. I don’t want to seem bitter or burn bridges with anyone or seem ungrateful. How would you recommend handling this in meetings and even just with your own family? How do you talk about a project that didn’t turn out like you dreamed it would?”
John: Craig and I, we’ve both been there.
Craig: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
John: First off, Embarrassed, it’s amazing that you had a movie get made at a big level. That’s fantastic. You’re better for having gone through the experience of it all. I’ve been there. What I will say in meetings is like, “Oh wow, yeah, thank you. It was a real challenge. It wasn’t quite the movie I wanted it to be, but I’m glad it worked. I’m glad it had success.” You can say things like, “It was weird to agree with the critics on it.” I would say you don’t need to volunteer about the bad experiences you had unless you think they’re relevant for the discussion you’re about to have, like why you never want to work for that director again.
Craig: There’s really no great advice here, Embarrassed. When it doesn’t come out the way you want, the only thing you can say is, if someone mentions it, you can say, “Ultimately, it was not the movie I wrote. The director took it in a different direction.” That’s I think fair to say. That’s all you need to say. I think everybody will get it.
John: There may also be a way to put it in a positive direction, say, “It’s a really interesting situation, because here’s a story that I actually wrote,” and basically talk about what the plan was. Then you don’t have to get into… They saw the movie. They know what the result was. They can see, oh, you’re that kind of writer. You’re the kind of writer who wrote that script that would’ve been a different movie. That can be useful.
Craig: There’s another thing, Embarrassed, that I think is worth mentioning. That is that these days, everybody is absorbing and soaking in review culture. When John and I were starting out, there weren’t even that many reviewers. Reviewers worked for newspapers. There are only so many newspapers. There’s four billion outlets right now online that write reviews. Everyone writes reviews. The old joke “everyone’s a critic” is now a fact. Everyone is a critic. There are so many reviews. They all get slurried into the Rotten Tomatoes score or a Metacritic score, and so now there’s metrics attached to reviews. Then on top of that, even people that aren’t writing reviews professionally are writing reviews on Twitter. Everyone’s reviewing everything constantly. It’s just what people do.
You may therefore feel a little worse about this than perhaps you should, because in the old days, you’d get your ass kicked in a bunch of newspapers. You’d feel bad. Very few people are even reading those things. Most people are just like, “Oh cool, you got a movie made. That’s awesome.” That’s it. Nobody would really dig any deeper. It just wouldn’t matter.
Just keep that perspective in mind that you may be feeling this intensely just because you’re swimming in the waters of reviews. It might be worth taking a break and turning some of that stuff off, because here’s what has happened. You got a movie made, and that this the beginning, my friend. Somewhere down the line, something great is going to happen for you. You will be happy. You will feel terrific. People will come up to you and tell you it’s wonderful. You don’t get there until you do the first thing.
The other thing is let time do its job, because 20 years from now, people are going to have a very different opinion of that movie. I don’t care what it is. They just do. That’s how it works.
John: I think we can also offer some very specific advice for Embarrassed, because we’re not going to say this on the air, but Megana has a note in the Workflowy about what the actual movie was that came out.
Craig: (singing) Megana has a note.
John: I’m looking at the title. I know that’s a movie. I know it’s a movie that came out. I have no idea what the critical reception was. I didn’t see it. I don’t know what people are saying about it. I would say that was a big movie. That’s what a lot of people are going to know about that movie. It’s a movie that came out, and that’s awesome. I honestly think that credit is not going to hurt you. Your feeling that it’s not a great movie is not important. It’s not going to weigh on anything.
Craig: You’re in the business. You’re writing movies that get made. In features, directors get all the credit. We know that. They also get all the blame. Your job is to write a movie that people agree to make. You didn’t cast it. You didn’t shoot it. You didn’t edit it. You probably weren’t on set. If you were, you were visiting, because that’s how features work, unfortunately. You did your job.
Of course you’re going to want it to turn out better. Of course you’re going to want the director to have done better and all of that. I completely get it. This is a great beginning for you. Don’t apologize for this. You can just say, “That really wasn’t the movie I wrote, but the movie I wrote got everybody to agree to make a movie,” and that’s of value.
John: Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Nothing Forever on Twitch. Craig and Megana, if you’re not seeing it, Nothing Forever is an animated, pixelly animation of a Seinfeld episode.
Craig: I’ve seen it. It’s cool.
John: It’s the Larry stand-up bits, which are Jerry Seinfeld’s monologue things. Then you’re in this apartment. These characters are moving around in really awkward ways and sitting on couches and on their heads. It’s all crazy and goofy. It’s all generated basically by AI and algorithms and a bunch of prebuilt assets that are just doing this thing. Basically, it’s constantly creating a new episode of a Seinfeld-like show in real time. It’s really unusual and unnerving to watch. It’s not good, but it’s fascinating.
I think the degree to which we talk about AI coming for our jobs, I don’t think they’re going to be writing the kind of stuff that we’re writing. I think they’re going to be making stuff like this that’s actually compelling and strange, that no human would ever actually try to do. I think that’s in many ways the real danger, like what is it that I’m watching, and why can’t I stop watching it? I think it’s really interesting.
If you’re clicking through the links right now, you may find it’s not available, because just this morning as we’re recording this, the account was suspended for transphobic content because of things that the algorithms itself had generated. It had characters saying bad things that the creators had not intended, and so the creators are apologizing and trying to fix it, which is again another exciting challenge to this kind of thing. Nobody wrote it, but it created a thing that actually got itself banned.
Craig: It’s canceled. We have canceled AI. Listen, it’s important for artificial intelligence to learn. These are learning machines. Maybe it needs to learn from what it’s done and do better.
John: Indeed. It’s taking some time to listen and really reach out and reflect.
Craig: I’m looking at what it was suspended for. It’s very strange. In a weird way, it’s almost anti-bad. There’s actually a weirdly subtle thing of it’s making a comment on the thing that’s not good, but still. Let’s put it this way. There is a line in the thing where it’s suspended, where the AI comedian, the Seinfeld literally says, “No one is laughing, so I’m going to stop.” I think that’s incredible. Wow.
John: Craig, did you have something for us?
Craig: I do. I purchased an item called the Manta Sleep Mask. This is available wherever you shop online, I’m sure. It is not expensive, like the last thing that I thought was not expensive but turned out to be expensive. This one’s $35.
John: Great.
Craig: You may say, “$35 for an eye mask?” Here’s why I love this one. I don’t wear eye masks normally at night, but if I’m on a plane and I need to sleep, I absolutely wear one. One of the things that we have been learning over time about light and sleep is how important it is to keep it out of your eyes. We talk a lot about some of the fancier, newfangled things, like not as much blue light. You probably have the night shift thing set on your tablets and so forth. I certainly do. That’s nice, but it seems like blue light, not blue light, the most important thing for sleeping is no light.
The thing with eye masks is they’re super annoying. I hate them. They come off my face. They squeeze my head. They pinch my eyes. I don’t like the way they feel. This thing is great, because they’ve designed it so that there are these eye cups. It floats away from your face, but it really does a good job of sealing out the light. It doesn’t mush around to the left or the right when you turn your head and sleep on your side. The eye cups themselves are Velcroed to the straps. You can move them to fit, because the distance between our eyes is different for everybody. For me, I’ve found this to be an excellent travel solution. Big recommend for the Manta. What a nice name for it too, the Manta Sleep Mask.
John: I think I’ve recommended sleep masks before, because I’ve slept with a mask for 10 years or so. I sleep every night with a mask on.
Craig: Really? In your own bed at home?
John: At my own house, absolutely.
Craig: Wow.
John: I want absolute darkness. I think they’re great. Yes, they take a little getting used to. So often, I think people’s only experience with masks are when they’re on a plane and they’re using those cheap ones that come in little kits.
Craig: Those are bad.
John: Those are really bad. That’s not what we’re talking about. These are going to need to be soft. Definitely they don’t touch your eyeballs, which is crucial. You should be able to open your eyes with a mask on, without your eyelashes touching. That’s what this will allow you to do.
Craig: Exactly.
John: It’s great. I really recommend, if you’ve not tried sleeping with a mask, get one of these, because it really is just a better night of sleep, and you’re out.
Craig: Love it.
John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Pachoo.
John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Chow.
John: Our outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. For short questions, I’m sometimes around on Twitter @johnaugust, but not consistently, so send it in to ask@johnaugust.com.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on overpowered characters. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so this past week at DnD, we leveled up. We went down a level in the dungeon. We went up a level of our characters. I got to pick a new spell for my warlock named Klaus. Here are the choices I had. I had Demiplane, which was not going to be situationally very useful, Dominate Monster.
Craig: In the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, no. Dominate Monster, excellent spell.
John: Excellent spell. It basically lets you not just charm but really control a creature.
Craig: Control a creature.
John: Feeblemind, which was done against us shortly before, which basically just knocks somebody down to a Level 1 intelligence. They can’t do anything meaningful.
Craig: And charisma.
John: And charisma, yes. It really keeps them from casting spells and things. Glibness, which is a skill I don’t have, which is the ability to speak extemporaneously and [inaudible 00:54:13] charisma checks. Maddening Darkness, which is a powerful darkness that does damage on the people who are inside it, and Power Word Stun, which stuns people.
I picked Feeblemind because there’s a recency bias. It had just been done against us, and it felt great. It also felt like a good way to knock out a spell-caster, except I’m also thinking a lot of spell-casters could counter-spell that, and then I’ve just burned an incredibly expensive spell on them.
Craig: Hard to counter-spell that one though. It is a higher level spell. As they go up, trickier to counter. I think Mind Blank probably-
John: Protects against that?
Craig: … protects against Feeblemind. Yeah, it does. Mind Blank is a pretty awesome spell. It’s is also an 8th level spell. That’s 8th level wizard spell, pretty sure. Oh, and bards apparently can do it as well. Feeblemind is a great spell against casters for sure. You don’t want to cast it against a dum-dum monster, because it’ll just still punch you. Really good spell against anybody that’s using charisma in particular, so warlocks. If you’re going up against another big warlock, Feeblemind would be a really good one.
John: This got me thinking about overpowered characters, because now Klaus is at a level where he can do some really impressive things. I can lock somebody in a force cage and basically take them out of a fight, which is great.
It got me thinking about overpowered characters in DnD but also overpowered characters as they relate to the stories we’re trying to tell. I think we talked about the challenge of Superman on previous episodes, where you have a character who can do so much, who’s so powerful, that you end up having to look for his small weakness. You have to find the kryptonite so you have some ability to stop him. It makes it very hard to fit him in with other groups of characters, because he’s just so overpowered.
Craig: Overpowering leads to power inflation. The more powerful a hero is, the more powerful the villain has to be, so that we care. What ends up happening is this blunting of ability, where you get very excited that somebody is such a badass. Then you’re like, oh no, a mega badass has appeared. At some point, isn’t it just all the same then? If Superman is trading punches with-
John: Darkseid?
Craig: Yeah, Darkseid. He’s going up against Darkseid. Now it’s just these gods punching each other in the face, which is fun, but it does turn into the whole Thor is fighting with Hela, and you’re like, they’re the same.
John: They’re gods.
Craig: Now it’s just fistfight again. You get that weird inflation of power, all the way to Thanos can wipe out half of the universe and that we can do these things. For me, as a DM, the challenge of running a campaign with… There are seven of you guys, who are all Level 16. You’re a Level 15 warlock, but you’re also a Level 1… What’d you dip into?
John: Artificer.
Craig: Artificer. Seven Level 16 characters are demigods. The danger now is that every encounter will either be trivial or you’ll all die. The ability to craft close battles is becoming much, much harder because you guys can beat almost anyone. It’s tricky.
John: What you’re describing in terms of the DM’s challenge is really the screenwriter’s challenge or the TV writer’s challenge in terms of figuring out ways, when you have characters who can do all these things, how do you create scenarios in which they are challenged, and yet it still feels like they are recognizably human, it still feels like they’re relating to things at a normal human level. That becomes just really, really tricky thinking about the Superman problem, like Doctor Strange and Wanda Maximoff, which again, super incredibly, incredibly powerful characters.
In the case of Wanda, you’re looking for what is she really trying to do, how do we set up the things that she’s actually focusing on, which is basically to get back to her sons. How can that be a driving factor? Yet we as an audience have very little ability to understand what are the limits to her power, what is it that she cannot do. You end up having to have other characters describe someone that’s putting other guardrails around where the edges of her power is. It’s really tough. I think we sometimes under-appreciate how tough it is to write incredibly powerful characters versus people with more normal levels of ability.
Craig: You begin to get stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. There was a video game I played years ago called Turok, the Dinosaur Hunter. It’s a cool game. You were running around. I think you were on another planet. You must’ve been on another planet where there were a lot of dinosaurs but also bad guys. As you go, no surprise, the monsters get tougher, bad guys get harder.
Like a lot of first-person shooters back then, it was about weapon fetishization. You start with a gun, but then you get a shotgun, but then you get a big shotgun, but then you get a rocket launcher. Where it ended up was you have a gun that fires small nukes. That’s where you ended up. You were literally firing nuclear weapons out of your gun, which of course should theoretically kill you as well. It just got stupid. That is stupid. It was fun. Oh my god was it fun, but it was stupid fun.
The one time in Predator, way way back when, in the end, spoiler for the movie from the ‘80s, the Predator explodes himself and it’s a nuclear explosion, which Arnold Schwarzenegger runs from, jumps, does the whole something behind me is exploding jump, lands and takes cover behind a log or something, and he’s fine.
John: He’s fine.
Craig: He was at Ground Zero of a nuclear blast. He’s all right. They don’t show his character going through intensive cancer treatments years later. That was hysterical but also stupid. I know I’m going to get angry fan mail about that. That’s part of the fun of overpower is like, oh my god, what a badass, but then what it costs you is…
Another case of overpower, Highlander. There can be only one. He’s the one. Now let’s make more Highlanders. They’re overpowered. They’re eternal. They can kill everybody with their swords. This guy killed all those people with his sword.
John: I want to point out though, going back to your Predator example, because the most recent Predator I thought was a really, really good version of Predator. I loved it.
Craig: Grounded.
John: Grounded. I think one of the reasons it was grounded is that the Predator character could seem overpowered and yet it has put limits on what it’s willing to do, in terms of it could fly off in its ship. It’s not going to fly off in its ship. It’s going to do some stuff. Therefore you can use the overpowered character’s abilities against itself. That’s ultimately how they are defeated, which is true to the Predator ethos. An overpowered villain is not nearly as much of a problem for the screenwriter as an overpowered hero is.
Craig: Yes, although the overpowered hero will lead to overpowered villains. I see in the notes here you reference The Matrix. That’s what happened in The Matrix. What a great movie.
John: Great.
Craig: I love The Matrix. It is just gorgeous from beginning to end. It has a wonderful end. Then the demands of sequel made it so like, okay, he’s definitely God in The Matrix, so what do we do? Let’s bring back the bad guy, but let’s bring back a thousand of him.
There are so many interesting things that are happening in The Matrix sequels that I really enjoy, that are fascinating. That was the part that was the least interesting to me, because you could feel it getting silly. You were losing a sense of reality to anybody getting really hurt or really dying. It was getting so mythological as to disconnect me from a relationship with it. That’s one of the costs of overpower.
John: I’ve been thinking recently about why there are not more movies being made about the Greek gods. I think it really does come down to that. It’s very hard to have any sort of grounded things happening to them, because they are just literally gods. Their powers are so vast, it’s hard to find a challenge for them.
Craig: The great Greek dramas were about humans that were being toyed with by the gods or encouraged by the gods. The stories of the gods in their internecine warfare feels more like reading bible stories, where you’re like, “I don’t really think that that happened like that. I don’t believe that Jesus is fighting Satan in Hell.” I don’t really believe that, I don’t know, Chronos ate his children. I don’t know where any of this stuff comes from. It’s all rather silly. What is interesting is Persius.
John: Exactly.
Craig: He’s interesting. That story is fun. Jonah and the Whale, Jonah is interesting. People are interesting. One of the problems with the proliferation of the superhero genre is that we’re just disconnecting with people. The more superheros are like people to me, the more interested I generally am in them. I love Spider-Man. I love Batman, because Batman’s a person. Spider-Man’s a kid. I love that.
John: Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you!
Links:
- ‘Doppelganger murder’: Woman accused of killing Instagram lookalike in plot to fake her own death By Andy Eckardt and Aina J. Khan for NBC
- The Godfather, Saudi-Style by Anuj Chopra for the Guardian
- The Last Days of Nikki Finke by Jacob Bernstein for the NYT
- The Nun and the Monk who fell in Love and Married by Aleem Maqbool for BBC
- 13 stranded strangers went on a road trip. Here’s what happened by Francesca Street for CNN
- ‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI by Chloe Xiang for Vice
- Manta Sleep Mask
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 587: Toldja! The Nikki Finke Movie, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 586 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we welcome back one of our earliest and most frequent guests, Aline Brosh McKenna, who has just made her feature directing debut.
Craig: Woo!
John: Hey, Aline.
Aline Brosh McKenna: Woo woo woo!
Craig: Welcome back, Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes.
Aline: I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, so I’ve answered to every kind of name. I got Aline [AY-leen], I got Aline [AH-lin-ee], I got Aline [ah-LEE-nay], I got Borsh. I got McKeena. I’m answering to everything these days.
John: If people listened to Scriptnotes, they would know that your name’s Aline.
Craig: I do like Aline Borsh. That’s pretty great. I might start calling you that.
John: It’s good stuff. We’ve now all directed feature films. It’s great.
Craig: Jeez.
John: We’re going to talk about feature films and feature filmmaking and all that stuff. We have a bunch of TV stuff to talk through and a zillion listener questions, so we’ll get into it. Aline, I would propose that in our Bonus Segment, you and I could interrogate Craig about this third episode of The Last of Us, which we just watched. We’re recording this a week ahead of time. I also want to dig into Craig’s inexcusable decision not to have Bill and Frank do any jigsaw puzzles during their years in isolation.
Craig: Not puzzles.
John: They could’ve had jigsaw puzzles, and not once, because-
Aline: They would! They would!
John: They totally would’ve!
Craig: No.
Aline: Yes.
Craig: No.
Aline: He would’ve handmade them.
John: Because Bill is methodical, and Frank is artistic.
Craig: I will explain to both of you why you’re both absolutely dead wrong.
Aline: I want to know what games they were playing.
Craig: I will tell you.
Aline: I feel like [inaudible 00:01:41] it’s like an old Monopoly set or something, or an old Battleship set.
Craig: You’ll find out. You’ll find out.
John: Content you can only get as a Premium subscriber.
Craig: Yes, totally worth the 4.99.
John: A hundred percent. Just for that one answer, yeah.
Craig: It is 4.99, right?
John: Yeah. For a year, it’s a lot cheaper. Just buy the year.
Craig: Guys, do the year.
John: Aline, Craig, did you see that Showtime and Paramount Plus are finally combining their thing down to one brand?
Craig: They’re Showmount Plus now.
John: Showmount Plus now.
Craig: That’s weird, because there hasn’t been any other kind of strange consolidation going on. There has been. What I’m excited for is in 12 years we’re all going to be working for HBO Plus Mountflixmazon.
John: On Mifflin Penguin Random House.
Aline: Isn’t it all going to be Silicon Valley? Aren’t we all going to be working for the tech companies? Why doesn’t Google have content?
John: They have YouTube, and that’s their-
Craig: They tried.
John: They tried.
Craig: They tried.
John: They had YouTube Originals. They had YouTube Red.
Aline: I see.
Craig: They do. Do they still do YouTube Red?
John: No, I don’t think so.
Craig: It’s been folded into other things, because the show I remember from YouTube Red was the new Karate Kid, Cobra Kai, but that’s on Netflix now.
John: It’s a Netflix show now. Ed Rosson had a show that was a YouTube Original as well and all that stuff.
Craig: Google I guess was just like, “We’re too busy making all of the money in the world in advertising. We don’t need to spent more on content.”
Aline: It is interesting though. These companies do have different culture from Hollywood. They really are run differently. I think the three of us came up in a time when it was like, insert name of studio chief. Let’s just say it was Bob. It’d be like, “Oh, Bob hurt his back, but he forgot his back pillow, so you don’t want to ask him today.” Or let’s just say the person’s name was Lisa. It would be like, “Lisa, her husband broke his tooth surfing.”
It used to be so personal. You were so in the zone. Especially this was true when you’re waiting to hear on TV stuff. It would be like, “Oh, the president of the network was supposed to read it, but his daughter accidentally cut bangs, and so he can’t possibly be reading it.” There is something about tech companies, where they don’t say things to you that are egregiously personal like that. There really used to be a sense of there were a bunch of delis. You went in and everyone screamed and grabbed a number. Now it definitely seems much more like Madmen.
John: It’s all corporatized.
Aline: It’s all behind glass. You’re being very polite. You have to show your ID. Craig has this look of a complete scowl on his face.
Craig: No, that’s my resting Jew face. I completely agree with you. I was just thinking how you can never say, “Oh, we can’t go pitch Netflix today because the algorithm’s wife’s husband broke his tooth.” The algorithm has no feelings whatsoever.
John: Not a bit.
Craig: That’s my agreeing with you face, Aline. Imagine what my not agreeing with you face looks like.
Aline: Oh, boy. I think Craig and I decided a long time ago. I use your agreeability index frequently. One is the most agreeable, and 10 is the least, right?
Craig: Yes.
Aline: I’m in a 6/7 zone. I’m in a 6/7 zone. Where are you?
Craig: I like to live in the 8. Disagreeability meaning your willingness to disagree with the general consensus around you.
John: Fascinating.
Craig: I have high disagreeability. I’m not looking to do it, but I have no problem doing it. Other people are like, “If nine people in this room all agree we’re doing this, I’m going to be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that too.’”
Aline: Where are you?
John: I’m probably more conforming in a lot of ways, but there’s definitely things I will stick out and-
Craig: You’re a 5.
John: I’m a 5.
Craig: You’re right in the middle. Most people probably are.
Aline: I think you’re a 4/5. Craig and I, if we’ve ever gone to have to order or pick a restaurant or go someplace with a puzzle group or whatever, Craig and I are definitely the least agreeable, for sure.
John: I’ll go anywhere, as long as there’s food I can eat. I don’t eat a lot of stuff.
Craig: As long as you can eat food.
John: As long as you can eat food. Showtime and Paramount Plus has become Paramount Plus with Showtime, which is I think what we’re already subscribed to, because we get Showtime through our Paramount Plus [crosstalk 00:05:57].
Craig: I think I’m subscribing to Showtime and Paramount Plus.
John: Maybe save some money.
Craig: What happens now? Cancel one of them.
John: Let’s segue to HBO and HBO Max, because it was announced this week that Westworld is one of the shows that they’ve taken off the service. They’ve now sold them to different FAST services.
Craig: Tell people at home what it is in case they don’t know.
John: Free ad-supported television, which we used to call AVOD, but FAST is the new name for it.
Craig: We used to call it television. When we were kids, it was television.
John: It’s streaming television. It’s on demand. It’s not continuously playing.
Aline: It’s like Pluto. Pluto is that, right?
John: Pluto is one of those. They sold these specifically to I think Roku and Tubi.
Aline: Can I ask you a question?
John: Please.
Aline: Our residual definitions for cable are pretty good, right? Cable broadcasts are pretty good.
John: Cable broadcasts are pretty good. Actually, AVOD/FAST is also pretty good.
Craig: It’s okay.
Aline: That was my question. Obviously, the aftermarket on streaming is bad, but now the streamers are moving to this thing which seems in every way to me to be cable television. Are our definitions good on those Tubi, Roku, Pluto?
Craig: They’re not great. They could stand to be improved.
John: They could definitely stand to be improved. Here’s my question though. This is not clear in any of the articles that I’ve seen. Is Warners licensing these shows to these services or is it some sort of partnership?
Craig: Licensing. It’s gotta be straight up [crosstalk 00:07:25].
John: If it’s straight licensing, then it’s actually not a bad thing, because what they would actually be calculated on is the license fee that Tubi or these places are paying. Yes, it can be hinky, just because it could be a package of shows, and you have to split up the package and the fees.
Craig: They already do stuff like that.
John: That already happens.
Craig: It’ll be complicated, and none of us will understand it. That’s the most important thing for everyone to know.
John: We’ll never understand it, ever. Aline, you get to a good point, that it’s a little bit more like what we used to have with residuals when they’d show up on other services. That was at least an income stream. The concern with the stuff that was made directly for streamers is there was no income stream for residuals after three years.
Aline: The definition which is rent at home I know is a great one.
John: I love that.
Craig: That’s the best one.
Aline: That’s the best one. It would be great to have something. That’s an on-demand… Anyway, somebody will sort it out, and we will be sorting it out shortly.
John: While we’re talking about things being a little bit more like they used to be, have you noticed that some of these streaming orders have gotten larger and larger? Daredevil’s getting an 18-episode season order. Andor was two 12-episode seasons. That feels more like TV.
Craig: Yeah. They definitely don’t do it like that at HBO. I know that much. There has been this thing. I have to say I would be surprised if it catches on. It just seems like from a business point of view, it seems a little crazy to just… For instance, Lord of the Rings, they renewed them before it even came out. I don’t know. Wait until one episode airs. That’s what HBO does. They’re like, “Just in case.” It makes sense. Even if you internally renew it.
John: You want that press bump.
Craig: However that works. I would be surprised if that trend continues, because these shows are expensive to do.
John: They are.
Craig: All of them.
Aline: Also, where do you add your value? Where are they getting the value? If they’re getting value from ads, then they’re going to want to do more episodes. Where are they making their money? The 25-episode season, when you’re doing traditional advertising, that’s a big windfall for them.
John: One argument maybe is they’re making more money by reducing churn. If they have 18 episodes of a Daredevil season, and they’re releasing those once per week, you’re going to have to keep your Disney Plus membership up for at least half the year, and that helps.
Craig: It’s this weird calculation they have to do, where they go, “Okay, we are going to keep people or make money off of ancillary markets or ad-supported on another tier, the more episodes we have. However, the more episodes we ask our creators to make, theoretically, not always, but theoretically, the quality begins to decrease, because it’s just —
John: They can’t make the same kind of show.
Craig: No. The more time and energy you put into something, theoretically the better it gets. You have this 8-to-12-episode season model for your prestige. Let’s all show up and buy a subscription because it’s part of the culture. Then you have these other kinds of shows that could be making a terrific amount of money for them, some of which can be excellent. There’s still great stuff on network television. It’s an interesting calculation, and thank god I don’t have to be the one making it, because that would be bad.
Aline: Talent is also driving it, because from their point of view, the value they get from having done eight episodes and then being able to do two movies in the year two, in a lot of ways that’s where… They all want to be flexible now. They all want a slightly limited order.
Man, I really have such respect for the days of sitcoms kicking out 120, 150 episodes. We did 62 on Crazy Ex, which is actually, I discovered this week during my Girls rewatch, is the exact same number of episodes as Girls. It was a lot. It felt like a lot. It’s so nothing compared to Raymond, Friends, Office, hundreds of episodes.
Writers are very nimble. They really are. I think writers have done a very good job of… We’re all pivoting as fast as we can to whatever the new model is. I think there are so many opportunities now to go places. I think there’s an upside to finding a spot that can really support your piece and really understands your piece. There was a thing in broadcast where you felt like things were getting less special handling.
I think now there’s more attention being paid to everybody coming together to craft this. You could feel it. You can feel that when they’re making these investments, that yeah, if you’re making 8 or 10, you have a different level of scrutiny from if you have to make 25 of them. I’m assuming that people give you notes at some point or like, “Yeah, this looks good.”
John: Also, you literally could not create some of the shows that we’re talking about. You would have an impossible time trying to make 20 episodes of The Last of Us. You would still be shooting The Last of Us. It would be a different show.
Craig: Also, it’s just too expensive. That’s the other thing is there are certain shows that people expect to be somewhat cinematic in nature. They go to different places. They’re a spectacle. For a typical network show, like say the kind that our friend Derek does, there’s a fire station. That is a central set you could live on. You can roll 50% of an episode inside this confine. That’s incredibly helpful. Sitcoms, that’s all they were, by and large. It’s way easier to go through those episodes and shoot them. When you’re out there running around like you’re making the way we would make movies, there’s just no way to do 20. That would kill you.
Aline: We did bonkers stuff on Crazy Ex. We had episodes with 70 strips. So did Jane the Virgin, so many strips. I remember talking to Jenny about how she shot things in the hallway in her office. We shot things in Michael Hitchcock’s office, in our office. Our finale, there was a scene that took place in Guatemala. Guatemala was our PA’s parking spot. On our schedule, it said “Guatemala, dot dot dot, PA’s parking spot” on our strips. We just did so, so, so many. It was kind of a fun thing to feel like how crafty can you be.
John: Definitely.
Aline: How can you repurpose things. It was funny. Making it an inexpensive show, relatively inexpensive show, was actually great preparation for making a bigger movie, because I’m so used to cutting for budget, and I’m so used to making a tiara out of tinfoil, that when we were scouting for the movie, people would have to say to me, “Wait a second. Don’t pick anything yet,” because I was so apt to be like, “Oh, this is going to work. This is going to work.” It’s like, “Aline, this is supposed to be the seashore, and this is a conference room.” I was like, “No no no, we can do it. We can do it.”
It was like I had come up doing Summer Stock and then I got to Broadway. That really was Crazy Ex. We worked at the outer edges of our financial capacity just all the time and repurposed things and repurposed sets and two-walls and one-walls.
I’ve done a segue for you, if you’d like to use this as your segue. It was good preparation for doing something where I went from shooting seven pages a day to shooting two pages a day.
John: Let’s take that segue, and we’ll jump back to our follow-up in just a second. You came on the show before, talking about this movie. One of the things you did say before was that you had to unlearn some of the habits you had learned in terms of the thinking always about schedule, thinking always about budget, recognizing that there were people whose job it was to do the job you were doing as a showrunner, to make sure that the trains ran on time, and that your job as a director was just to get what you wanted. You really had to focus on the artistic side of it, and not so focused on all the business side of it all. Now that the movie’s done, and it’s going to be out on Netflix for people to see, tell us what day it drops on Netflix.
Aline: It drops on February 10th, Friday.
John: February 10th.
Craig: Why are we all rap artists now? Everything drops.
John: Everything has to drop. Everything has to drop.
Craig: We used to just put movies out.
John: When does it come out?
Aline: Craig, I’m dropping it. I’m hoping it blows up.
Craig: Exactly. We drop things. I don’t drop anything. I’m not cool enough to drop stuff.
John: When do your episodes of your show come out, what time of day?
Craig: They come out at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday evenings.
John: Aline, do you know what time of day Your Place or Mine comes out?
Aline: I don’t, and I need to find out. You know what? Someone asked me yesterday, and I don’t know. Man, what I love about HBO is it’s so on mama’s schedule, because I’m eating dinner at 6.
John: Exactly.
Aline: I’m watching my show. Mama’s taking her bath and going to bed. I always love that the HBO stuff is on at 6. It’s a delight. 9 o’clock is too late.
Craig: We get that benefit out here on the West Coast. We get to see stuff at 6 p.m. I’m actually now really fascinated by this Netflix thing, because it’s true, they always talk about what day something is going to be. Is it 12:01 a.m.?
Aline: I’m going to find out. Should I find out while we’re talking? Let me see if I can find out.
John: If you can figure out while we’re talking, we’ll do it and we’ll have an update live in the course of the show.
Aline: That’d be a live time… I’m going to ask right now. When things post to Netflix-
Craig: You don’t have to do it out loud.
Aline: … at what time? Do you know why I do that? Because in the writers’ room when I have to send an email or a text in the writers’ room, I feel like it’s so rude for them just to watch me type, so I often read it out.
Craig: You think yelling it at them while you do it is going to…
Aline: It’s always the answer. Always the answer.
John: Weirdly though, Aline has developed the ability that she could say one thing, type a completely different thing. While she’s basically firing this writer who’s in the room right now, she’s saying the other thing. It’s really an impressive skillset she’s developed over the course of seasons.
Craig: I need to learn that.
Aline: You can’t see that, but I’m making an eggplant parm right now.
Craig: Oh god, I wish that were true. By the way, I’ve made eggplant parm. You know what? It’s a huge pain in the ass.
John: It is, because you have to-
Aline: The draining and the salting [crosstalk 00:17:54].
Craig: The draining and the salting and the dehydrating, but it’s essential. Then when it’s good, it’s good.
John: It is good.
Craig: It is so annoying.
Aline: It is.
John: I’ll still take a chicken parm over an eggplant parm any day of the week.
Aline: I can’t believe I’ve never told this story on the podcast before, but one day on Crazy Ex, we were sitting around talking about our favorite foods. People were like pizza, doughnuts, ice cream, pasta, whatever. It got to me and I said, “At the end of the day, what I really love is a well-cooked vegetable.” Rachel looked at me and goes, “Don’t say that to people. Don’t do that.”
Craig: She’s right.
Aline: She goes, “Everyone’s going to hate you. Don’t say that. That’s not a good answer.” She’s like, “Just say butter pecan ice cream.” You know what the truth is? I love a well-cooked vegetable.
Craig: Aline, don’t say that to people.
John: Let me try to wrestle this conversation back to the making of your film. One of the things I’m curious about is… Up to this point, we’ve talked a little bit about production over previous episodes. You were shooting in LA for New York and other things like that. When it came time to actually promote a movie, you’ve promoted a ton of movies, big movies, and you know what that looks like. How does it look to promote a film that’s going to be debuting on Netflix? Does it feel the same scale? What’s the same and what’s different to you?
Aline: I’m in the zone of I can’t compare it to having a big movie come out as a director, because I’ve only been a screenwriter on those. Any whisper of information that I could glean as the screenwriter, I was so… All the information I could get was basically from the director or the producers if I had a good relationship with them, or sometimes the studio person would loop me in. Now I’m so super looped in that sometimes I have this moment of being like, “Oh, you want to know what I think of this spot or this clip or this?” It took me a while to get used to it.
Also, I can’t compare it to other marketing PR departments, but the people at Netflix are incredibly nice. Very, very nice, very on top of it, very helpful, very good communicators, so I have felt looped in at every step. I haven’t had that feeling of disorientation that I always had with movies as a screenwriter where I was always trying to… Like a mutated mushroom, I was always trying to get into people’s brain-
Craig: That’s weird.
Aline: … and figure out what was going on. Now I know what’s going on, so that’s been really nice.
John: One of the things that’s going to be different though about this film is that usually by Friday evening you would know did the film work or did the film not work, did the film do great or did the film tank.
Craig: Box office.
John: You’d get a read on the box. You’d hear the East Coast box office numbers. You won’t have that. You’ll have the reviews, which will be great. You’ll have Twitter reactions and social media stuff. You won’t really have a sense of how big the cultural-
Craig: You get numbers the next day. Netflix numbers are bananas. I don’t know what they’re based on. Honestly, I legitimately don’t. I don’t know how I would even interpret them. For other outlets, there’s a little bit more of a firm, “Okay, Nielsen says this many people watched it. Linearly, this many people watched it on the platform.” Then as the day goes on, or the week goes on rather, they keep telling you as people are watching. As a movie goes, it’s one episode that they will just continually accrue numbers for and keep filling you in on. It’s Netflix, so I fully presume that they’re going to let us know that 14 billion people watched it. That’s what they do.
Aline: I think they mostly give you good news. I think where it’s not performing, I don’t think they give it to you. I think I’ll know mostly if it’s working well. Those days of waiting for your movie to come out and looking at the tracking and calling your other friends and saying, “What does this mean?” and looking at the other. It was so stressful calling. The only way that I remember you would get box office is from calling the New Line box office number. That went up at 11:30.
Craig: We would call William Morris. They also had a little recording where you would call in on Saturday morning, and an intern was explaining your fate to you. You’re waiting for your movie. It’s like, “In fifth place. In sixth place. In seventh place.” You’re like, “Oh, no.”
John: Oh, no, not even there.
Craig: “In ninth place, your piece of crap.”
Aline: We’ve all had that feeling. We’ve all had that feeling. Somewhere in my saved emails folder, I have an email that Craig sent to me when one of the movies I wrote that bombed bombed. Craig wrote me this beautiful email. I just remember it was like, “Because you are Aline, you’ve written 15 screenplays in the time it’s taken for… ” It was a very comforting pep talk email because it was very public. It felt like you were just waiting to be defenestrated and it was terrifying, those bad box office numbers.
John: No matter what, you won’t have those, but you won’t also have the good box office numbers. That’s a point, a thing I would get to is, we’ve had friends who’ve released movies on Netflix. Rawson Thurber has movies on Netflix. They’ll have the big headlines about “the biggest thing ever,” da da da, but it doesn’t carry the same weight as $200 million.
Craig: Because they say that every movie does that.
John: That’s the problem.
Craig: Netflix is a little bit the boy who cried wolf.
Aline: We didn’t grow up with these barometers. I remember running into Rawson and he was like, “Red Notice has been seen by everyone who’s eaten waffles within the last year with their right hand, everyone on the planet Earth.” He had metrics that were so intense. I don’t know. It’s going to be a new experience.
Listen, I think the barometer for myself of what success is is a little different. I think we’re all different about that and what reactions bother us, what don’t. It used to bother me if I had a close friend and they didn’t see the thing I wrote. Now I don’t care at all. It used to bother me in the beginning, because it seemed so momentous to have anything come out that I…
I’ve gotten much more, I think, defining the success by the process. You’ve gotta somewhat let the rest of it go, because obviously, we can’t control it, and because it’s like, yeah, we knew what $200 million meant, we knew what $100 million meant, and now these things are…
We have a saying in our house. When we’re trying to figure out if someone’s famous enough for something, Will will say, “Maryann McKenna doesn’t know who that is,” his mom. I think it’s the same thing with success. If I call Maryann McKenna and try to explain to her how many minutes were streamed, they’re not those clear touchdown arms you’re looking for. You never want to do that anyway.
I think like what just happened with Craig’s, the third episode of The Last of Us, which you could feel… I like to think I was quite early to the twits with that.
Craig: Twits.
Aline: As I’ve been looking around, that episode got a huge reaction. I don’t know what its numbers will be or how they will compare. You can feel that it made an impact on people. I think in a world where we’re not leaving our house as much, we’re not going to the movie theaters, we’re not getting that box office, you have to define success differently.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was very poorly rated, but people thought about it and wrote about it. I was particularly honored by the number of people that wrote intelligent things about it the day after it aired. That was really, really an honor to go to those recap places and see how much care and effort people had put into it and how well they knew the show. That’s nice, because before the internet, you’d have a movie come out, and if it didn’t do well, it felt like it disappeared.
John Gatins, our friend, has a great expression. When you finish a movie, he always says, “You just wrote someone’s favorite movie,” because among the three of us, we’ve written some stinkers, for sure, but I’m sure we all have-
Craig: What?!
Aline: … someone who comes up to me and goes, “Hey, that stinker that you made was my favorite movie, and we watch it all the time,” or, “I’ve seen a hundred times.” I think there’s a lot of ways to define success that are different from the cold, hard metrics. That being said, I love the cold, hard metrics. Love them.
John: Let’s give one thing to our Scriptnotes listeners. Folks who have listened to this podcast from the beginning and know who you are, what’s one thing when they watch the film they can look for, like, “Ah, that’s the thing Aline told me about that I’m looking for, because she told me on this podcast.”
Craig: Add value to our podcast is what we’re saying.
Aline: I’m going to preview something for you. I’m trying to think if I have a Craig or a John reference in this. I don’t, because I definitely referenced Mazin in Crazy Ex. There is a line that Tig Notaro says, that she improvised in one of the scenes. We all laughed really hard. I was like, “That’s never going to be in the movie. It’s just too dirty. It’s never going to be in the movie.” Not only is it in the movie, it’s in the trailer. It’s a moment where she says, “I hope you have a good time going to New York. You might meet someone, so you better get waxed.” Reese goes, “Waxed?” Then Tig goes, “Waxed,” and points to her butt. Then Reese says, “Oh, that’s not going to happen.” That was a really funny improv, but I was like, “That’s never going to be in our PG-13 movie,” and it’s there.
Craig: It is.
Aline: You can thank Miss Tig for it, because that was an improv.
Craig: She’s amazing.
John: We love it. We have a little bit of follow-up to get to before, so let’s truck through that. Megana, help us out on the cereal mascot movie, because it’s something that Craig and I talked about. Why is there not a Franken Berry, Count Chocula-
Craig: Is there one?
John: Kind of there is.
Craig: Megana.
John: Megana, help us out.
Megana: Dustin from Atlanta wrote in and said, “The corporate food mascot film Craig pitched in Episode 585 kind of already exists as a horrific bargain bin DVD called Foodfight! The battle between the world’s most beloved brands and the forces of darkness features computer animation so hauntingly cheap that it shocks the conscience to see the celebrities and products who willingly attached their names to the project.”
John: Here’s who’s in this.
Craig: I just love “shocks the conscience.”
John: We have Mrs. Butterworth, Mr. Clean, Chef Boyardee, Charlie the Tuna, Chester Cheetah, the California Raisins, but also Christopher Lloyd, Hilary Duff, Eva Longoria, Charlie Sheen, Ed Asner.
Aline: What? What?
Craig: It’s all animated though.
John: All animated, yeah.
Craig: If you can sit there in your underwear and pick up a check for a hundred grand for a day’s work-
John: I can’t fault them.
Craig: I would. I would be Mr. Clean, no problem.
Aline: Wow. You stop at Mad Men before that.
Craig: You know what? That doesn’t shock my conscience. I guess he’s saying that the quality of the animation itself. Have you heard about this Christmas animated movie? I gotta find this article that I read. It was an animated movie. It is not just poor animation. It is impossibly poor animation. It actually did air on television.
John: Love it.
Craig: Once. There’s this whole cult that’s grown up around it. Basically, the people that did it, it was a very poor script, and then they used something like Microsoft slideshows, some off-the-shelf thing for children. I gotta dig this up. That one does in fact shock the conscience.
John: Further follow-up about state-sponsored script consultants. We had a person who wrote in to say like, hey, here in the Netherlands or in Europe, they have script consultants who are paid.
Craig: By the state.
John: By the state, who are editors. Holden wrote in. Megana, what did he say?
Megana: Holden said, “In discussing Lorenz from Vienna’s question on Episode 585, it appears all three of you missed a key point that should’ve been made. If a government is funding script consultants, it would be an easy way to control the narrative for various media projects, thus enabling the state to make sure it’s seen in a positive light.”
Craig: If we’re talking about generally non-democratic states, theocracies, or whatever you would call Russia, kleptocracy, mobocracy, then absolutely. If you’re talking about Austria or Denmark or France, no. I think the consultants aren’t there to impress upon screenwriters the necessity to valorize France, for instance.
John: There’s definitely state funding of films, and sometimes through taxes and other things to do that. Sometimes that’s how you keep a local film market going, make it possible. There’s always going to be a question of political influence there. Yes, it’s good to be mindful of it, but I don’t think it’s the number one thing to be thinking about.
Craig: No, I don’t either.
John: We have a bunch of listener questions, but more important than any of those…
Craig and John: Megana Has a Question.
Aline: Megana has a question. Megana has a question.
Megana: Oh my god, I love that. Is that what harmony is? I always pretend I know what it is, but I truly have no idea.
Craig: Of course you do, Megana. Harmony is simply the blending of voices to create chords, like on a piano.
John and Craig and Aline: (singing)
Megana: It’s just that there’s multiple, okay. My question is, a few weeks ago we re-aired this 2013 segment where all three of you were talking about the process of finding your voice. Given that Aline has just directed her first feature, I’m curious what’s been your process for figuring out your professional ambitions? Are you guys doing the things you imagined you’d be doing 10 years ago, 20 years ago? How has that changed, and why?
Craig: Megana does have a question.
Aline: That’s a great question.
Craig: That’s heavy.
John: That’s a good question. Craig, I want to start with you, because go back 10 years to the start of the podcast, you did not seem to have an ambition of doing television. Television was not interesting to you. That’s been a professional change. What other ambitions have changed?
Craig: I don’t know if I’ve ever had really specific ambitions. I’ve always wanted to make stuff that people saw. I’ve been making stuff that people have seen for a long time, but I think probably what changed maybe about 10 years ago, ish, was a desire to make things that I would want to see, more than just things that other people would want to see. That’s definitely had a pretty fundamental impact on how I do things.
John: I would say I’ve always had the ambition of doing one of everything. If I see somebody else doing a thing, like, “I want to do that. People are having a podcast? I want to have a podcast.” I’ve always wanted to do those things. I think one of the things I recognize about that ambition is that sometimes you don’t get to the second one of those things for quite a long time.
I directed a movie, and it was a really good experience. I had opportunities to direct movies, and instead, I did a Broadway show, and now as I need to go back to actually direct another movie, it’s just been a long time. It took longer than it probably should’ve to get back to there. I don’t know that my professional ambitions have changed that much. I’ve always wanted to play in all the sandboxes, and that’s what I’ve been going for.
Craig: What about you, Aline?
Aline: I think for me it’s actually more of a personal ambition than a professional ambition, if that makes any sense. In connection to that voice episode, I came into the business feeling like I have a way of expressing myself that seems to make people laugh or be interesting. That’s really what I have.
Then just fighting to be heard and express myself in the way I wanted to, you have to sell things. You have to attach a director. You have to listen to the director. You are a screenwriter, so you are not the prime mover. As you guys know, I’m an opinionated gal, and I like things a certain way. I’m glad I learned these skills.
There was a way of being political that was very important as a screenwriter and as a woman, frankly, to learn how to speak other languages that could get you where you needed to go. One thing that has changed really since I became a showrunner was I felt like I could express myself as an artist comedically or as a writer, but also just be more me.
I’ve inherited from my mom a bit of a sense of I’m a magpie. I just pick up shiny objects and like to wear them. I have very few neutral items in my closet. I have a lot of colorful patterns and things that are fun.
Craig: Same.
Aline: Just like Craig, which is something that I’ve always always… Our big point of connection. On set, I started wearing the things that I enjoy, that make me happy. Actually, on the movie, it got to be a fun thing. We would talk about our clothes and what we were wearing or play music.
I think as a screenwriter, there’s a certain seemliness. There’s a certain lieutenant-ness that you built into your personality. You’re very diplomatic, especially if you’ve ever done a production rewrite. You’re the diplomat. You’re the person who’s bridging gaps. Not that I don’t still do that, but I feel that I’m able to do the things I want to do in a way that is the most me and not feel as inhibited. It also goes back to having immigrant parents and hairy arms and the things about growing up. I feel like I’m able to express myself better now.
There is a line in Your Place or Mine where Reese says, “As my drunk mother once said,” and there is no reference to her having a drunk mother anywhere in the movie. There’s no reference to her mother having alcoholism. It’s not part of her backstory. I just flew in the line, “As my drunk mother once said,” because it made me laugh, because it feels very true to life. It is something that you would learn about something through a blurt.
I think as a screenwriter, I would’ve pitched that to a director, and they would’ve been like, “That’s not in there. There’s no precedent for that. It doesn’t, strictly speaking, make sense.” It doesn’t. It makes me laugh. It made Reese laugh. It’s in the movie.
That ability to just say to people, “Hey, trust me, this resonates with me. I think it might resonate with other people because it resonates with me and I think this is funny and I think this is interesting,” and learning to really be that person, whether it’s being a showrunner or a director or frankly just a screenwriter when I still do that has been a journey for me to be my full self at work.
Megana: Thank you.
John: Let’s let Craig be his full self as you tackle this next question, because this one is so tailor made for Craig to answer.
Megana: Carl asks, “I’m a mid-level TV writer at the cusp of becoming upper level. I’ve made the decision to part ways with my agents. I’ve been with them for seven years. Although I like them, I think we’ve mutually lost that loving feeling. Correspondence is minimal. Phone conversations are quick and impersonal, even when they’re congratulating me on a new staffing gig. Anyhow, I’m fortunate to have been consistently working throughout my TV writing career. Now that I’m finding jobs on my own, I think it’s time to move on. I’m currently on a show, so I feel like the time to strike is now. My questions are, what’s the healthiest way to let go of my agents and do I fire my agents first, then find another one, or is it the other way around?”
Aline: These are my favorite Craig questions. My favorite.
Craig: I do enjoy these.
Aline: In fact, somebody was once having an issue with their agent, and I almost got you on speakerphone with them, because Craig’s agent advice is my favorite. Hit it.
Craig: Always fire your agent. You definitely are in the perfect zone for agent firing. You want to fire them. They have lost the loving feeling. You’re working. That means that it shouldn’t be a massive problem to find another representative, especially if you’re working steadily. I assume that you have another representative in your life, whether it is a manager or more likely an attorney. Pretty much all of us have an attorney. You want to talk to that attorney first.
My experience, full disclosure, I haven’t fired an agent in 15 years. I don’t always practice. I like my agents. What can I say?
I think the honorable way of going about things is you fire them first, and then your attorney lets the other places know, “So-and-so is available.” Then you look around and see who wants to meet. You have those discussions, and then you pick somebody. You may say, “What if nobody wants to be my agent?” I don’t really think that’s going to be a problem. It doesn’t sound like that would be a problem.
More to the point, they all talk. You may not even get a word out. You pick up the phone to call. Let’s say you’re at CAA. You pick up the phone to call somebody at Gersh. Before anyone answers the phone at Gersh, CAA will know. I don’t know how they… They’re fungus. They have threads underground, and they just know. My recommendation would be to talk to your lawyer, and then yes, you would want to normally let the first agent go and then start looking for a second.
John: Aline, same advice for you?
Aline: Yeah, that sounds all right to me. I’ll tell you where my brain went. I wanted to thank Craig publicly for making monsters that don’t look like vaginas, because every movie-
Craig: You weren’t listening.
Aline: When they finally unveil the monster, it looks like a big, slimy vagina. The monsters that you created in your show are so interesting looking to me. When you had that closeup of the guy from the side, I haven’t seen that exact shape of monster. I enjoy that. It always felt like in these movies, TV shows, you get to the monster, and it’s just a big, slimy mucus membrane with a big aperture. Thank you. That has nothing to do with the question.
Craig: You’re welcome. No, it doesn’t.
John: Actually, here’s how I think we tie this back in. I think you call up your current agents and start talking about how much you enjoy the monster design. As you get into these little bits, “Really, the reason I was calling is I don’t think this is actually the right setup. I don’t think this is actually working write. I’m going to be starting to look for other representation.”
Craig: You’re fired, but how about those clickers? Thank you, Aline. I have to give credit where credit is due. All of the amazing people at Naughty Dog, the company that made the video game, they are really responsible for… We have adapted it so that it can be done and be convincing in live action, but all inspiration was taken from them and their total, and I mean total, lack of vagina monsters. You will not see a single vagina monster.
Aline: You know what I’m talking about. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
Craig: Oh yeah. There’s this thing that happens somewhere along the line. I don’t know where it started, but in my mind I want to say Predator all the way back in the ’80s-
John: That feels right.
Craig: … where alien or monster mouths have split mandibles, so when they open, the whole mouth becomes basically this large, slimy orifice. It just keeps sounding like Stranger Things. The monster in Stranger Things, it does the same thing. The mouth opens and becomes four pieces.
John: Petals out, yeah.
Craig: Everybody loves the four-piece mouth. Our people are not monsters. Our people are sick.
Aline: They put something tonsilly at the top, which looks rather clitoral to me. I’m sorry, I’ve derailed the show.
Craig: Or you’ve finally put us on track, that after all this time, we finally have found what we’re… Listen. As everybody knows, I am an expert in female reproductive health. I’m, again, not licensed. I have not gone to medical school, and nonetheless.
John: I think we need to find a question that can really apply your female reproductive health to our listenership. Megana, do you have a question cued up that relates to female reproductive health?
Megana: Nat in LA asks, “My writing partner and I are repped by our first agent together and are approaching our first staffing season. I’m also pregnant with my first child. At what point do I communicate my pregnancy with our agent? We love our agent, trust them, but I worry that my pregnancy could come in between me and my writing partner’s career, either preventing us from getting work or making our first job complicated with a summer due date. I’d like to think my pregnancy won’t prevent us from getting a spot in a writers’ room. If worse comes to worst, my writing partner could represent us when I need to give birth, rest, etc, but I also know that pregnant women scare even the best of employers.”
Craig: That is a question about female reproductive health. If you trust your agent, I think it’s essential for you to tell your agent, because your agent is only, what, maximum three months away from finding out? They’re going to see you. Eventually, you will start showing. It will become clear. This isn’t something where you will want them to be shocked. I think part of an agent’s job is to handle that for you and advise you.
You’re absolutely right that people have been, I’m going to call it problematic, fully problematic about pregnant women in the workplace. It is against the law for them to discriminate against you for being pregnant. It is your right to be pregnant and not to have recriminations or exclusions. Your agent and your attorney will be the best advocates for you, so I would bring them in on this one as soon as possible. That’s my instinct.
John: I’m going to do a counterpoint, and we’ll let Aline be the deciding vote.
Craig: Great.
John: I don’t think you say anything. I don’t think you say anything until you are at a point in your pregnancy where it’s just going to be so obvious that you actually have to communicate it-
Craig: Interesting.
John: … because you do not know what opportunities you’re going to be missing, because it’s out there or because the agent feels like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t put that writing team on that list, because I know this is a thing that’s coming up,” or this thing could be shooting overseas or whatever. I don’t think you say anything. I think you’re only asking for trouble revealing something that doesn’t need to be revealed.
Craig: Tiebreaker.
John: Tiebreaker. Aline, help us out here.
Aline: I’m tending more towards John just in terms of it’s not really anybody’s business. There definitely can be repercussions. Whether they’re conscious or unconscious biases, there are going to be people who are going to be thinking, “Are they going to want to sit here? Are they going to then nurse?”
This is one of the hardest things for women to negotiate, because at the point where you’re in your reproductive years, you’re probably also in the building of your career years. If you’re very well established, things work around you. In your early 30s, you’re probably still…
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling your agent when you’re six or seven months, and it’s going to be very obvious to anyone that you go in to meet. You don’t want the agent to have heard about it from the person that you’ve met with for the first time.
I think at the point where you’re actually being sent up for jobs, you can say, “Hey, you know what? I’m due in May.” Then I think partly if you want to make it a non-issue, you have to act like it’s a non-issue. I really wish there was some guarantee that people are not going to be heinous about it.
The only thing I will say is that one upside to letting people know, letting bosses know, is that their reaction will be telling about what kind of experience you’ll have on that show. On our show, a lot of people got pregnant. We had people nursing in the room and pumping in the room. We had a little room that they could go into to pump or rock the baby. I know Jenji’s room was like that. It’s not industry-wide. If you are being hired by someone who seems like they’re going to be a big asshole about it and won’t hire you, you’re probably saving yourself from a crappy room.
Craig: Just to be clear, this question is about whether you tell your agent, not about whether you tell an employer.
John: I think you have to assume that if you tell your agent, it could get out there. What happens if that person does know? Did the agent tell them? Then you’re maybe losing a little trust in your agent.
Craig: I hear what you’re saying. Nobody wants to be the first person that gets mowed down on this thing or the 9,000th person that gets mowed down. We do need to change the culture somehow.
John: Absolutely.
Aline: Listen. You go to your agent. You say, “Yeah, I’d like to staff.” Then they come back and go, “Craig, August wants to staff you.” You go, “Oh, great. By the way, I’m pregnant. I’m due in May. Anyway, when’s my meeting?”
Craig: That’s my point is that that seems like you’ve disrupted your relationship with your agent, because now you’ve put your agent in a weird spot.
Aline: Your agent doesn’t need to know when they’re putting you up for jobs whether you’re pregnant or not. You can just tell them before you get an interview.
Craig: It sounds like the person asking the question is concerned about it. That’s what I’m coming from. She seems very concerned about it. Somebody needs to counsel her on this, other than us on a podcast. We don’t know her. We don’t know what level she is in her job. We don’t know how frequently they work. She’s saying she loves her agent. We don’t know who that agent is or anything like that. Ultimately, I guess what it comes down to is no matter what advice we can give, she’s going to have to follow her instincts on this.
John: I think instincts are important.
Aline: I would say when it feels pertinent. If you’re sitting in your house not working, your agent doesn’t need to know what’s going on in your uterus. If you are actually up for something, if you get a big movie job, and they’re going to want you to go somewhere, you go, “Great. Singapore, that’ll work. I’m going to give birth, and then I just need two months.” I just think it’s better to talk about it when it’s in the context of something that actually needs to be administered.
I have always had very close relationships to my agents, and most of them have been women. I would’ve erred on the side of like, “Hey, I’m pregnant. Let’s put our heads together and figure this out.”
There is no one right way to do it, especially because, as Craig said, culturally we’re still very bad. This is one of the things on which we are the worst. This bias is so deep. It’s not just our business. It’s really, really tough for women to be looking for jobs when they are pregnant or have newborns. People just have these preconceptions.
I just will say from my perspective, having worked with so many pregnant and nursing mothers, they were very devoted to their work, great workers, figured it out, made it work. Men too. There’s a lot of really devoted parents who want to go and hang out with their kid. We need to change the language around that too, because if a man’s having a baby, he’s not paying that same price, but then we also don’t give them the same opportunity to go and be parents.
Craig: We get nothing.
John: We get parental leave.
Craig: Yeah, now we do.
John: That was only in the last contract we got parental leave.
Craig: Yeah, the last contract. When my kids were born, there was no like, oh, you get to… Nobody cared.
John: Aline, as a person who’s staffed shows before, the fact that Nat would be coming in here with a writing partner, does that change your thinking about it at all? Does that maybe feel like, oh, at least I’ll have one of those people in the room? That’s my first question for you.
Second question is, now so much more is being done on Zoom, and so even if she were home, she could still be participating, or if she’s on bedrest she could still be participating. Do you think that makes it easier for her to be landing this job?
Aline: Yeah, the partner thing does make it easier, because people will perceive that you won’t go to zero. Working from home is still a thing. God, it’s really hard to work from home when the baby’s there. I got an office when my son was 18 months old, because it was just so hard to do it with him. It was actually easier for all of us if I wasn’t there physically. These are really personal choices.
We just are not a country that’s very good at laying out the most family-forward way to do this. You’re relying on individual bosses. It’s one of the things about Hollywood that’s still a little weird. We’re all in these individual fiefdoms with individual bosses. Again, when you meet with folks, try and make sure… If this is somebody who’s really anti-family in general, those can be really nightmare jobs.
John: Lastly, I’ll point listeners to, if you have more questions about pregnancy and working, Liz Hannah’s episode where she comes on and she talks about… She got pregnant while she was making her show and basically kept it from everybody and wore baggy clothes all the way through production, because she knew it was going to be a real problem. Basically, she did not want to be the showrunner, director who everybody was so obsessed about your pregnancy. Those are factors too.
Craig: No question. If your instinct is to do that, you should do it. Like Aline says, it’s your uterus, it’s your body and situation. If you trust somebody in your inner circle to bring them in and basically say, okay, just like my partner and I, if she has a partner at home, we know that I’m pregnant. You can bring a trusted partner in and say, “Now you know I’m pregnant, and let’s make that part of our internal planning before we go and do anything.”
Aline: “Can you find me someone that we know is not an asshole about these things, has regular hours, might be accommodating, has kids themselves?”
Craig: Exactly.
Aline: I’m sure you guys have talked about it on the show. The showrunners with bad personal lives are brutal to work for. Brutal.
John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game I just played this last weekend called Salem 1692. It is a good game that Craig will enjoy because it’s like Werewolf or Mafia. There’s a social deception or a social deduction game.
Craig: I do like that.
John: You are, as you might guess, either a witch or not a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. You’re trying to figure out who the other witches are. We played with seven people, which felt like the right number of people. It’s a card game. You have these alibis in front of you. You make accusations against people. It moves pretty quickly, which is a nice thing.
There’s an app on your phone that can do the moderator, do the Craig role in terms of telling people what to do. Ultimately, we found that once a person was dead, they should take over, and a human person should do it, but it’s a good way to get started. The box it comes in is gorgeous. It’s a fun, good game for any group of people that you’d want to play a board game with.
Aline: Invite me over, August. Come on.
John: Next game, you’re over here.
Craig: What about you, Aline?
Aline: I have a very short one, but I’ll add if you like that sort of thing, Mafia, The Traitor on Peacock, delightful.
John: I’m so excited to see The Traitor. Alan Cumming’s hosting it.
Aline: Oh my god. If you like that sort of game, you’ll like it.
Craig: I saw images of this thing.
Aline: I watched it. I got real bingey on it. I watched it in two days.
Craig: The thing about reality programs that I often get caught up on, weirdly, and that knocks me away from them, is the music. It’s like there’s one computer making the overly dramatic music for all of them. I just keep waiting for one of them to be like, “We’re going to go with jazz. Let’s just see what happens.”
Aline: This one is loosely set on Alan Cumming’s Scottish Highland castle. They do a lot of music which is riffs on that. It’s fun. It knows it’s silly. He knows it’s silly. He’s wearing fantastic outfits. It’s really pretty delightfully done. My thing is, as we all are trying to drink more water, and obviously, all of us growing up, we never drank a single glass of water, pretty much ever.
John: Never drank water.
Aline: Maybe a Dixie cup.
Craig: Water’s disgusting.
Aline: Dixie cup here and there. Here I am with my… I’ve discovered these Nuun. It’s a product. They look like Sweetarts. You put them in water, and they make it lightly carbonated. They have very few calories. They have electrolytes in it, whatever that is.
Craig: Thank god.
Aline: It tastes good, makes me drink a lot more water. I was getting a lot of La Croix guilt, because there’s just so many cans with the La Croix. It felt so wasteful. These little Nuun tablets-
Craig: How do you spell Nuun? How do you spell it?
Aline: N-U-U-N, Nuun. N-U-U-N, I think it is. Yeah, Nuun.
John: Mike has those too. They’re good.
Aline: They’re good.
Craig: Nuun.
Aline: There’s a variety of flavors. Six bucks and you get 10 or 12 drinks for that. When you don’t feel like drinking water because it doesn’t have any flavor, this feels like a little treat. It’s a little sweet. It’s not aspartame or sorbitol either. I don’t like fake sugar very much. It’s just a little splash of hydration and electrolytes.
Craig: Little zhuzh.
John: The three of us talked. I think we were backstage before the last live show. I’m trying not to drink on weekdays, because as I get older, it’s harder to recover from it. I’m always looking for something else to drink instead of a cocktail or instead of a glass of wine.
Aline: I have this theory now that I think we’re going to look back on drinking the way we look at smoking.
John: Maybe.
Craig: I won’t.
John: It was delightful. Do you have time to think of a One Cool Thing?
Craig: I think we got two great-
John: We had two good ones there.
Craig: We got two terrific cool things. I’ll be back next week with a great cool thing.
Aline: You’re a sufficer. You know that.
Craig: On this topic, I am an absolute sufficer.
Aline: What’s the opposite of a sufficer? Optimizer. Optimizer.
Craig: Optimizer.
John: Optimizer.
Craig: On this one, I’m [crosstalk 00:56:14].
Aline: Craig is, in this instance, a relatively disagreeable sufficer. I love it.
Craig: Correct.
John: Love it.
Aline: Sounds like we’re done, but John, and you don’t have to broadcast this-
Craig: We’re done.
Aline: … but two people told me that you’re working on something so huge that it cannot be discussed.
Craig: Oh my god.
Aline: Then someone else told me that they read a pilot that you recently read, and it was maybe the best television pilot they’ve ever read.
Craig: Wait, that he’s recently written or read?
Aline: Written. Sorry, written. Sorry.
Craig: I was like, why is that a compliment to him? Somebody said you read something that was amazing.
Aline: Somebody said that you’re working on something so huge it cannot be discussed and that they recently read a TV pilot that you wrote and it was one of the best TV pilots they’d ever read.
Craig: Is it true?
John: It’s true I wrote a TV pilot. I think it’s really, really good.
Craig: I’m excited.
John: I don’t want to jinx anything by revealing it. I’m specifically keeping it a secret from friends, because I think it would be really exciting just for it to come out.
Craig: Love that. Boom.
Aline: I’m hearing rumblings, and I wanted to pass that along to you, because-
John: Thank you. I love that.
Aline: There’s bullshit rumors. There’s bullshit when people say to your face, “Oh, I think this is going to do great.” You’re like, “Shh.” When you start to hear these things where people are abuzz… They were like, “Do you know anything about it?” It’s huge and stuff. Whatever it is, I’m excited about it.
Craig: That’s exciting.
John: I’m keeping a lid on some stuff.
Craig: Keep a lid on it.
John: Keep a lid on it.
Aline: Woo!
John: It could make it difficult to make Scriptnotes, but we’ll make it work.
Craig: Or we just let Aline do it.
John: Aline and Megana take over the whole show.
Aline: That’s it. We’re ready.
Craig: [crosstalk 00:57:53].
Aline: The John August hive is going to…
Craig: The hive will take over.
John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: What?
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. On Instagram and elsewhere, where should we find you, Aline?
Aline: I am still on Twitter, alinebmckenna. I am on Instagram, abmck. My company had an Instagram, Lean Machine. I’m sickeningly online probably for the next two weeks. I have encouraged people who don’t want to hear about this movie to unfollow me. My Instagram is just littered with Your Place or Mine promo. I’m very sorry if you are a personal friend of longstanding. You are definitely looking at your spouse and being like, “What the eff is wrong with her?” I got a movie coming out. I’m trying to do something.
John: You were emailing while we are talking to the people in charge. Do we know what time is it coming out?
Aline: 12 a.m. 12 a.m., so basically Thursday night.
Craig: It’s right there.
Aline: 12 a.m. EST.
John: February 4th.
Aline: February 9th technically. February 9th technically.
John: February 9th.
Aline: February 10th, but now I’ve just found out midnight February 9th. You guys are going to stay up until midnight, aren’t you?
John: Stay up late on February 9th so you can watch it.
Craig: Just so people don’t get confused, let’s say 12:01 a.m. February 10th. I think that’s going to-
Aline: Correct. Correct.
Craig: Otherwise, everyone’s going to get so confused.
John: I want Netflix’s numbers to show at 12:01 suddenly a bunch of people. That twas the Scriptnotes factor.
Craig: The Scriptnotes factor.
Aline: I will tell you that the other day I was talking to one of our old-school friends, and he was saying, “I’m just really thinking about what works on different platforms.” Then there was a pause, and I was like, “Did you ever think we would say a sentence like that?”
Craig: What works on different platforms.
Aline: Trying to figure out what works on different platforms.
Craig: Super Mario, it’s a platformer. Donkey Kong.
John: When’s it going to drop on streaming.
Craig: When’s it going to drop. That just sounds urological, doesn’t it?
John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great. I think you’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. They’re basically all I wear.
Craig: That’s all I wear.
John: Hoodies also, so comfortable. Aline, do you have a hoodie? Do you have a Scriptnotes hoodie?
Aline: Sorry, I have very, very old Scriptnotes apparel. I have vintage Scriptnotes apparel.
Craig: What is happening over there?
John: Why’d you move your microphone?
Craig: Legitimately, what are you doing?
Aline: I put it to the side.
John: We still have a Bonus Segment to record. We still have a Bonus Segment to record.
Aline: Oh yeah. Oh, sorry. We have a Bonus Segment. Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. I don’t have any current… We’ve taken a little break on this, but Megana and I are going to work on some female… You know what I think, Megana? Also a set. A workout, seamless sports bra and leggings set. Wouldn’t that be great? Like something you get from Outdoor Voices or Girlfriend Collective with Scriptnotes on it.
John: No idea.
Craig: Girlfriend Collective.
Megana: It’s going to drop soon. Look out.
Craig: It’s going to drop.
Aline: Like a Nikibiki vibe. If anybody knows what Nikibiki vibe… It’s a Nikibiki vibe.
Craig: I’m obsessed.
John: You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Matthew, god bless you. You’re going to have so much work on this episode. I apologize. Aline, thank you so much and congratulations on your movie.
Craig: Thank you, Aline. Congrats.
Aline: Woo!
[Bonus Segment]
John: We’re here for the Bonus Segment, and now we get to talk about Episode 3 of The Last of Us. Episode 4 will have already come out by the time this one’s dropped, so who knows?
Craig: Dropped.
John: Dropped. We’ve gotta say dropped as much as possible.
Craig: Everything keeps dropping.
John: What games would Bill and Frank have been playing? What activities would they have been doing, other than sex? They certainly don’t have puzzles. They totally could have had puzzles.
Craig: Neither one of them are interested in jigsaw puzzles, because jigsaw puzzles aren’t puzzles.
Aline: Wrong.
Craig: I am correct. Here’s what I think happens. My dad had this setup in our basement of a World War II reenactment on maps with little pieces and things. He was solo playing this war scenario game. I think Bill would absolutely be doing that. When Frank shows up, Frank is like, “No no no, I don’t want to do that. Let’s start with some simple things like Charades.” I think that they would’ve absolutely played Charades. I think it’s a fun thing to do. It doesn’t take up any resources.
John: Playing Charades just with each other, I guess.
Aline: How do you play Charades with two people?
Craig: You write a bunch of things down. Frank is only doing the charading. Bill only guesses. Bill doesn’t act. Bill doesn’t perform. It’s really just can Bill guess these things. I think they’ve done something like that. I think they might play cards. I don’t think they’re big on board games per se. That’s not how they connected. Neither one of them does crossword puzzles, which is a huge shame. Terrible shame.
John: Of the two of them, Bill would be more likely to do crossword puzzles.
Aline: You don’t think there’s an old Scrabble set knocking around there that they’re playing with?
Craig: They may have tried a couple of times.
John: Bill’s mom has Scrabble.
Aline: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots?
Craig: No. You know what? There probably would be this old, musty Parcheesi that perhaps they pull out every now and again.
John: Yeah, because he would’ve also had his childhood games, because that’s apparently the house he grew up in.
Craig: It is the house he grew up in. He’s so into his survivalist stuff. Games are frivolous and will distract you from your goal, which is of course to defeat the forces of Armageddon.
John: Indeed. I want to talk to you about the filming of the episode, because I was curious, how many days did that episode take? There’s a lot happening. Aline measured how many strips were in an episode. The number of strips, number of setups and scenes in that were so vast. A lot happens.
Craig: Not as vast as some of our other episodes. I think that one was pretty on target for what our… Generally, our episodes were between 18 and 22 days of shooting. That one was probably around 19 or 20, I’m guessing.
John: What we’re seeing for the house-
Aline: Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.
John: Eighteen to 20, that’s a lot of days.
Aline: Eighteen to 20 per episode?
Craig: That’s right.
John: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you had all that time.
Aline: We had seven.
Craig: You were half-hours, in fair. You were half-hour.
John: They were not a half-hour show. They were an hour show.
Craig: You were an hour.
Aline: They were an hour show, 44 minutes, 42 minutes.
Craig: Forty-four minutes, okay. This was 72 or 73 minutes.
John: It was lengthy.
Aline: It was a whole ass movie. That’s why I tweeted what I did. John, you were wanting to ask something, because what I wanted to say about the episode is, have you guys done testing with dials? You’ve done testing with dials, right, [crosstalk 01:05:10]?
John: I’ve done dials, yeah, for a pilot.
Craig: I’ve never done it. I’ve heard about it.
Aline: I’ve done it. People really tend to… They’ll crank it. You’ll see somebody crank it. If you have dials in our house when Will and I watch something… Man, we are PB and J. I love the setup. I love the first 10 minutes of every action movie. Epilogues are my favorite. In every action movie or genre piece, there’s always the rest, where they make a campfire, whatever. I love those purely human, non-genre things.
The first two episodes are much more propulsive in genre stuff, which I do enjoy, but I am the one who’s always waiting for those human moments, because that’s what my work is. That’s what I love the most. This for me started with some genre stuff. I’m enjoying it. I love it. Literally, that episode to me is like a jar of honey-laced… I’m just rejecting drugs. It’s just like a big box of sprinkles, and I’m going to eat them all, because that is exactly what I love, which is watching human behavior in extreme.
Craig: I’m glad you liked it.
Aline: It is the best piece of anything I’ve seen about what it felt like to live through a pandemic, which is like, there’s just us here, these little decisions, I’m rotating the plate in a certain way, and that means something, and just all the human, human moments.
For me, it was very moving, because I’ve been married for 25 years, so pandemic or not. We’re empty-nesters now. It’s just two old people in a house, puttering around and saying, “Do you want the spring beans or do you want the green beans or the asparagus?” I really related to that.
Knowing that Craig’s been married a long time and how much he loves his family and the sweet, emotional, human, but also very concise way in which Craig is a sweetheart. I really do have to find this email that Craig sent me when my movie bombed. There’s just a particular way in which Craig is kind, and it’s very un-flowery. It’s very concise and simple.
The thing is, if the writing is too emotional, I won’t cry. There was so much space left for me to cry. I don’t cry very often in TV shows. The characters I love so much, but there’s just a particular kind of humanity that I find in Craig’s work that is this simple… Also, two more things. It’s funny. I really hate when these more masculine genres… No one’s funny. No one’s farting. No one’s giggling. No one’s barking a shin. It’s like, guys, that’s not what life is.
Then the other thing is, my god, every heavy genre thing is shot like Fincher. All these people owe Fincher money. It’s like that blue, brown, gray, milky. I love the way this show is shot with, when there’s bright sunlight, there’s bright sunlight. There’s vegetation everywhere. It doesn’t have an onerous stylistic overload, which I feel like a lot of these pieces really have. There’s something that feels almost very totalitarian. You’re trying to do a dystopia, but you’re dystoping me. This one is like, no, this is what the world is like, and there’s still sunshine, and there’s still strawberries, and there’s still wine to be poured.
When I love something, I really… Will will tell you. I was so excited about it because of all those things, but it really, really made me cry.
Craig: That’s very sweet. I’m very glad.
John: I have an actual question for you. What has impressed me most about-
Craig: That was outrageous, wasn’t it?
John: Sorry.
Craig: That was the most dismissive thing I’ve ever heard in my life. “I have an actual question.”
John: In addition to a phrase, I have a question. One of the things I enjoyed most about the episode was that we went through this long thing with Bill and Frank. It was gorgeously done and detailed and precise, but the fact that actually it had a purpose to pay off into the Ellie storyline. At what point did you know that was going to happen? From the initial conception, that was always going to be there?
Craig: Had to be.
John: Had to be. What did change though over the course of the writing, because one of the things you talked about on the podcast is sometimes you’d get really smart notes from people. Were there any things that you got notes on for the first draft to this last draft that things grew and changed and improved?
Craig: In all honesty, this largely was there in the first draft.
John: From the start.
Craig: There were changes that I made primarily for some practical considerations. Basically, that was what I wrote.
John: Great.
Craig: It was just sort of there.
John: It’s lovely when that happens. I’ve had a couple of movies where it’s happened, and other times there have been discoveries along the way. I was curious whether there was something that was a development, like someone’s like, “Oh, but what if… “
Craig: I have to tip my hat to HBO. They read it and they were like, “We love this.”
John: Great.
Craig: “Here are a couple of little things.” As we go, like I said, for budgetary purposes or location purposes or whatever, you have to change some things here or there, but it’s pretty much whatever.
Aline: It’s the biggest departure from the game, right? How did you decide to do that?
Craig: Yes. In the game, your perspective is always pinned to Joel, or later in the game, the perspective shifts, and you play as Ellie. Your perspective is always pinned to one or the other. You never leave them.
In the game, you must share the perspective of Joel as he arrives at Bill’s town. There is no Frank. Bill is angry and grouchy. He’s got the town rigged. The whole thing becomes a mission of figuring out where a car battery is, to get, to put in this car. It’s very mission-based because you need game-play. The character’s terrific. It’s just very different. It’s serving a different purpose, because the nature of that medium is quite different.
You do eventually find Frank, but in the game, Frank is dead. You don’t even see his face. You see his feet, because he’s hanged himself. He and Bill, you eventually figure out… Bill mentions him as his partner, and you just presume in a heteronormative way he’s talking about business partner or smuggling partner. It turns out, no, it’s a romantic partner. They basically broke up, and one of them lived on one side of the town. One of them lived on the other. They stopped talking to each other completely.
Then Frank was trying to leave, got infected, and killed himself and left a note behind that was the most bitter note ever. It was like, “This happened, and anyway, I’m better off. I’m glad I’m dead. It would be so much better being dead than spending one more day with you.” That relationship was presented in the game as a negative omen for Joel, like this is what happens to you if you don’t let anyone in.
John: Would a player always have found that, or could you have gone through the section and never discovered that?
Craig: You will always discover Frank, but that note is something that you have to choose to pick up and read. It’s one of the hallmarks of how Naughty Dog does their games. Those notes are gorgeous. There’s all this great stuff in it.
I thought that because we can shift perspective, we had an opportunity to, first of all, tell the story of what happens over 20 years through the lens of a relationship, which is generally what interests me, and then also to see a success.
These two guys love very differently. One is about improving the world, and the other is about protecting what matters to him, which is one person. They take care of each other, and they complement each other perfectly. They get to grow old together. They take care of each other. When it’s time to go, they go out on their own terms. As Nick Offerman playing Bill says, “I’m old. I’m satisfied, and you were my purpose.” To me, I needed the audience to understand that you can win. This is a brutal world. Aline, good news, there are going to be a lot of the dial turning scenes for you.
Aline: Cupcakes. Cupcakes.
Craig: Many, many more cupcakes coming, but it’s a tough world out there. The whole thing is about challenging Joel to open his heart up to this kid and what happens if he does and what are the risks and costs to him, but you can do it.
Like you said, there’s no point in doing the Bill and Frank story if it doesn’t have any direct bearing on Joel’s character and his relationship with Ellie. There have been a few people who just missed it. I don’t know how exactly, because it’s pretty clear. Bill leaves a note. Bill would never write the things in that note if he hadn’t met Frank. The note is about Frank. What he’s saying is, “You and I are here for literally only one reason, to protect the one person we love.” Joel has failed twice now. He’s failed to protect his own daughter. Now he’s failed to protect Tess. This is his last chance is this kid. If that note isn’t there, he’s a different man. That is why that story’s there.
Aline: That’s what is so great about TV is that you can take that detour and you have that time and you have that real estate. I’m always surprised if people don’t use it, or frankly, they overuse it. Sometimes things are so incredibly un-propulsive that you’re like, dude, give me a story, something. That balance between moving forward and resting is so…
You could probably do a podcast about that, an episode about that, where you move forward and where you rest. You need to let the audience rest. A lot of times, they just don’t let you. That’s why I often fall asleep in big budget movies, because when they get to the monsters, the vagina monsters and the flying caterpillars, I’m out. I’ve lost my human rooting interest.
Craig: How can we not call this episode vagina monsters and flying caterpillars?
John: I think so.
Craig: That’s pretty much what’s going on here.
Aline: That’s really what I care about, and so I really miss that. It was so funny, because one of the things that you do, Craig, that’s so confident, is that you don’t over-expositoritize. That’s what I was saying to you. That’s even in the racking, that you don’t rack. It’s like you can see it. You can see it. Then you had mentioned Bill and Frank a bunch even in the first two episodes. When I realized who it was, I turned to Will and I went, “That’s Bill and Frank.”
Craig: That’s what we’re going for.
Aline: I think that we sometimes forget how important it is for an audience to discover something. That’s one of the reasons it’s really important not to be noted to death, because when you’re noted to death, what people are doing is like, explain, explain, explain, rack now, rack now, explain exactly who they are. I am Bill. I am Frank. An audience is smart, and they’re going to get it.
The joy that I had when I realized, oh, this is who they’ve been talking about this whole time… What is this? What is the meaning of this? How are they going to meet? How is this? Because I trust you as a storyteller, I was like, oh, this is going to… To watch where the touchpoints, where the bones were going to drop in…
I think in action and genre particularly, it just gets bony towards the end. It’s just all fish bones. It’s like, let me still have my… When you go back and look at movies, even Die Hard or Rocky or things like that, you’re shocked at how little happens. So much happens in our movies now that it’s just like, I feel like there’s a point that usually comes at minute 62 where I’m just punched in the face for 20 minutes. I will get overloaded and fall asleep.
One of the things, Craig, is that because you come from writing comedy, because you come from writing things that weren’t super dramatic or whatever, I think you have a confidence in your comedic resting abilities. All the best stuff in most of these movies is… My favorite thing in Bourne Identity is when he washes her hair in the sink.
Craig: You are going to continue to enjoy this show, I think, because that’s definitely so much of what we do. It’s not to say that there aren’t going to be some sequences, including some enormous ones. The reason I wanted to do this show in the first place, it’s always primarily been about relationships.
The first couple of episodes are always hard, of anything, because you are building a world, introducing people, causing trauma, staging plot, and then motivating the things to begin. I will say that at this point with that episode, the first act of the season has concluded. We now begin the second act. We are ready to go with Joel and Ellie on this journey.
Aline: Felt that. Felt that with the car driving away. I felt that.
Craig: There are more, “Oh, that’s what that means,” to come.
Aline: You want a mix, right? You want a mix of things you’re discovering and things that are fed to you helpfully, because the other thing is I get very confused. I’m every joke TikTok about the mom who’s like, “Who is that? What is that? Who is that?”
The episode, spoiler alert, where you’re like, “When you step on the mushroom thing over here, it’s going to activate the other thing,” I was like, I’m just now counting down to when we activate all the outdoor mushroom people, which is not a sentence I’ve said ever before. I think it’s fine to do also the Mac and cheese story stuff.
In some point in Devil Wears Prada, she says, “If you can last here a year, you can have any job you want in the publishing business.” We say it one time, but it gets you through. You’re wanting to go, “Just quit, lady. Quit complaining and quit.” It’s such a good illustration for people of, you want to have those very clean, clear things, and then you want to have those delightful discovery things. To me, it feels like this is a chef who’s been cooking a very long time and has a lot of confidence and is not sweatily…
I’m just going to mention one more thing. Thank god that the people who are supposed to look like shit look like shit. I’m not kidding, because one of the weird sexist things is that when you watch a show, the men look like shit, and the women look like they stepped out of a hair and makeup trailer. Thank you for making… The women are supposed to look like shit. They look like shit.
Craig: I don’t know if I would go that far, but I would definitely say that we tried to keep everybody fairly realistic in the world. One of the things that was interesting about this episode is that we could depict two men not looking like shit, because they had a shower, they had clothes, they had resources.
Aline: That was nice. That was nice.
Craig: I did have this crazy moment on set where I had… We didn’t shoot our episodes in order.
John: How late in the season was this shot?
Craig: After the episode I directed, we went into this one. Then we went back and did the one that was the week before, because we needed time to put a lot of the effects in place. This one, we were like, “This isn’t as effects-heavy. We can do this one first.” I’d just come off directing that episode.
Every day, poor Anna Torv had to have this puffy eye thing stuck on to make her look all beaten up, which was incredibly uncomfortable. She was a real trooper about it. I get them out of the trailer. They come to set already ready to go. They just go back and get their touch-ups while we’re setting up after blocking. We’re doing this, and we come to the scene where they’re having their lunch, which is a flashback. Anna walks on set, and I’m like, “Oh my god, you’re beautiful.”
John: It was fun to see her out of all the distress makeup.
Aline: Again, that’s important. Her looking like you would, filthy, I’m sorry, but that’s a feminist act.
John: It was important for her to look great at that moment.
Aline: How many times in these movies where the man looks like a man would look and the woman looks like she’s had a vanity pass. Exactly what you said, which is then when someone gets a shower or a meal or does their hair, it has impact.
Craig: You notice it. Connie Parker was the head of our makeup department. She did such a good job. Makeup is like magic to me. She did such a good job of putting makeup on without ever seeming like anybody was wearing makeup, which is hugely important, especially when we’re talking about aging Pedro, because we aged Pedro every morning to play an older version of himself.
When we’re doing multiple versions, Anna Torv just got beaten up. It’s the next day. She’s not quite as beaten up. Now we’re going back in time. She’s not beaten up at all. As we go through this story, keep an eye on us, Aline, and keep giving me the makeup reports.
That was something that was important to me. There are shows that everyone, men and women, everyone first of all is gorgeous, and their hair is perfect and their makeup is perfect and everything is perfect and the lighting is perfect. We tried to be be more realistic.
Aline: The hardest I’ve ever laughed at that was… What’s the movie that Kevin Costner made in the West that was such a… Dances with Wolves. Dances with Wolves, people look generally pretty grubby. He looks pretty grubby. People look like they might in the West. Cut to Mary. What’s her last name? She has a several-thousand-dollar Jose Eber haircut. She has the most fabulously feathered hair. It’s incredible. It’s like how you would possibly have cut all those precision layers and then curled them with your round brush.
I’m very, very sensitive to that kind of thing. It really pulls me out. The women waking up with their full makeup on, all those things really pull me out. I think you don’t need it. You don’t need to add levels of un-reality. Again, I feel like this comes from confidence and from Craig being a competent chef who’s left in the kitchen to do what he needs to do. You don’t have anybody saying to you, “We got this beautiful woman. When is she going to rip her dress into a mini dress?”
Craig: That’s why she’s here, to be beautiful.
Aline: I’m going to be embarrassed if-
Craig: There are no mini dresses. Hair cutting will occur.
Aline: Great.
Craig: We talked a lot about hair and hair cutting and how would they be cutting their hair and what it would mean for them and all sorts of things like that. We try as best we can to… Look, in the second episode, Ellie wakes up, and pretty much the first thing she says is, “I have to pee.” No one ever has to pee in movies or television, but we do. We have to pee. The first thing I do when I wake up, I don’t know about you guys, I pee.
John: You go pee.
Craig: Anyway, our people pee.
Aline: No, I turn to the very handsome man in bed with me, and I’m fully made up. Then I start kissing him, even though I haven’t brushed my teeth.
Craig: Exactly.
Aline: I keep my bra on. It’s bonkers what we accept. I think what’s smart, Craig, is you’re in a genre world. You have enough tropes to go around. You don’t need to add extra ones. That’s what I really admire. Genre is there to give you those guardrails. When people ask me about romantic comedy, it’s like, sure, I’m going to have some of the things that you associate with the genre, just like you’re doing a zombie thing. Dead people looking weird are going to go argh across the frame, for sure.
Craig: They’re not dead.
Aline: That doesn’t change that you can still have a reality and emotion and talk about human beings. Genre gives you some nice guardrails with which to do it. I think Craig has an exceptional understanding of genre. If it’s identity thief, it’s going to use those conventions as a guardrail. To me, it’s like you’re going to use your genre pass on the zombie stuff, and by the way, do it well. I think that the enoki mushrooms are-
Craig: Not vagina monsters.
Aline: They’re not vagina monsters.
John: I think all Aline and I are saying is that it was a terrific episode.
Craig: Thank you.
John: A puzzle may have been too much, but it would’ve been fantastic.
Craig: Would’ve ruined it.
John: That is our episode.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thanks, Aline. Bye.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Aline: Bye.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Watch Your Place or Mine on Netflix at 12:01am on 2/10/23
- Showtime and Paramount+ Merging, With Rebrand Planned
- ‘Westworld’ Gets New Home As Warner Bros. Discovery Strikes Roku & Tubi FAST Channel Deals
- Cancellations Of Completed Seasons Of TV Series; Experts Weigh In On Whether Trend Will Continue
- Salem 1692 Game
- Nuun Hydration Tablets
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter and Instagram
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 586: Against Vagina Monsters, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back writer/producer Megana Rao to discuss techniques to explain what happened in the world of a movie before the movie began. How do we use past events as touchstones, and how does our interpretation of events become the narrative in our culture?
Then Megana tells us her story of getting staffed. How does a new writer join the WGA, and what is expected of a writer on your first day? She also answers listener questions and shares advice she’s learned from her time on our show.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Megana introduces John and Craig to Get Ready With Me videos.
Links:
- How to Become a Member of the WGA
- Conceiving the 2000s by Noah Smith
- Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams
- The Romantics on Netflix
- Logitech Lift Vertical Mouse
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Lex Kornelis (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Collective Narratives first appeared on John August.
John and Craig twirl their mustaches and discuss what motivates our villains. Why does past trauma lead some characters to become villains, while others become heroes? What separates good and evil, and what makes a villain great?
We also celebrate Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy TV special, and follow up on office phones, #PayUpHollywood, and American military influence in film.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss Craig’s new tattoo of Ellie’s switchblade, and our first tattoo experiences.
Links:
- Amtel Systems
- The U.S. military’s Hollywood connection by Rebecca Keegan for Los Angeles Times
- How E-girl influencers are trying to get Gen Z into the military by Günseli Yalcinkaya for DAZED
- Warren Beatty Appears in Bizarre Dick Tracy TCM Special in Apparent Film-Rights Ploy by Dan Clarendon
- The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote by T.B.D.
- Why do good people do bad things? by Daniel Effron
- Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk by Catherine A. Sanderson
- WGAw Late Pay Desk
- The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic
- Tattoo artist Yeono
- Craig’s Tattoo
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Dilo Gold (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Anti-Villains first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 585 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what are the unique characteristics that allow you to distinguish one writer’s writing from another’s. We’ll talk about writer fingerprints, voice, and situations where you may need to mimic someone else’s style. Plus, we have a lot of listener follow-up.
Craig: Good.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we often answer writer questions about producers, but here we have one from a producer asking about how to best handle a writer who can’t seem to finish or deliver on a script. If you want to know what advice Craig, Megana, and I have for this producer, you can find out as a Premium Member in about one hour when we get to that segment.
Craig: That’s worth the five bucks right there.
John: Right there. Right there.
Craig: Right there.
John: You know what’s worth more than $5?
Craig: What, Segue Man?
John: A spot on Scriptnotes if you are a writer, because we are the number one podcast for getting Oscar nominees to happen. That’s what I’ve decided.
Craig: I think you might be right about this.
John: Our track record this year, pretty darn good. Sarah Polley, Oscar nominee. Rian Johnson, Oscar nominee, Daniels, Oscar nominees. You count them as one or two people?
Craig: I count them as one bi-person duology.
John: Absolutely. Although she wasn’t on the podcast this year, she’s a previous guest, Pamela Ribon, and she was a One Cool Thing, so I think that counts for her animation nomination for My Year of Dicks.
Craig: Absolutely. It’s so funny, Year of Dicks triggered something in me.
John: The title or the film itself?
Craig: The title. I’m so glad I got to say that and it’s preserved eternally. Have you watched Poker Face yet?
John: I haven’t watched it yet. I’m excited too.
Craig: I saw the first episode of Poker Face last night, which is the new show from Rian Johnson and the great Natasha Lyonne, who by the way, have we had Natasha on the show?
John: No, she was never on the show.
Craig: We’re going to change that momentarily. It was a delight. There was a line that was said not once, but twice, possibly thrice. “Cloud of dicks.” It made me happy. I think we have entered the dicks phase of language.
John: Yeah, 100%. Now, I worry though that the success of these writers who came on the Scriptnotes podcast is only going to make it worse for Megana. I don’t know if you know this, Craig, but publicists are flooding her inbox.
Craig: I know.
John: We need to stop that.
Craig: There’s nothing we can do about that really. They’re going to find whoever they can find, and I don’t blame them. I honestly don’t. The thing about these awards seasons is… You’ve been involved in one. I’ve been involved in one. The publicists are constantly looking for these angles. The ones that they love the most are the inside baseball ones, where they know you can go and talk to people for an hour, it’s actually a fun conversation, it’s not brutal, and it’s going to be over-sampled by the people voting in the Guild Awards and for the Academies.
I get it, but also, dear publicists, we’re not a talk show really. This is my favorite kind of show, me and you alone with Megana. Alone with Megana. That’s a great song title. Didn’t Air Supply do that one?
John: I do want to acknowledge that most of the people we’ve had on the show who are writers who get awards were people we just knew independently of publicists. There have been a couple cases where the only place that we could find these people were because of publicists, and some of those have turned out great too. The Greta Gerwig episode is a fantastic episode. I don’t know Greta Gerwig from anybody, but because of publicists, we were able to be connected together. I’m not digging publicists. They serve a great function. I just want to make sure that we are true to our goals of not becoming just a talk show.
Craig: I think we really do try and limit it, even among our friends. We have friends that still bug me, like, “Why haven’t I been on your show?” Because that’s not what we do. It’s not our thing. Then every time we do have a guest, I’m like, “I’m going to hear from people.” It’s honestly not our focus. We are not a come on and plug your thing. The reason that we talk to people almost always, not always, but almost always, is because there is a personal connection. Even the Daniels was just down to, I’d had a nice chat with one of the Daniels on Twitter. There was some connection there.
John: I met them up on the mountain at Sundance.
Craig: There you go. There you go.
John: There was some connection. The person we’ve not been able to get on the show, and we’ve kind of tried, we haven’t tried that hard, but James Cameron is a get that we’d love to get, because not only his most recent work, but how incredibly influential his writing style for films like Terminator and Aliens. Action writing is different because of him. It would be great to have him on the show.
Craig: I am a huge, huge fan of the script for Titanic. I just love it. I love it. It would be great to talk to him for my own interest. I’m that selfish. If other people want to listen, fine, but I want to talk to him.
John: We’ve been trying to make that happen. At some point, maybe we can make that happen. In the meantime, if you want to read any of these scripts that are nominated, you can now, thanks to Megana Rao, read them on the Weekend Read beta. Weekend Read is the app my company makes for reading scripts on your iPhone. We have a beta for the new version. It’s really good. It’s really fun. We now have all the For Your Consideration scripts up in there if you want to read them. The new version has notes. It has a read aloud feature, which is fun.
Craig: Nice.
John: If you would like to try the beta on that, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s just a simple test flight. There’s still kinks that we’re working out, so if you want to try it out and tell us what’s working and what’s not working, that would help us out a lot.
Craig: Don’t kink-shame.
John: No. Kinks are good. Kink-celebrate.
Craig: I’m giddy today. I’m clearly giddy.
John: You are giddy. Let’s talk about why you’re giddy, because you had a rough start to your day. Do you want to tell us what happened this morning?
Craig: It was an up and down sort of day.
John: Literally.
Craig: Exactly. Upside, The Last of Us has been renewed for another season.
John: Hooray!
Megana Rao: Congratulations.
Craig: Thank you. I was very happy about that. Then on the downside, there’s some businessy, contracty nonsense. Every now and then, you just get a call from your lawyer where you’re like, “Wait, what? What?! What?!” I just got grouchy about that. It’ll all be resolved. Nobody freak out. Then I went and took a shower, and I was moving quickly, because I didn’t want to be late for this show.
John: You don’t want to break your perfect streak of being on time.
Craig: Exactly, because I’m always so punctual, and I really felt like it’s important to not blow it. That’s obviously really important to me, and so I raced. Coming out of the shower, I slipped and I fell in the bathroom. As I was falling, I did a pretty good job of… Time slows down, and you basically get spidey senses. Your body knows somehow, something terrible is about to happen, so your brain goes into a mega state. Everything got slower. I was able to get my hand out to slow things down. I was also able to turn. I took all of the brunt of the fall on my hip, which as you know, is something that old people break all the time. Now I know why. I did not break my hip. I was on the floor, and for a second I was like, “Did I just… No, I think I’m okay.”
There’s a comedian, Alonzo Bodden, who does this bit about how when you’re in your 20s and you fall, you just pop back up and your only concern is, “Did anybody see me? Because I looked really stupid.” When you’re in your 50s and you fall, people tell you, “Whoa, don’t get up. Stay down.” Then he said when you’re in your 80s and you fall, people fly in from out of state. I decided to stay down for a bit, and then I was like, “Everything’s fine.” Then I got back up, and I was just like, “Oh, for God’s sakes, what a start to the day.”
John: I’m so sorry, Craig. I had a fall at the end of last year. We were skiing. Skiing is inherently kind of dangerous. You’re going to fall while you’re skiing.
Craig: At least you fall on snow.
John: I was going in to change my gloves or something. I’m walking in ski boots, which are perilous anyway. I hit some wet concrete, slip, and start to fall. Yes, again, time starts to go more slowly. In fact, they think what’s actually happening is that time isn’t moving more slowly but your memory of it is moving more slowly. It takes more slices. That’s why it seems like-
Craig: Interesting.
John: That’s why you remember it happening slowly.
Craig: I like that.
John: I start to fall. I end up falling and hitting my ribs against this row of seats. I bruise my ribs. They’re still now recovering.
Craig: Are you sure you just bruised them?
John: If I’d broken them, it would’ve been harder to breathe.
Craig: It’s probably true.
John: Also, there’s not a lot they can do for broken ribs [crosstalk 00:09:12].
Craig: There really isn’t. You can’t cast them. You just basically tell people don’t take deep breaths.
John: The rib I bruised the most is one of the ribs in back that’s not actually connected to anything. It free floats, which is kind of great, but also they could just remove it like they removed Cher’s ribs. I was thinking, “Maybe they can just remove the rib.”
Craig: Did they really remove Cher’s ribs?
John: I think that is not just a Snopesy thing. We’re going to look it up right now, because I don’t want to put false information out. Snopes Cher rib.
Craig: I’m doing it too, Snopes Cher rib. “Did Cher have ribs removed to make her waist smaller?” False.
John: False.
Craig: False. The claim was Cher had her lowest pair of ribs surgically removed to achieve an ultra-small waist. That is apparently false. In fact, it doesn’t seem that really anyone has done that.
John: I’m looking up Marilyn Manson too, the other thing I’ve heard.
Craig: For a totally different purpose. We could say auto-fellatio on the show. I don’t think that that violates any… Marilyn Manson, who apparently is a horrible person, from everything I’ve read… Am I allowed to say that on the show?
John: Yeah. I think we avoid libel by saying you’ve heard people say that he’s not a good person.
Craig: I don’t mean to slander anybody. I’m just saying I’ve read things online. It sounds like he’s a horrible person. Some terrible claims have been made against him by people that I have no reason to doubt. The rumor that had been out there is that he had ribs removed so that he could perform auto-fellatio, which it can’t possibly be true.
John: No, it doesn’t seem like it’s true. People apparently are asking him, and he’s giving vague non-answers, probably because he wants the story to continue. Anyway, circling back to-
Craig: Boy, have we gone off… Wow.
John: Craig and I both fell down and hurt ourselves, and we’re older, but we’re okay.
*Megana:* Aw.
Craig: I like that Megana’s like, “Oh, you guys are so cute, falling down.” Megana, you’re the one that’s going to have to take care of us.
John: Megana has a sore throat.
Craig: Oh, you have a sore throat?
*Megana:* I have a sore throat, yeah.
Craig: Oh, dear. Oh boy.
*Megana:* It’s normal. It’s a cool thing to have.
Craig: Is it?
John: It’s a very useful sore throat.
Craig: Megana, I gotta push back on that. I don’t think it’s cool at all.
*Megana:* It’s not cool, but I got it from being social and fun, not from the two stories we just heard.
John: At a party.
*Megana:* I got it at a party.
Craig: Not from some pathetic old man lost his balance thing. Cool. Cool cool.
John: We actually have a PSA, not really a question or a follow-up, but from James, which is also about medical-related things. Megana, would you help us out with that?
*Megana:* James says, “This isn’t a question. It’s a reminder for all writers to look after their tools. For the last couple of years, I’ve been struggling to write. I would feel mentally drained whenever I started writing. Depression and writing became synonymous in my mind. I wasn’t looking at things clearly, literally. I got my eyes checked a few weeks ago, and it turns out that I needed reading glasses. That’s all. The effort required to read was causing me stress and fatigue. These glasses have given me a new surge of creativity, and it’s a joy to write again. If we’re sighted, our eyes are a key tool for our job. Please look after them.”
Craig: That’s fantastic, James.
John: That’s fantastic. I feel very seen by James, because a thing I’ve noticed over the past last few months is some days I wake up and my eyes are just not working quite right. It’s not that I need my reading glasses on or need them off. Just my monitor is hard to read. I actually have an eye appointment to go in and see if I need some sort of medium distance glasses. Right now, as we’re recording, eyes are crystal clear, everything is so sharp, but there’s times where it’s hard just to read, and writing’s tougher.
Craig: You don’t wear reading glasses?
John: I wear reading glasses only for very close distance things.
Craig: I see. John, alas, that is changing. John, your body is going through changes. Have a seat. Let’s talk about what’s happening with your body. Your eye muscles are dying, and so are mine. I will say the more you use reading glasses, the-
John: More you depend on them.
Craig: Oh my god, because your eye muscles are like, “Thank you. We’re done. Everybody go home. We retire.” I think it’s fun actually. I am enjoying this part of being old. I feel like this is the best old time. What follows this is not good old time. This is fun old time, like, “Oh, I need glasses. Oh, I slipped and fell, but really nothing happened, lol.” The 20-something that I work with on my show laughs about it, and that’s funny. In 10 years it’s going to be sad.
*Megana:* Also, just because most people on the podcast don’t get to see this, you do have quite a flourish when you put your reading glasses on.
Craig: I do?
*Megana:* Yeah.
Craig: I like to snap them open and slap them on. Everybody knows when the reading glasses go on-
*Megana:* It’s business time.
Craig: It’s business time. Decisions are about to be made.
John: A trick for people is that if you are starting to use reading glasses, like I am, get on Amazon. You can get packs of 10 that are basically all the same. You just leave them around places in your house, so you don’t have to worry about, “Where are my reading glasses?” Your reading glasses are everywhere, and that’s a really helpful thing you can do, just like pens. Just have a pen everywhere you need a pen.
Craig: Try and make as many friends as you can in their 50s and 60s, because they’ll always have reading glasses with them also. I used to look at people 10 years ago in a restaurant with their glasses and their phones with the lights on, looking at menus. I’m like, “What is wrong with these people?” It me.
John: You’re the problem.
Craig: I’m the problem.
John: We have another question that I think we can actually maybe answer, about Apple Podcasts and Siri. Megana, help us out.
*Megana:* Anthony writes, “I had a weird change in my normal listening habit when I upgraded to a new OS on my phone. I’m using an iPhone 12 Mini and I just upgraded to iOS 16.2. I’m subscribed to the show via Apple Podcasts, and when driving, I used to be able to press a talk button and say, ‘Play Scriptnotes podcast,’ and it just started playing the latest episode or wherever I left off. Now after this update, if I say, ‘Play Scriptnotes podcast,’ it says you have to blah blah blah Apple Music to do that. I tried changing it to say, ‘Play Apple Podcast Scriptnotes,’ and it didn’t work, starts playing Apple Podcasts but other shows. Without boring you to tears, I’ve managed to verbally get it to play a couple of times, but I can’t remember the exact phrasing that worked.”
John: This is a form of prompt engineering. It’s almost like what ChatGPT is, like what am I going to say to this device to get them to do what I want. We have the same kind of problem occasionally. In the morning, we ask Siri to play us the news. We say, “Play the news from NPR,” or just, “Tell us the news.” Sometimes it works like that, and sometimes it doesn’t.
What I think Anthony needs to do is be a little bit more specific. I think the real trick here is that the podcast we’re listening to is not Scriptnotes, it is Scriptnotes Podcast. For whatever reason, when we first set it up, we called it Scriptnotes Podcast. If he says, “Play Scriptnotes Podcast in Podcasts,” it should work. I listen to Overcast, and I’d test it, that, “Play Scriptnotes Podcast in Overcast,” will pull up Overcast and it’ll play in there.
Craig: Is there a way to change that, so that just saying Scriptnotes would work? Is there somebody we could talk to?
John: I think we would probably break… It’s too risky. There’s too many things that could break because of it.
Craig: What if I talk to Tim Apple? Would that help?
John: Tim Apple could fix all of it.
Craig: I’m telling you, this is going to… John, hang on. Just hang on, because this is going to be a show. It’s going to be a show, buddy. It’s going to be a show. We’re going to have a great time.
John: Also, what’s important for people to understand is that we think about Apple controlling podcasts, but they really don’t. It’s just an RSS feed, like your old website, Craig. That RSS feed has really nothing to do with Apple. It’s just people tend to use their iPhones to listen to podcasts.
Craig: I just wanted to say Tim Apple.
John: Tim Apple. Craig, we have talked before about IP-based movies. I think one of the things we got to was there was going to be a Pet Rock movie at some ponit. The moment has come. I was talking with a writer who’s going to pitch on the Pet Rock movie. We had a great conversation about what the Pet Rock movie should be.
Craig: I don’t hate it. Did you have a Pet Rock by the way?
John: I didn’t have an official Pet Rock bought at the store. I got a rock out of the garden and drew some eyes on it.
Craig: Oh my god, that’s the saddest thing in the world.
John: I don’t know what to tell you.
Craig: You were too poor to have the $4 Pet Rock?
John: Yeah, it’s true.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: Basically, my parents said no.
Craig: That is the most Eagle Scout thing I’ve ever heard from you, and you have quite a bit of Eagle Scoutness as an Eagle Scout. I had the actual branded Pet Rock, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s superior to your homemade faux rock.
John: Tell me why it was better.
Craig: No, it wasn’t.
John: What are the characteristics of a real Pet Rock? Are their googly eyes glued to it?
Craig: Yes, there are googly eyes glued to it. That is essentially what it was. Megana, have you even heard of Pet Rock?
*Megana:* I’ve heard of Pet Rock. I’ve never actually seen one. I haven’t held one.
Craig: There’s probably a few out there still in the wild. The joke of it was I think it was invented as a novelty to make fun of consumerism. It was like, “Look how stupid everyone is.” People would buy a Pet Rock. It’s a gag gift you’d give to somebody on their birthday, “Ha ha ha, I bought you a Pet Rock.” Then it just became a fad, a real fad. In the ‘70s, fads happened in the weirdest ways. We watch fads happening now live on Twitter or Instagram.
These things would just emerge in these crazy, organic ways until eventually they filtered down to people on Staten Island. Then it subverted the whole point. The whole point was look how ridiculous it is. Then actually people were like, “We want Pet Rocks.”
What we have now are a lot of people running Hollywood who are in their 50s and 60s who are remembering Pet Rock. This to me is the epitome of pointless in that nobody who’s going to… They’re not making the Pet Rock movie for people in their 50s and 60s. They’re making it for kids. Kids don’t know about Pet Rocks. Zero cache for them. It could be good though. It could be.
John: It could be good. It could be good, just because there’s literally a blank slate, as the writer said. There’s many rock puns you can get to.
Craig: I get it. Slate.
John: Here’s what I’ll say. I think the idea of this thing that should be completely inanimate being the central character of a story is interesting in the wake of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and the moments in Everything Everywhere All At Once which are about two rocks just sitting and watching the end of time. I kind of get it, but they’re going to want it to be a big, four-quadrant movie. They’re going to want it to be Minions, and that’s going to be challenging, but somebody’s up for it.
Craig: If you made a movie called Rocks and it was about animated rocks, that would be perfectly… We know that you can make a wonderful animated movie based on almost anything. It’s just the fact that they think Pet Rock has some kind of value.
John: I’m curious whether Pet Rock is a trademark, whether they held onto a trademark for that or if it’s just [inaudible 00:20:40].
Craig: That’s a great question. I don’t know, although now I’m seeing that apparently there is a Pet Rock that is introduced in Minions: The Rise of Gru. Perhaps this is why. It may be that the Pet Rock has been revived via Minions.
John: The other revival of the Pet Rock of course is Elmo’s longstanding beef with Zoe on Sesame Street about her pet rock. Zoe wants to save a piece of pie or a piece of pizza for her pet rock. Elmo’s like, “It’s just a stupid rock.”
*Megana:* His name’s Rocco.
John: His name’s Rocco, the pet rock.
Craig: Does Elmo physically fight Zoe? Do they fight? Is there blood? Do muppets bleed?
John: Do muppets bleed? We’ve got a title for the episode.
Craig: Hey, Siri, do muppets bleed? I just triggered a lot of phones out there.
John: We will follow the development of the Pet Rock movie. The other thing, which I don’t know if we talked about on the show before, is I was curious why is there not a General Mills cereal movie. Why is there not a Franken Berry movie? Why is there not a Count Chocula?
Craig: Why isn’t there?
John: I looked it up, and there was a whole plan to make them, and it all fell apart.
Craig: Things do tend to fall apart a lot in Hollywood.
John: Things fall apart.
Craig: That is true. Hold on a second. I just had a cool idea for a movie.
John: Please.
Craig: It’s an animated movie. It’s basically a battle royale between all of the cereal mascots.
John: The mascots, yeah.
Craig: All of them. There’s so many. Right off the top of my head, there’s Cap’n Crunch, there’s the Trix are for kids rabbit, there is the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
John: Love it.
Craig: Snap, Crackle, and Pop. There’s the Honey Smacks Dig ‘Em Frog. Was it Honey Smacks?
John: Dig ‘Em Frog, yeah.
Craig: There’s the Dig ‘Em Frog. There’s the wizard from Cookie Crunch or Cookie Crisp. It was a wizard.
John: Cookie Crisp wizard. We obviously have Boo Berry.
Craig: Franken Berry, Boo Berry, Count Chocula, the bee from Honey Nut Cheerios. What else do we need to say?
John: It’s IP-alooza. It feels like it could be Laff-A-Lympics, which is great.
Craig: Or Space Jam.
John: Space Jam is really the comp for it, although those were all within one studio. Getting them all together would be a little bit tough, but completely doable.
Craig: You just have to settle the great Kellogg’s/Post war. That’d be fun. Somebody get to work on that.
John: Easy done. Craig, we’ve talked before about the preface page or whatever we want to call that page after the title page, before the script itself starts. Thanks for Adrianne Cespedes who wrote in with this preface page Tár. Craig, would you mind reading the preface page from Tár?
Craig: Sure. Here’s what it says. “Based on this script’s page count, it would be reasonable to assume that the total running time for Tár will be well under two hours. However, this will not be a reasonable film. There will be tempo changes and soundscapes that require more time than is represented on the page, and of course a great deal of music performed on screen. All this to say, if you are mad enough to greenlight this film, be prepared for one whose necessary length represents these practical accommodations.” That’s great.
John: I really like this. I like it because here we have Todd Field warning the studio distributor that the film is going to be long, but also it feels very Tár-like. It feels like it’s in keeping with the spirit of the film, which is going to be like, “I am going to set impossible standards that are going to make you a little uncomfortable. Let’s get started.”
Craig: You can feel the intelligence radiating off of this. The formality of the language is setting you up for Tár. It’s wonderful and I think probably wasn’t necessary, but additive. If Todd hadn’t put this there, the people would’ve read it and said, “Wow, this movie’s great.” Then you would’ve said, “Terrific. Now, if you want to make it, I gotta tell you, blah blah blah blah blah.” I like that he put it in anyway, because it sets the table.
John: That’s what a preface page does is gets you ready for the read. We have a question from Lorenz in Vienna here.
Craig: Should I read it?
John: Megana, do you want to read this?
Craig: I don’t want to take Megana’s job.
*Megana:* I appreciate that, Craig.
Craig: You’re welcome.
*Megana:* Lorenz from Vienna writes, “In Episode 582, Craig briefly mentioned paid script consultants and what he thought about them. I then went back to the transcript of Episode 71 and was surprised to read that essentially you seemed to consider them a waste of money at best and dangerous quacks at worst. I’m an early career writer-director in Europe, and over here, script consultants are an integral part of the industry, with dedicated state funding for them during script development.
“My own experience with consultants has been very positive, and judging from what I’ve learned about writers’ rooms on your show, the relationship feels a bit like a mini room, with the consultant acting as a conversation partner and providing outsider’s perspective on the script. Most of the consultants I know are screenwriters themselves, but the relationship between the quality of their feedback and the measurable success of what they have written is not necessarily linear, similar to how someone might be a successful artist but a terrible arts teacher and vice versa. I’d be curious to hear if this is a completely different kind of consultancy to what you were talking about, what you think about it, and if this kind of relationship exists at all within the Hollywood system.”
John: This ties in actually really well to the Bonus Segment we’re going to be talking about, because that is a British writer and producer, and they have a whole thing called a script editor, which is not a thing we have at all here. Craig, let’s open our minds and think about, what if there were a person who came in to sit down with a writer to help them get their script better? What do we think about that person?
Craig: It sounds like things work quite a bit differently there. I’m trying to dig under the hood of this comment from Lorenz, because it almost feels like script consultants with state funding are operating the way our development executives operate over here. It’s quite a different thing. We’re talking about people that other people pay, like the government, to help develop screenplay and art in Europe.
Lorenz, here in the United States, these people that I’m talking about, writers pay them directly. They are out there saying, “Hey, hire me on a private basis. You pay me this much per hour or this much per read, and I will give you notes,” and things like that. Writers are essentially paying for the thing that in your country the government is funding. To that extent, there’s the problem. You end up with a lot of… When you drive down a city street and you see, I don’t know, store fronts for psychics, you can go in there and pay them if you want. It’s probably not going to work.
John: I agree with you that I think the real corollary here is probably development executives, which is a little bit different than producers, so we should talk about what the difference there is. A producer is a person who’s trying to get your film made.
Craig has talked a lot about working with Lindsay Doran, who is a great producer and has also worked as a development executive in times. She is a person who you can really have very in-depth conversations about your script and what you’re trying to do and how this scene’s working and how that ties into the next. She’s not a writer. She’s a person who works really well with writers. If that is what the script consultant is for someone like Lorenz, that’s great.
Really though, we’re getting back to what is the paid relationship, and is the person really any good. I think so often we’ve just encountered terrible, terrible people who are billing themselves as script consultants, who really have no business doing that at all. That’s I think the reason why we’re so gun-shy about recommending any script consultant is because we’ve had so many bad experiences or people coming in to us with terrible advice, terrible notes. People are just taking their money.
Craig: People are just taking their money. Our operating principle here is that there are perfectly good positions in Hollywood where people are paid, and often quite handsomely, to do the job of helping writers develop a screenplay. The executives who work at the studio are paid by the studio to obviously help the studio, but in doing so, try and give the writer advice and feedback. Then there are producers who are more entrepreneurial, but they too are being paid by someone else, certainly not the writer. That’s fine.
If your goal is to give writers notes and shepherd and develop, then you should be trying to be a studio executive or a producer. If you can’t, because say you’re not good enough, then perhaps you decide instead, “Oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll just go out there on my own and just start making writers pay me for this. In order to convince them, I will talk about how brilliant I am and what wonderful insight I have.” Eugh.
John: Thinking back to my time up at the mount in Sundance, the Sundance Institute works a lot like this. The consultants, the advisors they’re called for Sundance, they’re not paid. They’re volunteering their time to come up there to sit and work with these writers about their projects. It is not a governmental thing, but it has an organizational integrity quality to it. People are doing it for the best possible reasons and trying to make the best possible films.
Hopefully, that’s what you’re finding there in Austria, Lorenz, is someone who’s doing that. I want to make sure that when we are talking about script consultants negatively, we’re really talking about our experience of Hollywood hucksters who are taking writers’ money and making things worse.
Craig: Hollywood hucksters, that’s a great way of describing them.
John: Great. One last bit of follow-up here. Megana, we have Jake from Dallas.
*Megana:* “I was listening to John and Craig talk to Sarah Polley, and it reminded me of how supportive and nice the three of you are.”
Craig: Aw.
*Megana:* “Each of you are very smart and insightful people, which probably means you could be the ‘actually’ person to always correct others, who always tries to one-up those around you or the one who’s just waiting for their next opportunity to shower the conversation with their magnificent oration instead of listening to the people we’re sharing our time with. The Sarah Polley conversation was another example of you behaving in a supportive, constructive, and nice manner. Have you learned this anti-‘actually’ trait over your careers or do you think you always had the capacity to listen and contribute?”
John: It was very nice of Jake to write in with that. I thought it was a great episode too. A lot of people [inaudible 00:31:18] how much they enjoyed the Sarah Polley episode. Craig, what do you think? Actually, what’s going on here?
Craig: Actually…
John: It’s all Matthew cutting out all of our actuallys. That’s really what it is.
Craig: He has a filter now that just automatically strips everything of actually. I think that you and I learned this as we were starting out, because in a way, I think we were forced to, because of the way we were doing the podcast. This was obviously well before Zoom. We generally don’t look at each other when we’re having these things anyway. It’s all audio and certainly was at the start. When you are having a phone conversation with someone, which is what this essentially is, you need to give that person space. Also, I have to say I have occasionally sampled podcasts. I admit it. One of the reasons I struggle with podcasts is because people are constantly talking over each other, and it makes me crazy. What about you?
John: There are podcasts where that’s just the nature of how they work. It’s a tacit agreement between the host that that’s how it all works. It’s oneupmanship and who’s louder. That’s just never been us. My One Cool Thing actually ties into this.
Craig: Actually.
John: Actually. It’s basically how you set affordances so that people can say what they need to say or what they want to say, how do you ask questions that lead to interesting answers and continuing discussion. There’s some prep work there, but it’s also just mostly listening to what the person wants to tell you.
Craig: I think being interested in the people you have on your show is probably a good idea. I will also say that in a personal growth sort of way, it’s been made clear over the last few years by a lot of women that men in particular talk over them. You and I, I don’t think we ever talked over anybody when we had them on the air. I am certainly aware of just the general concept of not mowing people down when they’re talking. I like a nice, slow discussion.
The first scene of this season of The Last of Us is basically a Dick Cavett talk show. I am obsessed with Dick Cavett. I watch these videos of old Dick Cavett interviews, and it’s almost like from another planet of people talking and listening. They’re talking at length. It’s not about constantly entertaining the crowd. You can tell that the discussions haven’t been pre-organized and curated the way they are on talk shows now. I miss that, and to the extent that we can contribute to that sort of culture, I think that’s great.
John: I think also our guest selection is crucial. Sarah was a great example of that. Taffy Brodesser-Akner could take over Craig’s spot tomorrow.
Craig: Good. Please.
John: She definitely has that ability to just keep it all going. There have been times where a publicist has been insistent and gotten somebody onto the show, have been more of the frustrating times, where it’s like, I don’t have a thing to get to next. There have been a couple interviews, actually not that have been on Scriptnotes, but some live things, where the person was not interested in hitting the ball back. Man, it’s just tough.
Craig: It’s brutal. It is almost worse when people aren’t listening to each other. Turn on any news channel now. It’s just people yelling at each other constantly. Aren’t you amused when… It’s always two guys. Two guys are talking, and they’re angry at each other and they’re arguing, and neither one of them is willing to stop talking to let the other one talk, so they just keep going, like a game of chicken where the cars keep smashing into each other over and over. It’s remarkable.
John: They’re encouraged to do it because it generates conflict and it seems exciting. I hate it. A podcast I’ll recommend to everybody, and I think I talked about this on the show before, the Attitudes podcast with Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi is terrific and a great example of people who can talk over each other and yet they’re clearly listening at the same time, because their brains are synced in a way, and they’re improv people, so they can just keep building and building and building in ways that are delightful. I love it when I see people who are doing that really well. Cool.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Craig, our main topic here, this came from a recent issue of Inneresting. It was a recap of an old post of mine where I was talking about the things you do that make your writing unique, that you aren’t even aware that makes your writing unique. I also include a quote from Dara Resnick, where she was talking about how sometimes on a writing staff, one of your real goals is to lose your style and just mimic the showrunner style.
I thought I would talk for a few minutes about the kinds of things that are unique to one writer, where if a script dropped on your desk, Craig, and it didn’t have a title page on it, you could sometimes tell, “Oh, this was written by this person.”
Craig: Some of that stuff is magic and hard to parse out. Sometimes it’s almost scary to parse it out. I certainly don’t want to do that to my own stuff. Have you ever seen the Aaron Sorkin supercut?
John: I think I know what you’re talking about, which is basically just the dialog thing that does always happen in Sorkin dialog.
Craig: Exactly. There’s this collection that they’ve pulled from, all the years of West Wing and whatever the SNL show was and Sports Night and A Few Good Men and all the movies. There are these phrases and comments and styles and things that just keep coming up over and over and over. It’s not really self-plagiarism as much as it is just the fingerprint. It’s the style. Now, he’s a very stylistic writer. Part of knowing that it’s Aaron Sorkin is the hyper-literacy and the speed and all the rest of it. Everybody I think who’s good has a signature to them. Figuring out what comprises that is really interesting.
John: With Sorkin, there are words that you can cut together in a supercut. In other cases, it’s actually a little bit hard to parse. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this story about how they figured out how that Robert Galbraith, the writer, was actually JK Rowling. It was just basically forensic linguistics.
Craig: That was her nom de plume.
John: Nom de plume, her pen name. It was a secret that she was Robert Galbraith. There had been some rumors that it could be her. What they did is they went through and they compared the texts and they looked for sequences of adjacent words, sequences of characters, and a third test was on the most common words, and a fourth was about the author’s preference for long or short words. Basically, that’s what builds up that fingerprint. It’s like, “Oh, we are 90% certain that this is actually the same person writing these two things.” These were not deliberate choices that Rowling was making. It’s just that that’s just what happens. It’s just like you do things just because that’s how your brain works.
Craig: We can hear each other in our rhythm. Sometimes people will do an impression of me. When they do, I go, “Oh yeah, that does sound familiar,” but I’m not sure that if somebody had done that and not told me ahead of time that it was me, that I would’ve known it was me. Can you do an impression of me?
John: Not at all. I can’t do impressions of anything. That’s actually one of my biggest frustrations. You’re actually quite good at hearing and being able to do impressions or do accents. It’s just not a thing I’m good at. I can do it in my head. Can you do an impression of me?
Craig: Yeah, I can do an impression of you.
John: Let’s do it.
Craig: There’s a lot of stuff that comes out quickly, but yeah. Okay, moving on. It’s a rhythm thing. My impression of you, it’s not a great impression, because most of what makes you idiosyncratic is the speed of your speech and the rhythm of it. What people always do when they do an impression of me is they’re like, “So. Everything’s huge. Then when you talk you’re big.” I’m like, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know. Megana, can you do an impression of me?
*Megana:* I think an impression of you would be difficult to do, because you do take these pauses, but then in order to do the impression of you, I’d have to also replicate the eloquence that comes after the pause, and that would be very difficult to do.
Craig: You know what? You’ve won my heart.
John: Just that was a very Craig, like da da, da da da da. You also pitch up. I think you have a much more tonal range than I do or that a lot of speakers do.
Craig: I’m a singer.
John: You’re a singer.
Craig: I like to sing.
John: You’re a natural singer.
Craig: I guess my point bringing all this up and having fun with it is I don’t make those choices and you don’t make those choices and Megana doesn’t make those choices, why we talk the way we talk and why we have the patterns we have. All of that then I think is translatable or at least analogous to the weirdness of the way we write, but I don’t think I necessarily write the way I talk. I don’t think you write the way you talk. It’s this whole other thing.
John: Honestly, we write more similar than you would guess, because as we were working on the Scriptnotes book, one of the big jobs is to take the Scriptnotes transcripts, as we’re having a conversation about scene length or something, and so you and I are having a back-and-forth conversation. When we try to just turn it into a chapter with just prose, literally our sentences do fit together pretty well. We don’t read that different on the page, which is useful.
Craig: We’re like an old married couple that starts looking like each other.
John: Let’s talk about things that are different between-
Craig: I just want to keep upsetting Megana, like, “Aw. Aw.”
John: Let’s talk about some of the things that are different that you can notice on a screenplay page about one writer versus another writer. This is a list I had in my blog post, but we may add to this. How you handle unfinished end-of-line punctuation. Are you two dashes? Are you an ellipses? What are the situations where you’d use an ellipsis versus two dashes. It’s personal style. There’s not one precise right answer.
Craig: You want to try and be consistent within your screenplay. What do you do, by the way?
John: I have two dashes if it’s literally cut off and ellipsis if it’s trailing off.
Craig: Same. I probably use ellipses more than most writers. I know I do. I’m a big fan.
John: I use ellipses less than I used to. I used to use ellipses for everything, but I now do a lot of two dashes.
Craig: Interesting.
John: How much uppercase do you use within scene description? Some people just will uppercase a lot more for emphasis. Some people are really spare with the uppercase.
Craig: One of the things I’ve found over time is that my uppercasing tends to increase when I’m writing either… Usually when I’m writing action or something that maybe you wouldn’t define as action but is very physical, like physical humor or something like that.t
John: Absolutely. It’s sometimes that uppercasing can be a way to indicate, this is a shot, this is a shot, this is a shot, or there’s other reasons why you’re using it there. Parentheticals. Are you using parentheticals as say to mean a beat, for clarity, like joking, or how to play this in quotes, “Please die in a fire.” Basically, are you using it for all line things? Those are all valid choices, just different ways to use the parenthetical.
Craig: Some people never use them.
John: Never. Commas and comma usage, very distinctive. You can use them sensibly. You can use them in an Oxford way. You can use them in any way that makes sense.
Craig: The Oxford way is sensible.
John: Often using commas and whether you use them to break off any kind of phrase. If I’m going through and editing someone else’s script, I will move commas all the time and realize that’s just pointless, because they’re just using commas the way they use commas.
Craig: We aren’t writing articles for the New Yorker where there’s a style guide, although I will say that Mrs. Gilligan’s comma lessons in high school have stayed with me. I think about the proper, correct, and orthodox use of commas all the time.
John: Profanity. Is it a spaceship or a giant effing spaceship? Just how often are you using the F word and other words in your script is very distinctive. In the JJ Abrams universe, all those Lost scripts, they will use a lot of that. They’re very punchy and loud and take you by the shoulders and shake you. That’s just the style. If you’re writing in one of those shows, you should write in that style, because otherwise, it’s going to feel wrong for the show.
Craig: That must be really difficult to do. I’ve never had to do that to write in someone else’s actual on-the-page style. I can see how that would be very tricky to do. Then it also implies one reason why showrunners have to then run everything through their own typewriter, even if it’s minimally about let’s say improving things. Sometimes you just need to conform it.
John: That was the point that Dara was making there and what I’ll link to, is that especially that first script you turn in as a staff writer on a show needs to look as much like the showrunner’s script as possible, so they read this and they can actually read it without having to just immediately go, “This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.” They can actually read it like it’s their own script. That’s tough, but you gotta do it.
Craig: I’m imagining me reading a script for my show that wasn’t at all like my scripts, and I’m starting to sweat. It’s bad.
John: How characters see events within a scene. Do they clock them, spot them, notice them, spy them? There’s various choices you can make. Nothing’s wrong.
Craig: It’s okay to be repetitive or, I don’t know, self-copying there, because that stuff’s not going to be on screen literally. If it helps you to fall back on some phrases that work for you and help define for the reader what you see, that’s great. Try and avoid repeating them within the same script, but if you have some go-tos, there’s nothing wrong with that.
John: Transitions, is it a cut-to for every new scene or do cut-tos mostly go away? Just style. Also, I think cut-tos tend to vanish because we want to get pages shorter, but it’s really whatever you need to do.
Paragraph length. What is the upper limit in terms of numbers of lines? On this podcast, often in our Three Page Challenges, we’re urging people to keep those paragraphs short. Three lines or less is great for a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they all have to be that way. David Koepp writes giant blocks of text.
Craig: He does.
John: It happens. It works.
Craig: He’s great. He’s great. I think we’ve probably said it so many times that it is maybe finally sinking in, although I doubt it, among all the people out there. All these things, there are I wouldn’t call best practices as much as better practices. Nothing that we do can make bad good, and nothing that we do can make good bad. That’s the deal. If it’s good, it’s okay to have that long paragraph if that’s the way you vibe.
Going back to the paragraph that Todd Field puts on the preface page of Tár, that is how many… It is a brick of text. One, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ten-line paragraph. That’s not three lines or fewer. I loved reading that paragraph, because it was good.
John: Good paragraph. Finally, and this is probably I think a thing I can definitely notice from one writer to another, is how to handle simultaneous or overlapping dialog. Are they doing side-by-sides a lot, or are they doing a parenthetical for overlapping? Are they just making it clear that stuff is overlapping in the scene description around it?
There’s not one precise, right way to do it. Writers can get incredibly granular. When Greta Gerwig was on, she puts a slash in the first character’s dialog where the next character is going to be overlapping them. It’s incredibly precise. A lot of times, I’ll just say “overlapping” and I won’t worry about doing side-by-sides. It’s going to work in the moment.
Craig: I use the side-by-side, but I rarely, very rarely do simultaneous dialog. That’s not because I think it’s wrong. It’s basically stylistically, and perhaps this reflects the way you and I have these discussions, I like when people aren’t talking over each other, and other writers love when people are talking over each other. That’s okay. It’s a tonal thing. Similarly, how many words per sentence do characters say?
John: Exactly.
Craig: Some people really love having characters talk at length. Tarantino will have characters talk at length at times. Other people listen quietly. They do not interrupt. Go to Samuel Beckett and read Waiting for Godot. There are just strips of pages where Vladimir and Estragon are saying two lines two words each, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That’s part of the fingerprint.
John: We had Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the show. The dialog for Fleishman Is in Trouble, those are long lines. It’s not just that people have a lot of lines together. One of their lines could be much, much, much longer of a sentence than I would ever feel comfortable doing. It works because it works and because she has really good actors who can pull it off. There’s no right or wrong. You could recognize Taffy’s writing from someone else’s writing. It’d be hard to write in Taffy’s style.
Craig: It should be. That’s part of the sign that your style is unique, and therefore you are expressing your voice, is that other people… You can maybe do a goof version of it, a satire, but you can’t do it. If anyone could do it, then anyone would do it.
John: Let’s talk about situations where we have had to rewrite somebody or choose not to rewrite somebody and actually just blend in, because a lot of times, as feature writers, we would get scripts, and sometimes we are doing a massive overhaul on something. I’m like, “Okay, I see these scenes here. I’m the showrunner. Everything’s going through my typewriter. I’m going to put out a new thing that is in my voice. I’m going to clean it up and make things consistent.”
In some cases, I think that was helpful, because I wasn’t the second writer, I was the seventh writer, and there was a bunch of little pace jobs [inaudible 00:49:52] it wasn’t reading like one document. It was sometimes just me running through the whole thing. It just was a much better read for me having done that. In other cases, I’m just doing two scenes here. It’s doing no one any favors for me to try to change things or make this feel different.
I’ve had to adapt to people’s styles. I’ve done more things in caps than I would’ve put in uppercase, because that’s the rest of the script. What’s been your experience?
Craig: All over the place.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Honestly, all over the place. Sometimes, more often than not, when I’m doing the kind of work you’re describing, there’s also some preexisting work. A lot of these things, most movies that come out have either a preexisting film because they’re a sequel or they’re based on something, and so there’s other work that you can look back on and investigate.
I don’t really get too worked up over how I do the things that aren’t spoken or aren’t on screen. The things that are spoken and are on screen, I try and stay consistent within the character. Sometimes, the reason that you’re there is because people aren’t happy with the voice, or you can also come and say…
As you’re saying, there’s this patchwork quilt, and someone has to make it all seem like it was from one mind. That is a challenge. It’s a challenge to do something like that without… The phrase I use is, sometimes you have to pull permits, it’s that kind of work, and sometimes you don’t. When you have to pull permits, that means we’re going to be doing quite a bit here. Then you have to undo a lot. It depends on the situation. The spectrum is rather broad for those jobs.
John: I’m thinking of once doing a job where the first half of the script was really great. I really did not want to touch any of it. There were some real significant things that needed to change in the second half. I had to make a choice, like am I going to go back and rewrite all this first half so it’s going to match what I’m doing for the second half, or am I just going to write this new stuff in the style of the first one?
It was a challenge to do, but it actually made sense. Hopefully, the characters’ voices I was able to be consistent, which is great, because we didn’t want to touch those. Even just the scene description making it just feel like it was one thing, that there wasn’t a sudden change in how the whole thing read and felt. Even examples of keeping whatever, their INT period versus INT not period style, sure, I’ll do that. I wanted it to feel like it was the same writer the whole way through.
Craig: If there’s a very idiosyncratic, clear style going on, I’m not going to be a jerk and just start doing… I’m not going to go through and be like, “Okay, first things first, all these two spaces after the period have to turn into one space.” That’s just evil, so I try not to do those things.
John: Obviously, the last thing is if you’re in a situation where you’re generating changed pages with stars in the margins, you’re going to be much more conservative about making that kind of stuff, because you’re not going to release a new page just because you’ve changed two dashes into a long hyphen. No one wants that.
Craig: No one.
John: No one wants that. What people do want are One Cool Things.
Craig: Segue Man.
John: It’s time for that. I referenced this earlier. This is an article by Adam Mastroianni on his Substack, called Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs. He’s really talking about how in a conversation, you tend to have givers and takers. Givers are people who put a lot of stuff out. Takers are people who are just receiving stuff in.
Craig: Interesting.
John: There’s an improv quality to a conversation, where you’re yes, and-ing and you’re keeping the ball up in the air. When you have two givers, that can be sometimes a little bit frustrating, because it can feel like no one’s actually receiving. If you have two takers, no one is actually throwing a ball out there to get things going.
What I liked about his discussion is, it’s not just diagnosing the problem but offering some solutions, which is basically affordances, which are the big, easily graspable doorknobs of the conversation. His example of an affordance, if you ask the question, “Why do you think you and your brother turned out so differently?” There’s a lot of possible answers to that. You would have to see how it goes on.
No affordance would be, “How many of your grandparents are still alive?” That’s a number. It doesn’t invite a further discussion. You can take that, “How many of your grandparents are still alive?” and do some judo on it to send it back through, to say, “Both my grandparents are still alive, which has really been remarkable because of this, because I can do these things, and I have these insights,” but it’s tougher.
Just always be thinking in a conversation, next time you’re at a party or whatever, Megana, as you’re getting another virus, think about how do you say things in a way that invites the person to build upon that, rather than just letting it drop there.
Craig: I love just this drive-by shooting of Megana, like that’s her problem.
John: All the parties she goes to.
Craig: I really like this a lot. What it’s prompting for me is how useful this concept is for people who are on the autism spectrum, because this is exactly the kind of… We lump these things into so-called social skills. Social skills is such a broad term it’s almost useless. There’s also this weird judgey-ness to that phrase that I don’t love. What I love about this is, if somebody has a hyper-analytical mind, this is a way for them to understand why certain things are more engaging and more interesting for other people, because that’s something that sometimes people on the spectrum have trouble with. I’m definitely giving this to my kid. I think she’ll be really interested in this. I think she’ll like this.
John: The other thing I would say is that everything that applies to real-life dialog applies to movie dialog as well. As you’re writing dialog scenes, be thinking about naturally you are doing this as a writer anyway. It may be helpful to think about how you are letting this character get to the next thing out of that character, the next thing out of this character, and by the same token, are they deliberately not doing that, and is that part of the frustration and conflict of the scene.
Craig: That’s a great point. This is really useful for thinking about characters, because we don’t want our characters to be fully actualized. All the foibles are what make them interesting. If somebody is trying to chat up a girl at the bar and he asks a dead-end question or as Adam calls it, no affordance, then it’s interesting. You can see the other person struggling with that. I love this. It’s very insightful.
John: Craig, in the second episode of your show, there’s a moment early on where Joel is having a conversation. They’re in that-
Craig: Salon.
John: … salon, and they’re having a conversation. He gives up on the conversation. I really liked that moment, because it felt true to conversations that I don’t see very often, where a person just buries their last line, like, “I guess I’m done talking, but nothing’s really resolved for me.” That felt like a situation that I just hadn’t seen so often on film.
Craig: I’m glad you liked it. Joel is a really interesting character to write, because how much he decides to say… He mostly doesn’t talk. It’ll be interesting for people I think if the season goes on, if they’re watching. He’s not going to always not talk. Let’s put it that way. It’s impactful when he does. When he starts talking, it’s impactful.
John: What do you have for us?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is The Case of the Golden Idol. Now this is a game that normally I wouldn’t be playing, because it’s not on iOS. It is currently on Steam. Neil Druckmann, my partner in crime over at The Last of Us, urged me to get the Steam Deck. Are you familiar with the Steam Deck?
John: Tell me what the Steam Deck is.
Craig: Steam Deck is a handheld game console, not dissimilar from say the handheld Switch, that is designed to tie into your Steam account and play Steam games. You can play them handheld. It’s got a touchscreen. The touchscreen isn’t iPad quality. It doesn’t need to be. It’s got multiple joysticks and buttons and other buttons and trigger buttons. It can basically cover the control system of any game. It’s very portable.
I bought it and played this game that Neil loves, called The Case of the Golden Idol, and now I love it. It’s fascinating. It’s one of those retro style games that’s very much about the pixel art, which generally I hate, because I’m like, I grew up with that crap.
John: We’ve moved on.
Craig: I want good graphics. It’s this very strange concept. Each chapter, there are 12 of them, is a murder has taken place. They’re all loosely connected by the story of this golden idol, which is cursed, clearly. Typically, each murder situation has two or three screens of stuff. On each one of them, there are clickable areas where you can just start collecting information. What you have to do is piece together what happened based on all the clues and bits of information that are there. You have to figure out who is this person, what’s his name, what’s her name, and what have they done and what is this and blah blah blah.
It gets increasingly challenging, to the point where sometimes I’m just sitting there just staring at this thing for 40 minutes, going, “What am I missing?” Then when you finally get it, you’re like, “Ah!” It’s a lot of fun. If you have Steam, check out The Case of the Golden Idol. If you have a Steam Deck, certainly do. I think it plays very nicely on that device.
John: Cool. Nice. Exciting.
Craig: Great.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Who?
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Don’t know him.
John: Our outro this week is by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered this in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers. What we’re playing is actually a clip from the score to Coming to America, but it actually has the Scriptnotes theme in it. We have time-traveled back to put it into existing movie scores.
Craig: Well done.
John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on advice to a producer. Craig, Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.
*Megana:* Thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, here’s what I have. A friend of a friend is a producer in the UK and has a project for which he’s brought on a writer. The project is based on a true story. It’s required a lot of research. This is a relatively new writer but a really good writer who’s from the region, been doing the research, and everything’s very promising. The problem is the producer’s just not getting a draft out of this writer. He’s waiting. There’s whole machineries that it really looks like this movie could happen, but he needs a script.
The producer emailed me just to say, “Hey, do you have any advice for how I should not be an asshole but get the writer to deliver this script? The writer has had a lot of personal issues and things going on in their life that’s made it incredibly difficult. How do we do this?” I wrote back with some of my advice. I’m curious what your advice might be for this producer on how to get this draft out of this writer and what you think might be going on.
Craig: There could be all sorts of things going on. At the end of the day, is the writer being paid?
John: The writer’s being paid.
Craig: No matter what’s going on in our lives, if we are being paid, we are professional by definition, which means we have to behave professionally, which means we either hit our deadlines or we sit down with the employer and we say, “Here’s what’s going on in my life. Here’s why I can’t go through that deadline. I’m giving you the choice now of what to do. I would like to continue. I would like extra time so I can do my job. I need to let you know that this is what’s going on, because it changes the arrangement.” That’s how a professional handles things. It doesn’t sound like this writer is necessarily handling these things professionally. That doesn’t mean that I’m not incredibly sympathetic to whatever problems they’re having. I am, but it’s a job.
The question that I would ask the producer is, do you think that this writer is changeable or not, because there are some writers that it doesn’t matter what you do, they have a rhythm and a process that is unaffectable by you, the moon, anything. Nothing will ever change it. They are as they are. The only question that you have to ask yourself as a producer is, is it worth it or not, because that’s nothing I can do about this. It’s like I’m yelling at clouds.
If it seems like they are the kind of writer that would respond to change, then I think it’s fair to say, “Okay, because this is a professional relationship, I have to create boundaries. The boundary is I need a script by this date, which is already beyond the date that we agreed on. If it doesn’t come in by that date, I’m going to have to talk to another writer.”
John: I think ultimately you need to get to that ultimatum and to that point where it makes it clear. I think there are some steps before you get to that point that could be useful. That’s what I urged the producer to start at.
First off, to understand from the writer’s perspective, the writer feels shitty. I think the writer is aware that they’re late and that they’re holding things up, and they feel bad about it. Feeling bad about it is not helping them write the scripts. They’re not a writer who it seems that that bad feeling is motivating. It seems maybe it’s the opposite. Being late is not helping them get it written.
I think they may also be having a problem that they’re not willing to tell you about, which is that they may be struggling with a script with a story in ways that they are embarrassed about. They just cannot figure it out. They could probably use someone, either you or somebody else, to just talk to about what’s going on, because they may have lost hope or faith or any joy in writing it. That may be really the issue here.
Going back earlier in the episode, we talked about script consultants or that kind of thing. I think you may need to find some other writer who can sit down with them to talk to them about what it is that they’re writing, what’s exciting about it to them, where the problems are, and see if you can get a little of that shaken out.
There could also just be some actual… You’re saying this writer has some struggles in their life. You may need to help provide some structure for their writing time, which basically is like, “Would it help if I got you an office for a month? That way you could just come in on a daily basis and sit down and do your work, because maybe something’s going on at home that is making it really tough for you to write in your normal space.”
Just be aware that there could be some other way you’re going to be able to get them to do the thing. I would try those things first before bringing out the stick of, “If I don’t have it by this date, I’m going to have to cut you off.”
Craig: Certainly, it’s nothing anybody wants, but there are people that just need the structure of consequence. It’s not evil consequence. It’s not unjustified consequence. They just need to know that this is there. There are situations, again, where you may say to yourself, “I have a madman genius on my hands, and I need to just let him go through this insanity, and what’s going to happen on the other end is something great.”
One of the things that I’ve always tried to stress to people I worked with is, if I say I need eight weeks, and you’re telling me you really want it in six weeks, what you’re saying is two weeks of time is more important than you getting it right.
My response is always, those two weeks are going to cost you so much more time than two weeks, because if you get something that’s unworkable, unsellable, unproducable, unshootable, guess what? You’re back to square one. You’re going to have to start all over again anyway. First, you’re going to have to find another writer. That takes time. Then they’re going to have to do it. Then they’re going to run into trouble. You have to do the math in your head. One of the most frustrating parts of being a producer is how you are accountable to the outcome, but you are not in control of the outcome.
John: For sure.
Craig: That’s tricky.
John: Craig, you’re talking about estimating the time it’s going to take you to do a thing. You’re an experienced screenwriter who’s been through this. You’ve written 50 scripts. This writer probably hasn’t and probably has a very limited ability to estimate how long it’s going to take them to do that work. That may be a situation too.
It looks like the producer has actually been able to read some stuff that the writer has done on the project, which is why the producer’s so excited to have the writer finish it, because it’s apparently really good.
I think one of the things that may be important in this conversation is to really stress to the writer how much you love what they’ve delivered so far, because sometimes writing feels hopeless. Just putting that hope back in there can really do it.
I definitely can remember meetings where I’ve been really bummed about a project, I go into it, and then in that discussion something comes up that’s like, “Oh yeah, now I’m actually genuinely excited to write this thing that I was dreading this morning.” That does turn around.
Craig: One bit of practical advice that I would suggest is to maybe, since currently most days I suspect the writer is writing zero pages, say to the writer, “Okay, here’s the plan we’re putting you on, and you must do it. Every day, Monday through Friday, you must write one page. That’s it.” You’ve now reduced the burden and the expectation, which can be crushing sometimes, down to something that seems very achievable. One page. One.
What will happen, almost always, is that once the writer starts writing their one page, they will end up three or four pages later. It’s how our minds work. It’s the starting that is so hard. If you can just give them this, because even if they write one page a day, five pages a week, in a couple of months, you’re going to be doing just fine, and certainly better than you’re doing now anyway. Maybe just smallifying things might help.
John: Megana, what perspectives are we missing here? Anything that is striking you as you listen to this?
Craig: Actually…
*Megana:* No. I think you’re right. I love the advice that you gave about encouraging this writer, because I just remember when I was in college, I had a roommate who was a real perfectionist and was not sending their thesis advisor the chapters or whatever that they needed to be doing and was just getting herself into such a hole of perfection and misery and doubt. I was like, “You’re smart. I’m sure that the work is fine and good enough.” I think sometimes with a screenplay, it’s this big thing to figure out. I worry that this person is just in a shame spiral. I love the tactics that you offer this producer to help them out of that.
John: On the second Arlo Finch book, I fell behind. I was running late to deliver my first draft. Again, as a professional, I did reach out to my editor and say, “Hey, I’m running behind. Let me talk to you about what the problem is.” She’s like, “Okay, I get this. Let’s make a plan for how you’re going to finish it. Basically, why don’t you take two or three days to just outline the rest of this, figure out what those problems are going to be, and how you’re going to be able to deliver this on time. We’ll reset all the rest of the deadlines to make this work.” Starting that conversation was incredibly stressful, but at the end of it, I just felt such a relief, because I didn’t feel so trapped.
It’s possible this screenwriter feels trapped and stuck. They worry they’re not going to be able to deliver anything that’s going to nearly good enough or to do the job whatsoever. Having that conversation, being that editor in that situation, could be the way out.
Craig: That’s good advice.
John: Cool. Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you.
*Megana:* Thank you.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Scriptnotes episodes with 2023 Oscar Nominees Sarah Polley, Rian Johnson, Daniels, Pamela Ribon
- Weekend Read Beta Try it out — now updated with all FYC scripts!
- Writing in another writer’s style on John’s blog with advice from Dara Resnick Creasey
- Algorithms were able to figure out that Robert Galbraith was JK Rowling
- Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
- The Case of The Golden Idol game
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered it in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 585: Do Muppets Bleed?, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome comedian, actor, writer and Jeopardy! champion Patton Oswalt to discuss joke structure and building standup specials. Patton pulls back the curtain on his writing process, how he develops a comedic premise, and earning an audience’s trust.
We also dissect M.O.D.O.K., punching up other people’s scripts, and the art of adaptation. We then answer a listener’s question about writing films that include standup comedy.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss characters who keep secrets for no reas– there’s no time to explain!
Links:
- Patton Oswalt on IMDb, Twitter and Instagram
- “Wackity Schmackity Doo!” from Patton Oswalt’s Werewolves and Lollipops
- Animation of Patton’s “Christmas Shoes” joke
- “The Ham Incident” from Patton Oswalt’s Finest Hour
- M.O.D.O.K. on Hulu
- Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt
- Clinical Practice Guideline for the Evaluation and Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Obesity by the American Academy of Pediatrics
- Dracula: The Evidence by Beehive Books
- Melanie Lynskey answers questions for Dear Prudence
- Murderers’ Row – Melanie Lynskey by Scout Tafoya
- The Unloved by Scout Tafoya for RogerEbert.com
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The One with Patton Oswalt first appeared on John August.
John and Drew discuss the WGA’s Pattern of Demands for the 2023 MBA negotiation. In order to best understand what the WGA is asking for, John explains each bullet point in detail and helps to define terms such as mini-rooms, span, new media, and two-step deals.
Links:
- Find more about the WGA negotiations here at WGAContract2023.org
- WGA Seeks Approval of ‘Pattern of Demands’ for Upcoming Studio Negotiations by Gene Maddaus for Variety
- Scriptnotes Episode 407: Understanding Your Feature Contract
- Scriptnotes Episode 553: Adapting Station Eleven
- Scriptnotes Episode 546: Limited Series
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: Pattern of Demands first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Whoa, whoa, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 577 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re sitting down the writing/directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, to discuss their film Everything Everywhere All At Once and all the stuff that led up to it. Welcome, Daniels.
Craig: Daniels!
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you guys.
John: Oh my god, hello.
Daniel Kwan: As a longtime listener-
Daniel Scheinert: Congrats, 577.
Craig: Woo!
Daniel Kwan: Wow. I know, it’s crazy. I’ve listened to every episode. That’s not true, but I’ve listened to a decent chunk, so this is very exciting. Thank you for having us.
Craig: A decent chunk is a lot, so thank you.
John: We’ll happily take it. We want to talk to you about Everything-
Craig: Everywhere.
John: … and how you got started, how it all came together. If you could stick around for our Bonus Segment, we would love to talk to you about music videos and other things you guys shoot that are not movies, because somehow, we’ve made it through 576 episodes, and we’ve never talked about music videos and commercials and all the other stuff that writer-directors get to make, which is I’m sure a crucial part of your learning process.
Craig: (singing)
Daniel Kwan: That’s exciting.
Craig: God, I love that music video so much.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.
Craig: That is a music video that occasionally, if I’m feeling down… If you don’t know what we’re talking about, Turn Down for What. If I’m feeling a bit down, sometimes I’ll just turn it on. It’s instant mood lift.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.
Craig: I’m sure for the two of you it’s nothing but traumatic memories, but for me it’s instant mood lift.
Daniel Kwan: You have no idea. I’ve gone to so many weddings since that video has come out. Any time I’m at a wedding, someone tells the DJ, “You have to play Turn Down for What.”
Daniel Scheinert: “He loves it.”
Daniel Kwan: Truly, it’s now a traumatic experience hearing that song. Even you jokingly saying that is making me want to leave.
Craig: Good. That’s my job on the podcast is to try and shorten the length of each episode by driving people away.
Daniel Scheinert: I like this.
John: Let’s talk about it. Let’s get into how you guys got started, because I first met you guys up on the mountain at Sundance Labs. You guys were great. You had a crazy script. I don’t think I worked with you guys directly on it, but I hear all these stories about, “It’s a farting corpse movie.” I’m like, “These guys are geniuses somehow.” That’s when I first saw your shorts, but I don’t know how you guys got started. Can you give us the recap of the origin story for you as a team?
Daniel Scheinert: Totally. We met in college, didn’t get along. We were taking an animation class. I participated too much. He thought I was an asshole. He didn’t participate enough. I thought he was wasting his money at film school.
Daniel Kwan: Classic rom-com.
Craig: I love it so far.
Daniel Scheinert: Our Harry Met Sally didn’t take as long. It didn’t take a decade. It was a year before we had a summer job as camp counselors for the New York Film Academy, which I don’t necessarily recommend, but I do recommend as a job. It’s a great job.
Craig: Get paid by them but don’t pay them is what you’re saying.
Daniel Scheinert: Exactly. Most film schools are [crosstalk 00:03:08] as far as how much they cost.
Craig: I love you.
Daniel Scheinert: They’re pretty great as far as who you might meet. We both have camp counselor vibes. We like to make art that way. We bonded and got very jealous of the kids. After work, we started making some short films together that the internet liked.
Daniel Kwan: I think the through line is that our collaboration has just been a series of accidents. We just decided to do a short film together. It was actually just like a quick test. I wanted to teach him aftereffects. He wanted to teach me how to shoot live action stuff. We put it online.
Daniel Scheinert: He had a new camera. Then it was like, “Oh, let’s try out the new camera.”
Daniel Kwan: “Let’s test this out.” We did something stupid together. Scheinert put it on his Vimeo account, and we were put on the front page of Vimeo. We were like, “Whoa, what happened? I’ve been trying to get on the front page for the past eight months, and we just did this thing randomly.” It just kept happening.
Daniel Scheinert: He was so jealous, because it was my page.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Craig: Did you suspect that maybe Vimeo just puts white people’s videos on right away? Was there like a little bit of a, “Hm, hold on a second.”
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, I don’t want to-
Craig: “I’ve been working pretty hard at this, and this guy literally-“
Daniel Scheinert: You were here first.
Daniel Kwan: Vimeo is racist. That’s a whole other conversation, not the Vimeo is racist thing, but just the way our race actually has played into our careers is fascinating.
Craig: We’ll dig into it. We’ll dig into that.
Daniel Kwan: Long conversation for later. I will say that we accidentally started working together. Through this very strange Pavlovian response, we got some rewards, and we’re like, “Let’s do it again.” We just kept doing it. Next thing we know, he asked me if I wanted to help him on a music video. We’re like, “Sure, let’s try that out.” We did that. A month later, someone from London says, “Hey, I saw your music video that you did for free. What if we gave you $12,000 to make another one?”
Craig: Hello.
Daniel Kwan: We’re like, “Sure.” We quit our jobs. I was working at DreamWorks Animation at the time as a low-level designer, and Scheinert was working at a VFX company as a runner. We quit our jobs, went to New York, did a music video. Then another month later, someone was like, “Hey, you want to do it again?” It just became this slow-motion thing where our identities became entrenched and we had to figure out our process. We like to say that the algorithm gave us an arranged marriage. The internet accidentally put us together.
The relevant part of the story is even the leap from music videos to screenwriting, feature-length screenwriting, was an accident. We were finding success in music videos. We got a manager, Josh Rudnick, for anyone who cares. He’s incredible. They started sending us scripts, and none of them were speaking to us. None of them felt like the kind of thing that we would actually feel passionate enough to spend years on.
Even though neither of us considered ourselves writers at the time, we took a step back and we’re like, “Hey, we’ve been writing all these music video treatments for a few years now, dozens. Every couple months, we just write a new idea.” It was like a boot camp. We were like, “What if we just tried doing that ourselves? None of these scripts are going to be the thing that makes us want to direct a feature. Let’s try to write our own way.” We naively jumped into screenwriting, thinking that it would just be like a long music video. Oh boy, we were so wrong, but lots of lessons learned. That was our path.
Daniel Scheinert: One of the lessons that’s fun, it was through writing music videos that we discovered our writing process. We didn’t even think we were screenwriting when we would do this. We would listen to the song. We were usually attracted to a story, not just visuals. We would structure our little short films based on the verse, chorus, verse, chorus of whatever song and designing moments that pop, to try to set them up and create. We were very much like visual screenwriters at first, because there’s no dialog in a music video. We would have to break it down beat by beat and time it out and find the rhythm of the scene. That still informs how we write.
Craig: You’re pulling something out that’s actually quite profound, that I don’t think we’ve actually talked about in our four billion episodes, which is that the very simple structure of a classic pop song, verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, is something that provides a fundamental and essential shape to a story, even though we don’t realize it’s happening. We are all taught, and I don’t know why it works. I guess our brains are designed around verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, but it does-
Daniel Kwan: I have a theory that I’ll tell later.
Craig: Tell me.
Daniel Kwan: Continue.
Craig: Tell me now. I need to know.
Daniel Kwan: I had a roommate in college who was a musician, very heady, philosophical guy. He was telling me about this essay about the pop song and why it’s so important to the human experience. It’s because it’s meant to imitate sex, reaching towards climax. There’s the tease. There’s the lift. There’s the comedown, the teasing again. Now you bring it to the bridge. That’s when you’re getting really close. You hit that climax. It feels like this really beautiful, cathartic experience packed into five minutes, which I think is incredible and very narrative. Very narrative. It’s got three acts. You’re right. It’s a really perfect way to think about story. Even when we were just doing music videos, people would tell us that, “Your music videos sometimes squeeze more story into four minutes than some features do.” Some people might say that’s a bad thing. For us, it was an exciting challenge.
Craig: We’re going to get into that. When we start digging into, which I’m sure will happen soon, into Everything Everywhere All At Once, I definitely want to talk about the… You guys call it maximalism? What is the word that you use?
Daniel Kwan: Maximalism, yeah.
Craig: A whole lot. There’s so much. I don’t know. John, should I short circuit things by talking about it? Should I just ask my question?
John: I think there’s actually a very nice segue though between the videos you’re doing… If you looked at Turn Down For What, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Turn Down For What, a tremendous amount happens in there visually. You’re constantly adding new layers to things. You’re literally falling down through the floor, into a new layer, a new layer, a new layer of a story. I want to talk about your short film, Interesting Ball, the 2014 film, which was an ongoing series of vignettes that all tie together and feed into one big thing. What is the process for you guys developing those ideas? You talk about [inaudible 00:09:42] song and then having to figure out what is speaking to me. That’s fine if it’s one person. If it’s both of you, do you have to give veto power over what ideas are happening? What is the process like for figuring out, “Okay, this is how we want to do this thing. This is a story. We should follow on this.”
Daniel Kwan: Before I answer that, I just also want to include Foster the People, Houdini is another one that has a very dense story, and then our Simple Song by The Shins, also way too much story in five minutes, just in case people want to see what we’re talking about. It’s too much. It was great.
Craig: It’s a great song.
Daniel Kwan: The collaboration, like I said, it’s all very accidental. It’s all very organic. A lot of times, we just constantly pitch things back and forth. The things that stick are the things that we chase, which is why me as an individual director and Scheinert as an individual director, we would be making very different things on our own.
Our Venn diagram is so specific and strange that it has to excite us both in order for us to chase it. It’s not fun to drag someone along on a journey that they’re not fully committed to. That really hones and sharpens what the story can be or the potential for what it is. Oftentimes, it is the stuff that scares us the most, because on our own, I don’t think I would be quite as brave. Together, it’s like, “Are we going to bite off way too much? Are we going to chase after something that we probably shouldn’t be chasing after as storytellers? That sounds exciting.” I think that’s something that at least within our relationship, that’s the strongest part of the Venn diagram is that’s risk-taking.
Daniel Scheinert: I think I maybe get a kick out of tricking Dan into making his craziest ideas actually happen.
Daniel Kwan: There’s that too.
Daniel Scheinert: I’ll become the cheerleader for the weird ones. There’s rarely veto power. In fact, in some ways, there’s tons of it. We’re just looking for that thing that makes us both excited. Over the years, we’ve learned to not sweat it if an idea falls flat for the other person and just be like, “Huh, okay. I trust his taste. For some reason, that idea doesn’t sing to him.” Then sometimes it’ll come up again a few months later. There’s a movie idea that I’ve been pitching to Dan for years that just recently got consumed by this other idea that we’ve been working on. I’m like, “Oh, it’s actually happening now.” It took years of throwing this dumb idea against the wall for it to finally find its home.
Daniel Kwan: It’s a slow-motion passive veto. If it gets buried by time, then that’s the veto. I think this is an acting metaphor that an acting coach once told us. The reason why you don’t want to say no is because you want to allow the bush to grow in every direction it needs to grow before you start trimming. Otherwise, you won’t know what shape it can be. I think that’s a part of our process working with actors, but also a part of our writing process is just letting things grow. If it’s meant to die, it’ll die. You never know what the bush could be until you see it in its biggest, most unruly form.
Daniel Scheinert: I love that metaphor.
Craig: There’s something beautiful about the permissiveness of your process, where you do allow each other to say and come up with ideas that maybe other people would reject out of hand. One of the things that struck me when I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, or can we abbreviate it to EEAAO, is that…
Let me back up for a second. John and I, I think, do a decent job of generally educating people about screenwriting. I think in all the time that we’ve spent looking at say the Three Page Challenges and things, I think we are good at helping people get better, but I’m not sure that we’re good at helping people be Good with a capital G. I think that there’s something innate. Obviously, there is talent that exists. Watching your movie, I felt overwhelmed in the best possible way, by quality of ideas. There were not 1 or 2 or 12 fresh ideas. Movies oftentimes give you zero fresh ideas. There were 1,000 fresh ideas.
Daniel Kwan: Wow.
Craig: By the time I got to the Everything Bagel, which I think may be the single best metaphor ever immortalized on film-
Daniel Scheinert: Oh my god.
Craig: … I was just overjoyed by the amount of original thought. I just want to dig in a little bit to ask you guys, are you aware of how original all of these thoughts are? Is it something you pursue very purposefully? Do you worry about losing connection with some of the necessary conventional things, which I think in your film you did not lose touch with? How do you manage this fire hose of brilliant thought?
Daniel Kwan: Oh my gosh, thank you. That is such an incredible compliment. Regarding the bagel metaphor, I feel like Twitter would disagree, but it’s okay.
Daniel Scheinert: [Crosstalk 00:14:40].
Craig: I quit Twitter.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Craig: Fuck Twitter. They’re wrong.
Daniel Kwan: I should quit. The first thing I’ll say is, in college I remember I heard someone say something funny and snarky about success that has always stuck with me. They said if you want to be successful, you either have to be the best or the first. From the very beginning, I was like, “I will never be the best, but I can be the first.” That was definitely a very inspiring moment. That was something that me and Daniel had a proclivity for is just surprising each other. That’s why the duoship works is because half the time, that’s all we’re doing. We’re trying to surprise each other, either with a joke or even with an emotionally resonant idea. How do we surprise each other so that we can surprise our audience?
A lot of it comes out to the fact that I’m realizing now as an adult, I’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD, and people with ADHD are novelty seekers. I’m the truffle pig. That’s how my brain is defaulted to think about the world and look at the world. I think a lot of people look at it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is way too much.” To me, I’m like, “Welcome to our brains. This is just how we think.”
I’ve been reading a lot about neuroanthropology, this idea of taking anthropology and going back to ancient traditions and the ways that brains worked back then to decode and understand how we can hack our minds for the modern world or whatever. One of the things they talk about is how important innovation is and novelty seeking is for the human condition.
A lot of people can be like, “Oh yeah, it’s just new for new’s sake,” as far as our movie goes. It’s whatever. It’s just random and fun. I do think that the newness and the freshness of our stories is very much intentional, because I think humans are so fickle. You learn a moral to a story or you learn this beautiful, life-changing idea, and two months later, you’ve already forgotten why you felt that way. I think we were constantly having to remind ourselves, as humans and as storytellers, these very simple, universal truths. Unless we wrap it in something new, it’s hard to penetrate our very hardened, logical, cold brains. Innovation to us is really fun and playful and inspiring but also feels important as a vehicle for story.
John: Innovation and novelty are amazing tools. They’re definitely going to help you find some new territory, but they’re not going to get a movie made. They’re not going to get a script written. How do you go from… You have all these great ideas. They’re great ideas you could’ve had in a dorm room, but you’re not actually getting them to a movie. You’re not getting them to a script stage. What is the process from these great ideas to, “Okay, now we’re agreeing on the words on the page to create this story.” What is that conversation? You have great abstract ideas, but you also have to agree on what is the scene.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s nonlinear. It’s still confusing. We’re still figuring it out. I do think that, back to music videos, we discovered our process on these short-form projects and discovered that we enjoy biting off something ambitious that we would have to keep trying to polish straight up until the final day. That the story wasn’t going to work until the effects were done was a fun way to make a story. I feel like that gave us the courage to write scripts, because we never look at our scripts as a final product at all.
Daniel Kwan: Great advice for a screenwriting podcast.
Craig: Nobody buys screenplays. It’s true.
John: It’s true.
Craig: They’re meant to be transformed.
Daniel Scheinert: They’re meant to be a blueprint to this other thing. That was a really freeing thought, I think, for both of us, because it meant we didn’t have to fight tooth and nail about exactly what the lines were, because we were like, “That’s just the line for now.” It gave us, I think, the courage to just write in a very iterative way, that wasn’t super OCD about the details. We did a ton of outlining, wrote a draft, went back and re-outlined it, drastically wrote a draft.
Daniel Kwan: We should send you guys… My whiteboard has an outline.
Craig: Please.
Daniel Kwan: It’s got 30 timelines across the thing.
Craig: Oh my god.
Daniel Kwan: It’s tracking everything. It’s a mess.
Craig: I would love that.
Daniel Kwan: It’s hilarious. I think that gets back to, process-wise, not only are we looking for innovation on a moment-to-moment and idea-to-idea level, but structurally I think that’s where we find the most inspiration, and that’s how we organize all of it.
With Swiss Army Man, structurally what we wanted to do is we wanted to ask, “What if we started this movie with just the worst idea ever, a man who is farting so much that he’s able to be used as a jet-ski but it’s cathartic and beautiful? What if we started with that image and we still found a way to justify this film’s existence?” It felt like a very interesting challenge to us. The classic line that Paul Dano used to use at all the Q and As was, “It was a film that started with a fart that made you laugh and ended with a fart that made you cry.” It’s a semiotic experiment. It’s very academic. Structurally, that was what we were going for, and everything else was trying to be thrown into that bucket.
With Everything Everywhere, we asked ourselves, “Okay, what if we could create a multiverse movie that went to too many multiverses? What if we took the hero’s journey and deconstructed it beyond anything recognizable, where you had way too many stories, way too many wants, way too many needs?”
Originally, we wanted the whole film to fully collapse. Basically, we wanted the main character and the audience to not care anymore, to actually believe in nihilism, like, “Nothing matters. This story doesn’t matter.” Then we were like, “Okay, but what if structurally we got there, but then we still found a way to pull everything back together and make it make sense?”
When we came up with that structure, we were like, “Holy shit, this is amazing, because this reflects the lived experience right now that everyone… ” Twitter and social media and the constant news cycle that we were experiencing. We started writing this in 2016. Everyone knows what was happening then. This film was very much… That structure was like a reflection of that moment.
To us, we’re like, “Okay, great, we have a lot little, fun, innovative ideas, but we have this very big, structural, big swing that we’re excited to use as a blueprint for us to drop those ideas into.” That structure has stayed the same. I don’t know how many drafts we did, but many, many, many drafts. That structure was always the goal throughout, even though entire characters got thrown away, scenes got rewritten. Everything changed except for that structure. I think that’s something that maybe some people miss in the innovation conversation when talking about this script in particular.
John: We’re looking at a script that you guys sent through. It’s not quite clear what the script is that we’re looking at, because it has side-by-side the Chinese dialog for characters, it has some ADR stuff and other things thrown in. What was the script that you first went out to actors with? What was the first script that you had that’s like, “Okay, this represents our intention of the thing to make.” How long was that script? The script we’re looking at is about 125 pages. It has the end at Page 83. Then it restarts at 86. All At Once begins 124. Was the script you were going out to actors with similar to the script we’re looking at?
Daniel Scheinert: It was relatively similar, yeah. It was an interesting thing when the movie was done and we were like, “What script do we release?” I always think it’s funny when you get these award [inaudible 00:22:30] with a screenplay, and you’re like, “I think they hired a kid to transcribe the finished film.”
Craig: Exactly. It’s usually not a kid, but that is exactly correct.
John: We know a guy who does that.
Craig: In fact, we know somebody who has done that quite a few times.
Daniel Scheinert: We didn’t want to do that. We kept in stuff that got cut out. We wanted to keep in the stuff that changed, like when we did pickup shoots and ADR and stuff. That cracked the movie open. That was part of the writing process. It’s like, “That is screenwriting we did, so I guess we’ll put that in there.” It’s a mix of things.
I was just going to summarize that first we went out to Michelle years and years ago. We met with her right before Crazy Rich Asians came out, which I think was 2018 or something. That was pretty different script. I don’t think that character had a grandpa in it.
Craig: You mean you were Hongless at that time?
Daniel Kwan: Yeah, we were Hongless. [Crosstalk 00:23:25].
Craig: I have a huge problem with that, because James Hong is the greatest actor of all time.
Daniel Kwan: Agreed.
Daniel Scheinert: I think in that one, it wasn’t a Chinese New Year’s party. It was a wedding. Joy, the daughter, was getting married to her partner and hadn’t invited her mom. To Dan’s point, it had the same structure, like about a family, it goes to too many universes, come back, they hug at the end. Then we refined it. Michelle helped us refine it. Going out to different actors… We’d sometimes talk to actors and go home and be like, “Oh, that conversation totally helped you crack why the wedding’s a bad idea,” for example.
Daniel Kwan: The one thing I’ll add is it changed a lot, it changed a lot, it changed a lot, but the most important thing we learned on Swiss Army Man was making sure that the script was good enough before we shot, because we were rewriting as we were shooting, and it was miserable. What we ended up doing with this script is… Even though it was constantly changing up until the shoot day, by the time we were shooting, it mostly remained blocked. It was pretty close to the final thing. The script that you guys got is pretty close to our shooting script. The only difference is we added some ADR and stuff like that. Otherwise, the structure of it, the order of it, what you guys are seeing is basically what our crew saw when we started shooting, which I’m very proud of. It was very important to us.
Craig: I don’t know how you could’ve… I’m thinking about your poor first AD. Literally, I was thinking about your poor first AD while we were watching the movie. I’m in Calgary, watching it in this lovely little theater, and my mind is blown, but at some point, I think it was maybe one of the first super-montages, where we see Michelle Yeoh a thousand different times in a thousand different places, where I was just like, “Is the first AD okay? Did they take care of him?” because the thought of doing that movie without a locked, I mean locked script gives me hives just thinking about it.
Daniel Kwan: I think we knew that, and then we also got lucky, and Rod, our first AD, was also very good at his job and very zen about it.
Craig: You would need to be, I would imagine.
Daniel Kwan: He was just like, “We got this, guys.” Sometimes I’m like a part-time AD when we’re shooting. I worry about that a lot. I’m teaming up with whoever it is, to just be like, “What was the schedule today? What do we have to get? What are the priorities? If we get behind, what are we going to cut out? Does it matter? If we have time, what’s the fun stuff we’re going to sneak in there?” trying to manage expectations.
Craig: How many days did you guys shoot?
Daniel Kwan: It was 8 weeks, 38 days.
Craig: Wow.
Daniel Kwan: Then we had several days of pickup shoots and stuff during COVID, but they were small.
Craig: If by several you don’t mean 14,000, I am amazed. It’s really amazing how much you did in the time you had. Question for you. You’re making this movie. From your point of view, I hope you felt that you had covered all these brilliant bases. You had written this really interesting story full of very specific… We always go on about specificity. I can’t think of more specific writers than the two of you. It’s not just hot dog fingers. There’s cheese inside of the hot dog fingers.
Daniel Scheinert: Oh, cheese.
Craig: Every single thing has been thought through. I hope it was cheese. Maybe it was something else. Was it mayonnaise?
Daniel Kwan: Mustard.
Daniel Scheinert: Mustard.
Craig: Oh, it was mustard. I thought it was cheese.
Daniel Scheinert: That says a lot about you, actually.
Daniel Kwan: It’s whatever you want it to be.
Craig: It had that American cheese color. Fair enough. Mustard. See, even specific enough that it was mustard. You also had these incredible costumes. Stephanie Hsu, who I became obsessed with after seeing your movie, is in like 400 costumes that are each brilliant. At any point, or perhaps at lots of points, did the two of you look at each other and say, “Either we are going to succeed fantastically or this is going to be pointed at and laughed at for all time?”
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, you’re getting at our sweet spot.
Craig: Good.
Daniel Kwan: It’s the big swing. It’s the disastrous, ambitious… I don’t want to speak ill of other movies, but I actually love these films. It’s films like Southland Tales.
Craig: It’s funny, I was thinking of Southland Tales, because we’re big Richard Kelly fans here.
Daniel Scheinert: Totally.
Craig: I really like that movie a lot, but it’s out there. That one, people didn’t quite connect with the way that they did with your film.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. I think I find that film so inspiring, more inspiring than most other films, because he just went for it and he put everything in it. It was trying to be political and funny. It was way too ambitious.
Craig: Weird.
Daniel Kwan: And weird. Films like that, they were our North Stars for this film. We were like, “We want to do what they did, but can we stick the landing? Can we stick the landing in a way in which our mothers might actually appreciate the film?”
Daniel Scheinert: A lot of times, we’ll pick something bonkers and something really broad as our two North Stars and be like, “Oh, can we land somewhere in the middle?” It was It’s A Wonderful Life and Southland Tales. Those are very different movies, but it’s fun to bounce between them.
Craig: Incredible. That’s a fun way to walk into a pitch at A24 and say, “Southland Tales.” They’re like, “Goodbye.” That’s awesome. The bravery is really just something else. When you say stuck the landing, it’s a wonderful phrase, because I do feel like the way I feel when I watch Olympians do really complicated things. If they don’t stick the landing, they’re probably just going to break their neck and die. I feel like you guys are so brave, braver than I am. That’s for sure. You’re just like, “Here we go. Might not live.” Amazing.
Daniel Scheinert: We also have a bag of tricks we’ve collected over the years that make it not as scary for us as it would be for other filmmakers.
Craig: Tell us about those.
Daniel Scheinert: You mentioned Interesting Ball. That was an experimental film that we made for almost no money. Part of the experiment with that one was the script was five short films that we thought would be fun to intercut. We didn’t actually know what would cut to where or how it would work. Even on the day, some of them were too ambitious, and we only shot some of the script. There was a whole sequence with these broformers where a bunch of dudes hug and turn into a big mech warrior made of dudes. That’s a hard thing to photograph. We ended up shooting only pieces of the script and being like, “I don’t know, let’s see if it works in the edit.” That one, we spent a long time in the edit. It was very hard finding this flow. It was wild to see just how much you can fix in the edit. It was part of the experiment of that short film.
We held onto that while making this. In this case, we designed how it would cut. It was in the script, so that we wouldn’t overshoot it or have to figure it out on the day. We did know in the back of our heads, we’re pretty good at montage, we’re pretty good at finding music to guide an audience through a scene that isn’t good. We’ve fixed our movies in the past a lot. We had some crutches that made a scary screenplay not as scary for us as it was for the producers.
John: It sounds like you guys have a good faith in Future Daniels. Writer Daniels have good faith in Director Daniels, and Director Daniels have good faith in Editor Daniels. You’re going to do your very best at that moment to give Future Daniels what they can use. You know that in the future you guys are going to be able to solve some of these problems and you’re not catastrophizing things on the day. If you can’t get that shot, if your shot list doesn’t get completed, it’ll work out. You’ll find a way through it.
Daniel Kwan: That’s such a wonderful way to put it. You’re collaborating with past, present, and future versions of yourselves. I think that that trust comes from the fact that we’ve gone through the process so many times in a very quick amount of time. I recently calculated. I think we’ve done about a dozen commercials, a dozen music videos, maybe close to a dozen short films, seven or eight TV episodes, and then of course we’ve done three features between the two of us.
Because we were able to do that so quickly, we really quickly understood what our strengths were within each other’s sections, the pre-production, the production, and the editing, in a way that… Even in the writing process, we always say that we want to start writing a movie that we have to grow up and mature to become the directors who can direct that movie. Right now we’re working on another film that is way too big, way too ambitious. We are not good enough directors to make that movie yet.
Craig: Yes, you are.
Daniel Kwan: That’s what you think.
Craig: Do it. Do it.
Daniel Kwan: That’s the fun of it.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s aspirational. We’re like, “Oh, I’m excited to become the guy that can do that.”
Daniel Kwan: Who can do that one day.
Craig: The reach is part of the process for you guys.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. Also, the other thing that we have in our back pocket is, if something doesn’t work, we can just turn it into a joke. It’s such a cheap trick. Within the context of our films, so much stuff doesn’t work at first. We have all these different ways to repurpose it or recycle it, or worst-case scenario, we just cut it out, because like what you said, Craig, we have so many ideas that if something doesn’t work, we’ll be like, “There’s plenty of other things, so get rid of it.” The first cut is this crazy monster of a film that has all these appendages that are wonderful and beautiful but so bloated and so confusing. Our process has always been throw everything at the wall. We don’t know if it’s going to work, but at least some of them will work. Some of them will work really beautifully, and that’s enough for us for now.
Daniel Scheinert: With this movie, more than ever before, like Dan said, we really wanted to like the script and have something locked before we shoot. Some of that was being better writers, and some of it was a mental exercise. You just have to tell yourself, “Turn off the writing and focus on the filmmaking.”
Swiss Army Man, Dan and I had this argument, we’ve been having it ever since, about how much of it was not a good script and how much of it was just bad process on our part. We just shouldn’t have been rewriting it as frantically as we did. It wasn’t good. Shot listing might have been a smarter move with our time. This time, in addition to liking it, the scriptwriting process was so helpful in helping us figure out the priorities. The format of a screenplay forces you to essentialize. You can’t describe every costume, or else it becomes a 200-page script. We were constantly having to make hard decisions to get the page count down. It helped us know what really mattered. It was like, “We have all these gags, like with Raccacoonie, but they’re not essential to the story,” and so we’d cut them out.
Craig: Oh, Raccacoonie. It is essential to the story.
Daniel Scheinert: We’d remember them and be like-
Craig: Raccacoonie.
Daniel Scheinert: Stuff would rise back in.
Craig: God.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s essential to us. We knew these details were why we wanted to make the movie. The screenwriting process really was about killing darlings a lot of times. It was about like, “No, we have to focus on the family. We can’t get too enamored with what Jobu’s costumes are going to be. We’ll figure that out later. For now what matters is where’s our character at.”
Craig: Tupaki. The discipline that you guys applied to what seems like an absolute chaotic wellspring of ideas is why the movie works. You just mentioned Raccacoonie, and that brings up a question that I wanted to ask you guys. My grandparents were immigrants, and they lived with us. I grew up in a house where Raccacoonie type mistakes would happen all the time. I’m just interested in… The movie is so much about existentialism and what it means to survive and love in the face of what I think is true, which is none of this means anything, but at the same time, so much of the movie’s built around the immigrant experience, in a very honest way, a very eyes-open way. I’m curious how you came about smashing these two pretty disparate themes together in such a gorgeous little blend.
Daniel Kwan: A lot of it, I like to say that me and Scheinert are very naïve writers. We do things that we don’t have a plan for sometimes, or we don’t overthink it, because we’re drawn to it. We’re like, “We’re drawn to it. Let’s put it together. Let’s see what happens.” Oftentimes, what happens is some of the things don’t work. As you live with a script, that gets thrown out.
With the immigrant experience and the multiverse, as we were working on it, we realized, oh, these two things are actually a fascinating pairing, because both the immigrant story and the multiverse are talking about multiple worlds. Our parents and our grandparents, they live in-
Craig: Interesting.
Daniel Kwan: … different existence, very different point of views. This is what the multiverse is actually in real life. It’s just having a completely different outlook on life and that collision of those things. All this intergenerational immigrant narrative stuff is about the collision of the past, the future, and everything in between, as far as traditions and whatever goes.
Then also, a lot of the multiverse and the immigrant story is a questioning of life paths and decisions and asking yourself what if. When I talk to my mother about her past, a lot of it is like, “What if this happened? What if that happens?” The only reason why she came to America is because her family got the money together to send her there, as almost like a backup plan. They’re like, “Okay, if the family business in Taiwan doesn’t work out, you’re going to go to America. You’re going to get educated.” She was almost like the test subject. Then when the family company went under in Taiwan, her whole family moved over to Pennsylvania with her.
The whole immigrant experience is about this ever-branching list of possible life paths that you could’ve taken. It’s things like that that I love, where the pairings don’t necessarily make sense or the contradictions of what you’re trying to put together don’t make sense, but the longer you live with them, things get revealed.
I like to think of all of our scripts as these filters that we carry around with us, these fishnets. As we’re walking around through life, it’s going to catch real moments and real ideas. True emotions are going to be caught in that net. You won’t know what you catch unless you live with it. I think that’s one reason why our scripts take so long is because we want to live with them, and we want to see what we watch. People who are able to write a script in seven days I am so jealous of. Also, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to catch the things that I want to catch with it, because seven days isn’t a long enough time to live with something.
Craig: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you.
John: Daniel, what you’re describing is a phenomenon I always felt when I’ve been working on features, but especially in the times I’ve been working on TV. I was working on a show that was supposed to be a 22-episode season. The workload was so great that I felt like my life became just about grabbing things in the air and saying, “Is this part of the show? Is this part of the show?” I was the net. I would catch anything that could possibly wrangle them into the show. We heard a song, it was like, “Oh, how does it fit into this thing?”
Daniel Kwan: Totally.
John: You make a very good point, that I don’t know that that’s healthy or a great way to make great art, because your whole existence just becomes transferred into being the person who channels reality into the show. I felt like I was living for the show rather than living my actual life, which is so frightening.
Daniel Scheinert: I feel like the worse thing is the opposite, if you’re working on art that has nothing in common with your life, and so it just becomes a reflection of maybe something you read once or you’re just mimicking a movie you made sometime, but if it can intersect with your life, then ideally it can be a really good therapeutic project, to be like, “Oh, I’m going to work through some real things. This is going to come from an honest place,” as long as you’re not a workaholic, you don’t go crazy.
Craig: These guys are healthier than we are. Don’t you feel like they’re the healthiest versions of us? They seem so put together.
Daniel Scheinert: I was just thinking what inspired this movie. You bringing up Raccacoonie made me think about our producer John’s dad. The movie’s dedicated to him, Alexander Wang. He loved movies but could never remember the names of them. Originally, it was just a joke about how Mr. Wang always got movies wrong. Also, Mr. Wang passed away right after Swiss Army Man came out. I think this movie was inspired a bit by his funeral. It was also inspired by Dan’s wedding and also inspired by Dan becoming a father and also inspired by Dan going into therapy and all these huge life events. You can trace back pieces of this movie, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that a hundred percent affected the journey of the Wang family in the movie,” each of these real-life journeys we’re going on.
Craig: Amazing. I could talk to you guys all day. Let’s kidnap them.
Daniel Scheinert: Let’s do a four-hour podcast.
Craig: Everyone loves a four-hour podcast.
John: Daniel Kwan, I want to make sure to circle back to you, because early on in the conversation you said you wanted to talk about the experience of being Asian and working in the film industry. Is there anything more that you wanted to get into about that, or is the immigrant stuff more what you wanted to talk about?
Daniel Kwan: This is such a funny, unromantic way to look at our relationship, me and Daniel, and why I think we’ve been resilient through the fact… The industry’s constantly changing. The past 10 years, every few years, something has really shifted. Yet somehow we’ve managed to make a path through it all despite the fact that so many of our very talented friends and whatever have been having a harder time, if we’re being honest. The independent film landscape is just not a fun place right now. It never has been, but right now it’s definitely feeling… Especially now that even streaming is being turned over again. The whole thing is precarious.
They talk about in genetics, oftentimes when you take two people with very different backgrounds, it actually creates better genes. You become more resilient, because you’re actually knocking out things that… That’s why pugs look the way… They’re all inbred.
Craig: It’s why my children can drink milk. I can’t.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. Oh my god, that’s so funny.
Daniel Scheinert: Wow.
Daniel Kwan: It’s a long-winded metaphor for the fact that when we first started, I didn’t think I was going to become a director, because I was an Asian dude. I was very quiet, very reserved. I wanted to go into animation, because I thought, “Okay, I can still create things, but I don’t need to be the leader or whatever. I can make things on my own.” Scheinert was a very confident white man who had been directing things since he was like 12. He came in, saw something in-
Daniel Scheinert: I was the kind of kid who was like, “Yeah, I could see myself going to film school. I could see myself becoming a director. Those dudes look like me.”
Craig: Wow.
Daniel Scheinert: It didn’t require much imagination.
Craig: That’s awesome.
Daniel Kwan: I also think having him interfacing with the record labels and interfacing with the bands or whatever in a way that I was not ready for, I did not have the confidence for early on, all those things made it so that we… I could sneak in on his back. It’s genetic hitchhiking a little bit, where I was able to navigate this world and learn. In some ways, our duoship and his whiteness was my training wheels. I learned so much from that process.
Then suddenly, #OscarsSoWhite happened, and the whole paradigm shifted, and everything changed. I remember distinctly the moment when we started getting scripts, and they weren’t necessarily for Scheinert, they were for me, if that makes sense. People started sending us projects that were very specifically Chinese. We were being invited to events because I was Chinese. Suddenly, the whole thing switched. Suddenly, he was on my back.
We talked very frankly about this, because again, it’s very unromantic. I feel very grateful that he found me when I did, and I was able to be ready for this moment. The fact that our relationship has been going on for 12, 13 years now, and we’ve been able to make the things that we do is in part because there’s two of us. We have very different backgrounds. Honestly, our belief systems were very different. Our upbringings were very different. Our inspirations were very different. We have very different ways of looking at the world. I think that makes us more resilient, both in just the race of it all, the race conversation of it all, but also just in the types of things that we make.
Daniel Scheinert: Hopefully, 10 years from now, as the world shifts, we still have something to offer, but who knows what that’ll be. Hopefully, we find something that we-
Craig: When the world shifts to white supremacy in the next couple years, it’ll be great.
Daniel Scheinert: Oh, sick.
Craig: You’ll be back again. Don’t worry, Scheinert. It’ll be your time in the sun soon.
Daniel Scheinert: They’ll trust what I look like, and then I’ll sneak in and I’ll rip it apart from the inside.
Craig: Not to overextend the analogy, but John and I are also very different people from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different all this stuff. It is the vive la différence. It is something that makes it work. I don’t listen to podcasts, but I have noticed that a lot of them seem like they are hosted by four clones.
Daniel Kwan: Totally. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Craig: Differenceness is good.
John: I’m the Whoopi Goldberg. He’s the Joy Behar. It’s what makes The View The View.
Daniel Kwan: That’s amazing.
Craig: That’s exactly what I was thinking.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: I’m going to start with mine.
Craig: Great.
John: First, it’s a plus one on Craig’s previous recommendation of The Past Within, which is a very cool video game. Two people play separately but together in ways that… I was not expecting it to be so smart about how it works together. Recommendation on The Past Within, the Rusty Lake game. I have two movies to recommend. The first is The Territory, which is a documentary by Alex Fritz about-
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god. Sorry. We just met Alex last night at an event, at the Gotham Awards. He was incredible.
John: I bet he’s incredibly sweet.
Daniel Kwan: He is.
John: So smart.
Daniel Kwan: He might be listening right now.
Craig: I hate him.
John: [Crosstalk 00:46:36].
Craig: No, I don’t.
Daniel Kwan: Different walks of life.
John: Alex Pritz. I said Fritz. It’s Pritz. Such a smartly done movie. It’s about indigenous peoples in Brazil fighting to save their territory, their land from encroachment. So smartly done. You can imagine the bad, eat your vegetables version of this movie a thousand different ways. It managed to navigate through all that. It’s so smartly done. You can find that on Disney Plus. Check it out, The Territory. Second is My Year of Dicks, which is written and produced by our own Pamela Ribon.
Craig: Pam Ribon.
John: Directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir. So smart. It’s up for an Academy Award, Best short. People should watch it. It’s really, really cleverly done. Based on Pamela’s book about her teenage years and trying to lose her virginity. So great. If you like Pen15, you will definitely love this animated short. It uses animation in such a smart way to be able to show you what otherwise you could not see.
Daniel Kwan: Wow.
John: I really recommend My Year of Dicks.
Daniel Kwan: A great title too.
Craig: Best title ever.
Daniel Kwan: Incredible.
John: You guys will love My Year of Dicks. [Crosstalk 00:47:39].
Craig: “You guys will love My Year of Dicks.”
Daniel Scheinert: It’s a great sentence.
Craig: It is. Continuing the theme sort of, at least etymologically, my One Cool Thing is spatchcocking. If you’re not familiar with spatchcocking, to spatchcock a turkey, you remove the backbone, then you flip it over, and then you push down, and you flatten the whole turkey out. Now, removing the backbone of a turkey, as it turns out, is incredibly hard to do unless you have-
John: It’s brutal.
Craig: … special poultry shears, which I did not have. For about 30 minutes, I was just in this war with a dead animal, almost lost, but finally won. The whole point of spatchcocking is if you keep the turkey on one flat level and put it in the oven, it will cook together at the same time. It will all cook at the same temperature. It will cook way faster. A 15-pound turkey took 1 hour and 10 minutes to cook.
Daniel Kwan: Wow.
Craig: It was perfect.
Daniel Scheinert: Wow.
Craig: If you do like cooking and you are responsible for the turkey in your family, strongly recommend. If you have a butcher that you bring the turkey to, they will often just say, “Yes, yes, we will spatchcock it for you using our spatchcockers.”
Daniel Scheinert: It sounds disgusting. When you said spatchcocking-
Craig: Of course.
Daniel Scheinert: … the last thing I thought was that I was going to want to eat whatever you were about to describe.
Craig: Spatchcocking sounds like something you would need to do to jump to a different timeline. I’m hoping that somehow, at some point, you guys do at least include a little bit of spatchcocking. I feel like if somebody asks a typical filmmaker, “Hey, can you include something in your next film?” they’re like, “No,” but you guys…
Daniel Kwan: I like a challenge.
Craig: What’s one more thing?
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Craig: What’s one more thing? Get the spatchcocking in. That’s all I’m asking.
John: Craig, last year we did spatchcock the turkey and, like you, had the same experience. It was so hard to remove that thing.
Craig: So hard.
John: Then it ended up working out much better. This year, we decided the only way to win the game is not to play, and so we did duck confit, duck legs instead of turkey.
Daniel Kwan: Whoa.
John: So much better.
Craig: Honestly, one of my favorite things in the world is a little duck confit. It is so delicious.
Daniel Kwan: Fancy. We did something similar, except for we went really far away from the tradition. We ended up doing a Chinese hotpot. It was amazing.
Craig: That does sound pretty good.
Daniel Kwan: Also, honestly, there’s very little prep too, so you’re not spending the whole day cooking. Usually, we’re on our feet, trying to get the turkey ready with the mashed potatoes, everything. It’s literally a nightmare, but some people love it.
Craig: Everybody’s basically chasing the French in Western cooking. The French just made cooking the most arduous possible thing. You’re just like, “There’s 4,000 steps.”
Daniel Scheinert: I know.
Craig: It’s the same ambition that you guys have for making films, I have that for cooking. I’m like, “Give me the recipe that no one else will want to do.”
Daniel Kwan: That’s great.
Craig: Hotpot’s just fun.
Daniel Kwan: Literally, give me some materials. I’ll dip it in the water myself. It’s the laziest. I love it. My One Cool Thing-
John: One Cool thing, Daniel Kwan.
Daniel Kwan: There’s this podcast that I’ve been obsessed with for the past couple years called Your Undivided Attention. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with-
Craig: You know I’m not.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Daniel Scheinert: Two clones.
Daniel Kwan: Two clones talking to each other.
Daniel Scheinert: Two clones named Aza and Tristan.
Daniel Kwan: It’s Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. They’re both ex-Silicon Valley people who were very much at the forefront of Twitter and Facebook and all those things. They realized their invention was slowly destroying our ability to communicate with each other, social media. One of them even is the guy who invented the infinite scroll. Now he’s trying to figure out what to… They have a very beautiful, clear-eyed vision of what’s wrong with social media and also what they think are some solutions to it. They bring in all these incredible guests who are thinking about the world in a completely different way, because there’s the social media level of animal conversation. It’s all about that limbic system, what makes you angry, what makes you sad, what will keep you engaged.
I think so much of the discourse about how to save the world exists in this plane of animal fury. I think this podcast tries to rise above it and think about things very much from a system standpoint, an incentive standpoint, instead of just from emotions. To me, it’s been really healing, and I’ve been learning so much. Go listen to Your Undivided Attention. I’ll say a couple of episodes. Audrey Tang is an amazing person you should listen to, Daniel Schmactenberger, Jessie Wheal. I won’t tell you what they’re talking about. These are people that I’m-
Daniel Scheinert: Isn’t it Jamie Wheal?
Daniel Kwan: I’m sorry. Jamie Wheal, yeah. I went a little too fast. A big fan of Jamie.
Daniel Scheinert: That way they can Google it.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly. If you’re someone who thinks about everything that’s wrong with the world and how we can fix it and you feel lost, for me it’s been a really good starting point for me to at least feel empowered in a world that does not want to empower us.
Craig: What about you, Scheinert?
John: Nice.
Daniel Scheinert: A bunch of my friends pitched in to buy my friend a stripper pole, because she’s been taking these pole dancing classes. It’s gotten her in touch with her body, her sexuality. It’s exercise. When we gave it to her, she taught me some of the moves. I had so much fun.
Craig: Really?
Daniel Scheinert: I’m on the hunt for some good heels. She’s going to teach me some more pole dancing.
Craig: Oh my word.
Daniel Scheinert: I just can’t wait to dress up in drag and do some more pole dancing with my friend. Just for anyone out there, just try cross-dressing. Try pole dancing. Just get in touch with another side of yourself. You can just go in the privacy of the garage. Also related is watching pole dancing. There’s a reason that’s the most popular thing at a strip club. There’s a way to do it respectfully, guys. You go and you pay well to watch someone who’s an incredible athlete. I’ve been going to one with some friends in L.A. and having a blast at Jumbo’s.
Craig: Can we ask where you go?
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, Jumbo’s Clown Room.
Craig: Jumbo’s Clown Room, the best name for a strip club ever.
Daniel Scheinert: You’ve gotta tip well. If you go and you don’t tip, you’re a loser.
Craig: Yeah, don’t do the stupid $1 bills dumb thing.
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, or just try it in your friend’s garage. Big cosign on the pole dancing.
Craig: You do look like you’re in excellent shape. If I tried pole dancing, I’m just sure that I would end up in the ER. I would end up in the ER with a wig on.
Daniel Kwan: That sounds great.
Daniel Scheinert: Step one is real easy. You just put your hand on the pole, and you just really slowly, confidently walk around the pole. That’s it. You just gotta work on your strut. Anyone can strut.
Craig: This is the problem is my confidence level. You know what? Something to discuss with my therapist. That’s awesome. Those were great One Cool Things. Those were Two Cool Things. Thank you for that. Incredible.
John: We like it.
Craig: Thank you, Daniels.
John: Daniels, thank you so much for being on the show.
Daniel Scheinert: Thank you for having us.
Craig: Oh my god, it was a joy.
Daniel Scheinert: It’s our pleasure. Thank you for helping us write our script. We listened. We took notes. It was helpful.
Daniel Kwan: We ignored half the advice, but it’s so-
Craig: Thank you.
John: That’s the crucial thing.
Craig: That’s almost as important. What to disagree with is very important.
Daniel Scheinert: Totally.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Woo!
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re actually running a little short on outros, so we need some more outros there, folks. You can send your longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. Craig’s no longer on Twitter. I still am there @johnaugust for the time being. How do we reach you guys on the social medias? Are you guys there at all?
Daniel Kwan: Instagram’s good for me. Instagram, it’s @dunkwun, Dun Kwun.
John: Dun Kwun.
Daniel Kwan: Dun Kwun.
Craig: Dun Kwun.
Daniel Scheinert: My Instagram’s private, just for my friends. I’m sorry if you want to keep track of my life. Social media makes me super anxious.
Craig: I feel that.
Daniel Scheinert: Go check out our movie. I’m so proud of it.
John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find links to transcripts and our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on music videos and other things that people pay you to shoot. Daniels, thank you so much for a great show.
Craig: Thank you, Daniels.
Daniel Kwan: Thank you.
John: Congratulations on your film.
Daniel Scheinert: Pleasure.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Daniels, so in the bulk of the episode, you were talking about writing for music videos. Can you talk to us about what you were actually writing? As you were proposing to do a music video, what does that look like? What are you turning in as a document? I’ve seen some proposals, but I don’t think our listeners have ever encountered that as a written form. What are you writing up if you’re trying to get a music video?
Daniel Kwan: Normally, it starts off, and a record label or a commissioner or sometimes an artist will reach out direct, and they will send the brief over. They’ll say when they need to shoot it, when it needs to be done by, what the budget is, and a rough idea of what the band wants. Usually, it’s not enough money, not enough time, and the ideas are super vague. That’s where it starts off. Usually, the prompt is like, “Okay, the artists don’t want to play music, but they also don’t want to act, but they also want to be in it, but also they want it to look cool. Make cool stuff happen around them.” It’s the most frustrating thing to get sometimes.
Craig: Sounds easy.
Daniel Kwan: Also, it’s like, “We need a treatment in two days.”
Daniel Scheinert: Or sometimes it’ll be like, “Drake’s really into Hawaiian shirts lately. $100,000.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s run with that. Let’s see what we can come up with.”
Craig: That’s an interesting exercise.
Daniel Scheinert: It is.
Craig: Narrows down the paths.
Daniel Kwan: It was film school for us. You talk about how we have so many ideas in our movies. It’s because we were forced by this industry to pump out fully formed ideas within a day or two. They’d be like, “We need a treatment in two days. Come up with a whole idea. Pitch us… ” Usually, they want a treatment, which has reference images, execution ideas, and a rough idea of what the concept is going to do.
Daniel Scheinert: Can I talk about the Maroon 5 renaissance?
Craig: Yeah.
Daniel Kwan: Great. Do it. Do it.
Daniel Scheinert: Right when we were starting out in music videos, our first thing we pitched for money got green-lit, turned in, and turned out well, which is a miracle. It turns out we thought, “Wow, music videos are easy.” Then we proceed to get rejected for eight or nine months straight. To his credit, Paul Hunter, who runs the company that had signed us, was like, “Hey, Maroon 5 wants me to do a music video. Do you guys want to help me come up with an idea? You could maybe ghost direct some of it and get paid, because I know you guys are getting rejected all the time.”
Craig: Starving, yeah.
Daniel Kwan: Exactly.
Daniel Scheinert: Then we listened to the song. It was bad. We’d try to come up with ideas. We could not stop coming up with joke ideas that were just making fun of Adam Levine.
Craig: Oh my god. Oh my god.
Daniel Scheinert: We would laugh our asses off at these things, being like, “There’s no way we could do that, but it sure is funny.” We were really struggling to come up with something that we actually thought would be good. A lot of those ideas that we did not pitch to them, that started as just us making fun of the band and the song, became ideas that stuck in the back of our brains, that we loved, that we actually ended up making. Over the next 10 years, we’d be like, “Oh my god, we’re doing one of the Maroon 5 videos again,” because there was one where their music’s so good it gets women pregnant, and we ended up making that.
Daniel Kwan: For Chromeo.
Daniel Scheinert: There was one where their music’s so good the floor falls apart and they fall down into a bar mitzvah, and then the floor falls apart, and they fall down into a rave. That turned into Turn Down For what.
Craig: I love that that’s the weird [inaudible 01:00:04] wellspring of all Daniels work is just that three-week period where you guys were just destroying Maroon 5 in your minds.
Daniel Scheinert: You never know if this is productive or not. We were laughing. Our favorite one that I’ll pitch, that way the people who came for this 20 minutes feel really rewarded-
Craig: Oh, good.
Daniel Scheinert: We sort of made this. The idea was that there was a huge crowd. They’re all chanting, “Maroon 5. Maroon 5.” Then a stagehand comes out and says, “Hey guys, I’m so sorry, this show’s canceled. There’s been an accident. I’m so sorry. They’re dead. Their bus went off the road.” The fans are starting to cry. The stagehand’s like, “I’m sorry, what? Oh, wait. Oh, I’m sorry, apparently I’m wrong. Here they are, Maroon 1!” Then smoke starts to pour out. This weird Weta [ph] puppet comes out in smoke, and it’s all five of them smushed into one weird, mangled creature. Then out of a crevice comes Adam Levine’s face. Then Maroon 1 becomes more famous than Maroon 5 ever was. They rocket off to superstardom and stuff.
Craig: They should’ve done that.
Daniel Kwan: The bridge is they are so successful that every other band wants to recreate their magic.
Craig: Oh my god.
Daniel Kwan: Metallica gets in a car crash.
Daniel Scheinert: They start wrecking their tour buses.
Daniel Kwan: Sum 41 gets in a car crash. Everyone’s just trying to… Whatever. They’re all dying.
Craig: Oh my god.
Daniel Kwan: Also, I think it ends with Adam Levine opening up his shirt, and he has six nipples, and he starts breastfeeding [inaudible 01:01:41].
Daniel Scheinert: I think that was a different idea.
Daniel Kwan: That was a different idea.
Daniel Scheinert: I think that was a different one.
Daniel Kwan: We still haven’t made that video yet.
Daniel Scheinert: One of our Foster the People videos started with the band dying and then the record label puppets their corpses.
Craig: See, it’s all there.
Daniel Scheinert: Then that led to Swiss Army Man.
Craig: See, everything comes… If people aren’t paying the $5 a month to Scriptnotes to hear this stuff, they really should start. That alone was worth $80 as far as I’m concerned. That was awesome.
Daniel Scheinert: I feel like we never actually answered your question though about what does a treatment look like.
John: What is the document? Is it a pdf you’re setting up that has all the images embedded in it, or is it a deck? What are you sending over these days?
Daniel Scheinert: A lot of directors do different things. The process we discovered was that we would collect a lot of images. Kwan was very graphic design savvy and could mock up some really lovely pdf treatments that would set the tone. For the first few years, each page would have five or six photos, and then I would end up usually writing a persuasive essay, because Kwan was a little too long-winded. The longer you talk about a music video, the harder it gets to wrap your head around it. I would write my attempt at a concise essay, and he would collect images and put it into a thing. We would always get bored try to reinvent it after a while and try to stay interested. Sometimes we resorted to gift treatments, because we found out collecting gifts was really fun and helpful. We started making much longer documents that were 10 or 12 pages and just putting 1 or 2 photos on there, because that became a nice way to break up the different ideas.
We have one friend who shoots videos of himself and edits in clips and photos because he just finds that that’s fun for him. Also, he’s a really charming British man, and so the record label will be like, “Oh, he’s so cute.” It helps him book the music video.
It’s pretty cool that as a writer, we didn’t have to follow Final Draft screenplay format. We started off with this very experimental writing process of just write whatever document you think will get you hired. Just try to be persuasive, whatever tools you have at your disposal.
Craig: It worked.
Daniel Scheinert: The bummer is you do a lot of these that just get rejected. Then you spend a lot of time writing. We never thought of it as screenwriting, but we’re basically writing spec scripts.
Craig: Yeah, and you’re practicing.
Daniel Scheinert: Constantly.
John: You’re a writer going out for an open writing assignment. It’s the same idea. They want to make this thing. Nineteen people are going in and pitching their take on this.
Daniel Kwan: Yeah, except for we’d be doing three a week. Literally, we’d get three different projects, and we’d have to pump them out.
Craig: That’s amazing. That you could do that at all is just I think really a testament to the fertility of your minds. You guys really are special. It was such a special experience watching your film. It’s been special watching your music videos. I really am just in awe of… There’s the whole quality and quantity thing. Typically, as quantity goes up, quality goes down, and somehow, you guys manage to keep those lines in lockstep. It’s amazing.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god.
Craig: There’s more and more of it, and it’s still good. That is just so special and rare.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you.
Craig: I tip the hat that I am not wearing to you.
Daniel Scheinert: Thank you. Sometimes we feel like we use quantity as a crutch, where we’re like, “If there’s enough ideas in there, they’ll like a few of them.”
Craig: If they’re good… When it’s suddenly like, “Oh my god, there comes [inaudible 01:05:26]. Oh my god, there comes this. Oh my god, there goes that.” It’s everything, everywhere, all at once!
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, you did it.
Daniel Scheinert: He went for it.
Craig: It’s really good.
John: You did it. Oh my god.
Craig: I did it, and it just works. I’m really impressed.
Daniel Kwan: Oh my god, thank you.
Craig: I hate everybody. I gotta be honest with you. I just really hate everybody.
Daniel Kwan: Oh, wow.
Craig: I love John.
Daniel Scheinert: Me too. Let’s do a podcast about that.
Craig: By the way, if you want to do a podcast about hating people, girl, I’m there. We’re gonna do it, and it’s gonna be awesome. We’re gonna be canceled literally-
Daniel Kwan: Don’t tempt Scheinert.
Craig: We will be canceled in the middle of the first episode. We won’t even make it to the end of the first episode.
Daniel Scheinert: Let’s go back and forth. Who do you hate? Who do I hate?
Daniel Kwan: This is the bonus bonus.
Craig: Bonus bonus bonus.
Daniel Scheinert: Bonus bonus.
Craig: Our first episode is 14 hours long. Amazing.
John: Gentlemen, thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you guys.
Daniel Scheinert: Thank you.
John: Pleasure talking with you guys.
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:06:19].
Daniel Kwan: Really exciting to be here.
Links:
- Daniels on Twitter, Dan Kwan on IG
- Turn Down For What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon, Houdini by Foster the People, and The Simple Song by the Shins music videos
- Interesting Ball short film
- Everything, Everywhere All at Once
- The Territory
- Pamela Ribon’s My Year of Dicks, directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir
- Spatchcocking
- Jumbo’s Clown Room
- Your Undivided Attention podcast
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Jordan (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 577: The One with Daniels, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded live last week at the Austin Film Festival. This was the day after our big, raucous live show. This is a more sedated affair, but still a pretty full house. We have a bunch of the writers who wrote their scenes for the Three Page Challenge in the audience. We’re going to talk to them about what they wrote, why they wrote it, and get some real feedback from them. If you’re a Premium Member, stick around after the credits, because we’ll do some Q and A with the audience. Some really good questions were asked and hopefully answered. Enjoy.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is a sort of version of Scriptnotes, which is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We’re here live in Austin, Texas. How many people in this room have submitted a Three Page Challenge to Scriptnotes, either now or at some point? That’s a lot of hands here in the audience, a lot of brave screenwriters here.
For folks who are not aware, the Three Page Challenge is a thing we’ve been doing on the Scriptnotes podcast for 10 years, where we invite people to send in the first three pages of their screenplay, their teleplay, and we give them our honest feedback. It’s criticism, but hopefully really genuinely constructive criticism about what we’re seeing on the page, what’s working great, and what could maybe possibly work a little bit better. Craig Mazin, my cohost and I, we talk through this. We do it every couple of weeks. It’s been really fun and educational for everybody, because it’s great to have a podcast about screenwriting, but it’s really hard to talk about screenwriting without talking about the words on the page.
Today is all about the words on the page. We have some other brave writers here who submitted samples so we can talk through these things. If you’re listening to this at home, later on it’ll be attached to the podcast episode. You just click on those links. A good chance to see what these things look like on the page, what we’re talking about literally, like transitions and the language choices that you’re seeing.
When we ask people to send in these script pages, I don’t read them, Craig doesn’t read them. It’s Megana Rao who reads them. Let’s bring up Megana Rao, our producer. Megana Rao, when we call for Three Page Challenges, we’ll put it on Twitter or we’ll announce it on the podcast. How many submissions do we typically get?
Megana Rao: We usually get a couple hundred.
John: A couple hundred submissions. These are writers who are writing in, saying, “Please talk about my thing on air.” For Austin, how many people did you get? We had a special little tick box like, “I’m going to be here at Austin.” How many did you read through?
Megana: Oh god, I didn’t count this time. I’m sorry.
John: It was a lot. It was a good number. These are people who could actually join us up on stage, because that’s what’s fun about the Austin Film Festival is we can actually talk through with these people about what they did and what their intentions were and what we saw versus what they were attempting to do, because so often it’s just a vacuum.
Megana: Totally. We’re just assuming, and we don’t get that feedback.
John: Talk me through your general selection process, because this isn’t a competition. You’re not looking for the best scripts pages. What’s helpful for you in picking a Three Page Challenge?
Megana: I think first of all, I want to make sure that no one ever feels embarrassed and that these are pages that I would be comfortable if I had written being on our website and seen by people. I want to make sure there’s no formatting issues or too many typos or anything like that, that there’s a certain level of professionalism.
Then typically, they are pages where I am surprised or excited. I feel like there’s something new, there’s something I’m rooting for in those pages, but maybe it’s not quite landing on every point. I really feel like I want to champion those writers and those pages to be the best that they can be. I usually put those in a selection pile, and then you and I go through the top five or seven and narrow it down from there.
John: Absolutely. It’d be great to be like, “Here’s three perfect pages. Everyone do these three perfect pages.” Then we wouldn’t have a lot to talk about. We could just say, “Oh, these are great. I want to read the next 30 pages of the script.” It’s the ones who have some like, “Oh, there’s something really promising here, but there’s also something we can work on, that we can discuss.” As you’re looking through, why we picked these three samples is because we saw things that were really promising but also things that we could discuss.
Megana: Totally.
John: We don’t have Craig here with us today, but we do have, luckily, someone who has to read scripts for a living. Can we welcome up Marc Velez? Marc, you are a production executive. You are working at Universal?
Marc Velez: Yes. I oversee development for a division at Universal Studio Group. There’s many television studios within the studio, and so I work at one of them.
John: Great. What is your experience on a daily basis with scripts? Are you reading submissions from writers you’ve never hear of, or are you reading to help put together staffing for shows? What is your experience working with scripts on a daily basis?
Marc: I would say it’s a combination of all three. We have overall deals with a lot of different writers and directors and production companies. They will send us material that they want us to option and work with them and then take to platforms, so there’s that. Then agents will call us and say, “Hey, you should know this writer. They have a really great script,” so there’s that. Then there’s, third, I guess, submissions that are just being considered for pilots.
John: Great. What was your background before this? You were working with Lee Daniels’s company.
Marc: My first job was at Planet Hollywood.
John: Wow. That’s a whole origin story.
Marc: That’s a whole story.
John: You went from all the props in movies to actually working with the people who make those things.
Marc: I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood. I thought the way to get to Hollywood was work at Planet Hollywood.
John: Of course. It’s got Hollywood in the name, so you’d figure. You were that close.
Marc: Prior to working at UCP, I ran Lee Daniels’s company for the last six years as a producer. We did Empire. We did the new Wonder Years. We did a Sammy Davis limited series on Hulu.
John: For something like that, you are helping to staff up those shows. You’re helping to find writers who could be making these things possible. You must get a lot of submissions. You’re probably going through a lot. You may not be stopping at three pages, but what gets you excited to finish a script, and what makes you go like, “Oh, you know what? I think I can set that down and never pick it up again.”
Marc: That’s a really good question. I would say it’s just a gut thing that I connect with the material at the core of it, the character, the point of view, the emotion in the script.
John: Sometimes you’re reading specifically for staffing on a given show, and so does this fit this thing. Also, I bet you can recognize this is a writer with a voice, this is a writer who feels confident on the page.
Marc: Yeah. I would say it’s almost like three buckets. There’s, like you said, the staffing where if I’m staffing a specific show knowing that I need to mimic something in let’s say the spy genre or if it’s an agent who has just sent a script in just for a general meeting and I’m just writing it for their voice. Then there’s the third, which I always think is the hardest. I’m reading the script to see if we want to option it to actually make a show, which just has a different kind of structure to it.
John: Yeah, because within a third one, you’re really looking like, “Can I see Episode 2? Does it feel like there’s a thing here to keep going?”
Marc: Exactly.
John: Which is challenging. Let’s apply some of that structure and thinking to these three pages that we’re looking at from these three samples today.
Megana: We’re going to start with Michael Heiligenstein, who wrote The Encyclopedists. The summary, “King Lear the 15th smiles to himself as he seals an order and passes it to his attendant. As we watch the order travel from the palace to the police barracks through the streets of Paris, we hear Denny Diderot in VoiceOver describe the corruption of the monarchy and society. We see scenes of Denny writing in his apartment until the police show up to his home with the royal order and drag him out and throw him in a police carriage.”
John: The Encyclopedists. Marc, let’s say this landed on your desk, virtually or physically printed, The Encyclopedists, a pilot for a limited series. Just even on the cover page, we have Michael’s name, written by, copyright. Everything looks good to me. Anything trip you up at all?
Marc: No, it looks great.
John: Cool. Let’s get on to first instincts after reading these three pages. Did you see what this show was going to be? What was your feeling after the three pages?
Marc: I would say a couple things, Michael. I would say the first, actually I didn’t know this story, so then I did a real deep dive after, which was really cool.
John: Which is great when you get that.
Marc: It’s rare to have somebody educate me on something that I didn’t know. That was really cool. I would say overall, I got what the premise was of the show and this man being persecuted obviously for writing encyclopedia within this world. It was a pretty clean, clear premise within the first three pages.
John: I would agree. I had a sense that this is going to be this guy’s story, Diderot’s story. I could see there’s going to be a journey here. I was excited to see what happened. He gets thrown in jail by the end of the three pages. Things were moving quickly. We’re essentially intercutting between Denny Diderot writing this thing about the abuse of power and how kings work, while we see his arrest order come through. The intercutting was nice.
I did have some questions though. We’re in a time period, but I don’t really know the time period. I didn’t know the year. I wasn’t anchored into a moment or a year. I didn’t know King Louis the 15th’s age. I like that the writer was telling us to call him Denny, D-E-N-N-Y, so we would actually pronounce it right in our head, because the French name would be Denis Diderot. It didn’t have a great visual on him. I knew that his hair kept falling in front of his eyes, but I couldn’t quite see him. In these three pages introducing this central character, I need to have a clear visual on who he is and be able to cast him in my head.
Marc: If you had the timeframe on there, it would’ve just been more helpful to clarify. I know voiceover’s always really tricky. I felt like in those three pages specifically, what did you want to say in the VoiceOver, because the VoiceOver jumped around a little bit from explaining the king is beholden to the realm to then the king, if he is corrupt, makes bad decisions, and then there was something about the guards basically deciding what they want to do. I was looking for a little bit more consistency in tracking that VoiceOver, because I think that VoiceOver was really key in the first three pages.
John: It’s an interesting use of VoiceOver, because it’s not a VoiceOver that’s directed just to us as an audience. We’re supposed to believe that this is what he’s writing, because he’s going to get stopped mid-sentence as he’s writing this thing. Essentially, he has that compulsion to write. What he’s writing is what we’re hearing in our heads.
Other things I noticed as we went through on the page, we’re lacking ages on people. I was lacking some sort of physical details on some people that could’ve been helpful. I didn’t necessarily believe at the bottom of Page 1 that Rene Berryer was eating a steak at his desk. That just felt like a modern thing versus a whatever year this is supposed to be thing, a horse-drawn carriage kind of year thing.
Then on Page 2, midway through, “Over his left shoulder, a window; through it you may notice the police pull up outside.” I had trouble visualizing that, because for some reason I saw us on the second floor, and that was a challenge. The “you may notice,” it’s either we notice or we don’t notice. Are we supposed to notice or are we not supposed to notice? I needed a little bit stronger of a choice there.
Marc: Yeah. Then for me a little bit on Page 3, I was curious what happened to the blade and if he put that in his pocket for later and what that reveal was to come. I was curious where it went, because for me it dropped out a little bit. Then I just was curious in terms of his point of view. He seemed so nonchalant about getting whisked off by the police. It was just curious getting in his POV a little bit, as well as, if he knew that they were taking him because he was a writer, would he not hide the stuff he was currently writing in that first scene?
John: We approach things with an expectation based on… We see this person writing. We see the police coming. We’re setting this up. For his writing just to be out there felt a little bit of a risk.
Marc: Yeah. I will say I did not see the reveal coming at the end. That was great. I thought they were going to apprehend somebody else, and you were just cutting between the two when he was narrating the story. That was a really nice reveal that I didn’t see.
John: Great. One of the things we love about doing the live Three Page Challenge is we actually get to talk to the folks who wrote the script. Could we have you come up and talk to us about your pages here, Michael?
Michael Heiligenstein: I think I’ve gotten so good at taking feedback in the past couple years, I’m finally ready to do it live on stage.
John: Nothing at all nerve-wracking about this. Michael, did we misunderstand anything you were trying to do in these three pages?
Michael: No, I think that you pointed out a couple things that were unclear and could be clearer on the page. You get the premise. I’m glad that you understood where it was going, what was going on.
John: Great. Talk to us about what’s going to be happening on the next 10 pages. What goes next?
Michael: I love the next 10 pages. This is a script where the final 30 pages of this pilot I’m less sure about, but the first 15 are why I wrote it. When he gets thrown in that police carriage, Denny is about to find out he is not being arrested for what he wrote. He is being arrested for who he loves, because France is so restrictive at this time, the union of the clergy and the king are such that even though Denny is 33, he needs his father’s permission to get married, who he’s estranged from.
He writes his father to ask permission, and his father calls in a favor from the king to have Denny arrested. He is hauled 80 miles from Paris and imprisoned in this monastery where the monks hate him, because he scammed them at one point in the past. They beat him. They starve him. After a couple weeks, all he wants to do is get back to Annette, who is the woman he’s in love with.
After a couple of weeks, in the middle of a rainstorm, he jumps out the second floor window and hikes back to Paris 80 miles in the rain, shows up at her doorstep sopping wet and 20 pounds lighter than last she saw him. He says, “Annette, I don’t care what my father says. I don’t care what he does. Come what may, I want to be with you. Will you marry me?” She says no. That’s the next 10 pages.
After that, he gets involved in the Encyclopedia Project. His friend Rousseau pulls him out of his slump and is like, “Look, you need to work. You can’t stay in this apartment. You need to rent someplace else, so you need money. This project pays well.” He gets pulled into this Encyclopedia Project that’s already going on. By the end of the episode, he’ll become the co-editor of the encyclopedia.
John: Great. Talk to us about tone then, because what you say, having this romance, he feels like a romantic character who’s drawn to great extremes to get back to this woman he loves. Is that the tone? Is it serious romantic?
Michael: My overall impression of it is it’s about his life and it’s about both his relationships as well as this political philosophy bent where he’s somebody who wants to write about the world as it is. There’s two fronts, but you see so much of it is about his personal life and the relationships as well, his relationship with the woman who becomes his wife, as well as with eventually his mistress, this other affair. To me, it’s both sides.
John: Marc, let’s say this is a project that crosses your desk. There may be these people, things attached, or there’s nothing attached. What is helpful for you to think about this as a property that you could develop at Universal or with Lee Daniels’s company? What are the things that we’d say, oh, these are the comps, this is the framework in which you can see making this series? What else would he need to bring?
Marc: I would just ask you thematically your point of view and why you wanted to tell the story from a thematic principle, because I think that would help.
Michael: To me, Denny’s situation is not that different from the situation that any writer is in. Some writers are going to chafe at it more than others, but everybody works under some ruling system. For us, that is capitalism. Look, I’m cool with it on some level. I’m here to make stuff that sells and finds that audience. There are constraints. If you’ve got to pull together $30 million, $50 million to put something together, that’s the constraints that we work with, and that colors the storytelling, and not just the storytelling, but what we write about in the world.
I work in marketing currently. I worked at a website in content stuff. The topics that get covered online, working through that industry, I saw how the stuff that gets covered extensively and written about in detail is all stuff that makes money. There are subjects, for instance, like history, American history. I love history. You can’t find really great information about it online. There’s subjects that are just not covered well. To me, that’s because you don’t make money off of that, so it’s not important, I guess.
John: What is the pitch for somebody who doesn’t know anything about the Encyclopedia Project? Is that the Wikipedia of its day? How do you talk about that in a way that resonates with somebody who is just… It’s 2022. Tell me why this matters.
Michael: It’s a banned book. He’s not just a philosopher. He’s a fugitive philosopher. He’s a renegade philosopher. The book is not able to be published in France, so he has to go back channel through all this stuff. He’s arrested twice in the course of his life. This is the book that eventually is going to be considered foundational to the French Revolution. This is the precursor to the part that we all know about. There’s other fun stuff in there. You get the salon culture, the intellectual culture in France at the time. To me, the core of the pitch is this contrast. He’s a philosopher and he’s a fugitive.
John: Now, Marc, I asked about what else he needs for a series. Talk about a pitch book or a pitch deck. If you were taking this to buyers, what would you need?
Marc: I would say the first script, it’s a format. It’s between a bible and a format, and so it’s about 10 to 15 pages where you map out episodically where the show goes. Ideally, we would send the script around, buyers would be interested, then basically you would go and you would pitch how you see the show, and then you could leave behind that format for them to decide.
John: Since the pandemic, those going around towns have resulted in a lot of Zooms with slideshows, where Megana’s driving the slides. It’s complicated, but it works, and so it does feel possible to do. Michael, thank you so much for sharing this.
Michael: Thank you.
John: Thank you for coming up here.
Marc: It was really good.
Michael: Thanks.
Marc: It was really good.
John: What script should we talk about next?
Megana: Next we are going to talk to Liliana Liu. “Nicole, 22, sleeps in the control of a facility where she monitors conversations. She’s woken up, and we see her travel in a driverless pod through the Mojave Desert on her way to her mobile home. At home, Nicole makes instant ramen and exercises in front of a series of monitors. We cut to baby Sophie’s room and see her parents put her to sleep. In the living room, we see Sophie’s mom accept a call from Sophie dated April 22, 2032. They speak, and we cut to Sophie, age seven, in a pod with her dad. Her dad encourages her to talk on the phone to her mom normally. Sophie refuses until she hears her mom’s lullaby. We cut to the control room where Nicole watches the scene.”
John: Great. I’m so excited to talk about this because I love near-future. I love this space. The premise feels like a Black Mirror kind of premise, like there’s something, what if you could do this, and what are the consequences of being able to do this, which is really exciting.
There’s also some challenges on the page I think we could really talk through and clean up, because sometimes you don’t recognize what’s confusing in a bad way on a page. By clearing those up, you can actually really lock your reader in, because we always talk about there’s a difference between confusion and mystery. Mystery’s great, because that makes us want to keep going. Confusion’s like, I don’t know, and I lose some confidence. Let’s figure out ways to make us more confident about what’s happening on these three pages. Marc, what was your first read on this?
Marc: I would say I love the tone. I think you really created a beautiful minimalist tone that I thought was really cool. I definitely was leaning in. Then honestly, after the three pages were over, I did have some confusion, to John’s point, but I still was leaning in, curious to see what the show was about that I didn’t quite understand, but I think in a good way too.
John: I want to focus on something on Page 2 which I thought worked nicely and just the description of what’s inside Nicole’s home. I’ll just read a little bit here. “She closes the door. Boots off. Black backpack and a pair of red over ear headphones go on a hook next to the door. Small yet not cozy. Only the essentials: a table, one chair. Rustic. Retro. Wood and white dotted with red. No photos. Nothing personal. Nicole (22), maroon tunic over black tights, turns to the kitchenette. She is also unadorned, small, not cozy. She grabs a red kettle, fills it, taps it on. Psst – boils in an instant. Grrl – straight to a Nongshim spicy cup noodle.”
I can see it all. I can see what’s happening here. I can see the order of things, which is really nice. It’s giving me that near-future vibe. I get a sense of who she is and where that is. That moment works really well. I think I want to try to bring that clarity to the rest of this, because I got lost a few other places.
Marc: Yeah. I loved your description. I thought it was so beautifully crafted, but I was looking for a little bit more of a POV from Nicole at times, because her description was pretty thin, but maybe that was a choice you chose. You had a full page of the surroundings, and I was looking for a little bit more of her as a character within that page.
John: Yeah. Let’s go back to Page 1. We open with, “Over black. Silence. Flat green line. Steady. Then a small ripple.” Really what we’re seeing, we’re going to see the voice pattern go past. There were a lot of words to say that there’s a green line on a black screen. I think we can be a little more minimalist here, so, “Flat green line on a black screen. Steady. Then it ripples.”
“A distinctive voice, deep, smoky.” Then we go into the Older Woman and Younger Woman’s dialog here. It was mysterious. That’s mysterious, and then the next moment’s mysterious, and the next moment’s mysterious, and you’re not telling us people’s names. They’re just figures. I need to be a little more anchored in what I’m actually seeing and who these people are, because there’s apparently Nicole that we’re seeing in this control room. Great. Just tell us her name then and don’t keep the mystery until we finally reveal her at her little mobile home pod, to me.
Marc: I agree. I was searching, like I said earlier, just for a little bit more Nicole up top and getting in her POV, because I think you beautifully crafted the world really well and the tone. I was looking for a little bit more of the character up top.
John: Then on Page 2, we’re moving between Nicole’s home and Sophie’s home. There’s projections in both places. I got really confused. I didn’t know that we’d gone to a different place and that we were establishing a new location and a new time. Give us a transition line. Just make it clear that this really is a jump to a new place that we’ve not been to before. Also, it took me three times to read it to realize that by mobile you meant a phone. I thought it was actually a mobile, like he was running in with-
Siri: I’m not sure I understand.
John: Sorry, Siri. Sorry, Siri. I thought he was running in with some sort of mobile to hang over the baby’s crib or something. This is really confusing. It’s a phone. Again, it’s one of those American English versus British English things that I read it the wrong way.
The only other point I’ll make is that the premise of what you seem to be setting up, the Black Mirror of it all, is what if you could set up a call between someone who’s 7.14 years ahead or behind. Intriguing. It’s a little strange that we’re in Nicole’s POV for so much of this rather than Sophie’s POV, that we’re starting with this tech worker rather than the actual family at the heart of it.
Marc: Also similar, I think the transitions I had to read a couple times to make sure I was tracking timeline, in addition to then when Nicole was back at work watching Sophie, I was a little confused of the point of view that we were in.
John: Luckily, we don’t have to stay confused, because we have the writer herself here. Could you come up here? Liliana, thank you so much for being here with us.
Liliana Liu: Hi.
John: Hi. Talk to us about this script. What’s the status of it? Is the whole thing written or just these three pages?
Liliana: Completely out of my depths here, just to say that. My husband is the only one that has ever read any pages, were those pages.
Marc: Wow.
John: Wow. Brave choices here. Nicely done, Liliana.
Liliana: Just a little background, I’m a full-time mom and a part-time software developer. I literally started writing sometime last year. This is a kick in the ass for me to do something, just to embarrass myself and get it out there.
John: You did. You’ve done a great job. Black Mirror, is that right? Is that what you’re going for? Is that the feel?
Liliana: Yeah. I discovered that all my ideas were all sort of sci-fi-ish but sort of a little realism, grounded in real life, sci-fi. This is my first feature script. In fact, it’s still in the middle of writing this, as I’m trying to propel myself to actually finish writing it. I would say the genesis is very personal, even though the theory behind it is not. I’m a sensitive person. I think a lot of writers are. I grew up in a home where my mom was ultra-sensitive. A lot of times, there’s this thing about going back. You replay things. You talk to people or make decisions or you didn’t say certain things or even make certain decisions. It plays back in your mind. It haunts you. Then you wish you could go back. It could be something very small. You want really hard to say something or do the thing that you didn’t, stuff like that. That’s the genesis of where this whole thing comes from.
John: There’s this phrase, esprit d’escalier, that thing you realize you should’ve said as you left the place. This is with a seven-year time period, a bigger gap. It’s a great premise. You’re saying this is a feature. Who is our central character, and who protagonates over the course of your feature?
Liliana: Nicole is the central figure. This is a big company. I think the only other thing I found was some movie with Daniel Quaid about, I think, firefighters calling between dinner times. This is more like there’s a company now, like Amazon or something, that provides this service. She is working behind the scenes. There’s some complications around… People think this is an artificial intelligence provide the service, but in the background, because a lot of times this happens, I work in the background software, that that’s not real, there’s no AI yet. She’s one of the people behind it that’s actually making it happen. People don’t know that it’s her job. I guess another complexity layer is that originally I wanted to do something like Lives of Others where she is just almost in the background.
John: An observer, yeah.
Liliana: Nobody knows she exists. Then she makes an impact to a particular client. I don’t know if this is the right direction. I wanted to make it more personal for her, where she wasn’t just opaque character who just is an observer, like you say. I’ve found basically an angle where she has something very, very key in her own life.
What you see in the first page, that first conversation, now that I think about it, maybe it’s too mysterious. The Older Woman is her mother, and she is the younger woman. She left home when she was 15 and had basically a broken relationship with her mother. Even though she won’t admit it to herself, that’s what’s been haunting her all this time.
It’ll come to pass in the first 10 pages or so that her mother is going to become a client that comes in, but she works behind the scenes. It’s a voice thing. She overhears another worker there that talks to her mother. She’s been listening to these conversations with her mom day in, day out, but she hasn’t talked to her or seen her for seven years. That’s the inciting incident is that her mom is now a client.
John: A pitch, and not necessarily a thing you need to do, but the story you’re describing, it may make sense to have an opening vignette that sets up the premise of what this is and what the service does and if we can establish that she works at this company that’s doing this thing, just so we’re clearly anchored in like, oh, this is what normal life is like before things get upended. Right now, it feels like you’re trying to set up so many mysteries, and we get a little bit lost in that.
Marc, let’s say that the cleaned up version of this script crosses your desk. It’s a feature length thing. Is it something you would say, “Okay, this is great. Let’s think about it as a series.” How much does that happen, where you take something that shows up as a feature, you think, “We could do this as a series.”
Marc: I’ve actually done it a couple times. I’m doing it recently, where there was a feature script I read that I loved. You met with the writer. You could easily see how you could open up the world. We’re just breaking it up into episodic now. I’m super impressed that this is your first thing you’ve ever written, because it’s a really clear, concise, high-concept, grounded genre piece. There’s something really fresh and cool about it.
John: Absolutely. I’m also thinking the cleaned up version of this could be really good staffing, because it reads well for that. This writer can do near-future sci-fi, grounded sci-fi, which is not easy to do. We’re making a fair number of those shows right now. The Nolans would need to have people like you to do that stuff.
Marc: It reminded me of Arrival the movie or Severance, a little bit in that tone.
John: Cool. Now she’s excited that you did this. Liliana, thank you so much. Thank you very much for coming up here. Thank you so much for coming up here. We have a third and final Three Page Challenge here to talk through. Megana, I think we have a listener question that is relevant here. Why don’t you start with a listener question?
Megana: Carrie asked, “Are there legitimately good reasons for the protestant adherence to the unexpressive screenplay format we all use, as in more than, ‘Well, that’s because that’s the way we’ve always done it.’ Several episodes ago, you read a Three Page Challenge with a title page designed like a wake flier, and everyone was so delighted. As a career graphic designer, it seems obvious to me that typography, layout, color, imagery are evocative storytelling tools, but screenwriters are still debating whether bolding a slug line is showing too much ankle. What are some of the good reasons we’re using our great-grandfather’s typewriter constraints in 2022?”
John: Provocative question there. We talk a lot about the formatting on the page on normal episodes. I really want to focus on title pages. Marc, if you see a title page that is designed versus just the 12-point Courier, maybe underlined title, what do you think?
Marc: It doesn’t really register.
John: It doesn’t register for you?
Marc: As long as there’s the title, I’m good.
John: Great. It doesn’t help you? It doesn’t scare you?
Marc: Me, no.
John: Our third Three Page Challenge has a very well-designed or a very graphic cover page. I’m holding it up here. For our listeners at home who can’t see this, it’s The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman. The title is very big on the page. It’s single words in probably 72-point font, “Original teleplay by Rudi O’Meara.” The background is a photo that is a gradient from red to blue. It’s stylish. It’s big. It’s not anywhere like a normal title page would be. It’s a very strong, bold choice. Megana, could you give us a synopsis of what we see in these three pages?
Megana: Yes. This is The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman by Rudi O’Meara. “We open on a middle-aged man floating facedown in a pool, wearing a kimono and covered in blood. In VoiceOver, Clay, early 20s, aspiring screenwriter, tells us he can’t believe that David, the man facedown in the pool, is dead and that he’s one of the ones trying to figure out who did it. Clay warns us that David wasn’t usually this calm. We hard cut to production offices, where we see David Schwartzman, a famous indie producer, storm in and scream at Clay about work, looking for some guy named Phil, and picking him up food from Canter’s.”
John: Great. Marc, this producer did not remind you of anybody you’ve ever heard of, right?
Marc: Many a producer I worked for back in the day as an assistant.
John: Back in the days. This is a story about Hollywood. It’s focused on that. There’s a little bit of PTSD that comes up as I read these things, both from having experienced these people and also having read things about these people and the Swimming with Sharks and all this stuff. As I sit down at this, I’m like, oh, so it’s a Sunset Boulevard opening with someone floating in a pool and a screenwriter talking, the narration that’s going onto this. As you finished these three pages, what was your first thought? What was your first feeling?
Marc: I would say I love the title.
John: I think the title is fantastic.
Marc: Yeah, that definitely brought me in. I would say after that, if I was looking at it for development, it would be a harder point of view, just because Hollywood stories are just really hard to sell. I would then assess more of as a staffing sample.
John: The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman is a really strong title. We’ve talked on the show before. There’s been periods at which spec scripts with very provocative titles would get a lot of attention. Then they would always be released as something completely different than the actual movie. I’m going to remember that. Saying That Awful David Schwartzman is really great. This is apparently Episode 1: Who the F is Phil.
Some other things I’m noticing on the title page here, we’re given an address, we’re given a phone number, we’re given an email address. Once upon a time, we maybe wanted all those things. Email address is great. We don’t need anything more than that. WGA registration number, you don’t need it. We don’t care. It honestly looks to me a little unprofessional. I just don’t trust that people know what they’re doing if they’re putting that number on there.
Marc: I agree.
John: As everyone who listens to the podcast knows, I’m the one on the podcast who actually is pro-WGA. I think WGA is a fantastic organization. I don’t think WGA registration is meaningful for almost anything. If you decide to do it, great, if it makes you feel good. It’s not any more protective than copyright is in general. Do it if you feel like it, but you definitely don’t need to put that registration number on here. I haven’t registered anything with the WGA for 20 years. Don’t worry about doing it.
Megana: Also, it’s because you email drafts. That’s important.
John: Emailing a draft around is also a proof that it existed at a certain point of time. That’s all the WGA registration does is just prove that this thing actually did exist at a certain point in time. There’s other ways to prove that.
Marc: Also, if you have an agent manager or a lawyer, they’re going to protect you when you submit things to production companies and studios.
John: Our point of view is Clay. Clay is giving us the VoiceOver. He’s the one who’s working for That Awful David Schwartzman. He has a VoiceOver power in the story. Not only does he have VoiceOver power, he has ability to stop time and freeze-frame us and be live in scenes while he’s talking to camera. It’s a lot. Did it work for you?
Marc: I think at points it worked for me. I think the thing that was hard for me to track was Clay as a character, because in the VoiceOver he was really brash and confident, but then in the description he was fresh-eyed and young. I was trying to find a way to track him as a character when you’re introducing him in the first three pages.
John: Yeah. We have basically two characters we’re setting up here. Let’s talk about David Schwartzman. He’s described as “mid-50s, long, thinning gray hair, wire rim glasses.” Love it. “An infamous independent producer with a checkered past” in the description, no. That’s too much for me. I’m always a fan of being able to cheat a little bit on that first character introduction in terms of a thing that an actor can play but is not necessarily visual or something we’re going to see. “An infamous independent producer with a checkered past,” we don’t know that from just that description. If you can quickly get that out there, we’re going to feel it. That just felt like cheating to stick that in his parenthetical there.
Marc: Yeah. I don’t know if this is intended to be a comedic murder mystery, but I thought when Clay says, “We’d be the ones trying to figure out who did it,” it felt like it tipped your hat to the mystery a little bit. I wanted a little bit more intrigue and not laying out all your cards in the first page.
John: Yep. We have another character cheating thing here when we finally get to Clay’s actual introduction. He’s been voiceover-ing, but only on Page 2 do we actually meet him in person. “The camera wheels around to reveal our narrator – Clay Wilcox,” parentheses, “early 20s,” comma, “a fresh-faced former English major and aspiring screenwriter then unaccustomed to David’s fury.” That whole last sentence there, “then unaccustomed to David’s fury,” facts not in evidence. Show us that, but you can’t just tell us that in a scene description.
Marc: Yeah. Similar to the way he talked in VoiceOver, and then when he was freezing, it felt like he had been doing this for a while, so it was hard to track which kind of, I guess, Clay we were tracking and following.
John: Yeah. That’s where I had a hard time buying Clay as a character, which is important, because he’s our POV character. He’s the one we’re going to see going through this. All that said, I’m curious and intrigued about the tone, because like you, I thought it was maybe a comedic murder mystery, sort of Only Murders in the Building. There’s something fun about that and piecing that together, we have a dead body, and figuring out who could’ve done this thing, when it seems like everybody probably did want to kill this person, because I want to kill this person, and I don’t even know him. Luckily, we can ask the question of the writer himself. Can we bring up Rudi O’Meara? Rudi, thank you very much for being here.
Rudi O’Meara: Thanks for having me. Great feedback though. Thank you so much.
John: Great. Thank you for being here. Talk to us about your experience with David Schwartzman. Was he really that bad?
Rudi: Yes. Actually, the title, the “That Awful,” so the person… It’s kind of from my life experience in some ways. It’s the reason I left the industry when I was younger. Later in the script, it’s mentioned that he was actually part of The Factory with Andy Warhol. When I was told that I got the job, I was working at a bookstore. The Warhol Diaries had just come out. I went to the index, and his citations were long in his name. I went to the first one. It was like, “Went to so-and-so’s house, ran into that awful David.” His last name was not Schwartzman. Next citation was exactly the same. Twenty citations later was exactly the same. That’s where the title comes from.
John: That’s awesome. I didn’t know that it was based on… I think it’s a sad state of Hollywood that there’s a bunch of other people who I assumed it could’ve been based on.
Marc: Exactly.
John: A bunch of terrible, terrible people, some of whom we’ve discussed on the Scriptnotes podcast, who we could assume that it was inspired by. Was our guess that it’s a comedic murder mystery at all correct? What is the tone for you?
Rudi: Ding ding ding.
John: Great. Someone killed him, and it’s Clue, and we have to figure out who could’ve done it.
Rudi: Correct. Like you said earlier too, it really could be anyone. That’s part of the both episodic nature, but also… Every single person from the financier, basically every aspect of the production, everyone has a motive. They’re trying to figure out how to solve it.
John: Talk to us about the engine of the show though, if it’s an Only Murders in the Building, or it could be The Afterparty. Are we switching POVs episode to episode? How does it work, or do you know?
Rudi: Clay is the protagonist. There is a time-swapping element. It jumps forward, jumps back. It’s a little bit like Only Murders but then also like The Big Lebowski meets The Maltese Falcon in some ways, where it jumps around, but it’s also a little trippy. In some ways, the narration is maybe faulted for that a little bit, because it does feel like you’re hearing from him at a different stage of his own understanding. At the same time, when he’s speaking in the first person or interacting with characters live, sometimes it’s a little bit disconnected from his later wisdom. It jumps around in time a little bit, and that can be a problem.
John: Making it clear to the audience that there is that gap is really challenging, and on the page, feeling the difference between that too, because we’re just seeing Clay with dialog, and so we’re not necessarily always clocking if it’s a VoiceOver dialog versus what’s happening in the scene. It’s a challenging thing to have characters be able to VoiceOver in a scene and talk in a scene, and yet many great movies do it. Clueless does it, and it works flawlessly when it happens. Maybe we’re actually looking at how those things worked on the page and what you can see and feel and steal from how they’re balancing those two things. You mentioned before, Marc, that movies about Hollywood, shows about Hollywood are really tough. They’re tough to get made, and they don’t tend to work especially well. Why is that? Do you have a sense?
Marc: There’s always the Entourages of the world that work. I think it’s hard because for the most part, people don’t want to access behind-the-scenes movies, TV shows about Hollywood. I think that’s been always hard. Can I ask you a question about the script though?
Rudi: Yeah, sure.
Marc: In terms of Clay, and you might not have this figured out, is there a detective that comes in? If Clay is new to this guy’s world, why does he want to figure out who killed him?
Rudi: There is a detective later. I’ve only written the pilot, but I’ve mapped out the first season. That’s very presumptuous, first season. In Season 4… No. There is a detective, but also at the same time, they have the motivation in that just before the murder happens, the film that has been in production is failing, and out of desperation, the producer, David, taps Clay for an idea, like, “Give me a spec script of yours.” He’s like, “Oh here it is. I got one.” It starts moving. Things go into production. David gets murdered. They want to keep that moving. Also, at the same time, they’re under threat, because they’re seen by all these other people who are also suspects as possible suspects themselves. Everyone’s on the table in terms of who could’ve killed David.
John: Great. Rudi, thank you so much for these three pages.
Marc: Thank you.
Rudi: Thank you very much.
John: I want to thank everybody who sent through the three pages for us to talk about, especially our brave writers who came up here to talk about the things they wrote, because that’s so intimidating to have us talk about problems and then you come up here and do it. Thank you very much for that. Thank Megana Rao, our producer, for reading all of these pages. Thank you to the Austin Film Festival for having us again. Thank you for a great audience. Thank you. Have a great afternoon.
It’s John back with you kind of live again. I want to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us yet again. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Graham. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. A reminder that if you want to submit your own three pages for a Three Page Challenge, the place to do that is at johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts, and they’re great. We saw so many of them at the Austin Film Festival. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, and actually only at Cotton Bureau. There’s now knockoff Scriptnotes T-shirts, which is wild. The real ones are at Cotton Bureau. You should get them there, because they’re the only ones that are soft enough to merit the Scriptnotes brand.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to put on the end of this episode, which has questions from the audience after our Three Page Challenge. Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
John: At this point in the podcast, I’d love to talk to you guys and get your questions you have in the audience about either the pages that we talked through today or the general thinking about what on the page works for a person who’s trying to get staffed on a show or get a show set up at a company like yours.
Do we have questions in the audience? Right there in the white. Just say your question. I may repeat it back so we have it on the air. The question is about the layout of each particular page and whether, especially in those early pages, are we trying to make sure there’s a cliffhanger at the bottom of the page and what those all are.
The first couple pages are incredibly crucial to make sure that you’re just drawing people down that page, and they want to keep flipping. The goal is just get them to the next page, get them to the next page. That’s not necessarily a cliffhanger. You don’t want to break the actual story to get you to the next thing. You are really thinking about how am I going to get this person to read. A very common cheat you’ll see in a lot of scripts is that putting a few extra blank lines at the top, so that the first page is just a little bit lighter and so that we’re starting about a quarter of a page down, just to get you flipping and just make it less intimidating to get through.
A thing we talk a lot about when we do Three Page Challenges is just the page feel and how dense it is on the page and how light it is. The samples we’ve gone through today are pretty good examples. The longest blocks of scene description are about three lines, four lines. There’s no 15-line things. If you look back at older scripts, sometimes they had really massive things. Those are intimidating. You might start skimming.
As a writer, you never want your reader to skim. You always want the reader to feel like every word, they got it in there and they took it. The only thing you want your reader to be able to skim is character names. At a certain point you can get into a flow where you don’t have to look at the character names anymore. You have a feeling of it’s ping-ponging back and forth between these characters. It’s great. You basically want to make sure that you’re keeping the reader glued to every word and flipping the next page.
Again, one of the things we always say at the end of each of these samples, would I want to read Page 4? Sometimes, yes. In the case of these scripts, yeah, I would keep reading a little bit longer, which is a great sign.
Right here in the first row. Julie, you’re asking a really good question, because classically, we talk about structure, especially for film structure, like, oh, the inciting incident needs to happen at a certain point, or there’s an act break and these changes. I think the thing we kept trying to stress is that even before then, by the end of three pages, we need to have a sense of what this world feels like, what this movie feels like, what ride am I going on. If you’ve done that in three pages, that’s important. If we’re hooked into who you are as a writer and feel confident, that’s greater. I asked you earlier what makes you stop a script. That’s one of the things you said is just that feeling of, “I want to keep going.”
Marc: I don’t think it needs to be somebody gets murdered in the first three pages. It could just be a really beautiful tone that’s intriguing, that you are excited to read more.
John: Another question. Right here. Great. The question is, how worried do we need to be in the first three pages of being either too irreverent or saying something, doing something on those first three pages that make someone feel like, “I don’t ever want to meet this writer.” Marc, has that ever happened to you?
Marc: No.
John: Have you ever been like, “Oh my god, this person seems like a jerk.”
Marc: No. Be as authentic as you want to be in your writing, I always say.
John: On the live show we did last night, we had two great guests, Chuck and Brenda, coming on. One of the things that they made most clear is that what was key to them getting staffed on shows finally was just writing what they uniquely themselves could write, that no one else could do this. When people read their sample, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I want that guy who did that thing.” It wasn’t a generic thing that someone else could’ve written. It was only a thing that Chuck could’ve written or that Brenda could’ve written. Using something that shows your own voice is crucial.
People also come to me and say, “Oh, I’m working through a couple different ideas. I’m not sure what I should be writing next that might be a good sample.” If there’s something you could write that the central character or premise feels like it matches you, that can be really useful, because then the person who’s reading it can have you in their mind, and so when they sit down and meet with you, they’re like, “Oh yeah, that character and her, yeah, I could see them jiving.” That can be really useful.
Marc: I will say there’s scripts that I’ve read in my career that are batshit crazy ideas, but I will always remember them. To John’s point, as I’m staffing a show, I might say, “I really loved that script two years ago,” and then I’ll flip it to the showrunners because it stuck with me as something that just felt noisy and different.
John: Noisy can be good. Right here. Marc, are you pro-splat?
Marc: I’m always open to a splat. Are you?
John: Yeah, I think so. On the podcast, we often call this a Stuart Special. Stuart Friedel, who’s one of our previous producers, as he picked Three Page Challenges, sometimes there would be this big dramatic thing happens, and it says then “two weeks earlier,” and then it goes back. We call that a Stuart Special, because it’s got that flashback thing. Those are often splats, where there’s a whole horrible death or a thing happens and then everything can go back to normal life beforehand. Those can totally work. They can be cliches, but if they’re cliches that are done really, really well or have a spin on them, they work and they can be really, really helpful. Don’t be afraid of them.
Right here. The question is about character introductions, character descriptions that have a lot of psychological insight or they really talk through the psychology of characters and how we feel about that. I want to contrast that with some of my criticisms of this last script, where they weren’t psychological insights, they weren’t things that an actor could play. They were just facts that we couldn’t see. I think that is really the distinction for me.
I haven’t read the Mare of Easttown scripts, but I suspect that if I were an actor reading through that script, I’d say, “Oh, that is really useful for me. That is a thing that I can figure out, how to embody what you’re describing there. That is great, whereas I can’t embody being a despised producer. That’s not a thing I can take into my body.” I’m great with it. You always have to recognize that if you’re throwing a lot of scene description at us, we’re going to be tempted to slow down or stop reading or we might skim it. It’s always that balance. If it works, it can be great. How do you feel when you see those things on the page?
Marc: I haven’t read Mare of Easttown. I’ll be actually curious to see how it maps out. I would say I agree. If you could be a little concise with your descriptions, I always think that works better just for the read and the flow.
John: Great. Another question. Let’s go all the way to the back. I see you, sir. Great. The question is about companion material, so if there’s a deck that comes with a script or there’s some sort of link, would you click that first or look at the deck first before you read the script?
Marc: I think it just depends, honestly. I would actually look at the sizzle first, just so I get the visual tone of what they want to do. Then I would read the script.
John: Just so we’re sure we’re defining terms, what is a sizzle to you, and how long is a sizzle reel?
Marc: A sizzle reel could be anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes. That’s almost like a proof of concept for the tone and the look and the feel of the series, or if it’s a deck, I’ve gotten decks anywhere between 5 and 20 pages of templates for who the characters are, the world. A lot of times with genre stuff in big world-building stuff, they tend to put a deck together so you understand the scope of the world.
John: I’m working on a project for the first time that has a deck that goes with it. It’s exciting. Also, it kind of feels like cheating, because I can show you what this all looks like. This is this giant movie star in this role. That’d be great. Of course you want to make that movie or that show. We didn’t used to do them, but they are helpful. Curious what you think about it. We now can embed links in scripts. We can embed links in things. Do you ever click links in a pdf?
Marc: The only thing I’ve seen, which I thought was super cool, was there was a Spotify playlist at the top of the title page, because it was a Southern show, and they wanted Southern music bands. It was actually just really nice at the end just to play that playlist, which I thought was cool.
John: That was on the title page or at the end?
Marc: It was on the title page, on the QR code.
John: Great.
Marc: It was pretty cool.
John: [inaudible 00:51:15]. A question right over here. The question is, beyond just a link, embedding images, putting other stuff in a script, and do we think that the screenplay format will evolve beyond where it is right now? Craig Mazin who’s not here, would say, “Yes, it’s going to. We’re going to break the whole script format.” Me, as the person who actually makes apps that do it, it’s like, eh. I’m maybe a little more conservative on some of it. How do you feel when you see an image in a script?
Marc: I would say at the end of the day, at the core, it’s about the actual script. You can jazz it up and put bells and whistles, but at the core, I think I just look at the script and assess the actual script.
John: Yeah, because to be the entire cliché here, the script is the plan for making a TV show. The photo is in the plan for making the TV show. The photo can be really helpful for other things. I think those decks and other stuff can be really helpful for showing what stuff is. The script is the plan for what the scenes are and how we’re going to get through this important storytelling moment. If an image is absolutely crucial for doing that or if you could not possibly understand this without that one image… Rian Johnson did it in Looper. If there’s one image that you have to see for it to make sense, great. If you can’t do it with your words, maybe there’s some reason why your words need to be improved.
Marc: I also thought for a deck over Zoom, for my writer friends who have to talk for 30 minutes, it’s a nice break to show visuals.
John: Yeah, it really is so great. Because of the pandemic, we first started having to do this. It was better, because suddenly, I can have my cheat sheet of what I’m pitching off of right close to the camera line, but the deck’s filling up some space. It does help, because I’m the person who always used to bring in boards. I would art-mount my boards and bring them in. Slides are just better.
Great. Right here. The question is, we talked about some scripts being really good for thinking about making this into production versus staffing and what the split is here. Can you define what is a useful thing to be thinking about, like, “Oh, this is a good sample for staffing,” versus, “This is something we would actually make.”
Marc: I would say the first step is I would talk to the creator/showrunner and say, “Ideally, what are you looking for? What are your needs?” because at the end of it, it’s the writer’s, creator’s decision on who he or she wants to hire. Then off of that conversation… Let’s say it’s a cop show. If they want somebody who has a cop procedural, then I’ll look for specific scripts that mimic that, or if it’s a genre piece, but it’s a real character piece, then look for something specific in line with what the showrunner wants. It really depends on what the show is.
John: Of course, back in the day, if you wanted to write on a half-hour sitcom, you would write a spec episode of Seinfeld or some existing show that was on the air. It’s like, “Oh, he can write that show.” You wouldn’t write the show that you were staffed on. It was just to show that you can actually do that thing. Mindy Kaling says she really misses those days, because she misses being able to staff off of like, “I know they understand how shows work and how to write in the voice of a given show.” We don’t do that anymore, because you probably read very few specs of existing shows anymore.
Marc: When I first started my career, it was a lot of CSIs, Law and Orders. I hadn’t watched CSI a lot, so it was hard for me to track if they were mimicking the show, because ideally when you’re staffing, you’re mimicking what the show and the creator is creating. Now it’s really refreshing, because it’s all about originals. There’s plenty of playwrights that I’ve staffed off just an amazing play sample that just has a really great character that tonally fits what the creator’s doing in the series too.
John: Marc, talk to us about reading things that are not scripts, because reading a play, do you feel like you are getting a good sense of whether they could do it?
Marc: Yeah, sometimes if there may be a lower-level writer, so a staff writer or story editor, where they’re not an upper-level writer, but they just have a really great, unique voice, and we just need a really unique perspective in the room, that will help. A couple years ago, I got pitched somebody who had a Twitter handle as a way to staff a show.
John: Great. Was it a very serious Twitter handle? It wasn’t funny at all.
Marc: No, it was funny. It was for a comedy room. They hadn’t written a script yet, but they had really funny tweets.
John: Diablo Cody, quite famously, she was funny on Twitter, and sure enough, she could actually write. Who knew? That is a way to show a very specific voice. Great.
Let’s take one more question here. Right there in the back, I see you. Great. Our question is, we were talking about specs, which is so confusing. In TV, a spec is writing an episode of an existing show that’s on the air, or are people just reading originals? For our writer there, would you recommend she spec an existing show or just do originals?
Marc: I’d say originals. I did read recently a Golden Girls spec. That was really fun and new. It was interesting how they told the story. I think it was noisy, the way they planned out the story. For the most part, originals. I would say have two, because you never know if there’s a great genre show that you want to get staffed on or a great drama. To have two samples is always really good.
John: Some things I took from this conversation today, I’m going to use the word noisy a lot as a describer, because really, a noisy thing you notice. You just notice people who are noisy, and you notice a script that is noisy. It just sticks with you. Things that are just quiet and subtle and disappear and they’re not objectionable but they’re not memorable, that’s not going to help these people.
Marc: I think it mimics… There are so many platforms right now. What buyers are saying, they need things that are noisy to break through the immense amount of content that’s on the air right now.
John: Great.
Links:
- Marc Velez on IMDb
- The Encyclopedists by Michael X. Heiligenstein
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John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 584 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, let’s imagine you wrote a bestselling novel. Everyone wants to turn your book into a movie or TV series, but you decide no, you really want to do it yourself. How would you even begin? On the show today, we have someone who faced that exact scenario and absolutely killed it. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is the writer of Fleishman Is in Trouble, both the book and the limited series, and now she’s here with us. Welcome, Taffy.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here.
John: I watched your show and I immediately knew that I wanted you on. You’ve done so much press and publicity for this. I’m sure you’re absolutely exhausted, but we’ll talk about some different things than I think you probably talked about on any of your other 19 podcasts, interviews, articles, I hope.
Taffy: This week, and it’s Monday.
John: This week. It’s only Monday. I want to get into how this became a book and then became a series, but I also want to look at characters and really dig into what characters are trying to conceal and protect, which I think is a really interesting lens to dig into for Fleishman, how you tackled making a series and running a series when you’ve never done it before. Plus, Megana has picked some questions that are going to be really good for you to answer, just because you know special new things.
Let’s get into it. Taffy, talk to us about Fleishman Is in Trouble. I had not read the book. I had just started watching the series on Hulu, loved it, caught up all of it so I could watch the finale in real time as it was happening. My husband and I set aside time to make sure we watched it live and real. What is the genesis for Fleishman? Where did the notion first come to tell the story?
Taffy: That is a great question. Thank you. I am a journalist first. I was working at GQ and the New York Times. I have contracts with both of the magazines. One day, around the time when I was 40 or 41, suddenly all of my friends started coming to me and telling me that they were getting divorced. It got to the point where I knew that if I hadn’t heard from somebody in a few months or in a year, they were going to tell me that they were getting divorced. Nobody ever comes to you and tells you they’re divorced in a weepy way. They tell you when they’re ready to tell you. I would sit down with each of them.
I was so interested in this, mostly because I come from a family of colossal divorce. We’re the greatest divorcers in I want to say the East Coast, but I’ve also lived in California, so I’m going to say we’re the greatest. We’re number one.
John: Absolutely. Any coast, you’re number one. Would you say you’re a family that’s very likely to end up in divorce? Is that why you’re the greatest?
Taffy: Statistically. I have three sisters. Two of them are divorced, one of them for a second time. My parents are divorced. My mother divorced the man she remarried. I have a sister who is ultra-Orthodox, and she is married. We all work hard.
We all work hard, the fact of marriage, because we have all observed the same thing, and this is what I was observing then, which is that all these people, they were as happy as I was on my wedding day. What happens with marriage is that it’s two people, and therefore it’s a kind of sedition to ever talk about your marriage. Therefore, when there are problems, you don’t know if your problems are bigger than other people’s. You read between tea leaves. How many metaphors is that?
John: You were reading tea leaves.
Taffy: That was several. You’re welcome.
John: You read between the lines or you read tea leaves.
Taffy: That’s how bad it was. I was reading between the tea leaves and trying to figure out how can I escape this fate and what is new about divorce, how did I get to the age where people were getting divorced, what is new about it.
Also, they would show me their phones, and their phones were wild. They had apps where they were… My gift is efficiency, like an economy of motion. I could walk through my apartment and everything is where it needs to be. It’s my only economic skill. I looked at these phones, how you were allowed to date now without going somewhere, without showing up, without getting dressed, and all I wanted was to hear stories about it. The thing I thought was, I will go to GQ, and I will tell this story, because that’s what I do. I tell the story at GQ.
John: That was my question, is because you were hearing these tales, and you’re a journalist, so naturally, this is a great story to report.
Taffy: I called my editor one day after seeing the most recent friend’s phone. I was like, “We have to do this story about how people are dating on their phones now.” He said to me, “You don’t always sound like a middle-aged housewife, but right now you do. Our readers wouldn’t even… They’ve never dated other than that. They wouldn’t even understand it.”
I had a first-generation Jdate account. My handle was matzahbride. We had advanced so far to the point where now I have these amazingly beautiful friends who can’t even get eye contact at a restaurant, because it’s not protocol. It’s almost like Edith Wharton’s New York, where you’re not allowed to go over to someone anymore.
I called up my editor, and he was like, “This is not a good idea.” I was about to call my editor at the New York Times Magazine, because that’s how my contract went, that if GQ didn’t want a story, the New York Times could have it. Right before I did, I thought about what a New York Times Magazine story was going to look like with this. It was following some guy for a year, implicating his ex-wife and his poor children, him pulling out right at the end, and it being a sad story, when it’s not sad. It’s really wonderful when people free themselves from something that isn’t working for them.
I sat down at a Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan and I started writing. I can’t remember if I had 10 or 30 pages. I’m a very fast writer. I can’t remember if I had 10 or 30 pages by that first day, but I had them. They didn’t change once. I wrote this as a novel.
John: You have all this experience of your own family, all of your friends. You’re describing this as this new world of dating, divorced people, apps and stuff. That’s in Fleishman Is in Trouble, but that’s not the bulk of Fleishman Is in Trouble. Fleishman Is in Trouble ultimately is a… There’s a mystery to it, what actually happened. There’s the contrasting notions of whose story it even really is. Did you know that as you started to do these first 10 or 30 pages? Were you discovering it as you wrote it?
Taffy: I thought I was going to write something that was a meditation on marriage, but what it turned out to be was… In journalism, I write mainly profiles.
John: I’d actually like to get into that for the Bonus Segment. I really want to talk about the celebrity profile. Let’s dig into that in the Bonus.
Taffy: Gotta be a Premium Member to hear all about the profiles. I’m a Premium Member by the way. I’ll be able to listen.
John: Thank you.
Taffy: I know that novels are hard to write. The way I kept this in my head as a manageable project that I was doing while I was also still writing for GQ and the New York Times, was to think of it as a profile. Then the same thing happened while I was writing it that happened in every profile I wrote, which was that I started to wonder what the other people in the story would say, which is a crisis of journalism.
It’s 2016. One of the places I work, the New York Times in particular, is being crucified and berated for not having covered the country well enough. Then once they start, people are angry that they’re covering the country well enough. You can’t do a profile on a Nazi.
I thought about profiles in general. My personal crisis in profiles is that there is no way to tell a story about somebody without creating sympathy for them. The minute somebody takes up the mantle of telling somebody’s story, there is no way around sympathy. Sometimes when you make people feel sympathy for people they don’t want to feel sympathy for, they hate you for it.
I don’t do a lot of politics, so my personal crisis around this was, I’m listening to a celebrity, he’s talking about his ex-wife, for example, and everyone knows who his ex-wife is. He’s talking about his new wife and how happy he is. He’s implicating the ex-wife. You start to think, should I call the first wife? I don’t know. Some people say yes, but I say anyway.
John: Let’s talk about the characters you chose to embody these different points of view. We have Toby. He is newly-ish divorced as the story started. He’s a dad with two kids that he shares with Rachel, his ex-wife.
At what point in writing the novel did you know that these two central characters were actually going to be narrated, their story of what’s actually happened was going to be narrated by a third person? Was that third person always you? Because she seems like a placeholder for you in that she is also a journalist working at a men’s magazine. When did you know those three characters were going to be the people we would follow through the story?
Taffy: I always knew that the Libby character was narrating the book. In the first place, I had done it as a third-person book. Then at the end you would realize that one of the characters had narrated the book or had written this book. Everyone I gave it to, all these smart readers, did not realize that, so I had to go through and change it and make her into a first-person character. I always knew that. I always knew this was going to be written.
There’s a famous thing of journalists and their first novels. Usually, it is so close to the thing that they do. Whereas you would think it might be about celebrity that I would do this, actually it was about profile writing, because the reason I write about celebrities is mostly because that’s what people are interested in. I think I’m a partisan of the profile but not necessarily the celebrities.
John: When you’re writing a profile though of a person, you are reporting facts. Basically, you’re seeing stuff. You’re getting the interviews. You’re figuring that stuff out. With the case of Toby Fleishman, he is a hepatologist. He’s a liver doctor.
Taffy: He’s a liver doctor.
John: He’s a liver doctor. He’s not a real person. Were you interviewing real liver doctors to figure out what they need to do? What was the decision to make him this medical specialty?
Taffy: I’m a Jewish woman in New York. I have all sorts of specialists at my fingertips. I called up a few doctors and asked, “What is a disease you could have where if somebody had looked at you more closely, they could’ve seen it, if someone were paying attention, they would’ve seen your disease?”
There were two of them. One of them was an osteo disease where you have blue sclera. Bone doctors are not so interesting. Personally, I’m sure they’re fine. The liver is a very romantic organ. It regenerates once it’s injured. It forgives you. I just fell in love with this disease.
John: Metaphorically, it works really well.
Taffy: It just worked very well. I have a friend who’s a nephrologist, which is close enough, because there are very few hepatologists. It’s literally close enough. Abdominally, it’s close enough. He guided me through this. I read all about it. I’ve since gotten a lot of letters from liver doctors who… You talk about representation. All seven of them feel very seen.
John: You knew who Toby was. When did you decide Rachel’s arc? We’re going to go in very light on spoilers for this episode, because we want people to watch this.
Taffy: Do it. Good. Thank you.
John: When did you know that Rachel was going to be missing and what had actually happened? It very much feels like in the early portions of the story that this could be like she’s dead in a ditch someplace.
Taffy: I had to work so hard to signal to the… I always picture the reader or the viewer as someone who’s about to be disappointed, who could cut and run at any moment. I was so worried about a Gone Girl, like, “Oh, am I reading Gone Girl?” and the marketing of the book and all of that. It was so important that we not convey any sort of thriller aspect of it, which is why…
I’ll tell you, in the book, the reason I did that, the reason she’s missing is because I could write forever. I have a million words in my fingers. If I didn’t have a plot… At a newspaper, I have a limit on the amount of space I’m given. I go for twice that much. Then in this, it could’ve gone on forever. I needed a plot.
The plot is, what if this inconsiderate ex-wife… Because all of the wives from all of the ex-husbands I was hearing from, they were all so inconsiderate. The husbands were angry, and the wives were inconsiderate. If you’re a journalist and you’re looking for the common theme of everything, it was the husbands were angry but also wanted to know why their wives were so angry all the time. Anyway, [inaudible 00:14:29].
John: Early on, you knew that was going to be the plot. You knew that ultimately the story was going to be told by Libby, and so you had to go back through and make sure the reader understood that Libby was telling the story. Ultimately, and this may be different for the series than for the book, you realize the whole reason we’re actually hearing this story is because Libby is going through her own crisis.
Taffy: It’s exactly the same. You have not seen a book and TV experience that are redundant like they are. You have read the book, John. The reveal is, you’ve read the book.
John: You’ve read the book. That’s a very natural segue into really this process of adaptation. You’ve written the book. You’ve found the right publishing house for it. It goes out. It becomes a huge success. People in Hollywood immediately start wanting to say, “Oh, let’s adapt this into a book or into a movie.” What were those sorts of calls like? What were you thinking about early on? I’m sure even when you first turned in the manuscript and you got the initial reaction from editors, publishers, you knew that somebody was going to want to make this into something. What were your instincts, and what were those first calls like?
Taffy: I didn’t think anybody would want… I thought it was too internal a story. I have friends who have written novels. I saw the kind of thing that was getting optioned. Rachel is a theater agent. This story is, in the end, so much about middle age. I don’t want the listener here to be cynical, but if you are looking to reach the Hollywood optioning segment-
John: Put an agent there, yeah.
Taffy: Middle-age, wealthy people, also an agent. That’s what I think happened, because I can never say to myself, “Hey, maybe you wrote a good book.” I’m just incapable of that. Probably I had quadrants. It’s a three-quadrant book.
John: You have Craig Mazin Disease, where you don’t believe that anything you did was actually good in and of itself. That was just some sort of dumb luck or-
Taffy: I was looking forward to talking to Craig about that.
John: Craig is off doing press for his show now [crosstalk 00:16:32].
Taffy: He’s off telling people that nothing he did was good.
John: Yeah, that’s what it is.
Taffy: I understand that. Here’s what happened. In the interim, when I wrote the book… The thing you didn’t ask… You’re asking very dignified questions about plot, but you’re not asking the undignified questions about financial desperation.
I was a very good freelancer. I made my year every year. Then April would come, and I’d realize, “Oh my god, I have to pay for camp.” Camp always blindsided me. Always 17 times more than you think it should be. Sometimes I would teach a class. This year I decided I’m finishing this novel. I knew for sure that I was a journalist that enough people were interested in, because I was having meetings with publishing houses about nonfiction books that I didn’t want to write. I knew that I could sell a book for camp tuition. I was just going to do that. I sell this book.
In the interim, the New York Times hires me full-time. I get hired. I start doing more interviews. I put the book, even though the revisions are due, on the side, because I have this new job, this new, big job. One day, I interview Jimmy Buffett, not Warren Buffett, but Jimmy Buffett.
John: I know Jimmy Buffett.
Taffy: Of course, but the story I’m going to tell you, you’re going to be like, “Did she mean Warren Buffett?” because I started talking to him about money.
John: Jimmy Buffett is also a theater producer. He was one of the producers on Big Fish, and so I know him through that context.
Taffy: Was he?
John: Yeah.
Taffy: That’s amazing.
John: It’s a weird, small world.
Taffy: I loved the Big Fish musical. When they’re running at the end… Anyway, I talked to him about money, because it seems to me that he has created this laid-back lifestyle that he now has to support with constant work. I say to him, “I’m having this struggle myself, Jimmy Buffett, where I feel that I’m successful, but I’m broke. Why am I broke all the time?” He said, “Margaritaville, when I wrote that song, I saw the reaction to it and I knew it was going to be a child that supported me in my old age.”
John: Wow.
Taffy: I cartoon-like ran out of the room. There’s dust there. I go to do my revisions, because I realize Fleishman is going to be a child that supports me in my old age, no matter what it does. If it sells three copies, it could become something. If you’re wondering if I remember the question, I do not.
I go and I do and I hand in my revisions. I’m still at the Times. People start calling. So many people start calling. That I had never pictured. People are telling me what it means to them. I call my husband, and I say, “Claud, I had a child that’s going to support us in our old age.” People start talking about what they would like to do with it. I think I’ve had enough magazine stories optioned that I have a real zen about it. Once you sell it, it is no longer yours. You just have to deal with that.
All of these great writers are talking to me. They have such good intentions. All I could think of is, A, I’m jealous, and B, that’s not how you do this. You like this for the wrong reasons. I don’t ever say that out loud, and I hope none of them are listening, though I’m now thinking about the logic of that. Whoever’s listening, it wasn’t you.
John: All of them had fantastic ideas that were great.
Taffy: They were fine ideas. Their ideas were great. Then I get a call from my agent. I said, “I’m in the middle of a Marianne Williamson story.” Then I’m in the middle of a Tom Hanks story. I go to Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks tries to option Fleishman. I said, “I can’t even listen to you.” It’s crazy. I’m like in a movie about someone who wrote a book.
Then I get a call from Sarah Timberman and Susannah Grant. Of course, those two are absolute legends. I took the call just to have the call and tell them how much I love them. The first thing they said was, “How are you thinking about this as a screenplay or a TV show?” I said, “No one had asked me what I think, but it can’t be a screenplay, because you need a certain amount of time with Toby, so that you could really become partisan to his side. That is time. I can’t think of a narrative trick that would do that, other than pure here’s six episodes. You need to commit to the bit.” They said to me, “You would have to write it.” I cannot tell you how low the threshold was to me believing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you’re right. I do have to write it. I do have to write it.”
I said, “If it’s going to be a TV show… “ I write alone. I’m very concerned with people liking me. I know that if I’m in a writers’ room and people have ideas, I’ll be more concerned with not putting down their ideas. I hear stories about how people feel bad all the time in writers’ rooms, and feel good, but I’m so worried about the feeling bad. I said, “I could write it by myself.” They said, “It’s a lot to do.” I said, “I’m a newspaper reporter,” which is not true. I’m a leisurely magazine writer, but I pull out, “I’m a newspaper reporter,” when it’s convenient.
John: You wrote 30 pages in a sitting.
Taffy: I am a very fast typer. I can write as quickly as I talk, but I can’t read as quickly as I talk. What is that? Another bonus segment for another time.
John: Absolutely.
Taffy: Everyone else fell away. Everyone was so wonderful. The people who made it to the end, I said to my agent, “Tell everyone that I’m writing it myself,” because there were still all of these bidders. Immediately, half of them were like, “No, thank you. We’re out.” Sarah and Susannah just… I now know the kinds of conversations that must have gone on.
In fact, I will tell you that when it came down to shooting it, Sarah Timberman left her home in California and moved to New York for the year to be on set with me every day, which I had first thought was wonderful fun and now realize must have been a negotiation with the network and the studio who were like, “Are you crazy?”
John: She was the [crosstalk 00:23:36].
Taffy: She’s like, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” There are a lot of promises that are made in that stage of optioning, and they kept every single one to me. That’s what happened.
John: Susannah Grant, former fill-in cohost of Scriptnotes. She’s went out to Austin Film Festival. Good person, screenwriter. For folks who don’t know her credits, she did the Julia Roberts movie, Erin Brokovich, but she’s also done-
Taffy: It’s the Steven Soderbergh movie. Back then, the idea of a woman writing a muscular movie like that was mind-blowing.
John: She also had a really great series that at that time would’ve just come out on Netflix, which was terrific.
Taffy: Unbelievable. It was both of them. It was Sarah and Susannah. This was what they were going to do next. Unbelievable, you couldn’t stop clicking to the next thing. Even though my husband and I do not love a sexual assault show right before bed, we couldn’t stop.
John: Not the ideal time. You had never written a novel before. It turned out great. You had never written a TV show before. How was that process? How did you learn about the actual mechanics of a TV script? You’d read a thousand novels. Had you read the teleplay form before?
Taffy: John, I learned it by watching you. I’m not even kidding. I’ll tell you. I went to NYU for dramatic writing, and I learned how to write spec scripts for sitcoms. Then I was so quickly unsuccessful at it that I went into… I saw an ad for a soap opera magazine in the New York Times, and I went and worked there. Everything changed. I would read screenplays a lot. I love reading screenplays. Also, I have a little group of film critics that I hang out with. We table read screenplays sometimes.
John: Wow. That’s really nerdy. No one does that.
Taffy: It’s the nerdiest. Just throw us in a locker. We just sit there. We started with Michael Clayton during the pandemic. I would read these things. I think that my journalism was successful because I paid attention to storytelling. First of all, you can in a profile, because it doesn’t have the same news imperative that everything else does. The idea of a beginning and a middle and an end and suspense and callbacks, those were things that I knew were successful through journalism, that I had learned through screenwriting. Also, I have listened to every episode of this podcast.
John: Oh my gosh.
Megana Rao: Wow.
Taffy: I even listened to the compendium ones that are collections of the thing I just heard.
John: The Megana specials.
Taffy: I love those. I love those. I loved seeing Megana’s rise to on-air personality. I love all of it. I read a lot. Then I had Sarah and Susannah. I don’t know what other producers are like, but I know that there’s a variation in editors. They read everything. There was no feeling bad about getting it wrong. The first script had 20 pages of VoiceOver in what I now see as a hilarious way but at first was like, “What do you mean? I thought we said we were doing VoiceOver.”
It was not easy for me. It was not an easy adaptation for me. The book was already written. When it came down to it, I knew what the moments in the book were where you would maybe end an episode, although the question I had before is how do you make this not suspenseful? I was going to have three episodes before Rachel was spotted. Sarah and Susannah launched a real campaign to talk me down to two. They were correct to do that.
John: Let’s talk about the breaking down of what was going to happen when. Was that a process that was entirely you? Was that with Sarah and Susannah, the three of you together at the whiteboard, figuring out how things split up?
Taffy: First of all, it very much follows the book. Second, we were supposed to get I guess green-lit is the word, which I literally thought someone was going to call up and scream, “You’re green-lit!” or something or a light would show up. It does not happen that way. You just have your lawyer and your agent check in 20 times.
The pandemic happened. I thought, “I’ll go back to the New York Times, because New York Times probably needs/wants me or tolerates me or is obligated to me or can’t fire me because I’m union.” FX, which was very enthusiastic about Fleishman, all of their blood cells will go to the shows that are already in production. It was such a crisis. I also knew that if I went back to the Times and I was on a story, this pandemic was only going to last six or seven weeks.
John: Totally.
Taffy: I was asked, “What if we assemble a mini room?” I had listened to all of the Scriptnotes episodes. I said, “I don’t know if that’s okay. Is it okay to have all of these writers do this?” The answer was, sometimes writers like to do a thing like this in between projects or maybe just for… Everyone in there was far more experienced than I was. That’s first of all. It’s a few weeks. It’s a pandemic. You don’t know who needs health insurance. Also, what we decided was that whatever happened, they would get credit on the show. We would negotiate for their credit so that they would not be this anonymous group.
John: Great.
Taffy: I’ve heard this on Scriptnotes. Susannah and Sarah were like, “Whatever happens… “
John: Those folks would get some sort of producer credit on the show, even if they [crosstalk 00:29:31].
Taffy: We couldn’t give them a producer credit unless they came and rendered-
John: Actually produced, yeah.
Taffy: We made them into consultants, although one of them, the Cindy Chupack, came and was a co-executive producer. I have minders on the set for the fact that I’d never done this before. We talked and talked. It was such a beautiful experience. It was like my book had all of these best friends. We talked about what we could change and what could be different. Ultimately, I left it with, no, the book is enough.
The book is written in such a way… By the way, you didn’t read the book, though you did because you watched the show. It really does follow. Everything happens in the same order. There is no trick that’s different. In the show, there’s a deepening of one of the tricks, but I don’t want to spoil it. In the Bonus Segment, I’ll spoil it. You can opt in or out at the very end.
John: Is it Toby’s daughter that was [inaudible 00:30:29] changed?
Taffy: The only thing that’s changed, you’re right, is that while I was doing this, I was in this mini room for 10 weeks, I was planning my son’s bar mitzvah. We would talk about it. I would cry in the mini room, which I guess is de rigueur for someone in a mini room.
John: Very common, yeah.
Taffy: Then I ended up inviting them all to the Zoom bar mitzvah. I didn’t know that this bar mitzvah would be such a big deal for me. I wrote it in. You’re right. That’s the only thing that’s different in the show.
John: Great. I only know that because I listened to you on the Slate Working podcast, which I listen to all the time.
Taffy: I love that Working podcasdt.
John: I actually TED Talked about doing some Working podcasts. There was a transition point, because remember [inaudible 00:31:14] he created the Working podcast and would interview waiters and such. I just loved it back when it was still just like… People’s jobs weren’t even creative or fancy jobs, just normal people jobs. I had a few conversations about maybe doing some Working episodes, but that never came to be.
Taffy: You mean on that podcast?
John: On that podcast. I would just be like David Plotz. I would be the interviewer, because I love interviewing people about what they do.
Taffy: You’re great at it. I think we should talk to them.
John: We should talk more about that.
Taffy: Let’s have a call after this.
John: Just because I’m curious about how things work with other people, what was it like for you to be on set? I remember my first time on set was on the movie Go. I remember walking up, being like, “Man, there’s a lot of trucks around. I wonder what’s going on.” It’s like, “Oh, crap, these are here to make my movie,” and just feeling like, “Oh, am I allowed to eat this craft service?” It was crazy. By the next day, I was shooting second unit, because we were already four days behind somehow.
Taffy: “By the second day, I was firing the craft services people, and I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
John: How did you navigate suddenly you’re in production? I recognize the directors on the show. You had really very smart directors working on the show.
Taffy: The greatest. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were our first block directors. Alice Wu was our second episode director. Then Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman did four episodes. John and Val did three. They all knew that they were with somebody who was an authority on the material and yet would not know half the words they were using.
It’s funny. Being a completist of your podcast, I used to think it was so gracious when you would say “our movie.” I thought, “That’s so nice. I would be saying ‘my movie.’” No, it really is our thing. I had this authority on the material. I was always there. I was there for every minute of shooting, except I attended one parent-teacher conference.
Everyone was extraordinarily kind to me. The minute I walked onto set, the one thing I understood immediately was that there was not even pretending I knew what I was doing, that it would be an insult. The PAs were more experienced than I was. It would be an insult to everybody if I… I’ve never even been anyone’s boss.
It’s pretty profound to suddenly be in charge of making decisions about material, because I didn’t realize that once you’re in production, so many of the decisions are about people’s welfare, not just their safety. Everyone’s concerned with safety. The first AD is always concerned with safety. I had these great first ADs, Adam Escott and Vanessa Hoffman, who also understood that I didn’t know anything and would explain things to me. No one had to explain anything quietly in a corner, because I was not embarrassed to not be an authority on this. I was apologetic. I didn’t want to slow us down more than I had to.
You’re looked at with so much authority for the first time. I’m used to being the scrappy person in the middle of the night, closing a story at the New York Times, saying, “What if we make the picture smaller, then I get some more words in there?” The answer to the nature of that ridiculous question is, “Yes, we’ll do whatever we can to help you.” Then you realize, that means that that guy who lives in New Jersey won’t get home, and that even though there are those rules, there are not really that many rules.
Right before, there was talk of an IATSE strike. Then when I got on set, I was shocked to see what a set is. I’m a newspaper reporter for this conversation. I couldn’t believe how long the hours were and how efficient it’s made for the sake of cost-effectiveness and time and getting people out and getting actors to their next projects and making sure that you have room in case someone gets COVID or everyone gets COVID. I found it so shocking and scary.
I was very lucky that Sarah Timberman was there with me every day. I was very lucky that she made sure that Cindy Chupack and also our consultant producer Becky Mode were there, because I instantly went to, “Let’s just send everyone home. I’ll cut this all into a dream sequence, and you send everyone home.”
I had to also learn to create efficiency. I want to tell you, on a craft level, what that meant was that… The first few episodes I had written had a lot of scenes. People would say, “These are big scripts.” I’d say, “Thank you,” not really knowing what that meant.
John: A ton of scenes, or was the script itself long?
Taffy: No, it was not long. It was not long.
John: It wasn’t long. It was a lot of short scenes.
Taffy: It was a lot of short scenes. Once I saw, wait, so that’s how long it takes for these hardworking people, there are nine of them, to set the lighting up and to change an outfit, and wait, you need a new outfit, the mechanics, the absolute physics of it were so shocking to me in a way that I don’t… I guess I never really thought it would happen, and I didn’t think about the practicalities of it. Starting in Episode 4, which we’re on set by then, the scenes start getting longer, because also, I start to see what actors are capable of.
John: I suppose you were trying to control everything from the page originally and just making sure that everything was exactly how you envisioned it, and you realized when you actually had people doing things that you don’t necessarily need to have all of the little short scenes and obviously all of the VoiceOver, because I know that the VoiceOver, you’ve said it before, drops down dramatically once we get to Episode 4.
Taffy: By the way, then I see these actors who are so amazing at talking to each other. I start putting in these eight-minute scenes that then they kindly make fun of me for, because that’s a lot. I have to say, I’ve seen the show, and I feel like each one of them works. These actors are really good at being watchable.
John: Now, Taffy, as a longtime listener to this show, you know that something that Craig and I both enjoy doing is playing Dungeons and Dragons. We talk about Dungeons and Dragons repeatedly on this.
Taffy: Yes, I do. I have questions about it, because I cannot believe that you have room for hobbies. I cannot believe it.
John: We have new next-door neighbors who moved in during the pandemic. They had us over for dinner one time. They said, “Can we ask you a question? Why on Thursday nights is that upstairs office light on until midnight every Thursday night?” It’s like, “That’s because that’s when John plays D and D, every Thursday night from 8 p.m. to midnight. That’s D and D, of course,” which we play on Zoom. Even when Craig is gone for recording a podcast, like today, the Thursday game is probably going to happen.
Taffy: Wow.
John: We do prioritize that.
Taffy: Good for him.
John: It’s important. I was reading a new D and D book over the weekend called How to Defend Your Lair. It’s the third book in a series called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing by Keith Ammann. What’s fascinating about his book is he’s talking about all characters, whether they are little monsters or bandits or kings, they all are trying to protect something. In the case of D and D, they’re trying to protect their life, they’re trying to protect their loot, they’re trying to protect some lore.
I was thinking about this interview I was going to have with you. It feels like the characters in Fleishman are desperately trying to protect things. In trying to protect things, they end up making some bad choices. I look at Toby. Toby’s trying to protect his kids, obviously. He’s trying to protect his career. He’s juggling how to protect both his career and this. He wants to protect his ex-wife to some degree. Also, he wants to protect his own identity and sense of self-worth, of self-identity. Can we take a look at the characters in Fleishman from what they’re trying to protect? Is that a useful way to think about the choices and the motivations characters make?
Taffy: That’s so interesting. Yes, because so much of Fleishman is about protecting your point of view. The thing that Fleishman ultimately is about, and I have 20 answers for that, but in this case the thing that Fleishman is ultimately about is the fact that everybody has a point of view about what happened, and everyone deserves for it to be heard. The consumer of the story is not fully informed unless she knows all of those points of view.
This goes back to magazine interviewing. If you don’t ask too many questions of somebody, if you don’t just bombard them with all the questions, and you just let talk, you see that people form the thing they’re saying to you as a case that they’re making. Everyone is making a case to their righteousness even when they know they’re wrong. They’re not lying. They’re saying, “Here’s why I’m a defensible person.” Everyone in Fleishman just wants to protect the idea that their crisis is legitimate, that their point of view is valid. That’s all.
John: With the case of Rachel, who makes the decision to drop off her kids and disappears, she is trying to protect her career, obviously. She’s trying to protect her trauma to some degree. She’s trying to protect that the reason she ended up this way was because of something that somebody else had done and it wasn’t entirely her fault.
Taffy: I would go even further and say that what Rachel is trying to say and how Libby builds her story when she speaks on her behalf, is not that the thing that happens to her is her trauma. I’ve never spoken about this before. I feel like her trauma is a lifetime of abandonment, the apex of which was the thing that happened to her.
We are not led to believe that the divorce is as big a crisis for Rachel as it is for Toby. Then we find out that, no, all the more so, not only is she divorced, but she’s abandoned. She’s been abandoned since her mother died. She’s been abandoned since she was in the hospital room trying to give birth. The thing I guess she’s trying to protect is that she wasn’t as bad as she’s being made out to be. I guess we all are.
John: She’s trying to protect this little flicker that’s still inside her that she identifies as herself. Her primal scream is about trying to rekindle that or at least protect that little thing.
Taffy: In the last episode, Toby says to Libby, “You were supposed to be my friend.” That is like what is the essence of friendship. It’s that I have decided that your version of things is that version. That’s friendship, right?
John: Aw. We could obviously go on for another hour here, but we have some questions from listeners that we thought would be really good for you to answer with us, because you’ve listened to [crosstalk 00:42:30].
Taffy: I know. I’ll make sure I’m not even redundant.
John: Let’s start with Martin from Australia. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Martin asks, “I was reflecting on iconic character names such as Ellen Ripley, Hans Gruber, and Travis Bickle, and I’m interested in your thoughts about how to choose an apt character name in a screenplay. Is a name something that organically occurs to you? How far can you take creative license in the choice of a name without it feeling like an artifice? Is there anything specific to think about when choosing a name?”
John: Taffy, talk to us about the names that you chose for these characters, because in journalism, you’re stuck with the names people have in real life. For this you had free reign. Were these the original names for all these characters?
Taffy: These were the original names for all these characters. There was some push back to changing Toby Fleishman’s name because it was too New Yorky. Does anyone know what that’s code for?
John: I think we all know what that’s code for.
Taffy: I’m very interested in a real name and not a forgettable name. John Ryan is a very strong guy, but he was born to be strong. Toby Fleishman was born to lose.
John: Born to be overlooked there. Character names we talked about on the show before. When I was picking the names for Arlo Finch, I couldn’t start writing until I knew the names for each of those characters and made sure that they were each distinctive, that you weren’t going to get any of them confused or conflated between the two of them. I think you were doing the thing where none of the central characters have the same first letter of their name. You’re not going to blur them and forget them because of that. It’s very confusing that Libby is played by Lizzy Caplan. How often on set did you say Libby versus Lizzy and mean the wrong thing?
Taffy: Always, and nobody cared, because we were talking about the same person.
John: In the edit, did you ever find moments where they referred to her as Lizzy rather than Libby? Did that ever happen?
Taffy: Never. Never once. Never once.
John: Professionals you hired.
Taffy: I had all professionals.
John: That’s the trick.
Megana: Wait, so was Toby the name that you initially had during that time you were writing at Le Pain Quotidien?
Taffy: Yes. It was the first thing I put down was the messiness of names and the way Jews in general are named after people. Rachel is Rachel because you end up with a biblical name. Libby is the most Jewish form of Elizabeth. Toby is just a name that someone was like, “I guess we have to name this person after this person.” Then Fleishman, I liked something that couldn’t have been conceived as a character name, like Lipschitz. I would’ve done Lipschitz in a minute, but I was given good advice that you need people to be able to search it.
John: Also, I think Chicago has claimed Lipschitz forever. (singing)
Taffy: Lipschitz.
John: Lipschitz. It’s important. What is Taffy short for?
Taffy: Stephanie.
John: Stephanie. How long have you been a Taffy versus a Stephanie?
Taffy: I was named after a Taffy whose name was Stephanie but had been called Taffy from the time she was young, because her brother couldn’t pronounce her name. I was named after her, so I was named Stephanie but always called Taffy. However, what Taffy is to Stephanie, other than me, everyone’s who’s a Taffy from Stephanie, that’s their story. I know this because I’m in a Facebook group for people whose name is Taffy. I was added to it. We all just give testimony.
John: Love it.
Megana: Aldo asks, “While watching Deep Impact, in the scene in which Oren begins to go into the recently bored hole, we hear Andrea say, ‘Suit pressure 3.5.’ I imagine the dialog is not there necessarily to drive the story, but rather just to embellish the technical aspect of the scene. We always hear you say the dialog should drive the story. With that in mind, how do we strike a balance between dialog that drives a story and dialog that only dresses up the scene?”
John: That’s actually a really nice question from Aldo, because yeah, screenplays are also full of stuff that is there because it’s real and because the characters would actually say it in the moment. Taffy, in your show, there’s a medical aspect to it, but it’s not ER. It’s not full of a lot of doctor jargon. There’d have to be some moments that just feel… How did you think about that? How did you balance this is what they would actually need to say in the moment, even if it’s not on character?
Taffy: I had a medical consultant who helped us. We were so concerned with what this isn’t. It isn’t Gone Girl, but it also isn’t a medical procedural. Once we got on set, Rob and Shari, John and Val, they expressed concern in the first day we were shooting hospital scenes, that this seemed too much like a hospital show and that it would be misleading in the pilot, or a medical mystery. Right then, we inserted the idea that they speak in hospital drama cliches. They say back and forth to each other, “Don’t you die on me,” or, “I’m not here to play God.” That was born on the set out of that crisis.
John: Great, so just actually to put a hat on it so that everyone sees they’re aware of these things would be.
Taffy: We get it. We’re sorry. We get it, and we’re sorry.
John: Let’s see if we can get one more question in here.
Megana: Chris asks, “I loved watching The Bear and thought it worked really well as a series of mostly half-hour shows. In the UK we’ve also recently had Mammals by Jez Butterworth, another half-hour show. I’d be really interested in why these writers chose this length, even when free from the constraints of a linear TV schedule. What do they feel it gave them? What are the challenges? Half-hours are the traditional length for comedies, which often feel baggy when they’re longer. It’s also the classic length for soap operas, but most UK and US dramas tend to be an hour or more. Does it also say something about the way that we consume shows these days that people are looking at the half-hour again?”
John: Taffy, for Fleishman Is in Trouble, how long are the episodes? Did you have to hit a certain length?
Taffy: I was told to stay in the 40s to 50s mark, although Episode 7, I think it’s 70 minutes. We couldn’t find anything to cut from it. I think that the answer to this… By the way, I’m watching with a newly critical eye about, in awards season, how things are classified. Transparent was a comedy, a devastating, devastating comedy.
I think it actually has to do with money. It is less expensive to shoot half the amount of stuff, but you have to have enough episodes to make it worth it. I wonder if 30 minutes is a hedge. I think that people really do begin with wondering what the story needs. If you look at The Bear, I do wonder one of the many reasons it landed so electrically is that it was I this one claustrophobic location. I wonder if that would’ve felt too much one place, but I don’t know. I don’t know.
John: From early discussions with Sarah and Susannah, did you always know it was about 40 minutes? Did FX tell you that you don’t have to do classic act-outs, but there will have to be moments where commercials could be inserted?
Taffy: No. They told us there would not have to be that. Then when Hulu came in, they were like, “We have some news.” We didn’t have to write toward. We just had to find the places. We had great editors who found the most painless places for that. I will say that I don’t know anyone who has ever heard one of my 80-word sentences… I don’t think anyone looked at me and said, “That’s going to be a pithy half-hour.”
John: When you’re talking about the length of things, we tend to think of comedies being a half-hour.
Taffy: You know what? We’ve thrown out so many rules.
John: We have.
Taffy: Now we’re hostage to these awards categories. That’s what it really is. I’ll let you finish, because it’s your podcast.
John: Fleishman could be seen as a comedy. There are episodes like, “Oh, that’s funny.” You have people who are talented at being funny, at yet also it does not feel like a comedy. I could see the argument for choosing to enter it as a comedy, the same way Transparent was technically a comedy.
Taffy: That’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll call someone after this and ask about that. I think it’s just entered as limited series, which eradicates all of that.
John: Nice.
Taffy: I don’t know, because I also think that it’s a very specific thing. It has a precedent. It has a Woody Allen, Erica Jong, the New York, divorced sex, Jewish comedy that’s also devastating and hopeless and sad has a precedent. I did not pave this ground myself. I guess the word sometimes is dramedy. I always feel dramedies are lighter. I feel Fleishman is a little devastating. I don’t know. All these rules are being thrown out. Why are there still any remaining?
John: Get rid of everything.
Taffy: Burn it down.
John: The first dramedy I remember was Thirtysomething, which I can see the argument for-
Taffy: I love Thirtysomething.
John: Love it too. So good. God, when that one character dies completely unexpectedly-
Taffy: Are you not spoiling Gary’s death? Isn’t that what you’re doing?
John: I’m not spoiling it. I’m trying to remember it.
Taffy: You can’t even find it. It’s not even streaming. Tell the world. Remember Gary’s name. His name was Gary Shepherd, John. John, his name was Gary Shepherd.
John: His name was Gary Shepherd. He rode off on a bicycle on a snowy day, and [crosstalk 00:52:27] oh, don’t slip.
Taffy: By the way, do you remember that episode?
John: Oh yeah, I remember it.
Taffy: Everything you need to know about dramatic storytelling is that they’re waiting for Nancy’s cancer determination, but Michael, his best friend, says, “You really should not be on a bike anymore.” He’s in a car. Oh my god, I’m so upset.
John: It’s so upsetting. I’ll say that had a huge impact on Big Fish ultimately, that death moment. I remember afterwards, one character has to call somebody else to tell him what’s happened. That became the phone call moment in Big Fish.
Taffy: Really?
John: Yeah.
Taffy: We’re not spoiling Big Fish either.
John: No. I would hope that a lot of listeners have seen Big Fish, but I’m always surprised people have not seen Big Fish.
Taffy: How dare they, first of all?
John: How dare they listen to the podcast?
Taffy: It’s the greatest. Also, wait, I was raised in a Hasidic household. My mother became Hasidic when I was 12. I used to sneak into the basement. We still hid a TV. I used to sneak into it and watch Thirtysomething so that I would know how to talk when I was an adult, because all I was hearing was Yiddish and Hebrew.
John: Amazing. Wow. How much that could’ve shaped you. Fleishman Is in Trouble would not have existed if it had not been for this secret TV hidden in the Hasidic household.
Taffy: I know. I know. Thirtysomething really walked so that I could stumble.
John: This could go on forever, but we need to get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a New York Times story that came out today as we’re recording this on Jodorowsky’s Tron. There was a movie out a couple years ago called Jodorowsky’s Dune, which is basically… Alejandro Jodorowsky was this director who had dreamed of making a version of Dune. He had all this artwork that he had done for it and had hired all this people to do it. He never ended up shooting it. It was gorgeous. There’s a really good movie people can see about it.
Frank Pavich, who directed that movie… This New York Times story is looking at all this artwork that was generated for Tron. I’m going to show this to you right now. This is all artwork for a movie that does not exist. It’s gorgeous. It was all generated by Midjourney, the AI thing.
Taffy: Wow.
John: People just typing in and saying “Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron,” and this is a computer thinking about what his version of Tron would look like. It’s absolutely gorgeous.
Taffy: It’s magnificent. Wow.
John: As we talk about AI frequently on the podcast, yes, there’s a degree to which it is jeopardizing the lives of production designers and artists and stuff like that, and you could say it’s zapping creativity. Sometimes, you can enter some stuff in and get something that’s actually really inspiring and makes you think about like, oh, wow, that’s such a very different way to do stuff. I remember when we first had Dall-E in the office, we would do things like Wes Anderson’s Spider-Man, and so you’d have [inaudible 00:55:21] Wes Anderson-looking Spider-Man.
Taffy: It’s everyone in a bow tie.
John: This is just way beyond what I’ve seen this stuff happening. It’s exciting, and people should check it out. I guess for listeners at home, Taffy, can you help us describe what we’re actually seeing here, because it’s not actually-
Taffy: It’s in the opinion section. It’s an interactive I guess testimonial of what the art is. The art, it looks like Tron. It’s really interesting, because talk about adaptation. You would think that Tron would look a little bit more out there, but this holds the Tron brand intact. I’m looking at lot of sci-fi references here and the light-up suit. How do you describe this? It took this guy 20,000 words.
John: We’re used to the stripey suit aesthetic of Tron, the light suits and the ribbons of things, but here, they almost get bigger and bigger and bigger. The color seems very different. It goes into these oranges that are not Tron-like at all. It’s just spectacular.
Taffy: So beautiful. Everyone should go look at it. Everyone go look at it.
John: Everyone go look at this. Taffy, do you have something to share with our listeners?
Taffy: Sure. My One Cool Thing is this book that is coming out, that will already be out by the time people listen to this. It’s called Vintage Contemporaries by a Slate journalist and podcaster named Dan Kois. He wrote the Angels in America book. He co-wrote it with Isaac Butler, who does the Working podcast. He wrote this great nonfiction book called How To Be a Family a few years ago, where he took his family around to different countries to try to figure out if we are raising our children and doing childhood correctly.
This is his first novel. It is so squarely and unapologetically about a coming of age. He wrote from the point of view of a woman a coming of age as a literary assistant in New York. The timeline goes from 2003 to 1996. It does something so beautiful and so magical that it really had me clutching my heart at the end. I can’t believe how good this is.
John: Oh my gosh, I’m excited to read it. Dan Kois also was original host of Mom and Dad Are Fighting [inaudible 00:57:56]. A good Slate family reunion of things there.
Taffy: He’s pretty great.
John: Vintage Contemporaries?
Taffy: Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois.
John: K-O-I-S.
Taffy: Yeah, K-O-I-S, being published by Harper Collins. We support their strike. You should buy this book, because we also support authors. It was a privilege to read it in galleys.
John: Speaking of galleys, you have another book. What’s next for you?
Taffy: My next book is called Long Island Compromise. It’s about a family on Long Island, a wealthy family that loses its money 30 years after its patriarch is kidnapped. He gives the money away. He gives all of his money away, the money which is supposed to symbolize both safety and danger. It asks these two questions. It asks is money safety or is money danger. It also asks does a certain amount of wealth and success doom your children to an idle life, and is it better to come from something meeker and therefore your children can thrive. The immediate answer is everyone should be rich.
John: Everyone should be rich at all times. Socialism for all. This being your second book, what were the pressures to compare it to the first book? Immediately, did everyone say, “Gotta get the rights now.” How did that feel different with the second?
Taffy: There have been some preemptive bids. There is nothing that could hang over your head and force your failure like a preemptive bid. In fact, I thought about scrapping the… Do you know the Book Thief? You know the guy?
John: Oh yeah.
Taffy: He claimed to have my book, which was insane. I remember saying, “I want to find him and ask him how does it end.”
John: Absolutely.
Taffy: “If you have it, is there a version that you have? Is it good? Does it turn out good?”
John: “Give me the first sentence of Chapter 13.” That would be great.
Taffy: “How did I resolve the mother character? Does she seem like a real person in the end?” There were a lot of pressures. I always bet on failure. I made sure to sell this book on the eve of Fleishman coming out. It has been written for a while, but its revisions have been waiting out. It should be out by now. Then I made a TV show, which was the most consuming thing I’ve ever done. It’s going to come out. I don’t know.
It’s very funny, because the one outstanding question I had about it was should I have Libby, that narrator who’s kind of me, should I have her narrate this. Philip Roth did it. He had Nathan Zuckerman. It was torture. The worst thing about the torture was that I was so decisive about everything else. The one good thing you could say about me is that I’m so decisive.
Then the show finished on December 29th. My family, we went skiing so that I could not be wandering the streets of New York, asking people if they’d seen it. They took me off the streets. On December 30th, I was on a ski lift, and suddenly, I was like, “Of course she shouldn’t narrate it,” and I was free. I was freed from Fleishman. Your projects really have a hold on you.
John: Then we drag you right back into it.
Taffy: I know. I know. Now I’m reconsidering everything. Thank you for asking about it.
John: An absolute pleasure having you here on the show. Thank you for talking with us.
Taffy: This was so fun. This was a dream come true.
John: People should either or both read the book Fleishman Is in Trouble, watch the show, which is FX and Hulu.
Taffy: Then read it again, watch it again.
John: Then read it again.
Taffy: Then re-subscribe to Hulu. Then write your Congressman.
John: All these things will happen.
Taffy: Thank you for having me.
John: If you could stick around for the Bonus Segment, because I want to talk to you about celebrity journalism.
Taffy: Sure, because you’re a journalist too.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. We’ve finally figured out what happened to Episodes 500 through 515. We got that sorted out. If you missed those, they’re back. Thank you again, Taffy.
Taffy: Thanks for having me. This is great.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Taffy, you have interviewed all sorts of famous people. We mentioned a couple of them along the way. Nicki Minaj.
Taffy: Oh my gosh.
John: Andy Cohen. How do you get started in this? You mentioned Soap Opera Digest, Soap Opera Weekly? You were doing that.
Taffy: Thank you for asking about that. My first job was at a magazine called Soaps In Depth.
John: We gotta go deep.
Taffy: The reason I can enunciate it like that is because you’d call people up and say, “I’m calling from Soaps In Depth,” and they’d say, “Soaps and Death?” You’d say, “No, Soaps In Depth.”
John: The Ps are important.
Taffy: I worked there for a year, and I wrote profiles. Then I was poached by a larger soap opera magazine. I do mean larger.
John: Physically larger.
Taffy: Physically larger, called Soap Opera Weekly. Ultimately I was fired from there on June 5th, 2001. Later, I would pretend it was a post-9/11 layoff for my dignity. I started writing personal essays as soon as my son was born, because I didn’t want to leave the house, and I wanted a writing career on my own terms. One day I was just done writing personal essays. I pitched a profile at the New York Times Magazine, and I got a yes. It was Zosia Mamet.
John: She was starring in Girls at this point?
Taffy: She was starring in Girls. It was the second season of Girls. It was my first profile. I just loved doing it. I had a great editor named Adam Sternbergh at the New York Times Magazine who, I handed in one that was terrible and he just very deftly said to me, “Oh no, here. There’s a scene, and then there is the bio section.” Then from then on, I just… He taught me how to fish.
John: What is the structure of a really good one of these?
Taffy: Thematically it is, “Here’s something I saw. Here’s why it matters. Here’s why this person matters.” What he told me was, it’s a scene and then it is an evaluation of what is newsworthy about this person right now, and then it’s their bio section, and then it’s the return to the examination and what you decided about it. I took that and went with it. I had very kind editors. I was sent to Nicki Minaj, who fell asleep while we were talking. I wrote a story about what I would’ve asked her if she had been awake and what I think she would’ve said. I spent a few days on a tour bus with Billy Bob Thornton on his band. I spent five years asking Val Kilmer for an interview. I spent some time with Bradley Cooper in the run-up to-
John: A Star is Born?
Taffy: Star is Born, and Tom Hanks. Really, I feel like I don’t know who I haven’t interviewed. I would write long interviews.
John: You are a character in the interviews to some degree too. You have to expose-
Taffy: I’m a character the way Libby’s a character.
John: Exactly.
Taffy: Libby, by the way, to tell this story, in the novel and in the show is someone who quit her job and stayed home. I didn’t do that. It worked thematically. Journalism is always true. The I character in those profiles is the aspects of me that are like the reader, that would help the reader, because I hate chummy profiles. I hate profiles where they’re clearly friends and going to hang out after this. The profile is, here, reader, is what you would think if you were sitting here with me, which is I think what journalism is supposed to do.
John: Also screenwriting though is putting you in the place that you actually believe that you are in that room with this conversation happening around you. It is scene setting in the same way, which is different than other classic journalism could be, where it’s [inaudible 01:07:02] I’m going to tell you a story rather than let you know what I saw, what I heard, what it’s like to be in the presence of this person.
Taffy: It’s what it’s like to be in the presence of the person and why the person matters. By the way, the more famous they are, the more it’s not even about the person, but the person that the person has become in light of all this fame.
John: In agreeing to be a member of this partnership to do this celebrity profile, they are also aware of the game too. They are choosing what parts to show to you. It’s gotta be complicated.
Taffy: It’s hard to ask factual questions, because you have to ask yourself, why would this person even tell me this? In fact, if you’re quiet, what you’ll find is that by the time someone is famous, they have some sort of gripe or understanding of who they are in the world that they would like to correct. If you listen carefully, that is what they are trying to tell you. You have to listen very carefully for it, or else you are just bombarding them with questions about their divorce or about their scandal. There’s always one thing they’re afraid you’re going to talk about.
John: Craig will never listen to this Bonus Segment, because he doesn’t listen. If he were to listen and two years down the road somebody wants to do a profile of him, what advice would you give to a Craig who is going to be profiled by somebody, who won’t be your equal, obviously, but-
Taffy: Thank you.
John: … is going to attempt to do Libby’s job, Taffy’s job. What would your advice-
Taffy: That’s a great question, or you. Have you had a profile?
John: Years ago, but it was written by a magazine. It was just the WGA [inaudible 01:08:41].
Taffy: The thing I would say to him, interesting, advice for Craig on doing that. Craig is such an interesting talker. To deal plainly and openly with the person as a fellow writer is the best move. What’s very interesting to me is that, especially over these last years where we had a president who had this open, warlike contempt for journalists, it was shocking to see that contempt reflected in actors. There are people who have told me they don’t trust anything a journalist said. It was like, “What, journalists? What?” That’s shocking to me.
I think that the conversation you can have, if you’re with someone who does not seem like they’re manipulating you… Because also journalism isn’t a monolith. There are people who are looking for something ugly, but most people aren’t. Most people just want to hear what it’s been like for you. That said, I always prided myself on getting people to open up to me.
Disney, because of their COVID protocols, wouldn’t let us have any rehearsals for the show. I tricked everyone by taking them out to dinner so that they could meet before they had to play best friends. We would have these outdoor dinners. Disney, they were outdoors. They would talk to each other. Within 10 minutes, they were telling each other their deepest secrets. I was quietly devastated. I didn’t do anything. Nobody told me anything. That’s the thing. A journalist should never think that anyone’s telling them anything, really should just wonder why they’re saying what they’re saying.
Craig, who is headed for this, should just deal openly and kindly. Damon Lindelof was very, very nice to me and answered every single question I had. It was during a complicated timeframe. It was the first time he was doing interviews following Lost. It was for The Leftovers.
John: I knew Damon well. Particularly during that time, it was tough grappling with what he even wanted or what his relationship was like with the fandom.
Taffy: The thing that I take away from my experience on set of Fleishman is that it seems to me an exquisite kind of ironic punishment that in success you should want to spend all day being someone else, and your reward for that is that you have to sit down with an asshole like me and tell me things that you don’t know how I’m going to use. It’s very impossible to keep in your head. I found this in my interviews, because you just want to answer the question, because you want to be polite. It’s very impossible to keep in your head the breadths of people who could hear something.
John: I want to just close up by just turning this back on you. We gave advice for Craig. Now there are profiles on you. That’s gotta be strange too. Do you sit them down and tell them, “Here’s how you interview me.”
Taffy: I did that once. It’s a findable story for Cosmo that’s called Taffy Brodesser-Akner Really, Really, Really Wanted to Write This Profile. I have been chastened and I don’t do that anymore.
John: That’s great. Taffy, an absolute pleasure talking with you.
Taffy: This was so fun.
John: Thank you so much.
Taffy: Thank you.
John: Please come back whenever.
Taffy: Sure, I’ll see you next week.
John: Next week.
Taffy: Bye-bye.
Links:
- Fleishman Is in Trouble on Hulu, and the book
- Taffy’s GQ Celebrity Profiles
- This Film Does Not Exist By Frank Pavich for NYT, Tron reimagined by AI in the style of Jodorowsky’s Dune, images by Midjourney
- This Voice Doesn’t Exist – Generative Voice AI
- VALL-E Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers
- Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 584: Adapting Your Own Novel, Transcript first appeared on John August.
In honor of our producer Megana Rao’s departure, John and Craig discuss how to retool a long-running show when a beloved character leaves. How should writers think about replacing them, and does it have to change the fundamental dynamics?
We also follow up on staffing while pregnant, working with child actors, and European script consultants. We then answer listener questions about contributing to ideas as an assistant, selling a show in the room, and writing under pseudonyms.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we dive into the wild and wondrous world of online prescription services.
Links:
- Woman who poisoned lookalike with cheesecake to steal identity convicted from The Guardian
- ‘The Last of Us’ Featurette with Keivonn Woodard from HBO
- The Fleishman Effect: In a city of Rachels and Libbys, the FX show has some New York moms worried they’re the ones in trouble by Caitlin Moscatello for The Cut
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by David Kawale (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Changing of the Guard first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin. How can I help?
John: This is Episode 552 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk narrative geography, professional development, and when it’s okay to take that pitch out somewhere else. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and give our honest opinions on what’s working and what’s not. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll teach you the one secret to social media everyone is too afraid to show you.
Craig: Oh god, it’s not the top 10 secrets?
John: No, there’s just one secret, it turns out. It’s a secret you already know, Craig. The secret was in you the whole time.
Craig: I can’t wait.
John: It’s going to be good.
Craig: Fun.
John: I should say there’s not a general language warning for the whole episode, but I will probably swear when we get to that part. If you’re a Premium Member and your kids are in the car, John’s going to probably be saying some bad words.
Craig: Now you’ve unleashed me.
John: Craig, we’re going to start with some Follow-Up. This is so much in our pocket. It’s one of those questions that comes in that you and I are so well qualified to answer. Megana, start us off.
Megana: @ryanbeardmusic from Twitter asked about the credits for the upcoming Elvis movie. He said, “Hi all, can you explain Baz’s multiple writing credits for Elvis, please? I presume it’s a WGA thing, but I can’t wrap my head around it.”
John: This tweet shows the credit block for Elvis. This is what it reads. It reads, “Story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Lurhmann & Craig Pearce and Baz Lurhmann & Jeremy Doner.” Baz Luhrmann’s name appears four times in just the writing credits for this movie. That’s a lot, but it happens. Craig, talk to me about why this happens.
Craig: We do answer this pretty frequently, but this is a particularly good one. I really like this one. The way to understand all this stuff is to understand that every writing team that works on a movie is considered an individual writer for the purposes of credit. Let’s say there’s a writing team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. We know they’re a writing team because of an A-N-D between them, there’s an ampersand. The ampersand tells you they’re a team. They count as one writer for the purposes of credit arbitration.
Now, when we do credit arbitration, and in this case there was an automatic arbitration, because Baz Luhrmann is also the director of the film, we don’t know who the writers are. We’re given scripts, and the scripts say Writer A, Writer B, Writer C, Writer D. I’ve done a couple that hit Writer H, which was exciting. What happens is we say, okay, we’ve gone through all the scripts, and here’s what I think it is. I think that the writing credit should be story by Writer A and Writer B.
John: With an A-N-D between those two.
Craig: That’s right. Writer A and Writer B, they’re two different writers. Then I think it should be screenplay by Writer C and Writer D and Writer B. Now, here’s where it gets fun. What if Screenwriter C is Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell? As it turns out in this case, that’s what happened. Baz Luhrmann wrote on this own for the purposes of story. Then he clearly did a draft in tandem as a team with a writer named Sam Bromell. He also did another draft as a team with a writer named Craig Pearce. This is an interesting one. Basically, the arbiters gave out as much credit as they could on this. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. They gave credit to Jeremy Doner. Then when it came to story, they gave it to Baz Lurhmann and they also gave it to Jeremy Doner. Wow.
John: It’s a lot. Here’s a thing that will help people understand this is, if you added some parentheses it would make a little bit more sense. If you put some parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell, if you put parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner, you’d understand those are three separate writing teams, and they were probably Writers B, C, and D, but they could’ve been writers B, F, and J. We don’t know how many writers were involved in this project.
Craig: Sure don’t.
John: That’s how it happened. By the distributive property, you want to be able to put Baz Luhrmann out and then put everyone else in parentheses, but you’re just not allowed to do these credits. As a person who’s been an arbiter on these things, I can tell you that Craig’s exactly right. We have no idea whether these people are writing teams or individual writers when we’re reading through these scripts. We’re giving credits to Writer A, Writer B, and then C, D, and E. We have no idea. That’s why you get credit blocks like this which look kind of strange. Same thing happened with Chloe Zhao on Eternals. It’s just a thing that happens.
Craig: It’s just a thing that happens. There is only one weird circumstance where we can collapse the credit down a bit. That is if there’s a writing team and then another writer, and the writer is one of the writing team, and there’s nobody else getting credit. If I worked on a script with John, it would be Craig & John. Then John goes off to do something else and I write another draft just by myself, and the arbiters say, oh, A and B both share credit. Written by Craig Mazin & John August and Craig Mazin looks bizarro. In that case they can smush it down to just written by Craig Mazin and John August. The apportionment of residuals would still be accurate to the technical credits.
John: All this was done by the books and is all good. I think a person could reasonably argue that there should be some way that these writers could agree to have the credits not have his name there so many different times, that there’d be some way the actual monies could be apportioned properly, but the credit block could look less screwy. Craig, under our existing rules, could these four writers decide that?
Craig: No. They can’t. There is an almost never used rule that says that writers can determine their own credits if they want to get together and do that, but not in the case of an automatic arbitration. Furthermore, the apportionment of screenplay credit among three writers can only be granted by arbitration.
John: Yes, in this case the screenplay is apportioned between three writers, in this case three writing teams, so only arbitration can do that. Megana, did that answer your questions?
Megana: I guess my question is can you talk about the development process of this, the process of Baz Luhrmann working with these three different writers? Are they hiring these people on to work as a part of a writing team to work with Baz Luhrmann?
Craig: Yes.
Megana: My question was whether the writing team is also under contention, like who did what to the draft?
John: We know people who’ve worked on… None of these writers. We don’t know these writers personally, but we know other folks who were involved at some point in this process. I think the call was, hey, do you want to go to Australia and work with Baz on this script. A writer would go and work with Baz for a couple weeks on this thing. It was a collaborative team writing thing where you were doing stuff together. There’s no real transparency into that process from the arbitration point of view. How much were they really a team? I don’t know. These writers were hired on to work on drafts with Baz Luhrmann.
Megana: Got it. That does clarify things.
Craig: That’s correct. There is really no… Other than a writer protesting to the guild and saying, “Listen, I was strong-armed into being part of the team. I didn’t want to be part of the team,” or somebody stuck their name on as if we were a team, but they really weren’t, unless that kind of protest happens, no, it’s just presumed that the writers who share the credit on the title page there for that draft are a bona fide team. It does seem like Baz Luhrmann probably wrote some kind of treatment at some point, some sort of story material by himself. Whether that came before or after Jeremy Doner, I do not know. Then it seems like he did indeed have at a minimum two writers that he did extensive work with as part of two different teams.
John: That’s my guess as well.
Megana: Got it. Thank you guys.
John: Megana, what else do we have?
Megana: Chris asks us, “What do you call the page before a script begins, where the writer puts either a quote or an explanatory message? I’m trying to figure out why writers do this, because my gut reaction is that it feels like cheating, but perhaps I’m missing a valuable tool I could use to better elucidate or thematically prep the reader for some of my writing. I don’t mean a character list like in The Nines script. I’m referring to something that is much more directly explanatory for the reader.”
John: Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page of a script?
Craig: I don’t. It’s just the stupid page with the stupid quote on it.
John: It feels like a dedication page. I’ve also called it an intermediary page. If there were a standardized name for it, I think it would be helpful, because it’s weird we don’t have a good standardized name for it.
Craig: You could call it quote page. It’s not something that you need to worry about, Chris, honestly. I don’t think it’s cheating. If somebody wants to do it, God bless them. Is it a valuable tool? No. There has never been a single screenplay that went toward the path of success as opposed toward the path of failure, simply because of the strength of its quote. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be fine. You use it, you’re fine. If you don’t, you’re fine. It is not a valuable tool. It sounds like it’s not the kind of thing that you feel a great desire to do. The vast majority of screenplays do not do this.
John: The majority of the screenplays I’ve written do not have one of these pages. He mentions The Nines, which has a character explanatory page, which was really crucial for that, because otherwise you might not realize that the same actor’s playing these characters in different parts of the movie. Big Fish has one. It says, “This is a Southern story full of lies and fabrications, but truer for their inclusion,” just a single sentence on that page. It was helpful for Big Fish, because it just set up the right tone for what is the story you’re about to read. For that, I thought it was great. It ties in very nicely to the next question from Corey here. Megana, if you want to ask.
Megana: Corey asks, “In Episode 550 you discussed a screenwriter placing a trigger warning page between the cover and Page 1, whether it was warranted. I’ve written a screenplay that has several characters with disabilities. I don’t outwardly identify as a person with a physical disability, and I’m concerned that it could deter producers into thinking my writing is ableist. My question is, should I be putting a disability inclusion/information page at the top of my screenplay? Since my script is a comedy, it involves both abled to disabled bullying and disabled to disabled bullying. Can an information page alleviate potential producer concerns or scare them off more quickly?”
Craig: That was a really good question. Wow, it’s funny, we’ve been doing this so long, John, that now we actually can get new questions, because the world changed. That’s how long we’ve been doing this.
John: It did change.
Craig: The world changed.
John: Craig, before your answer, what would your answer have been 10 years ago?
Craig: My answer 10 years ago would’ve been nobody cares. That is not the answer that I would give today. This is a good question to ask. It’s relevant, because I think that a lot of producers, particularly in mainstream Hollywood, have become very concerned about this issue. Depending on what the story is, they may feel a burning desire to know if the writer is part of the class they are portraying. There’s lots of ways they can find out. The easiest way is your agent. Your agent says, “By the way, I represent this disabled writer, and he or she has written this script.” If you don’t have representation, nobody’s doing that for you, then I think it actually is helpful to put some kind of thing in there to let them know that you are coming at this from the inside as opposed to from the outside.
John: I agree with you in principle. I’m trying to imagine what would actually be said on that page that would both set the reader up for a good experience reading the script and not feel weirdly pre-defensive. I think it’s a really challenging thing to phrase there for that one page, that one sentence you’re going to put there, that’s going to set the person up right.
Craig: It’s not an easy… You could simply say something… Let’s say Corey’s last name is Jones. “Corey Jones is a disabled writer from Virginia.” You could do something as simple as that that is the most barebones biographical thing. Then I think the readers would say, “I understand why you were saying this.” I don’t think anybody would go, “Who cares about your bio, Corey?” They would get it, I think.
John: I think another alternative would be to find some quote, a thing a real person said out there, who is a disabled writer, a disability activist, who said the most important thing is that we push hard and then take it back. There might be some quote from a disabled person who says you also have to be able to have fun. You can’t put people up on a pedestal. There might be something like that that can actually help frame the comedy that you’re about to get into, because otherwise the person might be uncomfortable with some of the bullying that’s happening there.
Craig: Every comedy, you risk that, regardless. You could. You just don’t want to start your comedy by saying, “Lighten up. It’s a comedy.”
John: Don’t do that. Not a thing to do. I can imagine other kind of comedies that are talking about marginalized communities where a similar kind of advanced statement could be really helpful in framing who you are and why it’s appropriate for you to be telling this story or the kind of story that you’re hoping to tell.
Craig: Megana, what would you do in a situation like this? Should there be something? What do you think? Also, how would you phrase it?
Megana: I think it’s becoming a lot more common just in my experience. I feel like I’m seeing whatever we want to call that interstitial page a lot more. I think that people are more open to reading that. I think the quote is nice. I think what John was saying about finding a quote that frames it, without being too explicit, sounds nice and warming you up to the story.
John: I’m curious what our listeners think about this issue, but also what to call that page, because Megana just said interstitial page, which is the term I was reaching for rather than intermediary page. What do we want to call this page? I feel like if we just picked a title to this page, within five years we could actually name this page, and it would no longer be a question out there in the world. Write in to Megana or just tweet at us and let us know what we should call this page between the title page and the first page of the script. Those are follow-up-y questions, but Megana, we have some new things in the inbox. What do you got for us?
Megana: Great. Fred asks, “What do established screenwriters do for professional development? I’m in a field where there are continuing education requirements to keep up on the latest developments and hone my skills, but I’m curious what you do.”
John: Craig, are you caught up on all your classes or your coursework? Is your documentation up to date?
Craig: Yes, I have been proceeding up the ladder of professional development, and I should have access to the executive bathroom shortly.
John: That’s good, because you got to keep your credentials going there, because you never know when you’re going to be called up on it.
Craig: I’m so un-credentialed.
John: We tease, and yet there are some things I think we are doing consciously or subconsciously that are the equivalent of professional development. There’s certain things like WGA Showrunner Training Program, well-known, well-respected. Hey, you are going to be running a show. Here’s a boot camp in how you run a show. That is important. It’s been going on for a decade. It’s been really helpful in people figuring out how to do that job, the management function at that job. Things do change and evolve over the course of our careers. What Craig was just saying about 10 years ago, he would’ve had different advice for this writer, than now when we recognize that the world around us has changed to some degree, and we have to adapt what we’re doing. Yet there’s not a systematized way of doing that, because we’re not continually employed by the same employer. Just know we have to do HR training and sexual harassment training if we are staff on a show sometimes. For feature writers, that’s not really a thing.
Craig: I did have to do that when we started our production here. I don’t really consider that professional development, per se. It’s a creative job. We really don’t have professional development beyond watching TV, seeing movies, reading books, talking to people that are different than we are, the things that creative people and writers have always had to do. Professional development, I think in a lot of fields, is essential. Then in other fields it seems like it’s just a bunch of busy work designed to make people jump through hoops so they can get paid more, when they should have just been paid more already. It’s a way for some people to say, “Oh, I took these seven classes, so I should get paid more than that person, who is way better at this job than I am, but I took the seven classes.” We don’t have these problems. We don’t have the benefits or the drawbacks of professional development. We just try and stay plugged into culture and hold on to some relevance, I think is probably a good way of putting it.
John: I would say, just to be perfectly honest, most of my professional development has come through Scriptnotes, because you and I having a structured weekly conversation about the profession that we’re in, between each other, but also with all the guests that we bring in, I learn a lot, especially when we bring in folks who are doing something different than what I’ve ever done. We bring on showrunners or folks who are working in late-night or other fields I’m not directly involved in. That’s professional development, because I’m learning how they’re doing their jobs, the questions they are asking themselves, the struggles that they are facing. If I were to run a TV show, I’d be much better prepped, just because I’ve been doing all of the work and listening to these very smart people talk about their jobs.
Craig: There’s your answer. All you have to do, Fred, is start a podcast and do it for 10 years. Then you too will be professionally developed.
John: Love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?
Megana: Rachel asks, “I’m working on a spec script that’s based in a city I know well. I know where each of my characters live and work, and when I have them meet, I’m automatically thinking in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, like which character would selfishly pick a place that’s close to their home but inconvenient for everyone else. At the same time, I’m aware that this isn’t generally how real-world locations are treated in actual movies. Any Before Sunset fan who’s visited Paris knows the disappointment of trying to trace Celine and Jesse’s walking route, only to discover that it dissipates after 10 paces because they teleported to some entirely different part of Paris mid-scene. Is my current approach misconceived? Am I sweating a set of considerations that don’t matter at all?”
Craig: A good question.
John: That’s a good question. I’m not saying you are totally misconceived, but I think you’re also, in your question, you’re answering your question. In the real world, people don’t think about that as much. In the actual making of films, we are going to cheat things to get from place to place. All that said, it does drive me crazy when people can do impossible things in LA in a movie. In movies that I’ve set in LA, things like Go, I am mindful of what part of town I’m sticking in and being sure it all tracks and makes sense within that part of town, both logistically but also just culturally and visually that it feels like you’re in the same part of the city that whole time. It’s not wrong for you to be thinking about where these people live, but you can get too anchored into some of your choices in the script that aren’t going to be relevant to the reader or to the viewer.
Craig: There was this note that used to get handed out a lot in the ’90s. Let’s say you were writing a movie that was set in Miami. The studio executives say, “I feel like you need to make Miami more of a character in the movie.” You would always think, oh, yes, yes, but what does that mean? Do you mean show places in Miami or have things that are… That’s what setting a movie in Miami is supposed to be. What do you mean? I think maybe all they meant is to provide some bits of authenticity and specificity. I think it’s probably a good thing that you’re thinking this way because it’s helping you think about your characters. If you think in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, that gets you closer to where that scene is going to take place.
Now, if you’re doing a movie that is very much about a city, then sure, you’re going to want to make sure that Fenway Park is where it actually is in Boston, because people will just point at you and say that you’re terrible. It’s okay to lay everything out as truly as you can, and then when production happens, you figure it out. If they say, “We can’t shoot there. We’ll have to shoot here,” you can either rewrite it or you can cheat it. If it’s helping you write and it’s helping you achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude, specificity, and authenticity, then yeah, as long as it’s not holding you up, march on.
John: The other thing I would ask you to do is keep in mind what your reader needs to know versus what you want to know, because you as the writer/creator have this vision in your head for how people got from this point to this point and the shoe leather that would take them from this moment to this moment. That may not be important to your reader at all. Always just try to go back through your script and think, okay, do they actually need to know this detail? Do they need to know this connecting bit, or are they just looking like, “We’re in this location and we’re in this location. We don’t need to know how we got there or how realistic it is.” Is it not informing the characters and their dialog and the choices within those scenes, it probably doesn’t belong in your script.
Craig: I want to answer another question, desperately.
Megana: Do you want to answer this one from Jack from Sydney, Australia?
Craig: I haven’t read it, but yes. I don’t know what you’re going to say. I haven’t opened the thing. I’m committing to answering this question no matter what it is.
Megana: Jack says, “I recently completed a feature, and after receiving some extremely warm notes from a coverage service, I decided to share details and the log line of the project online. It’s very high concept, and judging by the responses and feedback, it’s clear the idea alone has a great deal of appeal. Off the back of this, I’ve been contacted directly by development executives asking to read it, which all sounds very positive but also has me a little nervous. I know ideas on their own are a dime a dozen, so I’m very keen to get the entire script into people’s hands to digest and enjoy. As this is my first time with any sort of industry attention, I’m just not sure how to navigate this and whether to share it freely with whomever asks. I’m unrepped and still very early in my writing journey, so any advice on what to expect and how to manage this would be appreciated. Before sending, should I watermark my script somehow? Will I be expected to sign release forms? Are these for my protection or theirs? Is this all just the ramblings of a paranoid newbie?”
Craig: I’ve committed to answering this question, Jack.
John: Craig, do it.
Craig: I’m going to answer this question. Don’t worry. You are from Australia, Jack. I do not know how copyright functions in Australia, but I can assure you it offers you more protection than copyright does in the United States, because copyright protection in the United States is the worst, unless you’re a business. You have Droit Moral. You have moral rights of authors and so on and so forth. The point is, when you write something, you have established authorship. There is likely a copyright office in Australia. You should contact them, register your screenplay with them so that there is a legal paper trail. Then you should go ahead and give it to people. You can absolutely watermark it. I think most of the major screenwriting programs do it. John has a separate program called Bronson Watermarker that does it.
John: Oh my gosh, this is Craig Mazin hyping one of my products. Please make a note of this in the transcript. This is the first time this has happened.
Craig: I don’t know if I hyped it, but I’ve acknowledged it.
John: Acknowledgement is hype from Craig Mazin.
Craig: If your sales spike, I want money. Yes, you may be expected to sign release forms, but they have requested this, so it is now, instead of an unsolicited screenplay, it is a solicited screenplay. If it’s an unsolicited screenplay, it’s fairly common for them to ask you to sign something, because they really didn’t want to read it at all, and they don’t want to get sued over something they didn’t want to read. If they’re soliciting it, then in general you should be able to send it to them, watermark it with their name. They won’t be offended. It is for everyone’s protection. Live and love, man. Go for it. That’s what you wrote this stuff for is to show it to these people, right? Show it to them.
John: The moment has come which you’ve been hoping for which is that people like your stuff and want to read it. This is very exciting. Yes, so you can watermark it. It doesn’t have to be a big, obnoxious watermark either. Just a little reminder like, hey, this is for you and only for you. You have a trail because they’ve asked for it, and then you were emailing the thing. Down the road, if you do need to sue somebody, you could prove that they had access to it, that they read the thing. It’s fine. Don’t catastrophize this yet. The best possibility is that you’re going to make some connections. You’re going to hopefully find somebody who makes this movie or at least wants to meet you as a writer. These are only good things. I’d say take the excitement, work with the excitement, and keep pressing on. Also, in stressing out over this script, don’t stop writing your next one, because that’s even more exciting than this current one.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Megana, give us one last question before we get to these Three Page Challenges.
Megana: JJ from Pasadena says, “A couple of months ago, I had a general meeting with an exec from a company that controls a lot of magazine IP. After the meeting, the exec sent me a couple of articles they thought I might be interested in. One of the articles clicked with me, and I came up with a pitch for a show. I didn’t use any characters from the article or any other material except for the idea for a setting. Even then, my setting became completely fictional. I pitched my idea, and they passed. My question is, am I free to take this pitch to other places, without the article attached, of course? The characters I created, their relationships and backstories are wholly original works and have nothing to do with the article. My managers are saying it’s tricky, but my take is what’s the difference between what I did here and me reading the article on my own and using it for inspiration to create something original, which happens every day?”
Craig: Managers. I swear to God.
John: I’ll take the first crack at this, because I may have a different approach than Craig. We just talked through Jack’s situation where people have solicited his script, and so he doesn’t have to worry about this. In this case, the reciprocal is true, because this magazine can show like, oh we came out to you for this thing, and we didn’t want it. We didn’t want it, but you took this article that we’ve used, and it became a basis for your project. Is that likely? Not likely at all. The way to make it even less likely or ever become a thing is to really change whatever other details were from that article and just make it your own thing. If this thing was set at a bowling alley, could it be set at a roller rink instead? Is there a different place you could set it, it just gets rid of all traces of that article? Yes, what you did, JJ, was create a whole new story that was vaguely inspired by that thing. You can get rid of that thing that was underlying it and use what you’ve got there as its own pitch. Craig, what’s your take?
Craig: The tricky part is only the diplomacy between yourself and these other people, but they passed.
John: They passed.
Craig: Which to me, that’s the end of diplomatic negotiations. The fact is, I’m presuming this article is nonfiction. It may not be. If it’s fiction, that’s a different story. To me, I don’t think of articles as fiction. If you had said essay, that might be different. Fiction is copyrighted, and it is a unique expression and fixed form. You can’t infringe upon somebody’s copyright on that any more than they could infringe on something you wrote.
If it’s a nonfiction article about facts, and the facts have been published in a magazine or newspaper, those facts are free to everybody in the world. You cannot own facts, particularly after you have reported them. You have gone even further than you would need to go, because you’re not using any of the characters from the article, or if it’s nonfiction I would call those people people. Then you said your setting became completely fictional. I think you’re perfectly fine if it’s nonfiction. If it’s fiction, no. That’s dangerous. You would have to make it very, very different so that when the executive from the IP magazine company hears about what you’re doing and reads it, that he or she can say, “Oh my god, I’m suing you.”
John: Let’s talk for a moment about fiction versus nonfiction, because we’re not lawyers obviously, but let’s talk about it just in a general sense of why they feel different and why they work differently in terms of what we consider literary material. If something is a work of fiction that has characters in it, something that has story developments, you can see, okay, this is the movie within this space. These are characters that were created to tell this one story. It’s hard to get rid of all those things and create a whole separate story. It’s unlikely you’re going to do this. As opposed to most nonfiction works, which are like, okay, this is about underwater mining, and there’s just a general sense of how this all works and the people involved in this, but there’s nothing there that you couldn’t go out and just do your own research and come up with the same details and facts. You’re going to be able to do that with nonfiction. You’re not going to be able to do that in fiction. That’s part of the reason why they feel different and why you don’t see the same kind of problems happening with the nonfiction articles.
Craig: The nonfiction work is research. You’ve read it. It counts as research. It’s facts. Certainly you can write about real people. You can’t defame people. The reason that we are so obsessed, we meaning Hollywood, with buying the rights to nonfiction articles, is because it helps the company stake a claim to an area, so everybody else knows they’re making a movie about let’s just say-
John: FIFA Soccer scandal.
Craig: The FIFA Soccer scandal. So-and-so has bought the rights to this big article in Rolling Stone about the FIFA Soccer scandal. They’re going for it. Also, now, when they buy that article, they have access to the journalists’ notes and all the stuff that was behind the article, including the contact information for all the people they talked to so that you can keep going further. You can also use things that they didn’t publish in the article. Beyond that, facts are facts. It’s just research.
John: Facts are facts.
Craig: That’s why anyone can write a movie about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. You can take any fact you want from any nonfiction book or article, any of them.
John: Let’s discuss a practical matter though. Let’s do your Reagan assassination attempt thing. Let’s say there was a really good article and JJ was brought in to maybe pitch on this really good article about this Ronald Reagan assassination. It’s a very specific moment and beat. They say, no, actually, we’re not interested in that. If JJ then went out and started pitching this Ronald Reagan assassination movie to other places, those producers would be pissed. The ones who passed would be pissed. Would they legally have a claim to stop it? No, not really, they wouldn’t, because he could do his own research. That doesn’t mean it’d be a good idea for JJ to do, because it’s very clearly they brought him in, they passed, and he’s going off and doing that. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t do it. It just means he should be aware of that. I can understand some hesitation there. It doesn’t sound like JJ’s situation is anywhere near that specific.
Craig: No. It’s a bad idea unless somebody buys it, in which case it was a great idea.
John: Then it’s a great idea.
Craig: This is an area where having great representation helps a lot, because representation can launder these kinds of interactions. No, you wouldn’t want to be known for going around town shopping an idea like this. If you had a general meeting and you mentioned your awesome take on the attempt on Reagan’s life, and they got excited, when the other people call to complain, your agent’s going to say, “They wanted to make one too. They mentioned it to him. What do you want? You don’t own the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.” Then they just have to eat it. This is the danger of developing stuff that’s nonfiction. While I was developing Chernobyl, there was a competing Chernobyl project at Discovery, I think, which now amusingly is HBO, so that’s weird. You’re aware that it’s there. Let’s all see what happens. Nothing you can do.
John: Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. These are, as far as we know, not based on any fiction or nonfiction works. Instead, these are pages that our listeners have sent in. If you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can see the entry form, which you can send us a pdf of your three pages, generally the first three pages of a script. It can be a teleplay. It can be a screenplay. Every once in a while, Craig and I will read through these and give you our honest opinions. I say we read through these, but of course it’s really Megana Rao, and in this case Drew Marquardt, our intern, who is reading through all the entries in this last batch. If you want to read along with us, you can go to the show notes for this episode and click there. It will have the links to the pdfs of what was sent in to us, so you see. You could pause this episode and read through the pdf first, or just go back through it after you’ve listened to us describe them. We have three of them here. Megana, could you help us out with a summary of this first script?
Megana: The first one is Tag, You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson. In the dead of night, World War One trench fighter William leads a small group of soldiers to silently plant barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Caught by a German patrol, William is riddled by machine gun fire and bleeds out. We cut to present day, where Nia Jenkins, 50s, goes to take a sip of water but notices a drowned spider in her cup and flings it across the room. At the same time, a man in filthy clothes mutters to himself as he walks through the town center. He lunges at a group of students who fight back, and in the scuffle, pull off his hoodie to reveal he’s William, and he hasn’t aged a day.
John: Craig, one thing I want to say about these pages before we get into anything else is a lot happens in them. There’s actually a fair amount of story beats that happen in just the course of these three pages, which I just want to commend, because so often we’ll get through three pages and it’s like, okay, that set up some scenery, but not a bunch happened here. A bunch happened here, so good job on that. Before we get to these three pages though, the title page here reads Tag, Season 1, Episode 1, You’re It, but doesn’t have Suw’s name or contact information on it, nothing else. A cover page doesn’t do any good unless you actually have the cover page stuff on it. Just make sure you’re always putting that stuff on for a Three Page Challenge or for any script you’re sending out there into the world.
Craig: Particularly if your script is entitled Tag, because there is a thing in television that is the tag, and so they may think, wait, is this just the end of Episode 1. You might want to put that in all caps or something, just because… It’s a little interesting. Often, you will see pilot episodes. Season 1, Episode 1 is a bit… It’s very optimistic.
John: Say pilot.
Craig: I think pilot seems a little bit more true to what it is, unless Suw knows something that we don’t.
John: Craig, when we got into… We’re opening up in these trenches of World War One. What did you think of this first page? Let’s go through the World War One sequence.
Craig: There was a lot of really good stuff here. World War One trenches are pretty evocative things. I think that Suw did a pretty good job of placing us in that world. I needed a little bit of effort, which I didn’t want to expend, I generally don’t want to expend any effort early on, to get through a little bit of lack of information. It begins with, “Exterior, World War One trenches, night,” although it is WWI. I think if it’s World War One, you can go ahead and write it out at that point.
John: I agree.
Craig: You can come back to the abbreviation later, but give us the first bit. Then it says “super: the Western front, 1916.” Other than my late father and men his age and history professors, a lot of people are not going to know what the Western front was. They’re not going to know where it was. I think we need to hear where we are, whether we’re in Germany or France. We need to know a town, an area, just so we can place ourselves.
I loved that William Fernsby, I liked he had “ferrety eyes and a shaven head.” He’s “up to his ankles in filthy water.” He’s got lice. He’s waiting for the soldier in front of him to move forward. It’s a nice way to move us into establishing that there are six men. It says “in the wiring party.” We don’t know what that is. Probably not a good idea to use that lingo when you just need to show me what you show me next, which is they’re gathering “supplies of six-foot pickets and rolls of barbed wire.” We proceeded through the No Man’s Land. Again, probably a good idea to give people a little bit of a concept of what No Man’s Land is, which was essentially this dead space in between opposing trenches.
This puzzled me. I’m curious, John, what you made of it. In the second scene, “William treads carefully, quietly, his nerves humming. The German trenches are only 150 meters away. There’s a noise.” Noise is in all caps. “The entire party freezes, nervously searching for its source. Communication is by hand signal and low whispers. Slowly, as they realize there’s no one there, they begin to move again.” Now, I know what happens next, but what-
John: Yeah, but at the time, what-
Craig: What is this noise? What is it? Do you know? I don’t know.
John: I don’t know what that noise is. You have to be more specific here, because a noise could be anything. What do they think they hear? Do they hear movements? Do they hear someone approaching? What do they think are hearing?
Craig: Describe the ruckus. We need to know what they think it might be. Now, it seems to me that what Suw’s going for here is in the next scene, “William has moved away from the others.” That’s pretty vague. Why? What’s he doing? Why is he away from the others? “Out of nowhere appears a German soldier,” which is ironic, because that is how a German would say that. It’s backwards. A German soldier appears out of nowhere is better syntax, I think. “Part of a patrol.” You wouldn’t know that, because we don’t see them, because he’s alone.
John: Scratch that.
Craig: Don’t need it. Also, how out of nowhere? Do you mean apparated? Do you mean from the shadows?
John: From the darkness?
Craig: Yeah, because there’s clearly something supernatural going on. We need a little bit more clarity there. Also, it says, “The German soldier is on him immediately, but neither fire their weapons. Instead, they grapple hand-to-hand, silent except for huffs and puffs,” until the German soldier puts his wrist against William’s and then, “William screams in pain.” Why were they quiet earlier? Maybe that gets answered later. I don’t know. I like what happened next. Everybody died.
John: Everybody died. I was assuming they were quiet just because everyone has to be so super, super quiet. I think that could’ve been a little better set up. I think my only real frustration with this trench sequence is that throughout this whole thing I have got no sense of who William is individually. I wanted just one line. Just give one piece of business to William that is his alone, because otherwise it’s just the camera is favoring this one guy. I don’t know that’s going to be enough, because it is important that it is him, that we’re really going to see his face.
Craig: I agree. I did like that on the top of Page 2, the German soldier, which is spelled solider, a word that any spell check would capture, so please, for the love of God… “The German soldier leaps almost gleefully into the line of fire, his body jerking grotesquely.”
John: Love it.
Craig: Whoa, okay, that’s interesting. Then we find out that William is dead by, “William lies amongst the mess of bodies, eyes barely open, blood flowing freely from bullet wounds in his chest. Dawn breaks on the dead.” That’s great.
John: Dawn doesn’t break on the dead though, Craig. The sun suddenly comes up?
Craig: I still don’t know the difference between dawn and sunrise, to be honest with you. Every cinematographer laughs at me. Meaning there’s light on the horizon and there’s a lot of dead people. It was evocative.
John: It was evocative.
Craig: Then we ran into some trouble.
John: Last thing I’ll say is we want to get William off by himself. I think the wringing of the wire could be a good reason for him to be off by himself. Either he’s pulling ahead or he has to stay back with the reel as the others are pulling it forward. Just show us how he gets to be put by himself.
Craig: Agreed. No question, we need to explain that, because otherwise what’s happened is your screenplay has moved him somewhere he shouldn’t be so that something can happen. Audiences just don’t like that.
John: They don’t like that. That’s not all of our scenes. Next, we’re moving into Nia’s house, the bedroom. The room is “stylishly decorated, tidy but sparse … curtains drawn, dawn light seeping in around the edges.” I don’t know what tidy but sparse means.
Craig: Tidy and sparse. Sparse does not contradict tidy. It says “super: present day.” I’m not sure we would need that if you could just give us some details in the room that would tell us we’re no longer in 1916.
John: Now, we see this spider crawling around. I don’t need the spider crawling around at all. I basically just need… I love that she’s hot in bed and she’s the sort of person who sleeps hot and she grabs for the water and there’s a spider in it. That’s great. I think we spent too much time on this spider business.
Craig: Unless it becomes really important later, which is possible.
John: It could be.
Craig: We have some reverse syntax again. “Alone in the double bed lies a sleeping woman.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe Suw is a German speaker.
John: Could be.
Craig: “The menopause has reached Nia at last.” The menopause?
John: The menopause.
Craig: The menopause.
John: You got it.
Craig: I think it’s just menopause.
John: Menopause has reached-
Craig: She’s menopausal. Here’s my biggest issue. She wakes up. There’s a spider. She freaks out about the spider. She calls up for somebody named Tomos. There’s no one there. She’s upset. She then picks up the spider with some barbecue tongs and flushes it down the toilet. It says finally she can breathe again, except it says, “She can breath again. She sags.” Then that’s it. Then we’re off to a different scene. I’m like, why did I watch any of that?
John: I don’t know why we watched it.
Craig: I learned nothing. It didn’t drive me forward. Why? Here’s the deal. Suw, you get this big, exciting first sequence. Then you go somewhere else. I need something at the end of that sequence, doesn’t have to be crazy, to make me go, “Oh, what’s going on here?” I don’t get anything. I just get a lady flushing a spider.
John: I like the details. I like her with the tongs and all that stuff. I see it. It’s all great. I didn’t get any new information that’s making me extra intrigued. It just feels like a different movie, like okay, that movie happened, now we’re in this movie, and now we’re going to this third sequence, which is the college students. This fortunately does tie back into our opening. We see that William is part of this world. He seems to be the stereotype of the insane person rambling around that everyone’s trying to not look at, but mostly this worked for me. Then he’s on top of a student there. I would say my frustration at the end of this was, “With surprising speed and agility, the man lunges at the nearest student. There’s a scuffle as the others pull him off. His hoodie falls backwards, and we see his face.” The other student, who is that student? Is it a man? Is it a woman? Give us some detail here. Even if this character’s not going to survive this moment, we’ve got to know something.
Craig: Also, again, describe the ruckus. “There’s a scuffle as the other pull him off.” What does that mean, scuffle? Are people throwing punches? Do they grab him? Unless you were different, John, I had zero doubt that this was going to be William.
John: No. Of course it was going to be William.
Craig: His face is covered by a hoodie. I wonder who it is? You might, Suw, get away with not doing this ornate reveal and just a simpler reveal. We see a man from behind, stumbling “through the pedestrian precinct.” That’s an interesting choice of words. A car almost hits him. He turns, and now we see his face. It’s William, and he’s muttering to himself or whatever. This feels pretty involved. Generally speaking, “One notices the man but studiously ignores him,” I don’t know. The students, they’re nothing. They’re like props. Then we end with a reference to a character. We learn their name. We learn how the name is pronounced. We learn what their skin color is, what their eye color is, what their hair color is. We really probably don’t need all of that there. We’re going to learn it later. I would rather learn it when other people would learn it, because the audience isn’t going to learn it here. They’re not going to know his name here. I would probably dose that out a little bit later perhaps, because he’s supposed to be mysterious.
John: Agreed. Let’s give a little more detail on William at the start. Let’s consider whether we need to have this scene with the spider and Nia where it is, because I think it’s meant to be just a filler scene so that we don’t have these two things back-to-back. It’s not doing a job here. Let’s get to our William quicker. Even though I started this conversation by saying I was happy with how much happened in these three pages, and I still am, I think we could spend our time better in these three pages still.
Craig: If you do have what I think is a pretty interesting narrative conceit, which is Highlander but World War One, there’s other, more imaginative ways to show somebody being launched through time and still being alive and being as disturbed as the man who put this curse on him. I think this feels familiar. The executive feels familiar. I would really take a look at Page 3, and I would just ask myself… Let’s presume people get it, that there is actually… It’s not the most earth-shattering concept. Maybe put a little less pressure on the concept and think a little bit more about a more contemporary or challenging execution of it.
John: A thing we started doing recently with Three Page Challenges is that we asked them to submit a log line as well. Craig and I don’t know the log line until this very moment. I’m going to open up the triangle here. Here’s the log line for this thing which Suw sent through. “A curse transforms a single mum into an immortal heroine who must protect Earth from aliens, but is her 1,000-year-old champion really on her side or should she be protecting her enemies from him?” I did not see aliens coming.
Craig: No.
John: An involuntary immortal quality there, I get that.
Craig: You knew that Nia Jenkins was important because we saw the scene, so yes, but aliens, that’s the part I was like… That caught me by surprise.
John: I’m excited to see what Suw does with the rest of this script. I thought there was some promising stuff here.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Now let’s move on to our next thing. Megana, can you give us a summary of Halloween Party?
Megana: Great. Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu and Zachary Arthur and Kyle Copier. In a local newscast, a reporter delivers breaking news that three people have died and hundreds more were injured at a Halloween Party at Arizona State. They showed the mugshots of the two students identified as suspects, Carmichael and Allie. We then go back to two days earlier as Carmichael and Allie walk to class. Allie bemoans that they’ve yet to attend a single college party, but Carmichael defends this decision, saying he needs a spotless record in order to sit on the Supreme Court one day. Allie pushes back, insisting one party won’t destroy his life, but Carmichael asks her to wait until after his longtime crush, Maddie, leaves.
John: That’s where we’re at after three pages. Craig, first impressions of Halloween Party?
Craig: Lucas and Zachary and Kyle, this is going to sting just a touch. There’s a lot going wrong here. There’s a lot going wrong in a way that is very typical for screenplays. In that regard, this is, I think, useful and fixable. I want to go through them, because there are just a lot of screenwriting sins that pile up really fast and really consistently.
John: Agreed. There’s also some good things we can point out as well, but the sins are very obvious.
Craig: The sins are pretty obvious. Let’s start with sin number one. The reporter is not reporting the way any reporter reports. This is what the reporter tells us: Breaking news. Three people died and hundreds of people were injured “in a Halloween party gone wrong” near a college campus. Two people were taken into custody. They are the key suspects. What? How did the people die? It said investigation “into last night’s horrific events are ongoing.” What events? No one ever gets on the news and said, “Three people died.” How? Were they shot, chopped up, melted?
John: Poisoned?
Craig: We need something. Right off the bat, there’s just a clumsiness here. Reporter dialog is just something you need to get right.
John: Let’s talk about reporter dialog. This whole setup essentially is a Stuart Special, where it’s just like we’re seeing the aftereffects of this and the news footage of this thing, and then it jumps forward to three days earlier, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Stuart Special. This could be a good setup because it is surprising that these two people did this horrible thing, apparently. They want to see them in the time before. That can absolutely work, but we’re relying on this newscast to do a little too much. I also wonder about starting over black. There’s a limited amount of time which an audience is willing to just stare at a black screen and have someone talking. I think this was pushing beyond that. Think about what are you actually showing on screen. Are there multiple reports happening simultaneously in an I Am Legend kind of way? That could be a way to get into it. This is not going to work here. All that said, I love the character descriptions of both Carmichael and Allie. “Carmichael, 21, short Black chubby kid with a smile wide enough that it probably hurts his face, has a cul-de-sac haircut and lipstick all over his face.” I don’t know what a cul-de-sac haircut is, but I love that his smile “probably hurts his face.” I love it. Craig, Megana, what is a cul-de-sac haircut?
Craig: In the shape of a horseshoe?
Megana: I took it to mean just suburban and nerdy.
Craig: We’ll have to look that one up. While we’re doing research on this, I didn’t mind this description, but I did not like the description of Allie. The description of Allie was, “Allie, 22, tall skinny woman who’s far cooler than she has idea about.” To me, that’s just cool but doesn’t know it.
John: I like “glossy eyed and faded, she’s still on top of the world and doesn’t give a fuck about her black eye.” Great.
Craig: Hard to get across in a still photo. Also, who’s watching this? It’s on TV. We won’t know she’s a tall skinny woman because you’re showing us mugshots. How do we know she’s tall and skinny? Is there a specific height on the mugshot? They don’t really do that. That’s from the bad movies from the ’50s. There’s so many issues here. I thought, okay, let’s see where we end up two days earlier. We’re at campus. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the Stuart Special. We’ve seen this particular kind of Stuart Special a lot.
John: I do not believe that two days before Halloween, people are already wearing their Halloween costumes around campus. I just don’t believe it.
Craig: They’re not.
John: I did not believe the campus at that moment. They’re not. Here’s my frustration is, there’s no such place as “exterior, Arizona State University campus.”
Craig: Thank you.
John: That’s not a place.
Craig: Not a place.
John: It’s not actually a location. You can be like, the main quad moving between the dorms and this place, but describe, give us a place, because I don’t know what the ASU campus looks like. I need to know something, and especially because you’re going to do a walk and talk, attempt to do a walk and talk for a very long time between two characters in a space. I have no idea where we are. By picking a more specific place, you could break it up. Give us some things to do and see and change up the scene. Right now, we are just trapped in this conversation that just keeps going. Aaron Sorkin could not make a good walk and talk that could carry us through these two pages of some void that we’re in.
Craig: Well-observed that we are in a place that doesn’t exist. Many, many years ago, all the way back when I had my blog, I wrote an article called You Can’t Just Walk into a Building. I think that’s what it was called. It’s common for screenwriters to say walks into a building and looks around. It’s like, what building? Building isn’t a thing. Someone has to go find the building. What is inside of the building? Is it just a building? Campus is not a place. Absolutely true that nowhere on the planet Earth are people in costumes two days before Halloween. There is no reason for Carmichael to be dressed in a Harry Potter outfit. Why?
John: I think it’s trying to ironically comment on JK Rowling’s trans controversy. I have no idea why he’s in a Harry Potter outfit. No idea.
Craig: It’s a brave attempt, but no. Then what proceeds is two pages of what I called ticker tape writing, just dialog, no interruption, no action lines, no one else shows up. I simply have these two people having a conversation that doesn’t appear to have a moment before. The conversation begins like this, “This weekend we’re doing it. I think we should try drugs.” Okay, but what were they saying before that?
John: They were together. They were already walking.
Craig: Correct.
John: This could be a first line if she runs up behind him and grabs him, startles him, and pins him down and says this is what we’re going to do. That is the beginning of a scene, that that moment started. It can’t start with them already walking and she says this.
Craig: If you just added the word no, then I would understand that she was responding to something, and so that we were inside of a…
John: That’s true.
Craig: You can’t just start as if these people were walking silently and then suddenly, scene. Then what happens is two people that know each other very well start telling each other things that they should already know. They just start announcing things that they should know. “We’re seniors at the number one party school in the nation and have literally never been to a single party.” Yeah, they know that. “I want to be on the Supreme Court.” Yes, I know. Then, “You act weird around Halloween,” which is bizarre, but also something that you would know. Then, “Imagine how many more copies of my book I’d sell.” Okay, so you’re a writer. You need to tell him that, even though he already knows. Then he has to tell her that there is a woman that he is in love with, that she already knows about. None of this would happen.
John: It would not happen.
Craig: None of it.
John: We often talk about how late could you come into a scene and still get the purpose of the scene. It’s a fun exercise with this, because you would come in so much later to this and actually get the information out that you want to get out, and give yourself space to do more interesting things in here. We won’t keep beating on this, but it’s like a jokoid. It has the quality of dialog, and dialog that people say in movies, but it’s just there’s too much, and it’s not actually moving us anywhere, not going to any place. There’s one sentence I actually have to talk about, because I think it would be actually an impossible sentence to diagram. I’m going to read Carmichael’s sentence from the top of Page 3. This is what Carmichael says. I’ll try to give a fair performance of it. Here it is. “I’m simply saying I have to go in there with a resume solid enough for Lindsey Graham to be comfortable nominating somebody with a skin color that’s darker than his mother’s.” Wow.
Craig: What I wrote next to that was awkward and written. By written, I mean instead of somebody talking, which is what dialog in a screenplay is for, it appears that somebody has taken some time to write some prose out. He does it again. Then his next dialog brick is, “This just kind of feels like one of those moments I bring up in my bestselling autobiography 50 years from now where I talk about how your decision to try drugs in this moment led you to a life hunting for Sasquatch and multiple felony-level prostitution charges.” No.
John: How many words was that?
Craig: So many words. The sentences are coming out in absurdly complete packages. I have a challenge for Lucas and Zachary and Kyle. The challenge is I want you to rewrite this scene. I want you to not worry about being funny. I don’t want you to write a single joke. I want you to write it in the most realistic way possible, as if these were actual human beings walking across an actual campus, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, and having a discussion that two people that have known each other for years would actually have, in the way that they would have it. Just go as low concept as you can. Go mumblecore on this. You can always then pull it up. I think you guys need to get down to the really realistic ground on the ground before you can start getting into the comedic stuff, because it’s just not connected to reality right now.
John: I very much want to see that. I was going to propose the same thing. I want to see a cleaned-up version of this. I think it’s also challenging to have a team of three writing scenes. It can happen, but you don’t see it very much. It’s not common.
Craig: That’s true. Maybe that’s part of it is that it becomes committee-ized or something. All I can say, guys, is I think that I’m sure that you have a movie that all three of you love, that is in this genre. See if you can get that screenplay and just really dig into how it’s constructed. I think you will move forward by leaps and bounds. I really do believe so.
John: Agreed.
Craig: I am rooting for you guys.
John: Here’s the log line that they sent through. “When two best friends decide to impress their friend group from out of state, they mistakenly throw the greatest Halloween party of all time.”
Craig: That’s what I think probably you thought it would be about, certainly what I thought it would be about. There are lots of great movies about young adult parties going bad but good. Time-tested genre often works. I think you guys, just give yourself this little exercise, and then I think write back into it. It’s okay. Like I said, you didn’t invent any new mistakes, so don’t worry about that. I made these mistakes. John, you made these. Maybe you didn’t, but I did.
John: A hundred percent, I did. Also, I do wonder if some aspect of what happened to dialog at a certain point, and what we took to be as good dialog, like of the Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s very convoluted, and yet it all fits together, people heard that and internalized that and think that’s what dialog should sound like. It’s just not working in some of these situations.
Craig: Also, there’s a certain kind of person that can do it. If your characters are highly educated, articulate press secretaries for the president or future Mark Zuckerbergs who are on the spectrum and at Harvard, yeah, then they can talk like that, because some of those people talk like that. This is not to insult anybody at Arizona State University, but this is not the typical cadence of anybody. Neither Carmichael nor Allie are talking like actually people there. All of their lines are too formed. When Allie said, “Never fucked a woman,” she knows he hasn’t. What is that even about? Then you fuck him then. It was just so weirdly mean, and then he just kept going through it. That’s an example, guys, where I think you’re going for a laugh but you’re actually hurting the characters. That’s the other thing is never, never sacrifice character on the pyre of the laugh, because you probably won’t get the laugh, because people will be upset at the character, and you’ll hurt the character.
John: For sure.
Megana: Wait, also, do you want to know what a cul-de-sac haircut is?
Craig: Yeah.
John: I want to know. Please.
Megana: I think that what they are saying here is it’s a fade. There’s a little bit of hair on top, and then you have the cul-de-sac effect because it’s really trimmed down on the sides.
Craig: Got it.
Megana: The thing that comes up when you first search for this on Google is just male balding patterns. That makes more sense to me as a cul-de-sac.
John: A horseshoe, yeah. I doubt he has shaved his head to resemble male pattern baldness, although I’d want to know that character. I’d really want to know that character who would choose to do that.
Craig: I would respect that.
John: A hundred percent.
Craig: I would respect that.
John: Megana, can you talk us through our final Three Page Challenge?
Megana: Ronnie, an American at college in Scotland, comes home from a one-night stand to a voice mail from her dad, Ed. As she listens to the voice mail on speakerphone, she notices her pet goldfish floating in its tank. As she tries to resuscitate the fish, Ed informs her that her mother has died. Back home in Santa Barbara, Ronnie and her siblings stand on the beach as Ed pushes their mother’s urn out to sea, which the tide quickly brings back to shore. Her sister Elle swims the urn out and submerges it. When she returns to shore, their sister Sophia accuses Elle of stealing her earrings.
John: That’s where we’re at at the end of three pages.
Craig: What’d you think, John?
John: I liked quite a lot about these. I really liked quite a lot about these pages. There’s some interesting stuff here. Again, we’re on a college campus, and yet it feels a more specific college campus. I wasn’t trapped in nowhere for this as much. I have specific things about getting to voice mail. This is essentially the convention of someone listening to their voice mail when they get home or the answering machine that we used to have in the ’90s. I want to propose that maybe her phone is dead and she’s plugging it in when she gets into a room and that’s why she’s now getting this message from her father about her mother being dead. Yet I dug the tone. We were in a dramedy space. I was curious to see what was going to happen on Page 4, which is always my question for these kinds of samples is do I want to keep reading. What did you think?
Craig: I loved it. Do you think it’s Emme or is it Emme?
John: I think it’s Emme. That’s my guess.
Craig: If it’s E-M-M-E?
John: We’ll say Emme for this podcast. We’ll apologize if that’s not quite right.
Craig: Miss Harris. The start, here’s a description that does work for me, “Ronnie Thomas, 20, American, the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café, ties her sex-wrecked hair back and throws on sneakers.” Now I must admit, I’m not sure what the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café is, but sex-wrecked hair gets a check mark for me. I can see her. This was a very efficient way to show me something that I’ve seen a million times. Here’s the thing. It’s okay to do things that people have done a million times. Just don’t dwell on it like you’re the first person to do it. What I liked here about Miss Harris is that she writes this very efficiently, like you get it, you know the deal. As you point out, she’s running across the university campus. I would like to know where, but at least at the end, it’s super short and she’s heading for another dormitory building. At least I get a sense roughly of where she is. I like the stone spiral staircase.
I thought this was such an interesting way to convey information. We’ve talked about exposition a lot and how you get across ideas and how exposition is sometimes a wonderful opportunity to be creative. This is creative. He’s just yammering on her voiceover. She’s very upset about a goldfish. She starts doing little… I saw her doing little finger compressions, which I thought was really hysterical. Then her dad says, “Oh, and your mum is dead.” Then she starts screaming. Then her roommate says, “Well, that seems a bit dramatic, doesn’t it?” It was very good. It was a good way to… I’m so leaning forward and excited. I kept feeling that way when we got to the beach in Santa Barbara. How did you feel about that scene?
John: I think the beach mostly worked. We are there. The idea is that we’re going to put these ashes. We’ve seen the ashes at the beach thing a hundred times. Again, you weren’t scared of the stock scene. You’re doing the thing. You’re putting the urn in, and it just won’t sink. That comedy, it just keeps washing back up, feels great that the sister swims out with it and finally submerges it and dunks it. It feels right. Do I know quite what’s happening on the page after that? Nope, but in these three pages we’ve met our hero, we’ve taken her from Edinburgh where she’s going to school to Santa Barbara. It feels like that’s where we’re mostly going to stay. We don’t know. We’re curious. We want to know more about her. We basically like her so far. These are promising things.
Craig: They’re smart. This is a very funny bit. I thought this was really funny. I liked the idea that Ed is like, “This is ridiculous. This urn full of her ashes, it’s biodegradable, it’s supposed to just sink and release the ashes into the water.” Everyone starts laughing. Then Elle takes it and brings it out into the water and she dumps it in, and then there’s this bit about earrings. It had that kind of intelligence that you see in Fleabag, for instance, to me. You know in Fleabag, in the second season, when they’re at the funeral, and everyone’s just like, “Oh my god, you look really great.” It’s this incredibly awkward thing that happened. Her hair just was perfect that day. It’s so weird and specific. I could see her sister. I could see her other sister. I like that Elle was wearing a slightly too extravagant gown. It’s all just really well done. I loved how much white space there was on the page. I salute you, Emme or Emme or Emme Harris. Well done.
John: Here’s a suggestion for Page 1. As Ronnie’s speeding across campus, her friend in upper case “carrying books, stops as she passes.” Friend asks, “Are you coming to Lit?” Ronnie says, “Yes, just going to my room to grab my stuff. I’ll see you in a sec.” “They part ways. Ronnie heads for another dormitory building.” Who’s that friend? That friend male, female? That friend could be somebody specific. Just give us a gender. Give us something about that. Also, it’s a wasted opportunity. It’s like a nothing conversation. There’s a moment to either acknowledge that this was a walk of shame coming back from this thing. I wanted something funny there and for them to just tell us that, okay, we’re in a comedy and get us primed for the next scene, which could land even better if we had some joke before that.
Craig: I agree with that.
John: Cool.
Craig: That’s an excellent point.
John: As we wrap up here, let’s talk about the log line. “After the death of her estranged mother, a college student returns home to her sisters and dad in California for a memorial service that reveals more than one complicated relationship.” It’s a half-hour pilot, apparently.
Craig: Great. Great. I want to read it. Send it. I’ll read it. I’m excited. This is good. It was funny. I enjoyed it.
John: I want to thank all the people who sent in Three Page Challenges, especially these three that we talked about today. If you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and fill out the form there and attach your pdf. We do this probably every two or three months. If you’re a Premium Member, we’ll send out an email in the week before we’re going to do one so we can get that last call of entries for this. I want to thank Megana and Drew for going through all of these entries…
Craig: Thank you guys.
John: …and remind people that this is a voluntary thing, so we really applaud you for sending in scripts that we can all talk about. All right, Craig, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from, on Saturday night, we did a thing we had not done for a long time since the pandemic, which was having a game night. We were over at a friend’s house. We all played games together and gathered around a table. It was tremendously fun. I played a new game I never played before, which was the Blockbuster Party Game. I’ll link in the show notes to it.
This game comes in a case that looks like a Blockbuster tape, which is just such a wonderful bit of nostalgia. The game itself, you have movie titles on your cards. You’re trying to get your team to guess them. It has a Charades-y kind of quality, but it actually has some really smart game mechanics in terms of things you can do to compete against the other teams. There’s timers. It’s all smart, and just the right version of this kind of game. If you’re a person who loves movies, which you probably are, if you listen to this podcast, and want a party game for six people or more, I recommend you check out the Blockbuster home game. It was like eight bucks on Amazon, so not a big commitment, but a really surprisingly fun game.
Craig: This was a game from the ’90s, right?
John: No, this is a brand new game.
Craig: No, it’s not.
John: This is a brand new game that just-
Craig: You’re kidding.
John: It’s a brand new game that just happens to have the packaging and the feel of Blockbuster. They must’ve just found out whoever has the logo for Blockbuster. They got the rights to have the logo for Blockbuster. It’s a brand new game.
Craig: Oh my god, so this isn’t when Blockbuster’s at the height of their power. They had a little associated game. Maybe they’re like, “Who’s going to sue us? There’s no Blockbuster.”
John: I think Blockbuster’s one of those brands, it’s like Ataris. You don’t need the real company. You want the nostalgia for the thing.
Craig: Got it.
John: I quite enjoyed it. When you’re back in town, Craig, I’m going to have you and Melissa over for game night with a bunch of folks, and we’ll play this, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. It’s a smart choice they made in deciding this.
Craig: Deal.
John: I also insist that at some point you host Mafia again, because Craig may be a good screenwriter, he’s one of the best Mafia hosts you could possibly ever imagine.
Craig: I’m thinking about just doing that professionally from now on.
John: I think it’s a good choice. Craig, it’s less stressful. People would pay you good money. You could have billionaires pay you to be a host for Mafia parties.
Craig: I worry that for billionaires, when people die, they actually die, because they can murder, because laws don’t matter. My One Cool Thing this week is something that wandered my way via Twitter but I guess from TikTok. This is not a new thing, although it’s new to TikTok. It’s called the hanger reflex. Have you been following along with this one, John?
John: I have. We tested the hanger reflex around in our house after watching an episode of TV. We tried it. Craig, does it work for you? Does it work if you do it to yourself, or only if someone else does it to you?
Craig: I only tried it putting it on my… Let me tell you what it is. If you haven’t heard of the hanger reflex, you take a wire coat hanger and you spread it slightly and put it on your head and then let it go so it squeezes on your head. For many, many people, including myself, your head will naturally turn to either the right or the left. What I found was if I rotated it, it would turn one way or the other. It always turned towards the way the coat hanger was hooked.
John: The hook.
Craig: This is not one of these mass suggestion things. This in fact is an established reflex discussed in journals, medical journals, research journals. No one really knows why, although they think it has to do with shearing force, which is basically when one force is pushing one way and the other one is pushing the other way, but not directly at each other. It creates a natural desire to twist along with the shearing force. It’s really weird. I was not expecting it to work. It absolutely worked on me. Have you tried it, Megana? Have you hangered yourself?
Megana: I have not yet, because you have to have a wire hanger, right?
Craig: Yes.
John: Yeah. Apparently, it will work with a thicker plastic hanger, as long as there’s actually space, as long as it will squeeze properly, but wire is the preferred one.
Craig: I think I’ll find a wire hanger and I’ll put it on your head. We’ll get this done. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry. Anyway, check it out. If you just Google the hanger reflex, very easy to try at home. Fun for the whole family. You start to feel very, very stupid as you’re doing it. Some people are like, “Wait, this is a setup, right? You all just agreed to say that this does something, and then I’m going to be the idiot that puts this on my head, and you’re going to laugh at me.” No, it’s a thing. It’s actually real.
Megana: Have you tried to resist it when you’re doing it?
Craig: Yeah. You can.
John: It’s not overwhelming. It’s not like some ghost is turning your head.
Craig: No, it’s really more that if you don’t try and resist, you don’t try and help it, your head will just naturally want to turn. It’s really weird. You’ll see when I put it on your head.
Megana: Cool, I can’t wait.
John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with help this week from Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Nice.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Our outro’s by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on secrets of social media. Craig and Megana, thanks so much for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: The secret to social media was actually revealed this past week by Sara Schaefer, a writer and comedian who has actually been a guest on this podcast before. Let’s take a listen to Sara Schaefer’s secret to social media.
Sara Schaefer: I used to always share my opinion online. No matter the topic, I was ready to dive into the discourse, even when it had nothing to do with me. The result, me posting a lot of dumb shit. Before I knew it, I was posting dumb shit online every single day, until all that changed. Now I don’t post dumb shit at all. What’s my secret? Silence. Surprised? I was too. Turns out you don’t have to post anything at all. It’s not required. Sometimes you can just be quiet. My girl friends ask me, “But Cheryl, wouldn’t that be censoring yourself? Is this the end of a free society as we know it?” No, it’s actually something else. It’s called maturity. I wondered what would happen when I stopped blasting out every half-formed thought from my head like a diarrhea cannon, but now, thanks to silence, I’m posting half the amount I used to, and guess what, I still exist. Silence, I never knew. Did you?
John: Craig, do you think Sara has hit upon the formula for social media success?
Craig: She has, although I have to give credit to fellow screenwriter Katie Dippold for saying this exact thing a number of years ago. Somebody had tweeted something, and she showed it to me and then just wrote, “You don’t have to say anything.” It’s just an interesting thing. Sometimes you get fooled by social media into thinking that it must be used. It doesn’t have to be used at all.
You know what? The other day I was thinking about this very issue. We’ve been living with alcohol for thousands of years. They find residue of beer in prehistoric bowls. What if we hadn’t? What if no one had ever had alcohol until 10 years ago? Then the first alcohol was very rudimentary. It was pretty watered down. Now after 10 years, there’s beer, there’s wine, there’s vodka, there’s gin. Someone just invented tequila. People are going crazy. No one knows what to do. They’re puking. They’re arguing if it’s a disease, is it not a disease, is this a good thing, is it a bad thing. We’re so ill equipped to handle something as powerful as alcohol, because it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s social media. We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s alcohol. Sara Schaefer, what you’re really saying is you don’t have to drink it. You don’t have to drink it. You can watch other people drinking, and it’s fun.
John: One thing I think Sara hits on which is really important is that, “I didn’t say anything, and yet I still continued to exist,” because one of the things about social media, if you’re not posting it’s like you’re not really there. No one’s retweeting you. No one’s acknowledging you. If you don’t put out your opinion, do you even exist? You do continue to exist. You actually are a person who has opinions, even if you’re not sharing those opinions. More importantly, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You can just stay out of whole conversations. That’s a crucial skill which I wish people could pick up earlier.
Craig: I love staying out of conversations. It’s like crack cocaine for me now. I read something. In my mind I’m like, “I’ve got something to say.” Then I don’t say it, and I feel great. It’s such a joy.
John: What put us on the bonus topic today was the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, which I’ve never commented on. Obviously, I know Johnny Depp from work projects before. I don’t know Amber Heard at all. It angers me so much that this is a public trial that’s being shown to the world and also discussed by the world, when it’s none of our fucking business whatsoever. I just get so incredibly frustrated by that it’s just a moment of entertainment and enjoyment for the world to participate in and comment upon, when who the fuck cares? We shouldn’t be allowed to watch this thing.
Craig: I haven’t been following along with the trial of the century. You’re right. It’s none of my business. I can’t possibly learn anything or grow as a human being by following the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial. There was this other thing that happened to me over the last couple of months. That was, and I think I shared this with you, getting a number of interview requests by real places like TV news outlets here and abroad to comment on the war in Ukraine, because I had written a television series about a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. They’re always very flattering when they come for you. I politely declined. The reason I politely declined is because I am not qualified to discuss the war in Ukraine. That’s not what I do. It seems like nobody out there cares. They’re just trying to throw more people at microphones. Everybody can shout their unearned opinion at each other. That’s why I like that we do this, because we actually have earned our opinions about screenwriting, so it’s nice. You see what I mean? Why would anyone ask a screenwriter to talk about a war in Ukraine? That’s crazy.
John: On the podcast we are sharing our expertise and our opinions on a topic that we know very well because it’s actually the thing that we do every day. Had they gone to an expert in Ukrainian military history or the tactical issues involved with Russian military or nuclear safety, fantastic. Those are great places to go to. The guy who wrote Chernobyl is not a valid news source for this thing.
Craig: No. I think everybody has been trained to believe that everyone is an expert on everything, and God knows they’ll tell you about it. The problem is, what do we do? I don’t know how to get out of this.
John: A choice is silence, as Sara Schaefer lays out. We don’t have to weigh in on things. We don’t have to weigh in on things that we are experts on or not experts on, that we do know of some information. We can stay out of it. There have been times where I’ve jumped in on something because it’s a funny moment. Great, but I’m trying to stay out of things that are just like, this is an enraging thing that’s happening in the world. If I’m not showing my rage, it sounds like I’m sitting on my hands. No, it’s just that I’m better off donating to abortion rights charities than screaming about it on Twitter, or I’ll go to a protest where actually my physical presence is important for me to be there, than just putting it out on the timeline, where everyone else is also venting. Megana, you are not as big of a social media user as I am. What is your decision process about what to amplify, what to keep back from? What’s your metric for doing that?
Megana: Sorry, this is something that I could talk about forever. I think I prefer to hold most of my opinions to myself and reserve the right to feel differently about things.
John: Wait, I want to stop you there. Reserve the right to feel differently, reserve the right to change your mind?
Megana: Yes, I reserve the right to change my mind, which social media and the internet does not respect or it’s not a thing that is really possible on the internet.
Craig: You monster.
John: You monstrous hypocrite. How could you possibly change your mind?
Craig: How dare you?
Megana: I agree. I also grew up with social media. Me and my friends all got MySpaces and Xangas when we were 12 years old. No 12-year-old has anything interesting to say. I think that around 2014 I was grossed out by the way it felt like everyone around me was behaving in a way that they could then curate to social media instead of just living. After that, I just stopped posting stuff. I’m still on social media. I’m still on Facebook because there are certain groups that I get information from and message boards. I wish that I didn’t have to be on Facebook, but I am, because of that. I’m on Twitter because of writing and work stuff. Then I’m on Instagram. I’m actually not really on Instagram that much. I wish that I didn’t have to be on any of these things, because I think that there is some value in them, but for me in my life it’s mostly a negative.
John: You’re distinguishing between you’re a consumer of these things but you’re not a producer of content for these things. That’s an absolutely valid choice. Basically, it is helpful for you sometimes to get this stuff coming in. There obviously can be toxic effects of that too. I guess back to Sara Schaefer’s point, you don’t feel the need to comment on everything that’s happening, passing by. You’re very judicious about what you put out there in the world. You got to go up and see Craig in Calgary, and Bo, and hang out with them. I got to see pictures of beautiful stuff up in Calgary, which is great. I was so happy to see you posting that kind of stuff. You could share that with people who would be interested in seeing those things, but you didn’t have to weigh in on bigger issues.
Megana: I think another thing with social media is that especially with the new Facebook algorithm and the metaverse overhaul or whatever, it favors extreme opinions. Most people don’t have extreme opinions. Most people think pretty similarly about things. When I’m on social media, I’m like, “Oh my god, this world is so polarized.” When you go outside and talk to people, you realize that’s not actually the case at all.
John: I will stand up for the fact that Oreo Thin cookies are the best version of Oreos, and the dark chocolate Oreo Thins are the best version of Oreo Thins. That’s the hot take that I will stand by.
Craig: Guess what? You’re a garbage person.
John: Tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me what is the actual correct answer for what is the best store-bought cookie.
Craig: You may absolutely be right, but I feel that my job is to express outrage. Where is the outrage? I love when people on Twitter are like, “Where is the outrage?” I’m like, are you kidding me? What else is there here? “Where is the salt?” says man drowning in ocean. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Megana: One thing that was nice is John and I went to the Bans Off Our Body March in LA, what was it, two weeks ago?
John: Yeah.
Megana: The Supreme Court leak and the stuff about Roe v Wade is something that is incredibly frustrating and painful. I see so many hot takes on social media. First of all, found out about the march through social media. Being able to be in a physical space with people was so affirming. That’s all I wanted to say.
John: You just don’t know how many people there are on Twitter. You can see all these things scroll by in your timeline, but when you’re actually physically in a space with a bunch of people, you’re like, oh, these are all as upset and angry and scared as I am, and they’re all coming together to stand up for something, is meaningful. Shouting there was meaningful because we were all shouting together. Shouting at each other on Twitter is not doing any good.
Megana: There’s no room for anyone to “well, actually” you at that march.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Exactly, because you were experiencing real community. These places call themselves virtual communities, but that’s an oxymoron. You need to see people. You need to be with people. It’s why sporting events are still popular. Everyone has the best seat in the house to see any baseball game they want, any football game they want, and still, tens of thousands of people go every day in each individual city to see a team play because it’s community. It’s physical community. Fuck you, Meta. It’s not going to work. It’s just not.
John: Craig, what I hear you saying is that while you love Scriptnotes as this podcast, we need to go back to doing our live shows and we need to get all 40,000 of our listeners together in a stadium to listen together to a Scriptnotes recording.
Craig: That would be good if they would all agree to show up on the same day. It’s true, the pandemic, we worked around the lack of physical communion, but it’s just not the same. We were designed to live in space, in reality and space, and not in this disconnected fucking void. It is of course a system that is built on shouting, will encourage shouting. Sometimes people say, “Twitter just makes everybody mean.” I don’t think it’s Twitter that’s making people mean. I think it’s people being assholes make people mean. It’s the “well, actually” people. They have no control over themselves. They don’t know how to use this. They don’t know how to drink the alcohol, and so they’re ruining the party for everybody. All my metaphors collided, smashed together. I don’t care. It’s awful. Talk about a really hot, hot, hot take. Is there anything more Twitter than complaining about Twitter?
John: Nope. The circle is now complete.
Craig: The circle is complete.
John: Thank you guys.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Ryan’s Elvis Question on Twitter
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: Tag – You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson, Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu & Zachary Arthur & Kyle Copier, Belly Up by Emme Harris
- Blockbuster, the Party Game
- The Hanger Reflex
- Sara Schaefer Silence Video
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 552: Parentheses Would Help, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss a doppelgänger murder, the true life of a Hollywood rebel, an unexpected roadtrip, and more in this week’s installment of How Would This Be A Movie, where we analyze how stories in the news would translate onscreen.
We also follow up on Chat GPT, Celebrity Jeopardy, and writing in other people’s voices. We then answer an embarrassed listener’s question on unfavorable movie reviews.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss overpowered characters in D&D and how character strengths factor into our own writing.
Links:
- ‘Doppelganger murder’: Woman accused of killing Instagram lookalike in plot to fake her own death By Andy Eckardt and Aina J. Khan for NBC
- The Godfather, Saudi-Style by Anuj Chopra for the Guardian
- The Last Days of Nikki Finke by Jacob Bernstein for the NYT
- The Nun and the Monk who fell in Love and Married by Aleem Maqbool for BBC
- 13 stranded strangers went on a road trip. Here’s what happened by Francesca Street for CNN
- ‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI by Chloe Xiang for Vice
- Manta Sleep Mask
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Toldja! The Nikki Finke Movie first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: M-Y N-A-M-E I-S C-R-A-I-G M-A-Z-I-N.
John: Impressive.
Craig: Thank you.
John: This is Episode 582 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Who Can You Trust, an expert? What is expertise? Is their success an indicator that they know what they’re talking about or were they just lucky? We’ll dig into that as it applies to writing advice and general life stuff. We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions, Craig, because we’ve got a lot of those. So many questions. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, it’s a disaster. We’ll talk about the various natural disasters that could befall Los Angeles and how to think about them.
Craig: What? Easier to talk about the ones that won’t befall Los Angeles.
John: I could say we shouldn’t have cyclones, but sometimes we could have cyclones.
Craig: At this point.
John: Anything could happen.
Craig: Anything.
John: Anything could happen. One thing that will happen this week is your show will come out, Craig, finally.
Craig: It’s coming out, yeah, because this show… Yep, that’s right, technically the first day of the following week. It’s Sunday night, January 15th. Finally. By the time this episode comes out, I think I will know my fate as far as reviewers and all that goes. Then shortly after that we’ll see if people show up and watch it. I hope they do. I think it’s a really good show.
John: I’m excited to watch it. I’ve seen not a frame of it, other than the little teaser things.
Craig: Great.
John: I haven’t seen anything more. I’m coming in as just a viewer. I’m excited to watch it and to see it. I deliberately did not play the games, because I downloaded them, and I realized, you know what, I’m going to watch Craig’s show really soon. I’d just rather watch Craig’s show.
Craig: You know what? It’ll be a very interesting thing for you, if you do watch the show, to then go back and play the game, because Naughty Dog, the company that makes the games, released a remastered version of the first game, The Last of Us, for the PlayStation 5, and so I played it. I played it after we had produced the show. It was really weird, because it was like, “Oh yeah,” but sometimes, “Oh,” and sometimes, “Oh.”
John: I forgot about that.
Craig: Sometimes just, “Oh, we went a very different way there.” Then sometimes you’re like, “Wow, that is eerie. It’s like I’m back in the show, but I’m not in the show.” It’ll be interesting to see what you think about the process of adaptation, because there was quite a bit of adapting going on.
John: I’m sure there was. I’ve talked before on the podcast about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wrote the whole script, and we started shooting the movie. It wasn’t until we started shooting the movie that I saw for the very first time Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the original version of it.
Craig: Wow.
John: Just to see, wow, the same source material, and we made some very different choices along the way.
Craig: I can’t believe you hadn’t seen that one. (singing)
John: At some point, I’m going to discover that I was locked in a room for a period of my childhood, because there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I should’ve seen, that everybody saw. It’s fine. H.R. Pufnstuf? I have no idea what H.R. Pufnstuf was.
Craig: What?
John: People talk about it. No idea.
Craig: Oh my god. We’ll get into that. There are a couple of things I did want to mention.
John: Please.
Craig: In regard to the show, I just saw a few things circling around on the internet, and I figured, hey, I’ve got a podcast.
John: You can just talk about it.
Craig: I can just talk about them. The first thing was, Neil Druckmann and I were featured in an article in the New Yorker. There was a quote I had that some people have aggressively taken out of context.
John: Bad faith?
Craig: Yeah, it was a little strange. I was talking about how in a video game when you’re facing certain enemies, NPCs essentially, you’re facing NPCs and you die, and you get sent back to the beginning of the encounter. Those NPCs are back, and you now know a little bit more about them. You know that they’re basically moving in a certain pattern. If you struggle with a section, at some point the NPCs really just become obstacles that you’ve got to figure out your way around, which is part of the fun of gaming.
I said watching those NPCs – I meant to say NPCs, I just didn’t say NPCs – but watching those people die shouldn’t have the same impact as watching people die, say in a television show, except pixels is how I referred to the NPCs. It’s very clear that that’s what I’m talking about, but then they left out the NPC part and just said, “Oh, pixels.” In case anybody’s wondering, watching characters, actual characters in The Last of Us, the real characters that we’re invested in, die is incredibly moving. That’s why I wanted to make a show of it. That’s one thing.
The second thing is there is a quote that I saw circulating around being attributed to me where allegedly I say something like, I don’t know, “Video games, you put a quarter in and then you smash people on the head.” Anyway, I never said-
John: Oh, wow. Wow.
Craig: They just invented a quote and then said I said it. Internet!
John: Craig, how dare you? How dare you say that?
Craig: Talk about literally manufactured outrage.
John: Now in the transcript for Scriptnotes, people can selectively pull that quote out of the Scriptnotes transcript.
Craig: Exactly. They can just pull individual words.
John: Anything’s possible.
Craig: Anything is possible.
John: Hey Craig, is there a companion podcast for The Last of Us?
Craig: There is. The companion podcast, it’s with me and Neil, and it is hosted by Troy Baker, who has a podcast of his own, but he is most notably the voice of Joel in the video game, the character that Pedro Pascal plays.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: John, you play video games. Troy Baker is the voice of almost every male lead in every video game. It’s astonishing.
John: It’s either him or it’s Nolan North.
Craig: Both of them, they work together in The Last of Us, and they work together on Uncharted.
John: Nice. We have a video game question later on in the podcast.
Craig: Whoa.
John: That’s a teaser for that. Only other bit of news is we’ve had the promo code for ONION for people who wanted to sign up for the yearlong subscription to Scriptnotes Premium. Thank you to everyone who did that. A ton of people did that, which was fantastic and great.
Craig: That’s great.
John: One thing we didn’t anticipate is that some people had problems switching their monthly over to an annual subscription, so they’d email Megana at ask@johnaugust.com, which you could do, but she would just then send you on to help@supportingcast.fm. If you’re trying to swap over from monthly to annual, good job. You’re saving yourself some money. If you have problems with that, go to help@supportingcast.fm, and they can get that all switched over for you.
Craig: I wish you would say the promo code one more time.
John: The promo code is ONION.
Craig: ONION.
John: ONION.
Craig: ONION. Such a weird word.
John: Such a strange, strange word.
Craig: Onion.
John: Onion.
Craig: Onion.
John: Craig, you had some time off. You had a vacation. Did you enjoy your vacation?
Craig: I did. I did enjoy my vacation. Went with the family to London, and then the wife and kids peeled off to go visit a friend of hers in Edinburgh. I took that opportunity to zip over to Ireland to visit our script supervisor and his husband. I think you’ll enjoy this, John. No matter where I go, in this case it was Ireland, escape room, and this time, escape room on a boat. It was quite good.
John: Oh, I like that.
Craig: It was quite good.
John: Very nice. I took a vacation too. I was up in Wyoming with my family. I was texting with Aline, and she said, “Every writer I know is not taking vacation. We don’t talk about how writers don’t get vacations.” I felt guilty, because I was just totally on vacation. I wasn’t doing any work. It sounds like you weren’t working.
Craig: I wish that were the case. I did have to do a number of music approvals and visual effects approvals. The business does shut down. We had built in this time where we knew we actually had to get stuff done aggressively, quickly, because once we hit the holidays, it was going to be rough.
John: Starting December 6th, the town does shut down. It’s hard to get answers on anything.
Craig: In terms of the effects vendors, they’ll work with you all the way up to Christmas Eve, and then it’s like, “Hey, we need a little bit of time off here. We’re people too.”
John: Let’s jump ahead to this question from Alex, which is about video games.
Craig: Great.
John: Megana, could you help us out?
Megana Rao: Alex asks, “I had some time off recently and decided to play the new God of War and absolutely loved it. While it was a blast to play, I was really impressed by the writing, and not just the cut scenes and big story moments, but the little bits of dialog between characters as you ride your sled or sit in your canoe. This got me thinking, how does someone become a writer for a video game? Do they hire film and TV writers? Are there writers that specialize in writing for games, or do they just get one of their level designers who took a creative writing class in college? I know you guys aren’t designated video game writers, but I thought your shared interest in games and Craig’s work in adapting video games to TV and film might give the Scriptnotes team a unique perspective on the matter.”
John: Alex, there are definitely video game writers. It’s a real job.
Craig: Oh yes, of course.
John: Neil would be one of them.
Craig: Neil Druckmann for sure. There are writers for video games. Of course there are writers for video games. We’ve been talking about it actually for a long time, going all the way to the Writers Guild trying to maybe organize some companies. The primary creative director of God of War is a guy named Cory Barlog. I presume there are quite a few writers on the game. There are a number of writers on all games. For The Last of Us 2, the writers were Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross. Now, how do you become a writer for a video game? I gotta be honest. I don’t know.
John: That’s a question I think we can try to answer. I think it should be our goal for 2023 for Alex is we’re going to try to get some video game writers on to talk about the job that they’re doing and how they’re getting started writing in video games.
Craig: Listen, we can crush that goal.
John: Done.
Craig: If that’s our goal for 2023, we can just go ahead and go dark for February through the end of the year, because we’re going to crush that.
John: What I’m mostly curious about on Alex’s behalf is what the form is for writing in video games, because I have a friend who’s just moved. He’s an established screenwriter who just now started working full-time for a video game company. He’s learning the differences between writing standard, normal scripts and writing for this, in which you have decision trees and there’s bits of dialog that could come or could not come, and there’s whole story things.
You’re trying to tell a story that both feels like you as a player are in charge of it, and yet there’s a story also happening. Jordan Mechner, who’s a friend and also a video game designer and writer, often talks about that challenge. It’s like, how do you make it feel like the player’s really driving the story rather than spectating as the story’s happening around them.
Craig: There’s certainly a creative concept there that has to be figured out. Interestingly, I know from Neil at least that the script for The Last of Us and the script for The Last of Us 2 I think was primarily in Final Draft. It wasn’t like there was a specialized form. I talked to him about not using that anymore and switching. Depending on the kind of game you’re writing… Very different kinds of games require very different sorts of writers.
John: If you’re playing a Skyrim, that open-world game isn’t going to have one script for the whole thing, because there’s not just one linear flow through everything. Each of those characters has to have stuff written for them to be able to do and some development. That’s very different than the things we’re doing, and yet they’re similar skills. Let’s get some people on who can talk to us about that.
Craig: Again, if that’s our goal, I’m telling you…
John: I think that we’re setting low goals for this year and just knocking them out.
Craig: I love it.
John: That’s the goal.
Craig: Just finish off by Jan. 20. I like it.
John: I see another follow-up bit here, a writer who is new to the plot twist game. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: This writer wrote in and said, “In Episode 574, a listener asked about pitching a script that contains a big twist, do you give away the twist in the pitch or keep the mystery? You suggested not giving away the twist. My question is, if you’re not going to give away the twist, what exactly do you say in the pitch?”
John: If you’re pitching The Sixth Sense, Craig, do you give away the twist? Would you say it in a log line? What would you say in the room?
Craig: I would absolutely give away the twist in a pitch. Did I say we shouldn’t do that?
John: According to Megana, we said you should give away the twist.
Craig: I think you should give away the twist. I don’t know how to pitch something and be like, “Then you get to the end and that’s it. Please validate my parking.” You gotta give it away.
John: What form of the pitch do you give it away in? In the three-sentence version, you might not give it away.
Craig: Definitely not.
John: If you’re really giving the person the whole experience of watching the movie, then yes, you do need to give away the twist. A sit-down pitch would have that in there, but the very short log line-y pitch would probably not have that twist in there.
Craig: That’s right. I’m talking about a standard Hollywood style pitch, which is very different than the sort of pitching that people do in contests and conferences, where you sit in a room, you have an appointment, the meeting is set for an hour, there’s 5 or 10 minutes of chitchat, and then you dive in. In about 20 minutes or so, you’ve spelled out the whole movie. Then there’s some questions and some discussion, and you go home.
John: In the old days, you would drive across town, you’d park in a lot, you’d find your way to the building and do this. Now you log into the Zoom. The executive’s about two minutes late, so you’re talking to the junior executive for a little bit. Then you can re-pitch. Sometimes you have a deck. It’s nice. I love it. Craig, you proposed the topic for this week, which doesn’t always happen, so I was really excited.
Craig: That’s so nice of you to phrase it that way. How about we phrase it accurately, which almost never happens?
John: Talk to us about this topic of who should you trust in expertise. What gets you thinking about this?
Craig: There was a tweet that had been circulating around. Somebody screenshotted it and sent it to me. Without going into who it was, it was somebody that charges money as a screenwriting consultant, and you know how I feel about that. This is what that person said. Quote, “We suffer too much from success bias in this industry, especially with writers. Those who have great success must know what they’re talking about and be heeded, and therefore those without major successes must be wrong, but I cannot effing tell you how often this isn’t the case.”
This got me thinking. On the one hand, how dare you? On the other hand, fair point that just because you have had success, it doesn’t guarantee that you know what you’re talking about, because you and I both know very successful writers that we wouldn’t trust talking about anything. Success is not a guarantee. However, I think it’s also fair to say that the implied converse is not true either, which is failure doesn’t make you any more likely to be right either. Probably quite a bit less likely.
I thought it’d be an interesting conversation to have, since you and I have put ourselves out there as experts who ought to be trusted. What do we think makes somebody trustworthy? Who should we be looking to for authority, and who should we be suspicious of as we make our way in the world?
John: I think these are all great topics. Going back to the tweet, I’m struck by “success bias,” which is probably another way of saying survivorship bias. Basically, the people who have made it through to the end made it through to the end, so therefore they can feel like, oh, what I did must be the reason why I was successful, when it could’ve just been pure dumb luck that got them there. There’s not necessarily just a reason. Maybe it wasn’t their actual skills that got them there. It could’ve been some other factor. Fair point. You could see that in all sorts of different industries.
Let’s talk about whether you and I are experts and how you can determine whether you and I are experts. I guess we have credits. We’ve done this for a time. We have a body of work. We’ve not just had one success. We’ve had a string of successes and a string of failures. We’ve actually seen both sides of these, of the coins.
Craig: True, true.
John: We know how it all works. That feels like an important marker. I’m also questioning an expert on screenwriting or an expert on the craft of screenwriting, an expert on the business of screenwriting. I feel I’m much more qualified to talk about what it’s like to be a screenwriter and not necessarily, these are exactly the ways you should be putting your words together on the page. I feel like there’s a range of opinions on that. In terms of how to actually do the work of screenwriting, my experience is partly what makes me an expert there.
Craig: I think it’s fair to say that if somebody has had little to no success in our business, that it is not likely that they are going to be a very valuable expert when it comes to advice seeking, because advice is practical. It’s, I don’t know, hard to trust somebody giving you practical advice if they themselves do not appear to be succeeding, because isn’t that what the advice is for?
When we’re asking for practical advice, we’re saying, “Hey, what do you think about this situation? I’d like to succeed in the following: how to make a better contract for myself, how to improve my chance of selling this, how to improve my chance of getting casting, how to navigate successfully between a studio and a director and an actor.”
We’re talking about success. If someone hasn’t had any, I’m not really sure why they would feel entitled to or even encouraged to act like an expert when it came to advice giving, although that certainly doesn’t stop people. I do think that your success and my success is not necessarily directly connected to our theoretical success as advice givers.
John: Agreed. I think you and I could’ve had the same kinds of careers and actually give some really terrible advice.
Craig: That’s right.
John: You and I both know writers who have good track records. You could look. You can point to what they’ve done. It’s like, “Oh, that should be great.” You’ve actually talked to them. Sometimes we’re on panels with them at various conferences and like, oh god, don’t do what he says, because they’re only relying on what their experience has taught them, and they may have a perspective that is solely shaped by their experiences.
I think one of the things that’s good about us and that’s really good about this podcast is we’re continuously bringing in other people to talk about what their experiences have been and trying to learn things, rather than pining just strictly based on what we’ve done before. In 2023, we’re going to have some video game writers on to talk about their job rather than just speculate on what their jobs are.
Craig: There’s a little bit of humility required, and that I suppose also implies a certain amount of good faith, that the reason you and I are giving people advice is because we legitimately want to help them. We are not giving them advice to feel really powerful or important about ourselves.
There are people who give advice as a performative act of self-reassurance. “I am giving you this advice. Therefore I’m awesome.” You gotta keep your antennae up for those people. You don’t take advice from people who are puffing themselves up. This is a bad idea.
I still think that there was a bit of a slippery false dichotomy here from the original tweeter, because while it is true that those who have had great success don’t necessarily know how to give advice, I think that has nothing to do with the odds of getting good advice from people who simply have had no success at all.
John: I wonder if we can distinguish at all between advice, which is what we give on this podcast, versus teaching or leading. There are people who are good English teachers who are not good writers. I’ve definitely learned from that. Definitely there are incredibly successful football coaches who are not good football players and never were good football players. There can be a difference between the person who is leading a discussion on something or organizing a group to do something. That means it’s different from being the expert on actually doing the thing.
Craig: That is true. I think that when it comes to critical analysis, you don’t need to be a writer to understand how to analyze writing. It’s a different discipline. One is creating and the other is taking apart, examining, and critiquing. English teachers, and I’m talking about once we get past grammar and so forth, pretty much exclusively are teaching you how to analyze and think about writing.
Now, there are creative writing classes. I know for instance at Princeton, they have a pretty amazing creative writing program. When I was there, James McPhee was teaching a class, and Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. You got a pretty good shot there, because they’re good. They know how to write. They have had tremendous success as writers, and so at least there’s a decent chance.
It’s a little bit tougher when… For writing, you can’t define success as just brilliant writing, because there’s a lot of brilliant writing that isn’t commercially successful. If you’re trying to do what you and I do, which is write movies and television for a mainstream audience-
John: Things that get made.
Craig: Things that get made. It’s really hard for me to see how people who have had no experience with that whatsoever are going to be able to help you get that. I think they might help you with scene work. They might help you with this or that. I think that there is something special about people who do it and have proven that they can do it. They must know something in certain cases. Now, whether they’re able to give that advice out reliably, that’s a matter of character.
John: Let’s think about why people might listen to somebody who doesn’t have credits, who doesn’t have any track record of real success. I think a lot of times it’s that they project a confidence. It may be an unwarranted confidence. Particularly newer writers, aspiring screenwriters, they want answers. They want a clear guide to, “This is how it works. You should definitely not use we sees. You should definitely do this, not do that.”
I think you and I both have strong opinions on certain things and clear lines, but we also recognize that there’s many ways to do things and that sometimes you can’t know what the right answer is. The right answer is what’s right for you in that scene, in that script, in that project you’re working on.
Craig: Which I think is a kind of humility. Do you watch Barry?
John: I did. I’ve watched all of it, Barry. It’s great.
Craig: It’s a wonderful show on HBO. Henry Winkler plays an acting teacher. The whole joke is that he’s not a good actor at all. In fact, he can’t get any acting jobs, and he behaves poorly. He’s neither good nor a reliable and professional actor, but he behaves with his students as if he is the fount of all wisdom, and he is not. That’s part of the joke.
There are a lot of people who, in lieu of getting where they think they ought to be or getting where they want to be, simulate the kind of respect and admiration and success they were looking for in this area by cultivating it as an expert, a self-anointed expert. A lot of people fall for it.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who can’t really help. Just for everybody, I’ve been giving this bit of expert advice for years. Take everything with a grain of salt, and really just be a critical thinker. If anybody puts themself forth as the fount of wisdom or behaves as if they know things, when there doesn’t appear to be much justification for that, maybe you should think twice or thrice about taking that advice. Oh, that was a beautiful rhyme.
John: I really liked the “twice or thrice.”
Craig: “Taking that advice.”
John: I’m trying to apply this advice to my own life and trying to think about where am I looking for experts, where I don’t necessarily know if I’m seeking the most qualified person. I can’t immediately link to mine, but I’m sure there have been cases where I’ll reach the person who is accessible, the person who I can easily find on Twitter, and assume they’re an expert on a topic because I just don’t know it, like economics or macroeconomics. I just don’t know, and so I will tend to believe a person who can passionately defend their point of view, even if I don’t have the broad experience of even being able to judge whether they are an expert or not.
Craig: There’s a little danger there, because passion is not necessarily an indication of correctness. It’s just conviction. So many other careers and industries have credentials. Credentials themselves can be extraordinarily misleading. There are plenty of people with a PhD after their names who don’t deserve it or aren’t any good at anything.
If you are looking for an opinion on health, exercise, economics, politics, clothing, anything, in a lot of industries you will find some sort of credential that might help. If somebody is a professor of economics at Wharton, they probably know a bunch. At least you wouldn’t be an idiot for thinking they did. If somebody random on Twitter is going on about, “Here’s an incredible thread you need to hear and need to read, because this will make everything make sense. 1/323,” then you’re like, “Oh god, maybe not.”
John: It’s tough. I do find myself gravitating towards folks who have not only had a consistent opinion for a long period of time but clearly are curious, and they’re actually still trying to explore and not even defend their opinions but challenge their own opinions. I hope that we’ve done some of that on this podcast, because I think if you go back 10 years, we’ve been consistent, but we’ve also grown and changed on some opinions.
Craig: Yeah, of course.
John: You had written no television when we started this podcast.
Craig: That’s right. How many times did I say that the Academy would never let me in?
John: Hey, you were wrong. Craig was wrong.
Craig: I was just flat out wrong. We have changed our minds plenty of times. I’ve changed yours, and you’ve changed mine. We also, I think, do a pretty good job of trying to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and interrogate our own internal biases and the natural slants that we may have in our own mind that would perhaps lead us a bit astray. We’re not perfect in that regard, but we’re trying. I’ll just come back to that word again. It’s humility. You have to be somewhat humble when you give advice.
John: Absolutely. The other thing I will say I’ve noticed is expertise fades after a time. We both can think of screenwriters who really were genuinely top of the game. You talked to them, and it’s like, “Oh, you don’t know how things are going right now,” and they’ve lost the thread. One of the things that I think has been good about us doing this podcast and continually talking to the new folks who are doing this job is we’re staying a little more current on where things really are at.
Craig: We do try, and we are helped by all the people who come on the show, but it’s also just as important for us to say, “I don’t know.” People ask me a lot about writing rooms, and I’m always very quick to say, “I actually don’t know.”
John: No experience.
Craig: I just don’t know. It’s not the way I do it, so I’m not going to give you an opinion. People ask me about mini rooms and span and all the rest of it. I’m like, “I’ve gotta put my hand up. Not an expert about that.”
John: In the episodes you missed this last year, I asked a lot of stuff about rooms, just because I was so fascinated the different ways people were running their rooms. There’s not one right answer. There’s a bunch of different ways that work. The consistent thread I got from showrunners was you need to pick the way that it’s going to help you create the show you need to create.
Craig: Simple as that. It’s good advice.
John: I see on the Workflowy here that Megana Has a Question, which is my favorite segment.
John and Craig: Megana Has a Question.
John: What’s your question, Megana?
Megana: My question is, how do you guys unwind or go to sleep after a good writing session or when you have that sort of rare moment of creative inspiration?
Craig: I love the amount of mistaken premises in this question. There’s like a hundred mistaken… For instance, the idea that I ever go, “That was a good writing session.” That never happens.
Megana: To give you some context, this past week, I feel like I finally figured out something, and the experience and how exhilarating it was so exciting to me, I could not get to sleep for hours.
Craig: Wow.
Megana: I imagine that you deal with that a lot.
Craig: No. Here’s what I deal with. I deal with misery, and then when I have that moment of inspiration and clarity, it just gets me back to where everyone else’s normal is.
John: Aw.
Craig: There is no high.
Megana: Do we have a wah-wah sound effect?
Craig: We can. Ready? Wah-wah.
John: That was very well done.
Craig: Thank you.
John: You’re your own sad trombone.
Craig: I’m a human sad trombone.
John: Megana, I totally recognize what you’re going through, so ignore Craig.
Craig: You’re healthy.
John: Even this last week, while I was in Wyoming, I had that moment of creative inspiration on this project that’s been maybe 15 years percolating in the back of the brain. I was like, “Oh, that’s how I do it.” It’s 3 in the morning. I wake up, and I know how to do this thing. It’s tough. I was up for a long time.
What’s helpful for me is, I think I just open the notes app on my phone, vomit it out as much as I could get out there, just so it was out of my brain. Once it was out of my brain, I didn’t feel responsible for keeping it circling, then I could go back to sleep. Respect that something’s trying to get out of you. Get it out of you. Then you know it’s there, and you can be joyful about it in the morning, but you can go back to sleep.
Craig: I find these days the only thing that apparently helps me unwind and go to sleep after whatever my day is half of an edible, five milligrams total.
John: This is a thing you learned over the course of 10 years.
Craig: Exactly.
Megana: Craig, maybe you don’t feel that after a writing session, but your show’s about to come out, and I can already tell there’s going to be a great reception. There’s going to be so much excitement around it.
Craig: Oh god, [inaudible 00:30:57].
Megana: I’m knocking on wood, which will solve all of that superstition.
Craig: Fair.
Megana: How are you going to go to sleep after that? Because I already know I’m not going to be able to go to sleep after watching the first episode.
Craig: First of all, that’s very flattering. You might fall asleep in the middle of the first episode. You don’t know. Boy, I’m bad at self-promotion. I’m certainly looking forward to it coming out. I think if I’m at a lot of jangly adrenaline, that may be a night where my good old friend Ambien comes to tuck me in, because boy, that’ll just cut through any tension. It’s all anxiety for me. It’s just anxiety, because I have anxiety. It’s the way it goes. I’m very jangly. I’m a bit scared right now, even though I love the show and HBO loves the show and everybody so far that’s watched it has been really happy.
John: Megana, one thing that’s really helpful that Craig’s doing right now is he’s labeling the emotion. He’s labeling his anxiety. He’s labeling exactly what he’s feeling. As you’re up and you’re not able to get to sleep, try putting some words for how you’re feeling, so not just excited. What is it that is causing you to be up and ah? Is it anxiety about the thing? Is it excitement? Is it joy? What is it?
Megana: That’s a good question. I guess it’s a fear that I will never have that feeling again.
Craig: Oh, good.
John: That’s insightful.
Craig: Now this I understand, finally. I was waiting for this, because normally, I feel like Megana and I are both-
Megana: We do relate emotionally totally.
Craig: We just wade around in the misery pool and then bump into each other every now and then, and you’re like, “Oh, you’re still here.” That I totally get. Believe me. Listen.
Megana: I just don’t want this to stop, because I’ll probably never have a moment of clarity again.
Craig: That’s a great fear. I get that fear completely. Completely. Right now, I’m afraid about writing another season, because I’m like, “I love this season. How am I going to do that again?” I don’t know. I don’t know.
Megana: Exactly. Not that I can relate to that.
John: I totally hear what both of you are saying. I totally get that as valid. It’s just not been my experience at all.
Craig: No, you’re much happier with yourself. You are.
John: I am.
Craig: You are.
John: While we were doing the Big Fish musical, we had these talk backs on Wednesday after the matinee. It’s all the old people who come to the matinee. Then there’d be a talk back. Some of the actors and some of the people involved in the production would talk to these old people afterwards. We were talking about the show. I’m there. I can picture two actors who are behind me. This woman raises her hand. She goes, “Why are you so confident?” I was like, “Because I am.”
There’s a moment in Bros. There’s a really good speech in Bros where Billy Eichner is basically [inaudible 00:33:58] why are you confident. It’s like, because I’ve had to fake being confident for so much of my life that I just get good at it, and I somehow convinced myself to be confident, like, “Oh, it’s going to work out. I’m going to be able to solve this thing. I’ll be able to write that scene tomorrow. It’s fine.”
Megana: Wow.
Craig: Oh my god. They would have never asked. They would have been like, “What’s wrong with you? Are you okay? Do you need a hug?”
Megana: Aw.
John: Aw. Be born a gay, closeted child, and then all your problems will be solved.
Craig: I wonder what happens when you’re born a gay, closeted Jewish child, because then it’s like the war begins.
Megana: I do think this gets back to who should you trust, because the distinction that you make sometimes, Craig, between core pride and core shame, which I really like, the people who are so tempting to trust are people who have core pride and can just say these things really confidently, whereas you and I are up all night being like, “We’ll never write again.”
Craig: It’s true. I also think, Megana, sometimes that the people who have, I don’t know if it’s core pride, but sometimes there are people who know how to trigger your core shame as they’re doling out advice. In fact, that’s their con artistry. Then anyone that can trigger your core shame, you’re trying to make them happy now.
John: Cult leader.
Craig: I am as susceptible as anyone to somebody who says something bad about me to me. They already become way more valid in my mind than anyone else. That’s not right. That’s incorrect. I know enough to know to not go down that path and let that happen to me. My instinct, inerringly, is to over-reward people who are critical and under-reward people who are praising. I’m not John.
John: That’s true. Wow, what a therapy session this has been.
Craig: “Why are you so confident?” I love that lady. Was that my mom? That was probably my mom.
John: “Why are you so confident?” I think it was your mom, actually.
Craig: “What’s wrong with you?”
John: “Don’t you know this is all going to fail and burn?”
Craig: “You’ll end up dead.”
John: “You’ll still die.”
Craig: “You’ll still die.” That was a great question, Megana.
John: Yeah, nice question.
Craig: Good job.
Megana: Thanks, guys.
John: Let’s return to some listener questions. How about James? He has a question about raising kids in LA.
Megana: James is an aspiring screenwriter currently working as an editor to pay the bills. He says, “My wife Alex and I have been living on the west side of LA for about five years now, but we’re thinking of starting a family. It’s time to move to what will hopefully be our forever home. Alex is pitching that we move to New York to be closer to her family, but I’d prefer to stay in LA. It goes without saying that there are myriad fundamental differences between living in New York versus LA, but I’d like your advice about parenting in particular.
“One point of disagreement between me and Alex is the idea that our children will be significantly impacted by what city they grow up in. Alex believes that East Coast culture inherently shapes children into more grounded, worldly humans. She fears that children brought up in LA are more likely to be vacuous, superficial, and materialistic. She also feels it’s harder to forge truly deep and meaningful friendships here.
“While I think Alex is being reductive, I can’t say I fully disagree with her. I believe there’s a certain type of person who lives in LA, namely those who work in the entertainment industry, who reek of superficiality and who don’t understand the difference between making friends and networking. If those people are sending their kids to the same school as our kids, then our kids will be exposed to their values, right? John and Craig, what has been your experience raising children in Los Angeles?”
Craig: Lot’s to go through here.
John: Lots to go through here. I don’t know that we can fully resolve the LA versus New York battle, because that has never come up before. First competition to ever happen between LA and New York and which is a better place to raise a family.
You can raise great kids in either place. Are you talking New York City, the city itself, or somewhere out in the suburbs? They’re very different experiences. Are you talking about staying in the west side or going to the Valley? Because those are different experiences too. I think you’re right to be thinking about where do you want to move to have kids. My advice would be, wherever you go, if you could move someplace where your kid can go to the public school, you’re going to get rid of a lot of your worries about the superficiality and grossness of the place.
Craig: James, I’m going to go backwards through your points one by one quickly to get to the one that matters the most I think to me as I read through it. First, I raise my kids in La Cañada. It’s in LA, basically. It’s between Glendale and Pasadena. My kids went to the public schools here. It is not like West LA. Very few people in the entertainment business in La Cañada. It’s mostly just lawyers and some financial industry people and just various people.
There is an emphasis on raising kids in a healthy, nurturing, kind environment, where there are just decent pro-social values. I don’t mean to say family values. I mean legitimately, it’s progressive. They’re trying to do the right thing. I like that. It is doable. There are other places doing it. It’s not just La Cañada.
I grew up in New York. My kids grew up in LA. I have a little bit of the benefit of that perspective. I can tell you that, you think there’s a certain type of person who lives in LA, reeking of superficiality and don’t understand the difference between making friends and networking, and I will point right to the entire industry of finance in New York, which is horrifying. It’s horrifying. Apologies to everybody in it, but the culture of that industry is pretty brutal.
You want to talk about reeking of superficiality. At least in the entertainment business, we’re making stuff for people to watch. In the financial industry, they’re just making money. That’s it. Their job is to just make money. To me, you make money to do the thing, but they’re like, “No, the thing is to make money.” There’s an enormous amount of superficiality in all that.
If you’re around the superficial people, it’s going to happen. New York, full of them. LA, full of them. I disagree with Alex when she thinks that children in LA are more likely to be vacuous, superficial, materialistic. I went to school in Manhattan for a couple years, and oh boy, I met some winners.
Here’s the thing that you said that I went, “Oh.” Alex says she wants to be in New York to be closer to her family. I gotta tell you, if you are starting a family and having a child or maybe prospectively having more than one child, being near an extended family that you can get along with, and I’m assuming that you do, is a huge bonus.
John: I agree.
Craig: It’s a massive bonus. It will help you and your wife tremendously. It’s definitely worth considering, just for that alone. While you may engage in the progressive male feminist fantasy that you are going to be as much of a nurturer as your wife is, I doubt it. I just doubt it. I think that what will happen is, without you even trying, you’re going to naturally just imagine that some of this stuff is going to be more on her shoulders. I’m not accusing you of anything, James. I’m just saying it’s going to happen, and then she’s going to need the extra help, not you.
My suggestion is to think less about what’s going to happen to your kids, because if you’re good people, and you can put your kids near good people, they’ll be good people. I would think more about who’s going to help you as you raise these kids.
John: I think the accessibility of your wife’s family could be a huge boon and probably a reason for considering New York over Los Angeles. I agree with you there. In terms of you’re an aspiring screenwriter just working as an editor right now. You can do that in New York. You’ll get a job. It’ll be fine.
Craig: Yeah, completely.
John: We should say though, Craig, you’re proselytizing La Cañada, and you loved it, but you are moving out of La Cañada.
Craig: That’s right. My youngest is in her senior year of high school. She’s going to be going to Berklee College of Music in the fall.
John: Fantastic.
Craig: In Boston.
Megana: Congratulations.
Craig: I didn’t do it. She did it. I salute her.
John: You made a James and Alex choice to move to a neighborhood you wanted to raise kids in, and now you’re done.
Craig: We raised kids. We’re done, and now we’re leaving, because somebody once joked about La Cañada, you don’t move there for the nightlife. We have friends obviously in La Cañada. Most of my friends are more near where you are, including you. That made sense to do a little switcheroo and head down there.
John: Borrow a cup of sugar from Aline. She’s right down the street.
Craig: It’s more likely that she will have to borrow the sugar from me-
John: That’s true.
Craig: … because everybody knows that my pantry is well stocked with the staples.
John: Gotta have them all.
Craig: Megana, if you need a staple, you come talk to me.
Megana: Like flour and sugar?
Craig: Oh, it goes well beyond simple flour and sugar. What kind of sugar? Confectioner’s sugar, dark brown, golden brown, light brown, demerara? Yes, I’ve had them all.
Megana: I’m excited that you’re moving closer to us.
Craig: You need rice? Basmati, short grain, long grain? What would you like? I have it all. Just come on over. Knock knock.
John: Fantastic. I think this was good advice. I don’t want to jinx us, so let’s go right ahead to our One Cool Things.
Craig: Great.
John: My One Cool Thing, I actually have two of them, the first is a video by Erik Grankvist, who’s a Swedish kid who moved to the wilds of Sweden and spent three years building a log cabin. It’s great. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s so good. I watched the whole thing. There’s no dialog in it the whole time. Craig, you probably read My Side of the Mountain growing up, didn’t you?
Craig: I love that book.
John: I have tried to get the rights to it several times. I’m honestly not sure it needs to be a movie now that this movie exists.
Craig: Tough movie. It’s a tough one.
John: Honestly, this video is probably better than the movie would be, because this guy, he just starts building a cabin on his grandparents’ property, which is really basically the plot of My Side of the Mountain. Instead of getting a falcon, he gets a little puppy. He sees puppy grow up into a full dog while he’s doing all this stuff. It’s really impressive. I’d recommend this. Honestly, Megana, if you have trouble sleeping sometime, you’re going to watch this. This is going to make you feel happy about things. It’s anxiety-relieving.
Megana: Oh, nice. Thank you.
Craig: Megana, have you read My Side of the Mountain?
Megana: I thought I did, but I think I’m confusing it with a different book, so no. I feel like I’ve absorbed it.
John: There’s a book called Hatchet which is actually similar.
Megana: Did you say Hatchet? I was thinking of Hatchet.
Craig: I think you should read it.
John: A kid runs away.
Craig: It’s survivalism. It’s teenage survivalism. I love that stuff.
John: It’s good stuff. It’s good.
Craig: What else you got?
John: My other thing is, I have to do a lot of screenshots for stuff, for work stuff, but screenwriting stuff, but also a lot for the app development stuff. I have this utility called Skitch that I love, which is really good for taking a screenshot and being able to send it to somebody or do the little annotations on it. It basically became unsupported, and I really missed it. I found something that was much, much better, and it’s absolutely free. It’s called Shottr. Shottr.cc is where you get it. It’s a Mac utility. You just want to take a little screenshot of a piece of your screen and send it to somebody or-
Craig: Wow.
John: … drag it into something, so, so good. It’ll tell you what colors are in the selection. It’s really, really smart. I salute the makers of Shottr. Everyone should use it, because it’s just so much better than the built-in screenshots on Mac OS.
Craig: Damn. I love this. I’m going to check this out for sure.
John: Do you screenshot things often, Craig?
Craig: Constantly, yeah.
John: Do you find yourself [crosstalk 00:45:57]?
Craig: I’m basically a Command Shift 4 guy. That’s fine.
John: Replace your Command Shift 4 with this. Basically just map the same thing to that and it’s better.
Craig: It’s just better. It’s more functionality.
John: More functionality, and also it won’t litter your desktop with a bunch of screenshots that you don’t want anymore.
Craig: Oh god, tell me about it, although I did remap my screenshots to a different folder, which you can do.
John: You can do that in this too.
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a simple article this week in Wired, one of my favorite publications, with a headline that grabbed me. Oh boy, it was like it was designed for me. The headline is “Humans Walk Weird.” It should be weirdly, but fine. “Scientists May Finally Know Why. Humanity’s peculiar gait has long confounded engineers and biomechanists, but it might be one of nature’s clever tricks.”
It’s stuff that I never thought about, because I didn’t really understand. There is this weird thing that we do when we plant our leg, before we swing it to the next step, our leg bounces twice. It bends and extends when our foot touches down and then again just before take-up. Why do we bounce twice? Never been clear until now. Scientists at the University of Munich may have found an answer. It all basically comes down to our foot, which is really weird. Really weird. In the Animal Kingdom, it’s on its own. Of course, all this connects to evolutionary biology, as you would imagine it would. It’s a short article, but it’s a really interesting one. I haven’t thought about it as I’ve been walking, but I want to, because it’s just a very strange thing to think that our walk is weird. Even our walk is unique among the animals.
John: I’m sure the folks that listen to this podcast who work in animation are familiar with how strange people walk and how you’ve built a believable walk cycle for a character you’re trying to animate. I love evolutionary biology, because you recognize humans are strange for so many reasons independently of our big brains and our ability to speak and think and organize societies. Our hands are just so remarkable. The fact that we can swim so well, as primates we can swim so well, and if you’ve ever read the book Born to Run, we can just run so fast and so long, so much more than any other primate, but really most mammals. We just have these physical abilities that are so special and strange. It’s not just our brains that got us here.
Craig: No, but it’s our brains that keep us here. That’s our show.
John: That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Yeah, it is.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: As always.
John: Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. It features an ode to Sexy Craig.
Craig: What? Who? Who did you say?
John: Nica Brooke?
Craig: No.
John: Sexy Craig?
Craig: Oh, yeah.
John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.
Craig: I’ve got an outro.
John: That’s also the place where you can send questions.
Craig: You like outros?
John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting.
Craig: Inneresting.
John: It has lots of links to things about writing.
Craig: Oh, yeah.
John: We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments.
Craig: You like back-episodes?
John: Remember to use the promo code ONION to save a ton on your annual subscription.
Craig: I’ll give you a promo code.
John: Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun episode.
Megana: Thank you.
John: A useful, therapeutic episode.
Craig: Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig and Megana, I had to break this to you, but Los Angeles will at some point suffer a huge disaster, a natural disaster, and I don’t know what to do about it. I kind of know what to do about it, just not a lot. Obviously, one of the things that could befall Los Angeles is the big one, a giant earthquake. Looking at the stats, within the next 30 years, probability of a big, big earthquake, 60%. That would be an earthquake measuring 6.7, which is Northridge, 46% earthquake measuring 7, which is big, really big. I heard that gasp. A 31% chance, basically a one third chance that an earthquake measuring 7.5, which is really big, can happen in Los Angeles.
Craig: That’s scary, but let’s also point out that when they say an earthquake measuring magnitude 7.5 in the Los Angeles region, the Los Angeles region is enormous.
John: LA is giant.
Craig: It’s giant.
John: It’s giant. I love the maps that show the population of LA County is bigger than almost the entire rest of the United States. It’s crazy how many people live in Los Angeles versus everywhere else.
Craig: It is a sprawl. It is a geographic sprawl. Having lived through the Northridge earthquake, I do know that a 6.7 thrust quake, as we experienced there, was very frightening to ride out near the Beverly Center, which is far away from Northridge and right by Megana’s house, but we survived.
John: We did.
Craig: Very few buildings fell down. One apartment building in Northridge collapsed. One. Now, there were some overpasses that fell down. The 10 overpass by La Cienega and I believe Fairfax fell down.
John: There was also one on the west side. It’s past the 405 freeway basically, because I was living in Palms, and suddenly my commute to Santa Monica got actually faster because no one could get on the 10 freeway except for me right by the 405.
Craig: Right, because you’re in between the trouble. Chunks of the Beverly Center fell off. I remember that.
John: [crosstalk 00:52:17].
Megana: Oh my god.
Craig: If the Northridge earthquake hadn’t happened at 4 in the morning, a lot more people would’ve died.
John: It would’ve been bad.
Craig: Even then, you think about the amount of buildings in Los Angeles, which is just insane, for so many of them to make it through and for so few people to be seriously injured, we’re fairly well prepared.
John: I think that part of the reason we’re well prepared. Because we’ve had these earthquakes, we actually have building standards that are actually pretty good.
Craig: Really good.
John: A giant earthquake could do some crazy, crazy, damage, absolutely 100% true, but we’re actually built for the Northridge earthquakes.
Craig: Yes, we are. New construction is very well designed for earthquakes. Our very tall buildings downtown, quite a few of them are on rollers, so they’re able to move back and forth, which will be very scary when you’re on top floor, because you’ll be, “Whoa. Whoa.” What isn’t happening is the bottom isn’t fixed where the top is swaying, which is what ends up toppling buildings. I will be scared during an earthquake, but I’m not scared of earthquakes.
John: Now that we’ve made it through the earthquake fears, my new fear from this last week, my friend Miles quote tweeted a thing about ARk floods. Craig, are you familiar with ARk floods?
Craig: No.
John: This is the new thing to be worried about. It’s a real, genuine thing. These have happened before in California. Essentially, what happens is two big storms. One comes from the north. One comes from the south. Basically, the river of moisture comes from the south, and they get jammed up over California. It just rains and rains and rains and rains.
If you look in the Workflowy, you’ll see ARkstorm flood areas, which is basically what happened in 1862. There were inland lakes. Basically, the whole central part of California got flooded. Those canyons, they became a landlocked sea for a time. There wasn’t as much of Los Angeles at the time, but it got wiped out. I think it’s worth thinking about that, because I know the same degree we’ve prepared for earthquakes, we haven’t really prepared for floods in Los Angeles as much, because it just hasn’t happened to us recently. I think it’s causing me some concern as it rains so much this season.
Craig: That’s scary, but what are we going to do about it? I’d love to know.
John: Craig, what are you doing right now for emergency preparation? You’re obviously moving to this new house. Are you thinking about how many days of water and food and stuff like that?
Craig: Yes. I have a decent supply of canned goods that I always make sure we have on hand, along with some basic emergency supplies, knives, strike-all matches, tarps, blankets. In La Cañada I have a generator, which runs on natural gas, but if that gets disturbed, it also has a backup propane tank. At the new place, I’m not sure where I’d put the generator, but I’m thinking about it. I do also have large 50-gallon storage bins for drinking water, and I have water purification tablets.
John: In both places you have a pool, which you can use for water as well for a time.
Craig: The name of the game is how can you survive comfortably for a week. That’s what you’re going for, a week, because if emergency services, FEMA, the government can’t help you after seven days, you’re screwed. It’s over.
John: As I even put this on the Workflowy, I realized that the first time we talked about COVID was in a Bonus Segment. I don’t want to somehow manifest an ARk flood by putting it-
Craig: Oh, you thought that’s how that worked?
John: That’s how it works. We are the reason COVID happened, that it became what it did. One difference I would point out though, Craig, is that with an earthquake, we’re always prepared, like, “Okay, you’re going to bunker down. You’re going to stay there until things get better.” In a flood, you may just have to leave, because your house may be underwater.
Craig: Yes, that’s right.
John: Preparing to get out is a thing too. I’ve never thought about having a boat, a canoe. I guess there might be some parts of Los Angeles. I’m up on a hill, so I don’t think about it so much. There’d be some parts of Los Angeles where it wouldn’t be the worst idea to have some sort of inflatable raft someplace.
Craig: You’re not on a significant hill, meaning if you have a massive flood that is turning areas into lakes, the fact that you’re maybe 20 feet above the street may not be enough to save you.
John: Thanks. Thanks.
Craig: You’re saying you’re going to keep a canoe?
John: Megana [crosstalk 00:57:03] come over here.
Megana: That is my emergency plan. Now that Craig has this pantry-
Craig: I was going to say, I have all the staples.
Megana: I’m just going to be swimming from Craig’s place to John’s place.
Craig: Which actually is adorable. I love that.
John: It’s nice.
Craig: There won’t be any internet, so I can write notes to John, and you would just swim them over to him.
John: To end this on a happier note, I will say one of the best memories of the Northridge earthquake was that power went out. Everything was out. That was pre-internet. Phones were out too. I had just started dating a guy. My car, I got it out of the garage. I drove it over to his place. He was there. I could check in. He was fine. We just hung out for that weekend and saw his friends. We were sitting on rooftops watching transformers blow. It was kind of romantic in a snow day kind of way, so I do have some good memories from it.
Megana: That’s horrifying.
John: No, it wasn’t horrifying. It was kind of romantic in a way that-
Megana: It is romantic, but you were just watching transformers blow?
John: The end of the world. Yeah, they pop.
Craig: I’d like to point out that you said that’s horrifying and John’s rebuttal was, “No, I repeat it was romantic.”
John: Romantic.
Craig: “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. Clearly, I said… ” I can see how that’s fair.
John: I don’t mean to invalidate your feeling there. I would say in my experience it was romantic.
Craig: I can see that. I remember that sound actually, if you watch the first episode of The Last of Us.
Megana: How do you know that it’s okay to travel though if you don’t have your phone?
Craig: We used to just do it all the time, Megana.
John: We just did it.
Craig: Megana, literally every time anyone traveled anywhere ever, it was without a phone. Ever. Anywhere. Everyone.
Megana: I deserve that.
John: We grew up in a time where there weren’t phones.
Craig: Everywhere.
John: Everything will be okay. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s going to be fine.
Craig: Everything will be okay. Now John, just to be clear, because I want to understand this, you’re saying that you’re going to keep a canoe or some sort of kayak on your property so you can just get out there?
John: Mike has not heard this yet. That’s why I was thinking something inflatable, just so that we can use it if need be, but store it in this giant storage closet that holds our giant bucket of food and our canned goods.
Craig: The food bucket. Megana, I don’t want to be a downer, but it does concern me a little bit that you’re going to be swimming back and forth between my house and John’s, because a lot of the water is going to be contaminated with raw human sewage.
Megana: John has a pool float.
John: The pool float, yeah, it’s [crosstalk 00:59:34].
Craig: As long as you can float down shit river, you’ll be thrilled. So much fun.
John: We need to figure out a plan for chemical toilets, because in a flood situation, toilets won’t flush anymore.
Craig: In a flood situation, the toilet is the world. That’s what the toilet is.
John: All the world is a toilet.
Craig: Just go ahead and jump in the water, wave hi to Megana, take care of it.
Megana: Wow. Wow. I’m not going to be able to sleep after this conversation.
John: I’m so sorry.
Craig: You will. You will. You’re going to be fine. Megana, don’t worry.
John: If you click through the links, you’ll find that La Cañada Flintridge is singled out as being a very dangerous place in a flood scenario.
Craig: That’s why we’re moving. La Cañada is generally not considered at all a flood problem because we have flood channels and we are 1,600 feet above sea level. However, mudslides could theoretically be a problem for certain areas, and they have been. Our street is not a mud flow problem area, because there’s a rather large valley between the hills and where our street is. There are other areas west of us that got absolutely hammered. Homes got wiped out by some mudslides when we had severe rainstorms a few years ago. It’s definitely a thing.
John: Craig, would you ever live in the Hills? Would you live in the Hollywood Hills?
Craig: Never. Never, ever, ever.
John: We have friends who live up there. I would never do it.
Craig: Forget earthquakes and the ARk floods. Forget all that. How about just I cut myself badly chopping vegetables, I need an ambulance. They’re going to have to squeeze through the narrow thing going up. You ever notice in the Hills it’s like, “Oh, I live on Waterton Place. It’s off of Waterton Avenue, which connects with Waterton Street.” You’re like, “What? Why?”
John: If you want to have a party in the Hills, just give up, because no one will be able to park anywhere.
Craig: No, you can’t park. It’s brutal. I understand why people live there. I truly, truly do.
John: Gorgeous views.
Craig: Melissa and I have always been in absolute lockstep on this. Never would we ever live in the Hills.
John: Megana, you’re going to parties in the Hills all the time.
Craig: All the time.
John: Would you live there?
Megana: I have also made the mistake of driving to parties in the Hills. Also, you don’t get any service there, so it’s not like you can call an Uber or anything either.
John: That’s the problem too. We have friends who will say, “Oh, we’re wrapping up here, so time to leave.” They’re like, “Oh, great, I’ll call an Uber.” They’re like, “Oh god, you’re going to be here another hour, because someone will refuse to come get you.”
Craig: Look, I’m from New York. Again, I like a nice grid system. Streets at right angles are lovely.
John: They are. Plus, the Hills always burns. It’s always fires.
Craig: They burn. They burn.
John: Where you are in La Cañada, that could’ve theoretically burned too. How close did the fires ever come to you guys?
Craig: Very. There was the station fire. Oh jeez, that was, I don’t know, maybe 13 years ago or so. We were evacuated. Our home was never threatened by fire, but the smoke was unbearable. You couldn’t even see. I did go to the very top of my street, because my street is on quite a steep incline. Like I said, my house is about 1,600 feet above sea level. There’s probably another hundred feet of elevation or more to get to the very end of the street. When I got up there, I did see… You know when there’s a utility pole and the steel wire that goes to the ground on an angle to it, to anchor it? That steel wire was partially melted. The fire got that close.
Megana: Oh my god.
Craig: We definitely had to leave. You know what? I think it was more like 15 years ago, because I remember we were like, “Okay, we’ve got an hour to just start packing crap up. In case our house burns down, what do you bring?” At the time, Melissa just started packing these large photo albums into our car. I was like, “Photo albums? Who cares?” Now there’s no photo album. There’s no nothing. Just take your laptop. You’ve got everything on your laptop. Everything. Megana, we used to have photo albums.
Megana: I know both of those words separately.
Craig: I know. Imagine a book, a big, huge, massive book, and on each page, it’s just blank cardboard and then this nasty plastic film that you would peel back and it’d go sss, like that.
John: That eventually gets yellowed.
Craig: That’s what it would sound like. Then you’d stick your printed photos on the page and then lower the plastic back down.
Megana: Wait, but I do know what a photo album is. I was just kidding. I’m not that young.
Craig: Megana, let me explain again.
John: Craig, I gotta say-
Craig: I don’t think you get it.
John: Your sound department must love you for the Foley, because clearly they’re just like, “Craig, we need you to come in and do the Foley for the show.” You’re just like, “I’ll make it all with my mouth sounds.”
Craig: I’m going to tell you. I will tell you. I will give this podcast an exclusive story about The Last of Us following the completion of its airing. I will say I’m all over that thing.
John: He is his own Foley.
Craig: When you hear it, you’ll be like, “What?” I’m not talking about my voice. I do have an appearance by voice at one point, but sound effects-wise, when it’s over, just you wait.
Megana: I can’t wait to see that in the credits.
Craig: It’s not in the credits.
Megana: It’s just right there.
John: Only Scriptnotes Premium Members know about this.
Craig: Exclusive to Scriptnotes.
John: Love it. Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you, Megana.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Megana: Bye.
Links:
- The Last of Us premieres on HBO 1/15/23 at 6pm!
- Can “The Last of Us” Break the Curse of Bad Video-Game Adaptations? by Alex Barasch for the New Yorker
- Use PROMO code ONION for $10 off an annual Scriptnotes Membership email help@supportingcast.fm if you run into any issues
- Scriptnotes, Episode 574: Difficult Scenes, Transcript
- Erik Grankvist’s Video of Building a Log Cabin
- Shottr screenshot app
- Humans Walk Weird. Scientists May Finally Know Why by Katrina Miller
- The Big One – Probability Earthquake Will Occur in Los Angeles
- ARK Storm and The Great Flood of 1862
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nica Brooke (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 582: Who Can You Trust? Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: No, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 580 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a How Would This Be a Movie case study. I’ll be talking with screenwriter William Nicholson about his script for Thirteen Lives, following the attempted rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. We’ll get into issues of life rights, competing projects, narrative point of view, cultural sensitivity, and what happens when you and the director don’t agree about what kind of movie you’re trying to make. Craig, it’s a really good conversation. I was sorry to not have you there, but sometimes the one-on-one things are better when it’s just one on one.
Craig: What I’m hearing is that it was a really good conversation because I wasn’t there.
John: It was a good conversation. Also, I saw the movie. I think I was vaguely aware of the actual real-life rescue. You remember that one when it was happening, right?
Craig: Of course. I remember when it was happening. I remember Elon Musk doing what he seems to do on a daily basis now, which is say something incredibly stupid, so there was that.
John: There was that.
Craig: They got the kids out, which was great.
John: Yeah, which is great. I knew that the kids got out. We did talk a little bit about knowing the ending of the movie. Before we sit down and watch it, you know the kids get out. The specifics were actually a lot different than I realized or than I heard reported in the moment. It was really a question of point of view. Do you talk about it from the family’s point of view, from the kids inside the cave’s point of view? At what point do you reveal the kids inside the cave are alive? How do you reflect the balance of worldwide attention versus the actual very small, local story on the ground? It was a good conversation about the choices he made but the other choices that could’ve been made.
Craig: Nice.
John: Nice. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about our non-work goals and aspirations for 2023. We are canonically not a resolution show. We’re not going to promise to do a thing. I always like to think about stuff we’d like to do more of or less of.
Craig: Great.
John: Let’s be thinking about that for a Bonus. We’re going to ask Megana too.
Craig: As long as we’re asking Megana, then we’ll be fine.
Megana Rao: I have to think of something.
Craig: Get going, Megana.
John: Some follow-up from last week. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We were answering a question about variable frame rates. I said that I was going to watch Avatar right after we record it, and I would be able to tell you what I thought of the variable frame rates. They mostly worked for me. The times that you go into really high frame rate stuff, it tends to be underwater. There’s a lot of underwater. The underwater stuff is amazing and beautiful in the movie. There are other moments where I did notice things were shifting, but it’s also hard to tell, because it’s a 3D movie, so everything’s a little bit weird anyway. I don’t know, if I was watching a 2D movie, I might not have had the same experience with the high frame rate stuff.
Craig: How are the glasses these days? Feeling good?
John: So much better.
Craig: Good.
John: The glasses are pretty lightweight. This is my first time wearing them with a mask as well. A little trick for people is that if your glasses start to fog up, just pull your glasses a little bit further away, further down the bridge of your nose, and they won’t fog up so much.
Craig: That’s a good tip, or get Lasik.
John: I’m talking about the 3D glasses.
Craig: Oh, the 3D glasses. You have to wear the 3D glasses. I guess that makes sense. It would fog up. Maybe in a movie like Avatar, the fog might add a little something.
John: No, the fog will not add. James Cameron does not want you to have fog on your glasses.
Craig: Interesting.
John: He will come by and he will wipe off the fog on your glasses.
Craig: He does seem like somebody that would more likely just smack the mask off your face.
John: Interestingly, he was supposed to come to the Q and A after this, and all the chairs were filled and-
Craig: He got COVID.
John: He got COVID. He got COVID 20 minutes before. [inaudible 00:03:33] positive test 20 minutes before.
Craig: That’s very convenient COVID to get, by the way. There have been times where I’m like, “Come on, COVID.”
John: Craig is scratching a little line with a little thin Sharpie there like, “Oh, sorry, can’t go.”
Craig: Yeah, “I don’t want to do this thing. Oh, dammit.”
John: I really enjoyed the story in Avatar 2. It didn’t feel like three hours. I think what impressed me most is it’d been a long time since I’d seen a 3D movie, because I just didn’t really care about 3D. This was the first 3D movie I’ve seen that didn’t make me go blind at a certain point. There’s something that happens to me in 3D movies where my brain just stops being able to process what I’m seeing. In this, it didn’t happen. I felt like I could see everything [inaudible 00:04:14].
Craig: That’s good. There is a diminishing return. Watching 2D stuff, you begin to forget pretty quickly that it’s just a flat thing on a screen. Your mind turns it into 3D basically. Similarly, your mind turns 3D into whatever the 2D version of 3D is. It all just in my mind turns into the same experience, unless they’re doing the tricks, like something flying at your face. Otherwise, meh.
John: I think Cameron obviously couldn’t do whatever he wants to do, because it’s all virtually filmed and stuff, so that he could build shots after the fact to work properly to brain in 3D, which is helpful, because so much of the 3D we see these days was really shot to be 2D and then they do it in post.
Craig: They do a conversion.
John: It’s not the same. Let’s talk to smaller screens. The big news this past couple weeks has been how many shows got chopped off of HBO Max, and things that were already shot, things that were already on the system.
Craig: Gulp.
John: Old things, they’re gone.
Craig: My show’s still there. Yes!
John: Craig, are you checking Chernobyl every moment to see whether-
Craig: I am not checking Chernobyl every moment, but listen, who knows? I don’t understand it. I legitimately don’t understand it. We’ve talked about this before. It seems like there was some sort of tax benefit to merging companies and then offloading some assets or something like that.
John: That one was an example of that, where you could take a big write-off on it and just bury it. It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily going to bury all these things. Patrick Somerville, who came on to talk about Station Eleven, he said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He keeps checking to see if Station Eleven is there. He promises that he will project it on a rock in the Mojave Desert if he has to. These other shows, they’re off HBO Max for right now, but it looks like they’re going to try to put them on some sort of ad-supported system that’s maybe not HBO Max. That could be someplace else. I want to talk a little bit about that, because that’s something we haven’t really gotten into a lot on the show. Megana, I think there’s a question we could frame this with.
Megana: Andy from Seattle asked, “Once a show gets sold from HBO Max to a free, ad-supported streaming television service, will writers and actors start getting residuals as the property starts making active money?”
Craig: They sure will.
John: They will. They’ll get some residuals. It’ll just be a different system for it.
Craig: Yes, but it will be a better system. We will make more money this way.
John: We’ll make more money depending on how it’s set up, because I can imagine two scenarios, which we’ll just set up. First off, HBO could sell it to a place like Pluto or one of the other existing services, in which case there’d be a license fee. That might be good.
Craig: There’s always that. That’s the only way we make money off of residuals. HBO made Chernobyl. Let’s say they put Chernobyl on CBS. The only money HBO gets is the licensing money. The ad money goes to CBS. We don’t get any of that. We just get the licensing money that goes to HBO. That’s the gross. Then the producer’s gross is 20% of that, because we lost many, many years ago. Then we get a percentage of the 20%.
What’s interesting is right now if you make something for a streamer, there is no licensing fee ancillary market. The residuals we get are these weird, imputed things that are not necessarily connected to anything real. You and I are old enough where we wrote movies, and then those movies ended up on TBS with ads in them. We would get pretty decent residual checks from the licensing of those movies to TBS. For writers and directors and actors, this could revitalize the dwindling residuals stream. Creatively, as we’ve discussed, it’s a little disconcerting that you can make a show and it just disappears from something like that. I think it’s gotten everybody a little wigged out, and for good reason. I’m curious. Is Station Eleven available on DVD?
John: Station Eleven does not have DVDs right now.
Craig: How does he have it?
John: I think he’s talking about whatever cut he has off of the non-linear editor. His actual tweet was, “If Station Eleven ever disappears, I promise to purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave Desert and just play it on a loop projected on a rock forever.”
Craig: We’re going to have to download some of these things.
John: I’ll check into it. It’s entirely possible that DVDs were cut for that show. So many of these HBO Max shows have no DVDs. There’s no other physical way to see it. That creative fear is huge. Circling back to the issue of residuals, Chernobyl that’s on HBO Max, you’re still getting residuals, but those residuals right now are based on a declining fee per every year that it’s on the service and based on a certain fixed price. It doesn’t have anything to do with the actual success of the show. It’s just basically from the time it was made it just declines in value after that time. Chernobyl could in theory make more money being licensed someplace else and therefore create more residuals for you.
Craig: It would. It would. I don’t want people to watch it with ads in it, but yeah, it would. It’s really interesting, because what’s happening, this is again financially not necessarily bad news for artists, creatively potentially bad news, is that streamers are suddenly asking the question that all of the rest of us have been asking for a long time, which is, so wait, how do you make money? I know you sell a subscription, but okay, if they’re subscribing, why do you need to make anything more, or do you need to make this much more, or how much stuff do you need to have there, because where does money come from, because in the old days, if you could convert stuff to ad-supported or home video of any format, there was your reason to make more stuff. There’d be additional revenue streams. If all it is is streaming, that’s it. You’ve basically curtailed your own revenue stream as far as I can tell.
John: Your revenue stream is based on the monthly subscribers and the idea that having these vast libraries was going to keep them returning as monthly subscribers.
Craig: Sure, but that is the only revenue stream you’ll ever have, whereas in the old days studios would have ticket sales, airplane rentals, home video, and then eventually pay TV, licensing it to HBO and Showtime, and then eventually ad-supported television on TBS. Let’s just presume everything goes to TBS if it still exists.
John: A thing I’m always confused about when these announcements are first coming out is… Free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST is the abbreviation you’re going to see for that, it’s the same thing as AVOD, so advertising-based video on demand. The difference is that we usually talk about AVOD for things like The Office. If The Office was showing on NBC, and so you’re watching it there, but then a few weeks later it was showing on nbc.com, that was AVOD, and so where studios would show their own things on their own websites.
What’s different now is of course there are streamers that are doing that [inaudible 00:11:18] TV. There’s existing things like Pluto. There’s probably going to be new things presumably coming out of Warner’s that are going to be a service like that. I think figuring out what the appropriate licensing fee is for HBO Max to be selling it to their own service will be an issue.
Craig: That kind of self-dealing has been litigated many, many times before and will continue to be litigated now that it seems to be coming back. Making sweetheart deals with yourself is tricky. You need to sell it for what would be a legally supportable market price. You can’t completely jam people. It will be interesting. I feel like the wheel is turning back in time. We’re heading backwards in time. It’s funny.
Silicon Valley was so behind the explosion of streaming, if you consider Netflix. I consider Netflix to be Silicon Valley-esque. I guess the idea of just the new way of doing things, new media we called it. Meanwhile, what were those companies in Silicon Valley doing? Selling ads on everything. Google is an advertising company. YouTube, which Google owns, is an advertising company. Facebook is an advertising company and so on and so forth. Currently, the aforementioned Elon Musk is flipping out, trying to get more people to advertise on Twitter, because it’s an advertising company. They’ve always been ad-supported, and then somehow we got hoodwinked over here into being like, “No ads. No, we don’t need that. That’s old-school stuff.” I guess if you want to make money, ads.
John: Ads.
Craig: Ads.
John: The answer to the question is, what’s going to happen, hopefully this will be more residuals for the writers involved, but of course, those things actually have to be distributed someplace. I think it’s potentially good news assuming that they actually are putting those things someplace and not just burying them in a hole, which is I think the worry we had originally.
Craig: I could be wrong, but it seems like the things that are getting buried in holes are things that had very low viewership numbers. They’re pulling Westworld off of HBO Max. That’s going to land somewhere. That is be on another platform.
John: That was the marquee property of HBO two or three years ago.
Craig: There’s no question about that. It will be figured out one way or another. I think some of the things that got completely removed were probably… They had said in some article some of the… They mentioned one show. I can’t remember what it was. I think it was animated. Something like only 400 people watched it in a year or something. It was like, okay, I guess-
John: There were back-episodes. They had the whole catalog of Sesame Street. There were some episodes of that show that just no one had watched in-
Craig: No one had watched.
John: Yeah, because who wants to watch a 20-year-old random episode?
Craig: It makes me feel good sometimes to watch Sesame Street.
John: Nice. Let’s get to our main centerpiece of this episode, which is the conversation I had with Bill Nicholson. This is part of a Writers Guild Foundation event. We’ve done a lot of events for the Writers Guild Foundation over the years. There’s going to be a link in the show notes to the video of this whole Zoom interview we did. William Nicholson, Bill Nicholson, is great. I’ve never had a chance to talk to him before. Credits include Everest, Unbroken, Mandela, Les Mis, Elizabeth, Gladiator, going back many, many, many years, starting out as a playwright. We really got to talk about the whole process of figuring out from someone coming to him with like, “Hey, would you want to do a movie about this cave rescue?” to all the changes and drama along the way, shooting this during the pandemic, and then shooting it for Amazon, which couldn’t release it the way they wanted to release it. A really good conversation and just a really great writer. Enjoy this. Craig and I will be back afterwards for our One Cool Things.
It is my absolute pleasure to be talking to you today, Bill, about Thirteen Lives but also I’d love to talk about screenwriting in general and your career and many other things. Where are we talking to you today from? I see it’s dark there.
Bill Nicholson: I’m in South England, in Sussex, in the converted garage where I do all my work in the lovely English countryside.
John: Fantastic. Let’s start with Thirteen Lives, because I just watched it last night. I’m really curious how you came into the project, because I remember the story as it was happening in real time. It felt like, okay, obviously there’s going to be a movie coming out of this, but what was your entrance into this as a movie?
Bill: Like you, I remember it from when it actually happened. I wouldn’t say I followed every deet, but obviously, I did follow it. It was very moving, and then I forgot about it. Sometime later, as is the way of these things, a producer got in touch with me and said would I be interested in writing the screenplay. I was initially a little reluctant, because I thought maybe it was an oversimple story. Guys go down in a cave, get stuck. It’s all terrible. Then they get out and it’s okay. Of course, they sent me some research. They’d had a lot of research done on it. That amazed me and I realized what a rich tale it was. It moved me in a whole different way actually. I really like writing very emotionally valid and powerful pieces, so I said yes. The simple answer is I got asked.
John: That’s great to be asked. I’m not surprised you were asked. If you look at your credits and look at the movies you’ve written and going back to Gladiator and Shadowlands and those things, but more recently, Everest, Unbroken, other true stories, and finding the ways to tell these historical true stories in ways that are compelling. You seem like a very great fit for it. I guess my question is, when they came to approach you to write this, how much did they have? Off and on Scriptnotes podcasts, we get these questions about like, “Oh, what rights do I need to do to tell a true story?” People will see producers jockeying for rights, locking up this person’s life rights or this person’s life rights. As they came to you, what were they coming to you with? They had some original research, but what else?
Bill: You’re completely right. It was a writer’s nightmare. Lots of other projects were in the mix. There was another team that had the rights to the Australian doctor, Harry Harris. We did not have the rights to the Thai kids at all. The Thai government controlled that. The key rights, which are the British divers, those were the ones that my producer had obtained. That was the core of the project. The rest we had to… You know the process. We had to use material that was in the public domain. It’s worrying when you’re [inaudible 00:18:06]. It’s worrying on all sorts of levels. It’s worrying also because I’m dealing with real people’s real lives who are still there, especially the Thai people. I think we had a superb level of research, which fed me absolutely as much as possible. I just did my best to give a fair crack to all of those individuals.
John: You say you had research. How much of that was coming to you in written form versus your ability to talk to these divers? What was your ability to reach out and ask specific questions, or did you have to go through levels to get there? What was your connection to these characters?
Bill: With the two main divers, I went and visited them and talked to them and subsequently made very good relations with them, was able to check a lot of things with them as I went along. All the rest was [inaudible 00:18:58]. This was in COVID times. A superb researcher had amassed an enormous amount of material, mostly remotely, particularly on all the Thai details. I was supplied with that when I began, because the producer had also produced the documentary, which is called The Rescue. They’d done all the research for that. I was given all of that, and I was able to ask the researcher to ask the researcher to follow up whenever I wanted. I was very well supported.
John: One of the fundamental decisions you have to make as a writer is how you’re going to tell the story and when you’re going to start the story and what details are going to be at what point. How early in the process of the conversations with the producers about coming on to do this did you have an approach? Did you have a take for how you were going to tell the story?
Bill: Not immediately, but you’re completely right. People think if you have a true story, because you take down what happened. Of course, you sort of do, because you have an obligation to the truth. My job is finding the emotional through line and also the mini emotional stories within the overall one, because nobody is going to watch just to hear another fact. They watch because of what you make them feel about the characters, what the characters want, what the characters fear, and what then happens to them. It really is a kind of crafting of real events to create emotional drama. Of course, there is emotional drama once you’ve got kids threatening with death.
You’ve really got to do a lot more than that. I looked to the material. I drew up a timeline of my own, the peaks and the troughs. I looked at that very early on, because obviously, the producers, when they asked me to do it, they didn’t just say, “Go ahead and do it.” They say, “Tell us what you will do before any contract gets signed.” That’s fair enough.
I give them I suppose my pitch really. I said very early on the obvious thing which anybody tackling this story would say, which is, “We cannot afford to make this be a white savior story, so how are we going to deal with that? We’re going to look at all of the Thai stories. We’re going to look at what they did and the complexities of that and how much we can weave that in.”
I made the decision very early on that this was in a way not the story of the boys. This was partly because I did not have their rights, but it was also partly because they’re stuck. They’re in a cave. You have a choice. Are you going to keep cutting back to them inside the cave getting hungrier and hungrier or not? I said, “My way of doing this is we’re going to see them go in, and then we’re not going to see them again until they’re found.”
John: It’s 45 minutes into the film before we see them again. We see, oh, they are actually alive. This is a real open question. Obviously, as an audience who has some knowledge coming into it, we know that they’re alive in there, but everyone on the outside doesn’t. You set up a good expectation that maybe they are going in to find bodies ultimately. They don’t know where they are, how far.
Bill: It’s very interesting the way you can tell a story by being able to know the ending and still make it tense. I think it’s because as people watch, they accept that they’re within that moment. One of the reasons that I took the project on actually was because one of the things that really struck me, after the divers found the bodies, there was this ecstasy throughout this enormous camp, real cheers. The boys are there. The boys are alive. That was simultaneously experienced with the divers knowing that the boys are going to die, that there is no way to come out.
I find that sort of crunch very powerful. When I saw that, I go, “Actually, we have got a story here.” Of course, if you can communicate to the viewers sufficiently, this really is an insoluble problem, and then you proceed to find a crazy solution, which against all the odds works, and you have a story.
John: Now, let’s talk about decisions of classic characters and themes going through stuff. You have actors we recognize who are doing certain things. Also, what I was really impressed by with the movie, and you talk about making sure that the Thai people in their efforts are centered in this, for a lot of the start of the film and really throughout the film, we’re seeing the rest of the efforts from the Thai perspective. These are competent people who are doing their very best. It feels very documentary in a good way. It feels very matter of fact. You don’t see a lot of speechify. You don’t see people stopping to explain something about Thai culture and history and stuff. It’s very much focused on the moment.
Did you know from the start that you were going to have so many characters and that we as an audience might not even really know their names? I’m thinking about the engineer on top of the mountain who’s trying to divert the water. We recognize him, but we know very little about him. Do you know that from the start, that you’d have this wide array of characters?
Bill: Yes, in the sense that I had to place my heroic British divers in this much bigger context. I think the first thing that I thought when I looked into all this story was an enormous number of people volunteered. There was this great mass, like 5,000 people just gave their time or their equipment for nothing. I love that. It runs counter to the kind of story that we’re being told all the time, which is that we live in a competitive world where people will only get off their bottoms for money. I’ve wanted to celebrate that very much, which meant locating as many of these stories as possible.
There are very many stories. You simply don’t have the space. In that sense, you color code the characters so that people recognize them visually rather than knowing their names. You also give them each a little kind of trick so that you can spot how they’re likely to… You can only do that to a very small degree, because you’re juggling so many characters. You talk about it being documentary. Yes, it’s documentary in the sense that it did happen. We’re not grandstanding with it. We’re not trying to make out some sort of opportunity for people to make their own speeches.
I actually think the grand sentiments come over much more powerfully if you throw them away, if they’re not asserted, you ask the audience to find that for themselves. That’s a conscious decision, particularly with the main divers who really led me into this by their own characters. I was picking up from what they told me about themselves, which is, “We don’t do this for money. We’re amateurs. We’re not interested in publicity.” They’ve got a rather delightful… There were so many that got cut out.
When they were first asked to come, Rick, the Viggo Mortensen one, said, “How are we getting there?” John says to him, “They’re giving us business class flights.” Business class, I’ll fly anywhere. I love that. It’s very British, very undercutting heroism and grandiosity. I was working from the characters.
I also think it means that you can feed your actors with a role where they have very few words but a lot of emotional moments. Those emotional moments, they are going to act on. They’re going to be on their face. If you’ve correctly structured the emotional trajectory, the audience knows what they’re thinking and feeling, looking at their face. They don’t need words. That is what screenwriters do. It drives me nuts when people say… Somebody said to me, “Oh, you didn’t have much to do for the first 20 minutes, did you?” I say, “I wrote the damn thing. Every feat is written.”
John: Absolutely. What is the camera pointing at, what are we seeing, what are we living.
Bill: Exactly. Not just that. Ron and I talked a lot about structuring the dives, because too many dives are boring. Each dive has to have its own character, its own emotional little story. I literally listed them all with the emotions that accompanied them.
John: Let’s talk about the emotional trajectory of the Viggo Mortensen character, because he’s the one who I think… I would say your characters don’t protagonate a lot. They’re not going through this classic giant character’s arc where they come in as one thing and leave fully transformed. It’s small and it’s subtle but it’s there. Viggo Mortensen’s character’s probably the easiest one to see that. He’s initially reluctant to necessarily go on this dive, to even join on his trip. Then when he’s there, he’s skeptical a lot along the way. What were the beats you mapped out for yourself? Were they literally in an outlined form? How much were you thinking about how his character progressed over the course of the story? How did you chart that for yourself?
Bill: That’s kind of fairly simple really, because he starts out not wanting to go, doesn’t like kids, as he says. He gets there. He’s pissed off, because we then have all the beats about the local Thai divers don’t rate them, which is fun to have that. They’re old guys [inaudible 00:28:12] which gives him something to resent. Eventually, they do get allowed to dive, and it goes wrong. They pull out the pumping guy, and it all goes wrong. Then they’re stuck, and he wants to go home. I got that beat.
All the time, you’ve got John beside him, acting as the antagonist, his protagonist in a way, saying, “Yeah, but we’ve got to stay.” John, who knows, and I like this, John knows that Rick really wants to save the boys even though Rick says he doesn’t. That helps me a lot. I can write those little moments.
Of course, the big beat with Rick is that they find the kids, and he’s depressed. He goes down instead of out. Then you’ve got the interesting question of… This I had to argue out with both John and Rick, who had the idea to use anesthetics. I got it wrong the first time round, because it worked in my structure to have John suggest it. The real Rick said to me, because we’d shown them the script. This is no secret to them, of course. I always do that, by the way.
When I’m dealing with real, live people, I will say, “You can see anything I’m writing at any time.” Of course. It’s their life. I said to them originally, “You’re going to find this really peculiar, because I’m going to invent two characters, Rick and John. I have to.” They were really good about that. They got it. Then lots of stuff I just made it. They said, “That’s fine.” He did say, “That was my idea.” I restructured that beat.
Then you bring in the next group of divers. In the cut version, they come very abruptly. I wrote several scenes that introduced them, but it’s a long movie. Something has to go. You have the relationship with the incoming divers, which again reflects on Rick, because Jason is the one who thinks Rick’s a little bit [inaudible 00:30:19]. You then realize Rick is the leader. He has gone along with this idea. The failure will be his failure. We’re now emotionally engaged on his behalf, not just the boys’. That then takes you through the various beats of finding semi-failure along the way, until the moment when they’re sitting in a group and they’re just laughing. You can feel the release of the nervous tension and at the moments when he’s resisted contact with the families. I had so many moments I could track. There he is hugging families or being hugged I should say, because he doesn’t know how to do it.
It’s a gift really to just track all this. I did give him a little speech, which is not in the film, right at the end when they’re in their minibus and they’re going back to the airport. He’s saying, “You know what? This is something that should not have worked. This is like a one in a thousand chance that it worked, but it did work. You know what [inaudible 00:31:18] make a movie out of it, and everybody else think it’s easy.” I rather like that, but no, it didn’t come to pass.
John: The movie probably wanted to be over before they would’ve had a chance for that moment. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s in the movie and the dialog that’s not in the movie, because they both help in form. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s not in the movie, because there’s not a lot of talking. We have our characters mostly doing the work that they’re there to do.
There’s this misconception obviously that the screenwriter just writes the dialog and the director does everything else, but it sounds like if I’m reading the script, I get a very good sense of what those characters are, what’s going through those characters’ heads, even as they are silently observing, moving their way through the cave, stopping to get abreast. I’m thinking back to Colin Farrell’s character half freaking out because his kid has woken up. There’s all those moments. Those were all scripted. I think it’s crucial that we remind people that those moments are in the script from the start.
Bill: That’s right. You’re right. If you were to see one of the drafts towards the end, you’d get a lot more dialog. It’s not so much more dialog, because there are several scenes, basically dialog scenes. This always happens to me. I guess I overwrite. I’m always writing dialog scenes which I think really help to get us sympathetic with the characters. They’re too long, and in the end the whole thing goes. The people along the way read them. Your point is correct. That feeds into their understanding. The director reads them.
I have no complaints about what is cut out. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve had the embarrassing experience of writing scenes that seem to me to be vital, having them cut out, and realizing they weren’t necessary. Each time, I think, “When am I going to learn? When am I going to write the 90-page script that they shoot instead of the 120-page script?” I don’t know why I don’t learn, but that’s the process. I’ve worked with some actors.
A million years ago, I wrote a film called First Knight with Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Sean Connery sat me down in his hotel room in London with a scene, and he said, “Look, I want to go through the scene with you. I’ll do my lines. You do the other person’s lines.” I did the other person’s lines. I would do the line, and Sean went, “Ah.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” He never spoke a word. It all made perfectly good sense. He said, “Would you mind if we just [inaudible 00:34:01].” Maybe you have to start with more and hone it down.
You are dependent on the actors, because once you start dispensing with the words, you’ve structured it so that the audience knows what the actor is likely to be feeling, but the actor has got to deliver that without the acting. In my opinion, acting has become so sophisticated now. Actors are so extraordinary, film actors. You can see what they’re thinking. I can think of moments like the little scene where Harry Harris is being asked to use his skills [inaudible 00:34:46]. He’s saying no, and the other two, Rick and John, are disagreeing on how to deal with him. There aren’t many words, but that little trio, you can see what each one is thinking right the way through. There’s a couple of shots at the end that are just faces saying nothing. That’s also very skilled directing, of course.
John: It is. There’s a moment in Worst Person in the World, a film from last year, where a woman makes a fundamental life decision, and we see it completely on her face. It was the screenwriting that got us from her leaving a party to standing at that place and being able to think. The natural instinct would be for her to say something to someone to make sure we understood that, and yet the power of a camera and a really talented face, we can see all that information. It’s a great lesson to learn.
Let’s circle back to you say you overwrite and you need to learn how to write the 90-page version of a thing. Also, it’s just recognizing that the process of making stories is always going to be too much. There’s going to be a process of discovery there, so giving yourself permission to overwrite there a bit and recognizing and hopefully having good collaborators who will see, “Yes, there may be too much here, but we need all this too-much-ness in order to find the movie that we’re also going to want to make.”
Bill: I would definitely agree with that, yeah.
John: Let’s talk about your relationship with Ron Howard. At what point did he come into the process? Was he there from the start or only after you had a draft? What was his involvement in the film?
Bill: He was not there from the start. It was pretty much completely written. What happened was the producer, PJ, hired me. At that point, he had an arrangement with another director, a very good director. I worked on it with that director. I did I guess speed drafts. We kind of ran into a problem of how we saw the movie between me and the director. I have huge respect for the directors that I work with. I tried very hard to deliver the kind of tone that he was looking for, but it ran counter to my instincts. I argued it very strongly with him, but he was very clear what he wanted. There came a point when I said to PJ, “I have to leave the project. You must get another writer who’s in sync with your director.” They had a big think about it. The director had a big think about it. To his enormous credit, he said, “Look,” because PJ and Gabi Tana, the other producer kind of liked my take.
He said, “Look, I’ll withdraw. It’s not a problem.” He withdrew. I then proceeded with my version, which was, to put it very, very simply, more emotional. He was much more action and repression, which is a great way to go. I’m a very warmhearted person. We proceeded in my version. I did several drafts until both the producers were thinking, “This is good. We will shop it.” They then took it to their agents in LA. That is when it went to an agent, and that’s when Ron picked it up. Ron then came in, and I then worked with Ron for several more drafts.
John: We both had the experience of an existing draft and a director comes on board. It’s both a conversation with the director about what movie they see versus the movie that you wrote and what they need. You’re trying to explain what your intentions were with things. They’re trying to explain what they think they actually need from a movie. What guidance can you give to a writer listening to those conversations with the director? How do you approach that in a way that both sides benefit?
Bill: The first thing is you have to not be defensive as a writer. We writers have a very tough time, because we are not in control. That is the reality. If you want to be in control, be a writer-director, which I have also done. You are not in control. The director is going to have to make this damn movie. It’s no good, you demanding the director executes your vision. He’s going to execute his or her vision. Don’t be defensive. What you do is when the director says, “I think they need more of this or less of this,” what you’ve got to think is, why is he saying that? What’s happening here? Is there a valid point here? If there is, how can I enact it in a way that fits my vision? I’ve had some bad ones, but mostly they’ve been good. My experience has been that it improves when you do this.
I always tell people, and this applies to development as well, if you get notes, don’t obey the note. If the note says, “We think the dog should jump over the cliff,” don’t say, “Okay, I will write it.” Say to yourself, “Why did they say that? Haven’t I got a better way of giving them what they want?” because you will have, because you’ll understand the whole thing. They’re probably looking just at that beat. That’s the problem you have with some directors. Some directors aren’t good at overall structure. I’m talking now about really emotional storytelling. They’re good at a scene. They know that they can make a scene work. They can make that scene work when the guy comes in and we don’t even know what he’s seeing and he’s incredibly scared.
[inaudible 00:40:23] how that impacts down the road. What you have to do is say, “Okay, they want an emotional high point, which I have not delivered. I’ve got to find a way to deliver it, and then they’ll be happy at that point.” If you have a problem, I have had this with some extremely famous directors who have said, “I think there should be a scene like this here.” I’ve said to the team, “That will make no sense. That will wreck the whole flow.” They’ve said, “The boss has asked for it. You’ve got to do it.” I then do it. In my experience, always those the projects that don’t get made, because the director hasn’t understood what the story is, but the director is too powerful. There are too many directors, unfortunately, who never get anybody telling them boo. It’s just extraordinary to me.
I’ve said to the team, “Just tell him it doesn’t work.” They said, “You don’t do that. He’s our boss, literally our boss in every way.” [inaudible 00:41:25]. Mostly, you should be able to collaborate with the director in such a way that the director feels really safe with you as a writer, that the director can say, “I want more here and less here,” and you go, “Yes, fantastic, let’s do this. We’ll find the way together.” That is really exciting.
I have to say, with Ron, he was extremely respectful. I think he had taken on a highly developed script. It had been through many processes. His attack, it was a combination. It was very process-driven. He really wanted to understand how he was going to film the process and what impact that would have. A lot of his changes related to that. Other changes were he wanted more of a particular element. For example, he wanted more of the guy called the water guy, Thanet, who is up on the mountain diverting the water. Let me think. What else was there?
We did talk quite a lot. We played around quite a lot with changing some of my structure. We talked, and I was willing to, but in the end, we stuck with it. He will say that the last time we were on a giant Zoom together to talk about this at this stage, he said that the thing about the screenplay he received was that the structure was there already. He didn’t have to really mess with that too much. He’s a very nice guy.
John: He’s a nice guy. I’ve worked with him on a couple projects. He’s lovely.
Bill: He’s just amazing. I just wanted him to be able to do what he needed to do. Then the other thing that happened was he started shooting it, and I was not present on the shoot. I was in Australia. He was on the phone to me or on the email to me quite a lot, saying basically for budget reasons, we can no longer do this scene or that scene, “Find a way to write the beat that happens there somewhere else in another way,” or, “Could you please add it in to the existing scene?” There was quite a lot of that, which I was of course completely willing to do. I think you need to be in that sense a kind of craftsman who is there. “We’re now sailing the ship and it’s leaking. Please could you plug that gap?”
John: Absolutely circling back to this, in the first time you’re talking with the director or really anyone else in the project, a friend always reminds me that as the screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. You see the whole thing there. You have everything that’s on the page, but you also have a whole movie in your head. Sometimes those initial conversations are really just aligning what movies is the director seeing in their head and trying to find the overlaps there and fix the things that aren’t overlapping quite right.
In those conversations, it varies director to director for me, but sometimes you are spending three days talking about the color of the paint on the walls, but that’s really the process for just trying to align your visions for what things really look like and what’s important to them or what’s important to you. You never know what it’s going to be as you start the process.
Bill: I don’t get into those sorts of conversations. I’m happy for him to paint the walls whatever color he wants really. What I want to know… I say I want to know. I don’t have any power over this person. It doesn’t get me anywhere. I would like to know that the director sees the same movie as me, but to be honest, I never know until it’s done, until it’s actually being shot, because people do the oddest things.
John: bill, you’ve made your living as a playwright and as a film writer and director. Do you have any experience running television shows or doing any of the series where the writer would be more in control, the writer would be telling the director what to do? Have you had that experience?
Bill: Not in the modern form. I’m doing a Netflix TV series right now, writing it. You’re right, it is very, very different in power terms. Back in the day, when I was working with BBC, I did I think four TV movies. The interesting thing about the BBC and television then is my name was the name that was in the newspapers, to the rage of the directors. It was William Nicholson’s latest. I really of course liked that.
I really disliked the filmed by thing, where directors act as if they’re created the whole thing. I’ve softened over the years. I used to be quite militant about this. I’ve done two movies myself as a director/writer. That has taught me to respect directors very, very highly. I do realize I need them. I just wish that the world out there understood what screenwriters do. I don’t know why this hasn’t got through. We need a movement like Cahiers du Cinema, which elevated the directors. We need a movement.
Maybe you’re right. Actually, it’s happening. It’s happening in TV. The people who create the great TV series are the writers. Our day is coming. That’s fantastic. You get astonishing things like Succession, which I don’t know who’s the hero of that, whether it’s Jesse Armstrong, Lucy Prebble, or whoever, I don’t quite know what’s going on, but somebody is doing something completely brilliant there. They’re also superbly directed, I have to say. Again, let’s all try not to quarrel over who gets the credit and be grateful if we can together do something good, because most things don’t quite work.
John: Circling back to Thirteen Lives, so much of the film is in Thai. It’s in a very specific Northern Thai dialect. I’m guessing you don’t speak it. At what point in the process did you need to think about how much of the film was going to be in Thai versus how much was going to be in English and what the balance was going to be. Did you need to interact with any of those language experts or did that process come later down?
Bill: It came much later. I knew all along that a large part would be in Thai. That was all part of respect for the people we were filming and not turning it into an outsider attack. I write it all in English, and it goes on the page in bold italics, meaning translate this please. The team making it under Ron then bring in Thai translators, but not just Thai translators, Thai filmmakers who are also Thai, who tell me about the culture. Back comes the message. You have this scene where this Thai Navy Seal speaks to his boss, his captain, in a quite strong way. They would never do that. That does not happen. We have total respect for authority people. You’ve just [inaudible 00:48:20] I change it. I just simply rewrote. That happened quite a bit.
I had a whole lot to do with the governor here, who had actually a very interesting story. I originally made him a rather ironic, wry guy, who was constantly saying, “They’ve set me up for the fall here.” There’s a little bit of it in the movie, but I had quite a lot more. I was told he would not speak of his superiors in this way. Even though he thinks it, even though it’s true, he just wouldn’t, so out it went.
John: Probably both choices about how that character would respond but also what the movie wants to do. The movie is so focused on the question of will we be able to get the boys out, anything that feels like it’s not to that point is going to be on the chopping block. It’s hard for it to last in the film. You made choices about how much we’re seeing or are aware of these characters’ personal lives before they get involved. Basically, the moment anybody shows up Thailand, we’re never seeing their homelands again.
Basically, we’re only going to stay near the caves here in Thailand. Talk to us about decisions to show Colin Ferrell’s home life and what you were trying to do there, the few glimpses we had outside of Thailand. Were there more scenes? What were your decisions about showing their life before they get to Thailand?
Bill: No, there were not more scenes. I knew that I wanted to just tell you enough about them to give you some anchor for how they were going to make their emotional journey and then just show you enough at the end to remind you where they’re come from and what it means. They’re two different stories, obviously. With Rick, Viggo Mortensen, he lives alone in this chaotic, machine-filled space. You would kind of sense that the guy’s asocial just from the images of him. Also, there was quite a bit of dialog there when he’s talking on the phone to John.
With John, with Colin Ferrell, all I needed to do was show that he’s divorced and he’s got a kid. Obviously, he’s going to identify the kids in the cave with his cave. I don’t need to say that. You just plant that, and that’s there.
In the early versions, there was another thread. They had a kind of office, the British Cave Rescue Council. There was a woman there who fed information back all the time. We did think whether to have her in England, but I really decided no, this is one of those stories where you need to maintain the pressure cooker, get them into the pressure cooker and keep them there. That was a very conscious decision, which is why I didn’t want to go into the home life of any of any of the Thai characters once the pressure had begun. I think it’s sort of like Aristotelian unities. It’s a unity of time and place, and they’re up against the clock, and just hold it there. Don’t play games. Don’t do cutting around with time. Give us a sense of the passage of time.
John: [inaudible 00:51:29] your theater background, it did feel like once you created the space of the camp outside the cave, that was your main set. That’s where everything has to happen within the space and within this place and time, which I guess helps answer the question of your decisions about which of the Thai parents we were going to follow, which ones we were going to identify and have some ongoing relationship with. You pick one mother, one father who we come back to more often and we [inaudible 00:51:55] which kid is —
Bill: And a boy. The boy, I made him up. That didn’t happen [crosstalk 00:52:00].
John: The smallest boy, yeah.
Bill: The smallest boy did happen.
John: That’s right, the boy [crosstalk 00:52:05].
Bill: The one who doesn’t go into the cave and who was out there. I wanted one boy who represented [inaudible 00:52:11]. That didn’t actually happen. They all went into the cave. The smallest boy, that was a real thing, because I had that in the research. Obviously, the mother is a competent mother, the father is a competent father, etc. All their names are changed.
John: Let’s talk about structure overall, because you have a time structure, which is very natural for day one, day two, and seeing the progression. With each day, there’s a change that has happened. Sometimes it’s the weather. The way that the weather is a huge villain in the course of the stories is really interesting. You also have the decision to overlay the map and show where things were and how far deep we are into things. Was that a decision that was made on a script level or does that come later on in the filmmaking process, the literal, how deep we are into the cave system structure.
Bill: That was not me. That was in the cutting room, in the final stages. That was Ron and his team doing that in the final stages, looking at it and saying, “It is really important that people know how far in we are.” In the longer version of the script, I’d incorporated that information in the dialog and things like that. That didn’t survive. I thought it was really good.
John: I think it’s a really smart choice.
Bill: It was really smart. In a kind of clever way, there was more information you could take in, but it didn’t matter. You got a visual sense. That was not me.
John: I think it’s another thing taken probably from some of the great documentaries of the last 10 years in that sense of as you see somebody climbing a peak in Yellowstone or a peak in Yosemite, seeing how far up they are, and it was just the right choice to give us that sense of-
Bill: It’s a very interesting challenge. How much does the audience realize? How much have they picked up? How much do they know? What do they need turning? On the whole, you’ve got to be ahead of your audience. If they’re left saying, “We’re underwater. I have no clue where I am,” which of course is the case. How could they? What we did was, and this was in the script, I characterize stages along the journey. I said, “This will be the stalactite one. This will be Chamber 3. This will be the T-Junction.” The T-Junction was what they called it and Pattaya Beach was what they called it. I gave a description of each stage so that when they built the sets, they would look a little bit different and would give us a bit of a sense that we’re not just always in a bath. We did think about that ahead of time.
John: You said you’ve written the script. You’re heading into production. Obviously, casting has happened. Was there a table reading? Was there any chance for everyone to get around tables to read this together? It doesn’t seem like it would have been necessary for this, but was there some sort of [inaudible 00:55:01]?
Bill: I simply don’t know, because it all happened in Australia, and I wasn’t there. They all had to fly out and go into quarantine for two weeks, and then they were in their bubble. I would say about this table read, which I’ve had on every film, I absolutely hate them.
John: Tell me why.
John: There’s a couple of reasons. For some reason, the person who reads the directions is the third AD, and he can’t read. That sounds like an illiterate monotone, which is awful, and I’m dying. I learned after a bit to say, “Let me read the directions, and I’ll put some [inaudible 00:55:37].” The second reason is the actors find it very, very difficult to know whether they’re performing or not. On the whole, they don’t want to perform. They don’t want to perform, because why would they? It’s a weird set of circumstances. The confident ones don’t want to perform because, “Why should I?” The un-confident ones think that they’ll perform and be found wanting. People will say, “Why did you cast him?” The whole thing is awful for everybody. I’ve come out of every reading thinking it is a disaster.
I wasn’t present at the readthrough of Gladiator. I was involved in the project. It was such a disaster that they practically pulled the whole thing. That’s when I came on board. I think they’re terrible, these readings. They do have a function, because I almost think you should get a whole team of completely different people to do the reading. The tech people, they need to know a little bit what this thing feels like. The actors, it’s hard.
John: I will make a mild case for the opposing view. I’ve had table readings that have gone as badly as Gladiator’s table read, where it’s just like, wow. Everything you’re saying about an actor choosing not to perform, the risk of performing, definitely been there, seen it. My argument for them is that it makes it clear that all the actors that have at least read the whole script once, because so often, actors, they’re reading, they’re focused on their part. It’s a chance to say, “Oh, you know what? This scene actually pertains to the scene before this scene.” It’s the whole thing feeling together chronologically for once, because movies are going to be shot out of sequence and it’s going to be hard to tell what things are where. For one moment, everyone was together.
The other thing, if anyone’s listening and this is helpful, I will tend to do, if there is going to be a table reading, I will make a special version of the script that is just for the reading, that greatly cuts down the scene description so it’s just getting you right into the dialog there, and it’s all clear. If we’re going to summarize things, everyone’s looking at the same page. I hear you there.
Bill: That is very smart. I think you’re quite right. The table reading should be treated as a kind of performance in its own right and thought about and almost directed. Each of the actors could be told, “Don’t worry about it. Just do it clearly. That’s all. You don’t need to emote if you don’t want to.” I have been at readings. When Shadowlands was done as a reading, it was amazingly successful, and it made everybody feel this is going to work. I just wish that happened every time.
John: My movie Go had a great table reading, and some other ones haven’t. Of course, in theater, the idea of a reading is actually super common, and those are ways you get financing and get to the next level. Everyone understands that it is a form of a performance there, but with movies it’s a special thing. Really, you have to ask yourself, who should be in the room for that? Is it just for the filmmakers and the actors? Do producers need to be in there? Do financiers need to be in there?
Bill: I really like your idea of having a special text for the reading, because that’s great, because you want to maintain the pace. I’ve sat there while somebody reads through a whole page of directions in a [crosstalk 00:58:53] tone where it needs to be tightened, performed, and move on so that we can get the feeling of it. I hadn’t thought of that. If it ever happens to me again… It’s quite a lot of work though, isn’t it, doing your own-
John: For you or for me, maybe it’s two hours of time to take and cut it down. If it saves a lot of drama down the road, I’ll do it.
Bill: Do you read directions yourself?
John: No. We’ll find somebody who’s actually a talented actor who’s not in the production to do it.
Bill: Good. Good.
John: My friend Dan Ethridge is fantastic at that, so I will draft him whenever possible.
Bill: You’ve thought about this much more than me. You’re smart.
John: During production, obviously this is happen in Australia. At most, you’re having a phone call or Zoom with Ron, so you’re not super involved in that. At any point doing post, do you come back in? Do you take a look?
Bill: Yes.
John: Was there anything for you to do?
Bill: Yeah. This is entirely at Ron’s discretion. He’s a nice guy, and he’s also a smart guy. It was cut in London. He said would I please come in, see the first assembly, talk about it. We talked together. I came in and saw the shorter version, and we talked about that a lot. I wouldn’t say that I did anything tremendously significant, but I was certainly there watching it and talking about it with him.
John: Great.
Bill: I was incredibly grateful for that. A lot of directors are frightened of writers, because they know the writer knows more than them what’s supposed to be there. They don’t want the writer on set. They don’t want the writer in the cutting room. They didn’t want the writer getting too much credit. Ron is not like that.
John: That’s terrific. This movie came out theatrically limited but then also on streaming. Did you have a chance to see this with an audience?
Bill: Not really. As you know, MGM, who financed it, got bought by Amazon after we finished the movie. It didn’t get the screen life that we would’ve liked. I’m old-fashioned. I like cinemas. I like theaters. They did put on a… This was in London. There was a premier in LA, which I didn’t go to. I was obviously invited, but I chose not to make the journey. There was a good screening in London. We were in France. We got the train back for that evening, and the train was delayed three hours in the Channel Tunnel, to my fury, so I actually missed about half.
John: Oh, no.
Bill: We got into the theater. I haven’t seen it much with an audience. Now it’s seen as a streaming event, and people see it separately. I’ve got this odd feeling. I don’t really know how people have responded to it.
John: I watched it again. I watched it last night at home, streaming it. My instinct though is that there’s going to be some big cheers when the first kid is brought on the stretcher up through the pulley system. That was a really emotional moment for me is seeing that the kids are getting out but also that everyone is there pushing the sled out together. I feel like that’s the moment where you’re going to get some cheers in the audience. I’m frustrated that you didn’t get a chance to hear those cheers, because I feel like it’s going to be a great sound. Bill, can you talk to us about what’s next? Are there any things that you’re working on that we can discuss?
Bill: I’m always a little bit shy, for the simple reason that I never know they’re actually going to get made.
John: Same.
Bill: That’s the life we lead. I’m doing a cinema movie. It’s with a very good director right now. It seems to be going a bit slowly. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. I’m waiting for my next instructions on that. I mentioned I’m doing a TV series for Netflix, which is about the crypto scam. It was a podcast actually called The Missing Crypto Queen-
John: Great.
Bill: … about a Bulgarian woman who created a crypto coin. It’s a wonderful story.
John: I think we actually maybe discussed that on our podcast in terms of How Would This Be a Movie. I’m excited that you’re doing that, because she’s a really flamboyant character if I remember correctly.
Bill: Exactly. It’s wonderful. It’s all about why do people believe what they believe, which is central to our current experience everywhere, politics everywhere. I’m just doing the first two episodes of that. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. I’m also doing a small British movie about a guy, which is a true story again. You see, these are all true stories. I don’t like adapting novels. I don’t do it, because somebody else has [inaudible 01:03:41] the characters and invented the story.
Real life is a complete mess, so it needs people like me to come in and turn it into craft, something out of that. That’s what I like doing. I’m doing a small movie about a person who goes mad. The fun of it is, it’s kind of implying that madness is a choice, which actually serves a purpose. He thinks he’s a secret agent saving the planet. He ends up being sent to hospital and given heavy drugs and so on. You realize that being a secret agent saving the planet beats his real life. You kind of get why a guy would do that. Essentially, it’s dealing with the fact that all of us are prone to picking up clues around us and creating a narrative of our life that enables us to feel good about ourselves.
John: Absolutely. You are the story you’re telling about yourself.
Bill: Yeah. I’m doing that. There’s a couple of other longer-term projects. Those are three that are actually on my desk right now.
John: That’s amazing. Bill, an absolute pleasure talking with you and meeting you here. Congratulations on the film. I’m really excited to see these next projects as well. A delight. Thank you so much.
Bill: It’s a great pleasure for me as well, talking to somebody who gets these things, a fellow. I love it. Thank you so much.
John: Thank you.
Bill: Bye-bye.
John: Have a great night. Bye.
Bill: Bye-bye.
John: Craig, we are back in this moment. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two TV shows to recommend to you and to our listenership. First is Andor, which everyone says it’s by far the best Star Wars series. It’s just phenomenal. It’s just really, really good. Craig, I was thinking about you as I was watching it, because there was this scene, I think in the maybe second or third episode, where the Empire, or what will become the Empire, is having this board meeting, just planning meeting. It’s in this big white room. It’s just so smartly done. It’s everything you always talk about how you admire the Empire for its efficiency and for its organization. I thought of you. If I could find the clip snippet of it, I want to send it to you, because you will just love that when you get a chance to watch it.
Craig: Obviously, I always root for the Empire. I’m just so confused after all these movies. How do they keep losing? It just doesn’t make sense. Why is everyone so scared of them? All they do is lose.
John: I’ll say that the whole premise of Andor is basically how does the revolution start, how does the rebellion start. It’s really smartly done. It’s no surprise. It’s coming from Tony Gilroy, who’s a great writer and is running this show. Just so, so smart. Everyone tells you to watch Andor. I’m just the 19,000th person to tell you to watch Andor, because really, it’s worth it.
The other thing is Fleishman is in Trouble, which I don’t hear people talking as much about. So good. As I recognize the names going past, Susannah Grant, who is of course fantastic, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote the book and she wrote almost all the episodes of the series. It’s so smartly done. The POV storytelling on it is really, really great. Fleishman is in Trouble, another great thing to watch. That is on Hulu in the United States.
Craig: Excellent. My One Cool Thing is an article. It is in Wired. I don’t know if you’re going to need a subscription or not. Maybe Wired does a couple of free articles a month. This one is called Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira. It’s a really interesting story about this class of workers called digital nomads, who work entirely virtually, and so can work anywhere, but they’re alone. These are a lot of people who don’t have families, etc, so they’re stuck alone in their homes. They want to go places. They can go anywhere.
This Portuguese island basically on the southern coast of Madeira created what they call a digital nomad land. It’s basically like we built some homes and some work areas for you, communal work areas. You can come here, live here, and you’ll have a community, instead of being alone. Theoretically, this would also be great for the actual island itself and the people who live there, because it would help the economy. It doesn’t work exactly the way they were thinking, but it’s really interesting, because I never considered this is a new way of building a community. All of our legacy communities are built around decisions that were made god knows when, based on there’s a lake nearby or there’s a river or whatever.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: This is like, “Ah, it seems like a good spot to put a bunch of people with laptops,” so a new way of creating communities. Check out Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira in Wired.
John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week and our show for this year. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Again.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Still.
John: Our outro this week is by Michael Lane. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segment. Reminder to use the promo code. What is the promo code, Craig?
Craig: Onion.
John: Promo code onion to save $10 on your annual subscription, but only through January 15th, so do that.
Craig: Onion. Onion. Onion.
John: Onion. Onion. Onion. Stick around after the credits, because we’ll be discussing our non-writing aspirations for 2023. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun year.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thanks, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, I sprung this on you. We didn’t have time to prepare any sort of plans for 2023, but not work, because obviously you’re going to have a very busy work 2023. Maybe I’ll start with some of mine, and you can think of what some of yours are going to be for 2023. I’m excited to be DM’ing again. It looks like we’re going to finish up the campaign that you’ve been so generously hosting for the last three years.
Craig: It’s a long one.
John: It’s a long one.
Megana: Wow.
John: When you finish up, we’ve discussed in the group, I’m going to try to run a much, much shorter, not going to go three years, kind of campaign. I’m excited to get back into that and look at who our group is. We have a large group, but not everyone can come every time, so trying to plan for things that will work will if people are just gone, so their tokens aren’t just sitting there idly, that we can actually do things every week with the people that we have on hand.
Craig: Great.
John: That’s probably the thing I’m most excited about in 2023.
Craig: I’m excited about that. I can’t wait to just play again. I guess that’s not really an aspiration. It’s going to happen. It’s an inevitability.
John: It’s going to happen. We’re going to finish. We’re going to finish the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and then we’ll do something new.
Craig: Yes, we will. When it comes to non-writing aspirations, I don’t really have specific ones, or at least none that are tied to a new year. I have an ongoing project, which is to catastrophize less, take deep breaths, put anxiety in its proper perspective, and remind myself… Am I allowed to curse in this Bonus Segment?
John: Sure.
Craig: Everything will be fucking okay. That’s great.
John: [crosstalk 01:11:27].
Craig: That’s what I’m working on. Megana, I feel like you and I are very similar in this regard.
Megana: Yeah, absolutely.
Craig: Tell me, what do you do, or first of all, is that part of your non-writing aspiration for 2023? If it is, how do you go about it?
Megana: I think it is. I am also trying to stretch more in 2023 because I’m getting older.
Craig: That’s nice. Yeah, you are.
Megana: I am. I think that getting myself to a place where it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out,” and moving my body in some way is always incredibly helpful. That is a new tactic I’m taking for 2023.
Craig: I like it, stretching.
Megana: Instead of just panicking alone in my room.
Craig: Right, and tightening up in a little stress ball.
John: Stretching also one of the things that you can do while you’re doing something else. You can stretch while you’re watching TV. Increasingly, I will just not sit on the couch. I will sit on the floor and try to stretch while watching Andor or Fleishman is in Trouble, because I can still fully enjoy the show, but I’m also hopefully getting my hamstrings a little less messed up.
Megana: I have a standing desk, but if we’re being honest, I don’t stand at it very often.
Craig: You mean your sitting desk? That’s your sitting desk, Megana.
Megana: Now it’s going to be my stretching desk. It’s going to be my stretching and less panic desk.
Craig: I like that.
Megana: Do you have a standing desk?
Craig: I do. Like you, it’s really… Look. Here’s the deal. I know what I can do. I know what I can’t do. I know what I might do. Part of everything is also just giving myself a break.
Megana: You deserve it.
Craig: I do a lot. You know what? I don’t want to use the standing desk. Screw it. I don’t want to.
John: If listeners are looking for things to help them think about their year and they want to try a book, a book that actually was genuinely useful for me was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which really talks about how the best way to change your habits and get rid of some bad habits and start some good habits is just make them unavoidable. It’s literally like putting your running shoes by the door so you’re going to be tripping over them if you don’t do it. It’s making sure you’re setting yourself up for success. If people are looking for a book or something to read over the holidays, to make them think better about what they want to do in the new year, how to get that achieved, that’d be a good bet, Atomic Habits.
Craig: If your New Year’s resolutions or aspirations are to read less and sit more, I just want you to know I’m your patron saint.
John: We’re going to support that. Craig, a thing I’m going to try to not do in 2023 is recreate Twitter. I’m not going to try to, because obviously, Twitter is going to… It’s not dead, but it’s not going to be the same thing it was. If it’s around six months from now, six years from now, it’s still not going to be as useful to me as it used to be. I’m not going to try to find the new Twitter. I just don’t think that’s going to be a goal. I’m going to find other ways to encounter the ideas in people that I used to encounter and stumble across on Twitter. I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be. I can still miss the things that were great about it. I’m not going to try to look for the next version of it.
Craig: Which is totally fine. I think you probably won’t have to try too hard. I think that there are people right now salivating and rubbing their hands together, going, “We sense a vacuum.” That said, Twitter never really made money. I don’t know if anybody necessarily… They’re not going to want to recreate Twitter either, but they’re going to make something. Something’s coming. You remember the fantastic opening credit sequence for Silicon Valley?
John: Oh yeah. Great. The constantly churning, 3D, top-down view of all these companies building up and exploding.
Craig: Exactly. They would change it over the seasons to reflect other implosions and new risings. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We just know change is afoot. It just doesn’t stop. The churn doesn’t stop. Something new is going to come along that’s going to take over our lives soon enough.
John: What it has started doing more of as Twitter’s been declining is just going back to my RSS readers, the blogs I follow and stuff like that. That was actually really good technology. RSS is what’s actually powering podcasts like Scriptnotes to let new episodes come out there. People can use that for posts as well. I’m going to try to do a little bit more blogging on johnaugust.com. The thoughts that I used to try to cut down to 280 characters to fit on Twitter, I will expend a few minutes to make a longer blog post.
Megana: Nice.
Craig: Been a lot of that going on.
John: Craig, thank you for a very good 2022. I’m so excited to be doing more Scriptnotes with you in 2023.
Craig: Oh wait, we’re still doing this? Oh my god.
Megana: Wait, Craig, was that your answer for your resolution?
John: Catastrophize less?
Megana: Catastrophize less?
Craig: Yeah. What did you think it should be?
Megana: No, I think that that’s great. I also think that you deserve more vacation in 2023.
Craig: Aw, that’s very sweet. I don’t love vacations. I know I’m supposed to.
John: Maybe a different definition of vacation. It doesn’t have to be sitting on a beach someplace. It could just be like, Craig, for the next week you just get to play all of the video games.
Craig: I do love that.
John: I think we both wish a little more of that for you.
Craig: Thank you. You guys are very sweet. I wish you guys to have a wonderful and happy new year, no matter what it brings for us, which will be fascinating, no doubt.
John: It will be a fascinating year, I’m sure.
Craig: We will, as always, look back on this and go, “Aw, you guys didn’t know. You didn’t that the space weasels were coming.”
John: So naïve we were.
Craig: From the Planet Weasel. Yeah, they’re coming. We didn’t know. Until they do come, let’s have some fun.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Megana.
Megana: Thanks, John.
Craig: Thank you guys.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- William Nicholson on IMdB
- Watch the conversation between John and William here
- Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for organizing the event!
- Use Promo Code ONION for two months free in our annual Scriptnotes premium membership
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Kyle Jeffers for Wired
- Fleischman Is In Trouble on Hulu
- Andor
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Michael Lane (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 580: Finding a Way In, and Out, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 564 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be answering questions from listeners who seem to be on the cusp of a career breakthrough, or are they? We’ll try to sort out what’s real from what’s fantasy. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about iterating and failing fast. Is there a way to apply this classic startup guidance to writing?
Craig: I didn’t even know that that was classic startup guidance.
John: The idea of these startup companies, you want to get a product out there really quickly to see if it works, and then you can iterate on it. Rather than spending a year developing a thing, get something out in two months and see is there even a market for this.
Craig: Got it. We’ll dig into that, but only for the people that pay through the nose.
John: Paying through the nose at $5 a month.
Craig: $5 a month.
John: For Premium Members.
Craig: $5 a month.
John: Before we get to any of that, we have to talk about some stuff happening on HBO Max, or not happening on HBO Max now.
Craig: What is going on?
John: It’s a lot.
Craig: I can’t keep up.
John: This past week, HBO Max removed a bunch of TV shows they had there. It wasn’t just they were canceling things that they had in development. They actually just pulled stuff off the service, so things like the series Camping, Vinyl, and Mrs. Fletcher.
Craig: A lot of animation.
John: A lot of animation, King of Atlantis. There’s a whole big list of animated projects that were there [crosstalk 00:01:28].
Craig: Can I ask a question?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Maybe you can explain this to me.
John: Please.
Craig: What is the point of pulling something off of a streaming platform? Don’t they own these things?
John: They do own these things. That’s what we need to figure out. Let’s back up. We talked about Batwoman a couple weeks ago. In the case of Batwoman, that was a very expensive movie that they had made and decided to shelve. With that, they were going to have ongoing marketing costs. They still had to finish the movie. There’s an argument to be made they wanted to change direction on how the DC films were going to go. They might not want to have this movie out there. They wanted to pivot. That was really surprising, but also kind of understandable. Those shows are done. They don’t have a lot of ongoing costs except for residuals.
Craig: How much residuals could there possibly be there?
John: That I don’t really get, because there’s the writing residuals, there’s going to be acting residuals for the voice cast, presumably.
Craig: There’s not going to be writing residuals of any significant kind for a lot of the animated shows, because those are generally covered by Animation Guild, where there aren’t residuals. I’ve not watched Summer Camp Island, but if you have Summer Camp Island, why not just leave it there? What does it cost to leave it there? I’m confused.
John: Here’s I think the best explanation I’ve seen, that it’s not just the ongoing costs. Animated series do have residuals, but it’s paid to the Guild rather than paid to the individual. There’s a little bit of cost there. They may have other licensing costs or things.
Craig: It’s got to be de minimis. I can’t imagine.
John: The best explanation I’m seeing is that it’s actually worth more as a tax write-off basically to say by scrapping this, we’re able to take it off our books and call it a loss. They’re just looking for things that can take a loss off.
Craig: This is like an accounting game.
John: I believe it’s mostly an accounting situation.
Craig: Ugh.
John: Ugh. Let’s talk about what happens next and if there are any remedies. I would like to say that there are not going to be remedies from a legal lawsuit standpoint or from a Guild action, because this is not a case of self-dealing. If it was a situation where they were cutting themselves a sweetheart rate, then you could see some sort of arbitration happening or some sort of lawsuit happening, which we’ve seen before. These people whose shows are not available now, they got paid for their initial work. You can’t force the company to release something. There could potentially be a kill fee in some of these deals.
Craig: I can’t imagine.
John: In many ways it’s analogous to the classic pilot process, because back when we used to make TV shows for a regular season, you would go and shoot 50 pilots. The network might have 50 pilots, and they pick up 10 of them. Those other 40 pilots, it sucked. You felt like that work was wasted, but also, you were going into it expecting that things might just never be seen. You were prepared for it. Emotionally it’s just so different for these people who have had a show that was on the air that’s no longer available, or they made a season that no one will ever see.
Craig: The company owns the stuff, so they can do with it as they wish. I have to wonder, isn’t there some sort of implied contract between the company and the consumer if they say, look, you can give us this subscription and you get all this stuff? Then they take a whole bunch of that stuff away. Now, people can cancel. I hope they don’t, as somebody that has a show coming out on HBO.
Look, to be honest, I think a lot of these shows are getting a ton of attention on social media, because they have very passionate fan bases, but those passionate fan bases were not broad. They were narrow but deep. It’s going to be hard to make the argument, for instance, that whatever, The Runaway Bunny was bringing in millions and millions of viewers. It wasn’t, I’m sure, because they wouldn’t have put it in this bucket otherwise. That said, again, if the only value is some sort of accountancy dance, that’s such a bummer. Why?
John: The only thing I will say is going forward, I could see this attracting attention of some federal agencies, because back in the day, when you and I were starting this business, this couldn’t have happened, because there was what’s called fin-sin [ph], which basically the people who make the shows and the people who release the shows could not be the same company. If this were the case here, and Summer Camp Island was taken down, a different company made Summer Camp Island, so they would find a different distributor for it, or they would put it on DVD. There’d be some other way for it to make its money back. Because so much of what is created in streaming models is Netflix makes it for Netflix, HBO Max makes it for HBO Max, and it has no other life, I could see some agencies stepping in and saying hey, this is restrained trade. It’s an unfair business practice to the people who are making these things for you to be doing this, or you’re restricting the ability of access to material. There’s probably some federal way to look at this.
Craig: I don’t think restricting access to material that you own and create is ever going to be a thing. This is more of just a general cultural and moral question. I’m not sure that there is any kind of federal enforcement that could happen, unless the government said hey, you know what, the whole reason we had fin-sin was specifically because we felt morally this was the right way to go and it would be better for culture. I don’t think you’re going to find the will to do that in today’s political climate where the corporate money is flowing like wine. I think it’s a black eye for HBO Max. They’ve had a bad couple of weeks here.
It also is sometimes when companies smash together, this stuff happens. I hope that this is just when the Earth was formed, the Moon broke off. Maybe that’s it. Maybe we’re done. I hope we are. It sounded like it was going to be worse initially than it turned out to be, because initially people were like, oh my god, HBO Max is disappearing tomorrow, and everything is getting fired into the atmosphere.
John: What are some remedies going forward, if you were a creator who had a show, who didn’t want this to happen to their show? I reach all the way back to something like United Artists or something, where I could envision some creators banding together, saying, “You know what? We are not going to directly write stuff for this company or make stuff for this company. We are going to only have an independent studio that’s making this, and then we’ll license it to that.” It’s challenging, but possible, foreseeable.
Craig: It’s possible. I think you could probably, if you are a show that is desirable enough to this company, that you could probably work in some closets for as long as there is a streaming service owned by this company or its successor company, this has to be on the streaming service. It has to be available. You don’t have to promote it. You just can’t make it go away. You can’t send it down the rabbit hole.
John: You can’t disappear it.
Craig: What are the shows that people are likely to grant that allowance to? The ones that they wouldn’t be taking off anyway. The little ones, they’re not going to give that to. I think we have been confronted with a new reality that was always there for this short but exciting time that streamers have taken over everything. It has always been a possibility that they would just make things disappear. Now they have started to do so. Be warned, this is not just something that HBO Max can do. It is something that Apple or Amazon or Netflix or any of them can do.
John: Last thing I’ll say is that, this is not a solution, but a thing I’ve noticed when stuff gets crazy is that sometimes commiseration is actually a little bit helpful, and gathering together and talking about the things, because a lot of these shows came out during the pandemic. These people have never gotten a chance to hang out with each other. I would not be surprised if the people of Summer Camp Island or someone else, or especially these animated shows, or even people who made Camping or whatever, if you want to get together and talk about that stuff and just rejoice that you made something cool, that’s great, or if you end up doing screenings of the stuff that you have, do that, because I think emotionally that can be really helpful. Maybe you can talk and figure out what you want to do next and meet the people you would’ve met if the show had been out there in the world. It sucks.
Craig: It does. I would imagine at some point, given how cheap digital storage has become, someone somewhere is going to start just archiving everything, which is not their legal right to do, but they will, so that if something like this happens, then… The danger is that this just encourages piracy if they are archived. I don’t know. This is a weird one. Have you read somewhere that this is about a tax write-off thing? I wish I understood how taxes work. I don’t understand.
John: I wish I understood. Here’s what we’ll do. The same way we did a VFX deep dive last week, maybe we should get some tax experts on.
Craig: Oh god, no. No no no no no. I won’t make it. I won’t make it. I won’t last five minutes.
John: Honestly, it’s speculation at this point that it’s a tax thing. I know that for that woman it really genuinely was a chance to write that down.
Craig: That I understood. I understood that completely. I’m just like, what is the write-down value of something that exists that you’ve already paid for and it’s done and it’s been on the air already? I don’t understand. You know what? I don’t have to, because guess what. John, my job is to write screenplays, make television shows, and answer questions.
John: Craig, I have been thinking about you this past week. Obviously, the first little mini trailer came out for The Last of Us, and it looked great. Congratulations.
Craig: Thank you.
John: I was also thinking, oh, what if they never aired your show? How devastated would you be? You gave 18 months of your life to this show.
Craig: Here’s the thing. There is, I think, a strong part of me, and other people I’ve spoken to have this. Lindsay Doran is this way, where we wish once we finish something that we wouldn’t have to show it to anybody, that we made something and we love it exactly as it is, and we don’t have to have it sullied by observation. That obviously is not really what we feel, but there’s a part of us that just thinks, on the positive side, no one’s going to be saying mean things to me. Of course, it would be crazy. It would just be crazy. I wouldn’t even know what to say. I’m a weird one, because I actually do love the making of things more than the other stuff. The making of it is 90% of the joy that I get out of it, and then people appreciating it is 10%. I’m a weirdo like that. I just like the making part.
John: That’s great. It’s great that you do like the making. There’s moments I like the making, but to not be able to show that thing you made would be just devastating to me.
Craig: Yeah. It’s funny, I think I would be able to move on. I would definitely question, in a serious way, what the hell I was doing now.
John: Then you would want the financial accounting to explain why burying your show made more sense.
Craig: I’m not sure I would do anything like it again if I didn’t have some sort of guarantee that it was actually, when they said that they were going to put it on the air, that they’re going to put it on the air. That said, they are putting The Last of Us on television.
John: It does appear to be that way.
Craig: It is happening.
John: Let’s do some follow-up. We’ve been talking about short films on this podcast. We’ve got some listeners who wrote in with some additional thoughts. Don wrote in to say that the problem isn’t with the quality, format, or audience, the problem is with accessibility. He’s pointing out that he logged into Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, HBO Max, all these different streamers, and it’s very hard to find a short section anywhere on them. I remember a while back on Amazon, I did find where their shorts were. There were actually some really good shorts in there, but they’re buried. They can be there.
Craig: Don, you may be right. This also may be an instance where somebody makes a product that people just aren’t that into, and so they don’t make the product that accessible. They don’t put weird food that people generally don’t like right there at the end of the aisle. They put the stuff that people do like. If more people wanted to watch short films, trust me, Don, these corporate nightmares would not be burying them. They would be putting them front and center for you to enjoy. That’s my belief.
John: Absolutely. Gabriela wrote in to say that there are places that do put these shorts front and center. She points to nobudge.com and Short of the Week, which has links to a lot of short films and things categorized by filmmakers. She says that she often finds herself going down rabbit holes, following all this director’s short films, or that actor was in this short film. We’ll put a link in the show notes to nobudge.com but also some of the ones that Gabriela really liked, some of the short films [crosstalk 00:14:59].
Craig: She’s curated a nice list for us. This is kind of the deal, like aha. You can wrap your mind around the idea that this thing that you are making or this particular thing that you are enjoying isn’t necessarily a mass audience thing. That is not a judgment. I think people are getting a little feather ruffly about it. We’re not saying the short films are lesser than or bad. We’re just saying that they don’t have a mass audience the way other formats do. Where they do exist, people that like them can enjoy them. It’s a little niche. Your niche. Enjoy your niche. I like saying niche.
John: Niche is a good word.
Craig: Niche.
John: One of the things she points out is that it’s a great chance to see actors before they became famous. It’s the same way first people’s exposure to Melissa McCarthy was in my short film, God. One of these films has Sarah Sherman, who’s now on SNL, Kirby Howell-Baptiste. The same way that shorts could be calling cards for directors, a lot of times it’s the first time we get to see a really interesting actor.
Craig: That may be.
John: Another reason why shorts are important.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Finally, Anamin [ph] Games in Long Beach wrote in to say that one of the biggest uses of short films is really if you think about video games. The short films that are used to introduce video games or just form mythology around video games is really important. I hadn’t considered that, but yes. We would not have the TV series Arcane if we didn’t have all the short films that went into the League of Legends universe.
Craig: Yeah, but those are kind of commercials, right?
John: They’re commercials, yeah.
Craig: I think we can call them commercials, unless you want to say that commercials are short films, which I think a lot of commercial directors would love to hear. That’s its own thing.
John: Yeah, or they’re the endgame connecting pieces behind stuff. It’s explaining how you’re moving from this plane to that plane.
Craig: Supplemental material and so forth.
John: Many of them do function like short films in the sense that they will have a character experiencing one small problem and overcoming that one small problem rather than being a full three-act situation.
Craig: Good.
John: Important update here about Chris Morgan’s terrible WiFi. Our listeners will know that the whole reason why we had to play Codenames that one night is because we were over at Chris Morgan’s house, and his WiFi was disastrous. Megana can tell us Sandrine’s theory on why his WiFi was so buggy.
Megana Rao: Sandrine wrote in and she said, “It’s hard to say for certain without seeing the network setup, but likely it’s because consumer routers try really hard to be smart and often don’t succeed. The router divides the amount of available bandwidth by all the devices, and once it reaches the maximum number of devices it can accommodate, it stops splitting the bandwidth. Most homes have three to five devices per person, between your phone, laptop, tablet, gaming console, Alexa-like device, etc. That quickly adds up before you even add any guests. If you get a new device, the router still reserves a connection for your old device, because it doesn’t know. It’s trying to be nice.”
John: When we were over there, one of the things I did notice is that Chris’s Nest thermostats, they all had individual IP addresses. At one point when we restarted everything, they all had the missing WiFi signal. I think there could’ve just been a lot of devices that were trying to do it. It was just basically saying, “Okay, I’m full up. I cannot take any new devices.”
Craig: I appreciate the theory. I am suspicious. Almost every modern router can handle internet of things plus phones and things and all the rest of it. When we looked at his system, I think he had some Ubiquiti stuff. It was pretty decent. What he said after was that there was some kind of throttle problem that was happening in the neighborhood. I’m pretty sure his internet is coming in through Charter or whatever they’re called now, when they each each other, Spectrum, I don’t know. Anyway, point is there was a provider issue, which makes more sense to me.
John: Also, it could be both being true. Basically, the pipe coming into his house was very, very narrow, and this very smart router that he had, which was a good router, was trying to protect the limited resources it had. It might’ve been doing that by, when it hit a limit, saying okay now we’re going to stop allowing new things on it, so that everything wouldn’t degrade.
Craig: It’s possible.
John: I think what we all agree on is that Chris needs a new person to come in there and fix his whole internet situation, because that was a mess.
Craig: Maybe not, because once the service came back, he said everything was fine. I don’t know, I think he might be okay.
John: He didn’t have six other people trying to access the internet.
Craig: I think he did a test.
John: He recruited six volunteers to come to his house.
Craig: I think he started up as many devices as he could, and everything was fine. I’ve been there before with multiple people, and there’s never been a problem.
John: [inaudible 00:19:48].
Craig: I think his system is all right. Look, I think the important thing is he doesn’t really understand the system. It’s good to understand your own system.
John: I think it’s important.
Craig: Thank you, Sandrine. You may be right.
John: Let’s close out our follow-up with something going back all the way to Episode 44. Megana, help us out.
Megana: Ryan wrote in and said, “I was recently listening to Episode 44: Endings for Beginners and wanted to revisit a discussion you were having at the outset of that long-ago episode. It’s about vocal fry. Back then, you didn’t seem to care for it much.”
Craig: Yeah, back then.
Megana: “I’m curious if you both have maybe changed your minds about linguistic tics like this and of the linguistic tics of teenage girls in particular. It seems to me that annoying as these might initially sound, they just give us a bigger canvas to work with, that without teenagers generally and teenage girls in particular, to say nothing of all sorts of other communities who come at language differently than what we think of as the default, white, English-speaking, mostly male, without all of these groups trying out and inventing new forms of speaking, that yes, make us feel older and increasingly out of touch, but also keep language a living, evolving thing, we’d be stuck with fewer voices and tics and whatnot to try and get down on the page. Anyway, I would love your thoughts on this as language-lovers and voice-capturers and recent fathers of teenage daughters.”
Craig: This feels very setup-ish.
John: It does feel very set up. Ryan, I agree with your thesis in that I think we were too dismissive too quickly of vocal fry as being just a little trend, and we’re not mindful of the fact that all language change tends to happen with young women. Young women change their language most quickly. The changes they make end up spilling over into other people. Vocal fry, which was largely a teen girl phenomenon when we first probably talked about it, is now ubiquitous. It’s crossed to all sections of things. The new thing which you’re hearing, which Craig, I’m curious whether you’re hearing this too, is, “Stop-uh! Stop-uh!” The extra “uh” on the end.
Craig: I love that thing.
John: Love that thing. I think that starts in teen girls and then probably goes to gay men and goes to other places too. Our language is richer for the weird quirks that come up.
Craig: The “uh,” it’s not new. It’s not even mildly old. It’s very old, because I used to call my sister No-uh, because when she was a teenager she would like, “No-uh.” It’s always been there. Maybe I’m wildly off on this, but I feel like there’s less vocal fry than there was. I feel like vocal fry had this moment, and then it passed. My daughter does not have it. Her friends don’t have it. I listen to them. When they talk, let’s say I happen to be near them for 3 minutes, I will hear about 90 hours of regular people talk in that 3 minutes, because there are so many words, and I don’t hear it. I don’t think it’s as common. I think it might have just sort of crested. It’s not as prevalent I think as it was. The up-talking is out of control. It’s completely out of control.
John: I’m thinking back to, Lake Bell had a movie called In A World, which was about these dueling movie announcers.
Craig: In A World.
John: I really liked the movie. I think I had a concern about your takeaway from the end of it. It’s because in the end she does training for young women to get them to stop up-talking and vocal frying. I wonder if really the solution is not to try to change women’s voices, but to have a broader acceptance of what is a professional voice.
Craig: I have no problem with women trying to change women’s voices. I’m fine with that. I definitely see that it’s problematic for men to say, “Women, stop it.” If I say, “Look, people who up-talk are going to be viewed as less intelligent than people who aren’t,” I don’t have to like that, and I don’t have to agree with it, and I can actually say affirmatively that that’s bad. If it’s real, what do we do? We make these decisions as we go. Obviously, things change as generations grow up and take over. I don’t get in the way of women teaching women how to do stuff. I stay over here. I stay over here and watch. Megana, what do you think?
Megana: Recently, an actress tweeted that she likes women but their voices on podcasts are irritating because they’re a little higher, and that they should work on lowering them. Basically to say, I don’t always agree with women telling other women what to do. I think we need to examine why we find women’s voices annoying at all.
Craig: I think that part of this is generational. I think it’s tempting to look at this solely through the lens of gender, but a lot of times we are looking at old versus young. I think that as people get older, I find that men and women of a certain generation start to see more in common with each other than they do with their gender cohorts of younger generations, that boys are annoying and girls are annoying to men and women who are older. It is an interesting phenomenon. You begin to see this exasperation. I try and not be exasperated by young people, because they’re going to be taking care of us. Vocal fry and up-talking, there’s no crime there. It’s something that I giggle about, to be honest with you. Anybody that’s actually like, “Damn this vocal fry,” has definitely got a problem.
John: To wrap this up, I want to point people to a performance I thought was remarkable. This is in the series Search Party. I think it was the third season. There is a character named Cassidy who’s a lawyer played by Shalita Grant. Her vocal fry and her performance is so remarkable. She’s a really good lawyer who’s defending Dory. She has completely the most extreme version of a 20-something vocal fry. It’s just an absolute delight to hear. Going back to the question of to what degree can a vocal tic inform a character or do you use a generational vocal tic as a character, I thought it was a great, great choice. Maybe in the tradition of Legally Blonde is a great character who’s really marked by not just her personality but really her vocal performance that lets you know that she is young and she’s challenging established authority.
Craig: Great.
John: Megana, are you still hearing vocal fry? I’m still hearing vocal fry.
Megana: I’m still hearing vocal fry. Also, John, we were talking about this months ago. We were talking about how I notice it a lot in men my age. John coined the term brocal fry.
Craig: Brocal fry. That’s guys who are doing this sort of thing.
Megana: Yes, exactly.
Craig: I can talk about those guys. I can be part of that. I can be part of men telling boys to effing stop it. I can be that grouch. I have no problem with that. Cut it out.
John: I think Brocal Fry will be the title of the episode.
Craig: Cut it out, brocal fry. I have no problem policing men.
John: Hey Megana, it’s time for (singing) Megana Has a Question.
Megana: My question is, what is the strategy behind announcing a project in the trades?
John: Some context behind that, so you’re asking why do certain things get announced and other things don’t get announced. I think you’re asking, why is this thing even in the trades? I don’t know who these people are or who this director is.
Megana: This isn’t me subtweeting anyone or any article, but sometimes when I’m reading through Deadline, it’ll be like, “So-and-so is attached to this.” Then I read the article and I’m like, “Attached to what? What is this? What is there?”
Craig: Derek Haas, friend of our podcast and Chicago Firer, sometimes will send me a link to a Deadline article and just be like, “Dude, huge news.” The Deadline article is something like, “John Finkleberg is the sound mixer for the pilot of a show on the Serial Channel.” You’re like, “What the hell is this?”
What is the strategy behind announcing a project in the trades? I think the strategy is that it costs nothing. They’re fire-hosing stuff out there. The online trades cost them nothing to put another article out and call it an exclusive or whatever. It’s just one more opportunity for people to click on something and see an ad. For the people that are putting it out there, they’re trying to confidence something into existence. It doesn’t work that way. They can show people, “Look, it’s legitimate. We’re in the trades. If it’s in Variety, it must be real.”
John: I think another reason why some stuff gets announced and other stuff doesn’t get announced is that the producer or the studio wants basically to make a claim to something, basically let everyone know, okay, clear this territory, clear this space, because we have this big writer on this project or this director has come onto this thing, so don’t do something else that’s like it, or this director who’s actually attached to nine different things, now they’re attached to this thing, and we think this is the next thing that’s going to happen. There can be some jockeying in that. The audience really is not for the rest of the world but for that actor’s reps or for… There can be certain very specific audiences, the same way that people in Trump world will say something to the press just so Donald Trump will hear it.
Craig: It’s a little bit like it’s hot wind for a hot wind farm. It’s bloviators talking to each other, because I don’t like announcing anything personally. What’s the point? I am announcing that I’m going to do a thing. No one cares. Do the thing. Then we’ll tell you if it’s good or not. That’s basically how this works. All this announcing, it’s really for… There is a class of people in our business, and it is probably actually the largest class by number, of people who don’t write or act or direct or edit or even produce in the classic way like Lindsay Dorant produces, but more middlemen and middlemen between the middlemen and sub-middlemen and representatives of middlemen and the derivatives of the representatives of the middlemen, and all of them are talking to each other. I’m out of that.
John: Let’s say you were a development executive at some small company that’s at Disney or something like that. It may behoove you to have that project announced in the trades to just remind people like, oh, they’re actually a place that makes things or could make a thing or we should re-up the deal at Disney. It reminds people that you exist. I think it’s proof of life.
Craig: It can be proof of life. I suppose that is true.
Megana: It’s sort of like the way boomers use Facebook updates?
Craig: Yes.
John: Once again, Megana has really summarized it down and provided the best answer.
Craig: (singing) Megana has an answer!
John: (singing) Answer!
Craig: Wait, were we just set up there by Megana?
Megana: No.
Craig: I think we were. I think she set us up so that she could just dunk on us.
Megana: When you said the thing about reminding people that they exist, I’m like, I recognize that as a phenomenon.
Craig: The olds do that. They do that all the time. We have another question coming about money. Is that right?
John: Money.
Craig: Money.
John: Megana, can you read us through DB’s question here?
Megana: DB says, “Let’s talk about money.”
Craig: I hope this isn’t David Benioff, because I can’t.
John: [Crosstalk 00:32:00].
Craig: That’s just too much money to discuss.
Megana: “After some small but meaningful successes, established producers in a studio took a chance on me and I booked my first rewrite job. After two months, many late nights, and several listens of back Scriptnotes episodes, I submitted the script. The studio loved it, and they offered me other rewrite jobs. I’m now writing, rewriting, or developing a few features in addition to my own show. My question, while perhaps tacky, is this. What future path might eventually lead to bigger paydays, partnering with producers or studios to write and sell originals or gunning for that sweet, sweet rewrite money? Is there sweet, sweet rewrite money? I come from a lower middle class background. I’ve struggled financially without safety nets my entire life. In fact, after I graduated college with a mountain of student loan debt, I was a safety net for my immigrant family, not the other way around. My manager and agent have been great, helpful, and protective of my choices creatively. I’m of course pursuing my dream projects. From a purely financial long-term point of view, I’m just curious.”
Craig: Great.
John: Great. This is the happy struggle. I’m glad things are going well for DB. Let’s talk about this, because you and I have both done big work on features that we’ve initiated, but we’ve also done a lot of rewrite work. Maybe, probably, the rewrite work has paid more on the whole.
Craig: The way I always like to think of it is that the work that you do, that you generate, whether it’s an original, or more likely these days, being the first writer to write something based on something, that is the stuff that gets you all the rewrite work. You can’t just rewrite forever. At some point you’ve got to do your own thing. You just will eventually fall off that list, unless your rewrite work is attached to more than a few big feature directors who ask for you by name. You’re going to have to feed both beasts. The best money in features is the weekly production rewrite money. That’s the best money there is in terms of just day for day.
John: We should clarify that that’s a situation where you are probably not the original writer. You are coming on to a project that is in some sort of crisis moment, and they’re paying you on a week-to-week basis, they can stop you at any point, a good amount of money to be there to rewrite the stuff that’s about to shoot. That’s when they stick me on a plane and fly me to Hawaii to help out on a thing. That is one of those weekly jobs. It’s not a thing I started. I’m the emergency fixer of a problem.
Craig: Sometimes you’re brought into one of those things because the movie’s fine, but one of the actors is not happy. One of those I was brought on, my job was you have one week to convince that woman to get on that plane and go to that production. You have to sit with her and write stuff and make her happy without screwing up her movie. There are all sorts of reasons why you may get that assignment. Those are financially incredible. You don’t get there unless you’ve written a bunch of other stuff that people like and you’ve had some successes on your own. That’s part of it. You have to feed both.
It sounds like you came from a similar background that I came from. My family was an immigrant family, but same deal, lower middle class, mountain of student loan debt, taking care of them. Don’t over-calculate here. There’s temptation to try and game the system. You can’t. Do the best work you can do. I guarantee that if all you do is write well, you can’t fail. Just keep writing well. That’s all you got to do.
John: DB has one very different situation than you or I did is that he’s coming just because he sold a show. He’s going to have a show that he’s going to be theoretically running. That is a big complication, because running a show is taking up your entire life in theory. It may be hard for you to go out and pitch all those other feature projects or to be the weekly person, because if you are running a show, by definition you are not going to be available for a weekly to do for that other thing.
Craig: It sounds like he sold a show, but I don’t know if that show is on, because the way he’s talking, it says, “After some small but meaningful successes, I sold a show to a streamer.” I think maybe that show is not running.
John: Maybe it’s not running yet. At a certain point, it could be running. At a certain point, there’ll be an expectation that you’ll be going into-
Craig: In that case, yeah. Look, if you’re running a show, you’re going to be saying… DB, the best thing of all, then you start saying no. Nothing makes you sexier than no.
John: The ability to say no is a crucial thing. I’m flashing back to my early years as a writer. Go was produced. I was writing Charlie’s Angels. I sold the TV show DC, which I was then running. There were other projects happening simultaneously. Big Fish was also happening. The show does end up eating your life. Craig can testify, actually running a show eats your life and makes it impossible for you to do other things during it. Just also be aware, DB, that you may not even have the opportunity to say no to some things, because it just may be impossible for you to do some of the things at a certain point.
I’ve talked with other feature writers who have gone off to do a TV show. They’ve said, “I don’t know if I can afford to do this TV show, because this is taking away the time that it would be able to do the feature work I was going to be able to do.” Those are really high-class problems to have, but there are problems that you may encounter at a certain point.
Craig: It is a nice thing to go chase your dream gig when you know that you’re financially settled. It’s a much better feeling. Fear is the enemy of creativity. If you’re writing afraid, you’re going to be in trouble. It sounds like things are going well for you. I would say just keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t think about just being a rewriter or a not rewriter. Do it both. Remember that you have no idea what phone call is going to happen tomorrow. I think all the time about how I can plan for things. Every kooky, crazy, exciting thing that ever happened to me came out of the blue. It wasn’t out of the blue. It’s just that I didn’t know that people were talking. People had meetings, and then eventually I get a phone call. I didn’t know. I had no idea.
Megana: Can I ask a follow-up question on rewrites?
Craig: No.
John: Please ask your question, Megana.
Craig: Oh my god, that was the most sad rollover ever. “Okay.”
Megana: I already had the whole song and dance of my segment, so that’s fine.
Craig: (singing) Megana asks another question!
Megana: Just for DB, if he’s going into these rewrites, and this is more of a question of how you guys approach rewrites, because if you’re working on original stuff, you can do the note behind the no and make the changes you want to make. When you guys are going in to do a rewrite on a big studio tent pole project, are you taking the notes more literally because you’re trying to endear yourself to the producers?
John: Yes and no. There’s a little less kabuki in terms of if there’s a production problem that you need to write around, then you’re writing around that. If it’s an actor problem, then you are having to do that tap dance where you’re both trying to make that actor feel heard and supported and confident in what they’re about to do and yet not derail the whole movie or what the director needs to do or what the studio is telling you to do. I think we said this before, that so much of what they’re hiring you for as a writer on those production rewrites is really to be the therapist to the negotiator. You’re a hostage negotiator getting them through this situation.
Craig: The one thing that they really don’t have to worry about with you is you being emotionally invested in such a way that you’re going to be defensive. I’m a neutral party when I show up. I say what I see. They tell me what they want. I have discussions with them. Very often, the discussions go like this. “Okay, I’ve read everything. I hear what you’re saying. I hear what you’re saying. I think the problem is actually different. I think this is the problem. You may or may not agree, and that’s your choice. If you don’t agree, let us part ways. If you do, this is what I would do.” More often than not, they agree, because what they’re not concerned about is that my solution is the product of emotional defensiveness or desire to preserve something that mattered to me, because I wasn’t there when this whole thing was done. I can be clinical.
This is a really good question, Megana, because if you at home find yourself in the enviable position of doing these kinds of rewrites, don’t just do what they tell you to do. That’s how you will yes your way out of that business. What they want is somebody coming in to be an expert. When corporations hire consultants, which is basically the closest analogy I can think, they’re hoping for the consultant to tell them stuff they didn’t want to know or didn’t know. That’s why they’re paying the consultant, even to the extent that employees are like, “Oh god, here comes a consultant that’s basically going to crap on everything,” because that’s their job. I don’t do that, but I don’t just give them what they want. I give them what I think they need.
John: A writer friend was talking about this one job she was brought in on. She realized at a certain point that, “Oh, they don’t actually even want me to rewrite this thing. They basically want me as a woman with these credits to do exactly what they wanted to do anyway.” She ended up quitting out of the job. They were basically giving her the pages that they wanted to put her name on for this rewrite, which was just absurd. I was offended on her behalf.
Craig: That is a thing right now. Hiring writers to rewrite, but really they don’t want to rewrite. They just want to sprinkle whatever diversity need they decided they have on it without actually treating that person like an artist and needing them. That’s debasing. Everybody has to have their antenna up for that. That is a problem. We can’t do anything about that. That is something that the employers just have to understand is awful and will backfire, by the way, almost every time. It’ll just backfire. That’s a thing that didn’t used to exist that now exists. That’s creepy. Everybody, good news, more creepiness in Hollywood.
John: I think we have time for one more short question.
Craig: Woo.
John: Let’s try this one from Pat.
Megana: Pat says, “Well, it’s happened. First optioned script, a pilot, has died on the vine. Creative differences. I’m disappointed but also could see it coming, as the producer kept pushing further away from the original idea/script towards something I had less and less interest in writing or believed would be successful. Now what do I do? What advice do you have for that day/week/month after a project you’ve been working on has failed to launch? Reformulate and send it around again? Start the next project you’ve been itching to work on? Eat a bag of Dove chocolates and watch The Sandman? Any wisdom from the trenches would be much appreciated.”
John: Oh, Pat. I’m sorry this has happened.
Craig: Sorry, Pat.
John: This has happened to every writer who’s ever been on this podcast, where something was like, “Is this going to happen? It’s not going to happen. It’s done.” What you’re describing where you could feel this is drifting further and further away from what you had intended, yes, and so you had some warning that this was going to happen. It wasn’t just a sudden shock. It’s just now it’s clear that this thing is gone. Craig, what’s your instinct? Do you go back and look at this exact project again? Do you focus on something else first? What would you do first?
Craig: I think it’s important to focus on something else first, because you’re just so close in it right now. What you might do would be motivated more by proving somebody wrong, as opposed to what you should be doing or would really want to do artistically. You need a little perspective, and perspective is a function of time. Personally, I would say let’s put that in the drawer for a bit, but it’s still yours. It’s an optioned script. You own it. You’re going to come back to it. Work on something else. Work on something else. As you say, start the next project you’ve been itching to work on. You can definitely eat a bag of Dove chocolates and watch The Sandman. While you’re doing that, start looking at that next project. Eventually, you can and should come back to the pilot in the drawer and take a look at it and think about it and wonder what you would want out of it, because here’s what I know, that if another producer comes across that script, perhaps it’s improved, because time helps us improve things, another producer comes across that script, they might cotton to it, and where they want to push it is in a completely different direction than the other producer.
The one thing I know about producers is they don’t lack confidence. They all think they’re right. What you need is a producer whose right is aligned with your right. There may be a much better match. I can’t imagine a worse match. Give it some time, and then come back to it.
John: The underlying message behind all this is make sure you don’t treat this project not going forward as a failure, because it wasn’t. It was a series of successes that didn’t end up in a final glorious TV show, but you accomplished some things. You were able to get this script in the hands of somebody who wanted to make it, who saw the quality here. You were able to learn about how to work on this thing. You made it to a certain stage. It didn’t go any further, but you did learn something from it. There was a bunch of successes. Don’t take this last collapse as the overall failure, that this was a waste of your time. Instead, go forward. Pick that next thing that you really wanted to write, that you probably would’ve preferred to write, that you’re doing all this work on this other pilot, and move forward. Cool. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. You said you had a great one.
Craig: I do.
John: Let’s see if it’s actually all that great.
Craig: It is all that great. John, every now and again, something happens in the world of technology that really does change the way that we approach making television and film. I was out to dinner the other night with John Lee Hancock. He has just finished post on his next movie. I’m in post-production on my show. We started talking about this thing that we were so excited about. It’s relatively new. It’s I would say two or three years old at this point, commonly used. It’s called fluid morph. Now every editor out there is like, “Yeah, we know.” For the folks who are listening along, let me explain why fluid morph is the greatest goddamn thing of all time. Editing is a big puzzle. I love the puzzle of editing. You’re trying to figure out how to achieve what you want to achieve with the footage you have. Sometimes that requires a little bit of trickery. The one thing that’s so frustrating is when you have this great moment. Let’s say there’s a line. John, give me a line from a movie that you love that I can do.
John: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Craig: We’re going to need a bigger boat. The “going to need a bigger boat” was so good, but there was a pause between “we’re” and that. We could start the “we’re” over another person, cut the pause, and then come back to “going to need a bigger boat,” but that’s not as good as just somebody looking and going, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” There was nothing you could do back then, because if you cut within a take, that’s a jump cut. Everybody would see. Enter fluid morph, where now you can just cut out some space inside of a take, stick the A and the B side together, and then fluid morph just goes and makes the jump cut go away. It doesn’t work in every situation. It needs certain circumstances. It generally works best when there’s lots of light and when most things aren’t moving. It can handle little jump cuts. It’s wonderful and just a great tool to have in the editing quiver, tool belt. It’s a great tool arrow to have in your editing quiver tool belt.
John: What you’re describing is… I knew of it in general, but hadn’t seen it, this thorough breakdown. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how this is being done. In audio editing, like what Matthew is doing all the time on our podcast, is cutting out this weird stuff. It’s always been really easy to do an audio. The challenge is, oh, we have these people’s stupid faces here. We can’t do this because we’re seeing the line. It’s been very easy to make that kind of cut when we’re over someone’s shoulders, but when we’re not seeing their actual mouth. This is just moving mouths to actually fit and get rid of that jump, which is great.
Craig: In audio, typically when you cut a pause in between, you’ll put the two things together. Sometimes you don’t have to do anything, but sometimes you need a little two-frame dissolve or two-frame cross-fade in terms of audio, where it’ll blend over that cut and then it just disappears. We can’t do cross-fades and visuals until now. Essentially, that’s what a fluid morph is. It’s a cross-fade over a cut inside of a take. Man, I’ll tell you, sometimes when you’re stuck in a corner and then you’re like, “Wait a second, what if I want to cut this line out between these two lines but I want to stay with him on those two lines?”
John: That’s a great example, because it wasn’t just the actor’s performance. It’s literally like, okay, that doesn’t actually make sense anymore because of a change.
Craig: Exactly. I like the first sentence. I like the third sentence. I don’t like the second. I love the way they’re staring. I want the camera to stay on them. Fluid morph.
John: Exciting to see. My One Cool Thing is a treat yourself. We talked about when you finish a project, how do you treat yourself. I of course go to Panda Express.
Craig: Of course. So weird.
John: My treat myself this last project was an OXO coffee grinder. I made my own coffee. I use an AeroPress, which has worked out great for me. I always have to use decaf.
Craig: Why do you use decaf?
John: Because I can’t actually have caffeine anymore, Craig.
Craig: What?
John: Literally it was causing this heartburn problem that felt like I was having a heart attack all the time. I stopped caffeine, and it all got better. I miss caffeine sometimes. I really, truly do.
Craig: Did you try Prilosec and so forth?
John: None of that stuff was doing the job.
Craig: Wow. Serious. I’m sad. I’m sorry.
John: It was acid reflux really, basically. The little flap wasn’t doing its job right, and Prilosec and all the other stuff wouldn’t take care of it.
Craig: Caffeine will absolutely exacerbate that, no question.
John: Dr. Craig with the advice.
Craig: Dr. Craig is here.
John: I was using my little Mr. Coffee stand-up grinder thing that has a little whirring blade. It’s just not as good as a brewer grinder. I got this OXO coffee grinder. It is delightful. You fill it, put your beans it. You push a little button. It gives you exactly the amount of coffee you need to make one cup of coffee. I’m just so much happier. I wish I had gotten this 10 years ago.
Craig: Sometimes we forget that we can change something. We just live with this slightly annoying thing for years. Then one day… The OXO, this is great. I like that we do commercials and we don’t get paid. I guess that’s how you know we actually like things. I don’t listen to podcasts, as you know. I have a new car that has Apple CarPlay, and [crosstalk 00:52:17].
John: So much better than anything else.
Craig: It’s wonderful. I was just poking around. Then they have podcasts. I’m like, “Okay, let me just see what… “ It was some small list of curated podcasts. I just picked one. I picked Pod Save…
John: Pod Save America?
Craig: Pod Save America. Thank you. I was going to say Pod Save the World. That’s so terrible of me.
John: There’s Pod Save the World too.
Craig: Pod Save America. I’ve been on Pod Save America. Some idiot.
John: You were on Love It Or Leave It.
Craig: Isn’t that the same thing?
John: It’s the same network.
Craig: It’s the same guys.
John: It’s some of the same people.
Craig: This is how bad I am. I was on one of those things. I’m listening to one of those things with one of those guys. They start doing a commercial for… I honestly can’t remember what it was for.
John: Probably Beam or Casper Mattresses.
Craig: No. I don’t know what it was for. Oh, no, I do. It was for SimpliSafe.
John: SimpliSafe is a common sponsor there, yeah.
Craig: The alarm system. I was like, “What is this? Why are they doing this?” Obviously, in real time, it took .01 seconds, but in brain time, it was a year of me going, “Why are they talking about SimpliSafe like this?” and then like, “Oh, that’s right, podcasts have ads.”
John: We don’t have ads.
Craig: No, although now at this point we’ve done an ad for SimpliSafe and the OXO Burr grinder.
John: We didn’t talk about how great SimpliSafe was and how it can provide confidence that your home and your possessions are protected while you’re away, that it’s easy to set up.
Craig: It’s so easy to install.
John: Here’s what I’ll say about switching to my OXO coffee grinder. Literally, because I now don’t have to open the bag of beans, scoop the beans, put them in the thing, it saves 30 seconds every morning, which is great.
Craig: Here we go. Here we go. Here comes the calculation.
John: 30 seconds every morning, and it also tastes better. Literally, my coffee does taste better.
Craig: I have added five minutes to my lifespan.
John: More will be accomplished.
Craig: More will be accomplished in this time. OXO coffee grinder has increased John’s overall CPU efficiency.
John: Even without the caffeine. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, and I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, they’re great, and hoodies too. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, and news about our upcoming live shows first. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: This segment is about failing fast. We have two questions here that can help set this up. Megana, do you want to start us off with Joe from Kokomo?
Megana: Joe from Kokomo wrote in and said, “Like many, I’m a big fan of Pixar and their creative process, which has been tried and tested. Fail fast, be collaborative, and many other strategies seem to give them quality. It’s usually over years and years that they attain this high standard. It’s not uncommon for them to toss out a bunch of work and start afresh. Safe to say this is labor and time-intense. When working on a pitch for an open writing assignment, how is it possible to come up with real quality so quickly? I find cracking a narrative painfully time-consuming, and really the majority of the work involved in, quote unquote, writing. How do you strike the balance of not pitching crap and not doing a Pixar and not spending every waking second working for free on a pitch an exec will just flippantly consider?”
John: Great. The second question we had was from Raja, who basically asked, “I want to fail fast so I can iterate faster. How do we get to that point?” Basically, there is this theory [inaudible 00:56:50] the startup world, of just you want to come out with a minimum viable product, so you can see is there a market for this, what are the things, so we are not wasting a year trying to build something that nobody actually wants. This is I think tough for the kinds of stuff that Craig and I are usually writing. It reminds me that Mike Birbiglia and all stand-up people, they do this all the time, because they could just try stuff out really easily. They can just go on a stage and see what jokes work.
Craig: They can workshop things. Maybe not so much for Mike, just because of the way that he does more this long-form storytelling piece, but for a very traditional comic like let’s say Patton Oswalt, who’s one of my favorites, Patton’s sets are very traditional. They’re jokes. They are connected into chunks, and they’re organized, but they’re jokes. If one of the jokes isn’t working, he’s going to know after a few sets, I would imagine. Then he’ll just cut that one out, or if one is working really well, maybe he expands on that. What we do is not in pieces. We’re not delivering pieces. No one’s going to watch a movie and talk about, “Oh my god, there were so many great scenes, but then five scenes that bombed.” That’s not the way it works.
While I appreciate the questioning here, I think it’s slightly misguided, meaning what I’m detecting underneath this is a desire for efficiency. You’re not going to have it. This is not an efficient process. Being artistic is not efficient. Being creative is not efficient. Sometimes you’re going to put in a lot of time to get something that’s so-so. Sometimes in two minutes you’re going to come up with something awesome.
John: I think what you’re pointing to, the difference between Patton Oswalt or even Mike Birbiglia is that they have a built-in feedback mechanism. They have laughter. They have an audience. They have a set planned for going ahead and doing this. As writers, we generally don’t have that quick feedback mechanism, so we’re asking someone to read our script or listen to our pitch. Unless we have a system for doing that the way that Megana has her writers group, we’re not going to have regular people always being able to provide feedback and giving us a real sense of whether this thing we’re working on is working or not working.
Sara Schaefer, who’s been a guest on the show before, she has a new show called Going Up. I went to the first run-through of it, her first trial version of it. It was like this to some degree. It was a full one-hour show set concept. I will say, smartly, she was at an inexpensive theater that she could rent for not a lot of money. There wasn’t the pressure of expectation that everything had to be perfect. She could play around with it some. Rachel Bloom has been doing the same thing with her show. She’s finding ways to get feedback before a thing is finished and yet it’s still not nearly the failing fast the way that I think Joe and Rahad are looking for.
Craig: When comedians go in front of an audience, let’s say there’s 200 people in the room. I don’t know if that’s typical, large-ish comedy club.
John: That’s a pretty big [crosstalk 00:59:59].
Craig: Let’s say 100 people. Do 3 shows a week, 300 people. Do 2 weeks, 600 people. That’s a lot of people. We’re not getting 600 people to read a script. More importantly, you don’t want it. Telling jokes and getting laughs is a democratic process. You’re looking for the thick middle where you’re going to get most people on board for some comedians. Some comedians really enjoy just making their people laugh and everybody else confused. That’s fine too. Some of them are amazing. For what we’re doing, that’s not the point. You can’t fail faster. You’re going to fail as you fail. I want to fail faster is a little bit like saying I want to come up with ideas faster and I want to write faster and I want to think faster. You can’t.
When Joe asked how do you strike the balance of not pitching crap and not doing a Pixar and spending every waking second… You just try your best. You’re not going to pitch something you don’t believe in, obviously. If you find cracking a narrative painfully time-consuming, I got news for you, Joe. You might not be the guy that gets open writing assignments, because that’s maybe a gear that’s just not really compatible with your machinery. Your machinery works a different way.
John: Craig, I loved pitching open writing assignments. I just loved, hey, we want to do a Highlander movie, and so I could spend two days thinking, how would I do a Highlander movie. That to me is the joy. I love that.
Craig: Some people love it, and some people hate it. Personally, my story, I would go fast. I could do it, because it would go somewhat quickly. Also, I think I had a decent internal barometer about what mattered and what didn’t for that stage, so that I didn’t get bogged down into the little minutiae, because ultimately they didn’t matter for that stage.
John: Megana, I want to ask you about your writers group and the degree to which they can provide that quick feedback. Are you able to pitch them an idea or give them a brief glimpse of the thing and hear whether it’s a thing worth pursuing?
Megana: Yeah, definitely, but the project that I’m working on now, we actually just met last night. It’s pretty close to finished. Even with pretty consistent feedback from them, and them watching the evolution of this feature that I’m writing, it still took the time that it took for me to get to this stage. I don’t know that it could’ve gone any faster. Ultimately, whatever feedback they gave me, I’m the one who had to figure it out and take the time to change how certain characters are interacting with each other, whatever. Maybe that’s my limitation. I can’t think of a way I would’ve gotten here sooner.
John: The minimum viable product for a script is a script. You got to write the script. There’s just not a lot to it. Maybe for a pitch. I definitely remember when I switched agencies, I did the water bottle tour of Los Angeles and met with a bunch of people. I had a couple things in my back pocket that I was pitching, like, “Oh, this is a kind of movie I’d love to write.” I was able to get the quick feedback on, oh, a lot of people are interested in that, and no one bit on that other thing. If you’re thinking of a full script, I don’t think there’s a quick way to get there or a quick way to fail on that. On a pitch, sure, no one’s biting, you know that’s probably not the thing you want to pursue.
Megana: That makes sense. I guess when I have a new project, I’m talking to my writers group about it based off of the questions that they’re asking. It helps me realize whether there’s actually story there or not.
John: Craig, as you’re working through, you’re now in the editing room, there is a version of this argument where you’re not trying to make the absolute final, most perfected version of a thing. You’re just looking at on this screen does it look like this is the right way to do a scene, and then you’re working on perfection later on?
Craig: You definitely funnel in. There’s no question about that. The ending process is different, I think because you are dealing with specific pieces. Actually, it is a little bit like a broken picture jigsaw not-puzzle, because there is a finished show that looks like a finished jigsaw not-puzzle, and you’re just figuring out how to move the pieces around to get there. They are the pieces. When you’re writing, you can make your own pieces. You can eliminate pieces, change the pieces entirely. It’s just a very different process. For me, I tend to find that I want to dive into the details as quickly as I can with editing. To me that’s where it all happens, all in the details, all in the little moments. If a scene is just a total mess, then I may give a general guidance for it.
There’s two kinds of ways that I work with our editors. The first way is to say, “Okay, here’s my general notes, because I think that this is not on the green. I can’t tap it in the hole. Here’s what I think. Da da da da da.” Then they’ll work on that. Then I’ll come back, “Okay, it’s on the green. Now let’s get into everything. The line reading is where we cut from there to there. Do we have them move slightly before we cut away?” All these little tiny, tiny, tiny things that we can get into. I love that part. I’m only working with that’s there. There’s nothing else.
Megana: I also just want to make a plug for the segment called How Would This Be a Movie, where I feel like you guys go through open writing assignments.
Craig: I guess that is true.
John: That is true, because we’re really looking through all the possibilities of how you would approach a thing, and then it’s like, is there a movie there? I guess you find out.
Craig: I legitimately thought Megana was going to say, “I want to make a plug for,” and then announce some competing coffee grinder, just because she had been stewing over this this whole time, just like, “The OXO is not very good.”
John: Any time that coffee aficionados hear about a thing, everyone will tell me about why OXO is greatly inferior to this other thing which costs five times as much. That’s how it goes.
Megana: I look forward to those emails.
Craig: That’s going to be fun. You know what? Just put a little filter.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: The word coffee. If anyone emails you about coffee, just delete it. Spam.
John: Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you, Megana.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- HBO Max to Remove 36 Titles, Including 20 Originals, From Streaming
- Gabriella’s short film recommendations: Squirrel, Bev, Savasana, Learning to Walk, Lavender, Home
- OXO Coffee Grinder
- Fluid Morph
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 564: Brocal Fry, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 583 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ve got a very special guest. Sarah Polley is a writer/director whose credits include Take This Waltz, Away From Her, and Stories We Tell. She’s also the star of my very first movie, Go. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah Polley.
Craig: Woo!
Sarah Polley: Nice to see you. You look exactly the same, and it’s really eerie.
John: Somehow I don’t age. It’s a lot of wearing a hat I think is what does it.
Sarah: It’s frightening.
Craig: I worry that what’s going to happen is you’re going to age all at once.
John: That’s going to be terrifying.
Craig: One day we’re going to be like, “Oh, no, what happened? He’s a hundred.”
Sarah: I think it’s like a Death Becomes Her type scenario. Actually, this house that we’re recording this in reminds me a bit of Death Becomes Her, so it’s all coming together. Some kind of illegal potion, and Bruce Willis is somewhere.
Craig: Yes. We should do a deep dive on that one. I love that movie.
Sarah: Oh my god, that’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
Craig: It’s so good.
Sarah: I’ve seen that movie probably 30 times. There was a period in high school where we watched it every weekend. We just kept watching it.
Craig: It’s so good. It’s such a good movie.
John: Sarah Polley, I remember you from Go, obviously, because that was my first movie making experience, so it was all overwhelming. You had made a zillion things before that point. I distinctly remember there was a point in which you wrapped, and the next night we were shooting, and there’s Sarah again, and she’s sitting on the floor of this hotel room, in a scene that you’re not in at all, just watching. Do you always know that you wanted to direct? It seemed like you were studying it from the moment I saw you.
Sarah: That actually happened as a result of that movie in a way, because I remember meeting with Doug. I remember I was not feeling particularly ambitious as an actor. I didn’t want to make a movie in LA. I remember Doug hadn’t read the script yet. I remember he waylaid me at a hotel somewhere, was like, “Just meet with me for an hour,” before I got on a plane.
I remember him talking about his filmmaking and how he wanted to break the rules and light differently, and he operated his own camera, and rules of filmmaking that he felt were outmoded, that he was going to change. I literally had a moment in that meeting where I just went, “If I can shadow you and learn about what the hell you’re talking about right now, I’m in. I don’t particularly want to act, but I’d really like to spend my time this way.” I loved the characters.
It turned into this kind of apprenticeship where I was watching Doug working and watching you working with him. That became something I suddenly was interested in was filmmaking. Even though I’d been acting for a long time, I never thought of it as something I was interested in before that movie. Then yeah, I was watching a lot.
John: I want to get more into filmmaking and writing and directing, but specifically I want to talk about your new movie, Women Talking, which Craig and I both just absolutely loved.
Sarah: Thank you.
John: It’s up for all sorts of awards this season. It’s really, really good. We’ll talk about that. I also want to talk about your book, Run Towards the Danger, which is a moment in your life, but also good general life philosophy advice. I think it’s a generally applicable thing you apply to your life and your career, correct?
Sarah: I think that recovering from this concussion, which I had for about three and a half years, and having little success doing so, and then finally finding this amazing treatment program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where the advice I’d been given was turned on its head, so the advice to either rest in a dark room, or the best advice I got was walk and do stuff, but as soon as you start to feel symptoms, come on, go down to zero.
He shook that all up, this amazing doctor, Dr. Michael Collins, and he said, “Look, if you remember one thing from this meeting, it’s this. Run towards the danger. You’re not going to get better at handling the things that are difficult for you with a concussion by avoiding them.” There’s a bunch of very specific exercises and vestibular exercises, but basically, your main treatment is exposure therapy. The things that cause discomfort, you have to do more of. That became this paradigm shift for me that permeated every aspect of my life.
John: Great. We’ll talk about that in relation to life but also filmmaking and the decision to make this movie after a 10-year gap. We’ll get into all of it. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I’d love to talk about child actors, because you were a child actor. You have strong opinions about child actors. I watched your movie, and there were a bunch of child actors in it. I’m like, “Sarah, there’s a bunch of kid actors in here.” We’re going to get into that. Craig, I don’t know even what your theory is on child actors.
Craig: It’s fraught with danger for everyone. It’s fraught with danger for the children. It’s fraught with danger for their parents and the relationship between the parents and the children, and it’s fraught with danger for the people making the movie or the show, because you can’t help but put your production first. The panic when you’re making something and making your days and all that is just so palpable. You can easily forget that it’s a child. There are so many ways to go wrong, but I think also there are ways to go right.
John: We’ll dig into all of that in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members.
Sarah: I love the way you articulated that, by the way.
Craig: Thank you. We’re now best friends.
John: This is a whole bunch of stuff we want to talk about. We might as well start by framing it in the conversation about this movie that you’ve just made, because it was great. It’s based on a book. I’m curious how the book came to you and what the decision process was, like, “Okay, this is something I’m going to choose to adapt and choose to spend years of my life making.” Talk to us about Women Talking.
Sarah: I read it when it first came out. I actually heard about it first through a member of my book club. It wasn’t the book we were doing, but she took me inside into the kitchen and said, “Going to tell you the background events behind this novel. When I do that, you’re not going to want to make this into a film.” The book isn’t about that. It’s about what happens after. She told me the background, which is of course this devastating story of these series of assaults in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia. I said, “I don’t want to make that into a film.” She said, “I told you you were going to say that. Just wait.”
Then she told me what the film was about, or what the book was about, which was about this incredible meeting between these women, this incredibly rich, dynamic, challenging conversation about how to respond to these series of attacks, whether or not they’re going to stay and fight, whether they leave, whether they stay and do nothing, and this incredibly democratic process and difficult discussion that they have. Really, by the end of her talking, and I already loved Miriam Toews as an author, I was pretty intrigued. I ran and got the book.
Really the day I finished reading it, on my Twitter feed it comes up that Frances McDormand and Dede Gardner have the rights to it. I reach out through my manager, Frank Frattaroli, who’s also Fran’s manager. My email says, “Women Talking, do they have a writer and director for this?” He sends me an email he received within the hour before mine.
John: That’s great.
Sarah: It says, from Frances McDormand, “Women Talking with Sarah Polley doing these days.”
Craig: That never happens.
Sarah: It was all very thrilling.
John: That part felt like it was meant to be. Reading the book, did you have a sense of how you would make this into a movie? The movie has a really strange form, but did you know it was going to have that strange form from the start? For folks who haven’t seen it, it all takes place really over the course of 24 hours. It’s these conversations between these women that punctuated at different times. They break up and they get back together. We’re all seeing it through the lens of this decision. I guess 12 Angry Men would be one of the early comparisons to it. When did you know it was going to feel like that?
Sarah: I feel like what I was excited about was figuring out if this could be a movie or not. I won’t claim that I had a moment where I just knew this is a movie. I felt very tingly about it and very excited about the idea of what an incredible cast could do with a conversation like this.
I don’t think I would’ve embarked upon it without partners like Dede Gardner and Frances McDormand, who could help me hash it out. This was an incredibly collaborative process from the beginning, and a thrilling one, of these conversations with women that were rich and wild and bonkers. This process of figuring it out was a real process. I think what I was excited about was trying to figure out with them if this was a movie or not. I think as we worked on it more and more and I honed the drafts more and more, we realized it was.
John: Now, a strange thing about the movie is that there’s not a protagonist in a classic sense. There’s a group protagonist. It’s a group of people arriving at a decision and making a decision together. The storytelling decisions are all diffuse among these different people. How early on did you land on that? Were you writing scenes? What was your drafts and documents along the way that got you figuring out what stuff was going to happen, what people were saying, where stuff would fall.
Sarah: It’s interesting what you say about there not being a clear protagonist, because I think my first two films, Away from Her and Take This Waltz, the anchor I held onto was, I am going to make this as concretely from one person’s point of view as humanly possible and stay as close to that character as I can. I think anything I like about those films, that’s what it is, is that we never leave that person whose eyes the story is through.
Then I think when I made my documentary, Stories We Tell, things cracked open for me in a way that made me very interested in what it means to tell a story through a chorus of voices and what does that feel like and what does that look like. There was this real break for me with that form of a singular perspective. I always knew it would feel like a true ensemble. I always knew that I couldn’t lose the perspective of any one character at all, so I had to write multiple drafts from each character’s point of view, as though they were the only character in the movie, just so I could keep the thread alive, even if they weren’t active in the scene, that I was looking at the script from their point of view and really gauging how this was impacting them.
In terms of the documents along the way, the first thing I do when I’m adapting something is, after I’ve done the first read of the book, before I read it again, I write from memory what I think the key points are and the most beautiful images are from the book and that I want in the film. I’m always fascinated to go back for that second read and realize how many of those moments I’ve made up. They’re not in there. You project it on.
John: So much of Big Fish, I’m like, oh, I took that from the book. No, it wasn’t there, ever.
Sarah: No way.
John: There’s no circus in the book. There’s no war in the book.
Sarah: Wow.
John: It’s all creations.
Sarah: Were those things that you knew right away you wanted in there that you-
John: It was actually while we were still shooting Go, I was reading through Big Fish.
Sarah: Wow.
John: As I was flipping pages, like, “Oh, the Will character has to have someone to talk to, so I’m going to give him a wife. I think she’ll be French and her name will be Josephine.” On that first read through, you create things, you invent things.
Sarah: I think I’m also curious about the things that you just don’t know you’ve invented, like, “That image really spoke to me.” You realize something in your subconscious has mapped something from your life onto the book. I think that’s the really juicy stuff to explore is what’s that distance between you and the book and how are you traversing it in unconscious ways. Unpacking that material of what’s connecting you is super interesting.
Craig: One of the things that struck me is that it is an ensemble piece, and you are studiously, and therefore effortlessly, or appearing effortlessly, showing it from all these different perspectives. You can tell you’ve done your work, because sometimes you cut away from the person talking to somebody else, and they’re not simply listening. They are doing things. Sometimes they’re not listening, which is fantastic. Nonetheless, the drama begins to organize itself, as it almost always does, around an axis. For me, it was almost like Rooney Mara’s character was the protagonist and Jessie Buckley’s character was the antagonist. Then at some point you start to feel like, “Wait, maybe Jessie Buckley is the protagonist.”
Interestingly, I’m just curious if this was anything that you were cognizant of, a story about a group of women trying to figure out what is true and what is correct and what is the smart way to do things and changing their minds, that in a reflective way, who we in the audience are attaching ourselves to begins to change and swing back and forth in pretty dramatic ways.
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. It was really interesting through the casting process how every actor I met with was really gravitating towards Salome or Ona, because they thought they were the protagonists. I was constantly saying, actually, by the end, the person this actually revolves around ultimately, and she’s not the protagonist, it is a true ensemble, but the more complex journey which I think ends up surprising you is the character Mariche, is Jessie Buckley’s character, who ends up moving towards becoming the person who leads them forward in the direction they’re going to go, which I think is a surprise. I think it is genuinely an ensemble, but I did want it to feel like we could go back and forth in perspective in terms of who we were most connected to, and to be surprised by the end by our connection to Mariche.
Craig: It’s pretty amazing to watch. Jessie is such a good actor. Isn’t it a shame that she’s such a bad person though? One of the nicest people.
John: One of the stars of Chernobyl, we should say.
Craig: One of the nicest people I’ve ever been on a set with, just so lovely.
Sarah: I’m going to be honest. They all were. I know people always talk a whole lot of bullshit about the people they worked with and how great they were. This was the most unbelievable community of human beings. They all shared a greenroom. No one had a trailer. They spent every hour together. It was a time where the Canadian women’s soccer team was doing really well. There were all these amazing videos of their team spirit, and when one of them would of them would struggle, how all of them would run and lift one of them up. I just felt like that’s what we were living. Someone would have a great moment or a monologue, and everyone could feel it when it worked. There’d be crazy applause. They’d literally be lifted up into the air.
Craig: That’s awesome.
Sarah: It was just this sense of collective celebration of each other and connectedness and also challenging each other and pushing each other, but in very, very healthy ways.
John: I want to talk to you about the setting of the movie, because I don’t know how much of this came from the book as well. When you say it’s a Mennonite community in Bolivia, my natural assumption is all this should’ve been taking place in Spanish and stuff, but the actual Mennonite community that was there, that was all in German. It was all in low German.
Sarah: In Plautdietsch, yeah.
John: In Plautdietsch. It was this weird, insular kind of place. When did you know that you were going to shoot it in Canada? When did you know that you were going to do it in English? Were those just fundamental, baked in decisions from the start?
Sarah: Yeah. This book was written as a response to real life events in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the movie takes a little bit of a step from that. While we’re happy to talk about those events, and it’s important to, the film exists more in the realm of a fable. I want it to be placeless. I wanted it to be timeless. I didn’t want people to be able to pin these issues which we’re dealing with in every patriarchal society to some degree or another on this obscure, already misunderstood community. I think it’s really important we talk about that story. For the purposes of the film, I did want it to feel we were basically nowhere.
John: There’s a moment at which a 1980s Census taker comes through, 1990s?
Sarah: 2010 but he’s playing Daydream Believer.
John: Making it clear that we’re not in space, we’re not in some sort of alien dimension. There is an outside world that does exist, but these characters have no connection to it. They have no relationship to it, which is so important as we’re trying to figure these things out.
They’re trying to figure it out in a vacuum, because they don’t have the benefit of having read all the other theory about stuff. As they’re trying to figure out collective action and what we do, these are not literary characters who can do these things, and yet they speak at a level of sophistication that makes it seem like they have had some greater conversations about these things, or at least through their biblical training, have had some elevated level of discourse.
Sarah: There is this incredible oral tradition, and especially in communities of faith, where even if there’s no literacy, there’s been an incredible amount of analysis of text and interpretation of text and of thinking about spiritual and philosophical ideas. I did play with the dialog a little bit, because in the book, it’s through August’s point of view, the male, educated narrator. The language at times is more sophisticated than what it would be. I did a lot of work of trying to put it in their mouths in a realistic way. When I started to go too far and make it too pedestrian, I started to feel uncomfortable ethically with that decision.
I had this really interesting conversation with my husband who’s a legal academic. I was like, “I don’t actually want to dumb this down, because I don’t believe that they’re not capable of these kinds of sophisticated ideas and thoughts just because they haven’t received an education. I think they’ve lived in community. They have a sense of the collective and selflessness and faith.” He just looked at me and said, “Why not put the most sophisticated language into the mouths of the most marginalized people you can think of?” These women were incredibly marginalized. There was something that felt like a radical act about that and also that there is a heightened reality to the film that I didn’t want to shy away from.
Craig: That comes through beautifully. In thinking about the speech patterns that you’re talking about, it was unique. Listening to them speak, you got the sense that they had been raised to be remarkably articulate. Everyone is speaking very clearly and without many apostrophes. There are not a lot of contractions. It’s very florid but also grounded, and yet some of them are better at it than others. It was interesting to watch how different characters had… For instance, Jessie Buckley, her character doesn’t quite engage on the same structured language level that Rooney Mara’s character engages on, or Claire Foy’s. There’s more structure.
I’m curious if there was a dial that you were turning back and forth in terms of the level of articulation and the level of sophistication or formality of that language, because this is such a dialog-centric piece.
Sarah: Absolutely. There’s a reference briefly in the film to something that’s a bigger thing in the book, which is that some of these women like Ona have had access to August’s mother, who’s had this secret schoolhouse. She has brought in some of these ideas and talked about things and had more access to somewhat of an education. There are some differences in terms of exposure amongst the women.
Craig: It was a really smart choice to give them that inflection. I really loved it, because it also helped me feel that they were in the center of a religious colony. They’re quoting the bible all the time. If they can’t read, this means that they have been drilled over and over in this kind of biblical instruction, which was remarkable.
Also, just to circle back to an earlier point that you and John were talking about, the fact that you don’t tell us where they are I thought was a fantastic choice, because I’m as afraid as they are when they start to contemplate, “If we leave, where do we go?” because I don’t know where they are. They talk about the city. Where? I felt as insulated as they were, which I thought was such a smart choice.
Sarah: Thanks.
John: Let’s talk about the script itself a little bit. We printed out some pages here. We’re going to have a link in the show notes to the full script so people can read what you wrote here. This draft we’re looking at is dated April 12, 2021 as the production draft, and then a whole bunch of revisions, double pink revisions on August 16, 2021. This April 12th original production draft, how much does it resemble the movie we saw?
Sarah: There are some really seismic changes. All of the films I’ve made thus far, excluding Stories We Tell, you would look at the script, and it’s basically the movie. This one, when they released it publicly recently, I went, “Oh, dear god.”
John: I want to talk about that.
Sarah: We made huge changes in the editing room.
John: Craig and I have a friend who one of his jobs is, when it comes to awards seasons, he has to take like, okay, here’s a shooting script, and here’s the actual movie, and he has to make the script match the actual movie rather than this. I loved being able to see this, because I got to see, oh, I can see why those changes were made.
Sarah: Interesting.
John: The biggest change of course is, in the draft we have here, the narration is from August’s point of view. I’m not even sure who’s narrating it. It’s a woman who’s narrating it to her unborn child. Is it Jessie Buckley’s child? Who’s narrating it?
Sarah: Autje, the youngest woman in the room, the teenager, is narrating it to Rooney Mara’s unborn child from the future colony.
John: Great. It completely works in the movie, and it could’ve worked on the page here, but it seems like you didn’t know if that was a thing that needed to happen.
Sarah: No. In fact, it’s funny, because I love August narrating it in the book. The narration is so beautiful. Ben Whishaw read it so beautifully.
John: He’s a talented actor there, yes.
Sarah: He killed it. He killed it.
John: He’s Paddington Bear.
Sarah: There was no way to think of it as anything but that in my mind. I chafed at some of the… This was a lauded book, and everybody loved it. Some of the criticisms were, “Why would you have a male narrator?” which I just found so boring and beside the point. Actually, it’s also about men listening and taking notes. There is such a thing as a useful presence in a room when someone knows how to be a good ally. There was something about it that just felt so one-dimensional about the criticism. I think I was also quite defensive of the idea of August as the narrator.
John: You’re a person who defends the writers’ room’s assistant who takes all the notes in the room. You’re defending that person.
Sarah: Exactly. I’m totally defending that person. I just was like, “No, this is amazing.” Again, Ben doing that narration was so beautiful. We cut the film together. The scenes were where we wanted them to be. There was some disconnect. There was some distance between us and the film. Then there was this amazing brainstorming session that we had with Dede Gardner and Frances and with Chris Donaldson. We had another editor, Roslyn Kalloo.
There was this moment where I think it was Dede who originally said, “Should we be looking at the narrator here?” Then the idea originally was maybe it’s Rooney’s character talking to her unborn child. Then I think it was Chris who said actually, “What would be amazing is if it’s the youngest person in the room, Autje,” because we had fallen in love with Kate Hallett’s performance. I’d fallen in love with her. She has a poetry about her and just a way of processing things and going through the world that’s so fresh but also sophisticated.
As an experiment, I asked Kate to send me her notes on her character when she was prepping, because I knew at her age I made these beautiful notes that no one ever saw. Sure enough, there were these beautiful notes, which provided the inspiration for me to go back and write this whole other document, which was me trying to remember what it felt like to be 16 years old, around the age I knew you, and how I saw the world, how uncompromising I was, and fierce, but also there was a sense of poetry and connectedness with my true self and how I was processing things.
I just wrote this stream of consciousness document and would have Kate send back these voice memos to us in the editing room of recording them. We didn’t necessarily know where they were even going to go. We would create sequences around them, or we would take sequences that were there and change them according to the voiceover. Suddenly, we started to find the film. Suddenly, what we started to find actually was the spirit of the book that we had lost by remaining too close to it.
John: That’s amazing. Let’s talk about the first page here, because you do some stuff that is so helpful to the reader, but the audience doesn’t get to see. You have this list of the women broken down by family. We see the 11 main characters of the story. We’re introduced to them here, so we can see what the connection is, because later on, you’re going to shotgun them at us, and we’re going to be in a room with all of them and have to sort ourselves out. Visually, when we see it in a movie, we can do that, because you recognize actors.
Sarah: Exactly.
John: On a page, we would have no sense of what this what. It’s going to get really confusing without this little guide map here at the start.
You also say, “VISUAL NOTE: The flashbacks of trauma will be shot at 15 frames per second and there will be a ‘roar’ over these scenes, animal and/or machine-like.” Early on, you knew that there would be moments where you have to acknowledge these things happening, but you didn’t want them to feel like the rest of the film.
Sarah: That’s right.
John: You didn’t want the audience to be sitting in them that same way.
Sarah: Again, the manifestation of how we created that difference ended up not being what I’ve written there. It was a sense that there would be a differentiating factor. What we ended up using was actually this very, very simple bell that Hildur Guðnadóttir brought to us, in place of my idea of this different frame rate and this roar. Actually, what it boiled down to is something extremely simple. There was some sense in which I wanted the reader to be able to imagine those things.
I think that legend is really important in terms of the characters, because when you’re reading them on paper, I find still as a reader, reading scripts, it’s just this dry document staring at you. It is hard to pull apart who is who.
John: The other job of these first three pages is to set up the premise. You get right to it. Right away, we know these things happened. The men are out of the village momentarily, and we have to make this decision whether we’re going to stay or go. I was surprised how little like, let’s set up the world, let’s set up everything else. Nope, you’re going to learn about the world as we’re getting into this decision making process. Is that from the book or that was you coming in to start telling the story?
Sarah: It’s me. Also, my first draft of this, there’s about 35 pages cut from the beginning of the film.
John: Wow.
Sarah: This was the best script note I’ve ever received, which was from Dede Gardner. My first draft had all of August’s childhood and backstory, and we got to know the world. We got to know everyone’s backstory, basically. There were some beautiful scenes from the book that I really genuinely wanted in there.
I remembered my first notes call about this script. I’m used to working with Canadians, where it’s, “Oh my god, it’s so good. I just have one little thing.” That’s not Dede Gardner or Frances McDormand. It’s like, “Okay, let’s get down to business.” The first question Dede asked was, “The beginning of the film, the first 20 to 40 pages, did you write these because you wanted to or because you felt you had to?”
John: Oh, wow.
Sarah: That was really eye-opening for me in terms of, oh, this gets to be what I want it to be, not what I feel I need to do. That for me then set the tone for every decision I made afterwards.
Craig: There is something interesting about a movie that is so much… Let’s say we go back in time, and you don’t cut those pages, and you do shoot that, and it is in the movie. Once they isolate themselves in the barn, that’s where they stay, mostly. We have a couple of brief excursions. If you had gone around and seen their backstories and them as children, once you got them in that barn, there is a danger that you’re like, wait, are we just stuck in the barn now? If you start in the barn and you stay in the barn, then it’s this magical space. I think you made the right choice, certainly.
Sarah: Thank you.
John: What we often talk about, you have to teach the audience how to watch your movie. What’s crucial for your audience is that they understand this is how our movie’s going to work. We’re going to be in this barn largely. We’re going to jump out of the barn at any time for different reasons. We’re going to be in this barn. Our women are going to speak this way. They’re going to speak at this heightened level that’s not quite natural. The first three to five minutes, you have the ability to teach your audience what the rules are. If you hadn’t come out of the gate like that, once we got into the barn it would’ve felt really strange and artificial.
Sarah: I also feel that looking back at my first two features, I would love to go back and cut 10 minutes from both of them. I think there’s too many endings to both of them. I think there’s a time somewhere in the middle that kind of lags, and the beginning of Take This Waltz doesn’t really recover, I don’t think. I think knowing that, having this 10-year gap, and going, wouldn’t it be great to create a scenario where I don’t look back in 10 years and go, “I know where that 10 minutes is.” What if I know where that 10 minutes is now?
I had this, and I said it out loud, which committed me so deeply to this, which was my first meeting with Dede and Fran, I said, “I’m not delivering a script over 95 pages, because I know I’m going to regret it, and that’s still going to be too long. I’m still going to need to cut another… ” As it turned out, I didn’t go over that, and we still cut half an hour out of the movie from our first cut.
I just felt like this film really needed to be efficient, especially because of what we’re asking from the audience. It had to be just pulled tight. I’m also just finding maybe since becoming a parent that I’m becoming really impatient with long movies. I just don’t have it in me anymore. I hit 40, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s over 90 minutes. What am I going to do?”
John: Absolutely. It’s a huge commitment. Thinking back to Go, you came back for the reshoots on Go. That was my first movie, so I didn’t know better. I’m always surprised how few movies plan for reshoots and just really look at, okay, what does the movie want to be now and how do we create the scenes that actually best support that movie? People may not know that the jumping-off place where we get to each of the different three storylines, that was all reshoots, and we brought you guys back for that.
Sarah: Which was it? What was it?
John: In the back of the grocery store where you’re getting evicted and going out with Simon, and then the TV. Those scenes existed, but they were three separate scenes. We had to go back and make them into one scene so we always knew we were jumping off from the same place. On a script level we didn’t know that. On a read through level we didn’t know that. When we actually watch the movie, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s absolutely true. That’s how it has to be.
Sarah: That isn’t a function of you not doing your work. You literally can’t know those things until that chemical reaction emerges between all the different elements you’ve brought together. It’s not something that can always be predicted.
John: August as the narrator is a thing that you could not have predicted. What else changed? What could you have not predicted until you actually saw the edit and saw like, oh, that was a thing I didn’t need.
Sarah: We had more of August’s backstory too. August at the beginning of the film is about to kill himself. Ona comes up to him in a field and says, “No, we need you. We need you to take the minutes for a meeting.” In a way, she does that to give him a function and a purpose. That’s not in there. There are whole swaths of the conversation where any time we felt we were repeating something unnecessarily, we took out.
We took out stuff in the editing room that nobody has noticed. Where all the characters are sitting down, there’s an entire conversation that happens. Somebody comes in, they all stand up. Then they leave. We’ve taken it out. Actually, the people are completely on different ends of the room geographically. We just put in a sound effect of people standing up or something off camera. Nobody notices it. We’ve taken out 30 minutes of the movie. It’s just incredible what you can get away with.
John: I’d love to talk about the speeches, because this is a movie where people have to articulate their opinions. There are some long speeches. Page 54, we have a big speech from Salome. This is a thing where I see excerpted as a credit, because Claire Foy does this brilliant job with this speech, but so much of the film relies on us being able to understand what the characters are saying, but why they’re saying it and what their purpose is in trying to communicate that. When you’re writing it but also as you’re working with actors, how are you getting it to feel like it’s in the moment as they’re saying it?
Sarah: First of all, I felt like we had to cast this thing within an inch of its life, so I wanted to make sure the majority, the percentage of actors had a theater background, because I think there’s just a certain relationship they’re trained to have with text that was really important for what we were asking them to do in this film.
We had a lot of conversations ahead of time, a lot of family meetings and meetings between people of various relationships. We had a really full-on rehearsal process. We had a week over Zoom of just text analysis and working through the scenes that way, and then we had a week in the actual location before we started shooting. All of that was necessary, because it was really functioning in so many ways as this almost theatrical experience.
Craig: I’m curious, just in talking about rehearsals and looking at the cover page of the script, which, in correct fashion, documents when the different revisions took place. You were a busy, busy bee at the end of June and through most of July.
Sarah: I love that someone notices this. It’s so satisfying. I was. Look at these dates.
Craig: I’m just wondering, was this the result of rehearsals? What was going on there during that? It’s really just one solid month of work there.
Sarah: That was rehearsals. It was Zoom meetings. It was rehearsals. I see I have a draft on July 8th and one on July 9th and one on the 10th and one the 18th. It was finding those moments and input from actors and movements within the space and discovering things that I didn’t know.
John: Your Zoom rehearsals, obviously you don’t have the same sense of being in a space. When did you first put scenes on their feet? You said you were in a space to be able to do those things. I’m curious really about that main barn set, because I always assumed that it was a one-story thing and they had a ladder down for the stuff that they need that. Looking at production photos, it really was a two-story set. People were really up in that loft, and you had a crane going in there the whole time. It was a set. There was a blue screen behind everything. You had to digitally replace everything around there. That was the space you were able to be in to rehearse?
Sarah: Yeah. I have had this thing on every film where I’ve just driven everyone nuts. It drives line producers crazy. It drives the art department crazy. I’m like, “I need the set dressed two weeks in advance.” I need to be able to rehearse in the spaces with the actors, because what I don’t want ever is a crew to be standing around while an actor’s trying to figure something out and for there to be time pressure on that.
I also don’t want to adjust to new blocking in five seconds, because I want to be really thoughtful about how I’m moving a camera and accommodating for how an actor is choosing to move. It allows me to give the actors freedom in terms of their blocking and me time to process that and come up with an intentional way of shooting it.
John: A project like this, you can absolutely do it, because there is one main set you’re coming back to. There were also a lot of other, smaller things. I guess they’re not really dialog scenes. Basically, every place else that we’re hanging out during that time, they’re not big, juicy scenes between actors.j
Sarah: We actually had quite a few exterior days, because even though the premise of film, so much of it is in the hayloft, there are actually a lot of sequences outside. Those got to be these just visual, beautiful, meditative, poetic moments. Those days when we were out on that farm shooting, we were all so happy to bust out of that hayloft.
John: A question about Frances McDormand’s character. I see her in the first scene thinking, oh, she’s going to be the driving force of this movie. It’s all going to be about her. She’s actually a very small role in it. How early did you know that that was going to be a plan?
Sarah: It’s funny. When it wasn’t sure that Fran was even going to be in the movie, Fran talked early about wouldn’t it be awesome to get somebody amazing, like a Meryl Streep or someone you expect to be the lead in that movie, and then they just walk out, and you don’t see them again, just in terms of subverted expectations, but someone who you can map enough onto that that perspective stays alive even when they’re not there, because you have them somewhere subconsciously in the back of your mind.
There was something about Fran playing that part that I loved both for that reason but also because she can show you strength and vulnerability in an instant without moving a muscle. We needed to feel something for that character. We also needed to be intimidated by her. We need to feel a million things, and she’s there for so little time.
John: She’s definitely intimidating.
Craig: That’s something that I think you really balance gorgeously, which is a sense of empathy for everyone. Frances McDormand, when she shows up, she’s tough and she’s not interested in what they’re doing. A conventional story would have her ratting everyone out. You felt like, uh-oh, she’s trouble. By the end, you have successfully managed to instill empathy in her. She’s sad. She’s so enslaved that she can’t imagine being free.
Similarly, you do this over and over with the women who are in the hayloft, which I call barn, because I’m stupid, but in any case, where I kept being surprised with how empathetic they were to each other. Look, it’s called 12 Angry Men for a reason. If you put a bunch of men in the hayloft, they’re going to be shouting. Someone’s going to go full Pacino real fast, and then there’s going to be a lot of anger.
Particularly, I loved the way the generations were striated, that the older women would just moderate the younger women through empathy. The empathy was drawn from their religious background, that they were actually, even though this colony and their religious upbringing had led to this terrible crime, they still believed and were using it in the best possible way.
As you’re writing these speeches and as you’re writing the reaction to these speeches, how did you approach the task of making all of us feel empathetic all the time, even when for instance a character like Jessie Buckley’s is being pretty awful?
Sarah: I think that that process of writing and rewriting the script from each character’s point of view helped, just forcing myself to make sure I could see it clearly from everyone’s point of view.
One of the things I love about Sidney Lumet as a filmmaker is if you go back and watch all of his films, I’m not thinking specifically of 12 Angry Men although that’s in there too, but he just loves all of his characters. There’s no one that he others, which means he ended up being so ahead of his time on so many levels of these characters, not necessarily because he was the most progressive guy. I don’t know what his politics were.
If that’s your starting principle, that you will love your characters equally and force yourself to do so, and take their perspective no matter what, you’re going to be ahead of your time. Thirty years later, you’re not going to look so bad in the way you’ve represented someone that had an experience completely other than you. It’s funny, I spent a lot of the pandemic rewatching his movies, and I just took that as my operating principle is that I will love these characters equally.
Craig: It shows.
John: I want to talk about the decision to make this movie. Also, you have a 10-year gap between this movie and your last movie, and the things that happened in between. You had three kids, which is a lot of it. You also had a concussion. It looked like you were going to be knocked out of commission for who knows.
Sarah: Ever.
John: Forever. Can you tell us about the decision, like, “Okay, now I’m going to step ahead and make this movie,” and what led up to, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m a filmmaker. I’m going to go back and start making films.”
Sarah: It’s funny, because I definitely didn’t think I was going to be able to make a film again, because I couldn’t multitask anymore. I couldn’t handle bright lights or a lot of noise, couldn’t handle too many activities in a day after my concussion.
I remember when I did this treatment with Dr. Michael Collins. I’ve been told by doctors before… When I said, “Will I be able to make a film again?” they would look at me sympathetically and say, “It’s a good goal to have.” It was clear they did not think I was going to be able to. I remember my first meeting with him, saying, “Will I ever be able to make film again?” He said, “Let me put it this way. You’re not going to get better until you make a film again, because that’s part of what makes you you. That’s what you’re working towards. That’s what you’re going to have to do. You’re not going to be a hundred percent until you’ve done that impossible thing.” That was an amazing paradigm shift. That for me opened up, for the first time, “Okay, maybe I will make a film again.”
Then this came along. I’m not one of these filmmakers where I have to make a film all the time and I want to have some illustrious career. I don’t need people to tell stories about me being a filmmaker. I make things because I feel like I have to and it’s urgent. I hadn’t felt like that about anything in a really long time. I felt like that about this book and working with these people. I did feel like by the time I embarked upon it, I was way better than I had been, but through the process of making it, all of my headaches went away.
John: Let’s talk about the accommodations, because it sounds like you didn’t end up having to make accommodations for disability, because you were actually able to tackle what was standing physically in your way and deal with that, but there were other things that were standing in the way of women with three kids making films.
Sarah: Absolutely.
John: What were some of the things that you were able to do and your producers were able to do to make it possible for you to make this movie this way?
Sarah: The first thing that I said to Fran and Dede was, “I love the idea of writing this. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, like many female filmmakers I know who have made one or two films and then have a kid and go, ‘I don’t want to disappear forever, and so I’m going to write.’ I would love to direct again, but I don’t think I can, because I don’t think I can work those hours. I want to see my kids on a daily basis. This is probably impossible, but is is possible to work way shorter hours so people get home for dinner and put their kids to bed?”
Fran took a pause and said, “Men have written the rules of this film industry, and we’re women talking, and we’re going to rewrite the rules. Let’s just make that happen. We’re going to have to fight for more money to do it and more days. It’s going to be hard, and we’ll do it.”
John: What are some of the changes that you made?
Sarah: We had 10-hour working days, which in any other industry doesn’t sound that spectacular, but in the film industry, for some reason, that’s incredible.
Craig: My god, what a luxury.
Sarah: I believe we won the 40-hour work week like a hundred years ago, but in the film industry this is revolutionary. We had a rule that if anyone ever needed a break, they could take one. If anyone needed to take a call from their kid or elderly parent or vet or if they needed to breastfeed their baby or if they needed a break from the intensity of the work, we took one.
I learned that trick from my sister Suzie, who’s a GP, who often will give patients her cellphone number and say, “You can call me anytime over the weekend or at night.” What happens is she rarely gets a call. What she does get is a much less stressed out Monday morning, because people know they could. I think that thing of like, anyone can take a break at any time, people panicked when I said that. It happened maybe once or twice. The knowledge that people could I think just created a safer, more nurturing environment that really helped us.
We had a therapist on set, because a lot of stuff I knew would come up. Some of my crew I knew had come from histories of abuse and from backgrounds actually unfortunately like the women in the film. She was available for harder days if people needed and always accessible by phone. We just tried to build in the presence of care as a basic principle of the working environment, which leads us to the conversation about kids, where for me the basic operating principle with the kids was, “If you’re not having fun, if you’re even a bit bored, you can leave. When we do have you here, we’re basically just going to play. We’ll follow you around and have fun together. If you’re not having fun, you don’t have to stay. We’ll work around that.”
John: Great.
Craig: That sounds like somebody who did in fact work as an actor as a child. There is something nice about being able to retroactively fix some of the crimes of the past. We’ll get into that in our bonus episode.
Sarah: I was going to say, I don’t want to give away anything from the bonus people. I’ll keep my trauma to myself for the bonus people.
Craig: You’re costing us eights or nines of dollars.
John: Talk to us about the plan for making the movie announced to releasing the movie. Did you know it was United Artists from the start? Did it sell at a festival? I don’t even know what the history of this was.
Sarah: This is interesting. I originally was going to write it. Dede and Fran had basically raised the money for us to make it with somebody who was going to pay for me to write the script and ultimately make the film or finance the film. There was just a moment early on where I just felt like, not so much in his interactions with me, but just… A couple emails went by with Dede and Fran where I went, “You know what? How about I write this on spec, and then let’s figure out who our partner is?” because already there were caps on budget and all of these things, where it’s like, we don’t have any of this information yet.
I wrote it on spec. Then Dede had a deal at MGM. This was her picture at MGM that year. It both created this incredibly liberating space in which to make the film, but also our partners there at the time were Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, who just absolutely understood the film, believed in Dede and Fran, believed in me. It was this utopian studio experience, the likes of which I am certain I will never have again.
John: This is MGM when it was functioning. It feels like a Fox Searchlight movie. It feels like a specialty film thing, so they could see it as, oh, this is a thing we could release theatrically, and they had a plan for it. This is all pre-pandemic, right, when this is being set up?
Sarah: Yeah.
John: Then a pandemic happens, and everything gets pushed.
Sarah: We delayed for a year, and then we went back to it.
Craig: It’s Orion. It was so lovely to see the Orion [crosstalk 00:46:23]. It was like, ah, I’m back.
Sarah: Awesome, yes, but when we were cutting, we were using the old Orion logo.
John: The original one is so beautiful.
Sarah: I loved it so much.
Craig: I know. What happened?
Sarah: I was so sad to see it go.
Craig: Do they not own it anymore?
Sarah: They do. I think that they were revisiting what Orion was and meant, and they wanted it to be more indicative of that, which I actually think makes sense. Now that I’ve lived with it a bit longer, I’m like, okay. I was having a very eh reaction to it.
John: I associate Orion with Robocop. There’s a certain kind of movies. I just loved seeing that Orion logo. It’s so good.
Craig: It’s so great, just circling stars.
Sarah: [Crosstalk 00:46:58].
Craig: It makes me happy.
John: We have a listener question I think is actually perfect for Sarah Polley. Megana, you want to read it for us?
Megana: JM asks, “I’m a novelist, but I recently wrote my first screenplay, submitted it to Austin, made the second round, went to the festival, without really any idea of why I was there. However, at the WGA party, I met an indie director and producer who were looking for exactly what I had, and now they want to make a film. They had a feature film in the festival in the same genre as mine, and we even are from the same part of Canada, so we’ve met up here too.
“This will be a union job in Canada. I’m a dual citizen, but not a member of the WGA or the WGC. I’m waiting for the option now, but the director did tell me he wants to proceed and he’s putting it all together. I’ve had a literary agent since 2009, but I left him last fall, as we’d run our course, and I have a new novel I’m shopping around to agents now, so I’m also agent-less. Basically, I have no clue how this all works or what I should be doing. Please help.”
John: This Canadian novelist screenwriter seems to be in a pretty good spot. It’s just looking for an agent or somebody to help out making the deal. Sarah, what’s your first instinct?
Sarah: My first instinct is to get the agent thing sorted out. I do think it’s a dangerous thing to be at this stage with an agent. I think people can really undervalue having that protection and that wisdom around a process. It does feel like if someone’s trying to make your thing, it seems like a perfect time to be doing some very real research about who the good agents would be to approach. You would know more about this question than [crosstalk 00:48:34].
John: I’m curious whether you think this person needs a Canadian agent manager person or would a Los Angeles person be okay?
Sarah: I think either would be okay. I think it’s about the connection. I would meet with both and figure out who you feel most connected to and safest with. Margaret Atwood always says this thing, because sometimes she’s waited for people like me for years and years to make their thing when she’s had other options. She always says go with the one who loves you. Whether that person has more or less status doesn’t matter. Go with the one who loves you.
John: Craig, what are you thinking? Does this person need an agent? Would a lawyer be okay for this point? What do you want JM to be asking for?
Craig: I agree with Sarah. I think an agent is extremely important. There’s always one little moment of these questions that makes me go (gasps). The (gasps) moment of this one was, “The director did tell me he wants to proceed, and he’s putting it all together.” I’m like, what about you, JM? You’re the one who’s writing it. I get nervous when someone’s like, “Don’t you worry. I got this.” Someone has to be advocating for you. You as a writer will never have more leverage than the moments right before you sign away the rights to a thing you wrote.
Sarah: You don’t do that without an agent, because actually, I just have a friend in a situation, worked on an idea for years, and the series is going ahead right now without his name on it anywhere. Get your agent.
Craig: These things happen. I’m not sure how the WGC functions in terms of credit and all the rest. It’s a different situation because Canada does have [inaudible 00:50:14], and they don’t have work for hire the same way that we do. There are also other limitations to being in the WGC. I’m not sure there’s much in the way of residuals there, the way there are for the WGA. There are all these questions. The agent will then get a lawyer on board. The lawyer can handle a lot of the details. Somebody needs to be advocating for you. This is the most pro-Canadian thing I can say, as somebody that just lived there for a year and a half. Polite people get chewed up all the time.
Sarah: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Craig: Canadians are beautifully and wonderfully polite. Your natural instinct may be to accommodate and bend and compromise. That’s why you need a jerk who’s American to advocate for you.
Sarah: I could not agree with this statement more. I’ve learned this the hard way over and over and over again. The other thing I would say that I’ve learned far too recently is that clear is kind. I’ve done a lot in my life of being nice and accommodating and all those things. People in a professional environment, clarity is the most kind thing you can do for yourself and for others. It’s underrated in my country.
Craig: Right on.
John: Sarah, can you talk to us about the state of Canadian filmmaking? It’s a lot to be throwing at you, but is this film a Canadian film or an American film?
Sarah: It’s an American film.
John: It’s an American film?
Sarah: It’s my first American film.
John: Your first American film.
Craig: Where did you shoot it, Sarah, just out of curiosity?
Sarah: In Canada, so mostly Canadian crew and lots of Canadian cast. Just outside of Toronto.
Craig: In Toronto.
Sarah: Just outside of Toronto, but American finance.
John: Talk to us about the differences between Native Canadian films and American films. Do people try to go back and forth and do both? We have listeners in Canada right now. I’m really asking on their behalf. Should they be focused on trying to make a Canadian film or trying to get someone in the US to try to make their thing? What is your instinct? There’s so much talent in Canada.
Sarah: I’m a little bit out of touch with the Canadian system, because I haven’t made a film there for 10 years. I obviously live there and I have lots of friends who are going through it all the time. I think you look for the people with whom you can make your film the most authentic to what you want that film to be. You don’t go for the shiny apple where you have this whisper of huge mistrust, but you know they can get a big platform for it. I think you go with the people who help you make the film the most you want to make it.
In my experience, that’s been more in Canada, because there have been some protections, when you get public money for a film, around your creative vision. However, I will say more and more I hear that it is just part of the process now in Canada that you test screen everything. Nobody’s immune to that. With this film at MGM, with a bigger budget than I’ve ever worked with, I did not have to test screen it.
Craig: Oh, joy.
Sarah: I would say I had not just creative freedom on this, but enormous help from people, where I wasn’t afraid of their notes. I was excited for their notes. It was an idyllic process. I don’t know if it’s as much Canadian versus American as the specific people you can find to make your film with.
John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Sarah, you said you had two cool things to share with us. Let’s get you started here.
Craig: Overachiever.
Sarah: I love the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I’ve read it over and over and over again. I think it had a huge impact on my approach to this film, just in terms of the love and the kindness in it.
John: I know nothing about this book.
Sarah: Oh my god.
John: Now I’m excited, because it’s new to me.
Sarah: It’s so beautiful.
John: Everyone else may know what it is, but I don’t know, so pitch me.
Sarah: It’s written in the form of a letter. This older man who’s a preacher, and he’s writing a letter to his seven-year-old son. He’s dying. It’s about his father and grandfather in the Civil War. It’s about him. It’s about spirituality. It’s about his love of his son. Every sentence is stunning. It gives you some faith in human beings. There was a moment where I just felt I was reading all these great novels, but I just wanted to read about a good person who I might like to be. It’s the most stunningly beautiful book. Whether you’re religious or not, it’s stunning.
I think that a film that I’ve not seen get the attention it deserves this year is Till. I think it’s an incredible film. For me, it’s the best performance of the year, with Danielle Deadwyler. Chinonye Chukwu just is a masterful director. I just recommend everyone go see that movie. Don’t be afraid to go see it. I think people are really afraid. She really protects her audience. She’s very conscious of making it a really fruitful, rich experience to watch it and not a damaging one. I just recommend everybody go see it.
John: Protecting your audience feels like that was also a goal in your approach to filmmaking, especially for this movie, because it could’ve been harrowing and terrifying and gruesome, and that’s not what your movie’s about.
Sarah: That’s right. We never showed the assaults. We don’t go deeply into that. What we go into is the recovery and the healing and the conversation.
Craig: That’s great.
John: My One Cool Thing is something that could be a How Would This be a Movie. It could be for that segment that we often do. It’s this article I read this week by David Epstein. It is about this 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She knows she has some form of muscular dystrophy. Her arms and her legs are wasting away. Her torso is normal proportions, but everything else is wasting away and she ends up having to use a scooter.
When she goes to college, even though she wasn’t a biology major, she spends all of her time in the library just researching different things like, “What is it that I could possibly have?” She comes across this syndrome that she thinks maybe she has and maybe her father has in slightly different manifestations.
Where the author, Epstein, gets involved is, she reaches out to him to say, “I think there is this famous athlete, this Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, who is a Canadian sprinter. I think she has the same thing, but slightly different. I think she has the opposite, where her muscles are over-developed in ways that are interesting.” Through Epstein’s help, she’s able to get genetic testing and all of it. It turns out, yes, they basically discovered this one genetic mutation anomaly that is the cause of both of their situations. It’s a good, long read. It’s in ProPublica, but just a fascinating story.
Sarah: Wow.
John: It is movie fodder. Allison Williams is apparently already developing it, because she’d be perfect for it. It’s so inspiring to see somebody who says, “Listen, I know I’m not the person who’s supposed to be able to figure this out, but I want to figure this out,” and she just does it.
Sarah: Amazing.
Craig: Love that.
John: It reminds me of Lorenzo’s Oil.
Sarah: Sounds incredible.
John: It’s another relationship to it. Craig, what you got?
Craig: I feel like we’ve just overdosed on inspiration, so let me bring things down a bit.
Sarah: Good for you.
Craig: The most mundane possible One Cool Thing. Bo Shim, who used to be my assistant and is now a writer, got me a holiday gift that I am so in love with. I take it everywhere. I’m the worst person to get gifts for, because either I just don’t need a lot of things, and if I do want something, I just buy it. I don’t believe in waiting, because life’s too short. Get the thing you want. She got me this thing. It’s the Mophie 3-in-1 travel charger. It’s like a trifold wallet that you fold back up again. In one part there’s a little tray for your air buds.
John: AirPods.
Craig: AirPods, not air buds, because I’m stupid. Then there’s a bit for your phone. Then there’s a bit for your Apple watch. It’s incredibly compact and so useful around travel time, because I used to have to fight over who had their watch charger. It’s all said and done.
Sarah: I like that.
Craig: It just wraps right back up. It’s not expensive. I don’t mean to say that Bo’s cheap. I’m just saying, folks at home, you can buy this. In fact, I’m going to tell you how much it is right now.
Sarah: I like this idea a lot, because I’m not a very organized person, unlike John August, whose house I’m in right now, and is terrifying. It’s Sleeping with the Enemy in here.
Craig: For sure.
Sarah: Everything has been thought of. It’s absolutely terrifying, but these are my aspirations, and so I would like that.
Craig: Every room in John’s house is a killing floor. No question.
John: There’s a drain in the side, straight down.
Craig: Every single room.
Sarah: When you open the drawers, everything’s perfect. You know how terrifying that was in that movie?
Craig: I want to amend my statement. This was expensive.
John: I’m looking at it. It’s $150, Craig.
Sarah: You jerk.
Craig: It’s $150.
Sarah: You got us all excited.
Craig: Now I feel terrible but not super terrible, because honestly, it really is great. Sarah Polley, I do believe that if you are looking to slightly upgrade your life organization, pick this thing up.
John: I like it. Craig, I was thinking what an air bud charger would be. I think it’s when you plug in your dog. You plug in your dog, air bud, and so he can catch the footballs.
Craig: You insert it gently into your dog.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Gross.
John: That’s our show for the week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always.
Craig: Yay! What what.
John: Outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, sometimes I’m still around Twitter. Are you still on Twitter, Sarah?
Sarah: I’m on Twitter.
John: You and I DM’ed on Twitter once. Craig’s gone though, so don’t talk to him.
Sarah: Are you gone for moral and ethical reasons?
Craig: I am gone for moral and ethical reasons, yes.
Sarah: Wow. Should I be thinking about this? Is this what’s happening?
Craig: I am a fairly low bar, so yeah, I think so.
Sarah: [inaudible 01:00:09].
John: I’m also on Mastodon and the other things, so I have my backup plans.
Sarah: Where am I going? Mastodon, is that where I’m going?
John: Yeah, probably Mastodon.
Craig: [Crosstalk 01:00:18].
Sarah: It’s so complicated.
John: I’m also on Instagram. Instagram’s easy.
Craig: It’s so complicated. It’s so annoying that Twitter got ruined. Not like it was just a paragon of loveliness. Still.
John: People can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script for Women Talking, so you can see where it was before it became the movie. If you want to watch the movie though, is it on Amazon at this point? Where can people see it?
Sarah: It’s in theaters only right now.
John: Theaters only right now. Go to your theater and see the film on a big screen. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on child actors. Sarah Polley, it’s so amazing to see you again.
Craig: It was lovely talking with you, Sarah.
Sarah: Thank you so much for having me. I loved being here. I love the show. I listen to it all the time.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Sarah Polley, you were a child actor. You were in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Sweet Hereafter, which I think is the movie right before Go, the bus crash movie. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that girl from the bus crash, she should play a checkout clerk who’s trying to make a drug deal.” You’ve written to and about Terry Gilliam and your experience on Baron Munchausen. What’s the synopsis of that? Basically, it was traumatic in a way that you felt like hadn’t been acknowledged? What was your feeling about being a child actor?
Sarah: In general, my feeling about being a child actor is that it’s not a good experience and that it’s also really hard to untangle what a child’s really feeling from what the expectations are of them, by either their parents or other adults in the room. It’s really hard to get the truth out of a kid who feels the pressure of adults.
In general, I think that film sets are generally populated with people who are not trained or particularly interested in the well-being of children. Craig very eloquently put it, the production is always going to come first. When you put the panic, emergency room mentality around something, a kid’s well-being is going to be forgotten, no matter how conscious you are of it.
I had particularly traumatic experiences, for sure. They were on the extreme end, which led to a whole interaction with Terry Gilliam later when he was about to cast another child actor. I reached out to him to explain how difficult my experiences had been on that set, which I felt very, very unsafe. I felt that things had been very dangerous, scared for my life at times. Again, it was extreme, but I’ve seen child actors with less extreme in terms of the tangible, physical danger experiences, and still, I don’t buy it.
There was a really concrete example of what Craig was talking about on my set, because I had this horror of, I can’t make this religious community that’s doing this whole thing to basically fight for the future generation and build a new world without ever showing children.
John: That’s crucial.
Sarah: That’s exactly what these women are fighting for. I did a couple things. One was, yes, the kids are going to run around and play. We’re just going to follow them with the camera. I’m going to make an announcement every single day, they can leave whenever they want. It’s no problem.
My kids couldn’t visit set, because of COVID, unless they were gainfully employed by the production. My oldest has always wanted to be an actor, because every button gets pushed by your children. There was this advocating that happened for my kids going, “We’re coming to set. It’s the only way we get to see you at work. You’ve never been working like this since we were born. We’re coming to watch you work, and we’re going to be background performers, and we’re really excited about it.”
My kid’s there. It’s my seven-year-old’s birthday. Of course, it’s a giant crane shot and a drone shot at magic hour. As the crane comes into my seven-year-old’s face, my kids keep looking at the camera and flaring their nostrils. It’s this giant crane shot. Literally, we have five minutes to get the shot. We’re just coming in, and they’re like, “Ha ha, let’s screw up mama’s shot again.” They thought it was so funny.
I literally had this moment where I empathized with every filmmaker who [inaudible 01:04:40] for granted as a child actor, which is why kids shouldn’t be on set, because even me, with my past and my trauma and my own children, I had a hundred people standing around panicking, and this kid was potentially between us and getting the shot, and this is why children should never be on sets. I just proved my own point.
Craig: It’s true. It’s true. I had a really interesting, I guess I could call it a revelation or good learning experience, making The Last of Us, because we cast an actor who, I believe he was eight or nine. He’s deaf. The thing about casting a kid who’s deaf is nobody questions how much support is required. His mom is there, but also, he’s got an interpreter, and he’s got a coach, one of whom is deaf and obviously communicates with him through ASL. Then the translator, or the interpreter rather, is helping us back and forth. There’s all this support around this kid.
Then I thought, wait, shouldn’t be there all of this even if you’re not deaf? Any kid being on set should be carefully bubble wrapped. Schedules should presume that the kid is not going to be able to nail the crane shot the first three or four times.
Sarah: There you go.
Craig: What ends up happening when you’re panicked and running out of money and you’ve got this studio gun to your head, whatever it is that is all of our madness while we’re making these things, is children become these annoying obstacles. They can’t work as many hours. Oh, we get to send him to lunch. Oh, he gets a break. Oh, he has to go to class. School they call it, fake school in the trailer, whatever it is. You’re like, “Ugh.” Now you’re angry.
I’ve been angry at babies. I got angry at a baby once, not to its face. I didn’t yell at the baby. Obviously, I’m in the tent by a monitor. I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe this baby. We don’t have another 20 minutes with the baby?” They’re like, “It’s a baby.”
Sarah: I literally had this moment a couple of times on my set, where I was like, “Oh my god, we’re bringing the kids again. Oh my god, bringing the kids again. Oh my god.” I remember the parents all coming up to me and going, “No, we’re okay.” I’m like, “I can’t, because I actually literally wrote this rule.”
Craig: I know. I know.
Sarah: I wrote this rule in the ACTRA, in the Canadian actors union. I’m not breaking it. I promise.
Craig: At that moment you were like, “It was really more of a guideline and not so much a rule.”
Sarah: Exactly.
Craig: “Got to make my day.”
Sarah: Here’s the other thing that should be presumed. The other thing that should be presumed, whether it’s true or not, and a lot of the time this isn’t true but it should be presumed just in case, is that the parents don’t have the kids’ best interest at heart.
Craig: Absolutely.
Sarah: That’s a really hard thing to presume, because you always go, “If the parent’s okay. It’s their department.” We have no idea. Whatever face that parent is presenting to us, whatever face the kid is presenting to us, we have no idea what the pressures look like at home. I’ve seen those be two very different things in my own experience of other kid actors I was working with. I would see one face that the parent presented on set and another one that I would see in private moments with the kid. There has to be a third party that is not paid for by either the production or the parent who makes calls that will sometimes fly in the face of what both the production and the parents say is okay.
Craig: I think that’s so true.
Sarah: I think that person has to be there. I also think kids can’t sign long contracts for series. I’m sorry. There should be a limit on how much a kid could work in a year, maybe one project, maybe two projects a year. I don’t know. I think there have to be some really serious things in place to allow for the fact that as a society we have decided children should not work, but we’ve made this exception for this Wild West of an industry that’s probably the last place that should be given this exception.
Craig: You’re on to something there.
John: First movie I directed, Elle Fanning was the star of it. Small role, but she was fantastic. She was Elle Fanning before she was Elle Fanning. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, you’re great. I’m going to write additional scenes for you.” We’re shooting exterior. It’s Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, and Elle Fanning. We’re setting up these shots. Elle Fanning can only work a certain number of hours.
The AD goes, “Oh, and this is her stand-in.” The stand-in is some other kid. I’m just like, “Wait. First of all, this kid’s really annoying.” I didn’t like this kid. Also, what is this kid getting out of it at all? This kid is not going to show up on camera. This kid is not acting. This kid is just there just to occupy space and is just working.
Sarah: They’re not being treated particularly well. Those kid stand-ins get treated badly.
John: The kid was annoying. I said, “I never want to see that kid again.”
Craig: Did they murder the kid?
John: Yes, they did. “Get her out of my sight.”
Sarah: “Take her away.”
John: Also, I don’t ever want a kid stand-in. I want to find some other way to do this, whether it’s a little person or some other situation where we can just find a person to do that role. That kid could not get anything out of it.
Sarah: No, because they’re not even getting the fun, whatever, toxic coddling that can feel good in the moment.
John: Absolutely, as opposed to Elle Fanning, who was clearly a superstar in those little moments I saw her. She’s giant and can do all these impersonations. She was having the time of her life. This other kid was there because her mom wanted her to be there.
Craig: John, what if that kid is a fan of Scriptnotes? They’ve grown up. They listen to Scriptnotes every week.
Sarah: [crosstalk 01:10:04].
John: This whole time.
Craig: They’re like, “Apparently, I was annoying.”
John: I just ruined things [crosstalk 01:10:09]. The other thing I want to point people to is the second season of Nathan For You is about this experiment where Nathan puts together this house to figure out what it’d be like to have a kid. This woman wants to know what it’d be like to have a kid. They hire a bunch of child actors to be this woman’s kid.
Sarah: That’s really funny.
John: They go through all this stuff. Later on in the season, it becomes clear, oh, some of these child actors have really enjoyed it and enjoyed being part of the family and this relationship and what is responsibility to child actors. Like all Nathan For You, it doesn’t answer the question at all. It just makes you really uncomfortable about it. It was a good exploration of what it feels like to be using children to be doing this emotional labor.
Sarah: The other thing about it is it’s this toxic combination of coddling and neglect. You have on the one hand, everyone’s going to laugh at that kid’s jokes, everyone’s going to tell them how great they are. Everyone’s going to lie to them if they’re behaving horribly and laugh it off. There’s no boundaries on behavior really. No one actually deeply cares about that kid’s well-being beyond what their purpose is on that set. There may be one or two angels that come out of the woodwork. In my case, there were. The kid’s experience is not the priority on that set. It’s getting the day. It’s a terrible thing it does to one’s head of both this superficial ego boost and the sense that nobody cares about me really.
Craig: Then on the other side of things, there’s the more modern problem. I know Bella Ramsey’s been talking about this. When she started with us, she was 17, so there was still a K on her number. Then she turned 18 fairly early on. When she started shooting with us, she was still not a legal adult. Then you come out on the other side of shooting, and hopefully everything’s gone well and you’re treated well. In our case, we were also very lucky, because her mom was there, and she was fantastic. Everything’s wonderful. Then the internet has to talk about your face and your body and your this and your that and your hair and your eyes and everything and take you apart.
Sarah: It’s a whole other dynamic now.
Craig: This is difficult for adults, difficult, borderline impossible for adults to handle. For a child, it’s terrifying to think, I want to really tell this story and I want to make a TV show but am I damaging someone. We talked about it a lot. We still talk about it a lot. It’s a scary thing. It’s something that’s made I think being a child actor even harder than it used to be.
John: Sarah, you are a parent of a kid who wants to be an actor.
Sarah: I am.
John: Let’s say you’re a listener whose kid wants to be an actor. At what age do you think you might allow a kid to start, it’s like, “Okay, you can start doing this.” When do you think that maturity might be a thing where you feel like they have some agency in the situation?
Sarah: It’s so fun, because I’ve always had to talk about this in the abstract, and now I can talk about it for real as a parent of a kid who really wants to go into it, to the point where I have almost weakened. It’s so desperate, this need and want.
The first thing I would say is we have loaded my oldest kid up with after-school theater programs, weekend improv classes, to get that creative stuff going, because that’s legitimate. Wanting to create things shouldn’t be held back, but in an environment that is designed to be nurturing and exciting and educational. We’ve done a lot of that. We’ve talked about 16 as the age where we can start talking about it if they still have this intense desire to do it professionally. I still think that’s young, but we’re willing to talk about it.
I had a hilarious experience recently. My brother’s a casting director, and he was casting this film with child actors. My oldest was being babysat at the time, last-minute thing. I had to drop off my kid. He was doing these Zoom auditions. My oldest was like, “Just get me on.” My kid goes on, gets the part.
Craig: Love it.
Sarah: I watched then. I get there. I watched for the rest of the Zoom calls, hidden, and go, “Okay, this woman has cracked the code of how to deal with child actors.” I saw her subvert horrible stage parents who I have worked with and make it a good experience for those kids. This woman was a genius, clearly. Then at the end, I talked to the woman, and she’s like, “I just read your book. It’s becoming part of our model for how we’re going to treat child actors.”
I’m like, “Okay, it’s only four days. I’m free for these four days.” I was like, “Eve, if you’re willing to put up with me being the most obnoxious on-set parent where I’m literally shutting down that production, pulling the lights at the slightest discomfort for anyone.” Eve was like, “Yeah, I’ll deal with that.” We’re about to do it. Eve reads the script. It was a great script based on a great novel, but Eve was like, “This is about a kid with a disability, and I don’t trust that your generation of filmmakers is going to get how to do this in a way that’s not sensitive. There isn’t someone with a disability making this film. I can’t be part of it.” Eve passed.
Craig: Wow.
John: Wow.
Sarah: Eve passed. Eve passed.
John: That’s totally Sarah Polley.
Sarah: Just like their mom. Just like their mother. All I really wanted to ever do was pass. I never really wanted to work as an actor. I just liked passing on stuff. It was my favorite.
John: You passed on Go a bit too.
Sarah: I passed on Go. I passed on everything. It was the best part.
Craig: That’s great.
John: I remember one person had to fly you up and walk you through immigration in Canada to get you here to Los Angeles.
Sarah: I know, because I bailed at the last second, because customs was a tricky, and I was like, “You know what? I didn’t really want to do this anyway.”
Craig: I love that.
Sarah: “Forget it.” Chuck Schumer got involved. It was a whole thing. With Eve, they wanted to do this so badly, and they passed. Now, I don’t know where we are, because I finally caved on this that was so intense for me.
Craig: Maybe that’s all they needed was just permission.
Sarah: I wonder if it was also like they saw this thing was on the others in terms of me having this red line around something and went, “We’re just going to get rid of that and then we can move on.”
Craig: There you go.
John: On Episode 2000 of Scriptnotes, they’ll come on this show, and we’ll talk to them about what it was like growing up with a director parent and why they are now the filmmaker they are today.
Craig: Yes, when their book, I Hate You, Mom, comes out, it’ll be great. We can go through it and really dig in to what happened.
John: Sarah Polley, such an amazing pleasure.
Craig: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah: This was so fun. This is the middle of a crazy, soul-crushing part of the process of putting the film out, and this was by far the highlight.
John: Yay.
Sarah: Thank you for the very awesome conversation, you guys.
Craig: Fantastic.
Sarah: This was amazing.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thanks.
Sarah: Thank you.
John: I’ll see you later, Craig.
Craig: Thanks. Bye.
Sarah: Thank you.
Links:
- Sarah Polley on IMDb and on Instagram
- Women Talking film and novel by Miriam Toews
- Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley
- Find the Women Talking Script by Sarah Polley here
- The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene by David Epstein for ProPublica
- Mophie 3-in-1 Charger with MagSafe
- Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
- Till film
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 583: The One with Sarah Polley, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back writer/producer/director Aline Brosh McKenna ahead of her feature directorial debut “Your Place Or Mine.” Aline discusses how tech has changed Hollywood and finding new creative challenges.
We also talk about streaming news, platform mergers, and follow up on script consultants. Megana asks about professional ambitions and we answer listener questions on firing agents and staffing while pregnant.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we go behind the scenes of Episode 3 of The Last of Us and force Craig to answer the question on everyone’s mind: what games did Bill and Frank play together?
Links:
- Watch Your Place or Mine on Netflix at 12:01am on 2/10/23
- Showtime and Paramount+ Merging, With Rebrand Planned
- ‘Westworld’ Gets New Home As Warner Bros. Discovery Strikes Roku & Tubi FAST Channel Deals
- Cancellations Of Completed Seasons Of TV Series; Experts Weigh In On Whether Trend Will Continue
- Salem 1692 Game
- Nuun Hydration Tablets
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter and Instagram
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Against Vagina Monsters first appeared on John August.
John and Megana chat about the start of the 2023 WGA negotiations. John defines terms like the AMPTP, MBA, and Pattern of Demands, and offers an overview on what the process will look like for the next few months.
John also answers listener questions on writers who are trying to break in and what a strike might mean for support staff.
Links:
- Find more about the WGA negotiations, look up your captain and member meetings here at WGAContract2023.org
- Directors Guild Says It Is Not In Their Best Interest to Begin Negotiations Ahead of Its Contract Expiration
- Scriptnotes Episode 407: Understanding Your Feature Contract
- WGA Contract Negotiations 2023: What to Expect with Adam Conover
- John on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Sidecast: WGA Negotiations first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 581 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what’s this?
Why, it’s a clip show. Producer Megana Rao has been working on a forthcoming Scriptnotes book and has found three vintage Scriptnotes segments, in which Craig and I try to answer the question, what is good writing, and how does one do it. Megana, can you tell us what segments you have picked, and more importantly, why?
Megana Rao: Great. I picked three segments that talk about the components of good writing and what elements need to be there and what immediately turns you guys off as signals of things you don’t have confidence in the writer in. We start with Episode 239, which you guys recorded in March of 2016. You guys talk about what good writing feels like.
John: I suspect that we were talking about good writing involves an element of surprise, confidence. It’s not just the words you’re choosing to describe a story but how much we believe that you are telling a story that we want to keep turning the pages on.
Megana: It’s interesting because you guys talk about how these elements function on a sentence level but also structurally. You talk about how you want to surprise and delight your readers in scene description, but also with a plot twist at the end of act two or whatever. It’s cool to see how good writing, that sort of DNA exists in every aspect of a screenplay.
John: Cool. Great. That’ll be our first segment. What’s the second segment we’ll listen to?
Megana: The next one is Episode 76, called How Screenwriters Find Their Voice, with Aline. That one was recorded in February of 2013. You guys are a little bit younger but really consistent in some of the advice that you give. It’s interesting, because you guys talk to each other about your perceptions of each others’ voices. You talk about your impressions from the first times reading each other’s scripts too.
John: It’s interesting, because at that point, Craig was just a comedy writer really. He was only known for the bigger, broader comedies that he’d done. I’m sure it’ll be a good time machine for people to listen to. You say we’re younger, which I’m rather offended by, but it is weird to think we’ve been doing this so long that we were actually younger back in those days.
Megana: You’re a full decade younger, basically.
John: Yeah. Wow. How about for Segment 3? What’s our third segment?
Megana: The last segment is from Episode 432, Learning From Movies. That one, you and Craig talk about your techniques for watching movies. You introduce this concept of mindfulness around movies. What’s interesting is, as you’re talking about the framework for how you analyze a movie, you also teach people what are the key things to be thinking about when you write a movie.
John: Great. It’s important to remember that before we were writers, we were all readers, and we were watchers of movies. We have a sense of what is supposed to happen in a movie. We have a sense of what we’d love to see happen in a movie. As writers, we have to be aware that our audience is doing some of that work too. Just as we’re learning from the movies that we’re watching, we are hopefully writing movies that are aware of how they’re going to be taken in, that they’re not just going into a void, they’re meant to be projected into somebody’s brain. We can learn a lot from thinking about how we watch our movies.
Megana: I think for newer writers, it offers a useful way of pulling out the tools to see how the sausage is made.
John: Cool. We’ll have these three segments. Then we’ll be back at the end of the episode to do our One Cool Things. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will be talking once more about the Scriptnotes book and rumors of industry strife coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for picking these segments.
Megana: Thank you. Hope you guys enjoy this craft compendium.
239 – What Is Good Writing
John: So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.
And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”
And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.
Craig: This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.
But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.
John: Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.
Craig: And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?
John: Yeah.
Craig: We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”
John: Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”
Craig: Right.
John: That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.
So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself.
But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.
Craig: Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.
All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?
John: Right.
Craig: Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.
John: And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.
The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.
That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.
Craig: It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.
You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.
John: Yeah.
Craig: They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.
John: Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”
Craig: No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.
John: Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.
Craig: Oh, yeah. [laughs]
John: But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”
Craig: Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.
John: Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.
Craig: Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.
John: Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.
Craig: And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”
John: Yeah.
Craig: You know, let me take care of you.
John: Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.
It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.
Craig: Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.
Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.
John: Yeah.
Craig: So listening becomes crucial.
John: From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.
Craig: There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.
John: Yeah.
Craig: You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.
John: Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.
Craig: Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Yeah.
John: Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.
Craig: And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”
John: Ah, yes.
Craig: You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.
John: For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?
Craig: Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.
John: Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.
Craig: Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.
John: Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.
Craig: Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.
The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.
John: Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.
It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.
Craig: Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.
And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.
So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.
John: Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.
Craig: Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”
John: And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.
Craig: Bingo.
John: And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.
Craig: That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.
John: Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.
Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.
And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.
Craig: Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”
You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.
John: What’s an example of a bad crossword word?
Craig: Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.
And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.’”
John: Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.
And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”
But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.
Craig: Right.
John: And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.
Craig: Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.
Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.
John: Yeah.
Craig: And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.
John: Spoilers.
Craig: Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.
John: Sorry, man.
Craig: Yeah, spoiler.
John: It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.
And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”
Craig: Mm-hmm.
John: And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.
Craig: Yeah. [laughs]
John: What an amazing voice he has.
Craig: Brilliant.
John: So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.
Craig: Addams Family.
John: Was it Addams Family or —
Craig: Yeah.
John: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.
Craig: [laughs]
John: And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.
Craig: Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.
And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.
John: He’s fantastic.
Craig: Yeah.
John: My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”
Craig: [laughs]
John: And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.
But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”
Craig: Yeah.
John: That’s a really remarkable thing.
Craig: It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”
You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.
John: Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.
So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.
She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”
Craig: It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.
John: Yeah.
Craig: And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.
John: I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.
Craig: No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Yeah.
76 – How Screenwriters Find Their Voice
John: Absolutely. Well, the reason why I wanted to start off with voices is I thought today we might start talking about when you first discovered a writer’s voice, or sort of your own writer’s voice, and sort of what that process was like.Because I remember reading books and reading magazines and enjoying them and recognizing that people wrote in different ways, but never really got a sense of what a voice was until I started reading Spy Magazine. And Spy Magazine, the entire magazine was written with such a specific sardonic, snarky voice. And like that first introductory “Welcome to this Month” kind of thing was written so specifically that I was like, “I want to write like that.” It was the first time I started experimenting writing in someone else’s voice.
But it got really clear when I sort of switched into having a voice of my own. Because I feel like if you read through most of my scripts, there are things I write, they’re consistent, but I’m not quite sure why they’re consistent or sort of how that develops. So, I want to talk about voice and how writers find their voices.
Aline, do you think you have a voice that persists from script to script, or is it different every time?
Aline: That’s all I had when I started, really, was just a way that I spoke, or the characters spoke. And, you know, one of the downsides of that is all the characters spoke the same way. And they all sounded like the scene description. And I have a tendency to put the best jokes in the scene description, too.
But, you know, I had a point of view. The other stuff was stuff that was more of an effort — the plot, particularly the plotting stuff, and differentiating the characters. But, you know, even before I became a writer I just tend to have a particular way of speaking. So, that was I would say the part that came to me the most easily. Craig?
Craig: Yeah. It’s funny. I almost had like an opposite problem. Because the movies I was writing initially were very broad comedies, everything was about jokes. And in the jokes, yeah, definitely, there is a specific kind of joke that my wife will say, “Oh, that’s such a you joke.” And it’s funny — she’s now so good, like she’ll pick them out from trailers or from movies. She’ll just turn to me, “That was you, that was you, that was you.” She knows those things.
But, did I have a voice, like a dramatic voice? Early on, no. And in fact that was something I had to kind of get to. On the plus side, it was helpful to actually… — I never had the problem with characters sounding the same. And in a way I looked at it like it was mimicry, you know, like how does this person talk, how does this person talk, how does this person talk? Because I’m fascinated by the way people talk and I like to do impressions of people.
But over time I have noticed, and lately more so, there is a dramatic expression, maybe is the best way I can put it. There’s a certain way I like the story to unfold that is, I think, kind of like my voice. But it’s funny. It’s not like…
Aline: That’s so interesting. Because you have a very distinct authorial voice in your non-screenwriting that’s extremely distinct, your emails and your prose is extremely distinct.
Craig: Well, because that’s me. And if I’m writing a character I want them to just be true to them.
Aline: Right.
Craig: And not be me. And sometimes I also feel like I’m, yeah, I guess I just sort of go from that point of view. I’m more interested in other people, so I like to go that way. But some voice-like thing has occurred over the years.
John: It’s challenging with screenwriting because when we talk about voice, are we talking about the way characters are speaking? Are we talking about the authorial voice? And when you’re saying in early scripts you didn’t have the technique, you didn’t have the skills, you didn’t have the plot and all that stuff, but you had a voice is, I think, part of the reason I became a writer is I apparently had a voice, and I had confidence on the page. I felt like, you know, people would read through the whole thing. And it felt like it was all of one piece, and it was not just desperate to get to the next thing.
It was enjoyable to read on the page. And it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I had somewhat of a voice people would say, “Yeah, you should keep writing.” And so then I would write more and it sort of developed into that thing. Same way people develop styles or fashions or ways they present themselves, people get reinforcement for the way they talk.
Aline: Your voice is kind of badass. I mean, I had read Go and then when I met you I really expected you to be a little bit more of a hipster badass than you are.
Craig: Oh, yeah, for sure. He’s not what you think from reading your work. Which is cool. I actually like that. You know, I mean, for me because it was comedy, you kind of get a little screwed over in comedy because people laugh. And they go, “I laughed.” But all the work around the laughing, they tend to either not see or not give you credit for, and they certainly don’t reinforce. They don’t teach you how to do it. You’re kind of left to figure it out on your own.
And in a weird way you’re left to figure it out from non-comedies. And it’s the rare comedy like Groundhog Day where you look and you go, “Oh, look how, at least I can see what’s happening around the jokes here…”
Aline: But it took me awhile to learn that the jokes don’t play if the scene work and the dramatic structure doesn’t play. And you know that from your own work, and you know that also from going to countless punch-ups where if the scene doesn’t work, or the characters don’t work, the jokes don’t stick.
Craig: The jokes won’t work. And, unfortunately, no one tells you early on, “I love this joke because of all this wonderful dramatic context around it, or character context, or the way that it served some moment in the scene to connect to the next scene.” No one ever says that. They just say, “Oh my god, that line was so funny.”
John: I was looking up some lines last night for this other project, and so I’m on like great classic movie dialogue lines, a lot of them were from Star Wars. And one of them was like, “You’re awful short for a Storm Trooper, aren’t you?” And that’s actually not that funny of a line, but the only reason it’s memorable is because that movie is really good and the moment worked. And so therefore that line feels appropriate for that moment. So, “Oh, it’s a good line,” but independently it’s not a great line.
Aline: Oh, “I begged you to get therapy,” is one of the best jokes in any comedy, and in and of itself it’s not a joke.
Craig: Yeah. There you go.
John: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” That’s a great line independent of a really great scene, but so many things aren’t.
Craig: Right. I know. And also now the way that we write movies now, they’re a little less written, I don’t know how else to put it. They’re obviously written, but that’s such a written line. You’ll hear sometimes people say, “Oh, that just feels like writing. It doesn’t feel like actual human talk. No one is that witty.”
Aline: I love written lines.
Craig: I know. I mean, the problem is, it’s like so many times I see them play out on screen and I go, “Yeah, congratulations to me for being clever.”
Aline: Right.
John: Yeah.
Craig: But that human didn’t say that. And so there’s…
Aline: Fine line.
John: Yeah.
Craig: There’s a thing between the audience and the line.
John: That’s the luxury of writing a period movie or something that’s set in an alternate thing that’s not meant to be here and now, because you can get away with those lines.
Craig: You can.
John: There’s probably not a single line in Django Unchained that an actual human being would say, but it’s really enjoyable to see in that context.
Craig: Or any Tarantino movie. I mean, everybody speaks, it is understood that we’ve signed a contract with Tarantino that all of his characters are, it’s like it’s opera. I don’t know how else to put it. They speak like the way that recitative is sort of to opera. It’s not human dialogue. It’s awesome.
John: I mean, Tarantino is a great person to bring up, because you want to talk about voice, that’s what he had more than anything else. I mean, I think there was interesting plotting and interesting stuff going on, but if you just plunked down and read one of his scripts — I remember reading Natural Born Killers as a script when it was just his script. And it was the first script that I ever read to the end, flipped back to page one and read through again, because it’s just a great voice that you love to hear. And it’s not about the dialogue. It’s about everything that’s fitting together, that the world feels.
And I think people can learn a lot of the other things. You can learn the plots. You can learn how to sort of get through the story. But, when you read a sample that has really good writing, really good voice, that’s what you sort of get to.
Aline: Can we all say the word “recitative.”
Craig & John: “Recitative.”
Craig: Is that right? It’s “recitative” is what it is. “Recitative.”
Aline: Recitative.
John: Oh, “recite-a-tive” is how it’s pronounced.
Craig: Yes, “recitative.” Why are you looking at me like that?
John: On NPR yesterday, or actually one of the other podcasts I was listening to, they were doing a thing about Les Mis, and they went into the “recitative…”
Craig: Recitative.
John: And they played a little clip of it. Like out of context with the whole movie it just sounds crazy.
Craig: It’s hysterical.
John: Yes.
Craig: Like, why is this person singing, “What’s this? It’s sunny. Where is my hat!” It’s ridiculous. But, you know, once you’re in the middle of it… — I mean, frankly, that is the worst part of Les Mis for me. I mean, when I went to go see Les Mis for the first time I’m like, stop all the sing talking, just talk, then sing the songs. I’d be much happier. I really, really would. Or, just sing the songs, [laughs], and I’ll figure out what’s going on between them. Or hand out a pamphlet and I’ll just read what happens in between them.I would have been happier. The recitative is a tough one.
John: But don’t you sometimes read scripts from people who, like, are aspiring writers and they’re — you don’t know what to say to them other than the fact that like, “You don’t have a voice.” You’re like, “At least I’m not getting any sort of voice from you.” And that’s one of the hardest things; there’s no nice way to say that.
Craig: Well, other than to say, “Look, you’re not the only person. And it’s not fatal. Because people have pulled out of that flat spin before.” But if you read something, I mean, you’ve had this experience where you read something and you think, “Yeah, I could write the next five pages just like you did here, in a minute.” Or, anybody could write these pages. There’s no reason I need you to write the rest of this story. You’re not expressing it uniquely.
Aline: Right. But some people have a voice in life as they walk around. They just can’t get it onto a piece of paper.
John: Yeah.
Aline: And so partly it’s about learning what your point of view is, what makes you interesting to people, and being confident that that’s going to interest a reader.
Craig: Well, that’s the thing right there. Because I think people are just scared that their natural expression is boring. And what they do is they chase. And everybody has to sort of start like that with rare exception. There are prodigies, but so many people start by copying. You know, that’s how we learn to speak, by copying. So, it’s natural that we learn to write by copying, but at some point you got to kind of take the training wheels off, because all you’ll ever be is a copyist at that point.
John: Yeah. It’s having the courage to speak as you actually see the world.
Aline: Some screenwriters have been incredibly influential. I would say William Goldman, Shane Black, just in terms of having a very distinct way of writing that people then imitated. I mean, Goldman was huge for a very long time and people would write in that kind of epigrammatic way that he wrote. And then Shane Black, obviously. I mean, I think people are still writing in that tone.
Craig: Yeah. To me, it’s the first mistake. It’s the mistake of page zero is that you’re copying. I mean, all it says is it looks like I’m going to have to go get Shane Black, I guess, to fix this script, because I just got ersatz Shane Black.
There is nothing else you can offer as a writer except that which is unique to you. If it’s not unique to you, I don’t need it from you.
John: I’ll say it’s useful to look through the writing that you like a lot and figure out why you like it that way. And there may be aspects of that that you can completely use. Rather than sort of aping Shane Black’s short sentences and overuse of periods, find your way of getting that scene description on the page in a way that’s meaningful. Find your dialogue that is useful in those ways.A writer who we both, Aline and I both — I’m pointing to Aline. Pointing doesn’t do any good on a podcast.
Craig: Right. This one over here.
John: This one over here. — We both talked about Lena Dunham and how much we enjoy her stuff. And you want to talk about somebody who has perspective and a voice, this feels like, you know, her world and what’s interesting to her being nicely put together on screen.
Aline: And you feel like you could see a line — someone could say something in life and you’d be like, “Oh, that’s such a Lena Dunham kind of moment.” You know, she already has, at such a young age, she already has a signature style/way of looking at the world perspective.
I mean, what’s amazing about her is when you see Tiny Furniture, it was all there. It was always all there. And she has such a distinct point of view. And I think, you know, because people do start out often by copying, I think we’re going to see a lot of stuff which is…
Craig: Oh, for sure.
Aline: …you know, young women in their 20s. She, though, will free other people who have different… — You know, that’s what’s interesting about somebody like a Quentin or a Lena or somebody. If you have a distinct point of view you kind of give other people permission to find their own voice and to be that.
John: Absolutely. I get very frustrated by the knocks on Go as being like Pulp Fiction light, but I’m fully willing to acknowledge the fact that it would have been very hard to make Go without Pulp Fiction, because restarting the story twice and our structure, everyone would be like, “Well that’s not going to work. You can’t do that.” And once you’re like, “Well, there’s a very successful movie…”
Craig: I don’t think of Go, I mean, I don’t think of it that way. Maybe in the moment…
John: In the moment it was. That’s what people compared it to.
Craig: Well, and that’s what people do. It’s pattern bias. You know, “Well, that thing just happened so it must have caused this.” But it’s important to know the range of your own voice. There are people that have really specific voices like Tarantino or Dunham, and they write that kind of thing.
But it’s also okay to be the sort of person that is the Jack of all trades, who can kind of move in between, as long as there’s something unifying. It might not be dialogue, but unified in a way you tell a story, how you structure you out, what themes you dwell on. There’s all sorts of ways to express yourself, but you have to at least express yourself.
John: Now, Aline, most of your produced movies seem to fall into a certain kind of, not even genre really, but a certain kind of mold. Is that because you’ve picked those movies, or those are the movies that have gotten made? What’s the through line?
Aline: Well, the first couple movies that I wrote were pretty straight up rom-coms, I would say. And then The Devil Wears Prada is not, and well, 27 Dresses also is a straight up rom-com. But then I wrote a few that were sort of women in the workplace trying to balance their life. And that was just, Prada was brought to me. Morning Glory was something that I wanted to show the first time a woman has real responsibility in a workplace, so that was a different spin on that.
And then I Don’t Know How She Does It is a work/life balance thing. But, it’s funny, I don’t think of myself as being a genre writer, because I don’t think of myself — I think of myself as writing pieces that are essentially dramatic, even if they have jokes in them. Dramas with jokes.
And, so, I sort of — I did We Bought a Zoo, which is a family movie.
John: That’s also a drama with jokes.
Aline: It’s a drama with jokes. Yeah. So, some of the other stuff that I branched into, I just approach it as sort of characters/character dilemma. So, I never think of myself as a genre writer. But I don’t think anybody does.So, it’s funny, you know, I’m doing a broader range of stuff, even though I’ll always love — I love single lead comedies. I love romantic comedies. But one of the things I’m writing is a robot movie which one of our samples today is a…
Craig: Yeah, a robot movie. So, we’ll get into that.
Aline: So, I’m writing a robot movie. And what’s been interesting is working in different genres. I mean, I think I still have a lot of the same concerns and interests irrespective of what kind of material I’m dealing with.
John: Because I got pigeonholed right from the very start as a kid’s book writer — the first two projects I got were kid’s book adaptations, which didn’t get made, but I was only being that guy. I’d written Go largely just to break out of that box.
Aline: Oh, that’s interesting.
John: And so I very deliberately, consciously wrote that, saying like…
Craig: To not be the Fried Worms guy.
John: Exactly. And so with that, the weird luxury is everyone saw whatever they wanted to see in it. And so they’d say, like, “Oh, you are the edgy action movie guy.” “Oh, you are the comedy guy.” “You are this guy.” And so I was able to quickly get a lot of different things.
And I don’t think it hurt my sort of craft, but it did make it harder to sort of figure out what — ultimately what box to put me for other things. Because I didn’t become a brand in comedy, I didn’t become a brand in action. I just became the guy who does the various different kind of things.
What’s weird is that when you sort of take a big step back and look at the movies that actually got made, almost all of them are sort of “Two World” movies, where like there’s a normal world and the character decides to cross into this other world that has special rules, and ultimately sort of comes back out of it. And it’s very much sort of —
Aline: Yeah. I would probably, in my own stuff I would play more to thematics and layers than genre similarities.
John: Yeah. I described your movies in the previous podcast as want-coms.
Aline: I remember that.
Craig: The want-coms. Yeah, I’ve been all over the map. I mean, I’ve been very, remarkably uncalculating in my own career for somebody that’s kind of like, I have a tendency to calculate. But really kind of I just like making movies. So, I’ve always gravitated towards what’s getting made. And I had some really rough experiences. The best things I think I’ve ever written haven’t been made.
So, I started to be more interested in just writing movies. I just don’t like writing scripts that don’t get made. It just feels so awful.
Aline: My husband calls that the Document Production Business.
Craig: Yeah, pretty much. You’re just pushing paper around and then in the end it’s a booklet that no one reads. You know, I adapted Harvey and I wrote a movie called Game Voice at Bruckheimer. I love those scripts. And they meant something to me. And I adapted a Philip Dick short story. These are all really the ones I cared about, and then it just didn’t happen.So, I started, basically, okay, well what’s in front of me that’s getting made? And I think the downside is sometimes what’s getting made isn’t that great. But, it then got me to a place where now some of the things that are getting made I really do think are great, and I love them. You know, so, I don’t know. I always feel like, I swear, maybe it’s just me — I always feel like I’m just a rookie still. I don’t know how many times… — I always feel like the next ten years are the ten years that count. In any given year, I always think the next ten years are the ones that count.
Until I finally get to retire, which as you know I’m really looking forward to. That’s my big thing.
Aline: Yeah. Nobody wants to retire more than you.
Craig: Oh, I can’t wait. I cannot wait. So much fun to think about all the things I can do.
John: You’re being serious? You’re actually thinking about retirement?
Craig: Always.
Aline: He’s always talking…
John: Oh, god, I never talk about retirement. I cannot ever imagine retiring.
Aline: Me neither.
Craig: Oh, no, no, it’s going to be the best.
John: Yeah. I will die mid-draft.
Craig: Now, listen, I’m not going to retire next year. I’m not going to retire in five years. But once I hit 50, then I’m going to start thinking about it. And then I’d like to have a nice regenerative breaking down kind of vibe towards 60. And then I’m out.
Aline: There’s a good recitative in that.
Craig: There is!
Aline: [singing] Here I am. I’m a…for 50.
John: [singing] But what will you do?
Craig: So many things! [singing] Anything I want. [laughs] Why do they do that?
Aline: Do you have enough hobbies?
Craig: Well, that’s the thing. I have a lot of hobbies, and there are a lot of things I want to learn. Like I want to learn some languages. I want to learn to play the guitar better. There are things I know how to do, just not well. And I want to be able to do them better. So, I’d like to learn things, go places, check stuff out, see my friends, hang out.
And, by the way, I would still write, but I would write for myself. I would write things that aren’t screenplays. I would just do stuff because I wouldn’t be worrying about saving for my kids, and my family, and retirement and all the rest of it.And also, frankly, I like what I’m doing right now. I do. I just feel like — this is a whole separate therapy discussion — but at some point you have to stop doing what you’re doing. You can’t do it for your entire life. You can’t.
Aline: You can if you’re my dad.
Craig: I know. You can if you’re my dad, too. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. I’m saying you shouldn’t.
Aline: He loves it.
Craig: Yes, some people do. Here’s the thing: I don’t. Like I know, sorry — I know that I need something new at some point. I get excited when things change. I love chaos and mayhem, basically. And I think I want to change it up. You know, I can feel change coming. You know what? There’s a wind of change in the air.
Aline: [singing] There’s a wind…
Craig: Recitative. You want to talk about…?
John: I want to talk about one more thing before we get into that. I could imagine at some point not writing screenplays, but I’m also sort of — part of me lives like ten years in the future where there’s some movies I’ve already directed. Like I already know, like, well that’s that movie I’m going to direct. And so at some point I’m going to get to that point. So, retirement is always way beyond these other movies that I’m going to be doing.
Aline: You have lots of hobbies and interests.
John: I have a lot of interests, yeah.
Aline: Your hobbies are businesses.
Craig: You’d be better at retirement. You love making apps. You’re a little app-making elf.
John: But I would never stop my current career to do that. So, I enjoy it, but I want everything to happen simultaneously.
Craig: The world needs apps.
John: I mostly just want to clone myself and send out the army of John Augusts to do different things.
Craig: What a horrifying thought.
John: It would be great.
Craig: And army of John Augusts.
Aline: I think it’s already happened.
Craig: It might have. Which one do you think we’re talking to now? Which generation of August is this?
Aline: The relaxed fit.
Craig: Oh, this is Relaxed Fit August?
432 – Learning From Movies
John: So Craig, one thing I’ve done in 2019 which was helpful and I’m definitely carrying it with me into the new year is when I watch a movie I try to take some notes afterwards about what worked in that movie for me. And so this first segment I want to talk through this idea of what we can learn from movies.
So I think so often we’re talking about screenplays or like reading scripts and all that stuff but really what all of us do is we watch movies and we take things from movies. And I want to have a discussion about how to be a little bit more systematic and really thoughtful about what we’re taking from movies as we finish watching a film.
Craig: Mindful viewing of movies. That’s a good idea. Everybody that does what we do uses other movies as examples or inspiration. Sometimes we use them as negative examples.
John: Of course.
Craig: But the movies that we love we tend to really think about carefully. It’s a little bit like what you and I do when we walk through one of these movies.
John: Exactly. And so we did our walkthrough of Die Hard and that was really trying to look systematically at what the movie was doing and how the movie was working. That’s a thing that people can do by themselves with every movie that they watch. And really if you’re aspiring to be a screenwriter, or you are a screenwriter, it’s not a bad practice to get into with everything. So if you watch a pilot of a TV show or you watch a movie, just take a few minutes and really look at how that movie worked. Because when you don’t do that it tends to be only the most recent thing you’ve watched is the only example you have in your head. And if you do it more systematically it will work for everything.
Craig: Yeah.
John: So my questions I want to ask myself when I finish a movie is what’s working in it, what’s not working for you in it? If it’s not working why is it not working? Really troubleshoot for yourself what didn’t click for you and why didn’t it click. And what could you have done differently in that movie to make it click?
Really you’re trying to focus on the how questions. How is the movie working and how could the movie be working better if you were to have access to the engine underneath it?
Craig: Yeah. There’s this saying that people put out there about social media. Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. And sometimes if we watch movies, particularly ones that we love, and we don’t think about them in a gear-watch-works way then we may suffer from that. We may think, OK, I’m currently sitting here with a pile of tiny little gears and cogs and springs and it’s not a watch. And I just saw the most beautiful watch. I suck.
If you start to really look at it from the point of view of a craftsperson then you can see that they had the same problems and limitations you did. And it’s really helpful I think to start to strip away stuff that isn’t purely writing. Start to strip away the lighting. Start to strip away the music. Start to strip away the performances. And just think about the movements of things that were commanded by text, because that’s what you’re doing.
John: Absolutely. So let’s start at the fundamental. Let’s start at the hero. Let’s take a look at who the hero is in this story and what the function of that hero is. So, as the viewer do you understand who that hero is? What they want? Both on a macro scale, the overall arc of their journey through the story, but on a micro level. On a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment do you understand what that hero wants? And if you do how is that being communicated? What information are they giving you to let you know what that hero wants?
And that is purely craft. That is the screenwriter’s job is to make it clear what that central character is trying to go after.
Craig: And it’s perfectly reasonable to study how people do that elegantly. So Damon Lindelof and his team did Watchmen which I loved and a lot of people do. And one of the things that I thought was so good about it was what I call non-expository exposition. They were so clever – and that is craft – about making the information release interesting and meaningful beyond just you need to know this. They managed to weave it into other things. Really good lessons learned from that. And I think that when we watch movies it’s fair to look at those really hardcore craft things and say, oh, you know what I’m not going to steal the way, like their movie there, but I’m going to steal their ambition. Like they clearly aspire to do better than the usual. I should, too.
John: Absolutely. Watchmen is a great example for my next question which is how does the hero fit the story. So thinking about what story do you want to tell and which hero is the appropriate hero for telling that story. The fit between hero and world in Watchmen could not have been better. So you had a character whose grandfather was part of this sort of long story, this long struggle, to get us up to this present moment. So she was uniquely qualified to be the central character in the story.
Craig: And you can sometimes struggle when you watch a movie because you’re looking at the wrong person. This is another thing that movies do all the time, we just don’t notice it until we really watch meaningfully. And that is they have us following somebody that isn’t the hero. We think they’re the hero. They’re not the hero.
Sometimes the hero is this side character or somebody we think of as a side character because they’re not occupying this huge space in the story. But the story is really about this smaller – I mean, the most famous example that people kick around is who is Ferris Bueller about? Who is the hero of Ferries Bueller? And it’s Cameron. It’s the friend. Because he’s the only one that has a choice to make. He is the only one who has a problem, who is running away from his problem, who has to confront his problem, and overcome his problem. But he’s not Ferris Bueller. He’s not in the title. Nor is he the guy we watch in the beginning, or the end. It seems like Ferris Bueller is the hero but he’s not. So meaningful watching helps you get there.
John: Absolutely. And finding those situations where the central character of Ferris Bueller is not the protagonist. It’s not the one that actually undergoes the transformation, the journey. So really being deliberate to look at sort of who is playing what role in the story. And once you do that figure out how are they introduced. How are you as a viewer first introduced to these characters? And how quickly do you understand who they are and why you should be interested in them. Those initial scenes of meeting those characters we all know as writers are so crucial. Well, how did this film do it? And ask yourself what are the other choices they could have made and why was this the right choice or the wrong choice?
Craig: Introductions are something that I think writers probably glide past all the time and should not. Maybe it’s because they think their “directing on the page.” As you know I’m a huge fan of directing on the page. I think that’s our job. And I think of movies that are delightful and how often their delight is conveyed to us through an introduction of a character. Like so when we first meet Jack Sparrow in the very first Pirates of the Caribbean movie he’s on this ship, he is a proud pirate, he seems like just one of those plot armored heroes where no wrong can. And then you reveal that his boat is sinking and he literally steps off the top of it onto a deck as it disappears below the waves. That says so much not just about him but about this world, the tone. It’s delightful.
John: Yes.
Craig: In the second movie I believe he shoots his way out of a coffin. It’s another just – it’s surprising. So, another excellent thing to keep an eye on for all movies. And sometimes they’re not flashy like that. The introduction of the family in Parasite–
John: Yes.
Craig: Spectacular. Just the way that they’re living in a basement sort of, and how their day is consumed by trying to steal wifi. Brilliant.
John: It’s really talk about all these aspects, like who are the right characters for the story, how are we meeting these characters, and do we understand what they want? And Parasite is a great example of how you’re seeing all three of those things in one initial sequence that’s really telling you this is their situation. These are the people you’re going to be watching through the course of the story.
Craig: Yeah. If you’re watching a movie and you feel good at the end of a scene, stop. I don’t mean to say that you should do this the first time you see it. But when it’s time to watch it meaningfully and thoughtfully if the scene works for you stop and then roll back and then watch it again. And just think about the layers and why.
This is so much more important than why – I feel like our culture is just obsessed with people explaining why they hate things. They’re rewarded for it, I guess. It teaches you very little. It really does. I’ll tell you, more than anything when I watch something I don’t like I get scared. I get scared because I think would I have done the exact same thing in that situation? How would I have done it differently? I’m starting to get scared. Better to look at things you love.
John: Looking at any of these characters, a useful metric for me is could I describe this character independently of the actor? Do I have enough information about that character at the start and as the story progresses that I could talk about that character independently of the actor who is playing him? So I think Jack Sparrow is actually a great example. Because we think of him as Johnny Depp, but that character is very, very specific independently of the performance of Johnny Depp.Same with all the family members in Parasite whose names I don’t know. And so they are such strongly drawn characters that I don’t have to fall back on a description of who the actor was playing them to be able to describe them as what they’re trying to do in the story.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, Disney, the folks who are running Disney very famously they knew they had hired Johnny Depp and when they saw what he was doing and what he looked like and how he sounded and walked they freaked out, because that was not some sort of inevitable thing that travels out of Johnny Depp. That was something specific and different. And it is a character that could be played by another person. It could be.Would it have been played the same way? No.
John: No.
Craig: I think he was perfect. I really do. But in some alternate universe someone else is playing it and people also love the movie.
John: Agreed. So we talked about the hero, let’s talk about the antagonist. How does the antagonist arrive in the story? How do they challenge the hero? And in movies that work well the antagonist is so specific to the story and so specific to the hero that it’s hard to imagine them existing outside of that universe. So we talk about this in Die Hard. We talk about it in almost any of the movies we love, they have a villain or a chief character who is challenging the hero who is so specific to that story. So always look for how is that antagonist introduced and how specifically drawn are they to challenge your hero in the story.
Craig: And if it works for you, accept that. You know, you could fall into a trap of trying to fit things into categories and saying, well, sometimes I’ll see people say, “You know, I really liked this movie but it doesn’t follow the rule of blankety-blank.” Correct. It does not. Because that is not a rule. The rule that you just cited isn’t a rule. There are movies where the villain, the antagonist, is the weather. There are movies where it’s a dog. There’s movies where it’s a ghost. There’s movies where it’s fate. There’s movies where it’s the person you love the most.
It’s defined in so many different ways, so start with the fact that it worked. And then say, OK, I’ve just learned a new way of conceiving of what an antagonist is. The word villain, also, a bit of a trap.
John: Agreed. So then we have our characters. Let’s talk about the storytelling of the movie. So, how quickly and how well does it establish who is important and what they’re going after? How does the movie move between storylines? And this I think is the most crucial kind of craft question. Obviously there’s multiple things that are going to be happening. How does the movie decide how to switch back and forth between? Does it limit POV to only things that the hero knows? Or does the audience have omniscient POV? How is it working in terms of telling you its story? And how quickly – going back to the Pirates example – does it set up what its tone and genre are really going to be?
And these are fundamental things. And if the movie is not working you’re going to notice it here.
Craig: Correct. And that’s why it’s so important to carefully watch a movie that is working for you. Because when it is working it is designed for you to not notice any seams whatsoever. You won’t notice cuts. You won’t notice that one scene has changed to another. You won’t notice transitions. It will all seem inevitable and purposeful and of a single whole.So take the time to now go, OK, but it’s not. So let’s be amateur magicians that are invited to the magic castle and we’re asking the really good sleight of hand guy, OK, slow it down for me. Let me see it bit by bit, move by move. That’s how you’re going to learn.
John: Absolutely. The last bit of technique which I think is so crucial to be monitoring is how does the movie surprise you? Because by this point you’ve watched thousands of movies. You are a sophisticated movie viewer. The movies that succeed are the ones that still manage to surprise you. That you feel like you’re caught up with them and they still have some more tricks up their sleeve. So how do they do that? How did they deceive you in a way that got you to that moment of surprise?And those are the moments to really go back and really figure out what was the set up that got you to that misunderstanding.
Craig: Setups, payoffs, misdirections, but also just as important clues, hints. We will not feel as satisfied if there were no hints. I was watching, so Knives Out, written and directed by our friend Rian Johnson, which has done extraordinarily well and for good reason. I watched it again and there’s a moment that happens during the reading of the will when the lawyer announces that the old man has left all of his stuff, all of it, to Marta, his nurse. There’s one little thing that happens with one character that is a clue. But you sure don’t know it at the time because it’s a clever clue. It’s a smart clue. And I thought, OK, there’s intelligence at work and there’s also an understanding of how fair play actually improves the misdirection and the surprise.
It is, again, a very calculated, careful crafted bit. And at its best moviemaking is about marrying this really hardcore calculating craft with a kind of inspired wild creative abandon.
John: Yeah.
Craig: And that’s what good things like Knives Out do.
John: Absolutely. And I think a crucial thing about Knives Out is to remember like, so Rian Johnson is both the writer and the director. That scene is incredibly well directed, but that moment that you’re describing is a written moment.
Craig: Yes.
John: It was very clearly an idea that occurred in the writing stage of this. And so I think it’s also great to have a separate discussion about what works on a directing level, on a cinematography level, on casting, costuming. Think about all those things but as a separate conversation. Really just focus on what is it about the storytelling, about the writing that is working for you so well in this part of the process.
Craig: Whodunits are amazing for this. If you want to really study the craft of surprise and misdirection just watch whodunits. Because that’s all they’re about. I mean, they are about some other things occasionally. I mean, Knives Out has a certain commentary about class and what it means to be an immigrant in the United States and inherited wealth versus earned wealth. All of that stuff is there. But mostly it’s about the machinery of who did it. And that’s what’s so satisfying about it.
John: Well it’s also a meta examination of sort of the whodunit as a genre, because it ultimately is not so much a whodunit.
Craig: Correct. It’s sort of like we know who did it, but whodunit. And I love those movies because they really do instruct you. Comedies, also, I will say comedies are oftentimes–
John: Well, there’s setup, payoff.
Craig: It’s machinery.
John: Yeah, it’s machinery behind.
Craig: Study the machinery.
John: So we’ve watched the movie and now we’re trying to focus on it. Obviously if you have someone there to go have a drink with afterwards you can talk through all that stuff, which is great. But if you’re watching the movie by yourself what I found to be really helpful and I’ve started doing it much more for the last couple months is just one page of notes, bullet points of like these were the things I learned from this movie. And if it’s a movie that I loved, great. These are some things I loved and some things that this filmmaker was able to do in the writing that really worked for me and things I wanted to remember from this.
If it’s a movie I didn’t love, I find that also to be really helpful. This thing they tried to do just did not work, or I was confused by these moments. This isn’t a review. This is like what is it that you can take from this thing you just watched and apply to your own work. And what you said before about when you watch a movie that’s not working you get that moment of fear. Would I have made the same mistakes? And as I look at the movies that didn’t work, yeah, I definitely see some things where I probably would have tried that in that situation, too. So it’s helpful. It’s a chance to sort of have the experience of having made that movie that didn’t work and learn from it without having spent years of your life making a movie that didn’t work.
Craig: How nice is that, right? I mean, it’s hard enough doing these things. So if there’s anything we can do to save ourselves from a trap. By the way, we probably can’t. I mean, if we’re going to fall into a trap we’re going to fall into a trap. But studying other people’s good stuff but help I think but make us better. And if you do see, well, I guess here is how I would put it with the negative things. I do think of these things as relationships. We have a relationship with something. A movie. This is why very, very smart, cultured, tasteful people can have violent disagreements about the same movie. Because it’s not about the movie being good or bad, or you being a good or bad viewer. It’s about this unique relationship that forms between you and it, which is the sum of all of what it is and all of what you are.
So, when we watch these things and we find ourselves in a good or bad relationship, what’s worthy there is it will help us craft something that we have a good relationship with as we write. Because I’ve written things before where I just thought I’m fighting with this thing. I mean, this thing doesn’t want to exist, or it shouldn’t exist, but I’m being paid to make it exist and I am fighting with it. I am at war. And it’s not a good feeling. Figuring out how to have a good relationship with what you’re writing is something that you might be able to be helped to do by thinking about the good relationships you’ve had with other things.
John: Absolutely. One unique thing about the time people are living in now versus when we were starting out is that pretty much any movie you’ve really enjoyed you can read the screenplay of. And so if you have questions about how it worked on the page you can go back and look at those scripts. This is the part where you and I come clean and say we don’t read the scripts. We’re not reading those For Your Consideration scripts.
Craig: No.
John: But they’re available there for people to read. And it was very important for me when I was starting to write to read a bunch of those scripts. And so definitely go out and read those scripts if you are new to the craft and learning how it all works.
Craig and I tend to watch movies and we can sort of see the script coming through there. So, obviously we don’t know what the drama was and what changed on the set, but we get a pretty sense of what the storytelling was on the page that led to that movie. But if you’re new to this that’s a great place to start. And so I would recommend watch the movie, read the script, and see how it compares. Or if there’s something that you’ve not seen, reverse it sometimes and read the script, see the movie in your head, and then watch the final movie to see sort of how the filmmakers did the job of converting that screenplay into a movie.
Craig: I mean, really what you’re advising people to do is their homework.
John: Yes.
Craig: Do you homework, people.
John: Yeah.
Craig: This is a job. They don’t just pay you for nothing.
John: And I guess–
Craig: You got to know stuff.
John: In my taking notes on movies that I’m watching now I’m just sort of trying to do my homework a little bit more. I feel like I’ve been letting it slide for a few years and just like watching the movie just as a fan. That’s why I like to watch a movie just to enjoy it, but then afterwards take those notes. I’m not taking notes during it.
Craig: Well that’s a really good way to keep yourself relevant also. I think as people get older sometimes we think of them as losing a step or losing some zip on their fastballs, as we say, but sometimes I think all that’s happening is they’ve just disconnected from the churn of culture and what is relevant and what’s happening around us that is new and different. Because people are constantly kicking over the old stuff.
Like for instance what Rian did with Knives Out. It sort of kicks over the old stuff a bit. And if you’re not paying attention to that you will just make more old stuff. Sometimes I read things, I’m sure you have too, where a studio will say we really like this idea. It’s not quite working. Can you fix it? And you read it and you think, well, I get it. This is a good idea. It feels like it was written 30 years ago.
John: Yep.
Craig: It just seems like whoever wrote this stopped at some point and you can’t.
John: Move forward.
Craig: Move forward.
John: We are back in 2023. It’s time for our first One Cool Things of 2023. No pressure whatsoever. My One Cool Thing is a blog post that I saw a bunch of people linking to this past week. A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to had it. It’s called the Dangers of Elite Perception by Jarrett Walker. He is an urban theorist, a philosopher, a person who talks about public transit. His concept of elite perception is that the folks in elite positions often believe they actually understand how things work overall. They have this natural bias. They can only see what their experience would be.
The example he gives is that someone would say, “How is this new subway going to help me, a guy with a BMW parked in my driveway?” and not understanding not everyone has access to a car and that it’s not going to be useful for him necessarily. He’s not going to directly benefit but everyone else might benefit.
I think you can really broaden this idea of elite perception beyond just urban transportation to a lot of situations where it’s so easy to get caught up in the solipsism of everything in the world functions the way it functions to me and really stresses the importance of going out and just asking questions and figuring out different people’s perspective and needs and wants, because it’s very unlikely that your experience is the same as other people’s experiences.
That feels especially true for anyone writing stories, anybody who has to really think beyond what their immediate needs are. Just be aware that there’s a lot of other things out there, and just always be asking yourself, “I think it’s this way, but why do I think it’s this way? Is there some other people I can ask about how they really see the situation?”
Megana: That’s so interesting. It seems so obvious that if you’re designing public transit, you would be thinking about the people who are already using public transit the most versus yourself who owns a BMW or something.
John: I think the same thing can be applied to any industry-wide thing. We have a bunch of different people who are involved in the process of making movies and TV shows. The needs of one group may not match up with the needs of other groups. Recognize that if you’re pushing for one thing that you really want, it may have harmful effects to other people as well. Always good to be looking at what are the needs of the whole and not always prioritize what are your immediate needs.
Megana: I love that. I feel like as I learn more about design, it really comes down to asking more questions of people making sure that the design’s actually functional.
John: Absolutely. Some of the software stuff that we’re doing, I have persnickety taste, and so a lot of things in Highland or Weekend Read are very much what I want. It’s only when we actually have betas out there that other people can use or people who are trying to use the software for different things than I’m trying to use it for, that we can really see what’s useful. Ryan Knighton, who’s been a frequent guest, tests out our iOS apps to make sure they actually work for blind people, for example. We can turn on the simulators to see what would it be like for a blind person, but we are not a blind person who can use this app. He’s our guinea pig there and really lets us know what he needs.
Megana: Great. In keeping in theme of broadening point of view, my One Cool Thing for this week is a book by Gabrielle Blair. It’s called Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. It’s this short, funny, thought-provoking read. You could probably finish it in one sitting.
In the book, she lays out these 20 arguments where she makes the case for why we should move the debate away from legislating/controlling women’s bodies and instead focuses on the role of men in sexual health. I think what she does so well is she takes away some of the political and religious weight that we bring into these conversations, and instead, really roots it in these biological and scientific arguments around fertility. I learned a lot from it. It was a really interesting read. I think it’s an important perspective to consider.
John: Absolutely. I think you’re right to tie it into this dangers of elite perception. I think we have this sense when it comes to fertility and abortion and all these things that it’s strictly just a women’s issue.
Megana: Really helpful way to frame this conversation.
John: It all comes from just an act that happened on one day that has these long repercussions, and that we should probably be thinking about that moment rather than all the other stuff around it.
Megana: She really gets into the science of the fertility and the difference between it. These are things that I have known and felt, but to see these arguments written out in this way was just really powerful. I think it’s really smart the way that she does it.
John: Great. I’m looking forward to reading it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, and two of our segments were produced by Stuart Friedel way back in the day.
Megana: Yay.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always. Our outro is by Martin Kubitsky. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Scriptnotes book and other things coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for putting together this episode.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Megana, this whole episode came to be because you were working on a chapter for the Scriptnotes book. We’ve not had a lot of big updates. We’re still not talking about delivery dates and things like that, when we have to turn it in to our publishers at Crown. It’s been fun going back through the archives and seeing who we were then and what advice we had. I’m sure our writing advice is pretty consistent, but other stuff has changed. What are you finding as you’re looking through things?
Megana: It’s interesting to also hear how much more confident you guys are in talking about these things as time goes on. There are kernels of truth that you’ve been saying since Episode 70 of the podcast, 500 episodes ago. That’s really cool, because I think that these lessons that you’re teaching are consistent, but they’re also really difficult to learn, which is why we have to keep talking about them.
John: One of the goals of the Scriptnotes book is that it can be a little bit timeless, that it’s really screenwriting advice that’ll be applicable in 2023 or 2043 hopefully. There’ll be things that’ll still be the same. Other stuff does keep evolving and changing.
One of the things that you and I have been trying to figure out is that… Over the next year, we’re going to be coming up on a new WGA contract. There’s going to be all the questions of stuff about what happens around that. That’s a difficult thing for us to do on the show, because we’re not that timely of a show. We record a week in advance sometimes. We can’t be especially responsive. We have international listeners and listeners who are listening just for the fun of it, who don’t necessarily need to know about the intricate details of WGA stuff. It’s not cool for them.
What you and I have been talking about is maybe just doing short little side-cast episodes that are not a full hour, not our normal thing, but are just about WGA topics that come up related to this new contract that don’t have to be about everything else. If you want a normal Scriptnotes episode, you’ll get your normal Scriptnotes episode on Tuesday, but there may be some extra little bonus things that come out not on a Tuesday, about just this WGA stuff.
Megana: Absolutely. I think the one common thing of everyone in Hollywood is they’re incredibly dramatic. As we are coming up to some of these conversations, I have been hearing crazy, wild takes. I think it’ll be nice to have a really measured, responsive way of hearing what’s true or not, because you’ve had so much experience with the WGA, at least negotiations, to shed some more light and insight into what’s actually going on.
John: Absolutely. I’ve been through many negotiation cycles. I’ve been on the negotiating committee. I’m on the negotiating committee this year. I can’t comment specifically about some stuff in this negotiation, because that’s just not appropriate. The only place that you’re going to hear the real scoop from the WGA side is going to be from the WGA itself and from the folks who are in charge of things. What I can hopefully do is offer some just broad frameworks for thinking about the timelines of things, how stuff works, because there’s terminology that is just facts, but it’s not necessarily obvious to someone going through it for the first time. I see here in the Workflowy you have two questions from people who’ve written in already. Maybe we can try to just break the seal with these two.
Megana: Chris wrote in and asked, “I’m a new pre-WGA arrival to LA and have been taking some general water bottle tour meetings with execs at various studios and production companies. During my last three conversations, the execs all mentioned that they were concerned about the uncertainty of a pending writer’s strike in May, with two of the three saying they believed it likely to happen. I’ve not heard this possibility discussed on any recent Scriptnotes episodes, and I’m wondering if you can share your thoughts.”
John: What Chris is experiencing is probably what Megana’s experiencing, what I’m experiencing too, is that when you have conversations in general meetings with people who work in the industry, film or television, they’ll ask like, “Oh, it’s getting crazy. There could be a strike.” People will weigh their percentage odds on what that’s going to be.
Here’s the very general thing that people are looking at and talking about timeline-wise is that the the WGA works under a contract with all the studios, all the big studios, everyone who makes film and television. That contract is renewed every three years. We have a negotiation to update and revise and renew and approve a new contract with the studios. The existing contract runs out May 1st.
In the time leading up to that, you would expect there to be negotiations with the studios between the WGA and the studios to figure out what that new contract will be. In some years it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a very contentious contract. In some years it feels like a more contentious contract. There’s a lot of discussion this year about what’s going to be in that, but there are no proposals from either side. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. I just think there’s a general feeling that it looks like there’s a lot of stuff to be figured out.
We’re not the only people negotiating contract. It should be noted that IATSE, who represents most of the below-the-line decisions, they’ve already negotiated a contract. The DGA may be in negotiations to work on their contract. SAG, the actors generally go after us. There’s a lot of negotiations happening this year about contracts. It’s very normal for someone like Chris to be hearing these conversations as they go in and have these just general chitchatty meetings about what’s going to happen and thinking about head to if there were to be a strike, what that might look like. Megana, are you hearing these conversations too?
Megana: Yeah, and I would say that they’re a little bit further, where people are banking on the inevitability of it. I just heard someone at a party recently saying that they were planning a vacation around when they think the strike would happen, because to me that feels like putting the horse before the cart. Wait, no, that’s where you’re supposed to put the horse.
John: The horses generally do go in front of the carts, but you do you.
Megana: Putting the cart before the horse. You and I had an interesting discussion about this. I was hoping you could talk about why we shouldn’t presume an inevitability of a strike.
John: I don’t think this idea of inevitability helps anybody, because I think what it could do is back some producers and some studios into rushing or making some hasty decisions that they’re going to regret. I also think it doesn’t do well for writers, because if everyone assumes there’s going to be a strike, then maybe the other side isn’t negotiating with best intentions of actually averting a problem. I just don’t think inevitable is a great word to be thinking about, especially when, again, there are no proposals. There’s no deal to be discussing. It’s just a lot of speculation at this point. I don’t think it’s especially great to be doing that.
Listen. All writers I think at some point have this dream list of like, what if there were a snow day and I didn’t have to do my other work and I can just do whatever I wanted to do. That’s natural. That’s a natural fantasy in film. I’m sure executives have that too. Presuming that there’s going to be a giant blizzard and that the school’s going to be canceled for a period of time isn’t a great way to be approaching the works that you actually need to be doing.
Megana: Oh my gosh, and it sets you up for so much disappointment.
John: I don’t think inevitable is a great word to be throwing around here. I see a second question here from Liliana.
Megana: Liliana from Los Angeles wrote in and said, “A few episodes ago, Craig mentioned a potential writer’s strike next summer, and it made me curious what you all think it means for assistants. I currently work for a writer under her overall deal, and she warned me about the strike as well. If her deal ends, I’ll be out of a job. What can pre-WGA writers/assistants do to prepare? What was it like for them in ’07 and ’08?”
John: I can’t speak specifically to how things worked for below-the-line staff, writing staff, in ’07 and ’08, folks who were writers’ room assistants, who were showrunners’ assistants. What I will say is that I think given Pay Up Hollywood and our general better awareness of the issues faced by folks who were working in those rooms, there will be some more awareness of how do we keep those people solvent during any sort of work stoppage if it were to happen.
There’s not a lot I can advise Liliana to do other than to be frugal with her money, which is a hard thing for me to say, because I know she’s not probably being paid a lot, to be aware and open, and to be maybe ready to shift to something else if she needs to during a time if work were to ever stop, if there were to be some sort of strike or some sort of other action.
If there were to be a strike or work stoppage or a lockout or anything like that, if there is to be a disruption, it stops for everybody. Studios will look to trim costs where they can, and they will fire people. They will not employ people. In some cases, they are able to keep productions going for a little time, but it’s tough. Liliana could be out of a job for a time. I do recall something from the last strike that I was involved in. Things also ramp up really quickly again. It’s not going to be like the pandemic where you just don’t know what is possibly going to happen. We do know how to get out of these things and how to get back to things.
Megana: Resuming production after the pandemic had so many questions, and we introduced this whole new role of the COVID safety officer, but you’re saying that this is like, as soon as it’s back on, it’s on.
John: Yeah. After the ’07-’08 strike, the next day, rooms were reopening and things were getting back into shape. Did people need to figure some stuff out? Sure, but a lot of stuff did just resume, pick up right where it left off. Not everything. People did lose overall deals. There were other things that were trims and there were [inaudible 01:32:11]. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but it did kind of get back to the way it was, and just with a better contract. It certainly is doable. It won’t necessarily feel like a dramatic change if there’s a stoppage and then it comes back.
Megana: Got it. Basically, you’re saying maybe don’t think on it, but also put more money in your bank from your savings for the first part of the year.
John: Yeah. To go back to the storm metaphor, don’t count on a blizzard that’s going to close schools, but you should also have some emergency mac and cheese in your cupboards in case it does happen.
Megana: Yeah, or study for the English test that you’re hoping will get canceled.
John: That’s exactly it. Somehow I have a feeling, Megana, you were always prepared for those things. Do you long for snow days or do you rue snow days?
Megana: I think it depended. I loved a snow day, but if I had a big test, I’d rather just get that over with, because you’re delaying this terrible thing you have to do. We would usually have one really cold week in January where we would just have a week full of snow days, and that is incredible.
John: I loved a snow day where it was enough to close school, but I could still get over to my friend’s house and hang out. Those were the ideal snow days for me is the ones where… They were less fun as I got older. I just remember the grade school snow days just felt like, “Wow, this is a thing I can’t even believe has happened.” I definitely agree with your point where there’s times where you’ve crammed for the test and you’re so ready, and if you had to delay and then cram again, it just felt like wasted work, because you knew that you weren’t going to hold onto those facts about chemistry.
Megana: Yeah. This is all short-term memory. None of this is being-
John: None of this is sticking.
Megana: Exactly.
John: Now, our poor kids these days, they can just Zoom into school or they have to just turn in their paper digitally.
Megana: Oh my gosh.
John: They don’t get it.
Megana: Oh, wow.
John: It’s unfair. The world has become unfair.
Megana: That is one of the biggest joys of my childhood.
John: Hopefully, there’ll be no snow days that derail the delivery of the Scriptnotes book, but that is another thing. We’ll be working on it very hard. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to ship, but we know our delivery day is going to be sometime this year. We have a lot of work ahead for us. I’m not saying I want any sort of labor disruption, but if there is a labor disruption, that’s a little more time we can be working on the book.
Megana: I feel like that’s what we just advised against talking about.
John: I’m not saying I’m looking forward to it. I’m just saying a writer can’t help but theorize, if something were to go awry, this might be something I would do in that gap period of time and that might be something I’d work on in that gap period of time if it were to happen.
Megana: That’s fair. I just feel wizened from the pandemic that I know that that will never happen for me.
John: Absolutely. You always think, “Oh, I’m going to have all this luxury free time.” Then it’s like, no, I’m not.
Megana: Absolutely.
John: If there’s a strike, I’ll be marching outside of Paramount like I did last time. Who knows? Thanks, Megana.
Megana: Thanks, John.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Episode 239 – What is good writing?
- Scriptnotes Episode 76 – How screenwriters find their voice with Aline Brosh McKenna
- Scriptnotes Episode 432 – Learning From Movies
- Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to the episodes sampled as well as the entire archive. Use promo code ONION to save $10 on annual subscriptions.
- Dangers of Elite Projection by Jarrett Walker
- Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Martin Kubitzky (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with segments by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 581: A Guide to Good Writing, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig take a look at ‘writer fingerprints.’ They break down how idiosyncratic choices make up an individual’s style on-the-page and offer advice on how to mimic someone else’s voice.
Follow up includes pet rock, a defense of script consultants, the preface page in Tár, and the anti-“actually” mindset.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we offer advice to a producer who needs help working with a writer who can’t seem to finish — or deliver — a script.
Links:
- Scriptnotes episodes with 2023 Oscar Nominees Sarah Polley, Rian Johnson, Daniels, Pamela Ribon
- Weekend Read Beta Try it out — now updated with all FYC scripts!
- Writing in another writer’s style on John’s blog with advice from Dara Resnick Creasey
- Algorithms were able to figure out that Robert Galbraith was JK Rowling
- Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
- The Case of The Golden Idol game
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered it in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Do Muppets Bleed? first appeared on John August.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner joins us to discuss her journey adapting her bestselling novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” into an acclaimed limited series. We chat about drawing inspiration from the familiar, learning how manage others, and presenting multiple sides to a story.
We also answer listener questions about naming characters, decorative dialogue, and the renaissance of the television half-hour.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we dig into the art and structure of the celebrity profile, a genre in which Taffy is herself an expert.
Links:
- Fleishman Is in Trouble on Hulu, and the book
- Taffy’s GQ Celebrity Profiles
- This Film Does Not Exist By Frank Pavich for NYT, Tron reimagined by AI in the style of Jodorowsky’s Dune, images by Midjourney
- This Voice Doesn’t Exist – Generative Voice AI
- VALL-E Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers
- Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Adapting Your Own Novel first appeared on John August.
The original transcript for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 576 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters place things in front of the reader’s virtual camera? That’s right, it’s a crafty episode, where we’re going to take a look at some really nitpicky word choices and how those make movies you can watch on the page. We’ll also tackle a bunch of listener questions on everything from outlining to maligning small villages, Craig.
Craig: Maligning small villages, finally. I have been waiting since Episode 1 for somebody to write in about that.
John: Absolutely. Those little, tiny villages that you drive past, what if you could just slander them, slander them to death?
Craig: Malign them.
John: Oh, but Craig, you’re going to really enjoy our Bonus Segment for Premium Members. Sixteen will enter. One will win. Which dessert will come out on top of our first ever dessert bracket?
Craig: I don’t know if people know this, but I do love making desserts. I like baking, cooking, mixing, whipping, folding. I love to make a dessert.
John: We’re recording this pre-Thanksgiving. Mike and I are planning on making three different pies. Pies are definitely in the entries here.
Craig: Of course. Of course.
John: Overall, in the general categories of desserts, we need to figure out which are the ultimate desserts and which are not the ultimate desserts.
Craig: Let’s rush through this shitty podcast so we can get to that.
John: I’m looking forward to it.
Craig: That’s what matters.
John: Let’s start with some news though, because Craig, Megana Slacked me this new on Sunday afternoon. I could not believe it. Bob Iger is back running Disney.
Craig: I could not believe it either. As somebody that owns a small amount of Disney stock, I was thrilled. Bob Chapek was an interesting choice to succeed Bob Iger. That was always going to be a tough gig to succeed Bob Iger. He was in a class of his own in terms of these uber-CEOs that ride over the whole corporation. Bob Chapek came in there and was like, “Watch what I do.” Then he did a bunch of stuff, and nobody seemed to like it. I think Bog Iger must have somewhere along the line thought, “I probably picked the wrong guy.”
John: Chapek was a handpicked successor. There was a whole plan for transition. There was a year of overlap. It was all going to be a very smooth transition in theory. Iger left, and then Chapek had a series of missteps and stumbles. The recent reporting we’re reading seems to be that it was really an investor call, that Chapek messed up on an investor call, was the inciting incident that got him out the door over the weekend. Friday afternoon, the call went to Iger. Then by Sunday-
Craig: Wow.
John: … evening, Chapek was out and Iger was back in.
Craig: What did he do on that phone call?
John: The New York Times story, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. The sourcing seems to indicate that he was too sanguine about the really dismal numbers and seemed out of touch.
Craig: Oh, I see.
John: His own lieutenants were basically going to the board and saying, “If you don’t get rid of Chapek, we’re going to leave.”
Craig: Bob Iger is back. One of the things that was really interesting was he came back on Friday and it’s currently Tuesday, he’s already changed 4,000 things. Look, from my point of view, obviously, you and I, we don’t swim in those waters. Different people do that stuff. We don’t really care about that stuff, only to the extent that it infects us. Bob Iger was always about the content and about making sure that you protected the creative output and made sure that the content was great and that the content would drive everything else. Don’t worry about it. Everything else will just flow from it. It appears that he is hard at work to reinstate that culture. I hope it accrues to the benefit of writers.
John: Another thing I’m thinking about this week is just how much CEO quality matters, because so often it seems like these corporations, they just are their own corporations. Many of the times, a well-run corporation is the one where you don’t have any idea who the CEO is. You look at Disney right now versus Twitter, and oh, wow, the person in charge of things can really have a huge impact on how stuff is happening, how stuff’s working. A good CEO can fix things. A bad CEO can break things very quickly, much more quickly than I would’ve ever guessed was possible.
Craig: The good news for CEOs is they’ll still make $400 million as they absolutely screw their company into the ground. Twitter, boy, wow. I quit. I’m out. I’m gone.
John: He’s out. He’s gone.
Craig: I’m gone. Pedro Pascal quit over the weekend. I saw that. Even internally, as we’ve been talking about gearing up for lots of marketing and stuff for The Last of Us, just incorporating the Twitter exodus into the planning. It’s now received wisdom that Twitter is a damaged product if you are not a MAGA troll.
John: It is fascinating, because if you’d told me a year ago someone’s going to build a rival to Twitter, it’s like, that’s a stupid idea, because there’s already Twitter. Now it seems like, you know what, you could probably find a bunch of engineers who are available to build you an alternative to Twitter. I don’t know that one thing will ever take off. I don’t know that we’ll ever replace it. I don’t know that Twitter necessarily will go away in a complete sense. It is just fascinating that something we assume, it’s Twitter, it’s always going to be there, can just disappear so quickly.
Craig: As a company, I think they always struggle to figure out exactly how to make money. When Elon Musk came along and offered them some stupid amount of money as a dumb, pot-inspired joke, I think, they were like, “Holy shit. Yeah, we’ll take that. Thank you. Thank you for overpaying for this thing that just doesn’t make money.” Now he has it, and he’s just flailing around and smashing it into bits. It’s very strange. I have to say, for something that I used every day for years and considered my main method of communicating things to the world, not only do I not miss it, I feel better. Not a little bit better, a lot better. I feel a lot better. Let’s put it this way. You and I, John, lived most of our lives without Twitter. Everything was fine.
John: Everything was fine.
Craig: It was fine.
John: I was on Twitter before I was doing this podcast, but the boundaries are blurry. I had my website before I had Twitter. I had some other place of truth of John August’s opinion. Twitter did become that, and I don’t know what’s necessarily going to replace that. I guess just the blog. Wrapping up the CEO talk, we have Bob Iger back there in charge. He’s not going to be there forever. He needs to find someone else to take over for him. That’s going to be even probably more difficult, because finding the person who can now do this job, it’s going to be challenging.
Craig: John, I have a real question for you.
John: Please.
Craig: What if they said, “Hey, John August, we want you to do it.”
John: I’ve been thinking about that, because Craig, I do consider a lot of alternative [inaudible 00:07:07].
Craig: That is the craziest answer ever. Ever. That was insane.
John: Craig, I have been thinking about it.
Craig: Wow.
John: I don’t think I would do a good job. Here’s the reasons why I don’t think I would do a good job. I know a fair amount about making movies. I know a fair amount about making TV shows, less but a fair amount. I do not know how to manage all the other parts of that company, including the theme parks and the streaming services and all this other stuff. That’s why when I look at who the people are who could potentially take over for Iger, it’s really challenging. Dana Walden is on that short list. Dana Walden is fantastic. I’ve met with her. I think she’s great. She’s really good at making TV shows and entertainment, and that’s not the whole job. Maybe it’s just too big a job for any one person to do.
Craig: It’s not. Somebody has to do it.
John: It’s not too big for Iger.
Craig: Nobody can know everything. You have your lieutenants and people that report to you, and hopefully you do a good job. I think the thing that would get you… I remember the very first time I directed, I was talking to my first AD. First ADs have seen a billion directors come and go in their lives. I said, “What’s the one rookie mistake you can advise me, that perhaps I could then avoid making?” He said, “Honestly, it’s never about any of the technicals.” He said, “The thing that no first-time director ever sees coming is the politics.” I suspect that would be the biggest problem, because you take over, and suddenly, there’s all these people trying to figure out how to assassinate you and take your job. If they could promise me that none of that would happen, I feel like I could probably make a few things up.
John: I could make a few things up.
Craig: I couldn’t have done worse than Bob Chapek. No offense, Bob Chapek.
John: Honestly, it seemed like the politics were a big part of why he didn’t succeed, because he didn’t have the trust of the people that were working for him.
Craig: When the Florida thing happened, I could feel myself sweating. I’m like, “What would I do? This is really tricky.” That’s tricky. You’re like, “On the one hand, I have my principles and I have my morals. On the other hand, part of my principles and morals is taking care of the 12,000 people that I employ in the state of Florida. What do I do?” That’s a tough one. I’m glad I don’t run a company.
John: I’m glad I’m not taking over for Nancy Pelosi, because I’ve also been thinking about that.
Craig: That’s a hard one.
John: That’s a hard job. That’s a lot of [crosstalk 00:09:37]
Craig: Thank god you’ve been thinking about that. Who do you not thinking about taking over from?
John: I’m involved in a project right now, which Megana knows has just an incredibly high degree of cat wrangling. I can do it. You got to think from each person’s perspective, what are they looking for, what do they need to hear. That’s a challenging job. That’s why whoever takes over for Bob Iger or the ruins of Twitter whenever Elon Musk gets bored is going to have a lot to do. Let’s get to some questions. We have two follow-up questions about your outlining process, Craig.
Craig: Fair enough.
Megana: Neil asked, “I just listened to the episode on writing difficult scenes, and Craig mentioned his go-to on preparation via an outline. I’ve heard his testament to outlines a bunch, but I’ve never been able to track down an actual sample of Craig’s. Are there any available in the archives? I’m an engineer, so less of a pantser and more of a plotter, or maybe a plantser.”
Craig: A plantster.
John: A plantster.
Craig: I don’t have any out there, but it’s possible that maybe after The Last of Us runs through, I might put that show bible out there, because it’s quite extensive. I generally avoid doing it, because as much as I enjoy informing and educating to whatever extent I can, I’m also… I don’t just teach cooking. I also am a chef. I don’t necessarily want to show people how my magic tricks are fully done. A little bit of the process I think should remain opaque.
John: Maybe if we can’t see the actual visual, can you describe for an episode of Last of Us or an episode of Chernobyl, how many pages was an outline? Was it paragraphs? How closely were you matching? Were there scene headers? What do your outlines look like?
Craig: I don’t do scene headers. It’s basically prose. For each episode, my guess is, I would say probably five to eight pages, single-spaced paragraphs describing what happens, and more importantly, why. That’s the thing, because I don’t write these for myself. I write them for myself and others, so that everybody can feel what we’re doing before we do it. That’s important to me.
John: Your paragraphs are largely matching up to what scenes look like. No paragraph is going to cover multiple scenes or it will [inaudible 00:12:05].
Craig: No, a paragraph could cover multiple scenes, because I know there are certain scenes that flow together. Two people have left one place. They’re on their way to another. Then the next day they’re there, and a thing happens. Then they move on. Those things could probably be a paragraph where we describe what happens and what’s discussed or why it’s important. I will combine.
John: For Neil’s edification, what Craig is describing is actually a pretty common length and size and scale and scope of an outline in television. A lot of one-hour dramas that you’re going to see are going to have a document like that at some point that goes to the producers, to the studio, to other people, to let them know this is what’s going to happen in the episode, and sometimes they’ll get notes off that outline, depending what the process is.
Craig: Just as important as those episode outlines, there’s also character breakdowns, and there’s general discussion of theme. I will also sometimes take a moment to talk about, for instance… There are no spoilers here for The Last of Us. I apologize to those of you who are looking for them. In the outline, in the show bible, one of the little sections was a section on violence and what our philosophy about violence was, how we wanted to portray it, and what we thought was important philosophically for everybody to know as we went ahead and writing and then producing the show. It’s your chance to basically get anything off your chest you want, that you want other people to know.
John: In some ways, that’s doing what a tone meeting might do, but way in advance. People are looking at documents. Everyone knows going into the project, this is what our goals are here. Then you’ll have very specific notes on individual scripts, individual scenes.
Craig: In fact, the outline, the show bible we did, it was very extensive. I think it was about 180 pages. It was also the document that our production team used initially to budget. It was thorough enough that they could essentially get within, it was really close, within actually 5% of what we ultimately ended up spending, because they had a sense of locations and set pieces and all that.
John: A follow-up question from Tommy here. He asked, “In the last episode, Craig talked about needing roughly 20 days to write a one-hour TV script. How much of that time is spent before that in the outlining phase?” Is it 20 days after this episode is outlined?
Craig: The 20 days is the length of time I need to write the script. The amount of time it takes to outline things ahead of that is considerable. None of that is really divisible by episode, per se. You have to figure everything out together. That process could be two, three months, where you’re really trying to figure out how you’re breaking this all apart and what the episodes are going to be. Then you can spend about a week just writing it all up in one massive document.
John: Cool.
Craig: Then after that, yeah, it’s about 20 days. For me at least, it’s about 20 days.
John: Great. Before we get on to our big marquee topic, we have a bit of follow-up here. Way back when, Craig and I each did episodes with Megana, just Megana, where we answered listener questions and tried to get some good advice to people. One of those people is Ben. He wrote in about some advice that Megana and I gave him. Craig, would you talk us through Ben’s follow-up here?
Craig: I will play the role of Ben. He says, “I wanted to give you all some follow-up on my question that John and Megana answered on Episode 543 about my boss’s boss’s boss inviting me to send my script in to the head of the studio that I work at as an office coordinator, and I wondered whether or not I could take a year to do so. I took John’s advice and sent my script to six friends to make sure what I was writing would be worth sending. All my friends loved it, and so I sent it to a couple of other people I made connections with at work, and they loved it too. I was a little skeptical, because I’ve never gotten this type of universal positive response before. I was wondering if telling them I had this opportunity made them forgive certain shortcomings in the script.” I like Ben. I like that he’s nervous about good news.
John: Thoughtful.
Craig: That’s the way to be. He goes on, “I then checked it over a couple more times and finally end it to my friends who are a little more harsh. They loved it too. Just a few easily correctable notes. I emailed my boss. As John predicted, my boss’s boss’s boss said she couldn’t send it in to the head, but she connected me with a few creative executives, and after signing a release form, I submitted my script for them to review. It took them a month to read, but they got back to me, and they loved it also. It was great timing, as I wrote a family spooky movie,” for spooky season, “and they read it three days before Halloween. The creative executive said my script was a really fun read and very well executed and invited me to the lot to, quote, talk generally. He made it clear that the script wasn’t quite right for their current slate, but he did invite me to have coffee with him. I just got back from the meeting. It couldn’t have gone better. We really hit it off. He invited me to send him another script when I have one ready. He’s a really nice dude.
“All of this to say thank you, John and Megana, for your advice and all the great tips. Also, I want to thank Craig as well,” thank you, “even though he didn’t answer my question directly,” and has done nothing for my life, “but has given me like 600 episodes of advice as well.” That worked out phenomenally for Ben.
John: It worked out so well for Ben. That’s great. Craig, you stopped where he said take a year to send in the script, which felt like too long for us as well. I think what Ben did, which is really smart, is really just double check, like, “Wait, is what I’m writing any good at all?” and actually get that feedback to say oh yeah, this is actually pretty good. He went through then proper channels, and people liked it. It sounded like he was doing the right things there. My question for you, and for us to discuss, is what should Ben be doing next, because he’s had this good meeting with a creative executive. That’s lovely, but that doesn’t do anything. What should Ben be doing next?
Craig: I think the very first thing Ben should be doing is dropping an email back to his new creative executive friend and saying, “Hey, would love to get myself an agent. Any chance you could slip this script and your general approval and good feelings to an agent that you think might be well suited for me?” That’s the very first thing I would do.
John: I think that’s the right choice, so agent and/or manager. “I’m looking for a rep,” is the general thing, and who does this creative executive think might be the right person. The way to think about this from Ben’s point of view is like, “Okay, I know what I get out of this, but what could this creative executive get out of this?” In some ways, there are reciprocal relationships between your agents, certain managers and execs. If this exec really does think you’re a pretty good writer, then sending you to this representative could be a good, sympathetic kind of thing. It could actually help both of them. Don’t feel weird about asking for that ask is what I’m saying.
Craig: No, not at all. This is how it all starts. I imagine that the creative executive is probably roughly in the same age bracket you are, Ben. As we all grow up together in the business, we meet each other’s friends and connect each other with people that we like to work with. By this point, I know a whole lot of people in this business that I’ve never actually worked with, but you never know. We like each other, and then they mention something to somebody else. Crazy things happen all the time.
John: That’s how I got my first agent was a friend sent my script to a producer, who read it and liked it and said, “Hey, could I take this in to the studio?” I said, “That would be great. Also, I need an agent.” He’s like, “Oh, I think I know the perfect person for you.” That became my first agent.
Craig: There you go. There you go.
John: Ben, keep us posted a year from now and let us know what’s happened next. Great. Marquee topic here. Julian wrote in with a link to this thread by David Wappel, a writer I don’t know. Wappel’s thread was showing how nouns and sentence structures, when used well, can feel like they’re directing on the page, in the good sense of directing on the page. They really give you a sense of what you’re seeing. In this thread, he’s pointing out the difference between, “Sally reaches into her back pocket,” and, “Her hand slips into her back pocket,” and the idea that the second one, we’re clearly focusing on her hand. We feel like we’re in a closeup there on that.
Another example from this thread is on apples. If I say the stem of an apple, you’re thinking very closely about that stem of the apple. If I say an apple, you’re probably picturing the whole thing. If I say five apples, we move wider. A bushel of apples, a row of apple bushels, you get the sense that we’re pulling out wider and wider with those shots.
Useful there, but in some ways I was like, “Obviously.” I think it’s a thing that I do subconsciously, that I’ve never actually put words to. You and I are doing this all the time. Every sentence, every scene, we’re really thinking about what is the visual idea and how I’m using that visual idea to direct the reader’s attention, but I don’t know if we talked about it so explicitly on the podcast. We probably talked about it in Three Page Challenges. I want to spend a little segment talking about how we emphasize and convey the visual information we need not just scene by scene, but sentence by sentence, word by word.
Craig: Which is why, when people say, “Don’t direct on the page,” I just want to slap the world, because what else can we do? If you are visualizing the scene appropriately, visualizing it in terms of, as you said, close, far, up, down, movement, still, then the language ought to flow naturally from that. If you were imagining a closeup of Sally’s hand reaching into her back pocket, slipping into her back pocket, so now it feels a bit furtive, you would never write, “Sally reaches into her back pocket.” Those words wouldn’t happen as a result of the thought you just had. [Crosstalk 00:21:57]
John: Craig, sometimes I think people do stop at the very most basic sentence that gets the idea across. I worry that sometimes as we look at Three Page Challenges, we are getting a little bit like, “Sally reaches into her back pocket.”
Craig: Then people, stop doing that.
John: I want to shine a bit of a spotlight on it, because I think it’s an automatic process for you and for me. I don’t think it’s necessarily an automatic process for other writers, especially because screenwriting is a little bit different. All writing is about word choices and sentence structure, but screenwriting is a little different. As an example, here is a paragraph from Pride and Prejudice, one of the great novels. Jane Austen, really, really talented writer. Let me read this to you, and you can see why it’s not screenwriting.
“Mr. Bennett was so odd, a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserved caprice, that the experience of 3 and 20 years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married. Its solace was visiting and news.”
A terrific paragraph. The word choice, every little thing, every comma was deliberate, so smart, and that is not at all how you write screenplays.
Craig: No, because this is somebody that is relaying information to you about things that are not happening in front of your eyes-
John: Exactly.
Craig: … whereas in screenwriting, everything is happening in front of your eyes, unless you’re dealing with a voiceover or something like that. In a voiceover, you could do something like this. However, while the voiceover was doing all this, I need to know what I’m seeing.
John: Exactly.
Craig: This would actually be wonderful if I heard this in voiceover and then I-
John: Oh my god, a dream.
Craig: … witnessed Mrs. Bennett showing “little information and uncertain temper.” Because we are a visual medium and because we do not relay descriptions of things that have already happened, we are always in the business of thinking about what we’re seeing and hearing.
John: I think the challenge I want to put to our listeners is, as you’re doing the screenwriting, really be thinking about what is the visual idea of the sentence. Oftentimes, there’ll be a single visual idea in the sentence or a series of visuals that imply motion that gets you from place to place. If you have a sentence that has no visual idea in it, it has to have another really good reason why you need to put it there, because otherwise it’s not doing the job of screenwriting. Not every sentence in your screenplay is going to have visual information, but most of them should. That visual information should probably be at the start of the sentence rather than touch back in at the end of the sentence.
Craig: Let’s say that the word screen also encompasses sound.
John: Of course.
Craig: We are screen sound writers. That means we are visual sound writers. That’s what we do. That’s the description of the job. When you are putting these little moments together, there is no moment too small to be considering how to guide the mind’s eye of the reader to align with your mind’s eye as the writer.
John: I pulled some examples from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is from the very start. “Chocolate pours into a mold, one of hundreds inching along a conveyor belt. Complicated gears tug on oiled canvas ropes, slipping through swinging pulleys.” “With giant scissors, Wonka slices a fat red ribbon. One of the ribbon ends flutters up, obscuring Wonka’s face yet again.” “Wonka’s hand smooths out the blueprint for a massive structure, complete with curvy onion domes and twisted columns.”
Just four sentences picked at random from the script. It’s clear what the visuals are in the sentence. Also, if there’s multiple visuals, it’s clear how we’re moving between those multiple visuals. It’s not just the nouns. The nouns are very specific. The verbs used to convey action and convey meaning are also very specific. They’re tugging. They are pouring. They are fluttering. You could write more basic versions of each of those sentences, but they would not convey the visual information you’re trying to convey.
Craig: I particularly like that first one, because if I were handed that as a director, there’s an implication that I’m going to be shooting a closeup of chocolate pouring into a mold, and then I’m going to shoot a much wider shot to reveal that mold is one of a hundred. Perhaps I watch the chocolate pouring into the mold, and then I angle the camera slightly [inaudible 00:26:28] to reveal there’s this line of a hundred that are moving along, and that was just one of a hundred that are exactly the same. There’s all sorts of implications from the way that was written that you would not get if you weren’t considering what you wanted people to look at and see.
John: If I say, “A conveyor belt shows hundreds of chocolate bars being produced,” that doesn’t give you the same information, doesn’t tell you what you need to see.
Craig: It doesn’t. “One of hundreds inching along” is giving me a sense of speed. I can kind of hear it. There’s a vibe to it. There’s a lot of information there that is producible. As much as you can, if you think about… This is really what the job is. If you imagine a moment in your mind, what is the best way to describe that with the fewest words? That’s the game.
John: Its other general rules, I would say, general principles, is have characters doing things rather than things just existing. If you can have a character make a change within the scene, make a change within the sentence, the character is doing something rather than a thing just is, that is helpful. That’s not a condition on avoiding the verb to be. It’s just saying if a character can take an action that is part of the visual, that’s more helpful, and getting back to, again, showing us rather than telling us. Rather than just describing a thing, make it really feel like we are giving you a visual to really show what the thing is, rather than just being narrated to about what the activity is that’s going on.
Craig: Those are great rules. I would throw this one on the pile also. Watch out for certain words that mean lots of different things to you but may not mean lots of different things to the reader. For instance, let’s say it’s as simple as somebody smiles. We smile for a thousand different reasons. We smile because we are excited. We smile because we pity. We smile because we’re giving up. There’s so many reasons we smile. If you find yourself using one of those words that have a billion purposes, consider what you could do to relay the more specific aspect of it.
You could say, “John says, dialog, ‘Unfortunately, it turns out we’re not going to be able to offer you the job after all,'” and then in action, “Craig smiles, stands up, shrugs, shakes John’s hand,” or you could say in parentheses, in action, “Yes, as I figured.” You can try as best you can to not rely too much on people reading your mind, because they’re not always going to be able to, especially if there’s ambiguous action.
John: Here’s an example from Station Eleven I thought was really useful. “Jeevan faux-waves, straightens up, knows no one at this macabre gathering. He pats his jacket, looking for his phone, not left, not right, not back, not chest, remembers where his jacket is.” Very specific actions that Jeevan is doing, and it lets us know something about Jeevan. Clear visuals. We know what we’re actually seeing on screen. We also know why Jeevan is doing it. We know what he’s looking for. We can connect his thought process there. We’ve been that person, and we understand what he’s looking for. Another example from Station Eleven, “Kirsten’s attention has been drawn to the big windows, so huge they’re like the deck of a space station. She approaches the glass and puts her fingers on them, looking down at the lights of the pier.”
Craig: I could direct that. I know what to do. I even get a sense of alienation. All the things that they would want me to feel here, I understand. They’re just pouring off of these words. Note that you don’t have to say, “She approaches the glass and puts her fingers on them, a tiny person lost in the world,” blah da da, “separated by glass,” blah, whatever the hell it is. You get it. Any time somebody puts their hand on glass, I know what it means. I also know what to do. I know to shoot the hand. I also know to shoot back through the window at her, which would be great. “Looking down at the lights of the pier” implies I need to see what she’s seeing. I also need to see her seeing what she’s seeing.
John: The camera’s going to probably raise up a little bit so we can get the look down at the-
Craig: Yep.
John: Good stuff.
Craig: Then the reverse is a low angle back up. Distance would be great there, to get a sense of scope, because the windows are “so huge they’re like the deck of a space station,” so I need to be really wide behind her. There are all these things clearly implied by the writing there. Weirdly, for a craft where everyone is constantly admonished to not direct on the page, the one thing that will get your script bought, sold, produced, directing on the page.
John: This whole conversation I wanted to avoid, the “we see,” “we hears,” the wes of it all, because none of these examples involve the wes.
Craig: These don’t need them.
John: These are just good visuals, clearly communicated, giving us a sense of what it would feel like to be in the audience, seeing that produced on the screen.
Craig: As much as I love writing “we see” and “we hear,” I only do it when I need it.
John: In this case, we don’t need it.
Craig: We don’t need it.
John: Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Yes. Adam asks, “How many montages can my 118-page screenplay have?”
Craig: 118.
John: Three.
Craig: I really do love the idea of a 118-page screenplay with 118 montages.
John: It’s all montages the whole time through.
Craig: Every page is a montage.
John: Everything Everywhere All At Once is honestly probably 118 montages.
Craig: It’s close. It is.
John: The answer is there’s no answer, but here’s what I’ll say. If you’re using the word montage more than three times in a script, something is probably weird about your script. It feels different. If you’re doing bullet-pointy montages a lot in your script, something is really strange about your script, and that’s worth noticing. Did you write a strange script?
Craig: Yeah, particularly if the montage is doing the most tropey of montage purposes, which is some sort of training/growth.
John: (singing)
Craig: (singing) I include makeovers as part of training and growth. There are certain kinds of montages that we almost don’t even notice are montages. For instance, very common when you’re watching a movie or television show and people are driving quite a distance from one place to another, there’s nothing happening along the way other than the driving, that’ll get montaged. We don’t feel like it’s a montage. It’s not the same thing as someone decides they’re going to start lifting weights and here we go, or the worst of them all, the novelist finally figures out what to write and 40 seconds later, there’s a book.
Megana: No, there’s papers flying first.
Craig: Of course. First, you have to throw… The wastepaper basket has to get filled up.
John: It has to overfill.
Craig: It overfills, and then suddenly you’re like, “I’ve got it.” Now, you’re just pulling the paper out, slapping it on that pile right to the right of you, and then threading in the next page, because everybody exists in 1963 when they’re writing a novel, and then clack clack clack clack clack. I hate that so much.
John: Getting back to the point of when you use the word montage and when you don’t use the word montage, I feel like I’ve probably used the word montage in my scripts maybe five times in a career. There are a lot of montages in there. Spring comes to the castle. A couple sentences describing what has changed and what we’re seeing. You don’t necessarily need to use the word montage to make that clear.
Craig: Agreed. How many montages? Not too many.
John: Not too many.
Craig: Adam is regretting asking us this question. He’s like, “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about?” What’s the next question, Megana? I feel like we’re going to crush the next one.
Megana: David asks, “My story takes place in a real town with a small population. After a recent draft, the townspeople have become way more complicit in the evil doings of the antagonist. Is this poor taste, since real people live in this town and are being represented negatively? Should I change it to a fictional town, or is this just part of the storytelling game and I shouldn’t worry about it?”
John: Interesting. It’s a real small town. David is writing some terrible deeds happening in this small town that people are complicit in. I don’t know. He’s not saying whether it’s a true story or not. If it’s a true story, then yes, you have to be much more mindful of the fact that people can be mashed together to be in your thing. I really wouldn’t worry about it. You cannot libel a town. You can libel people.
Craig: That’s right.
John: Unless you are making it clear that these are the specific people who are doing this terrible thing, I think you’re in the clear.
Craig: I would refer you to obscure author Stephen King, David, who has forced real small towns in Maine to go through all sorts of horrible things, and Massachusetts. As long as the actual people aren’t reading this and going, “Wait a second, that’s me,” then you’re fine. That thing at the end of episodes or movies that say, “Any resemblance to people alive or dead is,” what is it, coincidence? That’s the key. I would not worry about this too much.
John: Agree. Megana, it looks like we have a question about shooting scripts.
Megana: Yes. CH asks, “I keep being told by a fellow writer that I shouldn’t put things like establishing shots into a script. He tells me that this is something that is done when you write the shooting script.”
Craig: What?
Megana: “Can you tell me about the process that happens to a script when it goes into production and a director gets his hands on it? What is the difference between a script and a shooting script? Who writes the shooting script?”
John: Wow, some fundamental questions here. I also want to point out “gets his hands on it.” Their hands on it? It could be a woman. It could be a person who identifies as a he.
Craig: It could be a person without hands.
John: By the way, it could be a person without hands.
Craig: Just saying.
John: I want to start by saying we could probably put a link in the show notes to a previous episode where we talked about some of the things that do change when you move into production. You don’t see numbered scripts until you get pretty close to production, until someone tells you, “We need scene numbers.” Then you put scene numbers in. You don’t put them in scripts up until that point. There’s not a big difference between a shooting script and the script that you’re writing. It’s a mistake to think that they are completely different things or that some other person does them.
Craig: CH, here’s what I would like you to tell your fellow writer. You’re wrong, fellow writer. Apologies, but you’re wrong. The shooting script is not a thing. The shooting script is just like, “Okay, we’re shooting now, so I guess this draft is the one we’re working with for now,” but you can revise that one. There’s no special skill to writing a shooting script. There is absolutely nothing other than, as John says, scene numbers, that belong in that script but not in earlier script. If you want to say establishing shot so-and-so, of course you write that into your script. You don’t need to wait for some theoretical day where they tap a magic wand on your document and call it the shooting script. There’s no such thing really. For the legal purposes of figuring out credit, the Writers Guild essentially describes the shooting script as the last one. That’s the last one they got published. That’s it. I guess that’s the shooting script.
I have a feeling that your fellow writer either is not particularly experienced or is just deeply confused. In anything, just for all of you, any time anybody gives you advice that smells like, “Hey writers, know your place,” reject it.
John: Here’s where I think the friend maybe got confused is that online you will find screenplays and you will find screenplays that look just like the screenplays you and I would write normally, or you’ll find what are called shooting scripts, which all have half pages and A and B pages and stars in the margins, and they look crazy. They’ll be in different colors if they were originally in different colors. There’ll be weird headers on things. That kind of shooting script is the production drafts that go through multiple series of revisions and stuff. Things can look really strange in those. You don’t want your script to start that way. It’s just a way that we’ve decided to handle additions and deletions to shooting scripts while we’re in production. We don’t have to re-shoot the whole script. We can just re-shoot pages. That is the difference between a shooting script and the original script.
Sometimes it’s harder to read shooting scripts, because they are just messy, and there’s weird one-eighth pages, and things get broken, strangely. You’re not writing that. You’re writing a draft, and you’re writing the script that is meant to be read and goes into production. Don’t worry about the differences here.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Agreed. I think it’s come time for our One Cool Things.
Craig: Oh, exciting.
John: I have a big One Cool Thing and a very small, little, adorable One Cool Thing. My big One Cool Thing is, previously on the show we’ve talked about the Inevitable Foundation, which is a great group here in Los Angeles that helps match writers with disabilities and people who should be hiring those writers with disabilities. They’ve had a great track record of getting people staffed on shows and getting projects set up. This last week I went to an event that they were doing that was really focusing on their new class but also their concierge service. I want to hype up the concierge service. If you are person who is looking to hire on a writer with a disability for a specific project or if you have a show, and it’s like, “Man, it really would be fantastic to find a deaf writer from a Latin background for my show,” you call them, you [inaudible 00:40:10] them an email, and right away, they will give you a list of some really great writers and samples for you to be reading through.
Shoshannah Stern, who was a previous Scriptnotes guest, was one of the hosts of this event. She’s a great example of somebody who is working today in part because people recognized, “Wow, it would be really great to have a deaf writer to help us figure out how to do this show about deaf characters.”
Just hyping up the Inevitable Foundation. If you are a person who is looking to staff, you’re an executive who is curious about trying to find disabled writers for your project, they are the place you should go to first.
Craig: That’s great.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. My small, adorable One Cool Thing is, you can see it in the show notes here, I fell for an Instagram ad which was about these little crochet animals you can make. I bought the little kit. It was kind of difficult but actually really fun and rewarding. I made Pierre the Penguin that you see there, this adorable, little, plush thing that I crocheted just from a bunch of yarn.
Craig: This was not something I could have foreseen.
John: I’m a crafty person, Craig.
Craig: You are.
John: You’ve seen me-
Craig: You’re amazingly crafty. It’s just the crocheting was something-
John: Crocheting?
Craig: … that I did not foresee. I love it. It’s adorable. I will tell you… John already knows this. I watched John expertly duct tape the handles of picket signs for our last strike, not to be confused with the one we’re about to have. He watched me absolutely screw up. All I needed to do was just duct tape a wooden stick, and I really struggled.
John: It’s all about the angle.
Craig: His, it was diagonal, and it was layered perfectly. I have a feeling Megana would also be just amazing at that.
John: Megana has great craft.
Craig: She looks crafty as hell. I still do not know how to wrap a present. That’s me. This is wild. I love the way this thing looks. You’re a very good crocheter. Speaking of crocheting and crocheters and pronouncing French words, John, you mentioned that the Inevitable Foundation has a concierge service. Have you heard, and I have heard this so many times, people say concierge [said like concier]?
John: Yeah, they’re over-applying the language. They’re over-applying the rule. They think a French word, you have to not say the last bit of it.
Craig: They don’t understand that if the word were C-O-N-C-I-E-R-T, yes, concierge [said like concier], but concierge, G-E, the word’s concierge. I never know what to say when they say concierge [said like concier]. I don’t want to be that guy, but I am that guy. I am that guy.
John: While we’re in a digression about pronouncing things, where is the World Cup being held right now?
Craig: Qatar [said like cutter].
John: We decided it was Qatar [said like cutter] and not Qatar [said like ka-tar]. I’m fine with it. I’m fine with it, by the way. It’s just interesting that we’ve now all come to agree that we’re going to say Qatar [said like cutter] rather than Qatar [said like ka-tar].
Craig: I think we agree because the people from Qatar [said like cutter] were like, “It’s called Qatar [said like cutter].”
John: It’s interesting in what cases we decide to use the local pronunciation and not, because we call it Paris, we don’t call it Paris [said like Pari], but some people insist on calling it Barcelona [said like Barselona], which drives me crazy.
Craig: It’s too much. Part of it is when we learn these terms. Qatar as a nation is not… As a people, it’s been around forever, but as a nation, it’s relatively new compared to say China. The word for China in Chinese is not China any more than the word for Japan is Nippon. Why don’t we call it Nippon? I don’t know. It’s because just somewhere along the line they said Japan. Then we do change things. We don’t say Bombay. We say Mumbai. What are some of the other ones? Beijing is the best example. It used to be Peking.
John: Peking.
Craig: Now it’s Beijing.
John: Those were cases where it was like our colonialism had forced a word on there and we were like, “Oh, that’s not the real name for things, so let’s not call it that.”
Craig: Then other places, we have no problem forcing our colonialism on. It’s like, “Fine. You’ll just be called this or you’ll be called that.” Korea’s not Korea. That’s not the name for Korea in Korea. I don’t think it is.
John: No, it’s Hanguk.
Craig: Yeah. Anyway.
John: Anyway.
Craig: Any who.
John: That’s a digression. Anyway, the Woobles are adorable little things. I think they’re largely sold out. I can’t believe I’m hyping something I found on an Instagram ad, but I enjoyed it.
Craig: You’re hyping it. My One Cool Thing, this one’s expensive, folks. This will be more expensive than the Woobles. I use a Yeti mic for this podcast. I can’t remember what my headphones are, but they’re nice. I enjoy them. They’re nice. I had them brought to my house, because I was at home sick with COVID, and I’d left them there, of course, because that’s me. Here I am in the office, and I need to plug headphones into my mic so I can do this podcast.
As luck would have it, our amazing editor, Tim Goode, had gotten our amazing producer, Jack Lesko, a pair of new headphones, because she didn’t have really good reference headphones. I’ve immediately stolen them for this podcast. I will give them back. I promise I will give her her headphones back, but they’re awesome. These are AKG headphones. The model is K702. They are reference studio headphones, open back, around ear. What I love about these is they are incredibly comfortable and I can hear my own voice not solely through the microphone, if that makes sense. I’m hearing my own voice much more naturally, which is really nice. My ears don’t feel quite so stifled. In terms of actual sound reproduction, these I think are state of the art. I don’t even know what they cost. Should we dare to look it up and see?
John: Let’s dare. We’ll take a moment here.
Craig: Oh, boy.
Megana: They’re not crazy.
Craig: What are they?
Megana: It looks like they’re on sale for 289.
Craig: That’s not horrible. We are heading into the holiday season. They are a joy. I’m getting myself a pair of these for sure.
John: Craig, I’m guessing that the headphones you’ve been using have been the Sony MDR ones.
Craig: I think they are.
John: They’re the classic-
Craig: I think that’s right.
John: That’s what Megana and I both use. They’re great. They’re the standard. Obviously, if you have something that you like better, go for it.
Craig: These feel better. I’d say they feel better and they sound better, to me. If you are looking for some reference studio headphones that feel comfortable and reproduce sound nicely, and you’ve got a little dough to spend, or perhaps you want to shower somebody with luxury this holiday season, AKG by Harman, K702.
John: K702. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Yay yay, woo woo!
John: Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig’s not on Twitter anymore, I’m @johnaugust for the moment. We’ll see. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. I think you can still probably get them in time for Christmas if you order today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the dessert bracket. Which is the ultimate dessert-
Craig: Ultimate.
John: … that will beat all others? Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: This is inspired by several things. First off, it’s the Great British Baking Show just resolved, or Great British Bake-Off if you’re British, which was always a delightful show to watch. They were always making great, delicious, tasty desserts and some other tacos [said like tack-os] that they should not be trying to make.
Craig: Tacos. Taco [said like tack-o].
John: Tacos [said like tack-os].
Craig: Their pasta [said like pass-ta] and their tacos [said like tack-os].
John: Oh my gosh, don’t get me started on the pico de gallo [said like gall-o] and pico [said like pike-o] de gallo [said like gal-o].
Craig: I know. Come on, British people.
John: It’s also the holidays, which means there’s lots of good desserts out there. I thought we would actually just take a moment and really figure out which is the best dessert possible.
Craig: Great.
John: In this bracket, we’re going to have 16 different desserts competing. I want you to imagine the best possible version of a thing. It can be a thing you make yourself or a thing you got from that one fantastic place. It’s the ultimate version of it. Don’t worry about the mediocre ones.
Craig: Perfect.
John: We will start with the fruit pies. Which is the winner, apple pie or cherry pie?
Craig: Apple.
John: Megana?
Megana: Apple.
Craig: It’s apple. It’s apple, for sure.
John: I don’t think there’s really a [inaudible 00:49:15] question. Cherry pie is delicious. Again, vanilla ice cream elevates both of them. Apple pie is the one you want to go for.
Craig: The only way to really make cherry pie is to over-sugar and glop the cherries. The cherries themselves become kind of gross and not really cherry-like, so yeah, it’s apple pie.
Megana: It’s just not as versatile.
Craig: I agree.
John: Apple pie also you could have for breakfast the next morning. It’s delicious.
Craig: It’s wonderful.
John: So good. So good. Next the battle of the breads. We’ve got banana bread versus bread pudding.
Craig: That’s actually tricky, because you’re asking me to imagine the best possible version. If you were going for just average probability of happiness, you’d go with banana bread, I think, but the best possible version of bread pudding destroys banana bread.
John: That’s where I’m coming too as well. Megana, what’s your feeling on the breads?\
Megana: I am bread pudding all day every day.
Craig: There you go.
John: I’ll pick a bread pudding at a restaurant almost any day, so let’s go for it.
Megana: I’m just going to say it. I think banana bread is over-hyped.
Craig: It’s fine. You know what it is? It’s a dessert that anyone can make, and so it gets over-made. That said, somebody did recently give me, as a gift, a wonderful banana bread.
John: Did it have walnuts in it? Should banana bread have walnuts?
Craig: It should not, and it didn’t.
Megana: I just think it’s a place that we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s good so we don’t feel guilty about our brown bananas and doing something with them. Let’s just end this charade.
Craig: It’s one of the most annoying things. Melissa’s like, “I’m making banana bread.” I’m like, “You’re rotting food on my counter. That’s what I’m seeing.” Next, we have cake.
John: We have cakes.
Craig: That’s a big one.
John: Which do we prefer? Do you want a chocolate birthday cake or a poundcake?
Craig: I’m going to be the unpopular one here. I don’t love chocolate cake. I find it to be cloying. It’s too much for my palette. I’m not a huge chocolate person. Actually, I think a good poundcake, a really well done poundcake can be fantastic. I’m actually going to go with poundcake.
John: Is the poundcake frosted in any way? Is there a glaze to it?
Craig: No, I would not do frosting or glaze. I’m a purist.
John: Megana, what are you thinking in this cake battle here?
Megana: I knew that Craig and I felt the same way about chocolate birthday cake, so I am also going to go with pound cake.
Craig: Nice.
John: I would generally go for chocolate birthday cake, but I will go with the majority here, so poundcake is the winner.
Craig: Poundcake.
John: Now we’re going to worldwide here, international. Crepes Suzette versus baklava.
Craig: Can I throw one other one on there?
John: Sure.
Craig: Tiramisu.
John: Tiramisu’s also really good.
Craig: With that, my answer is tiramisu.
John: Again, we’re trying to only picture the ultimate versions of tiramisu. I’ve had some really shit tiramisus. I think I’m still leaning towards baklava.
Craig: Interesting.
John: Megana, help us out.
Megana: I know I’m taking this way too seriously, but this is incredibly difficult for me.
Craig: I know. You’re stressing out. I love it.
Megana: I’m going to go with crepes, just to mix things up.
John: Wow.
Craig: Now what do we do?
John: [Crosstalk 00:52:27].
Craig: I think what we have to do is maybe rank choice this, even though Sarah Palin does not like that system.
John: Absolutely, rank choice voting. Craig, rank them. Crepes, tiramisu, baklava.
Craig: I’m going to go tiramisu one, crepes Suzette two, baklava three.
John: I would go baklava one, tiramisu two, crepes Suzette three.
Megana: I’m going crepes one, baklava two, tiramisu three.
Craig: Oh god, did we just [crosstalk 00:52:54]?
John: Good Lord, I think we completely broke it.
Craig: Oh, no. Did we break our whole system?
John: We’re going to circle back to that. We’re going to cleanse our palette with other ones and circle back to the worldwide.
Craig: I’m happy to defer to crepes Suzette. It’s not that I don’t like baklava.
John: It is one note. It is one very sugary and honey sweet-
Craig: Very sugary. I don’t tend to like Middle Eastern dessert profiles, whether it’s Israeli or-
Megana: It’s so syrupy.
Craig: It’s so syrupy. Exactly.
John: It is syrupy. We’ll go for crepes Suzette. It has fire. Fire is exciting.
Craig: Fire is exciting, and it’s French.
John: Alternative pies. We have pumpkin pie versus key lime pie.
Craig: Wow. Oof. Man. You’re kind of catching us at a weird time in the calendar here.
John: That’s true.
Craig: Going for the best possible version, the ceiling on pumpkin pie is higher than the ceiling on key lime pie.
John: I agree.
Craig: I would go pumpkin pie.
John: I’m going to go pumpkin pie too. Megana?
Megana: Yeah. That was a great analysis.
Craig: We think we’re on CNN.
Megana: Or ESPN.
John: The only ting I’ll say is, two bites of key lime pie, and wow, this is really great, but my 10th bite of key lime pie, I’m like, “I don’t want anymore,” whereas pumpkin pie, I can keep eating it.
Craig: I’ve made them both from scratch. They’re both excellent. By the way, tip on key lime pie, never use key limes to make key lime pie. They’re disgusting.
John: Just use normal limes.
Craig: They’re tiny and bitter. Mediterranean limes, which are the ones you would imagine in your mind, those make a much better key lime pie. This has been confirmed by the excellent people in the test kitchens at Cooks Illustrated.
John: Love it. The cold round, cheesecake versus ice cream, any flavor, including hot fudge sundaes.
Craig: This is an easy one.
John: Are we going for ice cream or cheesecake?
Craig: Best version for me, cheesecake all day long.
John: I’m also going to go with cheesecake. Megana, what are you thinking?
Megana: I imagine this is what it would be like if you asked me to pick between me children.
Craig: It’s Sophie’s Choice. This is your Sophie’s Choice. One of them has to die.
John: One of them will come with you. The other one will just melt out on the sidewalk.
Craig: You’re actually crying.
Megana: God, my first love is ice cream, but I’m going to go cheesecake.
John: Something about it. I love a hot fudge sundae, but cheesecake, the best.
Craig: A great cheesecake is a great thing.
John: Pure Americana here, chocolate chip cookies versus s’mores.
Craig: I would go chocolate chip cookies myself. Megana?
Megana: To Craig’s earlier point, the ceiling on chocolate chip cookies is just higher.
Craig: S’mores are required to be one thing basically.
Megana: Unless you’re Paul Hollywood.
John: S’mores are exciting in a camping situation, like oh, this is pretty good for around a campfire, but I’m never reaching for a s’more.
Craig: No. It’s actually very annoying to eat. God help you if you have a beard like I do. You can’t.
John: Crumbly?
Craig: The marshmallow just begins to embed itself in your face.
John: Lastly, some summer fun. Peach cobbler versus rice crispy bars.
Craig: Megana, I want to hear from you first on this one.
Megana: Rice crispy bars.
Craig: That’s where I was going, and here’s why. Peach cobbler can be excellent, but rice crispy bars are not only one thing. You can kick them up. You can mess around with them. You can do some interesting things. They have a unique texture. No other dessert can have what rice crispy bars have. I’m going to go with rice crispy bars.
John: Rice crispy bars are rice cakes with syrup on them.
Craig: Correct.
John: I do not enjoy rice crispy treats. I will eat them. I will eat them, but I won’t enjoy them the way that I will enjoy a great peach crisp. God, summer fruits, stone fruits are incredible.
Megana: I knew it. I knew it.
Craig: Unfortunately, the rice crispy bar people have spoken.
John: Fine. Now, we get to the next bracket here. Lead a battle between apple pie and bread pudding.
Craig: Bread pudding for me.
John: That’s bread pudding for me too. Megana, how are you feeling?
Megana: I’m going to go apple pie, but I guess I lose.
Craig: You have lost.
John: Bread pudding made it through the round, although now we have no fruits left in the competition.
Craig: Great. Good. Fruits are garbage. Let’s get to the real stuff.
John: Poundcake versus crepes Suzette.
Megana: Can I switch over to tiramisu?
John: You can switch to tiramisu.
Craig: If you switch to tiramisu, then I’m going with tiramisu for sure.
John: Great.
Craig: In that case, this is hands down tiramisu for me.
John: I think tiramisu deserves it. It’s a weird stacked dessert. It’s a trifle. It’s got come coffee in it potentially.
Craig: Definitely.
John: Perfectly made [crosstalk 00:57:36].
Craig: Required. Mascarpone cheese, delicious.
John: Pumpkin pie versus cheesecake.
Craig: I would probably go cheesecake. It’s just more versatile.
Megana: You could have a pumpkin pie cheesecake.
Craig: That’s exactly right. You can have a pumpkin cheesecake. Bingo.
John: You can have a cheesecake pumpkin pie, but you would still call it cheesecake.
Craig: You would call it cheesecake.
John: I think cheesecake’s going to win this one. Chocolate chip cookies versus rice crispy bars. No competition.
Craig: It’s chocolate chip cookies there.
Megana: Yeah.
Craig: That’s an easy one.
John: Final four. Bread pudding versus tiramisu.
Craig: Tiramisu.
Megana: Yeah.
John: I’m pretty much a bread pudding. Let me see if I can sway you to bread pudding. Bread pudding, it’s coming out hot. It’s coming out with little bits of chocolate melted into it, maybe some caramel melted into it as well. It’s like French toast. It’s a little bit eggy. You got to eat it with a spoon. Maybe it’s in the middle of the table and you’re sharing it.
Megana: Yeah, and some caramel.
John: Or maybe it’s in a little cast iron pan.
Craig: It’s amazing. Now let me try and sway you to tiramisu, because I recently made it.
John: Great.
Craig: Delicious espresso coffee. Ladyfingers have soaked it all up, this delicious, spongy yumminess. Then you’ve got a mixture of cream and Mascarpone cheese adding a little bit of tang, lots of sweetness from sugar. Then the whole thing is dusted on top with a little bit of cocoa powder. It all just blends together. Each bite has five things going on.
John: Megana, it’s coming down to you. You have to decide between tiramisu and bread pudding. Your vote decides everything.
Megana: I’m going bread pudding.
Craig: Wow.
Megana: He got me at it’s hot.
Craig: I hope the nation of Italy visits its vengeance upon both of you.
Megana: Don’t put them on me.
Craig: You’re a racist.
Megana: Where does bread pudding originate from?
Craig: It feels Englishy to me.
John: It does.
Craig: Any time the word pudding is in there and it isn’t a glop, I think it’s English.
John: Cheesecake versus chocolate chip cookies.
Craig: Cheesecake.
John: I’m debating. I’m thinking of the ultimate versions of things. Maybe it’s because chocolate chip cookies, while they can be dessert, they’re not really an end-of-meal dessert. They’re a treat to be eaten other times.
Craig: You can eat them after lunch.
John: The same reason we haven’t [inaudible 00:59:55] blueberry muffins, which are delicious.
Craig: Yeah, because they’re not really dessert.
John: Megana, you agree with us?
Megana: I don’t, but you guys win.
Craig: We win.
John: Make your case. Are chocolate chip cookies as dessert as the dessert winner here?
Megana: I don’t know. They’re just my best friend.
Craig: That’s not what we’re talking about though. We’re not talking about what listens to you talk.
Megana: They’re all the time. They are just a universal, delightful treat for any time of day, year, season, whereas a cheesecake is an undertaking.
John: What I was saying is it comes down to the definition of dessert. If it’s something that’s uniquely a dessert versus also a snack, is that a difference?
Megana: Yeah, because a chocolate chip cookie is like a treat.
John: It is a treat.
Craig: It’s a treat. I made a cheesecake recently for the first time. It came out beautifully. It’s fun to make. A cheesecake, when you bring it out at the end of dinner, people are like, “Oho.” You bring out a plate of chocolate chip cookies, they’re like, “Oh, you don’t care about us.”
Megana: Yeah, “He phoned it in.”
Craig: “He phoned it in.”
John: That’s fair.
Megana: I guess we’re going cheesecake.
John: Cheesecake. Final round. This is actually a surprise. Not what I would’ve predicted.
Craig: Startling.
John: Bread pudding versus cheesecake. I’m astonished apple pie didn’t make it through to here.
Craig: We’re not that American, I guess.
John: We’re not. Bread pudding versus cheesecake. What’s going to win?
Megana: Cheesecake.
Craig: Yeah, it’s cheesecake. I know. I know. I know. I know.
John: I think it’s the effectiveness of presentation. Would I have a stronger impression of cheesecake, would I enjoy cheesecake more if it weren’t for the Cheesecake Factory? That is what definitely has soured me.
Craig: The fact that they put the word factory next to it is pretty brutal. The whole concept and experience of Cheesecake Factory is upsetting from the very moment you walk in. The faux Italianate design.
John: Yeah, oh my gosh.
Craig: The menu that appears to be a phone book. They are terrible at night but good at nothing. Then the cheesecakes themselves, they’re stupid. They’ve gotten so far afield from just the simplicity and elegance of a New York style cheesecake.
John: We’ve not even discussed the Basque cheesecake and the rise of the Basque cheesecake.
Craig: The Basque cheesecake is-
John: Burnt.
Craig: … fantastic.
John: It is.
Craig: It’s glorious. That’s another great vote in favor of cheesecake is that there are different families.
John: I think a thing that’s also been pushing it over is because there’s been recent innovation, at least within America, the popularity of Basque cheesecakes.
Craig: Discovery.
Megana: Watch the cheesecake space.
Craig: Watch this cheesecake space. I’ve always loved the combination of sugar and cheese in a dessert. Even a cheese Danish is delicious to me. Cheesecakes are not easy to make. Bread pudding is easy. It just is.
John: Yeah, true. Anyone could do a bread pudding. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun dessert bracket.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
John: Bye.
Megana: Bye.
Craig: Bye, guys.
Links:
- Bob Iger Back As Disney CEO, Bob Chapek Out on Deadline
- Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John
- David Wappel’s Twitter Thread on Anchoring Nouns
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The post Scriptnotes, Episode 576: What You’re Looking At, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 578 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often when we have guests on the show, I am meeting them for the first time right before we start recording. My guests today I’ve known for almost 30 years, which is impossible, Al Gough and Miles Millar, the writer/producers known for Smallville, Shanghai Noon, Into the Badlands, and a zillion other movies and TV series. Their latest is the Netflix hit series Wednesday. Welcome Al and Miles.
Al Gough: Good to see you.
Miles Millar: Absolutely. Great.
John: We actually went to film school together a thousand years ago.
Al: Yes, we did, 1992.
John: 1992. I want to get into a little bit of that. Maybe in our Bonus Segment, let’s talk about film schools, because Craig hates film schools. It was actually incredibly important for the three of us. I think we can get the other side of film school and whether we would do it again.
Miles: I think the answer for all of us is yes.
John: I think it would be yes, but I might do it differently this time. We’ll see when we get into that. That’ll be our Bonus Segment. For you guys right now, I really want to start by contrasting… I remember as your whole career began. Usually, this would be the point where I would ask you to do an origin story. Let me see if I can give the origin story, Al and Miles, see how much I get right and what stuff I get wrong. Al Gough, before you came out for film school, you were working some place in the East Coast. You went to Washington University?
Al: No, I went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
John: Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Something like that. You came out to Stark with the intention of becoming a producer.
Al: Correct.
John: Miles Millar, you came from the UK. You had been working in London before that?
Miles: Yep.
John: You came into the program, the Stark Program at USC, with the intention of being a producer, or did you also know you were going to write?
Miles: I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was my excuse to get to America. That was really the reason. I loved the idea of film. I’d been obsessed with film my whole life. That was my dream. I didn’t really know how to navigate Hollywood. The program felt like a grab bag of you figure it out.
John: That’s honestly very close to my experience there too. I knew I could write in a general sense, but I had no sense of how Hollywood worked. It was my introduction to everything. We should explain to people listening what 1992 was like. It was pre-internet, basically.
Al: It was pre-internet. Also, we say the party was over, but the after-party was starting. Corporations buying movie studios was just becoming a thing. I think Sony had bought Columbia. I think at that point, Matsushita had bought Universal.
Miles: Turner had bought-
Al: Not yet. That wasn’t until ’94.
Miles: It was a gold rush era.
Al: It was a gold rush era.
Miles: It was incredible.
John: It’s important for how we all came up and rose into it, because it was definitely a period of great expansion that we were coming into it. You guys met in our very small film program. Only 25 students per year in that group. How quickly did you hit it off as friends and then did you start thinking about writing together? That’s where I’m not quite clear, because it was in that first year you must’ve started writing together.
Al: We were friends almost… I think we met the second day of film school.
Miles: Yeah, we had that cocktail party. USC film school had this bizarre, brutalist architecture. It had this garden well, where there was a bad cocktail party we had for students.
John: It was a kegger really.
Miles: Exactly right.
Al: A kegger, yeah.
Miles: We met there. At the end, I gave Al my phone number. I’m terrible. I’m the worst with numbers.
Al: Terrible.
Miles: I gave him the wrong number, so he couldn’t get in touch with me. A few days later, he said, “I tried to reach you.” I was like, “Oh, whoops.” We did hit it off immediately.
Al: Miles is terrible with numbers still.
Miles: I have to copy his-
Al: I do the WGA dues, and then I take a picture of it and send it to him.
Miles: I’m always [crosstalk 00:03:44].
John: You guys eventually hit it off. In our first year of Stark, we were writing scenes. We had a class taught by Bobette Buster. We were writing scenes for that, and we were writing individual scenes. You guys were separately trying to work on some stuff together?
Al: No, because remember, she partnered us up.
John: Did you?
Al: I think we all did an outline and 30 pages.
Miles: It was the outline and the first act of a screenplay. You had to partner up with someone. I love this story, by the way, because we had to partner up. I partner with Al. My story was the worst story. It was a very commercial idea, but found out later on it was the worst story as a professional writer, which was a story about a cop and an orangutan, because they were buddies, called Mango. Al lost faith in me pretty quickly and tried to bail. Luckily for us, the head of the program, Larry Turman, who is the producer of The Graduate, told him he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bail on me, and so he was forced to work with me. Lucky he did, because…
Al: Then that led to Mango, led to the first sale.
John: What was crucial to understand about this origin story is that you guys wrote this project together. You had the initial idea, but you end up working on it as a team. In our second year of Stark, you end up selling this spec script for a lot of money.
Al: That’s another thing too, which we tell young writers. Again, it was a different era. Where now we’re in the era of IP and everything, there it was literally the era of spec scripts. It was Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas and all of that.
Miles: Every day you’d go to Variety and you’d read five scripts sold for a lot of money, and they were high-concept stories, and first-timers breaking in every day. It really was this gold rush mentality of you just needed to get the story out, and people would buy the idea. It was really amazing, all of us, the three of us to launch at that point as writers, because it allowed us… We always talk about the [inaudible 00:05:36] to learn how to write. Without that sale, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was all about the gift of that era.
John: As we all know, Mango got an immediate green light and went on to make $200 million. It was a giant hit that made your whole career. No, Mango did not get made, and yet it did start your career. Let’s talk through that, because going from a sale, which doesn’t really happen so much… A spec sale of a script doesn’t happen that often anymore. There are scripts that get attention, and then people go off in meetings. That’s really an important next step for you guys is not that Mango happened, got shot as a film, but you guys were taken seriously. You got agents and managers, got started with a career.
Al: Exactly. As Miles was saying, we sold Mango. It was the week after Ace Ventura opened. Some of it, you hit the right moment. People loved the concept. They liked the writing enough. What we found is then you go for these general meetings at Disney, at New Line, Warner’s, and they’re offering you animal comedies. This is not what you want to be known for.
Miles: It was literally our very first script. It was total beginner’s luck. We didn’t know really the craft of writing yet, so we spent the next three years working every day. We’ve always had a really good joint work ethic. I’m sure John does too. It’s all about not the grind, but it’s really about treating it as a profession, that there’s never a day when we’re not writing. That’s something that’s I think stood us well in terms of we just keep on working. We’re workhorses, and we’ll always do that. Even when it’s hard, we’ll still work.
John: It’s also important though to think back to that time and the expansion of the industry. It’s not just that there were spec scripts selling. The reason why there were spec scripts selling is because they were trying to make so many movies.
Miles: Correct.
John: That was also an era where Disney was trying to do 40 feature films a year.
Al: Yeah, each division, Disney, Touchstone, and Hollywood Pictures were each making 25 movies a year, because it was also the era of DVDs. Basically, even if a movie didn’t make all its money back in theatrical, the DVD aftermarkets were huge. A lot of them got made.
Miles: There’s a similar era now in terms of content. The streamers desperately need content. It’s not dissimilar. I think for writers, it was a better period when we started out, just in terms of you could hit the jackpot, literally.
John: Coming off of Mango, what was the next big step in your career? I was trying to [inaudible 00:08:03] is there another big thing, like, “Oh, that’s a shining beacon,” before we get to Smallville?
Al: Oh, yeah. We wrote a couple more specs. The next one we sold was a political thriller called Favorite Son. We sold it to… It was a producer named Leonard Goldberg. He was Aaron Spelling’s partner.
John: Absolutely. He did Charlie’s Angels.
Al: Exactly. We sold it to Laura Ziskin, who was a producer we all had as a film school teacher, who was then running a division of 20th Century Fox. For us, that was the first script that was… It was a great sample, and it opened different doors. I think that’s the great thing about being a writer is you don’t need permission, and you can always write yourself out of any corner. Finally, with that script, we were able to do that. It just got us out of the animal comedy cul-de-sac.
John: Absolutely. I was pigeonholed as a guy who’d do movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas, very soft family things. Then Go was the thing that got me out of that.
Al: Go, right.
John: People could read it for whatever they wanted to do. You have written Favorite Son. That gets set up at Fox 2000?
Al: Fox 2000, yeah.
John: From that, you’re taking other meetings. Are you getting any rewrite work? What’s the next step?
Miles: We’ve been a little bit in the rewrite business but not really. It’s never been something that we’ve had time to do or focused on, because then we pretty quickly got into TV. We had an agency change. We changed agencies and went to William Morris, and then they put us with a TV agent as well as a feature agent, because we’d done… Our first TV credit was this British BBC show called Bugs. That was our first-
John: Oh, that’s right. I forgot about Bugs.
Miles: It was a really obscure but fun BBC show.
Al: It was an action-adventure series. The reason they liked us is because Miles is British and I was American. They couldn’t find British writers who could write Mission Impossible type stories, which is what these were.
Miles: That got us when we went to William Morris. They’re like, “Oh, you do TV. You should have a TV agent.”
John: Because it was a UK show, you were not in a room with a staff writing that show.
Miles: No.
John: You pitched an episode, wrote an episode.
Miles: We used to fax the pages to them in London. That’s how old we are. It was a great experience. Then that led to our interest in TV. Then we started staffing on TV. We met some writers. They said the way to be successful in television is, just fair enough, you have to learn the hierarchy, and you’ve gotta go up from staff writer to story editor to the various stages of TV writer. We did that. Our first TV credit in America was Timecop, which is based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
John: ABC show? I’m trying to remember.
Miles: ABC, yeah.
Al: ABC.
John: Did it run for a season?
Al: No, I think it ran for eight, and then it was out.
Miles: It was an era they thought TV drama was dead, but sitcoms were the king. The idea of doing that show… You have to sign a three-year contract. It was like, “Oh my god, if we do this for three years, I will literally die.” It ran for eight. We were heroes on that show, because there was such infighting with the young guys on the totem pole. We ended up writing… Was it three scripts?
Al: Yeah, we wrote three of the eight.
Miles: Three.
Al: One of ours became the new first episode, because ABC hated the pilot episode of the show. With writers too, we call it the “fuck you, I’m doing Nazis” approach. When they were pitching the show, ABC said, “Whatever you do in Timecop, don’t have them go back to Nazi Germany, because Germany’s a huge market for us, and we don’t want to do it.” What did they do? They go back to Nazi Germany and stop something. That started.
There was no room on that show. You’d go pitch to the executive producer. We did, and then we wrote the script. He came in, and he goes, “Yep, this one’s going to be the first episode.” Timecop. Then we got our first pilot at ABC from that, which got made but didn’t go to air. Then we staffed on a show that Carlton Cuse created called Martial Law.
John: That’s right.
Al: That’s the TV side of the story. Then meanwhile, on the feature side, we had done some work for Joel Silver and Dick Donner on these low-budget genre movies, which led to Lethal Weapon 4.
John: I remember visiting set with you on a movie you’d written that starred Heather Locklear.
Miles: That was called Double Tap. That was our very first feature credit. It was directed by Greg Yaitanes, who is now a huge TV director. He just did House of the Dragon.
Al: House of the Dragon.
John: That’s right.
Miles: It’s weird we’re all still here. Those were really cheap movies, but we learned a lot doing those. We never said no. That was also our thing. We always just said yes to anything, and still do. That’s part of our problem is never saying no. We’re not as selective as John.
John: There’s also two of you, so you can get twice as much done. Are we almost caught up to Smallville at this point?
Al: Yes. On the TV side, during Martial Law, we got a deal at Warner Bros, and we did this show from Lethal Weapon 4 with the producer, Joel Silver, called The Strip, which was an action buddy thing set in Las Vegas. We’d sold it to Fox. They had a regime change. A thing that did happen in 1999 was you’d sell a pilot to another network. They sold it to UPN, which was another network that no longer exists. Because it was on UPN and was so under the radar, they let us run the show. We really hit it off with Peter Roth.
Miles: He was the head of Warner Bros.
Al: He was the head of Warner’s Television, just retired a year or two ago. They made an overall deal with us. The Strip ran eight episodes, got canceled.
Miles: First-time showrunners, we had no idea what we were doing. I’ll say for the first three pilots, we had no idea what we were doing. Then it began to click in terms of what we needed to do and be set forward. There’s always this thing about showrunning, which is you’re basically two guys in a garage writing scripts, and suddenly you’re in charge of a huge business, and they expect you to know what you’re doing, and you don’t.
John: You also had very few opportunities for mentorship, because you’d been on some sets, with Double Tap and things like that, I guess Martial Law. You have seen some of it. Was Martial Law shot in Los Angeles?
Al: It was, yeah. You’re right, you don’t really get that much-
Miles: You’re stuck in the writers’ room.
Al: You’re stuck in the writers’ room. We had a deal. At that point, I always tell people there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe. The later iteration of Superman had been Lois and Clark. The last iteration of Batman had been Batman and Robin. This was like the Nadir of superheros. Warner’s, who was like, “Sure, TV, you can have Superman,” they didn’t care.
Peter Roth came to us and said, “I have the rights to do Superman, and I want to do kind of like a Superboy show. We were like, “We don’t want to do Superboy.” We came up with the pitch for Smallville, which was no flights, no tights, making the parents younger, introducing the idea of the meteor shower and all these different things.
Then we went out and sold… We only went to Fox and to The WB. What was funny at the time is The WB and Warner’s Studio did not have a good relationship. Peter was brought in to smooth it over. They had just pitched them the idea of like, “Oh, we’re doing a Superman in high school show.” They’re like, “Eh.” They weren’t interested.
Miles: This is the era of Dawson’s Creek.
Al: Dawson’s Creek, yeah. We went to Fox, and we sold it in the room to Gail Berman. Then that afternoon, we had to go to The WB, just because they’re corporate siblings. Peter’s like, “Just go in. Pitch it. It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to sell it. We’re going to sell it to Fox.” We go in and pitch it to The WB, to an executive named Susanne Daniels. It’s one of those things, you could tell during the pitch. In the beginning, it was a little like sitting back, and then as they heard the pitch, they were like, “Oh, this might actually be good.” Then by the end, we left, and we’re like, “Oh, that went better than we thought.” Peter’s like, “We’re going to Fox.” Then three days later, we were at The WB, which is where it should’ve been.
Miles: The great story there is that the other executive in the room, who’s a friend of ours, we’d had lunch with the year before, and she’d told us point blank, “You guys aren’t WB material. Sorry.”
Al: “You do buddy action,” because at that point we’d done Lethal 4 and Shanghai Noon. “You’re buddy two-hander guys.” Then the next year, we’re at The WB.
John: I want to compare and contrast that experience, taking an iconic piece of property, a piece of IP that people know, Superman, and turning it into a teen show, to Wednesday, which is, again, an iconic piece of property everybody knows, and taking the character from that and putting it at the center of a teen series. On the surface, kind of similar, but actually, the way we make things now is so vastly different between the two of them. I want to contrast the two of those experiences. Let’s talk through the pitch on Wednesday Addams. How does Wednesday Addams come into your universe?
Al: It was 2018. We had just finished doing this show called Into the Badlands, which we did for AMC for four seasons. We were, frankly, looking for our next thing, and knowing how IP-obsessed everybody is… The Addams Family seemed to be… We knew MGM had the animated movies, but Paramount had done movies.
In a similar way that Smallville tells an unknown chapter of Clark Kent’s story, it’s a story nobody’s ever told. We wanted to do Wednesday, but we’re like, “Teenage Wednesday Addams in boarding school.” That was really the eureka moment. We sat down. We knew we wanted it to be a supernatural murder mystery. We talked about do we just put her in a normal high school or do we do something different. We realized if we just put her in a normal high school, it becomes a very one-note show.
Miles: She goes home to her family at the end.
Al: She went home to her family. The opening of the first episode is her in a regular high school. She gets expelled, and then she goes to Nevermore, because it gave us the Addams ethos without being the… It’s like if you took the Addams mansion and the Addams vibe but then you put it in the school. Then it was the school where her parents met. Literally, we had the idea. We came up with the whole pitch.
Miles: We did it on spec.
Al: On spec.
Miles: We wrote a 20-page bible.
Al: Bible.
Miles: Then we approached MGM, said to the head of the studio, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and he loved it. It was the first step. It was the first step with us coming up with the idea. It wasn’t like they approached us.
Al: Nobody approached us.
John: There wasn’t any notion, like, “Hey, let’s do a Wednesday Addams show.”
Al: No, it wasn’t.
John: [inaudible 00:18:40].
Al: In fact, they didn’t even know if they had the live-action TV rights. We were like, “Does Paramount have those?” We pitched the head of the Addams Foundation, who controls the estate. He loved it. That’s how it all got started. It was very different. Smallville was like, “We have this idea. Can you guys crack it?” This one, we brought them something they didn’t frankly even know they had.
John: Great. In both cases, the idea is now set up. Was the idea set up at Netflix, or did you have to write a script first?
Miles: Now it seems like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t at all. It’s been a three-and-a-half-year journey to get to this point. We’d written it. They loved it. In terms of the pitch, we went out and pitched it around to all the different streamers, to Apple and Amazon, Netflix. Actually, Netflix bought it. This is great.
Al: This was fall of 2019. This was this time 2019.
Miles: They couldn’t make a deal, so it fell apart.
John: It fell apart. They couldn’t make a deal because of underlying rights or your rights or just everything?
Al: Basically, whatever Netflix was offering, MGM said, “That’s not enough.” This was basically January of 2020. They had already basically given us the go-ahead to write the pilot script. They’d written that. We thought it was kind of dead. Then Steve Stark, who was the head of television at the time-
Miles: At MGM.
Al: … at MGM, convinced MGM to basically fork over money for a writers’ room, for a mini room, and said, “We’ll write a bunch of scripts, and then we’ll go back out with it,” which to be honest with you, is a terrible idea. Most streamers aren’t going to buy a show that they had no hand in developing. We were like, “If it keeps the project alive, great.”
John: That said, Station Eleven was a similar situation.
Al: Was it really?
John: He came on to talk through the Station Eleven process. Paramount did put together a mini room for that, so they could write scripts. It ended up working out really well for them.
Al: Same here.
John: At this point, there’s a pilot, and you have a room together. How many scripts are you trying to get out of this room?
Al: We’re trying to get another seven scripts out of the room.
John: Which is the whole season.
Al: The whole season, because we had the bible for the whole season, and so we were breaking it. Of course, we had to push the room a week, because it was literally the first week of lockdown. The pandemic started. We did it fully on Zoom.
Miles: Which I think was a really great… No one had ever done a Zoom room. It was actually incredibly efficient, because often my beef of writers’ rooms is everyone sits around talking about war stories. It’s so inefficient, whereas a Zoom, it’s actually much more focused. It can be exhausting, but we got an incredible amount of work done in a limited amount of time.
Al: Yeah, we did. We did. It was spring of 2020. Before we went out, we wanted to package it. Tim was always our first-
John: A natural choice.
Al: A natural choice.
John: Tim’s always wanted to do an Addams Family story.
Al: We’d heard. Of course, everybody’s like, “He’s not done television. He’s not going to do it.” We’re like, “If we don’t ask, the answer’s no.” Steve’s partner, Andrew Mittman, got the script to Mike Simpson, who’s Tim’s agent at WME. Mike read it and really loved it. We heard all this later. He sent it to Tim, and then four days later, we get a text, “You’re not going to believe this. Tim read the script. He really loves it. He wants to talk to you guys.” Tim lives in London. We thought, “Okay, great, so his assistant’s going to set up Zoom?” He’s like, “Nope.” Mike goes, “I’m texting you his number, and you’re going to FaceTime with him tomorrow.” It was Memorial Day weekend 2020. We called. We FaceTimed with Tim. He was in Oxford.
Miles: Oxford. He has an amazing house in Oxford with this beautiful garden with these life-size dinosaur models. He was out there wandering around in this garden talking to us about Wednesday Addams and how she would’ve been his girlfriend in high school. It was really, really great. He was a bit nervous, I think, about launching to TV, but also really intrigued about doing extended storytelling. Long-form storytelling was something he’d never done. It was really something that he thought would be a great challenge. He’d always loved the Addams Family, and Wednesday in particular.
Al: What we did know, the opening of the script, it opens with Wednesday terrorizing the water polo team. We didn’t know Tim played water polo in Burbank.
Miles: At Burbank High.
Al: He must’ve been reading the script going, “What is happening?”
Miles: That’s how it happened.
John: I want to also flash back to Smallville though, because bringing on the pilot director has always been a big thing. That’s a big deciding factor of which pilots get ordered is what kind of director you can get on board, but they’re never the iconic name that a Tim Burton is.
Al: Correct.
John: It’s never that level of [inaudible 00:23:23] directors. It’s always like Michael Dinner. It’s some person you’ve never heard of.
Miles: Michael Dinner, yeah.
John: Normal people don’t have that. It’s such a change from this. Also, in a classic way you pick pilots to make, it’s on a casting. For Smallville, talk through the casting on that, because I remember my WB show, the way you had to bring in actors to audition in the room in front of Susanne Daniels and everything else was a very specific, scary, terrifying process. I want to contrast it with now. Talk us through Smallville casting, and then we’ll go to Wednesday casting.
Al: Again, this was in 2000. We sold it in the fall of 2000. When we sold it, it’s interesting. In old-time network television, they usually didn’t let you cast a pilot until they green-lit the pilot. Here they bought the project and they said, “We’re going to let you start casting.” We hadn’t written the script yet.
Miles: We hadn’t written the script yet.
Al: This was actually a great exercise, which we’ve done. We don’t really do it in features, but we do it in television. We wrote a bunch of the scenes from the pilot that they could audition with. It’s good, because you realize you can give them handles. We always call it secret lines, where if they get that right, it’s like, “Oh, they understand it.” We wrote a Lex and Clark scene.
Miles: All of which ended up in the show.
Al: All of them are in the pilot. It was a Clark-Lana graveyard scene, which is in the pilot. There’s a Lex-Clark fencing scene, which is in the pilot, the parents, which was great, because when we went to write the pilot, we had a bunch of scenes written already. They let us do that. We actually got to spend about four months casting. The other thing was, we knew exactly who we wanted to direct the pilot, which was David Nutter, who certainly at the time-
John: He was [inaudible 00:25:08] him or Michael Dinner [crosstalk 00:25:09].
Al: David was the Steven Spielberg of TV pilots. His track record of getting-
Miles: He’d done a lot of great… Not The X-Files. He’d done a lot of X-Files to start off with.
Al: He’d done X-Files to start off. I think he’d done Roswell the year before.
Miles: Dark Angel.
Al: He’d done Dark Angel. What’s great is Peter Roth, who had just come over from Fox, knew David very well. He literally got on the phone, pitched him, sent him the same-
Miles: David was a huge Superman-
Al: He was a huge Superman fan.
Miles: It was the perfect marriage. The process, as John suggested, it’s so awful, which is the person, or they have to sit in the room outside, and have to come into a room with probably 15 people watching them, which is the most artificial experience for TV performance, and have to perform like they’re auditioning for a school play, in front of these people. It is the most nerve-wracking experience. For example, Zach Levi was our top choice for Lex Luthor. He came in and was amazing. Then he came in to do this network audition, and he really just didn’t click. Then we ended up with Michael, who was fantastic. It was just the whole process and the idea of having to perform in this really bizarre way for a TV show.
Al: It was always very weird. It’s stressful all around.
Miles: Absolutely.
Al: So artificial.
John: Also, we have to remember that back in those days, these truly were pilots. They were going to shoot a bunch of pilots and only pick up certain series, as they were trying to figure out what are the elements that are going to be useful in this show versus that show. It’s not the same situation with something like Wednesday, because it’s the first episode, but how that first episode goes is not going to determine whether the rest of the series shoots. You’re going to shoot the whole series.
Al: Correct. We even had this on our last couple shows. Everybody now does it online. They self-tape. I think actors must think it’s great, because they can do as many takes as they want until they get the one they like.
John: They don’t get the feedback.
Al: They don’t get the feedback, but they get that.
John: Also, we’re seeing what do they look like through a lens.
Miles: Exactly.
John: It’s really what it is.
Miles: That’s the point, exactly. It’s the old-fashioned screen test is how you should do it. On Wednesday, I’ll say we did do chemistry tests over Zoom. We’d all meet with the actor, talk to them, and then our screens would go black, and then we’d watch the audition. Then we’d give notes and Tim would give notes. I think it was intimidating, because it was the first time they met Tim, and over Zoom. The first time we did it, Tim just gave them one chance. They were so nervous.
Al: We did it once, and it was a disaster. What’s great about Tim is Tim Burton doesn’t realize he’s Tim Burton. We’re like, “Tim, here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll introduce them. We’ll introduce you, let you say hi. We’ll do it twice, so you can give them notes in between. Even if you don’t have notes, let’s just let them do it again.” Then he was like, “Great.” Once they got over the initial shock of the Tim Burton part, then they could ease in and do it. Even on the Brady Bunch screens, you could at least go, “Oh, okay.” You see what they look like side by side on camera.
John: Which is crucial. I want to back up in the process a little bit here, because you’d been in writers’ rooms before. You’d been in a writer’s room for Martial Law. You had that experience. This time you’re running a writers’ room on Zoom for your show. How did you go about thinking about who you wanted in that writers’ room with you? It was a mini room. Was that the only room you ever got together?
Al: That was a mini room. We frankly picked two writers, Kayla Alpert and April Blair. We knew.
John: Experienced.
Al: They were like, “We’re going to pay for a room. You can only have a couple writers.” It’s like, “We need people who we’ve worked with before, who we know are good, who can be helpful.” Obviously, we wanted the female voices in the room too. We heard a lot of Zoom room horror stories, but I think because it was a bunch of people who have never worked together, so I’m sure it was a lot of bad first date theater. We had that room. It was a 10, 11-week room. That was the only room we had.
John: What was your schedule? What was your writing process? How long were the rooms going for? What were you trying to get done in a day’s work in a room?
Miles: I think first it’s having a very clear idea of where the trajectory of the season’s going. We just had the first episode, so they had a sense of what the show was, which is important.
John: It’s crucial to set up… That first episode, you set so many plates spinning in terms of who these characters are, and each of them is going to have a thing. You had a sense of where they were going. You had to actually track out where that information would go. Those were the first weeks. You were just figuring out all the rest of those-
Miles: Yes. I think the first season, we certainly had ideas. I guess because we’re old-school TV people, every episode, unlike some binge shows, conceptualized. One episode’s about the school dance. One episode’s about Parents Weekend. Each one feels like a complete chapter of a book, rather than just… Sometimes shows are like mud. You couldn’t identify what the-
John: It’s like an eight-hour movie.
Miles: For us it’s much more compartmentalized. It’s figuring out the beginning, middle, end of each episode so it feels complete in itself, although it still leads on and has this propulsive energy, which is always something that we aim for, that it’s never boring. That’s our motto in terms of story breaking, that it has to keep going so it’s propulsive and delicious and you want to keep consuming. You want to be able to not turn it off at 3 a.m. in the morning and finish. That’s our goal as storytellers is that it has to be relentless. Then it’s really working out the beats and where are the characters going, so what’s the arc over the course of the season and how will that person get there.
The first week is just figuring out big ideas, what a great set piece is, where do you want to see these characters, what are the scenes you want to see with them. That’s something we learned from Carlton Cuse, which is what are the scenes you want to see in this episode, between these two characters. That was something that we always do, and just like, “What are the craziest ideas we can put Wednesday Addams in?” That’s something. It’s just an exercise. We always ask people when they first come to the room to bring a lot of ideas. I want to see a list of 50 ideas. Where could she be, what’s funny, and what situations or locations she could be at or just concepts for [inaudible 00:31:27].
John: What documents are you trying to get out of this? Ultimately, you’re going to get to scripts. At what point are you generating outlines? Are you generating beat sheets? How much are those shared outside of the room or just for your purposes?
Al: We do cards.
Miles: The first thing we do is we break out the stories. We do the little paragraphs.
Al: Paragraphs.
Miles: By the end of probably week two, we have eight one-page ideas for what each episode’s going to be. It has to be really quick and fast. You can adjust.
John: Is that a Google Doc, or how are you sharing that among your team?
Miles: It’s Google Docs.
Al: It is a Google Doc.
Miles: We have the writer’s assistant who takes notes every day and assembles that. We split up to write the one-pagers we call them, which is just each episode, so we have a sense of what the season is, because you can’t spend too long conceptualizing. We just need to start really thinking about the stories.
Al: We did the one-pagers. Then we do beat sheets. Those have, here are all the scenes.
John: The scenes.
Al: They’re in skeletal form. The other thing, we had never done a closed mystery, a cards down mystery, where you don’t know, it’s the whodunit.
John: Absolutely. We have the same information as the audience as Wednesday does.
Al: Exactly. We knew how it ended. Then it was working backwards. Then it was do we have enough red herrings. Even when we were shooting it, we’re like-
Miles: Oh, gosh.
Al: … “Oh my god, is this going to be too obvious?” It’s all the red herrings. You have to play by the rules, so that if you go back and did a re-watch, it’s… I remember there’s one thing we caught in the first episode. We’re like, “Oh, that character could never be there at that time, so we can’t do that.” You’re doing the math of it. There was that aspect. Then once we broke them out, then I think we verbally pitched out to the studio at that point, just to get their feedback.
John: The studio being Netflix.
Al: No, actually at the time, just MGM.
John: Just MGM, that’s right, because [inaudible 00:33:26]. You’re pitching them to make sure that they understand what the vision is for the things.
Al: Correct.
John: They’re not reading things.
Al: Not yet. Once we got their thoughts and sign off, then we went and we did 10-page outlines.
Miles: Our whole philosophy always is to, I’d say overshare. There’s no surprises is our thing.
Al: I think they got the one-pagers. They got the one-pagers.
Miles: For us it’s always about we have nothing to hide. If you try and hide things or keep people at bay… We’re really looking for great notes and not guidance, but it’s great to have some… You’re stuck in a room. Even if it’s a Zoom room, you’re stuck in this little bubble. To have some outside viewpoint about what you’re doing, for us is always very helpful. It’s true with the whole process in terms of what we do. We’ll take a good note from literally anybody.
Al: Because everybody’s a viewer. Even if it’s their job, everybody’s still a viewer.
Miles: It doesn’t mean we’re going to take it.
Al: It doesn’t mean we’re going to listen.
Miles: We’re incredibly open and say to the actors, to everybody that we want feedback and need feedback. It’s always about the best product. That process goes all the way to the end, to ADR, to the post, to everything. It’s always about evolving until you finish.
John: Let’s run through the documents again. We’re starting off with these one-paragraph synopses of episodes. Then it goes to a beat sheet. Then it goes to a 10-page outline. Then from 10-page outline, those are assigned to a writer to write the full 60-page script.
Al: Correct.
Miles: I will say before that as well, we have the bible, and then we usually do a look book as well, so they have a sense of what [crosstalk 00:35:02].
John: Before they got there, they were looking through that.
Miles: Yeah, so they have a sense of what the show will look like in our minds. We shared that with Tim. It’s always about the communication, and everyone’s on the same page about what we’re doing. It’s always about that clarity of vision, “This is the show we’re going to make. This is what we’re doing,” so there’s no confusion, and keeping the lines of communication open between every department, which is hard.
John: Are all these scripts written by the time this room finishes?
Al: No. I would say four of the eight were written, and there were four that there were drafts for.
John: Great. Let’s take a moment and contrast that back to Smallville, because this was not at all the schedule on Smallville. Smallville, you’re shooting, rather than 8 episodes over the course of however long it takes, you had 22 episodes to shoot.
Al: 22 episodes.
John: These are 40-page scripts probably?
Al: I think Season 1, they were probably 50-page scripts. Probably they were too long.
John: They were long. You’re responsible for delivering basically one of these a week.
Miles: It was an absolute nightmare. The first season of Smallville is a total blur of insanity and sleepless nights and just us hammering away. Also, in the middle of this, we had 9/11, and we didn’t stop shooting for that. It was just a really crazy time. That’s where we really learned how to run a show. The first season was absolute chaos. The writers hated us. We used to write all day, turn up at work at 6 p.m., work until 12. It was just [inaudible 00:36:29] horror stories of writers’ rooms, that first season was like, oh my god.
John: That was you?
Al: Yeah, that was us.
Miles: Yeah, because you don’t know. It’s like a freight train, and then it becomes a hit, so you have this added pressure and then the studio. It’s just overwhelming.
Al: You have a process that moves twice as fast, but you have two levels. You have a studio giving notes and then a network giving notes.
John: The other crucial thing though is you are also not writing these scripts in a vacuum like you were in this mini room.
Al: Correct.
John: You were trying to write these things while you’re actually trying to produce the show.
Miles: Exactly.
John: You’re dealing with all the fires happening on set while you’re doing this and dealing with the post. In this case, you had the luxury, you had these… How long was your mini room? Was it 10 weeks, 12 weeks?
Miles: Yeah.
John: To just focus on the writing and not focus on anything else.
Miles: I’ll say the difference is that I think [inaudible 00:37:13] on a streaming show, on a show like this, is every episode has to be a Faberge egg-
John: Wow.
Miles: … whereas on network, you know you’re going to have some clunkers. You know that not every script’s going to be great. It doesn’t take the pressure off, but it’s impossible to have 22 amazing episodes of network TV.
Al: What was interesting too with Smallville, it was the era where TV on DVD was starting to become a thing. We would say Wednesday is chapters of a book, where Smallville is short stories in a world. You have some mythology episodes and some bigger ideas that then tie the whole season together, because they tell you an avid viewer of a network show watches one in four episodes. There’s a certain amount of repetition, at least in the first season, where you’re starting, where you don’t want people to be like, “I watched the pilot, and then I’m coming in an episode. What the heck’s happening now?”
Miles: It’s not a sausage factory, but it kind of is, in terms of there is that repetition. Then once you get into the rhythm of a writers’ room, it’s still incredibly difficult to turn out 22 good episodes of TV. It becomes a machine. That’s certainly what we aimed for and achieved in subsequent seasons in terms of the writers’ room and everything else became a machine.
Al: We trained people. It’s another thing too. It sounds weird. The show tells you what it can and can’t do. I think in Season 1, we had to break so many more stories that didn’t work to get to the 22 episodes that did.
Miles: [inaudible 00:38:41] in terms of what it wants to do. Everything’s always too big.
Al: It’s too big, and I get blamed.
John: You’re learning what your cast can do. You’re learning what your crew can do.
Al: Exactly.
John: You’re learning, “Okay, we can do two stunts or whatever it is for your thing, so how are we going to budget our two stunts for this?”
Al: Exactly.
Miles: Exactly right.
Al: Exactly right.
Miles: You have to figure out what’s the pattern of what you can do. The first season of Smallville, we were resisting a pattern. It was like, “No, we’re going to do four stunts an episode. Then second season we’re going to make lives easier for ourselves. We’re going to find the pattern, then we’re going to do it.”
Al: We did, because at a certain point, a TV show either runs like a TV show or it implodes. Two of the Smallville stars are doing a podcast where they’re re-watching all the episodes. They had us do one. We watched this episode in Season 1, which literally four directors worked on, then we had to shut down for a week just to finish it. When we watched it back, it was actually a pretty good episode, but we’re like, “We were insane.” I’m like, “What were we thinking?”
John: Smallville was shot in Vancouver. For this show, you wanted to keep it nice and close and local, clearly.
Al: Absolutely.
John: You wanted to keep making life easy for yourself. Where did you choose to shoot Wednesday?
Al: We shot in Romania.
John: What was the decision for Romania?
Al: There’s a couple. One was, there was literally no studio space anywhere else in the world. We looked in Ireland. We looked in the UK.
John: If you were shooting this at the peak of coming out of pandemic…
Al: The studio wanted us to go to Toronto.
Miles: Toronto.
Al: The thing with Tim is, it’s the sets. You need the sound stages to be able to build these amazing sets.
John: Size.
Miles: It’s size. You’re looking at Tim’s work. It’s all about giant sets and physical sets. The studio was obsessed with us going to use The Handmaid’s Tale sound stages, but the roof with those sound stages is 12 feet or something.
Al: It was 19 feet.
Miles: 19 feet. [inaudible 00:40:37]. It was like, “We’re not going to do that,” because what you want with a Tim show is to have built sets. They also never accepted that. The show was budgeted like a CW show. As soon as you get Tim Burton directing the show, it’s not going to be a CW budget. They never understood that. The big fight with that show was always like, you don’t hire Tim Burton and give him that budget, because he’s not going to do it.
Al: We also said Tim doesn’t show up and go, “I’ll do the discount TV version of Tim.” Tim shoots as Tim shoots, one camera, very efficiently actually, but-
John: Romania.
Al: We ended up in Romania, because they actually had massive sound stages. There’s no tax credit there, but they do have crew. If you drew a longitude-latitude line from New England across, it actually hits Romania.
Miles: There’s an abandoned Soviet era studio, which was phenomenal, with huge sound stages. Then it had an area next to it of woods and a lake.
Al: Right outside the gate.
Miles: Then it had an area where you could build this huge town. It had these amazing architectural gems in the city of Bucharest, which we used as interior sets, with these beautiful decrepit villas. It just had such texture and reality to it. I went on a location scout with Tim. It was completely obvious we had to shoot there, and we did.
We’ve shot all over the world, in New Zealand and Ireland, Canada, but we’ve never shot in a country that didn’t speak the same language, the crew. It was challenging, and in the middle of COVID. Then we had the war happen in Ukraine, which neighbors Romania, which freaked out most of the cast. It was a very, very challenging shoot.
John: We were talking about the phases of getting things made. You have your writing phase. That’s all day. You have production phase. Challenging. Mostly done in Europe. Are you posting at the same time, or you’re waiting for all the post when everything’s done being shot? Were you shooting sequentially or were you cross-boarding the show?
Al: A couple things. We shot the show in blocks of two, but we didn’t go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Miles: Unfortunately.
Al: We did one, two, five, six, three, four, seven, eight.
Miles: Makes total sense.
Al: Part of it is because Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman, who play Gomez and Morticia, are in Episodes 1 and 5, and we needed them to come to Romania once. Secondly, Tim was doing two blocks and needed time to prep.
John: A prep break.
Al: He wanted to do the first four. It was challenging, especially when you’re doing a mystery show and you’re trying to keep everything straight, and the actors are trying to keep their emotional arc straight. That was definitely a challenge. Tim’s editor was on site in Romania with us. We do all of our post at a place called Take 5 in Toronto. We’ve done that for the past three shows. What was interesting, even compared to our last show, is just all the technology.
John: It’s gotten so much better.
Al: It’s amazing.
Miles: Oh my god. In our last show, which is Into the Badlands, it used to be you go to a special studio and do a cineSync. It actually never worked. You’d talk to your editor live in Toronto, but the feed you’re getting back was slightly out of whack. It was never coordinated.
Al: Then you would have to go up for a week too.
Miles: I’d go up to Toronto.
Al: Just to sit in the rooms and finish everything.
Miles: Constantly fly up to Toronto. We were doing a show in New Zealand and Ireland at the same time, and then I’d fly to Toronto. It was an absolute nightmare. This was a dream experience. It’s completely synced up. You can talk to your editor.
John: You’re watching it on your laptop.
Miles: You’re talking to your editor on Zoom, watching the cut on your laptop. You can give notes in real time. It works incredibly well. The only thing you have to go for is now the sound mix. You go to a place in Hollywood, watch the sound mix. None of us went to Toronto. If we had to go from Romania to Toronto in COVID, you’d have to come back and spend 10 days in quarantine. It just wouldn’t have worked. Now technology is so… It’s really advanced in four or five years. It’s ridiculous.
Al: It was pretty incredible.
John: Great. We have some listener questions. I thought maybe you guys could help us out with some of the listener questions.
Al: Absolutely.
John: Let’s start with Hilary’s question.
Megana Rao: Hilary in Los Angeles asked, “I mentioned a feature idea I’m working on to an executive friend at a production company, and he said that if I tweak one insignificant bit of it, it’s exactly what they’re looking for for their new deal with a major streamer. He asked me to send him a one-pager of the feature and said that the streamer is paying for outlines and scripts. Is this different than No Writing Left Behind or is this essentially the same no-no, in that this executive could then use my one-pager at their will and cut me out completely?”
John: Let’s talk about No Writing Left Behind and when it’s appropriate to give somebody a written document versus not giving somebody a written document. You guys, you’re big on sharing. You’re big on showing stuff. In this case, it feels like Hilary’s written this original things, so she owns it and controls it. It feels pretty safe for her. What are you guys thinking?
Miles: I think maybe we’re dumb and naïve, but we always share. We have no problem leaving anything behind, because we’re fearless about what we have next. The chance of someone stealing something and executing something is minimal.
Al: I think again, she has the paper trail. The other thing too is you can always register with the Guild first so you have that stamp. Does that work?
John: It doesn’t really work. Let’s talk registering with the Guild, because obviously, I’ve followed the WGA for a long time. You can register your document with the WGA. Basically, they stick it in an envelope and say, “We sealed this envelope on this date.” It proves that it existed at a certain point in time. That’s no more meaningful than actually-
Al: Do it yourself.
John: … doing it yourself or showing an email that you sent it to somebody. It doesn’t do any more than that. It doesn’t provide an extra protection. I worry it’s basically what people feel good about, but it doesn’t necessarily do a thing. A situation where Hilary probably would not want to leave something behind, let’s say she’s one of six writers going in on a project, and you’re going out with your pitch, don’t leave them that pitch.
Al: Do not leave behind, because that’s when things can get used in the studio for parts.
John: Your details got moved into their thing.
Miles: That’s true.
Al: We have seen this, where you do have younger writers who are working with producers or a production company or a studio, and they’re just doing all this free work.
Miles: It’s just a bigger issue.
Al: You gotta stop. That’s just where it’s-
Miles: We worked with one writer. She hasn’t been paid. We’re supervising her. We were asked to come in for some producer friends of ours. She’s been working on this thing for three years. The pitch keeps getting delayed.
Al: It keeps getting pushed down. We’re like, “Guys, she’s been doing… This isn’t fair. She needs to be able to pitch this.” That’s incredibly frustrating.
John: Hilary should definitely, if she feels like writing up a one-page and sending it in, great, but if the guy keeps asking for more and more details-
Al: Do not. Do not.
John: … that’s when you start getting into problems.
Miles: That’s when you gotta say no.
John: Also, she has a whole script, so at some point just share the script.
Miles: Is it a script?
John: Yeah, she says it’s a script, or it’s a feature idea.
Miles: If it’s a finished script, then she’s fine.
John: Cool.
Megana: Mike from San Jose asks, “For someone who’s equally open to starting a career in either features or TV, does it even make sense to write spec feature scripts in the current environment? What I mean by that is, it appears that the vast majority of professional work nowadays is on the TV side of things. If a writer was to write a great feature spec, at best, it might lead them to an increasingly narrow field of work that appears to be getting narrower at a rapid pace, whereas a strong television pilot may perhaps help open the door to a much larger field of work opportunities. If equally interested in both, why would someone choose to write a feature spec in this current marketplace?”
John: This is a great question for where we were at 30 years ago versus where we’re at right now, because some people are writing TV spec pilots, but not really 30 years ago. Now, if you’re trying to staff a show, you might read a spec pilot, you might read a pilot, but you’d also read a feature. You’d read whatever, right?
Miles: Absolutely.
Al: Yeah, but I think it seems a sad reality that features are dying. I would never recommend anyone writing a feature, starting out now. I’d definitely aim at TV. That’s not a badge of shame anymore. We have Tim Burton directing now a TV show. It’s really changed everything. It’s an amazing opportunity now, what has happened. I think writing a 90-minute movie or a feature script is not the way to go, starting out.
Megana: Would you guys read a feature spec as a sample for a writers’ room?
Miles: Absolutely.
Al: Absolutely.
Megana: It’s not like what he’s saying.
Al: No, it’s not even church and state. We’d read it. It’s just the writer might have more opportunities with a spec pilot script to sell versus a spec feature script to sell. We read both.
Miles: Also, in terms of it takes half the time to write. It’s not as strict as a… It’s an easier option. It’s definitely I think the way to go. There’s more opportunity just for employment in television. What’s great, when you’re looking at a stack of scripts to read when you’re staffing a show, the shorter scripts are attractive. It really is.
Al: It’s true.
John: Although somebody could read the first half of the feature script and say, “Listen, I know this person can write. I want to meet this writer.” There are examples of TV pilots that are just… People read a random pilot, and they say, “I want to make this show.” Severance is a case of where it was just a great script and they said, “Let’s make this into a show.” That’s really rare from a person who has no TV experience, where they wrote a spec pilot and suddenly they’re shooting a show, where some movies can get made in different ways. There’s always cases of… Go was a spec script, and it sold and got made.
Miles: It’s just that I think the market for movies has shrunk and is shrinking. I think you have more opportunity in terms of selling, or even if you staff on a show and you have written three spec pilots that you can bring out and say, “Hey, I got this spec pilot that I wrote four years ago,” and present it as a new thing. It feels like there’s opportunities for your war chest of scripts.
Al: That’s where TV has gotten a little more like features, because it used to be with networks you’d write pilots every year. Then if that pilot didn’t go, it was like the pilot never existed. They didn’t go, “You had a great version of this last season. Why don’t you just do that pilot again?” Nobody ever did. Now it is more like you can have it in your drawer, because there’s not that machine of you’ve got to pick everything up in May, be shooting in July to be on the air in September. That whole system is gone with the wind.
John: One thing I think listeners may not understand is that… Let’s say you staff on a show. Let’s say you staff on Wednesday or staff on some other show, on a streamer show. You may have writing credit on some of those episodes, but those aren’t necessarily going to be good things for people to read, because they don’t know what you did on that versus someone else writing on that.
Al: Correct.
John: They may look at your work history and say, “It’s great that you worked on this show,” but they want to read something that’s original to you.
Miles: Hundred percent. That’s something that’s important. Usually, we like to read an original piece of work. In the old days, we also used to write spec episodes of shows that existed, which is a less-
John: Very uncommon now.
Miles: Yeah, but it was actually useful, because they could see if they could imitate your voice. That was something that I think has been lost. You can hire somebody who’s an amazing writer, but they have no aptitude to write our voice, because that’s what you want when you staff people is that they have that facility to be able to mimic you, which is an odd thing for some writers to do.
Megana: Jack says, “I’m Jack from England, and I’m a screenwriting student. I wanted to ask you about procrastination. I love writing. I’ve written several shorts and two pilots. I really want to take the next step and write a feature. I keep putting it off, and I know why. I’m terrified of it being terrible and discouraging me. Instead, I find myself procrastinating, and I’m stuck in a terrible place. Do you guys have any tips of squashing procrastination and finally getting around to starting that project?”
John: We’ve talked about procrastination a lot of times on the show. Episode 99, we have a big segment on it. I’m curious, the two of you together probably is a good barrier to procrastination, because you hold each other accountable.
Al: Exactly. We can also get together and kick around ideas, and it gets that process going, because a lot of times when people are like, “I have writer’s block,” you probably have story block, and you’re trying to work through things or you just hit something. I can see that getting in that cycle of like, oh, is it going to work or not? I think that is the nice thing about a partnership is you do… We always treated it like a job, so you do hold each other accountable.
Miles: If we get, as Al says, story blocked, we usually go get pie or doughnuts.
Al: Sugar’s great.
Miles: Sugar’s great. We just figure it out. The ability to talk it out with someone is often… How you get motivated is usually with a writers’ group or someone who can help you work through the story issues.
Also, often, it can mean that your story isn’t fully formed yet, so spending longer on the outline, making sure that works, so you haven’t written 40 pages of your script and realize the story’s not working, which that leads to depression and starting again. It’s really not launching too early. It’s always wanting to start too soon before you’ve actually… The heavy lifting is the story break, so making sure that you feel confident and you’ve pitched the story to people so you know the structure’s working. Once the structure works, then everything else should be much easier in terms of flowing.
John: Advice for Jack, what I hear Miles and Al saying is that having someone who you can work with is incredibly useful. If you don’t have a writing partner, having someone else who can be on your side or just hold you accountable to getting stuff done could be great to get you over the procrastination.
Jack’s also worried about, “The thing I write is going to be terrible,” and it’s going to be discouraging to him. Maybe try approaching it from the opposite way, like, “This is going to suck. This is going to be terrible. This is going to be awful, but I’m going to just do it anyway. It’s going to be bad. I’m going to learn from it.” Try to get yourself started that way, but don’t hold yourself to some impossibly high standard. Hold yourself to actually a pretty low standard [inaudible 00:54:58] to get the work done. You’ve already finished two shorts and two pilots. Great. You know you’re able to actually get stuff done. A feature’s a longer thing, but you can get a feature done.
Al: We were talking about this the other day. When we got Lethal Weapon 4, and it was our first big thing, and then you’re like, “Oh shit, how are we going to write this?”
Miles: You’re overwhelmed and intimidated.
Al: Overwhelmed and intimidated, because movies you loved in college and things like that.
Miles: Mimi Leder had written an article actually in Written By, which is the Writers Guild magazine, about this movie Deep Impact and how she got through that. She got through it one scene at a time. It’s really not thinking about the big picture. It’s thinking about every scene is a building block to something. Really, what got us through that script was just focusing on the scene where it was ahead of us and just writing that. We just accumulated scenes.
Al: It got you past the intimidation of the-
Miles: You just needed to get through a page and a half of a scene, and then you’re fine.
Megana: I really like that distinction of story block. Is that something that you’re encountering when you’re going from outline to scriptwriting phase?
Al: Our outlines are pretty detailed. When we look at the paragraphs for the scenes, sometimes there’s dialog in them. In some ways it’s kind of a little like a first draft, because you’re trying to work through… We say if it’s a roadmap, it’s giving you all the interstates, so that when you sit down to write, it’s like, “Oh, I can go off to this back road and try this.” It actually frees you up to I think be more creative when you’re actually writing the scenes and not be worried about the math and the architecture, and just being able to focus on writing the scene and knowing it works, so if all else fails, you can go back to this. It does give you opportunities.
Megana: You’re figuring out more of that before you even start the outlines.
Miles: Absolutely. That’s the key element, that you don’t start before you’re ready. It’s knowing when you’re ready. We’ll spend weeks, months, years sometimes working on just the architecture before we launch in, because you don’t want to launch in and realize, oh, that’s where the story block happens.
Al: That’s a lot of what you’re working through in the writers’ room. This was interesting, because we love Zoom rooms, and it’s great when you got the big picture stuff, but then sometimes when you’re writing and you’re getting into the more granular pieces… We’ve said this a couple of times, “I wish we’d all just get in a whiteboard, and we would totally figure this out in a couple hours.” I think there’s that element of it as well.
John: The two of you, what is your process for that early stage stuff? Are you guys index carders? Are you whiteboarders? Do you have a thing you go to, or is it just conversation and notes?
Miles: A lot of conversations at cafes. We go to the [inaudible 00:57:37] and sit upstairs and eats doughnuts, just sit there for hours talking through the store.
Al: We’re like, “Let’s write this down before we forget.” It’s a lot of that. Again, we’ve been writing together for nearly 30 years. I always know if we get together, whatever kind of problem or block we’re having, we will ultimately figure it out. Might not figure it out today. Might be two days from now. It takes a lot of talking through it.
John: Either you’ll solve the problem or you’ll realize that you’re trying to answer the wrong questions and figure out something different.
Al: Exactly right. You’ll, exactly, do something different.
Miles: It is just hours of talking.
Al: Even in the writers’ rooms, like we said, we really want the outlines. Everybody knows what it is. The writer knows what the scene’s about. It’s not just the logistics of the scene. It’s what’s the scene about.
John: Let’s talk through the last stage of what the scene’s about is really that tone meeting discussion. The script’s been written. It’s there. Everyone can agree on what the words are that are going to be said. The actual approach to how you’re going to shoot the scene and how you’re going to edit the scene, that last conversation is really important too. Can you just talk us through, working with Tim or working with any of your other directors, what is the tone discussion going into a given scene or a given day’s work?
Al: What’s interesting is what we… Tim is different than obviously the directors, because what we would do with him… We worked this out, because he’s obviously never had showrunners before. We wanted to respect his process but be available, because it’s keeping a bigger story in your head. What we would do is, we would meet with him in the trailer in the morning and go through all the scenes. He would ask any questions he had. he would then say, “Are there certain things you want to make sure that I hit?”
Miles: That’s right.
Al: He was also like, “You guys are keeping the big mystery, and so I want to make sure I’m getting all the… ” We’d say, “This is important. That’s important.”
Miles: He was amazingly collaborative in all stages, except when he was directing, when he got into his whole directing… He was different in terms of he got into…
John: I knew that from Big Fish. I was really curious what that was going to be like on the set, because on Big Fish, it’s like this garage door goes down in front of him.
Miles: Exactly.
John: He doesn’t want to have that conversation.
Al: There were a few days of a pre-shoot so the crew could get their feet. We realized on the first day, we’re like, “We gotta figure out… ” It was a little awkward. We went to him and said, “Look, we want to figure out a system so that we’re respectful of you.” He was like, “I’m glad you guys talked.” He said, “Let’s do it this way.” In the old days, we would just have one big, long tone meeting with the director, and they’d go off and shoot. Then what we started doing, I think it was on Shannara, is we would meet with the director on the weekends, because it’s a block. It’s actually two episodes you’re shooting.
Miles: There’s a long-
Al: It’s a long-
Miles: It’s like 35 days.
Al: To keep in your head. We’d go and meet with him and just go through the week’s work when it was a Sunday afternoon and there was no meter running.
Miles: They’ve now worked with the actors. Also, we’d sit there and say, “These are the actors’ strengths and weaknesses. This is the crew’s strengths and weaknesses,” just so they have a full picture of what we’re doing. Then we also talk about how we want the scenes shot. We usually have a specific way we want them shot and understanding the visual effects element or whatever it is. It’s making sure that’s communicated so it has a consistence. It’s all about consistency, so every episode feels like it’s the same vision rather than five different directors. That’s always the goal.
Each thing you do, I’m sure John would agree, you learn something new about the process. You never get there. It’s always like, “Oh my gosh.” This one was all about the camera operators, how important they were. It’s always a fascinating learning experience.
John: The most difficult people, the most dangerous people you’re going to meet in this business are the ones who’ve had some success and will never change from the way they’ve always classically done things. Those are the situations where you cannot convince them otherwise. The ship can be sinking, and they’re going to stick to their plan, because that’s what’s always worked for them.
Al: Exactly right. It’s so true. The other thing too, on this one specifically, is the other directors got all of the dailies. They got to watch all of Tim’s dailies, just to see his process.
Miles: [Crosstalk 01:01:59] to match the style.
Al: To match the style.
John: Great. You have an ongoing crew that’s going to help with everything else, but still, you want to make sure they’re making the same choice about how you’re coming into scenes.
Al: Exactly.
John: It’s not just about lenses. It’s really what the approach is.
Miles: Exactly.
John: Great. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you guys have things to recommend to our listeners?
Al: My One Cool Thing, because I have a one-track mind, I’m reading a book. It’s called The Way They Were, which is about the making of the movie The Way We Were. It is a fascinating look at the studio process in the ’70s. That movie is a total studio movie. It’s not an auteur movie.
Miles: Say what the movie is.
Al: The Way We Were.
John: The Way We Were.
Al: The Way We Were.
John: The Redford, Streisand movie.
Al: Redford, Streisand, Sydney Pollack.
John: I remember that there was a poster of that in our Stark classroom.
Al: Yes, there was, because Ray Stark, who was the benefactor, it was his movie. I always forget Art Murphy, who was the first head of the Stark Program, who used to review movies for Variety. He met Ray Stark when he wrote a review of The Way We Were, which he didn’t like. His first line of the review was, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Anyway, it’s a fascinating book just looking at an actual studio movie getting made. It was rewritten by every top screenwriter in town in the ’70s. You had Sydney Pollack as the director, who was a classic studio prestige movie director. It’s a great read, because everybody talks.
John: The nice thing about a movie with that much time going past, no one has an ax to grind.
Al: Exactly.
Miles: Mine’s a little more practical, which is I always use a Moleskine notebook, which is lined, for just jotting down lines or observations or lists, just so it’s actually not just a random thing, so it feels special. I always keep it with me. I think it’s a really good writer’s tool, that you actually physically write stuff, not just note it down on your iPad or iPhone, so it really feels like you’re writing. I think that’s something that’s very useful and I’ve really come to love as a tool.
John: Let’s get very Moleskine-specific here. What you’re talking about is about six inches wide, eight inches tall?
Miles: Yeah. It’s the hardback small book.
Al: It feels like it’s a book.
John: Are you a both sides of the page or one side of the page?
Miles: I’m both sides.
John: You’re both sides of the page. Do you date the pages?
Miles: I don’t.
John: It’s just continuous going through it all. When you’re done with the notebook, what do you do with it?
Miles: I keep them in a stack.
John: Are they labeled on the spine, or how do you find them?
Miles: No. I got five of them. They’re all full.
Al: It’s like a serial killer book.
Miles: Each one’s a horrible memory of a different production. They’re sitting there like scars. They’re incredibly useful. I think that’s a really valuable tool, just the physicality of writing what you need to do. That’s my One Cool Thing.
John: Absolutely. I use the notebooks for actually taking notes, not just my to-do list kind of stuff, but for taking notes. I’ll find it’s really useful in meetings just to note who said a thing, and a lot with WGA stuff, who made a point, and so you can go back to it and remember that person was actually a smart person. I have found that being able to go back through and actually find my old note has been really, really useful.
Miles: I always do that with casting, when I’m looking at Zoom stuff. I can write all the people down, because sometimes you don’t get the person you want. Just having that physical book rather than just a piece of paper, you can go back to refer to. Even years later you can go back and say, “I like that kid,” or, “I like that actor. What was their name?” You’ve starred that person. It’s really a great tool that’s been lost. I think that’s something that’s great.
John: Yeah, because the casting sheets we always used to get were two or three sheets of paper stapled together. You don’t hold onto that. You might take little notes on it, but you’re not going to hold onto it for a while.
Miles: The person you like is the one you pick. There could be three other people that are actually pretty good. Also, you don’t necessarily get the first person you want. People can evolve. It’s really I think useful.
John: I remember Josh Holloway, who became Sawyer on Lost, came in for a pilot of mine. He was supposed to be playing this Alaska State Trooper. He’s the least Alaskan person you’re ever going to meet. I think I said to him in the room, “You’re not right for this, but you’re fantastic. You’re absolutely going to kill it.” I was right. Those are the kind of people you star and you remember and you keep-
Miles: Who did we have? Rachel McAdams came to see us.
Al: Rachel McAdams.
John: Wow.
Miles: For Lois Lane.
Al: Lois Lane. This was in Season 3 of Smallville. We didn’t get Lois until Season 4. We met with her, and she had just done a pilot for ABC.
Miles: She hadn’t got it, remember?
Al: Nancy Drew. Was it Nancy Drew?
Miles: She was up for Nancy Drew and she hadn’t got it. We said, “You know what? That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you, because you’re going to be a movie star. Don’t worry about it.”
Al: You said, “This has been a great meeting. A year from now, you will not be here.”
John: I’m sure you’ve had this experience where the network of the studio will have an actor they absolutely love, and they’ll send them to you, and you’re like, “I don’t understand what you see in this person.”
Al: A lot.
Miles: A lot.
Al: We got a lot of that from The WB.
Miles: We’ve put people in the show as well. I won’t mention names. It’s like, “Oh my goodness, what were we thinking?” We want to play ball. Whatever happens happens. We don’t really now take that pressure, do we?
Al: No. Also, shows are different. Obviously, ’22, you had a lot of guest stars. You had a lot of those, more opportunities.
John: We’ve all been there. My One Cool Thing is incredibly self-serving. For Scriptnotes, we have our Premium subscriptions where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record. People can sign up for that scriptnotes.net. Also, scriptnotes.net, you can click on the Gifts tab, and you can buy a $29 gift pass for Scriptnotes Premium for six months or $49 for a year. You might want to give that as a gift.
Actually, I think the more clever thing to do, as many of our listeners have done, is… You know how you always have that parent or that grandparent that’s like, “I want to get you something for Christmas. I don’t know what to get you,” and you’re like, “I have no idea what to get me.” Ask them to get you a Scriptnotes Premium subscription, because you’ll actually learn something about screenwriting. They’ll feel happy that they got you something that’s going to advance your career. You’ll be happy because you’ll get to hear all the Bonus Segments and Megana laughing at the things we’re saying in the background. If you would like a gift subscription to Scriptnotes or just general Scriptnotes Premium, scriptnotes.net, and there’s a Gifts tab at the top. Al and Miles, thank you so much for a fun show.
Miles: Thank you.
Al: Thank you. It was great.
Miles: Great.
John: It was really great. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Locke Norton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig is no longer on Twitter, I’m still @johnaugust for the moment. Are you guys on Twitter or any of the social medias?
Al: Not on Twitter, no, on Instagram.
John: We’re going to probably take this out of the outline, because no one’s on Twitter anymore. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes, the Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on film school. Al and Miles, thank you so much.
Al: Thank you.
Miles: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: The three of us met in film school. I applied to the Stark Program coming from Iowa. I knew nothing about the film industry. I knew what I’d read in Premiere magazine, and that was it.
Miles: Premiere magazine.
John: I miss Premiere magazines.
Miles: I know.
Al: Me too.
John: Oh my god, it was so good. We all showed up here. We knew nothing, and we came. This was an era before the internet. One of the reasons why I loved USC film school was it had this giant script library. I remember checking out scripts in the library and learning so much. [inaudible 01:09:55] had her own script library. You could check out two a week. It was an invaluable resource. Now that’s just the internet. Any script you ever want to read, it’s there.
Let’s think about recommendations for people who are thinking about film school, pros and cons, who should, who should not be thinking about it. Would the three of us go to film school in 2022 if we were similarly situated? Would you, Al?
Al: I probably would. We all have now college-age or almost college-age kids. I don’t think I’d go to film school undergrad.
John: I wouldn’t either.
Al: I think that’s kind of a waste. I think that was great about our program was it was 25 students. They were all type-A personalities. It was like a reality show before reality shows. I think a lot of these schools cater to the graduate students. I certainly felt like we got all of the information, equipment, everything we needed. It did open doors. We all had internships. We were able to really learn the business. I only wanted to go to film school in Los Angeles. I only applied to USC and I applied to UCLA, both to the producers’ programs, and got into USC, thank god. That really was the entrée in, because we were all coming up together. None of us knew anybody.
Miles: Or anything.
Al: Or anything, because like you said, it was pre-internet. I would still do it again.
John: Miles, would you do it again in 2022?
Miles: I would a hundred percent do it again. I would be absolutely nowhere without that experience at film school in terms of a career. It was really what launched us totally, utterly. We still have friends who employ us every now and again from that experience.
For me, it was literally a kid in the UK, “How do I get to Hollywood?” because I had no interest in making films in the UK, because that sensibility was not mine. It was a way to come to America, which was a huge deal as an international student. That was great. I always loved Hollywood movies, so being in LA, that to me was like… It makes sense to come to LA, because that really is still the center of this business. I know there are great film schools all over America and all over the world. I always wanted to make Hollywood movies and be here, so for me it made total sense.
Then I also didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do within the business. Our program in particular was like a grab bag of writing, directing, producing, all of it. I think looking back now, I would like to have directed a lot more. Would I like to have gone to a directors’ program? Probably. That’s what I should’ve done. I’m not complaining about my writing career. It’s an interesting thing.
What I didn’t realize before I came to film school and what I learned very quickly at film school was writing is the essential element of this business. Without a script, without an idea that is executed well, there’s nothing. Writers really are kings. I think that’s amazing that we’re still so undervalued and underappreciated and our lives are hell most of the time. It’s still true. That’s still the lesson I think I learned, which is a revelation when I came, because I always thought the director was everything. Oh my god.
You read the scripts, as John says, from the film library, and you see everything is in the script. You read a great script for everything. There it is, written down, interpreted and executed by the director, but it actually comes from the mind and imagination of the writer.
Al: It’s funny, I thought that was interesting. The Oscars I think a couple years ago put the page all the description and answered the question, which we all get, “Do you guys just write the dialog, or do the actors just make that up?” No, they do not.
Miles: Exactly. It’s, “What do you guys do?” It’s like, you work it all out.
John: Miles, would you go to undergrad for film school?
Miles: I wouldn’t, no.
John: I agree with you both. I don’t think undergrad film school makes a lot of sense. I think if someone who is an 18-year-old is super into films, great. Go get a liberal arts degree in something else that you also really enjoy. Makes film on the side. Do a bunch of stuff. That should be your complete hobby is making films and learning about films, but it doesn’t have to be your main focus of those four years. Maybe save some money in those first four years. Go someplace that’s not super expensive.
If you really want to go to film school, go to film school for grad school, because that is where you’re going to meet a group of people who are trying to enter into this business at the same time, because as much as I learned in my two years of Stark, it was my classmates.
Al: Totally.
John: 100%. It was you guys being successful and incredibly competitive at the start. It was all of the drama and all that stuff. It was really helpful.
Miles: Of course. Absolutely.
John: Of our 25 students, 12 or more are major players in the industry now, because we all rose up together. You guys read my stuff. I read your stuff. Finding a core group of people was essential. I could not have this career without it.
Miles: That’s right.
Al: Agreed.
Miles: It is always a class of 25. 12 of us have been very successful. I feel bad for the others, because it’s a big financial commitment. Nowadays, obviously, you can sit in a room and make amazing stuff on your computer. You have an iPhone, which is incredible. If you want to be a director, there’s no excuse. You can go make a movie tomorrow, five minutes or an hour. Whatever you want to do, you can… The technology is there, and it’s dirt cheap. That’s a difference from our period. You can put it online. It can go viral. It’s amazing what people do. The guy Wes Ball, who did Maze Runner, it’s all from his thing he did in his computer at home in his basement. It’s huge opportunity. I think film school is great in many ways, but that networking element for us was critical.
John: I want to circle back to something you said, Miles, because you said as a person coming from the UK. Our program that we went through is now mostly international students. If you are a person who wants to get to Los Angeles, who wants to get to America just to learn about doing stuff, getting into a college is a way to get yourself into the US. You wouldn’t have been able to get a work visa to come here and do stuff.
Miles: No, it’s impossible. It wasn’t my motivation for coming, but in terms of coming to Hollywood, it was like, “Oh my god.” I couldn’t believe I got in, for one thing. It was a dream come true to come here to the epicenter of the movie business. It was a big deal.
Megana: Would you choose to do a producing program again?
John: It was the right choice for me because I didn’t know anything about anything. I think I imagine myself as a 22-year-old in 2022 who has listened to Scriptnotes and knows that I want to be a writer, maybe I would’ve done that. I may have done a more true production program. I’m sometimes skeptical of the pure writing programs in that it’s a lot of theory and you may not actually get a lot out of it. The nice thing about the program we were in or a production program is that you’re around people who are making stuff and that you’re seeing, “Okay, from what I just wrote here, this is the scene that actually come out.” You get [inaudible 01:16:55] a lot more.
Al: Also, I think what the Stark Program was was incredibly practical. Very few of our classes were actually at USC. They were out at Sony. They were at lawyers’ offices. They were at different things. You were just immersed in it right away.
Miles: From what John said, a lot of writing programs are navel gazing, over-intellectualized. That’s great if you want to make arthouse movies, but if you want to make commercial Hollywood movies or TV shows, that’s not a great place to start. You’re always going to be resisting, like, “This is my personal story.” It’s like, “That’s great, but that’s not going to be a global sensation or it’s not going to travel. It’s a small movie.” I think for us, USC was about commercial, like Spielberg, George Lucas. That was the goal, wasn’t it?
Al: Yeah.
John: The other crucial thing people need to remember is that unlike law school or medical school, how you’re doing in your classes does not matter at all. I have no idea what grades I got. I’m sure I did great, but I don’t care.
Miles: Remember the documentary class?
John: Oh yeah. Classically, people who don’t know the stories, we had this documentary class. Mitchell Block I think was who was teaching it.
Miles: Exactly.
John: He was so great and so dedicated about how you make documentaries, really about how you raise money to make documentaries. I remember one night he was talking through about PBS grants and how you can get up to $6,000 from PBS for this kind of thing and talking about how you cobble it together. Net to me, our friend Jen, her cellphone goes off. You should not have your cellphone in a classroom. Her cellphone goes off. She runs out into the hall. She comes back, she says, “Al and Miles just sold their script for a million dollars.” Poor Mitchell Block then had to go back to saying how you could get $9,000 from this other little-
Miles: Remember he had a great thing about, “You can become your own church and get a grant.”
Al: That’s right.
Miles: It was like, what are you talking about?
Al: I know.
Miles: You can’t be serious. Oh my god.
Al: So funny.
John: The other thing which I would say was really helpful that I got out of Stark, which I would never have really learned otherwise, is that budgeting and scheduling class. It was a drag. I did not enjoy doing it. The fact I can actually read a budget and a schedule and understand what those choices are how to make them… I don’t ever want to do that again, but I can actually understand. I would’ve had a hard time learning how that all worked if I hadn’t had a class that really just walked me through the whole thing.
Miles: That gave us a global view of everything, didn’t it?
John: Yes.
Miles: In terms of the TV thing and the legal element, which is really useful in terms of contracts. It was really a great thing. I think the issue for many people though is just owning what you want to do. Sometimes you don’t know it. I want to be a writer is a hard thing for someone to say and admit, because people will think you’re… Like, “Really?” How do you prove that? It’s like I think declaring you want to be a director. Then you’ve gotta direct and do something, which you can do on an iPhone. If you want to be a writer, you’ve gotta write. It’s not talking about writing. You’ve actually gotta do it. I think that’s something that is difficult for people. I understand why it’s difficult, because it’s really a declaration of your life, a life choice. It’s hard.
John: Let’s think through some of the below-the-line skills as well. If you want to be an editor, should you go to film school, if you want to be a cinematographer? I’d say maybe. The pros of it is you’re going to be taught by people who actually have some theory behind stuff, which is great. You may make relationships with people who will actually make a lot of movies down the road too. That could be great. You could DP on their things while they’re in film school, and they keep you around. There are people who have been building whole careers out of that. Yet that’s still not the same kind of practical experience you’d get just working on a set. Being a PA might teach you more about what that all is than [crosstalk 01:20:37].
Miles: I agree. The best experience is practical. There’s also a wealth of production now. I think if I were in the UK right now, this is the dream period. There’s so much production in the UK. It’s like, why to go film school? You can work on a Marvel movie or a Star Wars show. It’s about persistence. It’s about the hustle. That’s a great lesson.
I love this lesson from film school. We had this really aggressive producing instructor. He was an old-school Hollywood. He drove this huge Mercedes. He came to his class and said, “I was just pulled over in Beverly Hills speeding to this class. It was the best lesson I’m going to teach you right now about producing, which is beg. When the cop pulled me over, I said, ‘I’m going to get out of this ticket. You know how I’m going to do it? Beg.’ That’s what Hollywood’s about. You beg until they say yes.”
Al: Is this Jack Brodsky?
Miles: Yeah, Jack. He said, “Guess what? I got no ticket. I bluffed my way out of it, and no ticket.” It’s like, oh my god, that is such the Hollywood hustle.
Al: It is true, yeah, because that’s the thing sometimes I think writers forget is that you are an entrepreneur. You do have to really generate your own material. Again, you can change the perception of you with one script. It’s always that. You can’t wait for people to hire you or put you on staff or rely on agents or managers. You really do have to do it yourself. Then the rest comes from that.
John: Great. Thanks.
Al: Thank you.
Miles: Thank you.
Links:
- Al Gough on Instagram
- Miles Millar on Twitter
- Wednesday on Netflix
- The Way They Were book about the movie The Way We Were
- Moleskine Notebooks
- Looking for a Christmas Gift? Buy a Scriptnotes Gift Subscription $29 for six months, or $49 for a year for a friend, click here!
- ChatGPT by OpenAi
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Adam Locke Norton (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 578: Any Given Wednesday, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has just the smallest bit of swearing. Also, my audio’s a little bit goofy at the start of this podcast, but it gets better as it goes along. You may not even notice, but we pride ourselves on good audio here, so I thought I’d give you a head’s up on that. Enjoy.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 579 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we have a very special guest. He’s the writer/director of Brick, The Last Jedi, Knives Out, Glass Onion, and the upcoming Poker Face on Peacock. It’s returning champion Rian Johnson.
Craig: Woo!
John: Rian Johnson, welcome.
Rian Johnson: Yay. Oh, thank you for having me. This is like sinking into a warm bath, being back with you guys.
John: Aw.
Craig: Then you open your veins and just slip away.
Rian: Just no pain.
Craig: No pain.
Rian: It just slips away.
Craig: Just go to sleep in my arms, Rian. Shh.
John: Now, of the three of us, I am the only person who’s not in the middle of a press tour, because Craig, you’re doing your press for your show. Rian, it’s just an endless press tour, because the movie came out, I saw it on a big screen, and yet it’s still not out as we’re recording this, on Netflix. Is your life just press at this point?
Rian: Yeah, it’s a lot of press, but I don’t mind it. I actually enjoy it. It’s fun. I like the whirlwind. Travel is really fun. You get to talk to people about the movie. I don’t mind it. It’s been pretty nonstop.
Craig: I think if we are lucky, maybe when we do start to ask Rian questions, we can start with the questions we think he gets asked the most, because there are those questions that-
Rian: That would be a nice change. People sit down and they’re like, “I’m going to ask you some stuff that no one’s ever asked you before. What was the origin of this movie?”
Craig: “What is the origin of this movie?” is my favorite. Sometimes someone will ask a question, and I’ll say, “Let me rephrase your question. How did all this happen?” We will endeavor to do better than that.
Rian: I’ll take that over the… What sends chills down my spine is when you sit down and realize it’s going to be a fun interview.
John: Oh, no.
Rian: They’re like, “We have a little game that we worked up for you.” I’m like, “Oh god, please just ask me how it was to work with the actors. Please.”
Craig: “We brought Clue. We’re going to play it with you. We’re going to try and do a speed run of Clue.” We’ll do better.
John: Here’s things I know I want to talk to you about. I want to talk about theaters versus watching it at home, because I saw it in both venues. I want to talk about the differences between that. I want to talk about suspension of disbelief, which is crucial for any movie, but also especially important for a movie like yours, red herrings, sequels. I want to talk about ChatGPT. We got some more listener questions I think will be just right for Rian Johnson.
I think we’ll save all spoiler stuff for the Bonus Segment. If you’ve not seen Glass Onion as you’re listening to this episode, don’t worry, you can listen to the whole episode. It won’t be spoiled for you. Then if you’re a Premium Member, you get to stick around for the Bonus Segment and hear all the spoilers where I ask Rian some tough questions about the movie he made.
Craig: You make him squirm.
Rian: That’s right. That’s right.
Craig: I’m just going to make that noise the whole time. John, talk to me about this. We’ve got a situation with our subscribers.
John: It is. Our Premium membership goes through supporting cast. Megana and I were talking to them this last week. They said, “It’s strange because 80 to 90% of your members are month to month, but they’re monthly members, so they’re paying us $5 a month,” which is great. Thank you for doing that, but also, you could be saving a lot of money if you were an annual member, get an annual subscription.
Craig: A lot is a strong word for what we’re offering them, because if they do this, how much would they save?
John: Traditionally, it’s 5 bucks a month or it’s $49 a year. There’s some savings to go to annual. I thought let’s just encourage people to make the smarter, wiser choice. We’re going to do a promo code for the next month, let’s say through January 15th. The promo code “onion” at checkout will save an extra $10. That makes it $39 a year rather than $49.
Rian: I see what you did there.
John: Tied into Rian Johnson.
Rian: Don’t involve me, John. Don’t involve me in your goddamn show.
Craig: You are now a deductible in the class-action lawsuit that is going to be coming our way.
Rian: I was going to say. Mr. Johnson. I’m going to be like the end of The Jerk, writing out a ton of checks.
Craig: Exactly.
Rian: 39 cents! It’s a wonderful deal. It’s a wonderful deal.
Craig: We’re a company that wants to make less money. I think that’s really what we’re saying here is stop it with all this money you’re sending us. This makes sense. I think people should do that. I like it. Promo code. Also, I have to say, John, I’m so glad that you created the promo code “onion.” Obviously, everyone who listens to this show knows I had nothing to do with this. This is entirely all John’s doing. It’s smart and I love it, because whenever I see that there’s a promo code box and I don’t have a promo code, I feel so mad. When there is one and it works, what a dopamine hit.
John: It really is. It’s good.
Rian: It’s a satisfying moment, yeah.
John: Craig, talk me through the math. $39 versus $60 a year.
Craig: That’s $21.
John: That’s four months free.
Craig: Again, that’s the thing is I can’t say that we’re going to save you a ton of money. Legitimately, our goal is to make as little as possible, so do it. Go for it.
John: The best way to save money is to actually not buy it for yourself but to get your parents or your grandparents to buy it for you, because you always have those people like, “Oh, what should I get you, son or daughter, for Christmas?” Scriptnotes.
Craig: I think grandparents at this point are young enough to know what a podcast is. They’ve been around long enough.
John: It would make them proud. Hey, some follow-up. Rian Johnson, I don’t know if you’ve been watching the World Cup at all. What country is the World Cup being played in?
Rian: It’s obvious from my blank stare that the extent to which I’ve been watching the World Cup is passing by televisions where groups of cooler people than me are gathered around them, very involved. I haven’t been paying enough attention to the World Cup. I have no clue, John. I have no clue.
John: It’s a Middle Eastern country. It starts with a Q.
Rian: It’s Qatar [kuh-TAR], that’s right, because there was the controversy about it. I did read about that.
John: That’s what I want to do for some follow-up. We were discussing how to pronounce the name of that country.
Craig: I was saying Qatar [KUH-ter], and apparently, it’s not Qatar [KUH-ter].
John: The thing is actually there’s not a great place, so I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this article by Sarah Lyall for the New York Times talking about the fact that we can’t agree on how to pronounce the name of this country, Q-A-T-A-R, and there’s reasons why there’s no great American pronunciation or English pronunciation for the country, and maybe we should just be fine with however you want to pronounce it. We all know what country we’re talking about, Qatar [kuh-TAR], Qatar [KUH-ter].
Rian: How do you say it, John?
John: I was originally saying Qatar [kuh-TAR], and then all of the news people were saying Qatar [KUH-ter]. I’m like, “Oh, maybe that’s how you’re supposed to really say it.” In Arabic, it’s just not really either of those things. It’s one of those places that hasn’t been around in English long enough, that we just agree to call Paris Paris [PEH-riss] rather than Paris [pah-REE]. It’s just in the weird middle place.
Rian: Got it.
Craig: That’s so upsetting. There’s no right answer is what you’re saying.
Rian: Yeah. Scriptnotes!
Craig: I read this article years and years ago that was just an analysis of the different ways people would spell Qaddafi, Gadhafi, Qadhdhafi.
Rian: Oh, wow.
Craig: You can put as many Fs or Qs or Ks or Ds as you wanted. It didn’t matter. The only thing people agreed on was that it ended in an I.
John: Kabul [kah-BULL] is the same situation.
Craig: Kabul [KAA-bl]. Kabul [kah-BULL]? Kabul [KAA-bl].
Rian: Growing up in San Clemente, there was a freeway exit just north of our high school that was Calle Estrella [es-TRAY-uh], but everybody in San Clemente, if you were from San Clemente, you pronounced it [es-TRELL-uh]. I hope that’s changed. I hope that’s changed.
Craig: We live in Los Angeles with Los Feliz [lohs FEE-luss], which is not correct at all.
Rian: Los Feliz [lohs fuh-LEES].
Craig: In Florida there’s a lake that is Lake Buena [BWAY-nuh] Vista, but they pronounce it Buena [BYOO-nuh] Vista.
John: Buena [BYOO-nuh] Vista.
Craig: Jesus.
John: A thing that always struck me about Los Angeles is that we have two important north-south streets. We have La [lah] Cienega and La [luh] Brea. If you say La [lah] Brea, everyone’s like, “What? That’s weird. It’s La [luh] Brea.” The same La in both cases.
Craig: That is weird.
Rian: What is that about?
John: I don’t know.
Rian: We don’t say La [luh] Cienega.
John: Rian, I’m sure you’ve seen this in some of your research, but if you look at old movies set in Los Angeles, it’s Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees].
Craig: Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees].
John: Up until 1940 or something, it was Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees].
Craig and Rian: Welcome to Los Angeles [AN-goh-lees], Mr. Fink.
Rian: Me and you, buddy.
Craig: That’s right.
Rian: Me and you, Craig Mazin [muh-ZAIN]. Craig Mazin [muh-ZAIN] and me, we’re in it.
Craig: Craig Mazin [muh-ZAIN].
John: Rian Johnson, Glass Onion. I saw it in the theater, because you had that one-week theatrical release. It was so delightful to see on a big screen. Even in the first 10 minutes when we have the split-screening, the split-screenings work so well on big screen. They work on TV too, but they work so well on a split screen.
Craig: Worked great on my laptop.
John: All right.
Rian: I was going to say, Craig.
John: Craig.
Rian: Watched me on your Apple Watch last night, and texting me through the whole goddamn thing.
Craig: You were texting back.
Rian: “I know who did it. I know who did it.” Yeah, I was texting back, “Stop texting me. Watch the movie.”
John: Let’s talk about that social contract thing, because I watched it-
Rian: Thank you, John. Thank you, John.
John: I watched it a second time with Megana and Nima on the TV. It’s a different experience for many reasons. It’s a smaller screen, but also the social contract is different when you’re watching something on a TV screen. When you’re talking during it, and Nima’s shouting out these theories about things, there’s a social aspect to it that’s just different seeing it on a small screen versus a big screen. I think it’s especially relevant in a puzzle box mystery like you’re creating. I could ask them, “What do you think is happening at this moment? Where do you think the story’s going next?” I’m not going to turn to somebody who’s sitting next to me in a theater during that time. Also, I can pause it and get a drink from the fridge, seeing it at home.
It just is such a different experience. It’s not better or worse. As you sat down to make this movie, and you knew you were going to make this one for Netflix, were you thinking about the form under which people are going to experience the movie the first time?
Rian: No, I’m not that smart. I was thinking I was just making a movie. I guess just because is what I grew up with. I just make movies assuming that people are going to be sitting in a theater, I guess, watching it, having the description you described in the theater. I don’t know how you could calibrate. Do you guys feel like there’s a way to calibrate writing for that second scenario you described, John? By its nature, you’re not in control of it. There’s nothing you can to do build in anything, and I feel like it would probably be a bad idea to try to. I don’t know, maybe you guys disagree.
Craig: I don’t have any clue of what would be different. When we write movies in the old days, before streaming, when we wrote movies, we were also aware that they were going to end up on tiny little seat-back screens on United Airlines or on someone’s television at home.
Rian: Home video.
Craig: Home video. It’s always been this way. We’ve skipped a part where it was… That was the thing, the joke people would say, “I’ll wait until it comes out on video.” Now, you don’t have to wait until it comes out on video. It’s out. It ends up there anyway. I think there are two kinds of movies that people these days are saying are worth that theatrical experience more than others. One of them is comedy. Glass Onion is a comedy. I look at it as almost a pure comedy, even though obviously, primarily, it’s the murder mystery genre. I think even more than Knives Out, this one felt like it was designed for a lot of people to sit together and laugh.
Rian: Very much so. Very much so.
John: It’s also a comedy in the sense that if you met any of those characters in real life, they’d be the most extreme person you’ve ever met. They’re all really big, big, broad, silly people. This ties into suspension of disbelief. You just have to accept this is the world we’re in. Very quickly, you have to establish that as the writer and as the director.
Rian: That was a hold your breath and jump type moment for me when I started writing, because the first one was about a family in New England. It was still very heightened and aware of its own genre, but it was still a lot more grounded than this. This one, the moment I started figuring out who and what it was about, the whole thing just very naturally started ratcheting up in terms of the tone into a much more comedic…
I think when I talked to Edward Norton about the script before I sent it to him, I said, “Just to brace you, this is a little different. We go a little more Strangelove with this one. The tenor of the whole thing is just much more heightened.” For me though, that’s just entirely a product, again, of who and what it’s about. The instant I started writing about a tech billionaire at the center of this thing and the natural group of friends that he would have, any time I would try and tamp it down, you would open the news.
If the object was to reflect the nightmarish carnival reality that we’ve all had our heads in, in terms of the pop culture space with these people for the past six years, there’s no grounded version of that, because that defines the past six years in terms of our experience of watching these folks is it just keeps getting more and more garish and huge and nightmarish. Just when you think it can’t top itself, it tops itself. Anyway, all to say there was a natural gravity, and also to say it’s specific to this film. That’s one big thing going forward, because I’m already starting to doodle and write the next movie. It’s not like this is a trajectory of where these are going. This is just what this on required. I’m really excited actually about the idea that each one of them will be different according to the needs.
Craig: Even though these characters are pretty pushed, some more than others, I’m still… Kate Hudson is so fantastic-
Rian: So good.
Craig: … and can play something that… There was a time when her mother, Goldie Hawn, ruled the world as the ding-dong, a slightly daffy, beautiful, but confused person. That fell out of style, maybe because it just got super tropey. Then it comes back. It comes roaring back. She reminded me so much of her mom in this movie, which was so wonderful to see. These characters, their expression is pushed, their expression is broad, but inside, there’s actual, legitimate things going on.
If I were you, and I’m curious if you were you, it would be the same… You have a general sense of what you want to write here, but when you’re designing all the machinery of the murder mystery, are you pulling out what ought to happen from the way these characters relate to each other, meaning do you design the mystery for the relationships that are there, or do you design the mystery and then say, “How should these relationships fit into this machinery?”
Rian: I guess it’s the second one, but “when I designed the mystery” is maybe the wrong way of putting it. I would say I designed the story. That may seem like a fine distinction. For me, the difference is just I definitely don’t create a field of suspects and then pick, “Okay, which one done it?” I start like with any other type of movie. I start with structure. Structure contains the mystery within it. The structure isn’t even defined exactly by the mystery.
I’ll avoid spoilers with Glass Onion, so I’ll talk about Knives Out. We will talk Knives Out spoilers, I guess. In the first one, it was the notion of getting a character that the audience actually cares about, doing this false reveal that, oh my god, they actually did do the murder, but still keeping the audience genuinely on their side emotionally, so it’s not like a Norman Bates in Psycho type empathy. It is actually like you want her to get away with it. Then introducing the detective and the tropes of the genre where you know they never get away with it in the end, and then doing the actual reveal at the end of, oh, there’s been a murder mystery hiding underneath this the whole time. The decisions for all the characters were backed into through the needs of making that work.
The character of Ransom, Chris Evans’s character, was very much backed into in terms of, how do I genuinely fake out the audience at the end. It can’t be a sympathetic character. It has to be something that ultimately makes sense. If your first impression of him is, “Yeah, he did it,” and then you think, “Oh, they’re doing a jiu-jitsu, using that against me type thing of, of course the one person you think did it is the only one who is actually on her side against all these monsters,” and then the reveal at the end, nope, he actually is exactly what he seemed at the beginning, that’s going to be satisfying for the audience, because you’re going to feel a balance. You’re not going to feel like we cheated. The first thing we told you is the thing that is actually true. That’s the math that goes into all the characters for me. It is a very character-driven process, but it starts with structure, and then the characters are put in to serve their functions in it, I guess.
Craig: I did not expect that.
John: As we get to the spoiler section, let’s talk about potential spoilers for the whole career and profession of screenwriting. We got a lot of questions this last week about AI and ChatGPT and other systems that are going to replace us as writers.
Craig: Oh, good.
John: Being a representative question. Megana, how about Josh’s question?
Megana Rao: Josh wrote in, “I’ve been an avid listener for years, but I’ve never felt compelled to actually write in until now. By now we’ve all seen the ChatGPT AI chat bot that, according to Forbes, is able to write college-level essays when given a prompt, boosting concerns that such technology can replace human workers like journalists or programmers in the future.
“A friend of mine who works in tech called me the other day to warn me that AI like this is going to be writing most screenplays for movies in 10 years and that I should get in front of it now by learning how to utilize it. His call was well intentioned, but it sent me into something of an existential spiral. If AI can write technically competent, entertaining screenplays, what’s stopping studios from using AI to generate the screenplays for all of their tent pole franchise films? With the demand for new content higher than it’s ever been, why wouldn’t a mainstream platform use an AI to churn out a hundred episodes that fill time and entertain well enough? Basically, he was saying that it’s going to be near impossible to make a living as a writer much sooner than people think, and I’m frankly freaking out.”
John: I had a chance to play with ChatGPT and other versions like it. It’s just really, really impressive. Rian and Craig, have you tried any of these yourselves?
Craig: No, I haven’t. When Josh said, “By now, we’ve all seen,” I was like, “Eh.” I got news for you, Josh.
John: You guys have been busy.
Rian: I’ve seen examples of it. I’ve seen examples of it. I haven’t messed with it myself. I’ve seen the stuff that some people have-
Craig: We’ve got a screen share suddenly.
John: I’m going to screen share.
Rian: Screen share.
John: I’m going to screen share here.
Rian: Hide your porn, John.
John: I have ChatGPT open here. Let’s ponder, let’s think about something that we might try to use ChatGPT for. Should we have it figure out a plot for… You’re starting to work on the next Knives Out. Should we have it start to think about it?
Rian: Give me it, man. I’ll take it. God, yes, please. Let’s see what’d happen if we took the franchise to space with the next one. Let’s say Benoit Blanc is taken to a moon base.
Craig: Let’s do that. Can we tell it to do that?
John: Sure. I’m doing that right now. Give me a plot summary for a Knives Out murder mystery set in space with Benoit Blanc.
Craig: That’s all you say is, “Give me a plot for that.” Wow.
John: Craig, would you just read this aloud?
Craig: “In this futuristic murder mystery set in space, renowned detective Benoit Blanc is called to investigate the apparent suicide of a wealthy space station owner. Upon arriving at the space station, Blanc quickly realizes that the death was actually a carefully planned murder and sets out to uncover the truth. With the help of a diverse cast of suspects, including the victim’s family, Blanc must unravel the complex web of lies and motives to identify the killer. As he delves deeper into the case, he finds himself up against a cunning adversary who will stop at nothing to keep their deadly secret hidden.” Does it do more than that? That’s just basically saying Benoit Blanc goes to a murder mystery.
Rian: To me, what’s mostly impressive is just the grammatically correct-
Craig: The sentences work.
Rian: … structuring of cut and paste of the linear progression of what the movie is. There’s nothing in there that isn’t cut and paste from either fan theories or what people wanted to see or other stuff, although I guess depending on the type of movie you’re talking about, that might be enough. I can think of some big movies that, yeah, that’ll work, but I don’t know.
Craig: I love the sentences. I love the way that basically this thing is doing a great job of being a bullshit artist. I have seen this in rooms where people start pitching things and it’s all about cadence and confidence. Then you realize, “They’ve told me nothing.” What’s happening here is ChatGPT, to me, doesn’t seem to be threatening screenwriters. It seems to be threatening producers who go around saying stuff like this.
Rian: Good in a room. It’s good in a room.
Craig: It reminds me of my grasp of story structure when I was beginning, right at the beginning. Maybe it will grow and get better and better. It’s certainly leaning hard into the expected.
John: Let’s do one last push on this. I’m saying, “Okay, this doesn’t feel very space-oriented. Let’s make sure this does a lot in space, with things that can only happen there. Give me a three-act structure.”
Craig: Whoa. Here it comes.
Rian: Whoa.
Craig: First of all, the fact that it understood that is insane. “Act 1. Benoit Blanc arrives at the space station to investigate the apparent suicide of its owner. He quickly realizes that it was actually a carefully planned murder and begins to interview the suspects, including the victim’s family and business associates.” That was Act 1. “Act 2. As Blanc delves deeper into the case, he uncovers a complex… ” They’re just restating the other stuff.
John: Yeah, they are.
Rian: This is just restating it.
Craig: Then Act 3, oh, new, “However, the killer,” in Act 3, “attempts to flee the space station in a spaceship. In a thrilling finale,” that’s a little strong, “Blanc must pursue the killer through the vastness of space in order to bring them to justice.” Oh, man. They blew it at the end. They had me and they lost me.
John: They did.
Craig: “Along the way they faced very… ” Oh my god.
Rian: Yet you can totally see this working in a room. Some asshole gets up on the table and is pumping their arm and pointing at the exec. You can see execs coming out of the room saying, “That was the best pitch I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Craig: “I had to dodge meteors and asteroids and [inaudible 00:23:57].”
Rian: Starts grabbing the bottled water off the table and throwing it. I can see this working.
Craig: ChatGPT is an asshole producer. That’s basically what it is at this point.
Rian: Like you said, this is like my initial grasp of story thing. I don’t know, as this gets better, is it going to get better the way that we got better at it, or is this smoke and mirrors, and this is a cut and paste thing from the internet, and it is very impressive in terms of… I don’t know, because I don’t know the mechanics behind it. That’s the weird question. I don’t know.
Craig: Also, one thing, Josh, I’m going to try and comfort you here a little bit, because I get it. It’s easy for me to be more relaxed about this, because I’m 51 years old. 10 years from now, he’s done. Wheel him into the old age home. For people that are coming on up, here’s one thing that I think will hopefully save us, and that is actors. Even if they digitize actors, they still have to talk. As long as actors are there to say, “Who wrote this shit and how do I fix it?” there will be a job for a human to come and say, “Sorry, the robot clearly blew it there. Let me see if I can make this better.”
Basically, at this point, there’s… David Erlich, who’s a critic, he wrote this thing of like, anyone that bets against James Cameron is insane, doesn’t matter what the trailer looks like. I think the same thing is true for technology at this point. It’s so drastically changed our lives. Look at what we’re doing now. We’re making a podcast over Zoom. Everything’s changed. I think it’s possible that something that is exhibiting this quiet level of competence could get good.
John: Let’s see if it can actually write us a scene here. I’ll say, “Write a scene in which Benoit first meets the police investigator, the police person in charge here, at the space station.” Rian, give me some prompts, something that the scene is about, something to hang this on.
Rian: They talk about the clue of a broken air hose on the victim’s spacesuit.
John: I love it.
Craig: They’re going to compete over this, and one of them is going to be… Then they’re going to work together.
Rian: Then they have to work together.
Craig: Then they’re going to fly through space. By the way, the third act goes crazy and becomes Battlestar Galactica.
John: It’s actually a hundred percent true though, right?
Craig: I know. That is what ends up happening when you’re like, “We don’t know how it ends, so we go crazy.” All right, here we go. “Benoit Blanc and Constance Pickering.”
Rian: That’s pretty great.
Craig: “Blanc is standing over a holographic display of the victim’s spacesuit, examining a broken air hose. Pickering approaches and clears her throat, drawing Blanc’s attention. ‘I’m Constance Pickering, and I’ve been assigned to investigate the death of Marcus Wells.’ Blanc raises an eyebrow. ‘Marcus Wells? I was under the impression that his death was a suicide.'” That doesn’t sound like something he would say. “Pickering shakes her head. ‘Not according to the evidence. The broken air hose on his spacesuit indicates he was suffocated.'”
Rian: Oh, wow.
Craig: “‘This was clearly a murder.’ Blanc considers this for a moment. ‘Interesting, and what leads do we have so far?’ Pickering crosses her arms. ‘As of now, we have a list of suspects but nothing concrete. I was hoping to discuss the case with you and see if we could combine our efforts.’ Blanc nods. ‘I think that’s a splendid idea.'” Even though we were competing for about .1 seconds, let’s work together and see if we can’t crack this case wide open. By the way, I am available for looping if Daniel Craig is not.
Rian: That’s pretty darn good.
John: It’s pretty good.
Rian: I was going to say. You’re hired.
Craig: Wow. Jeez. This is terrible actually.
Rian: This is really bad.
Craig: It’s not consistent. “Rewrite this as a screenplay.” I like the fact that John is just this brutal taskmaster and chat bot’s like, “Okay, I’m trying.”
John: We don’t need to read through this again, but basically, the first version of this was actually in prose form, and I just said, “Rewrite this as a screenplay scene.” It’s doing exactly what [inaudible 00:28:06].
Craig: It’s actually terrible. Really, profoundly terrible. Blanc is staring at this thing. She comes in and says something terrible. All the dialog is awful. Blanc seems stupid. Then she says, “Not according to the evidence. The broken air hose indicates that he was suffocated. This was clearly a murder.” There’s nothing to support that whatsoever.
John: Here’s what’s surprising and impressive to me is the fact that this large language model understands that a murder in space could be about a broken air hose and suffocation would be a thing.
Rian: Absolutely.
John: That’s surprising to me that in 2022-
Rian: That’s incredibly impressive that-
Craig: It’s pretty cool.
Rian: … from the prompt you gave it, it drew this out. Absolutely. Not a good scene, but very impressive.
Craig: This chat bot is now better than most people. I’m being serious about it. Screenwriting is hard. The average person, if they wrote a scene, it would not be this good. This is still a bad scene, but screenwriting is hard. What chat bot has to do is become the best in the world to defeat the Rian Johnson’s out there. The only rooting interest I have in ChatGPT at this point is defeating Rian Johnson.
John: Let’s go back to Josh’s questions and fears. I think one thing to give him hope, and I think we’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, is that screenwriting is about pushing words around on the page, which ChatGPT is getting better at doing, but it’s also about being able to be with people and communicate what the vision is for the thing and being able to respond and address their concerns. It’s being able to talk to Daniel Craig about why his line is that way and how to treat the line, if it’s that the line is not fitting that actor right or fitting the moment right.
So much of the job is not just the words on the page but also the communication about the story on the whole. That’s the thing that computers have a much harder time doing. It’s the subtle, have to be there in person, have to be there in the flesh to do stuff. That’s not going to change.
Craig: Or…
Rian: The robot dog with the little reading glasses.
Craig: At some point it may just be Wall-E. We’re just sitting there in our chairs, and they’re making movies for us. We can adjust the movie as we’re going. You get to the end of Glass Onion, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s who did it? I don’t like that. Fix it.” The movie starts over.
Rian: I want to see a robot on set just throwing a script down, like, “Your motivation is your fucking salary.”
Craig: “Get out of the trailer, you piece of shit. We are paying you $800,000 an episode.” Then another robot’s like, “I asked for almonds. These are cashews. I’m out.” I like that idea. I like that they’re harassing each other. If we’re going to teach them to be like us, I’m just saying, they’re going to end up being like us.
John: It needs to do a behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of the actual production, so the reboot, behind-the-scenes thing, so we see how it’s all put together and made.
Rian: There you go. I like it [crosstalk 00:31:17].
Craig: Oh, wow.
John: I don’t think there’s a thing to do about this. I don’t think there’s legislation that’s going to happen. I don’t see there’s a way to protect ourselves from this necessarily. I think it’s making peace with it and recognizing that some of it is going to be transformative. Some of it can be really helpful, in the way like we moved from typewriters to word processors, we actually got more done, can do some more stuff ourselves. It’s going to be a change. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s going to be there.
Craig: There are some movies where the plot is AI gets out of control, and then there’s a war. I think the backstory of The Matrix is, or between 1 and 2 or something, that there’s this whole robot war. The whole fundamental backstory of Dune is that civilization got into a war with their own AI and had to destroy them. Now AI is illegal. That’s why you have Mentats, the human computers.
Rian: Is this the point where we reveal that John has been an AI for the past year of Scriptnotes? Suddenly, he just pixelates, and the real John steps out and says-
Craig: “I’ve been just sitting in my room. I wrote this.” I think it’s much more interesting if I end up being the AI. I think I’m actually easier to program. I’m way more predictable, just like, “Oh, there’s the umbrage subroutine. Oh, there’s this stupid [crosstalk 00:32:37].”
John: Hey, Craig, do you remember when we did-
Rian: Run disgruntled.
Craig: Run disgruntled guy.
Rian: Disgruntled subscripts 23.
Craig: Go to 10.
Rian: Go to 10, semicolon.
John: Back at the live show we did with Melissa McCarthy and folks, we did a thing where I plugged in all the Scriptnotes transcripts into this Markov chain generator, and we had a conversation between you and me that was all computer generated. That was only three or four years ago, and things have just progressed so much more.
Craig: They have. What’s happened is they’ve gotten way smoother with the stuff that’s rules-based. The grammar is spectacular. The punctuation I’ve loved, and also the complexity of the sentences with interior clauses. This thing’s actually a good writer. It’s just that it doesn’t have any ideas of its own. It’s clearly just puking out stuff. It certainly knows how to choose wisely. It really is as good as most producers. I’m not joking.
Rian: The thing that it’s doing absolutely none of is things that don’t make sense for the characters to do in a completely linear thought type way. It’s doing, “Here’s the bad idea.” It’s just doing the bad idea.
Craig: It’s the bad idea.
Rian: The notion of something that’s genuinely unexpected, but people acting like actual people in real life, doing stuff that makes no sense, and then it reveals why they did it, that’s interesting. Are you about type [crosstalk 00:33:58]?
Craig: Yep, he is.
Rian: Are you about to type in, “Do something that doesn’t seem like it makes sense.”
Craig: He’s asking it to translate the scene to French.
Rian: Translate the scene to French. That’s easy.
Craig: (speaking French)
Rian: (speaking French)
John: This is something I think might actually be an opportunity though. What this could really open up is writers whose native language is not English, who want to write English scripts. I think it’s a chance for them to actually have natural, native-sounding English, even if they don’t actually have that themselves.
Craig: Interesting.
John: That ability to rephrase and to write in English, even though it’s not your native tongue, I think will be a lot better, because there’s definitely people who can read in English really well, and they know what that is, but they can’t do it themselves. That will be interesting to see whether more international writers can do it.
Rian: I don’t know if it’s actually what you’d define as AI technology, but in the Google Translate apps and all that-
Craig: That is AI.
Rian: You can see how that’s going to be transformative in the next decade. It’s going to be like in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish in our ear. It’s kind of exciting to think about that aspect of it, because it’s getting so good.
Craig: Didn’t Microsoft advertise… There’s a great article I read about how Google Translate was based on this old, very formal way of doing it, and then they did go into this fuzzy logic AI world and it just made it so much better, so much faster. It’s getting better every day. People are working on the put it in your ear and it hears what people are saying and translates it live in real time. That’s the thing I’m waiting for. That’s just going to be such a joy. It’s just going to make ordering in restaurants a little bit easier, and that is what it’s all about.
John: I’ve also seen demos of real-time subtitles, so basically glasses you wear, and it’s subtitling life in front of, which could be effective as well.
Rian: God, I wish Douglas Adams was still around and on Twitter.
Craig: I know, for a lot of reasons, yeah.
Rian: What would he make of all this? No kidding.
John: It’s time for one of our favorite segments, which is…
John and Craig: Megana Has a Question.
Megana: I have a question about variable frame rate. I saw this tweet by Eben Bolter about Avatar: The Way of Water.
Craig: Eben Bolter, by the way, just to interrupt, one of the cinematographers on HBO’s upcoming television series The Last of Us.
Megana: Oh, wow.
John: That’s nice.
Megana: Maybe you can explain this to me.
Craig: Yes, please. Sorry, Megana. Sorry for the interruption. Just wanted to say Eben Bolter is a wonderful and very, very smart guy. You would love him, Rian. He’s a scientist. I know you like a scientist-y piece.
Rian: I like a good scientist.
Craig: All right, Megana, apologies.
Megana: That’s my question. In this tweet, Eben says that he saw Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D and that it was projected at 60 frames per second, but Cameron’s actually moving between 60, 48, 30, and 24 frames per second, shot by shot. I was confused by what that meant, because it challenges what I think about frame rate.
John: Rian Johnson, you’re a person who makes movies. Can you tell us about frame rates as they exist in 2022 and what we’re used to and what the options are?
Rian: For most of the modern history of cinema, we’ve been watching movies at 24 frames a second. When you watch a film, it literally means that every second there’s 24 distinct frames on the screen. Also, through the history of cinema, there have been people who have messed around with, what if we made that frame rate higher? Is it Douglas Trumbull who was-
Craig: He was trying to do 48 or…
Rian: Yeah, he did. He was trying to push it up. There have been historic precedents for trying it, but it’s never took. Recently, there has been a new push. Peter Jackson I think is the one who’s done it on the biggest scale in his Hobbit movies.
Craig: Ang Lee also did it.
Rian: Ang Lee has experimented with it. It’s just bumping it up to more frames a second. What that does, it takes out an element of stutter to it. It takes out an element of smeariness to it. It makes everything incredibly crisp and clear. If you’re used to watching stuff at 24 frames a second, it feels very, very odd. You get lots of people making the analogy, because it’s mostly where we’ve seen non-24 frames a second thing, to an iPhone. It looks like it was shot with an iPhone because it doesn’t have that stutter to it.
You can get into philosophical questions of, is it just what we’re used to, or is it something where the human brain actually does… It feels odd. The process is real. The notion that higher frame rates actually more duplicate what we see with our eye in real life, not really, I don’t think, because your brain is processing it. The fact that it looks weird to us tells me maybe no, but I don’t know.
Multiple frame rates is exactly that. It’s that Cameron can actually make the movie so that in the action scenes, when there’s tons of stuff moving around, suddenly it’s at, whatever, 120 frames a second or whatever it is, so that it’s not smearing and you can see all the individual things. Then when it’s in the dialog, more intimate scenes, you can dial it back down seamlessly to 24 frames a second. Suddenly, it feels more natural. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m very curious to see it. I generally have not been a fan of high frame rate stuff that I’ve seen already.
Craig: Same.
Rian: I’m an old grumpy man though.
Craig: As well. Look who you’re talking to. What’s fascinating to me is, first of all, one of the strange things about frame rates is that because it started with film cameras, and 24 frames per second was essentially about the fastest they could go with intermittent motion and the sprockets pulling the frames down. Also, 24 frames per second was enough to satisfy the need for persistent motion, that the eye couldn’t tell that it was looking at a lot of pictures. Our brain could fil in the gaps, and it seemed smooth to us.
When television came along, because of the way electricity works and the way television was operating by scan lines and frequencies, 30 frames a second, or 29.98 [crosstalk 00:40:24] is how television works. Now what happens is we have to figure out how to go from 24 frames per second to, okay, we’re going to air it on television. That’s where you got this whole telecine 3:2 pull down thing where they would duplicate a few frames here or there or actually split frames up into two frames because of the scan lines. Now, here we don’t have that problem per se. He’s projecting at 60 frames per second. I get where, okay, this scene, let’s say I shot at 30 frames per second, all I’m doing is duplicating. I’m just duplicating frames in there, I would presume. I don’t know. You’re not inventing new frames in between.
John: I read up on this. There are theaters that are equipped to actually change the frame rate. The projectors can actually change.
Craig: The projection changes.
John: There are theaters that do that. For theaters that can’t do that, he is basically just cheating.
Craig: Duplicating.
John: Essentially, it’ll stay at 60 frames per second, but for things he wants to be at 30 frames per second, he’ll just put the same frame twice or do other-
Craig: Going from 30 to 60, that’s the simplest math in the world. 24 to 60, you can’t duplicate every frame, so which frames do and don’t and-
John: There’s some math. There’s some way you interweave those things to make it work.
Craig: Like Rian, I am not a fan of these high frame rate. They feel soap opera to me. Of course, motion smoothing, which is something that Rian and I turn off wherever we go, including Best Buys if we can, that is creating a fake-
John: Artificial.
Craig: … artificial up-framing. I do enjoy sports at 60 frame. If I see something like that, it’s awesome, because it’s supposed to be live, so I don’t mind it as much. As I said before, don’t bet against James Cameron. I’m wondering if he just very smartly was like, “This is basically sports right now. You’re going to want to feel like you’re there. It’s going to be way more interesting at that rate.” Then when two people are just talking around a fire, let’s just dial it back to 24, because it’s a good old-fashioned chat.
John: In three hours I will be able to tell you, because I’m seeing Avatar at the Academy screening this afternoon. I’m excited to see it.
Rian: You fancy.
John: I’m fancy.
Craig: You are fancy.
John: Apparently, the 120 frames is a lot of the underwater stuff, which I could imagine exactly where it’s perfect, because it is such a different experience. We don’t have a great sense of what underwater necessarily needs to feel like, and so I suspect that’ll work great there.
Rian: The 3D is almost the more interesting thing to me, because the first Avatar launched a whole thing. Suddenly, we had to release all these big movies in 3D. The fact that it’s gone away, the notion of what is this. Is this going to be another resurgence, or is this going to be like a, yeah, this movie does it, but then people are not actually-
Craig: Yeah, just let James Cameron do it.
Rian: It feels like 3D, it feels like it didn’t take. I’m all in for Cameron to do it. It doesn’t seem like people generally stuck with it, I guess. I don’t know.
John: Rian, I forget, did Last Jedi have a 3D release?
Rian: It did. We did a 3D. The technicians who did it were wonderful, and they were very, very cool. I felt bad that I was slightly grumpy about doing it, because I don’t like 3D. If you like 3D, they did an absolutely… They put a lot of work into doing an absolutely fantastic job.
Craig: It was nice that you could ruin my childhood in 3D.
Rian: That’s right. I’d like to come right at you and put my hand through the screen and poke you on the nose.
John: Slap you. For the 3D you did for that, that was all post. While you were on set, shooting the film, you did not need to worry about the 3D.
Rian: No.
Craig: Helpful.
Rian: Not a lick.
Craig: No one wants that.
John: Hey, let’s get to some normal listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Sarah asks, “In last week’s episode, 576, Craig recalled advice he got on his first directing job that suggested it was politics, not techniques that was the biggest challenge for new directors. As someone with no experience on Hollywood sets, can you give a sense of what you mean by navigating the politics? Does it boil down to conflict management or something more specific? How does one train for that kind of thing?”
Craig: I guess, Sarah, I could give you a sense of what I thought it meant at the time, which was you are caught. This was relevant really to studio, not necessarily independent film, but for a studio production. You’re caught between executives above you and sometimes actors who are vastly more famous and better paid than you are. You have producers that are managing your budget and appear to be working with you and yet are also directly employed by the people at the studio who want them to produce the budget. Everyone in Hollywood is adept at lying. Also, there is this thing that happens when you’re a rookie director, which is everyone presumes you are going to fail.
Coppola told this great story about on his second or third day of shooting on The Godfather, they started with the wedding sequence. He went into where they had their bathrooms set up. There were stalls. He was in a stall. A couple of crew guys came in and didn’t realize he was in there and were just talking about how Francis Ford Coppola was an absolute idiot, the worst director ever, and any one of them could be doing better. He was like, “I think they’re right.”
There’s just this weird thing where everybody’s desperate to invest confidence in the captain of the ship, and yet at the same time they’re all gossiping about how the captain of the ship stinks. You have to just figure out how to get your legs, how to earn people’s trust, and how to navigate the way that some people are actually not working in sync with you and get them to work in sync with you.
How does one train for that kind of thing? There is no training. You just get thrown into the piranha tank and start figuring out how to live with the piranhas. That’s what I meant, at the very least.
John: Hey Rian, what advice would you give to Sarah in terms of, she’s directing her first feature. What does she need to think about in terms of the group dynamics, politics, whatever you want to call the stuff that’s not about the words on the page or what’s in front of the camera, but everything else? What advice do you give her?
Rian: I’ve been blessed in that I have an amazing producer that I’ve been working with since the start of my career, Ram Bergman, who’s kept me… I just read that Godfather book, the most recent one. I’ve never been in a situation like that where I am alone on an island, surrounded by sharks, trying to just… I will say though, even the best-case scenario, there’s always some degree of… A big part of directing is managing people and is management, that element of getting the team on your side, maintaining their trust in you. The thing is though, if I heard all of this before I directed my first movie, I would be so petrified, I probably would never step on a set. This sounds so scary to me. I do want to say it sounds a lot scarier than…
I guess my advice is, know the movie that you want to make. Go in there with a strong vision of what you want, but also bringing people into the process with open arms and making them feel like you’re all working towards getting the same vision. Just all the Pollyanna-ish stuff, that’s what you go in there armed with. Then it’s like just jumping in the pool. You’re going to be swimming. You’re not going to be thinking about the mechanics of how you swim. You’re just going to be swimming to stay above water. It could be hard. It could be tough. When you’re in the middle of it and actually doing it, there’s an element of intuition that kicks in, in terms of how to deal with the stuff. It’s not like sitting down and doing math. It’s much more like jumping into the pool and keeping your head above water.
John: There’s that aspect of it’s a group project and everyone’s trying to do their best work. I’ve found just how to have the conversations with people that got them to do their best work and allowed for different opinions. At the same time, you’re trying to steer everybody together to make your vision of the thing possible. That’s tough. Especially coming out of mostly having been the screenwriter in those situations, I’m just trying to solve multiple problems. I’m trying to solve for multiple variables, like the actor who really wants this one thing, but the producer who needs this budget down to a certain thing, a director who wants this one thing.
When you’re the director, in theory you are running the whole thing, it’s all your choice, and yet there’s some bigger stuff around that you have to always be aware of. It’s tough. I thought maybe we’d ask the AI one last time to see if they have advice on this.
Rian: Oh my god, you love this so much. You like this more than you like us. John, [crosstalk 00:49:25].
Craig: Unquestionably. Are you kidding me? I’m off this podcast.
Rian: Oh my god.
Craig: The second this thing can be his cohost, I’m gone.
John: Here was the prompt I tried. “Write a Scriptnotes podcast transcript in which John August and Craig Mazin ask Rian Johnson for his thoughts on how to answer this question from Sarah.” I just verbatim put in the question from Sarah.
Craig: Whoa.
Rian: Oh, wow.
John: Craig, it’s just transcript, so we’ll just read what’s here. I’m literally just reading off the screen.
Rian: Oh my god. This is a lot.
John: “Hi, welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I am John August.”
Craig: “I am Craig Mazin.”
John: “On this week’s episode, we have a question from Sarah, who asks about navigating the politics on a movie set. Sarah said… ” There’s a question from Sarah. Craig?
Craig: “Good question, Sarah, and to answer it, we have a very special guest with us today. Rian Johnson is a writer/director/producer known for films like Knives Out, Looper, and the critically acclaimed Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” That is AI for sure. “Rian, welcome to the show.”
Rian: “That’s right. Thanks for having me, guys. It’s great to be here.”
John: “Rian, when you talk about navigating the politics on a movie set, what do you mean exactly?”
Rian: “I think there are a few different aspects to it. First of all, there’s the politics of working with a large group of people with different roles and responsibilities. As a director, you’re the one ultimately responsible for making the creative decisions, but you’re also working with a lot of other people who have their own ideas and opinions, so it’s important to be able to listen to those ideas and incorporate them into the overall vision for the film, while also being able to assert yourself when necessary and make sure the final product is the best it can be.”
Craig: This is the worst Rian Johnson ever.
Rian: It’s really bad.
Craig: “What about dealing with conflict on set? I know that’s something that can come up when you’re working with such a large group of people.”
Rian: “Absolutely. Conflict is inevitable on any movie set, especially when you’re working on something as complex and collaborative as a feature film.”
Craig: Wait, wait, wait, hold on. I gotta stop that. That is an insane sentence.
John: It is, yes.
Craig: “Conflict is inevitable on a movie set, especially when you’re on a movie set.” Go on.
Rian: “It’s important to be able to handle those conflicts in a way that doesn’t derail the production or damage relationships. That can mean anything from having a difficult conversation with a member of the crew to mediating a disagreement between two actors to managing your own stress and emotions when things get tense.”
John: We can stop there.
Craig: Terrible.
John: I don’t think Rian’s answers were in Rian Johnson’s voice.
Rian: I don’t think it was terrible.
Craig: That’s the problem. The answers themselves were great, because they were drawn from the big book of generic answers. Rian and I are both in the middle of press. Because you get asked the same question a million times, you do start to come up with some pretty… You shake it up a little bit but-
John: Canned responses.
Craig: There’s some canned responses. When you’re doing press, you naturally will push yourself more towards the middle of polite, reasonable answers. The answer that AI gave there was essentially the polite answer. This is great training for people who don’t know how to answer.
Rian: I don’t know, reading it though, I will say this. There was absolutely nothing in that that was any kind of even simulation of experience-born advice. It was all just a complex version of restating the question, which is though what Craig’s saying. That is like when you’re on hour four of a string of five-minute interviews, that’s something your brain defaults to a little bit. Reading it out loud, it’s absolutely content-less in that regard.
Craig: What the AI would be fantastic at is answering questions on behalf of athletes, because athletes are infamous for not knowing-
Rian: Yeah, that thing of like, “I think we just want to get out there and give our best game and pull for the team.”
Craig: “I’d say the most important thing is that we get the win. Four home runs in a game feels pretty good, but at the end of the day, it’s all about winning.”
Rian: I think an AI could probably do better.
Craig: That’s what I think they should… Let’s just get into that, and then we’ll come around to movies.
John: One thing I do want to acknowledge though is that I did not tell it how to start a Scriptnotes podcast. Clearly, it was trained on our transcripts, because it did give the, “Hi, welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.” It knew what that was. It knew how a Scriptnotes podcast starts. I feel good that we are part of the corpus of words that it learned how to talk about Scriptnotes.
Rian: You feel good about that?
Craig: I’m horrified.
Rian: That’s just a little creepy.
Craig: That’s the difference between me and John. I am horrified that they know we’re here. I would’ve much preferred to have been under the blanket of obscurity, but apparently the eye of AI Sauron is upon me.
John: We’re not going to ask it for its One Cool Thing. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what do you have to share with us?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is an enormous cool thing called Brazil.
John: Tell us about Brazil.
Craig: I was in Brazil for CCXP, which is the world’s biggest Comic-Con. I think they had something like over 300,000 people move through this thing. As big and as crazy as San Diego is, CCXP is like, I don’t know, double it and so wonderful, because it draws people from all over Latin America, mostly South America, and of course, largely from Brazil. We were in Sao Paolo.
The energy level and enthusiasm and love and positivity was so refreshing. It was so wonderful. You look on Twitter, and every 10 minutes someone tells you you’re a moron. Then you go to a room full of thousands of people, all just in love with culture and art and pop culture and pop art. It was wonderful. They were lovely people. I really enjoyed my time there. I would love to go back. Hopefully, I will be able to one day. To all the people who came to see me and Neil and Pedro and Bella and Gabe and Merle at the CCXP thing, I just say thank you, thank you, thank you. We loved it.
John: Fantastic. Rian Johnson, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
Rian: Yes. A lot of my knowledge of whodunits comes from growing up reading Agatha Christie. Now that I find myself on a longer sea voyage, it’s like Gilligan’s Island, suddenly I’m stuck on the island with the genre for a few more movies. I’ve been trying to expand out my knowledge of it. I’ve been trying to read more of the golden age of detective fiction authors.
One person I discovered recently is John Dickson Carr, C-A-R-R. He was actually an American, but he lived in England a big chunk of his life. He writes mysteries. They’re fantastic. They’re so much fun. First of all, he’s just a hell of a writer. He’s an incredibly fun writer to read. One of my favorite of his detectives is this guy Gideon Fell, who’s this massive man who walks around on two canes and is modeled after Chesterton. He drinks beer and smokes cigars constantly and is just an asshole. It’s just absolutely delightful. Carr was very adept at doing much more than Christie. She had an engineer’s brain of doing these locked door mysteries. Also, he always has an almost Poe-like, macabre element to his mysteries.
I just read recently, it’s Gideon Fell’s first mystery. It’s called Hag’s Nook. It was delightful. Also, The Mad Hatter Mystery and The Crooked Hinge. You can go down the rabbit hole. If you’re into Agatha Christie mysteries and you want to broaden out, I’ve really been enjoying John Dickson Carr’s novels recently.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Cool. I have two short One Cool Things. First is this blog post by Daniel Huffman about airplane maps. If you guys want to click through the link on that, I just texted it to you, Rian. You’re only used to, in the back of the airplane magazine, that map that shows all the different routes people could fly to. This was just a blog post talking through how he went about making one of those maps for a company and just the silent decisions you go through to figure out how to have all those arrows land where they need to land but also be clear and understandable.
Rian: Oh, wow.
John: I just liked it as a design discussion. Take a look at that.
Rian: Cool.
John: My second thing is a LEGO Star Wars movie called The Phantom Limb, directed by Aaron Legg. I’m actually here because Matthew Chilelli of Scriptnotes did the music for it, and he did a fantastic job.
Craig: Awesome.
Rian: Nice.
John: Matthew Chilelli, very talented editor and composer. Take a look at The Phantom Limb. It’s very clever LEGO stop motion, literally stop-motion LEGOs that must take years to do, but impressively done.
Craig: Fantastic. Well done.
John: Great.
Craig: Congratulations, Matthew.
John: That is our show for this week.
Rian: Very cool.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: What what.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: What what.
John: Let’s use some of Matthew’s music from the Star Wars LEGO short as the outro music.
Craig: That’s smart.
John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. On our website, you’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Don’t forget to use the bonus code, what, Craig?
Craig: Onion. We’re finally real podcasters now.
John: We have a real podcast.
Craig: We’ve become absolute shills.
John: Shills to save 10 bucks.
Craig: Tell me about Squarespace.
Rian: Don’t involve me. Don’t involve me.
Craig: Rian Johnson, you built a website out of Wix.
John: Absolutely. When you need some mental health help, do you go to Better Help? Is that where you go for your mental health help?
Craig: Do you sleep on the-
John: Casper mattress?
Craig: … mattress or-
Rian: Casper. Got my Casper mattress. When I have to go to the post office, that’s the worst, as you guys know, but luckily-
John: Stamps.com.
Craig: Use our code Casper.
Rian: Use my code.
Craig: Onion. It finally happened.
John: We’ve become that. We’ve become that.
Craig: We’re saying the same things that every other… There’s a law that every podcaster must say, “Use the discount code,” once a year.
John: Rian Johnson, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Craig: Thank you, Rian.
Rian: It’s been delightful. It’s great to see you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Now we can actually talk spoilers for Glass Onion, because Rian Johnson-
Craig: Finally.
John: I loved your movie. I have questions. My first question is, what do you have against the Mona Lisa? What did the Mona Lisa do to you?
Rian: There’s a great interview I read years ago with John Cleese where he’s talking about in A Fish Called Wanda killing the dogs. There’s that great sequence where Palin’s trying. They asked him, “How do you get away with that? How do you not have the audience just hate you?” He leaned back, and he was like, “It has a lot to do with the casting of the dogs.”
That was the deal with the Mona Lisa. It couldn’t be anything else. It was this perfect thing where it’s famous enough to where it is a sacred cow and it’s going to get that little oh my god thing. It’s so famous in that way. It’s more famous for being famous than it is almost as people reacting to it as an actual work of art. I think audiences get the joke. Daniel was very nervous about it. He was like, “Are we killing the puppy by burning this?” I was like, “I don’t think so. I think it’ll be okay.”
Craig: It was funny. There was this natural weak human instinct that I had, which was like, “Then they reveal that it was fake Mona Lisa.”
Rian: We shot an end credits thing, which we did not use, just for a Get Out of Jail Free card, in case we screened this thing and people were actually like, “Screw you for burning it.” It was a cute little scene, but it was pretty lame, and so we were never actually going to use it, I think.
Craig: I think the thing is ultimately you know the Mona Lisa’s fine. It’s okay, because we all have this weird desire to protect the Mona Lisa. It just feels like, oh my god, as everything else around us crumbles… Much of what the movie digs into is the stupidity of disrupting and what that means. We want the Mona Lisa to be okay. You know what? It was punk rock. It was punk rock, man. It was as punk as Rian Johnson gets.
Rian: A big part of that whole last sequence was the idea that it plays out exactly, it’s structured exactly to match up with Miles Bron’s disrupter speech, basically, so the idea of the last step being to destroy the thing that nobody wants to destroy.
Craig: Exactly.
Rian: You had to go there a little bit.
Craig: Once he revealed in the first act or beginning of the second, whatever you’d call it, that there was a release for it, I was like, “The Mona Lisa isn’t destroyed.”
Rian: No, it’ll be coming back.
Craig: “I don’t think this movie’s ending with the Mona Lisa.”
Rian: “Don’t tell the insurance guys.”
Craig: I was like, “Poor Mona Lisa.”
John: I danced around it at the main podcast, but the ad I saw, which is an LA Times ad, shows Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monae’s character behind bushes, looking together. They clearly feel like they’re in cahoots. Obviously, in the movie we learn that they are in cahoots. She’s not in rich bitch mode. She’s just in her adorable, approachable mode. That was my question. That was a big thing for you to keep secret the whole time through, to not talk about, or is it? Is it one of the biggest twists you’re trying to hide?
Rian: Yes and no. Also, it’s fucking hard, because at this point, the movie is getting out there. We’ve had the theatrical release. It’s about to come out on Netflix. The reality is how many people actually are going to see that specific ad or whatever. Also, I’ll tell you what’s really hard for me, and why I think I’m like, with something like that, “Let’s go with it,” is I want people to start knowing about… I want to push Janelle. I think that she’s so good in this movie.
John: She’s great. She’s really, really good.
Craig: Remarkable.
John: Her performance is fantastic. I want to give your cinematographer, I want to give hair and makeup and everybody… She is stunningly beautiful. You photograph her in ways that she just has these… She just occupies these astonishing frames. On top of her performance, she looks amazing.
Rian: Jenny Eagan, our costume designer, the costumes that she [inaudible 01:05:09] and Steve Yedlin. They all did absolutely fantastic work. It is also really hard to point a camera at Janelle Monae and not have her look stunning. With all of that adding into it, there are just some frames in that that are incredible. All to say that a big part of what is great in this movie with her performance is her chemistry with Daniel and the fact that they’re in it. For something like that, it was like… If you haven’t seen the movie, even if you see that they’re going to be… You don’t know the actual twist of the movie, that it’s the midpoint thing.
Craig: It’s a midpoint thing. I’ve been asked over the last week four million times, when you’re adapting something, a preexisting story that’s out there, what do you do about the fact that people may know what happens to this character or that? My thing is, I don’t care, because some people won’t, and it’ll not be that experience. Journey. Journey. We made movies out of novels all the time. We know that the Titanic sinks. James Cameron wasn’t like, “We can’t make it because people know.” I think it’s sometimes overstated a little bit about what those… It’s so much more fun to see it unwind. I’m not as interested in the fact of their team-up as how you expressed it, how you pulled the trickery of fixing your shoe and all that other stuff. That’s the art.
John: A question for you. You talked about cheating. There’s a moment in the film where Edward Norton has a glass that he either hands to Dave Bautista or does not hand to him. That becomes a major plot point. I remember seeing it in a theater, thinking, “Oh, he did something weird there. I think he handed him that drink.” I clocked it. Then you show us, no, he sat it down on the table, which was an imagined thing. Can you talk me through that? It’s a trick. It’s a cheat. Yet it also feels very much in keeping with the me. Can you talk me through that decision and the decision to show both ways?
Rian: It’s a cheat but it isn’t. That was almost the central moment of expressing the entire, whatever you want to call it, theme or what have you of the movie, in one exact moment, the notion of something being absolutely in plain sight and obvious, and when a rich dude tells you it’s something else, you believe him. You see it with your own eyes. You know exactly what you just saw. Then Edward Norton as a billionaire says, “Oh my god, this just happened,” and says something different. In your brain, you then let it go enough to where a murder mystery can still hinge on how did that thing happen. In that regard, we play it completely straight. When you’re seeing it the first time, you see exactly what happens. You see him just hand the glass. It was a nerve-wracking thing to bake into the central moment of the movie. Then 30 seconds later when he retells his lie of the moment, you cut away to his lie version of it, which is an entirely different piece of film than what was in there initially. In that way, it’s playing it absolutely straight.
There’s a lot of things in that that we do. That’s another reason actually I’m excited for it to get on Netflix, so people can start digging into it. We play incredibly, frighteningly fair in terms of that first half and what is just on screen. You can see Edward stealing the gun. You can see Duke’s phone. It’s a black phone sticking out of the back pants of his white pocket for half the scene. It’s all just there.
Craig: You’re relying on the fact that traditionally when people are watching a Rian Johnson movie, they just don’t care or pay attention.
Rian: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Craig: They’re bored.
Rian: They’re like, “Gotta disengage.”
Craig: They never notice any of the details.
Rian: Just on their phone [crosstalk 01:09:06].
Craig: Exactly. They’re not really watching.
Rian: Exactly.
John: When I saw the movie for the first time in a theater, I couldn’t stop and rewind to see, wait, no, it was different the first time through, because the movie’s just going to keep going forward at 24 frames per second. Nima, who I was watching with, like, “Wait, rewind. It was different the first time I saw it.” We didn’t stop and rewind it, but I think the fact that you could do that is the difference between the two kinds of experiences, is one, you have control, and the other you don’t.
Rian: I guess so. I don’t know. If someone wants to experience the movie that way, that’s fine. That’s great. I don’t think most people will. I think most people be just along for the ride. They’re not going to stop and in their first watch go back and watch it or something. That is an option that is available to you.
Craig: One of my favorite moments in the movie, and this is a very Rian Johnson thing to do, and I loved it in spite of the fact that it was a very Rian Johnson thing to do-
Rian: This is teeing me up here for-
Craig: … is that Miles Bron has this fake murder mystery planned for the weekend, and Benoit Blanc spoils it instantly and walks everybody through and just ruins it. What I loved about it was it was a great character moment for him. It was wonderful to see his mind at work and to be reminded of how… Proof of concept, because you can actually forget that he’s good because of his super fried chicken accent and Foghorn Leghorn way of going through the world. Then he’s brilliant. Also, it was like, spoilers are part of this. Part of the genre is people ruining it for you. It’s fun. I thought it was hysterical and pretty brilliant of you to do that. It put everything in this wonderful place. It also put me on notice, because I did not expect that at all. It put me on notice that I was in safe hands even as I felt unsafe.
John: Rian, I have one last question for you. As the writer on set, who’s also directing the movie, you have to have answers for all the questions that actors might come up to you with. What was your conversation with Edward Norton when they first arrive at the island and Edward Norton sees Janelle Monae’s character? What’s in his head? What is he thinking when he sees her there?
Rian: Luckily, we’re able to leave it slightly ambiguous. The thing that made sense to us, given what we know about Miles, is that he would see her. If you think about the method of murder, Blanc says [inaudible 01:11:40] they don’t even see her die, Blanc says, so the notion that she somehow survived-
Craig: She got better.
Rian: … and that she woke up. No, because he drugs her, but the drug is not poisonous, to put her to sleep, and then he puts her in the car, so she actually dies of asphyxiation. The notion that maybe she didn’t give her enough or she woke up and stopped the car and got out, I think that’s what’s in her head is doing the math of, oh shit, Andi survives, and she’s come back now to, in this big public way, out him in front of all the disruptors and get her revenge or something. I think that’s what we landed on the math in his head.
Craig: I want to add one thing before we go. This was something I was texting with Rian about. My friend Heather Kennedy, who is an excellent puzzle solver-
John: We did puzzles with her in Austin.
Craig: We did an escape room with her in Austin. She has spotted something that Rian did not intend, but it’s excellent, or maybe he did.
Rian: Yes, I did. This was central to the mystery.
Craig: Of course it was. He had no idea. What kills Dave Bautista? Do you remember, John? Why does Dave Bautista’s character-
John: Pineapple juice.
Craig: Pineapple juice. He is allergic to pineapple juice. The compound in pineapples that people are allergic to is a chemical called bromelin. If you anagram Miles Bron, you get bromelins. It was there the whole time.
Rian: That’s right.
Craig: He was born-
Rian: That’s in keeping with the theme of the movie.
Craig: Of course.
Rian: That’s why I decided… I thought hm, just for the Heathers out there.
Craig: What a genius you are, sir. What a genius.
Rian: I’m so happy. I’m so happy you unpacked that, Craig. You’re one of the first, I have to say.
Craig: You win the glass onion.
Rian: We have a winner.
Craig: You can have my entire fortune.
Rian: You get a yearly subscription to Scriptnotes. Oh, boy.
Craig: Oh, man. Rian, you’re the best.
John: Rian, thank you so much.
Craig: Thanks, Rian.
Rian: This was a blast, guys. Thank you so much.
Links:
- Glass Onion on Netflix, December 23, 2022!
- Sign up for a Scriptnotes Premium Membership! use the PROMO CODE: ONION for four months free on your Scriptnotes annual membership. (Valid through 1/15/23)
- The 2022 World Cup is being hosted in Qatar, which, as everyone knows, is pronounced… by Sarah Lyall for NYT
- Eben Bolter’s Tweet on Variable Frame Rate
- ChatGPT
- On Airline Mapping by Daniel Huffman
- LEGO Star Wars: The Phantom Limb short film by Legg Animations, score by our own Matthew Chilelli!
- Comic Con Experience — CCP in São Paulo, Brazil
- John Dickson Carr mystery novels including Hag’s Nook and The Mad Hatter
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! – use promo code ONION
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes Episode 579: Rian Johnson Returns, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig invite writer/director Sarah Polley to discuss her critically acclaimed feature “Women Talking.” They cover twice-removed adaptations, crafting fable-like settings, protecting your audience, and the power of narration.
We also look at “Run Towards the Danger” — the title of Sarah’s book as well as her personal philosophy. We answer a listener question on development and Sarah explains why clarity is kindness.
In our bonus segment, we talk about child actors. Sarah shares her perspective as a former child actor and what it’s like to have her own kids on set.
Links:
- Sarah Polley on IMDb and on Instagram
- Women Talking film and novel by Miriam Toews
- Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley
- Find the Women Talking Script by Sarah Polley here
- The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene by David Epstein for ProPublica
- Mophie 3-in-1 Charger with MagSafe
- Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
- Till film
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Timothy Lenko (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The One with Sarah Polley first appeared on John August.
GPTZero is a new service created by Edward Tian designed to sniff out AI-generated text.
I’m dubious, in part because I’m not sure I could reliably spot the differences between sentences assembled by humans versus machines. But maybe that’s just my human bias.
As an experiment, I decided to run a quick, not-at-all-scientific test. I asked ChatGPT to “write three paragraphs explaining what a manager does for screenwriters.” I also looked up the answer for “What does a manager do?” on screenwriting.io.
Here are the two responses, one written by a human1, the other by an AI. See if you can spot which is which.
SAMPLE A
In brief, a manager manages your career.
This includes tangible acts, like setting up meetings, giving notes and feedback, and assisting with deal negotiation, as well as the more abstract, like helping steer your career’s direction.
Managers, unlike agents, are not required to be licensed by the state. They usually have fewer clients than agents, and often take more personal and less business-focused roles in their clients’ careers. Managers, are allowed to take producer credits on their clients movies, which agents are not.
Like agents, a manager typically receives 10% of a client’s earnings. A manager should never ask for an upfront or flat fee.
SAMPLE B
A manager for a screenwriter plays a vital role in helping the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, as well as helping the writer shape their existing ideas into marketable concepts. This often involves providing feedback and suggestions to help improve the story and make it more appealing to potential buyers.
Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things, such as identifying potential buyers and pitching the writer’s work to them. They can also help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. In addition, they can help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, such as agents, producers, and studio executives.
Finally, a manager can also help screenwriters with their long-term career goals by helping them identify opportunities for growth and advancement. This might include working on larger projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand to increase their visibility and credibility in the industry. Overall, a manager plays a critical role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.
For each answer, GPTZero measured the text’s Perplexity — the randomness of the text — across several ranges.
| Total | Average | Highest | | --- | --- | --- | | Sample A | 41 | 136 | 219 | | Sample B | 11 | 36 | 49 |
That 219 is an example of “Burstiness,” which GPTZero defines as “spikes in perplexity.” For Sample A, the opening sentence has a perplexity of 219, whereas highest perplexity in Sample B is just 49.
That’s the tell, apparently.
Some human written sentences can have low perplexities, but there is bound to be spikes in perplexity as the human continues writing. Contrastingly, perplexity is uniformly distributed and constantly low for machine generated texts.
After crunching the numbers, GPTZero renders its verdict.
SAMPLE A (score 66.44):Your text is likely human generated!
SAMPLE B (score 9.93):Your text is most likely to be AI generated!
On both counts, GPTZero got it correct.
But how hard would it be to fool the system? I spent two minutes editing the AI-generated version into the following:
Sample C
Managers can play a vital role for screenwriters. Basically, they help the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, or shaping their existing ideas. They provide feedback and suggestions.
Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things: who the buyers are and how to pitch to them. They can help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. They help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, including as agents, producers, and studio executives.
Good managers think about screenwriters’ long-term career goals. This might include working on bigger (or smaller!) projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand. Overall, a manager can play an important role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.
| Total | Average | Highest | | --- | --- | --- | | Sample A | 41 | 136 | 219 | | Sample B | 11 | 36 | 49 | | Sample C | 19 | 106 | 439 |
The verdict:
SAMPLE C (score 118.77):Your text is likely human generated!
Some takeaways* The ChatGPT answer was well-written and potentially helpful for someone who didn’t know anything about managers. * GPTZero is looking for patterns a human likely wouldn’t notice, which makes sense. But an AI model trained to provide responses with high perplexity and burstiness would likely evade detection. It’s interesting to see this arms race play out, because adversarial networks are already a fundamental tool in AI. * It’s currently very easy to fool GPTZero with just minimal rewriting. If this tool meant to detect AI-generated term papers, students will quickly learn how to evade it. 1. Stuart Friedel wrote most of the early screenwriting.io answers.
The post Which of these answers was written by AI? first appeared on John August.
John and Craig dissect expertise and “why you should think twice or thrice before taking someone’s advice.” They look at how survivorship bias, pride, and luck should factor into how we judge sources of authority.
We answer listener questions on raising kids in LA, writers for videogames, and Megana asks about creative-comedowns.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss natural disasters in Los Angeles. Earthquakes, storms, mudslides, floods, and fires–we’re at risk for it all!
Links:
- The Last of Us premieres on HBO 1/15/23 at 6pm!
- Can “The Last of Us” Break the Curse of Bad Video-Game Adaptations? by Alex Barasch for the New Yorker
- Use PROMO code ONION for $10 off an annual Scriptnotes Membership email help@supportingcast.fm if you run into any issues
- Scriptnotes, Episode 574: Difficult Scenes, Transcript
- Erik Grankvist’s Video of Building a Log Cabin
- Shottr screenshot app
- Humans Walk Weird. Scientists May Finally Know Why by Katrina Miller
- The Big One – Probability Earthquake Will Occur in Los Angeles
- ARK Storm and The Great Flood of 1862
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nica Brooke (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Who Can You Trust? first appeared on John August.
John and Craig (and Aline!) discuss the elements of quality writing in this collection of craft conversations.
As we work on the Scriptnotes book, producer Megana Rao has been collecting wisdom from the archives to write an introductory chapter to define good writing. In these segments we cover how to find your voice, spot confidence on the page, and actively watch films.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Megana discuss the Scriptnotes book and rumors of upcoming industry strife.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Episode 239 – What is good writing?
- Scriptnotes Episode 76 – How screenwriters find their voice with Aline Brosh McKenna
- Scriptnotes Episode 432 – Learning From Movies
- Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to the episodes sampled as well as the entire archive. Use promo code ONION to save $10 on annual subscriptions.
- Dangers of Elite Projection by Jarrett Walker
- Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Martin Kubitzky (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with segments by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post A Guide to Good Writing first appeared on John August.
In this How Would This Be a Movie case study, John interviews screenwriter William Nicholson (Les Misérables, Gladiator) on the challenges he faced with his script for Thirteen Lives, a film that follows the attempted rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave in 2018. They cover issues of life rights, competing projects, narrative point of view and cultural sensitivity.
Before that, John and Craig discuss end-of-year news in Hollywood, the recent changes to HBO Max, and what that means for creators and audiences in the new year.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss our aspirations and resolutions for 2023.
Links:
- William Nicholson on IMdB
- Watch the conversation between John and William here
- Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for organizing the event!
- Use Promo Code ONION for two months free in our annual Scriptnotes premium membership
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Kyle Jeffers for Wired
- Fleischman Is In Trouble on Hulu
- Andor
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Michael Lane (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Finding a Way In, and Out first appeared on John August.
On a recent Scriptnotes, I showed off ChatGPT to Craig and Scriptnotes guest Rian Johnson. We asked it to write up a plot summary for a future Knives Out movie set in space.
We got an answer similar to this query I just ran:1
In the far-flung future, wealthy space entrepreneur Harrison Thorne is found dead in his luxurious space station, the victim of an apparent suicide. However, Detective Benoit Blanc, a renowned investigator known for solving even the most complex cases, has a hunch that foul play is at work. As he begins to investigate, he finds that every member of Thorne’s eccentric and contentious family has a motive for murder.
As the detective delves deeper into the mystery, he must navigate the tangled web of lies and deceit spun by the suspects, all while trying to stay one step ahead of the cunning killer. With the help of Thorne’s loyal assistant Marta, Blanc must unravel the truth before the killer strikes again.
As the body count rises and the tension mounts, it becomes clear that no one is above suspicion in this high-stakes game of space-age crime and deception. Will Detective Blanc be able to solve the case before it’s too late, or will the killer get away with murder in the cold vacuum of space?
None of us were blown away by the plotting. It felt like it was copy-pasting ideas from the first movie, with a lot of generic pitch filler. Still, we all agreed that the sentence-by-sentence writing was surprisingly good. It didn’t feel like it was written by a bot.
When we asked it to write a scene, it was functional but weightless. Here’s one based on the summary above:2
INT. SPACE STATION – DAY
Detective BENOIT BLANC, a middle-aged man with a southern drawl, walks through the sterile corridors of the space station, his face etched with determination. He approaches a door labeled “Harrison Thorne – CEO.”
BLANC
(to himself)
Time to get to work.
He opens the door and enters the office, which is spacious and well-appointed. A young woman, MARTA, sits at a desk, typing away on a computer. She looks up as Blanc enters.
MARTA
(stands up)
Can I help you?
BLANC
(flashes badge)
Detective Benoit Blanc, ma’am. I’m here to investigate Mr. Thorne’s death.
MARTA
(nods)
I see. Well, Mr. Thorne was a good man. I can’t believe he’s gone.
BLANC
(nods sympathetically)
I understand. Is there anything you can tell me about his final days, or any unusual circumstances leading up to his death?
MARTA
(hesitates)
I’m not sure. I mean, he was under a lot of stress with the business, but he always seemed to handle it well.
BLANC
(nods)
I see. Well, thank you for your time. I may have more questions for you later.
MARTA
(nods)
Of course. I’ll do whatever I can to help.
BLANC
(smiles)
Thank you, ma’am. I’ll be in touch.
Blanc exits the office, deep in thought. The investigation has only just begun, and he has a feeling that it won’t be an easy one.
To be generous, it’s not nonsense. Unlike earlier attempts at algorithmically-generated screenplays, you can follow what happens, and characters do feel like they’re talking to each other. But there’s no nuance or character motivation despite the endless parentheticals.
It’s not a scene, but a simulacrum of one.
Listener JR, who makes his living using tools like these, wrote in with an interesting perspective:
Language models are built on “training data,” which is the text you feed into a learning process to produce the output. For very sophisticated models, the training data is vast: for something like ChatGPT, it includes something like all the text you can scrape off of the last twenty years of the Internet, or so.
But this means ChatGPT is about as smart as the average writer on the Internet has been over the past twenty years — and indeed, the models that comprise GPT drag the results toward the average, not the extraordinary, because the average has much nicer statistical properties than the extraordinary for companies that seek to produce a marketable, scalable product from their models, which requires the ability to tweak, diagnose, and defend what you’re selling.
ChatGPT isn’t optimized for breathtaking originality because that’s not its goal. It’s meant to be conversational and approachable, not wild and daring. It’s giving you hamburgers rather than Japanese wagyu sando with white truffle shavings because 90% of the time, that’s what you want.
JR continues:
Ultimately what these models mean is that with the click of a button you can now be just as good as the average writer who posts content to the Internet, and so the old “average” is now the new “zero.” If you wrote at the average level of the Internet in 2022 you now write at the zero level.
That’s a big idea, so let’s turn it over in our hands a bit.
Let’s imagine we can pick something that represents the average quality of English writing on the internet. It might be an article about holiday lobster prices or a piece of Peloton marketing copy.
Could any English speaker write at that level? No.
You probably don’t have to think that hard to come up with several people in your life who can’t write up to the standards of “Yahoo News article” or “Peloton blog post.”
Many folks don’t write, won’t write, can’t write.
In fact, if we want to consider it “median” writing quality rather than “average,” then approximately half the English speakers on the internet couldn’t hit this level of sophistication.
Only now, with tools like ChatGPT, they can. It’s very good at taking awkward, ungrammatical writing and making something decent out of it.
I fed ChatGPT this text —
if youre stove won’t light here’s what you do 1) check that that the gas is on turn the knob do you hear it 2) lisen if it’s clicking that’s the igniter. if it’s not clickign you could light it with a match 3) lift off the burner cover cuz sometimes that the issue 4) try another burner
— with the instruction to “Rewrite this as a good blog post.” Here’s the result:
If Your Stove Won’t Light: A Step-by-Step Guide
If you’re trying to cook a meal and your stove won’t light, it can be frustrating and time-consuming. Here are some steps you can try to troubleshoot the issue:
- Check that the gas is on. Turn the knob and listen for the sound of gas flowing. If you don’t hear it, the gas may be turned off or there may be a problem with the gas line.
- Listen for the igniter. If you hear a clicking sound, that means the igniter is trying to light the gas. If you don’t hear a clicking sound, you can try lighting the burner with a match.
- Lift off the burner cover. Sometimes, food or debris can accumulate underneath the burner cover and prevent the gas from lighting. Removing the cover may resolve the issue.
- Try another burner. If all else fails, it’s possible that there is a problem with a specific burner on your stove. Try using a different burner to see if it lights properly.
By following these steps, you should be able to get your stove working again in no time. If the problem persists, it may be a good idea to call a professional for assistance.
Imagine you’re a technician asked to document how a system works. You could describe the steps and let ChatGPT do the writing. Would you still need to proofread it, to make sure it’s not hallucinating something wrong? Absolutely. But most reluctant writers are competent readers. They should be able to spot when it’s gone off track.
Where I think these tools have even more benefit is for people who don’t feel confident in English. Type in your native language and let the AI do its work, translating not just the words but the intent.
Which brings us back to JR’s thesis, that a tool like ChatGPT resets the levels. In a world in which everyone can write at the old “average” level, what happens?
I’m not sure. There’s not a great comparison in recent human history. Calculators enabled ordinary people to do a lot more number-crunching, but were they transformative? (For the human calculators of Hidden Figures, perhaps so.)
A world filled with AI-polished text might push us in unexpected directions. To err is human, and we might find language incorporating mistakes to porve a hooman wrote it. Or we might use these tools like Instagram filters to make us look like someone we aspire to be.
Personally, I don’t think screenwriters are particularly endangered, at least not in the short term. Future tools may be trained and tuned for scriptwriting, but they’ll be working off a corpus of all the screenplays that have come before. And that’s how it’s always been.
JR notes:
All writers are competing against the cumulative past of our species and its semi-automatic weapons of creative destruction, and are competing to stand out from an average defined over the past couple of decades or so.[…] Writers should only worry about automated writers as much as they are already worried about the agglomerated capacity and output of our species up until the present moment, which, eh, we can do better.
- The prompt is “Give me a plot summary for a Knives Out set in space.”
- Prompt: “Write me a scene from this movie where Blanc first meets Marta, in screenplay format.”
The post How ChatGPT resets the levels first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 553 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Station Eleven was one of my previous One Cool Things. Today on the show, I’m very excited to chat with the series creator, Patrick Somerville. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick Somerville: Thank you for having me, John. 553, intense.
John: 553. 553 episodes.
Patrick: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of podcasts.
John: We finally get to you. Now in addition to Station Eleven, we should also say you are a TV expert, because you wrote on Leftovers, Maniac, Made for Love. You’re writing a new thing called The Glass Hotel, based on another book by the same author. I’d love to talk to you about adaptations in television and getting into it. You actually started as a novelist. Isn’t that right?
Patrick: I did. I never actually had any plan or thought that getting into TV and film was even possibly, honestly. I think 12-year-old me went down to the Brown County Public Library in Green Bay, Wisconsin and got George Lucas and Steven Spielberg biographies and desperately wanted to be a movie director and wrote letters to both of those gentlemen. I think when I was 16 or 17, I think being from Green Bay, just not having connections, I just was like, “Writing fiction seems like the way to go if you have no resources, no connections at all.” I went all in in that direction. It wasn’t until my early 30s after I’d published 4 books that a manager cold-emailed me and asked if I liked TV, and I said, “Yes, I do.” Then I ended up in Hollywood.
John: That seems impossible. I do want to get back into the origin story of you and how you started writing for film and television. I want to actually really drill in deep on Station Eleven and the process of going from here’s a book you read to here’s a book you’re adapting to assembling a writers room, putting this show up on its feet. I really want to do a deep dive in that. We haven’t had a chance to really deep dive on a project for a while. Also, we have some listener questions I think are right up your alley, because there’s TV stuff that I won’t know the answer to, but you definitely will.
Patrick: Maybe. We’ll see.
John: If you’re willing to, in the Bonus Segment I want to talk about making a pandemic show during a pandemic, because that just feels like an extra weird complication on top of complications.
Patrick: You’re right. That’s exactly what it was.
John: Cool. Let’s get back to… You were growing up in Wisconsin. You are a kid who reads books, like pretty much everyone who’s listened to this podcast. I’m guessing you were always a writer, you were always singled out for being good at writing, and yet you didn’t have any way to approach film and TV writing, so you started working in books.
Patrick: A lot of those details are exactly right about me. I decided to be a writer when I was seven, standing in I guess my 1st grade classroom. I had written a short story called How to Be a Molecule. I loved writing it, but the thing that got me was reading it out loud to the audience, to all my fellow students, and them clapping afterwards. Something in there, in that whole mix, just sparked me in a way nothing ever had and hasn’t since then, honestly. I didn’t know how to do it, but I think my heart knew what I wanted to be really early, which is a gift. There’s lots of people who I meet now in our business and otherwise. I think there’s something about those 10 years of insane teenager energy devoted to being a writer that I actually think matters.
John: If you were a person who was great at basketball and you didn’t spend those 10 years playing basketball, you wouldn’t have developed all the skills and the muscle memory for how to do these things. Like you, I was the kid who was writing in 1st grade and declared myself a writer. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, but I definitely knew I was a writer, because that’s the thing that I was good at that people kept telling me that I was good at.
Patrick: You were good at it. I think it wasn’t just feedback. You had some special ability with the language that put you ahead.
John: Now, did you study writing? Did you go through a writing program? How did you go from this kid who was writing a story in 1st grade to a guy who published four books?
Patrick: I was standoffish about the profession of writing, especially growing up in the Midwest. There’s a bit of an eye roll when you say, “I’m going to be a writer,” just because like, good luck, kid. My dad was a doctor. I had this plan that I would go and be an English and biology major and go to medical school and then also write fiction. I don’t know if it was my cover. Actually, I think I believed it until about sophomore year of college, when I just dropped the bio part, because fruit flies, counting fruit flies, John. I was like, “I am guesstimating these fruit flies right now. I don’t like this. I’m not detail-oriented in the right way. I’m going to kill someone if I’m a doctor, because I’m going to, I don’t know, eyeball something that I shouldn’t be eyeballing.”
I didn’t really get the idea of creative writing as a subject. I just was an English major. I just was like, “If I want to be a writer, I should just read as much as possible.” I was an English major. I didn’t really take creative writing classes, but I did then move to New York for a year in 2001. I was a waiter, and very quickly realized that I needed to be back in academia to somehow insulate myself from the job market and the regular world. It was also 9/11 three weeks after I’d moved to New York. It was a strange moment. I applied to MFA programs. I got into Cornell, which was a great one, and went up there for three years.
John: My perception of writing programs, and this is probably a broad stereotype, it’s just a bunch of people who were always told they were good writers, who were then put in a hothouse environment to… I don’t think it’s a Survivor situation. You’re theoretically trying to help each other, but at the same time there’s a competitive aspect between you guys. What was it like being in an MFA writing program?
Patrick: It’s a bit that, but for Cornell, it’s a very small program. The cohort is only four people of total fiction writers and four poets coming in each year. There’s eight total in the program. Unlike other programs, everyone’s totally funded. There isn’t a tiered list of funding. Everyone has the same deal. Everybody’s getting paid and getting a stipend to live in Ithaca and teach and write. We weren’t competitive for resources. We were friends. It was a pretty good vibe there, even though there were different approaches maybe to using the time from different people. I was young. I was 23. Everyone but one other incoming writer was 27 or 28 and had been in the workforce. I just was in psycho devoted writer mode. I would just hole up in my apartment for 12 hours, not see the outside world, and write a short story over and over and over again. I was feasting on my hermit fantasy of writing.
John: What was your output during that time? You say you’re working on a short story and rewriting it. On a given week or a given month, how much were you generating?
Patrick: A lot. More than is realistic to be good. Too much probably, but my imagination was really firing. I think it was that moment when your technical skills starts, just to get to a place where you’re like, “My taste thinks this is good.” It’s very frustrating when you’re young because you can’t… I couldn’t make it feel like the books that I read when I was writing yet, but it was coming. It’s just slow. In the end you leave with a thesis, which became my first book, Trouble, pretty soon thereafter. I probably wrote three times as much as that thesis.
John: Wow.
Patrick: I probably wrote a thousand pages of fiction while I was in my MFA program.
John: Circling back to what you’re saying there, you were describing what Ira Glass describes as the crisis where you have taste, but you don’t actually have the ability to reach that taste. You know that you’re not quite good enough. Maybe that program gave you the chance to actually get your skills up to what the level of your taste was.
Patrick: It helped. Also, I’m funny in that my taste was stunted, I think, which was a gift also. It took me a while. I was behind in cultural matters, I think, in a lot of ways. Also, just the way my brain is built, I don’t overwhelm myself with self-criticism that much, which I think is unusual for writers. My problem’s in the other direction. I think everything is good. Then it takes a little while for my taste to settle in and be like, “Actually, that’s not good, Pat.” I didn’t crush myself, but I did know that my technical skill as a prose writer was a ways off from the caliber of fiction that I wanted to be producing. To me it’s just read and write and read and write and do reps in that time.
John: You started writing prose fiction. At what point do you become aware of screenwriting, or at least the form of screenwriting, and what it’s like to write for film and television? Was that during this program or after?
Patrick: No, it was 10 years later. One thing that was happening at Cornell, it was right when the last season of Sopranos was premiering. I got cable, I remember, so I could watch that. The Wire and Deadwood were both on then too. I was like, “What are these shows?” because I had loved a choice selection of TV shows, like Northern Exposure, growing up. What else? Six Feet Under. I guess Dream On from the old HBO days, The Larry Sanders Show. I had glimpsed kinds of TV that I loved. That year it just was like everything on HBO was as good as any book that I was reading. I was like, “This is the same.” I watched those then. I just continued on the fiction road. It wasn’t until that manager, Brian Steinberg from Artists First cold emailed me and asked me if I was interested in writing for TV that I read a script, I think. Then I downloaded Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Six Feet Under and Sopranos I think. I read them all, and I wrote a pilot of a TV show.
John: Right now, a bunch of listeners are throwing their phones across the room, that a manager cold emails you, a person who’s not even a screenwriter, to offer to represent you.
Patrick: He didn’t quite do that. He had read one of my novels, and he had noticed that the dialog I wrote lent itself to screenwriting and was curious. I was like, “Are you real?” I had to look up… I felt like it was a phishing scam or something, but it wasn’t. It took I think a year and a half to actually get repped by them and another year maybe for WME to decide they wanted to sign me.
John: You’ve now downloaded these scripts. You’re reading these scripts. You’re learning about the form. What were the first scripts that you wrote?
Patrick: The first script I ever wrote was called Very Honest. It was a pilot. It was an idea I had for a short story that I did as a show. It was about a right-wing radio guy, Bill O’Reilly at the time was the comp, who received a phone call from a Speak and Spell that basically said, “I know what you did. Tomorrow on your show I want you to say, ‘I am a fucking asshole,’ and I want you to turn your show into a show about how you are a fucking asshole. Unless you do this, I’m going to reveal what you did.” The guy’s such a dick that he has to make a list of the 10 people it could be who are blackmailing him. Then the shape of the show is him trying to figure out whether it was someone inside his family, his son, his daughter, his wife, or various people he’d run afoul and had problems with in the past. He does, in the end of the pilot, lean into his mic and start talking about what a dipshit he is, which I think is very wish fulfillment on my part at that time.
John: Now, this very much feels like it was in keeping with the HBO shows at the time. You have this antihero at the center of your story, a person who should be unlikable, and yet because we are laser focused on him, we can see through the bad stuff into the good side.
Patrick: I think actually what you just said is why it wasn’t a good project ultimately, because I didn’t have the vision yet to see the wall I was going to run into about how my political anger was aligned with the blackmailer, not the protagonist. I think ultimately that was going to end up having to make me humanize a bad person that I didn’t want to make a whole show or write a show about or watch a show about.
John: After this script, how many more scripts had you written by the time you got repped, by the time you started meeting on shows to be working on?
Patrick: I probably wrote a half dozen pilots in that period. This is right after my son was born, my first son. I was 32, 33. We were living in Chicago. We had no intention of ever leaving Chicago. It was Pat’s dabbling around in Hollywood things, I guess. When you’re a fiction writer on that side, you tend to get real skeptical of like, “Oh, someone’s optioning my novel. Oh, someone wants to work with me.” That stuff comes and it seems like it’s life-changing when you’re on the fiction writer side. Then you realize when you get here, oh, that was just someone taking a shot at something. There was never any chance of that turning into anything. When you’re a fiction writer, you’re like, “My life has changed forever. I am going to be rich. They’re making a movie out of my novel.” The movie didn’t come ever.
When I did actually get a job suddenly, on The Bridge on FX, via a Skype meeting with Meredith Stiehm and Elwood Reid, I had to go home from my office and tell my wife I’d just been hired for a job in Los Angeles that started the next Monday.
John: Wow.
Patrick: She said, “What the fuck?” I ended up commuting for a whole year. I flew to LA on Monday mornings, went to the room all week, or set, came home Friday nights and helped my very, very brave and loving wife take care of our son.
John: The first show you’re working on is The Bridge. I know Meredith. This is an adaptation of a Scandinavian show. It was a show in its first year, right? This was still all being figured out. What did you learn being in that room for the first time? Being a novelist is always a solitary job. You’re just doing this all yourself. Suddenly, you’re having to be in a group environment, figuring out this show. What did you learn?
Patrick: So much. It’s almost like waves of learning, because I had no context. Unlike the other track of assistants, I think, witnessing rooms for a while and then getting it, getting the language, I was completely in the dark. I think I learned that listening is really good early. I learned that it was very, very, very good for me to come in at the staff writer level way down on the bottom rung and have to learn and do the work to learn how to be a screenwriter, because what I also learned is I had no idea how to be a screenwriter. I was good enough I think to earn my place in that room that first year. I didn’t really know what pitching was. I didn’t really know what a scene was. It took me that year of watching it and listening to understand that the fundamentals of fiction writing are just not the same as screenwriting. There’s an overlap, sure, but I needed to pay my dues. I think that first year was paying my dues.
John: The Bridge, you were on that for just one season, and then what was your next job after that? How did you get from that to your next job?
Patrick: I was at The Bridge for both seasons. Right around the end of the first season of The Bridge, Meredith introduced me to Howard Gordon. He had a need for a young writer in the 24 room for the limited series, the last episode of 24 that Jack was in. I went over and met those guys one day at the Fox lot. I was like, “What is going on?” because I love 24 and that kind of storytelling, more specifically, just the intensity and drive and clarity and just like da da da da da da da da da da. I didn’t know how to do it. I was a literary fiction writer, but I was a fan. That’s how I met them. They offered me a job. Right when I was coming back, I had to tell my wife I got another job. That’s when we decided to move, when we moved to LA. I went right from the 24 room back to The Bridge Season 2 room.
John: Great. That was between two seasons you were doing this 24. Was Leftovers the next show after The Bridge?
Patrick: It was. The Bridge got canceled in the summertime I think of 2013. I was always wanting to get to the showrunner level and not ready, but wanting nevertheless. I think when The Bridge ended, I was going down that road. I wrote a cop show set in Chicago that I was into and trying to get set up. Then The Leftovers came around. That show in particular, the combination I think, Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof, and also just it had everything that I wanted in terms of what the next step was. I didn’t think I was going to get that job. It took 400 meetings to even get to Damon to have lunch with him. We hit it off when we met. I think it was only after spending two years in that room with so many amazing writers that I realized I wasn’t ready for anything at that moment before Leftovers. I needed that time. I needed those two seasons to really learn the last things I needed to learn before I took a crack at it.
John: We’re working on the Scriptnotes book right now. Just yesterday I was reading through the Damon Lindelof interview I did a zillion years ago where he’s talking about The Leftovers room. It’s weird to hear Damon talking about this. This is pre-Watchmen. Leftovers was still on the air. He doesn’t send writers to set. He believes that he wants writers in the room. He himself doesn’t seem like he wants to go to set. He’s a creature of the room. How different was that from your experience on The Bridge or on 24? It just feels like there’s so many different ways that showrunners run shows.
Patrick: It was the complete opposite as what Meredith and Elwood did and thought. I was sitting on set within a month, and I didn’t know what to do there. I had too many jobs to enforce and not enough context. It’s a great way to learn, especially if you’re humble about it and read the room well and understand it’s the director’s set but you’re there to support the script. It was great. The thing about Damon’s point of view that I think is right is it does make it so the script has to be the script. That requires a very complicated system to make that true. It was good for me to have that two-year period where it was very room-centric, but now I am not like that at all as a showrunner. I am very present on set. I very much believe in having the writers come to set too. I couldn’t for Station Eleven because of the pandemic. I’m active on set, in rehearsal, in the dialog with the HODs and with the actors.
John: Now, I want to get to Station Eleven, but I don’t want to skip over completely Maniac or Made for Love. What were those experiences like? My hunch is that Maniac was completely scripted before it was shot, but maybe there was some stuff along the way. What were those room experiences and development experiences like?
Patrick: Different. Both of those shows were specific situations and different setups. Maniac was ordered straight to series before they had a writer. That was complicated. We incubated all 10 scripts in a room, the way I had learned it. They changed a lot once we got into prep. That largely had to do with the collaboration with Cary, my creative partner on that show. That was a whole different kind of experience that I would characterize probably more like a movie.
Made for Love, we had a great room and did a lot of the work up front. I think that’s the one where I learned, I think, about budget and production realities and how you have to protect your show and your people by acknowledging the cost of scripts at the front end and insulating them from being deconstructed during prep, because that’s a dangerous thing.
John: When you say acknowledging the cost of scripts, basically acknowledging what in the script is going to be expensive, what is going to push it over the edge, that’s going to force dramatic cuts or compromises down the road?
Patrick: Yeah. I think putting your producer cap on when you’re in the writers room or privately doing it, because it infects the conversation if you do it too much. You won’t end up in the right creative place. I think I was coming from more maybe a purist point of view where we don’t talk about that when we’re in the room, we’ll figure it out after. Now that I’ve been through it a few cycles, and I can even feel it, the way I pitch, the way I think about scripts now is some part of my head is always thinking what’s this going to cost and what’s the core of this beat and how are we paying for it in another part of the season, how do we get it back or how do we do it in the one tenth of the cost way. I think that’s just about experience too. You learn a new layer of this business every time you go through the cycle. That one, I was learning about being a producer at the front end.
Then Station Eleven came along right on top of the beginning of Made for Love. I transitioned over to exclusively being the showrunner of Station Eleven when we were in prep in the fall of 2019 in Chicago.
John: I want to talk to you about how you came upon the book and whether you knew from the start the shape it was going to be in. This is a book by Emily St. John Mandel, which I’d read early on in the pandemic. I think my first conversation with you, I DM’ed you on Twitter saying, “Hey, just read this.” I think my question was, “Does COVID exist in your world?” I was just really fascinated by how you were going to do this thing. How did the book come to you?
Patrick: I just loved the book. I read the book when it came out, because I very, very barely knew Emily from the fiction world. We had read together once in Chicago and had a great conversation, in which I said, “I don’t think I can support myself and my family or pull my weight as a fiction writer, even though my books are getting reviewed in the New York Times.” I was successful by all metrics, at least that I’d built for myself. I was broke. I was like, “Emily, math doesn’t make sense.” She was like, “I know. I’m going to try to write one more and see how that goes.” I went to the Bridge job, and about a year later I see her book just everywhere and on the bestseller list. I was like, “Oh, okay, Emily figured it out.” When I read it, I just loved it. I loved the element, the weird combination of post-apocalyptic Shakespeare at Hollywood, the idea of, I don’t know, the minutia of everyday life in the apocalypse instead of death over and over again. I loved it.
John: For folks who haven’t read the book or seen your show, what’s the quick elevator pitch version of the story? How do you describe it?
Patrick: This is how I pitched it. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic show about joy. I think story-wise, a flu descends very rapidly on the world in our modern era and wipes out 99.9% of the population. Most of the book takes place around the Great Lakes with a traveling group of artists putting on Shakespeare plays to little villages 20 years later. It’s not about the horrible survival times. It’s about the rebuild times. It’s actually life-affirming, even though so many people die in the beginning.
John: It’s not The Walking Dead. I think whenever you hear post-apocalyptic, you assume it’s going to be this. I would say some of the choices you made in the adaptation make it a little less ominously The Walking Dead. You made some clear choices. I’m wondering when those choices came about. For example, keeping Jeevan with Kirsten through much more of the story, the changes with the prophet, who Miranda is and how she comes upon the graphic novel. How early on into this conception of like, oh, if I took this book and could make it into a series, when did you know you were going to make those changes?
Patrick: Right after Maniac, I called Emily, because I had heard that the book was coming available again. They’d been trying to make a movie script out of it and failing. I got a meeting on the books with Scott Steindorff, the producer who had the rights for something else. I just went to his office, and I was like, “Hey, Station Eleven, how about a limited series?” I told him what I thought it should be, and he agreed, and we made a deal with Paramount. I was in an overall with Paramount then. They paid for a mini room for me. It was just two weeks.
All those ideas, the big ideas that you’re talking about, the Jeevan Kirsten stuff, their separation and reunion, the change of Tyler as a standard cult leader into a different kind of cult leader, and how to handle the airport, the big ideas, we cracked a lot of the huge ideas in that two weeks. That was enough to help me write the first two scripts on my own. That’s what was the document that I sent to Hiro when he signed on. Then we sold the show, all on the energy of that early development.
John: Hiro Murai, who’s the director who did the first two episodes.
Patrick: Yeah, and really a creative partner at the development level for months and months and months beyond his duties doing prep for those two episodes. It was a very close partnership I think to crack that show, the tone of that show.
John: I want to go back to this mini room you put together, because it’s two weeks. How many writers did you have together to tackle this?
Patrick: It was just four writers. It was Nick Hughes, Gina Welch, Mauricio Katz, and Kim Steele and me.
John: I recognize two of those writers who wrote scripts later on on the show. What were you actually doing in that room? Was it just filling up whiteboards of stuff? Was it chatting? What happened in that room?
Patrick: There was one whiteboard. There was a big couch and a table and one whiteboard. We just would chat. We were just talking. They had all read the book. We just came together and like, “How would we do this?” It was just putting the big ideas up on the board.
John: The end result of this two weeks, you come out of there, and did you then need to pitch to Paramount and to other places about what the show’s going to be? Obviously, Paramount had gotten involved here, but had it already been set up at HBO Max? What was the status of the show at this point?
Patrick: It was not set up at HBO Max. It was an in-house Paramount development. I’ve always gravitated more toward writing scripts than pitching verbally. I think I’ve gotten much better at pitching verbally, but I like to lead with the text to show people what the show is. I wrote those two. We talked with Scott and the early producers about them. Eventually, right in there, the head of Paramount Television changed over and was just a reset for everyone who’s under an overall. Nicole Clemens came in and really doubled down on Station Eleven and endorsed the project and said she was very excited about it. We lined up the pitches once Hiro was attached and went around and pitched in April of the following year. I sold Made for Love in between in that story.
John: Just to make sure we’re clear on the timelines, so you’d gotten together this writers room. Two weeks coming out of it, you had a whole bunch of notes. With those, you wrote two scripts. You wrote these first two scripts, then attached Hiro to direct, and then went out to pitch?
Patrick: Yeah. I wrote Episode 1 while the room was going, in the background of the room. Then we internally talked about it, the producers and the studio, and everyone decided we wanted a second script. That took another month. I think I was on my own for that. Then Hiro, and then we went and pitched.
John: The decision about the second script was that the first one was entirely in present day, and the second episode jumps forward 20 years. You really could get a sense of what that world was going to look like and feel like.
Patrick: We needed the second world, but we also needed to understand the lead, adult Kirsten.
John: She’s not in that first episode. She shows up at the very end.
Patrick: Yeah, we needed a full episode with her. I was into it. It was hard. It was daunting to do it by myself, especially because you are faking the world building. When you’re there, you have guesses, and you have the novel. I didn’t know some truths about the traveling symphony or about the characters yet. You have to leap of faith your way through a script in those early days.
John: You’re taking us around to the various streamers and networks. How quickly did you end up at HBO Max? It sounds like based on your experience in the shows that had informed you so much, HBO felt like a great home for this.
Patrick: HBO Max didn’t exist.
John: That’s right, so just HBO.
Patrick: The first day we pitched was to HBO and to Warner Media, which I didn’t really know what the difference was. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they did. Then throughout the next week, we pitched to all the places and had a number of offers that coalesced down into Netflix and Warner Media. We went with Warner Media for a lot of reasons. Sarah Aubrey was there, who I knew from The Leftovers and also from the sale of Made for Love. They felt like a good home for the show.
John: Cool. I want us to start talking about the pilot script for this. In the show notes for this, people can see, we’re going to have links to the pdfs of all eight episodes so people can read through the scripts and really see what the show looked like on the page. I really want to, on this episode, talk about the pilot script and some things I’ve noticed from this. Episode 1 of 1, Wheel of Fire. Why is it called Wheel of Fire?
Patrick: There’s a burning Ferris wheel at the end.
John: That’s true. There is a burning Ferris wheel at the end. There you go.
Patrick: That term has some older connotations as well. The wheel was going to be a motif and theme.
John: For the traveling circus.
Patrick: For the whole show. I wanted it to be in there. I just thought it sounded cool too.
John: It does sound cool. Do you call this a pilot or not a pilot? If it’s a limited series, does it actually have a pilot or it’s just the first episode?
Patrick: I don’t know. It depends who you’re asking, because they ordered the series straight to series, but that doesn’t mean straight to series, I think. There’s always an opportunity for the streamer to bail at any time. I did call it Episode 1 on principle. I think collectively 1 and 3 operated as pilots for the show.
John: Just because we’re not looking at TV production scripts very often, this second page is revision history. The draft we’re actually looking at is the third white revisions. As I look through this revision draft, there’s 12 revisions here. There’s a noticeable gap here. The second pink revisions were December 1, 2020, which would’ve been production-ish. Then more than a year later, we have second yellow revisions on 1/4/21, which would’ve been production post-pandemic or once you can get back into development. We show also what pages are revised in each of these scripts, which is so helpful, so people can zoom right to what might be different.
Patrick: You know what happened between 12/1/20 and 1/4/21.
John: The actual pandemic, the thing that eclipsed a lot of what you were trying to talk about in the show.
Patrick: Yeah, but we also shot the episode between those two dates. The reason it kept getting revised after we had shot it is there was one piece left to do in Canada. We had to keep adjusting and adjusting and adjusting that.
John: What is the sequence that was left over from that first episode?
Patrick: On page 53, after we’ve gone to space, we’re coming back, and scene 47 we land on a stage, different version of a stage than where our story began. We see wagons. We hear actors. We’re hearing lines from the play King Lear. Then we’re finding people playing King Lear, but not at all in the context that the episode began in Chicago. This is the traveling symphony out in the wild and Kirsten playing the same part Arthur played at the beginning of the episode. That was the wheel. We were trying to close that loop in the script.
John: It was meant to be a clean bookend, where it starts with King Lear and ends with King Lear. That’s not how the actual episode ends, as I recall what I watched.
Patrick: It’s not. It’s not at all. We shot this. Our costume team made an amazing new set of costumes for Lear, and Jeremy shot the shit out of it. Mackenzie and company crushed it. When we put it all together, we didn’t feel like it was quit capturing the bang of the year 20 feeling that we needed. I think actually, this is so superficial seeming, I guess, but simple, I don’t know. We shot this at night. That was a problem, I think, because all of Episode 1 is dark and night. I think we needed it to be day. We needed to see the green, and we needed to see the lushness of year 20. We needed to know, just to know that that was Kirsten inherently.
John: You needed someone to yell Kirsten and her to look over.
Patrick: Yeah. That’s actually a piece from Episode 4 that Helen Shaver shot. It’s a scene that we come back to by Episode 4. One of our editors had that idea. What’s so great about it and what Hiro loved too is that the book is there. That is the linking piece that has been the thread through the whole episode.
John: The book plays a much more important role in the series than it does inside the book, I think partly because it’s a visual medium. Seeing who has the book, who has exposure to the book becomes incredibly important in the series. You’re letting the audience know, pay attention to this graphic novel.
Patrick: Who wrote the book was the other thing. We had to write the book, basically, to make the show make sense to us.
John: That’s a lot. Second page of the script, or sorry, third page I guess, is the cast list, so showing who is in our episode. We have a scratch through for the conductor, Lori Petty, because she’s no longer in that first episode because of changes that you guys just described. That makes sense. Locations list, this is where you’re talking about the producer hat and where the money’s going. Locations that you’re only going to see once that are expensive are costly. People that are getting the script, who is going to be focused on the location list? Obviously, your location manager, but why else is this page important in the script?
Patrick: I think your production designer and art department is going to sit down and get a feeling for this spread of the episode. We talk about world building in terms of big fantasy and big tent pole stuff, but every episode has world building to it. What is the world of Episode 1?
I think for Ruth Ammon, our production designer, Frank’s apartment was critical, not just for this episode, because we have a big VFX shot in it, but for the whole series. Lake Point Tower is a very specific building that we fell in love with and communicated a lot about the show. You can see it stacked there, how many Lake Point Tower locations there are. That’s a pretty quick sequence. That’s on the way in, which we shot really there. In the lobby we shot. To the elevator we shot. Then we built Frank’s apartment. That one is on our stage. The hallway we also built. The stairwell was a different stairwell. It’s a very important sequence, stacked as dense as the theater, which we also constructed out of four Chicago theaters.
John: As you watch the whole run of the show, you start to realize, oh, these are the standing sets that we’re coming back to. Frank’s apartment is an incredibly important standing set that we’re going to come back to. The airport is incredibly important standing set that we’re always going to be able to base ourselves around. Even as a person who was just watching the show, the producer brain does kick in, and I start to realize, okay, these are the things they actually built or found or headquartered in versus some place they traveled to to shoot for a couple days.
Patrick: Actually, the crazy thing about Frank’s apartment is we trucked it from Chicago to Toronto during the pandemic and rebuilt it as well. It traveled. Our standing set traveled.
John: Anything can travel. On this last page here is a day and night breakdown. Tell me, who is responsible for making these pages that are going at the front of the script? Who was doing these pages?
Patrick: Katie French, who had gone from our writers assistant in the room to our script coordinator through the whole run of the show and who ultimately was promoted to staff writer right at the end of production. She’s in the mini room for The Glass Hotel now.
John: Fantastic. Finally, on the sixth page of the pdf, we’re actually at the first page of the script. Some things I notice right from the start, you are a double spacer. You hit that space bar twice after every period. That’s fine.
Patrick: That’s correct.
John: Some people do.
Patrick: We can talk about it if you want. We don’t have to talk about it.
John: There are no wrong choices about spaces. I used to be a double spacer. I famously gave up my double spacing and never looked back, but nothing wrong with-
Patrick: I’m not as passionate as I once was.
John: You might be the last one. You might be the last one.
Patrick: That’s fine too. It’s just I think that I’m wrong. I actually think that I’m wrong. I keep doing it. I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why.
John: Because you have muscle memory. If you try to stop it, it’ll feel weird for a sec, and then you’ll get over it.
Patrick: What happened to you? Are you a fundamentalist now? Are you open?
John: I used to be a fundamentalist about double spacing, to the degree which I would actually do a find replace in my script before I turned it in, make sure all the spaces were double spaced. Then I started to realize I’m the only person left doing this, because double spacing went away completely on the internet. Html actually gets rid of double spaces. At a certain point I was like, “You know what? I’m going to stop fighting this fight.” I gave up. It’s smooth sailing. Here’s the reason why we don’t need to do it anymore. Our eyes are used to seeing capital letters start sentences. We don’t need that double space anymore. It’s just a vestige of how we used to do things with typewriters, truly.
Patrick: As insane as I am about the way the script looks personally, I don’t care also. Every writer who’s ever been in my room is rolling their eyes right now because I made them do it. I think I’m done fighting this fight. It’s stupid.
John: I want to talk about how good this first page looks, because I answered a question on Twitter this last week about… Someone said, “Is it wrong to not have any dialog on your first page?” Here’s a first page that has no dialog on it.
Patrick: Not a great sign. Not a great sign, I got to say.
John: If you’re going to have a page without any dialog on it, your choices of when to bold stuff is helping a lot. It’s helping me get my eyes down the page and make me less terrified about reading just a wall of text. A thing I notice as I read through this, because I just read this this morning, versus watching the show, is we have post-apocalyptic guy, post-apocalyptic boy, who are set up as these recurring characters throughout the pilot. They don’t actually recur throughout the pilot as shot or as shown to us. When did that idea drop down or diminish?
Patrick: In post we shot them. Hiro was having an instinct that there was something wonky about them coalescing in his head. He liked them too. It was almost too cute in the way that it was pretending to be The Walking Dead. They looked unlike any of the traveling symphony people. they looked ratty. They looked like the dad and the kid from the road. We were trying to tell a little bit of a story with the boy. I think Hiro’s instinct ultimately was the right one, which was it’s too much story freight to be asking the audience to track too soon about people who don’t matter in our story. Hiro I think also knew that these opening moments are about place, not about people. The ferns were doing the work. We didn’t need a boy and a dad too.
John: A thing you do on the second page here… I’m going to just read aloud this paragraph. “Somehow the boy didn’t even hear that. Watch out, boy. Where is your father? You are about to be eaten by a man in rags who has teleported from another network’s very earnest, self-serious prestige cable limited series about pain, starvation, and how all humans are horrible at their core.” You spent five lines just talking to us as the reader about what your show was opposed to another post-apocalyptic show would be. I like it. It reminds me of… Lost scripts would do that, where they would actually just really give you a sense of, this is what it’s meant to feel like as a person watching the show.
Patrick: I think obviously I watched Damon do that for years. I had been doing maybe a version of it myself. It fought the screenwriting advice that’s pretty standard, which is don’t do that. I think the reason I do it, I have to do it, because my writing is really, really dependent on tone. Whether or not a scene, any given scene I write works is entirely up to getting the tone right. Therefore, I think I need the person reading the script to understand it a little bit more than what the very skeletal version of the scene would do.
Some of it maybe reflects my anxiety changing over from the novelist to the screenwriter and not knowing how to make tone happen because of the scene, if that makes sense, or I’m still learning, I think, in that regard. I think part of it is also these are sales documents. You have to attract your crew. You have to attract your actors. You have to get people to want to buy it. The script has to be a read in and of itself.
John: Yeah, because you’re asking someone to take an hour of their day to read the script. You’re trying to make it a worthwhile hour of their day, and not having them skim, not having them skip through things.
Patrick: In this case too, post-apocalyptic genre comes with a lot of baggage. I think very early I wanted to make it very clear that we both had a lighthearted and wry point of view about all this, and we’re not doing the thing that that genre often did do.
John: I don’t want to talk about every page. There’s a moment you have happening on page 8, near the bottom of the page. “Jeevan moves away, crosses past Arthur’s body, and asserts himself between it and little Kirsten, who’s still staring, fascinated and unable to look away.” You’re doing some very specific blocking of two actors. It works really well. I remember that moment working as shot. On the page I can see he’s trying to physically do something here to keep this girl from seeing this. We’re learning about both Jeevan and Kirsten in this moment. I just wanted to single that out, because it’s the kind of thing that I think a lot of writers feel like, “Oh, that’s overstepping my boundaries. I’m directing too much from the page.” It’s not at all. It’s absolutely essential to make that beat work.
Patrick: Blocking is unbelievably important. Whole scenes can crumple when the blocking changes. On top of all that, this is just how I imagine. I think that blocking says a lot about Jeevan and who he is and how he’s safe and how he’s driven fundamentally by concern for the well-being of a stranger. That’s happened twice now in the last couple pages. I think in terms of the director conversation, any confident director will just say, “That blocking sucks. Let’s do it this way.” Any confident writer showrunner who knows what they’re doing will either say, “You’re totally right,” or, “No, we got to keep it.” I think if you’re all there doing the same thing, the blocking will end up what it needs to be.
Hiro, Christian, every director, Jeremy, they all knew they could change it if they needed to, from what I did. I often was lurking too. I would be like, “The problem with that though is this line doesn’t make sense anymore.” We worked together. Half the time I’m wrong on the page here, but I was doing it for a reason all the time. I think that’s the key in the collaboration. If everybody knows that, then we’re good. We changed a ton of stuff left and right.
John: What you’re doing on the page has set the tone. It’s the pre-tone meeting in terms of what is this scene actually really about. You can tell because of the specific stuff that you put in the scene.
Patrick: I find directors, actually that’s what they’re looking for, what is the core essential truth in this scene. I think the hard thing about being a director in Hollywood is getting scripts that just don’t speak to that at all.
John: We could focus for another hour on the script, but let’s actually turn our attention back to the room, because you’ve now set up the series. You are going to be going straight to series, but you need to actually write all these scripts. This is where you’re assembling a new room to put together the scripts for this 10 episodes. How many weeks was that? How did you find your writers? What was the process for putting together a room on Station Eleven?
Patrick: It was a 20-week room.
John: 20 weeks, that seems like a lot.
Patrick: It wasn’t enough. At the same time, yes, in today’s conversation I think that’s just… Leftovers, Season 2 was 42 seeks, and Season 3 I think was 44.
John: Oh my gosh.
Patrick: We moved slow. When the script came out of those rooms, it was the episode. There wasn’t any fluctuation in prep or in production. That was the show. We moved slow. Damon really believed in collective consents. We wouldn’t move forward if someone was bumping anywhere. We would overcome it as a group. You often would bog for three days on one scene because of that.
John: Wow.
Patrick: The problem though I faced at the beginning of this fall of 2019 was that because of Hiro’s coming schedule with Atlanta, because of my various entanglements in Los Angeles where Made for Love was shooting, the room was starting, and we had 20 weeks to go. We had 2 scripts, and we needed to output a bunch of them. I was getting pulled to Chicago and a set in LA. We had originally planned to shoot Station Eleven much later but had to pull it up into the fall of 2019 because of what Hiro’s coming schedule was going to be. It’s crazy to think about it, because it created a very difficult situation for the room. I was not in it all the time. I think that made it hard for the room sometimes. It’s crazy to think, had we not done this, we never would’ve made Station Eleven, because there’s no way in hell HBO Max would’ve said go ahead if we had shot nothing and the pandemic descended.
I built the room out of writers I knew and new writers to me. Nick Hughes came, a writer named Shannon Houston, who’s brilliant, who I’d been talking to for a while, Cord Jefferson, Kim Steele, Will Weggel. My former assistant also came in. A few other people. We were underway together, and September rolled forward for about a month before I started popping around to different places, and they tried to keep hacking away at it.
John: Looking through, just on IMDB, some of these people who I don’t know, it felt like the room was bottom-heavy. So often with small rooms, you see here’s a consulting producer or these are near showrunner levels. These were a lot of people who felt newer, or newer to their career.
Patrick: That’s true.
John: A deliberate choice?
Patrick: Sarah McCarron I forgot to mention, who’s also a brilliant writer. A deliberate choice? Maybe not consciously aware. I trended that way. Honestly, all these people are brilliant people who are in the room. We had plenty of brain power to get the show baked enough. I think a mistake I made as a younger, inexperienced showrunner was often to do this, and I think honestly reflects more than anything my own insecurity being able to run a room and being intimidated by the idea of someone more experienced than me in the room with me. I think this room reflects the end of that time for me when I was starting to realize that it was a mistake to not embrace as much experience as I could around me and take the wisdom and help of people who’d done it and been through 10 cycles of production. It was silly, but I think I didn’t quite know that that was happening consciously. I don’t think if I time traveled to me and confronted me about it, old me would admit that that was what was happening. Does that make sense?
John: Absolutely. We had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show recently. They were talking about the rooms for their two limited series and how incredibly important it was to have a writer on it who’s like, “Okay, that’s all well and good. Here’s how we make a TV show.” It was important to have a writer who just really knew how stuff got done. That was useful.
Patrick: I thought that was me. I think I was overestimating that too. You need help. You need experience. You need people who have gone through it a bunch of times who can guide you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good leader, I think. I think it probably means you’re a better leader to know that.
John: What internal documents or tools were you using to get the show figured out? I assume there was a whiteboard, because you’re actually recording this in the room where you put the room together, I guess. You have whiteboards, but what were the internal documents or what things were you guys looking at as a group?
Patrick: We had a bunch of stuff going at the same time. If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve started in a different order. We had whiteboards. We had a board that had a guess at what the 10 episodes were wanting to be, what the flow of the season was wanting to be. One thing that was very right was Episode 103 firmly planted as Episode 103, which later became a point of discussion a lot about whether that was the right place for it. We always thought that Miranda’s story needed to be right there early, even though it was a departure from the central story. The break was going for whatever episode we were on. Damon always likes to do a scenes we like board, which was the pre-break conversation for a few days. There was that going. We only got through the break of Episode 5 before the show was in production, 5 or 6.
John: Wow.
Patrick: What happened was the amount of world building was unbelievably gigantic, more so than I think I ever thought it could be, between Tyler, the airport, the way to separate Kirsten from the troupe, the way to reunite everyone, the scenes of the show. There was a lot to talk about. I think it was like, “I’m going to go out for a hike,” and then walking up to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and realizing at the last minute that you hadn’t brought some important climbing gear or tents and stuff. Do you relate to that experience?
John: Oh my god, yeah. Backstory behind all of this is that my first and really only experience running a television show was a disaster, back in the year 2000, 1999, where I was the hotshot young screenwriter who set up a show at the WB and was running the show that I had no business running, and just this slow-motion car crash of trying to do all this. I’m nodding as you’re saying that fear of having more experienced people in the room. I didn’t have more experienced people in the room. I surrounded myself with just the wrong folks.
Patrick: In my case, I was surrounded by the right folks, but I think I needed to be surrounded by more folks.
John: Exactly. You were too lean.
Patrick: I’m not sure my health was okay as those months of prep continued and I kept flying back and forth on red-eyes and not sleeping. I definitely was thinking that I was totally okay, but I was, I think in hindsight, slowly getting pulled into a whirlpool down. I think it was one of those things where we had just enough. I had the support I needed at the critical times I needed it. I think Hiro and his team and Christian and the HODs we had hired together in Chicago were so good. They were so brilliant and so pursuing the right questions, the times I wasn’t there in Chicago. The studio and the network ultimately had my back, just enough to get us rolling.
When we were rolling, I don’t think we ever missed on a day of dailies. I don’t think there’s a bad take in anything Hiro shot for the first 28 days of production that he directed 1 and 3 for. I think that’s when the Schrodinger’s box of is this showrunner a conman or not gets opened and that you start to show episodes, and they work and they’re good. Our cast also, they were so incredibly grounded and on it emotionally. Everyone knew what they were playing so well, so intuitively that I was learning from them as they shot scenes, to tell you the truth.
John: You said before, you couldn’t have actually waited any longer, because the pandemic would’ve happened, and you would never be making the show. The show would not have existed if you hadn’t started shooting before the actual real-life pandemic. In a perfect world, what would you have wanted to do or what would you want to do in the future. Would you want to have clear separation between the writing phase and production phase? What would’ve been different about how you would set up a show like this?
Patrick: Station Eleven is special in that the way in which things happened in the wrong order created the magic of it. I don’t mean to say that it should be that way. It’s hard to think about… For example, Danielle Deadwyler shot the end of Episode 3, her speech in the boardroom in Malaysia on day 3 of our shoot.
John: That’s crazy.
Patrick: I had that to aim for as an idea of the show always. I couldn’t have written some things without seeing what Danielle did. The right way to do it to me is the room outputs all the scripts that are at production draft level and ready to shoot before prep starts. That’s the right way to do it, I think.
John: That’s the fantasy. You’re actually prepping a thing you know how to make.
Patrick: Stability too, for the actors, for the sake of the departments and everyone’s ability, because people below the line in our business can pivot amazingly. Sure, they can do it. Do you want to do that every day to people? No, it won’t get you the best show. It’s not okay. It’s ultimately the showrunner’s responsibility to be good at his or her job and prevent that from happening. I’m learning. I’m trying to get better at that.
John: My cohost, Craig Mazin, has been away for the better part of a year making his own show up in Calgary. He’s obviously having to do a lot of writing on set and producing on set. Talk to me about your experience of being on set as the writer, creator, showrunner, and what you see as your function there.
Patrick: There needs to be someone there who just knows the answer. That’s both a creative thing and I think a leadership thing and a morale thing too. Scripts were still changing all the time, even the next year when we were in Toronto. Somehow in that year gap and having the two episodes and having written it all, something had internalized in me where I just understood the show. I felt like I was ahead of everyone in a weird way, because I just had been in the scripts. I felt like I could come to set, I could see if something was off, maybe with the blocking or with set deck, or someone needs to be there with the director when he says this scene isn’t quite right in the writing. There’s got to be one person on set who knows. I felt like every scene of the show, there’s some little nudge or change or alteration that I think I’m not sure it would be unified in the right way if I hadn’t been there.
John: Talk to me about post. Were you posting while you were shooting? Was post up in Chicago and then Toronto or was it back in Los Angeles? How did all that work?
Patrick: The first part of the show, the Hiro episodes, we shot them and then we posted them linearly. That’s when the pandemic descended in the middle of the post process for those two eps. Then post came back up online in January right when I flew to Toronto. A few weeks into the shoot, here’s my morning. It’s 5 a.m. in Toronto. It’s dark. It’s 1 degree. Go to the stages, which is an airport and a facility near an airport. I enter my trailer, because it’s COVID. I have three monitors up. I have post back home, which will come online at noon. I have the sets, which is 150 feet away from me, but I’m not in it, because it’s COVID. I would need a reason to be in it, which usually just means your rehearsal and then I go back to my trailer. Then I have prep meetings on the third monitor happening about concept meetings for Episode 9.
John: Zooms.
Patrick: Yeah.
John: Wow.
Patrick: My day is in there and then going to set and then coming back into the trailer and then going to set, in that case when Lucy needed me. We shot Episode 7 first.
John: Throughout all this whole process, what is HBO Max seeing? What is Paramount seeing? Are they getting outlines? How do they know what the show is that you’re making?
Patrick: By Part 2 in Canada, they had all 10 scripts.
John: That’s true.
Patrick: On Part 1 when they had a total of 3 scripts. They had 1, 2, and 3 when we shot 1 and 3. Soon after we started, I published 4 and 5. Then I published 7 during the January and February shooting period. I went and gave a big presentation and pitched the entire season out right after we wrapped that first iteration. We got behind in the room. We were supposed to have outputted more than that. That’s not on the writers room. That’s just on me not wanting to publish a script that felt not right yet. You know that thing, where it sometimes feels like it’s going to do more damage to your show to publish the wrong script than to publish no script? Like I said, the world building feat was just more gigantic than I think I had realized. That was what was happening slower back in the room, back in LA. Ultimately, that’s what I used to write the rest of the show, the work that the room did.
John: At what point do writers who are in that room get assigned, “Okay, you take this script. You take that script.” When is that decision made?
Patrick: That was pretty early. I think everyone in there got a script, and everyone knew what their script was going to be. It was tougher for 7, 8, 9, for Kim, Sarah, and Will, because the break, we really had only gotten to an outline place for those ones by the time the room was wrapping. What I think the room ended knowing and getting right was what emotionally each episode needed to be and a basic break of it. Then I think in all those different cases we continued, or I continued to do the writing.
John: Great. We have a listener question here which is right up your alley. Megana, do you want to help us out with that?
Megana: Nicole asks, “I have my first interview ever for a staffing position on a legal drama. I listened to your episode Advice for a New Staff Writer and was just wondering, do you have any tips for preparing for the interview? This is a new series that’s just been ordered. Any tips of advice would help.”
John: Pat, you’ve been through both scenarios here. You’ve been the new person interviewing for a job, and you’ve had to interview someone who wants to be a staff writer on a show. What advice can you give for Nicole? What should she be thinking about as she goes in that room?
Patrick: I’m thinking back to that Skype I had with Meredith and Elwood. I’m trying to remember. I’ll say it this was as the hirer. I think what I want is someone who seems to be both sophisticated socially, someone who can read a room and feel their way through a situation, just getting the sense of that, the life skill, and then someone who seems to have clear ideas, whether or not they agree with me. I think it’s very easy to get into this thinking that you’re supposed to serve the showrunner. Then sometimes that feels like without critical thinking. I don’t know. You need to show them that you’re not necessarily pliable, you’re not just there to please their imagination. It’s a tough needle to thread, honestly, because you got to be a good worker too. You got to, quote unquote, get it, whatever the fuck that means.
John: When Nicole goes into this room for staffing, how quickly does she bring up how much she loves the script that she read, the other writers’ previous work? What are the kinds of things that Nicole should just have cued up, ready to go when she walks into the room?
Patrick: I think if someone’s read the script, and if someone says one sentence… It doesn’t have to be, “I loved it.” It just has to be something that catches me like, whoa. If someone says, “I think this show is about blank,” and it dings a bell in my head as the creator, then I’m really paying attention. If someone has a thematic understanding of the story in a way that feels new to me, that’s really great. I don’t think it’s about praising it. It’s about understanding it. That’s when I feel as a showrunner someone’s going to come in the room and really help me.
John: Great. As the showrunner, you’re looking for somebody who can help you. That doesn’t just mean flatter you. It’s somebody who actually can bring something that you sense that you need. How could Nicole communicate that I guess is what I’m trying to get to. What does she say?
Patrick: I think it’s about the read of the script, honestly, what do you think this show is about, because the person doing the hiring in that situation doesn’t know the answer yet, usually. I think the anxiety best served is how do I help the showrunner know what this show is and find her vision, find his point of view.
John: Wonderful. It has come time in our podcast for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article I’ve just read this last week about the time in Ethiopia. I know that different cultures will have different calendars, just for cultural reasons. If you’re in Ethiopia, 1 a.m. is when dawn happens. Dawn is 1 a.m. It goes through 12 hours and then starts over again after 12 hours. It just made me realize it is so arbitrary that we start our days at midnight, in the middle of the night, as opposed to starting it at dawn, which feels like a very natural way to start your days.
Patrick: I got a good one.
John: Tell me.
Patrick: I’m not an expert, but this is what I’m doing lately in the last week. I saw a tweet last week that was a quote from Bell Hooks about friendship. I texted my friend who knows a lot about Bell Hooks, and I asked her about the quote, and she put me onto All About Love. What the quote was about, and why I’m fascinated, I’m about to dive into Bell Hooks, I guess, what she was saying is we live in this world of systems right now that we’ve already lost in a lot of ways in terms of power, just as a democracy. This is why friendship is so important, that we should treat friendship like the stakes are as high as anything else.
In the pandemic, I found it was really easy to let go and not put energy into a certain tier of friendships, the kind that you would maintain in regular life. I don’t know, I just started to feel that loss as very important, myself personally. Showrunning does this to you too. You can’t keep up with friendships properly, which it’s nefarious. It’s actually really important to find a way to keep balance in your life. Read All About Love, but also listen to Bell Hooks on friendship. That’s my one thing.
John: Your show is a lot about friendship as well. Arthur’s friendship and the trials that he goes through with their relationship is crucial story points there.
Patrick: It’s weird stuff for TV. It’s like Clark saying, “I miss friendships. I just miss friendships,” which just kills me still the way David Wilmot did that, because I do. There’s usually not a good way to frame that in TV and movie storytelling, but it’s a powerful emotion if you can get to it.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Patrick, what are you on Twitter?
Patrick: I am @patrickerville. It’s Patrick E-R-V-I-L-L-E.
John: Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find all eight episodes of Station Eleven scripts that you can download and read at your leisure. You’ll find the transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we are about to record talking about making a pandemic show during the pandemic.
Patrick: Don’t try it.
John: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Patrick: Thanks for having me. 553 represent.
[Bonus Segment]
John: We’re back. Patrick, as I said in the main body of the episode, I first reached out to you during the pandemic because I had just read Station Eleven and wondered how the hell you were going to make a show about a pandemic after a pandemic had happened, whether you were going to acknowledge COVID. I think you said, “We’re in a separate timeline where that pandemic never happened.” Is that where you ended up?
Patrick: Yeah. What’s crazy was that our date I think for the pandemic was December 12, 2020.
John: Oh my gosh.
Patrick: That was just what we had done well before it was even happening in Wuhan. We were shooting then in January in 2020, and then the show premiered December 16, 2021. I had no idea when you texted me or when you tweeted, DMed me… You couldn’t tell. We were watching cuts of our own show and being like, “I literally can’t tell if this will be tone deaf or not a year from now.”
John: It came out at just the right time. It came out at a time where it’s like, oh, it’s beautiful, and a memory of a different world, in a weird way. The most jarring moments for me watching your show were when we were in the hospital with Siya, his sister, and no one is wearing masks. I’m like, “Of course they’d be wearing masks.” At the time you were shooting that pilot, that first episode, it was reasonable that they wouldn’t be wearing masks.
Patrick: The other crazy thing about that scene is the kids are wearing masks. That was the thing in the script. It got erased by the pandemic. What was chilling about that scene was the idea of seeing children in masks. Now that’s normal. It doesn’t read right anymore, but it doesn’t matter.
John: I’ve finally gotten to the place in watching film and television where I don’t bristle at, “Oh wait, these people are standing too close to each other in the elevator.” I’ve gotten past some of that early pandemic fear. A question for you is how far were you into shooting, what was the last thing you shot before you had to shut down because of COVID?
Patrick: I think our last day of shooting was Arthur’s house at the dinner party. We were finishing up the dinner party and the fire. That was the pool house on fire. That was somewhere around February 20th or 25th of 2020. What’s crazy to me is the first shot of the show, the theater that’s full, that’s practical. You can’t shoot with that many people in a place anymore. That’s 300 people. Our before is the before, if that makes sense. We shot all that in the time when no one had heard of COVID yet.
John: That’s wild. Talk about the day when you had to shut down, because I’ve talked with other friends who’ve literally had to… They got the call, and 10 minutes later they’re packing up the trucks. What was it like for you?
Patrick: We were in post. It was very memorable, because post is a place where you go down into this hole, and in reality it doesn’t exist. It’s alarming to say this, but that morning, Friday the 13th, my wife had stopped by with my two-year-old daughter to say hi in the morning. It was like, this feels scary, but we don’t know what’s going to happen. We had just I think heard the term shelter in-place a day or two before when San Francisco closed down. That’s how oblivious and not at the same time we were.
Hiro and I, we had really been grinding. We were at some microscopic stuff in 101. We worked all day with Isaac Hagy and the editor of Episode 1. Right around 5 p.m., Hiro’s producing partner and one of our EPs on the show, Nate Matteson, just burst into the bay. His hair was just wild and everywhere. It was scary, because you could see a person who had been spending the day in a different world, and he was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” That kind of energy. He had to come down, I think, to properly communicate to us that we had to go. It was scary. It was really human. We’d been through a lot together making the show. I hugged Hiro goodbye in the parking structure. I don’t know when the next time I saw him in the flesh was, a long, long time. We got back to work I think a week later online and continued editing Episode 3.
John: This was in Los Angeles or this was in Chicago?
Patrick: That’s LA. That was all in LA.
John: That’s LA. You were basically the grocery store cashier, and someone had to come and tell you, “Oh no, no, you should probably just leave. The world as you knew it no longer exists.”
Patrick: Is this that thing, that flu thing? Greatest day player of all time, that dude. Holy shit, he’s good. Yeah, that was me. That was all of us. We were at work. We were head down in the show.
John: Talk to me about the decision to go back into production. Were you ever worried that they were just going to pull the plug and say, “We’re just not going to make the show at all.”
Patrick: As much as everyone was about everything.
John: Because of the subject matter. Basically, you were thinking-
Patrick: No. That part I wasn’t worried about, because 1 and 3 were just too good, I thought. Also, we always were set up to be… If any show was going to be continued, it was going to be ours, because it was about rebuilding. It was about connection and joy. It wasn’t about pain exactly. I think if either of those episodes had been distressed episodes, that would’ve been a problem. I think Hiro, the cast, everyone delivered. I think people just wanted to see the show. What we had to decide was where to shoot. We had to wait for a while, and then we had to make a choice about where to go, because it didn’t feel like Chicago was going to be safe on the timeline they wanted to shoot. That was the big conversation over the summer.
John: Had there been no pandemic, you would’ve done those two episodes and then immediately gone into shooting the rest of the show or was there always going to be a break between the two episodes that had been shot and the rest of things?
Patrick: We had eight weeks more prep in Chicago and time for me to write. We were going to come back up in the late spring and shoot year 20 stuff with Mackenzie in and around Chicago. That plan went out the window.
John: All the prep you’ve done for Chicago is moot, because you had to prep completely from scratch in Toronto to figure out here are our exteriors, here are our locations, here’s how we’re going to do everything.
Patrick: It wasn’t moot. It wasn’t moot, because the prep we’d done in Chicago was conceptual about the show. It was about the space station. We hadn’t even gotten to the wagons and the airport yet. It was deeply valuable, that prep in Chicago. The loss of those eight weeks was-
John: You knew what you wanted to do. You didn’t know what the specific locations were and such.
Patrick: We hadn’t scouted yet for the next stuff, so we didn’t lose that. The loss of that eight weeks was horrific. We needed that. We got some of it back in the summer online with art and costume. We needed all of it. We were playing catch-up all through the shoot.
John: I wish you no pandemics for the next things you’re going off to shoot. You’re in the room right now for the next Emily St. John Mandel book?
Patrick: We’re working on The Glass Hotel. We’re working on a different version of The Glass Hotel that fits into the Station Eleven world that we made.
John: It’s set around Miranda, right, so a character who exists in Station Eleven?
Patrick: Yeah, that’s right. I think unlike in the novel, the role that Miranda plays in the story is much bigger.
John: Great.
Patrick: It’s the financial collapse in 2008. It’s new zone for us. It’s also, this is my favorite, it’s a mystery. We’re learning all those new kinds of story moves, but in our way.
John: That’s great. How far are you into the process of the room, this new product?
Patrick: We’re early. We’re finishing up what’s been a six-week mini room. We’re going to output the first two episodes and we’re going to go talk to HBO Max about making the show.
John: That’s awesome. Good luck with that. Absolute pleasure talking with you, Patrick.
Patrick: Thank you, John. This has been great.
Links:
- Follow along with the Station Eleven pilot discussion! Read all of the Station Eleven scripts here.
- Station Eleven the series on HBO
- Station Eleven the book by Emily St. John Mandel
- Patrick Somerville on Twitter
- All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks
- Time in Ethiopia
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Pedro Aguilera (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 553: Adapting Station Eleven first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 575 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. One billion dollars, that’s the cost for entry for today’s How Would This Be a Movie segment, where we take a look at stories in the news and ask ourselves, huh, is this something I could watch on the screen somewhere?
Who is this we? We are down one Craig. Luckily, we found a comedian, actor, writer, podcaster, and very experienced host to fill in. You might know him from Fire Island, I Love That for You, or as one half of the Las Culturistas podcast. His new Showtime special, Have You Heard of Christmas, stream started December 2nd. Welcome to the program Matt Rogers.
Matt Rogers: I am so happy to be on the program. Thank you, John. I’m a massive fan, which I think I told you the first time we interacted over direct message, which is exclusively how we’ve known each other up to this point.
John: It’s so weird, because as we were starting to record… Do we know each other? It’s a real 2022 question, because we chat on direct messages on Instagram. That’s the extent of our relationship up until this moment.
Matt: I also guess it just matters how much of ourselves we put into our work, because if you’ve put a ton of yourself into your work, which I’ve seen many, many times… I often cite Big Fish as one of my favorite films. It’s in my top five again and again and again. Then I feel maybe I know you quite well, but this will be an opportunity to heighten that.
John: I also have a bit of a parasocial relationship with you because of the podcast you do with Bowen Yang. Obviously, you’re putting a lot of yourself in that podcast every week. I hear you, and I feel like I know you through that, because you’re talking about your ups and your downs and all the stuff in between. It’s a strange way that we know each other.
Matt: I think probably I share about 90% of my reality on that podcast. 10% you gotta keep hidden, which I think is a good rule of thumb.
John: That sounds like the iceberg motto, yeah.
Matt: Exactly. In a world where 90% of icebergs are above the surface, that’s the Las Culturistas podcast. Maybe for Bowen it’s 70/30.
John: Absolutely. We’ll see if we can just sink the Titanic with this. On this podcast, I want to talk to you about your origin stories or how you got started, because I think of you as a performer, but you’re also a writer too. You wrote on The Other Two. You wrote on Q-Force. I want to talk about balancing being a performer and being a writer on other people’s stuff. We have obviously a bunch of billion-dollar stories to talk through. Megana also picked out some listener questions I think are going to be perfect for you to answer.
Matt: Awesome. I’m ready, locked and loaded.
John: Let’s get into this. Let’s get into some origin story stuff.
Matt: Cool.
John: You went to NYU. Were you always a funny person who wanted to perform? When did you start to find your lane?
Matt: As a kid, I grew up on Long Island. I grew up in a very sporty atmosphere. My father was a varsity football and baseball coach. I think ever since I was a young child, I definitely wanted to participate in those types of activities, perhaps to impress him and make him proud, like any kid with their dad. There was always this thing in me, I think around the 1997 Oscars and the Titanic fever, when I was like, “What’s going on here? What’s this world? What’s this industry?” I was very susceptible to that Hollywood environment. It really hooked me just through the television. Then I think I realized, oh, maybe there’s something inside me that wants to perform.
By the time I got to college, I felt like I was distant enough from the atmosphere where I had to be very, very closeted on Long Island, and I was. I went to NYU and I think did a year there in a general studies program, and then I transferred into Tisch, truly willing myself into Tisch.
It’s true that basically I always wanted to be an actor and a performer and a comedian by the time I got to New York and was around 19 years old, but I just didn’t have the confidence in myself to go into Tisch and audition with a monologue, because I had never acted before. What I knew I could do as an AP English student, I was like, “I can write 25 pages of new material,” which was the requirement to get into dramatic writing at Tisch. I did that and got in.
I thought, “Great, I hacked the system. I’m in Tisch now. I can find a way to perform and act while being in this school.” Lo and behold, I realized I had a passion for writing, a talent for writing, and I basically was able to find performance as well through sketch comedy. I joined my sketch comedy group at NYU, which was called Hammerkatz, which was a legacy sketch comedy group at NYU. Its alumni are Donald Glover and Rachel Bloom. Those are just a couple of the names. They’ve obviously gone on to become these-
John: Titans of industry, yes.
Matt: … celebrated multi-hyphenates in their own right. I would even say I was addicted to writing and performing sketch comedy. It was my entire reason for living. It was really what propelled me forward in terms of… I was all of a sudden this prolific person. I would come into the sketch meetings with… If people were required to bring in two new ideas or two new sketches or even two new one-pagers, which is what we call it when you bring in just the first page of a sketch just to get the game out, I would bring in five. I was just always feeling like volume was going to get me to a place where I would produce something good. I always said, when I was directing the group, “If you have 10 ideas, one of them is good, so bring in volume.”
John: What is this schedule for this? Was it weekly meetings where you’d have to do this and then you’re putting up that show later on that same week?
Matt: Correct. We did monthly shows. We did new monthly shows. Probably there was 10, 11 sketches in the show. We would have writers’ meetings on Monday evenings. I eventually became the head writer and director of the sketch group. Sudi Green was my assistant, who went on to become a writing supervisor of Saturday Night Live. We ran the group together. We really, really, really took it seriously. It was also around this time that I met Bowen Yang, when he was in the improv group at NYU. We became this coterie of students of sketch comedy and also participants in the New York comedy scene very young.
I was not only doing that, but I was studying writing. I did get my major in a concentration in television writing at NYU Tisch, but also took screenwriting and playwriting. I had a really well-rounded writing education by the time I left, but really my passion was writing and performing sketch comedy. I paired that with taking classes at UCB.
Then all throughout my 20s, I found musical sketch comedy. I was the artistic director of a musical sketch group with Sudi and Bowen called Pop Roulette. We were an indie group in New York for several years. Then started performing on my own. Before I knew it, Bowen and I had the podcast, which started in 2016. All of a sudden, it was apparent to me that I didn’t have to hide in sketch anymore. I could also use my own voice for comedy. All of that in my 20s coalesced to create the me of now.
Now I have Have You Heard of Christmas, which takes all of those things and puts them together. It’s all original music. It’s stand-up. It’s sketch. It’s very much a narrative piece, actually. It’s not just a person up there singing cabaret songs. It’s actually a narrative piece. It almost feels like a book end, like I started and ended, and I have this. It feels almost like a love letter to myself all through my 20s when I started. It’s this thing I have at the end of my 20s and the end of my time in New York that I get to share with people now.
John: You fast-forwarded through a part that I actually want to dig into more deeply-
Matt: Sorry.
John: … because transitioning from you’re working at this sketch group at the university, but then having to move beyond that to actual professional spaces where you don’t have the excuse that, “I’m just a student.” Was UCB a crucial part of that? How did you move from being a student where you have that protection to you’re out there in the real world? You must’ve had a job. What were you doing to pay the bills while you’re trying to figure out how to make a living as a writer/performer?
Matt: I was waiting tables. I waited tables for a decade in New York. That was not my favorite thing to do. This is actually funny. When I was very young, I went to a Screen Actors Guild screening of the movie Zero Dark Thirty. Jessica Chastain was there. I’ll always forget… I’ll always forget.
John: Always forget.
Matt: I’ll always forget what she said. I’ll always remember what she said, which was, “Do one thing every single day that reminds you why you’re an actor,” is what she said. I said, “I’m going to do one thing every day that reminds me why I’m a comedian actor/writer.” I made sure to always keep an anchor on something, even if it was something as small as sending an email that would further my career or something.
When it came to transitioning to professional situations, that really didn’t happen, because everything was very self-start-y all throughout my 20s. I did not get a job in the industry until I was hired as a writer on The Other Two in 2019, so for the second season of The Other Two, which was a huge wake-up call in terms of how the industry works and how a writers’ room works. If I had a note for NYU dramatic writing, Tisch, it’s they should think about how a writers’ room actually works, which they have to know, because they’re all adjunct professors.
The industry had changed so much from the time I had graduated to the time I was hired on that show, because I graduated in 2012 where they were still teaching spec scriptwriting, so I left school with a Modern Family, which is something that no showrunner is going to look at and consider as a worthy sample for their writers’ room in 2019 when I’m hired on The Other Two. By that time, it was more about reputation, and it was more about original work. It was really interesting the way that it changed very quickly.
What I did get out of my time at NYU were my connections and my friends and my eventual colleagues, because I’ve continued to work with all of them. It was being seeped in the environment of New York City, of creatives that really was the thing I took from school. I know this is a frustrating answer for some people who they’re more comfortable simply just putting stuff on the page and then sending it out or having themselves represented on the page, but it really was more social connections and maintaining and watering those connections I had with peers, lifting people up myself, that ultimately resulted in me getting hired, because I knew Chris and Sarah, who created The Other Two.
John: They came from Saturday Night Live, so they were part of that whole environment.
Matt: Right, and they had become fans of the podcast.
John: Great.
Matt: Then I had them on the podcast, and we really hit it off, and so they put me in their room as a staff writer. That was my first job in the business.
John: Now, during this time where you’re waiting tables, you’re doing other stuff, were you also submitting packets for late-night shows? What were your goals? Ashley Nicole Black has been on the show talking us through that process, and it seems crazy. You’re trying to put together the best packet, but clearly there’s also a who you know to even know that they’re looking for packets.
Matt: Absolutely. It was a fool’s errand for me when I was submitting late-night packets, because I didn’t know anyone at the time. I was 23, 24, 25. Eventually, I just realized this is not my skill. I always thought, weirdly enough, it’s just not what I… Even though I’ve written sketch, I wasn’t good at the monologue jokes of it all. I really couldn’t stand writing in the voices of some of these hosts, just because they were not my voice.
It’s really difficult when you have a packet, and these are 10 monologue jokes that will go in Jimmy Fallon’s voice or Jimmy Kimmel’s voice or any Jimmy really. That was not my skill, because it’s also a lot of times coming up with centerpiece bits that people can do and less sketch ideas for people. It’s some sort of thing where Jimmy can go in front of a green screen and something behind him is surprising. It’s more creating bits than it is doing, and this is going to sound shady, it’s not, actual comedy. It’s more responsive to the environment and the ecosystem of what’s happening, which doesn’t necessarily have to be hard jokes.
Everything I wanted to do was writing television, being in television, and doing sketch. Ultimately, I did end up sending several packets to SNL. That never went forward. I did screen tests for SNL and did the whole thing, actually alongside Bowen. They had us both on hold for six months. Ultimately, they cast him, and I was released. Then I moved to LA and worked on The Other Two. I went as far as you possibly could in the SNL process without getting hired.
John: When you go in for one of these final things at SNL, are they going to bring you in as a performer, a writer, or both? I know Bowen was really more of a writer before he was a performer.
Matt: It’s interesting the way it works, because if you are screen testing, they can decide to do whatever they want with you. You sign a contract before you even get on that stage. It basically says we can put you in the writers’ room, we can do whatever. Bowen was put in the writers’ room first, but that’s not because they didn’t want him to perform. It was a thing of, let’s see how he does in the atmosphere of Saturday Night Live before we move into cast, which I think was almost a good thing, because then you’re not thrown to the wolves as a featured cast member, and sink or swim. He also did get to do a bit with Sandra Oh on the show.
That’s the way it works there. It’s a more holistic thing. It’s less like, oh, you auditioned for a performer, and so we’re only seeing you for that, or we saw your packet and so you’re only going in the room. It’s much more of a chaotic process that makes a lot less sense than you would ever think.
John: Circling back to late-night, I think one of the trends I’ve noticed over the last few years is that more late-night shows are using some of the people that they bring on as writers and as performers to actually be themselves on the show, like Louis Virtel, who gets to be himself, or Amber Ruffin. That is a great thing too is recognizing that not every writer is going to be able to write for that white male host, and the white male host is not going to be able to deliver every joke to every audience. I hope that we continue this trend where you might actually have one named host, but you see a lot of other familiar faces on the screen who can be specific in their comedy because they’re part of a group.
Matt: Yeah, definitely. I know Lou has a great time doing that. He’s a dear friend of mine. I obviously adore Amber. To see her spin off into her show, which is so great, that’s so awesome. In fact, Bowen and I actually, we did our segment I Don’t Think So, Honey on The Tonight Show, and it was supposed to be a recurring thing. The second time we went to do it, we got cut because Aretha Franklin had passed, and they needed to make time for Ariana Grande to come out and sing Natural Woman. J-Lo was on the show. Aerosmith was on the show. It was this really crowded day where they cut us, and so we were never invited back.
John: You’re going to blame Ariana Grande for the rest of your life. Aretha and Ariana screwed you over.
Matt: I have beef with both of them, in life and death. Just kidding. I’m good with them both.
John: Let’s get into our main segment here, which is How Would This Be a Movie. We do this every couple weeks where we talk through some stories in the news or history and think about how would these be converted into quality filmed entertainment, either 2 hours long or 10 hours long, as we tend to do these days.
Matt: Everything’s too long.
John: Everything’s too long.
Matt: Cut 40 minutes out of every fucking thing. That’s my note. Every single thing.
John: Most 10-episode things could probably be episodes, because there was padding.
Matt: Oh, darling, the way The Vow is back with another 10-episode season, I know that’s not even narrative, but I’m like, essentially, yes, it is, because we have to watch it, and we’re being told a story. You gotta get this done in four.
John: I don’t even remember what The Vow is. That’s how much TV there is. What is The Vow?
Matt: It’s about the NXIVM cult. It’s on HBO.
John: I love me a cult, but I don’t have 10 hours to watch it.
Matt: Love me a cult, but I understand what a cult is, and you don’t need to explain it to me again and again, episode to episode. It’s actually not that different from the other cults.
John: Speaking of cults, we should let the listenership in on our main point of bonding on Instagram was talking about great Elizabeth Mitchell was on Lost.
Matt: Oh my god, yeah, one of my favorite TV performances of that era.
John: She is the cult leader I would follow anywhere. Forget Ben. Elizabeth Mitchell in any role, I’ll watch her do it.
Matt: She was so great on that show. I remember she played Juliet. They missed the opportunity to give her any Emmy nominations while she was on the main cast, but then they threw her a guest nom the year after for I think the final season, which was too little, too late.
John: A hundred percent.
Matt: She’s so great on that show.
John: Yeah, so great.
Matt: They so did that character dirty. It sucked.
John: I know, but they did everyone a little bit dirty.
Matt: They did themselves dirty, or the network did them dirty.
John: A lot happened there.
Matt: It’s not Damon’s fault. He’s made good on it.
John: Let’s find a way to catch Elizabeth Mitchell in all of these projects that we’re going to discuss here. We’ll start off with FTX and Binance. As we’re recording this, the company’s imploding. I’m going to try to give the quickest summary possible, so if you have to talk about this at a cocktail party, this is what happened with FTX.
There is this company called FTX, this giant exchange where you can buy and sell cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin. It’s sort of like a bank. You can put your money there. It’s the second largest of these exchanges in the world. It’s founded by this guy named Sam Bankman-Fried, who we call SBF, everyone calls SBF. You’ve seen pictures of this guy. Do you know what he looks like?
Matt: Yeah, I have.
John: He’s sort of like a young Jonah Hill-ish type.
Matt: It’s giving schlub.
John: He’s giving schlub. Binance is the second biggest of these exchanges. It’s founded by Changpeng Zhao, who everyone calls CZ. The general portrayal is that SBF is like the Luke Skywalker of the story, and CZ is like the Darth Vader. They’re like the good guy and the bad boy of crypto. Their relationship starts off well. They both become billionaires. They both form these giant companies. When SBF starts cozying up to regulators, things get frosty.
Last week, an article by CoinDesk showed that internal accounting at FTX was basically… They were all magic beans. There was nothing underneath there. That starts a run on FTX, which can’t pay out, ultimately agrees to sell itself to its rival, Binance, run by CZ. Then Binance looks under the hood and says, “Oh wait, no, we don’t even want to buy you.” FTX declares bankruptcy. FTX has lost $15 billion of its $16 billion, and this all happens in a few days. All of this cascades down. Matt Rogers, as you look at the story of FTX, what are the interesting things to dramatize? Who do you think the funny characters are? What kind of movie or TV show would you watch out of this or want to make out of this?
Matt: Picture this. I’m going to go a completely different way with it.
John: I want to hear it.
Matt: It’s actually a queer romantic comedy. It stars me and let’s say Bowen Yang.
John: I could see that.
Matt: It’s about two men who instantly have a connection, but one of them understands what the fuck you just talked about and one of them doesn’t. I play the one that doesn’t get, for a single second, what any of this is. When someone says the word crypto to me, I go absolutely black in the eyes and in the mind. Basically, we try to make it work, but it’s the very difficult, complicated love story, that really gets cute at the end, about a crypto gay and me, because there are crypto gays out there. I have questions for them like, what? I have questions for them like, huh? I don’t understand a single thing.
For the listeners at home, they send the outline. You’re to prepare, based on the outline. I said, “This is not the project for me to story break.” I’m going to be a joke writer on this one. I’m actually going to sit in the room and participate in the way where it’s like, I’ll pepper you with jokes, but this is me checking out in the plotty part of the room, which is what I do when I’m in the rooms I’m in. Once they get too plotty, I’m like, “Yeah, and then they go to Burger King.” That’s where I’m at.
John: You snipe in there with a joke, a funny line there, but not the web and plotting.
Matt: Yeah. Then basically, someone can be like, “You know, SBF.” I’m like, “SPF?”
John: “What?” Yeah.
Matt: “Yeah, we should all wear SPF. I totally agree.” He’s like, “No, SBF.” I’m like, “I don’t know.”
John: Matt, I think a lot of times you need to find some other template for what the story could be. That’s why you reach for Shakespeare, you reach for Romeo and Juliet, you reach for a rom-com. I think the template for this might be Showgirls.
Matt: Now we’re talking.
John: You have Nomi, who comes to Las Vegas, and then you have the Gina Gershon character, who is the bad girl, who teaches her the ropes of things. Ultimately, they’re going to be vying for… There’s only one featured dancer, and it’s all going to come down to this. I think that could be the SBF-CZ competition, because they have their moments of bonding at the start, the dog food conversations, but then fundamental values get involved there. The turning of the two of them on each other I think could be fascinating, like who’s pushing each other down the stairs.
Matt: Could it also be a little horny between them?
John: You know what? It can be a little horny between them. Why not?
Matt: Or are we going to have a hard time selling that?
John: Oh. I don’t know. I think as long as they don’t actually touch… I think straight audiences love when there’s tension but it’s never consummated.
Matt: We all know the big problem with Bros where they didn’t cast Chris Evans, so of course we get Chris Evans for this. Maybe we de-glam him. We turn him into a Seth Rogen type. Maybe Seth Rogen plays the other one, because now he’s shedding the pounds.
John: There’s some homoerotic tension in there, a little bit like… You think back to 40-Year-Old Virgin, I Love You, Man. There’s a thing about that that is fair [crosstalk 00:21:43] go far. It’s a comedy, I think, because it’s gotta be that way.
Matt: I think it has to be, because I’m telling you, if I’m writing the script, I’m bailing on anything in plot, and it’s becoming really silly and stupid, because I do not have the human capacity to understand Bitcoin. I just don’t. I feel like life is too short for me to try.
John: I think so too. I get that. I like that choice for you.
Matt: Look. Listen. They say write what you know. Write what you know. I’ll never forger, when I was in school, my teacher, his name was Paul Selig, he was my craft of writing teacher. He had us all come in at the end of the semester, and he sat us down. He was going to give us advice, individual advice. He said to me, “I just think you need to go out and live more life.” He goes, “I think you need to go out and get your heart broken, because I think you’re a real writer, but you don’t know anything yet.” I was like, “Okay.” I know that I don’t know about Bitcoin, so I’m going to pass this one off.
John: I love it. This will become a movie almost definitely, because there’s already a Michael Lewis book being written about it, so Michael Lewis who did Moneyball and did other famous books about real life things. He was already embedded with SBF when this all crashed down. The hubris of this kid, this 30-year-old billionaire, to say, “Oh, you know what? I want this famous biographer just to follow me around while I create this massive fraud company that’s going to completely disintegrate.” There’s something about that that’s fascinating too.
Matt: Listen, God bless Jonah Hill on his third Oscar play. That’s wonderful that he will ultimately have that, because I guess you’re right, it really is that for him, huh?
John: It is. It is.
Matt: Probably has to dye his hair back from Malibu blond, which it is right now.
John: That’s fine. He’s willing to do it for the art.
Matt: He can do that.
John: He’ll do that.
Matt: Of course, and wigs.
John: Wigs. Come on, with the wig craft these days, it’s unstoppable.
Matt: Truly.
John: You know nothing about cryptocurrency. You probably know a little bit more about Twitter. Is that true?
Matt: A little bit more.
John: A little bit more about Twitter.
Matt: A little bit more.
John: We’re recording this on a Tuesday. Who knows what’s happened to Twitter by the time this episode comes out next week.
Matt: I hope it’s over. I have such a burn the world mentality about it. I hated it to begin with, and now that it’s run by a demon, it’s just like, let’s just burn it down, for me, personally. I hope by the time this is out, this whole thing is moot.
John: This is the first project in a while where even before it was on this outline, I got an email saying, “Hey, would you want to do a Twitter movie? Would you want to do a movie about what’s happening at Twitter right now?” Some people reached out to me like, “Hey,” sort of thing. There probably is a thing, but it’s the question of where are the interesting boundaries of this, because Elon Musk is going to be a character in this. Great, you can find some way to do Elon Musk, but are the other characters in it… Who? There’s Grimes. There aren’t a lot of other names you can put to it. There’s just faceless employees who get fired and that sense of-
Matt: Jack Dorsey is probably the main character.
John: Jack Dorsey, sure.
Matt: I would say Jack Dorsey’s the main character of this, because honestly, he’s the center of it. He was there for the rise and the fall. You’d need that in this narrative. He saw it and then failed with it. Now he’s watching it from afar, probably with overgrown facial hair, watching Elon burn it down. I do think that Trump has to play into this narrative too, because I think he broke Twitter.
John: It’s a question of do you want to do The Social Network, where you’re looking at the launch of the thing, or are you doing some very small slice? I just saw the movie Margin Call, which is great, Demi Moore is in it, which is just focusing on 24 hours and everything falling within that.
Matt: I’d rather see grandeur.
John: I like grandeur.
Matt: I’d rather see grandeur.
John: Big vision there.
Matt: Big vision, I think. Let’s see the rise and fall. Let’s tell the story, because you really can. I don’t think it’s too complicated. I think that that’s the most compelling thing is to see something enter the consciousness, change the world for the better, then the worse, and then cease to exist because of ego, which I think is so much a part of Twitter too, that you can log on there and say anything you want, and that you’re going to not be held accountable for it. Then comes the accountability in a major way, which is the digging through of old tweets, etc. I almost think you could do a Don’t Look Up style, many characters in many different environments situation. It could be very big, many different people and how they respond to it. Maybe this is a limited series, to be honest with you.
John: I’m wondering if it’s a limited series too. It feels like a lot.
Matt: Like a Mrs. America type. It’s definitely a lot. There’s a lot to tell. I do think it’s an open and closed, season-long, let’s call it six, seven-episode narrative.
John: People will push for 10, but you say no, we’re going to keep this short and tight. This is going to be Chernobyl. It’s not going to be one of these other things that keeps going on and on forever.
Matt: It’s Andrew Garfield’s limited series lead actor Emmy and hearkens back to the Facebook of it all. I think he’d be a great Jack Dorsey.
John: He would be a great Jack Dorsey, absolutely.
Matt: He looks like him.
John: Yeah, he does. That’s great. [inaudible 00:26:43].
Matt: So do I, kind of. Actually, I take it back. I want to play him.
John: Very good. What are you doing here? You’re pitching this movie, and you’re not even pitching yourself as the lead in it.
Matt: I know, as if Andrew Garfield needs more. He’s got it all, and now they released those pictures of him today where he looks hot. Did you see those pictures of him in GQ?
John: I saw those pictures. It’s him in leather pants on a sand dune and apparently falling or something. He looks absurdly hot.
Matt: Do you want to know some tea?
John: I want to know all the tea.
Matt: We share a makeup artist. We share a groomer. I asked what he was like, and she told me he’s amazing, so nice, very emotional, often a laugh away from a tear, a very emotional, grateful, sensitive person, to the point where sometimes he’ll get emotional, and they’ll have to redo his makeup. He needs a lot of touch-ups, because he’s very grateful, emotional, right on the skin, water sign type. I would be really interested to find out astrologically what the situation is.
John: Matt, my guess is that you are often close to a tear too. I guess that you are an emotional person. Is that fair?
Matt: Oh yeah, I’m a Pisces, rising Pisces, Cancer moon.
John: Oh my god.
Matt: If you say one thing to me [crosstalk 00:27:49].
John: I have no idea what any of that means, but Megana, she’s [inaudible 00:27:51].
Matt: It means I’m a dripping wet water sign, which yes, to answer your question, means I’m emotional. I’m in the right business.
John: Always good.
Matt: Sort of.
John: Circling back to you didn’t cast yourself in this movie to start with, that is a rookie mistake. You look at Seth Rogen, Seth Rogen isn’t setting up a thing, saying, “Oh, but there’s no part for me to play.” No, Seth Rogen’s like, “No, I’ll be in there.” [Crosstalk 00:28:14] figure out like, “Oh, there’s a role for me in this movie too.”
Matt: I know who I play. Exactly. I respect it. I respect the hustle, always. He’s like, “Oh, there’s a romantic comedy with me and Charlize Theron? Of course I’m the lead.” That is the confidence we should all aspire to.
John: Seth Rogen levels of confidence.
Matt: I liked that movie actually.
John: I did too.
Matt: Long Shot.
John: It’s good stuff. Finally, we’ll end on maybe a happy note. This is the billion-dollar lotto. $2.04 billion was awarded this last week. The winner hasn’t come forward yet, but the store owner is potentially a good character. His name is Joel Chahayed. I didn’t realize that the store owner gets a million dollars for having sold the winning lotto ticket.
Matt: I didn’t know that.
John: Yeah, that’s wild.
Matt: Really?
John: Kind of great. This guy is a Syrian immigrant from the 1980s. He said, “We are excited. We’re happy for California, happy for Los Angeles County, happy for the city of Altadena, and we’re happy for the schools that are going to get more money.” He’s saying all the right things. This little, small store owner gets a million dollars just for the luck of having sold a lotto ticket. What do we feel about lotto? Is lotto culture?
Matt: You know what’s interesting about lotto? It’s actually something that specifically was discussed in writing school about what a cop-out it is to have someone win the lottery. Then I’ve seen it happen a few times, where I was like, “I buy it.” I guess if you like In the Heights at all, you have to like the lotto of it all, because it’s the whole movie by the end. Is lotto culture? Yeah, it’s culture. Everyone knows what it is. It is monoculture. Buying a lottery ticket and potentially winning or losing and how it might change your life. It hearkens back to Rosanne, that sitcom that everyone was watching in the ’90s. That is monoculture. Of course lotto is culture. I’ve been told it’s hack narratively.
John: I think it’s hack unless it is actually the fundamental premise of the thing. You get let’s say one coincidence in your story. If that coincidence is the inciting incident, great. Otherwise, the lotto feels like too much of a wild thing.
Matt: The lotto can come in and change the world of what you’re doing. If it does, it probably has to be the center of it, or it’s a heightened musical. I’m actually an In the Heights apologist. I don’t think it got what it deserved.
John: I a hundred percent agree with you. I loved In the Heights. First off, I’ll acknowledge that I’m watching it on the Chinese Theater, and the huge screen, and the first movie I’ve seen on a big screen post-pandemic, or mid-pandemic. The big pool fountain sequence in the middle of it-
Matt: Amazing. That was so great.
John: Blows me away.
Matt: Jon Chu is great.
John: Jon Chu is great.
Matt: I actually have a lot of faith in Wicked. I love Crazy Rich Asians. He’s really, really good. He can put a set piece together. Also, everything tracks. I thought In the Heights really fleshed out those female characters too, especially if you have seen the stage musical. Vanessa is not fleshed out enough, which is interesting, because they had such an amazing actress, Karen Olivo, playing her on the stage. In the movie, it’s this whole fleshed out thing. I thought the ecosystem of the world felt very full. It’s got that great performance by Olga Merediz as the grandmother. Anthony Ramos was amazing. That was a great movie, so I didn’t mind the lotto of it all.
John: It needs more love, for sure.
Matt: It needs more love. It was bizarrely ignored.
John: Let’s talk through our billion-dollar movies here. The FTX movie or something will get made, because a book happened. There’s no love for Matt Rogers in this thing. You’re not going to watch it. [Crosstalk 00:31:55].
Matt: I’m not going to go see that. I’ll go see it if I have to go see it. If at the end of the year, they’re like, “You all have to see Jonah Hill’s tour de force,” then I’ll be like, “Okay, I’ll go see Jonah Hill’s tour de force, I guess.” I’ll always try to put my own personal biases aside if there’s an actor tour de force. I try. Sometimes it just can’t happen for me. I cannot sit through a horror movie. If Bitcoin is less of a horror in this film than I think it is to me personally, I’ll sit through it.
John: Did you like The Big Short?
Matt: Yeah. I’m actually a bigger fan of Adam McKay than I think a lot of people in my coterie are. Some people drag him.
John: People got annoyed by Adam McKay as the public figure, I think.
Matt: I actually saw a DGA screening of Don’t Look Up. It was the first screening in LA actually. Adam was there. Leo was there. Jennifer Lawrence was there. Meryl was there. They came and did a talk-back after. I remember watching the movie, and my immediate response that I felt was, this was funny, but it also needed a joke punch-up bad, and also, it’s obsessed with the lesson it’s teaching you, which I think is a little bit lol when you consider it’s Leo, who does do a lot of good things but is also a massive hypocrite when it comes to the environment. We’ve seen the yachts, to say nothing of the age of the girls on them.
It’s just bizarre to me, the finger-wagginess. I just know that when Hollywood waves a finger at everyone re: climate, it’s like, okay, but… I actually liked Vice more, to be honest with you, because I thought it was more knowing and surreal. Then I say that about a movie where an asteroid hits the earth.
John: Funny, that. Did anybody ask about Jennifer Lawrence’s wig work in that movie? I think that was a crime.
Matt: The wig work? I actually thought she was the strongest part of it, to be honest with you. I thought Leo was great. He’s an amazing actor.
John: I think a good performance despite wig. The wig sometimes elevates the performance. It just makes the person, “Oh, I see what that is.” Nicole Kidman is transformed by a wig. Jennifer Lawrence I felt like was just-
Matt: Not everyone is.
John: She was trapped under that thing. Whatever that was, I don’t understand it.
Matt: They were giving her a cool girl haircut. They were giving her the little bangs and the whole thing so we knew that she was alt and a scientist, but cool scientist, young scientist, and willing to speak truth to power. I did love her joke about [inaudible 00:34:28]. I thought that was the strongest part of the movie. I thought the movie needed more of that. I don’t know. It just needed a punch-up.
John: Agreed, a punch-up is needed. Finally, we’ll get to the billion-dollar lotto. We’ve learned from Matt Roger’s teachers that lottery tickets are lazy is what we’ve learned.
Matt: I don’t mean to be a snob about that shit either, but you can always do better than that.
John: You can do better. You can do better. Do better, Hollywood.
Matt: Do better.
John: We have some listener questions I think are very appropriate for you to be answering here. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Yes. I also have one of my own questions for Matt.
John: You can start with that if you want.
Megana: A lot of our listeners, I feel like coming out of film school, they have a question of what is their next step. Hearing you talk about your origin story, it sounds like you were doing so many things and just putting your work out there. Did you have any sort of guiding principle? You’d gone to school for television writing, but you weren’t afraid to do sketch and do different performance things. What was your guiding motivation throughout that period?
Matt: I just wanted the work to be good. All I wanted was for the work to be good. I took every opportunity to try out what I had written. Like I said, I had this sketch group, and I was the artistic director of it. I steered where it went comedically and musically and artistically. I always felt like if I tried something and it didn’t work, at least I had put a ton of work into it in preparation. Everything was always really well rehearsed, rewritten, punched up, etc. Then if it didn’t work, it was just because it didn’t work, but not for lack of trying. I just always wanted to make sure that I was doing work that I at least felt was good. Nothing was ever not ready, even if it was a little bit show. I always over-prepared.
I think that all throughout my 20s when I was doing comedy and the stakes were so low because no one was watching, it actually taught me a lot, because in my over-preparedness, I think sometimes I lost a little bit of that spontaneity and the magic that comes with doing live comedy and discovering things on stage. You don’t want to be so married to something that the littlest thing throws you off, which can happen in live performance. Again, that is how I developed. I’m speaking more to people that are more on their feet doing the work. I’m talking more to comedians with this.
I guess my global note for something like that is, if you’re going to send something out, if you’re going to present something, at least stand by it, because I always think it’s better to wait on capitalizing on a connection that actually can move you forward than present something to that connection just because that connection is there.
Don’t be stressed out that you don’t have a manager or an agent at 23, 24, 25. I think I got one at 26, 27, and I felt really stressed about that. When someone who you’re meeting with says they can advance your career eventually or represent you eventually, that’s not necessarily a frustrating or bad thing. They know, from being professionals as well, who’s ready, who’s not. It’s not a bad thing to be told you’re not ready yet or, “Keep going,” or, “Keep sending me stuff.” Just make sure you’re proud of what you’re presenting.
If you don’t know yet what is good or bad, go out and see things and gauge your own reactions. Expose yourself to things. If something makes you feel a certain way in any regard, ask yourself why. Journal about why. Really follow the careers of people that promote a gut instinct in you, I would say.
John: Love that.
Megana: That’s such good advice. Our first listener question is from To Drag Or Not To Drag. They wrote in, “I was invited to participate in a Zoom pitch festival later this month. The pilot I’m pitching is about a queer masc-presenting, assigned female at birth person who’s also a drag queen coming into her femininity while her girlfriend, a high-femme and very glam trans woman, is realizing she may identify more as nonbinary and taking back her masculine side. This show works through questions and issues about gender presentation, ongoing issues trans people face in using shared/public restrooms, identity, what it means to be a woman, etc.
“I work with drag queens at my day job and learned to do drag makeup during the pandemic. I haven’t performed but have gone out in female drag with the queens I know. What I’m wondering is, should I consider doing my pitches over Zoom in drag, or is that way too schlocky and gimmicky? I realize that I can instead talk about this in the, quote, ‘talk about myself and how my background, experiences, and point of view led me to write this specific script’ portion of the pitch.”
John: Matt, what do we think?
Matt: I think there’s a couple things I think based on this person’s question, which is, I think it’s always great to stand out in your pitch. My special, Have You Heard of Christmas, I did it in full Christmas garb. I pitched it in the summer, and I had a red sweater on and a bow tie and everything. It’s always important in a pitch to stand out.
I also think the pitch that you’ve described, while it sounds interesting, is complicated. I think that you need to try to think about how you can distill what you are presenting to the most simple thing. I honestly almost feel like you doing the presentation in drag would help simplify it and center in on the joy and the relationship of what is happening between your characters in the pitch, and less on identity, because me, even as a part of the queer community, has heard this pitch in your question, and I’m a little confused as to who’s who. I think we need to pare it down, make it about relationship and character. I actually think that you pitching in drag could help that, because we immediately understand what it is.
I don’t know how good your drag is. I would not look like a person in a wig on Zoom. If you’re going to do drag, let’s get the drag together and make sure that we have a really solid landing spot for the people that you’re pitching to, because I think clarity is going to be really, really important in any pitch, especially because a lot of them happen over Zoom, where people are less in tune off the top. Clarity, comedy, and-
John: Some other C word.
Matt: Beat your face right.
John: What I would say to our listener is that a pitch is a performance. When Matt was going out to pitch his show, he’s giving a performance. You are going to be giving a performance, regardless of whether you’re in drag or not in drag. The fact that you’re not a seasoned drag performer makes me nervous about whether you’re going to be able to deliver fully in drag. I think the way you’ll know is just to try it. The good thing about Zooms is you can do some with it and some without it. Maybe use one of your less important ones, try it in drag, and see what it is and see how it feels there and whether you’re able to land and connect the way you want to connect.
I guess I do worry about that it’s going to feel like you’re dressed up and that you’re not actually performing, that you’re not actually able to be authentically the writer pitching this thing, that you’re just going to be a guy dressed up, and they’re not going to see… They’re going to be too focused on figuring you out that they’re not going to be able to figure out your pitch, unless you’re good. If you’re Trixie Mattel, do it in drag, but you’re not Trixie Mattel yet. That’s my question.
Matt: I guess that’s the thing is we actually don’t know, and again, this is going to sound harsh, but the quality of your drag.
John: Exactly.
Matt: Immediately, if it’s looking shitty on Zoom, they’re going to be like, “This is looking shitty on Zoom.” Then it’s going to distract them. I would say if you have the opportunity to have an actual drag queen or drag makeup artist do your makeup, then sure, but you have to be really confident too, because that’s another thing about drag is you can’t hide in drag. When you look shy or silly in drag, apologizing for being there, that defeats the purpose of doing the drag. If it’s something you’re really confident about and feel really good about and like it’s going to extend your clarity and make it a simpler, more visual, easier pitch to go down, then I would do it, but you have to be honest with yourself.
John: Matt, my nightmare scenario is that it’s going to feel like when Ru says, “Okay, you have 10 minutes to get into quick drag for this thing.” No quick drag. This is going to have to be good.
Matt: Get it together or just don’t do it. You could also get the drag across by using visual aids. It doesn’t have to be you. That’s another thing. You can also just make sure you look fucking great, so that in presentation of yourself, you give the vibe of, oh, this is someone who aesthetically knows what’s up. Get your lighting together. Ain’t no shame in putting up a ring light.
You can present someone who’s part of the queer community and really knows how to put themselves together without doing drag, because we’ve now actually seen, especially people that are in the industry, that may assume it’s easier than it is, because they see it presented on a television show where these people are in the Olympics of drag. These are the best makeup artists in the country, sometimes in the world. They’re also lit by professional, Emmy-winning technicians that make Ru look like the most beautiful human being possible. Understand that the tolerance for bad drag is now really low. You should see some of the ways that the Drag Race fandom drags these queens who are capable of things these people that are commenting never could be. Just understand the bar is very high when it comes to something like that.
John: Megana, next question.
Megana: Small Client asks, “In the year since I signed with my agent, he’s become a bit too big for me. He’s moved up, become a partner at his agency, and reps writers who are much, much more prominent than myself. As a result, he puts minimal effort into representing me, as in I haven’t had a successful last few years. We have something of an unspoken agreement. I don’t bother him, and he keeps me on as a client. While that may seem sad, using his name as cache has been hugely helpful over the past few years and has helped me generate some recent momentum. I’ve got projects going out, and I recently signed with a new management company. The managers there are more engaged and interested than my agent.
“Here’s my question. Now that I have a little bit of buzz, is it prudent to go ahead and cut ties and find a better match, or should I let him know that I don’t think his representation has been up to snuff and ask him if he’s willing to do better? I actually like him as a person, and he always responds promptly when I contact him, but he doesn’t put me up for any work.”
John: If Craig were here, he would say fire your agent, but I’m not going to say fire your agent. I’m more curious what Matt Rogers thinks about this situation.
Matt: I would be curious what agency he’s at. That’s I think missing information here, because firing your agent is actually not the worst thing in the world, because then it’s less people to pay. Then it really feels tough when you’re paying someone that actually did no work. I will say sometimes it is worth it just to be able to say, “I’m at UTA,” or, “This is my agent.”
My agents did not pay attention to me until I made money, period. That’s not really the job of your agent. Your manager, which it sounds like you have good managers, are there to be on the ground floor with you and help cultivate your career and your connections. That’s the job of a manager. It’s the agent’s job to broker deals. If there are really no deals there, then your agent doesn’t have anything to do.
I know it sounds weird, but I was told when I signed with UTA at 27, where I had friends tell me that they were expressly told we don’t really do anything in the first 10 years. It takes a long time for people to build their type of cache in the industry. Then your agent starts popping off when there’s stuff to do. If there’s nothing to do, and it sounds like things are percolating because your management is good, then I wouldn’t fire your agent, because then you’re leaving the agency. Then you burn a bridge with the agency. There’s nothing to burn down yet, so don’t burn it down. That would be my opinion.
John: I think that’s the right opinion. We don’t have any information about this agency, but we said this agent became a bigger partner, so it’s big enough that there’s that.
Matt: Which feels not good to be ignored.
John: There may be some other junior agents there, younger people, not partners, who are a better fit for what you need to do. I would talk to your managers about the situation and see what they say. It’s entirely possible that they can interface with some other agents that they know at that agency, because you’re represented by that agency, not just that agent. If you’re trying to do TV staffing, just have some conversations about the things that this agency could be doing for you, or at least who they can put you in rooms with and where they see it fitting.
Matt: It feels like the mistake that this person is making is that they have this weird relationship where they don’t communicate. I don’t think you can expect anything to ever happen where you don’t communicate. Also, this is another thing I’ll say, because this is a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. Don’t be afraid of your reps, because they work for you. They work for you. You can communicate as much as you want. Don’t worry about being annoying. They’re not going to not respond to you anymore because you were annoying.
I was having an issue at my agency where I realized there was really no one on my team to send me out for auditions. I made it very clear that if I’m going to be in Los Angeles and an actor, I need someone on my team that’s dedicated to sending me out on auditions. Then they added that person, and my life completely changed. I booked a pilot within I think 18 months.
John: Great.
Matt: It’s about asking for the opportunity. If you don’t ask for the opportunity or if you don’t express the things that you think are wrong, then you’re fucking yourself. Also, at the same time, when there are no opportunities yet, or there aren’t opportunities that someone that’s at the level of your agent usually meddles in, then try to see if your managers can make that happen. They probably can, because oftentimes it’s very amorphous what a manager does and what an agent does. We don’t know what the management company is or the agency is, but you can probably get a lot of the things you want from your agent, who’s now a big deal, from your managers, and that will cultivate more going on for you that maybe your agent [crosstalk 00:48:50].
John: Managers can get you into rooms to meet with people.
Matt: Absolutely.
John: Agents can do that too. It’s going to be meeting with people that’s ultimately going to get you some work. Then when it comes time to negotiate how much to be paid for that work, then your agents could be excited to get back involved in stuff and see you’re a person who makes money.
Matt: I think that there’s this misconception because of the way that agent-client relationships maybe are depicted in film and television or the way that we may think of things on a simplistic level, that people are close with their agent. They’re not. You could be. Maybe if you were a big deal and they’re one of your only clients, or you’re one of their only clients, then maybe that situation happens. People are much, much closer with their managers than they are their agents. That’s certainly my reality.
John: Another question from Megana here.
Megana: Adrian asks, “I’m an aspiring writer who just hit his one-year mark in LA. Since I’ve been here, I’ve bartended, day-played, and just worked on the TV show as an art PA that wrapped in September. It’s been a struggle to say the least, but I think I’m making progress. I’m out of work now, but I’m hoping my luck will change soon. My question is, how am I doing? I know you’ll say good job, keep it up, but what should be my next step? I know there’s no right way, but there’s always a better way. Any advice at my one-year mark? What should I be doing now besides writing and submitting a thousand fellowship applications?
John: We’ve both been there, where you’ve been doing this for a while and it’s not clicking and you’re hoping it’s going to click. What advice do you give to Adrian in a situation at the one-year turning point?
Matt: He has to be persistent. He has to be persistent. I think it’s probably really difficult in LA to hit the one-year mark, because everyone’s doing the same thing. You will, if you don’t already, have those people that are popping off in areas, and you’re going to wish that that’s the same for you. There’s really not much to say besides you have to keep writing and keep making connections. I think that is the most important thing is that the connections are going to be what gets you the work. That is just true. I don’t know if you’re also a performer, but try to be as well-rounded as possible. I would just always try to maintain a situation where you are as ready as possible and really keep up to date about who’s working in what rooms, what’s staffing, what’s been picked up.
When I heard the Q-Force animated series that I wrote on was picked up, I literally said to my agents and my managers… It was really my managers actually, just to hearken back to the last question. I said, “Please be on that for me,” because I knew the showrunner, and I knew it would be a cool project. They were on it for me. They got me a meeting based on a sample that I had, not a spec script, an original sample, which I’m sure this person has. Then I got the meeting, and it went from there. I did get hired.
It’s about giving your representatives enough time to procure those opportunities. You’re going to be able to do that by being really aware. Pay attention to that group chat of writers that you’re in, which I think is also a really good thing. Have a hub socially where people talk about this type of thing. I understand that it can get to be a little much, because it feels like in LA that’s all anyone is ever talking about is the business, but those people also work. Really keep your ear and nose to the ground, and don’t be afraid to send a deadline article to your reps and being like, “This.” I’ve done it many times, and it’s worked out for me several times.
John: It feels like Adrian may be pre-reps, so he may not have a manager yet or anything like that. He definitely has people in his or her life that are out there trying to do the same kinds of things. Matt, let’s talk just for a second about good networking, relationship building versus gross network and relationship building, because I definitely have encountered people who I just felt like, “You don’t actually give a shit about me. I’m just a contact that you’re just trying to mine and keep fresh in your Rolodex.” As a performer and as a writer and growing up and working up through New York, how did you keep people engaged and keep up with people in a way that felt like it was positive, like everyone was coming up together, versus, “I’m using you.”
Matt: The thing is, people do talk about it when it feels like there’s a person like that around. I would say make your relationships about the other people. Don’t make it about their connections. Make it about like, “I respect your work,” and hopefully they respect your work too. “You made me laugh. I wanted to tell you that.” This is maybe not easy for everyone. It’s not always easy for me. I’ve really had to learn this skill. Being social is really important. This is a very social industry. Sometimes it means it’s genuine interest and not fake interest. If all you have is fake interest, understand that people can see that. Go to therapy. Find other things in your life that you care about. This cannot be the only thing, because if it is the only thing, you do feel and seem sharky.
Also, if you are going to be like that, then be up front about it, because there are other people like you. That’s another thing is you can’t expect to go up to someone and be like, “Hey, you should consider me for this,” and have everyone respond to that. If that’s going to be the way that you go about it, there will be some people that do. I’ve seen some people become extremely successful that do that. That’s not what has worked for me. It hasn’t been what I respond to. Genuine interest, be a nice person, and be around.
John: Be around. It’s being around so that people can remember you exist, and then following up with the people you think are actually genuinely talented people who down the road, you can help them, they can help you. That’s one of the good things about going through my film program, and it sounds like for your film program too, is you met a bunch of people who were trying to do the same things you were trying to do, and you all rose up together. Adrian’s not in a film program, but he’s going to meet people trying to do the same thing. See if there’s a way you guys can all rise together and enter into the business.
Matt: Also, one year in LA is nothing. You have time before you even have to worry about the question, what am I doing wrong or what’s next. You have time.
John: Agreed. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. This is where we recommend things to our listenership. My One Cool Thing is a game called OnlyBans. It is a web game, nothing to pay, just click through on the link. It’s created by this team of sex workers and allies. It’s this interactive game that shows what it’s like to be a sex worker working on OnlyFans and the obstacles and challenges you run into. It’s like Oregon Trail but with nude pictures. There’s no actual nudity in the game itself.
I think it’s a really smart way of showing the frustration and hassle and stuff, what it is to try to make $200 in this business and how it all fits together in a way. Reading an article, I wouldn’t really get a sense of it, because you’re not doing it first-person. Click through this thing, OnlyBans. I thought it was just a really smart presentation of a difficult situation faced by sex workers in the US.
Matt: Love it.
John: Love it. Matt, do you have a One Cool Thing to share?
Matt: I have One Cool Thing to share. If you are in New York or you’re traveling to New York, some of the best theater I’ve seen maybe in years and years is a show called Titanique. It is in New York. It transferred from what was the old UCB Theatre. It was in that space. It’s now at the Daryl Roth Theatre. From November 20th on through February, they’re going to be performing there. This is on 15th Street.
Basically, it is a parody musical using the music of Celine Dion to tell to the story of Titanic from the perspective of Celine Dion, because she claims she was on the Titanic. Marla Mindelle, who’s an absolute genius musical theater actress and comedian, plays Celine Dion. It was co-written by her, Constantine Rousouli, who plays Jack, and Tye Blue, who also directs. This is a really amazing cast. It’s incredibly funny.
John: That’s great.
Matt: It’s also really camp and dumb. The music of Celine Dion is also so camp and dumb and big, but it feels so good, especially with these truly incredible musical theater performers singing it. I’m telling you, when I hear parody musical, I of course have a certain reaction to that. I’m like, “Oh, come on. Is it going to feel like off-Broadway in not a great way?”
John: [Crosstalk 00:57:49].
Matt: This is so funny. It’s the real deal in terms of how much you’re going to laugh and how much you’re going to enjoy it. It’s a truly holistic theatrical comedy experience. I’m so excited that they have such a hit on their hands. I went to go see it. That’s one of my favorite things about having the podcast Las Culturistas is I get to share what I truly like with everyone and encourage everyone to indulge in these things that I think everyone that listens to my podcast might like. This is one of those things. I’ve not received one piece of feedback that was like, “That sucked. Why did you suggest it?” Everyone that’s gone is so happy when they’re leaving.
Honestly, it made me excited about New York theater again, because I had seen this on the heels of seeing so much bullshit on Broadway. It’s really in bad shape. If you’re going to New York, one of the nights you have to have out on the town is to see Titanique from November 20th through to February at the Daryl Roth Theatre.
John: Very excited. As we wrap up here, I want to make sure we don’t miss out on another musical comedy experience, which is Have You Heard of Christmas. Megana and I are going to see your show in Los Angeles. Should we also see the Showtime show or should we wait?
Matt: Let me make this very clear. You should stream the show on Showtime, absolutely, to everyone wondering. When I do the show, it’s going to be a concert version of what is really like an original album.
John: Great.
Matt: Don’t worry about spoilers. It’s a completely different thing. There’s a whole narrative element in the special that’s not in the live show.
John: Great.
Matt: Basically, what it is, it’s a documentation of me trying to become the pop prince of Christmas and join Mariah Carey as Christmas royalty so I can forever be synonymous with the season and make money in a capitalist sense. It’s a fully original album I co-wrote with my musical director, Henry Koperski, who’s also my ex-boyfriend, which is explored in the show. It is ultimately an incredibly dumb and what I hope is fun show. I’m really proud of it. It’s definitely something I can point to and be like, “Yep, that’s me in there.”
John: We are streaming. By the way, we are not only just streaming to watch it. We’re just going to keep clicking the stream so it just streams a zillion times. We’re never going to stop streaming it.
Matt: A hundred percent. If you don’t have Showtime, honey, you better get that 30-day free trial, and you can stream I Love That For You, all eight episodes as well.
John: A hundred percent. Also, if you’re a Paramount Plus person, it’s just a little add-on to it.
Matt: Hulu too.
John: Hulu too.
Matt: There’s ways.
John: No excuses.
Matt: There’s ways. Also, please come see me on tour in 14 cities all throughout December. You can go to www.mattrogerscomedy.com or go to my Instagram, and there’s a Linktree there, @mattrogersvo. Please come see me on tour.
John: Love it. Of course, listen to Matt and Bowen every week on Las Culturistas, another very good podcast.
Matt: Of course.
John: By the way, that was actually the first time I think you were referenced in this show is because I think-
Matt: I remember.
John: We did a thing about how people actually really talk versus normal dialog, and we used a snippet of it.
Matt: Yeah, with that Ben Platt episode.
John: The Ben Platt episode.
Matt: It was really cool.
John: It was fun.
Matt: Thank you for doing that. It taught me something too, because you’re right, it’s rare that you see something like that depicted, but that is three excited gay men talking. We do talk over each other. Sometimes it’s interesting, because when you’re recording a podcast in person, that happens, especially when you all really like each other and are excited to talk about these things. It can feel a little rude listening. It’s not one of those podcasts that’s like, “I’ve said something, and now you said something.” That really is just me and Bowen’s friendship on paper, or on recorded podcast paper. It was really interesting to hear you call it out like that. I was very honored.
John: It was a pleasure to have you on this podcast officially.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
John: Of course. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Matt, you’re on Twitter at the moment, right?
Matt: You can follow us on Twitter @lasculturistas.
John: That’s better.
Matt: Bowen and I share it. I’m not individually on Twitter, no. It’s hell.
John: It’s hell. Obviously, you’re @mattrogerstho on Instagram.
Matt: On Instagram and TikTok now.
John: And TikTok now. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on the culture. Matt Rogers, thank you so much.
Matt: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Matt Rogers, you are an expert on the culture, because you host a weekly podcast on the culture, Las Culturistas. What is culture?
Matt: I think culture is everything. It’s so funny, because we ask the question of all of our guests, what was the culture that made you say culture was for you. The answers vary from just a musical artist or a scene in a movie or the attitudes of people where they grew up. Culture is I guess a holistic thing. I love the fact that high culture and low culture is blending nowadays. I love talking about the fact that there’s going to be a Super Nintendo theme park in the same breath as Tár. I think it’s whatever affects you and moves you to think, create, whatever, perform, anything that moves you to express your own opinion or your own take.
John: I like that as a definition. It’s whatever you’re experiencing that makes you want to participate in it. For me, that moment of culture was, I remember as a child watching Wonder Woman spin and turn into her new outfit, so when Diana Prince would spin and all those transformations. I did not realize that was culture. I realized that other people had the same response about it that I did. That’s culture. It’s like, oh.
Matt: That’s another important element of it is it’s something that connects. It’s something that we all can observe and react to and then discuss. In that way, it’s a really, really broad thing, but yet you can get so specific with it. I think that is such a specific answer to what was the culture that made you say culture was for you, specifically her spinning, not Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman spinning and changing. That is actually very much a queer answer.
John: It is.
Matt: It was a powerful woman changing into the protector and the warrior. That is very indicative.
John: Very much. I would posit though, so much of what we talk about the culture is what is interesting to the gays, basically what is it that they are going to be discussing. I don’t think it’s just because we’re two gay men and of course we’re looking at everything through our eyes. There’s been a way that the gay eye defines, not just in fashion, but like this is a moment, this is a thing that we’re going to talk about, is it worthy of discussion independently of its place in normal society. There’s just something about whatever the gays find fascinating is culturally relevant.
Matt: I think it’s any minority group that’s pushed to the side of what is widely popular or whatever media at the time is telling you is monoculture, which caters to I think a heterosexual white audience. I think what happens is those other groups either can see that culture very clearly for what it is and make their own estimations and opinions on it, or they create their own cultures, which then thrive in such a way because there’s such a specific energy to them that then those things get co-opted and become mainstream culture themselves. It’s really interesting for you to say that, because I would say that yes, gay people and queer culture and queer communities, they do dictate what is en vogue, but also, that’s often taken from the Black community, which were the most pushed to the side-
John: Of course.
Matt: … and have obviously been pioneers in terms of everything that is quote unquote gay culture now does have its roots in that. You see that even in popular music. Obviously, rock-and-roll was a Black invention. Obviously, hip-hop is a Black invention. Then you see it appropriated and marketed and capitalized on in the society, and there’s not enough questions asked about why that happened, because the answer is very ugly, because people felt like they could make money on it, because what they’re really good at is finding ways to make money based on things. It’s an interesting melting pot that we have in America. It’s important to understand that it was those communities that are pushed to the side that actually set the tone.
I think the other thing about queer people is because we communicate through this common interest of pop culture, because we’ve all been pushed to the side and forced to see it very clearly, it’s one of those things that connect us. Because we are unabashedly interested, that translates to us being trendsetters and oftentimes gatekeepers of culture. It’s a very interesting phenomenon. I think if you look at the past 60 years, it’s been a really interesting journey in terms of how culture is decided upon, discussed, and ultimately sold.
John: I have some questions for you, a speed round about is this culture. I just want your honest reactions. Shania Twain, is this culture?
Matt: Absolutely, 100%, important culture, revolutionized women in country, created country pop in many ways.
John: Yeah, a hundred percent. The Gap?
Matt: The Gap is culture. Everyone needs a basic, and that does not necessarily mean you’re basic. The Gap, it’s a place to begin.
John: A place to begin. Forest Gump.
Matt: It’s absolutely culture. It also directly responded to culture. That was I think one of those big ’90s movie, where it felt like nostalgia was almost starting in the ’90s. I think because of what was going to become the internet and the fact that we were now able to access the past in a quicker way made us more interested in the past. Forest Gump, literally, this is a man who has interacted with all of the important cultural events of his lifetime. That’s because there was an interest in culture to begin with, and then that movie became culture itself, because it was well-performed and let’s say iconically written.
John: We have the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company thanks to Forest Gump.
Matt: Absolutely. Bubba Gump Shrimp is culture in and of itself. Of course it’s culture.
John: Absolutely, movie-themed culture. White copier paper, 8.5 by 11 white copier paper. Is that culture?
Matt: Yes, it’s culture. It’s office culture.
John: It’s Dunder Mifflin.
Matt: That is culture. Office culture is the basis of so many things. Yes, of course we have pieces of pop culture that interact specifically with offices, because again, working in an office is monoculture. We all understand it. What’s more important than paper? How would we write without it? Of course it’s culture, which we use to write things.
John: Are treated as culture.
Matt: Exactly.
John: Not being able to believe someone hasn’t seen Tár.
Matt: That’s becoming culture.
John: I heard you on Lovett Or Leave It. I had two issues there. I was wondering, when do you go for one specific person experiencing a thing to it becoming a cultural meme. I do wonder if we’re going to get to a place where not just Tár, but being obsessed with someone not having seen Tár becomes a thing.
Matt: I think I just want the best for everyone, and so that’s why I react so strongly to someone not having seen Tár, especially a very tuned in… I would imagine a lot of queer people in that audience. I’m telling you, you couldn’t see it, because podcasts are not a visual medium famously, but there were about five people in that audience of a packed Dynasty Typewriter that had never seen Tár. I was like, “This is crazy.” Lovett himself had never seen Tár, which to me feels very odd-
John: It does.
Matt: … because it’s been out for weeks now, and we’ve been saying it’s one of the, if not the performance of the year, and I think so far, my favorite film of the year, up there with Everything Everywhere All at Once.
John: A slip of paper in your playbill that says, “At this performance, the role of blank will be played by:” Is that culture?
Matt: Someone else. That is culture. It’s disappointment culture. Ultimately, it’s opportunity culture.
John: It is.
Matt: It is of course interacting with the culture of theater. That idea, that ideology of the show must go on, the idea of the understudy. You mentioned Showgirls before. It is an opportunity for someone to appear. Of course, we are reminded of Sutton Foster in Thoroughly Modern Millie, an understudy, and then so stunning when her opportunity arose that she became not only a Tony winner and a success in that performance, but a bona fide Broadway star, which are few and far between. That little paper had to appear in that playbill for that to happen, John.
John: I think the lesson I’m taking from you is that everything is culture.
Matt: It is
John: I tried to stump you with some of these, and you were able to find ways it was just culture. Both everything is culture and you’re also very good at improv and thinking on your feet, which are two crucial skills.
Matt: I’m very good at bullshitting, and also I genuinely believe what I say.
John: The best bullshitters do believe what they’re saying.
Matt: Here I am working in this industry. I obviously was able to fool a lot of people. I’m an excellent bullshitter and a major talker.
John: Fantastic. You’re a fantastic fill-in host. Matt Rogers, thank you so, so much for doing this.
Matt: Thank you for having me. It was a genuine pleasure.
Links:
- Matt Rogers on Instagram and Tiktok
- Have You Heard of Christmas? December 2nd on Showtime and on tour, buy tickets here!
- Binance Pulls Out of Deal to Acquire Rival Crypto Exchange FTX by David Yaffe-Bellany for NYT
- Michael Lewis FTX Book
- Billion Dollar Lotto Ticket
- OnlyBans.com
- Titanique Musical in New York
- Dialogue episode where we sampled Las Culturistas Scriptnotes Episode 438
- Las Culturistas on Twitter, listen to the podcast here
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Owen Danoff (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 575: The Billion Dollar Episode, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
Episode 574
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Craig Mazin is my name.
John: This is Episode 574 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what do you do when you just can’t crack a scene? We’ll discuss why some scenes are harder to write than others and what to do when you want to throw your laptop at the wall.
Craig: Throw it hard.
John: We’ll also answer listener questions on twists, scene headers, and getting elbowed out. Plus, can something be too meta, Craig?
Craig: No.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk with Megana about what she learned from her first time attending the Austin Film Festival.
Craig: Wait, that was not Megana’s first time.
John: That was.
Megana Rao: It was.
Craig: Whoa. You and Bo were both newbies. Fun. I had a great time at the Austin Film Festival.
John: You enjoyed attending all the panels and all the discussions and really lining up for all those things.
Craig: I had one good day.
John: You had one good day, and then you got really sick, Craig. Are you feeling better?
Craig: I am, yeah. I got sick. I thought I was hungover, but I was not hungover at all. I was sick for four or five days. I don’t know what was going on. It wasn’t COVID.
John: It was not COVID. It wasn’t RSV probably. It was just something you got.
Craig: I think it might’ve been a long, lingering stomach virus or something.
John: I got a text from Craig about 15 minutes before the live show for the Three Page Challenge, and Craig’s like, “I cannot leave my room.” Me and Megana did it well with Marc Velez, who was a great guest.
Craig: Great.
John: It ended up being a good show, but we missed you, Craig.
Craig: I’m sorry. It was one of those things where I’m like, “Get up. You know there’s stage health. If you just get out on stage, you’ll feel good.” I just was on my way from the bed to the door, I’m like, “Nope. Let’s turn around and get right back in bed.” I left the room for about 12 minutes on Saturday. It was just awful.
John: We saw you very briefly and dinner, and then you went back upstairs.
Craig: I couldn’t make it. I lasted five minutes.
John: You had this bottle of Gatorade. We decided that bottle of Gatorade is contaminated, so we wrapped it in a napkin and set it aside.
Craig: That’s nice. I made sure to test myself, just to make sure it wasn’t… It didn’t feel like COVID, because I’ve had COVID before. It was a stomach thing. Now I’m never going back, because you know what happens. If you throw up after you eat a particular thing, you can’t eat that thing anymore. I guess I can’t go to Austin anymore.
John: Now in Austin Film Festival. For all we know, we’ll never be invited back again. We’ll see what happens.
Craig: I’m okay with that.
John: You know who else is never going to be invited back?
Craig: Who.
John: The former executives from MoviePass. They were indicted by the Justice Department.
Craig: Were they? Were they? What for?
John: This’ll be for security frauds and three counts of wire fraud. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the article about this. I guess I’m a little surprised, because to me, I think MoviePass was a really bad idea in general. I wasn’t surprised that it failed. I guess I was surprised it was actually a criminally bad undertaking.
Craig: Once you start lying to people, I guess it becomes a problem. Of course, what gets you in trouble faster is lying to shareholders. Lying to customers, people are like, “Meh, business.” They definitely did falsely claim things. It seems like where they really screwed up was lying to their shareholders about the value of the business and how they were doing. That’s how they get you. They could’ve just asked us. We knew.
John: They could’ve asked us. They should’ve come to us for due diligence, said, “Is this a good idea?” We would’ve said no. We said no repeatedly on the air.
Craig: We said that there’s something terribly wrong with this, it makes no goddamn sense. As it turns out, it didn’t. By the way, could you come up with better businessmen names than these guys, Theodore Farnsworth and J. Mitchell Lowe. It’s like they’re from 1880.
John: I don’t want to say pushing back, but I feel like any time you’re starting a new venture and a new business, you are faking it until you make it. It’s a question of where does the line between faking it and actually fraud exist.
Craig: That’s why you have lawyers to tell you, “Oh, no, you can’t say that.”
John: That’s true.
Craig: There’s no question that they had lawyers working with them that they were like, “Oh, you don’t want to say that.” They were like, “Shut up, lawyers. We know better. We’re MoviePass. We came up with a brilliant idea to charge people $10 for something that’s going to cost us $80.” Stupid.
John: What if the MoviePass movie makes a hundred million dollars and wins Oscars?
Craig: It’s unlikely.
John: It’s unlikely.
Craig: It’s unlikely that it will.
John: It could happen.
Craig: By the way, it’s unlikely just because any movie making a hundred million dollars and winning Oscars is unlikely.
John: The MoviePass movie is more likely than my Van Halen movie that I pitched on the show. Basically, a couple episodes back, I said I really want to make a Van Halen movie. I want to put this out there in the world and see if the universe will say, “Yes, let’s make a Van Halen movie.”
Craig: And?
John: Thank you to everybody who wrote in with suggestions. People knew music execs and other folks. Through my agency, I was able to actually talk to the music execs involved, because ultimately, as we discussed on the show, when you’re doing a biopic, you don’t necessarily need the rights to all those people. I could just do it without all that stuff. Without the music rights, there’s not a Van Halen movie to make. There’s not a Van Halen movie to make, because David Lee Roth does not want a Van Halen movie to be made.
Craig: There you go. You know what? There’s nothing wrong with certainty, even if it’s bad news, if it’s certain bad news. It’s the bad news that’s almost bad news, but like, “Oh, if we just do this or that or write a letter or wait five years,” or blah blah blah-
John: Keep pushing that rock up that hill.
Craig: Exactly. It’s better to just be like, meh. Sometimes dead is better.
John: One thing that is not entirely dead is the Warner Bros. Television Workshop.
Craig: Segue Man. Yeah, that’s right.
John: It looks like they were closing down completely. It now looks like it’s going to be morphed into a new thing that’s part of a different arm. We asked for listeners who had experience with the program if they could write in and tell us about it. Megana, can you talk us through what we heard from these people?
Megana: Eli wrote in and said, “I can’t speak to all the programs, but getting into the writing fellowship has been very positive for my writing partner and me. The program led to two immediate benefits. The first was my mom stopped passive-aggressively telling me I should be a producer and started actual-aggressively telling others I write for HBO. The second immediate benefit was that the industry’s perspective of my writing partner and me changed. We’re showrunner assistants, and that’s all people saw when they met us. Getting into the program gave us a stamp of approval that allowed people to view us as actual writers. When my boss found out that only 21 of the 3,000-plus applicants got in, he stopped making me get his dry cleaning, so that was nice.
“The program itself consisted of weekly Zoom workshops/masterclasses with executives and writers. We developed a pilot with the program executives, which allowed us to experience the notes process for the first time. Also, we were paired up with some amazing mentors, and we got to work with and learn from all the other talented writers in our cohort.”
Craig: That sounds great.
John: That does sound great.
Craig: I really like the point that this really comes down to a stamp of approval. While that is a turn of a phrase, it’s almost literally the truth that there is this weird imprimatur that has to happen where you’re like, “Okay, I’m in this bucket or I’m in this bucket.” If all programs like this do is shift people from one bucket to the other and makes it easier for them to be seen as writers, then it’s worth it, because it is fairly arbitrary how some of that stuff works sometimes.
John: I think the thing I hope we see happening with this new revamped program at Warner Bros, and also Universal’s programs and other places, is that having a structure behind it is so important and so crucial, because people can go to film school. We had other people write in like, “I went to film school. I was a page. I did other stuff. It wasn’t until I got into this program that I actually had a structure that talked me through like, this is what I’m writing, this is the feedback I’m getting from actual executives who would be working on this, from actual showrunners, and got me that first position on a job.”
That structure is really crucial. It feels like the people who are running this program at Warner were really good at that structure. I just want to make sure that whatever we do to replace this isn’t just like a, “Hey, we’re going to try to hire some more diverse writers.” No, you actually have to have a plan for how you’re going to get them set up for success in those rooms.
Craig: This will always be part of the charity wing of these massive, multinational conglomerates. Their budget for private jet travel for their CEOs and so forth is going to outstrip how much they spend on this by I assume logarithmic amounts. That’s reality. We can bemoan that, or we can protect at least what we have, because we saw how quickly… To me, this is the equivalent of Congress debating whether or not they should keep funding NPR or something, which they actually don’t. It’s just pointless. The budget is a trillion dollars, and they’re picking on 75 million. This is a similar thing.
I hope that everybody watched what happened here and learned the lesson. In a very simple way, what happened was the company made a lot of changes and then people went, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you shouldn’t have touched that.” Everybody correctly yelled at them, and they went, “Oh, sorry, no, we didn’t mean to touch that,” even though they did. I’m glad that they didn’t. They’ve got to commit resources. They can’t just keep it limited to just a little bit of a charity organization.
John: Agreed. Some more follow-up. We were pretty negative on how much progress we really thought had been made on battling copaganda. Some listeners wrote in with suggestions for shows that they felt were doing a good job showing the other side of things. Some of those were Bloodlands in the UK, Beyond the Night, Alaska Daily on ABC, 61st Street on AMC.
A guy named John wrote in saying, “As a film professional in Chicago, let me tell you, avoiding copaganda shows while making a living takes full-time vigilance. Protest requires sacrifice, and per usual, most people take the paycheck, but not all of us, and we are out here.” Talking about the decision whether to write on that show, whether to work on that show can still be an individual choice.
Craig: I guess that’s a positive thing. Look, any working person, let’s call part of the below-the-line cadre of crew folk, they deserve to make a living.
John: Craig, you and I both admitted to the fact that we don’t watch a lot of these shows, but we had a listener write in who does watch a lot of these shows. Megana, can you talk us through Complicit here?
Megana: Complicit said, “As someone who doesn’t write copaganda but who watches a lot of us, I wanted to gently push back that no progress has been made in copaganda since George Floyd. These shows actually have had a large increase in message episodes that talk about police misconduct, police brutality, gun control, and even other progressive issues like abortion. As I watch them, I can’t help but imagine the writers who have advocated for these episodes to be included, as I don’t believe it is in their economic interest to write these themes. These shows have almost completely abandoned a ton of the good cop who plays dirty tropes they used to embrace. There’s also no longer an acceptance that sometimes the heroes may need to rough suspects up to get the truth, which was sadly extremely prevalent just five years ago.
“I understand that this isn’t really the point and the infallibility of the shows’ heroes furthers copaganda even when they are investigating bad cops in the context of the show, but in terms of the progress that can be made, I want to recognize the people who are pushing for these storylines, as I feel like it is the only reasonable hope for progress that we have. It’s a big ship to turn, so I appreciate the people leading on the rudder, or maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better.”
Craig: No, I don’t think you’re trying to make yourself feel better. I think it’s important to note these things. I don’t think that we felt no progress had been made. It’s good to hear what you’re saying is out there. That’s a positive thing. I guess that it wouldn’t have been really surprising if things hadn’t changed at all, because the complexity of the writers’ rooms have changed, I would imagine quite a bit.
John: Some more follow-up on virtual rooms. Andre wrote in, “I was just getting caught up. I was listening to Episode 557 where you guys were talking about virtual rooms versus in-person rooms. I had a question about how to go about letting them know that you would prefer a virtual room. For me, I have a handicapped daughter and would refer a virtual room because I like to be with her as much as possible, because she requires a lot of attention. I know you guys have been going on about disabilities and that stuff.”
Craig: I like “going on about.”
John: We’re going on about disabilities and that stuff.
Craig: “You guys are just going on about these disabilities.”
John: Craig, off-mic and over beers, I have conversations with a lot of showrunners. This is about the Austin Film Festival. I was asking them, “What’s happening with your rooms? Are you back in person? Are you going virtual? Is it a hybrid?” What have you been hearing?
Craig: Both. I’ve been hearing hybrid. I think it’s more common now that the rooms are in person again, but with exceptions made for people who want to dial in virtually. The infrastructure is there. It’s easy enough to have some people on the big screen on the wall and everybody else sitting around the table. That’s what I’ve basically been hearing. For Andre here, it sounds like the way you would go about letting them know you prefer a virtual room is by saying, “Hey, I’d prefer a virtual room. There’s this situation with my daughter. I’d like to be here. Here’s why.” I would be blown away if a showrunner was like, “Oh, no, sorry.”
John: Like, “Andre, we think you’re the perfect writer, but no, we won’t accommodate that.”
Craig: “No, sorry.”
John: One model I did hear discussed at the Austin Film Festival was someone was setting up a room that I think they were in person Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then virtual Fridays and Saturdays. She had some writers who did not live in Los Angeles, who were flying in to be there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then gone the other days.
Craig: That works. It really comes down to the nature of the room and who you have in there. If it’s very small, then I would think keeping it… This is just my preference would be to want to be in a physical space with people. It is easier for me, maybe just because I’m old.
John: Could be. We have one last bit of follow-up. Someone asked about act breaks and whether act breaks are going to be coming back into shows now that streaming shows are going to have ads. This thing is actually pretty long, so I think we’ll put it up as a blog post if we can. To summarize, this guy Mike wrote in and said that he was working on a show for one streamer which had act breaks but then it decided it was going to premier internationally on another streamer which did not have ad breaks.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: He was in the editing process of this. They put in commercial black, basically a place for where the commercials go. The second streamer got the show and said, “Oh, no, we don’t have act breaks, so you need to take all those things out. Take out those black spaces.” Of course, it’s not just the black spaces. You have music that ramps into the commercial and then out of the commercial. This whole thing is set up to have those things there. It became a whole fight over the holidays over what was going to happen with this.
Craig: I’m in the thick of all this right now for The Last of Us, because as we’re approaching our broadcast date, which has been announced to be January 15th, we now have to make sure that we have all of our deliverables hitting their dates. So much of it comes down to what Mike refers to as localization. That’s the word for it. Everyone around the world needs time to take the show and subtitle it and prepare it for also, in the case of HBO, a lot of different delivery systems.
It’s much easier for a single delivery platform like Netflix, because everybody gets Netflix the same way around the world. They log into Netflix and they watch the Netflix. HBO’s not the same. HBO is on cable, it’s on satellite, and it’s also on HBO Max, so you have to prepare all of these things. All of these little ticky-tacky bits and bobs need to be figured out, how long is the space between the end of the main credits and the beginning of the show and so on and so forth.
One of the things you get into is, when you’re putting a show together, or a movie, when you lock picture, that’s your time, and then all the mixing, all the sound is laid on top of that. If you change the time, you have to go and do quite a bit of work to just get the sound mix back together to match this new time. Also, if you’re moving things like black spaces in and out, you have to redo all the color timing. It’s a whole mess. This will be an ongoing problem.
Megana: Can I ask a question?
Craig: Yeah.
Megana: Would it make sense then to just, by default, include act breaks all the time?
Craig: No, because if you include act breaks… This is exactly what happened to Mike. The show had act breaks. It came out of Hulu. He had to then remove the act breaks, because they were sending it over to Disney Plus, that doesn’t have commercials. Basically, the commercial black is the hole where the ad goes. You send it to the broadcaster with these holes in it, and then they drop ads into the holes. Removing the holes is work. It’s work to re-conform the mix and the color timing and the cut and the music around the fact that there are now not these holes in it. The answer is don’t change it. That’s the only real way to get through this with any kind of efficiency, but no such luck.
John: Re-asking Megana’s question in a different way, if you think your show is likely going to end up having ad breaks in it, from a creative standpoint it may make sense to think about where those ad breaks are going to be and build for them, because otherwise it’s going to be jammed in randomly.
Craig: Writing-wise, yes, but production-wise, no. There’s no way to anticipate it. Basically, you are going to produce your show to either have or not have commercial breaks. It is a binary choice. The problem is that in certain situations we find ourselves living in a nonbinary world when it comes to commercials. It is impossible to have something be flexible enough to have both ads and not ads. You need to make two versions, which is money. It’s just money and time. It’s complicated. It’s annoying.
John: For instance, I very much enjoy the show Reboot on Hulu. Because we pay for Hulu, we don’t get ads, but you can definitely tell where the ads go in the Hulu version. It’s fine. You don’t need to stress out about it. You have basically the commercial blacks. We see it goes to that and then it comes back out. It’s great. If you were to try to strip those out, it would be chaos. We’re talking about for music, but also for all the internationalizations, for all the subtitles. Those have to link to specific moments of time code. You change the time code, you’re breaking subtitles.
Craig: This is why for a guy like Mike, who’s a post-producer, he’s the person who’s shouldering this burden with his team that are doing all the technical work. It would be nice if they just picked one. HBO is tricky, because we don’t have that Netflix delivery system. We have to deliver things earlier than they do I think at Netflix, just so that they have time to get ready. What I don’t have to worry about is whether or not there are going to be ads. HBO does not air with ads.
John: That said, your show will have ads in some markets down the road. It will. We know that. We know that from Chernobyl.
Craig: That’s what happens. At that point, I don’t even care.
John: Let’s get to our marquee topic here. This actually comes from a blog post I wrote a gazillion years ago back in 2008, where I talk through why some scenes are harder to write or really how writing this one scene was so unexpectedly difficult. It took me six hours to get through what didn’t seem on the surface to be a very complicated scene. I went through all the agonies of wondering whether this needed to be two scenes rather than one scene, were they starting at the right place, could a different character drive the scene. Ultimately, it came down to, no, I actually needed to work really, really hard to get the one scene to work, and it ended up being a good scene. I thought we’d talk for a little bit about why some scenes are much trickier to write than others and what we do when those scenes come upon us.
Craig: I definitely have had scenes that I knew were the right scene. I knew that it was supposed to be here and accomplish the following things. What was so challenging was making the scene feel original, because the nature of the scene might’ve been, “There’s 500 cliché ways to do this, and I don’t want to do any of those, so now what do I do?” Also, sometimes scenes where people deliver speeches are really hard, because there’s a fine line between a good speech and crap. It’s a really fine line. The scene in Chernobyl where Stellan Skarsgård gives this kind of speech to the potential divers, trying to get them to go dive under the reactor. Oh my god, I spent so much time on that speech just to make it what I thought would be interesting and speech but not speech.
John: Craig, if you’d spent a little bit more time, would it have actually been good? I’m sorry, I never do that, but you set me up so perfectly for it.
Craig: I don’t think so. Basically, it was the best I could do but not.
John: I bring this up because it comes down to the fact that underlying this whole conversation is really about taste and recognizing this is a good scene, this is not a good scene. If you don’t care, there really are no difficult scenes, because it’s just like that. If you’re fine with crap, it’s not a problem. The challenge comes when you know what the quality level needs to be, and you still can’t get that scene to happen the ways you need to do it. Your Chernobyl example, that was in your first draft. You’re just trying to figure out how to get the scene to work on the page the first time.
I was trying to listen through some of the issues that come up, like why sometimes those scenes are big challenges here. I’ll list them through. Sometimes it’s a major shift in the story. If it’s a crucial reveal, if it’s a highly emotional moment, if the scene has really complicated geography, choreography, or simultaneity, things have to happen in the same moment, when you need to set something new up, sometimes these things are hard, because the story overall, the movie wants the scene to be short, but the scene itself wants to be long. It wants to take its time. Sometimes you just have to accomplish a lot within a scene. The needs of tone make it difficult to do the story points you needed. You need the scene to be funny, and yet it’s actually material you need to cover, and it’s just not funny, or vice versa, this has to be a big, serious thing, and yet it doesn’t feel like it wants to be that. Sometimes, obviously we talk about this a lot on the show, the issue is you’re locked in by the scene that happens before it and the scene that happens after it, and you have to connect those two things. It’s just really tough. Those are some of the things I’m encountering on a first draft when I hit a scene that is really blocking me.
Craig: I think because I’m such a planner, it’s rare for me to struggle with how to connect two scenes, because I’ve already thought that through. I did the hard work on that one a little bit earlier. I wasted my six hours earlier on that. You mentioned emotional scenes. Emotional scenes are like a car with bad alignment. They keep wanting to pull towards melodrama. It’s so tempting to just write somebody, parentheses, sobbing, “How could you do this to me? You meant everything to me.” Then you get there, and it’s just a soap opera. Figuring out to do those things in a way that is honest…
I always think about Spielberg as somebody who aims for honest emotion, true emotion, but doesn’t shy away from entertaining you while it’s happening, because there’s the mumblecore version of everything, which to me is the greatest capitulation of all. That’s just like, oh, rather than expose myself and potentially be laughed at, I will just simply have everybody feel everything at a 0.5, and therefore I’m cool. I would argue, sometimes, and sometimes it’s just cold and I don’t care and I’m bored. Trying to find that middle ground where you are both entertaining and showing restraint, this is hard stuff to do. I find it hard. Spending six hours, by the way, on a scene, I do that all the time. All the time. That’s not even that long to me.
John: If you think about it, 6 hours on a scene, most movies are about 100 scenes long, so 600 hours to write a script. That’s a lot. That’s 12 weeks to do that. It’s not impossible.
Craig: I don’t know. If there’s 100 scenes, not all of them are going to be 6-hour scenes.
John: They can’t be.
Craig: No. A whole bunch of them are going to be not that at all. Within a 60-page hour-long drama, so I’ll make it a little bit shorter for purposes of the argument, maybe there’s 3 scenes that are going to be what we’ll call 6-hour scenes. It’s no big deal. I really only write a scene a day basically, or what I consider three pages a day. 20 days to write a script is not that bad. It’s four weeks, or if it’s a movie it’s roughly eight weeks. That works.
John: The question I have for you, and I’m asking myself this, is can I always anticipate which are going to be the difficult scenes to write. You are a big outliner. From your outline, do you have a sense of which scenes are going to be the tricky ones to write, or are you surprised in the process?
Craig: I have a terrible sense. All my predictions are wrong. I’m like, “This is going to be hard.” Then I get there, it’s not hard, it’s just a lot. Then there are other things where I’m like, “I know exactly what that scene is. That’s going to be a joy to write.” Then I get there, I’m like, “Oh, no, this is not a joy to write at all.” My guesses are useless, and so I’ve stopped trying to guess. On the day, I discover is this going to be one of those days or not.
John: In Big Fish, I think I did know from the start, these are going to be really challenging, difficult scenes to write, because they’re emotional. They’re really tough to get just right. The first 10 pages of Big Fish were so challenging, because I had to set up so many different things. I knew this would be a situation where I was going to work for weeks just to get those 10 pages to work properly, which is great.
I would say going back to action movies that I’ve worked on, you think, “Oh, that should be pretty straightforward.” Then you realize the amount of simultaneity or the amount of different things that all have to happen at the same time. Charlie’s Angels are some of the hardest movies for me to write, because those scenes have to be entertaining and action-filled, but also move one of the three Angels’ storylines ahead. Those are really tough. When a scene has so many demands on it that has to do with a bunch of things, that’s where it becomes a puzzle, where I know this has to work within the framework of this scene, and yet it’s just really tough to get all those pieces to click together.
Craig: The action stuff generally, because again, I know the challenges you’re talking about, I try to address those in the outline phase, so that when I get to the action sequence, it’s just annoying, because it’s so many goddamn words, but I get through it.
The harder part for me, I think you put your finger on the first 10 pages, certainly in a movie. I will spend as much time on the first 10 pages as I do on the first 30 pages or 40, because the first 10, it’s everything. We’ve talked about this before. That’s the zygote. It’s worth spending time on those. If you can make the first 10 beautiful, the rest of the way should be much, much easier.
John: As long as you get the ship moving in the right direction, you’ll hopefully get to some good places. It’s just so often, those first 10 pages are required to do so much, and you feel like, “I have to set up this thing to get to that thing.” It’s remembering [inaudible 00:27:57] that you are both the writer who knows where this is going and the reader who has no idea where it’s going. That’s the tricky balance there.
Let’s talk about why scenes sometimes can be hard because of the rewrite. We’ve just been talking about the first draft and the obstacles there. Sometimes in the rewrite, you get those six-hour scenes where it’s like, “Jesus.” Those are situations where I’m now asked to compress two or three or more scenes down into one scene. I basically have to cover the story points that multiple scenes used to do, down to one thing. So tough.
There could be a shift in focus. There could be a shift in what I’m trying to emphasize at that moment. There could be a scene that was a major link, and that scene is no longer there, so I’m having to do the work of that, or I need to link it from one idea to actually a different place that the scene has a different job than it did before. It’s the same people in the same place, but the actual purpose of the scene is so different. The energy from the previous draft doesn’t actually make sense for where I was. Then of course, there’s the bigger things like different actors, different production things, different realities of what you had planned versus who you have now.
Craig: I try and solve a lot of the problems ahead of time. What I need to figure out and I can’t solve ahead of time, what I need to figure out on the day is shape. Shape is the trickiest thing. I know what’s supposed to happen. I know why. I now how everyone starts in the scene. I know how they end. I know what the plot points are. I know all the facts. I know what I must achieve. Now, achieving that with shape so that the scene feels like it has places to go and reversals and an interesting flow with some surprises, and then balancing out what is said and what is unsaid, how much can I say without talking, all these things, that execution stuff is where I find myself really tweaking tiny little screws and bolts to make it feel seamless and gorgeous. Sometimes you just know you’re going to be there for a while, and that’s okay.
John: Sometimes you have some stuff down on the page. You’re like, “If I move this around, I start at a different place… ” Sometimes it is just like, “I have to wipe that clean and just find a different way into this moment, a different way through this moment, because it’s not the words and who says what. It’s like, “This is the wrong way for me to get this.”
It could be that I approach the scene thinking I’m going to ask the question. Maybe I need to actually answer the question at the head of the scene and deal with the ramifications of that. You come in with the answer rather than answering the question, or the reverse, where I thought this would be the person who has the answer. No, they’re actually answering the question and exploring in the moment. I thought it was this energy level, and that’s actually not going to get the characters where they need to go. I need to change the energy level to a different thing. I need to set the tone higher. That’s a real tricky thing.
As a writer, I’m always imagining myself in the space with the characters, watching what they’re doing and seeing stuff. Sometimes I have to scratch that. It’s just like, “Okay, now let’s build a new space. Let’s build a new approach to how to get this and wind it up and see what the characters want to do and how they want to make the scene happen.”
Craig: The most important thing that you’re demonstrating is a sense that something’s wrong. To me, we should all be like the Princess and the Pea. The tiniest thing should cause us the most distress. That’s how you make it better. When I’m working on a scene, and it’s not right, and I don’t know why it’s not right, I feel terrible. I feel like I’m dying. That is important to listen to. You need that sense. You need the sense that something’s wrong. I think so many people write with this sense that they’re doing something correctly, and they just accentuate the positive, which sounds healthy, except they’re missing so many things. Really being attuned to something being not good enough, not correct, not delightful, it’s essential.
John: My daughter the last couple years has really gotten into indoor bouldering. She goes climbing all the time. When you’re working on a climbing wall, you call that a problem. Basically, you are trying to climb the wall and figure out how do I get to the top. It can be really hard. One of the things I loved in watching her is how you tackle and solve problems. “I got to this part. I got to this part. I cannot get to this next thing.” You’ll fall or drop. Then you’ll sit back, and you’ll look at the wall again and figure out, “Okay, that didn’t work. What could I do differently? What if I put my foot there rather than there? What if I try to make this reach?”
Sometimes other people will watch you do it and get suggestions. Sometimes it is an issue of you are trying to do it wrong. Other times, the answer is you just gotta do it perfectly. You actually have to make that jump and grab. It’s just like your hand wasn’t strong enough to do it. You try it the fifth time, you suddenly can make that hand hold and you can get up it.
That sometimes is writing scenes for me. Sometimes I’m just trying to do it wrong, and I have to start over. Other times, I just have to keep pushing forward. Finally, I’ll find that word, that one line of dialog that will actually make the scene work, and then I can keep climbing higher. You just don’t know from the start what kind of solution it’s going to be. Regardless, I think one of the things we can take comfort in is that, no matter what, most readers will have no idea how difficult those scenes were.
Craig: Nor should they. Not their problem.
John: Not their problem, but we do have listeners with problems.
Craig: Segue Man.
John: It’s time for some listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana: Yes. Andrew wrote in and he said, “I’m curious if there’s something that can be too meta. Apparently, Hallmark has a Christmas movie coming out about a small town where a production company is producing a Christmas movie. The premise is that a small-town woman falls in love with the star of the movie, who’s known as the King of Christmas. The movie’s called Lights, Camera, Christmas. Have we reached peak meta? Is there such a thing?”
John: Andrew, there’s no such thing as too meta. I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s a great idea.
Craig: That sounds actually like regular meta. It’s not even that meta. It really isn’t. It’s one level of meta. I think it’s fine. What’s wrong with that?
John: There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a Simpsons episode that is basically the same plot, but of course it’s better that it’s a Hallmark movie that’s making fun of Hallmark movies.
Craig: Simpsons did it.
John: Simpsons did it. Simpsons always did it. We endorse the meta here on the Scriptnotes podcast.
Craig: We do. We love a meta.
John: Oh, I see we have a listener from the UK. Craig lovers a listener from the UK.
Craig: I do.
John: We have audio for this one. We will listen to Beavis’s question read aloud in his own natural accent.
Bevis: Hey, Megana, John, and Craig. I have recently completed the first draft of my first screenplay. It contains two plot twists, one that you probably see coming, and the second that I hope is less obvious. To date, I have only shared the draft with friends and family, and so I have not had to describe or sell it to them first. I would like to pursue opportunities to ask others to read it, but I am not sure how much to reveal to any potential readers. Explaining the twists in advance would help articulate the plot and overall sense and tone of the script but might compromise the reader’s ability to objectively assess how effective the twists are. I may of course be rudely underestimating the capacity of professional readers and writers to make this kind of objective assessment.
I would be grateful if you could offer any advice on how to handle this in the following scenarios: in a log line or outline summarizing the script, in an informal conversation or an email exchange with the potential reader, in a formal treatment document.
I am based in the UK, so I would just like to say to ’90s cockney Craig, all right, mate, thanks for doing this. You’re a top geezer. [inaudible 00:35:56]. You and your podcast are fantastic. Thank you, Beavis Sydney.
Craig: Thanks, Beavis.
John: Craig, what do you think? You will have the twist in your story. In what scenarios do you reveal the twist or not reveal the twist?
Craig: There are zero scenarios where I reveal the twist. It’s a twist. Either it works as a twist or it doesn’t. You can certainly say, “Hey, look, you may be reading this and wondering WTF. There is a twist.” You could say that if you felt the need to. Even saying that does rob the twist of some power. I’m not sure there’s a world where you write an M. Night Shyamalan type of movie and give it to someone and you go, “By the way, the thing is that this village actually isn’t like in the 1800s. It’s in modern day. They’re just sealed off. That’s the whole thing. That’s how it ends.” That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
John: I would agree with you that if you’re talking with somebody about a project, revealing the twist in that is generally not useful unless it’s a longer conversation, and you’re really going through the whole story. In some of the written samples here, Beavis has a formal treatment document. Yeah, in that you’d have to reveal the twist, because that’s a crucial part of what’s happening there, particularly if it’s not even an end twist, like a Shyamalan twist, but a midpoint twist where everything changes like a Gone Girl. Yeah, you would have to reveal the twist in that. If you were doing an elevator pitch on Gone Girl where there’s a big mid-story twist, I don’t think you would reveal that there.
Craig: They’re twists. Keep them twisty.
John: Don’t twist it.
Craig: Keep the twists twisty. Thanks.
John: Megana, help us out with Elbowed Out.
Megana: Elbowed Out asks, “I’ve been developing a project with a production company for the last two years. It’s a true crime story, and we have the life rights of the people involved in this scandal, and the quintessential book rights. I created this project, wrote a spec pilot, the pitch deck, series treatment, but the production company, as well as the producers attached, have told me I’m not big enough to tackle a show like this. I totally understood, and we started looking for showrunners. We landed on two talented industry vets as our showrunners. When asking them if they’ll be doing writers’ room, they said, ‘No, we’re going to tackle this ourselves, because there’s too much research to catch everyone else up.’
“I’m 25 years old, and I’ll be the executive producer of the series, which is pretty nuts to me, but I also wanted to be a writer on this. I already know everything about this case, and I want to help creatively in any way I can. I’ll take notes and get them coffees if I need to. I just don’t know how to give this up and let them take over.
Also, speaking for the future, this was supposed to be a launching pad for my career, but it seems I won’t get the attention I initially thought I would. How do I nicely get involved creatively or push myself forward in this madness? Because I’m slowly being cast to the sidelines.”
John: I want to start with the good news. Hey, you’re 25 years old, you got a series set up with good people, and this could actually happen. That’s great. Don’t shit on yourself for things that may not happen, because good stuff is already happening for you.
Craig: There is good stuff happening, but there are some warning signs. There are a few red flags here that concern me, and not concerned in the way I normally am, which is, “Oh my god, Elbowed Out, you’re being abused.” I’m more concerned that a number of people have all agreed that you’re not ready to be writing on this, which makes me wonder if you might not be ready to be writing on this, which is fine. When people say you’re not big enough to tackle a show like this, if they love the writing, I think they might think otherwise. The showrunners similarly I think would think otherwise.
What I think is fair to say is this. It is fair to say to the showrunners, “Look, I get it. It seems like from what people are reading, I am not necessarily at the level you are looking for, for this work.” Honesty will take you so far, Elbowed Out. You can’t even imagine. You can continue that honesty and say, “I really want to get better. The way to get better is to work professionally and in a room. If I can’t be in a room with you guys, is there a world where maybe you let me write a draft? If you hate it, just rewrite the whole damn thing. You’re going to do that anyway. Is there some kind of participation I can do here, with full honesty that I understand what’s going on?” Then people may be like, “Look, we get it. You know what? You’ve earned a break here, so let’s throw you a bone.” I think that’s probably the best you can hope for. Full honesty is going to be the best policy for you.
John: I vouch for Craig’s full honesty within this room, with these people, with these producers. Then I think there’s another level of how you present this out to the world. You should be getting an agent and a manager off the fact that you have a series set up as a 25-year-old. People should want to represent you.
I think as you go out to the town with these representatives and they talk about, “Oh my gosh, it’s so amazing that you have a show set up,” your reps can be a little bit more aggressive in promoting what a wunderkind you are for getting this thing happening and getting you out there and getting people to read your stuff, which is hopefully good, because even if you don’t have the opportunity to do everything you could do on this one series that you got set up, you should hopefully be in a good place to have great meetings and hopefully get good jobs on other projects out there. I think there’s space for both real honesty within the showrunners and a little bit more expressive hyping of you because of what you’ve been able to do.
Craig: Definitely, there’s good hype opportunity here, certainly hype opportunity as a person that finds material and gets it set up places. If you want hype material for the writing, the writing has to be there. That’s part of the deal.
John: He says that he wrote a spec pilot. Maybe that spec pilot’s really good and it got him places.
Craig: I gotta be honest, just based on what I’m… It’s a rare thing for somebody to write a spec pilot that’s really good and then for everybody to be like, “No, thank you.”
John: I agree with you. More often, if this pilot was really good, and they were concerned about his ability to run the show-
Craig: They’d pair him with someone.
John: … they’d partner him up with somebody to actually keep going after that.
Craig: Co-showrunners, exactly, or at least you would be in a room or be part of that process.
John: Cool. Let’s take our last question from Juliana here.
Megana: Juliana asked, “When your character is moving from one room to another, do you ever end the previous scene with wording that leads directly into the slug line, or would one address the location change and then reconfirm in slug line? For example, ‘She takes her wine and heads into the INTERIOR KITCHEN NIGHT,’ or, ‘She takes her wine and heads into the kitchen, INTERIOR KITCHEN NIGHT.’ It feels more continuous shot the first way, but also more confusing to read. Is there a better way to direct this type of continuous movement on the page?”
John: Craig, I find myself doing both of these things. I do it both ways. Sometimes I do wonder, because people don’t read slug lines, whether it will actually track and make sense, and yet on the page, you can make it work. What do you do?
Craig: It depends. Juliana, here’s the good news. It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. I will often say things like, “She takes her wine and heads into the,” and then usually I’ll put a colon if it’s heading into the slug line. It’s for no reason. I just like that. That’s perfectly fine.
“She takes her wine and heads into the kitchen, INTERIOR KITCHEN NIGHT,” feels a little bit like time cut almost in that sense, like you’re starting a new… It’s an hour later and her wine is empty. If there were a time cut involved, and I was going to show that by showing, oh my god, the whole wine bottle’s empty now, or there’s now three open wine bottles, then yes, I would say, “She takes her wine and heads into the kitchen.” Period. Next, “INTERIOR KITCHEN, LATER,” is probably what I would write. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating a… If you want them to feel a natural flow from room to room, I think using the wording that leads into it makes total sense.
John: Agreed. I would probably be more aggressive, “She takes her wine and heads – INTO KITCHEN NIGHT,” because you then read INTO KITCHEN NIGHT as into the kitchen night, and flowing through. The question is sometimes that dash, I will then match with a dash on the other side of the scene header, if it’s a natural flow. Then I’m not even really acknowledging the scene header. I’m just saying it’s a continuous action that brought me to a new scene. You’re thinking the right thoughts here, Juliana. It’s basically how do you make this feel right on the page, make it feel like it is one continuous action, versus starting and stopping a brand new scene.
Craig: It’s all about your intention. How fluid do you want this to feel? If you want it to feel fluid, if you want the audience to experience this as somebody breezing from room to room, then this would be the way to do it. If you don’t, then don’t.
John: Great. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things. Want to start us off?
Craig: Sure. I have two One Cool Things this week, which you know me, I’m making up for past crimes. The first one is calling The Past Within. I think I mentioned this earlier when I was doing the other cooperative puzzle-solving game. This is by the folks at Rusty Lake, who make all these wonderfully surreal, effed up little puzzle games. They’re all fantastic. Definitely check out the Rusty Lake games if you haven’t already. They have their own weird mythology that I can’t quite make sense of. It involves some people who are owl people and crow people and also shrimp, matches, and other strange light motifs.
The Past Within is their first game that is a required cooperative game, meaning two people are playing it on separate devices. One person sees one part of it, and the other one sees the other part. They have to cooperate back and forth to solve it. I did it with Melissa and we had a great time. It’s pretty short. The point is definitely check out The Past Within. It’s great to play with… An older kid can do this, a teenager, no problem. Also great to do with a spouse. It goes by real fast. It’s two chapters, so it’s pretty simple.
My second One Cool Thing is The Fabelmans, which has not come out yet. This is the new movie from Steven Spielberg. It is essentially the story of his coming of age. I was asked to interview him and Tony Kushner, his fellow screenwriter and producer on the film, for the Writers Guild Theater showing. In order to ask the questions, I said, “Hey, I need to see the movie first,” and I loved it. I just loved it.
John: That’s great.
Craig: The log line, I’d be like, “I don’t know. It’s a movie of his own life. It’s a movie about movies, and I generally don’t like that trend.” It’s gorgeous. Beautiful performances all around from everybody. A fantastic screenplay from Steven and Tony. Tony Kushner is… He’s Tony Kushner.
John: [inaudible 00:46:55].
Craig: Angels in America and so many other things. Just a brilliant man. They made something absolutely beautiful, that is not really about the power of cinema at all. It’s about something else that’s I think far more profound and oddly sad, sad and beautiful at the same time. When that movie comes out, which is pretty soon, I think, maybe has already come out by the time this airs, definitely check out The Fabelmans. This up-and-comer Steven Spielberg did a great job.
John: That’s great. My One Cool Thing is a sad One Cool Thing. Doug McGrath, who is a fantastic writer and director and actor, a Princeton grad-
Craig: That’s right.
John: … died this past week, had a heart attack. I really regret we never had him on the show, because he was an absolute delight of a guest and a raconteur. His credits include Emma, Infamous, Born Yesterday, Saturday Night Life, but I mostly knew him through the Sundance Labs. He was just a fantastic mentor and advisor to everyone who came into that Labs, but also to me, because he was always just such a personification of kindness and grace and wit and was just a phenomenal guy.
I’m going to put a clip in here. He was accepting an award from the Austin Film Society in 2012. He was telling a story I’d heard him tell in person about showing his movie Emma at the White House. Bill Clinton is there. I’m excising the part where Bill Clinton eats two giant bags of popcorn and drinks a soda, just to start with Bill Clinton and his reaction to Emma, which I think will fell very familiar to a lot of us.
Doug McGrath: The weird thing about watching a film at the White House with a president in the front row is that nobody watches the movie. They just watch the president watching the movie. Now, Emma is one of the great comic novels in English literature. There’s a lot of very funny things that happen in it. They’re not listening to it. They’re just watching President Clinton. If there was a joke and he laughed, about a half a second later, everybody would laugh. If there was a joke and he didn’t laugh, it was like you were at a child’s funeral. It was the saddest quiet room that you’ve ever been in. I’m like, “Hey dude, chuckle it up. They’re all looking at you.”
About three minutes into the movie, but not four, just three, three at the latest, I noticed, because I’d seen the movie a lot, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to it, I was trying to watch him peripherally out of the side of my eyes, I noticed there was a lurching motion. He lurched toward me, lurched forward, and then pitched back and dropped his head on the back of his chair and went to sleep. I’m telling you a dead sleep. Russian troops could’ve come into Washington and they would not have disturbed him. Lincoln saw more of that play at Ford’s Theater than President Clinton saw of my movie. In a deep sleep.
I thought, “Look, I’m not going to hold it against him. He’s the leader of the free world. God knows what he’s been doing all day. I’m sure it had been a draining experience for him. The guy was tired. I can’t blame him. It’s not like I had an action film to show him. Our idea of an action sequence in Emma, it’s Emma poured hot tea. I just thought, “Give him a break.”
20 seconds passes, which is like 7 years, because the audience is thinking, “Now do we have to go to sleep?” They’re all just watching him. After about 20 seconds, you know he was doing that thing whenever you fall asleep, which may be happening now for people, where you fall asleep and you think, “Where am I?” I know he was thinking, “Oh my god, where am I? Oh, I’m at that movie,” because all of a sudden, out of a dead sleep, he lurches forward and goes, “Nuh!” He looks over at me. I’m just looking at the screen like, “I had no idea you were asleep. Look at the pretty English field.” I just pretended I had no idea he’d been asleep, but he didn’t want to leave it at that.
He takes my arm. We shared an armrest. He takes my arm and he squeezes it and he says, “I love this movie.” I’m like, “Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. It’s fine. I’m pretending I don’t even know you’re here. Whatever.” He squeezes my arm again. He goes, “I mean it. I just love it. I love it.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m voting for you. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine. It’s fine.” He could not leave it at that. He leans over one last time, and he says, “Sometimes the language is so beautiful, I have to shut my eyes and let the words wash over me.” That is why you want to be in this business, to be a part of an evening like that.
Craig: I only spoke with Doug McGrath once. I was very early in my career. I was at my very first job in that agency. One of the account executives had also gone to Princeton and was a classmate of Doug’s. He knew I wanted to write, and so he put me on the phone with Doug. We had a lovely conversation. He was just such a nice, warm guy. He meant so much to me. I think it was right around when his Born Yesterday was coming out. I was like, “Wow, he’s on a billboard, and I’m talking to him.” It was very cool. He also has a fantastic little cameo in Quiz Show.
John: Great.
Craig: Which is one of my favorite movies. Rest in peace, Doug McGrath. Very, very nice guy, very cool guy, good writer, and taken from us a bit too soon here.
John: Definitely. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: That’s right.
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig’s not on Twitter anymore, so don’t even try. Don’t even dare.
Craig: I’m gone.
John: He’s gone.
Craig: I’m gone. Oh my god. Can I tell you how good it feels? It feels so good. It hurt for 15 seconds.
John: You left Twitter before though.
Craig: No, I didn’t leave. I took a break. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to leave my account here, but I’m just not really going to do much.” Really, ever since then, I didn’t really do much. My tweeting dropped down to almost nothing. I had a few replies here and there to people. My account, it’s over, gone. My account’s gone. It’s done.
John: For the moment, I am still @johnaugust on Twitter, but also Instagram. You can find me there. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great, and hoodies and other stuff too. Aline is really pushing for sweatpants, so maybe we’ll get some sweatpants in there too.
Craig: What?
John: Aline wants sweatpants.
Megana: No, a full-on sweatsuit. She wants a sweatsuit.
John: She wants a full sweat-suit.
Craig: I want a tracksuit.
Megana: That’s it.
Craig: I want to look like an Eastern European gangster.
John: I think we need zip-up jumpsuits.
Craig: Like in the future?
John: Yeah, like Carhartt overalls.
Craig: I think of those as future clothes.
John: Whatever we make, you’ll find them at Cotton Bureau and only Cotton Bureau. Craig, you realize that there’s now knockoff merch?
Craig: What?
John: Listeners sent in links to Scriptnotes T-shirts, of our new Scriptnotes T-shirt, the one with the cool S, on other sites that are not Cotton Bureau. If you go to one of those other sites, you’re going to get an inferior knockoff product that has not met Stuart’s quality of softness. It’s not that you’re taking money out of our pockets. You are hurting yourself by not getting the softest T-shirt you can imagine.
Craig: Is there that much of a market for these things that there’s a knockoff market? What are we, Louis Vuitton?
John: I don’t know. I don’t understand either. It’s one thing if somebody wants to make their own Scriptnotes T-shirt that it’s just the word Scripnotes in their own style and things. More power to you. We don’t have a trademark on the word Scriptnotes. Go for it. If you’re literally taking our design, that’s lame.
Craig: That is copyrighted.
John: That’s copyrighted. I have no interest in going after them, suing them.
Craig: That feels like a lot of hassle. I can’t imagine the damages of that, like, “We sold four T-shirts, so after your $400,000 lawsuit, here’s your $12 back.” I don’t think so. Anyway, I think it must be just bots just do this, right?
John: Yeah, I think that’s what it is.
Craig: Populate a marketing thing, yeah. Damn you, bots.
John: Damn you. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record with Megana talking through what she learned-
Craig: What she learned.
John: … at the Austin Film Festival. Craig and Megana, thank you very much for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: We’re here.
Craig: Woo! Woo!
John: Megana, this is your first time at the Austin Film Festival. I just want to hear your honest feedback about what you were expecting and what you actually encouraged. How was your time in Austin?
Megana: It was great. It was really fun. To be honest, it was I think probably the biggest event I’ve gone to post-COVID. That aspect was a little overwhelming.
John: I was a little overwhelmed to.
Megana: As I understand, they have changed locations or venues. It felt a bit sprawling. I learned the topography of Downtown Austin as it relates to all these different hotels very well. I had a great time. I wasn’t expecting or predicting that intangible feeling of being around a bunch of people who are passionate about similar things that you are. That was really nice, that sense of community.
John: Now, you actually went to other panels and things, because when you weren’t producing Scriptnotes, you could do that kind of stuff. What did you attend? What did you learn? What is the process like going to things? Because we never go to anything.
Megana: I also wasn’t expecting how long the lines were. I don’t know if that was a new thing or a post-COVID queue culture thing where people are just obsessed with standing in lines. There were a few panels that I wanted to go to that I wasn’t able to because of the lines. Then the things that I went to, I saw managers speak and different screenwriters. A lot of the things that they were saying were similar to stuff that you guys say on the podcast, but I guess it’s just nice to hear similar sentiments come out of other people’s mouths.
Craig: Is it as good? I don’t think it’s as good. We say stuff and it sounds amazing. They say stuff and it’s like, “Fine, whatever.” That’s not how it is at all. I’m sure they were great.
Megana: It was great. It was great.
John: What was not so great?
Craig: They need to know. It’s good for them.
Megana: Sometimes it’s just hard when I meet a lot of people who are aspiring screenwriters. Say they were aspiring novelists or something. That’s great. This is beautiful. You’re creating art. Whether or not this is published, you could self-publish or you could show this to somebody. It feels like going to a conference for aspiring architects. Nobody cares about blueprints. People care about houses. A screenplay, it’s just the first step, and it requires so much work after that and so much other buy-in. That aspect stresses me out when I meet people who are so excited about the screenplay, but it feels like that’s where it ends. If you get satisfaction and joy from that, I love that, but if you don’t, then that makes me feel bad.
Craig: Because that’s what it’s probably going to be for a lot of people.
John: It will be. I don’t know how many thousands of people attend the Austin Film Festival, but most of those people were not going to be having screenwriting careers. That’s the reality. I think, Megana, you articulated something that I always felt about Austin is that it’s great, all-day enthusiasm, but I get a little sad for the enthusiasm, knowing that a lot of these people are chasing a dream that won’t happen for them.
Megana: Right. If you want to connect with people who love movies and who are interested in movies and interested in writing as a hobby, I think that’s so positive and awesome. I think it’s also overwhelming to look at that amount of people, and then all of the people I know in LA who are aspiring screenwriters. I don’t know, it does something to my heart a little bit.
Craig: I’ve felt this too. The rough part is that there’s something a bit old-fashioned, bordering on anachronistic at this point, about a conference dedicated to scripts, documents, as opposed to the making of things, because obviously they do have movies at this thing as well. There’s the film festival. The screenwriting part, just the pure, “How do I write a script?” so much of it, as you say, is focused on either a pitch for the pitch competition, that does not resemble in any way, shape, or form how people pitch things in our business, or on the creation of the documents but no concept of what happens after, when in fact, screenwriting is an integrated job. Ideally, it is writing and seeing your writing through as it’s made. It’s one of those things where a lot of people only ever do half of what the job is. It has been weighing on me.
Alec and I did a panel. Someone asked us about the value of the competition, the screenplay competition. We both told them our honest opinion, which is it doesn’t matter. If you win that competition, I don’t think it really matters. There a lot of that. Lately, I’ve just been wondering. It’s a fun thing to do. I think a lot of people like doing it. Is it a little bit of a tourist trap? Possibly.
John: Makes me think about Comic-Con or fan cons of things, where if you go to one of those things, it’s a chance to meet all the people who are making the stuff that you love, and it’s great for that, or DragCon, same thing. You’re going to see all the drag queens, but you don’t go there thinking, “Oh, now I’m going to become a drag superstar.” You’re there to celebrate a thing.
Craig: You’re not going to learn the real deal of how to be a drag star. You’re there to just see people you love, which is totally cool.
John: Completely fine.
Craig: I completely agree, that aspect is great.
John: Absolutely. The degree to which people want to just soak in screenwriter culture, [inaudible 01:02:17] screenwriter culture, it is fun for that. I think we are a part of that. Scriptnotes is a part of that. It’s part of the reason why we go back, because it’s a chance to hang out with a bunch of our screenwriter friends who we could see in Los Angeles but we don’t. We get a beer at The Driskill. It’s fun for that. I am torn, because it’s fun to be around people who like to talk about screenplay stuff. That’s great, but it’s also a little sad knowing that most people who are going there because they want to become screenwriters are not going to really progress based on their attending.
Craig: I’ve shed my tears for all those folks. I think the part that is a little uncomfortable for me is just feeling a little perhaps implicit in creating a sense of, hey look, if you purchase a special badge, you will hear a secret. Like I say to people all the time when they’re like, “Hey, I would love to just buy you a coffee and pick your brain for 10 minutes,” I’m like, “You can just listen to 580 hours of me talking with John. We’ve done it all. I’ve said it. It’s all said. It’s all out there.” I’m not sure anybody should pay for anything you or I have to say.
John: Megana, I want to get back to you here, because Megan McDonald’s gone to Austin with us before, we’ve had other people who have gone, but you are the biggest celebrity of our producers, by far. How are people with you there? I tend to hide while I’m there, but you were out there. Were people cool with you?
Megana: I don’t think anybody really recognized me. I wish I had more of that experience that you’re describing.
Craig: You’re a radio personality.
John: They recognize your voice at times.
Megana: I was just walking along the sidewalks reading questions off my phone, hoping somebody would stop me.
Craig: I love the idea of you standing, waiting for the crosswalk, and you’re just saying, “John writes in and says,” and then you look to your right at a group of people like, “Mm-hmm? Did you hear that?”
John: I will say, Craig, you missed out on the live show we did for the Three Page Challenge. Megana gets this huge round of applause, because everyone knows Megana Rao is the heart of the Three Page Challenge. It was nice to see the public validation for all the hard work you do making this show possible.
Craig: No one deserves fame more, as far as I’m concerned, than Megana Rao.
Megana: I appreciate that. I think it’s also because I don’t really want it.
Craig: Exactly.
Megana: It was so nice to meet our listeners. I do want to say that. Also, I feel like I introduced a lot of you listeners to my very creepy memory, where they’d be like, “Hey, my name’s this, and I wrote in,” or, “I had this Three Page Challenge.” I was like, “Yeah, and this thing happened, and then this character was there.” They were like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe-“
Craig: Are you like a Marilu Henner?
Megana: No. I read all the emails that come in. Whether or not you respond to them, if you give me enough details, I’ll usually be able to recall them. It was so nice to be able to put some faces to these emails and these Three Page Challenges that I’m getting.
Craig: Wow. I didn’t know that you could do that.
Megana: Not all the time. Most of the time I can though. I’m not going to downplay it.
Craig: I got to say, that’s impressive. That is a thing actually. I didn’t realize that you had that, because I answer emails all the time, and then they’re gone.
John: Then they’re gone.
Craig: They’re gone.
John: Here’s the nice thing about emails. I go and search back and find who was that person, what were we talking about.
Craig: If you’re Megana, you don’t have to.
John: It’s just in your brain.
Craig: You just, boop boop, “Oh yes, I remember you.” Megana, what can’t you do?
Megana: Oh, so many things.
Craig: That sounds like a good Bonus Segment for next time. What can’t Megana do?
Megana: Singing is definitely up there. One of our listeners brought a book for me that she signed, that she’d also written. That was cool. I think that was my favorite part of the experience is just being able to meet our Scriptnotes fans. I think that the Scriptnotes events were, in my humble opinion, the best events at Austin.
Craig: That’s nice to hear. I will say that in the past, I think there have been… It’s gotten a little thin. I think the cadre of people showing up, it used to be a little bit thicker with big shots. It’s got a little thinner in that regard. It’s very encouraging to see that people still listen to the show and they enjoy the show. We do have a good time. I think a lot of these panels are soaking in… You know that thing where people are so excited to be the professional on stage answering questions, that they get really self-important? We don’t do that. You get a break from all that, of going to panels where people just talk to you with unearned confidence about all the stuff that they insist they know.
Megana: There’s just no right way to do any of these things. That’s why you guys are still talking about this 500-something episodes later. There’s just so many different ways to find success or be successful in this industry.
Craig: That’s right.
Megana: I wish there was a secret you could learn over a 10-minute coffee.
Craig: See, this is my problem, because I do think people are, in a sense… There are people going there looking for that, because we still get questions like that all the time. It’s hard to answer. What I do know is that a lot of people came up to me and just thanked me for this aspect of the service that we provide, not the advice, not the topics, just caring, caring enough to take questions and to answer them and to listen to people, and in the sense that this is a give-back show, because we’re not running ads and we’re not Dax Shepard and all that. I think it does good. People really appreciate it. It’s nice to hear that from them in person. Everybody that said anything nice to me, I really was quite touched by.
John: As was I. Megana, thank you very much for coming with us to the Austin Film Festival and for sharing what you learned there.
Megana: Thank you guys.
Craig: Thank you, Megana, for… You know what for. Let’s leave that as a mystery for everyone. Now they’re like, “Oh my god, there’s a Craigana. It’s happening.”
Megana: You’ll have to subscribe to the super premium content.
Craig: The super premium to hear what Megana did. It was really helpful.
John: Awesome.
Craig: Thanks, John.
John: Thanks, guys.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- MoviePass Executives Charged with Fraud
- Warner Bros. Discovery Says It Will Keep Writers and Directors Workshops Alive, But Evolve to Conglomerate-Wide DEI Oversight
- The Six Hour Scene from John’s Blog
- Doug McGrath Austin Film Society Honoree Speech
- The Past Within – Rusty Lake
- The Fablemans
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Holly Overton (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 574: Difficult Scenes, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back writer/director Rian Johnson (Glass Onion, Knives Out, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) to discuss the difference between developing a mystery vs. designing a story. Rian shares how his writing process begins with structure and how the needs of the story inform the tone of his films.
We then test ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that’s been thrilling and terrifying screenwriters, to assess how worried we should be for the future of the profession. We also answer questions on variable frame rate and politics on set.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we dive into theories and spoilers for Glass Onion. Don’t listen until you’ve watched the movie!
Links:
- Glass Onion on Netflix, December 23, 2022!
- Sign up for a Scriptnotes Premium Membership! use the PROMO CODE: ONION for four months free on your Scriptnotes annual membership. (Valid through 1/15/23)
- The 2022 World Cup is being hosted in Qatar, which, as everyone knows, is pronounced… by Sarah Lyall for NYT
- Eben Bolter’s Tweet on Variable Frame Rate
- ChatGPT
- On Airline Mapping by Daniel Huffman
- LEGO Star Wars: The Phantom Limb short film by Legg Animations, score by our own Matthew Chilelli!
- Comic Con Experience — CCP in São Paulo, Brazil
- John Dixon Carr mystery novels including Hag’s Nook and The Mad Hatter
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! – use promo code ONION
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Rian Johnson Returns first appeared on John August.
For this week’s Inneresting rebroadcast, editor Chris Csont chose this 2011 blog post in which I wondered how much of ourselves we present online. Even then, I was looking backwards:
In the seven years I’ve been running the blog, I’ve noticed the online version of myself drifting closer to the “actual” version. But there is still a difference, and that’s deliberate. Even though this site has my name on it, it’s still a fairly controlled product: a ton of useful information on screenwriting. You’re getting the screenwriter John August, not the Eagle Scout, the cook or the Real World/Road Rules Challenge completist.
For the newsletter, I wrote up a blurb to put the post in context which ended up nearly as long as the post itself.
Eleven years ago, I was talking about Facebook, a platform I’ve largely abandoned. Nearly all the same points apply to Twitter and Instagram today.
Twitter has been problematic for years, with its trolls and mobs and twitchforks. But I’m honestly grateful for it. It’s where I first met many colleagues and learned new ideas, mostly by listening in on conversations from communities I wasn’t a part of.
For all the talk about Twitter leveling the playing field, allowing direct access to powerful people, I found my blue-check status to be incredibly useful. The moment I followed someone, they would get a notification and often follow me back. That digital introduction made it easy to DM them a question like, “Hey, would you ever want to come on Scriptnotes?”
Scrolling through someone’s Twitter gave you a sense of who a person was, or at least how they wanted to be perceived.
I’m talking about Twitter in the past tense because I think it’s dead. It may still exist in six months or six years, but Elon Musk’s erratic decisions have broken its hold on the conversation. It will ever feel essential again. Maybe that’s good. Other weird things can flourish in its absence.
Meanwhile, I still use Instagram, particularly Stories and DMs. If I meet someone at a party, Instagram is probably how we’ll keep in touch. Yet it’s an every way a more extreme version of what worried me back in 2011. It’s curated, performative and artificial. It feeds body dysmorphia and parasocial relationships. But it doesn’t feel like it’s contributing to imminent collapse of democracy, which in 2022 is the low bar we’ve set.
As I’m posting this, I haven’t officially left Twitter. I still skim and reply. But I’m not going to be engaging in any discussion or debate. I’ll certainly try out Hive and Post and Mastodon, just like I used to have Tumblr and others. But I don’t expect any of them to replace Twitter for me.
Just as it was 12 years ago and seven years before that, I suspect this blog will remain the official version of me, so follow me here. RSS forever.
The post Social media has always been dying first appeared on John August.
Like most writers, I’m trying to understand these wild moves at HBO Max.
Cancelling Westworld? Sure. Happens all the time. That’s TV.
Ditching an unaired season you’ve already shot, like what just happened to Minx? That’s heartbreaking, but I guess not unprecedented after Batwoman.
Pulling Westworld off the service is just bonkers to me. My only guess is that they’re going to stick it on an ad-based service with a different residual formula.
Makes it hard to want to make a show for HBO Max.
I mistakenly titled this post “Wither Westworld” instead of “Whither Westworld” and both work.
The post Whither Westworld first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer/producers Al Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville, Shanghai Noon, Into the Badlands) to discuss their process of discovering new stories within familiar worlds, like in their Addams Family hit series Wednesday.
We discuss casting actors, shooting overseas, and the difference between writers’ block and story block. We also answer listener questions on one-pagers and whether aspiring screenwriters should focus on feature or television writing samples.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John asks Al and Miles their thoughts on film school and what decisions they’d make if they had to go back.
Links:
- Al Gough on Instagram
- Miles Millar on Twitter
- Wednesday on Netflix
- The Way They Were book about the movie The Way We Were
- Moleskine Notebooks
- Looking for a Christmas Gift? Buy a Scriptnotes Gift Subscription $29 for six months, or $49 for a year for a friend, click here!
- ChatGPT by OpenAi
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Adam Locke Norton (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Any Given Wednesday first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here!
John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded late at night in front of a live studio audience, so unsurprisingly, it has some salty language. Listener be warned. Also, for Premium members, stick around after the end, because we have an audience Q and A that’s actually really good and makes Craig a little uncomfortable. Enjoy.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about what?
Audience: Screenwriting.
John: And?
Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.
John: Wow, so good. So impressive. 581 episodes. They’re so well trained.
Craig: I’m so hurt by what just happened.
John: I want to thank Heidi Lauren Duke for singing our intro. Thank you, Heidi.
Craig: Thanks.
John: We are here at the Austin Film Festival, which we’ve been to many, many times. It’s been a minute since we’ve been at the Austin Film Festival.
Craig: It’s been three, four, five years.
John: Something happened, but now we’re back.
Craig: There was a little bit of trouble.
John: It’s exciting to be back here. Craig, this afternoon we were planning the show. One of the plans was we would get together for dinner. I did not join the dinner. I want to know, how was your dinner?
Craig: There was drinking. I have a vague sense of what will happen tonight, as I often do. It was a lovely dinner, actually. I’m not saying that it was lovely because you weren’t there. I’m simply saying it was lovely despite the fact that you were not there.
John: Also, live shows tend to be a bit loose and a little bit messy. The live show we did in Los Angeles, it was on a schedule there.
Craig: I know. I don’t like that. I like a nice, drunken, stupid, disorganized mess.
John: Originally, I had planned to be at this dinner, but then I had to do a pitch on a Friday evening for 90 minutes on Zoom.
Craig: That’s ridiculous.
John: Not the ideal time to pitch a movie, so I don’t know how it went. Either it’s going to be announced and deadline at some point or it will never happen. We’ll see what happens there.
Craig: Hollywood.
John: Hollywood.
Craig: Hollywood.
John: We’re not in Hollywood. We’re in Austin, Texas.
Craig: I’m so glad to be back, honestly. Thank you guys for showing up, honestly. It does mean a lot. Thank you. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a live show in this room.
John: I don’t think so. We’re usually at the other-
Craig: At the other place (mumbles under breath).
John: For some reason, we’re not at the other place this time.
Craig: I don’t know what happened there.
John: There’s lots of speculation about things that happened.
Craig: There was speculation.
John: I don’t know.
Craig: Perhaps the ghosts.
John: The ghosts finally got-
Craig: The ghosts got the upper hand.
John: We’re here in a big venue full of people, which is really exciting.
Craig: Thank you.
John: It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night, which feels like the ideal time to talk about really serious issues that are facing screenwriters, television writers, the industry. Over the next three hours, we’re going to dig really deep into some of the fundamental issues afflicting the film and television industry. I think we’re all ready for this. Did we all stretch? We’re good for this.
Craig: I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I know you said earlier we were preparing, but really he prepared, and I was there near him.
John: Classically, we are on the floor of the hotel, which is the best place to plan for these.
Craig: He was telling me what I’m going to do.
John: Thank God we’re in a venue where we can just grab people and say, “Oh hey, do you want to be on this show?” We’ve got amazing guests for you.
Craig: We do.
John: Why don’t we just start with our guests?
Craig: Should we start bringing some guests on?
John: I think we should bring two guests on.
Craig: I don’t know if there’s any reason to delay other than to say… I will say that as the night goes on, at some point, and hopefully not too late in, we will have lots of Q and A. I love Q and A, and I’ll tell you why, guys. It’s not because I care about your questions. I don’t. It’s because I don’t have to prepare anything for it at all. I can just react. If I had my way, that shit would start right now, but because I don’t, I will do what he tells me to do. We have four guests tonight.
John: Four guests.
Craig: We’re going to start with two, Chuck Hayward and Brenda Hsueh. Chuck Hayward writes on or has written on Ted Lasso and WandaVision. Brenda Hsueh has written on a whole bunch of stuff, but the thing that I’m most excited about is the Ghostbuster movie, because I’m super excited about the animated Ghostbusters movie. Come on up, guys.
John: Obviously, we can talk about features, but I really want to talk about television with the two of you. I would love to get to know how you got started getting staffed for your first television show. Chuck, can you talk us through what were the scripts you wrote that got you staffed?
Chuck Hayward: I was an assistant for about nine years in Hollywood. I was doing a lot of coffee acquisitions and excrement consumption. After doing a whole lot of that for nine years, I was like, “All right.” I started sending my scripts around to people, agents’ assistants, managers’ assistants, and, “Hey, if you like this, kick it up to your boss.” Somebody did eventually. Then I got repped. Then the reps started sending me on meetings. I had no fucking clue what I was doing.
John: Chuck, before we get to that, talk to us about the scripts that you actually first approached people saying, “Hey, would you be willing to read this?” because that’s where I think a lot of people in this room are at is like, is this script right for people to actually read and think about you?
Chuck: I’ll tell you where I screwed up. I started writing scripts that were like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if X happened or Y happened or whatever?” My manager told me, “You should write something that’s very personal, write something that shows people, ‘Hey, here’s my view on the world. Here’s what my experiences have been, my perspective is, my humor is,'” because people originally, they were like, “Hey, we like you, but we don’t really know you from the script.” They say write what you know, but just really make sure you put a lot of yourself on the page. After I did that, that’s when I started actually getting hired for jobs.
John: Brenda, any similarities in your experience? What were the first things that you wrote that got attention?
Brenda Hsueh: I think for me, I was an Asian immigrant, and I was like, “Oh, that’s not a real job. Writing is not a real job.”
Craig: You’re right. It’s not.
Brenda: Like, “That’s not a thing.” I was sensible, and I was an English major. I wrote about Jane Austen and stuff. Then I was like, “I’ll be in television news producing or something like that.” My mom got sick, and then I had to take care of her. She was in LA. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to move out to LA to take care of my mom.” I was like, “Oh, I’m super derailed. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I would come out here. All my friends are in New York City. My job’s in New York City.”
Then in LA, when I was taking care of my mom, she’s a frugal Asian, and she was like, “Oh, you can’t just take care of me. You have to work and make money.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” I was tutoring overachieving Asian kids in SAT tutoring and anything I could bluff my way through. It was a lot of me going ahead in the book and being like, “What’s dew point?”
I met somebody at the alumni function that was a Seinfeld writer. Then I was like, “Oh, okay.” I was like, “Oh, this is a job. People can make money on this? This is interesting.” Then he was like, “Why don’t you try writing a spec?” Then honestly, I was so lazy, I was like, “Okay, writing. What’s the shortest one?” I was like, “Oh, half hour.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll do a half hour.” Because I was lazy, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s the one to do.” Then I was like, “Oh wait, actually that’s the hardest one to do,” because you have stakes and story and character but be funny and do it all efficiently in 22 minutes.
I got tricked into doing half hour. Then I was doing that in my bubble, taking care of my mom. Then I was like, “I don’t know how to get a PA job. I don’t know how to get a writer’s assistant job. I don’t know how to do any of that. I don’t know anybody.”
Craig: I am so amazed to see how this works out. It seems like you’re doomed for failure.
Brenda: For sure. I was like, “Don’t know anybody.” I was a sensible Asian, and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to give myself two to three years to break in.”
Craig: Tip: be a sensible Asian. Go on.
Brenda: I was like, “I’m giving myself two to three years like grad school.” I was like, “I don’t have to pay tuition.” I was like, “Okay, I just have to support myself, try to get better at this.” I basically just read every example of good writing of what I wanted to do, on the internet, guys. Then I was like, “Okay, I’m going to enter a contest,” because that’s what you did.
John: Oh, Craig, you love contests.
Craig: We’re about to hear about the contest that matters. Go on.
Brenda: I was like, “Okay, so since I have no connections, I’m going to enter a meritocracy,” which is a contest.
John: Oh, you think contests are meritocracies?
Brenda: Kind of, because they don’t know anything about-
John: Wow, let’s have a good, long-
Brenda: They don’t know anything about you!
John: Sorry. Tell us.
Brenda: I also am an Asian. I wanted to get paid. There was many contests, but there was only one that paid.
Craig: You know the rest of us want to get paid too? You know that, right?
John: [inaudible 00:09:56] that is. Tell us, tell us, tell us.
Craig: All the people want to get paid.
Brenda: There was an ABC Disney writing fellowship that was the only one that paid. I was like, “I’m going to apply to that one.” I was like, “Okay, if I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. I’ll do something else.” I was like, “All right, we’ll see.” I literally was like, “We’ll see.” Then I got it. Then I got a job on that. Then I got an agent off of that. I circumvented the whole-
Chuck: How dare you?
Brenda: I know.
Craig: Both of you, regardless of your arc-
Brenda: Very different.
Craig: Everybody has a different path in, but both of you arrive on your first day. I want to hear what that was like, when you’re no longer doing excrement consumption, you’re no longer just taking care of your mom. You’re not taking care of your mom and doing a job, because your mom is apparently a tyrant.
Brenda: She’s just an Asian mom.
Craig: I have a Jewish mom. It’s-
Brenda: Similar.
Craig: It’s bad, so I know. What was that first day like, when you’re like, “Okay, I made it.” Did you feel like you made it? How did that go?
Brenda: It’s hilarious. When I got the fellowship, there was one show that was like, “We will take a writer.” There was three of us that were interviewing for this show. I didn’t realize in comedy when you go on an interview, you are basically going on a high-stakes date. You just be charming and lovely and funny and a raconteur but not seem nervous. I was such a nerd that I was like, “Oh, how do I prepare for this?” I literally wrote up potential questions and answers for this interview, which would’ve been fine.
Craig: Sounds awesome.
Brenda: I did that. I typed them out, and I printed them out. I had it on a piece of paper. I was in the office, waiting to be called in. I was just reviewing it like a nerd. I was like, “Okay.” This would’ve been fine. Then I get called in. We go for the meeting. I forget to put the piece of paper away. I fold it up. I’m holding it in my hand.
It’s going great. The interview’s going great. For 10 minutes, I’m charming their socks off. Then the showrunner’s like, “What’s in your hand?” I could’ve lied and just been like, “My shopping list.” I’m so honest, and I can’t lie, so I was like, “Oh, it’s the potential questions I thought you would ask and the answers that I would give you.”
John: If I’m the showrunner, I’m delighted by that, by the way.
Brenda: He’s like, “What are they?”
Craig: Did you share?
Brenda: Yes, I had no choice. Literally, they said the question. They were like, “Why do you think you got into writing?” One of the answers is because I had no friends growing up and because I’m a nerd.
Craig: Oh my god. “I’m repellent.”
Chuck: Be a friendless, frugal, nerdy Asian, and that is how you get-
Brenda: You’re getting the picture.
Craig: It’s easy.
Brenda: My older sister and I were best friends, because we had no other friends. We had a world called Dolly Land, where we had stuffed animals, and we would just create a whole world with our stuffed animals.
Craig: That’s terrifying.
Brenda: It’s not terrifying. It’s delightful.
Craig: It’s terrifying.
John: It is a Pixar movie.
Brenda: It’s Toy Story. It’s Toy Story.
Craig: Or a Blumhouse movie.
Brenda: My sister and I would make up stories and narratives and characters with our stuffed animals. I remember she would be the mayor. She was older. She was like, “I’m the mayor.” She’s like, “You are the vice mayor.”
Craig: The vice mayor.
Brenda: Even at seven, I was like, “That’s a fucking made-up-“
Craig: You knew that was bullshit.
Brenda: I was like, “That is not a real office.” I was like, “That’s made up.”
Craig: That’s fucked up. Your sister’s awful.
Brenda: It was a lot of us playing stories and making up stories all the time with our stuffed animals. I was like, “Oh, that’s where I got this.” I was like, “Oh, we were just acting out stories with our stuff all the time.” I had to tell the story.
Craig: It worked.
John: It worked.
Brenda: It worked.
Craig: It worked.
John: You got the job.
Brenda: I got the job.
John: Chuck, what was your interview for your job that got you staffed?
Craig: Tell me please that it was the exact same thing.
John: Were there stuffed animals?
Chuck: My sister and I, we had dolls, but they were Transformers. It’s boring. My agent set me up with a bunch of showrunner meetings. The first seven or eight of them were like, “Go fuck yourself.” I was sending out this script that was basically about a non-stereotypical gay man who was a chronic masturbator who couldn’t get his life together, so semi-autobiographical. I’m like, “I’ll just go in there and I’ll be myself and we’ll toss it back and forth. We’ll go at it.”
Then I meet with Tad Quill, who I adore, who is one of the WASPiest men in the history of WASPing. Whatever I was saying, he would like, “That’s good. That’s funny. That’s funny.” About 30 minutes later, I was like, “Okay, I am not getting this job, so I’m going to get out of here.” Then I got the job.
John: Yay!
Chuck: Turns out, just be yourself and don’t worry about your audience. You might get a cold room, but they end up liking you sometimes.
Craig: I love both of these stories, because as you’re going through this, one no after another, it’s very tempting to just look at it as a part of a pattern that will continue on forever. Then one day you get the yes. You didn’t change. You didn’t change. They did.
Chuck: The nos are great, because then you build your revenge list. I know that at some point down the road, I will take all those people down, and it’ll be fun.
Craig: That’s the only thing that gets me up in the morning is anger, honestly, just anger.
Chuck: Listen, revenge, it’s a dish best served cold.
John: My question for the two of you is… You had studied this job a little bit. You wanted to be writing in TV rooms. What were the biggest things that you guessed wrong about what the job would be like? What were your misconceptions going into that room about what you should do or how it would be? What were the things that surprised you about it?
Brenda: I don’t know if it was a surprise, but I think it was hard for me as a writer, because when I was writing alone, I was like, “Oh, I hear the joke, and I can just write it on a piece of paper.” The thing that you have to do well in a room is pitch. I’m like, “Oh, you have to sell it.” It’s not the same skillset. It’s one thing to pitch an idea and not get a reaction. It’s another thing to pitch a joke and it not-
John: Give us an example.
Craig: Give us an example of your failure.
John: Your first show is How I Met Your Mother?
Brenda: Yes, that was my first show.
John: Great. What is a joke in that? Is it already within the scene, what the next punchline is going to be, or what are you trying to sell?
Brenda: It’s all very character-driven and premise-driven. What I would do is, I would sit near the showrunner and just pitch quietly, but they could hear it. It was the way that I would slowly gain confidence in my pitching. What did you do? Did you have any issues with that?
Chuck: No, I just pitched terrible jokes. I called myself the cricket-maker, because I’d say the-
Brenda: Just embrace it.
Chuck: … funniest fucking thing I could think of it. Then it was like, “All right, I’ll stop doing that.”
Craig: The cricket-maker. That’s funny.
Brenda: You’re like, “That’s a good name.”
Chuck: Unfortunately, that’s where my comedy lay was in my own failure.
Craig: Your lack of ability is hysterical.
Chuck: Exactly. I chose the wrong career. The biggest surprise was I thought you just go in there, and you come up with stuff off the top of your head. You come up with stuff that you feel like is topical or that works in your showrunner’s voice or whatever. A lot of it is sharing yourself. A lot of the times, the likelihood of your pitch getting taken is increased if you say, “Hey, this happened to me. Here’s a story that I went through.” By the way, it can be the darkest, most fucked up, most terrible story ever, and then you can be like, “I felt like our character might be able to do something like this.” I’ll give you an example if you don’t mind.
Craig: Please.
Chuck: On that show Bent, which was my first show, there was Amanda Peet and David Walton. They were dating. We needed a reason why Amanda Peet really wanted to have sex right away. Nobody could come up with a reason. I was like, “Hey, I don’t know if this helps, but I had sex a couple of months ago because if I had waited another month, it would’ve been a two-year dry spell since I had had sex the last time. Maybe that’s her thing. She needs to not hit that awful deadline.” My showrunner goes, “I like it. I like it.” Tad goes, “Let’s make it one year though so it doesn’t sound so pathetic.”
John: He plus-oned it, yeah.
Chuck: That’s what I always say the best part about being a writer is, is the worst thing that happens in your day, in your life, in your world, you get to make money off of it.
John: What I hear both of you saying, which is a truism that we’ve heard throughout 581 episodes of doing Scriptnotes, is that by being your authentic selves, you were cast in that role of the writer of that show, but also you could pitch things that you were the only person in that room who could pitch. You could be very specific that you’re not trying to write for somebody else or some mythical audience or some mythical showrunner. You were writing what you could do.
Brenda: It’s funny, because I’ve been in this business long enough where I think being Asian was a liability in the beginning, but it’s awesome now, which is great. I’m glad we’re on the other side. In the beginning, I wanted to write about my dad and how he’s a real stoic Asian dad that’s repressed and taught me to be a repressed Asian man. Basically, I was like, “That’s hilarious.” I was like, “I can’t really write about an Asian dad. That’s crazy.” I’m like, “What’s a white comp for that?” I was like, “Oh, a CIA dad, a crazy CIA repressed white guy.” I had to make a show about that. I was like, “That’s palatable. That I can cast. That is what a thing is.” That was early on. Now I’m like, “Oh, he could just be an Asian dad. That’s great. I can do that,” which is progress, which has been amazing.
Craig: It is progress.
John: That’s nice.
Craig: Now you can humiliate your father on television or in movies.
Brenda: Now I can just be blatantly about it.
Craig: That’s awesome.
Brenda: I don’t have to hide it.
John: Cool. Chuck and Brenda, stick around, because we’re going to keep you up on stage. You’re not going anywhere. We’re going to play an audience game, because we have a big audience. We want to play an audience game. I asked earlier today who would be willing to be a contestant on this game. I texted with Kelly McAllister. Kelly McAllister, are you here? Kelly McAllister!
Craig: Yay.
John: Can you go to that microphone? Craig, you remember our last time here in Austin.
Craig: Yes, I do.
John: It was really fun.
Craig: It was.
John: Then we got a call afterwards.
Craig: Little bit.
John: We had a little bit of a moment.
Craig: We got in a little bit of trouble, because the last time we were here, we did a live show.
John: In the other place where we can’t talk about anymore.
Craig: I happened to be somewhat friendly with Mr. Beto O’Rourke, and he appeared on screen and encouraged everybody to vote, because around this time, obviously, elections are coming up. He encouraged everybody to vote. It was a message about voting. I guess that was maybe too political, and their rules-
John: Their rules. Basically, the Austin Film Festival is a-
Craig: No politics.
John: … nonprofit organization. It shouldn’t have a political agenda. We get that.
Craig: We get it.
John: I had a long, uncomfortable phone call.
Craig: We don’t. I’m going to be honest.
John: I had a long, uncomfortable phone call, because I did this.
Craig: We don’t get it.
John: Tonight, no political content at all. We’re just going to have fun.
Craig: We’re only going to deal with facts.
John: Facts and fun. Facts and fun.
Craig: Facts.
John: That’s the Scriptnotes way.
Craig: Facts and fun.
John: We want to do some movie trivia. In the spirit of spooky season, we’re going to give you, Kelly, some log lines to some scary movies, and you need to tell us the film.
Craig: That’s easy.
John: That’s simple, right?
Craig: Right.
John: Easy, right?
Craig: Easy. Since horror films, as you know, are often commentaries on modern issues, we’re also going to ask you a second question. Please do not answer the first question until you hear the second question, because it’s important. The first question, we’ll give you a log line. You have to name the movie. The second question will be a related question about current events.
John: Current events.
Craig: Current events.
John: Facts. No political content, just facts.
Craig: Nothing political, just facts.
John: Kelly, it is possible for you to score two points-
Craig: Two points.
John: … if you get both of them right.
Craig: Two.
John: Again, it’s just a game.
Craig: Just a game.
Kelly McAllister: I answer both after you say both things?
Craig: Yes, wait until you have heard both questions. Then you may buzz in. We don’t have a buzzer.
John: No, there’s no buzzer. Kelly, are you ready to play Nothing is Scary When Everything is Terrifying?
Craig: Is Kelly playing through all these questions?
John: Yeah, it’s just you and Kelly.
Craig: He’s just doing all of them?
John: Yeah.
Craig: It’s just Kelly?
John: Yeah. Originally, we were going to have two contestants, but now it’s just Kelly. It’s all Kelly.
Craig: It’s just you.
John: Question number one. In this 1974 classic, five friends head to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way, they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover a psychopath armed with a chainsaw.
Craig: Wait. Second question. However, Texans are much more likely to be killed by assault weapons. Yet according to this Texas governor, raising the age to purchase these weapons would be considered unconstitutional. For two points, can you name the movie and the governor?
Kelly: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Greg Leatherface Abbott.
Craig: That’s two points. Two points.
John: Two points. Two points.
Craig: Hold on. Come on.
John: We got [crosstalk 00:23:58] questions here.
Craig: We got a long way to go. You don’t want to-
John: Matthew can’t cut it down this much.
Craig: Kelly at this point is just like… It was the best moment of his life. We have so much to do. Let’s build it for him, okay? Are you ready for question number two?
Kelly: I am.
Craig: In this 1994 sequel, an evil leprechaun selects the descendant of one of his slaves to become his bride, leaving it up to the girl’s boyfriend to save her.
John: However, if they lived in this state, that boyfriend could be sued under state law by any citizen he assisted in getting her health care, such as terminating the resulting pregnancy. Leprechauns are not real, but women’s health is. For two points, can you name the movie and the state we’re talking about?
Craig: Trickier.
Kelly: That is, because I don’t want to instate the fine state of Texas.
Craig: The state, that’s right.
Kelly: Leprechaun 2.
Craig: Yes!
John: Leprechaun 2.
Craig: You get another two points.
John: Kelly, perfect score. Let’s keep going. Hush, everyone. Shh.
Craig: Easy, guys.
John: In this 2019 hit, a family’s serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgangers appear and begin to terrorize them.
Craig: Meanwhile, in 2022, Texas families with trans and nonconforming kids have their lives upended when this governor, so it’s going to be the same answer, instructed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate medical treatments of transgender adolescents, such as puberty blockers and hormone injections, as quote unquote, “child abuse.” The policy is currently blocked, by the way. For two points, can you name the movie and the same governor from before?
Kelly: That would be Us and Greg Abbott.
Craig: There we go. He’s on fire, guys. Right about now, the people that did mention to us that we should be less political are having serious regrets.
John: Craig, we’re only saying facts.
Craig: That’s true.
John: We’re not telling anyone to do anything.
Craig: He’s right. It’s facts.
John: There’s no endorsement of any-
Craig: We may agree with what he’s done.
John: A hundred percent. Ask another question.
Craig: In this 2007 sequel, three American college students studying abroad are lured to a Slovakian hostel and discover the grim reality behind it.
John: In September of this year, Venezuelan asylum seekers in Texas were lured by a mysterious woman named Perla and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, part of a plan hatched by this governor. For two points, can you name the movie and the governor?
Kelly: Hostel 2, Ron DeSantis.
John: That’s great. I thought we might get him. I thought that was a trick question.
Craig: I gotta be honest. Kelly’s freaking me out with how good he is with the sequels.
John: These are good. I wouldn’t get some of these things.
Craig: Hostel 2?
John: Megana researched these. I didn’t do any of this.
Craig: I didn’t even know there was a Hostel 2.
John: Let’s try question number five. This 2001 film finds a brother and sister driving home through an isolated countryside for spring break, where they encounter a flesh-eating creature in the midst of a ritualistic eating spree.
Craig: Wait. We all agree that consuming teenagers is bad, but that’s not the only questionable diet out there. This TV doctor turned candidate was grilled by the House subcommittee on consumer protection for hyping green coffee beans as a weight loss secret. He also suggested that maybe he drank pee in medical school. For two points, can you name the movie and the candidate?
Kelly: Jeepers Creepers, Mehmet Oz.
John: Wow.
Craig: That’s exactly correct.
John: I would not know.
Craig: That’s great.
John: I would not know either of those things.
Craig: I love it.
John: This is all news to me.
Craig: I love the fact that, if you notice, Kelly, who is on an all-time high-
Chuck: He’s the Ken Jennings of this game.
Craig: Kelly is the Ken Jennings of the only game instance this has ever happened.
John: Indeed.
Craig: I like that he said Mehmet Oz. He didn’t even give him the honorary doctor.
John: No, took away.
Craig: In this 2014 film, a single mother and her child when an eerie children’s book manifests in their home.
John: Just last night, this enigmatic billionaire manifested his dream of buying Twitter, a move we both thing is great-
Craig: Officially.
John: … and not problematic at all. He definitely knows what he’s doing.
Craig: He knows what he’s doing.
John: For two points, can you name the movie and the billionaire?
Kelly: Strangely enough, Babadook is actually Elon Musk’s middle name.
Craig: What I like is that Kelly’s now just going for flair.
John: He’s riffing. He’s taking over this thing.
Craig: Do you guys see what you’ve done? This was a perfectly decent man, and he’s on his way to being a monster.
John: Final question. You could win it all here.
Craig: All. Or lose it all.
John: Or lose it all. In this 2021 film, a vacationing family discovers that the secluded beach they’re relaxing on for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day.
Craig: If you think time is moving quickly on that beach, what day this week did CAA drop Kanye as a client over his antisemitic remarks?
Kelly: The film was Old, and I think it was Tuesday.
Craig: Don’t listen to the audience.
Kelly: I think it’s Thursday. I thought Thursday.
John: Come on, give us the answer.
Kelly: Today. Today. Wednesday. Monday.
Craig: Yes!
Kelly: Monday.
Craig: Yes, you got it right!
John: Monday is the answer.
Craig: You got it right!
John: Kelly.
Craig: A perfect score!
John: Thank you so much.
Craig: Perfect score!
Audience: Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!
John: Kelly, thank you!
Audience: Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!
Craig: Oh, man.
John: As a prize, you get all those applause. That’s your prize. Thank you for playing Nothing is Scary When Everything is Terrifying.
Craig: Well done, Kelly. Good job.
John: Craig, we need some more guests.
Craig: The next two idiots, big friends of ours. Both have been on the show before.
John: Repeats.
Craig: Both are both feature writers and television writers, which I think is particularly interesting, because we have lots to talk about tonight with television, etc. Do I do credits? No. Alec Berg and Phil Hay.
Alec Berg: I found myself carried away during that game. I almost shouted from the front row, “The one about the Babadook! It’s The Babadook! It’s a good one!”
Craig: Kelly didn’t need no help.
Alec: No, he didn’t.
Phil Hay: It is really going to be impossible to follow that man.
Alec: A good improviser would try to take the incredible energy-
Craig: That Kelly provided.
Alec: … and humor and power that has happened thus far and build it.
Brenda: “Yes, and” it.
Alec: A great improviser would turn it into quiet tears and introspection. We’re great improvisers.
Craig: Let’s go for that.
Phil: Or just boring.
Craig: Let’s go for that.
John: We’ll go for that. I’m curious. The two of you are working on shows that are in subsequent seasons. I would love to talk to you guys about-
Craig: Mysterious Benedict Society.
John: … Mysterious Benedict Society, Barry, Silicon Valley.
Craig: Barry.
John: I’m curious about the conversations that go into your thinking but also into your writers’ rooms as you approach the second season of a show, because it’s one thing to figure out everything from the start, like, “What the hell is this show?” Then you have a show, and you have to go back and figure out, “Okay, what do we do next?” Phil, you’re new to television. I’m curious, going into Mysterious Benedict Society Season 2, what are the first conversations that you’ve come into that room with?
Phil: I will answer that question, but first I have a question for you.
John: Oh God, he’s taking control of the show.
Craig: Just violating our format, but fine.
Phil: How am I supposed to be funny talking about that?
John: You have no requirement to be funny.
Craig: You can’t be Kelly.
Phil: Fine.
Craig: No one else can be Kelly.
Phil: I’m going to provide content.
Craig: Content.
Alec: Make them cry, Phil. Make them cry.
Craig: Make them cry, Phil. Here we go.
Phil: The second season I would say when you’re making a show… This is the first show we’ve done, so this is new to us. I guess what we thought about right away was how to honor the growth that happened in the first season and to not try to redo what seemed to work and not try to undo anything, but to just grow. We had the advantage of having a second book in the series that we’re adapting that was in kind very different than the first. The first book and the first season of the series is a spy, undercover mission. The second one is sort of like a Mad, Mad, Mad World kind of peripatetic journey. There was a lot of just physical stuff that was different.
I guess one thing to be specific about that we thought about was how to put… There’s a lot of characters in our show. There’s many main characters. I think the one thing we specifically talked about is how can we take characters who haven’t been together a lot and put them together and find ways to see what happens when you take people who don’t naturally tend to each other among the characters and put them together and see what happens.
John: Mysterious Benedict Society has a really huge cast. On Barry, you have a much smaller core group of people. As you’re going into the second season-
Craig: Or third.
John: … or third, subsequent things, how are you figuring out like, “Okay, these the things we want to follow through.” Are you figuring out Barry’s line first and then who tips into it, or are there themes? What are the discussions for figuring out a shape for a season?
Alec: Every discussion we ever have is just about what is the honest, true emotion of what would happen next, what would this character do, and what’s real, not what would be cool, not what would be fun or funny, just what’s the honest emotion of this moment and what would happen. We started from the pilot that way, and we’ve just followed that forward ever since. It’s the fourth season now.
John: That’s right, fourth season.
Craig: Dammit, John.
John: Embarrassing us at our own show. Matthew, cut that out.
Craig: Wait, hold on. Do the question. “As we all know, Barry’s entering its fourth season.”
John: Fourth season.
Craig: As you progress into a subsequent season or a fourth season, showoff, even if you say, “Look, I want to insulate myself from Twitter and the world and all the rest of it,” the world exists. There is a feedback loop. You put the show out there. People have reactions, whether it’s reviewers or people online or anything. It is obviously dangerous to think, “Okay, we’re going to consider all that as we’re preparing to tell this story again.” At the same time, you can’t possibly be completely blind or deaf to it. How do you manage that aspect of it? I ask as a guy that may have to have that problem.
Alec: Honestly, so much of it was so funny to me. I don’t know who has watched Barry. I’m not pandering, I swear.
Craig: No. No. No.
John: No. No. No.
Alec: A seasoned professional.
Craig: That was fishing.
Alec: Seasoned professional. Just because we’re in our fourth season-
Craig: Fishing.
Phil: Just a little show called Barry.
Alec: There’s no reason.
Craig: Shame on all of you for falling for that.
Alec: No, guys.
Craig: Goddammit. You didn’t see these two doing that.
Alec: Why does Kelly get to have all the fun? Some of us are really needy.
Craig: He fought for that.
Alec: He did, and he earned every bit of it, dammit.
Craig: Goddamn you, all of you.
Alec: That man is a legend.
John: He replied to a tweet, so he gets all of it.
Craig: What did you do? Nothing.
Alec: One of the funniest things about Barry is… Sarah Goldberg’s character, Sally, is a lot. There’s a lot of debate online about is she the right person for Barry. People say, “She’s very needy and she’s narcissistic and she’s petty. I don’t know if I want Barry to end up with a person like that.” We’re sitting in the room going, “Barry kills people. He is a murderer.”
Craig: Murderer.
Alec: There are people he kills just because he has to, so he doesn’t get arrested. It’s so funny to me that people are concerned about him ending up with a nice girl. Stuff like that, I just go, “They’re following it in a different way than we are.” It’s nice to have the feedback and the affirmation, whatever. Honestly, for us it’s just about what makes sense to us in the room. If people don’t like it, honestly…
When we started the show, Bill’s movie… Bill did this movie called Trainwreck that was huge. Every day we were working on Barry, I felt bad because he was turning down immense movie offers to keep working on this show. I assured him. I said, “Look, we’re going to write this thing as aggressively and as hard as we can, because if this show fails, it’s honestly going to be the best thing that ever happened to you, because you’re going to get to do all of those movies.” We just said, “Look, we’re not going to try and hold anything back. We’re not going to try and please people for the sake of pleasing people. We’re going to write what is true and real and honest.”
Craig: You like pleasing people.
Phil: I love it, Craig. It’s how I get what I need. I was going to say that we’ve had an incredible experience with the fans of the book, who are very passionate. It’s really a wonderful feeling around these books. Everything that we’ve changed and modified seems to have been received really well, except for one thing. It’s weird, because it’s come up a couple times, where people are like… A lot of invention has to happen when you’re doing a show of some books. These books are beautiful. They’re truly inspiring.
There’s a small contingent that is really hung up on one thing. I discovered this because someone sent it to me like, “Isn’t this funny?” Then it kept happening, which is, “I’m out, because Kate Wetherall has blond hair and a ponytail, and in the show, it’s pretty clear… She’s often wearing a hat, which I don’t like as well, no hat. Beneath the hat, there’s no blond hair, and there’s no ponytail. We’re done.” I was like, “We’re not going to get the blond hair, ponytail people, but hopefully everyone else.”
Craig: As a guy adapting a popular video game, I can assure you I never have to deal with that problem.
John: 100%.
Craig: No one’s ever like, “Pedro Pascal’s beard isn’t full enough. That’s it.”
Phil: No, he uses a seven-millimeter clip or a nine-millimeter clip.
Craig: “I’m out.” I love it when people are like, “I’m out.” No one cares.
John: Great. We’re fine.
Craig: It’s fine.
John: We’re fine. We’re good.
Phil: Of course I care. I want to please everyone.
Craig: Then you’re like, “There’s a guy that’s out.”
John: Alec, you came up working on Seinfeld, which is running 22 episodes a year.
Craig: Guys, no.
Alec: Oh, yes.
John: On a regular comedy-
Craig: Dammit.
John: … there’s just churn. You’re burning through stuff. You’re writing. You’re producing. You’re filming. It’s all happening. There’s a schedule to it, versus something like Barry I suspect is written all in advance of when you’re shooting those episodes. Mysterious Benedict Society is also, I presume, completely written before you get started shooting, so that feedback mechanism is also very different. If you want to make a change, you realize, oh, that thing isn’t working very well, there’s a lot more gears to shift. Can you talk about the planning process when you know you have to get the whole thing done before you start filming versus adjust on the fly? What’s that been like for you?
Alec: Obviously, what’s nice about it is you can plan the whole thing out. The shooting schedule gets more efficient that way. That buys you a little bit more time, which means you can spend a little more time and energy getting that stuff right. Honestly, the big thing is you feel this immense pressure that we had all this time to do all of this, and if it doesn’t work, then we’re that much bigger idiots than we would’ve been if we had the excuse of we just didn’t have time.
John: For Barry, were all the scripts written before you started shooting?
Alec: I don’t know if a script is ever… We were two weeks away from shooting Season 3 of 4 when COVID hit. We finished writing Season 3, and then we were sitting on our hands. We asked HBO if we could put a writers’ room together. We wrote Season 4 also during COVID. Then based on what we had written in Season 4, we went back and rewrote Season 3. Based on what we had rewritten in Season 3, we then rewrote Season 4 again.
John: Oh, God.
Alec: If COVID had lasted three more years, we would’ve just gone back and forth between Seasons 3 and 4. Thank God we finally got to a protocol that was safe enough that we could start shooting. It’s weird. You get to the set sometimes, and you’ve had months and months and months to write something, and as soon as you’re there on set in that moment with cameras and lights up, you run it with the actors and you go, “This shit doesn’t work.” There’s no way you could’ve foreseen it. You have two choices.
Phil: Huh. That’s interesting.
Craig: Not familiar?
Phil: I didn’t really consider that. Interesting.
John: Tell us about the Mysterious Benedict way.
Craig: I don’t know what that’s like either.
Alec: You have two choices, Phil.
Phil: I feel for you, man.
Alec: You can either ignore those feelings and simply shoot what you have, or you can make everyone very uncomfortable and you can risk looking like an idiot. Bill and I have done this, when we’re sitting there about to roll. We’re both sitting there scratching on the back of our scripts, writing a new scene. We have actors who are very nimble and happy to roll with that. We also have actors that have a real system. They really work the dialog, and they want to own it and really have it in their bones by the day you show up. When they see you writing on the back of pages 30 seconds before they’ve gotta shoot something, they do not like it.
You have the conversation of, “Look, we could shoot what we had, and it might be a B-minus, or we can strive for something better, and we can all be very uncomfortable, and you can feel very exposed and betrayed and like we put you in a bad spot. We’re only doing it because I’m not happy with a B-minus, and I would rather take a shot at having an A-plus if it means that it brings a C-minus into play.”
John: Alec, I want to ask you a truthful question in front of all these people here. Are there any of those situations where you went through and rewrote the B-minus scene and it didn’t make it better or you actually broke something that needed to work a certain way? That’s always my fear in those situations, in trying to fix this thing you don’t realize everything else it’s going to break.
Alec: Again, the virtue of having Bill and I there is that we have been through every inch of it. We are shooting it. We direct. Now we direct all of them. He’s directing the entire fourth season himself.
Craig: Fourth season you say?
Alec: Yeah.
Craig: Of Barry?
Alec: Yeah, and not the movie about Barack Obama either. The series Barry.
Craig: I thought you were talking about Barack Obama this entire time.
Alec: No.
Craig: You have a show called Barry?
Alec: Not for much longer.
Craig: You’re on Season 4?
Alec: Yeah, believe it or not.
Craig: Did you guys know this?
Phil: Could I add something?
Craig: Yeah, please.
Phil: I do think there’s something interesting about what we’re talking about, because I think there’s a danger sometimes that happens when everybody gets bored with the A-joke, because they’ve heard it so many times. It happens in pitching, for sure. I think it really happens less in a show than it does when you’re selling something or you’re writing.
John: It happens in features too. We’ve all had the experience where, oh shit, they got to the set, and they just didn’t shoot the scene you actually needed them to shoot.
Phil: Everyone’s doing the joke on the joke on the joke because they’ve all heard it, but nobody in the audience has heard it. The A-joke is the best joke. I think there’s something interesting about that. I also think there is a cultural bias toward making it up on the day that I don’t think is good for everybody. It’s good for some. It’s really interesting. It’s different, the process you’re talking about, where you have the thing, you refine the thing, you refine the thing, you refine the thing. I think many of you probably feel the same way.
It’s crazy how desperately people want to believe that the actor just made it up on the day. You go to a film festival, and they’re like, “I have a question. How much was improv?” They’re really bummed when the actor’s like, “None of it. It’s written, and then I do it.” I wonder about that. There is a bias toward what just happened, the last thing you thought of. That can be dangerous actually, because it’s not always the best thing.
Craig: For sure.
Phil: It’s the last thing you thought of.
Craig: Sometimes you have to do a little bit of a rescue mission at times, because the plans aren’t working. I definitely had an experience with Pedro Pascal in particular, where sometimes I would think, “I wonder if we could maybe just do this or this,” because sometimes it’s not even that it’s not working. It’s that you’re running out of time on the day. “Maybe we can make this a little shorter,” or, “You know what? We needed it to be like this. It’s not like this. We needed a car to be there. The car never showed up. Let’s figure something else out.” Sometimes I would say, “Okay, why don’t we just do this instead?” He would say, “Okay.” Then he would come back to me about 10 minutes later and go, “Listen, I’m going to defend your writing,” which he wasn’t really doing. It’s not that nice. What he was doing is like, “I actually like the way it was, and here’s why.”
Then he would remind me about things that I had forgotten about, even though I was writing it, because when it’s narrowed down to just writing, you can actually think about all the specific things that are going to happen throughout the show. You’re laying these little breadcrumbs down and setting things up. Sometimes you just forget on the day. It’s why directors should not be in charge of feature films, because they didn’t write it. They just don’t know.
Audience Member: Yes.
Craig: Exactly, person, yes. Sorry, feature directors.
Alec: It is interesting sometimes when you’re shooting something. I’ve had this happen a few times where you do a take of something, and one of the actors is doing something, and you’re just like, “What the hell is that person… Why are they playing it that way?” You cut, and you go over, and you go, “Hey, just a reminder. Remember, the scene before this, you just found out that your dad died. Remember?” They go, “You mean you want me to play it correctly? Okay. Can you roll again, please?” They just forgot where they were in the-
Craig: Because you’re shooting everything wildly out of order.
Alec: Honestly, when I direct, one of the things I always do is I just talk to the cast and I go, “Remember, this happened, then this happened, and now we’re here, and tomorrow this is going to happen.” A lot of times, people go, “Oh my god, I was about to make a huge mistake about how I was doing it.”
Craig: It’s very human.
Alec: It’s just the simplicity of knowing where you are in the story.
John: Brenda and Chuck, I want to talk to you guys about this, because oftentimes as shows are being written, as many rooms are rooms way before production happens, writers are not getting the opportunity to go to set and learn how things are working or just to visit and see how the scripts are being shot. Chuck, did you have the opportunity on something like Wandavision or other shows you’ve worked on to visit an episode that you wrote six months ago?
Chuck: Yes. That was actually the first mini room I was on. All the rooms I was in before then, we were doing writing corresponding with the production, so we could just run across to the set and do whatever. I think that’s invaluable. I think with this mini room thing where there’s 10 weeks or 20 weeks or whatever of a writers’ room and then production happens, these writers are not getting the on-set experience that they need to become really good showrunners later in life. They’re not learning how to talk to actors. They’re not learning how to talk to directors. They’re not learning what everyone does on a set. I think it’s a problem that’s going to bite us in the ass in a couple of years. To your point, it is cool to have all the scripts ready by the time production starts. Then we can go back and adjust them.
Anybody under the rank of executive producer has no fucking clue how to make a television show. They know how to write one, but they don’t know how to make one. I think that’s something that really needs to… I know with talks within the Guild, people have been really voicing that concern, being like, “There’s gotta be a way that we can address this,” because mostly streamers, but I think cable companies are starting to follow suit, is doing this cost-plus model where they don’t want to have to pay all the writers through production, so they’re like, “Get the nerds to write the shit, and then tell them to go home so we can make the thing, and it can be fine.” I think it’s penny-wise and pound-foolish, and I hope that they find a better way.
Alec: I was just going to add that I think another thing that makes a huge difference is shorter orders. When I was working 22, 24 episodes a season, the showrunner could only be in so many places at once. As a very junior writer, the showrunner would say, “Hey, can you go into casting and read the people for waiter?” or whatever. Even if it was a smaller level of importance, just being in a casting session and getting to see what that was… Or they’d go, “I don’t have time to look at the new cut of your episode. Can you go down to the edit, watch it, and if anything is glaring, let me know.” I started directing movies at some point after Seinfeld, and there was not a single part of the entire process that I hadn’t been exposed to by working as a writer on Seinfeld, because I just had to cover…
Now that we do 6, 8, 10 episodes, the showrunner can… It’s still tight, but they can pretty much be in every room. You don’t need people to cover all that stuff. They’re not getting that experience.
Chuck: They’re not getting the experience. Also, if you’re showrunning and you’re directing a bunch of episodes, it would be nice to be able to have somebody to delegate to, so that you’re not putting an undue pressure on yourself or the two or three other co-EP-level people are bearing the brunt of work that used to be covered by 5 to 10 other people. I feel like everybody has to work a lot harder because they want to spend less money on fewer people.
Again, the long-term issue is that we’re not training our next generation of showrunners. Honestly, selfishly, it’s great for all of us, because they’re going to have to pair us up with younger people who don’t have that experience. I think that that’s an experience that they should have, because it strengthens your confidence as a writer. It makes you feel like showrunning is not this crazy thing that I maybe one day can sort of, kind of do. No, it’s the thing I’ve been doing for the last several weeks whenever the showrunner taps me in. That to me has made me feel way more involved, way more invested, and just way more like this is something I can actually do, and do well.
John: Brenda, I want to get back to one more point with you. Your first thing was a television writing workshop.
Brenda: A fellowship.
John: Fellowship. Talk to us about that, because Warner Bros is potentially closing down their television program or they’re changing their television program.
Craig: They opened it back up.
John: They brought it back.
Craig: They hit Command-Z on that shit.
Chuck: Command Zaslav.
John: Talk to us about those workshops-
Craig: Command Zaslav.
John: … because I think a lot of people in this audience look to those things and say, “Oh, is this an opportunity for me to actually learn my craft?” Was it constructive for you?
Brenda: I think it’s amazing. I was like, “This is my way in.” I didn’t have any way in. I didn’t know how to get connections and stuff. I thought it was a great opportunity. The one thing that was hard for me as a lady in comedy early on was just that I was always the one lady in the room. It was difficult. Then I realized I was doing this thing where I… I got this thing called vocal nodes. I had this hoarse throat for many, many months and no other symptoms. I’m like, “What is this?” I went to the doctor, and he’s like, “Oh, you should go to an ENT.” Then an ENT put a scope down my throat. He’s like, “Oh, you have vocal nodes.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s what Adele has. That’s what she does [inaudible 00:53:18] singing.” I’m like, “Am I talking too much?” They were like, “No, you’re not talking too much. You’re talking at the wrong pitch, at the wrong volume.”
Phil: Are you singing too beautifully?
Brenda: I was like, “What? What?” Then I was talking to my female writer friend. She’s like, “I think this is a female writer problem.” She’s like, “I had vocal nodes.” I’m like, “Really?” She’s like, “Oh, and Kristin Newman has vocal nodes too, and she’s also a female comedy writer.” She’s like, “I think this is a female comedy writer problem.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “Oh, we’re all talking at a pitch that is not our natural pitch, that is too loud.” I realized, I’m like, “Oh my god, I think I’m trying to sound like a guy.” I’m Elizabeth Holmes-ing.
Craig: Elizabeth Holmes-ing.
Brenda: I was like, “I’m fucking Elizabeth-“
Craig: You’re Holmes-ing.
Brenda: Subconsciously. I was like, “I’m inadvertently Elizabeth Holmes-ing. I’m trying to sound like a guy.”
Craig: I’m doing it right now.
Brenda: I also want to be heard, so I’m talking at a low voice that’s not my pitch, that’s too loud. Then I’m getting vocal nodes. I was like, “This is crazy.” The irony was, so then I go to a doctor, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, so take some steroids, just anti-inflammatory.” I’m like, “Okay.” I take these steroids, and they actually give me shingles, because they suppressed your immune system. Then I get shingles on my boob. I was like, “What?” I can’t wear a bra, because it hurts. I’m like, “Oh my god, now I can’t wear a bra to work!” I’m like, “Oh my god!” I’m like, “The whole point is to not be a lady! It’s hot!” I’m like, “I can’t wear a sweater! It’s 90 degrees outside!” I’m like, “What?”
Craig: You got boob shingles?
Brenda: I literally was like, “Oh my god! Oh my god! How do I hide these?” I was like, “This is crazy!” I’m always aggressively trying to be unattractive. I was like, “I have to wear glasses, never wear makeup, always have my hair up, and never show my body.” I was like, “I have to sound like a man.” Then I was like, “Oh my god.” This is the irony. Whatever, I couldn’t wear a bra. Finally, I went to a speech therapist. She was like, “You’re talking at the wrong pitch. I’m going to teach you how to speak correctly.”
Craig: And put a bra on.
Brenda: “You can wear a bra again.” Isn’t that fucking crazy?
Craig: That’s insane.
Brenda: I’m like, “Oh my god!”
Craig: Because I’m obsessed with the Elizabeth Holmes thing, can you give us just a sample, without giving yourself nodes?
Chuck: Don’t set her back on her journey. What are you doing?
Craig: Don’t give yourself nodes. I just want to hear it.
Chuck: Don’t do it, Brenda!
Craig: I want to hear what it sounded like.
Brenda: It was low. It was low. It sounded like a guy. Sounded like a guy, and then it was loud. It was not good for me.
Craig: It was not healthy.
Brenda: It was not good for me, guys.
Craig: No, clearly.
John: Don’t do that.
Craig: Clearly.
Brenda: Can you believe I did that for years, and I didn’t realize I was doing that?
Craig: Don’t do that.
John: Bring this all back.
Brenda: It’s fucked up.
John: You were hired for this writers’ room because of who you uniquely were. Then you felt you had to completely change yourself in order to be heard in this room.
Brenda: Yes. That’s not cool. I think that’s changed. Obviously, that’s different now.
John: Everything’s better now. We solved Hollywood.
Brenda: Better now.
John: We have to thank our producer, Megana Rao, who’s right here.
Craig: Megana.
John: Megana!
Craig: Still no Megana. Megana. She is beloved.
John: Scriptnotes is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who will cut out all the stuff we tell him to cut out.
Craig: Hooray!
John: Yay. We need to thank Colin Hyer and all Austin Film Festival for having us back.
Craig: Colin over there.
John: Colin, thank you very much.
Craig: Thank you. All the volunteers who have been working so hard this weekend.
John: I need to thank our incredible panelists.
Craig: Thank you guys.
John: Oh my god, Phil, Alec, Brenda, Chuck.
Craig: Chuck.
Chuck: Thanks for having us.
Craig: Brenda, Alex, Phil.
Phil: Thank all of you.
John: Thank you all so much!
Craig: Thank you guys for coming out.
John: Thank you! Have a good night!
Craig: We release you into the wild!
John: Austin!
[Bonus Segment]
John: We gotta do questions.
Craig: I know. I’m so excited for questions, finally.
John: Craig’s been looking forward to it for weeks. Questions!
Craig: I made it through the rain.
John: Hello and welcome. Tell us your name, and what is your question?
Jerry Jerome: Hi, my name’s Jerry Jerome.
John: Hi, Jerry Jerome.
Craig: Hi.
Jerry: I’ve been listening to Scriptnotes for a long, long time.
John: Thank you.
Jerry: I know you said it’s no statements. I’m going to have to break a rule.
Craig: We just said. We literally just said.
Jerry: I was writing. I was going to film school to make Craig happy. I got hurt at work, and I had to take care of my own health. It took a while for me to get back to writing. Listening to you guys really helped me out.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thank you.
Craig: We accept that. That is allowable. I should’ve added non-questions that make me feel good about myself are completely allowable.
John: Also, praise makes Craig really uncomfortable, and I kind of like that too.
Craig: That is true.
Jerry: It made John feel better. Before I got hurt, I turned in to Austin. I didn’t make second round, anything. This time I made the semifinals.
John: Hooray. Congratulations.
Jerry: Now for my question.
Craig: Thank god.
Jerry: When I was listening to Scriptnotes all the time, my girls loved it. Sometimes I would try to go through different episodes. What they would always love and laugh at was every single time Craig would say his name differently. There’s one outro where I believe you guys had a mix where it was just Craig saying his name differently each and every time set to music.
Craig: That’s terrible.
Jerry: I cannot find it.
Craig: Let’s get you that.
John: We gotta find it.
Craig: Did he dream it, or was it real?
John: I think it’s real. Megana, we can find that.
Craig: Megana’s like, “Is it real?”
Jerry: That’s my only question, to make my girls happy.
Craig: I have to say I remember this. I also remember it.
John: We’ll find it.
Craig: It’s real.
John: Also, we’ll put it in the episode. Someone will do the research for us and find it.
Craig: We will get you this.
Jerry: Thank you very much.
Craig: We will get it for your girls. Absolutely. Gotta look out for the dads. Dads look out for dads. It’s what we do.
Audience: Aw.
Craig: Don’t you dare.
John: Hello. What’s your question?
Craig: Hi!
Teresa: Hello.
Craig: Hi!
Teresa: My name is Teresa. Thank you all. I love Mysterious Benedict Society. I’ve never read the books. It’s the sweetest nugget of television ever.
Phil: Right on. Thank you.
Teresa: My question is… It’s related to something that Chuck said regarding the future of television. Something that I’m hearing when I’ve been sent out on meetings and stuff is, “We love you. You’re great, but we’re only looking for upper-level writers,” or a lot of writers sometimes might even write all the episodes of their show and not even have a staff. I’m not thinking of anyone in particular. I’m just thinking out loud. My question is, why does this happen, and are there any efforts being made to try to re-incorporate staff writers and get those lower levels going?
John: Great. Do you guys want to talk about this?
Phil: Sure.
John: Talk about your plans on Mysterious Benedict Society, how you guys did it.
Phil: We do have lower-level writers on our show. That’s definitely one of the points, and who have frankly performed as well as anybody else on the show. Sometimes you have a certain amount of budget slots, basically how it works. Every show is different. There are shows where one person writes every episode. Writers’ rooms seem to be smaller now because the orders are shorter, but also because you want everyone to have a script. We only have eight scripts, and we are going to write two of them, and our partners are going to write two of them. We want to make sure that everybody has a script. We try to very carefully offer those opportunities.
I think in the case of our show, we’ve always had people at every level. It’s not a staff of 12 people or 15 people or more that might be in a traditional half hour or something like that. I guess what I’d say, it’s different for every show, but for our part, it’s not just because it seems right to us. That’s true, but also, I will say those writers have performed tremendously. You’re trying to find the right person regardless of level. Sometimes you have to have a certain number of every level. I think not every show is served by a writers’ room. If you have a writers’ room, I think you’re served by having all of those different, not just different perspectives, but actually people at different points in their career.
John: Teresa, this last year while Craig was gone, I had some showrunners who came on for just one episode and we talked through how they did things. One of the things that came up off mic pretty frequently, I would ask, “What was your process for putting together a room?” The thing I heard probably most consistently is like, “Man, I really need a mix of experienced people who knew how to do stuff and some brand new folks,” because some rooms were so top-heavy with just like, these are the power hitters, but then they disappear and they can’t do anything, or just brand new people who didn’t know how to do stuff.
Really, I think just communication in terms of making sure people are thinking about the whole range of experiences in rooms is going to be important. I don’t see the studios making a big change. I don’t see them pushing for that. The Guild’s not going to push for that. That’s not a thing. It’s going to be just changing the culture, hopefully. Chuck, thoughts?
Chuck: I think it’s also important because, I don’t want to speak for the rest of you guys, but I stopped being cool about 15 years ago. I think it is important to hire staff writers that are younger so that they actually talk the way that people talk for the last decade or so. I think you, A, have that, and then B, to your point a second ago, John, upper-level writers are all allowed to develop. Their attention is a little splintered in a way that a staff writer’s would not be. If you have these people that are there, that haven’t learned a bunch of bad habits from other showrunners that aren’t running the show the way you are, I think it’s very important to get them in there to add authenticity, to add a youthful vibe.
I find that younger writers inspire me. They make me want to work harder, because I’m like, “I had that excitement in me before they beat the shit out of me in this town for all those years.” I think it lifts all boats. It’s a [inaudible 01:04:24].
John: We were talking beforehand about Megan McDonald, who was a previous Scriptnotes producer, who went on to Wandavision, is now a superstar and is doing a bunch of stuff. She was hired on as just a staff writer.
Chuck: The Wandavision room was full of staff writers. I think I was the most senior at… I think I was 38 at the time or something like that. The younger people were really the ones… It was funny, because you could tell the demarcation, because they were like, “Oh, it’s like in Harry Potter when blah blah blah.” Me and Gretchen were like, “I’ve never seen any of those movies.”
Craig: What?
Chuck: They grew up with all this-
Craig: Really?
Chuck: Yeah, not a single one.
Craig: I’m older than you are. I saw all those movies.
Chuck: You have kids though, right?
Craig: Yeah, but I still like them alone.
Chuck: They came into it with such enthusiasm and with such lore from fantasy projects that we hadn’t had exposure to, Fantastic Beasts. I’m going to stop naming things, because I don’t know. That’s the whole point. They made that show as inventive as it was.
Craig: I will also say, if they say, “Hey, you know what? We’re looking for more seasoned or senior writers,” they still met with you. There will be a day when they want staff writers who are newer. You just give a great meeting. Give a great meeting. Trust me, no one else is.
Brenda: As a 43-year-old woman who watches Mysterious Benedict Society, new writers, because not all new writers are young.
John: Very good point. Hundred percent.
Craig: I like that. Good for you.
Chuck: Totally.
Craig: You showed him.
Phil: Can I just underline something quickly before we go to the next question, really quickly?
Craig: Yes.
Phil: Something Chuck said earlier which relates to this is, there is a cultural thing that is not good, which is the idea that we’re strip mining the culture right now and the idea of just development, developing people, developing talent, developing writers. Again, whenever you start in that journey and wherever you’re at, that is devastatingly shortsighted. We started in features with the idea of development just getting crushed. That’s the R and D of the business. Writing staffs are the training ground of people who are going to… Again, it’s not just like it’s great to give people jobs. That is. It’s people who are going to make the culture. I think it’s really dangerous that we’ve created a thing where somehow we don’t care about developing people, just right now, what can you do right now.
Chuck: It’s also shortsighted financially, because as an established executive producer, if you have a young show writer or an unseasoned show writer that you’ve given an opportunity to, you can utilize them. They’re part of your camp from now on. Whatever idea they have, you put your name on it as executive producer. You make money off of it for the lifetime of that show. You have a farm team that you’re creating that you can continue to make money on in perpetuity. I think it’s shortsighted, both for the career and for your wallet.
John: Our next question, sir.
Craig: Here comes a Dodger fan.
Marc Blitzstein: Oh yeah.
Craig: Sorry, man.
Marc: I think it was six to five Phillies last I checked. I don’t know what the score is now.
Craig: Oh wait, Phillies came back?
Marc: Phillies came back.
Craig: Good, because honestly, I’m sorry-
Marc: Oh hell yeah.
Craig: Fuck you, Astros.
Marc: Fuck you, Houston.
Craig: I don’t give a shit.
Marc: Fuck you, Houston.
Craig: Fuck you, Houston.
John: Everybody go to the bar.
Marc: Cheating pricks.
John: Go to the bar right now. Let’s go.
Craig: Fucking Houston. We’re in Austin. It’s cool. Go ahead.
Marc: Hey, guys.
Craig: You don’t know what we’re talking about. It’s baseball.
Marc: John, it’s okay if you don’t know what we’re talking about.
Craig: It’s baseball.
Marc: Honestly, I’m huge fans of every single one of you on this stage. I’m honored even to be in the room. My question is on packaging right now. My writing partner and I, we go out with projects all the time. Ever since we all collectively fired our agents, there seemingly has been a power-
Craig: You’re going to hire them back now. You know that, right?
Marc: I know, but since that happened, since that inciting incident, the power seems to have shifted away from the writers, and it’s gone to the directors and to the actors. My question is, at this stage when we go out with a project to pitch, we’re seemingly introduced to more and more obstacles that are too high or moving, that you have to come with a showrunner, you have to come with a director, you have to come with a piece of talent. That burden is now on the writer to package that or for our management to assist in that. I know you’re at a different level where that’s not necessarily as important. For guys like us, how do you navigate something like that?
John: Great. I didn’t get your name. What’s your name?
Marc: Sorry, my name’s Marc Blitzstein.
John: You’re mostly working in television or [crosstalk 01:09:20]?
Marc: I am. I’m a television writer. I’m a Guild writer.
John: Great. He’s being asked to put more of the show together before he’s going into a studio or to a streamer or anywhere?
Marc: Anywhere.
Craig: Anywhere. I guess my question is, do you feel like based on what you’re hearing, what they are saying is you’re not going to really be the showrunner.
Marc: Of course.
Craig: That’s what they’re saying. Take that to heart and do what you need to do to be the showrunner, because if you’re not, there’s nothing anybody can help you with. What they’re saying is, “Hey, we don’t think people are going to put you in charge of this show. They’re not going to put you in charge of the show possibly for the reasons that Chuck was talking about, that you maybe don’t have the experience.”
Running a show, as everybody here that does it can tell you, is you still have to be a writer, you still have to be an artist, you still have to be creative. You also have to be the CEO and CFO and COO of a company. You are dealing with a business. It’s a whole other shitload of shit to do. What they’re saying is, you don’t have that yet. All the other stuff, what they’re really doing is backfilling in what they think they need based on what is lacking from your repertoire. Then the question is, how can we get that experience? My then asking back to you is, have you worked on shows? Have you and your partner worked on any shows together?
Marc: Yeah, we’ve been staffed.
Craig: Great. Then I’m going to turn to you guys, turn to all of you and say, okay, there is this military hierarchy within a television room. Here’s the executive producer. Here is whatever the staff writer is hired at. How do you start to make your way up the rungs of that ladder in an effective way, so that when you do have an idea, you are not being told you are not enough. We don’t have to add on a bunch of crap to sell this. You guys are now considered whatever you need to be to be a showrunner.
Phil: I figure that out, I will gladly let you know, because I’m stuck in [inaudible 01:11:29].
Alec: One thing I would say is that I actually think that you don’t graduate from that. Right now, we have a television company. Fortunately, our television company comes with a great director with it. Sometimes that’s the package. Sometimes we have to go get an actor too. I think that’s definitely been a much increased expectation recently. That is just yet another difficult obstacle to get to, depending on how much access you have or what the thing is. I guess it’s the same thing that you’d say anyway, which is it puts even more pressure on writing a spectacular character. Beyond the story, the idea, the concept, the other stuff that could sell your show, it seems like it’s putting more of an intensity on a lead character who is spectacular, because I think it’s true.
I’m interested to hear what you guys think. All of the stuff that we’ve gone out recently, we have attached an actor to. Sometimes that takes a really long time. That’s an expectation right now I think generally. Do you guys think the same?
Phil: Yeah, I think it varies project to project. I think one really interesting thing is that when I started as a TV writer, the specs that I wrote were scripts of existing shows. The idea of writing a pilot was so foreign to me. I didn’t write an original pilot probably for the first five or six or seven years I worked professionally. I think now that people write specs from the jump, I think it changes the way people think about when they’re ready to put a show on the air.
Brenda: Run a show, yeah.
Craig: Right, because original material is not the same thing as running a show based on original material.
Phil: It’s interesting. Literally, there was not a showrunner on earth when I started who hadn’t been on a staff for at least six or seven years before a network would even consider hearing a pitch from them.
John: One of the things that you’re pointing out is that it used to be very hard to even get in that room to pitch your thing if you didn’t have all these credits, but now because people don’t have those credits, because we haven’t built the farm team system, people can’t progress up the seasons. Now you suddenly have the ability to get into those rooms sometimes to pitch this idea, but they’re saying, “Who are you? What are you bringing?” You’re not bringing your experience, so they’re expecting you to bring in all these other people. That’s really fucking tough. It was always tough. It was always tough to get that actor to read that thing, to get that director to do that stuff, because they’re getting a lot of other requests for those things. What these people are saying is having that thing that feels like, “Oh shit, that person is going to really want to play that role,” that may be the way through. That’s something that’s really specific to them.
The other thing I’ll say is younger writers, newer writers who are having some success right now, that I see in my life, it’s not necessarily they’re getting a big director or a big star on, but they’re getting a producer who has some juice at that place to read it. That’s always been the class leading the way. They have some deals someplace. They have relationships someplace.
Craig: It’s true.
John: They’re getting you in. Maybe don’t focus all your energy on that director or that actor. Think of who has the deal in that place, who might want to be able to make [crosstalk 01:14:49].
Craig: That’s great advice. That’s true, because when I went to HBO to pitch Chernobyl, I did not have an actor and I did not have a director. I just had myself. I didn’t even have a script. What I did have was Carolyn Strauss, who was one of the executive producers of Game of Thrones. That made it a lot easier, I imagine. I still had to do my job. It certainly was enough to put that meaning in context. That’s great advice, because I do think that when we get into this mode of, “What do we have to throw on this to get them to say yes?” the problem is, oh shit, they said yes, and now I’m stuck with this fucking idiot and this fucking idiot-
John: That are never available.
Craig: … that I don’t want and I never wanted. That’s a huge problem. I guess at a minimum, if you need to go in with somebody, go in with somebody you actually like, because you’re going to get stuck with them.
Chuck: A hundred percent.
Marc: Thank you guys, all of you.
Craig: Thank you for that one.
John: We have time for one more question.
Craig: Aw, one more question.
John: One last question. You’ve got a great one. I can tell. I can see it.
Craig: This is it.
John: This is going to be the one.
Catherine: The pressure is crazy now.
John: It should be good. What is your name?
Catherine: My name is Catherine, and I represent all of the final questions.
John: Oh my gosh.
Catherine: That’s what everyone said.
John: You are the final question.
Craig: You’re doing great so far.
John: Amazing.
Catherine: Thank you.
Craig: You’re welcome.
Catherine: My question is for whichever ones of you, which I think is actually the majority… When you’re reading scripts, looking for your staff writers, obviously you’re reading hundreds potentially, what is happening in the moment before you stop reading?
John: What a great question, Catherine.
Craig: You mean what’s the thing that make you stop is what you’re asking?
Catherine: Yeah.
John: My god, Catherine maybe asked the best question, because-
Craig: That is a great question.
John: It’s answerable.
Craig: Yes, answerable.
John: I want to start with Phil Hay, because Phil, this is your first time reading for staffing probably.
Phil: Yeah.
John: As you’re reading through scripts, you probably had to read a lot of scripts, what were things that were just like, “Okay, I’m done. That’s enough. I get it. This is not my jam.”
Phil: I’m not really like that, John.
John: You read every script to the end, didn’t you?
Phil: No, I did not, but I relied on other people to curate the scripts before I read them. Generally, they would all be of a certain level of accomplishment. It’s hard for me to say what would make me stop if I felt something, if I felt anything, because a script can be amazing, it can be really technically good, it can be very accomplished, but I might not feel anything. A script can be a little rougher or a little more off or a little wandering. That doesn’t bother me if I’m feeling something.
I guess what I’d say is I love to be surprised somewhere in the first 10 pages of the script. Maybe that’s the way you say it, like that. That can be any kind of surprise. It can be like, “Oh shit, that was really funny,” or, “I’ve never really seen a character like this before.” That’s gold. It’s just something surprising, and not relentless surprise, just a nugget of little inspiration and weirdness to me. The weirder, the better I guess I would say.
Craig: Alec, what stops you in your tracks?
Alec: This is my own personal pet peeve, but typos drive me fucking nuts. It’s not because I don’t like typos, because I’m one of the worst typists on earth. It’s because if you’re sending a script out to get a job and you can’t be bothered to read your own script over two or three times, why would anybody else feel like they should read it too? It’s one of the easiest things to fix.
Craig: There’s a machine that does it for you.
Alec: They just drive me… That said, to Phil’s point, if I start reading, and I’m like, “Where is this going?” or, “Where is this coming from?” or, “That was hilarious,” I can see past typos. That’s just one of the things that personally drives me nuts. Again, it’s just because I start to get into this conspiracy theory of like, how much does this person not care that they didn’t bother?
Craig: Brenda, what stops you in your tracks when you’re reading a script?
Brenda: I think I am trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, but you’re right, I think it’s really hard to be surprising, especially given we all know the structure of things. Anything that’s going to throw me, I’m like, “Oh, let’s keep going.” If it’s humorless, I’m kind of over it, something that’s too self-serious, even drama. Life is never humorless. I think there’s something about if you’re trying to say something, you can’t be funny at all. I’m just like, “No, you need a foil.” That can stop me in my tracks.
Craig: Chuck, what stops you?
Chuck: I think I understand the question.
Craig: You left without even asking.
Chuck: Listen.
Craig: You just left. We have a whole system where you ask to leave.
Phil: Don’t make us call the hospitals, Chuck! Don’t make us call!
Chuck: What stops me in my tracks is my tiny bladder. That’s why I had to get the hell out of here and then return. I’m going to be petty with mine. What stops me in my tracks are character introductions. I feel like there’s two things. Number one, when you tell us stuff that you couldn’t possibly show on the screen in order to say, “Hey, this is Barbara. She’s a Princeton grad who bakes a hell of a fucking double baked potato,” or something. I’m not going to see that on screen, so just give me what her physical description is, maybe a little bit about her attitude, and move on. Second thing is assuming that all characters are white as a default, so not listing the ethnicity of a character as white-
Craig: Unless they’re not white.
Chuck: Unless they’re not white. That’s what I’m saying.
Craig: [crosstalk 01:20:35].
Chuck: I think in order to really help me understand what I’m seeing, I want to know who everybody is. A lot of times, I understand if it’s not pertinent to whatever the story is, it might not feel like it’s a big deal. For me, in order to paint the picture, which is what we’re supposed to be doing as writers, I want to know who that is. I don’t want to assume that everybody’s white unless stated otherwise.
John: Catherine, thank you for your question.
Craig: Well spoken. Well spoken. I have a very short answer for you. The thing that stops me in my tracks is when I read somebody saying something and I just go, “That’s fake. Fake.” Almost everything I read, at some point I’ll go, “Fake.” It’s tempting, because sometimes we, “Oh, I’ve got a great, clever… Oh my god, I’m so clever. I can’t wait to… This line of dialog is so clever.” Fake.
When I read things where I just feel like the writer is disconnected from the simple question, like Alec was saying, what would a human actually do in this situation? How would they respond? So much of what we talk about when we’re doing our Three Page Challenges, which is this endless “where did I stop reading” challenge, is when a writer writes something, and both of us say, “Who would say or do that in this circumstance? No human being.” As much as you can, try and be honest.
John: I’m going to just phrase it the other way around, what keeps me reading. To me, the things that keep me reading is envy, where I feel like, “Shit, I couldn’t have written that. Oh yeah, that was really good.” That’s a big one, “I don’t know if I could’ve done that.” That’s the thing that keeps me going. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m intrigued and impressed and a little intimidated. I love it. That’s the person I want, because you can see that talent. That’s great.
Phil: Can I add one more thing on that, that I think may be [crosstalk 01:22:30]?
Craig: Sure.
Phil: Is mystery, is the confidence-
Craig: You love a mystery.
Phil: … to ask a question and not answer it. That is so intriguing to me, because that shows so much confidence. Also, what you want to see is confidence, someone who is just boldly doing their thing.
Craig: That’s how I know you’re not a network executive. You enjoy mystery.
John: I love it! Like humans for thousands of years.
Craig: Exactly.
Brenda: Don’t have to know the answer.
Craig: You like not knowing things.
Phil: I was saying this in another panel. The best spec I ever read, I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t stop, and entirely because I’m like, “What lunatic wrote this? This could never get made.” It was Being John Malkovich. The reason that got made is Spike Jonze read it and went, “This is unmakeable. I have to make this movie.” It just was the most insane thing I’ve ever read.
Craig: Just do that.
John: Do that. That’s all.
Craig: What have we learned?
Catherine: I’ll do that. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Craig: We learned be Asian, I believe was one of the things we learned, write Being John Malkovich. What other lessons did we cull out of this?
John: Authenticity.
Audience Member: Tiny bladders.
John: Tiny bladders.
Craig: Tiny bladder. Tiny bladder.
Brenda: Talk like a boy.
Alec: Doesn’t have to hold you back [crosstalk 01:23:49].
Brenda: Don’t be humorless.
Craig: Don’t be humorless.
John: I think most crucially, we managed to avoid any political content in this episode.
Craig: Correct!
- Thanks Heidi Lauren Duke for singing our intro!
- Brenda Hsueh on Instagram
- Chuck Hayward on Twitter
- Phil Hay on Twitter
- Alec Berg on IMDb
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by John Venable originally from 266 — this is the outro Jerry was looking for! (Send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Ep 572: Live at the Austin Film Festival 2022, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hi.
Craig Mazin: Thank you. Thank you. That was so jaunty. Love it.
John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about what?
Audience: Screenwriting.
John: And?
Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Craig: Honestly, for a second there, I thought maybe none of them listened to the show.
John: Oh my god, that would be so amazing if no one knew what that was.
Craig: Literally no one.
John: Not a one. Jerome on the piano, thank you [crosstalk 00:00:52]!
Craig: Thank you, Jerome. Thank you.
John: What a lot of people may not know is that Jerome is with us every week on Scriptnotes. Matthew just doesn’t cut him in to the actual show. We have to have backing piano. Jerome, it’s so great to have you here with us tonight live to provide [crosstalk 00:01:08].
Craig: Finally mentioning your name after 590 episodes.
John: Matthew and Megana get mentioned all the time. I believe Megan McDonald’s also here in the audience, one of our previous-
Craig: Megan right there!
John: There she is!
Craig: Hey!
John: I didn’t see, is Stuart Friedel here?
Stuart’s Dad, Lee Friedel: Stuart’s sick.
John: Stuart’s sick, oh, no!
Craig: Seriously sick?
Unknown: [inaudible 00:01:26].
Craig: Oh, fuck him.
John: We’ll be fine. Craig.
Craig: Yes?
John: It’s our first live show in three years?
Craig: Three years, yes. Something happened along the way, and we weren’t able to do it. Lovely to have everyone back. I feel like it’s like riding a bike. We couldn’t have possibly gotten worse at it.
John: We possibly could have gotten worse at it.
Craig: We might’ve.
John: I remember early in the pandemic we did our live show with Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was exciting, but also, it was on YouTube.
Craig: This is nice.
John: Now we have one and a half glasses of wine in us, and we’re better prepared for a live show.
Craig: Might’ve gone up to one and three quarters.
John: Who do we have on our live show this week?
Craig: We do have an amazing show. For starters, we have the amazing Joel Kim Booster.
John: So excited, Joel Kim Booster. We have Megan Ganz?
Craig: We do. We have world-famous Ike Barinholtz.
John: We love Ike Barinholtz. It would not be a return to Scriptnotes without our own Aline Brosh McKenna. Plus, we have things we can only do with a live audience, including a raffle, a dumb little game show I made up about streaming, and we have to have Megana on the show, because she’s become a crucial part of the show.
Craig: I believe I heard a yeah and a yass, and I agree with both of those. Megana will be helping us out tonight with spooky audience questions, because she loves the spooky season.
John: The spooky season.
Craig: Which I will reiterate is horseshit.
John: What is not horseshit, Craig… Segue man.
Craig: Segue man.
John: We actually have breaking news to share. I texted you this afternoon about this news that is so fundamental to Scriptnotes.
Craig: Just so you guys know, you get breaking news about four hours after I get breaking news. This is great.
John: I do tell Craig first. If I told him onstage, it would be maybe more authentic to the experience. We’ve talked about doing a Scriptnotes book for a year or so. Some of you have signed up for updates about the Scriptnotes book and sample chapters. We put together a full proposal, which we will happily email to all of you, because we sent it out to publishers. We got offers. We’ve signed a deal today to do a Scriptnotes book.
Craig: That’s right.
John: It’s Crown Books. They’ve done small, little things like the Obama books.
Craig: That’s about right.
John: That’s about right.
Craig: We should be up there with them.
John: We should be up there with them. 2024 probably. It could be sooner. 2024 feels like a safe bet. If you want to see the sample chapters and the proposal that we put out, go to scriptnotes.net. We have a special little thing there where you can put in your email address, and we’ll send you what we’ve done so far. We’re so excited. I need to thank Dustin and Megana and Drew and Chris, who were doing the real yeoman’s work of putting together this proposal and getting this book ready to go. We’re so excited to share it with everyone.
Craig: It actually looks quite good, I have to say, as somebody that has nothing to do with it. It looks gorgeous. It will be an excellent stocking stuffer for those of you who care about screenwriting or things that are interesting to screenwriters.
John: It’s like 500 pages, so it’s a big stocking. Get bigger stockings for 2024 is what we’re saying. We’re so excited to have this in book form. We’re more excited at this moment to be back in live form, in person, to welcome a guest in front of you, who we can ask questions of. Our first guest is Joel Kim Booster.
Craig: Joel Kim Booster, let’s give him a hand.
John: Let’s welcome out Joel Kim Booster!
Craig: There he is. Thank you for coming.
Joel Kim Booster: Hey.
Craig: Thank you.
Joel: Hi, guys.
Craig: Hi.
John: Joel Kim Booster.
Craig: Welcome to the couch.
John: You are an actor, a stand-up comic. You’re a writer. You’ve worked with television. We’ve seen you on Shrill, Search Party. Your Netflix comedy special, Psychosexual, is terrific.
Joel: Thank you.
John: Thank you for that. Everyone in this audience probably saw you most recently in the Hulu film Fire Island, which you wrote and starred in. Congratulations, Joel Kim Booster.
Joel: Oh, man, thank you so much.
John: I want to ask you the first question here. We talk on this show a lot about screenwriting, TV writing. We don’t talk a lot about stand-up writing. I want to talk to you about putting together a stand-up set, because you did Psychosexual, you’re probably in development on a new thing. What is your process for figuring out how to do stand-up and how to put together a stand-up that makes sense as a special or at least as one performance? What’s your process for getting stand-up jokes put together?
Joel: It’s really sloppy and bad. It’s completely different from my process writing scripts or anything else really. It’s very much a conversation I have with the audience. I’m not a comic who goes to a coffee shop and sits and writes down every setup and punchline word for word and then tries it out that night. I usually show up to a show when I’m working on stuff with premises and bits of jokes that are half-formed. Then I mostly do my writing on stage with the audience, doing a lot of crowd work.
Craig: That’s scary.
Joel: It was, and it is, but it’s freeing at the same time, because I can show up to a show and know like, okay, tonight I want to talk about the Electoral College and all of the fucked up things about the Electoral College that I can think of. Then I just talk to the audience about it and get a lot of feedback. In the special you saw the repeated crowd work with the guy. That started as just an early stage of writing that special and putting that special together, was in those early stages where I would just find that person to test it. That rolled into how I am writing this special as well.
John: It feels so unsafe, because as writers, we’re used to… We are just like, “I’m in my own little bubble.”
Joel: I’m raw dogging it.
John: You’re just out there. How do you balance that, like, “I want this to be funny for the people who are there with me, but I also want to experiment and find new material.”
Joel: I should say I’m constantly writing new material, even slipping it into my longer sets and things like that. When I go to a night, like a bar show or a set here at Dynasty Typewriter, which is one of my favorite places to work out new material, plug, I’m not doing 10 minutes of crowd work. It’s usually four, five minutes of crowd work that I’m doing with the new stuff, forming it, figuring out what hits and what doesn’t hit, and then mixing that in with the stuff that I’ve been workshopping a month ago, so that there are fully formed jokes. Most people paid at least a little bit of money to see me, so I don’t want to completely bite it, but I have.
Craig: I’m just fascinated, because you have this raw dog version. You go out there. You wing it. You see what happens. Then on the other side of things, you’re writing a screenplay for a feature film, which is the epitome of not raw dogging it. Not only that, but you’re writing a feature film that is based in part, or at least inspired in part, by Pride and Prejudice. You have this preexisting narrative. You’re obviously doing it in your own way with your own characters and your own vibe. I’m curious, going from the freedom of the stand-up stage to both the rigidity of the form of screenwriting and production, and honestly the rigidity of working inside of a preexisting narrative, was it awesome? Did you ever feel trapped? Talk us through the difference there.
Joel: The thing is, as loosey goosey as I am with stand-up writing, I am a very structured screenwriter when I write scripts. I started as a playwright. Even back then, I was outlining my ass off before I would even touch paper, because structure is what turns me on when I’m writing. It is something that I need to tackle and figure out before I actually go into script. That being said, by the time we were shooting Fire Island, the script supervisor hated me, because there were full monologues that I would show up to set and say, “I hate this as written.” I would tell Andrew, the director, I’d be like, “I’m just going to wing it.”
Craig: Oh, no.
Joel: The monologue that I give to James Scully at the end of the film, trying to convince him to go after Bowen Yang, that was completely made up that day and was fairly different every single take. Everyone from the script supervisor to Andrew to the editor all hated me, but it worked out.
Craig: It did work out, because it’s fantastic. I wonder, is the process of writing it and then showing up on the day and saying, “I hate this but let me find something new,” can that only happen if you do write it first?
Joel: Oh yeah, absolutely. It only happens when you’re also the executive producer and the star of the movie.
John: That does help, doesn’t it?
Joel: I wouldn’t recommend that if you’re not wearing all three of those hats at the same time.
Craig: You can’t fire yourself.
Joel: No one can really say boo. The structure has to be there. The technique has to be there. I went to theater school. I’m very staunchly in the camp of like, theater school, acting school, any of it doesn’t really make you better or can’t give you talent. Everybody who got there who was good got slightly better. Everybody who got there who was bad never got good.
Craig: They got poorer.
Joel: The reason the people who were good got better is because you learn all of these really annoying techniques that you’re like, “Okay, I’m never going to do this in practice.” When you get it all down into your body and into your brain and it’s running on autopilot in the back of your head, that’s when you can lift off and fool around with form and fool around with structure and make up a monologue on the spot, because you have all of the pieces in place running in the background to make sure that you have a safety net.
John: You’re talking about structure. You’ve written features. You’ve written television shows. You’ve written stand-up. We know structure in movies. We know structure in TV shows to some degree. Your stand-up shows also have structure. You have callbacks. You have a plan to go through things. As you’re developing your next special, how are you going from like, “Okay, I have these jokes about this thing and these jokes about this thing.” How do you make it feel cohesive? What is your practice?
Joel: That takes a lot longer than just writing the jokes. Right now, I would not say I have an excellent closer. For me, when the special or when the hour really comes together is when I land at the end. It’s very similar to how a lot of people write scripts, I think. I think most of us really start being able to write it when we find the ending. It gives us a good map to get there. Since I haven’t found that out yet, I don’t know what’s tying all of this together yet. I would say too that I don’t know that it’s absolutely vital that there is a cohesive structure.
My special on Netflix definitely had a point. It wasn’t full Nanette, but there was a point being made through the comedy of the special. That is actually a very British thing. They write new hours of stand-up every year and go through this festival system where they take that hour from festival to festival basically all year. They all come from this school of thought that stand-up is very much associated with theater almost. There is always a through line and a message or a point to the special that leads up to it. I spent a lot of time over there and in Australia where they also do that. That was another reason why the special came out the way it did, is because I was absorbing all of that process.
Craig: Are you workshopping that as well, the notion of what is this all about and what unites all these things together? As you’re doing your set in development for when you then shoot Psychosexual and it’s on Netflix, are you looking to see what’s landing and how?
Joel: Yeah, absolutely.
Craig: Not comedy-wise. I mean thematically.
Joel: Okay, because I was like, “Babe.”
John: Laughter.
Joel: Of course.
Craig: I definitely wanted you to call me babe. I’m happy about that.
Joel: I’m definitely doing that.
Craig: Stop it.
Joel: That’s harder, because with the jokes, it’s an immediate feedback system. You know if that’s working or not. I think for me, even in Psychosexual, I dip into moments of seriousness, but it’s a secondary goal for me. The primary purpose of stand-up is to make people laugh.
John: Make people laugh.
Joel: The rest of it is just set dressing. If that works for some people, then great. Overall, the set should work on its own without any of that as a piece of comedy. That’s more for me.
Craig: Interesting.
Joel: I care less about if that’s working.
Craig: Working for them.
Joel: As long as I’m closing strong and there’s a good joke-per-minute ratio throughout, I’m happy if that is all funny. I don’t care about the rest of it as much.
John: A common theme you see both in Psychosexual and in Fire Island is the specificity of being a gay Asian person making it through the world, and the special things that you’re encountering that other people may not be familiar with. Some of the job you have to do is deciding how much you’re going to tell the audience or explain to the audience about what things are versus just putting it out there and letting them figure it out. What is the balance there? How much do you feel like you have to educate people in like, “This is why this is funny,” or, “This is why this is important.”
Joel: You know what? I feel less and less beholden to that the longer I do all of these things, stand-up and writing. No matter what it is, I feel more and more free to let people fill in the blanks a little bit. I’m also coming with a good amount of privilege now, especially because the Netflix special is out. People who are coming to my shows, I’m not having to introduce myself completely to them every single time, which makes things a little easier. Then it also is a real shock to the system when I do get in front of an audience who has no fucking idea who I am, and I’m suddenly like, “Oh, this is good, because now I have to be a real comedian again. I can’t just rest on my laurels.” I really shot myself in the foot though in Fire Island in regards to that, because I added that fucking voiceover.
John: At what point did the voiceover happen? Was that always in the script?
Joel: It felt like a good idea at the time. It was always a part of the script. I always wanted it to be a part of the script. Actually, fun fact, when it was at Quibi, there was a moment when it was not going to be a personal first-person narrative. It was going to be a third-person narrative done by, we were hoping, Emma Thompson, because she was available to do a Quibi.
Craig: That’s right. You’re right. That would’ve been awesome.
John: Remember Quibi? Aw, Quibi.
Craig: Quibi.
John: Vertical video.
Joel: The problem with the voiceover for me became in post, because there are a lot of things that are unfixable in a normal movie, unless you want to spend the money on reshoots, which Searchlight was not spending money on reshoots for this movie.
Craig: Pour a little VO sauce on it.
Joel: All the notes were, “Can we explain this joke in the VO? Can we explain this moment in the VO? Can we fix this with the VO? Can we do this in the VO?” Is it a little bit more than I wanted in the film? Absolutely. Do I hate it? Absolutely no. That kind of stuff makes it a little harder when other people are asking you to explain it, because my thing was, I was always fighting back and saying the audience is smart, and the moments that go over audiences’ heads… I don’t know, when I’m watching movies that are about cultures that I’m not a part of, those are the moments. The moments that I don’t necessarily understand are the moments that make me feel almost the most engaged with the story.
John: Because you’re having to pay a lot of attention to figure out what’s happening there.
Craig: You’re learning.
Joel: You’re learning. There’s stuff that you look up afterwards and you figure it out, and it’s enriching. It makes the movie even better on a second watch and things like that. I think there are plenty of moments like that in Fire Island still. I was happy to leave even more of them in the movie than I think the studio would have liked. That’s the studio’s job, to make sure that it’s palatable to as many people as possible.
Craig: They do stand in as a little bit of a proxy of the average person that might buy a ticket. I’m interested in that. That oftentimes is focused on the other. They’ll say, “Okay, but what if you’re not gay and Asian? What will those people think?” I’m actually more interested in if you felt any pressure in the other direction, meaning when you’re telling a story from inside a group, there is a little bit of that syndrome of, “Okay, you’re going to tell our story. You better tell it fucking right.” Did you feel a squeeze that you were maybe going to be held accountable in ways that maybe other writers weren’t going to have to be?
Joel: Way more than the other thing. Way more than the other thing. Andrew’s constant refrain to me on set was, “We cannot write this movie for Twitter, Joel,” because it was in my head a lot. I was like, “What are people going to say about this moment? Gay Twitter’s going to drag me for this and that and the other thing.” I’m glad we were able in our press cycle to talk about the movie and how much we loved the movie and loved each other and loved the comedy of the movie, and we weren’t necessarily pressured to make it about our identities as much or anything like that, because I think that that can… I don’t know, people don’t like to go and see a movie that feels like homework.
Craig: Homework, that’s the best word for it.
Joel: We were really lucky that the studio didn’t pressure us to go in that direction. I think because we were able to present it as a hyper-specific movie… There were definitely people in my community who hate the movie. Trust me, no one is more willing to tell you that than a drunk gay guy, to your face.
Craig: Oh my god.
Joel: I think because it wasn’t couched in universal terms… It wasn’t like, “This movie is for all gay people. This movie is for all Asian.” It wasn’t couched in those terms.
Craig: It was just the characters that were in the story.
Joel: I think I was able to fly slightly more under the radar than I think other projects have been able to.
Craig: That makes sense, absolutely.
John: You’re saying so many words we try to say on the podcast all the time. You’re talking about specificity, about being a unique, original voice. Whether you’re starring in the movie or just the person writing the movie to put out there in the world, it’s about what is it that you specifically can say about this situation, what is the story that you can tell, that other people couldn’t tell. You’ve been able to do that both with your stand-up and with your film. What is the next thing we can look forward to seeing you in or seeing you writing?
Joel: Right now, I’m getting ready to shoot Loot Season Two, which is an Apple TV show that I’m on, that I’m very grateful to be a part of.
Craig: Maya Rudolph.
Joel: With Maya Rudolph. I’m furiously working on my next screenplay.
Craig: Good.
Joel: Writing it on spec.
Craig: That’s good. I’m glad.
Joel: Just trying to keep my hands busy doing that. Then there’s a bunch of other stuff that will come out.
Craig: Fire Island was fucking great. If you haven’t seen it-
John: See Fire Island, Hulu.
Craig: I don’t watch things.
John: Craig doesn’t.
Craig: I loved it. I thought it was terrific. I don’t know, it was delightful. That’s the word I think is the best word. It was a delight. You should absolutely check it out. It’s fantastic.
John: Joel Kim Booster, can you come back for some Q and A after the show?
Joel: Yeah, absolutely.
John: Joel Kim Booster, everyone!
Craig: Thank you, Joel.
John: Now, we have a raffle.
Craig: Oh, here we go.
John: This is all just figured out as we’re doing this.
Craig: Now it’s gambling time. Here we go.
John: Talk us through how we should do this. I see that there are different prizes here. These are the tickets. There’s a grand prize. Exciting. For listeners that are home, who don’t have the video here, there’s Item 1, Item 2. Item 1 is the Camp Scriptnotes shirt plus a guaranteed question during the show, correct? Is that right? No, I was wrong. I was wrong. I was looking at the wrong card. Matthew, edit.
Craig: Matthew, do not edit that.
John: Item 1, a Momofuku basket plus two tickets to The Huntington.
Craig: Now, the Huntington meaning the garden.
John: The garden. I remember bumping into you at The Huntington gardens.
Craig: I’m there all the time.
John: Before the Scriptnotes show started, I bumped into you and Melissa and your son at The Huntington gardens.
Craig: If you have a little baby, it’s a great way to-
John: There you go. Having a baby is mostly about how you kill a Saturday and a Sunday.
Craig: Just fill a Saturday. You’re certainly not killing it with sex or anything like that.
John: We identified Item 1.
Craig: Item 1, here we go. Item 1.
John: Item 1.
Craig: Item 1.
John: Craig, I’m going to open this up. You’re going to reach in there and pick one of these tickets.
Craig: I’ve got one. The number is 3559437!
Audience Member: Yep.
John: All right! I see someone back there. You can stay there, but remember, hold onto that ticket, because we’ll remember that.
Craig: Hold onto that ticket. I gotta say that “yep” was pretty much the right response.
John: “Yep” is the absolute right response. We’re going to put this on top of this.
Craig: Based on what we were giving you, yep. What else do we have?
John: Item number 2. Thank God for Jerome. You’re saving us here.
Craig: Jerome, thank you. Thank you for saving this sinking ship.
John: What is Item 2 here?
Craig: Item 2 is a pumpkin spice basket and four tickets to The Broad.
John: Now, Craig, we know you have issues with spooky season. What is your feeling about pumpkin spice?
Craig: Bullshit.
John: Oh, man.
Craig: Now, I will say that pumpkin spice in a pumpkin pie is amazing. Otherwise, get it the fuck out of there.
John: I like pumpkin bread. I like pumpkin bread. You like pumpkin bread?
Craig: Okay, that’s you. Here we go. Are you guys ready? This is for pumpkin spice.
John: Pumpkin spice.
Craig: Pumpkin spice, the worst of the Spice Girls. Here we go. 3559411.
John: Oh, fantastic! We see you there. You are the winner of the pumpkin spice.
Craig: That didn’t even get a yep. That got nothing.
John: It got nothing.
Craig: Silence.
John: We’ll sit this here. Now, we are up for Item number 3. This is bigger. This is bigger.
Craig: Here we go.
John: I recognize the studio. What do we got?
Craig: We have a DreamWorks basket. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s exciting. Maybe the shark from that shark movie.
John: It could be Shrek.
Craig: And two tickets…
John: I’m excited about this, to the Hollywood Wax Museum.
Craig: I didn’t realize we hated them.
John: No, it’s exciting. It’s exciting.
Craig: Let’s see who the big loser is.
John: You could be a winner. There’s three tickets in here.
Craig: I know. Nobody wanted this. I’m so sorry, the owner of-
John: [crosstalk 00:23:47] now.
Craig: Ticket 3559389.
Audience Member: It’s me.
Craig: I’m so sorry.
John: Hooray!
Craig: Did you hear what she said?
John: “It’s me.” I’m sorry.
Craig: “It’s me.”
John: “It’s me.”
Craig: “It’s me.”
John: We’re excited for you. It’s so nice to win things.
Craig: Hey, listen, we can’t all be winners.
John: Oh my god, now-
Craig: Here we go.
John: These are the real ones here. This is serious.
Craig: Realer than that?
John: Realer than this. The winner of number 4 gets-
Craig: Number 4 gets a Camp Scriptnotes T-shirt and a guaranteed audience question. What does this mean?
John: That means they will absolutely get their chance to ask their question, no matter what.
Craig: What if they’re an idiot?
John: That’s the risk we’re taking.
Craig: I love it.
John: It’s really on you, because you’re going to draw this ticket. If it’s a terrible question, it’s all your fault.
Craig: Gulp. Here we go. Here we go. 355, I’m going to say it every fucking time, I don’t care, 9418.
Audience Member: It’s me.
John: Yay! Are you going to ask a great question?
Craig: “It’s me.”
Audience Member: Will you come back next year and do this for Hollywood Heart?
John: Sure, we’ll do it again.
Craig: Absolutely. Aw, you’re so sweet.
John: You can also ask a real question during the time.
Craig: She may not have one. Let’s not pressure her.
John: We’ll ask you in the moment. If you don’t have a real question, that’s fine too. Thank you very much for bidding on this. Oh my gosh, look how many… This is Item number… Wait, what’s the grand prize? Now I’m confused. What’s number 6?
Craig: Number 6 is the grand prize.
John: Number 6 is the guaranteed… Oh, that’s the Three Page Challenge. Oh my gosh, this is worth a lot. This is number 5.
Craig: Number 5, also a Camp Scriptnotes shirt.
John: We love the Camp Scriptnotes shirts. You might think there might even be too many Camp Scriptnotes shirts and we’re trying to get rid of them.
Craig: You’re right. And a lifetime Premium membership to Scriptnotes. That’s a lifetime of not spending $5 a month.
John: Let’s do the quick math here. Scriptnotes, the annual membership is-
Craig: I think we need an actuarial table to see how old they are and also do they smoke.
John: This could be worth thousands of dollars, honestly. Thousands of dollars. Look how many tickets there are. There are so many tickets in there.
Craig: There’s a lot. Oh god, people want this.
John: People want this.
Craig: People want this. Guess who’s gotten it? Number 3559487.
Audience Member: Yay.
Craig: Hey!
John: Hooray! Hooray.
Craig: I gotta tell you, I love the way you guys are taking victory in stride. “Yay.”
John: “Yay.”
Craig: This isn’t making us feel weird or anything.
John: Congratulations on this. We’re going to put this over here.
Craig: “Yay.”
John: Identify yourself later, and we’ll find you for your lifetime-
Craig: Here we go.
John: Wow, this is worth a lot.
Craig: This is the grand prize. The grand prize, a guaranteed Three Page Challenge. That’s right. Bid on the opportunity to have your script pages featured in our next Three Page Challenge segment to receive feedback from John and Craig and a call-out on Scriptnotes.
John: Megana will tell you that we will have 200 people write in [crosstalk 00:27:12].
Craig: That’s a lot.
John: She’s reading through a lot. You could jump the line. No matter what, good, bad, you’re there.
Craig: A little bit of a monkey’s paw, this one. I gotta be honest. Here we go.
John: Craig, draw it out.
Craig: Oh yeah, a lot of people wanted this one, but only one person can get it. Their ticket will begin with a 355. The winner is 3559453.
Audience Member: That’s me!
John: Hooray!
Craig: Finally, someone with some passion!
John: I’m excited about that.
Craig: Thank you!
John: 453, what is the script you’re going to send through? Do you have a title for the script you might want to send through?
Audience Member: Skullduggery.
John: Skullduggery.
Craig: That’s a good title.
John: Everyone listen for Skullduggery.
Craig: I’m into it. It’s going to start with like, “Skullduggery started so well, but then hm.”
John: Thank you, everyone, for the raffle. Yay!
Craig: Thank you! Way to go, rafflers. Wow.
John: Wow.
Craig: Now things are going to get a little weird, unfortunately.
John: Oh my god.
Craig: I gotta sit down for this, because this is going to get bad.
John: This is going to be a challenging moment here.
Craig: Not every segment we do on these live shows are what we would call easy or fun.
John: They’re not all giggles.
Craig: Some of them are tough.
John: Some of them are tough. Over the years of doing Scriptnotes, we’ve been able to highlight some real success stories, like people who are doing good in the world, like Pay Up Hollywood. That’s people who are doing some great stuff.
Craig: Hollywood Heart.
John: Hollywood Heart! I think we’ve also taken the time to call out some bad actors, people we felt like who were not helping screenwriters, especially aspiring screenwriters.
Craig: No question.
John: What were the words you might use for those people?
Craig: The people that we don’t like?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Dickheads.
John: Dickheads, yeah, dickheads. Sometimes it’s gotten contentious. I’m thinking back to Episode 129, the one with the guys from Final Draft.
Craig: They were great, weren’t they? That was fun. I wish you guys could’ve been there to see John like…
John: I have serious PTSD from that episode.
Craig: Because I’m like, “No, John, hold on.”
John: The thing I’ve taken from this is that conflict is not necessarily bad, because sometimes in conflict you illuminate and elucidate some real issues there.
Craig: Make things better.
John: Yeah, which is why tonight, we want to take a risk and invite on somebody who we’ve talked about a lot on the show. You probably have the strongest opinions about the person.
Craig: I am very hesitant about this, but in the spirit of hoping that it goes well, I have agreed to do this.
John: You’ve never been shy about telling your listeners what you think about this. Now he’s here to give his side of the story. Please welcome The Manager We Told You to Fire.
Craig: Here he is, The Manager We Told You to Fire. Oh, god.
The Manager We Told You to Fire: In town. Let me grab my water.
John: Oh my god.
Craig: Here we go.
Manager: Can’t really see past the first few rows, but I can tell it’s a bunch of average-looking people, because it’s writers! Because it’s writers, right? Come on, we’re all on the same team. We’re all in the same game.
Craig: We told you to fire him.
Manager: God.
John: Chad, thank you for coming.
Manager: That’s what she said.
John: God.
Craig: Chad. Chad.
Manager: Come on. Come on. It’s back.
Craig: No, Chad.
Manager: Woo! I’m happy to be here at this New Balance convention. Holy shit. Listen, man, I love the show. I listen to the show. I love it. It’s great.
Craig: Do you?
Manager: Yeah, I listen to the show when I can get to it. A lot of podcasts out there. I got you guys. I got Rogan. I got Logan Paul, my new client. He’s starting to write now. He wrote a feature, and it’s pretty good.
Craig: Basically, everybody that rhymes with “ogan,” you have.
Manager: Yeah, but also you guys, Pod Save America, Dax, another client, Dax Shepard.
Craig: That’s real.
Manager: You fucking heard of him?
John: I guess it’s good that you listen sometimes, because you know we talk about managers on the show sometimes, and people write in with questions and concerns.
Manager: I know. I know. I heard the show. I told you. You don’t believe me? I can do Sexy Craig. You ready? Hey, it’s Sexy Craig. Sexy Craig wants to touch your hair.
Craig: No.
John: You sound like that.
Craig: I don’t sound like that.
John: That’s what it sounds like in my head every time.
Manager: That’s what it is. That’s what it is.
Craig: No.
Manager: Hey, can I do a One Cool Thing?
John: No, you don’t-
Craig: You can’t. I’m going to go with no, you can’t.
Manager: Can I just say, the problem with you two is-
Craig: Oh, please.
Manager: You guys have never had a manager. I’m going to get real with you, no cap. You don’t even know what a manager does.
Craig: Great. Why don’t you tell us what the fuck it is you do?
Manager: It’s in the name. It’s manager, manage from the Latin manage.
Craig: What do you manage though?
Manager: I manage writers or writer/directors if they have rich parents, that type of thing or, oh, the golden goose is a writer/director/actor, multi-hyphenate. You get that shit, those people are desperate, like a groundling. Oh, give me a groundling. I want a groundling! Yeah, baby. They’ll do whatever.
Craig: You’re terrible. You’re a terrible person.
Manager: You know what I say?
Craig: No.
Manager: Hate the player. Don’t hate the game.
Craig: I should’ve known that he was going to say that.
John: Let’s get back to what you actually do as a manager. For example, do you read your clients’ scripts and give them notes?
Manager: John, yes, I read their scripts. Of course I do.
John: That’s good.
Craig: What’s the process?
John: Talk us through the process there.
Manager: Okay, the process. I’m on the Peloton, and I get an email. I’m trying to listen to Logan Paul’s podcast. I get an email from whatever. Let’s just call him, I don’t know, fucking Groundling Gus. He’s like, “Hey, I have a script. It’s about two turtles that are in love.” I just write back, “Boring!”
John: That’s it? That’s one word. Do you give them anything they can work on?
Craig: That’s your management, “Boring.”
Manager: I think it’s implied. I’m going to give you guys some free advice. Don’t write boring shit, especially this one about turtles. It was so bad. No one wants to see turtles, guys.
Craig: I gotta ask you a question. Did you actually read the turtle script?
Manager: I read the email. I read the subject of the email.
Craig: Fuck, I hate him.
Manager: Listen, man.
John: We told you to fire him.
Manager: What good is it going to do for me to actually read the script when I promise you no one’s going to buy a fucking script about turtles in love, about turtles in general, unless they’re Teenage Mutant variety, in which case, let’s talk.
Craig: To be clear, your entire process is you just read the log lines? You don’t read the material?
Manager: Yes.
Craig: Great.
Manager: Look at the movies that came out this year. I would’ve told my clients, if I represented any of them, not to write them. Bros, little too gay.
Craig: Can’t say that.
Manager: Fire Island, too gay and too Asian.
Craig: Can’t say that.
Manager: Double whammy. Double whammy.
Craig: Can’t say that.
Manager: Double whammy. Death on the Nile, not gay enough.
Craig: Yes.
John: I will say there was actually a lot of-
Craig: No, I agree with him.
John: There was a surprising amount of gay coding there.
Craig: There’s coding.
John: If you look at Poirot’s relationship with Bouc, it felt like there was a thing that was happening there.
Manager: I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. Also, I don’t fucking care about subtext. If it’s there, just write it. Who cares?
Craig: Great. Let’s get back to the real question. What service are you actually providing to your client?
Manager: It’s the service of being their manager.
Craig: You don’t do anything!
Manager: No, I do, okay. I make it feel like something is happening in your career. You didn’t have a manager, and now you do. Nobody wanted to read your fucking script, and now maybe somebody will. Your mom can tell her friends, “Oh, my son Shmuli, he’s got a Hollywood manager.”
Craig: Shmuli?
Manager: Hello? Antisemitic much, Craig? The way you said that was fucking weird.
John: Let’s move on. A lot of times on the show, we’ve talked about open writing assignments. What is your policy or philosophy about OWAs and your clients?
Manager: I love them. They’re my bread and butter. I send all my clients out on open writing assignments, doesn’t matter.
Craig: All of them?
Manager: I will send literally every client on every writing assignment. As Gandhi said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
John: That wasn’t Gandhi.
Craig: He didn’t say that. He did not say that.
Manager: He did. I think he did.
Craig: Just to be clear, he didn’t. He’s a great man. How dare you? Your clients are all competing against each other for every single open writing assignment?
Manager: Yes, it’s survival of the fittest. We pit them against each other. It’s like the movie with the Japanese teenagers where they all fucking kill each other.
John: Great. Even if one of your clients does book the job, the rest of them have all wasted days or weeks of their life going after that one job?
Manager: They learn how to pitch. That is a very valuable skill. Whatever they wrote up, they can leave behind to the executive.
John: Oh, gosh, no.
Manager: Just walk out and just drop it on the ground.
Craig: No.
John: That’s not how that works. That’s a terrible idea.
Manager: Whatever. Whatever. I’m not a real person, I guess. I’m a straw man that you created to stand in for all the terrible managers your listeners are always writing in about. What you’re forgetting is that a lot of your audience, they hear these tales about terrible managers, and secretly, deep in their hearts, they still want one, even a shitty one like me, because it’s scary never knowing if you’re going to make it-
Craig: That’s fair.
Manager: … if you’re good enough, if anyone will even care. Getting the tap on the shoulder from one person vaguely connected to the industry is a game changer. Why do you think people do your Three Page Challenge? Because they need that hit of validation. We’re not so different, you and I.
Craig: He did the line.
John: He did the [inaudible 00:37:44].
Craig: He did the line.
Manager: These mildly unattractive writers know there is a wall surrounding this industry. You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.
John: You’re Sorkining. Congratulations.
Craig: Sorkining.
Manager: I would rather that you just said thank you-
Craig: He’s still Sorkining.
Manager: … and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!
Craig: Just out of curiosity, did you order the Code Red?
Manager: I did the job. You’re goddamn right I ordered the Code Red!
Craig: I have no further questions.
John: Let’s give it up for The Manager We Told You to Fire.
Craig: The Manager We Told You to Fire. Thank you.
Manager: Thank you.
Craig: Ike Barinholtz, everyone!
John: He’ll be back for questions.
Craig: He will be back at the end of the show! Well done, Manager We Told-
John: Nicely done, Ike Barinholtz.
Craig: I gotta say-
John: Hate you, hate you, hate you.
Craig: We were right to tell them to fire him. He’s dreadful.
John: Good choices we made. Good choices.
Craig: Absolutely fucking dreadful.
John: Oh my gosh.
Craig: God.
John: Craig, that’s stressful. It’s stressful having him around.
Craig: Can we have nice people [crosstalk 00:39:08]?
John: We should welcome some nice-
Craig: Nice people.
John: … warm, caring people who make things.
Craig: Nice, warm, happy, smart people.
John: People who make things.
Craig: Make things, yeah, not people who exploit us and treat us like shit, in a hilarious way.
John: Let’s brainstorm on who these ideal next guests could be, if we were to pick our next guests.
Craig: You’d want somebody with the skill of an Aline Brosh McKenna, but also somebody with the stick-to-itiveness and insight of a Megan Ganz.
John: These are really good choices, because they’re both TV showrunners. They both created shows. They know how it all works together. Maybe we could even read their credits a little bit before we bring them out, to set up the audience for who these people are.
Craig: It’s not that I don’t know what they’ve done, but I’d like to refer to this card.
John: I will talk about Megan Ganz, who’s a comedy writer and producer whose credits include The Onion, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community, Modern Family. She co-created the Apple TV comedy series Mythic Quest, along with-
Craig: Starring myself.
John: … Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day.
Craig: And myself. Aline Brosh McKenna, I’m going to tell you who she is, even though you all know. She is a writer, producer, and director known for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses. Her feature directorial debut-
John: Her feature debut.
Craig: … Your Place or Mine will come out next year on a small channel called Netflix.
John: Megan, Aline, please come out.
Craig: Megan, Aline, please come on out.
John: Welcome to the couch.
Craig: Welcome to the couch. Have a seat. Please feel free to discard all of the cards that The Manager We Told You to Fire has left behind.
Megan Ganz: What’s great about having two women is we only get paid 60 cents on the dollar, so two of us-
Craig: Sorry, you guys are getting paid? John.
John: Sorry.
Megan: With two of us, you’re getting a buck 20 worth of value.
Craig: [inaudible 00:40:46] nothing.
John: It is so amazing to have both of you here. That last segment was very stressful to me. Hopefully, you can talk us all down. You are both people who create TV shows. You run TV shows. This last week, we saw a huge change that’s happening with our streaming services. Our streaming services that have never had commercials before are suddenly going to have commercials. Disney Plus is going to start having commercials. Netflix is going to start having ads in the middle of it. I want to talk to you about that, because that’s a different thing than we’ve encountered before. Megan, on your show on Apple TV, so far there are no ads, but are you-
Megan: Bringing back the act break? Is that what you’re asking?
John: Yeah, is that act break going to happen?
Megan: Bringing back the act break?
Craig: Because you have a lot of experience with ad-supported television.
Megan: I do. I started out in network television, so I started out thinking about act breaks a lot. In fact, on Modern Family, they always called the first act break the Hey May. Have you ever heard this phrase?
John: No, tell us Hey May.
Craig: No.
Megan: Hey May was that something really exciting had to happen before the commercial break, so that the guy that was watching it would say to his wife, “Hey May, you gotta see what’s happening on this show that’s coming up.” That was the phrase that they-
Craig: [crosstalk 00:41:48] name is May. What year are they from?
Megan: Cheers. They were watching Oklahoma. I grew up on knowing act breaks and very strict time limits for shows, and now that all went out the window, but apparently it’s coming back. That’ll be interesting. What do I think about it? When I was in network, and everybody was going to streaming and everybody thought streaming would fix all the issues, it was like, it’s just going to become the new dinosaur, right? Then whatever’s next, TikTok, will take over. Then in a few years, we’ll all be desperate to write TikTok shows.
Craig: The TikToks.
John: We first knew you of course as a feature writer. Then you were [inaudible 00:42:37] Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, when that was going to be a thing. Originally, it was a Showtime show, and then it transitioned to a CW show, so you had to figure out how to do act breaks.
Craig: The act breaks.
John: Are act breaks natural to you now? Are they part of your blood?
Megan: No, they’re not, they weren’t, and they never were. I’ve really only worked on one TV show for any sustained amount of time.
John: It was a good show.
Megan: We had six acts, which was too many.
Craig: CW’s pumping those ads out.
John: The network required you to have six acts?
Megan: Six acts. There are episodes where it’s 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 minutes.
Craig: That’s how they did it?
Megan: No, you could put them wherever you wanted.
Craig: Oh, I see.
Megan: They had to be at least two minutes long. We would sometimes get to the end of the episode and just have just extra shit happen because we didn’t have… It would be a page and an eighth. I would have to be in editing, trying to pump the last act. The first act had been 22… It was a haphazard process. I was saying I enjoy watching things where I feel like, end scene, and then you’re moving. I think it’s a good discipline. Especially it works for comedy.
We’ve been through an interesting shift. For the old people on the stage, we wandered off to a thing where they were like, “This is a comedy,” and you’re like, “This is not funny, has no jokes in it, and is 48 minutes long. I don’t know what’s happening.” It feels like there’s a nice move towards more traditional. The cycles are accelerating at such a rate. People will write more towards those act breaks. Hulu’s always had ads, so they’ve always done that.
Then the other thing is I think formats are getting more… Everything is getting more juiced, because as we were talking backstage, for a streamer, you have to nab people really quickly. Also, you’re competing with things like TikTok now, and so people are… They want to know what they’re looking at, really, so the pace of things. You go back and watch a movie from 1978. You’ll be dead on the ground. It’s all like, “I need to go somewhere.” Then it’s the person opening the door and walking to their car, opening the car door, getting inside the car, backing out of the driveway.
Aline Brosh McKenna: That’s so funny you say that, because something I would say a lot when I’m directing is, “I know how cars work. I know how walking works. I know how drinking works. We know how eating works. We know how buttering works.” There is a certain genre of thing where we’re going to watch this man unbutton every button. I feel like now it’s to the point where it has to be one or the other. It has to be the most eye-grabbing, attention-stealing thing ever or it has to be so bland that you could leave the room for minutes at a time and come back and miss nothing.
Megan: It’s so true. It’s like we’re in TikTok or we’re in profoundly Swedish, slow, slow… You come back and the tumbleweed has just turned over once.
Craig: That’s the best kind of Swedish is profoundly Swedish.
John: With shows you’re developing now, because Aline, you’ve set up some new shows, congratulations, and Megan, you’re working on new stuff as well, are you thinking about where the commercials will go if they ultimately stick commercials in? Craig, Chernobyl has commercials. We got the email in from France. Chernobyl in France has commercials in it.
Craig: That’s fucking France.
John: That could very well happen to HBO Max as well when people are watching Chernobyl here.
Craig: I must admit that I put blinders on in terms of what happens once it leaves the confines of the United States. I go, “I’m not there.” I’m not there when the tree falls. I don’t know.
Aline: Also now, we’re just aware that you’re spending all this time making something beautiful, and people are going to watch it in their bathtub with their grubby fingers.
John: Megan, would you…
Aline: Are you bothered? You say, “Who cares Chernobyl’s got commercials in France?” If you knew that they were interrupting in the middle of a line of dialog to go to commercial and come back-
Craig: It would be kind of amazing if they were just like, “That is how an RBMK reactor… “ Boom, and go-
Aline: Then commercials, and then it comes back.
Craig: Then it comes back and it’s already exploded.
Aline: Can we talk just a minute about the captioning? Now, somebody was telling me today it’s like 70% of people watch their TV captioned. They’re riddled with errors, riddled with misspellings. As you mentioned, I have the movie coming out next year. I desperately want to see the captions, because if the grammar is incorrect or spelled incorrectly, it’s going to make me nuts.
Craig: Why are you putting this in my-
Aline: I’m trying really hard to get it so that I can see it.
John: [crosstalk 00:47:16].
Craig: You know what just happened is that her Jewishness went into my Jewishness and just created this awful mega Jewishness of my anxiety now that they’re going to fuck the… Oh, goddammit.
Aline: It’s nerve-wracking with a W, come on!
Craig: Ah!
John: Practical guidance though for, let’s say we have our folks out here who are writing their pilots. If you were writing a pilot today and you wanted to be staffed on one of your shows, do you think these people should be putting act breaks into a one-hour, into a half-hour?
Megan: I don’t know for one-hours. I’ve never written a drama. For comedies, I did the act break thing for a long time, and then I ended up on Sunny, and they never talked about act breaks. All they talked about was that in every scene, every character should have a specific motivation and a want and that something should happen in that scene that changes the story and that moves them into a different place. Once I got into that mode where I was thinking more scene by scene, now I never think about act breaks anymore, because if the story is moving, it’s moving. I don’t think that your general uneducated TV viewer is like, “Oh, interesting first act. I wonder what’s going to happen once we get into that road of trials. Where’s our atonement coming from?”
Some of it is almost instinctual too. Story breaking has always felt like something to me that’s a little bit like I can almost explain why I think that the story should go this way or that way. It’s almost innate. I wouldn’t push act breaks on, because again, you’re never going to know. Maybe you write them all in, and then somebody yanks them all out again.
Aline: If you’re writing a spec for a particular show and you know the format, for that, I would [crosstalk 00:49:03] writing a pilot.
John: You just set up a new show with [inaudible 00:49:06]. For that, will there be act breaks?
Aline: It’s ABC network, so it’s a network format. Whatever network you’re selling it to generally has a format of some kind, or they have none. They generally have length guides. Actually, there were a lot of restrictions in working on the CW. I got to perversely enjoy them. We only had a certain amount of runtime. Then I got really into something I never thought I would be interested in, which is those previously-ons. You think they’re computer generated or something. We worked really hard on them. Really hard. I loved working on those.
Craig: Those are great.
Aline: We tried to craft them in editing, so it helped you understand what the episode was you were going to watch. Now I know that most people fast-forward through them. We put a lot of thought into them so that they would frame the episode correctly. I’ve grown to love them as an art form. It was Mad Men that famously had the string of just non sequiturs that you could not… They’re pretty fabulous. I think they can really help a show. Again, I like some of the more traditional format things I enjoy. I think that we might regret throwing out some of the baby with the bathwater.
Megan: Structure is good. I like structure.
Craig: Having some sort of thing to follow. You just mentioned what’s coming and what just happened. You’ve both worked on shows that have been ongoing shows. There’s the world of cable television or premium cable, whatever they call it, where here’s a limited series, or it’s a series but it’s only going to run for two seasons. You guys are working on shows that are designed to run for a long time. I’m curious, just from a craft point of view, how you guys balance the need to keep the flywheel going year after year without leaning too hard on things that you know are grade Hamburger Helper, like will they, won’t they, or we made it, we lost it all. What do you do to keep it going and fresh when there is this interesting meta problem that you need to reset it every time no matter what?
Megan: It’s got to be the same but different-
Craig: Same but different.
Megan: … every single time you have it. For me, it’s been different on the two different shows that I’m currently working on. On Sunny, they get around that by making them cartoon characters that know-
Craig: Learn nothing.
Megan: … nothing they do influences the next episode whatsoever.
John: [crosstalk 00:51:24].
Megan: They never learn their lessons. There’s no third act in Sunny. It’s great. You just get them in a really bad situation, and then you roll credits. Then the next week, they’re out of jail somehow. That’s great. That’s the way they do it on that show. That’s why they’ve been going for 16… I’m about to start on Season 16-
Craig: Oh my god. Amazing.
Megan: … of Sunny in a couple weeks.
Craig: Mythic Quest is a workspace.
Megan: Mythic Quest is a workspace, real people that have things that carry over. It has been difficult. We don’t have a romantic relationship between our two leads, so we can’t rely on that. We didn’t want to get into the place, because it’s all about a video game. We didn’t want to rely too much on is the video game going to be successful or not, because I don’t think most people care about that. We really try to pin it on the emotional relationships.
From the very beginning, we tried to make the thing that makes you coming back is there’s this odd couple, these two people, they love each other, they hate each other, they’re making this thing together. It’s like two people raising a kid, where it drives them insane, but they also can’t leave each other, so they’ve got to figure it out for the sake of the kid. We’re hoping that that tension is bringing people back over and over. What helps that is that it’s 10 episodes a season and not 24, which is what I used to do. In 24, you need a love interest.
Craig: You’re not going to make it otherwise.
Megan: You’re not going to make it.
Aline: Also, don’t we love a filler episode?
Megan: Oh, I love filler.
Aline: I love a filler episode. I love something where they just go to Costco for the whole episode. Honestly, they’re some of the most fun. The great thing about those episodes, they’re often later in the run. You’ve established so much about your characters that you can trap them all in a room together, and then you can really pay off these character-based emotional things. That’s why I love a good bottle episode. I think once you earn that thing where you’re like, “Guess what? We’ve set up so many things that we can put these people in one space and just let them talk to each other, and you’re going to be entertained for a half-hour.”
Craig: They can hash it out together.
Megan: Great.
Aline: Our last season was extended from 13 to 18. We managed to make one of them a live special, but then we still had four. We ended up doing things we never… She had a brother she didn’t know about. We just had a lot of fun.
Megan: Find a dog.
Aline: She knew that he existed. She’d not really spent any time with him. You can just chase wild herrings. She went to a waterpark. That was some of the funnest stuff we did. It’s not my podcast, but somebody said to me-
John: Really?
Craig: It basically is.
Aline: Never stopped me before.
Megan: It could be, by the way.
Craig: It is.
Aline: I wanted to ask you guys a question, because somebody said to me the other day… I was talking to an executive, and they said my… Their theory is that feature writers can write TV more easily than TV writers can write features.
Craig: I agree with that.
Aline: They said that if you’re a feature writer, you’ve learned how to wander in the woods by yourself big chunks of time, so then when you go to write TV, you have that sense of the whole scope, but you can write these tinier chunks faster, and it doesn’t have to be the complete thing. I don’t know about that. I’m curious about that.
Craig: I agree.
John: Here’s the other version of that. It’s that sometimes you see these streaming shows just feel like, “Oh, I see it as a 10-hour movie.” I’m like, “Oh god, I don’t want a 10-hour movie.”
Craig: That would be bad.
John: I want a sense of [crosstalk 00:54:34].
Craig: Episodes.
John: Episodes. I want a sense that things [crosstalk 00:54:36].
Craig: I’m a big fan of episodes. I do think that feature writers know how to finish something, and a lot of television writers have never actually been in a spot where they had to finish something. It was always designed to keep the machine running. We know a lot of television shows really stumble at the finish line.
Aline: In TV you finish-ish.
Craig: Ish.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Finish-ish.
Aline: Finish-ish. You give them enough of a thing that they can go to bed that night, but then they gotta come back.
Craig: They gotta come back, exactly.
Aline: Literally, Act 1 is the pilot, then you have 70 episodes of Act 2, and then Act 3 is the last 15 minutes of the entire series.
Megan: Oh god, that’s great.
Aline: I could do it now.
Craig: You’re showrunners. I have been a showrunner, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. One of the things that’s blown my mind, and I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s been a little hard, when you’re not a showrunner, whether you’re a feature writer or you’re working on staff at a show, your job ultimately is a creative job. You’re supposed to be playing, and you’re supposed to be just being creative and writing and all the rest. When you are a showrunner, you have to do these things. You also are the CEO of a fairly large corporation. You are kind of a mom or a dad to a lot of people. How do you guys reconcile those two sides of yourselves when you’re doing the work?
Aline: I have a thing that I think may be different from how other people think of it, which is a lot of showrunners and movie directors have this thing where they’re like, “This is my process. Now welcome to my movie. Welcome to my TV show. I’m the boss, and this is my process.” I don’t do that, because I don’t think… I am assembling a group of creative people. Particularly with actors, they’re all very different. They all have a different process. They all approach things differently.
I’ll just tell you guys, we had Reese and Ashton on this movie. We also have Tig Notaro, Steve Zahn, Zoë Chao, Jesse Williams. They’re all really different actors. They approach things really differently. On Crazy Ex, we had people from Broadway, we had stand-ups, we had all different… I like to very much meet the actors where they live and explore what their process is and then even what they need on a particular day.
With the writers, you can only really have one process, but what I like to try and do is figure out how to make every writer there feel comfortable so that they can contribute the most. All writers are different that way. Some writers come in, and they just are very comfortable speaking to authority. They’re very comfortable speaking out. Some need more encouragement and more direction. That’s true with department heads too. I will be collaborating very, very closely with costumes. When I hire a costume person, I’m saying, “You’ll be sick of me. I’m going to go down to the socks with you.”
My process is a little bit different based on who I’m working with, as opposed to like, “This is how Aline does stuff.” There’s a few things that are baseline things with me. I’m not great with lateness. If there’s more than two people in the room, and someone’s late, the disrespect of that is really hard for me. There’s just a few things that I do a certain way.
Basically, instead of coming in and saying, “Gosh, I want this done a certain way. I gotta get everyone to do it,” I try and go more with like, “I have a goal. Our goal is to take the mountain, and we can all have a different approach to that,” because what you want to do is bring out the best creative work that you can from everyone. Everyone’s different.
For example, in the writers’ room, sometimes I will say to someone, “If you don’t feel comfortable speaking up in the room about something, come find me later or send me an email or put a note on my desk. If there’s something where you want to say, ‘I really think we should do X, Y, and Z,’ and for whatever reason, the room wasn’t the place where you felt like you wanted to say that, just let me know some other way,” or for an actor, if someone wants to send me a six-page email, but someone else doesn’t need that, I like to adjust my… I think if you’re trying to get everyone to be you and to approach things the way you would and to think that… You’re going to rob yourself of good ideas. It’s not going to work.
Craig: Megan, you’re toxically rigid, so what do you think?
Megan: I was going to say, have you-
Aline: I’m contrasting myself to Megan, obviously.
Megan: I was going to say, so your first room was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Aline: See, this is why I’m not a really good sample. I had been in other rooms, little, tiny things here and there. Basically, I didn’t come up being a staff writer.
John: Megan, give us the real dirt. How does it really work?
Megan: That sounds amazing. That is what I am, now that I am a showrunner, trying to do. What that process feels like to me, in an adjustment from the way that I saw showrunners being when I was coming up and the way they acted towards me, the way that I’m trying to be a showrunner is like… I bought mushrooms recently.
Craig: Go on.
Megan: This woman that I bought mushrooms from gave me this chart of different dosages.
Aline: I didn’t know what kind of mushrooms we were talking about.
Megan: Sorry.
Craig: You thought she was talking about [crosstalk 00:59:58].
Aline: I was like, “Are we porcini? What are we-“
Craig: Oh, Aline.
Megan: She gave me the scale of all the different things you experience, different levels. At six grams of mushrooms was ego death. That is what I feel like I’m experiencing as being a showrunner, because I think in order to do it right, it is exactly what you’re saying.
Craig: Ego death.
Megan: In order to do it right, what you have to do is go, “I am your captain, but only in the senses that I am here to make everyone aboard this ship feel safe and a part of this team and feel like we’re all rowing towards the same place.” That’s not my experience when I started. When I started, it was like, “I’m in charge. You do what I say. If I tell you to come in at 10 a.m. and sit in a room until 7 p.m. without me entering that room, you’re going to sit there.” I didn’t have that experience coming up. When I was trained, it was very much like you shove a million ideas to your showrunner, and then they take the best ones, and then those somehow became their ideas. Then they go on with that.
Aline: Megan, my training ground as a feature writer, which these guys will know, is working for sometimes wonderful, occasionally-
John: Often monstrous.
Aline: … not wonderful people who are not trained in story often-
Craig: Who have authority over you.
Aline: … who couldn’t express their ideas with words, to whom I would have to say, “Oh my god, that’s so amazing. That’s so interesting. I love that. I was wondering if we could do something that made sense or advanced the story or had to do with the characters. We don’t have to.” As a screenwriter, it is a certain way similar to being on a staff and being semi listened to.
Craig: You’re working for writers.
John: Writers [crosstalk 01:01:45].
Craig: In features, you are often working for people that just don’t understand [crosstalk 01:01:51]. They haven’t done it themselves.
Aline: Most of my really bad experiences, by the way, were with things that never got made. I worked with a gentleman whose entire way of communicating to me was to send me screen caps.
Craig: Efficient.
Aline: “I was thinking this scene could be like this.” It would literally be a screen cap of a cartoon from the ’40s.
Megan: I’m not trying to say that I’ve had it worse than anybody else. Let me just say that. I will say that that is what I’m trying to do as well, which is to say… Really, it’s come out of my experience, because I realize that if you’re not properly incentivized to believe that your contributions matter to your showrunner, you are not showing up every day to do your best work. You are showing up every day to be there until they let you go. Then you go home and you do things that matter to you. What I am trying to do as a showrunner is say, “I hear you. Your voice is important. The things that you say are important. Your thoughts are important. If you need to tell me something, send me an email,” those sorts of things.
Aline: You’re saying no 85% of the time.
Megan: Yes, all the time. I’m resisting my inner nature to not be like, “You should be so lucky that I’m even listening to you, because I never got that.”
Craig: I wish that you would express that more. I want you to release the Kraken. I’m just curious, do you ever miss just being the… Jerry Seinfeld once got an award, and he said, “I don’t want to be up here accepting this award. I want to be back there making fun of the guy accepting this award.” Do you ever miss being the person who, after the showrunner finally lets you go, you can go out in the parking lot and go, “What a dick.”
Aline: “What an asshole.”
Craig: Now you’re the dick.
Megan: I do. I do, because the place that I’m in right now is between the two better places, which is you can either be one of the guys rowing, that’s like, “God, the captain’s an asshole,” or you can be the captain. Being the guy that’s below the captain, that passes along the captain’s wishes to the rowers, and then the rowers complain to you, and then you try to go tell the captain. He’s like, “I don’t give a shit.” Then you’re like, “Okay, I guess I have to go back and tell the… ” That position, that’s where I’m at right now, which is in between those two things.
Craig: Which honestly is the dream of most of these people.
John: Indeed. It’s honestly the dream of these people to have a show on television. There are so many shows on television. Back when we started our careers, it was pretty easy to keep up with what was on television. You could go into a general meeting, and you haven’t seen the show, you fake it, because you know what the shows were.
Craig: There were 12 shows on TV.
John: There were 12 shows on TV. Did I ever watch Gossip Girl? No. Could I fake my way through a meeting about it? Absolutely. In 2022, it’s actually much harder. You guys have staff people, so you know it’s hard. We’re guessing that even two fancy TV showrunners like you couldn’t tell us-
Craig: Here we go.
John: … where these streaming shows are airing, or if they’re even real.
Megan: Oh, no.
Craig: Here we go.
John: We’ll give you the title of the show-
Craig: And a little description.
John: … and a little description.
Aline: Can we confer?
John: You can confer, yeah.
Craig: And the platform.
Aline: Two women’s minds are better than one.
John: We’re going to tell you the title of the show.
Craig: We’re not going to say the platform.
John: You’ve gotta tell us what platform it’s on. If you don’t recognize the show, we can give you a log line and the star.
Craig: That’s it.
John: It’s hard, because we tried this. Are you ready to play I’ve Been Meaning to Watch That?
Craig: Here we go.
John: I’ll do this first. Mythic Quest, where would we find that show?
Craig: Is it real?
Megan: It’s on Apple TV.
Aline: It’s an extra special show starring Craig Mazin-
Craig: That’s right.
Aline: … on Apple TV, which I have watched.
Megan: Yes, it’s starring Craig Mazin on Apple TV.
Aline: I have watched.
Craig: They nailed it.
John: They nailed it.
Craig: That is correct.
John: One for you.
Craig: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Megan: [inaudible 01:05:36].
John: It’s streaming.
Megan: The CW?
Craig: That is not a streamer.
Megan: What is The CW? Is that Disney? That’s Disney, because-
Craig: Did you just arrive in this country?
Megan: I don’t know, Hulu?
Craig: Tell them.
Aline: It’s on Netflix.
Craig: It is on Netflix.
John: Netflix.
Aline: Some people think it’s a Netflix show.
Megan: I watched it when it was on legit CW TV.
Craig: There we go. Now the game gets-
John: Now it gets hard.
Craig: Basically, the difficulty level goes like… Here we go.
Megan: We know Chernobyl is on Disney Plus. Keep going.
John: [inaudible 01:06:08].
Craig: It’s very Elden Ring-like, as you guys know.
Aline: It would help that I don’t watch TV, right?
John: As you keep showing us.
Craig: It won’t hurt.
John: Our next program is Salvage Marines. Where is it streaming, or did we just make it up?
Aline: If it is streaming, it’s on Discovery.
Megan: It’s gotta be on Discovery, right?
Craig: We can give you a little information if you want.
John: We have a log line.
Craig: “In a green future of corporate tyranny and deep space combat, Samuel Hyst dares to dream of a life beyond the polluted industrial planet of Baen 6.”
Aline: Is it on the Syfy network?
Craig: No.
Megan: It’s not real.
Craig: Do you want to know who it stars?
Aline: Not real, I’m going to guess.
Craig: You’re incorrect.
John: Incorrect. A real show on Crackle. You can watch it now. Starring Casper Van Dien.
Craig: It is on Crackle. Here we go. The Old Man.
Aline: That’s on FX.
Megan: That’s real. That’s on FX.
Aline: That’s Jeff Bridges.
Megan: On Hulu.
Craig: Hulu, you’re right.
Aline: No, it’s FX for Hulu.
Megan: FX for Hulu.
Craig: What the fuck is the difference?
Megan: It’s FX for Hulu. It’s FX for Hulu.
Craig: You got it.
John: You got it.
Craig: You nailed it.
John: You got it!
Craig: It’s correct.
Aline: I watched it. I love it.
Craig: Nice work.
John: Irma Vep.
Aline: That’s on HBO. It was a French production. It’s Olivier Assayas. It stars-
Craig: Good Lord.
John: Jesus.
Aline: It stars the beautiful-
John: She’s getting the extra credit here. She’s like, “Teacher, teacher, I know more.”
Aline: Alicia Vikander. Alicia Vikander.
Craig: Correct.
Megan: Wow.
Craig: Mostly Fine.
Aline: I don’t…
Craig: You want a little description?
Aline: Sure.
Craig: “Two strange sisters deal with divorce, motherhood, and their father’s legendary china shop.”
Megan: Is it F-E-I-N?
Craig: It is not. It is F-I-N-E. Would you like stars?
Megan: Sure.
Craig: Lauren Graham and Zooey Deschanel.
Megan: No, that’s not real.
Aline: No, that can’t be.
Craig: It is not a real show.
John: [inaudible 01:08:07]. Rutherford Falls.
Megan: That’s real.
Aline: Rutherford Falls, yeah.
John: Where?
Aline: God, I did watch that too. I watched it too.
Megan: [crosstalk 01:08:16].
Aline: It’s Ed Helms. It’s Ed Helms.
John: Yes, that’s great.
Aline: The showrunner’s name is-
Megan: Sierra Ornelas.
Aline: … Sierra Ornelas.
John: Where is it?
Aline: It’s on…
Craig: I’ll give you a hint. Meh!
Aline: Oh, Peacock. Peacock. It’s an NBC show.
Craig: People don’t know that’s what they sound like, but they do. Roar.
Aline: That’s real, and it’s an anthology series. Alison Brie was in it.
Craig: Where do you find it?
Aline: It’s on Apple?
Craig: Yes.
John: [crosstalk 01:08:52].
Aline: I was at an Apple event literally last night talking to another person that came up and said, “Oh, I’ve got a new show.” I said, “Where’s it at?” He’s like, “Apple.” I’m like, “I never heard of it.”
Craig: Gulp.
Aline: I’m so bad! It’s so bad. We’re on the same things now, and we don’t even hear of each other’s shows.
Craig: There’s too much. Surely you’ll know about this one.
John: Woke.
Aline: That’s a semi-animated show starring Lamorne Morris.
Craig: Wow.
Aline: It was on Hulu.
Craig: We picked the wrong person to play this game.
John: Yeah, dear God.
Craig: Let’s see if you know about this one. Heartbreak High. Would you like a summary?
Aline: Yes.
Craig: “Emory becomes a social pariah when the mural she made of everyone’s past hookups goes public.” Heartbreak High.
Aline: This is a blind spot for me, because I don’t really watch high school shows.
Megan: I know, yeah. I don’t either.
Aline: I’m going to guess that is real and that it’s on… What are those high school shows on?
Megan: Freeform?
Craig: No, but it is real.
John: Real. Netflix.
Craig: It’s on Netflix.
Aline: Netflix.
Megan: There you go.
Craig: Heartbreak High.
John: Chapelwaite.
Aline: Isn’t that a British crime show?
John: I don’t know. You tell me.
Megan: Can we get [crosstalk 01:10:13]?
Aline: Is it a British crime show?
John: [crosstalk 01:10:14].
Megan: Use it in a sentence.
Craig: I have not heard of Chapelwaite.
John: “Set in the 1850s, this series follows Captain Charles Boone, who relocates his family to his ancestral Maine home. Charles has to soon confront his family’s sordid history to fight the end of darkness that has plagued them for generations.” Starring Adrien Brody.
Craig: Chapelwaite.
John: Chapelwaite.
Craig: Chapelwaite.
Megan: I have never heard of it.
Craig: Is it real?
Megan: It’s probably real, and it’s on a bus stop near my house I walk past.
Aline: Epix!
John: Epix is right. Aline [inaudible 01:10:49].
Craig: That’s inappropriate. Also, I thought it was Epix. Okay, next. Okay, smarty.
Aline: What?
Craig: Wendy.
Aline: Wendy.
Craig: Not Wendy Williams.
John: Yeah, Wendy.
Craig: Wendy. Would you like a summary?
Aline: Yes, please.
Craig: “Based on the classic Harvey comic, Wendy the Good Little Witch leaves the haunted forest but finds new terrors lurking in her high school hallways.”
Aline: No, that’s not a show.
Craig: That is not a show. You’re right.
Aline: It’s about a woman. It’s about a young woman. Why would you put that on the air?
Craig: It did say she was a witch.
Aline: If they did make it, it would be written, directed, and produced by a man.
Megan: That’s true.
John: I’m going to jump ahead to our last one here.
Craig: Let’s get Joel Kim Booster back up here.
John: The Last Kingdom.
Megan: That’s real.
Aline: That’s on Netflix. It’s a thing that my husband always wants to watch.
Craig: He sounds like a man.
John: My brother, who doesn’t watch anything, was like, “Oh yeah, we watched all four seasons and the movie.” I’m like, “This whole thing is just… ” You guys have won the-
Aline: There’s four seasons of it?
John: Four seasons. You have won the game-
Craig: You have won the game.
John: … I’ve Been Meaning to Watch That.
Craig: Well done.
Megan: Nice.
John: Let us welcome back to the stage Joel Kim Booster and Ike Barinholtz.
Aline: Oh, great.
John: Ike, I want to say, because in real life you’re not a douche bag manager. We just want to make that clear.
Ike Barinholtz: No, not anymore.
Craig: Not after tonight.
Aline: Not a manager at all.
John: I’m wondering if you could please answer this in the form of a question for us. This screenwriter, director, and actor is best known for The Mindy Project, The Afterparty, and Hulu’s upcoming History of the World, Part II. What is your question in the form of an answer, or answer in the form of-
Ike: Who is Ike Barinholtz?
John: Ike Barinholtz, everyone. Jeopardy champion, Ike Barinholtz.
Craig: This is my favorite part of the show, because we don’t have to prepare anything.
John: Nope.
Craig: We are deluged by questions.
John: Usually on our live shows, we have to give the warning of, if you’re going to ask a question, it actually has to be a question rather than a statement. We’re always nervous about questions.
Craig: Make your question a question.
John: This time, we did something different. We asked our audience to submit their questions in advance. They filled out little cards. They have been curated by our very own Megana Rao.
Craig: Yes, Megana Rao.
John: Please welcome to the stage, Megana Rao! Where are you, Megana? Megana, should we start with the audience question or your question? You get to choose.
Megana Rao: Let’s [inaudible 01:13:31].
John: Carefully step down the stage there and find [crosstalk 01:13:34].
Ike: Can I just say, this set is absolutely terrifying.
John: It is.
Megan: It’s very spooky.
Ike: That freaking skeleton up there, oh my god.
John: If you were the person who has a question for Megana, who won the raffle, do you want to ask your question, or are you passing?
Audience Member: I don’t have a question.
John: Aw.
Craig: That’s honestly the best gift you could’ve given us.
Aline: Aw.
John: Megana, I think she’s basically gifted you a question. Do you have a question you want to ask of any of these people up here?
Craig: That’s a big no. I can tell.
Megana: I spent enough time in the greenroom with them.
Ike: You have heard all the-
Joel: She’s so sick of us.
Ike: [crosstalk 01:14:06]. We’ve been talking for 30 minutes.
John: Megana, you’ve looked through these questions. What questions do you have for us here on the stage?
Megana: These are all questions from the audience, that came in before the show. Someone who did not sign it wrote, “Writers are upset about TikTok kids getting development deals, but is this different from a comedian getting a deal or optioning a bestselling book?”
Craig: Oh boy, here we go.
John: Oh, man.
Craig: How does that feel, gentlemen?
Aline: First, writers are just upset about young people being born every day, new people entering the world and trying to change things that we’ve set into place.
Joel: The bottom line is that they’re either going to make something cool or they’re not. It doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from. When you get these deals, they’re not meaningless, because you get a lot of money, but they don’t mean anything about the quality of the work. We’ve seen time and time again that a lot of social media stars do get these deals and then they don’t produce anything, because it’s a much different medium than what they’re good at. Some of them do end up making it and doing really awesome work that I enjoy. I don’t really pay too close attention to where they’re coming from. I’m mostly concerned about what are they making.
Aline: I love that answer. I love that.
Craig: That was the first good answer we’ve had on this entire podcast, ever.
Aline: I think that’s really smart. I think that’s really smart.
Megan: I met Bloom from YouTube. She just had uploaded her video. It didn’t have to go through a development program and a, I’m really bashing on men today, but another man and another man named Dave and another man named Brad and another man named Jeff to get to me. The thing that I love about TikTok is it’s people in their living rooms, it’s kids, and it’s not all people dancing. I’m going to talk more about that. I think if you create something great and then you’re put in a larger format and you can make it work for you and it’s something good, people will be judged on what they make, not how they broke in.
Ike: People are haters. It’s me and my friends living in a house, making our fucking TikToks. If they don’t like it, fuck off.
Joel: There you go.
Aline: I see you doing one of those where they come at the camera in a row and they’re dancing, and then one goes this way and the other one goes that way. What do you think?
Ike: We love it. We love all of our dances, don’t we, folks? Don’t we love our TikTok dances?
Aline: Didn’t Robert Evans just climb out of a swimming pool, and somebody saw him and was like, “Hey, you’re a star, baby.” What’s different about that from TikTok? It’s all the same.
Craig: I agree. You know what?. If you’re good at what you do, I don’t think you should be afraid of anybody. I don’t care what the new thing is. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a good writer, it’ll work.
Aline: I’m sure you experienced it, but when I worked in TV, developing pilots, they would give you a list of who the network was really into. It would be like, “We’re dying to do a show with this person.” It was always like, why?
Megan: Why?
Aline: Why? Didn’t it seem like the most random selection process?
Megan: Yes.
Aline: Then you would be walking around being like, “I’m doing a show for this person. The network really loves them.” Your friends and family would be like, “What?”
Megan: “Who?”
Ike: They’re talking about Mario Lopez, by the way, in case you’re wondering.
Aline: Be like, “He’s so funny in those interviews.”
John: Megana, do you have another question for us?
Megana: This one’s going to be a Megana question.
John: We love a Megana question.
Craig: Yay.
Megana: It’s a follow-up, because Joel and Ike were talking about social media. What is your take on writers having social media and the idea of building a brand as an emerging writer?
Craig: Brand.
John: Brand.
Craig: Brand.
Megana: I know, I set you up for that.
Craig: You’re not a person. You’re a thing.
Joel: Developing my brand on Twitter is just my fun, flirty way of saying I’m developing a mental illness.
Craig: Thank you.
Joel: Every day, deepening, deepening, deepening every day.
Aline: May I say I love you on Twitter though?
Megan: Your mental illness is so funny.
Aline: It’s a thing. I’ve found a lot of people. That’s how I knew who Joel was to begin with. There are a lot of great… I don’t know. I’m really shilling for the big corporations here.
Megan: I don’t think that it’s the thing that’s definitely going to get you a job, but I do know that when I’ve been recommended writers, I tend to Google them, and the first thing that comes up is their social media.
Ike: That’s what I was going to say. I would be careful what you tweet.
Craig: I think that your answer was perfect. It does feel like if you are aiming for a brand, then you are probably trying to monetize your personality disorder, and you should not do so. You should try and be as authentic as you can possibly be. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to go crazy. You don’t have to tell everybody everything, because people do that. Calculating a brand, it gives me the willies.
Aline: I can’t think of writers who I’m like, “Wow, social media’s killing it.”
Ike: Just don’t tweet about other writers, because you might be interviewing them.
Craig: Or don’t tweet at all.
Ike: That’s another option.
Megan: I read that, Ike, what you said about me, by the way.
Ike: So sorry. I thought I deleted it. I don’t know how to delete it. Someone needs to show me.
John: A question.
Megana: “What makes a great elevator pitch?”
Ike: It just has to have a pulley system strong enough to lift what’s inside.
Craig: I knew it was coming, but I was happy that it happened.
John: John Gatins [inaudible 01:19:10] on the stage. We have a microphone. You can share a microphone. You need to pitch something. You have 15 seconds to pitch something to somebody in an elevator situation. What are the crucial things you’re trying to get out there?
Aline: Couldn’t be a wronger guy to ask this to. Couldn’t be a wronger guy than John Gatins.
Megan: [crosstalk 01:19:25].
Aline: Here is one of the things that John has been saying to me for… John and I have known each other since 1997. He’s been retiring since then.
Craig: That’s true. That’s fact. That’s fact.
Aline: I would say 8 to 10 times a year he’s retiring. The other thing John says all the time is, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” He goes, “I went to the movies. I saw that. I don’t know. I [inaudible 01:19:48] TV. I don’t know. That guy just got made the head of a studio. I don’t know. I don’t know.” It’s actually really great. I’m going to tell you one… I have many, many, many, many, many pearls of wisdom from John Gatins.
Craig: “I don’t know.”
Aline: One of them is a gift that I have given to many people, which is that John says, “Hollywood remains undefeated.” It is incredible. I wrote that down and hung that up in our office, because it is incredible. So many people look like they’re winning in Hollywood. The car’s about to cross, and then something happens. Hollywood remains undefeated.
Then the other thing that’s actually a helpful tip that I got from John, which is, when you’re upset about something to do with work and something’s really gotten you in the gut, John has this 40-hour rule. We’ll talk about something, and then John goes, “You know what? Call me in 40 hours.” It’s a great amount of time. It’s like the glass and a half of wine. It’s not two days. It’s not two full days.
Ike: It’s a workweek.
Aline: It’s just enough time for you to… Every time we’ve ever done that and I’ve called him back, I’ve gotten over myself in 40 hour.
Craig: Nice.
Joel: I think a good elevator pitch elicits-
Aline: You wanted us to answer the question?
John: Joel, if you’ll answer the question.
Joel: I think it should elicit a question. Don’t give it all away in the pitch. It should make the person be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why are you talking to me in this elevator? I’m trying to go to my doctor’s office.”
John: That’s actually a very good point, because basically, you’re not saying, “Oh, I only have these 15 seconds.” You’re trying to get them to ask the next question that makes it go on longer than that little, short period of time you had. So smart. Megana.
Megana: Chad is a storyboard artist, and he says, “In boarding, we have exercises like retro-boarding or watching a movie and pausing and drawing what the storyboard might have looked like. This helps you learn the craft. Anything like this in screenwriting?”
John: I think I’ve told this on the podcast before. When I was first trying to figure out what the hell is screenwriting, I would tape an episode of a show, like Star Trek, and I would actually just write what I was seeing, so all the dialog, but also what would the scene look like around that. It’s a thing you can do. It’s free for everybody. It’s just figuring out what would the scene look like underneath that scene. The good thing about the internet now is we can probably look and find the actual scene pages behind that and see how does mine compare to what the actual real screenwriter wrote. You definitely can do that. It’s a thing we can experiment with.
Megan: I actually had to do this when I wrote my spec script that got me my first job in TV, because I didn’t go to… I was an English major, so I never took a screenwriting class. Then all of a sudden they told me I needed to write a spec script, and I didn’t know what that was. I watched an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Then I wrote out all the lines of dialog for every scene, and exactly what you’re talking about, and reverse engineered a script. Then I went, “Oh, it’s about 28 pages long. I guess that’s how long scripts are supposed to be.”
Ike: Then you use that as your sample.
Megan: Then I sew that back in.
John: [crosstalk 01:22:55].
Megan: They’ve done so many episodes.
Ike: It’s not cool.
Megan: They couldn’t tell the difference.
Ike: Those morons.
Megan: They just hired me and I worked.
Ike: “She really understands the tone. This script is awesome.”
Megan: It was sort of reverse engineering. Then what’s been useful to me after that is that sometimes I will write down more like an outline of what happened to describe what happens in the scene, because all the best TV shows that I love… If you can’t describe what actually happens in the scene, especially comedies… You sometimes get distracted by the jokes. What I try to do is I broom away all the jokes, don’t write down any of the funny stuff that’s happening, just write the nuts and bolts of what’s happening in the scene, because then when I go to sit down and outline my own episodes that I’m writing, it lets me be more honest about is there anything actually happening in the story or is it just funny.
Craig: Great.
Megana: “What is the smallest hill you’re willing to die on?”
Aline: One space after every period in the script.
John: Yeah, one space.
Craig: Yass.
Megan: No.
Joel: No.
Craig: Bones.
Megan: No.
Craig: Bones. Bones.
Ike: I’ve been broken. I was a two-space guy, and I’ve been broken to the one space.
Craig: You should be, because you only need to do one space.
John: I look at old scripts of mine that have two spaces, and I’m like, “Who was this person? I can’t recognize him anymore.”
Craig: What was this idiot who needed all this extra space to know that the sentence ended? Please.
John: The period did that job.
Craig: The period does it.
Megan: I think we’re all going to Hell because no one knows the difference between fewer and less.
Craig: Ever since Game of Thrones made a point of it, I think it’s been coming around. They did a pretty good job.
John: It was in there. It was a little [crosstalk 01:24:28].
Ike: The word “desperately,” spelling that one. There’s just certain words, I’m just like, my brain cannot spell it. I can’t even think of them right now, but there’s four or five words that I’m just like, “Man, fuck those words.” I can never spell them correctly.
Craig: Fuck those words.
Ike: How about you?
Joel: I would say that Season 10 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race is an underrated season.
John: Remind us who the queens were on Season 10.
Joel: Season 10, the winner of course was Aquaria, Eureka O’Hara’s second go at it, Asia O’Hara, the butterflies, tragic but iconic, and then of course Kameron Michaels. That’s the smallest hill I’m willing to die on.
John: That’s a small hill.
Craig: He stole my answer.
John: Megana, one more.
Megana: “With all the bleak news about mass buy-offs, show cancellations-“
Joel: Ending on a high note, cool.
Megana: “… decreased box office sales, etc-“
Ike: Global warming, hunger.
Craig: My cat dying.
Megana: “… what can you tell those of us who are working to become working writers that might give us hope about the future of the industry?”
Craig: Oh boy, you asked the wrong group of people.
John: Hope, hope, hope, hope.
Craig: Hope.
John: Oh my god.
Craig: Megan, they don’t know.
Megan: Sorry.
Ike: I think honestly, if you really focus on stories that you think are important and you throw everything into those stories, there’s a chance that you could end up working on Jeff Bezos’s sky raft. If you’re in the sky raft, you will live through the second atomic war. Once you’re up there, I don’t fucking know. I don’t know. Do whatever he says. To get there, really tell the stories that matter to you.
Aline: I’m going to give a more sincere answer. I have a production company. I have four wonderful people I work with. They read a lot of stuff. I read stuff after they curate it for me. If you write a great thing, it’s still really, really compelling, just because there’s more stuff, just because it’s harder, just because I think we have a huge problem with breaking people into the business now. It couldn’t be harder. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s very hard to break in, very hard to earn a living. If you write a great thing, and that’s really what you want to do, a great thing does still really stand out and will get passed along and will be treated with reverence.
Craig: Here’s a little bit of hope. The things that you’re reading about are echoes of shit that’s already happened. It’s already old. Sometimes when we talk to people that work at these places, I’m startled by how they’re monomaniacally fixated on what they’re going to be doing in 2026.
The stuff that happens now, it may feel like you’re in the middle of it. You’re actually not. It’s already happened. You don’t actually know what’s going on, because they haven’t shown it to you yet, but it’s happening now. It may very well be that the evidence of things being wiped away and collapsed is already being undermined by things being created in even larger amounts. We just don’t know. We don’t know. Maybe the Netflix ad-supported thing, suddenly all these new shows get made. We just don’t know.
It’s probably best to not pay attention to that stuff, because you can’t control it anyway. It does go up and down. It’s a very cyclical business. If you concentrate on what you love and anything you feel very passionate about that’s unique to you, that’s all you can do. That’s literally all you can do.
Megana: Aw.
Craig: Thank you, Megana.
Joel: Or you can become huge on TikTok.
Craig: That’s the other myth.
Joel: That’s the other option.
Craig: [crosstalk 01:28:25].
John: The one other thing I’ll remind people about is that if productions shrink, if we’re not making as many shows, we probably won’t make for a while, if we’re making fewer movies, if you’re an actor, it’s tough, because as an actor, you’re waiting for somebody to cast you in a thing. As a writer, you always have the ability to create your own stuff and find a new way to make that thing. One of the huge advantages of the people on this stage is we can just go off and do a new thing. Do that new thing and figure out where the next place is that you can create some things for the world. That’s the luxury of being a writer. It’s what sucks about being a writer is we have to do all our own stuff. We have to be entrepreneurs, but we can just do our thing whenever we need to do our thing.
Joel: Entertainment is democratized in a way it’s never been before. Maybe there are less opportunities to make a shit ton of money doing writing. There’s also a million opportunities and ways to put out your work now. You can take that screenplay and make it a podcast. It’s so easy to do that now. It can get out to as many people as you can get it to. You just might not make as much money.
Craig: I don’t know, those guys just sold their podcast, what’d you say, for $75 million?
John: Yeah.
Craig: We gotta get that.
John: We made a book. We’re starting, Craig. [crosstalk 01:29:33]. That’s our show. [inaudible 01:29:37].
Craig: That was a great show. That was a great show.
John: We have some people we need to thank. We need to start off by thanking Hollywood Heart, Jessica Martins, Sarah Eagen, everyone at Hollywood Heart, our own John Gatins.
Craig: Of course.
John: Also apparently UTA for their support. Hollywood Heart, everybody.
Craig: Of course, we would like to say thank you to all the volunteers who helped make tonight possible, and of course everybody who showed up here in person and online. We appreciate you.
John: There’s people watching the livestream. Hi, livestream people.
Craig: Hello, folks.
John: I want to thank Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. This is just an ideal venue. This was great. This is terrific. Thank you very much for making this all possible here at Dynasty Typewriter.
Aline: Air conditioning in here slaps.
John: I love it. It’s so good. Jerome Kurtenbach on piano!
Craig: Yay.
John: Thank you.
Craig: As always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Yay! We are the least popular things in our own show. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
John: Matthew! Thank you all. Have a great night!
Craig: Woo! Thank you guys. Thank you for coming. Woo!
John: Yay! Thank you so much!
Links:
- Learn more and donate to Hollywood Heart!
- Joel Kim Booster on Twitter and Instagram
- Ike Barinholtz on Twitter, Instagram, and Celebrity Jeopardy!
- Megan Ganz on Twitter and Instagram
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter and Instagram
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes Ep 571: Scriptnotes Live in LA, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Daniels, writing-directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere All at Once) to discuss making big, ambitious movies. The filmmakers share their process of chasing challenging ideas and the importance of novelty seeking.
We also talk about having faith in your future self, bravery, the narrative structure of pop songs, and idea generation as a fish net.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we learn about directing music videos and the unlikely flashpoint of many of their ideas. (It’s Maroon 5. No really, it is and you have to hear the explanation.)
Links:
- Daniels on Twitter, Dan Kwan on IG
- Turn Down For What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon, Houdini by Foster the People, and The Simple Song by the Shins music videos
- Interesting Ball short film
- Everything, Everywhere All at Once
- The Territory
- Pamela Ribon’s My Year of Dicks, directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir
- Spatchcocking
- Jumbo’s Clown Room
- Your Undivided Attention podcast
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Jordan (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The Daniels first appeared on John August.
John and Craig get crafty! They examine how sentence structure and word choice translate to camera direction, allowing writers to direct the reader’s eye. They offer advice on how to think about the visual and aural idea behind each noun and verb, and why the screenwriter’s task is unique. We also discuss Disney’s leadership changes, […] The post What You’re Looking At first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer/performer Matt Rogers (Fire Island, Las Culturistas) for a new installment of How Would This Be A Movie. From crypto crashes to lotto longshots, this week they look at money-themed stories in the news and why they’re worth adapting. Matt shares his background getting started as a comedy writer and tips for non-icky […] The post The Billion Dollar Episode first appeared on John August.
John and Craig investigate why some scenes are so much harder to write than others, with strategies for tackling (or surrendering) to the difficulty. We also follow up on virtual rooms, act breaks, and diversity workshops. Listener questions this week include introducing twists, getting elbowed out of your project, and whether it’s possible to be […] The post Difficult Scenes first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 570 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a followupisode. Craig: Aw. John: We’re taking […] The post Scriptnotes, Ep 570: How Much Progress? Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 569 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you sit down to […] The post Scriptnotes, Ep 569: Inspiration vs. Motivation Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Oh, oh, right, my name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 568 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, there are actors […] The post Scriptnotes, Ep 568: Writing as Acting, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 567 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, when do you want to cast […] The post Scriptnotes, Ep 567: No Stars, Please Transcript first appeared on John August.
John invites NBC Executive Marc Velez, SVP, Head of Development at UCP, on for an in-person round of the Three Page Challenge, our segment where we look at listener-submitted pages and offer honest feedback, at the Austin Film Festival. We’re joined live the writers who add context and pitch their vision for each project. From […] The post Three Page Challenge Live in Austin first appeared on John August.
John and Craig return to the Austin Film Festival for a raucous show with a full house. They invite Brenda Hsueh (The Afterparty, How I Met Your Mother) and Chuck Hayward (Ted Lasso, Wandavision) on to discuss breaking in, staff-able samples, and the dangers of losing your voice (literally!) in the room. Then we welcome […] The post Live at the Austin Film Festival 2022 first appeared on John August.
In our first live show since 2019, John and Craig welcome guests Joel Kim Booster (Fire Island), Ike Barinholtz (History of the World, part 2), Megan Ganz (Mythic Quest), and Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). They discuss writing scripted comedy vs. standup, representation, and the difficulties of being the boss. They’re joined by The Manager […] The post Scriptnotes Live in LA first appeared on John August.
John and Craig take an in-depth look at two scenes in Damien Chazelle’s WHIPLASH to see how conflicts were structured and what changed from script to shooting. We also discuss the myth vs. reality of Zola, and what we mean by a character having agency. In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Megana […] The post Whiplash on Paper and on Screen, Rebroadcast first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome back Liz Alper (Day of the Dead, The Rookie) and Brittani Nichols (Abbott Elementary, A Black Lady Sketch Show) to discuss how much progress has been made on issues from #MeToo, #PayUpHollywood, and depictions of police on screen. We look at common threads between the movements, and the difficulty of maintaining […] The post How Much Progress? first appeared on John August.
Since the launch of Writer Emergency Pack in 2015, we’ve partnered with youth writing programs to get decks into classrooms and after-school groups. By far our biggest partner is NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program. With the arrival of Writer Emergency Pack XL, I asked NaNoWriMo’s executive director Grant Faulkner for an update on how the original […] The post How classes use Writer Emergency Pack first appeared on John August.
Three years ago — October 8, 2019 — a writer who went by “Christian” emailed about their experience as a writer’s PA, explaining how they were expected to do the jobs of multiple support staff on a tiny salary. We discussed their email on the show, including the issue of needing to have a car. Last […] The post PayUpHollywood progress, an update from ‘Christian’ first appeared on John August.
John and Craig compare the romanticism and reality of writing. They discuss why inspiration is overvalued, why ‘bad motivations’ aren’t necessarily bad, and the rare bliss that occurs when inspiration and motivation align. We answer listener questions on act breaks, cover the phenomenon of show-runners as promotional vehicles, and John attempts to manifest a Van […] The post Inspiration vs. Motivation first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 566 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we have the incredible Ashley Nicole Black filling in for Craig. She’s a […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 566: Not Controversial At All, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig analyze what lessons writers can learn from acting techniques (such as staying present) and working with actors (like staying open). We also discuss writer retirement, how Craig’s “central dramatic argument” applies to TV, and the skill of cutting a character to save a scene. In our bonus segment for premium members, we […] The post Writing as Acting first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 565: Sorry to Splaflut, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss movie and television stars. When do you want to cast a huge star, and when is it not a good idea? From big names in small parts to new names in big parts, they try to calculate how much fame a role requires. We follow up on the editing process and […] The post No Stars, Please first appeared on John August.
John invites writer/producer/actor Ashley Nicole Black (Ted Lasso, Black Lady Sketch Show) to discuss fandoms, cultural appropriation and boycotts over abortion access. They also answer simpler listener questions: What do TV producer titles really mean? When should you attach a showrunner? And what happens when you disagree with your manager? In our bonus segment for […] The post Not Controversial At All first appeared on John August.
John and Craig host a round of the Three Page Challenge, a segment where they offer feedback on listeners’ scripts. This week they discuss the whiplash of cutting too quickly, captivating title pages, and V.O. narration that actually works. We also cover the return of MoviePass, 25 years of Netflix, and AI generated language. In […] The post Sorry to Splaflut first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 537 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on a mountain somewhere, which is fine, because that means I get to […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 537: The One with Mike Schur, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 563 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re going to do a deep […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 563: VFX Deep Dive, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig answer questions from listeners teetering on the precipice of success. What projects do you take after a big win? How can you make the most money in your career? And how do you move forward when your dream project dies? We follow up on vocal fry/linguistic tics, HBO Max’s recent announcements, and […] The post Brocal Fry first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Okay, okay, my name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 562 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, good lord, it’s […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 562: Finish Line Blues, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome VFX supervisor Alex Wang (The Last of Us) and VFX producer/writer Addie Manis (Foundation) to pull back the (green screen) curtain on the visual effects production process. We ask the VFX experts to break down a sample scene, line by line to explain how they’d turn scene description into an actual […] The post VFX Deep Dive first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss the confusing phenomenon of post-scriptum depression. They explain why even a good experience can feel like loss and offer tips for how to move on. We also cover the difficulty of balancing timelines in parallel storylines. Follow up this week includes a fuller explanation of the Monty Hall and a passionate […] The post Finish Line Blues first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 560 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll discuss how writers should think […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 560: Books and VFX, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 561 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why now? We’ll ask the question […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 562: Why Now? Transcript first appeared on John August.
My friend Nima recently pointed out that most of the stuff our company makes is free. That’s probably not a great business model, but it’s always been our culture. We only charge for those things that have significant ongoing costs — like upkeep and hosting — or a per-unit cost to produce. If you’re a […] The post The Free Stuff first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 559 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we will ask the eternal and perhaps […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 559: Dating Your Writing Partner, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig tackle the third question every development executive asks: “why now?” What makes an idea relevant to the moment? They offer ways writers can think about this early on in their process, including reframing it as “how now?” instead. We then talk about reversals and look at how they work on the page, […] The post Why Now? first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August. Craig Mazin: Je m’appelle Craig Mazin. John: [French language]. Craig, we’re back. You’re back from Calgary. I’m back from France. We are back in our native home city of Los Angeles. Craig: Correct. We were both […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 558: Magnetic Characters, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 557 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what happened before this moment, and […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 557: Flashbacks, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. Craig Mazin: Standards and Practices has informed us that we have violated a certain number of rules, including use of bad language that may be inappropriate, in fact is inappropriate for your children, so earmuffs, guys, or just listen to it when they’re not around. […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 556: Let’s Catch Up, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 555 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, I’m talking with the Emmy Award-winning writer behind Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 555: Marveling with Michael Waldron, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: And this is Episode 502 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we keep saying it’s important […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 502: Free Will (Or, It’s Okay to Not Be a Screenwriter), Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 554 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it is a craft compendium. We are going back to previous segments, in […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 554: Getting the Gang Back Together, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at visual effects from both a creative and budgetary perspective. From set extensions to blue screens, the guys discuss the hidden costs and tricks of post-production. We also cover the options screenwriters have when optioning books. We cover formal (and less-formal) arrangements, loose adaptations and answer a listener question on making […] The post Books and VFX first appeared on John August.
John and Craig weigh in on writing partner romances, voice-y scripts, character chemistry and end-of-draft treats in this week’s listener questions. We also host a round of How Would This Be A Movie, featuring stories on treasure hunts, jailed activists, and a sports scam. We look at how these news articles would translate to film/television […] The post Dating Your Writing Partner first appeared on John August.
John and Craig welcome Josh Wardle (creator of Wordle) and Aaron Reed (game designer and author of “50 Years of Text Games”) to discuss elegance in game design and the art of working with words. They cover the concept of S.A.D., a mysterious female collective of designers, the future of AI text based games, and […] The post Bonus Episode – Word Games first appeared on John August.
John and Craig are back together! They discuss the magnetism that draws viewers into a story, pulls characters together and pushes them through the narrative. We follow up on adulting, gun violence and remote writers rooms. We also look at the new animation writer contract and the CW sale. For our premium members, check out […] The post Magnetic Characters first appeared on John August.
Based on an earlier Three Page Challenge entry — and with the blessing of writer Andrew McDonald — I’ve posted a new video in which I revise a scene in real time. Along the way, I discuss how small choices on the page can help (or hurt) a reader’s ability to understand where characters are […] The post Clarifying scene geography first appeared on John August.
John and Craig take a look at flashbacks: reasons to incorporate them, how to manage nonlinear storylines, and when it’s too late include one. We cover ‘Side Character Summer’ and three words that ruin a screenwriter’s day. We also answer listener questions on writing partner break-ups, managers, and remote rooms. In our bonus segment for […] The post Flashbacks first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 551 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re going to the writers room to discuss the making of two of […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 551: Making the Modern Comedy Series, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Hey, Yankee fans. My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 550 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 550: Entrances and Exits, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig are back together! They chat about the box office (it’s also back!), guns in Hollywood, writing credits, and follow up on what to call the [interstitial] page in a script. We answer listener questions on imperfect story logic, writing authentically in a different language, and when it’s time to be a team […] The post Let’s Catch Up first appeared on John August.
John invites Michael Waldron (Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Loki) to share his origin story and offer advice on how to make the most of film school/internship opportunities. We discuss writing characters that cross the TV/film barrier and answer listener questions on preparing for success, looking for rejection, and how to track ideas. […] The post Marveling with Michael Waldron first appeared on John August.
John and Craig offer guidance on wrangling groups of characters. This episode features a collection of craft topics that address how to build community on the page. They cover how to introduce relationships, structure features with multiple protagonists, reasons to split up the group, and how to reunite characters. In our bonus segment for premium […] The post Getting the Gang Back Together first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer/showrunner Patrick Somerville to explore the development process for Station Eleven. From finding the source material, organizing the writers room, to writing production drafts, they walk through the steps of creating a limited series. Along the way, Patrick explains how he transitioned careers from novelist to television writer, and advises a listener on […] The post Adapting Station Eleven first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In Episode 547 we […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 549: The Sideways Effect, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 545 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be discussing nuclear energy, nuclear safety, and nuclear war, both the realities and […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 545: The Nuclear Episode, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 546 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking at the genre/form of limited series based on actual events with […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 546: Limited Series, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 547 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting screenwriters. Today on the show, we live on a planet experiencing climate change, yet the stories we tell tend […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 547: Good Energy, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 548 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, films may have returned to theaters, but many of them are still being made […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 548: Made for Streaming, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig host a round of the Three Page Challenge where they look at listener pages and offer feedback on what’s working and how to avoid common pitfalls. This week we look at time jumps, reveals, and ticker-tape dialogue. We follow up on confusing credits, then answer listener questions on narrative geography, professional development […] The post Parentheses Would Help first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writers John Hoffman (Only Murders in the Building, Looking) and Brittani Nichols (Abbott Elementary, A Black Lady Sketch Show) to bring us behind the scenes of the comedy writers room. They explain ‘alts’ (alternative line jokes), crafting tone, and the process of pitching. We also discuss the sophomore season and different comedic engines. […] The post Making the Modern Comedy Series first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss the mechanics of getting characters in and out of scenes. They cover why writers might show a character’s entrance or exit, both what it accomplishes for the story and the expectations it sets up for the audience. We get an update from ‘Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School’ […] The post Entrances and Exits first appeared on John August.
John welcomes Willa Paskin on to discuss Sideways Effect, centering on an episode of her podcast Decoder Ring. Willa looks at how dialogue in the 2004 film upended the red wine industry. John and Willa then look at other movie moments that have have shaped cultural behavior, including Clark Gable’s missing t-shirt sales and the […] The post The Sideways Effect first appeared on John August.
On Scriptnotes 541, Craig and I discussed which of the classic D&D attributes (Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity and Charisma) were most important for an aspiring film and TV writer. We ranked intelligence first, while acknowledging that charisma was important for the social aspects of the job. We felt wisdom was gained through experience — […] The post The Odd Joy of the Wizard/Paladin first appeared on John August.
John and Aline Brosh McKenna welcome writing team Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (How I Met Your Mother, Most Likely to Murder, Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers) to chat about made-to-stream movies. They discuss the joys of niche IP and how changes in the film landscape have resurrected certain genres. We follow up on ‘Murder […] The post Made for Streaming first appeared on John August.
John invites Anna Jane Joyner and Quinn Emmett from Good Energy Stories to discuss climate change on screen. Climate change affects every creature on our planet, so why don’t we see it more on television? They discuss opportunities for writers to inspire change and raise awareness to capture the environmental concerns of our time. We […] The post Good Energy first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 544 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Last week, Megana and I answered 20 listener questions without […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 544: 20 Questions with Craig, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer/creators Liz Meriwether (New Girl, The Dropout) and Liz Hannah (The Girl from Plainville, The Post) to discuss the genre/form of “limited series based on actual events.” Meriwether and Hannah explain what compelled them to each project and the process of realizing each story on screen. We also play a lightning round of […] The post Limited Series first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 540 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do we get characters to […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 540: Nice to Meet-Cute You, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 541 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, which trades are the most important […] The post Scriptnotes Episode 541: Intelligence vs. Charisma first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 542 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig, I thought I trusted you, I believed […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 542: Betrayed! Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 543 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. While it may sound like a normal John and Craig episode, […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John talks with Joan Rohlfing (Nuclear Threat Initiative, U.S. Department of Energy) and author/reporter David E. Hoffman (Washington Post) about nuclear energy, nuclear safety and nuclear war — both the current reality and how these issues are portrayed in Hollywood. Joan and David explain how the nuclear landscape has changed over the decades, the stories […] The post The Nuclear Episode first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 539 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we ask the eternal question, how would this be a movie? This time focusing on stories and topics related to science. To help us out, we have two special guests joining us. First, Erin Macdonald is an astrophysicist PhD and a tattooed one-woman career panel for the field. She lives in Los Angeles, working as a writer and producer, and is currently the science consultant for the entire Star Trek franchise. Welcome, Erin.
Erin Macdonald: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
John: I have so many questions about the science in the franchise, and specifically space science as it relates to Star Trek, which feels like it’s a long history there. Warp drives, we’ll get into all that stuff with you today hopefully.
Erin: Excellent.
John: Next up we have Leigh Whannell. He is an Australian screenwriter, actor, producer, and director, known for co-creating the Saw and Insidious franchises with James Wan. He made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3, and has since directed 2 more films, the widely acclaimed Upgrade, and The Invisible Man, which was the last movie I saw in theaters pre-pandemic. Leigh, welcome back to the show.
Leigh Whannell: Thanks for having me again.
John: You were on Episode 354, which was an episode that Craig recorded without me. Now we’re recording this episode without Craig. Essentially, we always have to keep one of us off the podcast when you’re there, because you’re just too dangerous.
Leigh: It would be too dangerous, like combining the wrong type of chemicals.
John: It’s all risky. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, speaking of risk, we are going to talk about Leigh’s proposal for a period shopping mall theme park experience. I’m strongly in favor of this happening, for the record, and so I want to really work through all of the possibilities for Leigh’s proposal to create a theme park experience period mall.
Leigh: Excellent.
John: We’ll do it. Before we get into sciencey stuff, we have a business question. Actually, it’s here from Megana. Megana, can you ask your question that I see here in the outline?
Megana Rao: I saw this tweet from Ed Solomon about the accounting for Men in Black. I spent an embarrassingly long time looking through these documents, and I feel so confused about what I’m looking at. I was hoping you guys could explain some of the movie accounting to me. He says, “Sadly, Men in Black lost over $5 million this period alone. Someone needs to call Sony and tell them to stop building sets. Seriously, does nobody know how to run a business?”
John: Ed Solomon is putting up links here to the profit definition, the profit statements from Men in Black, obviously a huge, huge hit, one that spawned many sequels. He’s one of the credited writers on it. He has a net profit participation in the movie. The movie is not into net profits, even having generated gazillion dollars. Leigh Whannell, you are a person who’s written movies that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Is this at all familiar to you?
Leigh: I did enter the film world through a different door. It wasn’t the front door. Obviously, Men in Black was a film that was made very much within the studio system. Big studio, big money, big movie stars. The first few films especially that I was involved in were definitely independent films. The first Saw film was actually financed by the producers. Two of the producers did what they say you should never do in Hollywood, which is spend your own money. They mortgaged their houses to pay for that movie. It’s a very different financial map. I guess it’s the old saying of betting on yourself. I think with those movies, by betting on ourselves, maybe we saw more backend and more profits.
What I hear about these big studio films, and maybe you can enlighten me, John, is that they always find some creative accounting to show why, “Oh, no no no, you see, the standees that we made in Malaysia mean that you don’t get your profit participation checks.” That’s what I hear from people who have worked more in the big budget studio system.
John: I’ve made many movies for Sony and for other places. I made Aladdin. I will guarantee you the movies will never turn a technical profit. The reason behind it is that setting out to make this movie, the studio takes a loan out to make the movie. They’re borrowing $150 million or whatever to make this film. Your film Invisible Man is probably similar sort of [unclear 00:04:20] because it was not that expensive, but it was still expensive enough that it will never turn a technical definition of profits.
These studios are taking out this big lump of money to make this film. They’re spending the money to make the film. They’re charging interest on that loan for the whole time. Even though they are both the bank and the person borrowing the money, they are essentially continuing to generate interest on that original loan, and that original loan will never pay down. They’re also throwing every conceivable expense against the film, including a distribution fee, which is money they’re paying themselves to distribute the film, basically all the other overhead and accounting they’re throwing at it. These films will never achieve technical profit, based on the definitions. Those definitions are laid out in the contracts that you and I have signed as writers when we are doing this. Even the attorneys who we’re paying good money for tell us never to expect to see real money in the backend on these things.
Leigh: You say the studios take out a loan, are you saying… This might prove my naivete on these matters. Are they taking out a loan from themselves? Don’t these studios have vaults full of cash that essentially when they finance movies, the money, it doesn’t come from a bank, it comes from those vaults? It comes from the studio coffers, right?
John: Yep. You would think that you could not loan yourself money in that way, but that is technically what they are doing. Each of these films, just like your Saw film or Insidious film, it is its own company that is formed and set up to do the thing. They’re loaning money to that production to do this. There’s many ways they could be structured. It could also be structured as an international situation. They are designing things in ways to maximize the amount of money that the studio gets back in without the film itself getting paid money.
Leigh: It is interesting to hear about things. I had a friend of mine who was directing a film for Universal, and he wanted to shoot some scenes on the studio back lot, in one of the studios. One of the producers was saying, “It’s too expensive.” My friend said, “This is a Universal film and we’re shooting on the Universal lot.” The producer said, “Yeah, you don’t get a discount for that. They will charge us.” I just found that an insane version of double dipping.
John: There might be circumstances where a studio will require a production to use its things, for certain good reasons, but they will still charge that full freight for using their own facilities. That’s just how it goes. This can be frustrating, but it’s also, I think, because it is unlikely that a writer will ever be paid these kind of net profits on things, that’s why you find other ways as a writer to get some backend participation. Obviously, residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of the film, and so we get paid residuals no matter how much it shows on this statement, which is great.
We might also ask for box office bonuses. If we know that our film is going to be theatrically released, which is never a given in 2022, we can say, “When the US theatrical box office on this film hits $50 million or $100 million, you have to write me a check for X.” That’s one way to get around these impossible net profit definitions. Megana, did we answer your question to any degree?
Megana: You did. Basically, it’s not supposed to make sense to me, but yeah.
John: When you’re back in the office, I can show you Aladdin statements or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory statements that show that they are similarly money-losing propositions on paper, even though they’ve made the studios good money.
Megana: Thank you very much.
John: We just played the role of business consultant here, explaining to Megana how this weird thing in accounting work. I’m only vaguely qualified to do that. I’m not qualified to talk about space or astrophysics. Luckily, Eric Macdonald is qualified to talk about this. Can you give us, Erin, a sense of your history studying astrophysics and how that segued into your working on the Star Trek franchise?
Erin: I’ve always been interested in film and television and the entertainment industry. I made that fork crossroads decision when I went to college, or university, to decide to study physics. As I went through there, I realized I didn’t quite like it as a career. I did research for many years, specifically in gravitational waves. I went through, did my PhD in Scotland, had a great experience, but when it came to the postdoc life of research, that wasn’t really for me.
When I left academia, I was looking for things that would scratch some of the things that I enjoyed doing in academia, one of which was teaching. I started going to sci-fi conventions to teach about the science behind things like Star Trek. I would go and give these science talks, and they were hugely popular. People just really lined out the door to see these talks. I started going to multiple conventions all around the country. I started to meet a lot of writers, creators. Then when I moved out to Los Angeles, a lot of them started to give me a call and start folding me in. I found my way in a very indirect route to now be a part of the entertainment industry, which I’m thrilled about.
John: Can you talk about those early calls you’re getting, asking for your advice, your input on a project? What are the kinds of things that, at a writing stage, they want to know from an actual scientist?
Erin: Typically, it’ll just depend on when they find out that I exist, whatever the stage the project is in. Typically, it’ll be in that story development period, where they’re coming up with a high concept, especially for some hard sci-fi. They’re going to ask me questions about like, this is the method of faster-than-light travel we use, or this is the energy source that this population’s using, or here’s the inciting incident that is somehow science-based. Can you just give me a pass on it to see how it feels? I always say, all right, if I can read it and it doesn’t make me throw up in my mouth, that’s a good pass.
Leigh: Erin, I have to say, this is really strange kismet that you’re on this episode, because I recently in the last six months started writing a sci-fi, horrory type thingy and needed to talk to an astrophysicist because our film was about that. Everything you’re talking about is exactly what I’m basically sitting someone down and saying, okay, how ridiculous is this?
Erin: I love that, by the way. I try to take the approach with writers that I’m going to “yes and” your project. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people with very negative experiences with science consultants, where they have a friend or a friend of a friend who has a background in that story, and then they send them the idea, and the response is like, “Nope, that doesn’t work. Science doesn’t work like that.” I really try to take a more positive approach, like, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, let’s see how we can make this work and let’s see to what extent we need to explain it.” That’s sometimes a lot of what I do too is just say, “Yeah, you can do it. Just don’t try to explain it.”
John: Let’s think about the kinds of questions a writer might ask. A lot of times these are bigger conceptual questions. If it’s gravitational wave, faster-than-light travel, this is the means of faster-than-light travel I’m planning to use in my script, so great, and talking them through the options there. In some cases are you also talking about what the lingo is, what an actual astrophysicist would say in these moments? We had Zoanne Clack on the show, who was originally hired as a writer’s consultant on Grey’s Anatomy. She was there as a medical consultant, not just for like, this is the medical procedure, this is the disease, but also like, this is what a doctor would actually do or say in those moments. Do you get involved in this is what an astrophysicist would be like?
Erin: Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s where the direction of my career has gone. I still have those early concept conversations like you were talking about, Leigh, but now when I’m folded into a writer’s room or into a specific show, it can be all the way from story development and most of my days reading scripts. I will give little tweaks to the dialog here and there. Then like you talked about, maybe not necessarily getting the technological language right, but more the conceptual drive of what a scientist does. That’s something I’ve done for a number of episodes, where they have a scientific problem, and I’ll help the writer’s think through it as you would a scientist to build that story and to drive that forward.
John: We had a conversation two weeks ago with Mike Schur from The Good Place. He was talking about as it came time to do the moral philosophy on his show, he had done a lot of reading on moral philosophy, but he needed an expert who could really talk about this the way that a philosopher would talk about it. He enlisted Todd May and another philosopher on to do that. It sounds like you’re involved in a similar place where the writers may have a good sense of what they’re trying to do in general, and they’re coming to you for specific help and making this actual fit with everything else that’s around it. Is that right?
Erin: Yeah. What’s really interesting about my role now is I’m available to the whole Star Trek franchise. That’s five shows right now that are currently in development. They all use me very differently. Some of it is based on the fact that I’ve been with them for multiple seasons, and so that trust and that relationship has grown. I’ll be in from breaking season arcs all the way through to sitting in the writers room to reading scripts, but even be involved with the post-production aspects and help with graphics. Other shows, I’ll just get the script and I’ll just edit little dialog and just do a little wordsmithing here or there.
Any time I’m approached about a science-fiction project, I always like to ask, okay, science fiction is a huge spectrum of science to fiction, and tell me where you want to live, and we’ll tweak the science to fit that appropriately, because there’s a lot of different types of sci-fi out there.
John: Speaking of different types of sci-fi, Leigh, your film The Invisible Man involves a scientist who’s developed a means of invisibility, which is very different than in the original film. He’s really using optics to become invisible, and a suit that lets him do this. At what point in the development of the script were you really figuring out, oh, this is what is believable to me for how this invisibility technology works?
Leigh: It’s a good question, because Invisible Man and Upgrade were both films incorporating a lot of sci-fi elements. I am definitely not a science major. If you started quizzing me about the Periodic Table, I would draw a blank, but yet I have my imagination. It’s been strange to watch certain things that I’ve invented in my mind somehow create some link to the real world. In the case of The Invisible Man, I thought, what if you had a suit covered with cameras, and each camera was taking thousands of pictures and then simultaneously projecting a hologram, so it’s almost like this hologram suit.
We were well into pre-production in Sydney, Australia, when we went and talked to some scientists at the Sydney Institute of Technology. We were explaining to them that it would work. They were thinking, and they were like, “Yeah, that could work.” They said the technology’s not there yet, but if you had a camera that could render fast enough and take these images and project. It was almost like I was retroactively given the green light on what I was thinking, but by that point the ship had sailed. It is interesting, this meeting ground between your imagination and real science.
John: For our topic today on How Would This Be A Movie, it’s interesting, some of them actually are things that started out as science fiction and then crossed more into scientific discussion. There are ideas that were first broken in the pages of sci-fi, yet the underlying concepts were interesting enough that given enough time, real science could catch up to these ideas.
Let’s segue right into some How Would This Be A Movies. For this installment, I asked our listeners on Twitter for suggestions on articles, topics to explore, and as always, they delivered. We picked a mix of some astrophysics, social science, some biology. I want to dig into some of the reality of each topic, but then also, what are the fictional possibilities based on the topic. This first one is an example of something that we first see in science fiction and then explored more. This is the Dyson sphere. Erin, maybe you could help us explain what a Dyson sphere is and why we might be looking for those out in space.
Erin: Yeah, totally. I love Dyson spheres. I’m very excited about this. Dyson spheres are a theoretical construct, kind of a thought experiment that people have put together about trying to find advanced life out in other solar systems. Really quickly, we live in our solar system, which is a bunch of planets that orbit a star, and then there’s millions and millions of stars in our own galaxy, and then there’s a bunch of galaxies out there. Typically on this scale we’re just talking about within our galaxy, but outside of our solar system. The idea of a Dyson sphere is that you essentially build a giant sphere, sometimes starts as a ring, then that ring starts to grow, that goes all the way around the star, and it’s essentially solar panels, that you’re able to harvest all of the solar energy off of this star. It’s an insane amount. If your civilization is advanced enough to do that, then the idea is they’ll probably need that much energy anyway.
John: A Dyson sphere is a way of harnessing all the power of a star. The reason why we might notice those out there is if you’re actually collecting all this energy, astronomers here on Earth, using our space telescopes, might notice that something is weird about that star, and they might be able to see the effects of this Dyson sphere and that it’s collecting all this energy.
Erin: Yep, absolutely correct. When it comes to trying to find a Dyson sphere, the big thing is trying to find ways that astronomers can differentiate between an artificial object like a Dyson sphere versus any sort of naturally occurring objects. This actually happened. There was something called Tabby’s Star, where they discovered it had a weird signal to it, that it could be artificial, but upon further investigation, they think that it’s just a bunch of debris that’s around this star that was making its signal look weird. That’s the tricky part about astrophysics.
What I think makes it a great vessel for storytelling is we just have to take what the universe gives us. We really don’t know anything. We can’t create our universe in a lab. We get these puzzle pieces that we have to put together. Dyson spheres are a really exciting one to explore.
John: Let’s think about this in terms of a movie, because building a Dyson sphere would presumably take thousands of years, and so it’s not a thing that’s going to be happening in the course of one of our movies, most likely. It could be a character who is encountering a Dyson sphere that exists in the world, finding proof of an alien civilization, because they have one. Leigh, what’s jumping out to you in terms of a way that a Dyson sphere could appear in a film that you want to make?
Leigh: The first thought I had was of those two options. Are we building a Dyson sphere to save our universe or do we come across a Dyson sphere? I feel like you solved the first problem. It would take too long to really make a film about building one. Maybe this is a film about finding a Dyson sphere. It’s so funny, because the film I’m writing right now, I could really incorporate some of these elements. I would say coming across or seeing a Dyson sphere at a distance, and then where do we go from there?
John: It feels like it’s a setting, it’s an initial incident, but it’s not the actual thing itself. Erin, you can tell us… Obviously, there’s probably NDAs for future stuff, but have Dyson spheres already appeared in the Star Trek universe?
Erin: They have, actually, totally NDA-free. This was in The Next Generation. There was an episode where they discovered a Dyson sphere around a star system. It was a Next Generation episode, but they were able to bring back Scotty from the original series, that his ship has crashed into this Dyson sphere. That’s exactly what it was. It had a huge gravitational pull. That’s why his ship crashed, because it was just so massive. In this case it was a fully closed sphere, which it doesn’t need to be. The gravitational attraction of this is what caused the ship to crash. It’s been seen before.
John: We can’t talk about search for extraterrestrial life without maybe bringing up the Fermi Paradox, that sense of, there should be so many civilizations out there, given the time span of the universe, and there should be more things out there. It’s the question of why does it seem like we’re the only people, or at least we don’t see any other civilizations out there.
That paradox could be answered in a couple different ways. One of the possibilities is that no civilization actually gets up to the point where they would build a Dyson sphere that we could see them, they all collapse first, or there may be other reasons that we can’t understand why we’re the only ones who are visible. Maybe people are out there and they’re hiding because it’s a good idea to hide. There’s all sorts of interesting, provocative questions that are raised by the lack of evidence out there.
Erin: I love the Fermi Paradox. You touched on a couple good ones. Like you said, it’s this idea that it takes so long to create this advanced capability, whether that is a Dyson sphere or something like warp drive to be able to visit other star systems. A big one for me is not the philosophical aspect, but just the probability that your civilization is going to have an extinction event from space, like a gamma ray burst wiping you out, is much higher than you having enough time to build that. The analogy I use, it’ll take you 200 years to build a house, but you live in a 100-year floodplain. It’s going to wipe you out before you do it.
John: It’s all very dispiriting.
Erin: It is.
John: Leigh, let’s think about characters in this situation, because it feels like if we’re out in space doing things, we have such tropes about what space [unclear 00:21:38] are like, but is there any other way to get into the characters who would be in this story?
Leigh: I think if we’re talking about the human characters here, it sounds like a film about humans meeting obviously a much more advanced civilization. What’s interesting to me about a lot of these films is that a lot of sci-fi films that involve creatures from space or other civilizations still couch it in very human terms. A spaceship is a very graspable concept for human beings. It’s a flying car and the aliens look just like us except their skin is green or something. I find the mysteries of space so much more enticing, like the last 15 minutes of 2001, where what’s happening is so far beyond your comprehension. I do think Arrival was a recent film that, it made the aliens very mysterious. I thought their language was very provocative. For me, I see a movie about us primitive humans, the ants on the side of the freeway, meeting this super advanced civilization and learning about them, I guess.
Erin: I can throw out one fun science thing that you can maybe play with for the story, which is the fact that it takes light time to reach us from other stars. We might detect a Dyson sphere that’s, let’s say 100 light years away, but we saw them as they were 100 years ago. You can always factor that in in space exploration stories, especially about humanity, that can sometimes talk about the passage of time or the futility of existence, because hoping that they’re still there by the time you’re able to talk to them.
John: Or that they might be on their way to us. Can you give us a quick primer on warp drives, both the warp drives that exist in the Star Trek universe and what the other versions of warp drives we see in the Star Wars universe? What are the basic edges of faster-than-light travel in these different environments?
Erin: There’s typically about three flavors of faster-than-light travel. Warp drive is the one most people think of. That’s this idea that when you’re on the surface of space time, this bowling ball on the trampoline visual some people are familiar with, you cannot go faster than the speed of light. Once you have no mass, then you just coast in a straight line. Warp drive is saying, what if space time goes faster than the speed of light and you wrap that fabric of the trampoline around your ship and then that moves you faster than the speed of light. That’s essentially how warp drive works.
Other fun examples include things like wormholes, whether they’re artificial or naturally occurring, which is, again, thinking about that fabric, that trampoline, you take two points and you have a tunnel between them that’s actually shorter than the whole distance from traveling along the surface. We’ve seen a lot of those.
John: I think it’s Carl Sagan I first saw on Cosmos, who had the piece of paper bench and a pencil sticking through. That’s a very classic image of the hole through the plane.
Erin: Bingo. Exactly. That’s it. Again, wormholes are something similar to warp drive that mathematically our understanding of space time, they could exist. It’s just we’ve never seen one or we don’t have enough energy to create that. Then the final way to travel faster than the speed of light are things like we saw in Battlestar Galactica or Dark Matter, which were jump drives or blink drives, which is where you spool up. It’s as if you’re pulling that fabric toward you, using a ton of energy, and then you make a small jump, and then you let go and you get catapulted to where you were wanting to go. Also takes a ton of energy to do that.
You mentioned Star Wars, so I’ll just explain briefly. Star Wars is hybrid between a wormhole and a jump drive. It’s as if you’re building the wormhole as you’re traveling through that. Yes, I’ve tried to science Star Wars.
John: Let’s go from these big cosmological problems to really small, inside your DNA problems. We have a tradition of movies that explore science that goes too far. We have these human-animal hybrids, Island of Dr. Moreau. It turns out that hybridism is actually much more common than we would’ve guessed. Specifically chimerism, which is where a human has two different sets of DNA in themselves. We’ll put a link to a couple different articles about this. Oftentimes it’s from in the womb. You’ve absorbed your identical twin, and so both of your sets of DNA are in there. In real life, there are examples of a woman who was suspected of murder for her young children, and it turned out that she actually had a chimerism disease, disorder, that was causing these kids to be dying, or their DNA samples didn’t match who they should be, or they were not the father of their own children, weird situations that come up like this. Let’s think through some movie options, story options for chimerism. Leigh, is anything jumping to mind?
Leigh: I feel like my brain, it must be stuck in bad ’90s thriller mode or something, because the first thing that comes to my mind when you’re talking about this hybrid is it’s one bad twin, one good twin. They’re one human being, but it’s almost a Jekyll and Hyde situation with two personalities fighting each other and maybe one personality not remembering what the other person’s doing.
John: That’s literally the plot of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which is that it’s an unborn twin.
Leigh: One of my favorite Stephen King books when I was a teenager. Underappreciated. That’s right, in that book he ingested his twin and it became his pen name. That’s where my brain first goes, but maybe that’s just the first piece [unclear 00:27:07] that you get out all the bad ideas before you get to the good one.
John: Erin, it seems like part of the issue, why we’re just discovering chimerism right now, is that there’s really no reason to check a person’s DNA unless there is a problem. It’s only in these weird fringe cases like a crime or a paternity thing that we would even notice that someone had two sets of DNA in them.
Erin: That seems to be the case. I think when you look up examples of chimerism, a lot that you see are aesthetic duality. You can play a lot with visuals there, where you have one half of the flower is one color, one half is another one, or a cat that’s half one type of cat and half the other type of cat, because it seems like… Again, I’m not a biologist, but it does seem like this DNA almost, it’s like they merge but they exist side by side as opposed to existing throughout the whole body. It’s really interesting.
John: It is. Let’s think about the kind of characters we would find in this story. Thrillers are natural, but maybe there’s options for comedies or other kinds of stories. It could be the main character is a chimera, actually has this double set of DNA. It could be like The Dark Half or it could be some other reason why they’re manifesting as two selves. It could be also the investigator who’s trying to find out how it’s possible this crime was committed by somebody who doesn’t match up to this thing or the DNA’s not matching. It could be a scientist exploring this. Leigh, any thoughts about who you’d want to see in this story?
Leigh: I like it from the point of view of the person living it, rather than the investigator, which turns it into a twist, like aha.
John: It feels like a Law and Order episode.
Leigh: Exactly, whereas I think a movie from the perspective of somebody who’s actually sharing their consciousness and their body with some other set of DNA, I think this could be really interesting, like a first-person. Maybe the two sides could be communicating with each other. You have these long blackouts where the other guy’s in charge. Then the two sides of the personality are communicating about what the other one’s doing. I think that’s a more interesting thing.
John: Erin, I’m thinking back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, or sorry, it was a later show. There’s the Dax character who has… It was a person who, they have another consciousness inside them. It feels like a trope that Star Trek has played with a bit.
Erin: Oh yeah, for sure. I think whether it’s a dual personality or whether it’s something that exists somewhat separately. Like you said, the Trill were these alien species that had a symbiont that would pass from a host to another. Instead of it being a chimerism thing, then you’re thinking it’s almost like two sentient entities. You’re talking a little bit more about a parasite symbiotic relationship, which is really fun. Then when I see chimerism, the first thing I think of is the original series episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where you have the people who are white on one half and Black on the other. Black on the other half and white on the other half. It’s a not so deep metaphor.
John: I can’t imagine an analogy for anything.
Erin: They hate each other. Again, that’s more visual, whereas what you’re talking about is much more psychological, which I think would be a fun area of this to explore.
John: It’s also easier to envision a world in which chimerism was so common that people visually did look interesting. You could tell that they had multiple people in them at all times. We’ll put examples too. These people whose skin tones don’t match from side to side, but you can have more extreme examples than that. That doesn’t go quite to the black and white Star Trek, but it could be an interesting look for a character. If Craig were here, he’s always talking about hair, makeup, and wardrobe and how characters look. It could be an interesting detail for how a character looks. I like that.
When Craig was on the show, a couple weeks ago, we were talking in the Bonus Segment about population and how growing up I was always taught to fear population growth, that basically we’d run out of resources, that the world’s population was going to get too big, and now suddenly we’re facing, like, oh, populations are declining in a way that could be very detrimental, and population loss is a thing.
I want to talk about the scientific concepts behind sudden population loss. Asked on Twitter was, how much of the population do you have to lose where you go from a Leftovers situation, where they lost 3% of the population, it was sad, but life goes on, to Station 11, where they lose almost all of the population and you’re suddenly back in agrarian times. I’d love to talk through the math and science behind how much of the population you can lose before everything changes and everything falls apart.
Erin: When you think about population, there’s an interesting aspect, which is the exponential growth. I think I remember those messages sent from the past about how population growth is out of control. There is true to some extent, but when you really think about it, let’s imagine the blip, where half of life gets wiped out.
John: In the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Erin: Yes, correct.
John: The Thanos snap.
Erin: I remember seeing something where people were like, if you just got rid of half the people now, our global population would be down to what it was in 1970.
John: Which doesn’t seem so bad at all.
Erin: Right, but half seems like a lot. That’s just our understanding of exponential growth, which I think we’ve also seen a lot this past year with how exponentially things can spread from one person to another. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around sometimes. I’d probably err on going on the more extreme example of that.
John: It’s also this question of how quickly you lose all the people. If you lose 50% of your population in the snap of fingers, you’re also going to have a lot of collateral lost, based on the planes that were in the air and the people who are stranded and things falling apart. I think my question, which it’s hard to answer scientifically, but I think is good to grapple with as writers, is what other institutions of our civilization would just completely collapse if we didn’t have enough people to do them, that the human infrastructure behind things would be really challenging? Leigh, as you’re thinking through this space, we always talk about post-apocalyptic and we always think about, oh, there are zombies now or there’s some other problem, but honestly just having not enough people can be its own struggle.
Leigh: I was going to say, maybe the most interesting thing for me would be somewhere between the Leftovers and Station 11, whereas Leftovers was a chunk of the population and they were just dealing with the weirdness of it, and then Station 11 is everybody. What if it was like all of a sudden, there’s still a lot of people, but it’s half what was there before, and suddenly it’s like, wait, nobody knows how to make this anymore. We lost most of our scientists. It’d be interesting to suddenly see people having to grapple with minds that have been lost. A lot of people who were maybe working on things that were going to improve the planet are suddenly gone.
Erin: That’s so funny you say that, because I really feel… When I worked in engineering, and in academia, we had a lot of people that were like that, that had been in the industry for 30, 40 years, and make the morbid joke, like, man, he better not get hit by a bus. We’re in so much trouble.
John: Think back to the Y2K bug and all the problems that could’ve happened if we’d not been able to pull people out of retirement to fix the computer systems that were written in. Was it Coble?
Erin: Yeah.
John: They were the folks who actually knew how those things were built. If you lose certain people who know certain things, that’s going to be a huge impact, the folks who actually know how to run the nuclear power plants or know how to run our water systems. You look at the zombie shows, you look at The Walking Dead, and the zombies are terrifying, but not being able to use a sink is also terrifying.
Leigh: You think about time travel, I remember talking to a friend once and saying, “Yeah, I’d love to go back in time, 200 years. I would just rule the population by holding up my iPhone.” My friend was like, “Yeah, but could you explain to them how it works?” I was like, “No.” He was like, “What happens when it runs out of batteries? What would you do? Could you explain to them how a toaster works?” I was like, “No, but I could tell them what it was.” He was like, “You would very quickly be flayed and hung on the castle and you wouldn’t amount to anything because you can’t actually make anything or explain it.” He was very right about that.
John: That’s where I think it’s so interesting about sudden population loss, because it’s like time travel, where you’re having to revert back to an earlier time, even though you’re moving forward in time. It’s like certain things just can’t be done anymore because you don’t have those capabilities. As you think about this as a movie, let’s think about what characters we may want to see in this story, which also I guess depends on what time frame we want to tell our story in. Station 11, it’s both present day and jumping forward 20 years to what happens after that.
Leigh: What if it was a scientist character who was building something that maybe was going to some sort of climate technology that was maybe going to improve the world, and then suddenly he was part of the population that disappeared, and his teenage children or adult children are suddenly left with this thing that they don’t understand how it works, that their father was the mastermind of. He’s creating a tension there of we have all this stuff, but we don’t know how it works anymore.
Erin: Yeah, or even their colleagues or their people that they were mentoring or that are now having to piece together what they were working on.
Leigh: Exactly. There we go. Let’s [unclear 00:36:22].
John: In the second South Park movie about COVID, that actually is a plot point, where this one guy has built this thing that no one else can figure out how to do. It’s definitely an idea that’s out there, that sense of the person who’s created the situation is the only person who can solve it, and we can’t find the person who created the situation, which feels great. That person is probably not the central character. That’s the obstacle, the McGuffin we’re looking after. It’s either children of that person or someone else who is searching.
Leigh: Perhaps the thing that caused the massive population loss could be what the scientist character was working on. Suddenly he’s one of the people that’s gone, and his children or his colleagues, as Erin said, have to figure out how it works before everybody’s gone. There’s this ticking clock of how do we figure out how this thing works before we all disappear and there’s not 50% of the people here, there’s 0%.
John: At least pointing out that we have to have continuous stakes. If it’s a onetime event where we lose half the population, that’s horrible and there’s repercussions, but what are the ongoing stakes? What’s the ongoing narrative tension that’s being built up through the situation? Something like it’s going to keep happening.
Leigh: Maybe if there’s a rip in the dimensional fabric. Now we’re getting into Marvel territory. If there’s some sort of cataclysmic event, cosmic event causing the population loss, and this machine or device that the scientist character, she or he has been working on and is suddenly gone, I think as that tear in the cosmic fabric gets bigger and bigger, you’re like, there’s something to work towards.
Erin: I really like the idea of it being a continuous event and that ticking bomb of like, all right, we have to make this as accessible and as understandable to anyone, because we don’t know who’s going to go next.
John: Let’s talk about accessibility and understandability, because our characters in the movie are trying to understand it, but also we as an audience have to understand it. I think back to, Leigh, your explanation of how the suit works in Invisible Man. It was really clear. You were showing it to us. We were seeing it happen. It’s like, oh, I get what it was, and there wasn’t anything more to it. Anything that’s involving a scientist concept, we have to think about what is the simplest, most logical way to explain what’s happening here without over-explaining it.
Leigh: I always love people explaining something to a child. It’s always helpful, because then again, I think it’s a way to dramatize exposition. I feel like one of the gold standards for this is the scene in Jurassic Park when they sit down and they get the kids animation that’s like, hey kids.
Erin: 1,000%.
Leigh: Here’s how dinosaur DNA works. I remember the 13-year-old watching that movie in theaters. Within 30 seconds, the writers and the filmmakers had completely explained this hugely complicated concept of extracting dinosaur DNA from mummified mosquitoes. All of a sudden I was like, “Great, got it,” and they can just move on with the monsters and the crashing and the bashing. It was beautiful. I feel like if you involve a child, and the child’s like, “I don’t understand,” and you just have a character saying, “Look, this McGuffin over here is going to fix all our problems,” I feel like that’s a good way to explain it to the audience.
Erin: It’s a classic trope we use in Star Trek all the time. It started with Spock over-explaining something and then Kirk giving a blank stare and getting a much more simple–
Leigh: [unclear 00:39:50].
John: Then you have McCoy saying, “No one could possibly understand this.”
Leigh: I’ve noticed a tic in screenwriting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, John. I’ve noticed a tic with screenwriting, like in Marvel movies and stuff, not to keep calling them out, but they’ll have one of their characters… I’m just making this up on the spot. They’ll have one of their characters say something like… It has to sound creative scientific and very complicated. One of the characters will say, “No, listen, what we need to do is take the interlocker and connect it to the vectranon and then when we plug it twofolds back into what we would consider dimensional da da da, then we’ll be okay.” Then one of the other characters will say, “Time travel. You’re talking about time travel.” It’s like, oh my god, they do it every time. I look around the theater, and I’m like, is it only our screenwriters noticing this tic?
John: I do want to give a shout-out to Episode 419 of Scriptnotes with David Koepp, where we actually talk about the film strip inside of Jurassic Park that explains all.
Leigh: Can I ask you, John, is there an actual industry screenwriters nickname for that thing of saying, “Time travel.”
John: In some ways it’s like hanging a lantern on the exposition. Basically someone’s explaining jargony stuff, and they do have some character comment on the fact that you’re explaining jargony stuff. It’s a little bit hanging a lantern, but if a listener has a suggestion for, oh, that’s what we called this, we’re happy to popularize a term for that phenomenon that I’ve definitely noticed.
Erin: I have no problem with it, because it’s been my entry into the industry is to write them, is to write those scenes.
Leigh: You do the jargony part for the screenwriter, and then the screenwriter comes in and goes, “Flying. You’re talking about humans flying.”
John: I love it. This whole thing has been a thought experiment on different story topics. Our next one actually is a thought experiment. It originated on a rationalist message board. It’s called Roko’s Basilisk. Basically the greatly simplified version is that a future artificial intelligence might punish or otherwise take action against anyone who stood in its way, including those in the past. It gets a little hand wavey, but essentially, because for all we know, we’re living in a simulation, AI could torture us, or torture indistinguishable copies of us, and so therefore, we shouldn’t try to stand in the AI’s way.
Leigh: John, just in reading the article, I did have one point of confusion, which was just how does this hypothetical AI torture people in the past? Does it have time travel capabilities?
John: Basically, because it could create a simulation with us in it, that would be indistinguishable from us, it’s torturing a version of you, even if you, Leigh Whannell–
Leigh: Right, but I would not be affected by my simulation being tortured. My simulation wouldn’t be having a good time, but I myself would not be–
John: If you stick it in the framework under which all these other discussions are being had, if a version of you is being tortured, it is you being tortured, if that thing is indistinguishable. That’s my best understanding. Help me out, Erin.
Erin: As far as I understand it, and this is one of those things that does result in crying in the shower in the middle of the night, but the way I have thought about it is it’s… This is why they talk about it as a doing thought experiment.
Leigh: I love when the article says, “Be warned. Just reading this article may send you insane.”
Erin: What they’re trying to get across is, once you’ve learned this sentient, all-knowing artificial intelligence could exist in the future, you now have a decision if you’re going to be one to help that or to not help it. Your decisions as you make along the way could influence that one way or the other and it could eventually punish you. Again, as John mentioned, there are versions of this where it’s in a simulation or we’re living already in that simulation. Extrapolating the probabilities of your own behavior, like when we code NPCs in video games, non-player characters in video games, we’re assuming they’re going to make decisions based on what you do. It’s the same idea that this artificial intelligence will make a decision based on what we’re deciding to do. It’s very philosophical.
Leigh: Maybe the movie there, so as not to skirt too closely to the Matrix, although maybe it already is, maybe the movie there is that there is an anti-AI scientist, somebody who is a distinguished scientist who believes that AI is the wrong direction to go in, if we give it too much power, suddenly starts to find their life falling apart. Things are happening. Maybe people they know aren’t recognizing them anymore. Starts to work out that the AI that this scientist colleague invents in the future is now inflicting pain on a simulation, but somehow that simulated version of this main character is affecting her own life. Somehow the simulation is bleeding into her own life, and it becomes this almost Jacob’s Ladder version of what’s real, what’s not, how can a supercomputer in the future be tearing apart my current reality.
Erin: It brings up good things you can play with with free will. Am I going to choose this? I’ve been predetermined to choose this. Everything I’ve been exposed to in the past says I’m going to choose this, but now I know that it knows I’m going to choose that.
Leigh: Maybe the main character’s life starts falling apart so much that the AI in the future sends her a message somehow, be it through somebody else or whatever, but saying, “This can all stop if you get on board and help your colleague to make me what I am today.” She has this moral crossroads of do I stop this tearing apart of my life and help my colleague create this thing that is tearing apart my life, or do I keep on my current track of trying to stop something that I think is bad for humanity.
Erin: I got to say, this reminds me of a film, Superintelligence, with Melissa McCarthy. It was really similar to this.
Leigh: Oh wow.
Erin: Really weirdly similar to this.
John: Let’s pull back a little bit and look at the article in context, because the headline is, are there basically ideas that are too dangerous to think. That reminds me of The Ring. Once you’ve seen the videotape in The Ring, you are cursed and you are going to die in seven days. I think there’s some aspect of once you’ve been exposed to a thing, you can’t ever get away from it, feels like an evergreen topic. Everything we’ve been describing feels like a horror film [unclear 00:46:23] in some ways. That knowledge could be a curse that you carry with you.
This also reminds me of, there’s a book that Megan McDonald and I both like a lot, called There is No Antimemetics Division, which has a sense of ideas that you can’t actually see or think, because they are anti-memes. They’re memes that are so powerful that they worm their way into your head. There’s something that feels scary about this, but also not necessarily super cinematic. I’m having a hard time picturing a thing that a camera would be pointed at.
Erin: I could picture it being a very heady hard sci-fi, psychological sci-fi horror about how do you forget you learned something, truly forget it.
Leigh: Also, if you have an AI in the future that’s torturing you, I almost see it as a science fiction Jacob’s Ladder where the character’s life is falling apart in really eerie and scary ways because this entity in the future is messing with her reality somehow. I can see things to point the camera at.
John: You’re quire a director. I’m also thinking early Darren Aronofsky. I’m thinking Aronofsky around Pi and that sense of people who get so obsessed with ideas that it takes over their life. [unclear 00:47:40].
Leigh: I want to pitch what I’m working on right now, because every time you guys are talking about seeing things in space that don’t make sense or a character becoming so obsessed with an idea, I’m like, I just want to pitch it, but [unclear 00:47:53] so I can’t.
John: Let’s go back out to very, very wide and things we can’t point a camera at, which would be solar storms. I’d love to talk about the reality and dramatic potential of solar storms, which are basically… The surface of our sun sometimes puts off these giant plumes of fire and radiation that can mess up life on Earth. We have records of these things that happened. There have been telegraph lines becoming charged and paper catching fire. That was before we had all the modern technology. If we were to be hit by one of these right now, it would be really, really bad. Erin, can you give us a sense of what a solar flare or solar storm could be like? You’d mentioned gamma ray bursts earlier on. There are things out there that are just really bad if they hit the Earth.
Erin: Yeah, space will kill us. I love that you brought this up. The big bad solar storms are called coronal mass ejections or CMEs. Actually, we wrote this into an episode of Season Three of Star Trek: Discovery, where the engineer referred to it as a star burp. We will simplify it to that. Like you said, it unleashes a huge amount of radiation, a huge amount of heat. Now you’ll survive the Earth getting hit by a CME. A gamma ray burst is such high radiation, you’re just going to fry. A solar storm isn’t going to necessarily hurt you, but what it does do, as you said, is it takes down technology. It’s a huge electromagnetic pulse.
You mentioned the telegraphs and the papers catching on fire. That was from an event in 1859 called the Carrington Event. That was when Earth got hit by a CME right at the early stages of this industrial era. It was so powerful, it took down transformers. It blew out all the telegraph lines. People who were using telegraphs, it set their paper on fire. They got shocked by it. It’s crazy. It’s come close to happening these days. I think in 2012 we discovered a couple years later we only missed one by a couple weeks. It can happen, and the implications are numerous and delightful and catastrophic.
John: It’s not hard to envision the big catastrophe movie of this, which would be everything gets taken down. Let’s set a moment to think about the period film of this. If we actually were to make a movie about the Carrington Event and what that would be like, in some ways it could be charming. It would be a disruption and things could happen, but it’d be a good parable for losing this technology we counted on and having to do things the old way or something like you can’t send a message out and so you’re isolated. There’s something charming about that image.
Leigh: Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I actually think just that concept, it almost is by the by now when you talk about the solar storms. It’s like a movie based on what would happen to us all if none of our devices worked anymore, if suddenly everyone teenager’s TikTok in the world was not available to them. I think I can see an interesting dramedy about that.
John: As we went through this pandemic, it was bad. Everyone agrees, it sucked, but we still had our technology. Without our technology, it would’ve been much, much, much worse. Our ability to get things and communicate with people, if we didn’t have Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls, it’s hard to even imagine how much worse this would’ve been. Scaling back up to the modern day catastrophe movie, it would be horrible. It would be one of those pre-apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic kind of scenarios. We could get our way back, but it would be really, really hard.
Erin: I think it’s fun to explore. I’ve tried playing around with different stories with this too. We could be sitting here having this conversation, a CME could hit us, and it’d just all be gone. All the cell towers are gone. None of the electricity works. All the power lines are down. What do you do in that situation?
John: A question for you. I’m envisioning the Earth turning in space. Does it only hit half of us or does it hit the whole planet? Do we know what would happen?
Erin: Good question. That’s why we’ve dodged them in the past is because it’s just lined up with Earth’s orbit or not. Yes, if a CME hits us, it will affect the whole Earth, because of Earth’s magnetic field. These are all charged particles. If you think about iron filaments in a magnet, they’re all going to align with that. Certainly the side that’s hit direct will be affected by it, but the magnetic field of Earth will carry that throughout. There are some nuances to it, but it would definitely be a global event.
John: We talked through these different scenarios and different story ideas. Obviously, we’re overlapping so much with what Leigh’s already writing that he’s really angry at us now.
Leigh: No, I’m not angry at all. I’m desperate to almost chat it over with you so you guys can shoot holes in it and talk about it with me, but maybe to do that publicly wouldn’t be wise.
John: Maybe we’ll do that offline.
Erin: We’ll take it offline.
John: Yeah, we’ll do that. Thank you for talking us through the science behind all these things. If a studio were developing one of these ideas, how would they enlist your help in doing this? How early do you come in in a process? Do you come in when there’s a script done and the director’s figuring out some stuff? What is the best way to involve a scientific professional like you on this?
Erin: I’m naturally moving into the writer space. Other science consultants have done the same. Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis both got their starts as science consultants on Star Trek. It’s very easy now for me to see how that transitions into a writing career, but what I’ve found with other writers is the earlier the better, because we can brainstorm fun ideas. We can break story. We can add layers that you might not have thought of, that have this backbone of science. Then we also don’t have to undo anything, just because it doesn’t quite fit. It’s not that I would never not let you do something, but it just means that we can make it stronger by getting ahead of stuff.
John: Erin, if somebody were working on a thing like the chimeras in a story, obviously they can do a lot of research themselves, but what would be your recommendation for finding experts or finding people in the field who they could actually bounce ideas off of? Do you have any guidance on that?
Erin: Yeah, there’s a few resources. The Science and Entertainment Exchange is one in LA that is available to writers. I know the WGA has some connections as well, that you’re able to reach out to them. I’m hired as a science consultant, and sometimes I do get asked biology questions. My role for that predominantly is to reach out to experts I know and whom I trust, but also that I have that research background to filter through a lot of the BS, to not waste anyone’s time, and that I can translate that in a way that helps your story. There’s lots of resources. Twitter’s also a great way to reach out to science communicators and people who are good at translating stuff for you.
John: Fantastic. We have one question here Megana’s put on Workflowy. Do you want to ask that for us?
Megana: Greta asks, “I’m writing a sci-fi horror project about an experimental medical procedure. I’ve gotten really caught up researching the science and mechanics of drug trials, etc, but when I watch other movies in the genre, they don’t seem to spend much time explaining or justifying the premise. My question is, how do I get out of the way of my own backstory?”
John: That’s a good question. We talked a little bit about that in the great explainer in Jurassic Park, which is such an efficient talking it through, like this is how this is all going to work. As I think through, so many of my favorite movies that are in a scientific space don’t spend a lot of time on the science. It’s just part of the premise itself. Leigh, with both Invisible Man and Upgrade, you have scientists in those movies, but they’re not sciencing that much.
Leigh: I feel like I remember reading an interview with a guitarist once who was playing really experimental, seemingly crazy music. He’s like, “Yeah, but you have to know the rules to do this. You got to learn the rules and then forget them.” I feel like one thing for me is just to know what the science is. In the case of The Invisible Man, I had my theory and had written out how I thought the suit worked, but I didn’t feel the need necessarily to have a scene where somebody explains that in detail.
I feel like sometimes you knowing how the science in your film works can filter through your screenplay in more of a drip feed fashion than this exposition dump. I do feel like audiences pick up on a lot. John, you said before, “I saw the suit and I felt like I knew how it worked,” but I didn’t really have anybody explaining it in the movie. I did have a couple of people say, “You didn’t even explain how the suit worked.” I guess you’ll never please everybody. My policy is just to know it yourself, but not necessarily force that knowledge on the audience in a heavy-handed way.
Megana: Do you find yourself ever going through in a pass and taking out some of the science if you’ve overwritten it?
Leigh: Sometimes, yeah, because I guess when you get into editing you realize that the essential bone marrow of the film is just the story, and anything that’s not pushing it forward is window dressing. What I actually love is one thing that you’ve talked about, Erin, that you do, is giving people technical terminology. There’s this thing that I love where it’s like when you’re watching a film and you feel like you’re in the hand of authority. If I’m watching a scene with neurosurgeons and somebody’s like, “Hand me the excavator,” is like, “Three milliliters of da da da da,” I don’t need to know what that stuff is. What I do need to know is that the people on screen know what it is.
It works very well in spy movies when somebody sits down and is using terminology that I don’t understand. If somebody sits down, some CIA guy, and is like, “This whole thing’s a blackout. I’m going to need a two-day wash-up on this,” I don’t know to know what those nicknames are. I’m like, “Oh, wash-up, that sounds important.” The scene would be bad if the character sat down and said, “Oh, this whole thing’s a blackout,” and the character they were talking to said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m pretty new here at the CIA. What’s a blackout again?” and the guy was like, “A blackout is when an operation goes totally south and we have to pretend it didn’t exist.” If I was watching that movie, I’d be like, “Oh my god, you had me at blackout. What are you doing?”
The script I’m working on right now, just to give you guys… I’ve been talking to someone about telescopes, super duper powerful telescopes. This guy from Cal Tech was giving me all these terms that they use that I’ve been dropping in the script, like, “Check the baffles.” I wouldn’t explain to anybody what baffles are or anything. By the way, if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the black sheeting that keeps light away from the telescope.
Erin: Very nice.
Leigh: What I would do in the script is have someone on screen say, “Check the baffles,” and then somebody else would be like, “Baffles are all good.” I really don’t think the audience would be sitting there going, “Wait a minute, what about baffles? I’m lost.” All they need to know is that these guys are scientists who know their shit. That’s the most important thing.
Erin: The counterpoint too is that it gives a lot of good credibility when you do have that one astronomer or that one neurosurgeon who’s watching it, and they’re like, “Yeah, they used the right word.” [Unclear 00:59:15].
Leigh: On Upgrade I got a lot of comments, or I saw a lot of comments on Twitter from hacker types who would say, “He used the right terminology for that hack.”
Erin: Makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’d still caution people to throw the techno babble in, as I like to call it, but making sure that it is right. You don’t have to explain it, but make sure what you’ve got is at least as close to possible.
Leigh: It’s not important for the audience to know how the science works. It’s just important that they believe the people on the screen know how the science works.
John: Exactly the point. You have to believe that the characters know what they’re doing and are doing things properly. The case with Star Trek, Erin, I will say that there’s techno jargon, but it’s also very Star Trek-specific techno jargon, because you want to make sure that you’re referring to the same things in the same way, episode to episode, series by series, that it’s consistent.
Erin: That’s a lot of the reason they brought me on to be available to the whole franchise was to maintain that consistency, because that’s five shows. Once shows are off and running, they’re operating pretty independently. Having someone double checking how one show’s talking about transporters or talking about warp drives or imposing any numbers or star dates, all that stuff is in my purview to make sure that that all stays consistent, and consistent with the last 55 years of Star Trek. No pressure.
John: I bet we have some listeners who are so envious of your job. It does sound remarkable.
Erin: Thank you.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Annie Rauwerda for Input. She’s talking about the love story behind… In Wikipedia, if you look up High Five, there are these four photos of this man and this woman doing high five, down low, too slow, showing what those actual things are. They’re the public main photos for those things. It’s tracking down who were those people in those photos and what is their deal, because they look to be like they’re in college. It’s not clear, are they a couple? What’s going on? The spoiler for it is they are actually a couple. They are actually married. They have two kids now. It was lovely to see a thing that’s been on the internet forever and tracking through who those people are now. It’s a lovely story that has nothing to do with science whatsoever, but made me happy as I was reading it.
Leigh: Very good.
John: Leigh, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Leigh: My thing would be, I’ve been reading these short story collections by an author named Brian Evenson lately. I’m really loving his short stories. He writes these, I wouldn’t call them horror stories necessarily, but they are somehow infused with existential dread. Literary horror I guess would maybe be the term. He’s written a few collections of short stories. I just read one called A Collapse of Horses. He has another one that I’m just about to start reading called The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell. Actually, each story is related to somehow, going by the back blurb, each story is related to what we are doing to our environment and our planet. I guess he’s building these stories of eerie dread out of the way our planet’s going. His stories, some of them are very short. They’re just amazing little bite-size chunks to read before bed or whenever, just because we don’t have enough existential dread in society right now. Things are going just fine, and you want to feel more uneasy.
John: We love it. Erin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Erin: Yeah. I’m taking the opposite approach to Leigh in terms of existential dread and confronting it or running away from it. I have gotten really back into comic books and comic book stories and that lighthearted, fun, skirting around sci-fi fantasy world. I’m reading a book right now called We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen. It is a delightfully fun book about two characters. One has woken up with no memory, but he’s able to erase other people’s memories, so now he becomes a super villain. He holds up banks in order to buy coffee and books. Then another character is also looking for her past. She can’t remember, but she can go really fast, and so she deliveries fast food. They meet in a memory loss support group and then they team up. I haven’t finished it, but it is an absolute delight to read. It’s We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen.
John: That sounds absolutely great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Contra Entropy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Leigh, where are you on Twitter?
Leigh: @lwhannell.
John: Great. Erin, where can people find you on Twitter?
Erin: @drerinmac. That’s D-R E-R-I-N M-A-C.
John: Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where we’ll have links to articles and topics that we discuss today on the show. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Leigh’s fantasy mall. For now, Erin and Leigh, it was an absolute pleasure. Leigh, thank you for coming back on the show. Erin, you’re welcome back on the show any time. This was a delight having you here.
Erin: Thank you. I had a great time.
Leigh: Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Leigh, on Twitter one night I saw you pitch this idea of like, would anyone go to a period shopping mall where basically you were in the ‘80s or the ‘90s and everything inside this shopping mall, presumably a dead mall that you’d resurrected for the thing, would be of that time period. Am I explaining your concept properly?
Leigh: Yeah, pretty much. It was interesting. This idea of mine lives in the gray area somewhere between an actual business plan and a stoned 2 a.m. thought. It’s somewhere in the middle there. I just sent up this tweet. It got a lot of attention, maybe more so than my usual tweets. Once you get the attention of the internet, that can be a bad thing. The 17 Scandinavian Saw fans that usually respond to my every tweet are nothing but positive. All of a sudden the darkest tentacles of the internet were like… If we had to think of the internet as a creature unto itself and not millions of individual people, I’m always astounded at the anger of it.
In that tweet that you’re referring to, I said, “Would anyone want to come and visit this period ‘80s themed mall with movie theaters, but if you had to give up your phone to keep up the illusion of it being the ‘80s, would you do it?” It was astounding, the number of people who were like, “You can take my phone when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.” I was like, whoa, calm down, random guy, not really posing this. I was also astounded by the number of people who would quote tweet it and write, “So…a mall,” or like, “Hey, what if I took a mall and turned it into a mall?”
No, random people. I will use this podcast as an opportunity to say, basically what it would be is a little nostalgia theme park, that you take a dead mall and you make it all very period, so the cinema just shows ‘80s films. The arcade there just has vintage games that were around in this era of the mid ‘80s, the food, everything about it. Basically it’s essentially a Stranger Things theme park. You’re walking around. I just know that if someone did do this, I would want to be there every day. I would want to drink it in. It is something I’ve thought about a lot over the past year.
John: Now Erin, would you visit Leigh’s mall?
Erin: I would. Depends how long, but again, I spend a lot of time in malls. I don’t know if I have a ton of nostalgia for it.
Leigh: What I think the idea is, it’s not so much a mall, like hey, you’re here in a mall to go shopping. It takes the shape of a mall, but it’s really an adult theme park. I went to this place in Portland, Oregon a few years ago with my friends. It was called the Kennedy School.
John: The Kennedy School’s great. Describe it, because it really is a very unique place.
Leigh: Incredible, especially for someone who lives in LA, which is a city that I don’t think has great entrepreneurial bar and entertainment options that are happening, new ones. Basically, the Kennedy School, this company has bought this old elementary school, which I think was called something something Kennedy School. They bought it and they’ve converted it into this entertainment complex for adults. It has movie theaters in there, a bowling alley, several different bars. It’s a one-stop shop that you can go to. Instead of doing a bar crawl down a street, you go to the Kennedy School, and you walk in and there’s one little bar here, and then there’s a movie theater, and you can plan a night around it. I just remember being blown away. I don’t know how you felt, John.
John: I went there for a lunch. It was cool that it was clearly a public school and everything looked like a public school, but it had just been turned into a bar and restaurant, movie theater. I think there was even a hotel.
Erin: That sounds awesome.
Leigh: I loved it. Dammit, see, Erin’s loving this Kennedy School idea way more than my mall idea. The great thing about it is you’re walking down the corridor, and it was like an elementary school corridor with the little hooks for the coats and everything. I guess my mall would be like that. It’s not a mall in the sense that you can shop there. It’s restaurants and bars and entertainment options would be the only… There would be a movie theater, a bowling alley, an arcade, three or four different food courts, and different bars. It would all be housed in the shape of a mall. Maybe there would be some performance art. Maybe somebody is doing 80s style robot dancing or something. You could really build this little insular world.
I like this world building thing that’s happening with theme parks. I went to the Stars Wars World at Disneyland recently. I loved the all-encompassing nature of it, that when you walked in, it’s like you’d left this planet and you were now interacting with Storm Troopers.
Erin: I love that.
Leigh: I guess this would be the ‘80s nostalgia version of that Star Wars theme park. Maybe there’s a video store there or something.
John: We need to ask Megana Rao, who’s too young to have ‘80s nostalgia, would you visit Leigh’s ‘80s nostalgia mall.
Megana: Yeah. I like arcade games and bowling and things. I miss mall food courts. Would you have that there?
Leigh: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Megana: Yeah, I’m in.
Leigh: It would be good food. You would gussy it up a bit. It would have the look of an ‘80s style mall food court, but the food would be a little bit better.
John: Let’s talk about how we manifest this vision of yours, because I would like to visit this mall too. Who builds this? How much control do you want over this? Do you just want it to exist and be able to visit it or do you want to have some role in making it exist?
Leigh: It’s one of those things where a lot of people say if nobody’s doing it, you should do it. I’ve read a lot of interviews with people that have opened restaurants or whatever, and they’ve said, “I decided to open this restaurant because it didn’t exist.” If I’m to take that approach, I have no hospitality experience, so I guess I would have to get in touch with someone who is some sort of venture capitalist or had some experience in experiential… I do know there was a guy at Blumhouse who I’ve worked with a few times who was in charge of their maze experiences or anything that was real.
John: Escape rooms, that kind of stuff.
Leigh: Exactly. Maybe someone in that field who could… Maybe you could tie it in with… For all I know, you could go into Netflix and say, hey, this could be Stranger–
John: Stranger Things. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who is probably wealthy, but also has experience in hospitality, that could be great. I think about my friend Ryan Reynolds has a gin company. Ryan Reynolds doesn’t know anything about gin. He didn’t go into this knowing anything about gin. He wasn’t a gin expert. He had an appreciation for it, and he built this company and sold it for a gazillion dollars. I just want this to be your gin, Leigh. I want this to be your Aviation Gin.
Leigh: I feel like with your encouragement this might exist one day.
John: We’ll hope so. We’ll have you back on the show for that.
Leigh: Excellent.
John: We’ll do live Scriptnotes from your mall. I promise you that when the mall opens, Craig and I, we’ll commit Craig to doing a live Scriptnotes at your mall.
Leigh: Thank you. Excellent. I’ve got two guaranteed customers.
John: Leigh, Erin, thank you so much.
Leigh: Thanks, guys.
Links:
- Ed Solomon’s Tweet on MIB Movie Accounting
- What is a Dyson sphere? and Dyson spheres on Wikipedia
- What is a Human Chimera? and Becoming Two People At Once
- Stephen King’s The Dark Half
- The Science Behind the Endgame Snap and Minimum Viable Population
- Rokos Basilisk: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time
- There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
- Are Solar Storms Dangerous to Us? and How We’ll Safeguard Earth From a Solar Storm Catastrophe
- The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos by Annie Rauwerda for Input
- A Collapse of Horses a short story collection by Bryan Evanston
- We Could be Heroes by Mike Chen
- Leigh Whannell on Twitter and Leigh’s 80’s mall tweet
- Erin Macdonald on Twitter
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Contra Entropy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 539: Science Movies, Transcript first appeared on John August.
Craig answers listener questions ranging from craft to career: how do you find your voice? What questions should you ask before writing a new project? When should silence carry a scene? Craig offers professional advice and gets dangerously close to starting a cult.
We follow up on Barton Fink, writer’s block, and keyboards.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig and Megana discuss millennials and how Hollywood can invest in R&D.
Links:
- Logitech K860 has Bluetooth!
- Take this typing test – Craig got a 110 wpm!
- Barton Fink
- Chernobyl, Chernobyl Podcast and The Dropout
- 60 Seconds With Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon and puzzle here
- Not Past It Podcast
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 4-25-22 The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post 20 Questions with Craig first appeared on John August.
John answers listener questions on craft and industry. When are you ready to send a script? How do you rewrite scenes during production? Is it cool to take a picture with your celebrity crush on set? John offers professional advice for writers on the page and in real life.
We follow up on screenwriter dexterity (typing speed) and ergonomic keyboards.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Megana discuss ‘Murder House Architecture.’ What makes contemporary homes so scary and who are the contractors constructing these basements?
Links:
- Patton Oswalt in King of Queens Scene
- ZSA Moonlander
- Compare Your Typing Speed Against ours here!
- Phoebe Waller Bridge – 73 Questions with Vogue
- Residuals for High-Budget Subscription Video on Demand (HBSVOD) Programs from the WGA
- Paul Stamets on Seven Mycoattractant and Mycopesticide Patents released to Commons!
- Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert
- Murder House Architecture
- Samantha Hartsoe’s TikTok NYC Apartment
- Ohio State Students Discover Students Living in Basement
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Ben Gerrior (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post 20 Questions with John first appeared on John August.
John and Craig investigate backstabs and double-crosses onscreen and share how writers can set up plot twists on the page.
We answer listener questions on imposter syndrome, negative feedback, and hear about John’s journey to find the right ergonomic keyboard. We also follow up on meet-cutes, charismatic aspiring writers, and angry costume designers.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss which reality competition show we’d enter and how we’d win.
Links:
- ‘Better Nate Than Ever’ Filmmaker on Disney’s Handling of “Don’t Say Gay” Bill: “Good Representation Does Not Cancel Out Bad Legislation”
- MGM joins Amazon Prime Studios
- Kinesis Ergo Keyboard
- John’s Old Keyboard set up with SafeType
- Subscribe to the Inneresting Newsletter and read our issue on betrayals here!
- Murderville on Netflix
- Logitech ERGO K860 Wireless Split Keyboard
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Betrayed! first appeared on John August.
The link to this post can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 536 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we look at adaptation, both how screenwriters approach translating existing properties into film and TV, and how writers adapt to changes in their careers. It’s a big mailbag episode, so producer Megana Rao has a lot of reading ahead of her. She’s stretching, she’s warming up, because there’s a lot of listener mail to get through here today.
Craig: Doing those elocution exercises, “red leather, yellow leather,” and so forth.
John: So important. Also in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, to be or not to be, what’s the logic behind trying to minimize the use of be verbs in your writing.
Craig: That’ll be a short segment.
John: What features of other languages do we wish we had in English.
Craig: That’s a great idea. That’s a great question. Now we’re talking. All right.
John: Craig, MoviePass is back.
Craig: Thank God. Thank God.
John: The co-founder Stacy Spikes took control of the company this week as part of bankruptcy proceedings. It’s coming back in some form. We can make fun of MoviePass a lot, and we have over the years, but the article I’m going to link to is from IndieWire. Chris Lindahl writes it. A thing it points out is that post-MoviePass, a bunch of the movie theater chains did roll out their own versions of all-you-can-eat things, and those are continuing and may be good for people who do want to go to the cinema a lot.
Craig: Yeah, and that’s because they need to right now. The truth with MoviePass was, and why it was never, ever going to work was, the movie business was fine, and they were like, “Give us $20 and you can see all the movies you want.” When the steakhouse business is doing well, that doesn’t make sense to have SteakPass. When there’s been, I don’t know, mad cow disease and no one can go to steakhouses and no one wants to go to steakhouses and there’s steak.com delivering to your home, then yeah, it absolutely makes sense for a steakhouse to be like, “Here’s a crazy plan.” Let’s be clear about it. Regal or AMC, they’re not doing this crap when we get back to, if we get back to regular movie going. No way. No way.
John: Craig, they absolutely are, because AMC’s Stubs program was existing way before the pandemic, and it was profitable by all accounts.
Craig: That was not an all-you-can-eat plan.
John: It was a little bit limited, but it was the same sort of idea as MoviePass. MoviePass was the absurd, extreme example. What they recognized is there were a group of people who go to movies frequently, who would like to go even more frequently, if they can make a discount, and they paved the way for that. Then it opened up for the other theater chains to say, “Oh, we can do something like that.” Alamo Drafthouse had a similar thing.
Craig: A club pass always makes sense, because you get a regular thing. You know they’re coming in. They can’t bankrupt you. They can’t put you out of business, because you’re not saying it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for all three meals of the day for $9.99. They’re going to buy popcorn and drinks and all the rest of that. All the money goes directly to AMC. It’s not through a broker. AMC’s list here, it says three movies per week. That’s reasonable. That’s smart.
John: It’s a lot of movies. That’s great. You can see how that makes sense, both for AMC and it makes sense for the customer. I don’t know that that would’ve existed had MoviePass not broken ground there. I just want some acknowledgement that sometimes the crazy thing that was never going to work, the pets.com of it all, does lead you to something down the road which actually makes more sense.
Craig: You’re an endlessly positive person.
John: I’m trying to be generous with my assumptions here.
Craig: I hear you. I see MoviePass as people who are like, “Hey, here’s an idea. We’re going to do something stupid.” Then other people are like, “That’s stupid. Why don’t we do the smart version of that?” I can’t give MoviePass any credit. It was kind of fraud, right? Didn’t they rip people off? I can’t give them credit.
John: I don’t know that there’s any fraud. We’re certainly not saying that there was any fraud. I’m reading a book that’s actually really interesting about financial crimes and Ponzi schemes and other things like that. An interesting thing that does happen is there’s a tipping point in a lot of companies where you’re just making promises that you’re not sure you can actually keep.
Craig: That’s where they were.
John: You got to keep running. MoviePass was one of those things where they could keep getting investment as long as it felt like they were growing. When it became clear, oh, there’s actually not more growth here, that’s when it all collapses down.
Craig: Am I just imagining it or wasn’t there a thing where they said you can see as many movies as you want in a month, and then they sent an email out saying, by the way, no. You paid that money, but no, you can’t see all the movies you want in a month. Also they made it really hard for people to cancel or … It’s been a while. We’ve done too many podcasts. Of course I’m not accusing any large newly restored company of fraud. That would be crazy.
John: We wish them all success with MoviePass 2.0. We’ll keep an eye there.
Craig: Keep an eye on them.
John: Some follow-up here. In a previous episode, we had a listener who wrote in asking about software that can help read a script aloud. We had some recommendations, but actually a better recommendation came in this past week, which is ScriptSpeaker.com. We tried it out, and it’s basically what our listener was asking for. You can throw it a pdf or a Fountain file, and it’s taking it, it’s ingesting it, and it’s kicking you back out an mp3 that does what Highland does in terms of taking character names and saying “Mary says” rather than just “Mary” so it actually makes more sense. It does a pretty good job. If you are specifically in the need for just this kind of solution, this is one that’s out there right now that you could try and use.
Craig: I like that I see on their website that it was developed with the participation of Creative BC and the British Columbia Arts Council. Since I am essentially Canadian now, it’s good to see. Wouldn’t it be nice, John, if our governments, state and federal in the United States, would help create things like this and help people create art and put things out there in the world that were … Nah, it’s not going to happen. Who am I kidding?
John: Come on. Craig, I’ll push back on this. How about the California Tax Credits? How about the Louisiana Tax Credits? That’s all over the place. We’re calling them tax credits rather than foundations and boards.
Craig: Those tax credits are for these enormous corporations. Those are the only who can take advantage of them really. Warner Bros, they’re fine. I’m not talking about … I assume that the people who made this, they’re not a large corporation.
John: Zach Lipovsky is not a giant corporation. He’s a guy.
Craig: An individual who’s making something like this, that’s … We have things like the National Endowment for the Arts, that of course the Republicans are always trying to take away, because it costs literally .001% of one missile or whatever. We don’t have a good tradition of this. As you know, in Europe, a lot of movies and television are financed in part by extensions of the state, state funding, which-
John: I always love the Irish tax lottery and how that works and the little finger crossed logo on somebody’s-
Craig: I love that. That’s fun. We won.
John: Craig, I just want to make sure that our listeners who have been listening for a long time can track Craig Mazin’s journey into socialism-
Craig: That’s fun.
John: … over the years.
Craig: It’s definitely happening.
John: It’s always good to see.
Craig: I don’t know, am I going in the opposite direction? People generally get more Fox Newsy as they get older, right?
John: Yeah. I think you’ve gotten less Fox Newsy. I think you’ve actually gotten more-
Craig: Listen, man. I got to tell you, that awful orange game show host has driven me into a deep leftist position, where I will probably remain for quite some time. My life goes back and forth, depending on what’s going on. I’ve never been just one sort of, “I’m only in from this point of view.” I’m about as left these days as I’ve ever been.
John: I think that’s absolutely true. Last week we were talking about main character energy, and this was a thing that came out of TikTok. Therefore, we’ve returned it to TikTok. We now have a Scriptnotes Podcast, @ScriptnotesPodcast, TikTok account.
Craig: Great.
John: Which has exactly one post and will maybe never have another post. It is your counter-rant about it. Let’s play it here for folks who are not on TikTok.
Craig: The quote about romanticizing your life, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the exact opposite thing that I think about everything than that quote, because here’s the thing, life is not romantic. You’re a big sack of slowly decaying meat that will eventually stop functioning. Everybody that you know and meet and love will eventually die. You are going to be sick. You are going to ache. You are going to have moments that are wonderful and moments that are terrible. You also don’t deserve everyone’s attention. You almost never deserve anyone’s attention. The best thing that you can do with your life, other than fulfilling yourself and feeling like you’ve achieved something you wanted to achieve, is helping someone else. Go ahead and make a life or help a life or nurture someone or something, teach someone something or something. This romanticization is just really superficialization. That’s what it is.
John: That’s Craig’s audio, but this little clip was put together by Drew Rosas.
Craig: Thank you, Drew.
John: Thank you for putting that together for us and using the same background music as the original clip. We had some feedback from listeners about this. Also, a friend texted me to talk about it. Her point was that there’s a gendered component to main character energy memes that I don’t think we really talked about on the show, that it’s really mostly young women who are leading this thing. One of the central points of it is that people who are not generally centered in the conversation, because of gender, race, or identity, it’s telling them to take control of the narrative, which I fully get, that if you’re not pretty enough or if you’re not white, you don’t get to be the main character in stories, and think of yourself as the main character. It’s really trying to redefine who the main character is. Totally get that. I think we were responding to said meme as the aesthetics of a main character, rather than the putting yourself at the center of the story.
Craig: Yeah. Maybe I don’t understand then what all this is about, because I don’t understand how any of this has to do with any conversation at all. From what I understood, it was really just about how you present yourself to the world and not about how you are recognized or participating in anything with anyone else. It seems so self-centered, so therefore outside of conversation. This friend says people who feel decentered from the conversation, which makes sense if we were talking about how to put yourself into a conversation when you have been ignored. That is a worthy pursuit. I understand that completely. My view of this was that it wasn’t about conversations at all, it was really about, what did they say, “I’m going to look out over the balcony with my glass of wine, because that’s what the person in the movie does.” I don’t think that has anything to do with any conversation at all.
John: I think that’s what we were both responding to is that a lot of the memes around it really felt like be Emily in Emily in Paris, rather than actually really address the structural things that are keeping you from at the center of it. We had two listeners who wrote in with some really smart thoughts. Megana, do you want to share those?
Megana Rao: Katie from Toronto wrote in, “I thought I’d offer my observations as a Gen Z. What I like about the idea of romanticizing your life is that it demands you take your life as seriously as you’ve taken influencers or celebrities. I think the main character conversation asks, why do I care more about Kim Kardashian’s life than my own? Why am I invested in this person’s reality when I can be the star of my own story? Because I’m a liberal arts nerd, I’ve come to see main character energy as another rendition of Nietzsche’s life-affirming philosophy of nihilism. Nothing matters after this anyway, according to Nietzsche, so I may as well live as the main character while I’m still in the movie.”
Craig: We’ve wandered into an area that I’m very fond of, which is the philosophy and works of Friedrich Nietzsche. While yes, I could see an extension of main character energy into Nietzsche, Nietzsche is make your own values, hammer of the gods, you are not going to follow other people’s description of what values and good is, you are going to create your own. All that makes sense, but I don’t see that as romantic at all, and I would argue that Nietzsche didn’t either, although early on, in his earlier works, maybe when he was in love with Wagner. Then he fell out of love with Wagner pretty quickly.
What’s such a bummer about this, Katie, is you are and were already enough. You don’t need to romanticize your life to care more about yourself than Kim Kardashian. What you need to do is deromanticize Kim Kardashian. You’re fine as you are. You should take your life more seriously. More seriously, not as seriously. Way more seriously than any influencer or any celebrities, because they don’t mean anything. Kim Kardashian means nothing. Her life means nothing, or at least not as presented as an edited, produced, glossy moving magazine. It’s not relevant. What I would say to you, Katie, is what if you already mattered a billion times more in your existence and in your shoes than any influencer or celebrity you could ever see? You don’t need to romanticize your life. You need to deromanticize all these other people.
John: I’m equally unqualified to talk about Nietzsche or Kim Kardashian. What I do hear though is that you can see these lives of these celebrities and imagine what they’re like, but of course you’re comparing your raw footage with their highlight reel. I think what we’re both saying is to really just focus on what you’re actually doing, rather than how it’s being presented to people out there. Don’t let your self-identity be so consumed with the presentation to other people, which is easy for us to say, because we’re not being bombarded with it every day. There’s an aspect of generational drift here that’s also true.
Craig: It’s sad. I feel bad, because I think there’s a lot of poison out there. I think there’s a lot of poison out there that people are soaking up, and it bums me out.
John: Megana, we had another piece here which I thought was really good.
Megana: Rachel wrote in and she said, “I also had a comment on your conversation this week about main character energy. Craig mentioned Fleabag as an example of this. I wanted to note that the trajectory of the second series entirely bares out all that you were saying. The hot priest character starts to comment on Fleabag’s frequent absences, which disconcerts her and which brings home for the audience that every time she’s been winking at us, she’s been checking out of the moment that she’s in. The series concludes with her entering her own life more completely, hopefully to give her experiences and the people she’s with the quality of attention that they deserve, precisely by shutting out the audience and her consciousness of herself as a character.”
Craig: Oh, Rachel. Oh, I love you, Rachel. One of the most amazing moments I’ve ever seen in anything was the moment where the hot priest went, “Who are you talking to? Who are you looking at?” She gets caught looking at us and is like, “Oh my god, he saw that,” which yes, I think, Rachel, you’re right, if we interpret it logically, means he saw her check out and go somewhere else in her mind, where she had metaphorized her life into a character as opposed to who she was with. In the end when she tells us essentially, “You can’t follow me anymore. I’m letting you go,” it was wonderful. That’s a great point. That’s a great point, Rachel. That’s smart.
John: It’s no surprise that Phoebe Waller-Bridge made something very, very smart about that. Megana, it’s reminding me though, you were talking about people you know who are influencers or sort of influencers and it being exhausting to be with them because they’re never really with you, they’re always lining up their next shot or their next story.
Megana: Yeah, and it just blows my mind, because I have this image of them based off of their social media that they’re constantly doing fun things. Then when I’m actually with them, it’s like they’re not eating the food when it comes, because they’re taking pictures of it. They’re not dancing in the club or whatever, because they’re taking videos of everyone else doing it and then immediately posting that. It is a lot of work. I feel like it both takes them out of the moment and … I just don’t like to be filmed like that all the time, so I also don’t find it fun to be around someone who’s doing that.
John: There’s an aspect of performance to everything, which of course all of our life is sort of performance, and we’re always putting ourselves out there in certain ways. Our self-esteem is always going to be a little bit based on what we’re getting reflected back to us, but just it feels so much more extreme and so much more immediate with social media.
Megana: I also told you the story about the friend that I was traveling with who would do a yoga pose in all of these different European cities. It was like, can we just enjoy going on this castle tour instead of doing-
Craig: God.
Megana: … Birds of Paradise here, and I have to take these pictures of you?
Craig: You’re her camera person?
Megana: Yeah.
Craig: We had a really interesting conversation with Dan Savage, as I recall, partly about porn and how it had messed people up. One of the points he was making was porn isn’t inherently bad, but you have to understand that those people aren’t actually having sex the way that human beings normally have sex. That in fact is not the sex that we should be having with each other. That’s athletic performance. It’s like gymnastics or something. It’s watching this extreme version of something we do all the time, because it’s exciting. We shouldn’t think that that is what we’re supposed to be doing, or that if we can’t do that or aren’t doing that or don’t look like that, that we’re doing it poorly or bad, because we’re not. It feels sometimes like these influencers have just pornified everything, food, walking around, vacations, being with friends. Everything gets pornified.
John: It’s not fun unless it’s capital F Fun that could be filmed and packaged and presented out to the world.
Craig: When we’re shooting movies and television and we shoot a scene that’s fun, it’s not fun to shoot it. It’s a long, miserable day, and there are a lot of problems, and no one’s laughing. Everyone’s working really hard to create this thing so that later you get an illusion of an effortless good time. We’re paid for that. It’s our jobs. Then we go home and live our regular lives. We don’t then continue this love affair with production. It’s very strange.
John: On the topic of idealized visions of how our life is supposed to be, we have some more follow-up about supportive partners and to what degree your partner should be supporting your career, supporting your ambitions. Megana, start us off.
Megana: John wrote in and he said, “I think it’s worth remembering that many of us listening aren’t in a secure part of our careers as screenwriters. Many of us are aspiring screenwriters, and you and Craig are our inspiration. Perhaps it’s worth considering the listener I’m speaking about has a fraction of the self-esteem successful writers like you have. I think you may have verged on belittling his relationship problems, something I believe you probably didn’t mean to do. Although your relationship advice was sound, I believe he would be feeling fairly flat right now.”
Craig: It’s possible.
John: It’s possible, yes. I think we try to be respectful of people’s feelings. I think we try to address who they are and what they’re presenting, but also we’re presenting to a bigger audience. Sometimes I think I do forget the actual original questioner in these things. It’s always good to remember that. I hope he’s not feeling that we were belittling his situation, because I do remember what it was like to not be sure of myself that I was going to be able to do this thing, that I needed support around me. It’s important for you to have support people, but I think if you were asking for this romantic partner to be an incredibly important support person, that may not always be the right fit.
Craig: John and I were both aspiring screenwriters once. I think we try and keep that in mind when we answer questions from aspiring screenwriters. I have never had what I think that questioner was feeling he or – I can’t remember, was it he or she, I can’t remember – deserved. I was not coming solely from a place of, “Ah, I’m a secure screenwriter and I don’t need my wife to tell me how great I am, because look at all these other people telling me how great I am.” There was a time when I was not great and I was not earning money, and my wife still wasn’t like, “Oh my god, you’re incredible,” because we just don’t have that relationship. What I said was true to myself at all stages.
When we get questions, and I think this is important for people to understand, at least for me, I take them at good faith, meaning if you ask us a question, you are saying, “Go ahead and give me an answer,” not, “Give me an answer that makes me feel good,” but rather, “Look, I asked you for a question. What do you think?” In that particular thing, I think the question was along the lines of, “Am I right or what?” There’s another person involved in that, an actual person person, and that is that person’s partner, who I was thinking about. I would imagine that if we had erred on the side of making our questioner feel good through validation, that we might’ve made that person’s partner feel a bit flat. There’s a little risk involved in writing in and asking a question and specifically wondering, “Am I doing this right or wrong?” because you might hear from us, we think you’re doing it wrong, point being if you are tenderhearted – which a lot of people are and there’s no crime in that – think twice before you write in to a radio show. I call us a radio show. Can you believe how old I am, Megana? Do you even know what a radio is?
Megana: It’s a thing I accidentally press when I’m looking for Bluetooth.
Craig: I love it. Oh my god, that’s the best answer I’ve ever heard in my life.
Megana: Also, just so you guys know, the original poster wrote in with a very kind email thanking you both.
Craig: Good. I’m glad-
John: That’s nice.
Craig: … that he wasn’t feeling-
John: That’s great.
Craig: … bad. Look, honestly, we’re not the kind of people who are like, “Awesome, someone wrote in, we’re going to destroy them and make them feel crappy.” It’s not that. If you ask us a question like, “Did I do something right or wrong?” and we think maybe you aren’t doing it the way we would, then that’s why you wrote in, right? You don’t have to agree with us. That’s for sure.
Megana: I think more than, I don’t know, belittling him or making him feel badly, I think you were both supportive of the fact that he was looking for support, but just delineating that there’s a difference between support and admiration.
John: Along those lines, there’s another listener who wrote in who had some really good suggestions about how to approach that.
Craig: Let’s hear them.
Megana: Sarah says, “I’m an actor dating a machine learning engineer with a PhD in computer-“
Craig: Wait. Sorry. Hold on. She’s an actor dating a machine?
Megana: “Learning engineer with a PhD in computer science.”
Craig: I got so excited. I was like, “Oh my god, John. Do we have the girl for you.” Go on, Megana.
Megana: She says, “He fully supports my dream to break into the entertainment industry, despite knowing very little about it. He supports me through active listening, making an effort to watch TV and movies together, and by paying much more attention to the industry-related news that pops up on his Apple News app, so great. However, he politely told me when we started dating that he did not wish to watch any of my work until we were further along in our relationship. His reasoning was that he didn’t want his opinions, spoken or unspoken, to influence my future career decisions, and he also didn’t want to open himself up to fantasizing about potential sex-“
Craig: What?
Megana: “Potential successes-“
Craig: What’s that?
Megana: “He didn’t want to open himself up to fantasizing about potential successes I could come upon, or conversely, failures that may be ahead for me. Basically he told me that my professional life is my professional life, and our relationship is our relationship. He also made the interesting point that I will likely never gain insight into how good or not good he is at his job, which is the case for most spouses who don’t meet in the workplace. In my opinion, the greatest gift a partner can give, outside of love obviously, is unconditional support toward their partner’s personal endeavors, especially those which do not directly include them. I’m challenging myself to be an equally supportive partner, but wow, turns out Machine Learning For Dummies wasn’t written for actual dummies.
“Anyways, knowing I’m loved for who I am and not what I accomplish professionally is such a great feeling, and I really encourage other creatives to try to find a partner who offers this comfort. I encourage other creatives struggling with feelings of neglect to make a list of the ways they are actively supporting the professional aspirations of their partner before making a list of the ways their partner is failing to support them.”
Craig: Oh my god, Sarah.
John: Just master class there.
Craig: Talk about somebody that doesn’t seem like they need therapy. Every now and then you meet someone, you’re like, “Oh my god, you don’t need therapy.” It’s rare.
Megana: Like you’ve won therapy.
Craig: Right, like you clearly won therapy. You passed the test. You’re an A-plus in therapy. That’s both.
John: Both Sarah and her partner have won therapy, because what the partner said is just right too, because it’s the best way of saying, “I want you to be fantastic and great, but I’m worried that if I see your work, you’re going to get the wrong feedback out of me, so maybe we just keep that stuff separate.”
Craig: I guess that they push on everybody, and it seems so obvious until you meet people that aren’t doing it, is communication. It seems like Sarah and her partner are communicating fully and openly and quickly. I think it’s also when you feel something, you communicate it. If you let it fester for a while, it’s going to get weird. That’s great. In all honesty, generally speaking, you’re going to want to try and communicate your feelings to your partners before you write in to a radio show about it, which I’m not saying that our last person didn’t, because they did. This is great. Well done, Sarah. Well done, Sarah’s machine … learning engineer.
John: Let’s turn to our main topics here. We’re going to talk about adaptation and transition. There are a lot of questions about adaptations, both how we take existing material and turn them into new film and TV products for the world, but also the struggles and challenges in those. Megana, start us off.
Megana: Alexander in New York writes, “I have a question about adaptations, and I hope this comes across as more curious than negative, but why do writers continue to butcher them?”
Craig: That sounds so curious. I’m just wondering, why are you all terrible?
Megana: “Writers make changes to the source material that often seems completely arbitrary and unnecessary, or worse, actively going against what the original source material does. Why? Is it ego? Do they feel compelled to make changes to the story so that it’s theirs? Is it laziness? Is it the studios? Or am I asking for something I shouldn’t want? Are faithful adaptations less interesting and creators correct for trying to keep things different?”
Craig: There’s some fair questions in there, but the setup was a little…
John: The butcher.
Craig: The butcher.
John: The butcher was hard. I would say let’s talk about adaptations in a very general sense. We’re coming in from a book, from some other preexisting material, a video game. Those things are generally adapted because they worked so well in their original medium. That novel was fantastic. That video game was one of the best things you ever played. Film and TV work differently. They don’t run along the same tracks. You’re going to need to make changes to make it make sense as a movie or as a TV show. Structurally, things just work differently. The audience’s relationship to those characters works differently.
As I’ve done books and I’ve done movies, in a book I can go inside a character’s head and explore everything, and I have all the pages and all the time I want. Movies are about two hours, and the whole story needs to fit into about those two hours. TV shows can be longer, but they have their own rhythms to them. I think part of it’s just the basic nature of moving from one medium to another medium. Things are going to change. That’s at the very start. That’s when Craig or I first get the call about adapting this work from something else. We’re talking about, “Okay, these are the things I need to change in order to make this into a movie.” Then it goes through a whole other process of getting from that first script to the final movie. Just everything does just change along the way, and because of who was cast, because of what director comes on board, because of what the studio wants. There are just a bunch of these problems that crop up. Sometimes movies are just bad. It’s not because they just decided to take this original great piece of material and make a bad movie. It’s just stuff happened.
Craig: Stuff happened. God, that is true. I think John just listed all the really good reasons why things change. Let’s talk about some of the bad reasons why things change, because I want to acknowledge that a lot of times there are adaptations where I will look at it and go, “What happened?” Is it ego? Almost never. Writers don’t really get much ego. A few here and there, but mostly that’s been beaten out of a lot of us. Are we compelled to make changes to the story so that it’s theirs? Not really. If something is working, it’s a great gift. Is it laziness? Never. There is no such thing as laziness. You may not be great. There may be a limit to what you see. We are all limited in one form or another, but rarely are we limited by just truly not caring. Is it the studios interfering? Yes.
John: Sometimes. Let’s talk about why studios interfere, because I think in some cases they got this book and they liked this book a lot and they want to adapt it, but they really want a big commercial movie and that it’s not necessarily in that book. They want to take what the thing is they loved about this book and make it into a movie. Whatever it takes to make that movie, they’ll do it. That will be casting the wrong people in it, making sure it’s set in a completely different place than it originally was set. They’re willing to change a lot in order to get the thing that they ultimately want to spend $100 million on and $40 million to market.
Craig: A lot of times, Alexander, when studios buy properties, what they’re buying is a title and awareness. They don’t look any further past that. They don’t actually care what’s in it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sent a book – some books by not just bestselling authors but household name authors – I get sent a book, “We love the title, and obviously marketing value of the person who wrote it, and the basic concept. The rest we hate. Change it.” Typically I will say no. In fact, always I will say no.
Now there are other cases where in adaptations, drastic changes have occurred and it’s worked wonderfully. The example that a lot of people will often offer is the Shining. Kubrick just went way left turn off the book and ignored huge chunks of it and invented stuff and did things differently, and Stephen King notoriously hates that movie. I don’t blame him, because his book is personal to him. His book’s incredible, by the way. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read. I love the Shining, the book.
John: It’s great.
Craig: I also love the Shining, the movie, because I didn’t write the book, so I have a little bit more mental freedom there. Sometimes wild adaptations work wonderfully. Wicked has been running on Broadway for 14 billion years and made $14 billion. Have you read the novel by Gregory Maguire? Because it ain’t like that. It’s a good book. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the book. It’s just they went way off base when they put that musical together. It’s just not like the book.
A, oftentimes studios are rewarded for going away from the material. B, oftentimes they are punished for being too close to the material, because it’s really hard sometimes to be super close and not feel like you’re just checking off boxes. You also left out directors, Alexander. Directors, especially in movies. Directors are the ones who are basically creatively in charge. They are as prone to error as writers.
You did not come across more curious than negative, by the way. It came across equally curious and negative. I understand your frustration. What I would suggest to you, Alexander, is just so that maybe, and maybe this will give you insight into it, try it. Try it. Try adapting something from one medium into another. You will, at the very least, I think be a little humbled and be at least a little more aware of how perilous those minefields can be.
John: A thing I’d ask Alexander to do is to make a list of great adaptations and terrible adaptations. I think right now top of mind is all about he just saw a terrible adaptation of something and that’s what he’s remembering, but he’s forgetting, oh, there are actually really good adaptations or adaptations that are better than the originals, and that also happens too. It’s not always that an adaptation’s going to fall apart or that they’re so often butchered. I don’t think that’s usually the case.
Craig: There are adaptations of little things all the time that are just wonderful, and much better than what they came from. It does go both ways. I will just say this. If your suspicion is that it’s writerly ego, it is not.
John: It’s not. I guarantee it. Megana, what else do we have?
Megana: Sara from Berlin asks, “I’ve been wondering about the phenomena of similar content being released around the same time. I know from my advertising background that sometimes this is indeed just cultural zeitgeist, like the influx of vampire content in the 2010s. However, sometimes the similarities are too similar. For example, I attended Sundance in 2016 and there were two documentaries about Christine Chubbuck, the Florida reporter who committed suicide on air in 1974. The question’s coming up for me again with the Amy Poehler Lucy and Desi documentary and Being the Ricardos coming out at the same time. Any theories or wisdom on this? Is there a secret stash of upcoming content material only certain people have access to?”
Craig: Wouldn’t it be amazing if Hollywood were that organized?
John: The secret list, oh my gosh.
Craig: Wonderful.
John: That would be so awesome. I don’t think it’s actually all that different than the vampire situation in the 2010s, because there was suddenly a bunch of vampire stuff. I think it’s just these invisible cycles of things, where the same reason why it was appealing to one person to write that vampire story, it was appealing to other people. They weren’t communicating with each other, but the same cultural forces were pushing them to do that thing, and it fed upon itself. Vampires are a more general case than Lucy and Desi, but I think Lucy and Desi are an interesting couple to be thinking about in terms of power in television and how relationships develop and change. It was a really good idea to do a documentary about it. It was a really good idea to do a fictionalized story about it. They just had the same idea at the same time. That happens a lot.
Craig: It does happen a lot. Also, just practically speaking, there are times where people are in development on something, and because there’s no competition, they just spin their wheels for a long time because there’s no pressure to do otherwise. Then they hear that somebody else is starting to prepare something that would scoop them, and they suddenly go into high gear, and voila, there are two projects. Just sometimes the hearing of the existence of one will inspire the other one into being, and now you have two.
John: We often do How Would This Be A Movie segments on the show. One thing that Craig always likes to stress is that in many cases you don’t need the rights to anything, because it’s just a true event that happened. The same people are opening the newspaper and seeing that same thing happen. It’s like, oh, we’re both going to write this story about it. I don’t know the backstory on the two Christine Chubbuck documentaries, but my hunch is that there were some articles somewhere that came out about it that inspired both filmmakers to push through it or it just percolated up in some way that it inspired both of them, but they weren’t communicating with each other.
Craig: There’s no conspiracies, sadly. It would explain a lot.
John: This could be umbrage bait, Craig.
Craig: Here we go.
John: Megana.
Craig: Here we go.
Megana: Juliana asks, “What’s up with MTV using a contest to get three work-for-hire feature scripts for a total of $20,000?”
Craig: What?
Megana: “I notice their FAQ on their contest website says they don’t want WGA members applying. It all seems a bit bizarre. How are they able to use public domain IP – for example they’re using A Christmas Carol – as the basis of the contest, yet retain all rights to writers’ own ideas about how to adapt that IP? Could they really enforce this, if a writer who wasn’t selected went off and used the treatment they submitted to write a script and sold it elsewhere?”
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to, it’s firsttimescreenwriters.com. It’s an MTV contest.
Craig: Don’t do it. We’re putting a link there for you to not click it.
John: You could click the link and read through the stuff. I don’t think most of our listeners should be doing this thing. I’m going to be generous with my assumptions here, because I genuinely believe this was done with the best of intentions, that it’s a chance to find new filmmakers who are doing interesting things and see new stuff. I don’t think this is a good idea for people to be writing in and doing this thing. The basic gist of this is you say, “Okay, I have an idea for … I’m going to write up one page with … This is how I would do A Christmas Carol related to my life or my experience.” You send that in, and they pick some people out of this to have them do a slightly longer treatment and a slightly longer treatment, and some people are going to be writing full scripts.
Craig: No.
John: If you’re inspired to write A Christmas Carol story, great, do it, but I don’t think you should send it as part of this thing, because I just don’t see anything listed here to make me believe that you’re going to get feedback or support or anything out of this other than a meat grinder process.
Craig: I’m going to be way harsher than you were.
John: I knew you would be. I wanted to be the generous version.
Craig: First of all, to answer your specific question, I don’t know if it’s Julina or Yelana, how are they able to use public domain IP and yet retain all rights to writers’ own ideas about how to adapt IP? They won’t retain your ideas. Your ideas aren’t anything. They’re not copyright. What they can do with their contest terms is say it’s a work-for-hire and if we pay you, we retain all rights to anything you’ve written down. The specific way you choose to adapt a book, like A Christmas Carol, into another work, like a movie, is absolutely copyrightable. That’s why, for instance, while John and I, I’m sure, and Megana all love Muppets Christmas Carol, we cannot just copy it down and make our own Muppets Christmas Carol, because adaptations are in and of themselves new bits of IP.
Let’s talk about why this is horrendous. Here’s their frequently asked questions. It says, “MTV Entertainment Studios First Time Screenwriters Contest was designed to find fresh voices who tell diverse stories.” Ah, okay, they’ve certainly hit the buzzwords to make us think that this is a progressive, pro-social activity to find writers who aren’t of the usual overly represented ilk in Hollywood, and bring them to prominence. That’s wonderful. That sounds amazing.
It says, “We believe our community is enriched,” remember that word, “when the stories told on film reflect a distinct vision of independent artists from every facet of our multicultural community.” Oh my god, who could have a problem with that? Me. Here we go. “MTV Entertainment Studios will select one project to be the original Christmas Carol movie for production in 2022. Data subject to change at MTV’s sole discretion. The selected winning script’s writer will be awarded,” are you ready for your enrichment, “$10,000 for the purchase of the script.”
$10,000. We have Writers Guild minimums, and that’s not even close. That’s not on the green. That’s not on the fairway. That’s still on the TBox. That is nowhere near what a screenplay for a movie that is being produced by MT-fricking-V deserves monetarily. How dare these people – and I love saying how dare – how dare these people give us this claptrap about how, oh, the community is going to be enriched and multicultural, diverse, blah blah blah, and then go, “Oh, but by the way, if we decide you’re good enough, we’re screwing you. We’re going to pay you so much less than all the other writers that we’re not going for, the WGA writers, all the white guys that we’re trying to say, oh, we want to help people so it’s not just all white guys in the world, but the white guys are getting paid. You, not white guy, are getting screwed by us, MTV.”
Screw you back, MTV. That’s outrageous. They should, at a minimum, pay Writers Guild minimum for a screenplay that is an adaptation work that is being produced. This is exploitative. In my opinion, this is exploitative. It is immoral. They should not be doing this, especially if they’re doing it “designed to find fresh voices who tell diverse stories” and “independent artists reflecting distinct visions of multicultural communities.” As far as I’m concerned, they should be paying more than minimum. Help these people by giving them an actual career, money that they can use to pay rent and write more. $10,000? I’m speechless. I’m speechless. This is embarrassing. Viacom is worth billions of dollars, and this is what they do? That’s gross.
John: Let’s say their goal is to find diverse voices of people who have not had produced films and get them writing for MTV and come up with a new Christmas Carol. Could you find those people out there in the world? Yes. It is not hard to find diverse writers of different backgrounds who have written scripts that are not produced, that you could come in and have pitched their version of A Christmas Carol story, and you could pay them to write the movie. You could do that. That’s a thing that MTV could do.
Craig: They’re not doing that.
John: They’re not doing that. I think the summary is people should not enter this and we think it’s a bad idea.
Craig: It’s terrible. I actually think that if enough people, and hopefully people talk about this, that they change this, that MTV Entertainment Studios First Time Screenwriters Contest should change this. There should be more money given. At a minimum, it should be WGA minimum. Note that they say, “If I’m in the WGA, can I apply?” Answer, “The intention of the contest is to find new voices, so at this time we are looking for non-WGA writers.” Also, they don’t have to pay you. They don’t have to pay you WGA. That’s what that’s about, FYI, so you know.
John: Everyone should understand that MTV is a WGA signatory, but a signatory can also have a nonsignatory production entity, and so they’re going to hire these people under their non-WGA production entity. They could not hire a WGA writer on this non-WGA production entity. That’s the real reason why they’re not going to have WGA writers on this.
Craig: I’m looking at our list of minimums here. If you exclude a treatment, you’re just being paid minimum for a non-original screenplay. I’m going to assume that this is not a low-budget film. I think our low budget is $5 million or less. I want to point out, even if it were a low-budget film, the minimum for a non-original screenplay, so based on an existing work, not including a treatment, which I’m sure they’re going to make you write anyway, $42,000. If it is a normal budget, that is to say more than – and I’ll find out what the, I can’t remember what the actual number is – $5 million or $10 million… It’s $5 million. This movie’s going to cost more than $5 million. The actual minimum, therefore, is $90,000.
They are screwing you to the tune of $80,000 at a minimum, and on top of that, they are denying you the health care that you would get if this were a WGA job and you were paid a normal amount, because both of those amounts would qualify you for health care for a year. That’s what they’re doing to you diverse writers who they are asking to work for them. This is gross. Boy, I really have become a leftist.
John: It is entirely possible that this would be done under a movie-of-the-week contract, which is a special TV contract, which could be lower than some of those minimums, but it’s going to be so much higher than $10,000. That’s I think the important point. Whether it’s $40,000 or slightly less than that because they’re doing it under a MOW contract, still, it’s going to be more than this. It’s ridiculous for them not to be paying at least that. There’s a reason why we have minimums.
Craig: I don’t think there’s any minimum that we have that gets you a script for $10,000. We know that because they’re telling us, “We don’t want WGA writers.” It’s gross.
John: Gross.
Craig: Boo, MTV. Come on. Seriously. What are you guys saving? What was the point? That’s what blows my mind is they wouldn’t even miss the difference. It’s a rounding error. It’s nothing to them. They still can’t do it. They just pay lip service but then they don’t actually want to step up and give people who are not inside of this industry and who have traditionally been excluded what everybody on the inside and has been traditionally included gets, which is money. I’m so angry. I’m so angry.
John: That went kind of dark there. Megana, can you find us a little bit happier-
Craig: Please.
John: … question to try to answer?
Megana: Bernard wrote, “After being blindsided and fired off an adaptation of one of my favorite IPs, I’m now in the healing process, but looking for tips for moving on. Is the source material dead to you? Do you unfollow creators? Do you burn your physical copies? So much of selling ourselves to adapt projects is showing/embracing our love for the original material, which becomes a double-edged sword if things go poorly. In a world that’s so IP-focused, how do we navigate this, just work on things we don’t love?”
Craig: Just enter the MTV contest and you’ll be fine. You’ll get enough money for groceries for three months. It’ll be great. John, this is a good question, actually.
John: Oh Bernard, I feel you there. I’ve been there. I’ve been fired off of things that I loved. It kills me. Your instincts are kind of right. You don’t have to physically burn things, but that playlist you were listening to, stop listening to that playlist. Stop thinking about the project. You do yourself no good to obsess over this thing that has sailed on. It’s like you’ve been dumped, and you have to unfollow them on Instagram. You have to not put yourself in that space, because it’ll only make you sad when you think about it. I think the best thing to do is recognize that this sucks and that you’re going to move on.
When you need to talk about it in meetings and stuff like that, it’s like, “Yeah, I really loved working on the thing. I was frustrated that I didn’t get to carry it to the finish line.” There’s ways to talk about it to make it sound like it was a more positive experience than it maybe was, but you have to move on yourself. Don’t try to score any points or wish the project ill, because it’s not going to help you. Down the road, hopefully the movie will get made and you’re going to be invited to the premier, and you can fake a smile and be happy. Maybe your name’s going to be on this. That’s another thing to look forward to.
Craig: You know that story about the guy who was the first director on the Island of Dr. Moreau, the Marlon Brando film? He got fired and couldn’t stay away, and essentially got himself hired anonymously as one of the animal people, so he was extra.
John: Oh my gosh.
Craig: Because he was in costume and a mask, they didn’t know it was him. He was just there watching them screw his thing up. It’s the most amazing thing. I can’t believe that that guy wanted to do that.
Bernard, I feel for you. I think what I loved is that you said you were in the healing process. That’s exactly right. These things are hurtful, and you have to mourn them. Time will be your friend here. Is the source material dead to you? I hope not, but for a while, yeah, leave it be. The source material is unchanged. You didn’t write the source material. What you got fired off of wasn’t the source material. It was an adaptation of the source material. You’ve been soaking in it. You’ve had your own vision of it. It’s been yanked away from you. You just need time.
Above all, don’t turn away from this … When you say, “In a world that’s so IP-focused, how do we navigate this, just work on things we don’t love?” No, unfortunately, you have to keep working on things you love. This one is very much like you get dumped, your heart is broken, should you just never love again? Wonderful poetic quotes about why you should. You should. Just give yourself a little time. It’ll be better. Allow yourself to feel and hurt, and then you’ll be all right.
John: I have many of these in my past, but the one I’m thinking of right now involved a director, and whenever his name comes up now in the future, I’m just like, “No.” I won’t work with that director. It makes me happy, that I don’t need to see his movies. I keep getting sent stuff that he’s attached to, they want me to work on. Like, nope, not going to do it. I’m not going to say why. No, you screwed me, and I don’t feel like doing it. That thing that I loved, I recognize now I will never be able to get my version of it made, but I’m on to the next thing.
Craig: You got to protect yourself as you go. It’s easier to protect yourself, tying back into the earlier question about established and non-established, when you have made a lot of money and you’re doing fine. Then it’s a lot easier to protect yourself that way. It’s harder when you’re starting out, because sometimes you actually have to … Just to pay the bills, sometimes you have to work with people you really wish you weren’t working with. It’s hurtful, but it’s certainly character-building. You obviously never want to be in a situation where you are in danger or people are actually hurting, but if it’s somebody that you don’t love working with, early on it’s harder to say no. Later on, will become much, much easier.
John: Craig, you and I can both think of writers who early in their career they get fired off of a project and they just won’t let it go. You’ll talk to them a year later and they’re still talking about that. I’m like, “No, you need to move on,” because that’s this business. You’re going to get fired off of stuff.
Craig: You can’t let it define you. Everybody is going to lose. Everyone’s going to love and lose. Everyone. I don’t know anybody that fell in love once and that was the person they were in love with for their whole life and then they died peacefully. Then they died first. You’ll lose, and it hurts, and then, just as our moms and dads taught us, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, you get back on the horse. No one likes to hear that. No one wants to do it until they’re ready. Sometimes you have to push yourself a little bit to do it. I wish I could tell you that being successful makes it easier or makes it hurt less. No, not in my opinion. It still hurts.
John: The thing that does happen is that you recognize, oh, I should’ve seen that pattern coming. I’m surprised that I’m blindsided now, because I feel like I have the good pattern recognition to see bad things coming, but it still hurts. It’s frustrating.
Craig: If you spend your time vigilant, then you are not giving yourself over. If you don’t give yourself over, there’s no chance it’s going to work. You have to give yourself over. You have to be weirdly un-vigilant and trusting and faithful, which means you might get hurt. Every time I go into something, I just think to myself, give myself completely, and if they stomp on my heart, alas.
John: I’m sure I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but Dick Zanuck, who’s now passed away, is a legendary producer, and there was a project that I was writing for him that I got a phone call from him, 8 o’clock at night, and it’s like, “John, it’s Dick. I got to let you know that they’re going to bring another writer, and I’m sorry, and it’s terrible, but I wanted you to hear it from me,” and basically spent the next 10 minutes talking me through the process. I was still really upset, but I continued to have a good relationship with Dick Zanuck because he was so forthright and honest about what the situation was and why it was happening. It’s still frustrating to me now that so many producers and other folks who were in higher positions don’t take the time to actually close off the loops like that and actually understand what it would feel like to be fired.
Craig: There are situations where you don’t have a relationship with the people in charge. If something has gone in an impersonal manner, then it’s okay that that’s the way it ends. When you have a relationship with somebody, then it is essential that they continue that, that they can’t just send you a Dear John letter. Did you ever get a Dear John letter, by the way? I shouldn’t ask everybody named John that.
John: No. No one’s ever broken up with me by an email or by letter, an actual letter, no.
Craig: (singing)
John: I’ve gotten letters that are just Dear John, but they were never about any relationship.
Craig: That’s how I’m going to end this one.
John: Let’s take a transition question here. Megana, start us off.
Megana: A listener wrote in and said, “Diversity inclusion efforts are by their very nature going to be most focused on those at the bottom rung, the entry-level staff writer jobs. Where does this leave those who had the misfortune of trying to break into the business with the wrong skin tone in the wrong year? The white men in power at the top get to continue to champion diversity efforts with zero personal sacrifice, while those of us just desperate for an opportunity continue to be tossed aside and told to toughen up.”
John: This was part of a longer email, but that’s the distilled essence of it. I think my first instinct is to attack the argument, like oh, it’s not actually harder for you or it’s still harder for other people, but I wanted to try maybe instead to do the classic thing where we first acknowledge what you’re actually saying, so validate not that you’re right, but that you have this feeling – it’s the feeling you’re experiencing, just to validate that you’re having this feeling – and then maybe try to restate what you’re saying, which to me you’re saying you feel like your opportunities to get these lower-level writing jobs are reduced because you’re a white man and that feels unfair. Craig, is that a fair restatement of what you think he’s trying to say?
Craig: It almost seems like he’s gone a bit further, that there are no entry-level staff writer jobs for white men.
John: Yes. He doesn’t say that there are none, but he is saying it’s the misfortune of trying to break into the business. He’s certainly saying it’s more difficult than it would’ve been five years ago, 10 years ago. Here’s where I think the next stage is to investigate, is to really check the facts. If you look at the numbers for TV staffing, the percentage of BIPOC writers at those lower levels has increased a lot, and so that’s true. It’s not a zero-sum game, so there’s been more writers hired overall, but the percentage of white male writers at those lower levels is down from where it would’ve been five years, 10 years ago. That sound right?
Craig: I take your word for it that those are the statistics.
John: I’ve also heard anecdotes and excuses from agency managers about why it’s harder to get white men staffed at those lower levels now, that they can use this, like, “Oh, they’re only looking for people of color for those lower-level positions,” as an excuse for why you’re not getting staffed, and yet there are still white guys making it. You still see people who are getting. It’s not the fact that this listener couldn’t be hired. It’s just the fact that he’s not been hired and that he feels like this is the obstacle.
Craig: Let’s just take it like you cited the statistic. Let’s say there are fewer white men being hired at entry-level staff writer positions. Therefore we can say, yes, it’s harder for white men right now to get entry-level staff writer jobs than it used to be. What we’re not saying is that it’s harder than it ought to be or easier than it ought to be. I note that none of us, and when I say us I mean white people, white guys, were going on particularly about “the misfortune of trying to break in the business with the wrong skin tone in the wrong year” for all of the years preceding the last two or three, if you are not white.
Yes, I can see how it is annoying to hear from white men in power at the top, who already have jobs, who already broke in, and who have the luxury, like you and I do, of saying fair is fair, other people deserve a turn. It’s been over-represented for so long that we have to make a change and we have to turn the wheel a bit. Easy for us to say, because we’re not trying to get those break-in jobs.
On the other hand, there’s almost no jobs anyway. What’s a little tricky is, almost no one ever got those jobs. Maybe .01% of all the people who want to have an entry-level staff writer job got one, in the world, or in our industry. It’s certainly not impossible to get one of these jobs if you are a white man. You just have to be better than you used to be. I think anyone who’s not white is going to be very familiar with that, which is you have to be better than the other people in order to get a job.
We can’t go down the road of trying to figure out what the perfect solution to fairness is when it has been so unfair for so long. It’s going to be what it’s going to be until it is basically fair. That causes problems. I am empathetic. I get it. It doesn’t feel good, like it didn’t feel good to everybody who wasn’t white for so long. It is easy for us to say.
John: I can understand why listener feels like it’s unfair. I understand why it feels that way. That doesn’t mean that it is unfair or that it is fair or that we’re going to get to a perfect solution here, but I understand why you feel that way. I think the challenge I’d present is what do you actually want to see change? If this were fixed, what would the end result be? What change do you want to see happening right now so that it could be this way? When I see complaints come up about this, I don’t see proposed solutions. If you, the listener, got staffed, would the problem be solved? Is it a structural problem or is it an individual problem? You’re describing both at the same time. I get why it feels unfair. Talk to me about what the system is that would actually be fair and how we’d get there. I think it’s difficult.
Craig: If you’re feeling angry or you’re feeling aggrieved, just make sure you direct that anger toward the right cause, which is the institutions and the studios that perpetuated unfairness for so long against people who weren’t white men, because that’s what’s happening now. There is a reaction to that. I haven’t heard anybody suggest that what we really ought to be doing is punishing the people who caused this problem, which were entry-level staff writers who are white men. Entry-level staff writers who are white men don’t hire anyone. Be angry at the studios. Certainly don’t be angry at the people who are getting jobs right now.
Above all else, understand and internalize the following statement. It is absolutely possible for a white man to get an entry-level staff writer job in Hollywood. You’re going to have to go for it. If you need to get better, you get better. If you need to work harder, you work harder. Do what you need to do to break through. That is what anyone has ever had to do. If it’s a little harder this time. It’s a little harder this time.
Some people have the misfortune of graduating college in the middle of a terrible recession. Some people have the misfortune of having a disability that writing rooms have traditionally just went like, “Oh yeah, no, we don’t want that person in here. We don’t want a deaf person in here. It’s too hard.” Everyone has a misfortune. You acknowledge it, you feel what you feel, blame the right people, and then get to work. There’s nothing else you can do.
John: Another thing I’d say about writers rooms is think about what are you able to bring to a writers room, and what is it that is unique, that would make you an incredibly valuable asset into that writers room. It’s not going to be that you’re a white guy. It’s going to be some sort of special experience you have, an insight you have, an ability you have, something about your personal experience that you can bring in that writers room, that can improve the show because you are part of that show. Instead of focusing on your skin color, really think about what is it that’s unique about you that is going to help you get staffed and be the perfect person for them to hire. That’s going to be more likely to lead to success. Let’s wrap up with one more question. Megana, can you talk us through Tony in LA?
Megana: Tony in LA asks, “I never expected the first time I wrote in to the show to be about this, but life can sure throw some curve balls. My best friend and writing partner died unexpectedly during the holidays.”
Craig: Oh no.
Megana: “I’m processing and slowly making my way through the grief. Eventually, I will be able to get back to writing. I’m pretty sure I already know what that first script will be, a sci-fi feature dealing with death and what comes after death. I pitched the idea to him about a year ago, and he loved it. It’s been on my mind a lot recently, and I’m hopeful the subject matter will be cathartic for me.
“That said, the idea of diving into a project by myself feels incredibly daunting. Writing with him was always fun and often easy. We kept each other accountable, and no suggestion was ever frowned upon by the other, no matter how crazy it seemed. We were the perfect balance for each other. It’s been over six years since I’ve written anything solo, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t irrationally concerned about trying to write by myself again. I’m not sure I even know how anymore. Do you have any advice on how to make that transition?”
John: Tony, first off, we’re just so sorry. It’s a horrible loss. You can’t rush grief. It doesn’t sound like you’re trying to rush grief. You’re trying to think about what happens after you move through this period of grief, but acknowledging that this period of grief is necessary and it’s just going to happen there.
Two things. We can talk about this first thing you’re going to try to write, which I think might be a mistake, because it’s going to be too closely tied in to your memory of your former writing partner. Then I think we should also talk about learning to write in a new way, because you’re going to learn to write without this person who was always there writing with you. Those are both challenging things to tackle.
Craig, let’s start with learning. You have written with a partner before. Then you were writing solo. What would be your instinct for Tony in terms of how to find out what his new writing routine is going to be or how he can start writing solo, if solo is the best way for him to write?
Craig: Again, Tony, certainly you’ve gone through it here. It’s awful news to hear. You’ll be okay. Like you said, you’re slowly making your way through the grief. It’s important for you to not try and feel accountable to the writer that the two of you were together. That writer doesn’t exist anymore. You’re a different person now. You’re a different writer. You may not be as good of a writer without him. That’s okay. You may find that you grow into a better writer without him, which will cause its own weird feelings. You don’t know. What you can’t do is be any better than you are right now. In a sense, you’re learning to walk again. You’re learning to run and to talk again, because you’re doing it differently, wildly different.
Of course everything comes back to musicals. Everything. There is a great musical called Curtains, a very funny musical, but also a very beautiful musical. The music was by John Kander. Music and lyrics by John Kander. He wrote a song called I Miss the Music. Partly it’s about a lyricist and a musician, and they break up, and he misses the music that they made when they were together. This was very much an overt love letter to John Kander’s former partner, Fred Ebb, who had died. Kander and Ebb were amazing. Kander and Ebb did Cabaret, they did Chicago. They wrote the song New York, New York. What else do you need to know? They’re incredible. They are all-time greats. Did Kander’s career go as well as it did without Fred than it did with? No. Would John Kander have ever thought it would? No, and that’s okay too. I will say that John Kander wrote one hell of a song with that one.
I like that you’re talking about writing something that has to do with what happened here. I think that could be very beautiful. It wouldn’t surprise me if as you were writing, you heard his voice in your head every now and again. If you do, listen to it. If he’s like, “Eh,” you go, “Mm-hmm, got it. He’s still there in my head and he’s telling me not good enough.” Listen to that. You can’t be better than you are on your own. Give yourself time to be a new writer, because you are now a new writer.
John: Whatever you decide to do next as your first full thing, I would just push that back a little bit and give yourself some time to not have the responsibility of trying to tackle a 120-page script. That just feels like a long slog, and I could see you getting really stuck in it and stuck in your head. Maybe pick some shorter projects. Write a short. Just experiment with how you’re going to write, where you’re going to write, what time of day you’re going to write, what is going to be the new things you want to try. Experiment and figure out what that could be, work on something shorter that you can actually finish, and then write something else that you can finish before you get up to that full-speed thing, because it’s going to be new.
You might also be thinking about, am I a person who really should be writing with somebody else? Maybe. That could be a situation where go to a writers group, find some other people who you can try to write with. I guess I would advise you to figure out whether you can write alone first before finding a replacement partner.
Tony, if you could write back in to us maybe a year from now and just give us an update on how you’re doing, I’m just really curious what the next steps are for you and how this next year goes for you.
It’s now time for our One Cool Things. I have two little short ones here. My first one is this comic by the Oatmeal. The Oatmeal’s such a great internet comic. This one I really liked was about creativity. He’s describing when you’re blocked in a project, it’s sort of like how your ears get stuck, like at altitude, and then suddenly your ears pop, you’re like, “Oh,” you have just have this inspiration, and how creative inspiration is like your ears popping. If you think about it that way, you know how to get your ears to pop. You actually have to go up or go down to get your ears to pop and just to let yourself go on that journey to do the thing that lets your ears pop. That’s a good reminder there. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Second thing is Australian Survivor. Craig, did you ever watch Survivor?
Craig: I watched the first season of Survivor back in 1839.
John: Way back when. Jeff Probst is a friend of the show and has read stuff for us before. We still watch Survivor. My daughter watches all of Survivor. She had us watch Australian Survivor Season Six, which is Brains Versus Brawn. It’s set in the Outback. I got to say, it was a really good season. Incredibly high production values, the right amount of twists and things, really good game-play throughout the whole thing. Craig, the Australian Outback is actually really pretty. I don’t know why-
Craig: It’s gorgeous.
John: Often I see it is as this desert wasteland. It looks amazing in this. There’s water and there’s stuff to do.
Craig: Yeah, and then venomous animals everywhere.
John: There are. No spoilers, no one dies of a venomous insect or snake in this situation.
Craig: I’m not watching it.
John: The episodes are too long. They feel a little bit padded, and yet you still love it all. I would say if you’re looking for a Survivor – obviously Jeff Probst, if you’re listening to the show, we still love you, you’re still number one – but Australian Survivor, quite good.
Craig: Wait, was he not on Australian Survivor?
John: No. Jonathan LaPaglia is the host of Australian Survivor.
Craig: You mean it’s the Australian … I thought it was Survivor in Australia.
John: No, it’s all Australians. It’s all Australians.
Craig: It’s just Australians. To me, Australian Survivor feels redundant. You walk out of your house, and there’s a tarantula. It’s right there. Tarantula.
John: Right there. You get a variety of Australian accents. You start to recognize, oh, the guy with the cowboy hat actually has a more Australian accent than the beach-loving people. You start to get some sense of geography of Australia in the course of it. I will say that it’s a bunch of white people.
Craig: In Australia?
John: There’s not as many people of color in the show, I think even as representative of the-
Craig: Of the actual Australian population.
John: Yeah. If we’re watching American television, we’re used to seeing people of various races. It’s so helpful when you have 24 people. That helps you remember who’s who. There’s just so many blonde ladies, it’s tough at the start.
Craig: Whitey number one, whitey number two. Who’s your favorite? Whitey five.
John: The best one.
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a game, as it often is. Now this is a game on Apple Arcade. I wasn’t subscribing to Apple Arcade, but now it’s come with this new, what is it called, Apple One subscription.
John: Apple One, yeah.
Craig: Now I have it. Cool. It’s called the Last Campfire. I just started it. I think it’s fairly new. You play this funny little character who’s going on this little journey. I guess the puzzle format is how do you get from here to here kind of thing, move some stuff around, turn a thing. Interesting puzzles, but it’s rather beautiful looking, and it’s also incredibly sweet and a bit mournful. There’s a narrator. I’m trying to figure out what her accent is. It almost sounds Icelandic or something. She has a very specific accent. I got to look it up and see what it is. I don’t know, I feel sad while I’m playing it, but I also feel hopeful. It’s really weird. It’s just got a lovely tone.
John: I’m watching the video as you’re talking about it. I can totally see that. It does look really beautiful.
Craig: There’s a word that they use. Oh, I found out what the accent is. The word is “forlorn.” It comes up quite a bit. The narrator in the Last Campfire, according to Reddit, is … Somebody said, “It makes me think I’m listening to Bjork,” because she’s … It did sound Icelandic. In fact, it is a British Norwegian Icelandic actor. I think I identified the Icelandicness-
John: You hit it.
Craig: … because of Hildur Guðnadóttir, who was our composer on Chernobyl. Icelandic is a really specific accent. There you go. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful accent.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Thank you for all your reading today. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin and I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Craig, so this, as many of our bonus topics, came out of a Twitter discussion where somebody had tweeted at you, or you and me, and said, “I try to avoid using forms of to be in my writing, because it’s weak,” or something. Remind me what the setup was.
Craig: They had a teacher who told them that the best practice would be, when writing a screenplay, to just simply never use any form of the verb to be, it would make your writing better. They had internalized this as something that was really worthy. I thought it sounded absolutely bananas.
John: It is bananas as a blanket rule to try to do this. I’ve seen people experiment with this, where they’ll write an entire blog post without using any form of to be, and it takes twice as long, because you realize that be is not just the sense of existing, it is a fundamental helper verb for constructing our English language. It feels like one of those over-applied rules, because there’s definitely sentences you read where a form of to be is in there and if you actually just use the real verb, it’s a stronger sentence. It’s always worth looking at a sentence to say, oh, is there a way I could make the sentence better? Great. Sometimes that is removing the verb to be, but as a blanket rule, gosh, no, you should never try to get rid of all forms of to be.
Craig: I’m trying to figure out how to sing And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going without using a to be. (singing)
John: Oh yeah, because you can’t do the present progressive without it.
Craig: (singing) I don’t know how to … It’s just stupid. If you overuse something, it’ll be dumb. The example I use was “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” I don’t know, what could you turn that into? “An offer exists in such a manner that … ” Any of those rules, any of them should just be ignored. Any of them, honestly.
John: Another language thing that came up this week, a colleague wrote in to me to say, “Listen, there’s a thing I’m noticing,” which I’m wondering if it’s really coming from social media or where it’s from. His example was people talking about the insurrection on January 6th, and the quote will be something like, “I went outside and it was crazy. All around you could see these protesters and police cars.” The colleague was asking, “What is this about? A person is narrating a story, so it’s in the first-person I, and then it shifts into second-person, where you could see these things.” His theory was like, is it because of our writing on social media or how we talk with people? Craig, what’s your perspective on the shift from I to you?
Craig: It’s actually an interesting shift. I think it is meaningful. The first sentence is “I went outside,” which can only happen with him. Let’s say it’s a him. He’s inside, and he chooses to go outside. Once he goes outside, there are other people out there. At that point he’s part of a group experience, all around you, meaning you, me, us, we, everyone could see these protesters and police cars. I wouldn’t have written it myself that way, but I understand the shift.
John: Yeah, but I suspect if we were to record you or I talking, at a certain point we would do that.
Craig: I wouldn’t do it in written writing, but yeah, in talking, sure.
John: It’s natural for a character to do it, for example. These sentences here are natural things that we do in dialog. I was looking up a little bit more about this, and it turns out that in English we use you as an indefinite pronoun. When we need to describe so that anybody in that situation could see, we’re using “you” as that. Different languages have different ways of plugging this in. In French we have “on,” which is a “we,” but it’s also just “one.” In the example of the sentence I just said, like, “All around, one could see these protesters and police cars,” “one” is a little formal there. That’s really what it was saying, a person who was in that situation could see this thing, and we’ve just swapped it for you.
Craig: There’s nothing wrong with that. We all know what it means. If we know what it means, then it’s good.
John: On the topic of pronouns, case usage. I ran into a LA Times article that used a “whom” in a way that was technically correct but absolutely boggling to me. Where are you right now with your whos and your hims and your hes? Do you think you’re using them grammatically correctly almost all the time or are you just using what sounds right to your ear?
Craig: I use them grammatically correctly more than most people do, but I do not use them grammatically correctly in all circumstances. For instance, I do not say, when I knock on someone’s door and they’re like, “Who’s there?” I don’t say, “It is I.”
John: It is I.
Craig: That just sounds ridiculous. Now I sound like a vampire or an earl of something. It is I.
John: This sentence is technically correct, “Is that we in the photograph?” You’d sound insane if you were to say that.
Craig: Or like you’re in a Merchant Ivory film. “Is that we in the photograph?”
John: With a sturdy enough accent, you can get any of those things to pass off.
Craig: Certainly.
John: It’s such a good thing. It got me thinking too, I said before “on,” which is the French version of … It’s “we,” but it’s also anybody there in that situation.
Craig: Like “one.”
John: A version of “one.”
Craig: It’s like “one.”
John: Are there any features of other languages that we want to incorporate into English, if we could just grab them and drag them in, because English is really good at-
Craig: Absorbing.
John: … using stuff from other languages, absorbing.
Craig: I’m hesitant to say this, because I think it might cause more problems than it’s worth, but the way that Germans manufacture single words out of multiple words could be useful to us. We do it sometimes, but we tend to do it more in a portmanteau fashion than in a five words smashed into one word fashion.
John: As I look at Spanish and French, sometimes their pronouns are a little bit easier to use in terms of trying to have neutral language, because you’re only worried about the object and the gender of the object, rather than the gender of the subject, which can be useful. His and hers isn’t relating to the subject. It’s relating to what the gender is of the object at the other side, which is not necessarily tied into a person’s identity.
Craig: Wait, is that true?
John: Let’s see.
Craig: There’s definitely in Italian, or in French I think, if there are three boys and it’s our thing, I think it is related to them and not the object.
John: [French language]. Those are his sons or her sons. The “ses garçons” is not telling you the gender of the speaker of the sentence, the subject of the sentence.
Craig: I see. I see.
John: Our his and her are always tying back to whoever the subject is. In other Romance languages, that his or her is only related to the object.
Craig: I like that we’ve basically gotten rid of all gender in English. I don’t think that the gender stuff helps. We do have his or her relating back, but it’s so simple.
John: It is really simple.
Craig: It’s pretty simple, because nouns really shouldn’t have gender. That just seems really stupid and arbitrary.
John: It is, even though of course with this podcast, the ability of just using “their” and “them” to take the place of, that has been really helpful. I think if you listen to early episodes, we’re saying “his” or “her” a lot, and now we’re just saying “their,” and it’s easier.
Craig: We can absolutely do that. There’s one nice thing about Italian that we can’t do in English. I wish we could. Technically, I think they could get away with it in French, but they don’t, and Spanish. The Italians have conjugations of verbs, just like the French or the Spanish or any other Romance language. What they do generally is they just leave the subject off.
John: Spanish does that.
Craig: Rather than saying “I” or “a,” they just leave that off, because the verb itself gives you that information. It’s baked in. The French don’t seem to do that though.
John: There’s Spanish “hablo español.” You would say, “Yo hablo español” if you had to really emphasize that it was I, but you just say, “Hablo español.”
Craig: Yeah, and then “e yo.” French they will say “je.”
John: French has to say “je” because all the verbs-
Craig: Why?
John: All the conjugations sound the same.
Craig: They sound the same. “Parle” and “parles” with an S sound the same. Got it. That’s interesting.
John: There’s English where we basically don’t even bother conjugating our verbs.
Craig: English is kind of smart that way. It’s why, I don’t know, learning other languages is hard for me. It’s not hard for Melissa. It’s not hard for you. The simplicity of English, even the spelling is ridiculous, and we have no good consistency of pronunciation, but boy, the grammar is super simple I think.
John: We have weird edge cases. The whole way we use “do” and “did” is just strange, to create past-tense and to create questions and things.
Craig: Yeah, but the way that the French use “fair” is weird, I think. “It’s raining” is so much easier to say in English than … [French language] like “he is making the rain.” It’s like, what, God?
John: Megana, jump in here. Is there anything that you would like to see imported from another language into English or that you find is fascinatingly different that would be cool to do in English?
Megana: Oh my gosh, you’re really putting my AP Spanish on the spot here.
John: You speak some Spanish. You speak some Telugu. What else do you speak?
Megana: I speak Spanish and Telugu. We don’t really have a formal you in English. You have them in Telugu, but it always results in me making decorum mistakes. I think it’s nicer that we don’t have that and it’s all a little less formal.
John: I wish we had a plural you. We have “you all,” which is pretty common, but a plural you is nice, and a formal you is nice too. In the case of Spanish they use “usted.” In the case of French they use “vous.”
Megana: I wish there was something better than “y’all” or the “you all” in English.
Craig: We used to have formal words. We just don’t use them anymore because we’re not very formal people. We had “thou.”
John: “Thou” was the informal version though.
Craig: Really?
John: “You” was the formal version, and “thou” was the informal version.
Craig: Interesting.
Megana: That’s actually really nice. I’d like to bring more Old English back, if anything.
John: 100%. That’s our goal for the next 10 years of Scriptnotes is to bring back the old complicated things. The last thing, a Twitter question I asked. This is related to Australian Survivor. One of the contestants on Australian Survivor said that he “striked while the iron was hot.” He said the word “striked.” I’m like, “Wait, striked?”
Craig: That’s not right.
John: I turned to Mike and Amy, like, “Striked?” They’re just like, “Yeah, that’s fine. It always feels weird when you say struck.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” I asked a Twitter poll, and 95% of people agreed with me that “striked” is a weird word.
Craig: There’s no “striked.”
John: “Striked.”
Craig: Is that a word?
John: Yes, like “the WGA striked.”
Craig: I’m looking in Merriam-Webster.
John: It’s a word. Here’s the thing. I looked it up on Google Ngram. “Striked” has a very low prevalence.
Craig: It’s not.
John: Overall in English, the general trend is that our past tenses where we’re changing a letter from “striked” to “struck,” they’re all going away. “Sneaked” I think is passed over “snuck.”
Craig: Yes, okay, but “striked” is not a word. It’s not. It’s just not a word. “You striked out.” You sound like an idiot. I’m looking at “strike” in Merriam-Webster, and “striked” is not there. “Struck” and “stricken” is there, and “striking” of course, but not “striked.” Not a word. “Hanged” and “dived” are interesting cases, because it’s those specific definitions. Scuba diving is “dived.”
John: What does “dived” do?
Craig: “Dived into the water.”
John: “Dived,” yeah.
Craig: Or “he dived,” I guess from scuba diving. Then I don’t know why “hanged” for putting a noose around your neck is that and not “hung.” Who cares? What’s the difference? We hung this from a tree. “We hanged it from a tree,” nobody would ever say that. Why are you “hanged” a person? I don’t know why.
John: Arlo Finch, the copyeditor and I got into a disagreement about “kneeled” and “knelt” and which one we were going to choose. I think I used two different versions of it. That’s a word that sits right on the cusp, because “knelt” is a little bit strange, and “kneeled” is just taking its place.
Craig: Interesting. I would’ve probably said “knelt.”
John: I think I did say “knelt” most of the time.
Craig: Really?
John: Apparently that’s a word that’s on the cusp of changing. Really. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun podcast.
Craig: Thank you guys.
Megana: Thank you.
Links:
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- Script Speaker
- Check out our first (and only) Scriptnotes TikTok — thank you to Drew Rosas for editing the audio!
- Fleabag Season 2, check out our episode with Phoebe Waller Bridge here!
- First Time Screenwriters Contest
- Your Ears are Plugged by the Oatmeal
- Australian Survivor Season 6
- The Last Campfire
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Owen Danoff (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 3-1-22 The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 536: Adaptation and Transition, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.
First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.
Craig: Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.
John: That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?
Craig: Yeah.
John: I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.
Craig: Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?
Megana Rao: I identify with Gen Z.
Craig: You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …
Megana: I’m old, I get it.
Craig: Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.
Megana: I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.
Craig: Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”
John: My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.
Craig: Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.
Megana: Yeah. My cold bones.
Craig: You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.
Megana: I already am.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.
Craig: So dumb.
John: We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-
Craig: You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.
John: Going to be great.
Craig: Just to get meta.
John: First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.
Craig: Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-
John: 99% of all COVID in North America is that.
Craig: It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.
John: Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.
Craig: The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.
The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.
John: Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.
Craig: It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.
John: This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.
Craig: Of course, that’s the rule.
John: That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.
I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.
Craig: I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.
I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.
John: Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?
Craig: It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.
John: We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.
Craig: I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.
John: Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?
Megana: Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.
I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”
John: I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.
Craig: I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.
John: Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.
Craig: No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.
John: What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.
Craig: Indeed.
John: All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?
Craig: That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.
John: Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.
Megana: I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.
John: I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.
Craig: That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.
John: Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?
Craig: It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.
John: Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.
Craig: It’d be a bummer.
John: That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.
Craig: I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.
John: This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.
Craig: A run-in?
John: I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.
What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.
Craig: I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.
John: All that meta data was buried into the file system.
Craig: You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.
John: I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.
Megana: When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …
Craig: You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.
John: I don’t want to Command I.
Craig: Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.
John: Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.
Megana: Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.
“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”
Craig: Yes. Amen, Jules.
John: Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.
Craig: Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?
The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.
I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.
John: It’s a lot of money.
Craig: I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.
John: The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.
I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.
Craig: I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.
John: Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.
The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.
I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.
Craig: I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.
John: Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?
Megana: Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”
Craig: What’s up with that?
John: What’s up with that?
Craig: What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-
John: It’s a magic thing.
Craig: Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.
John: We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.
I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.
Craig: Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.
John: Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.
Craig: A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.
John: Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-
Craig: Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?
John: We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.
Craig: Yeah, we have questions.
John: First question is, what is your refund policy?
Craig: Oh boy.
John: Oh boy.
Craig: What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.
John: This is just all-
Craig: It’s all bad.
John: It’s all umbrage bait.
Craig: Great.
John: Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.
Craig: Aw. Come on.
John: Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?
Craig: I call it both, slug line and scene header.
John: It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.
Craig: Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?
John: “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”
Craig: It’s rare, but I’ve done it.
John: It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.
Craig: “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.
John: Sometimes it’s really helpful.
Craig: Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?
John: Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.
Craig: “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.
John: Craig is requesting his refund.
Craig: I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?
John: Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?
Craig: Yeah, help us out.
Megana: John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”
John: Exactly.
Craig: We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?
Megana: I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.
Craig: Script throwers.
Megana: They just have to pick that back up.
Craig: Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.
John: Please.
Craig: One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.
John: We do know what we’re doing.
Craig: Come on.
John: Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”
If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?
Craig: No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.
John: Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.
Craig: There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.
John: I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.
Craig: No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.
John: This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.
Craig: Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.
John: I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.
Craig: It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.
John: They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.
Craig: At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.
John: We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.
Craig: Yeah, new stuff.
John: Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.
Megana: JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”
John: What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.
Craig: Yeah, this one is answerable.
John: Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.
Craig: JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.
One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.
John: We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?
Craig: I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.
This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.
John: While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?
Craig: No, it’s 19-A.
John: That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”
Craig: We just call it 19 Apple Apple.
John: Apple Apple.
Craig: That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.
John: Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.
Craig: Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.
John: Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”
Craig: What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.
John: I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.
Craig: There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”
John: Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.
Craig: Yah.
John: Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.
Megana: Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”
John: Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.
Craig: Best mom.
John: That’s mom of the year. Best mom.
Craig: Best mom.
John: It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.
Craig: Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.
There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.
I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.
John: I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.
Craig: Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.
John: Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.
My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?
Craig: No.
John: It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.
Craig: I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.
John: I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.
Craig: This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”
John: Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-
Craig: “Do we have to know dates?”
John: … for this to work.
Craig: My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?
John: I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.
Craig: Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.
The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.
John: It feels like a perfect device for it.
Craig: It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.
John: Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.
Craig: There you go.
John: Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.
Craig: Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.
John: They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.
Craig: No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.
John: Ethereum.
Craig: China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.
John: I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.
One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.
Craig: All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Boogle?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Is that it, Boogle?
John: Beeple.
Craig: Beeple.
John: Beeple.
Craig: I like Boogle better.
John: He was a previous One Cool Thing.
Craig: Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.
John: Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.
Craig: That’s different. That’s different.
John: It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-
Craig: The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.
John: Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?
Craig: Copyright.
John: Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.
Craig: No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.
John: They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.
Craig: There is. There is.
John: What’s that?
Craig: The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.
John: Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.
Craig: JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?
John: Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.
Craig: Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?
John: Apparently not.
Craig: Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.
John: We can Google this now.
Craig: It’s $3 million.
John: $3 million.
Craig: They spent $3 million.
John: Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.
I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.
Craig: It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?
John: I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.
Craig: I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “
John: Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.
Craig: It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.
John: You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.
Craig: It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.
John: Doesn’t it?
Craig: Yeah.
John: Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.
Craig: Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you, John. Thank you, Megana.
Megana: Thanks.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s MOTHER Script
- Script University’s 20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order
- Read Aloud Software Suggestions Table Read, ZoomText, JAWS, VoiceDream
- DnD for kids Level 1 Geek and Being a Dungeon Master for Kids
- Flee animated film
- Wikipedia Timeline Game
- Papers, please by Lucas Pope
- NFT Articles Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 by Tim O’Reilly, My First Impressions of Web3 on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are by Molly White
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by William Phillipson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 534: Halfway There, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig breakdown the ideal attributes of the “screenwriter” character. Looking at the ratio of craft to charm, they debate which combinations lead to success in Hollywood.
We also host a round of the Three Page Challenge. Samples this week range from stories on earthquakes to community theatre, but all feature surprising reveals. The guys offer advice on cutting scenes, introducing characters, and punching up dialogue.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig discuss a Vanity Fair article on film score production and rumors of ghostwriting for composers.
Links:
- Follow alone with our Three Page Challenge selections The Man Who Could be Macbeth by Daniel Brace, Pizza Boy by Mick Jones, Evergreen by Heather Kennedy, Scavenger by Phil Saunders.
- WGA East Settles Five-Day Strike Against G/O Media
- RSVP for the Animation Guild Rally Sunday 3/20 at 2pm in Burbank, CA
- ‘Copshop’ Screenwriter Sues Zero Gravity Management For Breach of Contract
- ScreenSkills To Fund Accessibility Co-Ordinators For British TV
- Behind the Tweets: “Rewrite Map” by Jeffrey Lieber on WGAW Connect
- Scriptnotes Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne
- David Iserson’s Tweet on Great Scripts
- Touring the MOST EXPENSIVE HOUSE in the United States! on Youtube and The Queen of Versailles
- The Astrologer on Elden Ring
- “The Minions Do the Actual Writing”: The Ugly Truth of How Movie Scores Are Made by Mark Rozzo for Vanity Fair
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Joe Palen (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Intelligence vs. Charisma first appeared on John August.
John and Craig bump into/trip over/spill coffee on the ‘Meet-Cute.’ They look at the history and mechanics of that moment when two lead characters meet each other in a romantic comedy, with advice to writers on how to keep it fresh.
We answer listener questions on packing for set, branding yourself as a writer, and staggered success in a relationship.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we talk about onboarding, specifically in the game Elden Ring.
Links:
- Volodymyr Zelensky and the ongoing war in Ukraine
- Does Hollywood Ruin Books? by Numberphile on Youtube on Berkson’s Paradox
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter and the Meet-Cute edition here!
- Scriptnotes 433: The One with Greta Gerwig
- Elden Ring video game
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Nice to Meet-Cute You first appeared on John August.
John welcomes writer/director Leigh Whannell (Saw, Upgrade, Invisible Man) and astrophysicist/science consultant Dr. Erin Macdonald (Star Trek) to explore the science of sci-fi. They follow the evolution of an idea through the brainstorm to edit phase, advising how to titrate the proper amount of fact to fiction along the way.
We look at how science can catalyze a story in a round of How Would This Be A Movie. Topics range from solar storms, evil artificial intelligence, human chimeras, and advanced spacefaring civilizations.
In the bonus segment for premium members, we discuss Leigh’s proposal for an 80’s shopping mall theme park experience.
Links:
- Ed Solomon’s Tweet on MIB Movie Accounting
- What is a Dyson sphere? and Dyson spheres on Wikipedia
- What is a Human Chimera? and Becoming Two People At Once
- Stephen King’s The Dark Half
- The Science Behind the Endgame Snap and Minimum Viable Population
- Rokos Basilisk: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time
- There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
- Are Solar Storms Dangerous to Us? and How We’ll Safeguard Earth From a Solar Storm Catastrophe
- The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos by Annie Rauwerda for Input
- A Collapse of Horses a short story collection by Bryan Evanston
- We Could be Heroes by Mike Chen
- Leigh Whannell on Twitter and Leigh’s 80’s mall tweet
- Erin Macdonald on Twitter
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Contra Entropy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Science Movies first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 535 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, as screenwriters we’re constantly looking for ways to expose a character’s inner states, but what happens when real-life people start performing with main character energy?
Craig: Whoa.
John: We’ll look at the issue from both the perspective of writers creating characters and 21st century humans trying to function in a society.
Craig: We live in a society, John.
John: We live in a society. If everyone’s the main character, society probably doesn’t function. We’ll also have Follow Up and lots of new listener questions, and in a bonus segment for Premium Members, we will talk about population, speaking of society. Craig and I grew up in a time of Malthusian predictions of overpopulation. You remember that, Craig.
Craig: Oh, ’70s.
John: Oh, ’70s, and now there’s just not enough ’80s. We’ll talk through that.
Craig: Depending on where you live.
John: Depending where you live. It’s a very situational and very local thing, but also the trends are pretty clear. We’ll get into some of that. First, Craig, this is pretty huge news. It was hard to sit on the whole week. We almost put out a special episode, but we didn’t. Fans are suing Universal Pictures because the 2019 movie Yesterday did not include Ana de Armas. I was aware she was not in the movie, but I wasn’t aware of the controversy around this, because Ana de Armas is in one of the trailers for the movie, but she does not actually appear in the movie itself. Fans have taken it on themselves to actually sue Universal Pictures over this. Craig, you are the legal expert on the show. Medical expert, legal expert, expert in puzzles. Can you help us figure out what is the likelihood that this lawsuit will go through and that these fans will be justly compensated for the lack of Ana de Armas they got?
Craig: It depends on whether Universal wants to make an example of these people or just settle and give everybody a five-cent coupon for something. It’s pretty silly. Obviously the defense is simply that she was in the movie when they made that marketing material. They do put together trailers before the movie’s finalized. Then they creatively came to the conclusion that she didn’t need to be in the movie, and so they removed those scenes. This happens all the time. I remember when I was in high school, my friends and I were very excited to go see, I think it was Nightmare On Elm Street: Dream Warriors is the name of number three.
John: (sings)
Craig: (sings) Yep. Was that Tesla or Dokken? In the commercials, not just the trailer, in the television commercials, every single commercial, at some point Freddy Krueger would go, “How sweet, fresh meat.” We thought this was the funniest line, and we couldn’t wait to go to the movie and smoke the 1980s weed, which is the equivalent of nibbling one 19th of a gummy today, and then sitting in the theater, and when that line would come, we would go, “Yay! How sweet, fresh meat.” Then he never said it. What we did was we sued.
John: That’s how you raised the nest egg that let you become the successful screenwriter you are now.
Craig: We live in a society. Basically, so this is ridiculous, either Universal goes, “Yeah, we just want to make a point of never having anyone do this ever again,” which is what I will suspect, they will just fight this to the bitter end, because even the people are asking for $5 million. This is a class action, I presume. $5 million spread out over affected viewers in their home states. Even if Universal lost and had to pay every dime these people wanted, whatever. This is ridiculous. I think they’ll fight it all the way. There’s always the possibility they just settle and everybody gets, like I said, 20 cents, a 20-cent coupon for something.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes that lets you see the trailer that actually has Ana de Armas in it. Apparently she plays another guest on a talk show when the guy, the hero of Yesterday, is playing a song. There’s some sort of spark between them. It’s not even clear that it’s beyond the one scene. I do just hope that the end result of this, whether it’s found in Universal’s favor or the fans’ favor, is that it’s really found in favor of Ana de Armas, who needs to be in all movies, because she is one of the most delightful things about the recent Bond movie. She’s so fantastic in Knives Out. We need more Ana de Armas. If this lawsuit is what it takes to bring this awareness to the general public, I think it’s worth it.
Craig: Seems like the general public is saying that she is so compelling, the only reason they went to go see a movie with Beatles music in it was to see her, and no other reason.
John: No other reason.
Craig: No other reason.
John: I’ll say, even the movie without Ana de Armas in it, I really enjoyed the movie. I don’t think people talk enough about Yesterday, because I thought it was actually a really well constructed movie, and took a very high-concept premise and ran with it well. I wish good things upon the movie Yesterday, even if it doesn’t star Ana de Armas. If we get the Snyder cut that has Ana de Armas back in it, maybe that’s the best of all possible worlds.
Craig: That sounds good.
John: Yeah. Now Craig, you texted me last night asking about, “Hey, can we pull this Scriptnotes podcast that you and I record off of Spotify, because,” you said, “F Spotify.”
Craig: Yeah. Spotify has been in headlines lately. Neil Young pulled his catalog off. I think Joni Mitchell just did the same in solidarity with him, because Spotify is the main patron and platform for Joe Rogan’s podcast. I don’t have anything against Joe Rogan the person. I don’t watch his podcast or listen to the show.
John: To be clear, you don’t listen to any podcast.
Craig: Correct.
John: Including this podcast.
Craig: That’s right, so that’s not a judgment.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Craig: Stipulated it’s a thing that one could watch or listen to. Therefore I don’t. But I certainly have read enough transcripts and quotes from him that indicate that he’s not on what I would call the right side of the science when it comes to epidemiology and COVID-19 and public health and vaccination. I think it’s fair for these people to say, “Look, Spotify is … ” I think they made a $100 million deal with him. They don’t like the things he says. They’re not asking Spotify to kick him off Spotify. They’re not asking Spotify to censor him. They’re just saying, “I don’t want to be at that party. If that guy’s talking like that at that party, I don’t want to be there.” I think that’s reasonable. I don’t want to be there either. Now we don’t make any money off of Spotify. Did we get $100 million from Spotify?
John: We did not get $100 million from Spotify.
Craig: I just wanted to check real fast before I said no.
John: Here’s what’s confusing about this is that in terms of a podcast versus a song on this, like Neil Young or Joni Mitchell pulling their catalog off, that means that Spotify cannot play their things anymore. Joe Rogan’s podcast is a Spotify Exclusive, so you can only listen to his podcast through Spotify. Scriptnotes is a free and open podcast for the whole world to enjoy, so people can choose to use Spotify to listen to it, but our files are not actually ever on Spotify. People are choosing to listen to it. Scriptnotes is like a webpage that you could go to in Firefox or Opera or Safari or whatever else. We could theoretically somehow block Opera from opening our page, but that’s not really how the internet works. It’s just an RSS feed. We’re not getting any money from them. The only thing we did recently is we made it so that our Premium subscribers, if they’re using Spotify as their main app, they can now subscribe within Spotify, but it’s not Spotify paying us money. It’s just that they can go to the webpage for everyone else who wants to pay us five bucks a month to listen to all the back-episodes.
Craig: Does Spotify put ads on us or anything like that?
John: No. Just a podcast player. Just like opening a PDF in Acrobat versus Preview or-
Craig: I see.
John: Something like that. It’s just an app. It’s not actually a thing that’s paying us any money.
Craig: It sounds like if we said to Spotify, “You can’t do that,” they would feel nothing, and nothing would change for us either. That’s what I’m hearing.
John: I think if our listeners want to choose to not use Spotify, that’s their choice to not use Spotify, and should not pay Spotify their money. I’m not paying Spotify any money.
Craig: I don’t either.
John: Easy for me to stop. You know what? Last week on the show I talked through my experience of coaching a friend, like, “It’s time to leave your reps,” and his career improved. We have a Follow Up question from that from a person named Frustrated. Megana, can you help us out?
Megana Rao: Frustrated wrote in, “I’m a mid-level TV writer who has written/produced several episodes of television. I’ve only ever had a manager and no agent. In the last few weeks it’s become clear to me that my manager has got to go. It was on a new show, my second, when COVID hit, and we went virtual for several months, but eventually the plug got pulled and it never went into production. Since then I’ve tried everything, pitching on open writing assignments, writing new material, pitching original ideas, networking, etc. I’ve had lots of good feedback, but ultimately no paid work. It’s been a year and a half with nothing to show for it. My question is, can you talk more about actually firing your reps? Do you simply send an email? Should I try to find new ones before firing the old ones. How do you sell yourself to new reps when you’ve been out of work for a long time? Are agents or managers better for someone in my position at this point?”
John: All good questions.
Craig: Great questions.
John: Let’s talk about first firing your old rep before getting a new rep. My instinct is that you can start the process of looking for the new rep and get those initial conversations happening. It doesn’t really matter that much if you fire the first one before you start hiring the second one. It’s all going to work out the same.
Craig: I’m going to-
John: You disagree?
Craig: A little bit, because it’s a small town, for being such a big town. The one thing that managers seem to be good at and agents seem to be good at is hearing that other managers and other agents are sniffing around their clients. In fact, they seem to have way more attention paid to that than, for instance, getting their client’s work. What happens is you can find yourself in a weird middle ground where you head out there, you start talking to people, your manager finds out, yells at them about poaching. Managers and agents do poach from each other, but they’re careful about how they do it, because they don’t want to get into open warfare. The new people might back away. Your current manager is super pissed off. Now you’re stuck in a house with somebody that’s not talking to you. Other people feel like, “Okay, just come back when you fire that person,” but it’s gotten weird.
It’s better to go out clean, I think, but before you go out clean, I think the person you need to talk to, Frustrated, is your lawyer. I’m going to presume you have a lawyer, because you say you’re a mid-level TV writer, you’ve had work, you’ve got credits. Your lawyer will be able to give you a decent sense, because they’re the ones who talk to business affairs, about where you stand, and ultimately where you might be able to go. Your lawyer is also able to, in an intermediate fashion, talk to some of the agents or managers that she or he knows, and whisper, if say something was going to happen, and get a sense, a little preview of what the world is like out there. If it’s bad, if generally there’s not a lot of interest, you got to get something going and then walk, but if there is, then I think you cut it clean. I think you can send an email or you can phone call. It doesn’t matter. Maybe they have some sense of what is fair. Who cares? They’re fired. Fire them. Then go out there and start talking to new people.
As far as agents versus managers, as someone better for your position at this point, I am so old-fashioned, and I think that agents are better options, because they don’t mingle production in with representation. It is also true that often, depending on where you are on the ladder, managers may have more time to focus on you.
John: Craig talks about the important stuff, discussing this with your lawyer. I think the other people you should really involve in this conversation are the other execs you’ve been interacting with. Say you’re pitching writing assignments, you’re doing this stuff, there’s people that you’ve connected with. I think it’s worth asking if you have any relationship with them, like, “Hey, what is my manager like? Is my manager actually doing a good job? What do you think? Do you have any better suggestions for me?”
Same with you were on this room writing the show, those are other writers who have reps. Talk to them about your experience and what their experience has been, and they’ll give you a good sense of is this manager doing a good job for you, which it probably sounds like they’re not, and who might be the better people suited for you, because I remember as I left my first agent, went to my second agent, that was really part of the discussion is who was the right person for me to even be going to. You will find those answers by talking with folks who are working with those people all the time.
Craig: That’s a good point, that Frustrated has been in rooms. He or she knows other writers. They have reps. That’s a good place to start. When you’re a feature writer, you interface with executives all the time. When you’re a television staffer, you generally don’t. There may not be that person to go to, but then you have the availability of all these other writers that you’ve been with, and who knows, maybe they have a sense of things. I think you’ve identified a problem when you say, “It’s become clear to me that my manager has to go.” Trust that feeling. It’s not going to get better.
John: Yep. Agreed. All right, some more Follow Up here. Two episodes ago we were just talking about the 100-year-old screenplay format and how frustrating it is that some certain things are hard to include in it. Clint wrote in to point us towards Script Hop, which is a service that can package up your scripts, along with supporting material, so visuals, audio notes, music, and things like that. It feels like something that’s designed for pitching your project to places. It’s not necessarily the kind of format that would be useful for a production, for something to represent the whole project for a production, which is I think more what Craig and I are looking at, but sure, different people are trying different things.
Script Hop is owned or seems like it’s created by Script University, which makes me shudder a little bit, but it feels like the kind of thing where people are trying to do experiments around the edges of that. Great, experiment with it, but I think we are both still looking for what is that service or format that it’s going to be a great way to say, “Here is the script, the text you’re going to be shooting, but here is important stuff that goes with it,” that goes beyond just my suggestion of just like, here’s the deck that the company sent.
Craig: I’m looking at this, and it absolutely does seem like a pitch. They’re literally saying pitch content. That’s what they’re calling it. The Premium fee here is $8 a month. You can create as many packets as you need. This is not exactly what we’re talking about, but it looks pretty. From the demo here, it looks snazzy.
John: Some more Follow Up on We Hear and We See. Alex in Liverpool, England wrote, “I do see the value in avoiding we see/we hear [inaudible 00:14:24] for the sake of brevity. Why have, ‘We see a woman walk into the room,’ when you can simply have, ‘A woman walks into the room.'”
Craig: Oh my god, I never thought of it that way. Oh, I have. We have. We’ve talked about it literally four billion times, Alex. That said, big fan of Liverpool.
John: We love Liverpool. Let’s talk about we hear and we see though, and why it’s useful in situations where you can’t just literally just have the clean sentence there, because, “A woman walks into the room,” yes, that is correct. For me, we hear/we see is most often a case where the cause of something isn’t known, so it’s happening off screen. We experience it as an audience, but the characters in it aren’t there. You can describe a thing that’s happening, but there’s not a verb that goes with it, or if it’s a stand-in for the camera. Really I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s a way of not talking about cameras and shots and angles. It’s really like folks in the audience’s attention on something without calling out the camera does a thing.
Craig: Those are all excellent practical reasons. In addition, philosophically, brevity, this kind of extreme brevity is not the goal. We see and we hear also has a psychological impact on the reader. It is immersive. It means you are immersed. You are feeling and experiencing something in this moment, the way that a character would if they would be right next to it, or the way you would if you were right in the middle of it, which is very different than if you don’t. If the six characters, five letters and a space, gets that done, and gets it done that efficiently, why not? Just brutal, spartan brevity is a style, I suppose, but it is not the holy grail.
John: Two examples I was trying to come up with. Here’s the first one. We’re falling through an emerald void. All around us we hear crackling sounds, like ice shattering. You could do that without the we’s in those cases, but it’d be hard and brutal. The we’s really give you the sense that we as an audience are falling through this space, that we are hearing these things, and it’s not dependent on this character hearing the things. This is what the experience is like in the theater.
Craig: How else would you do it? An emerald voice. Crackling sounds like ice shattering. That doesn’t tell me much, including falling.
John: It doesn’t tell me the experience we’re getting. It’s like pointing at things. Here’s a second example. While Tom is digging through his pack, we see a shadow move across the headlights.
Craig: Tom does not see that shadow, but we do.
John: That’s the important thing.
Craig: Oh sweet, fresh meat, I assume is what the next line would be.
John: 100%. That is exactly what I had planned. Literally, you reached into my mind and pulled the words out before I could even say them.
Craig: I love that commercial. I’m going to sue. The example that Alex gives us, why have, “We see a woman walk into the room,” when you could have, “A woman walks into the room.” “A woman walks into the room,” that feels like, I don’t know, a very dull man is telling a story, “A woman walks into the room.” Wait, does everybody notice that a woman walks into the room? Are we really close to her when she walks into the room? Are we really far away when she walks in? “We see a woman walk into the room,” I already have an idea. The camera’s pointed toward the door, I’m going to say a wide shot here, because we see her walk into the room. We don’t see at the door, a woman enters frame. There’s lots of information here. That’s why I think we get so frustrated by this whole, “Don’t say we see or we hear,” not because it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt.” It helps. It’s incredibly helpful. There we go. I think at this point we should just change the name of this podcast to the We See Cast.
John: That’s what we do. One useful exercise for people who still are bucking up against we hear and we see is to go through some of the screenplays that we’ve mentioned, like some of these award-nominated screenplays from this past year, and look for situations where the writer was using we hear or we see, and try to rewrite those sentences without them. I think you’ll find it’s a little more difficult than you would’ve guessed.
Craig: Or not as good.
John: Or not as good. Honestly, probably just not as good. It’s not to say you have to use it. Many screenwriters do not use it, and that’s absolutely their choice, but I think it’s a useful tool, and to take it out of your belt unnecessarily is dumb, in my opinion. Aaron from New York writes, “I’m pretty certain I first read the instruction that discouraged the use of we see and we hear in David Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible,” which was first published in 1994 and Aaron read back in 2004. “I’m not sure if it matters. I’m not sure if Trottier himself started it.” I think it predates that, because, Craig, I think I remember a prohibition on we hear and we see from when I first started in film school, which would’ve been ’92. Do you have a sense of when you first heard this as a quote unquote “rule?”
Craig: It was on the internet somewhere.
John: Yeah, I guess, early internet, because you were in a film school situation that would’ve discouraged that.
Craig: No, late ’90s or early 2000s I think maybe. Who’s Dave Trottier? Trottier?
John: I recognize that name. I think he’s still a person who does stuff about-
Craig: I’m looking him up. Tell you what, not to be a jerk about it, but go ahead and everyone out there just choose who you think you should listen to. I’ll just leave it at that. How about that? Not being a jerk. I’m just saying-
John: Not being a jerk.
Craig: You have choices in to whom you listen.
John: Now another thing we’ve discussed in a previous episode I think was a listener question talking about how this person’s partner, spouse was not supportive of his screenwriting, he was feeling frustrated. I think you and I actually had a good back and forth about how supportive that partner needs to be. Some Follow Up that Megana can read for us.
Megana: Once Felt Neglected Too wrote in and said, “I’m a recently produced screenwriter. The film has some serious household name actors in it. While the film was in production, I started dating someone. This person was lovely, with a regular, non-creative office job, who only displayed a mild, passing, supportive, light interest in this accomplishment and a general disinterest in my career choice and abilities as a whole. I would be lying if I didn’t feel some disappointment when I wanted to express something about a project and was met with a superficial support one might give a child about their 5,000th drawing. This attitude persisted even when we were exiting the movie theater after watching the first screening of my film. My head knew they were a good person and supportive in their own ‘I support you as a person’ way, but my heart felt it was death by 1,000 ambivalent cuts I tried my best to ignore. This all became very clear one day when an old college crush had seen the movie and I met them for coffee.”
Craig: Oh, no.
Megana: “They expressed such awe about the film and what I had done.”
Craig: Of course they did.
Megana: “It felt like I had touched their soul. I remember thinking if my partner had looked at me for just five minutes like this person across the table had for a couple hours that day, I might still be with them. It’s one thing to be recognized on a surface level. It’s another to be wholly and completely seen by your companion.”
John: Craig, this person’s having an emotional creative affair with this other person. That’s what it is. Someone is looking at you with those big eyes, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I want to feel this desirable.”
Craig: It feels great, obviously. Those of us who write or create, any artist of any kind, we all are making things for others. It is a rare artist who is so self-sufficient in their motivation that they legitimately don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, good or bad. Certainly for those of us who are trying to make movies and television, which is a fairly popular artistic kind of pursuit that is entirely driven by audience, yeah, we’re looking for applause. That’s our dream. Our dream is we write something and everyone just looks at us and goes, “Oh my god, you’re incredible,” and then you win awards and you do your speeches. That’s our dream.
When your old college crush met you for coffee, which is quite a commitment on their part, and expressed such awe about the film and what you had done, which must’ve taken an enormous amount of effort on their part, yeah, it felt like you touched their soul and maybe they really liked the movie, but also here’s the thing. Not everyone loves movies that way, and yet maybe they do other things for you that this college crush couldn’t. Look, practical advice for Once Felt Neglected Too. John, you’ve read Love Languages. You’ve read Love Languages.
John: I’ve not read Love Languages. I’m sorry. I know the term, but I’ve not read it.
Craig: There’s a book, I think it’s called the Five Love Languages. It’s a staple of couples therapy, but it’s also great for anybody in any kind of relationship, friends, whatever, coworkers. It’s incredibly useful. The basic thesis is that people experience love in different ways. For some people, when someone spends a lot of quality time with them, that’s what makes them feel loved. For some people, receiving gifts from people is what makes them feel loved. For some people it’s very much a physical thing. For some people it’s words of praise. Now I think a lot of screenwriters experience love through words of praise. I think it is useful, Once Felt Neglected Too, to say to your partner, “I’m not asking you to be a different person. I’m not asking you to care more about this than you actually do. What I’m telling you is the way I experience love most viscerally is through words of praise. If you love me and you want me to feel loved, that’s how it works. I’m not asking you to lie. I am asking you to figure it out. Then I think it might work better. I just feel so sad at the thought of someone’s solid relationship with a human being that would look after them when they were sick and back them up and defend them and stay with them and be faithful and loyal, all going to hell because they just also didn’t super love movies or know how to express love for a movie, because I got to tell you, people can say stuff like that over coffee and it means nothing. Nothing.
John: You don’t want a relationship with a fan. This coffee date was a fan. That’s not a strong foundation to build a relationship with. Now it’s entirely possible that your relationship, sounds like it broke up with this partner who wasn’t as supportive as you needed, maybe that was not a right relationship for you either. I’m not saying you need to go back to this person or that was the end all, be all of things, they should sacrifice what you want out of this for that relationship, but yes, there’s levels of support. It wasn’t like this person was standing in your way or telling you to give up your writing career or mocking your writing career or doing anything to hinder you. They just weren’t as rah rah, enthusiastic about it as they could be. Maybe you need rah rah enthusiasm. That’s fine. Maybe that’s why the relationship doesn’t work. To compare it to the super fan is only going to be at your detriment.
Craig: I couldn’t agree more. Let’s get personal for a second, shall we?
John: Let’s do it.
Craig: Has Mike ever just not really loved something you’ve done? I’m not talking about a script. I mean just the movie comes out, or the show, and he watches it and he’s just like, “Okay. Yeah, not for me, but great. Good for you.”
John: Yes, but I would say that in those situations it’s also been a thing where I wasn’t incredibly delighted with how it turned out either. I think there’s also recognition that there’s genres and things that I will like that he will not like. I think we know each other well enough to know that I’m not going to be expecting wild praise about those things. Same with you and Melissa?
Craig: Very much so. It’s always been surprising to me, the things that have grabbed her that she’s loved and the things that were like, “Meh, not so much,” because it wasn’t an easy thing to predict. Then again, that’s the least surprising thing of all, because people are unique. They like different things, even within genres. It’s never been the kind of thing where I thought, “If you don’t understand what I tried to do here, then you don’t see my heart,” because there’s an us that is beyond and separate from the work we do. That’s really important to differentiate. Megana, in your extensive life, I’m keeping you as young as I can.
John: Absolutely.
Megana: I’m very young.
John: The few years that you’ve been out of high school.
Craig: Exactly.
Megana: Exactly.
Craig: In the few decades you’ve been out of high school.
Megana: In my youthful experiences.
Craig: In your youthful experience.
Megana: I was telling John that this … A couple of things. The dynamic that this person is setting up with wanting to feel like they’re touching their partner’s soul, that doesn’t feel like an equal partnership to me. They want someone who is going to make them feel like this really visionary auteur. I think that it goes back to something you guys have been talking about in recent weeks, that success often feels like failure. You also can’t expect to be receiving that external validation from the people closest to you. It just seems like the dynamic and the expectation is off.
Craig: Yeah. That’s a great way of putting it. Look, if you guys are farting in front of each other, how much worship can you expect.
Megana: The other thing I was telling, because John and I were talking about this yesterday, was that it would be so stressful for me to be in a dynamic like this, because I feel like professionally for myself, and I have reps and all of these other people invested in my project success, to also have my partner invested in that would really freak me out. It would feel like way too much pressure. I think the creative process can be messy. None of us are always producing great work. If I felt like my partner’s support of me was contingent upon that, that would be horrible.
Craig: I agree. I agree.
John: Craig and Megana, I have some advice that could change your life, so if you just want to take a seat, because it sounds simple, but it may actually bring about some changes for you.
Ashley Ward on TikTok: You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character, because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed, so take a second and look around and realize that it’s a blessing for you to be here right now.
Craig: What is that?
John: That’s main character energy, Craig. That is main character energy. That’s our marquee topic for today. I think it’s good that we have Megana on here as the Gen Z Millennial cusp person to talk us through this, because it’s not quite what you might at first expect, because we have main character on the internet, which is not this at all. Main character on the internet is the villain that Twitter chooses every day for everyone to pile onto.
Craig: Oh, I see.
John: Main character energy is that sense of life is a movie and you are the central character and you just start acting like the central character in your movie.
Craig: I see.
John: It’s different from I think a thing that I’ve advocated a lot on the show, which is treating yourself as a protagonist and recognizing the protagonist struggle. This is really almost more about an aesthetic series of choices that you’re making about how you’re going to present yourself and how you’re going to perform as the character in a movie. Looking into a little bit of the history of how this came to be, but hopefully also really look at how screenwriting invented this problem and the weird way in which we now have characters who are aware that they are characters in a drama and are living their lives this way. Emily In Paris is an example of a character who has main character energy and she’s actually the main character of a show. I want to grapple with this a bit.
Craig: Is that where that is from, that clip you just played?
John: It’s not, no. That was actually from a TikTokker from this last year. Some really good things we will put in the show notes that link to it, there’s an essay by Coco Klockner. They have a really good overview of the philosophy of main character energy. Here’s an example from Lauren Is Oversharing. “It’s drinking out of a wine glass and looking over a balcony so everyone on the beach knows I’m the main character.” You get that. You get that feeling?
Craig: This is crazy.
John: This is from Coco Klockner’s essay, “Main characters have an impeccable magnetism to them. They’re creative. They don’t play by the rules. They’re a little ugly, but in a hot way. They’re full of themselves, but humble in the right moments. They’re self-aware, but unanxious. They’re not perfect, but if they stumble, a lesson is learned. Perhaps foremost, a main character emerges as someone who can pull of the paradoxical feat of conveying interiority in a world of surfaces.”
Craig: Oh god.
John: “Main character energy is not a matter of being individualistic or singular, but rather a matter of being extremely legible.” What I think they’re pointing to here is that it’s projecting interiority, it’s projecting an inner life, only through these surface manifestations. What as screenwriters we’re trying to do is trying to expose an interior life through what we can see on a film and TV. In this case it’s real-life people trying to present that they’re having this interior life just through all the outward trappings and through the Instagram stories and the trips they’re taking with influencers. It’s this weird thing that’s happening that I want to grapple with a bit.
Craig: I’m horrified. I’m legitimately horrified by this. I guess maybe movies and television just got too clever for their own good, because what we’re supposed to be doing is creating … Drama is not meant to be life at all. In fact, that was the point. When they created drama, back in … They created Western drama in Greece. There was certainly drama predating Greece. The idea was we’re all aware this is not life, right? Get it? There’s a stage. Or you’re sitting in a room watching a fricking piece of glass on the wall. It’s obviously not real. In this unreal representation of the world, you will learn some interesting things that might actually be thought-provoking or make you think about stuff in your regular life, or maybe they’ll make some sense of things in your life, or maybe you’ll just feel like you’re not alone in your emotions and that other people have felt the things you have felt. In no way, shape, or form should anyone ever want to live their lives like a, quote unquote, “main character.” That’s insane. You’re not a character. Help.
John: Let’s let you stew on that for a little bit.
Craig: Help.
John: We could talk about movies, which is a easier way into it, because there are characters in movies who seem to be aware they are characters in movies and are living their life that way, so Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off seems like he’s aware that he’s a character. He’s performing with main character energy, because he’s literally stirring stuff up and creating adventure around him at all times. Emma Stone in Easy A has main character energy, and it’s not just because she’s narrating. I think narrating is an important part of this. She’s also presenting herself on video in a pre-TikTok way and communicating what her arc is and what her change is, what’s going on. Fight Club has it. Emily In Paris we talked about before. The whole series Search Party is all about I have to be the central character driving the story. Girls is about that. We had Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge on to talk about Deadpool and Fleabag. Those are both characters who are aware that they are characters and aware that they were being watched and how they’re being perceived by audiences.
Craig: Yes. They’re all characters. If you actually met somebody like Fleabag, you would be repulsed and go running, because that’s awful. It’s amazing when you watch it on television. The reason why, and Phoebe’s a genius, because what she’s done is create an externalization of the inner ticker tape in her mind, the hamster wheel that runs, the self-commentary that we go through, but we never go through it in the moment. Normally we go through the day, we have these encounters. Then we go home and then we get into bed and then we start thinking about them and rummaging them over and over and over in our heads and reliving them and thinking, “I should’ve said this,” or, “That was weird.” She takes it, because she can, inside of art and makes it happen all in the moment contemporaneously as it’s happening. It’s fascinating to watch. It’s a really cool way of showing the way the human mind and heart function. If you act like that actually in your life, you’re nuts and you’re awful. This just feels like a very fancy way of saying be a pointless, empty narcissist.
John: Narcissism is a interesting word for it, because you’re staring at yourself, but also we are all living in the Truman Show anyway, at least a generation is living in the Truman Show, because they are constantly performing and presenting themselves on YouTube, on TikTok, on social media, to present themselves as a certain kind of way. Megana was talking about people she knows who are especially, I don’t know if you want to say adept, or entrenched in this means of self-identification through self-promotion. Megana, you have one great quote, which I want to make sure you get credit for here.
Megana: I have some friends who are self-professed aspiring Instagram influencers. I was telling John, I was like, “Why is everyone always on a boat?”
Craig: Why is everyone on a boat?
Megana: Why are they always partying on a boat? I don’t get it.
Craig: What’s special about the boat?
John: Because the boat photographs well.
Megana: You can shake champagne.
Craig: They’re all doing the same goddamn thing in the same way. I don’t even think anybody at this point is like, “Oh, influencers, I want to be like them,” because people want to just be like influencers to influence other people. They don’t actually want to, “Oh, that influencer came up with a great way to do makeup.” They don’t even care about makeup. They just want to be the person that’s doing the makeup on the camera that other people think about the makeup for.
I do have to believe that these people who are extremely online and who are obsessed primarily with how they present to the world are experiencing some very serious issues when the camera is off, and that as time goes on, it is fascinating to see how reality simply doesn’t go away, it just waits for you and catches up. You cannot keep that up if this divorce between who you actually are and who you want to show the world, because you’re not a real person but a character, that’s a recipe for ruin.
John: When I was doing my Arlo Finch book tours, I was visiting a whole bunch of schools, I would give the same presentation twice a day, sometimes three times a day for groups of 6th to 7th and 8th graders mostly. One of the things I tried to stress towards the end is that … We were talking about heroes and what heroes in stories do, what protagonists do in stories. Protagonists are always struggling. They’re growing. They’re changing. They’re facing obstacles. They’re overcoming adversity, but it’s tough. They’re creating change by changing themselves.
I tried to just turn that around and say, “Listen, if you think about yourself as the hero of the story of your life, you’re going to face obstacles. Heroes also have principles, they have codes, they have things they learn to live by, they have rules they set for themselves. Most importantly, they have allies, they have people who were on their side and they are an ally to somebody else.” What I find missing in a lot of this main character energy discourse is forgetting about the other people, forgetting that we live in a society, forgetting that we live-
Craig: We live in a society.
John: That you have relationships with people. It goes back to our previous email about the guy who wasn’t getting support from his partner. It’s like, yeah, but you’re thinking about yourself as only the main character and not recognizing that your partner also has needs and stuff too. You’re not acknowledging those.
Craig: It’s really interesting. There are lots of different kinds of characters. It seems like this main character energy is really focusing on poorly written characters. The quote that you played about romanticizing your life, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the exact opposite thing that I think about everything, than that quote. You can go ahead. Go ahead, start romanticizing your life. We’ll wait, because here’s the thing. Life is not romantic. You’re a big sack of slowly decaying meat that will eventually stop functioning. Everybody that you know and meet and love will eventually die. You are going to be sick. You are going to ache. You are going to have moments that are wonderful, moments that are terrible. You also don’t deserve everyone’s attention. You almost never deserve anyone’s attention.
The best thing that you can do with your life, other than fulfilling yourself and feeling like you’ve achieved something you wanted to achieve, is helping someone else. Go ahead and make a life or help a life or nurture someone or something, teach someone something or something. You know what’s not romantic? Teaching. This romanticization is just really superficialization. That’s what it is. You don’t want to be a main character in a good thing. You want to be a main character in a soap opera that holds wine and looks out over the balcony or the boat railing. Megana, what is going on?
Megana: I think that example is sincere, but a lot of the other examples that I see on social media are funny and tongue-in-cheek. I think it’s because there is this awareness of constantly curating and filming your life and playing with these tropes. There is a self-aware humor to it. I’m curious also how that affects how you would write people who are grappling both with their own presentation of image versus themselves in film.
Craig: I’m just not interested in those people. I got to be honest. I’m not.
John: Here’s a great example though of a character predating social media. This is from Sleepless In Seattle, which is a great script, Nora Ephron’s script. Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell are talking. Rosie O’Donnell’s line to her is, “That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” Nora Ephron, thank you very much for that-
Craig: Good quote.
John: Good insight. Good quote. It’s the unrealistic expectations of how life is supposed to be, that life is supposed to be like a movie, that things should be as extreme, as beautiful, as perfect as that. It’s that desire for impossible perfection. It’s like some sort of body dysmorphia disorder applied to your life, where you don’t actually see things as they truly are.
Megana: Have you seen Bo Burnam’s Eighth Grade? I think it’s just such a brilliant depiction of that.
Craig: It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous because it confronts what Nora Ephron was getting at here, you want to be in a love in a movie. She’s literally saying you want main character energy. You want to be the main character. If the movie ever got this right, it was The Graduate. It’s the last shot of The Graduate. It’s brilliant. It’s the most wonderful thing. It still remains just like a little miracle to me.
John: He’s done this big dramatic thing that is such main character energy.
Craig: He stopped a wedding. He stopped a wedding by banging on glass and, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” and stopped a wedding and comes up to her, and she goes, “Yes,” and leaves the stupid guy that she shouldn’t be marrying. She runs off with him. They run out. All the adults are like, “What’s happening?” These crazy kids, they’re in love, and it’s the most romantic thing ever. They get on a bus and they sit down, full of just this romantic energy, and then the camera just stays with them, and you see the reality of what they’ve done slowly sink in.
John: As the adrenaline fades.
Craig: The adrenaline fades, and now, “Where are we getting lunch?” and, “I guess we need an apartment,” and, “Yeah, I don’t have a job.”
John: This has been on my mind, partly because the thing I’m writing right now has characters who are struggling with main character energy and presentation and public shaming and all the things that wrap up in that. It’s a thing that’s going to be there. I just want to make sure as we’re wrapping up the segment is that we don’t be afraid of having your protagonists protagonate, but those are actual actions and choices and difficult things that they are doing to achieve the thing that they want. The thing that they want is probably not to be a character in a movie. Hopefully they want something that is actually tangible and real that they need to pursue for their own inner being, and that as screenwriters, it’s our job to externalize these internal thoughts, but make sure the characters have internal thoughts and have internal drives and desires, because otherwise they’re going to just feel like empty puppets running around, which is what I think Craig and I are worried about, some of these Instagram influencers are just feeling like empty puppets running around.
Craig: They tell you they’re empty puppets. They just say it. It’s wild, man. It’s wild.
John: It’s wild.
Craig: You know what? The kids are all right. They’re going to be fine.
John: They’ll sort it out.
Craig: I just think that the internet has essentially become the playground of people with extreme personality disorders, that yes, main characters have an impeccable … Most main characters, if you really study them, have personality disorders.
John: Ferris Bueller is pathological.
Craig: He’s evil. The things that he does, it’s evil. He’s a terrible villain. Anyway, thank you for this. I’m stunned and horrified, but hopeful that everybody knows, like Megana says, a lot of it is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It’s like the new version of big dick energy. I get it, but also I feel like for people like the lady that said you have to start romanticizing your life, deromanticize your life, and then you might actually get a chance to live an interesting life.
John: Use your drones to spy on people, not to photograph yourself. That’s what they’re really made for.
Craig: There you go.
John: All right, we have time for two listener questions. Let’s listen to questions from Bex and Alex. Megana, can you start us off?
Megana: Bex asks, “I’ve taken a particular online screenwriting course from a writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, and I learned a great deal, but he said to be careful about submitting your work to agents, managers, or studios too soon, because if the writing isn’t good, your name goes on a do not read this person’s work ever list. That list is maintained and shared by all, or at least a majority of the industry. Once you’re on that list, you’re blackballed from ever having legitimate industry people look at your material, no matter how improved your work is. My question is, is this true? Does the industry share and maintain such a list of blackballed unknown writers? The writing instructor says he’s seen the actual list.”
John: No. The simple answer is no.
Craig: No.
John: Here’s the answer with a little bit more subtlety is that within a certain agency, they will keep a database of who they’ve read, just so that if one agent has read and passed on a thing, that they won’t keep reading it, the same person again and again, if it’s not for them, but the idea that there is an industry-wide list of like, “These are all the upcoming writers, the ones we’re not going to pay attention to,” is absurd, because not only would it be collusion, no one would make that list. It’s just not actually helpful to anybody.
Craig: They’re not even competent enough to maintain a list like this. This falls under the Bush did 9/11 heading. Do you really think Bush was smart enough to do 9/11? No. He couldn’t even figure out how to plant weapons of mass destruction in the middle of a desert. I don’t think he did 9/11. Similarly, Hollywood is just not organized enough to even keep anything close to a list like that, nor would anybody care. Here’s the thing. Unknown, unproduced writers, who have never worked before, nobody knows who they are. Nobody’s going to sit there and make a list of names. You know how much time it takes? You know how quickly I could figure out if the script is good or not? Three pages.
John: Three pages.
Craig: Who needs to look at the list?
John: I do like the idea that there’s a anti-Franklin Leonard out there somewhere, who’s making a list of all the unrepped writers, all the unproduced writers who are just trash, who should never be produced. That’s great.
Craig: That’s great.
John: That’s a great James Bond character, but no.
Craig: You get ranked from negative one to negative 10?
John: Uh-huh.
Craig: I love it. No, that’s crazy. To the writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, stop it. That’s just not true. You think that she or he is doing it as a scare, oh he, that it’s a scare thing, like, “I’ll just motivate you by-“
John: I want to be generous in interpretation. I think that perhaps the writing that he’s reading right now, he knows it’s just not at a level to be getting work, and so he doesn’t want these people, writers he knows will improve over the next year or two, to go too hard too fast and try to get their stuff out there, because they’re just going to hit a meat grinder. He sees potential in them and he wants their potential to be-
Craig: Got it.
John: Better.
Craig: It’s like parents telling their kids that Santa knows if they’ve been naughty or nice.
John: Yes, that’s what it is. How about Albert’s question, Megana?
Megana: Great. Albert writes, “I’ve been writing for about three years now, and I always have this internal battle about using ing in my screenplays. After writing my first script, I was heavily criticized for using ing words by a professional screenwriter after submitting it to a screenwriting feedback service. When I looked it up on Google, I keep coming across, quote, ‘Screenplays are written in the simple present tense.’ Is this correct? Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards? I appreciate the time and hope to hear an amazing reply soon.”
Craig: Amazing reply forthcoming.
John: Forthcoming. I’ll put a link to a blog post I did about this at some point, because what you’re really talking about is simple present tense was like, “I kicked the ball,” versus present progressive, like, “I am kicking the ball.” Screenplays are largely in the simple present tense, but Craig and I both use ing forms, the present progressive, in times where action needs to be interruptable, where you’re showing simultaneity of things. There’s reasons to use the ing version of things.
Craig: Absolutely. This is very similar to the let’s save a little bit of page count by removing we see. There’s something that’s happening while I’m doing something. Doing something. As John is loading the gun, Craig comes up behind him and hits him in the head with a golf club.
John: Jesus. Craig, what did I do to you? First off, where did I get this gun? I’m not a gun [inaudible 00:49:27].
Craig: We’re going to get into what happens next, because then it goes, “Three weeks earlier.” John loads a gun. Craig comes up behind him and hits him on the head with a golf club. That means the gun got loaded.
John: It’s finished.
Craig: Then I came up and I hit John in the head with the golf club. You can see that once again, I know this is crazy, the full breadth of the English language is valuable when writing in the English language. If you were, underline, heavily criticized for using ing words by, and then you put it in quotes, “pro screenwriter,” all I can say is you may have just been using them way too much.
John: That’s entirely possible.
Craig: Make sure that when you use them, you’re using them purposefully, because they are not as elegant inherently as the standard form. I’m fascinated by this final question, “Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards?” Wouldn’t that depend on who that guy is and who Albert is?
John: Absolutely.
Craig: If Albert is royalty, then the guy punched upwards. Are you a prince?
John: Is he punching or did he punch? That is a simple question. Is he still punching?
Craig: Is he still punching?
John: Is the action interrupted? I agree with Craig’s generous interpretation that maybe you were using it too often. Any time you’re using one, it’s worth a look, like do you need that present progressive or could just a simple verb work? If a simple verb works, use a simple verb.
Craig: There is an answer to that question. There is always one form that is more accurate to what you want to show on screen than the other.
John: Yep. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The Afterparty, a new series on Apple TV. Plus created by Chris Miller, produced by our friends Lord and Miller. It’s delightful. It’s a comedy. It’s a murder mystery. Each episode follows the same crime from a different character’s point of view. Terrifically done, as you expect from these. Craig, in this workflow here I have two pieces of artwork from this. This is the movie within the show. The character who dies, this is not a spoiler, his name is Xavier. He is I think a musician and an actor. The poster I want to point to is Private Eyes: The Hall and Oates Story. As you look at this poster, so much of it is fantastic, as Channing Tatum plays Oates. Yeah, Oates. I have an issue with the credit block. Can you tell me what my issue is with the credit block?
Craig: Yes. In the credit block for a film, these days it would go, at the bottom, reading left to right, producer, then writer, then director. In the old days it would go writer, then producer, then director. This one, for some reason, doesn’t even … Does it have a director?
John: Yeah. It says A Stephanie Preston Film before Private Eyes, but no, there’s no director listed.
Craig: There’s no director. For some reason also, it says executive producers are listed last, when in movies the producer would be way more important than the executive producers. There doesn’t appear to be a producer. We have to talk to Lord and Miller about this. This is just a disaster. I can’t recommend the show anymore.
John: Hopefully there is time to go in and do the post-work on the poster that’s on the wall and put that in there. I would also point out the written by credit is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, and there needs to be something between those two, unless the person’s name is-
Craig: Karen Tate Wallace Doe.
John: Unless this one writer’s name is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, there’s either an and or an ampersand between those names.
Craig: That is correct. There are so many problems with this. We have to talk to them. This can’t happen again.
John: This is the only flaw I saw in the first episode of the show, which I think is actually just delightful. It stars a bunch of talented folks, including Ike Barinholtz. Your golden girl pal Tiffany Haddish is the central investigator there.
Craig: Did you say my golden girl pal?
John: Yeah. I’m sorry. Your Golden Globe pal.
Craig: Oh, my Golden Globe pal. She was my Golden Globe pal. She’s fun.
John: Yeah, you had that weird, awkward moment there on the stage with Tiffany Haddish.
Craig: It wasn’t awkward for me. Her feet were hurting. She took her shoes off and just leaned on me. It was fun. That’s what happens on those shows. “My feet hurt. Can I lean on you?” “Absolutely.”
John: From that moment forward, the Golden Globes really went down. It was really the highlight of the Golden Globes. From that point forward they realized, “We cannot top this. We need to stop the Golden Globes all together.”
Craig: They keep on rolling. I was lucky enough many years ago, so this has been in development by Chris primarily for the longest time, and many years ago I actually went and saw a staged reading of this one. I think it was a movie.
John: I think [inaudible 00:53:49] was originally a movie. I’m sure it was great as a movie. I think it works much better as this series, because you can just do more. You’ve got time.
Craig: I think almost everything does at this point. An additional fun bit, and you know what, maybe I’ll make this my One Cool Thing. I’m going to tack on to yours. I had another thing that was technical. I’ll get to that next week. In addition to The Afterparty being a delight, no surprise, and featuring posters that are visually hysterical, but in terms of credits, absolutely horrible, the show The Afterparty also includes quite a few hidden hints, clues, and puzzles that were developed by my wonderful, magical friend David Kwong, and my wonderful, magical friend Dave Shukan, who is a puzzle master and indeed was one of the primary puzzle creators of the MIT Mystery Hunt, which I think was my One Cool Thing last week.
John: Nice. The character that Sam Richardson plays in The Afterparty is an escape room designer, which feels exactly in your wheelhouse there, Craig.
Craig: Probably modeled after me. One would think.
John: Actually, yeah. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
Craig: Indeed.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Julia Hostetler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes, more often than not now, @clmazin.
Craig: I’m around.
John: I’m @johnaugust. You could find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Our whole main character energy thing came from Chris Csont’s newsletter about main character energy, which was in Interesting. Thank you, Chris, for putting that together. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also get the hoodies now. The hoodies are so comfortable. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on population. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Craig, can you help our younger listeners understand how we thought about population in the 1970s?
Craig: Sure. In the 1970s we were constantly warned about two problems that were going to come and kill all of us. Sorry, three. Three problems that were going to come kill all of us.
John: Let’s see if I can name them. Nuclear war.
Craig: Four problems that were going to come and kill us.
John: Oh wow. Nuclear war was not even one of them.
Craig: Yep, sorry. Four.
John: Wow. Nuclear war was my only go-to. Obviously population was going to be one of them. Population and famine, those are really related, right?
Craig: Population and famine, connected. Nuclear war.
John: What were the other things we were worried about?
Craig: People snatching you off the street with a van.
John: That’s entirely true, because that happened a lot.
Craig: It didn’t. It actually didn’t.
John: No, seriously, Craig, it happened all the time.
Craig: It did not.
John: That’s a thing.
Craig: It did not. Gary Gulman has an amazing bit about this in his show The Big Depresh or The Great Depresh. Basically a guy went on TV and said there are 50,000 kids being pulled off the street every year. Everyone lost their minds. Three years later he came back and he was like, “It’s 3,000 kids.”
By that point, when we grew up, Megana, so John and I would go to school and we would have milk, because you had to drink milk when you were a kid in the ’70s or you would die apparently. On the milk cartons were pictures of missing children. Gary Gulman has this amazing bit about how, “What were we supposed to do about it? We’re eight. Are we supposed to be out on the hunt? What?” “Have you seen this child?” “I’m in third grade!” It was horrifying. You would have to drink milk from a carton with this sad kid staring back at you like, “I don’t drink milk anymore.”
John: We have men in white vans stealing children.
Craig: Men in white vans, nuclear war, overpopulation and famine, and acid rain.
John: Oh yeah, I remember acid rain.
Craig: Eventually the rain was going to come down and melt the skin right off your bones.
John: Here’s the thing. We actually got some of the acid rain taken care of to some degree. The hole in the ozone layer was probably a little bit later than that. We actually dealt with that in a way.
Craig: Yeah, unfortunately, because the ozone layer is holding in all the carbon dioxide. Everything’s working out great for us.
John: Everything’s working out fantastic. Let’s just solve the population problem, because China took it upon itself to actually solve the population problem. This is a thing that I remember learning about in grade school was the one-child policy, which is basically a couple can only have one kid. I didn’t understand how math worked, because I was in third grade. They explained, “Okay, so when the mom and the dad die, that one kid will replace them.” That’s only half people, but then you realized they actually have grandparents too, and so it all works out. It sounded like they took care of it, but it didn’t work out so good.
Craig: There aren’t many examples of grand social architecting that does work out.
John: That’s true.
Craig: Particularly when you’re interfering with basic biological functions like how many children do you have and how much do you eat. What we know now is that Malthus, the father of this fear, Thomas Malthus, who was doing his best in the 18th century, and in the 18th century, there was this very rampant population growth within urban centers. You could see London transforming and these other places. People were dealing with crowding in a very specific way in the West. There’s this fear that the more people you had, you would eventually run out of food, because industrialization hadn’t occurred yet, and so our ability to feed ourselves was not as advanced as it would be even 50 years later.
John: We would have to turn to cannibalism at a certain point.
Craig: At some point we would eat ourselves.
John: That was always part of the stories, like, “Oh, and eventually we’ll have to start eating people, because that’s what happens.”
Craig: Yeah. “We’ll start with grandma, because she’s got to go.” By the time it got around to us, obviously the United States is spatially enormous, although they kept talking about overpopulation, even in the United States, which is bizarre, since no one lives in Wyoming, for instance, or Alaska. There certainly were places in the world, and there still are places in the world, that deal with overpopulation, including China at the time certainly, India, Indonesia.
There were famine issues, because in the ’70s we didn’t realize, because we were children, how close we were to the ’40s and ’50s. Kids who are growing up now don’t realize how close they are to the ’90s. The famine that was happening around the world in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was astonishing. It made sense that people were scared of this. No one talks about the Bengal famine. The Bengal famine was one of the worst famines that ever, ever happened ever, on any planet, as far as I’m concerned. Two to three million people died in 1943 in Bengal.
John: I agree with you. In the ’70s I associated overpopulation with famine as being the same thing, not understanding famine is actually caused by many things. It could be crop failures, but more often it’s just actually poor government. There’s a reason why democracies don’t have famines. It’s all about power and control. That was the problem. Let’s fast-forward to today.
Craig: By the way, just to back you up on that, ultimately the cause of the Bengal famine probably was Churchill. You’re right, it was not just as simple as too many people, not enough food.
John: This one-child policy in China went on for 35 years. They eventually took their foot off the brakes a little bit. It feels like they should’ve been aware of it more quickly, because you look at what happened in Japan. I remember hearing about the stories in Japan 10 or 15 years ago about, “Oh crap, we are so far below our replacement rate, we’re going to have a bunch of old people, and no young people to look after them.”
One of the findings that came out of Japan is really it comes down to once you educate women, once you give women opportunities, that they’re going to choose to have fewer children. You don’t have to have a government policy about it. You just make it so that they don’t feel the need to have large families, because if you’re not in a agricultural society anymore, they’re going to have smaller families. Depopulation is now more of a concern to most certainly Western countries, but really countries around the world.
Craig: Yes. Depopulation is becoming a serious problem in Europe, a very serious problem in Russia. Depopulation is one of the driving factors behind the rise of nationalism, white supremacy, because as traditionally majority white countries depopulate, there are labor needs that have to be filled, and the gap is filled by immigration. Now Russia just won’t let anyone in. Russia’s just like, “Nope! We’re white people only!” Let’s see how that goes for them.
In standard Europe, as we’ll call it, there’s been a lot of immigration. The immigration is necessary, because as traditionally white countries just cannot keep up a replacement rate of birth, then yeah, you’re going to need more people. What one would hope is that most people would understand that what it means to be English or Swedish or German is not, “Let’s start with white.” It’s not. Their culture is not skin color. Also, of course, America has, in our finest moments, has shown that there is a proper melting pot and that cultures can collide together and make something beautiful.
There’s this panic that’s going on because it’s the great replacement theory, that they’re panicked. The truth is the tenets of the great replacement theory, they’re not there yet. I think the white paranoia is extreme. You are in fact seeing issues of depopulation in non-white countries as well. What does humanity do as it no longer is I guess what a net positive human creation.
John: Yeah. You run into problems of how do you keep a standard of living going for a country when there aren’t enough people to actually do the work, to do all the things that need to be done, how do you take care of older people. These are all real challenges. I’m curious for Megana, who’s coming into this whole conversation 20 years later, going through school, did you hear about population being a crisis one way or another way? How does this land for you?
Megana: I feel like when I was in school they told us about overpopulation and some of the same fears that you guys described having, being taught in school were still in our curriculum.
John: When you were visiting your family in India, did you perceive that India perceived population as being a crisis, a problem? What was that experience like for you?
Megana: It’s interesting. It’s just so overwhelmingly crowded, as an American going back to visit. I don’t know that that came from my Indian family or Indian relatives that this place was too crowded, but I do think it came from the white people I grew up around in Joplin, Missouri, who would be like, “Oh, you’re from India. That place is overpopulated and it’s a Third World country.” That sort of mentality I think I internalized. I think that came from my experience of being an Indian immigrant in America and what older white people said to me.
Craig: As you were growing up, the rate of population change in India was starting to slow. There is still a net positive growth in India. There’s still a net positive growth in the United States, but it’s very tiny. India currently, population growth rate is 1% annual change. The United States it’s .4%. Now let’s take a look at Russia. This ought to be good. Russian population growth, yeah, so they’re minus. They’ve gone into minus territory. They were as low as minus .5% in 2000. They are currently at minus .2. They are losing population, and that will probably accelerate, which is bad, and they’re going to have to figure that out.
John: Let’s talk about what solutions governments and societies, because we live in a society-
Craig: We live in a society.
John: Let’s look for what are the things that can be done to address this. Obviously first and foremost is creating policies that actually make it easier for people to have children, because we have so stripped away a lot of the support systems that should be there for families to just begin to have families, to have a kid, but much less two or three or four kids. It’s funny that we used to think about poor families would have a bunch of kids, and now it seems families of a certain means are the only ones who can afford to have a certain number of kids, because they worried about educating them, food is cheaper than it’s ever been and clothing is cheaper than it’s ever been, but that there’s still all these expenses that come with a kid. If we’re not creating policies that make it possible, both financially and time-wise, it’s just not going to happen.
Craig: I agree with you. I think if a country is concerned with maintaining its population so that the functions of its structure are functioning, then it has to make this a priority. In the United States in particular, it’s like, “Screw you. You want to have a kid, fine, go, do it, but we’re not paying you. We can fire you. We’re not giving you time off. If you’re a dad, you get nothing.” Also maybe you don’t have health care. There’s no child care. We don’t have extended families here. It’s not like there’s grandmas and aunts and uncles. Basically, yeah, lol. It’s hard. It was hard when we had a kid. When we had our first kid, it was hard. Melissa wasn’t working. It was hard.
John: It’s challenging. The other obviously thing to address is immigration, because the other way a society can function if it’s not creating enough people of its own is to import people from other places. Certain countries can afford to import a lot of people here and bring them into the fold. America has had a tradition of being a country that can take in groups from other places and make Americans and change America’s identity to include new people. We need to remember that and ber better about it.
Craig: We’re terrible.
John: Easier said than done.
Craig: We suck. The celebration of immigration was part of my education in the ’70s. We used to celebrate it. The poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty was a big deal. Now it’s just like, do you remember that idiot Pat Buchanan?
John: Yeah, I do.
Craig: Pat Buchanan used to be considered a loony, and now I think he would be actually probably not conservative enough. “America first.” There have been idiots saying, “America first,” forever.
John: It was always up against the Italians or the Irish or whoever the new group was coming in.
Craig: Yeah. The Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. Boy, if they were that pissed off about white people showing up … We’ve always had this fricking problem. I’m like, isn’t it a sign that you’re doing well, that people want to come to your shop? People want to live here, on purpose. This is great. We have massive, massive stretches of land and resources. We have more than we need, way more than we need. What happened? What happened to who we … We should be celebrating immigration as much as we can.
Megana: I do remember that as a distinct shift, because I was in the fourth grade I think when 9/11 happened. I remember in elementary school feeling like, “Oh, I am a super-American because I am a child of immigrants.” I think after 9/11 it was no longer a thing that was necessarily celebrated in school.
Craig: This country lost its goddamn mind on 9/11. Lost our minds.
John: It did.
Craig: Lost our minds.
John: Absolutely. It did. We didn’t solve anything, but at least discussed it.
Craig: I think we convinced people earlier that they can use we see, so there’s that.
John: There’s that. If we all think of ourselves as the main character in this story, as main characters we need to solve the issues of population and immigration and really family rights.
Megana: Yeah. I think the other thing you guys mentioned is having more progressive policies instead of shaming and blaming young women.
Craig: This is the thing. We live in a society.
John: We do.
Craig: Men only understand one mode. That is control women, force them to have babies, that’s how we’ll get babies. That’s it. They don’t know any other way. They can’t think. They cannot possibly fathom any other way to encourage birth. Pregnancy and birth.
John: It goes straight to Handmaid’s Tale.
Craig: Yeah, basically.
John: On a future bonus segment I want to talk to you about your show and the post-apocalyptic, I guess you consider your show post-apocalyptic, and that sense of when population drops so low, just that certain functions cannot be fulfilled anymore, because I find it so fascinating. I feel like we explore that in fiction all the time, but we will actually experience some of that in real life.
Craig: Until next time.
John: All right. Thanks, guys.
Megana: Bye.
Links:
- Fans Are Suing Universal Pictures Because a 2019 Movie Didn’t Include Ana de Armas
- How Sweet Fresh Meat clip on YouTube
- Ashley Ward’s original Main Character TikTok
- Main Character Energy: Interiority in a world of screens by Coco Klockner for Real Life Mag
- We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker
- Rediscovering ‘The Truman Show’ in the age of Main Character Syndrome by Mischa Anouk Smith for Far Out Magazine
- Gary Gulman’s The Great Depresh Kidnapping Hoax
- Main Character Energy and Narcissism – Inneresting Newsletter by Chris Csont
- The Afterparty on Apple TV from Lord Miller, First Ep on YouTube
- Puzzle pals David Kwong and Dave Shukan
- Malthusianism
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Julia Hostetler (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 535: Main Character Energy, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin.
John August: This is Episode 532 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show we’re looking at how you move from scene to scene. That’s right, transitions. It’s a clip show where we listen back to past John and past Craig as they offer their advice, which for all we know, is better than our current advice, because we were younger then, and fresher.
Craig Mazin: So much younger than today.
John August: Now we actually got an email in from a listener recently saying like, “Oh, I went back and listened to your early episodes, expecting it to be different, that John and Craig would’ve grown and changed a lot.” She said, “No, actually, you know what? It was the same. Your microphones weren’t as good, but it was the same show,” which I was heartened by.
Craig Mazin: Yes, I think it might’ve been a man.
John August: Oh. It could’ve been either one.
Craig Mazin: I think based on that name I think it’s a guy, but either way, I wanted to say to that fellow that no, of course we weren’t great at that then, and we have gotten better. Maybe it’s just that we found something where we weren’t accountable to anybody at all. Sometimes the key is that if you have something where you’re completely free within it to do whatever you want, how you want to do it, without any accountability whatsoever, and no expectation or ambition or anything, then there is a purity to it, and people who are going to like that purity are going to like it. If you dig Scriptnotes Episode 500, yeah, you’ll probably like 1 through 10. If you hate Episode 500, I guarantee you’ll hate 1 through 10. We’ve said a lot.
Don’t get fooled by the way things look on the other side of stuff. Here, hopefully you just listen to me talk about how ashamed I am all the time and how I feel bad about myself, and I try and work on that really, really hard. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Basically in your letter you said, “To be honest, I was hoping that you guys weren’t as good at the beginning. It would’ve given me hope to get better myself at my stuff.” You have plenty of hope. You’re doing a hard thing. You’re trying to do a hard thing. You’re going to move at the speed you move.
John August: Yeah, and I always also say at the beginning we were new to podcasting, but we weren’t necessarily new to screenwriting and offering advice to screenwriters. That was a not a new thing for us to do. It was just sticking a mic in front of us was the new aspect of it.
Let’s travel back in time and look at transitions. These are three conversations we’ve had over the years. We’re going to start with Episode 446: Back To Basics, where we talk about the origin of screenwriting, opening scenes, what a scene is, what it means, and the difference between formatting and transition versus the psychology of what a transition actually does, like how you’re moving from scene to scene versus the actual words you’re using.
In 493 on our Opening Scenes conversation, we talk about how you begin a screenplay, the process for thinking about opening scenes, the rules and expectations. We talk about Chernobyl some. It feels like a lot of what we’re talking about in this is really relevant to transitions, basically how are we going to get the story started and how are we going to get the audience moving with us into the plot.
Finally, we’re going to go back to Episode 89, which is probably, wow, eight years ago?
Craig Mazin: Peesh.
John August: Yeah. We’re looking at technical approaches to different types of transitions, so literally what are the words on a page that is signaling to the reader that this is how we are going to be moving from this scene to that scene. Literally it’s the right-hand margin stuff we’ll get into in that last segment.
Three segments here. We’ll also put a link in the show notes to some blog posts where we talk about transitions. If you’re a Premium member stick around, because when we come back at the end, we are going to be discussing how to get out of a conversation, so it’s really the transition between I am talking with you right now and I don’t want to be talking with you any longer. We’ll be discussing how to end conversations, both in person and online.
Now let me make a transition out of this opening segment into our three pre-recorded bits. Craig, can you help me out with this transition?
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: Perfect.
All right. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, and so I thought we might actually take this time in Episode 446 to define screenwriting and what screenwriting actually is, because I don’t know if we’ve actually talked about it in actually that much depth, weirdly, over the course of this, because Craig, you did your solo episode about how to write a screenplay. That was really fundamentally 101 the things about writing a screenplay, but I wanted to do some backstory about the origin of screenwriting and how screenwriting began to what it’s become now and what those transitions were.
I have three things I want to keep in mind as we talk about what a screenwriter does and what screenwriting is, and maybe tease them apart a little bit, because I think especially newer people who are approaching screenwriting, which we have a bunch of new people listening, just because they watched Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge last week, really talk about what the screenwriter does and what screenwriting is about.
Craig Mazin: I hope that my understanding of it is correct. I’ll be very embarrassed if I’m wrong.
John August: I think you will probably be very, very correct. Let’s talk about the origin of screenwriting, because screenwriting as an art form is only about a century old, because movies are only about a century old. When the first motion picture cameras were aimed at things and it went beyond just photographing a train coming into a station, to actually trying to tell a story with a camera, at some point people recognized, oh, you know what, it would help if we wrote down the plan for what we’re going to do before we actually shot this stuff. Those initial things that would become screenplays were just a list of shots, or a plan for how you’re going to do the things. When we talk about screenwriting being like architecture, that’s what we’re getting to is that sense of like it’s a plan for the thing you’re going to make. It is a blueprint for what the ultimate finished product is going to be, which is the finished film, the thing that a person is going to watch, which is not the literary document or not the paper document that we’re starting off with. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those first screenplays, but they don’t closely resemble what we do now.
Craig Mazin: No. I think that when people say a screenplay is a blueprint, I always get a little fussy about it, but in this aspect of it, that’s exactly what it is. Part of a screenplay, a screenplay is many, many things at once, one of the things a screenplay is and has always been, going back to those first ones, is essentially a business plan. It is an outline of where you need to be and how long you need to be there and what needs to be seen. There’s not a lot of art to it. It really is more of an organizational thing, and the modern counterpart to it I guess would just be sometimes a director will come in and make a little shot list for the day. That is appropriate to blueprint.
John August: Yeah, or agenda. It’s basically these are the steps. This is how we’re going to do it. Because it’s written on eight and a half by 11 paper and it’s done with words rather than a flowchart, it feels somewhat literary. The words you pick matter a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. It’s basically as long as you’re going to be able to communicate what your intention is to the other people who need to see this document, that’s all that really matters.
Craig Mazin: That tradition carries through to this day when a screenplay still uses interior, exterior. Every scene must give you blueprint information that is not literary information. There is nothing literary about exterior, house, day, rain, or whatever you say there. The literary part comes in this other stuff that started to emerge as our craft of filmmaking and writing evolved.
John August: Now, that evolution, I’m not enough of a student of the history of cinema to tell you exactly when the screenplay became more what we talk about today, but often you’ll hear Casablanca referenced as a turning point between this list of shots to something that’s more like a modern screenplay in the sense of it’s a document that you can read, and in reading this document, you get a sense of what the actual film is supposed to feel like. It’s not just the pure blueprint. It’s more like this gives you a sense of where you are, what’s going on. It gives you a preview of what the film is actually going to look and feel like, versus just a straightforward list of these are the things you’re seeing.
Craig Mazin: This is not necessarily historically … You can’t call me a professor here, by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding when I look at the early stuff is that it was the American movie business that was very blueprint-y and shot list-y. There is a pretty famous … You’ve probably seen the silent film A Trip to the Moon.
John August: Oh yes, yeah.
Craig Mazin: Yes, remember where the moon gets shot in the eye.
John August: The Brothers Lumière.
Craig Mazin: Exactly. George Méliès. Méliès? Méliès? Méliès? If you look at the script for that, it actually feels quite modern. There is a literary aspect to it. It’s more descriptive. I think in Europe probably there was a little bit more of a literary aspect to this much earlier than there was in the United States, but eventually by the time you get to films like Casablanca you’re fully in the swing of a literary screenplay that is combining two things at once, a non-literary production plan and art.
John August: Now, in both the literary form and in the blueprint-y construction plan form, the fundamental unit that you come back to is the scene. Even novels have scenes, that sense of there is a moment in space and time when generally characters are saying something or doing something. It’s one carved out moment of a place and a time where things are happening. That idea of a scene you see in both the really clinical early versions of screenplays and you see them in modern screenplays. That sense of like this is a chunk of time in which these things are happening.
I want to suss out three different kinds of things we mean by scene. First is that moment of space and time where characters are doing a thing. That’s scene version A. Scene version B is the writing of that scene. By the writing I mean this is what the characters are saying and doing. It’s where we’re coming into that moment. It’s how we’re getting out of that moment. It is the words we’re using to describe the world in which the characters are happening, the actions they’re taking, basically everything we call scene description, which you compare to stage plays, which is the other natural version of this, the scene description in stage plays tends to be incredibly minimalist. It’s much more robust in screenplays, because you are trying to really visually describe this world in which the characters are inhabiting. That’s an important transition. That’s version B is really the writing.
The third version of a scene I want to distinguish between is all the formatting stuff. All the basically the grammar of screenplays that we use that make them, the conventions that make it easier for people who read a lot of screenplays to understand what’s actually happening. The same way that commas and periods become invisible to a reader, people who are used to reading screenplays, they don’t even see INT and EXT and DAYS. Your brain just skips over those things and is able to concentrate on the meat of those. All that other information is there, but it’s invisible to a person who is used to reading them. Being able to understand those conventions and use them properly really does affect how a person perceives a screenplay. That formatting, that syntax choices and all that stuff, is really a different thing I would say than the words you’re using to describe stuff. It’s really grammar versus the actual creative act of writing.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, and that grammar is eventually going to be analyzed by a grammar specialist known as the First AD, who along with the production managers, are going to be taking those scene headings and asking, “Okay, are these scene headings accurate to what we think we’re going to be actually doing in terms of the locations we found? How can we group them together? We need to make a timeline, night, day.” All those things have huge production implications. None of them have to do specifically with art. You’re guessing at what you think the ultimate grammar will be, but then you make adjustments once you get into production. Individual first ADs will have different ways of adjusting that grammar.
You’re right that for most people reading it, those things serve weirdly as just paragraph breaks. They’re paragraph breaks, which are incredibly helpful. It’s one of the reasons why my formatting preference is to put two lines before a new scene, because the scene, the EXTERIOR or the INTERIOR, is serving as a break in the visual flow of the reading, so I make it one, because I agree with you. I think that that’s really what it’s doing. If you took out all the interiors and exteriors and just mentioned those things in action lines, the script would become a book and it would be harder to read.
John August: Yeah. In thinking about scenes in three different waves, so there’s the visualization, the imagination of what’s happening with those characters in space and time, that is a thing that a screenwriter does, but it’s also the kind of thing a director does. It’s a thing that other creative people can do. It’s a thing an author does, is envision people in a place and a time doing a thing or saying a thing. Directors often do that scene version A a lot. They’re really imagining what that scene is like. They’re thinking about it through their own specialties. They’re imagining it’s like, “Okay, so I’m envisioning this scene, this moment happening,” and then they’re thinking, “Okay, where would I put the camera? What are the opportunities I have here? How would I use my tool set to make this happen best? What am I going to tell the cinematographer about what I’m looking at? What am I going to tell the editor about how I imagine this being paced? What are the costumes? What are all the things that I will need to be able to describe to other people about this moment?” That’s a version of crafting the scene.
The screenwriter has to do all that stuff, but then take a second level abstraction, thinking, “Okay, having thought through all that stuff, what are the words I’m going to use to describe what’s most important about this moment? Because I could describe everything, but that would be exhausting, and it would actually hurt the process of being able to understand what’s important. How am I’m going to synthesize that down to the most important things for people to understand if they’re reading this scene about what it’s going to feel like, what’s important, what they need to focus on?”
Most of what Craig and I really are talking about on the podcast is this second level, is the B version of that scene, which is how do we find the best way to describe and tell the reader what they would be seeing if they were seated in a theater watching this on a screen, how are we going to convey that experience, what it feels like to be watching that moment on the big screen. That’s mostly what we talk about on this podcast.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. There’s a weird kind of psychological game we’re playing with scene work, in the way that Walter Murch wrote this book about editing, I think it’s called In the Blink of an Eye, where he says we’re cutting in the pattern of people’s blinks, that we blink in normal moments. We’re kind of predictable this way. We have a rhythm. We’re editing slightly on that basis. Editing feels like music. It’s all about timing. You just know, there, cut there, that’s the spot. It’s kind of the same thing with scenes. What you’re doing is feeling a psychological impact and then there’s a blink, a story blink, that just needs to happen. We have reached a point where something should happen and the story should blink and reset, and in a different place or a different time or with a different person, a different perspective. That to me is where the scene begins and ends.
Inside of the scene, we may have additional slug lines or scene headers, because we’re giving that blueprint information, that nonliterary blueprint information, to our production friends. For the purpose of being artistic and literary, the scene is the psychological unit. I don’t know how else to describe it other than something blinks and the story moves.
John August: Here’s an example. Imagine you could take a real life thing that’s happening. We’re in a room. There are people talking. Imagine we’re at a cocktail party. There’s a cocktail party happening. It’s maybe six people in this room. There’s discussions happening. We could invite three screenwriters in and have them see all of this, and then each of them goes off and writes their own version of this scene. There would be three very different scenes, because those screenwriters would be choosing to focus on different things.
Even though we all encountered the same moment, we’re writing different scenes, because we are choosing to focus on different things and we want to direct the reader’s attention to different moments. It’s what snippets of conversations we’re using. It is who we’re choosing to focus on. The same way the director is choosing where to put the camera, we are choosing where to put the reader’s attention. That is mostly what we talk about on this podcast is how as a writer you make the decisions about what you’re going to emphasize and what you’re going to ignore about a moment that is happening in front of us as an audience.
Craig Mazin: It’s one of the reasons I stress transitions so much. We have a podcast we’ve done about transitions. I can’t remember offhand the number, but we’ll put it in the show notes. Transitions help the audience demarcate the blink, the beginning and end of the scene, because inside of scenes, once you get away from the page and you’re just watching a television show or a movie, there is the montage effect, which is essentially, in the old sense of the word, not the, “We’re doing a montage,” but rather when you show something and then you cut to something else, we understand that time is continuing even though we have moved the camera and cut. These things are constantly happening. So how do you know when one thing begins and one thing ends? Since it’s all cut cut cut cut cut, why does one cut signal the beginning of something, and why does one cut signal the end, and why do others feel like they’re just part of a continuity? Transitions. They let you know when the scene has begun, and they let you know when it’s over.
John August: Absolutely. That’s a great segue to really this third version of what I’m describing. It’s this scene which is all of the formatting and the standard conventions and grammar that we’ve come to expect out of screenplays. It’s different from the transition that Craig is talking about, because Craig is really talking psychologically what are we trying to do by ending the scene there and getting to the next scene. That will also have a reflection in literally the words and how we’re formatting that moment to get us from one scene to the next scene. All the stuff that your screenwriting software does for you, that is the technical details that makes screenplays look so strange and different.
As I was reading through all these entries for the Three Page Challenge, picking them for the episode we’re recording tomorrow, I was struck by many of our listeners really get it, they know exactly what they’re doing, but some of them are actually still struggling with that third kind of scene writing, which is basically understanding how standard screenplay conventions are so helpful in letting the reader understand what’s important in this moment. Some of them are still struggling with that stuff. That’s the kind of thing I think you can actually teach and be taught. The best way to do it is to read a ton of screenplays and see just how it is, just so it becomes really natural. You read a bunch, you write a bunch to try to match up to that thing, but you will very quickly get a sense of how screenplays are formatted and how to make that feel effortless, make it feel like it’s not in your way but it’s actually helping you. What’s much harder for us to try to teach you is that second part, that part of how to very naturally convey what a moment feels like. I want to make sure we keep that distinction clear, because being able to type “cut to” and understand how to get down a page is a different thing than being able to really shape what a scene is going to feel like for the reader.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Literally anyone can put something into a screenplay format. It’s never been easier. saying “cut to” and then “exterior such-and-such” will make something look like a scene has ended and a new scene has begun on the page, but it actually will not translate whatsoever to the actual viewing experience. The only thing that you have in your arsenal to demarcate that for the viewer is creativity. A sense of rhythm. A sense of conclusion. A sense of propulsion. A sense of surprise. Contrast. All the things that we talk about when we think of transitions that have nothing to do with formatting, because alas, there is no sign flashing in the movie or on your television set that says, “New scene has begun.” This is the craft part. Man, if I were teaching a screenwriting class at USC or UCLA or one of those places, I think honestly I would just begin with that. I would just begin with please let’s just talk about the art of letting people know something has begun and something has ended.
John August: Yeah, because “cut to” is not when a scene ends. The scene ends when the scene is ending. So often you feel like, okay, that scene is over, but there’s a couple more lines. When you actually film that you’re going to realize you don’t need this extra. You recognize that that moment is over and therefore the scene should be over. It’s a hard thing to learn until you’ve gone through it.
Craig Mazin: That is where the talent and instinct is. Obviously experience helps as you go on, as it does with everything, but there is an innate sense that something has concluded. Even for those of us who have been doing this for a while and we’re professionals, we will often make a mistake of going a little bit too far or not far enough, and then somebody will come and say, “I feel like maybe the scene ended here.” The key is that when somebody says that, you can look at it and go, “No, it hasn’t, and here’s why,” or, “Yeah, you’re right. That’s where it ended.” There is a sense.
John August: Having written the Arlo Finch books, one of the great advantages to traditional literary fiction is that if you’re lucky, you have a publisher, and that publisher provides an editor, who is going through that work and doing some of this actual checking with you. Whereas I might send Craig a script and he can say like, “Oh, I think your scene really ended here,” the editor’s job is much more clinical, saying, “Okay, now I’m … ” She’s actually cutting some stuff, saying, “No, you’re done here.” Sometimes you’ll get to a line editor or a copy editor who is going through and actually fixing your mistakes.
Screenwriters generally don’t have anybody like that, so we are responsible for doing all of that ourselves. I do sometimes wonder if sometimes there are people who are really pretty good at that stage A of writing a scene and stage B of writing a scene, but are really kind of terrible at stage three, that stage C of writing a scene and doing the actual making it work right as a screenplay kind of thing, would just be so helped out by having someone who could just go through and make it read better, make it read more conventionally on the page, so that we can really see what the intention is, versus being hung up on the strange mistakes they’re making.
Craig Mazin: I was a guest for a webinar, a Zoominar. A Zoominar through Princeton University. I did it yesterday. They open it up to members of that community. I don’t know, there was 100 people or something like that watching, which is kind of fun to see all the little Zoom faces. Someone asked a question and it essentially went to this, which was, when you look at how screenplays work as opposed to a novel, there are so many other things that you have to be thinking about. In a novel you’re just thinking about what people are saying and doing and thinking. In a screenplay you’re managing all this other stuff, like time and the camera and the visual space and how it will be structured and when things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, that’s true. If you want to be a good screenwriter, you’re going to have to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife. It’s very hard to be a good screenwriter but only be good at one thing.
Every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re bringing them in, but they’re doing a character pass.” I’m like, what the hell does that mean? What’s the difference between character and story? They’re exactly the same thing to me. They’re interwoven. I don’t know how to separate these things. Or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re bringing somebody in to do a comedy pass.” Okay, so is that just like somebody’s going to stop in the middle of the movie and do some standup? The comedy has to come out of who they are and what the situations are. We have to do all of it at the same time, which is why it’s so hard. It’s really, really hard. There are, I don’t know, 4,000 times as many successful novelists as there are screenwriters.
John August: That is true. What I will say though about the Princeton question is the things that student was asking about, like, oh, you have to do all these other things, those become really automatic and much simpler with experience, so you stop having to worry about them so much. The same way like once you really learn how to use a semicolon, you can just use a semicolon. A lot of the detritus and the weird things about our modern screenplay format, once you get used to it, you stop thinking about it, it becomes less of an obstacle. I’m never, as a screenwriter, frustrated by like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a screenplay format.” It just becomes really straightforward after a time.
Craig Mazin: It does take time, but eventually … It’s like touch typing. I don’t think about where the W is. My finger just goes there.
John August: What we can do is talk about really specific crafty things, which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. This actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of the script to be in the story, or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”
Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge, and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script, so we’re really looking at these opening scenes, and yet because we’re only looking at that scene, we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie. I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.
Craig Mazin: It’s a great question, Martin. It I think has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ’50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. We’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we see how that opening goes. Then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins. These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad, which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on? What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? Then the puzzle gets solved.
John August: I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to present day movies in how openings work, because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. You look at those old trailers and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is just so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all.” In many ways we now look for these opening scenes and opening sequences to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to reward you for like, thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention, because this is what’s going to happen.
Let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences, they don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story-wise, plot-wise, or character-wise in these scenes?
Craig Mazin: You have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. You are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything’s fine. I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. There is the indication of a thing, and it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see, or if they do see it, they’re looking at it from a different time, this is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, that there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.
John August: Yeah. From a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character, you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. In that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence, but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie. You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece and what it feels like to be watching this movie, the setting of this world, how the movie kind of works, and some of the rules of this world. If you’re in a fantasy universe, is there magic, how does gravity work, what are the edges of what this kind of movie can be, because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching, so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that, because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing and challenging, which I’ve always loved. I often look at the very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned, but it’s the opening they ended up with. Neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator, and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. He’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman, essentially. You have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. Then the man, feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions, kills the investigator.
What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up, and a promise that it will make sense later. In addition, I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty. Sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. Let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.
John August: As you’re talking about that, I’m now recalling that scene. It works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story, that there’s going to be questions of identity and existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction, if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important. Now Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say, “This is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie.” It’s a weird thing to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like, they just don’t start right, they start on the wrong beat, or as you dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first, but then they kind of wrote a different movie, and they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?
Craig Mazin: I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes it’s hard to hit that mark, because nothing else has been written yet, so it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it, but the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. The opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies, or in any particular episode of television, where the audience will forgive us a lot. It’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road, but in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.
John August: Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. If they’re going into a movie theater to watch it there, they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie, whether they love it or they don’t love it. In those first minutes, they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there, but their expectations are very malleable at that start. You really can take them anywhere. You get a lot of things for free. They come in with a bit of trust. If you can honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you, they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well, they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story you’re trying to tell.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. Don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting, and then the lights go down. It’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are! Let’s go!” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of wah.
They get you ready. That can go on for a while, because everybody knows, oh my god it’s happening. Let it be happening, don’t let it just happen, if that makes sense.
John August: Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and what our experience was for this. I’m going back, thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, if I recall correctly, opens with an old woman and a cow.
Craig Mazin: That is how Episode Four or Three opens.
John August: That’s right. It was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?
Craig Mazin: The first image of the first episode is a couch with an afghan type thing of a deer, and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.
John August: Yeah. We don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special, that we are setting up a thing, the past, and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth. I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is that it’s an example of we don’t have context for who these characters are, why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. I thought it just worked really well.
Craig Mazin: Thank you. Every episode needs its own beginning. I’m pretty sure that’s beginning of Episode Four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now. That was designed to be a bit confusing, because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there, and we’re not sure what his orders are, and we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is, and we don’t know he’s just standing there, and so this goes on. Then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. That is a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of, and generally I don’t. Sometimes it’s okay to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world, and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about. We think, oh, do they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening? Certainly one way to go.
John August: Completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie. Of course, again, you’re establishing a place and a time and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored … We’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. There’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. It’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is this elaborate sequence to get this guy, this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly. That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie and what the rules are of this movie and the heightened gravity-optional nature of this movie and what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie. Nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense, the fact that they could go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous, and just how it feels. It was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end, because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.
Craig Mazin: With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. It’s weird to say, okay, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly, the old woman and the cow, you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline. You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. This is a good thing. Now they’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next, but also they are aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.
John August: The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds, a real world and a story world, that there are two protagonists, and that both of them have storytelling power. Getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where if I didn’t have that opening sequence, the movie just couldn’t have worked, because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.
Craig Mazin: This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care. I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word precious real estate about, or phrase, a thousand times, you need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says, “I will keep watching.” If it’s just kind of meh, then you could’ve done anything there. The moment you have an opening, you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.
John August: You build a funnel.
Craig Mazin: You make a funnel, a logical funnel, but not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. If you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, “This will get better.” It won’t.
John August: No. Weirdly, it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at, just because by nature we’re going to end up rereading it and tweaking it a zillion times. I do wonder if sometimes, let’s just talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story? Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene, because so often you can be trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene, but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.
Craig Mazin: 100%. If you do know what your end is, it would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl, because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with, I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens, and at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” You go, “Ah, aha!” in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd. I like that. I like the sense that you catch up and you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.
Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic, and down to nothing but dialogue and performance, two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. At the very, very end of the movie, he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end, and you go, “Oh man, this guy.” That’s how you can think about these things. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.
John August: Cool. Now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward, let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up, because that’s really a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script, but let’s also be thinking about what movie we think it’s actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that. Just a note for ourselves. We will start, try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.
Let’s talk about transitions, because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.
Craig Mazin: One thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page, “Don’t tell the director what to do.” Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read, so that they can see a movie. Part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page, but you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind, because it’s really important to them. Frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect. Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.
John August: Let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. One is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO or TRANSITION TO or FADE TO or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting. We’re only half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were originally taught to do. You can tell first-time screenwriters because they will always use a CUT TO. In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing. Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is … You want a scene to flow into the next scene. That’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, why we’re coming into this scene at this moment.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. This is a very nuts and bolts craft thing. They’re techniques. I wrote down a few techniques, which I’ll run through, and you tell me what you think.
John August: Great.
Craig Mazin: The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time. Just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected in their own way.
John August: Let’s talk about what that actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie, obviously. If you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you are going to get into some fairly close coverage there. If it’s just it’s about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something something something, that is a big size transition. Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d see, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scales there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.
Craig Mazin: It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. It’s just real simple things like that. Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room, they’re chitchatting, and then over the sound of hip-hop we are, and now we’re South Central LA, rolling down Crenshaw, just to help the reader understand there’s a connection here. Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and the next thing we hear is a siren. By the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. Something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times, because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. If it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.
John August: Absolutely. There are times where we want that really smooth, legato flow from one thing to the next thing, and there’s times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and there’s brand new information going to be coming your way.
Craig Mazin: Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call a misdirect transition. A guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” or whatever, and he’s got a gun. We go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.
John August: Exactly.
Craig Mazin: Little tricks, basically.
John August: Yeah. Again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that 10 times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.
Craig Mazin: Probably, unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s like a, I don’t know, a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.
John August: Yeah. I was going to say the Asian action films might do that more often. Yeah, if that’s your style, then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much. A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will, they’ll pre-lap the character. They will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut, that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene. It’s very clever how they do it. That’s a way of misdirecting you comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.
Craig Mazin: Exactly. Exactly. I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. Two people say, “That didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. Over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard TV-ish thing, but it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky. Another tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.
John August: Exactly.
Craig Mazin: Where someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth,” and the next shot is a woman smiling. It doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer, in other words, but just that the transition itself is giving us information.
John August: That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the, “We need to find a witness who can,” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that, or like, “This is the question we need to have answered.” You ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.
Craig Mazin: Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat, drunk.
John August: In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head, and so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way. Thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. You’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition. Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that seems to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to get people across the bridge there.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. They’re generic, because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story, but really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here, that there’s something that helps move us through, little tiny things. It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. Frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.
John August: I would agree. Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. Don’t paint a big, giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be straight, simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing, we as the reader will notice, okay, something big and different has changed here.
When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile … The first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word, because it’s all a new form to you, but after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They just skip past you. You can sometimes jump back to them if you’re curious, but you’re really just looking for the flow of things, and so most times you’re just jumping over that. You don’t really know or care where you are. Even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky. Save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really need that reader to stop and slow down and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.
Craig Mazin: Well said. Well said.
John August: Great.
All right, we are back in the present, which in our case is 2021, but by the time you’re listening to this it’s 2022. It’s time for our One Cool Things.
Craig forgot to do a One Cool Thing. He forgot to have a One Cool Thing, so he’s hopping on a phone call while Megana and I are going to do our One Cool Things.
My One Cool Thing is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I love me a good fallacy. I think I’d heard of this fallacy, but never had it described to me before. Basically it’s why, when you have a whole bunch of data and you are looking for patterns in the data, you can find things that really aren’t there. The actual description of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is like, “Oh wow, look, this person hits the bullseye every time.” If you’re shooting at a barn, basically if you shoot first and then paint the target afterwards, you’re going to find patterns there that aren’t really there. I just really like that as an idea.
It reminded me of, this is something that Megana knows what I’m talking about, but I’m going to be a little vague here, I went in to pitch a project at a studio or a streamer, and they said, “Oh, we decided looking at the data we no longer do that genre of project, because it’s not successful.” I’m 100% convinced it’s really a Texas sharpshooter fallacy, that basically they looked at all their data and said, “Oh, this thing doesn’t work for us,” but I think they’re really after the fact trying to find a pattern for a couple failures that really don’t make sense.
Megana Rao: Just so I’m clear, because I haven’t heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, so it’s that you paint the target after you already have …
John August: Yeah, basically you’ve taken all the shots. Basically you have all the data there, and then you are trying to paint the target after the fact. You’re basically picking a small subset of the data to describe what the bigger thing is, and you’re saying, “Oh, this is the finding, the conclusion we’ve had,” but you didn’t actually have a hypothesis, a thesis going into it, so you weren’t really looking for anything. You noticed something and said, “This must be significant.” It’s a problem whenever you have a large big batch of data, it’s very likely that you’re going to some subset of the data that indicates a certain thing, but if you weren’t actually systematically looking for that thing, it’s not probably a valid result.
Megana Rao: It’s how you guys talk about screenwriting structure, screenwriting books.
John August: Oh yeah, absolutely, because if you’re looking at all these things and you’re trying to say, “These are the patterns that are in there,” it’s like, are they really the patterns that are in there or are you basically just deciding that’s a thing you’re going to look for, describe being in there, but that was never the intention, that was never the actual goal behind it. When this studio or streamer says, “Oh, this genre does not perform well for us,” it’s like, okay, did you go through and systematically say, “Okay, let’s take a look at all of the examples of this genre we’ve ever done,” and then seeing how they performed, or you’re just saying, “Of the five biggest disappointments of movies we’ve made in the last couple years, were they in the genre?” You’re being choosy with what data you’re letting in and letting out of that criteria.
Megana Rao: Very cool.
John August: Now since Craig doesn’t have a One Cool Thing, Megana, can you pinch hit for him?
Megana Rao: Yes. In our last bonus segment where we talked about New Years Resolutions, I talked about data privacy and data rights and trying to be more digitally hygienic. My One Cool Thing is this movie Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is delightful and funny and has a lot of themes about data privacy that I think are accessible and rendered in a family-fun way.
John August: Cool. I saw that mostly [inaudible 00:57:26] bus board advertisements. I never actually saw a trailer for it. When I actually looked at the trailer for it, it looks delightful and definitely worth checking out. Now I see it’s on all the … I got a screener for it, so I know that they’re going for the typical awards for it.
Megana Rao: Yeah. It felt really fresh. Zach Galifianakis voices the robot, and he has this really flat affect that is so funny. I was just watching it by myself and chortling, laughing, chuckling. It’s a fun movie.
John August: Cool. Ron’s Gone Wrong.
Megana Rao: Yep, Ron’s Gone Wrong. I think it’s on Disney Plus and some other places too.
John August: Fantastic. That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with one segment produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig Mazin: Of course.
John August: Our outro’s by Henry Adler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You’ll get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting out of a conversation. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.
Craig Mazin: Thank you guys.
Megana Rao: Thank you.
John August: All right, Craig, thinking back to times when you were at a party with actual people around you … Actually that last time I think I saw you in a party situation was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly, who was running at that time for Senate in Arizona. That was a party filled with people I knew and some people I was just getting to know, but it was a lot of small conversations, and I needed to get into and out of those conversations. Is that an experience you recall from that night?
Craig Mazin: Sure. That’s a pretty common thing. You’re at a party and you start talking to people, and then sometimes it gets boring or it gets awkward or you run out of things to say. I try the best I can to not think about who else I should be talking to. I try as best I can to be as present as possible for the person I’m talking to, no matter who they are, because the notion of, “Oh I should be talking to that person,” or, “That person would be more fun to talk to,” oftentimes turns into utter disappointment anyway. My general rule is if I’m enjoying a conversation with somebody, whether it’s the most important person at the party or a waiter, I’m going to keep talking to them because it’s rare enough to enjoy a conversation.
If things are going a bit boring or slow or sluggish and it seems like the other person doesn’t feel the same, or maybe does, either way, that’s a great time to just simply say, “You know what? I’m going to go grab myself a drink, but I’ll be back around,” or I’ll say, “I’m going to run to the restroom,” or I’ll say, “I just got to go find my wife.” That’s always a good thing if your spouse, partner is there, or I’ll somebody and be like, “Oh my gosh, I promised that person I would catch up with them. I do have to, but this was so much fun talking to you.” I’ll say something like that. Of all the things I have shame on, and there are so many, that’s not one of them, and I try not to calculate how to have conversations at parties.
John August: I would say I’ve gotten much better at this over the years and I’ve done all the techniques that you described, and certainly having someone that you can use an excuse to go on to the next thing is great. The other technique is the handoff, which is basically someone who’s passed, who you’ve already had a conversation with or you know, you can say, “Oh hey, have you met Bill?” Then you introduce the two of them and then you can make your exit out of there. That can be a very useful way out of it. I will say this, honestly doing a lot of the WGA stuff where I’d be in these rooms where I’d have to have 50 conversations over the course of an evening, I got much better at basically being very present in a conversation and giving 100% full attention. It was clear I’d addressed that issue. I could just really make a clean exit, like, “It was great talking with you. Thanks for coming out,” and move on to the next thing. That’s more of a work function than a social function. It feels honest that I’m not looking for an excuse and basically saying, “This was great. I value our conversation. Now I’m taking two steps over this direction.”
Megana Rao: Are you guys sure that you want to be giving away all of your secrets for-
Craig Mazin: It’s not really a secret. I’ll tell people. I’m just like, “Yeah.” Look, it’s not like if I say I have to go to the bathroom at a party, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, he hates me now.” Sometimes I really have to pee. If they don’t see me go, if I don’t leave and go to the … By the way, when I say I have to go to the bathroom, I always go. I don’t not go. That would be horrible.
John August: Yeah, even if it’s just to shut the door and check his phone for a few minutes, he will go to the bathroom.
Craig Mazin: By the way, I’ll do that sometimes anyway. When I’m at a party, at some point I’ll hit a little bit of an overload. I’ll go to the restroom, close the door. It’s like when I’m on a plane. Sometimes I’ll do that, just to be alone. Just for one lovely minute I’m alone. It’s so nice. I try and be as honest as I can. When there are situations like when we would do live shows, after the show is over, there’d be a lineup of people that want to talk to us. They all have comments or questions, or sometimes they want a selfie or whatever it is. We’ll do those things, and I have no problem at some point saying, “I want to answer some of their questions too, but thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it,” so that I can just say the truth, which is I have a limited amount of time and I have to talk to these people too. The same thing would happen if I were on a panel at the Writers Guild, which occasionally I have done. Same deal. Afterwards you talk to people. At large parties, honestly I have no problem, if I get cornered by somebody and they’re awesome, I’ll talk to them all night. I don’t care. All night. I do not care. I have no FOMO when it comes to party conversations. 99% of them are just air. What about you, Megana? It sounds like you don’t want to give away your secrets, but how do you handle let’s just say the mixing, the mixing around?
Megana Rao: Yeah, I think the same bathroom, drink technique. What I’m more curious to hear about is, I don’t want to shame anyone else or give away too many details, but the situation if you’re at a dinner party or a place where you’re more fixed, and the conversation is just unbearably boring, like you’re hearing about somebody’s pandemic hobbies that are just … I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about anybody making sourdough starter. I don’t care. I have no interest in it. How do I transition out of that conversation where I can’t easily move around?
John August: It’s tough when you’re locked in place and you didn’t actually have a choice or you just made a wrong choice about who you sat down next to. It’s always tough, because you don’t know if it’s the kind of situation where there’s going to be one conversation for the table or if it’s going to be like there’s a conversation on your left and a conversation on your right, and if you turn to your left, then you’re shutting out the person on your right. It’s tough. I find myself trying to ask a question that will just get us off the horrible track, if possible.
Craig Mazin: Some people are nothing but horrible track generators. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. They will ruin everything with their monotonous, banal point of view, their rambling stories that go nowhere. This is why if there’s something where I’m fixed in position, a dinner party for example, I need to know that I know enough people there where I can’t get stuck alone with somebody that’s not doing it for me. Ideally there’s somebody I know will sit next to me. You have to protect yourself going into those situations. If you are single, you still need a friend. That friend can be somebody that you’re interested in. It can be somebody that’s just friend friend. It doesn’t matter. You need somebody you can anchor yourself to, who can help you and rescue you. Also if I get invited to a dinner party and I get stuck next to a super boring person, that goes into my ledger, and I’m not going back there ever again. Life is too short.
By the way, I will also just leave. I’ll leave. I don’t care. I’ll leave, because here’s the thing, everybody’s got limited time. I’m not saying because we’re all busy. I’m saying we’re going to die. Sitting next to boring people all night while other people are having fun five feet away from you, it’s brutal. No, I’ll just fucking go. I don’t care, because if I go home, I can do all sorts of things that are wonderful. I have video games and puzzles and television that I can catch up on. You know I’m really down to it if I’m doing that. I don’t have to stay there. Why? You know what? Shame on the party host, the dinner party host, for putting anyone at that table that that’s boring. The only time that I honestly get stuck is if sometimes if Melissa says in advance to me, “You need to do the following thing.” I’ll say, “Okay,” but she’ll be there, so I’ll be fine.
John August: Many dinner parties will separate spouses so that you have-
Craig Mazin: Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t do it. By the way, everyone knows. I’m sort of famous in my little town for not showing up, for leaving early, for going, “I don’t do crap like that,” because I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t like small talk. I like big talk. I like to really get into it with people. I don’t just bland-
John August: Two things that I really respect about my husband is first off he’s the only person I’ve seen who can in real life click the ignore button, where someone is trying to engage with him, and I see this floating ignore button, he’s hitting that button, it’s like, “You don’t exist to me.” I love that he’s able to do that. The other thing is he’s very honest about, “We don’t want to go to your dinner for this charity we support. We will write a check. We’re delighted to write you a check. I have no interest in actually going to the event.” Where I can happily go to the political fundraisers all the time, he’s just like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” I respect that. He is the Craig Mazin of our relationship on that whole-
Craig Mazin: By the way, they don’t want you at the dinner anyway. They just want your money. If you give them money and don’t show up to the dinner, you’ve given them extra money, the money that they would’ve had to spend to feed you. No one cares. I’ve been a host of multiple political fundraisers that I did not show up to.
John August: Yeah. There was one at your house, which was great, but it did feel like a rare exception for us to be at your house to do this thing.
Craig Mazin: Definitely, yeah. That was Beto O’Rourke. That was way, way early in his run, so early that indeed he was showing up to the likes of my house. It was smallish, but it was nice and we had fun people there. It was an interesting conversation. That was that. As things have gotten bigger and larger and so on and so forth, I just … God bless Billy Ray, our colleague Billy Ray, that does a lot of fundraising and is always collaring me for that stuff. Sometimes I’ll end up with my name on the hosting … By the way, so-
John August: You’re not going.
Craig Mazin: No. People, if you ever get an invitation to a political fundraiser and it lists a bunch of hosts, that doesn’t mean that they’re all sitting there figuring out who’s going to cook what. It means they all gave a certain amount of money. That’s what that means. That’s all it means.
John August: All right. Let’s transition to talking about not in-person gatherings, but text threads and text messages and that stuff, and how you end a text conversation, because I’ve found myself sometimes where we’ve been texting back and forth for half an hour, and sometimes it can be awkward, it’s like who’s going to end the conversation? My default move is the tap back, which is basically the thumbs up, the whatever, saying that’s it and it’s mentioned, and this conversation is done here. Is that what everyone else is doing? Megana, what are you doing when a text conversation has run its course and you need to make it clear that I’m not going to be answering your next text?
Megana Rao: I feel like either that or sometimes, “Hey, I’m about to hop in the shower, but I’ll answer when I’m back out.” I think the cadence with millennials is a little bit different. It’s fine if somebody doesn’t respond to my text for days or hours. I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me and it’s fine if the conversation fades.
John August: Being left on read doesn’t kill you?
Megana Rao: If it’s just a friend, a close friend that I’m texting or a friend that I’m catching up with, no.
Craig Mazin: Maybe I’m a millennial, because I feel like that’s the whole point of text is … Mostly. Sometimes I will think, “Oh, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say here,” but I don’t want to send some sort of formal, “It was lovely chatting.” Then I’ll think, “Will they be upset?” Then I remember, no, no one gives a shit, because if I send you a text in a conversation, and the thing doesn’t ping back, I’m not upset. I’m relieved. It’s over. We can all move on.
Megana Rao: It’s almost more awkward if … The example that I even gave before is not something that I do. It’s something that some friends will do to me. It’s more awkward if you acknowledge that the conversation is ending.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, like can’t we just be cas and just talk to each other and not have to worry about that? Text to me, sometimes for fun, what I will do is I’ll just go, “Byee.”
John August: Yeah, I’ve gotten a byee.
Craig Mazin: I love byeeee. That’s fun. I like to do that. Basically every text conversation I have at some point will devolve into GIFs and then it’s over.
John August: Yeah. Fair choices.
Megana Rao: I do feel that I have acquired a very specific skill of knowing exactly when John is done talking, in person, via email, or via text.
John August: My sentences do get shorter. It goes down from three sentences to one sentence to two words and then the conversation’s done. Even in emails I do find it sometimes there’s a bounce back and forth, and I thank you, you thank me, and then it’s all resolved, because in text it’s not quite a conversation, it’s not quite an email conversation, it’s just this weird middle ground and you don’t quite know whether you’re done talking. Megana, do you find it happens in Slack? I don’t as much, but what are you finding?
Megana Rao: You and I aren’t casually texting that much. I only text you when I really need your attention. We casually Slack sometimes. That’s the same thing where-
Craig Mazin: Sounds gross.
Megana Rao: I’m in communication with John all the time, so I don’t really think of us having a cadence there, because I’m talking to you at all times of the day.
John August: Basically.
Craig Mazin: I feel like even though Bo and I are together every day, I probably text with her more than talk. We text all the time. Oh yeah. We’re besties. We’re texties. We’re like beep beep beep beep beep GIF lol. Yeah, we’re two 12-year-old girls. It’s wonderful.
John August: The advantage of texting or Slack or whatever is that you can also scroll back and get to that thing. If I said something to Megana in person, she’d have to remember it, but if I text it to her, then it’s there for her to be able to look back at and confirm.
Megana Rao: I do remember everything you say, but yes, I hear your point.
John August: You consult with everyone else about, “What did John actually mean when he said that thing?” Now if you don’t mind, I got to go to the bathroom. It’s been great talking with you both.
Craig Mazin: Byee.
John August: Byee.
Megana Rao: Bye.
Links:
- A Good Life is Painful by Sean Illing
- The Sweet Spot by Paul Bloom
- Crazy Italian chocolate cake (egg free chocolate cake) by Chelsea Winter
- Baba is You
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Owen Danoff (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes first appeared on John August.
A listener pointed me to this listing on Barnes & Noble for “Aladdin: Screenplay” by Meredith Day. The listener writes:
This is clearly a bootleg, and the Kindle preview shows it’s just a movie transcript without any proper formatting. You don’t even get credit as a screenwriter in the book.
On Amazon you can find dozens of books by Meredith Day, all of them “screenplays.” But they’re not actual screenplays. At most they’re transcripts, perhaps pulled from the closed captioning.
The text isn’t the only thing that looks to be yoinked without permission. The cover artwork shows up in the Artstation portfolio of Vietnamese artist Khánh Khánh as “Aladdin 2019 Fanart.”
The listener asks:
I was wondering if you ever do anything to legally take these down? Have you ever considered official publications of your previous screenplays besides just the digital releases in your library?
Let’s take a moment to look at the copyright issues here.
Aladdin — both the character and the basic story elements — are wholly in the public domain. Everyone has the right to retell the story of the kid, the lamp and the genie.
Disney’s Aladdin, including its songs and dialogue, are property of the Mouse House. This book isn’t the public domain version of Aladdin; it’s a transcript of the film. It’s hard to imagine it passing any of the standards of fair use, as it’s a commerical endeavor that uses the work in whole without commentary or transformation.
What’s more, it invites confusion about whether it’s an authorized product. To my knowledge, Disney hasn’t published the screenplay anywhere, but they have put out a well-reviewed novelization.
As one of the credited writers of Aladdin, I considered filling out Amazon’s “Report Infringement” form, but Disney is the more properly aggrieved party here. It’s their call.1
As frustrating as it is to think of someone profiting off this hacky transcript, I honestly don’t think they’re profiting that much. A quick Google search will find you the same text for free. The best case for taking these fake scripts off Amazon and Barnes & Noble is that they’re terrible and certain to disappoint anyone who purchases them.
- Because the 2019 Aladdin is based on Disney’s IP, I don’t control any of the separated rights, including publishing a book of the script.
The post What to do about fake scripts first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss the craft of leading a creative life: What counts as practice? How do you make friends? When is it okay to take a break?
A Scriptnotes listener suggested a lifestyle compendium episode, so we reach back through the archives to explore the artist’s soft skills. We touch on the dangers of self care, the importance of staying curious, and how to cultivate a workplace when you’re working alone.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we invite listener Jake Kelley on to explain why he chose these clips and how Scriptnotes has influenced his visual art practice.
Links:
- Episode 6: How Kids Become Screenwriters
- Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing
- Episode 425: Tough Love vs. Self Care
- Episode 439: How to Grow Old as a Writer
- Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to all the episodes in our back catalogue, including the ones sampled here.
- Thanks to Jake Kelley for the episode suggestion!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Christiaan Mentz (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (with segments by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan Mcdonnell!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post On Being A Screenwriter first appeared on John August.
John invites writer/creator Michael Schur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Good Place) to discuss the history of comedy, specifically the evolution of the half hour sitcom.
We also cover moral philosophy, working with experts, and coming up with new projects. Mike explains why ‘inside-out’ ideas tend to be more successful shows.
In our bonus segment for premium members John asks Mike about writers room jargon.
Links:
- Michael Schur on Twitter
- How to be Perfect by Michael Schur
- Todd May, academic papers here, books here
- The Poscast by Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur
- TV Writers Room Terms
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post The One with Mike Schur first appeared on John August.
John and Craig talk about adapting in Hollywood: the process of reimagining existing properties for the screen and career transitions. They cover why some adaptations don’t work, revisiting source material, and developing projects with public domain intellectual property.
We offer advice to writers on adapting to a changing industry and returning to writing after a major life event. Follow up this week includes the first Scriptnotes TikTok, relationship advice, and the perils of main character energy.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we appeal to our grammar nerds as we discuss writing with “to be,” the generic you, and indefinite pronouns.
Links:
- Movie Pass is Back!
- Script Speaker
- Check out our first (and only) Scriptnotes TikTok — thank you to Drew Rosas for editing the audio!
- Fleabag Season 2, check out our episode with Phoebe Waller Bridge here!
- First Time Screenwriters Contest
- Your Ears are Plugged by the Oatmeal
- Australian Survivor Season 6
- The Last Campfire
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Owen Danoff (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Adaptation and Transition first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin.
John August: This is Episode 531 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show we’re looking at how you move from scene to scene. That’s right, transitions. It’s a clip show where we listen back to past John and past Craig as they offer their advice, which for all we know, is better than our current advice, because we were younger then, and fresher.
Craig Mazin: So much younger than today.
John August: Now we actually got an email in from a listener recently saying like, “Oh, I went back and listened to your early episodes, expecting it to be different, that John and Craig would’ve grown and changed a lot.” She said, “No, actually, you know what? It was the same. Your microphones weren’t as good, but it was the same show,” which I was heartened by.
Craig Mazin: Yes, I think it might’ve been a man.
John August: Oh. It could’ve been either one.
Craig Mazin: I think based on that name I think it’s a guy, but either way, I wanted to say to that fellow that no, of course we weren’t great at that then, and we have gotten better. Maybe it’s just that we found something where we weren’t accountable to anybody at all. Sometimes the key is that if you have something where you’re completely free within it to do whatever you want, how you want to do it, without any accountability whatsoever, and no expectation or ambition or anything, then there is a purity to it, and people who are going to like that purity are going to like it. If you dig Scriptnotes Episode 500, yeah, you’ll probably like 1 through 10. If you hate Episode 500, I guarantee you’ll hate 1 through 10. We’ve said a lot.
Don’t get fooled by the way things look on the other side of stuff. Here, hopefully you just listen to me talk about how ashamed I am all the time and how I feel bad about myself, and I try and work on that really, really hard. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Basically in your letter you said, “To be honest, I was hoping that you guys weren’t as good at the beginning. It would’ve given me hope to get better myself at my stuff.” You have plenty of hope. You’re doing a hard thing. You’re trying to do a hard thing. You’re going to move at the speed you move.
John August: Yeah, and I always also say at the beginning we were new to podcasting, but we weren’t necessarily new to screenwriting and offering advice to screenwriters. That was a not a new thing for us to do. It was just sticking a mic in front of us was the new aspect of it.
Let’s travel back in time and look at transitions. These are three conversations we’ve had over the years. We’re going to start with Episode 446: Back To Basics, where we talk about the origin of screenwriting, opening scenes, what a scene is, what it means, and the difference between formatting and transition versus the psychology of what a transition actually does, like how you’re moving from scene to scene versus the actual words you’re using.
In 493 on our Opening Scenes conversation, we talk about how you begin a screenplay, the process for thinking about opening scenes, the rules and expectations. We talk about Chernobyl some. It feels like a lot of what we’re talking about in this is really relevant to transitions, basically how are we going to get the story started and how are we going to get the audience moving with us into the plot.
Finally, we’re going to go back to Episode 89, which is probably, wow, eight years ago?
Craig Mazin: Peesh.
John August: Yeah. We’re looking at technical approaches to different types of transitions, so literally what are the words on a page that is signaling to the reader that this is how we are going to be moving from this scene to that scene. Literally it’s the right-hand margin stuff we’ll get into in that last segment.
Three segments here. We’ll also put a link in the show notes to some blog posts where we talk about transitions. If you’re a Premium member stick around, because when we come back at the end, we are going to be discussing how to get out of a conversation, so it’s really the transition between I am talking with you right now and I don’t want to be talking with you any longer. We’ll be discussing how to end conversations, both in person and online.
Now let me make a transition out of this opening segment into our three pre-recorded bits. Craig, can you help me out with this transition?
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: Perfect.
All right. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, and so I thought we might actually take this time in Episode 446 to define screenwriting and what screenwriting actually is, because I don’t know if we’ve actually talked about it in actually that much depth, weirdly, over the course of this, because Craig, you did your solo episode about how to write a screenplay. That was really fundamentally 101 the things about writing a screenplay, but I wanted to do some backstory about the origin of screenwriting and how screenwriting began to what it’s become now and what those transitions were.
I have three things I want to keep in mind as we talk about what a screenwriter does and what screenwriting is, and maybe tease them apart a little bit, because I think especially newer people who are approaching screenwriting, which we have a bunch of new people listening, just because they watched Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge last week, really talk about what the screenwriter does and what screenwriting is about.
Craig Mazin: I hope that my understanding of it is correct. I’ll be very embarrassed if I’m wrong.
John August: I think you will probably be very, very correct. Let’s talk about the origin of screenwriting, because screenwriting as an art form is only about a century old, because movies are only about a century old. When the first motion picture cameras were aimed at things and it went beyond just photographing a train coming into a station, to actually trying to tell a story with a camera, at some point people recognized, oh, you know what, it would help if we wrote down the plan for what we’re going to do before we actually shot this stuff. Those initial things that would become screenplays were just a list of shots, or a plan for how you’re going to do the things. When we talk about screenwriting being like architecture, that’s what we’re getting to is that sense of like it’s a plan for the thing you’re going to make. It is a blueprint for what the ultimate finished product is going to be, which is the finished film, the thing that a person is going to watch, which is not the literary document or not the paper document that we’re starting off with. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those first screenplays, but they don’t closely resemble what we do now.
Craig Mazin: No. I think that when people say a screenplay is a blueprint, I always get a little fussy about it, but in this aspect of it, that’s exactly what it is. Part of a screenplay, a screenplay is many, many things at once, one of the things a screenplay is and has always been, going back to those first ones, is essentially a business plan. It is an outline of where you need to be and how long you need to be there and what needs to be seen. There’s not a lot of art to it. It really is more of an organizational thing, and the modern counterpart to it I guess would just be sometimes a director will come in and make a little shot list for the day. That is appropriate to blueprint.
John August: Yeah, or agenda. It’s basically these are the steps. This is how we’re going to do it. Because it’s written on eight and a half by 11 paper and it’s done with words rather than a flowchart, it feels somewhat literary. The words you pick matter a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. It’s basically as long as you’re going to be able to communicate what your intention is to the other people who need to see this document, that’s all that really matters.
Craig Mazin: That tradition carries through to this day when a screenplay still uses interior, exterior. Every scene must give you blueprint information that is not literary information. There is nothing literary about exterior, house, day, rain, or whatever you say there. The literary part comes in this other stuff that started to emerge as our craft of filmmaking and writing evolved.
John August: Now, that evolution, I’m not enough of a student of the history of cinema to tell you exactly when the screenplay became more what we talk about today, but often you’ll hear Casablanca referenced as a turning point between this list of shots to something that’s more like a modern screenplay in the sense of it’s a document that you can read, and in reading this document, you get a sense of what the actual film is supposed to feel like. It’s not just the pure blueprint. It’s more like this gives you a sense of where you are, what’s going on. It gives you a preview of what the film is actually going to look and feel like, versus just a straightforward list of these are the things you’re seeing.
Craig Mazin: This is not necessarily historically … You can’t call me a professor here, by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding when I look at the early stuff is that it was the American movie business that was very blueprint-y and shot list-y. There is a pretty famous … You’ve probably seen the silent film A Trip to the Moon.
John August: Oh yes, yeah.
Craig Mazin: Yes, remember where the moon gets shot in the eye.
John August: The Brothers Lumière.
Craig Mazin: Exactly. George Méliès. Méliès? Méliès? Méliès? If you look at the script for that, it actually feels quite modern. There is a literary aspect to it. It’s more descriptive. I think in Europe probably there was a little bit more of a literary aspect to this much earlier than there was in the United States, but eventually by the time you get to films like Casablanca you’re fully in the swing of a literary screenplay that is combining two things at once, a non-literary production plan and art.
John August: Now, in both the literary form and in the blueprint-y construction plan form, the fundamental unit that you come back to is the scene. Even novels have scenes, that sense of there is a moment in space and time when generally characters are saying something or doing something. It’s one carved out moment of a place and a time where things are happening. That idea of a scene you see in both the really clinical early versions of screenplays and you see them in modern screenplays. That sense of like this is a chunk of time in which these things are happening.
I want to suss out three different kinds of things we mean by scene. First is that moment of space and time where characters are doing a thing. That’s scene version A. Scene version B is the writing of that scene. By the writing I mean this is what the characters are saying and doing. It’s where we’re coming into that moment. It’s how we’re getting out of that moment. It is the words we’re using to describe the world in which the characters are happening, the actions they’re taking, basically everything we call scene description, which you compare to stage plays, which is the other natural version of this, the scene description in stage plays tends to be incredibly minimalist. It’s much more robust in screenplays, because you are trying to really visually describe this world in which the characters are inhabiting. That’s an important transition. That’s version B is really the writing.
The third version of a scene I want to distinguish between is all the formatting stuff. All the basically the grammar of screenplays that we use that make them, the conventions that make it easier for people who read a lot of screenplays to understand what’s actually happening. The same way that commas and periods become invisible to a reader, people who are used to reading screenplays, they don’t even see INT and EXT and DAYS. Your brain just skips over those things and is able to concentrate on the meat of those. All that other information is there, but it’s invisible to a person who is used to reading them. Being able to understand those conventions and use them properly really does affect how a person perceives a screenplay. That formatting, that syntax choices and all that stuff, is really a different thing I would say than the words you’re using to describe stuff. It’s really grammar versus the actual creative act of writing.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, and that grammar is eventually going to be analyzed by a grammar specialist known as the First AD, who along with the production managers, are going to be taking those scene headings and asking, “Okay, are these scene headings accurate to what we think we’re going to be actually doing in terms of the locations we found? How can we group them together? We need to make a timeline, night, day.” All those things have huge production implications. None of them have to do specifically with art. You’re guessing at what you think the ultimate grammar will be, but then you make adjustments once you get into production. Individual first ADs will have different ways of adjusting that grammar.
You’re right that for most people reading it, those things serve weirdly as just paragraph breaks. They’re paragraph breaks, which are incredibly helpful. It’s one of the reasons why my formatting preference is to put two lines before a new scene, because the scene, the EXTERIOR or the INTERIOR, is serving as a break in the visual flow of the reading, so I make it one, because I agree with you. I think that that’s really what it’s doing. If you took out all the interiors and exteriors and just mentioned those things in action lines, the script would become a book and it would be harder to read.
John August: Yeah. In thinking about scenes in three different waves, so there’s the visualization, the imagination of what’s happening with those characters in space and time, that is a thing that a screenwriter does, but it’s also the kind of thing a director does. It’s a thing that other creative people can do. It’s a thing an author does, is envision people in a place and a time doing a thing or saying a thing. Directors often do that scene version A a lot. They’re really imagining what that scene is like. They’re thinking about it through their own specialties. They’re imagining it’s like, “Okay, so I’m envisioning this scene, this moment happening,” and then they’re thinking, “Okay, where would I put the camera? What are the opportunities I have here? How would I use my tool set to make this happen best? What am I going to tell the cinematographer about what I’m looking at? What am I going to tell the editor about how I imagine this being paced? What are the costumes? What are all the things that I will need to be able to describe to other people about this moment?” That’s a version of crafting the scene.
The screenwriter has to do all that stuff, but then take a second level abstraction, thinking, “Okay, having thought through all that stuff, what are the words I’m going to use to describe what’s most important about this moment? Because I could describe everything, but that would be exhausting, and it would actually hurt the process of being able to understand what’s important. How am I’m going to synthesize that down to the most important things for people to understand if they’re reading this scene about what it’s going to feel like, what’s important, what they need to focus on?”
Most of what Craig and I really are talking about on the podcast is this second level, is the B version of that scene, which is how do we find the best way to describe and tell the reader what they would be seeing if they were seated in a theater watching this on a screen, how are we going to convey that experience, what it feels like to be watching that moment on the big screen. That’s mostly what we talk about on this podcast.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. There’s a weird kind of psychological game we’re playing with scene work, in the way that Walter Murch wrote this book about editing, I think it’s called In the Blink of an Eye, where he says we’re cutting in the pattern of people’s blinks, that we blink in normal moments. We’re kind of predictable this way. We have a rhythm. We’re editing slightly on that basis. Editing feels like music. It’s all about timing. You just know, there, cut there, that’s the spot. It’s kind of the same thing with scenes. What you’re doing is feeling a psychological impact and then there’s a blink, a story blink, that just needs to happen. We have reached a point where something should happen and the story should blink and reset, and in a different place or a different time or with a different person, a different perspective. That to me is where the scene begins and ends.
Inside of the scene, we may have additional slug lines or scene headers, because we’re giving that blueprint information, that nonliterary blueprint information, to our production friends. For the purpose of being artistic and literary, the scene is the psychological unit. I don’t know how else to describe it other than something blinks and the story moves.
John August: Here’s an example. Imagine you could take a real life thing that’s happening. We’re in a room. There are people talking. Imagine we’re at a cocktail party. There’s a cocktail party happening. It’s maybe six people in this room. There’s discussions happening. We could invite three screenwriters in and have them see all of this, and then each of them goes off and writes their own version of this scene. There would be three very different scenes, because those screenwriters would be choosing to focus on different things.
Even though we all encountered the same moment, we’re writing different scenes, because we are choosing to focus on different things and we want to direct the reader’s attention to different moments. It’s what snippets of conversations we’re using. It is who we’re choosing to focus on. The same way the director is choosing where to put the camera, we are choosing where to put the reader’s attention. That is mostly what we talk about on this podcast is how as a writer you make the decisions about what you’re going to emphasize and what you’re going to ignore about a moment that is happening in front of us as an audience.
Craig Mazin: It’s one of the reasons I stress transitions so much. We have a podcast we’ve done about transitions. I can’t remember offhand the number, but we’ll put it in the show notes. Transitions help the audience demarcate the blink, the beginning and end of the scene, because inside of scenes, once you get away from the page and you’re just watching a television show or a movie, there is the montage effect, which is essentially, in the old sense of the word, not the, “We’re doing a montage,” but rather when you show something and then you cut to something else, we understand that time is continuing even though we have moved the camera and cut. These things are constantly happening. So how do you know when one thing begins and one thing ends? Since it’s all cut cut cut cut cut, why does one cut signal the beginning of something, and why does one cut signal the end, and why do others feel like they’re just part of a continuity? Transitions. They let you know when the scene has begun, and they let you know when it’s over.
John August: Absolutely. That’s a great segue to really this third version of what I’m describing. It’s this scene which is all of the formatting and the standard conventions and grammar that we’ve come to expect out of screenplays. It’s different from the transition that Craig is talking about, because Craig is really talking psychologically what are we trying to do by ending the scene there and getting to the next scene. That will also have a reflection in literally the words and how we’re formatting that moment to get us from one scene to the next scene. All the stuff that your screenwriting software does for you, that is the technical details that makes screenplays look so strange and different.
As I was reading through all these entries for the Three Page Challenge, picking them for the episode we’re recording tomorrow, I was struck by many of our listeners really get it, they know exactly what they’re doing, but some of them are actually still struggling with that third kind of scene writing, which is basically understanding how standard screenplay conventions are so helpful in letting the reader understand what’s important in this moment. Some of them are still struggling with that stuff. That’s the kind of thing I think you can actually teach and be taught. The best way to do it is to read a ton of screenplays and see just how it is, just so it becomes really natural. You read a bunch, you write a bunch to try to match up to that thing, but you will very quickly get a sense of how screenplays are formatted and how to make that feel effortless, make it feel like it’s not in your way but it’s actually helping you. What’s much harder for us to try to teach you is that second part, that part of how to very naturally convey what a moment feels like. I want to make sure we keep that distinction clear, because being able to type “cut to” and understand how to get down a page is a different thing than being able to really shape what a scene is going to feel like for the reader.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Literally anyone can put something into a screenplay format. It’s never been easier. saying “cut to” and then “exterior such-and-such” will make something look like a scene has ended and a new scene has begun on the page, but it actually will not translate whatsoever to the actual viewing experience. The only thing that you have in your arsenal to demarcate that for the viewer is creativity. A sense of rhythm. A sense of conclusion. A sense of propulsion. A sense of surprise. Contrast. All the things that we talk about when we think of transitions that have nothing to do with formatting, because alas, there is no sign flashing in the movie or on your television set that says, “New scene has begun.” This is the craft part. Man, if I were teaching a screenwriting class at USC or UCLA or one of those places, I think honestly I would just begin with that. I would just begin with please let’s just talk about the art of letting people know something has begun and something has ended.
John August: Yeah, because “cut to” is not when a scene ends. The scene ends when the scene is ending. So often you feel like, okay, that scene is over, but there’s a couple more lines. When you actually film that you’re going to realize you don’t need this extra. You recognize that that moment is over and therefore the scene should be over. It’s a hard thing to learn until you’ve gone through it.
Craig Mazin: That is where the talent and instinct is. Obviously experience helps as you go on, as it does with everything, but there is an innate sense that something has concluded. Even for those of us who have been doing this for a while and we’re professionals, we will often make a mistake of going a little bit too far or not far enough, and then somebody will come and say, “I feel like maybe the scene ended here.” The key is that when somebody says that, you can look at it and go, “No, it hasn’t, and here’s why,” or, “Yeah, you’re right. That’s where it ended.” There is a sense.
John August: Having written the Arlo Finch books, one of the great advantages to traditional literary fiction is that if you’re lucky, you have a publisher, and that publisher provides an editor, who is going through that work and doing some of this actual checking with you. Whereas I might send Craig a script and he can say like, “Oh, I think your scene really ended here,” the editor’s job is much more clinical, saying, “Okay, now I’m … ” She’s actually cutting some stuff, saying, “No, you’re done here.” Sometimes you’ll get to a line editor or a copy editor who is going through and actually fixing your mistakes.
Screenwriters generally don’t have anybody like that, so we are responsible for doing all of that ourselves. I do sometimes wonder if sometimes there are people who are really pretty good at that stage A of writing a scene and stage B of writing a scene, but are really kind of terrible at stage three, that stage C of writing a scene and doing the actual making it work right as a screenplay kind of thing, would just be so helped out by having someone who could just go through and make it read better, make it read more conventionally on the page, so that we can really see what the intention is, versus being hung up on the strange mistakes they’re making.
Craig Mazin: I was a guest for a webinar, a Zoominar. A Zoominar through Princeton University. I did it yesterday. They open it up to members of that community. I don’t know, there was 100 people or something like that watching, which is kind of fun to see all the little Zoom faces. Someone asked a question and it essentially went to this, which was, when you look at how screenplays work as opposed to a novel, there are so many other things that you have to be thinking about. In a novel you’re just thinking about what people are saying and doing and thinking. In a screenplay you’re managing all this other stuff, like time and the camera and the visual space and how it will be structured and when things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, that’s true. If you want to be a good screenwriter, you’re going to have to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife. It’s very hard to be a good screenwriter but only be good at one thing.
Every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re bringing them in, but they’re doing a character pass.” I’m like, what the hell does that mean? What’s the difference between character and story? They’re exactly the same thing to me. They’re interwoven. I don’t know how to separate these things. Or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re bringing somebody in to do a comedy pass.” Okay, so is that just like somebody’s going to stop in the middle of the movie and do some standup? The comedy has to come out of who they are and what the situations are. We have to do all of it at the same time, which is why it’s so hard. It’s really, really hard. There are, I don’t know, 4,000 times as many successful novelists as there are screenwriters.
John August: That is true. What I will say though about the Princeton question is the things that student was asking about, like, oh, you have to do all these other things, those become really automatic and much simpler with experience, so you stop having to worry about them so much. The same way like once you really learn how to use a semicolon, you can just use a semicolon. A lot of the detritus and the weird things about our modern screenplay format, once you get used to it, you stop thinking about it, it becomes less of an obstacle. I’m never, as a screenwriter, frustrated by like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a screenplay format.” It just becomes really straightforward after a time.
Craig Mazin: It does take time, but eventually … It’s like touch typing. I don’t think about where the W is. My finger just goes there.
John August: What we can do is talk about really specific crafty things, which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. This actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of the script to be in the story, or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”
Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge, and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script, so we’re really looking at these opening scenes, and yet because we’re only looking at that scene, we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie. I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.
Craig Mazin: It’s a great question, Martin. It I think has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ’50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. We’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we see how that opening goes. Then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins. These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad, which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on? What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? Then the puzzle gets solved.
John August: I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to present day movies in how openings work, because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. You look at those old trailers and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is just so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all.” In many ways we now look for these opening scenes and opening sequences to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to reward you for like, thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention, because this is what’s going to happen.
Let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences, they don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story-wise, plot-wise, or character-wise in these scenes?
Craig Mazin: You have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. You are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything’s fine. I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. There is the indication of a thing, and it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see, or if they do see it, they’re looking at it from a different time, this is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, that there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.
John August: Yeah. From a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character, you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. In that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence, but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie. You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece and what it feels like to be watching this movie, the setting of this world, how the movie kind of works, and some of the rules of this world. If you’re in a fantasy universe, is there magic, how does gravity work, what are the edges of what this kind of movie can be, because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching, so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that, because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing and challenging, which I’ve always loved. I often look at the very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned, but it’s the opening they ended up with. Neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator, and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. He’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman, essentially. You have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. Then the man, feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions, kills the investigator.
What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up, and a promise that it will make sense later. In addition, I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty. Sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. Let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.
John August: As you’re talking about that, I’m now recalling that scene. It works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story, that there’s going to be questions of identity and existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction, if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important. Now Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say, “This is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie.” It’s a weird thing to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like, they just don’t start right, they start on the wrong beat, or as you dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first, but then they kind of wrote a different movie, and they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?
Craig Mazin: I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes it’s hard to hit that mark, because nothing else has been written yet, so it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it, but the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. The opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies, or in any particular episode of television, where the audience will forgive us a lot. It’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road, but in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.
John August: Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. If they’re going into a movie theater to watch it there, they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie, whether they love it or they don’t love it. In those first minutes, they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there, but their expectations are very malleable at that start. You really can take them anywhere. You get a lot of things for free. They come in with a bit of trust. If you can honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you, they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well, they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story you’re trying to tell.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. Don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting, and then the lights go down. It’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are! Let’s go!” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of wah.
They get you ready. That can go on for a while, because everybody knows, oh my god it’s happening. Let it be happening, don’t let it just happen, if that makes sense.
John August: Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and what our experience was for this. I’m going back, thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, if I recall correctly, opens with an old woman and a cow.
Craig Mazin: That is how Episode Four or Three opens.
John August: That’s right. It was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?
Craig Mazin: The first image of the first episode is a couch with an afghan type thing of a deer, and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.
John August: Yeah. We don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special, that we are setting up a thing, the past, and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth. I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is that it’s an example of we don’t have context for who these characters are, why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. I thought it just worked really well.
Craig Mazin: Thank you. Every episode needs its own beginning. I’m pretty sure that’s beginning of Episode Four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now. That was designed to be a bit confusing, because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there, and we’re not sure what his orders are, and we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is, and we don’t know he’s just standing there, and so this goes on. Then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. That is a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of, and generally I don’t. Sometimes it’s okay to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world, and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about. We think, oh, do they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening? Certainly one way to go.
John August: Completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie. Of course, again, you’re establishing a place and a time and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored … We’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. There’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. It’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is this elaborate sequence to get this guy, this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly. That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie and what the rules are of this movie and the heightened gravity-optional nature of this movie and what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie. Nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense, the fact that they could go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous, and just how it feels. It was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end, because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.
Craig Mazin: With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. It’s weird to say, okay, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly, the old woman and the cow, you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline. You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. This is a good thing. Now they’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next, but also they are aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.
John August: The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds, a real world and a story world, that there are two protagonists, and that both of them have storytelling power. Getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where if I didn’t have that opening sequence, the movie just couldn’t have worked, because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.
Craig Mazin: This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care. I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word precious real estate about, or phrase, a thousand times, you need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says, “I will keep watching.” If it’s just kind of meh, then you could’ve done anything there. The moment you have an opening, you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.
John August: You build a funnel.
Craig Mazin: You make a funnel, a logical funnel, but not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. If you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, “This will get better.” It won’t.
John August: No. Weirdly, it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at, just because by nature we’re going to end up rereading it and tweaking it a zillion times. I do wonder if sometimes, let’s just talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story? Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene, because so often you can be trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene, but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.
Craig Mazin: 100%. If you do know what your end is, it would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl, because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with, I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens, and at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” You go, “Ah, aha!” in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd. I like that. I like the sense that you catch up and you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.
Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic, and down to nothing but dialogue and performance, two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. At the very, very end of the movie, he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end, and you go, “Oh man, this guy.” That’s how you can think about these things. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.
John August: Cool. Now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward, let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up, because that’s really a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script, but let’s also be thinking about what movie we think it’s actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that. Just a note for ourselves. We will start, try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.
Let’s talk about transitions, because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.
Craig Mazin: One thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page, “Don’t tell the director what to do.” Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read, so that they can see a movie. Part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page, but you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind, because it’s really important to them. Frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect. Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.
John August: Let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. One is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO or TRANSITION TO or FADE TO or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting. We’re only half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were originally taught to do. You can tell first-time screenwriters because they will always use a CUT TO. In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing. Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is … You want a scene to flow into the next scene. That’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, why we’re coming into this scene at this moment.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. This is a very nuts and bolts craft thing. They’re techniques. I wrote down a few techniques, which I’ll run through, and you tell me what you think.
John August: Great.
Craig Mazin: The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time. Just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected in their own way.
John August: Let’s talk about what that actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie, obviously. If you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you are going to get into some fairly close coverage there. If it’s just it’s about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something something something, that is a big size transition. Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d see, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scales there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.
Craig Mazin: It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. It’s just real simple things like that. Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room, they’re chitchatting, and then over the sound of hip-hop we are, and now we’re South Central LA, rolling down Crenshaw, just to help the reader understand there’s a connection here. Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and the next thing we hear is a siren. By the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. Something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times, because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. If it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.
John August: Absolutely. There are times where we want that really smooth, legato flow from one thing to the next thing, and there’s times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and there’s brand new information going to be coming your way.
Craig Mazin: Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call a misdirect transition. A guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” or whatever, and he’s got a gun. We go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.
John August: Exactly.
Craig Mazin: Little tricks, basically.
John August: Yeah. Again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that 10 times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.
Craig Mazin: Probably, unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s like a, I don’t know, a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.
John August: Yeah. I was going to say the Asian action films might do that more often. Yeah, if that’s your style, then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much. A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will, they’ll pre-lap the character. They will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut, that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene. It’s very clever how they do it. That’s a way of misdirecting you comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.
Craig Mazin: Exactly. Exactly. I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. Two people say, “That didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. Over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard TV-ish thing, but it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky. Another tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.
John August: Exactly.
Craig Mazin: Where someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth,” and the next shot is a woman smiling. It doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer, in other words, but just that the transition itself is giving us information.
John August: That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the, “We need to find a witness who can,” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that, or like, “This is the question we need to have answered.” You ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.
Craig Mazin: Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat, drunk.
John August: In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head, and so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way. Thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. You’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition. Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that seems to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to get people across the bridge there.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. They’re generic, because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story, but really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here, that there’s something that helps move us through, little tiny things. It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. Frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.
John August: I would agree. Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. Don’t paint a big, giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be straight, simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing, we as the reader will notice, okay, something big and different has changed here.
When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile … The first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word, because it’s all a new form to you, but after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They just skip past you. You can sometimes jump back to them if you’re curious, but you’re really just looking for the flow of things, and so most times you’re just jumping over that. You don’t really know or care where you are. Even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky. Save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really need that reader to stop and slow down and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.
Craig Mazin: Well said. Well said.
John August: Great.
All right, we are back in the present, which in our case is 2021, but by the time you’re listening to this it’s 2022. It’s time for our One Cool Things.
Craig forgot to do a One Cool Thing. He forgot to have a One Cool Thing, so he’s hopping on a phone call while Megana and I are going to do our One Cool Things.
My One Cool Thing is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I love me a good fallacy. I think I’d heard of this fallacy, but never had it described to me before. Basically it’s why, when you have a whole bunch of data and you are looking for patterns in the data, you can find things that really aren’t there. The actual description of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is like, “Oh wow, look, this person hits the bullseye every time.” If you’re shooting at a barn, basically if you shoot first and then paint the target afterwards, you’re going to find patterns there that aren’t really there. I just really like that as an idea.
It reminded me of, this is something that Megana knows what I’m talking about, but I’m going to be a little vague here, I went in to pitch a project at a studio or a streamer, and they said, “Oh, we decided looking at the data we no longer do that genre of project, because it’s not successful.” I’m 100% convinced it’s really a Texas sharpshooter fallacy, that basically they looked at all their data and said, “Oh, this thing doesn’t work for us,” but I think they’re really after the fact trying to find a pattern for a couple failures that really don’t make sense.
Megana Rao: Just so I’m clear, because I haven’t heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, so it’s that you paint the target after you already have …
John August: Yeah, basically you’ve taken all the shots. Basically you have all the data there, and then you are trying to paint the target after the fact. You’re basically picking a small subset of the data to describe what the bigger thing is, and you’re saying, “Oh, this is the finding, the conclusion we’ve had,” but you didn’t actually have a hypothesis, a thesis going into it, so you weren’t really looking for anything. You noticed something and said, “This must be significant.” It’s a problem whenever you have a large big batch of data, it’s very likely that you’re going to some subset of the data that indicates a certain thing, but if you weren’t actually systematically looking for that thing, it’s not probably a valid result.
Megana Rao: It’s how you guys talk about screenwriting structure, screenwriting books.
John August: Oh yeah, absolutely, because if you’re looking at all these things and you’re trying to say, “These are the patterns that are in there,” it’s like, are they really the patterns that are in there or are you basically just deciding that’s a thing you’re going to look for, describe being in there, but that was never the intention, that was never the actual goal behind it. When this studio or streamer says, “Oh, this genre does not perform well for us,” it’s like, okay, did you go through and systematically say, “Okay, let’s take a look at all of the examples of this genre we’ve ever done,” and then seeing how they performed, or you’re just saying, “Of the five biggest disappointments of movies we’ve made in the last couple years, were they in the genre?” You’re being choosy with what data you’re letting in and letting out of that criteria.
Megana Rao: Very cool.
John August: Now since Craig doesn’t have a One Cool Thing, Megana, can you pinch hit for him?
Megana Rao: Yes. In our last bonus segment where we talked about New Years Resolutions, I talked about data privacy and data rights and trying to be more digitally hygienic. My One Cool Thing is this movie Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is delightful and funny and has a lot of themes about data privacy that I think are accessible and rendered in a family-fun way.
John August: Cool. I saw that mostly [inaudible 00:57:26] bus board advertisements. I never actually saw a trailer for it. When I actually looked at the trailer for it, it looks delightful and definitely worth checking out. Now I see it’s on all the … I got a screener for it, so I know that they’re going for the typical awards for it.
Megana Rao: Yeah. It felt really fresh. Zach Galifianakis voices the robot, and he has this really flat affect that is so funny. I was just watching it by myself and chortling, laughing, chuckling. It’s a fun movie.
John August: Cool. Ron’s Gone Wrong.
Megana Rao: Yep, Ron’s Gone Wrong. I think it’s on Disney Plus and some other places too.
John August: Fantastic. That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with one segment produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig Mazin: Of course.
John August: Our outro’s by Henry Adler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You’ll get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting out of a conversation. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.
Craig Mazin: Thank you guys.
Megana Rao: Thank you.
John August: All right, Craig, thinking back to times when you were at a party with actual people around you … Actually that last time I think I saw you in a party situation was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly, who was running at that time for Senate in Arizona. That was a party filled with people I knew and some people I was just getting to know, but it was a lot of small conversations, and I needed to get into and out of those conversations. Is that an experience you recall from that night?
Craig Mazin: Sure. That’s a pretty common thing. You’re at a party and you start talking to people, and then sometimes it gets boring or it gets awkward or you run out of things to say. I try the best I can to not think about who else I should be talking to. I try as best I can to be as present as possible for the person I’m talking to, no matter who they are, because the notion of, “Oh I should be talking to that person,” or, “That person would be more fun to talk to,” oftentimes turns into utter disappointment anyway. My general rule is if I’m enjoying a conversation with somebody, whether it’s the most important person at the party or a waiter, I’m going to keep talking to them because it’s rare enough to enjoy a conversation.
If things are going a bit boring or slow or sluggish and it seems like the other person doesn’t feel the same, or maybe does, either way, that’s a great time to just simply say, “You know what? I’m going to go grab myself a drink, but I’ll be back around,” or I’ll say, “I’m going to run to the restroom,” or I’ll say, “I just got to go find my wife.” That’s always a good thing if your spouse, partner is there, or I’ll somebody and be like, “Oh my gosh, I promised that person I would catch up with them. I do have to, but this was so much fun talking to you.” I’ll say something like that. Of all the things I have shame on, and there are so many, that’s not one of them, and I try not to calculate how to have conversations at parties.
John August: I would say I’ve gotten much better at this over the years and I’ve done all the techniques that you described, and certainly having someone that you can use an excuse to go on to the next thing is great. The other technique is the handoff, which is basically someone who’s passed, who you’ve already had a conversation with or you know, you can say, “Oh hey, have you met Bill?” Then you introduce the two of them and then you can make your exit out of there. That can be a very useful way out of it. I will say this, honestly doing a lot of the WGA stuff where I’d be in these rooms where I’d have to have 50 conversations over the course of an evening, I got much better at basically being very present in a conversation and giving 100% full attention. It was clear I’d addressed that issue. I could just really make a clean exit, like, “It was great talking with you. Thanks for coming out,” and move on to the next thing. That’s more of a work function than a social function. It feels honest that I’m not looking for an excuse and basically saying, “This was great. I value our conversation. Now I’m taking two steps over this direction.”
Megana Rao: Are you guys sure that you want to be giving away all of your secrets for-
Craig Mazin: It’s not really a secret. I’ll tell people. I’m just like, “Yeah.” Look, it’s not like if I say I have to go to the bathroom at a party, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, he hates me now.” Sometimes I really have to pee. If they don’t see me go, if I don’t leave and go to the … By the way, when I say I have to go to the bathroom, I always go. I don’t not go. That would be horrible.
John August: Yeah, even if it’s just to shut the door and check his phone for a few minutes, he will go to the bathroom.
Craig Mazin: By the way, I’ll do that sometimes anyway. When I’m at a party, at some point I’ll hit a little bit of an overload. I’ll go to the restroom, close the door. It’s like when I’m on a plane. Sometimes I’ll do that, just to be alone. Just for one lovely minute I’m alone. It’s so nice. I try and be as honest as I can. When there are situations like when we would do live shows, after the show is over, there’d be a lineup of people that want to talk to us. They all have comments or questions, or sometimes they want a selfie or whatever it is. We’ll do those things, and I have no problem at some point saying, “I want to answer some of their questions too, but thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it,” so that I can just say the truth, which is I have a limited amount of time and I have to talk to these people too. The same thing would happen if I were on a panel at the Writers Guild, which occasionally I have done. Same deal. Afterwards you talk to people. At large parties, honestly I have no problem, if I get cornered by somebody and they’re awesome, I’ll talk to them all night. I don’t care. All night. I do not care. I have no FOMO when it comes to party conversations. 99% of them are just air. What about you, Megana? It sounds like you don’t want to give away your secrets, but how do you handle let’s just say the mixing, the mixing around?
Megana Rao: Yeah, I think the same bathroom, drink technique. What I’m more curious to hear about is, I don’t want to shame anyone else or give away too many details, but the situation if you’re at a dinner party or a place where you’re more fixed, and the conversation is just unbearably boring, like you’re hearing about somebody’s pandemic hobbies that are just … I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about anybody making sourdough starter. I don’t care. I have no interest in it. How do I transition out of that conversation where I can’t easily move around?
John August: It’s tough when you’re locked in place and you didn’t actually have a choice or you just made a wrong choice about who you sat down next to. It’s always tough, because you don’t know if it’s the kind of situation where there’s going to be one conversation for the table or if it’s going to be like there’s a conversation on your left and a conversation on your right, and if you turn to your left, then you’re shutting out the person on your right. It’s tough. I find myself trying to ask a question that will just get us off the horrible track, if possible.
Craig Mazin: Some people are nothing but horrible track generators. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. They will ruin everything with their monotonous, banal point of view, their rambling stories that go nowhere. This is why if there’s something where I’m fixed in position, a dinner party for example, I need to know that I know enough people there where I can’t get stuck alone with somebody that’s not doing it for me. Ideally there’s somebody I know will sit next to me. You have to protect yourself going into those situations. If you are single, you still need a friend. That friend can be somebody that you’re interested in. It can be somebody that’s just friend friend. It doesn’t matter. You need somebody you can anchor yourself to, who can help you and rescue you. Also if I get invited to a dinner party and I get stuck next to a super boring person, that goes into my ledger, and I’m not going back there ever again. Life is too short.
By the way, I will also just leave. I’ll leave. I don’t care. I’ll leave, because here’s the thing, everybody’s got limited time. I’m not saying because we’re all busy. I’m saying we’re going to die. Sitting next to boring people all night while other people are having fun five feet away from you, it’s brutal. No, I’ll just fucking go. I don’t care, because if I go home, I can do all sorts of things that are wonderful. I have video games and puzzles and television that I can catch up on. You know I’m really down to it if I’m doing that. I don’t have to stay there. Why? You know what? Shame on the party host, the dinner party host, for putting anyone at that table that that’s boring. The only time that I honestly get stuck is if sometimes if Melissa says in advance to me, “You need to do the following thing.” I’ll say, “Okay,” but she’ll be there, so I’ll be fine.
John August: Many dinner parties will separate spouses so that you have-
Craig Mazin: Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t do it. By the way, everyone knows. I’m sort of famous in my little town for not showing up, for leaving early, for going, “I don’t do crap like that,” because I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t like small talk. I like big talk. I like to really get into it with people. I don’t just bland-
John August: Two things that I really respect about my husband is first off he’s the only person I’ve seen who can in real life click the ignore button, where someone is trying to engage with him, and I see this floating ignore button, he’s hitting that button, it’s like, “You don’t exist to me.” I love that he’s able to do that. The other thing is he’s very honest about, “We don’t want to go to your dinner for this charity we support. We will write a check. We’re delighted to write you a check. I have no interest in actually going to the event.” Where I can happily go to the political fundraisers all the time, he’s just like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” I respect that. He is the Craig Mazin of our relationship on that whole-
Craig Mazin: By the way, they don’t want you at the dinner anyway. They just want your money. If you give them money and don’t show up to the dinner, you’ve given them extra money, the money that they would’ve had to spend to feed you. No one cares. I’ve been a host of multiple political fundraisers that I did not show up to.
John August: Yeah. There was one at your house, which was great, but it did feel like a rare exception for us to be at your house to do this thing.
Craig Mazin: Definitely, yeah. That was Beto O’Rourke. That was way, way early in his run, so early that indeed he was showing up to the likes of my house. It was smallish, but it was nice and we had fun people there. It was an interesting conversation. That was that. As things have gotten bigger and larger and so on and so forth, I just … God bless Billy Ray, our colleague Billy Ray, that does a lot of fundraising and is always collaring me for that stuff. Sometimes I’ll end up with my name on the hosting … By the way, so-
John August: You’re not going.
Craig Mazin: No. People, if you ever get an invitation to a political fundraiser and it lists a bunch of hosts, that doesn’t mean that they’re all sitting there figuring out who’s going to cook what. It means they all gave a certain amount of money. That’s what that means. That’s all it means.
John August: All right. Let’s transition to talking about not in-person gatherings, but text threads and text messages and that stuff, and how you end a text conversation, because I’ve found myself sometimes where we’ve been texting back and forth for half an hour, and sometimes it can be awkward, it’s like who’s going to end the conversation? My default move is the tap back, which is basically the thumbs up, the whatever, saying that’s it and it’s mentioned, and this conversation is done here. Is that what everyone else is doing? Megana, what are you doing when a text conversation has run its course and you need to make it clear that I’m not going to be answering your next text?
Megana Rao: I feel like either that or sometimes, “Hey, I’m about to hop in the shower, but I’ll answer when I’m back out.” I think the cadence with millennials is a little bit different. It’s fine if somebody doesn’t respond to my text for days or hours. I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me and it’s fine if the conversation fades.
John August: Being left on read doesn’t kill you?
Megana Rao: If it’s just a friend, a close friend that I’m texting or a friend that I’m catching up with, no.
Craig Mazin: Maybe I’m a millennial, because I feel like that’s the whole point of text is … Mostly. Sometimes I will think, “Oh, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say here,” but I don’t want to send some sort of formal, “It was lovely chatting.” Then I’ll think, “Will they be upset?” Then I remember, no, no one gives a shit, because if I send you a text in a conversation, and the thing doesn’t ping back, I’m not upset. I’m relieved. It’s over. We can all move on.
Megana Rao: It’s almost more awkward if … The example that I even gave before is not something that I do. It’s something that some friends will do to me. It’s more awkward if you acknowledge that the conversation is ending.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, like can’t we just be cas and just talk to each other and not have to worry about that? Text to me, sometimes for fun, what I will do is I’ll just go, “Byee.”
John August: Yeah, I’ve gotten a byee.
Craig Mazin: I love byeeee. That’s fun. I like to do that. Basically every text conversation I have at some point will devolve into GIFs and then it’s over.
John August: Yeah. Fair choices.
Megana Rao: I do feel that I have acquired a very specific skill of knowing exactly when John is done talking, in person, via email, or via text.
John August: My sentences do get shorter. It goes down from three sentences to one sentence to two words and then the conversation’s done. Even in emails I do find it sometimes there’s a bounce back and forth, and I thank you, you thank me, and then it’s all resolved, because in text it’s not quite a conversation, it’s not quite an email conversation, it’s just this weird middle ground and you don’t quite know whether you’re done talking. Megana, do you find it happens in Slack? I don’t as much, but what are you finding?
Megana Rao: You and I aren’t casually texting that much. I only text you when I really need your attention. We casually Slack sometimes. That’s the same thing where-
Craig Mazin: Sounds gross.
Megana Rao: I’m in communication with John all the time, so I don’t really think of us having a cadence there, because I’m talking to you at all times of the day.
John August: Basically.
Craig Mazin: I feel like even though Bo and I are together every day, I probably text with her more than talk. We text all the time. Oh yeah. We’re besties. We’re texties. We’re like beep beep beep beep beep GIF lol. Yeah, we’re two 12-year-old girls. It’s wonderful.
John August: The advantage of texting or Slack or whatever is that you can also scroll back and get to that thing. If I said something to Megana in person, she’d have to remember it, but if I text it to her, then it’s there for her to be able to look back at and confirm.
Megana Rao: I do remember everything you say, but yes, I hear your point.
John August: You consult with everyone else about, “What did John actually mean when he said that thing?” Now if you don’t mind, I got to go to the bathroom. It’s been great talking with you both.
Craig Mazin: Byee.
John August: Byee.
Megana Rao: Bye.
Links:
- Blog post on Transitions
- Scriptnotes Episode, 446: Back to Basics at 03:57 of this episode
- Scriptnotes Episode, 493: Opening Scenes at 26:06 of this episode
- Scriptnotes Episode, 89: Writing Effective Transitions at 44:12 of this episode
- A Trip to the Moon the 1902 Science Fiction Film by Georges Méliès
- The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
- Ron’s Gone Wrong
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Henry Adler (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, (with a segment produced by Stuart Friedel!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 531: Scene to Scene, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 533 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, why are so many screenwriters worried about the word ‘we’?
Craig: Why? Why?
John: Craig and I will hopefully drive a stake to the heart of the “we hear/we see” prohibition, as we talk through some screenplay fundamentals, before looking at some of the scripts up for awards this season.
Craig: We will see some of those scripts. We will see them, we.
John: We will see them.
Craig: We see.
John: And if we were listening in a room, we could hear them-
Craig: Yes.
John: -because we can hear and we can see. We have the sensors.
Craig: Yeah.
John: Then, we’ll get into some listener questions. And our bonus segment for premium members, we will discuss what is the screenwriting equivalent of bootcamp?
Craig: Ooh, that’s interesting.
John: We talk about soap operas being like actor bootcamp. Is there a boot camp for writing?
Craig: Oh, I see what you mean. Got it.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Understood. Okay.
John: A place where you’re doing so much work that you’re really picking up your skills, you’re developing your craft.
Craig: Mm-hmm. All right. [crosstalk]
John: I like it.
Craig: That’s only if you pay us.
John: If you pay us, you can listen to us talk about that.
Craig: Yeah.
John: If you pay enough money, you could own The CW, which is apparently up for sale.
Megana: [chuckles]
Craig: [chuckles] Wait, what? [chuckles]
John: Yeah.
Craig: The CW is for sale?
John: It was announced this last week or the week before that a CW may be up on the auction block. CW in the US, for our international listeners, is the home to a lot of great programs, including where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend used to air. It was a joint partnership between Warner Brothers and CBS. So, there were some shows that were CBS shows which was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and some things. There are a lot of Warner Brothers shows that were there. Now that Warner is more focused on HBO Max stuff, and CBS is focused on Paramount+ stuff, it’s not quite clear how The CW fits in. So, it may end up becoming a new thing, it may change. But anyway, the head of CW said, “You know what? Yeah, we’re probably up for sale.”
Craig: The sentence you just said there, if we had just rolled back to when we started this podcast, would have made utterly no sense to us.
John: No. [crosstalk]
Craig: The HBO Max and– What?
John: Paramount+.
Craig: Paramount– CBS with Par– what? What? Para+. But it’s remarkable how much things have changed. I guess, similarly, it’s remarkable how oddly adaptable we are as human beings. We are terrified of change, but we’re really good at absorbing it and accepting it when it happens. We’re odd little creatures, aren’t we?
John: Obviously, it feels everything’s accelerating, but I think at any given moment in time, we would probably feel it’s accelerating to all these new things. It’s always strange to think back to 100 years ago, cars were new, the time between the first flight at Kitty Hawk to man landing on the moon was so much shorter than you think it would be.
Craig: Yeah. And that’s right. We are witnessing the acceleration of things in our lifetime. But everything that happened before us just feels like history that took forever.
John: Yeah. We’ll see what happens to The CW. One of the discussion points is that CW airs on a bunch of local stations, obviously, and the local stations are part of bigger groups. And that group might just buy out The CW instead of [crosstalk].
Craig: Do you have any interest in it?
John: Honestly, I don’t. I feel at this point, I’m all in on streaming. The normal linear broadcast and stuff is just not so appealing to me.
Craig: I mean, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was on it, right?
John: It was. It was great.
Craig: We could own that.
John: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was originally going to be a premium cable show.
Craig: Showtime. Yeah.
John: And then, they retooled that. You can go back and listen to the episode where we talked to Rachel and Aline about the show back when it was a Showtime show before it became The CW show. It was filthier. There used to be a handjob in it and then the handjob became a kiss.
Craig: Ultimately, you’ve summed up the difference between Showtime and The CW.
John: I did.
Craig: It’s just that whatever mathematical equation converts a handjob into a kiss, that’s it.
John: That’s what it is.
Craig: That’s it.
John: That’s the difference between a broadcast and premium cable.
Craig: You’ve got it.
John: Do you remember Stuart Friedel?
Craig: Sorry, who?
John: Our first Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel?
Craig: I mean, Stuart’s a part of our lives.
John: He is. Stuart is the reason for a lot of how Scriptnotes used to work, and of course, the reason why Scriptnotes t-shirts are so soft is because-
Craig: Yes.
John: -Stuart is so sensitive and has this Stuart’s sense of softness. Stuart talked to me last week. He said, “I just had a mentor conversation with a Nebraska kid, who is my mom’s hairdresser’s nephew,” which is classic. “This guy mentioned the movie that he wanted to write. And he described the opening as a Stuart Special. He doesn’t know why it’s called that, but that’s what it’s called on Scriptnotes,” he says.
Craig: [chuckles]
John: He has no idea that it’s called a Stuart Special because of Stuart Friedel.
Craig: How did he miss that?
John: Yeah.
Craig: It’s a kind of amazing that there’s a generation of people who are going to call that a Stuart Special. The way in lore, the last shot of your day is the Martini. But the second to last shot is called the Abby or Abby Singer, because there was a first AD named Abby singer, who would call for the martini and he was always one shot off. And so, the second the last one became the Abby. And people will call it a Stuart Special, and then every now and then somebody, “You know why it’s called that by the way?” That’ll be a bit of trivia for people.
John: Yeah. And, of course, it’ll be like, it’s named after Stuart Friedel, who used to be a producer on Scriptnotes before he became a titan of children’s television.
Craig: Before he became the CEO of The CW.
[laughter]
John: Before he bought out The CW and turned it into–
Craig: I want to know what the Megana maneuver is?
John: Oh, yeah. Well, it has to be a term that Megana will coin here. But, Megana, I’m curious, do you know what the Stuart Special is? How would you define it as Stuart Special? Or, is it just all alien territory for you?
Megana: Stuart Special, I think, it’s something I encounter a lot when I read threepage challenges, which is flash forward in a script, and then, by the end of two or three pages, it’s like one week ago or six months ago.
John: Right. Absolutely.
Craig: Yeah.
John: That’s the Stuart Special.
Craig: Yeah. It’s showing the moment right before the climax. And then going back like one month earlier. Exactly.
Megana: Right.
John: Record scratch. I bet you’re wondering how this all happened, and let me talk about this.
Craig: [chuckles]
John: Flashing back to just a few weeks ago, we had Jack Thorne on the show. We had a great conversation with him. He was talking about disability and also invisible illnesses. This last week, Annie Hayes wrote in. Annie Hayes is a friend of Scriptnotes. She has helped us out at Austin Film Festival. She had such a great letter that I thought, “Oh, it’s much better as a blog post than for us to try to read it on the air.” But Annie Hayes writes about her experience. She’s a staff writer on The CW show In the Dark, and she’s had cystic fibrosis this whole time since [crosstalk] she had cystic fibrosis. And writing about sort of the challenges of living with a chronic illness and working with a chronic illness, a lot people can’t see that you’re fighting this. She started off as an assistant. I think she was assistant at Verve before she started working as a staff writer, but it’s a great overview of what her experience has been.
One of the things she really stresses is that she’s been very open about it, but she also tries to make sure she’s always presenting a solution rather than a problem, which seems good advice in general.
Craig: That is. It’s funny, a little bit after that show, I talked with Jack, because he was curious, because I did mention that I had been dealing with chronic pain for a long time. He was like, “What is it?” He was actually, I think, maybe the first person I’d really talked to about it, because I’m me. I’m not that guy. It’s not related to any feelings about disabilities or physical challenges as much as just my general sense that, “Just shut up, Craig,” [chuckles] is mostly what I struggle with all the time, but it is interesting that you have to make choices when you have an invisible disability or illness or challenge. Whereas you don’t have that choice when it’s visible, at all. Both things come with their own unique difficulties. So, I appreciate Annie writing in about this.
John: Megana, we got another question from a listener about the Jack Throne conversation.
Megana: Great. Alok wrote in and said, “Your recent episode with Jack Thorne was amazing. I love Jack’s Edinburgh TV festival speech. As a person with invisible disabilities, I find his advocacy work really empowering. But I’m looking for a recommendation. My disability forces me to read text documents while simultaneously listening to them using a text-to-speech software. The one I use is called Read Aloud, which is a Chrome plugin. It’s a free software with minimal options that reads documents back to me in a deathly robotic monotone.”
Craig: [laughs]
Megana: “It’s not at all suited for reading scripts.”
Craig: No.
Megana: “I was wondering if anyone at Scriptnotes was familiar with text-to-voice softwares that professional writers with disabilities could use to read their scripts. Again, it is text-to-voice that I’m looking for, not voice-to-text. If there is something on the market that you recommend suitable for script reading, I don’t mind shelling out some money to purchase it.”
Craig: Oh, that’s an interesting thought there. John, this seems like something you would probably know, if you knew you would know. Not me.
John: A couple things I can point you to. I do have friends who will listen to scripts in the car with some read aloud software. I think having similar experiences where it’s a little bit awkward, because it has no idea that you’re reading a script. Some things that could be helpful. In Highland 2, we have what’s called a narrated script. And what it does is, it’s looking at the same script, but it’s changing it to rather than like:
Tom: Welcome to my house, Mary. Mary: It’s so nice to be here.
It says, “Tom says, ‘Welcome to my house,’ Mary says this.” It’s adding in the says and things, and it actually has the sense of like int and ext become interior and exterior, that may help you. It might make it a little bit easier for you to read. So, it’d just be a matter of throwing that PDF in there and exporting it as a narrated script, that could be a little bit better solution for you.
The Weekend Read beta has text-to-speech that’s actually really good, where you can actually set voices and do things so you can set the male characters to a certain male voice, female characters to a certain female voice. That’s great. It’s still in beta. So, I can’t offer that to everybody. We’ll send a copy to Alok, who can test it. And we’re also doing some new stuff in the new Highland beta that should be a little bit better for folks who need some accessibility things. We’re working with Ryan Knighton who’s our blind friend about making sure that’s fantastic for blind writers to use.
Craig: Well, that’s all sounds pretty useful information there. Turns out, you had all the answers right there, John.
John: I don’t have all the answers though, because I feel we probably have other listeners who are in similar situations. So, if you are like Alok who needs stuff read aloud, scripts read aloud, write into us and tell Megana what you’re using, and we’ll share that on a future episode.
Craig: It’s good idea.
John: Fantastic. All right. Well, let’s talk about screenplays in general and screenplay formatting, because this feels such a giant, fundamental question that we’ve addressed many times over the years. But even just this last week, Craig-
Craig: Hmm.
John: -you and I were both a little bit dumbfounded by someone who wrote to us and said like, “Hey, can you explain why you’re so upset against ‘we hear’ and ‘we see’?” And you replied with a GIF of–
Craig: [chuckles] Not sure if serious.
John: Not Sure If Serious. He just had fundamentally like mis–
Craig: Misunderstood, yeah.
John: -what we’re talking about here. So, just to make sure we will reiterate this a thousand times during the podcast. It’s absolutely fine to say “we hear” and “we see” on the page in screenplays. It’s also fine to not use it. You can be a writer who chooses not to use it, that’s great. But it’s an available tool for you, and you should not feel at all bad about using it. And if anyone smacks you down for using it, they’re being dumb.
Craig: They’re bad.
John: They’re bad.
Craig: Yeah, I use it all the time. Like John says, it’s not that we recommend using it. It’s just if you like it, great. I find it to be a useful tool. We’ve talked quite a bit about why it does something unique, that other presentations of actions do not so that it’s not simply a stylistic choice or a bit of decoration, but it has–
John: It’s not lazy. No.
Craig: No, it has purpose. I am mystified. I wish I could go find the patient zero of no one should ever write “we see” in screenplays. I don’t know who started this terrible virus, but it’s wrong. And it is metastasized throughout all of these mediocre schools. And the mediocre schools, I mean [chuckles] they’re all mediocre when it comes to this sort of thing. Waves of human beings have just keep arriving on Reddit, like teeming onto Reddit shores to explain to other people why you can’t use “we see.” And the two of us have just been standing there trying to rescue people from this nonsense because, I guess we can’t. But let’s try one more time.
John: We’ll try one more time. As we get into this, we’ll answer a bunch of listener simpler questions, and that’ll hopefully stack up together to a broader understanding of what we’re trying to do here on screenplay page. Megana, if you start us off with Adrian in Dublin here.
Megana: He asks, “I’ve been writing for years, but I’m still puzzled by the question when to use action in the quote ‘action section’ of a script and when to use it as a parenthetical.”
John: Adrian’s wondering, and this is a thing that every writer still makes choices, kind of every line is like, “Okay, is this going to be better as an action or scene description on the left-hand margin? Or is just the kind of thing that it’s better tucked underneath the character, the header, in parenthetical saying a small little thing that as part of that character’s direction or as a part of the overall scene direction?” You’re always making choices? for what that’s going to be. Craig, what general guidance are you thinking through when you’re making a decision about whether to use parenthetical or an action line?
Craig: Almost always, I’m going to use an action line for action. Parentheticals are the orthodoxies. Parentheticals are for terms that influence the way the line is read, or are there to imply that there’s a pause. However, every now and then, if there is an action that is super tiny, and is necessary to understand the dialogue properly, and the dialogue would be best served if we didn’t chop it up into two bits, then I will use the parenthetical. If I’m running a bit of dialogue and between two lines, someone lights a match, I might put that in parentheticals (lights a match).
John: Absolutely.
Craig: And then, they keep going. But it would have to be, we’re talking about an action that could easily be described in a couple of words, and more importantly, would feel really dumb and tiny if it were its own action line.
John: Agreed. It’s how short the action is both in screen time and in words, because parentheticals that go on for 6 or 7 or 10 words, that should have probably been an action line. In my whole writing career, I’ve probably written two parentheticals that were that long and it was for some very specific purpose that I needed to keep them together as a parenthetical, rather than moving them in as an action line. Parentheticals, if it’s affecting how that line is going to be read, it’s really affecting the tone, the tenor, the intention of that line, that’s great for a parenthetical. If it is something that a single character is doing that is breaking their dialogue block, like a sneeze, that can fit great in a parenthetical, but anything that’s between multiple characters, beyond offering a handshake, that becomes action.
Craig: Yeah.
John: One of the reasons why you may mix it up occasionally or decide to make something parenthetical versus a longer line is, you and I both have a preference against long columns of just two characters talking. Therefore, we’ll both look for opportunities. It’s like okay, this is a dialogue scene, but I would love to have some moments where over on the left hand margin in an action line, just to break up visually on page and not make it feel like this is just a tunnel of text.
Craig: Yeah, I call it ticker tape. Ticker tape screenplay page where it’s just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and just run out of things down the middle. If you require that you break it up, it forces you also to start thinking about, “Well, where are they? What are they doing? How are they moving in the space? Is there anything I can do to make this visually interesting?” Otherwise, it’s just going to be bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong.
John: Great. Another question for us, Megana.
Megana: Nick in LA asks, “Over the last few months, I’ve been listening through all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, and there was a string of episodes in 2014 where John and Craig brainstormed ideas for a top-to-bottom reimagining of the screenplay as we know it. This new format included things like embedded music, images, more clickable links, etc. In general, a more interactive and dynamic document than the current standard. My question is, now that we’re sevenish years later, do you still feel the same way about the standard screenplay format? Has any progress been made in terms of what is permissible to include in your script, and is changing anything a fool’s errand? What you described in those episodes sounds great and made a lot of sense to me, but it seems little has changed since 2014.”
Craig: Yeah.
John: Very little has changed. I do see links in screenplays more often. I have seen clickable links in PDFs of screenplays that will link out to an image or something that explains something more fully. But no. I think you and I both had a little bit more utopian idea of this is what’s going to change, and it didn’t.
Craig: Well, I think we thought this is what we would like to change. This is what we would hope for change. But no, it hasn’t happened, and I think it’s still a great idea. It hasn’t happened at all. Part of the problem is Final Draft. It’s just this monster that sits on top of Hollywood and keeps this entire format back. I really do believe that. No one is sitting there at HBO or Universal or Disney saying, “We really love this 100-year-old method of putting screenplays down.” They don’t. Unfortunately, Final Draft, which is now owned by a payroll company, which is perfect, has essentially cornered the market on the format of screenplays as connecting into the format for budgeting and scheduling. There’s just no appetite for it, because everyone’s just stuck using it. It’s the Windows problem.
John: It’s the Windows problem. I’m not going to put all the blame at Final Draft’s feet, because I do think if Final Draft were to suddenly just explode and go away, it wouldn’t change quickly, because I think everyone’s just so used to scripts looking a certain way. You’re doing your show right now, and you could do your scripts a different way. You could choose to do something different. You’re not using Final Draft, you’re using Fade In, and you could do something different. But it’s easy to keep people doing the same thing they’re doing and it’s working for you. What I do think has changed since 2014 is, and this is also, I think, because the pandemic, because of Zoom, I see screenwriters doing a lot more work in Keynote or PowerPoint. A lot of early presentation stuff is now being done as slides. I think slide decking has become a more important part of describing a project early on. It’s not like I’m turning in a script and add a deck for things. But for some stuff, I might because it would at least show this is what this is meant to look like.
There’s a big world-building project that I may or may not do. I think if I were to take on that project, my script might be accompanied by, “Here are the images that go with it,” because everything I can describe on a page, so helpful. But to me being able to show it to you, it’s going to be more instructive.
Craig: I would do something else. I would write my show now in a different way if the tool were available. It’s not.
John: Okay.
Craig: There’s just no tool, and I don’t think there’s going to be a tool available until someone feels the amount of time, energy, and resources to create something like that would be rewarded, because it just takes a lot. If Final Draft disappeared tomorrow, there would be a period where people would have to use other things that would basically be the same thing. But there would also be a massive opening. I think you would see a lot of people trying to become the next Final Draft, and figure out how to fill that space, but do it better. If there were a tool while we were writing, there was a way to create a document that wasn’t a PDF– by the way, that’s the other issue is that PDF that format is just kind of useless. It’s useful, but useless.
John: Yeah, the good thing about PDF is it’s baked in and locked down. The bad thing about it is it’s baked in and locked down, and it’s hard to do anything else with it.
Craig: It’s a printed piece of paper, except it’s on your screen. That’s all it is. It’s static. If there were a software platform that created a document that people could open and view that was dynamic, that would be amazing, and I would use it all the time, but there isn’t.
John: I will tell you that for Late Night and Variety comedy writing, especially the daily shows, they are sometimes now using fully online writing software where you can– the monologue, it’s constantly updated by everybody all at once. It’s a better version of Google Docs.
Craig: Yeah. What’s that, Script 2.0? Ah, what’s the one–
John: It’s lot like WriterDuet.
Craig: WriterDuet, yes.
John: It’s like that, but very deliberately multiple users can really work on it. It’s not just you and your writing partner. Everyone can tag in. You can see who’s made what changes. And it works, but it’s very specifically set up for that kind of show to do. I think Colbert’s show does that. Some of those changes are working in places where they really need. They have very specific, very time-based needs. And so little of what we do is urgent in that way. But I will say, Craig, you’re working on a show right now that if you could update everyone live in terms of, these are the changes, it would be fantastic. But you’re probably doing some version of this just distribution lists of things go out.
Craig: Well, it’s Scenechronize. Scenechronize is the other big behemoth, and Scenechronize is the standard distribution software for things. Scenechronize could distribute anything. I think it’s just that there is the file format that I would love, the kind of method of creation of a screenplay document that I would love just doesn’t exist. Where when you’re talking about a song, there is a little note icon, you click it and it starts to play that song, and brings it up in a soft window, up to the right, that you can minimize or get rid of, or just click away if you chose to. There are little icons and things to say, “Okay, I want to see what this looks like.” We can’t do that, because there’s no document that we can release that other people can look at that works like that. That’s the biggest issue.
John: Okay. Yeah, as a person who builds the software for a living, I can see some of the solutions, but I can also see some of the issues. It’s what the shape of that container document is. Are you sending the document? Are you sending a link to something that lives on a server?
Craig: For privacy purposes and all the rest of it, whichever would be fine, whichever people would want. But the problem is, there isn’t the receiving thing on the other end. It’s going to be hard to create that because you’re asking people to download and they don’t want to [chuckles] and you’re asking them to try a new format, and it’s new. Change is hard. Tip of the hat to the screenplay format, as we’re talking about it, it has lasted longer than most human beings. In fact, it’s lasted longer than almost every human being.
John: Absolutely. I think we should also stress that what we’re describing in terms of changes to screenplay format is not the words on the page. We’re not talking about the “we hear”, “we see,” we’re not talking about the job of the writer. We’re talking about the container in which this is going out there so that your words can be accompanied by other useful material and be updated in real time in ways that aren’t so torturous. Because right now, how we handle screenplays, especially as we go into production, with star changes and such is so linked back to when we had to xerox pages and send them out, that it’s maddening.
Craig: Yeah, it’s pretty weird.
John: Another question for us, Megana?
Megana: Scott asks, “I’ve been working on a spec script based on a true story that feels like it’s taken on the scope of a Godfather-esque crime epic. The question of whether to expand this into a longer miniseries-type structure has come up before. But my producer and I both agree this feels like a feature film. As we’ve gone back and forth on drafts, the length of the script has fluctuated from 140 pages at its longest down to 125. I’ve always been taught no one wants to read a spec from an unproven writer longer than 120 pages and I’ve tried to reach that magic number, but the notes we keep getting from colleagues is to dig deeper into the characters and to explore more, not less. So, my question is this. In our current climate with the line between film and TV forever blurring, is the 120-page rule the end-all and be-all, or 132 pages reasonable for a decade spanning crime saga? Follow-up question, why are gangster movies always so long?
[laughter]
John: They do seem longer as a rule. Let’s take this last part first. I think because we have expectations of the genre, that it’s going to be a bunch of characters and there’s going to be complicated family dynamics in addition to the A plot, that there’s just going to be a lot happening, and so we just allow them to be long, and also because the Godfather is long.
Craig: Yeah. It may have something to do with the fact that the directors who have made these things have come out of a school where length wasn’t a problem. There have been mobster movies forever, but the big ones were coming out in the 70s. But then again, you look at like Martin Scorsese’s first movie, Mean Streets, I think that was his first movie, it’s under two hours. So, it’s not necessarily always the case that they need to be super long, but I think John is right. If you’re telling the Godfather saga, then it is marked by an epic nature. They’re very Shakespearean in this regard. They are telling long family dramas, and they’re telling involved crime plots, and we seem to enjoy– otherwise, it becomes an action movie. Part of it is the opera. It’s opera. By the way, Godfather III is that– you’ve seen Godfather Part III, I assume.
John: I have seen it. I have seen all of them now.
Craig: Yeah. I love that operatic third act. It’s just lovely. Anyway, I think that’s what it is. Scott, here’s the deal, man, if the first 10 pages are awesome, people will keep reading, they really will. Especially these days, I just think the rules are not the rules anymore. They’ll be reading it wondering, “Well, maybe I could turn this into a limited series.” You never know what they’re going to be thinking.
John: Craig is right. Obviously, if it’s good, they’ll keep reading and you should not worry about that much. A 125-page script is a lot different than 140-page script. 140-pages, people start to go, “Oh, okay, wow. This could be a problem because it’s going to probably be longer when that one’s actually shot.” I would say that my expectations of movies are things you can watch in one sitting and we always had a sense of like it’s a story that can only happen once.
But as we look now at limited series that also feel like they’re things that can only happen once, maybe there’s nothing wrong with thinking about, does this story really work best for me sitting in a chair for two hours watching it? Or does it have natural parts in installments that build out in ways that it could fit a limited series? If the first 50 pages or 60 pages of what you wrote has a natural cliffhanger, it can be a phenomenal writing sample for you, and a phenomenal spec to take out there in the world for people to see like, “Oh, this person can write really well.” And they’re more likely to read that one-hour thing versus a two-and-a-half-hour thing, because the one-hour thing can get made because people are hungry for the one-hour thing.
Craig: Yeah. Also, we’re in a weird time, you could maybe make just two-hour longs or three-hour longss. You say, “Okay, it’s at 140 at its longest.” So, you’re talking about 45 pages-ish, 43 pages-ish per episode of a three-episode thing. Well, you’re probably squeezing yourself in 140 anyway. Expand a few things here and there, write some endings so that each episode has an ending and each episode is beginning. So, there you’re filling some things out. Before you know it, you’ve got three-hour long episodes.
John: Yeah. My one cool thing this week is going to be a six-hour thing that feels like a movie. It is cinematic and tightly focused, but it could only work a limited series, and it works really well as that. Keep that in mind.
Craig: Yeah.
John: All right. Let’s take a look at some movie movies, like actual movies that showed up on big screens this past year.
Craig: What?
John: I saw many of these but not all of these. But the good thing about 2021-2022 is you can read the scripts for all these movies online for free because they put them out there for award season. We will have links in the show notes to all the scripts that we’re talking through. I really encourage you, if you’re a person who’s interested in screenwriting, to read through these. You don’t have to finish them, but just look at what they actually look like on the page, either before or after you see the movie because you’ll get a real good sense of, this was the intention on the page and this is how it translated.
In most of these cases, these were the writers directing. In a couple of cases, there’s different screenwriters and directors. But they’re all really good and interesting in different ways. They’re all chock full of “we hears” and “we sees.” And we’ll not just cherry pick the ones that had them. Most movies, I would say probably do use “we hear” and “we see.”
Craig: Yeah, because it’s incredibly useful.
John: It’s incredibly useful. I want to start with a young writer named Aaron Sorkin.
Craig: Who?
John: This early work, this is called Being the Ricardos. This is a story of behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. I actually really enjoyed this, I actually tweeted a little screenshot of a scene that I really liked a few weeks ago. This is all a backstage drama of an imagined week on the set of I Love Lucy and the conflict and controversies behind the scenes. The thing I tweeted about was, there’s a scene on page 5 that goes on for a long time. And it’s all OS, it’s all off screen. Basically, we are focused on a radio while Lucy is off screen and she’s listening to this thing, but having conversations with other people, and we don’t see people’s faces for a long time. It’s a deliberate choice on Sorkin’s part just to not show Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem for a long time, so we’d be invested in them as characters before we saw their faces and had to make a judgement of like, “Oh, does she look enough like Lucille Ball?”
Craig: Yeah. What I love about these pages, and well done, young writer Aaron Sorkin, is how much whitespace there is. Even in scenes where there’s huge blocks. For instance, on page 5, the announcers has just got this big huge– what is it nine-line bit of dialogue all because he’s reading advertisements, and he’s doing an intro to radio stuff. All fine, because then there’s just these wonderful seas of white, as Lindsay Doran would say, “Like milk.” And it’s so useful. It’s really useful. Interesting choice, by the way. This is what the Academy voters see, is that correct, John?
John: Mm-hmm, it is.
Craig: Interesting choice. When you go into production, inevitably, they’re going to be revisions that you want to do. Just as a holdover from the old days where people would have to have binders where they would insert pages into, there are A pages and B pages, and there are pages where there’s only stuff on half a page, because they get rid of the rest, but the page numbers don’t change. I would imagine that a lot of people would just do a collapsed page unlock version. But he just sent over the other one. He also does something that I don’t do, which is at the top of the page, it says “Continued:” and then the scene number, which I don’t do.
John: Which we don’t. This is a thing that Final Draft and Fade In can do for you. I’ve never found it especially useful. It’s never tripped me up. So, I’ve never done it. I want to get back to the scene where we have this radio announcer talking and we’re not seeing their faces. We come out of it, and the broadcast continues as we hear the front door open.
Craig: What?
John: The next minute or so, we’ll see no faces, just out of focus arms and legs and other shards of movement as they pass through the frame, which remains on the radio, the only thing in focus. We hear and we see in the same paragraph from Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who’s won many, many awards for being a good writer.
Craig: How else would you even do this? I’m top of page 6, “We HEAR his face being SLAPPED–” In this case, Aaron Sorkin has capitalized word ‘HEAR’ just to stick it to all of you, ding dong “professors of screenwriting,” because how else was he supposed to describe that? Someone hears his face being– the sound of a face being slapped? Like what do you say? Of course, we hear it. We hear it.
John: Love it. I think that Sorkin does, which another one of our writers that we’ll to talk about today, he capitalizes every character’s name, even in scene description. You can do that, that’s not common. I would say that’s maybe 5% of scripts I would see do this, but he does it. And you know what? It’s fine. But I wouldn’t leap on that as an example, but you could do it.
Craig: Clearly, and because the truth is I read through some of this, and I didn’t even notice it, because it just doesn’t matter.
John: He doesn’t use a ton of seeing description in his things. And there are ticker tape pages where it’s just all dialogue down the page. You know what? It’s really good dialogue, that helps.
Craig: It does help. And if you do have pages of ticker tape, for instance, page 12, the lines are short. The longest line is three lines long. Then, okay, actually, in a weird way, that’s a ticker tape conversation, snappity, snap, snap back and forth. I like it.
John: We were talking about A pages and B pages. An example is page 22A. At scene 24, and it’s just one line goes over the edge of this. Lucy has a single block of dialog there. It’s a good reminder that this all comes from a time when you were distributing physical pages. So, rather than having to send people a brand-new script, when there’s a tiny change, you just send in the pages that changed. But if there was too much to fit on one page, you create an A page or B page, and it would fit in between. So, his script would go page 22, 22A, a 22B if there needed to be and then there’d be a 23. That’s historically how we’ve done it. We could still do it that way. Craig, on your show, are there A, B pages, how do you do that?
Craig: You know what? There are. I’m starting to wonder why I’m bothering, because I have not seen anyone with a printed script on my set. Everyone used to carry binders around, but our script supervisor, the incredible Chris Roufs, he uses an iPad, as I think almost every script supervisor at this point uses an iPad or laptop. The first AD isn’t walking around with a binder with pages in it. I’m starting to wonder if I should just get rid of that. And just [crosstalk] do it anymore.
John: Here’s the issue. If you were to then unlock pages, you’d have to talk about what scene it is and never talk about the page numbers again, because the page numbers will keep changing.
Craig: But we never talk about page numbers anyway, we just talk about–
John: Yeah, because they’re [crosstalk] scenes.
Craig: And we talk scene numbers which never change. By the way, it’s so weird. It’s been a while since I’ve worked just a couple of years now on a feature script in production. Scene numbers here looks so tiny, because in television shows you start with scene 101, because that’s Episode 1, scene 1. And then, by the time you get to your 10th episode, it’s starting with scene 1001.
John: On these shows, do you have scripts that have more than 100 scenes?
Craig: No, that would be insane. I don’t even know how– [crosstalk]
John: Yeah. I was just thinking really complicated Game of Thrones episodes where you’re constantly cutting back and forth between a bunch of different things, but you’re not really-
Craig: You would just sort of–[crosstalk]
John: -picking those individual scenes, because they’re all a part of–[crosstalk]
Craig: Yeah. I’ll just pull a random script here. I’ll take episode 5. Let’s see what the number is of this particular– how many scenes I hit. 56. I have a feeling that’s probably pretty standard for me.
John: Yeah, that makes sense.
Craig: Yeah.
John: Last thing I want to say about Being the Ricardos, this is on bottom page 23. The scene description reads, “We’re going to start to go in and out of LUCY’s head as the reading goes on. She’s imagining what each beat will be like in its final form the way a chess master can see the board twelve moves ahead. She can also see and hear what the audience is going to laugh at.” Basically, so the idea is, we’re intercutting between the table reading of a script, and Lucy’s imagination of how it will actually be staged. It works really well in the movie, but it’s done very simply on the page. And Sorkin trusts that the reader is going to pay attention and follow what’s happening here, and you do.
Craig: Yeah. This is an area where– because sometimes people will say, [in mimicking tone] “Well, if you’re directing–” and that’s yes, to an extent, that is true. He can shorthand things somewhat, because what he doesn’t have to worry about is a director coming along and going, “I don’t know what the hell it is. I guess I’ll just make something up.” When you’re writing for other people directing, and I typically am, I will at least try and put things in there to make sure that the stuff that I need to happen or want to happen is there. That said, there’s always some amounts of confusion or things that can be cleared up. And that’s why we have 4000 meetings [chuckles] before we start shooting. So many meetings. Oh, my Lord.
John: [crosstalk] -obviously, there’s a tone meeting, which is really talking through what are we actually going for scene by scene? What does this need to feel like? But we have so many logistical production meetings to just figure out every department what do they need? What is the intention behind this? What does Craig want? What is the director need? All these things.
Craig: Yes. There are questions that are legitimately, “Can you explain this?” There are questions of, “Okay, we think you’re saying this, but are you saying that?” Then, there are questions that fall into the general category of, “I don’t want to be yelled at on the day.” It says here that he stabs him. Is that meant to be through the clothes, because if it’s not, then we have to build a prosthetic. And on the day, I don’t want you to show up and be like, “What the h–?”
John: Yup.
Craig: They ask, and it’s reasonable. They should ask. [chuckles] Making television and movies is basically a game of how many questions can I answer today without falling apart?
John: Let’s move on and take a look at The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal. This script is based on the Elena Ferrante novel. Obviously, she has that to draw from. As I’m looking through this, especially this opening sequence, there’s not purple prose, she’s not painting every sunset, but it’s very effective, especially in terms of describing the house that the character is renting, the house that she’s moving into, and giving us a sense of the geography inside the space. I felt like, “Oh, I can see where things are.” I can feel how would I generally get from one place to another, and how this character specifically is approaching this space. I really liked what they did there.
There’s also a man who’s like a– I was in the movie, so I think it’s interesting, a supporting character man, but I liked his character description is just his white hair. From the initial description, I felt I could see him, but then he was doing very specific things along the way and saying specific stuff. That was helpful for grounding him but also the space, this [unintelligible [00:38:22] that we’re staying on.
Craig: Yeah. This is an example of a script that generally does things differently than I do, and I don’t care. I like to bold my scene headers. Maggie doesn’t. I like to keep my action description chunks really tiny. She will occasionally roll off one that’s 12 lines long. I don’t care. As long as it’s interesting and I can make it through it, then I’m fine. She uses CONT’Ds. When a character talks, then there’s an action description, then the same character talks. I don’t do that, don’t care.
John: I generally do that if it’s going to be unclear. So, I will do that.
Craig: Yeah, I don’t it. It just doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the point is you set yourself free, people, it’s all good. Everything works fine if the script is good. The other thing that Maggie will do, she puts up– getting back to our parenthetical question from earlier, she puts a lot of stuff in parentheticals. She’ll have two-line parentheticals, and that’s fine. There is nothing better than a good script. And there are no formatting issues that a good script can’t overcome.
John: One small thing that I would do if I’d had access to the script, is do a search and replace for double spaces and make them one space because there’s places where there’s one space and places where it’s two spaces, and it’s just a little bit off. That’s a personal little pet peeve of mine, that does not influence the quality of the writing.
Craig: Well, yeah. Look, the very title page, there’s a comma after the word ‘based on’ that shouldn’t be there. [chuckles] I would say, Maggie, John and I are available for basic stuff like that.
John: Punctuation consultants, that’s all we’re asking.
Craig: Mostly, we just want to hang out with Maggie Gyllenhaal. [crosstalk]
John: Yeah.
Craig: We just want to hang out. We want to be your friend.
John: I met Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal a zillion years ago back when they were children because they used to live down the street from me.
Craig: Oh, wow.
John: It’s nice to see that they’ve made something of themselves.
Craig: They’re doing all right. They’re doing all right, those crazy kids.
John: The other thing I’ll say it’s important about, as we’re reading through the script, is right from the very start, it sets up the rules of how this movie is going to work, and that we are going to be going back and forth in time, and that is important. It’s important to do that early enough in movie, so we get a sense of like, “Oh, this is this kind of movie where the back and forth will matter.”
Mitchells vs. the Machines is a film I’d love from this past year. It’s written by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe. I just really adored it and I was happy to see that so much of what I adored, starts on page 1 of the script. It is one of the busiest first pages I’ve encountered. And yet, I could follow it and really get a sense of what this movie was going to feel like. It was chaotic, but ultimately with a point.
Craig: The script on the page feels like it’s on cocaine, which is correct.
John: Yes.
Craig: Lord and Miller as producers have a really good record of both kinds of paces and things, but this has that kind of fantastic growing up in the 70s, we ate way too much sugar cereal in the morning, and then just sat down and watch these strobe lights of terrible cartoons, and our attention spans are shortened to nothing. Obviously, here’s just this wonderful quality that Mike and Jeff have put down on the page, but it does also have that just crazy snap to it.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: It’s almost exhausting reading these pages. You can feel yourself like, “Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.” [onomatopoeia] [chuckles]
John: And then the movie does really trade on that. In the end, the movie eventually does settle into some quieter moments so it’s not this frenzy all the time, but it does kick off with a tremendous amount of energy. There are so many exclamation points on this first page, but none of them feel gratuitous. The word “we” is used constantly because we’re always there with them. Basically, it’s inviting us to be a part of this journey with the characters. I really dug it.
There is a shotgun introduction of all of our main characters. In one paragraph on page 2, “The VERY stoppable “warriors” are: RICK (40, Bearded, nature-loving Dad), LINDA (38, colorful, yet nervous Mom, worn out from trying to keep everyone together), AARON (8, nerdy blonde Muppet who wears exclusively dinosaur shirts), delightfully round pug, MONCHI. And KATIE (17, exploding with creative energy- nerdy now, but will be cool in college).
Generally, shotgun intros are not my favorite, and it works really well here because they boldfaced all the character names, so you see that, “This is important, pay attention here, we’re really going to see these people. This is our movie, is these four characters, plus this pug that looks like a loaf of bread. That is who we’re going to follow in the course of the story.”
Craig: The introductions feel they’re part of the tone. If you stop and did standard introductions, you’d be like, “Oh, what happened? Did you guys get tired?” Because, they’re just like, “Bah,” on page one, and then page two like, “Bah,” and then they’re like, “Okay, now let’s talk about dad is a–.” It’s wonderful, because they’re going to make a point of stopping this madness on page 4, when it literally says, “We go from this manic energy to,” boop, “a quiet, boring suburban neighborhood.” And that’s where they slowed down a bit, because they can.
John: It’s an animation script, and writing is not different than normal writing, there’s no fundamental difference here. This could be a live action script as well. So, we just reminded that animation writing is writing. The only thing you may notice is that parentheticals, here in this case, have been tucked in to the first line of dialogue, rather than having their own separate line. You see that more often in animation. Nothing would change if we were to do normal parentheticals here, you could absolutely do normal parentheticals in this case, and nothing would break or change. We’re not seeing scene numbers here. Numbering scenes and sequences in animation is its own special, unique beast. My advice is to do whatever they tell you to do.
Craig: Yeah, because it’s practical. There’s no magic to that. If you find yourself as you’re writing, dwelling on these issues of formatting, just make a mental note that you are trying to avoid writing.
John: 100%.
Megana: [laughs]
John: A film I greatly enjoyed watching was Passing. This is a film by Rebecca Hall. She adapted it from a novel by Nella Larsen. Here’s what I want to point out about Passing, is that the movie and the script have this kind of hallucinatory, too bright, kind of uncomfortable, kind of stagey artificial feel to it. That really works for the film. There are moments in in it I felt like, “Wait, is this somebody’s 16-millimeter project from the 90s?” And then, you realize like, “Oh, no, it’s actually the incredibly well-made best version of that film aesthetic.” I really dug that the film, partly for just how strange it is, and it feels strange on the page too. It radiates from the page to how they actually shot it.
Craig: Lots of little short bursts of things, then there’s longer stuff. There’s an interesting thing that happens on the bottom of page 1 where there’s a scene header.
John: Yeah, I saw that too.
Craig: Then the same starts in the next page, which we never really do. We always combine the scene header with at least the first line of the scene itself.
John: And who do we have to thank for that? Final Draft. Final Draft, honestly, one of the few things Final Draft did well early on in its incarnation is, making sure that scene headers don’t flow at the bottom of pages, so they always carry through the next page. It just automatically does that, and so is Highland and so does Fade In. Everyone does that.
Craig: That wasn’t something about the steno pool of Warner Brothers and– [crosstalk]
John: Oh, the steno pool did it, but, I think-
Craig: Oh, okay. Final Draft turned it into an automatic–
John: Automated, yeah. You and I don’t think about it because you and I never have to manually do that.
Craig: We don’t manually do it, which made me wonder if Rebecca had written this in Microsoft Word or something, because [crosstalk] notes, which is totally fine. Again, doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
John: It just doesn’t matter. And she’s capitalizing all the character names like you might in a play. It works fine.
Craig: Also, in the second paragraph of the first page, it says, “Dissolve to Light flaring in a static frame.” She’s capitalized the word ‘light.’ Not all caps, just the L. Um, okay. [chuckles] It’s fine.
John: Yeah. If we’re doing a three-page challenge [crosstalk] we’d then point out that’s unusual.
Craig: It’s unusual. It doesn’t kill anything, and maybe it’s intentional. I can’t tell if it’s intentional or just Rebecca is one of those people– because there is a whole generation of people, they don’t care about capitalization or punctuation. That’s all fungible to them.
John: We’ll see.
Craig: We’ll see.
John: I’ll quickly get through Belfast. This is a script by Kenneth Branagh. He’s a person who’s done some [unintelligible 00:46:40] movies, it’s not his first here. This is labeled as “Shooting Draft.” It’s also in Gill Sans rather than Courier. I strongly suspect that this is something that some studio put out and said, “Oh, it shouldn’t be in Courier.” I’d be willing to bet $100, this was a Courier script that’s somebody down the road ultimately put it to Gill Sans for us to read, because it’s weird that it’s in Gill Sans. I don’t think it’s helpful that’s in Gill Sans.
Craig: It is odd, only because of all the things that people can and can’t do, Courier is the one that just about everyone does, 99.9%. So, when it’s not in Courier, there’s a little bit of a, “Oh, so I guess you don’t need to get in line like the rest of us.”
[laughter]
Craig: Special, feel special, do we?
John: Yeah.
Craig: It’s a little tricky, but it also makes me yearn for a different time or a different day where we wouldn’t have to necessarily be in Courier, because actually on the page, it’s rather pretty. It’s just different.
John: It is. I wouldn’t have picked this typeface. I love a sans-serif typeface. This, I think it’s actually a little bit hard to read. I think Gill Sans is a great face for certain things. All uppercase doesn’t look great in Gill Sans. Some things are harder to read than they necessarily need to be. Again, character names are being uppercased through the whole thing for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe that’s why Rebecca Hall is doing this as well. A thing I really did appreciate about this though is there’s on page 3, the description, “The camera is high above and behind BUDDY as he starts to walk down the middle of the street. You can see clearly all the way down to the other end, where it meets a road going horizontally across, making a T junction.” Great. I can see that. Also, weird, we got a “you” rather than a “we?” Sure.
Craig: Yeah, I’m fine with it, because “you” and “we” are doing the same thing. They’re just saying in the audience, whether you feel like you’re a part of an audience, perhaps at this point in his career in life, Kenneth Branagh, when he watches movies, just buys up the entire thing. [chuckles] [crosstalk] So, he just presumes that everyone watches it alone.
John: Yeah. He doesn’t want to share armrest with anybody.
Craig: There’s no one else there, but you see the following.
John: It’s also important should point out that, we’re following a young boy through this, all the action is character limited to what he can see and experience until a certain point. Basically, there’s a mob that’s descending, and we’re only getting limited information from what he’s encountering until the mob is upon us. And then eventually, we break that limited POV and see everything, but that’s just good technique. It’s a technique that works on the page, that translates really well to visual medium. [crosstalk] -thinking of that.
Craig: Yeah. There’s another thing that happens on page 7, which is cool. He’s doing a montage really. It’s not so much a montage, it’s just a rapid sequence of things, and he uses CUT TO: for each one of them, which he doesn’t use for other scenes. It makes everything spread out really big on that page. But in a sense, that also helps me see each one of those things. I actually quite liked it. Generally, I don’t do it even in something like this, because I’m always scrambling for paged count time, but the truth is, this is probably more accurate. Again, no problems. It’s fine.
John: No problems. Last one I want to look at is Tick, Tick… Boom!, a film I really enjoyed. This script is by Steven Levinson. It’s based on Jonathan Larson’s musical, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. On page 1 and 2– the thing I think the film does really crucially, and you see this here on the script, is it has to set up, okay, this is who Jonathan Larson was, this is why he’s famous, and we’re not going to get to that stuff at all. This is all going to take place before then. And that’s a lot to do in two pages, and it does it really, really well. Basically, framing this is how much of the story we’re going to tell, and only this part of the story is really important. I thought they did a very effective job here, starting off with making sure you understood why you’re watching the movie, and what movie you’re going to watch.
Craig: Yeah, totally agree. Quality-wise, obviously, great. There’s an interesting choice here that I struggle with a little bit format-wise on a script that is only 104 pages. So, you have the time, meaning you have the space, to not put that extra line break before each scene header. It just makes everything– and to not bold, the scene headers, it’s harder to read. I just find it harder to read. I get confused a little bit as I’m going through or the transitions don’t feel quite as crackly or sharp because it’s just a smudge. For me, and this is really a pure readability thing, I think people should put that extra line break before the scene header or bold the scene header, but to do neither is rough. That said, doesn’t stop things from working.
John: It could work. Your choices are one or more of extra line space before the scene header, underlining scene header, which some people do–[crosstalk]
Craig: Yup, that works.
John: -are choices. There’s underlining here which I think it’s really important in top of page 3. “NOTE: Throughout the film, we move back and forth between Jon in 1992 performing at the show, and the events he is narrating as they occur in 1990.” This is something that is completely obvious when you’re watching the movie, but could be perplexing as you’re reading the script. What the script does, INT – LOCATION – DAY, and then will say either 1990 or 1992, because they’re two different timelines and we can see it when I watch the movie. But on the page, it could get confusing. So, it’s important to put that note out there for the reader.
Craig: Great.
John: Great. These are some pretty good scripts. So, congratulations to all of our writers here. I think you did a good job, I think you have promising careers ahead of you.
Craig: [chuckles]
John: But I really do strongly encourage our listeners to click through the links and take a look at the pages that we’re discussing and describing because that’s how you learn, is by reading scripts and reading good scripts is a great way to learn how some good writers’ work.
Craig: Great.
John: We have time for maybe a question. I see one here from Johnny. Megana, can you ask us that one?
Megana: Johnny asks, “I have this question for John about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie inherited the chocolate factory from Wonka because of his good nature/personality/traits, honesty, kindness, compassion, etc. However, in the beginning, he bought the chocolate using the $10 bill on the street. He didn’t try to find the owner or turn it in. Does this behavior contradict his good nature?”
John: Craig, I have a question for you before we get into the actual script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you find $10 on the street, do you have an ethical duty to find its owner?
Craig: How the hell are you going to find the owner?
John: That’s my question.
Craig: No.
John: Money is fungible. I can’t tell you whose money that is. If I find a wallet, I’m going to find-
Craig: Yeah, of course.
John: -the owner of the wallet.
Craig: Of course. But if you find money on the street, there’s literally no way to identify who that came from. None. If somebody came rushing back around the street was like, “Oh, my God! Did you find a $10 bill on the street?” I’d say, “You know what? I did. Here it is.” Because there’s no way they would have known that it was a 10 or on the street if they weren’t there. But otherwise, no. That’s that’s a weird question.
John: It’s a strange question. But I wanted to point to Johnny to say, just go to the library, go to my johnaugust.com Library, and you can just read the script, that’s not actually what happens. And I realized like, “I’d never actually posted the scripts for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I posted the working scripts, and then a final script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And just like our Aaron Sorkin script, I put in the change pages so people can see this was the white draft, here’s the blue pages, here’s the pink pages, and here’s the final script all together so you can see how this fit in. I also put in the memos that go out with those distributions so people can see like, “Oh, this is why these things are changed.” And this, again, back in the time of physical pages going out. I would put a list of, “This is the order of pages that you should see,” because sometimes it gets confusing. All those things are out there.
The reason why I point to the original script though is that doesn’t say like you won it because you were good. He says, “I invited five children to the factory, and the one who is least rotten would be the winner.” Charlie doesn’t have to be good, he just has to be the least rotten. It’s also important to share my version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory. Wonka is going through this existential crisis and self-doubt and all sorts of weird things are crashing down on him. He doesn’t really want to give up his factory. So, that’s the point of like, Wonka is protagonating over the course of this and really going through this crisis. He’s not even quite sure why he’s invited these kids in here. But it’s not because he wants to find a good-hearted kid, because that’s not even how Wonka is wired.
Craig: Other than getting everything wrong, Johnny’s question was great.
John: What Johnny’s question did, is it did motivate me to actually finally put up the scripts, which I’m not sure why I didn’t put up the scripts before, so people can read how Charlie and Chocolate Factory looked on the page. All right, I think it’s time for One Cool Things.
Craig: Okay.
John: As promised, my One Cool Thing is a limited series that I enjoyed and really loved called Vigil. This is a British show that in the US is on Peacock. I guess this is on Peacock, you don’t even have to subscribe to Peacock. Even the free Peacock would have it. It’s created by Tom Edge. Personally, I follow him on Twitter. George Northy described it as “Mare of Easttown on a nuclear submarine.” And that’s actually probably what it is. You have a female police detective investigating a murder. It’s on this British nuclear submarine, but she has family custodial drama. There’s just a lot happening in her personal life [unintelligible 00:56:11] being a claustrophobic character on a submarine. I just really dug it. I love everything that has a submarine, but I really thought it worked especially well. The twists and turns were great. There’s that classic sense of Mare of Easttown. At a certain point, you suspect that every character you’ve seen on screen somehow was involved in these murders. That’s the show, and I really, really dug it.
Craig: Fantastic. My one cool thing this week, is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which you cannot– Currently, it’s a week later now when you’re hearing this or five days later, and it will surely have been solved by some group of incredibly brilliant people. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the MIT Mystery Hunt, John.
John: I don’t know what it is.
Craig: MIT Mystery Hunt has been going on for quite some time, maybe 20 years. It was always a physical hunt that took place on the MIT campus that involved solving lots and lots of puzzles, which would feed into meta puzzles. It’s like an incredibly complicated, long version of the thing that David Quang and I did at The Magic Castle that you attended.
John: Yeah.
Craig: It would take place over the course of a number of days. It would involve moving physically around the campus and finding a coin, and then you won. If you found the coin, you were the team that won. Over the years, it’s become more and more complicated. The last couple of years, it’s been virtual for obvious reasons, including this year.
One of the interesting things about the MIT Mystery Hunt is that the team that wins is responsible for creating the mystery hunt for the next year. When I tell you that this is like a full-time job, I’m not kidding. Last year, a team named Palindrome or Team Palindrome, they won, and they have won before, a couple of times, I think. Some of my friends are on it, including Dave Shukan and Mark Halpin. There’s also a guy that I’ve occasionally solved puzzles with named Eric Berlin, who I think was their captain. These folks, along with dozens of other people, this is a very large team, by all accounts created quite the hunt, and I think it legitimately took them all year to create this huge event that teams are currently working on and solving right now.
To give you a sense of how complicated it gets, the team last year, Galactic Trendsetters, they were the ones that won the year before us, they created the puzzle hunt last year, they literally created their own MMO for this event. Because you’re dealing with MIT people. They can do anything, anything. They’re coding. They created their own proprietary software for this. Anyway, it’s very exciting. I’m a decent solver. I’m just not at this level. I can solve the first tier of their puzzles, but the later tier, beyond me, definitely beyond me. It’s going on right now. I don’t think anyone’s won yet. But my guess is probably by– we’re recording on a Saturday. Probably by Sunday, there will be a winner. So, I just wanted to say one cool thing to Team Palindrome for creating all that working, so hard. It’s not a paid job. And then, congrats to everyone that solves it and participates in it. And of course, a special congratulations to the team that wins. I don’t know who they are yet.
John: I was going to say, I wonder why someone would do something like this when they aren’t getting paid for it, and all they could do is have some sense of satisfaction of how they made a thing, after– [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Craig: Well, we get to do this one hour a week. The sense I got was that this was practically a full-time job that required its own organizational structure and methods, and just review– I actually test solve quite a few puzzles for them. I think they were nice to only have me test solve the ones that I was capable of solving, but they were all really interesting. There are rafts of test solvers that are being worked on. They have this point system for evaluating. It’s incredibly com– it’s like producing a show. It’s something else. Great work on that, everyone. I’m hoping everyone’s enjoying it. I’m sure they are. Dave Shukan has told me that he will send me a collection of good ones that he thinks I [chuckles] can solve that I haven’t already solved. So, thanks, Dave. I appreciate that.
John: Fantastic. Also, it might be a good moment to shout out a congratulations to a friend of the show, David Kwong, who is now engaged.
Craig: That’s right. David Kwong is finally going to be an honest man.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: We’re incredibly happy for him.
John: Yeah, please don’t saw your wife in half. That’s all we’re asking.
Craig: Those are the people that are doing all the hard work on stage. You know that, right?
John: Yeah, of course. They’re the contortionists.
Craig: Yeah, exactly.
John: Yeah. And that’s our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can also find the links to some of the scripts we talked about today. You’ll find the transcripts there. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts, and they’re great. They have Stuart’s sense of softness. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The hoodies are great. Now, Craig, did you pick up your hoodie while you’re in town or not?
Craig: Oh, I don’t think I did.
John: Okay. Well, we’ll ship it to you up in Calgary so you can keep warm.
Craig: Oh, thank you.
John: They turned out really well. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record, talking about the screenwriter equivalent of bootcamp. Until then, relax, stay chill. And we’ll see you next time on Scriptnotes. Bye.
Craig: Bye.
[music]
John: Hey, Megana, we got a question from Andrew. Read the question that Andrew has?
Megana: Andrew asks, “I’ve heard many former or current soap opera actors refer to working on the soap as a bootcamp for them, mainly because of the production schedule and the need to get everything right the first time. Soap actors who find work elsewhere are praised for their ability to memorize and always get things right quickly. Is it the same for writers? Do writers who worked on soap operas have an insane work ethic and the ability to turn out content? If not, what is the writing equivalent of a writing boot camp?”
John: All right. That’s an interesting question. There obviously are. There are actors who started out soap opera actors who are now some of our best actors out there. Not everyone who works on a soap opera is going to be the best actor out there. But that sense of being able to show up, do the work, get it done, get it right the first time, memorize a bunch of lines, that all feels great and crucial. Craig, can you think of examples of high pressure or writing jobs where there’s so much quantity that you actually do pick up good skills?
Craig: Sure. I think I went through it, and it’s called advertising. Copywriting in advertising is pretty brutal. You have to do a lot of different kinds of writing, is to do a lot of idea making, which is important obviously. You have to talk a lot about how to get into something and what the purpose of something is, so you learn about purposefulness. And then you have to write a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of versions. Versions, and versions and versions. And they all have to fit to time. You’re dealing with a very limited amount of time to get your idea across, the purpose, the point, structure, beginning, middle, end. And then, you have to do it again, but for a shorter amount of time to do multiple versions of it. When you’re cutting things together for marketing like trailers and things, you need to start asking which of this stuff is emerging as important or salient or notable. And you also learn which movies are harder to market because they don’t know what they’re about either. All of that is pretty great bootcamp. You learn audio, you learn visual, you learn how to write, purpose, revisions, rewrites.
When you come out of it, you’re pretty well set up to go on to the next thing. I’m not recommending that people go seek it out as the basis for a screenwriting career, but having gone through it, I think boot camps is a pretty darn good term for it.
John: My freshman year of college, I was a journalism advertising major. My J54 was the basic news writing class I had to take. It was famously difficult class, it was exhausting class, because it was 8:00 in the morning, you’d show up and the professor say, “Okay, I need each of you to find a story on campus and it needs to be delivered in the next 90 minutes.” So, you’re like, “Argh.” You’re running around, trying to find something to write about. Get introduced, get notes, get back, sit down at a computer and write the story. And then, he would hover over you as you’re writing. It really made you focus in on just getting it done, getting the words out, thinking about that pyramid style, like the most important stuff at the top and being able to cut off the story at any point, and breaking some of your preciousness are the way that you can get in your own way with stuff. So, I had to learn how to write those kinds of news stories. And yeah, I did learn a lot there.
But that kind of news writing is different than longform journalism. When I would actually have the time to actually do more work and to do more than just reporting, but actually think about synthesizing and putting stuff together, those classes were much more useful in terms of my actual screenwriting, in terms of thinking about how I’m going to go from, “Here’s a bunch of ideas,” to, “Here is the way I’m going to structure and tell these ideas in a way that is interesting.” I think we have to have both. I just stayed doing news writing, it would be like when I was working at Tristar and having to write coverage on two scripts a day. It would burn a hole in your brain and limit you from doing other kind of writing.
Craig: That’s one of the downsides of working as a young person in something like advertising, is that the people who have remained, you can tell that they have been scarred and changed by it.
John: Yeah. [chuckles]
Craig: It’s because there is something brutal about writing that isn’t about the writing itself. That whatever you write is in service of a purpose. You learn to write with purpose, but only purpose. Whereas when you’re writing things to entertain people, there is its own intrinsic value. The point is watch this, not watch something else, or learn about something else. When are in your 20s and you’re working at these things, you often are working for people that are maybe a little roughed up. I remember meeting some wonderful people. It’s possible also that my experience and your experience was strongly informed by the year it was. The 90s, people were meaner in the 90s.
[laughter]
Craig: They really were. People were mean.
John: Well, let’s think about things that are closer to what we are actually doing for a living. People do write soap operas obviously, and soaps are covered by the WJ. There’s WJ writers who are writing soaps. I don’t see a lot of people who are moving from writing soaps into other things. It feels almost like game show writing. It’s a very unique specialty, because you’re just having to crank out so much and there’s just not time to do the kinds of other work you could be doing. But there’s obviously people write on network one-hours that are like procedural shows, and there’s a whole way procedural shows work. There’s TV sitcoms, which have a very different vibe in how it’s all geared up towards the weekly taping of the show. Those are very differing experiences, but you are on the hook for generating a lot of material each week. And it’s going to get you out of some of your preciousness about everything having to be perfect at all times.
Craig: Yeah. You can pick up skills in these things. Accountability is a big one. It would have been really hard as a 21- or 22-year-old to start writing a screenplay with no sense of accountability whatsoever. When you are paying your bills because of the stuff you’re writing, you learn accountability. You also learn frustration.
John: Yes.
Craig: The frustration of being a writer, I don’t want to say it’s a good thing, but it’s a helpful thing that we get frustrated so frequently, because we get better and better at dealing with it. There are other categories of artists in our business that I don’t think have been exposed to the frustration we’ve been exposed to. It’s harder for them to deal with. We are weathered.
John: We’re talking about these early jobs as being you’re accountable for doing stuff, and you haven’t just turned stuff in. Schools can be accountability mechanisms, where basically you are having to turn stuff in and therefore having to get work done on a regular basis, and be able to show it to people and actually have a conversation with people, which could be great. But, Megana, I’m thinking about the writing groups that you’re a part of. A large part of that is accountability, where you’re getting better because you’re being forced to generate stuff for each week’s meeting.
Megana: Absolutely. I think the social pressure of it is really helpful too. I think you lose your preciousness really fast. One thing my writing group implemented, which has been helpful during the pandemic, is that you have to say what your goal is for the next session, and if you don’t meet that you have to contribute a certain amount into a pot that we use at the end of six months to take ourselves out. So, there’s a financial repercussion if you’re not meeting your goals.
Craig: Yeah. That’s right.
Megana: That is helpful. It’s like, “Ah, okay, well, I’ll send something in that I feel unsure about because I don’t want to spend 20 bucks on missing this deadline.”
Craig: Hmm. You don’t want to give me that option of buying my way out of writing though.
[laughter]
John: Well, let’s talk about– Craig and I have been bought many times. I want to think about when we do weekly work, and I’m not doing as many weeklies as I used to, but for a time I was doing a fair number of weeklies, and it wasn’t very classically that pick two motto. Something could be fast or cheap, or good, and you’re going to pick two. They would pay me really good money. I was not cheap, but I was fast and I was good. It was my ability to recognize what they needed, to be able to deliver what they needed within this short period of time that they had. If I could write great pages but I couldn’t turn them in on time, that was not helpful to them. If I was fast and I wasn’t delivering what they needed, it wouldn’t have worked. So, I did learn a lot having to generate pages that could shoot tomorrow on that timeline.
Craig: Everybody has their own internal clock. If you find yourself in a situation where writing has to be done really quickly and really well in a short amount of time, it may not be for you. You may not have the ability to write well that quickly. You may not have the emotional ability to write that well that quickly. One of the things that happens when you’re working on a weekly, and it’s very similar to when you’re working on short term, impulse projects like advertising and so forth, is you’re also going to be getting the same amount of compressed reviewing and critiquing in the short amount of time. So, you work on something for a week, you’re readily expecting to be rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and hearing and talking and back and forth and back and forth for the week, it’s intense. And you need to be able to do all that, and have the emotional fortitude and the mental stamina, and your mind just has to work quickly. It’s not for everybody, it really isn’t.
I love doing weeklies because they actually don’t have the level of accountability that other things have. And I don’t mean to imply that I write a bunch of crap and walk away laughing. I care very much. But it’s focused, it’s so focused, I’m not responsible for the entire movie. I’m just trying to fix the first act. And then, I’m gone. I’m doing everything I can in that moment to help, but I am not raising this child. I’m just watching them like a grandparent for three days.
John: Absolutely. It’s more like you’re the emergency room doctor who’s keeping the patient alive and stabilized and getting them so they can walk out of the hospital, but you’re not responsible for like, “Oh, that other thing which we detected,” you’re not going to fix all those problems.
Craig: I did. There was one project I’m working on where I was like, “I’m not the emergency doctor trying to stabilize this patient. I am the undertaker just trying to get you into open casket funeral.”
[laughter]
Craig: That’s all I’m doing. This thing is dead. I just wanted the parents to be able to see it when you wheel it out there because right now, oh, my God.
John: Yeah. We’ve all been there. We’ve seen some of those movies and early things. I say yes, there are some bootcamp situations. Do you need to enroll or list yourself in a bootcamp situation? I would say to our friend who wrote in, Andrew, assess what you need. Is your problem that you’re just not getting stuff done? Is your problem accountability? Then, signing up for a class or getting into a writing group might be good interest in terms of getting you to generate more pages. If the problem’s that you’re just not generating a lot, that’s great. If you’re a person who’s generating a lot of stuff, it’s just not very good, maybe what you don’t need is a bootcamp. Maybe you just need some quality control. Maybe you need to slow down a little bit more and focus on refining some stuff, and getting some people to read you, who can really help talk you through what’s working, what’s not working, so you can actually polish rather than just generate the most you can generate.
Craig: Great.
John: Cool. Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you, guys.
Megana: Thank you.
LINKS:
- The CW is for sale!
- Annie Hayes on Writing with an Invisible Illness on John’s blog
- Being the Ricardos by Aaron Sorkin
- The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines by Mike Rianda And Jeff Rowe
- Passing by Rebecca Hall
- Belfast by Kenneth Branagh
- Tick, Tick, Boom by Steven Levenson
- Willy Wonka Script at the johnaugust.com library!
- Vigil show
- MIT Mystery Hunt 2022
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by William Brink (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 533: We See and We Hear, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig discuss the Main Character Energy meme. What does it mean for writers when real life people cast themselves in the leading role? We break down main characters vs. protagonists and the danger of life imitating art.
We answer listener questions on do-not-read lists and verb tenses. Follow up this week includes: a how-to guide on firing reps, relationship advice on unsupportive partners, and liberation of the screenplay format.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig discuss population, specifically how we went from worrying about overpopulation to underpopulation in a span of decades.
Links:
- Fans Are Suing Universal Pictures Because a 2019 Movie Didn’t Include Ana de Armas
- How Sweet Fresh Meat clip on YouTube
- Ashley Ward’s original Main Character TikTok
- Main Character Energy: Interiority in a world of screens by Coco Klockner for Real Life Mag
- We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker
- Rediscovering ‘The Truman Show’ in the age of Main Character Syndrome by Mischa Anouk Smith for Far Out Magazine
- Gary Gulman’s The Great Depresh Kidnapping Hoax
- Main Character Energy and Narcissism – Inneresting Newsletter by Chris Csont
- The Afterparty on Apple TV from Lord Miller, First Ep on YouTube
- Puzzle pals David Kwong and Dave Shukan
- Malthusianism
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Julia Hostetler (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Main Character Energy first appeared on John August.
John and Craig look at midpoints, the murky middle of the movie, and why writers shouldn’t overthink them.
We follow up on script formatting, firing your reps, screenplay “rules,” and how Sisyphus can achieve happiness. We answer listener questions on omitted scenes and imaginative children.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Craig debate the ethics and issues surrounding NFTs.
Links:
- Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s MOTHER Script
- Script University’s 20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order
- Read Aloud Software Suggestions Table Read, ZoomText, JAWS, VoiceDream
- DnD for kids Level 1 Geek and Being a Dungeon Master for Kids
- Flee animated film
- Wikipedia Timeline Game
- Papers, please by Lucas Pope
- NFT Articles Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 by Tim O’Reilly, My First Impressions of Web3 on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are by Molly White
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by William Phillipson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Halfway There first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 524 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
We don’t have Craig today but we do have a very full show because today’s episode we’re going to be talking about endings. We’re going to start with a segment from Episode 44, Endings for Beginners, where Craig and I look at how you plan for a successful conclusion. Then we’ll have Aline join us for Episode 152, The Rocky Shoals, where we look at the particular challenges writers face around page 70 every script, when you start shifting gears into the end game. Then in a segment from 392 we will focus on the final moment, the punchline and the payoff. So it’s a whole episode about endings. It’s not really a script from A to Z. It’s more from R to Z, or maybe S to Z. But it should be a very useful thing as you’re thinking about your script.
As always, if you want to hear these full episodes you can find them in our archives available to premium members at Scriptnotes.net. And if you are a premium member stick around at the end where Megana and I will chat about nighttime rituals for creative folk. Enjoy.
[Episode 44]
John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start we start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first ten pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.
And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.
Craig: Yeah. Ending are… — Like I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last ten. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything.
I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.
John: So, I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we are talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you, it will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”
The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line, it’s the resolution, it’s the triumph. And so often it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.
Craig: Yeah.
John: So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first ten pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last five, ten pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. And so those last ten pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started. Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.
My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there.
Craig: Right.
John: As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”
Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract, that’s exactly right. Because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling depending on your perspective towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying it had to go like this.
That ultimately the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment. And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. You know, I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected — it always seems to me — it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.
That’s the point is there is an expression of faith in something that has changed. But there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie they are not the same person they were in the beginning. John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re going to get to. Like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations.
Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.
Craig: I’d like to see that movie.
John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence…
Craig: Well, but that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie she leaves home. She runs away.
John: That’s right.
Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away, you made a stand, you thought you were a grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”
That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. And the whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending… — It’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “Well, you know, the ending, it’s they’re mocking us. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.”
But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point the ending is defined by faith and decision. And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious, you know.
The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re going to cross the streams.” [laughs] “We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.
John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. So, sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often it’s expressed by what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally, or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.
Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about, you know, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly there’s not much more reason to watch movies. [laughs] You know?
John: And we are talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. One of the first things we see, or how we meet those characters. You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?
Craig: Right.
John: And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.
Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing… — And frankly if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. Because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.
John: In one of our first screenwriting classes they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10 you can write your whole movie because you know — you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.
Craig: I love it.
John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, with sort of coffee momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.
And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness if I don’t have… — If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.
Craig: You know, I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean, I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end. Why that difference is interesting. What decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.
When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be, or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life. And, you know, Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. And I went, I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where he had — Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. You know, he brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back. And I like that but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go.
And they design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.
John: Yup.
Craig: And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as “man on airship with boy scout, flying, talking dogs, and a house tied to him.” No problem; you can make it work. John: And example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines, and the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die. The question of the movie is, “Will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?” And so quite early on I had to figure out like, well what is it that the son — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? Well, the son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing, like, that’s going to be incredibly difficult, an emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel that.
Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, well what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to what are the steps that are going to get me to that point. And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, it’s Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, “Well, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement?” “What are the conversations along the way?” Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.
Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identify Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that — that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. That to me — it’s all about the ending like that. So, looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.
John: This talk of endings reminds me of… — I met John Williams. He was at USC; the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. And when they were rededicating it John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.
And John Williams made this really great point, was that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you, it’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s — that’s your ending.
And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.
Craig: Oh, for sure.
John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.
Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, you know, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “Well, it’s not really a 98. At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up.”
But, you know, if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer. And similarly when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, just like the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.
John: But I want to make sure for people who are listening, we are not arguing for happy endings.
Craig: No.
John: We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point.
Craig: Yes.
John: Is it one that tracks with the characters along the way? So it doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.
Craig: Yeah. And maybe just a little bit of hope.
John: Yeah.
Craig: You know, I mean, I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. I mean, this man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person when inside in fact he was awful. And in a moment of explosion at the end truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he never, you know, he just died alone.
And yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling, and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down — I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he always, he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there. You know?
[Episode 152]
John: So, we’ve set a very high bar. But let’s get started. Let’s get started with those rocky shoals. So, talk to us about what you mean by this topic.
Aline: Well, this is something that I’ve always found to be true and in talking to other writers I have found it also true for them. Which is the first act tends to be the funnest and easiest to write. You often overwrite the first act. You often write the 38 pages when it needs to be 29, but it’s usually because it’s the thing that you spent the most time on which is the setup and the idea and you have the most information about it.
And what I’ve found is that after the first part of act two, where you’re sort of setting up the pins to knock them down — analogy — in the second part what you’re really doing is sort of building that on ramp to the third act. And I know Craig has talked many times about how you need to know that third act to write the movie, and it’s best if you know the third act, and I agree with that. And I find third acts not, I would say, on a par with first acts in terms of difficulty to write. But if I’m going to have an existential crisis, if there is going to be a moment where I drive home from work and say to my husband, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I’ve ever written one of these before, I don’t understand how these work,” it will always be around 71 where I start to feel like, you know, it should start to spit out material, and it’s probably the stuff you have the least of in the outline. But it should start to spit out steps to this thing that you know you’re going to.
So, often I know exactly what the third act is and I can see it. And it’s just over the crest, but I need those steps, and 70 to 90 are those steps. And if something is wrong, if you’ve conceived a character incorrectly, if the action in the third act is in fact wrong, if your thematic are wrong, that’s where it’s all going to fall down. It almost never falls apart in act one. For me it almost never falls apart in act three. It’s always 70 to 90 is the moment where I think, oh boy.
Craig: Mm-hmm.
John: In act one you’re setting things up. And that’s the part of the movie where you had the best idea of what it really was. That was probably what got you to start writing the movie. You had this idea, and that was probably act one.
Act three, you’re closing stuff down. You’re cutting off those threads, you’re tying stuff up. Final confrontations. But there is not a defined thing that’s sort of supposed to happen in that stretch that you’re talking about. There’s probably been some big thing that happened in the middle of your second act, but now you’re kind of waiting for this third act thing to happen. You’re waiting for either the worst of the worst, or this big twist, this big reveal, and you don’t want to do anything before its time. But, yeah, it’s a tough moment.
Craig: Well, it is. Although I kind of feel like that’s the point. You know, your character is going through this process and that’s the part of the movie where they’re lost, right? Your plot is building in a certain way and that’s the part of the movie where the plot and the simplicity of what’s supposed to happen doesn’t work anymore. It’s natural for us to get to that place and start to feel overwhelmed. Oddly, we give ourselves a break from page 30 — well, the ending is far away, I’m relaxed.
When you get to page 70 you think, well the ending is supposed to be coming up soon but it also still feels far away. It feels further away now that I’m at 71 then it did when I was at 30. But I feel like that’s the purpose of that section. In a weird way pages 71 and 90 in every movie is a horror movie, in every genre. That’s where the horror is. It’s where everything is supposed to basically fall apart, otherwise your ending is kind of a “who cares?”
So, if you start to embrace the fact that you’re supposed to feel that way, particularly if you’re connected to your main character and the movie is supposed to fall apart. You have to break it to fix it. Then maybe, you’ll still be scared, but at least you’ll understand why.
Aline: You know how Ted Elliott talks about that stuff where you make those first couple decisions about a movie and then you’re sort of — you have the consequences of those you can’t ever get back. I feel like to use one of my tortured analogies that to get — you’re going to have a lot of stuff and you’re winnowing. The process of a movie really is winnowing down thematically and plot wise.
And I always feel like it’s like you’re at the edge of a river. You’re Tarzan. You’re trying to get to this place across and there’s ten vines. And you can only pick a couple to swing across on. And I just have had a couple times where I’ve gotten there and thought which one is taking me, is the right path to act three. And I think that’s probably the section that I rewrite the most because often I have an act three I really like, but it might not land if the onramp is not — if I have not picked the right thing to swing across on.
John: One of the things I think you’re describing may be part of the problem. If you’re describing it as an onramp then you’re not describing what the actual — what’s the joy of that part of the movie? If it’s only doing work, then there’s not a joy to that part of the movie.
Aline: Right.
John: One of the scripts that I was working with at Sundance this last year, as I was talking with the writer we were trying to figure out how to move some scenes around, or sort of what could go where. And I had him really rethink the whole thing in terms of sequences. And so basically like imagine this is the sequence that goes from here to here, the sequence that goes from here to here. And within that sequence, those are the edges of your sequence — what is the movie? Like imagine that little sequence as its own movie.
And maybe that’s the key to what the 70 to 90 is, is think about, well, given where we’re at what is the movie of 70 to 90 and how can we make the most interesting movie in that place? Craig: That movie also is… — One thing, it’s funny, I actually have a weirdly opposite point of view that it is true, as we make choices, the breadth of choices that are available to us begin to narrow. But that section to me is actually the one place where you get to not worry about that because, for instance, that’s the point in movies a lot of times when somebody gets really drunk, or gets high, or has a vision, or a dream. That part of the movie you’re allowed to almost become non-linear. And then arrive at something kind of —
Aline: But you need propulsion. It’s too late in the movie to not be propulsive. And I often find I’m in that section cutting stuff because it feels early act two-y.
Craig: Maybe so. I mean, to me if you’ve gotten your character to a place where they are disconnected from the life they had, but they are no longer at the life they need to live, then you’re allowed to get arty horror, I guess. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re allowed to break the rules of your movie and actually plunge them into a moment where out of it they can have an epiphany or something.
I was just telling John before the show began that I’m plotting out the story of the script that I’m about to write and I got to this point. And I understood that my character needed to have an epiphany, but well how do you have — it’s hard to create an epiphany. If you can create it that simply then it’s probably not that satisfying.
So, part of what I did was just relax. I don’t know how else to put it. Like you can start to beat yourself up when you get to that section because you feel like, oh my god, ugh. And then it has to make this half propulse and make the ending happen and all the rest. I just weirdly just relaxed.
Aline: But I do think it’s the point where the audience starts to get shifty. It’s just the part in the movie after the first hour and it’s the thing that I always refer to in meetings as you really don’t want people to be sitting there going, “Did I park on P2 or P3? Honey, was it P2 or P3?” And they’re thinking that. And that’s where if it’s going to go south it’s going to be there.
I mean, you have such tremendous goodwill in act one. You really do. And I always find, I have a friend who watches movies going, “I’m at an A. I’m at an A+. I’m at a B. I’m at a B-. I’m at a C.” Like that’s how he experiences a movie. And so often you watch a movie and you’re like, I’m at an A. I don’t know why people didn’t like this. I’m at an A. I’m at an A. But getting back to you’re like at a B. And then it’s always an hour in where you’re like, oh, we just wandered into D- here. Like we’ve lost our way. That’s always the — that really is. That’s why I say, “Rocky shoals, men from the boys, you know?”
Craig: Yeah. Because you can get into a treading water syndrome where you kind of think, oh, I’m not allowed to have my ending yet. I need to do some work. You actually don’t. Like for instance one solution to your 71 to 90 problem is that it’s really 71 to 80.
John: Yeah, you’re cutting it short.
Aline: And you know what I will say? I worked with Alex Kurtzman and he said something to me that I really think about all the time. He’s like, “You always need less stuff than you think you need.”
Craig: It’s so true.
Aline: It is so true. You pack up for your screenplay and you’ve got like giant suitcases and a duffle and a carryon slung across you. And you always get through and go, “Why did I bring all this stuff? I didn’t need all this stuff.”
Craig: But you don’t know what you need until you get to the resort.
Aline: You don’t know what you need until you get there!
Craig: Yeah, but you should just be willing to not wear everything at once. Right.
John: Well, let’s talk about like that heading into that last section. If we talk about a movie as being a character’s transformation and hopefully you’re going to have this arc of transformation. They start at one place and they end up in a different place. And that transition to act three is really the lowest of the lowest, that moment of great transformation. Everything seems lost. All hope is gone. There may be an opportunity in that 70 to 90 phase for the character to try a new thing, to try a new persona, to try a new approach that may not end up succeeding, but you can see it’s a step on their way to this next thing. So, they wouldn’t get to the character they’re going to be at the end if they hadn’t tried this new thing. And that could lead you into the new thing.
It may also be a moment for — I’m a big believer in burning down the house. Like literally I will burn down the house as much as I possibly can. And sometimes you’re burning down the house at the start and that’s instigating the whole story. But sometimes you’re burning down the house at the act two moment, that’s like that was the worst of the worst and their house got burned down. But it can be a fascinating time to literally burn down their house or destroy everything they have at that moment before the real end of act two. And so this is a section where they’re forced to sort of be on their own. They’re force to sort not be able to go back.
Aline: I’ll give you a somewhat, it’s not super specific, but in the script I’m writing midway through this character has had a relationship with — a woman has had a relationship with a man. And halfway through she realizes he’s not who she thought she was. And the third act is her realizing, oh, he’s a good guy. I’m going to go help him and save him.
But in between, oh, he’s not the person I thought he was, in that 70 to 90, she’s trying to decide or figure out is he the good guy or bad guy of this story. That’s really what’s she’s doing is she’s going back and forth between trying to figure out was I right to be drawn to this person or not. And at the end she’s, yes, and she goes — so, she is in a treading water kind of a thing where she’s investigating and it is a little bit like a horror movie because she’s sort of going down halls and trying doors.
And my challenge has been to pick the things that allow her to be in a little bit of a suspended state, which you often are in that section, right?
Craig: Without feeling like —
Aline: Without feel like —
Craig: The movie is just flat-lining across. I know what you mean.
Aline: Yes. Exactly.
Craig: Well, sometimes also the way to approach those sections is to think of them as false endings. So, okay, in her mind this movie needs to end on page 90. So, perhaps then she just decides I’m going to make a decision. I don’t know if it’s the right decision or not, but I’m making a decision and I’m going to confront this person and I’m going to blow this thing up. And that’s going to be the end of this movie. And she does it. But then it’s not, you know?
Aline: Right. Right.
Craig: Or sometimes if it is a heist movie, this is where we’re going to do the thing, oh my god, it just —
Aline: Well that’s exactly, really smart, because that’s the part in the heist movie where everybody is moving in and getting the thing and the acrobat is in the box and all that stuff is happening. And I think one of the reasons really truly that I find it challenging is not often because I don’t know what to do, but because the execution of that, if it’s elegant and wonderful like it is in Ocean’s, if it’s an elegant, wonderful, surprising thing, it elevates the movie and if it’s the kind of thing where the audience goes, yeah, yeah, okay, so that’s the part where blah, blah — I think the onus on the level of execution in that particular thing is quite high. I just think they’re not in a — an audience is not in as forgiving a mood.
Craig: Yeah, no, you have to write it well.
Aline: Yes.
John: [laughs]
Aline: The solution to all your writing problems is write things well.
Craig: Yeah, you have to do that part good.
Aline: But I do find, I always think of it as like going down a rapids thing and then you get there and you’re like, oh, you know, here it is. Rocky shoals.
John: Part of the challenge may be with your project, but all projects in that 70 to 90 phase is that you want to sort of keep your hero active. So, right now in your case like she’s opening doors and she’s investigating, but that character doesn’t necessarily know where the end is. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
Aline: Exactly. That’s right.
John: And I think part of the reason why movies often feel aimless in this part is you’re not communicating to the reader and to the audience what the character is trying to do and where the character thinks they’re headed. And so sometimes you just literally need to put a place or you need to put — explicitly state a goal, like I need proof that he is this person. I need proof that he really did this thing, so we know what they’re really trying to do.
Aline: I’ve noticed this a lot in action movies where they wrap their movie up on page 85 and they start a new movie.
Craig: Right.
John: Yup. Absolutely.
Aline: Every action, I mean, I actually really admired in X-Men it did not feel that way, the latest X-Men. I felt like it was a true continuation. But a bunch of the super hero movies I’ve seen and the action movies I’ve seen recently, it seems like you all just stop at the end of act two and then there’s new creatures, and new stakes. And then they go to a… — And that’s a note. In the third act you often go to a new setting, a new environment.
Craig: I actually don’t love that syndrome. And I think that’s part of the new creature of movie as theme ride theme room.
Aline: That’s exactly how it feels. It’s like that thing where you’re in that strap in a ride and you get around the corner and you see that last thing.
Craig: Right, you’re like, oh, I thought I was done, but there’s one more thing. You know, and that’s fine. But for an integrated story that you’re telling, I think, John’s got the exact right advice. There’s a — even if the character doesn’t have clarity, that’s good. But the audience needs clarity.
Aline: That’s right.
Craig: And you need clarity to know what the hell you need to do.
Aline: She doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but you don’t want the audience to be like, “What is she doing?”
Craig: Right. Even if she sets an artificial thing up, okay, I’m giving myself 48 hours. I’m like a jury now. I’m going to collect evidence over 48 hours and then I’m going to render a verdict. Verdict: you’re not good; I’m dumping you.
Aline: Right.
John: Another possibility would be to shift POV. So, if your story has really locked POV to one character —
Aline: That’s when you can switch.
John: That might be the right moment to switch and actually see things from the other point of view.
Aline: Listen, you guys are very expensive, so if we do a lot more of this on the air I’m going to be owing you guys a lot of dough.
Craig: Uh, you already do.
John: Yeah.
Aline: That’s a great idea because you know what’s funny —
Craig: As John Gatins says, “The meter is running.”
Aline: It’s funny when you have a single perspective movie, it does get exhausting. And that’s a great kind of technical tip just to try, even if you don’t end up keeping it, which is go to the other lead, go to the other main relationship and write what they’re doing for awhile and see if that is — because that creates a nice intriguing mystery for the audience, which is you want to get back to your lead. That’s an excellent tip.
John: One of the other exercises I do with people when I’m sitting down and talking about their scripts is I’ll ask them like, okay, you have written a thriller here, but let’s imagine this as a crazy comedy. Let’s imagine this as a western. This imagine this in a completely different genre.
Aline: Yes
John: And sometimes you’ll figure out what the beats would be in that other kind of genre and that you won’t necessarily be able to apply those directly, but it will get you thinking in different ways.
So, in your case, if your movie is predominately not a thriller, but these are thriller moments, like let’s talk about the real thriller of this, and then you can sometimes bend those elements back into your —
Aline: Well, I don’t think it’s funny because this is sort of what Lindsay Doran’s thing is, but every movie I’ve written in any genre, you always start going — someone always says, or you say to yourself, “This is really a love story about these two people.”
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: All movies are.
Aline: Always. All movies are.
Craig: If they’re done right.
Aline: They’re always a love story between two people.
John: 21 Jump Street is a love story.
Aline: Sometimes you have the wrong people. I mean, name any movie we love, ET, even movies that are — every Hitchcock movie. I mean, they’re love stories.
John: Cast Away.
Craig: All movies have a central relationship. All of them. And knowing your central relationship and playing that through. And she has this great thing. She talks about how some movies it’s do a thing, and then you get the relationship. And some movies the relationship is the thing.
Aline: That’s right.
Craig: Which I love. I love both kinds.
Aline: That’s great.
Craig: But I think it’s not — the Rocky Shoals aren’t so rocky. You know, we know this because we get through them. Once you’re done with it, and you’ve fixed it, and you know what you’re doing and you’ve solved that problem, when you look back you go, “There’s no rocks. There’s no shoals.”
Aline: Yeah, well, of course. Any writing problem once you fix it it’s like why was that a problem, yeah.
Craig: So, I guess my point is that over time, we’ve been doing this long enough to know, when you get to that place, see if you can’t subtract the fear of it from the equation. The answer may come, I don’t know if it will be a better answer, but it will probably come quicker. I do believe that. I believe that relaxing and not tensing up will probably make it go faster. I love speed.
John: Yeah, speed is good.
Craig: Speed.
[Episode 392]
John: Cool. Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel she flew off into space and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next. And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written that last moment, that last beat, has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I sort of want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.
Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me because I’m obsessed with that moment it actually rarely doesn’t change – it doesn’t change much for me.
John: OK.
Craig: But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.
John: I start with it, too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.
But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, you know, we shot the script, those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s deliberated to. So let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story and then what it looks like at all the different stages.
Craig: Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. You know, I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. So the last shot really is about sunsets. But of course it’s not. For me the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment. We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. And she would cite how sometimes she would ask people well what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it is Mr. Miyagi’s face. Proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other and there’s pride.
So, figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you kind of know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.
John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey. A character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process of where do you want to end up. And way back in Episode 100 there was a listener question and someone asked us I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing. And my answer was you should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.
Craig: Right.
John: And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. So, having a clear sense of this is where I think the movie lands is crucial. It’s like the plane is going to land on this runway tells you, OK, I can do a bunch of different stuff but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.
Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer? John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think about what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?
Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.
If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either. That you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning. One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I think it’s Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did, and one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s life, but it also was satisfying. You felt things were connected and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant.
It’s the way frankly Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come around with that last final look.
John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about.
Craig: No.
John: We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.
So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.
Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, oh, here’s the variable. Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start at the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound. You know, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed and that’s your character.
John: So, I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, OK, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, OK, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes he’s physically in the same space but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened. And so being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, you would not – reading Arlo Finch you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.
John: [laughs] It’s really shocking for middle grade fiction.
Craig: Well it is. But then when you look back you go, oh yeah, you know what, he was laying the groundwork for that all along. It actually makes sense. He’s a nightmare. Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.
John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.
Craig: You should do it.
John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.
Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear.
John: Silver Bear.
Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.
John: Oh yeah.
Craig: I love it. So, you know, when I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. You know, it’s a coming of age story and the last shot when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who is no longer with you. And I go, OK, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it that can change.
John: For sure.
Craig: And often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome, so a writer will have an intention like I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention. And here is how I would execute it.
Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, yeah, the ending, and that writer never really nailed the ending.
John: Ha.
Craig: You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.
John: Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. So, in the pitch version of it, you know, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So you’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.
So, in a pitch you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. So that last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.
Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot, so for instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars.
What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot our hero receives a medal which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say this farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.
See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end but not the actual end.
John: Well, let’s take your example of Star Wars because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there. Actually painting out the world so we can see like, OK, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene but also I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.
And so in the script stage what was sort of a nebulous description of like this is what it’s going to feel like has to actually deliver on that promise.
Craig: Yeah. I always wondered – I hate being the guy who’s like would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this – but the last shot of Star Wars is the medal ceremony, right. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and kind of starting a new beginning, a new hope. You know, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return. John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. Whether the journey was this is a kid who is all on his own who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory.
Craig: Dead family.
John: Dead family. So I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than sort of the – I would just imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.
Craig: Yeah, no, you’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke and Han and Luke. That it’s we’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.
John: So let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production there’s finally a cut and you see that last moment in the film and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience it’s generally because the movie sort of got – the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters things just feel different. Obviously some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you kind of thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there.
In some cases it’s reshoots. In some cases you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways and it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.
They’re thinking about what does the music feel at this moment. How are we emotionally landing, the payload here. And the music is going to be a big factor. So, there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.
Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, OK, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.
In rare circumstances you do get to a place where you realize, oh my god, having gone through this movie it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. OK. So, now we have to think of the beginning, let’s recontextualize what our beginning means and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending. But the ending can never be just – do you know what? “It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.
John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings they’ll see like, OK, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or like an extra thing. And generally people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more, they just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.
Craig: Right. How do you leave them feeling is the biggest. John: So sometimes though the opposite holds true. Just this last week I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it I was like oh that’s a really great last shot/last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw. But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that I was like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense. So it was really talking about this is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie because doing that you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.
Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. Right? If something is not working in that where your circle is supposed to connect up and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong.
John: Ha.
Craig: But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid and this this thing sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” And, John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.
John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it and you can get them there.
Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive.
John: All right. That is our discussion of that final moment.
[Bonus segment]
John: All right. I’m here with Megana Rao our producer. Megana, why did you pick these segments for today’s episode?
Megana Rao: I guess because I’m approaching the rocky shoals in my own project and rewriting it. And so I obviously turn to Scriptnotes for advice.
John: All right. So you don’t get enough of me and Craig just talking normally.
Megana: Exactly.
John: You listen to old back episodes. Now we’re talking about endings so much in this, and I feel like we’re always talking about beginnings in this podcast, like sort of how you get started, how you break the seal and get started writing, but we don’t talk enough about finishing stuff up in terms of your work and your craft. With you and a script how do you – if you’re finished with the day’s work what does it look like and are you just walking away from your laptop? Like when you’re done what do you do?
Megana: I feel like if it’s a good day’s work I’m usually pretty hungry. I’m usually pretty hungry or you know sometimes you have that feeling where my mind is still buzzing but there’s nothing in there. I still have a lot of energy in my body so I’ll go for a walk or I’ll workout then.
John: Yeah.
Megana: But basically just not writing and not looking at my computer.
John: Yeah. I think it is important to sort of make a clean break from your writing time to your non-writing time, because you will still have stuff swirling there and you should take some notes. I tend to if I’m sort of writing more or less in sequence or I know what the next thing is I would be writing I’ll take some really quick little notes about what happens next just so I can plan for it, so that my next – I’m trying to do a favor to my future self.
Megana: Aw.
John: And put some stuff down there so that Tomorrow John will be able to get some stuff actually written there. In Highland that’s where I would use the synopsis format where there’s little equal signs there. It’s not meant to be real material, but it’s just bullet points for what happens next.
Megana: And then the next day are you going back and rereading your work?
John: I’m not rereading from the start, but I’ll try to at least reread what I just wrote the day before so I can get a sense of what the flow was. And I will make some small changes in that to get back up to speed and obviously you recognize some things that you didn’t notice the first time. And so you can polish that a little bit. But I will try not to go back too far because otherwise you’re just constantly revising stuff you’ve already worked on and you’re not actually moving the cursor forward.
Megana: Totally. And when you finish a writing session do you go back and read those pages?
John: Not immediately. Sometimes I will print, like I’ll print them for you so that they’re down there. It’s sort of that closure on that idea. But I will save the file and sort of walk away from the laptop. I’m trying not to focus on it too much.
Now, how about at the end of the day? Are you doing anything at the end of your work day or the end of getting ready for bed that is creative?
Megana: I don’t think so. I feel like I’m a night owl and so my best writing time is either 9pm to midnight or 7am to 10am. But we live in a morning-biased world. So most of my nighttime is trying to get my body to sleep when it’s so tough because as soon as the sun goes down I’m just awake.
John: Yeah. Classically I was oriented the same way where I was very much a night owl. And I loved to write from like 8pm until 2 in the morning. And sort of once you have kids that stops becoming an option. And also just like you’re trying to have a life and do other things and see friends. It does get in the way of a lot of things. And so I’ve had to much more shift to like, you know, my work life is 9 to 6 as much as possible as I can do.
But, the creative brain is still functioning really well at night and sometimes that stuff is coming up, so I do have as you’ve seen a stack of note cards beside the bed and I will just write down the stuff that’s in my head so I can get it out of my head. And capture it. And that helps me sleep, too, because I’m not trying to keep a loop going in my head of I have to remember this beat or this moment or this line of dialogue. I write it down, get it out of my head, and I have a constant system where I put it on the door, on the floor, by the door so I will see it as I’m headed downstairs in the morning. So I know that I’ve captured it and I won’t forget it and then I don’t have to worry about it.
Megana: Yeah, sometimes I’ll journal and write goals or things that I want to write in the morning before I go to bed and that helps me turn that part off.
John: Now is that journaling at all like The Artists’ Way, that classic technique of getting stuff out of your brain?
Megana: Yeah. I think that that’s where it started, the sort of morning pages of doing the – I’m not doing a full three pages, but as you know I’m such a deep sleeper and my dreams are really intense, so I need to write in the morning to remind myself that I am awake and starting my day. That journaling in the morning helps me make that transition.
John: Let’s circle back to where you are at in the script you’re at right now because you said you were in the rocky shoals situation. And is that because you feel like you’re having to shift gears from the first engine of your story to the end game of your story? Or do you feel that you haven’t adequately planned for the section? What kind of stuff are you feeling about the section of the script you’re in right now?
Megana: The supporting characters, I feel like I have gotten to know them too much. That my original ending doesn’t feel satisfying anymore.
John: That makes a lot of sense. You’re going to discover a lot about your characters over the course of writing, and especially if you’re writing in sequence you spend 70 pages with them and you might have had one plan for them but they’ve told you who they are in ways that’s different as you’ve gotten to this point. Listening back to the segments that you picked for this show, are there any insights from that that you think you can actually use?
Megana: In your discussion of the final moment where you talk about getting to this final moment and then having to rewrite your beginning because of that, like I have come to the realization that that is what I’m going to end up having to do.
John: It’s giving yourself permission to do that. Because you might have had absolute, fantastic, perfect opening image, opening moment for the story you did not end up writing.
Megana: Exactly. Exactly. It is, yeah, it’s a weird feeling and I’m like, ugh, it feels like I have gotten to know these people and now I can’t shut them up.
John: Yeah. You’re also suffering from a bit of the curse of knowledge. Because you know who those characters are at page 70 in ways that the audience wouldn’t. So, again, you have all the blessings of wisdom of living with these characters and really knowing who they are, but you have to remind yourself that a person picking up the script for the first time won’t know these things, so you have to introduce them as strangers too.
Megana: Yeah.
John: And that’s honestly one of the really tricky things about getting through this pass and sort of – it’s not even really your second pass. It’s that draft 1.5 is remembering, oh that’s right, you have information that the normal reader would not have.
Megana: Oh. I have to walk away. If this wasn’t on a mic stand I would have dropped it for you. Wait, but did you want to talk about your nighttime rituals?
John: So my nighttime ritual is obviously using the cards is really helpful to get stuff out of my head. And if there’s a thing that’s the main thing I’m writing and I don’t have it all figured out I will as I close my eyes to get to sleep I will try to think about that space and be in that space. And I won’t necessarily dream about it but it just reminds me that it’s the most important thing to be working on.
I’ll also write myself some cards like focus on this first tomorrow. As I get started on the day’s work I’ll know like, oh, those are the things I actually really wanted to write. And so the scenes you just read today those came out of cards last night saying like write this scene between these characters, do the new version of this, and that sort of sets the priority, the agenda for what my writing is going to be like the next day. Because as you know it’s just so easy to be distracted from actually getting started doing the work and so to close up a day’s work with notes about what you want to tackle next feels important.
Megana: So you’re not writing at night at all?
John: I’m almost never writing at night. Unless there’s something urgent I’m almost never writing at night. There have been times where I’ll have to excuse myself, I really do have a great new idea that I want to tackle. But as a parent and husband you can’t do that too often.
Megana: Yeah. That makes sense.
John: Now, we’ve talked about the end of your writing day, the end of the day, sort of getting ready for bed. But what about finishing up a script? Because at this point you’ve now finished a couple of scripts. And do you have – what is working for you in terms of feeling closure, completion with the stuff you’re writing?
Megana: I will usually send it to a friend and then I will like treat myself to something nice, like maybe a nice blouse.
John: The equivalent of me treating myself to Panda Express.
Megana: Exactly. Like I’ll buy a piece of clothing that I like, or I will go treat myself to a nice dinner.
John: Which is I think a smart way to reward yourself. We’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo right now so, or I guess we’ve just started NaNoWriMo, and when I was doing the Arlo Finch book which started as a NaNoWriMo project I loved the daily routing of like OK I have to hit my 1,500 words or 1,600 words in order to hit this goal. But it did feel weirdly artificial because I didn’t necessarily feel like I was achieving any sort of story purpose. It was a very artificial sort of boundary behind stuff.
One thing I do very much like about screenwriting is that a scene begins or it ends. It’s just done and you can have some closure. And there can be short scenes. And there can be short moments that feel intact and full. But getting to the end of an Arlo Finch book was just so amazing because I could just look at all the words that I had done. There wasn’t even time to reread the whole book because it just takes too long to read a whole book. So those feelings of completion, like I actually had some postpartum joy and depression for a week or two after finishing one of those giant books.
Megana: There’s such a fleeting moment between feeling so proud of yourself and then being like, wait, was that shit? Now I have to reread it and edit it and face my own writing judgment.
John: Yeah. So as we end this segment on endings any thoughts about the next topic that will be good to do as one of these clip shows? Because we hadn’t done clip shows before you became a producer. So, any other things you want to think about? Do you want listener suggestions?
Megana: I would love listener suggestions. And to hear what other people are struggling with.
John: Yeah. Megana, thank you so much.
Megana: Thanks John.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Episode 44: Endings for Beginners
- Scriptnotes Episode 152: The Rocky Shoals
- Scriptnotes Episode 392: The Final Moment
- Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Henry Adler (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 524: The Home Stretch, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John August: And this is Episode 529 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters balance the needs of the scene versus the needs of the story? The two are of course interlinked but in practice are often at odds. We’ll wrestle with how and when to prioritize one over the other.
John August: Then it’s another round of the Three-Page Challenge where we look at scenes submitted by our listeners and offer our honest feedback. And in our bonus segment, for premium members, what do you do when you get bored with what you’re writing? Is that a sign to bail or buckle down?
Craig Mazin: We’re going to give excellent advice and terrific feedback. And overall, provide tremendous value to our listeners.
John August: Right. Provide tremendous value to both our free listeners and our premium members who we love a little bit more.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. I just feel like you we’re a value proposition.
John August: 100 %.
Craig Mazin: I’ve been watching Succession. So, I have all these nerdy business phrases in my head. I think sometimes they’re just making stuff up.
John August: Sometimes, they probably are. But someone said all those things.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Someone said it somewhere.
John August: Someone said that I don’t love you but I love you.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant. I got to be honest with you. Sometimes, they are legitimately over my head.
John August: I love succession. And so, we’re going to talk just a little bit on about Succession. I love Succession. But I do feel like that which the intimacy in the tabletop and the next slide dialog will be like, “What the hell did you just say to me? Why would you say that? That was the worst thing you could possibly do.” And yet somehow, they continue on with their lives.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, it is really interesting that they haven’t all just left. I think normally, especially if you can just be bought out of a company, why would you stay?
John August: Why would you stay?
Craig Mazin: If you’re any of them?
John August: So, were of course having a conversation on Friday before Sunday, the finale. So, for all we know, everything’s changed.
Craig Mazin: Do you all love each other now?
John August: Yeah, so my theory going into it, which I can spoil now, is that I think that Tom was wearing a wire through a lot of this season. And that will hopefully be revealed on Sunday’s episode, but it might not. I may have ruined it for other people.
Craig Mazin: If that is revealed, then I assume the government will have to figure out what I love you but I don’t love you.
John August: That’s what it is.
Craig Mazin: I said it backwards. I don’t love you but I love you. Which one was it?
Megana Rao: I don’t love you but I do love you.
John August: Okay. Well, now that just clarified.
Craig Mazin: What?
John August: Yeah. Regardless of interest.
Craig Mazin: I know the difference between I’m not in love, I love you but I’m not in love with you. Is that what they mean?
John August: That’s how I feel about you, Craig. I’m not in love with you. But I do love you as a friend.
Craig Mazin: Sure. I don’t know. It’s a little weak. I don’t like the way you said it.
John August: So, we can have this banter because we are three feet away from each other. For the first time, you’re no longer in Calgary for a brief period of time.
Craig Mazin: Yep. Little hiatus over here.
John August: Yeah. So, we’re here back in our Hancock Park abode. Let’s talk through some news. This is news. Craig, can you tell me what an open writing assignment is?
Craig Mazin: Of course. An open writing assignment is a job that the studios have. They need a writer to write something. It’s often a rewrite. But sometimes, it’s a first draft of some property that they already own.
John August: Or it could be something like how would this be a movie if there was an article they bought, that becomes-
Craig Mazin: That becomes an article. And so, they go to the agencies and they say, this is… and each agency has an agent that covers that studio. And they say to that agent, “We have an open writing assignment. This is the job. This is the producer. And we’re looking roughly for this thing.” And then, the chum is in the water and everybody starts going for it.
John August: Absolutely. And so, in some cases, they may be going out to certain writers, and I say like, oh, we’re out to this writer, this agency, and we’re waiting to hear back this writer. Or, it could be like, this is the thing we’re looking for. Who do you got for us? And the agents reach out to clients and say like, “Is this a thing you’d be interested in pursuing?”
Craig Mazin: Yeah. When they have an open writing assignment, it usually means they aren’t pursuing anyone in particular. They’re looking for people to come in and impress them.
John August: When an assignment is out there, there are emails exchanged back and forth, or phone calls. And this last week, the WGA introduced this thing called the Project Page, which is a one sheeter that essentially collects all that information about a future project in one handy document. It’s shaking it in front of him. So, we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. But it’s just a simple PDF you download.
John August: The idea behind it is that the Product Page is for the producer, executive, to give those critical details about where the IP rights have been secured, who else has written on the project, if there’s talent attached, who are the producers, and hopefully, at some point, get to a place where you can say, “Can you send me the Project Page?” And that’s the summary of where the project is at this moment in time. Will they fill this out? We’ll see.
Craig Mazin: Because you might as well have a big box on here that says, “Are you lying?” The question are the underlying rights secured. They just lie about that all the time.
John August: They will. And so, I had a conversation with some agents about this, this past week. And all of them want this to happen and also feel like it may be hard to get the producers and studios to agree to do it. And yet, I think it’s very useful for writers and maybe we could talk through what’s on the sheet because I don’t think you should be considering taking a job unless you could answer these questions. So, in some ways, I want to have this by the computer to actually check all these boxes, like do I know this information? Because so many times I’ve actually had to call my agents, email my agents to get clarification on like, “Wait, tell me who the producers are because I have a feeling I know who one of the producers are and I will never work with that person again in my life.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, it is a good checklist for stuff that would be nice to know as long as you understand that you might not… let me revise that, that you will be lied to at least to some extent. So, for instance, when it says, how long has the project been in development, they’re going to lie. The names of the previous writers, they’re going to lie. This is a rewrite, number of previous writers, that’ll be a lie. Can you briefly describe the project’s development history? This is a fresh project. We’re looking for an exciting new voice, lie. So, they’re just going to do all that because it’s Hollywood. But the part that I think is helpful is at least putting them on notice that you’re asking the question. Once an agent starts to ask, then the problem for the studio is, if they lie to that agent, and then another agent comes along, and they hear a different thing, then they have an agency problem. So, it’s a good conversation to have. This is maybe the most useful version of this is one that you put in front of your agent and say, it sure would be good if you could tell me the answer to these questions.
John August: That’s what I really think we should be our first and lowest goal is basically say like, before you come to me with this project, I want to be able to know these answers because I want to know the IP rights are not all secured. Great, but what’s happening here, like is it really based on thing? You and I have a common friend. I don’t think she’s ever shared this story publicly. But she wrote something that she thought was an original that ended up being based on something and wasn’t, so she got to arbitration that she found out like, “Oh, this was actually based on a book.”
Craig Mazin: Which they will do.
John August: They will do that. And so, this will not preclude that. But at least you have some conversation. At some point, they said it was not based on something else.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Once you get hired, they do have to list all the assigned material to you. So, at that point, you should know, it should be in your contract. But certainly, if they don’t have the underlying IP locked up, then not only is there risk for you, but also they’re using you to get the IP.
John August: Let’s also talk about why this is important for any writer considering one of these projects. Because if you are going to go after this thing, that could be not just hours, but days or weeks of your time putting together a pitch, figuring out like is this worth your time to pursue. In many cases, you won’t know if you didn’t have the answers to these questions.
Craig Mazin: Correct. Also, any open writing assignment is usually fraught with a lot of risk. The reason it’s an open writing assignment is the same reason that there’s stuff in the sale bin. It means that it’s not particularly high on the studio’s priority list. It may be something that a producer is pushing really hard that the studio isn’t particularly interested in, but, sure, make 100 people jump through hoops to bide some time before we convince you. We’re not going to ever do this.
Craig Mazin: There’s all problems with open writing assignments. They are somewhat dangerous. They’re like junk bonds. Junk bonds can make you a ton of money as many criminals have proven. But there’s a lot of risk.
John August: Transformers was an open writing assignment at one point. And they came to me with it, like I don’t get transformers, not for me. But it was for somebody and became a huge property. But there have been so many things that across the transom. It’s like, I don’t know.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, the worst version of this, and this is fairly common is they’ll come to you. And they’ll say, “Yes, this is an opening writing assignment. It’s from, let’s pick a studio, Universal, and the producer is, “Let’s just call her Vanessa. And Vanessa has this property that she’s talking to the estate about. And we’re putting a pitch together. The studio is super into this and is a priority for them. And what she’s really doing is laundering things, right? The people who own the rights to the thing, which may be useless, or like, “We’re not going to give you the rights unless we see what the movie would be.”
Craig Mazin: So, they’re going to you, and they’re saying, “Yeah, we can’t give you the job unless you show us what the movie is.” And then, they’re just looking across, share that stuff. And somehow they get money. But it’s all they’re just lying crosswise to everybody.
John August: But I’m pretty sure his job though is just like dream about a movie that could possibly exist and convince folks that you’re building stuff out of smoke, and that’s their job, too.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. I don’t want to imply that that is completely morally treacherous. It has resulted in good things. But a lot of times, open writing assignments are a bit, they’re vaporware. And you just have to be aware of that that they can go away.
John August: I think if I’d had this checklist earlier in my career, there are things that are just like, oh, hell, no, I’m not walking down that road, because I wouldn’t have pursued it. So, if it avoids somehow for some people, it’s a good thing to have them.
Craig Mazin: When you’re young and you don’t have children, what else do you do? Seems like a pretty good use of your time. Practice your skills.
John August: And I think you should practice your skills to the degree that you’re not actually stopping writing original stuff for yourself. And that’s, I think that’s the trap that people fall into this. They’re only pursuing open writing assignments and they’re not actually doing new stuff because they have nothing to show for a year of their writing time.
Craig Mazin: There’s only one writer that’s ever going to get any internal credit from the studio. And that’s the writer that gets this thing, the green light. Everybody else is just somebody that they had to fire along the way. So, odds are that this won’t work out great. So, there’s glum. It’s almost Christmas time. I should probably pep up a little bit. We are out of spooky season, correct?
John August: Yeah we’re in the holiday spirit. Megana who’s here with us, talk to us about how you’re feeling post-spooky season, like we’re still in cozy season. So, is it still a good time of year for you?
Megana Rao: It’s still a good time of year. It’s a little too dark for my taste.
John August: Yeah. My one cool thing is about this darkness. When I asked Siri what time the sunset was and she said 4:45, that’s not okay. A sunset-
Craig Mazin: Do you guys have a little problem with the sunset down here in Los Angeles?
John August: Oh, yeah, we do.
Craig Mazin: Because I wake up in the darkness. And then, I go to lunch in the darkness. And then, I go to bed in the darkness In Calgary.
John August: Yeah, you picked that place.
Craig Mazin: It was selected for us for a number of reasons. I love Calgary. But my goodness, the first thing that happened when we got there in May was we realized that at 5:00 a.m., the laser blast of the sun was going to hit your eyeballs through anything. It penetrates through wood, concrete. And, man, now it’s dark. Oh, wow. Is it dark?
John August: Yeah. People moved to Los Angeles. And I think they don’t… because it’s warmer. They seem like it won’t get dark in some way. But it feels like it gets extra dark here.
Megana Rao: Yeah, because it’s extra bright during the day.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. No, it does not get extra bright no. It’s actually fairly moderate when it comes to that thing.
John August: The main thing I want to talk through today is this idea of scenes versus the whole movie, scenes versus the story and the journey versus the destination. And I think one of the things that’s so fundamental that’s easy to overlook. And we’ve talked about this in various ways over the course of the 10 years of the show. But writers are both creating stories and scenes. And if the scenes are like the individual pieces of Lego, the story is what you build with all those Legos assembled.
John August: But we experience books and movies linearly. So, they are assembled in front of us or watching them be assembled. And the pieces themselves are constructed. They’re little movies themselves are built of these smaller moments, bits of dialogue, visuals, conflict. And so, the tension is that we’re trying to create the most interesting little Lego blocks that are full and joyful to look at and are fantastic. But that will ultimately fit together to build that, the unit we’re trying to build. And sometimes, those are not compatible goals is that we are trying to… both have every moment be spectacular and brilliant and insightful and rewarding and have the whole experience fit together and be what we’re set out to make. And those are real tensions. And you experience it in the movies where you’re experiencing I’m sure the same writing a show right now.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. No, that’s always a challenge. And it’s why I do like to outline early on because it’s the one time where you can engage in very simple scene work like just describing what a scene will be, where is it, and what’s the point, and then look at all of it together. Because what happens when you do all this work is you begin to realize that scenes are always in the context of what came before and what’s coming after. And those things change what that scene feels like to you all the time. You’re guessing how that will work. But it doesn’t always work the way you think. And there are certain things that you… especially once you get into editing, you realize that seems so important. And now, it’s like, yeah, just get rid of it.
John August: Yeah. I think it’s both a craft of making sure the individual later blocks those scenes, those moments as bits are the best possible versions. But also, do we even need that Lego block? Or, no, it’ll all fit together better. And these hold them stronger without that, that extraneous piece is actually breaking the flow of what you had originally intended.
Craig Mazin: It’s so hard because you wonder, Am I giving something away that I should hold on to? Is this one of those stories, where if only I’d kept that thing there? And then, you also think, Oh, wait. Am I being precious about this? And does it not matter? You’re making these value judgments all the time. It’s very frustrating. But it does drive home the need for transitions. I do think that as you’re crafting your Lego piece, if you know how it fits with the one before it and the one after it, better chance that it sticks around.
John August: So, let’s talk about planning versus pantsing. Whether you are carefully outlining and figuring out what the whole story is. So then, as you zoom in on this scene, this scene is to accomplish this thing. This is where I need to get into and this is what needs to achieve at the end. And I’ve done that on movies. There’s also been other movies where I have pants it as it’s grown organically out of like, this is what the scene feels like. This is where the energy of the scene is taking us to the next thing. And sometimes, that works, and you don’t know if it’s going to work. So, it’s probably a riskier way to start. It’s that organic, just like what wants to happen next. But some really good movies have come out of that process.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, certainly. I try and do a bit of a hybrid thing, which I think a lot of people do. I’d like to know, just I like to know what the scene is before I write it. I think some people just start typing and then see where it goes from there, which is a bit like auto writing like using Ouija board. For me, I like to know what I’m supposed to be writing. I like to know what the beginning, middle, and end is of the whole story, of the scene.
Craig Mazin: But then, once I’m in it, a little bit of auto writing is good for you. You get surprised by things. It’s fun to be surprised. And certainly, I have had moments where something just happens. And it’s the best part of the scene because it even got me. If it can get me, right, then it’s definitely going to get other people I think.
John August: That’s when writing is working well. We have good writing and somehow, magically, it feels like both these individual pieces and the whole thing, we’re always in unison. They were always going to support each other. But when we experience bad writing, sometimes it really is that tension where like the writing is bad because it was trying to fit this outline, like this outline probably looks really good and you can still smell the whiteboard markers. They were like locked into this thing. And characters are doing stuff that may not feel organic, that the story is moving in ways that don’t feel like the scenes themselves are rewarding. The scenes aren’t funny. They don’t have texture. They don’t have specificity. They’re not unique moments. They’re just functional. They’re just the basic Lego bricks that are going to hold the thing together But they’re not interesting. And we’ve also seen bad writing, which is like, yeah, moment by moment, these things are interesting but it doesn’t go anywhere. And we all have these frustrations of things that just feel like they’re constantly in a loop because these characters are saying brilliant things and yet we’re not actually achieving our goals.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, there is definitely value in occasional wastes of time, all of its precious real estate. But I’m thinking there’s a rambling bit in Shrek, where Shrek goes on about an onion, or the two of them are talking about the onion. It’s just a shaggy dog thing. Everybody remembers it. And it’s an utter waste of time, particularly in an animated film as CG animated film.
John August: Is watching money burn, yeah.
Craig Mazin: That conversation cost many millions of dollars. And maybe people would have been like you don’t… you can get away with saying one quick thing there. Or showing it. Show, don’t tell every dumb rule there is. But there is a value in occasionally wasting time because it is a human thing. A little bit like singers who have beautiful pitch. If they wobble a little bit on a note, keep it because that’s how everybody knows it was an auto tune.
John August: That says a lot.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. So, I think that it’s good to do that. The trouble is when that’s all people have. And then, you just get one of four… I mean, Megana reads how many of these… They’re still doing for Tarantino up there, right? They’re still just blah blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, those aren’t so much scenes as indulgences, which if you are a particular writer and filmmaker can be delicious. But for the rest of us, not particularly.
John August: Well, there’s the struggle of the screenwriter who’s working on their script. And, okay, I’ve got the idea for the movie. This is how all the scenes are going to fit together. I’m writing a scene. I’m working on this. But then, there’s the whole second level of like, Okay, now, you’ve turned this in, and now you have developed, you have notes. And you have people who are trying to optimize this. And one of the ways they’ll try to optimize this is like, can’t we just do this shorter? Can we get out of the scene faster? And sometimes that instinct is correct. You and I both experienced, they’ve just squeezed all the life and joy and then that just becomes a plot machine. You’ve lost the things in those scenes to actually make those scenes worthwhile. You’ve tried to cut a scene so short, the scene barely starts, and you should just get rid of the scene. And that’s the frustration is recognizing you could have this master plan, you can have these beautiful scenes. And then, stuff will happen. And you have to find a way to make it work without those things. It’s like you’re building a bridge, and they said, “Oh, no, you have 30% less steel than you expected.” Work with it.
Craig Mazin: Well, that’s pretty much always because I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten the budget they needed. So, even money-wise, this ends up happening, and that’ll impact you as well as the notes. There’s also this thing where you have to be accountable to your own notes because we just talked about sometimes surprises. So, you’ve planned something out, and then you surprise yourself. And then, you go, “Whoa, hold on a second. This now has ramifications for many things. I have to be accountable to those. I can’t just get stuck here.” And then, all of those subsequent scenes need to be considered in the Gestalt. That’s right, I said Gestalt.
John August: And we’re that kind of podcast. [crosstalk]
Craig Mazin: We say those things. Everything. I feel like we talk about almost one topic in so many different ways. And that is about balancing competing interests. And in storytelling, you just have to balance the whole with the parts, because the individual parts of the ones that people love, in the moment, but they will only remember the whole after.
John August: Yeah, they will remember some certain little moments of that little highlights during that thing, but then they’ll have an experience like, did I like the entire thing? Or did I not like the entire thing? And then, that’s the frustration. And I think our shared frustrations also that in teaching screenwriting, there’s such an emphasis on structure, which is the whole, which is basically this roadmap of like how it’s all going to fit together, and not nearly enough emphasis on the actual writing moment to moment. How do we keep all these balls in the air? How do we keep this moment feeling alive and excited? How to make the most fascinating Lego pieces? It’s just about like, here’s how you click the Lego pieces together to build this dinosaur.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, it’s like we make a mosaic. So, we have to have an image that we’re shooting for with all of our little tiles. But each tile has to be really cool. That’s annoying. The Romans just had the blue in the way. And it was fun. And they made a whale. And it was great. But not us. So, to me, the great majority of the work we do is actually inside of the scenes. But the most inspired work we probably do is about the whole, is understanding what is the story that people would care about, why, what tone is it, and roughly, what is the shape of it?
John August: And that shape is really the journey. So, the other metaphor be the destination versus the journey, like you started here, you got there. But really, the experience of the movie is how you got from point A to point B and what route you took. If it’s a road trip, it’s like the fastest way to drive from LA to New York is not going to be the most interesting way to drive from LA to New York, is not going to be the most rewarding way to drive. But you’re going to have to make decisions about what the choices and compromises you’re going to make, like you can’t see all of America. You’ll have short amount of time. You’ll have a certain amount of gas or electric charge. You’re going to have to make some optimizations. And that’s the choices you’re making as a screenwriter.
Craig Mazin: And as you go, you have to look and see how it’s going. And sometimes your beautiful route has just too man rivers in a row. And then, you have to change it. You have to be very relaxed in a weird way when you’re doing it, although I find myself very tense. Well, to me, it’s like a tense relaxed. I guess there’s the balance. Again, you just need to be able to pivot all the time in response to what’s happening.
John August: Yeah, I’m working on two projects now. One of which is the scene work. And one of which is the big macros, or what is the shape of this whole thing want to be? And it’s exciting to have those two opportunities. But even in trying to figure out the whole shape of it, I need to zoom in on certain moments. I feel like, is this even going to be rewarding in those individual moments? I’m imagining myself a few months down the road, am I going to enjoy writing those scenes or not? And that’s a thing you’re always asking yourself.
Craig Mazin: And eventually become accountable to the world. So much thought and energy is required. And then, people can just go, “Sucks.”
John August: So, on the show, we often do a Three-Page Challenge, which is where we look at the first three pages of scenes that people have sent in. We’ve given our honest feedback. And I think that some of that’s in response to the pressure of ordinary screenwriting books and such talking about the structure as a whole thing. So, we zoom in on this really tight… We’ll focus on just three pages, like what’s happening on those pages. But maybe we should look for a way to actually talk about the shape of stories overall. I don’t know if we want to read treatments or longer things. But I felt like-
Craig Mazin: I can answer that question.
John August: You don’t want to read them at all.
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: No.
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: Or we could look at, I guess, when we do our deep dives on existing movies, we have a sense of the shape of the whole thing.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And ultimately, there is not much interest for me, at least in talking about story in the abstract. Whereas doing scene work is lovely. It’s very detailed. When you’re in production, it’s the work of the day. You’re doing scene work and you can talk about all little things. For overall stories, the truth of the matter is if somebody told me the overall story for karate kid, I probably would shrug and go, “That just feels like so rocky” but like little rocky with karate, I guess. And then, you see the movie and you experience all those scenes, and they’re wonderful. And they collect up too much more than what it sounds like. So, I think we are probably doing this right. I think, in fact, it is one of the problems with… Well, there are a number of problems with screenwriting schools, not the least of which is just listen to this podcast. Honestly.
John August: I do get frustrated when people ask like, “Oh, can you give us some advice on scriptwriting?” I’m like, “Yes, I have a weekly podcast you can listen to. There’s 500 episodes.”
Craig Mazin: Dude. When people are like, “I just want to take you out to lunch and pick your brain, you don’t have to.
John August: No. I’ve done it.
Craig Mazin: It’s picked.
John August: It’s been scraped clean. There’s nothing left on the inside on the scale.
Craig Mazin: We are literally. Why would anyone ask us for screenwriting advice at this point?
John August: No, they shouldn’t.
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: No, but they do. They write down the questions. Sometimes, we answer them.
Craig Mazin: They do.
John August: So, let’s get started on our Three-Page Challenge. We’ll start with Firebird. Now, if you want to read along with us, these PDFs are linked in the show notes. You can stop now and look at the PDF and get your sense of it before we discuss what we’re reading on the page. But Megana will give us a summary of what it is we’re about to read.
Megana Rao: Great. So, Firebird by Benjamin Blattberg. The voice of father narrates an animated Russian folktale about a woodcutter who strays from the safe path when he uses his axe to free a trapped crow. As soon as the woodcutter realizes he stepped off the path, the crow opens its mouth, unleashing explosions. We then cut to Stalingrad in November 1942 where 12-year-old Mila steers out of her apartment at burning buildings and bombings. Her Aunt Anya urges Mila to pack and collect her parents’ jewelry, money, and food to help her escape from Stalingrad. Mila refuses saying her Papa told her not to. Anya slaps her across the face and keeps packing. Mila brings a book a fairy tales with an inscription from her father.
John August: All right. So, that’s where we’re at the end of these first three pages. There’s things I want to talk about in this but I was intrigued. I basically got the setup. I got the situation. I was intrigued to read the next thing. It did feel JoJo Rabbit to me just because that was the most recent movie that I saw that had a similar situation happening. But there’s a lot of stuff here that I thought can work. The animated opening can work, the tie in with a fairytale book. It felt tragic and whimsical at times. These are good combinations. What was your first instinct on this?
Craig Mazin: Yeah, that was really well done. And in the sense of scene work, regardless of how it might unfold, I thought that there was so much here worth recommending to people who are wondering roughly how should these things feel and flow. It looks great on the page. Lovely, broken up. I was-
John August: It’s Courier Prime, so it’s already off to a good start.
Craig Mazin: He’s just a suck up is what he is. But where got me was, I’m following along. I love Russian folklore. So, I’m looking along here and I got a little confused when the woodcutter chops at roots and branches laughing as he frees the crow. The crow flies to his shoulder and they laugh together. I thought, well, that’s very odd.
John August: I didn’t know whether I was confused or whether it hadn’t been clear on the page. What was your instinct?
Craig Mazin: I think it was just tonally bizarre, but that’s okay. Because then, something is coming closer. The crow opens its mouth. But what comes out is the sound of next line, all caps, explosions. Next line, lowercase, far off, coming closer. That’s actually quite horrifying. And then, we are immediately into reality and we realize we’re with a child. She is in the middle of World War II. Her city is being bombed. Her aunt, there’s a slightly clumsy introduction to the fact that she’s the aunt, where she refers specifically to her brother, Mila’s father, she just, my brother was too soft on you. That was-
John August: Well, also, Mila says, “I’m not leaving Aunt Anya.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, we generally don’t do stuff like that. But we’ll figure it out. Eventually, there’ll be a reason to… you don’t need to shove it in right there. I don’t think you can let that develop later. And the conversation between Anya and Mila is pretty good because it’s real. This feels normal.
John August: It feels heightened and rushed in the way that there’s an urgency to it, which is great. And they’re cutting off lines, things trail off when they need to trail off. They dash dash, cut off, when people are cutting each other off. We can improve a little bit here on the bottom half of page two. We run into a situation where between every line of dialogue, there’s a line of scene description. It’s a little staccatoAnd so, you could get some better flow by figuring out when to break that up and when not to break it up, which of those things that go to parenthetical, but that’s a small criticism.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. For instance, where did your father hide money? Mila looks at her blankly, effing hell, where that could just be in parentheses, no response. So, we can absolutely do a little bit of squishing down here. But I could see the space. I could hear it. There was a point of view. I understood that I was with Mila. Certainly, the general concept that her father had left to this book and the book was important that the father had imparted her with a love of fairytales and the fairy tales in theory would help her survive some of this. All that felt there and good. And so, yeah, I think Benjamin Blattberg can do this.
John August: Yeah, I agree. You talk about, so that we’re from Mila’s point of view. And I think that’s crucial. And one of the ways in which we’re seeing it right in Mila’s point of view is when we get to this apartment from the next room, we hear drawers being opened and slammed. Mila just fetches with the buttons and follows code so long and heard that it’s him sweeps the floor. That tells us because we’re starting from her point of view. We’re literally only with her and we’re sitting out here and off camera sounds. We know that she’s the one to follow. If we’d seen the aunt first, it would have been the aunt’s story.
Craig Mazin: Completely, and great use of sound. We talked about transitions. This is full of them. And we’re using all the palette that we are provided, directing on the page, thank God. And also, just like the… things happen with that too much of a Mila being made of them like Anya slaps Mila, that’s a sentence. That’s a perfectly good sentence. Subject, verb, object, done. Great.
John August: Cool. So, let’s go on to our next Three-Page Challenge. This is The Drawing by Todd William Knack.
Megana Rao: Ten-year-old Luke draws a mysterious woman on a piece of paper in his bedroom. It’s Gabrielle Lawson, 38, with a power ponytail, calls to him yelling that it’s time to go. Gabrielle speaks with Officer Raymond Carter in the front doorway. The officer shows her the stakes he’s put in the yard and explains the boundaries of the perimeter. Gabrielle asks Luke where his backpack is, but he doesn’t answer. We learned that Luke doesn’t speak. Twenty-four-year-old Scarlet enters carrying Luke’s backpack. She drops it by her feet where we see her ankle monitor and realize that the new perimeter is for her house arrest.
John August: Craig, start us off here. This is again, we have a story of a young kid. You have a parent authority figure. We have some mystery about what’s going on. How did this work for you?
Craig Mazin: I spent most of these pages utterly confused.
John August: Yeah. I was confused too.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, about what was going on. First of all, there’s the view of an oncoming train and then we reveal it’s actually just a toy train, but that’s a reality shift. And it’s so short. I’m not sure what we’re getting from it exactly other than it’s somewhat clever, but there’s not enough of it to make it feel like it’s a thing.
Craig Mazin: Formatting notes, a ton of capitalized words here in this one paragraph where we see the things in the room. Weirdly, there’s Edward Gorey posters. Edward Gorey is not capitalized, but posters is. Most of the stuff, you don’t need to capitalize like art supplies.
John August: It’s uppercasing and that doesn’t need to happen.
Craig Mazin: Right. And then, we meet this kid and he’s scribbling a picture of a shadowy figure and then we hear a woman off-screen, “Luke time to go.” Who is that woman?
John August: The woman is theoretically Gabrielle, but it’s weird that we don’t identify her here.
Craig Mazin: But also, if she’s yelling to him, she’s also talking to a police officer at the same time. Interior front doorway, that’s not a location. You could be by the front door. You could be foyer. The police officer, here’s the description, crop dark hair in perfect unison with his short beard. Okay.
John August: How are things in unison?
Craig Mazin: Well tidy, I guess, weathered. Never told a joke. But if he did, it would be quality.
John August: I don’t know how to play that.
Craig Mazin: What is that?
John August: I can’t do that. It’s not a playable thing.
Craig Mazin: If you’ve never told a joke, how could it be quality?
John August: So, Ashley Nicole Black, when she was on the show she was talking about, she’s also an actor, and she talks about when she’s going out for a role she reads the character description there and she gets frustrated when it’s just like, that’s not a thing I can actually do or play.
Craig Mazin: No one can do that. But even if you could, you couldn’t because it’s contradictory. Never told a joke, but if he did, it would be quality. That’s like never drove, but if he did, he would nail it. But no, because you’ve never… what?
John August: Yeah. So, never told a joke period. I get that. That’s a playable thing.
Craig Mazin: Yes. So, the sticks in the yard, again, not really sure why they need to be there exactly. But that’s fine. And then, Luke shows up and she says in the pantry, honey, but wasn’t she just calling him telling him to go?
John August: That’s what I’m confused about too.
Craig Mazin: So, if she’s telling to go, but was it maybe, was it Scarlet that was saying time to go? I don’t think so. Because Gabrielle eventually says, “Ready? Where’s your backpack? So, Gabrielle yells, “Time to go.” We don’t identify her by name. And then, she does not seem to have any sense that it’s time to go. Still not a word, huh? Just more drawings. No. No.
John August: You’re setting up too much that this is the fundamental thing. That’s strange about this character. We don’t know how long he’s been involved in their life, which seems strange to. So, let’s talk about the stakes because the literal stakes have been put in the ground by Officer Carter. They’re already in by the time it started. If you were putting the stakes in, that would be intriguing to me. What is he doing that? And then, I was like, “Oh, the fact that it’s about her house arrest and the perimeter, then we’re in the middle of something that’s great.” But they’re just standing having a conversation about a thing that’s already happened. I don’t know the context of it.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And it’s putting a lot of pressure on this reveal. She’s under house arrest. But there’s probably a more interesting, casual way to drop that in there. I do struggle when characters have this openness with each other. Someone says, still not talking. Yeah, no, just drawing. Typically, a parent of a child who has any struggles will be far less forthcoming than that. Still not talking, huh? No.
John August: Let’s also talk about point of view. So, in the last thing we were looking at, it was clear that we own the little girl’s point of view. I’m not sure who’s…. We’re not in the boy’s point of view.
Craig Mazin: We’re no one’s point of view. So, I don’t know whose scenes belong to. If I were directing the scene between Officer Carter and Gabrielle, I’m not sure what they want. They don’t seem to want anything actually. This is a problem. So, in scenes, typically, people are trying to achieve something. Is he hitting on her? He’s not doing a particularly convincing job of it. Does she want something from him? Does she want him to leave? She doesn’t seem like she does, nor does she want him to stay. Everyone’s mild.
John August: Yeah. And mild is usually not a good sign for a first scene.
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: So, let’s go back to our earlier conversation about the Lego pieces. And it’s like it’s entirely possible that Lego piecewise that this is actually building up, stacking up something interesting in the fact that they’re under house arrest, the stakes are going to be useful down the road, but the actual scene work that we’re seeing, the Lego pieces that we’re looking at, they’re confusing, and that’s not helping us.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, even if this exists just to set up that there’s somebody under house arrest and there’s a kid and he’s drawing a weird picture. And maybe there’s some, who knows what’s with the picture. The problem here is the conversation between the cop and this woman. The two of them don’t seem to have any reason to be talking to each other. It’s almost like we’re watching aimless small talk, which you tend to avoid like on planes and in lines.
John August: So, we actually have a logline for this one. So, we now ask for a logline. So, here’s the logline for the whole thing, which I do believe this Lego thing. After mysterious and tragic incident, artist Scarlet finds herself on house arrest at our strange aunt and silent 10-year-old cousin’s big empty house. Soon she begins to experience supernatural events, all of which she suspects is linked to her cousin’s artwork.
Craig Mazin: Sure. And you get a supernaturally vibe from the description of the artwork itself.
John August: But I don’t feel like she’s the central character of the story. It’s showing on the three pages you’ve given us.
Craig Mazin: No. No, this would be… There’s the answer. This should be from her point of view. She’s the hero. Everything that’s happening here is boring. So, if she’s watching all this and she’s watching a cop describe the perimeter and her looking at it-
John August: That’s interesting.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, that would be interesting, yeah, perspective. I would feel like she would have feelings about that. She’s trapped. So, that’s a good thing. And she’s trapped and then she turns and there’s that little kid staring at her. That would be scary and weird. There’s a lot of ways to go. But the key is her. And we get nothing from her except this very bit at the end, which is like-
John August: Her description is-
Craig Mazin: Cold and distant but without angst.
John August: I don’t know how to play that either. I could play cold and distant without angst.
Craig Mazin: Well, angst is incompatible with cold and distant, right? So, I don’t know what the word but is doing. So, I just think cold and distant would be enough. And then, he adds detached, which I think was covered by cold and distant. And she’s-
John August: But also, cold and distant is a hard thing to stick on your central character. That’s the hard first thing to give us a character who is the one we’re going to actually be following through the course of the story.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. I think it’s also something that is the thing you can get from the execution of the character in the scene with the kid. So, if the kid walks in there and he’s like, “Hey, can I… and she just says one word answer or doesn’t answer at all, but just looks away, that’s cold and distant. Better to do that probably.
John August: Yeah. And use that character description line to give us some visual, some specificity about who this character is versus anybody else who could be in this movie.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Last thing, Todd, I would say just on when you’re on mild patrol. On page three, Officer Carter chuckles and tips his hat and then at the end of the page, Scarlet chuckles. Chuckling is just for like grandpa. Yeah-
John August: As Megana laughs.
Craig Mazin: And then, you like to chuckle. That doesn’t count as chuckling. That was a proper laugh. I was thinking of chuckling as like [demonstrates chuckling].
Megana Rao: I see. I see.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Usually, your ruffle a little. Your grandson’s hair because he took him fishing and he said something funny and you go. Chuckling is mild.
John August: Yeah, it’s very mild. All right, let’s get on to Perdition by Terry Rietta. We’ll get a summary from Megana.
Megana Rao: We’re in Cullman, Alabama in the 1830s. Thirteen-year-old Duncan narrates the pastoral setting as he comes upon, strangled 16-year-old Eily’s body by the creek. His father, Loren tells him to go get Pastor Haig. As Duncan runs to the pastor’s house, he flashes back through memories with Eily. Loren and Pastor Haig discuss next steps as they look at the body.
Megana Rao: The sheriff is too far away to reach that day, so they take the corpse to Eily’s home where her mother Eustace falls to pieces at the site of her daughter’s dead body.
John August: Alright. So, yet again, we have young people and dark things happening around them. There were moments here that I like. I liked the idea of finding a body in an older time. We have a sense of what a modern day kid finding a body is. But I liked that it was awkward. And there wasn’t a natural thing to do. There wasn’t police to call. I liked all of that. And yet what I was actually seeing on the page didn’t feel like the best version of this scene in the sequence to me, and there are a lot of small things on there I want to talk about in terms of showing vernacular dialogue, showing accent, showing regionalisms in a way that is suggestive, but not annoying to read, and sometimes just got a little annoying to read in terms of the “gittins” and the “aint’s and the “gahs.”
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And I don’t know, Megana, if these are all linked together by little fantasy moments perhaps because this is the third one in a row now, where there’s a slight fantasy aspect to it because he sees himself playing with the girl when they were younger, and she was choked to death, which I found confusing.
John August: I am confused too. And I don’t know how…. So we’re talking about on page two as he’s running. He sees these things as like, I don’t know that as a viewer. I would get that he was seeing an earlier version of this. And also, it’s weird how the, a teenager, a young person that’s imagining a younger version of himself. That doesn’t happen.
Craig Mazin: It doesn’t happen. And generally, people aren’t looking at themselves in memories. They can see other people in memories perhaps, but happy memories just seemed like we were hit with a pretty tonally shocking thing. And then, on top of that, we were hit with this gimmick. And then, writing over all that is voiceover.
Craig Mazin: So, we have three competing interests. And I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look and feel, but I can tell you what I wanted. To me, what’s really cool is this, a peppercorn snail, and I don’t know what a peppercorn snail is [crosstalk]. But I loved it, a peppercorn snail.
John August: Daddy, I want a peppercorn snail.
Craig Mazin: I want it now. A peppercorn snail crawls up her porcelain shoulder, revealing deep purple bruises around the girl’s neck. I didn’t love it was her and then the girl’s because it sounded like two different people. But what I loved was that there was a snail on a person, and that’s how we find out they’re dead. And that’s really cool and weird. And I wanted basically the kid to shut up. Now, I don’t have anything against voiceover. Sometimes it’s brilliant. In this case, it’s turning everything rather corny.
John August: It is. So, let’s read through the voiceover here. So, it’s labeled as Duncan’s voiceover. I’m confused whether this is Duncan, the 13-year-old kid or an adult. And as I read this aloud, I think you’ll be confused with me. “Cullen, Alabama, was a pretty place anytime of day. Old oaks leaning down, big moss feathered slabs of stone, soft grass will take the print of your foot and hold it. In the spring, the bubbles don’t seem to rise but rather hang like a string of beads. And Eily Jurdan looked the part of it just lying there like a girl in a tale.
John August: Now, in a book, great. I love that. I actually think that’s good writing. And I really do enjoy it. I don’t believe a teenager can say that. So, it has to be an older version.
Craig Mazin: It says a boy, 13, speaks with a soft southern accent.
John August: Yeah. So, I guess that’s him talking but it doesn’t track for me.
Craig Mazin: It doesn’t sound like what anyone would say to anyone. It does sound book-like. It is an omniscient narrator description of things. But if I were describing my town to you and I started talking like this, you would walk away. There’s something wrong with me. Soft grass, it’ll…
John August: I’m going to start doing that.
Craig Mazin: Take the print on your foot and hold, you’d be like, “What? What are you talk… what? Just where are you from?” Staten Island. I think that it’s a bit purple in terms of its prose, which again, in a novel can work. But coming out of someone’s mouth will sound corny. And on top of that, a 13-year-old boy who talks like this should be studied in a lab because it’s just too much.
John August: A very specific on the page note here. So, in that block of dialogue I just read, this voiceover, and Eily in parenthesis, it says rhymes with highly. I like that we have that clarification here. But I was so tempted to read the parenthetical aloud. So, maybe put it in brackets, put it above this if you need to. I didn’t mind knowing how to pronounce it. We also run into problems with Eily on page three. We’re in this open cart and Duncan is in the back. Duncan sits with Eily holding her head in his lap and I had to think like, “Wait, is she dead?” So, I think Eily’s body is really what we needed to have here.
Craig Mazin: Yeah.
John August: On page three is also where we see, the first line is, outta get the sheriff. It should be an oughtta to get sheriff. That oughtta is spelled differently. Half days ride to Huntsville and it’s getting dark. Animals will get at err if we just leave her out. You don’t need the errs in that situation. I think at a certain point you have to stop dropping on all the “g”s. We get a sense of what the sound is supposed to be. But it gets to be frustrating to read that all the time.
Craig Mazin: Yes, you don’t need it. And the actors will generally do that. If you give this to them, you run the risk of really getting a lot of-
John August: But things like animals will get her if we just leave her out. The animals’ll, I like that.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. The animals will get at her. You can say that too. It’s just the err. It does seem a little much… I get immediately confused on page one. First of all, he’s describing things as if they were in the past. But he’s there looking at them in the present. So, I don’t understand quite how that functions.
John August: I don’t know when we are in time.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And then, Loren is this guy who is staring at her. Now we’re going to presume that unless Duncan sounds like a boy boy, that’s who it is because that’s who’s staring at this girl. And it’s the first person we see. Loren it says blends into the setting, granite face, stoic and sporting blood on his pants. Okay, a couple of things. That does not going to blend into the setting, too. You don’t really spurt blood on your pants, blood-stained pants. But when I see a dead body and then I see a guy next to it with blood-stained pants, my mind goes to weird places.
John August: Pretty natural connection. They’re somehow connected that there’s blood on that. Yes.
Craig Mazin: And yet after reading it over a few because I get very disturbed. And then, he said, “Oh, a few freshly caught rabbits dangle from his belt.” Okay.
John August: Maybe start with rabbits.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, maybe start with the rabbits because right now, oh, bloody pants. Nobody wants that.
John August: Page one. Afternoon sun kisses the foothills of the Appalachians, dangerously purple but okay, I’ll allow it. Next slide, hills, pastures, pines, and hardwoods. You said foothills in the previous sentence. I don’t think you need to say hills twice.
Craig Mazin: Yes, I agree. And when we go into this next section, there’s the promise of Eustace. Before we get to Eustace, there’s a preacher. Duncan has been told to run to get the preacher. And Duncan says, is she dot dot dot? And obviously she is. She’s dead. Clearly. He’s 13. He’s not nine, right, or eight. He should know that she’s definitely dead. She’s not breathing. She’s pretty dead-looking. Regardless. And because it’s always this fake-ish. He finally gets to the preacher’s house. He pounds on the old oak door, a weathered… this is second weathered. The other script had a weathered.
John August: Everyone’s weathered.
Craig Mazin: Everyone’s weathers. Kindly man opens it. A cross around his neck and round spectacles on the end of his nose. A bit central casting there for the old person. This is preacher Haig. The preacher’s face falls at the sight of Duncan standing there, tear-stained and out of breath. What happened? Duncan throws himself in the preacher’s arms. Well, this is a whole different type of movie now. What? So, I think maybe he meant collapses into.
John August: Yeah. Yeah. I’m not buying that either. I’m not buying that moment. I don’t mind buying that as an out. So, what happened is a good exit line in general.
Craig Mazin: You don’t need what happened. How about just uh-oh, right? He reacts to this kid standing there. And then, the two of them are chit-chatting. And then, they get to Eustace who I assume is his mom.
John August: Eustace is a man. Eustace looks past the preacher and sees his little girl. So, last thing I want to talk about is there’s a dedication page. So, after the title page before the real script, definition of the word perdition in Christian theology, a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death. Great. I’ll take it like, yeah, I’m fine with that. And that’s a good use of that dedication page.
Craig Mazin: I did not like that perdition was printed out in syllables.
John August: I’m going to allow it because I could see people pronouncing it strangely or getting tripped up on it. If it weren’t for the Road to Perdition, the Sam Mendes movie I wouldn’t know.
Craig Mazin: You wouldn’t know about perdition. So, I think Terry, less novelistic here probably less than general seems like you’ve got a great eye for visuals. You can really see this place and I can see it with you. You probably are over describing in spots. When I say probably, I mean definitely. And given that you have such a good eye for visuals, don’t clutter it quite so much with extra stuff.
John August: I will be fascinated to see the version of this that basically has no dialogue which is all just visuals telling the story and then fill out the scenes you need to. Here’s a logline, 1830s Alabama, after discovering that a small town’s golden girl has been strangled by in a creek and her friend Isaac, a boy 18 with down syndrome has run off with a stolen horse.
Craig Mazin: What?
John August: It’s a confusing logline. A posse is organized by the girl’s wealthy father to bring back the boy to account for the crime they think he committed.
Craig Mazin: I see.
John August: So, it sounds like there’s a posse going after the presumed killer of this girl.
Craig Mazin: Sure. And that’s fine, but that’s not what this is giving me.
John August: No, it’s not.
Craig Mazin: And it feels a little bit, Terry, like you’re forcing To Kill A Mockingbird on us here. It just feels To Kill A Mockingbird-ish. It’s that vibe. And that’s that vibe. And honestly, it’s an old fashioned vibe.
John August: Yeah, to strangle a sparrow.
Craig Mazin: It’s a great book but it’s an old book. We honor the things that come before but then the fact that they get popularized and then recycled and redone a bunch, you got to move past that and I think this feels a little too Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Megana Rao: Can I ask you a question?
Craig Mazin: Sure, of course.
Megana Rao: On page two where Duncan’s sprinting and as he passes the field, he sees himself much younger with Eily playing in the high grass .Say Terry did want to keep that, would you recommend doing another logline or like a flashback? Would that help?
John August: Yes, I would recommend keeping our kid out of it and just seeing the younger version of the girl. I have a hard time imagining how that’s going to help tell the story. I don’t think it works with the Lego piece but I don’t think it’s going to actually help him and the entire thing is trying to construct is to have flashback moments.
Craig Mazin: That’s also the wrong time for this information. I just saw her dead. Give me a moment or two. Let me learn a little bit about… let me at least hear what supposedly the deals with her before you start showing me things that are maybe private things like her kissing some guy behind the barn. At a church, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Maybe there’s a barn near the church, usually aren’t.
John August: No, shouldn’t be.
Craig Mazin: No. Regardless. It’s too soon. Oh, I see. He’s running by the church. And then, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Now, how would you do that?
John August: I don’t know how you do that.
Craig Mazin: I don’t know how you do it.
John August: So, we’re having a hard time visualizing what we’re actually going to see on screen. And that’s a real problem, especially on page 10.
Craig Mazin: Plus, why is he thinking of this at all right now. He’s got a job to do, which is to get to the preacher.
John August: Do your job. Get to the preacher.
Craig Mazin: Throw himself in the preacher’s arms.
Megana Rao: Okay, second question. So, in the last script and maybe in this one, it feels like a thing that you guys are bumping up against is the fake reveal, like false suspense. So, do you think in this script, like with that line is she dot dot dot, if they just said is she dead, that would have been better?
Craig Mazin: Yes. Yes, that actually would have been better because then you would have had an opportunity for the other character to look at him like, what do you think, idiot? And then, that kid could hang his head because that was a stupid question. It gives you an opportunity for humans to interact.
John August: Yeah. And the “is she…” doesn’t… it’s false. Doesn’t feel real. You could say almost anything else would make more sense in that moment. She’s dead, right? Or what do we do? I really don’t have anything. It’s probably better than like the is she because we’re just assuming she’s dead.
Craig Mazin: Is she?
John August: Yeah.
Craig Mazin: Yes.
John August: Is it time for the next sample? Let’s take a look at Helen Sedwick’s pages for Ten Million.
Megana Rao: We open on the San Francisco Bay and close in on an upscale home at Dawn where Patti Wendecker rushes down in her bathrobe to greet a SWAT team of FBI agents pounding at her door. Patti reminisces about the old days in voiceover as we watch federal agents restrain her and storm her home. Patti’s teenage daughters Abby and Monica are escorted downstairs where they’re seated next to Patti. Patti insists the agents have made a mistake until they dragon her husband, Sam, 45, an attorney, whom the agents caught trying to escape in the backyard. Sam apologizes before he’s escorted away. The dFBI asked Patti if she has any firearms in the house.
John August: Great. I like these pages. And I like the situation that was being created here. I’m going to have a lot of very specific notes about things I think could be improved. But meeting this character in this situation, I think feels interesting and right and appropriate. I was a little confused about the time period and start. For some reason, I assume it’s modern day, but it feels like could also be ’80s or ’90s. So, I was a little curious about that. But I was with it moment by moment, which I think is a good sign for these pages. Craig, what was your first instinct on this?
Craig Mazin: Yeah. There is a good reveal here, which I liked. Because she sold me on the fact that they were in the wrong house. And then, turns out they’re not in the wrong house. And that’s interesting. However, there’s a little bit of a thing that happens here early, which lost me a touch and that is Patti in voiceover says, and this is what we hear first as she’s coming downstairs. “If you ask me, the FBI should let you finish your first cup of coffee and run a brush through your hair before they pound on your door with warrants, rifles, and bulletproof vests.” Pound pound pound.
Craig Mazin: Then she opens the door, shakes her head in disgust. “I told them right off you’ve got the wrong house. By noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok.” Now, a couple things, one, shaking your head in disgust. Nobody shakes their head in disgust at the FBI unless they’re like a mob wife and this is the 12th time. This is new. This is weird. Second, by noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok. That makes it sound like that’s exactly what happened. But it isn’t what happened. And also, I don’t see them say you’ve got the… I don’t see her say you’ve got the wrong house. They slam her to the floor. She says sometimes, “I miss those days” in voiceover which I was okay. So, something is interesting.
Craig Mazin: But I was already nervous that I was disconnecting from a normal human reaction to a situation. And I got particularly nervous when the daughters were taken. And towards the end, the agent says to Patti and her girls… and how old are the girls?
John August: They are 16 and 14.
Craig Mazin: Sixteen and 14. Monica is 14. And Daddy has already been dragged off by the FBI and apologizes. Something’s gone terribly wrong. The agents say to Patti and her girls, “Now, don’t move.” And Monica says, “What? And missed all the fun?” Excuse me?
Craig Mazin: You’re 14-year-old mouthing off to the FBI that just apparently justifiably dragged your dad out. And you guys are all on the floor and tied up. No. So, tone was a problem for me. But the layout of things was really interesting. It was a cool scene to start with.
John August: Yeah, I agree. So, I think let’s talk about the daughters because this is about what we hear. Girls scream, Patti’s daughters Abby, 16, and Monica, 14, stumble down the stairs, their hands bound behind them and a behemoth in a black helmet on their tails. Patti tries to stand but with their hands tied behind her, she topples over. The behemoth sits the girls beside Patti and tips her back up.
John August: So, I love Patti trying to stand up. I love the daughters coming down. I don’t know if I believe that they had their hands behind them. Maybe they do. Maybe not.
Craig Mazin: No.
John August: I don’t see it. They’re juveniles. But then, being freaked out is great. But I’m only seeing them as this collective unit. I don’t know anything specific about who they are because they’re not going to be the same girl. And so, give us some visual that distinguishes this. So, who they are, what are they wearing? Are they still in their pajamas? Well, just what’s happening here? Because these are supposed to be important characters I’m taking and I am just getting names for them.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And they screamed, and they are tied up. And yet they’re sassing the FBI. It just didn’t seem to make sense. This is more where the scene ends. But there is a fairly chunky description at the end of this about what’s on the walls.
John August: Let’s about that because I think there’s actually some good stuff there. And maybe it is the right time to wait and hold back where we can sit for a second where we can actually see some of the stuff. The way that their home reflects affluence, but not true wealth, a wall of glass facing the San Francisco Bay, other walls are lined with shelves holding a chaotic assortment of art and mementos, handmade pottery, Mexican alebrijes, bolga baskets, most of which has been tossed to the floor.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, they were tossing stuff earlier. I think it probably would have been better to integrate that into the action. So, it didn’t feel like we stopped things just to get a little cataloging.
John August: Let’s talk about the difference between how Patti is responding in her voiceover and what she’s doing in real life. Because that’s some of the tension that I think you hit on it at the start. She’s not actually saying, “I told them right off, you’ve got the wrong house. She’s not saying those things. And maybe it’s okay that her reporting of what actually happened is different than what we’re seeing, but maybe it needs to be more dramatically different that she actually didn’t really is freaked out and crying.
Craig Mazin: Which she’s not because she’s having it both ways. It’s like, you guys don’t belong here. You have the wrong house. None of that should be happening, which normally, first of all, why is she… when she opens the door, she’s not surprised. So, I’m confused by what her context for them is.
John August: If this felt like a home invasion almost from the start, which is probably what it would feel like, then her natural reaction to that is probably going to be interesting and compelling. And I can imagine there’s a version of this voiceover that is a good counterpoint to it. But I think to reveal the husband can be done better, because right now the husband’s coming in, for whatever reason. It’s morning, but he’s already dressed in a suit. I don’t understand where he was.
Craig Mazin: And he was in the backyard. Right? That’s where they caught him, in the backyard.
John August: Yeah. He’s trying to get out.
Craig Mazin: Right. But how did he even know to get out like… Anyway, there’s a lot of logical issues here. Patti is incredibly not forthcoming with these agents. And I’m not sure why. Everything that she’s describing here sounds like she’s a mob wife, like she is…. So her husband is a criminal. And she knows it. But she’s getting sassy with the feds. This feels Carmela-like a little bit. But that’s not what she’s saying in the voiceover, really.
John August: I’m going to cheat and look at the logline. Because we don’t look at the loglines before we do this. The logline is a woman’s safe suburban life has shattered when the FBI raids her home and arrest her husband, a high price attorney, for stock fraud. So, it’s not a mafia situation.
Craig Mazin: Then this is not correct. Just tonally speaking. Helen, you’ve got a really interesting situation here. But what you’ve done is you’ve shoehorned in an attitude that doesn’t necessarily comport with even if Patti is just that person who’s got that cold ice water in her veins. Her freaking daughters couldn’t be like that. And plus, if your mom and your two daughters have been tied up and thrown downstairs by the FBI, you’re going to be emotional. She’s just very-
John August: Yeah, so I’m going to take this moment to, again, talk about how amazing Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is, but one of the things that Hustlers did so well is the characters comport themselves when they’re being interviewed in formal situations. And they present the story of what happened in a very different way than what we actually see in them happening. And so, I would be fascinated if the voiceover that we’re getting in that character that should present yourself at the end, we’re going to learn through how she became that thing. And it doesn’t match up with the character seen at the start. That can be really-
Craig Mazin: That could be really interesting. Unreliable narrator being proven right in front of us.
John August: Yeah. All right. So, as always, we want to thank our four writers who sent in their Three-Page Challenges. But also, everyone who sent us a Three-Page Challenge. Megana will read through how many for this session.
Megana Rao: A bunch, yeah.
John August: A bunch, a bunch. So, thank you, everyone who sent them in.
Craig Mazin: Five.
John August: If you have pages you would like us to look at on the show, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And you’ll see a forum, which you can fill out the information and click to attach your script. And it goes into a magic mailbox that maybe we can look at and pick things for our next Three-Page Challenge. But, again, thank you, everyone who sent that stuff in.
John August: Now, it’s gotten dark as we record it and it is time for one cool things. My one cool thing is this cool little thing that I got this last week that I found very helpful. Craig, can you describe what this is?
Craig Mazin: Oh, this is one of these things. So, this is a flexible strip that you can snap onto your arm. And it lights up. That’s cool.
John August: Yeah, so it’s like a slap wrist.
Craig Mazin: Slap wrist bracelet.
John August: This bracelet thing, but it has an LED inside of it. So, it reflects but also it glows. And so, if you’re running at night or walking your dog, I find it actually really helpful because cars can see you. It can be set to just be a steady light or it can blink and so people can see you because I just find that this time of year, both as a driver and as pedestrian or a runner, it just becomes a little bit dicey because you don’t know that people can actually see you. So, I recommend this. This is cheap. I’ll put a link to it on Amazon. This is the Nite Ize SlapLit, SlapLit.
Craig Mazin: Sorry. SlapLit.
John August: SlapLit, LED Slap Wrap.
Craig Mazin: SlapLit.
John August: Yeah, there’s other ones that-
Craig Mazin: Oh, SlapLit.
John August: SlapLit.
Craig Mazin: I thought it was Slap Let.
John August: SlapLit.
Craig Mazin: Like a Slap Let like a bracelet.
John August: SlapLit.
Craig Mazin: So, SlapLit.
John August: So, I would just recommend this if you’re going to be outside walking in a place where a car can hit you.
Craig Mazin: How much does that cost?
John August: It’s really cheap.
Craig Mazin: I’m looking up right now. The SlapLit is currently going on Amazon for $10.59.
John August: So, to not be hit by a car, I think it’s money well spent.
Craig Mazin: My one cool thing is slightly more expensive than this.
John August: All right, tell us.
Craig Mazin: If you’re in the market for a new computer. And we are writers, it is our instrument. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone, of course. It’s a bit of a budget buster. However, in the sense of the technological aspect, the new MacBook Pro 16 with the Apple, this one has the Apple M1 Max, is spectacular. It said return to a chunkier MacBook Pro, which I actually like. I never needed it to be the MacBook Air. I never needed it to be slender. It’s a little heavier. They got rid of the glowy bar that was a wonderful gimmick that literally nobody wanted or liked. The screen is brilliant. But my God, the speed on this thing is remarkable. And the fan doesn’t run. It also uses way less energy so the battery lasts way longer. It’s just everything you would hope for has been put in here. I was telling Megana that the thing that I use that’s the most processor-intensive is when we play Dungeons and Dragons.
John August: And so, last night when you’re playing you were using on this machine and your ability to hang on an app, which is much, much faster.
Craig Mazin: Oh my god. And so, did it read faster-
John August: Oh, yes. Faster, yeah.
Craig Mazin: Because normally it would be like wuuuuuuuuh, and now it’s like poink, which is awesome. And my side, because I’m the DM, my side is always going to be the hardest one to run because it’s seeing everything. So, it’s rendering everything all at once all the time. And it’s also showing me all of your lines of sight. So, it’s basically doing five or six times the work that your computer’s doing. Plus we’re running Zoom. It’s great. So, just a huge thumbs up on these suckers. My favorite computer.
John August: On my home office here, I have an iMac which is my main one. But of course, the MacBooks are much faster than my iMac is at this point, which is frustrating. Megana and I both have the M1 MacBook Air, which have been great. They’ve been super-fast and reliable. Again, you don’t appreciate how nice it is to not have your fan run for anything but the battery lasts forever. It’s smart and good. It’s good.
John August: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by added by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask @johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send the longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great as well as hoodies, too. You can find my Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes @johnaugest.com. That’s also where you find the Three-Page Challenges that we talked about today. You can find transcripts and can sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptsnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. And starting this week, you can also listen to us on Spotify.
John August: So, if you’re a premium member and want to listen to it through the Spotify app, there are instructions for that. We emailed it to you but you could probably figure it out. It’s not that hard. But if you’re confused, we’ve sent you an email. So, search your email history because we sent you screenshots on how to sign up in Spotify, if you want to listen to the premium feed in your Spotify. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.
Megana Rao: Thank you.
Craig Mazin: Thank you.
John August: All right. For this bonus segment, this is a question we got from Kyle in New York City.
Megana Rao: I’m an amateur screenwriter who started writing during the pandemic.
John August: We don’t believe the word amateur screenwriter.
Megana Rao: I’m represented but hope to eventually get to the point of being paid for my work. I’ve encountered an issue where I can write really well when I’m excited about a project. But I tend to get bored easily. And once something bores me, it’s nearly impossible for me to find the energy to keep hacking at it. I could be wrong since I’m new to the craft. But I imagine one of the traits that separates amateurs from professionals is the ability to keep going even if you’re not feeling what you’re writing. We can’t all be on 100% of the time.
Megana Rao: Do you have any mental tools or tricks you’d recommend for getting back to a place of energy around a project to make sure you give it its due diligence? What do you do when you need to finish a project but are sick of it?
John August: Kyle, I have to embrace you. You’re the only person who’s ever felt this way. Literally from the moment I start a project to the moment I finished project, I fall more in love with it. I start out really liking it. And I realized, no, I’m deeply, deeply in love with it. This is the best thing I’ve ever written. And I cannot wait to get to it every morning.
Craig Mazin: Do you have more sex with your spouse now than you did when you first met?
John August: 100%.
Craig Mazin: Through the roof.
John August: It’s crazy.
Craig Mazin: There’s not enough time in the day and it gets worse year after year.
John August: So, it’s the right equivalent, where I just can’t get my hands off the keyboard. I’m so eager to get back to this project and just keep writing it. I have hypergraphia is really what it is, is that compulsion to write is really this one idea that is just so good. And really everything I’ve ever touched, it’s been that experience.
Craig Mazin: Well, Kyle. So, look, good and bad news. The good news is, yep, you’re like us. You’re like human beings. I don’t know if there’s necessarily anything you can do to get back to that original feeling of excitement. Nor should you need to or want to. Because the original feeling of excitement is a fresh romantic vibe. It means your brain is buzzing because something new has collided into it. The work that we do is to execute carefully and steadily. And that is sometimes rather boring. It’s certainly rigorous. But you’re not going to get that excitement. It’s gone, it’s over. And it will never come back. And like I said last week from beloved Polish poet, even success feels like failure. So, really, this is a goal-oriented process. It is a process process and that you need to learn how to sustain yourself through the process, which is not particularly exciting. But you must be driving toward the goal of finishing.
Craig Mazin: The difference between professionals and amateurs is not that we have the “ability to keep going even if we’re not feeling what we’re writing.” The difference is we’re paid. That’s literally the difference between professionals and amateurs. And it turns out that when you are paid and there are lawyers and contracts, you don’t have the option. You have to do it. And this is actually quite valuable.
John August: There have been times on projects where I’ve just been so frustrated that actually I calculated. This is early in my career when I wasn’t making much money, but I was like, I’m going to calculate how much I am being paid per page. And that’ll get me through this day’s work.
Craig Mazin: But there’s also times where I thought, what would happen if I just gave the money back, every writers had that moment. And lately, sometimes I’ll just think to myself, if I’m in an elevator in a tall building, I’ll just turn to… if I’m with Jacq or Bo and I’ll just say, “Well, if the elevator just plummets, I won’t have to write these episodes,” just get out of some writing, which should be nice. This is the deal.
Craig Mazin: But then, you have moments where you do well. And you will not have those moments until they have happened. They do not happen before they happen. So, you have to do the work to make them happen without having them happen.
John August: So, Kyle’s experiencing intrinsic validation, where he was loving the product, he’s loving doing this because of the excitement about the idea and it was all internally generated. And eventually, it just faded away. And he’s waiting for that moment where there’ll be external forces that will tell him like, “No, no, it’s good. It’s exciting. You’ve done a good job. “And that hasn’t kicked in yet. That’s the reality of being a new person at this.
John August: The other thing I will say is that as you have more experience and no one’s an amateur screenwriter. You’re a newer screenwriter. You don’t have the experience to be able to tell like, “Oh, is this a crush, or is this a possible relationship”, when it comes to a project idea. And so, sometimes you have a crush, like, “Oh my god, I’m so excited about this.”
John August: But Craig and I, you and I both have enough experience to know this is a crush that will pass and I can see what the problem is going to be. And I will fall out of love with this versus there’s some ideas because you’re like, “Oh, that’s a genuinely good idea that I can build a relationship with this project.” This is a thing that can actually sustain and build.
John August: And so, the choice of whether to buckle down or bail, we can make a different calculation because we know how this all goes and we know where this is. But we can only do that because we’ve been in other writing relationships with other projects that know how we react, how projects react. We just know how it all works.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And I think Kyle probably like most people, his relationship with movies and television is he sees finished products. He doesn’t have a finished product. And even worse, he has to dive into every little grain of this thing over and over and over and over again. It becomes mind-numbing. I can be maddening. And wait until you get into the editing bay. And then, you’re really going over and over and over and over.
Craig Mazin: It’s just the nature of the gig. It’s very foreign to everyone. I think nobody experiences this for the first time it goes, “Is this process been my whole life?” It’s grueling.
John August: Let’s go back to a word he says. I get bored easily. So, let’s talk about boredom. And so, boredom is it happens when it’s no longer new. It’s no longer exciting. It’s no longer fresh. But also, it’s because you don’t know what to do. It’s not intriguing, or the problems in front of you are not interesting, solvable problems, are actually just difficult problems you have to grind on and get through them.
John August: And so, I would say try to look for ways to make that day’s work less boring. Make some challenges for yourself. How can you approach this scene, this Lego piece, and make this the most interesting Lego piece it can possibly be? And once you tackle that, then you get on the next one, the next one eventually. You might fall back in love with it because you see something in this that you didn’t even see when you were first crushing on it.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. Megana, do you have any tricks for yourself when you’re feeling bored or unmotivated?
Megana Rao: I usually have a playlist associated with a project and sometimes listening to that helps, or getting external feedback can help me, I don’t know, relive excitement about certain parts of it. Okay, I have a question for you guys. So, in talking about having a crush on a project versus a long-term relationship. So, I was recently working on a project where I felt like I was banging my head against the wall for so long. And it just felt like endless and I should just walk away from it. Because I’m never going to figure out these problems.
Megana Rao: All of a sudden, it felt like the wall broke open and there was sunlight, and I could see my way out. I’m just confused how I make that differentiation. Do I trust that that’s going to happen always because it happened this time?
John August: I don’t think you can necessarily trust. There’s been projects like that for years. Where I just got to a certain point I just couldn’t quite crack what that was, or that there’s something that I knew was not working quite right. And it just was wrong. And so, even though we have experience with these writing relationships, we can’t know how it’s all going to go or work and how it’s going to really be on the page.
Craig Mazin: Yeah, again, balance. You just wait and hope. But there is a difference, I think between a project where you are stuck but you wish you had the answer, and a project where you stuck because you don’t care what the answer is. And if you’re in that space-
John August: You can stop writing.
Craig Mazin: … it’s over.
John August: Yeah. So, I think the only case you made for finishing that project is if you’re pretty close and you just think you need to have the experience of having finished the things, that makes sense.
Craig Mazin: Which is-
John August: Something.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. There is a resilience that’s required, obviously, to do all of this. But I think if it gets hard, don’t confuse hard with bored. Don’t confuse I think I’m maybe not good enough to do this with bored. Boredom is an all-purpose term for dissatisfaction. But you have to interrogate a little bit why you’re dissatisfied with this. And here’s the tricky part for people who are starting out, a lot of their ideas are bad.
Craig Mazin: And a lot of times, even if the idea is good, their method of executing is bad. So, they should stop because it’s bad. But then, if you don’t finish, you don’t get better. So, balance.
John August: Yeah. You got to work through it. There’s a case we made for finishing those things. The other thing I’ll remind people is that a lot of times, newer screenwriters were always really good at school, for example. They’re always really good writers. And everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re a good writer.” And so, they approach this thing. And they have the sense of like, “I know what good writing is. People tell me I’m a good writer.”
John August: And then, something that’s been comparatively easy for them versus other people, they’re in the middle of it like, “Crap, it’s really hard to write. This is actually exhausting. I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I’m just bad. Or maybe it’s this project.” And you’re just not used to struggling.
John August: And sometimes, what you’re saying is bored, it’s actually you’re just struggling and it’s new and it’s uncomfortable and you’re not used to be uncomfortable writing. But that’s what writing is.
Craig Mazin: And our culture encourages everybody to be a jerk. So, everybody grows up. If you’re interested in film, if you’re interested in TV, perversely, you are encouraged by culture and like-minded people to crap all over everything all the time. So, you become rather convinced that it is easy, because look at all the garbage. This is what Ted Elliott has always called crap-plus-one, your job, you think is to just write one better than all the crap out there.
Craig Mazin: But the truth is, with the rarest of exceptions, if you are a new writer, you are actually not good enough to write the crap. That’s how bad you are. And that’s how hard it is. It’s so much harder than they think. So, when they get into it, there is a cognitive dissonance between this thing that’s supposed to be so simple and how hard it is.
Craig Mazin: And I think maybe the brain convinces you that you’re just bored. Because the only other explanation is, you’re not good enough. But you’re not until you are. And unfortunately, you’re never good enough, because you’re just as good as you could be on that day. You try and get better. And then, it’s over.
John August: I’m thinking about Megana and Megana’s metaphor for you and your writing group has a chance of accountability. And so, where you have to do stuff and that might be actually a humble thing for Kyle to find at some group of people who he can be accountable for. So, he’s actually getting some work done. And he also recognized like everyone is struggling at the same time in the same ways. And he can get a sense of how it all fits. And if you could find the right group that might get him on board.
Craig Mazin: Yeah. And you can always pick somebody that if you vibe with that person and say, “Look, we’re going to spend two hours. For one hour, I’m going to talk to you about my problems about this script. And then, for the other hour, you’re going to talk about your problems with the script.” And the only ground rule is that nobody can say, yeah, I thought of that but. Or, yeah, I tried that but. Because that’s just annoying to everybody. Just pretend you didn’t talk it through. Talk everything through.
Craig Mazin: Sometimes just talking makes it clear. If you write alone, you can go deep into your own weird mind and get totally lost and you can confuse feelings with facts.
Megana Rao: One more pitch for writers’ group. There have been times where I’ve gotten so bogged down in the weeds and really unexcited about a project but the people in my writers’ group who have seen it since the inception have reminded me what excited me about it and that can be really helpful.
Craig Mazin: Yes, something was there. You had something that made you do all of this. Certainly, Kyle, if you are writing by the seat of your pants and you feel you have a tendency to get bored, I would strongly recommend plotting the whole thing out first. It’s hard to get bored when you know exactly what you’re supposed to write that day,
John August: Yeah, if you had a good outline and then you could really approach how to make this piece the most awesome scene it could possibly be and not going to waste the work, that might help him.
Craig Mazin: Precisely.
Links:
- WGA Introduces Project Page check out the pdf here.
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenges: Firebird by Benjamin Blattberg, The Drawing by Todd William Knack, Perdition by Terry Rietta, Ten Million by Helen Sedwick
- Nite Ize SlapLit LED Slap Wrap
- The New 16 inch MacBook Pro
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! You can now listen to Scriptnotes Premium on Spotify!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 529: The Journey, The Destination, and Movie Lego, Transcript first appeared on John August.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John August: This is episode 530 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll look at making TV in the U.S. versus the UK, and what writers on either continent need to know. Then we’ll discuss disability on screen and behind screen. As we get ready to move into 2022, we’ll focus on some goals you can control. Now, Craig, since you and I are not well versed on several of these topics, could you suggest someone who could talk to us more eloquently about these issues?
Craig Mazin: When you’re looking for somebody who is eloquent and you can’t find that person, you immediately to turn to Jack Thorne. One of my past One Cool Things, one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite people in the world, Jack is, among other things, very tall. He is wonderfully British and a spectacularly good and almost as importantly, spectacularly prolific writer. Among his as many brilliant credits are the The Aeronauts, National Treasure, not the looking for treasure in the U.S., but National Treasure, the sexual abuse scandal film that was done in the UK, Wonder, Enola Holmes, The Secret Garden. Television credits include His Dark Materials, Skins, Shameless, and the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, along with the miniseries This is Britain. Basically Jack is kind of the cornerstone, as far as I’m concerned, of modern English screenwriting for feature and television, and again, one of my favorite people in the world. If he weren’t already wonderful enough, he’s gone and kind of out-sainted you, John, which is really hard to do, by giving voice to an issue that has gotten a bit of a short shrift as our industry, global industry, has attempted to rectify sins of the past and do better for everyone working within. That is advocacy for disabilities and the representation of disabilities and disabled folks on screen. Welcome Jack Thorne.
Jack Thorne: Thank you for having me. You’re very nice.
Craig Mazin: I agree.
John August: Jack Thorne manages to be incredibly humble. Even in emails, you could hear his voice. This is the first time I’m really meeting him, but you could hear his humility in an email like, “Oh, I shouldn’t even be on the show.” It’s like, of course you should be on the show. Thank you very much for agreeing to join us here.
Jack Thorne: You’re very kind. I feel like I sort of thrust myself upon you, but yes, all good.
John August: Now we’re going to talk about these things, but I also want to, for a bonus topic, get into the differences between American English and British English and sort of how you reveal which side of the pond you’re on in your screenwriting and whether you should basically put the U’s in the words when you’re writing a British thing. We’ll get the official answer from you about writing American versus writing British.
Craig Mazin: Just spoiler alert. Don’t use the phrase fanny pack when you’re writing in England.
John August: Now, as I was watching your MacTaggart lecture, which we’re going to put a link in the show notes to, it was one of Craig’s previous One Cool Things, we have questions about it from our listeners, but as I started listening to it, I recognized that this is a famous lecture given every year at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Edinburgh TV Festival I guess, about television. Can you just give us a sense of what the MacTaggart lecture is? Your being chosen for it was an honor, of course, but also probably a huge responsibility. Then we can maybe transition into really talking about British television, because I kind of only barely understand it.
Jack Thorne: The MacTaggart is a big thing. It’s had all sorts of different stages in its existence. More recently it’s had quite a lot of makers talk. Michaela Coel famously gave a speech which laid the groundwork for what became I May Destroy You. Before that there was a period when it just basically took the most powerful people in television and gave them a microphone, which included at one point an excruciating lecture from James Murdoch. It’s had lots of different iterations. Everyone from Dennis Potter to Troy Kennedy has done it at different points, and it was a ridiculous honor to be given it, and as you say, a huge responsibility, because coming out of COVID in particular, it was clear what I needed to talk about, but whether I had the necessary means to talk about those things, whether I had the moral power to talk about those things, were questions I really wrestled with.
Craig Mazin: Let’s talk about your moral qualifications. By the way, I should apologize. The shows you work on were called This Is England, not This Is Britain, but I’m a donkey, so this’ll happen every now and again. Why were you wondering if you were morally qualified to deliver this talk? In what ways do you have any kind of personal insight into this, or why this? Why connect it to this topic for you?
Jack Thorne: I walk a really weird line where disability is concerned in that I was a disabled person. I had a physical breakdown when I was 21. I got this condition called cholinergic urticaria, which left me unable to move. I became allergic to heats in all its forms. I became allergic to sunlight. I became allergic to radiators. I became allergic to my body movement. Every time I moved, I provoked an allergic reaction. I spent six months flat on my back, and then slowly but surely I worked out how to get better. I got on the right medication and I got the right doc support. It was about 12 to 15 years of my life, I was very limited in terms of what I could do, but I got better.
Jack Thorne: Now during that time, there’s this theater company in the UK called Graeae. Graeae are this wonderful company, disabled-led, that’s trying tell stories about the disabled experience with disabled performers and disabled writers and disabled makers. They have this open day. I went along to this open day, unsure whether I belonged or not. I talked to a woman there called Alex Baumer, and she said, “Of course you belong here. You are a disabled person.” It felt like something just kind of … My back straightened. It was like, “Oh right, this is where my pain makes sense,” because the thing is, if you are battling pain every day as I was, you don’t really know who to talk to about it. There comes a point where people get a bit bored of hearing you talk about it, and so you sort of stop talking about it. That thing of being part of a community of people for whom pain was an everyday occurrence and who navigated these things, and it didn’t mean that I had someone to moan to, it just meant that I felt like I belong somewhere.
Jack Thorne: The way I talk about myself now is I was a disabled person, I am now a member of the disabled community. Whether that’s legitimate or not, I don’t know, but it’s what I cling to because I think that that experience and what happened to me is a history that’s still very current in my body, and it’s a history that’s still very current in my head. I’m trying to, as much as I can, do disabled work and have disabled performers and disabled makers within my shows. I am in no way an angel where that is concerned. I have got it wrong a huge number of times. As I talk in the lecture, I have been a coward a huge number of times. That question as to can I talk about this, is it legitimate for me to talk about this, and how will people feel about me holding the microphone when I talk about these issues, when I’m not someone who has the stigma and the attacks, who isn’t coping currently with a disability, how will people feel about me being the one that’s holding that microphone?
Craig Mazin: They seem to feel pretty good about it, from what I can tell. The response was dramatic and it was extremely well received, and for good reason. You have chosen an excellent cri de coeur, and you have delivered it beautifully. One of the things you talk about are the notion of invisible disabilities. Disability is something that affects everyone sooner or later. This is a universal condition at some point for everyone. Chronic pain is something that an enormous amount of people live with silently. I myself have lived with chronic pain now for about four years. I don’t talk about it much, or ever. Here I am. I’m okay. We carry on. I’m very British this way I suppose. I should start saying English. I’m very English this way. It is something that everybody deals with to some level or another.
Craig Mazin: One of the things that I really admire about you is that while you have talked a little bit about how and why you came to be inside of this movement, you also don’t make it about yourself. You recognize that there are tiers of disability and that there are people who have been more egregiously treated and more egregiously left out. That is something that is happening on both sides of the camera, behind and in front, in terms of how people, when we create characters who are disabled, how we treat and portray them, who we hire to cast them, who is writing those characters. All these questions are now coming to the forefront in a way that I think had not happened until people like you, not only you, but people like you really started banging the gong over the last few years.
Jack Thorne: The way I see it is that I’m temporarily in a spotlight for a moment. I was given that spotlight by the MacTaggart, and my job is to get out of that spotlight as fast as possible, which would be nice, personally would be nice, in order to let more legitimate people come to the front. I’m trying to do that in my working practice too, in terms of co-writing and producing and trying to change the dial so that the spotlight is filled with those people that it should be.
John August: Great. Before we get to some of the recommendations about improving portrayals of disability on screen and the work behind screen, can we talk a little bit about the environment in which you’re giving this lecture? Because I don’t think we have anything equivalent to this in the United States. We have upfronts, which is the annual meeting of big advertisers where they pitch their big new shows. In the film industry we have the big exhibitor screenings where we’re talking about things. We don’t have a situation where there is one point of focus saying this is the state of the industry, this is an important thing we must focus on, whether it be you talking about this, Michaela Coel or Rupert Murdoch. We don’t have anybody talking about this and what needs to change, why it needs to change. I think you also bring up in the lecture is that television actually does have a moral responsibility because it is in everyone’s home. Can you talk to us about how television functions in the UK and if you feel like that might be different than how it functions in the U.S? I feel as an outsider, I think there is a central authority to television in the UK that does not exist in the U.S.
Jack Thorne: That’s really interesting. It’s not something I’ve especially thought about in terms of comparing the two, but we do, I suppose, wrestle a bit more in this country, maybe with the general state of the industry rather than specific programs. The MacTaggart is supposed to be that conversation, what should TV be, because yeah, I think that TV is hugely important. I think it’s the stimulation of a conversation. If you look at the trajectory of where we are, I think TV, sometimes it’s reflecting society and sometimes it’s pushing society on. The movement between the West Wing to Succession is quite a stark point. What it means that we want society reflected that way, or is the reflection provoking the society that is, is I think a really, really fascinating question and something I think about an awful lot.
Craig Mazin: You’ve got a situation in the UK where there seems to be a lot more state involvement in practically everything, and television is no exception. BBC, I don’t know if it is technically the most viewed channel on television, but it’s certainly-
Jack Thorne: I would suspect so. I would suspect so.
Craig Mazin: In the United States, PBS gets about 12 people a week watching it. I apologize, PBS. I know it’s more than that, but it’s very small. As John says, all of our gatherings, whether it’s the Television Critics Association or the upfronts as you mentioned, it’s all commerce. It’s all about selling. That’s partly because it is entirely a question of corporations and not at all a question of the state, and therefore there is no governmental interest or point of view in the United States. Television is an industry and it is not necessarily ever promoted as some kind of potential lever for good. I think that is a cultural difference between the United States and the UK that is stark. It makes a lot of sense that in the UK television and culture in general would be spoken about both in terms of commerce, but also in terms of how to promote the public good. I’m interested in how you feel things have gone practically. I know that at least in the public space of discussion, your lecture, as I mentioned before, was incredibly well received. It was reprinted and revideoed everywhere. I think it’s the kind of thing that makes people feel really good to talk about. My question is are they just talking about it or are things changing? Because ultimately I feel like the only prayer we have over here is in this instance seeing some leadership from your side of the pond.
Jack Thorne: As part of what has happened in the last year, I’ve been part of this pressure group. We call ourselves a pressure group called Underlying Health Condition. We call ourselves Underlying Health Condition because we are angry at the appropriation of that phrase to describe essentially disabled people and disabled deaths. Certainly in the first half of the pandemic, the idea of dividing deaths in two seemed to go everywhere, where it was like, okay, there’s one set of deaths that we worry about and then there’s one set of deaths that we really don’t. We had our first Omicron death in this country recently. you saw the question being asked everywhere, which is, did he have an underlying health condition, in that should we be concerned or is it just happening to disabled people? We formed this pressure group, and we formed this pressure group to look at TV. My lecture came out of that pressure group, and now we’ve launched a report on the back of our findings. A number of different things have happened in the last six months, that straight after the lecture that the BBC and Netflix and Channel Four made commitments to disabled programming. There were certainly mooted commitments from Sky and Channel Five too.
Jack Thorne: What we are focused on, I mean Underlying Health Condition, which isn’t just me, it’s me, Katie Player and Holly Lubran, who are two people that work behind the scenes, and Genevieve Barr, who is an actress and a co-writer of mine, we’ve done three things together, and a writer in her own right too, and what our focus has been on is accessibility, because TV is incredibly inaccessible. I’ve been sitting on panels with disabled actors and makers for the last 15 years, and at the start of every discussion, the first question that basically comes up is how do we make TV accessible to us, because we can’t use the toilet.
Jack Thorne: Underlying Health Condition did a survey of facilities companies and of studio spaces. Facilities companies, one of the starkest findings was there is one accessible honey wagon. The honey wagon is our name for toilets. I don’t know whether you call the toilets-
Craig Mazin: We call it that too.
John August: Honey wagon, right.
Jack Thorne: There’s one accessible honey wagon in the whole of the UK. For 20% of the population, there’s one toilet that they can use. I hear stories all the time from friends who are wheelchair users about trying to restrict how much they use the toilet, because using the toilet costs the production time, and they do not want to be responsible for costing the production time, because this is the reality for disabled people all the time, which is we do not want to cause trouble. If we cause trouble, we might not get hired again. On panels, every single time that would come up. From friends, every single time that would come up. We set out, trying to work out how our industry could break down the barriers, how we could reform the way that the industry functions so that if you are a disabled person, you are not excluded by the space you work in. The response to that has also been very good. We are at the start of that process. It’s going to require a big injection of time and money. Who knows what practical things will come out? Certainly at the moment I’m talking to very senior people in the BCC and Channel Four and ITV and in Sky and Amazon and Netflix, and going to find ways to address our recommendations. There is stuff happening. It’s just it’s going to take a while. It’s going to be hard.
Jack Thorne: In terms of what you say about the U.S, that’s really interesting. We work closely with the One In Four Coalition, which was set up by a wonderful talent manager called Eryn Brown. What she’s done is amazing. One of our key recommendations is for an accessibility officer on every set.
John August: That’s interesting.
Jack Thorne: That comes from One In Four. They have been at the forefront of that. They say the same as you, which is maybe, if Britain, which is a smaller community with more government, maybe if Britain sets about answering some of these questions, then the ripples can be felt in the U.S.
Craig Mazin: That’s really interesting.
John August: We’re going to put links in the show notes to both the Underlying Health report and the One In Four Coalition to see the recommendations. There’s overlap between the two of them, but I want to focus on the four key recommendations that you have in your report, which they seem very practical, which really speaks to the fact that you are a person who makes television and understands that you need to actually be able to do things and achieve things and make things happen. The first recommendation is a line in every budget for needed adjustments. Talk to us about adjustments that might need to come up in a budget to make a show accessible to a disabled person.
Jack Thorne: That was about making the production responsible for those adjustments. By the way, you say in terms of practicality, I am useless. I am one of the least practical people alive. Katie Player, who’s one of my co-writers on this, is a production manager. She understood behind the scenes a lot better than us. When it was coming up with these recommendations, she has been an invaluable part of that. The idea is that there is small fund, and by small we’re talking 5,000 pounds adjustable down if you’re a smaller production, which is available for interpreters, is available for ramps, is available for a stool, is available for anything that the accessibility officer or coordinator suggests that just might make the experience better. It’s not a radical sort of like, “Yeah, we’re going to have to build something specifically for a purpose.” It’s about adjusting what we’ve got.
Jack Thorne: Katie worked on a show of mine a few years ago and managed to get a hold of a ramp that she now takes with her wherever she goes. She was working on another production where the ramp didn’t quite go down to the floor because the trailers were a bit higher, so someone built her a little wooden extension to the ramp. Those sorts of things, it’s not a huge amount of money, but it can make a huge difference that the production is prepared and ready and considering the adjustments that might be required for a disabled person.
Craig Mazin: It doesn’t seem like that an enormous amount of resources are required. What’s required is a minimum of care. When we all started in the business and somebody was walking around, let’s say on some sort of elevated space in a scene, they would walk around and the stunt people would say, “Don’t get too close to the edge,” and you wouldn’t get too close to the edge. Now we tether people and we paint it out digitally because we have safety standards that are stricter. Yet as we have advanced the cause of safety where we can, we don’t have disabled accessible toilets or a trailer that has something other than steps on it. I watch even people who aren’t disabled but merely old struggle on sets. I struggle on sets at times just to get around and over things. It is not the most hospitable place. Changing things would not require a lot of money. It seems to me that it just needs attention, a small amount of attention, which is why I’m desperately hopeful that this kind of attention that you’re bringing to this is going to work.
Craig Mazin: Normally what you hear is, “Yes, no, of course, and we’re absolutely looking into these things, but it’s a large budget item,” and rah rah blah blah blah, of course. They’re discussing this while they’re having dinner and charging it back to the production. Something for instance, you mentioned the idea of a disability coordinator I think. Is that what you called it, a disability coordinator?
Jack Thorne: Accessibility.
Craig Mazin: Accessibility coordinator. Even better. We have intimacy coordinators now. We never did before. In the old days there would be sex scenes, there would be scenes with nudity, and some of those sex scenes were violent and criminal in nature, and people would just do it. A lot of weird stuff happened. A lot of bad stuff happened. There was certainly an enormous amount of pressure on people and confusion about boundaries. Now we have an entire professional class of people who appear to help mitigate those problems. We’ve had somebody like that on our set, not for a sex scene, but just because there was something that involved some nudity. It was amazing having her there. She made everything really clear and simple. It was a relief. I would think that productions would want this, because it’s a relief to have somebody help you navigate through it, especially if you are running the production and you aren’t disabled and you don’t have a lot of personal experience with people with disabilities. Then let’s just hire the people who do and let’s make everybody comfortable and welcome, physically comfortable and physically welcome.
Jack Thorne: Absolutely. Disability is a spectrum. It could be that there are people who identify as disabled and for whom the accessibility coordinator will make a huge, huge difference immediately. There are others on the set who won’t necessarily know how to talk about what’s going on with them. To have someone that they can talk to privately about what needs they might have that the production isn’t automatically addressing will make a huge difference to the comfort of their lives and their ability to do the job. It’s such a small thing, but it could just create an unbelievable change in how people feel going to work. It stops things happening like, a friend of mine’s a producer, the production was on the fourth floor, the lift stopped working, so they put her in the canteen. She wasn’t part of the production from then on. She was just excluded on the outside of it. That happens all the time. If you have someone that’s just there to go, “This doesn’t work. We need to address it in a different way. We need to radically think about things or just moderately think about things,” the difference could be profound.
Craig Mazin: We’ll get to lift versus elevator later.
John August: Our premium members can hear about the lift versus elevator debate. Now you were talking about the needs on a set or the physical needs of a place, but one of your recommendations seems more targeting who gets to actually be able to write on programs. This is freelancer funds coming out of the high-end TV pool, which is where I recognize that I don’t know how British TV works, because what is a-
Craig Mazin: What is that?
John August: … high-end TV pool? Your MacTaggart lecture also mentions different tiers of budgets. Can you talk us through what those are? Because it’s really confusing to me.
Jack Thorne: I don’t know it all. High-end TV is everything I believe above 750,000 pounds an hour. That’s about a million dollars would it be?
Craig Mazin: Yep.
John August: About a million.
Jack Thorne: The high-end TV pool was formed a little while ago. It was a commitment by broadcasters that if your show was above that tariff, if your show budgeted above that tariff, then you would pay not .5% of your budget into a pool, which was for training purposes for people coming into the industry. It’s run by an amazing group called Screen Skills. Screen Skills have been talking to us about whether they could be part of this freelancers fund. It would be amazing if they can. The idea is that it’s not .1% on top of that, which would just allow for disabled people who have needs to have those needs cared for.
Jack Thorne: I was working on a show. Someone’s call was at 6:00 a.m. Now if their call is at 6:00 a.m. that requires a carer to be with them at 3:00 a.m. They don’t have the money in their budget, their personal budget, to have a carer with them at 3:00 a.m. If they had access to this freelancers fund, that would allow for it. Similarly, deaf people and having an interpreter around both on set and off set so that they are not excluded from the processes that are happening off set as well as on set. All these things require someone to make life work more easily for those who have impairments. A freelancers fund would allow for that.
Jack Thorne: Now we have something in the UK called Access to Work, which is for disabled people to access, which is supposedly for that, for the adjustments that they need that go beyond what an industry would pay for them, so that the industry wasn’t paying for them so that the government pays that bit so that the industry still pays their wage and so people aren’t excluded from work. It’s a very, very brilliant scheme. Unfortunately, it doesn’t operate very well in the TV sector because our jobs are very transitory, can happen very quickly, and also Access To Work has had quite a few cuts to it in the last 15 years under the Tory government, which has meant that it operates a little less well than it used to, well a lot less well than it used to.
Jack Thorne: We think that this fund, which the rich in the TV industry will pay for, you know that everyone that makes high-end TV is rich in comparison to the rest of the country, our industry is doing very well compared to the rest of the country, would allow for a world in which disabled creatives would have power over their own agency.
John August: The point to bring up here is that it’s one thing, with it probably equivalent thing American with Disabilities Act, which requires that place of employment, place you need to go into are accessible. It’s one thing if you have an office worker who’s making sure that getting into the office building and the use of the office building is accessible, but a freelancer going from show to show to show, in television or in film, they cannot count on the fact that things are going to be accessible for them. Some sort of funds that let them bring their accessibility with them feels crucial. I think that gives me some hope that some of these changes can be implemented. As we saw with the advent of COVID that studios really wanted to be back in production as they found ways to, “Okay, we’re going to set up COVID funds. We’re going to figure out how to do this thing.” It was really difficult, but you know what? We made a lot of good film and television during the pandemic once we figured out how to do this stuff. They can spend money when it’s in their interest to spend money.
Craig Mazin: Oh yes. Think about this, John. Every day our production is providing health support and services to every single member of our crew in the form of COVID testing and making sure that everybody has PPE and all of that stuff. We do it. There’s an entire job now, and an entire team of people working for the guy who’s in charge of COVID compliance. We have cleaners that we didn’t used to have before. We were able to mobilize an entire new department, new division of people that cost new amounts of money so that otherwise healthy people wouldn’t get sick. We seem to struggle with anything that would help people who live with a disability. That’s just shocking. It’s the sort of thing, and Jack, don’t beat yourself up, you’re doing amazing work, I know you’ve mentioned your cowardice, I don’t note any of it. I think the sin out here in the world of not being Jack Thorne is a general obliviousness. It’s very easy to be oblivious about this sort of thing, until it gets you, and then harder, a lot harder to be oblivious.
John August: Let’s talk about differences between the U.S. system and the UK system. The UK system has this sense of moral authority in television and in industry grappling with a thing. We don’t have that, but we do have unions. We do have, in ways that the UK doesn’t have, we have bodies that set standards for things. It does feel like in terms of performers being able to do their job on sets, that feels like a thing that SAG wrestles with, to a degree to which writers have the ability to participate in a writers room, to have interpreters be available for them if they need them. That feels like a WGA thing, the same with DGA. We have groups that can mobilize tremendous pressure to get some of these things done, and I would not be surprised if as we push forward here, we’ll see these unions step up to demand some of these changes happen. It won’t happen the same way. It may not happen as quickly. I think some of these things can and should happen.
John August: I’m also reminded that when we added the parental leave benefit to the WGA, which is a new thing we won, one of the artist rule to make is that, listen, everybody who works for Netflix right now gets paternity leave, gets parental leave when they have a kid. It just seems right that the writer who’s creating that show should have the same benefits as the executive who’s running that thing. I can imagine a situation where people who are working for the studios right now have expectations that their workplaces can be wheelchair accessible for people who need to use wheelchairs. The same should apply to our sets. I think that logic sometimes can help and help people think about why they need to be thinking about this and why they need to be ready to spend some money to make that happen.
Jack Thorne: I love that. I’d not considered that the unions could be a huge, huge role. You’re right, the power of your unions is so much bigger than the power of the unions in this country. The idea that they could provoke this change, it’s really warming, it’s really huge, really exciting to hear actually.
Craig Mazin: All they have to do is work together, which they’ve never done before [inaudible 00:30:51].
John August: Even working under their own self-interest though, some things can change. It tends to build upon each other, so things do happen. We have two listener questions that came in which were very specifically designed for you to come on the show, not even knowing that you’d come on the show. Megana, can you help us out with some of these questions that we’ve gotten?
Megana Rao: Great. Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight asks, “Craig-“
Craig Mazin: Here we go.
Megana Rao: “Your cool thing has broken me. Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart lecture was extremely impactful. I feel broken because I’m concerned I’m taking the wrong lessons or that I’m being selfish. Originally I was writing a story with a main character who had been disfigured in military service. Later I decided to pare it down to a mental health issue like PTSD, because I just didn’t think that I should write it, as I have no experience with physically disabled people, but I can’t help reference the embarrassingly large number of stories put to screen that have clearly been written by people who don’t have the slightest clue how their character should sound or how those events should play out.
Megana Rao: “Mr. Thorne’s speech has made me think about a lot of things that I don’t have answers for. I want to write for female characters, because in my life the women around me have been so valuable and interesting that I’m inspired to write with them in mind. I listen to the voices of marginalized people speak on how they feel. They just want a place at the table, starting with their faces in popular culture. I fall immediately into self-doubt and concern for what my place is in producing that culture. I am a near radioactive level of white bread American. Should I even participate?
Megana Rao: “Jack Thorne spoke passionately and with great vulnerability about a group of people that just wants dignity and a fair shake. How do I participate in the business of storytelling that doesn’t perpetuate the endless narrative of the singular white male voice telling the world what culture is?”
Craig Mazin: Jack, that’s a simple question and I’m sure you can answer that in, I’ll give you seven words.
Jack Thorne: I think authorship is something we’re all wrestling with right now. I write a lot of female characters. I write a lot of female character-led dramas. I always have. It’s something that I’m asking about myself why I do that and whether I have right to do that.
Jack Thorne: When it comes to disability, one of the groups that spoke at our event, we had this launch event, and we didn’t want it just to be about Underlying Health Condition, we wanted it to be about all the major disability groups in British television. We had lots of different people speak. One of the people that spoke was this man called Laurence Clark who outlined how a writers room should be run for disabled people and what consideration should be given when having disabled people in the room. It’s really complicated because you’re talking about a group that have been historically excluded. It’s a very, very small group. It’s a group where being given authorship is not something that historically has happened. I don’t quite know whether no one should be writing disabled people except for disabled writers. I certainly think disabled writers need to be part of a discussion when it comes to writing disabled characters, and they need to be a senior part of that discussion, and they need to be armed so that future authorship is exclusively disabled, because as the caller says, there has been historically a huge amount of ignorance, and quite dangerous ignorance put on the screen by people who didn’t know better but should’ve known better and have perpetuated myths about the disabled experience, which has been incredibly damaging to disabled people everywhere.
Craig Mazin: Well said. I think Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight, don’t fear my umbrage, I have no umbrage for you. I feel for you. I would suggest that somewhere along the line in our bourgeoning and justifiable desire to include people who have been traditionally excluded and to have better, fuller, clearer, and truer representations of all sorts of people on screen, we have lost sight of what the word fiction means. Particularly when we’re talking about fiction in drama, everybody is writing something they’re not. There is only one story you can write that is perfectly true to yourself, and that is your autobiography, and even that will probably be garbage. We are professional liars, who like actors, occupy the minds of people we are not. That is literally the job. What’s happening I think is that some people are having an existential crisis about what it means to actually be a fiction writer.
Craig Mazin: What I do think is critical, and we’ve said this on the show many times, is that you have to approach material with respect. You have to approach the lives of other human beings with respect. Here’s the deal. Doesn’t matter how good your intentions are. If you are a bad writer, your writing will be bad. If you are a good writer but a callous writer, your writing will be probably put off in that pile of what they call lazy or tropey or oblivious. You have to be both good and you have to have your ears open, you have to have your eyes open, and you have to have some humility. You have to talk to people. When you are writing a character, and if that character’s disabled in a way that you don’t have personal experience with, find people who do, who are already willing to discuss these things, not people that you know who that you can then burden your questions upon, but rather there are groups, advocacy groups. The Writers Guild is very good about putting you together with people who want to talk about these things, who are interested in helping. If you do get into a position, a privileged position where you can hire people, hire them. That’s important.
Craig Mazin: When you are writing characters who are a different race than you are or a different gender and then you cast those people, talk to the actors and ask them, “How did we do? What did we get wrong? What did we get right? Let’s have that discussion.” What we should not do is box ourselves off into a place where we can only write who we are. If anything, that would mean fewer representations of disabled people on screen. What I like about what Jack is doing is that he’s advancing in a rising tide manner everybody’s opportunity. If you write something great that provides opportunity for better representation and employment of different people than you, then that’s a victory for everybody.
John August: One moment of the current discourse I’m following closely is West Side Story. West Side Story is an iconic musical that is problematic when you look back at the original incarnation of it. You look at this new incarnation and Tony Kushner’s work on it, and you can see that like a Jack Thorne, he was very concerned about his role in telling the story and making sure to find the information about the communities he’s writing about and what the communities were like at that time and how this could all fit together. It’s a difference between letting that concern guide you to do more and harder work and letting that concern stop you from ever trying to do that work. That’s I think what Scared is wrestling with. I think you may be looking at it as a blockade, a wall preventing you from actually doing the work, when in fact it is a challenging path for you to go down, but really it’s an invitation to really explore what’s out there.
Craig Mazin: Megana, what’s your take on this question?
Megana Rao: I agree with all of the things that you guys have said. One other thing that came to mind is I watched an interview with Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in West Side Story. She is a Black Latin woman. She talked about going to the interview with Steven Spielberg and saying, “I’m not going to take this role unless you honor what it means for Anita to be played by a Black Latin woman.” They were really receptive to that and made the changes in the script and worked with her on doing those things. I think that speaks to what you were saying, being open to the experiences that your actors or actresses who are representing these characters bring to that material as well, even in the later stage of the process.
John August: Megana, you have one more question that feels very much on topic here.
Megana Rao: Great. Mike from London asks, “I got COVID in May of 2020 and subsequently developed long COVID. Most of my symptoms have improved since then, but I’m still suffering extreme fatigue and post-exertional malaise. In short, getting COVID seems to have triggered chronic fatigue syndrome. Before this I was a healthy 27-year-old with dreams of writing for Hollywood. I improved as a writer each year and was starting to see a small amount of success. I was a semifinalist in the Nicholl last year and was getting some reads from managers and production companies, but unfortunately, getting long COVID has made everything much more difficult. I now have to be careful not to use too much energy in a single day. Even a small amount of activities, like going on a short walk and writing two or three pages, can be enough to completely exhaust me for a few days. Just writing this email feels like a huge mental drain, and because of this, I know I won’t have energy to write this evening. All of this on top of having to somehow keep my job has left me worried that I’ll never reach my goal of being a working writer. I’m wondering if you know or are aware of any working writers with similar chronic diseases. How has their disability informed the content of their writing and their process?”
Craig Mazin: Rough situation there, Mike. First of all, we are still learning a lot about long-term COVID, long COVID, long-haul COVID as it’s sometimes called. We don’t know if it’s permanent. It is very tempting when you are in the middle of something difficult as, Jack, you are in the middle of your disability. I’m sure it seemed to you at the time like it would be permanent, which is terrifying, I assume. I’ve certainly felt that way about my situation.
Jack Thorne: I was told by a doctor, “You won’t get better.”
Craig Mazin: Even if you’re not told by a doctor, you’re told by your own fear center in your brain that you’re not going to get better. That is really terrifying. First things first, it seems to me, Mike, you just have to honor the reality that you’re in. The reality that you’re in is you can only do what you can do. You can’t do more than you can do. If I told you that the only way to be a working writer would be to climb 100,000 steps a day, no matter what your situation would be, you wouldn’t be able to do it. That’s not a failure. That’s just reality. Accept the reality that you have.
Craig Mazin: Perhaps as a relatively young person, in fact rather young, half my age, sir, or ma’am, give yourself a little bit of time here. Maybe what you could do is concentrate on what you might be able to do to get a little bit better, if there is that ability, and if there’s not, then take the time to readjust your life. If you write, I think it says writing two or three pages in a day is enough to completely exhaust you for a few days. Then that’s what you can do. You can write two or three pages for every few days. By the way, I know a lot of great writers that have zero problems who do exactly that. If they’re two or three great pages a day or two or three great pages a week, that’s two or three more great pages than almost everyone else can write in the world.
Craig Mazin: Count the blessings, but also accept the reality. Make your peace with it. Mourn what you’ve lost. Do anything you can that’s available to you. In terms of resources, yes, I think Google is your friend. There’s got to be some groups of writers living with disability and working with disability and chronic disease. John, does the Writers Guild have a resource or a group for something like this?
John August: I don’t know that they do. I know that there are committees that have writers with disabilities, but I don’t know. This is actually I think a great question for Jack to answer, because this feels like this is not an accessibility kind of issue, this is not even a representation issue, this is like it’s hard for me to do the thing that I want to be doing situation. Do you have experience with this?
Jack Thorne: Yeah. I would say try and find a community, because that’s what gave me the most solace. In terms of the UK there’s two groups I would say to go to straight away as you’re a Londoner. The first is a group called DANC, which is D-A-N-C, or also called Triple C, which is confusing, but I think it’s www.triplec.org.uk. Then there’s another group called DTPTV, deaf and disabled people in television, who are also amazing. They are on Facebook and Twitter. Both those organizations have a community of people that you can talk to about this stuff. Reach out to them. Make yourself part of it. Become a member of the community. I think you’ll find that there’s lots of other people going through similar things. My experience of that was feeling like I had a home. Once you feel like you have a home, I think everything gets a bit easier. I’m so sorry you’re struggling. I really hope it doesn’t stay with you, but if it does, there are lots of people who are going through chronic fatigue and who do produce beautiful work, behind and in front of the screen, very good friends of mine who do find ways to manage their condition, and as a result of finding ways to manage their condition, find a way to have a fruitful career in our industry.
Craig Mazin: Great.
John August: Great. Our last little bit is hopefully inspiring. Actually I think does fit in well with this last question, which is basically do the things you can do and control the things you can control. This comes off of a TikTok by Franchesca Ramsey, but it’s Ashley Nicole Black, friend of the show, who had retweeted it, put it on my timeline here. Let’s take a listen to what Franchesca says.
Franchesca Ramsey: If you’re a writer, winning an Oscar or selling a $100,000 movie, those are huge goals, those are awesome, but you can’t control those right now. So many things have to happen in order for those doors to open and those opportunities to come to you. Instead, shifting your goal to something you can control, like write 10 pages a day or take a writing class, start a writing group, finish my feature, try a pilot new genre, those are things that you can control, and then you can actually cross them off your list and feel like you are accomplishing things that are helping you get to the place that you want to get in your life.
John August: That’s Franchesca Ramsey. Ashley Nicole Black also had said if your goal was to be cast on Saturday Night Live, you’re giving all of your power to Lorne Michaels to cast you on Saturday Night Life, but if your goal is to learn how to write great sketches, that’s a thing you can learn how to do. Jack, as a incredibly prolific writer here, what can you tell us about the work you control versus the work that makes it out in the world ratio in your life?
Jack Thorne: It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that I’m still wrestling with now, to be honest, in terms of, “Oh, but if I do this, then I can get this. Then if I get this, then maybe people will like me.” I don’t think that goes, that feeling.
Craig Mazin: I already like you.
Jack Thorne: You’re weird.
Craig Mazin: So true.
Jack Thorne: It’s strange in terms of thinking about my career. I remember ringing my parents so excited because I had a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic, and my parents being completely nonplussed by a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic and me realizing that it was a huge achievement for me, but no one else quite being able to see it. I think that thing of just constantly seeing rungs of a ladder and then going, “Oh right, if I do this and if I do that.” I suppose what she’s saying is try to avoid the ladder entirely and just celebrate what you do every day. To be honest, I’m nowhere near able to do that yet. It’s a good goal for me for 2022.
Craig Mazin: It’s funny, the word goal maybe is part of the problem, because I think sometimes people, what they outline as a goal is really a symptom. Winning an award is a symptom of something. So is being cast on Saturday Night Live. You have a goal, and the goal should be something that only can be things you can control. It’s not just focus on goals you can control. If you can’t control it, it’s not a goal, as far as I’m concerned, because the only purpose of the word is some target that you can hit. You try and be the funniest you can be, and then you show up for an audition and let’s see what the symptom is. You try and write the best you can write, and then you hand it out in the world, let’s see what the symptom is. Let’s see what the reaction is. Everything goal-oriented is probably a bit of a trap. The only way to get there is to immerse yourself in the process. If goal has an antonym, I suppose it’s process. Process is everything.
Craig Mazin: The work is unromantic. We talk about this on the show all the time, how unromantic writing is and how angry I get when I see portrayals of writing on screen. You want to talk about bad portrayals on screen, writers getting some sort of mystical burst of energy and typing a novel all night and then it’s celebrated and the next thing they’re at a book signing. I hate this crap. I just want to fire it into the sun.
Craig Mazin: Maybe, maybe if you want to get to the next third eye in the forehead level of achievement here, don’t have any goals at all. Just try and write. How about that? Just create stuff. Try and access what feels honest and good to you and enjoy it for what it is. I will tell you the thing that I’ve done that was received the best was not a goal-oriented thing. There was absolutely no expectation that it would even get made. The goal concept sometimes is a liar that whispers stuff in our ear and turns our head from the path.
John August: I think it’s so important to distinguish goals that can actually be achieved under your own efforts versus goals that you just rely on the universe working out a certain way, which I think Saturday Night Life is a universe working out a certain way. The goals that are under your own control to some degree, like wanting to run a marathon, “I want to finish a marathon,” okay, if that’s your goal, great, but what are the actual things you need to do in order to get yourself up to being able to run a marathon. Completing a marathon is a lagging indicator. If you got to that point, it’s only because all the leading indicators, which were how many short runs were you able to do, how far could you go. All the work that it would take to get up there, that’s what you could actually focus and do, which is basically putting on your shoes and starting to run. You’re not going to put on your shoes and start to run a marathon. You’re going to put on your shoes and start to run a mile and then two miles and eventually you’ll get up there. Frustratingly, writing is just that hard work of page after page, mile after mile. To be more inspiring going into this, maybe go into 2022 thinking about forget your goal, let’s focus on what you’re actually trying to do each day and make that work rewarding.
Craig Mazin: What if we take the goal away, meaning let’s take the reward away. Doctors make a the bin Laden mistake. Megana and I are both unlicensed medical doctors, so I think we both understand this. Doctors put an enormous emphasis on the scale, on your weight. This is automatically a very goal-oriented thing. “You’re 240 pounds. You need to be 160 pounds.” That’s a goal. No one’s pretty much going to get there. What’s sad is for a lot of people, that goal isn’t even revenant to their well-being.
Craig Mazin: If they simply just made certain changes in their life for the sake of bettering their health, with the promise of no reward, if I say to you, “Look, I’ve looked into your future. If you do the following things, you will not lose any weight at all, but you will live another 10 years,” and so we’ve taken away all the reward. You’re not going to wear the skinny pants. You’re not going to look like the person on the cover of the magazine. All that’s garbage. What you are is going to be happier and healthier. Would you take that deal or not?
Craig Mazin: It’s hard for people, because what you’re saying is it’s just process. Goals that are distant and far off like that and intangible are really hard, whereas when someone says, “Okay, I’ve got a goal. I’m going to be 150 pounds. I’m going to do the thing. I’m going to be on the cover of Men’s Health,” that’s when they fail, inevitably. You’ve set yourself up for failure by turning the goal into the goal.
Megana Rao: Something Ashley said in her tweet was that she added what she wants the work to feel like as part of her goals. She says, “I wanted to work in a calm, fun environment, which makes decisions easier to make.” I also think shifting from thinking about goals, how you want the experience of the process to be, I don’t know, that’s not a concept that I’d heard before, but definitely something I want to use in 2022.
Craig Mazin: I like that too. Look, in the U.S. the goal always has a dollar sign in front of it. We’re trained this way from birth. The whole thing is basically fame and fortune, fame and fortune, fame and fortune. When you look among the class of the famous unfortunate, you find a lot of misery and bad behavior, because humans are human, as it turns out.
John August: We should also call out Ashley Nicole Black for her new deal at Warner Brothers. She’s joining Craig over there in HBO Max land.
Craig Mazin: See, that was a goal that just happened. I doubt that was her goal. It’s a symptom of her good work.
John August: Indeed.
Craig Mazin: It’s a process symptom. Well done.
John August: Any last thoughts on goals, Mr. Jack Thorne?
Jack Thorne: I’m interested in the notion that, because the show that you’re referring to, which I know you probably get bored of talking about, but the show that you’re referring to happened despite setting a goal with Chernobyl, and yet that was you taking a fork in the road, wasn’t it? That was you going, “I don’t want to write the sort of shows I’ve done before, so I’m going to take a fork in the road.” That is you setting yourself a goal of working in a new genre, working in a new way, and challenging yourself in a way that you hadn’t challenged yourself before to do a certain type of work. By doing that, and I think that you’re probably the starkest example of someone that’s done that, of writers that I can think of, you changed the whole trajectory of your working life. Is that not a goal? Is that not a, “I am going to put my head down on a stone and rub it until I get to a different place for myself.”
John August: What a metaphor that was.
Craig Mazin: I don’t know if it was a rubbing stone. I think I wanted to do it because I felt like it was worth doing. When I did it, there was no promise of anything. Really the only promise was that it would likely just be ignored. Nor did I know if I could do it. I just wanted to. It to me very much was there was no real money involved, there was no guarantee of anything, nor was I doing it with any expectation that you would need to be watched. I honestly thought that it would mostly end up being a thing that substitute teachers would show the social studies class on a rainy day in high school. It really was not goal-oriented. A lot of what I do, I’m very haphazard about a lot of things, I have to admit. When I find that I start thinking about how to create outcomes, that’s actually where I get into trouble, because artificial things start to seep their way in. Maybe I’m a bad person to ask this question to, because my career has been weird and meandering and confusing. There’s not a lot of shape to it. I have a lot of notes on the narrative of my own life and career. It’s not a well told story. Weird fits and starts. You have a much better narrative, Jack Thorne. That’s a story. I like that story. That’s a good one.
Jack Thorne: The distinction between going, “If I do this, I’m going to win an Emmy,” and, “If I do this, then I might find a tad more professional well-being in my soul,” I found your example very motivating and very interesting in terms of the choices we make for ourselves. That is a goal, is it not? I suppose it’s just that that interests me.
Craig Mazin: I think that sometimes people underestimate the joy I had in prior work to all that, because I really did enjoy them.
Jack Thorne: I’m not saying you didn’t. If your character was singing the I want song, you used the word I want, there would be a moment where you were making a film that you were enjoying and you said, “I want to write about the Soviet Union, and I feel like I’ve got a way of singing about the Soviet Union,” and then the audience would be on their feet.
Craig Mazin: See, that’s the thing about writing. I love that this is something that was specifically targeted by Franchesca Ramsey to creatives, is that there’s nothing in between you and the doing of a creative thing, unless it requires a lot of money, but writing doesn’t. You don’t even need to get to goal step. If you want, and I did want to write something, write it. That’s the best part. It’s not even a goal. It’s there. You can do it. You can paint whatever you want. You can write whatever you want. You can sing whatever you want. All that’s there. Now are people going to watch it? Is it going to get made? Will it be popular? Are you going to get money? Will you get a big deal? All that stuff happens after.
John August: It’s completely out of your control, which is of course-
Craig Mazin: It’s completely out of your control, exactly. In a weird way, if your goal is to write something amazing, you can take that write out of the goal column and put it right into the I’m doing it today. You don’t have to wait. A goal to me isn’t the future. Maybe I just am confused about the concept. There’s nothing stopping you right now today from writing anything you want. It’s free, which is wonderful.
John August: Now in our discussions of goals, Megana has in our little workflow here a year in review. Our goal with Scriptnotes was not to have 500 episodes in 10 years in Scriptnotes, but-
Craig Mazin: Jesus.
John August: We hit that-
Craig Mazin: Thank god that wasn’t a goal-
John August: … this last year.
Craig Mazin: … because I wouldn’t have done it.
John August: Lord no. We were listened to in 198 different countries.
Craig Mazin: Oh god.
John August: We had 2.15 million downloads so far this year in 2021.
Craig Mazin: Oh my god. Now wait, with that 2.15 million downloads, I presume that’s just three people that just keep redownloading it over and over.
John August: It’s all bots. It’s bots all the way down.
Craig Mazin: It’s bots. Just bots.
John August: A bit of housekeeping, we’re hoping to do another random advice episode. That’s this episode where we just answer random listener questions that don’t have anything to do with writing at all. It could be about relationships. It could be about real estate. It could be about the proper fork to use for a certain meal. If you have random advice questions, send those into Megana, ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll get a special list of those together and we’ll answer random things that are not about writing.
Craig Mazin: That’ll be fun. We should have Jack on for that as well. I think Jack should be the new … Let’s just have him all the time.
John August: Absolutely. It’s time for our one cool things. Craig, do you have a one cool thing?
Craig Mazin: No, I don’t.
John August: Jack Thorne, you got the memo. Did you find a one cool thing to bring in?
Jack Thorne: I’ve got two.
Craig Mazin: Thank god.
Jack Thorne: One of which is slightly embarrassing.
Craig Mazin: Good. I’ll take that one. That one’s mine.
Jack Thorne: Craig chose me for One Cool Thing six, seven years ago. I don’t know how long ago it was.
Craig Mazin: I would call that early Thorne period. America still didn’t know.
Jack Thorne: It was a highlight of my life and a really beautiful thing and it made me spill my water. Sounds like I wet myself. I almost said made me spill my tea, and then I was like, I don’t drink tea. I don’t drink any caffeine. One of my one cool things is Craig Mazin, who appears like he is a misanthrope and seems to present like a misanthrope, and yet is incredibly kind. I once went to lunch with him wearing Ray Bans and he laughed at me for about an hour, but it was still … His ability to give time to things that he shouldn’t give time to is a very, very kind thing, and so he is one of my one cool things.
Craig Mazin: Thank you, Jack Thorne.
Jack Thorne: If that’s all right.
Craig Mazin: Jack, I think you had another less Craig-oriented one cool thing.
Jack Thorne: Which is authentic and celebratory portrayals of Father Christmas, because I find it very annoying that Father Christmas, I have a five-year-old, is frequently portrayed in our modern world as a dark, despairing figure or someone with a take on it. We’ve watched Santa Claus the movie, the Dudley Moore film from 1985 twice this week, and we’re probably going to watch it a third time, purely because Elliott, my son, finds the Father Christmas in it so authentic to his impression of what Father Christmas should be. I don’t know whether Father Christmas should be white or any of those things, but a jolly person who is having a good time is a good thing, and we need more of him I think.
Craig Mazin: Can I ask, this might seem like an odd question, but who’s Father Christmas? We don’t have him here. Who’s that?
John August: That’s Santa Claus.
Jack Thorne: Santa Claus.
Craig Mazin: Oh, Santa Claus. Oh, Santa Claus.
Jack Thorne: You don’t call him Father Christmas?
John August: No, we call him Santa Claus. There is more of this in the bonus segments. Trust me.
Craig Mazin: Megana, have you ever heard of Father Christmas?
Megana Rao: I have.
John August: I’ve heard of it.
Megana Rao: I have.
Craig Mazin: Wait, hold on. Now I know. It’s from the Kinks song, (singing).
John August: It’s not from the Kinks song. It’s a thing that exists and the Kinks mentioned it.
Craig Mazin: I thought the Kinks invented it. All right. So much for that.
John August: My one cool thing is also Christmas-related. This last week I fell down a rabbit hole of the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions, which if you have not read it, you should just spend an hour of your life looking through the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions. Mine is that the Bible does not explicitly say that three magi came to visit baby Jesus, does not mention a Father Christmas or Santa Claus either, nor does it mention that there were kings or rode on camels, that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The three magi are inferred because there were three gifts. Basically the three kings who come to visit baby Jesus in the Christmas story, that was just made up sometime in the third century. We don’t really know where came from, but not part of the original Christmas story. My one cool thing. That is our show for this week. Jack Thorne, thank you so much for joining us.
Craig Mazin: Thank you, Jack.
Jack Thorne: Thank you for having me. I’m very sorry for talking quite a lot.
Craig Mazin: No, that’s why you’re here.
John August: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Nico Mansy, if you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes there at @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. Jack Thorne, are you on Twitter?
Jack Thorne: Not really, no. No. It sent my brain mad.
John August: That’s fine.
Craig Mazin: Me too.
John August: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The sweatshirts just came and they are actually genuinely the softest things I have experienced in a sweatshirt. Craig, your sweatshirt should be there, if you ordered that first batch. Mine came yesterday. Check your mail. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. We’ll learn from Jack Thorne what a British person would call a bonus segment and other words that don’t make sense on either side of the pond. Thank you all very much.
New Speaker: BONUS SEGMENT
John August: We’re back. Jack Thorne, as you were talking, I was writing out some of the things you said that were-
Craig Mazin: Ridiculous.
John August: … distinctly British. You said Graeae are this wonderful company. You used are because the company is plural, but we would say Graeae is this wonderful company. Pluralism is a thing that is different between American English and British English is you would say are and we would say is.
Jack Thorne: I wouldn’t assume that I speak good English. I’m not a very educated person, so I wouldn’t assume that [crosstalk 01:04:06].
Craig Mazin: This is outrageous.
John August: This humility.
Craig Mazin: This is outrageous.
John August: You said, “I remember ringing my parents.” We never ring our parents at all here.
Craig Mazin: We call them.
John August: We call them. We don’t ring them.
Craig Mazin: Then oddly, when people are describing names in England, they will typically say, “Oh, I met a guy, he’s called Jack,” and here we would say, “He’s named Jack.”
John August: British English still does that thing like [inaudible 01:04:29] you’re calling somebody. You call somebody the same way you phone them, which is strange. Are you ringing your parents if you’re ringing them on their mobile phones?
Jack Thorne: Yes, yes, still ringing my parents. I would still say that, yes.
John August: Now you’ve written for both the UK and for American audiences. Do you change anything in your actual writing if you know it’s going to Warner Brothers rather than to the BBC?
Jack Thorne: Yes, and will use U.S. spellings. Now I say I do that. I have an assistant called Mariella who is rather brilliant and does that and makes sure that I make sense in another country.
Craig Mazin: I had the opposite experience. Jane Featherstone, who is a very small person, and yet a giant person in-
Jack Thorne: She is.
Craig Mazin: … British person, she was rather insistent, and I think reasonably so, that as we were a European production on Chernobyl that I ought to use English things like torch instead of flashlight. You wouldn’t go into the hospital. You would be in hospital. I was trying to think. Color and even spelling, which doesn’t show up on screen, but color and favor with a U.
Jack Thorne: Honor.
Craig Mazin: Honor, which is actually fun to do. Then there were certain things too like firemen. We have firemen, and you guys have fire brigade.
John August: [crosstalk 01:05:55].
Jack Thorne: We have firemen, but if they’re a collective then they’re a fire brigade.
Craig Mazin: You call the fire brigade. There’s a line in Chernobyl where he’s like, “There’s a fire,” and he goes, “Call the fire brigade,” but originally he said, “Call the fire department,” because that’s what we call it, the fire department. She’s like, “No one calls that here.” That was it. When Jane tells you to do something, you do it.
Jack Thorne: Jane is always right.
Craig Mazin: Yep.
John August: Growing up, sometime in about fourth grade or something I recognized that British people put the U’s in the words, and I was just obsessed with putting the U’s in the words. I’d put U’s in words that they couldn’t possibly exist. I would try to do it. All my school essays I would do it. Sometimes I’d get flagged for it, sometimes I wouldn’t. I’m wondering if it was just an early case of cultural appropriation. I just desperately wanted to not be this Colorado kid. I wanted to be this international student. Craig, did you ever do the U’s in your words?
Craig Mazin: No, but I think that the cultural appropriation was taking the language and bringing it here. That’s cultural reappropriation. I never did that. That would probably get you beaten up on Staten Island, John. I got to be honest with you. That, by the way, the other thing that sometimes, we mentioned fanny pack earlier, so in America fanny is your butt, and a fanny pack is that silly pouch that travelers wear with the belt that goes around their butt and they put their money in it. In England fanny is cruel slang for vulva, I think would be fair to say. There are certain differences like that.
John August: There’s a word for cigarette that we don’t use here.
Jack Thorne: Do you know what we call a fanny pack?
Craig Mazin: You call it a bum bag.
Jack Thorne: A bum bag, yeah.
Craig Mazin: Now if you say bum bag in the U.S., people will assume that that’s something that involves a hobo. It is entirely different. Also I’ve noticed in England the C word, which is quite a verboten term here, is tossed around like it’s nothing over there.
John August: It becomes really challenging, because you’re not sure whether that person, a British person’s using it in a sexually offensive way, in a way that it’s going to cause a lawsuit, or if they’re just speaking their language.
Craig Mazin: I think they’re speaking their language.
Jack Thorne: Try being in a rehearsal full of 50 people and just using it as part of your sentences, because that’s who you are, and then just looking at their faces as they stare back at you in literal sheer horror.
Craig Mazin: I actually had the reverse experience where spending so much time in Europe with Brits and then coming back to the U.S. and people like, “I’m sorry, what?” I’m like, “Oh, right, sorry. I’m not [crosstalk 01:08:33]-“
John August: “You can’t say that.”
Craig Mazin: “… anymore. It doesn’t work that way anymore.” We do speak a common language, but there are these fascinating. Really it’s the structural differences that get me, the things like called and named and in hospital. He’s in hospital.
John August: I would say as a screenwriter, when I’m working on a production that’s going to be shooting in the UK, I’m not sticking U’s in my words where they don’t need to be there, but I am mindful if there’s a thing that’s going to translate wrong or feel different in the other place or if I can just get away from that problem. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an example of we wanted the movie to feel like it didn’t exist either in the U.S. or the UK. The cars drive down the middle of the road. The bill he picks up out of the street is not a British pound or American dollar. We’re deliberately in no place. That’s great, but then everyone speaks with a British accent, so I guess we are still in the UK.
Craig Mazin: That’s how that works.
Jack Thorne: I love that film, and it felt very British to me. Even if it wasn’t intended to be, it felt like that to me.
Craig Mazin: One of the other challenges that screenwriters face, and I think we maybe talked about this on the show before, is in the U.S. we use eight and a half by 11 paper. In the UK we use A4. They’re so close to being the same, but they’re not the same.
Craig Mazin: It’s outrageous.
John August: A4 paper always looks wrong to me. Mathematically it makes so much more sense.
Craig Mazin: Of course.
John August: It’s such a smarter design for paper.
Craig Mazin: As is the metric system.
John August: 100%.
Craig Mazin: That’s the nice thing about England is you guys straddle the metric system and the imperial system, which I like. You haven’t quite let it go, which is good.
Jack Thorne: I think we firmly believe in the imperial system.
Craig Mazin: You believe in the imperial system unless it comes down to things like liters of petrol, litres of petrol.
Jack Thorne: Yes, we do, but you can also see gallons. There’s a separate measure for gallons.
Craig Mazin: Very good. Wow. This plus the blue passports, England is back.
John August: Now on a practical matter, if you were working on something like you’re working on His Dark Materials, which was a complicated production. There were American companies involved. There were probably British companies involved as well. Were your scripts done on A4? Were they done on eight and a half by eleven? Did you just make a choice early on and just live with it?
Jack Thorne: I didn’t even think about it. I just opened final draft and just used whatever format. I guess other people might’ve changed it, but I don’t think so. Those sorts of questions, I think our industry’s a lot more haphazard than yours. We don’t really ever deal with them. No one complains. I guess I just kept doing it the same way that I was doing it.
John August: I ran into it on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We were using A4 paper, and the Warner Brothers script department, which is a whole notorious thing, we could talk about a whole rant about the Warner Brothers script department, would send it back to us in not A4 paper, and so the scripts would be longer and we’d get all these concerns about budget. It’s because you put it on different paper. It’s the exact same script.
Craig Mazin: Oh wow.
John August: Drives me crazy.
Craig Mazin: A4.
John August: A4.
Craig Mazin: A4.
John August: [crosstalk 01:11:24].
Jack Thorne: I’m so sorry.
John August: Jack Thorne-
Craig Mazin: That’s Britain.
John August: Again, don’t apologize for everything. Far too much.
Jack Thorne: I’m afraid my country, the imperial system and everything else that comes out of my country, gets away with the fact that we are probably responsible for more evil than any other country in the world.
Craig Mazin: Certainly A4 is just maybe the worst thing that Britain ever did, A4, top of the heap, followed by the slavery and colonization.
John August: Jack Thorne, thanks so much.
Jack Thorne: Thank you so much.
Craig Mazin: Thank you, Jack.
Links:
- Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart Lecture
- Jack Thorne Launches Underlying Health Conditions Pressure Group, Publishes Major Report Into Disabled Representation in TV Industry
- 1 in 4 Coalition
- Ashley Nicole Black and Francesca Ramsey Twitter Thread
- Santa Claus: The Movie a celebratory portrayal of Father Christmas
- Wikipedia List of Misconceptions
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Jack Thorne on IMDb
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Scriptnotes, Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne, Transcript first appeared on John August.
John and Craig rant about prohibitive screenwriting advice and declare their allegiance to the “we see/we hear” convention. They analyze scripts from this year’s awards season to argue good story trumps all else.
We also answer questions on screenplay fundamentals from parantheticals, action lines to script length.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we consider: what is the screenwriting equivalent of boot camp?
Links:
- The CW is for sale!
- Annie Hayes on Writing with an Invisible Illness on John’s blog
- Being the Ricardos by Aaron Sorkin
- The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines by Mike Rianda And Jeff Rowe
- Passing by Rebecca Hall
- Belfast by Kenneth Branagh
- Tick, Tick, Boom by Steven Levenson
- Willy Wonka Script at the johnaugust.com library!
- Vigil show
- MIT Mystery Hunt 2022
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by William Brink (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 2-2-2022 The transcript for this episode can be found here.
The post We See and We Hear first appeared on John August.
Annie Hayes is a longtime friend of Scriptnotes, who first helped me out at the Austin Film Festival.
I’m currently a staff writer on the CW’s In the Dark. I previously had several different assistant jobs in the industry. I also have a genetic disease called cystic fibrosis.
As an assistant in Hollywood, you’re often told that this is the time for you to pay your dues, to work long hours and run yourself ragged for the pocket change they throw at you every week. You’re young, you can handle it.
Before I moved to LA, a producer I met at a CF research conference told me I would be crazy to try to get one of those jobs with my condition. I should stay home, write, and live off my mother for as long as I could get away with. I didn’t take his advice, but his words got in my head. No one really talks about what it’s like to navigate such a demanding industry with a chronic illness. I’ve learned it is possible, but I wish more people had been having this conversation a long time ago.
In Scriptnotes episode 530, Jack Thorne mentions his complicated feelings about the word disability. I share them. I don’t feel “disabled” applies to me, but neither does the word healthy. We don’t really have commonly understood terms to describe the people who fall somewhere in the middle.
Our society still has a long way to go in terms of employers making workplaces accessible for the physically disabled. Accommodations for people with invisible illnesses are barely on the radar. I in no way mean to imply that I have it harder than someone who is blind or uses a wheelchair — working with disabled writers on a show about a disabled character, I am acutely aware that I do not. But it can be a very thorny path to navigate.
Over the past several years, I’ve come to realize that I greatly prefer being open and vocal about my illness. To anyone else with the same situation, I would say it’s important to present the people you’re working for with the solution rather than the problem. You may need to work a little differently or have a different schedule, but if you’ve figured out what that looks like and all they have to do is go along with your plan, it will be so much easier to get them on board.
For me, that once meant having to do my brand new script coordinator job from a hospital bed for a week. But nothing fell through the cracks, so in the end, no one gave it a second thought.
For aspiring writers, there’s also the question of trying to find the time and energy to write your own stuff on the side. I certainly know what it’s like to be so wiped out from the cumulative stressors of work and health that you have nothing left to give your own writing at the end of the day.
I just had to learn to forgive myself. You’re not being lazy, and you can’t judge yourself by other people’s standards. I’ve seen plenty of very healthy people struggle to get any writing done at all, so you’re not falling as far behind as you might think.
Cystic fibrosis is a progressive condition, so I have a lot of uncertainty about what my health will look like down the road. The silver lining of working in an industry this precarious is that our jobs rarely last more than a year, giving me built-in opportunities to continually re-evaluate what I’m capable of.
That’s changed over time; frankly, right now I probably couldn’t do the agency assistant job I loved five years ago. But I’m at peace with that. I never take a job with responsibilities beyond what I know I can currently handle. And if that were to change suddenly, I would just have to be honest with my boss. Granted, that’s easier as a writer, but I managed it as an assistant, too.
Ultimately, I wish I had known when I came to LA in 2016 that I would be able to handle it. That even though my health would get worse, it wouldn’t affect my career. To anyone else out there who may be having the same doubts, I say give it a shot.
The post Writing with an invisible illness first appeared on John August.
John and Craig consider the choices writers and characters make based on fear, flattery, or FOMO. They offer guidance on how to make authentic choices and discern between want vs. being wanted.
We also look at reshoots, both what they mean for production and the final story. We tackle listener questions on agents attending meetings, bad outlines, and unsupportive partners.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we discuss how to discuss movies at a party.
Links:
- A Good Life is Painful by Sean Illing
- The Sweet Spot by Paul Bloom
- Crazy Italian chocolate cake (egg free chocolate cake) by Chelsea Winter
- Baba is You
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Owen Danoff (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
The post Mistakes of Yes first appeared on John August.