Scriptnotes, Episode 702: Last Looks, Transcript

The oringinal post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 702 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We often discuss how to start a script. Today on the show, how do you finish one? We’ll discuss last looks, those final steps when you think you’re done, but you need to get your script ready to hand in. We’ll then apply some of those lessons to samples we’re reading for our new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at the first three pages of scripts our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. Today, we’ll have bonus feedback because our beloved Scripnotes producer, Megana Rao, is sitting here to the left of me to help us out.

Megana Rao: Hi. Thank you so much for letting me come back. I have so many questions on this topic.

John: You have a very specific question about last looks because that’s prompted the whole episode.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: I mean, we don’t let you come back. It’s not like you’re begging us all the time. We’re like, no, and then finally we let you. I personally want you here.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: I can’t speak for John.

[laughter]

John: It’s fantastic to have you here. Trying out some new stuff in the studio here. We don’t have headphones on, which is strange, but good.

Megana: I feel naked.

Craig: It is a little nudifying. Also, I have always loved the vibe of bald men wearing headphones because we all look like Lobot from Empire Strikes Back, which I think is amazing. It’s just regular.

John: It’s just regular. Yes.

Megana: Yes, it’s fun.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss musical scores and the function of the soundtrack in feature films. We had a question about that, and we haven’t dug very much into that. I want to talk about what we’re looking for in music, in the things we make. We have no items in the overall news category, but I want to talk about something new I learned this week. Not new to me. Craig, you understand the musical scale. As for you– I forget. Megana, what instruments did you play growing up?

Megana: I played piano, violin, and the recorder.

Craig: The recorder.

John: The recorder, absolutely. The recorder is a fundamental music education which actually ties into this.

Craig: It is. We all played the recorder or even its stupider nephew, the song flute.

John: I don’t know the song flute.

Megana: Oh, I did not play the song flute.

Craig: The song flute is for kids who struggle with the recorder. [chuckles]

Megana: Then I should have been on the song flute.

John: Craig and I, we went hardcore down the woodwind track, and we were both clarinet players.

Craig: Deep clarinet.

John: In our early music education, we learned do, re, mi. We learned that. What I learned from Mike this week was that in French solfege, which is the do, re, mi, they only use do, re, mi. They don’t have letter notes for C, D, E, F, G, A, B. They don’t.

Craig: When kids are learning piano, they don’t learn middle C? They learn middle do?

John: Do.

Megana: What?

John: Yes. Is that wild? Our international listeners are like, well, of course.

Craig: Wait, they say it’s in the key of fa?

John: Yes.

Craig: That can’t be right.

John: That seems impossible.

Craig: That’s impossible.

John: No, you actually look it up. There’s–

Craig: Because there’s things like Minuet in G. Do they translate that?

John: Different countries will do different things for how they handle stuff. In France, it literally is.

Craig: Did you fact-check them on this?

John: I did. I looked up, the answers here. It’s the system of a fixed do system. Fixed do is solfege. Do is always the root C. Whereas we have the movable do system, which is, I think, just so handy because that way we can talk about do is just like the root of whatever–

Craig: Of whatever it is.

John: It’s just wild. It’s assumptions I would have made about like, well, everyone, they must work the same way.

Craig: I got to tell you, when you look at the history of classical music in Europe, you see, obviously, great composers from Germany and Austria. You see great composers from Italy. You see a couple from England. France?

John: Oh, so that’s what it is.

Megana: [chuckles]

John: Yes. Send your letters into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll forward them directly to Craig.

Craig: Listen, I’m just wondering where are all the great French composers, the great classical French composers.

John: Did you see?

Craig: Okay, keep going.

John: God, the guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet. They’re all French authors.

Craig: That was Tchaikovsky. Russians, great.

John: Oh, no, no. There’s a different French–

Craig: The Russians had a ton.

John: They had a ton.

Craig: Tons.

John: What are you going to do other than compose music because it’s cold outside?

Megana: Do only French people have this system?

John: No, so it’s common throughout a lot of Europe.

Megana: Okay.

Craig: The other countries that don’t give us great classical composers. [chuckles]

John: You can also find a lot of Americans. It’s just strange to me that I would have assumed that everyone’s using the same A through G notation.

Craig: Do you think they’ll let me into France after this?

John: No, but this was not the deal killer.

Megana: You’ve been on their list for a while.

Craig: They’re the easygoing about people that criticize the French. It’s going to be fine.

John: Let’s do some follow-up. We had more advice for general meetings, which is our topic in Episode 699.

Drew: Alyssa writes, “I wanted to share a tip that’s helped my Zoom generals immensely, just in case it helps someone else. Before every meeting, I put my dog on the bed behind me. Without fail, he will be the first thing commented on. While his first couple appearances were a happy accident, seeing such a positive reaction to a cozy mini poodle with an underbite meant that I was happy to manufacture the situation if need be. In the Zoomverse, having something, anything bold in the background lays the ground for both an easy icebreaker and leads so naturally into a conversation about who you are and what you’re all about. It does mean I always have to make my bed before meetings and occasionally bribe my dog with a treat, but I think it’s worth it.”

John: I love this advice. I think it’s practical. It’s usable. Just having a first thing to talk about and having them compliment your dog. Love it.

Craig: You have to force that dog on the couch, though. He doesn’t want to go. “Hey, sit good on the couch. Mommy needs a job.”

John: Every dog wants to be on the bed, though, too. You let the dog up on the bed.

Craig: My dogs love being on the bed. You know it’s a sad day when your dog is too old to get up on the bed. I know. I have two dogs. Bonnie, the younger one, will spring onto the bed effortlessly. Cookie just stands there like, oh, and can’t get up there. She’s big. We can’t really get her up there. Then we got to get her down.

Megana: Do you have steps for her?

Craig: We don’t have bed steps for her. Maybe we should get her bed steps.

Megana: Yes, or a little ramp.

Craig: I’m not sure that she’ll still be here by the time it shows up. It depends on how fast the shipping is. She’s really old. Poor Cookie. She’s almost 15.

Megana: What?

Craig: I know.

John: She’s a big dog.

Megana: She’s like such puppy energy. I had no idea.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Cookie?

Craig: Oh, geez.

John: This podcast took a depressing turn.

Craig: Yes. Thanks for reminding me about your vital dog.

[laughter]

John: No, Craig. You need to put Cookie up in the background and then you can talk about how sick she is.

[laughter]

Craig: I just want to say that you guys are really lucky. This may be the last Zoom where Cookie’s in the background. All right, here’s my comedy.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic, which is brought to us by Megana Rao. Megana, can you remind us of what your question was that you wanted to bring to the show?

Megana: Yes. I have been working on this feature script and I was about to send it into producers and was really just taking my sweet time in the “polish phase.” I wanted to talk to you guys about what you do when you are doing your polish phase or your final pass on a draft. What sorts of things are you looking at? What questions are you asking yourself? I think there also might be a little bit of anxiety or comfort with me taking my sweet time during this phase because it’s like everything’s where it needs to be. Nobody has given me notes yet. How do you deal with that? How do you know when done is done?

John: How do you know you’re not just procrastinating?

Megana: Exactly.

John: Or that you’re just being OCD about stuff that actually doesn’t matter at all?

Craig: Well, I am OCD about stuff that doesn’t matter at all. It’s so funny. I was talking about this with Mehr, my new assistant, because she also works as the script coordinator for our show. It’s her job to go through the script right before it gets sent out through Synchronize as the official draft. If she finds typos, she fixes them. I’ve just let her know if, for instance, I’ve left out a letter and you stick a letter in and it makes the line go longer, which means the page breaks differently, tell me, because I will not turn a draft in with dialogue that is slopping over across two pages. I have a problem. I know that.

Megana: Wow. I thought that my question was going to be really nitpicky, but no, I had no idea the depths to which–

Craig: Scott Frank also has this. We’ve talked about this at length, and we know it’s dumb. We know that. I indulge it.

John: I’ve, over the years, started indulging it much, much less. I just turned in a script yesterday and–

Craig: All the dialogue broke across pages.

John: Every single line won. It was just little dangling lines. I did the spell check, drew right through it as well. I went through and I was looking for examples of I was using the same word too much. I was using the word processing too much. Because I was writing the scene separately and it’s like, oh, it made sense in each of the times I was using it, but collectively, like, oh my God, I’m using that word too much. I can take all those out.

I would look for, you sort of blur your eyes and look at the page. It’s like, is there anything that’s weird about it? Is there anything that just feels strange? It’s too dark. It’s too light. You’re looking for widows and orphans. Honestly, our software all takes care of those situations. What Craig is describing is, let’s say I have three lines of dialogue and it’s at the bottom of the page and the application may split it at sentence level, so the next sentence drops to the next page. You try to avoid that if at all possible.

Craig: I do. There are two things that I think about with dialogue as I’m going through. Obviously, part of the tweaking process is checking for typos and repeated words. I like to read the whole script through because sometimes I might think like, oh, I don’t need this paragraph, or I thought I did, but I don’t because something happens later and it’s fine. For dialogue, I try, again, avoid terribly, frighteningly avoid the continued dialogue on the next page. The other thing I look at is there are times where someone says something that follows another person’s line that should be together on a page.

John: If you were to page flip, you’d lose the context.

Craig: It almost feels like a drum roll, please, page turn, and it undermines it. There are times where I look for those things to make sure that it feels okay. Honestly, just reading it through and the usual stuff, I don’t get too crazy. What are you doing in your process there, Megana, that seems to be occupying so much of your time?

Megana: Well, I feel, okay, this is after I’ve had friends read it, and I’m going through and doing all of the stuff where if I have one word hanging off, can I rewrite the sentence?

Craig: Oh, big fan of that.

Megana: I’ll do a couple of command F passes for words that I feel like I’m using too much or I’m worried I’m using too much.

John: What are examples?

Megana: Here’s one that’s not specific, but I’ll do a just pass where I’ll command F for the word just.

Craig: Oh, you’re a big just person.

Megana: Yes. You almost never need it.

Craig: Well, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why I don’t need it.

John: I can also imagine cases where you’re using it. It’s the right question to ask. Do I actually need it in this case?

Craig: If you know that you use a word as a bit of a crutch or a tick, then yes, it’s worth searching for. I’m not sure I have. Well, if I have them, I’m not aware of them, so I don’t do any specific word searching. Maybe I should.

Megana: Well, mine thankfully come from having John having read my scripts. I’ll do a pass for tries to, which I think is sort of like young woman hedging.

Craig: Oh, yes. I could see you hedging. I could see a hedge.

Megana: Thanks to John, I now go through and just make it a little bit more assertive, but that is another example of a pass I’ll do with a command F where I almost never need a tries to. The character just does the action.

Craig: Does the thing. Yes, if they try to and fail, that’s interesting. Tries to pour a cup of coffee and succeeds, [laughter] it’s not that interesting.

John: It isn’t that interesting. We had a guest on recently, and I’m forgetting who it was, that talked about doing a transition pass, which is basically, the day before you’re sending it in, you’re sitting down and actually just looking at, what are the transitions between all the scenes, and are they the best transitions we could do? Does it naturally flow from one thing to the next? Is there a visual? Is there a way that you can get the energy leaning forward at the end of a scene so it tumbles into the next scene with a lot of spark there?

I won’t do a specific thing for that, but I am always mindful of, is there a pre-lap that makes sense? Is there a way that I can carry the energy across that transition? The project I just handed in now is animated, and the transitions will be incredibly important. I wanted to make sure that you could always get a sense of, okay, this is how we’re going to move from this thing into this thing because it’s not going to be an accident. It’s going to be a lot of animators building stop motion stuff to make it all happen.

Megana: I was just rereading the first episode of Chernobyl and Go last night. You both use transitions a lot in the beginning of a script and you highlight it because I think you’re establishing visual language. Then later on, the story just carries itself. Is that something you’re aware of that you’re thinking about when you’re doing these sorts of last passes?

Craig: Well, the beginning of scripts tends to be a little more lyrical because it’s the beginning. We’ve talked about how in the first 10 minutes of sitting in a movie theater, the audience is accepting. They are welcoming everything in because they are learning. They’re new to this country and they want to learn. You can be a bit more lyrical. Once you’ve established everything, then like you say, I think people can put that visual language on top of the read as they’re reading it, and there’s probably less call for it. At the end, you’ll see a lot of lyrical writing come back, I think.

John: We’re going to get into the first three pages of the temples that people have sent through. I will spend a little bit more OCD time on those first couple of pages because you’re inviting somebody in and you just want everything to present itself well so no one has any excuse for stopping reading or setting it down. Making sure those first three, five, 10 pages just really read flawless and there’s nothing there that’s going to jump out is incredibly helpful.

Over the years, I’ve been less prone to the word Jenga or the word Tetris where you’re trying to make things fit exactly the right way so that the page breaks fall down. With careful work, you can almost always squeeze a page or two pages out of a script by just making pages break a little bit earlier and it ripples through the script. I just do a lot less of that now.

Craig: If I see a big chunk of white space at the bottom of a page, sometimes I’ll be like– but usually I’m okay with that, honestly. It’s funny, I don’t worry about length. I think it was much bigger deal in features. I never worry about length.

John: Well, you’re also the boss now.

Craig: I’m the boss. I also know that there are pages that look slow and they’re fast, and there are pages that look fast and they’re slow. The other thing I like to do as a final, what are we calling this, last looks?

John: Yes, last looks.

Craig: Is I read it as if I know nothing. I try and flush my brain of everything. I don’t know anything. Who’s this? Who is that? What are they talking about? I don’t know. Sometimes I will note, oh, you know. That’s not clear to somebody who knows nothing. I don’t love clarity notes because I try my best to make it as clear as I want it to be. There are times where I realize it’s not as clear as I want it to be. The reading as a tabula rasa is a good idea.

John: Agreed. Also, the tabula rasa reading may also help you. If you’ve moved scenes around, I think I’ve noticed that sometimes, oh, I moved this character’s introduction to here, but I didn’t end up uppercase in their name on the first time they showed up. It’s weird that the uppercase is showing up in the wrong scene. Stuff has moved around and there may be other dependencies that I’m not thinking about at the time, which is helpful.

Megana: How do you get into that mindset? I think when most readers are in this phase, they are probably very close to deadline. They have been reading this thing over and over again. In my case, I’ve memorized what it is, so I just start hearing it. How do you get to this point where you’re looking at it with totally fresh eyes?

John: Printing it out is a big help for me because I’m so used to reading it on the screen. If I read it, like what I handed in yesterday, I print it out and sort of did all my corrections in pen on the paper because I’m just reading it differently if I’m reading it on paper is a good way to do it. There’s people who will proofread by reading it all backwards. It’s like, I don’t get that.

Craig: [unintelligible 00:16:51]

John: I don’t know. That’s the thing people do for recognizing those mistakes. The obvious things, spell checking, making sure you’re spelling characters’ names consistently because if you have a weird character’s name, you may have made different choices for how you’re going to say that. The title page, so often I’ll focus on everything else and I’ll forget to update the date on title page.

Craig: Date on title page. One of the last things I do for an episodic script is figure out what the title of the script is. I don’t like to do that until I’m done with the script because I sort of want to think, okay, what’s a weird little moment or a thing or an idea from this script that then would make an interest-inspiring title? People wouldn’t quite know what it means until they’ve watched the episode. I have to remind myself to do that or else the title will be Untitled Script.

John: Yes, that’s not good.

Craig: Nor, nor.

John: It’s also going to sound stupid, but you need to– You’re sending in a PDF almost always. Drew was asking yesterday, how did you turn in scripts before? It’s like, oh. We should explain. It’s like we would call the studio executive and say, I’m ready. You can send a messenger to pick up a script. We would print up the script. We would put it in an envelope. We had to have lots of paper, brass brads, and envelopes. We could stick it in and a messenger would just show up at our door and pick it up. It was always whenever you call about the messenger, then you would find another typo and you’d have to reprint a page or to–

Craig: Scramble.

John: Scramble.

Craig: Scramble. Yes, absolutely. You would also have to make sure that your printer, you’d have to go through, flip, flip, flip every page because sometimes your printer would just like, I don’t like page 38. It’s blank. It would just do that sometimes.

John: I will say printers used to be more reliable than they are now. I have many more problems printing now than I did 10 years ago.

Craig: I’m not surprised because they’re no longer a vital piece of equipment. The divisions within, I don’t know, whoever owns Brother–

John: Brother or Epson.

Craig: Epson, this is like seven guys.

John: My Apple LaserWriter, it worked well.

Craig: I remember I had a Brother Daisy Wheel printer in 1985.

John: If you were to print a script on one of those things, that would be a three or four-hour process because you’d have to feed him. It was awesome.

Craig: A Daisy Wheel printer. Do you know what this is? Is this the one that got the little punch holes on the side? No. That’s a dot matrix printer. That’s different. That was a little thing that would go side to side, left to right, and put dots. Then the dots would create letters. It was like– That’s what that sounded like. The Daisy Wheel printer basically had what a typewriter has. It had physical things. It would spin.

John: It was a plastic disk with all the letters on it.

Craig: It would spin to the letter, and then a thing would go, bam, and hit it. It would go very fast. It was like the fastest typer, but it was still typing it.

John: It was incredibly loud.

Craig: It was so loud and slow. Those disks would, if you wanted a different font, you had to get a different disk.

John: Click in a new disk.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Wow.

Craig: I know. There was ink ribbons. It was madness.

Megana: It’s like a printing press.

John: Yes, it was a printing press.

Craig: Now, we talk about this as a horrible thing, but people in the 1500s would have thought literally God Himself had handed this to us.

John: Yes, but this was at a time when there were still script processing departments at studios.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Now, we send it in a PDF. My point is that you may have your own system for how you’re labeling your files, but whatever file you’re emailing through to your executive, your producer, whoever, just make a smart name for that, that makes sense to them. Like, title of movie, date, is a good choice. Don’t say first draft, second draft. Just say date.

Craig: Yes. If you’re rewriting and you’re not the first writer in, stick your name on the file as well, just so later when they’re looking through all the files, they’re like, “Oh, that’s the John August draft.”

John: That’s amazing drafting. That’s a smart choice. What else can we help you with figuring out in terms of last looks?

Craig: Or just your life.

John: We’re here for all of us.

Megana: We’ll do that offline or like bonus, bonus segment.

Craig: Oh, bonus, bonus segment. I like that.

John: Absolutely. For super premium members.

Craig: Yes. Oh, we should have a super premium.

John: Absolutely. A new tier.

Megana: Okay, here’s a question. You’ve written this thing. You’re sending it out to your producers. Stuff has changed between the last time you’ve spoken to them. Are you getting ahead of it? Are you annotating like, you gave me this note and this is the change that I made, or are you letting them figure that out as they read the draft?

John: That is a great question. If it’s the second draft that they’re reading, if you’re coming in with specific answers to things, this is like you responded to their notes, I think it is good in that email. If it’s just a few things, it can go in the email. If there’s a whole, here’s an explainer, I will put that in as a separate document just to walk them through what the changes are.

Megana: Oh, interesting.

John: Because you may have revisions turned on so they can see the stars, but they may not really get the context of what that is. That is a useful thing. For our first draft, before I turned it in yesterday, here’s what I actually said in it.

Craig: Here’s your stupid script, jerks.

John: Hello team, untitled maybe, excited to share with you the first full draft of this script. I say that because then if I’m looking for, why did I send that in? I can actually Google and search for that. No real warnings or disclaimers. I think and hope it feels like the treatment and subsequent discussions. Then I refer to one specific thing which we never actually discussed, but is a context kind of thing. We’re going to have to need to talk about this. Looking forward to discussing and digging in after the long weekend. Hope everyone has a great one. Files attached, goes through, happiness all around. If you’re sending through a multi-paragraph email with your script, I think it’s not helping you.

Craig: The person who’s making the decisions isn’t going to even see that email. I agree. I think if you’re doing a second draft and there are a lot of notes and a lot of changes, it could be helpful to turn revisions on. Give them two files. Give them a clean one and give them one with the asterisks. This way, it’s like, what do you prefer? Do you like to just read it through without knowing what changed or do you just want to go to the changes, up to you?

John: That’s a really good point. I will tend to do that. One file will be parentheses clean, one file will be parentheses starred, and then they can see both things.

Craig: Then they have a choice. Because from the point of view of somebody that, as I start to take on projects as a producer, and I occupy the space of the evil ones, what I’ve noticed, it’s fun, is that there are times where I will read something and I’m not sure if it’s always been that way or if it’s changed. As writers, we are 100% masters of the script. The people reading these scripts read a lot of scripts. They have a lot of notes conversations. In their minds, it gets confusing sometimes as to whether this was always there, it’s an answer to a note. Yes, a little bit of extra helps.

John: In generating the clean versions of scripts, what I used to have to do was I would save the file again and then just go through and clear all revisions and save a clean version of that. In Highland Pro now, you can just tick the box, don’t print revision marks, and just export the PDF again.

Craig: Oh, you know what? You can also do that in the software. I really should do that. Although, I don’t really do it now. Now, for television, I just send a draft in and then we just start. In feature land, it would make total sense.

John: Absolutely. Because you don’t want to send a draft that has star revisions all over it to an after. There’s something like that.

Craig: Exactly right. Of course, there are levels of revisions too. I don’t think I’ve ever used the setting where it’s like show all revision levels because that’s just, oh, congrats on your asterisked draft. I wonder why that’s there. Have you ever come up with a use case for that?

John: There were times, I remember on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there were a couple sets of revisions that went back and forth and they asked for, hey, can you give us a draft that just has this stars on it? I’m like, no. It wasn’t useful for my process, so I didn’t hold on to all those levels of revisions.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I do. I just go through and I just advance it. If I’m not in production, I can just call it level one, level two, level three, whatever it is, so that I can actually go back and say, here is what was changed, this date, this date. What I do is I name the revision instead of just blue. I edit the name so it’s blue and then I include a date. It’s obviously the date that it was turned over so that it’s not just also like, oh, what was level three? I don’t remember.

John: At a certain point, certainly on television, a script coordinator will be doing that work rather than the feature writer themselves. You still do it yourself?

Craig: I change the name of the revision. I try and do as much as, so I change that. I do that and I keep track of the revisions because as I’m writing, I want to make sure I know what changed. The script coordinator is going through to make sure that I didn’t screw that up actually because sometimes you get into things where you realize, oh my God, I was working out the wrong draft and it was the one that I blah, and then it’s a whole nightmare and then you got to go. There was one nightmare that I created that Allie Cheng had to un-nightmare for me. I got to tell you, it felt great not having to do it. I’m not going to lie.

Megana: Also, Craig, who is reading your drafts before you send them in to people?

Craig: My producing partner, Jacq Lesko, and this is the method that she and I have been using all the way back before Chernobyl even. Doesn’t matter what I write, whatever the day’s work is, I send it to her. She reads it, comes back, catches some typos, if there are any questions, positive comments, areas where she bumped, anything, I take that in. Every day’s work is read. She knows enough about me now to know that when she gets the next day’s work, she goes back for a good five, six pages because she knows I would have also tweaked earlier stuff. I don’t asterisk that, obviously. Everything is read every day.

John: Oh, wow. That’s not how we’ve ever worked in our office. Drew and Megana, when you’re working for me, I will tend to give you full drafts of things. Megana, did I ever send through scenes as I was writing them? At times, I’ve worked more scene by scene rather than the full thing. Have you proofed individual things?

Megana: The only thing that’s coming to mind is Arlo Finch. That, I was definitely reading chapter by chapter, unless you were doing a rewrite and there was a specific thing. Even then, you would send me the rewrite within the context of the full draft.

Craig: Well, you move around when you’re writing.

John: Yes, I do. You’re always page one, two page, whatever you’re at.

Craig: Exactly. Whereas I’m linear. I think if you write linearly, it’s easier to have somebody reading every day because it’s like a story being told very slowly to them. They’re getting like, if every episode were five minutes long, that’s what they’re getting. Yes, if I were to write, oh, here’s a scene that happens later, I don’t know if she would know what to do with it.

Megana: I was going to ask you this because in the first few pages of Chernobyl, it’s so specific. Each sentence is a very specific shot and it’s so detailed. Is that something that in your first draft you were doing that or is that like–

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Okay. Wow.

Craig: Absolutely. That’s why I talk a lot about directing on the page and how important it is supposed to win these people, so you shouldn’t. So much of what I’m trying to do, whatever that day is, is get as much out of my brain onto the page as possible that is of interest. That is of interest is the part that I think a lot of people struggle with because they don’t know which part would be interesting, which isn’t. Yes, I do that.

I think, in part, it’s because I’ve gone through that process, where I do hand over six pages and then she walks back in my office and says, “I was confused. You said this, but where are they or how is that different from this?” I’m like, okay. Over time, I’ve just gotten more and more detailed. Lindsay Doran also, a brutal where are they, why are they standing, what does the room look like person, which has been amazing.

John: The pros and cons of what you’re doing with Jacq Lesko is because she’s seeing it every day, she has a consistent vision for what it is, but she won’t have fresh eyes to look at a brand new draft. She’ll have to just sort of do a mind wipe on herself.

Craig: She will never get an episode the way that other people get it. That’s a great point. If it hadn’t been a successful process from the start, I’m sure I would have abandoned it. As it turns out, it has been.

John: It also feels like there’s just some accountability because you know you’re handing this in to her every day.

Craig: Well, that’s the other thing, is that she’s down the hallway like the Grim Reaper and I know she’s there and she’s waiting.

Megana: She’s so sweet.

Craig: No. No, no. Yes, she is. Just a reminder, you said that this draft would be done by April 15th. Are we still on track for that? I’m like, you know we’re not on track for that. What are you thinking now? I just know it’s like, there is a librarian asking for the book back. It kind of helps.

John: I do wonder if some of our listeners could create this situation for themselves where they just basically have an accountability partner where every night they’re sending through the pages they wrote to that person and vice versa.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. You don’t need to hear back from them. Just, here, I’ve proven to you that I wrote another– I think it would make a huge difference. If you have a choice as a developing writer between attending one of these script groups, which I think oftentimes can be corrosive, or having an accountability partner where you guys give each other zero notes, zero feedback. You just go, you owe me five pages. Where are my five effing pages? That will be helpful, I think.

John: If any listeners out there have tried something like this or are going to try this experiment, write back to us and tell us what happens. All right, let’s do our accountability, which is a Three Page Challenge. Three Page Challenge for people who are new listening to the podcast, so often we put out a call to our listeners saying, “Hey, send in the first three pages of your script.” It could be a screenplay. It could be a pilot. We will give you our honest feedback. Just make sure it’s clear to everybody. People are asking us for this feedback. For harsh moments, it’s because people asked for our honest opinions.

Craig: They asked for it.

John: We have three very brave writers who’ve sent stuff through. Let’s start with Katie Seward. It’s a pilot for The Thin Place. Drew, can you give us a quick synopsis for folks who don’t have these pages in front of them?

Drew: San Francisco, 1924. A herd of bison break out of their paddock and move down the city streets in the middle of the night. A lone bison lags behind and stops under a streetlight. We then cut to present day where, in a hotel bar, Connor Sullivan, 36, is trying to tell his friend his theory about how time is controlled by capitalistic forces. His friend, Francis Dunn, also 36, keeps showing him pictures of the Olsen twins, marveling at his ability to correctly tell them apart. They negotiate who’s going to buy the next round of drinks.

John: Great. If you want to read these pages yourself, look at the show notes, and we’ll have a link to the PDF so you can read through them with us. Megana, you’re our guest here. We start with you. What are some things you enjoyed or stuck out for you as you started reading through these pages?

Craig: In a non-enjoyable fashion as well.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: I loved the setting. I was really excited about Golden Gate Park, the bison paddock. I love that park and I love the bison that are in there. I was very interested to read more about 1920 San Francisco. We quickly shift away from that. I was also really excited by what this guy was saying, this character, Connor, was saying about satellites and time and what seems like it’s going to lead to a conspiracy theory around that. I found that really fascinating. I thought that the Olsen twins game was clever and cute and I enjoyed reading that.

John: I liked the Olsen twins as well. I liked the idea of starting with the bison in the paddock. That is an opening image. I have many criticisms of how it was done, but that as an opening image is really good. I was a little frustrated that I didn’t feel like how this was going to tie in by the end of these two pages. I wanted a little bit of a better sense of what is the juxtaposition of these two things mean for us. Let me just dig in with some of the things I noticed from the top here. A monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath, giant bodies pound against wood. Again, this is all done over black. Something cracks. In the darkness, we see– Wait, what? How do we see something in the darkness, Craig?

Craig: I got there and it was, listen, Katie, this is what you wrote. In the darkness, we see a massive bison in the dark.

John: I see at least two problems with that. First off, we can’t see in the dark.

Craig: Correct.

John: From the darkness, ventures a massive bison.

Craig: Then we mentioned dark redundantly. This is all over black, so we can’t see anything. Now, if you want to say over black, also, I would say a monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath. Those are sounds. We don’t have to indicate the sounds. Then it says giant bodies pound against wood. I would write the sound of giant bodies pounding against wood. Again and again, something cracks. Then how do you want this to be? Tell me this movie, do you mean when it cracks through, that’s what makes light flood in from the moon or a street lamp or something? Or do you want to just go exterior Golden Gate, boom, bison explode out of their pen? Yes, the way this opened is confusing.

John: Here’s why I think it’s relevant to today’s episode. This feels like a last looks thing. You need to notice that what I’m saying, over black, darkness and dark, back to back to back in these first couple lines. You got to pick where you’re going to do this and sort of where to move on. This is a thing I think you could notice in that last step here. In the next block here, where exterior Golden Gate Park, night, the entire herd streaming out of their paddock, trampling over the battered gate. The entire herd streams out of their paddock. Again, there’s no reason to go for the gerund here when I feel like it just gives us a simple verb. Next block here, but our bison lags behind. Capitalizing the hour felt like a weird choice too.

Craig: Very Trumpian tweet style. Yes, sorry, truth. Is it a truth? Is that what he does?

Megana: Truth social?

Craig: Yes. He tweets a truth, he truths.

John: He truths. Whatever that is.

Craig: That’s a great word for lying. I love it.

John: Then we get Connor’s pre-lap. A pre-lap, valid choice.

Craig: Yes, but I suspect that this may be what’s on your mind. You tell me if I’m right. If you pre-lap somebody who is in a bar or a crowded restaurant, that sound will be with them also.

John: Yes. It’s not a clean sound.

Craig: It’s not.

John: As I started reading this pre-lap, I assumed that this was somebody on a microphone or was sort of a voiceover.

Craig: Exactly.

John: A clear space.

Craig: You may wonder how I got here. Yes. The issue is, you can’t do this. You literally can’t do what she’s trying to do here. What you can do is show this bison dazed, frozen, staring at us, and then, boom, smash cut to a guy, a crowded happy hour hotel, and we’re hearing him before we see him. Then we see him because the sound will be accepted.

John: Yes, but you could have or you could have pre-lapped the sound of the hotel bar. That could also have been interesting too. Why are we hearing this background noise that doesn’t match with what I’m seeing on screen?

Craig: Then you’d barely get a few words. The point is, and this is why this is important, Katie, the point is when you do this as a screenwriter, you are ceding way too much control to a director because the director’s going to go through this and go, well, this person didn’t write things that are physically produceable. Let me start fixing it. You want to fix it. You don’t want them fixing it. Fix it.

Megana: If Katie wants to keep this dialogue over the image of the bison that we’re seeing, what should she write instead?

John: You can’t. Connor could do it as a pure voiceover, but then it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t track quite right here.

Craig: You literally can’t do it unless you wanted to have the noise of the hotel and the bar with him, which would ruin this moment because you’d be staring at this bison and hearing a bar for some reason. It just doesn’t make sense.

John: I think there’s a way you could sell that, but it would be a different feel for what this is. It just doesn’t–

Craig: Especially because there’s continuous action. We’re looking at a herd and then suddenly we would hear. Like John says, you can get away with a slight prelap of the noise of the bar and maybe even one thing. This bison and then the sound of a bar starts to fade in and we hear a woman say, Mary Kate or Ashley. You could do that and then, boom, we’re into the bar and he looks in and goes, Mary Kate. You could do that, but you can’t have this run.

John: I like the idea of the Mary Kate or Ashley runner. I like the frustration that he’s feeling that this is just a parlor trick he can do. He doesn’t actually care. He actually is trying to engage on conversation. The challenge I ran into is that the scene descriptions, the actions in between, like momentary pain flashes across Connor’s eyes, but it gives in. No more physics talk. It felt out of scale with what was actually happening here. In a scene that really should just be dialogue, boom, boom, we were stopping a lot to address people’s reactions to things.

Megana: It was just hard for me to believe that these two characters, if I am to believe that they’re old friends and went to grad school together, are having the conversation that they’re having.

Craig: Right. It feels like they just met.

Megana: Yes. It’s like a first date or like a blind date, a setup, I believe it. If my friend could do this, I would never bring it up again.

Craig: Right. You mentioned it’s somebody else, but you wouldn’t suddenly discover they have this parlor trick after all these years. To me, it felt more like he was in the middle of picking this girl up and he was trying to impress her with what he’s impressed by, but she only cares about this other thing that he can do that isn’t that impressive, except that when you’re trying to pick girls up at a bar, anything that impresses them is great. Anything, right? That’s the point of learning this parlor trick.

You mentioned pace, I think, John, is what you’re referring to. Everybody knows the wonderful scene that opens the social network, and this has a slightly social network opening scene vibe to it. There’s a questionably spectrum-ish sort of guy, and there’s a girl, and they’re not quite connecting verbally. That scene is notoriously fast. It is paced faster probably than any dialogue scene ever, and I’m throwing in all the screwball comedies of the 30s.

When you are pacing, and this feels like it should be paced that quickly. Honestly, what I would do is have him say less stuff like, Mary Kate’s on the left. It should always be like, Mary Kate. So, dadadadada, Ashley. Dadadadada, Ashley. Nope, Ashley, and then Mary Kate in the same dress. Dadadadada, but make him– I don’t think he would use extra words because he’s so interested in talking about what he wants to talk about. All the stuff in between, the description, shorten because you want to keep the pace.

John: If you absolutely need it, you can pull it into a parenthetical for when the dialogue blocks rather than having it be its own separate thing because every time we stop reading the dialogue to read the scene description, we’re losing the sense of the pace of whatever we really feel like on screen.

Craig: Right. We have, that’s Mary Kate. Action. Dejected, Francis returns to scrolling through pages of images of the Olsen twins. Then the dialogue continues. Francis holds her phone up again, a picture of the twins in their Full House days. Connor examines it carefully, then we complete. I think he’d like, it wouldn’t take that long. It says Francis. In the dialogue, it says Francis, in parentheses, not listening. She’s not listening. I’m not sure I need a lot of description also showing that she’s not listening. It could say in parentheses, looking on phone, Jeff Bezos. I also did not understand this.

This is important because Connor’s making this interesting point that theoretically will either be relevant to the plot or just an interesting window into his personality. He’s talking about time and he says, the satellites we use for Google Maps have to get the time beamed out to them from Colorado. I think beamed to them or sent to them from Colorado. The next brick of text is, or dialogue, the clocks they have on board gain so much time, our GPS would go off by six miles a day otherwise, exclamation point. I don’t understand what that means. What does that mean have so much time and what is, and go off by six– Our GPS would go off by six miles a day, otherwise is incredibly unwieldy. It’s very clunky. It doesn’t sound easy to say.

John: It would drift by six. There’s ways to get to it.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

John: To Katie’s credit here, I feel like if you do the blur of the eyes test and look at the pages, they have a good balance of light and dark.

Craig: Yes. Absolutely.

John: There’s not chunks that are impenetrable. There’s no road blocks in your reading, which is nice.

Craig: Can I pull one more thing out?

John: Please.

Craig: This tends to stop me, and I see it quite a bit. Francis, in this kind of not horrible expositional way, says, which was harder, your PhD in science, which again is crazy because they literally lived together in grad school. How does she not know? That just seems ridiculous. We’re developing this expertise. To your point, this should have already been covered by their friendship. He says, my PhD is in quantum mechanics and we lived together when I was in grad school, you bitch. She rolls her eyes.

John: Yes, I wrote, ouch, on that.

Craig: That’s just aggressive.

John: It’s aggressive, but it’s also, it feels expositional. It just feels like, oh, this is not for us. This is for the–

Craig: A, expositional. Very expositional. We lived together. This is an, as you know, I have a degree in– B, if it’s two women calling each other a bitch, sure. If it’s a straight guy and a girl in a bar and he just casually calls her a bitch, it feels aggressive.

Megana: I guess I didn’t mind it so much. It was more offensive to me that she said science instead of–

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Science?

John: Science?

Craig: Do you stuff with numbers?

Megana: If she said quantum mechanics or some sort of physics and it actually was theoretical physics or whatever niche thing, that would make more sense to me. Yes, it was just more offended by the science part.

Craig: Yes, they’re both stopped me in my tracks. Then why is she saying, I’ll buy the next round if you know what I do? They lived together. They lived together. Anyway, this is trouble. The last line also, Francis goes to buy him another drink. As soon as Francis turns her back, Connor’s face falls. Is cheerfulness a performance? He’s barely holding it together.

John: I wasn’t reading as being cheerful.

Craig: Also, I don’t believe he’s– How do I know he’s– If he’s barely holding it together, this was a lot of talking. He seems quite activated and passionate about this topic. If you are barely holding it together, you’re probably listening more than talking because you’re barely holding it together. These are things to think about, Katie, but interesting stuff. There’s obviously a lot going on here, which I want to know more about.

John: Yes, we can know more. Tell us about the long line for this pilot.

Drew: A millennial fundraiser can’t accept her best friend’s alleged suicide, so she digs through his San Francisco apartment full of mysterious scientific instruments, dives headfirst into nostalgia for their wild 20s, and unravels a conspiracy that goes further into the past than she ever imagined.

John: All right, so she is the main character and he is going to be dead.

Craig: Well, guess what? In these three pages, they are screaming to me that he is the main character. The perspective is entirely his. Entirely his. She walks away, we stay with him. If she’s the main character, I think this needs to be reconsidered.

Megana: I also want his dialogue, like what you pointed out with the six miles off the GPS or whatever, I want his dialogue to be a bit wonkier and more esoteric in that case, like he’s more misunderstood.

Craig: If he’s barely hanging on and there’s like a maniac to what he’s saying, a little mad scientist-ness, I need to see her being like, are you on coke? What’s going on? She needs to notice. I think that something’s going on because while one can make the argument that people who have depression often present as normal, the problem when you’re dramatizing it is that it just seems like you cheated, that you didn’t give us anything of interest and then they kill themselves. They’re not around to say, oh, let me explain. That was all an act. You know what I mean?

John: One possibility here for Katie to consider is if it’s not just the two of them at the scene, but there’s a third person that like, so her showing off her friend’s ability to tell the– She just wants to show off his freakish ability to tell the Olsen twins apart, whereas he’s trying to communicate important stuff to this third person, could be really interesting and just gives someone a point of focus.

Craig: That’s a great idea. If I were writing this, I would have, yes, I would make it from her point of view. She’s trying to understand what he’s saying because what he’s saying is provocative. She’s like, I don’t, but how? How is time part of capitalism? Explain that. There’s this other friend who’s like, Mary Kate and he’s like, Ashley, and she’s like, just trust that he’s going to get them all right. It’s what he does. Go back to the thing about the– so she’s interested and she has a want and her want is to understand him. The other friend is doing Mary Kate and Ashley, which is interrupting and creating frustration with her. Then I would know it’s from her perspective.

Megana: Because this isn’t setting me up to like Francis very much.

John: No, it isn’t.

Craig: No, it’s setting me up to like Connor, and then he dies. Oh, no, he died.

John: Oh, no, he died. Our next script has an arguably protagonist on the spectrum as well.

Craig: Oh, fun.

John: Let’s talk through Sunset Paycheck by Holden Potter. Can you give us the synopsis, Drew?

Drew: Eric Bond, 27, is at a job interview. We see a balance superimposed, $2,743. The interviewer, Casey, asks him where he sees himself in 10 years and his greatest strengths and weaknesses. Eric gives a very confident answer. Later, Eric walks through a park with Jane, who asks him how the interview went. Jane is excited to hear that he got the job and the interviewer asked all the questions Jane had prepped him for. Eric Venmo’s Jane $10 and the balance goes down to $2,733. We learn that Jane works at Casey’s company and tells Eric all about his future coworkers. Eric asks Jane if she’s told the company they’re a couple.

John: Great. We officially have a trend, which is two scripts that open over black.

Craig: Over black, which is fine.

John: I think we need to find it and go ahead. Just like a Stewart special, it’s a Three Page Challenge that opens with a flash forward and it comes back in time. Let’s workshop a term for opening over black.

Craig: Well, it’s going to have to do with Drew. He’s the one thinking that.

John: It’s like a Drew noir.

Craig: The Drew darkness.

John: The Drew darkness.

Craig: This is a Drew darkness.

John: Just some Drew darkness. His voiceover is, where do I see myself in 10 years? We open in a pretty classic job interview. I’m not mad at it. It’s a familiar scene. I found myself in the last script where there were a lot of scene descriptions interrupting the dialogue flow that weren’t actually helping me out or telling me more about what was special about what I was seeing.

Megana: I think a lot of the action lines that were describing Eric’s character confused me more.

John: Yes. It happens to Casey as well. On page one, Casey is stunned and surprised. Really, you’re stunned in a job interview?

Craig: And surprised.

John: Both. As people who play Dungeons and Dragons, we know they’re incapacitated and paralyzed. There’s a very specific condition for a specific thing.

Craig: She has the stunned and surprised condition, which now they took away the surprised condition in 2024 rules, as you know, Drew, and I’ve talked about that at length on a different podcast. A great choice to do that. If they’re playing 2014 rules, stunned and surprised, Casey will not make it through this combat.

John: No. 100%. Here’s the thing that is unique to the script I do want to talk through.

Craig: Megana is so bored with us. [chuckles]

John: The fourth line down on the first page, text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, then fades slowly after. An interesting idea that they’re basically constantly showing his Venmo balance, but you’ve got to make that more clear of what we’re seeing because I had no idea what it was.

Craig: I thought the chair was worth $2,743. That’s what this is telling me. Text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, fades away slowly after. That’s after a sentence that says, “He adjusts his chair in an awkward motion slowly.”

John: My focus is on the chair, the actual object, and so I’m thinking, well, that dollar figure must have pertained to that chair. Also, his age was 27, and the text is 2743, so I kept thinking like, wait, are those numbers connected somehow? Is there a purpose here? I think it’s an interesting idea to show that we just got to set that up really cool and clearly from the beginning.

Megana: Just why not clarify that that’s his bank account?

Craig: Net worth.

John: Net worth.

Craig: You can even say his name, Eric Bond Net worth. I don’t know. What does fiddles with his lips mean? How do you do that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: What is that?

John: It was one of the things that was making me think from the start, like, oh, this could be like a spectrum-y thing here that we’re trying to– Because his dialogue choices felt a little spectrum-y, and so I wondered whether that was a physicality that we’re–

Craig: Well, it says, “Eric fiddles with his lips and takes a sip of the water cup in front of him.” Now, you don’t take a sip of a cup. Takes a sip of water from a cup. Also, this is like one of those ventriloquist gags where they drink milk and make the dummy talk. [laughter] How are you doing both of these at the same time?

John: We’re also missing a from. Eric sits across Casey Morgan. Again, this is your last look, so you’ve got to make sure that you don’t have stuff missing out of here.

Craig: He says, “Well, okay, where do I see myself in 10 years?” Well, that’s a great question. Then she says, “Take your time, dear.” Which is a very nice thing to say. Casey looks down at her notepad. Eric flutters and rolls his eyes. What an idiot. Why after take your time, dear? Super nice thing to say. Why is he rolling his eyes?

Megana: Rolling your eyes in an interview is so rude.

Craig: It’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to do, and it’s not even called for.

Megana: I also don’t really know what flutters means.

Craig: It’s like this. It’s a thing.

John: The fact that it stopped us to think, what does it actually mean? What is it doing? It’s the wrong line there. Cut it or find a better way to get that in there. I think you cut it and get more into the meat of it.

Craig: “Well, if hired in 10 years.” You want well, comma, if hired. Well, if hired is a strange phrase. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t have this job. I think it’s an interesting concept. It’s an interesting interview gambit. You probably want to- because I don’t have this job. What job? We don’t even know what the job is. It hasn’t been mentioned yet. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t be working here. Then Casey is not surprised.

Now, my biggest issue, Holden, is that we are forced to watch two people sitting across from each other talking, which is my favorite thing to write. I love two people sitting across from each other talking, but when two people are sitting across from each other talking, it must feel like an action sequence with dialogue and emotion, or in this case, one-upsmanship, lying, concealing, different wants, different–

John: Surprise, seduction.

Craig: It’s just rambles. He just talks. The point he makes, it takes forever to make it, and it’s not a particularly fascinating one.

Megana: Also, in that part that starts with, “If you look at my resume,” I don’t understand why, if this was a question he was expecting, he’s umming so much, and that’s written out in the dialogue. Then I think this is the last looks thing. If Holden would have read this out loud, he starts two sentences with now, and then he says grow and no. I think that’s just a little too rhymey and awkward for an actor to say.

John: That’s good advice.

Craig: Also, why would somebody in an office care why you left a job in a mini golf course? You worked in a mini golf course, because no one wanted to hire you for an office job. That’s fine. Or you love mini golf, but I don’t care why you left the mini. You left mini golf because it was mini golf. You’re getting minimum wage. Of course you left.

Megana: A bigger note that I had with these pages is that these questions are so basic, and they’re so generic that Eric being surprised about it or them betting on it was upsetting to me. I feel like if the questions were more specific, I’d learn more about Casey and just have more respect for how odd the situation is. Someone being surprised that you’re being asked your greatest strength at an interview was baffling to me, whereas–

Craig: Right, or where do I see myself in 10 years? This is the most–

Megana: I think you could just say something so much more interesting about corporate America or interviews by the questions you’re asked. At Google, I was asked so many times what my death row meal would be or what my walkout music would be. I think there’s something so bleak in those questions and how standard they are.

Craig: Something so horrible and pointless. I’m here to code stuff. Who cares? Who cares what I eat when I die? My walkout music? I don’t have any. I like coding. [laughter] Am I getting this job or not? We all know you’re not going to decide it based on my walkout music.

Megana: There’s something cutesy that you could do.

Craig: Now here’s one other thing that’s important. Jane makes a point of saying, I’m assuming she said, “Is that right?” Which is not a particularly–

John: Not memorable.

Craig: The biggest problem is on page 2, they chuckle. Not sure why. Casey looks down back at her notepad. Eric cringes and his posture sinks. I don’t know why, because she just chuckled and he said what he wanted. Then she says, “Okay, is that right?” Why is she saying that?

John: I don’t know. I don’t know the context.

Craig: It doesn’t follow from-

John: Big question mark with that.

Craig: -what she said, what her attitude is.

Megana: Then we come back to it, right?

Craig: Then Jane’s like, did she say it? Did she say the thing? Yes. I would have had him like, okay, is that right? I think that’s an interesting thing. If an interviewer suddenly asks a question that shouldn’t be asked because it doesn’t follow for you to be like, “Yes.” Then later like, yes. For no reason. It didn’t belong. That would be interesting to note.

John: To Megan’s point, if she asks a really weird question, then the recall on asking the really weird question makes sense.

Craig: It makes sense.

John: More last looks things here. On page 2, exterior Loose Park afternoon.

Craig: What’s a Loose Park?

John: I assume that’s a place.

Craig: The name of a park?

John: It reads here.

Craig: I think there is a park named Loose Park, and you don’t live in the US. It’s like a famous park in London, which I don’t think it is. You need to say the full name of it or just name it something else. Loose Park sounds odd.

John: The Loose Park here, Holden is using double dashes before the time of day, which is not common, but it doesn’t bug me. On the first one, there’s a space between the place and the hyphens, and now there’s not. Just be consistent.

Craig: Consistency. Check my list and see.

John: Here’s the description of Loose Park. Ducks in a pond. An older gentleman feeding the ducks. A woman walking her dog. A couple walking by the water. Have you ever been dealing with stress where you’re supposed to just look around the space and just identify the name things in the room? That’s what it felt like to me.

Craig: You have to repeat them to make sure you remember them. Yes, this does feel like a memory game. How about just an older gentleman, not an older gentlemen. There’s only one of him. That’s a mistake. An older gentleman feeds ducks in a pond as a couple strolls by. A woman walks her dog.

John: If you want to go with a couple walks by the water, Jane, you got it. Then it’s Eric and Jane.

Craig: If we know him, we don’t say a couple walks by and then cut to the couple, and it’s Eric. Reveal the couple as them. I can see them, because you just said a couple–

John: We have eyes.

Megana: Also, the office chatter and machines began to drown out the interview on the line before I felt like was unnecessary for cutting to a park.

Craig: Then suddenly it’s quiet. Yes. If it said, “As his anxiety rises,” but he’s done talking, so there’s nothing left for him to say. It says, “I don’t quit, no matter the obstacle–” Then he stops talking. The sound rises. What is the actor doing while that’s happening? Just uncomfortably run out of dialogue? This is one of those things where you have to just say, how do I do this? Holden, you are going to make this movie. I want you to make this movie. You’re going to go out with your iPhone and shoot it. Can you shoot some of these things the way you’re describing and go through that exercise? It’s important.

John: Last looks, page 3, both laugh. That laugh was capitalized for some reason. Not the whole word, just that the L was capitalized. Eric asks, ?Seriously though, am I going to like it there?” is a question. Yes.

Craig: Jane.

John: Who is Jane? Jane is 26.

Craig: This is what I know about her. 26. I know what shirt she’s wearing, which is not important. I know that when Eric says, “She did ask every single question you’d say she’d asked,” instead of every question you said she would ask, which is more, I guess, grammatically correct, Jane jumps up and down. I know that she is slightly insane, because she’s jumping up and down at the most mundane thing possible.

John: Let’s back up a sec here, because they came from someplace. They didn’t just start walking. Just now, we’re going to say that what–

Craig: What were they talking about before this? How is this possible? You’ve got to make this movie in your head. You’ve got to imagine it. Jane needs to be a character. There’s something off about these. They don’t feel like full people. Maybe they’re not. What if they’re AI robots?

John: Could be.

Megana: I wrote, seems like they don’t know each other.

John: They’re dating.

Craig: Or they’re AI robots.

John: Or they are.

Craig: Well, let’s find out.

John: Let’s find out. Well, actually, one last thing.

Craig: Sure.

John: Title page, all looks good, and the email address is there, but just also like the full mailing address. No one’s going to send you a postcard. I don’t think you need your mailing address there. Phone numbers, I wouldn’t put my phone number there. Just so you know, randos are going to call you.

Craig: It’s a fair point.

John: Tell us what’s actually happening in this full script here.

Craig: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.

John: A character is Anne Sheeran, who’s not been introduced yet, which is fine. It’s three pages in. I’d like that his declining balance is going to be a recurring thing throughout this. That makes sense. You set that up on page one. Great. I don’t know.

Megana: I think that number should be lower.

Craig: That’s not a horrible number.

John: For a 26-year-old, no.

Craig: No.

Megana: If he just got a job, I’m not that worried about him.

John: [unintelligible 01:00:55].

Craig: Maybe he didn’t get the job.

John: Maybe soon.

Craig: Can you read that again?

John: Yes.

Craig: I just want to hear it again.

John: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.

Craig: I’m not sure a movie about somebody learning to save time and money is going to be particularly interesting. I don’t feel like this character is just bursting with authenticity. More importantly, I’m not sure how to portray Anne Sheeran, the firefighter, in a way that posits that she is inauthentic and wants to be authentic. If you want to be authentic, just stop pretending and lying, I guess. I’m not sure how Kirk is going to help her with that. This may be trouble.

John: It may be trouble.

Craig: It may be trouble.

John: Holden, thank you for sending it through. Let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is Levelling Up by Sylvia-Anne Parker. I will say from the start here, it’s leveling with two Ls.

Craig: She’s British.

John: She’s British. I looked it up.

Craig: She’s British, and there’s so many Britishisms throughout. It was almost like I got a feeling she was like, no, seriously, I’m British. I am so British.

John: Story with me.

Craig: I trace back to the Saxons, like the early Saxons.

John: Those angles. I hate the angles.

Craig: I love the Saxons.

Megana: Putting a U everywhere.

John: Talk us through, if we were not reading the pages, what we would see.

Drew: After a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., the sound of choking takes us to a bathroom where a woman is being drowned by an unseen assailant. We then cut to that same woman. It’s Grace Tierney. She’s in her 50s, and she’s Black, waking up on a London tube from her nightmare. She grabs the arm of another passenger who pushes her away. Grace gets off at the next stop. We then cut to a tower block in Hackney where Jeannie, a 20-something white woman, discovers her heat isn’t working and brings her 60-something father a blanket.

In a podcast studio, Grace interviews Cameron Stonely, the minister of a new program called Levelling Up, aimed at reducing economic imbalances across the UK. When Grace presents him with numbers that prove a widening disparity, he tries to spin his way out of answering her questions. Grace’s boss and producer, Dennis, watches from the other side of the glass with a look of pain.

Craig: This is the opposite of true darkness. This is white

John: Okay, I’m white. A white screen.

Craig: This is true whiteness.

John: We’re opening with a nightmare image again, a thing we’ve seen before. This woman is being pushed underwater. Let’s talk about a woman, (Black), versus a Black woman.

Craig: It doesn’t bother me.

John: Doesn’t bother you?

Craig: No. What bothers me is that it’s a woman. I don’t know how old she is.

John: Ultimately, we’re supposed to be matching that up to Grace herself.

Craig: It would be good if you just put a 50-year-old woman just so I just know what I’m dealing with there, because it’s all about the imagery.

John: When we actually get to revealing her, it says, the woman Grace Tierney 50, which is just an awkward construction. I might try the woman– Grace Tierney 50– just to separate it off because- to make it clear this is the woman we just saw before.

Craig: A positively.

John: A positively.

Craig: A positively.

John: Good choice. Megan, what was your reaction to these pages?

Megana: I really enjoyed these pages. I liked this character. I am curious about what this nightmare she’s having in the middle of a pack tube is. I love a podcaster going after a minister. I’m excited about that. I just felt like things could be a little bit punchier, but I’m excited about the potential of this.

John: I am too. The idea of we see Grace. We don’t know her context, and then we see her in a podcast situation, feels right. My assumption is that we’re going to find that the tower block apartment and the heat not working is related to levelling up as a program.

Craig: I hope so.

John: I hope so. I had to reach to get myself there because I felt like, why am I seeing this here now, and why am I not continuing to see Grace throughout this?

Megana: It felt unnatural for that. If I’m watching her on the tube going to work to then cut to this woman, Jeannie, and I also just felt like that scene with Jeannie could be more dramatic.

John: There’s no dialogue in the scene. We can’t tell if this may be a postcard image, because there’s no actual real action happening in them. You’re looking at this stuff, and you’re not sure why we’re here. We’re seeing a tower block, literally just an image, and then we’re inside that apartment and just seeing an old woman. There’s no dialogue. No scene actually happens.

Craig: That just doesn’t work. You can’t do it, really. What’s going to happen is you’ll cut it out. If you want to be there, there needs to be at least one line of dialogue or something to say, “I understand why I’m here.” If there’s not a line of dialogue for us to push past the dad through the window and see Grace walking to work or something just to connect it somehow, otherwise, just this floating scene that could go anywhere just doesn’t fit.

I want to talk about the very beginning. In the very beginning, there’s this stylistic choice to start with a white screen and then the sound of typing and then see text typed onto the screen. It’s this visualized act of typing a sentence. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized- now it’s a quote from an American, so I don’t know, maybe I would put a Z there, but whatever, realized that we were the victims. The typing stops, resumes, of a broken promise, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a really cool quote, and it’s a really cool moment where it pauses.

My issue is we go from that, which is this stylized thing, to another very stylized thing. It’s like I started with two desserts, and I feel like you can do one dessert. I’m not sure you can do both of these things. It’s such a great image to start with somebody drowning. That’s, whoa, I’m in it. That’s exciting. I would argue that maybe that’s the way to go here. The quote is really cool, but I would sacrifice it.

John: Let’s imagine the opposite of the case where we keep the quote and then just come to Grace on the tube.

Craig: You could do that.

John: What resonates for me about that is it’s just like, oh, how does that tie into this? I’m curious how that ties into this next thing.

Craig: You wouldn’t be able to have her waking up out of a nightmare, I don’t think.

John: No.

Craig: Let’s talk about waking up out of a nightmare, which is something that happens all the time to us in life, and it happens all the time to characters on screen. It’s just that it happens very differently to those of us in life than on screen. When you wake up from a nightmare, your eyes open, that’s pretty much it. That’s how I do it. Here, it’s really tricky, because we show her with her mouth wide open, which is meant to match her drowning, I guess. Then she sits up in her seat with a start, breathing heavily from the nightmare. Without looking, she grabs hold of the arm of the male passenger, Black, 30s, in the seat next to her and yells, “Marcus.”

The passenger roughly pushes her away because he’s not Marcus. Then she realizes, I don’t believe that at all.

John: I don’t believe it.

Craig: She wakes up and immediately knows she’s in the tube, by the way. She’s on a train. She reaches without a no-look reach to her right, yells somebody’s name as if she needs that person without looking at them. No.

Megana: As a nightmare queen, I have startled awake and grabbed the person next to me on a flight, but my eyes aren’t open yet.

John: That’s a crucial difference.

Craig: Have you woken up? You see what I’m saying? You’re not there yet.

John: You grab the person and then you wake up. I believe that.

Craig: If your eyes are closed and you grab the person next to you, in my mind, you could be grabbing them in front of you or turning to them and staring in their face. It could be anything, but the no-look grab and the no-look name while the eyes are open, is not a realistic thing, nor is it necessary. I know she wants us to know that Grace had somebody named Marcus who was important to her, a husband, a son, a boyfriend. We don’t know. There are other ways to get that.

Megana: Just before that also, we cut from this image of the water going into her mouth, and then she says, fast cut to a packed carriage. I would prefer a fast cut to mouth wide open, and then we get the packed carriage later.

Craig: Absolutely. If you’re going to cut to her, you’re going to cut to her. You’re not going to cut to a wide shot of a train and then cut to her. You have to think about how would I actually edit this? I want to talk a little bit about the interview, because there was something about it. First of all, when somebody has a disturbing experience, if they are then the next thing we really see is them doing their job, it feels like there needs to be a moment where we’re with that person and understanding that they’re taking a breath, having a drink of water. Flushing that out of their system, and then focusing in.

It says, “Grace dons headphones, ready for work. Grace is dedicated to her job. She’s damn good at it, and she knows it.” Which, by the way, I hate. I’m just going to say it. I hate she’s damn good, and she knows it. I don’t know that she’s damn good, and I don’t know that she knows it. If she’s damn good, why does she need to know it? That just feels overconfident. Kind of an annoying characteristic. I’d rather other people tell her she’s good at it. The most important thing is I would prefer a moment here where Grace dons headphones. She’s not ready for work. She just had a nightmare about drowning.

Take a breath here. Have somebody say, okay. She’s like, “Absolutely.” Then it’s gone. Then the red light comes on, or she’s not okay, and then the red light comes on, and she changes, because she’s– Last thing, we are in East London, which is one of the poorer areas of London. It’s where a lot of these council housing, and they call it quick-build, multi-occupational housing, ugly blot on the landscape. There is this prior scene that we’re discussing where there was somebody trying to warm up her father, a flat tower block, Hackney, London, so East London.

Then she interviews this guy, and the point that she makes is hospital waiting lists currently stand at 7.46 million cases in the north of the country, as opposed to 4.27 million in the south, highlighting the north-south divide. London is in the southern part of England. Why is her point here that the northern– By the way, the northern part of England does get the shaft relative to this big city in certain cases, but that doesn’t seem to be what we’re talking about here. Why are we spending so much time in East London, but then worrying about the folks up in, I don’t know, Yorkshire or Newcastle?

John: I want to talk about the actual flow on the page of this, because reading through it a second time, you realize like, oh, it’s meant to be that she’s just talking over him, but it’s not clear on the page that she’s talking over, because right now we’re seeing Cameron suddenly, it’s all dot, dot, dot to connect through the things. Visually on the page, it looks like they’re each taking their turn, and that’s not the intention here. I think this is a case where you do need some smart dual dialogue to show that this is simultaneously happening.

Craig: I think you could do this in this dual dialogue, and whenever I can avoid it, I do, but there is a way to do– Well, first of all, Cameron Stonely is just talking. He’s doing this thing regardless of what she says. I think ending each line of dialogue with dash, dash would be better than dot, dot. Dot, dot is a trail off. Dash, dahs is on cutoff, and then just a simple Grace parentheses cutting him off. How do the figures differ? Cameron Stonely rolling ahead. This government is doing, and then you understand that she’s going to keep cutting him off, and he’s going to keep rolling ahead. This looks a little bit like a page of Morse code because of the amount of dot, dot, dots.

John: I think the intention here is that she’s not backing down. She keeps going, but she’s also not letting him ever attempt to answer the question. I want to make sure that as an audience, we see that she is both listening and pushing through.

Craig: That’s where I think this could be broken up a touch with single lines of Grace lets him go on for another second, then enough already or whatever, so that we’re with her. We end with her saying, “Are you simply lying your way out of answering the question?” That is not necessarily a more aggressive line than, “Are you able to back up your claim with concrete evidence? Please answer the question.” Stonely’s stream of spin is brought to an abrupt halt. This guy is pretty good at just ignoring what you’re saying, and I’m not sure why that would bring him to a halt.

Through the glass, into the control room, comma, we would want there, Grace’s boss, producer Dennis Reardon, 35 white, old head on youngest shoulders. What are youngest shoulders? What is an old head? You mean older than he looks or looks older than he is?

John: I think it’s his experience. It’s like why he’s beyond his years.

Craig: Maybe that’s a British expression.

John: Oh, it could be.

Craig: It might be a British expression. Old head on your shoulders. Looks on with a pained expression. Why is he pained?
John: Good question, because we don’t know. Is Grace being too aggressive? What’s going wrong here?

Megana: To Craig’s point about the line of she’s good at her job and she knows it, I want to see how she’s good at her job in this versus that line.

Craig: I think that she doesn’t take any crap, and she really wants these people to answer, but if this is who she is, and this is how her podcast works, why is Cameron Stonely going on it? If this is what she does, why does Dennis Reardon suddenly seem pained as if to say, “Oh, no, she’s doing it again.” This is what she does. If she were doing the normal, okay, interesting, and then just something snaps and she just does something really aggressive and then he’s pained.

John: We’d have to see what normal is before- because we have no–

Craig: She just jumps right in. I’m not sure why he’s pained here. It would be good if we saw him earlier, not pained, and then she says something, and then he reacts so I know what it was.

John: Well, to your point, if he’s the producer asking, “You’re good?” She’s like, “Yes, you’re good.” Just establishing him earlier could help a lot. Title page looks great. A date on there would be helpful just so we can see when this is from. It’s not essential.

Craig: This is an interesting choice. Capitalized her name. You normally don’t, but-

Megana: I like it.

Craig: -I think it’s like, “Hey, I’m Sylvia-Anne Parker.”

John: You’re going to pay attention.

Craig: You’re going to pay goddamn attention to me. I want to find out what this is.

John: Oh, please, yes.

Craig: When a campaigning journalist confronts a government department over its socioeconomic policy, she discovers that the ministers in the department are the target of a serial killer.

John: Wow, a serial killer was not something I was expecting.

Craig: I wasn’t expecting that based on I thought maybe a supernatural thing possibly was going on.

John: I would say that the drowning thing does not feel connected to that premise that I was just given.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: I thought it was going to be more of like a get out experience of drowning. I didn’t think there was going to be actual physical violence.

Craig: This is an interesting choice. This is a movie that is criticizing the government for failing to achieve their promises of leveling people up and helping them economically, but the serial killer is going after those people. I have to stop the serial killer from killing these ineffective government people.

John: We’ll have to read the description to know what’s happening.

Craig: I’m sort of rooting for the serial killer. Not really, but I’m not like, “Oh, no.” That’s an interesting choice.

John: We want to thank these three writers for sending in their pages and everyone else who sent in their pages. Drew gets hundreds of these. If you want to send in your pages, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form you read through. You click the button. You attach your PDF, and we look through them all. If you want to read through these pages with us, remember that they’re in the show notes. Just click the links there, and you’ll get the chance to look at those PDFs.

Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a blog post by Hollis Robbins. The title of it is How to Tell If Something is AI-Written. I try never to use the word writing with AI, so AI-Generated. Hollis makes really good points that for us, for humans, language represents a signifier, so a word like a tree, along with a signifier, the actual real or imagined tree. Because we exist in the world and have concrete examples of things around us, we’re talking about those concrete things, versus LLMs don’t have any of that. They just can generate a string of patterns that match to other language that they see, but they don’t actually know what things really are.

If you’re reading it through text and you’re wondering, did an AI do this? Is this real or something? Some tests you might try to do. If you can’t see anything, nothing springs to mind, it’s more likely going to be AI. All these tests are also, it could also just be bad writing, but good writing will tend to have concrete things that evoke an image in your head. If you look for a naturally perfect balance where every point has a counterpoint, where every advantage has a corresponding challenge mentioned there, so they’re always balancing the pro, the con.

Craig: They’re both sidesy.

John: They’re both sidesy. In the absence of concrete details, they’re not giving an example of an actual, real person or actual thing in the world, but it’s a hypothetical, because they don’t actually have a reference to a thing. AI can be good at persuasion, because it has learned a bunch of rhetorical patterns without having to believe the actual argument underneath it. I think the converse of this is looking at, well, how do you write things well? It’s something we talk about so often in screenwriting. It’s like you’re creating a visual for the reader, so the reader sees something in their head as they’re doing that. That’s what we talk about in these three-phase challenges. It’s what we talk about every week.

It’s how are you evoking the experience of sitting in a place, hearing the sound, feeling things? That’s why we say we, because we are putting ourselves into these things.

Craig: Never say we, John. I saw that on Reddit.

John: Absolutely. Two examples that Hollis makes is of things that create a visual. Instead of apologizing, she brought donuts. I get that. I feel the donuts. I see that. I understand what you’re saying. His idea of teamwork was to circle my title and draw a sad face. Again, you’ve created a visual. You’ve created a moment. I believe that in a way. I just think the lesson here is just make sure you’re not detecting AI stuff, but also just don’t write like an AI.

Craig: Don’t sound like AI. It’s funny. As you were talking, I never considered this before. Do they still do standardized tests for college?

John: They still do. [crosstalk]

Craig: The SAT section where you would read some sort of three-paragraph narrative about some historical event, and then you have to answer questions about it.

John: It was boring writing.

Craig: That was basically early human AI. Just a blunt, featureless, both sidesy, just unflavored oatmeal writing.

John: It really is.

Craig: AI certainly does that well.

John: I just had some really good observations in there, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Megan, what do you have to share with us?

Megana: My one cool thing, does it still count? I haven’t done this thing yet, but I’m going to do it.

John: You absolutely could aspire to a thing.

Megana: I am going to the Pageant of the Masters tomorrow. Have you guys heard of this?

Craig: Of course.

John: I’ve been to the Pageant of Masters.

Megana: You have?

John: I went last year, and I’m so excited for you.

Craig: I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been to it.

John: Do describe it.

Megana: You are also welcome to describe it, because you actually know. I’m going tomorrow. It is this festival in Laguna Beach. They’ve been doing it for the last 90-something years. It is a living art show. Have you seen the rest of development?

Craig: Of course.

John: There’s an episode where the Bluth family does the equivalent thing where they all dress up and recreate a work of art, a painting, but they’re there in person and filling the roles.

Megana: It’s a fantastic scene. It’s one of my favorite episodes. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that this was a real festival that they were referencing. Tomorrow, I will go down to Laguna Beach, take the trolley from downtown, which I’m so excited about. I think there’s something like 50 artworks that they recreate.

John: What is the theme this year?

Megana: It’s Road Trip in California or California Masters. It’s all paintings that are in different California museums. It ends with Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

John: Oh, yes. I think it always ends with it. I think it was a comment.

Megana: Oh, does it? Because I was like, I don’t know that that is in any California museum.

John: That’s not in California.

Craig: Oh, no, that happened in California, Jesus. According to the Mormons, I think it happened in Missouri.

Megana: There’s apparently music and narration, but please tell me, John.

John: It really is remarkable. It’s a thing that everyone in Southern California should at least go to once. The year we went, fashion was the theme. It was fashion throughout the ages. The curtains close. The curtains open. A work of art is there, giant-scale work of art, but with actual actors in there who are painted to look like the thing. It’s a wardrobe, but it’s also makeup. You don’t believe that it’s actually human beings doing it. The changes between them are so quick. How did they possibly do that?

Craig: Do they have two stages in the alternate?

John: No.

Craig: They have people waiting to run in.

Megana: They have thousands of volunteers.

John: It’s a huge thing that happens. There’s some stuff off of this.

Craig: Is the audience just a mass of people with their iPhones out taking pictures constantly?

John: Oh, you’re not supposed to take pictures.

Craig: Oh, thank you, Pageant of the Masters. I can’t stand it. Just watch the thing. I told you I went to go see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. I think it was awesome. It was fantastic. So many phones out. I’m like, just live the moment. Be in the moment. Then grab a video from one of the 14 million people that took a video.

John: I’m so looking forward to your report on what you think, because it was really great. The narration was really well written. All the music stuck together, which was great. Tickets are expensive, but–

Craig: Sounds like they would have to be for all those volunteers. Wait, volunteers?

John: Volunteers, but also other people. Everyone I think you see on stage is a volunteer, but the staffing behind everything else is incredible. There’s a whole orchestra.

Craig: Oh my goodness. I assume it’s a nonprofit venture.

John: It must run it all. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Well, this is a repeat, but I try and do it every year at this time, because as we record this, we are two days away from what David Kwong and I refer to as Helpenmas. This is our friend Mark Helpen’s puzzle Labor Day extravaganza. David Kwong has flown in. We will be solving together over the course of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. That’s usually when we finish. Our goal is to finish on Sunday. We never do. We’re usually top 20. By the time you hear this, we will have solved it, because it’s a Tuesday. However, not too late for you to jump on this. It is free. If you just Google Mark Helpen puzzles, it’ll take you to his puzzle page where all of the Labor Day extravaganzas are listed.

Fair warning, it is hard. It is not what I would call extremely hard, because I’m not good enough to do extremely hard. There are some MIT puzzle hunt stuff that are just extremely hard. This is hard, but so beautifully crafted from a puzzle construction point of view, so elegant, so much attention to detail. There’s always a theme and he writes beautifully. There’s always beautiful flavor text leading into the puzzles. There’s a tip jar where you should leave a tip. That is always my one cool thing as we approach the Labor Day weekend.

John: I’m going to repeat one of my other one cool things, which is to get your flu shot. Flu shots are now available. The flu sucks. Don’t get the flu. Get the flu shot.

Craig: I was talking to my doctor, one of my doctors, because I’m a middle-aged Jew. I’ve got like 100 of them now. She said her thing was to wait until the end of September to get the flu and COVID booster because you get about three to four months before the vaccine doesn’t quite have the same potency. The flu and COVID will probably peak around December, January. That was her.

John: I love that she still believes that we’ll have flu shots.

Craig: She told me that the flu shots were locked in in terms of the strain and the production of them before the brilliant Trump administration decided that we don’t need to be healthy as part of their Make America Healthy Again thing.

John: I just believe that tomorrow they could come down and say, “Oh, no, we’re banning flu shots.”

Craig: I don’t think they’re going to ban flu shots. The bigger issue is next season, they will not provide the flu shot makers with their evidence for which strain will be predominant.

John: We’re getting way off topic. Even this last time, they did not convene the meeting that they were supposed to do. The manufacturers just had to figure it out themselves.

Craig: They did for this time, but next time is in question. I am the most pro-vaccine person on the planet. Maybe you’re right there tied with me. Megana, as we know, anti-vaxxer.

John: Stipulating that is not correct.

Megana: I love vaccines. Give me as many as you can.

Craig: Give me as many as you- I love a vaccine. I’ve always loved a vaccine. They now have, I think, their first measles death in Mississippi. Pointless measles death. Pointless. Heavy sigh. Anyway, Labor Day puzzle extravaganza, everybody.

John: That is our show for this week. Script notes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer many weeks. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. If you’re following us there, you may see more stuff from our show in the weeks and months ahead.

You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today, including the PDFs for the three-day challenges. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all these premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have new chairs in this office because of our premium subscribers. Thank you.

Craig: That’s why I’m sitting on this nice chair?

John: Yes.

Craig: Thank you, premium subscribers.

John: You can sign up to become our premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Film Scores. Megana Rao, thank you for coming back on the show.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Craig [unintelligible 01:28:23] question. Thank you, Megana.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Coming off of that outro music, let’s talk about more music. Jenny wrote in with a question.

Drew: From your perspective, what should a score aim to accomplish in a film or show? What sets a good scores apart from great ones? To what extent are you working with composers to capture texture or tone that you’re imagining versus leaving it in their expert hands? What are your thoughts on temp tracks? Are they a helpful tool or a creative hindrance?

John: Last week, we went to see John Williams’ show at the Hollywood Bowl, which is always great. One of the pieces was introduced as Adagio with motorcycles. Basically, John Williams had written this brilliant, clever piece of music, and then you basically can’t hear the music at all because there’s just motorcycle sounds over the whole thing, which raises the question like, oh, did he need to write that clever piece of Adagio music? The music’s great. Music is essential.

I love music in the movies I watch and the TV shows I watch, but there’s two very different patterns I notice. One is the music is there to support and it’s there so that there’s not silence. There’s a thing. It’s just filling some space. Then there’s the music that’s like, pay attention to this music. I’m thinking Blade Runner 2049. It just starts big and loud. The music is always a big part of what’s going to happen here.

Craig: There are so many different ways to explore how this works. To me, scoring is like writing again. It’s another chance to write. To answer, I guess, the last question, how important is temp music? Incredibly important, because when you’re editing, you know you’re going to need score in certain areas. You want it, and you want to make sure it’s working, and you want to be able to create something that feels like it’s being supported by the structure that music creates.

I think of scoring in two ways. There’s scoring that is connected to and consistent with what is happening on screen, and then there’s scoring that I just refer to as underscoring, which is scoring that punctuates or emphasizes what’s on screen. Somebody says something dramatic and the music goes, [mimics] that’s underscoring, which I tend to avoid, but some things it works great for. There’s also what I call, “Funny music,” which is never funny. It’s music for comedies, and it always sounds something like this. [mimics] I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It destroys everything in its path.

Scoring is essential. It’s an essential part of the process for me, whether it was Hildur Gundadottir on Chernobyl or Gustavo Santaolalla on The Last of Us and David Fleming on The Last of Us, we do a session where we just talk through scenes, and then we let them do what they do, and then it comes back. I listen, and they send it connected to the scene, and I watch it. I listen, and then I give my thoughts. They’re always how it made me feel. I didn’t want to feel like that, or, oh, you’re making me feel like this, but I actually want to feel like this, and it’s all about the language of feeling. It’s exhaustive and exhausting and leads to some of the most beautiful stuff imaginable. I love score. I love it.

John: It reminds me of costume design. There’s some projects in which you want to notice what people are wearing. It has to stand out. It’s a big part of it, and there’s other ones where it’s just like everyone should plausibly be wearing what they would be wearing in real life. I don’t want to pay attention to those things. Music can work the same way where there’s times where it’s just supporting. You’re not really paying a lot of attention to it. Then there’s The White Lotus where it’s just like this whole scene is just this wild, crazy music, and that’s part of the delirious joy of that show.

Craig: Completely. There’s music that is more sound design than music. In Chernobyl, I think the first music we hear is when Legasov walks outside. He makes his little recording, and then he walks outside to go hide the audio tape and the scores. [mimics] That’s it.

John: The Hans Zimmer race. Something has happened there, yes.

Craig: It’s Hildur Gundadottir on a cello that has been distorted and lowered and all sorts of cool stuff, but it’s not melodic. I’m not even sure how you would notate it. It is sound design. Sound design and score often blend. With particular composers now, when you look at stuff like, for instance, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that line between sound design and score, again, can get a little blurry, which is fun. Which I love.

John: Now, if we had the comedy music underneath, like Tron: Ares, that would be amazing. [mimics]

Craig: Brutal.

Megana: I was going to ask, since both of you have directed, and Drew is directing your first short.

Drew: Not first but a short.

Megana: A short this week. What questions are you asking yourselves when you’re meeting with your sound designer, your composer? What vision do you have going into it?

John: You have to speak to references. You can talk about your script, obviously, like what you’re feeling here, but you’re going to have to use metaphors. Working with Alex Wurman on the music for The Nines, we had to come up with the main theme before the frame was shot, because Ryan Reynolds plays it on the piano. We had to figure out what is that longing theme? What does it sound like? We know it’s going to be on a piano, so it has to make sense on a piano. How are we going to do that? [mimics] Figuring out what that was, was a very early part of the process.

That’s unusual. In most cases, you’re giving a sense of the overall space for something, and you’re probably casting that composer based on their previous work. You’re using their previous work to temp score it.

Craig: Absolutely. You don’t want to be talking to composers that have no evidence that they can do something like what you’re doing, but you, of course, don’t want them duplicating anything they’ve done. You just want to know you’re generally what I’m looking for. Then I think one of the things that helps is to say, “Look, here’s what I don’t want. Here’s what I don’t like. Then here’s what I am looking for and what I do like.” Then you just vibe it out. They should ideally read the script and have thoughts, but I will say some composers work very differently and achieve brilliant results.

The aforementioned Gustavo Santaolalla, Gustavo likes to score without looking at what’s on screen. He just knows, okay, this is what the scene is about. This is what the feeling is and the emotions are. I’m not going to watch the scene. I’m just going to write a piece of music. Let’s see if it fits. A lot of times it does. You make adjustments here and there, but that is specific to him. Look at process. I think when you talk to him, look at their prior work. Talk about process. Talk about your goals and your aims, and talk about the things you don’t want, and then pray, because God’s honest truth is you don’t know until you start getting stuff back from them. You just don’t.

John: You’ll hear stuff. Are you ever hearing music independent of picture? Are you sending your tracks and then you have to–

Craig: I never listen to music independent of picture. What I ask for is music when they send it to me– Scott Hanau, one of our music supervisors, is amazing this way, because he coordinates all of this. What I used to get back was the standard thing, which is here’s the scene. Here’s the cue. We’ve cranked the cue up to 11, and the scene is down to a 2, so that you can hear the music. My problem is that’s not how anyone’s going to hear this music. What I ask them is to also send me a version. Much like Scott, just do a basic shot in the dark mix here, so I generally know how this will sit. If I can’t hear a moment properly, I’ll go to the other one. I want to see how it sits.

John: Sometimes you have the luxury, just like you’re writing for an actor, you know in advance who the composers are going to be. The movies I’ve done with Danny Elfman doing the music, I have a sense of the world of his music and it’s just so helpful. I know, okay, I’m actually planning out for some space where we can get the– If I bring that in there, that’s going to be great. The opening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I knew I could really hear what the opening title sequence was going to be like, which is we’re in the factory assembling the chocolate bars and all that stuff. I could hear it even before he’d written a note of it.

Craig: That’s the joy of working with an established composer, because you know– I remember when I was reading the script for Dune, I don’t know if John Spitzer at the center or Eric Roth, but I think it was probably Denis. I think it’s when we maybe first see the worms, he wrote, in all caps, full Zimmer power. You know, okay, I know it’s full Zimmer power. It’s full Zimmer power is like [mimics].

John: You’re going to feel this in you.

Craig: It’s just like a thousand horns at the same time. When you’re starting out, and you’re talking to people that are also starting out, it’s a little tricky. You just got to vibe it out. If you have some temp pieces that are in the world, you can make a little mix tape of like, here’s the world that I’m thinking about.

John: The other thing that’s helpful, if you’re starting out and you’re making a lower budgeted film, you’ll have a conversation with your composer about like, what can we actually afford in terms of real instruments? My initial conversations with Alex Wurman were about like, well, piano, and he’s like, accordion. Hear me out because accordion can actually sound like a lot. It’s a much bigger sound than the one player would ultimately give you. It’s like, yes, you can digitally do a bunch of stuff, but we wanted some real things in there. Piano, accordion, harp actually gives you a lot of things, and then we can figure out, okay, what are the wins that are actually important and what are not important?

Craig: This is an ongoing battle. It’s been an issue also on Broadway as well where they have very strong unions that are protecting real players. The golden days of going to see John Williams and the LA Philharmonic doing the score for you and watching it live are slowly diminishing or rapidly diminishing, because you can create very accurate sounds with synthesizers and samplers. For what we do, maybe some of the bigger action cues rely on that for budget. I stay out of that discussion. I’m really just listening.

Happily, for Chernobyl and for a lot of stuff on The Last of Us, it really comes down to a person doing weird stuff in a room with Cellos. Gustavo loves a plastic tube. He loves a PVC pipe and his Ron Rocco, which is this very specific South American stringed instrument. I’m always just making sure it doesn’t sound synthy, because bad synthy sounds synthy unless that’s what you want, and then it’s great.

John: Going back to my wonderful thing in terms of when things feel artificial, you feel like there’s nothing really there. We do have a sense that there was an instrument. There’s something underneath that thing. It’s not just a waveform. It really was something that created that sound. Thanks for the question. Thank you, guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

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