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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 720 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you sell and produce an original series in this age of streamers and IP? To help us answer that question, we welcome back the co-creators of the new spy series Ponies, Persons of No Interest, Susanna Fogel and David Iserson. Great to have you back on Scriptnotes.

David Iserson: Great to be back. I listened to this show enough that it is still freaky to see you do the thing that I hear you do.

[laughter]

John: Last time you were here, it was Episode 361. This is Episode 720. It was halfway through. Every 360 episodes, it’s like a year cycle. You come back on the show.

David: This is how hard it is to get a thing made. It goes from script to production over the half-life of Scriptnotes’ journey as a podcast.

John: That was for The Spy Who Dumped Me. Now you’re back with another spy show, so spies are in your pocket.

David: We’re back with something that has some shared DNA in that we wrote it, and that it is about spies, but it’s a very different tone, very different feel. I think we learned a lot of things for making that movie that we didn’t bring into this show. It’s a different beast, but it is still things that we gravitate to. We shot them both in Budapest.

Susanna Fogel: Budapest. French stories–

David: About two women.

John: That’s true. It’s hilarious, but the tone is specific and strange. I really want to get into it because I was struck by sort of Ponies is a tone I’ve not seen on a show in a while, which is fun to say. I want to talk about that.

Susanna: Aw, thanks.

John: I want to talk about the series, but I also want to answer listener questions on trusting your judgment, how to tell if you’re talented, and differentiating character voices. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about taste. We did a little bit of this before we got on mic, but what is taste? How do you cultivate it, and should you even worry about taste? We’ll get into taste. Let’s remind listeners who weren’t here for episode 361–

David: What were you guys doing?

[laughter]

John: What were you doing? It’s okay. Answer and remind us who you are because Susanna Fogel, and the time since we saw you last, you went off and directed a whole bunch of things. Pilots for the Flight Attendant, The Wild, A Small Light. You directed the features Winter and Cat Person all in the time since we’ve seen you. You’re so busy and prolific. Congrats.

Susanna: Thank you. I go for long stretches of time where I’m not working, and I’m in my pajamas, so when things come out all at once, and it looks like that’s my regular density of work, I feel excited that that’s how it looks.

John: David, when we talked before, we talked about you working on SNL way back in the day.

David: Yes, that was my very first writing job.

John: Yes. Since then, United States of Terror, Up All Night, New Girl, Mad Men, Mr. Robot, Mozart in the Jungle, Run. Since the last time you were here, you also had young kids.

David: Yes, I had identical twin girls who, by the time this episode airs, will be two years old.

John: That’s incredible. As Craig and I often describe on the podcast, kids are the death of a career.

David: Sure, yes.

Susanna: When we started working on the show, they were negative six years old. This is how long we’ve been working on the show.

David: Working on this, I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids, and I’m married with two kids. I brought my kids and my wife overseas to make this show. I couldn’t get them on camera, but they are a part of the show in that they were there.

John: They grew up in it. My daughter grew up in and around the Big Fish musical, the long journey of that.

David: Sure.

John: Every incarnation she was a part of and saw, so her DNA is somehow in that show as well.

David: Did she run screaming from this industry as a result of seeing us?

John: No, she loves it. She loves tech rehearsal, which is where they’re painstakingly rearranging lights, and actors will move two feet, and they’ll reset the lights. It’s the most tedious process. She was maybe six, eight years old during it. She would sit there at the table for hours watching it. I couldn’t believe it. Now she loves all production stuff.

David: That’s amazing.

Susanna: That’s so cool.

David: I remember when I started off in this industry, and you’d hear people being like, “The last thing I would ever want is for my kid to be in this industry.” I was talking to Vic Michaelis, who’s an actor on our show yesterday, about how all of our toddlers love musicals and how we would be just distraught if they just wanted to be in tech or accountants or just something. We just essentially just need them to be in showbiz because it’s the only thing we understand.

John: At Sundance Labs, I was there with this married couple. She was a writer, and he was a writer-director. For years, we’d see them up there, and they had young kids and like, “Oh, we want our kids to do other things.” Other kids are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal. Somehow, it does just rub off. Let’s talk about the genesis of this series. Where did this come from? It feels like it should be based on a book or something else, but it’s not. It’s just a thing.

David: It’s not based on a book. You can, as I did, take a deep dive into many, many books about spies in the ’70s, abouty the American Embassy and the British Embassy during the Cold War. There’s a lot of sources that give a window into what this world is. There was an idea that kept coming up when I became interested in, and just to predate even that, my interest in just the aesthetics of the ’70s and the Cold War. It came out of a trip I took in my 20s to Prague and Budapest and Berlin.

You just can see there’s a communism museum in Prague and the DDR museum in Berlin. The aesthetic of this time is such a weird version of what American pop culture looked like through this weird prism. I just was really captivated. If you come to my house, you will see I have a large mural on my wall about the second and third dogs in space from the USSR. I have weird old watches. I love this look and this feel. For me, I would read these books.

The idea that kept coming up again and again is that although maybe film and television, Cold War-era film and television made it seem like spy operations were happening with some success, the Americans and the British really couldn’t run a spy operation in Moscow. They just couldn’t. They tried to. They would be followed everywhere. I think that idea of it was a desperate time where they’d be willing to try anything was something that Susanna and I started talking about.

From there, the most ethereal way I sometimes think of writing is that sometimes it is just there. It is almost behind a wall. As you start naming a character and just finding details of it, it really took form. For us, we just started talking through these characters, and then everything became very clear very fast.

John: The logline of the show is set in 1977. It’s following two secretaries who are working at the American embassy in Moscow. They become spies after their husbands die in mysterious circumstances. The engine of the show, at least at the start, is them trying to figure out what actually happened to their husbands. That’s the logline. What was the actual pitch? What did you actually pitch to people? Did you write this first? Did you go in and pitch to Universal? How did this all come together?

Susanna: This was a really interesting and very singular experience of having a bunch of general meetings after Spy Who Dumped Me, where people were looking for us to do the TV version of Spy Who Dumped Me. We didn’t want to do exactly that. We didn’t want to do something quite as comedic. We didn’t want to do something broad. I had a general meeting at a network that is not Peacock.

David: That doesn’t exist anymore.

Susanna: No longer exists. That shall not be named.

David: It was Quibi.

Susanna: Exactly. The executive said, “Do you have anything that’s similar to Spy Who Dumped Me?” I said, “Not exactly, but David and I had been just batting around the idea of what if there were these two women in this era and they became spies, but it’s a friendship story, but it’s a little bit more grounded in terms of the tone, but also more action.” She said, “We’ll buy that.” She said, “We know we’re not the coolest place to sell a show.”

David: We know Quibi is not the coolest.
[laughter]

Susanna: She said, “I know on the downside, we’re not the coolest place to sell a show. On the upside, you don’t have to pitch it to anyone else. If we don’t do it, we’ll give it back to you, and we won’t be assholes about it.” After having pitch fatigue about trying to sell everything else and just the amount of time you waste or spend with maybe limited rewards, the idea of just getting a yes and being able to actually just go write the thing and not have to spend six months, it was such an appealing thing that we just said yes.

David: Absolutely.

John: Why is that such an exception? Because I never hear that story. It makes so much sense from both sides. From your side, you don’t want to pitch to every place. You just want to go to the one place that will actually maybe do it that feels right. From their side, they don’t want a bidding war. It’s the right idea. If it did go out further, they might lose it.

Susanna: I know. I really admired just her autonomy in saying that. She wasn’t the head of the network or anything. She just said, yes, we’ll buy that as opposed to needing a bidding war to tell her that it’s worth buying.

John: Exactly.

Susanna: We just took the yes, and we wrote it. We had a great experience developing. Then that network folded into a different network. We wrote backup scripts. We were many years spending waiting to see if this would go at that network. Ultimately, it didn’t. We reshopped it with multiple scripts and a Bible and a chap.

John: Multiple scripts that you’d written because you never had rooms together?

David: We just had one script. We had one script. Then we had figured out what the rest of the show would be. This was deep pandemic because I remember I was house sitting for my in-laws when we pitched this to Peacock. I think we only pitched around three places. Other people had heard the premise, and it wasn’t for them. We couldn’t–

Susanna: Mostly because it was an original period piece, and everyone says, “Don’t try to sell that.”

David: It was very scary because this is, again, what people tell you never to do right now. Period. End. Original ideas are both not things that people tell you to try to sell, and we pitched to peacock.

Susanna: Let’s dig into that a little bit more. You’re pitching the show, but the script is already written. At what point are they reading the script versus you pitching first and they’re reading afterward? Because I’m going through this with a project that’s already written as well. Were they reading the script first, and then you could answer specific questions about the show, or are you pitching broad strokes? Did you have–

Susanna: These details are so fuzzy for me because it’s been so long.

David: I’ve done both versions of this. I’ve pitched shows in the past and then handed them the script at the end of it. I’m almost positive they’ve read the script before, and then we pitched.

Susanna: I think because they were inheriting a bunch of ideas already, we shared those ideas, I think.

David: Yes. Then also because what we’re going to talk about is tone. I don’t like pitching tone. I think tone is a really– it is such a vague thing to pitch. It’s–

Susanna: Trying to describe why a joke is funny.

David: Try to describe something, and then also just having to find a comp, and then the comp might not be right. I think that we gave them all the script and we pitched the show. I think at that point, because this is just what television is now, we had many seasons of ideas. We pitched the first season in detail and then said, “Here’s where we would go with season two, and here’s where we would go with season three.” Yes. It was pretty elaborate.

John: The show is visually very distinct and interesting. Were you bringing visuals to the pitch to show them what it would look like and what it would feel like, or was it just talking?

Susanna: Oh, yes, we did. Part of the idea behind the aesthetic of the show is that, like David was saying, there was an explosion of color and pattern. When you see Cold War content, mostly it’s really dramatic, and it’s really dreary-looking. There isn’t summertime, and there aren’t flowers, and there aren’t people with lively patterns on their clothes. The reality is, looking at pictures of people in that time, there’s so much vibrancy to it, in an imitation of American pop culture in a way.

We really wanted to do a loudly colorful look.

John: Yes, [unintelligible 00:12:06].

Susanna: Yes, so it could still have the muscularity of a spy thing, but also the fun of just people wanting to watch things that pop, because it was actually how a lot of the world looked. Yes, that was what we wanted to show in the deck. We wanted to say, this isn’t a dreary, depressing thing. Not only do we not want the tone to be that on the page, but we also want you to know that this is going to be a fun show to watch with lots of a feast for the senses when you’re looking at the clothes and the design and all that.

David: I think for me and Susanna, sometimes you hear people use the word entertaining almost pejoratively. Entertaining is the kind of show that those are the shows you fold your laundry to. They’re not the serious, important shows.

John: They’re lean-back shows rather than lean-in shows, yes.

David: I don’t feel like that is true in the media that we grew up with, the movies we love, the television we love. It just is how film and television has become a little bit bifurcated now. I think we are always trying to lead with being entertaining, and part of that is trying to be visually bold, but also to try to be as significant as we hope to be. To not make it light, to not be soft, to have the emotions real, to try to work to the top of our abilities, but also to not bore an audience. I think being visually bold comes hand-in-hand with that idea.

John: You get the yes from Universal for Peacock?

David: For Peacock, and then went to Universal.

John: It’s always so complicated. Are you going to the studio, or are you going to the network?

Susanna: Yes. We didn’t have a studio on at our first buyer, and so we came to Peacock clean of that. We did bring on a producer in the interim between parting ways with this other Network and shopping it around. I brought on Pacesetter, who had produced this Gillian Flynn show that I directed a couple of episodes of Utopia for Amazon. I had a good experience working with her. I floated it to her and said, “Can you–” She was doing a lot of commercial but elevated stuff, and I thought that she’d be a good match. With her, she became our partner, and then we had her on the journey since then. UTB came on.

David: We went right to networks, and then the networks laid it off to the studios. When we pitched to Peacock, we pitched, among others, to Alex Sepiel, who is somebody who we just knew forever. You lived in a Melrose–

Susanna: He was my neighbor in a hipster, downtrodden version of Melrose Place when we were in our 20s, where we just-

John: Yes, we all have those.

Susanna: -had gross, slummy apartments and a sketchy landlord who was running from the law. He and I were on a trivia team together every Monday. I knew him really from way back. Every time I’ve pitched to him since, it’s like there’s a legitimate familiarity there of just we know too many of each other’s dirty secrets from that time. Anyway, having him as our executive has been really fun. It was fun to work with him because we just know him. He’s a peer. He’s the person who shares our sensibilities, our taste.

Susanna: You have this deal to be making it at Peacock Universal. You have a script written. You need to write backup scripts. Then, at a certain point with backup scripts, you get the order to finish writing everything and to go to a series. How does it work? Did you ever have a room? How did it all fit together?

David: If it were so simple. We sold this in deep pandemic, and it just took time. Basically, between selling it in whatever 2020, 2021, where we got what they call the cast contingent pickup, which happened on the eve of the actor strike.

Susanna: On the eve of the strike. It all took a while.

David: It all took a while. This ultimately just became years. We were paid at different points to do two more scripts. Then we also just were waiting around. We wrote two more after that, just betting on ourselves and assuming that the show would eventually get picked up.

Susanna: We got the cast contingent pickup as we were waiting for actor offer. Actually, we were waiting for an actor deal to close. We’re like, if the deal doesn’t close, it’s not picked up, but it probably will. Then they’re going to be rushing us so fast to get these scripts ready. We should–

John: Just do it.

Susanna: Even though we were grumbling about it, we were like, “We should just write these ourselves.”

David: I think at that point-

Susanna: We had Amelia.

David: -we had Amelia, and we were just making her deal. We just wrote two more scripts. Then–

John: There’s five scripts as you’re coming into–

David: Yes. We did do a writer’s room because we believe in writer’s rooms, but also because we had– This is a spy show with a lot of heavy plotting that we were just doing ourselves piecemeal over the course of many years. We just wanted some smart, interesting people to vet the plot, but also vet the characters. We wanted to build to a really satisfying ending and set up everything that we need to in hopes of a new season.

Susanna: We also felt like maybe if I was going to be directing the first couple of episodes, that we might get in a situation where they would send me over there to start working on crap, and we’d be separated. We just wanted to have as much of it buttoned up as we could before I left.

David: Fortunately, it didn’t happen. We had everything written by the time we started.

John: Eight episodes, right?

David: Eight episodes.

John: Eight episodes. It’s written before you go. Are you block shooting it? How are you figuring out the best ways to do that?

Susanna: Well, I want to say one thing, which I think we can admit now because it all worked out, which is that we definitely lied about having episodes four and five written when we–

David: Yes, and tell them.

Susanna: We had to be like, “We’re thinking it could be something like,” and we go through the whole process. I am glad we did it that way. It made us really interrogate those scripts. We had a lot secretly done.

David: We shot blocks. Yes, we shot two episodes at a time.

Susanna: I knew I wanted to do three or four, and we were trying to figure out– Normally, if it wasn’t a show that I also wrote, I would come in and do the first two or three.

As we were in the writer’s room, my thought was, I knew I wanted to do the first couple. Then there was a mid-season episode that I just was personally really connected to. I knew I wanted to do that. We were like, how can we be creative? I was going to do a middle block so I could do that.

Then, as we started breaking the finale, it sounded like it was so much fun that I called Jessica during a lunch break, and I was like, “I’m going to be really annoyed if someone else directs the finale because now I love it. Can I do it?”

She’s like, “Yes.” Anyway, I ended up basically being there the whole time more or less. It was fun having the experience of breaking the episodes and deciding there which ones. I got attached to different episodes as a director, too, which was nice.

John: Talk about your writer’s room. How did you pick writers you wanted to be in the room with you? Obviously, the two of you have a clear vision, a clear voice. Were you looking for people who complemented you in ways, things you weren’t particularly good at? What were the criteria, and how many writers did you end up ultimately bringing in?

David: It’s funny because we had this conversation a lot, and I’d been in a lot of rooms. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot of what to do and what not to do. Also, it was a thing that would keep me up at night before a room started because it’s like I’ve been in great rooms, I’ve been in not great rooms. I’m just like, “Oh God, I have so much pressure on myself of making sure that my room is one of the good rooms.”

John: It’s not just SNL, but also looking through your credits, you’ve been in some challenging rooms.

David: I’ve been in some challenging rooms, and every room I’ve been in, I’ve learned a ton, but also, yes, some were harder than others. One thing that I do feel strongly about from just witnessing it in other rooms is that I am not a huge fan of bringing in specialists. I’m not somebody who’s like, “Okay, we have comedy in the show, we have a mystery in the show. Let’s bring in a really good mystery person. Let’s bring in a really good comedy person.” Eventually, you want people to be able to write the show, and you want people to write the show fully.

Selfishly, we just wanted to bring in writers who at least had a sensibility like us. We wanted to bring in people who had different experiences and different perspectives, and a diversity of types of people. At the end of the day, we wanted people to be able to execute a script that could both have the banter that is emblematic of our show, have the emotional grounding that is emblematic of our show, and be able to speak to the twist. I read a ton of samples, and I met with great people. They met with great people that I would have hired, and I couldn’t afford.

There was a lot of shaping to find the puzzle pieces. What was really exciting putting together is that a lot of the writers just still came about being able to have a sensibility that was shared with different skill sets. We had a writer who was just really good at making a map of who knows what, when, and the board. That’s just not how my mind works. It was just really helpful to see it. Other writers who just really could hook into the emotions of the friendship, drama, and in a way that felt very personal, that we were just able to use there. We built a really nice family, a very small group of writers in a very short amount of time, and all people that we care a lot about.

John: Did the two of you ever disagree in front of the writers?

David: Yes, of course.

Susanna: Yes, probably.

David: Susanna and I have a sibling–

Susanna: We’re very like, “Shut up. I don’t want to do that.”

David: Yes. It’s also helpful to have your ideas challenged and to be able to back it up.

Susanna: The dynamic of the room is like Dave has so much more room experience than I do. At the same time, within a hierarchy of a room, it takes a while for people to know that they can challenge the showrunner’s ideas sometimes. It’s maybe like a learning curve with people knowing that it’s going to go over well if there’s a meritocracy of ideas in the room, and that’s how David is wired. Until they learn that, there’s a certain fear around pushing back on stuff, even if we want the ideas challenged.

Weirdly, although I didn’t have as much room experience as many of the writers that were under us, for a while, it was like I was the only person sometimes who would be like, “No, no,” because other people are just not sure if they can do that in a writer’s room just because of how those rooms work. We really do share tastes pretty specifically. It’s very rare that we have a disagreement about how something is executed. It’s pretty amazing, actually. I’ve worked with a lot of people, but there’s always a sense of if I have to miss a meeting or miss something, I know you’re going to make the decisions I would make, which is a relief, I think, especially if I’m off directing something. I don’t know. I know you’ll catch the thing if I miss it.

David: It was helpful in casting, too. It was just being able to see. Clearly, we had the same vision in our head of who the characters were because we would definitely be like, “Oh, of course, it is this person.”

John: I have almost no TV writing room experience, so I have all these showrunners who come through, and they tell me their stories. A thing that’s always struck me as strange is that you hire writers based on how good they are at writing. You’re reading samples, and you want really good writers. David, you were saying you want writers who can write the whole show, and yet for the weeks and weeks of the show, they’re not writing. There’s very little writing. You’re just using their brain. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that weird that the people aren’t writing more during the course of the writer’s room?

Susanna: Especially in this room, because we had written so much. We were like, “Okay, there’s two available episodes for all of y’all to do.”

David: Yes. It is very weird. Also, when I think about other rooms that I’ve been in and rooms that I had no hiring and firing power and rooms where I was just an observer in, I think that people who are incredibly skilled at the politics of a room or just how to have a great disposition and have everybody like them or have really good ideas, all really great. If you can’t deliver a script, you’re toast. Ultimately, that is what the hard part is.

I would say that what makes you good in a room is being in a room more, but what should get you in the room is being able to write the script. A lot of the process of running a show is going back to my job’s past and where I didn’t do a good job, or where I would have done differently, or where I can see my place in it. I remember in a very, very early job, a very famous producer who I won’t name, but he has a voice like this.

John: It was Alfred Hitchcock, wasn’t it?

David: It was Alfred Hitchcock. He gave negative feedback about me that his certainty does not match with his experience at all. I took it to heart, and I really tried to internalize it. I didn’t know any other way to be in a room, but feel that I had to feel strongly about my ideas. Now, running a show, you can’t just be like, “Meh, it can be this, it can be that.” You have to be certain. It is a process of just knowing that, aha, I have the solution. Also, I am the 17th person down on the hierarchy of this room. How do I do that? It takes time.

I think now I absolutely love helping other friends with their stuff, coming up with ideas because I have no personal investment other than just wanting to do it. It’s not like if you don’t listen to my idea that it’s going to hurt my heart. I absolutely don’t care. I’ve now done so many versions of what a room is and what breaking a story is and what fixing a story is that I have all of that ammunition. I only have that because I’ve been in a lot of rooms, and I’ve only gotten those rooms because I was able to write the script.

John: Let’s talk about what is so specific and unexpected for me in your show is the tone in that, first off, it’s a period show that almost feels like it could have been shot in the time. Some of that is how Susanna you chose to direct it. You’re going for that pillar box format, so rather than widescreen, it’s square screen. Obviously, everything looks right and feels right, and Budapest stands in really well for Moscow.

The camera movements and everything else, it tells you that we’re in a ’70s place without a shot. The show shot in that time wouldn’t have looked like that. It would have looked crappy and then this looks great. That is part of the tone. Also, the comedic tone between the actors and how the world is presented and how the stakes are presented is just a little lighter than the equivalent other spy show would be. How really did you know that and how did you anchor into that?

Susanna: I think something that we’ve always been interested in is if most spy movies are on plot most of the time, if you went home with those people at the end of the day, they would still call their moms and fight with their husbands. They would still have a life where they’re not acting in character as spy. I think there is a truth to that. We just wanted to shift where the lens is sometimes to that. It naturally has the other parts of a person’s personality that come forward when they’re not on the job in a high-stakes situation are by nature, lighter if their job is high stakes. We’re interested in that.

If it feels true and grounded enough, then it doesn’t feel like the tone is confused. I think sometimes with a mixed tone and what scares people about it is people don’t want it to feel like you’re in two different shows and hopefully if it all feels grounded.

John: You feel like you’re one show, but it’s a very specific unusual show to sort of be in. The Americans is a great show where you have spies who are in their home lives. The difference is they’re incredibly competent. They see attention, even like they’re the best of their game and they’re still struggling with it. Here you have two women who are new to all this. They’re fish out of water as they’re getting started in this. That is essentially a comedic environment to be in. They’re in over their heads, which is relatable but also fun, but just that’s not a thing we see so often. We saw it in Spy Who Dumped Me, yes.

David: Both of us bring a lot to our work because I think this is just how we are as people in the world. I consider myself a funny person. I consider most people I surround myself with as funny people. If I am in a really tense situation, if I’m going into surgery, if I’m going into a funeral, if I have some sort of crisis in my life, I don’t know that part of me is still, I’m putting it away. People are still making jokes. This is another lesson I learned from actually, when I was very briefly on Mad Men was that the rule of writing comedy in a drama versus writing comedy in a comedy is that in comedy, other people in the scene are servicing your joke.

In a drama, there could be a funny person. The other person’s purpose in that scene is not to set up your joke. People are funny because this is the world that they’re in. Twila, in our show, Haley Lu Richardson’s character, is somebody who uses humor as armor in her life. That is just such a true thing for so many people who have-

Susanna: Not for me.

[laughter]

David: -had really difficult lives as she has, that is who she is going to be, and that is how she’s going to deal with crisis. B is very neurotic, not like you. [laughs]

Susanna: Not like you.

David: She’s going to spin out, and-

John: She’s going to overthink, yes.

David: -she’s going to overthink when she is in crisis. These are just true things that these people are going to do, and it is still going to be enjoyable. The fact that these are also people who have jobs in an office, and also Moscow is a really weird place, particularly in the USSR, and that is funny. We are able to try to live in a world that still feels like the world. That the stakes are high and that when there is a life or death moment, it was very important to us that the final sequence of our pilot, which I won’t spoil, but that it should really, really feel extremely dangerous, but there are still jokes before them, and there’s still awkwardness within it. Also, you better be scared.

John: I want to circle back to something you raised through, but was actually such a good point. I want to underline it. You’re talking about Mad Men and how, in a comedy, the characters are there to set up the joke for someone to spike. In a drama, that would feel really weird. There’s just an expectation about how people can be funny in a drama that’s just so different than a comedy, and so just a really smart distinction there. Thank you for that.

David: Oh, you’re very welcome.

[laughter]

John: A few last things. Looking through the script, it has ad breaks, and you feel them in the show also. Is that something that was always there? Did you ever consider taking them out? Because people were watching on a Peacock. They might have ads. They might not have ads.

David: We didn’t write them with ad breaks. We were asked to put them in.

John: Storytelling power. At what point did you know who could actually drive scenes by themselves? Because in the pilot, you established that Andrei can drive scenes by himself, which was a surprise when that happened. Talk to me about when you decided who could hold scenes by themselves.

David: Perspective-wise? Behind the curtain. We added that scene of Andrei late. That was the last scene of the entire series that we shot because we were looking at the already cut pilot. We knew how scary Andrei was because we knew. Because we wrote in the script, this is the scariest person you’ve ever seen.

Susanna: We knew what would happen in episode two.

David: We knew what would happen in episode two, but we needed to have the audience feel that when we see him at the end of the episode, that we are scared to death of his presence. We cast a fantastic but unknown actor, Artjom Gilz. If we had cast a famous movie star who was famous for being a villain, then we would already know– if Christoff Waltz walked in, then we wouldn’t have had to do that. We gave him perspective. I think we just learned more and more about our characters and what they brought, and who gets their own scenes.

Dane, Adrian Lester plays him, and he’s being Twila’s boss. He is somebody who is elusive in a lot of the shows. Part of what he brings is mystery. We don’t know what his life is really like. We don’t know what his secrets are. We have a sense that he has secrets. We really wanted to build several episodes before we could see him be vulnerable and display some of his secrets, and we get a sense of who that man behind the curtain is. For the first chunk of the season, we want to see him as this all-knowing, unknowable person that he projects to be in Twila. The audience know that that couldn’t be true because no one is like that.

John: The rules of the world you’ve established. No one is especially competent. It’s not like they’re bumblingly competent, but they have very limited power to do things. Literally, they can’t turn on the power to their own building, which is established. Let’s wrap up by talking about Budapest because I think you probably knew that this was going to be shooting in Budapest or someplace like it from the start. It’s not a show where you’re forced to go to Budapest. That’s the place where you go to shoot.

Susanna: It wasn’t Budapest for Boston.

John: Yes. That’s the place you go to do Moscow. It’s a reasonable place. Talk to us about shooting there, pros and cons, things you loved, things you learned, shooting there in 2025.

David: Just to get it out of the way, they have a bad government, and they passed some really bad laws while we were there. That did make shooting there complicated. Our studio’s lawyers were really great and helpful and supportive in just trying to make sure that everybody felt safe because they passed some anti-gay laws while we were there. It was very actually moving at the very end of our production. The Pride parade, which was a thing that they banned. The people of the city did it anyway. It was–

Susanna: It came in from other European cities. It was the biggest. It was on the cover of the New York Times.

David: Multiple and it’s larger than it had ever been. It is a blue city in a red country. Our crew, for the most part, was very progressive and lovely, but it’s complicated.

John: Are our crews in Budapest drawn from around Europe, or really, it’s a Budapest crew?

David: They’re Hungarian.

Susanna: They’re mostly Hungarian. Yes. Typically, they have a homegrown film industry of their own that is a different thing, but then they really are home to many– the huge economic part of the country is the film and TV that shoots there, mostly American and UK productions. They have an incredible brain trust and really skilled, top-of-their-game people. Actually, some expats. Our sound guy on our show, who also did Spy Who Dumped Me, did The Martian, and did all that, but he’s an American guy. He went to UT Austin and was living out in LA, and someone said come do a movie in Budapest in the ’90s. Then he just stayed in Budapest and married a Hungarian and had a family there.

There’s a lot of people there that are like– There’s expats living there. Then it’s a city that’s very used to hosting people who want to be insulated in a bubble of a film. It’s not aggressively thrusting you into the culture if you want to be staying at the Four Seasons and whatever. Not on our budget. You can. It has those amenities. I think it’s user-friendly. At the same time, if you stay there more than a couple of weeks, you just can feel the undercurrent of what’s going on in that, politically and otherwise, in the city.

David: It’s also beautiful. There is so much aesthetic that we needed from our show that we had sets, and our sets were beautifully built, and we were on a stage. I would say we were probably 60%, 70% location. A lot of those locations felt like we were in time capsules. We were in these beautiful old buildings that just looked incredible, that we just simply would not be able to accomplish in another place.

Susanna: I had shot Small Light in Prague. We looked into a couple of places like Prague and Berlin. Yes, just as things developed. I think it would have been more expensive, and we would have had a lot less production value, and we would have probably had to send a satellite crew to Budapest anyway, or a place like it. We just decided not to do that. It’s the same argument or the same debate, I guess, about shooting in a state that passes draconian laws here. You’re like, well, I want to make my thing. I want to employ the people. I don’t want to punish the crews that are living there for living there. Also, do I want to make a statement, which seems important to do? I don’t know.

It’s really challenging to figure that out. We can’t shoot everything in. I don’t even know what country to name that isn’t problematic now, so never mind. Greenland. No, just kidding. Venezuela?

John: No.

[laughter]

John: It’s a challenging time overall. Congratulations on the show. I really just dug it.

David: Thank you.

John: As this episode’s coming out, it’s just about to debut on Peacock, right? I think it’s two days later.

David: Two days later, great. Although I’m sad Craig isn’t here, I like that on this episode, as far as television shows created by people who went to high school in Frield, New Jersey, about the USSR, we’re the top one on this episode.

John: This episode. Very nice. Let’s answer some listener questions. We have one here from Richard.

Drew: “I find I can look at a scene on a particular day and think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written, and then two days later I pick it back up and think, ‘oh, that’s actually not that bad.’ Do you guys get this too? If so, how can we ever truly trust our own judgment?”

John: I rarely do I read something and say, oh, this is absolutely awful. Honestly, the reverse happens more like, well, I absolutely loved something when I wrote it, and then I go back and it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so–”

David: It’s bloated and dumb and degressive. I think what I can relate to is I finish something and I think I’m happy with it. It did what I needed to do, but I do want a set of eyes on it. I think for that, you just need to have a very small brain trust of people that you really respect and trust. If you have a partner, if you have a friend, somebody who won’t lie to you if it’s bad, will also be meaningful if they tell you, this is really good. You did a really good job.

I think sometimes that is helpful. I also think that it is a trap to keep going back and reading the scene that you wrote a few days ago, because if you are somebody whose head does that, who looks at it and then hates everything, you’re really going to have a hard time writing that next scene. Just try to finish a version of it.

Susanna: Yes, I would say try to finish it. Then at whatever point you feel comfortable hearing it read out loud, that’s really useful too. We’ve had readings of scripts that we’ve written just for ourselves in Dave’s garage. It’s really incredibly informative every time.

John: The challenge, Richard, is you’re always, you’re both the creator and the critic. At the time you were writing it, you were the creator, and you had this feeling about it. Then you’re also the critic, and that critic is a separate part of your brain. Maybe your critic is an asshole. Maybe your critic is just not good. David, you were saying earlier about how you love helping out a person, helping out a writer, just contributing. Maybe your inner critic is just not actually recognizing what’s good and how to improve it. It’s just seeing all the flaws. Maybe just cultivate that critic a little bit more. Maybe talking to some other people about their work and being gracious with them will get you to be a little bit nicer to yourself.

Question from Daniel.

Drew: “I am a sophomore screenwriting student at an LA film school. I can tell my writing does get better with every script, but I’m not sure if I have that innate talent or ability you guys always speak about. Mainly because with every script where I say, I think I got it, I in fact do not have it. How did you guys realize that you have this innate talent and how long did it take?”

Susanna: Well, just to speak to the first part, I just want to offer some wisdom from a book that I didn’t write called The Work of Art that came out recently. I think it’s Michael Cunningham who talks about the fact that he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as innate talent. It’s just having a personality that is so obsessively committed to something being good that it will just keep drilling down into something over and over and over until it becomes good. That, to him, is what makes a person skillful, not anything that they’re innately born with. I don’t know that I agree with that completely, but it did resonate with me that there’s an obsessiveness that people have, who I admire, that I think they share.

David: I think this question is very married to the previous question. First of all, definitely the stuff I wrote when I was in college, I wouldn’t share it now as a reflection of my best work, but there were moments throughout my adolescence or into college or into my early 20s where I would write a scene or a line or have an idea and it would excite me. It would be like, “Oh, that’s it. This is what I’m trying to do.” I couldn’t imagine not having any version of that and still being excited about writing.

I’ve got to assume, I’ve got to give the question, give her the benefit of the doubt that you must have had some sort of moment that excited you enough to start doing it. From there, yes, you just have to keep getting better, but you may have it. Also, a lot of very talented people worry that they don’t have that talent. That is also a very real thing that people–

John: Feeling impostor syndrome at this point in your early career is totally natural and reasonable and makes sense. You don’t know what you’re doing, and that’s true. I hope that in entering film school, you’re a sophomore now, people must have told you, “Oh, you’re a good writer,” and you’ve had some external validation that, “Oh, you really know how to do this. This is good.” There’ve been some moments where you felt yourself like, “Oh, this was a good thing I wrote. I’m actually proud of this thing I did.” That’s foundational. That’s [unintelligible 00:42:14] that gets you going to the next one.

There’s this meme I saw this week about thinking of yourself as a verb rather than a noun, thinking of you as the person who writes rather than the end product. Maybe spend this next year really focusing on writing as the verb versus generating this thing and that thing and that thing and see if you like the actual process of doing it. We talk on the show so much about how writing sucks. It’s not a fun thing to do, but you make peace with it. You come to accept that it’s part of this process of getting to work that you’re really proud of. Maybe just focus a little bit more on that rather than the quality and see if you’re digging it.

Susanna: I also think there’s a lot of noise outside the world of just you and your laptop or your notebook or however you write, and that when the noise gets really loud, it can be really hard to just focus on the actual nugget of excitement that you have. I talk to friends a lot now as people talk about how hard the industry is, and there’s a ton of negativity in the air.

Whatever you have to do to trick your brain into just being excited about a thing and sitting down and doing the work, like John was saying, that’s the most important thing you can do, is just to stay optimistic and excited about whatever it is you’re working on and not let the outside voices or your own internal critic stop you from actually just producing things. Find the spark, whatever that is. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s really important [unintelligible 00:43:35]

John: In finding that spark, I think it’s also reasonable to say, if you decide this is not actually a thing you like, a thing you would enjoy, it’s okay to say no. It’s okay to find something else you really do love. You only have the one life, so do the thing that actually really excites you and you enjoy it. More than talking about an innate aptitude or something like you’re born with a certain talent, maybe you have a set of interests and things that you actually want to be spending your time doing, and if this isn’t it, that’s fine, that’s good. Go searching for what the thing is that you actually do really love.

David: This is probably a bigger conversation for a whole other episode of this show, but I’ve spent a lot of time lately wrestling with what is the point of this. Not that I think it is without a point, but as I am in a position to– I’m releasing something out into the world, which is very scary. I think about when I first moved to Los Angeles, when I first wanted to work in film and television, and I had this idea in my head that I wanted to manifest of sitting in a movie theater and seeing my name up there. That does not feel like what the goal is now, though I can’t necessarily pinpoint what it is.

I do like writing. I do like making things. It is also a thing that terrifies me. I think it is a really tricky thing for me, for all of us, people who’ve been doing this for decades, to make sense of why we’re doing it. If you are on the fence in your first years, that also might be a good sign that it– Also, just know that we are also wrestling with what the point is, because it’s complicated.

John: A question here from Carlos.

Drew: “A few weeks back, I partook in a pitching workshop with a former executive from a big production company. One thing this former executive said really rubbed me the wrong way. He told us to stop writing pilots. He said that today, a lot of executives will turn down series pitches if they have a pilot attached because they want to be involved in the development stage from the beginning. We should stop writing pilots and focus on just the story development, which broke me since writing pilots is what I enjoy most from series development. Is this something that’s actually happening? I know the situation is probably different over here in Mexico than on the other side of the border, but I still wanted to get your take on this.”

David: Really makes sense why this is a former executive.

Susanna: David and I both, we produce a lot of other writers. We try to really support a lot of pitches that are not just our own pitches. As a director, I take a lot of pitches out that I’m not the writer on. Really, every project is different. We’ve sold things that have a pilot. We’ve sold things that have a pitch. We’ve been dissuaded from having a pilot for one specific type of project that I just think it’s dangerous to get mired in any one dogmatic idea about how to do anything.

If you’re enjoying writing pilots and you’re writing things that you feel really represent your passions and that you’re good at, the worst thing that can happen is you get some producer that wants to take your show out and they say, “Okay, let’s send the pilot later. Let’s develop the story.” They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s such a tactical decision that shouldn’t be your problem. It should be the problem of the person who’s doing the selling and that should be your partner and not a person who’s trying to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. That’s my opinion.

David: I also think how can you tell someone, you as a beginner writer, you are a good writer and you are worth backing and gambling on if no one is able to read what you are executing. I think that, yes, perhaps for a very experienced writer who has a long track record, sure, you can pitch. I also think pitching is a scam, but it’s a scam that we all participate in because you are sitting in a room saying, “This is what this is going to be,” but you don’t–

I think I talked about this many, many episodes ago when we were last on Scriptnotes, is that I have taken out pitches that I just also needed to write the script first just so I knew what the characters sound like and I knew what the jokes were because I don’t really know any other way to do it. You’re just saying, “Trust me, this is what it’s going to be.” If you’re a writer, you should write.

Susanna: Also, if you are a newer writer and there isn’t something produced that people can look at as a sample of how you write and you’re just like, “I have all these ideas for the story,” they’re going to ask to see a writing sample. It’s such bad advice.

John: We don’t know where Carlos is at in his career, but the good thing about writing a pilot is that you wrote a script that can be a writing sample. Maybe this series, it’s not the best way to sell this series, but it’s something someone else can read and David and Susanna can staff you on their show. It’s a thing people can read.

Susanna: They’re going to ask to read something before they pay you to write something based on an outline of ideas of a show that doesn’t have a writing sample. I think it’s bad advice no matter where you are in your career, Carlos. That person should not have a career, and they don’t.

John: Let’s do one last question from Alex here. A common note I receive from coverage services is that I need to differentiate my character voices because they often sound the same. Do you have any tips for how to subtly differentiate character voices without falling into caricature-ish dialogue?

Susanna: Oh, we talk about this a lot.

John: What conclusions do you reach as you talk about it?

Susanna: Honestly, sometimes I think about my first writing class I took when I moved out to LA at 21 at Second City, sketch comedy writing class. We talked about the game of a character. It was for comedic writing, but we talk about it all the time. Each character has to have, in your mind, what is the laugh with and what is the laugh at about that person. My description of how I am is going to be different from my friend’s secret gossip about what’s annoying about me. You have to know what someone would say behind that person’s back, I think, and then write that person–

There are ways in which we all lack self-awareness. If there’s a certain game of that person, that person says things a million different ways because they use too many words to talk, or that person is really passive-aggressive generally. If you just have an idea about a person’s flaw, it can just make their writing specific. We try to do that in our show a lot, where we don’t want anyone to show up in a scene, even a side character in The Office, and not have a specific personality or a tick or a quirk. I don’t know.

David: First of all, it’s also not the absolute worst thing in the world if you have a really strong, specific voice. Yes, sure, that might be your style. It’s okay, particularly when you’re starting out, because every character is a version of you. I think the first time I really thought about this idea was Noah Baumbach’s first movie, Kicking and Screaming, because a character in it tells the other characters, “You all talk the same.”

Actually, they don’t. All those characters are really specific, and I actually don’t think you could interchange jokes from one character to another, but I think it was probably him being a little bit self-aware and self-conscious that these are all characters who are in a very similar life stage, who have a very–

Susanna: The same education [unintelligible 00:50:28]

John: [unintelligible 00:50:29]

David: You can also just look at how it looks on the page. Some people are more verbose. Some people speak more simply, but yes, you should never be able to move a joke from one character to another and have it work the same way. Everyone should have their own voice and meaning, and that was what I was talking about earlier, that I have this ethereal belief of writing that everything exists behind a wall and you have to find it, and I think that is truly characters. That is most vivid with characters. If you start writing their dialogue and you start seeing them, you start hearing them, then you are really going to get a sense of who they are and what their specificity is.

Susanna: The caricature thing, it’s okay if the first draft, they feel a little pushed or a little broad. You’re either dialing something up or down. This is such a basic thing to say, but if it seems like how people would actually talk, or you could imagine a person in your life who would talk or act the way a character is talking or acting, sometimes we do things that are a little over the top as people in life. Just as a director reading scripts that other people write and thinking about directing them, there’s a first script problem that David and I talk about sometimes where just the main character feels like the avatar for the writer.

It’s usually a person who’s more passively observing the world’s hypocrisies and they’re witty and funny and everyone around them is an idiot. I’m speaking in broad terms, but that character, to me, it’s not that interesting. I wouldn’t know how to tell an actor what they’re playing, really. I recently read a script where that was the problem and it was by a young writer. I just thought, “I bet this writer is in their 20s, and I bet this is what amount of life experience they’ve had, and I can feel that in the way it’s written.” In that case, it was a really funny script. There was just a glibness to the writing, and it felt like the writer was punching up their own best joke.

John: I absolutely hear you there.

Susanna: To me, usually those are the characters that, if it’s the main character leading you through the journey and that character is just a little bit of a cypher except for their elevated wit, it feels like a first script to me.

John: Specific advice for Alex here, I feel like maybe you’re having a hard time listening and hearing how people really are different. Assuming this is a fair note that you’re getting from multiple people, that your characters are all sounding the same, I think what you might try to do with your script is just cast it in your mind. Cast actual actors in all those places and imagine how those actors are actually saying those lines. Doing that may give you a sense of, “Oh, there’s actually so many more variables I could be dialing in here.”

If I cast this as Christopher Walken versus Woody Harrelson or– what different choices would make sense given who’s actually going to be doing these lines? That may give you a sense there because you might think, “Oh, no,” and I’m just impersonating someone else’s voice, but you’re not really. Words you’re writing in a script is not going to sound like that specific actor.

Susanna: Whoever plays the part is going to be–

John: They’re going to bring their own specificity, but if you write it for one specific actor, another actor can play that part and it will feel unique and different and it won’t sound like all the other characters. That may be a first good exercise for Alex to try.

Susanna: Real people too. If you have an uncle who is-

John: Oh, totally.

Susanna: -always drunk, I don’t know, whatever, a drunk uncle, whatever you have. You can just– basing it on someone, whether it’s your imagination of an actor or some person in your life that if you were asked in a private booth to talk about that person, you would be able to describe them, good and bad.

David: I think the other way that a lot of newer writers get into the trap of just making characters feel similar, which is another way of saying generic, is that their supporting players, their one-line parts are extremely generic. I would try to avoid too many police officer number twos and just a bunch of people that you are trying to differentiate between the characters who are important and the characters who aren’t. If everyone feels like they have interiority and if everyone feels like they have some sort of vividness, then it does sort of come through everywhere in your script.

I think there’s a lot of– Cameron Crowe does this really well. The Coen brothers do this really well. I would look at movies and just really focus on the people who are in it for one scene and are really popping as a great way to just specify everybody in your script.

John: It may also be helpful to look at some movies that you really enjoy and love, and watch them while you’re reading the script, and really get a sense of like, “Oh, it’s not just the actor’s performance. It really was the words on the page that got to that performance.” That may also remind you like, “Oh, yes, dialogue, it does start here, and characters are really found in these words I’m choosing to have them say.”

Susanna: I think also with the TV show, we were asked the other day what [unintelligible 00:55:20] about story engines for a show going forward. One thing about our show which circles back to your original question about tone, John, was that we have a married couple on the show and we sort of tried to make their marriage really specific even though they’re not the leads of the show and it’s not a show about a marriage. They’re just people in the office, but we ended up wanting more and more and more of them.

If every character has something in a dynamic or in their voice that feels like, “Oh, I want to watch that person in a million different situations,” then it tells a buyer or whoever, if it’s in a TV format, “I want to watch more episodes of those people,”-

John: Totally.

Susanna: -and it just encourages them to see more of a long life or whatever it is you’re pitching.

John: You look at The Office and-

Susanna: Yes, exactly.

John: -just how deep, and how full that room was of very specific voices, that you felt like, “Oh, you could follow any one of these people, and it would be incredibly entertaining.”

Susanna: I think comedies are a good way to study it too. I was going to recommend Jury Duty, which is so largely-

John: Love it.

Susanna: -improvised, but each person-

John: Yes, it’s so well done.

Susanna: -is so specific. You couldn’t swap anyone’s lines with anyone else’s lines.

John: No.

Susanna: That’s on the broader side. I don’t know what tone you’re writing, but yes, it’s useful to try to do that with everybody.

John: All right. It’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is an article by Adam Mastroianni. I’ve linked to him a zillion times. I feel like I should be paid a referral fee here. This blog post you did was so useful for the start of a new year, called So You Want to De-bog Yourself. De-bogging, basically, you’re stuck in a rut. You’re facing a problem, a real-life problem, not a story problem, a real-life problem. What I think Adam is so good at doing is shining a spotlight on certain aspects of a situation and giving it a name so you can actually identify, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing.”

Two examples here. First off is stroking the problem, which is like, “I’ve got a big problem. Man, I have this big problem. I have this thing and this thing and this thing.” You’re not actually trying to solve it. You’re just stroking it. You’re basically just acknowledging there’s a problem here and you’re telling everybody about this problem, but you’re not actually trying to solve it. Stroking the problem is a thing I’m going to probably start using a lot when people express their issues to me. The second thing he calls out is the try harder fallacy, which is basically like, “Oh, man, that didn’t really work at all. You really need to try harder next time.” Almost never do you actually need to try harder.

[laughter]

John: You probably were trying as hard as you possibly could. You have no shortage of effort you put into it. You gave it everything. There’s no secret reserve of energy that you could have– It just didn’t work. You’re going to need to try a different way to do it because trying harder is not going to get there. It’s two of many examples in this really good post about getting out of the muck that you find yourself stuck in.

It’s for real life, but I guess it’s our characters too, because our characters are often trapped in situations. If we as writers are telling them to try harder or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that’s probably not going to actually really work. A good post and I’ll put a link in the show notes. David, what do you have for us?

David: I have a few connected cool things. My first artistic passion was drawing and painting and cartooning and illustration. My origin story as a writer at all is because I wanted to draw comic strips and political cartoons. Anything artistic, if you don’t use those muscles, they atrophy. I’ve been drawing with my children. I realize I’m not as good as I used to be. I’m a really big New Year’s resolution person. My New Year’s resolution is trying to draw or paint or something every day, either with a pencil and paper, pen and ink or my iPad. The essential iPad drawing program is Procreate.

There are a few companies that make brushes and color systems and fake paper to really emulate some beautiful mid-century comic book style or illustration style. Retro Supply and True Grit are two companies that do that. Retro Supply also has a lot of great videos on how to draw heads and color theory. That’s really great.

Then the other thing that is keeping me honest with my New Year’s resolution is the International Society of Character Artists, of which I am a paying member, does something called caricature resolution in January. Caricature artists all over the world, from beginners to masters, draw the same celebrity every day of the month-

John: Oh, that’s great.

David: -of January. You can find this by searching for the #caricatureresolution2026 on Instagram or on Facebook. They also have an Instagram page. It’s just a really fun way to just see what different character artists are doing, and also if it’s something you want to try whenever this airs, you can catch up.

John: What was today’s celebrity?

David: Today was Bette Midler.

John: Oh, great. She feels like a natural person. [crosstalk]

David: She’s got a lot of hair, a lot of big features.

John: That’s really great. The other things you recommended, those are plugins or things you put into Procreate?

David: Yes. You can download the brush packs and the fake paper and the color systems.

John: Great. I love it. Susanna, what do you have for us?

Susanna: I saw an incredible independent film-

John: Please.

Susanna: -that I wanted to talk about. It’s this movie called The Plague. It’s about 12-year-old boys at a water polo camp in the early aughts. I watched it because I’m on the jury of the DGA first-time feature committee. This time of year, I always get a packet of movies that either are just coming out, haven’t come out yet, or I just wouldn’t have necessarily heard of because they don’t necessarily have the marketing push. I so relate to that that I feel really strongly about seeing all these movies and getting excited about them and plugging them.

This one was really incredible. Just the writing and directing was really impressive and singular and specific, but also just having known kids that age at that time, just the zeitgeist is so perfectly captured.

John: That’s great.

Susanna: The music is perfect. The performances, which are almost all 12-year-olds. Joel Edgerton plays the coach. It’s about hazing and boys at that age. It’s really exceptional, so I recommend that movie highly.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We are low in the folder on listener outros, in part because, Drew, people are sending through outros that don’t have the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yes, very important. Basically, that is one of our only rules.

Susanna: That is it. That is what you need to do.

David: Can you just clip John just saying that and use that as an outro?

John: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

John: We definitely will. We definitely will. Send us through your outros. We’d love to have more of those, ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you get books. Get your Scriptnotes book.

David: I bought it for a bunch of young writers, and they probably really enjoyed it.

John: Hooray. Fantastic. We just got the British copies here, which are slightly narrower than the US copies, which is lovely.

David: They write a little narrower.

Susanna: It’s so pretentious.

John: It’s so pretentious. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the 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 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 taste. Susanna, David, it’s so nice to have you back here.

Susanna: Thank you. This was really fun. Thanks so much.

[Bonus Segment]

David: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

John: Okay.

Susanna: Thank you.

John: Thank you, David. Thank you for bringing us back in here. Drew asked this question. [unintelligible 01:03:38] wrote in about Taste.

Drew Marquardt: I argue often with my friends about old movies, and I get accused of having bad taste, and I was wondering if there’s a method to acquiring good taste. Also, is there a definition to good taste?

John: All right, taste. Let’s talk about taste. My initial instinct when I thought about taste is I often refer back to Ira Glass has this piece about taste where it describes how you develop taste before you develop talent. There’s this conflict between the two of them, and it goes through things. I brought this up, and then I realized, oh, Susanna, you know Ira.

Susanna: I married him, and that is how I acquired good taste.

David: That’s your good taste?
[laughter]

John: That’s how you get good taste, is marry Ira Glass.

Susanna: Yes, I’m goal-oriented. I always strive to have good taste-

John: Absolutely.

Susanna: -and I just went right to the top.

John: I knew I liked you for that. Let’s talk about taste because [unintelligible 01:04:27] concern here is that they have bad taste. It’s like, “Well, no, you have your own taste. You have your own specific–”

Susanna: Who’s saying this person has bad taste? What’s their taste?

John: That’s crazy. Developing your taste and understanding your taste is, I think, a crucial stage of development. It’s basically figuring out what do I like, and then more importantly, why do I like it? What is it about this genre, about this movie, about these things that spark for me that I really enjoy? What is it about these things that I don’t enjoy that are elements of that? It’s worth some time to think about what are those things, and what is a unique fingerprint for you that defines what is good to you?

David: I think that you go through this journey in your life where when you were young, there’s definitely things you don’t like. You look back at this movie I loved when I was seven, and it is garbage, but it definitely fell within what you enjoyed then. Maybe that is something that as you get older, because I think the next step, once you start getting a little– if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you’re a little bit pretentious, that you feel like there is some sort of value in dismissing other people’s tastes. Looking at other people and thinking, “I like smart things, and you like dumb things,” and that is how you place it.

Then you go through this other journey where you’re like, “Oh, well, actually, some things that are just a mass appeal I really enjoy,” or, “I like this little niche,” whatever. You feel less embarrassed about your taste. You feel about your taste as not something that you want to place against other people. It’s something that’s yours. You embrace. You want to see what you like. It’s this journey that you go through to finally just feel like you can reconcile it. I think what [unintelligible 01:06:10] is probably experiencing is perhaps– I don’t know how old [unintelligible 01:06:14] is, but maybe it’s his friends being a little bit pretentious as they start to learn about their own taste.

I think it’s just really important to just try to take in as much as possible. I think it’s a boring thing about me that I really, really love The Beatles, but I really, really love The Beatles. When you explore what makes them great, they’re very good at their instruments. They’re very good at singing. They’re very good at the technical ability, but they’re not the best at all of that. They took in everything. Bob Dylan too, just took in everything that was available when they were learning and coming up and almost had this encyclopedic knowledge of all of the music that came around it and synthesized it into their own stuff.

Then it was this ability to say, “This is what is good for us,” and give each other shit to say, “Not that line, Paul, not that line, John.” Then that is basically what made The Beatles great, was their very, very refined taste. That taste doesn’t happen without really, really taking in as much as you can and taking in things that you would never think you should take in. Every little piece of it is part of what you build and build and build to what you like.

John: Taste is a crucial factor when I’m looking to work with a person or to collaborate with a person. For a project that we were working on with the company, I needed a designer. The first criteria was just taste. I knew I would find people who were very talented who could build the thing, but also taste is a crucial thing because I can’t give you taste. I have my own taste, but I couldn’t explain why this thing needs to be over there. I needed somebody with that form of taste. Susanna, you, as directing movies, you’re working with collaborators, and their taste is so crucial. They need to be able to have an eye for what it is that they respond to and ability to communicate back to you why they’re making these choices, right?

Susanna: Yes, I think judging other people’s taste is a trendy thing to do. Words like basic, that person is so basic. It just means that they have a taste for certain things that are popular and a certain aesthetic that is popular in certain parts of the country and certain class. It’s all about– there are so many things that are coded in that too, that comment. I think, ultimately, my taste is just what I’m naturally drawn to and interested in and what’s pleasing to my eyes and ears and senses. Sometimes that’s just entertainment that isn’t necessarily elevated.

I would consider myself someone who has “good taste,” at least the taste that makes sense to me. I know when things are entertainment but not nutritious entertainment and when they’re not, but I guess that I would still consider that part of my taste. It’s not a secret that’s in a closet and my taste is only the things I admit that I watched.

John: No.

Susanna: It’s hard to even say what we mean when we say taste. I think it’s mostly coded with trying to say I’m smart, I have good taste, I have an eye.

John: It’s so weird that we use the word taste, because as a sense, it’s the only one that has a sense of revulsion. It’s like, “Oh, that’s delicious,” or, “That’s revolting.” You can imagine a thing. It’s weird that we’re describing a tongue experience for what art is supposed to be.

Susanna: There’s a value judgment, right?

John: Yes.

Susanna: It’s like asking someone what’s their taste and you can answer that question free of judgment, but then people also talk about, “Oh, that person has good taste,” as though we can all agree that there’s a bad taste. I think that’s what you’re saying. It’s like– I think for me, the experience of hiring people is I want to feel aligned with what they—obviously, when you’re hiring a cinematographer, you look at their lookbooks and their decks and they show you what you want the visuals to be. For me, it’s important to talk to them and make sure that the dynamic between the two of us doesn’t make me question my own judgment.

John: Absolutely. You might find a collaborator who, what they like is completely valid, but it’s just not the thing. If you don’t want to be fighting over lens selections with your cinematographer on the set, that’s not going to do anybody any good. Neither are you going to be happy with the choices. They have to be aligned on a fundamental quality. Come back to your show, the tone is a very specific taste. If you guys weren’t aligned on that, or if you’re trying to bring in somebody who didn’t get that, it’d be a mess.

David: I think if we talk about the word taste and just the idea of– I think what we experience making the show is that when something, and I think it’s also what is such a value of a writer being on set and me being on set when Susanna’s on set or whatever, is that I know immediately when this isn’t our show, in the same way that I would know immediately if the milk has turned. You see something, you’re like, “No,” and I don’t have to explain that.

John: It’s a gut reaction. You just know it.

David: I will have to explain it often if I will have to tell a collaborator or have a conversation with an actor or get a light changed or something, but basically something is– and it is also understanding this is not an objective truth.

John: No.

David: I understand that someone else would sit and do their version of a thing and they would want the line delivered that way or they would want this shirt on or whatever, but for me, I know that it tastes wrong.

John: Yes.

Susanna: Yes.

John: The reason why we’re using this tongue sense is because it is like an inherent thing.

Susanna: It’s visceral.

John: It’s visceral. It is. It’s a feeling like, “Oh, that’s wrong.” The Henson Company, we always talk about something is muppety or it’s not muppety, and something can fit in that world or it can’t.

Susanna: It’s an essential thing about it. It’s interesting too, casting comes into play all the time, or I guess just I’m casting something right now. There’s a very specific part, and thinking about different actors playing that part, it’s like they just either essentially are that part or they’re not, no matter how good they are. I don’t know. I guess that diverges a little bit from just a conversation that’s strictly about taste, but it’s just me matching something to a specific image of it in my head, it either works or doesn’t work, and how much can an actor interpret a part and get to where I need them to get to or are they limited by something in their innate self that isn’t quite–

John: I look at some executives who’ve gone on to careers, like an executive who went to a big streamer, and his job is in a very specific division at that streamer, and it’s like, it’s not his taste. I know it’s not his taste. This is not what he’s called to do, but this is what he’s doing, and that just seems like a prison to me.

Susanna: I have so many meetings with people like that. They’re like, “Well, right now I’m working in–” eye roll, whatever.

John: It’s like, well, I don’t know how to help you here because clearly, how can you be giving good notes on these projects when it’s not a thing you like or enjoy? How am I supposed to take your notes seriously when it’s like, “Yes, you can tell me what the algorithm or what you think your bosses want, but you would never watch this movie.” I think I’ve tried to be more honest in my career over time. There’ve been projects I’ve pursued because, “Well, of course I should pursue that,” but then I was like, “It’s not really my taste. It’s not really a thing that I enjoy.”

David: It’s what’s complicated about criticism, and we can all agree that there are just some things that are just bad.

John: There are things that are bad because they’re bad executions of a bad idea.

David: Yes, I think we can agree, except for a few maybe weird tax dodge reasons. No one sets out to make something bad, but yes, there are some things that are– but then other things are just like, “That’s just not for me.” I think it’s a very internet-brained thing. I think it’s thinking that not for me means it is not for existence, and I think as I’ve gotten further away from the part of me that just wants to dismiss people who don’t have my taste, like the 20-year-old version of me, I love that things exist in the world that are not for me.

On your and other people’s recommendation, I watched the first episode of Heated Rivalry, and I was like, “I respect that show. I don’t think I’m going to keep watching that, but I think what a well-made version of a thing that is not a thing for me, and that’s fine.”

Susanna: I think that I really applaud any well-executed version of whatever the person set out to make. I’m a big fan of that, and I do appreciate it even in genres I wouldn’t gravitate towards.

John: Totally. Yes, like slasher horror is not my thing, but I can recognize like, “Oh, that’s a well-executed version of that thing.” We talked on the show some time ago about the syllabus, what movies and genres should you probably see just so you actually have an understanding of what they are? Because there may be things you just don’t know that you love because you’ve never seen them, and so I think you do need to have– part of acquiring a taste, and going back to the question here, it’s like, “You’re talking about old movies because you’re having bad taste.” Well, it’s great that you’re watching old movies, for starters, because-

Susanna: What’s this person watching?

John: -you’re getting a sense of how we got to this place right now in cinema. If there’s things you love, great. If there’s things you don’t love, also great, but try to figure out what it is about those things. We’re saying it’s a visceral reaction, a gut reaction, but there may also be some details there that would be helpful for you to understand, like why don’t I like this? That’s good.

David: This is related to it, but it is part of my moviegoing experience in the last several years, is rewatching movies I’ve loved and feel like I have enough distance from them that I’m now watching them as a new person. I had this experience with The Graduate, which was always one of my favorite movies, and it remains one of my favorite movies in the rewatch, but I connected to it in a completely different way.

As an adolescent, I related to Benjamin Braddock, and that was the prism I saw it through, and now I watch it, and I find him insufferable and think the movie is great, and the movie is commenting on that, and understanding that if, for whatever reason, at any different point in my life, I watched The Graduate and didn’t like it, that it is also just much more of a reflection of me than it is of the piece. I think we as individuals, not we in this room, because we’re all perfect, but other people have a really hard time differentiating something that just does not connect with the version of who they are at this moment and think that it is a flaw of the piece of art.

Susanna: Somebody was saying, I can’t remember who said this, but I agree, that when you watch Reality Bites as a teenage girl, which I did. Everybody loves Ethan Hawke, and then when you get older, you’re like, “That guy–“ If your friend is dating that guy, you’re like, “Don’t date that guy.” Ben Stiller has a good job. He has health insurance. That’s who you want to be with.

John: Oh, so good. Thank you for this discussion of taste.

David: Of course. Our pleasure.

Links:

• PONIES Trailer | On Peacock January 15th
• Susanna Fogel and David Iserson
• The last time Susanna and David were on the show (Episode 361)
• The Work of Art by Adam Moss
• So You Want to De-Bog Yourself by Adam Mastroianni
• Procreate emulators True Grit and Retro Supply Co.
• International Society of Character Artists’ character resolution 2026
• The Plague (2025)
• The Taste Gap by Ira Glass
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (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.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 719 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, when is good enough, not enough? We’ll discuss how you decide whether a particular occasion calls for your very best work or whether you’re wasting your time. We’ll also answer listener questions on packaging, bleeping, and when you know you’ve got it, or you don’t. In our bonus segment for premium members, every year, I come into a new long list of things to do. We’ll talk through what I did last year and why, and my list for this new year.

Craig: So organized.

John: So organized. I try to be.

Craig: Yes. No, that’s you. I don’t remember the last time I made a New Year’s resolution.

John: We’ve talked about it. I used to have not resolutions but areas of interest. Archery would be my area of interest. I would do archery for a bit. I would do Austrian white wines. The thing we do now is, Mike and I make a list of 25 or 26 things that together we’re going to do over the course of the year. We do those because we’re efficient people who knock things off lists.

Craig: It’s terrifying.

John: I strongly recommend it for people. In the bonus segment, I want to talk through what those are because the key is achievable, doable things. Not like, “Do this thing more.” It’s like, “Do this thing twice.”

Craig: Right. Something that you feel like you can actually manage.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s good. Modest expectations.

John: We’ll also talk through a– I did a year-end wrap-up of the stuff I did, including the fact that I played, I think, 42 sessions of D&D.

Craig: Not enough.

John: Not enough.

Craig: No.

John: Never enough.

Craig: No.

John: No. Let’s get you some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Tyler writes, “I believe the origin of bumping this is from older web forums, where threads that have most recently been replied to will appear on the front page, and threads without a reply will fall down and eventually be relegated to page two.”

John: I think Tyler is exactly right. That’s where it comes from.

Craig: I think that sounds right.

John: Yes. Basically, because only the top 10 posts are listed. You go into a thread, you bump it, and then it shows up as a new thing.

Craig: Yes. Once you reply to it, it gets bumped up.

John: Yes.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: Thanks, Tyler.

Craig: Good job.

John: Nick wrote about back issues.

Drew: Yes. We were talking about Craig’s back issues in episode 716. Nick says, “I’m curious if your recent back problem listener is okay on their feet for more than 15 minutes and could possibly use a standing desk. Has Craig experimented with a standing desk at all?”

John: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a standing desk.

Craig: I tried.

John: You tried?

Craig: Yes. It made it worse.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Craig: Well, because my problem is standing.

John: Oh.

Craig: I recently received a little bit of treatment, feeling better. The thing about back issues is that it’s one of those things where everybody has advice.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: Everybody. Everybody’s back is different. Everybody’s problem is different. It’s just part of growing up. You know what part of growing up is? Part of growing up is getting back problems, giving back problem advice, realizing it doesn’t matter or work, and continuing to have back problems. You have to get to the other side of the advice stage. That’s when you know you’re really getting old.

John: Yes. I use a standing desk. I like it. I try to move between sitting and standing over the course of the day. I will do unimportant stuff like emails and all that kind of stuff. I’ll just do all that standing up, which is just great. Then what’s nice is psychologically, then if I’m lowering the table and sitting down to actually do real writing work, it feels like a change of state.

Craig: [crosstalk] Like you’re locking in. My version of that is to walk. Walking makes my back feel better always. I’ll take a long walk. Walking is also good because that’s where I could figure out what it is that I exactly want to write. There’s something about the movement that is– My thing is shower, walk, something that gets me out of my brain and therefore into my brain, if that makes sense. Standing is uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of people in our production office that the standing desk is now considered a chair. It’s too easy. Now there are people with the treadmill desk. There are people with the bouncy ball, keep yourself balanced desk. I just want to slap everyone.

John: I think the bouncy ball thing largely went away. You don’t see that as much. Are you still seeing it in your offices?

Craig: As I walk down the hall towards the elevators, there’s one room that has a full Pilates reformer in it.

John: Incredible.

Craig: Yes. Now that may be some sort of punishment.

John: Yes. It does look like a rack. [crosstalk]

Craig: I don’t meet out punishment on my production, but I know that somebody surely does. That may be where the bad people go.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna famously had a walking desk for a while. She had the treadmill on her desk. I think that got incorporated into Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I think literally, they may have taken her standing desk and just moved it over to one of the chairs there.

Craig: It is both admirable and frightening. There is something too efficient.

John: There is. We have a treadmill in the gym. I will set it at a low speed and just do very unimportant, email-y work on my iPad. We have a little keyboard that’s sitting up there. I will do some stuff like that, but I don’t have it on my main desk.

Big follow-up here, so this would be more of a topic. On episode 716, we had Mike Makowsky on. One of the things he talked about was how much he wanted text blocks and screenplays to be exactly even on the left-hand and right margins.

Craig: Yes, which is startling because that’s a neurosis even I don’t have.

John: Several readers wrote in to say that they felt seen. I think we have a little more of a conversation about things we said in that episode.

Drew: Jordan in Australia writes, “I just wanted to say to Mike that he’s not alone. I have an almost overwhelming compulsion to make the lines look neat on the page. Like Mike, though, I don’t consider it a problem because it makes me focus on the exact function of each word and line rather than accepting something as good or close enough that I can leave it. If push comes to shove and I think the result is worse or that something really just can’t be changed, I’ll put up with widows and orphans. Otherwise, I like that this compulsion helps with focus and attention, especially given my ADHD.”

Craig: It strikes me that when it comes to mental behaviors, people feel a need to justify all of it as if it mattered. It’s like saying, “I have red hair.” Let me give you the reasons why I think it’s actually okay. You don’t need to because it’s there. It’s not changing. That’s what you are. You’re a redhead. This is how your brain works. Don’t even bother justifying it. Let’s say it’s not helpful. Let’s say it’s actually harmful. So what? That’s how your brain works. We’re not perfect.

John: Yes. The last word of this response was ADHD. I want to talk about the medicalization of behavior, which I think is an aspect of what we’re going to be talking about here today, too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Go for it. Chris in Germany.

Drew: “I was blown away by the part where Mike had to explain his writing OCD. I have the exact same experience when I write. To me, these even blocks of text provide some sense of comfort through stability and order. It’s more important to me that the single lines in a block are the same relative to each other. Blocks on a page can differ. I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake than have the consecutive lines at different lengths. This sometimes blocks me, and it surely always slows me down. Best practice is not to look at the screen while writing. I really wanted to let Mike know that he’s not alone here.”

John: Again, I want to be supportive and say, what works for you works for you. Also, when you say, “I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake,” that’s making me wonder whether it is actually really working for him. That’s the balance I’m trying to find here.

Craig: I don’t know why I didn’t mention this to Mike, but I wonder if, for Mike, Joran, and Chris, just going into alignment and setting it to the justified thing, where it automatically makes it all the same length.

John: Yes. I wonder if that might be– It’s not typical screenwriting, but it also–

Craig: No, but neither is this.

John: Neither is this.

Craig: You wouldn’t have to think about it so much. It would just do it automatically. I’m sure that is a setting, justified.

John: Justified, yes.

Craig: Justified. It’s interesting because we get a lot of acronyms for these things. People, again, they want to assign a problem to this. It’s ADHD, it’s OCD. I’m not saying that Joran doesn’t have ADHD or that Chris maybe doesn’t have OCD, but that’s not relevant. It’s not necessary to pathologize it, nor is it necessary to celebrate it. It just is.

John: Yes. You can acknowledge it without pathologizing it.

Craig: If you get to a place where you think, “I wish I weren’t doing this,” now we’ve got a thing. Now think about how to stop. If you’re not in that place and if you don’t know how to do this otherwise, I think I’ve mentioned on this show before, if I lost my hands, I probably would have to quit writing because I think through typing.

John: You think with your fingers.

Craig: That’s how I write, through typing. I can understand this limitation that people feel.

John: I want to just acknowledge the synchronicity, the rhyming between justify and justify. These writers want to justify their margin, but they also want to justify their actions.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: That’s a theme.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: Let’s wrap up with Olivia here.

Drew: “I sincerely enjoyed Episode 716. However, I did want to flag something that kept coming up. Being OCD was said at several points during the podcast when referring to the look of a screenplay page. As a writer with OCD, I feel an obligation to speak on this. OCD is a deeply debilitating mental illness without treatment. For someone with OCD, the idea of needing a script page to look a certain way would feel like a life and death decision, not just an aesthetic choice or process preference.

Also, there is so little accurate OCD representation in the media that I feel it is incredibly important for writers listening to be aware of how something like I’m so OCD or you’re so OCD can come off. Not trying to censor anyone, but I think it’s a conversation worth having.”

John: I want to first acknowledge where Olivia is right, is that per the DSM, OCD can be a debilitating, pervasive life or death situation. It can feel like it is a life-or-death situation. That’s not quite what Mike was describing there in the experience. I don’t want to diminish or trivialize a person who has a diagnosis of OCD, and that was never our intention behind this.

Craig: No, but nor would any reasonable person think so. I say this as somebody who has a kid with actual diagnosed OCD, medicated, and so on and so forth. OCD is a pretty broad diagnosis. For a lot of people, it’s the O that is far more common than the C. We think of compulsive behavior as a hallmark of OCD, but obsessive thinking, cycling thoughts, is just as prominent, if not more so. There are people that have very severe cases and people who have very mild cases.

It is a useful term to describe behaviors that we feel we are not necessarily in control over, or thoughts that are pervasive and unwanted, or cycling. There is no value. I say this as somebody who is deeply invested in promoting both the destigmatization of mental health issues and support for mentally ill people. I say this as a parent who’s gone through this. This doesn’t help. This whole thing of, “You’re not allowed to call yourself or your problem this, you have to be as sick as I am to call yourself that,” does not help.

There are people who have mild schizophrenia. It doesn’t help to tell them you’re not, or to even say, “Stop saying schizophrenic when you really mean splt–.” It doesn’t help.

John: It’s a whole different podcast to go into when it comes to the DSM and things that are in there. Whenever you talk about there being a spectrum of something that always creates an issue where resources are being directed towards people who have very mild occurrences of a thing versus severe occurrences of a thing, that’s way beyond the scope of this podcast. We are a podcast about words and language. I want to talk about the words and the language here because, really, what I think we’re getting into is that there’s a DSM definition of OCD, but there’s been semantic drift.

The meaning has changed and broadened, which is a very natural thing that happens in language. The word nostalgia used to mean PTSD. It used to mean–

Craig: The pain, algia, is pain.

John: Yes. That changed over time. Nostalgia doesn’t mean that same thing anymore. It’s understandable why the term OCD, which had a stricter clinical definition, has broadened to mean picky, fastidious, that kind of thing. It’s in that same space as that original idea, but it’s not that same original idea.

Craig: Exactly. I don’t think it would be helpful for somebody with clinical depression to hear someone go, “Oh my God, I woke up today, the weather was so bad. I was so depressed when I saw the weather outside.” It would be unhelpful for them to scold that person and say, “You’re not depressed. This is what depression is.” We all know. We actually know. We know the difference. The thought, I guess, is that somehow your validity as somebody suffering is being diminished or stolen, like stolen valor. It is not.

Nobody is diminishing anything by this. That’s why, by the way, you see what I just did? I used the phrase clinical depression. We figured out a way in language to discriminate and get it back. Clinical OCD might be a nice way to describe what you have if you have diagnosed, serious obsessive compulsive disorder, per the DSM, per your psychiatrist, maybe you’re on meds, as opposed to somebody who’s like, “I just get very OCD when I see a pillow out of place on the bed.”

Olivia, I hope you don’t think I’m being too hard on you here. This is important because I actually want people to feel free to share their understanding of their mental health without feeling like they have to hit some target that someone else is setting. I don’t think you would want somebody with even more severe OCD than you telling you, “You’re not really OCD.” That’s the problem. Anyway, I’m going to suggest the use of the word clinical.

John: Clinical is very helpful here. As we’re having this conversation, I’m realizing that over the course of these 15 years of doing this podcast, there have been terms in which we’ve been such sticklers on trying to defend, like begs the question, where we feel like, “Okay, we’re losing the actual meaning of begs the question by–”

Craig: I will never, ever, ever quit.

John: I hear that there is something inconsistent in our approach to certain terms that we’re trying to do that.

Craig: That’s just fun.

John: That’s just fun.

Craig: That’s just fun. Did you see BJ Novak? I don’t know who it was that he corrected. Maybe it was Andy Cohen. He was on a New Year’s Eve broadcast or something, and I think it was Andy Cohen, said something about there are going to be less rats in New York and [crosstalk].

John: He said fewer rats.

Craig: It’s just gorgeous.

John: It’s gorgeous.

Craig: Way to go, BJ.

John: Another term which occurred to me was that narcissist used to have an actual definition.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: If we can’t say narcissist– you could say clinical narcissist. Someone who has a definition of narcissist, so helpful for distinguishing between just behavior we find [unintelligible 00:15:02].

Craig: Now that I’m thinking about it, we do this with every single mental illness diagnosis. We call people schizophrenic when they’re not, depressed when they’re not, anxious when they’re not. PTSD is now thrown around wildly, wildly. “I went to a restaurant. Oh my God, I saw PTSD from that waiter. He brought me the wrong thing.” It is analogizing. It’s instantly analogizing, because it’s talking about extreme forms of everyday mental processing. Yes, narcissistic, histrionic, dramatic. I’m now struggling to think of one that we don’t use.

Drew: Hysterical.

John: Hysterical.

Craig: Hysterical. You’re really not supposed to use that one. All of it. Every single word.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes, too. There’s a sociologist, Nick Haslam, who coined concept creep, which is basically how you have a concept that just the edges of it bleed out into ways that– Trauma is one of the things he talks about there, which had a definition, which now we understand it’s broadened.

Craig: [laughs] Every time someone says trauma, I now think of the Jamie Lee Curtis supercut of her saying trauma. Have you seen this?

John: I know. It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: It’s from Halloween? Where was it from?

Craig: It was from Halloween. When she was doing the press tour for Halloween, she was talking about how her character had to deal with–

John: Such a choice to tip to you and the trauma.

Craig: Yes. She went, “Trauma,” and then it’s just her saying the word trauma in 80 different– It was the Madame Morrible Wicked Witch of its time. Do you know what that is?

John: No, I don’t know Madame Morrible Wicked Witch.

Craig: Oh my God, you know what this is.

John: Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Just incredible. Love it so much. Let’s get to our marquee topic here. We can turn away from formatting on the page to the actual words themselves because so often on our show, we’re talking about getting things just right and making sure everything’s perfect. We do the three-page challenges where we’re really obsessing about the word choices, how we’re seeing the world through the words you’re choosing to put on the page.

Craig, last week, you were talking about there’s times where you will hold off delivering something because something’s just not right. You know it’s not right, and you don’t want it out there in the world when it’s not right until it meets your goals and expectation. I think the expectation there could be that in a perfect world, everything you write would be flawless. You would give them a flawless version of everything. That goes from the senior shooting this afternoon to that email to your landlord, but it’s not a perfect world. There’s not a limited time.

In many cases, it just doesn’t matter whether it’s the perfect version or not. I want to just try to find a rubric for figuring out when is it worth perfecting a thing, to finalize a thing, to polish a thing, and when is good enough, and making those choices.

Craig: I’m going to use a word now for mental health.

John: Which is?

Craig: Triggered.

John: Oh, sure. Yes.

Craig: Which I am not. Extending the use of that word, I have perfectionist issues.

John: I think you do.

Craig: I struggle with this all the time. I do know the difference between there’s something fundamentally wrong with this, and this is in a place where it’s on the putting green. It’s going to get into the hole, but I actually want people now to look at this, to gather opinions and thoughts, because it’s generally what it’s going to be. I do know the difference between that, but I will struggle writing emails, texts. I can’t leave the broken word in there. It’s a problem for me.

John: I hear you. I want to go to your process here because you talked about how Jack, who works with you, she’s your accountability buddy. Basically, you’re sending her pages. My expectation is, you have a relationship where you can send her things knowing it’s not quite perfect, because it’s part of the process is her looking at it to make a thing better.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Same with Drew for me. It’s like, I will send stuff to Drew so he can take a look.

Craig: I won’t read the editorial commentary, but a few typos. Page six, you write in here twice in one sentence. Page nine, bottom. “Aileen about putting the bandage.” That doesn’t make any sense. Aileen. Bottom. She with two Es. Bottom, “Tracking the sound as rises up the–” That’s horrible.

John: Yes. She’s a safe person for you to share it with.

Craig: I don’t proofread for typos. It’s actually not bad for– It was about 16 pages.

John: Sure.

Craig: Actually, a typo here and there does not flip me out. For scripts, it’s more about a quality thing.

John: Yes. Example from my own life. My daughter’s in college, and so she’ll sometimes send me a link to an essay she’s written for her class. I’ll read through it, and it’ll be good. It’s solid. She’s gotten to be a really good writer. It’s fascinating to watch how much better a writer she is year after year after year. It’s a huge improvement. I’ll notice that, “Okay, you missed this argument, or that point didn’t really land, or that conclusion’s not entirely supported.” She’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” and I was like, “But does it actually matter? Because one person is going to be reading this essay.”

Her instructor’s going to be reading this essay, and no one’s ever going to read the essay again. At some point, you have to make a decision. Is it worth the extra hour of time to improve this essay on a thing you don’t care about that no one will ever actually see again, or should she be doing her work on the other nine assignments she has? Those are choices a person makes in their real life, and a person who was so perfectionist and obsessed about making every last little thing as perfect as it could be would drop other balls because they’re spending too much time on one thing.

Craig: That’s the real problem. There’s a livable, supportable, quasi-perfectionism because there is no perfectible you, as Dennis Palumbo says, where you value doing your best. I would put it under that category. Yes, if I can take another 30 minutes, and I have 30 minutes to make this better, I should. That’s a good value to have. If you find yourself incapable of letting something go to the detriment of other things, well, then you really aren’t involved in modest perfectionism. You’re just doing poorly because a bunch of things aren’t going to get done or aren’t going to get done well.

What is very hard for me, I will tell you what makes me panic the most, and I have explained this many times to the people I work with, and it is particularly an issue when I’m directing. If I feel like I don’t have a sufficient amount of time to do my best work, I then start to feel like I’m dying because the gap between what I can do and what I’m allowed to do is too big, and I feel sick. If I have the time I need, and it’s not an unlimited amount of time, hit my satisfaction thing, and I can’t explain why that is. Probably has to do with some trauma [chuckles].

John: Yes, but you also have 30 years of experience of knowing yourself, knowing your habits, knowing how your work gets done. That’s reasonable. I get that, and I feel that too. There’s times where I’m not panicking because I know I can actually do this in the time, and if the time suddenly becomes too short, then I do start to worry.

Craig: It is also interesting how if you know going into something, before you even start contemplating what you want to do, that there’s only this much time. That’s great.

John: Weekly assignments. We’ve definitely done that, where it’s like, “I know I can’t fix everything. I can move this from this to that.”

Craig: Then it’s just, “Hey, let’s do– Everything’s getting better. We’re just making it better as we go,” and everyone will be shocked by how much you can get done anyway. I don’t panic over those situations, but this is a hard thing to figure out. I wonder whether it’s, “Okay, is good enough good enough,” or is it really about learning how to manage and prioritize the time you have to deliver the quality you can?

John: Yes, that’s fair. Let’s talk through some– I call it a rubric, but basically some decision points you’re going to have about whether you’re giving everything you have to this thing or you don’t need to be doing that. Audience, public versus private. We just went through this with Jack because it’s a private audience. You’re not embarrassed by typos in anything you’re sending to Jack because that’s the relationship you have. She’s meant to be looking at that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: If you’re sharing it with one close friend, you may be a little more concerned about those typos, but you’re not going to obsess about them. If something is public, it really does represent you out there in the world. We’ve often talked about how this is the manifestation of you out there in that space, and you want to make sure that it’s the best version of that. That’s why we encourage people to put their work out there so people can read it and do stuff. At a certain point, if you have older stuff of yours that isn’t really you now, pull it away.

Craig: Yes, if you can, and if you want to. We’ve talked about the illusion of intentionality before, the presumption that everything we see on screen is there because it’s exactly what we wanted to be there, when in fact, half the time, it’s what we got. That can haunt you because if you do put something out and you just didn’t have enough time and it wasn’t quite what you wanted, no one will know or give a damn. They will assume that’s exactly what you wanted, and you will be judged by it, and it will last until the end of written history. [laughs]

John: One of the actors, when he had a rivalry with Connor Storrie, there’s videos that came up. He became famous very quickly.

Craig: I saw this video.

John: He was a kid. It was this young little kid who’s like, “I’m an actor boy, da, da, da. I’m going to be famous and all that stuff.” What I appreciate about him is that he’s like, “Yes, I could have taken him down, but I’ve learned to love that kid.”

Craig: That’s the most healthy thing of all. By the way, that video was adorable. Of all the videos that you could make as a– he seemed like what? Maybe he was 14 or something.

John: Yes, or even younger, maybe.

Craig: Yes, 12. Of all the videos you could make of yourself at 12 or 13, that was the least objectionable, most wholesome, cute, and correct prediction of what you might be when you grow up. Oh my God, I’ll tell you, that hockey show, now my wife is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: Of course.

Craig: Jessica is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: My one cool thing that’s a spoiler, let’s just say there’s a woman who goes through and does– She’s a cinematographer who does breakdowns of it, and it’s phenomenal.

Craig: This hockey show is–

John: It’s great.

Craig: I’m putting it on my list.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say–

Craig: I’m just thinking about them listening to this, going, “Hockey show?”

John: Hockey show.

Craig: “Hockey show, Craig? There’s a name for it. It’s a phenomenon.”

John: The hockey show.

Craig: “Dude, we didn’t call your show Mushroom Show.” Sorry. What’s it called again? He did Rivalry.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s a hard thing to say.

Craig: Rivalry is a tough word.

John: It’s a hard word.

Craig: Rivalry.

John: English doesn’t do that a lot.

Craig: L to R is tough.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say, what stage is it? Is it a proof of concept versus a final? One of the things I admire so much about Mike Birbiglia, and this is true of a lot of stand-up comics, is they will just test and try material all the time. He’s going out, and he’s doing a stand-up, he’s trying new jokes, he’s seeing how they work, he’s recording the show, and he’s hearing, “What did I do? What was the reaction?” That is so important.

He’s not afraid to try a joke that’s not really formed, so he can figure it out. Even today, we have video cameras up here because we are testing a proof of concept to see how we’re going to do this show on video, if we ever decided to do it on video. No one’s ever going to see this. This is just a proof of concept.

Craig: Great.

John: I love that.

Craig: I didn’t put my face on this morning.

John: You didn’t have hair and makeup this morning.

Craig: My grandmother used to say that. “I have put my face on.”

John: There’s a product we’re launching next month or two.

Craig: Cosmetic?

John: Exactly, a cosmetic product. This is for you.

Craig: It’s a concealer.

John: It’s a software thing we’re launching. In trying to figure out how to do this, we were really clear about what is the scope of the minimum viable product. What is the simplest version of this that is useful, that we can see, that we can test, because we know that there’s things we’re not going to understand until we actually have a thing that we can try.

Craig: It interacts with the people on the other end of the relationship.

John: Third criteria here is context. What is the expectation of the person getting the message, or on the other side of this thing? I would stack this up from lowest expectation to highest expectation. A text message, your expectations of perfection in a text message are not as high.

Craig: They’re incredibly high.

John: For you, they are. For an email, incredibly high.

Craig: Incredibly high.

John: A tweet or a social blog post.

Craig: I don’t do those anymore.

John: A script, much higher.

Craig: The highest.

John: I would say for a book, even higher, higher, higher, because the number of times we had maybe six different proofreaders of the book and different editors going through it, we still missed the Star Trek deck versus bridge, but we got rid of so many typos. People who have the galley copies, even after we went through a bunch of those things, we still found typos in those.

Craig: Those will be worth more.

John: Absolutely, collector’s items.

Craig: Yes.

John: I think as you go up this chain, unless you’re Craig, the expectations of perfection increase.

Craig: Don’t be like me.

John: Don’t be like you.

Craig: Don’t be like me. I do think about this sometimes, how it is a waste of time, but also it makes me feel good.

John: Yes, I get that. After we get through the criteria, I want to go through the pros and cons of maybe you should obsess a little bit. I don’t know. Obsess is a loaded word, but maybe you should focus in on a little–

Craig: No. We can use these words. I’m giving us permission.

John: Focus in on these things. What we’re reading off of the Workflowy has a very low expectation of polish. There’s just typos all over it, which is fine.

Craig: It’s pretty darn good, though. I have to say the Workflowy generally is really good.

John: Some of those words missing. No one’s going to read it other than we’re going to look at it.

Craig: Right. I never look at this and think, “Oh, John doesn’t care. It’s sloppy. Drew doesn’t know how to spell.” It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s an outline.

John: It’s an outline.

Craig: It’s fine. I think this is a perfectly good way of doing things.

John: You just said, “Is it worth it?” That, I would say, is the cost-benefit analysis. If you were to refine and optimize this thing, is the value you would get out of that time and effort really worth it for doing the work? The flip of that is you might satisfy this. You might compromise if the expected outcome is lower than what you would have put into it. It’s basically like you’re spending mental money to do a thing or time to do a thing, and is it really worth it to try it?

Craig: One of the interesting things about our brains is that we apply values to these things that are actually disconnected from reality.

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: I think, “Okay, I look at an email, it’s a mess, it must be correct to a point that I decide, ‘Ah, this is good.'” Somebody else out there would look at it and say, “Oh, no, there’s 12 more layers of good that need to occur. To that person, my value system is broken, and also, I just don’t care enough. When I got to the point where I thought it was correct, I believe that I indeed had exhausted everything. I’d done everything I could to make it great, and neither I, nor the person who wrote the shabby email, nor the person who wrote the hyper-perfect email are correct.

It is all disconnected from any metaphysical value. It is just perception. It’s just what makes our minds go click happy. There are people whose minds never go click happy when they correct a typo, ever. Most people commenting on YouTube videos don’t seem to care.

John: Absolutely. Mashing keyboard, yes.

Craig: Yes. What’s the famous one? How is Babby Made? Do you know that one?

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: How is Babby Made? Here’s how babbies are made. I try to just keep it in the realm of either I feel good, or I don’t feel good. I don’t really understand why my feel-good is set where it is. I assume it’s some combination of just innate mannerisms and trauma. I’d love that.

John: There are times where I realize I have spent half an hour on this email that a person will spend 10 seconds reading.

Craig: Oh, yes. I don’t care because that time feels good. It feels good. Yes, there’s just something about it, but that’s why we’re writers.

John: That’s why we’re writers.

Craig: Honestly.

John: We shouldn’t put everything down in the trivial email category. On this show, I think we’re constantly talking about how important it is actually to perfect and polish the scripts that you’re doing to deliver. That’s why we obsess of the three-page challenges. Yet there are still things, even in the course of a 120-page script, that are probably not worth obsessing over and perfecting to a degree that there may not be any benefit to that tertiary character who appears in one scene.

Is that exactly the right name for them? Is it a name that we’re not even going to actually hear a person say aloud? We could spend another hour figuring out the better name for it, but is it going to improve the final product?

Craig: Things like that come down to, “All right, this is the tiniest pebble in my shoe. Do I need to unlace my shoe, take my shoe off, get it back on?” No, unless I’m about to walk a long time, in which case it’s going to make me insane. Sometimes a name is like a pebble. Then I’m on page 30, and that person comes back, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m typing this stupid name again. I can’t. This name is not right. That’s not who they are.”

We can only do what we can do because what we do, as writers, creative artists who are building stuff out of nothing but words, is a mental exercise that is deformed and then beautifully reformed. It’s a mess in there. It’s a mess. If the biggest problem we have is justifying the margins, dwelling a little bit too long, I guess what I’m saying is, if it’s bothering you that it’s not good enough, fix it. If it’s not, don’t. I think that’s really what it comes down to.

John: I’m going to put an asterisk there because if a trivial thing is bothering you so much that you’re not getting work done, that you’re actually not going to be able to be a screenwriter, then there’s something to change there.

Craig: Then you need therapy. It’s not going to happen because you go, “I shouldn’t be bothered by this.” Yes, you shouldn’t be.

John: John’s the wrong name for this character.

Craig: Yes, but you are. What are you going to do?

John: Last criteria, I would say, which is closely related to cost-benefit, but stakes. How much does it actually matter? If it’s the best version, the worst version, does it matter at all? What is the upside of success? What is the cost of failure? For a lot of things, it’s incredibly low, and yet some emails actually are very high stakes. You understand why you’re putting all your effort into it. A text to my brother, it’s just like the stakes aren’t that high.

Craig: The stakes are not that high. I think sometimes of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, which is worth rewatching. It’s one of the greatest pieces of video that exists, as far as I’m concerned, because it is a living document of a moment that changed the world. It’s a presentation. Basically, it’s just a big PowerPoint, is really what it is. It’s a fancy PowerPoint, and it’s spot on. When he needs something to pop up, it pops up. It has been timed out. He has planned it out. He has his stuff memorized.

It is thought through down to the tiniest bit, and it works great. Then, if you would, after you watch that, watch the video of Elon Musk introducing the Cybertruck in which he insists that the glass is shatterproof and bulletproof, and has a guy throw a heavy weight at it, and it absolutely shatters the glass.

John: That is incredible.

Craig: Did they not try that first? It is so sloppy. When the stakes are high, perfect it.

John: Let’s talk in that general sense of over-optimization or over-satisficing. Satisficing, I’m using this being like, “It’s good enough.”

Craig: What is satisficing?

John: Satisficing, you never ever heard that term?

Craig: No.

John: Satisficing is basically choosing the first acceptable alternative.

Craig: Oh, it’s a blend of satisfy and suffice.

John: Oh, you hadn’t heard of satisficing?

Craig: No.

John: I think satisficing is a really good word. You do it all the time without realizing it. It’s like, “Which chips do you want?” “The first one that works, do.” I’m often doing that on a menu at a restaurant.

Craig: You’re satisficing.

John: I’m like, “That’s good enough. I’m going to be happy with it.” I might be happier because I didn’t spend a bunch of time worrying about the choice.

Craig: Got it. Satisficing, I like that.

John: I think there’s a danger to satisficing when you shouldn’t. Let’s talk about over-optimization first. This thing’s all what I’m thinking, but you can add to it. We said you might miss opportunities because you’re so busy futzing with something. Basically, you’re not doing other work. You’re missing out on other chances.

Craig: If you are in a spot where, think of the time you have, think of the goals, think of the stakes, plan it, you know you need a certain amount of time to do this, and this is really important, don’t eat into that time.

John: No.

Craig: If you have extra time and you want to sit there and–

John: Love it.

Craig: Great, go for it, but you got to know your time.

John: You may simply never finish it. Time may just extend out forever. You can also burn out on a project because I feel like you have a certain amount of time in which your brain is willing to commit itself to a project, and if you’re just stuck in the middle of it for too long, you can just burn out.

Craig: It’s true. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the show. Alec Berg and I were talking once. He was cleaning out his place when they were moving, and he found this box of these old scripts that were printed out from when he had just started in the business, so 1991. It was like he didn’t remember any of it. He was reading another him.

John: That’s great.

Craig: He read it, and his thought was, “This is not anywhere near as good as I am now. There’s a freedom to it. It is unburdened by the curse of knowledge, self-expectation, perfectionism, the echoes of failure.” Until you get burned, you don’t know what burned is.

John: There’s a self-defense you can write into your things because you know all the things that are coming, so you’re anticipatory doing stuff.

Craig: Yes, and because you know what it feels like to write something that wasn’t good enough, so you can’t let yourself do that. If you go too far down that road, then you can paralyze.

John: I think one of the real issues with over-optimization is you can get locked in on a bad idea. You might have written a scene so beautiful and so perfect that you can’t touch it again when a note comes that you actually do have to address. You wrote this thing for a location that you no longer have. It can be so tough because you’ve spent so much time and energy on it. You’re so invested in this one version of it.

Craig: Yes. I get caught in loops sometimes. Recently, I got stuck in a loop on something and wrote and then realized, “Okay, this doesn’t belong here. I’m moving it to a different place,” for an episode, in fact. I was lost in that loop for a while. There is a slight panic that kicks in of, “Uh-oh.”

It’s like driving across country. You have plenty of time. Let’s say I’m going to give you a week to drive across the country. On any given day, you can either drive all day or you can not.

Along the way, you have to sometimes experience those days where you pull over, and you don’t drive much. Then you just know on some other days, “Here we go, wake up, don’t stop.” That’s part of the sweet misery of what we do.

John: This last point with over-optimization, I’d say it’s really perfectionism in general. You may be trying to control things that are out of your control. I definitely see that with screenwriters. They will make something so flawless and perfect because they actually want this movie that’s in their head to exist in the world. You have to recognize that that’s not within the scope of your power. You’re doing everything you can to communicate what this vision is you have for the movie, but you cannot will it into existence just through the words you’re typing and through all the refining you’re doing there.

Craig: It’s absolutely true. There’s two mes. There’s the me that writes the script, who is fastidious and a perfectionist. Then, when I’m directing, at some point, I’ll go, “Why don’t we do this?” and then the script supervisor will say, “Just in the script.” Then I’ll say, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Actually, that would be better because I’d already–” but the me there, it’s like I didn’t write it. It’s a disconnection.

John: Director Craig is constantly compromising. There’s always shots that are on your shot list you’re never going to get to.

Craig: That’s so true. It’s so true.

John: I would say give writer Craig a little of that grace.

Craig: No, writer Craig is better than director Craig because writer Craig thought it all through. Director Craig needs to pay more attention, just like all directors do, to the script. That’s really what happens is that I end up thinking to myself, I’m doing the thing that would make me angry that directors would do, where they would focus on everything in front of them and forget about the bigger picture or all the details on the page.

John: Except that director Craig is dealing with not just what writer Craig delivered, but also the realities of what’s in front of the camera and behind the camera.

Craig: That is all true. That is all true. You know what? Maybe Craig should just give himself a break.

John: I think that’s what we’re coming down to.

Craig: All right.[00:39:38]

John: Let’s talk about the dangers of oversatisfying, because, in the initial example, I was talking about how–

Craig: Oversatisfying.

John: Sometimes it’s like, “That’s good enough.” I was talking about how an essay you’re writing for a class that you don’t care about, that you’re never going to read again, maybe it’s actually not worth perfecting. If you were to do that too much, that’s just laziness, basically. You might lose your sense of taste. You’re not used to seeing your best writing, so you might not always be able to hit your best writing. You might forget what your best writing even looks like.

Craig: You may also find yourself getting passed by people that are not faster than you. It’s just that you’re not running as fast as you can, and this will become an uncomfortable feeling. When I say passed, I don’t necessarily mean, oh, they’re going to make more money or something, but they’re suddenly achieving things that you wanted to achieve that you’re not because there is value in pursuing the best you can do. You won’t get there. Pursuing it as a value is a positive thing. If you have the time to make the essay better, even if it doesn’t matter, take the time to make it better. It will make you better.

John: I think that was one of the good things about blogging when I was doing it more often, is that I was basically refining and perfecting those arguments, and it’s learning how to think and how to express those ideas. Writing is exercise, and you’re building mental muscle strength to do that. We’ve also talked about how you might say like, “Oh, it’s private,” or “No one’s ever going to read this,” but you don’t really know that. Things will be out there in the world, and it’s still going to be potentially seen by somebody. I think you’ve stressed this in terms of your collaborations is you are setting an example for everyone else you’re working with. If they see that you’re delivering 75%, why should they give you 100%?

Craig: Oh, boy, is that a thing. I talk to people on the crew about this because they are always working on something. I work on a show. They work on shows. Some of them do say there is a thing where you are on a show, and you can just tell that the people who made it sort of care, then it’s a 70% vibe that they’re like, “It’s a job. Got to do it. I’m supposed to do it. Nobody really cares about the show, but we’re working.” Then you don’t necessarily– why beat yourself up? Why lay it all out there? It’s part of the culture of anything is, “How serious are we taking this?”

John: Now, let’s wrap this up with a conversation about vomit drafts because neither you or I are vomit draft people, but many of our listeners and also friends or colleagues of ours really believe in just like you’ve got to get something on the page first, and then we’ll have whatever you do to get something out, and then you can edit and refine it. I want to talk through the pros and cons and arguments for that, and why people may want to consider it, but also what our concerns were that– the pro arguments for the vomit draft were you just get the thing out as quickly as you possibly can. You don’t censor yourself. You don’t edit yourself. By suspending that internal critic, you’re actually just able to explore, to find out about stuff.

Some people really cannot see the movie until they can have a thing on the page that they can see. They make discoveries along the way. You can’t edit what doesn’t exist. A natural part of the editing process, sometimes that’s writing the whole thing. Kevin Williamson famously vomited-drafted Scream and just wrote it all in a fugue state.

Craig: Awesome.

John: It’s awesome. It’s great. The con arguments I would say is that I watch these videos where, if you’ve seen bricklayer videos or when you’re building something up from the base, if that first foundation isn’t strong and you’re trying to build something up, it gets wonky and crazy, and so it’s going to collapse and fall over. It can compound the fundamental flaws of something is that if you start writing without a plan, without trying to make sure every scene actually really works, it could just go 19 different ways haywire.

Craig: It’s hard for me to criticize people who do this because they must do it for a reason. It’s not how my mind works. I can certainly see the pluses and minuses of the not vomit draft. We’ve talked about a lot of the minuses. It is meticulous. It takes longer. You can find yourself mentally strangulated as you go. You can feel trapped. Sometimes you don’t finish.

John: No.

Craig: On the plus side, though, there is an enormous amount of intention and thought and cohesion. The thing about the vomit draft that scares me is what I would imagine to be just a general lack of cohesion. I’m not sure how you can vomit page 70 in a way that is reflected and made somehow inevitable and yet surprising based on what happened on page 20. It feels like it would be very much and then, and then, and then, and then, and very dialoguey or very actiony. There are dangers there that I can imagine, but I’m only imagining them because I’ve never done it, and I don’t know how to do it, and I’m never going to do it.

John: I’ll say, over the course of the podcast, we’ve talked with alternative strategies that I think are trying to do some of the things that a vomit draft does. When I don’t want to write a scene, I will write a different scene in the movie, but I’ll write a really good version of that, of a different scene in the movie, because I know what the scenes are in the movie.

Craig: Sure.

John: Katie Silverman, she’ll do basically a vomit draft, but with things that are not in the movie, she’ll just have the characters start talking so she can fully understand the characters and what the world feels like. That’s great. Maybe a thing people want to try independent of a vomit draft-

Craig: It’s a good exercise.

John: -is basically just getting stuff, words down on paper. I would say the other thing I noticed about vomit drafts is it’s so easy to fall in love with that first draft. The emotional attachment to the thing you did, and you have a sunk cost fallacy, but also you can fall in love with the temp music. You’ve all run into this, which is just like it’s working and it’s feeling good, and so you don’t want to change anything up.

Craig: Yes. What you do is you attach the feeling of success that you had as you were barfing to the barf, but other people just see barf. They don’t see or experience your feeling of purging and relief. That is important. That’s one positive thing that comes out of the meticulous plan draft is you don’t have that. You don’t get overattached to things. Everything is interrogated, examined, questioned, acid-tested, and so on.

John: I guess my final advice here is with vomit drafts and the good enough, not good enough, is if you’re struggling to get started, if you’re struggling with blank page anxiety, getting words on the page is probably a good first step for you, whether that becomes a full vomit draft or just like the roughest sketches of a scene. Alina often describes it as like walking into the ocean and letting the water get up to your ankles. It’s like, oh, suddenly you’re swimming.

Maybe vomit draft if you are often abandoning projects before you complete them, because I think sometimes we talk about burnout and that perfectionism burnout, like you just– the joy of completing a thing may be useful for you, and so the vomit draft may be the way to get there.

Craig: It’s worth trying, right? If one method isn’t working, try it. What’s the worst that can happen? You stop. It doesn’t work. You don’t get past page 3. I don’t know, but try things.

John: If you’ve tried vomit drafts and you’re not happy with them, I think the reason may be because you’re done with– the vomit draft, you can feel like, “Well, I’m done. I want to go on to the next thing.” You may have green pasture envy where it’s like, “Oh, I want to do this other thing instead.” You never actually go back and edit and finish that thing. That may be a reason why you actually need to scene by scene really do the best version of each of these scenes and really perfect a thing because then you’ll actually have the experience of what it feels like to have a really good script that you’re proud of.

Craig: Maybe people need to try both.

John: Yes. I’m surprised we got you there, Craig.

Craig: Yes. Give yourself a chance to see if– the whole concept of vomit draft is vomit. You’re not being held. It is vomit. Everybody knows this isn’t what we’re shooting. If you are maybe somebody that tends toward that too much, try the other method. Try meticulous planning.

John: I want to acknowledge that this is exactly counter to the advice that Scott Frank gave. It’s like, “Don’t move until you see it.”

Craig: That’s for me.

John: That’s for you.

Craig: That’s how I think. Don’t move until you see it. I know that that’s what works for me. Scott, God bless him. Scott’s way is the way that everybody must do it. I love that about Scott, but I am more interested, I suppose, in results because I know that great writers write differently. I’m pretty sure that– I know Scott and I don’t write the same way because he writes these very, very long drafts that he expects will be cut down.

John: There’s really not vomit drafts, but they’re more expansive than the form will actually allow.

Craig: They are unfettered by the restraints of the medium-

John: Yes, they are.

Craig: -which is awesome because it means that everybody can go through and say, “Okay, story, characters. This moment, this moment, this moment. Now, this is too big. We asked you to build a 12-seat plane. This is an incredible jumbo jet. How can we get all the best parts of the jumbo jet into the 12-seater?” and then he does. Point being, we all have our ways there. Find your way there. If your way there currently is not working, try a different way there.

John: Let’s answer some of your questions. We have one here from Alan.

Drew: ”Back in 2019, there was a huge fight between the WGA and the talent agencies over packaging. After everyone fired their agents, the agencies eventually signed an agreement that went into effect in June of 2022. Now, two and a half years later, has there been any real on-the-ground change, or have agencies found ways to work around the agreement and still offer packages to studios?”

John: Craig, I’m curious what you think about what has happened in two and a half years.

Craig: I don’t think that the agencies have found significant ways to work around the agreement. Here’s what happened. It definitely accelerated the shrinking of the number of agencies available to us, so conglomeration occurred.

John: Do you think that would have been different without the agency deal?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you think there would have been more small agencies or what would–

Craig: Oh, I think ICM would still be there because what happens, once you took away a big part of what their income was, they were now exposed and vulnerable. We lost some diversity of agencies. CAA and WME arguably got more powerful. It’s almost like we were in a fight over what a beach should look like, and then a tsunami came, so it’s hard to tell.

John: There’s no counterfactual. We can’t know what the world would have been like if the agency campaign hadn’t happened. If agencies could still package the way they were packaging before, which we see, for newer listeners, we don’t understand, packaging is when you put together a writer with their script and a director and maybe some stars and sell that to a TV production company, sometimes a movie studio, but really it’s a TV thing. Agencies would do that, and then they would take a fee, and rather than charging their clients commission, they would take a percentage of the budget on every episode of a thing.

Craig: Which meant that they were essentially incentivized by the companies, not their own clients, and that was part of the problem.

John: Packaging still happens, but now they only get the commissions on their clients rather than a fee.

Craig: What we were hoping would happen might have happened, but shortly after that, the streaming wars accelerated dramatically. The massive television bubble began to burst, and huge tectonic changes occurred in our industry to the extent that I don’t know what this did because, like I said, it’s been tsunamied over by–

John: It wasn’t the biggest change in the industry by far.

Craig: No.

John: Much bigger things affected stuff, and so we can’t know quite what’s there. Also, the agencies themselves, we talk about CIA and WME, they entered into a lot of different spaces, and they were already starting to move into different things, representing sports, music, and other things, but just stuff that seems to have nothing to do with us. I think one of our concerns going into the campaign was that they weren’t prioritizing the actual needs of their clients, and the way they make their money isn’t off of us. That’s the big agency that is still kind of true. The money they’re making in the entertainment industry is off of us.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s good.

Craig: That’s why they fight over clients tooth and nail. They would certainly argue that we are valuable to them.

John: I would say that as we started in the industry, the fighting over clients was a much bigger part of the story and drama of Hollywood, and it really isn’t a big deal now.

Craig: Well, because people don’t go anywhere because there’s fewer places to go.

John: There are fewer big places to go. It’s true.

Craig: When we started, there were CAA, UTA, ICM, William Morris, and there was Endeavor, and there was Gersh, which still is in Paradigm, and– what’s the artists and whatever? Anyway, and now it’s like there’s WME, CIA, UTA, then there’s a tier below, and then there’s nothing, and you don’t get moved around a lot because you don’t move– Even the agents don’t move around a lot anymore.

John: The other thing which changed, which had started before this, but certainly accelerated during it, is writers and directors and actors who just have managers who don’t have agents at all anymore, or who are also British people who have their UK agent who’s really up-prepping them in the US as well. I’ve seen that change happen.

Craig: Yes, the management thing is a big one, and management is worse. We were fighting the agencies over packaging. That’s all managers do. That is literally what they do. They exist to be producers on projects, which you can’t be as an agent, to not charge their clients commission, instead get all their money from the production. I don’t understand why–

John: As you’ve talked about, coming out of this, I signed a manager for the first time, and what’s been helpful as a highway manager is to have a person who can talk to anybody, who can call anybody because there’s no vested interest in their own agency. They have relationships that are different, which has been really, really helpful.

Craig: Yes, it really just comes down to who do they work for in the end.

John: Then they’ve been working for me.

Craig: That’s good.

John: The other thing which did change in the agency campaign, which is worth acknowledging, is that agencies now have to send every writer’s contract through to the guild, and so the guild has so much more information about every writer’s deal. To know how many weeks was this writer employed in this room, how many one-step writers have deals, that’s actually been helpful, even though, theoretically, all writers were supposed to send in–

Craig: We were supposed to per– yes. My question is, what are we able to do with all that data, exactly, other than look at it?

John: We can make choices in the negotiating cycle about what we’re going to do for things. The other thing we’ve done is WJA enforcement, contract enforcement, which is something I don’t know you like. We now know this writer had a guaranteed step and was not paid for this step. What happened here? We can actually proactively investigate these things.

Craig: I’d love to ask their lawyer, first and foremost, “Hey, why didn’t you do your job?”

John: Exactly.

Craig: That’s kind of crazy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I guess the long answer, short, Alan, for me is hard to tell what impact this has had. I think there have been positives and negatives. I do know that quite a few people were upset because, once this ended, and you could go back to your agent, their agent said, “No, we’re good. We don’t want you back.” I think a lot of those people were not being well-served by that agent to begin with, at that point, then.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I think they were just hearing from their long-distance girlfriend that it was over and that it was better because now they needed to find a representative that actually cared about them.

John: I think the overall goal of aligning incentives on a purely logical level happened, but what impact did that have on individual writers’ careers? Harder to say.

Craig: You know what? It just occurred to me that, maybe, the real value that we got out of that was that, regardless of what the companies thought of what we did, it appeared that we were committed to doing stuff, and that there was a unity there, and there was some sense of aggression. Now, did that ultimately matter? No, because then they said, “Fine, go on strike anyway,” and then we did. Maybe it was just even for our own internal sake that we thought, oh, we could do a thing and not fall apart, [unintelligible 00:58:19]

John: Then after that, we did the strike, and we did not fall apart.

Craig: We did not fall apart, yes.

John: Let’s answer one more question on bleeping. Moose has a question about bleeping.

Drew: Moose writes, “I’m an audio professional. I noticed that in episodes where someone drops a naughty word, you have the disclaimer at the beginning, and I’m wondering why you just don’t bleep out the offending words.”

John: How the sausage is made here, Craig and I don’t swear on the show if we can help it. We won’t–

Craig: I did today once.

John: Sometimes, if it’s a very easy lift, Matthew just snips it out, and you never notice it was there. Especially when we have guests on, and they swear, it’s just hard to take that stuff out. We want it to be authentic to what the experience was to have it in person.

Craig: We’re adults.

John: We’re adults. We’re making this podcast for adults, but also, your kids can be in the car, and so we’re just mindful of that. That’s why we put the little warning on, if there’s going to be some bad words.

Craig: Just culturally, it is so much different now than it used to be. When we were kids, saying the F-word was like, “Oh my God.” You would get sent to the principal. No one seems to give an F anymore. It’s like we have friends with younger kids.

It’s like language is not– because of the internet, I think, it’s just become less taboo. Context. There are words that we used to throw around that you wouldn’t get sent to the principal for, that now you do get sent to the principal for.

Also, context, if you’re using words in a sexual manner or something like that. Bleeping sounds stupid, mostly, is the answer.

John: I always notice bleeping. It’s not actually a big tradition of bleeping in podcasts. It’s not really a thing.

Craig: No, because we’re not on the air at CBS.

John: No, no.

Craig: It just doesn’t make much sense.

John: No. I agree. Let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing I mentioned earlier on, it’s a cinematographer. Her name is Valentina Vee. She is an L.A. or New York-based cinematographer and director. The thing she’s been doing recently is going through a show, in this case, Heated Rivalry, and talking about the specific choices that the director and cinematographer are making as they’re composing scenes. Things from blocking to locations to camera placement. Going through this, this is the sense I had while I was watching the show, but it’s really clear.

They have no coverage. There’s basically not a shot that they shot that’s not in the show, and so often, they’re basically just staying on one side. The camera’s never coming around to the other side, which is because they had an incredibly limited budget, and they had to maximize the value that they got out of that. These are directing choices, lighting choices, but fundamentally, they’re also writing choices.

That’s why I really encourage people to watch these videos that she does because, again, you’re seeing that the scenes are written in a way that they can be shot from one side, that it’s really about one character’s perspective. Therefore, it’s not important that we see the other people who are talking off the screen because it’s really about this one character’s reaction to what is being said.

Craig: One of my favorite things to do. I try very hard to cover things. I like options. I love an option, but as I talk about with my editors all the time, just because we have it doesn’t mean we have to use it. We don’t have to use any of it. We can just use one shot if we want, if it feels great, and we just want to stay there. Staying with somebody is terrific. Editing too much just because you have it, it just turns into ping pong, tucking head theater, and there’s no pace to it.

The question is, who do I want to be with right now, in this moment? Who do I want to be with? Who do I want to be looking at? If you know that you have limited time and limited coverage, get one shot right, and then just nab something fast just to give yourself some little hinge bit.

John: My suspicion is they didn’t even have time for [unintelligible 01:02:08]. In some cases, they’ve really boxed themselves in where they had no choice other than the master that they had, and it works really well.

Craig: When we’re shooting things in tight situations, there’s a shot that she does here where she has the two of them. They’re sitting in profile, sort of a mini master kind of thing, so we can see both of them. They’re looking at each other, and they are sitting against a mirror, which creates depth that isn’t there. If you put them against the wall, it’s a dead shot, but that creates depth. The problem is the mirror will also see the camera. Well, that’s an easy one for us. As long as they are not moving in front of the camera, you can paint it out, especially if the background sort of drops away.

If you have money in post to get rid of these things, getting the camera– I will tell you that because we’re a handheld show, the amount of times we have had to paint out one little bit of camera as it bobbed in because we really liked this shot, it’s just that as they were moving, A camera saw B, and then B goes, “Oh, shit,” and gets out of the way, but that’s okay.

John: It’s fine.

Craig: That’s okay. We do split screens. We do paint outs. We do blow-ups. There’s a billion ways to handle it. It’s more important to get the work in than it is to– and this is actually good enough, “Okay, do we have an eraser to erase this thing later? Then don’t worry about this. Just get this,” right?

John: Because the priority is, are you getting the performance or getting the shot overall? You can fix the other stuff.

Craig: Performance, shot, feeling. If I love it, if I feel something, if it’s making me cry, I don’t care if I can see the reflection of a crew person over there, I’ll get rid of it. One way or the other, I’ll get rid of it. It is so worth it. That is what people connect to. Obviously, people are connecting to Heated Rivalry, AKA the hockey show, in a profound way, and that means they did a great job with the time and resources they had.

John: What I like about this, she was not the GP on this show. She’s just breaking down shots she’s seeing from it, so she’s able to scribble on the screen and show where a camera was and stuff that was happening. It’s such a good example of a thing you can do in video that we just can’t do as well in audio because you were just describing a thing, but in a video, to actually draw and show is just so much more helpful. I just like that people are out there using the medium in ways that we don’t know how to use yet.

Craig: Yes. I think people are interested in the silly tricks. I think there’s probably a good video that I should do. After this season, I think what I’ll do is take a little time with one of my editors, Tim Good, and we’re going to put together a video called All the Tricks We Use because the tricks that you can use in editing are incredible and so helpful, and very helpful to know when you’re shooting because there are times where I will watch a take and think, with trick number seven, I can get rid of the flaw in this take because the rest of it was great.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Knowing what you can do is a big part of it.

John: It’s not all just VFX. An example that she points out is that there’s moments in the show where they just go to silhouette and where you’re not seeing actors’ faces, but it’s not important for the scene because it’s a physical comedy, but you don’t actually need to see the faces for it to work. By going to silhouette, there’s no crowd. The amount of extras they have is incredibly limited. They’re making shots so you wouldn’t see those people out there.

Craig: Yes. When you look at sports movies, always look in the stands, look in boxing, who’s out there. Boxing, in particular, it’s a ring that’s overlit and then a crowd that is underlit in total shadow because there’s no one there.

John: If the audio is creating the crowd.

Craig: When you watch actual boxing, the entire place is lit up like a Kmart. No one knows what a Kmart is. Walmart. It’s lit up like a Walmart. In movies about football and baseball, you’ll get a couple of select shots where they’ve either licensed the footage or they’ve done some CG people. Then it’s just 18 people at a time and in close-up.

John: The mastermarks are still good.

Craig: Yes. Everything. It’s all the product of many meetings.

John: We love it. Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a game, as it often is. This is for– well, I played it on iOS on my iPad. I’m a big fan of the Rusty Lake games. One of the things about those games that I love is how freaking weird they are, sometimes deeply disturbing.

John: They’re specifically weird, yes.

Craig: Yes, they’re very strange, surreal. I came across a game– there are a lot of knockoffs. I thought for a moment, “Oh, I think maybe this is going to be a Rusty Lake knockoff. I’ll play a Rusty Lake knockoff. I don’t care.” It was not a knockoff. The game is called Birth! It is made by an independent game designer named Madison Karrh. That’s K-A-R-R-H, which already I love. That’s because the spelling is gorgeous. What she’s done is made a fairly satisfying puzzle game. The puzzles are sometimes too easy, sometimes they’re tricky, but they’re beautiful-looking and so deeply weird. The entire thing is so deeply weird. When you get to the end of it, it’s also so sweet and satisfying. It’s art. It’s art. It’s a lovely game and also fun.

I run into a lot of these things. I’m just going to whisper about this because I don’t want the people that make these games to hear it, John.

John: All right.

Craig: There are like 5,000 games that you can get for your iPad that are about grief. They’re not really games. They’re just somebody talking about– it’s just a very obvious metaphor for grief. They’re games, and they’re not fun.

John: Same way that there are joke aways. There are things that have the structure of a joke, but they’re not actually funny because they’re like– you know.

Craig: Yes, they’re really just trading on sadness or whatever. This is a game.

John: Good.

Craig: It’s fun to play. She did a great job. Excellent work, Madison Karrh. Birth! Well worth playing.

John: Very nice. That is our show for this week. The description is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. 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 a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll get those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the 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, especially the folks who’ve just signed up new for the holidays or new for 2026. Thank you. 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 26 for 26.

Craig, thanks for a perfect discussion of perfectionism and when good enough is good enough.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, in the outline here, I have a blog post I did called What I Did in 2025. I thought we might just review that first because I recognize that I’m not a person who remembers things. I don’t remember when things happened. Mike knows all that stuff. He can remember exactly what happened when and how things worked. I’ve been better at journaling this year, but I took a day and actually just went through what did I actually do in 2025? It was a lot.

This was the year I went to Egypt, Jordan, Dubai, and Mexico. We had the Big Fish 29-hour reading in New York City. We released Highland Pro. I got third place in Rachel Bloom’s Spelling Bee.

Craig: Pretty good.

John: It’s pretty good.

Craig: That’s a big deal.

John: We had two No Kings [unintelligible 01:10:43] tests, I did a half-marathon, went to Australia. I would say, overall, 2025 was a very shitty year for the world, but I had some good, fun things happen locally and personally, which was nice.

Craig: You say I never do this.

John: It’s the first time I’ve ever done this.

Craig: I just don’t look back. I mostly have feelings. I think about the feelings and moments and things, and there are these moments that stick out. I don’t really look back much. I’m all about right now and tomorrow.

John: I’m not generally a looking-back person, but I’m also a forward thinker. The second part of this conversation is, the last couple of years, Mike and I would do a 24 for 24, 25 for 25, 26 for 26, where we would basically share note and–

Craig: You know this is going to get tough. You see where this is going. This is going to be hard for you guys.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: The older you get, the more crap you have to do.

John: Yes. It’s a lot of stuff. This year, we had to find one extra thing, but it’s going to be a creep every year. It’s a fun thing. Basically, we have shared notes in Apple Notes. It’s like a checklist of things we mean to do over the course of the year.

Craig: I like that.

John: What’s different about this than a New Year’s resolution is they are specific things you want to do, and they’re not all laborious chores. We’ll go through some examples here. One of the things we need to do this year is sort and rationalize what we’re going to do with all our CDs and DVDs that we’ve not looked through in years. Do you still have all your DVDs and CDs?

Craig: No.

John: What did you do? You just got rid of them?

Craig: I have no idea where they are. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone. It’s gone. It’s over. They may exist somewhere, but I don’t know where.

John: Drew, do you have physical discs?

Drew: I have DVDs and Blu-rays. I have some CDs, but they’re just left over from when we bought CDs. I don’t even think I have the ability to listen to it, actually.

Craig: You can listen to it through your DVD player.

Drew: Probably.

Craig: I think so.

Drew: For a minute, my DVD player was broken, and I had a, “Do I just get rid of everything?”

Craig: I have a DVD player. I never use it.

John: For a while, we were playing Blu-rays through our old PlayStation, but then that gave up the ghost. Stewart gave our daughter some Blu-ray DVDs. She wanted to watch them. We didn’t have one, so we had to get a little cheap Blu-ray player, and then she didn’t remember to watch them.

Craig: Children.

John: Basically, we divided things into three categories; stuff around the home, stuff around L.A., and stuff that’s out of town [unintelligible 01:13:13] anywhere. We were revamping the room that we’re currently in, which is going to be our reserve recording studio. We already did the soundproofing. The wall behind you, Craig, looks crappy on camera because it’s just too blank and bare, so we’re going to introduce different stuff to that.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: I’m not sure. We’re going to bring in somebody to help us figure that out.

Craig: You know I’m not going to be here, right?

John: No. When do you come back from–

Craig: Okay. My heart stopped for a second. I’m like, “Wait.”

John: While you’re gone, some of the time, there’ll be famous people who’ll come in. We’ll record some of that stuff.

Craig: Love famous people.

John: While you’re gone.

Craig: They’re famous for a reason, you know.

John: We’ll do three game nights. We love having people over for game nights.

Craig: Amazing.

John: You love game nights.

Craig: We love game nights.

John: We’ll do some pool parties. Around town, three restaurants in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Often, our food-related thing was three new cuisines, like ethnic cuisines, but we basically run out of ethnic cuisines. We got to Bangladeshi, and it’s like, “I think we’re good here.”

Craig: Near the end.

John: “We’re near the end.” Two escape rooms. I need to make it back to Catalina.

Craig: Sorry, you said two?

John: Two.

Craig: No, no, no, no, no.

John: Got to do more than two.

Craig: Got to do more than two.

John: We only did one escape room this entire year. We did the new one as– the downtown.

Craig: Here’s an extra one cool thing for you. Melissa and I did this with our friends Cle and Mia. There’s an escape room up in Santa Clarita.

John: I’ve heard. They have a–

Craig: It’s called Appleseed Avenue. Fantastic. Must do. Must.

John: Drew went with us to the one we did this last month. What was it called?

Drew: It was The Lost Cat?

John: It’s downtown. What I liked about it, the general concept is this old woman has lost her cat, and you find her cat.

Craig: Did it.

John: Did it. Good and solid.

Craig: It was cute.

John: Cute. Good time.

Craig: It was cute when the stuff fell down. That’s fun.

John: Love it. Then some out-of-town stuff. We’ll do another half-marathon. We’re going to visit one new country and then see some concerts and some shows. What I’m stressing here is that some stuff is work. We’re basically dealing with our CDs, DVDs, repainting the kitchen chairs, tuning the piano. Most of it is just like– inertia will just keep you on the couch and not doing a thing. Their challenge is for yourself to actually just get out and do your thing. It doesn’t feel like work. It scratches that check-off span of the list to actually like, “Okay, we’ve got to see a concert. What concert are we going to go see?”

Craig: I love doing nothing.

John: You love doing nothing.

Craig: Oh, my God.

John: You love playing a game. You love playing a little rest-your-leg game.

Craig: Doing puzzles, playing games. It’s just joy. That’s the thing. Follow your heart. I’ve never been a checklist person. I’ve never been somebody who’s like, “I should do blank.” If I hear the word should in front of something, I’m like, “Do I want to?”

John: You’ve got to recontextualize. “I want to do this thing. I want to remember that I want to do this thing.”

Craig: That’s the thing. Do I actually want to do this thing? I’ve really gotten it down to, I just do the things I want to do, and I don’t do the things I don’t want to do.

John: You prioritize D&D, which is nice.

Craig: Because I want to. That’s the beautiful part.

John: Looking at the blog post here, I misspoke in the main episode. We actually played 39 sessions of D&D because I did miss a few.

Craig: 39. Solid.

John: It’s a lot. Craig, you are going to be off shooting a new season of the show.

Craig: Yes.

John: What other, I don’t want to say goals, but what else do you envision for your 2026? What do you think would, at the end of 2026, just like, “Yes, that was a good year.”? What are some things that would have happened?

Craig: If I am alive at the end of 2026, I will feel great. This is going to be a difficult production because of the size of it and the things we have to do. It’s going to be tough, and the length of it. My goal is alive. I want to try and make sure that my blood sugar stays– my big task is keeping my blood sugar at a healthy number, which I’ve been able to do. I keep my eye on that, and I continue to reflect on some of my mental health pluses and minuses.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m looking forward to working with the people that I have worked with before that I love, and some new people that I know I’m going to love that I’ve met, and I’m very excited about. Then there’s just the adventure aspect of it. It’s an adventure. That’s the thing. This list of doing stuff, I’m going to hike, stay up all night, see a forest fire, do this. There’s going to be 200 things that I’m going to do because of the show that’s like, “That’s my living.” When I say see a forest fire, we don’t actually have fire. I don’t know why I said that. We’re not lighting a forest on fire, don’t worry, but we are going to do some crazy stuff. That’s where all the living comes in.

That’s my big goal, and to keep playing D&D throughout it all because–

John: Absolutely. You’re starting a whole new campaign for it, so I’m excited.

Craig: Starting a whole new campaign. It keeps me sane. It’s my thing. It’s what I’m allowed to do for me. Everybody knows it. You got to carve out some stuff.

John: You’ve got to carve out some time.

Craig: You’ve got to carve out time.

John: Basically, be yourself. One of my nervous breakdown during my TV show is basically I existed only for the show, and I was stuck in this impossible place.

Craig: I exist almost entirely for the show, and then I carve out a little bit.

John: Nice. Craig, felicitations on this past year.

Craig: Likewise.

John: I hope it’s a great upcoming year.

Craig: I think it’s going to be a fine year for the two of us.

John: I hope so, too.

Craig: Drew, Happy New Year.

Drew: Happy New Year. I thought you were going to say, “Maybe not for you.”

Craig: What a horrible way to start 2026.

Drew: Good luck.

Craig: For Drew–

John: You’re fired.

Craig: Yes, you’re fired.

[laughter]

Drew: I knew it was coming. Thanks.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• Jamie Lee Curtis says “Trauma”
• Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology by Nick Haslam
• Young Connor Storrie on YouTube
• Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone
• Elon Musk announces the Cybertruck
• Valentina Vee on TikTok and Instagram
• Birth by Madison Karrh
• John’s What I Did in 2025
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (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 717 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. While this is, in fact, Episode 717 of Scriptnotes, it’s also Episode 277 of The Screenwriting Life, a fantastic podcast hosted by Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna, where they also talk on a weekly basis about screenwriting. Craig and I went there to talk about the Scriptnotes book, which is out there in the world. They’d read it, they’d loved it, but we also had a good, deep conversation about lots of other things related to writing and the craft and the process.

It was a really good conversation, a great chance to talk with other pros about this business that we all love. If you don’t know them, Meg LeFauve is the co-writer of the Inside Out movies, as well as The Good Dinosaur and Captain Marvel. Lorien McKenna is a writer on shows like Curious George, and a former story manager for Pixar. If you enjoy this episode, give them a follow, The Screenwriting Life. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great show for anybody who listens to our show to also listen to. One of the things I really appreciate about their show is that they talk every week.

They open up with a segment where they talk about the writing they did that week, where their successes and failures were, and their challenges. That was just great. Take a listen to this episode, and if you like them, give them a follow as well. Most of the episode is that, and then we’ll be back at the end for some boilerplate, some follow-up. In our bonus, for our premium members, we’re going to talk about the career, the life of Rob Reiner. I knew him. I knew his wife, Michele. I knew way too much about the places where this tragedy happened, but I also want to celebrate the incredible things he was able to do and to share some personal reflections on Rob Reiner. Enjoy this episode, and we’ll see you here at the end as we wrap stuff up. Thanks.

[music]

Meg LeFauve: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I’m Meg LeFauve.

Lorien McKenna: I’m Lorien McKenna.

Meg: Today, we have a truly special show. We are talking to John August and Craig Mazin, the duo behind the Much Loved Scriptnotes podcast, which has been running for 14 years.

Lorien: John August is a screenwriter whose credits include Aladdin, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and the first two Charlie’s Angels movies. In addition to his work in film, John wrote the Arlo Finch middle grade novel trilogy and earned a BAFTA nomination for his script of the Broadway musical Big Fish. Through his company, Quote-Unquote Apps, John makes utilities for writers, including Highland and Weekend Read, along with a writer emergency pack, which is used in 2,000 classrooms nationwide. He was also a member of the 2023 WGA negotiating committee.

Meg: Craig Mazin is a multiple Emmy award-winning co-creator, executive producer, writer, and director of such shows as the smash hit HBO series The Last of Us. Record-breaking and critically acclaimed, season one became the most watched debut of any series for HBO. Previously, Craig served as creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO limited series Chernobyl, for which he won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, a Peabody, and awards from the Writer’s Guild, the Producer’s Guild, the Television Critics Association, and the American Film Institute. Currently, Craig is executive producing the upcoming HBO Esports drama Damage alongside writer, director, and executive producer Celine Song.

Lorien: Together, John and Craig have released a brand new book, Scriptnotes, a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, which distills more than 700 episodes of podcast conversations, craft principles, and no bullshit wisdom. John August and Craig Mazin, welcome to the show.

John: Oh, we’re so excited to be here.

Craig Mazin: Thank you.

Meg: All right, so the first thing that you guys have agreed to do with us today is Adventures in Screenwriting, or How is Your Week? We’ll let Lorien kick it off. Go ahead, Lorien.

Lorien: My week this week was actually really good. It started out really shitty because I’ve been so busy. What is it, Meg? The busyness is the–

Meg: The highest form of laziness.

Lorien: Highest form of laziness. So busy, so stressed. I have a project due on Monday, and so all those self-doubt, fear, all those icky things came crashing in. I had the panic moment of I have to burn it all down. Instead of that, I talked to my therapist, and we made a big list of all the things I’m doing. I have to say no to a lot of things, which is good, and prioritize my time and energy so that I’m focusing on the right things. I did that, and I feel more in control and more powerful in the right ways. I have a good plan for the end of this year and into the first quarter of next year. It’s been a good week. It sounds horrible, but cathartically speaking–

Meg: It’s a good week.

Lorien: Craig, how was your week?

Craig: It wasn’t that different from yours. My guess is if our weeks are defined by the anxiety that we experience, and then the panic that we have, and then the burn it all down, and then the, “Wait, I’m a genius,” and then, “Wait, I’m an idiot.” That’s pretty much my week every week. I’m up here in Vancouver, and we’re prepping the third season of The Last of Us. I spend my week with forced busyness. I don’t want the busyness, but they force it on me. I try, and have them divide my day. Okay, mornings are meetings, scouts, all of that stuff, and then afternoons are writing. The problem, of course, is sometimes I just don’t want to. Also, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

The script that I’m in right now is a tricky one because it’s middle-ish, which is always hard, but there were some nice breakthroughs. I’ve just been sitting with a lot of discomfort, as my wife says, but I also had a lovely moment this week. While I was peeing, it’s not about the peeing itself, but I was peeing, and I had an idea. [laughs] It’s so amazing how often this happens where I just need to remove myself from civilization, go into a bathroom, or a shower, and then suddenly, I have an idea. I had an interesting idea that scared me. I wanted something scary, and I went, “Oh, my God, that’s scary.”

Meg: Congratulations on the pee breakthrough.

Craig: Right?

Lorien: All right, John, how was your week?

John: My week was really good largely because I turned in something last Friday. It’s weird how 30 years into this career, you’d think I would get over the joy of turning in a thing, but it just feels so nice to have a script off your desk and for not to be consuming all the brain cycles. Especially that last week where you’re trying to make all the last little pieces fit, it was a rewrite, so it wasn’t the first time through, but there were a lot of notes I was trying to incorporate. I wanted this to really reflect both what I intended, but also what the filmmakers needed to do. I had made a plan for turning it on Friday, and I hit it.

Friday morning, it was just done. It was ready to go. Drew approved it, sent it through, and I had that relief of having a thing off my plate. This week was really fun because I could just do the other stuff that kept getting delayed, and deferred because I was so busy working on that script. The main thing I was writing this week is I have to prepare for a speech for next month. It was really a chance to think through like, what do I actually think about this? What am I trying to communicate? How am I writing for my own voice? That was a fun thing to be working on. Craig and I had finished the first round of promotion for the Scriptnotes book.

It was just a chance to revel in people reading the book and enjoying the book. It was just a dream week. It was also nice to get all this stuff done before the holidays and have a sense of it’s just not looming over me. I’m not expecting any notes until January. It was a very good week for me.

Meg: Perfect. It’s perfect. It’s the perfect timing. We can’t wait to talk about the book.

John: Tell us about your week.

Meg: I will tell you about my week because it actually has a question for you guys. My week has a question, so we’re just going to dive in.

Craig: I love a question week.

Meg: My week was I’m writing a script for a studio with my partner. I’m in there doing the draft, and I’m ready to send it back to my partner because I think we’re done, and I realized, well, wait, I should go check those notes they sent us. Meaning, we had done verbal notes, and then we had taken off on the verbal notes. They were great notes. We were so inspired. We’re cutting out characters. We’re cutting out subplots. It was so fun, and challenging. Then I read the notes, and I was like, “Oh, shit, there’s more stuff in here.” There’s a big thing in here that I did not– By the way, they might have said it on the phone, and I just didn’t catch it, or in writing the notes, it came out.

Who knows? Nothing bad to the studio. I should have read the notes before taking off because in the notes, it says that the main relationship, they’re just not really connecting to them as a couple.

John: That’s a big note, Meg. [laughs]

Craig: Yes.

Meg: It’s a big note. It’s a really big note. I think a lot of the other notes are actually symptoms of this because now that’s a problem, that’s a problem. Maybe they are problems because you’re not emotionally connecting to the characters. Because I came from the Pixar school of thought, I’m like, “I have to blow it all up.” I have to blow up the whole thing because at Pixar, if you get a note like that, we’re starting over. Just [onomatopoeia] like, “Breathe, outlied.” I got very overwhelmed, called my writing partner, overwhelmed him, which was not the smartest thing to do because poor guy driving in the car, and I’m like, “Oh my God.”

My question to you is, short of blowing it up, let’s say I’m not going to blow it up because that’s, in a way, easier to just go, “Fuck everything, let’s just start over.” Somehow, to me, that’s easier because I can start blue-skying again.

Lorien: It’s a burn-it-down philosophy.

Meg: Sometimes, a lot of times, you do have to start over, so I’m totally in for it and up for it. If you guys get a note like that they’re not connecting emotionally to a character, where do you guys go?

John: I go to the first from where we first meet them. I think that so often that is a symptom of they did not meet the character in a way that they were ready to engage with them and to click with them. Something was not setting their hooks of curiosity correctly as we were first meeting this character, and that’s why they’re not seeing themselves in their situation. I fully hear the burn it down start all over again, but that’s definitely not my go-to reaction. It’s something in those first few scenes where we get to know this character are not inviting them into the story.

Craig: I will sympathize with you. The overwhelmed feeling is the worst, and it doesn’t help, but it’s so natural. It just comes and you feel like you’re drowning. It feels like, “The work that I would need to do to make this good is impossible to do in the time I have. What do I do? Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” but of course, if you could come back from the future and hand you the script that is finished, that does fix everything, it would only take you a day or two to write it after you read it, right?

Meg: [laughs] I love that.

Craig: If you know what to do, you have the time. In a situation like this, the first question I have is, this is about a central relationship. Which of those characters is the “protagonist”? One of them is, I assume, the protagonist. Why does that person need to meet the other person? It just goes to the question, what is this movie about? What’s the point of all this? If I know what the movie’s about, and I know what the point is, and I know what the problem is with this main guy, and I know what this main character needs to be at the end, which presumably is different, why is this other person the perfectly best person to send in? Why does God send this person? [laughs]

It’s a reflection, in a way. It’s what they needed to get. If you think about it like that, then suddenly, you don’t have to wonder, how do I make people care about this? You’re just going to care because you understand inherently this person’s poking right at the thing that our hero didn’t want poked.

Meg: That’s really interesting because I think what’s happening is, normally, in the past, I’ve written transformative characters that have to meet the person that’s going to poke them, help them change, help them change their view of life and themselves. These are characters who are more claiming their power. Meaning, think about Titanic, they’re not wrong, but they need each other in order to move right to the next place. Their transformation is more a claiming of who they are, and Moana’s a claiming character to me. She’s singing her song. She’s right. Her song is right. She needs to go. She’s just full of doubt, and her how is wrong.

Craig: Who does she need to meet?

Meg: Okay, you’re right. Darn it.

[laughter]

Craig: This is my point. Kate Winslet knows that she should be an independent woman who doesn’t have to marry this guy, except she’s on a boat, and she’s going to marry that guy. Who does she need to meet? What’s so delicious is that when she does meet Leonardo DiCaprio, she’s just giving him the arguments that her mother gave her. “I don’t like you. You don’t live right. I shouldn’t be with you. You’re gross. Fuck off.” We know that she’s just, okay, you’re literally afraid to do the thing. You’re so afraid you’d rather die than actually stand on your own two feet, and here comes this rakish fellow. Perfect, all handsome.

John: I love the story, class, and discussion that we’re having here, but I want to get back to, Meg, your initial comment, which is basically that you went back to these notes, you realized like, “Oh, they had this thing here which we didn’t address in this,” but at the same time, you had a call with them where they’re highlighting their main note wasn’t about this relationship. Going back through those notes, that moment of doubt was–

Meg: Yes, literally in the middle of a paragraph.

John: In the middle of a paragraph. Here’s what I’m saying is that I am skeptical that you, Meg, with all your experience, have actually done something so disastrously bad in this relationship. While it may be useful for you to think about “How to do this thing better?” I doubt that you’ve done a bad job. I doubt that it’s actually a crisis. Because if there was a crisis, these people, their notes would have been about that. That would have been the giant red flashing lights there, and it was not. I want to both honor and acknowledge that, yes, it’s so great to be thinking about how are we maximizing this relationship, and do we have the right people, but also you can rip apart things that are working beautifully with the false goal of improving something.

Meg: All right, so you guys have to come on the show every week and talk to me about my writing. [laughter] Number two, my poor writing partner basically said the same thing, and I yelled at him.

John: I see.

Meg: I was really overwhelmed. I was like, “You’re not listening,” that kind of thing.

Craig: I get that because you have to balance what John is saying, which is a general healthy self-regard with the other concern, which is that you’re just going, “La, la, la, I don’t want to hear this note,” but you wouldn’t be overwhelmed and have this feeling if you didn’t think maybe they were onto something. If I know that these characters are compelling in the way that I’ve created them for me, and someone’s like, “I’m just not compelled by them,” then I don’t know what else to do because I know I did this right. If someone says these aren’t compelling, and it’s really, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” it’s because I think deep down probably–

Meg: I think you’re right.

Craig: Yes. Now overwhelm. You’re our Kate Winslet today, Meg LeFauve.

Meg: Oh, my God.

Craig: You’re overwhelmed.

Meg: So beautiful, yes.

Craig: When you’re yelling at your writing partner, that’s you flinging yourself into the ocean. [laughter] You’re just going to turn back to your writing partner and say, “Take my hand and carry me off, and let’s do whatever the writing equivalent is of having sex in a car and storage in the Titanic.”

Meg: You can get on the door, writing partner. You can get on the door.

Craig: Yes, and you know what? We both fit on the door.

Meg: We both fit on the door. There’s plenty around.

Craig: Clearly.

[music]

Lorien: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show. We’ve been doing this podcast for a while, clearly not as long as you two have been doing Scriptnotes, but I have this experience, I think Meg does too. We learn something every time we talk to somebody, whether it’s an epiphany about our writing or a process or just, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” or, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” When you sat down to write this book, what did it force you to face, to articulate that you’d never got the chance to do in the podcast? Specifically around, what did you learn putting this book together? What surprised you?

John: It was my idea, my team’s idea to do it because our listeners had often said, “Oh, we would love to have a book.” The theory was like, “Oh, you could just take the transcripts and print the transcripts,” and it would have been larger than an entire library. There’s just too much there, and so we had to distill it down. Then it became an issue, what are the topics, and then how do we go through the transcripts and pull everything we’ve talked about, character introductions over the course of 700 episodes to see what kind of stuff was there? I think one happy surprise is that we’ve been very consistent. From episode 20 to episode 900 or 720,-

Craig: Oh, God.

John: -we are very much the same. Our messages are the same, but distilling it down was so, so, so much harder than I thought it was going to be. I was naive. We had Drew Marquardt, our producer, Prasant, who’s one of our editors, Megana Rao, lots of folks who worked with us all throughout this process, trying to pull and distill and to get it down to one consistent voice was just really hard to do. I’m really happy how we were able to get there, but it was just a long slog to do it. Like any writing project, you sort of think like, “Oh, I know exactly what this is going to be like.” You can envision the final product, but getting there is just a much more of a journey and adventure than I was anticipating.

Craig: I learned nothing because I didn’t do it. [laughter] Here’s what I did. I showed up and talked for 700 and some odd hours, and then John and the Scriptnotes team did all the work to turn it into a book. I’ve said this many times, I spend most of my life being in charge. I’m in charge of my show, and I like it. I like being in charge. It’s hard. There are a lot of challenges. It’s exhausting, but it’s what I do. Then Scriptnotes, I am not. I love it. [laughs] It’s so awesome to not be in charge. I don’t know if you guys are– Is one of you in charge, or do you both share?

Meg: No, share.

Craig: You share. I love that. Really, the podcast was John’s idea in the first place. I’ve always been a guest on my own show. [laughter] John comes up with what we talk about, John figures out everything. My job is to show up and be as spontaneously entertaining and as informative as I can possibly be. It’s like John gets to summon me like a wizard summons a familiar. I just pop into the world completely like, “What? Huh? What are we talking about? Great. Ti, di, di, boop, boop,” and then an hour later, I go, poof.

[laughter]

Meg: That’s amazing. I love that. It’s funny, Lorien, and I had this conversation after reading your book. We were like, “Pretty much we can just tell people, ‘Go read this book.'” [laughter] You cover everything, and it’s all so good and all so insightful. We are just going to talk about a couple of the things in the book just to let everybody know, just get a taste of it, and all the great stuff inside. Obviously, we’re not even going to get in depth in even one topic because the book is so in-depth and great. You guys talk about, and I believe this was mainly Craig’s chapter, but in terms of structure, and that there are these people who are analysis people, and they create these things where this is what structure is.

You have to hit this, this, and this, and then how that is bullshit because it’s about creation, and it’s more of a spine or a skeleton inherent within the character. It’s interesting because at first, listening to it, I was hoping it would be your voices, and it’s not, but the guy’s very great.

John: His name is Graham. He’s fantastic.

Meg: Graham is fantastic. He’s now part of your ethos to me. You were talking about, Craig, how at first you were like structure’s bullshit, basically. I love structure, so I was like, “[gaps] We’re going to have a fight on the podcast because I love structure.” Structure is everything to me, but then I realized we have a different way of saying the same thing. I say it as structure is the character’s movement,-

Craig: Exactly.

Meg: -and you’re watching a human being come to consciousness about something.

Craig: Exactly.

Meg: You’re saying, and I loved your word because it helps me think of my own script in a different way, it’s, I want to make sure I get the right words right, that to you it’s a central dramatic argument, a thesis that you’re putting forward, and you use examples like men and women can’t be just friends, better be dead than a slave, if you love someone, set them free. That’s so great to take to my work and be like I think about words, I think about redemption, I think about forgiveness, but that isn’t fully a thesis yet. What do you have to say about forgiveness? My question to you, and I love this chapter, you break down Nemo. I’ve used Nemo too, which was fun.

I was a little jealous. I was like, “Wait a minute.” [laughter] I thought, okay, mind melt. How do you, and I’m asking both of you now, how do you get to that argument? When you’re writing drafts, how do you find and distill it down? Do you always not start before you have it? Do you find it as you go? How do you, even if you have a word, let’s say forgiveness, or how do you distill it into that argument or that theme that will become the structure and the character movement?

Craig: I do caution people, I think, even inside that bit to not necessarily feel like they have to start by writing down a bunch of fortune cookie things, and then what story should go on. We often start with an idea. Really, the thing that gets you excited is the thing you should start with. You have an idea for a plot. You have an idea for a cool character in a place or time. The next question I usually ask, then, is like, okay, if I have an idea for a movie, just plot. Then the next question is, who would be an interesting person to see inside of that? Then the next question would be, why did I think that that person would be an interesting person, and what is wrong with this person?

Something’s wrong with them. Otherwise, they’re fine. I don’t want to watch it. It’s not drama. What’s wrong with them? By asking what’s wrong, you will get to a place of, okay, I understand. It’s a cool idea. Shrek was a cool idea. The man who wrote the book, William Steig, is that right? He had a cool idea. I think somebody like Ted Elliott comes along, and he goes, “All right.” The character is someone who is so angry about losing his swamp. Why would anybody want the swamp in the first place? What is an ironic thing for an ogre to want? Love, right? You very quickly will get to it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.

It’s just like, boom, right there, but that’s fine. You’ll get there through examination of what the fertile soil is around the plot that you’re playing with or around the characters that are emerging.

John: Going back to Craig’s Finding Nemo chapter and this overall framing of the question, we talk about structure, but central dramatic argument is also theme. There are all these words that we throw around a lot about in screenwriting. I feel like the jargon of it all is sometimes a barrier for people to understand what’s really at the heart of this, which is that, do you have interesting characters who are trying to do interesting things, and are you creating obstacles in their way that are compelling for the audience? I think a thing that Craig and I often feel frustration about with dogmatic structure is that you’re hitting these beats, but what is the experience of the audience?

What is the audience feeling through this? How is our relationship with that character changing? How are we putting ourselves in their shoes, seeing the choices they make, and have it feel like they are really driving the story? So many “well-structured” scripts are terrible because they’re just not compelling. They’re not interesting, and scene by scene, they’re not working. So many of these books talk about these templates for things and neglect like, oh, no, you actually have to have interesting scenes that do compelling things where there’s a structure within the scene where you have conflict within the scene.

In the book, we’re just trying to tease out those things and make it clear that as a writer, you’re thinking about all of this at the same time. You’re both in the scene with the characters and sitting in a theater watching it on the big screen. That’s really the challenge of the craft that we’ve chosen is that you’re trying to do all this at once and forget that you actually know what’s going to happen next.

Lorien: Along those same lines in the book, you talk about abandoning want versus need, which I am 100% for. I think it’s so distracting for people because they write characters who articulate their need in the first 10 pages. They’re super aware. We as the audience are aware, and we’re like, “Great, I know what’s going to happen,” so it’s not engaging. Again, it’s that conversation of the different words we use for things. I try to articulate that as what does the character learn? What do they realize? Meg talks about that belief system. How is their belief system shattered? What are ways that you talk about it that is more clear to you when you’re writing specifically?

Craig: Those all sound good. I just think about myself and you mentioned therapy earlier. We don’t go to therapy to announce the insights. Also, insights themselves–

Lorien: Wouldn’t that be great though if we did? [laughter] “Here are the things I know about myself. You pay me. You’re welcome.”

Craig: Just say them back to me. As my therapist and Scriptnotes associate therapist, Dennis Palumbo, says, insight is the booby prize of therapy anyway, because just because you realize something doesn’t mean you’re okay. In fact, that’s usually the worst moment. The worst moment is when you realize you’ve been wrong, you realize the way it should be, and you have no idea how to get there. You can’t go home, and you can’t go forward, and you’re just lost in the phantom zone. That is in fact what the low point is. It’s just that in these structure books they go, “No, a low point happens. Your character’s sad.”

Why? I do think quite a bit about just the simplest things. What is this character afraid of most? How profound is their denial? I want their denial to be profound enough that they are not aware of it because that’s how denial works, but I don’t want it to be so profound that they cannot then be shown. It’s right under, but it’s got to be under, and that’s as simple as that. What are they afraid of? What’s their denial? Why would I be invested as a third party in them having the insight, and then finding the courage to move forward and become the new person?

John: If you’re making those choices, honestly, they should resonate with the audience. The audience should be able to see themselves in this protagonist. Even if they wouldn’t make necessarily the same choices, they understand why the character’s making those choices. They want that character to succeed. They are right there with them. That’s classically what you’re going for with the protagonist going through on a journey and having that transformation. I think we also really try to focus on the book is that it’s never about one character. It’s always about a relationship.

It’s always about the relationship between two or more characters, and really thinking about that relationship as its own entity, and where are we at with this relationship. We probably have a POV perspective on that. There’s one character who’s driving a little bit more, but we have to really be able to understand things from both characters’ points of view. Again, that’s a thing we didn’t see in the books that we read growing up as we were starting off in this business.

Lorien: I love it. I like the, what are you afraid of? That’s something Meg talks about Jodie Foster asking all the time. What is the main character afraid of? I think it’s such a great. Then how much, how deep in denial are they? Because we have to be in denial with them.

John: Yes, and we have to make their denial understandable and even attractive. I want to know. I’m rooting for Shrek in the beginning. I’m like, “Yes, beat it. No one likes me. The world is designed to kill me. My parents sent me away when I was eight [laughter] to be alone, and I like being alone.” He’s so happy in the beginning of the movie, but it’s not really happy. It’s just content.

Meg: I talk about this. You guys have a whole chapter on point of view, which is great and enlightening. My take on it is also emotional point of view, which you’re talking about. Emotionally, I have to agree with the denial. Who’s emotional point of view in the scene? Sometimes when I help people with their scripts, I’m like, “Just go through your script and see whose emotional point of view are we in each scene because it’s flopping all over the place and I’m never landing.”

Craig: What you just said should be chiseled onto some wall at the DGA because where I find non-writing directors struggle sometimes is very specifically with that. Who has the emotional perspective in the scene? It’s such an important concept. The emotional perspective is typically defined to me as the person with whom at the end of the scene, I go, “You. You ran this. You were in charge of this. You saw it. You get it. You learned. You changed. You influenced. You did something,” but it’s got to be someone’s. Yes, I love that. Thank you for saying that.

John: It’s always a challenge when you have parallel plot lines. You may have a protagonist, you may have a secondary character who can drive their own scenes. They clearly have storytelling power in the movie or in the series, but then you put those two characters together in a scene, and it’s not obvious to the audience who is driving the scene, who’s in charge here, who we’re supposed to follow. You as the writer, you have to make that choice because they can’t both be driving the car. That’s a fundamental thing to do. I’ll go back Harry Met Sally. The movie is largely Billy Crystal’s movie and he’s driving those scenes when he’s in them together, but they’re wrestling for control of the wheel and that’s some of the fun.

Lorien: We get asked a lot, “Which project do you focus on? How do you know?” It’s, well, who’s paying me? What are the deadlines?

John: Yes, who’s paying me? That’s a good one. [chuckles]

Lorien: Other than that, let’s say you’re an emerging writer or you have multiple things going on, what do you say no to, I guess, is the bigger question. You talk about this in your chapter on endings. You say, which one has the best ending?

Craig: Yes, my default go-to answer. It’s like, write the thing with the best ending.

Lorien: Which is this is great. In a feature, your ending has to be inevitable, surprising, satisfying. In a TV show, you need to have an ending for each episode.

Craig: You get to have an ending for each episode.

Lorien: You get to have an episode that’s ending.

Craig: It’s a gift.

John: It’s so nice.

Craig: It’s a gift.

John: You also get to have a new start at the beginning of every episode, which is so great. Back when they had commercials, you had act breaks, which is also exciting.

Lorien: You get to have an ending at the end of the season and the series. What advice would you have for someone who’s writing a spec pilot and they need to have that ending of it that makes the person desperately want to read the next episode?

Craig: For starters, for television, you have to ask an important question. The movie question is, who would I like to sleep with for a month or two? The television question is, who would I like to move in with? I want to live here for a long time. I want to be in this world and tell these stories with these people for a long time. This will be good. In fact, I have too many ideas about what happens next. My problem is, how do I break these down into a manageable amount of episodes? Definitely, there’s a big idea at the heart of it that makes you go, “Okay, yes, I need to see this now.

At the end of this first episode, I understand, the audience understands why I want to be here.” I’ve transmitted to them the moment that made me go, “Ooh, I got to do this as a TV show.” Transmitting that passion theoretically should work.

John: Yes. My next project is probably going to be a streaming series. I’ve written the pilot. We took it out. We had all the meetings. What was so great about the meetings when they’d actually already read the pilot is they could ask me questions, and I could pitch them detailed things like, “Okay, this happens next, and this happens next, and this is a typical thing. In episode 6, this is how we’re flipping it.” I wasn’t faking any of that. I’m genuinely passionate about doing it. If you’re looking at writing your own spec pilot for something, you should have that sense of enthusiasm and excitement, and that will carry through back into the pilot you’re writing.

You’ll see that you’re setting up these things, and so like, “That’s going to be so exciting to pay off.” I’ve read a lot of spec pilots where it’s like, “Oh, I can see that you delivered the premise of that, but I just don’t feel like there’s another episode there.” While the writing on the page was good, I’m not that necessarily excited about that writer because I don’t feel like they have that hunger, that zeal for continuing and actually making this as a show.

Meg: Yes, so many times the spec TV pilots, they don’t have an engine to the show.

John: No.

Meg: Do you guys have any insight into TV engines? I’m a feature writer, so I can talk about feature engines till the cows come home. When people ask me about TV, I’m like, “Ah.” What is a TV engine for you guys?

Craig: I don’t know because I don’t write that kind of show. I’ve only written shows that had endings planned. The Last of Us, it’s just a very long single story cycle that has cyclots inside of it. Each episode is a cyclot. The season is a cyclot. The series is a cyclot. I actually don’t know how to write a procedural that is meant to go on forever or even an adventure show that’s meant to go on forever. I understand it. If you put a gun to my head, I could do it. Just I’m not sure that that’s where my smarts are particularly leveled up.

John: I would go for making sure that each of the characters that you’re establishing as your series returning regular characters, that there’s interesting things that we want to see paid off that can’t be possibly paid off in the course of an episode so that over the course of a season, over the course of multiple seasons, we’re going to get a chance to see them grow and change and get somewhere closer to where they’re going to be going.

The challenge, of course, is then the reason why you have to have big brains and/or a writing staff to help you do it, is finding ways that what each of those characters is going for, what they’re trying to pay off, the stuff that’s driving them can resonate with multiple characters in the course of an episode, and that they’re in conversation with each other, that each of these plot lines really do have a reason to be intertwined in ways that are meaningful. It could be thematically. It could be the conflict that’s going to come between them, but that’s the hard work.

If you go back and look at your favorite TV shows, the ones that keep coming back, they have that in their DNA. From the pilot forward, you can see that they set up characters who can just generate a lot of story, and that’s crucial.

Lorien: Craig, when you said movies are who do I want to sleep with for the next two months, you said, and then a TV show is who do I want to live with, and I thought, “How dare you? That’s not true.” Then I quickly flipped through everything I’ve recently watched to check to see if that was real, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s mostly true.”

Craig: I’m mostly true. That’s my thing.

Lorien: Mostly true.

Craig: I’m true-ish. [chuckles]

Lorien: It’s a great generalization, though, to check because we also get asked, how do I know if my idea is a feature or a TV show? It’s a little bit of, do I want to hang out with this person for a really long time and be all up in their business, or do I want to be with them for this hot moment, intense experience, and then say goodbye?

Craig: We have met people that we can think to ourselves, “This would be a great hot moment, but oh my God, I would not want to live with you.” You have to ask when you think, is it a movie or a show? How much is really here? Is this an explosion or is this dominoes that keep going? That’s what you just have to have a sense for. God’s honest truth. The reason that so many screenwriting books are bad is because they just don’t acknowledge something brutally fundamental to what we do, and that is talent. [chuckles] Taste, talent, instinct.

There are things that you learn over time that John and I have learned over time that you guys have learned over time, and you share with people, and we share with people, but we don’t get to that if there isn’t the stuff that you cannot teach. There’s a lot you can’t teach. The Screenwriting Education, our book, it’s ultimately for people who we will find out later had what they needed to have at the start. Maybe this helps them get where they were going to go a little faster. I think is nice, but these questions, movie, television show, we’ve all sat in rooms and watched executives debate with each other because they don’t know. It comes down to us, gulp.

[music]

Lorien: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show.

Meg: I also love the chapters in the book where you’re taking quotes from your guests. It’s really fun to see them so distilled down, and great insights from all the guests. One insight that I wanted to ask you guys, David Koepp and Eric Roth both talk about getting fired. These two penultimate writers, the icons of screenwriters, talk about, yes, getting fired sucks. Eric Roth talks about how much it hurt. To me, that’s also talking about, as writers and artists, our failure, which we want our characters to fail so they can transform. Yet, when we fail, we’re like, oh, what’s happening?

Craig: Exactly.

Meg: What is your experience, take on, it doesn’t have to be being fired, because maybe you’ve never been fired-

John: Oh, good Lord. We’ve both been fired a lot.

Meg: -or maybe failure.

Craig: A lot is strong praise, but certainly, we’ve experienced– you can’t work in this business and not. There’s the hard firing and the soft firing.

John: Mostly, the soft firing.

Craig: Mostly, the soft firing.

John: Mostly, it’s like we’re not proceeding with the thing.

Meg: They just never respond to notes. Literally, you hear from someone else, oh, they’ve moved on.

Craig: You do the drafts that you were hired to do, then they don’t really need more, and you go do something else, and then you hear that someone else is working on it.

Meg: How do you process that? What is your process? Do you immediately start something else? Do you rage? Because again, it’s approach to failure and what our characters do too. How do you guys approach it?

John: Maybe before I talk about healthy approaches, we should describe unhealthy approaches, things we’ve seen other writers do, which is just not serving them or serving anyone well. We’ve seen writers who fixate too much on one project to the exclusion of others and their entire identity becomes about this thing that it’s the next thing they’re going to make and it’s going to happen, or they got screwed over by this producer on this thing, it’s all they could talk about for years, and they don’t write other things.

That is so frustrating and debilitating when you see talented people who are getting in their own way by fixating too much on one thing. I think you have to passionately love the thing you’re writing, believe in it so deeply, and then also acknowledge at some point it could just vanish and go away, and it doesn’t diminish your experience and your love of it, but that you have so little control over it ultimately.

When I’ve written books, books exist out in the world, they’re on a shelf, I’m done, and they’re there. As screenwriters, we’re just writing this plan, this vision for a movie or a series that could be, and sometimes it’s not, it sucks, and you can grieve that, but if you fixate on it, if you let that be your defining quality, you’re going to be at the start of your tragic beginning. You’re going to protagonate on that, and that’s not a good place to be beginning.

Craig: It’s harder when you start your career because you have fewer experiences. If you get up to bat and it’s your first at-bat as a major league baseball player and you strike out, currently, you are on course to strike out every single time and be the worst player in history. You have to have a short memory. Feel your feelings. The most important thing is to not let it define you and to also remember, thank you, Dennis Palumbo, that feelings are real, but they don’t mean anything. They have no logical significance, and they are terrible predictors of the future because what we tend to do is say, I got fired, I will be fired, I’m the fired person. Now everybody looks at me as no good, I’m no good. The end. That’s in fact not what’s happening.

There’s this wonderful study that I’m obsessed with that these guys, we’ve talked about this before on the show, Kahneman and Tversky, who are these two psychologists who studied human irrationality. They were hired to look at the performance of people in the military, like in the Air Force. They were hired to basically help evaluate and teach the people teaching these people how to teach them better. They asked, well, what’s something that you guys know? They said, well, we know that when somebody goes out on a practice run, and they do really well, they come back, we praise them, the next time they don’t do so well.

When they go out, and they fail, and they come back, and we yell at them, the next time they do much better. It seems to us praising people makes them worse and punishing them makes them better, which is a perfectly human conclusion to draw, except the reality is, it’s just regression to the mean. Generally speaking, when you do really well, you’re doing better than you normally do. When you don’t do very well, you’re doing worse than you normally do. What happens when you get fired is, they could be wrong, which has happened to me before, where I’ve watched it, and I’m like, ahah, but let’s say you didn’t do as well as you normally do, that means you’ll do better because normally you do normal.

That’s the perspective that time gives you because you can’t see it unless you get fired a bunch and you succeed a bunch. There are wins that I’ve had that I didn’t really deserve. There are failures I had that I didn’t really deserve. There’s all sorts of weird things that occur, but eventually you can get to a place where at least you go, okay, if you don’t want to continue with me, that’s for the best. It’s good. It means you hired the wrong guy for what you want. It’s, you know?

Meg: Yes. I love that. It’s not a definition of you and your worth and your value and who you are forever. I think that’s great and a great example of belief systems in your characters and how we see things that are just not really, you might have to wake up through experience to that. All right. We could talk for hours and hours with you guys. It’s such a privilege. Craig and John, you have shows to go and features to write. We always ask our guests the same three questions at the end of the show. Go ahead, Lorien.

Lorien: Craig, what brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing?

Craig: When something just sings, I don’t know how else to describe it. When there’s just a beautiful harmony, and I know it’s right. You just know when it clicks, and you’re like, that is correct. It doesn’t matter if anybody in the world told me this isn’t correct, they would be wrong. This is correct. There’s no defense or argument here. It’s just humming in my bones. It’s humming the right tune. It is in harmony. That’s the most joy.

Lorien: I look forward to that happening quite soon for myself.

Meg: Craig, what pisses you off about writing?

Craig: How disconnected effort is to result. It’s remarkable. There are times where just, there it is, done. I’ve gone two weeks grinding myself over one scene because it’s just wrong, and it makes me crazy. Then, eventually, there’s a moment where I go, oh, it’s because that’s not the right scene or because of whatever. It is so frustrating to not be able to say, well, if I just work harder, if I’m building a house and I just sleep less and work more, theoretically, the house will get built faster. It just doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s frustrating. It pisses me off.

Lorien: What’s your proudest career moment to date?

Craig: Probably somewhere around the second or third week of Chernobyl airing, where it became clear that people were watching it. I didn’t think anybody was going to watch it. When that happened, and the response was what it was, I just felt great because it was legitimately after– I had been working at that point for 25 years, it was legitimately the first thing I had ever done that I wasn’t fulfilling anyone else’s request. I thought of a thing, I did a thing, I did it entirely in my own terms, and I was in charge of it. That was my proudest moment. It’s going to be hard to top that one. I don’t think I’m going to top that one. It’s a pretty good one.

Lorien: Yes, you will.

Craig: I’m still sad and anxious all the time. Don’t you worry.

Meg: All right, John, what brings you the most joy?

John: Related to Craig’s, he’s talking about how everything in the scene clicks. For me, it’s when a character surprises me. When the character does something that I wasn’t anticipating them doing, they say a line, suddenly, they just are able to do a thing that I was not conscious that they could do. At a certain point, they just become alive; they’re just doing their own things. Those moments where you feel like you are just a documentarian filming them doing their life, those are the moments that bring me real joy. Those are generally moments where I’ve passed into flow, where it just becomes easy. That’s the joy. That’s the high you’re often chasing.

One of the things I just try to remind writers is that just because you’re not in flow doesn’t mean that you’re doomed, that you’re bad. Flow often won’t happen, and yet, no one will know that you wrote that scene while you were in this magical, mystical state, versus you were just grinding through it.

Lorien: All right, so what pisses you off about writing?

John: Probably what pisses me off about writing is that there is fundamentally this impossible task we’re given that we are trying to create the experience of watching a movie just with the words on the page, and that all the artistry we can do, all the craft, all the little tricks we can do to create the visuals and the sound experience, or just the feeling of being in that world, it is fundamentally limited, and that it’s going to have to be interpreted through actors and directors and everybody else, and it’s never going to be quite the movie that I see in my head.

You have to learn to live with that and accept that. It’s never going to be quite– there’s just no direct brain connection where people can quite see the movie that’s in my head, and what’s helpful is when you remember that, you are the only person who’s ever seen the movie, you can have a little bit more patience with people who are still getting up to speed on the process, the directors who are asking 20,000 questions because they just cannot see the same movie that you’re seeing.

Meg: Last question is, what is your proudest moment in your writing?

John: Weirdly, it wasn’t a public moment, but I would say when we did the Big Fish musical. I wrote the movie Big Fish and did the Broadway musical Big Fish, and along the way, you do these readings and workshops where you’re getting it up to speed, and what’s so great about them is they’re so private. There’s maybe 20 people in the audience for some of these things, just sitting in chairs, and you don’t have props or costumes, people are at music stands. Yet, I can see, oh my God, Andrew Lippa and I made this thing that was just beautiful, and everyone’s crying in this room.

It was just great to see that you can create these really amazing emotional experiences with nothing but just words and songs. There’ve been many moments along the way in the Big Fish musical, but those small, intimate moments were some of my favorite and proudest moments.

Meg: John and Craig, thank you so much for coming on our show.

John: An absolute pleasure.

Craig: It was great. It was great to be here. Thank you, guys.

Meg: Thanks so much to John and Craig for joining us today. Their new book, Scriptnotes, a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, is out now, and we’ll link it to the episode description.

Lorien: For more support, find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and head over to thescreenwritinglife.co to learn more about our workshop program, TSL Workshops. We have a growing library of prerecorded workshops that cover craft-related topics from character want to outlining a feature. We also host two live Zooms a month where you could chat with me and Meg about projects you’re working on.

Meg: Right now, we’re running a special holiday promo. Just head to the tslworkshops.circle.so and use the code holiday25 to get 50% off your first month. The link and promo code are also in the episode description. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to thescreenwritinglife@gmail.com.

Lorien: Thank you for listening, and remember, you are not alone, and keep writing.

John: That was The Screenwriting Life. It was produced by Jonathan Hurwitz and edited by Kate Mishkin, whereas Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Our Christmas-y outro music is by Matthew Ciarlelli as well. 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 a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram at Scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts and hoodies to drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the 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. Thank you to all our premium subscribers, especially the folks who are joining us in this new year. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Rob Reiner. For Drew and Craig, Meg and Lorien, thanks for listening.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Okay, bonus segment. Not the bonus segment I wanted to record.

Drew Marquardt: No, I’m so sorry. As soon as I found out, I texted you because you knew Rob and Michele. It was heartbreaking for me. I can’t imagine how it was for you.

John: Yes. We were having dinner with friends, and another friend texted me and said, holy shit, Rob Reiner. I was like, yes. You quickly look at the headlines, but you don’t know what’s really happening. When I saw stabbed at his home, I was like, oh, I hope it’s not the son, and it was the son. Weirdly, Rob Reiner is, of course, an icon of a director. Looking at that period between 1984 to 1995, he was just unstoppable.

Drew: Incredible.

John: Just amazing. This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, The American President.

Drew: Incredible.

John: Incredible. Back to back to back. So many of these movies we’ve talked about on Scriptnotes over the years. Obviously, we did a whole deep dive on The Princess Bride, but When Harry Met Sally, it’s foundational.

Drew: Whenever I leave the podcast someday, let’s just do a deep dive on When Harry Met Sally. I think I’ve seen that movie more than-

John: Next week.

Drew: Next week, yes. Perfect.

John: It’s an incredible movie. We think about it as Nora Ephron’s movie, but it’s Rob Reiner who directed it. It’s because of his working with Nora Ephron that we got the movie that we got. We got that perfect trajectory-setting romantic comedy. It was hard to imagine what our rom-coms would be like if we hadn’t had When Harry Met Sally.

Drew: The American President felt like it was a constant on TV when I was growing up. That was Sorkin, right? I think wrote that.

John: It was Sorkin, yes.

Drew: He made these sort of North Star movies.

John: There’s an episode of Love It or Leave It where Rob Reiner comes on to talk to John Lovitz about just directing and other things. They talked about Aaron Sorkin, where he’s very upfront about all the cocaine he was doing when he was writing The American President. It was this 600-page script he delivered. Rob Reiner was going through and cutting out all the stuff that he did down to, here’s The American President, and all the parts that were not there became The West Wing.

Drew: That makes sense. It’s been striking to me in the last week or so, since this all happened, how many people just talk about him as a person who lifted them up and gave people freedom, creative freedom, and really bolstered people he believed in. He just seemed like the best, both professionally and then also politics, too.

John: Absolutely. I never worked with him on anything. I may have had one meeting at his company at Castle Rock at some point early on, but he was doing other stuff. I wasn’t writing anything for him. I first got to know him, recent history here. In California, we had marriage equality briefly, and then there was Prop 8. My husband and I got married during the brief window of time when we still had marriage in California. It wasn’t legal federally, but it was recognized within California. Then the same year that Obama was elected, Prop 8 passed in California, which took away marriage equality.

Mike and I were part of the lawsuit that was challenging the legality of that, which was designed to be a federal lawsuit. It was an organization called American Foundation for Equal Rights, and Rob Reiner was a big funder behind it. I went to organizing dinners and other events at their house to get this stuff started, to meet Ted Olson and David Boies, who are our lawyers behind all this. They were great and helped find us plaintiffs and helped put the whole thing together.

Over the course of years, I saw Rob and Michele a lot, and they were phenomenal. Obviously, everyone’s going to talk about Rob Reiner because he’s a legendary director. Michele Reiner was great. One detail I think is worth telling about Michele, which I’d never seen anyone do before, but was so smart. This was a pretty big dinner, and Michele said there’s going to be one conversation at the table, no side conversations, everyone participates. That was the rule, and it was a smart rule because it makes everyone be involved and no one gets pushed off in a corner. It’s like 20 people, but it’s one conversation.

Drew: That sounds like them, from everything I’ve heard about them, that making sure that everyone’s heard and everyone has a seat at the table.

John: I last saw Rob and Michele during this last election cycle. There was an event at their house that Kamala Harris was speaking at. It was right after Biden’s disastrous debate. Everyone was on edge. What is possibly going to happen? Kamala Harris just killed it. She was so competent and in charge. I remember walking away thinking, okay, Biden should pull out, and Harris should replace her. That event only worked because Rob and Michele just made everything comfortable. They just made everyone feel like, yes, everyone’s panicked, but also, we got this. We’re going to get through this. They were great, as always, and remembered me. Michele remembered me from years before, which is another great sign.

Drew: Just, oh, they sound so cool. Like adults in the room, exactly what you want a person to be.

John: It’s a great loss. Directors, everyone’s going to die. It’s going to happen. This could have happened in a car accident, and it would have been heartbreaking. For it to happen in such a grisly family tragedy way is what makes this so particularly awful and keeps it at the top of the news cycle. It’s mostly what I focus on. We lost two really good people, and it sucks.

Drew: I think that compounds the heartbreak for me. Also, you just imagine what it is to be a parent with a child who you can’t help and who you know has these huge problems. They seem like the kind of people that– I’m sure they did everything they possibly could do. This isn’t–

John: The son, Nick, was at this fundraiser, which is where I met him. He had a strange quality to him. I didn’t know his backstory, but reading about that story, oh, that tracks make sense. They could tell they loved him and that they were trying to help him out. It’s awful. It’s a tragedy. I guess I’m a little happier now that everyone’s starting to acknowledge that this is a family tragedy. There’s no greater meaning behind it. It’s a thing that could have happened at any point in the last couple centuries. It’s a thing that is specific to this family and so heartbreaking.

Mostly, I want to celebrate Rob Reiner, an incredible run of great movies, even forgetting an actor. An actor going back to– Obviously, that’s made his start. All in the Family, he came up with that initially with Penny Marshall, who also became a director. Was always guest-starring as somebody’s dad in New Girl or some other thing. Exactly who he’d want for that.

Drew: His sandwich is lettuce, tomato, lettuce, meat, meat, meat, cheese, lettuce.

John: Perfect. That’s what you want, you’re going to have it.

Drew: Never forget it.

John: Listen, I don’t believe in an afterlife or any sort of meaningful way that people, when they’re gone, that they’re watching down over us. He’s the kind of person who I hope their spirit lives on in a sense of we should all aspire to have that kind of effect on those around us.

Drew: Absolutely. I think talking about him and Michele now, everyone feeling that and feeling like that is a model for what we want to do with our lives.

John: You don’t really lose somebody if you can take the lessons and model what they would have done. What would Rob do?

Drew: I hope we keep doing that because he was great. They were both great.

John: Thanks, Drew. Thanks.

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John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 716 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you dramatize the untold aspects of an historical moment as a limited series? No, Craig, we’re not talking about Chernobyl again. This time, it is the assassination of US President James Garfield and the chaotic, dysfunctional political system surrounding it. We’ll also discuss personality typologies, the systems for categorizing what makes people and fictional characters tick, plus listener questions. To help us do all that, we welcome back Mike Makowsky, who joined us last time on Episode 448 in 2020.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you for having me.

John: Welcome back, Mike.

Mike: Good to be here.

Craig: Yes, blast from the past. I love this.

Mike: Yes, it was a COVID Zoom.

John: It was a COVID Zoom, yes.

Craig: Back in the COVID days, yes.

John: Back in those days. Your screenwriter, whose credits include HBO’s Bad Education, which is what we talked about.

Craig: Which we loved.

John: Which we loved. Death by Lightning is your new series, the Garfield assassination series. It’s now out on Netflix. It’s just terrific. Congratulations on it.

Mike: Thank you so much.

John: I want to talk about the production of it, the intention of writing about this obscure president and what happened there.

Craig: How dare you, by the way? Obscure?

John: Obscure. Also, just the notion of limited series because they’re increasingly hard to make. We’ll talk about that. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about coaching trees. This is an article that we found this last week, which was about which TV shows, writers’ rooms generated the most other creators of TV shows. There’s like a–

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: It’s a branching sort of–

Craig: Like Sid Caesar, our show of shows was sort of the ultimate.

John: Absolutely. That’s sort of the iconic one, but there’s many other ones along the way. Maybe just talk about what the culture is in those shows. That allows for so many writers to grow out of them. First, if anything is going to grow or change, it’s going to be in a new ecosystem because, as we’re recording this, which is sort of two weeks ago for our listeners, Netflix is apparently buying Warner Bros. Craig, how do you feel about that?

Craig: Well, it’s interesting. I work at HBO. HBO is owned by Warner Bros. I think everybody was sitting around going, “Well, it looks like David Ellison and Paramount are going to be buying Warner Bros. Then Netflix, and was it Universal? Both took a swing.

John: Yes, Comcast Universal.

Craig: Yes, Comcast Universal. Then it turned out that Netflix was the one that came out on top. Now, the thing is, we kind of don’t know. We all got the email from Netflix’s subscribers, right? They were like, “We did it.” Yes, they did it in the sense that the board of directors agreed to sell the company to Netflix, but there will be some significant regulatory issues here. Apparently, this is another horseshoe effect where the far right and the far left are very excited to join hands to try and block this sale.

John: It’s also worth remembering, like you were here with us in 2020, the universe conspires to do weird things. Anything that seems like a given or granted is just going to often not happen the way you expect it to happen.

Mike: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s far above my pay grade to be able to speculate what is going to happen here.

John: I think the only thing I would come back to as sort of ground truth is that I’m really concerned about the idea of making theatrical movies, because Netflix–

Craig: If you’re only really concerned, you’re not concerned enough. [laughter]

John: I just want to state sort of, basic foundational principles is I genuinely believe that movies, by which I’ll define as being roughly two hours of experience, of a narrative that is filmed, I think they belong in theaters first. The theatrical experience is crucial. Once they’ve made their money there, then you can release them for purchase, or for streaming. The goal should be to maximize the value out of each individual title and then reach the widest audience possible. That sounds so basic, but it seems to be so forgotten in all of this.

Craig: It’s not forgotten. I think it is rejected. I think Netflix has rejected that theory completely. They put things in theaters now for a week or two to mollify the filmmakers that they want to attract to their not theatrical experience. They do give Greta Gerwig or Rian Johnson a little taste, helps them qualify for the Oscars and so forth. Really, they just want it on their platform. I’ll make a few predictions because, unlike Mike, I do not have the humility of understanding when things are above my pay grade. These are above my pay grade, I don’t care.

John: Here to promote a Netflix show today, definitely.

Craig: Yes. Well, most shows are Netflix shows, and even more shows are about to be Netflix shows if this goes through. If it goes through, I think Warner Bros theatrical is toast. I think the only question is, what do they do with HBO? Because you don’t buy HBO to not have HBO, that would be crazy. The worst possible view is that Netflix bought Warner Bros for the library alone. Now they will just make Lord of the Rings shows and Harry Potter, which HBO is already doing. HBO is one of the only brands that means something in our ecosystem.

Prediction is that they actually keep an HBO app. It won’t be HBO Max anymore. It can finally just go back to being HBO. Well, it’s one last change. It will be a bundled app with Netflix that you get for free as part of your subscription, and HBO will live as a little island. It’ll obviously all be owned by Netflix. Then, when the Emmys come around, HBO, Netflix will win all the time.

John: All of the Emmys.

Craig: Constantly. It’s them, and then FX picks up a few here and there. That’s my prediction.

John: I can see that happening. We should acknowledge that as we’re recording this, there’s a lot of public statements about, oh, no, we’re going to maintain Warner Bros as an entity, and they’re going to still release things theatrically. They also said that about Fox. Fox exists kind of a name only. They are making movies.

Craig: That was Disney, that likes making movies.

John: They like making movies.

Craig: I think what Sarandos said was something like, yes, we’ll take a look at it, and then as things evolve, we’ll re-examine. It was sort of like, no, we absolutely won’t use this gun pointed at this head to shoot it. It’s a bummer.

John: It’s a bummer.

Craig: It’s a bummer. It’s not that I don’t like Netflix. I subscribe to Netflix. I watch Netflix. Netflix makes great shows like Death by Lightning. They make a load of great shows.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s just that I also like going to the movies, and that’s an area where I disagree with them. I know that when somebody like Ryan Johnson says, “You must give me a theatrical release,” clearly, he does too. We all want a theatrical release for things like that. I’m not stupid enough to root for one corporation over another. They’re all corporations. It will be interesting to see. It’s going to take, what, 18 months? Is that what they’re saying?

John: Yes. It’s going to be a while before we sort of know how this sorts up.

Craig: This will be the fourth corporate parent that I’ve experienced at HBO since I’ve been there. I’ve only been there since 2015.

John: That’s crazy. All right. We will not be able to resolve the Netflix of it all, but we can talk about something much more local, which is the Scriptnotes book. As we’re recording this, we don’t have the actual sales figures, so we don’t know how it did its opening week, but it did really well. We’re really happy with the launch of it. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered it. Thank you to everyone who bought it the first week. Thank you for everyone who came out to our live show to buy it there. Everyone who posted about it, that’s awesome. Drew has been reposting a lot on the Scriptnotes Instagram.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. Basically, anytime I open up the app, there’s five or so people who have posted about it, which is great.

John: Yes. We’re resharing their stories. Thank you to everyone who’s left a review on Goodreads or Amazon, because those help us get the word out about the book. One thing that’s come up frequently, and Mike, you have your copy of the book in front of you, people say it’s lighter than you expect it to feel, that it feels light in your hand. Do you notice this?

Mike: So light. I have to compliment the binding as well. It’s a beautiful-looking tome here.

John: It is a gorgeous book. I want to talk a little bit about why it feels lighter in your hand, because it’s one of the most consistent things we’ve heard. Craig’s like, “Oh, did they make it out of balsa wood? Is there something strange about this book?” I went down a rabbit hole, and I did the math. I did some research on it. It actually weighs about what it should. If you compare it to another hardcover book that’s the same size, so I Have Atomic Habits, which is a bestseller that’s also the same number of pages, it weighs more than that, which it should because it’s physically wider than that. It’s 24% bigger by volume, but only 13% heavier.

It’s a little bit different than should you expect. Mostly, the effect is that it’s called the size-weight illusion. It’s what makes your brain make predictions about how much it thinks something should weigh. This is actually a documented phenomenon. I’ll put a link in the show notes to it. Craig, you like psychology. This is certainly up your alley.

Craig: I love psychology.

John: Your brain makes predictions about how much something should weigh so that as you’re reaching for it, you have an anticipation about how much force you’re going to use to lift something. That’s based upon visual information. What you see, it’s size, it’s thickness, it’s apparent material. It’s based on semantic clues. You have a sense that a brick should weigh more than a book should weigh. Then, just prior experience with similar objects. I think that’s mostly what is throwing people off about it is because it looks more like a textbook, and we have a sense of how much a textbook should weigh, and it just weighs less than a textbook.

Craig: Why does it weigh less?

John: It’s a different paper stock. I think it’s mostly what it is. This is the standard hardcover book paper stock, whereas opposed to a textbook has that glossy paper and that glossy paper just weighs more. There’s an area called expectology, which is the expectation factor. When you make a prediction error about how much something should weigh or what it should sound like or feel like, you get this moment of cognitive dissonance. I think that’s what’s happening with the book.

Craig: To me, it still feels like when you pick it up, that it’s one of those fake books that you open and it’s hollow, and then you put your keys in it or something.

John: Absolutely. You store your hooch in there. You store your sippets.

Craig: Also, who needs a heavy book? Holding a book actually is annoying after a while when you’re reading it. Where do you think people are going to read this, John? Physically, in space, where are they reading this?

John: As we talked about from the very start, I think it’s an ideal bathroom book.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’re sitting there–

Craig: You’re on the toilet, and you’re getting smarter.

John: Yes, as you’re doing it.

Craig: Yes, I always wanted to be one of those books.

John: Yes, so good. For me, growing up, my D&D manual is one of those books.

Craig: Do you know who we had in our bathroom growing up? Reader’s Digest.

John: So good.

Craig: Yes. Did they even make that anymore?

John: I suspect Reader’s Digest still exists. I remember there was the word power. It pays to increase your–

Craig: Then there was Laughter is the Best Medicine. It was so clearly meant for old people because there were ads in it, and I recall they were always for pheniment or aspergum, basically just arthritis medications. I’m like an eight-year-old sitting on the toilet reading books for 80-year-olds. It was nice, though. I learned.

Mike: They do still exist in print, but it seems like it’s a bigger, it’s like a magazine size. I remember them being smaller.

John: It should be a little folio size. Oh my gosh, that breaks my expectation, and therefore I hate it.

Craig: Yes, therefore I hate it.

John: We also have some follow-up about Orange Books. Mick wrote in. On a recent episode, you referred to the Scriptnotes book as The Orange Book. As a former Nickelodeon writer, producer, and longtime listener, I feel a duty to mention that on my first day at the network in 2001, the creative director handed me a copy of The Orange Book. This incredible tome is a creative guide to all aspects of Nickelodeon’s brand. It’s legendary amongst Nickelodeon writers and producers, and it takes its title from the famous orange splat logo. I fear that you may be served a cease and desist order by the Bikini Bottom business and legal affairs team over your claims to the term The Orange Book.

They sent through a photo of The Orange Book, or a copy of The Orange Book, which still remains. I couldn’t find a copy of a PDF of it online, but I found some other material referring to it and drawn from it. It looks like a really good brand design book. I will say that Nickelodeon, at its peak, you clearly understood what Nickelodeon was. It was a very consistent sort of space, the same way Disney is very consistent branding. Good on them, but also don’t sue us.

Craig: I don’t think I’ve ever reflected on how odd it is that the cable children’s channel that was, I guess, at one time, the best, or the peak, was Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon is the most old-timey word ever.

John: It’s also a word I can never spell properly. I keep wanting to do it like a C-H rather than a K, or the L-E as opposed to the E-L.

Craig: That’s Nickelodeon. That’s different. Yes, but Nickelodeon?

John: It’s a word like chariot, where it’s just lost all reference to what it was really meant to stand for.

Craig: Yes, it’s a very strange thing. It’s something that they would never do now, but see, it worked. Children don’t know what an actual Nickelodeon was, which was, what, the five-cent thing that you would play the silent movie in while you stuck your face in it. In 1920, I guess.

John: I also feel like they, at some point, just shortened it down to Nick, and that they don’t say Nickelodeon very often anymore.

Craig: Nick, Nick.

John: Nick Jr. There’s Nick at night.

Mike: We have more follow-up about breaking into your 30s. Anne writes, after spending my 20s and early 30s working in a rock and roll concert production, I was in need of reigniting my creative side. With a stack of writing samples and a surprising number of contacts I’d unearthed, I moved to Hollywood at the age of 35. To support myself as I navigated this new world, I began temping at the studios as an assistant and quickly discovered that my age and experience were an asset. I became known for being able to parachute into high-level executive offices and keep everything flowing smoothly.

I found my home in the Disney Touchstone film division, where I rotated through executives while I inhaled the script database and watched the movie-making machinery in action. I don’t know if what is left of the studio still uses temps, but if so, this is an avenue that the person who wrote it earlier should explore.

John: Temping is a thing we didn’t talk about in that, and it does make sense. I think the original writer was saying, “Oh, I want to get a writer’s assistant job. I want to do this kind of thing.” I said, that’s a challenging way in. What Anne’s describing, which is being that temp who actually knows what they’re doing and can just show up on the day and make stuff work and happen, that’s great. I would say a lot of these companies do have internal temp pools or floating workers, and that feels like a really smart choice.

Craig: That was the first couple of jobs I had were temp jobs. I think we’ve talked about. Do they still have the Friedman agency, the temp agency just for entertainment business? I think it still exists.

John: Live Google.

Drew: F-R-E-I-D?

Craig: Yes, Friedman.

Drew: Yes, Friedman Personnel Agency. It seems to still exist.

John: Yes. A place like that could make a lot of sense and also give you a chance to just see a bunch of stuff. If you’re just at one desk at one studio, you’re not seeing a bunch, but if you’re floating around, you can have a chance to read a bunch of things. Also, the expectations of ability to do stuff as a temp are pretty low. Basically, just keep the lights on is probably a lot of it, so that may help.

Craig: Yes, you can easily exceed expectations.

John: All right. On the subject of exceeding expectations, we have Mike Makowsky here. Your show is delightful. It details the assassination of James Garfield and the man who assassinates James Garfield. Spoiler, he’s going to die. I want to first just start with a fundamental question. Why make this show? It’s based on a bestselling nonfiction book. It’s not called Death by Lightning. How did it come upon your reading list, and what made you want to make it?

Mike: About seven years ago, I was at the Grove Barnes & Noble at the Buy 2 Get 1 Free table, and I needed a third book. I picked up this book about the Garfield assassination. Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard. First, I obviously made sure it was the proper weight. I made sure that from a semantical perspective.

John: It looks like a book. In your hand, it felt like a book.

Mike: Yes. It wasn’t orange. It didn’t conflict with Nickelodeon or anything.

Craig: It sounds nice to be honest, they’ll get sued.

Mike: I read the back cover, and I think I had known that James Garfield had been assassinated. I dimly recalled that fact.

John: It feels like Jeopardy information.

Mike: That’s the reason I bought the book. I was like, I think I want to be on Jeopardy one day. Let me educate myself. I felt very embarrassed that I knew nothing about our 20th president. To me, James Garfield, his name evoked a little more than a very anonymous bearded portrait on a wall sans any real context. The book sat in a pile for a couple of months to get up the juice to read the James Garfield book. It wasn’t necessarily a priority for me. I wound up reading the book eventually in one sitting, which was atypical for me.

I found it not only propulsive, but very moving and tragic and crazy and absurd. I kept having to go to Wikipedia every five pages to make sure that this historian in Kansas wasn’t making all this shit up because it seemed way too crazy.

John: I will say that the show is absurd, but also it’s funny in ways that you wouldn’t expect it to be.

Mike: I found myself laughing a lot at this book that’s not written with any real explicit levity or mirth, but there’s a deeply ingrained situational absurdity to virtually all of the proceedings.

John: This man should never have been president.

Mike: He was nominated for president against his will, ostensibly. James Garfield shows up at the 1880s Chicago convention for his party to nominate an entirely different candidate. His speech is so profound and presents such a strong vision for the future of our country that someone stands up in the rafters and shouts, “We want Garfield.” Which is so crazy. In many ways, Garfield was this poster boy for the American dream. He was a Civil War hero. He was this outspoken progressive advocate for civil rights and civil service reform, and universal education.

He was largely self-taught, grew up in abject poverty, just the right man for the job. He was not a popular figure prior to stepping on that stage and delivering an Obama in 2004 level speech, where everyone’s just like, who the fuck is this guy? Eventually, the voting reached a deadlock because no one could agree on a candidate. There were a lot of warring factions within his party at the time. On the 36th ballot, Garfield is accidentally nominated for president.

John: There’s a version of that which is essentially Conclave because that’s the underlying–

Mike: It’s very much like an American Conclave. I wrote the show long before Conclave existed, but I remember seeing that in theaters last year and being like, “Oh, that’s just like, it’s very similar.”

John: You’re reading this book, and you have to make a decision like, okay, you want to do something with it, but when did you know, like, oh, this is probably a limited series versus a feature? What were your next steps after reading the book?

Mike: Yes, I think instantly. Again, I read the book. I found myself laughing a lot. That’s not normal for me, but my tone tends to be a little bit more darkly comic. I think the fact that I was laughing a lot led me to believe. I think that this is indicative of my voice and my perspective. I don’t know that other people would necessarily receive this story in the exact same way. I think I should try and pursue this thing. I ended up getting the historian, Candace, on the phone and pitching my heart out to, “Please let me adapt this.” She was like, “Yes, okay.”

I ended up optioning the rights to the book myself because there wasn’t anyone that was going to pay me to write a James Garfield show anytime that I told, whether it was my agent or executives that I was friends with, that I wanted to write a limited series about the Garfield assassination, they were like, “Good luck.” [crosstalk]

John: Let us know when you actually want to work.

Mike: My agent was just like, “Do you despise me? Do you hate me?”

Craig: At the same time, you probably understood that that’s why the show could work because nobody’s expecting anything. Then you go, surprise, there was this entire thing under your nose that is extraordinary. You’re sitting on a gold mine. That’s a good feeling, actually.

Mike: The great joy of Chernobyl was obviously very instructive for me in a lot of ways. It was a five-episode limited series about a subject that, on the surface, most people probably wouldn’t think that they would be terribly interested in. Then they would assume that any telling of that story would be a little bit dustier, didactic, like a history lesson. To be able, as a writer, to create an interest where there was none before. I have absolutely no illusions that most people are going to want to readily watch a James Garfield show or learn a ton about James Garfield.

Certainly, in the 150 years since his death, there hasn’t been a ton of interest in him.

Craig: That’s good news, though. That’s good news.

Mike: It’s a sort of tabula rasa where you’re like, you actually get to present, hopefully in a compelling enough way, a story that people really don’t know anything about.

Craig: I think it’s wonderful.

Mike: That’s so exciting.

Craig: It is exciting. When we think about the choices of what we’re going to do, it is true that if you say, I want to do a story about James Garfield, everyone’s going to either laugh or make fun of you.

Mike: There’s a lot of jokes about him hating Mondays or my agent loves lasagna. Keeps calling him Andrew Garfield by accident, so I just stopped correcting him.

Craig: That’s all fine. The problem is, if you say, I want to adapt blank, and it’s something that they would be excited by just because of the subject, it’s been done. It’s been done a million times. What’s the point of saying, “You know what I want to do? I want to do a story about Vietnam.” Oh, yes, the Vietnam War. I know about that. That’s a thing that people like. That’s why we made 400 movies and shows about it. Finding something like this that is this little hidden gem, and we know that oftentimes these are the things that just seize people. I’m thinking of Scott Frank’s Queen’s Gambit. I want to make a show about people playing chess.

Mike: The metrics for how few people who engage with the Queen’s Gambit have actually even played chess before is pretty fascinating. Again, you’re creating an interest where there was none before. From a marketplace perspective, these are, as I know you know, from Chernobyl, incredibly difficult propositions. No one’s lining up. There’s no ready-made comps for what you’re trying to achieve. You’re not trying to make the next Stranger Things that ends up being a pale imitation of Stranger Things. It is a wholly original proposition, and that is really scary. It ends up being incredibly difficult.
99 times out of 100, you don’t get to actually follow through with it, which is heartbreaking. It feels in many ways like we got to pull off this incredible heist by getting this show made.

John: You’re saying we, but you were just off writing this by yourself. What happened next?

Mike: I spec’d the pilot script, and it was immediately–

John: You didn’t say pilot, but you knew it was going to be four episodes, five episodes?

Mike: I originally intended for it to be six, and for a number of reasons, it ended up becoming four prior to ever being written. I wrote the pilot script as a proof of concept because, again, anytime I told people I wanted to make a darkly comic and subversive take on the Garfield assassination, they were just like, “No, fuck you.” I wrote the script. I was super proud of it. Then just through the different machination, it took about a year, but it ended up getting in the hands of our mutual friends and the producers of the show, David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bernie Caulfield, who gratefully fell in love with it and were able to champion it at Netflix, and at least get Netflix to agree to let me write a second episode.

It was a development process that lasted about three, four years, ultimately, because I had to jump through every conceivable hoop imaginable over there. I wrote a 70-page bible after the second episode. I ended up writing four more episodes, then condensed those back down to two more episodes. We had a director. The director fell out. We got another director. We had to cast the two leads. We were in Budapest scouting for the show, backing into a start date, and we weren’t actually greenlit yet. Again, I feel like we just slipped in under the wire on this thing.

Craig: I was going to congratulate Netflix on their impressions and their risk-taking. Now, I’m going to pull back a little bit just because it does sound like they really put you through it. Then again, HBO put me through it, too. Nobody’s just going to casually go, yes, here, make this thing that’s probably just going to run in social studies classrooms. They are going to put you through it, which I understand. I have to assume, based on Budapest, that budgetarily, you did not have a lot of wiggle room there, I’m guessing.

Mike: Yes. Whenever people ask me how the show got made, I hold up the one Dr. Strange finger from the Avengers. I don’t know that there were multiple pads to get this James Garfield show made in 2024 when he shot it. I’m extraordinarily grateful to Netflix. I don’t know that anyone but Netflix would have made this show at all. We had a slate of executives who were also extremely passionate and grew extremely passionate about the show. Even that only really gets you so far. No, we had to pass a lot of litmus tests in order to ever see the light of day.

John: Can we talk about Budapest? One of the things I was surprised about, but I realized I have not seen that era of American history very much on screen. Budapest, I suspect, had buildings and places that actually looked like that in a good way. I’m sure there was a lot of visual effects to create the depth behind things. It looks great, and you also have scenes with 500 extras in them, which is just very difficult to do in the US or even in Canada to get that sense of scale. That’s all really helpful. It’s also challenging just being in Budapest for six months or so.

Mike: Yes. It was funny. I got married, and two weeks later, I was in Budapest for five months. Now I’m getting divorced. No, we’re good. She’s finally out of that here on air now. No, Cara got a line in the show, which she was thrilled about. She’s crowd woman number one. She came out for one week, and she was treated as a queen.

John: Boo. Well, congratulations on the show. I’m just so happy that it exists and that it got made. I remember Dan and Dave talking about, like, oh, yes, we’re doing this crazy Garfield thing. They didn’t say it’ll never get made, but it was clear this is going to be a hard lift to get it there.

Mike: I’m not sure anyone but them could have really mounted it.

Craig: I love that they did that. Mike and I would pass each other in the halls over at Formosa Sound, where I was mixing the second season of The Last of Us, and he was mixing Death by Lightning. That’s where I found out that this was a show about Garfield. I was just to give a little salute to my dearly departed dad. He was an American history teacher, and he loved Garfield. He loved Garfield. He thought Garfield was one of the only good presidents of that era. Also, just as a musical fan, I love Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and Charles Guiteau’s song is the best song in the show. It’s the best.

John: I need to go back and re-listen to it. I’ve seen Assassins, but I don’t know it off the top of my head, so I–

Craig: Because he’s crazy.

John: Yes.

Mike: Charles Guiteau is the guy that assassinated Garfield, who is a very fascinating character in his own right and is this perverse funhouse mirror image of Garfield in many ways. These are two guys who operate at opposite ends of the American social spectrum. On one end, again, you have this poster boy for the American dream who falls upward accidentally to a presidency just based on strength of character and merit. Guiteau, who also grew up in abject poverty, but worshipped Garfield. As soon as he heard about Garfield, he was like, “This guy gets it.”

Craig: I deserve a job from him.

Mike: Right. I need to do everything in my power to get this man elected because once he’s elected, he’s going to see that the two of us are kindred spirits, and he’s going to appoint me to an ambassadorship to Paris. Guiteau, unlike Garfield, had failed abjectly at everything that he had ever attempted. He was a failed lawyer, failed public speaker, failed newspaper editor. He had spent a couple of years at America’s first-ever free love commune, the Oneidas, and he was kicked out. He was the one guy who couldn’t get laid at the sex commune.
He refused to do the manual labor required of him, so the women on the farm would call him Charles Get Out.

Craig: Charles Guiteau.

Mike: Once Garfield is elected, it’s the first time in Guiteau’s life that he’s ever put his energy into something and succeeded in some warped way, and derive so much of his own self-value from Garfield’s. There’s this weird, toxic parasocial obsession quality that feels so modern.

John: It feels incredibly modern. It feels like it’s a pre-social media time, but you recognize, oh, I see there’s that. Rather than retweeting him, he’s like, I’m going to shake his hand, and therefore we are best buds, and I know him. It’s interesting to watch that.

Mike: Once he’s rebuffed by the Garfield administration, he just descends into madness and becomes convinced that his way to matter and to etch his name in the annals of American history in a positive way is to save the country from James Garfield.

Craig: Well, he’s etched his name into the annals in the strangest way. We all know the name Charles Guiteau, just not for the reason you wanted. I’m very glad that you made this show. I hope it’s doing well. I would urge people, as they’re listening to this, if you have something that you’re obsessed with in history, I hope that you’re pulling out of this. The most important thing that I think Mike said about the genesis of this is how he became passionate. He felt like, “Ooh, I can’t wait to tell people about this.” If you start telling people about these things, and they go, “Oh, you got something.”

If you start telling people about these things and they’re like, “No, that’s pretty much as boring as I thought it was,” then you don’t. Follow that, at least that initial thing is very exciting to find something that we haven’t seen a million times.

Mike: James Garfield was my Roman Empire for about seven years. To anyone that would listen on the street, I would pull them up with the lapels and be like, James Garfield’s the most fascinating story you don’t know. I had a birthday cake one year that my parents made for me with Garfield’s face on it. They were just like, “When are you going to stop talking about James Garfield?” What a privilege to be able to help reintroduce this man to modern audiences. In the process of my research, I went to Ohio.

He’s the only president who is not interred or cremated, or buried. His coffin and his wife’s coffin are on twin pedestals in their crypt in Cleveland at their memorial. Anyone can go and spend time with Garfield. Obviously, the coffins are behind broad iron gates. You can’t touch the coffins. I went there in 2019 when I was first starting to do research on this. For the full hour that I was down there, I was the only visitor, which felt crazy to me.

Craig: That sounds about right.

Mike: No. To you, it seems crazy, but to everyone else listening, like, no, that makes sense.

Craig: I’m routinely the only person at Buchanan’s grave. That just happens. It’s just standard.

Mike: Buchanan, that’s not a good one.

Craig: No. It’s not. It’s just fully bad.

Mike: As a bonus, I also get to tell the story of Chester Arthur, who is Garfield’s vice president, or [crosstalk] Nick Offerman. Yes, our buddy Nick Offerman, who is just such a dream. Of all of the characters in the script, I wrote Chester Arthur with Nick Offerman’s voice in my head the entire time.

Craig: Which makes it so easy. I was just saying this the other day. If you can just sit there in your mind and go, well, it seems to me that you’re not, and you just start slipping into the cadence. You’re like, I know what to write. I know how to do this.

Mike: It does help. He was so great. I’m so glad that he said yes.

John: Mike, the first time I met you was on Zoom because you came on for HBO’s Bad Education. Then, post-pandemic, you and I met up for coffee, and we got to talk a little bit. At that coffee, we were having a conversation about your writing practices, your thing, how you do stuff. I think I noticed this in the Bad Education script is that we talk about how much things look on the page, how you want a good-looking page. Your pages were, all the margins were exactly identical. Each line was the exact same length.

There was a precision that I worried was a little bit overkill because you’re not making the best choices on words if you’re actually worried about the character length. I asked whether you’d ever consider talking with somebody about your writing practices and things like that. We had a little conversation about that. How much are you comfortable sharing what you’ve done in the meantime?

Mike: I didn’t know we were going to be talking about this. We had coffee a few years ago. You guys have done however many episodes of Scriptnotes. It’s 714.

John: 16, yes.

Mike: 16. I have a very, very specific way of writing. I think it’s a low-grade OCD where a lot of people don’t like orphans or orphan lines. I think I’ve taken it to an obsessive level. I think I showed you a sample page from something that I was currently working on, I think probably Death by Lightning. I was like, have you seen this before? You looked at it for about 30 seconds, and then you looked up at me, and you were like, “Are you in therapy?” [laughter] I was like, I’m not. You ended up introducing me to my therapist, who’s also a frequent guest on this podcast as well.

John: Dennis Palumbo, Episode 99. A famous episode for our listeners, which we talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and specific things that writers may benefit from therapy. Was it helpful? Again, as much as you feel like sharing or don’t feel like sharing, I’m curious because I feel like we have other listeners who probably have similar sort of things that they’re working on.

Mike: Here’s how I feel about writing. I probably spend about 50% of the time that I write making sure that the lines fit correctly for me. Sometimes that means sacrificing a really great line, but it also leads me to over-scrutinize every word in a way that I think actually does ultimately improve the writing. Nothing about my writing process is passive, and it needs to fit a specific way. The one sheet that I do, I don’t fuck with margins at all, but sometimes I will reduce the space between two words from a 12 to a 10 just manually.

I spend a lot of time obsessively just making sure that the dialogue looks like blocks and that there’s not just one or two words hanging over. I didn’t always used to be this way. It’s actually grown more cute as I’ve gotten older, which I think is a little bit worrisome. It’s also become almost like a good luck talisman. I want to present the best-looking aesthetic version of a script because I do believe that there is a subconscious quality to reading a script. If it just looks sloppy on the page, at least for me as a reader, it does sometimes affect how I read.

Craig: I wonder if, as I listen to you, I think a couple of things, that one, that’s crazy, but two, so what? Because you’re good. I guess whatever helps a good writer write. We are not perfect. We all have our things. As you mentioned, maybe there is a theoretical, better version of a script you write that is less concerned about these things, but you don’t write that script because you are concerned about those things. If the script is good and you need to not use the letter Q for some reason, what do I care? We’re all crazy.

What we do is a kind of insanity, and we all have our weird things. It sounds to me like maybe you’ve made your peace with it and you accept that it’s part of your process and it’s a good thing for you.

Mike: Yes, it’s never felt crippling. Then once you get into production and there’s just the realities of talking about the actors, and then you’re like, you know what? I don’t think I’m so hobbled by it, but I do think in those early drafts that it does help my process to over-scrutinize and be a little bit obsessive with the words that are in the script. Yes, I’m probably insane. When I first spoke to Dennis, my therapist of about three years now, I showed him a sample page, and he was just like, “Do you feel like it helps you? Do you feel like it makes you better at doing this?”

I think at least in the short term, it does. In the long term, we’ll see. For right now, I think it leads to a more thought-out product and one that I do think, from an aesthetic perspective, it is helpful to be presenting something that looks clean.

Craig: It may not really matter to anyone but you, but that’s fine.

Mike: It does matter to you.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I want to go back to my initial instinct when I saw your page. My concern was this may be getting in the way of you doing the best work that you know how to do. To hear you articulate that you feel like this is a helpful way for you to get that best draft that you feel good about that feels like it is your work, then I totally respect that. It sounds like Dennis provided a perspective on, is this helping or is this getting in your way? That would be the crucial question. Is this helping you do the work that you want to do, or is it a thing that is stopping you from doing the work or distracting you from doing the work?

It sounds like you believe at this moment, it’s helpful, but you’re also mindful that at some point, it could be not helpful.

Mike: It has to be. I’ve never run a writer’s room or really been in a writer’s room. When you’re collaborating with other writers, yes, you have to throw that in the garbage immediately, that notion that your script should look like someone else’s. At moments, I’m not that crazy.

John: Also, there are a lot of people who are listening to this podcast who are looking at their own scripts and their own pages. Listening to the three page challenge, and we’re talking about how it looks on the page. We’re talking about widows and orphan some, but also just how lines are broken up and how this all feels.

I want to make sure that in the conversations that Craig and I have about the pages that we’re looking at, no one is taking it to an unhelpful extreme. No one’s being so obsessed with it. They’re not actually focused on what the words themselves actually are. Which is, it sounds like it is for you, a tool to really help you inspect what are the word choices you’re making, not just is it exactly 60 characters long?

Mike: I know, I think every word has a cost to it, so hopefully it leads to a tighter draft.

Craig: It leads to a draft. That’s the–

John: It leads to a draft. That’s a crucial thing.

Mike: As long as it leads to a draft.

Craig: It’s how it comes out. That’s how it’s organized with you. Our brains are complicated. One of the things I’ve been really working on for myself in this area of– I don’t know what you’d call it, human growth and enlightenment, is understanding that the process that I follow to make stuff is flawed because I am flawed, and that’s okay. That’s standard. Standardish human being, not a god, flawed. It works. It’s just the flaws are part of it.

You have to accept it. You can call the flaws at that point not flaws, just characteristics. You don’t actually get to write anything if it doesn’t go through the machinery of, and I also want it to look like this. It’s the same thing. You can’t separate them. When you get to a place where you’re like, “I actually don’t like this. This is holding me back. Now it just feels like a bad habit,” then you become aware and then it is recontextualized, and perhaps it is teased apart, but if it never gets teased apart, if you spend the rest of your life turning things to make them fit, if the scripts are good, this is how you do it.

John: You said bad habits. I think I often say is that early in my career, I felt like I had a lot of bad habits, and at some point, stopped labeling them as bad. They’re just my habits.

Craig: They’re your habits.

John: They’re the way I do things, and that’s actually okay.

Craig: That’s part of it.

John: Some of my procrastination is just my habit, and I can’t fix it because it’s actually just how I work. That’s also okay. If at a certain point it does get in the way of how I work, then I need to really stop and examine them and see if there’s a thing I can do to not fall into that pattern again.

Mike: It’s actually incredibly helpful to talk about this with you guys. In no way would I recommend that anyone else do what I’m currently doing.

Craig: No one else is going to.

Mike: I’m not preaching the gospel here.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like fun.

[laughter]

Mike: No.

Craig: It sounds like you.

Mike: To me, it’s a version of problem-solving and puzzling in a way. It’s an added component to the way that I write. I think that at times it ends up leading to something beautiful. Other times, I do have to sacrifice my first blush best line, and maybe I find something better. Hopefully, if I’m ever on this podcast again, we can check back in, see if I’m still doing it. Right now it’s proved I would say mostly helpful and not too benevolent.

Craig: It seems like it’s been incredibly helpful, actually. Sometimes people will talk about these issues, and they will put them under, “Oh, I know I seem a little OCD about this.” We tend to concentrate on the O, which is obsession. I think it’s the C, it’s compulsion that is far more frequent among people who do what we do in a large sense, because we’re compelled to do it in the first place. It is compulsory. Then there are these kinds of compulsions that occur as part of this compulsory behavior of writing.

Mike: I think all screenwriters are bound by this. We’re all compulsive, we’re all a little crazy. We’re all neurotic. We’re all in our heads, locked ourselves in rooms, and written these things in a vacuum. There is a compulsion there. Sometimes that comes out sideways, like in my case. We all have different processes, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about it, especially with two guys like you.

Craig: You are not alone. To say that we are all idiosyncratic in our own idiosyncratic ways would be an understatement. This is actually great for people at home who may feel sometimes like they’re weird. Yes, writing is a weird thing to do. Imagining that you’re 12 different people who are all disagreeing with each other is a weird thing to do, coming up with these scenarios all the time, and what we do is weird.

It is neurologically weird. How could you not, as part of the neurological weirdness, have quirks? To the extent that you can accept those quirks as long as John says, they’re not things that you don’t– if you don’t feel a great need to get rid of it, then you and Mike Makowsky have something in common, and me, and John.

John: Next thing I want to talk about is typologies. This came up because my husband, Mike, I was describing to him this person I needed to work with and some frustrations I was feeling about our working relationship. Mike said like, “Oh, well, she’s a questioner.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” It’s like, “Oh, Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies. There’s a questioner.”

He brought this up before, and he is like, “I will show you the chapter on how to deal with a questioner.” He showed me the chapter in the book. I’m like, “Oh, wow. That is exactly right. You’ve precisely diagnosed why I’m having a challenging time with this and what the best strategies are for getting into consensus with this person.” I want to have a general conversation about personality archetypes, the ways we saw people, both in the real world and also our fictional characters.

I think there’s this instinct that you should be able to neatly categorize all these people and their personalities and their types. Craig, you and I have talked about Myers-Briggs before. In addition to Myers-Briggs, there’s Enneagram, the Big Five, you hear about the four behavioral types from DiSC, and the four tendencies from Gretchen Rubin.

Mike: I remember I read a book in high school when I was buying all the screenwriting books called The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits.

Craig: Sure.

Mike: I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of that one.

Craig: Is it Orange? Does it–

Mike: I’m sorry. I’m frantically–

Craig: Is it light?

Mike: It was blue.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I’m frantically trying to Google it right now, but maybe we can-

Craig: Blue books are out, orange books are in.

John: Absolutely. I remember an early book I read was The Gods in Everyman, or The Goddesses in Everywoman. Basically, it was talking about personality types that way. I’d love to have a discussion about to what point is it useful and to what point is it just astrology, and you’re just randomly assigning labels to things.

Mike: Oh gosh. I don’t–

John: You don’t think of your characters in terms of a bundle of attributes that sort of fit neatly together?

Mike: I don’t think so. I tend to adapt. I adapt a lot of true stories. I definitely gravitate to characters that have similar misguided impulses to one another, but I wouldn’t say that I try to be too prescriptive by sorting them into boxes.

John: Craig, have you ever tried to do Myers-Briggsy on any of your characters or how they approach things?

Craig: Hell, no. Everybody goes a phase where I don’t know– Melissa’s family was super into Myers-Briggs, but I never thought that it was particularly interesting. There’s probably a character type called person who likes character types, and they get value out of this.

John: I bet there’s a large number of our listeners, or at least a sizable percentage, who really want to neatly be able to categorize things.

Craig: You can’t.

John: That’s part of their process.

Craig: You can try, but-

John: You can try.

Craig: I personally don’t think this is a good– because it’s post, it’s not pre. Writing is about creating somebody. When you are introducing characters to an audience or a new relationship and a story to an audience, they need to see the birth of it, and they need to see people discovering each other. As they discover each other, they should be changing each other. We tend to look at people when they’re in moments of change. These things are sort of this is who you are, not changed. It’s simple, and they tend to go over the same things. Really, as far as I could tell, these things exist to sell books.

John: To sell books and to do workshops to understand your coworkers and things like that.

Craig: Here’s the thing, I’m fascinated by people who aren’t like me. I’m also fascinated by people that are fundamentally not like me. It is interesting. I don’t necessarily know if the people I’ve liked the most as I’ve gone through my career have been a certain type. My guess is no, I think generally what I seem to be attracted to is intelligence. There are intelligent people in all of these. You and I are not the same personality type. Did you know that?

[laughter]

John: I did notice that. Somehow over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed that. It’s funny. Yet we do have significant degrees of overlap in terms of our desire for logic, our desire for-

Craig: Also, you’re smart. Bottom line is you’re smart. That’s what I go for. I like smart. I like smart people who are so wildly different on only scales. When I meet somebody that has my characteristics, who’s just dull, I don’t need to hang out with them.

John: There’s a thing we’re developing internally for– so we made a writer emergency pact, which is, as you get stuck in a story, ways to navigate out of a jam. A thing we’ve been working on is a version that is more character archetype-sy, but rather than being expose facto, ways of thinking about if someone has these two characteristics together, what character would have that?

What would a nurturer or explorer feel like? What kind of character is that? Useful storytelling thinking tool, but it’s not meant to be, “Oh, you have to have this exact mix of characters in order for it to work properly.”

Mike: To what end do you think D&D character classifications?

John: I feel like I am constantly referring to characters as chaotic neutral. The alignment charts, yes.

Craig: Alignment charts are fun, but again, post-facto fun in and of themselves, they’re pretty blunt tools. There’s also quite a bit of fuzziness between some of them.

John: Here’s where I imagine it could be useful. None of us traditionally work with a group of other writers, but I could imagine, as you’re having a conversation about a character or a new character you’re introducing, how it fits together, rather than trying to apply an exact label to them, look at some of the spectrums that they lay out there. To what degree are they introverted or extroverted? To what degree are they rebelling against external expectations, or are they intrinsically motivated to do certain things? How agreeable are they? To what degree do they want to challenge authority? Those are useful conversations to have, but rather than reduce them to one little label, I think you’re probably better off.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions. What does Julia in Oxfordshire ask us?

Drew: I’m a novelist who teaches creative writing. I would be interested in your views on what someone with IP, like a popular novel, should look out for when people start circling. What’s the ideal journey from page to screen, and what’s the nightmare?

John: I’ve had a couple of adventures with adapting books, or you’re dealing with a property that’s becoming popular. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with authors in that situation. I won’t talk about the bad experiences. My Arlo Finch books came out at the same time that Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi came out. It’s been interesting watching that development cycle because that came out in 2017, and the first movie version has only coming out next year or 2027. It’s like a 10-year journey.

Looking through the number of times it got set up and then fell apart and then got going again, as the author, I used to say, you just cannot know when a thing is actually going to happen, when it’s all going to come together. Mike, you bought this woman’s book, optioned this woman’s book, and it took years. At no point did it seem like a certainty that it would ever actually make it to the screen, even two years out or a year and a half out.

I would say that talking with authors whose books have been optioned or purchased for adaptation, you have to treat it as this will probably never happen and make peace with that. You won’t have the kind of control over it that you do over your own book. It’s just like your kid is going off to college, and it’s just going to become its own thing.

Mike: Yes. I think a lot of authors have really challenging relationships with the eventual product, and so many other times. Some of the greatest books of the last 10 years, books that maybe in a different era would have readily been ripe for assassination or-

Craig: Wow.

John: For assassination. [unintelligible 00:52:50]

Mike: -for adaptation. I recently went on a big Barbara Kingsolver kick over this past year, and reading books like The Poisonwood Bible or Demon Copperhead where you’re just like, these are some of the best books of all time. Why hasn’t this been made as– You weren’t the first person who ever thought of doing it. It’s hard to get things made. Yes. It’s just really, really, really difficult.

John: I would encourage Julia Nostrachir, if someone’s circling your book, you might think, “Oh, a director would be fantastic.” Directors attach themselves to 19,000 things, and none of them ever happen. If a Mike Makowsky approaches you, who’s a writer who’s obsessive, who can actually do the thing, it’s generally a better choice.

Mike: I tend to classify myself more as compulsive than obsessive.

John: I’m sorry about that, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Well done, sir.

John: I don’t want to mislabel you or put you on the wrong side.

Mike: Yes. If I call you, please say yes. I agree.

John: Let’s answer one more question. Oh, here’s one from Marco about writing with a bad back. Craig, you may have an opinion about that.

Drew: I remember you mentioning back injections for pain. I’m turning 50 and right when things are finally starting to go well career-wise, my back decided to revolt. I can barely sit for more than 5 to 10 minutes without serious pain. The price of 15 plus years glued to a chair, I guess. I have scoliosis, facet joint arthritis, mild anterior-

Craig: Anterolisthesis.

Drew: There we go. Oh, boy. A couple of disc protrusions, probably the usual writer’s cocktail. Surgeons say it’s not bad enough for surgery, so I’m stuck in this frustrating in-between zone where something could be done, but hard to figure out what. Did you ever find something that actually helped? Do you have specific physio or exercises, or a special chair? Any professional tips would be a lifesaver.

John: Pretty sure many of the Scriptnotes audience might be in the same boat. Craig, you and I were talking about this just backstage right before the curtain opened at our live show, and you were about to get another injection. Did that happen? Did it help?

Craig: I had to make the appointment, but I’m going to be having it when I’m back home right after Christmas, right before New Year’s. In between Christmas and New Year’s, that’s back injection season. It’s going to be lovely. First of all, Marco, I certainly sympathize with you. Yes, you’re in your 50s, and yes, this is how it’s going, and you already had issues. Scoliosis has been there almost certainly since you were a kid and just gets worse over time.

Anterolisthesis is not fun, and any arthritis anywhere in your back, and disc protrusions, that’s really the worst of it because that starts to push on the nerves all around. That’s what the pain is. The pain is nerves. It’s not bones. It’s not the rest of it. It’s the nerves. Yes, physical therapy can help. There are some stretches that I do every morning that seem to help. I would not suggest you do those because those are for what I have, which is spinal stenosis and [unintelligible 00:55:35] and I don’t know what stretches would be good for you, but I think physical therapy, it could help.

Pretty much every single back doctor in the world suggests that you strengthen your core muscles, which I would do if I had them, but I’m pretty sure that my abs have actually dissolved. I don’t think I have abdominal muscles. [laughs] I basically don’t have a butt muscle or an abdominal muscle, and those are the muscles that they want you to strengthen, your glutes and your abs. That is something that they will always recommend.

I do use an Aeron myself, and it works very nicely for me. My body conforms to it, and it feels good. The special chair you should use is the one that makes you feel the least pain. Back surgery is a nightmare. If you can avoid that, I would avoid it. PT, for sure. Strengthen the ab, core, and butt, and find a chair that is okay. If you need to sit up in bed and write a bed, you write in bed. What can you do?

John: A friend of mine with back issues swears by peripheral nerve stimulator implants. Basically, once a year, they implant a little thing that basically keeps stimulating those nerves until your nerves just go like, “Oh, well, this must be normal. There’s actually not a problem,” but it’s a hassle to do, and you can’t get your back wet for a while, and things like that. There are other alternatives.

I would just encourage, and Craig, I want your opinion on this too, for Marco, this person says it’s not bad enough for surgery. That shouldn’t be the last person you go to. That shouldn’t be the last word on things. There may be other solutions out there. Don’t assume that you have to live in pain.

Craig: Well, as we get older, we will all be living in pain. Pain’s coming. You hear that, Makowsky? It’s coming.

Mike: Oh, no.

Craig: There are levels, of course, and there are remediations. The other thing that they sometimes will mess around with is radio frequency ablation, where they use radio waves to fry the nerve tips. It didn’t work for me, but some people have gotten relief from that. I don’t know where you live, Marco, but in Los Angeles, Cedar-Sinai has a pain center. That’s where I go, and it is a building full of doctors that are there to deal with pain.

The good news is that they have never suggested to me that the answer is opioids. Don’t worry about that. They’re not going to turn you into a junkie, but they really do concentrate on how to alleviate pain and to get to the root of it. It’s been good for me. I get basically two of these shots a year, and they work pretty well.

John: Let’s do our one cool thing. Craig, your one cool thing looks like it’s related to opioids.

Craig: It is. Opioids on my mind. I’m here in Vancouver. The guys here on the podcast who see me on my Zoom thing can see lovely gray slate rainy Vancouver behind me.

John: I want to say yes.

Craig: That is standard. Vancouver is a fantastic city. It has a brutal opioid problem. Anybody who lives or works here in Vancouver knows that there are about, I don’t know, six, seven straight blocks of East Hastings that are populated almost exclusively by people who are using drugs and primarily fentanyl and also now some sort of tranquilizer thing, like another veterinary tranquilizer. It’s bad.

The fentanyl epidemic is at this point just become the problem everywhere. There is an effort now to create a vaccine. You guys have probably heard of Narcan, which is naloxone, the thing you spray– Oh, you’re at a party. You see somebody go, and they thought they were injecting heroin. It was fentanyl. They’re dying. You spray this in their nose. It blocks all of the opioid receptors in the body and can help keep them from their central nervous system plummeting to zero. The issue, of course, is that has to be administered after the fact.

What they’re working on now is they call it a vaccine. It’s really more of a prophylactic. The idea is they inject you with something that binds to the fentanyl molecule, but along with it has a larger chunk of protein that keeps it from crossing through the blood-brain barrier. Basically, it can’t go anywhere, so it can’t hurt you. It just runs around your bloodstream doing nothing. This would be for people who are like, “Hey, look, I do use this drug, but I don’t want fentanyl, I just want heroin, I don’t want fentanyl.” It protects you against the thing that might kill you.
There are issues that this could create.

John: I could imagine.

Craig: For instance, then people are like, “I want fentanyl, I got the fentanyl vaccine, but I really want to get high off of fentanyl. I think I’ll just take twice as much as I normally did to overwhelm this.” That is a potential danger because one thing we do know about people with substance abuse issues is that they’re incredibly persistent and clever. The other issue, of course, is if you ever did need some sort of surgical intervention or something, if your blood-brain barrier is blocked from one or more methods of anesthesia, you may have a serious problem.

It does feel like, given how bad it is out there, something like this might be a good mitigation solution. It’s a very interesting thought because we do– Here’s what we absolutely know, telling people to not use opioids does not work. That is useless. We know that for a fact. Let’s see, maybe the fentanyl “vaccine” will gain some traction.

John: Great. Mike, do you have one cool thing to share?

Mike: Yes. In adapting this true story from the Annals of American History and then trying to make a show that appeals to more than just the 2% of people that would pick up a book about James Garfield, but also to the other 98% of people who are quite certain at the outset that they do not care about James Garfield and making a show with a little bit more of a modern engine behind it. There are a handful of other shows and films that have done it well, a small handful, one of which is a show called The Good Lord Bird from 2020.

It’s so good. It’s based on this incredible James McBride book, and it’s about John Brown, the abolitionist in his reign on Harpers Ferry in 1859 that, in many ways, precedes the Civil War. It’s adapted by Ethan Hawke, who plays John Brown and Mark Rashard. It’s so funny and weird and incredible. It’s one of the best adaptations that I’ve seen in a really, really long time, and I think very much is of a piece with Death by Lightning, hopefully. It’s just a show that I thought was really, really remarkable and that I wish more people still talked about because it’s great.

Craig: The Good Lord Bird?

Mike: Yes. It’s on Showtime in 2020, which was probably one of the reasons.

John: It’s probably Paramount+, I would suspect.

Mike: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I hope it’s available somewhere.

Craig: Let’s do a quick Good Lord Bird. Let’s do a little quick live Google. Good Lord Bird-

John: It looks like it’s on Prime, but I don’t know.

Mike: It’s really, really great. Would recommend it to anybody that likes my show and would want to do another historical deep dive. It’s very different from what you would expect it to be. It is rollicking and funny and strange.

Craig: Looks like it’s on Apple TV, and that’s about that. Oh, no, I see Prime Video. Yes. I think you got Amazon or Apple TV, both of which will be purchased by Netflix Warner Brothers within days.

Mike: Ethan Hawke is so, so good on the show, and Daveed Diggs is there. He plays Frederick Douglass.

John: That’s great. Again, that was peak TV, and so much was being made, it was so hard to just find an audience for anything, especially if it wasn’t on HBO or Netflix, even Netflix stuff disappeared. My one cool thing is a show that was made for Canada, made for Crave TV, is now available in the US on HBO Max called Heated Rivalry. Gay people know what I’m talking about because every gay person is obsessed with the show.

Craig: Every gay person.

John: Every gay person in Los Angeles or New York City. Basically, everyone on my Instagram knows about Heated Rivalry. What I admire so much about the show so it’s based on a book by Rachel Reed, and it’s created, produced, and directed by Jacob Tierney, who I want to get on the show at some point. The show is about professional hockey, and so it’s these two hockey players and their romance between them.

What is remarkable about it is, remember, Craig, we had Rachel Bloom on the show talking about sex on screen, and sort of like why we’re not seeing good sex on screen, and the show does it and delivers it in a really good way. There are sex scenes that are actually narratively important, really well shot, and story happens during sex scenes, which you just don’t see. It’s not just like a little bonus you put on there, it’s like, no, it’s like the sex is the point and the story purposes are happening during it. Just incredibly well made. Don’t watch it with your family, don’t watch it with your kids. [laughter]

Craig: Don’t watch it on a plane.

John: Don’t watch it on a plane. It is unapologetically smutty in a great way. I just really respect that they were able to make this show and put it out there in the world. Heated Rivalry.

Mike: Where is it?

John: It’s HBO Max in the US, and it’s just really, really well done.

Craig: Yes, so Crave is the HBO output channel up here in Canada, so typically it’s HBO shipping things to Crave, but I like that Crave is shipping something back.

John: Yes. It’s shot in Toronto, but set in many places around the world. Clearly, it made smart choices in pulling in the horniness of Challengers, the tennis show, but it’s actually making that subtext text and really nicely done. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Foster. If you’ve an outro, 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 a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. Please keep sending through those posts about the Scriptnotes book. Those are delightful. We’ll continue to repost those.

We have T-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkwear. They’re perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the 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 again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get the first emails about live shows and other stuff that’s coming up.

You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments. You get Mike’s episode from 2020. You get the Rachel Bloom sex episode, all those things, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coaching trees as sort of the growth of one show leads to showrunners of other shows. We’ll talk about that after the music. Mike Makowsky, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much for having me. It was a blast.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. This topic came from a listener, Rob G., who sent us in this article by Alan Sepinwall, who was writing for The Ringer, on which TV show has the best coaching tree. Here’s the setup. Football fans often talk about coaching trees, how so many currently successful NFL coaches used to work for Mike Shanahan, or how Bill Parcells at various points in his career employed Bill Belichick, Sean Payton, Tom Coughlin. I see you shrugging like you don’t follow football.

Mike: I don’t know who any of these people are.

Craig: John knows all of them.

John: I’m impressed I was able to pronounce these names.

Craig: The only thing John knows about sports are the names of those two guys in that hockey show.

John: Oh, really? [laughter] Hollander and Ilya.

Craig: There you go.

John: There you go. Absolutely. There are also TV coaching trees where producers or shows bring together many writers and directors who go on to have these amazing careers and, in some cases, create their own coaching trees. I’ll talk you through some of the ones they sort out, but then I also want to discuss why this may happen. The first one is The White Shadow, which I don’t really remember. Ken Howards.

Craig: I love that show.

John: John Falsey, and Joshua Brand, Mark Tinker, Thomas Carter, Tim Van Patten, Kevin Hooks all came out of that.

Mike: Well, Tim was an actor on the show.

Craig: He played Baloney. What was it? Oh, Salami. It was Salami. That was his name. Not Baloney.

John: Ken Howard is an actor. [crosstalk]

Craig: The former president of SAG.

John: SAG. He was Hank Cooper on 30 Rock. 30 Rock’s so good. Great.

Mike: He died a few years ago. When I first moved out to LA, I didn’t really know anyone, but my dad and stepmom were doing this dog charity that he and his wife were really passionate about. I got dinner with Ken Howard, and we really hit it off. He was the first person I ever met in the industry. He saw me as, I don’t know, someone that he would say [unintelligible 01:09:11] sure. Then he died three years into me living in LA.

My parents had a holiday party that year, and his widow comes to the holiday party, and she gives me this box. She’s like, “Put this in a safe place and open it tomorrow.” I was like, “Okay.” I was a little drunk. I was like, “Yes, thank you. It’s so good to see you, Linda.” The next morning, I open it up, and it’s this translucent blue and orange paperweight. I’m like, “Oh, that’s so nice from Linda Howard.” I’m like, “I’ll put this,” I don’t know.

Underneath it, there’s this note being like, “I just wanted you to know that Ken thought the world of you, so it seems only right that you would have a piece of him.” I have one-twelfth of Ken Howard’s ashes on my desk. The paperweights, it’s a company called Artful Ashes, and it’s the white shadow colors. They purposely did the white shadow colors. I see Ken every day. He’s my roommate. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: I’m thinking about who is going to get a little piece of me.

John: My instincts as well.

Craig: By the way, we now, both of us, have to send a little bit of our ashes to Mike Makowsky. He needs [crosstalk] weird collection.

[crosstalk]

Mike: My stepmom’s mother, who I was also really close with, died, and she was so inspired that she then contacted Artful Ashes, so I also have one-twelfth of Jan, and they live next– I’m collecting infinity stones, essentially.

Craig: Unfortunately, when you die, someone’s going to have to get all of your dead other people.

John: Wow.

Mike: That’s my Ken Howard story. That’s an incredible Ken Howard story. Whenever the white shadow comes up, obviously, I need to tell that story. He was such a great human being.

Craig: That’s awesome.

John: Let’s talk about that because it sounds like he was a great human being who also cared about the next generation. That’s partly what the coaching trees things were talking about. It’s like people who were apparently– they not only ran really great shows, but people developed underneath them who could take those lessons and do their own things. The Golden Girls, obviously, ran for a long time, was an accommodate institution. Mitch Hurwitz, Mark Cherry, Christopher Lloyd, all came from that. Christopher Lloyd went on to do Modern Family. Nash Bridges, Damon Lindelof, Sean Ryan, Glenn Mazzara.

Mike: Was Carlton [Cuse] on-

Craig: I believe he was.

John: I feel like they met on that.

Craig: I think that’s where he took Damon under his wing.

John: X-Files, Howard Gordon, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, Tim Minear, Darin Morgan.

Craig: Wow. Look at this.

John: Incredible. When you get to The Office, of course, we’ve had Mike Schur on the show, but Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak, but also Paul Lieberstein, Justin Spitzer, Lee Eisenberg, and Gene Stupnitsky. Incredible writers who all went off and ran things.

Craig: Your show of shows.

John: Your show of shows.

Craig: That’s the immediate thing I thought of, and it is number one on this list. This was their stacked writing staff. Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. What the hell? There’s a really interesting book about them that’s called Madness on Something Floors. It was just like the story of what that place was like with those guys when they were all, I guess, in their 20s and 30s. Neil Simon alone. Incredible.

John: The article also talks about Roseanne was not a happy place to be working, but obviously, amazing people came through there. Josh Weed, Amy Sherman-Paladino, Chuck Lorre, Norm MacDonald, Dana Jacobson, Bruce Helford. A difference, though, is that these are shows that most of these are– they ran 22 episodes per season. They had large writing staffs. There was a lot of you’re at that a lot, and so you got a lot of chance to just do stuff, and that helps you develop your craft and your career. Shows where you’re writing eight episodes, there’s just going to be less opportunity to learn from all that stuff.

Craig: Or a show like the one that Mike does where there’s nobody. Nobody learns. By the way, that’s my- [crosstalk]

John: Nobody learns. Chernobyl.

Craig: Exactly. Yes. Nobody learns, but it is interesting to look at how many shows there have been that were in this model. Quite a few shows now, even though maybe they’re not doing 22 episodes, maybe they do fewer. I’m thinking of shows like Hacks or something. There are still people on staff who are learning and growing.

John: They will [inaudible 01:13:57] it.

Craig: What it really comes down to, I think, is who’s running it and how good are they at picking talent? The people who were running these shows, Sid Caesar had choices. He was like, “All right, out of all the people I could hire, I like these people.” 100% accuracy on that. You have to look at the folks that were running White Shadow or Sopranos, David Chase. These guys had been around with some of these other people in other rooms before, but they knew, okay, I’ve been on a bunch of shows. I now have my chance to write my show. I’m taking this one, this one, this one, this one. Then those people are like, “Ooh, and you should take this one and this one.” The coaching tree is really a taste tree, I think.

John: Yes, I think that’s crucial. Thinking back to our guests, Abbott Elementary. We had Quinta Brunson on. We also had Brittani Nichols on, who’s grown season by season by season. She’s now an EP on the show. Five years from now, as we’re looking at this list, there’s going to be a ton of writers who’ve come out of Abbott Elementary who are controlling this business. It’s thanks to end the show on some happy news that sometimes things grow and change, and develop because people are good and they make good things.

Craig: Then you die, your ashes go into a chunk of Lucite, and it is sent to a guy.

Mike: To me. I will take your ashes.

John: You’ll take your ashes. On the future side, there’s less of this because you don’t have a chance to develop a staff. I would hope that I’ve had a very good run of assistants who’ve gone on to do amazing things and grown their own places. Rawson, and Dana, and Chad, and Stuart, and Drew, and Megan McDonald, and Megan– everyone’s gone off and killed in industry, which has been nice, too. That’s also a testament to you.

Craig: I’m sure you have great taste in picking assistants. You’re really good at this. As a recipient of this, I do have to acknowledge David Zucker, who taught me a lot, and Todd Phillips, who taught me a lot. Both of those guys didn’t need to include me to the extent that they did in the process of directing feature films, but they did. Without that, I would not– Those are essential things that I learned about filmmaking and writing and all of it.

John: Cool. Mike Makowsky, thank you again for being on our show.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Death by Lightning on Netflix
• Mike Makowsky on IMDb and Instagram
• Episode 448 (The last time Mike was on the podcast)
• Which TV Show Has the Best Coaching Tree? Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer
• Size matters: a single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion
• New evidence for the sensorimotor mismatch theory of weight perception and the size-weight illusion
• Friedman Personnel Agency
• Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
• The Ballad of Guiteau from Assassins
• The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
• Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein
• A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test by Emily Mullin for WIRED
• Heated Rivalry on HBO Max
• The Good Lord Bird
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Luke Foster (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.