John and Craig welcome back Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, Dept. Q) to offer their best advice to film students and the people who teach them. They look at ways to improve how we educate writers, and offer advice to an aspiring development executive.
We also look at the intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations of characters in Scott’s new series, Dept. Q, follow up on the decline of sex in movies, and ask, what genres of movies should people see at least one of?
In our bonus segment for premium members, John, Craig and Scott take a broader view of education in America to see what they’ve learned and what they would change.
Links:
- Dept. Q on Netflix
- Scott Frank
- Scott’s last time on Scriptnotes, Episode 476: The Other Senses
- Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny by RS Benedict for Blood Knife
- Scriptnotes 639: Intrinsic Motivation
- Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova
- Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch by Anthony Lane for The New Yorker
- Richard Price’s Street Life by Kevin Lozano for The New Yorker
- McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’ by Andy Greenberg for Wired
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (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.
UPDATE 7-30-25: The transcript for this episode can be found here.