The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 737 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Craig is off directing this week, so in his place we have Phil Hay.
Phil Hay: Hello, John.
John: I’m so excited to have you back on the show.
Phil: I’m so happy to be here. It’s really nice.
John: It must be at least five times you’ve been on the show. We’ve–
Phil: I’ve got to be a five-timer at this point.
John: Oh, you would–
Phil: If not, maybe we can do like a quick fifth right after this.
John: 100%.
Phil: I need the jacket, is what I’m saying.
John: Yes, for sure. In my notes here I said designated hitter. Is that a thing? Does that actually apply to what you’re doing here?
Phil: First of all, thank you for speaking my language. I really appreciate that.
John: I’m trying to speak baseball.
Phil: I would say pinch hitter would be more the–
John: Pinch hitter?
Phil: Yes, pinch hitting for Craig. We’ve got a lefty on the mound. It’s time for me to shine.
[laughter]
John: Today on the show with a lefty on the mound, I want to talk about making movies inside the studio system and outside the studio system on the periphery because two of my favorite movies that you’ve done are movies that are made not in the let’s-sell-it-at-festival route, but with outside money in ways that we don’t talk about much on the show.
Phil: Yes, no, I’d be glad to talk about it.
John: We’ll also answer some listener questions about themes and productivity. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to go back to one of your earliest films, the iconic documentary The Dungeon Masters.
Phil: I was very happy to see that on the schedule.
John: We’ll dig into the history of that, which is a more classic indie film, and so the story behind that. It’s also a documentary. We don’t talk about documentaries very much, but we’d love to talk about Dungeons & Dragons.
Phil: This is a documentary that our Dungeons & Dragons game talks about almost every single week.
John: It is. It is a constant point of reference.
Phil: My proudest accomplishment.
John: First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out with some follow-up.
Drew: We were talking about focus groups a few episodes ago. Steven writes, “I was a film focus group moderator for 12 years, did over a thousand focus groups on first-run movies. In the last episode, Craig did a little recap of the horrible testing process. He specifically mentioned pacing and how no one ever says a movie is too fast. Not true.
Once we break the movie into places or parts that are too slow or fast, oftentimes, too fast will come up. What this means is there’s not enough information given to the audience at that time, and it seems as if the filmmakers have glazed over information needed to enjoy and understand the movie. This happens quite often. Also, I’ve never seen a movie get worse after testing. The scores always go up if the filmmakers are willing and able to follow the research notes. While the process is not a favorite of young directors, the good ones know that tests allow for a director to really satisfy an audience.”
John: All right. You and I have both been through a lot of audience testing, so let’s push back against Steven to the degree that’s pushing back. Have you ever gotten the notes too fast?
Phil: I have never once gotten the note too fast, but maybe that’s part of the kind of movies we make or how we do things. I don’t doubt him, but I think that generally, in all these binaries that we have in talking about movies and art, it’s leaning toward make it faster. The culture is leaning toward make it faster versus, I would say, slower or investing more time. As we both know from making movies, sometimes making the scene longer makes it play faster.
John: Yes, the ironic thing about sort of like if a thing’s not working, it feels too slow, but if it’s working, it’s perfect and delightful. My experience with testing has been largely positive. I really do love seeing a movie with an audience for a first time. We get the sense of like, did that work? You can feel when the audience is confused, when they’re right with you and such.
I haven’t found the actual notes back from the little forms they fill out to be especially useful. Focus groups, kind of marginally useful. I sit in the theater and listen to them, eavesdrop on them, but I have not ever taken anything from them that I felt like, “Oh, that’s an insight I couldn’t have gotten.” Have you?
Phil: Not really. I think that the thing that I gained the most from test screenings is just watching the movie with the audience. To me, my ideal version of that would be you watch the movie with the audience. I always leave that with a ton of things I would like to do to make the movie better.
The reason that it carries a lot of angst with it is that oftentimes, they’re good if the movie’s going well. If the movie is either not going well or if it’s the type of movie that is more than one thing, is difficult, has an ending that is not a positive ending, the fear, and what does come into practice sometimes, is people within that process, start using those comments as weapons against the filmmakers to say, “You’re wrong, I’m right.”
John: Absolutely. They have an opinion and they’re using the numbers off of the test screening to justify their opinions in terms of like, “We have to cut these things. Look at the data here.”
Phil: It’s incontrovertible because this person said that when you could point to someone saying positive version and frequently, that’s not the case.
John: If it were just the filmmakers who were in the test screening or benefiting from the process, I don’t think anyone would be afraid of it. It’s the fact that it is the studio and the financiers who are paying for this, they’re paying for the movie and they want to see that it’s working or it’s not working.
There are cases where I’ve had movies that have been on the bubble. We had a great test screening, and wow, we suddenly just have a lot more freedom to do what we needed to do. The early cut of it was like, we knew there were some real problems, but in showing it to an audience, we got this enthusiastic reaction, which freed up our budget to actually go and do the reshoots we needed to do.
Phil: It can be very helpful in those ways. It’s also the type of movie you’re making, right?
John: Yes.
Phil: Like when we were testing both the ride-along movies, those movies are the type of movie that tests really well if they’re done well. I think they were and they did and you’re gaining momentum from that. A lot of times, the testing, people don’t realize, even filmmakers, what is being evaluated is not how good the movie is, it’s how much the movie satisfied the expectations of the people watching it.
In a way, that’s the way the questions are asked too. Some of my favorite movies of all time have incredibly bleak, downer endings that I know tested in whatever the negative 30s, but they’re great movies. If you’re in a forum, we talk about studio versus independent films, if you’re in the studio, like it’s a commercial film, you do have to reckon with that stuff, and it becomes a very anxiety-ridden process.
John: We talk about the top two boxes, which are the very good and excellent scores that come out. You want those top two boxes to be a high a number as possible. Some people say like, “Oh, it’s the 90s in top two boxes, then you’re doing great.” It’s important to remember that was a snapshot of how people felt right as the lights were coming up. They may feel differently about it an hour, a day, a week later. Are they going to tell people like, “It was a tough one, but I’m still thinking about that movie”? That’s the kind of reaction that gives a movie real legs.
Phil: The ones that are really confounding, and I’ve been to some of them and involved in some of them, are where the movie plays incredibly in the theater. If it’s a comedy, you know when people are laughing. If it’s a horror movie, you know when they’re jumping and when they’re engaged. You can feel that energy. Then the test scores come back and it’s two completely different things.
John: Exactly.
Phil: I’ve yet to discern what that is. Part of me thinks there’s sometimes when you start asking people questions about specific things. They feel like they have to come up with an answer why it worked or it didn’t. Then you start analyzing in a way that’s not necessarily organic to the way you’re just experiencing it.
John: Yes, for sure. In every test screening, we have the system where there’s cameras that are actually filming the audience so you can see what jokes play and what things landed? I’ve been at those. I’ve never seen the footage that comes out of them. I don’t know if it’s real or helpful.
Phil: I’ve had that footage brandished at me before.
[laughter]
John: No one laughed, yes.
Phil: No. It’s funny, what you also realize is you see two different audiences and you see two completely different reactions. What’s fascinating is seeing what jokes play with one audience. You can have a screening where the– It’s a diagnostic tool, it’s not necessarily great because you have one screening where this one gag plays through the roof. The next screening, it’s just nothing.
It can be any number of things. It’s just who’s in that audience or it can be the volume in the theater, the dialogue isn’t loud enough, or all these different things. You do have to take some of that in the aggregate. If you do have a scene and the entire crowd is laughing and it’s visible to everyone, that can be helpful. I’ve had that work for me as well.
John: I don’t think this has happened on any of my movies, but I know of situations where they did sort of an A-B test. They had two theaters side by side that were showing slightly different cuts to see which one played better. I guess, it makes sense. I think you would feel in the room which one people were clicking on, but if the numbers are significantly different, there’s something about that change that is meaningful.
Phil: Again, that’s such an unideal thing for a filmmaker to go through because it’s how clearly they’re not equally excited about both cuts when that’s happening.
John: It is the director’s cut and the producer’s cut.
Phil: Right. Later when we talk about the various bands of studio to independent and in between, sometimes in an independent film you’re fighting for your director to get final cut as a producer. Some of that negotiation sometimes goes back to what all the tie-breakers are. The secret is if it ever comes into play, you’re screwed anyway. Like any of these tie-breakers. If a tie-breaker becomes necessary, we have a big problem, but you have to have something. Sometimes it will screen competing cuts and we create a structure around that. You really hope to never get to that point, but sometimes you do.
John: It does. We have more follow-up on audio questions. This is something that came up last week where some of our listeners were really displeased when we were playing the audio from people who wrote questions.
Drew: Who were asking questions.
John: Yes.
Drew: We had a handful of more folks this time. We only had a couple the last time. Most of them were just saying they also thought something was strange. I had one come in from Jared that I thought was nice. Jared says, “When I originally heard the audio questions, I thought they sounded robotic, but the idea of writing in to ask you to stop featuring them would not have crossed my mind. That’s ridiculously fuzzy. I like the audio, even if it’s from fellow screenwriting nerd robots. Keep them coming.”
John: All right, great. I think Tony actually may have hit on something that may be the issue here.
Drew: Yes. Tony says, “I also think what might be AI sounding is the crystal clear quality of the audio. I listen to many call-in type podcasts, and almost every call has that voicemail sound that your audio questions didn’t. Maybe iPhones just have come a long way, and that’s what voicemail sounds like now.
John: Yes, I think that’s probably partly it. Also, Matthew Chilelli, our editor, has incredibly high standards for audio, and so I do feel like he may be screening to make those things sound like they’re not coming out of an iPhone, and that may be the uncanny value– [crosstalk]
Drew: You got to stuff it up a little bit, and so–
John: If we go back to it, we’ll add some like traffic noise behind it-
Drew: Yes, exactly.
John: -to let you know that-
Phil: Sirens.
John: -someone’s yelling over construction equipment.
Drew: A guy selling newspapers in the ’30s. [laughs]
John: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Somewhat related to this, one of my big frustrations recently has been situations where in a program, there’ll be the sound of someone making a call or leaving a voicemail, but it doesn’t actually work that way, where the audio around it is just not actually how things work. Or whether you hear somebody, this happens in Duolingo specifically, where it’s like someone’s playing a voicemail, but you hear it ringing first. That doesn’t exist.
Phil: Yes, it is weird because it’s so boring. The reality of waiting, and also the thing of no one ever says goodbye off the phone. Everyone in every movie and television show is incredibly rude. They’re just like, yes–
John: Just stops talking.
Phil: Yes, or not even, yes. They just finish saying their line, and then the phone call’s over.
John: I do think it’ll be interesting as generations who are writing movies have never grown up with answering machines or that technology, and they’re trying to write period stuff that’s part of our era, just their assumptions about things. Because they’ll have seen stuff in movies, but that will be wrong too. The fact there was a physical machine.
Phil: There was an era. The machine era was like a gag, like a repeated gag that people would do, like–
John: Swingers had a great gag about-
Phil: The greatest. Maybe the greatest voice machine gag ever.
John: Voice machine. It was a pre-voicemail answering machine.
Phil: You remember the thing where somebody would introduce the character, and it’d be like, “Beep. Hey, it’s Toby. You know what to do.” You’re like, “Oh, great. Yes, I’ve been introduced to the character.” Not anymore.
John: Not anymore. All right. Phil Hay, you have made, with your partner, Matt Manfredi, made many studio features. We’ve also made features that are indies, but not kind of the, “Oh, let’s sell this at South by or Sundance.” They’re movies that are made with independent financing, that could have been made inside the studio system.
I want to talk about the split there. We’ve talked about this with you on Episode 244. We talked about The Invitation, which is fantastic. 377, we talked about Destroyer, which is a bigger film. The Invitation feels like you can imagine it playing at a festival, and so– [crosstalk]
Phil: That was the route for that one.
John: For that one? Okay.
Phil: Yes.
John: Whereas Destroyer, it’s a noir film set in Los Angeles with a recognizable star lead, and it could have been made for a studio, yet wasn’t. I’ve also talked with Keith Calder, Episode 343. We talked about indie producing overall. He’s a person who raises the money and does things outside of the system. I want to talk about the decision to do some things in the system, do some things outside of the system. Let’s start with The Invitation. You said it’s more of a classic model for it. Did you know from the very start this is how you were going to approach making the movie?
Phil: Yes, that one we did know from the beginning. In a way, it came about over the course of many, many years in a reaction to feeling like we not only wanted but needed for ourselves to make a movie that was ours, and that was not in the studio system, and that wasn’t beholden to all the stuff that is good and bad about that system. We wrote it very deliberately to be able to be made on a very small budget. In the end, it was $1 million flat, for that movie. We shot it in 24 days. All along the design for that, though it doesn’t fit into something like a classic festival movie. It’s not a straight drama. It’s a drama, thriller, horror, whatever else it is.
John: It anticipated the Blumhouse era, though, of a single location, terrible things happen in a single location, in a not quite real-time but almost real-time.
Phil: Yes, the thing that makes it necessarily independent was the subject matter and the tone, and also, the size of it being. That was our proposal to everyone. “Let us do this movie, and Karyn directing it, and let us be in charge of it.” When you do make a movie for $1 million, it’s the same as now, there’s these thresholds, where the level of you getting to do what you want to do decreases as you go up potentially. It really depends.
At that level, the deal that we said is like, “Karyn has final cut. This movie is what we want it to be. We’re going to cast whoever we want to.” We found the financiers who were willing to do that. Then did take that to South by Southwest where it premiered. It did sell there. In an interesting way, I think we’re going to talk about this a little bit later, the role of streamers now.
Then, we were able to sell to Drafthouse Films, which became Neon. It evolved into, with other things into that, for just theatrical and physical media. We sold it to Netflix for just streaming, which is not something they do anymore. They only did that up to a certain point. I think it was a real boon for a lot of independent films because you could sell it to the right distributor that could put it on as many screens as you can while knowing it wasn’t going to be a wide or even medium release. Then the Netflix deal could backstop everybody and make it work. That was the intention. Everything about it felt like an independent film. Destroyer–
John: Before we get to Destroyer, let’s talk through the pros and cons of doing something indie, because you were saying like, you have just much more freedom and autonomy. You have final cut. You have all these abilities. You can just say no to things you don’t want to do, but you’re also not an employee. Not being an employee means you don’t have the guaranteed money that you have to do. It’s all a risk, a bet on yourself because no one is paying you to write that draft. All of the work that you’re doing, you’re doing for yourself in the hopes that a thing will get made.
Phil: When the movie got made with a low-budget agreement, WJ, we deferred basically almost all of our screenwriting money. That’s it. You’re just investing in it yourself. It is really a labor of love. You’re doing it because you want and need that movie to be made. You’re doing it because you think that’s the best way to get people to see it.
John: Of my movies, The Nines is very much that model, where it’s just money we had ourselves. We went to Sundance, sold out of Sundance, sold foreign, sold domestic, got our token theatrical. That was always the plan for it. Go was an example of supposed to be all foreign-financed money in a very classic indie way that we would sell at a festival. We lost that money before production started, but Columbia Pictures came in and said, “We will be the bank, it’ll be our movie, but It was structured like an independent film. It already had a buyer at the end, so we didn’t go through the whole sales process on that.
Let’s talk through more, though, the pros and cons of you have this idea, a script you’ve written, pursuing it independently versus trying to sell it to somebody to make. What’s the calculus?
Phil: For us, it usually is, are we going to make this movie ourselves with Karyn Kusama, my wife, who’s the director? It really becomes a, is this something we’re going to take together and try to go all the way with? We have one right now that we’re planning to make independently, but it is not impossible for a studio. A studio maybe in another era would have made this movie, but now, the type of movie it is more likely to be made by either one of the mini-majors that we could talk about that have filled that gap a little bit, or made independently with independent money. For us, it’s like, what the thing is.
There are certain things that you can squint your eyes and see how a studio might see it, but if you have to work hard, I’m already worried. You want to make sure everybody makes the same thing. It’s almost dangerous to get someone excited about the potential of the thing versus the thing itself because you might not see it exactly the same way.
John: You can imagine a project which a studio might read the script and it’s like, “Yes, we’ll do that,” and so you get into development and you’re doing a draft, you’re doing another draft, and you realize, “They’re never going to make this movie.” You spend a lot of money and time wasted to getting it there and they now own the thing.
Phil: That’s the thing that’s really, you think you hit upon the thing too, is giving up your control and ownership over it at the last possible minute because if you do sell it to a studio, you get money and that’s great. If they make it, great, but if they don’t make it and they cannot make it for a million reasons, it’s almost impossible.
We had one recently where we miraculously got it out of turnaround from one studio into another studio. Then that entire leadership changed and we got it out of turnaround a second time, but by then, it was too expensive. We couldn’t make the movie. We had someone, an independent financier or a mini-manager ready to make the movie and you just can’t. That’s tragic when you’re–
John: Became expensive because of the money spent on development–? [crosstalk]
Phil: Because the money spent on script? The money spent on development, the interest on that money, the producer’s deal at that studio with their amortizing against it, all those fees, they just lumped that in there. If you can’t negotiate them off of it, then the movie’s dead. That’s something you have to think about, especially if it’s an original, do you want to risk putting all your eggs in that basket, unless you get the green light? You can obviously sell it to them if they’re saying, “We’re going to press Go if you sell it to us.”
With an independent film, there’s endless chances. You go down the line, financer after financer, there’s a million ways to do it. All of them are hard, but if you control it, like this movie I’m talking about now, the new movie we’ve just written, it’s me and Matt, it’s Karyn, and it’s Fred Berger, who’s our producer on Destroyer, and he’s our producer. That’s it. It’s an original, so there’s no rights to worry about. It’s just us.
I think that’s the safest place in a way because you have to be really careful about who you ask in and who you invite in because then they’re with you.
John: With The Invitation, it’s $1 million. You’re able to raise $1 million. No one had rights to this territory, that territory. Everyone was investing in the movie, hoping to make their money out of the movie when it’s sold to a distributor, correct?
Phil: Yes, that was the pure equity model.
John: Yes, that’s clean.
Phil: We did foreign sales later or maybe concurrently. Our producer, XYZ, was really great at foreign sales. I can’t remember exactly what the order was, but I think we had the equity money first, and then it was backstopped by some foreign sales. That was, again, just finding financiers who really wanted to make the movie and the price tag was low enough that they could literally write the check.
John: Let’s talk about the entities involved here. You say XYZ, there’s also Gamechanger, and Lege Artis.
Phil: Yes. Gamechanger was the primary financier, a fund that was specifically created to finance female-driven, female-directed films.
John: Great.
Phil: They had a mission. They were very serious and pure about it. They really liked what they saw with our movie. Then, they could put up three quarters of the money, and so we had to go get another quarter of the money. That was from a group of investors out of Canada called Lege Artis. That came together. Of course, there were lots of ups and downs and money flying from here to there. [chuckles]
John: Who connects you with those people? Is it your agents, Karyn’s agents? Who is the people who’s like, “Oh, you have this script, and so here are some people we can go to,” or are you just meeting people at festivals? How are you finding these folks?
Phil: The way that we did it and the way that a lot of people do it is, so every agency has an indie sales department. In our case, we’re at UTA, Karyn’s at WME at that time was at ICM. You just have to decide which is going to be the sales agent. Often, they team, but another secret about making independent movies is you have to leave one slot open for an actor because if you get a big star in your movie and they’re CAA, CAA is rightfully going to want to help control and package the movie.
We’ve had to have a noble back and forth with our various agents on who is going to handle the movie. We worked with a woman named Jessica Lacy, who was at ICM at the time, who put both Destroyer and The Invitation together. That’s just her job. She goes out and finds money for independent films. She was invested because she worked for Karyn’s agency. It was all part of a push to try to get this movie to happen. The sales agent at an agency is one very prime way. They’ll get involved at some point, no matter what.
There’s also a version where you don’t have them driving and you’ve got someone like XYZ or you’ve got someone like Rocket Science who is the foreign sales for Destroyer or FilmNation, very powerful, great entities who can say, “We’re going to build this on foreign sales. We’ll run it. We’ll go to Cannes market or we’ll go to any of the markets and try to start putting together based on your movie and your cast. We’ll put together the money that way.” They’re almost always working with a sales agent too. It’s foreign sales and a sales agent, and then your producer.
Fred, our producer is a real producer. He’s out there pulling stuff together. He’s on his own mission, monitoring and managing everything and has his own relationships with financiers and his own relationships with every agency in terms of that. That’s the answer is really the sales agent is the sales agent, producer, foreign sales is the [unintelligible 00:24:36]
John: Absolutely. It ends up being a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of just figuring out who is doing what and what the next step in the process is. You’re all sort of chasing this dream of imagining making this movie. To what degree is this person attached? To what degree is it realistic? Is this timeline realistic? Is the money actually going to show up in the account when you need it to show up in time?
Phil: Yes, that is the question because so frequently, the money doesn’t show up in the account [chuckles] and you’re back scrambling again. Or you put together an entire cast and take it to sales and get the money, but by the time you can get the movie going, half the cast has to fall out because they’re doing something else. This is constant gears turning and trying to grab whatever the go thing is and get it far enough that when the inevitable stumble happens, they’re okay with the fact that it’s not that actor anymore. Now it’s this actor. That’s basically how that works.
The one thing I’d say that I took away, I’ve been doing some mentoring and so I’m talking to some younger filmmakers about this, is through all these meetings, the difference between someone who has the money and someone who can “get you the money” is the difference between night and day.
[laughter]
Phil: There’s so many people who will only out themselves in the meeting that they don’t have the money, but I can call this guy and this. You don’t need that person to call that person. You can call that person. The gold is the person who actually has the money.
Then the part 2 of this was to say, and this might be useful for listeners out there who are trying to put their own movies together, is always trust your first instinct about the people you’re sitting down with because that first meeting is the very best they are ever going to be with you. They want something.
They might stay that good and you might learn wonderful dimensions about them later, but on a basic sense, if you’re sitting in that meeting and you’re like, “I don’t think I’m aligned with this person, or I don’t think they get it, but they say they’ll write a check,” you have to acknowledge that because when the pressures of making the movie get together, that’s going to be your favorite meeting with them. It better start out pretty good.
John: There’s a feature I’m executive producing and I’m not heavily involved in the day-to-day of it at all, which is great and by design. Over the course of its development, there have been different actors in different roles. I was talking with another filmmaker and said like, “Oh, one of your actors is in this movie I’m executive producing.”
It’s like, “Oh, that’s so exciting.” It’s like, “What’s the thing?” I was like, “Blah-blah-blah. I don’t know that he’s doing that, but maybe he’s just doing something secret.” It was like, “Oh, no, he’s not in the movie at all.” I was like three or four months behind. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a completely different person.”
As I see the actual like, “Oh.”
Phil: It’s complete alternate universe you were talking about.
John: “That person’s not in the movie whatsoever.”
Phil: Yes. No, no, not at all.
John: You forget how many times along the way, like, this is the dream of things being put together and it wasn’t this way. My movie, The Nines, we had a completely different cast. As we were putting stuff together, but then schedules change. I can imagine that movie. I had a lovely meeting with Aaron Eckhart, but he’s not in the movie.
Phil: Right. The alternate universe version he is, I guess.
John: Yes. With The Invitation, you’re making a million-dollar movie, and there’s a template to that. We know what that looks like. 24 days is a reasonable amount of time. You’ve got one location. Destroyer is much more ambitious. For that, it feels like it could have been made as a theatrical feature. It’s unusual to have a woman starring in that role, Nicole Kidman. It’s her out of her normal lane. What was the process on that? Were you ever considering going into the studio, or you knew from the start that this would be some kind of indie?
Phil: I think when Matt and I first thought of the script, and again, like everything we do, it took eight years from inception to the movie coming out, and Invitation was the same thing. When we first thought of the script, I think we thought of it as something that we could do at a studio, that we wanted to maybe either write to try to sell to a studio or pitch to a studio. In a way, it’s like maybe a movie that Warner Brothers would have made in the 1970s or something, but maybe creeping up toward the present.
John: Yes, Jane Fonda would have starred in it. Yes.
Phil: Right, but we quickly realized, once Karyn knew she wanted to do it, and we started imagining what we were really chasing with it, we felt like it was much more at home. Again, we wanted to try to make it ourselves. The Invitation allowed us to have credibility to say like, “We want to do this again, and we want to do this movie.” The budget wasn’t massive. It was around $9 million, but it’s a lot bigger than The Invitation.
John: It’s a bigger risk and a bigger swing, though.
Phil: It’s a bigger risk, and that’s the thing, once you get to that point, people can start seeing how they might lose money. Fortunately, we made money for everybody with that movie.
The way that was built was, again, through Jessica Lacy, through all the people that were- through Rocket Science, through Fred, who came on to produce it, it was finding the perfect equity financer, again, to write the check on the trust that the type of movie it is with the director and with the script was going to pull people in. They got on board before Nicole Kidman, which is very, very rare when that happens now especially. It’s almost always cast– [crosstalk]
John: For a movie that’s almost entirely on her shoulders. She’s in nearly every frame.
Phil: Who knows, had it taken longer to find her, who knows what other things might have happened. To her eternal credit, Nicole is one of my favorite actors and people and is so wonderful. She just read it and wanted to do it, and she was in. It was not a lot of crap. It wasn’t a lot of waiting seven months to read it or whatever. That really made it go.
John: What were the differences in terms of, it’s one thing to reach out to people like, “Oh, for $50,000,” or whatever, but if you’re trying to get to $9 million, you have to have bigger swings and bigger people writing bigger checks. Was there a foreign presale? How are you getting up to $9 million? Was it just individual people writing bigger checks or was it pre-commitments to–?
Phil: I think we did well in presales, and we did, and then–
John: Let’s talk through presales. In presales, this is the script. This is the theoretical poster. You’re going to a market like Cannes and say like, “We’re making this Nicole Kidman thriller with this director.” Out of different markets, they’ll say, “I’ll buy that for X dollars”?
Phil: Yes. You’re going market by market. Like in Japan, you get a certain amount of money for that. Each market, each star is worth more in every market. Of course, as we know, that’s mostly just total voodoo.
John: Yes, absolutely.
Phil: Nobody has any idea. It means nothing, but they believe it. [chuckles] You’re going down the line. They present you with something, the ask and the take. The ask is what, in best scenario, they would get from, say, Australia, which you did really well because Nicole is an Australian and a massive star there. The take is like, “This’ll be okay. These are our bottom line. If we get the take from everybody, we’ll still be able to make the movie.”
John: What’s crucial to understand about this is that you could come to them with like, “I have this genre of movie and this star,” and they could do it, but they could also do it even without the project itself. They kind of know how much different people are worth in different packages. They could get a sense of what a package is worth.
Phil: In a feel of a type of movie.
John: Yes, they get a feel.
Phil: Sometimes they read the script. Sometimes it’s very intensive. Sometimes we’ve all seen endless deadline announcements of some package at Cannes that sold for all this money, and they just grabbed this star and they grabbed that star, and they have a title, and then they go, and then the movie never gets made, or maybe it gets turned into something else or whatever. In this case, we also had a unique thing where we were able to make the movie. We talked about, “Should we try to go get a distributor now?” Because we felt really strongly about the movie. We felt like it was turning out just the way we wanted it to.
John: An option you could have done is essentially, a negative pickup like we did with Go, where it’s like, “Okay, this movie is happening. Paramount, do you want to come in now and–?”
Phil: “Would you like to come in now, and you’ll be the distributor?” Now we have that backstop. Also, if you have a domestic distributor, your foreign sales go way up. That really helps them to know that because that’s advertising for them, too. We went back and forth about the pros and cons of that, like making the movie for a place, or making the movie ourselves and then trying to sell it. The plan always was make the movie, and then get into one of the festivals and sell it there.
Then at Cannes, at the market, when we were in the middle of cutting the movie, the idea came up, and I don’t know whose it was, to cut a reel. We cut a 15-minute reel, which is a mega trailer, but it was beautifully done. I was so proud of how they put it together. That really tells you the story of the movie if you are a distributor. They were like, “Look, we could either, we could have a distributor screening and screen the film later, or do the thing, we’ll premiere it Toronto, and we’ll try to sell it there, or let’s have this screening.”
We screened it for many, many distributors. I think a couple studios were there, too. Out of that, Annapurna just bought it lock, stock, and barrel. That was the ideal outcome for us because they were able to say, “We’re going to write a check that will make your investors fine. We believe in the movie, and we don’t want to wait until you screen at whatever festival.” We ended up premiering it at Telluride, which was incredible, and then screened it Toronto and London. Then it was better because we had a movie that we were just putting out, as opposed to trying to sell. That worked out great for us that they were willing to step up.
John: The festival is a launch pad, but it doesn’t have to do a sales job, which is great.
Phil: Totally. It’s a very different experience.
John: You mentioned Annapurna, which is no longer exists, if I recall?
Phil: They’re around. They’re making a comeback.
John: Fantastic. I want to talk about these mini-majors, because that’s an example of a place that can make and release its own movies, but it’s not one of the big studios. They could have developed the script themselves and got into it, but they also will buy a project along the way and do it. How do mini-majors complicate the question here? Because you have the Searchlights, the Focuses, the sub-labels of bigger companies, and you have these independent companies like Neons and Annapurna. How does that change the equation?
Phil: I think it seems like, and again, to use the movie that we’re working on now, it’s called Sorceress, that we’re in a hopeful way, it expands the possibilities for those things because A24 and Neon are acting more like traditional studios now, but in a really good–
John: They’re clear brands and–
Phil: Clear brands and clearly what they like and what they want to do and what they want to give their audience. I think it’s working out really well. The question that I have, I think they develop some within. I think that it’s possible to go to them with something and say, “Hey, let’s develop this movie together,” if you’re a filmmaker that they want to work with and you have the right idea. I think mostly it’s still buying a package, either buying script director, stars, plan, budget, and they’re like, “Okay, go, we’ll do it.”
Especially Neon is like a lot of acquisitions at festivals. It’s like the best movie at every festival is Neon grabs it, usually. You’ve seen the budgets that they’re comfortable with go like up to 20 or whatever million dollars, which is now something that Neon could not– Neon was one of the people interested in Destroyer, and we love them and they’re wonderful, but at that time, [crosstalk] they’re nowhere near the budget that they were able to spend on stuff.
John: Now you have A24 doing Marty Supreme for–
Phil: Yes, exactly. That’s going to be really interesting to see how that works because as they push out into the desire to make commercial movies, in my heart, I’ve always felt commercial movies are just good movies. We’ve been taught that commercial means bad or there’s one or the other. I’m like, “How about making a great movie, and then people show up and they see it and they talk about it?”
John: I do feel like the success of the box office this year will get people hopefully remembering like, “Oh, that’s right, we can make movies and make money,” which is great.
Phil: Yes, totally. Create something that people want to go see in a movie theater, which I think is important.
John: Let’s also talk about streamers because made for streaming, I think three years ago, we were like, “Ahh.” We were concerned about how much is made for streaming in terms of features. Now, you don’t hear about it as much, but both of these movies could have been made for streaming directly, and there’s a good case were made for those.
Phil: Yes. No, and I think a lot of movies that are on one end, a lot of super commercial movies, but then a lot of oddball, fascinating, director-driven, script-driven movies are made for streaming. For me, it’s always like the first thing is making the best movie, but there is something very real that we talk a lot about, about what happens to it in the culture? If you make it, if the tree falls and no one’s there.
I think the danger is how do you get people to pay attention and remember? We’re very lucky with movies like The Invitation and Destroyer that did not make a ton of money at the box office or anything, but they’ve been kept alive and thriving online and through getting reviews and through getting the traditional ways that people talk about movies and on Letterboxd and on all this stuff.
A lot of movies that are, I think, excellent movies come and go and it’s without a trace. It’s not even when a movie comes out in a theater and leaves in two weeks. It’s like, I’m in the business and I have never heard of a movie starring someone I think is incredible, directed by someone I think is incredible. That’s crazy.
John: We so often think about like, “Oh, you want to make sure your movie gets into a theater because of its exposure and people can see it on a big screen,” and that’s absolutely good and true. I’ll say my experience with The Nines is we never got the right streaming deal. The fact that it’s never been– It’s always been on iTunes, you would always buy it through Amazon. It’s always been a rental versus it just shows up on streaming. I’ve never gotten the right streaming place for it to be featured on.
Phil: That’s interesting.
John: It sucks. Frustrating.
Phil: Let me go to work for you, John.
John: Yes, absolutely. We’ll get somebody on board. To wrap up a few things in terms of the people involved, we talk about the agents who are representing the film for sales. We talk about the packaging and the fee. Let’s make sure we’re differentiating that kind of packaging from traditional TV packaging, which was the whole agency campaign.
Phil: Yes, totally different thing.
John: It’s a different thing. They are not taking an upfront fee, but they’re getting a percentage of whatever the sale is they’re able to make out of this.
Phil: They have a number, a percentage built into what’s called, which you know is called, The Waterfall, which maybe your listeners, some know and some don’t, which is this document that the money trickles through until a little desiccated little bit might fall into your little bird mouth at the end. It’s how everyone gets paid, and it’s administered and dropped through. They take their fee off of percentage of the sales that they make. It’s not a similar thing to what we were talking about there.
I’ll tell you as an anecdote, with The Invitation, which only cost $1 million to make and succeeded beyond our dreams in terms of what it accomplished and how many people know about it and everything. Just two months ago, we entered our profit stage.
John: Actual profitability.
Phil: Which is shocking and incredible.
John: Incredible. Nicely done.
Phil: It’s happened.
John: That’s awesome. Great. Let’s ask and answer some listener questions. What do you have for us, Drew?
Drew: Helen in Toronto writes, “I’m in post-production as a writer-producer of my first indie feature. This is my first project as a producer and sole writer. The script is political in nature and originally included talking heads and experimental moments. It hinted at a larger systemic failure surrounding our two protagonists. At this stage, some of the B-roll and interview-style material is being cut because it “isn’t working” in the edit, making the film feel smaller and more interior to me.
We lose characters, locations, and a sense of scale. I already had to rewrite the ending 13 days into shooting, and have also been asked to change the title. My question is, how much should I fight with my director and co-producers over cuts? What should I defend and how do I know when I’m blinded by my writer lens and should defer to the editor or director-producer perspective?”
John: What Helen’s describing is specific to her movie in terms of what’s getting cut, but really familiar to everything we’ve been through on our movies, where you have an intention as a writer and then in production and then going into post, it’s not the movie you had in your mind.
Phil: I feel for you because it’s something that a lot of us go through, that sense of it mutating before your eyes into something. It can be a very happy thing. It really does hinge on your relationship with the director and how you think they are accomplishing the goal. For us, it’s been very transformative to work with Karin. We were side-by-side, step of the way, and we mutated and evolved it together.
In this case, it sounds like you’re a little bit at aesthetic odds. I guess what I would say is the director really, for better or for worse, does have to be the last word. That’s the way it was meant to be. I guess the advice that I would give you is to fight for what you think is important for that relationship, because you’re going to have many of these along the way. You’re going to want to be able to work together. You’re going to want to maintain your credibility as not just a writer but a producer on this movie.
Our rule of thumb is always if we suggest something to the director and they say no, most of the time, we just move on. If it’s really, really important, we take the time to stop and explain one more time why we think it’s so important. If it’s a no again, it never is spoken again. It just never comes up because it will never change. If you can give yourself leeway to say, “Hey, can I explain to you why this is really important to me” in the most comprehensive manner you can, do that. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I think you have to move on from it at this point.
John: I would ask Helen, does it feel like the director actually has a vision and a plan, or is the director flailing and floundering? If it’s clear that they know what they want to do and they have a vision for how to do it, what Phil says is exactly right. You can speak your mind, but eventually, you’re going to have to back up and let them pull off its vision. If they’re flailing and don’t know what to do, that may be a situation where you’re going to have to insert yourself a little bit more directly into the editing room as the producer and say, “Let’s try this thing. Let’s go in this way.”
There have been some of the studio features I’ve worked on where I’ve had to just get in the editing room and just like, “Let me show you what this could actually look like and try it this way because there may be a way to do it.” In theory, Helen, you were there for a lot of these productions. You saw the stuff that was shot, and you have a sense of what footage actually exists. There may be a way to get something more like what you want happening, but it’s going to depend on the social skills of being able to read where this director is at and how much.
Phil: That’s a great point, John, that I would say is useful no matter where Helen is with her director is if you can offer an alternative and a solution and an idea and articulate some ideas that are different, versus articulating that you don’t think that works and it should be the way it was. It’s funny. It’s often the right argument. In human beings, it’s not a compelling argument to go back. You have to take that and go forward with that.
John: 100%. There’s also a bit of validation that needs to happen. You have to make sure that you make it clear that you hear and understand what’s not working about the old version, and also that the version you’re describing isn’t trying to recreate that. It’s trying to recreate the best of what was actually shot.
Phil: Sometimes speaking in values is really helpful, like the values of what you’re feeling is not there anymore. If it’s the value of, I want something bracing, I want something that really shakes the viewer, or I feel like we’re missing something that creates a sense this is happening in a wider world or any of that, then that starts to become a conversation that is more likely for you to win because we want you to win because you’re the one who wrote it.
John: Grant has written in asking about task lists.
Speaker 3: “In Episode 728, you mentioned you have a daily task list, John, that’s broken up into four quadrants, and you pointed to it as a key to achieving your daily goals. I’m always struggling with getting things done and breaking down tasks into achievable amounts. I’d love to hear more about your lists. Do you make them the day before? If you miss a task, does it carry over? Do you have repetitive elements accounted for on your list, like vitamin consumption? Basically, I’d just love to know more. If you care to share. Great.
John: I have mine right here. This is a blank one. Phil, you can describe this. Tell me what you’re seeing.
Phil: What level? Do you want me to go philosophical with it? Do you want me to analyze why you might have done this?
John: Maybe describe it physically, and then we can describe.
Phil: It’s just a piece of paper folded in quarters. Today is blank because it’s the place for the date. It’s got a lot of boxes and nice faint dotted lines, like a lined paper that you could write a task on. Then we got some PERMA stuff at the bottom. Rush Lambert’s teeth, journal, Duolingo, afternoon fiber, Anki. That’s what you got.
John: That’s what you got. It’s a sheet of 8.5 by 11 paper folded in quarters. It’s pre-printed, so I print it 10 at a time and just fold it up in quarters. Keep a little stack of them by our phone charger. First page says today is. I write the day of what it is. There’s an overflow inside. The back has 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM schedule. I rarely use that. Mostly, though, if I’m on a phone call and I need to take little notes from myself to remind me things to ask or just what happened in the call, I’ll jot those on the back.
Every day at breakfast, I fill this out. I say, “These are the things I want to get done today.” I will carry over tasks from the day before if they are still important. It’s just been great. There’s a blog post. I’ll put a link where I have a template there. People can look through a bit. I’ve done it since 2019, 2020. It’s really good. It’s my way of doing things. Only I put things on the list. No one else can touch the list. No one can go to it. I wouldn’t dare now. I wouldn’t dream of it now.
It’s my personal accountability. The other thing I’ve talked on the podcast, I have index cards everywhere in the house. If I need to write something down, a note to myself or a lot of dialogue, or a note for a scene, I write on an index card. Those index cards get tucked into the little pocket here. They all stay together until they’re handled or processed.
Phil: I’m experiencing this, John, like a beautiful alien being descended and taught me of a life I could never live, but I’d aspire to. Wouldn’t you rather just take a Sharpie and grab something and write, outline, and then stick it somewhere that you never found it again?
John: Absolutely a valid choice. I’ve sat next to Phil playing D&D. Phil will, in a notebook, hand-draw the cheat sheet guide for his character. He’ll do it every session, every single time. He doesn’t bring it back in every time. He’ll do it each time.
Phil: I love doing it each time because I actually enjoy it. I enjoy feeling the Sharpie. I do draw a little diagram, little stars and arrows, and things. Yes, I redo it every time, and I don’t know why.
John: Obviously, people could do that. You could have a list on your phone that you do it. I find having it on paper and the process of doing it every morning at breakfast to be really good in terms of just prioritizing and figuring out what the things are that need to get done. Another thing I think is crucial is don’t just write down things you have to do. Write down things you want to do, so things like watch the next episode of Widow’s Bay. It’s on the list, so I remember to actually do it because I want to do it. Otherwise, I’ll forget to do it.
Phil: That sounds great, John.
John: If it works for you, there’s a template you can download. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. Do we have a question about themes?
Drew: Joey in North Carolina says, “I’m in the middle of writing my first feature. It’s all outlined, and I have a pretty good idea of where it’s going. However, I keep coming up with interesting new themes to explore. At this point, I probably have six to eight themes woven into the script. Though these ideas all fit the story conceptually, I worry I may be trying to explore too many themes. I come up with a new idea, then stop myself, saying, “I can’t explore that because I already have enough themes. Is there a line I should avoid crossing when it comes to the number of themes in my screenplay, or am I just overthinking this?”
John: In the first sentence, I actually had my explanation. He’s in the middle of writing his first feature. In your first feature, you’re going to try to shove everything in there because you’re like, “Will I ever write another feature? I don’t know.” I’ll put everything I know about everything into this one feature. At least he’s aware that he’s doing it. That’s a good sign.
Phil: First of all, I’m glad he’s thinking about theme because I think weirdly thinking about theme, there’s some people who act like they’re too cool to do that. I know you do. I do all the time. I’m always thinking about it because theme to me is just what does it mean? What’s it about? Why would someone want to watch this? I’ve never thought about it in terms of number of themes. I guess what I would say is, hopefully, what you have are shades of one theme, are many shades of one theme.
John: If the theme is the central question, it’s parts of that question or aspects of it.
Phil: Totally. I think it’s always helpful. Part of the reason I was excited to answer this question is talking about theme, it’s always worth reiterating that so many times people mistake theme for what I’m telling the audience or what my lesson is or what my political stance is or anything. I think the most potent way to talk about theme is it’s a question that has more than one legitimate answer. Your movie is about digging into where you lie on that spectrum of those questions.
To me, if you’re thinking about it in terms of themes, having themes that are coherent and that are intriguing, another way to look at it is it gives your characters, there’s always something for them to talk about. Whether they’re talking about it directly or more likely indirectly, whatever that theme is, touches something that is either a strength or weakness of that person, and they want to express it in action or words.
John: It occurs to me, Phil, you and I, and three others I know, we’re never sitting around talking about theme. It’s not that thing that just comes up. It’s an inherent, intrinsic part of the specific story that we’re telling, but we’re never around lunch tables like, “Yes, I’m really struggling with the themes in this thing.
Phil: It’s right. It’s almost like it’s just the breathing of the script is the theme is almost why it exists to me.
John: Absolutely. It’s the question that you’re itching to explore and why you’re even doing it in the first place. I will say that if you’re doing a television series, yes, you might be exploring multiple themes. Each episode might be hitting one aspect harder than another thing. It makes sense that over the course of a series, you’re going to explore different themes. Even over the course of a season might have a thematic central premise that you’re digging into and diving into. For one feature, it’s a one-time journey of these characters going through with this thing. There’s probably a central theme that you’re exploring and aspects of it.
Phil: Maybe it’s helpful to say your theme should be big enough that it can incorporate a lot of these other– maybe I can’t tell because I don’t have it in front of me, but maybe what you’re talking about is six or eight big ideas, or maybe you’re talking about really six or eight themes. That would be a lot for a movie to handle. It’s really what you’re defining the theme as.
Again, to not think about it in the removed sense of I’m stating a theme, but think about it, how it makes your script breathe, how those questions motivate everything. Again, if it’s a question that is provocative, a lot of people say a theme is something that everyone agrees. It doesn’t do anything for you. You have to add to that. If I go back to our own stuff, like The Invitation, one of the themes of that movie that was provocative to us was, can one recover from grief?
Part of the movie is saying, “No, you can’t.” Part of the movie is saying, “Yes, you can,” and that’s the tension. How you do it is the text of the movie, how one can make that possible or not. You may have, ideally, a theme and then a bunch of interesting angles on that theme.
John: Joey, if you’re trying to figure out what is my main theme? Look at what is closest to your protagonist. What are they wrestling with the most? What is the thing that’s closest to them? That’s probably your theme. It doesn’t mean that your other characters can’t have interesting things they do. Everything doesn’t have to be directly on theme.
Phil: Yes, that’s a great point.
John: There are diversions and stuff, and no one has to show up dressed exactly to match those.
Phil: Every single cop in the station thinks the end justifies the means.
John: Absolutely. [crosstalk] Yes, absolutely. Every sequence probably needs to be on theme, not every scene. All right, and now it is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a documentary that Pamela Ribbon, a frequent co-host of the show, is directing about one-act film, which is this annual Texas competition in high schools where each different high school has to put on a one-act play, but it all has to fit within an hour, including building the set and striking the set, and then going back to a black stage.
It is an ingenious competition that they’ve been doing for, I think, 100 years. It’s very longstanding. Pamela has put together a crew, and they filmed behind the scenes of this competition and followed the teams. It reminds me of Boys State. Have you seen Boys State?
Phil: Oh, yes.
John: In that same sense of rather than future politicians, these are theater kids competing at the highest levels, but with all the fun and drama of theater kids.
Phil: That’s awesome.
John: It is great. The movie is largely done, but she’s raising money for finishing funds. If you go to oneactfilm.com, you can see the trailer for it and chip in some dollars for finishing this because it’s going to be great. It is one of the funniest, most emotional. You see the trailer, and it’s like, “Oh, I get why that’s a movie.”
Phil: That sounds great. I’m in.
John: You’re in. All right. Phil, what do you have to share for us? What’s one cool thing?
Phil: I have the good fortune of having a college-age son who is a DJ on his college radio station, Michio at KOXY, Occidental College. He is always introducing me to incredible new music that I might not have found otherwise. I had an experience recently where I heard an album. He played one of the songs. We talked about it. I bought the vinyl at Barnes & Noble, which was fascinating because this is a very niche artist that I’m about to talk to you about that somehow, we were about to go to a movie, popped into Barnes & Noble. This record was there like a miracle.
John: Incredible.
Phil: Whoever is doing the buying at the Americana, kudos to you because it was among all the basic amazing records you’d imagine, and this. It’s a record by an artist called Petey USA. The album is called The Yips, which is a term from baseball about losing your ability to throw.
John: Petey USA
Phil: Petey. P-E-T-E-Y USA. I went home and put on the record. I had the experience that you every once in a while have, where you say, “This is one of my favorite records.”
John: Oh, it’s amazing.
Phil: I put it right on and played it again. I was like, “It’s still one of my favorite records.”
John: That’s incredible.
Phil: I highly recommend it. It’s not a baseball-themed record by any means. He loves baseball. That also touches my heart that he’s into it. Petey USA. His record is, I’m going to call it an instant classic, The Yips.
John: The Yips, a baseball term. Even I know that.
Phil: Exactly. John, there we go.
John: When we went to college, if we were DJing at the college station, our families would never hear this because it was only being broadcast at the college at two watts or whatever. You had to have a radio right next to the antenna to hear it. Now it streams, and so everyone can listen to it around the world. You get to listen to your son DJ all the time.
Phil: It’s pretty amazing because yes, it’s online, and you go, and lots of our friends listen, and his friends listen.
Drew: What hour block does he have?
Phil: He’s Fridays from 4:00 to 5:00, but it’s over for the year now because school’s done. Next fall, he’ll have a different slot, and I’ll come back on Scriptnotes to promote it.
John: I’d hype him up. My similar experience is with my daughter, who is studying film and TV at BU. One of her paid jobs is to film the athletic events that are there.
Phil: That’s a good job.
John: Back in our day, yes, maybe the football game would be taped or something, but now it’s all broadcast on ESPN+. She could text us five minutes men’s basketball, and we can see her directing games, or a lot of times she’s on the court holding a camera. That’s our daughter. Yes, that’s amazing. One nice thing about the internet is this stuff that was incredibly local and temporal, people can see everywhere.
Phil: Yes, it’s really cool.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Craig Good. If you want an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You can 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 and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.
Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You 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 on the famous documentary, The Dungeon Masters. Right on. Phil Hay, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Phil: Thank you, John. Literally anytime.
John: All right.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, so in addition to your work as a writer, you have a credit as executive producers?
Phil: Executive producers.
John: Executive producers of a film called The Dungeon Masters. Wikipedia describes it as thus, a 2008 documentary film about the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and its significance in the life of three dungeon masters, Scott Corum, Richard Meeks, and Elizabeth Reesman. Let’s listen to a clip.
Elizabeth Reesman: My name’s Elizabeth Reesman.
Richard Meeks: Richard Meeks.
Scott Corum: My name is Scott Corum, and I play Dungeons and Dragons.
Speakers: Dungeons and Dragons.
Richard Meeks: Within my campaign, if I don’t kill you by midnight, I haven’t done my job.
Elizabeth Reesman: There’s a very big difference in the balance of power between males and females. His kind are not welcome. You’re an elf. Rights? Men don’t have rights. Most dragons can speak common.
Richard Meeks What’s that?
Elizabeth Reesman: It’s the common language which I’m speaking now.
Richard Meeks: I’m rolling 14 dice. Oh, Jesus, this is going to be sick.
Scott Corum: I’m a little sensitive to toxic mold.
Elizabeth Reesman: Relationships for me are interesting. The best way I can put it is that I am a drama attractor.
Speaker 6: Also, next month, there is going to be a lifestyle assessment survey. Expect about an hour and a half.
John: All right, so that’s a little taste from the trailer for the movie. What is this thing? Tell me why it exists and how you got involved.
Phil: This exists really from the Herculean efforts of Kevin McAllister, the director, who is an old good friend of ours and an amazing documentarian. I started talking about Dungeons and Dragons because, as we experienced together, it’s one of my favorite things. Kevin had never played and was not even super aware of it, but was immediately fascinated by everything about it.
Matt and I and our friend Kel, and our other producing partners decided to try to do this, which we’d never made a documentary before. It’s completely different than anything we’d done. It takes really long. The biggest difference, it depends on the type of documentary. This kind of documentary, you don’t know what the story is going to be when you start making it. You just have to figure it out. The important thing was finding the people. Kevin took a trip to Gen Con and interviewed a ton of people, all of whom were fascinating.
John: We should say Gen Con is the big D&D convention in Geneva, Wisconsin.
Phil: It’s the big gathering every year, and found all these amazing people. The one thing we had going into it, and Kevin says sometimes with the documentary, you don’t know what’s going to happen, but you know what is happening. That starts creating ideas. When we really knew it was going to be a movie, we realized we wanted to make a movie about how, talking about themes, I guess, if you’re a creative person in the United States of America and elsewhere, I’m sure, and you make money at it, you’re seen as a success, and you’ve done it.
It doesn’t matter what that thing is that you’ve done, or does matter, but you did it. If you are an incredible storyteller, a brilliant person telling stories to your friends, making joy for your community, and you don’t make money at it, you’re seen as nothing. We were like, “That’s really wrong.” The idea of Dungeons & Dragons and what we hope to show in this movie is that the amount of creativity can be a life.
Everyone in the movie, and sadly, we lost Scott Corum recently, but all of them have their whole lives, and then they’ve got D&D offers very different outlets for each of them, too, and that’s part of the fun of the movie. It was the desire to make a movie about creativity, but not in maybe the traditional way that we see artists’ dock of creativity.
John: What’s fascinating, watching it, because it’s 20 years back in time, is that Dungeons & Dragons has become much more popular, much more mainstream.
Phil: Whole different thing.
John: What we see in this film, it’s not live action role-playing, but they’re dressing up in costumes as they’re playing. It’s not what we normally think about it. It’s a more rough-and-tumble. I don’t know, theatricality, it’s just different.
Phil: I think part of that might be that Kevin, it’s a film, so he’s attracted to the people who did dress up more and do more.
John: For credit visual.
Phil: Also, Richard Meeks’s game is a very traditional, the glimpses we get of it, if extraordinarily brutal version of Dungeons & Dragons.
John: It’s actually that [unintelligible 01:05:07] of horror’s aspect of, and now, tear up your sheets and go home.
Phil: Tear up your sheets and go home. You’re all dead. You get the glimpse, the traditional round-the-table friend’s game. Elizabeth’s game, she dresses up. Scott’s game, I think in his game, sometimes they maybe dress, sometimes they don’t. They’re more traditional, too. We also have some LARPing. They all do a little bit of each of it. Yes, it’s a different time. When I knew we were going to talk about it, I was thinking that the evolutions of Dungeons & Dragons and the popular culture now.
Now, shockingly it’s a cool thing to do. It’s incredible to me because people who grew up in our era would be like, “If you played Dungeons & Dragons, you were part of the secret club, and you couldn’t let the jocks find out.” My friend, Chris, who I played D&D with, had a term that he’d call the shame of the game. He’s like, it’s the shame that you feel knowing you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and they could find you at any time.
John: What’s fascinating about making a documentary and picking these three people to focus on is that you’re shining a spotlight on them and their lives. Of course, what’s fun and amusing about it is their normal lives versus what this is, and to what degree they are masters of the table when they’re DMing, they control the universe. In real life, they don’t control the universe.
Phil: Totally. That was something that I’m so glad Kevin was able to evoke so well. I know it was his intention, is to show that these are people who live very real American lives and have struggles and have triumphs and have this thing that gives them a community. Even though D&D is great. I think some people misinterpret a little bit. D&D is ridiculous. That’s what’s great about it.
John: It’s essentially improv.
Phil: It’s improv.
John: We say it’s a game, but it’s not a game you win. The terrible shooting at home implies that you’ve lost or you’ve failed, but it’s not really a winning or losing game. If you were to make a movie about ballroom dancing or something where you see their normal lives and their ballroom dancing, there’s a scoring to that. You can understand where people are at, but who’s ahead and who’s behind in Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t make sense.
Phil: The idea of being the dungeon master is one who is controlling the experience. You really are in control, and you have a lot of responsibilities, as we see in Richard’s group, which disintegrates because they disappoint him so greatly as a god. That’s part of it. Again, this is the creative outlet for some tremendously creative people who certainly aren’t offered that.
Scott wrote books and tried to get them out there, and did public television. He was constantly making things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people in the movie, I’d hope they could recognize that the D&D games that they ran might be the greatest act of creativity that they’ve had, and might have impacted people much more deeply than anything else.
John: It’s also the fact that it’s people trying to establish community who, in many cases, don’t have fantastic social skills otherwise. It’s a paradox of you’re playing a social game where you, in real life, are not necessarily so socially adept. That’s some of the comedy in there and the pathos in there.
Phil: I think it’s a haven for people who desire structure for social time, and it really is wonderful for that. I’ll also say the stereotype isn’t always true. We encounter so many D&D players who are robust, hard-living, crazy fun folk.
John: In our town, we have a bunch of very recognizable actors who are playing the game as well.
Phil: That’s true. Ringers.
John: Yes, it’s some ringers. I think what’s nice about it, and I’m so happy that it exists as a snapshot of a 2008 version of this, is because it’s so entirely true for what that is. If you look at it from a modern lens, it doesn’t match up to what it is now. D&D is weird because it attracts both theater kids and folks who love baseball stats.
Phil: Totally. There’s a number- crunching part of it that I’m really bad at, as you’ve witnessed in real life, John. Some people are into that. They’re really good at it, but other people, it’s like, “I want to play a weird character, and I want to roll these dice and roll these wonderful tetrahedrons that are–
John: There’s a collectible’s aspect. It touches on so many different areas of that.
Phil: Totally.
John: I went to the Ren Faire three weeks ago, and it’s not D&D, but there’s a lot of D&D-adjacent stuff there. They have dice. They have special gem dice, and there’s a lot of D&D stuff there, which makes sense.
Phil: It’s weirdly where you can see a nexus where there’s a door open for straight-up hippies, and a door open for metal kids, and a door open for prog rock dorks like me. The world of fantasy, I think it weirdly was like back in the ‘70s. Every band, like freaking Uriah Heep, was with the amazing dragon on the cover and everything. Then it got squashed a little, and now I think fantasy is coming back a little, and just an iconography. That’s cool that we’re in that zone.
John: The Dungeon Masters, you said that the invitation finally paid off. Do you know if The Dungeon Masters paid off?
Phil: I can’t imagine it paid off for the financier. Jeff Kusama-Hintewas the financier, who is a saint and a great producer. I don’t know, but perhaps I should do an audit.
John: Absolutely. Just dig in there and find out the hidden gold at the port of treasure.
Phil: We are owed $4.9 million personally. This is a miracle.
John: Thank you, Phil.
Phil: Thank you so much. It was fun.
Links:
- Phil Hay
- Scriptnotes Episode 244, Episode 377, and Episode 505
- The Dungeon Masters
- The Answering Machine Meltdown from Swingers
- John’s daily to-do template
- Pamela Ribon’s One Act documentary
- Petey USA’s The Yips
- KOXY College Radio
- 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
- Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Craig Good (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.