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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: Okay, so. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 688 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back a seven-time guest.

Craig: Oh.

John: He is a comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster whose new special, The Good Life, debuted this week on Netflix. It is the legendary Mike Birbiglia. Welcome back.

Mike Birbiglia: Hey, guys. This is my favorite podcast. I, on the flight here, listened to the Taffy Akner Moneyball episode. As a fan of the show, I request-

Craig: More?

Mike: -more breaking apart a movie.

John: Oh, yes. The Deep Dives? Yes.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: I think he’s right. I think he’s right. We don’t do it enough. I guess what we do do enough, or maybe too much of, is having Mike Birbiglia on the show.

John: No.

Craig: Seven-time host. We should give you the jacket, the robe that SNLers get.

Mike: The Seven Timers Club.

Craig: The Seven Timers Club.

John: Here are the episodes he was on. First was in 2013 for My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Screenwriter. That’s way back to your first film. Then, Austin Forever in 2014. That was an Austin Live show, which I had forgotten that we actually– that’s where you first–

Mike: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Special. Then, what was it? We talked about Sleepwalk with Me, the movie? My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend wasn’t a movie.

John: It was number two. Yes, okay. That was a special, wasn’t it?

Mike: That was a special, yes.

John: That was a special, right. I think I first saw you– Joss Whedon interviewed you at the Writers Guild Theater for Sleepwalk With Me.

Mike: For Sleepwalk With Me. 2012. Woo.

John: 2014, Austin Forever. 2016, Don’t Think Twice. Your movie, which we all loved.

Mike: Thanks.

John: It was so early on the dissection of how comedy groups work and how improv works and all that stuff. It’s held up really well.

Mike: Oh, thanks.

John: We had you on in 2019 for The New One. We had you in 2020. You were part of a big episode with What We’re All Up To during the pandemic. We checked in with you there. I was a guest on your show, which we also aired on this very podcast. Your show called Working It Out, your podcast, is phenomenal. I recommend it to–

Craig: I have seen it. That’s the thing. That’s why I like the idea of maybe putting this on video because I like watching you-

Mike: Oh, wow. Thanks.

Craig: -more than I like listening to you.

Mike: That’s fascinating.

Craig: I actually turn the sound off.

Mike: Oh, you turn the sound off?

Craig: Yes. I just watch you.

Mike: I’m like a silent film podcast star to you?

Craig: I blow it up and I just look at you mouth. Yes, Sexy Craig likes your podcast.

Mike: Oh, I’m so glad that we’re recording this.

John: Recently on your podcast, you had Gary Simons, who works with you on that podcast.

Mike: Yes, true.

John: He’s also a stand-up comic. You were talking through the process. It was so good in terms of answering questions about what it’s like to get a career started as a stand-up comic in the way that I think we’re trying to answer those questions for aspiring screenwriters. It was just so, so smart.

Mike: Thanks a lot. It’s funny. There were two episodes back-to-back that were Scriptnotes-esque but in the comedy space. The Gary Simons episode, which we basically speak to what do you do in the first three to five years of trying to be a comic? Then the week before Ira Glass comes on and decides, “Hey, I want to try to do stand-up comedy.”

Craig: I was impressed by this. I really was.

Mike: It was like, “Well, what happens if you’re not a stand-up comic? You want to try it. I perform 10 minutes. What is your critique of these 10 minutes? It’s not unlike the three-page challenge.

John: What I’d like to do with you on the podcast today is talk about how you write a joke for the stage, for a sketch, or for a scene. We have some scenarios. It’s like how would this be a movie, but how would this be a joke? We have some scenarios we’re going to talk through and figure out what is the comedic premise for each of these types of writing and how different they are. A joke you tell on stage versus a sketch versus a scene, they’re really different needs even though they are all potentially finding comedy in a situation.

Mike: That’s great.

John: Cool. We’re also going to answer listener questions on breaking a story, using an idea, TV remakes. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about video and social and all the infrastructure behind the scenes and stuff, because you and your team do an amazing job with video for your podcast, the marketing without making it feel like marketing. You must have email lists that are managed. I’d just love to know what all that’s like, because it’s just–

Craig: Because we want to beat you.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Teach us your ways so that we may overcome you.

John: I just want to know more about that.

Mike: That seems great. I love that.

John: Cool. Drew, we have some news.

Drew Marquardt: We do. We realized that Spotify had comments on the podcast episodes.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: No idea.

Drew: So we turned them off. Oh, we have yours too.

John: The Spotify comments we were getting on Scriptnotes episode, and the reason we turned them off, they’re all about The Last of Us, Craig.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: Great. I’m sure the people that take time to leave comments on Spotify love the show and all the decisions we’ve made.

Drew: Very measured feedback.

John: Mike, yours are still on. You may not realize this, so we have a sampling of some of the comments on your Ira Glass episode.

Mike: Amazing.

John: Rory wrote in and said, “Maybe the best episode of the show feels like the core of what this podcast should be about.”

Mike: Oh, wow.

John: String of Numbers says, “Props to Ira for being open and vulnerable in his work. It was interesting to see Mike pointing out where the punchline should go and Ira being less sure how to approach that.”

Mike: Sure. All right.

John: Elise says, “Love this show but “Hiking is walking” is a joke made on Sex and the City-

Mike: Oh.

John: -by a character played by David Duchovny 20 years ago. It’s not original.”

Mike: Fair.

John: Then we also looked at the YouTube clip for that and it said, “You don’t know this, but in my brain, you’re my dad.”

Mike: Me or Ira?

John: Yes, to you.

Mike: All right.

Craig: You wanted it to be Ira, didn’t you?

[laughter]

Mike: He is in some ways, I said this on the episode. He in some ways feels like my dad.

Craig: He’s a very paternal.

John: He is, yes.

Craig: Yes, he gives that vibe.

John: Yes, but I think there’s a lot of dad energy in this podcast right now. We’re all very in that dad–

Craig: Even you. Even you, Drew.

John: Yes. He’s a young dad. Young dad. He has a young child.

Mike: Oh, you have a young child?

Drew: I don’t. No.

Mike: Okay. Perfect.

[laughter]

Craig: Because he seems so ambivalent about it?

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I know I have five kids, but I don’t know if I’m real.

John: Drew looks like he could be pushing a stroller, though.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

Drew: I’m going to take that as a compliment.

Craig: Drew, are we allowed to ask you how old you are by law?

Drew: I don’t think legally, no.

Craig: Okay. I’m not asking you. If you volunteer it, I’m just curious.

Drew: I’m 35.

Craig: I already had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by that point. I would say yes, he’s stroller age.

John: Final comment on your YouTube. Why do I just now realized Mike looks a lot like Matt Damon? Do you get the Matt Damon comparison?

Mike: Yes. Cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: Oh, wow. That’s it.

Craig: I would adjust that to just Bill O’Reilly.

John: Now, once it, you can’t unsee it. It’s crazy.

Craig: You are young, kind Bill O’Reilly.

Mike: Every time– so over the years, I get Paul Rudd. The one I got for years was James Van Der Beek.

John: [crosstalk]

Mike: When I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers once, and James Van Der Beek was there, I was like, “People tell me I look like you.” He was just like, “I don’t see it.” Anyway. Now I never say what people compare me [unintelligible 00:07:02]

Craig: The next time you’re on O’Reilly, you should bring it up.

Mike: Oh, God.

John: Where is O’Reilly now? Is it a podcast or is it a video? I don’t know. He’s not on a network anymore.

Mike: I think it’s probably some a self-release thing, right?

Craig: Podcast thing. From his bunker.

John: Yes, it’s wild. Mike, talk to us about this special. I saw versions of this along the way. I saw you had Mike Birbiglia and Friends, where you did some of the material in this. Then I saw the full thing on stage, and I saw it last night in its finished Netflix form. I think we’ve talked on previous episodes about your process, which we can see as a bunch of note cards up on a board.

Mike: Sure.

John: What was the inception of this, and when did you find the pieces fitting together?

Mike: The inception of it was two years ago when I finished The Old Man in the Pool, which was at Lincoln Center, and we filmed it for Netflix. I always talk on my podcast about this concept of obsession. What is the thing you’re obsessed about, can’t stop thinking about? As a writer, it’s like, “Well, just write that. Just free write on that. This Is My Journal, it’s like I’m free writing on that at breakfast this morning.

Two years ago, it was just like, “Oh, this is weird. My daughter is eight years old now, and I don’t know a lot of the answers to the questions, because kids just always ask so many questions. I was knocking it out of the park till age eight. Then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, these are tricky questions.” I just went– my first thing is always like I go to the comedy cellar. I go to small 100, 200 seat comedy rooms, try out a ton of jokes. Those jokes eventually become stories. At a certain point, I start to form the stories into having, similar to how you guys talk about it all the time, of so-then causality versus and-then lateral movement story-wise.

About a year into the process, my dad had a stroke, and so much of my life became about taking care of my dad. I started to think in relation to, “Okay, what if the show was about how do I explain things to my daughter?” and also, “What is my relationship with my own dad?” It becomes this– the title is The Good Life, but it becomes a meditation on the question that my daughter asked me when she looked up at a smoke shop called, The Good Life, “Dad, what’s the good life?” It opens the special with an existential question, “What is the good life?” It makes the audience wonder that. Then I go through a lot of stories with my daughter and with my dad, and then it arrives at a thesis at the end of what is the good life.

John: Yes. Great. When you’re figuring out these pieces, one of these things you get to do as a stand-up comic is just constantly test the material and constantly see what actually resonates with the audience. When we’re writing scenes, we’re writing scenes but they just exist on a page. We don’t hear them. We don’t feel them. We don’t get a reaction. You’re constantly getting the reaction. What was the culling process like of like, “Oh, I think it’s this idea.” How developed are jokes you’re telling in those initial rooms?

Mike: The jokes at the beginning are– they’re developed insofar as I’ve run them by friends who are comics, usually. Our listenerships are similar in the sense of it’s a lot of creative people who are either working as creatives or want to work as creatives. I always say, try to build a community of the people around you. I look around at the people who I started with, and we were all broke and struggling in our 20s. I look around and go, “Oh, they’re doing really well now.” ‘You know what I mean? There is a thing to creating your own community of people who are at your level.

I feel like now it’s like people like Pete Holmes and John Mulaney are people who in my 20s were trying to figure it all out, and we would run jokes by each other. Now everyone has a really good career, but still you run jokes by each other. Then even, I think it was one of those Largo shows that you were at and Mulaney came on and he gave me a joke that ended up in the special. There’s a line where I go, “I’m a comedian. My wife is a poet. Together, we’re a sculptor.” I came off stage and he goes, “What about this?” He goes, “It doesn’t make sense, but what do you think of this?” I was like, “Yes, I’ll try that.” It somehow does make sense in the context of the special.

That’s what it is. It’s like, you start out with, you bounce jokes off friends, which is what my whole podcast is. Then when you figure out something that you think is worth an audience seeing, you put it out there. Then I go on tour, and that’s really instructive bringing it to all different cities because you see like, “Oh, yes, this isn’t just a provincial sense of humor in New York City. This is something that plays everywhere,” or it doesn’t play. I think a huge part of being a comedian is figuring out what doesn’t work.

Craig: Yes, I wish that we had that. Although I suppose what we do– we don’t quite have it on the granular level that you do because I don’t think any of our friends would just go, “Hey, here’s a scene.”

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: It starts on page 37. You don’t know what happened before. We will share scripts, and we will look at– maybe even it’s more common to happen deeper into the process where we’ll say, “Okay, here’s a cut of.” You, actually, you had that testing procedure for your movie-

Mike: Don’t Think Twice, yes.

Craig: -Don’t Think Twice, where you would have a reading and people would there and then discuss it, which was really smart.

John: It’s hard to iterate. Long form writing is just hard to iterate overall.

Craig: It is.

John: You can’t watch this whole thing. When I was doing Big Fish, the musical, we could iterate. Every night, we could see the show like, “Oh, this is what’s working. This is what’s not working.” I can swap out jokes. We could move whole scenes around. In film and TV writing, it’s not really possible.

Craig: Yes, it is a little scary to know that you’re chiseling in stone and then sending it out into the world. What I love about what you’re saying, it’s what– we talked about writers’ groups last week, I think. Part of me gets itchy when people write in and they’re like, “I’m part of a writer’s group,” because I think, “Well, what if all the writers in that group aren’t very good?” because the odds are they’re not.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Then they’re all giving each other advice, and it’s maybe bad. Then I think, “Okay, if you do find yourself hitting a mark, getting a job, entering, to look around for people that are also like you, and what I think has changed, I don’t know if you agree with me, John, when we started in Hollywood, it felt like you were isolated and that, in fact, we were all meant to be in competition with each other. We were like horses in our stall before the gate opens.

I think as the internet brought everybody together, that went away completely and became more like, Okay, I’m going to pick up a phone, “Have you worked with this person?” or, “I have an idea. Do you think this is a good idea?” I love that you can do that with– does it ever hurt?

Mike: Which part of it?

Craig: When you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to try this show. Okay, Mulaney, I’m going to run this by you,” and he just stares at you and he’s like, “No.”

Mike: No, I don’t think that hurts. I don’t say– Look, I think not doing well with a joke with friends, it’s hard in that moment. Not doing well with a joke on stage is hard in that moment. I think you have to, like there’s an imperative to view it as I’m getting feedback for something that will be finished later. It’s like the wisest thing that almost anyone ever taught me is my editor, Jeffrey Richman, who edited this special, he edited both of my movies, he edited Severance, he did Escape at Dannemora, he does a lot of stuff with Ben Stiller. On both movies, I had moments in the edit where I go, “What are we going to do? This is a disaster.”

Craig: Oh, sure.

Mike: He just goes, “Oh, we’re not going to hand it in till it’s done.” It’s so simple of an idea, but I think that that’s– all artistic process, you just don’t hand it in till it’s done.

Craig: What I think people that work in comedy have, that people who have never worked in comedy don’t have, is this, which is, sometimes I describe it as a work ethic, but what I really think it is humility. Comedy humiliates you.

Mike: [laughs] Yes, sure.

Craig: Humiliates you. Then, as part of the process, you must get re-humiliated over and over and over-

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: -to the point where you don’t even see it as humiliation anymore. You see it as part of the process towards turning it in before it’s done.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: A lot of people who come in drama have this opposite point of view. Their point of view is, “I need to treasure my instincts. That is my voice, and what I have done, therefore, is correct, regardless of what people think.” I think having a little bit of that isn’t such a bad idea, but I’m far more admiring of the humiliation sequence.

Mike: Liz Gilbert has this, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and many other great things, has this TED Talk that’s so good about the idea of not being a genius but having a genius, and holding it, and fostering it. That way it doesn’t become about you, or you, or you.

Craig: Oh, yes.

Mike: I think that that’s really key as a comedian. You can never think, “I am funny.” You have to think, “I want to create something that is funny for these people.”

Craig: That’s brilliant. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. Now, also, you probably need to then do the same thing for whatever the opposite of genius is, the self-loathing, the critic, I guess, which is sometimes hard for me. I should imagine like, “Okay, it’s easy for me to imagine there’s genius over there. That’s not me.” Now I have to figure out like, “Okay.” Also, there’s a critic over there not in here. That can be difficult. I like that.

John: I want to talk to you about how you bring yourself to your work. As writers, we’re always putting ourselves in our scripts and in our pages, but it’s all disguised. It’s never really exactly us. We’re never identifying like, “Oh, this is me doing this thing,” versus your stand-up, which is all about what has happened to you. All of your comedy is very centered on your experience of things that happened to you, and the people around you, which is a challenge because your wife, Jenny, your daughter, Una, they’ve been part of all of your specials. We know a lot about them even though we’ve never met them.

Mike: My parents, yes.

John: Your parents, especially in this one, and your dad, who’s unwillingly dragged into this story.

Mike: Oh, yeah. So you’ve been talking to him about it?

John: Oh, yes. Can you talk to me, as you’re developing this material and trying it on stage, how do you find the boundaries of like, “Well, this is me, Mike Birbiglia, as the individual person, versus me, the performer, who is creating this funny thing that’s not me”?

Mike: That is probably the most challenging part of it. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m going to take a few years off from autobiographical storytelling right now, because my daughter is 10, and she’s entering those years where I feel like you don’t want to make someone more self-conscious about all their stuff.

Craig: Yes, and you probably don’t want to be looking too closely at it either-

Mike: No.

Craig: -having gone through it twice.

Mike: Oh, yes.

Craig: It will be a great story for you 15 years from now.

Mike: Sure, yes. That’s what Jenny– My wife is a poet, brilliant poet, but she always says, whenever we’re going through something that’s really hard, she’s like, “Write it down. Just don’t release it now.”

Craig: I like how concise that is, have you ever checked to see if she’s constantly speaking to you in haiku and you just don’t remember?

[laughter]

John: It’s been a long constant this entire time. We’re going to wind back to the table, and I’ll think, “Oh, everything was a haiku.”

Craig: That would be the most brilliant thing ever.

Mike: She’s very wise and poetic person. Yes, that is hard. I’m pivoting over to the thing I’m writing right now. It’s fictional. I’m writing a movie and hopefully shoot next year, in the vein of Don’t Think Twice, a small-budget indie comedy. Yes, I’m going to take a few years off from it because I do think it’s hard. I’m talking about my dad. My dad’s in his final stage of life. He could go tomorrow. He could go in a year or two years, but it’s the final stage of life. It’s so hard. Yes, that side of it, I’m always juggling what am I saying and am I depicting the person well. Am I trying to find myself as the joke of the story-

John: Exactly.

Mike: -as opposed to just taking on people?

John: Absolutely. In this last special, you’re talking about how terrible nine-year-old girls are, which is just true, nine-year-olds are terrible. There’s a reason why you go to the jumpy gym where everyone’s going to get hurt because everybody gets hurt. All that stuff is very relatable, but none of it is directed. Your daughter comes out well in all of it.

Mike: True. I love my daughter, I hate her friends.

[laughter]

John: Yes, absolutely. A class of people is great, but the focus of the humiliation is always you. It’s your hard nipples.

John: That’s right.

Mike: It’s all-

Craig: I get that too.

[laughter]

Mike: The thing that’s funny about that, about the autobiographical side of that, is the hard nipple story is basically, I’ll paraphrase it for the audience, but it’s when I was 12, I had hard nipples. Sometimes something happens during puberty. I was always a hypochondriac, so I thought it was cancer. I went to my dad– he’s a doctor– and go, “Hey, Dad. I have hard nipples.”

John: On your special you say like, “Dad, I have cancer.”

Mike: I have cancer. He goes, “Why do you think that?” “I have hard nipples.”

Craig: I loved how calm he was. Why do you think that?

John: Exactly.

Mike: He’s a neurologist. No emotion.

[laughter]

Mike: I was like, “Well, see for yourself.” I take off my shirt. In the living room, he feels my hard nipples. Then he gives me the briefest medical diagnosis I’ve received to this very day. He goes, “Nope.” That was the end of the conversation.

[laughter]

Craig: What a comforting presence in your life.

Mike: Yes, exactly. This is a great example of when people ask me, “Are these stories true?” Sometimes they’re not true in small ways that you would never guess. When my dad felt my nipples, it was in his bedroom.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I took it out.

Craig: Yes, that’s smart.

Mike: I relocated it to the living room because the audience–

Craig: You don’t want them going where you don’t want them going. You want them going there a tiny bit, which is, LOL, my dad’s feeling me up.

Mike: LOL, yes.

Craig: If he’s feeling me up in his bedroom, that’s not LOL.

John: What’s also crucial, though, is that you had already set up that your dad would come home from his two jobs and sit in his chair and read his war novels. You’re able pull it back to war novels. He sets down his war novel and puts his hands on your hard nipples.

Mike: That’s right.

John: You already created the image for us, which is why it’s so much better than what it is.

Craig: Apparently we have the same dad.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I love dadness. I have to say it’s underappreciated in our society. We make fun of the fact that the dad comes home sits there and reads the war novel or watches the History Channel or plays a very long version of some World War II simulation with a friend. It’s wonderful. Let’s celebrate that.

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: Let’s celebrate that guy.

John: The last thing I want to talk to you about before we get to these “how would this be a jokes” is transitions. We talk on the show constantly about transitions and how you move from scene to scene. I’d seen your special on stage, but watching it filmed, I was very aware of when you’re transitioning from one idea to the next idea, from one tone to the next tone, from we’re in this world, now, we’re in this world. I’m sure it’s a thing that you worked out doing the show again and again live. You were able to pivot on such small spaces. Sometimes it’s a gesture, it’s a single word repeated, and pull us along to a completely new thing.

Mike: Sure.

John: Are you writing that? Are you thinking that or is just how it works on stage as you’re feeling it out?

Mike: I would describe that as the final stage of the development in a two-year process. It’s probably the final six months just figuring out how is this story, so then this story, so then this story, so then this story. My director, Seth Barrish, who also directed the special and– it’s a confusing title for people, but he is a dramaturgical person. He works through the script with me and the logic of the script. We’ll spend an extraordinary amount of time. He’ll go, “When you go to the hard nipples story, and then you go to but actually your dad wasn’t physically affectionate, but you are physically affectionate with your daughter. You hug her, you say, I love you. I don’t understand the connection between those two ideas.”

It’s almost like he’s making– what Seth is doing is he’s making his brain blank and — or attempting to — over and over and over again, making, trying to imagine what it would be like as someone who’s never seen the show, getting rid of the curse of knowledge. Getting rid of the curse of knowledge. We have these long, drawn out conversations. I’m sure you guys deal with this in television and films all the time, which is like, you’ll end up taking something that was 150 words, and then at the end of the edit, it’s four words. But those four words are the right four words.

Craig: Absolutely.

Mike: That’s a lot of what we do.

John: Last night, we were also talking about how a thing you do really well, which you see other comics do, but I was really struck by it last night, is we’re on one thread, and then you take a diversion, and we’re on another thread, which is really, really funny. Then you pull us back to the main thread, and we’d forgotten that we were on that thread, and yet we’re like, “Oh, yes.” You get a jolt of energy because you’re back on the main thread. You had forgotten that you’d taken a detour. It’s not a recall. We’re just rejoining the story that we were already on. It’s really well done.

Craig: You get to be a genius, because if you’re talking normally with people, you cannot maintain 12 spinning plates, including a hidden one up your sleeve, that you then go, ah-ha, and ah. You plan your own brilliance so that when you do come back around to things, it’s magician stuff. Right?

Mike: It’s a very strange art form, in the sense that, as a comedian, when you meet people, you are always a letdown because you look like that guy on stage, and your voice is the same as that guy on stage, but there’s less jokes, there’s less causality story to story. The transitions aren’t great.

Craig: No big surprises.

Mike: No big surprises.

Craig: No full circles.

Mike: Yes, nothing comes full circle.

John: No natural segues, no.

Craig: Just a lot of stammering, and then, and sweat.

Mike: Also, what I’ve noticed through the years is, I think comedians are people who are frustrated at parties because when we perform, people laugh or don’t laugh. They don’t interject. They don’t go, “Let me tell you about my sleepwalking story.” ‘You know what I mean?

Craig: “No, no. Sir, sit down.” Heckler.

Mike: This is the best one-

Craig: Yes?

Mike: “I’ve got the best sleepwalking story here. Everyone shut up.”

Craig: You do. You should just bring somebody with you to parties, who can tell other people to shut up.

Mike: Yes, can you imagine if comedians showed up at parties, and we’re like, “All right, everyone step aside.”

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: Yes, all of your stupid stories, wrap them up.

Mike: With your banter.

Craig: We’ve got a good one that’s crowd tested. Yes, that must be really frustrating. That’s like being, I don’t know, you play in the symphony, and then you go to somebody’s backyard where everyone’s like, “Oh, we’re going to do a quick jam. What do you play? Violin?” “Yes.” The guy banging the pot lid is really loud and–

Mike: You guys must have that, though, with movies, because people– everyone has a take on movies and television. Then you come in, and you’re like, “Okay, here’s my take, and mine’s right.”

John: Yes, but also, the movie is not happening in front of you. No one’s expecting, “Craig, make a movie right now.” There’s not that performance.

Craig: If it were that.

Mike: Yes, it’s–

Craig: If it were a party where the idea was to write a short scene, then I suppose that would be really frustrating.

John: Yes, I suppose, beautiful people who are photographed, they’re still beautiful in real life, but they’re not as attractive, they look immortal.

Craig: The wind machine is on and so forth?

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, but you’re absolutely– you guys are in the worst spot. Congratulations.

Mike: Thank you so much.

[laughter]

John: Let’s take a look at writing some jokes. We have three different stories that I’ve pulled from recent news things. We’re going to start with the Run Club Haters. This is a story in Curved Magazine, a New York magazine, by Melissa Dahl. Drew, can you give us a short summary of the lead here for this story?

Drew: One Saturday morning in April, Amy was running along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, one of her usual routes. It was a sunny spring day. The sidewalk was crowded with runners, some running alone like her, and others in big groups. At some point, she realized one of those big groups was headed straight towards her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Amy, who’s 31 and has been running in New York since 2015.

It was, in her memory, a group of young women running five to eight abreast. They were completely across the sidewalk, she recalls. This is the most runners she’s ever seen taking up a path, but she’s gone head to head with run clubs before.

Usually she moves aside, even if it means briefly stepping into the street or a bike lane. This time, she wanted to test something. She didn’t change course, and neither did they. It was something of a game of runner’s chicken, which ended when Amy ran straight through the pack, colliding with one of the women. “Neither of us fell, but I think she was definitely shook,” Amy says. The woman started apologizing, but Amy didn’t stick around to.”

John: This article goes on to talk with organizers of run clubs, including some who accidentally started a run club because they just posted on Instagram, “Oh, I’m going for a run if anyone wants to join?” and then 100 people show up. They’re also talking about parks that are now requiring permits, costing $1,000 for people to do this. This is as a story space, and I was wondering, let’s first start talking about, where are the jokes? Where’s the comedy we could find in this-

Mike: If we were Amy.

John: -if we were Amy or if we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be Amy.

John: If we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be in the run club.

John: We could be any of the characters in the story, but if this is something that happened to us or around us, where are some of the jokes? Where are the comedic premises there?

Mike: I think, first of all, you’d have to be Amy in the story. If you’re one of the big group of bird people who essentially wallop someone in the street, that’s not going to be very relatable, but we’ve all been the Amy of the story, which is– I would say, if this were my story, if this were something that happened to me, it would be talking about the observation in general of when people take up the whole sidewalk. You can bring up different examples.

One of my examples that drives me nuts is people with dogs where they’re on one side of the sidewalk, the leash goes across. It’s essentially a trip wire created by them and their evil dog, and they don’t act like they’re taking up the whole curb. I would go into observational things about that, and then I would go into, how do you feel about walking? Are you afraid of walking? How do you feel about walking in the city?

Ira Glass, in some ways, taught me how to tell these types of 7 to 10-minute stories. He always thinks of it in terms of a story, non-comedically, is a little bit of plot, how do you feel about the plot, a little bit more plot, how do you feel about the plot? In my case, as a comedian, it’s a little bit of plot, some jokes about the plot. A little bit of plot, the jokes about the plot. In order for us to care about Amy’s story, or “my story” walking down the street and running into a herd of runners, is you have to know that pushes my buttons as a character. Right?

Craig: Not enough to know that anybody would feel particularly annoyed. You really feel.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: If this were in a very broad movie, there’s the classic escalation technique. It begins with, I’m running, and there’s one guy just staggering, “I got to go run.” All right, and then there’s the guy with the dog, and then there’s two runners, and then there’s just a wall of runners, and then there’s a Zamboni.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: You just keep– it just gets stupider and stupider if it’s–

Mike: That’s straight from Naked Gun.

Craig: That’s Naked Gun. I do think there could be a sketch version where you are part of the run-

Mike: Oh, the runners group? Yes.

Craig: -where the run club is the most heinous, horrible group of people. It’s not just runners, it’s people in stretchers, and it’s– I could see that.

John: It’s taking me back to– on safari and you’ll see a bunch of animals stampede, and it’s like, “Oh shit.” One runner by themselves is not threatening at all, but you see a pack moving towards you, they just– all of your instincts kick in. It’s like, “Oh, this is a dangerous situation.” I also want to get back to what you talked about, humiliation and Amy being humiliated or being the source of– the problem is her is also, I think, really important too. What is it about me that I decided like, “Today, I’m going to be the person, I’m not going to move.”

Craig: Today I decided is really good. Maybe the setup is like every day I see the run club, I turn around and flee. Today I’m not going to because a friend told me to stick up for myself and my therapist. I’m going to hold my head high, and I’m not going to move, and she’s killed. That’s all, they kill her, which is a really good lesson.

Mike: I have an analogous story years ago that I do as stand-up sometimes that’s never found its way into the special. It’s a similar city scenario, which is years ago, I’m rushing down subway steps at the West Forest stop. One of the jokes I make is, I’m always in a rush, I have nowhere to be. I’ve never had anywhere to be. I’m always in a rush. I trip on my lace. My dad taught me how to tie my shoes when I was a kid– he was never around. As I’m not good at it, and so I trip fourth step from the bottom, fly in the air, I land on the ball of my shoulder.

Craig: Argh.

Mike: I know. I often tell people growing up, I know. I was that guy writhing on the floor.

Craig: Dirty subway floor.

Mike: Dirty subway floor. People blowing past me-

John: Of course.

Mike: -just like, “Are you okay?” “No.” “Good,” or “Yes, good,” and then they’re gone. Then, what I sometimes say– nobody’s like, “Oh– “ “If you’re laughing, you’ve been one of these pigs. I want you pigs to know, we’re not fooled by your faux generosity.” It is a similar scenario where, essentially what you’re trying to explain is what your point of view is, what your status quo is. It’s not dissimilar to movie writing. Then what happens, and then what happens because of that.

John: Because of that, there’s a chain of events, there’s a causality like this was not the end of the story. It’s moving to the next thing.

Let’s try our next thing. This is a story from Slate’s Care and Feeding. The advice is from Michelle Herman, but the letter writer is anonymous. Drew, help us out.

Drew: My mother and father divorced more than 10 years ago when I was in eighth grade, after my mother learned my dad was cheating on her. Once my parents split, my father married his affair partner, Ruth, and moved out of state. They ended up having two kids who are now eight and five. After my dad moved out of the house, he never paid a penny in child support, and I didn’t hear a word from him again, until now.

My dad told me that my five-year-old half-sister, Amelia, was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Her medical team wanted her to undergo a bone marrow transplant, but neither he, his wife, nor my half-brother was a match. He asked if I would be willing to undergo a screening to see if I am. Long story short, I am.

I find myself utterly conflicted. This man, who was supposed to be my dad, to love and provide for me, shattered my family with his selfishness. He abandoned me for the woman he cheated on my mother with. He wasn’t there to teach me to drive or to see me graduate from high school or college.

While I spent a decade dealing with the pain and rage his walking out on me caused, he started a new family and forgot I existed. Had his daughter not needed a donor, I doubt I would have ever heard from him again. Here he is, crawling to me, hat in hand. Part of me wants to tell him and his wife to leave me alone and never contact me again. I’ve never met my half-sister. I feel no connection to her. But then, there’s this stupid part of me that says that my father and Ruth were the ones who hurt me and that Amelia is innocent. That denying her a potentially life-saving treatment as a means of taking revenge against her parents would be wrong.”

Craig: That’s the stupid part? Okay. Because this guy cheated on my mom and left and didn’t pay child support, I now have a golden opportunity to murder a little girl.

John: Oh my God.

[laughter]

Craig: It was pretty awesome, actually. I also like that she said “affair partner,” by the way. There’s a whole side bit on that, like partner, the way that partners become a thing. In our society, it was just husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, and now everyone says partner. I never know if people are gay or not. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if they’re working together or romantic.

Mike: It’s a startup?

Craig: Affair partner.

Mike: It’s an app they’re working on.

Craig: Yes, exactly. An affair partner is incredible. That’s like granting status like cheating– Anyway.

John: There’s lots of things to unpack and potential comedic things to hold on to, even though this is not obviously comedic. There’s some good stuff here.

Her rage to this disappearing dad, that conflict and that my expectation of what this man is versus the reality is great comedic fodder. Obviously, her relationship to whatever this donor, her half-sister is fascinating. The space of bone marrow donations and would you help out a stranger? The trolley problem of it all is also fascinating. Mike, what’s your way in?

Mike: Yes, I think the way in, with anything that dramatic, I always say to people like, “You need to find one joke that works because the one joke that works indicates to the audience, ‘We’re all okay laughing about this.’” The way that Drew read it, and it was beautiful, was a little bit like a eulogy where it’s a sad story. That’s a tough story. If you just told it like Drew told it on stage in the first person, people would not know to laugh. They would go, “Well, what’s the funny part?”

I just think you need to find a joke. It’s like I have a joke in my special where I go, “My dad was a doctor and in his free time, he got his law degree. That’s how much he didn’t want to be a dad.” The audience knows that my point of view is I’m over that part of it. I’m okay with that part of it.

I had bladder cancer when I was 20 and the first joke I figured out was like, I had bladder cancer, but it’s funny because I’m a hypochondriac. I think the funniest thing that can happen to a hypochondriac is you get cancer because it affirms every fear you’ve ever had. “See, I told you. Remember last week when I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There’s going to be a lot of changes around here.”

Craig: “When I showed you my nipples–“

Mike: Exactly, yes. If someone wanted to do a comedy bit of this, it’s like, “Well, where is the first joke that indicates that this is okay?” That joke has to be really good. Probably nothing I could come up with now, but it’s like, “My dad wasn’t around as a kid, and then he called me because he wanted my bones.” Just something where just you break open how outrageous the scenario is, and then it turns on itself. I think you can do like, “My dad wasn’t around, and then he wanted my bones,” and then try to come up with a joke around that and then say, “But actually, I’m torn on it because this girl deserves this, and she needs this, and I could help.”

I think with a story that inherently has such high stakes, you have the ability to both have jokes and have dramatic moments. In The Good Life, there’s four or five times where it goes to a dramatic moment just because the audience– a lot of it is, the audience doesn’t see it coming at a comedy show. In some ways, it’s the ultimate surprise. I think the back and forth of jokes in comedy, I think jokes and dramas, it is the potential there.

Craig: You could also– I could see occupying a character and the character is a woe-is-me character, who’s like, “Anyway, my dad left, and cheated on my mom, and then married this other lady. They had a great family that was incredible. He never talked to me ever until his daughter was sick and he came for my bone marrow and I thought, ‘He loves me.’”

[laughter]

Mike: That’s good.

Craig: It depends, like occupying– I do enjoy comedians who occupy characters.

Mike: I love that.

Craig: I love that weird space. It’s always interesting meeting them afterwards and going– like Natasha Leggero occupies a character. Then you talk to Natasha offstage and you’re like, “You are the opposite of that person.” It is–

Mike: Then you can heighten that and be like, “Then he asked to borrow $75,000 and I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t love.”

Craig: “Wait a second. As the marrow’s leaving me, I thought, ‘Wait. Wait.’”

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk about this as a scene. I would say it could be a movie, which is a whole dynamic, but you could also imagine a scene where you’re talking to this girl at a party and it gets to the point where it’s like, “So now I don’t even know if I should donate marrow to this kid.” It’s like, “What are you talking about? You are going to kill a small child.” There’s that, it’s a good build up for like, what kind of monster are you?

Craig: Or you’re like– Obviously, you all know where this went, I didn’t do it.

[laughter]

Mike: Right, exactly.

Craig: She’s been dead like, I don’t know, three or four years now.

John: Oh God. Oh my God.

Craig: I got to go tell you, it feels great. They tell you it won’t, but it does. Revenge is awesome.

John: Yes.

Craig: Got ya.

Mike: A lot of that is– Those are like three different POV takes on the same–

Craig: With different tones.

Mike: Yes, a lot of it’s persona. Anthony Jeselnik gets away with a different type of joke than I get away with.

Craig: I wish we could send him that. Oh my God, Anthony Jeselnik. Can I just–?

John: Again, occupying a character’s place. [unintelligible 00:40:43] area.

Craig: Completely, but I just want to salute–

John: Oh, I assume that. He’s not actually like that, is he?

Craig: Oh God, I hope not.

Mike: Not that I know of.

Craig: Yes, no, that would be insane.

Mike: I’ve never had an interaction with him like that.

Craig: The mathematical precision. He’s the closest thing that comedy has to Agatha Christie. You know there’s going to be a twist and you’re trying to figure it out-

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: -and you can’t. It just happens over and over and over and over.

Mike: That’s right. Yes, that’s right.

Craig: He’s just, the craft there is pretty remarkable.

John: Great. This last one, we don’t have that part to read, but this is a New York Times article by Heather Knight and Loren Elliott, with great photos and video by Elliott. It’s about the coyotes of San Francisco. Basically, there were no coyotes in San Francisco, but 10 years or so ago, they started coming back in, and now there are more than 100 coyotes in San Francisco, and they’re letting them be, largely.

One case, they were going after a young child and they went after that coyote. Basically, they do keep down rodent populations and other things, so there’s a reason to be there. It’s just so jarring to have coyotes in the city that never had them.

Mike: Wow.

John: Coyotes are cool. Obviously, in Los Angeles, we’re used to coyotes in our neighborhood. We have coyotes all the time. The comedic space of predators in an urban environment and like how a person interacts with them, what the moment is.

Craig: This is in San Francisco?

John: In San Francisco. Hacks this last season has a coyote episode where Jean Smart’s character is hearing the coyotes howl all the time. She’s putting out bear urine to scare them away. She has a showdown with a coyote at the end. Let’s talk about what can we imagine the comedic premises are for talking about coyotes on stage? What are the handles for that?

Mike: For me, it would have to be story-based interacting with a coyote. I’m trying to think if I have– Do you guys have any good animal stories of interacting with animals?

Craig: My mind goes to just right off the bat, but what is–? Isn’t a coyote just an asshole dog?

John: Yes. [crosstalk]

Craig: Why have we put it in this special category? It’s just, I’ve looked at them. They’re hungry dogs. That’s all they are.

John: It’s a sense of like, what’s a dog off leash though. We have a sense of like, “Oh, dogs are wonderful,” but when you see in a dog in a place you don’t expect to see a dog or a dog who doesn’t seem to have an owner, that’s–

Craig: You call it a coyote. Right. They’re like the hobos of dogs.

John: I was just in Egypt, and Egypt is just like, there’s just dogs everywhere. There’s street dogs.

Mike: That’s right.

John: I was like, “Oh, wait, why don’t dogs get hit?” Mike pointed out like, “Oh, we’re seeing that’s the logical fallacy. Basically, we’re seeing the dogs that survived and–

Craig: You see the dogs that aren’t hit.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. Coyotes in San Francisco probably, I think the hacky version would just be to start making fun of San Francisco. It’s like, “Oh, now the coyotes keep moving into our neighborhood and the rents are going up.” I wonder where [unintelligible 00:43:29] Coyotes don’t seem funny to me.

Mike: I feel like I would break it–

John: Come on, Wile E. Coyote is an incredible character.

Mike: [laughs]

Craig: The thing is, Wile E. Coyote is, we’re laughing at him, I suppose, but he’s not doing anything irregular. I’ve never seen a coyote use an Acme product.

Mike: If I were going to go into animals, which I ever, if I ever did, it would be the inherent contradiction. So much of comedy is about inherent contradiction. The contradiction is similar to what you’re saying, it’s like, we eat animals, we own animals. We shoo away animals. How are we deciding? Yes.
Who made up the rules on this?

Craig: I think Gaffigan’s got–

Mike: Oh, did he have–? [crosstalk]

Craig: He’s got a pretty good one of like, we eat the animals that aren’t cute.

Mike: That’s right. That’s right. Contradictions would be the thing that would go down, and also the personal story, but I always tell people, one of the probably the smartest things I did artistically was like 25 years ago, I had been doing set up punchline, set up punchline, set up punchline based on things in the news, things happening around town. Then, at a certain point, I was like, “If I wrote about my own experiences, then no one can steal that idea.” Really, no one has that idea. No one’s lived that.

The first thing this makes me think of is like, there’s animals in the walls of my apartment that just run over us. Sometimes Jen will just be like, “Mo,” she calls me Mo. She goes, “Mo, what are we going to do about the animals?” I’m like, “I don’t think you know who you married. I don’t really know. I have no plan for the animals in the ceiling, and I’m not going to have one.” You know what I mean?

Craig: Right, and, “You know that about me.”

Mike: Yes. I don’t know. I do think like finding the what’s your story, the thing about standup comedy and in relation to storytelling, is that the more you have examples of things of your experience of dealing with something, the more people can see themselves in the story. They’re not judging it as, “Oh, this is another guy or lady with a hard take on coyotes,” or this or that or whatever.

I always just try and think, “What’s the personal way in? What’s the personal way in?” Because ultimately, you actually, by telling stories are exhibiting a point of view. Because it’s in the form of a story, the audience isn’t as suspicious of the point of view.

Craig: Yes. Also to give you credit, it’s not a persona. This is actually you. You’re incredibly likable. You’re incredibly likable in no small part because you’re not afraid to be vulnerable. A lot of comedians, their persona is, “I figured it all out. I figured it all out. Let me explain the world to you idiots.” Right? Your persona and your personality is I haven’t– I’m on a journey. I often don’t know what to do. I’m scared a lot. I’m confused. Everyone’s like, “Okay, I’m with you now on this.”

Mike: It’s so funny you should say that because the other day, I did an interview for Time Magazine and she goes– The reporter was great. She goes– It’s a funny question. She goes, “What’s your appeal?”

[Laughter]

John: I love that. That’s so good.

Mike: I’ve never been asked that, “What’s your appeal?”

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: It forced me to look inward.

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: She goes, the appeal of Jim Gaffigan is that he’s clean and he’s relatable. The appeal of this person is that she’d go there. I go, “Huh.” It’s so funny what I–

John: It’s amazing.

Mike: What reminded me of it is that my answer is similar to Craig’s.

Craig: There you go.

Mike: If I really had to think about it, I think people think they’re on the journey with me because I’m cataloging these eras of my life as honestly as I can. The audience, I think, trusts that I’m trying my best. I think the people who like me are trying their best. It’s weird to say that that’s my “appeal”, but I think it is probably close to that.

Craig: When she asked the question, was it–? There’s two different meanings to that question. One is, “I’m curious, what do you think your appeal is?” The other one is, “What is your appeal?”

John: Yes, there’s two different reads of that.

Craig: “I’m just so confused why anyone likes you. Can you explain why people like you?”

Mike: It was generous though. I think she’s a good writer. We’ll see how the article comes out.

John: It’s reminding me of when we were doing Big Fish on Broadway, after the Wednesday matinees, sometimes we would do talk-backs, where people could stay in the audience and talk back. It’s always really old people who stick around, who’d go to the Wednesday matinees in the first place.

It’s me and several of the actors at the front of the stage talking to people who stuck around. This one old woman, she asked me a question, she’s like, “Why are you so confident?” I’m like–

Mike: Oh my gosh. Why are you so confident?

John: Yes, and it’s just–

Mike: Wow.

John: It was actually just.

Craig: What a confident-shaking question.

John: Yes, and it sort of put me on my heels, like, “I guess I am con–“ I had to sort of do introspection, like, “I guess I am confident, but why am I confident?” Like, “Who is this person who is speaking right now who is confident doing this thing?” It was a while. It really did shake me a bit.

Craig: Yes, of course. It’s a rattling question. “Why are you so confident?” It’s suspicious.

John: Yes, it’s a challenge to it.

Craig: Yes.

Mike: I think to go back to this point of view and comedy concept, it was like, why is Jeselnik Jeselnik, and me me, and Gaffigan Gaffigan? Is a majority of what you do if you’re trying to be a comedian is you try to figure out who you are on stage in relation to the audience.

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: Yes, it’s what’s your appeal?

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: It’s like, “Oh,” and it takes years. Sometimes it takes a decade or more.

Craig: It is interesting seeing comedians early in their careers as opposed to where they end up. Sometimes it’s sort of unrecognizable.

Mike: Absolutely.

Craig: It is a fascinating thing to watch them evolve into the groove. Sometimes I think like, “Oh, do people get trapped? Because they get very successful, and then suddenly, that fake accent and get ‘er done thing that you’re doing, you can’t stop doing it.

Mike: Are you speaking of someone specifically?

Craig: No.

Mike: Just in general?

Craig: No, just in general, like–

[laughter]

Mike: Hypothetically, if someone was like, said a joke and they’re like, “Get ‘er done,”-

Craig: That would be like–

Mike: -that would be a thing that you’re leaning on a crutch.

Craig: They were like had a job that isn’t really a job anymore, like a cable guy, [crosstalk] or a plumber, or whatever.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Yes, like what do you do then, because you’re stuck making all that money?

Mike: What if you never were a cable guy?

Craig: Or had that accent.

[laughter]

John: So good. [crosstalk]

Craig: Then, what do you do? Then what do you do?

John: A crisis of inauthenticity.

Mike: This is like a three-page challenge of personas.

John: What if Mike Birbiglia had a heel turn, where I actually just like, it goes off for a little while, then it comes back, and it’s just like this shock comic, this– I would love to see it.

Mike: It’s funny–

Craig: “Hickory dickory dock.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Mike: No, I do think that there is a version of the next few years, where I’m leaning a little bit away from personal stuff, where I do something that takes on the religion, politics, world events, but in an evergreen way. I think what drives me crazy about topical comedy is that you just go, “Okay, this isn’t relevant today, even. It was relevant 24 hours ago,” but I would like to see something that has a wide-spanning, like the last 20 years of living in America.

Craig: It sounds like something that O’Reilly would do.

[laughter]

Mike: Yes, a cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly would do.

John: As we wrap up our discussion of coyotes, I do want to share one photo, which I think is a great comedic premise. This little white dog is wearing, it’s called a coyote coat, and it’s basically, it looks like a life jacket, but it has all these little plastic spikes on it, so that a coyote can’t bite it and carry it off into the woods. I can just imagine like having to buy the coyote coat for my dog, or just like my dog having to wear the coyote coat. It’s like you’re in a war zone now.

Craig: I think that is, some people might think that that disrupts the Darwinian process, but I think that it is an example of the Darwinian process. You become so cute that a larger, stronger animal dresses you in special things so that you aren’t devoured. It’s a strategy.

John: It’s a strategy.

Craig: That’s a strategy.

John: Yes. Let’s tackle some listener questions. We have one here from Chris.

Drew: Let’s say I heard an idea for a short film expressed on a podcast by a working actor, writer, comedian,-

John: Mike Birbiglia.

Drew: -and wanted to make that film, but was not able to make contact with said person to ask permission. Could that film still be made and shown publicly? Is there credit to be attributed? What if there’s a line spoken by an actor that is nearly identical to what was expressed in the podcast? In this case, this would be 60-second film for social media, just for context.” I can already hear Craig saying you can’t copyright an idea, but maybe the person or podcast details are important.

Craig: Yes, I will say you can’t copyright an idea, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing this.

John: It also feels like stealing a joke. It feels like–

Craig: There’s legal lines and there are moral lines. Legally, could you get away with it? Always remember, legally getting away with it means you were sued, spent money to defend yourself, and won, which is not ideal. In this case also, it’s just, yes, come up with your own idea. That’s my feeling, is if that person wanted to do a 60-second short bit about that, they would. It’s a little odd. I don’t think I would recommend that.

John: The fact that you’re doing this on a podcast with a working actor, writer, comedian, it’s their thing, they may actually do a thing with. If you heard it in a conversation or your brother said something, it’s a different kind of thing. You could also just ask their permission.

Mike: I also think, yes, building on what you were both saying, is as creatives, if you’re pursuing a creative profession, it is so oversaturated. There are so many things being made simultaneously. I actually think the only chance any of us stand is to have our work be so much ours and not something that’s already filmed, recorded, and out there in the universe that you’re actually– It’s a weird case against the argument. The idea is that it’s out there. Even if it’s not a short film already, someone said it, so it’s a little bit less original than you’d want it to be.

John: Going back to what we were just saying about hiking is just walking, that idea, what’s out there, is it’s not an original idea, and so great, do something else that is specifically to you.

Mike: 100%, and by the way, to speak to that person’s note, that’s an oddly helpful piece of feedback, is like, once that person says, “Hey, that’s out there in blah-blah-blah way,” sometimes people, along the tour for two years, people will say to me, “Hey, this line you have is similar to this comic’s thing you have.” Often, I’ll go and I’ll dig it up and I’ll try to find it, and then you have to make a judgment call. Is it too similar? If it is, can I write it in a different direction?

I had one a few specials ago where someone, when it came out as a special, was like, “That’s my joke,” and I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you, I never saw your joke, and it’s filmed right now, so I don’t– It’s parallel thinking, and I feel bad that that’s the case, but there’s nothing I can do.” It’s definitely best efforts to not do that.

John: Dylan in Little Rock has a question.

Drew: “I’m feeling myself getting a little bit paralyzed. I’m feeling that I need to start writing in order to feel accomplished and hold onto some momentum, but I’m not feeling that I have really broken the story in a satisfactory way, and I don’t feel that I know the characters as well as I could or maybe should. I’ve considered that the process of writing may help me to come up with new ideas and fill in some of the gaps, but when do you consider a story broken? How do you know when your characters are developed enough and how much character development work do you do before you write?”

John: Yes, so breaking a story means different things in different contexts. In a TV writer’s room, you break a story, you’re figuring out all the beats on a big whiteboard, you’re doing that stuff. The process of writing a feature film, it could be more experimental and you’re sort of putting things together as you’re doing them. I often won’t have the full thing broken as I start. I’ll just feel it out along my way. There’s probably not a perfect answer for this. You’re writing something right now, is what you’re writing broken? Do you know what all the beats are?

Mike: It’s so funny. Whenever people say this term, breaking a story, I’m always like, it’s not my process. Mine is, I have an idea for a story, I write it out in an outline. At a certain point, I take it as script. At a certain point, this is where I am right now, I take it back to outline because I’m trying to isolate all the individual character arcs, and I can’t do it in a script form. That’s literally what I am right now. My brain can’t do it.

How do you guys deal with that, actually? That’s a question from me to you. How do you deal with managing, like in the case of my movie, it’s like, there’s eight characters. It’s akin to a movie like Four Weddings and a Funeral where not everybody has to have a meaningful arc, but unless they have like a little miniature arc, I do feel like there’s some threads that are unfinished.

Craig: I think I probably wouldn’t start writing until I understood all of that.

Mike: All of it.

Craig: Yes, but that’s me. I think your process clearly works for you, and it’s perfectly fine. Anyone’s process is fine if the outcome is good. I think breaking the story is actually, I agree with you, it’s not a useful term. It comes really from writer’s rooms, from 14 writers eating Mendocino Farms and hashing out, “Okay, this episode, this happens. What’s the A story? What’s the B story? What’s the C story?” It is procedurals, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: There isn’t a mechanism to it, which is important for that process. For a movie, I never use the phrase, “breaking the story” for a movie. Really, I would say, outline. I start with a very broad outline. Who’s the main character? What is the thing that needs to happen at the end? What would be an interesting beginning for that? What is the premise of this thing, and what’s the journey?

Mike: I think one of the best things you can have in terms of breaking a story or to use that term is like figuring out, can I pitch this in 25 words or 50 words? And is that compelling? If I told this to a friend and I said it in the first person, are they interested? I think that if they’re not interested is when you start to go, “Okay, let me figure out where I’m losing their interest.”

John: Yes, I just pitched a project yesterday, and in the early conversations with people, it wasn’t fully broken. I sort of knew what the beats were, but by the time where I was actually pitching it to a buyer, it really had all the beats. You could feel what the entire movie was and that’s, I guess, what I would consider broken. It’s like you really can have a sense of what all the sequences of the story were going to be.

Mike: It’s funny, you hear terms like breaking story or industry terms, and in so many ways, the work I enjoy most is people trying to reinvent what their artistic process is. If you look at Last of Us, for example, I think my favorite thing about it is it’s not like other television shows. That it is, in some ways, weirdly, doesn’t resemble a TV show. That it feels like life, it feels like we are in this apocalyptic scenario and oh my God, what is that? What would I do? What’s she going to do?

Craig: Oh, it’s definitely not like other shows.

[laughter]

Mike: Don’t you think that’s part of it is like making things that don’t feel like other things?

Craig: Yes, I do think so. I think that’s become more and more important because there are 14 million television shows. The trick is to find a way to both be different and also compelling. It is very easy to be different and bad because a lot of difference were considered by our forebears and tossed aside because they were bad. I would say to Dylan, you need to slow down a little bit and ask yourself if maybe the story that you’ve come up with, any of the things that you think of as fixed in position should be fixed in position.

Sometimes we get stuck. We build a column and a load-bearing wall, and then we’re like, “I can’t fit the rooms I want around this.” Maybe the problem is the column and the load-bearing wall. Those things that we think of as immovable, maybe start moving them.

Mike: I also think you look at things that we admire, I was saying like Last of Us, another one would be like the films of David Lynch. It’s like if you try to put Mulholland Drive into the story-

John: No.

Mike: -the story format,-

Craig: You create that story.

Mike: -of McKee or something, it’s like,-

Craig: Or you could-

Mike: “I don’t know what that is.”

Craig: Pitch that in 50 words.

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: That would be the pitch.

Mike: Yes, exactly, that’s the pitch.

Craig: “What’s it about?” “Yeah, I don’t know.”

[laughter]

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things here. I’m going to call an audible, and so I’m going to pivot from what I was going to recommend to in terms of just like breaking the form and spinning a bunch of plates. John Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, it’s just gotten really, really good.

Mike: Oh yes, it’s great.

John: If you’ve not watched it at all, go back and watch the episode, guests are Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt, but the show is just nuts, and Mulaney’s blindfolded through the whole episode. 19,000 things are happening, and it all holds together really, really well. It’s postmodern in the sense of like, there’s a theme kind of, but it’s just crazy. it’s just I’m really admiring what they’re able to pull off once a week on Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing. What about you?

Mike: I was thinking of young comedians and newer comedians. There’s this great comic named Chris Fleming who came on my podcast recently, and he just kills me. He’s a Massachusetts guy like me. He — talk about burning it all down — he just has no allegiances to anyone, specifically in culture, and so he’ll say things where I’ll just– I said to him on my podcast, “Do you know that–?” the person he’s referencing? He’s like, “No.” I go, “You don’t know that person you said that crazy joke about?” but he’s great.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Mike: He’s super funny, and to speak to the kind of David Lynch with The Last of Us of it all, of creating a thing that hasn’t existed before, when I look at Chris Fleming, I don’t go, “Oh, that’s like this.” I just go, “Whoa, that’s Chris Fleming. I love that.”

Craig: Yes, who is this?

Mike: Who is this?

Craig: That’s my favorite. I’ve been on a roll for one cool thing for games, so I spoke to Inevitable Foundation, which is run by Richie Siegel, and it was a lovely group of folks. He was kind enough to send along some of the feedback, which was all bad, and [laughs] not really. They were very happy. One person in their feedback said, “Oh, and by the way, since I know Craig likes these sort of things, he really needs to play Blue Prince, if he hasn’t.” Blue Prince is as in blue, the color, and then Prince, P-R-I-N-C-E, but of course, this is a pun on blueprints. The game is so simple and so hard, which I love.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Craig: You have inherited a mansion from your mysterious uncle. Your job is to go through and explore the mansion, which has 45 rooms, find the 46th room, and you will be able to keep the mansion. The mechanics are every day, you start in the foyer, and there are three doors, and when you open a door, it gives you a choice to draft what room goes there, and there are like 40 types of rooms, and you pick it, and you start to move through, and every time, the house is different, and some rooms just stop, and you know if they stop or not.

There are costs, and keys, and methods, and puzzles, and it’s roguelike, because then the next day, you’re like, “Okay, that didn’t work, let me try this.” It’s early on for me, and I’m so beautifully frustrated.

Mike: Wow.

John: Love it.

Craig: Yes, it’s really, it’s like when you come across a fresh idea like that, it’s really cool, yes. Blue Prince, and it’s developed by Dogubomb.

Mike: Great.

Craig: You can get it on PlayStation, Windows, Xbox, your Steam Deck, which is where I play it, and so forth.

Mike: Very nice.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Sam Shapson. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Don’t leave comments on Spotify because we turn those off, but you can leave comments to our YouTube videos, which we have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel.

Mike: You do?

John: Yes, we just added this week.

Craig: Another place for people to yell at me about Joel. I’m Scriptnotes Premium, by the way.

John: Thank you very much for that.

Mike: I joined recently. I love it.

Craig: Oh– [crosstalk]

John: You get all those back episodes.

Mike: I love it. Two of my faves are Dennis Palumbo of course and the Craig Mazin, Here’s How to-

John: How to Write a Movie.

Mike: -How to write a Movie. It’s so good.

Drew: Those are both available on our YouTube.

Craig: We should probably charge extra for them.

John: We should. Yes, yes, how do we charge extra?

Mike: Yes, supplements.

Craig: Because we got to get these cool new microphones.

John: You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You get the show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. For Craig to dream of new microphone setups in our office studio here.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes, like episode 99 and How to Write a Movie. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the infrastructure of being a standup comic and doing all the things that you have to do to actually make a living. With that, Mike Birbiglia, thank you so much for being on the show.

Mike: It’s such an honor. I love this show. My favorite podcast.

John: Aww.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Mike, one of the things that impressed me when I came to record the podcast at your place is that you do video, you’re promoting the podcast, but it’s also part of your bigger machinery because you have to, as a touring comic, you have to plan all that stuff, you have to do marketing, you must have a giant mailing list. I want to talk to you about sort of the infrastructure it takes to be a comic who’s doing the kind of stuff you’re doing.

Mike: It’s funny, I was on The Town podcast the other day, which is really good, and we had this discussion of this thing where Matt says, “Do comedians need Hollywood anymore?” The answer is they don’t.

Craig: Not at all.

Mike: Weirdly, they don’t, and I think that that’s good. I think the things to make comedy and get the comedy to market are less and less expensive and more easy to access. It puts the onus on you to make something that’s great and sets itself apart from all other things, but also, you have to get it to market and market it, really. There’s a lot to that.

John: Getting it to market, there’s Instagram, there’s YouTube, those are crucial channels for comics. What else?

Mike: Weirdly, sometimes I’ll say, because Mabel and Gary and Peter and Joe, that’s my company, and we all produce the podcast together. Mabel and Gary are in their 20s, and so sometimes they’ll point out things to me that I’m just going, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that at all.” For example, at a certain point, like two years ago, Mabel goes, “We have to have the podcast on video. I’ve never listened to a podcast.”

[laughs]

John: Yes, that’s my daughter too.

Mike: I was like, “What do you mean you haven’t listened to a podcast?” She goes, “I’m sorry, I just I put it on. I don’t look at the video, but it’s on. Sometimes I’ll reference it, I’m like, ‘Oh’.” There is a degree of rolling with, so then we did it. Rolling with where culture and media is going. Then the other side of that is, sometimes I’ll say to Mabel and Gary, I’ll go like, “We have to be aware of what are the platforms that are next. Because when I was coming up in the 2000s, it was Myspace. Myspace is gone.”

Craig: It is? I’m spending so much time on that.

[laughter]

Mike: Your premium membership on Myspace is $49 a month?

Craig: Yes.

John: I have a friend request, and you never get nothing.

Craig: It’s the only place people don’t yell at me about The Last of Us.

Mike: Of course, Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars every year to make sure that Instagram is still relevant, still relevant, still relevant. Cut to, at a certain point, it’s not going to be.

Craig: It’s the opening credit sequence of Silicon Valley, just watch them go up, watch them go down.

John: That’s right.

Craig: Explode, implode, come back, grow. You have to have– Well, really, it sounds like part of your infrastructure is youth.

Mike: It’s youth. Yes, it is. Yes.

John: A mailing list. Is there a mailing list people subscribe to and you send out blasts with all your upcoming tour dates?

Mike: That’s right, and I’ve been doing that oddly since I was in college. I would do shows at the Washington, DC Improv, and I would have comment cards on the tables and say, “If you have your email address, I’ll send out a newsletter once a month.” I think the infrastructure is Maichimp and one of the companies that does it–

John: Mailchimp is so effing expensive.

Mike: I know.

Craig: Mailchimp is expensive?

Mike: It’s on the pricey side.

Craig: Also, then everybody, their podcasts are sponsored by Mailchimp, so Mailchimp is just like rotating the money around.

Mike: Yes.

John: Yes, it’s a money cycle.

Mike: No, it’s true, but I do think the relationship between artists and audiences has just gotten closer and closer through the years, and such that things that are massive, and it’s a comedian who’s playing Madison Square Garden, you might mention that person’s name to someone else, they go, “I’ve never heard of that person.” They’re playing Madison Square Garden, and it’s just them talking into a microphone, you’ve never heard of them.

Craig: That’s right.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

Craig: That’s happened a few times recently to me, where I don’t know, and that’s part of getting old. I actually love the way the world is slowly getting cottony and sealing me off in preparation.

[laughter]

Craig: I don’t mind that, but I do love talking to the people that work for me that are younger because– Riding back and forth from location every day with Ali Cheng, who used to be my assistant, and now she’s a writer on The Last of Us. Ali was able to explain to me in deep detail the whole Kendrick and Drake thing as it was happening, because I was like, “I don’t know– What is going–? First of all, who’s Dot?” She was like, “Oh my God. Okay.” But then, I was so into it.

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: Then I was deep in, and I was– Then the next day, I’ll come in, I’m like, “Oh my God. Did you see?” It keeps you plugged in, but you’ll need somebody to help you.

Mike: Yes, I think the key thing about entertainers in this moment is continuing to be open to where everything is going and nonjudgmental about where it’s going. Because if you become the judgmental person of like, “Oh, back in my day,” blah-blah-blah, I think you’re toast, or you will be toast.

John: Someone like Gary, who’s working for you, or Mabel, they have their own careers, they’re developing their own online presences.

Mike: Absolutely.

John: They have their own analysts. They have to figure out all that.

Mike: Directing things and short films and all kinds of stuff, yes.

John: Yes, so who teaches you? Basically, you just have to learn. You get in the crowd and see what everyone else is doing, because it’s not like you can go to film school, you can theoretically, learn how to write a screenplay. If there’s no comedy school, I guess you could go through-

Mike: UCB-

John: UCB.

Mike: -or improv and stuff like that. Yes, there’s no path to be a comedian, but at the same time, there never was a path, right?

John: Yes, it was always figuring out how early in a career does a person need a manager or an agent who’s doing mostly standup?

Mike: I’ve always thought– People ask me who are starting out all the time, how do I get an agent? When I think back to my agent now, Mike Berkowitz, who I’ve worked with for I think 25 years, he was starting out. I was like one of his first two clients. He started out at a management company, but he was doing the side, booking thing on the side. We’re the same age, and so we came up together. Now, he represents Kevin Hart and John Mulaney, all biggest comics on the place. He’s a huge agent, but I think part of it is surrounding yourself with people who you respect, who are in your roughly age group, and even level.

I think there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I need to sign,” I’ll throw out someone who’s dead, but it’s like, “I need to sign with Bernie Brillstein.” It’s, “No, no, you don’t need to sign with Bernie Brillstein. He doesn’t have time for you. You need to sign for someone who’s three rungs below Bernie Brillstein.”

John: Yes, absolutely. Signing with an agent who was really a peer and who I was grinding with together was incredibly helpful, because he just knew the right people. He knew what was actually happening.

Mike: The people who are young, while you are young will be the stars of tomorrow across the entire field.

John: Absolutely.

Mike: -and so making friends and making bonds and collaborations with people who are in your peer group and investing in those people, and hopefully, they invest in you. That’s, I think, one of the best things you can do.

John: How much of your work time is devoted to writing, figuring out the comedy, figuring out that work versus the career of like setting dates, and doing social media, and doing all the other stuff? What is the split?

Mike: I would say like it’s 2/3 the art, 1/3 marketing, but I would say, there are periods in my career where it is like 70/30 marketing. It’s miserable, but it was because there wasn’t enough work, and so it’s like, “Oh, I have to advertise my work more. I have to market my work more.” It’s like, you’re always rest always, and I think this is true of everyone.
It’s like the next hurdle is like, “We got to figure out the key art.” The next hurdle is, “We got to figure out the trailer.” The next figure, “We got to figure out what the Instagram tile is that conveys the idea of this whole project.” All that kind of stuff. It’s like, it is important. Yes, I try to minimize it, but it’s like, I don’t think anyone gets out of doing that.

John: I think one of the big differences between a pure screenwriter and what you’re doing is that we talk about like a screenwriter has to be entrepreneurial, but it’s like that whole level of magnitude is greater. You literally are responsible for how much the money’s coming in, whether you’re getting that date, whether you’re getting that thing to happen. Your income is so directly tied into how much promotion and everything else you’re doing for yourself.

Mike: Yes, and also, I feel like you have to have an awareness or try to have an awareness of where the business is going, where it’s been, where it could go, where we can’t possibly imagine it’s going. The AI discussion right now is so interesting because it’s like, it’s some people going like, “All right, easy on the AI stuff,” it’s every other conversation, but it’s like “No, no, it literally could change everything.”

John: Oh, absolutely.

Mike: Everything.

John: Yes, next week or a week after, I do once a full episode where we really just look at it because you look at not just the, how it’s impacting writing, but you look at the new video production things that come off, which is like, “That looks completely photorealistic, and the speech lines up,” and I just don’t what we’re going to do.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

John: Because like, maybe you won’t have to tour anymore because you could just press the button and there’s Mike Birbiglia. You’ll be this age forever.

Mike: Yes, we can only hope.

[laughter]

Mike: I got to lock in age 46, because it’s not getting any better.

John: This is the good life. Congratulations to get on the special, and thank you for coming on.

Mike: Thanks for coming to the screening last night, it meant the world to me.

John: Cool.

Links:

• Mike Birbiglia
• The Good Life on Netflix
• Mike’s previous episodes: 121, 168, 261, 427, 443, and Working it Out: Screenwriting Advice You’ll Actually Use
• Episode 660 – Moneyball
• Ira Glass on Mike’s podcast Working it Out
• Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk
• The Run Club Haters by Melissa Dahl for Curbed
• I Hadn’t Heard From My Dad in Over a Decade. Now He’s Returned With a Brazen Request. I’m Actually Considering It. from Slate’s Care and Feeding
• The Coyotes of San Francisco by Heather Knight and Loren Elliot for NY Times
• Coyote Vest
• Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney
• Chris Fleming
• Blue Prince
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription!
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s 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: This is episode 686 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do writers and the characters who create handle the obstacles that they encounter? One’s approach to problem solving can reveal a lot about otherwise hidden mental processes. We’ll discuss ways to tackle pernicious problems in real life and on the page, and what it says about the problem solver. First, we have a lot of follow-up from previous episodes, including a master class on how to do the lunch order if you are a PA.

Craig: Oh, this is good.

John: Yes, so we asked our listeners, they sent in, and man, they delivered this time.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Yes, so really good advice here. We also have a ridiculous and completely unworkable proposal about movie tariffs that will never actually happen. But we can use that as an excuse to talk about why we want to incentivize domestic production and ways a sane administration might try to do that.

Craig: Yes, somewhere inside the fog of crazy is a topic worth discussing.

John: Yes. Our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about tombs, because I am just back from two weeks in Jordan and Egypt, where I got to live my Indiana Jones fantasy. I’m here to answer any questions you have about relics and burying of the dead, and travel through exotic locations.

Craig: I just played the Indiana Jones video game, so I feel just as qualified.

John: Basically, the same thing.

Craig: Yes, if not more so.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I really went deep down there.

John: My question is, did most of the Indiana Jones game take place with like a bunch of tourists jammed around you in a crowded Egyptian museum?

Craig: No.

John: No. I’m surprised the museums in the Indiana Jones game are probably empty.

Craig: They are, unless it’s just you and a strange giant is attacking you. Yes, no, it’s remarkable how empty things are. You do move around the Vatican quite a bit.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: In the ‘40s, during World War II, and you’re ducking various fascisti.

John: Yes, fun, exciting. Yes, we’re recording this way before the conclave has even started, so we don’t even know– People are listening to this in a time where there may be a new pope, but Craig and I have no idea who the pope is.

Craig: We don’t know.

John: No, we don’t.

Craig: Oh my gosh, I don’t care.

[chuckling]

John: I’m excited for some change. I like things to happen. No knock against the existing pope who died.

Craig: Be careful what you wish for.

John: Yes, it’s wild. It’s wild. Let’s get into some follow-up, because man, we got a bunch of it.

Craig: Okay.

John: We’ll start off with last week on the show, or maybe it was two weeks ago now on the show, Eric Kripke was on, so he’s the guy who runs The Boys and lots of other great shows. We were talking about a listener question on– And Craig, I’m curious what you would call this, an episode that exclusively follows one of the characters, that it’s not a normal episode, it’s a standalone. Do you have a term that you would use for that?

Craig: I don’t.

John: I don’t. We were trying to bat around some. Our listeners came up with two good terms that they’ve used in writers’ rooms. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Aaron writes, “In our writers’ room, we call it our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern episode, as a nod to the delightful Tom Stoppard play about the side characters in Hamlet.”

John: Which makes sense. You’re elevating people who would be on the sidelines instead of centering it around them. The second solution from a different Aaron I thought was even better.

Craig: All right.

John: I’ve been in a couple rooms that have called them silo episodes, as in one character is siloed away from the rest of the cast and given their own story, and really, their own specific role building. It felt like after Girls did the Marnie episode and then the Shosh in Japan episode, that it started a conversation, at least in rooms, about this unique episode format and what to call it.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: I like silo.

Craig: Silo episode. What do you do on the show Silo, however?

John: Yes. There’s an episode of the second season of Silo that is basically a Silo episode that just follows one of the characters.

Craig: Solopsisode.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is decent, but it implies you’re following a couple of characters on the side.

John: It is, and also, to me, it implies a specific tone of what’s going to happen. It’s like a behind-the-scenes, that a normal episode is happening over on this side, and we’re just not noticing it.

Craig: Yes, like I really wanted to do a partner series to Game of Thrones that was just like a couple of soldiers who were posted somewhere out in Westeros, and things were happening in the background that they would occasionally hear about. You’d be like, “Oh, God, that’s the Red Wedding.” They didn’t really know, and it was mostly like, “Ah, gathering taxes, and my foot hurts.” The guys wouldn’t let me do it. That’s weird, yes.

John: That’s weird.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: That’s weird. All right, so those are some good suggestions from our listeners. The second bit of follow-up is a conversation you and I had. We were talking about how to make our phones less addictive and less interesting, and different techniques for that. I know you took social media off your phones.

Craig: Yes.

John: For this trip to Egypt and to Jordan, I was a little concerned, passing through security and stuff like that, and making sure, someone’s taking over my phone. I don’t want there to be anything on my phone. I almost went as far as to just get a burner phone that I could take with me and just not have all my stuff. What I ended up doing instead was going through and basically taking everything off my phone and really paring it back to just the essentials. I got rid of all the–

Craig: You just have the stock app and weather? [chuckles]

John: Exactly. You can take those off, too. You can take the stock app off.

Craig: Now you’re just down to tips?

John: Just weather. Then I also went through and changed the icon style and stuff like that to make the phone just less useful. Craig, here’s my phone now.

Craig: What in the world am I looking at?

John: Describe it to our listeners. We’ll put a screenshot in and just check out. [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure. To start with, I’m going to put my glasses on to really investigate here. It is a sickly mint green background, and it is monochromatic.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then the apps themselves are in gray/green scale. No color other than green, black, white, gray. There’s 10 apps total.

John: There are multiple screens, so you can swipe.

Craig: Oh, yes. This phone says, “Don’t look at me.” That’s what it says.

John: It was good. I actually did not look at it very much on my trip at all. In addition to going to the dark mode style and the larger icons, which also gets rid of the names of the icons, it makes the phone harder to use in a way that I actually found really useful. Based on location, you can figure out where the apps are. It broke me of my habit of constantly playing on my phone to check on a thing or to open Instagram.

Craig: It’s going to be wild when the next thing happens that makes this end, because something is going to happen that makes it end. We know that much.

John: What’s going to end?

Craig: The phone. It’s going to end, right?

John: It’s going to be that little thing that it’s, whatever they do on black mirror console, which is the little dot you put on your temple.

Craig: Something’s going to happen, and it will end. Then, boy, that’ll be a day. That’ll be an interesting day when it ends.

John: The post-phone era?

Craig: The post-phone era. Yes, but not yet.

John: We had talked an episode in 683 about long takes. That was before we saw a bunch of things that were about long takes. When we recorded the episode, it was before the Oner episode of The Studio, which I thought was delightful. This guy, Aidan wrote in and he had done a comparison of your Chernobyl scene with the rooftop clearing and a scene from Michael Clayton. Drew, talk us through what this post is. We’ll put a link into it as well.

Drew: The post is a comparison of those two scenes. They’re about the same. The Michael Clayton scene is 2 minutes and 11 seconds. The rooftop scene in Chernobyl is 2 minutes and 2 seconds. Despite the fact that they’re about the same amount of time, the subjective lengths, which is how long it feels like it lasts, is very different because it’s the assassination scene in Michael Clayton. The murder scene happens frighteningly quickly, whereas the rooftop scene feels agonizing and slow.

John: It’s just a nice comparison side by side.

Craig: That’s what I’m going for is agonizing and slow. I did get some additional feedback from Jack Thorne, who pointed out– And this is something that Seth Rogen pointed out as well. I did a LA Times roundtable with him that I guess will be coming out shortly. Both of them said the same thing, which is that planning for long takes, writing them into the script is a way to protect the writing itself, of course, because no one can really mess with it. It’s true. You can’t really decide what to do, say, with a script of Adolescence other than shoot it. That’s a fair point.

John: Yes. Last bit of follow-up here. In 682, we talk about words we don’t have in English, like words we could have wished existed in English, but it doesn’t actually happen. We had a couple of people write in with words that they’re looking for that are not in existence anywhere. Talk us through these. First, let’s start with Shauna in Vancouver.

Drew: She writes, “I regularly think about how I wish there was a word, probably a German word, for the feeling you have when you get to the end of a mystery novel and it’s deeply unsatisfying.” She did with additional undertones of, “Now I’m angry and disappointed that you broke my trust and wasted my time.”

Craig: I think it’s just unsatisfied, isn’t it? [chuckles]

John: I get that she’s feeling a specific kind of unsatisfied because it just took so long, and there is an aspect of social trust in there, too. Yes.

Craig: Yes, but I think we have that word, actually. I don’t think an extreme version of an emotion qualifies for a new word. You just put the word very in front of it, and you’re there.

John: Yes, isn’t that like a thing they teach you in writing classes is that anytime you use the word very, there really is a better word out there for it?

Craig: Oh, most certainly, and it may not be necessary at all. There is that whole “I don’t like adverbs thing,” which, you know?

John: Yes.

Craig: Listen, sometimes very is great.

John: Yes. It’s an intensifier. You know that very comes from verily, that it comes from truly?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, which is just such a strange thing to think.

Craig: Yea, verily.

John: Yes, as an intensifier. It’s actually apparently very common in languages to say “Truly this” and that becomes the intensifier.

Craig: I actually often will say, truly. It’s a good one.

John: That’s true.

Drew: Is that what we’re doing with literally?

John: It is. The way that literally started as being true, and then it’s just an enforcement.

Craig: Yes, but that one’s wrong.
[chuckling]

John: Yes, it’s still feels wrong to us.

Craig: It’s wrong.

John: It’s wrong.

Craig: It’s just wrong.

John: More of words that don’t exist from Reed.

Drew: Reed writes, “You mentioned the Russian word tosca as a deep anguish that can never be resolved.” A word in Welsh that I’ve always enjoyed is the word hiraeth. It’s about a similar deep longing, but is a more positive spin on the feeling rather than an undefined existential despair. The rough translation is a profound longing for a home, place, or time that you can no longer return. A homesickness for something that maybe never was, the echo of our soul’s past.

Craig: Nostalgia.

John: Yes, but it’s a feeling of nostalgia for the moment you’re actually currently in, maybe?

Craig: He said past, did he?

John: It is past.

Drew: He said past, or it might not even exist? Just a vibe you wish you could go to. I feel like Ren Faires do this.

Craig: Oh, I see. It’s sort of like a nostalgia for something that is fictional, even. A longing to be in your memories of Middle-earth, even though you’ve never been there.

Drew: Seems like it, yes.

Craig: If that’s the case, then sign me up.

John: A script I read recently actually did refer to the sense of nostalgia for the moment that you’re in right now. I love this thing, and I know it’s going to escape me, and I already miss this.

Craig: I have a version of that, which is, I know I should be enjoying this moment right now. Later, I will look back at this wistfully and wish that I could be back there. Right now, I’m miserable. [chuckles]

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s a tricky one because sometimes I think back to when I was younger, you miss these things. I miss things that at the time, I wasn’t thinking about at all. In fact, in many ways, and almost always, my life is better now than it was when I was in my 20s, except, my back doesn’t hurt as much, and I’m not that much closer to death. I wasn’t able to enjoy that at the time, and there are things right now I know that I’m not, I’m just, I should be enjoying more.

John: Yes. A related concept is sort of second-degree fun. Yes. Things that are actually unpleasant in the moment, but then you look back at them with a fondness. It’s like, “Oh, yes, remember that horrible thing we went through and did together?”

I was commiserating with Scriptnotes’ Megana Rao about the Giza Pyramid, because she had done that with her family. We were texting afterwards, wasn’t that just the worst? Yes, it’s the worst. It is the most unpleasant experience to go inside the Giza Pyramid, because you are climbing up this ramp. You’re stooped down, almost on hands and knees, climbing up this ramp, and packed, sardine tight with a bunch of strangers. It is just the most claustrophobic thing. You get to the emperor’s tomb. What do you think’s in the emperor’s tomb?

Craig: A sarcophagus?

John: Nothing. Not even a sarcophagus. Everything’s been taken out of it. It’s just an empty room with– There is a stone box where the actual real sarcophagus used to be, but it’s so unrewarding, and yet the experience as a whole is still second-degree fun. It’s like, “Oh, yes, I went through that thing.”

Craig: Right. You have a great story of how awful it was.

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, I’m not going there.
[chuckling]

John: What we should have done, and Mike was pointing out, is that, as we were lining up to get in, people are squeezing past you to get out at the same time. Some of them have this most horrified expression, and they’re sweaty, and they’re just exhausted. It’s like, “What am I doing?”

Craig: Right, like take a hint.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think it’s fair to say, as they’re coming out, “Should I get out of this line?” A bunch of them will be like, “Oh, my God, you need to get out.”

John: What would I say? I would be honest with them and say, “It’s not cool to actually, when you get up in there, but also, maybe you want the story.”

Craig: I would probably say something like, “We should all be home. Don’t go anywhere, ever.”

John: Yes, that’s a choice, too.

Craig: Yes. That’s just me.

John: Secondary fun, it’s almost a word in itself.

Craig: Do you know a tomb that you can go into where something actually is there, rewarding just to see? All of the tombs in the Indiana Jones video game. All of them. Everyone.

John: I need to speak up for the Egyptian tourism council. The pyramids are fantastic. Actually, going in that one tomb is just such a weird experience. The other tombs, the hieroglyphics everywhere, there’s still color on the walls. It’s actually genuinely impressive.

Craig: They’re not all–

John: No. Most of the tombs are spectacular. It’s just that the one that’s in the giant pyramid that you think should be the absolute coolest. No, it’s empty because everything was stolen out of there years ago.

Craig: Everything was stolen.

John: The reason why the King Tut is famous is because the tomb wasn’t opened until the ’20s.

Craig: That’s right. Yes. That’s when the curse happened.

John: That’s when the curse happened. Also, I just– The last bit of Egypt trivia here. They have photos of what the actual vault looked like in there. It was just a bunch of stuff piled up. It wasn’t like it was neatly arranged on shelves and stuff. It was all just a pile in the corner.

Craig: It’s a storage unit.

John: It’s a storage unit. It was like, “Here’s some chariot wheels for your sky chariot.”

Craig: Right. What do we throw in there? Oh, he loved chariots.

John: Yes. He loved bread. We need to make a bunch of stone things that look like bread because he loved bread.

Craig: Oh, you know what? You can get things like that at Pottery Barn.

[chuckling]

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s just Pottery Barn crap.

John: What it reminded me most of is my mom would go to Montgomery Wards or JCPenney’s to pick up her catalog orders, and they would have the refrigerators because you could buy a refrigerator there. You’d have the refrigerator, and some of them had the plastic food in there. I loved the plastic food.

Craig: Plastic meat.

John: Loved it so much.

Craig: Loved it. There was always a lamb chop. Oh, yes.

John: Yes. Oh, yes. We had a lot of lamb back in those days.

Craig: Yes, so much lamb.

John: We have one more missing word here. Let’s talk about Mitch’s proposal here.

Drew: Something that could be useful to have for describing an important feeling you want to attain in storytelling. I believe it was described by Rachel Kondo at the live Austin episode, but it’s a word for something that’s both surprising and inevitable. If anybody could get it to take off, it’s John and Craig.

Craig: We do talk about that all the time.

John: Yes. You want surprise and inevitable, but it is that feeling like, “Oh, of course.”

Craig: Maybe we just portmanteau to surprevitable.

John: I like surprevitable.

Craig: Surprevitable.

John: Let’s do it, Craig.

Craig: Done.

John: Done. Surprevitable. Let us talk about– Another bit of follow-up here, which is on first jobs. We’d asked our listeners, so many of you have worked as PA, so many of you have had to do the lunch run for an office or for a writer’s room. Man, there’s got to be so much shared wisdom out there about how to do it best.

Honestly, there was so much shared wisdom. We got– Drew, I don’t know.

Drew: Oh, dozens of emails.

John: Dozens and dozens of people. Rather than read through all of it, we’re going to put together a blog post we could link to so that it’s on the internet and everyone can always find it.

Craig: Great.

John: Drew, talk us through some of the section headers here and what some of the highlights were, things that were surprising even to you.

Drew: Sure. We start with just picking the restaurant because that’s a whole process. Simple things like making sure to ask about dietary restrictions, looking for restaurants that are good, balanced of healthy, and greasy. No tacos was a thing that came up because LA’s got great tacos and people probably want them, but they are, according to some people, the single-handedly, the most painstaking who ordered the place.

Craig: Everybody gets four different tacos, and then they all get mixed up, and no one knows which goes to what.

John: Also, I feel like tacos don’t travel well, fundamentally.

Craig: They don’t. Soft tacos, sort of.

John: Yes, but everything slides off across the [crosstalk]

Craig: It gets wet.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. No, tacos is a bad idea.

Drew: Homestate seems like it’s an exception to that, according to some people.

Craig: Homestate’s solid. Yes, Homestate’s solid.

John: How about taking the order? That’s a thing you clearly messed up if the order doesn’t get taken right. Talk to us about that.

Drew: We got some good horror stories in here, too, on that. A great thing is just to make sure that you would include a link to the menu or a PDF copy, even if you have to make one yourself because some people, you can’t trust them to find the menu themselves. They’ll ask you to get items that don’t exist or things that are out of season, sandwiches that they used to have but aren’t available anymore. Double-check it when you place it over the phone.

John: Oh, I guess people still have to do phone orders for some stuff. Craig, on Last of Us, when you are doing a phone order, is it printed out and handed in front of you when you’re circling, or how are you getting your thing?

Craig: In our writing office that we have now, our PA sends us an email with a link. “This is where we’re getting today’s lunch from. Let me know by this time what you would like.” You click on the link, you look around, and you respond back. So far, so good. Seems to work.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We don’t have a very big workload.

John: That’s actually very small. How about when you’re actually in pre-production or any of that stuff, or if you’re going out on a location scout, what’s the order there?

Craig: Typically, I don’t participate [chuckles] because it’s good to be the king. I can get whatever I want. Typically, the office will– It’s like a choice of three things. There’s an app that people can log into, and my camera order is called Eatly or something like that. Then everybody puts their thing in, and it all gets delivered roughly around the same time.

John: Okay, so it’s more like what we do for D&D. For D&D, when we’re playing each week, we’ll send out a link and everyone pick their things and at a certain point, it’ll cut off, and will submit the order.

Craig: It’s a group DoorDash thing. It’s sort of like that except we’re going to say “You can pick from any one of these three today.” Typically, it is a somewhat curated menu as well because some of those restaurants are like, “Hey, we can do this, a lot of this, but we can’t do a lot of those things.” When we’re on scouts and stuff, we usually just pick a restaurant.

John: Yes, makes sense. This is too long to read through on the show, but we’ll include Kelly’s Quiznos horror story. The punchline of this was, there is a Quiznos order, it was like a big Quiznos order. Quiznos called like, “Is it really this big? I know it’s a big order.” The total was $409. They ended up making 4,000 sandwiches.

Craig: No. Wait. How did they even make 4,000 sandwiches?

John: I don’t know.

Drew: She doesn’t even know. They called to confirm, and they went through the whole order. Apparently, everything was fine, but they made 4,000 sandwiches.

John: An order of magnitude difference.

Craig: They were supposed to make 400 sandwiches.

John: The total was supposed to be $409, so it’s not even 400 sandwiches.

Craig: It was 40 sandwiches?

John: Probably. That feels right.

Craig: They were just like, “Well, they might need a few extra.” [chuckles]

John: Yes.

Craig: How did they do that? That can’t be right.

John: That’s the exception, but it’s the horror story that underlines why it’s so important [crosstalk]–

Craig: I have so many questions lis where is this Quiznos? How did they do that? Do they really have the ability to make 4,000 sandwiches on the spot? I don’t believe this.

John: It does seem possible.

Craig: This feels urban legend to me. I don’t know.

John: Timing is so important, and so we’ll have a little session on timing. Basically, based on the restaurant, do you need to put it in an hour ahead, two hours ahead, 30 minutes ahead? What is it going to be? I just know from the Mendocino Farms at the Grove, it’s like, Good luck. You have to be able to navigate that.

Craig: I would be so bad at this.

John: I like the suggestion to label everything at the restaurant, so that as you’re double-checking, you actually label whose things and what they’re at the restaurant, because that’s a way of verifying–

Craig: That you got everybody’s [crosstalk].

John: That you actually got everybody’s thing, and that everybody eats the right thing. Suggestions of getting a giant plastic bin from Target to put everything in, so it doesn’t slosh around inside your car.

Craig: Smart.

John: Hand everybody their lunch, so rather than laying it out on the table. I actually like put it in there in front of them. [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, that is a nice thing to do.

John: Yes, because it also reconnects that you are the person who did this thing.

Craig: It keeps people at the table, and you don’t have this weird scrum, and somebody’s– Because, again, it’s like dealing with children, like kindergartners. They’re going to pick up the wrong thing. They’re not going to look at the name. They’re just going to see, “Oh, it’s a sandwich that I ordered,” except that that one was somebody else’s that didn’t have mayonnaise on it. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve ended up with the–

John: The mayonnaise sandwich. We know. Listeners know that Craig hates mayonnaise. Any white substance that’s spread on a sandwich–

Craig: Disgusting. We were talking about today in the room was the British nightmare, known as salad cream.

Drew: Oh, yes.

Craig: Disgusting. If you look at the Wikipedia page for salad cream, it describes it as something like a thick, pale yellow– [chuckles] It’s like, I’m already out. It’s like pus, basically. It’s disgusting. Sorry, Heinz.
[chuckling]

John: Then our last section is on general advice, which is good stuff, and it actually applies to a lot of the functions of being the PA in an office. It’s like, the stuff you’re doing doesn’t feel rewarding in the moment, but it is so important for the actual successful functioning of the room, the show, the whatever it is. Recognize that you’re not always going to get credit for the work that you’re doing, but know that you’re actually doing a great job.

There was a book I read over this break that was talking about custodians. This woman was feeling bad about her job, and she was a janitor at a place. They said, “No, you’re the custodian of the building.” It’s your job to make sure that this building actually works for everybody. That reframing was really important. In some ways, you’re like the custodian of the people who need to eat food.

Craig: Yes, and I will say that, and I hope this is true, that the PAs are appreciated when they’re doing this well, because I have been in circumstances where the person doing it wasn’t great at it. Every day, it was just, “I wonder who’s going to either not get lunch or get the wrong lunch. Who will it be today?” Every single day.

Thank you to all the PAs out there who are making sure we’re well-fed. By the way, let’s face it, we’re all in better moods. One o’clock rolls around, the hangriness that sets in, whoo.

John: It’s rough. It’s tough, we all know it. This was a very good experiment. Our next experiment, I would like to have our listeners talk to us about their best suggestions and tips for pitching on Zoom. It’s obviously a thing that started during the pandemic, but it’s now become the norm. I’ve been talking to a lot of writers recently who say like, “I hope to never actually pitch in person again because it’s just–“ They so much prefer pitching on Zoom and the ability to keep eye contact with the whole group and to have your nose at the top of the screen. I would love to hear people’s best practices for doing that.

Craig: Yes, you don’t have to memorize anything, I suppose, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s all there.

John: It’s there.

Craig: I like that.

John: It’s also tough because you don’t have the real feedback of a person paying attention or not paying attention, which has pros and cons.

Craig: Yes, and then there is– I’m still old school enough to believe being in a room with somebody, there’s a little bit of– I don’t know. You feel where they’re going one way or the other. You can sense it.

John: You do. There’s been cases where I’ve really misread a thing where I felt, “Oh, that went terribly,” and I’m driving off a lot. I get the call, they want to make a deal.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, so it’s crazy. I’d love to hear people’s suggestions, things they’ve learned, tips and tricks, but also, I love the horror stories. [chuckles] If you have your equivalent of the 4,000 Quiznos sandwiches, I’d love to hear that, too.

Craig: I assume it’s going to be, I shared my open browser tab with something, something.

John: Yes. I’ll say a pro of pitching on Zoom, I think, for up-and-coming people is that you can have more people in the room. You can have an assistant listening in and actually gleaning from that stuff, which is if they were in the room themselves, it would be distracting, but if they’re just an extra person on the little screen, it’s fine.

Craig: True.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about problem solving because this actually came up because a listener was writing in about a different thing. She mentioned this technique called rubber ducking, which I’d never heard of before, which is talking through a problem, especially like it comes from my coding. Talking through a coding problem to an inanimate object, like literally a rubber duck, saying “Okay, first I’m doing this and then I’m doing this.” You’re explaining it to a non-animate object to really think through your logic and verbalize it, and express it aloud.

It got me thinking about us as writers, but also our characters are often having to solve problems that are put before them. Looking at how people solve problems, it’s a great way of exposing how their brain actually works and how they’re forming a mental model of the world around them. I wanted to talk through some techniques for solving problems, but also why it’s important to show characters solving problems in stories.

Craig: Ultimately, there is a problem. If the character doesn’t have a problem, then I don’t care about the story. There is a problem, and then there are sub-problems and sub-problems. We know we’re invested in them solving things. The first question I like to ask when it comes to this particular topic is are they any good at it? It can often be, I don’t know, engaging watching somebody that is terrible at solving a particular problem who has to solve that problem.

John: You’re asking, does the character have expertise in this? If they don’t have expertise, are they good at being able to communicate with others and find out and solve a problem even if they don’t actually have the information themselves? Can they find the information? Can they find the expert? Can they draw from various sources to get to the answer that they need? In so many of our shows, I’m really thinking of procedurals, but also even the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, different people have different strengths and they have to work together to come up with an answer to the problem that’s facing them.

Craig: There are two kinds of problem-solving that we engage in as storytellers. One kind is a process problem. It’s straight up logic or insight. If I solve this problem, I will have information needed to do something, but I will not be changed. The process of solving this problem does not require me to grow or push past a boundary.

Then there are the problems where, in fact, the only way to solve it and the only way to unpack it or see the insight is to grow as a person, or in the solving of it, it changes you. We need to engage in both levels of problem-solving all the time. The non-character-y problem solvings, those are the ones we just have to be careful about because down that road sometimes is what David Zucker would call, “merely clever.” Clever sounds good. Clever is clever, but no one gives you a ton of credit for it unless it’s really clever. Otherwise, it’s meh. “Oh yes, you figured it out.”

John: Yes, so you’re talking about the problems that characters are solving that it’s not their fundamental flaw. It’s not a thing that’s going to transform them. We were talking about Michael Clayton earlier, and Michael Clayton is a problem solver. He comes in there to fix a problem, and so seeing him fix those problems is one of the rewards of that story. It’s saying like, “Oh wow, look at the expertise and competence, the social skills, his ability to read the situation, to read the room, crucial and fundamental.” Ultimately, it’s all in service to a greater arc and journey for him, but it’s great to see that level of expertise.

Craig: Yes, and that’s why that problem solving is fun to write and it’s fun to watch, but there are times where we think, “Oh, somebody just needs to get a clue about where to go next.” We have to create a problem for them to solve. The problem can’t be too hard to solve. The problem should be a fair problem to solve, so that people at home theoretically could have solved it also, but didn’t. Then we need to always ask, “How would this person do? How do they react to frustration, to not being able to see the answer?”

John: That’s what I think makes creating the right problem and showing their solution to the problem so rewarding for us as writers is that it lets us illuminate what’s actually going on in their head. It forces them to interact with the environment around them, with the people around them to solve the problem.

What I thought we might do is talk through– I think I have a list of 10 classic problem-solving techniques, and how that might work on seeing, but also for worth of words that you’re going to hear that really involve this thing. Rubber ducking is just there to describe that while you’re talking to an inanimate object, and it forces clarity because you have to explain something clearly, it slows you down. It externalizes the problem which is good.

In real life, the thing that I found I stopped doing a lot, especially when I’m talking through with my team on some software stuff, is I’ll say, “Let me explain back what I think I just heard.” You’re probably doing a similar thing, too, as you’re solving problems on your show. It’s like someone has dumped a bunch of information, and you’re trying to synthesize and process it back. In some ways, you are serving as the rubber duck to them. “I heard all this stuff, this is what I got out of it.” You’re showing it back to them.

Craig: Yes. I will sometimes– I guess this is the Socratic method. I will just start asking questions. Somebody has laid something out, and I think, “Okay, here are the parts that made sense to me. Here are the parts that are confusing.” I’m just going to start asking questions about every single thing that is either confusing to me or doesn’t feel right or feels incomplete until I know everything, until I don’t have any snag anymore.

John: That can seem argumentative, but it’s argumentative in the classic Socratic method of basically it’s exploring something together.

Craig: It’s interrogative. I think it’s interesting to watch people question. The questions that we ask and the way people answer things is in and of itself a great opportunity to learn about character, but it’s also a great opportunity to get information across without feeling lamely expository. It’s questioning. This is an interview. I like that.

John: Next technique would be free association. This is where you don’t censor the unworkable ideas. You swing bail, “Just tell me everything.” It’s when they say “No bad ideas.” It’s often used in comedies because like some of the ideas are just truly horrible, awful, terrible, bad ideas. At some points in some stories, you actually need that crazy solution because in proposing the crazy solution, then the other character says, “No, we can’t do that, but we could actually do this thing.” You find connections just because you’re willing to go crazy.

Craig: [chuckles] It is sad in a way how we tend to punish the big swingers in fiction because they take these big idea swings, and people are just, “Shut up.” Then one of them goes, “Everything you just said was insane, but wait.” [chuckles] They just existed to make you angry enough with their bad idea that your brain finally barfs up a good one. But in real life, it’s necessary because sometimes the answer to the problem is to realize you were trying to solve the wrong problem entirely.

John: Yes, and that’ll come up occasionally in these other approaches. Third one is to refactor or rewrite it from scratch. It’s basically rather than try to fix this thing, we actually just need to replace it completely. When a character proposes that, it does tell you about their instincts, which could be the right instinct because basically, you’re trying to fix an unfixable thing. We need to scrub it, or that they are so perfectionist, they’re idealists in a way that it’s not practical. I love to hear when people are like, “Oh, do we need to throw the whole thing out?”

Craig: Yes, I’m a big believer in throwing the whole thing. It’s the Gordian Knot solution, right? Just chop it in half, done.

John: Yes. All right. Decomposition, which is to take a problem and break it into smaller, more addressable chunks, which is so often the right solution that people are trying to just tackle too big of a problem, and you break it into smaller things. You’re like, “Oh, I know how to solve each of these little individual things. It’s just the big thing that seems so daunting.”

Craig: There are so many wonderful examples of this in movies. When people are explaining something that’s seemingly impossible to other people, they break it down. Maybe my favorite is in Ocean’s Eleven, where Danny Ocean is explaining, not yet, how they’re going to do it. He is explaining what the problems are and he is going little by little by little, one by one by one. It’s this, it’s this, gets worse, gets worse, gets worse. In doing so, you understand that he’s laid the groundwork for the solutions. We now know all the things that we’re going to have to solve.

John: Absolutely. The Martian is another great example that’s like every character in it is basically taking this giant, unsolvable problem and break it into solvable problems. The minimal viable solution, which is rather than try to get a perfect answer, let’s just get an answer that solves the issue okay for now, so we can at least– By getting something that works kind of, that we can see what we need to do next. That’s when you get characters say, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.” It’s just something that works.

Craig: It’s probably the thing that you would want to then replace with the good answer. It feels like a duck, not a rubber duck, but ducking. Evasion and unwillingness to face the problem in and of itself is a fun aspect of how characters approach problem-solving.

John: Analogization, basically saying, this thing is like this other thing. It’s recognizing that this specific situation may never have occurred, but it’s like other things that have occurred. It’s a case for generalists. It’s a case for people who’ve done other things, and a specialist may not see a thing that a generalist can recognize because they can pull from history or other fields.

Craig: Harold Ramis, describing the situation with the ectoplasma container in terms of a giant Twinkie. This is my favorite example. “Tell them about the Twinkie. It’s a big Twinkie,” but it’s essential. I didn’t really get into analogization. I said, “Well, I did in Chernobyl in the sense of like, I described a nuclear reactor like a car, like gas pedal, brake pedal. You do have to figure out how to make it relatable to somebody that doesn’t know the specifics and doesn’t need to.

John: Absolutely. Metaphors are how we communicate knowledge. It’s finding what the right metaphor is for this thing. That can be a useful metaphor for what the problem is, but also a metaphor for what a solution would look like. Very related. It’s just finding earlier solutions. I get frustrated by people who assume, like “This is the first time this has ever happened.” I always say like, “No, this must’ve happened a thousand times. Someone else has solved this before. We just need to look for the right way to find the answer that they came up with, because it’s probably the right answer.”

Craig: Or in their attempts to solve this, we see what we should not be doing, or we deepen the mystery. Why didn’t that work? It should have worked.

John: That’s a very good point. If there’s not a solution that’s out there, there must be a reason why there’s not a solution out there.

Craig: Right. It helps define your particular problem as a character as difficult.

John: Stepping away or letting something incubate, which is basically, rather than try to solve the problem right now, we are going to take a break, let our brains rest. We’re going to take a shower, which we often mention on this podcast. We’re going to come back to that when we are rested or when the situation has changed. That the problem may be that there’s actually not a solution in front of us because of where we are right now at this moment, but there may be an answer to this down the road.

Craig: Yes. This is an opportunity for epiphany, which can be a little silly sometimes, but a good epiphany.

John: Love it.

Craig: Worth its weight in gold. Typically, an epiphany comes when someone’s given up. RIP, Val Kilmer, Real Genius, a movie that all nerds and fans of comedy and people of the ‘80s love. He is trying to solve a problem with a laser. Because the laser is sabotaged, it explodes, and he’s out of luck. He’s not going to graduate, he’s not going to get the job, and he’s in absolute despair. He gives up. In that moment of giving up, he beats up a refrigerator, some ice falls out, he looks at the ice, and he goes, “Oh my God, I got it.” He solves the problem.

John: Sometimes it’s the recognition that the obstacle is you. The obstacle is your own pride, your own stubbornness. It’s only by taking a step back, you would say like, “Oh, this was the solution there.” Only by creating some space is a solution possible.

Another technique is what’s called test-driven development or contradictory development, which basically, first you establish what the thing should do, what it needs to do, and then you can test whether you succeeded. Then you can think about how to implement it. Rather than first trying to find a solution, find like, well, how will you know what the real solution looks like, so we’re not passing it by?

Craig: Just so people are clear, this is not just applicable to obviously defined problems. You can apply what you just said to romance. I look at those two people, that’s what I want. Now, problem, how do I get to that?

John: It really comes down to– We often talk about it. What is the thesis, and challenging that thesis, basically. How will I know that this thesis has been sustained or disproven? You got to define those terms first. Often, we’re looking for a solution without actually looking for how we’ll know a solution is satisfactory.

Last one is related to rubber ducking. It’s the Feynman technique. It’s named after Richard Feynman. Basically, you try to write an explanation in a way that a child could understand it. This is a thing we do all the time in movies, is basically simplify it to another character, and you’re finding metaphors, you’re finding ways to explain a thing so that you can actually get a non-expert to understand what it is that they need to be looking at.

Craig: Which requires you to really understand whatever it is and really be able to break down the problem. Ideally, a character can break a problem down and describe it in this matter very quickly. There are times in movies where somebody comes along, you’ll see this in movies that involve military confrontations, where somebody gets in there and there’s chaos all around, they’re like, “What do we got?” Ba-dup, ba-dup, ba-dup. Fast. No one has time to go on and on. If you have somebody in the middle of chaos taking their time, that’s just comedic.

John: It is. The thing I hope to never hear again is explain it like I’m five. It’s just so cliche.

Craig: Redundant and everybody should be explaining everything like we’re five.

John: That instinct is correct. It’s like finding the way to have a character explain something in a very clear way to a person who’s not an expert in it is incredibly valuable. Yes, you can overdo it at times, but you look at shows like Succession that we love so much, they’re able to take really complicated things and sometimes they’re talking up at the very high level so we don’t actually understand, but also fundamentally, they’ll bring it down when it’s important. The Big Short does it so well.

Craig: The Big Short was designed to teach us something important that was complicated. When you have shows like Succession, people like Jesse Armstrong are really good at understanding when they should not talk to you like you’re five because they want you to be impressed with these people who all know stuff you don’t. But when they need you to understand it for you to connect to the drama, somebody’s going to explain it to somebody like they’re five.

John: There’s times where they’re talking in high-level technical jargon, equivalent of like science-y. It’s gobbledygook to us, but we believe that they understand what it is. What’s crucial is that when there’s a problem to be solved, they’re able to then put it in terms where you can actually understand what the stakes are and what the solution feels like even if we don’t understand exactly how it all fits.

Craig: Yes. I don’t know why getting this person to call that person is going to make a difference. All I know is I have 20 minutes to get that person to call this person and the first person is in space, and the second person is in a submarine. What do I do?

John: Yes, exactly. You’ve made it really clear. All these techniques we’re talking through are ways you can think about solving problems in real life and that’s why they feel real and meaningful. Here, because of Scriptnotes, we’re really talking about how you have your characters address problems and create scenes where they’re solving those problems in ways that are interesting and engaging and hold the audience’s attention, and let us into our character’s thought process, which is so hard to do sometimes.

Craig: Yes, let us experience the frustration. Let us experience false celebration. Sometimes our characters have figured it out. No, they haven’t. That’s a terrible feeling. We’ve all felt that in life where we thought we solved it and then we’re like, “Oh no, we did not.”

John: It crosses every genre. It’s in comedies, it’s in mysteries, it’s in dramas. Everything is going to have problem solving. Every horror slasher movie is like, “How are we going to get through this?”

Craig: How are we getting out of this woods?

John: That’s what makes it so universal and so relatable. It’s making sure you’re setting up those problems in ways that can force our characters into really good problem solving. Cool. Speaking of problem solving.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Segue man. We’re recording this on Tuesday. Who knows what the status of the world is at this point.

Craig: What world?

John: This president has proposed a 100% tariff.

Craig: I like that, “this president.” That’s a great way to do it.

John: A 100% tariff on movies produced outside of the United States. As we were recording, Jon Voight came out with this other thing which is explaining more about it. Craig, can you briefly for people who are not aware, what is a tariff and why does it actually not make any sense here at all?

Craig: A tariff is a tax that is levied on imports.

John: Imported goods.

Craig: When some product crosses our border, it goes through customs. At that point, the government can levy a tax upon it. The people who are selling it, sell it to us, but when we buy it, that purchase price, there is a tax. We, on our side of the border-

John: The consumer of it.

Craig: The consumer pays the tax on that material. That is the cost of getting stuff from another country. If there is a tax on, for instance, steel from China. China does not pay more. They don’t pay that tax at all, but the people who import it do. The idea, of course, is to say, “See, we’ve made it too expensive to import this. Now you have to use the steel here.” Of course, what in the [inaudible 00:44:42] is that? The price goes up dramatically because they can, because the supply goes down and the demand is the same. Importantly, tariffs are on products.

John: Things that were put on a ship and they crossed it– it went through customs. A DVD that was manufactured overseas and brought in, you could apply a tariff.

Craig: Yes, you can. What you can’t do is put a tariff on labor that has occurred entirely in another country. Look, we can talk about how horrible runaway production has been for California in particular. Right now, finally, Sacramento seems to be taking this seriously. Seems to be. I just want people to understand, when somebody goes to make a movie in the United Kingdom, they fly there and then everybody who works there is paid there. All the things that they use to build sets, to dress people are there. The thing that comes back is a card with digital information? What is there to tax exactly?

John: That’s one of the reasons why specifically when power was delegated to the president to enact tariffs and things like that, movies were excluded as were books, things that are just intellectual property.

Craig: It just don’t work that way.

John: All that said, let’s talk about–

Craig: I can’t believe Jon Voight doesn’t know this.

John: Let’s talk about the instinct to make movies and television shows in the United States, which is not a bad instinct. No, we love that. To incentivize production within the United States through incentives, through taxes or other incentives, and to make sure that we have a sustainable industry so that continue to make things in the United States.

Craig: This is a good topic for a show about problem solving. Let’s start with what is going on. What has happened? Places outside of California, in the United States, notably New Mexico, Georgia, Louisiana, provide tax incentives. The way those generally work is that they say, “Hey, everybody that works here and all the money that you spend here on things, the sales tax and the income tax so that the people earn from labor, we’re going to provide back to your production. The thing is you’re powering the economy just by being here and by putting income in people’s pockets. We want you to come here, so we’re not going to tax you on that stuff. We’re going to give that back to you.”

Those schemes, they’re literally called schemes, function in various ways. Typically, there is a percentage that they give you back, and there is often a cap. The state, or whatever the municipality says, once we’ve covered this much money in this stuff, we stop, we’re done because we just don’t want to give everybody everything. What ensued and what has ensued is a race to the bottom. This is the problem.

Listen, people get very angry about globalization. Well, that occurred. I understand the anger at the underlying problem, which is capitalism will draw everything down to the cheapest number, which means drawing labor down to the lowest amount of expenditure and enriching corporations as much as possible.

This is why California has resisted this sort of thing for a while, and it’s why a lot of people fundamentally are uncomfortable with this because what we’re saying is the only way to help working people, especially the working crews in California is to just give a ton of money to rich corporations.

John: Let’s talk about when incentives work properly and how they’re structured. If I can find a link to it, there was a representative from the DGA who explained on Kim Masters’ podcast in a really good way, what the new California incentives are supposed to be. The incentives are paying people back for their labor costs. Basically saying, “You employed these people in the state of California. That’s a good thing. Therefore, we are going to refund money to you based on that.” That’s really what it comes down to.

One of the challenges we face is that California labor costs are higher than they are other places. Sometimes that’s why you move to cheaper places to shoot, including overseas, which is really what this focus is of this, which is becomes hard to do. When you’re shooting a movie that is set in Philadelphia, but you’re shooting in Croatia because it’s just cheaper to shoot in Croatia, that’s a harder problem to solve.

Craig: It is. That said, there are costs inherent to shooting far away. A ton of people have to be shipped out there, including most of your key cast.

John: Your department heads.

Craig: Your department heads. There’s also just typically a duplication of efforts. You’re going to want to find what’s called a services company. If you’re shooting something in Croatia, you have a production company, you have your script, you have your production, and then you need to hire a Croatian production company that puts you in touch with the Croatian folks that you’re going to need to work on your movie or your show. People don’t want to do this.

Unless you’re making a movie about Croatia, nobody wants to go far away from the setting of the movie. It is disruptive, and it has really hurt so many people who make their living off of these production trades here in Los Angeles. Listen, it’s dollar to dollar at some point, who knows?

John: Cost of currency, everything else.

Craig: It’s impossible to figure this stuff out, except on the largest level. What we know is the argument’s not even close for the companies. For my show, it was like, this is the difference. You either can make it or you can’t.

John: With Canada, the dollar exchange is part of it, but also the incentives.

Craig: The exchange rate is definitely an issue, and that fluctuates, but the incentives are absolutely a part of it. What happens is you start to get even inter-provincial competition to see, okay, well Alberta knows that they don’t necessarily have as wide and deep a pool of crew as BC does. They increase their incentives to bring stuff, in comes The Last of Us, more people are trained, more people are hired, better for Alberta.

We need to do something about this, and the one thing I think we just can’t afford to do anymore is clutch our pearls about the fact that this is putting money in corporate pockets because they’re doing it anyway. No matter what we do, they are either keeping the money in their pocket and not giving it to us, or they’re getting money to replace the money they give to us. One way or the other, it’s happening. I would rather that we replace the money in their pocket and have them give it to us here in Los Angeles.

By us, I mean all of our grips, all of our electric, all of our catering, all of our teamsters and our seamstresses, and every single person that works on– construction is an enormous part of this, and it will power our economy. It’s important to do. No, we’re not going to get there by tariffs. We’re going to get there the other way, it seems.

John: I want to end this on a happy note, which is a movie that I’m helping out on is a very low budget, but based on low budget, was going to probably need to shoot in Mexico, even though it’s set in Southern California, and went through a whole bunch of stuff and then was able to get the California tax credit, and so is now going to be shooting in California, which is incredible. It’s the right thing for the movie, it’s the right thing for the state. It shows off an underappreciated part of our state. I’m incredibly excited for it. It was a slog to get there, but it happened.

Craig: It’s lucky because it’s a lottery right now.

John: It is.

Craig: You literally win or lose randomly.

John: It’s also in tiers based on what size production you are.

Craig: That’s the other catch here, because the way the new schemes that are being proposed are structured, it really does aim more towards lower budget or middle budget things. I think there’s a great argument to be made that the large budget things employ more people. It’s one of those things of like, “Well, do we want to give five different people X units, or we would like to give one person 10 X units?” I don’t know.

John: It’s really tough. The other reason why we can’t say tariffs mean a different thing, if we’re going to slap a fee on things that were shot overseas, they’re going to slap a fee on anything that we try to show overseas too. Nobody wants a trade war over this.

Craig: It is literally other than– I’ll even take it back because we don’t really export technology. We import it because we build it all overseas.

John: Our film and television industry is a giant exporter of culture.

Craig: It is the only exportation that we have beyond some limited crops, I think, and in some limited cases, some fuels. I can’t think of an industry that is just so exportive. We don’t need sledgehammers to fix this. We just need will and the unions need to buy in. It seems like they are. Unfortunately, they have to agree to somehow make the corporate paymasters happy. Talk about not letting the perfect get in the way of the good.

John: All right. It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a person, her name is Hannah Ritchie. She has a great blog called Sustainability by the Numbers. She also has a podcast called Solving for Climate. She is a data scientist and writer who mostly talks about climate change, sustainability, all those things. She’s a person, as a data scientist, she actually crunches the numbers to figure out what is useful and what is not useful. She can talk about solar panel productivity and where the changes are there and the choices you can make individually, but also the choices systematically that governments make about doing things right.

She’s Scottish. Craig, you will love her accent.

Craig: Oh, Scottish.

John: She’s a really smart Scottish person.

Craig: I love the Scots.

John: I love them so much. Specifically this last week, she wrote about ChatGPT and there’s this meme going around of how much energy a ChatGPT query goes up, and it is so incredibly negligible. people say, “Oh, it’s 10 times as much as a Google search is.” A Google search is nothing, it’s a grain of sand.

Craig: Aren’t statistics fun?

John: Statistics are fun. I’ll point people to this blog post, but really I’ve learned so much reading her, but also listening to her podcast, talking about things like they’re putting sales on freighters now. Which is so cool.

Craig: Smart.

John: They retrofited because–

Craig: You save that much. If the wind blows, you turn your engine off, you save some money.

John: The expert they had on to talk about it was talking about how right now they’ll optimize for speed a little bit because sometimes it’s like, “Well, we’ll burn less fuel and go slowly and it’s worthwhile,” but with the wind blowing, when you don’t need it in a hurry, use the wind.

Craig: Absolutely. Imagine that.

John: It’s some stuff that feels like science fiction, but it’s actually people, actual scientists are doing it. Hannah Ritchie, Sustainability by the Numbers is her blog, but the podcast is called Solving for Climate.

Craig: I love that. I’ve got a delightful one cool thing, and it really is. It’s so cool. Our good friends at Rusty Lake-

John: Oh, yes. It’s another game. Another-

Craig: A surprise. [crosstalk] Yes. Our friends at Rusty Lake out there in the Netherlands who make all the wonderful Rusty Lake games, it is their 10th anniversary. To celebrate, they released a surprise game called the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show. Those of you who play these incredibly surreal games know that there’s Mr. Crow and Mr. Owl and Mr. Rabbit, and they are all very sinister. True to form, they just knock it out of the park.

It’s just like, hey, Mr. Rabbit’s Magic Show. There’s going to be 20 little puzzles and each one is– it’s just really, they’re really easy and you’re like blowing through them and then shit gets weird. Of course they supply a whole other game inside the game with incredible challenges to do. Getting and completing the whole thing, it felt like a full complete meal and extremely Rusty Lake, very intertextual. They’ve built quite a culture over there. It seems like such a nice place. I want to work there.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It seems like they have fun. They seem really cool. Congratulations to Rusty Lake. You guys and Fireproof Games who make the room games are my favorite iOS game makers.

John: Fantastic. I forgot to mention this before it actually happened, but I will say thank you to everybody who stopped by our booth at PAX East, the big game convention this last weekend in Boston. We were there with Birdigo, which is our game on Steam right now. I’m going to say great because it actually hasn’t happened as we’re recording this. I’m resuming it went fantastic, but I want to thank everybody who visited our booth and signed up and downloaded our demo for Birdigo up there.

Craig: Oh, I love that.

John: It’s so much fun. We made a little banner or something.

Craig: Nice work.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced my Drew Marquardt and Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you need an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. There’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Actually, we didn’t answer any questions today.

Craig: No, we didn’t.

John: We did some follow-up, though.

Craig: We must have an incredible backlog of questions.

John: Drew talk to us about the question backlog we have.

Drew: We do. We have some great ones that I’ve got in store.

John: We had four on the workflow today, which we didn’t get to because I’m always keeping an eye on time.

Craig: Sure. You know I love an all-question episode. It’s so much fun.

John: We’ll get there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a weekly newsletter we have called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about on the episode today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You let us do this every week, which is so much fun. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on Egypt and Jordan and my troubles through the tombs. Craig, it’s nice to be back with you here in person.

Craig: Welcome home, John.

John: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. I am back from two weeks off the grid. I actually, literally, I put the out of office email thing. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t open my laptop.

Craig: Love it.

John: It was good.

Craig: I need that.

John: You should do that. I know you traveled to Spain for last of–

Craig: To work.

John: It was work work stuff. Craig, I’m going to encourage you to find a time and just say– because the world did not fall apart and like Drew and everybody else, they stepped up and they just did stuff. I just said like, “Just to handle stuff as best as you could handle.”

Craig: Or maybe the world falls apart.

John: Maybe it’s fine.

Craig: Whatever. I’m not funding crucial research into chromosomal repair. I admire you for flinging yourself across the globe. I have come to find travel so exhausting, so exhausting to the point where just even like, “Oh, we’re just going to do a one hour hop somewhere, a short flight.” I’m tired. There’s nothing about going up and down that exhausts me and going this last trip to Spain and then the UK and then back to LA again, I was just– oh man, I was knackered.

John: You were knackered.

Craig: I was knackered. You fling yourself. It was just you and Mike.

John: Just me and Mike. I thank God– This is our 25th anniversary. That’s the reason why we took this trip and thank God we get along well because we were with each other for 17 days solid. Literally never apart.

Craig: Melissa and I, I think our secret because apart–

John: You never see each other.

Craig: 17 days out of the year, I would say we love our independence and then we come together and then we like to go to our corners and then come back together again. I don’t know if I can spend 17 days straight with anyone. I love being alone. Oh my God, I love it. You guys close quarters, 17 days straight, grouchy, I assume from jet lag.

John: Not that grouchy.

Craig: Not that grouchy.

John: No, we don’t get that grouchy. We also we can recognize each other when like stuff’s happening. Here’s what I’ll say was different about this trip is it was– generally Mike plans our trips and he’s responsible for everything. This time we went to travel agents like, “Make this happen.”

Craig: A travel agent.

John: We went to the travel agent, who then went through a safari company, Expedite company for that. We had handlers at every set because we were going to the Middle East and we’re two gay men going to the Middle East. I was going to ask put us in a bubble wrap. You expressed some concern.

Craig: For you. I can envision concern for me.

John: I’ll say it all went really well.

Craig: That’s great.

John: We had to make choices to help us.

Craig: Yes. You weren’t wearing rainbow t-shirts.

John: We weren’t. Honestly, it’s helpful that Mike and I can be red as brothers. We weren’t pretending to be anything, we weren’t.

Craig: Nor were you necessarily in a situation where you thought, “Oh, we’re going to attract unwanted attention.”

John: Yes. We also had somebody with us at all times. We had a handler who could meet us at the airport and we also always had a guide for where we were. In Egypt, that’s an Egyptologist, and that’s a whole fascinating thing where it’s a licensed thing who you have certifications and tests and stuff like that. They could do things that people can’t do. That was great. I wish we had equivalence of that here because our tourism industry is just nowhere near as sophisticated as Egypt is.

Craig: It’s so funny you say that because every time I find myself driving along Hollywood Boulevard and I see how many tourists are there, I think “Why. Why are you here?” Did just dumped them out of a plane and we’re like, “Enjoy.”

John: We stick them on a van and unlicensed undertrained-

Craig: Good luck everybody.

John: -with maps to the stars.

Craig: With maps to the stars. It is true, in other countries there is because tourism is so vital. Obviously there is tourism to United States. I think New York must be and San Francisco’s probably huge.

John: LA’s probably number three.

Craig: LA’s up there.

John: Orlando’s also probably high.

Craig: Orlando must be. LA/Anaheim, the LA metro area must be pretty big and people go to– but it’s not as big of a wedge of our economic pie as tourism is probably for Egypt.

John: I will confess that, while I was in Egypt, I did a ChatGPT question, an 03 and one of the detailed questions, “Can you compare tourism into Egypt as a share of the economy, versus specifically Los Angeles or New York?”

Craig: What did you get?

John: It’s like 20%, 25% of Egypt’s economy, tourism it’s crazy.

Craig: It’s insane.

John: It’s 1% to 2% of LA County.

Craig: No wonder there’s a rather robust tourism industry there to help people. I think it’s great. Sometimes because I hate traveling, I don’t like people that romanticize traveling and people who are like, “I just like going places and I don’t know where I’m going. I just like find things.” I’m like, “I want to know where I am.” I’ll love to wander, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to just guess. I’d like to have a vague sense of wander.

John: This sounds like an advert on ChatGPT, but I’ll tell you the one other thing I did do-

Craig: Oh my God, you’re ruining the climate.

John: We had this PDF that travel agency had put together. Like, “Here’s basically all the stuff that’s happening. Here’s the itinerary for things.” The PDF was such a nightmare to read through, where are we? I gave it a ChatGPT and it’s like, “Read this, tell me what I’m doing tomorrow.” It would come back with an answer. Like, “Here’s what happens tomorrow.” It’s like, “Thank God someone can actually just tell me the answer to this.”

Craig: Someone?

John: Someone. Someone told me. I didn’t have to ask Mike. I could ask this. This animated object.

Craig: One day Mike will be as good as this.

John: As this. I also point by the camera on my phone and say things like, “What is this thing I’m looking at?” It could tell me. God, that’s the near future here.

Craig: I am so dedicated right now to going nowhere. I think in part it’s a reaction to how much travel I do because of the show. A lot of it is this weird inside Canada travel just all over. Boy, a year of it.

John: I’ll say, I haven’t had to travel for work a lot yet. That’s probably why I actually had some buffer in me where I could sustain it. It was 25 hours of travel to get back from Egypt yesterday. That’s a lot.

Craig: Wow. Cairo flies direct to–

John: Cairo to Dubai, the wrong direction, then Dubai to LA.

Craig: Oh, that hurts.

John: It does hurt. Ouch but we made it.

Craig: You made it and you’re back home.

John: It’s great. I will say that as I said in the main episode, the tombs are great. The wonders of the world, I get why they’re a wonder of the world. Petra is gorgeous. I was in the Wadi Rahm, which is the Red Sand deserts of Jordan where they shot Lawrence of Arabia and The Martian. It’s incredible. It’s mars. It’s nowhere on earth. It’s great to be able to do that. The other thing I did on this trip, which was helpful is every day I would just write down what actually happened.

I would just write and write and write and write pages of it and actually just helped me process what had actually happened. Sometimes just a thing happened and I couldn’t even tell you afterwards, and now I actually do have a recollection if I could cross as what it actually felt like.

Craig: Oh, it’s so healthy.

John: It felt healthy.

Craig: This is what I did when I got to Madrid. I got into bed. And then at some point–

John: You brought with you your game.

Craig: My steamdeck. Oh, by the way, John.

John: Yes.

Craig: This is what this segment should have been about.

John: Please.

Craig: I’ve completed Baldur’s Gate 3 on honor mode.

John: At D&D. Before I left you were trying to do it. Congratulations, Craig.

Craig: It is now complete. I did everything. No cheating took on every boss did it all.

John: Congratulations.

Craig: Golden dice. Actually matters more to me than pretty much anything else I’ve done.

John: Craig, one thing I genuinely admire about you is that you do not feel any shame about pursuing your hobbies and interests and spending time on those.

Craig: Oh my God, no. I don’t know why I don’t do it more. Granted, a huge part of it is dissociating.

John: It’s a way of coping, but I honestly feel like even if you– you’re in a no show.

Craig: Some people get very guilty about saying that, how much time they spend on a video game. I’m like, “Why are you feeling guilty? What better way?” People don’t feel guilty about watching television shows.

John: One of the books they read on this trip was Four Thousand Weeks, which you’ve probably heard of. Four Thousand Weeks is basically that’s how long your life is just 4,000 weeks, which is scary when you think about it. It’s like, “Oh, that’s not that long.” That’s 80 years and that’s how long you have. It’s become a test of like, “Well, is this the way I want to spend one of my 4,000 doing this thing?”

What the argument the book really makes is that the thing is you’re doing as hobbies, which is you’re just doing them because you enjoy them, those are probably things you should be spending your time doing.

Craig: The stuff. Also we’re just ill-equipped to handle it. We cannot mentally handle this problem. Our own fatality just short circuits everything. Because if you really stop to smell the roses, you will go insane. If you really stopped to go, “I am present in this moment and feeling my life slipping by as time elapses and I move closer to the 4000th week,” you’re going to fall apart.

John: I did some of that though on this trip. There were times where just like, we’re on a Nile cruise and so for four days I was just looking everyone go by on the Nile. A river cruise, rivers are like trains but slower.

Craig: Slow trains.

John: What’s also different is that people build things right next to the river. People live next to the river. The trains, you’re going through places like no one wants to live next to the train.

Craig: It goes by so fast you can’t see anything anyway.

John: Here you can see like, “Oh there is some guy washing his clothes in the river. There are some kids playing. Look, there’s some goats.” That was great.

Craig: You occasionally will dock and one of the passengers will mysteriously be murdered.

John: We watched Death on the Nile in the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile which is so much fun.

Craig: First of all, amazing. Congratulations. That’s the first part of this trip I’m envious of, fully. When you say you watched–

John: I watched the old one.

Craig: Thank you. No offense to new one.

John: Michael Green and everybody else.

Craig: The old one is spectacular.

John: Just the silliest movie.

Craig: Ridiculous. So campy. Crazy.

John: Just wild. Also like Hercule Poirot has no reason to be. It’s all accidental. Doesn’t seem particularly concerned about how many people die in the movie.

Craig: Never. He’s a full sociopath.

John: The movie was actually shot at the hotel we were staying at.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We watched like the first half of it and then we had dinner and I was like, “Oh, this is right where they shot that thing.” It was so much fun. They’re like, “Oh, they’re at Abu Simbel.” We were there this afternoon.

Craig: Is that where the rock falls and smashes?

John: That was at Temple of Karnak.

Craig: Temple of Karnak. Yes.

John: Abu Simbel has the two giant Ramesses the second. It’s where Mia Farrow is crazy and he yells at them.

Craig: Mia Farrow. Boy, I love a classic Mia Farrow. I love a Death on the Nile. I love a Rosemary’s Baby.

John: It was fun. Anyway, Egypt. Jordan, great. Taking time off. Great. Love it. Huge fan of taking some time off and just doing things you want to do.

Craig: Glad you’re back.

John: Thanks.

Craig: Time to play some D&D.

John: We’ll do it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thank you. Bye.

Links:

• The Production Assistant’s Guide to the Lunch Run
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Note On Long Takes by Aidan Moretti
• Video tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza
• Donald Trump Says He’s Pursuing 100% Tariffs On Movies Produced Outside U.S. and John Voight’s proposal
• Sustainability by the Numbers by Hannah Ritchie
• Solving for Climate
• The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show by Rusty Lake
• Birdigo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even a little bit more swearing than usual, so standard warning about that.

[music]

John: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you plan for a multi-season TV series, and how do you wrap it up at the end? Our guest today is the creator and showrunner of shows such as Supernatural, Revolution, Timeless, Gen V, and of course, The Boys, which is back for its final season. Welcome, Eric Kripke.

Eric Kripke: Hey, thanks, John. Thrilled to be here.

John: Now, the fourth season of The Boys premiered last June, but you are now working on the fifth and final season, so I want to talk to you about that, but I’d also love to get more granular on the process of developing a show, breaking scripts, and seasons. We also have listener questions on bottle episodes, and using the conventions of comic books.

In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about blood, because you use an astonishing amount of blood on The Boys and Gen V. I’d love to discuss what you’ve learned about blood on the page, and blood in practice.

Eric: Amazing, I’m in for all of that.

John: Before we get into the details on how shows work on the inside, can we talk a little bit about your background here? Because how early in your development did you know that you wanted to do television versus features? What’s the backstory? Pitch us, Eric Kripke.

Eric: [chuckles] I was raised in Toledo, Ohio. I was one of those kids, I think it was E.T. in ’83. I was nine, and I came home from E.T. and told my mom, “Did somebody make that?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, then that’s what I want to do.” I was like the very prototypical ‘80s Spielberg obsessed, that particular subspecies of kid.

John: There’s a lot of us in that age range who are like, those were the important movies. The Spielberg movies were the ones like, “Oh my gosh, that is the vision I have,” or that’s how you get the J.J. Abrams emulating that model.

Eric: Yes, and it’s so funny looking back how few of them he actually wrote, or directed. You look back, and you’re like, “Well, that was actually Richard Donner, and that was actually Joe Dante, and that was actually Tobe Hooper,” with apparently, a very heavy assist from Spielberg, according to legend. It’s funny when you’re like– Oh, he was just– I mean, producing is a big job, obviously, but those weren’t actually his movies.

Anyway, it was just fascinating to me. I was that kid. I’d say by the time I was 11, I wanted to go to the USC Film School, because it was the only film school whose name makes its way back to Toledo, Ohio. I found the short story that I wanted my senior thesis movie to be when I was 13 in a Twilight Zone magazine written by Richard Matheson, and I carried it around with me in wrapped plastic.

I took it with me to camp and college, and anyway, and cut forward, and I went to USC, and I made that movie my senior year, and my goal was to be a director for features, and feature comedies. I made short films, and was unemployed, the usual thing. Then, my shorts were in Sundance and Slamdance at the same year, and then we won Slamdance, and okay, now I have an agent, and now I’m able to pick up bad open writing assignments, which they were giving away a lot more candy back then than they are today.

John: Let me pause you for one second, because we have a link here to Battle of the Sexes, which was a short film that you got into Sundance. Was that also at Slamdance?

Eric: Another one, Truly Committed, was at Slamdance, but Battle of the Sexes was at Sundance, yes.

John: I look at the short, it’s like, “Oh, well, I can see this is a person who wants to be a director, and wants to make a certain kind of movie,” because it’s a very well-executed, single-premise conceit just like–

Eric: Oh, I’m thrilled and stunned that you watched it, but, yes.

John: It’s six minutes, so it’s not a huge burden on anyone’s time, but it was a very good calling card for that specific kind of director who wants to do a thing. Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant, he also made a short film coming out of the USC program, but then a second short film, which was Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, which kicked him off in his career. It’s a good way to announce yourself to the town, and was that the intention behind these short films is to land yourself representation?

Eric: Yes, the main thing, and I know Rawson, he’s a great guy. The main thing at the time was make a short film, and have the feature-length version of that film as a script ready to go, and that’s the best way to get yourself into the director’s chair at a young age while you’re in your 20s. That was sort of the– That’s what you do.

John: Was the intention for Battle of the Sexes, here’s the short, and did you have a screenplay that went along with it?

Eric: I did. There’s a Battle of the Sexes feature-length screenplay that is only moderately successful, and I took it out. I got an agent, I had a good short film, people wanted to have meetings. I took out that script, and every single person who read it was like, “Yeah, no, what other scripts do you have?” I had nothing, [chuckles] so I totally blew my moment.

I had that month where I was taking eight meetings a week, and nobody liked the script, because it is a very sloppy script. I had to really learn writing from doing it. I don’t feel like I was an innately gifted writer. I always felt I was better at filmmaking.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between, so something like Battle of the Sexes is essentially a sketch. It’s something that, it’s a long version of what could be a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Eric: Yes.

John: We’ve had a couple of writers on the show to talk about the difference between sketch writing and writing the longer projects, pilot writing, a feature for sure, is that there’s a sense of ongoing development. It’s not just a complication upon the premise, it’s really a journey that the characters go on, and that’s not a natural progression sometimes from the sketch forward. It’s a very different thing.

We had Simon Rich on, and we were talking about, he writes short stories and sketches that are short and tight, and deliver the payload that they’re expecting for that small form, but it’s not what a feature script does. It’s not what a pilot does. It’s not setting up a whole world, which you end up having to learn how to do. How did you learn how to go from this, and the script that wasn’t working, to Supernatural, or other shows you were writing?

Eric: Through failure. I really feel that I learned what to do through process of elimination. I failed every other way until I figured out, “Oh, this actually works. This gets a response.” Everyone has their own process, but for me, what really landed was two things. Everyone says character-driven, but almost nobody means it, and because you have to walk the walk, and what I learned was, the stories were hanging together better when I started with, “Okay, who’s this person, and what do they want? Where do they start, and where do they end?

Then, okay, what are the steps that get them there? Psychologically, why do they feel that way? Then, okay, now, at least for TV, and okay, now what’s the plot that illuminates those beats?” It wasn’t until I landed there that things started to cook. Then, the second one was, which I think is a mistake a lot of young writers make, and you know maybe better than anybody with the stuff you’ve written, but you just have to be so brutal with your internal logic, and you have to be air-fucking-tight.

The Battle of the Sexes script, for example, failed because it was sloppy world-building. I set up rules in the beginning that were not consistent through the end, and you really have to look at it as, does this particular beat, does this particular line, does this particular reference fit in the rules of the world you’ve created? If they do not, you have to get rid of them. I don’t care how good that line, or character, or moment is. It’s a cancer to the credibility of the world you’re trying to create.

John: Let’s pull this back. Battle of the Sexes, for people who haven’t watched the little short film yet, the premise is that, when women go off to the restroom, they’re actually entering into a secret lab where they can do deep forensics on the man that they’re talking with, and figure out whether they should continue the conversation, or pull away from the conversation. It’s incredibly heightened.

It’s incredibly, a Mission Impossible level of stuff happens inside that space. In a sketch, it’s funny that we buy it because, the world expectations are not so high. I can imagine in the course of a feature-length film, or if this was the premise to a TV show, building that up, so the rest of the world actually made sense would be challenging.

Eric: Yes. It might be doomed from the beginning, and the first 20, 25 pages of that script are the best, and then it falls apart. It’s like, this idea of a guy who’s chasing a girl, and the obstacle is this secret network of women that are all in communication with each other to secretly run the world. By the way, not wildly different than Angelina Jolie’s agency in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Not that different, but by the end, it became every woman on the planet, and it was just too big. It should have just been a woman spy, spying for her– It should have been Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

That’s the best version of this idea. In the way that Brad Pitt has Vince Vaughn, and he’s riding around in a dune buggy, and she’s very fastidious and neat. Those are the right energies, but it was contained. I didn’t understand containment, and I didn’t understand the logic exercise, where you have to take everything to its nth degree and say, “If that exists, then that means this, this, this, and this, and is that okay for your story?”

Obviously, every woman involved in a conspiracy, [chuckles] raises way too many problems. The entire thing, look, I was 25 when I wrote it, but everything just melted by the end of that. Everyone who read it was like, “It really started promising, and then it went off the rails, and never went back on.” [chuckles]

John: Just very honest with you.

Eric: [chuckles] Yes.

John: Talking about the steps of learning between that, and something like a Supernatural, were you staffed on other TV shows, were you getting other deals to do stuff, what was happening?

Eric: I mostly blew my moment of getting any sort of feature directing going. Then, I took a couple open writing assignments for comedies, because I thought I was going to be a comedy filmmaker. They were all horrible scripts. They never got made, and I was banging around for three years, just being one of those guys who never gets anything made, and just that Twilight Zone.

I read one of the scripts, and it’s like, you can see someone’s struggling to learn something, but it’s terrible. They were terrible. It turns out, I wanted to be a comedy writer, but turns out I sucked at it, plus, the tyranny of multiple jokes per page, just was something that I just couldn’t do. I just was really bad at– The people that are good at it, are so good and every other line is a killer. I couldn’t do that. I needed more build up. I just didn’t have that muscle.

Then, my agent was like, “Why don’t you take a TV meeting?” This was 2002. TV then is not what TV is now. TV then, my film school friends were like, “Oh, you’re going to go do TV. Good luck, good luck. I always saw you as a TV person,” and I’m like, “Fuck you.”
[laughter]

That was the vibe. I went to take a TV meeting. They liked Battle of the Sexes. Here’s something that’ll also tell you how different the time was. I was a 27-year-old kid. I walked into that meeting based on Battle of the Sexes alone, they offered me the Wonder Woman series-

John: Oh, my.

Eric: -and I passed.

John: Incredible.

Eric: I said, “Yes, Wonder Woman’s not really my thing. No, pass.” Just shows you how different IP was then, but then they said, “Would you be interested in writing a pilot?” I tried, and I wrote a pilot, and it didn’t go anywhere, but they liked it. Then, my break was, they were trying– Smallville was a big deal on the WB.

John: Friends of mine who’ve been on the show, Al and Miles, they created Smallville. They were also out of USC, and I felt like, “Oh, is it sad that you’re doing TV?” No, it was a giant hit.

Eric: Exactly. Anyway, but at the time, and this show was– The story I’m about to tell is about a huge failure, is they were trying to recreate it with Tarzan, and they couldn’t break Tarzan. They couldn’t figure it out. They had big writers, and it’s a big title. I said, “Let me take a crack at it.” I had the winning pitch, and then I wrote a script and they loved the script. Then, I have David Nutter shooting my pilot, all of this–[crosstalk]

John: David Nutter is a giant TV director. He’s who you want to do your pilot.

Eric: The winningest pilot director in TV history in terms of more pilots picked up, and such a lovely guy. He makes the show, the show’s good. They pick it up to series, and suddenly, they partnered me with somebody, but suddenly, I’m a co-showrunner of a TV show at 28-years-old, having never stepped into a writers’ room before.

John: Eric Kripke, I was in the same situation as a 28-year-old creator of a TV show for the WB Network, and I had a nervous breakdown. I completely melted down. I’m seeing here your show lasted eight episodes, mine last was six.

Eric: Wait, what was your show?

John: I did the show D.C. I was partnering up with Dick Wolf.

Eric: Oh, right. Yes, young people in D.C. and making it happen. I totally remember that.

John: Yes. It was a post-Felicity show. It was a good premise. It sold well, and I was excited to be doing it, and I just was completely out of my depth in the process. Were you partnered up with somebody who actually knew what they were doing? What was that situation?

Eric: Yes. This writer named P.K. Simonds who had ran Party of Five. We’re still friends to this day. He’s such a lovely, lovely dude. I was partnered with him. He encouraged me to try to make it creatively my own. He wasn’t interested in taking it over. He wanted me to realize whatever my vision was. I proceeded to make so many mistakes, every mistake. I worked with, and I’m sure you did too. I worked with John Levesque. Did you work with John?

John: The whole thing is a blur to me. Literally, I can picture myself serving as third person going through a situation that I wasn’t actually present for.

Eric: [chuckles] He was this infamously hard executive at the WB. To just give you one quick example of him. You’re just a kid and they don’t teach you politics. He calls me on day one, or he takes me to lunch on day one of the job, and he’s like, “Look, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to slip me outlines and scripts before you show them to the studio. I’m going to give you the notes. You’re going to revise them, and then you’re going to show it to the studio, who’s then going to show it to me, and I’m going to pretend to love it. That’s how this is going to fucking go. Do you understand me?” I was like, “Yes, sir?”

I was immediately immersed in espionage, and slipping scripts. Then, Laura Ziskin, who was the producer of it, found out, and she was angry at me, but I didn’t understand. It was just a disaster. By the way, Tarzan shouldn’t be a TV show. [chuckles] It was doomed from the start.

John: I want to time travel back to you and tell you that, because also I did the Tarzan movie for Warners.

Eric: Oh, my.

John: It’s a very difficult character to center a story around in a feature, but as a TV show, dear Lord, you have a central character who we want to see shirtless, but can’t be shirtless all the time, obviously. Someone who’s by definition, low verbal, which makes things really challenging. It’s just–

Eric: It’s a mess. What I got handed was, “We want Tarzan in New York. You have to make Tarzan in New York work. Okay?”

John: It’s a jungle out there.

Eric: Right. [chuckles] Exactly. I think that was literally the tagline.

John: I’m sure it was, yes.

Eric: My take was, make the show about Jane. She’s a cop and whatever, but I’m like, “There’s a character you can relate to.” It’s like, Beauty and the Beast. It’s like, this guy comes in then he saves her–

John: Sleepy Hollow is a similar dynamic.

Eric: Then, we cast Travis Fimmel, who went on to be pretty big in Vikings. It was just nothing, but raw charisma. We cast him as Tarzan. He was a Calvin Klein model at the time, it was his first job. He’s just got that thing, and so all the dials went to the right whenever he showed up on screen, the testing dials. So all the executives were like, “He’s the show.” I’m like, “No, he’s a monkey. There’s nothing. He doesn’t know– Maybe he gets a job. How about one episode where he gets a job?”

I’m like, “He doesn’t know what currency is. There’s just nothing you can do, except that he loves this girl, and he wants to protect her.” Anyway, it was a disaster.

John: It was a mess. Let’s fast forward up to Supernatural, which was not a mess, which was a tremendous success. Tell us about the process of figuring out how to do Supernatural, not just what the premise was, but it feels like you approached that show with an idea of what that was going to be week-to-week in a very smart way.

It wasn’t just like, “Here’s the pilot, then we’ll see what happens.” You very much knew this is how the show wants to tell itself week-after-week. This is a central relationship. This is the kind of thing that happens in an episode. Was that clear from the very first pitch?

Eric: No. Here’s what was clear, which was one of the many lessons I walked out of Tarzan from, was, if you’re going to make a network show, and do 22 of them, spend most of your time thinking about the engine, and what’s going to give you story every week that you can always go back to that well if you need to. I happen to have been obsessed with Urban Legend. I still am.

I like to collect them, and study them and did in college. For me, the engine was, “Okay, characters are investigating urban legends that all turn out to be real.” That was the premise. I pitched a journalist. I pitched a bad rip-off of Kolchak, where he worked for a tabloid, and he was investigating. I had a whole pitch, and Warner Brothers, I pitched it to them, Susan Rovner. She said, “I really liked the urban legend idea, but the reporter thing’s really boring. What else have you got?”

John: Yes.

Eric: I had written in my notebook, literally the day before, only two lines. I wrote, “One way you could do this story would be Route 66.” I said, “Well, I have a whole other version of this idea.” I’m like, “It’s Route 66 and it’s these two guys, and they’re in a cool car, and they’re driving around the country.” Then, on the spot said, “They’re brothers.” I don’t– Still don’t know why. Where it came from.

She started leaning forward. She’s like, “Ooh, a sibling relationship, and a show about family. Oh, I’m really interested.” I’m like, “Great. I have all those notes at home. Give me a week to just go home and get them. Then, I’ll come back.” I went back and I furiously wrote what ultimately became the pilot pitch of Supernatural. The way I really– It’s funny. It’s like, thank God for those urban legends, because that’s how I learned structure.

They’re such tight little jokes, really. To take these two characters, and put them into those stories, provided a structure that I really learned a lot about. A beginning, a middle, a twist, and an end, because I always had that to go back to. I very much learned how to write on the fly.

John: Can we talk about Supernatural? Because it was a classic broadcast WB Network show with commercial breaks. I’m assuming that, as you’re writing the pilot, at every given episode, you’re really writing towards those act breaks. Those are the key moments of reversal that you’re hanging your story on those points, and then figuring out how to get to those points in between.

That probably starts in the blue sky of the episode. Then, those are the moments you’re listing on the whiteboard. Is that a five-act show? Is it a six-act show? I don’t know what it was at that point.

Eric: We started at four plus a teaser, and then they added another commercial break. Then, after season two or three, it was five plus a teaser. Six acts, yes. In a 45-page script.

John: Yes, so it’s really, you’re racing between those moments. Once you accept that, and you can build off that, and crucially, once you have a show that can actually fit that structure, it’s liberating. It’s got to go be just so nice.

Eric: I loved it, and I have to tell you, I miss it in this new streaming, freeform thing. The discipline of having something awesome happen every eight pages, is a really smart discipline. It’s very, I think, instructive because you just– To this day, I live in absolute terror of being boring, because I hate the idea of going more than 10 minutes in anything without someone saying, “Oh shit, that’s crazy,” because I had to do that, because I needed you to come back after the deodorant commercial.

Having too much structure was really great training ground, that then you can pull back a little bit. I’d say for The Boys now, we write three-act structure, but we are still really interested in structure. Structure saved my life. It’s how I learned to do this. Once you realized, “Oh, this is all just math.” It’s all plant, pay off, three or four character beats, set up, twist, action, wrap up.

Once you realize it’s all just beats that then you just blend together, and then hide under dialogue, and action, and emotion, and sex, and love, but the mechanics of it, the erector set, infrastructure of it is really predictable. That saved my life, because I was like, “Oh, okay.” To this day, I care more about structure than anything, because I think it’s like a life preserver for me.

The people who write independent shit, that they’re just like, “Oh, no, I hate structure. I just want– It’s a day in New York.” That terrifies me. I don’t know how to do that. I only know how to do, here are the four beats, and here’s how we’re going to get from A to B.

John: Structure classically being, when things happen. This is, as you’re moving through forward in time, these are the things we’re going to encounter. The structure of television also necessarily implies a structure of where things are going to happen. Supernatural is a road show, but they happen to be just driving around the same places all the time. It’s convenient that way.

With The Boys, it’s been interesting to notice season-by-season, figuring out like, “Oh, what are your standing sets? What are the places we’re going to come back to?” Because for financial reasons, but also for narrative reasons, we need to have home bases from which people can move out. There’s this last season, or maybe the season before, we have this office building with windows all around it, that it’s like, that’s a central set.

We know we’re going to come back to this place. It’s a home base for the production, but also for the viewer to say like, “Okay, I understand where we’re at. We’ve come back around, and these things have changed since the last time we were in this space.”

Eric: Yes. No, The Boys is actually the first show that I’ve ever done that isn’t some version of a roadshow. Standing sets were actually pretty new to me, and they’re very useful. Look, I have to say, I find them more useful logistically, budgetarily as a producer, than I find them necessarily narratively useful. Just today, we’re trying to bring down a budget of one of our episodes, and we’re like, “Well, let’s move these three scenes onto our home sets, and then we don’t have to drive out, or build them or whatever.” To me, that’s the value of home sets.

I don’t find myself watching something, and wishing that character went to that home set. I’d rather they didn’t. I like the variety life, that cinematic thing where everything is different and beautiful, and there’s a variety, is my own personal taste. You do need them, and they have saved my ass on numerous occasions.

John: You’ve mentioned that Boys, you think of it as being three acts, four acts. As you’re breaking an episode, what is the process? How many people do you have in the room? You probably started the season with a sketch of an idea of where things were headed. That came down into, these are the episodes. When you’re actually focusing on an episode, how many beats are you looking for? When do you have enough and not too much for an episode, and that someone can go off and start working on script?

Eric: We start– There’s about seven of us, seven plus me. Everybody gets an episode. We spend about a month at the top of the year talking about season-wide mythology, and where we want the characters to go, whatever. Then, when we start actually breaking the episode, we usually know, or at least are aiming for, here’s where we have to build to this character moment, or this plot turn, or this step in the mythology.

We have that guide to start with. Then, we spend, it takes about, for us, three, three and a half weeks to break an episode. We probably spend two of those weeks just talking through character psychology. What’s the character thinking? Where do we want them to grow in this episode? What’s the thing they want most in the world? What’s the thing they’re afraid of most in the world? How do we make the thing they’re most afraid of, stand in the way of the thing that they want?

How does that relate to their childhood, whether it’s on camera or not? We’re just talking, talking, talking trying to dig as deep as we can into the psychology. Eventually, it coalesces around, I’d say per character, like three or four beats. They start here, they grow here, this throws something in their path, and then they end up there.

John: As this is within an episode, each character will have three or four beats. That’s assuming all characters are in all episodes. There may be, obviously, places where people are off, but you’re also going to need to find ways, like people are just not in their own scenes, they’re in scenes with other people. You want to make sure that the scenes they’re in with other people are progressing both of their storylines.

Eric: Right. One thing I learned as the show went on, because we have 14 main characters, right? Though we spend our time thinking emotionally about those characters, I learned very quickly that you need to double and triple people up into the same story, because there’s just not enough– You can’t have 14 separate stories in a one-hour show, and already we have too many storylines.

The biggest challenge of The Boys is there’s too many stories. It’s like Game of Thrones in a way, where sometimes you want to just sit with a story longer than you can, but you have all of these other stories to service to keep the machine going.

John: With this new season, at the end of last season, it’s pretty common now to burn down everything at the end of a season, so that you can come back to the new season and start things over. You did a very big burn down of everything at the end of this last season, and including our expectations about what is supposed to be happening. In that first episode of the new season, which I’ve not seen yet, as we’re recording this, how much are you thinking about getting the audience back up to speed? Are you expecting them to just start in the middle, and figure out what’s happening behind it? Those blue sky discussions must be a really important part of thinking about your season.

Eric: Mileage varies and taste varies. I prefer throwing people into the middle of it, and then slowly revealing the information that got them there. We like to play, we’ve done it a couple seasons now, where we almost play a game of, how do we reintroduce the character in the craziest place, or the most unexpected place we can put them, and then explain how they ended up there. In season 3, like Hughie is in a suit, and he’s Butcher’s boss.

John: That’s right.

Eric: You’re just like, “What? Wait. I don’t understand.” Then you realize, “Oh, he’s working with Victoria Newman, and he’s the head of this– He’s one of the co-heads of this agency.” You tease it out, so that by the end of the episode, they understand everything, but that you don’t front load the exposition. If anything, you back load it. I think that’s more fun. That’s what we try to do for the– That’s how season 5 opens.

Look, it was really helpful that I had pre-negotiated with Sony and Amazon that they were going to allow me to end the show on my terms, and that the fifth season was going to be the final season, because that allows you to blow the doors off it, like you said, in the season 4 climax, because you know you’re not holding on any chips anymore. You can go all in. That freedom allowed me to do the size of the finale that we were able to do that I don’t think I could have done otherwise.

John: Also, you don’t have to hold back any beats for characters that you were like, at some point, we would want to talk about this aspect of Hughie, we want to do this thing. At some point, Jim and Pam from The Office, you want to see them get married, but when are you going to do that? It is very liberating to know the end of a thing.

Eric: Beyond just the simple ones of, you can kill people off, which is fun, but you can also have them have conflict that is irreparable, because you don’t have to worry about bringing them back next season. You don’t have to say, “Well, that’s character assassination, you guys. We still have to live with that character.” You don’t have to do any of that. It’s very freeing.

It’s also super intimidating, because you can count on one hand the amount of truly great series finales. The landscape is just littered with corpses of shows that did not stick the landing. That’s a really intimidating– This is the first time I’ve been able to end a show. This is my first stab at it. I’m appropriately terrified of, are we sticking the landing? What do we need to do? Is it happening? Is it emotionally satisfying? Is it unexpected? I lose a lot of sleep over trying to land this plane.

John: I’m not asking for any spoilers, but looking back to your decision process about the season, did that mean you really came into the room thinking about, “Hey, what are the questions we want the series to answer? What are the payoffs that, we as creators, and as an audience are hoping to find in that, and then working towards that?” Is it just, you really are reverse engineering a bit?

Eric: Yes, that’s exactly right. Again, structure is so important to me, and I’m a little OCD, and I just hate the idea of moving forward into a horizon that I don’t know, or understand. I want to know where I’m going. In the beginning of the season, we talked about– The way I phrased it was like, “Okay, let’s say all the action is over, and now it’s like the 10 pages of wrap up, set to like the slow part of Laila. What do we want to see? Who’s alive, who’s dead, the ones who are alive, what are they doing? Where do we want everyone to end up? We figured that out. We figured out that final montage is one of the very early things. Then, it was like, “Okay, so how do we get there?”

John: What are your favorite series endings? What shows do you feel like actually really stuck the landing?

Eric: Breaking Bad is an annoyingly good ending.

John: Absolute monster that Vince Gilligan, yes.

Eric: He’s so annoying, like he’s delivered two different shows that have never had a bad episode, and both stuck the landing, and it’s annoying how good he is. Those are the two that really come to mind, Saul and Breaking Bad.

John: Your description of the resolution, and the song playing over it makes me think of Six Feet Under and which just–

Eric: Yes, that’s a great one. Yes, really good. One of the best actually.

John: Absolutely. Where it’s just thematically like, “Oh, we’re all going to die. This has been a show about death. We’re all going to die. Let’s look at how these characters die.”

Eric: Yes. No, for sure. Six Feet Under is a great one. Again, there’s not many. [chuckles] I can’t think of that many.

John: Yes, and it shows that we absolutely loved, where you look at the last episodes like, “Yeah, okay.”

Eric: Yeah, okay. You’re sending people out into the parking lot with a bad taste in their mouth.

John: Yes, exactly.

Eric: It colors all the good work you did before it.

John: Yes, people’s frustration with both the ending of Lost, and the ending of Game of Thrones. It is weird how it retroactively makes people like decide they didn’t like the series. It’s like, “No, I can show you evidence that you’ve loved this show.”

Eric: When you think of the unbelievable undertaking to make those shows, how hard those showrunners worked, and the pages and pages of just top tier quality, and because they didn’t stick the landing, everyone’s like, “Yes, I don’t know about Lost.” You’re like, “Oh my God, that show changed television.” Poor Damon Lindelof who has to write essays about defending the ending. You’re like, “Dude, you made one of the great shows.” Anyway, I’m really nervous.

John: Here’s hoping you won’t have to write essays defending the ending and The Boys.

Eric: Oh my God. Cut to my Hollywood Reporter op-ed piece of why The Boys made sense.

John: Yes. Let’s get to some listener questions. Drew, help us out. We have one here from Scott.

Drew Marquardt: Scott writes, while a bottle episode is always locked to a particular location, is there a term for an episode that exclusively follows a particular character? Recent examples include the Severance episode that only featured Cobel and Salt’s Neck, or The Bear that was just all a Tina backstory. I can’t think of a phrase I’ve ever heard used to describe this. Is there one you can think of, or suggest?

John: Eric, I was a little stumped for a term here too. It feels like a thing you actually just maybe describe, because we know what that is, but I haven’t heard a common industry term for that.

Eric: No, I haven’t either. Funny enough, I’ve heard it about two people, a two-hander.

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: Obviously, I’ve heard bottle episode. The closest term I can think of that we actively use is, it’s a change-up, because it’s more about what’s your structural change-up from what normal structure of the episode is. We’re doing not particularly that, but we’re doing a change-up this season, where we just blow out our old structure, and do a totally new one. Change-up, I guess. We did them a lot on Supernatural.

John: Yes, a change-up makes sense. Side quest is also a thing. Just that sense of like, you’re taking one character outside of the main story space, and letting them do a whole separate thing. There’s a series I’m pitching that, where one of the episodes definitely does do that, and actually tracks a bunch of things we’ve seen, but from a completely new perspective, and point of view. It’s almost a convention at this point, but I have not heard one common.

Eric: No.

John: Especially with that.

Eric: Whoever wrote that should pick the phrase.

John: Pick the phrase.

Eric: Make it happen. They can give birth to it.

John: All right, we got a question here from Ethan.

Drew: Ethan writes, I’m working on a live action script that pulls a lot from the visual language of comic books. I’m trying to do this in a nuanced way, not like Scott Pilgrim or Spider-Verse. I’ve cracked the formatting on some visual elements like multiple panels in one shot, but something’s stumping me. How would you write a quick change in color, or background to emphasize an impact? What about silhouette? I’m sure just saying that is the simplest way, but I’m looking to streamline it. I don’t like to break flow, but I want to sell the style.

John: All right, so the images that we’re looking at here, I’m not sure what this is from, but the protagonist here is on a purple background, and then this woman shows up and slaps him, and it’s a yellow background. Then, the slaps are always on a different color background. It’s visually striking. Eric Kripke, you are a person who has adapted a graphic novel series, comic books, into another form. What do you think about this?

Eric: I’m going to say something like annoying and ice watery, which is, they’re different mediums. Comics, because I wrote a comic for Vertigo, and so I really got inside it. Comics, it’s a medium of space, and TV and film is a medium of time. They do not connect one-to-one. I actually think you’re risking something in your story to try to make it to keep the fidelity to the comic too high, because they just don’t have the same rhythms.

I would suggest, don’t focus on any of it. Leave it to the director, and just worry about making the characters nuanced, and complicated, and great, and a tight story that keeps turning.

John: Yes, thinking about The Boys, you’re clearly in a heightened universe. You’re looking at the pilot script for that. We can see that we’re in a heightened universe that feels comic-adjacent, but you’re not trying to emulate the specific styles of what it would look like on the page. There’s none of that stuff. Unlike, Scott Pilgrim, or Spider-Verse where you feel the intrusion of those elements onto the form, we’re not seeing that in your show. We know it’s in a comic space without having the conventions of comics.

Eric: Right. I think, look, I think Scott Pilgrim is one of the very few exceptions with a lot of fidelity to the original material, and it worked. I’d say much more often, they don’t. Damon’s Watchmen was so much more interesting than the movie, because he went his own direction with it. Yes, I would say, it’s about finding what’s unique about your story. The Boys, for instance, what defined a lot of the visual language that Dan Trachtenberg directed the pilot, and said a lot of that language is our gimmick, or our original little bauble was, what if superheroes existed in the real world?

You take this absurd concept, which is these magic flying people, but then how does that really work in the world we’re living in? In that tension, that’s where the show lives. Once we knew that, we knew how to make, someone-ism comes down to earth, and they seem like a God, but then they have to take a shit. It really finding the thing that is your, for lack of a better term, whatever your concept is, letting your visuals flow from that is good, because that’s a– We keep saying, “Well, what can we do that no other show can do?” That always brings us back to presenting something that stems from our concept.

John: Also, this brings us right, all the way back to the challenge you had going from the short film of Battle of the Sexes to a feature film. It’s like the world building didn’t make sense. The world fundamentally didn’t fit together right with those things you were trying to put together. In The Boys, it’s a heightened place, but within the rules of The Boys, things do actually make sense. There’s a consistency, there’s an internal consistency behind the different elements.

Eric: Right. Of course, yes, exactly. I take a lot of pride in maintaining that consistency. I drive my production designer nuts with– The posters in the background, I make him do 12 versions of, because I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t quite fit.” That character wouldn’t have been in that movie at that time. I got really obsessive with it, because it’s just fun. The point is, the rules don’t have to actually be logical, but they do have to be consistent. I think once people can do that, you can feel the internal logic of a piece.

John: A thing that I’ve always wondered about with The Boys, is that why Hughie, or some of the other person doesn’t point out like, “We must be living in a simulation.” There’s no way that these physics could possibly make sense. We have scientists, but then scientists could not possibly explain the things that are actually happening here. This must be a simulation. Is that an idea that ever came up in your thinking, and your development? That Hughie or some other character’s like, “No, this is impossible.”

Eric: No, never did. We always said, the show only has one slippery banana, which is compound V. You buy it, because the fact that it was born out of concentration camp testing. It’s like just this side of believable that you could make something like that, if you had thousands of people you could torture Mengele style. We always say, that’s the only magical thing. People just believe that this chemical can do this thing.

John: Because it’s a central premise. Without that central premise, the whole show doesn’t exist. People are willing to buy it, because you’re asking them to buy one thing versus a bunch of little small things.

Eric: Right, exactly. every time someone pitches me some James Bondian set piece, or some super high-tech, “Oh, he’s flying in on a flying green goblin thing.” I’m like, “Who invented that? Where did that magic come from?” We only get one magical thing, and it’s this vial of blue shit. That’s it.

John: Yes, so if aliens showed up in The Boys, it wouldn’t make sense.

Eric: Wouldn’t make any sense because we get one magic thing.

John: I loved the show, True Blood. One of the frustrations I have with the show is, I did feel like they kept adding layers onto it that didn’t all feel consistent with the premise that we’d had established in the early seasons.

Eric: Yes, but a beautiful metaphor, though, that show, yes.

John: Oh, so, so good. We’ll talk more about blood in the bonus segment. First, let’s go to our one cool thing. My one cool thing for people to check out this week is a video, so this was during the Olympics– Well, the Olympics that were in Paris, during those opening ceremonies along the Seine, which went on really too long for my taste, but there was a moment where there’s the Minions do this little segment, where the Minions are in the Seine, and they’re in a submarine.

I love the Minions, and I was hoping that I could find just that segment, and it was actually as good as I remember, and I’m happy to report, it is just as delightful as I remember. It’s two minutes of the Minions having hijinks in a submarine. I think it’s absolutely delightful. It’s on YouTube, on the official Olympics little channel there. I’m going to put a link in the show notes too. Two minutes of the Minions doing the Olympics. I recommend that.

Eric: One of my good friends and that we went to film school together co-directed the last Minions movie.

John: Oh, fantastic, who’s this?

Eric: Brad Ableson.

John: All right.

Eric: Yes, Minions.

John: The Minions are a fantastic creation, and they are so smartly done. They’re just these little creatures of pure instinct, and I just love them so much.

Eric: Yes. No, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.

John: Eric, what do you have to share with us?

Eric: Two things pop in my head. Can I say both of them?

John: Please. Absolutely.

Eric: One, and they might not be that obscure, so I don’t know, but the last movie I saw that really blew me away was Strange Darling.

John: I’ve recommended Strange Darling. I think it is so fantastic. I’m telling everyone to see it, and was so frustrated that more people are not seeing it, or that it’s not getting the award attention it should get.

Eric: It’s so good.

John: So good.

Eric: Brilliantly directed, but that script is so tight, and it’s such a perfect example of how to reveal information, and when to. I was blown away by it, and I would just recommend the less about that movie, the better.

John: Exactly.

Eric: If you’re listening to this, go on Amazon or whatever and watch Strange Darling.

John: There is blood, and so we’ll say that, if you cannot watch any blood, don’t watch the movie, but it’s just so smart.

Eric: It’s so, so smart. Then, the second one, is it okay if I say a podcast? Because it’s a podcast I’ve been listening to.

John: A hundred percent.

Eric: It’s fairly mainstream, but like The Lonely Island Seth Meyers podcast, where every week they talk about a short film that Lonely Island made during SNL. More than that, it’s a very nitty-gritty take of what it was like behind the scenes at SNL. If you’re a comedy nerd, which I am, they get so granular about how brutal it was, and the chaos that led to these sketches. Anyway, I find it both fascinating, and very funny.

John: Absolutely. It’s always great when you see like, oh, this thing that you love, they love it too, but their experience of it was so different, because they actually had to make it and it was exhausting, and they didn’t know if it was going to be good while they were doing it. They were surprised too.

Eric: I have a question for you actually, because I find that. My mom always used to say, “Cake never tastes as good when you bake it yourself.” I find that’s really true. Do you find, like so many other people like The Boys and Gen V more than me.

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: Because for me, it’s like a painful process, because all I’m thinking about is the mistakes, and what I wish I could have done better. Do you find that on your work?

John: I do some. People love the second Charlie’s Angels movie, and it was such a really painful experience for me, that I have a hard time experiencing the same joy they have for it. The flip side of that is, Big Fish was a largely good experience for me, and I’ve gotten to do the Big Fish musical again and again and again and again. It’s been just so much work in so many years of my life, but I can also get to watch it now, and actually just enjoy it as its own thing. I’ve crossed through that Rubicon of, it being painful too, appreciating that the pain is part of why I love it so much.

Eric: Yes. No, I get that. There’s certain episodes of Supernatural now that I can watch and enjoy, but I needed 10 to 15 years of separation to really enjoy it.

John: I don’t think either one of us is going to go back, and you will watch your Tarzan, or me watch my D.C. show. It’s like, there’s too much pain there. There’s not a lot of joy left in there.

Eric: Yes, I think that’s true.

John: Cool. That is Scriptnotes for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the shownotes with links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes, and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on blood.

Eric Kripke, it’s an absolute pleasure talking with you. Congratulations on The Boys. I’m so excited to see how it ends.

Eric: Oh, thank you, this was so fun.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Eric Kripke, from the pilot episode of The Boys, Hughie is standing there with his girlfriend, she gets run through by a speedster, and blood spatters everywhere. Hughie ends up wearing his girlfriend in blood, and that is the signal to us, like this is going to be an incredibly gory show. Did you know that from day one, from the moment of approaching this adaptation?

Eric: Yes, the gore is a really big part of the comic, and so we wanted to capture that. That was one of the things that I think made the comic unique from other superhero stuff. Again, if by putting superheroes in the real world with real fleshy people, the idea that they would just desecrate the human body over and over and over again, is a probably true fact that, just like the comic separated it from other superhero comics, it separated us from other superhero media.

John: Yes, so in Smallville, you’re not going to see blood, you’re definitely not going to see penises, you’re not going to see boobs.

Eric: Yes, and like what Seth Rogen always says, he’s one of our producers, is, “Shooting lasers from your eyes is not going to make someone shoot back into a door. They’re going to melt in the most horrific way possible.” We wanted to show that in a way that Smallville, or Superman never could.

John: Yes, let’s start with like the actual process of filming some of the goriness of the things, and how often your characters end up covered in blood, and how much they hate you for it? Talk to us about blood on set, and there’s probably a bunch of different ways you’re doing blood.

Eric: Yes, it depends on, there’s multiple departments that all have blood depending on where the blood goes. The three primary departments are makeup, wardrobe, and special effects. To hit them one at a time, wardrobe, they will pre-dress all of the blood all over the clothes. Makeup, if it’s on your face, and you’re playing with the character’s eyes, or whatever, you have to really carefully land all that stuff, so makeup carefully applies it.

In the hair, hair and makeup. Then, special effects is the coolest, most fun one because– For people who don’t necessarily know, there’s a difference between special effects and visual effects. Visual effects are the CG, and the computer, and all the stuff that happens afterwards. Special effects are the things that happen on the day, the explosions, the snow, the rain, the blood.

John: The squibs, yes.

Eric: Squibs, yes. What they’ll do is, use the example of when Hughie’s girlfriend Robin gets run through by A-Train. It’s so fun to do, because the special effects guys literally have like a blood cannon. It’s like a shotgun, and it’s loaded with blood. One thing we learned is, it can’t just be blood. It’s blood and all of these little gummy silicone bits. Someone is off camera pointing it directly in Jack Quaid’s face, and they’re going to pull a trigger, and all of this goo is going to launch at high velocity in his face, and he needs to not blink.

John: Yes.

Eric: God love that guy. He’s amazing at it. It’s like you’re literally– He’s there in front, cameras rolling, special effects guys take over the call. They’re like, “Everybody ready, three, two, one.” Then, someone shoots a shotgun at point blank range into Jack’s face with blood. That’s how we would do that. They also– If a character explodes, which we’ve done a lot of, a lot of times, it’s just CG, and it goes to visual effects, because it’s quicker on the day. Other times, they’ll create like a huge blood bag just loaded with blood, and bits, and organs. Then, they’ll put an explosive in the middle of it, and detonate it. Then, visual effects will replace the person who’s standing there with the explosion.

John: That’s how you get the blood on the environment, and on the other characters who are standing around, which makes sense.

Eric: Yes. The fun fact about blood is, it’s a corn syrup based, which means it’s sugary. Which means it’s insanely sticky and horrible. It attracts bees. My actors are always pissed at me, because it’s awful.

John: Obviously, we’ve been doing corn syrup since the beginning. There’s some reason why it works really well, but it does seem surprising to me that a show like you that uses so much of it, there’s been no innovation. There’s no alternative substance that–

Eric: We’ve never done– No, we stuck to what works. In season 2, we put the guys inside of a whale.

John: I remember that, yes.

Eric: The whale is doused with barrels of corn syrup. There were bees everywhere. They were living inside it. It takes the guys days to shower all of this goo off, but it just– It looks good. It flings in the right way. It feels like what it’s supposed to. Now, you raised an interesting question. It was like, “Does it feel real? Does it feel like the way the audience has been programmed over the last 50 years to think that that’s what blood looks like?” It’s probably that.

One thing they do, because all of it takes time. A lot of times, when you’re seeing the blood puddles on the floor, those are actually plastic decals they’ll lay down on the floor, and they can just peel right off, because you’re looking for anything you can do to save time on the day.

John: Backing up to make sure I’m understanding properly. Blood I see on a character’s face, hair, that’s one department. Anything that’s on their wardrobe, that’s pre-dressed there. You’re not taking a clean shirt and putting stuff on it. It’s a specially made shirt that has something on it. You might have to adjust that over the course of progression of a day, because it’s not going to look the same right when it first happens, and five scenes later.

Eric: Unless you want the moment of the blood hitting it for the first time, at which point someone wears a clean outfit, and someone from special effects has that blood cannon, and are waiting to just douse the character.

John: Has working around so much blood, changed your relationship about physical trauma, and your blood itself? Has there been an impact for you?

Eric: It’s funny, in Supernatural, even though it had much more stringent broadcast standards, it had a pretty solid amount of blood. This show is way over the top. I am so squeamish with the real thing. My wife likes to watch this, like these pimple popper shows-

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: -and these surgery shows. I cannot watch. I cover my eyes. I squeal. I leave. I literally leave the room. I cannot watch the real stuff. But the pretend stuff, I could watch all day. Peter Jackson, early Peter Jackson movies, I find that stuff so fun, because it’s basically like just a different version of Muppets. It’s just puppets. It’s puppets, and ingenuity, and magic. It’s so fun. The real stuff is horrible.

John: Yes. It is interesting how different, the context matters for these things. On your show, which is over the top and cartoony, we come to accept that. Then, if you’re watching a medical show, where they need to cut into somebody like, “Oh my God, that’s so horrifying.” It just feels so different. Where you’re priming the audience for one set of expectations.

Eric: Yes, it’s actually hard, because in our first season, and at least a good chunk of our second season, we still retained the ability to shock, where you could have something happen that would make the audience go, “Oh, shit.” It’s been very hard, because what you don’t want to do is try to keep topping it, and you become this big overinflated piece of bullshit. You want to be really driven about it. It’s hard on our show when you are so extreme to still surprise people.

John: Yes. Well, once you’ve had someone like a miniature person inside when someone’s urethra, it’s sort of– You can’t.

Eric: Yes, it’s hard.

John: You start to stop trying to top yourself there.

Eric: Yes, it’s true.

John: Eric, an absolute pleasure talking with you about blood.

Eric: Hey, thanks, John. That was fun.

Links:

• Eric Kripke on IMDb and Instagram
• The Boys
• Battle of the Sexes short film
• Minions on the Seine!
• Strange Darling
• The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
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John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you approach the second season of the acclaimed TV show you created? It’s a question asked by roughly 1% of our listening audience, and yet the answer is surprisingly relevant to anyone dealing with the pressures of expectation and reality.

Craig: It’s relevant to 66% of the people right now on this podcast.

John: Which is so odd to have you both here. We will also answer listener questions about transitioning from journalism to screenwriting and what to do when you realize that someone else is making something with the same premise.

To help us do all this, we have a very special guest. Tony Gilroy is the writer and director of movies such as Michael Clayton, Duplicity, The Bourne Legacy. He also wrote The Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum, Devil’s Advocate, Rogue One, and, of course, The Cutting Edge with D.B. Sweeney. Most relevant to today’s episode, Tony is also the creator and showrunner of Andor, which starts its second season on April 22nd. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Tony Gilroy.

Tony Gilroy: It is a pleasure to be here. It really is. I’ve been listening, so it’s nice to be someplace where you’ve visited.

Craig: That is startling and disturbing. Well, it’s very flattering. Tony Gilroy, for those of you who follow screenwriting, needs no introduction even though John gave him one. If you’re a casual listener, let me explain. We’ve got one of the all-time great first-ballot hall of famers here with us today.

John: Weirdly, Tony, your name has come up so much recently on the show because after our Moneyball episode with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, she mentioned running into you, which was great. Then a couple of weeks ago, Christina Hodson was on. We were talking through action sequences. We went through a great action sequence of yours from The Bourne Identity, which was so much fun to see and to see how you were doing things on the page, which is different than how Craig or I or other folks would do things on the page. It’s great to have you. You’ve been on our mind, so to have you on our show is just a delight.

Tony: I listened to that episode yesterday to prep for today. I thought she did an amazing– she just covered all of it. It was very well-played. It’s very instructive. That episode was really terrific.

John: Yes, so Craig will never listen to that episode. Craig, Christina was really smart.

Craig: I will. You don’t know that.

Tony: You have a lot to learn. There’s things to learn.

Craig: I think with this recommendation, this might go to the top of my list. Christina is fantastic, plus superb accent. It always helps.

John: It’s just the best. Love it. Love it to death. Tony, we’re here on the occasion of Andor starting its second season. Every listener needs to go back and watch Andor Season 1 immediately. Pause the podcast and go back and watch it. Maybe they’re in their car and they can’t. Could you give us the logline and set us up Andor within the universe of Star Wars for folks who aren’t familiar with what Andor is and why it’s so awesome?

Tony: I’m going to skip the awesome part. The simple setup is it’s the five-year prequel of a character, Cassian Andor, who’s in Rogue One. In Rogue One, he will sacrifice himself at the end in a very heroic, messianic way. This is the five years that leads him into the first scene of Rogue One, which is a slightly odd concept. When we meet him in Rogue One, the character in Rogue One is an all-singing, all-dancing spy warrior. There’s nothing he can’t do.

The concept of the show is to take him from a point five years earlier where he is a cynical, disinterested, self-preservationalist, the kind of guy in his town that people don’t want to see coming down the street, to take him from the lowest possible point, and have him become– In the first season, the first season is really about his stations of the cross on the way to becoming a revolutionary. It’s the revolutionary education of someone from a very outside point of view. We take him, in the first season, just to the point where he will join at the end. This second season is about the next four years as he activates that involvement.

John: Now, that’s centering it on your protagonist, the guy who’s changing, but you don’t limit the POV just to him. There’s other plot lines and things that are being set up, which leads to the bigger question of, what is the show really about? To you, what is the show? What are you actually trying to explore in the course of the show?

Tony: The show, for me, is the opportunity with the largest possible canvas and the largest possible cast and the most resources you can possibly imagine to tell the story of a revolution and to try to tell the story about what happens to a great variety of people and a great variety of social stratus and on both sides of the fence. What happens to ordinary people as revolution just explodes around them and washes over their life?

As people become absorbed into history and the pressures that that places on everyone, to my mind, it’s an all-encompassing opportunity to deal with things I’ve been thinking about my whole life and behavior I’ve been thinking about my whole life and challenges I’ve been thinking about my whole life. I have a chorus. I have a choir, 10 or 15 characters that are really identifiable that we’re carrying through. Cassian Andor, Diego Luna’s character, is this messianic character surfing through the center of that. But as you suggested, it would be a disservice to say that it’s really just about this one guy. It is a broad survey of what happens to people when the shit comes down.

Craig: I’m not going to get into the absolute trap of trying to rate Star Wars stuff because I like my life to the extent that I have one, but I think that Andor does feel apart. It is completely integrated into the story of Star Wars, the history of Star Wars, that narrative, that world, that tone, but it does feel set apart because it’s so– [chuckles] I’m just going to get in trouble. I don’t care. It’s so good. It’s really just of a quality that feels different.

My question. This is really a process/psychology question because I know I’m struggling with this myself right now. You’re about to unleash Season 2 upon the world. There is a Season 3 coming. When you finished Season 1, which was so complete and accomplished, did you think to yourself, “Well, how the fuck am I going to do that again?” How do you face the blank, I don’t even call it the blank page, the blank mind, knowing there is so much work to be done to do another season, another season, another season when you’ve just run a marathon and won it?

Tony: The great crise for us was during the filming of Season 1. Our show was really salvaged as probably other shows were as well by COVID. COVID really saved our show. I started this process either out of ignorance or vainglory or just blithe indifference, whatever. I had no clue whatsoever what I was getting into. I threw together a five-day writers’ room. Things were in process. I won’t go through the whole thing, but I was in London. I was going to be directing three episodes in the spring.

I was prepping them. I was casting them. I was half-assed watching the other scripts come in and going, “Well, I got to go do some other work here.” Had we proceeded on that schedule, it would have been a trade story disaster. It really would have been an epic disaster. COVID came in and everything slowed down and stopped and reset. I reoriented my job on the show. I decided not to direct. I realized where the priorities were.

As we began to crawl back into the process and Disney was one of the first places to start that and Sanne Wohlenberg, who you know well, was so great producer from Chernobyl and we share a lot of things from Chernobyl, but she just was determined. As we started that roll-in, there was time to get our footing and for me to figure out what I needed to be doing and how to make the show potentially what I really hoped it would be. We were on the hook. We had promised that we were going to do five seasons of this show. It was going to be one season per year.

Talk about delusional. It seems so, but that’s what we committed to. We got up in Scotland. Diego and I were up there. This was post-COVID after I went through my quarantine and got back over there and up in Scotland with him. I was just looking into the next black hole as was he because he’s got to marry into Rogue One and it’s 10 years earlier. This is taking 17 years to make the first season. We really knew that we were in trouble.

I literally remember the conversation where we just sat down in the backyard in Pitlochry at this hotel with a scotch and just said, “We’re so fucked. We’re just so totally fucked. What are we going to do?” I don’t want to make this the longest answer ever.

Craig: Go for it.

Tony: The answer was mystically already in front of us. Our show was organized around blocks of three, which is this European system that we– You go for any system. You’re looking for systems that’ll help you-

Craig: Survive.

Tony: – organize things. Yes, survive really, survive really. These blocks of three, a director will do a block of three and three and three and three. We’re doing four blocks of three and that’s what we were doing for the first season. It was like, “Oh, my God. We have four years to cover. Look at this. We have four blocks.” I remember going back to the room and going, “What if I did a year per block? What could I do and would Disney go for that? Would that appeal to them? What would Kathy say? How would we do it?” That was a crucible moment where we really figured out what to do.

John: Tony, can you describe what you mean by blocks? As I watched the first season, it does really feel like this is a movie, this is an arc, and then there’s another one, and there’s another one. Is that what you’re describing?

Tony: A block is three episodes. A director can come in and do three episodes. We do treat them like films. The prep time is probably longer than most films because our demands on the show, which is something we can talk about, are so many extraordinary, extra credit things that you would never think about in any other project. The prep, the building, the editorial team, the whole project is on blocks of these three. In both seasons, it is physically possible for a director to come in and do the very first block and the last block. That would be the only way you’d be able to do the workflow.

John: That’s great. One of the things I really admired about Andor is if we reached a new environment, we’d have a sense like, “Okay, we’re going to be here for a moment.” The prison sequence of the first season is so incredible. I think because you’re doing it as a block, logistically, you’re able to build out these incredible sets and create this space, but also create story elements and create characters who are going to be so important for that sequence.

We also have a sense of, “We will move past them at the end.” It made so much sense. It seems so obvious, but what you’re describing is it wasn’t at all obvious as you were starting the process. You really probably were thinking episode by episode and it wasn’t until you got to this idea of blocks that it became feasible to tell the story the right way.

Tony: No, but Season 1 was built around that system.

John: Okay, great.

Tony: We did build around the blocks. Our very weird writers’ room thing that we did and we can talk about that if you want to. The very weird thing that we did, each writer took a block. Again, you get a chunk. You get a movie. You get these three. Season 1 almost fits that. There’s an anomalous seventh episode, which is an interesting little sidebar. It’s just we weren’t Calvinist about it in the first season. In the second season, because we are jumping a year each time, as writers, it’s a fascinating concept. The idea is we come back, it’s a year later.

Then the idea became refined as I started to sketch it. I’m like, “Oh, my God. You know what I’m going to do? I’m not going to come back and stay a month or dick around and do this thing. We’re going to come back. When we come back, we’re coming back for three days each time.” We just drop the needle on three days and then we drop a year and come back for three days. There’s this abyss of negative space that’s in between. Then my desire, my goal, what we went for is to not have any exposition whatsoever. None of the Chekhovian, “No, John, I haven’t seen you since then.”

[laughter]

Craig: “As you know…”

Tony: None of that. “As you know. As, of course, you remember, when last we spoke,” none of that. What’s the most badass drop we can do and get away with it? This second season adheres very rigorously to the four-movie concept. The show will be released that way as well. They’re going to release them three per week for a month.

Craig: Which I love. It’s amazing that we’re still coming up with new ways to do this.

Tony: I know.

Craig: I’m just thrilled that any movement towards not dumping everything at once to me is a huge victory. I’m curious. This will lead in a little bit to some consideration about your writers’ room and how that works, but showrunning, which is something that you hadn’t been doing. You had been writing movies. You had been writing and directing movies, which is like showrunning a thing.

Showrunning a television show like this, of this size, is somewhat of an elastic job. People do it differently. I myself go crazy. I wonder how you do it. I’m curious how you handle your attention. Where do you hyper-focus? Where do you delegate? How do you keep your hand on the tiller of quality control over the course of this beast because a production like this is an absolute beast?

Tony: Look, you’re absolutely right. I think people are constantly striving for a formula for how to do this. They haven’t even figured out the formula how to make people’s deals on this shit yet, right? Anybody who tells you, “Oh, well, this is how everyone’s doing it,” is lying to you. It is absolutely the Wild West.

I didn’t know what to do. My only experience had been I spent two years on House of Cards as a consultant. I really didn’t go to the room. I went there a couple of times. I was really there as a backup asshole at the end to give notes.

Really, that was my function, to be the final horrible critic of what was there.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Tony: I’d gone to the room and I’d seen it. I certainly had a lot of friends who were doing it. We evolved into– what’s the most graceful way of saying it? We evolved into a system that was a writing system. I never once, for five years straight, have ever, ever, ever stopped writing. I’d never ever, ever had a break, not a single day ever. The writing started in the conception, in the very first conversations with Lucas and Kathy and Disney and everything and tiptoeing into how this might be and what I could get away with and how far we could push it, and should I do this? All that advanced work.

Luke Hull was my next collaborator, the great production designer of Chernobyl, who Sanne Wohlenberg brought over, the great 14-year-old Mozart production designer. I began collaborating with Luke and building Ferrix and building these places and starting to design and getting some sort of handle on what we could afford and what was manageable and what would the scale of the show be.

There’s a writing process with him. I write the first three episodes. I have 100 pages of what I think might be a season. Then I brought in Beau Willimon and my brother Dan. Stephen Schiff was ill in London, so he couldn’t come, but he’d pick up an episode off the notes. Beau and Danny and I go to a room for five days in New York with Luke Hull in presence, with the production designer there who’s already been my co-writer through a whole bunch of stuff in the design sense. The producer is there.

We have lines to Lucasfilm about what we can do and what we can afford. We have this absolutely knock-down, drag-out, accelerated five-day story conference where we beat out the story as crazy as we possibly can and fill in the gaps, all the gaps that I don’t have, and then divvy up who gets the assignments.

Those guys go off and they make drafts. They solve problems. They brought ideas in the room. They make drafts. They do rewrites. We do stuff. They’re always an approximation, right? It’s just such an approximation because those scripts are not going to be done. Well, because of COVID, they’re not going to be shot for 18 months.

Craig: Oh, well, that’s a lovely luxury there.

Tony: Right? There you go. They’re writing and then they go away. Then when COVID happens, all I do nonstop literally every day is write. Our system on the show, I always hear people say, “Oh, well, you have a writer on the set.” Never ever, ever, ever had a writer on the set. Our whole principle is to have the scripts be so prepped, so perfect, have so many meetings and so many design discussions and everything so completely taken care of.

I’ll do the first page turn. I’ll do the first HOD page turn. I’ll run that one. The second one, I’ll scramble. The third one, the final one, is the AD and the director taking over the show. The best version of that is I don’t ever have to say anything. I’ll have a Sunday night phone call with every director before the week’s shooting to go over anything that’s missing or any questions that we have.

Craig: That’s a great idea.

Tony: I want everything so perfect in every moment of tempo and design and everything. Everything’s been tucked away that these people can go to set every day and swing. The TV director thing, that’s a whole other podcast. As a director and as a first final-cut director and as a protective director, the idea of having me or somebody else watch over, I want them to know exactly what they’re supposed to get, what the protein is every day, what we’re going for, but I want them to swing when they go to work.

Our system was developed around that, a very scientific, “Let’s get a perfect set of drawings.” To a level, I would never take a movie. I’ve never taken a movie that far. This is hundreds of people, but so detailed. That’s what we evolved into. It’s a writing system. I wrote from the very first memos to Lucasfilm straight through. We finished November 5th to the final ADR and working with my brother, Johnny, when we’re doing all the final cuts and all the stuff because we get to finish up the show in a way. I don’t finish until the final ADR mix session. I’m writing every single day.

Craig: It sounds like you’re writing through until the point where you have finally finished the scripts. At which point, you now go, and you probably were already doing this anyway, to begin editing because you were now receiving director’s cuts in. Now, you start editing those and you start working on the visual effects. The job never ends, but it sounds like you’ve got a system where the materials that are coming in, it sounds like you’ve got a system where there aren’t too many bad surprises.

Tony: We shot 1,500 pages of script, right? We only lost one scene in the entire thing that we didn’t use for the cut. We only ever re-shot anything, which was the first sequence in the very first episode. Essentially, we re-shot it because we wanted to give the directors the balls to swing away. They were too afraid to swing. It’s like, “Dude, you got to go for it, man. I don’t need coverage. I need a movie here, man.” That’s the only time we ever did it.

Obviously, we had problem-solving complications and all kinds of workarounds because of the strike and different things like that. It is the most maximal, imaginative, immersive thing that I lived in for five years because when I say “writing,” I’m not just talking about the dialogue or the scenes. I’m not just talking about all the memos that I have to write to explain everything that I want or fight for what I need or all those things.

I’m also talking about all the dizzying, really almost hard-to-comprehend amount of design work that has to go into the show. There’s places where I will delegate. Obviously, to the directors. I delegate on the day. Every now and then, the phone would ring at 4:30 in the morning and I’d have to do something, but very, very rarely. Mostly, it’s me getting up at six o’clock in the morning and going through dailies from yesterday and being astonished at how cool these directors are blocking. “Holy shit, look what they did. How did they know how to–“ because they don’t have to worry about the script when they get to the set.

John: Now, Tony, this is your first time doing a second season of a TV show, but all three of us have done sequels. We’ve done movie sequels where we worked on one movie and then we had to come back and do the next one. We have the knowledge of like, we know what the thing is. We can make a plan for the second one. In my experience, you can have a plan for it, but that plan will go awry.

You’re dealing with a bunch of other expectations around it. Because it’s the second time through, expectations are higher and different. What were you able to take from, for example, the Bourne movies from that and bring it to this? Just like, what has been your experience of sequels overall? What are the things that you’ve learned that work well when you’re trying to do the next installment of a franchise versus that’s just not going to be relevant because you’re trying to make a new movie each time?

Tony: I think it’s easier. The first time when I went to do Supremacy, I was shocked that I didn’t have to introduce the character. I was like, “Oh, my God. All the work that you do to have people really understand this person that you’re talking about as quickly and as elegantly as possible, all that’s done.” I think it’s a huge advantage in a way. To the larger question, I think this maybe goes to what you’re saying and maybe the cherry on the top of the previous answer.

I’m no kid. I did a lot of things over the last few decades and a lot of experience of things. I found there were so many days every week where I was using absolutely everything I knew in all aspects of my life. I’m talking about all the ambassadorial things that one does as a showrunner. I’m talking about all of the, “Should I be Ho Chi Minh today or Napoleon?”

[laughter]

Is it time to write that memo? Is it everything from the most molecular scene-writing tweaks to the most maximal decisions about, “Oh, my God. We can’t afford to pay for this entire episode. What are we going to do?” and everything in between? It’s been a decompression process to come off of it, I must say.

Craig: Yes, I go through the same thing. I wonder if you’ve had this existential thought because I have, because you’ve been doing it longer. John and I have been doing it, I think, if anybody is a young person, for a long time.

Tony: I think we’re contemporary.

Craig: We’ve all been doing it for a long time. When you work in features, as you and I and John did for so long, you do get used to a little bit of the, “Well, you work on a thing and it’s maybe a year or if you’re making it two.” This show that you’re making and the show that I’m making will devour, what? A decade, a decade and a half of your life, of your rapidly dwindling life. I wonder, sometimes I turn to my first AD and I say, “When I’m not looking and when I don’t expect it, please hit me in the back of the head with a hammer as hard as you can.”

[laughter]

I don’t know how else to get off of this. Like you said, the dizzying move from molecular to macro at times is exhausting, but I love it. I do feel sometimes a little bit of an ache that there’s something– Well, whatever my Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Whenever your next Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Do you feel that or are you like, “Screw it. This is a beautiful thing”?

Tony: No, I spent the first year even when I was in London pre-COVID, I began to have just the worst buyer’s remorse. Epic every morning, “What have I done? I’ve fucked my life. I shouldn’t have done this.” Now, I’ve committed. All these people are here. This is horrible. When COVID came, I thought like, “You know what? Thank God. That will kill the show. Thank God.” I was very, very unhappy when the phone calls started coming. Then I was like, “Well, I’m not coming back to London to die for this show.” Then they were like, “Well, I’m not going to direct anymore.” It’s two speeds.

Number one, you have your pride of work. That never goes away. I think anybody who gets onto this podcast is probably in that category of obsessive human being. You’re just going to do the best you can all the time, but it was with horrible, horrible doubt. It really wasn’t until we started shooting and stuff started coming in and it started to pull together. My brother Johnny really came in and was really seeing stuff. I was like, “Well, this is going to be good.” My feelings changed as we did the first season. I’m only doing two, though, Craig. It’s five and a half years for me. I did do Rogue, but that was in the past.

Craig: You’re not only doing two. I don’t believe that.

Tony: I’m only doing two. We’re done. No, it’s a closed circle.

Craig: This is it? It’s over?

Tony: Yes, no, it’s a novel. Yes, because we’re taking him to the final scene that walks him into Rogue One.

Craig: In Season 2, yes.

Tony: Yes, literally, we’re walking him and I will say that is–

Craig: You found a way to get out.

[laughter]

Tony: Not only that, I think it let us stay sane. It let Diego and I stay sane and the people involved. It let Disney stay sane because there’s no secret there. The streaming model and economics changed right in the middle of our show, which could have been cataclysmic.

Craig: You’re in a victory lap now then.

Tony: Yes, but knowing the ending, always knowing the ending, made everything much more. It’s a freeing thing. It’s a liberating thing to know where the end of the road is.

Craig: Well, I know where the end of my road is. It’s just way the fuck down.

[laughter]

Tony: Well, I don’t know what to tell you.

Craig: I don’t know what to tell me either.

Tony: No, I’ve been out. I wrote another script over the summer, so I’m trying to get out.

Craig: Screw you, Gilroy. [laughs]

Tony: No, I’m out.

Craig: All right. Well, that’s a good answer and that’s encouraging. I like how happy you look right now. We’re looking at each other on Zoom. You look delighted. Just check in with me about five years from now. I hopefully will have that same, “I did it,” look on my face.

John: Yes, we’re an audio podcast. If we ever released a video episode, you could see Craig, the realization. They’re like, “Oh, Tony Gilroy’s done? That’s a choice I could have made?” You can see it recalculating everything he did.

Tony: I know. He’s shrinking there.

Craig: That was just my rage building up. That’s what that looks like. [laughter]

I love working on the show, but my God, the marathon aspect of it, at times, it’s incredible. Congratulations for making it to the end of the finish line.

John: Is there a way that we could manufacture a COVID?

Craig: Oh God, Jon, what are you saying?

Tony: Dude, I think they did that. They tried that.

John: Craig’s show actually has it built in. Is there a way that we can build in those times and the stuff because that was so crucial for you to be able to make it the first season?

Craig: Yes, I’m curious because you had the benefit of that forced break in Season 1. Now, in Season 2, as you were working on it, there was a forced break, but you couldn’t work during it because it was the Writers Guild strike.

Tony: Yes, but that was a different–

Craig: You were in a different spot.

Tony: The irony of that was that if you had asked me at any point during that year, “What’s going to be the most epic moment of your year,” I would have said, “Without any labor issues on the horizon whatsoever, I could have told you in September.” Oh, my God. Around March or April, I’m going to finish the final rewrite on the final script. That’s my timeline. I’m ahead of the production. I don’t want to minimize the work that Danny and Beau and Tom Bissell and Stephen– they make the rough-housing that we can cast and build and budget and everything.

My work to finish it and to get there and to tweak it all out and to get it off this desk, I was looking, “Oh, my God. Around March, the way I’m going, that’s where I’m going to finish.” I literally finished the final page turn about six days before the strike. It rhymed with that just by accident. The problems with the strike were production problems and it’s a whole different shit. It didn’t help me out.

Craig: It didn’t really help anyone out, I think, other than-

Tony: No, it didn’t help me out.

Craig: -the membership as a whole, which I guess was the point.

Tony: I’ll tell you one thing it did and this is interesting. What it did do is I was not allowed to see the show for six months.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Tony: They kept going. I had only seen one cut of one rough cut of the episode. In September, when the strike was over, my brother John came to New York and brought me all 12 episodes in extremely rough form, but all 12.

John: That’s amazing.

Tony: With temp crap and all the IOUs and temp music and sloppy shitty all over the place but 12. I was extremely nervous. I spent two days and I watched them. I had the experience that one always speaks about in an editing room. On every movie I’ve ever been on, there comes a moment where you go, “God, I’d pay $50,000 if I could see my movie for the first time.”

Craig: Right.

Tony: I got to watch all 12 episodes on a run with the freshest eyes and smart fresh eyes that you could possibly ever have. I generated, I don’t know, 100 pages of notes, but they were notes that were like I had developed a new way of thinking about things in a way where I’m really into the calories that the audience spends on information. I’m really sophisticatedly into that.

Craig: Describe that concept a little bit for us.

Tony: If the audience is worried about any bump in the road over here or if that’s confusing when they come in or something that she said takes my energy away and the audience is missing the protein that I have in the middle of there that I want to be there, I want to smooth that down or get rid of it. I was so much more in tune with that in a way that I never would be holistically before.

I think I generated, I don’t know, hundreds of pages of ADR and all kinds of– it was a superpower to go back to London a week later. I think we had the most exciting two weeks that I’ve almost had on the show, getting back to London after that cut and going– all four cutting rooms, all four directors, and just going like, “Okay. This is what I do here. This is this and this isn’t working. Let’s do this,” and like, man, people, it was so much.

Craig: Those are fun. Those are the fun weeks.

Tony: Yes, and so the strike in that sense maybe had a positive effect. Boy, I wouldn’t want to do it that way again.

[laughter]

Craig: Once is enough.

John: It’s like asking it to be severed. There was two Tonys and like, “No, it’s appealing,” but also, clearly, you see the damage there.

Tony: It was so much heartache for Sanne and the people in production. The work that they did was just heroic and my brother. Not to be repeated, but, again, you’re always trying to make an advantage out of something that’s a crise, right?

John: A crise is a crisis. It’s the second time you used that word.

Tony: Yes, a crisis, yes.

Craig: It’s a French crisis.

Tony: That’s the word I’m going to use. That’s the word you’re going to–

John: In your bonus segment, you’ll get more on a crise.

Craig: Yes, he’s already found the word for his word.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Craig, I’m taking from this. Calories, protein. Twice you mentioned protein, the protein of a scene. Love that. That’s so important because like everything else, lovely, makes things taste better, but the protein is the actual substance that you’re trying to make sure.

Tony: Why are we here? Why are we here?

Craig: We talk about writing sometimes like it’s a little bit like the way magicians practice the art of deception and distraction. If they are looking at the hand you don’t want them looking at, you need to figure out how to get them to not look at the hand you don’t want them looking at. You want them over here. Those little bumps, the tiniest bump is too much of a bump. I love that you talk about that.

Tony: Really, in my later career, I’m vastly more conscious of my relationship with the audience than I ever was before. Not in a pandering way but in a communicative way.

Craig: Yes, I love that.

John: The real trick of the writing that we do is we have to simultaneously know everything that’s going to happen and divorce ourselves of all memory. We have to both be the creator and the audience simultaneously. It’s every word on the page and every frame is that split.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Let’s go to some listener questions. First one here is an audio question. Drew, help us out. You can place this question from Jason in Canada.

Jason: “Back in 2021, I wrote and directed my first short, a ridiculous sci-fi comedy titled, I’m Not a Robot, about a man who, after failing a CAPTCHA test trying to log onto a website, faces an existential crisis when he thinks he might actually be a robot. If the title and premise sound familiar, it’s because Victoria Warmerdam just won the Oscar for Best Short Film for her, I’m Not a Robot.”

“It was funny hearing from friends and colleagues joking that my film was nominated for an Oscar, but this got me thinking how interesting it is that two writers, an ocean apart, came up with and created such similar short films within a few months of each other. Maybe that’s a sign that the idea was in the zeitgeist or that the idea wasn’t that original, but either way, it is cool that another writer felt like an existential crisis triggered by the mundane task of clicking on images of bicycles to prove their humanity was a story worth sharing, and even cooler to see Victoria recognized for her incredible work.”

“As Craig has said before, and apologies for paraphrasing, but it’s less about the idea and more about the execution. Victoria certainly executed at the highest level. With that in mind, I still feel oddly validated. My first no-budget film did not win an Oscar, not even close, and I had nothing to do with Victoria’s Oscar win. At the same time, I wrote something that felt true to me and another writer felt that way too. I was curious if, as writers, you’ve ever experienced something similar where you saw one of your ideas or stories brought to life by another writer. If so, did any interesting similarities or differences stand out? Your friend in the North, Jason.”

Craig: I love our friend in the North. That’s so nice.

Tony: Painful, painful, painful, painful. Yes, many times, many times. It’s the one reason why one should avoid the idea that you’re better off isolating yourself away from entertainment news and staying on top of the industry and keeping your ear to the ground, and if you live in New York or you live in London, you live away, making sure that you have an agent that has their ear to the ground.

I’ve had several, many things shot out from under me when I’ve realized someone else was doing it or there was something that was close. It’s really painful when you go deep. It’s really painful when you go all the way through and find out that you’ve been treading the same territory. You have a remarkably generous attitude about it. I’m hopeful that you’re a complete human being and there are some other painful conversations about it.

Craig: Oh yes, I’m sure.

John: There was a journey of acceptance to get there, I hope.

Craig: Jason can feel pain.

Tony: It sounds a little valium to me.

Craig: Well, I think you’ve probably had the experience a few more times than Jason has. There is something, I think, at least nice to say, “Listen, I’m just starting out. I’m aspiring.” At least the thing that I thought would be interesting conceptually turns out to be interesting conceptually to somebody, which is– It’s funny. This was in the zeitgeist because I remember that Ron Funches, who was a fantastic standup, did a joke about this very thing where he said, “They keep on asking me if I’m a robot and they make me enter a series of numbers and letters,” which seems like the sort of thing a robot would be really good at.

[laughter]

Tony: Oh man, this hurts. This question hurts. PTSD.

Craig: All right. Well, Jason, you’ve triggered Tony Gilroy, so another feather in your cap.

John: For me, that example was this movie, Monsterpocalypse, I wrote for DreamWorks. Tim Burton was attached to direct it. I turned it in and they’re like, “Oh wow, we really love this. Oh wait, there’s a movie called Pacific Rim and it seems like it has a similar premise.” They found that Pacific Rim is like, “Oh Jesus, it’s the same movie.” It really is. It’s just way too close. It was a Dante’s Peak versus Volcano situation where it’s just like they didn’t want to be the second movie. I’m like, “I get it.”

Craig: They did those, though. They did both of those.

John: They did those and it didn’t help.

Craig: They did Bug’s Life and Antz.

John: They did, yes. Sometimes they will do both things and sometimes it works out.

Craig: Sometimes they’re like, “Screw it. Let’s just do it.”

John: They decided not to do mine and it’s like, “Okay.” I wish I were as immediately accepting as Jason was, but it’s tough.

Craig: Jason is just clearly far better balanced than the three of us.

John: Hey, Craig, I do want to hold on to this example for the next time we see a story in the news about like, “Oh, this person stole my script or stole my idea.” Come on. It’s the same title, the same idea.

Craig: You know what? Great point. I love Jason for, A, being an incredibly positive person, which is really cool, but B, not going anywhere near the whole, “They stole my thing.”

Tony, John and I are obsessed with the following concept that if there were justice or, I don’t know, some really good journalistic standards in the entertainment reporting business, you would never hear a story about somebody filing a lawsuit saying someone stole their thing. You would only hear if they won. That meant you would never hear anything because they never win. I’m not saying that people don’t occasionally infringe. I’m sure infringement occurs, but I just love that Jason didn’t go down that path.

Tony: I’ve been ripped off.

Craig: Of course, you’ve been ripped off. You’re really good.

Tony: I’ve been ripped off. I’m not going to get into it, but Danny and I really early in our career got ripped off.

Craig: Did you sue?

Tony: No, we were advised by an agent because we didn’t really have an agent. We were hip-pocketed at that point. They said, “Look, you could do this. You might get over on this and these people might put you to work even, but you guys look like you might be around for a while and this might not be the best thing to do.”

Craig: There you go. “You guys look like you might be around for a while.” I guess, listen, I got ripped off too in the beginning of my career. It happened and it hurt, but then people said to me, “This is not your last at-bat. Just eat this one. Get back out there. You’ll be fine.” It’s not fun. Anyway, I appreciate that Jason didn’t go down that road.

John: Drew, another question here.

Drew Marquardt: This next one comes from Anonymous. “Could being a film critic or film journalist affect your chances of working as a screenwriter? As someone currently looking for work and with a background in journalism, I personally really enjoy writing about film and I feel like it could be a great avenue for me as a young person starting to build a career, but I’m afraid of costing myself future opportunities by being granted a film critic. Perhaps it makes me look bad or someone doesn’t like something I said about their work. Is that a real concern?”

Craig: Stephen Schiff.

Tony: Look, a good script’s a good script. If you’re lucky enough to write one, someone’s going to pick up on it.

Craig: Could not agree more.

Tony: Everything else is a moot point. Nobody gives a shit.

Craig: You could absolutely destroy someone’s mom’s movie. If you write a good script three years later, they’ll buy it.

Tony: They’ll put their mom in it.

Craig: Stephen Schiff was the chief film critic for The Atlantic, I want to say?

Tony: Vanity Fair.

Craig: A really big film critic and then one day said, “I think I’m just going to try doing this,” and has been doing it at a very high level ever since. As much as film critics can make me nuts, I’m on record with that one, no, as long as you’re not a complete jerk. If your persona as a critic is jerk or if you go down the Armond White, “I just like disagreeing with everybody,” maybe then, maybe. I agree with Tony. Write a good script and all is forgiven.

John: I would also say that there’s a difference between being the critic who is reviewing every movie that comes out this week and trashing them or giving the thumbs up and the thumbs down and being the person who writes very smartly about movies and the overall trends in movies or things you notice about who can pull out themes among different directors and different films.

That’s the kind of thing which is elevating the art of film criticism and making us think about film. That’s a different thing than just trashing the new thing each week and saying how bad the most recent Disney adaptation is. That’s not doing you any favors. If people are googling your name to see that kind of stuff, that ain’t going to help you. If you’re writing really smartly about film like Stephen Schiff, that’s fantastic.

Tony: Then wait for your first review.

John: Nothing will help you out more there.

Craig: That’s when you-

Tony: Karma.

Craig: -fucked around and you found out [laughs] because, good Lord, that hurts.

John: I will say there have been some cases where I’ve seen a person who does film criticism who then goes off and makes a movie and it’s just terrible. It’s always fun to see like, “Oh, you know what? Criticizing a thing and actually making a thing are very different skills.”

Craig: Absolutely.

John: I love that. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Today, it’s something that I mentioned on the podcast before in passing, but I wanted to drill down a little bit into it because I use it literally every day now. It’s called Startpage. I don’t know about you, guys. I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google for a long time because the company that says don’t be evil has become evil. The problem is the other search engines just aren’t very good or they’re slow, but Google is giving me the AI slop all the time.

Startpage is a company that’s run out of the Netherlands. They aren’t their own search engine. What they do is they take your search query and they run it through Google or Bing if you prefer. They don’t save your search information and they strip away all the trackers. Google doesn’t know who you are. They don’t save any of your stuff. You get to Google without becoming a product of Google. It’s just as fast, just as good, and no annoying AI slop. The last thing you might want to google with actual Google is Startpage. Install it–

John: It’s actually just startpage.com.

Craig: There you go. Go to startpage.com and it’s been a delight.

John: Craig, I was trying it out because I saw it here in the show notes and I think it looks great. I really agree with it and I want to try to use it. One frustration I have is that in Safari and other browsers, you can set your default search engine. You can just type in the bar to get a thing. Right now, you can’t set startpage.com as the default search engine.

Craig: You can.

John: Okay, so tell me how you’re doing it.

Craig: Well, I’m using Chrome, so that may be the part of it is that I’m not using Safari. In Chrome, I think there is an extension or something that allows that to happen.

John: Okay, but it’s certainly worth considering because I really do think it’s a better way to do stuff. Tony, what do you have for us for One Cool Thing?

Tony: Can I name a podcast without getting in trouble?

Craig: Are you kidding me?

John: 100%, we love it.

Tony: It’s not a competitive one. My salvation for the last year and a half has been, I think, the greatest podcast I’ve ever heard. It’s called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by a guy named Andrew Hickey. There was an article about it in The New Yorker last year. I can’t remember who wrote it. It wasn’t Adam Gopnik. It was somebody else, but it was an appreciation of this. It said, basically, this is the equivalent of one man trying to write the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. He’s only up to 170. He just dropped 177 this morning.

I literally got a new one this morning. I don’t know if he’ll possibly survive to finish it. I cannot recommend this enough. If you’re into music, I was turned onto it. I started listening to ’60s stuff that I was really interested in and British Invasion and different things. I worked through that and then I chipped away at some other things. Finally, I was like, “I’m just going to go back to the very beginning and start at the beginning and go all the way through.” It has been a place of great safety and curiosity.

Craig: Love it.

Tony: That’s my recommend. He always says at the end, “If you like this podcast, please recommend it because word of mouth is the most important communicator.” This is my appreciation of Andrew Hickey. It’s on Patreon, but it’s on Spotify. It’s fantastic.

Craig: Awesome.

John: That’s great. Andrew Hickey did the thing, which we cautioned against, which is you’re starting your premise like, “I’m going to do 500 episodes of this thing,” and then you’ve boxed yourself in there. Maybe he’ll find some block format just to get through that.

Craig: We should have done that because we would have been done years ago, John.

Tony: I’m just going to say one thing, guys. I’m going to tell you one thing. If you ever listen to this, you’ll clearly understand that he has to put a lot more into it than you guys are doing.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s not just two people chatting on microphones.

Craig: What we did put into this, John did 99.3% of.

John: Andrew, yes, it’s that. My one cool thing is like Craig’s. It’s a utility I find super, super helpful. Basically, you’re surfing the internet. You’re buying stuff and there’s a site, an article that you want to hold on to. You want to set a bookmark for it. You could save it in your browser, but then you’re never going to actually find that again. You have to find some place to store that thing.

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been using a service called Pinboard, which is a bookmarking service. You save the link and you put a little tag on it, so if I remember if it’s how it would be a movie or a one cool thing. Pinboard is clearly near the end of its life. It has not been updated for a long time. I knew it’s going to just fall apart at some point. I have 4,000 bookmarks saved someplace.

I was considering rolling my own because I’m a masochist, but then I found a service called Raindrop, which is actually really good. It’s raindrop.io and it’s just a bookmarking service. You click a button. There’s a little browser extension and it saves it. You put a little note for it, put a tag on it. Then you can always just search it and find it, which is really good. What I like about it is it has a native app for iPad and for iPhone.

If you’re looking on your phone, you tap the little share sheet and you just save it to Raindrop and it’s there. If you’re looking for a way to hold onto your bookmarks and organize them in a way that you’ll actually find stuff again, I recommend it.

It’s good and it’s a paid service. You’re paying for this to get the premium stuff. I like paid services because then they’re going to stick around because they have an incentive to stick around. Raindrop.io if you’re looking for a bookmarker.

Craig: It’s an actual business model in tech.

John: Yes, that’s where I think it’s like when you don’t pay for a thing, it tends to break and fall apart because people abandon it.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our show this week is by Spencer Lackey. It’s an homage to The Last of Us, Craig.

Craig: Oh, I got to listen to this one.

John: Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the description, but also in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week and to pay the talented folks who put it together. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on which words we wish existed in English. Tony, Craig, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations to both of you on your new seasons. I’m so excited to watch it.

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

Tony: Really gassed. Really happy to be here. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? We have a question here from Jean-Philippe.

Drew: Jean-Philippe writes, “I’m a Québécois screenwriter and I needed to share how incredibly envious I am of screenwriters who write in English specifically because of two precious golden verbs, “to gasp” and “to scoff.” These beautifully concise words simply have no practical equivalent in French, yet they’re extremely useful in a screenplay as they’re a way to describe elements of nonverbal communication that are very common. What are the words that you find most useful for screenwriting and what thing do you wish there was an English word for? To all the screenwriters who work in English, be grateful for your great language.”

Craig: You don’t hear that from a French speaker too often, I got to go say. Thank you for that, Jean-Philippe.

John: As we’ve talked about on the show before, English does have just a huge vocabulary because of the way it accumulated words from French and then German and all this stuff and all of that smooshed together. We got duplications of things and we are very sound-rich, so it’s very easy for us to import words and make them work. The obvious example is “schadenfreude,” which is such a useful term that we just borrow the German word. We can say it in English because we can say any word in English, which is so useful.

I was at breakfast this morning and I realized, so you’re eating food at a restaurant and you’re enjoying it and then there’s a moment, a tipping point where it’s like, “Get this plate away from me. I don’t want this plate in front of me. I want it to go away.” There feels like there should be a word for that and there’s not a word for that. I want there to be a word for that term. Can you guys think of anything to describe that? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Craig: Oh sure. Sure, yes, it’s like food repulsion.

John: Yes, it’s like a disgust, but it’s a tipping from like, “This is delicious to–”

Tony: Yes, we should have a word for that. You’re absolutely right.

John: I was looking and Spanish has a verb, “empalagar,” which is to become overwhelmed and sickened by something that was enjoyable, but it’s really relating to something that’s too sweet and too-

Craig: Like cloying or–

John: -cloying. Then French has “écoulement,” which is also that disgust or aversion. It’s a little bit more than nausea, but it doesn’t really refer to that, the tipping point.

Craig: Yes, you’re talking about when something flips its polarity from love to hate.

John: Yes.

Craig: The Germans surely have a word for this.

Tony: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance.

Craig: Grossbundance. I like grossbundance.

John: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance, yes. It’s that fork-drop moment where it’s like you just can’t take it anymore. I want that word to exist. If our listeners have good suggestions for it, what are you guys thinking? Are there words you long for in other languages or things you feel like should be encapsulated in a word that just don’t exist in a word?

Tony: I’ve used the word because it gets it done, but I wish there was another word for “gobsmacked.” It’s a good word and it’s effective. Every time you type it, you’re like, “I wish there was something else for gobsmacked.” Total incredulity. I seem to find so many characters in my shows are-

Craig: Gobsmacked.

Tony: -massive quantities of incredulity. I wish there were more words like Eskimo words for snow for the feeling of not being able to believe exactly what’s– and not going, “What the fuck,” either. I’ve done that too.

Craig: Jaw drop?

Tony: Yes, I know.

Craig: Drop jaw. Yes, that’s a tough one.

Tony: They’re all a little mundane.

Craig: That’s absolutely true. It’s funny, the thing that I yearn for the most isn’t actually a different word. It’s a different punctuation mark. There has to be something between a period and an exclamation point because, to quote our friend Christopher McQuarrie, every time you put an exclamation point in a script, you’ve failed.

[laughter]

Craig: I know. Tony’s like, “That’s every fucking page.” We rarely want someone yelling. I’m actually curious. This is a side note because, Tony, you wrote The Devil’s Advocate, which I’m obsessed with. There are sections where Al Pacino fully yells paragraphs. I’m curious if those were exclamation-pointed or if he just took off on his own. He might have taken off on his own there. [chuckles]

Tony: Yes, I think it was a collaborative. Those were all done. They were all written for Al and rehearsed at the apartment. There were 20 other ones that we didn’t do. I think it was an era of exclamation points.

Craig: I wish there were something that said emphasis, but it wasn’t more than a period, which feels like just meh, but not quite an exclamation point.

Tony: You know what I don’t like, though? I don’t like when they take a transcript of your interview and then they add exclamation points where you never meant it to be.

John: Oh, God.

Tony: You’re like, “I’m not a–” Really? Did I sound like that?

John: You did not.

Tony: No.

Craig: No, none of us sound like exclamation-pointy people.

Tony: What? How did you decide to put that there?

Craig: Well, here’s a word that I wish I had and maybe there is a good German word for this. We always look to the Germans for these words. That is a simple thing to put in parentheses that says, basically, the thing that I’m about to say now, I believe the opposite of. Now, you could say “lying,” but lying doesn’t give you the full picture of, “Did you kill her?” “Absolutely not.” Lying is not enough. Full denial, complete lying, but then you’re giving it away. There’s no evocative nature for framing something as a particularly good lie because I love when characters lie.

John: That’s great. I think what we’re distinguishing in between is there’s the words that would be so helpful to have in scene description or in parenthetical versus seeing the words people are actually going to hear in dialogue. Those could be different things. In dialogue, through performance and through shading, we can get the meaning across. Sometimes you just really desperately want that thing that encapsulates the idea so clearly and it’s hard to find.

I was googling around to see what other words people were longing for. I found two words that got mentioned a lot. First is “toska” in Russian, which is a soul-deep ache, a vague, restless yearning that can’t be named or satisfied. Nabokov said, “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska.” I get that. You know what that’s like, but maybe you don’t really know what that’s like unless you’re Russian.

Craig: Russians really do know what that’s like. They’re born with that.

Tony: Duende is like that. Duende, the Spanish word “duende.” A lot of people wrote about duende. I think Hemingway wrote about the lack of duende. The word that you’re just describing, the words that take on a whole– because people have tried to think, they bring their own luggage with them. They bring this extra sparkle. Maybe we should leave them as they are and use them. I’ve used duende.

Craig: Why not? We took “ennui,” which is the bored version of duende. Let’s take it.

John: Yes, absolutely. We took schadenfreude. The other word that was brought up, which I thought was great, is “cafuné.” It’s a Brazilian-Portuguese word for the act of running your fingers through someone’s hair out of love. It’s not the verb. It’s the noun version of it. It’s like, “Yes, that’s really nice.” In English, we can convey that with a lot of words to actually do that. It’s not just running the fingers through someone’s hair. It’s specifically why you’re doing that and it’s a good image. It’s a powerful word.

Craig: John, you and I love it when our spouses run their hands through our hair.

John: Absolutely. Our baldpates, yes.

Craig: It’s sort of shyness.

Tony: I wasn’t going there.

Craig: You buff us a little bit. [laughs]

Tony: I was not going there.

Craig: Listen, Tony, you’ve got a lovely head of hair. We’d like to congratulate you on that.

Tony: Yes, I know. I wasn’t going there.

[laughter]

John: All right. Referencing back to Jean-Philippe’s question, I think we agree that, yes, English does have an abundance of words, but we could always use a few more. If people have good suggestions for the words that we’re lacking, email us. Let us know and we’ll put those in follow-up.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Tony, thank you for sticking around and talking through some words that we wish existed. A pleasure.

Tony: It’s a gas to be in the tribal community. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Tony Gilroy
• Here’s a recap of Andor Season 1!
• Andor Season 2: Trailer 1 | Trailer 2 | Special Look
• Episode 680 – Writing Action Set Pieces with Christina Hodson
• I’m Not a Robot short by Victoria Warmerdam
• I’m Not a Robot short by Jason Speir
• Stephen Schiff
• Startpage
• A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
• Raindrop
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.