The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 652 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what things are characters doing out of habit or tradition? We’ll look at rituals to see how they can illuminate your hero’s background and provide a jumping-off point for your story. We’ll also answer some listener questions, including how to move from writing plays to writing movies. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, since we’re talking about rituals, how about bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. My guess is, Craig, you had a bar mitzvah.
Craig: I sure did.
John: Let’s look into that, because Megana and I didn’t have a chance to do that. Here’s why I say that. Megana is filling in for Drew, who’s off this week.
Craig: Yay.
John: Megana Rao, welcome back.
Megana Rao: Thank you so much. Here by unpopular demand, I guess.
Craig: I don’t know about that. From what I understand, Megana, you are popular. You’re somewhat of a celebrity amongst the millennials.
John: Even non-millennials. This last week, Megana and I went to see Taffy Brodesser-Akner at a book launch party for her new book, Long Island Compromise, which is fantastic. It was my first time meeting Taffy in person. She’s come on the episode. I guess you weren’t there, Craig, so it was just me and Taffy.
Craig: I wasn’t, yeah.
John: Megana was, of course, producing that. I got to see her in person. We hugged. It was lovely. I said, “Oh, and this is Megana Rao.” You should’ve seen the hug that Taffy gave Megana, because Megana is, of course, the true star of Scriptnotes.
Craig: Unquestionably.
John: No question.
Craig: She’s real quiet because she’s so uncomfortable with it, which I love.
Megana: I’m really glad the video’s not on.
Craig: Just squirming. Just squirming. By the way, I do the same thing. Just, “Don’t look at me.”
John: We’ll let her squirm quietly while we do some follow-up here. Craig, you and I have been talking about locked pages and colored pages and things that we should be moving on past. We asked for ADs and script supervisors and other folks who need to work with locked pages and colored revisions, “Okay, tell us what your objections, your concerns are. Are you for this?” We got a couple people writing back with good feedback. Megana, could you help us out with some of these responses we got?
Megana: Yes. I guess I’ll start with Adam, who’s a first AD.
John: Great.
Megana: Adam writes, “I loathe locked pages. They served a purpose when there were printed pages. Now, however, digital distribution/Scriptation has made them completely moot, so I would happily eliminate them. Colored pages still serve a purpose, as they allow crew to specifically target changes and the new elements they bring. Again though, digital distribution has made this dramatically easier.
“I don’t think shared documents are useful, given the number of department-specific notes that people make in their scripts. For me, keeping the script coordinator position is extremely useful when they’re good, as they track and list changes, on top of releasing the new pages, etc. Keep colored pages, eliminate locked pages, and still have a small number of paper sides available on set for us Luddites.”
Craig: Amen, Adam. By the way, completely agree about the script coordinator position. On The Last of Us: Season 2, the script coordinator position is occupied by Ali Chang, who also works as my assistant, so she does two jobs.
Megana: Oh, wow.
Craig: She’s very, very good at it. I’m pretty good at it too, meaning it’s not like I hand her a mess and then she has to clean it up. But she proofreads and she makes sure there aren’t any errant asterisks, and then she also pipes it through – I guess we use Scenechronize. Scenechronize. That is absolutely essential. I’m curious about colored pages here.
John: I want to talk a little bit more about that, because I think – and we’re gonna see this in other follow-up here – when we’re saying throw out colored pages, we’re not saying get rid of the idea of this is a set of revisions that are complete and intact. I think we’re for numbering them, dating them, making it clear that this is a revision. We just think the concept of color is silly.
Craig: Yes. There are options in all the popular screenwriting software to issue revisions either with text in color and asterisks, or text not in color and asterisks, or both or either of those and then the page itself being a color. I don’t issue pages in colors, and I don’t issue the text in colors either. I simply indicate the asterisks.
When we distribute this, there are two versions that people get. They get the full script, and they also get just the pages that have changed. I don’t think the actual color itself is necessary.
John: I think it was a very useful thing back and the day when everyone had a printed script. They’d say, “Okay, why is the page you’re looking at a different color than mine?” But that’s not the world we’re in right now.
Craig: It sounds like Sam, the first AD, has a different point of view.
John: Megana, can you help us out with Sam’s response.
Megana: Sam reads, “It’s the ADs, script supervisors, and script coordinators who most value the standard, so why are the people who cling to these messy remnants of a bygone era also the people who are in charge of efficiency and accuracy? The answer is efficiency and accuracy.
“Once pre-production begins, the script becomes a technical document, providing the necessary scaffolding on which all plans are made. Strange as it may seem, the physical position of the text on each page is a pretty critical component of that scaffolding. There are several reasons, but the big three I see are: one, page aids; two, line script coverage tracking; and three, preserving annotations.
“With unlocked pages, even small revisions will cause a chaotic cascade throughout the entire document, forcing the AD and continuity departments to re-break down the entire script, update all their documents along the way, and exchange notes with one another, so both departments’ accounting of scenes to be shot are synchronized. Not only is this immensely tedious, but it will inevitably cause discrepancies down the road.
“These discrepancies risk miscommunications, wasted resources, and a lot of personal anxiety, not to mention lost sleep, because when the revisions come in, they generally have to be processed outside of production hours, which are already brutal enough.
“ADs already sacrifice more sleep than you could imagine, to protect the creative vision that the writer dreamed up from shattering against the rocky shoals of reality. The last thing you want is to break down one of the few levies they have to keep the tide out, if the only benefit is doing so is that the pages feel nicer to read.”
Craig: Sam, I have a question. The question is, don’t scene numbers handle all of this?
John: That’s what I was going for also. I worry that there’s a lack of imagination happening here, or just a dismissal of the fact that we do have another system already in place there for keeping track of what is the thing you’re actually shooting, because remember, you’re not shooting a page; you’re shooting a scene. If that scene has changed and if it’s now two-eighths of a page longer, that can be denoted and seen. It’s not just that it’s breaking across four AB pages in different colors in different ways.
Craig: Yeah. It seems to me that it’s easier to track the length of scenes when they are broken up across pages, because ADs do divide pages into eighths, and it is a lot easier to divide a full page into eighths than it is to divide lots of little bitsy bobs into eighths.
Line script coverage tracking. If the documents that people have, if they are taking notes, I can understand that, meaning if the notes are tied to not necessarily physical pages but virtual pages.
John: Yeah, or a pdf with handwritten stuff on it from an iPad or something.
Craig: Right, I can absolutely see that that could be a thing. That’s the one thing that Sam’s mentioning here. I would probably check with my script supervisor, because I believe that he brings everything into his own software. When he’s going through the script – and I watch it on his iPad, because he’s got this fancy script supervisor software on his iPad – there are never broken pages. I think he’s unlocking them himself. Not quite sure if I agree here, but fair to say that unintended consequences must be investigated.
John: So far, we’ve been talking about pre-production and production, but Eric brings up issues with post. Megana?
Megana: “As a post supervisor, it was always helpful to have the locked pages, and then scene changes to the script as a new number, 13-A, for example. Also, most editors I’ve worked with print all the pages with scriptie notes for their binder and have the pages in front of them while they work.
“When considering whether to scrap locked pages for the benefit of production, please also consider the needs of post. There might be a future where editors are solely working from a digital script or digital scriptie notes, but feels like it won’t happen until those habitually using papers are retired.”
Craig: Again, I don’t understand this. I don’t see why, as a post supervisor, it’s helpful to have script changes as a new page number, because sometimes script changes don’t generate a new page number. Also, yes, editors do receive the printed scriptie notes for their binder, but almost every script supervisor right now is using software that then generates all of that. I believe it generates it without the broken pages. They don’t need broken pages. They just need the script supervisor’s notes.
Also, Eric, I will say, if there’s one thing I have complained about to every editor with whom I’ve worked, it’s that they do not look at the script supervisor notes, ever. I’m begging them. I’m like, “You have this huge binder over there. Look at it.” But the binder would be smaller and easier to read if the pages were unlocked. Again, the scene numbers are the key. That’s what editors go by, scene numbers. They do not go by page script numbers at all.
John: Craig, I think one other thing we’ve talked very much about on the show is that there are times when it becomes really a judgment call whether something is a revision to a scene or should just be a brand new scene with a new scene number. Can you think of examples on The Last of Us where in the edits you made to a scene, you realize, “Okay, it’s silly to be calling this the same scene number. We should just make it A-52, rather than Scene 52.”
Craig: In post?
John: In post or in production or heading into production.
Craig: Certainly in production, when we’re making revisions. I may look at something and say, “Look, this person actually is gonna dip outside of the room, look at something, and then head back in.” And when they go out, they see something. Then, yes, I will split it. It’s uncommon, but sure, I generally tie scene numbers to spots.
Our first ADs don’t break up large scenes into lots of scene numbers. I’ve seen other ADs request that. We just do scene part 1, scene part 2, scene part 3, scene part 4. That’s how they organize it. In post, we never mess with scene numbers, because they’re going by slates. Everything in their bin is connected to the scene number on the slate. The one thing that the script supervisor will occasionally do is decide whether or not this should be a different setup or a different take.
John: Of course.
Craig: We’ve done scene 238-A. Then we all decide, you know what, let’s do this next take but just change a lens here on the third camera, on C camera. Then they come, “Are we lettering up, or are we just going take 4 and then the script supervisor will decide?” But yeah, in post, never.
John: Never. A thing that happened in a couple movies I’ve worked on, Charlie’s Angels being most notable, is that a scene, a sequence was given one number, and based on who was in the scene, what the scene was actually doing, what function it served, you could’ve said, “This is the new version of scene 63.” But instead, “Cut scene 63. Here’s a new scene, A-63, that takes its place,” because I think the decision was that it’s better to tell people this is a whole new thing, and so don’t carry your previous considerations of that previous scene into this new thing that we’re doing.
Craig: That probably happens more frequently in movies than it would in television. The weirdest thing is – I think we’ve talked about this before – the crew is really good at learning what scene numbers are, and then sometimes they’ll come to me and say, “Hey, I have a question about 338.” I’m like, “No.”
John: No idea what that is.
Craig: “Please tell me what that is. I just don’t know.” But they all do.
John: Craig, is 338 the scene in that episode, or would that be Episode 3, scene 38?
Craig: That’s Episode 3, scene 38. That’s how we work it. Every episode starts with 300 or 400 or 500 and goes from there.
John: You can’t have more than 99 scenes in an episode?
Craig: We could. We could.
John: It would go 10-100 or something?
Craig: I think we would probably start using letters is my guess.
John: Cool. We have one bit of follow-up on industry software. We’ve talked about our frustrations with the current state of industry software and how difficult it is to make economically viable products here. A point from Pontus in Västerås, Sweden.
Megana: “I work in software, and in software we use version control systems like Git to keep track of changes in the code. This should be very easy to use for scripts. It should be a no-brainer to merge the two. The only thing that is required is that the doctors are in xml, json, or some other text format, and that someone needs to make an interface on top of Git to make it easy to use for a non-programmer.”
John: There, Pontus actually ran into the issue here. The idea of using version control for code for text documents, like scripts or like books and other things like that, is a longstanding idea. There are writers out there who really use version control for their own projects.
The issue is Git is just complicated in its own ways. You check something out, you put it back in. You have to merge branches. I’ve seen some clever ways of simplifying that, some UI things to make it a little bit easier. But keep in mind, screenwriters get fussy over the smallest things. I do wonder, Pontus, if the actual folks who would be using this would be willing to use it is just frankly my concern.
Craig: We won’t. What we do have is version control through the user interface of the various screenwriting softwares that are out there, the commercial software that’s out there. How they keep track of it may be some application of this. Every now and then, I end up in Github for some reason, and I just start running away.
John: I’ll say that under the hood, Highland actually does do some version controlling that would allow you to go back to earlier revisions and can do snapshots and that kind of stuff. The reason we don’t surface it for users is it’s actually just a difficult interface for people to grok. It’s hard to understand exactly what this means.
I think screenwriters have this habit and tradition of, “Okay, I want to save as a new file with a new date on it.” That’s the kind of version control that we’re used to doing. One screenwriter working by yourself, that’s okay. That’s actually very doable. The challenge comes when you have many people working on a document simultaneously, like a Google Doc situation. That’s where the online services, like WriterDuet or Scripto or other things like that, do have an advantage, because there is one central source of truth, and they can do some stuff around that that makes more sense. But it’s a challenging problem.
Craig: We also have a bit of version control through the commonly used backup systems. Dropbox, for instance, will hold 4 billion versions of something, all of which are indicated by date and time. I understand, Pontus, from your point of view, this makes absolute sense, but that is because you work in software. Generally speaking, screenwriters do not. There are screenwriters who barely can handle working with screenwriting software, much less Git.
John: When we had Eric Roth on the show – I just remember this because I saw his chapter in the Scriptnotes book – he was talking about this ancient system he still uses for typing screenplays that can only hold 30 pages at a time. I love it. I love that kind of kooky thing.
Craig: He’s still out there writing Killers of the Flower Moon and all these amazing movies. We don’t need to burden Eric Roth with Git.
John: For this next bit of follow-up, there’s a long email here. I think rather than read the whole thing, I’d rather summarize it, because it’s gonna be more instructive, I think, if we do summarize this. Phillip wrote in because back in Episode 613, you and I, Craig, we talked about the wins for writing teams in this most recent contract. You said, “For as long as I’ve been in this union, for as long as you’ve been in this union, teams have been penalized, essentially. They had a different deal for how much money they could receive healthcare contributions for, and now, finally, at long last, we have won that, which is not only fair, which is that if you write something with somebody else as a team, you are treated individually for the purposes of qualifying for pension and health care.”
Phillip, who’s a member of a writing team, says, “No, guys, you’re wrong. You guys are wrong, and everyone is reporting this wrong. Variety was wrong.” He called the Guild, and this is not what it is at all. He says, “With regards to minimums, nothing has changed. Each writer still needs to earn exactly what they needed before the strike, or to put it more succinctly, we need to make twice what a single writer would in order to qualify for pension and healthcare.”
Basically, he’s angry and upset, because he believes that we have misinformed the listenership of what actually was gained in this. He’s wrong, but I want to provide some context around this, because I think I understand how he got the wrong conclusion.
Craig: I understand. Yes, I do too.
John: I want to be generous here and say, listen, I’m sorry you thought this was a different thing than it was. I’m sorry you didn’t get the answer you wanted out of the Guild. But I also feel like maybe you were specifically asking one question that they answered specifically and didn’t provide a different context around things.
Craig: Phillip is talking about two different things. He’s saying, “Look, you guys got it wrong because of this thing,” but really, we were talking about the other thing. You qualify for pension and healthcare by earning a certain amount of money, but there is a cap on how much of that money the companies will pay fringes on. For every $10 we make, they will add – let’s make it $100 is a better way. For every $100, I believe they add something like $8 for health and $8 for pension, something like that.
John: It’s a contribution based on the earnings.
Craig: It was a contribution. But it stops. At some point, it stops. Pension, it stops at 225. After you hit $225,000 in earnings, they stop paying fringes for pension. After you hit $250,000, they stop paying fringes for your healthcare.
That amount isn’t just something that goes into the general pot for everybody, but also, the amount of covered earnings you have also generates these points that if you were to, say, have a down year, you could draw points to keep your health insurance going.
Now, it used to be that if you were writing as a team, the maximum for the team contributions would be $250,000. That’s it. But you’re only making 125. It’s not fair. You’ve only got contributions up to 125. That’s what changed. They decided incorrectly that if you’re a member of a team, the cap on benefits should not be halved for you simply because you’re making half of the money that the team is making.
What Phillip is saying is that there is an amount of money you need to earn to qualify for healthcare in the first place, and that doesn’t change for a writing team. For a writing team, the qualifying amount for pension and health is currently, as he points out, $45,000. If a writing team earns, collectively, $45,000, then what happens is one person gets paid $22,500, and the other person gets paid $22,500, and neither one of them are qualifying.
It can’t work the way he’s suggesting it should, because a certain amount of money has to be earned for a person to get health insurance. You can’t split health insurance in halves. You can’t give somebody half health insurance. In fact, each person does have to make that amount to get healthcare. That didn’t change. We didn’t think it would change. We didn’t ask for it to change. That’s not a possible thing.
John: I think it’s important for folks to understand where we were at before this contract. There was even a thing called a married writing team exemption or a special case. There were situations where this writing team, they’re married to each other. They know that one of them gets health insurance, they’ll both get health insurance, because your spouse gets health insurance. They would go and say, “Hey, give me an exemption here, so rather than splitting 50/50, we can split the income 80/20 or 90/10, so that at least one of us can earn over that threshold and therefore qualify.” It’s crazy.
What this deal did is that – you’re not getting double the money, but it’s making it possible for writers in that situation to earn enough to get their healthcare covered. It’s an important win, but we didn’t change the minimums for a writing team. It’s still $45,000 per writer, whether you’re part of a team or not part of a team.
Craig: The good news, Phillip, is that if you go past $45,000 – and most writers will – then they keep paying fringes, so your pension grows bigger, all the way to $225,000. It used to go only contributing up to half of that, and similarly for earning points for healthcare. It is now double what it used to be. When Phillip says, “Other than,” in all caps, “VERY successful writers, this isn’t helping teams.” I have to push back there.
John: I do too.
Craig: We’re talking about minimums here. If you’re working on staff as a team, I think you’re gonna hit 90 grand over the course of a season. That does not seem to me like what I would call the threshold of very successful writer. Very successful writers are earning millions of dollars. I don’t know what the average income is for a WGA member. I’m actually looking it up. Average income. Now, average is a weird way to put it.
John: Median probably, yeah.
Craig: Median. They haven’t released median. The last time they released a median figure was 2014. In 2014, in 2021 dollars, so it’d be a little bit more now, the median was $140,000. I don’t agree, Phillip, that only very successful writers in teams are making healthcare minimums for both.
John: The other thing I want to make sure we’re framing this as is, Phillip is right to feel frustrated about how hard it is to get health insurance, about the weird penalties we put on writing teams in the Guild. Structurally, we’re the only guild that has teams where they have to split an income. It’s nuts. All these things are real frustrations.
But in this one case, I think your anger is misdirected, because this is a genuine gain for a lot of writing teams. A lot of writing teams were overjoyed when this happened in the contract this year.
Craig: Yeah, probably most. What I will say is, Phillip is putting his finger on a problem that we have danced around at the Writers Guild, that has never changed. But the Writers Guild approaches healthcare in a different way than the Directors Guild does.
The Directors Guild offers two tiers of healthcare. It is much easier to qualify for the lower tier than it is to qualify for WGA health. The number is just lower. In part, this is because they also have a lot of first and second ADs. That lower tier of healthcare becomes available to you more easily. However, of course, it is not quite the limousine healthcare that the Writers Guild has, for instance. Then the idea would be that the second tier would probably be a higher number to qualify for.
The Writers Guild, as a matter of policy, has resisted doing this, because they don’t like the idea of first and second-class citizens within the Guild. I’ve always felt that that’s fine unless you don’t have health insurance, and then maybe it’s not fine. It’s a philosophical argument. I don’t know if it will ever change. But I guess I would say if I were in a room having a vote on that, I probably would vote for a two-tier system to get more people covered.
John: It’s a real challenge thinking about healthcare in a union environment, because unions overall, I think, want to see all Americans get great healthcare and great coverage, and at the same time, they want to make sure their members are protected to the standards they’ve always been protected. Sometimes those are not compatible goals.
If you really want Medicare For All, for example, that would mean unions having to address the fact that they’re on these plans that are way beyond where Medicare For All would be. It’s a challenging situation. Always has been.
Craig: It always has been. Also, Phillip, one thing to note is that the amount of money that somebody has to earn to actually pay for their own healthcare is not $45,000. It’s quite high. It’s probably more like $80,000 or $90,000.
What happens is, the people who are over-earning, all the way up to the cap of $250,000, they’re paying for themselves and they’re also paying and subsidizing other people who are below the break-even line, which is, again, probably 80 or 90. One other thing that’s great about this is by raising those caps for writing teams, we have the ability to subsidize more people, which may ultimately lower that number. It certainly will help keep the minimum number from ballooning as fast as it has.
But I commiserate here. We would love for every single writer to be covered by health insurance. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that our health insurance at the Writers Guild is so good, and the people who have it are so used to it and would be so upset about it being diminished, that nothing is probably gonna change, unless they did go ahead and adopt a two-tier system, which I suspect they never will.
Megana: I just want to say that $45,000 in the year 2024 is a hard thing to hit, with the climate and the way the jobs are. So I do really feel for Phillip and, I feel like, a lot of people listening. I just want to make sure that I’m saying that.
Craig: I agree with you. Meaning if you’re trying to get work, absolutely. If you have work on a staff, my question for you, Megana, is does $45,000, if you’re working on a staff, still feel out of reach?
Megana: In previous years, with mini rooms, yes. Moving forward, I don’t know what the shakeout’s gonna be with mini rooms. I still think that being on a staff position, $45,000 is still a pretty tough goal to get to.
John: As part of that, if you’re not hitting $45,000 in a year worth of earnings, beyond your health insurance, that’s a hard number to survive at in Los Angeles overall. It’s part of a larger systemic frustration.
Craig: What is the minimum for television work per week?
Megana: It’s $5,300 for staff writers.
Craig: So you need eight weeks, basically.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Got it. If you’re a team, I can see where that becomes an issue. You’re right, mini rooms really did screw that up. I’m hoping that part of the restructuring that we gained in the last strike and negotiation will do what it’s supposed to do with mini rooms. It seems like it should.
John: In terms of longer guaranteed terms of employment, mini rooms have to segue into the real room in most situations. Those are things that could structurally help some of these problems, and at the same time, it doesn’t get a writer hired. If you’re not hired on a job, making the $45,000 or whatever number is going to be really challenging.
Megana: Right. Mini rooms versus no rooms.
Craig: Exactly. I will say as a showrunner, and now I speak to fellow showrunners. Don’t do this to people. Know the number. It’s actually very important to know what the number is and get them to that number. There really isn’t much of an excuse as far as I’m concerned, because I don’t care what the show is. If you’re bringing somebody to $40,000 and then letting them go, you’re a dick. Get them there. It shouldn’t be hard. It is not a large amount of money. It is absorbable. Just to sleep at night.
Listen. Now, I do have a very small room. It will be one person larger. We run it really for about eight weeks, at which point I go and write everything, or Neil and Ali. But I make that over the course of those weeks that our hire qualifies for pension and health. It’s essential. At least for one year. It gets them health for a year.
John: I don’t know if you guys saw that Jimmy Kimmel does this thing where he will go to actors, and basically he’s looking for actors who are $1,000 away from qualifying for health insurance. He’ll bring them on for a line on the show, to pay them, so that they get paid enough to qualify for health insurance. That’s the silly system we’re in right now.
Let’s get to our main topic here. Let’s talk about some rituals. This is also inspired by our visit to Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s book signing event. She was talking about, in her book Long Island Compromise, there are two different bar mitzvahs, which makes sense, because it’s multiple generations of a wealthy Jewish family in Los Angeles and Long Island. It got me thinking about useful rituals are when I’m trying to establish characters and what the normal life is of these characters before the story has started.
I wanted to break rituals into two big buckets. The first is what I’ll call routines, which are the things that characters do every day – we see that this is their normal standard operating procedures – and rites, which I would say are the special ceremonial things that have significance to the characters but only happen occasionally.
I want to differentiate the two of those and really talk through how it can be useful to be thinking about what the rituals, routines, and the rites are of these characters we’re establishing, our heroes and everyone else around them, so we get to understand their world and specifically where they’re coming from.
Craig: Routines are maybe the most important, because we all know from Joseph Campbell and every other writing book and just from watching TV and movies, that when we meet people, we’re trying to meet them in their normal life, because we want their normal life to stand in stark opposition to the insanity that occurs once we throw the proverbial meteor at them.
These routines help ground us and explain who these people are. They are oftentimes routines that the characters detest. There are two kinds of normal lives. The, “Ah, I love this. I hope this doesn’t change.” Then there’s the, “Ugh, I’m going nowhere fast. This is my life day after day after day,” and then something changes.
John: Thinking about what is the checklist that the characters are going through – are they doing this by choice? By force? Just out of habit? Are they stuck in a rut?
We have an expectation of what a parent’s routine is going to be, which is basically, gotta wake those kids up, gotta get them fed, gotta make lunches, get them to school. You have dinner. You have bath time. You had bed time. Those are the rituals, the routines that we’re used to seeing parent characters in our stories do. As an audience, we have an expectation of like, this is probably what it’s like.
If you show us then what specifically it’s like with these characters or the ways that it’s different than usual, we will lean in, because it’s a surprise to us. It gives you a backdrop on which to show what is different about this version of the character than every other version of the character you’ve seen before.
Craig: Sometimes the normal rituals themselves give you tremendous insight into a character. One of my favorite ritualized introductions is Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Pee-wee wakes up in the morning, and his entire house is rigged as a Rube Goldberg machine to make breakfast for him. Him watching it and his delight interacting with it tells me so much about him, including the fact that even though this is clearly the same thing that happens every day, he’s thrilled as if it’s the first time. You can learn so much from even the way people interact with their own rituals.
John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this one card from Writer Emergency Pack. We have one called Standard Operating Procedures. I think what’s good about that is also to look at what would be in the guidebook for this character. What do they know how to do? What is the way they would approach the situation based on how they’ve been trained, what they actually do? If you have a paramedic character, they’re going to have a standard operating procedure, a routine they go through, which is how they work.
It’s good for you to know that, for us to be able to understand it as an audience, partly because when something goes wrong, goes awry, which it probably should in your story, we’ll understand what the expectation was going into it – what the character’s expectation was and what the audience’s expectation was.
Craig: For instance, in Crimson Tide, there is a missile drill, where they get a notice to run a missile test as if they were gonna launch their missiles. We watch the routine of getting the things out of the safe, comparing the numbers, communicating to the missile team, the executive officer concurring, which is incredibly important for the story. And then, great, we did it. The context was we didn’t do it fast enough. It had purpose. But then when it happens for real, we know. We’re not distracted by a lot of things.
Same thing in War Games. The opening of War Games was a ritualized launch of missiles that fails. It fails at the last moment. The failure of the ritual is what obsesses people and causes a change in the story.
John: So far, we’ve been talking about routines, really. These are things that would happen on an ordinary day. But I think rites are a special case of things that happen every once in a while. These are ceremonious, so things like weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, christening, quinceañeras , Lunar New Year celebrations, trick-or-treating, Christmas.
These are things that have special cultural significance to the audience maybe, but to the characters within the story definitely. Do they love these things? Do they hate these things? Is this a tradition? Are they a spectator to it? Is this already part of their culture?
I think some of the success of Midsommar was we have characters who are entering into this strange Swedish midsummer festival, and they don’t know how normal this is. This seems really strange, but maybe it’s just their culture. It’s like, oh, no, you were mistaken. This is deeply dangerous and weird. They don’t know how to react to it.
I think rites are – you think about them as bigger, more mythical things, but really, anything you do seasonally is probably a rite. We all have traditions that we do that we’re not even quite sure why we do them.
Craig: That’s part of the waking up of a character, to suddenly realize, why do I do what I do? The Truman Show is a guy going through an incredibly ritualized life and then suddenly asking the question, “Why? Why does all this happen this way? Why am I living this way?” We’ve all felt this; this sudden awareness of how mechanized we can be.
I noted once when I shower, I do everything in the exact same way. Literally in the exact same way, in the exact same order. Not all of it is perfectly efficient. Some of it’s just oddly – it’s just odd, like, “I gotta wash this part a little bit extra.” Why? The right side of my head? Why? I don’t know. It’s become ritualized.
John: There was an episode of The Office in the first season about Diwali. I think it’s called just Diwali. It was a Mindy Kaling episode where she takes the whole office to a Diwali celebration. What I thought was so smart about it was that it was a chance to see these characters who know their office environment so well reacting to an environment that was new. It was so great to see it. It was such a great reminder of, taking people outside of their normal comfort zone can be a great way to actually show how they work and how they really function outside of normal, everyday things.
Megana, we saw Diwali on that episode. Was it accurate? What was your experience watching that episode? You remember it, right?
Megana: Yeah. It takes place, I think, in a school gym or cafeteria or something, which felt so true to life, growing up in the Pennsylvania, Ohio area. Like Craig pointed out, the characters’ attitude towards rituals is so telling. I think you learn so much about Kelly Kapoor’s character based off of how she describes Diwali to the office. I think she says something like, “You dress up and there’s fireworks, whatever.” But I think it’s such a useful insight into who she is as a character.
John: Think about how different characters would describe Christmas. Christmas comes once a year, but it means a very different thing to different characters in different specific situations. You learn a lot about a character by what they think of Christmas.
Some other common aspects of rituals, be they rites or be they routines, is a lot of times there’s an unclear history or purpose, like, why do we do it this way? Why does Craig wash one side of his hair more than the other? He can’t explain it. But if there was a reason, he’s forgotten what it is right now.
A lot of times, these routines or rituals are a coping behavior. There’s some irritation in the world. There’s something that’s wrong. This is a thing you do to cope with it. If the character’s functioning on autopilot – and generally, in our stories, we’re trying to get characters off of autopilot, but just show what the autopilot was.
I think a lot of times, rites specifically are about attachment to the community – so either a community of choice or the community that you grew up in – or it can also be about escaping that community. Drinking can be a way of bonding with your friends or drinking alone to hide your problems. The same behavior can be a positive routine and ritual or a negative one. It’s your job as a writer to describe what that is.
That’s, again, why specificity is so crucial. If you’re showing a wedding, what is specific about this wedding? What are you showing us that is different than other weddings? Because otherwise, we don’t want to watch it.
Megana: I think even a character’s drink order is such a small aspect of a ritual or routine that I hadn’t thought of before, like the White Russians in The Big Lebowski or something.
Craig: All of these things provide us some sense of safety. That’s why we do them. We want to be fascinating people, but we do have these little Linus blankets that we have to clutch to. Sometimes you can tell an entire story about somebody who is routinized because of fear. The movie that’s coming to mind is The Others, the Nicole Kidman film.
John: Oh my god. She’s locking the doors.
Craig: It’s written by Alejandro Amenábar, also directed by him as well. I think it’s been enough time. It’s been 23 years, so we’ll go ahead and spoil it. It’s a ghost story. Nicole Kidman lives in a house with her children. She believes they are being haunted by people, which they are. But it turns out that in fact they’re the ghosts. She and her kids are the ghosts. Everything that they do is this ritualized existence to serve the denial of how they died and the fact that they’re dead at all.
Same thing with Sixth Sense. Just a guy going through this very ritualized, quote unquote, life, because he can’t accept what he has to accept. When you do, that’s when you let the rituals go.
Megana: There’s this book called Chatter. John, you’ve read it, right? This book called Chatter by Ethan Kross. It’s a pop psychology book.
John: I remember the book. I don’t think I actually read it. But I remember the conversations around it.
Megana: A point that he made in that is that rituals can be really helpful for anxious people, because it helps you assert a sense of control or order over your world. It’s a thing that helps you switch into muscle memory. Craig, as you were talking, I was like, oh, a ritual’s a really helpful thing to establish for characters around things that they’re anxious around. It can be a useful shorthand for that.
John: Absolutely. For people in the real world, we want them to find rituals that are effective for them and constructive. As people who are creating characters in worlds where we need everything to fall apart, we need to find ways for the rituals to fall apart or be destroyed so we can actually tell our stories. Again, as writers, we want bad things for our characters, at least at the start.
Craig: We’re bad.
John: We’re bad.
Craig: We’re bad. John, in order to not be bad, segue boy, why don’t we answer some listener questions?
John: Let’s do that. We actually have an audio question. Let’s listen to a question from Bethany.
Bethany: I’m an actress, and my training is in theater. Most of the work that I’ve done is in theater. I’ve only recently started to get the courage to start writing, which is what I’ve always wanted to do. I was able to stage a few one-acts. They did really well. I had interest from some filmmaking friends in turning one of them into a film. But I feel like I just can’t think like a screenwriter. All my story ideas involve putting everyone into one room and just putting a bomb off and seeing what happens. When I try to spread things out in time and space and try to see them progress that way, it feels like it just gets watered down.
I’m developing one play right now. A friend of mine is looking at it with me. He is in filmmaking. He suggested cutting away and adding some scenes connecting the characters to their history or to other parts of their life, letting us see more of that. I can’t see it. I can’t see that working, because it still just feels very much like a stage play.
So what do I do? Is there a way to start thinking differently? I feel very confident in my ability to write dialogue. I’ve heard you all say that’s one of the most important things, so that’s encouraging. But I just don’t know how to think like a screenwriter. So any advice? Thanks.
Craig: Interesting, Bethany. Here’s a provocative thought. Maybe you’re not a screenwriter. Maybe you’re a playwright. What’s wrong with that? There are some things. I worked with Lisa Kron as she was adapting her book and her lyrics for Fun Home into a screenplay. She was doing all the writing. I was just an advisor, a friend. One of the things I remembered saying to her was, “Plays are inside and movies are outside.”
Even though we shoot interiors all the time, of course, think about going places. Think about all the places you can be and how you can move through space and time, and also, how much closer you can be to somebody. Plays are presentational. Everybody in the audience is the exact same fixed length from everybody on stage, other than the rows of seats. But when you are thinking like a screenwriter, you can get very close, and you can be very alone. You can see tiny things. You can see enormous things. But Bethany, it’s also okay to just be a playwright, especially if you’re a good one. It sounds like you are.
John: I want to underscore what Craig just said. It’s entirely possible that writing plays is where your strength is, and you should completely pursue that if that’s something you enjoy. But it sounds like you’re curious about writing films and writing stories that move from place to place to place.
A couple things that you might want to try doing is just, to get a sense of what this feels like on the page, take your favorite movie or a great episode of a TV show and try transcribing it, which sounds crazy. But you’ll get a sense of what scenes look like when they are moving from this space into that space and how a scene connects to another scene, because when you’re doing a one-act play, it’s just a scene. It’s just one blob of a thing. There’s power in that, but there’s also a lot of power of cutting from one thing to the next thing to the next thing.
Transcribing something might actually be a good place to start to give you a sense of what that feels like. Obviously, read a lot of real scripts and see what that looks like on the page. Just try doing little, short things – try writing a little, short film that doesn’t sit in one place but has a character literally moving through space and time, so you get a sense of what that actually feels like on the page for you.
Megana, any thoughts for Bethany here? In your writers’ group, do you encounter people who come from a playwriting background?
Megana: Yeah, sometimes. I have a friend who has a theater company that does one-act plays every month, called Public Assembly. I think it’s such an interesting question. I like, Craig, what you said about the inside versus outside. But I have a follow-up question, which is – these are two very different things. Why do you think there’s such an impulse from – I don’t know what – it seems like executives, to bring playwrights over to become screenwriters, when they are such different mediums?
Craig: Executives don’t know. They don’t know. They see success and they think some of these will work. Sometimes they do.
John: They really do.
Craig: Sometimes they really do. But a lot of times, they don’t. There are some playwrights who very famously were excellent screenwriters. Tom Stoppard, for instance. They’re out there. Jack Thorne works in both, of course, being the genius that he is.
It is interesting that Bethany feels a kind of pressure. I’ll tell you, I’ve never felt pressure to be a playwright. Probably would be bad. That’s how I feel about everything. Probably would be bad. But I guess I would say to Bethany – sounds like she’s fairly early on in her journey as a writer, because she was an actor first. I would say let’s get plays mastered and then see. If you want to transition, transition.
John: I’ve done, obviously, a ton of movies. I’ve done some TV. I did a play. I did a Broadway show. Learning the differences between how we tell a story on a stage versus screen was a real education. I approached it with curiosity, interest, and a real understanding that I couldn’t do things the same way. I need to look for what is the theatrical solution to an issue that comes up, rather than going to a cinematic solution to those issues.
I’ve done books, of course, and that’s a different kind of storytelling. I’m doing my first graphic novel, which again, is a very different way of moving through a story. You’re always looking for what is it panel to panel and what is that page turn gonna get you.
These are all exciting new things to try, but that doesn’t mean you have to try all of them. If you like writing one-act plays where everyone’s in a space together, and that works for you, there’s no requirement that you do something else.
Guys, I think it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing – we’ve talked before on the show, I think, about non-alcoholic beers, which used to be just terrible, and in the last few years have gotten much, much better. There’s really compelling non-alcoholic beers, to the point where I basically only drink non-alcoholic beers now. The same could not be said for cocktails in general.
But there’s a brand out that I think is actually really good – at least some of their things are really good – called Free AF. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. But their cucumber gin and tonic is a canned cucumber gin and tonic with no alcohol, which is surprisingly compelling. They found some way to make the bite of alcohol without the actual alcohol in it. It’s just delightful. I’ve been having quite a few of these and really enjoying them.
If you’re looking for a non-alcoholic alternative, obviously, there’s a gazillion really good fake beers out there, but I would say try these Free AF non-alcoholic cocktails. Megana, you were over, and I think you had a different one. You had a mule, which we didn’t like as much, correct?
Megana: Correct, but just looking at their website, it is pulling me in. I want this beautiful marbleized, minimalist can. I need it.
Craig: Marbleized.
John: Megana and I were talking about the degree to which the fancier a product is, the more plain its iconography is, the plainer its label is. It’s just a psychological thing. The less crud is on a label, the higher quality you assume it is. It’s just this time that we’re in.
Craig: Do you guys remember, many years ago, somebody did a spoof thing where they took the packaging for, I think it was the old iPod, which of course was incredibly minimalist. It was just white and had the Apple logo, and then I think it said iPod. They said, what if Microsoft had put this out? There was this wonderful thing where they just kept adding stuff, badges and versions. There’s people enjoying the product. It’s hysterical. When you see what it ends up as, you’re like, this is ridiculous and also exactly what Microsoft stuff looks like, exactly, with reams of tiny words of explaining and all. Microsoft, never known for their taste.
John: Craig, I will say, as you love an old fashioned-
Craig: I do.
John: I’ll say it appears that brown liquors are just harder to fake. I’ve not seen a compelling version of this yet, but it doesn’t mean that we won’t somehow get there.
Craig: It’s certainly possible. I am not cursed with alcoholism. I don’t have a problem drinking in moderation whatsoever. In fact, I specifically have a problem if I try to not drink in moderation – it’s been a long time – because three drinks and I’m in trouble. I don’t feel good. I don’t drink much, but DnD is an opportunity to have a drink or two, and going out to dinner on a weekend, have a drink or two. It’s not something that I am ready for. But I’ll tell you what. When they come up with a healthy cigarette, oh my god, I’m first in line. Oh my god.
John: It’s going back to the early episodes where you can hear Craig smoking in the background.
Craig: Oh, man, I’m telling you, if they can invent a healthy cigarette – and vaping, I guess, but it’s not a cigarette.
John: Actually not healthy.
Craig: I want them to create a thing where I can light it on fire, inhale it into my lungs, and it’s actually good for me. Now. Now we’re talking. Oh, buddy.
Megana: A ritual.
Craig: That is the ultimate ritual.
John: That’s a ritual.
Craig: It’s the most ritualized ritual.
John: In previous years I’ve done Dry January and stuff, and it kind of sucked. I felt like I was not doing a thing. This more recent not really drinking much has been much easier, I think because there’s less structure and framework around it, but also – and this is, again, maybe just the age that we are now – I just feel the remnant effects of a drink the next day much stronger than I used to. That’s no bueno.
Craig: That’s me all the time. My body does not process alcohol quickly, and so it’s not like I get drunk really fast. But one or two drinks hang around for a really long time in me. The only way I’m ever gonna get past that is if a mistake occurs or if I’m at a dinner with a couple of my Irish friends, who fill your glass when you’re not looking. It’s their thing. It’s just a thing. No one hits the bottom of their glass.
I was at a dinner once and had what I thought was one glass of wine, and I was completely bombed at the end of the dinner. They were like, “Oh, no, we’ve gone through four bottles.” I’m like, “What? No. No!” Of course, they woke up the next morning at 8:00 a.m. I was in bed feeling horrible until about 2:00 p.m. I just can’t do it.
John: The drunkest Craig has ever seen me was at an Austin Film Festival.
Craig: Oh my god, that was the best.
John: I had more than I would usually drink there, and I was fine, but it was more than I feel comfortable being in public around.
Craig: But you were great. Drunk John was amazing.
Megana: Oh my god, I want to see it.
Craig: Megana. They say people sometimes become mean when they’re drunk or they can be sloppy. John was just the most charismatic. Basically, he was great.
John: Wasn’t Birbiglia there that year too?
Craig: I think it might’ve been. Drunk John August was just spectacular, just really fun. Megana, let’s figure out how to get that going again.
Megana: It sounds like we need a party.
Craig: We need a party. You know what? I’m coming back soon. I’m back in a month.
John: We’ll play some games, have a party.
Craig: We’ll have a party. We’ll just keep slyly feeding him drinks.
John: Absolutely. Keep my glass full there. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?
Craig: My One Cool Thing is Megana Rao. She’s here, so I’m gonna let her take over and do the One Cool Thing.
John: Megana, do you have a One Cool Thing in Craig’s stead?
Megana: I do have a One Cool Thing. I hope it’s a One Cool Thing that Craig might like. Have either of you watched Julio Torres’s new show, Fantasmas, on HBO?
John: I have not watched it yet. I think he’s great and just so specific and absurd.
Craig: I have not seen it.
Megana: It’s certainly within his world. It’s a sketch comedy show. It’s surreal and brilliant, like everything he does. But he captures what it feels like to just live in a bureaucratic state that makes it funny and fantastical. It’s so absurd it’s hard for me to even describe it. One of the characters is his friend who’s a performance artist, who’s been performing as his agent for so long that it’s unclear whether she’s actually his agent, because she does book him things. Check it out. I feel like it’s not getting as much love as it deserves. It’s on HBO and it’s fantastic.
Craig: Melissa loves, loves Espookys. Obsessed with-
Megana: This is why I love Melissa.
Craig: We all love Melissa.
Megana: We all love Melissa.
John: I will say that Megana Rao was very early on the Julio Torres bandwagon. Years ago, she was singing his praises. Don’t think she’s a latecomer here, because she’s always been into his-
Craig: Megana was into Julio Torres before he was cool.
Megana: I would say that he was always cool, but yes, cool to the wider public. I was showing John random lo-fi videos of him doing stand-up in a dark bar in New York, and being like, “This is incredible,” and John was like, “The audio quality on this is horrible.”
Craig: You’re just cool. Hey, Megana, here’s the deal. Millennials are old now.
Megana: God, I know.
Craig: Gen Z is taking shots at them all day long for being old. Welcome to our world. But you’ve always been cool. I don’t care what generation. There are some millennials who are actually legit cool, and Megana Rao is one of them, for sure.
John: 100 percent. Now she’s blushing again. Craig, you’ve done it.
Craig: Aw.
John: Aw.
Craig: Aw. You know what? Let’s let her off the hook by doing some boilerplate.
John: Here’s the boilerplate.
Craig: It’s a ritual.
John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with special help this week from Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. It’s also a place where you can send questions.
You’ll 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 weekly newsletter called Inneresting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware now for alcoholic or non-alcoholic choices. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.
Craig: With that hat. I got that hat, by the way, John.
John: You got the hat. I got the hat too.
Craig: I got the cool S hat.
Megana: I need a hat.
John: You can find our great word game called AlphaBirds at alphabirdsgame.net, also on Amazon now. Thank you to everybody who bought it, but also who left reviews, because, god, reviews really help us a lot, because it makes it feel real out there.
You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. Craig and Megana Rao, an absolute pleasure talking to you both.
Craig: Likewise, John.
Megana: Thank you both so much. The coolest guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Okay, Craig, so we are gonna time warp back to – let me see if I can get this right – was it 1983 or 1984 when Craig Mazin-
Craig: 1984.
John: Oh my god, what an incredibly iconic year and a year to have a bar mitzvah. Can you talk us through the experience?
Craig: Sure. First of all, it was mandatory. I just want to be clear about that. A bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah is the coming-of-age ritual in Judaism. When a boy or girl is 13 years old, that’s when they become, quote unquote, an adult. They do that because I guess the Bible says so. That’s so problematic, and no one ever talked about it. Ever. No one ever. They would just make a joke, “Oh, you’re an adult now, LOL.” I’m like, “Yeah, but no, I’m not, and none of us are. What are we talking about exactly?” Nothing changes whatsoever.
But everybody thinks that a bar mitzvah is just a huge party. If you live among rich people, it is a huge party. My family’s not rich. It was just a party, which your parents spend money they don’t have on. It’s kind of tricky.
Then the part that people maybe don’t know about is it’s also a lot of work for the kid. The idea is that, at your bar mitzvah, you get up there, and if you go to a conservative synagogue like I did, in the middle of a three-and-a-half-hour Saturday morning service.
Megana: Wow.
Craig: Endless, most of which is in Hebrew that no one understands. Then at some point you get up there to do a little speech. But the centerpiece of the bar mitzvah is when you, the boy or girl, reads your Haftorah.
What is the Haftorah? Every Saturday, the real Sabbath – because honestly, literally, it says on the seventh day God rested, and then I don’t know what Christians were doing with Sunday. So anyway, on the real Sabbath, Saturday, a portion of the Torah is read. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible. The year covers all of it. There’s a section that’s called the Haftorah. That’s what you’re reading that Saturday.
The bar mitzvah boy or the bat mitzvah girl has to read that section in Hebrew. They also have to sing it, because you don’t just read Hebrew; you sing it. There is a specific cadence and melody to this. You have to learn what amounts to, I don’t know, five minutes of singing in a language you do not understand.
By the way, when I say the first five books, I don’t even think that’s right. I think maybe it’s more books in the Bible than the first five. Honestly, I really don’t know. I don’t know. I gotta be honest. I went to Hebrew school. I was not paying attention. But I had to learn this thing.
John: One thing we should stress though is it’s a specific section of it, and you know going in what section it’s gonna be, because it’s basically what that week’s section would be. You got to prepare for that specific section.
Craig: Yes.
John: What was your section about?
Craig: Can’t remember. I can’t remember. I don’t even remember what it’s from. Maybe it was from Jeremiah. It’s not the first five books. It’s all of them, which is insane, because there are so many of them.
But here’s what was weird. My birthday is in early April. My father’s birthday is in early June. He was bar mitzvahed as well. Because the Jewish year doesn’t line up with the normal year that we use – it’s lunar months, and I don’t know what year it is, 5,000-something – that means that on any given Saturday, it shifts. It’s not like, oh, okay, it’s always gonna be the same thing, because the year is different. My father’s father forced him – a lot of forcing in this – to go to a recording booth in Manhattan in the 1950s and sing his Haftorah, and they made a record. My father had it.
John: Incredible.
Megana: Wow.
Craig: It was the same one that I had.
John: You had the same passage.
Craig: We had the exact same passage. Party has a theme. Do you know what my party’s theme was?
John: Would it have been Star Wars? What would it have been?
Megana: Dungeons and Dragons?
Craig: Computers.
John: Computers.
Craig: Such a nerd. You have to give people a little thing to take with them. I remember our thing, it was a pencil holder with these slidey bits where you can line up units. It was so dumb. Oh my god, I’m such a dork. It was computers. They got a pad that looked like the dot matrix paper, green, white, green, white, green, white. Oh my god.
Megana: This is so cute.
John: It’s adorable.
Craig: It was crazy.
John: Growing up in a non-Jewish household and without any Jewish friends in Colorado, I didn’t go to any bar mitzvahs as a kid. It was only when we got to Los Angeles I had a bunch of Jewish friends that I would go to their kids’ bar mitzvahs. Of course, my daughter, Amy, when she was 13, she was going to all these girls’ bat mitzvahs, and some boys’ bar mitzvahs as well. I got to see what the whole process was like. Aline graciously invited us to one of her son’s bar mitzvahs. Got to hear him give his little Torah reading on menstruation. That was just so ideal.
Craig: “You are unclean. You must go into the bath.”
John: How are we gonna take this Torah passage and make it meaningful for whatever, 2019 or whenever that was. Great. Love it. Love it so much.
What got me thinking about bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs was Taffy at her signing was talking about how she hadn’t really thought about the bar mitzvah until her sons went through it. She realized, “Oh, there’s no other time in my life where we’re gonna get a bunch of people together to say I am so proud of this kid, that I want to celebrate everything this kid has done and his transition from who they were into this thing that they’re becoming, and they’re so excited about their future.”
That got me a little goosebumpy, because I didn’t have any of those moments for me. We had high school graduation, but that felt a little bit late. It was nice to have a moment to celebrate at least the end of childhood, if not into adulthood. That felt kind of cool. I felt like I’d missed that experience growing up.
Megana: I would say that you have your Eagle Scout experience must’ve been similar, right? That’s you graduating into…
John: I got my Eagle when I was 17. But along the way, I guess Boy Scouts did have a lot of rituals and courts of honor, so you got to do things. You were moving up in ranks. Certainly, that was serving some of that same function, for sure. How about you, Megana? Did you have things you went through that were those coming-of-age moments?
Megana: Yeah, I think the closest thing is, in South India they do this thing called the sari ceremony. There’s a more formal Sanskrit name for it. But I was 12 years old and had to wear a sari for the first time. There was this puja and this whole party around it.
John: Did you do that in India or in Ohio?
Megana: We did it in India. There was a lot of family members that I didn’t know. I think that the ritual is that after that point you’re a woman and you start wearing saris. I was like, “I’m absolutely not wearing one of these.”
Craig: I do like a sari, I have to say. As you were talking, I was looking at the Wikipedia page for samskara, which I guess covers various rites. I just love this. They have an image. For Jainism, there’s a specific garment that they wear for one of the passages where they have the hand with the beautiful circle in the middle. And then above it, there’s a swastika. I know it’s not a swastika. But still, that’s awesome. Oh, man, that would be really weird to wear.
John: Yeah. I think you’re making a different choice.
Craig: The Nazis ruined everything.
Megana: I know. They really did.
Craig: They ruined it.
John: Hey, are we gonna come out on the show as being anti-Nazi?
Craig: I think so.
John: That’s a bold stance to take.
Craig: Based on my bar mitzvah, I think I probably should be.
John: You probably should be. For your bar mitzvah, you had the service, and then did you stay in the same venue for your party, or was the party someplace else?
Craig: The party was in our backyard. Everybody is finally released from the prison of the endless service. Then people go to your house and they shove into the backyard. We put tables in the backyard and stuff. It was a lot of people that I knew and a lot of people I did not know.
John: Did you invite your entire class? I guess you were in junior high.
Craig: Oh, god, no.
John: You invited close friends.
Craig: I did. Our backyard was not large. There was a real limit. One of the things you realize very quickly is that even though this is about you becoming an adult, you are not in charge of the bar mitzvah whatsoever, and that in fact, most of the people there will be people that your parents are inviting, because it is for the parents to go, “Look at our kid.” It is a little bit of displaying. It’s a slight zoo aspect to it. I felt the same, honestly, at my wedding. I remember there were just so many relatives that I didn’t know or care about, who were just observing, like, “Look at them. They’re married now.”
Megana: I need to know more about this computer theme though. Was there a computer present? This is 1984.
Craig: Oh, god, no. Are you kidding me? No, we didn’t have money for that. It was really more like, oh, on every table, the paper plates have a robot on them. They didn’t really cohesively present a theme. Themes back then were like baseball, computers. I think I wanted baseball. My parents told me no, because they thought it was stupid, so I had to go with computers. It sounds like the kind of thing my parents would’ve said no to. It was very mild. I’ve actually never been to a rich person LA bar mitzvah.
John: Oh, wow.
Craig: Someone sent me a video of one. I was like, “We shouldn’t be doing this. This is too much.”
John: I went to one at Henson Studios.
Craig: Oh, god.
John: It was bigger than most movie premiers I’ve been to. It was wild.
Craig: I think that’s problematic. I really do. In general, I think giving a kid a party, a rite of passage is great. Every culture has these beautiful rites of passage, especially when they’re around children growing up, because everybody loves embracing the innocence of that and the hopefulness of that. But then, especially in Judaism, where the concept of tzedakah, which is charity, is so high, the notion that you would – it’s too much. What I’ve seen, I’ve just been like, “Oh, or not do that.”
John: We talk about rituals as often having a purpose, that you forget what the original purpose was. I do wonder, with both the sari and the bar mitzvah, at 13, it’s not that you’re necessarily an adult, but you’re probably not gonna die in childhood. Basically, you made it through the period where a lot of little kids are gonna die. This is a real human now. This isn’t some transitional thing that’s gonna maybe die next week. If they made it to 13, they’re gonna stick around.
Craig: Yeah, and I suppose 13 was adulthood way back in the day. There were children having babies at 13. But it doesn’t make much sense now. What it is now is a party. It sometimes strikes me that it can be a competitive party situation, especially when you’re dealing with wealthy people, who are like, “Look at my huge party.” “Look at my huger party.”
John: My Super Sweet 16.
Craig: I don’t like that. I think there should be some modesty with these rituals, myself. But then again, I’m sure people might think, “Oh, you’re just bitter because your parents didn’t have any money and your bar mitzvah sucked.” But I don’t know.
Megana: Also, at 13, still now, but the last thing I wanted was anybody to look at me.
John: I get that.
Craig: You’re so awkward. You’re like, “Oh my god, you’re a man.” Look at me. Do I look like a man? Really? For girls, sometimes even worse. I don’t know. There’s just this awkwardness of everything. All of it is just bizarre to me. Then you throw on a boy reading a passage written, whatever, 5,000 years ago about menstruation. At that point, just throw up your hands and say none of this makes sense.
John: Craig, Megana, always a delight talking to you both.
Craig: Same.
Megana: Thank you.
John: Bye, guys.
Craig: Bye.
Megana: Bye.
Links:
- Standard Operating Procedures from Writer Emergency Pack
- Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Free AF non-alcoholic cocktails
- Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging
- Fantasmas on HBO/Max
- AlphaBirds
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