Archives for 2020

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-eric-roth).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 475 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show I’ll be talking with legendary screenwriter Eric Roth about his writing process and his very long career which is probably the envy of any screenwriter out there.

**Craig:** Screenwriters envious? What?

**John:** What? I mean, Craig, can you think of anybody else who has had the length of career that Eric Roth has had?

**Craig:** Well, you know, my go to on this one is Robert Kamen.

**John:** Oh yeah

**Craig:** Who is right up there. I mean, Robert Kamen as we like to point out stretches all the way from Karate Kid in the early ‘80s to Taken and more in the 2010s. So, he’s been crushing it for a long time. But Eric Roth is no doubt one of our all-timers.

**John:** Yeah. So the first movie I can think of that was Eric Roth’s was Forrest Gump. But that was at the midpoint of his career. So, his first movie credit is back in 1970.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And he’s still working more now than ever. So he has A Star is Born. He has the upcoming Dune. He has a lot of other projects. He has Mank which he talks a little bit about on this interview I did with him which is a Netflix thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So he’s got a lot of great stuff out there. So this interview was done a few weeks ago on Zoom. It was for the Writers Guild Foundation. It doesn’t sound as crisp and clear as when we’re doing our live shows all in a room, so keep that in mind. But I think there’s really great stuff in here.

Craig and I will be back at the end for our One Cool Things. And a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about, oh, that thing that happened this week. What was it, Craig?

**Craig:** The thing that was the week and that was our presidential election.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll be back at the end to talk about that. But for now let’s transition to a few weeks ago and my discussion with Eric Roth.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. It is my great, great pleasure to welcome you to this WGF event. We are here talking with the legendary Eric Roth. I’m so excited that we’re going to have a good long chat here on Zoom in front of 500 to 800 people watching us. So, we are in our respective homes. Just for folks who maybe don’t know your credits off hand I’m going to read just a shortened list of some of your credits. Forrest Gump. The Postman. The Horse Whisperer. The Insider. Ali. Munich. The Good Shepherd. Lucky You. Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Ellis. A Star is Born. The upcoming Dune. The upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. Producer on Mank. There’s so much to talk about with you. But thank you for being here. It’s a pleasure to see you.

**Eric Roth:** I do. I’m glad you do this. I said to you earlier they sent me a list of people who could moderate it and I don’t really know you that well and I thought, well, he’s a talented guy, why not talk to you, you know? I love that.

**John:** So I’m excited to get into this. And usually in one of these things we would start back in the beginning about how you got interested in screenwriting and all that stuff and we’d spend about 20 minutes getting up to something like the present time and then start talking about the things we should talk about. So I’m going to do it the opposite way. I’d love to talk about what your writing process is like, what you’re working on, how you work in October 2020 as we’re recording this. What does your daily writing life look like?

**Eric:** My writing life really hasn’t varied since I gave up the typewriter which wasn’t as long ago as you might think. Because I’m really a luddite. I still work and I’ve talked about this a lot, so if anybody is bored with it they can tell me, but I still work on a DOS program. I have two computers. And I think half superstition and half a fear of not being able to learn Final Draft or something. It’s a program called Movie Master that actually is what they formulated Final Draft from.

The problem with it is that after like 40 pages it runs out of memory. So you’ve got to make sure – it’s about an act break, you know. And so I can’t do anything with the internet on that computer. That’s just solely for work which is good. And I still have to print out everything and I can’t email on it. So, the problem starts to become if you’re getting lucky and somebody is going to do the movie, it’s on their computer with Final Draft and creating the real document.

Other than that I start at like eight in the morning every day. I mean, I always use the example of John Cheever. He’d go to work every day. Take the train in from Long Island in his nice suit and a hat and he’d go and worked in a basement in New York City in Midtown. And he’d take off his pants and he’d take his shirt off, worked in his t-shirt and his underwear. 12 o’clock he’d get dressed again, go have a martini lunch. Come back. Work till four or five o’clock. Get dressed again and go take the train home. So it was like a job. And a great job for him and better than anybody probably.

And I feel the same way. I’m pretty disciplined. I don’t do as many hours as John Cheever. But come one o’clock, I mean if I’ve done four or five hours that’s about all creatively I feel I can do. And then I’ll work again at night. I’ll start around 10 o’clock and if I’m going good I’ll go as late as I can go. If not I’ll just do an hour so I can go to bed.

If I’m really crunched I get up really early like three or four in the morning and see as much as I can do. [Unintelligible] I like to bet the horses, so that’s my afternoons a lot. I have too many children and too many grandchildren, so I spend a lot of time, if I could, aside from the Covid. I’m a blessed human being. I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to – I think the biggest thing that I taught myself and it’s obviously to be successful to do it, but I tried to pick – and I’ve been wrong many, many times – but projects I felt would somehow enhance my own self number one, and two some kind of legacy that I wasn’t just writing things for pay, which is a nice thing too. But if I could have a choice why not something I really cared about because I believe wholeheartedly that passion is two-thirds of the game and the other third is this kind of bastardized art form we do which is really a craft of a kind. And you can be a great craftsman. I’m not sure you’re an artist as a screenwriter, but that’s a whole different conversation.

**John:** There are so many threads I want to pursue off of this, but I’m going to start at the most recent one which is the degree to which a successful screenwriter like you are is largely – there’s an aspect of stock picking. Because you have your choice of the projects you could work on. Obviously you’re initiating yourself things, things you get offered. And there’s a decision process about which ones you’re going to pursue. So it sounds like you’re trying to pick projects that challenge you. Are they the ones that scare you a little bit? Are they the ones that you know you can do it? What is the decision process? Is it about who else is involved?

**Eric:** I think in a more intellectual way I try to pick things that the themes interest me and then who are the people involved and the characters. And I’ve done a number of adaptations. People think I’ve probably done more than I really have. But, I mean, even things like Benjamin Button was just a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald story if it’s possible that he wrote something that was bad. But of course the idea was a guy aging backwards. And I never came up with that one. But the theme of that I said well that’s interesting to me.

Elvis Mitchell, if you know who he is, the critic from the New York Times. And he does a NPR show. He’s a wonderful man. And he said that he felt – and it sort of stopped me because I thought it was kind of accurate, and I’m jumping. My mind works this way. That my films are about loneliness. And so I guess somehow – and then he started talking about it, and maybe you can make that case and maybe you can’t. But it resonated with me. I think there’s some truth to it. So maybe I pick out themes that have to do with some melancholic kind of [unintelligible]. And something about loneliness, you know.

I never had my own room my whole life. So, I guess I don’t know if I need that. I mean, I lived with my brothers and then – my brother I mean. And then I went to college and had roommates. And I got married very young. And then et cetera. So, maybe that’s part of it. This desire to have human contact nearby. I get very kind of funky in a hotel room alone at night. So not that I do anything exciting. I get too aware of everything I guess.

**John:** Now you can chart some of that fear of loneliness over the course of the 15 movies that I listed. But talk to me about the movies that I didn’t list, because I’m sure over the course of your career there’s at least as many movies that you spent a tremendous amount of time on, you worked your ass off on, that don’t exist. And to what degree do those movies still stick with you? The scripts that you wrote that are not reflected in your bio?

**Eric:** I’ll tell you one thing. I’m very lucky that my batting average is pretty great. So I don’t have that many. I regret they never made a movie that Brad Pitt was – it was actually Brad Pitt’s idea, Hatfield McCoy, that I think is a really good script. I told him eventually, said I’m going to give this to Kevin Costner to do it on television, very successful for him. I liked that very much because it was like about – that feud was kind of very interesting because there was no difference between the people. It wasn’t like the Hutus and the Tutsis, where there was religious differences between the Jews and the Arabs. You know what I’m saying.

And these people all came from the same place. But anyway it was interesting. It came down to the coal companies paid one group for the coal that was under their land because there was a lot of coal in one area and not the other. So that was one.

I wrote a big space thing that probably I don’t know if it was worthy of getting made, but the idea was that three prehistoric men were taken – they were triplets I guess – were taken to another galaxy where they’re like sponges, you know. I’m trying to think what else.

**John:** I can see a loneliness to that.

**Eric:** It’s very lonely.

**John:** It fits Eric Roth’s canon of loneliness.

**Eric:** Hatfield McCoy, the main character is lonely. So that one worked. I’ve had, just bragging I guess, like 25 movies made. And some of them I think are better than others. And some are my fault and some are other people’s fault.

I think I’ve had maybe seven that didn’t get done.

**John:** That’s amazing. That’s a remarkable batting average.

**Eric:** I think I started slipping as the business changed in the sense that I was able to write kind of the movie star driven movies to a certain extent. And then as that changed, you know, as movie stars became too common there was a change of course. And so I think those became – A Star is Born is kind of important to me because it reestablished for me that I could still do this in a way. Not that I had a question mark. But I think there were a few things that kind of lagged in the interim. I’m sure there will be others that come to me that didn’t get done. There’s a few. And there’s a few I wish didn’t get done.

**John:** We won’t make you names the ones you wish didn’t get done.

**Eric:** I’ll name them. I have no problem. I’ll tell you a very quick story that–

**John:** Tell me which one.

**Eric:** So this one I think people enjoy. So I wrote a movie called The Postman early on. And I wrote it for Tom Hanks and a whole bevy of directors were going to do it. Good directors. And it was supposed to be a satire, sort of Swiftian look at post-apocalypse idea, was supposed to be after nuclear war. A man who delivers the mail. Etc. Etc. And it was very tongue and cheek. But I thought it was kind of a good satire.

And then a number of years passed and Kevin Costner hooked onto it and he made it. And during the making of it the writer Brian Helgeland who is a wonderful writer who did Mystic River and he won an Oscar and really talented man. He had done the rewrite and he called me and he said, “What do you want to do?” He was very generous. “Do you want your name on this? What do you want to do? Do you want to just keep credit? Whatever you want to do.” And I said let me check. And I asked my agent. I said what do you think. And she happened to represent Kevin Costner and said, “You’ve got to put your name on it. I’ve seen the dailies. The movie is amazing.” I said really. OK. All right. I’ll take my credit.

And the movie won a Razzie as one of the worst movies ever made. [Barbara] gave us a Razzie, so it was pretty great.

**John:** I want to get into sort of the profession and this idea of rewriting and being rewritten and rewriting other people, because we’ve both done a lot of that. And I think we can clear up some misconceptions about that. But I want to get back to a little bit more of the daily work that you’re doing. Because you certainly treat your writing like a job. It’s not a thing you occasionally do. You treat it very seriously. You said you’re at your desk at eight in the morning.

There’s a scene for you to write. What is your first step in approaching a scene that you’re writing on a day? Outlining? What are you doing?

**Eric:** Well to go a step further, if it’s an adaptation I’m underlining the book and I find I underline the whole book, so then you say where do I begin. I’m not huge on outlines. I know, and I think every one of my movies has had the same truth. The first scene has never changed once I figured out what it was. And the end scene. The only one I can remember is in Munich Steven switched it to be at the World Trade Center for a good reason. It was in a different location, but the scene was basically the same. But the middle is this great big adventure. So I don’t know what it is. And it’s obviously a little more concise if there’s a book. But if it’s more original writing, no matter if there’s a book or not, then sort of that’s what the journey is for me.

So when I start a day, assuming I’ve gotten through the first two or three scenes, hopefully when I leave the computer I know the next two or three scenes, what I’m going to write the next day. That makes me feel very good. I sleep at night. If I don’t it makes me a little anxious.

**John:** Talk to me about when you say you know the next two or three scenes, that you know in a general sense what’s going to happen or how you’re going to get through the scenes?

**Eric:** I know what’s going to happen. I know where the characters are going. That doesn’t mean it works out always, but the characters lead me down there. And as long as I can stay with as I say the theme that’s all important to me. Like for instance I’m doing this little thriller right now for Oscar Isaac and Ben Stiller that I think is quite good. It’s from Jo Nesbo who is a Swedish mystery writer. He’s pretty terrific. Short story. And it’s an oddball story.

It needs me to keep figuring out where they’re going to go next, because it’s not a chase per se but it is in that English style of Strangers on a Train kind of thing. And so I know for instance that I know the next scene is in Paris in a hotel. I know what happens there. I know they have to then figure out how to get to sort of a farmhouse. And I know what happens at the farmhouse because I figured out that he does something deceptive. So I know those three, so I’m hoping when I get there I’ll know what the next three are. I know the trajectory of it though. I know what the outcome of the script is.

So, I’m on my track. Now this one has been a little trickier because I tried to be a little probably – I think it ended up being more clever than half. I tried to make it a little more post-modern kind of like adaptation or something. And I’m still with that but I had to tone it way down. So this one I actually had to rewrite quite a few times.

**John:** Can I stop you for one second? You say you rewrite a few times. So this is as you’re still doing the first draft you’re making big changes? Or this is after?

**Eric:** I start on page one every day.

**John:** OK so you are that kind of classic, like go back and read through what you’ve written and move forward?

**Eric:** I read everything and I make little whatever comments, fix grammar and spelling, whatever else. And it makes me go through another process and makes me more familiar with it. And they do say though that if you’re going to spend your time doing that you don’t give as much time to the ending because mathematically you’re running out of time at some point.

**John:** But let’s talk about the first new scene you’re working on. So you’re talking about the scene that’s happening in a Paris hotel room. You know sitting down basically what needs to happen in that scene, but what is your process in terms of figuring out who is going to say what, what’s the action in the scene, like how it’s going to unfold? Is that just a sitting and thinking thing for you, or is that fingers on the keys kind of decision?

**Eric:** I think it’s a little more intuitive. I’ll give you an example. I’m doing this thing for HBO, a TV show that Alex Gibney is going to direct with Laura Dern. And it’s a six-parter. I’m just doing the first episode. A true story about a woman who is a psychiatrist and her job is to interview serial killers and recommend to the court whether they’re sane or insane to be executed. And so I’ve sort of just begun, but now I’m coming to the interrogation of the guy that becomes our lead character in the first episode. And except for basic stuff I wanted to get out where he asks her questions, where did you go to school. I mean, it’s sort of expository stuff that’s just bad writing.

But I just started writing dialogue between them. And so some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but I just sort of feel my way. And I’m pretty good at it. I mean, I try to write a little off topic. I think the subtext is much more important than textual. So, that’s a thing I’ve had to learn over the years and it’s not something that I think you’re just given unless you’re just such a wonderful writer. But the best writing is not talking about what’s going on.

And so in this one I’m just trying what’s it going to sound like between this serial killer who killed like nine people and her. And so try to keep human and humorous of some kind and also get as much information we can get out of it. So I just dive in. And I’ve always done that. So it’s not a matter of just self-confidence from being successful. I think it’s just – and I embarrass myself by sort of saying the dialogue out loud. I’m like the worst actor ever. Because everybody’s voice sounds exactly the same. Which does remind me, I mean, as a rule that you want to have everybody’s character be something unique and sound different.

This came to me in a way, even though I think I knew it somehow instinctively from being just I like literature, so I read a lot. That Michael Cimino, if you remember that director, Michael and I were doing a movie. I had a rewritten a movie called The Year of the Dragon. It was OK. But it was by the same guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs. But he had given Mickey Rourke a wallet that had the character’s full life, like pictures of him in Vietnam and his children and driver’s license. I’m sure Mickey Rourke never looked at it, but it spoke to the fact that he had to know that person inside and out psychologically. And that’s how I feel as a writer that you have to do that. You have to know every one of your character’s complete lives.

**John:** You’re saying that you need to know your character’s complete lives, are you writing that down or are you just spending time thinking about that? How much of that bio work is something that a person could actually read versus just stuff you are thinking about in your head?

**Eric:** No, I don’t write it down. Except for little scribbles. Like in this thriller I decided that she was going to be a – because I thought it was clever – that she was going to be like Gillian Flynn, like someone who wrote Gone Girl. So she’s an author which I think is interesting because then it makes you wonder whether this whole thing is just a tale that she’s spinning, you know. So then I started figuring how old is she? And you go through it. And what are her neuroses? I’ll give something a little bit away, but like in the Laura Dern one I have her being like because she’s always stressed because of these horrible people she’s dealing with, I’m going to try to make her like a kleptomaniac. I just want to see it works.

So, what does that say? And then what does that say about your relationship, because her child then becomes a kleptomaniac? You know, that’s what I want to try. I probably shouldn’t say this too loud because it’s giving away something. But it’s just interesting to me. And so I don’t think I’m wrong. I’m maybe not right, but maybe that is a question.

I always think I’ve done that, though. That I just said to hell with it. Let’s get old and go down like the same bridge. I don’t mind trying things that are a little bit out of the norm, you know.

**John:** Now, you describe this Laura Dern project, there’s the Ben Stiller thing. It seems like you’re working on a bunch of things simultaneously. How many different projects are underneath your fingers at any given point?

**Eric:** This is unhappily, because I’m not really – it makes me very anxious. But I do have them stacked up which is nice for me, congratulations, but it just happened to be they dovetailed. And sometimes that happens. And the good news is I spent four years on, or five years on this book, with Killers of the Flower Moon, which everybody should read. It’s a wonderful book. And my screenplay I think was accurate to the book, but it was the book and the story of very quickly Osage Indians 1821 – 1921 I mean – poorest people in America and discover oil in this terrible land in Oklahoma they’d been driven to. And then every killer in America comes to kill 184 of them for their money. And this really heroic guy comes in.

So that’s still, you know, that’s supposed to start filming once the Covid clears out, and it’s Marty Scorsese, in March. So I have that. So there will be continuing rewrites with that. Leonardo wanted some things changed we argued about and he won half of them, I won half of them.

So that’s happening. And then these other two are works that are ongoing. And then there’s some older ones that pop up and I have to then address, which is just a factor of having been lucky enough to have a lot of work and some things are just dragging. We had this whole situation that’s developed with Cleopatra. I had done like seven drafts of Cleopatra at that point for Angelina. And it became a mess with the hack at Sony and Scott Rudin and this and that.

And now the project was announced the other day that Patty Jenkins is going to do one with Gal Godot and a very good writer named Laeta, I forget her last name.

**John:** Laeta Kalogridis.

**Eric:** Exactly. And so I’m debating whether this is going to be worth me racing with them. Probably not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Eric:** But that’s an old project. In other words I hadn’t worked on it for five years or something. But I think, look, that’s a function of some luck. Some people have given me the opportunity. And obviously I’ve been successful at it, which sometimes by design and a lot of it is not, you know.

**John:** Talk about rewrites. So talk about the rewrites that you go through in terms of getting the project up to the point where you’re happy with it. And then the rewrite process after you’re happy with it to get other people happy with it.

**Eric:** I mean, when I’m done – when I feel it’s done I’m done. And then I’ll turn it in. I don’t like turning it in just to a producer. I usually try to go around them and turn it into the studio at the same time if I can. And then we get the notes. I have rules about notes and now because I have enough cache I can say you cannot – only give me bullet points. I say would you consider this character doing that? Would you consider…?

I mean, I don’t like when they write these ridiculous essays on showing how clever they are with the notes, you know. And obviously if I did something stupid it wasn’t my intention to write something stupid. So that’s notes.

So then I’ll begin to rewrite. And rewrites are hard for me because I think I’m more of an instinctive writer. So, then I’m lucky enough to have worked with some really great directors. Some who are writers of their own and that’s easy in some respects because they get it and we can work it out together. Like Michael Mann. He’s a very tough guy and is hard to work with, for the right reasons. But he’s a writer so we would battle things out. But he knew if I didn’t quite have it we could feel the direction. While on the other hand, who can I think of, Robert Redford was a little more difficult because he wasn’t a born writer. So he wanted to prove things.

Marty Scorsese and David Fincher are very different people but phenomenal. Marty is the most willing to have you be inventive. And he’ll figure out how to film it and if he thinks it works. And he’s very generous if he doesn’t think it works. He says, “Let’s try it this way.” And David on the other hand is very, very specific. Very literal in a great way and as smart as a whip. And really fights you to get to where you want – he says, “I want you to tell me what you’re trying to articulate.” He just has a different way of doing things. And they both end up in different places. Their movies look different and they’re different people but they’re both incredible experiences which is incredibly rewarding. Which will just give me the time that – I have a movie coming out called Mank that I produced with David and his father wrote and we worked on the script to hopefully bring it up to where it’s really great. But it’s his father’s script.

And it’s about Herman Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane and his world with Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles. And I think it’s an incredible movie. I’m tooting trumpets here but it’s black and white. It’s as skilled as David Fincher can be I think. And I think it’s probably limited for appeal to people because it’s such a narrow subject, but it’s a master work I think because of David’s abilities.

**John:** Its appeal is exactly the folks who are listening to this Zoom right now. Because it is about a writer’s relationship with a director and a visionary film that may or may not come into being based on how people did the stuff.

**Eric:** I think one of the reasons David brought me on was because I’ve been sort of an insider in Hollywood in that way for many, many years. You know, I’ve worked with everybody from Kurosawa through Spielberg through whoever. So I’ve had many relationships with many writers, directors, actors. So I know the process. I know what’s wounding about it. So when he asked me what does it feel like to feel like you’re not going to get credit I can write that. I know what that feels like. So it’s a real experience yeah.

**John:** Well talk us through that. Talk us through advice for writers who are dealing with a director for the first time and what those initial conversations are like. How do you feel out a director and sort of understand what that relationship is going to be like in that first meeting? Because I’ve been through some of them and I’ve come in with assumptions. Sometimes I’ve been right. Sometimes I’ve been wrong. Sometimes it has gone well. Sometimes it has gone really, really poorly. What advice can you offer to folks who are listening about that first conversation?

**Eric:** I want to talk about sort of earlier in my career because I think it’s a little different now because I’m kind of cocky. I’m a little cocky now.

**John:** You’re a legend.

**Eric:** Well, a legend, so funny. But I can come in and I can back up things. I say you might want to [unintelligible]. Early on I did – this is a good story and it’s not [unintelligible] it’s true. There was a director named Stuart Rosenberg who had done Cool Hand Luke and he was a very good Hollywood director and a nice man. And I was really young. I mean, I was 19 when I went down and rewrote The Drowning Pool in Louisiana. And then I was on Onion Field with him. And Onion Field ended up getting made by a man named Harold Becker and it’s an interesting movie.

But Stuart and I fought for like two weeks over one particular scene. And I thought it was a great scene and he didn’t think it was so great. And he finally said to me, and this just always stuck with me that “you can leave it in the script but I’m not going to shoot it.” So that was the end of that conversation. And that was the truth. So at the end of the day if the director is not going to be flexible you are stuck. So, you better try to find a way to be as best communal as you can be and also make the scene as good as possible. So you have to find, I think, and sometimes I’m good at it and sometimes I’m not as good, another way to do the scene. Another way to tell that piece of drama if that’s what you need to do. And each director approaches it differently.

Amenable to a point and yet I get very stringent if I think that they’re varying from what the piece is about. And then I think – I’ve been lucky because the people I’ve worked with, I mean, in the main are really good directors. I mean, it’s also something I don’t think I could do. I mean, I tried it when I was younger and I actually won some awards, a short. But I always felt like this isn’t me. I thought if I went on to direct I’d be like a B-minus director and what was the point of that, you know? And I didn’t want to leave my family and a whole bunch of other reasons.

But the directors have been, I mean, I think have yet to figure out the way they want to get at something. And if you want to be a dick about it you’re going to have a lot of problems. On the other hand I don’t think you should just roll over. It’s a balance. It’s a tightrope walk.

**John:** Yeah. A thing that people have a hard time understanding about the job of a screenwriter is obviously we’re putting words on the page the same way the novelist is, but there’s a whole social aspect to it. You have to be able to read people in the room and understand what they’re actually going after. Even before you get to directors, initially with producers and with studio executives, find out what they’re actually really after and what the note is behind the note.

**Eric:** Yeah. That’s well said, John. In other words it’s really trying to read the note behind the note. Because the initial note will just annoy you. I mean, in most cases you probably thought about it. Just somebody gave us a note on something recently that they felt there was too much description and I took umbrage at it. Said I’ve been very successful with a lot of description. But I got it. In other words I think it made it harder for them to read. It was too dense. And once I settled down and I thought well that’s OK. So in other words you have to be somehow – unless they’re nasty, then you don’t need to suffer that in any way, shape, or form.

But I think you have to be finding a way to be as communal – look, it’s a communal craft, right. Even though I do believe it’s a film by is a director’s film when all is said and done. They put all the pieces together. The architecture, the ship is the screenwriter. And you’re not going to go on the journey without that. But the director has to get it to the right place in the right way.

**John:** How different is it now than ‘70s/’80s, your early credits? How different is it doing this job? Or is it not really that different?

**Eric:** I don’t feel it’s that different oddly because I guess maybe I just stay with my process. I used to, I mean, just on a personal level I had a lot of kids and a lot of little kids. And I used to love to just – they would run around and I would just write in the living room, sitting down to type something. But I don’t know. I had a couple oddball little interesting movies made in the ‘70s that probably would be, you know, interesting today if they were streamed. And then I had some big movies. So, I don’t know. I think eventually it comes down to feeling like the same task to me. But, you know, I’m looking, you know, it’s like my dad said when you talk how does it feel to be 80, or whatever he was at the time, he said, “You know, I don’t look out of those eyes. I don’t look out of 80-year-old eyes, I look out of whatever eyes I am.” And that’s the same thing at 75.

I’m quite – this is just a kind of sweet, sad thing, but lovely in its own way. I’m very close with David Milch who I think is our American Shakespeare from television. David has some challenges with some Alzheimer’s. So I went and visited him. I visit him like once a month. And he was talking about how time goes so. And I said sure does. And I thought to myself, gee, when I was 60 I said, well, I mean 15 years from now 75, or 20 from now, that seems like forever. Well, it was a blink. It was a complete blink of the eyes. And now I’m 75. I said do you have any regrets. And he said, “I wasn’t more generous of spirit.” Which meant he felt that he had been too selfish his whole life. And whether that’s true or not we can think about.

But it made me think. I mean, I think that’s an important kind of lesson. I’ll put that in something, you know. Because that’s just something important.

**John:** Thinking about David Milch and his tremendous success in television and you said the American Shakespeare and I can believe that, he was making television at this pivotal moment where it became just a dominant American art form in terms of a written art form. And the writers who created that were so acclaimed and rightfully. It’s a little frustrating to me. I’m wondering if it’s frustrating to you that we as screenwriters are writing the features that are so iconic and yet there hasn’t been the same appreciation that we sometimes are writing these films that are known for that.

If you were to go back and rewind your career 25 years would you have still done features and focused on features, or would you have been more attracted to 25?

**Eric:** No. First of all I think, you know, I was taught that television is smaller than life and that movies are bigger than life. So I still look at the 40-foot-screen as being 40 even though it’s irrelevant I guess now. And I’m not sure I’m as good a short story writer as you have to be, even though I think I’ve written some good TV episodes. I wrote one for David that they never aired because it was never shot because of this show getting canceled. I thought it was probably as good of writing as I’d done. But I can just be brave because it wasn’t sort of my betting the farm.

No, I grew up with movies. My first experience was watching like War of the Worlds in the Brooklyn Paramount balcony. And it was like oh my god. This is like something that takes me somewhere else. Then I was very big on psychedelics in the ‘70s and late ‘60s, so I liked sort of mind expansion stuff where you can try to go further and farther. So I never felt that way about television.

And I think the difference is that you have some incredible writers who are also directors though. And that’s a great advantage. Because Ingmar Bergman or Fellini. In other words you could start naming them, Antonioni, and then Francis of course. So these people could then realize what they wrote. So, I don’t think there’s anything better than Godfather II probably that has ever been done. Or to me 2001 changed my life in some way. So Kubrick was able to get that out of his writer and was able to write what he did.

I think, I don’t know, maybe there isn’t an American Shakespeare in screenwriting. I think part of that is because you have to be a director maybe to do that. And then maybe Chayefsky was, you know, of a sort. There’s probably a few others, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, and Sorkin would be in that list, but he’s also–

**Eric:** Aaron is wonderful.

**John:** Tremendous television stuff that he’s done before this. Nora Ephron.

**Eric:** I would think, like Bob Fosse, he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he’s a director though. I think there’s a major advantage in being able to direct and if you’re able to be good at being a director.

**John:** I’m going to tackle some questions from our growing list of questions here. This one is about adaptations from [unintelligible]. He asks, “There’s a ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.’ How do you negotiate what should be kept in an adaptation and what should be left out when you’re adapting a true life story?”

**Eric:** That’s a great question. We just had this discussion the other night because I watched The Trial of the Chicago Seven. And I thought Aaron did a really great job. And I first had a chip on my shoulder, I was a little jaundiced because I knew Abbie Hoffman quite well and I knew some of the people and I had been involved with [unintelligible]. Anyway, and then it got, I’m not sure, I have to ask him because there’s a scene at the end of the movie, because I think the move eventually really becomes pretty great. And he has a scene where someone gives a speech in the courtroom and I’m going to guess that he wrote a speech that was not what was there. And so then we got into a debate about what you can do.

I said, well wait a minute, this is like an historical event. And it’s a trial. And then somebody pointed out I had done the same kind of thing in something of my own. And so that I think I guess your first rule is you’re a dramatist, you know. I’ll give you another example.

I did a script for Tom Hanks called Garden of the Beast which is an historical book which was about the American ambassador to Germany during WWII who was kind of a very big Nazi aficionado. Spoke German. Had gone to school in Germany. And then he saw kind of the errors of his ways as certain things happened. But I dramatized a couple things that Tom objected to. One was that I had a scene – I don’t think this is a big deal – but Hitler used to watch King Kong like three times a week. And so I had a scene where he and the ambassador are discussing whatever the drama was while King Kong was being played. Now that probably didn’t happen. I don’t think that changes the course of it or anything. But Tom took to me to task for it.

And then I had Hitler offered him a ride back to the embassy and I had him get in the car with Hitler with all the people on the streets. And I wanted to see how that felt like for anybody being inside of that and with flowers all over them. Tom objected to that. And he wasn’t right or wrong. In other words so that – my first job is I think as a dramatist. And we say this actually in the Mank movie that you can’t view somebody’s life in two hours. You only can do an impression of it. And the genius of Citizen Kane is that I think it’s the first movie that showed, and maybe there’s a Russian movie, that showed a character from multiple points of view. That’s very rare. In other words usually it’s [unintelligible]. But if you have a wife you have her point of view. If you have a child.

The other thing is I usually pick kind of bad books. So, you know, bad books and bad plays make really good movies because one of the reasons is you can just go take off on your own. So you can change things. I think you have to be careful in certain respects to what is the sensibilities of people. In other words I don’t think you just blithely decide to change what somehow is slavery or holocaust. In other words I think you have to be very careful.

But I mean there is a criteria that you have to dramatize it if you’re a dramatist. So you’re going to combine things. And this Killers of the Flower Moon is a perfect example because that was where I realized I had done the same thing at the end of a particular courtroom that’s at the end of the movie. And I had dramatized something that was not happening there, but I wanted to have.

So, I say go for it, but be a little bit cautious because you can get your assistant kicked if you’re going to start rewriting history that’s affecting people’s sensitivity. And I have never tried to do that. But, yeah, I think there is a burden.

I mean, look, a lot of people don’t like Forrest Gump. They think it’s a poke in the eye at liberalism and all sorts of things. I don’t have the same feeling about it. And Bob Zemeckis and I are quite different. He’s very, at that time, more universal poke in the eye guy. He didn’t give a shit if he made fun of the Black Panthers or Ronald Reagan. And I was a good staunch, I was born as a red diaper baby and I had great communist beliefs. Became watered down over the years.

So the movie was criticized probably rightly in some respects, but I think as Quentin Tarantino said, “I think people have lost the sense of irony.” Because the whole thing is supposed to be – it’s supposed to be a satire, you know. But I think you’ve got to be careful of that is my point. I think you have to really look – and particularly today, because people are very aware of their everything – heritage, what they feel about themselves. I mean, they should. They should.

**John:** Speaking of Forrest Gump, a good segue into a question from JJ. Can you talk about the process of getting hired for adaptations in particular? How do you get started doing adaptation work? So I think it could be, you could talk about Forrest Gump, obviously many of your later projects they came to you with a book and you could say yes or no. But earlier one there were going to be projects where do you want to do this. Do you want to come in and talk to us about this? Your pitching approach to a book. What are those initial conversations like as you’re describing how you want to take an adaptation?

**Eric:** Well that’s a good question. The good news is that those were things that were presented to me by like studios. It wasn’t anybody else really. Or a producer. There was an entity. It wasn’t me bringing them a book and trying to stand on my head and say this will make a good movie. So that was I think ahead of the game. Forrest Gump came as a book. I didn’t think it was a great book. And the man who wrote it should rest in peace. He gave me something that was like a gift. But it was a little farcical for me. And then I thought well this is a good way to tell the story of this year that I just lived through with time passing and all that stuff.

And I’m trying to think. Benjamin Button was as I said a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. He just did it for money. He did it for Colliers Magazine and had no stake in it at all. So I had the sort of permission to do whatever I wanted with it.

Munich was a true story. I was rewritten on Munich by Tony Kushner who I thought did a pretty great job in certain areas. Other areas I still resent. Not him personally. I mean, we can talk about that getting rewritten if you want. That’s why I brought it up.

**John:** Well let’s talk about rewriting. Because that’s a thing I promised we would get into. So, obviously you’ve come onto projects where there was already a script and you were coming in there to do work on it. And you’ve also had projects that you started and then someone else has taken over the project. So let’s start with when you’re coming in on an existing project and there is a script and you’re talking with folks about stuff. What are those initial conversations and how do you treat the material that you got from the start? Are you treating it like you’re treating a book that you’re being sent? This is the starting place and I’m going to write a new script? Are you trying to incorporate as many scenes as still possible there? What is the decision process for you?

**Eric:** I think it depended on where they are in the sequence of getting the movie made. Because I would never want to go in and destroy somebody’s having a movie get made. I’ve some good jobs in more limited basis. I thought I did good on Black Hawk Down. I thought I did some good writing on that. Leonardo and Russell Crowe was in. Ridley Scott directed it.

**John:** Was it Blood Diamond?

**Eric:** No. Something of Lies or something. Anyway, my point being I just don’t think I did much to help them. And they didn’t want much. But I don’t think what I did was great.

On the other hand I’ve come in on things like Cleopatra where I started from scratch. There had been a couple scripts before I did and good writers, but I just had a different point of view. And Benjamin Button was another one. And usually if I have the time I’ll put in the effort and start over if I think there’s a way. Or I’ll just say I can’t be helpful. I think it’s a more interesting conversation about not so much the work but I’ve rewritten people where it’s bruising to other people. And it’s one of the things I don’t like about doing it. As writers we scavenge each other. And then they don’t have a – something I’ve always spoken to that when you fight for credit and then if you don’t get it you don’t exist in that sense, however much time. And I feel the Writers Guild should change that. But I’m in the minority. I felt like they should have an additional writing credit or something, because everybody should at least share in what they did.

But the Writers Guild feels in the main that it diminishes the credit of the writers that get credit.

And then I’ve had obviously people come in and rewrite me. And I haven’t liked it. I said, you know, you feel like you’ve failed, you’ve been rejected. I knew for instance on this movie The Horse Whisperer, I liked Redford very much but I lived with him for like two months, two or three months. And I realized at one point he’s going to look in the mirror and not want to see me there. And so that’s what happened. And so a good writer, Richard LaGravenese, came in and did very good work. And I’m still not wild about the movie which I don’t think had enough adventure in it, but not Richard’s fault.

But that hurt. I was wounded by that. And you sort of lick your wounds. But I guess I’ll give you a funny story because it’s about this. I think it’s about rejection, you know, which every writer feels from day one. And I asked Warren Beatty the other day, I’m dropping a name here, but have you ever – I don’t know why this occurred to me. I said have you ever been rejected in your whole life. And he had to think for a long time. I said are done thinking? He said, “Yeah, I wanted to do Fistful of Dollars,” or one of those Clint Eastwood westerns. They picked Clint Eastwood. And he said, “But I got to do Bonnie and Clyde, so it worked out OK for me.”

**John:** It worked out.

**Eric:** The only thing he could think of about rejection. He didn’t say there was a woman who didn’t want to go out with me or whatever.

**John:** No.

**Eric:** A man. Whatever he felt. But that was it. I said pretty good. I think him and I’m dropping another name. I worked for Mick Jagger on a thing and he’s the other one I thought this guy has never had a moment’s rejection in his whole life, you know.

**John:** We have real time follow up here. So Body of Lies was the movie that you were thinking about.

**Eric:** Thank you.

**John:** So we have 1,000 people here in the audience.

**Eric:** See, bad title. Bad title to begin with.

**John:** Not a good title. Not a good title. Titles are important. They help frame what things are going to be, the projects.

**Eric:** Oh boy, is it ever. And names, by the way. Don’t you think character names are key, too? Unless it’s a satire or something. If I see a name – here’s one of the things I don’t like about Dune. Because I had read Dune when I was like 15 and I thought it was OK. I wasn’t as wild about it like 16-year-old boys mostly are. But then as I went back into it now to do this version for a guy I like very much, I did a good rewrite on Arrival, which I think I did a good job on, for Denis Villeneuve.

So we were cogitating the whole thing and there was a character named Duncan Idaho in it. And I said wait a minute this is like the planets are billions of miles away. This isn’t a translation of some other language. That’s his name. And I said well how the hell does that work? But that was a famous character and still will be.

**John:** So you just don’t have characters saying his name aloud very often in the movie hopefully. So it doesn’t bum people so much.

**Eric:** I mean, it’s fun to do – I think if you can give characters to somehow reflect the tone of the movie, like I did something today. I called the villain in the thriller Mr. Lime. And the reason was because that was an Orson Welles’ name in The Third Man. So those few who will know that will – or they’ll just think that’s a stupid idea.

**John:** A question here from Ellen Cornfeld. She writes, “How to learn to trust your own voice when you are a people pleasure by nature and surrounded by smart voices giving you terrific feedback on your scripts?” So, basically really a question for you. You’ve written this thing. You had an approach. You had a point of view. There’s a thing you want to do. Now you’re getting these notes back. How do you stay true to your own voice and your own instinct when you start getting that feedback?

**Eric:** I think you have to find a different approach and try to hopefully make that similar to what you could then live with to be, you know, that says what you want it to say. It’s difficult because you feel inundated. There’s sort of a higher power that’s looking down and giving you these [theote] of notes. And obviously I have the power more now because I’m more successful, but when I was younger I’m sure I felt kind of a little buffeted by it.

But I’m not saying not to stick with your vision but I think you have to maybe find a way to do your vision differently I guess. And that’s probably I guess a little more communal in that respect, or a little more where you can mediate things. Because it’s not black and white I guess. And sometimes you’re surprised at the end.

What happens, I mean, eventually which is kind of funny is that you stake your claim on something and you really stick your sword in the ground and you’re not going to move and then you slowly move and eventually it’s gone and it becomes gone and you don’t remember even you were involved with it, you know, and that scene just goes into some void in the ether.

So, I think you have to be brave in a way. Be brave without being stupid I guess.

**John:** Always a good combination. I’m going to combine a couple questions here. People are asking about writing for an actor or writing with an actor in mind. Do you prefer writing something where you know who is going to be playing that role? Or would you rather have it be blank as you’re starting?

**Eric:** I think there’s an advantage to both. In many cases I’ve known who the actor was, so that was easier. Like Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump was the dream. Brad Pitt was Benjamin Button so I knew what he could possibly do or not do. I was a little more taken with in The Insider that Russell Crowe when he was hired I had already written the part and the part was very difficult because I couldn’t interview the real guy. So I had to go on basically who is the guy and I tried to then develop a character which you could always do. You say, well, who is this man who was a scientist for tobacco companies? And what does that say? That he wants to be a big fish in a little pond of scientists? Or he is insecure about his science knowledge? In this case he actually really just wanted to get his pension.

So I wrote what was I think a full-blooded character and then Russell came on and Russell had a lot of questions. And I can’t tell you the number of times I had to get on an airplane and go down there because Michael Mann didn’t want to fight with him and he didn’t want to have that kind of relationship. So I would go and say – because Russell wouldn’t come out of his trailer and I’d say what’s going on. He’d say, “I don’t get this.” And so you go through it and you hopefully convince him that this is the way that it should be. And then you make some accommodations. Things on that movie I’ll never forget is that Al Pacino called me one morning and he said, “You have a three-page monologue here. I could do it in one look.” I said if you can do it in one look do it. And he did. He did.

**John:** That’s good. It saves some camera. Saves some reel.

**Eric:** And he really did. He really did.

**John:** Eric, what’s been your experience, because I’ve had the same thing with actors who are incredibly challenging to deal with over little things on scripts and stories and I’m always wrestling with to what degree are they being reasonable but they can’t connect these dots either intellectually or emotionally they can’t make it work? And to what degree is it insecurity? With a Russell Crowe or with other actors you’ve dealt with how do you think a writer can or should interact with actors who are doing that thing? It could be on an independent film, a small independent film set that our people are working on, or a giant mega budget picture. What works?

**Eric:** I mean, I think rehearsals are really important. And read-throughs because I think you get a sense of what they can do or can’t do, or where there’s going to be bumps. Like for every movie I’ve written I think I go to the set, because I have anticipated what’s going to be a scene that’s going to be a problem. Or I’ll go to watch what I enjoy. But I think you have to befriend the actor in a good way, even if they’re a dick. And try to find a way so you understand their psychology.

I mean, I’m going to do it, and he’s a nice person, I’m going to do a movie in the future with Joaquin Phoenix which is a really tough subject matter, but he works very differently. And he really wants to get into the weeds and the emotions and the things. Like he doesn’t rehearse at all. He doesn’t like rehearsals. But I’ve already established a relationship with him and I think we intellectually can understand what we both want from it. So he’ll trust me to some extent and I’ll trust him. And some of that is just having the experience of having done it for so long, because I work with so many people.

But I remember as a young boy I was literally 19 years old walking on the set of The Drowning Pool, same Stuart Rosenberg had directed, and Paul Newman was the star. And they needed a rewrite and I came with my new pair of corduroys and my nice new briefcase and walked on the set. And Paul Newman said, “Our savior is here.” And I said good luck to him, me and him. And I don’t know they accepted me then. I guess I’m amenable. I mean, I don’t kiss ass particularly but I think it is a team effort of a kind.

So, if you can be smart about the way. I mean, I don’t think there’s any one way to do it, but I think part of it is your own personal skills with people.

**John:** As you’re talking about this 19-year-old you walking onto this set, if you could give advice to that 19-year-old you, obviously you made some really good choices along the way, but are there any other pieces of advice you wish you could whisper to that 19-year-old?

**Eric:** I think writing wise I wish I could be a little more concise. I think I tend to over-write because I’m a frustrated novelist. And so I write these long prose things and I think it probably gets in the way of things. So if I could articulate things a little more articulately in a smaller way. I don’t know. I can’t think of too many movies that I missed, in other words that I was offered and I said no. There’s a couple. The biggest one for me was I was offered to do Cuckoo’s Nest originally. And I was doing The Onion Field. And my agent said they’ll never make that movie. And then literally like a week later Jack Nicholson signed to do it.

And I did come back and I rewrote the fishing boat scene, because I was good friends at that time with Michael Douglas. But that was the only one I think that I said wow. But I don’t know, Bo Goldman who wrote it, even though he rewrote somebody, a guy named Larry Hauben who just out of the blue decided to write a script from it because it was owned by somebody. But Bo Goldman I think may be one of the better screenwriters who ever lived. I mean, he did Howard and Melvin and he did the best divorce movie, Shoot the Moon, I think. I haven’t seen it in so long. And Scent of a Woman.

**John:** All right. So, you’re going to whisper to him like do Cuckoo’s Nest but basically do everything else. Just follow your instincts because it’ll suit you very well.

**Eric:** Look, I don’t think everybody has that leisure. They have to work. So that you don’t get to always do – I think what you need to do though is try to do, and I’ll give you a funny example of this. So I had no money and I really needed work and I did Airport ’79 The Concorde. And I wrote a very wonderful line called, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing.” Anyhow, I tried to write, I mean, this is arrogance in a way, but I tried to write the best disaster movie, that’s what they called those then, ever made. You know?

And actually I got sort of half kudos for it. The critics in the New York Times said this is either the worst disaster movie ever made or the best. So, but I did try to make that something special for me. You know, I put in like Saint-Exupery about flying. I had Alain Delon reading poetry. You know, it was ridiculous, you know.

But I think you have to believe in what you’re doing and hopeful you make the best of it.

**John:** All right. Eric, thank you for making the best of it for all these amazing movies you’ve done and thank you for this conversation. I want to thank the Writers Guild Foundation for having us both here. So, they do amazing work throughout the year.

**Eric:** Yeah, they’re amazing. Amazing.

**John:** These panels are great fun but all the outreach they do to developing writers and other folks is remarkable. So please do support the Writers Guild Foundation. Thank you, Dustin, for putting this together. And, Eric, thank you so much. It was great to chat.

**Eric:** Thank you. I loved meeting you this way.

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice. Cool.

**Eric:** See you at the movies. Not really. See you on the television screen I guess.

**John:** And when do we see Mank?

**Eric:** Mank will be, I mean, I think late November/early December maybe. Dune will be next year. And Killers of the Flower Moon the year after maybe. But Mank I want everybody to look at. I think you’ll find it pretty special.

**John:** Exactly.

**Eric:** Thank you.

**John:** Great. Thanks. Bye.

All right, we are back here in the present. We are recording this on a Friday morning. As we record this it has not officially been announced that Joe Biden has won but it seems kind of inevitable that he’s won. So we’ll be talking about that in our bonus segment. But this would be the time where we would do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. So last week my One Cool Thing was maybe America. This week my One Cool Thing is the person we should be talking about, but instead we keep talking about this orange ding-a-ling and his nonsense. Or alternatively in a hopeful tone we talk about Joe Biden and the fact that he is going to be the new President of the United States. But the person we should be talking about Kamala Harris. Because in our ridiculously long short life as a country we have had zero, that is exactly zero, female Vice Presidents or Presidents. Zero. And now we have one.

And, also, she is a woman of color. This is the first Black woman to serve, aside from the first woman to serve as either President or Vice President. The first Black woman to serve as either President or Vice President. The first Indian woman to serve as Vice President or President. This is the most historic election since Barack Obama’s election. And I am just amazed and thrilled and I feel a little bit annoyed that Orange Thunder keeps stealing the limelight when this is the big story. That we have finally broken through the stupidest barrier of entry to high political office that we have. So congratulations us.

**John:** Yeah. And I hope that by the time people are listening to this podcast we will have seen her on a stage and Joe Biden on a stage and other things so we can say like, oh, that’s right. This is what it’s going to look like and that’s kind of exciting and cool. Because you just need the visual sometimes. And I think probably because of the pandemic we just haven’t had the visual at times.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think when we see that that will be great.

**Craig:** And also good for all of us. More Maya Rudolph, clearly.

**John:** Oh, come on.

**Craig:** This is a huge Maya Rudolph boom ahead, which is good for everybody. We get four years of her saying Joe Biden which puts a smile on my face every damn time.

**John:** It’s going to be great. My One Cool Thing is two related things. First off is one of the few physical magazines I still read which is MIT Technology Review.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** This magazine dates back to like the 1900s. It’s a very storied magazine talking about technology and sort of how things evolve. And one of the fun things about the magazine is that they will show like 30 years ago, 60 years ago this is what we were writing about and sort of compare stuff.

The best comparison for it would be Wired Magazine if it wasn’t so gadget focused. It’s really just more about the overall science and technologies behind things. But the actual article I want to point people to is by Richard Fisher in this last month’s issue called How to Escape the Present. And what I liked about it is it was talking about how human beings grew up in sort of cyclical time. It was all just the seasons and they planted crops, they grew stuff, and your ancestor’s life was not different from your kids’ lives. Basically everything stayed in this little circle.

And eventually we started figuring like, oh wait, there was the past. The past happened. And we started to think longer about the past. We started to be able to think about the future and like plan for future things. He points to a moment in the 1700s where you started to see writers talk about what life would be like in the 20th Century and the 24th Century and had these sort of grand visions of things.

And his point is that we’ve sort of stopped doing that. If you look at sort of how we think about the future it’s really, really short term. And in fact we sort of are obsessed with only the present. And that we are on these incredibly short cycles. So we have the 24-hour news cycle. We have two or four year election cycles. And it makes it very hard for us to do the long-term thinking that we need to do. It’s sort of like a cliff we run into and we can’t think about what happens after that time. And I think, Craig, in our lifetime I’ve definitely felt that.

I feel like as a kid I used to have a better sense of where the future was headed than I kind of do now. And it’s weird talking about this after this election, because I don’t even have a good sense of like what happens next week right now. And this present-ism is really troubling.

**Craig:** Well, we are told constantly to live in the now, as if that’s a virtue. I’ve always been a thinker about the future kind of person, because I like it. Our brains are not very good at this. We know that. But it is true that our culture essentially has made us obsess with a belief that by analyzing the state of affairs in this second we will somehow be able to control what happens next, or get certainty about what happens next, when all we really know for sure is that we will never have that, ever.

So we are taunting ourselves and torturing ourselves with this feeling that well if I just keep watching TV certainty will be created in my mind. Are you like this John? People will text me in these situations. I don’t know why it’s me. And they’ll say, “Can you just tell me what’s going to happen?” Like I would know? I don’t know. None of us know. Everyone wants certainty and they look to somebody to give them some kind of reassurance. But we don’t know until we know.

Math is a beautiful thing. It became incredibly clear, for instance, that Joe Biden was going to win because math is math. And much like Covid it doesn’t care what Donald Trump thinks. So that was nice. But I agree. I that we are locked in this obsessive now-ness because an industry that turns our attention into money has risen up to dominate our culture. And so it will keep doing that.

**John:** But speaking specifically to our audience, people who are writing movies and television shows, I do think that we only think about the future in clearly dystopian terms. We basically have a model of The Terminator, we have Hunger Games. Basically Mad Max. Everything is going to fall apart and what it’s going to look like when–

**Craig:** The Last of Us.

**John:** Yeah. The Last of Us. Go for it, Craig. What’s it going to be like when everything falls apart? And sure, we can do that. But we sort of stopped doing Star Trek. We stopped thinking about the future in terms of optimistic ways. And I feel like there’s a need and a vacuum out there for an optimistic vision of the future and sort of what we should aim for rather than what we fear.

**Craig:** Well, even Star Trek in its most utopian era, which was its network era, created a very virtualized view of where we as a human species would go and then immediately flung us into space to start shooting people. That’s sort of what happens. Because drama is drama. And that’s how it goes. And the earth is always under threat. And the whales are going to do something. And this is going to happen and that’s going to happen. I mean, that is part of what we do.

**John:** Famously The Next Generation wanted there to be no conflict among the crew. And I was like you need conflict for story. So I’m not asking for no conflict. I’m just asking for a vision of the future that is expansive and possibly hopeful.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, look, for art that is ultimately boring. What we like to see is triumph. So triumph requires bad stuff happening. The things that are the toughest are the ones – and you don’t see this very often – where there’s a vision of the future, there is a struggle, and the struggle fails. But then the purpose of that art is to say there but for the grace of God go we, can we figure our crap out and not be like that?

**John:** Yeah. A movie that you and I both like and refer to often is Her.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Which does posit a near future that is – the future doesn’t look bad. So his situation is not great, but the future itself is not a thing to be afraid of.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And just give me some more Hers out there, folks. I’d love to see it. Let’s make a few more of those.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I will not be delivering that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s not in Craig’s–

**Craig:** Not coming from me.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. So thank you everyone for listening. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re great and they’re very comfortable. They make a great gift for the holidays. You can find them at Cotton Bureau or in the links in the show notes which you can find at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts there.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record about the election. So Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** So, Craig, I went into Tuesday, well Monday and Tuesday, sort of getting into the election period noticeably more optimistic and hopeful than most of the people around me and on Twitter. And I felt like I wasn’t allowed to sort of express optimism because I was going to be ridiculed for it. And then as stuff happened on Tuesday I felt like oh should I have been more pessimistic. And then I realized like, oh, but being more pessimistic wouldn’t have actually helped this feeling right now. What were you feeling on Tuesday?

**Craig:** Yeah. On Tuesday I was feeling pretty confident that things were going to go well for Joe Biden and therefore for America and therefore for humanity. And they did. It was important to remind myself as Tuesday went on that we were facing an odd situation where the first votes were going to be counted last.

And this is something that I guess, I mean, look, on some level I’m sure most Republicans who are screaming falsely about fraud understand this all too well and they’re just yelling because they don’t know what else to do. I’m not sure Donald Trump understands it because he’s legitimately stupid. But the votes that are being counted now, those votes were cast before the votes that were cast on Election Day. And we knew that the votes that were cast before were largely going to break Democratic because for some reason, and I can’t explain why – I could – Democratic voters seemed more concerned about not getting Covid than Republican voters.

And sure enough that’s what happened. But therefore you had to be braced for the fact that on Tuesday or by Tuesday evening that things were not going to be simple. I was not onboard with the Ragin’ Cajun, James Carville, stating that it was going to be a huge rout and we would all know by, I don’t know what he said, 10pm Eastern Time or something. No. No.

**John:** Yeah. So I wasn’t there. It’s always hard to remember sort of what you were thinking at a certain point in time. But I was thinking that like, yes, if we did have a decisive victory in Florida then clearly it was going to be over. But when it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen that melting dread kicked back in.

It’s an experience I’ve felt enough in my life that I recognize what it is and sort of how I need to address it. And for me it was like go into the other room, sit on the floor, and actually just sort of doing the breathing exercises to calm myself down and just to not participate in the torture of it. And I just went to bed early. And that was the right choice for me.

Of course I’m thinking back to the 2016 election and the special episode that you and I recorded when the results came out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that sense that time forked and we ended up on the darkest timeline and then 2020 was just like the darkest part of the darkest timeline.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I was feeling on Tuesday night like, crap, am I in the coin toss where it actually went the other way? And that is such a terrifying feeling to know that, OK, this could actually all go horribly south.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so I did the same thing you did because I understood that being on Twitter and absorbing everybody else’s anxiety was not going to be good for me. What ends up happening, when people are anxious they’ll teach you – were you a lifeguard? I know you were an Eagle Scout so I figure you were a lifeguard.

**John:** I never actually lifeguarded but I’ve done a lot of CPR training.

**Craig:** Got it. So you know, as did I when I was going through that as a teenager, that when someone is drowning they’re very dangerous to you, because they’re in a full panic and they will try and drag you down. Not on purpose. But they will cling to you in panic and forget that you’re a living person and they can swamp you. And that’s pretty much what’s going on on Twitter on Tuesday. As I look around I just think everyone’s anxiety is just spiraling out of control and they can swamp me with this and it doesn’t have any connection to what’s coming. Right? Because we just haven’t seen it yet. It’s the thing of we’re looking at light in the sky but that’s old light.

So I turned off Twitter and I went and played MLB The Show 20 for quite some time. Did pretty well. Did pretty well. My character in Road to the Show has finally made it through his six qualifying years in the major leagues. He’s a free agent. He got a great deal. He’s a really good pitcher. That’s not important right now.

Here’s what matters. What matters is that it started to turn around as it was always going to go. And I never thought that Florida was going to be Democratic. I mean, yeah, you can fantasize about it. You can fantasize about Texas. And certainly Texas is moving steadily in a direction, so that’s nice to see. But it was – what did we all say? Like adults. This is going to come down to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent Arizona. And that’s what it did.

**John:** It is interesting to wind back a year and think about sort of what this election looked like a year ago. And we were told like, OK, the Senate is unwinnable just based on the states and the races and that it’s going to be really tough kind of overall. And I think, yes, we felt this certain optimism going in and we are not the podcast to actually figure out what happened with the polls, but clearly something about the polls got it wrong in a way that has to be figured out.

I mean, the question of can you even poll the American public or is there something special about this situation. Because the 2018 polls weren’t so wrong. I think the closest thing that I encounter in my work life to this is when – you and I have both been through this – when we have a movie that’s opening on Friday night. Because leading up to a Friday night you get tracking. And tracking starts two to three weeks before a movie comes out. You start to see what the interest is among potential movie going audiences for this thing you created.

And you’ll hear like “oh the tracking is great, the tracking is not going so well, they’re going to spend a little bit more,” and it’s all this sort of – it’s basically polling but it’s for your movie’s opening.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Then, we’re here on the West Coast, we know by about 5pm or 6pm how the movie actually did on that Friday night because we get the East Coast numbers and it can be cause for celebration or it can be cause for absolute just devastation because you realize like, OK, we tanked and this is not going to work. And I’ve been through both and it’s just the same kind of rollercoaster.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s unpleasant. And that said tracking is fairly accurate. I’m pretty good at reading tracking. And so back when we used to have movies friends would call me and say, “Can you tell me what my tracking means?” And I would say, OK, I think this is what it’s going to be, and generally speaking that’s what it was going to be. Within a small variance tracking is pretty effective.

I don’t know if our polling industry is broken. I think perhaps what we’re dealing with is a political freak and that’d Donald Trump. And if there’s any weird hope that I have, because I know the next two months are going to be awful, 2.5 months, and I know that he’s not going to go away and he’ll still be out there. And people who like him will still be out there. But one day he will be gone as time does its thing and I don’t think that this is a movement that exists outside of him. I think this is just him. And I think he’s warped polling as well.

**John:** I agree with you there. Because the whole issue of what is Trumpism, because he has no actual central philosophy. It’s just a kind of narcissism. And what that looks like independent of him is really hard to see. And, yes, there are some common themes of people who support him, but it kind of feels like it’s a “him” thing and not something that can be applied to another person.

I don’t see Ted Cruz, for example, being able to take the reins of that horse.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so we should acknowledge our ignorance about future events, but going back to my One Cool Thing from this week is be thinking about not just this next cycle but sort of an overall what are we trying to do, where are we trying to go. And that’s why figuring out how we’re dealing with climate change, how we’re dealing with systemic racism, how are we dealing with the projects that are going to take us decades is so crucial and so hard to think about when we’re stuck on what’s going to happen two months from now because we just don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are in trouble. And I keep looking back at this weird line in our history. You know, the McCain concession speech from 2008 is not old in the long run of it.

**John:** But it feels like a different lifetime.

**Craig:** Feels like a different nation. And I think in part that’s because between 2008 and now you see the rise of Facebook. And I think what Facebook has done to our national conversation is fatal. It is a fatal poison to our national conversation. It has united people who otherwise would have been separated by the insanity of their thoughts and statements. And it allowed them to – I mean, Facebook, when we look back at this there’s going to be a point where people say, “Wait, Facebook let QAnon be a thing for tens of millions of people for years.” They let it happen. And I don’t think we can wrap our minds around that yet. And we’re still dealing with it.

But what they’ve done, what they have enabled, is so horrifying. I don’t know what to do about it other than to say Facebook to me I look at the way I look at RJ Reynolds. A corporation that is just hurting people in our country.

**John:** Yeah. You can delete your account, so that’s what I’ve done.

**Craig:** And I have. Years ago, in fact.

**John:** And Facebook, yes, but there’s going to be other Facebooks. There’s going to be other things like that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And just being really aware of sort of how something that can start off with one intention and become a very different thing. One of my One Cool Things last week was this book about money and it gets into the creation of mutual funds and how mutual funds became money and they had to all be bailed out. And how bitcoin became money and how basically things that start with one intention, it can become a completely different thing. And we just need to be really vigilant about what can be the next thing that sort of pulls the country apart again.

It apparently didn’t take foreign interference this time to have us all at each other’s throats. And so–

**Craig:** Well, the foreign interference is lasting interference. What they did was pour a lot of gasoline on something and then it’s still burning. I mean, the dumpster fire continues on. Because all foreign interference is is gasoline. That’s it. Putin just puts some accelerant on there. But he knew that our dumpster of racism was full. And all he needed to do was just set it off and it would burn for four years. And it is, still, burning.

And that’s on us. So if we want to be optimistic about it we can say maybe this needed to happen. You know? Like we had a Civil War that didn’t let quite all the blood out. Maybe this is what we needed to do and this will somehow let the blood out. I don’t know. But it has had a lasting effect.

My great hope is that once we get a grown up administration back of professionals we can not only wrap our arms around the pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, but we can also finally do the work that is required to harden our defenses against this very consistent, predictable enemy.

It’s not like we don’t know who they are, where they are, or what they’re going to do. We know all of that.

**John:** Yeah. Now, going into this, obviously to control the Senate would be amazing and there’s certain things you can do when you control the Senate that you can’t do otherwise, but the Trump administration has made it clear how important the President is just in terms of putting people in places that actually do the jobs that need to be done. And so that’s the Cabinet, but sort of all those roles in the government and sort of the trust in the folks who need to monitor the things that need to happen. Folks who need to actually mobilize the pandemic response. Just to have sane grownups doing those jobs is going to be so crucial and it will save hundreds of thousands of lives.

**Craig:** Well, what the Trumpy people call the Deep State, the word we used to use for that was Government. And the reason that the Trumpy people like Steve Bannon didn’t like the “Deep State” is because who those people were were the people who sat down and said things like, “I’m sorry, Steve Bannon, or Donald Trump, what you just said is either illegal or stupid. Or something we’ve tried a hundred times that doesn’t work. We’re smarter than you. We have more experience than you do. And we’re here to tell you you’re just wrong.”

And they didn’t like this. So, rather than say, OK, we will learn or get smarter or have the confidence to listen to people who have studied a topic their whole lives, or worked on something their whole lives, we’re just going to denigrate all of them or get rid of them. And instead fill these rooms with people that just nod along with the Chief Nut Job. That’s what we have.

And as a result–

**John:** Authoritarianism, fascism. Yes. We have all these things. It’s been bad. And so it will hopefully–

**Craig:** Get fixed.

**John:** It will get better. It won’t get fixed, but it’ll get better.

**Craig:** It will get better. A lot better.

**John:** As we wrap up election season, and it sort of felt like a show I was watching and participating in and I will miss some of it. I won’t miss most of it. But I wanted to single out some characters, some actual real people, whose stories I got to know in this show. Some people I’m going to kind of miss. So, Marquita Bradshaw who I only found out about very recently from Tennessee seems just amazing. And so she feels like a character in the story about someone running for Congress and she was great. And I was sorry she didn’t win.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jessica Cisneros. Alex Morse. Abby Finkenauer who lost her seat in Iowa, she’s remarkable. She and I went to the same college. She was great and I just cannot believe that she wasn’t reelected. Mark Kelly. The last time I saw you, Craig, in person was at a Mark Kelly fundraiser.

**Craig:** It was the last party I went to before the country shut down.

**John:** Yeah. And Theresa Greenfield, also from Iowa. Again, just the kind of person you want to have in that office. And so my hope is that people will see these folks who ran, some of them won but some of them didn’t win, and will keep running because we need to have smart, dedicated people running for every office in this country to make sure we build a future that we all want.

**Craig:** Yup. Yup. Well, they’ll be back.

**John:** They’ll be back.

**Craig:** They’ll be back.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Eric Roth](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0744839/)
* Thanks to the [Writer’s Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) for organizing this event!
* [MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com) and [How to Escape the Present by Richard Fisher](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/21/1009443/short-term-vs-long-term-thinking/)
* [Why Joe Biden is Going to Win by Kendall Kaut](https://kendallkaut.substack.com/p/why-joe-biden-is-going-to-win)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/475premium.mp3).

The original post for this episode is available here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 476 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we welcome back a writer whose credits include Get Shorty.

Craig: Never heard of it.

John: Out of Sight.

Craig: No.

John: Logan.

Craig: Don’t like it.

John: Marley and Me.

Craig: Stinks.

John: Minority Report.

Craig: Terrible.

John: Godless.

Craig: No.

John: And the new limited series, The Queen’s Gambit, on Netflix.

Craig: Garbage.

John: I’m talking of course about Scott Frank. Scott Frank, welcome back to the show.

Scott Frank: Thank you very much for having me back. I really didn’t think you ever would after the last time. But glad to be here.

Craig: We didn’t want to. But I guess there was some sort of popular clamoring, and so we have to respond to our many tens of fans.

Scott: Many.

John: The real reason I wanted you here today is I’m watching your show and it’s great, but it occurs to me that you may be breaking some longstanding screenwriting rules.

Craig: Oh no.

John: About what you’re allowed to include on the page. So it’s a celebration and also an intervention for you, Scott. Because there’s some stuff you’re doing you’re just not allowed to do.

Craig: Yeah. There are a number of gurus who have never sold a screenplay or much less had a produced credit who are upset. We need to acknowledge their feelings and talk about why you, Scott Frank, are apparently no good. But also while we’re talking about that I do hope that we get into a little bit of a discussion about why you, Scott Frank, are in fact spectacularly good at what you do. And I have questions about it, like how can I be as good as what you do. Things like that.

Scott: [laughs] Drugs.

Craig: Other than those.

Scott: No, it will be a relief to be uncovered as a fraud by these other gurus. Finally we can get it all out today. So, thank you.

John: And we also have some listener questions that I think you are especially well-suited to answer, so we’ll get to those later on. And in our bonus segment for Premium members I want to get an early start on Thanksgiving and talk about some of the things we’re actually thankful for in 2020 because this has been a really crappy year. But I think there’s some things to be thankful for, so maybe we can brainstorm about some things we are grateful for that came about in 2020.

Craig: How much time do we have for that one?

John: It may be a short segment. But, hey, let’s talk about The Queen’s Gambit. So, Scott, give us some backstory here. Because I think I knew it was based on a book. It’s a book from 1983 by Walter Tevis. How did you come to make this as a series? Why a series not a feature? What was your on road to this as a series for Netflix?

Scott: Well I tried and failed to make it as a movie maybe a dozen years ago. Everybody, since it came out, Bernardo Bertolucci I think was the first director who tried to get it made as a movie. Various people were in and out of it over the years. Michael Apted, Tom Tykwer. Heath Ledger was going to direct it as his directorial debut before he died. I think Ellen Page was going to be the star of that. And right before that happened Bill Horberg and I tried to get it made. He’s the producer along with a gentleman named Allan Scott, who is known primarily for being Nic Roeg’s screenwriter. He wrote Don’t Look Now, The Witches, all sorts of things for Nic Roeg back in the day and is also a producer and a theater producer and so on.

He owned the rights outright. And we were getting together with him and trying to get it made and no one was interested. And then after I made Godless I realized, you know, the way to do this as a limited series, not as a movie, because if you do it as a movie it just becomes about the chess matches and does she win or does she lose. And it’s sort of reduced to that. But if I can do it as a limited series I thought I can kind of get into her head space as a character.

And Netflix had passed on a few things since Godless and I figured they would pass on this as well and I gave it to them to read and Cindy Holland just fell in love with it and said let’s do it. And so we ended up doing it. And it came together so fast that I was doing most of the adaptation during prep. So, it was one of those, which is not my normal way of working.

Craig: There’s certain similarities between you and me, not just the irritable bowel syndrome, but also—

Scott: Yes.

Craig: That you and I both came recently from feature world and now find ourselves in limited series world, and I want to talk a little bit about specifically some of the freedoms that you feel in that space. And I also want to talk a little bit about your choice, which is again a choice that I’ve made myself, at least for now, which is to not do what is typical in the limited series space which is to get a room full of writers and have people working on drafts and all the rest of it. You do it all on your own. Is it a case of you can’t take the feature writer completely out of the feature writer? Or is there just something about the freedom of a limited series that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to go all the way into TV writer room ville?

Scott: That’s a great question. The answer is simple. I only know how to do it the way I know how to do it. And I don’t know – I’ve written things with other people and that’s fine, where we started and began collaborating, and passed it back and forth. I’ve done that a couple times now. And that was great. Were all great experiences. But for this it seemed like I wouldn’t know how to assign, you know, episodes to people. I write it like a long movie and then carve it up.

In fact, so much so that there were six scripts but seven episodes, because I thought I kind of guessed how it would be carved up in the script phase, but ended up really organizing it in post. And so because I also know I’m going to direct it I have to write it all, you know. I can’t – it seems like make work to give it to somebody and then take it back and make it my own after that. I just wouldn’t know how to do that.

Now, if it were a longer series and a different kind of thing I might want a writer’s room, but even then I would only want a couple of people. The idea of looking at a big whiteboard and sitting there – I know people really enjoy it and ordering lunch and all that sounds like hell to me.

Craig: Ordering lunch is the worst part, I think. That’s the part that would absolutely paralyze me for sure.

Scott: I’m too self-conscious. I take too many naps during the day. And I kind of only see things the way I see them, so it’s tricky. But if something began that way I suppose I could try.

Craig: And do you think that now that you’ve had this experience back to back with Godless and with Queen’s Gambit that – and let’s put aside things like rewrites and things like that, but just actual starting from scratch, building a building – do you think you’re going to go back to features or is this were you live now?

Scott: I don’t know. I mean, I’m doing a few things going forward. Two are like this, and one is a movie. So, I definitely – it just depends on the story and what’s appropriate for the story. And in both cases, with Godless and with The Queen’s Gambit, it just seemed like the limited series was a much better way to serve that kind of story. But there are other ideas and things I want to do that feel more like movies to me.

And the challenge for screenwriters going into the limited series world, at least it’s a challenge I felt, is to be disciplined about it. Just because you have more time doesn’t mean you need as much time as you think you do. And you can kind of spend a lot of time sort of getting in the weeds because you have a lot of episodes to fill, or more episodes to fill, certainly more real estate than a movie. And you have to be very careful about that. You really have to be careful about that. Because people – and also as people watch more and more of these things I find that they’re waiting for it to happen as they’re watching.

John: Now, in prepping for this episode you sent through this really amazing, evocative image that you said sort of inspired the look of The Queen’s Gambit. So can you describe what you sent through here and we’ll put a link to this in the show notes, but it’s a very cool image of a chessboard. So tell me about what we’re looking at here.

Scott: So, it’s from a hotel lobby in Toronto. I’m blanking on the name now but it’s got a chess-themed lobby. There are giant chess pieces in the lobby and this interesting chessboard setup as well. And when we scout the cinematographer and I, Steven Meizler, we always bring the red camera along and we’re always taking both stills with it and moving images with it so that we can see how we might shoot someplace, even if we don’t end up shooting there. And this place we didn’t end up shooting.

But he was taking a still of this chessboard when this little girl ran by in the yellow dress. And the board, the dress, the chair, the wallpaper, all of it was the show for me. I looked at it and I instantly zeroed in on it. And I’d been trying to find an image to give to Uli Hanisch in the art department something, because I like to do that. I like to find an image or two and then they create a kind of larger palette board from that. Because I like to have a super limited palette because then you can control the look of the show so much better. And that along with natural light, I just feel like you have so much more control. Whereas too much color for me starts to feel – unless you’re doing it as a riot of color, but even then it should be just there are only a few in there. It just makes it easier for me to control it all. I may be wrong, but it’s what works.

Craig: I like that idea of control. It’s something that you and I have talked about a lot over the years about the writing as well. And it’s something that I always admire in your writing. Full disclaimer, I’m halfway through, so listen, I don’t know. If you guys want to get into spoilers that’s fine. If it’s awesome, like she kills everybody at the end, don’t tell me that.

Scott: She does.

Craig: I said don’t tell me that.

Scott: Yes.

Craig: But I’m going to assume that there is a big chess match at the end that is either won or lost, or it could be a draw. But as I’m halfway through what I’m doing is I’m watching the episodes and then I’m going back and reading your screenplay after the episode. And what always strikes me about your writing in particular is how there is just such a beautiful amount of control within scenes themselves. And it’s something that I learned really from you. Well, I mean, I try and get there as best I can, but I think that for most professional writers they have some kind of good instinct to start with. That’s why they keep working, I suppose. There’s just a good instinct about what is the scene about, what is supposed to happen in it, what is its greater purpose in the overall narrative.

And then there’s this other thing that I guess I’m just going to call finishing. Which is the far rarer thing. Because when we start to craft scenes and put them together, even if our instincts are right and the scene is where it should be, with who it should be, about what it should be, the pieces, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle where there are gaps and some of the bits are rubbing on each other and it’s not quite perfect. And then there are people like you, and maybe just you in your way singularly, who finish it. Who make sure everything fits perfectly, seamlessly. No gaps. No rubbing. No nothing. It all is machined to within a micron of its life.

And I want to ask you because the effect – the reason I bring it up is because the effect on me, as both the reader and a watcher, is that I am being taken care of. That this car will not wobble and that the control is perfect. So that my experience is solely what you want me to experience. How you want me to experience it. Or at least within the range of acceptable reactions to your material.

Can you talk a little bit about that finishing aspect? The perfection that is required to take what is good instinctive craft and make it something beautiful?

Scott: Whoa. Well, my One Cool Thing today…

Craig: You want to jump right to the end? We can do that. I can do my impression of you for the middle part and no one will notice a difference.

Scott: I mean, thank you. I don’t know what I’m aware of as I’m working in terms of that. I just know – like when we were just talking about the visual stuff a moment ago, I’m just trying to be specific. And I think a lot about tone even as I’m writing. I remember when I was writing Godless I realized, oh, it has to be in a voice that feels like the tone. It has to feel like the old west without being silly or kitschy, or feel ersatz. It just has to feel like it’s both authentic but there’s this tone to the script. And it took me a long time to sort that out and figure out how I was going to do that.

And with every script, you know, if I can’t – this sounds silly – but if I can’t hear it I can’t write it. And if I can’t hear the way people are talking it means I just don’t know anybody. And the character of the screenplay comes through the character that I’m writing about in a way. It’s almost like there’s a subtle point of view change that sometimes happens. So in the case of The Queen’s Gambit I was writing from Beth’s point of view. It’s really always in her point of view. And so that helps me with the tone, because I feel a certain kind of tone there. And it was very unusual. That’s what I loved about the novel. And so I’m trying to keep that in the script.

And what happens is I think many writers embrace the mechanical, or they lean into the mechanical because it’s so much easier to understand and see. If you follow a template, if you write an outline and then follow your outline. If you have all these things that are supposed to be in a good scene then you have a good scene. So, frequently you end up with scripts that look like scripts but read like nothing. And so what I’m always trying to sort out is what is the tone. And so I think what you describe as finished or even perfect as you said is for me more just specific. And what is it that makes this specific?

And in terms of the idea of control, you can tell when you open a novel or you read a script the first page. You don’t know whether you’re going to like the script or not, but you know if it’s somebody’s got you or not. I don’t mean hooked. I mean you know they’re in control.

Craig: Like they’re holding you in their hands. Yeah.

Scott: They’re in control. If they’re doing some generic description of something stupid you know they can’t write. You know they’re not going to spin good yarn for you.

Craig: Right.

Scott: So you’re looking for what is the kind of specific thing that brings me into it. That tell me what I’m looking at in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s telling me what I’m looking at. And you only do – you really do – only get two senses in a script. You get sight and you get sound. And so you’re using what do we need to see and what don’t we need to see. What’s important? What things will you describe in this room that will tell me what the room is in the least amount of words? And do you even need to describe the room first?

Frequently when you shoot a scene you’re starting close and you don’t know where you are until you need to know where you are. And then that rhythm is a different kind of rhythm and tells a different sort of story from a different – has a different feel to it. So it becomes feel. And so I don’t know if I’m thinking about it so much as I’m aware when I’ve lost specificity. I’m aware when the tone has changed. I kind of come out of my trance and go, wait, what’s wrong here.

John: All right. Well let’s get specific and actually look at your pages here.

Craig: Rip these apart.

John: Let’s take a look at the first two pages.

Scott: Tear them apart.

Craig: Tear them apart.

John: From the first episode. Because they are terrific and I feel like the image that you shared with us is so closely related to how your series is opening. That shallow focus that you’re kind of in a dream space as we’re beginning. So we’ll put a link to these first two pages in the show notes. But we’re opening in this Paris hotel room. A knock on the door. “Mademoiselle?” A splash. Someone stirs in a bathtub. More knocking. And we’re hearing things. We’re seeing some things but it’s mostly a sound experience. “Mademoiselle Harmon? Etes-vous La?” We make out a face in the dark. Breathing. Watching. Frantic pounding on the door followed by, “Mademoiselle! Ils vous attendant!”

Finally in the darkness, “I’m coming.” So we finally get to see Beth here. She’s getting herself out of the water. I remember as I was watching this how you established this room and we’re not quite sure what the space is we’re in, but suddenly the curtains are being pulled back. We establish that we are in a fancy Paris hotel room. She is clearly a mess. She needs to leave but we’re not sure why she needs to leave. Is she trying to just get out? Does she need to go to some place?

Then we’re going downstairs and we’re walking through this crowd as she’s going into this giant ballroom and then we finally get to the chessboard. She sits down and she says, “I’m sorry.”

They are two terrific first pages. We often do a Three Page Challenge on the show and I would say, Craig, I mean, you could have your own opinion but I think we would talk favorably about–

Craig: No. They’re garbage.

John: These pages.

Craig: Let me explain why these are garbage. [laughs]

Scott: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: No, the thing that I love about these on the page is how dynamic they are. Meaning the way that we talk about dynamics in music. Soft. Loud. Quiet. Rest. Play. Fast. Slow. Things keep getting changed. So we’re in the dark and then we’re in the light. And then we’re in more light, because the curtains open. And then we go from disheveled and a mess to beautifully made up and gorgeous. We go from a small space into a large space. We go from silence to then cameras. And when I see, “And now we hear one sound,” and the word one is italicized, “THE WHIR OF CAMERAS. A DOZEN PHOTOGRAPHERS gathered at the entrance snap her picture.” I see it. I hear it.

Not only do I see and hear it. I know where everyone is standing. That’s the beautiful. If you write well it means you saw it and you heard it so clearly that the people reading it can see it and hear it so clearly. That’s the point. And I try as best as I can to emulate this basic method.

And, John, you and I have talked a lot about transitions. And here every single scene number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, on page one and two, has a transition. Every single one. And it’s a transition – even like for instance the transition between 6 and 7 is not just from a hallway into a giant ballroom. But it’s punctuated by “a hundred heads turning toward her” in that ballroom silently when the doors open. That’s what I’m talking about.

John: But let’s also be clear what you’re not talking about. You’re not talking about literally cut to with a colon or a transition to with a colon.

Craig: You don’t need to.

John: We don’t see any of that on these two pages. Instead it’s just that naturally, logically as the action is flowing we can feel the transitions moving us from this moment to this moment. And it feels natural. Everything is falling forward in a good way.

Craig: Yeah, like cut to is actually not a transition. Cut to is simply an acknowledgment that a transition is about to occur. But the transition itself is defined by the difference of things. And so what Scott does really, really well here, we’ll keep talking about him like he’s not here—

Scott: Great.

Craig: Is constantly considering – because you’re not – is constantly considering the difference between things as he moves from scene to scene. And this is what I mean about completion. These are complete pages. Every single thing has been thought through. We do say specificity a lot. Sometimes I think that the word specificity becomes too generic in an ironic way because it can be applied in so many different ways. So to just zero in a little bit more on specificity, what he’s doing is thinking constantly about how big or small, how quiet or loud, how full of people, how not full of people. Power dynamics. She is at one moment bigger than a little girl, smaller than a room full of people. Every single moment is completed like this. This is how you write.

All you need to do if you want to be a good screenwriter is be as good as this. No problem.

John: Now, I said at the start this was going to be a celebration of Scott Frank, but also an intervention because one of the things I noticed here on this first page.

Craig: Seriously. My god.

John: And we have to talk about this. “We can just make out a A FACE in the dark.”

Craig: We?

John: We. Scott Frank, you’re using “we hear” and “we see” throughout the script. I did a search. 47 times you are doing “we see” or “we hear.”

Craig: Oh my god.

Scott: Oh my god.

John: In one script.

Craig: You’ve done the worst possible thing 47 times.

Scott: I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed. A couple of things. I also never write “cut to” ever unless it’s in the slug line because I need it to make the transition felt in a certain way. Cut to is a waste of time and a waste of space on a script because if you don’t know it’s a cut then what. I mean, Tony Gilroy’s scripts are great to read. They’re all cut to. They’re kind of a version of what Bill Goldman used to do. But he doesn’t use slug lines. So it’s OK. I use slug lines and I feel – I mean, it’s whatever conveys the image. Whatever conveys what you’re doing.

And transitions, because I’m so pretentious I will quote Tolstoy.

Craig: Oh god.

Scott: Because like all screenwriters do. Tolstoy said transitions are the most important part of storytelling. And they’re certainly the most important part of movie storytelling because it’s all transitions. It’s not like you’re writing a play where you’ve got to get them off stage and on stage. You’re using transitions to create rhythm. You’re using transitions to create tone. Humor. Horror. Whatever it is, there’s another tool that gets ignored because people just end their scene and they go, OK, where am I now. And they don’t think about where they were. And they don’t think about how they might dovetail.

And you don’t have to get cute every time. But you have to feel like there’s a real transition happening. And good novels do that. Good storytelling does that. And so there is that. And the cut to feels like it’s in the way for me. There’s too many things that people don’t even really read anyway. Why is it in the script? Dissolve. I rarely do it, and if I do need it for a certain reason it’s in the slug line so it doesn’t take up any room.

Craig: Right.

Scott: And I want you to read it. I actually need you to read it. It’s not a format thing. It’s a storytelling thing. There’s a difference. People, again, lean into format because it’s easy to remember the eight things about formatting.

Craig: Like don’t use “we see.”

Scott: We’ll get to that. So, yeah, and I love using it. And I use “as” as the first word too often after a slug line. As we…whatever it is. It’s just whatever feels right and sounds right is fair game for me or for anyone.

John: Now I want to talk about fair game though, because one of the things you said in your description well this is an audio-visual medium, you can only write what we can see and what we can hear, and that feels true. I mean, we’re probably not cheating specifically on those things. We’re not describing smells. We’re not describing inner mental states like a novelist. Like a novelist has the ability to take you fully inside a character’s experience and describe things that we as screenwriters don’t describe.

But I do wonder whether we are over-learning this lesson in saying that you can only write about what you can see and what you can hear because just looking at your pages here Scott I think we are getting a sense of those other senses through this. The way that her wet clothes are clinging to her. You’re not describing the smells of that room. You’re not describing what the liquor is that she’s using to swallow the pill tastes like. But those are experiences that the character actually has. And so I do wonder if sometimes as we talk about screenwriting as being just what you can see and what you can hear we may be doing ourselves a disservice because good writing actually does involve all the other senses even if a person watching those movies isn’t directly experiencing those.

So I wanted to explore that a little bit.

Scott: So, yes and no. Or no and yes.

John: Please.

Scott: Right train, wrong track. So, I would say what you’re smelling or thinking you’re smelling when you’re reading that is teed up for you by the description. And the tone of it. And what a screenwriter or writer is choosing to describe for you. They don’t have to say what it feels like and what it smells like.

I’m allergic to getting into too much other than sight and sound only because most often it’s done out of lazy writing. Most often it’s done because they haven’t done the job as a screenwriter already. It’s like when you read the introduction of a character and you get this whole thing about their life and he’s ambitious and he wishes – the audience doesn’t get to read that shit. They don’t get to see that. So if we don’t know who they are from their behavior and the first words out of their mouth, or have a good idea at least, then you failed.

And so the same thing happens with the other senses. Writers who try to do that, it becomes purple. They’re doing it because it’s stylistic. And it’s like this thing that we’re going to do and we’re going to describe this.

I find it not helpful and it gets in the way. So, you want to get out of the way. If you want to have rhythm and flow and feel like you’re moving forward, to describe smells and things stops you when you’re writing a movie. It doesn’t when you’re writing a book and you can describe why someone is smelling something or what it makes them think or whatever. Here if you convey enough sense of the scene you’re going to get all the other senses. You’re going to see it all. It’s going to be as I said teed up for you. That’s the trick.

John: So that’s what I want to push towards is that sense of you’re using the tools you have, which are what you can see and what you can hear, to create those senses that you’re not actually describing. So I’m not trying to argue for we should all be describing smells or textures, but I think you are making choices in terms of what the characters are doing, the environments you’re putting them in that naturally lead to those other senses. That give us a sense that these characters exist in a real world where they would be experiencing these things. They’re experiencing heat and texture and smell.

Scott: Yes. But that takes us right back to specificity. And that’s about choosing the right details that throw off enough description and feeling and tone as opposed to saying it’s a well-furnished apartment. You know? So you pick the things, the telling details are everything. And that’s what writers ignore. They kind of race through the description or they over-describe stuff that really has nothing to do with anything.

Craig: I mean, where you find differences is where I’m always fascinated. Where you present things that are different than what I would assume on the default.

John: Well, I want to talk about the senses as sort of my thesis for this episode which is that obviously sight and sound are crucial for screenwriting. Smell, taste, and touch are things we don’t directly put on the page, but they’re things that characters would know about and explore. And those are the five senses we most often think about. But there’s actually a bunch more and I see some of them in your first episode. The sense of movement. The sense of where we are at in a space. You move that camera a lot. And the sense of balance. Is a character standing on her feet or not standing on her feet? You’re finding visual ways to show balance.

Pain. Time. Temperature. Thirst. The sense of hunger or fullness. The sense of tension or stretch. These are all things that we actually feel physically that we have characters in spaces who can do these things. And so I want to make sure that as writers we are not just painting pictures for people, but we’re actually thinking about what it feels like to be that character in that space. I worry if on this podcast and as we talk about screenwriting in general we’re not emphasizing this enough in terms of what does it actually feel like to be in that place. And once you do that how do you find ways, how do you find actions that characters take that can sort of reveal those things. How do you make people feel like they are inhabiting these beautiful rooms that we’re drawing for them?

Scott: If we were in the room together right now I’d hug you, John. Well, actually if we were in the room together I couldn’t hug you because of Covid. But I would bump elbows with you. That is exactly the goal. That’s what you what to feel like. And I think the disconnect comes from how you convey that. How do you write descriptions or write words, the most basic way of putting it, that throw off those other feelings? And that, again, is the thing.

And people – it goes back to a couple of things. It’s a way of thinking. It’s not what Craig said is picking out different details than someone else would. It’s just a way of thinking. And thinking about this stuff is a way of thinking. It’s not a template. It’s not even rules. If people are telling you not to say “we see” or “we this” or “we that” then your script isn’t very good anyway. Because if it’s a really good story–

Craig: Right. No one cares.

Scott: Then no one is going to notice what you did. I mean, I read a Coen brothers’ script recently that was like formatted in Microsoft Word somehow. And I don’t even know – but it was a great read. It was so good. And it was not particularly screenplay-ish. But still because what they were saying was so great to read.

And so people get hung up on the rules in lieu of being creative. And so it’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking. And you can get stuck. You can become so mechanical if you’re writing to the rules all the time. You know, you just have to be able to spin yarn. And what makes a good yarn? What are those things? And you can analyze it backwards from the end of a story. You can say, yes, you need conflict, and you need this, and your character. And you shouldn’t have someone show up on page whatever. But you know what? I have new characters that have shown up on page 90. I’ve had 30-page opening scenes.

Craig: I’ve seen them.

Scott: Melvin and Howard is a 20-minute opening scene. I mean, I’m going back but I always was blown away by that. They’re singing Santa’s Souped Up Sleigh in the front of the truck and he wins an Oscar.

Craig: Star Wars.

Scott: Star Wars. There you go.

Craig: Goes on forever before we meet Luke. It’s 25 minutes or something.

Scott: The Godfather.

Craig: Right. It’s a wedding. It’s a wedding. Absolutely. A lot of these kinds of analyses I always say are like pathologists showing you a corpse and saying this used to be a this, and this used to be a this. But it’s not the same thing as making life. And one of the things that I find fascinating about the way you evoke these things that we’re talking about is whether you are doing it intentionally or not very often you are relating these kind of intangibles through relationship. Rather than just sort of saying this person is now cold. Even in these first two pages there’s a relationship between her and a voice outside that is causing her to emerge from this kind of pseudo drowning state. And then when she’s getting ready there’s a guy in her bed that she doesn’t even know and we don’t even see his face, but that is a relationship. There’s a sense that there are witnesses. That there is a contrast between her and another person.

When she’s coming downstairs that little girl is looking up at her and witnessing her and things are happening between them. There is a relationship. When she gets her period for the first time, you know, a lot of writers I think would just have her in the bathroom going, “Oh no, what do I do? There’s blood everywhere.” And then she would come out and we would see that she had handled it. No. Another girl comes in and they have a discussion. There is a human connection. And from those human connections that you create, whether there’s a conversation, or they’re silent, you are able to convey a lot of these intangibles and just for my money that’s always more interesting.

And it’s always more true than it is when it is just sort of fabricked in there and meant to be evocative for evocation sake.

John: What you’re describing Craig is in addition to sort of like the standard list of senses, we also have – people have cognitive senses. They have the ability to understand how they’re relating to other people. That they’re being watched. They understand connections between things. And we understand connections between things. So we know what it’s like to be that girl in that situation even if we have not actually had our period then. We know what it’s like to feel the need of trust or fear or disgust. We know what those things feel like. And a good writer is able to evoke these things and can put some of that stuff in subtext rather than having to have direct conversations about those things.

Craig: And the relevance therefore is implied. So it’s not just purple. And it’s not just description for description sake. Or look at the lusciousness of my scene. But we understand that there is something with which we can identify. Something that has some universal meaning for us and this is the best fullest use of what we can do.

It is amazing what you can do on a page. You know? It’s amazing. When you read something really well done it’s remarkable how full it is. Which is why I get so lava-incensed when I hear people say don’t direct on the page and all I want to say is that’s all we’re doing. That is literally what we’re doing. We are directing a movie on the page. We are creating a full space. And then the director, whether it is you, Scott, directing your own work, or somebody else directing your work, is hopefully translating that from the space you’ve created on the page to the space in the real world.

But this is what we do. And when it’s done well like you’ve done it here it’s just beautiful. And, congratulations. I mean, it’s a hit. I know Netflix says that five billion people watch it because anyone who watches four seconds of a Netflix show counts, but I know even in real terms it’s a hit. What are they saying, is it up to 78 trillion people?

Scott: I don’t know. Actually if you watch it you have to watch all of it. You have to watch over half of it.

Craig: Well, that’s real.

Scott: They don’t count people who turn it on and turn it off.

Craig: Oh, I thought that they were doing that like two minutes thing.

Scott: No, there’s something they have as part of it. But I don’t know the exact numbers.

Craig: Here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. Netflix is such a black box when it comes to that. But we can tell over on our side. Like I know when people are watching something on Netflix.

John: The discussion you have about it.

Craig: And this is being watched. This is a hit. Which I don’t mean to sound vulgar, but we make these things to be watched and this is being watched in a massive way. And I love that. I love that a show about a lady who plays chess is being watched in this massive way. It wasn’t always like this. You know, television has come a long way.

Scott: It’s very confusing. You know, there’s so much to talk about outlining and this and that. And I don’t know how to write an outline or treatments, but what I do outline are scenes. And if people put that same kind of thought into well what’s going to happen in this scene, and spent a lot of time in the scene and realized, oh, I don’t have enough character here. I don’t know who these people are. What am I going to do with them? I outline scenes before I write them. And then I write about the scene and, you know, do everything but write the scene until I end up suddenly it just starts to become a scene. Unless I hear dialogue right away I’ll start with the dialogue and just write dialogue and then begin to shape it with other things.

And I think that’s really important. The other thing that I would say, if people spent less time worrying about format and anything else and just focused on character, and just focused on who they’re writing about. I get stuck every time around page 60. I don’t know what to do. Because I realize I don’t have enough character. I don’t have enough character to figure out where we go next. So the characters are either behaving because the script says so, which is a pet peeve of mine, or I’m just thinking, OK, and then this happens, and then that happens. I’ve lost all of it.

And so, you know, if you spend a lot of time just thinking about who you’re writing about, every character. Even if they only have a line or two. They should be someone that’s understandable and readable. And so that helps you. Then when you get to your scenes you have all this information that you have that you can use to show, give it an attitude, what’s happening, how would they respond here, what would be the honest way they would respond. And maybe in your outline, they have to disagree here, but if it doesn’t feel like they would disagree then you need to either, A, have them agree and figure out what’s going to happen, or figure out what you did wrong where they’re not disagreeing anymore. It’s no longer true to the person you’ve created as opposed to again what the script says so.

Craig: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Truth to who you have and what would really happen there. I think the biggest mistake that is made by every writer, every writer, I mean, we all do it and then hopefully we catch it and fix it, is writing something that just wouldn’t be what would happen. Sorry, it just wouldn’t happen that way. You wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t do that. There’s nothing that feels less satisfying than someone making a great sacrifice where you’re like would you though? Would you? Well there goes your big moment. It just doesn’t work.

Scott: Or the boss who doesn’t believe you or whatever just because – or the parents who don’t believe you. I’m telling you. I saw him. He’s a monster. No, he isn’t.

Craig: No, he’s not.

Scott: You know what? You got too much sugar. Whatever it is.

Craig: You’re not going to take even a moment to think maybe?

Scott: And you’re missing really good character filigree and plot stuff you can explore to actually get to that point. Instead of just skipping to it, maybe by earning it you may actually create some interesting character facets or something that would get you there so you believe it. Why don’t they believe me? Why don’t they want to believe Jack Bauer is trying to save the world for the 50th time?

Craig: I know.

Scott: But this time he’s wrong.

Craig: I know. If Jack Bauer shows up, if Jessica Fletcher shows up and says I think it’s murder, it’s murder.

Scott: It’s murder!

Craig: It’s absolutely murder. There’s no question.

John: So Jessica Fletcher is here to solve crimes. Our producer, Megana Rao, is here to answer our listener’s questions.

Craig: Segue Man.

Scott: Nice. Transition.

John: In a segment we like to call Question Time with Megana. Megana, please join us and talk through some questions that our listeners have sent through.

Craig: Hey Megana.

Megana Rao: Hi guys, how are you?

John: Hey Megana.

Craig: Good.

Scott: Hello Megana.

John: I feel in the mood for some crafty questions since this has become a very crafty episode. So what do you have for us this week?

Megana: OK, awesome. So, Sophie in London asks, “I’m currently writing a TV series based on historical events in 1920s Argentina. I’ve never written any true story scripts before and I’m struggling with the sheer amount of research each thread pulls me into. How do you balance staying true to the history and communicating essential facts while crafting the heart of the story and character’s development? How do you know when you’ve researched enough and when it’s time to start writing pages?”

John: Ah, a crucial thing. So, people can fall into the abyss of research forever and actually never write their things. Scott Frank, so you are setting the story, the ‘50s and ‘60s?

Scott: Mm-hmm.

John: And so how much research did you do? How much did you not do? What was the process? When did you stop researching and just do stuff?

Scott: I didn’t do much of any research on this one because I had the novel and I had Gary Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini to talk to. So I did very little research in, you know, traditional. I have a researcher that I work with. I did a ton of research on say Godless. But research is a trap. It’s a wonderful thing because it gives you, again, telling detail. It gives you these things that you can find story. But if you’re just trying to write to the facts then you’re going to get lost. And the story should come first.

What is the good story? What is the story you want to tell? And you first need to figure out what is the yarn you’re going to spin. And, again, that’s a feeling. It’s not a crafty thing, it’s a feeling. What story do I want to tell here? What characters do I want to write about? And then as you get into that then you start to look to research to answer your questions. As opposed to look to research to sort of find your story. I mean, sometimes you do that. I mean, I did that certainly on Godless. But I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I just knew the genre.

You’re writing about something that’s true, so you have a lot of stuff there already. You need to sort of figure out, I would say, what the story is. And then use research to make sure that you’re being honest and true, but figure out again what yarn are you spinning. I’m going to just keep saying that.

Craig: Yeah. I would say to Sophie what got you interested in this thing in the first place. If it feels like you’ve given yourself a book report then, yeah, you’re going to get lost because what do you write about. How do you stress one aspect of this historical event in this decade in Argentina over another? What characters should you be focusing on? So you’re asking how do you stay true to history and communicate essential facts while crafting the heart of the story and character’s development. Why did you want to do this?

So what were the things that grabbed you? And why did they grab you? And how did they immediately in your mind connect to human beings and a story about human beings that would be relevant to anyone, whether they lived in 1920s Argentina or not? And that should help focus you.

You will probably swing back and forth at times between trying to figure out do I make the history, put these characters in a situation that reveals who they are? Do I make the characters and their relationship guide me towards which aspect of the history I should be focusing on in this moment? That’s a little bit of a push and pull balancing act. But keep coming back to what fascinated you. That will be your lodestone.

John: Yeah. I trip on the essential facts because facts – you’re not a journalist here. And so obviously you want to be truthful, but really emotionally truthful should be your goal. What are the essential themes, the essential questions, dramatic questions you want to explore here? And the true life details, the history, can help get you there, but you’re not trying to tell a history lesson. Or if you are trying to tell a history lesson maybe the screenplay is not the right way to do it.

Craig: All right. Megana, lay another one on us.

Megana: Cool. So Truthy asks, “I’m adapting a first person short story about a young woman struggling with depression. More than external events the story deals with the protagonist’s internal journey with her mental illness. I feel like having first person voice over narration in the screenplay would really help, but I’m concerned that voice over can seem like a writing crutch and that somebody detest the concept entirely. What are your opinions on using voice over narration and what do you think are the common mistakes people make with it?”

Craig: Scott, what do you feel about that?

Scott: I feel like the only thing worse than using voice over in this case is to use depressed voice over in this case.

Craig: I’m so bummed out.

Scott: Don’t yeah. Voice over can be great. It can be really fun. You know, if it’s used as kind of ironic or if it’s used – if it feels like it’s a character, you know. If it feels like there’s something – there’s a good reason for it. Goodfellas had great voice over. But then Casino was wall-to-wall voice over. It felt like they were just fixing something. But I love the voice over in Goodfellas beginning with “I always wanted to be a gangster.” It’s awesome.

And so you have to think about it. And frequently it’s a solve, but usually it works better if it kind of grows organically out of your concept. You haven’t said anything about, I don’t know what the story is that you’re telling. I just know that you have a depressed character. And I would just say that there are three things that get old fast. And I just had to wrestle with it. They get old fast on screen or in anything. Anger. Drinking, getting drunk. Drunkenness. And I would say depression/grief. So, those things.

It’s really hard to have a character wrestling with that unless they’re in some situation that’s really interesting. And, you know, what is – I don’t know where you’ve located this person and so I don’t know. It’s hard to answer the question. But voice over could work, but I don’t know how you’re going to use it. If you’re just going to use it to say how she feels and what she’s going through I think you can solve that better by putting her in situations that show us that. And giving her conversations that help us with that. Behavior that helps us with that. But be careful.

Craig: Yeah, Truthy, I think that the thing that’s maybe most concerning to me is that you’re saying your story deals with a protagonist’s internal journey with her mental illness. I don’t actually know what an internal journey with mental illness is. I’ve had my own mental illness. I know what the process of dealing with it is. I know how it makes me feel. I know how the nature of the discussions I’ve had with a therapist or with friends. And I know how it manifests itself in my relationships with other people. But there is no internal journey per se.

There’s a kind of story that externalizes an internal journey. You know, when Robin Williams goes to heaven/hell to find his dead wife, or one of those things. You know?

A great version of that is The Fisher King that Richard LaGravenese wrote which clearly shows an internal journey with mental illness by externalizing it completely in a kind of fantastical element. But if you’re dealing with a very kind of down to earth wide-eyed, clear-eyed view of mental illness it needs to be, I think, experienced through someone’s relationships and behavior. The first person voice over narration when you say it will really help, help what? Help us understand what she’s thinking? That is not the goal.

The goal is to have us feel for her. And a lot of times clear explanations of how someone is feeling takes away our feeling for them. It becomes more of an essay that we’re reading as opposed to something that we’re feeling heart-wrenched over because we’re seeing somebody struggle. Or somebody – I mean, what’s sadder? Having somebody tell us that they’re terrified but have to keep a smile on? Or watching somebody that we know is terrified trying to keep a smile on? See what I mean?

So, I think you might want to just consider that internal journey part first and interrogate whether or not that is a necessary part of how this story should be told.

John: The other thing I would stress is that if you do a first person narration you’re creating a very different relationship between the audience and that character. We get insight into that character’s thinking and thoughts. And that can be great and powerful. You know, Clueless is a great example of first person narration. And if we didn’t understand what was going on inside her head the movie would not work nearly as well as it does. So it bonds us very closely to that.

But it also can interfere with sort of the natural unfolding of story, particularly based on when is this narration happening. Is it happening simultaneously to what the character is experiencing on screen, or is it something that happened before and you’re basically retelling the story? You’re pitching a yarn, in the Scott Frank sense.

Many of the mafia movies are sort of like this is what happened, this is what happened next, and they’re going back and telling you how a thing happened.

So there’s not one right or wrong answer here. I think we’ve just experienced so many times in movies where something wasn’t working right and they tried to throw a voice over on it and it just made it worse. Make sure that you’re doing it, you’re being very deliberate about it and you’re really thinking how is this going to help the audience really identify with this character’s story rather than just being an easier way to have some things being said.

Scott: And that points out something really, really important, too. Which has two parts to it. The first part is you need to know what story you’re telling. That’s really what it is. Who is this – right now you’ve described almost a type. It’s almost that reductive. It’s a depressed person. So, without knowing where you’ve put that person and what story and what else is about this person it’s very hard to know how to kind of address your question.

But more importantly what John was talking about now about voice over is a lot of times, you know, the studio will ask someone to come fix something. The ending doesn’t work, but we think it will work with voice over. If you add voice over people will understand. And the problem is it isn’t about understanding. And they’ve cut out all the things, by the way, at the beginning that got you invested because it was “slow.” So, the problem is you need to feel something at the end. We can understand, oh, they got together, I’m supposed to be happy. But then there is really feeling happy when they get together. Or feeling sad. It’s a very different thing between understanding what’s supposed to be happening and knowing that, yeah, that’s right but really feeling it.

Your job is to make us really feel it. You know, you have to really feel – when you get to the end it can’t be this perfunctory exercise in paying off the beginning because of screenwriting rules. It has to be something that feels really, to use the overused word, earned. And that’s really what you have to feel.

And so voice over or description or explaining things, that’s sort of looking in the wrong place for a solution. You need to look at the character and the story that grows out of that character. All answers are there. Everything is there.

John: Now Megana while we have you here, one of the things – it’s been a full year since PayUpHollywood started and all that stuff. It seems like another lifetime ago. Are you getting any emails in from assistants, from people who are dealing with that? What’s the status of that right now? Is there any sort of news on that level?

Megana: Yeah actually. We’re just about to launch our next survey. We pushed it back because of the election, so I think it’s like November 16. And I’ll include all of that stuff in the show notes for assistants. I think in particular the survey is interested in how people have been affected by the different Covid shutdowns. But take a look for that survey because things seem to only be getting better.

John: Great. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And if people want to send in questions where should they send them?

Megana: To ask@johnaugust.com would be fantastic.

John: And we always love when people attach a voice memo because that way we can hear your voice and know who we’re actually talking to. Megana, thanks so much.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thank you guys.

Scott: Thank you, Megana.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I’m reading right now called Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox. It is just a book about how light came to be. How humans got to have light. And to be able to push back the darkness.

Craig: God. I mean, isn’t it just god?

John: God did it all. And so here’s a thing that I feel like all the movies I’ve seen and TV shows I’ve seen that were set before like 1900 have been cheating. Because most people just did not have the ability to have real light inside their houses to do things. But we needed to film period things and so we just sort of cheat the light and make it seem like these things were lit when they really weren’t.

And our ability to do things at night is actually very, very recent in human times. I mean, moving beyond campfires, which you can’t do very much by, to electric light we went through this transition where we had candles, and candles were just terrible, and then lanterns were a little bit better, and finally get to electric light. But I’ve just really enjoyed her laying out the history of this stuff and how much human civilization has changed because we’ve been able to control light.

So, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox.

Craig: Fantastic. Scott, anything on your One Cool Thing list?

Scott: I have a very analog One Cool Thing. Because I’m obsessed with the fact that writing has become so much about screens and looking at screens. Even getting notes on things. It’s just all on screen. And so I have taken to carrying this little teeny tiny Moleskin notebook that has changed my life. It’s tiny. It’s like the size of your Air Pods case, maybe a little bigger.

And what would be great, or what is great, is when you’re out there and I’ll be reading something or I’ll be listening to a podcast and I’ll hear a word that I think is a great word. And I just put that one thought on that page because they’re not huge pages. I don’t feel required, or feel pressured to fill it up with everything. But I think about little thoughts and sentences that I hear and that I want to plug into whatever it is I’m working on or thinking about. And it’s great. You just carry a little pencil stub or they make these great little tiny pens now. And I feel like if we did that more we would kind of find these little things out there in the world that would be better than finding them on screen.

Because I can’t tell you how often I hear something I think, wow, that’s a good use of that word. That’s amazing. I want to remember that. Or, wow, that was a really interesting image I just saw. I want to remember that. And I love notebooks. I have a notebook for every project. But this is something different. You just take it with you and knowing that it’s in your pocket makes you feel strong. [laughs]

Mind blown, right everybody? Yeah.

John: I like it.

Craig: It doesn’t take much to make Scott feel strong. A small amount of paper.

Scott: A little notebook in my pocket. It’s my little secret.

Craig: No one touch my notebook!

Scott: Your little secret.

Craig: Um, Scott can’t find his little notebook and so we can’t get started today. If someone could find his notebook. [laughs]

Scott: [laughs] It’s with his medicine. He left it with his medicine.

Craig: Exactly. Scott, you put your notebook and your wallet in the freezer again. Sweetheart.

Scott: By the way, you can get it on Amazon. The teeniest, tiniest Moleskin. You can get them on Amazon. They sell you like a six-pack or something.

Craig: Yes, of course. We’ve got to keep Amazon’s profit margins up, so here’s another thing you can get on Amazon. We’re heading into Thanksgiving. I don’t think either of you guys are big chefs, but–

John: I cook. But what you’ve posted here I’m fascinated by because it looks so much like a ShamWow kind of commercial.

Craig: No, no, it’s quite beautiful. And it’s cheap which is nice. I always like a nice, cheap thing. And it actually solves a problem. So when you approach Thanksgiving you are going to be making a lot of things with butter. That’s why Thanksgiving tastes so good. And there is a slight annoyance with butter. When you’ve got your sticks of butter you need to maybe grease a pan or something like that. You know how butter is wrapped, like the stick of butter is wrapped in such a way that you can’t unwrap it properly? I don’t know what they do. It’s like an origami thing around it. And then when you need to cut away a tablespoon or whatever you’re never quite cutting evenly. Plus the butter is always super hard.

This is a very simple gadget. It’s called The Butter Twist. You stick your stick of butter in this little plastic thing. Costs $15.49, or I guess the same equivalent as 4,000 of Scott’s little notebooks. Those cost a hay penny a piece. And you put it in there and it obviously holds the butter so if you need to grease a pan or something like that, but also if you need two teaspoons you just set the little dial on a thing and you twist it and it cuts that amount perfectly and drops it out onto your plate which is really nice. Because as you’re cooking like a big meal, like Thanksgiving, you don’t want to just keep screwing up knives and things to cut butter. That’s just a waste of dishwasher time. So, cute little thing. Works real well. $15.49.

The Butter Twist. Spread, cut, measure, dispense, and store your butter.

John: So unfortunately this only takes standard size sticks of butter. We use this weird Irish butter that’s really, really good, but it’s too wide to fit in that thing. So then we’d have to cut it and it would be a lot to do.

Craig: Yeah. This is really for…

John: Americans.

Craig: Well, and also for cooking. I mean, I wouldn’t waste the good Irish butter on cooking. Spread that on your toast. But for cooking just throw the crap in there. Your old Land-O-Lakes.

Scott: Craig, does this device fit in your pocket?

Craig: It does fit in your pocket. Yup. It does not come with a little pencil.

Scott: Just wondering. Just wondering if it fits in your pocket.

Craig: If you had a certain kind of small notebook you probably could write a word or two with butter on it.

Scott: There are marks on the butter where you can just slice right through.

Craig: Again, you must not have been listening to me. I mean—

Scott: About the dishwasher. Blah-blah-blah. Don’t you have to throw this in the dishwasher, too?

John: In fact one photo shows it going into a dishwasher.

Craig: Correct. So instead of the multiple things you just have the one thing. You can store your butter in it and, listen, I’m not talking to you. You don’t cook anything. You sit there at Thanksgiving. You’re asleep before Thanksgiving. Then they wake you up. They send you in there to eat. And then you go back to sleep. Sometimes I think–

Scott: They don’t even wake me up.

Craig: Exactly.

Scott: They don’t even want me in there. They’re glad I’m asleep.

Craig: They mush some potatoes around your slightly open mouth. I’m actually cooking.

Scott: They dip my hand in hot water, warm water, and leave me alone.

Craig: So that you’ll just get to the inevitable pants-peeing quicker.

Scott: Yeah. Dad’s in his chair.

Craig: We know exactly how it goes in your house. I’ve been there. I’ve seen this. [laughs]

Scott: [laughs] Yeah.

John: And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Phillipson. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Scott Frank, are you on Twitter? I don’t think you are.

Scott: I’m on no social media.

Craig: He’s smart.

John: That is smart.

Scott: But I do have a little notebook in my pocket.

John: That’s right.

Craig: He can tweet with his little…he says to himself, “Oh, people would love that.”

John: Yes.

Craig: You’re going to like my own thing.

John: We have t-shirts. They’re delightful. They’re at Cotton Bureau. They make a good gift if you’re looking for a Christmas gift for somebody. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes including the one where Scott Frank talks about Godless at the Austin Film Festival. We also have bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Thanksgiving. But, I want to express my gratitude and thanks to Scott Frank for joining us here on this podcast. Great discussion.

Craig: Thank you, Scott. Miss you.

Scott: Thank you guys. It was fun.

Craig: I miss you and I regret to say that once again you’ve done brilliant work. Pisses me off.

Scott: That’s my goal.

Craig: I know.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. So my thought behind this is that Thanksgiving is coming up. It’s going to be a weird Thanksgiving because of the pandemic. And this has just been a weird kind of generally terrible year. I think this will go down, for the rest of our lives, we’ll know, oh 2020, that was the year that was just awful.

But there were actually some good things that happened this year so I wanted to take a moment to think about the happy things that happened this year and I have a couple things on my little short list. One is that I had a movie that went from like, oh here’s an idea, to oh we’re in production and it all happened in 2020 which was just a delight. It was a fantasy project that I always wanted to do, that I got a chance to do, and weirdly the pandemic was kind of good for it. Because it was animation and nothing else could get made everybody could just focus on, OK, we can do an animated movie. And that was a good thing that happened in this bad year.

Do either of you have some things you’re grateful for in 2020?

Craig: You’re talking to the wrong Jews. A lot of complaining over here.

John: Scott Frank, you had an acclaimed series that you were able to finish post-production on.

Craig: But he’ll never do that well again. [laughs]

Scott: No. I never will. I’m very grateful that I peaked in 2020. I’m very grateful that the show got the response that it did which is surprising and yet lovely at the same time. I am grateful that we finished shooting last year. And am grateful that the technology caught up so that I could do all of post from my house in Connecticut. So that was – I’m very lucky that way. I know a lot of people who had to abandon production in the middle and then go back to it and I feel very fortunate that I didn’t have to.

I also feel lucky that the whole Covid thing forced everyone to kind of, in terms of family at least, to be a little more connected. And it got me to settle down a little bit that way. And it was nice to just be kind of in the quiet and enjoying – I wouldn’t say enjoying because there’s a lot of anxiety, but just kind of being with my family. I really like that. Who would have thought? They didn’t like it, but I did.

Craig: No. They like being with me. I know that.

Scott: They do. They love you. Especially Jennifer.

Craig: And I love them.

Scott: Yeah, they know.

Craig: They know. We all know. Everyone knows. That’s mostly what I’m thankful is the time I get to spend with Scott’s family.

Scott: Yes. [laughs]

John: I will say as the parent of a teenager, you know, in general I would not see her kind of at all, but for this last year we’ve had every meal together. We’ve been with each other this whole time. And it’s been actually really good. So I am also grateful for the sort of chance to hang out with her for this last year when she normally would have been off with friends and I would have been doing meetings and I would have been doing things in person. And I just wasn’t doing those things so we were all just together all this time. And I’m really grateful that it well.

Scott: It’s nice. And my kids are out of the house, but still they would, when we were in the city we would see them, or they would come up here. Because two of them live in New York. And my son came out from California and stayed here and wrote music. And every weekend we would come up and see him and we never would have seen him so much.

And even with Jennifer, you know, we’re married 32 years. Just to kind of cook at home and be at home and just, you know, hang out. There’s something that felt like a reset. It’s a little confusing given that not everybody has that experience.

John: Craig, there’s nothing we’re going to get out of you?

Craig: No, no, that’s not true. I am thankful about things. This is a pretty rough year just for the world and it is a weird thing to think about what’s gone well, because a lot of people have been suffering. But here’s a couple things that went well in 2020 for me, or at least me and the family.

My wife had breast cancer. And the treatment went really well. There’s a little surgery in there that was not too drastic and kind of just went well. And then the radiation after went really well. She didn’t need chemo, which I was really happy about. Because I think both of us were just sort of dreading that. Because, OK, Scott you’ve been married for 32 years. I’ve been married for 24 years. And I always say like any change after that amount of time is a positive. What, lose your hair? You’re going to be bald? Hot. That’s so great. I’m down. Let’s do this.

Any change is exciting. But she didn’t have to lose her hair, so I was a little bummed about that. But she didn’t have to get sick or anything like that from chemo which was really nice. And it looks like it’s all clear.

You know, you feel like you dodge a huge bullet with something like that. My son has Crohn’s disease and he was in the hospital again last week, because he had had some emergency surgery a couple years ago. And then he had a following surgery a year later because when you have stomach surgery there can be these adhesions in your colon that will sometimes just block everything and then they have to do another operation. Which is why the only good thing about him getting an abdominal obstruction and having a second emergency abdominal surgery was that it got me out of running for Vice President of the Writers Guild. So that was great.

I was in the hospital with him while that was going on. But it happened again last week. But this time happily they just – they kind of put him in the hospital and put him on fluids and just waited. And he did not need surgery. And so that was – it was sort of like dodging these bullets. When there are bullets flying all around I guess at some point you’re like, OK, people are dropping like flies so mostly I’m just looking at where the bullets don’t connect and saying, there. That’s a very good thing.

So I’m really happy about that.

Here’s another strange, like you try and find these little upsides to Covid which has killed nearly or more than a quarter of a million Americans and is on its way to ultimately being the deadliest thing America has faced since WWII. In fact, I think it will overcome WWII and be the worst deadliest thing we faced since the Civil War I guess.

My dad died and we couldn’t have a funeral or a memorial thing because of Covid and everything, so we have to wait. But it occurred to me that when we finally do have it, let’s say after vaccines and things it will be summer or something, I don’t know, that we will have a memorial service maybe eight months or a year after he died. And in doing so I think can have the experience that we’re supposed to have when people die. Like I think this should be a thing anyway. Somebody dies, you should wait a year and then have the memorial service. Because then it’s fun and it’s positive and you can actually do the whole thing of like remember. All the things they tell you you’re supposed to do you can do them. Because you’ve had time.

Why do we make ourselves do this when we’re in the lowest point and in the most wretched grievous state? Everybody should get time. And then have a memorial and it can be fun. It can be the kind of memorial the person who died would like to have been at. So, there’s a weird silver lining to that.

So those are the things for which I’m thankful this year. And I would argue that all of those things are more important and better than the things that you guys are thankful for.

Scott: Without question. Just one big ray of sunshine. Thank you, Craig.

John: Indeed.

Craig: And I’m also thankful for Jennifer, Scott’s wife.

Scott: Of course you are. And she for you.

Craig: I know. I know. I know. I know.

John: All right. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thanks guys.

Scott: Thank you.

 

Links:

• If you’re an assistant or coordinator interested in a PayUpHollywood survey please email ask@johnaugust.com
• Queen’s Gambit
• Queen’s Gambit Script Pages Opening and Basement Chess Scene
• Queen’s Gambit Palette Inspiration
• Scott Frank
• Moleskine Notebooks
• Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox
• Kitchen Butter Twist
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by William Phillipson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.