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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: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 681 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do you do when the answer isn’t yes or no, but an extended and interminable maybe? We’ll discuss strategies for coping and navigating periods of frustrating ambiguity as you’re trying to push projects forward.

Then it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how to know when a movie or TV show has had reshoots or significant re-tinkering. Craig and I will spill the secrets that will help us notice that things have changed there.

Craig: Let’s ruin it for everyone.

John: Absolutely. That’s why I put it in the bonus segment. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you can just skip the bonus segment.

Craig: We’re going to spoil everything.

John: The tricks, the tips, the everything. First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Sure. Elizabeth writes, “Can you please ask Craig to stop joking that nobody in Post reads the script, supervisor’s notes? My notes are nearly always utilized by the editor and Post team, and the role of script supervisor has been dismissed, disrespected, and marginalized for far too long by directors and producers.”

Craig: Okay, Elizabeth, this feels like manufactured outrage. I’m literally expressing an opinion in support of script supervisors and the way that their work is overlooked, and your reaction is to say, “Stop dismissing us.” Here’s the reality. You’re not in the editing rooms. I am. I’m telling you, after 30 years, it is extraordinarily rare for the editors or the Post team to refer to the notes. Take my word for it. It’s extraordinarily rare. If you’re frustrated by that, imagine how frustrated I am about that.

I’m not saying it never happens. Clearly, you had a nice experience where it happened at some point, but Elizabeth, hear me out. I’m on your side. That’s why I’m saying this. I want editors, especially up-and-coming editors who listen to our show, to read the effing notes.

John: Yes. You have sung the praises of the script supervisor on The Last of Us so many times.

Craig: So many times.

John: Apparently, it’s fantastic, which is great.

Craig: Chris Roofs.

John: Great. I will say that even if those notes are not being used for the editorial process, I suspect there have been times where you needed to refer back to those notes because you’re doing inserts, pickup shots, you’re reshooting some things, you need to figure out like, what was it that we were doing here?

Craig: That’s a separate thing. In the crazy list of things that the script supervisor is responsible for, it’s the Swiss army knife of crew members. Keeping track of inserts that we owe is one of them. That is a separate list that is generated and shared with the post-production supervisor and the producer and the editors so that everybody’s on top of that. The ADs, most importantly, to make sure that they’re scheduled.

John: More follow-up. This one is from AI Guinea Pig.

Craig: Is this a real person or an AI guinea pig? This is a real person, okay.

John: This is a real person. Drew, it’s a long story, but I think it’s an interesting story because it feels like, oh, this is the bellwether of things that could come.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Drew: “In 2023, I had a script make the annual blacklist. The script led to the proverbial water bottle tour and eventually an option offer. The offer came from a producer with many produced credits on movies and shows over the last two decades. As my reps and I asked around, we also learned that he had a good reputation, both as a person and as someone with a knack for getting things done. What’s more, his pitch was compelling. He claimed to have access to financing, didn’t hurt that there was money on the table with the option agreement. I was going to become a paid screenwriter.

My lawyer negotiated the option agreement. I signed it. The check cleared and we were off. The producer and I had our kickoff call, and this is how he opened. ‘So, how much have you played around with AI?’

The producer, as it turns out, was intending to launch a new AI studio with my script as one of the headliners of its slate. After no mention of AI during our initial conversations or negotiations, I was now being told my project was going to be made using generative AI. What’s more, I came to realize that the producer’s so-called access to financing was not access to financing for traditional film production. It was for this technology specifically.

I tried to give the producer the benefit of the doubt. I expressed my many ethical and creative concerns around AI production. I asked if there was still a possibility of traditional production with a real live cast and a real live crew. The producer paid lip service to this idea, but once the announcement of the AI studio went public, it was clear to me that it was only ever that. I quickly got on the phone with my reps and my lawyer and asked out of the option agreement. I would gladly send the money back if it meant keeping my script and my soul intact. Surprisingly, the producer did not push back. It’s probably not a coincidence that the other movies in the announcement slate are all from unproduced screenwriters.

What’s the lesson? We now live in a world where we can’t take traditional paths to production for granted. We need to ask a prospective partner’s feelings about AI and even bar it contractually if we can. Yes, this producer kept their intentions hidden, but there was also nothing in their filmography or reputation that gave soulless AI tech bro vibes. Next time, I will definitely be asking.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Wow. A whole journey there. Usually, people are writing in for advice. In this case, the person is giving advice, but I thought it was good to keep all the context in there because this is a real thing that writers will be facing. You and I may not face it directly, but I think a lot of our listeners could be encountering this where, in a general case, you enter into an agreement thinking that you’re making one kind of movie, like a live-action movie with actors, but you find out, oh, it’s animation or it’s generative AI where there’s no people behind it.

Craig: I’m guessing this wasn’t a WGA agreement.

John: There’s nothing prohibiting that, no.

Craig: Oh, it’s just that it prohibits AI as literary material for the purposes of credit. The good news here is this was an option. Therefore, copyright had not yet been transferred, sold. There was no work-for-hire agreement in place. You didn’t even have to give the money back. You could just let the option lapse.

John: The producer could have exercised the option and he would have lost it.

Craig: They don’t have the money. I’m just going to say flat out, they don’t have it, but true. Hopefully, the money wasn’t a lot for the option. I guess it’s exciting when you get money for an option. It’s not so great when you have to give it back or you need to give it back. In this case, brilliant maneuver to get out of this mess.

Let’s talk a little bit, John, for a moment about, there’s a phrase that popped out here, and that is there was nothing in his résumé or past credits that would indicate AI tech bro. Probably there was. We need to think about producers in a different way than we think about writers and directors and actors. Because no matter what the quality is, if you get a writing credit, you wrote, directing, you directed, acting, you acted.

There are 12,000 flavors of producer. There are so many different kinds of producers, including producers that routinely do nothing that the producers themselves had to invent a fake guild, of which I am a member. I love that they call it a guild. It’s not.

John: It’s an association.

Craig: It’s a trade association to self-regulate which producers actually warrant the best picture award. One thing is to look at the credits. If, in movies, you see a lot of executive producer credits, well, that’s different than producer. In television, if you see a lot of producer credits as opposed to executive producers, the other way around, that’s also possibly a red flag that what this person is, and there’s no shame in it, is somebody that puts projects together but isn’t necessarily making them. And those people over time, like water, find the path of least resistance to escape and head towards money. In this case, it sounds like this guy thinks it’s AI.

John: It’s entirely possible that this producer who has a lot of credits rarely has that PGA after their name, which would indicate that they really did produce the movie. Let’s assume maybe for the sake of argument that they did produce those movies, and they’re at a place right now where they’re finding it very hard to make movies. Some tech people show up saying, “Hey, we have this generative AI technology to create the video basically on demand, and so we can film things without a studio, without people, without anything else.”

I could imagine them going to a person who has some respectable credits, who actually knows how to make some movies, and convincing him to do this. That’s also possible that it is a legit person who’s just at a certain point in their career realizing, “Okay, this is the thing I do next.”

Craig: That’s another tricky one. When you are coming up, and you’re trying to get your first thing out there, you sometimes meet people on your way up that are on their way down.

John: Very true.

Craig: Everybody’s in the middle of the ladder. Figuring out who’s on their way down can be very difficult to do, and producers are extraordinarily good at convincing you that they’re amazing. That’s part of their job. It’s part of their skillset.

In this case, what is so startling to me is that this producer thought they were going to get away with it by not saying anything until after the deal was signed. I’m going to go with idiot on that one. Great warning here. Let’s just get this out to all the lawyers around town. This should be standard now in option agreements that this material will not be used to assist in AI. It will not be a springboard for AI. There will be no AI development of this. I think that clause now needs to just be in there.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between generative AI as a technology versus animation or motion capture or other things which are different ways to do stuff. You had a good initial meeting with this producer and he was talking about a vision for the movie but apparently was describing a false vision for the movie or was being so vague about what it was he was trying to do that it’s frustrating.

Listen, would I fault Guinea Pig for making a deal with this producer that was going to try to use this AI thing? For a feature film, I think yes. I think that’s a bad look. If it was for a short film where they’re going to hire you on to do this little experiment, that’s a choice you make whether you’re going to do it or not do it.

Craig: It’s their original material. It just feels like if you’re going to go through the misery of creating something original, why then hand it off to robots to do what they do? The whole point is that you’re trying with your first thing to explain to everybody that you have value. If you immediately let them feed it into AI, you’re saying, “I don’t.” A very wise choice here. I think everybody should be looking out for this.

Also, I sure wish we could just say who these people were. We don’t happen to know who this producer is. This is the kind of person I’d love to bring on the show and just say, “Okay, let’s talk.” Not to beat them about the head and shoulders, but just to say what is going on here exactly and get under the hood of this.

John: I do wonder how this conversation will age 10 years from now. Because there’s the boundaries between what is using generative AI to do visual effects versus to film a thing and to replace the crew. Those are the first principles I think we keep coming back to, is that are you making this choice so you can avoid hiring the people whose job normally would be to do things? This does feel like that situation to me.

Craig: There are situations, I feel, where AI is replacing what I would call rote work. If the job is to take this peg and put it in this hole 4,000 times a day, well, automation has done that. That’s been around forever. That’s not AI. That’s just industrial automation. When the robots came, people in the auto industry were very concerned. Repetitive rote tasks are ultimately going to go to machinery. Words? No.

John: Words and the idea of putting together a crew to film something or a crew to animate a thing, to make those fundamental choices, that’s really what we’re pushing back against. You and I both discussed, if we are using AI tools to clean up audio in the way that we would normally have used other digital tools, I don’t see that as a crisis.

Craig: No, that is using a calculator instead of an abacus. I’m okay with that. I think with things like animation, it’s quite likely that we will progress to a place where an artist is creating the first frame of a two-second shot and the last frame, and then there is some interpolation, and then choices are made. Which one of these interpolations do I want? It will make things go faster. That’s sort of inevitable. But the key choices, I think, need to stay with us, or else we will end up with a whole lot of what the kids online call AI slop, which is a wonderful phrase.

John: I’ll try to find a link to this to talk about it. There’s a study that showed that you have people looking at a bunch of poems, and some of the poems are the actual real classic poems, and some are in the style of these things. People inevitably prefer things that are in the style of the things that are in AI. It’s just like taste is a weird thing. There’s a reason why people sometimes want the slop.

Craig: Oh, yes. Well, we know. We play D&D every week. As is tradition, I try as best I can to provide Cool Ranch Doritos at every session. When they came up with the Cool Ranch powder in the laboratory–

John: The geniuses.

Craig: Geniuses. That is synthetic, and that is short-circuiting a lot of work that our brain normally has to do to get that rewarded. When we were kids, you would get banana-flavored taffy. It’s an ester. It’s a chemical, and it certainly doesn’t taste like banana. It tastes like something else. It goes right into happy center in your brain way faster than a fricking banana would.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: AI is artificial flavoring, and it is chemicals. Yes, it can do those things. At some point, somebody does still have to make new stuff.

John: I continue to believe that as we move into this next decade, and more synthetic entertainment becomes online, I do think there will be a gravitation towards some live, in-person things, artistic plays that are staged in front of you. You feel like, “Oh, this is actually really happening. I’m not being fed a thing. This is a real moment.”

Craig: Absolutely, yes. Spontaneity and connection will not go away.

John: Agreed. All right, let’s get to our first topic today, which is something that I realized this past week was a thing I felt a lot at the start of my career. It never really went away. It just changed a little bit. I want to describe early in my career, and I’m sure you’ll recognize what this feels like.

I remember waiting for word back from an agent who was reading my script at CAA. I would come back from work every day and look at my answering machine, which was actually a physical box answering machine, to see if there was a blinking light, if there was a message from this producer, whether this agent at CAA had read it and hopefully liked it.

I’m waiting for like a month every day looking for that thing. There’s just a constant waiting. Early in my career as well, my scripts were being sent out and I was waiting to hear back from stuff.

Then this last month or two, and I’m being a little bit vague on some of these projects, but these are the kinds of things I was encountering, which was on one project waiting for the big boss to sign off on making my deal because it’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of speculation around town that this person may not be in that job anymore. Oh, well, does he actually have the power to sign off? Do you even want him to sign off? Do you want to wait for the next person? Because if he goes, then it becomes a project under the old regime.

Craig: Sure. I like the race between pay me and get fired, which will win– That’s exciting.

John: Another example of waiting is waiting for notes on a draft because the director is off busy shooting another movie. Waiting to take out a project because the rights holders have another franchise that they’re currently out shopping and they don’t want to confuse the market. Waiting for the company boss before taking out a different pitch because their attention is divided. I just want to talk about waiting. The frustration of a screenwriter is that you’re generating work, but you’re also waiting for results and for other people to do stuff.

Craig: It’s incredibly frustrating. Having now been on both sides of that ball, I can say that the waiting is worse. The making people wait is a constant churning guilt. But at some point, there is your limit for attention and your ability to focus on things because there’s a lot. The people who are making these decisions typically have too many decisions to make, too much stuff to read, and then the waiting happens.

Also, in our business, crises tend to occupy everyone’s time all the time. If you’re not a crisis, you just fall back to secondary position. We have to make peace with this horrible feeling, what Melissa calls sitting in your discomfort. We have to sit in our discomfort, which is awful. It is the most brutal indication that we are not in control of anything at all.

John: Let’s talk about control because I think one of the real gifts we have as writers is unlike actors and other people who make movies, we do have the agency to just go off and do other stuff. We’re not waiting for someone to give us permission to do our trade, a director needs to be hired on to do a thing. An actor needs to be hired on to perform in a role. We can just do new stuff. Obviously, the simplest advice is, well, go off and write the next thing and don’t spend too many brain cycles worrying about that other thing.

I don’t want to let us off completely there because I do think there is a responsibility for checking in and reminding people and finding ways to check in without being so annoying that they hate you. Most times, they won’t, but you are sometimes creating a bit of guilt so they actually do pay attention.

There’s a balance between how often you should do it and how often your reps should do it. I think one of the things I’ve learned over the years is how to stagger it so that the reps check one week and I check the next week.

Craig: Sure. Little pro tip for reps out there, and I’m sure they all do this. One of the things that happens with people whose attention is very divided is that they will swivel towards the potential for a loss as opposed to looking for the potential for a win. If a rep calls and says, “Hey, just reminding you. My client wrote this great script, you really should read it. That’s the potential for a win.” They’re like, “Oh, I’ll get to it.” “Hey, the script that we sent you, we would really like for you to be this person’s agent or this producer. Heads up, a couple other people now are on top of it and we’re getting a lot of incoming calls. Just doing you the courtesy of letting there’s heat now.” Oh, I might lose something? Oh, here we go.”

A little bit of a psychology there. It is much harder to do as the writer than it is, and this is why reps are useful. One of the reasons, I would say.

John: Agreed. Sometimes that ticking clock that you’re putting on there is John’s not going to be available anymore. Basically, you need him to do this next draft. We’re past the reading period and now it’s time to go on to the next thing. We should describe a reading period.

Craig: Sure.

John: In our episode where we talked about your contract, for each step in your deal, so writing a first draft, for example, there’s a certain number amount of time for you to deliver that first draft. You turn it in and then it starts a reading period. Reading period’s often four weeks. Could be longer, but it’s negotiated. It’s written down in your contract. They will ignore that. Expect that to be the minimum amount of time it will take them to read this and get you back to notes.

It’s useful that it’s in your contract because then if they come back to you after that time and say like, “Hey, we need to start this next thing.” They pass the reading period. You’ve got some negotiating room to say like, “He’s actually doing this next thing first because we missed this.” It’s also an invitation for your reps to call when that reading period is about to be over and say, “Hey, just so we know, this is the thing.” Occasionally, I’ve even been able to get people to commence me on the next step, even though they really haven’t given me notes because–

Craig: What happens is there’s a point where whatever the optional is for the next step, that number, that pre-negotiated number, only applies for a certain amount of time. If they missed that time, and this happened to me earlier in my career, where they blew past it, didn’t realize it, then they greenlit the movie. Then they said, “Okay, it’s time for you to do your optional polish.” We were like, “What optional polish?” Now it’s greenlit. We have a gun to your heads. I ended up getting paid more for that polish than I did for the first draft because they blew through it and they screwed up.

Patience is one of those things that is highly recommended, only because we aren’t in control and we don’t know where the ball is going to bounce. We think that we are responsible to force the issue. The answer, whether it’s I like this, I don’t like this, I want you to be my client, I want to make this or I don’t, is actually fairly unpredictable. The factors that lead to that decision are far beyond simply the writing.

If you wait three more days, something crazy can happen and now everybody wants to do it. You wait three more days, something horrible might happen and nobody wants to do it. Your specific movie about this one person and this one, “Tom Cruise just signed on to do the same story somewhere else, you’re done.” There’s no way of knowing. I think distressingly, Zen is called for here. Don’t be passive, don’t give up, but also be aware that whatever you do, maybe you can impart about 10% of spin on the ball and the rest of it is up to fate.

John: The other thing I want to make sure listeners hear out of this is sometimes that the waiting, the maybe, the we’ll see, is actually just a soft pass. No one wants to say no, and they can’t say yes. They say maybe, but really it’s no. Sometimes when you’re not hearing back from people, it really is that they passed, they’ve moved on, they’re not thinking about it anymore, but they just don’t actually want to officially say no.

That’s why I’m always so grateful when people are very upfront about like, “This is what’s happening. Sorry, this is where we’re at.” There’ve been times where I’ve vehemently disagreed on the decision but totally respected the person for actually having the courage to say, “No, this is where it’s at.”

Craig: Exactly. Maybe without conditions is no. If it’s maybe, the following three things need to happen, but if they do, then yes, and you understand those three things? Okay, let’s see if those three things happen. Now, sometimes because people don’t like saying no, they’ll say maybe these three things have to happen. One of them is Jesus needs to come back. Okay, if you create an impossible condition, then it’s no also.

John: We’re waiting to see what the market’s like in a month or two months. It’s a no. It could potentially come into a yes, but it’s not likely to be a yes. You really should not pin any hopes on that.

Craig: Typically, when we’re dealing with large companies, the amount of money that we’re talking about here is not enough to rattle a stock price, nor is it an amount that gets shaken loose by the market. They have it or they just don’t want it. Because if you said, “Okay, we can wait for the market. Just FYI, Spielberg wants to do it over there. Let me know how the market is by tomorrow morning. Otherwise, we’re going to Spielberg.” They’ll buy it before you hang up the phone. As we often said, almost everything but money is no. That’s how it goes.

John: Certainly, something you brought up early on is we recognize that sometimes we are that person who is being ambiguous or is in the maybe situation. That’s why I try to be that person who gives a clear, quick answer on things. If somebody sends me a thing for a possible adaptation or whatever, “Is this of interest to you?” I will try to take a look at it that day and I’ll try to get a no as quickly as possible if it probably is a no. On a call, I will pass on something. They sent it to me and five minutes later, I’m emailing back, “Not for me, thanks.”

There are situations where I need to stew and ruminate on things or it’s a big book to read and it’s like I’m interested and it takes a while. I just try to make it clear that this is how much time it’s going to take me to do it, this is why I’m thinking about doing it and not hold up the gears because I’ve recognized over the years, sometimes I’ve been that person, just ambiguously sitting out there.

Craig: We also have an advantage to decision making, which is that we are the people that make stuff. We’re not really operating according to heat or market interest or any of that stuff. We’re just going by instinct. One of the things that you do have to do is accept that you may not want to do something that literally everybody else does want to do. You need to be okay with that.

I’m just thinking of– there was a book that is not yet published, but it’s in galleys and went around. It was a proposal and I understood the story behind it. I read the proposal and I thought, “Yes, this will probably be quite good in adaptation. I don’t want to be the one to adapt it.” Now, I need to make my peace with that because I’m pretty sure in about three days, I’m going to read that somebody incredible is doing it, which is exactly what happened. I was okay with that because I made my peace with it. I think it’s harder for the other side because they panic. There have been situations where people call back and they’re like, “Wait, did I say no? I meant yes.” No backsies.

John: No backsies, yes.

Craig: No backses.

John: That FOMO, getting over that fear of missing out.

Craig: FOMO.

John: That’s really what it is. I’ve also been in that situation. When I feel it, something that’s helpful for me is to get right back and say, “This is going to be such a great movie. I cannot wait to watch it. I’m not the person to do this. I’m sure you’re talking to X, Y, and Z. They’re going to kill it.”

Craig: It’s a very reassuring way to say, “It’s no, but it’s obvious you guys aren’t going to be left here with an unsold item. It’s going to sell. It’s going to sell to somebody great. Good news. You don’t have to worry about me being the person,” and always thank you so much for consideration because it’s true. It’s very lovely to be considered for anything. On the other side of things, I think for those of us who are stuck in limbo, waiting for things, creating a little FOMO, probably better than being thirsty.

John: Absolutely. Let’s wrap up this topic. Just getting back to what Melissa said is that making peace with the uncertainty, with the discomfort. I think sometimes just like recognizing it, labeling it, naming it. This is an open loop that I have no control over. It’s there. I see it. Now, we’re moving on and we’re doing other things. It was in that weird storm of uncertainty that I ended up writing Go. It was actually a very productive period because I was just waiting on other stuff. It’s like, I had the agency to do it and so just take advantage of what you can do as a writer, which a lot of other folks can’t.

Craig: If you can forget that you’re waiting, you win.

John: All right. Let’s get to the Three Page Challenge. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, we put out a call to our premium subscribers saying, “Hey, send us the first three pages of your screenplay, of your pilot. We will take a look at this on the air.” We put out a URL. It’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. People fill out a little form. They say it’s okay for us to talk about this on the air. Everything we’re saying here is because people send us these things and ask for honest feedback. We are not being mean to anybody.

Craig: Have people been suggesting that we’re being mean?

John: I think some people get uncomfortable with our– This is like, “Oh, you’re ragging on them.”

Craig: They need to sit in their discomfort because we are actually so much nicer than what we have had to deal with.

John: The thing is, we’re actually saying stuff, whereas other people would just like, “Eh.”

Craig: If people are paying you, brutal.

John: Yes, that can be brutal.

Craig: Brutal.

John: Brutal. Now, Drew, help us out here because you put out the call for folks to send in these submissions. You sent out an email through the little system. Talk to us about what happened there.

Drew: Oh, yes. We got 250 submissions in less than 48 hours. It was amazing. It was really good work.

Craig: Sheesh.

Drew: My eyes are burning right now.

Craig: [laughs] You read all of them?

Drew: Basically, yes.

Craig: My God, 750 pages.

John: Now, so the filtering mechanism you’re using is we only want scripts that don’t have obvious typos that feels messy in a way that’s like, we’re going to have to talk about the mess on the page.

Drew: Typos are automatically out, and multiple submissions, I’ve caught those before too. I’ll start reading and be like, “Oh, this is the same thing. Okay, gone.”

John: Now, any other patterns you noticed in this tranche of scripts?

Drew: Yes. Actually, this one, I’ve been seeing several scripts where character age and gender are in message board formatting, if that’s the right way to put it.

John: Describe it.

Drew: F24, M30, or something like that, which is new. It sort of makes sense. [crosstalk]

John: As long as we understand what it is, as long as it didn’t stop me, I’d be fine with it. It also reminds me of an advice column like, “Me, female 35, and my partner, male 26 are doing a thing.” I get that.

Craig: F number, M number, sure.

John: Anything else you’ve noticed, Drew?

Drew: We had a few scripts with email and contact info directly under the author name. It was titled by this person, then it was sandwiched right up. I don’t know if people are doing that for the Three Page Challenge.

John: I feel like bottom left corner is a great place to put that. I like it better down there.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s not the end of the world.

Craig: No. If I like the script, I don’t care where the email is.

John: All right. Let’s start off here with a sample called Scrambling by Tania Luna. Drew, if you could give us the synopsis for folks who are not reading along with us. If you are reading along with us, you might want to pause right now. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the PDF. You can read the PDF and then hear what we said. For Drew, everybody else, give us the synopsis.

Drew: Veronica, 24, walks quickly through the financial district of New York City, staring at her GPS, totally lost. She asks a stranger for directions to Front Street, which all the pedestrians are happy to give her, but their directions become this confusing cacophony of words. We intercut this with moments from her childhood. Lost in her school hallways, she imagines rolling fog and shadows until a teacher finds her.

Back in present day, when Veronica ends up on Fulton Street rather than Front, she hails a cab, which takes her to her destination only a few seconds away. She enters the ONG building, where the guard asks her which suite number she’s going to, and she’s overwhelmed by the amount of words in front of her.

John: All right. Let’s start with the title page here. Scrambling is written in a jumble of fonts. I actually really like the look of it. It’s fun. Then it says written by, and then it says Lania Tuna, and then that’s stripped through, and it says Tania Luna underneath that. Fun. We’re giving a sense of what the underlying dilemma is here for this character. It’s all in Courier Prime, which is a delightful typeface. I’ve always noticed that. It all looks really good. We got the email address and the phone number in the bottom left corner. Nothing on the cover page that concerned me. I had more concerns as we started going into this. Craig, talk to us about what you’re seeing as you enter.

Craig: Let’s talk about some good things first. These pages look great.

John: They do.

Craig: The way things are spread out is the golden ideal of a blend of action and dialogue. There’s some nice white space throughout. It was very easy to read. I moved across it nicely. The sentences were all well put together. The first thing that jumped out was this description. They walk fast, but Veronica, all caps underlined. I’m fine with that. Sure, why not? Veronica, and then in parentheses, 24, mixed-race, is faster.

I’m not sure mixed race is enough because that’s a very generic way to describe somebody’s ethnicity. If you’re going to make a point that it’s mixed-race, shouldn’t we know what the mix is?

John: Yes. In the next paragraph, we’re hearing long, straight black hair, yellow backpack, bouncing as she walk, runs, but we’re not finding anything more about her. Giving us just age and–

Craig: Basically, it was like saying Veronica, 24, won’t tell you what she looks like, is faster. That’s what it felt like to me. Either don’t or do. The halfway seemed a bit odd.

Now, what happens here over these three pages appears to be the demonstration of somebody struggling with some kind of information-processing disability. The glimpse of her struggling with this as a kid was interesting, but possibly out of place in this frantic opening.

The biggest issue I have here, as far as these three-page challenges go, this is a fairly high-level one. That’s good news because I think that Tania Luna can write fairly well here, is that if you’re demonstrating that somebody has a specific processing disability, don’t show me them doing something that I think they would be able to do regardless. If you’re 23 years old and you know that you have some issues processing information, direction, street names, things like that, and you’re going for a job interview, you will prepare. You’re not going to be helpless. You’re not going to wake up that morning and go, “Oh, right, I forgot I have extreme dyslexia or extreme dysgraphia, or I cannot remember names or places, or I’m face-blind.”

You know these things. Would it not be more interesting to meet this person in a situation where they did feel self-assured because they had prepared, and then something happens that they weren’t expecting, and then we see the expression of this disability and what it means for this person.

John: Yes. I think my frustration with the three pages on the whole was that it was three pages of just getting somebody to an office in a way that didn’t feel like, I didn’t learn that much about Veronica over the course of these three pages. I didn’t know anything specific about what she was. I didn’t get a sense of what her issue was. It’s some sort of information processing issue that she was overwhelmed by this scenario, but I didn’t know much specific about her, and that started with not getting a clear visual of her at the start.

I want to talk about just the very first lines here. With the New York City Financial District, skyscrapers jetted out of concrete like shiny Lego towers made by a kid without much of an imagination. I don’t see that specifically.

Craig: It’s also unnecessary because we know–

John: We know what skyscrapers are.

Craig: Yes, we know what New York looks like.

John: Cabs honk as they whiz by, a few meter trees, leaves yellow, dot the sidewalk. Not helping me get so much. Here’s my concern, tourists. So many tourists wander with the locals, business suits, business shoes, business expressions. I don’t associate a lot of tourists with the Financial District, so I think highlighting that there are people in business suits doing Wall Street work and that Veronica is maybe not part of that is actually more useful to us than the confusing thing of the tourists in there because I don’t understand who Veronica is in relationship to people she’s walking around. The GPS on her phone, the GPS just feels– it makes me think, “Oh, are we in the ‘90s?”

Craig: Right. It’s an incredibly ambiguous concept. It’s a technology that underpins all the other things we have.

John: We refer to it as a separate thing anymore.

Craig: Is she using Google Maps? Is she using Waze? Is she using Apple Maps? GPS is like a Garmin device.

John: Absolutely. Call up the map on her phone, which is fine. Beyond that, I mostly get it. Cutting back to the elementary school was probably not the right choice for cutting back and forth in these first pages leads me to think that we’re going to do this all the time in the movie, and that’s not, my friend. I get a little bit nervous about jumping back to the grade school so much at the start.

Craig: If you do jump back to the grade school, I need to know that it’s her memory. Otherwise, it’s the movie doing it, in which case I’m just frustrated. I feel, in this case, like the movie just said, “Oh, now, here’s her as a kid,” not okay, on her face, panicked, sweaty. There’s this memory of her being panicked and sweaty in a hallway. You’re absolutely right, where we place her in the beginning, none of those things are in service of her character. They don’t create specific obstacles. It isn’t a question that we almost missed her because she wasn’t interesting, but then we realized that’s part of the issue. It wasn’t that she was moving faster than everybody or getting jostled. Why the street? Why the here? What’s going on? Why not just, boom, panicked, running?

John: I want to get back to the thing you said early on. I said a person with this situation, this information processing disorder, would have a strategy going into it. They’d have a plan for coping ahead. That might actually be a more interesting thing. If we’re going to cut away from the moments, it might be more interesting to see what her plan was for that day, and then watch it fall apart.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You sit there and you make a plan. If I’m watching a 23-year-old young woman at night in her apartment practicing the map, practicing the movements, I would be so curious as to why. Then when I see her the next day moving, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, so she has some issue. That’s why she prepared this.” Then, “Oh, Con Ed has closed the street off. You can’t go that way. Oh, no.” Then I’m connected to her panic because I’m experiencing it. I’m part of it because I’ve been prepared for it.

One thing to consider, and I don’t know if Tania has this processing disorder or not, but one thing I would suggest, Tania, is to think, okay, sometimes reality gets in the way of what we think would be dramatic. Don’t worry. Better to be realistic. Then say, well, then what are the pettier, the smaller, the more mundane obstacles that will be unique to this situation?

John: As you were talking, I was thinking about, let’s say she’s coming from uptown to the Financial District. She gets on a train and she assumes it’s local and it’s going to stop, but it turns out to be an express, and so she goes three stops too far. We’ve all been in a situation where we’re like, wait, you just saw the stop go past you. We can handle that. We have an expectation of how we can handle that, but if we then cut back to her planning for how many stops it’s going to be, and you realize like, “Oh, this is a much bigger deal to her than it would be to me,” we’re leaning in, we’re curious.

Craig: Yes. If we replace this character with a blind character, we would not accept an opening where this blind character is moving through the New York streets with their cane, completely unaware of where they are. You would prepare, but we would be very invested if, for instance, like what you just said happened, and you realize, “Oh, my preparation is useless now. Now what do I do?” That creates connection with the character. What we don’t have here is a rooting interest because we’re just watching. We’re not invested.

John: Agreed.

Craig: I will say the ability to put sentences together, to lay things out in a convincing way, read, it was smooth as silk, so it’s all promising.

John: Absolutely. We’re sure pitching a better version of what’s already been solved.

Craig: Which we usually don’t have the opportunity to do, so that’s a good sign.

John: It is, agreed. Drew, our writer also sent through the logline to explain what’s happening in the full script. Tell us what else is happening in Scrambling.

Drew: The logline is, a dyslexic woman with a wild imagination accidentally lands a high-stakes job and must scramble to prove she belongs in a cutthroat corporate world that wasn’t built for her to succeed.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s right. It’s working girl. Great, love it.

Craig: Sure.

John: Let’s move on to our next script by Leah Newsome. This is Lump. Drew, help us out.

Drew: A desert town in the year 2140. Very pregnant Ingrid, early 30s, is being given a cervical exam by a doula in an old dingy motor home. The doula is feeling for something. She finds it, says no, and ends the exam. Ingrid hangs her head. On her way out, the doula encourages Ingrid to go to a hospital across the border as they’re cleaner. Ingrid is reluctant. Driving home, odd beeps and screeching comes over the radio. Ingrid accidentally swerves into oncoming traffic but avoids a crash. At home, Ingrid makes tea but panics when she drops some of the water on the floor. Sean enters, informing her that the water filter was jammed, and fence was cut.

John: All right, and so on the title page here it says, “Inspired by the mythical epic The King of Tars.” I’ve never heard of The King of Tars.

Craig: I’ve never heard of The King of Tars

John: I believe it exists.

Craig: It has to.

John: It makes me curious.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, and I also like that you’re saying the medieval epic because it’s like, nothing about this feels medieval. Great.

Craig: Yes, that’s inspiring.

John: Yes, if you’re just making it up just to pique our curiosity.

Craig: Brilliant.

John: Brilliant.

Craig: Actually, a genius movie.

John: Well played. All right, let me start us off here. We are starting off in this doula’s motorhome. I like the visuals that we’ve got here. I like sort of how we’re being set up. The super title over it says The Excised Lands 2140. I bristled a little bit at The Excised Lands. It just gave me that sort of fantasy sci-fi thing.

Craig: Slightly fanfic-ish name.

John: Yes, fanfic-ish. Yes, it does feel a little bit like that. This is a small thing. In the Courier Typeface, you use dash, dash. There’s no such thing as like a long em dash. Whatever Leah’s doing here to create those em dashes, those long dashes in the first paragraph and second paragraph, just a little bit weird. Just it bumped for me. I noticed it. Not a big thing.

What is a little bit bigger of a thing for me is fourth paragraph. She leans over Ingrid’s legs, finding the right angle. The last person who’s named was Ingrid. I didn’t realize it was the doula immediately. Just say doula. Just keep it. It’s that read to make sure that everything is unambiguous the first time you take a look at it. I was a little bit frustrated by the end of this first scene. Doula says, “Sorry.” I wanted more. I felt you were being ambiguous for no purpose. The doula would have said more there.

Craig: Yes, this is the reaction. The doula is doing a vaginal examination to check what? Dilation possibly to see if it’s time for the baby to be born. It’s a cervical exam. Cervical exam would imply, yes, that it is. We’re checking dilation, right? Then the doula feels for something difficult to find. The cervix is not difficult to find. Now I’m like, “Okay, well, what is difficult?”

John: Is something else happening in there?

Craig: Something else happening. Okay. We are in the future. Are we hoping for a two-headed baby? I don’t know. All I know is that the doula says, “No,” which is very casual. No, sorry. Ingrid drops her head onto the table defeated. It’s a bit like, I didn’t get the job. Not my baby’s dead. If your baby isn’t ready to be born, then that would be a different response. I had no idea what I was meant to feel there.

John: Yes. Here’s why it matters because we’ve established she’s very pregnant. We say that she’s very pregnant. We’re just seeing this exam or calling a cervical exam. Then the idea that she’s going to cross the border to do a doula makes me wonder, and not in the right way, is to wonder what’s going to happen next. I feel like if she’s close enough that she’s there for this exam, that the baby’s just about to come.

Craig: Let’s talk a little bit about the post-apocalypse, if I may.

John: Do you have any experience about that?

Craig: When you begin, it’s important to introduce changes slowly. The things that are contrasted to our life are important, but you don’t want to just pile on 12 of them at once.

John: No.

Craig: Because now nobody knows really what the rules are. Nobody knows quite what the connection is to the past. There’s so much going on here in this first scene that I don’t– They don’t have stirrups. She’s got to hold her own legs back. It’s in a motor home, but they do have rubber gloves or latex gloves. Then there’s an oil drum fire pit, which I have to say, I have a rule on The Last of Us.

John: No oil drum fire pits.

Craig: No oil drum fire pits. It is the most possible cliche thing to do in the apocalypse.

John: Where do we think– Was it Mad Max where we first established the post-apocalyptic oil drum fire pit?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: Because they used to actually exist. In the Great Depression, that was actually a way that people kept warm.

Craig: From oil drums? It was a metal thing.

John: It was a metal– [crosstalk]

Craig: When do you find– Oil drums exist. You’ll see oil drums in the second season of The Last of Us, but not for braziers. Isn’t it rare to just see oil drums with the top lopped off that you can fill with garbage and light on fire, and they’re always on the street corner? I think it’s because it’s just they’re easy to source for productions. They’re at a height that makes it interesting. Otherwise, people have to sit. I don’t know. Anyway, but here’s what I really don’t understand. There’s an oil drum fire pit and it’s 100 degrees out.

John: Yes.

Craig: What? What?

John: Yes. What is that? They’re playing a card game near the fire.

Craig: Why would they be near the fire sweating through their clothes when it’s 100 degrees? Now, that may be explained also, but then I want the script to tell me that’s weird. At least to acknowledge to me, I’m supposed to note that that’s strange. One thing I do think that would help this is if we took the excise land 2140, moved it down a bit.

John: I was about to say the same thing. If that’s, as she’s getting back to her truck and everything else, that’s when we’re saying that, great. Because then also it makes that first scene clean. It can be about the duelist medical examination. We’ll notice like, okay, is this just a– what’s happening here?

Craig: Generally, you want to put that title over the widest possible shot.

John: Agreed.

Craig: Where you get the full scope of the world and you go, “Oh yes,” that’s not just that I’m in this horrible junkyard or a terrible mobile park. Look at the horizon, look at the sun, look at the sky, look at whatever.

John: I want to make a proposal for the second scene. In the second scene, we’re outside the motor home and Ingrid is walking to her truck. She gets in her truck. I would propose that we start the scene a little bit later on, because right now we have an action line. Ingrid pulls her keys out of her pocket. That’s not an interesting line to give to itself. If she were to get into the truck at that point and the rest of the conversation is there, then we can end on the finally get the car to start the engine rumble into life. I would say just get us into that car sooner. It’s probably going to be your friend.

Craig: This is also a place where knowing where people are and how motion is functioning will help. Why is the doula following her? I didn’t even know the doula was following me until she started talking. Is she trying to keep up with Ingrid? Is she worried about Ingrid? What she’s saying here, I can’t tell what the intention is. Is she worried for Ingrid’s life? Is she just being just a know-it-all? I can’t tell because I don’t know how she’s moving with her.

John: Yes. If that first line from the doula is like, listen, you could probably make it in time if you left now. If she was following her and like that’s the first line, in the sense that she’s restating a thing she said before.

Craig: Also it says exterior doula’s motorhome day. The motorhome door slams behind Ingrid and the doula. That’s it.

John: Who slammed it?

Craig: Then they don’t seem to be walking. They’re just standing there. Is the truck right next to the motorhome? Where is everything? This is the classic Lindsey Durant question. Where are they standing? Are they moving? Where is the truck? Where are the women relative to the motorhome?

John: My instinct is they should be in motion as the scene starts.

Craig: It feels like they should be in motion because I would understand that the doula is worried about her. For the doula to be worried about her, I need to go back to the prior scene where Ingrid drops her head onto the table, defeated, then starts to get up. The doula goes, “Wait, wait, wait.” Cut to, boom. “Hold on, hold on.” Just because I don’t know why this next bit is happening. Just thinking about how people actually function. They don’t just do nothing and then suddenly appear together outside of the door. Find the intention.

John: Yes, agreed. As we get into Ingrid’s truck, she’s driving back. I was confused by the radio voice because the radio voice to me feels like, at first I thought, is it a dispatcher? No, it’s just convenient radio-

Craig: It’s the news.

John: -telling up the news.

Craig: It’s the news. I really struggle with this. Three arrested west of the former municipality of Phoenix.

John: Oh, come on.

Craig: If it is 2140, you’re not calling it the– That’s like us referring to New York as the former New Amsterdam today. We don’t do that, right? You could call it west of Phoenix territory or west of– Fallout would call it New Phoenix. That’s what they do. New Vegas. Why is there just this casual– If you have this casual news update, I feel like there’s way more civilization going on than we thought there would be.

John: With this last line, suspects were found with stolen rations on their persons. That feels police-y. That feels like police dispatcher. Finding the right level for that is interesting.

It sounds like, Leah, we’re really harping on a lot of stuff. I want to love this. I actually like the space of it. I love a pregnant woman in this space and trying to make a decision about what to do next. We’re about to get to Sean, who’s apparently the father of the kid. We’re about to meet him. That scene is better. We don’t know who Sean is. He’s not given any other uppercase name. I’m curious to keep reading based on what you’ve done so far.

Craig: Yes. I love a scene that begins with a cervical exam. If you start with a cervical exam, hats off, good for you. Audacious, bold. There is a lot of clunky, cliche, sci-fi stuff going on here that you have to be better than because you just don’t want to end up in a Wattpad world with this stuff, right?

Last thing is to just think about where everybody is, give the audience a chance to visualize things. It means say less and make the things you say matter more. We are interior cat house evening. What does the exterior look like? Where is it? I don’t know.

John: I don’t know what interior cat house means.

Craig: I don’t know either. Cat house could be whore house.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then it says her house. I don’t know what’s going on. Then, listen, Sean is saying a bunch of things that I suspect are intentionally confusing. The filter, what is it? The fence, don’t know. Something with the water. Not sure. All fine.

John: All fine. He’s entering in as if he’s just continuing a previous conversation, which makes sense for people who know each other well.

Craig: She knows something from the doula. She hasn’t told him. Am I looking at her face? Is she contemplating telling him? Is she worried about telling him?

John: I don’t know what she knows.

Craig: I don’t know either. All I know is that she doesn’t seem to be concerned about it here anymore either. I think all this is to say to Leah, “If there’s one word I could give you, Leah, as advice for this, it is to focus. Focus in on what you want me to see. Focus in on why it matters. Focus in on, visually, on your frame, the movement, all of it.”

John: Yes, watch the scenes.

Craig: Watch the scenes. These feel written. They don’t feel watched.

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? What is the log line? What else is going to be happening in Lump?

Drew: Over a century into the water crisis, a couple moves to the former state of Arizona where they’re pulled into a violent and mystical cult of doulas following the birth of their Lumpchild.

Craig: Okay. My interest is piqued. I’ve never considered that there would be a cult of violent doulas. That’s hysterical. I don’t know what a Lumpchild is. Cool. A lot of questions.

John: A lot of questions. I would say I’m intrigued because the fact that the doulas are an important part of the whole story, I wasn’t getting that out of them.

Craig: Not at all.

John: I’m surprised that thing we saw in the first frame is actually a crucial part of the whole rest.

Craig: Because they showed us doula.

John: Doula, yes.

Craig: Not doulas.

John: There were other dusty old women out there, but–

Craig: They were playing cards by a fire in 100-degree heat. The thing that I think is missing from that log line that I’d love to hear is some brief reference to why doulas matter at all in this new world, or at least more than they did now, or why they would conglomerate into a violent cult in a world with terrible infertility problems. Yes. In a world where no new babies have been born. In a world where only 1 out of 1,000 children survive. Something to create relevance so that it’s not just– Because you could take the word doulas out and replace it with janitors, bubblegum manufacturers, girl scouts.

John: It doesn’t matter. The thing I was missing in that log line is Ingrid must make a choice. Basically, what is the decision that this central character has to make? Yes.

All right, let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is The Dread Pirate Roberts, written by J. Bryan Dick. Drew, help us out.

Drew: “We’re dropped from space down towards earth, specifically the Carolina coast, and into the middle of a 17th-century naval battle between two ships, the Revenge, which is filled with pirates, and the Queen’s Pride, which is a Navy ship. The captain of the Queen’s Pride believes they’re winning, sends his steward, Wesley, 18, to go get his victory snuff. As he does, the Revenge turns and rams the Queen’s Pride, and pirates storm the ship. Too scared to do it himself, the captain gives Wesley a dagger to cut them free from the pirates’ grappling hooks. Wesley is quickly stopped by a pirate named Scars, who encourages him to jump into the ocean like the rest of the Navy sailors.

Wesley pretends to run away but grabs a rope and slingshots back and knocks out Scars to cut the rope. Soon, a pirate in all black soars over them all, swinging up to the crow’s nest triumphantly, and a knife is put to Wesley’s neck.”

John: Now, for listeners who are saying, “Hey, that sounds familiar,” we should say that underneath the title on the title page, it says, a pilot for the lost adventures of the black-masked scallywags from The Princess Bride, William Goldman’s timeless tale of true love. This is literally fan fiction.

Craig: Yes, and that’s fine.

John: Fine.

Craig: Are you allowed to sell this? No, not without permission. Are you allowed to write it as a sample? 100%. Absolutely, nothing wrong with that.

John: I actually applaud this choice, because if I needed to read a sample, and I sort of know what the source material is, can this guy write in this kind of a style? Can it? Sure, and I think, actually, J. Bryan Dick did a nice job here. I enjoyed reading these pages.

Craig: Yes, the challenge with this is the bar gets higher.

John: It does.

Craig: Because everybody’s aware that you’re cheating. You’re not creating new characters. You’re not creating a new world. You’re not creating a tone. You’re building off of something. Therefore, a little more expectation, because you haven’t had to cook at all yourself. In addition, when it’s something that’s derived from a beloved movie, like The Princess Bride, that, basically, everyone has seen in our business multiple times, you need to also nail it. It’s not enough to be good. It felt good, but I wasn’t delighted. It just sort of was a pretty typical naval battle.

Listen, you’re trying to write like William Goldman. What a target that you put on your back. It’s confident. It’s crackling. There was one moment where I thought, “Oh, there’s a missed opportunity, where the captain gets scared and sends Wesley.” That felt like it could have been a little bit more of a Goldmanesque turn from overconfident bravery to, oh, you there. I have a thought. It just felt so quick as to be almost arbitrary. Yes. It’s a naval battle. I will say, I appreciated that J. Bryan didn’t bury us in action description. The boats collide and side by side. Got it. Okay. I can do that math.

John: Absolutely. We were focused on characters during it, which was crucial. I did feel there was a missed opportunity with the captain who’s just captain. Give that captain a name that crackles. His first line is only okay. The first line is, these pickeroons will be food for the sea. Reload. Make this pass our last. There’s a better version of that first line. I like pickeroons, but like these pickeroons will feed the sea, man. Something about that could feel fun. Let us also know that this is a bit of a comedy, because I didn’t feel like we were quite getting to the joke. Even though the captain is not going to be a crucial character, he’s the first person who speaks, and that becomes important.

Craig: Yes. That’s the issue is everything has to be as good as The Princess Bride.

John: Reading this made me think back to Mindy Kaling when she was on the show. We were talking about when she’s staffing for shows, she gets frustrated by reading original pilots, and she’s like, “I really miss the day when you would read, specs of existing shows, because then you can see like, can this person write in somebody else’s voice?” That’s obviously what she needs to know. It’s this, can this person do somebody else’s thing?

I think what’s nice about this is, as a sample would be like, “Oh, this person is adaptable and can answer, can get a thing, which is really useful.” In a weird way, I suspect that this pilot script, which you can’t shoot. If it’s all at this quality and beyond this quality, will be useful because it shows the ability to match a style that’s not their own.

Craig: This would obviously hinge on the relationship between Wesley and the Dread Pirate Roberts. The promise of that story is enough to keep me going. One thing that’s important tonally is that The Princess Bride was framed as a tale where a grandfather is reading from a novel to his grandson. I think that that is baked in to the world of The Princess Bride. Even if you just want to start inside of it, which I think is reasonable, here’s what you can’t do.

On page three, Scars says, “What’ll it be, boy?” With that, young Wesley charges to the side of the ship. Scars reacts. That was too easy. Young Wesley doesn’t go overboard. He launches himself into a taut rope and slingshots back at Scars. Scars says, “Oh, shi–.” We don’t curse in The Princess Bride. Ever. That’s not a thing. We don’t do that. Understanding tone is massively important.

John: Absolutely. That oh, sh, could be a reaction from Scars. You can put that in italics after that. We wouldn’t say it.

Craig: We just wouldn’t. We would not say that.

John: We would not say that. That idea of do you, will J. Bryan Dick adopt that framing that this is a tale being told within this? Maybe. I can imagine at a certain point, I think something just stops. It’s like, but what happened next? Sure. Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Promise of fun. Zippy pages to read. Not a ton of what I would call fresh invention here. Enough to make me wonder like, okay. I will say like the great idea here is to meet the Dread Pirate Roberts. Because we never met him. Yes. We met Wesley. He was not the first Dread Pirate Roberts. [crosstalk]

John: That’s fine. What’s also helpful about this is like, if you had to pick between 10 things to read and you saw this one, it’s like, oh, I know what this is going to be. There’s something comfortable about that.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Drew, help us out. What else? The long line for the rest of this pilot.

Drew: Set in the Princess Bride world, the Dread Pirate Roberts TV series, follows the adventures of each person who donned the black mask to sail the high seas and command the Revenge.

John: Oh, well, that’s an interesting idea that it’s not just Wesley. It could also be like the history of.

Craig: Then why are we starting with Wesley?

John: What, that he was the last one?

Craig: Then we go backwards?

John: Maybe there’s a whole cadre of other folks who are still around and a lot.

Craig: I don’t want to watch that. I’ll tell you why. Because television shows, unless they are anthology shows like Black Mirror, where everything is a different story. It’s about connecting with the characters and relationships. I want to watch the Dread Pirate Roberts tutor this young lad, to whom he says at the end of every day, “Well done, probably kill you in the morning,” and then doesn’t. I want to see that father-son relationship happen. I don’t want to just keep meeting new Dread Pirate Robertses.

John: Yes, I do. I guess the version of this I want is basically Hacks, but it’s pirates.

Craig: Sure. Did you see Our Flag Means Death?

John: I did not get into Our Flag Means Death. But it’s in that same space, for sure.

Craig: It is in that same space, although definitely a different tone. What I loved is you got to meet this ship full of wackos and got under the hood of those wackos. It was appreciated if I kept going to different ships and different people.

John: I doubt that’s really what’s happening here. This reminds me of, because I was just editing the chapter on what kind of story this is. Basically, we’re talking through in this strip dance book chapter, I have this idea. Is it a movie idea? Is it a TV idea? There is a movie idea for the Dread Pirate Roberts, where it’s all contained within one thing. The TV show version of this is fun in the same way that Cheers is fun. Is that like you are following a group of people and sort of the adventures of the week.

Craig: They don’t change.

John: Exactly. They don’t change.

Craig: That’s the key. Every week we meet a new bartender in Cheers. That part, I do think it would be a wonderful, I presume that this would be a movie.

John: It feels like it should be a movie. Let’s talk about just the final, could you actually make this thing? You could if this were terrific. I don’t know who owns the rights. Is it Castle Rock? Who would own this?

Craig: Yes. It’s Castle Rock, but you would probably need– yes, you wouldn’t need permission from William Goldman. Unless you were, no, you might-

John: Because of the underlying book.

Craig: Because of the underlying book.

John: Yes. I suspect in buying the rights to the book.

Craig: They probably bought it all out in perpetuity across the universe for all time. Yes, you’re probably right. Then it would be Castle Rock. Not impossible, but you’d have to know there would be a tremendous outcry.

John: There would be. The standards would have to be really high.

Craig: This is meant for, hey, I’m a good writer. Not, hey, make this show.

John: Yes. I think it’s a good writing sample. We want to thank everybody who submitted, all 250 of you who submitted, especially these three writers for letting us talk about their work on the air. Drew, thank you again for burning your eyes out to read through all of 250 of these.

Craig: I don’t know how you did that.

John: It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show that’s actually in the same space. It’s a specific episode of a TV series called The Goes Wrong Show.

Craig, you may have seen on Broadway, there’s a show, The Play That Goes Wrong. There’s also a TV series, which the premise is that it’s a theater troupe that puts on a show for television each week. A director explains what the goal was and also tells what challenges they felt they encountered that week. Never mind, it’s going to go fine for this live TV thing. Of course, things go wrong at the premise.

The episode, if people are, if that’s at all appealing to you, the episode I recommend to folks is one called 90 Degrees. It’s a Tennessee Williams type play. The premise of the episode is that the set designers mistook 90 Degrees as instructions for how one set was supposed to be built.

Craig: Everything is turned.

John: Everything is turned. It’s turned 90 degrees. The cameras also turn 90 degrees for it. You have characters who are trying to sit around this table and they’re falling down, and gravity just works against them. It’s incredibly dumb, but also just delightful.

Craig: I love dumb.

John: It’s a thing you could also watch with your kids because it’s absurd and it’s completely safe.

Craig: Where would I find that?

John: I think we found it on Amazon Prime. I would just google and see what servers you can find it on.

Craig: Sure.

John: All right. What do you got for us?

Craig: My one cool thing is someone I met in Austin. We were down there for South by Southwest and myself and Neil Druckmann and the many of the cast of The Last of Us got to meet Cookie Monster.

John: Oh my God. Cookie Monster’s the best.

Craig: And Elmo. No offense to Elmo. Elmo’s great. Cookie Monster has been there, John, for our entire lives. It was so strange to meet a puppet as a 53-year-old and feel like you might cry because it’s like when you smell something from your childhood, it’s just this instant thing of getting back. Now, one thing I noticed about Cookie Monster that I did not expect is he’s enormous. Those puppets are huge. They’re so much bigger than you think they are. They’re so big.

It was pretty, it reminded me of how powerful Sesame Street is as a cultural institution. To the extent that these kinds of cultural institutions are being assaulted and undermined, it’s so distressing because it is just an absolute positive thing that has lasted. Every generation of children that comes along magically loves Cookie Monster. The color of the blue, just his blue made me so happy. I just want to thank Sesame Street and Cookie Monster for welcoming us into their studio. I still don’t know why, but they did. [laughter]

John: Craig, tell me, so I’ve never interacted with Muppets. Was it hard to maintain eye contact with the puppet and ignore the puppeteer?

Craig: No, because the puppeteer gets very low. There’s a camera that’s filming things and the puppeteer gets very low. In fact, there’s quite a bit of scrambling right before they roll, which is like, lower, no, see you, lower. That’s why the puppet is so big. Because it actually has to fill a lot of space below frame to make sure that the puppeteer is not in the frame.

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

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You will find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on the secret things we noticed that let us know that something has been re-shot. Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, you are watching a movie, you’re watching a TV show, and your little radar is like, okay, there’s a recut here, something’s changed, something went off. What are some things that are tipping you off that things changed here?

Craig: The biggest indication is there is a rather long and explainy bit of dialogue that is not on camera. Someone is, the person who’s not on camera that’s talking to the person who is on camera says a long thing that explains a thing that they wouldn’t have normally said or needed to explain because he would have seen it, which is probably covering for the fact that that thing was essential to know for the plot, but the scene just wasn’t working and so they cut it.

John: Absolutely. We’ve both been in situations where in post, you are adding ADR lines, looping lines to take care of a little bridge or situation. ADR is used to fix little technical mistakes but also can be used to correct some narrative issues because a scene got dropped out because a scene where that information used to happen is no longer there. Watching the current season of Severance, and we’re recording this before the final episode, and I don’t really know any of the backstory on Severance, what happened this season.

Watching it, I did notice a few moments in these last few episodes where like, okay, something shifted here. One of those things, situations was a crucial word or term was used and we were not on the characters while they were saying it or we suddenly cut incredibly wide when a character says a certain phrase. It led me to believe like, okay, something shifted here. There was also a situation where one character had a confrontation, drove away to leave the show and then comes back and then leaves the show again. My suspicion is that the episode in which those were happening got shifted later on in the season and we were moving stuff around to accommodate that change.

Craig: That could absolutely be true. The interesting thing about the streaming world now is that episodes have variable lengths. It’s not necessarily the case that if you see a very short episode or a very long episode that things, may have, but sometimes when an episode is very short, it’s because there were some scenes, it’s rare to plan for an episode to be say 35 minutes if you’re an hour-long show. There may have been some things that got cut.

The other thing, let’s talk about an additive thing that is an indication. When a sequence occurs that is very self-contained and exciting, actiony, scary, sexy, one of these big, loud, noisy scenes that didn’t really feel like it needed to be there, didn’t change anything, suddenly sort of happened, didn’t impact stuff. That is oftentimes the result of a studio network going, this thing needs to be louder, sexier. I need a car chase, and so they just make one happen and shove it in. If you ever feel like something got shoved in, it’s probably because it got shoved in.

John: A thing I will notice is that you have key characters having a scene on a set with nobody else around them. It feels like a reshoot. It feels like we haven’t established anybody else in the world who could be in this thing, but we need to have this moment happen. Therefore, we’re putting them in this set. One of the recent Marvel movies, I did notice there were some sequences were like, “Wait, why are we here? What is this place that we’re in?” It’s a place that was not established. It’s a place that serves no other function, and yet we’re in this place for this one scene to happen. To me, it felt like six months later, they brought everybody back and shot this one thing.

Craig: If you see something like that that isn’t really set up and isn’t used again, either it was created for that, or there were five scenes in that thing. All of them except one guy. That’s another good point. Sometimes that can be an indication.

You’re right to suggest that sometimes it’s those scenes between two characters sitting somewhere that are additional photography, but sometimes those are the best scenes. Very famously, we had David Benioff and Dan Weiss on our show, and they talked about how in the first season of Game of Thrones, they just missed the target on how long the episode should be and needed to go back and put stuff in.

They were out of money, so they did the cheapest thing, which was write conversations between two people in a room that already exists, and lo and behold, those are some of the best scenes in season one because they’re good writers. They did a great job of creating scenes where you, what happened inside of there wasn’t just plot or filler, it helped inform the conflict and the character.

John: Yes, one of the issues with the way we make TV shows now, especially for series on streaming, is that we’ll often block shoot things. We could block shoot the entire eight episodes or 10 episodes of the season, but more likely we’re doing things in chunks and stuff moves around. I’ve talked with show owners who they need to do reshoots, and suddenly they have like four directors who are like all shooting the same week in the same space to do stuff. It gets to be really, really complicated. It’s not surprising that you didn’t go in intending the scene to work that way.

Clearly, that was what you could do with the situation you had. You have a character giving a piece of information that’s like, is not the most organic way to do a thing, but it’s who you had available at the moment to make this bridge fit.

Craig: Yes, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. You either are on a show where you have the resources to accommodate those things. It was raining that day and we needed it to be sunny. We’re going to wait for it to be sunny and do it again. It was raining that day, we needed it to be sunny. They’re going to be in the rain, and we’re not going to really talk about it. The fact that the scene before and the scene after are on the same day are sunny, just going to happen. Things like that do happen. It is remarkable what people notice and don’t notice.

One of the things about all of these strange bumpy moments is that we’re very well attuned to them, but they wouldn’t happen so frequently if they didn’t work. They actually get away with it all the time.

John: The other thing I’ll notice about, something has changed here. A scene got dropped, something got wedged in there, endless days or nights, or it goes day to night, day to night in a way that’s not really possible. These two things could not be happening simultaneously, and that’s just a thing. No, the writers aren’t idiots. It’s just that something changed and something shifted, and this is sort of what we can do. This is where we’re at.

Craig: Yes, if something occurs that is jolting in a superficial way, it’s probably because there was something in between that got lost. If you have characters who are getting to know each other at work, and then the next scene is it’s the evening, and they’re at some sort of very swanky party, and the woman is dressed in this like rotten ballgown. The guy’s in a tux, and you’re like, where did you come from? Why is this totally occurring now in this way?

Something got lost here, and one thing that we always have to watch out for when we’re doing all of our work is that if the people who are paying for it are losing faith in it, or their faith is wobbly, they will generally resort to faster. Go faster. You don’t need that. It’s slowing us down, and they have such a lower sensitivity to things not making sense than we do. We’ll say, well, that literally will not make sense now. If we take that out, this will not make sense, and they don’t care a lot, and that’s a fight you have to have.

John: Because they are familiar with the bad version, and it’s like, let’s get rid of the bad stuff, and if we get rid of the bad stuff, it’s all really good. It’s like, no, it may just not make any sense.

Craig: In their defense, I have watched things before that I’ve enjoyed, where at some point I went, I don’t know, I don’t understand that. Anyway, okay, still, what happens next? You can get past some of those things.

Now, what’s interesting is when you have a show that is built heavily on intentional mystery/confusion puzzle boxing, like Severance, it can actually be very hard to tell. Did this happen because you’re screwing with my head? Did this happen because something went a bit awry in production? It’s hard to tell. I give Severance the benefit of the doubt that everything is intentional. There is that illusion of intentionality that no matter what we see on screen, it was exactly the way they wanted us to see it.

It could be, well, maybe that was a stylistic choice to have them say that line over this big, huge wide shot. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but it’s cumulative. You get one of those, okay, you let it go. Two, eh, you start getting four or five of those things, the boat’s going to sink.

John: Yes. Over the summer, I helped out on a show that was doing reshoots, and you’re trying to be surgical, and you’re trying to not break any of the good stuff, but there have been times where it’s like, okay, that’s actually a pretty good scene, but it just doesn’t make sense with where we are right now, and we’re going to have to take all that information and put it into a new scene where it actually is where things fit better, and that’s, the frustration is that sometimes you have to lose good stuff in order to make everything else fit together right.

Craig: I’m going to give you, I rarely do this, but I will give you a specific example from my own career. I worked on the second Snow White and the Huntsman movie, and what had happened was they had a script, well, I’d actually worked on a script, I think, and that had gotten the thing to a green light, and then someone came on to make the movie, and they rewrote the script completely, and got all the way, I think, to they were like a week away from shooting, and the studio said, “Wait, hold on, we don’t like this.”

They then came back to me and said, “You’ve got about two weeks, and here’s the deal. These sets have been built, and these people have been cast, and this stuff is occurring because we’ve already spent the money on the visual effects development, so that’s not changing, but we need to make this all make sense, and so then it became an exercise in, right: I’m going to get some blue index cards that are stuff I can’t change, and now I have all these white index cards, and I have to figure out how to lead into those blue cards and out of those blue cards and into the next blue cards in a way that is at least coherent, and then provides hopefully what the actors are looking for, the studio’s looking for, there’s a new filmmaker on board, what is that filmmaker looking for, and that was very difficult, and in the end, you don’t get a prize for solving the math problem. Basically, people didn’t like it very much because it was, you could tell, it was like something had gone wrong here.

John: Absolutely, so what you’re describing is very analogous to what I was describing in the sense of things hadn’t been shot, but they might as well have been shot because you were locked into certain sets, I was locked into certain scenes, which that already exists, we’re never giving that actor back, so we got to go get me into it now in a way and put that in a place where it actually makes sense.

Craig: It doesn’t matter how much you protest, it doesn’t matter how much you say, if you would just not have to have this in that, and they’re like, yes, but we do, so that’s what’s happening, and also, you can’t write anything that would require a new set build. We don’t have the money or the time. Those kinds of math problems are sometimes how movies happen.

John: Absolutely, and sometimes creative constraints can lead to great solutions, but in two weeks, they’re not going to likely get you the best solution.

Craig: Everybody’s thinking maybe this will be, because it’s happened, maybe this will be that chaotic thing that comes together and is brilliant, because it’s happened. Usually, the best you can hope for is coherent.

John: Let’s wrap this up by saying, these are things that we’re noticing when we’re watching other people’s projects, but there’s so many things we’re not noticing at all. The patches were so well done that even we couldn’t see it. It was like the hardwood floors, they somehow matched everything together. It’s like, wow, you did a great job, because I did not know there was that issue there at all.

Craig: Listen, the first episode of The Last of Us was the first two episodes of The Last of Us that were combined together with some stuff removed and some stuff that I redid, and just a lot of interesting, careful weaving to make it as seamless as– and to make it seem inevitable, like it was meant to be that way. Tricky.

John: Tricky, yes. When it works, it works.

Craig: When it works, it works. That’s great. Thank you.

Links:

• Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections! SCRAMBLING by Tania Luna, LUMP by Leah Newsom, and THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS by J. Bryan Dick
• The King of Tars
• Sesame Street
• The Goes Wrong Show on Prime
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• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (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: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to episode 679 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Who’s Behind the Wheel? We’ll discuss point of view and storytelling in both film and TV, both on the script and scene level. We’ll also talk about the most dangerous person in the room, plus we’ll answer listener questions on visual effects, syntax, and dealing with clingers.

In our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll explain east side versus west side for non-Angelinos, also known as why Craig and I never see the ocean.

Craig is gone this week, but luckily we welcome back a very special guest. Liz Hannah is a writer, producer, and director whose credits include The Girl from Plainville, The Dropout, Mindhunter, Longshot, and The Post. Welcome back, Liz Hannah.

Liz Hannah: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John: We’re so excited to see you. We’ve been trying to schedule you for a bit. You’ve been super busy, but this was the week I texted and you got right back to me. I’m so happy to catch up with you.

Liz: Me too. I’m so happy we got it done. I know we’ve been keep trying to do it. 2025, just like 2024, the wheel keeps turning.

John: The wheel does keep turning. We’ve talked a lot about sort of that was weird and unique about 2025 already. We had Dennis Palumbo on to talk through how you try to get creative work done in this strange–

Liz: I loved that episode. I loved that episode.

John: Thank you.

Liz: It was great.

John: Thank you.

Liz: Sorry to interrupt but I feel like I dropped at a time, particularly where I was having the same conversation with so many creative friends, which was what that episode was about so strongly. I hope if you’re listening to this, you’ve already listened to that, but if you haven’t, please listen to that.

John: We had some listeners write in with their reaction to that. One of them is Ryan Knighton, who’s been on the show a couple of different times. Ryan Knighton is a Canadian writer, a blind writer who has traveled a bunch. Drew, read what Ryan had to say.

Drew Marquardt: “Years ago when I was on assignment for a magazine during the Arab Spring in Cairo, I interviewed a number of filmmakers and writers. All of them had stopped working. All of them were in fact quite depressed, they said. They were exhilarated by that political change, unlike the world around us right now, but their depression stemmed from the fact that they didn’t know what work to do. Simply put, they said, ‘How can you make art that refers to a world that no longer exists or is about to disappear? Make art about what?’ Even in positive political change, a similar anxiety, if not paralysis, emerges.”

John: What I thought was so great about Ryan’s point is it’s not just that we’re in this moment that feels so dark and scary. It’s just that we cannot even have a prediction about what the next couple of years will bring. People going through the Arab Spring, they could be really hopeful about the change that was ahead of them, but also they just didn’t understand how to write about the world that was going to be changing so quickly.

Liz: I think that it’s hard to think about what you’re doing on Thursday when this universe is happening, so it’s hard to think about what you could write. I think there’s a paralysis. I also feel like writers are searching for paralysis at times, so like when we have legitimate ones, it’s even doubly hard and surprising. I think that for me, I tend to write in political, social formats often, or worlds, and for me, there’s a paralysis of what should I be saying now.

I think when you’re going through something that feels as traumatic, honestly either positive or negative, there feels a pressure of a response to be valid and somehow parallel to what’s happening and somehow speaking to what’s happening. If you’re not doing that, then it feels defeatist of like, what am I doing with my time? Then I think also for me as a writer, which I know you spoke about on the episode with Dennis Palumbo, but as I’m a writer, what can I do to change the world with everything that’s going on?

You really can. I think that we both serve the roles as entertainers and as we can be mirrors to hold up to the world. We can be reflections on people in power. We can be reflections on where we want the world to go. We can be reflections on how the world is that nobody wants to see. All of that is, there’s a lot of pressure on that to do that well.

John: Because we’re a podcast by writers, largely for writers, it’s very easy to think about it just from our point of view, which is good because no one else is thinking about our point of view. It’s important to remember that there’s also other decision makers out there who are trying to think like, well, what movies should I buy? What movies, TV shows should I greenlight? You’re trying to develop this thing that’s going to come out in two years, three years, like what will even make sense?

One thing I’ve found on recent phone calls and pitches and things like that is if I can talk about things that are universal themes that will make sense, no matter what the world is like, that’s really helpful. One of the projects that I’m hoping to get going ultimately comes down to this moment of unexpected international cooperation to deal with a serious problem. It’s like, oh, that feels universal.

It feels hopeful. It feels like it’s a fraught idea to explore at this moment, but also a thing that you could see working really well for– It’s what we want to sit down in a theater and see. It’s like, oh, a bunch of people coming together and actually solving a problem. I think as we’re thinking about what we as writers are trying to create, we have to be mindful that the people on the other side of that table are also trying to figure out what the heck is going to make sense as these shows and these movies come out.

Liz: I don’t think it’s one-to-one, but I personally feel like I have to tread a little bit in hope right now. I am finding that to be a constant word that comes up in conversations with executives and conversations with buyers is we need to have something hopeful that can be revolutionary, that can be not. But I think something that isn’t living in the darkness that we are living in just by waking up and turning on the news, I feel like finding a way out of that is both universal, as you’re saying, and also something that we can always hold on to and the only thing we can hold on to right now.

John: I was listening to this Culture Gapfest this morning, and they were talking about an article and trying to differentiate optimism from social hope and the idea of optimism feels a little naive and it can feel self-defeating. I was like, “You’re ignoring the world around you.” Social hope is remembering that people can come together to actually achieve things when they need to. There’s reasons to still have hope even in dark moments and it’s a thing we need to kindle as writers, but also as parents. I think it just is making sure that you’re able to be developmentally appropriately honest with your kids about this moment that we’re in, but also how people come together to resolve these issues.

Liz: Yes, I have a three-year-old and so living through the past six months has been just very strange and seeing his community of other three-year-olds and how each of them really is developmentally different in terms of how much they’re perceiving of what’s happening and how much they’re not. My son, fortunately, is very deep into cars right now and cars are fine, so that’s great for him. We’ve been living in that world. Lightning McQueen, A-plus over here. I would love to talk about Cars 2 with somebody, just like really want to break that down.

Then other kids are really understanding it and really they understand who Donald Trump is. They know who Kamala Harris is. They understood what the election was, at least peripherally in terms of how it affected their universe and the world. It’s really hard, as you said, to balance being a parent and how you appropriately have that conversation with a three-year-old, a five-year-old, an 18-year-old, and how you balance that with yourself.

I think, as a writer, I have found myself paralyzed with what’s happening in the world, both with the pressure of how I feel I can respond and also just how, as a parent, I can function and raise him. The thing that I continue to go back to is hope, and I think it’s really important to differentiate that from being naive about just, oh, it’ll all be fine. Hope doesn’t come without parameters that are, we’ll have to do a lot of work to get to the place that we can be hopeful for. Part of that is working.

When I wrote The Post, I’d been writing that movie for a long time, and it just so happened to come out in the era of Donald Trump, and I sold it right before the election in 2016. That’s the thing I’d say to writers who are looking for a way to respond, is tell the story that’s in you. It will always be relevant if it is something that you find relevant to your path and your existence.

John: Absolutely. Now you’re working on The Post 2, the Bezos era, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be fantastic. Just so much better. All those dilemmas of Katharine Graham and all the things, now the problems are solved.

Liz: Yes. We fixed it all in 1971.

John: We did it, team. Another bit of follow-up, that same episode with Dennis Palumbo, we answered a listener question about a listener who was comparing themselves to the Pixar brain trust, and feeling like, well, I’ll never be able to do as well as the Pixar brain trust. Drew, what did Scott have to say?

Drew: Scott said, “My framing of this is to think of it this way. I need to write a spec script so good that really talented people would read it and want to work with me on the project. It’s still a high bar, but it’s not as daunting as saying you have to write something as good as Toy Story all by your lonesome.”

John: All right. I think that’s fair. We talk about writing a script as like, this is the plan for making the movie, but it’s also a document that shows how good of a writer you are, and that hopefully, people will want to invite you into a room to do things. Liz, you started as a feature writer, but you also worked in rooms with other writers, and you start to realize like, oh, we are smarter together than any one of us is individually.

Liz: Yes. I think there are at least two things to that. One, I completely agree about a script being a document. I don’t write novels because I want to write a screenplay that becomes a visual piece. In that, there are thousands more of collaborators, but you as the screenwriter, your draft of the screenplay, that goes, be it a spec or be it your working draft that gets a director attached or whatever it is, that’s like your metal that you can show and that’s your proof of concept of yourself as a writer. I think it’s important while difficult to compartmentalize the steps and the successes that are possible at every stage of a screenplay. I wrote The Post as a spec to get representation and to have a career.

I did not write it because I thought it would get made. I’ve said it many times, but it was– it’s a moral thriller where the two leads are in their ’50s, no one kisses, there is not an ounce of sex in it, and truly the piece of the puzzle is solved within the first six minutes of the movie and then the rest is just like, do we do it or not? I wanted to watch it and I wanted to make it and so that’s why I wrote it. The screenplay changed my life, then the movie changed my life, but there were very significantly different stages of that one was involved with the screenplay.

The other thing I’ll say is that absolutely working in a room, it’s always better to have more brains than one, in my opinion. They have to be the right brains. They’re not always the right brains. That’s the thing about a room that is complex is sure. There are showrunners I know who’ve had dozens of rooms and their rooms are nearly perfect at this point because you’re working with the same brain trust that you have cultivated over the course of your career. That doesn’t always happen and it doesn’t happen often early and I think it’s trial and error, but when you get that room that fits perfectly for you and for what you’re doing, then yes, it’s great.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the episode that you were on with Liz Meriwether talking through your experiences on those rooms and it became so clear that how you cast those rooms, how you put those rooms together makes all the difference in the ability to achieve a vision. You can still have a singular vision of that showrunner, that creator, but they have help.

The original listener who wrote in with that question was like, all right, I’ll never be as good as a Pixar brain trust. It’s like, yes, but you get to be part of that Pixar brain trust by showing what you can do and by allowing yourself to be part of that community. It’s also the very understandable sin of confusing your first work with someone’s finished thing and the way that we– if we went back and looked at early drafts of things based on what they became, you see the transformation that the process itself brings out.

Liz: It’s also, calling it a brain trust, I feel like simplifies it almost. It’s more of like a full body that has been completed because you have one person who’s a really good right arm. You have one person who’s a really good left brain. You have specialties within that “brain trust” that are specific and going to exactly what you just said, like knowing your strengths and showing those strengths on the page gets you to be the right arm in that room rather than thinking that you can accomplish the entire personage that is the writer’s room of a Pixar movie, which by the way has multiple iterations throughout the life of a Pixar movie. This isn’t the same four people for 10 years.

John: If people want to go back and listen to the deep dive we did on Frozen, they had a plan for that movie and well into the process as they were watching it on the screen like, “Oh no, this is not right.” Then it was coming in and recognizing, “Here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working. How do we steer towards the part of the movie that it wants to be?” That’s also part of the process. It’s the thing we don’t see as often in feature films, but in TV as we’re back in the old days when you were shooting episode by episode, you’re finding episode by episode.

Now that we do things more as a block, you have to really then take a gestalt look at the whole project and figure out, okay, where are we at? Where are we getting to? That’s actually one of the main things we’ll talk about today in the episode is really point of view and perspective and storytelling power. That’s the thing you discover in the process, whether that process is a long movie development or episode by episode or breaking the whole thing as a room. That’s part of the journey. It’s part of the discovery and you have to be open to that as a reality of writing.

Liz: I’m not sure if you talked about this on that episode because I, unfortunately, missed it, but there’s also an amazing six-part documentary about Frozen 2, which is on Disney+, which comes in towards the end of the– They don’t have a ton of the feedback of it, but they do have that, they don’t know what the main song is going to be. They walk you through all the animation process. It’s amazing. I really recommend it, particularly if you think that any one person or any six people do it on their own at Pixar or Disney Animation, you’re very mistaken.

John: That’s great. Back in episode 652, we were talking with a playwright who was having trouble adapting their work to film and Tony wrote some feedback on that.

Drew: Tony says, “Craig touches on it in the beginning when he says that plays are inside and movies are outside, but I would take it a step further relating a similar comparison that was shared with me, that plays are driven by what people say to each other while movies are driven by what people do.”

John: I like that as a distinction. Plays are mostly talking. They really are. It’s about the verbal fights and spars and [unintelligible 00:15:28] we have between those characters and movies, we see people doing things. I think that originates with the fact that movies are brutal. Fundamentally a visual medium that sound came later. We tell stories through pictures on the screen.

Liz: I think that’s great. We’re going to talk about it, but I think that POV in general is an interesting distinction between film and television and plays and that doesn’t mean that you can’t have privileged POV in plays, but I think it’s really specifically different because of the visual aspects, the visual tools and technical tools that you have in features in television, but I like that. I think that’s a great distinction.

John: Yes, I like it. A phrase that Craig and I have discussed often on the podcast is begs the question, which does not mean invites the question. It really, it’s a legal term that means circular reasoning and things like that. I saw a piece by Alex Kirshner this week where he said begets the question, which I think is a clever way to use the framework of begs the question, but actually have it make sense.

Begets the question, it causes us to think of the question of this next thing. If you are reaching for begs the question, maybe add an ET in there and make it begets the question and maybe that’s how we’ll get through this annoying thing where begs the question has come to mean something it was not originally meant to mean.

Liz: Love that.

John: Love it.

Liz: I love being a trendsetter too, so I’m going to start using that and people will be like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?”

John: Absolutely. Begets the question.

I was talking with a friend at dinner this last week and he works on government contracts. He doesn’t work for the government, but he works on government contracts and he was told that they are supposed to remove all their pronouns from their email footers because of Musk and Trump and everybody else, which is nuts. I just want to have a small moment to rail against this because here is like, even if you believe in that woke-ism and all these things have to go away, pronouns are so effing useful.

It’s so nice to see if there’s a name, I don’t know, or if it’s a Chris or a Robin, to know whether it’s a he or her or who am I talking to is so useful. There’s this expectation that all names we can automatically understand the gender of, we simply can’t. I would just encourage people to put that in their email footer just so everyone knows, so that if it’s– Particularly if it’s a Chinese person is looking at this, they understand like, oh, I’m talking to a man versus a woman. I think it’s just ridiculous. I say, please keep putting your pronouns there. I think it’s useful.

Liz: Yes. Also, there are so many things to be concerned about in this world. There are so many legitimate problems. The idea that this government is attacking existence and attacking things that are not hurting people, like putting your pronouns in your emails, which of course is a tangent of attacking trans rights and the queer community. We’re smarter than you, we see what you’re doing. It’s just so beyond infuriating to me that I don’t actually have an articulate thing to say other than how petty and small and bored must you be that these are the things that you’re attacking.

John: My case I’m trying to make is that in addition to being helpful for a group of marginalized people, it’s just helpful for everybody.

Liz: Yes, I agree.

John: It’s just so damn useful. It’s like a small innovation that was just incredibly helpful. To take it away because you’re worried about the political valence of it is dumb.

Liz: It’s all dumb, yes.

John: It’s just my small rant on a topic. On more happy, positive news, this last week we launched Highland Pro. It’s now in the Mac and iOS app stores. It went great. We were a little bit nervous. We did a soft launch in Australia just to make sure that it would actually work properly and that people could subscribe to it. It’s worked really great.

Thank you to everybody who wrote in with the comments to Drew. Drew’s been sorting through the mailbox. Thank you to everyone who left a review. That is super helpful. Liz, I sent you a copy. I don’t know if you had a chance to play with it yet.

Liz: No, I am in a deep, dark place of not writing right now. When I do write, I will. This is why your podcast two weeks ago was very helpful. No, I’m currently in a like, carding, and Google document phase. That’s where I’m at.

John: That’s great.

Liz: I love Highland. I’m so excited. Can I shout out my favorite edition or my favorite aspect of this? Because it’s insane that we haven’t created this. I’m sorry for not knowing exact way that you do it. I always call it a scratch pile or like I have a different file draft document where I put things in there where I don’t want to get rid of them but like I don’t want them in this draft and I always have two documents and it’s always annoying because you’re like, where is this? You guys have created just a place that you can put it for every document.

John: It’s just a shelf.

Liz: It’s just the shelf where you put it.

John: The shelf [unintelligible 00:20:23]

Liz: I saw this in the program and I was like, this is great. This is so useful. It’s just there’s a lot of common sense things which is not dismissive but there are common sense aspects to Highlands that I’m very appreciative of that shouldn’t be hard to be in there for writers.

John: Absolutely. We’re excited to have it out there in the world. I’m excited for people to copy things from it because the other apps will do the things we do which is great because it makes the world better for other people too. Fantastic. If you want to try it, it’s on the Mac App Store. It’s on the iOS App Store. You can just go to “apps.com” and see more stuff there. You can see a little video of me talking about it. In fact, if you want to see, it will throw people because so many people when they meet me in person like, “Oh wait, I wasn’t expecting your voice to come out of that face.” You’ll see my face. You’ll see me talking there and see how it all fits in person.

Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is about the driver’s seat. This is something that occurred to me this last week. I was watching two series that I really enjoy. Severance and The White Lotus. I was thinking about which characters in those series were allowed to drive episodes, which characters were allowed to drive scenes by themselves. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but mostly from the context of features. In features, very early on, you established the rules for the audience, the social contract of like, these are characters who can drive scenes and these are characters who can be in scenes but not drive them themselves.

We’ve talked through issues even in the first three pages where we’re confused from whose point of view we’re telling a story. Liz, as somebody who has done more episodic work, I feel like those are some fundamental choices that you are making early on in the pilot, but also in those rooms. And you have the opportunity to bend or break those rules as you go through a season, as you’re figuring out episode by episode. Talk to us about what you think of when you think of the driver’s seat or point of view or even some other terms that you might be using when you’re referring to this phenomenon.

Liz: I think point of view, an episode protagonist is something that we use a lot. I am actually, breaking a series right now and point of view is incredibly important to the storytelling of it and there are a number of point-of-view characters within it. My partner and I, after we sold the show and we were like, let’s sit down and really think about what we want to say, how we want to say it. The how you want to say it is what characters do you want to say it.

That for me is a day one conversation because I can’t really start to break story without knowing who is going to be telling that story to an audience and who I’m going to be trusting with that story and who my audience is going to be trusting. By the way, that might be a trick, right? When you have a point of view character, it’s always privileged storytelling because they are not just a narrator telling you what’s happening. They are telling it through the lens of them as it is also a character revolving in the story. I think it’s really for me fundamental.

On Plainville, we had a lot of point-of-view characters because we had three timelines and we had a central thesis which I think does begin to adjust how you have these conversations which was, what if everyone was involved in this? It was a challenge to ourselves which is, what if we step back and don’t take a black-and-white perspective on this and say she’s the villain, he’s the victim?

Let’s look at everybody in a three-dimensional way and once we start doing that and telling that story of how these two people ended up here and their families ended up here, what are the scenes that come out of that story that feel organic and then who are the storytellers of those scenes? Lynn was always a primary storyteller, Coco’s mother, both because of her own trauma and her own journey but also because there were stories to be told about him that should come from her and shouldn’t necessarily have come from him because you are your own main character of your own life.

I think it’s really important. I think that happens organically in any series and should happen organically at the top because, in my opinion, you don’t know what story you’re telling until who’s telling it. That goes for features or television. I think of Severance in particular, now you’re adding another layer to this which is the privileged storytelling. Which is, you as the filmmaker are withholding very significant beats from the audience and you’re probably feeding incorrect or–

John: Misdirections, at least.

Liz: Yes, misdirections to the audience that you also don’t want the audience to be upset about. You don’t want an audience to feel betrayed by those misdirections. You don’t want the audience to feel betrayed by your storytelling techniques, but you do want them to be surprised. I think the crafting of that is a whole other level that I’m sure begins with what we were just talking about, which is who are my storytellers? Then also, at what point do I start to lie or misdirect?

John: I want to separate those two ideas out a little bit. There’s who has storytelling power and within the world of the stories or who do we get to drive things? Then also, really the social contract you’re making with the audience about not just who’s telling the story, but to what degree you as the creator of the show, as the show itself, is allowed to misdirect and do a magic trick on the audience.

Let’s start with the first part because one of the things you said that I thought was so interesting is you talked about storytelling power. You mentioned narration, and most series are never going to have narration. You’re not going to hear the person’s inner thoughts. That’s actually a useful way of thinking about who can drive a scene. Could that person literally have a voiceover?

Would it make sense for that character to talk directly to the audience? If it is, then they clearly have storytelling power. They can actually speak directly to the audience. In Big Fish, the movie, both Edward Bloom and Will Bloom can speak directly to the audience. You hear them talking directly to the audience. That choice I had to make in those first 10 pages to let it know both of these people can talk directly into your ears.

In most series, most movies, you’re not going to have that, but the equivalent of that is who is driving a scene by themselves? Who is the person who the scene doesn’t start until they enter the room? Those are fundamental choices. As you’re thinking about that on a series level, you might say, “Oh, we need to know what’s happening with Jane and Bob in this whole thing.” But if neither of those characters has been established in a way that we can expect to see them in a scene by themselves, that’s going to feel weird.

Those are the reasons why you can’t cut to are you a show that will cut to the random security guard and his conversation with somebody or not? Those are big choices you need to make early on. You can have fun with it at times. I can think about in The Mandalorian, they’ll cut to a conversation between two faceless guards who are having a little conversation, but it’s always in service of the bigger storyline. You’re not going to keep coming back to them as a runner.

Liz: I think there’s also the question of if you have to know what’s happening with Steve and Jane, but you’ve never established them as POV characters, then do you really need to know what’s happening with them? Because I think that it can become overwhelming sometimes, particularly when you’re starting out as a feature writer or as a television writer of I have to tell everyone’s story.

This is the other thing going back to the difference between plays and feature and television. In plays, you have a set cast, and you can only have so many people there, and you can only tell so many stories within that set cast. With television, in particular, it can be endless. You can continue to add cast as the episodes go on, and many shows do. Is the story that you’re telling with that cast member, that character, important to the story that you’re telling overall?

Which is why I do think it’s really important to come down to theme and come down to, as a creator, as a storyteller, what is it that you want to say, and what do you want to have your audience leave with. We always talk about blue sky in the writer’s room, which is that first two weeks, which is so lovely when you get to just sit with the writers and talk about what you want to have happen. It’s big dreams and there’s no bad answers and there’s no wrong answers. That all comes later.

For me, by the end of that week or two weeks, I want to know what the show is that we’re making. What are we collectively saying, and what are we all on board to collectively say? On The Dropout, we had a lot of conversations about her, about Elizabeth Holmes, and about the characterization of her within the series. What did we want to say, and how did we want to say it?

There was a lot of perspectives about her, in particular, at the time, and so a lot of our conversations were pushing that out and coming with our own bias to the table and then talking about that bias. Similar with Michelle Carter in Plainville, was a lot of people having a bias towards her, and that’s fine. I don’t think everybody should have the same opinion. That’s important. Again, when you talk about the brain trust, it’s important for not everybody to agree.

John: Let’s talk about Elizabeth Holmes. Clearly, she’s the centerpiece of the story, and she does protagonate over the course of it. We see her grow and change over the course of it, but if you’d locked into her POV exclusively for the entire run of the series, it would have been exhausting, and you really would have had a very hard time understanding what anybody else was doing, because she’s mostly for better, for dramatic purposes. She is, I don’t know if you want to say a narcissist, but she is, she’s really at the center of all this stuff, and she herself does not have a lot of insight into the people around her. You needed to be able to establish early on that we’d have scenes that were not centered upon her and understand what was going on around her.

Liz: I think she’s quite unempathetic, and just, if you’d never watched The Dropout and you only watched the documentary or listened to the podcast, it’s very hard to empathize with Elizabeth Holmes. Part of our goal was to infuse some empathy into her character, and I think empathy is the important word here. I don’t want anybody to sympathize with her. I think she’s quite hard to sympathize with. Empathize in terms of, can you put yourself in her shoes and see it from her perspective for a moment within the series? It doesn’t have to be the entirety of the series, but can you take a step back for a moment and not just go, whew, that monster, and find yourself into it that way? That was really important for us.

Then I think a word we continue to use, protagonist, which I think is important rather than hero of the story because the heroes of that story were not Elizabeth Holmes. The heroes of that story were other true people who worked at Theranos, as well as people who were just the day-to-day people who were completely affected by that. They are the heroes of their own stories, as well as this one as a whole. I think it’s important to remember when you’re trying to break out your point of view characters, they don’t have to be the hero of the story, they don’t have to be the villain of the story, but they are often the protagonist of the story.

John: I want to talk about protagonists as it relates to a recent episode of Severance. Again, we will not do any spoilers here, but in the second season, there’s an episode that is largely from the point of view of a minor character, a character whose name we knew but had never had storytelling power, and suddenly it’s all centered around her, and Mark, who is clearly the hero of the story, clearly a point of view character.

What I found interesting as I was watching, I thought it was fantastic, and I wondered as it finished, “Wait, did anything actually happen, or were we just filling in backstory?” Then I was like, “Oh, no. She really was the protagonist of the story.” She was the one who came into this episode with a need, a want, a desire, and was trying to do it, and we saw her in every moment trying to create some agency for herself to be able to affect the change that she wanted to affect.

The episode had a very classical beginning, middle, and end of a character who was trying to achieve one aim in this episode, which is good classic TV. At the same time was intercutting to show you all the history that led up to the moments that we were at. I thought it was an incredibly good episode, but also a really good reminder of the attention and craft required to both move the ball forward as a series while still having stakes and development and progress within an episode.

Liz: I have not watched that episode.

John: Hopefully my vagueness is useful.

Liz: No, it’s great. I think I do know who it is, and if I don’t, it still brings me to the same point, which is, I think that you have those conversations in the writer’s room when you begin to talk about that character very early on. Which is, I would imagine that in season one or in season two, whenever that character is first mentioned or introduced, You probably, as a showrunner, have in the back of your head, I really would like to see the perspective of this character of what is happening or of a separate story. I want to know more about this character because it affects your casting.

It affects your conversations of, okay, so if we are going to see a privileged point of view of that character at some point, how is that affecting the characters we’re seeing on screen now? I love when television shows do that in good ways, in successful ways, because it can both fill in the blanks on some things, but more importantly, you can think that a story is contained in a box and you realize that the box is open. Now there are things that you had no idea to be curious about that now you’re curious about, so it can change your perception of the series.

John: A term we’ve used a couple times here is privileged storytelling, and I’d love to unpack that because I’m hearing that to mean it is the special relationship of the show to certain characters or how we as an audience also understand that the show is not telling us everything.

Liz: I think it’s that. I think it’s two things, so we’ll just complicate it even more. I think it’s yes, that, and then I also think that it is a privileged storytelling of a character’s inner life that the rest of the characters are not privy to. For instance, with Mark in Severance, from the pilot, we know, as the audience, more about him than he does, because he obviously is severed. There is privileged storytelling in two ways, that I think is, in Severance in particular, exceptionally well done, and at a very high level, that would drive me insane.

For instance, on The Dropout, it was privileged for the audience to know that the box didn’t work. Because we knew that, she knew that, but not everybody within the series knew that. In Plainville, we knew that Coco and Michelle’s relationship was not what Michelle was telling everybody that it was, but they don’t know that. I think it’s important to distinguish as a writer and as a storyteller, what information everybody has, why they have it, and if the audience has it as well, how that changes their perception of what is coming next.

John: This is what is so complicated about writing, is that we have to be able to both be the architects who know why everything is there and how it all fits together, and we know if we have perfect insight to everything, and be able to step outside and say, okay, from the artist’s point of view, where are we at, how much do we know? In a case like Severance, where we have so much more information than the characters themselves know, and we have to be looking at Adam Scott’s characters like, this is this version of Adam Scott who wouldn’t know this other thing, and how is this all tracking?

It’s complicated, but I think that’s honestly the excitement and the reward of it. It’s so difficult to do on a writing point of view, but it can be so satisfying when it works well from an audience’s point of view because it’s requiring us to use our brains in interesting ways that are actually natural to how we are built to function. I think we have this inherent desire to understand other people’s motivations because it’s a useful survival mechanism for us, and it’s engaging all those things in our brains.

Liz: The only thing I would add to that is my own personal opinion, at least as how I come from a writer and as a viewer, which is the actual events of any story, but we’ll take Severance. If you gave me a five-page document that told me everything that we’re getting to and what’s happened, it just won’t be that interesting. It just won’t. It will never be that interesting.

What is interesting is how each character unfolds the story in front of them, how each turn happens, how I’m allowed to participate in each turn, and how the information is interpreted both by me and the people on the show and the people that I talk to about the show. So I think it’s important, at least for me, to always come character first when we’re talking about point of view and come from character first of empathy and character first of journey. For instance, is the story of Watergate most interestingly told through Nixon’s point of view or from the two journalists who fought for a year to break that story?

When you start even at the very beginning, for me, with the Pentagon Papers, is the most interesting version of this to tell the story of how the New York Times got the Pentagon Papers, potentially, is the most interesting version for me, Katharine Graham, and that it’s actually about her becoming the publisher of The Post and having her coming-of-age moment, that’s more interesting to me, and that’s the point of view in which I’m telling that story.

John: This is a reminder that after 679 episodes of this series, it always does come back to the fact that storytelling is not about the what, it’s about the how. It’s how you tell the story makes all the difference. Point of view, driver’s seat, who’s in control of telling the story is one of those fundamental how decisions that you need to make early on. If you made the wrong choice, well then go back and rethink it from another point of view. The reason why Liz is doing all this work on notecards this week is because she’s figuring out the how before she starts putting pen to paper.

Liz: Also, it’s really hard to write.

John: You’re avoiding writing.

[laughter]

Liz: Writing is hard.

John: Writing is hard. Let’s switch to something that’s a little less crafty and more the business that we’re in. This was a thread by Todd Alcott this last week where he was talking about– he was actually referring to some political events, but I really liked his description of what he saw in Hollywood all the time. He’s talking about the stranger in the room. Drew, if you could just read through– It’s not the whole thread, but something that will link to the full thread, but read through what Todd was describing about the stranger in the room.

Drew: “Screenwriters especially are well aware of the role of the stranger in the room. The stranger in the room is anyone in the meeting who is just there as a friend, someone who has no creative authority on and no stake in the project being discussed, anyone in the room who is a last-minute addition. Sometimes it’s a 20-something intern, sometimes it’s an executive from a sister office, sometimes it’s someone from marketing, or sometimes it’s an older, more experienced producer who’s lending a hand for a day.

The purpose of the stranger in the room is to destroy the project. The stranger in the room is the one who, after the writer and producer, and director have all agreed on the direction of the story, says, ‘Well, how will that play in China?’ Or, ‘This sounds a lot like whatever movie,” or, “But isn’t this movie really about love?” Then, suddenly, the balance in the room shifts. Suddenly, a collaboration, a negotiation, as it were, becomes an argument, where, just moments earlier, everyone was agreeing on how awesome the project sounded. Now, suddenly, the creatives are on one side, the suits are on the other, and the meeting becomes a power struggle, one the creatives can only lose because the suits have the money and the creatives only have the art.

John: Oh, this gave me such terrible flashbacks because I’ve been in those rooms where like, “Oh, wait, who’s that person? Who’s that?” Things are going well, and they ask questions, and they just start pulling threads. Creative challenging is fantastic if you’re poking at that thing, but then you realize like, “No, no, you’re here to destroy this. You are here to sink this ship.” At least three or four times in my career, I can really point to like, “Oh, this was a trap. This was a setup. This was meant to ruin a thing.” So I want to acknowledge this. I’m not sure I have specific solutions for it or guidance for it.

Liz: I’m breaking into a sweat having this conversation, legitimately.

John: This has happened to you.

Liz: Yes, I’ve never heard the phrase, “Stranger in the room.”

John: No, neither have I.

Liz: Maybe that’s terrifying me because now I’m putting pieces together through my career. Creative conversation, creative conflicts, creative pushing is always good at the appropriate time. I think what this is we’ve already gotten past these 12 hurdles, and now this person is like, “Let’s go back to Hurdle 1, and let’s start talking about that,” or, “Let’s go back to Hurdle 6, and let’s talk about that.”

It’s funny, out of nowhere today, maybe because I had read the rundown for the show and was thinking about this, and sort of like, “That never happened to me,” and then now I’m sweating. I was thinking about this one experience I had making a movie. We were on set. It was an indie. We were trying to figure out how to make this movie for no money and all of that. The director had called me the night before and pitched to me how we could save some days or things like that. He had pitched to me an idea of losing this one scene.

The knee-jerk reaction for any writer is like, “No, every scene’s important.” Then I thought about it and I was like, “Well, maybe we could move the content of the scene to someplace else.” Particularly as a writer on set, your job is the problem solver. Your job is to maintain the integrity of the show or the feature while making it producible. I was like, “Yes, I think we can do that.”

Then the next day I went into a meeting and one of the collaborators on the project was like, “Oh no, we absolutely can’t do that,” and really pulled it back. Then we went backwards in time to going to why this scene existed and all of this. I sort of was like, “If I’m the writer and I can say we can lose this scene, then we should probably move on from this argument.” We didn’t, and we continued to have it until we still lost that scene.

I promise there’s an end to this, which is I generally find the stranger in the room as they’re saying whatever they’re saying purely out of ego and purely out of the need for their voice to be heard. I don’t generally believe that it is for the goodness of the project. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be, but if you are the stranger in the room, and you are saying something like this, you know that it’s not positive, you know that it won’t end well. There’s no other reason for that to be said other than, “I want to be heard, and I need you to hear me.”

That goes to my advice, which is hear them. Let them be heard. Acknowledge whatever feelings are being felt by everybody and whatever threads are being pulled on. Then get off of the call as fast as humanly possible and never talk about it again.

John: Yes. It’s lovely that it could be in a call. I’ve had this happen in person twice. One case was the executive. Literally, we were like weeks away from shooting. I was like, “Listen, I think it would be best if we went back to cards and really thought about this.” I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, We’re not going back to cards. This is not a fundamental situation.”

Another meeting where I was on my polished step and this producer asked me basically a fundamental POV question. It’s like, “Well, what if it wasn’t about this, but it was about this other thing instead?” I was like, “Where do you think we’re at?” In both those situations, I extricated myself as well as I could from that situation.

Liz, what I think you bring up, which is so insightful, sometimes I’ve been the stranger in the room, I’ve tried to be really mindful of, “Listen, I see a fundamental problem here. How do I both acknowledge the fundamental problem and help steer people correctly without just blowing the whole thing up?” I think that is a delicate art too. It’s really making clear, within the reality of the space you’re in, what is the most work or the best work that could be done to get people to the next place.

If I truly feel like, “You need to stop this,” or, “You need to kill this,” I will always do that in a one-on-one and not in a group situation. Because I think it’s the group situation, the social dynamics of it that make it so awful. It’s like, you’re around a set of people who are seeing these things. If it was just a one-on-one conversation, it wouldn’t happen.

Liz: Yes, my scenario was also in person. I also, just as a human, don’t tend to react well in person to these scenarios because I’m just like, “Why are we having this conversation? We’ve already done this. There’s really big fish to fry, this isn’t one of them.” I think you bring up a bunch of really good points, one of which is that sometimes there is something true behind it, and though it means more work, or fundamental work that seems to have been accomplished, there might be some truth to the note.

To be clear, I think it’s important to always look at each note as if there is truth behind it. I do not believe in dismissing notes. One of your episodes, which I send to people, which is, “How to Give Notes to Writers,” which is one of the most foundational podcast episodes that anyone working in this business should listen to, because so much about this is about presentation, both from writers receiving notes and people giving notes. That process can immediately taint whatever the note is very quickly and very easily.

Look, we are sensitive, sweet, often thin-skinned people in this industry who don’t like to be wrong. That doesn’t always make for the best amount of collaboration when it gets to that stage where you are so close to the end. I think it’s important to really look at who the note’s coming from, how the note is coming to you, and process that in whatever way that you have to process it to hear the note.

I also really go back to something that Christopher McQuarrie said, which is, I’m going to butcher, but it’s something I think about a lot, which is, “There is no bad note.” There is no such thing as a bad note. There is such thing as a poorly given note, but there’s no such thing as a bad note. Because if you’re getting noted on something, it just means you’re not doing your job as a writer. You’re either not doing your job by how you’re telling the story, you’re either not doing your job of the point of view, or you’re not doing your job selling it.

That, for me, really changed my way of hearing notes and hearing the way in which I should think about them. I also want to say, that doesn’t mean you’re a take-every-note, but it means that you need to consider why it’s being given to you.

John: Yes. One of the things about Todd’s thread that really resonated for me is that the person who was coming in to do this job really had no stake in it or didn’t have the most immediate stakes. I wanted to differentiate that person from a questioner. Questioners can be just incredibly annoying. There’ll be directors, or producers, or actors, who will just want to have a three-hour meeting where they pull everything apart, and it’s just part of their process in how they figure out stuff. It’s so annoying. As a writer, it can be torture.

You see, “Okay, there’s an end product, there’s a reason why we’re doing this,” and you just have to put up with it and live in that space with it. Sometimes good things will come out of it, sometimes it gets to be frustrating. You understand, they are making a genuine effort to make this fit right into their brain, and that’s a valid process. It’s the stranger in the room, it’s the person who’s just there to be an assassin, whether they know it or not. They’re there as an excuse for killing a thing or for destroying a thing.

I think if you’re going into a meeting, this is some practical advice here, try to know who’s supposed to be in the meeting. If someone shows up who’s not supposed to be in that meeting, your spider sense should tingle a little bit just to make sure you understand something hinkey could happen here. Usually, it’s going to be a more senior person or some other person like that. If it’s another writer, be especially alarmed because that can be weird. That’s happened a couple of times where it’s like, “Why are you there, Mr. High-profile screenwriter? That doesn’t feel great to me.”

Liz: Who I know comes on and does rewrites. That’s so weird that you’re here.

John: That’s so weird. Maybe you’re thinking about the same person who’s been in that room. If that happens, that’s reasonable. Sometimes it is actually that junior executive. I’ve been in a couple of situations, “Why is this person doing this? Why is this person here?” First off, it’s great if they’re there to learn stuff, but when they then ask the questions and pull stuff, in TV pitches, I’ve had this happen more often, where they start to ask you for needless detail. I’m like, “Oh, okay, great, I’ll help you out here.”

Liz: I agree, but I don’t think any stranger in the room is there without a goal. Unless you have invited them there, unless you as the writer have invited a friend or something like that to hear this. If there’s an intern in the room, the intern is trying to prove to their bosses why they should have a promotion. If the writer is there, they’re proving to their bosses that they’re going to get the rewrite. You have to really evaluate the stranger in the room’s intention. Most often, there is something behind it. That doesn’t mean it’s malicious to you. It doesn’t mean that it’s personal. It also doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. It just means, again, going back to how it’s being delivered and the surprise factor.

To be frank, when you get to that stage and you have a junior executive that’s never been in a meeting start giving notes, you’re kind of like, “Wait, haven’t we gotten past this?” It can be alarming. I always try and think about notes in any stage, be it a stranger in the room or an evil person in the room, just to think about the context in which the note is coming to you.

John: Absolutely. If you are that intern in the room, the person who’s invited in, try to get a sense, you can even ask ahead of time, “What do you want me to do in this room?” Especially if you’re talking to the writer or the creatives, you have to be respectful and delicate and make sure you’re leading with some praise and if you’re asking a question, there’s nothing in that question that has a subtext of like, “You idiot, this doesn’t make any sense.” That’s where you run into problems.

Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Drew: “After a little industry success, I’m now discovering that I have friends, distant relatives, and son acquaintances who want to pick my brain or set me up on blind date-style meetings with my cousin who just started film school. I’ve even had friends and relatives share my email address without asking me. I like to share with people who are starting out, as a few people did for me when I started. However, I’m not sure how to decline when the connection is forced and I don’t want the obligation or how to distance when someone becomes too persistent, asking for Zoom after Zoom, sending life story emails, or asking to send me their screenplays. How do you guys deal with getting cornered by family and friends? How do you deal with clingers?”

John: Okay, so my mom, rest in peace, love her to death, but she would try to connect me with anybody and everybody. She was overgenerous about this. I had to step in and say, “Mom, you need to stop doing that. This is not useful for anybody. I will talk to your Boulder Screenwriters Group once, but I’m not going to do it every year. I’m not going to do it all the time.” I think Craig and I have the convenient excuse of we do a podcast every week that everyone can listen to and that’s the conversation. Before I did that, and for everybody else who doesn’t have their own podcast, bless you. Liz, do you have any suggestions for ways to be tactful and helpful but not deal with clingers?

Liz: Yes. Boundary is really important. Establishing that you cannot share your personal information that cannot be shared is really important. I also have a work email and a personal email. I think having those two, still setting boundaries, but those two are really important because if there is someone that you feel that you can be helpful to or feels polite and appropriate that you can reach out to, then you can do that from your work email. I know that it seems silly, but it does not feel as disruptive to me when it’s going to my work email. It feels like that’s the right avenue for it to happen.

Look, I try and talk to whoever I can. I try and be as helpful with my time and energy as I can be because I had a lot of people be helpful with theirs when I was coming up, you being one of them. I don’t have a podcast, so trying to do that is important. Having the ability to say, “Look, I totally would love to talk to you. My life is really crazy right now, so I can do it for an hour in March or I can do a 15-minute call now or I can do–” I just think really boundaries and being honest with yourself that you are a kind person for having any conversation and extolling any experience to people is really going above and beyond.

John: Yes, I completely agree with you on boundaries. Also, just establishing those boundaries at the start in a really friendly way. Saying, “I don’t have the time to read anything.” The truth is we’re all crazy all the time. We never really have time to do things. You can also say, “I’m sorry, but no, I can’t.” That’s also fair too. People have busy lives.

Listen, I have Drew and so Drew is the first filtering mechanism for people who are going to try come at me. Even independent of that, I think you just have to have your own system for saying no and not feeling awful about it or ignoring things and not feeling awful about it. That’s the reality. People ignore emails all the time. It’s not a crime.

Liz: I would say also go with your gut. I honestly have – knock on wood – had 99% wonderful experiences with people that have reached out or asked for a Zoom, a coffee, or whatever. I don’t read scripts unless it’s from somebody I know.

John: Same.

Liz: I think that is a step too far for me. I always just go legally, it’s a step too far. If you’re looking for a way to say, “No, I can’t read that, but I’ll talk to you,” then that’s the way I always go. It’s like, “I can’t read your script legally; it’s too complex for me to do that, but I’m happy to talk to you about what issues you’re having storytelling-wise and see if I can help.”

John: The other thing I think is useful for me to say, which is absolutely 100% true, is that when it comes to how do I break into the industry? How do I do this? How do I do this stuff? I can talk to you about scene work. I can talk to you about how movies work. I cannot talk to you about what it’s like to be a 20-something-year-old starting in 2025 in this town. That’s just not my experience. You’re much better off dealing with people who are just there and have just moved through that space than I will be.

One of the reasons why we try to keep bringing on guests who are newer in the industry is to make sure that we’re still hitting the realities of what it’s like to be in those moments right now because like, Craig and our experience, it’s 30 years past that, and it’s not the experience of starting in 2025. Let’s go to Dean, who’s writing about the visual effects industry.

Drew: “Regarding the sudden shutdown of The Mill and MPC and Hollywood VFX in general, how is it that these giant companies working on some of the biggest and most profitable movies and shows in the world keep going bankrupt? Their work is world-class. It keeps happening. What is it about VFX that is clearly unsustainable?”

John: Clearly, this email came in before Technicolor also shut down. It’s horrible. Listen, I don’t understand VFX economics, but clearly, a different situation has to be figured out because we’re able to do incredible visual effects and we’re spending a ton of money on visual effects, and it’s still not enough for these companies to be profitable and sustainable. Something big has to shift here. Liz, do you have any insight? Do you know anything about this space?

Liz: No, I don’t. Everything has VFX, so it’s horrific what’s happening. Again, I don’t know the economics of it, but it doesn’t make sense to me. There has to be a change.

John: Great. All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. Thank you to everybody who’s been playing Birdigo. We’re still up on Steam. The demo is still there, which is great. A game I’ve been playing a lot over this last month, and I think I’ve broken my addiction, so maybe I need to pass it along. It’s like the ring where I need to get other people to play this game, which was fun. It’s called Dragonsweeper, and it’s like Minesweeper that we all played, where you’re looking for the little mines, except there are various monsters hidden around. It’s by Daniel Benmergui. It is a free game that you play in your browser. It takes maybe half an hour to do once you’ve mastered it.

It’s a really clever mechanic and gets your brain to think in really interesting ways. If you need a distraction, if you just need your brain to stop ruminating on things it’s ruminating on, I point people towards Dragonsweeper, which is a benevolent time suck that I’ve found over the last couple of weeks.

Liz: Love that.

John: Liz, what do you have for us?

Liz: I have a one and a half one cool thing.

John: I love it, please.

Liz: Both my mother and my best friend were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Both are okay and recovering and in remission.

John: Great.

Liz: My big thing is mammograms. One cool thing, love a mammogram. Mammograms are not covered by insurance until you’re 40 years old, and my best friend was 38 when she was diagnosed. More and more women are being diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s or younger. If you have really any cancer in your family, you should be going to get tested. If it’s not covered by insurance, you can find ways to do it. There are really great ways to do it. My boobs, my two cool things.

Then the plus to that also is that in this experience, I’ve learned a lot about how women’s health is just shockingly underfunded and under-researched. One of the aspects of that is menopause and perimenopause, which has been something that’s been talked about a lot. Many of my family members have had to, either because of cancer or because of age, anything like that, gone through it earlier.

Naomi Watts just wrote a book, which is called Dare I Say It, which is about menopause and how she went into menopause in her 30s. It was shocking. Then, she discovered that many other women went through it as well and that menopause is not that thing that just happens when you’re 50 years old, that it’s actually something that progresses through your life. My addition to this is also to read Naomi Watts’ book, which I think is really enlightening and makes something that feels very, very scary and isolating, not that. Also, women should be talking about their health just as much as men do. That’s it.

John: These are great things. In terms of cancer screening, like we’ve heard, I’ve talked about colonoscopies on the show several times. I think it’s underappreciated to the degree to which there are certain cancers, certain terrible things that just with not horrible tests, you can just actually deal with it. Things that are grave threats that are not threats if you actually just get the test and get it early enough to see what’s there. Mammograms are 100% in that category.

Liz: My best friend actually, and she’s talked about this publicly, so I feel comfortable saying it, she had a rash on her chest. She was under the age of 40. The only reason that they found the cancer was because of this rash. Her doctor said that she should just go get a mammogram and get checked. If they had waited until it was stage 1, if they had waited until she was 40, God knows what that would have been and what would have happened. It is crazy that it’s on us to be like, “Hmm, that rash on our chest, maybe that’s cancer.” But there are preventative ways to find these early that are not necessarily constantly talked about or open.

John: Yes, great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

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

You get signed up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on East Side vs West Side. Liz Hannah, no matter what side, I want to be on your side because you were a fantastic return guest. Thank you so much for being on the show this week.

Liz: Thanks for having me. It was great.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Liz Hannah, you and I, we’re east siders by definition that we’re not on the west side. We’re actually in the middle of the city. If you’re able to look at the platonic ideal of Los Angeles, we’re plopped in the middle of it. For folks who are outside of Los Angeles, which is a big chunk of our listenership, I feel like I want to give a little geography lesson and a little geography explanation because your choice of whether you live on the west side or the east side is going to fundamentally shape some of your experience of living in Los Angeles. Can you talk to us about when you were first aware of there’s a big difference between living East and West?

Liz: Yes. My mom is from LA so I grew up coming here a lot, but I still didn’t understand it until I went to AFI. AFI is on the east side. It’s in Los Feliz. I lived in West LA, which is on the west side. That commute was really hell. It was awful. Significantly changed my experience for my first year of AFI. Then my second year, I lived in Los Feliz on the east side.

It was both my first time living here as an adult. I understand, also, coming from New York, just how much in your car you are in, in general, and then how much more you are in your car if you live on one of these sides and you must commute to the other.

John: Yes. There’s not a perfect New York comparison, but it’s like if you lived in Brooklyn, but you’re traveling to the furthest north place in Manhattan, if you’re traveling to cross 110th Street every day all the time, but it’s actually not quite a fair comparison because there’s just trains that can get you there directly.

Liz: You can do things on the train. You can read books.

John: You can do things on the train rather than being trapped in your car. The reason why the East-West split is so noticeable in Los Angeles versus the North-South split is because while there are some freeways that go East to West, you have to cross the 405. The 405 is sort of the boundary, the dividing line between what we think about East and West. If you have to cross the 405 at certain times of day or cross that imaginary wall, it’s just awful.

I would have meetings that would be out at Bruckheimer’s company, which is on the west side, and lord, an hour and 15 minutes later I’m finally home based on the time of the day. You have to plan things so carefully. That’s why I think Taffy Brodesser-Akner, when she was out here doing her book tour, she had an east side event and a west side event because they’re fundamentally different things.

Liz: They’re two different worlds. I think also they’re culturally very different. It sounds stereotypical, but West Siders are just a little more relaxed. They like nature a lot and they love the beach. That’s just what it is. Well, nature, not so much, but the beach. That nature, I think is shared.

John: They love the beach.

Liz: Nature is shared by all because there’s hikes everywhere in Los Angeles.

John: Yes. They live in a city that has a beach and you and I live in a city that does not have a beach.

Liz: No, we live in the city and they live in a beach city. Those are the fundamental differences. I think there’s like a walkability aspect to both the west side than the east side that exists, but it’s very different in those walkabilities and where they are. It’s just culturally very different.

John: Yes. There are things that are similar between the two. They have Abbot-Kinney, we have Larchmont, we have certain central points, but things do just fundamentally work differently.

Liz: A friend of mine lives on the east side and started dating somebody on the west side and we call it a long-distance relationship.

John: It is.

Liz: That is a commitment that you are making.

John: I moved out here for grad school and I was going to grad school at USC, which is east side and sort of South of the 10-2. Things are a little bit thrown off for that. I had some friends who lived on the west side and some friends who lived in Los Feliz, Hollywood. The differences between those things are vast. One of my friends, Tom, I would work out at the YMCA with him on the west side, but I was living in Hollywood. Good lord, that commute to get back from the gym was insane. On one of those commutes back, I happened to drive over the 405 and it was during OJ’s Bronco chase. I was able to stop on the bridge over the 405 and see OJ Simpson drive along this boundary wall between East Los Angeles and West Los Angeles.

Liz: That was the last time you drove to the west side?

John: Honestly, I think I did stop going to the gym shortly thereafter. I just realized it’s a fundamentally different thing.

Liz: I also live in the Valley now, which not to complicate it more, but like that’s–

John: We should talk about that.

Liz: The Valley is like above it all. I would refer to it more as east side than it is west side, just because it still has the dividing line of the 405. Once you get far west in the Valley, you’re basically in Topanga and Malibu. It’s more east side. I will just say that I can get to Silver Lake faster from where I live than whenever I lived in West Hollywood. Freeways are great. I just feel like now we’re in an episode of The Californians.

John: We are very much in an episode of The Californians. It does come down to that. Some practical takeaways here. If you are coming to visit Los Angeles, like, “I want to see Los Angeles–” I will have people who will show up and say like, “Oh, well, today I want to see the Hollywood Walk of Fame and I want to go to the beach and I want to go to Getty center and all these things.” It’s like, you’re insane.

Liz: Also have a great time doing that without me. No, I’m good. Thank you.

John: “No, I’m not going to do that with you.” You are going to be in your car the entire time. If you are literally out here for a week and you want to see all those things, three days in Hollywood, three days on the beach, split up your time because you’re not going to make yourself happy trying to do all those things from one central point.

The bigger question, though, is if you are moving to Los Angeles or you’ve taken a job or coming here to school, you have to make some fundamental choices. I would say, you’re probably best off living close to where you’re going to be spending most of your time just so you’re not killing yourself driving places. While there are more train options and bus options than ever before, still, you get a little bit trapped by the geography.

Liz: I would also suggest, do a Vrbo or something and stay in different places before you commit to where you want to live. One of my best friends lives on the west side and I joked when she moved there. She moved there from New York and I was like, “Well, I’ll never see you again.” She will drive to me. I was like, “Great.” She doesn’t mind doing that. It was important for her and her kids to live on the west side and she knew the burden she was taking on by moving across that, near the end of the world. Now she’s back. I think you have to sort of find your neighborhood and find your place. It is like New York.

John: Yes, very much.

Liz: While we’re saying east and west, there are pockets of neighborhoods within each of them that have their own personalities and their own quirks and things like that. I lived on the east side for a really long time but I never lived in Echo Park or Silver Lake but I lived in Los Feliz. I lived in Hancock Park. I lived in West Hollywood. Now I live in the valley, just FYI, the streets are so wide here. There’s no street, parking [crosstalk]. It’s lovely.

John: Yes. There’s no reason the streets need to be as wide. It’s lovely.

Liz: It’s glorious. Now I’m like the old person who drives in West Hollywood, and I’m like, “These streets are too small.” I think you just find your place, you find your people. Don’t rush it and say–

John: Agreed.

Liz: I do think what you said is really important is, if you are coming out here, for instance, to go to grad school and you’re going to go to USC or you’re going to go to AFI, find a hub that is localized around that.

John: Yes. Because otherwise, you’re going to be angry at yourself for two years that you made the choice that you made.

Liz: Yes.

John: All right. It’s always a great choice to talk with you. Liz Hannah, thank you for Zooming in all the way from the valley.

Liz: Thank you.

John: Let’s talk more soon.

Liz: Love it. Bye. Bye.

Links:

• Liz Hannah on IMDb and Instagram
• Episode 676 – Writing while the World is on Fire
• Slate Culture Gabfest
• The Post | Screenplay
• Episode 128 – Frozen with Jennifer Lee
• Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 on Disney+
• Highland Pro
• The Girl From Plainville on Hulu
• The Dropout on Hulu
• “The Stranger in the Room” by @toddalcott on Threads
• Episode 399 – Notes on Notes
• Dragonsweeper by Daniel Benmergui
• Dare I Say It by Naomi Watts
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on 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, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 680 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? We’ll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card. Then it’s a new round of How Would This be a Movie?, where we take stories from the news or history and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. To help us do all this, let’s welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey and The Flash, Christina Hodson.

Christina Hodson: Hello.

John: Christina Hodson, we’re so happy to have you back.

Christina: I’m very happy to be back. I cannot believe you’re on 680.

John: It’s so many episodes.

Christina: That’s so many.

John: Yes, but as we’re doing the Scriptnotes book, now we’re in sort of the last minutes on Scriptnotes book, it feels like 680 episodes. There’s just a lot there. It’s been a lot of sifting through stuff and the culling phase now where it’s like we’ve had these amazing guests on. It’s like, oh, we want to do a little breakout chapter with them. It’s like, oh no, there’s no room. There’s no room for these people.

Drew Marquardt: Ryan Reynolds, gone.

John: Oh, he’s gone. Ryan, if you’re listening to this, sorry. You were terrific. You’re wonderful. Twice.

Christina: They pick you for me, Ryan.

John: Christina, we want to bring you in here right now just to let you know that you’re such a valuable part of the Scriptnotes community and yet you don’t have your own chapter.

Christina: Fuck.

John: You can swear if you want to on the show.

Christina: I forgot to apologize in advance. I will be swearing.

John: All right. We’re going to have some swearing. We’re going to have some good crafty things. We’re going to talk about story. But in our bonus segment for paying members, I want to talk about the cold email, when you have to just email a person you’ve never met before and pitch your case and do that because it’s a thing I find myself having to do a lot and some people are terrified of it. I find it delightful.

Christina: You do it all the time?

John: Yes.

Christina: Who are you sending cold emails to?

John: People I have questions about what they’re doing. Sometimes on a professional level, sometimes for like the apps we’re working on. I’m actually kind of shameless and I have some techniques which I think other people who are scared to send those emails could probably benefit from.

Christina: Is it possible that your technique is being John August?

John: That is a part of it. Just as a little amuse-bouche for the real advice here, is that people are so much better emailing on behalf of somebody else than for themselves, so pretend you’re somebody else. Pretend you’re doing it for somebody else.

Christina: I used to make phone calls and pretend I was an assistant for myself.

John: You’ve got that British accent though. It still helps. It works. It really does.

We have a little bit of follow-up. Highland Pro shipped, we’re so grateful to everyone who’s been playing with it and installing it. You, Christina, were actually really helpful in the launch of Highland 2. Do you remember that?

Christina: I do remember that. Never in the world did I think I could possibly be helpful in anything to do with software.

John: You were, because one of the features in Highland 2 which you helped to work out was gender analysis. We were the first app that had a thing where you could put your script and say, what were the male and female ratios in the script in terms of dialogue and stuff? We put that in there first. All the other apps copied it, which is great. They could all see what that was like. Do you find yourself using those tools now?

Christina: I have not used them in a little while, but I think it definitely made me more mindful of it in general. I think now I don’t start writing a character without thinking a bit more carefully.

John: It really is sometimes in the conception phase where you’re thinking of like, wait, if I do it this way, there’s going to be so few female characters, or they not going to have any chance to actually talk with each other.

Christina: Totally.

John: This just all came out of the realization that there was like a study that you helped out on in terms of– You’re nodding like, maybe I helped out on it?

Christina: Honestly, I can’t remember anything.

John: Oh, it was pre-pandemic. It’s all a blur.

Christina: It was Me Too, and Me Too got wiped out by COVID.

John: Me Too, like hashtag Me Too, not like Me Too, me also.

Christina: No, I feel like my memory of hashtag Me Too got completely wiped out by hashtag COVID.

John: Absolutely. Everything’s been memory hole’d. It’s so scary. One of the things I find so helpful sometimes is just I will Google myself and find like, oh, did I talk about this thing? Because there was a New York Times article we were both in.

Christina: When I Google myself now, I find you.

John: Absolutely. There’s a lovely shot of the two of us at your house.

Christina: Pretending to read notes from my notebook [laughs]. I find that endlessly amusing.

John: All journals are basically 100% accurately portraying what really happened in a moment.

Christina: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

John: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. One of the things I’ve noticed, the difference between launching an app versus launching a series or a movie is that– There’s some things that are similar. Obviously, you get reviews, you get articles written about you, which is great. You get features. I got a feature of the app store for Highland Pro and ratings, star ratings. But with a movie or a feature, you’re just done at a certain point.

It’s just like, oh, it’s out there and it’s finished and it’s this completion versus something like an app. We’re constantly putting out updates and there’s bug fixes and Drew gets emails and we’re all responding to stuff. You have a chance to fix things, which is great, because it’s not frozen in amber, but there’s also a responsibility to keep doing

Christina: Also, it actually hangs over you forever.

John: Yes, it does hang over you for a while. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has left a review, that is super, super helpful and left us a star rating. If you haven’t tried Highland yet, it is available on the app store for Mac, for iPad and for iPhone. It’s a 30-day free trial. Give it a shot.

Next up and follow up, director’s chairs. We were talking to this on a recent episode about sort of the scourge of director’s chairs. We got some really good feedback and follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Sarah writes, “Last summer, I was six months pregnant as the on-set producer. You think your butt hurts? I was dying. Finally, I gave in and bought my own chair, which was an outdoor rocking chair I bought at a sporting goods store. It’s much lower to the ground, so it requires us to stick down the monitors. I had to swallow my pride a little as I was now a pregnant lady in a rocking chair on set, but I was so much less miserable. Highly recommended.”

John: Christina, what’s been your experience with director’s chairs and chairs on sets?

Christina: Very bad. I’m clumsy and I like to sit cross-legged, so I always do something wrong. I also always put bags where I shouldn’t and then hide things in the pocket and make them heavy and then they tip and I’m a disaster. Director’s chairs are terrible.

John: They are terrible.

Christina: There’s got to be a better solution.

John: There are better solutions. Ryan wrote in and what did she say?

Drew: “I was a producer on The Walking Dead and everyone had back problems after using the traditional director chairs at Video Village for the last 10 years of our show. Eventually, our prop master found a bamboo director’s chair and this made a huge difference for the execs. The props team had rolling carts that the chairs would be hung up on and transported to the next set or village move. The train was brutal and these chairs are a bit heavier, but to save a few people who kept us employed safe from back surgery, the team was happy to help out.” She included a link, which we’ll put in the show notes.

John: That’s great. It’s nice to see that there are solutions out there and it’s just a matter of people stepping up and saying, hey, this is important for me and for everybody else around you to just do this better.

The common threads we see, which Sarah’s first email talked about, is that you got to be lower to the ground. Part of the problem is that if you can’t put your feet on the ground while you’re in the chair, you’re going to have more problems. The other problem is the seat, and the little sling seats, you would think it’d be comfortable, but they’re the worst. It just pinches you in a really bad way. We won’t probably fix this problem on this podcast.

Christina: We could burn them all.

John: That’s a thing we could do.

Christina: Just as a suggestion, guys, this is why you invite me back. Great ideas.

John: Great. Let’s continue on with mammograms. This is from 679. We were talking about mammograms.

Drew: Stephanie B. writes, I’m writing in response to 679, where the terrific Liz Hannah’s one cool thing is to get a mammogram. She pointed out that insurance doesn’t always cover mammograms if the patient is under a certain age.

Even after age 40, my health insurance only covers mammograms every other year. I paid out of pocket for my own mammograms on the off years. There’s a little secret hospitals don’t advertise. They will almost always discount an uninsured procedure like mammograms. My hospital in Atlanta gives me an 80% discount for the mammograms if I pay out of pocket.

Always ask and call around to check different hospitals because this is one time when it doesn’t matter if a hospital is out of network since insurance isn’t covering it anyway. My breast cancer was caught early with a mammogram I paid for on my own and it was taken care of quickly. I’m so, so glad I didn’t wait another year to get a mammogram that my insurance would have paid for. Please don’t put it off. To all the men listening, please remind all the women you love to schedule a mammogram. They really do save lives.

John: This is great advice. I was like, I’m not following mammogram advice super closely. I have a daughter who will eventually need mammograms. I will say that the women in my life who’ve had breast cancer, it’s always been a situation like, oh, I should have gotten a mammogram earlier, but because of insurance, because of whatever, I didn’t do it. If you have any suspicions, if you have any reasons to think-

Christina: Even if it’s not an insurance thing, people just put them off.

John: They do.

Christina: Because it feels like you just did it because a year now goes in like a week. You still got to go.

John: You still got to go. Same thing with colonoscopies. When you reach the age of getting colonoscopies, you just do it and it helps.

Finally a bit of follow up, Birdigo, which is the game that I’ve been making with Corey Martin. We had a demo that people loved and a lot of people were running and saying like, hey, I played through the first 50 legs that came for free in the demo and I want to just keep on playing. Basically, I’m jonesing for more Birdigo and I’m locked out. What we’ve done is we’ve unlocked the first level for everybody so you can play it as many times as you want. We added a bunch of new feathers to get your points up higher and we added keyboard support. If you’re playing on your laptop, it’s actually a really great, fast and different game. If you want a little word game that has really cute, fat birds in it, Birdigo is on Steam right now. They’re really cute little birds.

Christina: I’m very excited to pick it up now that I know it’s yours, I didn’t realize, I saw it on the agenda and thought, but now I’m very excited to find out.

John: Birdigo is like Scrabble or Boggle, but with cute little birds.

Christina: Who doesn’t like that?

John: You just play yourself and it’s tremendously fun.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here, Christina Hodson. I want to talk about writing action because you’ve become an action sort of go-to writer. I see that grimace, but it is true. That is probably top of your calling card, is you write big action movies with set pieces in them.

I love a set piece. I love a set piece that works really well and so often you read bad set pieces in scripts. Let’s just talk about what doesn’t work on set pieces in scripts and the bad things we’ve read, because I’m sure you’ve gotten sent stuff where it’s like, oh no, no, no.

Christina: It’s so bad. There’s so many different ways to make them bad. I feel like we should be positive though and talk about what makes them good. Bad things are like, when it’s a whole block of text that you turn the page, no one speaks, and it just makes you go, oh God. Because it’s fine if no one speaks during an action set piece. It’s like, oftentimes people can’t speak during an action set piece, but you can still break up the page. The white space on the page is critical.

John: Yes, this podcast has been about white space on the page since episode one. It’s just so crucial to help the reader get their way down the page, because if you give them a wall of text, they’re going to skim.

Christina: I know, it’s really sad, isn’t it? We can read books, but in screenplays, if you turn the page and you just see like wall of text on two sides, you’re like, no, I won’t.

John: No. Some bad action sequences on a page, I just get lost. I have no idea, like what am I actually supposed to be following? What is the point? What is the purpose? What would I be seeing?

Christina: Sometimes people feel like, because they know they want the set piece to be two or three minutes long, they have to cover two or three pages, but they don’t actually have anything to say for two or three pages. They just write stuff and then you read it and you get so bored and so lost.

The big thing I find really frustrating is when the person clearly has zero sense of the geography of the space. That’s how I think you can tell, and this is where I’ll turn it into a positive because I’m so positive today, John.

When you read a writer who has a good handle of the geography of the scene they’re writing in, it can be in any genre. We ran a writer’s program, Lucky Chap and my company, and we were looking for writers who wanted to write in the action space. Often they didn’t already have an action sample and that was the whole point of why they wanted to do the program. You can tell even in a drama when someone has a handle on the geography of a scene, because they use whether or not someone is in the room, out of the room, coming in, walking in, sitting down, standing up. All of the spatial stuff basically that can add tension and storytelling and character stuff is there on the page, whatever the genre. A really good writer and a really good action writer always has a sense of the geography of the space.

John: Absolutely. You sense that you are in that space with them. We talk about, we see and we hear useful things that a screenwriter might choose to use, but it’s crucial that you as the screenwriter are placing the reader in the seat, in the theater. Experiencing this thing around them and so they’re simultaneously within the space of the scene and what it’s going to feel like on that screen.

Doing both things at the same time, it’s really tough. I think people tend to give short shrift to action writing because they feel like, oh, well, it’s storyboarded and there’s a stunt coordinator and the director and all that stuff. All true, but there has to be a plan for it on the page.

Christina: Yes. Also, I was going to say, this is a really important thing where there’s a big difference to me between a production draft, like a shooting draft and your first draft. The draft that’s going to go out that you’re trying to sell a spec with is written completely differently to the one that they’re going to shoot on the final day. The first pass of the Flash, by the way, first 12 drafts of the Flash, the third act is very, very short because it wasn’t intended to go on and on. It was like quite short and simple and contained and whatever.

By the time we got to the end, there’s 30 extra pages because you’ve got, like you say, HODs who want to do this and actors who want to do that and different set pieces and things that need to be all laid out really cleanly on the page. You can’t be sexy and succinct in the production draft because you’ve got hundreds of people whose jobs are dependent on understanding exactly what it is that the director wants to put on screen.

John: I want to both agree with you and also encourage our listeners not to take that too far. The idea that like a shooting draft is completely different than a script you sell, for a lot of things, it’s not. You shouldn’t at least discount the work that you’re doing in your production, in your own script.

Christina: Oh, I think the first one is way more important, because that’s the one that sells it.

John: Exactly.

Christina: That’s the one that gets you the job, gets you the next draft, sells you the project.

John: Absolutely.

Christina: To me, that’s a thousand times more important. I hate my production drafts. I sometimes like my first draft.

John: Sometimes the production draft, it’s because you’ve had to add all these little scenes to do these different things.

Christina: Costumes are asking you to like state exactly what weapons everyone’s holding and what exactly everyone’s wearing and when the jackets come on and off and stuff that you don’t normally care about.

John: Really inelegant stuff.

Christina: Yes, really inelegant stuff.

John: Absolutely. What we’re mostly talking about here, like this is the writing that you’re doing to let everyone see like this is the movie. You’re selling the movie on the page. That means you have to really clearly communicate what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling.

Christina: I was about to say, feeling for me is the main thing. You can change so many things about the way the action plays out and the specifics of the space, but the feeling should stay vaguely the same. You should know what you want it to feel like, the intensities, like the ebbs and the lulls.

John: Absolutely. And the vibe. Is this a cool, crisp, everything is sort of precise or is it just chaos? That’s the thing that you’re going to be able to communicate on the page. I think most crucially is, yes, you as the writer and storyteller are welcoming us to this world, but if we don’t have characters and the character’s experience within those moments, it’s pointless.

I’m thinking back to The Flash and like some of the moments you have, which I love The Flash, by the way, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast. All the scandal around The Flash and Ezra and everything else, it’s a really good movie and Ezra Miller is good in it too. As challenging as everything was around that, it was so specific to that character’s experience of those moments is what makes it land.

Christina: I also think just generally people, not even just beginning writers, I think a lot of writers sometimes think put character on hold and just focus on the action. To me, like you’re going to have a dead set piece if you’re only thinking about the action. You have to be telling a character’s story through the action. You can reveal so much about a person in the way that they fight or the way that they run or the way– Like, are they resourceful? Are they sloppy? All of those things and the way people work together, to me, each of those action set pieces should have its own beginning, middle and end that gives you a little story arc and a character arc.

John: I pulled out three examples of some really good action writing and some really different action writing to show the range of what this looks like and feels like. The first is from James Cameron’s Aliens, which we’ve referenced endlessly on this podcast.

Christina: Why not? Just keep referencing it.

John: It’s so good. As you guys are watching, it’s scene 114, but it comes pretty late in the movie. They are waiting for this ship to take them back up to the station. I’ll read this aloud, but we’ll put a link in the show notes too.

They watch in dismay as the approaching ship dips and veers wildly. That’s uppercased. Its main engines roar full on as the craft accelerates towards them, even as it loses altitude. It skims the ground, clips a rock formation. The ship slews, side-slipping. It hits a ridge, tumbles, bursting into flame, breaking up. It arcs into the air, end over end, a Catherine wheel juggernaut. Ripley shouts, run. She grabs Newt and sprints for cover as a tumbling section of the ship’s massive engine module slams into the APC and it explodes in twisted wreckage. A drop ship skips again, like a stone engulfed in flames and crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball. It goes on. It gets to the Hudson’s. We are in some real pretty shit here.

Christina: I want to ask you a question.

John: Yes.

Christina: How do you feel about caps in action?

John: Let’s talk about caps. Here’s what’s uppercased in this section. Crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball, that’s uppercase. Roars full on, veers wildly. To me, these are things that are sort of catching my eye and also, they tend to underline sounds that are happening here. How are you feeling about the uppercase?

Christina: Generally sound I do in caps, generally. In action, it gets so tricky because there’s so many loud moments and there’s so many big moments and crashes. If you do every crash and bang and whatever, capital can get too much. I have had one hilarious experience in a studio job with an old school, terrible producer person who is no longer with us, so I can shit all over him. He was a mean, mean man. He once told me that a set piece I’d written, he was just like, “This is dead. This is nothing. This is terrible. You got to rewrite this completely. There should be real punch in it.”

I was not this much of an asshole, I only did this because this was 17 free drafts and it was early on in my career: I just added caps. I didn’t change anything else. Oh, I also underlined the scene headings. I resubmitted it and he was like, “This is incredible. This is what I’m talking about. This has real pizzazz.” I was like, wow. He just needed capital letters.

John: That’s what he needed. He needed something to hang on.

Christina: Underlining and capital letters. I just think there’s too much sometimes, I find it, like when it’s overused. This to me is nice.

John: This is really nice. These paragraphs are longer than I would normally use myself. This is like six or seven lines, some of these paragraphs. Yet I read every word of it. I was never tempted to skim because it was catching my attention, holding my attention. Sentence fragments are there. Clips of rock formation. Did it need a subject there? Great. You have parallel structures because basically you have the implied subject is continuing from sentence to sentence. It’s just really good writing.

Christina: Nice short sentences.

John: Love it. Let’s compare this to Tony Gilroy who wrote Bourne Identity and many other things including the new Andor. I’ll read this, but you actually do need to see this because what Tony is doing at the end of every sentence basically, it’s a dash-dash.

Christina: Not even end of sentence, he’s interrupting himself constantly.

John: Absolutely. Basically, it shows just constant movement. You feel like what the tension is.

Bourne, the light bulb. He’s tossing it across the room, over her head, into that frosted window and she ducks down as it shatters. Everything starts happening at once. Silenced automatic weapons fire, raking into the apartment, and the frosted window peppered with holes, and Marie on the floor as the window shatters above her. Castel, he’s in the air shaft hanging from an out-of-sail rope, but off guard, firing blind, strafing the apartment, and Bourne kicking that chair across the room, and Castle reacting, instinct moving target, and the chair just strafed to shit, and Bourne rolling away, and Castle, he’s coming in.

The last piece is a window frame crashing away as he swings to the apartment, and Marie, right below him, shit raining down as he flies, and Ward throwing the knife and Castle turning back too late, the knife catching him in the neck, and it just keeps going.

Christina: I think people need to read that, because it sounds crazy when you read it.

John: It does sound just absurd.

Christina: It’s fucking cool on the page.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Christina: Because you see exactly what it is. The thing that he does here, which I like very much and which I think is a little bit also a thing that we should talk about, which is breaking the rules. Which is he’s using the names of the characters to create shots which are almost like cut between.

John: Yes, totally.

Christina: You can’t realistically start. This is easier because you’re just in one room, one space with characters. Sometimes you’re doing an action set piece where you’re moving between characters who are not right next. They’re not really in the room together. They’re in the same, call it like industrial plant, but they’re in different spaces. If you had to do a new slug line for every time-

John: You can’t.

Christina: -it would just be an impossible read. I have had a line producer once who made me insert those later and it was horrific for the read.

John: No, impossible.

Christina: When you’re doing the first draft, forget the rules. Find your style. You can basically break the rules and do it however you like as long as you’re consistent with yourself.

It’s really annoying when people switch up. I’ve seen people who do in capital letters on John August, colon, and then do the next line and do whatever. Here, he’s just doing the name of the character in capitals and it’s one smooth sentence. Whatever you’re going to do, make it your style, but then stick to it throughout. Otherwise, it gets crazy making.

John: If you do have people in different spaces, but you’re constantly in between the two of them, what I’ll tend to do is establish a scene header for one, establish a scene header for the next one, and then say intercut. Then it’s really clear that I’m doing uppercase or whatever for the person when I’m back in their shot or in their space, because otherwise, it’s all scene headers and it’s exhausting for us. Here, what I like so much about what Tony is doing is it’s almost you’re seeing shot by shot. Each line is basically just a shot, and it’s great.

Christina: Oh, I had one that I thought of last night when I was thinking about this. One of my favorite ones. We’re like– Just, you know Tony Gilroy, David Koepp. David Koepp’s Jurassic Park script, the one that he’s got on his website, is so good.

The sequence that is the best where they’re outside the T-Rex Paddock when the power goes down. He does this really well, where he’s moving between the two cars, different spaces, very fluently, and it just ups the attention massively, because every time you move away from one character, you’re wondering what’s happening to the other one and it’s fantastic use of exactly this.

John: Yes. Let’s wrap this up with The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The version I could find for this isn’t properly formatted, so there should be actually a little extra returns and spaces in there. I liked a lot of what they were doing here.

Exterior lab day, Jacobs, a security guard, and the two officers are huddled behind a squad car. Other employees are hiding and watching from the safety of the parking lot. They suddenly realize that everything has gone silent. A moment later, lab doors fly open. Officer 1 says, “Here they come. A massive primate barrel towards them.”

Officer 2, “There’s more of them.” Jacobs, “Those are my chimps.” They duck as the apes run by. Some of them get right up and over the car they’re crouched behind. Bam, bam, bam, bam, as the chimps hit and leapfrog over the squad car and their heads. The apes stampede across the parking lot, where several use Jacob’s black jaguar to vault over the fence. The last is Buck, whose weight crushes the car and then they’re gone, every last one of them. Quiet now, except for car alarms.

Christina: Nice.

John: Nice. It’s really smart writing here. I loved how much I could hear it and feel it. I loved the way crushing the car. There was an anticipation. It felt just right.

Christina: Yes, and you feel the chaos work is quiet, which is lovely. It gives you a nice out on the scene. People sometimes just forget about the end. The end is really important.

John: The end is really important. Absolutely. I always think about action sequences as being like, they’re the songs in a musical. Instead of breaking into song and dance, you’re breaking into this action sequence. Those are going to have beginnings and middles and ends. They’re going to have verses and choruses. It’s going to feel like a thing. Often, it’s just like, action is just happening and then it’s over and you don’t know it. Nothing’s really been achieved.

Christina: You feel nothing.

John: Yes. Empty action is just–

Christina: Such a bummer.

John: It’s a huge bummer.

Christina: It’s a waste.

John: Yes, it is. Talk to us about Flash or Bumblebee or Birds of Prey. Action writing on the page that was surprisingly difficult, that was a real challenge to convey. You might have had a vision in your mind, but it was actually hard to get those words down.

Christina: They’re all difficult. It’s one of the bits I love them most. It’s the bit for our job that feels most like playing.

John: It is.

Christina: I literally will get the toys and play with them. For Transformers, I made them send me Bumblebees, which, by the way, was really hard to get. You’d think that would be really easy working with Hasbro trying to get hold of Bumblebees?

John: No.

Christina: No, it was not easy. Yes, I wanted to the toys, because for me, there were things like the way they transform and using action through the way they’re transforming. That is incredibly hard to write because it’s nebulous.

It’s actually interesting with the Alien, that’s an interesting example, because when you’re writing that stuff that doesn’t exist, you have to pick a lane on how much you’re going to describe stuff. Because you can’t go into crazy detail and just put every new nebulizer and whatever. You just can’t, because it gets so boring on the page. You also need to create a sense that this is otherworldly and it is different. It’s a really tricky balance.

John: Talk us about then on the page, how are you talking about transforming? Are you describing those middle states? Are you describing how a limb as a limb is shifting from one thing or phase to another? What kind of stuff are you doing?

Christina: I have two things that inspired me. One is that I wanted the kids in the audience to feel the way I felt when I was a kid and I was playing with Transformers. Which sometimes it’s really fucking tricky and you’re trying to bend that arm back into a bloody door and you can’t. I wanted do that for Bumblebee. He’s a broken robot. I wanted to sometimes feel that. Mostly, I would go by the way it felt for the characters doing it.

Then I also went with the way it was for Charlie, Hailey Seinfeld’s character, is what does it feel like around her? Often, that was more about scale and sound rather than specifics of names of pieces and things. It was just about what would it be like if your sweet little Volkswagen Beetle just stood up and towered over you. Yes, playing with sounds, feelings, scale, things like that.

John: Scale is a thing that’s often missing in action-side pieces too, or on the page, you’re just not feeling like, you have a semi-truck and you have a bicycle. It’s that difference–

Christina: Missing or just that wildly wrong?

John: Yes.

Christina: The number of times I’ve seen people dive off a thing 300 feet and you’re like, “They would be dead. That’s not a thing. You can’t do that.” People often get scale wrong and distances away from each other.

I really recommend to people that they look online or go out into the world and measure things and feel what it’s like, because otherwise it just feels silly. As soon as people start doing that, as soon as you don’t feel that you can trust the writer, that they know what they’re talking about, you check out a little bit because you’re like, “This is just nonsense.”

John: You mentioned LuckyChap, and I remember having lunch with you. You were talking through this program you were working with LuckyChap to help writers who are not traditionally action writers get some experience there. What were you teaching them? What were the common things you saw that you needed to get people comfortable writing?

Christina: Honestly, it was more about teaching them how to get into the space rather than doing the actual writing. They were a whole mixture of levels. There was one writer who wasn’t even in the guild yet, and then there were many who were experienced in TV but had never been in features. Like I said, when we were reading submissions for those, we were often reading a drama as a sample for someone who wanted to be an action writer. You could get the sense of whether they could.

What we were really “teaching,” I shouldn’t be allowed to teach anyone anything. What we were really focusing on was how we would help them outline the movie. They came in with sometimes a title, sometimes an idea, sometimes just a character dynamic. Then we spent four weeks all day, every day in a room, breaking those movies down, outlining them so that when they were pitching them, they actually had a whole movie rather than just a kernel of an idea. Then we had wonderful people come in, talk to them about–

One of the things actually, which is one of the things we should talk about here, which is Chad Stahelski came in and talked to them about writing action and creating action set pieces. Chad Stahelski did the John Wick movies. If you’re interested in this topic, go look up any of his stuff online. He talks about this stuff incredibly eloquently because he comes at it from a place of real passion and love. He talks about Buster Keaton and humor and storytelling all the way through action. It’s not just like, pull out your guns and go bang, bang, because that’s going to be boring.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on the podcast talking about Deadpool and really thinking about that as a physical comedy movie. Really making sure the set pieces reflected the specificity of who that character was and what they were trying to do and why those set pieces were not [unintelligible 00:29:33] other things.

Christina: It was so playful and fun and funny all the way through.

John: Absolutely. Getting back to what you were doing with LuckyChap, what’s so important about the way you’re approaching it is that it’s not like an action sequence is something you drop into another movie. You have to build a movie that can support an action sequence. And you have to build the action sequence that actually tells the story, and they have to go hand in hand.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, you just end up with a piece that feels wonky and weird. Which happens a lot.

John: It does happen a lot.

Christina: Wait, you said one thing, though, which I think we should talk about.

John: Please.

Christina: Specificity.

John: Yes.

Christina: Because this is a real Goldilocks one, and I’m sure you, have found this. Either people are way too specific, and they’re using all these terms that you don’t know for martial arts that you wish you knew, but you don’t, or they’re not specific enough and it’s just like, “Uppercut, uppercut.” That’s a bummer, too. You don’t want to– Listen, we all know there are some writers who write, “This will be the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen,” but don’t do that.

John: Never do that.

Christina: Just don’t do that. I know people have gotten away with it, but don’t do it.

John: When you see that in a script, you feel like they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed by this. They recognize it’s going to be hard to do, and so they just don’t want to actually do it.

Christina: Or, they’re just really cocky.

John: Yes.

Christina: Anyway, but I do think it’s a mix with the specificity. For me, I look at it as zooming in and out as well, particularly in things like battle sequences. I’ve had to write a few, big scale battle sequences where you’ve got hundreds of people and then key characters that you have to follow. For me, often that is about picking the moments that you want to highlight. I’m not saying never use specific martial arts terms. If it’s relevant, because, for example, it’s a character who’s just learned a thing that they didn’t know, if you’re writing Neo, sure, it’s fucking cool to drop in a turn that it doesn’t matter that the reader doesn’t know exactly what that kick looks like. Because the fact that they don’t know what it looks like helps inform the way the character is experiencing it too.

Then also have moments where you zoom out, particularly if it’s a big, long battle sequence or something. Go from a tiny detail of swords clashing between two characters you know, and then zoom back out to what it feels like to be on that battlefield.

The other example that I love of this that I read often when I was writing, I wrote a Swords and Sandals thing at some point. David Benioff, of course, is masterful. David Benioff’s Troy script, that film is fun. It’s not one that anyone ever talks about. The battle sequences in that are incredible. Then there’s a really good one-on-one fight scene where he does another thing of “breaking the rules”, where he does–

It’s the Orlando Bloom plays Paris, when Paris fights Menelaus in that one-on-one in front of everyone. He does a very cool thing where he goes into Paris’s POV and he switches to second person. It’s all, you’re in there sweating, like you can feel your heart beating. It’s really fun and it’s really evocative.

John: All right, we’ll find that script and put a link into the show notes. Actually, I’ve never read it.

Christina: It’s cool. It’s very cool.

John: Awesome. Let us move on to our next topic, which is how would this be a movie? For folks who are new to the podcast or new to this segment, every once in a while, we’ll put out a call to our listeners and say, hey, tell us stories from history or from the news that you’re curious about how we might make these into movies. The examples that we’re talking through today, some were things that I just happened to stumble across and bookmarked. Other stories come from our listeners who sent them in.

All right, our first one is A Man of Parts and Learning. It ran in the London Review of Books. It’s written by Fara Dabhoiwala and it tells the story of Francis Williams and sort of the backstory, but mostly centers around this painting, which was a real question of like, is this painting a portrait in a positive light or a negative light? Is it just super racist? Drew, can you help us out with a summary of what we know about this?

Drew: Sure. In 1928, this unknown, strangely proportioned painting turns up from the 1700s. It’s determined to be this portrait of a black Jamaican intellectual named Francis Williams and that it was formerly owned by a white writer named Edward Long who wrote the book History of Jamaica in 1774.

John: Let me stop you there because at this point in the article, you actually see what the painting is, which is included here. If you look at it, it is a man who’s dressed in a formal attire. He’s got a blue coat, gold trim, white waistcoat, knee length, breeches, and his impossibly skinny legs. He’s got this powdered white wig. His hands are tiny. One is resting on this open book. His face feels out of proportion to everything else. You’re like-

Christina: Is it very good?

John: Is it very good? It reminded me a bit of, there was that Spanish painting, The Restoration of Ecce Homo, with the Jesus face. I don’t know if they have repainted it. It’s not that bad, but it’s not good.

Christina: Yes, although I will say so. I looked at it and was like, “Oh, why are we going to talk about this just not very good painting.” By the end of it, I fucking love the painting.

John: Yes, isn’t it great?

Christina: Yes.

John: You cannot tell at the start, is this a mockery? Is it a satire? Continue with what the description is.

Drew: Francis Williams was born enslaved, but he eventually gained his freedom. He was wealthy. He was Cambridge educated. He was arguably the most famous Black man in the world at the time. Lon’s book is actually a racist hatchet job. It’s incredibly denigrating and dismissive of Williams and many white scientific racists, which is a term they used a lot in this. At the time, they attacked Williams’ achievements in order to argue that slavery was necessary.

At first, this portrait’s value is dismissed. Then later it’s rediscovered. It’s assumed by scholars that it is this caricature meant to mock Francis Williams. After this author commissions a modern high resolution scan, it’s discovered that the painting is actually a rebuke of the racist assaults and character assassinations that Williams endured. The author researches every detail to discover it was likely commissioned by Francis Williams from this avant-garde American painter named William Williams.

Christina: I love this article.

John: Yes.

Christina: I’m not going to lie. When I saw it on the internet, I was like, this is going to be dry. It’s so long. I was like, John, why are you making me read this? I loved it.

John: Yes, I loved it.

Christina: There’s twists and turns and reveals. Everyone should go read it. That doesn’t make it an easy movie.

John: It doesn’t make it an easy movie. Let’s talk about sort of ways into this movie. Because, okay, this is a biography of Francis Williams, which is certainly possible. He was the most well-known Black person in the world at a certain time. Grew up enslaved, got out of slavery, but then ended up having slaves of his own. That’s problematic.

Christina: Problematic, yes.

John: Studied at Cambridge. Clearly very, very smart. He was a member of scientific organizations. In the forensics of doing this painting, Dabhoiwala actually discovers that, oh, that’s Halley’s Comet in the background. He actually literally had proven when Halley’s Comet was coming back. Clearly a brilliant man. You could do the straight biopic without looking at the painting. I don’t think you would. The painting is too interesting.

Christina: No, I was thinking of like comps. If you do the academic version where it’s about him, there’s like the theory of everything, but that’s Hawking who everyone knows. There’s a beautiful mind, but that’s really about something actually very different. I then thought about Belle written by Misan Sagay and Amma Asante, which was also actually based on a painting. There was very little known about her story. It was really just a painting, and then they created this fictional story. None of those feel quite right for this one. Did you find a way in?

John: I’m not sure I found a way in.

Christina: I’ve got two, just to be competitive.

John: All right. I have zero, you have two. My halfway in is I do think you’re probably intercutting between the investigation of the painting and the real person and sort of how stuff reshapes around that. I’m curious what you’re-

Christina: That was one of my two, John. Thank you for saying you had zero. That’s one, and I was trying to find them. Please, for the love of God, can one of your readers find the movie that is on the tip of my brain that I cannot find? There is a movie. It’s not The Hours, but it’s not totally similar to The Hours, where it is playing with someone in the present investigating something in the past. It’s a little bit Possession, but I haven’t seen Possession, so I know it’s not Possession, the A.S Byatt one. It’s doing that intertextual thing where someone is discovering and learning something in an old thing, and then you’re seeing that thing play out at the same time.

I do think you could do that. I think the reason, though, that we both want to do that, is just that it’s so fascinating what this very, very deeply passionate, nerdy person did. Who doesn’t love that? Someone going deep diving on this, the details and the twists and turns and how exciting it is when they reveal, this tiny little detail that you didn’t notice before. I think it’s too nerdy to be a movie.

Then the way in that I actually got excited about was the person that painted it, William Williams. Super fucking interesting. The first known paintings of this person, one was a celebrated Native American, one was an outspoken abolitionist, and then the third, according to this, is this guy. It’s Francis Williams.

John: If you look at the other paintings, they’re all weird in the same way.

Christina: Oh, and that’s why I came to love it. There’s details, like the wrinkled stockings. How cool and weird is that little detail?

John: I had assumed that he was just a bad painter who just didn’t see anything.

Christina: He’s not.

John: He’s actually not.

Christina: He’s not. He’s awesome.

John: It’s the same way that Tim Burton draws really exaggerated people. He draws exaggerated things.

Christina: Totally. There is something I think potentially really interesting about the relationship between– The idea is that Francis Williams, at the end of his life, he’s wealthy. They all said he was by then nothing. He’s wealthy and successful, he is. He does own some slaves, and I’d like to gloss over that. He’s doing Rodale, and he chooses to commission this. He’s the one who chooses what goes in the painting. There is something really powerful about the idea of an older Black man, and this young white artist. This man is trying to tell the story of his life through the white man’s paintbrush, because that’s the only way he can get his story to actually be listened to, because no one will fucking listen.

He’s got this idiot, Ed Long, who’s written this horrific book that just makes him sound like nothing and has basically erased him from history. He’s choosing to put himself in history. There is something potentially really beautiful about that friendship between them that could be– Obviously, it’s not a Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that becomes a romantic relationship.

Lindsay Doran, I went to one of her amazing talks at Austin Film Festival, and at the end of it, she was talking about King’s Speech and how they tested that movie, and it didn’t test that great. Then all they did was add the title card at the end that talks about the lasting friendship between the King and his speech consultant, passing, and that friendship.

Just that title card, just saying they were friends until they died, just completely transformed the scores. It makes sense. This is what I was missing from the story, is I want a friendship or a relationship story at the core of it. That, to me, felt like the most obvious place to put it. Let’s sell it.

John: We’re selling it. We’re selling it tomorrow.

Christina: John, taking it out tomorrow and we’ll sell it.

John: I’m embarrassed. Seemed to me like there’s no relationship in here. You need to establish those relationships because it cannot be between the person investigating him and Williams himself, because that is–

Christina: You could, but it’s such a struggle.

John: It’s Julie and Julia, and they’re separated by time and place. I do feel like some equivalent of the journalist of Fara Dabhoiwala feels important because there are so many cool things he discovers along the way. He discovers that like, oh, that book on the shelf is actually this book and this book could have only gotten there by–

Christina: I know, but aren’t we just excited about that because we’re nerds? In a movie, is that as exciting as we think it would be, or would it be cool to see it from the perspective of Francis having William Easter egg it in the thing? I’m so with you. I loved reading it.

John: Yes, but it is a cinematic idea.

Christina: I don’t know, but it’s cinematically exciting being like, oh look, this book was published in this year so it couldn’t possibly have been 1726. It must’ve been 1762. We’re excited, but we’re losers.

[laughter]

John: We are losers, but I think that’s potentially a good story. Really difficult to break. I think just the outlining of this is really tough on how you’re moving back and forth between the timelines and how you’re telling stuff. I think it’s also really cool.

Christina: Everyone should read it.

John: Everyone should read it. Second story, when a deadly winter storm trapped a luxury passenger train near the Donner Pass for three days. The article we’re reading is by Robert Klara for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a true life event that happened. Drew, talk us through what the reality was.

Drew: In January, 1952, a severe blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada and traps this luxury passenger train, the City of San Francisco, near the Donner Pass. The train, en route from Chicago to San Francisco, becomes immobilized by massive snow drifts, stranding 226 passengers and crew members for three days. During this period, they endured freezing temperatures, dwindling food supplies, and the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rescue efforts were hampered by the harsh conditions, but eventually, all individuals are safely evacuated.

John: Christina, so we’ve had many train movies. We have Snowpiercer, we have Murder on the Orient Express, which actually features a train that gets stuck in snow as a plot point. This was a real-life historical incident. Some people died in the process of rescuing things, but no one on the train itself appears to have died. Is there a movie here, in your estimation?

Christina: I think it could work as a setting in the way that those movies used it as a setting. I think it could be a really fun setting for anything from a heist, to a murder thing, to a whatever. Is there a version where it’s really– It’s not Society of the Snow. They don’t eat each other. It’s only three days. They’re a little thirsty and a little hungry. I’m not that excited about it. I would want to either add a big genre element, like a thriller, heisty, murdery thing, potentially a romance.

By coincidence, these are both train movies, but Brief Encounter and Before Sunrise came to mind, where you have some intense love story that develops in three days. Then at the end of three days, they have to say goodbye to each other forever. The one detail in the story that made me giggle and made me think of Triangle of Sadness was that there were some dedicated staff who remained on latrine patrol, and they would take buckets of snow and deal with all the piss and shit [laughter], which you could do some funny satirical class thing, maybe.

John: Yes, Train to Busan hits on some of that stuff too. I agree that this is a setting, but it’s not actually a movie. It’s not a story, because we don’t have characters in there yet. We just have a general place.

I think them being trapped is part of it, but I think they’re going from where they’re stuck to whatever tiny town they end up in, it’s also fun. There’s something about that feels interesting too, and it could lend itself to a comedy. It could lend itself to something else, because there’s like, the whole point of a train is that you get to bypass all these places that you would otherwise get stuck in.

Christina: Oh, like that. A bunch of rich people descending on a small mountain can be kind of funny.

John: Absolutely. There’ve been various versions of it, but for 9/11, when all the planes got grounded, there was a plane that was stuck in a tiny town in Canada. There’s an article called When the World Came to Town. It’s essentially just like, it’s a bunch of people stuck in an unfamiliar environment. It’s always a good setup for comedy. I didn’t feel like a pressing need to take this one exact point.

Christina: We won’t be pitching this one tomorrow as well?

John: No.

Christina: We’ll just stick with A Man of Parts and Learning.

John: Yes. Next up, a UK teen’s parents send him to Ghana. He took them to court by Lynsey Chutel for the New York Times. Laurie Donahue, a listener, sent this through.

Drew: British parents send their teenage son to a boarding school in Ghana believing he is at risk for being drawn into gang culture in London. The boy, initially unaware of his parents’ intentions, thinks that he’s visiting a sick relative, but upon discovering true reason for the trip, he contacted the British consulate and initiated legal proceedings against his parents, alleging abandonment and seeking to return to the UK. However, the judge ruled that the parents acted lawfully within their parental rights to safeguard their son from potential criminal activities.

Christina: He’s still there, guys. I read this and then only got to the very end where I was like, “Oh, this kid is still only–” He went when he was 12. He’s still there. He’s only 14 or 15 now, still stuck.

John: Still stuck in Ghana.

Christina: It’s harsh.

John: As we said before, relationships are important. Lots of relationships here and lots of really interesting relationships. You can definitely see the multiple perspectives on what this is. This is a family that wants to protect their kid, and they believe that their kid is safer in Ghana than he would be in London. That’s really interesting. That perspective is really interesting. We can see it from the kid’s point of view. It’s like, “Oh my God, how could you ship me away to Ghana when I have this life here in London?” You would think that the life would be better and easier for him in London. Yet-

Christina: The judge said no.

John: The judge said no, and also knife culture.

Christina: Oh my God, I know. The judge said it was like a sobering and depressing moment. I was like, “Yes, as a British person reading this, this just makes me real sad.” The picture of the knives in the London like [crosstalk]–

John: All the seized knives, yes.

Christina: London, not so good. If you’re willing to trick your 12-year-old and send them away to a country where they basically know no one, because I think he actually doesn’t– They’re from there, but he really doesn’t seem to know anyone from there. Just sending your kid anywhere where they don’t know anyone and in that situation, you’ve got to really be worried about where things are at in London. Yes, I feel bad for London.

The only way I would want to see this as a movie is if it starts with this setup, it’s super depressing, but then it becomes magical and wonderful. He finds incredible friends and the school is amazing, and he ends up really happy. The version where he sues his parents is– The version where they send him and then he discovers great things and connects with family and whatever, that could be great.

John: There’s a version of this where he wins the lawsuit and is able to get back. It’s a question like, do you need any–

Christina: Gets back to the knives on the streets of London.

John: Get back to the knives, or that, basically, his parents’ vision for what his life was like is actually not accurate or he’s able to overcome it. Those tensions are really interesting. I don’t think you need these actual people at all. I think the situation is what you care about and you could pick a different kid, a different family. It doesn’t have to be Ghana. It could be whatever.

That idea of this immigrant family who’s come to a place with one vision and then they see the dangers in this vision and they want to send their kid back to the place they came from, it’s really understandable and relatable. We can see both the family’s point of view and from the kid’s point of view, why it’s [crosstalk]–

Christina: Maybe that’s the way it is, that there’s something nice about if the kid can learn to see in his parents’ home country what they see in their home country, and they can then see in their new home country what their son does. Maybe there’s something redemptive and nice there.

John: Also, I think about the non-immigrant families, you’re always worried for your kids and you’re always, you want to protect them. What that means and what you’re able to do really depends on where you come from. A family of greater economic means can send them to a private school. They can shelter them. For this family, this is what they thought their best option was. From the kid’s point of view, of course, they’re going to say no. That’s not what they want. Is it a movie?

Christina: I’m going to say no.

John: Yes, I think it’s maybe a movie. I feel like it’s like a Sundance-y movie.

Christina: Oh. Yes.

John: I think it’s a smaller movie, but I think it could– I don’t know. I think the good version of this gets some Academy Award attention.

Christina: Do you end it happy or sad?

John: I don’t know. You could end it in a way that like a Palme d’Or winning movie at Cannes is neither happy nor sad, just sort of in that place.

Christina: Crunch [laughs].

John: It’s a crunch. I could imagine this being a movie that actually comes from the country that they’re being sent back to. Essentially, if it was a Ghanaian movie and this is basically the same setup, but you really follow the story as it happens back in Ghana, that’s also really interesting.

Finally, zombie colleges. These universities are living another life online and no one can say why. The article we’re looking at is by Chris Quintana from USA Today. Drew, talk us through what this article is describing.

Drew: The author starts looking into these zombie colleges. There’s one called Stratford. It ends up being these colleges that used to be real, but have since shuttered and they’re online, but they’re connected to nothing.

Christina: To be clear, Drew, there are no zombies attending the colleges.

John: Yes, I was a little disappointed too when I ended up past the headline.

Drew: We don’t know.

John: Here’s the reality. There are these colleges that shut down because they were no longer economically viable. Then somebody, somewhere, it’s like, oh, I can pull them up online and get people to-

Christina: Give me application fees.

John: Give me application fees and basically cash the application fees. In some cases, they will actually like, someone from that college will call you about what major do you want to study. A person naively could think like, “Oh, this is a real place.” I guess because these colleges were real as of a couple of years ago, googling them, you might think that there’s still a viable college. It’s not nearly as much fun as a college for zombies, though.

[laughter]

Christina: Oh, I know. On my little notes that I jotted down last night, for the first one, as you could tell, I got excited and wrote a whole page of scribbles. Then there’s like less for the train, and there’s like three lines for the UK teen. For the zombie one, you will see it’s literally just the bullet point and nothing.

John: An empty bullet point. There’s something cool about that. The term “zombie college” is better than the actual story.

Christina: Than the actual story [laughs].

John: It’s just a scam. A journalist investigating a scam can be interesting, and maybe it can lead someplace. At the end of this article, I didn’t have a bigger perspective on it’s just scammy people doing a scam.

Christina: People who go to college and want to eat each other’s brains, who doesn’t want to watch that?

John: Yes, that’s good. Yes on zombie colleges, no on this specific article. Let’s do a recap of how this would be a movie. I think we’re both excited for A Man of Parts and Learning, a Francis Williams movie. Difficult, but potentially great. Some really good roles in there. The trapped luxury train, it’s a setting, but it’s also a setting we’ve seen, so you’d have to do something interesting and new with it. I don’t think you need to have that specific incident as the basis. The Ghanaian teen, I think it’s a small movie. You’re less convinced.

Christina: I’m less convinced. I think you could, but I think anything could be a small little indie. Is it going to be a good small–? I think you should start out writing a small little indie being like, this could really work and move people. I see why people leave the Eccles Theatre clapping.

John: Yes. Honestly, I bet there’s a filmmaker out there who won’t have the identical life, but will have a similar life. I think you could find somebody who can make this movie and is like, oh yes, that’s my story. Honestly, the opposite is probably very common too. I have a couple of friends who’ve- they grew up in a struggling country and the parents shipped them off to the US or to the UK. They never saw their parents again, but their parents did everything they could to put them out there in the world.

All right. Let’s answer a question or two. We have Albin in Finland.

Drew: I was wondering how you create side characters specifically. Are there any guiding practices to help you figure out what side characters should be present in a story and what role they should play, or does it come up naturally? I found that it’s difficult to write a first draft when I don’t exactly know what roles all the characters should play in the narrative. I think getting a better grasp of this would help immensely.

John: Side characters, these are supporting folks who are not your protagonist, they’re not your antagonist or a key love interest. They’re characters who are in multiple scenes, but maybe it sounds like Albin doesn’t know quite who they are yet or what function they’re playing. Christina, as you are mapping out a story and you were actually just working on a project with a writing partner too, what are the conversations you’re having about those not central characters?

Christina: It’s really tricky because they take up space.

John: They do.

Christina: You don’t want them to be so generic that they’re just interchangeable. “I’m the funny best friend.” They’re always such a bummer to read. You also do want to utilize sometimes the shorthands. If you choose to have an assistant who is unusually older– Do you know what I mean? If you do something unusual with one of those characters, it can be really distracting in the reader and people go, well, something more is going to happen to that character, right? There’s got to be a reason why you made your assistant 65 years old.

It’s just a tricky one because it’s a bit Goldilocks. In theory, you want every side character to be like all the side characters in True Romance, where they’re the most amazingly specific, wonderful, life-enhancing humans. But also, you don’t want to be tediously shiny things all around the story.

John: I found that in planning out a story, those side characters who might appear in like three scenes over the course of the movie, I won’t really know who they are as I start writing. Then as I get into scenes and I recognize what I need in scenes, then they’ll become more specific and I’ll realize, okay, that’s this person who keeps coming back through, or I realize like this kind of character shows up in three different scenes, it should be the same character.

Christina: I sometimes think of it in terms of what our main character, what it says about them in the relationship with the main character. Often, I’ll use it as a parallel to another relationship. It’ll be a subtle thing that hopefully no one will ever even pay attention to, but you might just feel it there as an echo.

John: You can feel sometimes in scripts and in movies where a character is just there to set the ball so that the hero can spike it. That can be really annoying, and yet it’s also functional. Is that the character there who can evoke dialogue or actions from our hero that moves the story forward, that’s a good use for the character. You don’t want to think of them as strictly functional, but ultimately to you, they are, just the same way that your scenes are functional, even though they are hopefully engaging themselves.

Christina: I would say if you’re doing a pretty detailed outline, look back at the end of it and just make sure you clock which of the three scenes, and then maybe it’ll occur to you as you’re looking at it from a distance. Oh, I could do this, and then they would have their own mini little arc because people like to be closed out.

John: They do, yes.

Christina: No dingly danglies.

Drew: Let’s try one more here from Daryl. How can I establish a writing routine whilst trying to seemingly balance so much? I’m a student and I’m somewhat struggling to balance writing with school and exercise, healthy eating, living, and whatever else. Am I trying to do too much or do I just lack discipline?

John: Oh, Daryl, it’s all your fault.

Christina: Oh, Daryl, please get a good answer from John August and then give it to me because I don’t know yet. I still haven’t figured it out.

John: First, I want to ask about whilst. Do you use whilst?

Christina: Whilst, if I’m trying to sound very British and posh.

John: Yes, but you probably grew up using it. Are you using it in daily life in America?

Christina: Out loud with my mouth?

John: Yes [chuckles].

Christina: No. No whilst. Whilst. No, I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud.

John: [laughs] Listen, Daryl, you have to give yourself some grace. Yes, you’re trying to do a lot and if you are having a hard time fitting writing into your life and you want to do more writing, you need to recognize, okay, well, what are the times that I’m doing other stuff that I’m willing to not do that other stuff and write? That could just be giving something else up. It could mean making different choices about other hobbies and other stuff, but you’re going to have to make a choice to do some writing.

Christina: I’ve actually got recycled John August advice here.

John: I’m excited to hear it.

Christina: Because you changed my life a little bit with this, but it only lasted briefly because I’m an idiot and I can’t stick to anything. You, I can’t even remember if it was on the podcast or just in life, you told me about sprints.

John: Oh yes, let’s talk about sprints.

Christina: Just doing little short periods, setting yourself a goal. It can be really short, but giving yourself– Even if it’s 40 minutes, set a timer, just do it and don’t– Sometimes trying to clear out an afternoon for writing or a morning or a day is just impossible.

John: We won’t get more done in an afternoon.

Christina: No, you won’t. If you have a job and you have the whatever, and you come in the door and it’s the 40 minutes between walking in the door and making your dinner, and you just have 40 minutes, you will not get distracted. You will not look at your emails because you’re like, I only have 40 minutes. You have the timer running right next to you. Then you just go. You just give yourself a junk.

John: Yes. Just yesterday, I was doing that for edits on the ScreenPants book. I set the timer for an hour and I just did an hour’s worth of work. When the timer beeps, I went a little bit over that. If I had not set the timer, I don’t think it would have actually, I wouldn’t have opened the file.

Christina: I want you to know, I’m such an evangelist for your advice. I give it to everyone and I never do it myself. I don’t know why, because the period that I did it, I was the most productive I’ve ever been. I’m terrible.

John: Yes. Daryl, timers could help. Adjusting where you’re prioritizing that writing time can help too, because it can feel selfish to just take the time and to shut everybody else out to do stuff. That’s what writing is, yes.

Christina: We’re all selfish.

John: We’re all selfish. Be a little selfish. It’s time for our One Cool things. I have two comedy-related one cool things. I went and saw Mike Birbiglia’s new show, The Good Life, this last week. It’s so funny. He’s just so smart and so funny. He’s been on the show multiple times. It’s just observations on life and the way he’s able to weave in personal stuff and family stuff in ways that’s generous to the folks he’s including, but also helps talk about larger themes.

It’s so great to see somebody who can just do that so effortlessly. See his show. I think there are more dates on. We’ll put a link to his website in the show notes. You should also listen to his podcast called Working It Out, which is like Scriptnotes, but for standup comics and just talking through their process and how they come to what’s funny and they workshop some jokes in the course of it.

Second comedy thing is the print version of The Onion is just so good and people need to subscribe to it because it’s just so great. This last week’s just- everything, every story on the front page made me giggle. Trump administration offers free at home loyalty tests, Baby Saves Affair, US military bands man with girls names from combat. It’s all just so smart and to get it delivered.

Christina: It looks so lovely in your hand.

John: It feels so good. I strongly encourage you. We’ll put a link in the show notes to The Onion site, but it comes once a month and it’s just delightful. Christina, what do you have for us?

Christina: My one cool thing is a person and his company. It’s Padric Murphy who runs a company called the Research Department. It’s researchdebt.com. Drew will hopefully find a link and include it. He is amazing. I’ve known him for a number of years. He was a co-producer on Babylon, worked on a number of movies for a long time, worked with Baz Luhrmann for a long time, has always done research for movies just as part of his job.

Then a few years ago, just went out on his own, made it his job, set up this company. It’s just him right now. Although I think people should beg to be working with him because he’s just incredible.

I hired him last fall to research a story. I knew what I wanted. I knew the character stories. I knew the character dynamics. I knew everything that I wanted on a personal level, but I didn’t know when or where the story was set. I knew it was period, I knew I needed to deal with some colonial stuff, and I didn’t know what country or what time period because I didn’t know how I would then lay it into the history. It’s not about the history, but it’s very important that I have the setting.

Working with him was the most incredible experience because he’s not just a research nerd, he’s incredibly creative. His instincts on story and just listening to it and hearing it were amazing. The thing that he would do that was coolest was actually taking it all the way back to side characters.
I would have things like, “I’ve got this side character. It’s a maid.” We landed on Malaysia in 1914, which is not a place or a time that I knew much about. Then I had this side character who was a maid. I needed her to be of a certain ethnicity, a certain age. I was like, “This is what I think I want to do in the story. Does it sound plausible?”

He would go off and then find journal entries of people who were basically that same age, race, in the same time period. I would get actual flavor of what those people’s lives were like. That kind of thing is so extraordinary. I don’t even know how he physically does it, but then he scans all the pages in the books so that you have all of the resources, and then he puts it into a credibly digestible format. He’s amazing. He’s worked on a few TV shows and features as well. For any executives or creatives or whatever listening, he is amazing.

John: That’s fantastic. Researchdepartment.com. Dept. Love it.

Christina: D-E-P-T.

John: dept.com. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Kotrla, who’s a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the 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 Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hodson, so great to catch up with you.

Christina: [chuckles] Great to see you and speak with you for the first time today.

John: Come back anytime and sooner, please.

Christina: Anytime. I’d love to. It’s a delight.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. As billed in the opening, the cold email. I’m old enough and you’re probably old enough too [crosstalk]–

Christina: What are you saying, John. I’m a child. I’m so young and fresh.

John: Did you ever make a cold call where you just had to call somebody?

Christina: That’s how I got started in this industry.

John: First, let’s talk about the cold call because the cold call is genuinely terrifying because you’re interrupting someone’s life with a phone call, which is just scary, but we had to do it.

Christina: How else did we do it back in the day?

John: We didn’t have email.

Christina: It was when I wanted to work in film. I had gone to my university career service and they said, “You can’t work in film. That’s not really a thing. Do you want to be a journalist at the BBC?” I was like, “No, I want to work in movies.” They were no help. I went online, but it was early crappy internet when you couldn’t really find anything good. So I got a yellow pages and looked up film production and then just made a list of all of the offices and cold-called all of the numbers.

I need to tell you that I am a person that, to this day, I’ll like go and do big studio pitches with big grownups. I still can’t make restaurant reservations on the phone. I’m so bad at speaking on the phone. I hate it. It like cripples me with anxiety, but I did it.

John: I’m so impressed that you did it. You made a list and you just did it. How did you set yourself down on a phone and pick up the phone and just do it?

Christina: I forced myself to do it. I reminded myself that the person picking up the phone was just the receptionist. They are probably not having the best day in the world. As long as I’m nice, as long as I’m not annoying and an asshole– No, sorry, I probably was annoying, but I wasn’t an asshole, I don’t think. I wasn’t demanding too much. I was pretty specific in what I was asking for, which was, do you offer any internships? Is there anyone that I could talk to about possibly doing any work as a runner? I’ll photocopy or I’ll pick up sandwiches.

Because I was offering something and because I made myself fairly succinct, which is hard for me, as you can imagine, it helped. I finally got someone who asked me a question and we had one thing in common. From that one thing, I like spun it out into like a 5-minute conversation and then 10-minute conversation. Then he was like, well, we don’t have anything now, but come in and have a cup of tea with me and maybe you could do some reading. That’s how I got my first job. Reader, then runner, then intern, then free intern assistant for a year, then an assistant. Yes, it’s tough.

John: Yes, but you did it. You were able to make that cold [crosstalk]–

Christina: It was cold calls.

John: Cold calling is much worse than the cold email. Let’s talk about the cold email, which is at least you’re not ruining someone’s day by calling.

Christina: No. Sometimes they ruin my day. They make me so mad. Because it’s a cold email, you should try harder. You’ve got all the time in the world.

John: Let’s talk about a bad cold email you get and a good cold email you get. What does Christina Hodson get as a cold email?

Christina: I’m so mad just talking about this. The bad ones, the ones where they’ve copied and pasted it, and they’ve like changed the font on your name because it’s copied and pasted and so the formatting is all wrong.

John: Oh, the worst. The worst.

Christina: They’ve copied and pasted the credits in to be, “I love your film, bah bah bah,” but they’ve like copied and pasted that and you can tell. They also sometimes haven’t removed some of the other ones that you didn’t write. It’s so maddening. There’s just no point in doing it. It actively makes me want to block you forever.

John: Yes, I hear that. The mismatching fonts is just a dead giveaway. To me, a good cold email is one that is from the subject line, I can tell what it is they’re trying to do, what they need. It doesn’t say like from a fan or something like that. That doesn’t help me out. It’s specific about a movie.

A good cold email is like, hey, I’m putting together a documentary about women in Tim Burton movies. If the subject line was like Women in Tim Burton movies Documentary, oh, okay, I can see what that is. Quick introduction of like, this is who I am. These are some of the things I’ve done. I’m working on this thing. Could I convince you to come in for an interview for 90 minutes one day?

I’ll probably say no, but at least I’ll understand what the request was. It’s when something is so vague or takes forever to actually get to the ask that I’m like [sighs] “Ugh.” It kills me.

Christina: What about when they’re coming from, not someone trying to make you jump, when it’s someone that is starting out in the industry, that’s reaching out to you for advice? Now you have a whole podcast, they have a whole system they can go through. Do you have any tips for those ones where it’s like– I very often get a, “Could I take you out for a coffee?”

John: The answer is no, from my side. Also, I have a podcast and I can push people towards–

Christina: You’re like, I’ve got 680 episodes you can listen to.

John: Yes. The answer to that has generally been no. Let’s flip it around when you or I need to ask an expert in something about a thing. You were just talking about the research department, who’s a guy who is probably doing a lot of those cold emails to- trying to get those things. When I need to reach out to a specialist in something, I’ll just be very clear like, hey, I’m a screenwriter, I’m working on a thing about this. I see you’re an expert in this field. Could I get on the phone to ask you 10 minutes worth of questions about this subject?

If I read an author’s book and I really liked it, I’ll just reach out and say like, “Hey, I really enjoyed your book. Quickly, I’m John August and this is my thing. I just really wanted you to know how much I appreciate that.” No one’s going to get upset to read that.

Christina: No one’s mad about that.

John: No one’s mad about that.

Christina: No one’s mad about those.

John: If you’re a cold email, make someone’s day a little bit better.

Christina: Yes. I also think with that, in your example of reaching out to a specialist, because I’ve actually recently done that, some people don’t want to talk on the phone. Some people are like me and don’t want to make restaurant reservations because it involves being awkward on the phone. So I give them the choice. I say, “I’m happy to talk on the phone for 20 minutes or whatever, but if you’d rather email, I can lay it out here,” so that they have the option.

John: Yes. Give them choices. Don’t let them feel boxed into a thing.

Christina: Be specific about the ask. The general, like, “Can I take you out for coffee one day and pick your brain?” I’m like, no.

John: No. I never want my brain picked.

Christina: No. If someone emails and say, “Can I pick your brain? It’s this.” Then they give me one question in an email and the rest of the email is actually thoughtful and I think they have bothered choosing to ask me specifically rather than just generic screenwriter, then I might be like, oh yes, actually, this is an interesting question and you seem nice.

John: Do you seem nice and not like a crazy person?

Christina: Do you seem like you bothered proofreading your own email? Typos in those emails drive me crazy. Especially if it’s someone trying to be a writer, which it most often is.

John: One step better than cold email though is the introduction email. When some neutral person has done this or you’ve asked for a CC into a thing, then best practices are, they’ve CC’d you in, you put them on BCC so they can disappear off the thread and you can actually just do this. Drew, you’ve had to do some cold emails.

Drew: Oh God, yes.

John: Talk to us about what you find successful and what you dread.

Drew: It’s being specific with the ask and making the ask easy, to your point. If it’s one specific question, it’s a very short, that can be a fun after– If you need a break for something, you can answer that question. The general is always death. Especially like, because I’m essentially John’s firewall for emails.

Christina: [laughs] You must get so much.

Drew: We get a lot. To your point on the, it’s usually an assistant who’s having their own day. The things that are easy to elevate, that’s great. That’s fun. Think about that intermediary, whether that person exists or not. I think if it’s an easy ask, great. If it’s not, if it’s more complicated, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.

John: We did a 100th birthday party for our house. Our house turned 100 years old.

Christina: Congratulations house.

John: Stuart Friedel, who’s a former Scriveness producer, undertook this giant research project to figure out the whole history of the house and basically everyone who ever lived in the house.

Christina: That’s so cool.

John: One of the things I’ve always admired about Stuart Friedel is he is incredibly good at the cold email. He actually has none of that shame in there that stops someone from reaching out. He will just do it.

Christina: He does it in a way that’s charming and that people respond to.

John: Absolutely. He was able to get all this information because he was just unafraid to reach out to people and make that happen. In the setup to this, he said, “Oh, it’s easier for you because you’re John August?” It’s like, sure, but it’s also easier if you’re working on behalf of somebody else. For that, sure it’s his job. He’s sort of doing it for us. I was able to do it brilliantly because he had no sense that it wasn’t proper. Of course, it was proper. His asks were Also really clear. It’s like, we’re talking about one house.

Drew: There’s also that sort of motivation too. If it’s a thing that’s important to me, I will always be terrified to send the email or call or whatever. If it’s easy, if it sort of doesn’t matter–

Christina: This is just for John, who cares? [laughs]

Drew: Yes, totally. My wife’s favorite animal is a red panda. I was like, I wonder if a zoo would let us hang out with the red panda. I got shockingly far up the chain at I think the LA Zoo, maybe San Diego Zoo, where I just called. I was like, hey, can we hang out with a red panda? They were like, let me ask. I don’t know. I got like three or four people up the chain. The only reason we couldn’t is they were like, well, the red panda’s pregnant. We’re going to have some weird–

Christina: What? They’re going to get inundated now.

Drew: I know, right? That was one of those things that was like, that doesn’t affect the rest of my life. It’s just fun.

Christina: I’m going to think you like an email to hang out with animals.

John: Christina Hodson, Instagram. Will you message people on Instagram or not?

Christina: I’ve done it once, drunk, but I don’t know how to use Instagram. I have it under some– I had a cat who’s not even alive anymore. It was under her name. I drunkenly, in an Uber, once messaged someone and then didn’t know how to check my messages. The reply, I found two months later.

John: No.

Christina: No, I’m not.

John: Not a good strategy for you.

Christina: I don’t think I would do anything professional on Instagram.

John: Yes, I’ve done a couple of professional things on Instagram.

Christina: You probably have a very professional Instagram.

John: It’s also the difference of I think being a man versus being a woman on Instagram. Just the amount of crap that a woman gets on Instagram is much higher. Back when Twitter used to exist, that was the really useful way for me to reach out to somebody because I could– If I already followed them or if I deliberately followed them on that, they would get a notification because I was a verified person and then I could DM and that was–

Christina: Back in the early early days, it was just like, are you a funny person? If I scroll back in your tweets, are they witty?

John: Absolutely.

Christina: Then you can get anything you want. It’s a very different world now.

John: Yes. That is the nice thing, though, about even Instagram is that there’s a little bit better sense of like, oh, this is the actual person, versus an email could come from anybody. It’s really hard.

Christina: Yes. Sometimes it’s a catfish.

John: It could be a catfish. You never know. Christina Hodson, you’re not a catfish. You’re an actual real-

Christina: I’m a real human.

John: -a real star.

Christina: [chuckles]

John: Thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Links:

• Christina Hodson
• That New York Times article with John and Christina
• Bamboo Director’s Chair
• Birdigo on Steam
• Action samples: Aliens, The Bourne Identity and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• David Koepp’s Jurassic Park screenplay
• David Benioff’s Troy screenplay
• A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala
• When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days by Robert Klara
• A U.K. Teen’s Parents Sent Him to Ghana. He Took Them to Court. by Lynsey Chutel
• Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why by Chris Quintana
• Mike Birbiglia
• The Onion in print
• Padraic Murphy’s Research Department
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Vance Kotrla (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.