John August

Scriptnotes, Episode 730: A Frank Conversation About Screenwriting, Transcript

Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is episode 730 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

This week, Craig and I are still both off on our adventures, but fingers crossed we should be back in person with a normal episode next week. Today I’m here with producer Drew Marquardt. Hey, Drew.

Drew Marquardt: Hey, John.

John: I also haven’t seen you for a bit either because I’ve been in negotiations with the Writers Guild and then on vacation before that, so it is nice to see your face again.

Drew: It’s really good to see you too. I’m excited for this episode too.

John: This episode reminds me of, you know that feeling where you haven’t been to the grocery store in a while and so you open the fridge and you’re like, “What can I actually eat in here?”

Drew: Yes.

John: That’s the feeling today because we were trying to assemble a meal from leftovers. Sometimes those turn out really tasty.

Drew: Oh, those leftover sandwiches that are just weird things that you don’t think go together, but they’re great.

John: Looking through the big folder, a thing which we had in that folder was this interview I did with the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. This was an event to promote the Scriptnotes book and do a Q&A with their members. It ended up being really great.

The Northwest Screenwriters Guild, we should say, isn’t a union, but rather a screenwriting community based out of the Pacific Northwest. It was just me. Craig wasn’t able to join for that one. What I remember about it is it started out as a standard promotional stop, but actually became a really good conversation about process and career. We asked them and they said yes, that we could take the audio from that and share it with our listeners.

Drew: I feel like I’ve heard you talk about the Scriptnotes book and tell your career story 4 billion times at this point. This is the first time I felt like I heard new things and really frank things. It was really exciting to listen to.

John: There were a lot of good questions, and so we’re putting this in here. It’s a little bit of a strange episode because it’s just people asking me questions, but it is about the thing that Scriptnotes is about, which is screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It was also a good reminder that there’s folks out there for whom all of this is new, and they’re asking these questions for the first time. I enjoyed this conversation. Hopefully, you’ll still learn something new even if you listened to 729 episodes of Scriptnotes. Then we’re back at the end for a boilerplate and wrap up.

In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about sketch comedy writing because one of the real joys of being on the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild is we get a chance to talk with members who work across all sorts of different fields. Especially, we get a lot of writers from the East who work in sketch comedy and work right for shows like Last Week Tonight or the other big late night shows, SNL.

I had a great conversation over lunch with them about sketch comedy writing. I want to have them on the show to actually talk about it. I want to have a chat with you, Drew, about just the nature of sketch and, again, a segment of John didn’t know about how the process works and what the lingo is behind sketch comedy.

Drew: I’m into it.

John: Cool. Enjoy this conversation with the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. We’re back at the end and we’ll be back with a normal episode next week.

[music]

Mike Johnston: Hi. I’m Mike Johnston. I’m the vice president of the Northwest Screenwriters Guild, someone absolutely no one wants to listen to, so let me introduce our very special guest tonight so he can talk, the co-host of the podcast Scriptnotes, Mr. John August. Welcome, sir.

John: Hello. It’s really nice to be here.

Mike: Great.

John: I usually say hello and welcome. That’s my default greeting on Scriptnotes, but it’s nice to see a bunch of either faces or list names in boxes here for this. Mike, Lynelle, Scott, thank you so much for having me here at the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. I think what you’re setting up to do here is a lot of why I got involved in answering questions about screenwriting. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, was a journalism major in Iowa, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I actually found out there was such a thing as screenwriting. Everyone on the Zoom is ahead of where I was at.

When I was first finding out that there was such a thing called screenwriting, the only opportunity I had to read scripts was books would sometimes publish the screenplay that went with a movie. The first thing I read was Steven Soderbergh had a script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape along with a production diary. I was able to read through that and say, “Oh my gosh, this is everything they’re saying in the movie.” I was watching the videotape. Everything they’re saying in the movie is written down there on paper beforehand. It seems so obvious because we’ve all grown up reading plays in high school.

Of course, a movie is like a play, but with more stuff in it. I just didn’t know it until I actually saw it and read it for the first time. In discovering that there was such a thing as a screenplay and someone had to write that screenplay, I was like, “That’s a job I think I want to do.” I went to the library because this is pre-internet, and read as much as I could. I found out there were film programs.

I went to a summer program at Stanford where I learned the basics of shooting film and a little bit about cinematic storytelling. Then I applied to and got into USC for film school. For grad school, I did a two-year producing program. That’s where I read a thousand scripts and really got to understand what screenwriting was and how it worked.

I always remembered what it was like not to know these things. As the internet came up, IMDb asked me to write a weekly column about screenwriting. I was answering listener questions about screenwriting. I read a question about screenwriting. I started my own blog where I answered more of those questions and talked about what it was I was doing. Then almost 15 years ago, I started a podcast with Craig Mazin about screenwriting, and that was Scriptnotes.

Our imagined listener is the person who, maybe they’re working in the industry, but maybe they’re just the kid I was in Iowa who wants to know about screenwriting and wants to have good information about it. Since there weren’t other online communities for it, we were just trying to provide that answer for people with those questions and really talk about what the experience was like. For 15 years, we had a weekly podcast about it, talking everything from the craft to the business. That’s the instinct behind Scriptnotes, the book, the podcast, and why I like to talk to people online about what screenwriting is like.

Mike: Absolutely. I stopped screenwriting because the feedback I was getting, it was all these rules. Then I discovered your podcast. I’m like, “These guys get it.” It’s been a whole summer. I went back to the earliest episode I could get. I can easily say that I have listened to every single one of your podcasts.

John: Holy cow.

Mike: I highly recommend.

John: 714 or so episodes of Scriptnotes to listen to, plus some bonus segments along the way. It’s good you talk about the rules of screenwriting because one of the things when we set out to write a screenwriting book is that every book of screenwriting is basically, “Here are the rules, and follow these rules, and you will write a good screenplay.” We felt like we had to start with an introductory chapter that was just like, “Here are the rules of screenwriting. We came down to 20. I’ll just read you this 20, and then I’ll tell you why they’re all bullshit. These are the kind of rules you’re going to see all the time.

Your script must be 120 pages or fewer, 12-point career only. The inciting incident must happen by page 15. The first act break must be by page 30. The midpoint is really important. The second act break must be on page 90. No scene can be longer than three pages. You can only use day or night in scene headings. Never use cut to. It’s unnecessary filler. No camera directions unless you’re also the director. Don’t use “we see” or “we hear.” Use uppercase only for sound effects and character introductions.

No bold, italics, or asterisks. No punctuation in parentheticals. Don’t make asides to the reader in actual descriptions. If it can’t be seen or heard, cut it. Don’t use the words “is” or “walks.” Don’t use passive voice. No adverbs ending in -ly. No -ing verbs. No VoiceOver. Those are the 20. Those are the kinds of things we kept being forced at us as we were starting off as screenwriters.

These were like the shibboleths, like “Don’t do these things.” The truth is in reading good screenplays, you will find all these things in abundance. You’ll find a bunch of different ways and styles that writers write. There’s conventions, but there really aren’t rules to screenwriting. There’s just a way of conjuring the experience of watching a movie just with the words on the page. That’s all screenwriting is, but it’s a lot. That’s why it’s been 15 years of podcasting and a book.

Mike: Absolutely. Of all the guests that you have in there, writers, directors, who would you say was the best on theme?

John: On theme. I’m going to define theme loosely as the underlying thing about what a movie is really about and that it’s not about the plot. What is the question, the dramatic question that it’s trying to answer? Listen, Christopher Nolan was a fantasy guest. We were excited to have him on board, have him coming onto the podcast.

It was really interesting seeing his approach to writing something like Oppenheimer, which is basically, he had to do just a lot of digging to figure out what did the movie mean to him? What was it about Oppenheimer’s life that was so fascinating that he could key into that to keep coming back to? For him, it was sometimes really imagery to keep coming back to in the movie in terms of his discovery process that got us back into it.

Greta Gerwig talking about Lady Bird and what it meant to be a young woman who is both rebelling and also finding her place, and In Little Women, how she approached this book that she knew so deeply and so intimately, but she knew she needed to explore it differently on screen. Those are the kind of conversations that were so exciting to me to talk through.

Yes, on theme because you need to know what the movie is really about before you start writing it, but sometimes it’s also a discovery process. You write a draft and then you read it and other people read it and realize, “Oh, I thought it was about this, but it’s actually about that.” That becomes the unifying goal for the next draft.

Mike: Thank you. Was there a section that you wish you had more pages on structure, outlining, rewriting? Was there a section you really wanted to expand?

John: Yes. The initial draft of the book was 600 pages, and we were committed to 300 pages, so we bargained our way up to 333. One of the chapters that didn’t make the cut was called Getting Stuff Written. It was really about the process and procrastination and all the psychology of what it takes to actually get words on the paper. What I’m proud about with the chapter is that we were able to balance that.

Sometimes you need tough love and sometimes you need self-care. We talk you through what is the balance and how are you productive but not self-destructive? How are you finding ways to make writing rewarding and not just an absolute exhausting chore? That’s a chapter I’m really happy with.

Mike: Thank you. When you went through this whole process, did you find your opinions maybe evolved over time, and what might those be?

John: I think our opinions over the 15 years of listening to the podcast, some stuff has progressed. An example would be, I think 15 years ago, I believed in meritocracy more than I do now. I believed that, oh, if you’re a really good writer, it will work out and people will notice you and things will happen. I’ve just seen so often really great writers who the dots just don’t connect. I think I’m much more aware that there’s other factors that play there and some variables you can predict and some variables you can’t predict. That’s an example of how I’ve evolved over time.

I think it’s only because of talking with a bunch of other writers and, honestly, a bunch of listeners who are facing real challenges. I also think I had a very US bias in terms of screenwriting. I think I’m much more aware of the fact, if I’m answering a question, that the question might pertain to the US film and TV industry, but other industries just work a lot differently.

Even though the fundamentals of craft are going to be universal across all experiences, any answer I’m giving about the business itself is very going to be US-based, because that’s just the world I know. I also know very much a Hollywood world. I’ve done a lot of work with Sundance Institute and some other independent films, but I’m always surprised about hometown filmmaking that sometimes can be great and this was outside of my wheelhouse. I think I’m much more aware of the stuff I don’t know now. I’m very capable of saying, “but I don’t know, and there’s other good answers out there.”

Mike: Sure. Speaking of the business, a lot of people assume I write a great script, I get an agent, and then people pay me to write scripts for them. What’s the reality of what you do as a successful professional screenwriter? What’s your day like? What’s the stuff you’re doing besides screenwriting? How much hustle do you need to be a screenwriter?

John: I think that’s a great day to be asking that question because the episode we just put out today is by the two writers of KPop Demon Hunters, who are recent college graduates. There’s the prototype of just like, “I came out of college with a film degree and I hustled really hard and I made it and now I’m still working.” It’s good if you’re someone who’s in that cohort.

Great lessons in terms of just they made the most of their ramen days where they were broke and they just knew they were broke and that’s okay and they were scrambling. They were saying yes to everything they possibly could. They just worked and worked and worked and worked. They’re a great example of that kind of very classic story, which is that eventually people start passing around your scripts without you knowing they’re passing them around, and suddenly the heat just builds and it’s great. They made a lot of opportunities for themselves. They took advantage of it. That’s not universal.

There’s people who are entering into the business, switching from a different career, they’re coming in later, they’re doing different things. In those situations, there’s no one with classic way that it happens. I was talking to a guy at the Austin Film Festival who realized that he got tired of trying to pitch on things. It’s like, “I’m just going to write everything as a spec and I’m going to just sell specs.” He sold three comedy specs over the course of 18 months and got started and got things going. That does still happen.

I think my frustration has always been, even before I started the podcast, is there’s a lottery ticket mentality sometimes with screenwriting. It’s like, “I’m going to write this thing and they’re going to buy it for $1 million and then I’ll be set and then I’ll be working constantly.” That’s just not the experience. It’s amazing if you have a first sale, but more importantly is that you write something that people want to hire you to write other things because that’s the sustainable way that you keep going in this business for most writers.

Mike: You also mentioned pitches. I’m hearing and reading more pitches are getting bought. Is that something that entry-level people can take advantage of or is that really for established writers?

John: I think it can happen across the gamut. Listen, I think pitches are a good bellwether that there’s the businesses picking up some, which is great, and that people are excited to start developing new stuff and get things going. There are ideas that are very pitchable. There are ideas that you can see, like, “Oh, I get why that is a movie. I can see what the trailer would be for that. I can understand what the concept is there.” If you’re writing a thing that’s like that, then being able to pitch it is really important.

Is it a little tougher to get in the door to do that pitch if no one knows who the hell you are? Yes. Yet every day there’s examples of people who do that. That pitch might get you in to meet with a manager or to meet with other people. Again, they’re excited to hear the idea, but they’re only excited if the idea is matched with samples that they’re excited to read. Very few of these pitches are selling from people no one knows who didn’t also read a really great screenplay. It ultimately comes down to that.

Again, this episode that was dropped with the KPop Demon Hunters’ writers, they had a good, funny script. With that good, funny script, they could get in and pitch on KPop Demon Hunters. They weren’t just taking a random person off the street and hoping that they could do it.

Mike: Sure. You gave me a piece of advice once.

John: Oh, great.

Mike: It really stuck with me. I was hoping you could expand upon it. Getting notes is just part of the business. You told me, when I asked about getting notes, you said, “Everybody has an agenda.” Could you expand on that?

John: Absolutely. There’s actually a whole chapter we did expand on it in the book called Notes on Notes. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s just like the Mike Johnson perfect pitch for that. Whenever you get a note about a script, keep in mind that the note has an intention behind it. There’s something that was not working for the reader, and they wanted to let you know about it. Honor that. That’s great. It’s good that they’re giving you the note. Hear that they had an issue. Don’t take their solution as the solution.

If something isn’t working for them, your job is to figure out what it actually is. Sometimes they’re saying, “Oh, it’s this thing on page 15,” but is it really about the thing on page 15, or is it something that actually happened on page 12 that was knocking them off the track? Your job is to figure out what that is. Thank them for the note, and then see if you can explore and figure out what’s actually really happening there behind the note.

Some notes you just disagree with, or sometimes the person is not reading the same movie that you’re intending to make. You can have a good conversation where you can figure out what movie it is that they think they want to make. If they’re not the decision-maker, they’re not the person who’s writing the check, you don’t have to do their note.

If you get a consistent note, though, from several people, it’s especially worth paying attention to because something is not clicking right about the script. They’re not seeing the same movie that you’re seeing. That’s a good sign to dig in and figure out, is there a movie that matches their expectation that also meets what you are setting out to do?

Mike: Sometimes it comes out as a feedback. There’s three different pieces of feedback, and it’s all the same underlying problem.

John: Exactly.

Mike: They don’t know what it is, but they see the effect it’s having on your story.

John: Especially if you get notes like, “I got a little bored here. I got lost. I didn’t know what I was doing here. I found this repetitive,” those are signs that something before that was just not working right. You didn’t click and engage with them right because you’ll find that viewers and listeners and readers will forgive you a lot if they’re engaged and curious, but if you lose that engagement and that curiosity, they may keep flipping pages, but they’re not really reading it.

Mike: Sure. On the craft itself, think about earlier in your career: Go, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; you’ve worked on a lot of stuff for a very long time. What are some lessons you wish you had learned earlier in your career?

John: This is probably not as much a craft thing as a business thing, but I’m really happy with the movies I’ve gotten made. Love them to death. There are a lot of movies that I did just as much work on that didn’t get made. Some of the frustration I feel is that there’s a whole bunch of my work and the movies I wrote in my head that don’t exist out there. I think some of that is my own fault because I made some bad choices.

I think I chased and pursued some projects that were interesting but weren’t really my passion. Sometimes they were paydays, but sometimes they were a chance to improve myself in certain ways. I know I wish I would have spent a little more time focusing on writing the things that I could do myself, that I could direct myself, that were very specific and that only I could do.

I think in some cases, I was writing movies that lots of people could have done, and I was happy to do it, but it wasn’t my calling in life to do it. Big Fish was a movie that I feel like only I could have done. It was very specific to my experience. I got to do the Broadway musical version of Big Fish, which was, again, very true to my experience and took 15 years of my life. It was a lot.

I don’t regret that, but there’s other small projects along the way, including some that made that were not the best use of my words and my time and my attention. That’s a thing as a professional writer, but even as someone on Zoom who’s an aspiring writer who’s aspiring to become a professional writer, think about what movie you most want to see exist in the world, and that’s the one you should be focusing your time and your attention on, not just the one you think like, “I could sell it maybe.” It’s not going to be good for you.

Mike: I have a couple of those. [laughs] I could describe your writing style because I’ve read your screenplays. It’s just clean, Hemingway-esque, short, muscular sentences, but voice. How would you describe your voice? I think a lot of writers struggle with what a voice is, so how would you describe yours?

John: It’s friendly. It’s not crazy, smart, intellectual. I want it to feel like I’m sitting right next to you in the theater watching it on a screen. That’s what I want it to feel like. If I say we see and we hear, that’s because I’m right there with you and this is what we’re watching together, and so we’re on this ride together. I’m never going to refer to the second person. I’m not going to say you see this, but we do this thing as an audience together. We see and feel this thing. It’s warm. It’s not especially cold and clinical.

I can go back to scripts I wrote to see if I could 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and I will have forgotten every single thing about it, but it will still read like me. Essentially, you do develop a voice at a certain point. There’s a fingerprint to it, and it does feel like me. The thing I was writing this afternoon versus 15 years ago, they’re very similar in terms of the words I’m choosing and what it looks like on the page. You develop a style.

I should say, if you want to read any of my stuff, at my website, johnaugust.com, there’s a library there. Basically, everything I’ve written, all the scripts I’ve written are there. If you’re curious to read Big Fish or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or any of those things, that’s there.

Mike: Are you an outliner or right-by-the-seat-of-you-pants kind of guy?

John: Classically, I’m more of the pantser. I’m more figuring stuff out as I go and feeling my way through it. I do have a sense of what the overall shape of the story is, but I will write whatever scene is appealing to me right in the day. I’ll write out a sequence. I’ll do all that kind of stuff. Increasingly, I’ve been doing stuff where I’ve had to turn in an outline first, sometimes in animation or other projects. I resented it, but it is really handy when I can say, “Oh, actually, the story problems are solved, and now it’s just about the scene work.” I do appreciate that.

This project I’m working on right now, I turned in a 45-page outline. At that level, you really do know the story. There’s no mysteries. It was required stuff for this project, but it was really nice to be able to have conversations with the studio. They knew exactly what movie I was writing and so when I delivered them that movie, they weren’t surprised. They weren’t shocked. It was just a better version of what they had in the outline, and that felt good.

Mike: You’ve done original features, adaptations, big budget films. Is there crossovers or certain tips that you could give us on working with those different types of stories?

John: I do a lot of adaptations. Crucially, an adaptation, the idea is coming from someplace else, but it has to be a movie first and foremost. You really have to look at what does this story want to look like on a screen. That can mean radical transformation of the underlying narrative to make it fit in that two-hour block and with just what an audience approaches with expectation for a movie.

Big Fish is a collection of tiny little short stories. The book is very different from the movie, and yet it tracks, it makes sense. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has every single word I could keep from the original book and get onto the big screen is there, but it’s actually structured a lot differently. In the movie version of it, Charlie is the antagonist and Willy Wonka is the protagonist. Willy Wonka is the character who changes throughout the course of it because I needed somebody to actually have an arc over the course of the movie.

Charlie Bucket starts the movie as a really good kid and ends as a really good kid. I needed to have him be the one who created the change and created the nervous breakdown that was happening for Willy Wonka. It’s incredibly close to the book and yet also incredibly different in terms of the character dynamics you’re seeing there in the story. It really depends on the needs of what it is.

The movies I’m writing as originals, let’s say that I’m writing them in original right now, and it’s great. It’s liberating. It’s sometimes a little scary not to have the backstop of the material you’re adapting.

Mike: Sure. What’s a piece of advice that you just keep giving writers again and again and again they keep ignoring?

John: I alluded to it first, which is basically write the movie you would pay money to see. I said the pay money to see is, I think, important because it distinguishes between commercial, like big C commercial, like, oh, everyone is going to go see that movie. What’s the movie that you actually would want to see? If you love low-budget grisly horror, you should write that because that’s a movie that you wish you could see, that you’d actually pay your money to see.

By the same token, don’t write a football movie if you don’t like football movies. So often, I see people who have spent a year of their life writing movies you would never go see this. There have been a couple times in my life where I’ve come in and done a couple weeks on a movie, it’s like, “I’m never going to see this movie. It’s just not my movie at all,” but as a craftsman, I was just coming in to help them out. I think most of the movies I’ve worked on are movies that I’m genuinely excited to plunk down my money on a Friday night to go see, and that is an important distinction.

Mike: Good advice. After all these years, what do you love about screenwriting?

John: I love the adventure. I love just the chance to just build out a whole new space in a world I’ve never seen before. My experience of writing is, I close my eyes, I put myself in the scene, I see everything, I hear everything, I let it loop through, and then I quickly scribble down what I saw and then go back through and do a clean version.

I’ve always been just very good at just imagining and imagining myself in a place. I love going to that place and imagining it. There’s a series I’m hoping to do next. If it happens, the good part of that part is I look at being in a place for years at a time writing those episodes, and that’s really exciting to me. It’s a little terrifying, but exciting to me to get that chance to stay in a place and watch it grow and develop and change and interact with the realities of production.

Mike: Fantastic. Good answer. You mind if we take a few questions?

John: Sure. Let’s go for it.

Mike: Lynelle, are you still with us?

Lynelle Souleiel: I’m still with you. We have a number of questions, but this one has stood out to me. This is from Luke Rankin. He says, “We’ve talked to good routines, but what bad habits were you able to kick that helped you become a better writer?”

John: It’s a great question. I’m going to fall back on a thing I’ve said other times before. Google it, and I’ve probably said it before. I used to have bad habits, and then I decided to label them habits and not define them as good or bad. They’re just the ways that I work. As I recognize myself falling into a less productive habit, that’s just me. I’m wasting time in the ways I’m wasting time, so I’m doing that thing again. I’m not as harsh on myself when I see myself doing it.

Bad habits are the classic procrastination or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle when I know I should really start first. If I don’t get work done in the morning, I’m not going to get as much work done over the course of the day. If I don’t start that first sprint, which is that first hour of really concentrated work, I’m not going to get as much done in the course of the day.

Also, stuff will eventually get done, and that’s okay too. I can ruminate too much. I can fixate too much on stupid things, but that’s also a part of my brain that’s involved with my imagination. That’s also the muscle I use for writing dialogue. I have bad habits, but I just choose not to label them as bad anymore.

Lynelle: Connor O’Farrell says, “What matters to you more when you write, the process of writing or the prospect of the finished script? Is it the journey or the destination that drives you?”

John: Honestly, it’s the destination. I love having a finished thing. I love reading through something that I really like the outcome of it. Getting there sometimes is bloody and messy along the way. There’s moments where you enter what we call flow, where it’s just like, oh my God, it’s natural and it’s easy, and you just lose time. You’re like, “Wow, this is going so great. It can be addictive. You can start to chase flow in a way that is unhelpful.

If you actually go back and look at artists’ best work, it didn’t always come while they were in their flow states, when everything was good and easy. Some of their best work came when they actually were grumpy and resentful. As long as you’re getting stuff done, that’s what really matters most. Getting stuff done and finishing things, I love it. Love it to death.

Lynelle: [chuckles] Hanif Bahati asks, “How do you think that Hollywood has changed in terms of non-Hollywood writers, the talent outside of America or Hollywood?”

John: There have always been international writers who’ve worked in the Hollywood system. Obviously, a great number of British writers and Australian writers as well who are writing in English, but writing from overseas. Sometimes they come here. I have friends, Kelly Marcel, who’s a terrific writer who came from the UK, but made her career really in the US.

What’s changed most over the course of 15 years is that with the rise of international streamers, there’s a lot more local language production that’s happening with approximating Hollywood budgets. Have been serious, but there have always been great features made overseas. That’s giving exposure to a lot of international writing that US audiences would never have seen before. The globalization on that front is terrific in terms of the ability for non-English language media in particular to be consumed as primary media in the US. It’s a great change.

Lynelle: Claire June asks, “You worked hard to be an in-demand industry insider. What draws you to a project to say yes or to say no?”

John: Great question. There’s the underlying material itself. The first question is it a movie I’d actually pay money to see? Is it something I feel like I could do and that I could do well? Are there good, interesting people associated with it? If they’re people I’ve always wanted to work with, fantastic, or I have worked with them before, great. I will also call around and find people to work with them for it and get the download like, are they an asshole? Life is too short to be working with a bunch of assholes sometimes. Sometimes it’s worth it, but most times it’s not worth it. Those are the things.

I’m also really mindful of the opportunity costs. As I said before, I think over parts of my career, I’ve been chasing a little too much and doing the thing that I feel like I should be doing rather than the thing I really want to be doing. I will ask myself, “Am I just chasing? Is this actually a thing I really do want to do?”

Lynelle: Here’s a question from Joe King about The Prince of Persia. You’re on IMDb page or in your library on your site. He doesn’t see it. There are things he admires about that script. Is there a version you wrote that could be available?

John: I never read Prince of Persia. I was an executive producer on Prince of Persia. Jordan Mechner wrote it, and so Jordan Mechner created the original game of Prince of Persia. We got partnered up through a friend. He said, “I really wanted to do a movie of Prince of Persia.” He and I went around town over the course of two days. We pitched it to every place. Disney bought it for Jerry Bruckheimer.

Jordan wrote it in a great, great script. It got Hollywood Studio’d a bit. I think the movie that Jordan wrote was better than the movie that came out. I’m happy that some people like the original movie, but I never wrote it. It was a good lesson for me in that producing a movie seems like it’s easier than writing a movie, but it’s also very frustrating as a writer because I love Jordan to death. Yet, as we were going through the draft, I kept wanting to just fix things myself rather than suggest how he could fix things.

I likened it to being an airline pilot, and you’re in the cockpit, but you’re not allowed to touch the controls. It was a little bit frustrating on that front. That’s a reason why I’ve not done producing of other people’s stuff over the years. It’s that I learned I’m not a great creative roommate when it comes to screenwriting.

Lynelle: Combining a couple of questions, I’ll just paraphrase. Does age matter? If you are, say, over 50 or 60, does that make you obsolete?

John: It doesn’t make you obsolete, but I think age does matter. Age matters to the degree that you have different possibilities at different moments in your life. If you are just graduating from undergrad and you can live on very little money and eat your ramen and scramble and do things, you’re going to start your screenwriting career differently than if you are a parent with two young kids. You’re going to just make different choices, and that’s understandable and right. Both ways can work, but I think it’s naive to assume that everyone is going to have the same opportunities at every moment in their career.

Screenwriting is about writing a screenplay that people can then use as the basis for making a movie, but it’s also about being able to sit across from somebody and convince them that you really can deliver what they need in order to shoot that movie. There’s a large psychological component, a social component to it, which is important. A 22-year-old is going to have a harder time doing that than a 30-year-old sometimes because it’s just hard to get people to trust you a little bit.

If you are a person who’s not living in Los Angeles, it can be harder still to do that stuff. The logistics and age and things like that do matter, but it’s not because there’s some hard, bright line that you can’t cross. It’s just the nature of physically doing the work with other people that’s a factor.

Lynelle: Here’s a loaded question from Jermaine Reed. “For writers building original films instead of IP, what’s the smartest way to make the script undeniable on the page?”

John: Undeniable on the page. If you’re writing an original thing and it’s going to be a calling card movie, a thing I would strongly encourage you to do is see if there’s a way that the main character, the protagonist, can read as a reflection of you, can read as a reflection of your own experience. As you’re picking through all the things you could possibly write, the thing that most speaks to–

Someone read this script and then they met you, like, “Of course, Mel is the person who wrote this script.” It makes so much sense because they talk to you about, “Oh, where did you come from?” “Oh, I see exactly why you and only you could have written this script.” That is incredibly useful and helpful because not only did they like the script, but they understand, they get a sense of who you are as a person. They can be thinking about, “Even if I don’t do this script, how can I get this very talented writer to write something else for me?” That’s incredibly useful.

Listen, if you want to sell that script, and it’s mostly going to be a sample, if that sample is not just of your writing talent but your voice, your personality, who you are, that is incredibly helpful. That undeniability is not just that it’s commercially viable, but that, “Oh, I get why only he or she could have written the script.”

Lynelle: Here’s one on, “What’s something in younger writers that you’re really excited to see in the future? Is it style or is it theme? Something that Gen X and Millennial aren’t quite doing.”

John: Listen, theme is a hard one. It’s too esoteric, but style and voice. If I’m writing a script, I want to have a sense like the characters are speaking with interesting voices, but also the storytelling style on the page is engaging. If I keep flipping pages and I’m excited to see what happens next, that is a great read and that is a person I want to meet. It’s really of any age. If I was looking for somebody who was specifically writing for younger characters or writing for people currently in their teens and 20s, that’s the kind of thing I would look for on the page.

Lynelle: You personally have a goal of how many pages for yourself you write a day?

John: Three pages is great. Three pages is about an hour or two of writing a day. That seems like that’s not actually a lot, but it’s diminishing returns after two hours of actual writing per day. Just the amount that you actually get done tends to decrease. There are days where you will just crank through 20 pages and they’re actually like a pretty good 20 pages. If you start to think like, “That’s the normal,” you are going to burn yourself out.

In the bonus chapter we put out with Getting Stuff Written, we really dive into that. It’s just basically find whatever is the sustainable amount of writing that you can get done in a day and aim for that. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not hitting that because otherwise you’re going to start resenting writing, which is not the goal here.

When I was writing, I’ve written some books. I’ve written three. I have a three-book series called Arlo Finch, which is middle grades for Harry Potter age. For those, I had to write 1,000 words a day because I recognized that if I wasn’t hitting that target, you’re just never going to finish the book. 1,000 words seems like a lot, but when you actually look at the screen, as I scroll, it’s not that long. It’s a frustratingly small amount of actual page count, but it gets the job done.

Lynelle: Personally, I wrote a novel and did eight pages a day.

John: Great.

Lynelle: It was exhausting.

John: It is exhausting, yes.

Lynelle: It was tough. You think, “Only eight pages,” but it was exhausting. This is an interesting question from Hannah Lehman. She says, “What is the best time of the year to go out with a script realistically?” Meaning taking into account festivals and holidays, when is the best time to present your script?

John: I am not an agent or manager, and they would have much more experience with this. I would say back to school feels right. September feels right. Your instinct is correct that the holidays are just like, this is a terrible time of year for everything. January after Sundance can be good for a while. I think there’s a fear of the film festivals and stuff like that, overwhelming stuff.

The people who are reading scripts coming in aren’t quite the same audience for that. There’s some time in the spring. Stuff can happen in the summer. It’s just that people are gone more in the summer. It’s tough. I think that’s why you see so many things happening in the fall. Scripts sell every week of the year. There’s times you tend to avoid just because you know fewer people are going to be around.

Lynelle: Arthur asks, they’d love to hear about pushing through when working, when your world or your environment is not conducive to writing.

John: Oh, it’s tough. We have two episodes with a counselor, a psychotherapist named Dennis Palumbo; Episode 99, and there’s another episode. The second episode, I don’t remember the number, but the title of it is like Writing While the World Is On Fire, which was specifically this past January, which come after the elections and Los Angeles was burning. It felt incredibly hard to be thinking about doing meaningful or creative work while it just seemed like the world was crashing down around you. Sometimes it’s bigger outside factors.

Sometimes it’s personal factors. It’s your financial situation. It’s family. It’s illness. There’s other reasons why it’s harder to do. What I would encourage you to do is to think about, let writing be a time where you do have some control in this out-of-control world or life situation.

Can you take 20 minutes and write a scene? Put on your headphones and write a scene and just go off to the corner and do that? You will probably get some stuff done. You’ll probably feel a little bit better. Let writing be an opportunity to manifest some order and structure in a place that’s otherwise very tough to do. I’ve had to do some writing during some really difficult family times. It wasn’t always great or pleasant to be doing it, but in the end, if I were looking back on which pages I wrote during which time, I couldn’t tell you what I wrote when. It ultimately is still my writing.

Drew: Lina, let’s do two or three more.

Lynelle: Stacking your projects, what type of workload do you have? Just curious. Is it two specs and one assignment? They’re wondering about the workload of a professional writer.

John: Writers who are working pretty consistently– I don’t tend to write specs. I’ve written probably three specs over the last 10 years just because I’m generally moving from assignment to assignment with things I pitched to set up versus I wrote from scratch. Generally, I have one first draft that I’m working on. I’m doing that. Then if I hand that in and I have a rewrite or some other project I’m going to, very rarely are two things underneath my fingers at the same time that will happen.

There’s been situations where I’ve been on a first draft and a rewrite and a straw polish all at the same time. Based on the needs of what people needed to do, I was doing all three things. It’s not great for your brain to just be shifting back and forth between all these different things. You’re not going to get story confused, but there’s just a habituation time to put yourself back in the place of what that is and enter into that movie like, “Okay, what do I need to do in this space to make this make sense?”

I will rarely do more than one creative project over the course of the day. As I said earlier, I’m probably only writing two hours of script during the day, but I’m writing other stuff. I’m writing blog posts. I’m writing other initial draft things on stuff. There’s other writing that can be done, even if it’s not the all-consuming brain work of screenwriting.

Lynelle: One more question from David Pimentel. He’s writing and directing an animated movie, and they’ve screened and tested well, but the main character keeps getting the lowest scores. Any thoughts on the matter for that would be awesome.

John: David, sorry. It’s a really common thing, and so hopefully the other people involved in the project understand it’s a really common thing. You’re running into the sidekick problem, which is that the sidekicks in movies, especially animated movies, they’re just more fun because they’re more fun because they don’t have the burden of carrying the plot. People love them because they’re happy and free and get to do things and say crazy stuff.

If you have an opportunity to change things at this point, it may be looking for how can you get some of that sidekick energy into your hero. Are there moments where that hero could actually do a little bit more of that, especially in the very start of the story, so that we’re clicking and engaging with them more as not the responsible character, but as the wild character who is a little bit more unpredictable? What you’re running into is super common, particularly in animation, and that’s just the reality of it.

I’m sure if you actually were to test the characters in Inside Out, for example, Joy’s character probably tests low because she is responsible for carrying the movie on her shoulders, which is a great character. I don’t think everyone else probably scores higher in their boxes because they’re so jokey. That’s just the difference.

Lynelle: You’re getting lots of compliments on Scriptnotes, they’re all in the chat. Personally, I just wanted to say, I know last year, you all went through the fires in LA. I’m from LA, and so my heart’s there. I hope that you’re all pulling through well. It seems like the industry’s coming back after such a difficult time.

John: No, we’re in a much better place, but thank you for asking. It’s improved a lot.

Mike: Any closing thoughts?

John: These are all the right questions. It’s tough because it’s not like there’s one way to do anything, but I can hopefully just share my opinion on what works for me.

Mike: Thank you, John, for taking the time out of your schedule. Have a good night, everyone.

John: Thank you so much.

Lynelle: Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody.

Mike: Thank you so much.

[music]

John: All right, we are back in the present. I have one cool thing that I want to share. Julia Turner is a guest who’s been on the show before. She was at our live show, and she interviewed us about the Scriptnotes book. She’s formerly editor-in-chief of Slate Magazine. She’s a person who knows her journalism. She has launched a new thing called LA Material. It’s a website. It is a podcast. It is a newsletter, and it’s great. Unsurprisingly, it’s terrific. It’s very specifically about Los Angeles.

Some of the articles you can read that are up there right now are about five days that changed the LA mayor’s race. A deep dive inquiry in how many cars should turn left on a red light, which is a very specifically LA thing. Drew, what’s your instinct? You’re at an intersection. There’s no left-turn signal. How many cars are allowed to creep across before, what’s the acceptable number of cars turning?

Drew: Maximum of three. Once the light turns, three is the maximum, and then any more than that is too much.

John: I would agree with you, but the article goes into the wide range of opinions of what that is. Three seems to be where people tend to stop. Four is incredibly aggressive. The idea is that, of course, one car has crossed pretty far into the intersection during the light still being green, and a second one is probably inched into that space, too. It’s a question of whether that third one can gun through. Four is crazy.

Drew: Four is crazy, but if that second one doesn’t go, that’s a problem.

John: Oh, it is a problem, yes, because you’ve blocked the crosswalk, you’ve made a bad situation. You can tell people who’ve only been in Los Angeles a short time because they don’t know that they have to actually clear that intersection.

Drew: Have you ever been in the car with someone who’s born and raised in LA and follows all the traffic lights to the T, is polite at left turns?

John: I haven’t met that person. Have you?

Drew: I’ve sat in the car with a few of those people, and it always blows my mind. I’m like, “I thought you were baked on this. I thought you knew what we were doing.”

John: The weird thing is, LA drivers are not particularly aggressive. They’re not particularly smart, but they’re not particularly aggressive. We will tend to stop for people at crosswalks and do that kind of stuff in ways that people in other cities might not, but you’ve got to learn how to make the left turns. You will see, when I go back to Boulder where I grew up, there was an influx of California people and native Boulder people were like, “Ah, they’re doing these crazy things on the left turns.” Because that’s where they came from. That’s the culture. You’ve got to understand the culture.

Drew: We don’t honk. That’s the whole thing.

John: No, we don’t. It’s not a honking in town.

Drew: I’m excited for Julia because I remember her mentioning– We teased this at the last live show.

John: Yes. Now it’s launched. It’s LA Material. I got to see the list of all of the beta names and other things they were considering. I think LA Material makes sense for what they’re doing. There’s Hollywood news, but it’s not mostly Hollywood. It’s really about just being in Los Angeles.

Drew: I love it.

John: That is our show for this week. Special thanks to Mike Johnston and everyone at the Northwest Screenwriters Guild for hosting this event. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today in this forum, but we usually answer your questions, so send those in to ask at johnaugust.com.

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. Of course, the Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. Thank you for continuing to buy the Scriptnotes book. We look every week to see how many we sell, and God bless us, we’re selling a lot of copies. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware, you’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Again, thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we are about to record on sketch comedy writing. Drew, it’s good to see you, and thanks again for putting together this episode.

Drew: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segement]

John: Drew, in addition to being a writer, you have also been an actor, you’ve taken acting classes, and you’ve done a sketch comedy class somewhere here in town?

Drew: Yes, I did a sketch writing class at UCB, God, probably 10 years ago, but yes, I did 101.

John: The two big schools in Los Angeles, the two big programs that people talk about are Groundlings and UCB, both have improv aspects, but they have sketch comedy as a big factor in it. Talk to me about the things you were doing in your 101 sketch class.

Drew: I remember the first week was just write a sketch and figure out what your voice is, and then we would try to do things out of the news. Every week was a different assignment that was specific. It felt like different types of SNL sketches, basically. You started realizing they were all in little buckets. Then on top of that UCB has a specific philosophy around the concept of game.

Characters have a game, which is hard to describe, but the best description I’ve heard is, an emotional reaction to an unusual thing. You figure out what that is, and then you just try and heighten that and heighten that and heighten that until it gets insane. You’re applying that and practicing that idea and putting characters through that lens. Is that even the right word? That’s not the right word.

John: Yes, but that’s a framework, a structure. Sketch writing was on my brain because an Instagram friend had DM me to say, “Hey, I’m writing a sketch for the first time.” It’s a person who’s a stand-up comedian, “I’m writing a sketch for the first time. Do you talk about that all in your book?” I said, “Not really. There’s no chapter in it and it’s not about sketch comedy writing.” On previous episodes, we’ve talked about, “Okay, here’s a comedic premise.” I think this was an episode with Mike Birbiglia. We talked about, “Here’s a comedic premise. What is the joke version of it? What is the sketch version of it? What is the movie version of it?”

This Instagram friend was asking me, “Tell me about sketch comedy writing.” I said, “I don’t genuinely know how people in that field talk about it, but I can tell you what, as an outside observer, I notice about how sketches work.” Is that there is a premise, a complication that is like, “Oh, we’ve established the normalcy. This is the complication.” Then there’s a series of escalations, and there has to be an out, a button, somewhere to blow out of this moment.

That’s what you see in most internet live sketches. That’s flow of it. It actually closely resembles what a short film would be, except that there has to be something that is so often so strange about what’s happening in this that it actually it feels like a sketch. What you’re describing it with UCB in terms of the game is what is the recurring mechanism that is generating, that is keeping the momentum going in it, correct?

Drew: Correct, and how do you come at it from different angles, too. That’s where the real surprises, I think, start to happen. They pointed a lot to the Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show, Sketches, and Key & Peele, where all those writers came up through the similar ranks, which I think started Second City in Chicago, too.

John: Second City is another important touchstone here. One of the writers I was talking to around the lunch table in negotiations, one came out of the Second City, and one came out of a more New York focus on things. The Second City writer was talking about how character becomes a much more important part of the Second City philosophy of sketch writing, is that a character is driving things. You have to have a character with a specific point of view who is creating the energy within the scene. That tracks.

It’s not just anyone could do the scene. No, it’s specific to these characters or the relationship between certain characters. You see this in a lot of sketches, but also other things out there in the world, where it only makes sense because this character is doing it. Matt Foley in a Van Down by the River. That is a big character who is driving that thing.

It’s not just normal people with a heightened situation around it, as opposed to starring a life sketch with Harry Styles for Pepperidge Farms, who’s doing inappropriate captions for Pepperidge Farm products. It’s more of a normal world, and it’s just the situation gets more absurd around it. It’s great to hear people who do this for a living talking about and thinking about how they’re doing this work.

Drew: Was there anything surprising that they sent to you?

John: Actually, two of the people around the table, they taught this. It was interesting hearing them describe their process of teaching students about this. One would say, was that a timer for three minutes or three and a half minutes, and she would call scene. You have to understand this is the audience’s attention. The audience’s attention is out here. This is the blackout. You have to get out by this moment. That some ideas lend themselves to that short period of time. Some need to be developed more fully, and some are really just a 30-second. It’s just a premise, and then you’re out. It’s really recognizing where is the comedic heart of that idea.

There’s also a conversation about how you think about a Saturday Live sketch or something produced for filmed content, there’s an establishing shot. You see that, “Okay, we’re at the beach, so we don’t have to say that we’re at a beach.” Anything that’s being done on a black box stage, there’s just this expectation. Some character needs to say, “It’s so great that we’re here at the beach,” because otherwise, you just have no idea where it is, where the context is.

There’s things we don’t think about as a feature writer or someone who’s doing television. It’s like, there’s always a visual to tell you that information. You can’t assume that with a sketch, you’re going to have that visual. You may need to communicate really directly with the audience about where we are, what this is, what your expectations should be, and that has to happen in the first 10 seconds. If you’re not getting to the joke premise quickly enough, everyone’s going to feel like they’re out in space.

Drew: That was the thing that they basically told us by line three, you need to know. Line three is what they said.
[crosstalk]

John: Setting up. In case of UCB language, what’s the game? Also, where are we? What’s going on here? Then knowing that you may have situations where you know that your audience knows what the thing is, and so then you may have some sketches that are deliberately messing with that. One of the regs was talking about a thing that he and his scene partners would do, which was basically, they’re both a straight man in the scene. They’re both delivering setups that have no punchline, and they just keep doing it again and again and again, “My wife is such a good cook.”

[laughter]

John: It was like, “Yes, I’m sorry.” It’s like nothing goes that way. It’s that frustration of unanswered things. Everyone comes in with the expectation of what’s going to happen next. The value you’re not delivering it is just like audience edging.

Drew: That is brilliant because they’re breaking the rules.

John: Exactly.

Drew: Yes, another thing that we were taught was don’t hide the ball. You need to get that premise out by line three because the longer you hide whatever the complication is or whatever this premise is, the more the audience is going to want– The more they’re going to expect. They’re going to expect it to be funnier, and you’re never going to live up to that expectation. Just start messy and get it out messy if you need to, and then get to the fun, which I feel like is a good lesson for all writing. We’ll forgive you a little bit of messy at the beginning if it’s worth it for them.

John: It is. Also, I can see why it’s a challenging thing for folks who are coming from a features or TV background, where we talk about those first three pages, which is basically the setting up of things. It’s like, you got to make those sparkly, wonderful, magical and stuff. The lesson from some sketch comedies, sometimes you just need a blunt, clear thing. It’s like, “This is where we are,” and then the magic happens. The engines are just different, and it’s important to recognize that.

Drew: One of my favorite sketches I saw used the stage. They just put a super title above it. It was Mary Holland, who’s an actress who’s great. She was a silent film actress who had Her Arms Were Asleep. They just put that title in front. You knew the premise, and then it’s her trying to go around, and her arms are just flopping and smashing everything. It was so funny. Yes, it’s all you needed. It’s just, now we know the premise, and she just took off. It was great.

John: Other things. There’s often the scrolling credits that are established in this documentary about this, or it’s a presenter saying, “Back in the seminal 1940s film, this, blah, blah, blah,” and setting up what this thing is. Without that, you wouldn’t know– You don’t know what the essential hook is and what the game is that you’re looking for. I did also hear that people get frustrated by the term game because it’s used to apply to anything. It’s one of those terms that’s set for everything and doesn’t mean a specific thing.

Drew: It is a little nebulous, which is why when I was like, “How do I define game?” It’s frustrating, too. I think a lot of these theaters, too, have their own dogma, for lack of a better word, and approach to things. It’s however you get to it. It’s whatever you get to. I think character is always where to ground in a smart way.

John: Absolutely. What is the unique point of view of these characters in this scene? What is specific and unique? Like I said, it’s specificity. This is the thing they’re trying to do. Ego Nwodim had a character on Saturday Live, and I can’t remember the character’s name, but she was this big character who would always– In a restaurant, she would be sawing her food. She was cutting her meat really aggressively.

It’s a hard character to repeat because basically, it’s just doing the same thing. What is the next escalation? We’re talking about, how would you do something else? We understand what her thing is, but what’s another character who could enter into that so that they could have interesting, conflicting contrasting styles? That’s the challenge. Otherwise, you’re just doing the same. It’s just the same beats, and it’s not a new sketch, it’s not a new idea. That’s got to be one of the great challenges, frustrations, and opportunities for shows with great recurring characters, is what to do next.

Drew: Did you talk to anyone who was in the more like a weekend update, last week, tonight, Daily Show people?

John: I did, yes. They talked about joke buckets, which joke buckets are desk bits where there doesn’t need to be an escalation. It’s just like, here’s a joke, here’s a joke, here’s a joke. They’re all in the same line and thread, but they don’t need to escalate up. Desk bits are often joke buckets where it’s just like, here’s one funny thing after another. That’s totally great and totally valid, but it’s a different thing than sketch writing. You can understand why people on a show might be assigned specifically to that task versus other tasks.

Drew: I’m always so impressed with comedy packets because they have to have it all. You have to be able to do sketch. You have to have all of those daily show jokes. It’s so much funny material that comedy writers have to pull together.

John: I was heartened to hear that one of the writers who was teaching said that they often go back to the chapter in the Scriptnotes book or the episode before it was a chapter on Craig’s how to write a movie and the specific Finding Nemo stuff from there about this is a relationship between these two characters and what they need from each other. So often comedy does come about by really understanding what characters want and how you’re communicating that to the audience, to the viewer.

Drew: It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? We can’t get away from it.

John: We will have some very smart sketch people on the show to talk through in actual knowledge rather than just secondhand knowledge like we did today. I just want to say one of the real joys of being on the negotiating committee is I’m surrounded by so many smart writers. Tom Fontana is in the room every day. Tom Fontana has created all of these shows. He can introduce himself by saying, “I’ve been a WGA member for 45 years.” I’m like, “Lord,” and a showrunner for 41 of those years, which is wild.

To recognize the long line of writers and how they have shaped this industry and how the things that they’ve created are why we have Hollywood that we have, which is incredible. Drew, great chatting with you.

Drew: Great talking to you too, John. Good luck with stuff.

John: Thanks.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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