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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Craig Mazin is my name.

John: This is Episode 574 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what do you do when you just can’t crack a scene? We’ll discuss why some scenes are harder to write than others and what to do when you want to throw your laptop at the wall.

Craig: Throw it hard.

John: We’ll also answer listener questions on twists, scene headers, and getting elbowed out. Plus, can something be too meta, Craig?

Craig: No.

John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk with Megana about what she learned from her first time attending the Austin Film Festival.

Craig: Wait, that was not Megana’s first time.

John: That was.

Megana Rao: It was.

Craig: Whoa. You and Bo were both newbies. Fun. I had a great time at the Austin Film Festival.

John: You enjoyed attending all the panels and all the discussions and really lining up for all those things.

Craig: I had one good day.

John: You had one good day, and then you got really sick, Craig. Are you feeling better?

Craig: I am, yeah. I got sick. I thought I was hungover, but I was not hungover at all. I was sick for four or five days. I don’t know what was going on. It wasn’t COVID.

John: It was not COVID. It wasn’t RSV probably. It was just something you got.

Craig: I think it might’ve been a long, lingering stomach virus or something.

John: I got a text from Craig about 15 minutes before the live show for the Three Page Challenge, and Craig’s like, “I cannot leave my room.” Me and Megana did it well with Marc Velez, who was a great guest.

Craig: Great.

John: It ended up being a good show, but we missed you, Craig.

Craig: I’m sorry. It was one of those things where I’m like, “Get up. You know there’s stage health. If you just get out on stage, you’ll feel good.” I just was on my way from the bed to the door, I’m like, “Nope. Let’s turn around and get right back in bed.” I left the room for about 12 minutes on Saturday. It was just awful.

John: We saw you very briefly and dinner, and then you went back upstairs.

Craig: I couldn’t make it. I lasted five minutes.

John: You had this bottle of Gatorade. We decided that bottle of Gatorade is contaminated, so we wrapped it in a napkin and set it aside.

Craig: That’s nice. I made sure to test myself, just to make sure it wasn’t… It didn’t feel like COVID, because I’ve had COVID before. It was a stomach thing. Now I’m never going back, because you know what happens. If you throw up after you eat a particular thing, you can’t eat that thing anymore. I guess I can’t go to Austin anymore.

John: Now in Austin Film Festival. For all we know, we’ll never be invited back again. We’ll see what happens.

Craig: I’m okay with that.

John: You know who else is never going to be invited back?

Craig: Who.

John: The former executives from MoviePass. They were indicted by the Justice Department.

Craig: Were they? Were they? What for?

John: This’ll be for security frauds and three counts of wire fraud. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the article about this. I guess I’m a little surprised, because to me, I think MoviePass was a really bad idea in general. I wasn’t surprised that it failed. I guess I was surprised it was actually a criminally bad undertaking.

Craig: Once you start lying to people, I guess it becomes a problem. Of course, what gets you in trouble faster is lying to shareholders. Lying to customers, people are like, “Meh, business.” They definitely did falsely claim things. It seems like where they really screwed up was lying to their shareholders about the value of the business and how they were doing. That’s how they get you. They could’ve just asked us. We knew.

John: They could’ve asked us. They should’ve come to us for due diligence, said, “Is this a good idea?” We would’ve said no. We said no repeatedly on the air.

Craig: We said that there’s something terribly wrong with this, it makes no goddamn sense. As it turns out, it didn’t. By the way, could you come up with better businessmen names than these guys, Theodore Farnsworth and J. Mitchell Lowe. It’s like they’re from 1880.

John: I don’t want to say pushing back, but I feel like any time you’re starting a new venture and a new business, you are faking it until you make it. It’s a question of where does the line between faking it and actually fraud exist.

Craig: That’s why you have lawyers to tell you, “Oh, no, you can’t say that.”

John: That’s true.

Craig: There’s no question that they had lawyers working with them that they were like, “Oh, you don’t want to say that.” They were like, “Shut up, lawyers. We know better. We’re MoviePass. We came up with a brilliant idea to charge people $10 for something that’s going to cost us $80.” Stupid.

John: What if the MoviePass movie makes a hundred million dollars and wins Oscars?

Craig: It’s unlikely.

John: It’s unlikely.

Craig: It’s unlikely that it will.

John: It could happen.

Craig: By the way, it’s unlikely just because any movie making a hundred million dollars and winning Oscars is unlikely.

John: The MoviePass movie is more likely than my Van Halen movie that I pitched on the show. Basically, a couple episodes back, I said I really want to make a Van Halen movie. I want to put this out there in the world and see if the universe will say, “Yes, let’s make a Van Halen movie.”

Craig: And?

John: Thank you to everybody who wrote in with suggestions. People knew music execs and other folks. Through my agency, I was able to actually talk to the music execs involved, because ultimately, as we discussed on the show, when you’re doing a biopic, you don’t necessarily need the rights to all those people. I could just do it without all that stuff. Without the music rights, there’s not a Van Halen movie to make. There’s not a Van Halen movie to make, because David Lee Roth does not want a Van Halen movie to be made.

Craig: There you go. You know what? There’s nothing wrong with certainty, even if it’s bad news, if it’s certain bad news. It’s the bad news that’s almost bad news, but like, “Oh, if we just do this or that or write a letter or wait five years,” or blah blah blah-

John: Keep pushing that rock up that hill.

Craig: Exactly. It’s better to just be like, meh. Sometimes dead is better.

John: One thing that is not entirely dead is the Warner Bros. Television Workshop.

Craig: Segue Man. Yeah, that’s right.

John: It looks like they were closing down completely. It now looks like it’s going to be morphed into a new thing that’s part of a different arm. We asked for listeners who had experience with the program if they could write in and tell us about it. Megana, can you talk us through what we heard from these people?

Megana: Eli wrote in and said, “I can’t speak to all the programs, but getting into the writing fellowship has been very positive for my writing partner and me. The program led to two immediate benefits. The first was my mom stopped passive-aggressively telling me I should be a producer and started actual-aggressively telling others I write for HBO. The second immediate benefit was that the industry’s perspective of my writing partner and me changed. We’re showrunner assistants, and that’s all people saw when they met us. Getting into the program gave us a stamp of approval that allowed people to view us as actual writers. When my boss found out that only 21 of the 3,000-plus applicants got in, he stopped making me get his dry cleaning, so that was nice.

“The program itself consisted of weekly Zoom workshops/masterclasses with executives and writers. We developed a pilot with the program executives, which allowed us to experience the notes process for the first time. Also, we were paired up with some amazing mentors, and we got to work with and learn from all the other talented writers in our cohort.”

Craig: That sounds great.

John: That does sound great.

Craig: I really like the point that this really comes down to a stamp of approval. While that is a turn of a phrase, it’s almost literally the truth that there is this weird imprimatur that has to happen where you’re like, “Okay, I’m in this bucket or I’m in this bucket.” If all programs like this do is shift people from one bucket to the other and makes it easier for them to be seen as writers, then it’s worth it, because it is fairly arbitrary how some of that stuff works sometimes.

John: I think the thing I hope we see happening with this new revamped program at Warner Bros, and also Universal’s programs and other places, is that having a structure behind it is so important and so crucial, because people can go to film school. We had other people write in like, “I went to film school. I was a page. I did other stuff. It wasn’t until I got into this program that I actually had a structure that talked me through like, this is what I’m writing, this is the feedback I’m getting from actual executives who would be working on this, from actual showrunners, and got me that first position on a job.”

That structure is really crucial. It feels like the people who are running this program at Warner were really good at that structure. I just want to make sure that whatever we do to replace this isn’t just like a, “Hey, we’re going to try to hire some more diverse writers.” No, you actually have to have a plan for how you’re going to get them set up for success in those rooms.

Craig: This will always be part of the charity wing of these massive, multinational conglomerates. Their budget for private jet travel for their CEOs and so forth is going to outstrip how much they spend on this by I assume logarithmic amounts. That’s reality. We can bemoan that, or we can protect at least what we have, because we saw how quickly… To me, this is the equivalent of Congress debating whether or not they should keep funding NPR or something, which they actually don’t. It’s just pointless. The budget is a trillion dollars, and they’re picking on 75 million. This is a similar thing.

I hope that everybody watched what happened here and learned the lesson. In a very simple way, what happened was the company made a lot of changes and then people went, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you shouldn’t have touched that.” Everybody correctly yelled at them, and they went, “Oh, sorry, no, we didn’t mean to touch that,” even though they did. I’m glad that they didn’t. They’ve got to commit resources. They can’t just keep it limited to just a little bit of a charity organization.

John: Agreed. Some more follow-up. We were pretty negative on how much progress we really thought had been made on battling copaganda. Some listeners wrote in with suggestions for shows that they felt were doing a good job showing the other side of things. Some of those were Bloodlands in the UK, Beyond the Night, Alaska Daily on ABC, 61st Street on AMC.

A guy named John wrote in saying, “As a film professional in Chicago, let me tell you, avoiding copaganda shows while making a living takes full-time vigilance. Protest requires sacrifice, and per usual, most people take the paycheck, but not all of us, and we are out here.” Talking about the decision whether to write on that show, whether to work on that show can still be an individual choice.

Craig: I guess that’s a positive thing. Look, any working person, let’s call part of the below-the-line cadre of crew folk, they deserve to make a living.

John: Craig, you and I both admitted to the fact that we don’t watch a lot of these shows, but we had a listener write in who does watch a lot of these shows. Megana, can you talk us through Complicit here?

Megana: Complicit said, “As someone who doesn’t write copaganda but who watches a lot of us, I wanted to gently push back that no progress has been made in copaganda since George Floyd. These shows actually have had a large increase in message episodes that talk about police misconduct, police brutality, gun control, and even other progressive issues like abortion. As I watch them, I can’t help but imagine the writers who have advocated for these episodes to be included, as I don’t believe it is in their economic interest to write these themes. These shows have almost completely abandoned a ton of the good cop who plays dirty tropes they used to embrace. There’s also no longer an acceptance that sometimes the heroes may need to rough suspects up to get the truth, which was sadly extremely prevalent just five years ago.

“I understand that this isn’t really the point and the infallibility of the shows’ heroes furthers copaganda even when they are investigating bad cops in the context of the show, but in terms of the progress that can be made, I want to recognize the people who are pushing for these storylines, as I feel like it is the only reasonable hope for progress that we have. It’s a big ship to turn, so I appreciate the people leading on the rudder, or maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better.”

Craig: No, I don’t think you’re trying to make yourself feel better. I think it’s important to note these things. I don’t think that we felt no progress had been made. It’s good to hear what you’re saying is out there. That’s a positive thing. I guess that it wouldn’t have been really surprising if things hadn’t changed at all, because the complexity of the writers’ rooms have changed, I would imagine quite a bit.

John: Some more follow-up on virtual rooms. Andre wrote in, “I was just getting caught up. I was listening to Episode 557 where you guys were talking about virtual rooms versus in-person rooms. I had a question about how to go about letting them know that you would prefer a virtual room. For me, I have a handicapped daughter and would refer a virtual room because I like to be with her as much as possible, because she requires a lot of attention. I know you guys have been going on about disabilities and that stuff.”

Craig: I like “going on about.”

John: We’re going on about disabilities and that stuff.

Craig: “You guys are just going on about these disabilities.”

John: Craig, off-mic and over beers, I have conversations with a lot of showrunners. This is about the Austin Film Festival. I was asking them, “What’s happening with your rooms? Are you back in person? Are you going virtual? Is it a hybrid?” What have you been hearing?

Craig: Both. I’ve been hearing hybrid. I think it’s more common now that the rooms are in person again, but with exceptions made for people who want to dial in virtually. The infrastructure is there. It’s easy enough to have some people on the big screen on the wall and everybody else sitting around the table. That’s what I’ve basically been hearing. For Andre here, it sounds like the way you would go about letting them know you prefer a virtual room is by saying, “Hey, I’d prefer a virtual room. There’s this situation with my daughter. I’d like to be here. Here’s why.” I would be blown away if a showrunner was like, “Oh, no, sorry.”

John: Like, “Andre, we think you’re the perfect writer, but no, we won’t accommodate that.”

Craig: “No, sorry.”

John: One model I did hear discussed at the Austin Film Festival was someone was setting up a room that I think they were in person Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then virtual Fridays and Saturdays. She had some writers who did not live in Los Angeles, who were flying in to be there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then gone the other days.

Craig: That works. It really comes down to the nature of the room and who you have in there. If it’s very small, then I would think keeping it… This is just my preference would be to want to be in a physical space with people. It is easier for me, maybe just because I’m old.

John: Could be. We have one last bit of follow-up. Someone asked about act breaks and whether act breaks are going to be coming back into shows now that streaming shows are going to have ads. This thing is actually pretty long, so I think we’ll put it up as a blog post if we can. To summarize, this guy Mike wrote in and said that he was working on a show for one streamer which had act breaks but then it decided it was going to premier internationally on another streamer which did not have ad breaks.

Craig: Oh, boy.

John: He was in the editing process of this. They put in commercial black, basically a place for where the commercials go. The second streamer got the show and said, “Oh, no, we don’t have act breaks, so you need to take all those things out. Take out those black spaces.” Of course, it’s not just the black spaces. You have music that ramps into the commercial and then out of the commercial. This whole thing is set up to have those things there. It became a whole fight over the holidays over what was going to happen with this.

Craig: I’m in the thick of all this right now for The Last of Us, because as we’re approaching our broadcast date, which has been announced to be January 15th, we now have to make sure that we have all of our deliverables hitting their dates. So much of it comes down to what Mike refers to as localization. That’s the word for it. Everyone around the world needs time to take the show and subtitle it and prepare it for also, in the case of HBO, a lot of different delivery systems.

It’s much easier for a single delivery platform like Netflix, because everybody gets Netflix the same way around the world. They log into Netflix and they watch the Netflix. HBO’s not the same. HBO is on cable, it’s on satellite, and it’s also on HBO Max, so you have to prepare all of these things. All of these little ticky-tacky bits and bobs need to be figured out, how long is the space between the end of the main credits and the beginning of the show and so on and so forth.

One of the things you get into is, when you’re putting a show together, or a movie, when you lock picture, that’s your time, and then all the mixing, all the sound is laid on top of that. If you change the time, you have to go and do quite a bit of work to just get the sound mix back together to match this new time. Also, if you’re moving things like black spaces in and out, you have to redo all the color timing. It’s a whole mess. This will be an ongoing problem.

Megana: Can I ask a question?

Craig: Yeah.

Megana: Would it make sense then to just, by default, include act breaks all the time?

Craig: No, because if you include act breaks… This is exactly what happened to Mike. The show had act breaks. It came out of Hulu. He had to then remove the act breaks, because they were sending it over to Disney Plus, that doesn’t have commercials. Basically, the commercial black is the hole where the ad goes. You send it to the broadcaster with these holes in it, and then they drop ads into the holes. Removing the holes is work. It’s work to re-conform the mix and the color timing and the cut and the music around the fact that there are now not these holes in it. The answer is don’t change it. That’s the only real way to get through this with any kind of efficiency, but no such luck.

John: Re-asking Megana’s question in a different way, if you think your show is likely going to end up having ad breaks in it, from a creative standpoint it may make sense to think about where those ad breaks are going to be and build for them, because otherwise it’s going to be jammed in randomly.

Craig: Writing-wise, yes, but production-wise, no. There’s no way to anticipate it. Basically, you are going to produce your show to either have or not have commercial breaks. It is a binary choice. The problem is that in certain situations we find ourselves living in a nonbinary world when it comes to commercials. It is impossible to have something be flexible enough to have both ads and not ads. You need to make two versions, which is money. It’s just money and time. It’s complicated. It’s annoying.

John: For instance, I very much enjoy the show Reboot on Hulu. Because we pay for Hulu, we don’t get ads, but you can definitely tell where the ads go in the Hulu version. It’s fine. You don’t need to stress out about it. You have basically the commercial blacks. We see it goes to that and then it comes back out. It’s great. If you were to try to strip those out, it would be chaos. We’re talking about for music, but also for all the internationalizations, for all the subtitles. Those have to link to specific moments of time code. You change the time code, you’re breaking subtitles.

Craig: This is why for a guy like Mike, who’s a post-producer, he’s the person who’s shouldering this burden with his team that are doing all the technical work. It would be nice if they just picked one. HBO is tricky, because we don’t have that Netflix delivery system. We have to deliver things earlier than they do I think at Netflix, just so that they have time to get ready. What I don’t have to worry about is whether or not there are going to be ads. HBO does not air with ads.

John: That said, your show will have ads in some markets down the road. It will. We know that. We know that from Chernobyl.

Craig: That’s what happens. At that point, I don’t even care.

John: Let’s get to our marquee topic here. This actually comes from a blog post I wrote a gazillion years ago back in 2008, where I talk through why some scenes are harder to write or really how writing this one scene was so unexpectedly difficult. It took me six hours to get through what didn’t seem on the surface to be a very complicated scene. I went through all the agonies of wondering whether this needed to be two scenes rather than one scene, were they starting at the right place, could a different character drive the scene. Ultimately, it came down to, no, I actually needed to work really, really hard to get the one scene to work, and it ended up being a good scene. I thought we’d talk for a little bit about why some scenes are much trickier to write than others and what we do when those scenes come upon us.

Craig: I definitely have had scenes that I knew were the right scene. I knew that it was supposed to be here and accomplish the following things. What was so challenging was making the scene feel original, because the nature of the scene might’ve been, “There’s 500 cliché ways to do this, and I don’t want to do any of those, so now what do I do?” Also, sometimes scenes where people deliver speeches are really hard, because there’s a fine line between a good speech and crap. It’s a really fine line. The scene in Chernobyl where Stellan Skarsgård gives this kind of speech to the potential divers, trying to get them to go dive under the reactor. Oh my god, I spent so much time on that speech just to make it what I thought would be interesting and speech but not speech.

John: Craig, if you’d spent a little bit more time, would it have actually been good? I’m sorry, I never do that, but you set me up so perfectly for it.

Craig: I don’t think so. Basically, it was the best I could do but not.

John: I bring this up because it comes down to the fact that underlying this whole conversation is really about taste and recognizing this is a good scene, this is not a good scene. If you don’t care, there really are no difficult scenes, because it’s just like that. If you’re fine with crap, it’s not a problem. The challenge comes when you know what the quality level needs to be, and you still can’t get that scene to happen the ways you need to do it. Your Chernobyl example, that was in your first draft. You’re just trying to figure out how to get the scene to work on the page the first time.

I was trying to listen through some of the issues that come up, like why sometimes those scenes are big challenges here. I’ll list them through. Sometimes it’s a major shift in the story. If it’s a crucial reveal, if it’s a highly emotional moment, if the scene has really complicated geography, choreography, or simultaneity, things have to happen in the same moment, when you need to set something new up, sometimes these things are hard, because the story overall, the movie wants the scene to be short, but the scene itself wants to be long. It wants to take its time. Sometimes you just have to accomplish a lot within a scene. The needs of tone make it difficult to do the story points you needed. You need the scene to be funny, and yet it’s actually material you need to cover, and it’s just not funny, or vice versa, this has to be a big, serious thing, and yet it doesn’t feel like it wants to be that. Sometimes, obviously we talk about this a lot on the show, the issue is you’re locked in by the scene that happens before it and the scene that happens after it, and you have to connect those two things. It’s just really tough. Those are some of the things I’m encountering on a first draft when I hit a scene that is really blocking me.

Craig: I think because I’m such a planner, it’s rare for me to struggle with how to connect two scenes, because I’ve already thought that through. I did the hard work on that one a little bit earlier. I wasted my six hours earlier on that. You mentioned emotional scenes. Emotional scenes are like a car with bad alignment. They keep wanting to pull towards melodrama. It’s so tempting to just write somebody, parentheses, sobbing, “How could you do this to me? You meant everything to me.” Then you get there, and it’s just a soap opera. Figuring out to do those things in a way that is honest…

I always think about Spielberg as somebody who aims for honest emotion, true emotion, but doesn’t shy away from entertaining you while it’s happening, because there’s the mumblecore version of everything, which to me is the greatest capitulation of all. That’s just like, oh, rather than expose myself and potentially be laughed at, I will just simply have everybody feel everything at a 0.5, and therefore I’m cool. I would argue, sometimes, and sometimes it’s just cold and I don’t care and I’m bored. Trying to find that middle ground where you are both entertaining and showing restraint, this is hard stuff to do. I find it hard. Spending six hours, by the way, on a scene, I do that all the time. All the time. That’s not even that long to me.

John: If you think about it, 6 hours on a scene, most movies are about 100 scenes long, so 600 hours to write a script. That’s a lot. That’s 12 weeks to do that. It’s not impossible.

Craig: I don’t know. If there’s 100 scenes, not all of them are going to be 6-hour scenes.

John: They can’t be.

Craig: No. A whole bunch of them are going to be not that at all. Within a 60-page hour-long drama, so I’ll make it a little bit shorter for purposes of the argument, maybe there’s 3 scenes that are going to be what we’ll call 6-hour scenes. It’s no big deal. I really only write a scene a day basically, or what I consider three pages a day. 20 days to write a script is not that bad. It’s four weeks, or if it’s a movie it’s roughly eight weeks. That works.

John: The question I have for you, and I’m asking myself this, is can I always anticipate which are going to be the difficult scenes to write. You are a big outliner. From your outline, do you have a sense of which scenes are going to be the tricky ones to write, or are you surprised in the process?

Craig: I have a terrible sense. All my predictions are wrong. I’m like, “This is going to be hard.” Then I get there, it’s not hard, it’s just a lot. Then there are other things where I’m like, “I know exactly what that scene is. That’s going to be a joy to write.” Then I get there, I’m like, “Oh, no, this is not a joy to write at all.” My guesses are useless, and so I’ve stopped trying to guess. On the day, I discover is this going to be one of those days or not.

John: In Big Fish, I think I did know from the start, these are going to be really challenging, difficult scenes to write, because they’re emotional. They’re really tough to get just right. The first 10 pages of Big Fish were so challenging, because I had to set up so many different things. I knew this would be a situation where I was going to work for weeks just to get those 10 pages to work properly, which is great.

I would say going back to action movies that I’ve worked on, you think, “Oh, that should be pretty straightforward.” Then you realize the amount of simultaneity or the amount of different things that all have to happen at the same time. Charlie’s Angels are some of the hardest movies for me to write, because those scenes have to be entertaining and action-filled, but also move one of the three Angels’ storylines ahead. Those are really tough. When a scene has so many demands on it that has to do with a bunch of things, that’s where it becomes a puzzle, where I know this has to work within the framework of this scene, and yet it’s just really tough to get all those pieces to click together.

Craig: The action stuff generally, because again, I know the challenges you’re talking about, I try to address those in the outline phase, so that when I get to the action sequence, it’s just annoying, because it’s so many goddamn words, but I get through it.

The harder part for me, I think you put your finger on the first 10 pages, certainly in a movie. I will spend as much time on the first 10 pages as I do on the first 30 pages or 40, because the first 10, it’s everything. We’ve talked about this before. That’s the zygote. It’s worth spending time on those. If you can make the first 10 beautiful, the rest of the way should be much, much easier.

John: As long as you get the ship moving in the right direction, you’ll hopefully get to some good places. It’s just so often, those first 10 pages are required to do so much, and you feel like, “I have to set up this thing to get to that thing.” It’s remembering [inaudible 00:27:57] that you are both the writer who knows where this is going and the reader who has no idea where it’s going. That’s the tricky balance there.

Let’s talk about why scenes sometimes can be hard because of the rewrite. We’ve just been talking about the first draft and the obstacles there. Sometimes in the rewrite, you get those six-hour scenes where it’s like, “Jesus.” Those are situations where I’m now asked to compress two or three or more scenes down into one scene. I basically have to cover the story points that multiple scenes used to do, down to one thing. So tough.

There could be a shift in focus. There could be a shift in what I’m trying to emphasize at that moment. There could be a scene that was a major link, and that scene is no longer there, so I’m having to do the work of that, or I need to link it from one idea to actually a different place that the scene has a different job than it did before. It’s the same people in the same place, but the actual purpose of the scene is so different. The energy from the previous draft doesn’t actually make sense for where I was. Then of course, there’s the bigger things like different actors, different production things, different realities of what you had planned versus who you have now.

Craig: I try and solve a lot of the problems ahead of time. What I need to figure out and I can’t solve ahead of time, what I need to figure out on the day is shape. Shape is the trickiest thing. I know what’s supposed to happen. I know why. I now how everyone starts in the scene. I know how they end. I know what the plot points are. I know all the facts. I know what I must achieve. Now, achieving that with shape so that the scene feels like it has places to go and reversals and an interesting flow with some surprises, and then balancing out what is said and what is unsaid, how much can I say without talking, all these things, that execution stuff is where I find myself really tweaking tiny little screws and bolts to make it feel seamless and gorgeous. Sometimes you just know you’re going to be there for a while, and that’s okay.

John: Sometimes you have some stuff down on the page. You’re like, “If I move this around, I start at a different place… ” Sometimes it is just like, “I have to wipe that clean and just find a different way into this moment, a different way through this moment, because it’s not the words and who says what. It’s like, “This is the wrong way for me to get this.”

It could be that I approach the scene thinking I’m going to ask the question. Maybe I need to actually answer the question at the head of the scene and deal with the ramifications of that. You come in with the answer rather than answering the question, or the reverse, where I thought this would be the person who has the answer. No, they’re actually answering the question and exploring in the moment. I thought it was this energy level, and that’s actually not going to get the characters where they need to go. I need to change the energy level to a different thing. I need to set the tone higher. That’s a real tricky thing.

As a writer, I’m always imagining myself in the space with the characters, watching what they’re doing and seeing stuff. Sometimes I have to scratch that. It’s just like, “Okay, now let’s build a new space. Let’s build a new approach to how to get this and wind it up and see what the characters want to do and how they want to make the scene happen.”

Craig: The most important thing that you’re demonstrating is a sense that something’s wrong. To me, we should all be like the Princess and the Pea. The tiniest thing should cause us the most distress. That’s how you make it better. When I’m working on a scene, and it’s not right, and I don’t know why it’s not right, I feel terrible. I feel like I’m dying. That is important to listen to. You need that sense. You need the sense that something’s wrong. I think so many people write with this sense that they’re doing something correctly, and they just accentuate the positive, which sounds healthy, except they’re missing so many things. Really being attuned to something being not good enough, not correct, not delightful, it’s essential.

John: My daughter the last couple years has really gotten into indoor bouldering. She goes climbing all the time. When you’re working on a climbing wall, you call that a problem. Basically, you are trying to climb the wall and figure out how do I get to the top. It can be really hard. One of the things I loved in watching her is how you tackle and solve problems. “I got to this part. I got to this part. I cannot get to this next thing.” You’ll fall or drop. Then you’ll sit back, and you’ll look at the wall again and figure out, “Okay, that didn’t work. What could I do differently? What if I put my foot there rather than there? What if I try to make this reach?”

Sometimes other people will watch you do it and get suggestions. Sometimes it is an issue of you are trying to do it wrong. Other times, the answer is you just gotta do it perfectly. You actually have to make that jump and grab. It’s just like your hand wasn’t strong enough to do it. You try it the fifth time, you suddenly can make that hand hold and you can get up it.

That sometimes is writing scenes for me. Sometimes I’m just trying to do it wrong, and I have to start over. Other times, I just have to keep pushing forward. Finally, I’ll find that word, that one line of dialog that will actually make the scene work, and then I can keep climbing higher. You just don’t know from the start what kind of solution it’s going to be. Regardless, I think one of the things we can take comfort in is that, no matter what, most readers will have no idea how difficult those scenes were.

Craig: Nor should they. Not their problem.

John: Not their problem, but we do have listeners with problems.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: It’s time for some listener questions. Megana, can you help us out?

Megana: Yes. Andrew wrote in and he said, “I’m curious if there’s something that can be too meta. Apparently, Hallmark has a Christmas movie coming out about a small town where a production company is producing a Christmas movie. The premise is that a small-town woman falls in love with the star of the movie, who’s known as the King of Christmas. The movie’s called Lights, Camera, Christmas. Have we reached peak meta? Is there such a thing?”

John: Andrew, there’s no such thing as too meta. I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s a great idea.

Craig: That sounds actually like regular meta. It’s not even that meta. It really isn’t. It’s one level of meta. I think it’s fine. What’s wrong with that?

John: There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a Simpsons episode that is basically the same plot, but of course it’s better that it’s a Hallmark movie that’s making fun of Hallmark movies.

Craig: Simpsons did it.

John: Simpsons did it. Simpsons always did it. We endorse the meta here on the Scriptnotes podcast.

Craig: We do. We love a meta.

John: Oh, I see we have a listener from the UK. Craig lovers a listener from the UK.

Craig: I do.

John: We have audio for this one. We will listen to Beavis’s question read aloud in his own natural accent.

Bevis: Hey, Megana, John, and Craig. I have recently completed the first draft of my first screenplay. It contains two plot twists, one that you probably see coming, and the second that I hope is less obvious. To date, I have only shared the draft with friends and family, and so I have not had to describe or sell it to them first. I would like to pursue opportunities to ask others to read it, but I am not sure how much to reveal to any potential readers. Explaining the twists in advance would help articulate the plot and overall sense and tone of the script but might compromise the reader’s ability to objectively assess how effective the twists are. I may of course be rudely underestimating the capacity of professional readers and writers to make this kind of objective assessment.

I would be grateful if you could offer any advice on how to handle this in the following scenarios: in a log line or outline summarizing the script, in an informal conversation or an email exchange with the potential reader, in a formal treatment document.

I am based in the UK, so I would just like to say to ’90s cockney Craig, all right, mate, thanks for doing this. You’re a top geezer. [inaudible 00:35:56]. You and your podcast are fantastic. Thank you, Beavis Sydney.

Craig: Thanks, Beavis.

John: Craig, what do you think? You will have the twist in your story. In what scenarios do you reveal the twist or not reveal the twist?

Craig: There are zero scenarios where I reveal the twist. It’s a twist. Either it works as a twist or it doesn’t. You can certainly say, “Hey, look, you may be reading this and wondering WTF. There is a twist.” You could say that if you felt the need to. Even saying that does rob the twist of some power. I’m not sure there’s a world where you write an M. Night Shyamalan type of movie and give it to someone and you go, “By the way, the thing is that this village actually isn’t like in the 1800s. It’s in modern day. They’re just sealed off. That’s the whole thing. That’s how it ends.” That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

John: I would agree with you that if you’re talking with somebody about a project, revealing the twist in that is generally not useful unless it’s a longer conversation, and you’re really going through the whole story. In some of the written samples here, Beavis has a formal treatment document. Yeah, in that you’d have to reveal the twist, because that’s a crucial part of what’s happening there, particularly if it’s not even an end twist, like a Shyamalan twist, but a midpoint twist where everything changes like a Gone Girl. Yeah, you would have to reveal the twist in that. If you were doing an elevator pitch on Gone Girl where there’s a big mid-story twist, I don’t think you would reveal that there.

Craig: They’re twists. Keep them twisty.

John: Don’t twist it.

Craig: Keep the twists twisty. Thanks.

John: Megana, help us out with Elbowed Out.

Megana: Elbowed Out asks, “I’ve been developing a project with a production company for the last two years. It’s a true crime story, and we have the life rights of the people involved in this scandal, and the quintessential book rights. I created this project, wrote a spec pilot, the pitch deck, series treatment, but the production company, as well as the producers attached, have told me I’m not big enough to tackle a show like this. I totally understood, and we started looking for showrunners. We landed on two talented industry vets as our showrunners. When asking them if they’ll be doing writers’ room, they said, ‘No, we’re going to tackle this ourselves, because there’s too much research to catch everyone else up.’

“I’m 25 years old, and I’ll be the executive producer of the series, which is pretty nuts to me, but I also wanted to be a writer on this. I already know everything about this case, and I want to help creatively in any way I can. I’ll take notes and get them coffees if I need to. I just don’t know how to give this up and let them take over.

Also, speaking for the future, this was supposed to be a launching pad for my career, but it seems I won’t get the attention I initially thought I would. How do I nicely get involved creatively or push myself forward in this madness? Because I’m slowly being cast to the sidelines.”

John: I want to start with the good news. Hey, you’re 25 years old, you got a series set up with good people, and this could actually happen. That’s great. Don’t shit on yourself for things that may not happen, because good stuff is already happening for you.

Craig: There is good stuff happening, but there are some warning signs. There are a few red flags here that concern me, and not concerned in the way I normally am, which is, “Oh my god, Elbowed Out, you’re being abused.” I’m more concerned that a number of people have all agreed that you’re not ready to be writing on this, which makes me wonder if you might not be ready to be writing on this, which is fine. When people say you’re not big enough to tackle a show like this, if they love the writing, I think they might think otherwise. The showrunners similarly I think would think otherwise.

What I think is fair to say is this. It is fair to say to the showrunners, “Look, I get it. It seems like from what people are reading, I am not necessarily at the level you are looking for, for this work.” Honesty will take you so far, Elbowed Out. You can’t even imagine. You can continue that honesty and say, “I really want to get better. The way to get better is to work professionally and in a room. If I can’t be in a room with you guys, is there a world where maybe you let me write a draft? If you hate it, just rewrite the whole damn thing. You’re going to do that anyway. Is there some kind of participation I can do here, with full honesty that I understand what’s going on?” Then people may be like, “Look, we get it. You know what? You’ve earned a break here, so let’s throw you a bone.” I think that’s probably the best you can hope for. Full honesty is going to be the best policy for you.

John: I vouch for Craig’s full honesty within this room, with these people, with these producers. Then I think there’s another level of how you present this out to the world. You should be getting an agent and a manager off the fact that you have a series set up as a 25-year-old. People should want to represent you.

I think as you go out to the town with these representatives and they talk about, “Oh my gosh, it’s so amazing that you have a show set up,” your reps can be a little bit more aggressive in promoting what a wunderkind you are for getting this thing happening and getting you out there and getting people to read your stuff, which is hopefully good, because even if you don’t have the opportunity to do everything you could do on this one series that you got set up, you should hopefully be in a good place to have great meetings and hopefully get good jobs on other projects out there. I think there’s space for both real honesty within the showrunners and a little bit more expressive hyping of you because of what you’ve been able to do.

Craig: Definitely, there’s good hype opportunity here, certainly hype opportunity as a person that finds material and gets it set up places. If you want hype material for the writing, the writing has to be there. That’s part of the deal.

John: He says that he wrote a spec pilot. Maybe that spec pilot’s really good and it got him places.

Craig: I gotta be honest, just based on what I’m… It’s a rare thing for somebody to write a spec pilot that’s really good and then for everybody to be like, “No, thank you.”

John: I agree with you. More often, if this pilot was really good, and they were concerned about his ability to run the show-

Craig: They’d pair him with someone.

John: … they’d partner him up with somebody to actually keep going after that.

Craig: Co-showrunners, exactly, or at least you would be in a room or be part of that process.

John: Cool. Let’s take our last question from Juliana here.

Megana: Juliana asked, “When your character is moving from one room to another, do you ever end the previous scene with wording that leads directly into the slug line, or would one address the location change and then reconfirm in slug line? For example, ‘She takes her wine and heads into the INTERIOR KITCHEN NIGHT,’ or, ‘She takes her wine and heads into the kitchen, INTERIOR KITCHEN NIGHT.’ It feels more continuous shot the first way, but also more confusing to read. Is there a better way to direct this type of continuous movement on the page?”

John: Craig, I find myself doing both of these things. I do it both ways. Sometimes I do wonder, because people don’t read slug lines, whether it will actually track and make sense, and yet on the page, you can make it work. What do you do?

Craig: It depends. Juliana, here’s the good news. It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. I will often say things like, “She takes her wine and heads into the,” and then usually I’ll put a colon if it’s heading into the slug line. It’s for no reason. I just like that. That’s perfectly fine.

“She takes her wine and heads into the kitchen, INTERIOR KITCHEN NIGHT,” feels a little bit like time cut almost in that sense, like you’re starting a new… It’s an hour later and her wine is empty. If there were a time cut involved, and I was going to show that by showing, oh my god, the whole wine bottle’s empty now, or there’s now three open wine bottles, then yes, I would say, “She takes her wine and heads into the kitchen.” Period. Next, “INTERIOR KITCHEN, LATER,” is probably what I would write. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating a… If you want them to feel a natural flow from room to room, I think using the wording that leads into it makes total sense.

John: Agreed. I would probably be more aggressive, “She takes her wine and heads – INTO KITCHEN NIGHT,” because you then read INTO KITCHEN NIGHT as into the kitchen night, and flowing through. The question is sometimes that dash, I will then match with a dash on the other side of the scene header, if it’s a natural flow. Then I’m not even really acknowledging the scene header. I’m just saying it’s a continuous action that brought me to a new scene. You’re thinking the right thoughts here, Juliana. It’s basically how do you make this feel right on the page, make it feel like it is one continuous action, versus starting and stopping a brand new scene.

Craig: It’s all about your intention. How fluid do you want this to feel? If you want it to feel fluid, if you want the audience to experience this as somebody breezing from room to room, then this would be the way to do it. If you don’t, then don’t.

John: Great. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things. Want to start us off?

Craig: Sure. I have two One Cool Things this week, which you know me, I’m making up for past crimes. The first one is calling The Past Within. I think I mentioned this earlier when I was doing the other cooperative puzzle-solving game. This is by the folks at Rusty Lake, who make all these wonderfully surreal, effed up little puzzle games. They’re all fantastic. Definitely check out the Rusty Lake games if you haven’t already. They have their own weird mythology that I can’t quite make sense of. It involves some people who are owl people and crow people and also shrimp, matches, and other strange light motifs.

The Past Within is their first game that is a required cooperative game, meaning two people are playing it on separate devices. One person sees one part of it, and the other one sees the other part. They have to cooperate back and forth to solve it. I did it with Melissa and we had a great time. It’s pretty short. The point is definitely check out The Past Within. It’s great to play with… An older kid can do this, a teenager, no problem. Also great to do with a spouse. It goes by real fast. It’s two chapters, so it’s pretty simple.

My second One Cool Thing is The Fabelmans, which has not come out yet. This is the new movie from Steven Spielberg. It is essentially the story of his coming of age. I was asked to interview him and Tony Kushner, his fellow screenwriter and producer on the film, for the Writers Guild Theater showing. In order to ask the questions, I said, “Hey, I need to see the movie first,” and I loved it. I just loved it.

John: That’s great.

Craig: The log line, I’d be like, “I don’t know. It’s a movie of his own life. It’s a movie about movies, and I generally don’t like that trend.” It’s gorgeous. Beautiful performances all around from everybody. A fantastic screenplay from Steven and Tony. Tony Kushner is… He’s Tony Kushner.

John: [inaudible 00:46:55].

Craig: Angels in America and so many other things. Just a brilliant man. They made something absolutely beautiful, that is not really about the power of cinema at all. It’s about something else that’s I think far more profound and oddly sad, sad and beautiful at the same time. When that movie comes out, which is pretty soon, I think, maybe has already come out by the time this airs, definitely check out The Fabelmans. This up-and-comer Steven Spielberg did a great job.

John: That’s great. My One Cool Thing is a sad One Cool Thing. Doug McGrath, who is a fantastic writer and director and actor, a Princeton grad-

Craig: That’s right.

John: … died this past week, had a heart attack. I really regret we never had him on the show, because he was an absolute delight of a guest and a raconteur. His credits include Emma, Infamous, Born Yesterday, Saturday Night Life, but I mostly knew him through the Sundance Labs. He was just a fantastic mentor and advisor to everyone who came into that Labs, but also to me, because he was always just such a personification of kindness and grace and wit and was just a phenomenal guy.

I’m going to put a clip in here. He was accepting an award from the Austin Film Society in 2012. He was telling a story I’d heard him tell in person about showing his movie Emma at the White House. Bill Clinton is there. I’m excising the part where Bill Clinton eats two giant bags of popcorn and drinks a soda, just to start with Bill Clinton and his reaction to Emma, which I think will fell very familiar to a lot of us.

Doug McGrath: The weird thing about watching a film at the White House with a president in the front row is that nobody watches the movie. They just watch the president watching the movie. Now, Emma is one of the great comic novels in English literature. There’s a lot of very funny things that happen in it. They’re not listening to it. They’re just watching President Clinton. If there was a joke and he laughed, about a half a second later, everybody would laugh. If there was a joke and he didn’t laugh, it was like you were at a child’s funeral. It was the saddest quiet room that you’ve ever been in. I’m like, “Hey dude, chuckle it up. They’re all looking at you.”

About three minutes into the movie, but not four, just three, three at the latest, I noticed, because I’d seen the movie a lot, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to it, I was trying to watch him peripherally out of the side of my eyes, I noticed there was a lurching motion. He lurched toward me, lurched forward, and then pitched back and dropped his head on the back of his chair and went to sleep. I’m telling you a dead sleep. Russian troops could’ve come into Washington and they would not have disturbed him. Lincoln saw more of that play at Ford’s Theater than President Clinton saw of my movie. In a deep sleep.

I thought, “Look, I’m not going to hold it against him. He’s the leader of the free world. God knows what he’s been doing all day. I’m sure it had been a draining experience for him. The guy was tired. I can’t blame him. It’s not like I had an action film to show him. Our idea of an action sequence in Emma, it’s Emma poured hot tea. I just thought, “Give him a break.”

20 seconds passes, which is like 7 years, because the audience is thinking, “Now do we have to go to sleep?” They’re all just watching him. After about 20 seconds, you know he was doing that thing whenever you fall asleep, which may be happening now for people, where you fall asleep and you think, “Where am I?” I know he was thinking, “Oh my god, where am I? Oh, I’m at that movie,” because all of a sudden, out of a dead sleep, he lurches forward and goes, “Nuh!” He looks over at me. I’m just looking at the screen like, “I had no idea you were asleep. Look at the pretty English field.” I just pretended I had no idea he’d been asleep, but he didn’t want to leave it at that.

He takes my arm. We shared an armrest. He takes my arm and he squeezes it and he says, “I love this movie.” I’m like, “Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. It’s fine. I’m pretending I don’t even know you’re here. Whatever.” He squeezes my arm again. He goes, “I mean it. I just love it. I love it.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m voting for you. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine. It’s fine.” He could not leave it at that. He leans over one last time, and he says, “Sometimes the language is so beautiful, I have to shut my eyes and let the words wash over me.” That is why you want to be in this business, to be a part of an evening like that.

Craig: I only spoke with Doug McGrath once. I was very early in my career. I was at my very first job in that agency. One of the account executives had also gone to Princeton and was a classmate of Doug’s. He knew I wanted to write, and so he put me on the phone with Doug. We had a lovely conversation. He was just such a nice, warm guy. He meant so much to me. I think it was right around when his Born Yesterday was coming out. I was like, “Wow, he’s on a billboard, and I’m talking to him.” It was very cool. He also has a fantastic little cameo in Quiz Show.

John: Great.

Craig: Which is one of my favorite movies. Rest in peace, Doug McGrath. Very, very nice guy, very cool guy, good writer, and taken from us a bit too soon here.

John: Definitely. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig’s not on Twitter anymore, so don’t even try. Don’t even dare.

Craig: I’m gone.

John: He’s gone.

Craig: I’m gone. Oh my god. Can I tell you how good it feels? It feels so good. It hurt for 15 seconds.

John: You left Twitter before though.

Craig: No, I didn’t leave. I took a break. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to leave my account here, but I’m just not really going to do much.” Really, ever since then, I didn’t really do much. My tweeting dropped down to almost nothing. I had a few replies here and there to people. My account, it’s over, gone. My account’s gone. It’s done.

John: For the moment, I am still @johnaugust on Twitter, but also Instagram. You can find me there. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great, and hoodies and other stuff too. Aline is really pushing for sweatpants, so maybe we’ll get some sweatpants in there too.

Craig: What?

John: Aline wants sweatpants.

Megana: No, a full-on sweatsuit. She wants a sweatsuit.

John: She wants a full sweat-suit.

Craig: I want a tracksuit.

Megana: That’s it.

Craig: I want to look like an Eastern European gangster.

John: I think we need zip-up jumpsuits.

Craig: Like in the future?

John: Yeah, like Carhartt overalls.

Craig: I think of those as future clothes.

John: Whatever we make, you’ll find them at Cotton Bureau and only Cotton Bureau. Craig, you realize that there’s now knockoff merch?

Craig: What?

John: Listeners sent in links to Scriptnotes T-shirts, of our new Scriptnotes T-shirt, the one with the cool S, on other sites that are not Cotton Bureau. If you go to one of those other sites, you’re going to get an inferior knockoff product that has not met Stuart’s quality of softness. It’s not that you’re taking money out of our pockets. You are hurting yourself by not getting the softest T-shirt you can imagine.

Craig: Is there that much of a market for these things that there’s a knockoff market? What are we, Louis Vuitton?

John: I don’t know. I don’t understand either. It’s one thing if somebody wants to make their own Scriptnotes T-shirt that it’s just the word Scripnotes in their own style and things. More power to you. We don’t have a trademark on the word Scriptnotes. Go for it. If you’re literally taking our design, that’s lame.

Craig: That is copyrighted.

John: That’s copyrighted. I have no interest in going after them, suing them.

Craig: That feels like a lot of hassle. I can’t imagine the damages of that, like, “We sold four T-shirts, so after your $400,000 lawsuit, here’s your $12 back.” I don’t think so. Anyway, I think it must be just bots just do this, right?

John: Yeah, I think that’s what it is.

Craig: Populate a marketing thing, yeah. Damn you, bots.

John: Damn you. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record with Megana talking through what she learned-

Craig: What she learned.

John: … at the Austin Film Festival. Craig and Megana, thank you very much for a fun show.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: We’re here.

Craig: Woo! Woo!

John: Megana, this is your first time at the Austin Film Festival. I just want to hear your honest feedback about what you were expecting and what you actually encouraged. How was your time in Austin?

Megana: It was great. It was really fun. To be honest, it was I think probably the biggest event I’ve gone to post-COVID. That aspect was a little overwhelming.

John: I was a little overwhelmed to.

Megana: As I understand, they have changed locations or venues. It felt a bit sprawling. I learned the topography of Downtown Austin as it relates to all these different hotels very well. I had a great time. I wasn’t expecting or predicting that intangible feeling of being around a bunch of people who are passionate about similar things that you are. That was really nice, that sense of community.

John: Now, you actually went to other panels and things, because when you weren’t producing Scriptnotes, you could do that kind of stuff. What did you attend? What did you learn? What is the process like going to things? Because we never go to anything.

Megana: I also wasn’t expecting how long the lines were. I don’t know if that was a new thing or a post-COVID queue culture thing where people are just obsessed with standing in lines. There were a few panels that I wanted to go to that I wasn’t able to because of the lines. Then the things that I went to, I saw managers speak and different screenwriters. A lot of the things that they were saying were similar to stuff that you guys say on the podcast, but I guess it’s just nice to hear similar sentiments come out of other people’s mouths.

Craig: Is it as good? I don’t think it’s as good. We say stuff and it sounds amazing. They say stuff and it’s like, “Fine, whatever.” That’s not how it is at all. I’m sure they were great.

Megana: It was great. It was great.

John: What was not so great?

Craig: They need to know. It’s good for them.

Megana: Sometimes it’s just hard when I meet a lot of people who are aspiring screenwriters. Say they were aspiring novelists or something. That’s great. This is beautiful. You’re creating art. Whether or not this is published, you could self-publish or you could show this to somebody. It feels like going to a conference for aspiring architects. Nobody cares about blueprints. People care about houses. A screenplay, it’s just the first step, and it requires so much work after that and so much other buy-in. That aspect stresses me out when I meet people who are so excited about the screenplay, but it feels like that’s where it ends. If you get satisfaction and joy from that, I love that, but if you don’t, then that makes me feel bad.

Craig: Because that’s what it’s probably going to be for a lot of people.

John: It will be. I don’t know how many thousands of people attend the Austin Film Festival, but most of those people were not going to be having screenwriting careers. That’s the reality. I think, Megana, you articulated something that I always felt about Austin is that it’s great, all-day enthusiasm, but I get a little sad for the enthusiasm, knowing that a lot of these people are chasing a dream that won’t happen for them.

Megana: Right. If you want to connect with people who love movies and who are interested in movies and interested in writing as a hobby, I think that’s so positive and awesome. I think it’s also overwhelming to look at that amount of people, and then all of the people I know in LA who are aspiring screenwriters. I don’t know, it does something to my heart a little bit.

Craig: I’ve felt this too. The rough part is that there’s something a bit old-fashioned, bordering on anachronistic at this point, about a conference dedicated to scripts, documents, as opposed to the making of things, because obviously they do have movies at this thing as well. There’s the film festival. The screenwriting part, just the pure, “How do I write a script?” so much of it, as you say, is focused on either a pitch for the pitch competition, that does not resemble in any way, shape, or form how people pitch things in our business, or on the creation of the documents but no concept of what happens after, when in fact, screenwriting is an integrated job. Ideally, it is writing and seeing your writing through as it’s made. It’s one of those things where a lot of people only ever do half of what the job is. It has been weighing on me.

Alec and I did a panel. Someone asked us about the value of the competition, the screenplay competition. We both told them our honest opinion, which is it doesn’t matter. If you win that competition, I don’t think it really matters. There a lot of that. Lately, I’ve just been wondering. It’s a fun thing to do. I think a lot of people like doing it. Is it a little bit of a tourist trap? Possibly.

John: Makes me think about Comic-Con or fan cons of things, where if you go to one of those things, it’s a chance to meet all the people who are making the stuff that you love, and it’s great for that, or DragCon, same thing. You’re going to see all the drag queens, but you don’t go there thinking, “Oh, now I’m going to become a drag superstar.” You’re there to celebrate a thing.

Craig: You’re not going to learn the real deal of how to be a drag star. You’re there to just see people you love, which is totally cool.

John: Completely fine.

Craig: I completely agree, that aspect is great.

John: Absolutely. The degree to which people want to just soak in screenwriter culture, [inaudible 01:02:17] screenwriter culture, it is fun for that. I think we are a part of that. Scriptnotes is a part of that. It’s part of the reason why we go back, because it’s a chance to hang out with a bunch of our screenwriter friends who we could see in Los Angeles but we don’t. We get a beer at The Driskill. It’s fun for that. I am torn, because it’s fun to be around people who like to talk about screenplay stuff. That’s great, but it’s also a little sad knowing that most people who are going there because they want to become screenwriters are not going to really progress based on their attending.

Craig: I’ve shed my tears for all those folks. I think the part that is a little uncomfortable for me is just feeling a little perhaps implicit in creating a sense of, hey look, if you purchase a special badge, you will hear a secret. Like I say to people all the time when they’re like, “Hey, I would love to just buy you a coffee and pick your brain for 10 minutes,” I’m like, “You can just listen to 580 hours of me talking with John. We’ve done it all. I’ve said it. It’s all said. It’s all out there.” I’m not sure anybody should pay for anything you or I have to say.

John: Megana, I want to get back to you here, because Megan McDonald’s gone to Austin with us before, we’ve had other people who have gone, but you are the biggest celebrity of our producers, by far. How are people with you there? I tend to hide while I’m there, but you were out there. Were people cool with you?

Megana: I don’t think anybody really recognized me. I wish I had more of that experience that you’re describing.

Craig: You’re a radio personality.

John: They recognize your voice at times.

Megana: I was just walking along the sidewalks reading questions off my phone, hoping somebody would stop me.

Craig: I love the idea of you standing, waiting for the crosswalk, and you’re just saying, “John writes in and says,” and then you look to your right at a group of people like, “Mm-hmm? Did you hear that?”

John: I will say, Craig, you missed out on the live show we did for the Three Page Challenge. Megana gets this huge round of applause, because everyone knows Megana Rao is the heart of the Three Page Challenge. It was nice to see the public validation for all the hard work you do making this show possible.

Craig: No one deserves fame more, as far as I’m concerned, than Megana Rao.

Megana: I appreciate that. I think it’s also because I don’t really want it.

Craig: Exactly.

Megana: It was so nice to meet our listeners. I do want to say that. Also, I feel like I introduced a lot of you listeners to my very creepy memory, where they’d be like, “Hey, my name’s this, and I wrote in,” or, “I had this Three Page Challenge.” I was like, “Yeah, and this thing happened, and then this character was there.” They were like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe-“

Craig: Are you like a Marilu Henner?

Megana: No. I read all the emails that come in. Whether or not you respond to them, if you give me enough details, I’ll usually be able to recall them. It was so nice to be able to put some faces to these emails and these Three Page Challenges that I’m getting.

Craig: Wow. I didn’t know that you could do that.

Megana: Not all the time. Most of the time I can though. I’m not going to downplay it.

Craig: I got to say, that’s impressive. That is a thing actually. I didn’t realize that you had that, because I answer emails all the time, and then they’re gone.

John: Then they’re gone.

Craig: They’re gone.

John: Here’s the nice thing about emails. I go and search back and find who was that person, what were we talking about.

Craig: If you’re Megana, you don’t have to.

John: It’s just in your brain.

Craig: You just, boop boop, “Oh yes, I remember you.” Megana, what can’t you do?

Megana: Oh, so many things.

Craig: That sounds like a good Bonus Segment for next time. What can’t Megana do?

Megana: Singing is definitely up there. One of our listeners brought a book for me that she signed, that she’d also written. That was cool. I think that was my favorite part of the experience is just being able to meet our Scriptnotes fans. I think that the Scriptnotes events were, in my humble opinion, the best events at Austin.

Craig: That’s nice to hear. I will say that in the past, I think there have been… It’s gotten a little thin. I think the cadre of people showing up, it used to be a little bit thicker with big shots. It’s got a little thinner in that regard. It’s very encouraging to see that people still listen to the show and they enjoy the show. We do have a good time. I think a lot of these panels are soaking in… You know that thing where people are so excited to be the professional on stage answering questions, that they get really self-important? We don’t do that. You get a break from all that, of going to panels where people just talk to you with unearned confidence about all the stuff that they insist they know.

Megana: There’s just no right way to do any of these things. That’s why you guys are still talking about this 500-something episodes later. There’s just so many different ways to find success or be successful in this industry.

Craig: That’s right.

Megana: I wish there was a secret you could learn over a 10-minute coffee.

Craig: See, this is my problem, because I do think people are, in a sense… There are people going there looking for that, because we still get questions like that all the time. It’s hard to answer. What I do know is that a lot of people came up to me and just thanked me for this aspect of the service that we provide, not the advice, not the topics, just caring, caring enough to take questions and to answer them and to listen to people, and in the sense that this is a give-back show, because we’re not running ads and we’re not Dax Shepard and all that. I think it does good. People really appreciate it. It’s nice to hear that from them in person. Everybody that said anything nice to me, I really was quite touched by.

John: As was I. Megana, thank you very much for coming with us to the Austin Film Festival and for sharing what you learned there.

Megana: Thank you guys.

Craig: Thank you, Megana, for… You know what for. Let’s leave that as a mystery for everyone. Now they’re like, “Oh my god, there’s a Craigana. It’s happening.”

Megana: You’ll have to subscribe to the super premium content.

Craig: The super premium to hear what Megana did. It was really helpful.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Thanks, John.

John: Thanks, guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• MoviePass Executives Charged with Fraud
• Warner Bros. Discovery Says It Will Keep Writers and Directors Workshops Alive, But Evolve to Conglomerate-Wide DEI Oversight
• The Six Hour Scene from John’s Blog
• Doug McGrath Austin Film Society Honoree Speech
• The Past Within – Rusty Lake
• The Fablemans
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Holly Overton (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin.

John August: This is Episode 531 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at how you move from scene to scene. That’s right, transitions. It’s a clip show where we listen back to past John and past Craig as they offer their advice, which for all we know, is better than our current advice, because we were younger then, and fresher.

Craig Mazin: So much younger than today.

John August: Now we actually got an email in from a listener recently saying like, “Oh, I went back and listened to your early episodes, expecting it to be different, that John and Craig would’ve grown and changed a lot.” She said, “No, actually, you know what? It was the same. Your microphones weren’t as good, but it was the same show,” which I was heartened by.

Craig Mazin: Yes, I think it might’ve been a man.

John August: Oh. It could’ve been either one.

Craig Mazin: I think based on that name I think it’s a guy, but either way, I wanted to say to that fellow that no, of course we weren’t great at that then, and we have gotten better. Maybe it’s just that we found something where we weren’t accountable to anybody at all. Sometimes the key is that if you have something where you’re completely free within it to do whatever you want, how you want to do it, without any accountability whatsoever, and no expectation or ambition or anything, then there is a purity to it, and people who are going to like that purity are going to like it. If you dig Scriptnotes Episode 500, yeah, you’ll probably like 1 through 10. If you hate Episode 500, I guarantee you’ll hate 1 through 10. We’ve said a lot.

Don’t get fooled by the way things look on the other side of stuff. Here, hopefully you just listen to me talk about how ashamed I am all the time and how I feel bad about myself, and I try and work on that really, really hard. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Basically in your letter you said, “To be honest, I was hoping that you guys weren’t as good at the beginning. It would’ve given me hope to get better myself at my stuff.” You have plenty of hope. You’re doing a hard thing. You’re trying to do a hard thing. You’re going to move at the speed you move.

John August: Yeah, and I always also say at the beginning we were new to podcasting, but we weren’t necessarily new to screenwriting and offering advice to screenwriters. That was a not a new thing for us to do. It was just sticking a mic in front of us was the new aspect of it.

Let’s travel back in time and look at transitions. These are three conversations we’ve had over the years. We’re going to start with Episode 446: Back To Basics, where we talk about the origin of screenwriting, opening scenes, what a scene is, what it means, and the difference between formatting and transition versus the psychology of what a transition actually does, like how you’re moving from scene to scene versus the actual words you’re using.

In 493 on our Opening Scenes conversation, we talk about how you begin a screenplay, the process for thinking about opening scenes, the rules and expectations. We talk about Chernobyl some. It feels like a lot of what we’re talking about in this is really relevant to transitions, basically how are we going to get the story started and how are we going to get the audience moving with us into the plot.

Finally, we’re going to go back to Episode 89, which is probably, wow, eight years ago?

Craig Mazin: Peesh.

John August: Yeah. We’re looking at technical approaches to different types of transitions, so literally what are the words on a page that is signaling to the reader that this is how we are going to be moving from this scene to that scene. Literally it’s the right-hand margin stuff we’ll get into in that last segment.

Three segments here. We’ll also put a link in the show notes to some blog posts where we talk about transitions. If you’re a Premium member stick around, because when we come back at the end, we are going to be discussing how to get out of a conversation, so it’s really the transition between I am talking with you right now and I don’t want to be talking with you any longer. We’ll be discussing how to end conversations, both in person and online.

Now let me make a transition out of this opening segment into our three pre-recorded bits. Craig, can you help me out with this transition?

Craig Mazin: No.

John August: Perfect.

All right. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, and so I thought we might actually take this time in Episode 446 to define screenwriting and what screenwriting actually is, because I don’t know if we’ve actually talked about it in actually that much depth, weirdly, over the course of this, because Craig, you did your solo episode about how to write a screenplay. That was really fundamentally 101 the things about writing a screenplay, but I wanted to do some backstory about the origin of screenwriting and how screenwriting began to what it’s become now and what those transitions were.

I have three things I want to keep in mind as we talk about what a screenwriter does and what screenwriting is, and maybe tease them apart a little bit, because I think especially newer people who are approaching screenwriting, which we have a bunch of new people listening, just because they watched Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge last week, really talk about what the screenwriter does and what screenwriting is about.

Craig Mazin: I hope that my understanding of it is correct. I’ll be very embarrassed if I’m wrong.

John August: I think you will probably be very, very correct. Let’s talk about the origin of screenwriting, because screenwriting as an art form is only about a century old, because movies are only about a century old. When the first motion picture cameras were aimed at things and it went beyond just photographing a train coming into a station, to actually trying to tell a story with a camera, at some point people recognized, oh, you know what, it would help if we wrote down the plan for what we’re going to do before we actually shot this stuff. Those initial things that would become screenplays were just a list of shots, or a plan for how you’re going to do the things. When we talk about screenwriting being like architecture, that’s what we’re getting to is that sense of like it’s a plan for the thing you’re going to make. It is a blueprint for what the ultimate finished product is going to be, which is the finished film, the thing that a person is going to watch, which is not the literary document or not the paper document that we’re starting off with. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those first screenplays, but they don’t closely resemble what we do now.

Craig Mazin: No. I think that when people say a screenplay is a blueprint, I always get a little fussy about it, but in this aspect of it, that’s exactly what it is. Part of a screenplay, a screenplay is many, many things at once, one of the things a screenplay is and has always been, going back to those first ones, is essentially a business plan. It is an outline of where you need to be and how long you need to be there and what needs to be seen. There’s not a lot of art to it. It really is more of an organizational thing, and the modern counterpart to it I guess would just be sometimes a director will come in and make a little shot list for the day. That is appropriate to blueprint.

John August: Yeah, or agenda. It’s basically these are the steps. This is how we’re going to do it. Because it’s written on eight and a half by 11 paper and it’s done with words rather than a flowchart, it feels somewhat literary. The words you pick matter a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. It’s basically as long as you’re going to be able to communicate what your intention is to the other people who need to see this document, that’s all that really matters.

Craig Mazin: That tradition carries through to this day when a screenplay still uses interior, exterior. Every scene must give you blueprint information that is not literary information. There is nothing literary about exterior, house, day, rain, or whatever you say there. The literary part comes in this other stuff that started to emerge as our craft of filmmaking and writing evolved.

John August: Now, that evolution, I’m not enough of a student of the history of cinema to tell you exactly when the screenplay became more what we talk about today, but often you’ll hear Casablanca referenced as a turning point between this list of shots to something that’s more like a modern screenplay in the sense of it’s a document that you can read, and in reading this document, you get a sense of what the actual film is supposed to feel like. It’s not just the pure blueprint. It’s more like this gives you a sense of where you are, what’s going on. It gives you a preview of what the film is actually going to look and feel like, versus just a straightforward list of these are the things you’re seeing.

Craig Mazin: This is not necessarily historically … You can’t call me a professor here, by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding when I look at the early stuff is that it was the American movie business that was very blueprint-y and shot list-y. There is a pretty famous … You’ve probably seen the silent film A Trip to the Moon.

John August: Oh yes, yeah.

Craig Mazin: Yes, remember where the moon gets shot in the eye.

John August: The Brothers Lumière.

Craig Mazin: Exactly. George Méliès. Méliès? Méliès? Méliès? If you look at the script for that, it actually feels quite modern. There is a literary aspect to it. It’s more descriptive. I think in Europe probably there was a little bit more of a literary aspect to this much earlier than there was in the United States, but eventually by the time you get to films like Casablanca you’re fully in the swing of a literary screenplay that is combining two things at once, a non-literary production plan and art.

John August: Now, in both the literary form and in the blueprint-y construction plan form, the fundamental unit that you come back to is the scene. Even novels have scenes, that sense of there is a moment in space and time when generally characters are saying something or doing something. It’s one carved out moment of a place and a time where things are happening. That idea of a scene you see in both the really clinical early versions of screenplays and you see them in modern screenplays. That sense of like this is a chunk of time in which these things are happening.

I want to suss out three different kinds of things we mean by scene. First is that moment of space and time where characters are doing a thing. That’s scene version A. Scene version B is the writing of that scene. By the writing I mean this is what the characters are saying and doing. It’s where we’re coming into that moment. It’s how we’re getting out of that moment. It is the words we’re using to describe the world in which the characters are happening, the actions they’re taking, basically everything we call scene description, which you compare to stage plays, which is the other natural version of this, the scene description in stage plays tends to be incredibly minimalist. It’s much more robust in screenplays, because you are trying to really visually describe this world in which the characters are inhabiting. That’s an important transition. That’s version B is really the writing.

The third version of a scene I want to distinguish between is all the formatting stuff. All the basically the grammar of screenplays that we use that make them, the conventions that make it easier for people who read a lot of screenplays to understand what’s actually happening. The same way that commas and periods become invisible to a reader, people who are used to reading screenplays, they don’t even see INT and EXT and DAYS. Your brain just skips over those things and is able to concentrate on the meat of those. All that other information is there, but it’s invisible to a person who is used to reading them. Being able to understand those conventions and use them properly really does affect how a person perceives a screenplay. That formatting, that syntax choices and all that stuff, is really a different thing I would say than the words you’re using to describe stuff. It’s really grammar versus the actual creative act of writing.

Craig Mazin: Yeah, and that grammar is eventually going to be analyzed by a grammar specialist known as the First AD, who along with the production managers, are going to be taking those scene headings and asking, “Okay, are these scene headings accurate to what we think we’re going to be actually doing in terms of the locations we found? How can we group them together? We need to make a timeline, night, day.” All those things have huge production implications. None of them have to do specifically with art. You’re guessing at what you think the ultimate grammar will be, but then you make adjustments once you get into production. Individual first ADs will have different ways of adjusting that grammar.

You’re right that for most people reading it, those things serve weirdly as just paragraph breaks. They’re paragraph breaks, which are incredibly helpful. It’s one of the reasons why my formatting preference is to put two lines before a new scene, because the scene, the EXTERIOR or the INTERIOR, is serving as a break in the visual flow of the reading, so I make it one, because I agree with you. I think that that’s really what it’s doing. If you took out all the interiors and exteriors and just mentioned those things in action lines, the script would become a book and it would be harder to read.

John August: Yeah. In thinking about scenes in three different waves, so there’s the visualization, the imagination of what’s happening with those characters in space and time, that is a thing that a screenwriter does, but it’s also the kind of thing a director does. It’s a thing that other creative people can do. It’s a thing an author does, is envision people in a place and a time doing a thing or saying a thing. Directors often do that scene version A a lot. They’re really imagining what that scene is like. They’re thinking about it through their own specialties. They’re imagining it’s like, “Okay, so I’m envisioning this scene, this moment happening,” and then they’re thinking, “Okay, where would I put the camera? What are the opportunities I have here? How would I use my tool set to make this happen best? What am I going to tell the cinematographer about what I’m looking at? What am I going to tell the editor about how I imagine this being paced? What are the costumes? What are all the things that I will need to be able to describe to other people about this moment?” That’s a version of crafting the scene.

The screenwriter has to do all that stuff, but then take a second level abstraction, thinking, “Okay, having thought through all that stuff, what are the words I’m going to use to describe what’s most important about this moment? Because I could describe everything, but that would be exhausting, and it would actually hurt the process of being able to understand what’s important. How am I’m going to synthesize that down to the most important things for people to understand if they’re reading this scene about what it’s going to feel like, what’s important, what they need to focus on?”

Most of what Craig and I really are talking about on the podcast is this second level, is the B version of that scene, which is how do we find the best way to describe and tell the reader what they would be seeing if they were seated in a theater watching this on a screen, how are we going to convey that experience, what it feels like to be watching that moment on the big screen. That’s mostly what we talk about on this podcast.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. There’s a weird kind of psychological game we’re playing with scene work, in the way that Walter Murch wrote this book about editing, I think it’s called In the Blink of an Eye, where he says we’re cutting in the pattern of people’s blinks, that we blink in normal moments. We’re kind of predictable this way. We have a rhythm. We’re editing slightly on that basis. Editing feels like music. It’s all about timing. You just know, there, cut there, that’s the spot. It’s kind of the same thing with scenes. What you’re doing is feeling a psychological impact and then there’s a blink, a story blink, that just needs to happen. We have reached a point where something should happen and the story should blink and reset, and in a different place or a different time or with a different person, a different perspective. That to me is where the scene begins and ends.

Inside of the scene, we may have additional slug lines or scene headers, because we’re giving that blueprint information, that nonliterary blueprint information, to our production friends. For the purpose of being artistic and literary, the scene is the psychological unit. I don’t know how else to describe it other than something blinks and the story moves.

John August: Here’s an example. Imagine you could take a real life thing that’s happening. We’re in a room. There are people talking. Imagine we’re at a cocktail party. There’s a cocktail party happening. It’s maybe six people in this room. There’s discussions happening. We could invite three screenwriters in and have them see all of this, and then each of them goes off and writes their own version of this scene. There would be three very different scenes, because those screenwriters would be choosing to focus on different things.

Even though we all encountered the same moment, we’re writing different scenes, because we are choosing to focus on different things and we want to direct the reader’s attention to different moments. It’s what snippets of conversations we’re using. It is who we’re choosing to focus on. The same way the director is choosing where to put the camera, we are choosing where to put the reader’s attention. That is mostly what we talk about on this podcast is how as a writer you make the decisions about what you’re going to emphasize and what you’re going to ignore about a moment that is happening in front of us as an audience.

Craig Mazin: It’s one of the reasons I stress transitions so much. We have a podcast we’ve done about transitions. I can’t remember offhand the number, but we’ll put it in the show notes. Transitions help the audience demarcate the blink, the beginning and end of the scene, because inside of scenes, once you get away from the page and you’re just watching a television show or a movie, there is the montage effect, which is essentially, in the old sense of the word, not the, “We’re doing a montage,” but rather when you show something and then you cut to something else, we understand that time is continuing even though we have moved the camera and cut. These things are constantly happening. So how do you know when one thing begins and one thing ends? Since it’s all cut cut cut cut cut, why does one cut signal the beginning of something, and why does one cut signal the end, and why do others feel like they’re just part of a continuity? Transitions. They let you know when the scene has begun, and they let you know when it’s over.

John August: Absolutely. That’s a great segue to really this third version of what I’m describing. It’s this scene which is all of the formatting and the standard conventions and grammar that we’ve come to expect out of screenplays. It’s different from the transition that Craig is talking about, because Craig is really talking psychologically what are we trying to do by ending the scene there and getting to the next scene. That will also have a reflection in literally the words and how we’re formatting that moment to get us from one scene to the next scene. All the stuff that your screenwriting software does for you, that is the technical details that makes screenplays look so strange and different.

As I was reading through all these entries for the Three Page Challenge, picking them for the episode we’re recording tomorrow, I was struck by many of our listeners really get it, they know exactly what they’re doing, but some of them are actually still struggling with that third kind of scene writing, which is basically understanding how standard screenplay conventions are so helpful in letting the reader understand what’s important in this moment. Some of them are still struggling with that stuff. That’s the kind of thing I think you can actually teach and be taught. The best way to do it is to read a ton of screenplays and see just how it is, just so it becomes really natural. You read a bunch, you write a bunch to try to match up to that thing, but you will very quickly get a sense of how screenplays are formatted and how to make that feel effortless, make it feel like it’s not in your way but it’s actually helping you. What’s much harder for us to try to teach you is that second part, that part of how to very naturally convey what a moment feels like. I want to make sure we keep that distinction clear, because being able to type “cut to” and understand how to get down a page is a different thing than being able to really shape what a scene is going to feel like for the reader.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. Literally anyone can put something into a screenplay format. It’s never been easier. saying “cut to” and then “exterior such-and-such” will make something look like a scene has ended and a new scene has begun on the page, but it actually will not translate whatsoever to the actual viewing experience. The only thing that you have in your arsenal to demarcate that for the viewer is creativity. A sense of rhythm. A sense of conclusion. A sense of propulsion. A sense of surprise. Contrast. All the things that we talk about when we think of transitions that have nothing to do with formatting, because alas, there is no sign flashing in the movie or on your television set that says, “New scene has begun.” This is the craft part. Man, if I were teaching a screenwriting class at USC or UCLA or one of those places, I think honestly I would just begin with that. I would just begin with please let’s just talk about the art of letting people know something has begun and something has ended.

John August: Yeah, because “cut to” is not when a scene ends. The scene ends when the scene is ending. So often you feel like, okay, that scene is over, but there’s a couple more lines. When you actually film that you’re going to realize you don’t need this extra. You recognize that that moment is over and therefore the scene should be over. It’s a hard thing to learn until you’ve gone through it.

Craig Mazin: That is where the talent and instinct is. Obviously experience helps as you go on, as it does with everything, but there is an innate sense that something has concluded. Even for those of us who have been doing this for a while and we’re professionals, we will often make a mistake of going a little bit too far or not far enough, and then somebody will come and say, “I feel like maybe the scene ended here.” The key is that when somebody says that, you can look at it and go, “No, it hasn’t, and here’s why,” or, “Yeah, you’re right. That’s where it ended.” There is a sense.

John August: Having written the Arlo Finch books, one of the great advantages to traditional literary fiction is that if you’re lucky, you have a publisher, and that publisher provides an editor, who is going through that work and doing some of this actual checking with you. Whereas I might send Craig a script and he can say like, “Oh, I think your scene really ended here,” the editor’s job is much more clinical, saying, “Okay, now I’m … ” She’s actually cutting some stuff, saying, “No, you’re done here.” Sometimes you’ll get to a line editor or a copy editor who is going through and actually fixing your mistakes.

Screenwriters generally don’t have anybody like that, so we are responsible for doing all of that ourselves. I do sometimes wonder if sometimes there are people who are really pretty good at that stage A of writing a scene and stage B of writing a scene, but are really kind of terrible at stage three, that stage C of writing a scene and doing the actual making it work right as a screenplay kind of thing, would just be so helped out by having someone who could just go through and make it read better, make it read more conventionally on the page, so that we can really see what the intention is, versus being hung up on the strange mistakes they’re making.

Craig Mazin: I was a guest for a webinar, a Zoominar. A Zoominar through Princeton University. I did it yesterday. They open it up to members of that community. I don’t know, there was 100 people or something like that watching, which is kind of fun to see all the little Zoom faces. Someone asked a question and it essentially went to this, which was, when you look at how screenplays work as opposed to a novel, there are so many other things that you have to be thinking about. In a novel you’re just thinking about what people are saying and doing and thinking. In a screenplay you’re managing all this other stuff, like time and the camera and the visual space and how it will be structured and when things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, that’s true. If you want to be a good screenwriter, you’re going to have to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife. It’s very hard to be a good screenwriter but only be good at one thing.

Every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re bringing them in, but they’re doing a character pass.” I’m like, what the hell does that mean? What’s the difference between character and story? They’re exactly the same thing to me. They’re interwoven. I don’t know how to separate these things. Or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re bringing somebody in to do a comedy pass.” Okay, so is that just like somebody’s going to stop in the middle of the movie and do some standup? The comedy has to come out of who they are and what the situations are. We have to do all of it at the same time, which is why it’s so hard. It’s really, really hard. There are, I don’t know, 4,000 times as many successful novelists as there are screenwriters.

John August: That is true. What I will say though about the Princeton question is the things that student was asking about, like, oh, you have to do all these other things, those become really automatic and much simpler with experience, so you stop having to worry about them so much. The same way like once you really learn how to use a semicolon, you can just use a semicolon. A lot of the detritus and the weird things about our modern screenplay format, once you get used to it, you stop thinking about it, it becomes less of an obstacle. I’m never, as a screenwriter, frustrated by like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a screenplay format.” It just becomes really straightforward after a time.

Craig Mazin: It does take time, but eventually … It’s like touch typing. I don’t think about where the W is. My finger just goes there.

John August: What we can do is talk about really specific crafty things, which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. This actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of the script to be in the story, or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”

Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge, and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script, so we’re really looking at these opening scenes, and yet because we’re only looking at that scene, we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie. I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.

Craig Mazin: It’s a great question, Martin. It I think has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ’50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. We’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we see how that opening goes. Then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins. These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad, which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on? What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? Then the puzzle gets solved.

John August: I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to present day movies in how openings work, because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. You look at those old trailers and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is just so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all.” In many ways we now look for these opening scenes and opening sequences to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to reward you for like, thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention, because this is what’s going to happen.

Let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences, they don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story-wise, plot-wise, or character-wise in these scenes?

Craig Mazin: You have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. You are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything’s fine. I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. There is the indication of a thing, and it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see, or if they do see it, they’re looking at it from a different time, this is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, that there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.

John August: Yeah. From a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character, you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. In that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence, but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie. You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece and what it feels like to be watching this movie, the setting of this world, how the movie kind of works, and some of the rules of this world. If you’re in a fantasy universe, is there magic, how does gravity work, what are the edges of what this kind of movie can be, because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching, so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that, because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing and challenging, which I’ve always loved. I often look at the very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned, but it’s the opening they ended up with. Neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator, and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. He’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman, essentially. You have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. Then the man, feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions, kills the investigator.

What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up, and a promise that it will make sense later. In addition, I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty. Sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. Let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.

John August: As you’re talking about that, I’m now recalling that scene. It works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story, that there’s going to be questions of identity and existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction, if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important. Now Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say, “This is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie.” It’s a weird thing to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like, they just don’t start right, they start on the wrong beat, or as you dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first, but then they kind of wrote a different movie, and they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?

Craig Mazin: I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes it’s hard to hit that mark, because nothing else has been written yet, so it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it, but the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. The opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies, or in any particular episode of television, where the audience will forgive us a lot. It’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road, but in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.

John August: Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. If they’re going into a movie theater to watch it there, they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie, whether they love it or they don’t love it. In those first minutes, they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there, but their expectations are very malleable at that start. You really can take them anywhere. You get a lot of things for free. They come in with a bit of trust. If you can honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you, they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well, they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story you’re trying to tell.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. Don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting, and then the lights go down. It’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are! Let’s go!” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of wah.

They get you ready. That can go on for a while, because everybody knows, oh my god it’s happening. Let it be happening, don’t let it just happen, if that makes sense.

John August: Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and what our experience was for this. I’m going back, thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, if I recall correctly, opens with an old woman and a cow.

Craig Mazin: That is how Episode Four or Three opens.

John August: That’s right. It was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?

Craig Mazin: The first image of the first episode is a couch with an afghan type thing of a deer, and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.

John August: Yeah. We don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special, that we are setting up a thing, the past, and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth. I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is that it’s an example of we don’t have context for who these characters are, why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. I thought it just worked really well.

Craig Mazin: Thank you. Every episode needs its own beginning. I’m pretty sure that’s beginning of Episode Four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now. That was designed to be a bit confusing, because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there, and we’re not sure what his orders are, and we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is, and we don’t know he’s just standing there, and so this goes on. Then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. That is a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of, and generally I don’t. Sometimes it’s okay to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world, and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about. We think, oh, do they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening? Certainly one way to go.

John August: Completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie. Of course, again, you’re establishing a place and a time and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored … We’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. There’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. It’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is this elaborate sequence to get this guy, this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly. That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie and what the rules are of this movie and the heightened gravity-optional nature of this movie and what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie. Nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense, the fact that they could go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous, and just how it feels. It was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end, because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.

Craig Mazin: With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. It’s weird to say, okay, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly, the old woman and the cow, you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline. You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. This is a good thing. Now they’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next, but also they are aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.

John August: The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds, a real world and a story world, that there are two protagonists, and that both of them have storytelling power. Getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where if I didn’t have that opening sequence, the movie just couldn’t have worked, because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.

Craig Mazin: This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care. I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word precious real estate about, or phrase, a thousand times, you need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says, “I will keep watching.” If it’s just kind of meh, then you could’ve done anything there. The moment you have an opening, you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.

John August: You build a funnel.

Craig Mazin: You make a funnel, a logical funnel, but not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. If you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, “This will get better.” It won’t.

John August: No. Weirdly, it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at, just because by nature we’re going to end up rereading it and tweaking it a zillion times. I do wonder if sometimes, let’s just talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story? Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene, because so often you can be trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene, but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.

Craig Mazin: 100%. If you do know what your end is, it would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl, because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with, I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens, and at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” You go, “Ah, aha!” in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd. I like that. I like the sense that you catch up and you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.

Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic, and down to nothing but dialogue and performance, two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. At the very, very end of the movie, he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end, and you go, “Oh man, this guy.” That’s how you can think about these things. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.

John August: Cool. Now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward, let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up, because that’s really a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script, but let’s also be thinking about what movie we think it’s actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that. Just a note for ourselves. We will start, try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.

Let’s talk about transitions, because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.

Craig Mazin: One thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page, “Don’t tell the director what to do.” Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read, so that they can see a movie. Part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page, but you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind, because it’s really important to them. Frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect. Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.

John August: Let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. One is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO or TRANSITION TO or FADE TO or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting. We’re only half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were originally taught to do. You can tell first-time screenwriters because they will always use a CUT TO. In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing. Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is … You want a scene to flow into the next scene. That’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, why we’re coming into this scene at this moment.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. This is a very nuts and bolts craft thing. They’re techniques. I wrote down a few techniques, which I’ll run through, and you tell me what you think.

John August: Great.

Craig Mazin: The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time. Just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected in their own way.

John August: Let’s talk about what that actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie, obviously. If you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you are going to get into some fairly close coverage there. If it’s just it’s about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something something something, that is a big size transition. Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d see, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scales there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.

Craig Mazin: It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. It’s just real simple things like that. Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room, they’re chitchatting, and then over the sound of hip-hop we are, and now we’re South Central LA, rolling down Crenshaw, just to help the reader understand there’s a connection here. Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and the next thing we hear is a siren. By the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. Something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times, because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. If it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.

John August: Absolutely. There are times where we want that really smooth, legato flow from one thing to the next thing, and there’s times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and there’s brand new information going to be coming your way.

Craig Mazin: Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call a misdirect transition. A guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” or whatever, and he’s got a gun. We go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.

John August: Exactly.

Craig Mazin: Little tricks, basically.

John August: Yeah. Again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that 10 times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.

Craig Mazin: Probably, unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s like a, I don’t know, a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.

John August: Yeah. I was going to say the Asian action films might do that more often. Yeah, if that’s your style, then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much. A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will, they’ll pre-lap the character. They will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut, that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene. It’s very clever how they do it. That’s a way of misdirecting you comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.

Craig Mazin: Exactly. Exactly. I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. Two people say, “That didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. Over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard TV-ish thing, but it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky. Another tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.

John August: Exactly.

Craig Mazin: Where someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth,” and the next shot is a woman smiling. It doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer, in other words, but just that the transition itself is giving us information.

John August: That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the, “We need to find a witness who can,” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that, or like, “This is the question we need to have answered.” You ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.

Craig Mazin: Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat, drunk.

John August: In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head, and so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way. Thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. You’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition. Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that seems to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to get people across the bridge there.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. They’re generic, because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story, but really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here, that there’s something that helps move us through, little tiny things. It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. Frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.

John August: I would agree. Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. Don’t paint a big, giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be straight, simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing, we as the reader will notice, okay, something big and different has changed here.

When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile … The first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word, because it’s all a new form to you, but after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They just skip past you. You can sometimes jump back to them if you’re curious, but you’re really just looking for the flow of things, and so most times you’re just jumping over that. You don’t really know or care where you are. Even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky. Save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really need that reader to stop and slow down and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.

Craig Mazin: Well said. Well said.

John August: Great.

All right, we are back in the present, which in our case is 2021, but by the time you’re listening to this it’s 2022. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig forgot to do a One Cool Thing. He forgot to have a One Cool Thing, so he’s hopping on a phone call while Megana and I are going to do our One Cool Things.

My One Cool Thing is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I love me a good fallacy. I think I’d heard of this fallacy, but never had it described to me before. Basically it’s why, when you have a whole bunch of data and you are looking for patterns in the data, you can find things that really aren’t there. The actual description of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is like, “Oh wow, look, this person hits the bullseye every time.” If you’re shooting at a barn, basically if you shoot first and then paint the target afterwards, you’re going to find patterns there that aren’t really there. I just really like that as an idea.

It reminded me of, this is something that Megana knows what I’m talking about, but I’m going to be a little vague here, I went in to pitch a project at a studio or a streamer, and they said, “Oh, we decided looking at the data we no longer do that genre of project, because it’s not successful.” I’m 100% convinced it’s really a Texas sharpshooter fallacy, that basically they looked at all their data and said, “Oh, this thing doesn’t work for us,” but I think they’re really after the fact trying to find a pattern for a couple failures that really don’t make sense.

Megana Rao: Just so I’m clear, because I haven’t heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, so it’s that you paint the target after you already have …

John August: Yeah, basically you’ve taken all the shots. Basically you have all the data there, and then you are trying to paint the target after the fact. You’re basically picking a small subset of the data to describe what the bigger thing is, and you’re saying, “Oh, this is the finding, the conclusion we’ve had,” but you didn’t actually have a hypothesis, a thesis going into it, so you weren’t really looking for anything. You noticed something and said, “This must be significant.” It’s a problem whenever you have a large big batch of data, it’s very likely that you’re going to some subset of the data that indicates a certain thing, but if you weren’t actually systematically looking for that thing, it’s not probably a valid result.

Megana Rao: It’s how you guys talk about screenwriting structure, screenwriting books.

John August: Oh yeah, absolutely, because if you’re looking at all these things and you’re trying to say, “These are the patterns that are in there,” it’s like, are they really the patterns that are in there or are you basically just deciding that’s a thing you’re going to look for, describe being in there, but that was never the intention, that was never the actual goal behind it. When this studio or streamer says, “Oh, this genre does not perform well for us,” it’s like, okay, did you go through and systematically say, “Okay, let’s take a look at all of the examples of this genre we’ve ever done,” and then seeing how they performed, or you’re just saying, “Of the five biggest disappointments of movies we’ve made in the last couple years, were they in the genre?” You’re being choosy with what data you’re letting in and letting out of that criteria.

Megana Rao: Very cool.

John August: Now since Craig doesn’t have a One Cool Thing, Megana, can you pinch hit for him?

Megana Rao: Yes. In our last bonus segment where we talked about New Years Resolutions, I talked about data privacy and data rights and trying to be more digitally hygienic. My One Cool Thing is this movie Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is delightful and funny and has a lot of themes about data privacy that I think are accessible and rendered in a family-fun way.

John August: Cool. I saw that mostly [inaudible 00:57:26] bus board advertisements. I never actually saw a trailer for it. When I actually looked at the trailer for it, it looks delightful and definitely worth checking out. Now I see it’s on all the … I got a screener for it, so I know that they’re going for the typical awards for it.

Megana Rao: Yeah. It felt really fresh. Zach Galifianakis voices the robot, and he has this really flat affect that is so funny. I was just watching it by myself and chortling, laughing, chuckling. It’s a fun movie.

John August: Cool. Ron’s Gone Wrong.

Megana Rao: Yep, Ron’s Gone Wrong. I think it’s on Disney Plus and some other places too.

John August: Fantastic. That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with one segment produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig Mazin: Of course.

John August: Our outro’s by Henry Adler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You’ll get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting out of a conversation. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

Craig Mazin: Thank you guys.

Megana Rao: Thank you.

John August: All right, Craig, thinking back to times when you were at a party with actual people around you … Actually that last time I think I saw you in a party situation was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly, who was running at that time for Senate in Arizona. That was a party filled with people I knew and some people I was just getting to know, but it was a lot of small conversations, and I needed to get into and out of those conversations. Is that an experience you recall from that night?

Craig Mazin: Sure. That’s a pretty common thing. You’re at a party and you start talking to people, and then sometimes it gets boring or it gets awkward or you run out of things to say. I try the best I can to not think about who else I should be talking to. I try as best I can to be as present as possible for the person I’m talking to, no matter who they are, because the notion of, “Oh I should be talking to that person,” or, “That person would be more fun to talk to,” oftentimes turns into utter disappointment anyway. My general rule is if I’m enjoying a conversation with somebody, whether it’s the most important person at the party or a waiter, I’m going to keep talking to them because it’s rare enough to enjoy a conversation.

If things are going a bit boring or slow or sluggish and it seems like the other person doesn’t feel the same, or maybe does, either way, that’s a great time to just simply say, “You know what? I’m going to go grab myself a drink, but I’ll be back around,” or I’ll say, “I’m going to run to the restroom,” or I’ll say, “I just got to go find my wife.” That’s always a good thing if your spouse, partner is there, or I’ll somebody and be like, “Oh my gosh, I promised that person I would catch up with them. I do have to, but this was so much fun talking to you.” I’ll say something like that. Of all the things I have shame on, and there are so many, that’s not one of them, and I try not to calculate how to have conversations at parties.

John August: I would say I’ve gotten much better at this over the years and I’ve done all the techniques that you described, and certainly having someone that you can use an excuse to go on to the next thing is great. The other technique is the handoff, which is basically someone who’s passed, who you’ve already had a conversation with or you know, you can say, “Oh hey, have you met Bill?” Then you introduce the two of them and then you can make your exit out of there. That can be a very useful way out of it. I will say this, honestly doing a lot of the WGA stuff where I’d be in these rooms where I’d have to have 50 conversations over the course of an evening, I got much better at basically being very present in a conversation and giving 100% full attention. It was clear I’d addressed that issue. I could just really make a clean exit, like, “It was great talking with you. Thanks for coming out,” and move on to the next thing. That’s more of a work function than a social function. It feels honest that I’m not looking for an excuse and basically saying, “This was great. I value our conversation. Now I’m taking two steps over this direction.”

Megana Rao: Are you guys sure that you want to be giving away all of your secrets for-

Craig Mazin: It’s not really a secret. I’ll tell people. I’m just like, “Yeah.” Look, it’s not like if I say I have to go to the bathroom at a party, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, he hates me now.” Sometimes I really have to pee. If they don’t see me go, if I don’t leave and go to the … By the way, when I say I have to go to the bathroom, I always go. I don’t not go. That would be horrible.

John August: Yeah, even if it’s just to shut the door and check his phone for a few minutes, he will go to the bathroom.

Craig Mazin: By the way, I’ll do that sometimes anyway. When I’m at a party, at some point I’ll hit a little bit of an overload. I’ll go to the restroom, close the door. It’s like when I’m on a plane. Sometimes I’ll do that, just to be alone. Just for one lovely minute I’m alone. It’s so nice. I try and be as honest as I can. When there are situations like when we would do live shows, after the show is over, there’d be a lineup of people that want to talk to us. They all have comments or questions, or sometimes they want a selfie or whatever it is. We’ll do those things, and I have no problem at some point saying, “I want to answer some of their questions too, but thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it,” so that I can just say the truth, which is I have a limited amount of time and I have to talk to these people too. The same thing would happen if I were on a panel at the Writers Guild, which occasionally I have done. Same deal. Afterwards you talk to people. At large parties, honestly I have no problem, if I get cornered by somebody and they’re awesome, I’ll talk to them all night. I don’t care. All night. I do not care. I have no FOMO when it comes to party conversations. 99% of them are just air. What about you, Megana? It sounds like you don’t want to give away your secrets, but how do you handle let’s just say the mixing, the mixing around?

Megana Rao: Yeah, I think the same bathroom, drink technique. What I’m more curious to hear about is, I don’t want to shame anyone else or give away too many details, but the situation if you’re at a dinner party or a place where you’re more fixed, and the conversation is just unbearably boring, like you’re hearing about somebody’s pandemic hobbies that are just … I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about anybody making sourdough starter. I don’t care. I have no interest in it. How do I transition out of that conversation where I can’t easily move around?

John August: It’s tough when you’re locked in place and you didn’t actually have a choice or you just made a wrong choice about who you sat down next to. It’s always tough, because you don’t know if it’s the kind of situation where there’s going to be one conversation for the table or if it’s going to be like there’s a conversation on your left and a conversation on your right, and if you turn to your left, then you’re shutting out the person on your right. It’s tough. I find myself trying to ask a question that will just get us off the horrible track, if possible.

Craig Mazin: Some people are nothing but horrible track generators. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. They will ruin everything with their monotonous, banal point of view, their rambling stories that go nowhere. This is why if there’s something where I’m fixed in position, a dinner party for example, I need to know that I know enough people there where I can’t get stuck alone with somebody that’s not doing it for me. Ideally there’s somebody I know will sit next to me. You have to protect yourself going into those situations. If you are single, you still need a friend. That friend can be somebody that you’re interested in. It can be somebody that’s just friend friend. It doesn’t matter. You need somebody you can anchor yourself to, who can help you and rescue you. Also if I get invited to a dinner party and I get stuck next to a super boring person, that goes into my ledger, and I’m not going back there ever again. Life is too short.

By the way, I will also just leave. I’ll leave. I don’t care. I’ll leave, because here’s the thing, everybody’s got limited time. I’m not saying because we’re all busy. I’m saying we’re going to die. Sitting next to boring people all night while other people are having fun five feet away from you, it’s brutal. No, I’ll just fucking go. I don’t care, because if I go home, I can do all sorts of things that are wonderful. I have video games and puzzles and television that I can catch up on. You know I’m really down to it if I’m doing that. I don’t have to stay there. Why? You know what? Shame on the party host, the dinner party host, for putting anyone at that table that that’s boring. The only time that I honestly get stuck is if sometimes if Melissa says in advance to me, “You need to do the following thing.” I’ll say, “Okay,” but she’ll be there, so I’ll be fine.

John August: Many dinner parties will separate spouses so that you have-

Craig Mazin: Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t do it. By the way, everyone knows. I’m sort of famous in my little town for not showing up, for leaving early, for going, “I don’t do crap like that,” because I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t like small talk. I like big talk. I like to really get into it with people. I don’t just bland-

John August: Two things that I really respect about my husband is first off he’s the only person I’ve seen who can in real life click the ignore button, where someone is trying to engage with him, and I see this floating ignore button, he’s hitting that button, it’s like, “You don’t exist to me.” I love that he’s able to do that. The other thing is he’s very honest about, “We don’t want to go to your dinner for this charity we support. We will write a check. We’re delighted to write you a check. I have no interest in actually going to the event.” Where I can happily go to the political fundraisers all the time, he’s just like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” I respect that. He is the Craig Mazin of our relationship on that whole-

Craig Mazin: By the way, they don’t want you at the dinner anyway. They just want your money. If you give them money and don’t show up to the dinner, you’ve given them extra money, the money that they would’ve had to spend to feed you. No one cares. I’ve been a host of multiple political fundraisers that I did not show up to.

John August: Yeah. There was one at your house, which was great, but it did feel like a rare exception for us to be at your house to do this thing.

Craig Mazin: Definitely, yeah. That was Beto O’Rourke. That was way, way early in his run, so early that indeed he was showing up to the likes of my house. It was smallish, but it was nice and we had fun people there. It was an interesting conversation. That was that. As things have gotten bigger and larger and so on and so forth, I just … God bless Billy Ray, our colleague Billy Ray, that does a lot of fundraising and is always collaring me for that stuff. Sometimes I’ll end up with my name on the hosting … By the way, so-

John August: You’re not going.

Craig Mazin: No. People, if you ever get an invitation to a political fundraiser and it lists a bunch of hosts, that doesn’t mean that they’re all sitting there figuring out who’s going to cook what. It means they all gave a certain amount of money. That’s what that means. That’s all it means.

John August: All right. Let’s transition to talking about not in-person gatherings, but text threads and text messages and that stuff, and how you end a text conversation, because I’ve found myself sometimes where we’ve been texting back and forth for half an hour, and sometimes it can be awkward, it’s like who’s going to end the conversation? My default move is the tap back, which is basically the thumbs up, the whatever, saying that’s it and it’s mentioned, and this conversation is done here. Is that what everyone else is doing? Megana, what are you doing when a text conversation has run its course and you need to make it clear that I’m not going to be answering your next text?

Megana Rao: I feel like either that or sometimes, “Hey, I’m about to hop in the shower, but I’ll answer when I’m back out.” I think the cadence with millennials is a little bit different. It’s fine if somebody doesn’t respond to my text for days or hours. I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me and it’s fine if the conversation fades.

John August: Being left on read doesn’t kill you?

Megana Rao: If it’s just a friend, a close friend that I’m texting or a friend that I’m catching up with, no.

Craig Mazin: Maybe I’m a millennial, because I feel like that’s the whole point of text is … Mostly. Sometimes I will think, “Oh, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say here,” but I don’t want to send some sort of formal, “It was lovely chatting.” Then I’ll think, “Will they be upset?” Then I remember, no, no one gives a shit, because if I send you a text in a conversation, and the thing doesn’t ping back, I’m not upset. I’m relieved. It’s over. We can all move on.

Megana Rao: It’s almost more awkward if … The example that I even gave before is not something that I do. It’s something that some friends will do to me. It’s more awkward if you acknowledge that the conversation is ending.

Craig Mazin: Yeah, like can’t we just be cas and just talk to each other and not have to worry about that? Text to me, sometimes for fun, what I will do is I’ll just go, “Byee.”

John August: Yeah, I’ve gotten a byee.

Craig Mazin: I love byeeee. That’s fun. I like to do that. Basically every text conversation I have at some point will devolve into GIFs and then it’s over.

John August: Yeah. Fair choices.

Megana Rao: I do feel that I have acquired a very specific skill of knowing exactly when John is done talking, in person, via email, or via text.

John August: My sentences do get shorter. It goes down from three sentences to one sentence to two words and then the conversation’s done. Even in emails I do find it sometimes there’s a bounce back and forth, and I thank you, you thank me, and then it’s all resolved, because in text it’s not quite a conversation, it’s not quite an email conversation, it’s just this weird middle ground and you don’t quite know whether you’re done talking. Megana, do you find it happens in Slack? I don’t as much, but what are you finding?

Megana Rao: You and I aren’t casually texting that much. I only text you when I really need your attention. We casually Slack sometimes. That’s the same thing where-

Craig Mazin: Sounds gross.

Megana Rao: I’m in communication with John all the time, so I don’t really think of us having a cadence there, because I’m talking to you at all times of the day.

John August: Basically.

Craig Mazin: I feel like even though Bo and I are together every day, I probably text with her more than talk. We text all the time. Oh yeah. We’re besties. We’re texties. We’re like beep beep beep beep beep GIF lol. Yeah, we’re two 12-year-old girls. It’s wonderful.

John August: The advantage of texting or Slack or whatever is that you can also scroll back and get to that thing. If I said something to Megana in person, she’d have to remember it, but if I text it to her, then it’s there for her to be able to look back at and confirm.

Megana Rao: I do remember everything you say, but yes, I hear your point.

John August: You consult with everyone else about, “What did John actually mean when he said that thing?” Now if you don’t mind, I got to go to the bathroom. It’s been great talking with you both.

Craig Mazin: Byee.

John August: Byee.

Megana Rao: Bye.

Links:

• Blog post on Transitions
• Scriptnotes Episode, 446: Back to Basics at 03:57 of this episode
• Scriptnotes Episode, 493: Opening Scenes at 26:06 of this episode
• Scriptnotes Episode, 89: Writing Effective Transitions at 44:12 of this episode
• A Trip to the Moon the 1902 Science Fiction Film by Georges Méliès
• The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
• Ron’s Gone Wrong
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Henry Adler (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, (with a segment produced by Stuart Friedel!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 450 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll discuss my proposal for the most essential and most difficult practice every screenwriter needs to follow. We’ll also be talking about set pieces, virtual rooms, and juggling multiple projects. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will revisit our general advice about moving to Los Angeles given the pandemic.

Craig, I’m so excited to have you back. Because last week you were gone. You were off on a secret mission.

Craig: Yes.

John: We can’t quite say what that secret mission is yet, correct?

Craig: No. We cannot say what it is yet, but the secret mission is coming to fruition and everyone will know soon enough. And let’s not raise hopes. I have not cured any viruses in the news. So just want to be clear about that.

John: Absolutely. You’re not the 83rd vaccine.

Craig: No.

John: You’re something smaller than that. So somewhere between like you turned in a draft and cured COVID-19. Somewhere in that range.

Craig: Yes. It’s something that ultimately will be able to be shared with everyone.

John: Yeah. So we had an episode that was already on ice that we pulled out and Sam Esmail was gracious enough to come back and record a little wrap around. It was nice to have another New Jersian in your stead.

Craig: Got to be there.

John: So he does remind me of you in certain ways. And you will never go back and listen to the old episodes, but the conversation we had was really interesting because he’s a person who really wanted to be a director and started writing because he realized he needed to write in order to have the material he wanted to direct. So he really did everything he possibly could to avoid writing. And then it turns out he’s a really good writer.

So, it was a very different perspective getting into the writing craft than most of the guests we’ve had on the show.

Craig: Yeah. I’m trying to see where he’s from in New Jersey. The name of it is not popping off to me. I don’t know if it’s like southern, or northern, or wherever the hell it is.

John: What is it about people who are born in New Jersey and identifying the small little town they’re from?

Craig: That’s what we have. So New Jersey in a way that a lot of northeastern older states do has divided itself into tiny, tiny townships. So there are some cities in New Jersey that people know of, like Trenton or Princeton to a lesser extent, but then there are a ton of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny townships, each of which generally has some sort of English-y Revolutionary kind of name.

John: So my mom was from Matawan.

Craig: Matawan, which is very close–

John: Or Red Bank.

Craig: Yeah. So Matawan and Red Bank are both very close to where I was. I would often bowl in Matawan. I would go bowling there. So I get it. Let’s see, Sam is from Gloucester. Oh, I see where he is. Yeah. That’s a weird part of New Jersey. [laughs]

John: Doesn’t even count.

Craig: Well, it’s Southwest New Jersey, which we think of that more as–

John: It’s the New Mexico of New Jersey.

Craig: It’s Delaware. It’s Pennsylvania or Delaware. It’s not like Jersey-Jersey to me. I don’t know what it is. It’s a weird Jersey. I was very Central New Jersey. I’m Katie Dippold New Jersey. I’m your mom New Jersey. Michael Gilvary, our D&D buddy, also from I believe Red Bank.

John: So our international listeners or basically anyone who grew up west of the Mississippi, all of northeast geography is just a big mess. They’re these tiny little pieces that sort of get lost in the puzzle. We just have no idea what you guys are talking about. So we said like Pennsylvania or Delaware, you could just be making that up. I have no idea how all those things fit together.

Craig: Yeah. You’re from the part of America where every state is really large and mostly square.

John: Yep. We like straight lines.

Craig: Yeah. We like squiggles.

John: All right. Let’s do some follow up. So we’ve been talking on the show about the origin of the modern screenplay format and how it evolved from being more like a shot list to the literary document that we’re kind of used to. This week my former assistant, Matt Byrne, who is a writer on Scandal and many other shows, he wrote in to say, “I was listening to your very helpful back to basics episode. There’s a world in which the live reading of a screenplay is a huge consideration in the writing in television. These are often cold reads in rooms of actors and executives and department heads, none of whom have seen one word of the script. So there’s a different literary approach and criteria to the script form borne out of the immediacy of all of that, rather than one that’s handed in to a studio or a producer who might be reading it on their office sofa, or on the iPad by the pool. So the stakes are high because you’re in this room and it’s more like live theater. So, it’s a test of every aspect of every scene which requires some cozying up to the audience and some hand-holding of your actors and a fair amount of show person ship over all. So there’s a lot more directing on the page, both with camera and performance indicators, as well as over-communication of scene direction in regards to tone and pacing and all the rest.

“So all this is way more than the holders of classic or minimalist screenwriting rules would be comfortable with. It sets a certain expectation in television scripts that may be kind of strange when you’re being read by some of these shows who are used to their own scripts having a lot more detail in them than what you’d naturally think.”

Craig: Yeah. I can certainly see where this would be the case. And it brings an entire other topic to bear which is these readings. Script readings are a part of our business. They’re a part of what we do. I hate them. I’m still not quite sure they’re actually useful. I’ve done so many of them and I’m racking my mind to think if I believe they’re useful at all. I think that the benefit that you can get from a seated reading with your cast is minimal compared to the damage that can be done which is not only serious but likely.

John: All right. So I’m going to spill the tea on two different readings I’ve had of scripts and one that was incredibly helpful and one that was incredibly destructive.

Craig: Ooh, yum.

John: So, a helpful one was on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – actually, I have two good examples. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish. Big Fish was a chance for everyone to get together. We were in this room in Alabama. It was a chance to sort of see what the whole movie felt like kind of all together with this great cast. Get everyone’s accents kind of in the same universe. And so people weren’t giving their fullest performances, but it gives everybody a chance to get together and see what the whole movie felt like, especially the parts of the movie that they weren’t in at all. Because none of these actors is going to have a great chance to sort of see what the whole shape of the movie is.

Actors tend to read the scenes that they’re in and really kind of focus on that. So they may not really know how all the pieces fit together. So, when you have one of these readings you know that everyone has read the whole script at least once. And that sounds like a very low bar to clear, but that is really important. So, Big Fish that was super helpful.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory we had all of these young actors. It was great for them to all be in the room and sort of get over their nervousness about Johnny Depp and sort of get past that. It was really good. Johnny did not really perform, but he sort of got through all the words. And that helps.

Craig: There’s the issue, isn’t it.

John: Yes. But here’s the counter example. Here’s a case where I thought the table reading did a disservice was on the first Charlie’s Angels. We all got together in this room. We were super excited. We worked really hard on the script. We were very excited about sort of getting together. The three women had really formed a good relationship at this point. And there was one supporting actor who had been cast who I had not met with who just decided I think deliberately to tank his performance and cause a panic so that we would focus on his storyline stuff. And I thought – to me it felt like a deliberate choice and I’ve kind of despised this actor every moment since that point.

So that was a case where a power play happened in that moment and it was really frustrating.

Craig: Yeah. Here’s the thing about these – I like this ad hoc topic, by the way. The issue that I have with the table reads is let’s say it’s going really well. That in and of itself can be misleading. Just because somebody is being really funny in the room on that day reading it does not mean they’ll be funny on screen. In fact, the room tends to reward the broader performances. And then what happens is other actors start getting broad to try and get the same laugh or something, because they’re getting feedback.

Executives are often swayed by that sort of thing when they shouldn’t be. And there is no sense of intimacy. The room is completely leveled. Everybody is exactly the same distance from the “camera.” So, there is no subtlety allowed. That said, what then occurs is that good actors or insecure actors, doesn’t matter which, will often tank these performances. Sometimes they tank it because they’re trying to do something, right? Because they’re being naughty. But I think a lot of times they’re tanking it because they don’t recognize this as the thing they do well. And they do not want to be judged for it. They don’t know how to do their job in that room, so they don’t do any job at all.

I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed not just good actors but huge movie stars, award-winning actors, just mumble everything into their hand the entire time. Because they don’t want to be held accountable to this table reading and they’re going to give you nothing. And their understanding is you’re not going to fire me over it, so beat it. And because of all of that I just never know what I’m supposed to learn from it.

Honestly I don’t know if I will do it again. I don’t know if it’s necessary. I just don’t. I think it’s something we do because we’re supposed to do it, we feel like we have to, but I’m not sure I want to anymore. I mean, we did one for Chernobyl and it was – honestly, I think we would have been better off just keeping that day and having a little cocktail session for everybody, where everybody can meet each other and get to know each other and talk to each other if they wanted about character. Or ask me questions or anybody questions. But the reading which went swimmingly well ultimately didn’t really give me information. It gave me non-information.

So that’s my rant on those things.

John: All right. So, two topics. First off, Mike Birbiglia, friend of the show, this is part of his process. And so as he’s working through the script he will bring his actor friends together and he will do a reading of the work sort of in progress. That to me is a little bit different than what we’re talking about. When we are talking about these live readings it’s generally right before you start production. It’s sort of that kind of last look before you get started in production.

And the same reason why it can be dangerous for us as writers, it can be an enticing opportunity for producers and other people to muck about with things. And so when they see that after really not performing all that great they might try to swap that actor out, or ask you as the writer to make a change for the sake of that actor. And that is the real issue.

I’ve also been in situations where you sort of plead with an actor to go in and just do the reading, it’s fine, you already have the part. And people have lost the part that thought they already had once they don’t live up to the expectation in the reading. It sucks. And there are actors who are really good at these situations. And there are actors who are kind of only good when you stick a camera in their face and they’re just not good in groups.

So, pros and cons.

Craig: You put your finger right on it. Like the studio or whoever is doing network, they’re saying well this is what we do and it’s purposeful. And so then it happens. And then they come to you afterwards and say, “We have drawn a conclusion from the purposeful thing we’ve done.” And it’s very hard to say to them, yes, except it’s not purposeful, therefore your conclusion isn’t valid and we shouldn’t have done any of this. We’ve learned nothing. This is a terrible scientific experiment. Because it is. It’s just bad science.

Like we use rats because in some ways they resemble humans in certain process and pathways, but in others they don’t. We try not to use rats for the things that aren’t applicable. This would be a non-rat test. It just doesn’t make sense.

John: An actual screen test where you have those actors in front of a camera, even if it’s not the real sets and everything, would be a much more accurate reflection of what kind of performance you could expect from the actor than this table reading situation.

Craig: 100%. And the truth that nobody wants to acknowledge, but it is true, is that the table read that matters, the moment where you kind of get a sense of whether or not you’ve chosen well and the words are working, is on the day and particularly the first week. Because 400 decisions are made that first week based on what you’re watching. And nobody wants to think about that because it’s scary, but it’s true. That’s when you start to learn things. That’s when you can fine tune things. That’s when you can make adjustments. Because at last you’re looking at the thing you’re supposed to be doing, not some other thing you’re not.

John: Yep. A topic which we’ll try to get to in future episodes is there were a bunch of pilots that were in production when the pandemic hit and everything had to shut down. It’s been so fascinating talking to friends who have these half-finished pilots. Because they are trying to cut together their half-finished pilots and the TV season is still kind of happening and so these things are being picked up or not being picked up based on how many days of shooting they were into their schedule. And some shows had put all their big meaty action stuff at the top and other stuff hadn’t happened yet. It’s a really strange situation for these shows caught in this bubble.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And in some of these cases that table read which they may not even really want to have is the last experience networks and studios have with the show they had envisioned.

Craig: Well, it’s useless. I wish I could just convince them all it’s useless. I mean, unless there’s something specific that a showrunner or screenwriter can glean – repeatedly and reliably glean – they shouldn’t do them.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They just shouldn’t do them.

John: All right. To a new topic–

Craig: Yay.

John: Virtual rooms. So last week on the show I asked listeners to send in their experiences with virtual rooms and we heard back from some writers as well as assistants. So Megana has been going through the emails that have been coming in and also just reaching out to folks to sort of see, hey, how is life in these virtual writer’s rooms?

So, a couple things we heard back consistently. One is about the issue of the whiteboard. And so generally when you’re breaking a series and episodes in a TV writer’s room you have a bunch of whiteboards up and that’s how you’re planning out season arcs, character arcs, what happens in this episode. There’s a lot – you’re just looking at a lot of whiteboards. And that’s the general planning process for stuff.

So different virtual rooms are trying different techniques for how they’re doing that stuff. So, a shared Google doc is a really common way people are doing it. There’s other corkboard type software that people are trying. One writer wrote, “This room has been really tough because there’s no quick way to bring up a character’s season arc. Usually we can all just look at a board. Now it’s like a ten minute ordeal.” So you’re used to being surrounded by this visual information and you just don’t have it the same way if you’re all sharing a Zoom call.

Craig: Yeah. I think if I were running a room I would probably make sure that all of my writers – I would just send out tablets, iPads or whatever. And that tablet would just be for a shared view of a corkboard. So, whatever is on Zoom is on your laptop, that’s fine. But then you have this other thing you can just glance over at just the way you would in a room that’s separate, so you’re not switching back and forth between things. Because I imagine that’s where it gets a little dicey.

John: One of the things we’ll say at the end of this is we mostly heard what’s challenging. What I’d love to get to in the next couple weeks is some shared what are best practices. What are rooms finding that’s really useful? Because we’re kind of all in this together.

So, let’s continue with what’s challenging right now. The challenge of social cues and when to speak. Because when you’re in a room with physical people it’s pretty easy to announce that you kind of want to say something, or if someone is talking too much it’s easy to sort of make it clear that, OK, shut up a little bit.

Someone wrote, “It’s really hard to gauge how the room is feeling or how someone is responding to a pitch.” And when we say pitch, like when you’re pitching a joke, or a take, or how to approach this scene. “Can’t read anybody’s tells or body language. Makes it really hard to fall into a rhythm. I still love everyone in my room. It’s a really open, really great room. But still tough getting into a groove because it’s all virtual.”

Another writer says, “Even when you’re on a conference call you’re still very isolated. When there’s a great pitch you’re happy but it fades pretty quickly because you just can’t feel everyone else’s excitement.”

Craig: Well, I can absolutely see that being an issue. And I don’t know what the answer. I’m excited to hear if somebody solved that. I mean, you know, I’m such a weird lone wolf that it never – it doesn’t come up that much for me personally, but I can see that being an issue.

John: Now with Mythic Quest you were in the room on that first season some. Have you been in any virtual rooms since everything got broken apart?

Craig: Not virtual rooms. I did come back and do some early room work with the team to set up season two, which obviously we had to hit pause on in terms of production. But since that time I have had a number of sort of smaller discussions with Rob McElhenney or Megan Ganz or David Hornsby. So there have been further discussions, but they haven’t been a full big room type of thing.

John: There’s no online version of sort of what would have happened in that room?

Craig: For me, no. They may very well have been having those. But I’m a little bit more of a–

John: A sniper?

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. That’s the most charitable version of it. I’m sure they would be like, they’re more like–

John: Ruiner of dreams.

Craig: Well, he shows up early, gets us all whipped up to do something incredibly ambitious and difficult, and then never comes back.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s sort of my thing.

John: Another thing Megana heard a lot about was exhaustion. Someone wrote, “I think the one thing people don’t talk enough about is how we’re exhausted all the time in a virtual room. We’re much more tired than you usually are in a normal room and I think it’s because when you’re in a room breaking story together you feed off each other’s excitement. You get energized by a good pitch.”

And I think that’s also a general problem with video conferencing I’ve noticed and other people have been pointing out is that you kind of feel like you’re always on when you’re on a video conference. You don’t know when someone is watching you or not watching you. So that constant sort of readiness which when you’re in a room full of people you sort of have a sense of when you can sort of slink back and when you can sit forward. It’s just different when you’re on a video conference all day.

Craig: Yeah. There’s this interesting psychological thing where if I’m in a room with somebody, let’s say we’re all having a kind of television room like setting. So maybe ten of us are sitting around a table and we’re talking and one person is kind of just like looking down at their pad and doodling a little bit, but they don’t seem uninterested, this is how they’re thinking. You can just tell, you know what, they need to go somewhere and think for a bit. I understand it because they’re doing it in front of me which means they know I see them doing it and we all get it.

And when we’re on video I think sometimes people look and they see somebody not paying attention or perhaps doing something else and they just think, oh, they think they’re getting away with this but they’re not. And it’s a different vibe.

John: Yeah. It’s also I think exhausting because when you’re waiting for your time to speak you’re sort of always cued up and it’s a little bit harder to know when to break in and when to be able to get in on things. There have been a lot of video conferences I’ve been on lately where I haven’t said a word the whole time. I’ve basically just been muted the whole time. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, but I didn’t have something that was so compelling to say that I felt like I’m going to try to break into the conversation flow or digitally raise my hand. I’m just going to be an observer in this conversation.

And that’s where you lose people because in a writer’s room you’re paying those people for their time and their brains to be able to speak up and contribute. And it’s challenging in these situations.

Craig: Particularly in comedy where when you’re in a comedy room it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a moment where some sort of riff magic occurs and there’s sort of a rolling pile of pitches and ideas and lines and thoughts as people are growing a concept. And inevitably two or more people will be speaking at once. And your ability to process that is actually quite good. You can hear multiple things happening. And overlap is part of the fun of it. Unfortunately given the way the technology functions overlap is a disaster on video conferencing. And inevitably one person wins out. Sometimes you think you’re not being heard and you are. But most of the time a bunch of people are just gone. They’re obliterated. And so you’re not getting – OK, sorry, I didn’t hear, what was your pitch? And then you’re like, oh god, it really wasn’t – it’s already dead.

I can see it being a real issue.

John: Lastly, the question of whether these virtual rooms open up opportunities for writers who are not in Los Angeles. So we’ll get a little bit more into this in our bonus topic for Premium members, but a couple people have reached out on Twitter saying like, “Oh, great, with virtual rooms I don’t have to move to Los Angeles. I could still stay in Chicago. I could stay wherever.”

And to me – I hear you laughing.

Craig: [laughs] Yeah.

John: I think it’s a little early to be going for that. Because virtual rooms are a stop gap for now.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And while I think there’s things that studios love about them, and the ability to just stick people together and get scripts out of them, there is still some correlation between the room and physical production. And once physical production resumes you’re going to want to be able to communicate between those two environments. And so these virtual rooms may be good for short seasons that can be pre-written and figured out ahead of time, but for something like a Chicago Fire I don’t know that it’s really going to be realistic that that one writer is living in Florida the full time. I just don’t know that’s going to happen.

Craig: It’s not. It’s just not, because of the aforementioned things we’re talking about. There are certain things about rooms that work really well in person. The whole function of a room is to collaborate a number of individual minds into one large hive mind of narrative invention. And so what we’re doing now is the best we can do, but it’s not what we want to do. And all the people in these virtual rooms were in the non-virtual room prior. And they will return to the non-virtual room.

I do think that we are going to see more and more meetings held this way.

John: And as we said if I never have to drive to the west side at 5pm I won’t be grateful to the pandemic, but I will be grateful for the technology that allows me to not drive to the west side at 5pm.

Craig: Yeah. The comfort level has increased dramatically. So whereas if I had said before, “Hey, Casey Bloys, I definitely want to have this meeting with you at 4:30, but I don’t want to drive. I don’t feel like driving. You’re not worth it. [laughs] So, we’ll video conference instead,” he would be like, “What? That’s kind of a dick move.”

But now if I’m like, hey, would it be OK if we Zoom’d it anyway just because we’re all good at it now? And hopefully he would think that that would be OK. Not that I don’t want to – I mean, there’s certain times where I’m happy to go to Santa Monica and then those certain times are between 11:30 and 1:30. And that’s not it.

John: Yeah. This next week I’ll be going out with a pitch and here’s the pros. So we’re doing this all virtually. We can go to a lot of places. The list is probably longer because we can visit those places virtually, which is true and is good and that’s wonderful. But it is going to be exhausting. And just because we could stick four of these things in a day because I’m not having to drive around town, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be doing four of these in a day.

Craig: Right.

John: So it’s going to take a lot of my week to do this pitching, but I’ve gotten better at it. And we’ll talk about this on a future show, but with experimentation I’m much better at being able to show slides and be able to talk and do stuff. And so it’s required some rehearsal, but it’s been interesting.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Yeah. Last thing that an assistant noted is that while many of these virtual rooms do have a writer’s assistant who is responsible for gathering up the notes from everything and doing all the standard thing a writer’s assistant would do, they generally don’t have writer’s PAs anymore. And so that’s like a whole job that’s been lost from most of these rooms. Because that writer’s PA was largely responsible for the lunch order. And that lunch order goes away because there’s no lunch.

Some shows are actually giving a $75 credit to writers to make up for the free lunch that they would be getting. But that doesn’t pay for that one person who used to be employed.

Craig: Yeah. I got to say that’s a tough one to sort of justify. I do think that anyone running a virtual room would be well served by a mechanism by which people who are not necessarily there to contribute steadily, like for instance a writer’s assistant who is mostly listening and writing, can signal the showrunner there’s something important or worth saying. A little light could go on. That would be helpful.

John: Yeah. What I’ve seen some people do is you text to the person who is running the meeting to say like, hey, I have a thing. And so they can sort of naturally fold that in and it doesn’t have to be a public raising your hand of things. So, I’m sure – that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d love for people to write in to us with sort of their suggestions for best practices for virtual rooms. Because even though this is a stop gap, we’re going to be living with these for a number of months. And so as we get better at doing this stuff let’s share the knowledge to everyone else who has to do one of these rooms.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Indeed. All right. So now to our marquee topic for this episode. So after 450 Scriptnotes episodes–

Craig: Whoa.

John: We’ve been discussing our advice on screenwriting and sort of what the process and the craft is like, but this last week I had an insight. So, like a lot of writers most of my insights come right when I’m trying to fall asleep. And so what I’ve taken to doing recently is I have a stack of index cards beside my bed and if it’s something I need to remember I just write it on an index card and stick it by the door so I remember it in the morning. But it just gets it out of my head and onto a card.

And so here is what I wrote down. Craig, only the interesting scenes.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s what I’ve been doing wrong. Goddammit.

John: So basically a fundamental piece of advice I wanted to offer to all screenwriters is only include the interesting scenes. And that sounds so incredibly obvious, but it’s actually really challenging. It’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve told people to do on this podcast. Is because as a reader we can tell when we’re not interested, but as a writer sometimes you work really hard to justify why those uninteresting scenes need to stay in your script. And so I want to spend a few minutes sort of wrestling through the problem of uninteresting scenes.

Craig: It’s a great idea. And I think that it’s a very common thing for new writers to think that the movies that they see, their experience to those movies psychologically is that there are three or four scenes that make them go, oh my god. And the rest are sort of filler in-between. And so that’s how they approach the writing. What they don’t understand is that everything gets diminished in that sense and every scene in the writing must be important, compelling, and significant. And four of them must be really huge.

John: Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. And so here’s what we’re not saying. We’re not saying every scene in your script has to be like on a 10 out of 10 and sort of like the most compelling, most dramatic everything you’ve ever seen. You do need ups and downs and peaks and valleys. And these scenes need to be interesting in different ways, so it’s not just banging that drum as hard as you can in every scene. But to not give you permission to include those scenes that are boring. And so let’s talk about what boring or uninteresting scenes mean.

So, these are scenes where I don’t care what the characters are doing or saying. Or scenes where nothing is happening. Or probably more subtly, things are happening but they’re sort of exactly the things I expected were going to happen. So, two scenes ago I could have told you this scene is going to happen and this scene happens exactly the way I thought it would happen.

Craig: Yeah.

John: A classic mistake of characters telling each other things that I already know.

Craig: Oof.

John: Oof. Scenes were there’s no emotion, no excitement, there’s no emotional engagement between the characters in the moment. And really from a reader’s perspective any moment where I’ve stopped leaning in. Where I’ve stopped being curious about what’s happening in this moment and what’s going to happen next. That’s a sign that this scene is actually not interesting.

And here are the common excuses for how we’ve gotten to these scenes. As a writer I know that I need to go from X to Y. That there’s a thing that needs to happen and so like, OK, well, I’m just going to bite the bullet and have it happen here.

Craig: Right.

John: My hero needs to learn this information. I’m setting up something great. That’s probably the most insidious trap. I know this is not the best moment but it’s a path that’s leading me to something else.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: These are justifications we make for including uninteresting scenes. But they’re not good justifications.

Craig: Yeah. You have to have an inner, like a little guy on your shoulder, a little lady, not the devil, the angel one. But the angel one is saying, “Hey, that’s not enough.” Because there’s just a certain thing, like you say, listen, I know that I want her to go to this store and buy this thing. Because she’s going to give this thing to her husband later. And I need her to buy it because I need her to see her make that choice. That’s not enough. You just have to know that’s not enough. There has to be something else happening in that scene, in the background, or to her, or in her relationship with the person selling it to her. Something has to happen to make me go, whoa.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Or else it’s not enough. And you just have to know that.

John: Absolutely. So, here’s the problem when you include these uninteresting scenes is that if you have one boring page in your script that’s potentially one boring minute in your movie. One boring minute is a really long time. If you’ve ever sat in an editing room looking at one minute of film, oh my god, it’s so long. And when you suffer through one boring minute you’ll do anything you can to cut out of that minute or sort of get rid of that minute. You will do savage things to sort of get rid of that terrible minute. And the reason why you try to get rid of it is you’re breaking the social contract you have between the audience and the movie, or between the writer and the reader. And that contract is that if the viewer/the reader gives you their full attention you will make it worth their while. And for that minute you are breaking that contract because it’s not worth it for this minute to be sitting there. And if it becomes another minute or another minute you’ve lost them. They’re not coming back to your story. You’ve failed to engage them.

So often I think the trap is that we keep thinking about the function of a scene without worrying enough about the actual form of the scene. And good scenes have to do both. They have to be these beautiful, ornate, attractive pieces of architecture that actually still also meet their needs. Their bridges that sort of get us from this moment to that moment, but are actually interesting to walk on while we’re walking on those bridges.

Craig: And also someone is going to have to spend all day shooting it.

John: Yes.

Craig: And it’s going to get cut. You’re absolutely right. There is a shaken faith that occurs. When you watch a scene in a movie and you feel like you just didn’t need to see it, or in your mind you went somewhere. Then what’s happened is you have removed a bit of trust from the filmmaker. And you’ve withheld it. And the good ones, the good scripts, the good shows, the good movies, they make me feel so comfortable. When I watch something from Vince Gilligan or Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz like Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad there is not ever one minute where I think, “Mm, is this going to work? Or why am I here? Does it…?” I just trust them. They have earned my trust because they’re never boring. They just don’t put in boring scenes.

And I like to think of things, because I think that interesting has to be the default setting, rather than saying that something isn’t interesting I just say it’s now boring. It’s binary. Either you are actively drawing me in or I’m leaving you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So these people maintain trust with us. And when you fail to do that. And certainly as a reader I’ll tell you it’s even worse. Because when you’re watching something, well, all right, fine, I’ll just keep watching it.

John: Yeah. Inertia will just keep you going for a while. And you have to actually work pretty hard for me to get to like, “OK, I’m giving up on this thing.”

Craig: 100%.

John: But reading? Reading is so much more work that like if I have any excuse to not flip a page I’ll stop.

Craig: Well, even if you have to read it.

John: Yes.

Craig: You will just accelerate. You will accelerate and the kind of speed read will turn to a skim will turn into barely a flip just so that you can justify saying that you read it. But you cannot go through those experiences with those things. And it’s why when I’m going through my work or when I’m working on something with someone else and I’m going through their work I am meticulous and it’s something that I got drilled into me violently by Scott Frank and gently and gingerly by Lindsay Doran, but it was this notion that there is not fine enough view to improve things toward interest. Get as granular as you can. Be as ruthless as you can. It’s never good enough. That’s not a thing. You have to finish that scene and go, no, no, no, everyone get away from it. This is correct. Leave it alone. This is good. Moving on. That’s what you’re always aiming for.

John: So here’s the challenge that I would like to propose to our listeners is to take one of your scripts and go through it scene by scene and ask yourself, and be honest, is this scene interesting. And does this scene in and of itself not just sustain your interest but also actively interest you. And hopefully many of your scenes you’ll put a checkmark like, yep, this is interesting to me, this is interesting to me. I really want to see this scene. And not just because it’s in my movie, but because I think this is an interesting and a good scene and this is compelling to me.

But for the scenes that don’t get the checkmarks, then you really need to think about what is the hard work that is going to need to happen here. One of the first options is could I just cut this scene all together? And a lot of times you probably could. A lot of times you’re putting that scene in there because you feel like it has to be there, but there’s maybe a way to not include that scene.

But if the function of that scene is necessary, like a crucial bit of story needs to happen, then you’re going to need to really look at like well what are the obstacles keeping this from being an interesting scene or how can I reimagine the scene in a way that is actually interesting and compelling. So it doesn’t become one of the worst scenes of my script but it becomes one of the best scenes of my script. And really try to rise to that challenge on every scene in one of your screenplays.

Craig: If you run into trouble and you think to yourself I’ve got a problem, this is a load-bearing wall. It’s just a boring wall. Then your job is to think how could it not be? And it’s actually a wonderful writing experiment to say, right, this is otherwise an incredibly mundane, boring scene. Now what can I do to make this exciting? Here’s a very simple thing. In any scene if somebody in about 10 seconds in cuts themselves on the neck and is spurting blood but has to complete the scene, this is now a much more interesting scene.

Now, you can’t do that all the time, nor should you. But there are all sorts of things that recontextualize the action of things to make them terrifying, or funny, or compelling, or weird. All of those tools are at your disposal. You don’t need to throw it out because you’re bored by it inherently. You need to ask why is this not yet really a scene. It needs to be its own movie. What if that’s the only scene you can show people? Make it better.

John: Yeah. A thing we’ve said on the show many times is that in the really great movies that I love you can take any scene from that movie and sort of plant it in some fertile dirt and it would grow into the shape of that movie. It basically has the DNA of the movie in every scene. And so that is a thing we’re talking about. There’s a quality of what’s in this scene or this sequence. You can go as granular as you want to get to. But within that little bit of movie is the whole essence of what the movie is about and what the movie feels like. Tonally how it all engages and what the engine of that film is.

So, you can feel free to write in with examples from my own work that sort of don’t meet this threshold where I have uninteresting scenes in my script. And go for it. But I do think that at least the movies I’m best known for there are not uninteresting scenes that have made it through to the final cut. And I think that’s because I’ve been pretty ruthless with myself over the years about not sticking in those scenes that are just perfunctory, that are just sort of complacent to get to the next thing that needs to happen. That they’re not just little lulls between the big moments. They are hopefully all engaging moments along the way.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, you definitely want to hope that that’s your goal but that is what you achieve. You are usually aided by any number of collaborators who are there to watch and consider and advise. The movies that I had the least tolerance for any kind of wiggle room or lack of lean in were the spoof movies I did. They are relentless. They are sprints. And so you start running, you start telling jokes, you do not stop telling jokes until the credits roll. Period. The end. No space. No time. No breath. No pause. They are typically 80 minutes. Sometimes they’re 80 minutes including credits. I mean, because you’re compressing essentially a movie and a half into one. Because there’s no air. It’s brutal.

It’s also a great exercise, but it’s a miserable exercise.

John: Now, contrast that with Chernobyl which has fair moments of air. There’s moments which are not pressure cookers.

Craig: Right.

John: Especially in the middle episodes. But it’s always consistently interesting because you’re always concerned for those characters, curious about what’s going to happen next. You see characters approaching things with different energies and with different motives. And you’re curious how it’s all going to work because you’ve set up the things and you’ve created these moments that are all going to work. But in setting up those moments you didn’t just plod along and bore us with why these characters are on the path they’re on. Each of those scenes that got to us the place were also interesting.

Craig: Well, thank you. I mean, I hope so. And there’s certainly moments where you can be visually poetic and that alone even if it’s not advancing the story in a specific way, it is imparting a feeling. And it’s imparting a feeling effectively. So those are moments in the editing room where you really watch and you go, yeah, that’s great. That’s beautiful. Let’s keep that.

Sometimes the best way to approach stuff is to fake people out. People love to be fooled. This is why we love going to magic shows. And comedy shows are just magic shows with your mouth. That’s all they are. You’re just fooling people.

For instance, there’s a shot in Chernobyl Episode 3 I think where we see a bulldozer just rumbling along. And it’s like, OK, well it’s a bulldozer. And then you reveal that the bulldozer is essentially bulldozing crops in exactly the same formation that a harvester would be harvesting the crops. So there is an irony and there’s a punchline. There’s a visual punchline.

And you can actually get quite a bit of points I think from people when you get them leaning towards, oh this is being boring, and then you go, surprise. There was a plan. They like this.

John: Yeah. My One Cool Thing to set it up and spoil it, the first 12 minutes has no dialogue. And yet it’s really compelling and interesting, and partly because you’re waiting and wondering when is somebody going to speak. And yet it works really well. So it doesn’t mean that everything has to be chock-a-block pacing action suspenseful. It’s really about what is going to keep people compelled and interested in what you’re doing.

Craig: I agree with you.

John: That’s nice to hear once.

Craig: Once.

John: Once. Once or twice. The last little bit of advice I’ll have along this line is that a lot of what we’re talking about is sort of going through the script that you’ve already written or the script that you’re writing in front of you. This mindset is also helpful when you’re conceiving of the pitch or describing the project to other people. I’m thinking about a recent project that I was working on and they came back to me with this well what if this, what if that. And they had all these things which were thematically yes. I get why they’re going for that. But I could answer and answer really honestly, “I don’t know how to make that interesting.”

Craig: Right.

John: And there’s nothing wrong with that idea. But I could tell you as the craft person who actually has to do this I don’t think I can actually make that compelling in the moment. And I was able to win some of those discussions just by sort of being honest about I don’t know how that’s interesting. And that’s really how when you’re conceiving of a project from the point of view of how will those moments along the way be interesting that’s helpful.

Craig: Yeah. It’s really hard for people. Because anything is possible before something is done. And there are all sorts of examples. We talked about this in our How to Give Notes thing about you can caught up in this example sickness where you’re like, well, in this movie it wasn’t boring. Well, yeah, but in this movie they didn’t do any of that. OK, well but in this movie they did. And you’re just like, yeah, each one of those movies wanted to be the thing it wanted to be. And this one wants to be the thing it wants to be. And the person who knows that is me. So, just quiet. Just be quiet and let me do the thing that I do. And then we can all discuss. And we’ll have this discussion many, many times. But until you sort of see it all in one you may think that you need more than you need, or you may think that you need less than you need.

John: Yeah. All right, let’s segue to more than a scene, a sequence. And this is a discussion on set pieces. This came up because last week I was talking with a TV writer. She was out pitching a feature. It was an open writing assignment. And the producer said they wanted to hear two or three set pieces for this comedy. And she was asking me basically what do they really mean by set pieces? Because coming from a TV perspective she had a certain idea of what a set piece was. And set piece is something that you’ll hear us talking about in production because it’s generally a big thing to do in production, like there’s a whole discussion of how we’re going to handle the set piece. But also in narratives we use the term set piece. So I thought let’s have a quick discussion about, Craig, what do you think of when I say a set piece?

Craig: Well in feature comedy it means one thing. A set piece means a comic sequence that is self-contained with a premise. And then it plays out. So, simplest example I can think of right now is in Bridesmaids they go to a bridal shop and they all have food poisoning and it plays out. That is a set piece. So it always has a premise. The premise drives action through. There is always some sort of setting. And then the jokes escalate. It is not a joke, but multiple jokes.

Set pieces in comedies can sometimes be fights. They can be action sequences that are funny. They can be a situation like that. We had a set piece in Scary Movie – I mean, Scary Movies are mostly set pieces. Brenda played by Regina Hall dies and there’s a funeral for her. And a fight ensues at the funeral that escalates and gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. It ends up with electrocutions. That’s a set piece.

So, premise, escalation, play it out.

John: Yeah. So set pieces are little mini movies within your movie. And when Craig says beginning, middle, and end, that’s it. Because there’s a whole arc to them. Another way to think about it is if you just saw that set piece excerpted on YouTube it would make sense. So, independent of knowing who the characters were at the start and who they are at the end, you can get a sense of sort of what’s happening there.

A musical number from a musical will tend to be a set piece. Because there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a flow to it. There’s an arc to it. And so when this writer was saying well what do I need to be able to pitch in terms of set piece, you need to describe what that action is. So what Craig was describing with Scary Movie it’s like if you were pitching that moment you would say like, “So we’re at this funeral and this happens,” and then you show what the escalation is and sort of how it wraps up. And what the producers are asking for are two or three examples, set pieces, that would match the overall premise of this open writing assignment.

Craig: That’s exactly right. And it’s not complicated, but I will say that I remember hearing the phrase “set piece” when I was hired with my writing partner to work on our first movie, which did end up having quite a few set pieces in it. It was a movie for Disney. And I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I just didn’t know what it meant. I’d never heard it before. I did not know. I thought it meant something that had to take place on a set. Which wasn’t a bad guess.

John: No, not at all.

Craig: But also wrong.

John: But wrong. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. So, two weeks back I was posting on the blog about getting things done in a pandemic which is a to-do list of sorts that I fill out every morning and I sort of plan what my work is going to be that day. And I found it really pre-pandemic but it’s also been very useful during the pandemic. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Adam wrote in to say, “I spied an Easter egg of sorts on the peek page of your to-do list. You have eight writing projects. I’m super curious how you manage so many projects at once? Firstly in terms of servicing the scripts and other filmmakers and your time and focus. But also in terms of expectation and exclusivity from those paying you. Is it understood that writers have many projects on the go, or does it have to be explicit in contracts? Or perhaps it just comes with a career progress and a studio has to deal with an in-demand writer being on many projects at once?”

Craig: Hmm.

John: So, what Adam is describing is on my to-do list I can sort of fold back and it will show just a reminder list of these are all the things I’m kind of working on, the things that are in my head. And so if I’m thinking like what else do I need to work on I can look at this little peek page and it’s like, oh that’s right, I need to be doing that thing for Arlo Finch, or whatever. So it’s a reminder of like, OK, these are all the irons that are in the fire.

So, first answer is I’m not writing all those things at once. And some of those are in different stages of progress. Some of those projects I’ve been working on for like 10 years. And, you know, small progress is made at a time. In general I’m working on one thing, one paid assignment at a time. And the exceptions will be if I’m delivering a draft and I’m pitching something else, or something is handed in and I’m just doing the rewrite on something else. But I’m not on the clock for two people at once with very, very rare exception.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, that’s basically how it goes. Here in my office we have a whiteboard with the various projects that are in play. They’re in different stages. Some of them will be getting done. Some of them have been done but I may need to go back and revisit for another thing. But they’re different kinds of things. And, yeah, every now and then you have to kind of do a little bit of double duty. It happens. But generally speaking you just try and – you’re going to be hired for more than one thing at once. So there’s this classic thing where everybody – they’ll call you and say, “We really want you to do this.” And I’ll say, well, I can’t because I’m doing this. And then they say, “Well, just, you know, like you can squeeze it in and just do it while you’re doing that.” And I’m like, well, here’s the thing. Will you be OK when I do that to you with something else that somebody else tells me to squeeze into your thing? And they say, “No.” [laughs]

And I say well there you go. I try and be – the good news is if you hire me then you know I will be doing your work responsibly and professionally. Yes, every now and then someone calls me and says, “I need a week on something,” and I’ll go, all right, I can hit pause on this, do a week, come back. It’s not the end of the world. No one is going to cry foul. Everybody understands it’s the way the business works. But, yeah, we balance lots of things but in the moment we are traditionally working on a thing.

John: Yep. Absolutely true. So when I was doing the Arlo Finch books, during the time I was in a draft on those Arlo Finch books I was really just doing Arlo Finch for that whole time. If I needed to do a week on a project or fix a little thing on Aladdin I would do it. But in general I was full time on that. There’s one big writing project, but there’s always a lot of little things that sort of stack up. And the reason why I keep those on my list, and some of those were place-holder like fake code names because I did recognize that I’m putting this on my blog so people are going to see what’s there, some of those are things that are kind of in the pitchy kind of stage. And I just need to remember that I have to move the ball forward a little bit on that because this is an animation project that is going to take five years anyway. So I have to be making some forward progress on that or else it will never happen.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

John: Do you want to take the question from Chris?

Craig: Yeah. Sure. Chris writes, “In terms of No Work Left Behind, I’ve always understood this to mean don’t leave pages in a pitch meeting after you’ve run through the thing. Don’t give executives a reason to pour over a document that they will almost certainly find fault in or obsess over some minor detail. But as I watch the WGA video and hear you guys discuss it on the pod…”

Oh, god, you know I hate it when they say pod.

John: Yeah. Pod Save America.

Craig: Birbiglia says pod. I know. Everyone says pod.

John: It’s the worst thing Pod Save America has done.

Craig: I know. I know. And everyone calls it the pod. Ugh. I’m going to fix it. “But as I watch the WGA video and hear you guys discuss it on the podcast, I’m curious if I’ve been misunderstanding the concept. Does No Pages Left Behind also apply to the development process with producers? For years I’ve sent pages to producers in order to show them where my head is at or use as a conversation starter. Has this been a mistake? Should I only work up a pitch verbally from now on?

“Example, I’ve been trying to zero in on the strongest pitch for a spec pilot I wrote. I’ve been working with the producer for a while refining the script, batting around ideas via email, and trading documents back and forth to clarify the thinking. But after hearing your renewed call for No Pages Left Behind, that is to say no free work, I can’t square how best to proceed. Should I tell him that from now on no more pages? We’ll only discuss verbally? Should that be the rule going forward? I want to be on the right side of this, especially if I’ve been doing it all wrong. But I want to make I sure I [grock] it 100%”

Grock. Great–

John: Yes. Great word.

Craig: I think from like the ‘50s, ‘60s, Robert Heinlein kind of thing. It is. It’s Heinlein. Oh, Nailed it.

John: Heinlein.

Craig: It’s Heinlein. 1961. So it means to like really get something.

John: Yeah. To know and to love all at once. To be water brothers or something.

Craig: Yep.

John: All right. No Writing Left Behind. So, I was one of the champions of this back in my time on the WGA board. Here’s what it means. First off, it does mean the first thing we’re talking about which is when you go on a pitch don’t leave your pages behind and don’t email the pages behind. Keep things in a verbal realm to the degree it is possible. Just don’t give them pages, because when you give them pages it messes things up for you and for every writer after you.

Now, in situations where you’re developing a spec thing, it’s different than an open writing assignment or for anything where you’re going in to pitch on their property. You own all of this. And so if you choose to write up stuff you own the things that you’re writing. So if it’s helpful for you and your process to write that stuff down and to share it with these producers who you’re going to be taking this out on the town and the pitch with, OK. I still think there are some problems with that. I still think the basic problems of you are potentially making a lot more work for yourself is there. But, it’s still your thing. So you don’t have to worry about getting micro-noted on all this stuff or them falling out of love with your project because of little obsessive details. Because you still own the whole thing.

So you can do whatever spec work you want to do. You can write that whole script. You can write pitch pages. You can sell a treatment if you wanted to. If that is helpful to you, you can do it. But what No Writing Left Behind means is when you’re going in to land a job don’t be giving them writing because writing is what they should be paying you to do.

Craig: And I think that’s probably the best way of thinking about the rule of thumb. If you’re supposed to be getting paid for this writing prospectively then you should be paid for it. You shouldn’t give it to them. You’re not supposed to be paid for the prospective spec writing. That spec is going to be purchased. That’s literary material that would be purchased and then you will be employed to rewrite it and expand it and develop it and write more episodes.

But when it comes to a company that’s saying, yeah, we’re looking to hire somebody to rewrite this or to write that, then you’re supposed to get paid to do that work. So don’t give it to them for free. Period. The end.

John: Do you want to take the question from Zander?

Craig: I do. Zander asks, “In our post-COVID world, Hollywood is starting to experiment more and more with VOD and Premium VOD. News outlets state that Trolls World Tour has earned an estimated $100 million to date in PVOD sales. My question is what do these numbers mean? How do they compare to box office revenue with respect to how much money goes to the studio versus how much money goes elsewhere? And what does this mean for screenwriters and residuals?”

John, what do you think?

John: These are all good questions. So, Zander, first I’ll say $100 million to date, that’s good I guess. I mean, considering it was a choice between zero and $100 million I think Universal is really happy with $100 million. There’s a reason why they’re not putting the Bond movie on VOD right now because they know they can make more money theatrically. But for some of the projects that were originally theatrically going to be released and now they’re going to Video on Demand, you see that they’re ones that they were kind of on the bubble about whether they were going to be big hits and it felt like the right choice to bring them home. So I get why some of those movies are going that direction.

In terms of how much does that compare with what a studio would be getting from a movie theatrically versus on home video, a useful way to think about it is the movie theaters take about half of the money that comes in. It really varies on what weekend you’re looking at, but a lot of money does go to the theatrical distribution part of it. So the studio gets maybe half of those dollars back in. As opposed to this Video on Demand, they’re getting a tremendous amount of that money back in. And they’re not getting all of it, but a lot more of it in. So they’re getting more money in.

But, if this movie had been released theatrically it would still be making a ton of money once it was released on video anyway. So, basically they’re cutting off one of their revenue streams in order to get this money just on the Video on Demand.

So, there’s no magic way to sort of compute how it’s all going to work.

Craig: Yeah. We’ve got a little bit of a weird teeter-totter going on here. Because John’s right. If it goes into the theaters that is a primary exhibition. They make a certain amount of money. Basically they split that 50/50 with the movie theaters. And then there is this secondary ancillary viewing market that will be on Premium VOD. They’ll generate a certain amount from that from repeat viewing, which is a very common thing. Rentals, and purchases, and so on and so forth.

One way of looking at it is, well, they just did really well on the market they were going to be doing really well on anyway. John’s right. Instead of a 50/50 split in Premium Video on Demand it’s probably more like 80/20, I think. So the studio is getting about 80% of that money. So that’s great. But now let’s look at the other side of the teeter-totter. To put movies in theaters is expensive. The marketing costs are vastly higher. If you’re just running it on Premium Video on Demand there’s a certain kind of built-in marketing effort that you can use on your own platform.

So, if Warner Bros now has HBO Max. If Warner Bros wants to put out a movie on PVOD instead of on – they may have some special way to promote it on HBO Max. And then you can go ahead and make this special purchase. My guess is the marketing costs will probably not be as big.

So, you can see where maybe there’s some cost savings there. And of course it costs money to actually make and distribute the stuff. Even though it’s all digital, there’s a whole physical process of servers that send files and yada-da-da-da.

So, hard to say. Hard to say. But we can answer this part of your question. What does it mean for screenwriters and residuals? Well, to the extent that we may be getting cheated out of residuals from movies not being in movie theaters, the answer is no impact at all. We don’t get residuals for that. We don’t get residuals for movies airing in theaters. We don’t get residuals for movies airing on airplanes, oddly enough. The only way it will impact us negatively is if a lack of theatrical exhibition somehow reduces the amount of sales on Premium VOD.

But I got to say I’m skeptical of that. See, it may be that the studios ultimately end up not making as much money in this model, but I think we – writers, directors, and actors – will probably make more. Because more people will ultimately have to purchase this through PVOD or VOD. There is no primary [residualous] exhibition availability. So, we’re going to get residuals on all of it, instead of just some of it.

Now, I can absolutely see the companies coming back to us and trying to get rid of that. I can smell it. But at least for now I think this probably works better for us.

John: So, a couple of clarifications on Trolls World Tour is an animated movie. I believe it was probably made under a non-WGA contract. So there were not–

Craig: Yes. That’s different.

John: There were not WGA residuals for that regardless.

Craig: Right.

John: Here’s where it gets tricky in terms of residuals is that the movies we’re talking about were initially intended to be theatrical movies that because of the COVID-19 they ended up debuting on Video on Demand. If these movies are set from the outset, or if they are sort of retconned into being like, oh no, we always intended to release this on Video on Demand, or on Disney+, that is a big factor and a big distinction. Because suddenly the metrics for what you get paid if the movie debuts on Disney+ versus debuting theatrically could be a lot. And so if it’s not available anyplace other than Disney+ that is potentially really challenging.

Craig: Yes.

John: So, at some point I’m going to publish my residuals from Aladdin so people can see sort of what I make off of Aladdin, but I make really good money off of residuals of Aladdin because it was the theatrical movie that then had this life on iTunes and all the other places you can see it. And now it’s on Disney+. And those formulas are pretty good. If this movie had been debuting on Disney+ I would have made a tiny fraction of those residuals. And so that is the downside of these movies not coming out theatrically.

Craig: Yeah. We just don’t know. All we can do is rely on the companies’ greed. Right? So what Disney won’t do is make an Aladdin movie and put it on Disney+ for free for its subscribers. They’re never going to do that. Because they’re losing money. They know people will pay for it. Right?

So, there is a PVOD model where it’s over-the-top of what you would get through your normal subscription fee. And that will not go away. Especially if it’s a primary exhibition. They’re just going to say, look, if you want this it’s going to cost you $4. And people will pay the $4.

Look, the truth is this may get decided anyway just by reality. We don’t know how this is going to shake out. I’ve always been rosy about movie theaters and their prospects. I’m less so now. And the fact that this movie did so well just on PVOD is – it’s an eye-opener. Let’s put it that way.

There are movies that will still require those huge runs. But, that is an eye-opener, I got to say.

John: Yeah. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig: Yay.

John: Let’s see. I have two One Cool Things because I’m sort of saved up from previous weeks. The first is Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Boltcutters which is just a remarkable album. So this is coming weeks after its debut.

Craig: Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies. Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies.

John: So here’s what I want to talk about with Fiona Apple’s album is that it’s a remarkable album, but I would also say that you could give it a Tony award. You could give it other awards, too, because as a character study, as something written from the point of view of a character who is kind of at their midpoint and headed towards the third act, it’s just a fascinating portrait of sort of who she is. And so if you look at it as like if this were on stage and it was a one-woman show I would just give her all the awards. Because it really is just remarkably well crafted in terms of its storytelling. I thought it was remarkable as a piece of performance, independent of how musically wonderful it is.

Craig: Yeah, no, it’s terrific. It’s on heavy rotation in my house. That’s for sure.

John: Yeah. The other thing I want to recommend is a movie End of the Century by Lucio Castro. And I don’t want to spoil too much about what actually happens in it. It’s a gay film. Two guys meet in Barcelona. And as I said in the setup the first 12 minutes there’s no talking. And you’re sort of waiting for people to talk.

What I admired so much about this movie is essentially it’s just a three-hander. There’s only three characters in the whole movie who speak. And yet so much happens and there’s so many interesting questions being raised by it. And again it’s a movie that feels like when something is only a two-hander or three-hander you think like well could it just be a stage play? But this one could not be a stage play. And I thought it used cinematic language really, really well.

So I would recommend you check out End of the Century which is on iTunes and other places where you can rent it or buy it.

Craig: You guys have spent time in Barcelona, right?

John: Oh, Barcelona is amazing. Love it.

Craig: It’s a pretty magical city. So I have two One Cool Things also. I have got Two Cool Things. First, this is a little bit of a follow up from a prior two-time One Cool Thing for me. Nate Carden who is one of the crossword constructors and I think kind of one of the editors and supervisors of Queer Qrosswords, which is a pack of crosswords that are made by LGBTQ+ crossword constructors and generally built around LGBTQ+ themes. And a packet that you generally purchase by contributing to various charities that’s for LGBTQ+ causes.

Nate is saying, hey, given what’s going on right now we are happy to send people both packs of Queer Qrosswords, because there’s two of them, each one about 15 puzzles I think, without them even needing to donate if it’ll just help them weather the isolation. So if you are a little strapped for cash, you can’t quite make those donations, but you do want to fill your time with some fantastic puzzles, including two puzzles by my favorite puzzle constructor, Mark Halpin, then just get in touch with Nate and the Queer Qrosswords folks at queerqcrosswords@gmail.com. And they will send you your packets.

John: Nice.

Craig: And then secondly hooray there is a new game from the Rusty Lake people. Rusty Lake has been one of my Cool Things before. There’s a new game out by them called Samsara Room. It is a very classic kind of Rusty Lake game. It is creepy, eerie, funny, disgusting. All the things it’s supposed to be. But above all bizarre. I’m enjoying it. I feel like I’m probably close to the end of it. I’m already a little sad. But it’s excellent stuff. And it is available now for iPhone or iPad and maybe for Android. But I don’t care. Samsara Room by Rusty Lake.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be discussing whether you should move to Los Angeles given the pandemic. But otherwise Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: You know it.

John: Our outro this week is by Ben Grimes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. I’ll say that the folder of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so I feel like there’s people who are home who could maybe make us some more outros. We’ll happily take those in. If you have an outro, send us that link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. But for short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you find the links to things we talked about. You also find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. That’s how you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right, Craig. So this is a chance to revisit longstanding Scriptnotes advice which is our general advice has been at a super point if you want to be working as a film or television writer you need to move to Los Angeles because Los Angeles is sort of like Nashville is for country music. It’s just where stuff is sort of centered. So, New York is also possible, but really Los Angeles is where most of the stuff happens.

Craig: Yep.

John: But Kara wrote. She says, “I’m well poised to break into the film industry. I’ve written and produced an independent feature which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.”

Craig: Congrats.

John: “Written several pilots and screenplays and I’ve developed an authentic relationship with several folks in the industry. The rub is I don’t live in Los Angeles. I live in Chicago. I’m particularly interested in writing for TV and as you know the vast majority of writer’s rooms are in LA or they have been. So, I’m finally moving to LA and not on my own. I’m bringing my husband and two young kids with me. Because of this there’s been a lot of planning. My husband is a professor and he got a year-long sabbatical so we can all be together. I found a great school for my kids where they could go to school with their cousins, because my brother and his family are in Los Angeles. And we’ve worked out the finances so that for a while we can spending savings where we’re not going to want to go in debt.

“I thought I was being so smart but now with COVID it’s starting to feel like this is a dumb move. With virtual writer’s rooms and no definitive quarantine end in sight should I just stay put and save the money and the heartache and moving kids until we know more? Am I playing my hand too early? My stomach is in knots that I’m wasting our time and resources heading to LA now. You’ve both been diehard proponents of the need to be in the Los Angeles area, or at least Craig has been, so do you still stand by that, or does this feel like something that’s going to change the dynamic of where people need to be?”

Craig: Oh, now my stomach is in knots.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, this is a lot of responsibility. [laughs]

John: It’s a lot of responsibility here. What should Kara do? Kara is a filmmaker whose movie is available now. It seems like she’s very hirable.

Craig: Well, OK, so let’s take a look at some of the facts. And then we’ll deal with some of the premises. Here’s a fact that we know. Kara has written and produced an independent feature that is streaming on Amazon Prime and she’s done that without being in Los Angeles. So, it’s not that she is prospect-less. However, the implication that I’m getting is that she with her several pilots and her several screenplays and authentic relationships with folks in the industry it feels like if she were here that she would probably end up in some rooms or be meeting with people face to face, etc., and not kind of being her own cottage industry out there in Chicago.

So then the question is has COVID changed all that? First of all, Kara, congratulations to you not only for what you’ve done so far but also how carefully and thoughtfully you’ve planned. This is rare. It’s particularly rare among the people that ask us questions. A lot of these people are like I’m a lawyer, but I’m bored, should I just dump it all and move my wife and 12 kids? And I’m like, no, don’t.

But it sounds like you’ve really thought this through and that’s great. You know, obviously spending savings is scary, but again it feels like you guys have thought this through. Yes, there’s no question that COVID has thrown everything higgledy-piggledy. The issue with moving now is – for instance, I’m here in Los Angeles, I have no idea when my daughter is going back to school. She’s in 9th grade. 9th grade is almost over, question mark. Don’t know. Don’t when school is – the last we heard maybe school starts back up in July. So even that is entirely up in the air.

So, it may be that at the very least you might want to hit pause until we know what the hell is going on over here and you can even start having meetings.

However, I will say that I still maintain that once this is over things will go back to the way they were to some extent. Virtual rooms will not take over. There will still – almost every show you can think of will still have a room-room. And if they’re allowing people to pipe in virtually it’s because they know those people from real rooms.

So, I don’t think that in the long run there’s going to be a newly viable path for people that didn’t exist pre-COVID. I don’t think that. At least not for a long time. What do you think, John?

John: So, I agree with you that I think long term she’s going to be better off being in Los Angeles. I don’t think she’s going to be able to stay in Chicago and be a television writer long term. The three to five year timeline is not appropriate for this.

What I will say as I looked at people’s responses to the COVID-19 epidemic the people who impressed me most are the ones who are data-driven and who are basically saying given what we know these are the scenarios and this is how we’re going to move from this phase, to this phase, to this phase. And I think Kara needs to have that same mindset as she’s planning for this. And basically thinking like what are the benchmarks that I would need to cross in order for me to know like OK now is the time to pack up and move to Los Angeles.

And traditionally in a non-pandemic world she was probably thinking in terms of school years with her kids and stuff like that. And really basing on sort of how normal life works. But we’re not in normal times right now. And so there could be a scenario in which you’re moving in the middle of the year or the middle of the semester or whatever and that is going to have to be OK because that’s the situation we’re in.

So, I would say you independently and you with your family figure out what are the thresholds that would make you feel OK about moving to Los Angeles in terms of what things are like in Los Angeles. And you have your family here who can also give you some sense. But there’s no sense I think in moving your kids here to go to school virtually in Los Angeles schools. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I don’t think you would be meeting face to face with people in Los Angeles in the next three to six months realistically.

So, you could be kind of virtually moved to Los Angeles and be doing all the stuff that a writer who is trying to be hired in Los Angeles would be doing from Chicago and maybe don’t even tell people that you live in Chicago, or just make it seem like you’re in Chicago temporarily because of whatever. But I don’t think it has to be a limiting factor for you overall right now.

So, what I think Craig and I are both probably agreeing on is that at some point it will still make sense for you to move to Los Angeles. This is not that point right now. But you need to be thinking about what thresholds make sense for you to be moving here.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, in a way Kara you are as much in Los Angeles as any of us are right now. I mean, if there’s a way for you to start for instance having talks to agents and managers and lawyers that you are going to be having out here, well they would occur the same way, whether you are next door to those people or in Chicago. You’d be Zooming. So, it seems like maybe you can do that until this all gets settled. I would be concerned – I know that part of the trick here is that there’s timing. Your husband has a yearlong sabbatical. I don’t know if that’s something that can be rejiggered. I don’t know if he can hit pause on that. Because a year seems like it would be a pretty good amount of time for all of this to settle down and for you to have some clarity about what comes next.

But if he can’t, then maybe this is also an opportunity for you to figure out how maybe long term there may be a different employment prospect for him in Los Angeles. I mean, he’s a professor and there are plenty of amazing schools out here. I don’t know. All I can tell you is moving now seems – I mean, I’m feeling so stressful about it listening to you talk about it. I’m getting sweaty.

John: Honestly, as I do the introspection here I’m just trying to think of how do you even – even the process of going to look for an apartment would feel really stressful for me right now. Because I’m sure there are vacancies, but there’s not going to be a ton. And just going to meet with landlords to see places, it all feels like a really strange time to be doing that stuff. Because everyone is sort of frozen in place. And so it’s hard to sort of do the things would be challenging otherwise, or especially difficult right now. So that’s why I don’t think this week or next week or next month are probably going to be the right times to try to do this move. Even though the summer would seem like a natural time to do it, I don’t see that happening.

Craig, I’m also thinking about stepping aside from Kara for the moment, our general advice to people who’ve – you know, young people who just graduated from college who would classically be moving to Los Angeles, I’m usually the guy like, yep, yep, come on. You know, it’s going to be a tough time but come on and do it. I’m a little less enthusiastic about people trying to move here this summer to get started simply because the unemployment among these entry level jobs is going to be so high for such a long time that it’s going to be especially hard for new people to get their foot in the door here.

Craig: Look, we’re currently at depression levels of unemployment. Now, obviously that’s artificial. It’s not because everything went out of business and no one has anywhere to work. It’s because the businesses have temporarily closed their doors. But that still means it’s hard to just support yourself while you’re trying to do this other thing. I mean, I’ve always said make Plan B your Plan A. And then you won’t be writing scared. You’ll have money in the bank. You’ll be able to pay your rent. Harder to do that now. Harder to do.

It is a difficult thing to make a decision like I’m going to pick up and move, especially when you have a family. So, to finally breakthrough all of the fear and worry to get to yes is so momentous and so difficult and exhausting that when you finally do it and say yes it’s nearly impossible to un-yes it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I can see how that would be very distressing to have to un-yes the yes on this. But that may be what’s required. And if there’s any way to take some comfort in it it’s that this is a once in a lifetime event. God, I hope it’s a once in a lifetime event. And honestly the world is rarely thrown upside down this quickly and this dramatically. But it is a big deal. So, I think you have a ready-made excuse here to maybe take the easier path. I don’t know how old your kids are. Sounds like they might be on the younger side.

John: Yeah, she says two young kids.

Craig: Two young kids. I mean, their world is stressful, too. And in the best of circumstances moving is stressful. Leaving your friends and going somewhere new. It’s an entirely different climate. A different state. It’s all stressful. And then you do it on top of all this stuff, it just seems like maybe you can let yourself off the yes hook on this if that’s the hook that you feel like you’re on.

John: If Kara’s husband does still need to take the sabbatical this next year, an opportunity I could see is that if he takes the greater part of the daytime parenting responsibilities and Kara has the opportunity to just write her ass off that could be a very useful way to spend this year is for her to really focus on getting that writing done, taking all those virtual meetings she possibly can so that she’s in a really good place to kick ass in Hollywood when she gets here.

I do want to segue back though to the idea of like the general like college grad who would normally be moving to Los Angeles about this time of year. If I were in your shoes I would probably look for what is the unique situation happening in 2020 right now that I am well qualified to engage in that’s not Hollywood. So, this feels like a great time to get virtually involved in any of the relief efforts, in any of the political campaign stuff. There’s going to be people who can really use smart twenty-somethings who can work for no money. And just get some experience doing that. Because I feel like moving to LA right now is not going to be a great experience.

Craig: Yeah. I got to go with that.

John: Yeah. All right. Sort of bummer news for a bonus topic, but I mean also hopefully helpful. So I think we’re happy and proud of Kara and she is right in that we would normally be saying pack up the car, Kara. Come on out here because this is your moment. It’s just not quite the same with this situation.

Craig: Yeah. But it’s wait. It’s not don’t. It’s just not yet.

John: Yeah. Make your plan, make your thresholds, and come when you cross those thresholds.

Craig: How about life, huh? You know, you plan, you plan, you plan.

John: Yep.

Craig: What can you do? [sighs] Heavy Jewish sigh. That’s my new thing. Instead of actually doing it, I just say it. Heavy Jewish sigh goes here.

John: End of episode. [laughs]

Craig: [laughs] This entire episode can be called Heavy Jewish Sigh.

Links:

• Getting Things Done in a Pandemic
• Fetch the Boltcutters
• End of the Century
• Queer Qrosswords, email the team at queerqrosswords@gmail.com
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.