The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 704 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you construct and communicate the geography for where your story is taking place, and how does that translate onto the screen? We’ll look at examples from our own work and others. Then we answer listener emails on a plethora of topics, from imposter syndrome to revisions to disappearing agents. To help us do all this, welcome back returning champion, Liz Hannah.
Liz Hannah: Wooo.
John: Oh my gosh, Liz, it’s so nice to have you here.
Liz: Thank you. Do I get a T-shirt? I feel like a five-timers club or something T-shirt is necessary.
John: Absolutely. We’re getting the robes made. It’s going to be so good.
Liz: Merch. Get me with the merch.
John: Hey, Liz, how do you talk about yourself as a writer? Are you a feature writer or a TV writer at this point? You have several amazing feature credits, but the most recent two things I associate you with are limited series. Are you feature land, TV land? What do you think about yourself as?
Liz: I often just say writer, and then if anybody asks, I’d say feature and television. I definitely avoid defining myself in any way. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. I feel bifurcated in my brain. I don’t feel one way or the other.
John: When you talk to your team, to your agents, and I assume you have a manager as well, what is the split in terms of the projects you’re pursuing? How are you talking to them about bring me these things, reach out with these things?
Liz: What I look for in features is much smaller now in terms of what I feel like I want to do that I haven’t done. I haven’t done a big four-quadrant movie. I’ve done rewrites on them, but I’ve never originated one. That’s a bucket list type of– at least for me, my favorite movie growing up and the movie that made me want to be a writer is Raiders. Wanting to do something like that is always in there. I’ve always flirted with it and never found the right one. That’s always one.
Then it really is, for me, filmmaker, team-based. That could be director, that could be producer, that could be whomever is involved that’s originating it. That is, I’m very now experience-based and I want to have a good experience. I don’t want to work with people that will make it not good. That is really how I– I talk about it really much more, I think, holistically in that way.
I’m also focused on directing now in features that I’m generating a lot of that material myself. By a lot, I mean slowly over the course of many years, there will be potentially one.
It’s a much more, I think, organic conversation of just, “Where do we want to go? What are we looking for?” and then also having the ability to be flexible. If a filmmaker comes up that I really like, that I have a relationship with, that I want to work with, then it goes there.
John: I changed reps about a year ago, a year-and-a-half ago. Time is a void into which all reason disappears.
Liz: I was at the chiropractor the other day and I was like, “I can’t believe it’s September 8th.” She was like, “It’s September 9th.” I was like, “Great.”
John: Great, love it. As I was changing reps, I had to make a list of these are the things I want to do, these are my priorities. I’ve mostly stuck to that. It’s interesting because I think people perceive me as just a features guy because all my credits are features for the last 20 years. The money I’ve actually been making and the things I’ve been doing have actually been on the episodic side. It’s just that there’s no visible evidence of that yet. I say that I’m mostly a features person, but that’s actually not entirely true given what I’ve been doing.
Liz: I think it’s interesting because pre-strike and post-strike, my business has mostly been in television. That’s where I’ve definitely had the most consistency. Also, post-strike, it’s so hard to make anything, that it is one of those things that, like, I swear I’ve been working for three years.
John: Yes, same here. We’ll get into some of that. Also, in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss how we talk to our kids, other people’s kids, about what it is that we actually do for a living. There’s so many jobs which is like, “I’m a police officer, I’m a firefighter, I’m a baker,” where it’s just really clear versus what we do is, like, “I write things, but not things you can read, not books.” We’ll just talk about age-appropriate ways to talk to kids about what it is that we do for a living, be it features, or TV, or some murky middle that we can’t quite even articulate to ourselves.
Liz: Love it.
John: Love it. We have some news. The Scriptnotes book, which I don’t know if you’ve seen the Scriptnotes book. This is the galley-
Liz: So exciting. Love it.
John: -of the Scriptnotes book. We got our first review. This is in Booklist, which is a trade publication, which is one of the first people to put out reviews of things because it helps signal to booksellers, “Oh, this is a book you want to check out. We got a great review.” We’ll be able to link to the real one in October, but we got the advance of it. The last sentence in the review is, “Bound to be a staple, this guy, just like the podcast, is accessible, engaging, and informative,” which is nice. Also, they tagged us for young adult, which means that we could also be on the list for younger people to read it. We were pretty careful with the language in it so that it actually feels good for anyone 13 and up to be able to read this book.
Liz: Love it. I’m so excited to read it.
John: Yes, excited to send it to you. Reminder that the book is available for pre-order everywhere you buy books. You can just go to scriptnotesbook.com and see where it is in your market, UK, Australia, US. If you’re in another country overseas, wherever you buy English books, they’ll probably have it. Just check there. If you do pre-order it, send your receipt to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll be emailing you something very cool very soon. Send that through.
Drew has a very long list of people who’ve sent through those pre-orders, so it’s exciting. Liz Hannah, do you do Connections on New York Times?
Liz: I do. I do Connections.
John: We were talking about it two weeks ago, and we were commenting on how much we loved it and how great Wyna Liu is. I mispronounced her name as Wyna Liu, and I know that because she actually wrote us in. She wrote back to us and said that she’d listened to the episode in which we mentioned her. Drew, what did she say?
Drew Marquardt: Hi, John and Craig. Thanks so much for the shout-out in your Connections episode. It was so kind of you, and I’m thrilled you liked the game. It was my first time hearing your show, and I really enjoyed it. Glad to have something new in the rotation. Hope you’re doing well.
John: We’re doing very well to know that Wyna Liu is listening to Scriptnotes. Hi, Wyna, and thank you. Sorry I mispronounced your name. We’ll pronounce it right from now on because we’re probably going to mention it a lot because we love Connections so much.
Liz: It’s the best.
John: It’s the best. Liz Hannah, have you ever worked on Bob: The Musical?
Liz: I have not.
John: Did you know about Bob: The Musical?
Liz: I didn’t until this morning.
John: Bob: The Musical is a very long development project at Disney. I’ve worked on it. Craig, I think, didn’t work on it, but knew of it. Everyone in town has worked on it. It must have millions of dollars worth of scripts against it. There’s finally a director announced for it. Randy Mancuso is set to helm Disney’s long-awaited Bob: The Musical. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Deadline article. Just a thing to track. It would be just a nice thing to tick off that, “Oh, this thing actually happened.” It’s sort of, “How would this be a movie that’s actually been in development for forever?”
Liz: Is it good, is always a question.
John: I hope it’s fantastic.
Liz: I hope so.
John: You know the premise of it, right?
Liz: I do. I read the premise. I was like, “This is great.”
John: That’s a great idea for a movie. That’s why it’s been in development for forever.
Liz: Totally.
John: Also, you’ve got to hit it just right and moves change. Within the concept of a man who hates musical wakes up in a musical, there’s a lot of ways to go with that. I’m sure the drafts have gone through all these things. I have no recollection of all of what I wrote on that script. [laughter] Liz Hannah, have you seen Showgirls?
Liz: I have.
John: What is your impression of Showgirls? When did you see it? How did it land for you?
Liz: I saw it probably when I was younger at a sleepover or something like that, and then actually saw it in college. Then watched it again as an adult probably not that long ago, like 10 years ago or something like that. My impression is that it only got better with every rewatch as I aged into it. The appreciation I have of it and what it did at the time and what it was trying to do only grows. I’m happy for it– I saw it played at Vidiots recently or is going to play at Vidiots, and I’m happy for its renaissance.
John: I saw it screening over at the Academy as part of their summer camp series. It is an incredibly enjoyable movie until it gets to a horrifying rate that completely ruins your ability to laugh at and with the movie, completely falls apart. We were talking a few episodes ago about Joe Eszterhas and his career as a screenwriter and just all the things he wrote. Craig was saying, “Oh, we should have him on.” Several people wrote in to say that Joe Eszterhas actually has three to four autobiographies. Can you imagine writing one autobiography, much less three or four autobiographies, Liz Hannah?
Liz: He has three or four autobiographies that he wrote about himself.
John: About himself.
Liz: He didn’t ghostwrite other people’s autobiographies.
John: No, they’re his.
Liz: I would only be so lucky to live a life where I could write three to four biographies. I feel like, “Could you write one?”
John: Here’s how he did it. The first one is Hollywood Animal. That’s 2004, which my Amazon purchases shows that I must have bought at some point. I don’t recall. I don’t have that book.
Liz: Obsessed with that.
John: Obsessed. I don’t think I read it. 754 pages. That’s a long autobiography there.
Liz: That is almost as long as the tome about Che Guevara.
John: Exactly.
Liz: That is like 900 pages.
John: A similar career.
Liz: Same, by the way. Similar people.
John: Similar people, just the same. Devil’s Guide to Hollywood was in 2006. Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith about his return to Catholicism was 2008. Then he has– the fourth book is Heaven and Mel, which was a Kindle single actually, but it counts. 2012, which is about his experience working with Mel Gibson on the Maccabees movie, which never shot.
Liz: First of all, Heaven and Mel, iconic.
John: Great.
Liz: How have we not gotten there yet? Really elite title. I feel like it would be funny if he wrote about a biography with each generational iteration of somebody watching Showgirls and how it’s interpreted. It’s like with each generation, the first generation hates it, the second generation loves it and thinks it’s regarded incorrectly, and now the third generation is like, “There’s some really tough stuff in it, but there’s some really good stuff in it.” That would be fun. The first one, it being that long, feels like he can maybe cover it all. Also, how old was he when he wrote his first one?
John: I don’t know. 2004. We can do the math to figure out how old he was. He was not a young person as he was writing Basic Instinct or Showgirls or any of these things. I feel like you only get to write the screenwriter autobiography when you’re like, “Okay, I’m done with my career,” because you’re inevitably going to just burn a lot of bridges and talk about the things. The movies I’ve worked on that I could talk about that would actually be good stories would also make me unpopular with the people who I needed to write about.
Liz: Unhireable.
John: Unhireable, that’s really what we’ll say.
Liz: I think any autobiography or memoir, you have to be very conscious that people will, even if you’re telling, from your perspective, stories that are complementary, they might not be interpreted that way. You have to be conscious that anything that you’re divulging is something that somebody else doesn’t want out there. To write three of those, including one about Mel Gibson, who has such a great reputation, it’s fascinating.
John: It is. Choices that we could make, but have not chosen to make.
Liz: Hey, who knows?
John: Absolutely. The year’s young. [chuckles]
Liz: The year’s young, the world’s on fire. Let’s see what happens in 2026.
John: People ask, “Liz Hannah, do you write mostly features or TV?” It’s like, “I write autobiographies.”
Liz: Yes, that’s right. Memoirs [crosstalk].
John: Memoirs. It’s a memoirist.
Liz: Thank you.
John: In episode 702, we talked about Last Looks, and we had a couple people write in about Last Looks. Before we start with these emails, Liz, what is your process for Last Looks? What are the things you’d like to do before you hand in a script?
Liz: I’ve totally stolen this from Sorkin, which is I do a– I think we–
John: We talked about this. We were talking about transition pass.
Liz: You and I recently talked about this at the Sundance Lab, which is I do a full transcription pass. I basically have a blank page in final draft. I have my final “draft” of my script on the right, and I just type it up. I try not to think about it as I’m typing it up, and try to just let it flow. Inevitably, there will always be things where I’m like, “This action line is taking too long,” or, “This dialogue is bad,” or you’ll organically come to it, but it really is a final pass.
John: You’re really doing that on most of your projects where you are side-by-side.
Liz: Yes.
John: Wow. How long does that take you to type up a full script?
Liz: It’s like two hours. It’s the time of a movie. It doesn’t take very long.
John: Very good typist.
Liz: Thank you to Bedford Middle School for teaching me that. It doesn’t take very long because also at that point, I do feel quite burned out by my own script, so it’s the only way for me to, I think– For me, it’s the way to read things that I tend to gloss over when I’m going through those final passes. Sometimes it’s fine to do that because you’re like, “It’s done. It’s set. I need other people to read this at this point.” Sorkin says he does it for every feature. I stole it with The Post, and I’ve done it ever since.
John: We had two people write in with suggestions. Drew, help us with that.
Drew: Tom in Cheltenham writes, “My very final last look is now always on Weekend Read. Once I have endlessly polished and tweaked a draft and read through on my computer, I export to Weekend Read. I then read through it on my phone, not my iPad, and the amount of stuff I catch is unbelievable. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, but there’s something about seeing the text laid out differently with different line breaks that allows me to actually read it fresh.
This isn’t about typos or orphans or widows or page breaks. I’ve caught all those by now. This is about pure readability. It’s about catching sentences that don’t quite flow or could be improved or extraneous words that simply don’t need to be there. I get so used to seeing the exact same text and the same pages laid out the same way that at some point I stop actually reading it. Weekend Read is as close to reading your own script for the first time as you can get.”
John: It’s a good point. When you see things in a different format, it’s the same reason why back in the day when we used to print scripts and you’d pull a page at a time, you’d catch things just as in print on the first time and you’d see things that are different. That tracks to make sense. It’s not the intention of Weekend Read, but it certainly is a good use of it.
Liz: I also think that everyone should alleviate themselves from the stress of having a typo-free draft. It will literally never happen. Just to make everybody feel better, there’s a typo on the first page in the third sentence of The Post in the draft that went everywhere, and it’s still there. I will never recover.
John: Absolutely.
Liz: It just is what it is.
John: It broke the film. Absolutely.
Liz: It broke it. Everything.
John: It ruined everything. It all collapsed.
Liz: It is funny because it’s Chiron is misspelled, and so it’s also in bold and underlined very explicitly. There you go.
John: Fancy. One more suggestion here from John.
Drew: He says, “To have Weekend Read or WriterDuet read the script for you. It’s the one step I never skip. I don’t want to do it because I’ve spent so much time going over the script again and again, but it finds something every time. Repeated words, misspelling, something wonky from a copy and paste. The voices are pretty robotic, but performance doesn’t really matter, and it’s better than reading it out loud myself as my brain will skip things that I’ve read 100 times.
John: When you hear it read aloud, you definitely notice it. That’s why table readings are so mortifying for us because, “Oh God, there’s a word left out of that dialogue block, and I never knew it until this actor was sitting around the table.” Very publicly, everyone says, “Oh, yes, the writer screwed up here.” Drew, you do the most work in Weekend Read because each week you are curating the list of Weekend Read scripts that we’re putting in there. What is this week’s collection of scripts?
Drew: As we’re recording it, this week’s collection of scripts is Witches because I think we’re going off of the last Scriptnotes. As this comes out, the feature Friday to come is creator-driven comedies, so it’s all writer stars.
Liz: Ooh.
John: What are some of the things in that collection?
Drew: We’ve got Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, 30 Rock, Abbott Elementary, Atlanta, Feel Good, Fleabag, Girls, Insecure, Master of None, Pen15, Rami, Workaholics. There’s just a few.
John: That’s great. That’s actually a good grouping of things that I wouldn’t have actually thought of that being a creator-driven comedy, but where the person who created the show is the star of the show, and it’s all centered on them. That’s great.
Liz: Love that.
John: Reminder, Weekend Read is in the App Store. It’s free to download, so check that out. Each week, Drew will have new scripts for you to read. In Episode 702, we talked about Accountability Groups, and we had two people write in with their experiences with accountability groups.
Drew: Bill says, “I’ve found accountability groups to be a silver bullet. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I had to email five pages by 5:00 PM. No one had to read them. I just needed to send the pages. One strike for every day that five or more pages weren’t handed in on time. Three strikes, and you’re kicked out of the group. I had a first draft in what was, for me, record time. It costs nothing to be on the receiving end of an email that doesn’t require a response, but being there for each other in that capacity meant everything. It manufactured the kind of structure and deadlines that writing, especially on spec, especially a first draft, often requires.”
John: Wow. That’s great. In that sense of you’re out of the group, there’s not a financial penalty, but there’s a social pressure to stay in there. What did Ethan have to say here?
Drew: “For my last script, I set hard deadlines and a goal of writing three hours a day. Only words on the page counted to my time. I used a stopwatch and writing log to track the hours and minutes. For every three hours, I paid myself with a Magic the Gathering booster pack. I successfully finished a polished script in 12 weeks. Pay yourself for your work, and you associate the work with payment.”
John: All right. These are examples of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Basically, it’s ways to get yourself to do things. Paying yourself with Magic the Gathering cards, it rewards that little pleasure center in your brain until you start to feel like, “Oh, actually, maybe the writing is actually the pleasure center.” It becomes less about the Magic the Gathering cards to do it. I don’t know. I think these are good things to try if you’re looking for ways to actually get stuff done and get out of your way in terms of the habits that are stopping you from doing stuff. Liz, have you tried either of these methods or anything like this?
Liz: I haven’t personally. I will say, and I really don’t mean this in a dismissive way, but it made me laugh because I was like, I’m currently, over the course of the last 10 months, been potty training my child, and we are doing a potty training chart. He gets a sticker, and then at the very end, he gets a car. Let me tell you, every book tells you not to do it. Every podcast, everybody, every mom is like, “Oh, they’ll just do it.” It’s the only way. It’s the only way. I will buy him an actual car when he’s 16 if he’s still doing this. I don’t care. This is the way.
It is interesting psychologically how it works, and it does make me think about, and has in the past, even prior to this email, made me consider a reward base for myself of completing pages. I think I would be too tricky for myself and still buy myself Sugarfish at the end of the day, even if I didn’t do the pages. I think it’s whatever works for anyone is what you should do. It’s hard to self-motivate to write, particularly when you’re writing a spec. However you can motivate yourself to do that, be it a sweet treat or be it FOMO of not being in a club, if you don’t tend your pages in a time, then great, do it.
John: We have a screenwriter coming on in a couple weeks, and she was talking about getting her first script written. She went through a 12-week bootcamp-y situation. Yes, you’re learning something in that, but it’s mostly the accountability. It’s mostly like, “I am blocking out this amount of time, and this is the [unintelligible 00:19:53] and my identity for these next 12 weeks is the person who’s writing this script,” and that’s really meaningful.
I would say over the course of a 20-year career, I’ve been more productive, less productive, but you’re deep enough into it, you know you can get stuff written. Eventually, you’ll get out of your own way, you’ll get stuff done. If there’s weeks where I’m like, “Oh, I cranked through a bunch of stuff in weeks I didn’t–” You give yourself a little bit more grace because you just know what you can do and you know when you need to change things up and when it’s just normal.
Liz: I think the reward of having a first draft is the best reward possible for me. Being able to say that there is a completed draft of a screenplay that I can then rewrite and make better and it will never be as bad as it is in this moment is truly the greatest relief there is.
John: Honestly, for me, one of the greatest feelings is sending in a script, just getting it off of mind and just knowing, “Oh, I should have this freedom, I just have this lightness,” of like, “Oh, I don’t have this thing hovering over me.” As we’re recording this, everything is turned in at the moment. There’s some stuff I got for Drew, but everything else is done and it is nice to just like, “Oh, I could do anything.” I saw a movie at 10:00 in the morning. It was–
Liz: Oh, love attending a movie.
John: Yes, so good.
Liz: It’s the best.
John: Next up, let’s talk and follow up Three Page Challenges. Episode 702 was a Three Page Challenge, and we had two folks write in with their feedback on the Three Page Challenge.
Drew: Jason writes, “In the most recent Three Page Challenge, you questioned a writer’s choice to have a male character call his female friend a bitch during a scene. The consensus was that it was too aggressive. While I do agree with you, I did wonder something. Did we all assume that the male character was straight? I’m sure you’d agree that the levity of the exchange is different if it’s a cis gay man versus a cis straight man. What’s the most elegant way to deal with this default cis straight issue?”
John: I think Jason’s asking a fair question. As we were recording this, Craig pulled out the bitch and I did stick a little bit on, we don’t know enough about this character to know whether it’s actually okay for him to be saying it. The fact that he was saying it tipped me towards the idea that he could be gay or that it might be reasonable in his vocabulary to say this thing. In terms of overall, I just feel like–
Imagine a scene where we are introduced to a male character and we’re not told anything about him. If it’s not actually relevant in the scene, it feels really forced to try to put it in there because in that initial description for the character, something about the way he’s presenting, so what we’re seeing, what his behavior is like, that is useful. If it’s not relevant to the scene, it feels forced to try to jam it in there. Liz, what’s your instinct on identifying someone’s not just gender but sexuality when they’re first introduced?
Liz: I think to me, it goes to the authenticity of the read and the authenticity of the character and making sure that the character and your intentions are being interpreted in the way that you want them to be. If that character has any quality about them that would change the interpretation of their words, then I think it’s important to call that out. I would want to make sure the importance of that attribute, whatever it is not just for one scene and for intentionally creating an authentic character that lives in the world and is presenting in the world as a certain way.
Be that a cis straight white guy, then if it’s important to this character for that to be there and for him to be interpreted in the way, then that’s an important thing for me to read into it. If it’s not, then I don’t need to know that. I don’t think making choices about characters for one scene, for them to be a certain way is right.
John: Yes, I agree with you. I now want to go back and look through my scripts where I do have gay characters and see, “Did I call that out right away?” Obviously, in Go, that information is pushed back and hidden, so I’m sure I didn’t do it in that. In other things, I wonder if I did call it out from the start or whether the genre we’re in, we’re just going to assume that this character’s gay.
Liz: There’s a script that I wrote where it’s very important that there’s a character that’s not white because of the circumstances of the entirety of the script. I called it out in his character description because I didn’t want there to be any misinterpretation about the read. I think that is, whereas other characters in the script, it was not important to call out who they are. I don’t think you need to, because you define one character, define every character necessarily. You can, obviously, but I think it’s important. If it’s important to the character and to the read, to define them.
John: As we were talking here, I pulled up my script for The Nines. “Gavin Taylor, 30, walks into a meeting with his laptop bag over his shoulder. He’s a tidy, banana republic sensibility and an easy smile that belies his manic schedule.” I’m not calling him out as gay from the start, although it just feels like you’re going to see behavior pretty quickly that lets you know that he’s gay. We also had, specifically about episode 702, someone wrote in about loose part. There’s a location described as loose park, and we’re like, “What is that?” It bumped for us.
Drew: Tara wrote in that loose park is actually a famous park in Kansas City, Missouri.
John: Saying that, it bumped for us because we were like, “I don’t know what this is,” and yet it is appropriate to the thing. It’s one of those weird things where it bumps on the page. It’s not going to bump for anyone watching the movie. For somebody who knows Kansas City, it makes sense for that. To me, it’s being aware of what information your reader probably has and is going to assume. Liz, you’ve run into this, I’m sure.
Liz: Yes. When I wrote The Post, for instance, it takes place entirely in DC. There were major monuments and things like that where scenes had to take place. I just anticipated that we would Google if we didn’t know what they were. In other scripts I’ve written, it’s not important where it takes place. In a lot of scripts, I feel like I don’t necessarily have a defined base or area. It’s more general because you just don’t ever know. It reminds me of the previous question. I think unless it’s really important to the scene work or to the script, then I wouldn’t necessarily be that specific.
John: The other case for specificity is that if it was MacArthur Park, if it was Genesee Park, or whatever thing, I think because the word loose just feels like a normal English word, then we’re simply like, “Wait, it’s a loose park? What is a loose park? Is it like I’m not [unintelligible 00:26:28]?”
Liz: Was it capitalized?
John: It was all uppercase because it was the scene description. It was the scene header.
Liz: Oh, got it.
John: Because of that, we’re like, “Wait, what is a loose park as opposed to a tight park?”
Liz: Totally.
John: Totally.
Liz: Obviously, didn’t you know?
John: No. Show all revision sets. We also talked about this in Episode 702. Liz, as you’re going through revisions, do you tend to just switch to the next revision, color, and keep it in the same file? Are you making a new file? What is your preferred way?
Liz: The idea of show all revision sets just made me break into a sweat. That is terrifying. I keep it all in the same file. I live in blue. We’re talking about features that I’m just at this point revising myself. We’re not talking about production or anything. I just keep it in blue, and I clear, and I save a file that says which day it was and that has the revisions. I use Scriptation to do my notes for every draft for myself. I also have the PDF of my handwritten notes for each draft of the revision saved with those files.
That’s often more what I reference than if I go back and look at the revision set because the revision set is only a half thought because you can’t really see like, what did I strike out? What did I cut? I don’t really remember.
John: The stars and the margins, they are useful for showing what literally changed, but they don’t show intention at all. You don’t know why they have been changed. Sometimes it’s like you deleted an extra space, but was there a word there? Why was that there?
Liz: It’s funny because I have opposing arguments where it’s like when I’m turning in a starred draft, I actually don’t want them to have as much information of why I’ve made these decisions because I want them to know that I heard the note and I made an executive choice of how to do that. Hopefully, they agree. I think if we go into it becomes more by committee of making a decision of how we do this.
Whereas for myself, I want to be able to go back into my brain and be like, “Now why did I make this decision that this has to go here?” I recently rebroke a pilot into a feature, and going into my notes to myself in my earlier drafts was really helpful in being like, “I think I cut some scenes. What scenes did I cut?” Finding out how characters moved around and stuff was helpful.
John: We had a listener write in talking about how they use show all revision sets. That was actually helpful for them.
Liz: Good for them.
Drew: Happy in LA writes, “Because my wife and I tag team a draft, we often write on top of each other’s work. Revisions stack up quickly, so we found it clearest to change the color each time one of us takes a pass. Sure, the result can be a rainbow of colors, but it makes the progression easy to track. Once a sequence feels solid, we’ll flatten it with a clear revised for just those sections. Anywho, that’s just how we’ve fallen into writing together, and it really works for us.”
John: That absolutely makes sense. If that’s a thing that you as a team works for you, that’s awesome. That’s great. It’s always going to be challenging to figure out what is the right workflow for people, and you just have to experiment to see what it is that works.
Liz: I think it’s also really specific when you’re talking about working with a writing partner versus writing with yourself solo. Writing for yourself solo, who knows what’s going on inside my brain and nobody else does need to know. When you’re working with another partner, you actually do have to show proof of product and proof of thought in a lot of things. I’m working with somebody on something right now, and we do the same shared revision set, but we strike through things rather than just cut them so that we can show, this is my pitch for what we should lose, or this is my thought of where this could move to, and things like that, so that there’s a little bit more of a blueprint to how to get to those stars.
John: For the work you’re doing with somebody else here, are you just passing a file back and forth? How are you collaborating?
Liz: We take turns. On first drafts, we break out acts. It’s a series, so we’ll break out acts and separate them and then we’ll swap. In revisions, we’ll do it just different. She’ll take a pass and I’ll take a pass or vice versa.
John: I feel like there’s a missing, not missing solution, but the problem set that we’re trying to solve isn’t really addressed by the two cursors on the same screen at the same time problem, which is the classic shared script, nor is it really well resolved by passing a file back and forth because then you’re just duplicating files and stuff like that. There’s a middle ground. The late night shows, many of them are using Scripto, which is very much set up for this kind of thing and has a more robust checking in and putting stuff together, which is probably overkill for two little teams, but I think it is a good problem space to be tackling.
Liz: There’s definitely– I’ve written a lot with partners in my career, and there definitely feels like at least once in every single one, one of us is like, “Who has the draft? What draft are we on? Am I doing the pass first?” Just having an ability to streamline that conversation and not rely on my having dated it perfectly. Also, sometimes you’re doing multiple drafts in one day and keeping track of those. Yes, John, I think you should do this. That sounds great.
John: Absolutely. We’ll work on it.
Liz: Thanks, John.
John: Last bit of follow-up. In Episode 701, I talked about how Do, Re, Mi– in the US we have it as a movable system. In other parts of the world, it’s a fixed system. Craig then made an absolute slander saying there are no good French composers. In the moment, I said Debussy, but I said, “There must also be a lot more.” Our listeners wrote in to contribute, Charles Gounod, Berlioz, Poulenc, Duparc, Jacques Offenbach, and the list goes on. There are many good French composers and Craig was being stupid.
Liz: Of course, Craig’s not here to receive that. We will make sure he hears about it.
John: Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which actually does come from a listener question, but I think we can build it out to a bigger thing. Can you read Richard’s question for us, Drew?
Drew: “I just had my first movie made, which was so cool, but we did come into problems when the crew began building the set, notably, the house where 70% of this film takes place. I had to admit, with much embarrassment, that the layout in the script just didn’t make sense. We lost a bit of time restructuring the scripts so that the geography was coherent, i.e., whose bedrooms were where, how the kitchen links to the living room, where the stairs led, et cetera. How early do you guys think about the physicality of an interior space? Do you try and create floor plans and maps? How would you advise writers to avoid getting into these sorts of issues?”
John: This is a great question. I think actually a great topic. The project I just handed in, there are scenes that take place in a house where we need to– it’s not quite continuous shot through the house, but we need to be able to feel like, from the front door up into her bedroom, you could do that as a continuous shot. I had to really think through like, “What would this house be like and how would this fit?”
To be honest, there were rooms that I did not need. I didn’t need to know where the mother’s bedroom was. I couldn’t tell you where in the house that was. I feel like I’m always trying to be able to move the camera around and find where people are at in a space, interior and exterior as well. If there’s characters who are walking along a path in the forest and having two separate conversations, I need to be able to think about, “How far apart would they be? What would it actually feel like to be in this space with them?” Liz, as you’re working through projects, and especially if you’re collaborating with somebody on a project– another writer on a project, how often are you having conversations about the places themselves and the layouts of things?
Liz: I think it’s a really good question. I think my first instinct always is to be the most economical while being articulate as possible on the page, because I think– which I would just preface before going into anything else. I think if I’m the reader and I’m either thinking too much or too little about it, that’s a problem. I do think going to this question, I will say that– to answer, I think about it a lot in terms of how much I need the audience to know and where I am. There’s a specific project that I’m working on right now where geography is very important. The entire project takes place on a compound of two places that has two home bases. We’ve had many conversations.
We drew out what it looks like. There’s a map of it so that we can be on the same page when we’re describing this. I failed miserably in my first attempt at describing the proximity between these two places. Then we had conversations of how do we have a blanket answer for ourselves that’s a one sentence that we can quickly go to in multiple scripts that tells us the answer to the proximity of the two places. The other thing I would say, and this goes also to, I think is not specific to every writer. I definitely don’t think it’s a blanket statement, but I am generally not precious about most things if they’re not vital to the plot or the characters.
If it’s a preference that I have made, then I’ll probably say that. If we, within conversations with the– If it’s a series and I’m having these conversations with the production designer early on, and they pitch me something and I’m like, “That’s so much better than what it was in my head,” I would rather go into the script and make these adjustments or on the day make these adjustments with the director with blocking than to hold tight to whatever my vision was in my head.
I have a more specific thing of if drama is happening within a scene, let’s say within the house. I’ve written a few different projects where– I wrote one last year where there was a main house where things took place that needed to basically have a two-level central area because a death happened and somebody was pushed off of the top area. I spent a good amount of the first page of the introduction of that house describing the architecture of it and the geography of it, so I never had to go back to it again.
That took me a really long time, legitimately time-wise, to both articulate to myself and then find ways to make it so that it was engaging for an audience to read. Not just like, “And then here’s this room, and here’s this room,” but something that feels emotionally engaging and is telling me something about the characters, like why they live in this house, why it is important not just for the story but for the emotional arc of these characters, before I came here, of like, “This is the reason they bought this house, this is the reason that kid lives in that room, that’s the reason that this kitchen is here,” et cetera, et cetera.
John: There’s a project I wrote where it’s not quite an haunted house movie, but the house is incredibly important. You needed to know a sense of like, from the entrance, there are stairs that lead up, and this is where the dining room is because things will tie together in ways that are important. I needed to, when the characters are introduced to this house, have scenes that are leading them up and through places just so the audience would actually have a sense of how things were connected and what the geography was, and if a person needed to sneak out, how that would work, and how it all fit together.
There’s times where you need to be incredibly specific and explicit about where things are, and there’s times where you can just shorthand it because– especially if they’re in a place and they don’t need to go into or out of that place, it ends up mattering a lot less. You may need to describe what we can see through the windows and sort of how things fit together, but it’s not crucial.
Now, a thing which will still happen even if you’re in one space is the choreography within that space, we need to believe that you, at least the writer understands and the writer sees it and have some faith that like, “Oh, this actually would work and work well together.” The experience that you were describing in terms of like, “Oh, it doesn’t have to exactly match what I see in my head as long as it works.”
In Big Fish, there’s a moment where Will calls home after his father died. It doesn’t work for me watching it because in my head, I put the phone on the other side of the bed. Literally, I’ve seen the scene in my head one way for five years to that point. Then when I saw the cut, I’m like, “That’s wrong.” I was like, “It’s on the wrong side of the bed.” It’s like, “Of course, it doesn’t matter at all.” You can tell when some writers aren’t really putting themselves in the scene. It’s just characters talking, but they’re not physically present in the space with the characters.
Liz: When I was writing Lee, I had gone to Farley Farm, which is where she had lived and where one of the timelines takes place in the film. I remember driving there and being like, “Please let there be a patio outside.” I hadn’t written the script yet, but I had an idea for how I wanted it to end and how I wanted it to take place and to be staged and things like that. I was just like, “Let’s bank on some double doors.” That I was like, “We can get in.” Thankfully, there were. I also feel like early in my career, I blocked too much in my writing, which I think is really typical when you’re starting because you are–
John: talk us through what you mean by blocked. Theater stage blocking.
Liz: Yes, I would theater stage block the characters and where they would be throughout, which, in some ways, is important. For instance, in Lee, she’s drinking a lot and she’s making– Her act of making a cocktail is a breakup of some of the scene work that’s happening. Actions like that were really important for me to write in and to find other moments like that are happening like that. I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about literally motivated movement that is going to be an actor and a director’s choice on the day, and is frankly just too distracting to read when you’re reading a script. You’re reading something, you’re not watching something. When you’re watching something, they move, and you’re reading something, you should imagine how they move. That should be part of the audience’s interpretation of it. The act of removing that from my vocabulary partially also removed a lot of my tether to having a geography and relying on that.
John: All right. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Benjamin writes, have any of the entries to the three-page challenge been produced as full movies? I’d love to watch one, listen to the segment of the show where John and Craig talk about it, and then watch the movie again.
John: To my knowledge, none of them have been. Drew, have you been able to find any evidence of ones that have?
Drew: Not that I know of, but I’m really curious about this. I’d love if people could write in.
John: If you were in a three-page challenge and the thing since that point has, Shawn, please let us know. I can half remember, I feel like there’s one three-page challenge where it was a scene of two people in a car, and there was a pack of cigarettes, and I feel like they ended up going through and shooting it as a short film. I think something like that has happened, but to my knowledge, none of these have been features or pilots of shows. That may be appropriate because a lot of times, what people are sending in through the previous challenges are like, “This is just a test of my writing. This is an example.”
We’re not picking for the things like, “Oh my God, but that is 100% going to be a movie that’s going to happen.” We’re picking examples that show interesting things for our listeners to focus in on. It could be things that are being done really well, but more often like, “These are things that are bumping for us, and here’s how we would address those.” I’ll be curious to see if anything has been made, but again, this isn’t the Blacklist. You would expect that many of those Blacklist scripts will shoot at some point; three-page challenge is not the Blacklist. What do we have next?
Drew: Clara writes, “Revising is so hard and intimidating. I found it so challenging that in my early career, I basically tried to avoid having to revise it all. Instead, I’d attempt to get it right with my first drafts. So many of us feel stumped or totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of threads that we have to track unweave, and reweave in order to properly fix a script. Have you ever felt this way about revising, intimidated, not sure where to start, lost without a map? How have you overcome this both from a craft and from a mindset perspective?”
John: I’m sympathetic, but also I think revising is easier than the first draft sometimes because you have something to work off of. It’s like you’ve made some choices and you have to unmake some choices, but you also know who the characters are, you know what the places are. You, hopefully, have a sense of what’s not working and what you want to fix. My first bit of advice to Clara would really just be to, on a separate document, make a list of like, “These are the things I want to do. These are the things I want to change. These are my goals with this next set of revisions.”
Then once you have that list, then you can really look at the draft. It’s like, “Okay, what needs to change in order to make these things happen?” I’ve said this on the podcast a bunch, but my instinct is if you’re making some serious changes, it may make more sense to write the stuff that is new that’s going to change and then only bring into a new document the stuff that you can take from the original script rather than just try to open the old script and futz around with it because you probably won’t do as much as you should be doing. You should be doing a little bit more of what Liz Hannah does, it’s just retype the whole damn thing.
Liz: I have felt this way in a page 1 situation where, first of all, I’d send out a lot of admiration for somebody who can feel like they can get it on the first draft, because just even the pressure of that would make me never finish anything. The only way that I can ever finish a first draft is knowing that I’m going to be able to go back and make it better. The stress of that, if that’s something that drives you, great, but also maybe let’s find new tools so you don’t have that stress because that feels really difficult.
My thing is, I definitely have been in those situations where I’ve been so happy to have a first draft done only to realize that actually the story should be from a different character’s perspective, or that the tone isn’t right, or that it just didn’t work, and I have to go back to the beginning. It’s really overwhelming when that happens. I do something very similar to what John is suggesting, which is I make a list of the things that do work. I make a list of the things that I really like. It’s like positive talking, it’s like self-talk of like, “What do I like about myself?”
I recommend the episode where you guys were like, “Executives, this is how you should give notes.” That, I think, is how you should also give yourself notes, is to be kind to yourself first. Then rip it apart and make some very significant choices. On those page 1s that feel really overwhelming, I just do the big stuff. If it’s like I’m changing a point of view character or I’m adding in a massive storyline, which is something I just did to a script, then that’s the only thing I focus on on that draft. I do not try and do everything at once.
Even if I know there’s eight more things to come and eight more drafts, to try and do them all at once is just impossible for me. I just tackle one at a time and then that’s this character draft, and then I do the next one and the next one. Sometimes when you do those big things, you lose the other notes.
Sometimes the tone will change if you make it from a different character’s point of view, or the plot feels more propulsive, or feels more engaging, or anything. I would just say take it one draft at a time. Take it one step at a time. Take it one note at a time.
John: That makes a lot of sense. There’s a project which we’re maybe dusting off that’s like 10 years old, and there’s something I wrote. It was great to go back through the script and let you read it. It’s like, “Oh, I actually still really like this. This is mostly working really, really well,” but what’s challenging to think about it is that the scenes are very tight and the scenes fit together in a very tight way. It’s intimidating to try to make many changes to it because I do know the domino effect of making one change is going to ripple through a lot.
It’s multiple characters’ point of views and they are like, “Each transition is really important to get from one place to the next.” I just know it’s going to be an intimidating amount of work. Doing what we’re talking about here, which is really making a list of like, “These are the things I’m trying to do. These are the big changes I’m trying to make,” and picking one and letting that be this next bit of work and the next draft and then the next thing and the next thing. You’re right that sometimes these things, which were lower on the list, just get scratched off because those scenes aren’t there anymore.
The problems that you were trying to solve, they’re just not there anymore because everything has been shifted around in the script.
Liz: I think the other thing is that, sometimes you have a script and you’re like, “It just doesn’t work and I don’t know why.” I know the plot doesn’t work, or I like it, but I don’t love it. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on this podcast before, but on Plainville, we did something called Crazy Idea Hour on every Friday. At the end of the day, we would do about an hour, and anybody could pitch on anything. You could pitch on a character, you could pitch on a story, you could pitch him needle drop, you could really pitch anything.
It was a way for us to step out of the very typical, “Oh, we’re breaking this episode and we only have eight or we only have however many and we have to tell the story, and just remind you to be creative and to use your imagination and to find fun ways, at least for me, to tackle problems that you don’t sometimes think of. Sometimes you’re looking at something from North and you need to be looking at it from East. On this other script recently, I had this like, “I really like it, but it’s not working, and I don’t know why.”
I just did one of those, I spent two days and just watched a bunch of movies and I listened to a bunch of music and then I was driving in my car, and I had a totally batshit crazy idea. I was like, “What if I did this?” The initial thought I had was, “This will be a lot of work and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do that because it’s so much work,” but then I put the script back on cards, I looked at it and I was like, “I think I can do this this way pretty economically.” It ended up really helping me-
John: That’s great.
Liz: -with the script. I think sometimes we can have blinders on of this is the way to fix it. I just suggest rooting yourself in a different place to think about it.
John: Remind me, you called it your Friday session or your Friday one-hour session?
Liz: Crazy Idea Hour.
John: Crazy Idea Hour. It’s very smart. I’ve not heard other people talking about it, but listening to showrunners talk about putting their seasons together, they tend to start with a week of blue sky and stuff like that. It sounds like it’s a way to bring the blue sky back in on a regular basis so that it’s not so focused on like, “Oh, crap. How do we move between these two scenes?” It’s more like, “What if we threw a grenade in there?”
Liz: Right. Blue sky, I think, at least for me, is both the most fun and the most stressful because I’m like, “Well, but eventually I’m going to have to actually make this television show.” Like, “It’s so fun to talk about all these things, but like, “No, I don’t know how a Glee musical sequence will make its way into the television show.” When you have a refresh of Crazy Idea Hour, it’s also fun because I think at least when you’re doing it yourself for your own feature, you can have–
I have post-it notes on my computer of things that I want to remember about a script or a feeling I have, or I haven’t been able to put this in the movie, but I want to think about a way to do it and that’s my touchstone for a Crazy Idea Hour for myself. In a writer’s room, I think also is very freeing to your staff to be able to be like, “I know you love this idea and you haven’t been able to figure out how to put it in the television show, now here’s an opportunity for us to workshop it with no rules or consequences for 15 minutes a week and see if we can get there.”
In Plainville, one of our writers was pitching this fantastic writer named Ashley Michel Hoban, who has gone on to run her own show. She pitched a scene in an indiscriminate episode, but a scene where we were trying to figure out how to have the tension of their text messages between Michelle and Coco really reach its echelon. She pitched something very similar to the Tango in Moulin Rouge, and so that it was like a musical sequence that– I will say that musical sequences were a part of the vocabulary of the show, so it wasn’t totally batshit crazy that she pitched us.
She pitched it the first week, and it didn’t work. There’s typically a rule in a writer’s room that if you pitch something once, you don’t pitch it again, and it’s shut down. I would say that’s correct. I always have that, I would say, restriction in a room, but in Crazy Idea Hour, if you pitch it differently and you’ve developed it, then it can come back, and so she brought it back every week for 20 weeks, and it never made its way into the show. Then the room had wrapped. I was writing Episode 7, and I was breaking it, and I was moving at the time and I was listening to this playlist that we had created for the show.
I was driving back and forth, and this one song came on, and it just laid on top of her idea. I called her and I was like, “I think I know how to do it. In this episode, can you just write me a paragraph of this song and figure out how we can make it?” She did, and we made it work, and it’s in the show.
John: That’s awesome. All right. Let’s do one last question here from Becca.
Drew: “I signed with my manager in 2021. He’s friends with agents at a reputable agency, and they signed me as well for both TV and film. He emailed me today and told me we were parting ways because the industry is tough right now, and they want to focus on clients whose scripts are ready to sell, which is understandable. No hard feelings there. Should I not contact any of the people that they connected me to that I had general meetings with? Agents as well? Because I’m assuming I’ve also been let go by them. Am I able to send a script out that they already sent out, or do I shelve it? Not sure of the etiquette in these situations.”
John: Oh, Becca. All right. First off, I want to clarify. It sounds like– so your manager says, “We are dropping you. We’re no longer repping you,” but you’ve not had any contact with the agents about what’s happened here, too. Becca, it seems like you feel like “you are a member of Hollywood card” has been pulled, and that you’re no longer able to do things, so that it’s simply not the case. I’m sorry that your manager dropped you. It does happen. I’ve heard that happening a lot more recently as things have tightened down a bit, but the agents are free to do whatever they want to do, and I wouldn’t assume that they have disappeared on you.
My advice, Becca, is you are going to email the agents, who are your agents, and talk to them about like, “These are the things I’m working on. This is what I want to be doing next.” I don’t know if they even necessarily need to acknowledge that you’re no longer working with that manager, but see where that is, and just don’t make an assumption at this moment that they’ve dropped you. In terms of the other people you’ve met, good lord, you’ve met those people, the other executives, all the people you’ve had general meetings with.
That’s why you try to get their contact information in those moments so that you can also continue to reach out with them and talk with them and continue to develop stuff. You are not required to have a manager in this town. You’re not required to have an agent in this town. Most of the work you’re going to get for yourself, it’s really the work you’re going to get for yourself, and so I think, yes, you do need to look for a new manager, but you also need to continue writing and continue trying to find places where they want to hire you to do stuff.
Liz: 100%, no notes.
John: All right. Great. That is resolved. Let’s go onto our One Cool Things. Liz Hannah, what is your One Cool Thing other than the wasp I see flying around you?
Liz: There’s a wasp in my office. It’s cool. He’s not cool.
John: No.
Liz: He and I are going to have a conversation in a little bit that will end with, I’m sorry to say, a death.
John: Not yours. Liz, it’s not going to be you. Not today.
Liz: Fingers crossed. My one cool thing is a candle company, which is called Dehv Candle Company, D-E-H-V. I love these candles. They’re hand-poured, they’re non-GMO, they’re lead-free. It is a female-owned LA business. They are in these concrete jars that once the candles run out, they comes with a botanical biodegradable thing where you can grow flowers, you can put seeds in it, you can grow anything in it. I love them. There’s one scent in particular that I just lit the other day because it’s September and I would like it to be fall, which is called Northeast. It’s a very fall, not overbearing scent. Check out Dehv Candle Company, local business. We love it.
John: Excellent. Mine is also a physical thing, so I make my scrambled eggs every morning, and I’ve been using this really good nonstick thing. It works well on our induction cooktop and I’ve loved it, but non-stick services of all kinds are not great for the world, the chemicals that are used to make it. I know this largely because Drew’s wife, Heather, is a chemist who studies these kinds of things. It’d be great if we’d had fewer of these forever chemicals in our lives. I’ve been trying out a new fry pan from OXO. It’s a carbon steel pan.
Carbon steel is light cast iron, but doesn’t weigh 10,000 pounds. Basically has its own natural coating on it [unintelligible 00:55:18] oil that sticks to it. It’s non-stick as long as you treat it properly and treat it right. So far, knock wood, it’s worked really well. It works really fast on induction cooking. I’ve actually had to turn down the heat on that because it just transfers the heat so well, and so eggs go a little too quick if you don’t turn down the heat a bit, but so far it’s been really good. You just wipe it out. You never wash it. I’m enjoying using my OXO carbon steel pan. They’re not expensive, so if you’re looking for a fry pan, I would urge you to check it out.
Liz: Love this. I need a new one.
John: All right. That is our show for this week. Script is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place we can send questions like the ones Liz and I answered today. You’ll find transcripts @johnaugust.com, along with a signup for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find the clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow while you’re there.
You can also follow us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all of our premium subscribers and the folks who’ve sent through their receipts for pre-ordering the Scriptnotes book. If you’ve ordered the Scriptnotes book, make sure to send that receipt to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, because we’re about to send out something really cool that we are going to be doing as we’re signing books, so you get to see what we’re doing there.
You can sign to become our premium member @scriptnotes.net. You get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, all the Liz Hannah episodes, the other four or five. You’ve been on a fair amount?
Liz: I’ve been on a few times.
John: More than once or twice?
Liz: I need that merch, need that belt.
John: We’re about to record a new one on talking to your kids about what you do for a living. Liz Hannah, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back on Scriptnotes.
Liz: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. You and I are both film and TV writers. It’s a little bit hard to explain to a kid what we do. Your kid is being potty-trained, so three, four?
Liz: He’s three and a half.
John: All right. Does he have a sense that you go someplace, you do a thing, but does he have a sense of what Mama does for work?
Liz: No, not at all. He knows that I go to an office and that he’s been to my office, but he does not know what I do. Maybe he knows I think that we write. I don’t think he would know enough to say we’re writers, but my husband, who is also a writer, works from home and has a home office, and so he knows that the computer is a thing that we work on.
John: My daughter growing up, we filmed a movie at the house, but she was too young to know that was there. She got to see a lot of big fish for Broadway. She got to see all the rehearsals for that. She really had a very good sense of like, “Papa works on this show,” and she got to see how it all fits together, and that was great. It’s like, bringing a kid to set gives a sense of like, “Oh, this is a whole thing to do.” Then she could see the show and see how it all developed. In terms of me putting words together and being paid to do that, it’s a hard thing to explain.
For a while, I had an office outside of the house, and then I moved to this room over the garage. I’ve talked about it on the show before, how for several years, it was like, “Papa’s going off to work.” I would leave. She didn’t know that it was actually just upstairs in the office, and so–
Liz: Son of a bitch. There he is. Get out of here. Hang on. This is the most exciting Scriptnotes [inaudible 00:59:01].
John: 100%. An element of danger that’s lacking in most Scriptnotes episodes.
Liz: I see you. Land. Break the window. Got him. Oh my gosh.
John: Nice. A murder happened live on podcast.
[laughter]
Liz: Woo. All right. I feel alive. This is, I will say, the second wasp that has appeared in my office, which is a problem.
John: That is a problem.
Drew: I was about to say I feel like–
Liz: We’re going to have to deal with this.
John: If it’s three, then it’s officially a trend.
Liz: This is an issue.
John: All right. Wasps come from someplace, so if you track down the source, you could maybe get rid of the wasps.
Liz: Or just maybe they should spread to their brethren that this is not free to come to live.
John: A deadly place. Stay away from that office. My daughter had no sense that I was actually working upstairs over the garage, but she would come in to see Matt, my assistant at the time, who worked downstairs. I talked to Matt not knowing I was upstairs. Once she finally figured out that I wasn’t going someplace, because she was asking for a while, like, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It’s like, “Oh, he must have walked to work, which is not a lie. I did walk to work. Once she discovered I worked upstairs, I just sort of laid down the law, like, “You can never come out here while I’m working. I’ll be really upset if you come out here while I’m working. That lasted for a couple years. I actually got some years of quiet.
Liz: Productivity out of it.
John: Then at some point, kids stop caring about what you do and don’t want to be in your presence. Then she was not interrupting me for very much at all.
Liz: When I work from home, I often will just work in bed because I’ll just be writing. That really doesn’t help him think that I have a job because it also doesn’t help when part of my job is to watch things because then he’s just– it’s just really confusing. I had to explain to my niece recently what I did. Well, I didn’t have to, but she was at the house and she was doing some homework. Her homework was writing, and she was not pleased that this was a thing that she was doing. I was like, “Me and Uncle Brian, our job is basically homework.”
She just looked at me, and her mother was like, “Yes, I was explaining to you, they are writers, this is what they do.” I just truly felt like she was like, “Why would you do this to yourself? Did you lose a bet? This is a terrible idea.” I will say that, as an adult who I’m very thankful for my career, but I did really come to a realization about five years ago that I was like, “I decided to do homework forever.” That’s what I chose to do as a career.
John: Choices. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, at least there was a physical thing I could show a person like, “Okay, I wrote all the words that are in this book,” and that was helpful to see. When we were writing a movie, it’s like, “We’re writing the plan for the thing, but they’re not going to want to read this script for a thing, and that’s not interesting to them.”
Liz: I think going into production is fun for them to have a sense of process of it. I wasn’t shooting something, but my friends were shooting something legitimately around the corner from my house for the last six months. I took him and he went on set. He couldn’t process that he was seeing one of his aunts basically on screen and that she was working, but he was also engrossed by it because he loves watching things. He had a great time.
John: He just got into trucks and vehicles because there’s trucks and vehicles that are great.
Liz: Are you kidding? What are you talking about? Literally the dream. If I drove a truck for a living, I would be a hero. That would be it.
John: Liz, you’ve got to do a Fast and the Furious movie so your kids can see it.
Liz: I know. Did you ever have– because this is something I think about a lot, did you ever have a moment where you were like, “I want to make something that my child can watch? Did you have that period?”
John: I’ve done that. Of course, I did.
John: Yes, you have done that. My experience was, and again, I probably have told this on the air before, we were shooting Frankenweenie. We were in London, me and my husband and my daughter were in London, and we’re touring the sets for the stop-motion Frankenweenie. They’re so impressive, so amazing. To scale, that’s just really cool. Then at some point, she realized that Sparky the dog dies. She sat down on the floor and would not move until I explained that Sparky comes back through magic and everything is okay. Everything is fine. To this day, she’s not seeing Frankenweenie because she’s just been so traumatized by that memory of like-
Liz: You’re like, “I made this movie for you.” [laughs] I think it’ll take him a while to see the post. That’s going to be up his alley for a while. Long Shot might actually come closer for him to watch more recently. I do often think about making something for him to watch, but then there’s a finite time of him thinking I’m cool, so I really have to make it now.
John: By the time Aladdin came out, my daughter had no interest in Aladdin at all. She’s actually never seen Aladdin.
Liz: I’m very excited to show my son Aladdin. We’re deep in Cars right now, so that’s a big one.
John: Cars was not a big movie in our household, and I’m grateful for that. Cars is just that thing that never fit my brain well.
Liz: It’s funny because then I have friends who have girls and they’re watching all the princess things. For me, it’s a hard no. I would just not function in that world. The Cars world, I’m thrived. Truly, in this moment. Although I will say that Batwheels was recently introduced to my house, and that really broke me. There’s an overstimulation and sound thing that I can’t handle. We really do generally live in a Pixar world in our house, which I think is just great for everybody.
John: Sure. Absolutely.
Liz: It’s like Pixar and Disney animation, you really can’t go wrong. It’s really meant for everyone, and it’s very accessible. For me, who basically gets overstimulated by two people talking at once, having too many flashing lights was really enough.
John: The thing you get to look forward on your behalf for is, at a certain point, you’re like, okay, now we’ll start Star Wars. Every weekend, watch one of the Star Wars and pick the right order for it, which is great. You’ll be just astonished how much little kids love the prequels. They love them.
Liz: Oh, yes.
John: They love them.
Liz: Less excited for. I will say that Back to the Future made its way into my house. My son went through at least six weeks where he dressed like Marty McFly every single day.
John: There’s a DeLorean in it.
Liz: It was a dream. When we went to visit my friends on set, they were shooting on the Universal lot, and he dressed like Marty and brought a tiny DeLorean. Then we went and saw the clock tower.
John: Incredible.
Liz: It was life-changing for every adult that was present and him, though he won’t remember it. We are going to see– Back to the Future is coming back to theaters for Halloween, so we are going to see it.
John: A thing you also get to do is he will have some TV show that he loves, and you will pull a connection and get to visit a set of that TV show, and that will blow his mind. My daughter loved– I don’t even remember the name of the show, some Nickelodeon superhero show. I was like, “I bet I know somebody who works on the show.” We went to visit the thing, and you saw how incredibly tiny the sets were and how minimal everything was. She was still like, her mind blown. She said, like, “Papa, can we fly to Hollywood?” Like, “Honey, we live in Hollywood.”
Liz: Girl, we live there.
John: This is our town.
Liz: That’s so funny.
John: She always saw Hollywood as that thing off there. It’s something like American Idol. You’re going to Hollywood. It’s like, “No, no, we live there. This is what it is.”
Liz: That’s so funny. We were with Dan Fogelman recently, which it’s like when I think you have a teenager or something like that, and you’re like, “Here’s the showrunner.” They’re like, “I don’t give a shit who the showrunner is. What does that mean?” Having to really restrain myself from telling my three-year-old who’s obsessed with cars like, “This is the guy who created it all.” He’s just like, “Where’s lightning?” I was like, “Yes, it doesn’t compute necessarily the same thing.”
John: I guess what I’m looking forward to is there’s going to be a tipping point where like, “Oh, my parents do something that’s cool, that’s actually great.”
Liz: Yes. I’m very excited for that.
John: Then they’ll resent you for it, and then they’ll go to college.
Liz: It’s like a flash in a pan a few years where I’m cool. I’m documenting all of the things so that he does know that I was cool at one point and did take him to cool things when he hates me. Then I can show them to a therapist and be like, “I actually did do things.”
John: I have evidence. I have receipts. I did the good things.
Liz: FYI, he did have fun doing these things.
John: All right. We had a very fun time chatting with you. Liz Hannah, thank you again for coming back on Scriptnotes.
Liz: Thank you.
John: All right.
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