The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Whoa, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to episode 710 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig, whatever happened to weird?
Craig: I’ll show you.
John: I would argue that our modern world is safer in most ways than it’s ever been. The arguably edges of that are not safer, but it’s also less interesting. I want to root out the causes and potential solutions for what feels like cultural stagnation and what it means for writers and the entertainment industry. I also want to discuss the tipping point between wanting to write and actually writing. Not just on a daily basis, but like, “Oh, this is the thing I want to write.” What is the actual turning point for going for I want to write this thing, and I’m actually writing this thing?
Craig: Moving it from the, I think maybe one day I should do this pile to the, I’m doing it pile.
John: From the someday list to the active project list.
Craig: It’s happening list.
John: In our bonus segment, premium members, let’s discuss self-narrative and the pros and cons of remembering stuff about your past and having a continuity of who you are over time. We talked months and months ago about aphantasia, people who can’t summon images in their head. Correlated with that is, a lot of times people don’t have a clear memory of who they were over time. There’s a lot of disadvantages to that, but there’s also some advantages to that. You’re not weighed down by your history.
Craig: I may be one of the weird ones on that front. We’ll get to that if you pay the $5, which honestly, come on, it’s $5.
John: $5. Big news. We have a live show coming up. Our LA live show. We typically do a holiday show. We’re doing it November 30th at Dynasty Typewriter, our home base for live shows. Every ticket gets a signed copy of the book.
Craig: Oh my God. Really?
John: That’s it.
Craig: That’s amazing.
John: Usually, we’re doing a fundraiser for somebody. Now it’s a fundraiser for ourselves and the book.
Craig: Oh, my.
John: Oh, my.
Craig: Take that, poor kids. Look, all I’m hearing is that I have to sign more books, but do I? No.
John: You will have to sign some books. About the hour before the live show, we will be signing every copy.
Craig: That’s what I heard. I know you said other words, but what I heard was signing more books. I will say we have a great time at that particular venue. It’s a fun time of year. We always have good guests.
John: We do.
Craig: It’s a great rollicking time for the audience. Plus, free book.
John: Free book.
Craig: Free book and free book at the perfect time to then wrap it and regift it off to somebody else.
John: If you already pre-ordered a book, and thank you for everybody who pre-ordered a book this last week. It was crazy the number of new people we did. Your inbox, Drew, has been overwhelmed by people sending in those receipts.
Drew: A little bit.
John: A little bit, yes. You pre-order your book. You send Drew a copy of the receipt. We are going to be sending out a bonus chapter that didn’t make it into the cut of the book on getting stuff written. That’s coming out this next week.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: All that is great, but if you want to see us in person and get an early copy of the hardcover of the book.
Craig: Like a real book.
John: The real book, book, book. Not a gallery, the actual book.
Craig: The actual book you could hit somebody with and hurt them.
John: Yes. That will be November 30th, 3:00 PM. It’s an afternoon show.
Craig: Oh, I love that. I mean, at my age, get me to bed.
John: I like it. You can get back. You can be playing a game on your Steam Deck.
Craig: Yes. I’ll be back on my Steam Deck before you know it. That’ll be lovely. Everybody’s at home for Thanksgiving. Bring your friends, bring your family, bring your stupid little brother. Let’s have some fun.
John: Tickets are up on sale right now. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Get them quickly because it’s a pretty small venue, and we will sell out, and it’s a good deal.
Let us get to something I wrote down last night. I was thinking about how, in 2020 and 2021, when we were in the midst of the pandemic, on this show, we did acknowledge that we were in the midst of a pandemic. We didn’t do a lot of episodes that were specifically about it.
Craig: Right.
John: If you go back and listen to the episodes from 2020 and 2021, oh, yes, there was a pandemic happening. It wasn’t erased from history. I was thinking about the time that we’re currently in, and I feel like on this podcast, we’re maybe not acknowledging that things are just upside down and weird and wild. I wanted to just take a moment to acknowledge, as we’re recording this in the end of October 2025, stuff’s nuts, and it’s just easy to forget that stuff is crazy because it’s just so crazy each and every day.
Craig: Let’s distinguish that from weird, which is–
John: Oh, different, yes.
Craig: Things are chaotic.
John: Chaotic, unprecedented.
Craig: Yes, a lot of that.
John: As I started to put together the list, I realized, oh my God, I forgot that also happened in the past six months.
Craig: Our capacity to forget things is simultaneously our greatest asset.
John: We’ve limited attention. Our attention gets dried onto the next thing, and we forget the thing that happened before that.
Craig: I also believe, I have come to believe, in an age where everybody has access to information whenever they want it, at all hours of the day, and that information is generated extremely quickly after an event occurs. Most people don’t pay attention anyway, have never paid attention, and we are, as a species, far less plugged in than we think we are. The issue is that the people who are plugged in presume everyone else is, and all the people they talk to are plugged in. You’re in a plugged-in bubble. The biggest bubble on planet Earth is not plugged in.
John: I want to put this in here as a historical record of over-acknowledging these things have happened during the time. I think about someone five years from now, it’s weird they didn’t talk about this thing that was happening.
Craig: It feels like John’s trying to get us acquitted from some military tribunal. It feels like later when they’re like, “Who spoke out against all this?” You guys didn’t.” No, we did. Note this.
John: We did. I’m focusing mostly on domestic stuff here. Currently, as we’re recording this, the government is shut down. This question is, do you book flights to places? Because TSA is getting slower and slower. Air traffic control will stop at a certain point, unless those people get paid.
Craig: People are not paying attention. Thanksgiving travel will be insane.
John: Yes, it will be.
Craig: As always.
John: We have the US military in American cities in a way that we’ve never seen before. We have masked agents grabbing people off the street. That’s not a thing that happened before. The president knocked down the east wing of the White House just to do it, to build a ballroom.
Craig: I will say that the White House is a really decrepit building.
[chuckling]
Craig: In particular, the east wing, I don’t like– This is not a defense. I don’t defend anything that man does. Just in case people didn’t know, the east wing was not part of the original building. Also, the original building isn’t the original building because it was burnt down by the British in the War of 1812. The original building was built by slaves, yuck. There is an argument to be made that, in fact, the White House is garbage and should be completely razed and reconstructed in a way that is secure and impressive, and maybe ecologically better. There’s got to be chunks of asbestos in there that they put. God only knows what’s going on there.
John: I think the demolition and the new construction will be done to the highest standard. There’s no question that this is all going to turn out just fantastic.
Craig: The White House needed gold lions and a lot of Lucite.
John: I feel like the foam gold stuff that’s on there right now, it’s easy to scrape off, but you’re not going to rebuild the east wing the way it was. It just won’t happen.
Craig: It’s possible that a new tradition has begun. The new tradition is when a president is elected, they just knock the east wing down.
[chuckling]
Craig: Oh, that’s what it’s going to be this time? Okay, cool. Oh, this time it’s a GameStop? All right.
John: As we’re recording this, we have extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. So far, this has happened in international waters. The concern is, what happens when you start attacking and killing drug people inside the US borders?
Craig: We have been doing this for a long time, actually.
John: Did we use our military to do it?
Craig: We’ve been using our military to do it for a long time, just usually coordinated by the CIA. I’m not recommending it. I’m just saying what it is is now we have an administration that doesn’t mind boasting about it because they’re jerks. That’s really what it comes down to.
John: We have mass firings of officials or anyone with expertise.
Craig: Yes, we certainly do. All the smart people, get out. Dummies, welcome.
John: Welcome aboard.
Craig: We should put a certain guy in charge of the nation’s health. Let’s do that.
John: Yes, that’d be good.
Craig: Yes, he’s going to great. He believes a lot of great stuff.
John: He does. Idiot. When will we have a flat earther in charge of something?
Craig: We might already have a flat earther in charge.
John: Yes.
Craig: What I understand, the earth is very flat. It’s flat, folks. Look at it. It’s flat. You can’t see it. No one can see the curve.
John: I’m not surprised you have a decent president, but it’s evocative if not duplicative.
Drew: You get the hands.
Craig: That’s the idea. If you can see the hands-
John: Once you come into video, that is all the–
Craig: -if you could see the invisible accordion, then it’s spot on.
John: Extortion of universities and law firms. President demanding $230 million from taxpayers for some bogus claim that he was wrong. We have ICE grabbing people off the street. The trade wars, but now potentially a new Cold War era nuclear arms race or nuclear testing thing. That doesn’t feel great. The economy seems really brittle, and the stock market is still booming, which is just a weird state.
Craig: Since we are laying down some stakes here for the future so that we can look back, it sure feels like we are in for an enormous market collapse because AI is garbage. I’m not saying that AI won’t eventually be useful or power the economy in some positive way as opposed to the negative way it’s doing now, or that it won’t be effective or integrated into our systems one day.
The quote, Alan Greenspan, the irrational exuberance around AI, it feels like everybody in the marketplace and large corporations have just gotten excited about something they think is going to be awesome. They don’t know why or how, and it is not yet awesome. At some point, it feels like this is all tumbling down, at which point the tower will be reconstructed again, as it always is.
John: I think what I’m feeling is that everyone’s banking on it being a transformative technology that would be worth all of the leverage that we’re taking to get there. You could say that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen. The bubble pops, the bubble doesn’t pop. My other concern is that most of the growth in the economy is in that sector. If you’ve stopped paying attention to that, the real economy beyond that is not doing so great. These are all concerns that economists can debate. I mostly just wanted to put this all in one package so that five years from now, as we were recording episode 1,000-something–
Craig: People didn’t think we were out of touch.
John: Didn’t acknowledge that these are things that are happening right now. A thing you said shortly after the election was focusing on what is in your locus of control versus your local locus of interest. Again, a lot of these things I’m seeing right here are not things I can directly control at all. It’s not worth despairing about them, but also, at some point, you need to acknowledge them and not just bury your head in the sand over them. It’s not going to be useful either.
Craig: It is good to be aware, if only because it helps inform the decisions about the things you can control and influence.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Who you donate money to and who you volunteer for, and who you buy things from, how you save your money.
John: The plans you make for the next short period of time. Is it Thanksgiving travel? It’s like we decided again, Thanksgiving travel just because it’s going to probably be an absolute disaster, or we’re going to drive places rather than fly places, just because that’s going to be potentially a challenge.
Craig: I think Thanksgiving travel will be safe, and it will be exhausting and miserable, which is pretty much an evergreen statement. We’ll see. I’ll be one of them.
John: We’ll be flying back here for the live show.
Craig: I’m flying back, but I’m flying from Canada and to Canada, which feels somehow–
John: At least on the Canadian side, they probably still have air traffic controllers.
Craig: I don’t even know. Who knows? I don’t know. It may just be that they let the planes just decide themselves.
John: Unless the government of Canada says something that infuriates our president, then it’s beyond the topic.
Craig: They do have air traffic control, of course, but what they don’t have currently in Canada at proper capacity is the mail. There’s been a postal strike in Canada for months now. At first, it was a federal strike, but no mail. Then, I think because the government can do some sort of there’s got to be some mail, they have these rolling strikes now that I think are province by province. That said, I don’t use Canadian mail.
John: Our daughter’s in Australia, and they can’t mail anything to us in the US because Australia won’t basically send mail to the US because they can’t guarantee that there won’t be a tariff hit on it. Essentially, she’s not able to send us anything.
Craig: What about a PDF?
John: Digital goods, at this point, to this point.
Craig: Tell her to stop printing the PDFs and mailing them. She can just email the PDF.
John: Totally. Let’s do some follow-up. In episode 708, Craig was talking, This is going to be the best orange book–“ I’m assuming this will be the best orange book on anyone’s shelf.
Drew Marquardt: Zach wrote in, “Please let Craig know that claim is going to be immediately tested as Cameron Crowe releases his memoir at the end of this month with a completely orange cover.”
Craig: Wait, hold on, Cameron Crowe. Hold on. That’s our thing.
John: It’s our thing.
Craig: Orange is our brand.
John: 14 years, we’ve been orange.
Craig: 14 years of orange. How long has he been orange?
John: I don’t know.
Craig: How orange is his orange? Do we know?
John: It’s orange enough.
Craig: It’s orange enough. Oh my God, it’s very similar.
John: Pretty similar orange.
Craig: It’s very similar.
John: It has a picture of his– It has his face on it.
Craig: Look, we can’t say no one can have an orange cover.
John: I’m looking at the date here. His book actually already came out.
Craig: Oh, okay. Actually, he’s annoyed at us, probably. Now I’m apologizing to Cameron Crowe. The script for Jerry Maguire is one of the scripts that taught me how to write. You know what, he can– Go ahead.
John: Go ahead.
Craig: Fine. Second coolest book on your shelf that’s orange.
John: Same episode, we talked about printer prices and there was a debate, I remember, between the two of you.
Drew: There was.
John: Shelley wrote in that Drew is right.
Craig: Sure, because she found one guy that was selling one thing for $10.
Drew: She bought a printer on sale from Walmart for $29.97.
Craig: Yes, I’m sure you can also buy a car somewhere on sale for $29.99. Generally speaking, I knew this would happen. One person would be like, I’m going to spend all day because it cost them $29. By the way, is that printer, do you have to hand crank it?
Drew: Apparently, it can scan and copy as well as print, but the ink is $60. She gives you that credit.
Craig: Yes, it’s normally $60.
John: It’s $60 to refill both the black and white and color thing. It’s the razor and the blades situation.
Craig: Come on. What was her name?
John: Shelley.
Craig: Boy, she just loves you, doesn’t she? I’m going to remember this.
Drew: She likes truth, I think is what it is.
John: I think what we learned from Austin is that lots of people love Drew.
Craig: Yes, but they’ve chosen sides in what will soon become a great war.
John: My friend Quinn was misidentified as Drew. Quinn and Dana were–
Craig: Oh, somebody thought Quinn was–
John: Was Drew.
Drew: I didn’t know this.
Craig: By the way, let’s agree Quinn is a handsome guy.
John: He really is.
Craig: Quinn is one of the best-looking guys.
Drew: They met me, and they were like, “Oh no.”
Craig: No, you look like a podcast producer.
Drew: That’s just mean, Craig.
Craig: Yes, thank you. You’re welcome. Hey, it’s war. You started this.
John: Quinn is podcast host. You’re a podcast producer.
Craig: Oh, it’s getting worse. It’s getting meaner.
John: 708, Adriana and Veronica was one of the properties that we talked about on the How Would This Be a Movie? Craig, you were of the pitch that it’s only the real people are the interesting thing. That’s the only thing you want to see is a docuseries about the two of those women.
Craig: Right, like a reality show.
John: I was more convinced that it was a fictionalized version, but it’s one of those rare cases where the rights’ sold. Tell us about this.
Drew: Chris wrote in, “I’m a writer and producer, and been a fan of your show for years. Imagine my surprise and delight when I heard you cover my project on How Would This Be a Movie?. I’m a former book scout for Fox and have an IP-driven company called Winterlight Pictures. One thing I love to do is reverse engineer articles to sell for film and TV. I have an idea, the journalist writes it, and we sell it together. Nobody is better at this than Mickey Rapkin, who wrote the article that Pitch Perfect is based on. We’ve done it a bunch, but never at the level of Adriana V. Veronica.
I moved to East LA recently. My neighborhood has Adriana and Veronica on every bus stop. I started to wonder, who are these ladies? I saw a rumor on TikTok that they’re sisters, but that they never publicly talked about it or even acknowledged each other. I called Mickey, and he did his thing. He’s a genius journalist. After months of trying, he finally got them to crack and got both to talk. When the article came out, we must have had 15 meetings with producers, and there was a four-studio bidding war.
We just closed a deal. We can’t announce it yet. It was fascinating to hear your expert takes, as we’ve had many similar conversations. We met with unscripted folks, and there could still be a reality TV version, but we’re on the same page as you guys. We’d love to see an ongoing scripted show. Succession and Mad Men are good coms. Anyways, wanted to share that, and thank you for a terrific podcast and for covering the story.”
John: Great. I also love, it answers a question I had. It’s like, why does this article exist, and why was it in The Hollywood Reporter? The article exists-
Craig: To be sold.
John: -to be sold as a thing.
Craig: It is interesting. I guess there isn’t really any currency to hiding the fact that it is an artificially inspired article. I don’t mean artificially in a bad way, but it’s contrived to sell. I guess the fact that it is doesn’t impact the fact that people want it anyway. He’s happily saying, “Yes, this is how this works.” I’m like, ‘Oh, this could be cool if it were an article.” Then a guy writes an article, and then they sell it. Congratulations to them. It’d be fun to see how this goes.
John: I want to go back to the article. I thought the article was great as I read it. While it sets up a world that feels cinematic, it feels like it could be a series, I like that it didn’t explicitly try to make it– It didn’t feel like it was a pilot. It didn’t feel like it–
Craig: It wasn’t a pitch.
John: It wasn’t a pitch.
Craig: That probably would be a step too far, where people would read this and go, “Oh, this isn’t really–“ It’s a funny thing. People want something that isn’t a story so that they can make a story, but they want it to have a story.
John: They want it to have characters and a setting and a world, but they don’t want it to be predigested.
Craig: Just tell them what to do. Don’t tell me what to do.
John: Yes. All right. I want to talk about Weird. Two bits of inspiration for this. First off, there’s an article by Adam Mastroianni that argues that people are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of our society is pointing strongly in the same direction, that we are in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of mundane. Deviance is on the decline. It goes through, statistically, you can see we don’t have the same number of weird cults and serial killers. That kind of deviance is just down a lot. There’s arguments for what happened, if it was lead in the gas or whatever, that kind of stuff.
But also, it feels like there’s bumpers on the bowling lanes right now, like everything is just safe. The edges are rounded off a lot of things. Weirdness is discouraged. Things are more predictable. As I was reading this, I was thinking back to a project I got sent for a rewrite recently that was based on some really wild source material. Then I read the adaptation of it, it’s like, wow, this is just the most sanitized, cleaned down, just like the most mainstreamified version of a thing. It took something weird and just un-weirded it.
I just wanted to spend a little time talking about the value of weirdness, oddness, not even performative weirdness, but just the sense of just things that are following their own weird rhythms. Adam makes the point that creativity is just deviance put to good use. It’s the ability to not do the thing that everyone else is doing and create something that is just unexpected and surprising.
Craig: I think that there’s certainly some value to this argument. One of the things that happens over time is that things that are weird that attract people eventually fall apart because they were too weird, and also they were just wrong. Cults are a good example. Cults fall apart. Scientology, which on, I guess, the surface hasn’t fallen apart, it’s fallen apart. Nobody’s a Scientologist anymore. It’s just not a thing. There’s like 12 of them now. They’re mostly just a real estate holding company. It’s because people get wise to it. Over time, it becomes harder and harder to start a cult.
If you were to start a cult right now, you got to get over the hump of everybody going, “But all the cults end with a building on fire, or we lose all our money, or I can’t talk to my mom anymore.” You get smarter, and so a lot of the weirdness gets eliminated in that fashion.
The other thing that happens to weirdness is if it is successful, then there’s money in it. Then a company comes, and it’s not weird anymore. Best example I can think of is Goop. Goop is a large corporation that is primarily owned and controlled by Gwyneth Paltrow, I believe. Goop contains a lot of weirdness that is institutionalized and packaged, and sold. Which, by the way, thumbs up, well done. She employs a lot of people, helps the economy. The idea of, oh, throwing some bee pollen on my food is going to make me better, which it does not, used to just be something weird people did.
Lastly, because everybody weird feels the need to self-promote, it’s hard to be weird when you’re popular. We end up in a popularity machine where people pluck all the weird stuff out immediately. There’s no time for it to live underground.
There’s no chance for you to be like, “Oh, I knew them before they were famous.” Everybody’s famous all the time immediately. Nobody got in there early. There is no weirdness because we all know about it. There’s either just popular or unnoticed, which doesn’t mean bad. Lastly, corporations just take everything now. They just take everything.
John: I hear all that stuff, and I think you’ve hit on some really key things for why weirdness seems to be declining. I think there was a time when we grew up, people could be locally weird because you were the weird person in this group. With the rise of the internet, those weird people can find each other, and suddenly they have a base. They’re not weird within the group. That’s a thing that happened with comic books and the comic book culture, which was weird. It was a little bit more fringy, but then it became just more and more. Once everyone could find each other and Comic-Con became a thing.
Craig: Comic-Con is now a place where corporations go to sell stuff. It was, in fact, a niche thing. Hey, we play Dungeons and Dragons all the time. More people play it now than ever, but it used to be something that weird kids did, like me. [chuckles]
John: I also say that you talk about the corporations, but honestly, sometimes there is an ambassador or some person who can take a fringe thing and pull it into the mainstream and just make it approachable. RuPaul and drag. Drag, it was a very fringe thing that only a very specific subculture knew about, and the rise of Drag Race. Much good was done, but it also made drag less weird. Less weird in ways that are always going to feel. Yes.
Craig: It’s not that it’s sanitized as much as it is popularized. It’s not–
John: You can’t be weird and popular.
Craig: You can’t be weird and popular. That’s the bottom line. If you get popular, you’re out of weird zone. Now you’re just interesting and trendy. Drag culture is trendy. When my daughter is saying boots the house down or whatever, I don’t even know what that would be. Boots the gag me with your boots, I don’t know what. It’s something from Drag Race. A lot of people that watch Drag Race are laughing at me now. I’m cool with that.
John: That’s fine. I’m fine.
Craig: I’m weird, but everyone knows it.
John: Even within the culture of Drag Race, you have a performer like Jimbo who’s throwing bologna slices on himself. That’s weird, but you have to really go to a different thing. It’s bringing in a clowning culture into drag, which was related but not the same thing.
Craig: Boots the house down. Boots the house down. Slang expression that means to perform exceptionally well with great style and energy, or to look amazing. Just side note, I boots the house down all the time. I do not. That’s exactly right. There’s also, let’s talk a little bit about the popularization of kink.
John: Yes, for sure.
Craig: Kink, the concept of kink is weird. That’s kinky. That’s weird.
John: It’s not just sex, which is taboo or porn that is taboo, but it’s a special, that’s not weird enough anymore, so you have to go–
Craig: It’s like among the people who are doing weird stuff, you’re into the weirder stuff.
Craig: Then it became like, “Don’t kink shame.” Then it was like, “Oh, that’s your kink.” Meaning like, “Oh, you like rock?” I like BDSM.” Everyone’s like, “Yes, great. That’s your kink. That’s cool.” No one’s kinky.
John: There’s a great episode of Dakota Ray, and we’ll put a link in the show notes too, which is about cucking and a cuck chair. The degree to which–
Craig: [chuckles] There’s just something about seeing you say the word cucking that is so funny.
John: The Democratic Party can send out a meme, which is just a chair in relation to another political figure that’s clearly a cuck reference. It’s like nothing is taboo, nothing is weird too much.
Craig: How is the chair a cuck reference?
John: The cuck chair. The man who’s watching his wife be–
Craig: Did someone sell a cuck chair? It’s not a bad idea. A branded, this is actually a great chair for you if you’re a cuck. It’s comfortable.
John: It’s because it’s not a La-Z-Boy. It has to be a chair that feels like it’s appropriate in the bedroom.
Craig: Right. You don’t want the arms of the chair to be too high because you can get in the way of your self-gratitude. [chuckles]
John: I want to talk about–
Craig: That’s not a bad idea, right?
[chuckling]
Craig: Cuck chair.
John: Let’s bring it back to the things that we are actually doing, the films and television that we’re writing, because I think that sometimes we underestimate the degree to which weird does work. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a very weird movie that was a giant hit.
Craig: So weird. Sinners is weird.
John: Sinners is weird.
Craig: It’s weird.
John: It’s weird. It has this big musical number in the middle of it. Great. Love it.
Craig: It’s just Irish guys showing up and playing that weird song. It’s weird. I love that.
John: Weapons is weird. It’s really weird. It uses its time really strangely. Gladys is just a fundamental weirdo.
Craig: We crave it.
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes, it is hard to– Look, it’s not probably possible to make an equally weird Sinners 2 because, at that point, then it’s being repeated. It is absolutely true that what we used to call weird, people now call a little dangerous and risky. My least favorite term is punk rock because anyone who says, “Oh, yes, that’s more punk rock,” is never a punk rock person.
Anyway, point is, yes, weird is risky and dangerous properly, but what we get a lot of now is what I would call weird acceptance, where this is like, this movie is about defending the weird and promoting the weird and accepting the weird. We’re good with that. We’ve done it.
John: What I like about the examples you were giving, I’ll throw Poor Things in there, Lighthouse in there, One Battle After Another, so weird.
Craig: So weird.
John: But they’re not performatively weird. They’re not to feel like, “Look how weird I’m being.” They’re not just trying–
Craig: No, they’re just honestly weird.
John: From a fundamental level.
Craig: Inside of themselves aren’t weird. If you watch those movies, when you get to the end of Poor Things, you go, “That was weird, and yet by the time I got to the end, it was actually quite a conventional narrative in its own way.” That’s wonderful. It was just that it was doing something creative. It wasn’t afraid to wander off and do some stuff that is different and challenging and odd and kinky in a proper way, not in fake kinky way.
John: Here’s what I think these movies are succeeding on is that they are– The challenge I’m always putting to everyone when they’re talking about what they should write, it’s like they’re writing the movie they most want to see. These filmmakers are making the movie they most want to see on a big screen, and they’re being honest with themselves about what it is, and they’re finding ways to make the movie that is exactly their movie and not someone else’s movie.
Craig: I completely agree. I still think that we have a side business, by the way, in this culture. I just–
John: Craig, you’re not generally the entrepreneur, so I’m curious to see–
Craig: That’s what I’m saying to you, really. I’m not going to do it, but see, you have a company. I mean, Highland, right?
John: Yes, furniture is a real venture.
Craig: Sure.
John: Like an inflatable chair that you can inflate when you need it, because it’s also humiliating to be in an inflatable chair.
[chuckling]
Craig: God, I mean, you can almost charge extra for that. That’s the other thing about this plan is these people like to be humiliated, which means you can take even more of their money.
John: Absolutely, but I feel like if you could, I think an inflatable cuck chair is weird.
Craig: Is weird.
John: I mean, it actually pushes it–
Craig: That goes back around to now, even in the cuck community, people are like, “Dude, you know, he bought the inflatable chair from “apps.” [chuckles]
John: Other things I think we should acknowledge as being weird and wonderful. We’ve talked about Too Many Cooks, which is just such a strange video. I showed it to my daughter, and she’s like, “I don’t know what that is. I don’t know why you showed that to me. I’m angry that you showed it to me,” but it’s just so–
Craig: Then she showed it to somebody else, I guarantee you. It’s like a virus.
John: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
Craig: So weird.
John: So weird.
Craig: Pee Wee himself. That character is weird. Tim Burton, of course, been weird the whole time. Tim Burton, I think some people may have felt like, “Oh, you are now–” At some point, he crossed into, “Oh, you’re doing an impression of Tim Burton being weird.” Except I think that was just Tim Burton being weird the whole time. That’s just what he does.
John: Yes, that’s Tim Burton being himself.
Craig: Because they were popular, people were like, “Oh, it’s just not weird anymore, but it is. It’s weird.
John: What advice can we give to our listeners who are thinking about, “I want to embrace what this is?” It goes back to, really, what do you actually want to watch, and how do you make that thing that you want to watch that is specific to your experience? If you have really mainstream taste and you want to make mainstream stuff, go for it. We’re not steering you away from that. I’m also just saying, also look for what is specific to your experience that helps.
Craig: Coming back from Austin, there’s a certain trend I’ve noticed, and I would caution people to maybe consider not going down a path of what I would call well-traveled weird. There are a lot of stories about people who are struggling with their sexuality or their gender, and then they get thrown on a road trip with somebody. There are so many of them that you get the feeling that people are like, this is in and of itself, the point. I think about the movies that I’ve seen where there was the most interesting commentary on gender or sexuality, they were not movies about gender or sexuality. They were movies with people who had honest questions about these things.
There’s a commoditization of it. It’s almost like, “I think this is selling. Let me write a conventional version of a film about weirdos.” It’s also, we’re all like, we’ve all changed. Society has changed. It’s not so weird. If we’re all talking about the same weird thing, it’s not that weird. Here’s a movie that was weird. 1998, a movie called Happiness that was written and directed by Todd Solondz. That’s a weird movie, and that confronts some pretty weird stuff, including pedophilia. That movie felt dangerous. It felt like it was going to a place that made you uncomfortable and scared because you knew it was real. That is legit weird and fascinating and upsetting.
The other thing is, what’s actually upsetting? Horror, a lot of horror to me is not weird. It’s just pushing on the same old things. Then every now and then something comes along that is legitimately upsetting because it is weird.
John: May December, a weird movie.
Drew: I love that movie.
John: I love it too.
Craig: Weird?
John: Weird.
Craig: Weird?
John: Half the Nicolas Cage movies are just weird. Nicolas Cage is a fundamentally weird person.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: There’s a whole episode of Community, which there’s a class being taught to figure out whether Nicolas Cage is a good actor or a bad actor. The answer is, he does not fit on any spectrum.
Craig: The answer is, he’s Nicolas Cage. His movies are weird because of him because he is fully weird. Some of them are weirder than others, Bad Lieutenant. What the hell? That’s another disturbing movie. So weird. By the way, weird doesn’t mean good.
John: No, it doesn’t mean good.
Craig: Sometimes, weird movies are bad. In fact, a lot of times they’re so weird, you’re like, “I don’t know what to do with this.” Ken Russell used to make some weird-ass movies. I’m a fan of his weird. Layer of the White Worm, one of the weirdest movies you’ll ever seen. Tommy, based on this massively successful rock opera, weird movie, super weird. One of my favorite Ken Russell films, Gothic, which is the story of the night Mary Shelley conceived and wrote Frankenstein. So weird. Love that movie.
John: Emerald Fennell with Saltburn.
Craig: Weird.
John: I love that she’s getting to keep making weird movies because they succeed. Sometimes they break out because they’re strange. M3GAN broke out because it was weird.
Craig: So weird. Also, we forget because he’s become so, I don’t know, integrated into our understanding of modern cinema. Quentin Tarantino was weird.
John: Wes Anderson, weird, so weird.
Craig: Wes Anderson, we think of him now as just mostly twee, but he was and continues to be weird and honestly weird.
John: You love honestly weird. That’s the pride we’re having because you don’t have to love all the movies. I don’t love all these filmmakers, but I love that we’re continuing to make these movies.
Craig: Yes, and to the extent that you can either make something that is truly and honestly weird that comes from you, that feels authentic to you, that is interesting to people, or make something that is not weird, that’s really good. Pixar makes not weird, really good movies. Just try and avoid fake weird. That’s where I think there’s a lot of fake weird, and people can smell it from a mile away.
John: The little weird dust to sprinkle on top of it.
Craig: The weird dust, exactly. You don’t need to do that.
John: No. Let’s transition to talking about going from you have an idea, like, “I’m going to write this thing, this is the thing I want to do,” to actually doing it. Because I suspect we have a lot of listeners out there right now who is like, “Oh, I want to write a movie about this thing. I want to do this pilot.” Maybe you’ve written something before, maybe it’s the first time you’re doing it. But I want to talk about that transition from this is the thing I want to write, to actually doing the thing, and what the steps are in between. Because in previous conversations we’ve talked about, when do you know that you’re ready to start writing? Not doing too much, not doing too little. Unlike a song or a poem, you’ve got to have some plan going into it, or else it’s going to probably be chaos. But that transition point from, today I’m going to sit down and start doing it because I feel like so often it’s that worry that if I actually start doing it, I’ll hate it and I’ll fail.
Craig: You get married and you wake up and go, “What did I do?” It is scary. I think the truth is, we don’t really know.
John: You don’t.
Craig: Ideally, you have an ending. If you see the beginning and the ending, then it’s worth doing, and you’ll make it because you know where you start, you know where you finish, but you will be afraid and you will regret. Everybody regrets it. I regret when I get my food in a restaurant. I regret I couldn’t order something else.
John: I always want what Mike ordered.
Craig: Yes, exactly. I always want what Mike ordered, and I’m not even there. You have decision sickness, and it happens, but also, you must learn the value of commitment because commitment is not, “Oh, I made a great decision at the beginning of the process.” Commitment is, “It doesn’t matter if I made a good decision. I committed.” Through time, energy, and effort, it will be rewarding, hopefully. At worst, you finish, you have a finished script, you wish you hadn’t spent time on that one. You got better. You learned something, put it aside, start something else. You just have to pick and hope.
John: Nora Garrett was on the podcast a few weeks ago. She was talking about her first script, which ended up getting produced as After the Hunt. She went through a writer’s boot camp, basically, to do it. I think the value of write your screenplay in 21 days or NaNoWriMo is that it provides some excuse for why you’re starting.
This is why I’m starting to do this thing. It’s signing up for a gym on January 1st. It’s some reason to get there and actually start doing the thing, because once you’re in the middle of doing the thing, you’re more likely to keep doing the thing. You have to have some rationale for why it is now. Aline also has a metaphor of the easing yourself into the water, where you stand on the beach and let the water roll over your toes, and before you know it, you’re actually writing.
Craig: You ease in, yes.
John: I’m also remembering Katie Silverman coming on the podcast, talking about how, before writing the actual script or even writing treatments for things, she’ll just have those characters have conversations. Just have a long conversation.
Craig: That’s what I do. In the shower, I start doing weird– I’m weird. I’m weird in the shower, you guys, [chuckles] because I’m talking to myself.
John: You’re starting to hear those characters and what it sounds like when those characters are talking to each other. Those are all ways to get started. Then you’ve got to, at some point, bite the bullet. I’m writing a scene. Whether it’s on paper or you’re firing a pilot or however you’re doing it, you write a scene, tweak it a bit, and then write the next one, write the next one, and you got to keep moving. I feel like there’s so many unwritten things out there because people are just afraid to start because they will recognize all the problems with it once you start it, but that’s part of the process.
Craig: Also, starting implies you have to do work.
John: Yes.
Craig: We are afraid, and we’re also lazy. Sometimes we accentuate our fear because it is in service of our laziness when, in fact, really, it’s not that you’re scared, you just don’t want to do it.
John: Yes. Almost anything else is easier than writing.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: A video game, cleaning your kitchen is easier. Some of those are the excuses for why you’re not doing your daily writing or you’re not doing the stuff that you’re doing today, but it can back into the excuse for why you’re never starting on the actual project itself.
Craig: I would argue that if you are a writer, meaning you are a professional writer, or it’s not your job yet, but you would like it to be, and so you work when you’re not working, you should be writing. If you are trying to figure out which thing to be writing, pick one now and keep thinking about the other ones. What you don’t have an option of doing is hamleting around going, “Woah, this one or this one or this?” If you get into that mindset, then at least if you find yourself terrified at the thought of writing something, it’s because you’re actually terrified by it, not because you just don’t want to write.
John: Yes. To wrap this up, we talk about pick the project that has the best ending, which is my general advice for which of the projects you should do. If you don’t know what the ending is, that’s the right place to start. Think about you probably have a good sense of how it starts, how your project begins. Really spend the time to just work through the ending and try writing that out. If you can find it, great, and that’s going to make you really excited to do it. If you can’t find it, probably don’t start because you’re unlikely to finish it.
Craig: It’s going to be bad and you won’t know where to go and you may get to a place where you finally have to pay the debt. Then the debt is what the ending is that I don’t know. The other thing I would recommend is when you have the beginning and you have the ending, ask yourself, “Yes, but what is this about? Why would anyone care?” It’s never about what it’s about, as we know. Having that can be some nice rocket fuel for you because it gives you some mental guidance for what parts of the story would be important to tell and what parts you maybe don’t need to tell.
John: Yes. All right, let’s answer some listener questions. We have one here from Grace in London.
Grace: Hi, John and Craig. I’ve been screenwriting as a passion project for the last 10 years, averaging a screenplay a year, and I’m writing my first animated feature. I think the story and movie would work best as a musical akin to a Disney animation or even though these aren’t animated Barbie or The Greatest Showman. Do you have any advice for writing a screenplay that will integrate with an original soundtrack?
John: Sure. First off, great. She’s written 10 things. She writes a screenplay a year. That’s awesome. She’s a person who has an idea, and she’s like, “Okay, this is the thing I’m writing this year.” Love it. Good on you, Grace. I’ve written a lot of animated musicals. What I’ll tell you is that you plan for where those songs are and plan for what the function of those songs are. I always put the song in there, the original song in there. Will it get replaced? Yes, but if the song is in there serving a story purpose, my temporary song does that purpose, and you really have to think about that. If it’s not a story plus songs, the songs are crucial story elements.
Craig: Yes. Worked on somewhat popular musical film. One bit of advice I would give you is to write stuff to happen during the song.
John: Exactly.
Craig: I think a lot of people will write up to a point, and then someone starts to sing, and then they just put the lyrics in, and then the movie re-continues. No. What’s happening?
John: Yes.
Craig: Where are they? Do they move around? Who are they singing to? Do they go outside? Are there other people in the scene? How are they reacting to that? Write it in. Basically, songs are the action scenes of musicals.
John: Yes, 100%. Next question comes from Nyasha.
Drew: “I wrote and directed an audio podcast for Audible. I’m very proud of it, but I’m now in the process of trying to adapt the podcast into a movie. I’m really interested to get your thoughts on the process of adaptation. What are the pitfalls to look out for in adapting a podcast script to a screenplay and what do you think are the advantages?”
John: Nyasha, we don’t know whether yours is like a documentary podcast or a fictionalized version. I think they’re two very different things. If it’s a documentary podcast, it really calls back to Adriana versus Veronica, which is that you probably told the story in a way that really made sense in a podcast medium, but now you really need to think about what is it going to look like with visuals, taking place in time, and that kind of thing. If it is a fictional podcast, who are the characters that worked in the audio version, and how do they work just as voices, and how is it going to feel different when you actually are seeing places and time is more continuous the way that it is on video?
Craig: Yes. I’ll presume that this was a fictional podcast just for the sake of the question. You want to make sure as you adapt something like that, which is an audio-only medium, to not only think as visually as possible, but also think about how much freedom you have to go places and to see things. Show me where you are. Go outside, and don’t be afraid to spend a little time in silence as long as something interesting is happening. Some of the more interesting sequences on film are ones where people aren’t talking.
When you’re doing a podcast story, I assume people are constantly talking. Otherwise, it’s just hammering noises. You’re allowed to not talk as long as you’re showing me something fascinating. When you look at how Christopher Nolan opens the Dark Knight movie, that big robbery sequence, there’s almost no talking. Every 80 seconds somebody says, hey.
John: Yes, things that would not work in there. We often talk about how screenplays are limited because you only talk about what you can see and what you can hear. In your audio podcast, it’s just what people can hear. You’ve got one vector there. You’ll have a lot more, which is fantastic.
Craig: You have to break some things, too, because there are things that just simply won’t work well because they were designed for audio only.
John: A good example I’d point you to, I thought the adaptation of Homecoming, which is a podcast, Michael Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz did it, and Sam Esmail did the adaptation for series. I thought it was really well done. It took the best elements of what made that work as an audio fiction podcast and turned it into something that feels like a series. It had its still strange energies to it. Again, look for examples, but there’s not going to be a lot. You’re flying blind here.
Let’s answer one more from Owen.
Drew: Owen writes, “I wrote a short film based on a personal experience. A director loved it and will be shooting it next month. The collaborative process has been great, but I haven’t been involved in a lot of the creative production decisions, including casting. I’ve loved the director’s attitude and I’ve tried to stay out of the way in certain areas, telling myself it’s my story but the director’s execution. I’d love to hear about how you navigate your feelings of ownership over an idea, a story, or even a draft, and if that’s something you’ve had to practice, what that journey was like.”
Craig: Well, this is an argument for producing your own work. You’re making a short film, right, so nobody involved is some big shot in Hollywood. Everybody involved is trying to make a good calling card. They’re practicing. They’re sharpening their tools. If it’s your story, that is literally your story. Even if it’s not, even if it takes place on Mars with aliens and you control it and it’s original, you have to, I think, have to insist that you are producing this as well. I mean, unless some financier is coming in to back this big short film, you have to produce it, which means you have to have some kind of approval over the process of casting, and some general approval over the process of the schedule and the budget and all the rest.
First of all, you need to learn that stuff. Second of all, I don’t care who it is. This whole, “You got to get out of the way of the director,” unless the director’s wrong. Then you need to be in the way. They’re wrong. There’s this presumption that you’ll get notes because you’re wrong, but the director, their authority can be unchecked because they’re not wrong. Incorrect and also insane. My strong suggestion to all of you out there who are in this position that Owen is in is to be a producer on your own work so that you do maintain, at a minimum, participation this process.
John: Yes. Owen is saying that the experience has been really great, yet he’s writing to us because he’s also feeling like he should be more involved.
Craig: Stockholm Syndrome seems to have set in.
John: Absolutely. Yes, I think so. Listen, it sounds like the director is doing a good job, and you’re mostly happy with stuff. You just feel like you’re on the sidelines. Get yourself a little closer in there. It doesn’t mean that you have to weigh in on every decision at all. Just be there as a resource and learn from it because the process of making a short film is to end up with a great short film, but also so you learn about the process of making a short film, so you know what this is. By keeping yourself involved, and seeing how casting works, and what production is like, and whose job is it to do that thing on set, these are all things you should be taking in.
Craig: All of it. I think it’s important to come to the table with an open mind and a dedication to best idea wins. Even, I would argue, giving the other person a little bit of an extra edge over your opinion because you’re counteracting the fact that it’s your opinion. If you sit with someone and you really consider what they’re saying and they make a good argument, you’ve learned, and they’re right. It’s not a contest, and it’s not a game of who’s in charge of whom, but you have to be at the table of a short film that you wrote, the end.
You cannot– this nonsense– this is where it begins, where directors literally who haven’t directed things, but are like, “but I am a director. Therefore, you need to get out of my way. Everybody’s got to be worried about my feelings, my domain, etiquette, blah, blah blah, blah blah.” Everyone’s walking on eggshells around a director because the world of directors has created this culture. I’m a director and I’ll tell you, “I don’t need any of that. I don’t want any of it.” I don’t want people walking on eggshells around me. I don’t want them overly concerned with etiquette.
Yes, okay, can the guy with the boom mic give my actor’s direction? No, that’s bad for the process. Can he come and tell me that he thinks that maybe they’re saying something or doing something that might not make sense? Absolutely. Then I’ll make a determination, but there’s nothing– It’s actually the worst job to put in bubble wrap, so get the bubble wrap off that guy.
John: A practical bit of advice here, Owen. There are going to be conversations where the director’s talking to the production designer, talking to other department heads by himself, and that’s fine, that’s great, and that’s natural, but there are going to be some things which are production meetings. They’re going to be either in person or on Zooms. You should be in those meetings.
Craig: Absolutely, and helping to answer questions. If there is a disagreement, it is important that all the people working on something feel like there is a common marching order, that the instructions are consistent. If there’s a disagreement, then you can always– and this happens in meetings all the time, where– I’m in charge of my show. If somebody has a thought that is different from mine, and I’m not sure which one of us is right, I’ll say, “Okay, let’s table that. We’ll talk about that,” like my DP, “we’re going to talk about that, and we’re going to come back to you guys with an answer.” Not, “Don’t question me in front of people.” Question me in front of– What are we doing here?
Come on, the sensitivity around directors is astonishing. It’s perfectly inverse to the sensitivity around writers, which is to say everyone gets to kick them as hard as they want, and no one can even, like, “Oh my God, don’t breathe on the director. They’ll collapse. Please.
John: My first experience in production was on Go, and I was involved in every bit of casting, every production meeting, all that stuff. Did I know what I was doing in a lot of it? No, but I learned a lot of what I was doing, and I definitely had the right answers to questions as things came up. Because I was in all those pre-production meetings, when it came time when I needed to direct a second unit, I knew who everybody was, I knew what the brief was, I knew what our schedule was, I knew how to do all those things. In most of the movies I’ve written for other people, have I been that involved? No.
The Tim Burton movies, I’ve been there through pre-production, and I’ve gotten stuff up on its feet and running, could answer questions from department heads as things came up. Our director on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could send me, “This is what is in the newspaper articles that are on the background of this wall? Does this all look right?” “Yes, and thank you for that.” That’s because I’ve made myself available, and I tried to work with people who would include me in the process, and basically wouldn’t try to shut me out of the process.
Craig: Exactly. I worked with Todd Phillips. Todd is a very strong director, this firm hand clarity, but we collaborated constantly on all aspects, casting, everything, all of it. The idea is for you to know how to do it in a way that is graceful and that doesn’t confuse people, because there have been situations where people are like, “Who’s actually directing this movie?” That comes up sometimes because there’s a weak director and somebody seems to be steamrolling them. Typically, a producer or a star. There is a way to work with a director who is confident enough to let you in because it’s help. If you make it better, you make it better.
The directors that get really fussy about this stuff are the ones that are insecure because they’re not quite sure what their actual value is, and so they need to invent it.
John: All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. Mine harkens back to our celebration of weirdness. It’s a thing called Channelvue. It is just channelvue.biz. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Written by Joe Veix, directed by Brandon Tauszik. It looks like in late ’80s, early ’90s, cable listing, a cable TV scrolling guide with a little video on top that has ads and things, but things go very wrong. It’s really very smartly done. It was clearly so much work, and just the payoff is just great. It’s also just weird. It’s deeply baked down in weird. It’s weird in the same way that Too Many Cooks is weird, but it’s its own special flavor.
Craig: Its own weird. Well, that’s fantastic. I, too, have something on theme for weird.
John: I love it.
Craig: Our Dutch friends who work at Rusty Lake, one of my favorite game creators, have a demo out for their upcoming game, Servant of the Lake. Rusty Lake has made a lot of what I would call shorter, they call them cube escape games. They’re a few hours. Then they have a couple of big ones, which are my favorite. Rusty Lake Roots, big one. This is going to be a big one. They put the first, I don’t know, maybe 20 minutes of puzzle-solving little stage on there. It’s like, you show up at this place, you have a few interesting things you do.
Unfortunately, it’s only available currently on Steam. It’s not something you can play on an iPad, but eventually, of course, it will come to iOS. They always do. I played it. It was fantastic. Rusty Lake are so beautifully weird unto themselves. They have this thing. Do you play those games?
John: I have played a few of them. At your recommendation, yes.
Craig: Yes. There are a few things that always show up, no matter what. The storyline is impenetrably weird. Then there are also these things that happen. There’s always a shrimp. When you find stuff, you find matches, and you find, oh, the code sheet and the thing, but then you often will find a shrimp. That’s how you know you’re playing Rusty Lake. They put a shrimp in a drawer. Why? Don’t know.
John: Yes, but it’s specific to their taste.
Craig: Yes. Check out the demo for Servant of the Lake. I am very excited to play that.
John: Cool. Great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes was produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. We have a bonus holdover candy spooky outro by Jim Bond. It’s out of spooky season, but it’s–
Craig: We are recording this on Halloween.
John: We are recording it on Halloween.
Drew: It’s weird.
John: Yes, it’s weird.
Craig: That’s weird.
John: That’s weird. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. It’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips, another helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for ScriptNotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at ScriptNotes Podcast. If you need T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware, you’ll find us at Cotton Bureau.
You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers.
Craig: Thank you so much.
John: They showed up huge to pre-order the book. Thank you for that.
Craig: Second-best orange screenwriting book.
John: You should pre-order your Scriptnotes book today. That way, it’s in your hands December 2nd. It also gets us closer to being on lists and gets us in more libraries and bookstores. Thank you again for everyone who’s pre-ordered the book.
Craig: I like that you care about libraries. That’s very nice.
John: Yes, libraries are great.
Craig: Libraries are amazing.
John: I’m not opposed to– Like, “Oh, I’m not going to sell a book because it’s in the library.” No. Libraries are good things.
Craig: They’re amazing things. My dad, if he were alive, would absolutely take this book out from the library. I’d be like, “Dad, you know I can just send you one?” “No, I’ll get it from the library.”
John: “No, no, I’ll put it on reserve.”
Craig: He puts a request. Every week, he would go there and fill out cards. He’s like, “I’m not buying a book. I’m borrowing it.”
John: I love it.
Craig: It’s my dad.
John: I salute that. That’s good stuff. Please, pre-order your book so more libraries will be there for great staff.
Craig: Leonard.
John: Leonard will–
Craig: Leonard, well, he’s not anymore.
John: Yes. The Leonards of the world-
Craig: The Leonards of the world.
John: -will have it there.
Craig: He’s left behind legions of Leonards out there, gray-haired men in polos tucked into khaki shorts at the library with their reading glasses ready to go.
John: We’re finishing up the bonus chapter, which we’re going to send to all the people who pre-ordered the book. Remember, if you pre-ordered the book, send the receipt to Drew because it’s on the list for this bonus chapter.
Craig: Yes. ask@johnaugust.com.
John: Circling back to thank all of our premium subscribers. You can sign up to become our premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on this sense of self-narrative and remembering who you are. Craig, you never forget who you are.
Craig: I’m not sure who I am right now.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. Craig, maybe a year or two ago, we talked about aphantasia, which was this actually relatively recently discovered thing that certain people don’t have the ability to visualize things in their head. When everybody hears things like picture in your head or think back to a time, they’re like, that’s metaphorical, right? You’re not actually seeing a thing. Most of us around this table, and most screenwriters, I would presume, we can actually see things in our heads. We can sum up an image.
As they’ve done more studies on it, they see that it’s actually of a whole spectrum. There’s aphantasia, which is the inability to do this thing, and there’s hyperphantasia, which is you can do it too vividly and it’s actually not–
Craig: Disabling.
John: Disabling, yes. There’s a happy sweet spot, which is a great place to be in. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that I was reading recently, which went in much greater depth about it. It turns out that a lot of people with aphantasia don’t have a strong sense of their own history. They don’t have the ability to form a self-narrative, and they can’t think back to things. Sometimes they can’t picture places they’ve been before. They can’t picture their children. They can’t see these things. It’s not just face blindness. They just really don’t have the–
Craig: Gone.
John: It’s gone. That would feel strange and sad to most of us, and yet, some people are actually kind of happy. Their philosopher is just like, “I just move forward. I’m the person I am now, and my life is entirely present tense,” which feels like some of it, I read this and think about how would this be a movie? It’s interesting to reflect upon how freeing would it be to not be burdened by who you were.
Craig: Well, there are two things that we have to think about who we were. One are these specific memories, places, faces, times, imagining events, remembering, oh, the time I did something embarrassing. When we tell stories about something that happened, we begin to narrativize these things. There’s also the stuff that we don’t realize we remember from the past, that work underneath the surface. Those are the reasons we go to therapy because those are running in our minds. We just don’t realize it. Probably, I have just as many of those as anyone else. I think I do have a little bit, I wouldn’t say less ability to remember the past actively. We’ll call it active memory. I just have less interest in it. I don’t think much about it.
John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Larissa MacFarquhar that talks through what we know scientifically about it. What’s clear is that just the same way that some people have a kind of blindness where they actually really are seeing some things, like they literally can avoid walls. If they ask, “What do you see?” they can’t tell you, but they clearly are seeing something. There’s people who actually do have historical memory of themselves. It’s just that they can’t–
Craig: Summon it.
John: They can’t pull it up. They can’t do it.
Craig: I think that for most people, what we think of as the past is, in fact, a highly narrativized, reconstructed thing. It is not what happened. Our memories are notoriously terrible. Human memory is junk. We do not record things like a videotape. We take information in and rearrange it into a story. Our personal narratives are, in fact, narratives that are somewhat accurate, but oftentimes completely inaccurate.
John: The challenge, though, is that obviously, narrativizing is efficient. It’s a way of getting rid of the extraneous details and creating a consistent story which is useful, which may not be accurate. Narrativizing gives you the possibility of learning from your mistakes, and making different choices, and recognizing patterns that you don’t want to repeat again, or patterns that you do want to repeat again. They talk about some of these people who have the aphantasia who have a hard time with friendships because they don’t think about people when they’re not in front of them. It’s a kind of solipsism. It’s not intentional. It’s just like they literally don’t think about people unless they’re in front of them, but they sometimes worry, like, “Is everyone going to forget about me as well?”
Craig: Yes. I definitely don’t have that. I do have a healthy skepticism of my self-concept. I do feel like if I remember something, it means it probably has been processed. It’s like processed food. I’m suspicious of my own memories. I’m suspicious of my own memories of things that were good. I’m suspicious of my own memories that things were bad. I do note that I tend to memorialize things that are embarrassing, which is unfortunate. Ask me, like, “Oh, do you ever think about happy times?” No.
John: Well, probably because you’re not rehearsing those memories. Those bad things, they come up again, and they stew on them for a bit, and it reinforces them.
Craig: Well, I am a forward-looking person because I’m curious. More than anything, I’m curious, which means I want to know what’s around the bend. I’m always thinking about what’s coming next. It’s so exciting to me. The unknown is exciting.
John: One of the things I’ve noticed that they do in these studies is that people who work in scientific fields are more likely to be aphantasic than folks who work in creative fields. It makes sense, not just in the pre-sorting of it all, but the things you are– As your brain is growing and developing, if daydreaming has not been a thing you’ve been doing a lot of, you’re not doing that. I was a huge daydreamer, a crazy big daydreamer.
Craig: That would probably be the best word to describe me as a kid, as an adult, as an old man.
John: Absolutely. The parts of your brain that you’re exercising to do the things are going to reinforce. Imagining things a lot is what I get paid to do. It’s my default mode.
Craig: Well, it’s like in D&D, which of course is the answer to everything, you have abilities. The higher that ability is, the more likely you are going to use things that are connected to that ability and it all self-reinforces. I think daydreamers, we’re predilected to daydream. They daydream more. They really get a daydream. People that aren’t– Scientists have recorded data. They don’t have to remember the data. They don’t have to remember where they were when they recorded the data. There’s no story to the data. It’s just facts that are written down that can be referred to and compared and thank God for those people.
John: Yes, there’s a base truth, which is just very different from what we do.
Craig: They make miraculous things for us.
John: Drew, a question for you. Going through acting schools and stuff like that, to what degree, when you are in scenes, and did this change at all over your acting trajectory, are you literally envisioning yourself in a different place when you’re in a scene doing a thing? It’s always interesting to talk to actors like, “Are you getting rid of the camera and everybody else, or are you just in space?” Talk to me about that experience.
Drew: Oh, it’s been a while. That’s a good question. My gut was no. My gut is more about the way I was trained. It’s more about what you’re doing to the other person. That’s all actions and verbs. Just being with that other person and everything around you doesn’t matter. That’s all trappings on top of that connection.
But in improv and stuff like that, you have to imagine a room around you. Then, if you’re baking, you have to pick up the right thing. We did clown work and that kind of thing. There was a lot of that. Once it’s said, it’s said. If you’re putting out a table, you have to remember where you’ve left the forks and those kind of things. That is a different type of imagination.
Craig: Can I tell you something that bothers me about improv? People pick things up all the time. I have a water glass in front of me that you’ve so nicely provided. I’ll do this. People that pick things up in improv, it’s like they’re robots picking things up. They have to make this weird hand gesture and do this, or they put things away with both hands. It’s so weird. What is that?
John: Again, once we do this on video, all that makes much more sense. What you’re describing is, it’s the overperformance of a thing. It’s probably to sell it to the back row.
Drew: I think it’s an establishment thing.
Craig: When they reach for a door, they reach out, grab it, and pull it. They don’t just go pull.
Drew: It’s so weird.
John: It’s also because you’re establishing it for the audience, but also for other people who are on stage, that this is where the door is and this is how it swings and that stuff.
Craig: It’s very odd to me and amusing, that it always works that way. It’s just been taught and taught and taught, and now it’s inculcated. You know what? You got to imagine stuff in that space. I get it.
John: I have a focus group of people who have to watch Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, which is the movie. It’s just lines on the floor and everything is pantomimed.
Craig: I don’t want to watch that.
John: Yes. I really enjoyed it when I watched it the first time, but you are having to just imagine everything else around you.
Craig: It’s their job. That’s like, you go to an avant-garde restaurant and they just dump the ingredients on your table. Go ahead. Cook it. Make a thing. Here’s two eggs, some cheese. Make yourself an omelet, buddy.
John: I want to circle back to the sense of self-narrative. Craig, at what age do you feel like you are actually yourself? At what age does Craig Mazin begin?
Craig: I feel like I was probably 12 or 13.
John: That’s the same age I would put for myself. Before that, I acknowledge there’s a little kid who I see in photos, but it’s not really me.
Craig: No, it’s not me.
John: I feel like I can draw a continuous line back to that kid who was about 12 or 13, and it is consistently me. After moving to Los Angeles and people would make references to things, I have surprising gaps in popular culture before that age or around that age, like H.R. Pufnstuf, I just never saw.
Craig: Yes, I did see that.
John: There’s things you feel like, wait, it’s just weird, things I must have experienced or seen that just have disappeared because they never got rehearsed.
Craig: There are definitely things that I remember. I remember in first grade, kids would talk about The Rockford Files, and I was like, “What?”
John: [sings]
Craig: They loved singing the song. I’m like, “What?” I have a very specific memory. Maybe I told the story in the podcast before. We’ve done 7,000 episodes. We did charades in first grade.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: I was young for first grade. I think I was six. This is a memory from when I was six years old. There were charades where somebody would go up and do something, and we would have to guess what it is. Three different boys went up there, and their charade was just playing a guitar and pretending to sing. Everyone was like, Rockford Files. I’m like, “What is happening? What is this? What is The Rockford Files? Why would you know that from somebody playing guitar? Other people play guitar? What the?” See, I said Rockford Files, and what did you do?
John: [sings]
Craig: You did the song. As far as I know, The Rockford Files is a song for 45 minutes, then James Garner shows up, punches the guy, and it’s over.
John: That’s about right. Not entirely inaccurate. It has its scruffy charm. Again, it was a thing that was on in afternoon reruns that I was aware of,-
Craig: So weird.
John: -but I wasn’t really watching it.
Craig: Everybody was really plugged into that in 1976.
John: Yes, it’s wild. I would say 12 or 13 is when I first feel a continuity back to that person. Yet it’s strange because we are constantly creating fictional worlds and other things. We’re also in other places. All the time that I was doing Arlo Finch, those three years of writing those books, I was also simultaneously inside Pine Mountain. I could see everything. I knew the layout of everyone’s houses. I could do all that stuff. Now I don’t. As I go back, all of a sudden, I was doing a little thing about Highland, and I pulled up a chapter of Arlo Finch just to show some stuff. It’s like, “I don’t recognize these names. I don’t recognize these people. Who is that kid?” It’s weird how–
Craig: “Who wrote this?” I think about that all the time.
John: Yes. I recognize it as my writing, but I don’t remember it.
Craig: Yes, I don’t. I know I wrote it. It just was somewhere else when I did it. It is a strange thing to become other people because when you become other people in your head and you go to other places, it isn’t you. That’s why I get a little grouchy when people– and it’s inevitable. Somebody asks the question every single time when we go to Austin, like, “What stories do you feel you have the right to write?” All of them, everything. I can write anybody. That’s sort of the job is to be other people. Now that requires empathy and insight and attention and care and studying and doing your homework, but that’s what it is.
It is not surprising to me that you forget these things because you stop being those people. You start becoming other people. Well, I don’t know if this is true, but I was just thinking why the two of us thought 12 and 13. One argument is it’s because when you roughly start to transition into adulthood, which is what we are now, and so therefore that’s when you kind of remember being you. Every now and then, I do think that there was that time, I think between 12 and I’m going to say 16, where life was sort of magical.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: Everything that happened was powerfully magical. Becoming attracted to people was magical. The social stuff was magical. Drugs were magical. Everything was magical because it was all new, and it was all weird. There isn’t much magical left. I will say one of the bummers about growing old is I never have an experience where I feel like, “Oh my God.” Occasionally, I do, but generally speaking, the thrill of becoming someone is gone.
John: Well, you look at people complaining about like, “Oh, the experience of renting a movie at Blockbuster was just so much better than the current version of seeing a movie because we would go there and we would do this and sometimes you wouldn’t find the movie and that was half the fun,” and stuff. It was like, “No, you miss being 16.” That’s what it is.
Craig: Exactly.
John: You miss your youth. They do studies like when was America’s best decade and they also track their age, it was always when they were 12 to 18.
Craig: Of course. Basically, we are living through some dying boomer’s fantasy about that time, which had higher crime, and social justice was way worse. Social injustice was profound and now we’re like, “Oh, being queer isn’t weird anymore.” It was weird. That’s why they were called queer. They didn’t come up with that word.
John: Yes. It was a stronger word for weird.
Craig: Other people did. They were like, “You’re not normal.” That’s what life was back then. Then, when you look at somebody like Walt Disney, who when he designs Walt Disney World and Disneyland, what does he make? Main Street USA. Early 1900s. How old was he in the early 1900s?
John: It’s harking back to this vision of Americana, which was all the good stuff.
Craig: When life was magic. Born in 1901. Boom.
John: Exactly.
Craig: 1917, he was 16. If you look at Main Street USA, it sort of looks like what 1917 looked like in Wichita, for white people.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Those are the good old days. I guess for us, the good old days are the early ’80s, which were crime-ridden. There was a plague. It was really bad.
John: That’s part of the reason why I wanted to acknowledge in the main part of the podcast, they are not good things happening here, and just reflect note. We don’t have the ability to perfectly remember everything. I always go back to my photo roll. When was I there? What happened? That’s become my extra set of memories for things. Other references, like the podcast, it’s like, what was the context around things? You can find those.
Craig: I don’t look back.
John: You don’t look back? Only forward?
Craig: [singing] “Don’t look back in anger. I heard him say.”
John: Oh, my last thing is twice last week, I’ve watched videos of people watching my movies for the first time. It’s a really interesting–
Craig: Wait. How do you find a video of somebody watching your movies?
John: There’s a whole genre on YouTube of reaction videos where people watch a movie for the first time. It’s really fun to see people experiencing Big Fish for the first time. It’s like a couple watching Big Fish. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re narrating as they’re doing it, and they’re talking about what they expect. It’s a really interesting genre or media because it’s just like you’re seeing the live things. It’s intercutting, sometimes, with the scenes of what they’re saying.
Craig: Oh, yes. They send me a lot of reaction videos. HBO compile reaction videos to when we put a trailer out. They’ve had the trailer, the little box and the people in it. That is fun to watch.
John: It’s fun to watch it for your movie. You end up fast-forwarding through some stuff. Looking at the big twist revelations in Big Fish and how people take it, or I watched somebody watch Go, and I’m realizing how much I had forgotten about what actually happens in Go, but then seeing the person watch it for the first time and the revelations that happen in Go, it’s a fun thing. It’s nice that we have this in existence.
Craig: Yes. Some people are stuck in the past. I’m stuck in the future, which is a weird thing to say because I’m not there yet, but that’s where I am.
John: After I finished this little rewatch of Go, the algorithm showed me behind-the-scenes making of Go, which I’d never seen. I don’t know where this footage came from. They have a little interview with me and so here’s me on set of Go. This would be 1999.
Craig: Yes. It looks like you.
John: It looks like me.
Craig: You look the same.
John: I don’t remember this ever happening, but it was me.
Craig: I absolutely don’t remember any of those things. They’re gone. They happened, and then they’re gone. When we watch The Last of Us with our friends, Derek and Christy, they like to come over, and we watch together because they like the show, and it forces me to watch it. Then they make me watch the thing after the credits. They make me sit there and watch the talking head bits, the after-the-show stuff.
John: Then seeing how they cut you.
Craig: I don’t remember a damn thing from that stuff.
John: Those are all shot on one day, right?
Craig: Yes, those are all shot on one day.
John: Now we’re talking about this thing.
Craig: Hence, the single shirt, so pick a good shirt, I guess.
John: That’s the lesson we’ve learned from this discussion of aphantasia.
Craig: Pick a good shirt for behind-the-scenes.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
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