The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is episode 731 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Often on this podcast, we talk about characters heading out on a quest. We discuss wants and motivations. Today on the show, Craig, let’s flip that around. What are characters running from? What are they trying to avoid? How can that help drive story? Let’s also answer a listener’s question. Questions about writing as a couple and what happens to residuals after we die.
In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about the pivot to video because if you’re a premium subscriber, you sometimes see us in addition to hearing us because we’ve been doing videos for the last couple of months, but this is still basically an audio podcast. There are some changes coming to Scriptnotes, and I want to give listeners a preview of what is to come in the road ahead.
Craig: Change, John.
John: Change.
Craig: Change. Feels like something we should avoid. Perfectly on theme. I love it.
John: Mostly, Craig, I want to say hello because I’ve not seen you in so long. There’s been an interregnum. You were off directing an episode of your great series. I went to Madrid, and then Portugal, and I was locked in a room negotiating the WGA contract, which just wrapped up.
Craig: Oh, I thought that was your code for being locked in a room. You’re like, “I got to go to Madrid again today. I’m stuck in Portugal.”
John: We’re back.
Craig: We’re back.
John: Thank you to our listeners for your patience while we did encore episodes and other things to fill the month that we were away from our microphones.
Craig: Just to be clear, the reason is because when I’m directing, once Saturday comes, my brain just stops. It’s just pudding. It’s pudding for Saturday, and it’s pudding for Sunday. Then I start again on Monday. Got through that happily and glad to be back. Particularly glad because there’s stuff about the new contract that you guys did on your sidecast, which is awesome. I just wanted to say congrats to you, John, as co-chair of the WGA Negotiating Committee for the least drama-filled while still successful negotiation for our union. Thank you.
John: Certainly. You’re very welcome. It was an honor and a privilege and absolutely exhausting slog at times. It was more normal. We just haven’t had normal for a long time. 2023, of course, was a strike. 2020 was the pandemic. 2017, ended up having a strike authorization vote. It was also a healthcare fight. It’s been a while since we’ve had a cycle that was more, these are the things, this is how we’re going to get it done, and we got it done.
Craig: New leadership on their side as well, which sometimes makes a big difference. If you can hit a reset button there. Carol Lombardini, who was the head of the AMPTP, wasn’t really new. She worked for Nick Counter, who was the prior head of the AMPTP. It was more of a continuation of that regime or even a worsening of it, I think some people would say. Some new faces over there, maybe a sign of better things to come.
John: Yes, one would hope so. I would say that we have to remember that the AMPTP’s job is to give us the absolute least they can possibly get away with. That was consistent in this round as well. Hopefully, some tone matters too. We were able to get through this.
Craig: Tone and a basis of historical success. It’s good. It’s well done.
John: Yes, absolutely. All right. Let’s get back to our actual podcast, the thing that we are here to do this morning. Let’s do some follow-up. It’s been a minute. Drew, help us out. What did we miss?
Drew: Jesse in Chicago writes, “I remember a discussion about Craig’s frustration with locking pages during production. He suggested that because most people receive and view scripts digitally, that we really only need to lock scene numbers. As a script coordinator, I agree, but I’ve never had the buy-in to put it into motion. I’m wondering if Craig has implemented this on the new season of The Last of Us. If so, how is it going?”
Craig: Jesse, I tried. I tried, and I could have. It wasn’t that I didn’t have permission, but somebody I remember when we were talking about this, a script supervisor, mentioned that there was some aspect of the software they used that would make unlocked pages a little more arduous. Because our script supervisor already does 12 different jobs a day, and because I rely on him so much for so many things, he asked nicely if we could keep the pages locked. I said, “Sure.”
Just the other day, something happened that drove me crazy. Because of some adjustment, there was a scene, and then the next page, there was just one line of dialogue. Then on the next page, the scenes continues. There was something when we were doing it where that line, people were putting this emphasis on this line. I’m like, “Why is this happening?” Then I looked at the sides. I’m like, “Oh, for F’s sake.” I went over to them. I understand psychologically why this line is sticking. It has its own page. That doesn’t mean anything. Just flow on through. It was devil’s road to earth. Jesse, oh, man, next one. I swear, I swear to Moradin, the dwarven god of steel.
John: Back in future times, you and I were basically our own script coordinators. If we had run into that situation, we might have done something tricky in order to pull that line onto a previous page. This way, it’s a roundup. I hear you. I feel you. It’s so frustrating because we associate white space with emphasis, and this was not meant to be emphasized.
Craig: No. I do try and do that, but there are times where I think to myself, am I screwing this scene up just to change? That really, oh, that one. I haven’t. Maybe the last episode, I’m going to go, no page breaks, drive them crazy.
John: We have more follow-up from Stephen Follows, who is the data scientist who does a lot of stuff with movies and screenwriting. We’ve had him on the show before. What’s this bit of follow-up here?
Drew: He tried to calculate whether one page was actually one minute. He grabbed over 2,500 screenplays, put them up against the runtimes on IMDb, and basically, what he found was that one page doesn’t equal a minute. It equals about 55 seconds.
John: Yes. This is a follow-up on, he’d done an earlier study, but he took a larger sample set to make sure that this rule of thumb, which is approximately correct but not actually accurate, and how it all works out. The takeaway is that for four out of five scripts, the rule doesn’t really hold. Screenplays are normally longer than the movies that result.
Different genres have different standard lengths. It falls apart for long scripts, for short scripts, and if you take the end credits out of the movies, it’s even worse and sort of less applicable. Again, it’s what you’d expect. It’s a rule of thumb that should not be taken as an actual rule or law.
Craig: Do you happen to know if when he did this study, he also included the notion of standard deviation? If most scripts don’t follow this rule, it’s just that in the aggregate, this is what it ends up, then do you know what I mean? Some scripts are–
John: Standard deviation and how it falls on the bell curve is absolutely a thing. We’ll put a link in the show notes to his post, which really runs through in exhaustive detail.
Craig: I love exhaustive detail.
John: It’s approximative but not accurate.
Craig: Yes. I actually don’t think it ever works for me.
John: We’ve discussed this topic before. The reason why we need to be mindful of this fake rule is that people use it to justify having to cut things shorter than they should be.
Craig: Also, it may be that a produced single page takes more than a minute on screen, but things get cut. Barring additive reshoots, the general process is to winnow things down, which means you will effectively get fewer seconds on film per page, which means when you get the script, it doesn’t mean– If it’s 120 pages, it doesn’t mean the movie’s going to be two hours. No.
John: We’ve had conversations with folks who’ve been on shows, long-running TV shows, and on those cases, you probably can much more closely estimate, like, okay, based on this length of the script or this number of words, it’s going to track because you’re doing in a set thing. For any given single screenplay, it’s not going to be accurate.
Craig: No.
John: More follow-up. I love it when a How Would This Be a Movie becomes an actual movie. We have another example of that.
Drew: Christian writes, “In Episode 525’s How Would This Be a Movie, you discuss the story of Syllable and Brains, a Scottish rap duo who faked being American to land a record deal. Craig’s verdict was that the stakes were too low and that he struggled to care, but I’m pleased to update that the story has now been turned into a movie directed by James McAvoy. It’s called California Schemin’.”
Craig: Well, let’s find out if I was right. [laughs]
John: If you’re right.
Craig: There are movies where the stakes are simply, we want to succeed as a band, and that can often be nice. I struggle to care about all sorts of things. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t become movies. Now, the question is, do we think anybody heard what we said, and then we’re like, “No, there’s no chance,” right? They’d already licensed it, I’m sure.
John: At some point, our paths will cross with James McAvoy, and we’ll ask if he had any awareness that we talked about this idea.
Craig: After he punches me in the mouth.
John: Exactly.
Craig: I deserve it.
John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the trailer. The trailer is charming, and I hope it succeeds. McAvoy seems really smart. I can totally believe him being a solid director on this. I like that he’s Scottish, the band is Scottish. It all makes a lot of sense. Two bits of follow-up on the Scriptnotes book, which remains out there in the world for people to buy. It’s always nice to see it featured prominently at bookstores. What do we have on follow-up for Scriptnotes book?
Drew: Micah says, “I’ve recently purchased a Scriptnotes book and have been having an amazing time reading it thus far. I’m sure many have brought this up, but one of my favorite things is the lightweight quality of the paper. In particular, it makes it such that my cat can jump on my lap and stretch out fully as she’s prone to do, while I can raise the book into the air and keep reading without my relatively weak wrists getting tired. The result is a satisfying situation for all parties.”
Craig: [laughs] I just love the idea that Micah and his cat are both sort of like boneless people.
John: Totally.
Craig: That’s great.
John: We made a book for weak wrists writers, and that’s fantastic.
Craig: That’s most of us.
John: We know that Micah is American because it’s the US version that is lighter than the British version for just reasons. It’s mostly because you perceive that it should be heavier. We talked about the support. You perceive that it should be heavier than it actually is, so it looks more like a textbook size, but it doesn’t have a textbook weight. That’s what happens here. More follow-up from Luke in Mallorca.
Drew: “In the introduction to the book, you say, struggling with theme, you can jump right to that chapter, but there’s no chapter on theme, nor is there an episode specifically dedicated to theme. Craig’s How to Write a Movie episode looks at thematic arguments, which is super insightful, but I’d love to hear both of your thoughts on theme and the many different interpretations of exactly what theme is in a story.”
Craig: Then they included this beautiful picture of where they were in Majorca with the book and a glass of, I’m going to say, beer. Beautiful.
John: Beautiful. I think as we wrote that sentence, as I probably wrote that sentence in the first chapter, there probably was a chapter on theme that was pieced together, and it all pulled apart into different things. Drew, you’re nodding. I think there was a theme chapter at some point, and-
Drew: I think there was.
John: -it just got broken into other pieces. We have a page in The Notion about the Scriptnotes book of things to fix in second printing. I think the sentence about the theme chapter will probably be updated in future printing.
Craig: John, you and I read the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books as children.
John: Oh, God, yes. So amazing.
Craig: I remember one. I think it was one where you go to some new civilization in space or something where there were two pages. There was a point where you would open the book, and on the left and the right, it was a place that you couldn’t get to by choosing. They were like, “We don’t know how you got here.”
John: You’re not supposed to be here.
Craig: “This is the secret place, and blah, blah.” I was so like, “Oh my God.” Yes, maybe that’s what’s happening.
John: There’s a secret theme chapter. You just haven’t found it yet.
Craig: It’s not listed, and you haven’t found it. I will say, Luke, the how to write a movie thing, that is basically how I think about it. You got my two cents in there. Yes, mostly when I think about theme, I try and get rid of that word as quickly as I can and come up with something that’s more useful.
John: If we update that sentence, I’ll say, you can skip ahead to Craig’s chapter on how to write a movie, which is his analysis of theme. Finally, we have a question about free work.
Drew: Brian writes, “In Episode 727, Craig mentioned that, per Working Rule 8 of the WGA contract, if you’re a member of the WGA, you cannot write for anyone without an employment agreement. I hope this isn’t a stupid question, but as someone who has currently written two freelance scripts for television, and is about to join the WGA officially, does that mean I cannot work on a project on spec, which I later intend to pitch?”
Craig: No, it does not mean that. When we say you cannot write for anyone, anyone means any employer. It means anyone who could pay you. You yourself can write anything you want for yourself, of course. What happens if you sell something on spec is a little bit of legal jujitsu, where the employer says, “Yes, you wrote this, but really, you wrote it because we wanted you to write it. Now, we own copyright, and here’s a bunch of money, and you are now employed on a thing that you, in fact, created.
Then everything is fine. No, you are free to write on spec to your heart’s delight. There’s this interesting thing that happens. There used to be a lot of this. I don’t know if it’s going on as much anymore, where producers would ask writers to write things on spec. That is a funky territory. We know that, for instance, a studio cannot ask you to write something on spec, obviously.
John: Like, a producer saying, I’m really looking for inexpensive horror that could be shot in this sort of schedule or in this location. In those situations, you’re writing this thing that you actually own, you have no agreement with that producer. It’s the idea that producer will then be able to set that thing up for a thing.
Craig: Yes. Really, Brian, the rule is there so that you don’t take money from people under agreements that are not WGA agreements. That’s really what the rule is there for.
John: Yes. One of the best things about being a writer is you can just create your own stuff. Actors have to wait for someone to hire them. Directors need material. You can just self-generate, which is great. In the time that I’ve been a WGA writer, I wrote Go on spec. I wrote The Nines on spec. It’s a thing that writers are often doing. That’s absolutely appropriate. In TV, you’re often writing new samples for yourself to get yourself considered for other projects. Yes, you’re always writing your own stuff. Never stop that.
All right, let us get to the marquee topic today. I want to talk about avoidance. Here is–
Craig: I don’t. I don’t want to talk about it.
John: Exactly. Craig has the spirit already. I’m reading this book called Indistractable by Nir Eyal. There was one bullet point that just stopped me cold. His quote was, “All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort.” I said, “Well, that’s not true.” I feel that’s fundamentally not correct. Yet, it feels plausible on some level. It’s provocative.
I wanted to pick this apart because, Craig, we’re often talking about motivation. That’s what’s driving story. You have a hero that wants something, and that’s what’s causing the story to begin. Craig, do you mind talking us through the basics of the hero’s journey kind of thing we’re usually talking about with motivation?
Craig: Sure. This goes to the simplest thing. What do I want? We do want things all the time. Whatever we want could be something like winning a race, or getting the girl, or defeating my enemy, or saving my village, or keeping my child safe, or it doesn’t matter, or going faster than the speed of light. Whatever it is, it’s the thing we want. Typically, in these stories, and this goes back to the most ancient of fables and mythology, typically, what a story is, is somebody trying to get what they want, and other things or people trying to keep them from getting what they want. If they do get what they want, their life will change for the better. If they don’t, their life will change for the worse in significant ways.
That’s the most basic plumbing of a story I can imagine.
John: Part of the reason why it’s so important to think in terms of what a character wants, what a character is trying to get to, is that as the reader, as the audience, we lock into what they want. We want them to get that thing that they want. We understand what the story is about. It’s like the contract that we’re setting with the audience is, okay, this character is trying to get this thing, and we will see the character work to try to get this thing. At the end, they will either get it or not get it, but that’s the journey that we’re going on. We often talk about the freeze frame.
You should be able to watch a scene and freeze the frame and point to each of the characters, like, what are they trying to do? What is their goal? What are they aiming for? What I’d like to talk about today is, so often, you can actually reframe that as, what are the characters trying to avoid? Reframing that positive motivation, what they’re aiming for, as the negative motivation, what are they trying to escape from or get away from? Generally, the characters are running from something. Sometimes that is built into a classic hero’s journey, which is the denial of the call to adventure, that they want to stay put and stay at home.
Often, it’s just, they’re trying to just avoid anything unpleasant, and they want to stay in the place they are.
Craig: Very often, a character will want the right thing, but for the wrong reason. I don’t think all motivation is a desire to escape discomfort, but I do think a lot of it is. I think really, there are only two real basic motivations that humans have, fear and love. Those are the things that drive us. One of them is generally viewed as positive. One is generally viewed as negative.
What we often find in stories are that characters are moving towards something or away from something out of fear, and then are taught to elevate themselves and change their motivation to a more positive love, that is a higher motivation based on the well-being, not just of themselves or anything selfish, but everyone, or sometimes it’s a higher spiritual state of being.
Luke Skywalker wants to get off his stupid planet. He wants to be a pilot. He wants to fight in the war. He’s doing all these things because, in a sense, he’s afraid of being meaningless. He’s afraid that people around him will die, like his uncle and aunt, who are all crispy there. Then, of course, in the end, he has to change that so it’s not fear, but rather this higher, sort of stretching love here to embrace the force and join with everybody as one consciousness so that he can commit an act of violence that kills many, many innocent people and is a war crime.
John: Yes. You’re talking about fear and love, and those core emotions are driving a lot of the avoidance here. Fear, loneliness, awkwardness, all of the things that keep people at home, keep people from stepping out of their comfort zone, it’s understandable. Our brains psychologically are hardwired to try to get back to homeostasis, that we’re going to go back to this thing that we recognize, the thing that we feel safe in.
Sometimes what looks like a lack of motivation is just someone just trying to avoid that discomfort. They’re making choices that are unproductive, either for story or for themselves, because it’s understandable why they’re trying to stay close, stay at home, keep things normal.
Craig: They could be productive in the sense that they are staying safe, and it’s working. It’s just not the best life they could live.
John: The idea of avoidance, of course, goes back. It’s always been part of philosophies. You see it in Buddhism that dissatisfaction or suffering is the source behind craving, craving being ambition or a call to action to do things. Schopenhauer already talks about will comes from a lack, that you’re missing something, that you’re suffering, and that’s what causes you to go out and try to do a thing. Again, a positive motivation is often really just an expression of this thing you’re trying to avoid.
Craig: Yes. There is the pleasure principle, which would argue the opposite, that what people go for are the things that make them feel good positively. I think it’s both. I do. What we forget, I think we tend to overlook how important avoidance is for us, and how important fear is for us, and how much of what we do really is secretly about that.
John: Let’s get some concrete examples. The first thing that jumped to mind was Carl in Up. This is a man who has shut himself off from the world after losing his wife, and he’s an almost entirely avoidant character. He just doesn’t want anybody to do anything. His quest, and the balloons, and going into Paradise Valley is about shutting himself off from everything else.
The movie is constantly creating obstacles and forcing him to confront these things he doesn’t want to confront, and step outside of his comfort zone. Up, we talked about your chapter in the book, and you talk a lot about Marlon in Finding Nemo. This is again an avoidant character. It looks like he has a quest. He’s going to see his son, but really, he’s driven by fear. He’s driven by trying to avoid the pain of the loss and acceptance of what’s actually happened.
Craig: Yes. This duality of fear and love was something that I think I made as concrete as I possibly could in the Bill and Frank episode of The Last of Us. Bill is avoidant. He does not want to deal with the world. Anyone who locks himself behind a fence is theoretically thrilled. Doesn’t matter. Even before the world ends, he avoids expressing his sexuality or experiencing connection with other people. Frank is about love. Frank’s goal is to make the street look nice and to have friends and to enjoy things as much as he can while he’s here to make the world around him better.
We do find typically that when we have a choice of a character, we want to choose the guy who’s avoidant to be the protagonist because they’re the ones who have to change. So much of the story of avoidance is face it. Face the thing you can’t face. Deal with it because after all, I think that’s what 99% of therapy sessions are. Can you face the dragon, slay the dragon, or are you going to continue to get eaten by the dragon?
John: Yes. It represents two Pixar movies, but the third, which one is also iconic, is Inside Out. In the real world, you have Riley, who’s trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. Then in the inner world, we have Joy who’s just trying to keep things happy and avoid the reality like, “Oh, there’s other emotions too who need to have their turn at the wheel.”
Craig: Toxic positivity.
John: Toxic positivity, for sure. Paul Giamatti in Sideways. This is a character who looks like they have a quest. They’re going to go on this road trip to encounter all this great wine, but really, he’s just trying to escape his failures, his failed marriage, his book, his life. It’s avoiding confronting the realities and situations, and the movie is forcing him to encounter those along the way. Whiplash. This, again, looks like a kid who has a quest to become a legendary drummer, but when we see his home life, we see like, “Oh, no, he’s actually just trying to avoid being the normal kid. He’s trying to avoid this being ordinary or nothing special.
Craig: Which is what a great example because there, throughout the movie, you do sense he is driven by this avoidance of that life. His move towards something is really a move away from something, and he is punished for it. Over and over and over. In the end of the film, it is clear that he is no longer motivated by fear. He is motivated by love. He creates something spontaneous and outrageous because he’s not afraid anymore. He just is experiencing love. He doesn’t care what that guy does to him anymore. In that moment, the caterpillar becomes a butterfly of bloody hands, and there’s a whole lot else going on there, but basically fits into this dynamic.
John: Now, when we talk about the Bill and Frank episode, they’re partnering up two characters who are an avoidant and an outgoing, one are often successful, but you look at Lost in Translation, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, they’re both essentially avoidant characters. Neither one wants to confront the reality of their situation, and together they kind of do, which is an interesting dynamic that you don’t see very often.
Craig: Yes. In that case, which is a wonderful story of two people in limbo, they will not see each other again. They should not have seen each other this first time. This is an ephemeral moment in which they can both take comfort in each other’s fear and loneliness. Two lonely people getting stuck together is fascinating because they’re no longer lonely. You’re right. The dynamic of the avoidant and the, I’ll just call them the loving person, is classic. Planes, trains, and automobiles, John Candy, just outwards.
All the movies that David Spade and Chris Farley did, Spade avoidant, Farley outward and loving, and it always ends up where the one changes the other. It’s always the avoidant one who must change, always. You never want to see a movie where an outwardly loving person goes, “Yes, you’re right, we actually would like to change. This is a little crazy.”
John: You see the same dynamic in Groundhog Day. You have Bill Murray’s character, who is super avoidant, and then becomes trapped in a situation. Annie McDowell’s character is the one, even though she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, is the one who’s pulling him out of this thing and making him see the love in these moments.
Craig: Yes. With very little agency, by the way. There is a better version. I love that movie so much. It does suffer from the very specific ’90s era woman as morally perfected human syndrome. It’s just this sloppy man trying to reach the already perfected height of a woman who was created perfectly and will exist in such perfection. You’re like, “No, what’s interesting about people is that they are not,” but it’s still awesome movie.
John: Yes. The opposite case of the morally perfect woman is Lydia Tár in Tár, who is the most complicated woman. We find her already at the peak of her career, and then she’s avoidant about everything crumbling around and the bad choices that she’s making that is causing it all to unravel. I just love Tár so much. I just love what an incredible character is there. Obviously, she had a goal going into this, but we’re coming into this moment where she’s avoiding all of the negative repercussions of the things she’s done and love it. It’s just the right moment to see it.
Craig: It’s also one of the best character names possible in general, but also specifically for what is happening to her, Lydia Tár.
John: Tár. It has to have that–
Craig: The little slashy.
John: The little accent, the little down slash on it.
Craig: The movie, just being called Tár with the little slashy, it’s wonderful.
John: So good. I want to talk about sometimes avoidance can become the quest, which is actually a fairly natural pattern. Legally Blonde, Elle, she’s going to Harvard, but really to avoid the pain of heartbreak. She doesn’t have a vision for what her positive version of her life is going to be. It’s like she wants to get back to homeostasis. She wants to get the guy back, and that’s motivating her initial quest to Harvard. Mad Max: Fury Road. Max is trying to stay out of everything and ends up getting dragged into it, and then becomes the reluctant hero in it. A classic pattern.
I guess what I’d ask people who are thinking about this for their own characters is, does the character know they’re running away from something, or do they think they’re running towards something? How does the audience react to this? Is the character self-aware or not self-aware of what they’re trying to avoid can be helpful?
Craig: Yes. You need to at least understand what they’re afraid of. I don’t care who the character is. If you are a loving character, you’re still afraid of something. If you are a fearful character, you still have the capacity to love something. Han Solo can just keep saying over and over, “I’m just in this for the money. I’m just in this for the money. I’m avoiding being part of the fight. I’m avoiding giving crap. I’m avoiding falling in love with that lady who’s kissing her brother.” Then, in the end, he comes back and does something loving.
John: I think what you’re talking about is there’s a pivot. There’s a moment in which the character, what they’re running from, someone else needs them to face it. Basically, it’s the thing that they’ve been avoiding is the thing they actually need to address in order to help something else. That pulls them into, it brings them across the barrier into the positive quest.
Craig: They will inevitably get called out. Somebody at some point in a story where the main character is avoidant will call them out and say some version of, “Are you going to run away like you have your whole life? Are you going to pretend to not care your whole life just to protect yourself? Are you going to give a damn about something because we need you?” There will be that moment always. Inevitably, at the end of that little speech, the avoidant character will say, “Screw you, I’m going home.” Then they’ll just think about it. Then they’ll come back. We like that. We love the rhythm of it. We love it as much as we love verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, break, chorus.
John: Let’s wrap this up by talking about, so often we’ll get notes about making sure the character has agency, that the character is driving the story. Some of those are good, well-intentioned notes. I think it’s easier to imagine characters who have a lot of agency and a lot of vigor and vim and zeal. They’re driving stuff forward, but they don’t feel real because real characters have fears. Real characters have things that are pulling them back from moving forward. The avoidance things are what we as an audience recognize in them. The fact that Indiana Jones is terrified of snakes, that’s a reality. If he didn’t have that, he wouldn’t feel as real to us.
Craig: Yes. Indiana Jones also avoids the religious, spiritual implications of the things he engages in. They’re simply objects that belong in a museum. He needs to be avoidant of these things so that, at the end, when there is something that is about to happen that is supernatural, he must embrace that in order to save himself and Marion.
John: The takeaways for our listeners is that, yes, you should be thinking about what characters want and being able to articulate what they want and to what degree the characters understand what they want, to what degree the audience understands what they want. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t running from something as well. It’s finding that balance between what they’re running from and what they’re running towards, so it feels like a continuous arc.
It feels like, “Oh, this is the journey that I’m seeing these characters on.” Obviously, we’re talking largely about movies here, where there is a clear arc and trajectory. Even in series television, there’s a sense of seeing both aspects of a character to make them feel real. They’re both driving story, but they also feel like real human beings.
Craig: Always. Sometimes it switches. As characters go through things, somebody may be on the rise, or another person is. For ongoing series that are meant to keep going, like soap opera, drama, whether it’s daytime or prime time, they need people to cycle around each other where one is avoiding, and one is creating and moving toward. It’s inevitable.
John: All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Trepidatious Boyfriend writes, “My girlfriend and I are both early-career TV writers in LA. We’re a couple of months into our relationship, and she wants to write something together with me.”
Craig: Ah.
Drew: “Wondering what the pros and cons are of writing with your romantic partner. What sort of feedback have you received over the years from writing partners who happen to be dating or married to each other?”
Craig: The ones that we know that are married to each other who are writing are only the ones that were successful. [chuckles]
John: Exactly.
Craig: The rest of them broke up in all possible ways. We don’t even know.
John: There’s a strong aspect of survivorship bias in the things we would cite.
Craig: Exactly.
John: A couple of first instincts here is basically, do you want to write the same kinds of things? If that’s not the case, you should definitely not write together. Are you Crepidacious Boyfriend, a person who is a good, creative roommate? Do you share well? Do you like having that second brain? Would you write with a partner if it was not your romantic partner? That’s a good question.
There are big advantages to writing with your romantic partner because you see each other more and that can be great. It can be a problem too if you need some space from each other, but it can be really good. We know so many teams who it’s great they’re working together, because they’d like to be together, and they get to stay together, and they get to do the stuff they love to do. Craig, what other instincts do you have? What’s the checklist you would give them in terms of yes or no?
Craig: I think the most important thing would be that you both fill slightly different roles in the process. From the married couples that I know who work together, and we know a few, it does seem like one of them fills a different role or capacity than another. Typically, while they are both imagining and thinking, one stays more in dream town, and one is more in typey town. Not like I’m only typing what you say, but rather there’s one that generally is a little bit more constructive on the page, while the other one is more imaginative, outlining, conceptual. That’s just my impression.
For you, Trepidatious, the thing that’s concerning to me is you are a couple of months into your relationship. Give it a little more time, maybe? Because, man, this could kill it fast.
John: It could. I’m thinking back to some of the writing couples I know who’ve lasted. In some cases, they were writing partners first, and then they fell in love over it.
Craig: That’s different.
John: That tracks and makes sense.
Craig: That’s fair.
John: I think your love life, your emotional happiness, your finding a partner in life is more important than finding a writing partner. I would say prioritize that.
Craig: I agree. Yes, you don’t need a writing partner. Clearly, because you’re both writing individually anyway. Finding somebody that you can love and live with, honestly, it’s like so much. What’s the point of, you know? God help you, the day you guys break up is the day you get a call that you just sold a script as a writing team. I guarantee you, it’s a nightmare. Give it some more time. Get a little more of a basis.
John: Friends of mine were a married writing team who were staffed on a TV show, and they broke up during the episode. It was really, really hard. It’s hard for them emotionally, but then they also have to have a professional relationship split up, and that’s so tough. Don’t go into anything expecting catastrophizing it, of course, but these are just things to think about.
Craig: I’m guessing the odds are low. I’m guessing the odds are low here. The odds in general are low. 50% of marriages end in divorce, I think. I’m not suggesting marriage here, but that’s the funny part is writing together is sort of marrying somebody. It’s an entwining you may not be ready for.
John: All right. Another question here from JP.
Drew: With the recent passings of so many Hollywood legends, I can’t help but wonder what happens to a person’s residuals when they die? When a person’s no longer around to collect those checks, who does?
John: The setup of this question, recent passings of so many Hollywood legends, this probably came in around the time of the Oscars. Wow, that in memoriam segment was so long. There were so many iconic people who passed away this last year. It made me realize, “Oh God, that’s only going to continue. I’m going to know more and more people who show up in the in memoriam section.”
Craig: This is good news, John. Because the more people that we know that die, the more comfortable we will be when it is our turn to die. Because we’ll be like, “Yes, that’s what’s going on these days. That’s what we’re doing.”
John: Craig, true confessions here. I cannot help but watch the in memoriam segment and say, “If I had died in that group, how much notice would I have gotten in that group? Would I have been a slide that goes past? Probably?”
Craig: Yes, I think you would. I think when the screenwriter slides come by, my expectation is that when they’re creating the death montage, they are orchestrating for swells of emotion. When you know you want a big swell, put the screenwriter into lower.
John: I’m in the middle of a beach.
Craig: It’s a dip. It’s a dip to set you up for an actor. It really is. Let’s face it. You don’t end the thing on the screenwriter.
John: Whereas, Craig, I think you would be in the Emmys in memoriam more likely than you’d be in the Oscars in memoriam.
Craig: That’s correct. I think I would be currently in the Emmys. Do people normally show up in both? Is that a thing?
John: They can, for sure. I feel like Rob Reiner would show up in both.
Craig: That’s true. Yes, I do. It’s funny when I watch these. I just do think like, “Oh, okay, they just put that.” He’s like a camera operator. He worked a really long time. I think I got a shot at getting into this thing. But I’ll never know. That’s the thing. I’ll never know.
John: You won’t even know. There are unanswerable questions, JP, but this is a very answerable question you asked about residuals after you die. I looked it up. This is a thing you could have Googled, but I’m actually happy you asked the question because I actually can have an answer for you. I’m going to read you from the page that I found. In 1977, the Guild negotiated for the member’s right to receive residual compensation in perpetuity. As a result, even after death, a writer will continue to receive residual compensation if their material is reused. Your residuals will be dispersed pursuant to the terms of your will or trust document or under intestacy law. Did I say that right? Intestacy?
Craig: Yes. If you are intestate, it means you died without a will. It sounds dirty, but it’s not.
John: As well as under the terms of community property, as may apply. Yes, residuals are forever. They go along with your estate and, in some cases, can be meaningful. That’s some good stuff. I looked it up in SAG-AFTRA. It’s basically the same thing. The bottom line is there’s no expiration date on residuals. They follow the worker, and so therefore they get passed on to estates.
Craig: It is important, actually, for so many reasons, to have your stuff in order. Even if you are not, say, ready for the Emmy post-mortem montage, you’re a young person; it’s still important to have some sort of arrangement made. There are very, very cheap ways to do this. What does happen sometimes is when someone dies, and there’s no arrangement, and nobody tells anybody anything, the guild tries to figure out who to give the residuals to. In the end, a lot of money ends up in the unclaimed residuals pile. That money eventually, I believe, starts to filter back into the general fund of the writer’s guild, but they do try to distribute those funds as best they can. Obviously, you want to make it easier on them than harder.
John: Absolutely. All right. I think it is time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing feels like a Craig one cool thing, but it’s delightful for both of us.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: Josh Wardle, who created Wordle, he came on the podcast many years ago. We celebrated Wordle as a great product that he’d made. He has a new thing out called Parseword. Parseword is a cryptic crossword puzzle game that Craig directly inspired. It’s based on his conversation with Craig on this podcast, and Craig extolling the virtues of cryptic crosswords that got Josh thinking about, “How could I make a game for cryptic crosswords that would actually be accessible and playable even by someone like John August?” He succeeded. Parsewords is delightful. It’s just parseword.com.
It walks you through how to think about these things because it’s complicated. It’s not as simple as Wordle is, but I see Craig smiling. You’ve got to be delighted.
Craig: Of course. What Parseword does is, in its own way, teaches people how to do this. It’s a very specific format. A typical crossword clue will just give you some prompt, and you have to answer it like river in Egypt, Nile. The cryptic crossword will give you both a straight clue and a wordplay clue within the same clue in a way that’s funky. Let’s say, winding river in Egypt leads you to straight. What is that? In Egypt, it’s not a very good crossword. It’s not the bad cryptic clue, but it’s Nile, and then you anagram it to line.
There’s all these like– actually, what I just did is illegal, but regardless, the point is, this teaches you all the tips and tricks of how to do these things. I have to say, once you get into cryptic crosswords, you just don’t care about the regular crossword anymore because it’s just like, “Do I know a thing? Sure.”
John: It’s why, after you started skiing blacks, you don’t want to ski bunny slopes anymore.
Craig: You leave it behind. Checkers was fun. This is chess. Then there are so many levels, and I go deep into, as I’ve mentioned before, the Kevin Wald cryptics, which are insane. Even beyond those, there are the cryptics from The Listener in the UK, which are borderline impossible.
It’s all fantastic. It’s just such good brain work. Doing a cryptic crossword is my night routine to go to sleep. I spend 20 minutes or so, and then when I feel like, “Oh, I made some progress,” I put the iPad down, and I go to sleep. If I didn’t have that, I don’t know if I would sleep. I think I would just stay up all night.
John: People should check out Parseword. It’s a really well-executed version of a difficult thing to do. It’s just so smartly done. Check that out. parseword.com. What have you got?
Craig: I have a book review. I’ve not read the book, but I’ve read the review. It’s in The Nation, so it’s quite thorough. The book that is being reviewed is The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future by Virginia Dignum. Side note, when did books have to be title, colon, explanation of title?
John: Oh, yes, that’s interesting. I don’t know when that started.
Craig: It just happened, and it just never– there’s no way to not know it.
John: I think it’s within the 2000s, but if you just called it The AI Paradox, it wouldn’t be meaningful at all.
Craig: That’s how books used to work, though. Anyway, The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future by Virginia Dignum. This review is by Ben Tarnoff.
What she seems to be digging into, per his analysis, which I think is really fascinating, is that we seem to be caught between either fearing that AI will destroy us all or fearing that AI is a huge scam and our economy is about to collapse because it’s just a sham. What Ms. Dignum takes the philosophical position that, actually, artificial intelligence isn’t really like our intelligence, but it is something to cooperate with our intelligence, and that we ought to be–
Rather than running away from it or elevating it instantly to replace us, we should be actively figuring out how to work with it by its side and make it work for us. I liked the review mostly because I think it was positive about– and I thought a very reasonable approach, like, “Hey, what if everyone on the extremes is wrong here? What if there’s just this messy middle?” I remain generally in the, I think this might be a scam camp, but I was somewhat hopeful that this could be a really, really good version of a calculator, and work like that is of value.
John: I’m looking forward to checking out the review and possibly the book itself. It is tough because you have to hold multiple things simultaneously in your head. It’s like there are genuinely useful things that people are using it to do, which is great, and applications that seem valid and like, “Oh, that’s a thing you couldn’t do without this kind of technology.”
Disruptive and dangerous, just this last week, the security implications of the new Anthropic model that could basically break everything. That’s why they can’t even release it until they find all these patches for stuff. The fact that all the money pouring into it and the weird side deals, it could be Enron, but also be real. It’s very frustrating.
Craig: It is frustrating. It’s hard to tell if people are in so deep financially that they have to just keep shoveling crap at us to make sure that we don’t notice that it’s just bland. Then again, maybe this is in its best version, a great new tool like the computer. The computer changed– it wasn’t like when the computer came along, people were like, “Oh my God, so many people are going to lose their jobs.” A lot of people did lose their jobs and had to retrain doing other jobs, but it notably created a billion jobs. The notion that artificial intelligence must replace us, that seems like that’s the toxic point of view.
John: An article I was reading yesterday was talking about are humans horses or coal when it comes to AI? Basically, we used to have so many horses in the world, and it was like, “We just don’t need the horses anymore,” so all those jobs for horses went away, or is it like coal, where it’s just like, we are still necessary for actually figuring out how to implement it and do all the things with it. By being able to do stuff, we can actually grow things bigger. I don’t think we know yet.
It’s probably both. It’s a very different thing. I think the rise of computers and the rise of the internet are directionally similar, but it’s just a different force than we’ve had before.
Craig: She makes the argument that part of what makes human intelligence different is its cooperative nature with other human intelligences, that we are constantly relating to each other, learning from each other, and changing our minds because of each other in an inventive, creative way, including people whose minds don’t work quite right. For lack of a better word, mentally ill people have had an outsized impact on art and culture forever. That part of things, I don’t think AI knows what to do with. I don’t think so.
John: We’ll check in several hundred episodes to see where we’re at, if we’re still around.
Craig: We’re at the bots. We’ve got Craig Bot, John Bot.
John: Craig Bot, John Bot. It’s all working.
Craig: One final, one cool– I have an extra one cool thing this week. My daughter, Jesse Mazin, was asked by the Indigo Girls to open up for them. She will be opening for the Indigo Girls on all of their western dates. If you go to their upcoming concert, it’s Portland, LA, and all places in between, and I think Boulder, I think Colorado is her first– she’s put this song out, and it’s attention, and this is going to be her first real thing. We’re all very excited and very proud of her, and she did this all on her own. I don’t know the Indigo Girls, but she will be opening for the Indigo Girls, and we’re all very excited. If you want to buy a ticket, check it out.
John: Absolutely. Every father is so proud of their child’s first national tour.
[laughter]
Craig: I never expected that I would ever say– when I was in college listening to the Indigo Girls, I never thought, “You know what, it’s fun, maybe I’ll make somebody, I’ll make a person, and that person will open for these ladies one day.” Did not have that on my bingo card.
John: Life is full of surprises.
Craig: Indeed.
John: That is Scriptnotes for this week. It is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Don’t know him.
John: Our outro is by James Ashley McLaren. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’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 signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you buy books.
You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @ScriptnotesPodcast. We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkwear. You can find those at Cotton Bureau.
You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you, as always, to our premium subscribers. You keep the lights on and make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record about video and other changes coming to Scriptnotes. Craig, it is a damn delight to have you back in my little Zoom window to record another episode of Scriptnotes.
Craig: He’s back. Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Let’s talk about video. For Episode 726, we recorded our first full episode as a video podcast. We didn’t have Craig, but our guests were Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, who have since gone on to win the Oscar for their shorts.
Craig: Probably because they were on the show.
John: Honestly, probably because it was a tie.
Craig: Then definitely.
John: Literally.
Craig: Literally, somebody voted because they heard that episode.
John: Absolutely. I voted for him. I’ll say I voted for him. I was the one.
Craig: You were the one.
John: They were our guinea pigs. We sent that video as an exclusive link to our premium subscribers and asked them to give feedback. Drew, what did they say?
Drew: Very muted, no opinions.
John: No, that’s crazy. I really thought our listenership would have had opinions, but no, it was just silence, radio silence.
Drew: No, we got a lot.
[laughter]
Drew: It was very helpful. I can just run through some. Grigorij writes, “Huge fan of the podcast. This is really amazing. Well done. Would love to see all episodes as video episodes. Just miss Craig, 100% the way to go.”
Craig: All right. That is super positive. Why don’t we quit there?
Drew: Yale says, “This was really well done, and everyone’s heads had the right amount of shine. That said, I can’t see myself switching over to this format. It’s just that we’re 700 episodes in, and I just can’t say that in all those hours of listening to you guys as I’m doing the dishes or putting away laundry or on the subway, I’ve ever had a thought of, ‘Oh man, I wish I could see John and Craig right now.’ I’m very happy to have you continue to chat away in my headphones while you accompany me on my errands.”
Craig: Do you know what Yale just said? She said, “Oh, thank you, but I prefer that we just stay friends.” She straight-up did that. You know what? I get it. Don’t want to see me either, Yale. We’ll call that– what do you call that, a neutral?
John: Yes, we’ll call it neutral.
Craig: Neutral. Neutral, like take it or leave it, I guess.
Drew: Christopher says, “I had no intention of watching the whole video when I hit play. I just wanted to check it out for a few minutes since I don’t watch video podcasts. I prefer to listen to podcasts because I was born in the ’70s, and that’s what we do. 71 minutes later, I’m writing this email. What I enjoyed the most was connecting with Natalie and Alexandre as people visually. I felt more emotionally connected to their story as I watched them tell it than I think I would have just by listening to the podcast. I guess that’s why we write scripts in the hopes of turning them into films for audiences to watch. I loved seeing the studio space you’ve set up for these video recordings.
Nice attention to the background detail without being distracting, wonderful soft lights with the lamps. I even caught a squirrel on the wall just above Alexandre’s head at one point, to my delight.”
Craig: That was an unexpected win there with Christopher. I like that.
Drew: Rich says, “For me, this worked, and I love your background, but just be careful if and when you start to show video clips of movies in this medium to remember your roots and know that us in the car or on a walk can’t see it.”
John: That’s always a big problem with audio podcasts who try to include clips because then you have to describe what people saw in the clip, and it does slow everything down.
Craig: We generally don’t do much in the way of clips anyway for this very reason.
Drew: Guy says, “For me, pictures ultimately distract from your core purpose.”
Craig: Here we go. Finally.
John: “Scriptnotes was put here on earth in order to have two very experienced and amiable screenwriters chat about how to use words well in service of building pictures in people’s heads. With audio, there’s no distractions. I don’t want to see mics and cables. I just want to listen to my one-way friends and concentrate, usually while I’m driving or doing the washing up. ‘That’s fine,’ you might say. Just keep listening to the podcast. You won’t be forced at gunpoint to watch us. True, but here’s the thing. This will take up a lot of time, energy, and resources, and I suspect that ultimately may get passed on to your loving but financially stretched subscribers in the form of increased subscription fees.
Although you’re both fine-looking gents and this is slick, it’s audio-only vote from me.”
Craig: I like that Drew added some good old anger into that as he read it. He just imagined Guy getting pissed.
John: He’s an actor. Drew is fundamentally an actor. He’s a trained dramatic actor.
Craig: He’s an actor. He’s a trained dramatic actor. Also, by the way, I love Guy. Guy’s awesome. This guy’s great.
John: Give us the numbers. What was the breakdown here?
Drew: I broke it down. About five people said, “I prefer Scriptnotes as a video podcast. This is the only way to go.” We got about 26 people who said, “Heck yes, I love this,” but didn’t name a preference. For the people who said, “Looks nice, but there’s really no value add for me, and I’m probably going to stick to audio-only,” that was about 18 people. Finally, about four people said, “Do not do this. You’re ruining a good thing.”
John: That’s fair.
Craig: Let’s see. How would we evaluate this overall?
John: This is what I would have expected, but as Drew was reading through this, I was thinking back to Craig, we didn’t even used to look at each other on Zoom, or was it on Skype when we originally did it? We have our cameras on right now. We’re looking at each other, but for most of the podcast, we’ve only been hearing each other. I think one of the reasons I think we’re successful is because we actually do listen to each other.
We think of ourselves as an audio podcast. I still think of us as an audio podcast that has some video now. That’s where my head’s at. What’s your feeling, because we haven’t talked about this?
Craig: You’re right. The fact that we were audio-only has shaped what we do. I don’t think we would do anything differently with video as an added thing because I completely understand where people are coming from. I hope it doesn’t lead to more higher subscription fees. Maybe the idea is you get more subscribers, I would imagine. I understand that it looks nice, but no value add for me; we’ll stick to audio-only people. Then from time to time, if we have a guest on or somebody, I think that’s really where it can be valuable. I think this is generally positive.
I think the two of us are self-aware enough to know. If we suddenly started acting like on-camera jackasses because there was a camera there, it’s just not who we are. We are as set in our ways as Guy is. [laughs] I think we would just keep doing what we do. It’s just that if he did want to see, you could.
John: We sent you that episode to take a look at it. Your feedback was exactly my feedback. Do you remember? You were talking about camera placement, basically making sure–
Craig: Framing.
John: Yes, making sure we’re just not always in profile, which is how we were set up.
Craig: This is something that I’m constantly talking about on set all day because profile is, or three-quarters, often is a very flattering view of somebody. If you’re having a moment where people are connecting and learning, teaching, agreeing, arguing, something about the on-axis frontal view-
John: Say both eyes.
Craig: -it creates connection. You can feel it better.
John: We have gone back. We didn’t have to relight, but we had to move some stuff around in the studio to do it. Our great DP, John Pope, has been helping us out with that. We’re going to do some more of these. When we have guests in, we’re going to roll the cameras and have those as video episodes. A logistical thing, too, is when we record video, should Matthew edit the audio and then match the video to it, or should he edit the video? Prioritizing the two of those is a factor. This episode we’re doing right now, we’re not doing the video. We don’t care about the video for it. It’s just an audio episode. He’s great at both, but it’s where do you prioritize?
Craig: Way easier to edit audio. Way easier.
John: You can hide things. All of our little flubs just like, disapear.
Craig: If you have a couple of angles, obviously, you can cut to the other person when you need to snip something out, but it can get a little tricky, and you might end up with some jumping and stuff or just a cut to some little weird thing. Maybe we just do that. It’s called the video editing frog, and it’s like a little ceramic frog you just cut to, and there it is for some reason, and then we’re back to the discussion.
John: That’s the frog. Our current plan, just for listeners to know, is that when we have guests or we have a marquee topic, we may pull that marquee topic out as a video that just lives on YouTube, but full episodes will probably not be showing up on YouTube. As Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other places let you do video podcasts, we may put the video version of the podcast up for premium members and not have it for our standard feed. Our standard feed is just the audio of it all. Partly because one of the things we do at Scriptnotes, we’ve always done, is only the most recent 20 episodes are available in the free feed, and it’s a premium feed for everything beyond that.
If something’s on YouTube, then why would anybody subscribe? From a business model, it doesn’t make sense. We want to be able to make this a sustainable business. Part of sustainability is also recognizing the limits of our time and ability to do things. I am about to embark on a project that’s going to be taking a lot of my time over the next year or so. Drew is going to come with me over on that new project. There will be a new Scriptnotes producer at some point in the future. You’ll hear a different name there.
Craig: Who?
John: You’ll hear a different voice.
Craig: I wonder who it is.
John: We’re excited to introduce.
Craig: If I had to guess, could I guess what that person’s name is?
John: You could guess.
Craig: Meredith.
John: The Ouija board, where’s the tile?
Craig: I’m just guessing, Meredith. I don’t know why. I’m chucking it out there.
John: It feels right.
Craig: Putting it out in the universe, let’s see what happens.
John: No, that’s a thing that’s coming at some point down the road. I love co-hosting this podcast, but it’d be great to have someone on who could do a little bit more of everything else and whose job it is to just full-time be the Scriptnotes producer.
Craig: You’re very sweet that you say you co-host it. I co-host it, you host it, and I show up.
John: We want to make sure that we can keep the quality excellent even as I get much busier doing other things. I think we’ll be able to do that. Because we’re in the premium feed here, just thank you to all our premium members. The only reason that we can do some of this professionalization of Scriptnotes is because people pay the money for this thing, and we want to make sure that it stays excellent, and you are the people who let it stay excellent. Craig, Drew, thank you for a fun episode of Scriptnotes.
Drew: It’s just nice to be back.
John: Thank you.
Links:
- Does one page of a screenplay really equal one minute of screen time? by Stephen Follows
- California Schemin’ trailer
- Indistractable by Nir Eyal
- Explanation of Disbursement of Residual Payments After Death from the WGA West
- Parseword
- Frankenstein’s Regrets by Ben Tarnoff for The Nation
- The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future by Virginia Dignum
- Indigo Girls Tour featuring Jessie Mazin!
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by James Ashley McLaren (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.