The original post for this episode can be found here.
John: Hey, this is John.
Craig: And this is Craig.
John: Today’s episode was recorded last night at the Austin Film Festival, and we enjoy doing live shows. It’s fun to have a big crowd come out.
Craig: Yes, and we did have a big crowd.
John: We did have a big crowd. Whenever we do one of these live shows, Matthew Chilelli, our brave editor, has to go through and try to make it make sense, for what was in the room versus what you’re hearing in your ears. Last night’s episode and the episode you’re about to listen to is probably a little bit more confusing than other things. That’s why we have this explanatory introductory note. Craig, do you want to talk about the lights? We’ll try to cut out and mention the lights, but the lights were weird.
Craig: Yes, or now that people know, we can just leave that in and they can experience our confusion in real time. We’re in the Stephen Austin Hotel in Austin, and it’s like a ballroom. Lots of big lights, chandelier-y lights that are set for a certain mood. I guess the mood this night was podcast. At some point, they just started changing. They got really bright and then they went really dark, and then they got back to normal. Then five minutes later they went really yellow and then really orange. I honestly thought I was losing my mind.
John: It was like if you’ve been in Caesar’s Palace where it has the fake sky and it changes, but if it changed really quickly, it was jarring.
Craig: Somebody hit the button that says like, “wedding fun.” You will occasionally hear me say, “What the F with the lights.” It was funny. We all enjoyed it in the room. You at home I’m sure will go, “Why are they all laughing suddenly about nothing?” It’s the lights.
John: It’s the lights. Last night was also the first game in the World Series and we’ll cut out some of the mentions of it, but they’re an ongoing runner.
Craig: While the show’s being recorded, the last three innings of game one of the World Series between my beloved Yankees in the cursed Los Angeles Dodgers was occurring. Matt Selman, who is the showrunner of The Simpsons, is there in the third row. He and I are making eye contact and I’ve got my phone occasionally. The thing about baseball is almost nothing happens until something happens. You can just look at it graphically. You’re not really watching the game. At one point the Yankees took the lead and then, they lost upon a Grand Slam home run. The worst possible way to lose. Anyway, you may hear some ups and downs in there. Some confusing baseball updates as you hear this episode, the World Series is ongoing and my great hope is that the Yankees are winning.
John: In this episode, we have incredible guests. We have Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo who did Shōgun, which is great. It’s great to talk with the two of them. We have Megan Amram and Susan Soon He Stanton talking about working on their respective shows. We have a game show segment, which kind of worked? It was a very fun premise. We might put some part of that in there.
Craig: I enjoy the hell out of it personally. In a meta way, you’ll see why.
John: Of course, for our premium members, there’s a bonus segment. The bonus segment is the questions that come at the end of the night, Craig. You always do your standard disclaimer about what a question is. Still, sometimes people will come up to the mic, with questions that are not questions.
Craig: This particular one, if you’re a premium member, you’ll get to enjoy one question that was a question, but one of the weirdest ones we’ve ever gotten.
John: I want to thank again, the Austin Film Festival for having us here. We want to thank Matthew Chilelli for his brave editing. Drew Marquardt, Chris Csont, and Megana Rao who all helped out with the night last night and enjoy this live show from Austin Film Festival. One last thing we do mention at the very end, there is going to be a live show in Los Angeles, December 6th, and we have some great guests. When you get this episode, the tickets may already be on sale. If you’re a premium member, you’ll get an email about that ahead of time.
Craig: Of course, as one might expect, there is plenty of bad language in this episode. Earmuffs for the children.
John: Fantastic.
[music]
John: Hi. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You are listening to a very live episode in Austin of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and-
Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.
John: So good.
Craig: John?
John: Yes.
Craig: Two middle-aged white men on a stage in front of a large crowd. Should we Elon Musk jump together?
John: 100%.
[laughter]
John: Now, Craig, it wasn’t the last time, but it was one of our previous live Scriptnotes here in Austin. We got into a little bit of trouble. Do you remember that? You were roommates with Ted Cruz?
Craig: Yes.
John: You’re not a big fan of Ted Cruz.
Craig: No.
John: No
[laughter]
John: We had a very special person introduce us on that episode. Who was that person?
Craig: That was Beto O’Rourke.
John: That’s right. We had Beto O’Rourke.
[applause]
Craig: Well, don’t clap that loud. He lost.
John: It turns out that we got a little bit of trouble for that because it was political.
Craig: I may get in trouble again tonight.
John: Well, we’re getting in a little bit of trouble, so I guess we can say why we’re running a little bit late. Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome Kamala Harris.
[cheering]
John: No, that it didn’t work. It didn’t work, no.
Craig: She’s not like Beetlejuice. You can’t just summon her.
John: We do, we have no political guest. We have incredible, non-political guests.
Craig: We have one now. Before we get into that, I did see, somebody in a Dodger’s hat out there. Fuck you.
[laughter]
Craig: The Yankees are currently up two to one still. Did you just give me a thumbs down?
[laughter]
John: No.
Craig: Your friends are disowning you in front of me.
John: Craig, it could have been an accidental thumb down, you know how on Zoom sometimes?
Craig: No, that was incredibly-
John: You’ll do something, suddenly it’ll show thumbs down.
Craig: It was so vigorous. Feel free to interrupt our show and tell me if the score changes. Thank you.
John: Craig this afternoon we did an escape room. I would rate making movies in television high, of things we like. Playing D&D is also very high.
Craig: Higher.
John: Higher, yes. Escape rooms. Where do they fall?
Craig: No, right up in there.
John: They’re right up in there. It was a good experience.
Craig: It’s a fun time.
John: What do we need to teach our audience about escape rooms that they might be useful for them tonight?
Craig: To escape from this room?
John: Not this, but general life skills you’ve learned from escape rooms.
Craig: Because that was menacing. Well, communication, John.
John: Communication.
Craig: Communication.
John: That’s really what it comes down to. Organization as well.
Craig: Also, trying to suppress your frustration with other people.
John: 100%.
Craig: Especially when they’re doing things wrong.
John: I feel like every notes meeting is basically an escape room. You’re looking for, “What do I need to do to get out of this safely without dying?” You’re listening. You’re taking in all the information, you’re trying to process it.
Craig: Trying to not let your frustration get the best of you.
John: Absolutely. Not try to break everything in the process.
Craig: Including their faces.
John: Indeed. That is the goal. We have some guests tonight who have a lot of experience going through that development process.
Craig: Yes. Segue man.
John: I am the segue man. We should start with them right away because we’ve reached the end of Drew’s first card, which says, “John and Craig Banter.”
[laughter]
Craig: Thanks, Drew.
John: Thank you Drew.
Craig: So thorough. Legitimately it says that.
John: She is a screenwriter, producer, acclaimed short story writer who received her MFA from right here at the University of Texas, Austin.
Craig: Woo-hoo.
John: He– Tell us who he is.
Craig: Well I better get my glasses out. I don’t need those. He is a writer, producer, and showrunner who created television series such as Counterpart, which if you have not seen as fucking awesome. Sorry. Language warning. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Top Gun: Maverick, which, you’ve seen it.
[laughter]
Craig: Now together they created Shōgun, which won 18 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. They also created two children, eh, and are also married. Please welcome Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks.
[applause]
Craig: Rowdy, rowdy crowd. We are so excited to talk to you about your show, about what you’re able to achieve here and accomplish, but I want to wind us back to how this even began. Because, as I understand it, it wasn’t like you went in and said like, “I want to do Shōgun.” They came to you and you had to be convinced.
Justin: Well, it was a really long book.
Craig: It’s a long book. The Door Stop they gave you.
John: I love that book.
Justin: I didn’t know they sent us, well they sent me, I guess the book.
Rachel: Let’s be clear. They sent Justin the tome.
Justin: Well, no, first they told me about it and asked if I had read it. Unlike some friends, I had never read it.
John: But you said yes in the room, right?
Craig: Absolutely.
Justin: Yes. “Yes, I’ve read it. Yes, I’ve read it twice,” is what I said in the room. “Just so I can remember, can you send that book again to my house this weekend?”
Craig: A quick refresher.
Justin: It came, it arrived, and it was definitely like a hard pass on Friday afternoon with 1,200 pages in front of me, but I left it on the coffee table and Rachel picked it up.
Rachel: Luckily I was languishing as a truly highly successful short story writer.
Craig: Nice.
Rachel: You know, $40 a year. Paying all the bills.
Craig: The dream could be yours.
Rachel: It could, and that book was on our coffee table, just at that moment when I realized, $40 might not pay the bills.
[laughter]
John: You had young kids.
Craig: Neither one of you had read Shōgun?
Justin: No.
Craig: Had either one of you seen my beloved and corny as fuck 1980?
Rachel: 1980.
Justin: We did. The year of my birth.
Rachel: Justin was born. Not me, Justin.
Craig: Then you didn’t see it?
Justin: Yes.
Craig: I was nine.
[laughter]
Craig: No, that’s okay.
Justin: It’s shocking.
Craig: I know I’m old. It was like, it burned its way into my brain. Then I got the book out of the library and I read it over and over and over. I was obsessed with it. I’m just fascinated by the fact that you guys were like Shōgun initiates, which I think is amazing.
Justin: I think that there was like a silhouette of Shōgun that was in our head.
Rachel: In your head.
Justin: In my head. Which was a guy who looks like me wearing clothes that don’t belong to cultures that look like his. I think I was very quick to judge a book by its cover in this case. In truth, it’s actually a fantastic book. It’s just this in addition to everything else, an incredible page turner, but also really important for where we are today and had a lot more to say than I otherwise thought. Which is what happens when you read a book.
Craig: Let that be a lesson all of you.
John: Well, talk to us the process of like, so they’ve sent you this book, but you did have to go in and say like, “This is how I would do this.” What was that conversation like? Was it a presentation? Was it a pitch? Did you come in with decks? What was the way of describing, “This is what the story is to me.” What did that look like?
Justin: Why are you looking at me? I got to jump in.
Craig: They’re so married.
Rachel: We’re so married. Is this is a podcast?
Craig: I hope so.
John: This is a podcast for sure. This is a podcast where people are obsessed about–
Rachel: It’s a live?
John: Yes.
Rachel: It’s alive. It’s not dead. It’s alive. It’s a live podcast that speaks to screenwriters. I don’t want to give off the idea that my participation is a normal thing. I went into FX saying, “Hello.”
Justin: “My quote is $20.”
Craig: My quote is $20?
Rachel: I demand $45 a year. My memory is just that somehow I laid down on their couch with my head. We were just talking.
Justin: I wasn’t here for this meeting. What happened? To go in at the very early stage was just a conversation with them about, what were the feelings on it. For us, after some discussion and a lot of reading, it was really just a conversation about, “I think this book is great and I don’t think we need to change anything about this book.” We said one thing which turned out to be be entirely untrue, that our only approach to it was going to be to take this book and to invert the gaze to tell it from the Japanese side, which in truth the book does for you.
I also don’t think that that’s really something that it turns out we could do with the two of us and a room full of predominantly Asian American, but American writers doing it. What we could do, which we had a lot of fun doing, was to subvert the gaze, was to take what you think this kind of story is going to look like, and just to turn it on its head every chance we could get. You think you know what’s going to happen when this guy shows up in Japan and here it is. Then just to play with it and play with it very much at that character’s expense, but to have fun with it.
Craig: You guys, look, it’s a fantastic show. It was riveting. Hats off to Hulu also for putting out basically one episode a week, which I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do, it seems like a totally obvious thing to do.
Justin: It’s like the medium should be done that way.
Craig: Weirdly. We should do episodes once a week so as to create a cultural conversation for everyone. It did, and I’m just curious when, because you mentioned the book is a door stop. It is, it’s huge. I’m wondering, like a snake with a mouse. How do you break this thing apart just structurally to go, “Okay.” I suspect you guys didn’t start with, “Right. This is going to be this many episodes. Now. How do we fit this many episodes?” You broke it down. How do you break down something that size?
Justin: Well, we did know it was 10.
Craig: How did you know it was 10?
Justin: Because we were told it was 10.
[laughter]
Craig: The premise of my question is wrong. Moving on.
John: Also the premise was this is a miniseries, so this is going to be a limited 10 episodes miniseries, that it wasn’t going to be an endless–
Craig: They told you 10?
Justin: Yes.
Craig: You guys were like, “Okay.”
Justin: Sure.
Craig: Then you read the book?
Justin: Yes. “That’ll be $20 per episode.”
Craig: Wow. New question, this is way more interesting to me, is how do you break something down that size and make sure it fits into 10 buckets? How do you do that?
Justin: This is where, in truth, I think your short fiction background came into play.
Craig: I’ll give you $40 if it’ll help you answer.
Rachel: We’ll tell you what we came to in hindsight, but it’s not like any of us were going at this saying, “Yes, we know how to do this with 10 episodes.” No, we didn’t know shit. Can you say that you can on podcast?
Craig: Yes.
Rachel: Justin brings his sensibility. I bring my sensibility. My sensibility, as we all know, is short fiction. I don’t know how to do this, take a 1,200 page book and meter it out so that it feels like a story that sweeps you and carries you. Who knows how to do that? I don’t know how to do that.
Justin: I know how to do that.
John: He’s done that before.
Craig: One of you needs to know how to do that.
Rachel: All I knew was that I like a story to feel like it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like to be brought to a place that ends in the exact collision between surprise and inevitability.
Craig: I love that. That’s what we’re all looking for, isn’t it?
Rachel: Yes, it is.
Craig: Just to define it clearly, you’re talking about those moments where people are surprised by what happens and then immediately after go, “But of course that’s what happens”?
Rachel: But of course. Those are the two feelings that you aim for. I was like, “Shit, I have to write a screenplay.” I was thinking, “We’ll do that with a screenplay.” I was doing that with short stories. Why don’t we do that every screenplay, try to find the thrust of a narrative that can feel like that feeling at the end of a great short story.
Justin: It starts with the information in the first episode, because I think that we had to make a decision. The first episode, it’s a 1,200 page book. I would say the first episode covers about 400 of those pages.
Craig: You guys did a very good job there.
Justin: My metaphor, I guess is that it’s a pie, or a pizza. If you pull a slice of pizza, you have to be able to say like, “From this slice of pizza, I can tell you what all the other slices probably look like, because there’s pepperonis, and onions on this slice. I assume that they’re going to be on every slice. I can’t tell you where on the pizza they’re going to be, but it’s going to be like that.” I think you need to know in the first episode, this is a show with these characters, and this is the kind of story that’s going to be told where it is close ended in and of itself. It’s going to have, as Rachel says, that first, second, and third act, but it’s also going to bring these people together.
We knew we had to get 400 pages in before we could finally bring Mariko, Blackthorne and Toranaga together, so that became the first flag. Then everything else that followed just became about how do we just cohesively do it. Then, as we’re in the writer’s room and building it and building it, I was just, I guess, nervously eyeing episode 10 and being like, “Yes, we’re going to stick this on exactly episode 10.”
Rachel: Fine.
John: Well, so there’s a pilot written first. You guys wrote together, you wrote a pilot. What was it like writing together for the first time? Because you’re a short story writer, so you’re used to working on your own. You’ve written screenplays, but you’ve also written with room, so you have some experience with that, but you’ve never had to write with each other. What was that like?
Rachel: Have either of you written with your spouses?
John: Oh God, no.
Craig: No.
John: Are you kidding me? No.
Craig: No. Jesus. First of all, neither of our spouses are writers so that’s a good start. We very carefully married not writers.
Rachel: Smart.
Craig: You fucked up.
[laughter]
John: Because you know each other really well, but you probably don’t have a sense of each other’s creative process in terms of how they get to the next word.
Rachel: If this was 2018–
Craig: Look at this, I wish you could all see Justin’s face.
Rachel: Six scenes-
Craig: Just a headache, just a human headache.
Rachel: When he started this process, I had known him for– No. I had not known him. I’d been with him, biblically with him, for 12 years. 12 years. That’s a long time to know somebody.
Justin: It’s more than that though. We’ve been together longer than that.
Rachel: At the time we started.
Craig: Not biblically.
[laughter]
Craig: Let’s break this down. Non-biblically for seven. Biblically for 12, post biblically now.
Justin: About 20 seconds post biblically.
Craig: Continue with this amazing thought.
Rachel: Thank God my parents don’t listen to podcasts.
Craig: You don’t know that.
Rachel: You think you know a person pretty well, and you do. I was reintroduced to Justin as a high functioning screenwriter.
Craig: Sexy, right?
Rachel: It was super annoying.
[laughter]
Craig: Really walked right into that one. Super annoying.
Rachel: As a short fiction writer, you get snack breaks every 20 minutes.
[laughter]
Rachel: You take naps every 45 minutes
Craig: This is why they only pay you $40, you realize that?
[laughter]
Rachel: And Justin was a little more, I would say-
Craig: Rigorous?
Rachel: -rigorous than that.
Craig: Disciplined.
Justin: A machine.
Craig: Just a machine.
Justin: That’s what I got. That’s how I like to think of myself.
Craig: Maybe in a pruriant way, I’m just wondering like, what do you guys do when you disagree about stuff?
[laughter]
Rachel: We only sat in the same room writing together once.
Justin: For the good of the marriage.
Rachel: It was the first day of episode one. I think, “I’m a screenwriter now. I’m going to show up. He shows up and he says, “You do these scenes and I’ll do these scenes.” I say, “Great.” Then snack time rolls around, he’s still working. I’m like, “What? I can’t do this. This is too much.” We never worked in the same room again. Now all these years later, what it looks like is we still divvy out scenes, and I write mine and he writes his. As we discussed earlier in the panel today, I actually hadn’t thought of it, but somehow magically, the scenes come together, and apparently Justin puts them together.
Justin: Me.
[laughter]
Rachel: I didn’t even know that
Justin: I magically put the scenes together.
Craig: Who did you think was doing it?
Rachel: I don’t know. He just sent it to me.
Justin: Magical elves.
Craig: I want to be you so bad.
[laughter]
Rachel: So dumb.
Craig: You just did an entire show and you’re like, “Elves are doing this, I don’t know how.”
Rachel: Truly.
Craig: Amazing.
Rachel: I have a lot of mouths to feed. I’m busy.
Craig: I hear you.
Rachel: He will send me this script and I start to go through it and I’m like, “Hey, some things have changed.”
[laughter]
Rachel: He tries to sneak it in, but I know.
Justin: I don’t sneak anything in. I’m putting it together.
Rachel: You don’t put it in the red marks.
Craig: You don’t asterisk it?
[laughter]
Rachel: Asterisks.
Craig: Oh really? That’s your sneaking? That’s sneaking.
Rachel: That’s super sneaking.
Craig: He’s sneaking.
Justin: Nobody tell her how this works. Please.
[laughter]
Rachel: But I know. I go in and I just change it back and then I send it back to him.
Craig: Do you asterisk that?
Rachel: I don’t know how to do that, but I would. I would. Then I just hear from the other room, “You can’t just change it back to what you want.” I’m like, “That’s what I do.” Anyway, that’s how it works.
[laughter]
Justin: It sounds funny really.
John: Then that’s it. Next thing you know, you have an episode. 18 Emmys later.
Craig: Chaos. Absolute chaos.
Rachel: It is.
John: I want to talk to you about the use of Japanese in the show because you’re saying that you want it to be a show that’s actually from the point of view of these characters. Part of that is there’re speaking their own voices and we’re watching subtitles through a lot of it, but the subtitles we’re seeing are not necessarily what you were originally writing. Can you walk us through the process of getting to the words we’re reading and what a person who speaks Japanese is hearing and how those match up?
Justin: As quickly as possible, the steps go as follows, that we wrote it in English and we sent it to elves to translate it, and as people who had apparently not read Shōgun, we thought that translation is that simple, and that there’s just one right answer to translation and it turns out that that’s not true. That when the actors, when Hiro Sonata, our star and also one of our producers and Eriko Miyagawa another producer, they started reading it. They said, “This is Japanese, and a translation approximately of the lines in English, but it’s not performable.”
It’s not put into that prose, so we hired a Japanese playwright speaks no English, to translate that rough Japanese into something that felt like not just-
Craig: That’s really interesting.
Justin: -performable, but [unintelligible 00:24:20] because she writes in the Shakespearean Japanese that comes from the tradition of [unintelligible 00:24:25]
Craig: Just to be clear, you write in English, it goes through some fairly wooden translation process. Then a playwright takes the wooden stuff and builds it back into something beautiful.
Justin: She’s understanding the gist of it. Then Eriko, Hiro, they’ll look at it and it’s always like sitting at village. They’re looking at the sides for next week that are coming through and just like, “No, it’s not quite right,” because they can read the English too.
Craig: They can read the English and adjust back.
Justin: Get that back, and I’m of course just taking their word for it because that’s what we can do. Then what started to happen, because all this was discovered accidentally. We didn’t know how to do this.
Rachel: I did.
[laughter]
Craig: She did.
John: Rachel, do you speak Japanese? Do you speak Japanese?
Craig: Oh that’s a big no, I can see it coming.
[laughter]
Justin: Say something in Japanese please for everyone here.
Rachel: No.
[laughter]
John: You’re saying the writer’s room was largely Asian American.
Rachel: We’re all Asian American female. Except for him and Matt Lambert.
Justin: One other dude.
John: You’re getting this highly polished version of Japanese so a Japanese person watching this can hear the excellence, but we don’t speak that. How are you making decision about what we’re reading?
Justin: That’s when the real revelation happened, was when watching dailies, what we started to do was to say, “Why don’t we play telephone with it?” Instead of just putting the subtitles on there to this line that we wrote, that’s really an approximation. We had one of our Japanese-speaking assistant editors translate that what she’s watching on screen into words. Then I’m looking at it, I’m like, “That’s not exactly what we wrote, but it’s almost what we wrote,” but you’re not getting that thing where someone’s like screaming really loudly and then on the subtitles it just says, “Yes.”
You actually feel like there’s not that dissonance to it, but those words are just, now someone is just doing us a favor and translating words to the screen. So then that’s when Rachel and I went back into the process and we tried to take everyone off the hook and say like, “We’ll just do this on our own. We just need Eriko who speaks Japanese as well to verify some things for us. We don’t need 10 people on these Zooms because it’s just going to be Rachel and I arguing over syntax and what works best.” But we would do this for every line of every episode of the show over–
And, this was that when the strike was coming and I was like, “You know what? This is writing. What we’re doing right now, this is writing. This is not localizing, this is not just the postproduction thing.” It was like, if we’re going to brag about this someday and say we went through this process, we have to get it all done in a matter of weeks before this strike starts. And that is what we did.
Rachel: For all of you about to get married or thinking about marriage, just know that punctuation matters.
[laughter]
Rachel: It really matters.
Justin: Let me ask you a question.
John: It does.
Rachel: We discovered things about each other.
Justin: Who puts semicolons in dialogue? What sick psychopath?
Rachel: Who doesn’t believe in the em dash? Seriously.
Craig: You both make great cases. Yes. The em dash is great. Do not put semicolons and dialogue. You guys just need to agree with each other more. I think you guys can make it.
Rachel: What about creative tension?
John: Rachel and Justin, I think we had a great session today. I think our time is up right now, but I think let’s come back next week. We can pick up where we left off there.
Rachel: Great.
Craig: Good progress. Really good progress.
John: That was really good progress.
Rachel: I’ll apply it to my daily life during the week. Thank you.
John: That’ll be really nice. Fortunately listeners around the world get to hear this session and grow from it. Rachel and Justin, thank you so much. You’re going to come back for our Q&A at the end. Rachel and Justin.
Craig: Thank you guys. Stick around. Stick around for the rest of the show.
[applause]
John: Craig, probably two weeks ago you and I were over live. We were doing a podcast and we were talking about something and you brought up, “It’s that movie where the hockey player has to learn how to become a figure skater.” You’re like, “Oh, it’s that Matthew Modine movie. What was it called?” I’m like, “It’s not Matthew Modine.”
Craig: It wasn’t Matthew Modine. Thank you.
John: It was The Cutting Edge.
Craig: It was The Cutting Edge. Exactly, and it does not start Matthew Modine.
John: It does not start Matthew Modine. We had to basically stop and Google and ChatGPT and figure out what it is, but because Matthew Chilelli, our editor, is so talented, you cannot hear all the fuckups that happen along the way because we snip all that out. This is a live show, so you’re going to hear all these mistakes. That’s why we needed to have some people here help us out here. So Megana, I think you’ve recruited two folks who are really good at answering these movie things so if we met make a mistake, they can help us out. Who do we have to help us out?
Craig: Also first of all, Megana.
John: It’s Megana Rao, everybody. The legend.
[applause]
John: First we have Paul Horn.
Megana: Paul Horn and Hailey Nash.
John: Paul Horn and Hailey Nash. Come on up here.
Craig: Come on up.
Megana: Can I just apologize again for how hard this game is?
John: How hard?
Megana: Yeah.
John: Hello, I’m John.
Craig: Hi.
Hailey: Hi John. Nice to meet you.
Craig: Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Craig. Hi. I’m Craig. We do a podcast about things that are interesting to screenwriters.
John: Just pretend we’re doing a normal podcast and we’re going to mess up at a certain point. We’re going to come to you for advice. Craig, I thought we might make this interesting by each of us pick one person who we think is going to be better at this. We need to interview you guys a little bit.
Craig: I literally don’t know the basis of the game. I need some more detail before I make my choice.
John: Let’s talk through this. Paul, what’s your favorite movie of all time?
Paul: Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan.
John: It’s an incredible movie. How about your movie trivia Knowledge? Do you play on any trivia teams? Have you won any trivia competitions?
Paul: I did do trivia with just some buddies in a bar trivia for a while. It wasn’t movie. It was just generic trivia.
Craig: Just regular generic trivia?
Paul: Right.
Craig: I like the way you said buddies. It sounded smart.
John: It sounds smart.
Craig: His buddies are probably smart.
John: I’ve already lost your name. I’m so sorry.
Paul: They were.
Craig: They were?
Paul: Yes.
Craig: What happened to them?
Hailey: Hailey.
John: Hailey?
Hailey: Hailey, yes. Like Bailey Or Kayleigh but with an H.
Craig: Hailey.
John: Hailey?
Craig: Hailey.
John: Hailey, talk to us about your experience with movie trivia. Do people come to you and say, “Hailey will know the answer to this?”
Hailey: I do a lot of movie trivia, yes. At Bronxton Brewery in Westwood, I used to go a lot. I know a little. I know a wee bit.
Craig: She was underselling. Could you hear that?
John: I could hear that. Craig I’m going to give you the pick. Imagine this is Hollywood Squares, and you have to partner up with somebody or Password. Who is going to be your person? Which of these two do you want as your ringer?
Craig: Recency bias. The last answer was from Hailey. I’ll pick Hailey.
John: You’re with Hailey. I got you, Paul. We’re going to figure this out. Let’s talk through some movies here. The game we’re going to play tonight was the movie that we couldn’t think of and it was, do you remember who it was?
Craig: I can read it off of this. It was D.B. Sweeney.
John: It was D.B. Sweeney. As we did some more research, D.B. Sweeney is still a very active actor to this day. He’s in a bunch of different movies and so I thought we might play a little game, and you guys can help us out, called IMDB Sweeney Todd.
[laughter]
John: Here’s how it’s going to work. We are going to describe a movie. We’re going to describe a role in that movie, and we need your help to tell us, wait, was that D.B. Sweeney or was it some other actor named Todd? You’re going to need to help us out here. You get bonus points if it is a Todd, if you can tell us which Todd was the actor we’re thinking of.
Craig: Who’s going to keep track of the points?
John: Drew is going to keep track of points.
Craig: Drew, get that pad ready.
John: He’s got a pen.
Craig: This is big time.
Paul: Just to be clear, this is not what we were told to be prepared for.
[laughter]
Paul: I was told the ‘80s trivia, not Todd trivia.
Craig: Have you been studying furiously for weeks?
Paul: No, I was back there trying to think of an ‘80s movie like trying to remember. Like, Please say Ice Pirates. I want Ice Pirates movies.
Craig: Listen, I don’t know what’s going on with this show either. I got to be honest with you. It never works out the way I think.
Hailey: Wait, you’re not a Todd expert?
Paul: No, I’m not a Todd expert.
Hailey: Dang. Not many Todd experts here.
Paul: Steve, I’m on Steve.
Hailey: You’re a Steve expert? Cool.
John: Here we go. We’ll start. Craig, do you remember that movie it was, Scent of a Woman and wasn’t the main guy. The guy who played Trent Potter. Do you remember what Scent of a Woman was like?
Craig: Of course.
John: It was good but who was in that movie? Can you tell us who that was in that movie?
Paul: Todd.
John: Which Todd?
Paul: The Todd that was in the movie.
John: You are correct. One point for us.
Craig: That was a coin flip.
John: It was a coin flip.
Craig: That was a full coin flip.
John: It was a full coin flip.
Craig: He was like, “50% of the time, it’s going to be Todd. I don’t need to say who the answer is.” Hailey, you see what’s happening here, right?
Hailey: I see what’s occurring, yes.
Craig: Here’s another one. This was a movie called Fire in the Sky. Do you remember what this movie is about? What with the light?
John: That was a UFO movie.
Craig: A logger mysteriously disappears for five days in an alleged encounter with a flying saucer in 1975. There was this character, Travis Walton.
John: I think that’s the main person in it.
Craig: He was?
John: I think he was, actually.
Craig: I wonder who that was.
John: Was it D. B. Sweeney or was it Todd?
Paul: I saw the movie.
John: It’s her. It’s her answer.
Hailey: I, unfortunately, have not seen this one.
John: You’re going to have to guess. Do you feel it’s a D.B. Sweeney energy, or do you feel it’s a random Todd energy?
Hailey: D. B. Sweeney
Craig: That’s right.
John: That’s correct.
[applause]
Craig: They’re fucking with me now, right?
John: They are, yes.
Craig: They’re just doing this for me.
John: This is literally gaslighting.
Craig: This is gaslighting.
John: No, Craig, it’s all fine. All right.
Craig: “The lights aren’t changing at all Craig.”
John: I was watching this movie last night on cable, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, and the Pastor Allan Richardson.
Craig: Great role. Pastor Allan Richardson.
John: It’s about a washed-up former child star. God, who was in that movie? Was it D.B. Sweeney or a Todd?
Paul: I’ll go with D.B. Sweeney.
John: It was D.B. Sweeney. Nicely done.
[applause]
Craig: Megana was concerned that this game would be too hard. They can’t get anything wrong.
[laughter]
John: We’ll see. There’s still a chance.
Craig: No one has gotten an extra Todd point. D.B. Sweeney has been eating up a lot of these. Let’s see how this one goes. Everyone knows Twister.
John: Everyone knows Twister.
Craig: Everybody knows Twister. Two storm chasers on the brink of divorce doing stuff with storms. Everyone remembers the character of Tim “Beltzer” Lewis.
John: I’m not sure I remember who that was in the movie, though.
Craig: Me neither. Who played Tim Beltzer Lewis? Was it D.B. Sweeney or a random Todd?
Hailey: Todd Phillips.
Craig: Did you say Todd Phillips?
Hailey: Yes.
Craig: The director?
Hailey: Yes, wasn’t he? Wait. It’s Todd, Oh, my God.
John: Are you on the right track?
Hailey: Who did Tar, I’m trying to remember.
Craig: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Hailey: It’s Todd Field. That’s it. Thank you.
Craig: Once she said Tar, I think that was legal to-
John: Yes, 100%. That was really good.
Craig: Good job.
John: This one, this was, it was heartwarming. It was Hope for the Holidays. It was literally titled Hope for the Holidays and the guy who played Dr. Ward, I thought he was charming. He didn’t have a big role but he was good in it, but was that D.B. Sweeney or was it a Todd? Can you help us out?
Paul: Todd?
Craig: No one can get anything wrong.
John: Which was Todd, though?
Craig: Which was Todd, though?
Paul: Todd III.
John: No. It was Todd Bridges from Different Strokes. Still an actor.
Craig: What were the odds that Todd III was going to be correct?
[laughter]
Paul: Low.
Craig: Let’s try this one. Hailey, you’re on a roll. I think you got this. The Manson Brothers’ Midnight Zombie Massacre. Everyone remembers this one about two fighting brothers signing up for a new game, but then apparently there are zombies involved.
John: A big quarterback. The role is a quarterback.
Craig: Quickbuck.
Matt Selman: It’s 2-2 Craig!
Craig: You shut your goddamn mouth Matt Selman, showrunner of The Simpsons.
[laughter]
Craig: What inning?
Matt Selman: Top of the ninth.
Craig: Top of the ninth?
Matt Selman: Yes.
Craig: They scored in the bottom of the eighth. Well you just derailed this podcast, Mister.
[laughter]
Craig: I’m very depressed. Someone named a character Vic Quickbuck.
John: Wonder what he’s about.
Craig: Was that D. B. Sweeney or was it a random Todd?
Hailey: D. B. Sweeney?
Craig: No one can get anything wrong, Megana. They are 100% correct.
John: We’ll shoehorn it so we’re balancing out here.
Craig: It’s amazing.
John: It’s amazing. I thought the first movie of Atlas Shrugged was eh, but Atlas Shrugged II that’s where it really-
Craig: You mean Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike?
John: The Strike That was incredible.
Craig: Crushed it.
John: The rail runners, the Danny Taggert, all that action of excitement that Ayn Rand goodness.
Craig: All that hot sex.
John: It was so good. Wait, was the guy in that D.B. Sweeney or some Todd?
Paul: D.B. Sweeney.
Craig: No one can get anything wrong.
[laughter]
Craig: Somebody has to get something wrong.
Hailey: I’m up next.
Craig: This is madness.
John: Our last and final one.
Craig: Last and final one.
John: Oh my God, Marmaduke.
[laughter]
John: So good. Who does not like a big dog? Not a Clifford, too big of a dog. Just a big dog.
Craig: Just a solidly big dog with a tendency to wreak havoc in his own oblivious way.
John: Yes.
Craig: I mean, the role of Shasta.
John: Come on, incredible. I mean, that was a game-changer, really.
Craig: Was this D. B. Sweeney or a random Todd?
Hailey: A random Todd.
Craig: Megana. For an extra point, which random Todd?
Hailey: I would say Todd III, but he already said that. I don’t know.
Craig: No guess?
Hailey: No.
Craig: It was Todd Glass.
John: Here’s the thing. Matthew cuts out the stuff when we mess up, but he may cut out this whole segment. We want to thank the two of you for being incredibly good sports.
[applause]
John: Thank you so much.
Craig: Great job.
John: Craig I’m not sure who won.
Craig: I’m sure that we won. I won. Hailey won, because of Todd Field. Really what I think we all won was a view of two psychics because you can guess a flipped coin right once, twice, three times. That was like 12 times in a row. Something’s going on with those two.
John: It was magic.
Craig: Possibly connected to the lights. Let’s continue.
[laughter]
John: Let’s bring it back to more familiar territory where we talk to smart writers about the things that they do.
Craig: The smart test.
John: Do you want to introduce our guests?
Craig: Yes. We have two guests, and the first one is Susan Soon He Stanton, not related to John Carlos Stanton, who had a home run tonight but, oh well, she’s not perfect. She is a writer and producer known for her work on Modern Love, Dead Ringers, and some piece of shit called Succession that kept beating me all the time. She won two Emmys that I didn’t win for Outstanding Drama Series.
John: Megan Amram is a writer and producer on all your favorite funny shows, including Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, The Simpsons. She’s co-creator of the Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin. She has zero Emmys.
Craig: No Emmys.
John: She’s the writer and director of and star of An Emmy for Megan. Welcome, Megan and Susan.
[applause]
Craig: Folks who listen to the show know that Megan is my cousin. We’re cousins.
John: They’re actually cousins.
Craig: She is my nepo baby.
Megan: This is my nepo uncle. I got him where he is right now.
John: It is fantastic to have you guys here. As we were backstage chatting through stuff, we were talking a little bit about the difference between writing and being on set, dealing with something that was in production. You guys had such different experiences. I was wondering if we could compare and contrast the two of them. Megan, can you tell us about going off and doing about Bumper In Berlin and your role as a writer on set, and how much support you have?
Megan: This is a great tee-up. How do I tactfully answer this question? I co-created a show that was on Peacock that was a spinoff of the Pitch Perfect movies. It was called Bumper in Berlin, starred Adam DeVine, and it shot in Berlin. For those of you who listen to this show, you’ve heard a lot of different stories of how shows get made and I feel like there’s two camps of them. Either they are developed for years and years and people really dig so deep into the text like we were hearing about Shōgun, or they are told they have to happen in a matter of six weeks and you’re going to fly to Berlin by yourself. That was mine.
Just due to Adam DeVine is on a very funny show called The Righteous Gemstones and due to filming windows, which I’m sure is the most riveting thing we could talk about, we had this period of time we could get him. We knew it was going to be in Germany due to some creative things, but mostly tax breaks. I, as the showrunner, was given those, I would say mad libs of dates filming and characters, and location. We very, very quickly, my amazing writer’s room that I didn’t have for enough time, which is partially why we went on strike, put together a show and I went to Germany by myself, and was the writer-producer there.
John: Good Lord. Now let’s compare and contrast. Susan. Well, talk to us about the-
Craig: Susan, your life has been great.
John: Isn’t it great?
Susan: I don’t mean to compare.
Craig: Not this horror show.
John: I want to show the range of what it takes to make a series. On your show, your writer’s room for Succession was in London, and then writers went to set. Talk to us about what the process was of going from we’re writing a show to making the show.
Susan: Our writer’s room was in London. It was a combination of Brits and Americans and it almost felt like baseball, like home-court advantage. Then when we were shooting, then all the Americans were like, “Now you’re on our turf again.” That was really fun. I’ve been a part of a bunch of other shows, and I’ve never seen so many writers on set. It was something that I felt like was just part of the ethos that Jesse Armstrong had.
We had a lot of coverage and it was such a luxury. I’ve just never seen anything like it. There would be the writer of the episode or writers that would be watching the show and you’d have maybe one person would be in pre-production and doing location scouts and talking to different designers.
Then there’d be the writers while we were shooting. Maybe a couple of writers would be just re-braking some story later. There would always be almost two to four, sometimes more people just keeping their eye on things. We’d be writing alts every single day, alternative lines, which is more of a comedy structure, but there were a lot of roots in the show in comedy and we would have different exchanges and just keep an eye on things. We would read each other’s scripts. I just think everyone was trying to make the whole as good as possible. The brilliant Frank Reich would also be on set and would be lending his eye and his resources.
It just felt like we just had so many people working and if something wasn’t feeling right in the moment or the timing–
Megan: I’m going to start crying. I’m sorry. This is beautiful.
Susan: I’ve never had that since.
Megan: I love it. At least more people watch my show than Succession, so that’s good.
Susan: Everything else is going to be worse-
Megan: That’s amazing.
Susan: -which is the torture of it.
Craig: It does sound pretty great. It is Jesse Armstrong who’s the showrunner of Succession. He’s a lovely man. Well, unless you tell us otherwise. He seems lovely to me. This would be a weird place to suddenly destroy him.
Susan: No, I’m not going to just be like, “Do you want me to tell you?” He’s wonderful. He’s changed my life.
Craig: He’s just a lovely, sweet, humble guy. I’m interested in how, in particular, because you were a playwright sitting in a room, the room is just you when you’re a playwright, I think, because I’ve never written a play. Then actors look at the play as the text and they do the text. Television doesn’t generally work like that. I’m curious how you, from a writerly point of view, went from alone, “Mine, all mine,” to room sharing with somebody that in theory could say, “I’ve decided no,” or, “I want it to change.”
Susan: I think it’s probably more similar than maybe if you were coming as obviously a novelist or as a screenwriter. Obviously there’s a point where we all write alone, we’re all alone for a bit, and then there’s the collaborative fun bit. I think for playwrights, we sit in rehearsal for a long time. Maybe we’re the only writer in the room, but we’re there with actors and a director. That was actually a big bonus on set was I realized, “I’m comfortable talking with a director,” because when you’re a screenwriter maybe it’s all just at this really heightened level.
But when you’re in rehearsal, you just have that time where you’re used to having all of these even design conversations. The stakes, the size of it is much smaller to talk to a set designer for a play than on set. I was just terrified. It was my first show was being on Succession, so I was crazy and I was just constantly terrified. Then it was this nice surprise where I’m like, “Actually these skills are transferable,” which I didn’t think they would be. Then I was in a lot of different playwriting writers groups and that also felt like a writer’s room where instead of supporting each other, giving feedback, it’s like, “We’re all working on the same kind of project.” And I’ve done some devised things.
I thought I was going to feel incredibly different and I came in absolutely terrified and I called up some friends and asked for advice. I was like, “When can we go to the bathroom? Should I raise my hand? How much do I have to talk?”
Craig: Always raise your to go to the bathroom.
Susan: Like, “When can I eat the snacks?” Honestly, it was like, “Is it okay to order this much lunch?” I just felt constantly scared. It wasn’t a learning process but it was less foreign than I thought just getting into it.
John: Well, I think I’m hearing is there’s a sense of an imposter syndrome. “I don’t belong in this space. I’m going to mess up. They’re going to recognize that I was in the wrong place.” I think we’ve all felt that. I definitely remember going into like–
Megan: Mine is real though. Everyone else has imposter-
John: We’re going to figure that out.
Craig: She is literally an imposter.
John: I remember showing up to the first day of shooting on Go and I parked my car. I’m driving up and like, “Man, there’s a lot of trucks around here. What are all these trucks here for? Oh, shit. They’re here for my movie. I was like, “Am I allowed to eat this craft service?” Suddenly you’re onset and you’re worried you’re going to spill your Coke, you’re going to do something and be found out, and then three days later you’re directing the second unit because you’re three days behind.
It’s a very quick learning curve. I’m sure it was, for both of you, the first times you’re onset seeing the thing and realizing, “I actually have the answer here. I know how to get this thing worked out.”
Megan, I see you nodding. Obviously, Bumper in Berlin was an extreme case, but you had more positive experiences working on shows.
Megan: Very much so.
John: Something like The Good Place, that is a collaborative place and we’re watching things in front of you.
Megan: Absolutely. Yes. Well, I have to share one more story from Bumper in Berlin about, because now this is a great place to work through therapy. There was a day on set. As I said, I was the only writer and producer and then our script supervisor got COVID and we didn’t have a backup script supervisor, so people kept asking me about eye line. This is the person on set, very important job. About continuity and getting lines right, but getting angles of the the shots right and everything. I was like, “I don’t know. Just look wherever you want.”
[laughter]
Megan: It was a very funny out-of-body experience. To answer the more positive supported experience, which sound a lot more like Succession. I got to work on Parks and Rec and The Good Place for showrunner Mike Schur, who is also an incredible both writer and producer and then person and I think mentor to people who’ve never done this before. I am so truly grateful that I had a decade of experience of being on set where not only are you learning from other writers who have more experience, but the cast has a ton of experience, the crew all has experience, but it’s really intimidating.
There’s two types of people I guess. There’s people who are extremely intimidated and have imposter syndrome and then there’s people who waltz onto set thinking they know everything. I’m like, “That’s not good.”
Craig: Those are sociopaths.
Megan: It’s tough to find the middle ground.
Craig: You guys, in a way, both work in comedy. Succession was an hour long, but this 30 minutes versus one-hour thing, it doesn’t really make sense. The Good Place is a 30-minute “sitcom.” It’s also one of the most dramatic shows depending on the episode of the moment and vice versa for Succession.
I’m curious how in those rooms, and as you go forward, how you both think about comedy in today’s day and age, where we do have to figure out how to balance being transgressive and pushing stuff with also just not being tone-deaf, or falling somewhere into not funny town because you went too far. How do you guys approach that as you go through your comedy aspects of what you write?
Megan: Speaking for the rooms that I’ve run, part of it is having rooms that are representative of a lot of different types of people. That is under all metrics of identity, where they’re from, what they think is funny. I think that does, then if those people feel free to both be transgressive in a safe space, and then also respectfully push back on other people, I think that is an amazing, super fun mix of people. Any comedian who’s like, “You can’t say anything anymore because the world–“ I’m like, “I don’t know, you’re not hanging out with the right people.”
Because if you’re hanging out with good-hearted, empathetic people, they are transgressive in a respectful, safe way. Then how it comes out in television because I was obsessed with Succession. I think that was a show that did it in a really amazing way where it was edgy, but it also was extremely based in character, which is, to me, you forget that something is edgy or transgressive if you can see exactly why that character is saying that thing.
Craig: Did you ever feel on Succession like, “Oh, are we going a little too far here?” I remember pretty early on Kieran Culkin jerking off against the window of his office, and I was like, “Okay, HBO, here we go.”
Susan: Sometimes I think we got a little baroque in our sensibilities. We’re like, “Where is the line?” And we already crossed it. I think we were also playing with different, I mean, satire and humor. I think to the earlier debate, it’s like The Bear was a big debate. Is it length or in terms of what’s comedy or what’s drama? I think that there is a creepy metaphor of how do you get people to follow you down the path into darker themes, like giving somebody a piece of candy and luring them further into the woods. I don’t know.
I like the imagery. Terrible metaphor. You know this, but how do you get someone to join you on a dark journey is to have the comedy. It was interesting because a lot of the writers in the room just were incredible comics, and had just very funny bones. We were playing with that. I’ve never thought of myself. I think I write comedy and drama sandwiched together, but I’ve never submitted for comedy.
I remember even with writing, hearing, oh, if you submit a script early emerging days, they count how many jokes are per page, or people were just learning writing these joke packets. I was like, “Oh, no, that’s a different kind of writer. That’s not me. I have to do the drama.” Then, dramas that are just so, everyone’s so tense and serious. That’s not what life is. I feel like it has to have both the white and the black keys in terms of what makes something really enjoyable.
Megan: Do they count how many frowns per page in a drama spec?
John: Megan, you’re actually in a place now where you get to read other writers and put together a room, and you’re figuring out how many jokes per page in a script that you like.
Megan: There’s a magic number, but I don’t tell anyone until they submit it. No.
John: Talk to us about what it’s like to be on the other side now, not to be staffing, but to be putting together a staff. What are you looking for on a page that says, “Oh, this, I get this. I get what they’re doing,” or, “I just don’t want to meet this person?”
Megan: When I staffed my room, I took it very, very seriously. I ended up hiring some people I’d worked with on these amazing shows. I’d ended up hiring people I hadn’t worked with, but who I had admired for a long time. I also wanted to make sure that I really did my due diligence for those new spots. I was saying this morning I actually hired people with a few different types of samples. I didn’t want to just go a super traditional route, have agents send me scripts, though that was one of the ways that looked at people.
I also had been submitted a one-act play as a sample. I hired a staff writer who was a comic who I thought was very funny, and specifically that she was very funny at joke writing. But the show that I was making, it was very silly. I already had a tone in my head, even though the pilot didn’t exist because we only had six weeks to write the show. I knew what type of show it was going to be. It was going to be sweet and full of heart, but extremely joke-heavy and quick in that rhythm. When I read things, there’s different types of comedy.
There’s more situational or romantic or whatever. I was like, “I just want the people who are writing insane jokes. If they’re lower-level writers, but they’re amazing joke writers, they’ll figure out the story stuff as we work through it.”
John: Susan, have you had a chance to put together a writing staff yourself yet?
Susan: No.
John: Work back just for like, what were the samples that got you in those rooms though? What were they reading? You’re going in for these things, and then what are they reading, and what’s getting them excited reading?
Susan: I feel like, Megan, as you were saying, I think it’s really important to have a– I’ve been a part of a bunch of different rooms and understand the thinking behind it from different showrunners. Yes, I think you want to have people that have outside of your own experience, you want to broaden the perspective of what the room is. You don’t only want to have your friends, you don’t only want to have people that have the same lived experience.
You need to have a shared understanding and passion for what it is. Maybe you have somebody who’s really great at plot, someone who’s very character-focused. I think to the imposter syndrome, I came in really terrified because I’m not as just hilarious as some of the writers. Then it’s like, okay, well, we can all come in with our strength. We’re like an orchestra, and we can all be good at our own thing and just trust the showrunner who brings us all together, and we can all really work together and make the whole just stronger for it.
John: A metaphor you’re reaching for there, and it feels like a conductor almost. Basically, you’ve assembled all these instruments, how do you get them to play together and work? If it’s working great, you have Succession. If it’s bad, we’ve seen the stories of those terrible rooms that go terribly awry.
Susan: I think it’s scary because you do want to take a chance on new voices. People you don’t see. You don’t only want to bring in the knowns, but I don’t know. I feel like there are some really terrifying horror stories that we’ve all heard about where somebody’s written the page or who knows what. It’s amazing when you have that alchemy. And I think that happens most of the time, I feel like in terms of the rooms I’ve been in. It feels like the experiment works, and it’s really exciting.
John: Let us do our One Cool Things. Let’s bring back up, Rachel and Justin, come on back up here.
Craig: All right.
[applause]
Craig: Matt Selman, showrunner of The Simpsons. What is the score currently of the–
Megan: I was going to ask. Oh my God.
Craig: Still two to two in the– oh, I don’t like extra innings away. Matt Selman, you’ve disappointed me once again.
John: Traditionally, at the end of an episode, we do one cool thing. It’s something we want to recommend to our audience. My one cool thing this week is an episode of a podcast called Decoder Ring. This week’s episode of Decoder Ring, they talk through the movie, Charlie’s Angels. Specifically, a giant glaring mistake in the movie, Charlie’s Angels, which I wrote.
Here’s basically what happens: In the third act, Bosley is kidnapped, and the angels figure out where he is because this bird lands on the window, and they recognize the song of the bird there. That’s a really clever idea that I apparently came up with. The bird you see in the movie is not the bird, the name that they say. They say it’s the pygmy nuthatch, but that’s not a pygmy nuthatch, and the song is wrong. For 15 years, burgers across America and around the world are like, “How could fuck this up so badly?” I’m one of the answers. But the podcast actually goes through and actually figures out how it happened, and why it happened.
Craig: Do you like this?
John: I like this.
Craig: It was just a podcast dedicated to how wrong you were, and you’re like, “This is awesome. I want more of this.”
John: Also, it ends up being a good exploration of why movies are not reality, and why the choices we made and why it’s not a pygmy nuthatch are for good reasons. Why do you think it’s a pygmy nuthatch? Why do you think we picked the word pygmy nuthatch as you said?
Craig: Because it’s funny.
John: It’s because it’s funny. That’s one of the answers, but the answer is also to go back to the US Migratory Bird Act, is why it could not have been a pygmy nuthatch in the movie.
Craig: Less funny.
John: Less funny. Craig, one cool thing for you?
Craig: I have a one not-cool thing.
John: Oh, no, I’m sorry. You’re bringing down the mood.
Craig: Yes. My one not-cool thing is Ted Cruz.
John: Your former roommate.
Craig: We are in Texas, and I know a lot of you are from out of town, but I assume a bunch of you are from Texas. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. I really don’t. Republicans all hate Ted Cruz too. Everyone hates Ted Cruz. Donald Trump hates Ted Cruz. Mitch McDonald hates Ted Cruz. We all can hate Ted Cruz together because he’s awful. Do you know he wrote about me in his book?
John: That’s amazing. Congratulations.
Craig: Yes, he said his freshman year roommate was an angry man, an angry young man. I’m like, “Do you know why I was angry?”
John: Where’s the lie?
Craig: “Stuck in a fucking room with Ted Cruz.” So do us all a favor, Texans, you can vote for the guy that isn’t Ted Cruz, I’m trying to be nonpolitical, or you could just skip that one. But you got a chance. You actually have a chance to get rid of Ted Cruz, and when you have a chance to get rid of Ted Cruz, always take it. Always.
[cheers]
[applause]
John: Justin Marks, do you have a one cool thing to share?
Justin Marks: One cool thing. I hope this hasn’t been shared before. My confession, which should come as no surprise because I think a lot of us have this problem is I am an addict. I am a cell phone addict. I have for many years tried to find different ways to cut down on cell phone use while also recognizing, this is the thing that drives me crazy, is all these light phones and different things, you can’t function in society with most of these smaller, simpler phones. You need certain things like a map in the smartphone, or the ability to get the amber alerts, or different things that are-
Craig: Oh, yes.
Justin: -very, very supportive.
Craig: So we all spring into action.
Justin: There is this device that I came across on a Kickstarter called The Brick, which is this brick, it’s a little plastic brick and it has a magnet, and you can stick it on your fridge, or in a desk drawer or whatever. When you tap your phone to it, based on settings that you decide, you can turn off any app that you want to, and it’ll just shut them down, you can’t get email, you can’t get whatever, and then you can walk around with your phone. I can always have it on. I can always receive texts if something goes wrong, and then if I leave the house, you leave The Brick at home, which means there’s no way to unlock that phone unless you can– it’s actually pretty clever. They give you unlocks where you can pay them like $10 or something like that.
Craig: Oh my God. This company is going to be the biggest company on Earth in a month, wow.
Justin: It’s a nice, I don’t know, it works, I guess.
Craig: You’re doing a little bit better is what I’m hearing.
Justin: I’m doing a little better-
Craig: What else do we have?
Justin: -on that account.
John: That’s therapy. That’s why [inaudible 01:02:08]. Megan, do you have a one cool thing to share?
Megan: I have one and a half. The first one is that as of right now, the Dodgers have hopefully not lost the game, which is great.
Craig: Matt Selman? Yes!
Megan: Oh, why did I say it? Okay.
Craig: Yes. Matt Selman, yes.
Megan: You know what? It’s his podcast. I’ll let him have it.
[laugh]
Craig: Go on, Dodger fan, Megan Amram.
Megan: Okay, great. I don’t know if this will give you all as much joy as it has given me, it’s given me a lot of joy. I discovered a new subreddit recently, which is called TV Too High. It goes along with another one called TV Too Low. I am like, every comedy writer have a black heart where it’s so hard for me to laugh at anything. I’m so dark all the time. And this is just a subreddit of people posting mostly their parents’ living rooms where their TVs are mounted too high.
I’m also obsessed with movies and TV setups, and watching them correctly at eye level, and it’s just like they’ll be up here, and it’ll just be the caption will be like, “Is that too high?” And TV Too Low is pretty funny too, but for some reason a TV in the corner of the room-
Craig: Oh my God!
Megan: -just really gets me. Recently, my mom is redoing our living room and my childhood home, and she was like, “Here’s where I think it’s all going to go.” I narrowly averted a TV Too High in my own life.
Craig: Oh, nice.
Megan: I so excitedly texted my friends being like, “Wait, I almost had a TV Too High in my real life.” I highly recommend it.
Craig: That’s fantastic. TV Too High.
John: Susan, do you have a one cool thing for us?
Susan: Yes. I just discovered right before that, Rachel and I are both women from Hawaii, Rachel’s from Maui, and I’m from Oahu, which is a pretty rare and special thing. I wanted to do one more shout-out for a Hawaii woman, Bliss Lau. She’s an incredible jewelry designer, and she does sustainable pieces. I just really love her design. She does stuff inspired by her Popo, and like with Jade. She also just designs inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, and I don’t know, I just really wanted to throw that out there. She has a mention in Kevin Kwan’s latest book. Anyways, small sustainable designers and just Hawaii excellence.
Craig: Love it.
John: Rachel, bring us home with a one cool thing.
Rachel: I thought we had to do one cool thing about things we read.
John: Oh, whatever you love. If you read something you love, share it.
Rachel: Oh, okay. It’s a one cool challenge in the sense where I’m sure a lot of people do this, but I really hadn’t done this before. Recently we went to a part of Maui that’s very remote, and the place we were staying at had a library, and I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to go. I’m just going to go choose a book off the shelf.” They only had, I don’t know, Nicholas Sparks and a bunch of other stuff. Nothing wrong with Nicholas Sparks, but I chose a non-Nicholas Sparks book. That book happened to be, it was called A Dream of Islands. I just chose it off a shelf, and I thought, “Ah, this is going to be like–“ it was like a dime store-type novel. It ended up being riveting. I just drank it in like a Vodka Tonic, or Margarita.
I was like, “Oh, give it to me.” It’s a book all about 18th-century travelers who were in search of these strange islands in the South Pacific. It would be as if one of us said, “I think I want to go into space, and I think I want to just float there somehow, and I don’t know how I’ll breathe, I’ll just figure it out. I’ll meet some aliens, and we’ll maybe love each other, or we’ll kill each other. We don’t know.” That’s what they did in the 18th century. They’re so psycho. These are five men, of course, they’re all, sorry. Can I say White men?
Craig: You can say White men.
Rachel: They’re all White men-
Craig: Yeah.
Rachel: -who are like, “I shall be intrepid.”
Craig: That does sound like White men.
Rachel: Yes. And they’re psycho, what they ended up trying to do.
Craig: Those White men.
Rachel: Anyways, the challenge is to–
Craig: This is going to be on TV when? That’s what I mean. Nobody steal it.
John: All right. A Dream of Islands?
Rachel: A Dream of Violence by an Australian writer named Gavan Daws. The challenge is to just pick something random up.
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes, love that.
John: Pick a random book. I love going to see a movie, I have no idea what it is. Like the film festivals, you’re just like, “I have to know what this movie is.” Yes. Enjoy it.
Rachel: I don’t know who these people are.
John: Yes, but that’s the most fun. That is our show for this week.
[applause]
John: We have, as we get into some thank yous. Craig, we have an announcement.
Craig: Oh, we have an announcement. We have a live show in Los Angeles on December 6th-
John: You’re the first to hear of this
Craig: -with some incredible guests. Em dash. Tickets will be on sale soon. If you are a premium member, you’ll get advance notice when they go on sale.
John: That’s right. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with special help this week from Megana Rao and Chris Csont, thank you. It is cut and composed by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Yes.
John: You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at @johnaugust.com. This episode will go up on Tuesday. If you could look at the show notes, you’ll find the transcripts for this. We put up transcripts for every single of our 600 episodes.
Craig: Jeez!
John: If you can read through those.
Craig: Jeez!
John: We have t-shirts, hoodies, and stuff, you’ll find at Cotton Bureau. You get all the back episodes at scripnotes.net. Thank you to our incredible guest, Rachel Kondo.
Craig: Thank you, guys.
John: Justin Marks-
Craig: Amazing.
John: Megan Amram, Susan.
Craig: Amazing.
John: Thank you Austin Film Festival and all of you. Thank you.
[cheers]
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. It has come time in our show for Q&A. This is where Craig has to give an explanation-
Craig: Yes.
John: -of what questions and answers are about.
Craig: Yes. The answers are the things that we give you. A question.
John: What is a question, Craig?
Craig: It’s an interrogative statement that has a potential answer, and it’s not a speech.
John: No.
Craig: It’s usually not very long. It’s short, and it ends with a question mark, and it’s answerable. If you feel yourself like an airplane circling the airport, just stop and go, “Anyway, that.”
John: Yes.
Craig: And we’ll answer it.
John: Fantastic. If you have a question you’d like to ask us, you’re going to come up to the room here, and Drew has the microphone. You’re going to approach Drew and ask your question here at the front of the microphone with Drew. You can start moving now if you’d like to come up and ask a question.
Craig: Okay.
John: We have no questions. I’m so excited.
Craig: Awesome.
John: We’ve broken it, we’ve broken this down.
Craig: There’s a Dodgers fan standing back there.
John: I see a gentleman coming up here. Usually, it would be in the center of the aisle. Sorry. You’re very brave. Thank you for coming up here.
Audience 1: How does it feel you’ll have only one question?
John: Oh, how does it feel that we’ll have only one question?
Craig: Well, now it feels like shit. Good question. Solid.
John: Solid question. All right.
Craig: I honestly feel like we were just attacked by a ninja.
John: It really was.
Craig: That’s what it feels like.
John: It was so-
Craig: You just looked down and there’s-
John: -good.
Craig: -blood and you’re like, “How did that even happen?”
John: It’s so good. Actually, if you want to stay on there, you can probably just shout your question. We can hear you. What’s your question? All right, so the question is, for the rest of the audience, so you can all hear it. If you are a person who’s not a US citizen, but you want to get attention in the US film and television industry, how can you go about doing that? We’ve had a lot of folks on Scriptnotes who’ve emerged from outside of the US and have made it work, but it can be challenging. A US manager can sign you, a US agent can sign you, and they can put you to workplaces.
When they put you to workplaces, they do all the magic behind the scene stuff that gets you the visa that you need to work here. I would say coming to a festival like this is a chance to meet some of those people, but also I would say look for who is doing the stuff that you’re doing in your home country. Canada, where are you from?
Audience 2: I’m from Canada.
John: Canada. Obviously, you are willing to live in Los Angeles. If you’re a Canadian living in Los Angeles, you’re working in the industry like everybody else, they just hire you a little bit differently. That’s not the issue. What’s more of a challenge is when you have writers who are in small countries without their own film industry, who then have to reach out and find stuff. That’s where you end up going to international festivals. Just finding some other way to get attention and get people noticing you. Any other thoughts from up here on the panel?
Craig: Canada’s got a pretty good entertainment business. Nothing wrong with starting there, but Canadians have been working successfully in the United States-
John: Ryan Reynolds
Craig: -forever. Most of the funniest people in the world, SCTV and all those folks, Canada and the US share. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just write some good stuff. You’ll be fine.
John: Thank you very much. Hello. What is your question for us?
Audience 3: I have a question primarily for everyone.
[laughter]
Craig: That’s all what-
John: That’s awesome.
Craig: -primarily means. Yes?
Audience 3: Is there a difference between creating a show from the ground up and creating a show that is based on an existing property? Whether it’s a literary annotation like Shogun or The Last of Us?
John: Justin, I’m wondering from your service, because Counterpart’s not based on anything, was it?
Justin: No.
John: Compare those two situations.
Justin: I could do you one better and compare the first season of Shogun to the second where we have no book.
Craig: How are you going to do that?
Justin: The digging motion is the same, but instead of digging through, I don’t know, sand or something, we’re just digging through really, really hard clay. Which is to say it feels really good, it just takes 10 times as long to get to something. I think that what I’ve noticed, especially, and it’s the exact same writer’s room that we have in both seasons, but the process works. The process is the same and keeps us through it.
We just have to spend a lot more time at the beginning deciding what the hell this show is. Where the book really did that for us. I don’t know. I find it to be a lot harder, a lot harder to do it without a book. Especially when you had a book, and it was right there, and everyone thought it was really hard, but it was actually so easy because the book was so good, and here we are.
Craig: James Clavell wrote another book.
Justin: Yes. I’ve told them that.
Craig: It was in a different country entirely.
Justin: I brought up, there’s four other books he’s written.
Craig: They’re like, “No. More than that.”
John: In any situation, you’re going to be dealing with limitations and choices that you can’t make. If there’s an adaptation, there’s choices that are made for you based on what the underlying material is, which is great. If you are doing Bumper in Berlin, the limitations are basically, “You got six weeks, you got this thing, it has to be in Germany,” all this other stuff. In some ways you crave those constraints because if they say like, “Oh, it can be about anything,” that’d be paralyzing as a writer. You want that happy balance between those. Thank you for your question.
Craig: Thank you.
[applause]
John: Hello, and what is your question?
Audience 4: I have a voice strain right now, so please bear with me.
John: Oh, I’ll listen and I’ll [unintelligible 01:14:19].
Audience 4: This question is for Craig Mazin. I have not seen Chernobyl yet, but the question I have for you is, what were the challenges that you had to face when you were making Chernobyl?
Craig: You want me to answer a question about Chernobyl, that you have not seen?
John: Yes.
Craig: I like that actually. I like the balls behind that question.
John: Just so everyone can hear it, what he asked-
Craig: What’s your story?
John: -was like, I’ve not seen Chernobyl, but what were the challenges of making Chernobyl?
Craig: The greatest challenges is getting people to see Chernobyl at the moment.
John: Yes. It is.
Craig: That’s the challenge.
John: I hear it’s going to be sad, Craig. It’s going to be sad, isn’t it? If I were to watch your show, what would it be like?
[laughter]
Craig: Anyway, thank you for your question. That was great.
[laughter]
John: No. All right. He’s passing, but thank you very much your question.
Craig: Thank you. Come back, watch it next year.
John: Also, when you watch it, you can also see the behind the scene making of stuff where they ask Craig these questions every week about how he did that show.
Craig: True.
Megan: I only watched that.
Craig: Thank you
[laughter]
Craig: You have the same question.
Megan: The show wasn’t that funny.
[laughter]
Craig: There are good jokes. Yes.
Audience 4: I will direct that to the show The Last Of Us.
Craig: Let’s ask a question about that. There we go. You should have started with that one. That was better.
[laughter]
Audience 4: Like the world building for The Last Of Us, what were the video game adaptation and stuff, because I don’t know if it was you, but I heard a tweet that you never played the game.
Craig: That’s the wrongest tweet in history. That’s saying something because Twitter. No, I played the game when it came out in 2013, and played it multiple times. I loved the game, and I always wanted to adapt it. I wanted to adapt it while I was playing it. I just didn’t think anybody would ever let me. For the longest time, Neil Druckmann who created the game was trying to adapt it as a movie, which was folly. We disconnected because around the time the rights reverted back to Naughty Dog, which is the company that makes the game.
Naughty Dog is owned by PlayStation, so Sony got the first crack at it. They tried to make a movie, they didn’t. Right around that time the rights came back. Neil also saw Chernobyl, and he was a big fan, and we sat down together, and had a chat, and about a week later we went over to HBO, and off we went. I talked quite a bit about adapting video games is a tricky thing to do, because it’s an interactive medium, and you’re adapting it for a passive medium, and so you have to just constantly think about that. We consider that all the time.
What did we love about the experience that is portable, and what did we love about the experience that is not, and we should leave it over there and do something else over here? That’s how we do that. Thank you very much.
John: Our next questioner. I’m going to say your question for the rest of the room so they can hear it. We keep hearing at at AFF this year about how much contraction there is. The question is, as aspiring script writers, what does that mean to us? What should we do, knowing that this industry is smaller than it was before?
Craig: The Dodgers just scored.
John: Oh no.
Craig: Shut up.
Megan: I feel like I heard some people yelling and was wondering if that’s what it was.
Craig: Those people are dicks.
John: All right.
Craig: Oh, really?
Megan: Guess what, it’s six to three, Craig.
Craig: Putting my phone back in my pocket. What was the question?
John: With the contraction in the industry, what should aspiring writers be thinking about in terms of what’s going to happen next? I want to first validate. It’s reasonable to be concerned about this because if we were here four years ago, not four years, there was a pandemic. If we were here six years ago, things actually were increasing and growing and we were making more stuff than we ever had. There were just more jobs, and there are not as many jobs now because there were making fewer shows. We’re still making shows and those shows are still hiring writers, it’s how do you make sure that you are a writer who they want to bring in on one of these shows?
Craig: Look, everybody who is aspiring right now was aspiring five years ago when there were supposedly more jobs, so it’s hard. It’s just like, it’s very hard, or it’s very, very hard, or it’s very, very, very hard. It’s hard. I don’t think you should be worrying about that at all. At all. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s nothing we can do about it. The vicissitudes of the industry are beyond our control, and certainly not that there’s anything special we can write to make it any easier. There isn’t. The guy who owns Skydance just bought Paramount.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. Nobody can say where this is going. I wouldn’t worry about it. I would just worry about writing something great. People are still buying stuff. People are still breaking into the business. It does happen. The odds were always tiny. Maybe they are 5% tinier, but still tiny. Just keep getting better. How’s that for depressing? The Yankees just lost. It’s just game one guys. Just game one. It’s just game one.
John: Any other thoughts from the panel? Suggestions for, if you were an aspiring screenwriter now, is there any advice you would give them that is different than what you would’ve given them three years ago, six years ago, nine years ago?
Megan: No, and just to add to what Craig was saying, whose team just lost. I think that especially if you’re a comedy writer, how I was saying before of when I was hiring newer entry-level writers, I was looking at a lot of different types of things. I hired this team who go by Rajat and Jeremy, who are very, very funny internet comedians who have now written for a bunch of stuff. Part of why I knew about them is they were just putting out weird sketches online, and that is something that used to happen more when Funny or Die was really a thing-
John: Megan, that’s also how you got attention.
Megan: That is how I got found. What I think was so exciting about them, but also just a lot of really interesting writer-comedians, you don’t necessarily have to be a hyphenate, but just people who are making stuff is that they’re always going to figure out a way to make stuff. I think, yes, you should be writing your scripts and your samples, but if I find something, and I’m like, this person just loved making this thing, and it genuinely is really funny, I think that still is going to pop in a landscape where, yes, there might be fewer jobs, but if you’re making something that excites you and excites other people, it’s still going to pop.
John: Thank you so much for your question, and good luck.
Audience 4: Thank you.
[applause]
John: Hello, and what is your question?
Audience 5: Hello. My question is for you, Craig.
Craig: Are you going to tell me you didn’t watch Chernobyl anyway? Okay.
Audience 5: First question, Last of Us. I just want to question you about the Bill and Frank episode.
[applause]
Craig: There is definitely one guy that has not– oh no, he didn’t [unintelligible 01:21:48].
Audience 5: My question is, because there was a big risk to change that part of the story, was there any hesitations with that or pushback, or did you say, fuck it, let’s just do this.
Craig: No, the only hesitation was, it was just a general thing where I’d said to Neil, “I have an idea to do something totally different than what was there, but it’s filling a space that didn’t even exist in the game. It’s just a different thing.” I did feel like the thing about depressing stuff is that you need a break. You need to know that there’s a win. People can win, right? Or else like, “Oh my God, why am I watching this?” There has to be some glimmer of hope, and in the game they didn’t need to do that because you’re the person playing. It’s you, so you’re always winning by defeating the enemies, and when you’re watching, that’s not the case. It was just something I proposed to Neil, and he was like, “Go for it. Let’s see what happens.”
I wrote it, and I was very scared when I sent him, and he said, “This is my favorite one of all of them so far.” I have to tip my hat to him. I don’t know if James Clavell were alive today if he would be like, “No. You’re violating my work.” A lot of people that write novels are like that. A lot of people that write source material are incredibly protective of it, and can’t handle the idea of adaptation, and Neil has always been incredibly both generous but also, I think, smart and engaged. He understands that sometimes changing it keeps it closer weirdly to the source material than not.
Audience 5: Cool. Thank you, and last one is a quick one. We know you’re a favorite baseball team. What’s your favorite football team?
Craig: I grew up a Giants fan, but I got a huge– what the fuck is going on? Did they lose tonight?
[laughter]
Megan: The Dodgers just beat the Giants. I’m sorry.
[laughter]
John: Incredible. No one saw it coming.
Craig: It’s so weird. I can’t believe there’s a room. We’re in Texas. Why hate the Giants? Anyway, I’m not a big football fan. It’s hard. We talked about this on the show before. We’ve all just decided that we know that people are being paid to get brain damage, and we’re fine, and I’m not. I just can’t watch it anymore. I can’t. It’s fucked up. Anyway, a lot of you, I’m sure, are football fans. Thanks for coming.
[laughter]
John: Thank you. We have time for two more questions. You, sir, get one of the last two questions. What do you got?
Audience 6: This is exclusive for Megan and Susan, but anyways. If Eleanor Shellstrop from The Good Place had gotten a job at Waystar Royco-
[chuckles]
Audience 6: -do you think she could have taken it over, and do you think any of the four Roy kids could possibly end up in a good place?
John: Oh, I like the crossover there.
Susan: That’s a good one.
Megan: On the top of my head, I think she talks a big game, and absolutely could not have worked at Waystar Royco. I’m like, she just a bombast, but I think would have broken down, maybe flashed some tires and left the building or something.
Susan: She’s good at talking though. She’s a good problem solver. She could be like a Jerri figure, you know-
Megan: That’s true.
Susan: -where she’s a bulletproof Ninja running through it. I mean, yes, I’m really curious what their hell would look like. I mean, they don’t deserve to be in the medium place, I don’t think.
Megan: I think, yes, maybe they would have been recruited for corporate in the bad place-
Susan: Yes, devising- Shiv would have some really good ones.
Megan: Which is where the shows meet a little bit.
Rachel: I’d watch her and Greg though, the two of them together. I feel like something could– I would love to watch that show.
John: Greg and Eleanor? Oh yes, totally. They would torture each other in just the right way.
Craig: Team Gregnor. I love it.
[laughter]
Megan: Great question.
John: Now, that’s a fun question. Thank you for that question.
Craig: Thank you.
John: All right.
[applause]
John: Our final question of the night.
Audience: For the panelists who came into screenwriting from other genres, now that you’ve done screenwriting, it’s a thing that you have the experience with looking back either at your own work or work in your– whether it be plays or short stories, are there things that you would want to adapt under your own or someone else’s from their field into screenplays.
John: Absolutely. Talk about what you’re able to bring from playwriting into screenwriting. Is there stuff that you’ve taken from screenwriting that you want to bring back into playwriting or into short stories, or from this experience that you want to take back to the other medium?
Susan: Yes, really good question. I tend to see things, it’s like the vessel, and you see something in your mind, and it’s like, “Is this feel like a play?” I had a play that I was in the process of adapting into a TV series. The truth is, we have a lot of things that just don’t happen. There was one play of mine that was set in a hotel, and it was semi-autobiographical from one of my moonlighting jobs, survival Jobs.
But yes, I have another play that I haven’t written as a film, but I can see it that way, and it feels right. I think it’s an exciting opportunity because plays are much shorter, so you have that much more time to see how it looks in a series, or just playing with the visuals of what is it when it’s really literal? Because, theater, you have to use a lot of your imagination, you’re in an enclosed space, and so what does it look like when everything becomes very real, it’s not just the suggestion of it?
So I would be really excited to see that, but I think there are some things that really do feel like this must be a film, and this must be a play, and sometimes the act of translation, maybe it doesn’t move enough. I think you really have to crack open the play to make it work as a film. I think sometimes it really works. A lot of amazing older films began as plays as well, so it just depends on how willing you are to really go for it.
John: Rachel, have you done short fiction since you’ve done all this work as a screenwriter? What is it like going back to prose after this?
Rachel: Oh, I think the difference between the two is it feels like screenwriting is building something. You build something with your bricks. Every single day you show up, you– I don’t know even how you do bricks. You lay cement-
[laughter]
Rachel: -some mortar stuff. I don’t know. Something.
Craig: You actually know a lot about bricks.
[laughter]
Rachel: Yes, and then you put them in a pattern, and you build something, and afterwards you have a wall, of sorts, or a house. Then with prose, and probably playwriting too, it feels like–
Craig: This is what it’s like?
[laughter]
Rachel: Yes.
Craig: No, go on.
[laughter]
Rachel: What’s wrong with that? It’s true.
[laughter]
Justin: I’m glad everyone can see this tonight.
Craig: I am enjoying it. I like it.
[laughter]
Rachel: You put on your overalls and you go to work. You have your triangle-shaped-
Megan: Trowel.
Rachel: Is it a dowel?
John: No, trowel.
Rachel: Trovel?
Susan: Trowel.
Rachel: Trowel.
Craig: Did you say trovel?
[laughter]
Rachel: Sorry. I didn’t study Masonry.
[laughter]
Craig: You know a lot. You weirdly know so much.
Rachel: Really? No, but the point is that fiction write or prose writing, possibly play, I’ve never written a play. I wanted to star in a musical though.
Craig: Now we’re talking.
Rachel: Now it’s coming out. I feel like fiction writing or prose writing is like spinning gold out of thin air. Like you’re just like, “This is probably not going to happen today. It’s just not going to happen, but I’m here.” So I have not gone back to short fiction, but the question which I thought was interesting is the going back and forth, and the adaption, and whatnot. I just really want to finish my collection of short stories. That’s all I want to do, and I don’t see it. It’s like you bring different parts of yourself to everything, and there’s only one part of my heart that’s for that collection and one part that’s for the novel that is in a drawer somewhere. It’s a great question, but it’s funny, the divisions, there’s not much crossover for me.
John: That is our show for this week.
Links:
- Austin Film Festival
- Scriptnotes LIVE! December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter
- Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks
- Megan Amram
- Susan Soon He Stanton
- Decoder Ring – “The Wrongest Bird in Movie History”
- Vote Out Ted Cruz
- Brick App
- r/TVTooHigh
- Bliss Lau
- A Dream of Islands by Gavan Daws
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with special help this week from Chris Csont and Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.