The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 592 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, why are action heroes named John and not Craig? We’ll think into the mystery of the J names and why you see so many Jacksons, Jakes, and Joes, and so few Craigs. I’m sorry.
Craig: Aw.
John: Can you think of even one action hero Craig?
Craig: Literally, not only are there no Craigs, but do you remember when we were kids and you would go to a theme park or something and there would be the big rack of personalized miniature license plates?
John: License plates, yeah. You’d find Bort but no Craig?
Craig: Right. You could find Bort, yeah, exactly, but Craig was rare. Even back when Craig was a name that some people had, it was rare, whereas you never had a problem.
John: Never had that any issue. Was there an H? Was there not an H? Both options were always available.
Craig: Exactly. You literally had variations on your name. I had nothing!
John: After that discussion, we’ll get into another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering listener questions on research, options, and work for hire. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk anesthesia.
Craig: Oh, good.
John: I recently went under the knife, and wow, Craig, those drugs are good.
Craig: Yes, they are. Happily, we don’t have access to them.
John: No, and the people who do have access to them, like the Michael Jackson people who have access to them when they shouldn’t be using those, that’s bad.
Craig: That’s bad. We’ll get into that. We’ll get into that. I don’t want to give this away to the people that don’t spend the $5 a month. You know what? You don’t get it.
John: You don’t get it, but you know what you get? A quality show full of many other things, which we’ll dive into right now, starting with some follow-up. A previous episode about villains, we talked about the tied to the railroad tracks trope, that mustache-twirling villain who ties a damsel in distress to a railroad track.
Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, sent through this great article that actually went through the history of the tied to the railroad tracks trope. It’s fascinating, because it’s not what you would expect. I thought it started with silent movies, but when we see them in silent movies, that was already a parody of an existing trope that came from stage plays.
Craig: Oh, really? That’s interesting. People were tying damsels to train tracks on stage?
John: Yes, and it became such a cliché. It became an early copyright lawsuit, because there’s a famous play that did it. Then other plays started having the villain tie the damsel in distress to a railroad track. Then it became actual copyright lawsuit things happening about that, whether you could copyright that action in a play, which seems crazy.
Craig: That’s crazy.
John: This article we’ll link to says that at some point there were six plays in London that all had that trope in it at the same time.
Craig: What I like is that the folks who did it first, so looks like Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight by American, apparently that was first, contained a scene “where a character named Snorkey is tied to the rails by a man named Byke.” What I like is that Augustin Daly wrote this play, probably thought, “This can be cool. That’s a fun idea,” and then everyone went insane. Everyone was like, “Dude, that’s the greatest thing we’ve ever seen.” Everybody went, “People are clamoring for other people being tied to railroad tracks.” Why?
John: It’s wild. It happened on stage before it happened in real life. Then after it happened on stage and in movies, there are a couple examples of it happening in real life. I think the other example that this article gives talks about how the idea of cement over shoes, like the mafia casing your feet in concrete, then throwing you into the lake. That was in fiction first, and then there were a couple cases where it happened in real life.
Craig: Where they thought, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” It did always strike me as just very involved, really involved. Concrete is difficult, because the moment you pour it, it starts to set. That’s why concrete mixers are always turning. You gotta get some Quikrete. Then it’s messy. It’s all over the place. They’re thrashing around probably, so that’s annoying. Why didn’t you just shoot him? Just shoot him.
John: Just shoot him.
Craig: Shoot him. What’s hard about that?
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Karl Smallwood, which talks through this. I just really enjoyed reading the backstory of how we got to this trope. I was just fascinated to know that it was already a jokey trope by the time we see it in silent films.
Craig: No one’s ever taken it seriously.
John: No, it’s never been taken seriously. Two other bits of follow-up. Actually, related follow-up. In that same villains episode, we were talking about Annie Wilkes from Misery. I said, “Oh, would Annie Wilkes have even been a villain if this guy had not crossed her doorstep?” Two readers wrote in to remind me that it’s set up in the movie that he discovers that she was actually involved in a series of baby murders when she was a nurse. She was a bad person before James Caan’s character shows up at the house.
Craig: What if those babies were jerks?
John: What if she knew they were gonna grow up to become future Hitlers?
Craig: Exactly. You don’t know what she’s capable of. I totally forgot about that. It did strike me that, look, if you are the sort of person who upon reading a novel that kills off a character you love, goes so crazy as to hit the author’s shins with a hammer, there’s no way that’s your first crazy thing. Nobody just starts there at the age of 53. Something happened.
John: It’s a ramp up to that.
Craig: Have you seen the movie Pearl?
John: I haven’t seen Pearl yet. I’m eager to see Pearl. I haven’t watched it yet though.
Craig: It looks to be a fascinating portrayal of just good old-fashioned nuts. I want to see it. It looks intense. Looks terrifying.
John: It’s hard for me to see a terrifying, intense movie. I just don’t have a space in my life or a time in my day where like, “Oh, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna watch a terrifying, intense movie.” There’s just not a lot of opportunity for me, the way my life is set up right now.
Craig: How’s your life set up? You know what? Don’t go into it.
John: We watched The Last of Us in an afternoon at 1 p.m., because Mike does not want to watch a scary thing before bed, which I get.
Craig: I get that.
John: Mike has watched most of your show with his back turned to the TV so he can’t see what’s actually happening on screen.
Craig: That’s how we intended it. Boy, we could’ve saved a lot of money if we knew that everyone was watching facing away. Just a really nice, tight radio play.
John: Nice radio play.
Craig: That’s what we were going… You know what? The show sounds really good, so hopefully he enjoyed the sound.
John: It’s good sound mix quality here. We have a last bit of follow-up here. We talked before about European script consultants. Hillevi [ph] wrote in with a really good overview of the Swedish system. Hey Drew, can you talk us through what Hillevi wrote for his involvement with the Swedish system?
Drew Marquardt: Hillevi writes, “My day job is as a screen industry strategist for a regional talent development fund in southern Sweden. This is an organization that gets its money from the state and acts under the broad decisions made by the regional and local governments in terms of what their priorities are. A filmmaker will apply to us for money to hire a dramaturge to help them develop their script. We don’t really have development execs here. If we grant them the funds, we are not involved any further in that process.
“The idea is that the public funds will ensure that less commercially viable films will be able to be made and also so that people who have money are not the only people able to make films. In Sweden there is a democratic mission in the way public film funds are distributed. At the same time, any government influence is kept at, quote, ‘arm’s length.’ However, this paradigm is being tested more and more at the moment.
“The Swedish Film Institute was criticized by an independent oversight report for being too politically angled for launching initiatives to increase diversity and green filmmaking in the films being funded by the Institute. While those ideals are good, there is a danger in violating that principle of arm’s length. Since our last election, when the far right party got more power, there’s been a lot of talk about, quote unquote, ‘reviving Swedish culture,’ in a very specific way.
“If the arm’s length distance is no longer the norm, then there is a risk that the public funds for film development and production do become more of a propaganda tool for the state. If European filmmakers are being squeezed by global streamers on one hand and regressive far right governments on the other, color me concerned about what that will mean for the future of independent cinema in Europe.”
John: Thank you, Hillevi, for this good overview. I think it brings to light both what we’ve talked about in previous episodes, about how there is meant to be an arm’s length distance between the government funding and the actual filmmaking. They can use the money to hire [inaudible 00:08:56] not deliberately telling the people what they need to write, what their films can be about. That’s all meant to be there. That’s all part of the structure. The minute you try to introduce any kind of ands or qualifications or other things, it could also fall under political influence. That is a genuine worry.
Craig: That’s basically I think what we were concerned about. Any time a government is funding the arts, there is always the concern that they will bring some sort of governmental interest to bear, even if it’s done subtly. Hillevi points out something that we probably don’t think about much, and that is that governments change. If you set up a system that is run well or honestly by one administration, that is no guarantee that it will continue that way. Another administration may want to do something else with it.
We do have some public funding of the arts here in the United States, but precious little, not enough compared to how wealthy our country is. It’s limited enough where it never struck me that the government was influencing the content.
This is definitely something to keep our eyes on, because as he says, the paradigm is being tested more and more. Even when they are doing things that progressives might consider to be a positive, other people won’t, and then those people will come along and do things that conservatives think is positive and other people won’t. Suddenly, the arts have become a football, which no one wants.
John: The arts are traditionally associated with the left, and that’s why you always see when Republican governments take over, this talk about defunding the National Endowment for the Arts or defunding PBS, which of course mostly hurts educational outreach kinds of things of those institutions.
Just always be mindful that these things can happen, especially when you have any shifts in how government is structured. We tend to see these in the US and in Europe as shifts to the right, but you could also theoretically imagine shifts to the left, where suddenly, what was considered standard is now not considered acceptable for a new leftist government.
Craig: It’s odd bedfellows, as they say, government and the arts, especially considering what the mission of the arts is. I continue to be concerned about this method. I think even though our method isn’t perfect, it’s not terrible. That’s my full-throated defense of America.
John: We’re talking from the bias of a wealthy country that can spend a lot on the arts because we are a wealthy country, not as a nation, but just because we have the market to be able to drive a lot of things.
I think the goal behind these film funds was to make sure that you had a local arts scene or it is possible to make movies in your country. That’s the concern is that without the governmental funding, it may not be possible to really make a local film industry.
Craig: We wish everybody the best with that. Hopefully, it goes better than it goes poorly. What else can we say?
John: This is not really follow-up. It’s news, 20 years of follow-up. Andy Baio, who writes a great blog at waxy.org, for the last 20 years has been following the leaks of Oscar screeners. Basically, when movies come out for an award season, we get sent screeners. WGA gets sent screeners. The Academy gets sent screeners. These used to be DVDs. Then they went to Blu-rays for a little while. Now they’re all online.
He was tracking how quickly it’d go from this DVD was sent out to potential voters to it’s now leaked online [inaudible 00:12:32] that actual screener leaked online. It was incredibly quick. A large part of the high-quality movies you could find online were from these linked screeners. He was charting how many of those leaked each season.
This last season, not a single screener linked before Oscar night, for the first time in the 20 years that he’s been tracking it. He looks at why that has changed. It really comes down to the end of physical media, so moving more things to online services, and just the fact that by the time screeners have shipped out, there were already good online versions people could download that didn’t have to use the screeners as their source material.
Craig: I have a suspicion that that is one of the larger reasons why. That doesn’t bode well, because I think that the theatrical experience continues to come back, maybe not as quickly as some people want, but it’s coming back. That means that once again, as we head into the next year, that a lot of those movies will not be available on Netflix or any of the streaming services, they will be in theaters only, which means that there will be more of an interest in pirating them. Is Hollywood even trying? Nobody even tries, right?
John: Here’s what Hollywood tries to do. I think they are concerned about in-theater rips of things. Literally, the weekend that it debuts in theaters, if it’s available online, they hate that. They will try to do things to stop that. They can watermark the bejesus out of things. I’m sure they actually can do a pretty good job of figuring out what copy of what is the thing that is now on some sharing site, so maybe they can get some of those knocked down.
The huge worry over Academy screeners leaking and that being the way that piracy started I think can be put to bed, because that’s not the source of online leaks these days. The Academy app is great. I think that did a lot to help there. Even if we were still shipping DVDs around, I don’t think it would be the main source of piracy.
Craig: Here’s hoping, because while there are a decent amount of Oscar-nominated films that are from big studios and big movies, a lot of them are small. A lot of them are the kinds of movies that actually get damaged and the artists get damaged by this stuff.
I don’t know, it’s just a rough one. There’s so much copy-fightism inherent in what I’ll call the youthful left and not a lot of thought through on it. I think it’s easy to want everything to be free until you make something. Then you realize that you need to make a living. It’s not about defending the rich. It’s honestly about defending the people that are scraping by as artists more than anything else.
John: The films they are debuting at South by Southwest this week, some of those will be giant hits. Some of them will become Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was a South by Southwest debut. A lot of those films will have limited theatrical runs or will have to debut on streaming someplace or an exclusive debut on some platform. If you’re not watching it there, but instead you’re watching it through a pirated copy, those filmmakers who you say you want to support are not going to be supported. It’s making it harder for them to make their next film and everything else. All the previous speeches about the horrors of piracy are still true.
Craig, you are destined to be many things in life. You’ve achieved a lot, but you will probably not be defending the White House from attack. You’re not going to be stopping the runaway train. It’s not your fault, Craig. It’s your parents’ fault. They named you Craig. Mazin is a perfectly valid action hero name, but Craig is just not it.
Craig: No, it’s not. It’s mild.
John: It’s mild. You need to start with a J. You need to be a John, a James, a Jack, a Jake, Joe. This data supports this. We’re going to link to an article by Demetria Glace writing for Slate. She’s taking a look at, it feels like Johns and Jacks and Joes are over-represented. They are actually hugely over-represented among the characters when you have a single action hero in a movie or movie franchise. They’re way over-represented. As soon as you take out the James Bonds and the characters where they have 15 films in their history, the Js just run away with it. Is that surprising to you?
Craig: No. I think we’ve all seen this. There’s something that feels punchy and tough about the single-syllable name. These names, John, James, Jack, Jake, Frank, Joe, these are incredibly generic American tough-guy names. They’re also names that are not current. They’re names that have been around forever. They’re names that go back to the Old West. Because America doesn’t really have what the Europeans would call history, we have just have this whatever, short 400 or 500 years, these are the names that we have mythologized, and so it’s not surprising to see them come up over and over and over again.
When you look at the villain names, you notice that even though there are a couple of repeats, like James and Jack, most of the villain names are multiple syllables. Victor, Michael, Robert, Ivan, Simon, Eddie, Gabriel. Then there’s Ernst, which is just a straight up Nazi thing. Eddie in particular has a skeezy vibe to it. Eddie, he just seems like he might be a scumbag. Obviously, Ivan is your generic Russian terrorist.
Victor is one that always gets me. That always makes me laugh. I don’t know what it is about Victor. As a name, it’s a perfectly good name. It signifies victory. I think maybe Victor Frankenstein was it. I think it’s doomed.
Also note that villain names tend to feel a little bit more erudite. Simon feels like he’s a bit learned, and we don’t like bookworms.
John: No, none of those. None of those eggheads in our movies. Those eggheads are always plotting things.
Craig: They’re scheming, whereas a simple man, John, he’s just John. He’s a man of the earth. John. You know what you never see? You never see any of the what I call new American names, Jaden, Braden, Hayden, Maiden, Saden, Daden, all those. No, they’re not there.
John: My theory is they’re probably too new. They’re also, in many cases, ambiguously gendered. They can be used for male or female, so they don’t feel as strongly identifiably this is your male action hero star, so you’re not gonna give them that name.
Craig: You may be right. It really just strikes me how old-fashioned these names are. No one’s naming their kid Frank anymore, right? Are there still people naming their babies Frank? I’ve never met a baby that was Frank. That’s hysterical. Actually, now I want to have another baby and name it Frank, because that’s kind of cool. It’s a great name. Bruce.
John: Bruce, love it. Now, we’ve talked a lot about naming characters on the show and how I will stop and not continue writing until I can find the right name for a character, because it’s so crucial to just defining how I feel about the character and therefore how the audience hopefully will feel about the character too.
Arlo Finch, I spent a lot of time figuring out Arlo Finch’s name. I knew the rhythm of the name. I knew what it needed to do. Until I found that name, I couldn’t continue to write the story.
It does feel like something about the short, the John, the James, the Jacks, they are short, they’re punchy, for a character who literally will probably be punching some. In many cases, maybe a Joe or a Jack, they are a shortened, more familiar version of a longer name. That’s why you see a Joe. You don’t see a Joseph as a hero. There’s something familiar and next door about them.
These are also largely very white names. I think it’s important to keep in mind, this is looking back over the last 40, 50 years. We had a lot of white male action stars, so they were gonna have these names. If you look at the trends in the last 20 years, the J names have fallen a lot, and I think you’re gonna see a lot more names that are not these classically white names in those action male roles, because you’re not gonna write a character who could only be played by a white male.
Craig: Also, some of these names are names that I know Black people have these names. I know Black people who are named John or James or Jake or Jack or Joe. I think honestly, when you see a movie and the trailer says, “Jake Bronson was,” you’re like, “This movie’s gonna probably be bad,” because they didn’t even get past that. It’s pretty cliché. The best argument I think we can give people out there as they’re doing this is probably just avoid these now. They feel weak.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article. What I liked about it is she really did go through and pull the Occam’s razor. Is it just because those are the most common names? Is it because screenwriters are named with J names and then are picking those things? Is it because of Keanu’s hypothesis that when you say a J name, your mouth forms a certain hopeful place? It’s not really that. Probably a little bit all of the above. Each might be nudging a little bit closer there. I think there’s also an inertia in that we had a lot of J names and this became default for what we thought of as that one solo hero in an action movie.
Craig: I think also while you’re doing your villains, maybe give your villain one of these names. That’s kind of interesting.
John: Love it.
Craig: Why not? Flip the script.
John: Flip the script. Let’s flip the script on some Three Page Challenges. It’s been a minute since we’ve done this. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, Craig and I will do a Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at the first three pages from somebody’s script. It could be a feature. It could be a pilot. They sent those in. We give our honest feedback.
If you would like to read these three pages, you can look at the show notes. You can click there, see the pdfs, and read along with us. Drew will read us a quick summary of things, so in case you’re listening in your car, you have some sense of what the heck we’re talking about.
Reminder that everybody volunteered for this. They signed a little form. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, filled out a little form, and attached their thing. We are not picking on people randomly. These are people who asked for our feedback, and we are happy to give them our feedback. Drew, this is your first time doing this. Are you excited?
Drew: I’m really excited. I’ve read these before with Megana, and I haven’t gotten to do this yet.
Craig: Here we go.
John: Let’s start with your first pick. What is it?
Drew: Let’s start with Flotsam by Sam Darcy. A montage of news clips informs us of the death of the neo-Nazi terrorist named Clifton Calwell. He was given a burial at sea to deny his supporters a place to mourn him. The sound of waves brings us to a Maori child, Jai, nine, looking at Clifton’s bloated corpse washed up on a beach. Jai puts the corpse in the basket of his bike and takes it to his backyard, where his two friends investigate and decide it’s the body of a pirate.
John: Flotsam. Flotsam starts with an image on the cover of a bottle and a thing on top of it. Cute cover page. Looks great. Just an email address on the front for our writer, Sam.
Then getting on to Page 1, I really liked how we did this montage of getting us up to speed on who this Clifton Calwell was, how we’re finding out about this. They are very short little news hits. We are bolding and uppercasing these little moments, but we’re not going to [inaudible 00:24:18] all this stuff, just a blast of images and video going past, dialog where we need it. Establishing this thing which we’re very clearly meant to be thinking it’s like bin Laden, how they buried bin Laden at sea so there couldn’t be a place to mourn. I get it. You’ve created this alternate universe where there was a neo-Nazi person like this who was a big enough threat that you would’ve done this at sea.
Then we are arrived at Australia on the beach, and here’s where it did not work as well for me. Craig, I want to get your initial opinions on how this first page worked for you.
Craig: Pretty well. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s the montage of lots of different people describing a news event, so multiple anchors. We have a character, Australian Anchor, American Anchor, and Another Anchor. I liked Another Anchor. Aw, what country are they from? There’s a Government Official, and there’s also a Late-Night Host. The Late-Night Host was doing a monologue, so that helped initially to give you a sense of, okay, this is some sort of bin Laden type thing.
Where I got a little nervous was… This is just a hard thing to do. I would say to Sam, when you are writing monologue jokes for fictional late-night hosts, they have to be good. They can’t be bad. Sometimes late-night hosts do have clunky jokes or super generic jokes, but you’re writing it, so people are already like, “You wrote that. It’s not real.” Therefore, it has to be legitimately weird or funny.
This one was very clammy. “Yikes, that’s a face only a Fuhrer could love.” I don’t really think that’s getting a laugh out of an audience. If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it, for sure. Otherwise, you’re gonna put yourself a little bit in a hole right at the very top.
John: Agreed. That did feel like an unearned laugh there. I got nervous coming out of this. Don’t think we really stuck the landing.
“Camera flash. Sound of waves further encroaching.” The Government Official says, “The stench of neo-Fascism has been tempered today,” dash, dash. “Now the crashing of water, propelling us to: Clifton Calwell (30s). Bloated. Discoloured skin. Very much dead.”
The Government Official’s line was not especially helpful, didn’t tell us that we were coming to the end of this montage. Most importantly, I wanted to see the behind-the-scenes footage, the army footage of them dumping the body over, just that video footage. I didn’t want to see just… I needed a stronger image for this guy is dead and now he’s being pushed into sea. I wasn’t getting that in these delivered lines, so it didn’t feel like the end of this montage to me.
Craig: I agree with you, although I have a suggestion, because typically when they do this sort of thing, they don’t have footage of it, because they don’t want anyone memorializing it, basically.
What you could do is, one person could say, “There are reports that the body is being taken to so-and-so.” Then you could have another person on a panel saying, “I guarantee you they’re just dumping it at sea. That’s what they do in these cases. That’s what I’m hearing they’re doing. We’ll never know. No, we will never know, but I’m pretty sure.” Then somebody can disagree. “You’re an idiot,” blah blah blah. It’s a talk show. Then boom, the body washes up on shore. Clearly, the one guy was right. There’s a way to do it. It’s unlikely that they would film it and show it.
John: This is a probably entirely false memory, but I thought I remembered seeing something of bin Laden’s body being dumped into the water. Maybe that was a re-creation footage I saw. I feel like I saw something there. I definitely saw the equivalent of body cam footage of storming the compound.
Craig: Definitely, yeah. I remember that. I’m looking it up, dumping body ocean. Let’s see. There is a video, but it is a video that I don’t believe has been released.
John: There is a question of are we breaking the seal by showing this thing that would not be a part of the international news coverage to show that one thing. I don’t know. It’s a choice to make. I think you could go either way. What Craig pitched also works. I think we needed some stronger… Stick the landing here before we’re getting into more normal movie, because we’re changing our time and our tempo a lot.
Craig: You sure you want to say normal movie here?
John: The choices that are being made here are really fascinating. I don’t think they all work. I’m so happy we have this as an example, because we can talk about what’s working and where we got off the train.
“Exterior beach – early morning – continuous.” It’s not continuous. This is a whole new thing, so not continuous. Scratch that out. “Calwell’s legless corpse slumps in a cracked plastic capsule upon the sand. The tide froths then recedes around him.” You could do this where you could start with his body. I think that’s not gonna be your strongest choice.
I think your stronger choice is to start with Jai, our boy, who’s at the beach for some reason, because he doesn’t know that he’s looking for a body. He comes across this thing. Then we could gradually reveal, oh, it is actually this body and this corpse. I think this could be weirder and funnier, but by starting on the body, it makes it seem like the body is more important than this kid, who is going to be our hero for this story. Give us some moment of Jai before we find the body. That’s my pitch. Craig?
Craig: I kind of like this way, if we had stuck the landing on coming out of that montage. I think there’s something shocking about seeing that body. It is a startling cut, which I like, which then makes the reveal that a child is calmly looking at it also shocking and somewhat funny. Like I say, it has to feel like the cut to it is earned. If the cut to it is earned, I think it could be really interesting to see this kid.
Right off the bat, I will say, tonally there’s some nice things here. The fact that Jai [jae] or Jai [jai]… I’m not sure how to pronounce that name. I’ll go with Jai [jae]. Jai is wearing a Wrestlemania beach towel. I like it. There’s something already that feels very darkly comic about all of this.
Especially with what’s about to come, it reminded me of Peter Jackson’s early stuff. I suspect that our author, Sam, is either Australian or from New Zealand because of some of the spelling and the specificity of the location. Peter Jackson, obviously from New Zealand, some of his early stuff was just funny and disgusting. There’s a specific tone.
John: The body horror is a big part of this. What we’re seeing in these next two pages, just this disintegrating corpse that these kids are trying to examine, is fun. The way it falls out of his basket and just gets smeared on the road, love it.
Craig: People are gonna shriek. I’ve never seen this before in my life. “Calwell,” that’s the body, “draped in Jai’s beach towel, squeezed into the front bike basket like Norman Bates’s homage to ET.” That’s really funny, this nine-year-old kid biking along with a human torso corpse shoved in his bike basket. I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s really fucked up and funny to me.
Similarly, “Calwell’s insides fall out of his torso.” That’s so gross. Look, I don’t know if I would watch this, but I appreciate that it doesn’t care whether or not I’m gonna watch it. It’s doing its own thing. It’s, woof, yuck.
John: Oof. Bottom of Page 2, we have two paragraphs here. I would flip the paragraphs. Right now we’re talking about Calwell’s insides falling out of his torso before we actually get to setting up where we are at. I think it’s gonna be funnier if we’re establishing this place and then coming back to the body keeps falling apart, which is great.
“Weatherboard beach shacks, scattered Norfolk Pines, and scorched lawns permeate our ride through Aussie suburbs.” Great. It’s a really good description. Give us a start there, and then let us get back to the body and the melting of it all, because after it’s falling out of the basket, “Jai’s created a Hansel and Gretel trail of neo-Fascist entrails. We linger low on some organ as he pedals off.” It’s gruesome. The movie knows what it is, which is fine and fun.
On Page 2, there’s also a link out to a song, Rocky Raccoon covered by Charlie Parr. I wouldn’t know what that was. We had a link here. We can play it if we want to play it. I support that as a choice.
Craig: No problem whatsoever. Where I was most pleased was with the third page of this, because now we’re getting into this interesting Australian/New Zealand, probably New Zealand is my guess, Stand By Me. It’s like a weird alternate universe version of that. You’ve got these kids, Jai and two of his friends, Toni, who’s 10, and Daley, who’s 8. Toni is Samoan, and she’s reached puberty already, and she’s tall and she’s broad. I love the words, “She’s a broad girl.” I think that’s terrific.
Then Daley is white, and he “is the Donny Kerabatsos of this Lebowski trio. Bug-eyed, feeble, and malnourished.” Malnourished is such a great… I appreciate that the script so far has maintained its tone in such a way that I see that a kid is malnourished and I am laughing. This was really funny.
Now he’s got 3 kids, 10, 9, and 8, are staring at this horrible vision of a dead neo-Nazi’s torso and head. Then Daley says, “I’m telling!” He runs. “Jai and Toni give chase. The camera remains. Rather, we hear the ensuring struggle. The three return, Daley caught in a Toni-induced headlock. Daley: ‘Okay!'” This is a pretty great juxtaposition of childish hijinks with absolute disgustingness.
Then there’s this last little bit here at the end of Page 3 where Toni asks, “Who is he?” which is this nice little bit of innocence. She doesn’t know, even though it’s been all over the news. He says, “A pirate,” which he doesn’t know either. I only can imagine where this is going. Do they think he has buried treasure? Who knows? It made me laugh. It was sick, and sick on its own terms. I thought these were quite successful.
John: I thought it worked really well too. The part you mentioned on Page 3 where the camera stays behind as they run off and struggle and then it gets dragged back into the shot, it felt a little… I never want to say directing on the page, but it felt like it was a little much for me, and yet the whole script is a little much, so I’m totally fine to go with it. Also, it establishes that this is going to have a very certain style to it. There were lines that would’ve bumped for me in other examples and didn’t bump for me here.
Craig: I didn’t mind it. I saw the moment. It helped me see the moment. I laughed. I laughed.
John: Obviously, what I’m looking for on Pages 4 and beyond is really establishing specificity of the characters and their voices and what they’re actually about, rather than just their basic descriptions. I feel like I didn’t know Jai as well as I knew the other two, even in this little brief moment. I’d love a little bit more sense of that.
I’d be curious to read where this goes next. Luckily, now with this innovation we have where people send us the log line, Drew can tell us what actually happens next in the script. Drew, what happens?
Drew: “When the body of an international terrorist washes ashore following a botched burial at sea by US forces, an enterprising child fabricates tales of pirate mutineers and buried treasure to his peers in an attempt to monetize his corporeal find. A short film.”
John: It’s a short film. Then I’m probably even more intrigued, because I was really wondering how this was gonna stretch into a full feature and where this was going to go. As a short film, I can see the closure it a little bit more easily. Craig, what are you thinking?
Craig: Look, short films are tough, but they are at least easy to make, although this one won’t be easy to make. You’ll need a body. A fake body. Please, Sam. God. Stand By Me, even though it was a full feature film, it started life as a novella or a short story, one of four short stories. This one was called The Body by Stephen King. I could absolutely see a short-ish version of that sort of thing, for sure.
John: Cool. Drew, help us out with our next one.
Drew: Next is Sockfoot by Jesse Allard. Autumn, late 20s, finishes having a one-night stand with a mid-20s punk boy on a mattress on the floor. He criticizes her for wearing socks during sex, so Autumn quickly decides to leave. The two have a drawn-out, awkward goodbye. Autumn drives to her nice, spacious apartment, where her burn-scarred cat greets her. Slumping on the bed, Autumn takes off her socks, only to reveal another sock fused to her foot.
John: Great. Craig, what’s your first impression of Sockfoot?
Craig: Putting the sock-foot aside, which we don’t really understand quite yet, it just felt very broad and under-baked in terms of characterization, dialog, relationship, action on the page. Multiple issues. A bit clunky. The sentences themselves were a bit clunky.
Let’s just start with the very first couple of paragraphs. “A vinyl spins on a turntable.” No. A vinyl record spins on a turntable. “The sounds of a hard hitting punk song blast through the speakers.” Hard-hitting should get a dash. “The sounds of a” we don’t even need. Just a punk song blasts through speakers.
“Another sound seeps through the music growing ever louder as we follow a path of clothes that litter the floor of the apartment leading to the bedroom.” We’ve got prepositional overload.
Really, there’s just a better way to say all this. We’ve got a punk song blasting through the speakers. What punk song? First of all, what punk song? You can’t just say punk song. Second, there’s moaning. Just say over it or through it, we hear moaning.
Then the clothing continues. We’ve seen the whole thing of the hastily discarded clothing leading up to two people having sex a million times, but to keep it going… It was, “A band shirt, a modest bra, a pair of black jeans. Men’s underwear, a pair of women’s underwear to match,” one pair of socks. “Only one pair of socks — black, holes in the heels and toes.” First of all, we’re not gonna notice that there’s one pair of socks. It’s just gonna be laundry to us.
They were having sex, and then we arrive there and we meet Autumn, and she’s done. She rolls off. Somehow, the camera arrived, but we didn’t even know she finished. It wasn’t like I was hearing people having an orgasm or finishing or anything. It was just moaning and then suddenly rolling off. She “cuddles up to Logan. They play footsie as they catch their breath,” which is not really how it works for me, but that’s fine. Maybe other people do that.
Then this was where I just felt like I was being hurdled off the planet. “After a moment, Logan looks a bit concerned. He looks downs,” so looks and looks. “He looks down at their feet,” and there’s a comma there which shouldn’t be there. “He looks down at their feet pulling back,” there should be a comma there, “pulling back the blanket to reveal their toes. Autumn is wearing socks, he is not.” His line is, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” Her response is, parentheses, “(confused,” semicolon, “a frightful air in her breath) uh… yeah… ” “Logan (playful but serious): Don’t ever do that again.” What?
John: I don’t understand those lines. I think, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a great line. I think it’s the outline of that moment. I think that moment I would pitch differently.
I get while the following their trail of clothes to a bed is a tropey, tropey, tropey trope, in this case I would allow it because it is about the fact that she cannot remove this sock which is permanently fused to her foot. I’m going to allow it, but I think we need to get to the bed more quickly.
They may have already been finished and were pulling up the covers or something, and he sees her socks. “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a funny out. I don’t need the reaction from her or from him. Just let that be the thing. Then we get to the awkward going away, getting out of that house moment. There was just too much there. It’s like the moment had passed and we were still talking.
Craig: Also, they just met. They’ve just had sex for the first time. Who cares? Honestly, who cares that she fucked him with her socks on? Oh yeah, sorry if I was in the heat of the… We were rushing to have sex, because that’s clearly what happened. It wasn’t like we carefully took our clothes off. We threw our clothes everywhere and started fucking, and so whatever. Fuck, who cares? I don’t even understand. He says “playful but serious.” Excuse me? What does that mean?
John: Hard to do.
Craig: Hot but cold? Close but far. Then he says, “Don’t ever do that again.” What? That’s what he chooses to say?
John: I would love to see a great actor deliver that line in a way that’s playful but serious. Someone could do it, and it would actually completely work, but I’m having a hard time visualizing it, because even internally I’m not the great actor who can make that line work.
Craig: I just don’t know what the motivation would be. Again, just who gives a shit? It’s your first time together. It’s almost like she’s anticipating this question. It’s as if he looks down and goes, “Wait, do you not have feet?” Then she’s like, “Sorry, no.” He goes, “Oh, okay.” Then she goes, “Oh, no, he noticed.” Or, “Do you have hooves for feet?” Socks? Is it a crime? I don’t know. It just seems like such a weird thing.
Because it is the way that Jesse is introducing the problem for our main character, it’s just not… Everything that comes after it feels pretty off, because I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s like the script is saying, “Right? This is bad?” I’m going, “No, it’s not. It’s not that bad, not yet.”
John: We have a larger problem. After three pages, I don’t know what the tone of this is actually supposed to be. I think it’s supposed to feel bad for her because she has this injury, this sock fused to her foot because of a fire, apparently, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel and what the tone of all this that I’m watching is, because was this kind of sexy and then kind of funny and then she’s getting herself out of there? I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling about this situation.
We’re not hearing the name of the punk song at the start, but then bottom of Page 2, “Everybody Hurts by REM begins playing over the Bluetooth.” Wait, is it playing ironically or is it playing seriously? I just don’t know how to take that song, because that song is so loaded that I am lost.
Craig: At the bottom of Page 1, “Autumn breaks a bit inside. This isn’t going to work out.” I don’t know why. I don’t believe that moment. I believe neither what Logan asked, nor do I believe her response.
Then the next scene says, “Living room – moments later. Logan and Autumn stand at the door.” This is what I call a dead start.
John: So hard to do.
Craig: They’re just standing at the door. It’s not one of them is getting the clothes on while the other one’s waiting. It’s not one of them looking for her keys. It’s not him helping her find her underwear. It’s nothing. It’s just two people just, boom, standing, bah. It’s a dead start.
Then what I also don’t understand is, the scene before, he says, “Okay, I don’t like that you had sex with me with your socks on,” and she’s like, “Uh-oh, this isn’t gonna work out, because he’s noticed the sock thing,” and then the next scene is him really being like, “Hey, I would like to actually keep hanging out with you.” She’s like, “Nope. Nope, gotta go.” I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m so confused. The emotional math is not adding up at all. Then Everybody Hurts happened, and I got very, very concerned.
Then we go to Autumn’s apartment. This, if you were counting along, is the third consecutive interior. Interior, interior, interior. Where are we? I don’t even know if we’re in a city, a town, big city, America. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where we are. There’s a lot of description of what this building is like, and yet I don’t know what city it’s in.
John: There’s too much description of her place. The “apartment is very nice, a one bedroom with an open kitchen/living room area, fairly spacious and trendy with it’s exposed brick wall.” It’s is the wrong its.
Craig: Correct. Then another it’s happens.
John: “Recently been converted into an apartment, the kind of place most people in their 20s would struggle to afford on their own.” I don’t know ho to take that. Does it mean she has independent money? Maybe. Maybe she got money out of the fire, I guess, but that’s just a lot to be dumping at me in scene description that doesn’t help me understand this character.
Craig: I particular because I don’t know where we are. Is this a one-bedroom, nice, spacious, trendy, exposed brick walls apartment in Kansas City or Manhattan? That’s a huge difference.
“Autumn’s greeted by her cat, Luna,” and then quite a bit of description about the cat, and then a little bit of a burn scar there, so okay, we’re getting that there’s been some fire issues. Autumn says, “Sweet baby,” doesn’t say her name, doesn’t say Luna’s name, so we don’t know that it’s Luna, but fine. “Sweet baby. She pets Luna and heads to her room.”
I want to imagine this. She enters her apartment. Everybody Hurts is playing. A cat walks up to her. She says, “Sweet baby,” pets the cat, and then walks out. This is not a scene.
Then even weirder, after she says, “Sweet baby,” she gets to her bedroom and “slumps on the bed in defeat.” What was “sweet baby” about? Is she happy? Does Luna make her feel good? All of these questions are just piling up.
Screenplays are like the Titanic. They have lots of watertight compartments. They’re designed so if you puncture one of them, the rest of the boat can stay afloat, but if you puncture a whole bunch of them, it’s over. You’re sinking. Every single one of these moments of disconnect are creating a flooding of watertight compartments. The script is sinking here. This final line is not strong.
John: I can read it. “At least you love me even though I’m a monster.” This is after we’ve seen her fused together foot and the sock-foot, the titular sock-foot.
Craig: I don’t know what’s happened here. Drew will tell us. Initially, we’re like, okay, there was a fire. The sock was melted into her foot. They can’t remove the sock. It’s part of her foot now. I think it would be fair for her to say, “I was in a fire, and so I have to cover my foot.” That’s fine. She’s not hiding 666 or a Kuato. Do you know what a Kuato is, John?
John: Kuato from… It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall.
Craig: Total Recall, yeah. She’s not hiding a Kuato. She doesn’t have a foot Kuato. If the sock-foot fused thing is a Kuato, then that’s different. Even then, I think we need a different vibe. We just need a different opening. I just didn’t understand what was happening here. Help.
John: I do think the takeaway is that if you have a character whose central, initial dilemma is the fact that she has this sock-foot, this may be the wrong way to establish it, or you just picked the wrong character, this guy is not the right guy to be exposing that thing, because the scene as we saw, it feels like, why wouldn’t she tell him? We don’t have any understanding of why this is such a big deal to her at this moment. We just don’t believe it.
I do want to go back to one moment. I thought it was the right idea. On Page 2, this familiar moment where, “Logan goes to hug her. (It’s one of those awkward post one-night-stand hugs where there’s this question of do we kiss goodbye? Is that too intimate? Too personal?) His face lingers towards her for a split second while he contemplates what to do. Autumn saves him the trouble, quickly whipping her chin over his shoulder.” Overwritten, yet I got that moment. I was familiar with that moment. It felt like a nice thing to show, if it would’ve been a different scene getting into it.
Craig: Right, if I had understood why any of it was happening, because it seemed like in the scene before, she wants to be with him, and he doesn’t want to be with her, and then we cut to she doesn’t want to be with him, and he does want to be with her. I just don’t know why, but yeah, absolutely, it was an evocative moment. I didn’t even mind the overwriting because I understood it.
John: Yeah, understand it all. Drew, help us out. What is this about?
Drew: The log line is, “Autumn Cassidy is a woman with a secret, a woman with a sock-foot. Autumn is working as a preschool teacher with her best friend Sam, as they and their group of friends navigate the transition into true adulthood. However, Autumn’s secret, if exposed, threatens to destroy her relationships and her life, that is if she doesn’t do it first herself.”
John: I don’t believe that premise. I’m sorry. I don’t. I think it’s weirdly regressive. I don’t know. If I were a person who had one foot or something and I’m seeing this story about, oh no, her foot doesn’t look normal, I don’t get that. I’m frustrated by that premise.
Craig: I don’t understand it either. It is a challenge for people to have a situation like this, but it’s not something where it threatens to destroy every… I’m with John. I don’t believe it. Even if it’s causing a problem, it doesn’t cause a problem instantly like that. It’s just not that thing.
Look, if this turned supernatural and it did become a Kuato, then I would understand. I just don’t believe it’s a Kuato. I don’t. No, no, no, no, no, no. No. I think there’s something wrong. There’s something just fundamentally flawed here in this bit.
John: I want to thank Jesse for sending through these pages, because sometimes the pages that aren’t working give us a lot more to talk about and things people can recognize in their own scripts, like, oh, that thing you’re trying to do can’t work for these reasons. I do want to thank Jesse for sending these through, because I don’t want it to just be this slam on, “Hey, it just didn’t work for us.” Instead, let’s look at what we actually were able to take from this and discuss.
Craig: I would also say that it may be that after reflection and listening to this, even though it might hurt, Jesse, that you may find that there is a different story to tell with a similar premise. There was something that drew you to this in the first place. I think you need to dig into what it was and why and then ask how would this actually really, really go and what is it about this that you think could work in a more realistic way.
It may also be that you listen to this and say, “These two guys are out to lunch. This thing does work. They only read three pages. Screw them.” You might be right. You might be right. Either you will take constructive thoughts from this, and meaning you will create your own constructive thoughts, because I’m a big believer in destructive criticism when giving notes, it’s better than us telling you what to do, or you may be more convinced than ever that you’re on the right path. Either way, go forward, young man or woman or nonbinary.
John: Young man. We now know the preferred pronouns for all the people.
Craig: We do?
John: Yeah, because it says on the form now, so people tell us how to refer to them.
Craig: Oh, great.
John: An innovation which it only took us 10 years to figure out, oh, we should probably ask what people are, so we don’t have to guess based on their names.
Craig: Great point. Sir, take this and move forward. I believe in you.
John: Drew, give us one more Three Page Challenge, please.
Drew: Sure. Last we have Spark by Rachel Thomas. Winnie, 12, wakes up her sister, Lucy, 10, in the middle of the night, excited because it’s October 1st. The two girls jump out of bed and rush downstairs to find their mother, Clara, 40s, reading a book and using magic to bring a plate of cookies to them. Clara makes the girls wait until the neighbors are asleep before using her magic to decorate the house for Halloween. Giant spiders really move. Life-size skeletons dance with them. The girls are thrilled. When Clara takes them back to bed, Winnie makes it clear how badly she wants her witch powers, but her mother warns her that her powers may never come.
John: Great. I’m glad we’re talking about this sample, because we haven’t done anything quite like this before. This feels to me like a Disney Channel movie. It feels like a bright, poppy, made for TV kind of thing. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I just mean it felt very innocent. I want to approach that with I think the spirit in which it’s written. It’s very wide-eyed through the whole thing. It feels kind of innocent.
That said, my problem started at the very beginning, where I didn’t believe that these two girls were asleep and then waking up and then one is showing them a watch. That all felt really clunky. Either they know what day it’s gonna be or they don’t know what day it’s gonna be, what hour it’s gonna be, what hour it’s not going to be.
If one girl is asleep and her sister wakes her up, the older sister wakes her up, then I believe. Like, “It’s after midnight. We can go down.” It’s like, “Oh my gosh, yes.” Then we’re excited to get started in what is the equivalent of this family’s Christmas. It is finally October 1st and we can do all the Halloween things.
Craig: You’re getting at a problem that I think permeates these pages, and that is a lack of familiarity among people that are supposed to be the most familiar with each other. They’re family. This is not the first time this has happened. This happens all the time.
First of all, Winnie has a remarkable ability to wake up at exactly midnight. That’s pretty strange. It would make more sense, I think, to begin with a little girl just staring at this pocket watch, watching the second hand going until it finally turns midnight. Then she turns and she “taps Lucy gently on the nose,” and Lucy opens her eyes and says, “Is it midnight?” “It’s midnight.” Then they’re like, “Yay!” They know what’s going on. When they go outside to join Clara, who’s sitting on the front steps, where are they? Where are people?
John: Where are people?
Craig: Where are people?
John: I think it has to be Salem, Massachusetts, because all things with witches have to take place in Salem, Massachusetts.
Craig: That’s fine, but what part of the neighborhood of Salem, Massachusetts? Help us see things. Then Winnie says to her mother, “It’s my favorite day of the year besides Halloween.” Her mother says, “You’re definitely my kid.” Have they met before?
John: I think they’ve met before, yeah. I think they should have.
Craig: What’s happening? That’s not what happens. It just doesn’t feel like they are all really connected as family. There is a tonal thing here where it’s getting very juvenile, particularly when endlessly patient parents giggle at their children bothering them at midnight. These characters all feel like they’re saying exactly what they’re thinking. Do you know what I mean?
John: They do. I’m willing to let them have it a bit, because I placed it in this simpler, made for basic cable kind of universe. I think there’s a place for that kind of thing. There’s an innocence there that works. Yet this is a very pushed version of this. I think we could step back and sophisticate this a little bit and still retain the joy, still retain the innocence.
Craig: It doesn’t even require sophistication. “I can’t wait anymore. Let’s get started.” “You know the rules. We need to wait until all the neighbors are asleep.” Nobody feels real. They just feel like information bots at this point. It immediately goes into a lesson. “Can’t you make him go to bed?” “Winnie, using magic on other people has consequences.” It just feels so corny.
John: It does feel corny. Again, I’m willing to give it some of the corny because of just genre assumptions, the same way that in a body horror thing I’m willing to go there a little bit more. I definitely hear you, Craig. Let me validate you there. I did feel that too. I was just being more forgiving of it. Let’s talk about some things on the page that are just basic screenwriting things that need to be worked on.
Craig: Let’s.
John: Parentheticals go on their own line. In US screenplays, British screenplays for that matter too, your parenthetical goes on its own line. In this case, they’re just touching the dialog. That’s not how we do it here.
As we got into the montage on Page 3, where the house is being decorated, there are some fun elements in there. I would encourage you to break some things up a little bit more there and let these moments land separately, because the risk you have with these four paragraphs is people may just start skimming or just start skipping over some things. I would say break those moments out a little bit more. You might even want to do some bolding in there. Just do some things where you get a sense of what it is that we’re establishing and what has changed.
Going back to Craig’s earlier note, I don’t have a sense of what this house is normally, other than it’s a Victorian. I don’t know what neighborhood we’re in. I don’t know what I’m seeing and what I’m looking at. I have no sense of how close the neighbor’s house is. I just need it to be placed and anchored in a space more clearly from the start.
Craig: I agree with everything you just said. Rachel, when you have a montage like this, where you’re showing them decorating the yard with Halloween stuff and mom using a little bit of magic to help it go along and make it go faster and fun, and then you follow it up with Lucy asleep and Winnie saying to her mother, without prompting, without any prompting whatsoever, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween,” I think you’ve missed an opportunity to show that she does not have her powers.
Does Lucy have her powers? If Lucy has powers and Lucy’s using magic and mom’s using magic, then I could see Winnie getting frustrated. If Lucy doesn’t have her powers, but she doesn’t care, but Winnie keeps trying to do it and does care and doesn’t like that her mom has to do it. I want to motivate her character problems.
She literally says, “Winnie looks out over her neighborhood, having the time of her life.” Then the next thing she says is, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween.” “Win, some witches never get their powers.” You can just see where this is going.
John: It is called Spark.
Craig: Look, here’s the thing. It’s fine to do a straight up formula movie. Children in particular really enjoy them. They can be done beautifully. Pixar at this point has mastered a kind of formula. It is gorgeous.
This scene right here feels so blatantly setup-ish that it is bordering on somebody reading out loud, “Interior attic bedroom – later. Winnie doesn’t have her powers yet, and she really wants them, and her mother is saying, ‘You might never get your powers and you might need to accept that you are special as you are.'” It is literally that setup-ish here. We gotta do better, just for pure entertainment sake. Otherwise, it will feel perfunctory.
John: I would say you would find scripts of this genre that do similar, really clunky things and [inaudible 01:00:31] “I should write a script that is like that.” I think the challenge we’re both arguing for is how do you write the better version of that that gets you the job to write the thing that does get made? I think this as a writing sample needs to be above the minimum level that you see in that kind of genre.
Craig: Completely agree.
John: Cool. Those are our Three Page Challenges. We want to thank everybody who sent in their Three Page Challenges, especially these writers, for letting us talk about them on the air. If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a form there. You will say that it’s okay for us to talk about them. You will attach your pdf. It’ll go into Drew’s queue for next time. Drew, thank you for reading through all these with us.
Drew: Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for sending it in.
Craig: Drew’s Queue is a great name for a Blue’s Clues type of show.
John: Drew’s Queue.
Craig: Drew’s Queue.
John: Until this very moment, I hadn’t realized how much Drew Marquardt feels like he could’ve been one of the Blue’s Clues guys, 100%. If he put that sweater on, he absolutely could be a Blue’s Clues… You could have Blue as your cartoon dog.
We have listener questions that we won’t have time to get to this episode, so we’ll save them for next episode. Craig, I do think we have time for some One Cool Things. You got a One Cool Thing for us?
Craig: I do. This One Cool Thing actually comes from my assistant Allie, who like my assistant Bo before her, is quite the foodie. She was talking about a place that sounds amazing. I gotta go. She had a very specific recommendation. If you do like Indian food and you happen to find yourself, I believe it’s in the Los Feliz or Silver Lake area, it’s called Pijja Palace. Pijja Palace?
John: Pijja Palace.
Craig: Have you been?
John: I’ve been. Pijja Palace is built into a strip mall that’s connected to a mid-budget hotel. It’s very unpromising from the outside. You go inside, it looks like a sports bar, and yet the cuisine is actually Indian-inspired, non-Indian dishes. You have listed here the Malai Rigatoni. There are just pizzas and other things, but they all have Indian flavors and not Indian traditionally foods.
Craig: She got me the description of the Malai Rigatoni, which instead of a typical Bolognese, it’s in more of a masala sauce. It sounds delicious. I’m gonna have to check that place out. I just like the name of it. Pijja Palace.
John: Pijja Palace, it’s great. Definitely check that out. My One Cool Thing. We’ve talked before on the show about GeoGuessr, which is this great game where you are plopped somewhere in a Google Maps situation, street view of Google Maps. You have to figure out where the hell you are. You only have a certain number of guesses. Basically, once you make your guess where you are, it’s how close you were to the actual place. My daughter loves to play it.
I want to link to this YouTuber named Rainbolt, who is just really, really good at GeoGuessr. The video we’ll link to shows this meme, this Vine from many, many years ago, where this guy, he’s stepping off this curb, he says, “So no head?” It’s a five-second clip. The clip went viral. In this video, he tries to figure out what curb this guy was stepping off of. The way he can figure this all out is just masterful. It’s very Sherlock Holmes in terms of using the cues of just what the fire hydrants looked like, how many bars are on the telephone poles next to him, what other metadata he can find for this user who has these videos. Really, really smart. It’s no surprise he gets it down to the exact street, within one foot of where this video comes from.
Craig: That’s awesome. I love that.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Who?
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Unknown.
John: Our outro this week is by Richie Molyneux. If you have an outro this week, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. 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’re about to record on anesthesia. Craig and Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, when was the last time you were under anesthesia?
Craig: I would say it was probably eight months ago. It was the last time I had a spinal epidural injection.
John: That doesn’t sound good at all. I was under anesthesia just last week. I had these weird bones growing underneath my tongue, it’s called mandibular tori, that was making it hard for me to speak. The oral surgeon cut them out. To do that, they had to knock me fully out. There was an anesthesiologist. It wasn’t just a little drug. It was fully knocked out.
I remember talking to this guy about skiing, and then suddenly, much time had passed, two hours in fact, and I was waking up and being moved to this recovery room, and no idea what had happened, didn’t feel a thing. Later in that day, I realized, wait, how did I get home? Mike told me that I had fallen asleep while we were walking to the car. I asked, “Why is there a trashcan here?” Apparently, I had asked for a trashcan to be brought into the room.
At the time, I had felt like I was actually completely fine, but I realized I was not forming memories of that time. It was fun. It was such a different experience than I’ve had in quite a long time.
Craig: Yes, amnesia is cool. It is a very strange thing. The history of anesthesia is a remarkable thing and is inextricably linked, as far as I’m concerned, to the kinds of surgical advances we’ve been capable of. Without anesthesia, there just simply is a vast category of surgery that is impossible. It’s just not possible.
John: We used to do amputations without anesthesia. They could hold somebody down, but there’s no way someone could’ve sawed these out of my mouth without anesthesia.
Craig: There is. It would’ve been very difficult, and you would’ve been in horrible, horrible pain. What we can’t do, for instance, are things like a heart transplant or kidney transplant or anything involving lungs or kidneys, internal organs. Those things are really hard to do because people just keep writhing around. It’s just hard to do. Amputations is just a straight sawing. The trauma of that kind of injury is insane.
The crudest anesthesia was ether, chloroform. Those things were pretty brutal. Prior to that, back in the old, old days, it was just basically alcohol. I don’t think there was much else going on there. Then just holding you down in misery. Anesthesia is magical.
John: It is magical. A question for when you see in vintage things or post-apocalyptic things, it’s like, oh, some alcohol as I pull this bullet out or whatever. I don’t fully get that, because I can drink a couple shots of something. It’s not gonna make things hurt less. I guess I could be less combative, I guess, or are you drinking to the point where you’re actually blacking out, and that’s the goal? I’ve never blacked out from alcohol. In the old days of alcohol, how much alcohol were they using?
Craig: Quite a bit. Obviously, they would’ve used alcohol as a topical antiseptic as well. Drinking-wise, we do know that alcohol affects the GABA pathway, gamma-aminobutyric acid, I believe, which is connected to our pain pathways. When you are very, very drunk, you don’t experience pain at the same level that you do when you’re not. You’re more confused. It’s harder to tell what the hell’s going on. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which means that it can in fact knock you out, and if you’re knocked out, you’re knocked out.
Now, knocking you out without killing you is a trick. Alcohol is a toxic substance that we know can kill people in excess, and so is every single anesthetic that we use for surgery, which is why we need anesthesiologists, medical doctors, who very specifically administer this and monitor you and your breathing. Now, for a procedure like yours, my guess is you had an IV and they used propofol.
John: They did.
Craig: Propofol is wonderful. They used to use Versed.
Drew: It’s magic.
Craig: Propofol’s magic. They used to use Versed a lot. Propofol is better because it wears off much faster. Propofol actually gets metabolized by your body really quickly, so it’s perfect for these shorter procedures, because you don’t spend an hour or two hours groggily coming to. I believe Versed is more of a benzodiazepine, I believe. That’s the whole Valium family. That stuff is great.
When you’re dealing with serious surgery, where you have to be out for a long time, they can’t just keep hitting you with Propofol. Propofol is actually quite irritating to the veins. That’s when they give you the old mask on the face. Often, you’re intubated, which means that they have to breathe for you or need to be able to breathe for you if it comes to that, because so much of what they do to you is also paralytic.
John: Drew, you were saying propofol is great. You’ve had experience with it?
Drew: Yeah. I had a procedure last fall. I had a colonoscopy last fall. They injected it into my hand. It was interesting, you saying, Craig, that it’s hard on the veins, because one of the things I remember before I went under-
Craig: It burns.
Drew: … was that there was a weird pain. It burns.
Craig: It burns.
Drew: Saying to the anesthesiologist, “Hey, is that normal?” I think he got out the Y-E of yes before I was out.
Craig: It does tend to burn. Sometimes they will put a little bit of lidocaine in there with it to reduce the burning sensation, I believe. Yep, colonoscopy is a perfect example of a propofol nap. When I get those injections, propofol nap. Depending on the position you’re in, it’ll go right in the back of your hand. That’s where they have their IV.
Because I’ve had the procedure done a lot, on average once a year now for about, I don’t know, four years, five years, different anesthesiologists do it differently, I’ve noticed. Some of them push it in slowly, and those are my heroes, because you get to feel awesome for about five seconds.
It seems lately the new ones are like, “You know what? We actually don’t want you feeling awesome. We don’t want you coming back to enjoy your five-second propofol holiday. We’re gonna push it in much faster, so you’re gonna be fine, fine, fine. Bye-bye.” There’s not that euphoria. I have experienced the euphoria. It’s almost like your brain is inflating like a balloon with happiness and then you’re gone.
John: I’ve had a bunch of colonoscopies in my life, because my whole family gets colon cancer. In those cases, I don’t know what they’re using. Maybe it’s propofol. I’m just in a twilight state, so I actually am aware and conscious during it. It’s not been a problem. They’re giving me enough of something that I just don’t care at all, but I am actually awake for it in ways that were so different than my experience here.
This is much more like… I had to have my nose fixed, have my deviated septum fixed. In that case, you’re just completely out. You wake up completely like, “What just happened?” In this case, I was talking about skiing, and suddenly just a whole bunch of time had passed.
Craig: The fact is, when we say we go bye-bye, we don’t actually know what’s going on, because I think with propofol, a lot of times, like you say, you’re in this weird in and out state. They call propofol milk of amnesia, because it looks milky. You just don’t remember. You may have been talking throughout the whole thing. You don’t remember, because you’re just-
Drew: Oh, that’s horrifying.
Craig: … totally doped up. Yeah, but it’s not like you’re in pain. You’re not shrieking and going, “Oh my god, take this camera out of my ass.” You’re like, “Hey, what’s going on? My nose is weird.” You may be talking, but you don’t remember later.
John: When my daughter had the same surgeon take out her wisdom teeth, she was goofy on the drive home in the way that you love. We have video of her asking goofy questions. That wasn’t me at all, at least not to my recollection of it. I seemed perfectly normal. I wasn’t actually forming memories, in ways that were surprising to me and also made me think of, oh, you hear stories of date rape drugs. It feels like, oh, I can see why that is so problematic, because I didn’t have agency over my own memories, which was strange.
Craig: I’ve had that experience too, where I even realize, I know I was in the car with Melissa, we drove home. I know we talked about stuff. I don’t remember any of it. Any of it. I was awake, perfectly awake. Propofol definitely messes with the whole memory system.
John: It’s not sleep. Every night we have the experience of what it’s like to fall asleep and what it’s like to wake up. It was the suddenness of the change that was so striking to me. Not that I remember falling asleep every night, but I get the sense that you go down the ramp and then you come back up out of the ramp. This was just like lights off, lights on. It was just a very different experience for me.
Craig: It’s very fast. One thing that strikes me as really interesting about the propofol nap is I do dream vividly during it every time it happens. When I’m coming out of it, I’m coming out of dreams. Then there’s just that confusion for a moment of like, “Where… Oh, right. Oh, yeah, that. All that happened.”
Here’s an interesting thing. Talk about the amnesia. When you get this epidural injection, I’m on my stomach, and they put a needle all the way into the epidural space in my spine, and they inject stuff into it. Then they take it out. It occurred to me once, I was like, “How do you get me out of there?” because it’s not like I wake up in there. I wake up on my back in another bed in a recovery room. They were like, “Oh, you just wake up, and we help you down, and we get you over onto this other thing and wheel you out, and then we get you onto this thing and you do it.” I’m like, “Okay, so I’m awake. I have zero memory of that.” I have never once formed one memory of any of that.
John: That’s wild. Hey, speaking of knocking out, something I’ve been meaning to ask you is, in the last episode of The Last of Us, one of the characters is hit with a back of a rifle and knocked out. Talk to me about your decision to do that and how you feel about that as a thing that is done in movies and TV, because in real life, people shouldn’t do that.
Craig: No, you should not do that.
John: In movies and TV, it happens a lot. What is the reality of hitting somebody over the head like that? What does it really do? What is your decision making process of showing that or not showing that?
Craig: There was a lot of head hitting in the game. People get hit in the head a lot and get knocked out a lot that way. We avoided most of it. That was an area where just story-wise we just needed someone to get knocked out. We had done it earlier, actually, as well, when Joel knocks a guy out, and then he comes to, and Joel’s torturing his friend. I’m not a big fan of it.
I’m gonna try and avoid it if I can next time, because you can absolutely knock people out. You’re giving them a concussion. You can knock them out. You can also just kill them by giving them a subdural hematoma that just swells in their brain and then kills them. You can do all sorts of stuff. You can fracture their skull. It’s a terrible way of knocking somebody out. You shouldn’t do it. Nobody should be knocking anybody out.
If you hit somebody hard in the back of the head, first of all, you may not knock them out at all. You may cause brain damage, and especially if you’re hitting somebody in the back of the head. You could blind them. There’s all sorts of terrible things that can happen. It is not something you should do. I’m gonna try as best I can to avoid people hitting people on the back of the head with the stocks of guns for Season 2, but Season 3 will be nothing but that, just one after another.
John: All head injuries. They’ll suffer the consequences of those head injuries. That’s gonna be the real change. That’s gonna be the shocking revelation there. Craig, thank you for your answer there, because I suspect that there was a debate there, because you’re so concerned about portrayals of things in the real world.
As I was looking at the scene, I was thinking, okay, because a thing happens before that, there’s other ways you could’ve gotten that one character knocked out, and yet this made sense for the characters in that world and in that moment. [Crosstalk 01:17:39].
Craig: It made sense, but it’s not great. When we play DnD, as you know, if you are attacking someone and you don’t want to kill them, you want to leave them just alive enough to interrogate them, all you have to do is say to the DM, “I want to deliver a non-lethal blow here.” If it takes them to 0 HP, they don’t die, they’re alive, you can interrogate them. In this case, this was not that. The guys that came up, they didn’t know who Joel was. They were like, “We’re gonna knock you out, and if you die, you die. If you don’t, we’ll be able to ask you questions. Either way, it’s fine.”
John: Exactly. There was a movie I’ve really liked recently where the central character I think is knocked over the head three times, knocked out over the head three times. I was like, “She’s paralyzed now. I don’t think she’s coming back and fighting for victory here.” I loved the movie, but that was a thing that [crosstalk 01:18:27].
Craig: You gotta stop hitting people on the head. I agree. To the extent that we have contributed to the head hitting, I apologize to all of culture.
John: Nice.
Craig: I’ve got a colonoscopy coming up. I’m gonna try and take notes. I don’t remember. I’m just gone.
John: You can ask them. You can ask them. You can tell them, “I’m an absolute pro at this. You can give me less.” Maybe not, because they don’t want you talking.
Craig: Oh, no no no, I’m not gonna ever say that. Ever. Ever. I’m a baby. You want to run a garden hose up my butt? Do it. I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to be awake. I don’t want to know about it. Just do the garden hose. It’s not a garden hose, by the way. It’s incredibly slender.
John: It’s slender. It’s fine. People may way, way, way too big a deal of colonoscopies. They’re fine.
Craig: All they do is save your life. That’s all they do.
John: That’s all they do. Easiest thing you could do to save your life.
Craig: Get a colonoscopy, people. Thanks, guys.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Drew: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Has Anyone Ever Actually Tied a Damsel in Distress to a Railway Track? by Karl Smallwood
- Pirating the Oscars 2023: The Final Curtain Call by Andy Baio
- Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John? by Demetria Glace for Slate
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: Flotsam by Sam Darcy, Sockfoot by Jesse Allard, and Spark by Rachel Thomas
- Pijja Palace
- how I found the ‘so no head’ vine road in 15 minutes by RAINBOLT
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- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- Craig Mazin on Instagram
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- Outro by Richie Molyneux (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.