The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is episode 686 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do writers and the characters who create handle the obstacles that they encounter? One’s approach to problem solving can reveal a lot about otherwise hidden mental processes. We’ll discuss ways to tackle pernicious problems in real life and on the page, and what it says about the problem solver. First, we have a lot of follow-up from previous episodes, including a master class on how to do the lunch order if you are a PA.
Craig: Oh, this is good.
John: Yes, so we asked our listeners, they sent in, and man, they delivered this time.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Yes, so really good advice here. We also have a ridiculous and completely unworkable proposal about movie tariffs that will never actually happen. But we can use that as an excuse to talk about why we want to incentivize domestic production and ways a sane administration might try to do that.
Craig: Yes, somewhere inside the fog of crazy is a topic worth discussing.
John: Yes. Our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about tombs, because I am just back from two weeks in Jordan and Egypt, where I got to live my Indiana Jones fantasy. I’m here to answer any questions you have about relics and burying of the dead, and travel through exotic locations.
Craig: I just played the Indiana Jones video game, so I feel just as qualified.
John: Basically, the same thing.
Craig: Yes, if not more so.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: I really went deep down there.
John: My question is, did most of the Indiana Jones game take place with like a bunch of tourists jammed around you in a crowded Egyptian museum?
Craig: No.
John: No. I’m surprised the museums in the Indiana Jones game are probably empty.
Craig: They are, unless it’s just you and a strange giant is attacking you. Yes, no, it’s remarkable how empty things are. You do move around the Vatican quite a bit.
John: Oh, sure.
Craig: In the ‘40s, during World War II, and you’re ducking various fascisti.
John: Yes, fun, exciting. Yes, we’re recording this way before the conclave has even started, so we don’t even know– People are listening to this in a time where there may be a new pope, but Craig and I have no idea who the pope is.
Craig: We don’t know.
John: No, we don’t.
Craig: Oh my gosh, I don’t care.
[chuckling]
John: I’m excited for some change. I like things to happen. No knock against the existing pope who died.
Craig: Be careful what you wish for.
John: Yes, it’s wild. It’s wild. Let’s get into some follow-up, because man, we got a bunch of it.
Craig: Okay.
John: We’ll start off with last week on the show, or maybe it was two weeks ago now on the show, Eric Kripke was on, so he’s the guy who runs The Boys and lots of other great shows. We were talking about a listener question on– And Craig, I’m curious what you would call this, an episode that exclusively follows one of the characters, that it’s not a normal episode, it’s a standalone. Do you have a term that you would use for that?
Craig: I don’t.
John: I don’t. We were trying to bat around some. Our listeners came up with two good terms that they’ve used in writers’ rooms. Drew, help us out.
Drew: Aaron writes, “In our writers’ room, we call it our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern episode, as a nod to the delightful Tom Stoppard play about the side characters in Hamlet.”
John: Which makes sense. You’re elevating people who would be on the sidelines instead of centering it around them. The second solution from a different Aaron I thought was even better.
Craig: All right.
John: I’ve been in a couple rooms that have called them silo episodes, as in one character is siloed away from the rest of the cast and given their own story, and really, their own specific role building. It felt like after Girls did the Marnie episode and then the Shosh in Japan episode, that it started a conversation, at least in rooms, about this unique episode format and what to call it.
Craig: That’s interesting.
John: I like silo.
Craig: Silo episode. What do you do on the show Silo, however?
John: Yes. There’s an episode of the second season of Silo that is basically a Silo episode that just follows one of the characters.
Craig: Solopsisode.
John: Yes.
Craig: I think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is decent, but it implies you’re following a couple of characters on the side.
John: It is, and also, to me, it implies a specific tone of what’s going to happen. It’s like a behind-the-scenes, that a normal episode is happening over on this side, and we’re just not noticing it.
Craig: Yes, like I really wanted to do a partner series to Game of Thrones that was just like a couple of soldiers who were posted somewhere out in Westeros, and things were happening in the background that they would occasionally hear about. You’d be like, “Oh, God, that’s the Red Wedding.” They didn’t really know, and it was mostly like, “Ah, gathering taxes, and my foot hurts.” The guys wouldn’t let me do it. That’s weird, yes.
John: That’s weird.
Craig: That’s weird.
John: That’s weird. All right, so those are some good suggestions from our listeners. The second bit of follow-up is a conversation you and I had. We were talking about how to make our phones less addictive and less interesting, and different techniques for that. I know you took social media off your phones.
Craig: Yes.
John: For this trip to Egypt and to Jordan, I was a little concerned, passing through security and stuff like that, and making sure, someone’s taking over my phone. I don’t want there to be anything on my phone. I almost went as far as to just get a burner phone that I could take with me and just not have all my stuff. What I ended up doing instead was going through and basically taking everything off my phone and really paring it back to just the essentials. I got rid of all the–
Craig: You just have the stock app and weather? [chuckles]
John: Exactly. You can take those off, too. You can take the stock app off.
Craig: Now you’re just down to tips?
John: Just weather. Then I also went through and changed the icon style and stuff like that to make the phone just less useful. Craig, here’s my phone now.
Craig: What in the world am I looking at?
John: Describe it to our listeners. We’ll put a screenshot in and just check out. [crosstalk]
Craig: Sure. To start with, I’m going to put my glasses on to really investigate here. It is a sickly mint green background, and it is monochromatic.
John: Yes.
Craig: Then the apps themselves are in gray/green scale. No color other than green, black, white, gray. There’s 10 apps total.
John: There are multiple screens, so you can swipe.
Craig: Oh, yes. This phone says, “Don’t look at me.” That’s what it says.
John: It was good. I actually did not look at it very much on my trip at all. In addition to going to the dark mode style and the larger icons, which also gets rid of the names of the icons, it makes the phone harder to use in a way that I actually found really useful. Based on location, you can figure out where the apps are. It broke me of my habit of constantly playing on my phone to check on a thing or to open Instagram.
Craig: It’s going to be wild when the next thing happens that makes this end, because something is going to happen that makes it end. We know that much.
John: What’s going to end?
Craig: The phone. It’s going to end, right?
John: It’s going to be that little thing that it’s, whatever they do on black mirror console, which is the little dot you put on your temple.
Craig: Something’s going to happen, and it will end. Then, boy, that’ll be a day. That’ll be an interesting day when it ends.
John: The post-phone era?
Craig: The post-phone era. Yes, but not yet.
John: We had talked an episode in 683 about long takes. That was before we saw a bunch of things that were about long takes. When we recorded the episode, it was before the Oner episode of The Studio, which I thought was delightful. This guy, Aidan wrote in and he had done a comparison of your Chernobyl scene with the rooftop clearing and a scene from Michael Clayton. Drew, talk us through what this post is. We’ll put a link into it as well.
Drew: The post is a comparison of those two scenes. They’re about the same. The Michael Clayton scene is 2 minutes and 11 seconds. The rooftop scene in Chernobyl is 2 minutes and 2 seconds. Despite the fact that they’re about the same amount of time, the subjective lengths, which is how long it feels like it lasts, is very different because it’s the assassination scene in Michael Clayton. The murder scene happens frighteningly quickly, whereas the rooftop scene feels agonizing and slow.
John: It’s just a nice comparison side by side.
Craig: That’s what I’m going for is agonizing and slow. I did get some additional feedback from Jack Thorne, who pointed out– And this is something that Seth Rogen pointed out as well. I did a LA Times roundtable with him that I guess will be coming out shortly. Both of them said the same thing, which is that planning for long takes, writing them into the script is a way to protect the writing itself, of course, because no one can really mess with it. It’s true. You can’t really decide what to do, say, with a script of Adolescence other than shoot it. That’s a fair point.
John: Yes. Last bit of follow-up here. In 682, we talk about words we don’t have in English, like words we could have wished existed in English, but it doesn’t actually happen. We had a couple of people write in with words that they’re looking for that are not in existence anywhere. Talk us through these. First, let’s start with Shauna in Vancouver.
Drew: She writes, “I regularly think about how I wish there was a word, probably a German word, for the feeling you have when you get to the end of a mystery novel and it’s deeply unsatisfying.” She did with additional undertones of, “Now I’m angry and disappointed that you broke my trust and wasted my time.”
Craig: I think it’s just unsatisfied, isn’t it? [chuckles]
John: I get that she’s feeling a specific kind of unsatisfied because it just took so long, and there is an aspect of social trust in there, too. Yes.
Craig: Yes, but I think we have that word, actually. I don’t think an extreme version of an emotion qualifies for a new word. You just put the word very in front of it, and you’re there.
John: Yes, isn’t that like a thing they teach you in writing classes is that anytime you use the word very, there really is a better word out there for it?
Craig: Oh, most certainly, and it may not be necessary at all. There is that whole “I don’t like adverbs thing,” which, you know?
John: Yes.
Craig: Listen, sometimes very is great.
John: Yes. It’s an intensifier. You know that very comes from verily, that it comes from truly?
Craig: Yes.
John: Yes, which is just such a strange thing to think.
Craig: Yea, verily.
John: Yes, as an intensifier. It’s actually apparently very common in languages to say “Truly this” and that becomes the intensifier.
Craig: I actually often will say, truly. It’s a good one.
John: That’s true.
Drew: Is that what we’re doing with literally?
John: It is. The way that literally started as being true, and then it’s just an enforcement.
Craig: Yes, but that one’s wrong.
[chuckling]
John: Yes, it’s still feels wrong to us.
Craig: It’s wrong.
John: It’s wrong.
Craig: It’s just wrong.
John: More of words that don’t exist from Reed.
Drew: Reed writes, “You mentioned the Russian word tosca as a deep anguish that can never be resolved.” A word in Welsh that I’ve always enjoyed is the word hiraeth. It’s about a similar deep longing, but is a more positive spin on the feeling rather than an undefined existential despair. The rough translation is a profound longing for a home, place, or time that you can no longer return. A homesickness for something that maybe never was, the echo of our soul’s past.
Craig: Nostalgia.
John: Yes, but it’s a feeling of nostalgia for the moment you’re actually currently in, maybe?
Craig: He said past, did he?
John: It is past.
Drew: He said past, or it might not even exist? Just a vibe you wish you could go to. I feel like Ren Faires do this.
Craig: Oh, I see. It’s sort of like a nostalgia for something that is fictional, even. A longing to be in your memories of Middle-earth, even though you’ve never been there.
Drew: Seems like it, yes.
Craig: If that’s the case, then sign me up.
John: A script I read recently actually did refer to the sense of nostalgia for the moment that you’re in right now. I love this thing, and I know it’s going to escape me, and I already miss this.
Craig: I have a version of that, which is, I know I should be enjoying this moment right now. Later, I will look back at this wistfully and wish that I could be back there. Right now, I’m miserable. [chuckles]
John: Yes.
Craig: It’s a tricky one because sometimes I think back to when I was younger, you miss these things. I miss things that at the time, I wasn’t thinking about at all. In fact, in many ways, and almost always, my life is better now than it was when I was in my 20s, except, my back doesn’t hurt as much, and I’m not that much closer to death. I wasn’t able to enjoy that at the time, and there are things right now I know that I’m not, I’m just, I should be enjoying more.
John: Yes. A related concept is sort of second-degree fun. Yes. Things that are actually unpleasant in the moment, but then you look back at them with a fondness. It’s like, “Oh, yes, remember that horrible thing we went through and did together?”
I was commiserating with Scriptnotes’ Megana Rao about the Giza Pyramid, because she had done that with her family. We were texting afterwards, wasn’t that just the worst? Yes, it’s the worst. It is the most unpleasant experience to go inside the Giza Pyramid, because you are climbing up this ramp. You’re stooped down, almost on hands and knees, climbing up this ramp, and packed, sardine tight with a bunch of strangers. It is just the most claustrophobic thing. You get to the emperor’s tomb. What do you think’s in the emperor’s tomb?
Craig: A sarcophagus?
John: Nothing. Not even a sarcophagus. Everything’s been taken out of it. It’s just an empty room with– There is a stone box where the actual real sarcophagus used to be, but it’s so unrewarding, and yet the experience as a whole is still second-degree fun. It’s like, “Oh, yes, I went through that thing.”
Craig: Right. You have a great story of how awful it was.
John: Yes.
Craig: Oh, I’m not going there.
[chuckling]
John: What we should have done, and Mike was pointing out, is that, as we were lining up to get in, people are squeezing past you to get out at the same time. Some of them have this most horrified expression, and they’re sweaty, and they’re just exhausted. It’s like, “What am I doing?”
Craig: Right, like take a hint.
John: Yes.
Craig: I think it’s fair to say, as they’re coming out, “Should I get out of this line?” A bunch of them will be like, “Oh, my God, you need to get out.”
John: What would I say? I would be honest with them and say, “It’s not cool to actually, when you get up in there, but also, maybe you want the story.”
Craig: I would probably say something like, “We should all be home. Don’t go anywhere, ever.”
John: Yes, that’s a choice, too.
Craig: Yes. That’s just me.
John: Secondary fun, it’s almost a word in itself.
Craig: Do you know a tomb that you can go into where something actually is there, rewarding just to see? All of the tombs in the Indiana Jones video game. All of them. Everyone.
John: I need to speak up for the Egyptian tourism council. The pyramids are fantastic. Actually, going in that one tomb is just such a weird experience. The other tombs, the hieroglyphics everywhere, there’s still color on the walls. It’s actually genuinely impressive.
Craig: They’re not all–
John: No. Most of the tombs are spectacular. It’s just that the one that’s in the giant pyramid that you think should be the absolute coolest. No, it’s empty because everything was stolen out of there years ago.
Craig: Everything was stolen.
John: The reason why the King Tut is famous is because the tomb wasn’t opened until the ’20s.
Craig: That’s right. Yes. That’s when the curse happened.
John: That’s when the curse happened. Also, I just– The last bit of Egypt trivia here. They have photos of what the actual vault looked like in there. It was just a bunch of stuff piled up. It wasn’t like it was neatly arranged on shelves and stuff. It was all just a pile in the corner.
Craig: It’s a storage unit.
John: It’s a storage unit. It was like, “Here’s some chariot wheels for your sky chariot.”
Craig: Right. What do we throw in there? Oh, he loved chariots.
John: Yes. He loved bread. We need to make a bunch of stone things that look like bread because he loved bread.
Craig: Oh, you know what? You can get things like that at Pottery Barn.
[chuckling]
John: Absolutely.
Craig: It’s just Pottery Barn crap.
John: What it reminded me most of is my mom would go to Montgomery Wards or JCPenney’s to pick up her catalog orders, and they would have the refrigerators because you could buy a refrigerator there. You’d have the refrigerator, and some of them had the plastic food in there. I loved the plastic food.
Craig: Plastic meat.
John: Loved it so much.
Craig: Loved it. There was always a lamb chop. Oh, yes.
John: Yes. Oh, yes. We had a lot of lamb back in those days.
Craig: Yes, so much lamb.
John: We have one more missing word here. Let’s talk about Mitch’s proposal here.
Drew: Something that could be useful to have for describing an important feeling you want to attain in storytelling. I believe it was described by Rachel Kondo at the live Austin episode, but it’s a word for something that’s both surprising and inevitable. If anybody could get it to take off, it’s John and Craig.
Craig: We do talk about that all the time.
John: Yes. You want surprise and inevitable, but it is that feeling like, “Oh, of course.”
Craig: Maybe we just portmanteau to surprevitable.
John: I like surprevitable.
Craig: Surprevitable.
John: Let’s do it, Craig.
Craig: Done.
John: Done. Surprevitable. Let us talk about– Another bit of follow-up here, which is on first jobs. We’d asked our listeners, so many of you have worked as PA, so many of you have had to do the lunch run for an office or for a writer’s room. Man, there’s got to be so much shared wisdom out there about how to do it best.
Honestly, there was so much shared wisdom. We got– Drew, I don’t know.
Drew: Oh, dozens of emails.
John: Dozens and dozens of people. Rather than read through all of it, we’re going to put together a blog post we could link to so that it’s on the internet and everyone can always find it.
Craig: Great.
John: Drew, talk us through some of the section headers here and what some of the highlights were, things that were surprising even to you.
Drew: Sure. We start with just picking the restaurant because that’s a whole process. Simple things like making sure to ask about dietary restrictions, looking for restaurants that are good, balanced of healthy, and greasy. No tacos was a thing that came up because LA’s got great tacos and people probably want them, but they are, according to some people, the single-handedly, the most painstaking who ordered the place.
Craig: Everybody gets four different tacos, and then they all get mixed up, and no one knows which goes to what.
John: Also, I feel like tacos don’t travel well, fundamentally.
Craig: They don’t. Soft tacos, sort of.
John: Yes, but everything slides off across the [crosstalk]
Craig: It gets wet.
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes. No, tacos is a bad idea.
Drew: Homestate seems like it’s an exception to that, according to some people.
Craig: Homestate’s solid. Yes, Homestate’s solid.
John: How about taking the order? That’s a thing you clearly messed up if the order doesn’t get taken right. Talk to us about that.
Drew: We got some good horror stories in here, too, on that. A great thing is just to make sure that you would include a link to the menu or a PDF copy, even if you have to make one yourself because some people, you can’t trust them to find the menu themselves. They’ll ask you to get items that don’t exist or things that are out of season, sandwiches that they used to have but aren’t available anymore. Double-check it when you place it over the phone.
John: Oh, I guess people still have to do phone orders for some stuff. Craig, on Last of Us, when you are doing a phone order, is it printed out and handed in front of you when you’re circling, or how are you getting your thing?
Craig: In our writing office that we have now, our PA sends us an email with a link. “This is where we’re getting today’s lunch from. Let me know by this time what you would like.” You click on the link, you look around, and you respond back. So far, so good. Seems to work.
John: That’s great.
Craig: We don’t have a very big workload.
John: That’s actually very small. How about when you’re actually in pre-production or any of that stuff, or if you’re going out on a location scout, what’s the order there?
Craig: Typically, I don’t participate [chuckles] because it’s good to be the king. I can get whatever I want. Typically, the office will– It’s like a choice of three things. There’s an app that people can log into, and my camera order is called Eatly or something like that. Then everybody puts their thing in, and it all gets delivered roughly around the same time.
John: Okay, so it’s more like what we do for D&D. For D&D, when we’re playing each week, we’ll send out a link and everyone pick their things and at a certain point, it’ll cut off, and will submit the order.
Craig: It’s a group DoorDash thing. It’s sort of like that except we’re going to say “You can pick from any one of these three today.” Typically, it is a somewhat curated menu as well because some of those restaurants are like, “Hey, we can do this, a lot of this, but we can’t do a lot of those things.” When we’re on scouts and stuff, we usually just pick a restaurant.
John: Yes, makes sense. This is too long to read through on the show, but we’ll include Kelly’s Quiznos horror story. The punchline of this was, there is a Quiznos order, it was like a big Quiznos order. Quiznos called like, “Is it really this big? I know it’s a big order.” The total was $409. They ended up making 4,000 sandwiches.
Craig: No. Wait. How did they even make 4,000 sandwiches?
John: I don’t know.
Drew: She doesn’t even know. They called to confirm, and they went through the whole order. Apparently, everything was fine, but they made 4,000 sandwiches.
John: An order of magnitude difference.
Craig: They were supposed to make 400 sandwiches.
John: The total was supposed to be $409, so it’s not even 400 sandwiches.
Craig: It was 40 sandwiches?
John: Probably. That feels right.
Craig: They were just like, “Well, they might need a few extra.” [chuckles]
John: Yes.
Craig: How did they do that? That can’t be right.
John: That’s the exception, but it’s the horror story that underlines why it’s so important [crosstalk]–
Craig: I have so many questions lis where is this Quiznos? How did they do that? Do they really have the ability to make 4,000 sandwiches on the spot? I don’t believe this.
John: It does seem possible.
Craig: This feels urban legend to me. I don’t know.
John: Timing is so important, and so we’ll have a little session on timing. Basically, based on the restaurant, do you need to put it in an hour ahead, two hours ahead, 30 minutes ahead? What is it going to be? I just know from the Mendocino Farms at the Grove, it’s like, Good luck. You have to be able to navigate that.
Craig: I would be so bad at this.
John: I like the suggestion to label everything at the restaurant, so that as you’re double-checking, you actually label whose things and what they’re at the restaurant, because that’s a way of verifying–
Craig: That you got everybody’s [crosstalk].
John: That you actually got everybody’s thing, and that everybody eats the right thing. Suggestions of getting a giant plastic bin from Target to put everything in, so it doesn’t slosh around inside your car.
Craig: Smart.
John: Hand everybody their lunch, so rather than laying it out on the table. I actually like put it in there in front of them. [crosstalk]
Craig: Yes, that is a nice thing to do.
John: Yes, because it also reconnects that you are the person who did this thing.
Craig: It keeps people at the table, and you don’t have this weird scrum, and somebody’s– Because, again, it’s like dealing with children, like kindergartners. They’re going to pick up the wrong thing. They’re not going to look at the name. They’re just going to see, “Oh, it’s a sandwich that I ordered,” except that that one was somebody else’s that didn’t have mayonnaise on it. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve ended up with the–
John: The mayonnaise sandwich. We know. Listeners know that Craig hates mayonnaise. Any white substance that’s spread on a sandwich–
Craig: Disgusting. We were talking about today in the room was the British nightmare, known as salad cream.
Drew: Oh, yes.
Craig: Disgusting. If you look at the Wikipedia page for salad cream, it describes it as something like a thick, pale yellow– [chuckles] It’s like, I’m already out. It’s like pus, basically. It’s disgusting. Sorry, Heinz.
[chuckling]
John: Then our last section is on general advice, which is good stuff, and it actually applies to a lot of the functions of being the PA in an office. It’s like, the stuff you’re doing doesn’t feel rewarding in the moment, but it is so important for the actual successful functioning of the room, the show, the whatever it is. Recognize that you’re not always going to get credit for the work that you’re doing, but know that you’re actually doing a great job.
There was a book I read over this break that was talking about custodians. This woman was feeling bad about her job, and she was a janitor at a place. They said, “No, you’re the custodian of the building.” It’s your job to make sure that this building actually works for everybody. That reframing was really important. In some ways, you’re like the custodian of the people who need to eat food.
Craig: Yes, and I will say that, and I hope this is true, that the PAs are appreciated when they’re doing this well, because I have been in circumstances where the person doing it wasn’t great at it. Every day, it was just, “I wonder who’s going to either not get lunch or get the wrong lunch. Who will it be today?” Every single day.
Thank you to all the PAs out there who are making sure we’re well-fed. By the way, let’s face it, we’re all in better moods. One o’clock rolls around, the hangriness that sets in, whoo.
John: It’s rough. It’s tough, we all know it. This was a very good experiment. Our next experiment, I would like to have our listeners talk to us about their best suggestions and tips for pitching on Zoom. It’s obviously a thing that started during the pandemic, but it’s now become the norm. I’ve been talking to a lot of writers recently who say like, “I hope to never actually pitch in person again because it’s just–“ They so much prefer pitching on Zoom and the ability to keep eye contact with the whole group and to have your nose at the top of the screen. I would love to hear people’s best practices for doing that.
Craig: Yes, you don’t have to memorize anything, I suppose, right?
John: Yes.
Craig: It’s all there.
John: It’s there.
Craig: I like that.
John: It’s also tough because you don’t have the real feedback of a person paying attention or not paying attention, which has pros and cons.
Craig: Yes, and then there is– I’m still old school enough to believe being in a room with somebody, there’s a little bit of– I don’t know. You feel where they’re going one way or the other. You can sense it.
John: You do. There’s been cases where I’ve really misread a thing where I felt, “Oh, that went terribly,” and I’m driving off a lot. I get the call, they want to make a deal.
Craig: Yes.
John: Yes, so it’s crazy. I’d love to hear people’s suggestions, things they’ve learned, tips and tricks, but also, I love the horror stories. [chuckles] If you have your equivalent of the 4,000 Quiznos sandwiches, I’d love to hear that, too.
Craig: I assume it’s going to be, I shared my open browser tab with something, something.
John: Yes. I’ll say a pro of pitching on Zoom, I think, for up-and-coming people is that you can have more people in the room. You can have an assistant listening in and actually gleaning from that stuff, which is if they were in the room themselves, it would be distracting, but if they’re just an extra person on the little screen, it’s fine.
Craig: True.
John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about problem solving because this actually came up because a listener was writing in about a different thing. She mentioned this technique called rubber ducking, which I’d never heard of before, which is talking through a problem, especially like it comes from my coding. Talking through a coding problem to an inanimate object, like literally a rubber duck, saying “Okay, first I’m doing this and then I’m doing this.” You’re explaining it to a non-animate object to really think through your logic and verbalize it, and express it aloud.
It got me thinking about us as writers, but also our characters are often having to solve problems that are put before them. Looking at how people solve problems, it’s a great way of exposing how their brain actually works and how they’re forming a mental model of the world around them. I wanted to talk through some techniques for solving problems, but also why it’s important to show characters solving problems in stories.
Craig: Ultimately, there is a problem. If the character doesn’t have a problem, then I don’t care about the story. There is a problem, and then there are sub-problems and sub-problems. We know we’re invested in them solving things. The first question I like to ask when it comes to this particular topic is are they any good at it? It can often be, I don’t know, engaging watching somebody that is terrible at solving a particular problem who has to solve that problem.
John: You’re asking, does the character have expertise in this? If they don’t have expertise, are they good at being able to communicate with others and find out and solve a problem even if they don’t actually have the information themselves? Can they find the information? Can they find the expert? Can they draw from various sources to get to the answer that they need? In so many of our shows, I’m really thinking of procedurals, but also even the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, different people have different strengths and they have to work together to come up with an answer to the problem that’s facing them.
Craig: There are two kinds of problem-solving that we engage in as storytellers. One kind is a process problem. It’s straight up logic or insight. If I solve this problem, I will have information needed to do something, but I will not be changed. The process of solving this problem does not require me to grow or push past a boundary.
Then there are the problems where, in fact, the only way to solve it and the only way to unpack it or see the insight is to grow as a person, or in the solving of it, it changes you. We need to engage in both levels of problem-solving all the time. The non-character-y problem solvings, those are the ones we just have to be careful about because down that road sometimes is what David Zucker would call, “merely clever.” Clever sounds good. Clever is clever, but no one gives you a ton of credit for it unless it’s really clever. Otherwise, it’s meh. “Oh yes, you figured it out.”
John: Yes, so you’re talking about the problems that characters are solving that it’s not their fundamental flaw. It’s not a thing that’s going to transform them. We were talking about Michael Clayton earlier, and Michael Clayton is a problem solver. He comes in there to fix a problem, and so seeing him fix those problems is one of the rewards of that story. It’s saying like, “Oh wow, look at the expertise and competence, the social skills, his ability to read the situation, to read the room, crucial and fundamental.” Ultimately, it’s all in service to a greater arc and journey for him, but it’s great to see that level of expertise.
Craig: Yes, and that’s why that problem solving is fun to write and it’s fun to watch, but there are times where we think, “Oh, somebody just needs to get a clue about where to go next.” We have to create a problem for them to solve. The problem can’t be too hard to solve. The problem should be a fair problem to solve, so that people at home theoretically could have solved it also, but didn’t. Then we need to always ask, “How would this person do? How do they react to frustration, to not being able to see the answer?”
John: That’s what I think makes creating the right problem and showing their solution to the problem so rewarding for us as writers is that it lets us illuminate what’s actually going on in their head. It forces them to interact with the environment around them, with the people around them to solve the problem.
What I thought we might do is talk through– I think I have a list of 10 classic problem-solving techniques, and how that might work on seeing, but also for worth of words that you’re going to hear that really involve this thing. Rubber ducking is just there to describe that while you’re talking to an inanimate object, and it forces clarity because you have to explain something clearly, it slows you down. It externalizes the problem which is good.
In real life, the thing that I found I stopped doing a lot, especially when I’m talking through with my team on some software stuff, is I’ll say, “Let me explain back what I think I just heard.” You’re probably doing a similar thing, too, as you’re solving problems on your show. It’s like someone has dumped a bunch of information, and you’re trying to synthesize and process it back. In some ways, you are serving as the rubber duck to them. “I heard all this stuff, this is what I got out of it.” You’re showing it back to them.
Craig: Yes. I will sometimes– I guess this is the Socratic method. I will just start asking questions. Somebody has laid something out, and I think, “Okay, here are the parts that made sense to me. Here are the parts that are confusing.” I’m just going to start asking questions about every single thing that is either confusing to me or doesn’t feel right or feels incomplete until I know everything, until I don’t have any snag anymore.
John: That can seem argumentative, but it’s argumentative in the classic Socratic method of basically it’s exploring something together.
Craig: It’s interrogative. I think it’s interesting to watch people question. The questions that we ask and the way people answer things is in and of itself a great opportunity to learn about character, but it’s also a great opportunity to get information across without feeling lamely expository. It’s questioning. This is an interview. I like that.
John: Next technique would be free association. This is where you don’t censor the unworkable ideas. You swing bail, “Just tell me everything.” It’s when they say “No bad ideas.” It’s often used in comedies because like some of the ideas are just truly horrible, awful, terrible, bad ideas. At some points in some stories, you actually need that crazy solution because in proposing the crazy solution, then the other character says, “No, we can’t do that, but we could actually do this thing.” You find connections just because you’re willing to go crazy.
Craig: [chuckles] It is sad in a way how we tend to punish the big swingers in fiction because they take these big idea swings, and people are just, “Shut up.” Then one of them goes, “Everything you just said was insane, but wait.” [chuckles] They just existed to make you angry enough with their bad idea that your brain finally barfs up a good one. But in real life, it’s necessary because sometimes the answer to the problem is to realize you were trying to solve the wrong problem entirely.
John: Yes, and that’ll come up occasionally in these other approaches. Third one is to refactor or rewrite it from scratch. It’s basically rather than try to fix this thing, we actually just need to replace it completely. When a character proposes that, it does tell you about their instincts, which could be the right instinct because basically, you’re trying to fix an unfixable thing. We need to scrub it, or that they are so perfectionist, they’re idealists in a way that it’s not practical. I love to hear when people are like, “Oh, do we need to throw the whole thing out?”
Craig: Yes, I’m a big believer in throwing the whole thing. It’s the Gordian Knot solution, right? Just chop it in half, done.
John: Yes. All right. Decomposition, which is to take a problem and break it into smaller, more addressable chunks, which is so often the right solution that people are trying to just tackle too big of a problem, and you break it into smaller things. You’re like, “Oh, I know how to solve each of these little individual things. It’s just the big thing that seems so daunting.”
Craig: There are so many wonderful examples of this in movies. When people are explaining something that’s seemingly impossible to other people, they break it down. Maybe my favorite is in Ocean’s Eleven, where Danny Ocean is explaining, not yet, how they’re going to do it. He is explaining what the problems are and he is going little by little by little, one by one by one. It’s this, it’s this, gets worse, gets worse, gets worse. In doing so, you understand that he’s laid the groundwork for the solutions. We now know all the things that we’re going to have to solve.
John: Absolutely. The Martian is another great example that’s like every character in it is basically taking this giant, unsolvable problem and break it into solvable problems. The minimal viable solution, which is rather than try to get a perfect answer, let’s just get an answer that solves the issue okay for now, so we can at least– By getting something that works kind of, that we can see what we need to do next. That’s when you get characters say, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.” It’s just something that works.
Craig: It’s probably the thing that you would want to then replace with the good answer. It feels like a duck, not a rubber duck, but ducking. Evasion and unwillingness to face the problem in and of itself is a fun aspect of how characters approach problem-solving.
John: Analogization, basically saying, this thing is like this other thing. It’s recognizing that this specific situation may never have occurred, but it’s like other things that have occurred. It’s a case for generalists. It’s a case for people who’ve done other things, and a specialist may not see a thing that a generalist can recognize because they can pull from history or other fields.
Craig: Harold Ramis, describing the situation with the ectoplasma container in terms of a giant Twinkie. This is my favorite example. “Tell them about the Twinkie. It’s a big Twinkie,” but it’s essential. I didn’t really get into analogization. I said, “Well, I did in Chernobyl in the sense of like, I described a nuclear reactor like a car, like gas pedal, brake pedal. You do have to figure out how to make it relatable to somebody that doesn’t know the specifics and doesn’t need to.
John: Absolutely. Metaphors are how we communicate knowledge. It’s finding what the right metaphor is for this thing. That can be a useful metaphor for what the problem is, but also a metaphor for what a solution would look like. Very related. It’s just finding earlier solutions. I get frustrated by people who assume, like “This is the first time this has ever happened.” I always say like, “No, this must’ve happened a thousand times. Someone else has solved this before. We just need to look for the right way to find the answer that they came up with, because it’s probably the right answer.”
Craig: Or in their attempts to solve this, we see what we should not be doing, or we deepen the mystery. Why didn’t that work? It should have worked.
John: That’s a very good point. If there’s not a solution that’s out there, there must be a reason why there’s not a solution out there.
Craig: Right. It helps define your particular problem as a character as difficult.
John: Stepping away or letting something incubate, which is basically, rather than try to solve the problem right now, we are going to take a break, let our brains rest. We’re going to take a shower, which we often mention on this podcast. We’re going to come back to that when we are rested or when the situation has changed. That the problem may be that there’s actually not a solution in front of us because of where we are right now at this moment, but there may be an answer to this down the road.
Craig: Yes. This is an opportunity for epiphany, which can be a little silly sometimes, but a good epiphany.
John: Love it.
Craig: Worth its weight in gold. Typically, an epiphany comes when someone’s given up. RIP, Val Kilmer, Real Genius, a movie that all nerds and fans of comedy and people of the ‘80s love. He is trying to solve a problem with a laser. Because the laser is sabotaged, it explodes, and he’s out of luck. He’s not going to graduate, he’s not going to get the job, and he’s in absolute despair. He gives up. In that moment of giving up, he beats up a refrigerator, some ice falls out, he looks at the ice, and he goes, “Oh my God, I got it.” He solves the problem.
John: Sometimes it’s the recognition that the obstacle is you. The obstacle is your own pride, your own stubbornness. It’s only by taking a step back, you would say like, “Oh, this was the solution there.” Only by creating some space is a solution possible.
Another technique is what’s called test-driven development or contradictory development, which basically, first you establish what the thing should do, what it needs to do, and then you can test whether you succeeded. Then you can think about how to implement it. Rather than first trying to find a solution, find like, well, how will you know what the real solution looks like, so we’re not passing it by?
Craig: Just so people are clear, this is not just applicable to obviously defined problems. You can apply what you just said to romance. I look at those two people, that’s what I want. Now, problem, how do I get to that?
John: It really comes down to– We often talk about it. What is the thesis, and challenging that thesis, basically. How will I know that this thesis has been sustained or disproven? You got to define those terms first. Often, we’re looking for a solution without actually looking for how we’ll know a solution is satisfactory.
Last one is related to rubber ducking. It’s the Feynman technique. It’s named after Richard Feynman. Basically, you try to write an explanation in a way that a child could understand it. This is a thing we do all the time in movies, is basically simplify it to another character, and you’re finding metaphors, you’re finding ways to explain a thing so that you can actually get a non-expert to understand what it is that they need to be looking at.
Craig: Which requires you to really understand whatever it is and really be able to break down the problem. Ideally, a character can break a problem down and describe it in this matter very quickly. There are times in movies where somebody comes along, you’ll see this in movies that involve military confrontations, where somebody gets in there and there’s chaos all around, they’re like, “What do we got?” Ba-dup, ba-dup, ba-dup. Fast. No one has time to go on and on. If you have somebody in the middle of chaos taking their time, that’s just comedic.
John: It is. The thing I hope to never hear again is explain it like I’m five. It’s just so cliche.
Craig: Redundant and everybody should be explaining everything like we’re five.
John: That instinct is correct. It’s like finding the way to have a character explain something in a very clear way to a person who’s not an expert in it is incredibly valuable. Yes, you can overdo it at times, but you look at shows like Succession that we love so much, they’re able to take really complicated things and sometimes they’re talking up at the very high level so we don’t actually understand, but also fundamentally, they’ll bring it down when it’s important. The Big Short does it so well.
Craig: The Big Short was designed to teach us something important that was complicated. When you have shows like Succession, people like Jesse Armstrong are really good at understanding when they should not talk to you like you’re five because they want you to be impressed with these people who all know stuff you don’t. But when they need you to understand it for you to connect to the drama, somebody’s going to explain it to somebody like they’re five.
John: There’s times where they’re talking in high-level technical jargon, equivalent of like science-y. It’s gobbledygook to us, but we believe that they understand what it is. What’s crucial is that when there’s a problem to be solved, they’re able to then put it in terms where you can actually understand what the stakes are and what the solution feels like even if we don’t understand exactly how it all fits.
Craig: Yes. I don’t know why getting this person to call that person is going to make a difference. All I know is I have 20 minutes to get that person to call this person and the first person is in space, and the second person is in a submarine. What do I do?
John: Yes, exactly. You’ve made it really clear. All these techniques we’re talking through are ways you can think about solving problems in real life and that’s why they feel real and meaningful. Here, because of Scriptnotes, we’re really talking about how you have your characters address problems and create scenes where they’re solving those problems in ways that are interesting and engaging and hold the audience’s attention, and let us into our character’s thought process, which is so hard to do sometimes.
Craig: Yes, let us experience the frustration. Let us experience false celebration. Sometimes our characters have figured it out. No, they haven’t. That’s a terrible feeling. We’ve all felt that in life where we thought we solved it and then we’re like, “Oh no, we did not.”
John: It crosses every genre. It’s in comedies, it’s in mysteries, it’s in dramas. Everything is going to have problem solving. Every horror slasher movie is like, “How are we going to get through this?”
Craig: How are we getting out of this woods?
John: That’s what makes it so universal and so relatable. It’s making sure you’re setting up those problems in ways that can force our characters into really good problem solving. Cool. Speaking of problem solving.
Craig: Segue man.
John: Segue man. We’re recording this on Tuesday. Who knows what the status of the world is at this point.
Craig: What world?
John: This president has proposed a 100% tariff.
Craig: I like that, “this president.” That’s a great way to do it.
John: A 100% tariff on movies produced outside of the United States. As we were recording, Jon Voight came out with this other thing which is explaining more about it. Craig, can you briefly for people who are not aware, what is a tariff and why does it actually not make any sense here at all?
Craig: A tariff is a tax that is levied on imports.
John: Imported goods.
Craig: When some product crosses our border, it goes through customs. At that point, the government can levy a tax upon it. The people who are selling it, sell it to us, but when we buy it, that purchase price, there is a tax. We, on our side of the border-
John: The consumer of it.
Craig: The consumer pays the tax on that material. That is the cost of getting stuff from another country. If there is a tax on, for instance, steel from China. China does not pay more. They don’t pay that tax at all, but the people who import it do. The idea, of course, is to say, “See, we’ve made it too expensive to import this. Now you have to use the steel here.” Of course, what in the [inaudible 00:44:42] is that? The price goes up dramatically because they can, because the supply goes down and the demand is the same. Importantly, tariffs are on products.
John: Things that were put on a ship and they crossed it– it went through customs. A DVD that was manufactured overseas and brought in, you could apply a tariff.
Craig: Yes, you can. What you can’t do is put a tariff on labor that has occurred entirely in another country. Look, we can talk about how horrible runaway production has been for California in particular. Right now, finally, Sacramento seems to be taking this seriously. Seems to be. I just want people to understand, when somebody goes to make a movie in the United Kingdom, they fly there and then everybody who works there is paid there. All the things that they use to build sets, to dress people are there. The thing that comes back is a card with digital information? What is there to tax exactly?
John: That’s one of the reasons why specifically when power was delegated to the president to enact tariffs and things like that, movies were excluded as were books, things that are just intellectual property.
Craig: It just don’t work that way.
John: All that said, let’s talk about–
Craig: I can’t believe Jon Voight doesn’t know this.
John: Let’s talk about the instinct to make movies and television shows in the United States, which is not a bad instinct. No, we love that. To incentivize production within the United States through incentives, through taxes or other incentives, and to make sure that we have a sustainable industry so that continue to make things in the United States.
Craig: This is a good topic for a show about problem solving. Let’s start with what is going on. What has happened? Places outside of California, in the United States, notably New Mexico, Georgia, Louisiana, provide tax incentives. The way those generally work is that they say, “Hey, everybody that works here and all the money that you spend here on things, the sales tax and the income tax so that the people earn from labor, we’re going to provide back to your production. The thing is you’re powering the economy just by being here and by putting income in people’s pockets. We want you to come here, so we’re not going to tax you on that stuff. We’re going to give that back to you.”
Those schemes, they’re literally called schemes, function in various ways. Typically, there is a percentage that they give you back, and there is often a cap. The state, or whatever the municipality says, once we’ve covered this much money in this stuff, we stop, we’re done because we just don’t want to give everybody everything. What ensued and what has ensued is a race to the bottom. This is the problem.
Listen, people get very angry about globalization. Well, that occurred. I understand the anger at the underlying problem, which is capitalism will draw everything down to the cheapest number, which means drawing labor down to the lowest amount of expenditure and enriching corporations as much as possible.
This is why California has resisted this sort of thing for a while, and it’s why a lot of people fundamentally are uncomfortable with this because what we’re saying is the only way to help working people, especially the working crews in California is to just give a ton of money to rich corporations.
John: Let’s talk about when incentives work properly and how they’re structured. If I can find a link to it, there was a representative from the DGA who explained on Kim Masters’ podcast in a really good way, what the new California incentives are supposed to be. The incentives are paying people back for their labor costs. Basically saying, “You employed these people in the state of California. That’s a good thing. Therefore, we are going to refund money to you based on that.” That’s really what it comes down to.
One of the challenges we face is that California labor costs are higher than they are other places. Sometimes that’s why you move to cheaper places to shoot, including overseas, which is really what this focus is of this, which is becomes hard to do. When you’re shooting a movie that is set in Philadelphia, but you’re shooting in Croatia because it’s just cheaper to shoot in Croatia, that’s a harder problem to solve.
Craig: It is. That said, there are costs inherent to shooting far away. A ton of people have to be shipped out there, including most of your key cast.
John: Your department heads.
Craig: Your department heads. There’s also just typically a duplication of efforts. You’re going to want to find what’s called a services company. If you’re shooting something in Croatia, you have a production company, you have your script, you have your production, and then you need to hire a Croatian production company that puts you in touch with the Croatian folks that you’re going to need to work on your movie or your show. People don’t want to do this.
Unless you’re making a movie about Croatia, nobody wants to go far away from the setting of the movie. It is disruptive, and it has really hurt so many people who make their living off of these production trades here in Los Angeles. Listen, it’s dollar to dollar at some point, who knows?
John: Cost of currency, everything else.
Craig: It’s impossible to figure this stuff out, except on the largest level. What we know is the argument’s not even close for the companies. For my show, it was like, this is the difference. You either can make it or you can’t.
John: With Canada, the dollar exchange is part of it, but also the incentives.
Craig: The exchange rate is definitely an issue, and that fluctuates, but the incentives are absolutely a part of it. What happens is you start to get even inter-provincial competition to see, okay, well Alberta knows that they don’t necessarily have as wide and deep a pool of crew as BC does. They increase their incentives to bring stuff, in comes The Last of Us, more people are trained, more people are hired, better for Alberta.
We need to do something about this, and the one thing I think we just can’t afford to do anymore is clutch our pearls about the fact that this is putting money in corporate pockets because they’re doing it anyway. No matter what we do, they are either keeping the money in their pocket and not giving it to us, or they’re getting money to replace the money they give to us. One way or the other, it’s happening. I would rather that we replace the money in their pocket and have them give it to us here in Los Angeles.
By us, I mean all of our grips, all of our electric, all of our catering, all of our teamsters and our seamstresses, and every single person that works on– construction is an enormous part of this, and it will power our economy. It’s important to do. No, we’re not going to get there by tariffs. We’re going to get there the other way, it seems.
John: I want to end this on a happy note, which is a movie that I’m helping out on is a very low budget, but based on low budget, was going to probably need to shoot in Mexico, even though it’s set in Southern California, and went through a whole bunch of stuff and then was able to get the California tax credit, and so is now going to be shooting in California, which is incredible. It’s the right thing for the movie, it’s the right thing for the state. It shows off an underappreciated part of our state. I’m incredibly excited for it. It was a slog to get there, but it happened.
Craig: It’s lucky because it’s a lottery right now.
John: It is.
Craig: You literally win or lose randomly.
John: It’s also in tiers based on what size production you are.
Craig: That’s the other catch here, because the way the new schemes that are being proposed are structured, it really does aim more towards lower budget or middle budget things. I think there’s a great argument to be made that the large budget things employ more people. It’s one of those things of like, “Well, do we want to give five different people X units, or we would like to give one person 10 X units?” I don’t know.
John: It’s really tough. The other reason why we can’t say tariffs mean a different thing, if we’re going to slap a fee on things that were shot overseas, they’re going to slap a fee on anything that we try to show overseas too. Nobody wants a trade war over this.
Craig: It is literally other than– I’ll even take it back because we don’t really export technology. We import it because we build it all overseas.
John: Our film and television industry is a giant exporter of culture.
Craig: It is the only exportation that we have beyond some limited crops, I think, and in some limited cases, some fuels. I can’t think of an industry that is just so exportive. We don’t need sledgehammers to fix this. We just need will and the unions need to buy in. It seems like they are. Unfortunately, they have to agree to somehow make the corporate paymasters happy. Talk about not letting the perfect get in the way of the good.
John: All right. It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a person, her name is Hannah Ritchie. She has a great blog called Sustainability by the Numbers. She also has a podcast called Solving for Climate. She is a data scientist and writer who mostly talks about climate change, sustainability, all those things. She’s a person, as a data scientist, she actually crunches the numbers to figure out what is useful and what is not useful. She can talk about solar panel productivity and where the changes are there and the choices you can make individually, but also the choices systematically that governments make about doing things right.
She’s Scottish. Craig, you will love her accent.
Craig: Oh, Scottish.
John: She’s a really smart Scottish person.
Craig: I love the Scots.
John: I love them so much. Specifically this last week, she wrote about ChatGPT and there’s this meme going around of how much energy a ChatGPT query goes up, and it is so incredibly negligible. people say, “Oh, it’s 10 times as much as a Google search is.” A Google search is nothing, it’s a grain of sand.
Craig: Aren’t statistics fun?
John: Statistics are fun. I’ll point people to this blog post, but really I’ve learned so much reading her, but also listening to her podcast, talking about things like they’re putting sales on freighters now. Which is so cool.
Craig: Smart.
John: They retrofited because–
Craig: You save that much. If the wind blows, you turn your engine off, you save some money.
John: The expert they had on to talk about it was talking about how right now they’ll optimize for speed a little bit because sometimes it’s like, “Well, we’ll burn less fuel and go slowly and it’s worthwhile,” but with the wind blowing, when you don’t need it in a hurry, use the wind.
Craig: Absolutely. Imagine that.
John: It’s some stuff that feels like science fiction, but it’s actually people, actual scientists are doing it. Hannah Ritchie, Sustainability by the Numbers is her blog, but the podcast is called Solving for Climate.
Craig: I love that. I’ve got a delightful one cool thing, and it really is. It’s so cool. Our good friends at Rusty Lake-
John: Oh, yes. It’s another game. Another-
Craig: A surprise. [crosstalk] Yes. Our friends at Rusty Lake out there in the Netherlands who make all the wonderful Rusty Lake games, it is their 10th anniversary. To celebrate, they released a surprise game called the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show. Those of you who play these incredibly surreal games know that there’s Mr. Crow and Mr. Owl and Mr. Rabbit, and they are all very sinister. True to form, they just knock it out of the park.
It’s just like, hey, Mr. Rabbit’s Magic Show. There’s going to be 20 little puzzles and each one is– it’s just really, they’re really easy and you’re like blowing through them and then shit gets weird. Of course they supply a whole other game inside the game with incredible challenges to do. Getting and completing the whole thing, it felt like a full complete meal and extremely Rusty Lake, very intertextual. They’ve built quite a culture over there. It seems like such a nice place. I want to work there.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: It seems like they have fun. They seem really cool. Congratulations to Rusty Lake. You guys and Fireproof Games who make the room games are my favorite iOS game makers.
John: Fantastic. I forgot to mention this before it actually happened, but I will say thank you to everybody who stopped by our booth at PAX East, the big game convention this last weekend in Boston. We were there with Birdigo, which is our game on Steam right now. I’m going to say great because it actually hasn’t happened as we’re recording this. I’m resuming it went fantastic, but I want to thank everybody who visited our booth and signed up and downloaded our demo for Birdigo up there.
Craig: Oh, I love that.
John: It’s so much fun. We made a little banner or something.
Craig: Nice work.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced my Drew Marquardt and Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you need an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. There’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Actually, we didn’t answer any questions today.
Craig: No, we didn’t.
John: We did some follow-up, though.
Craig: We must have an incredible backlog of questions.
John: Drew talk to us about the question backlog we have.
Drew: We do. We have some great ones that I’ve got in store.
John: We had four on the workflow today, which we didn’t get to because I’m always keeping an eye on time.
Craig: Sure. You know I love an all-question episode. It’s so much fun.
John: We’ll get there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a weekly newsletter we have called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about on the episode today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.
Thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You let us do this every week, which is so much fun. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on Egypt and Jordan and my troubles through the tombs. Craig, it’s nice to be back with you here in person.
Craig: Welcome home, John.
John: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. I am back from two weeks off the grid. I actually, literally, I put the out of office email thing. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t open my laptop.
Craig: Love it.
John: It was good.
Craig: I need that.
John: You should do that. I know you traveled to Spain for last of–
Craig: To work.
John: It was work work stuff. Craig, I’m going to encourage you to find a time and just say– because the world did not fall apart and like Drew and everybody else, they stepped up and they just did stuff. I just said like, “Just to handle stuff as best as you could handle.”
Craig: Or maybe the world falls apart.
John: Maybe it’s fine.
Craig: Whatever. I’m not funding crucial research into chromosomal repair. I admire you for flinging yourself across the globe. I have come to find travel so exhausting, so exhausting to the point where just even like, “Oh, we’re just going to do a one hour hop somewhere, a short flight.” I’m tired. There’s nothing about going up and down that exhausts me and going this last trip to Spain and then the UK and then back to LA again, I was just– oh man, I was knackered.
John: You were knackered.
Craig: I was knackered. You fling yourself. It was just you and Mike.
John: Just me and Mike. I thank God– This is our 25th anniversary. That’s the reason why we took this trip and thank God we get along well because we were with each other for 17 days solid. Literally never apart.
Craig: Melissa and I, I think our secret because apart–
John: You never see each other.
Craig: 17 days out of the year, I would say we love our independence and then we come together and then we like to go to our corners and then come back together again. I don’t know if I can spend 17 days straight with anyone. I love being alone. Oh my God, I love it. You guys close quarters, 17 days straight, grouchy, I assume from jet lag.
John: Not that grouchy.
Craig: Not that grouchy.
John: No, we don’t get that grouchy. We also we can recognize each other when like stuff’s happening. Here’s what I’ll say was different about this trip is it was– generally Mike plans our trips and he’s responsible for everything. This time we went to travel agents like, “Make this happen.”
Craig: A travel agent.
John: We went to the travel agent, who then went through a safari company, Expedite company for that. We had handlers at every set because we were going to the Middle East and we’re two gay men going to the Middle East. I was going to ask put us in a bubble wrap. You expressed some concern.
Craig: For you. I can envision concern for me.
John: I’ll say it all went really well.
Craig: That’s great.
John: We had to make choices to help us.
Craig: Yes. You weren’t wearing rainbow t-shirts.
John: We weren’t. Honestly, it’s helpful that Mike and I can be red as brothers. We weren’t pretending to be anything, we weren’t.
Craig: Nor were you necessarily in a situation where you thought, “Oh, we’re going to attract unwanted attention.”
John: Yes. We also had somebody with us at all times. We had a handler who could meet us at the airport and we also always had a guide for where we were. In Egypt, that’s an Egyptologist, and that’s a whole fascinating thing where it’s a licensed thing who you have certifications and tests and stuff like that. They could do things that people can’t do. That was great. I wish we had equivalence of that here because our tourism industry is just nowhere near as sophisticated as Egypt is.
Craig: It’s so funny you say that because every time I find myself driving along Hollywood Boulevard and I see how many tourists are there, I think “Why. Why are you here?” Did just dumped them out of a plane and we’re like, “Enjoy.”
John: We stick them on a van and unlicensed undertrained-
Craig: Good luck everybody.
John: -with maps to the stars.
Craig: With maps to the stars. It is true, in other countries there is because tourism is so vital. Obviously there is tourism to United States. I think New York must be and San Francisco’s probably huge.
John: LA’s probably number three.
Craig: LA’s up there.
John: Orlando’s also probably high.
Craig: Orlando must be. LA/Anaheim, the LA metro area must be pretty big and people go to– but it’s not as big of a wedge of our economic pie as tourism is probably for Egypt.
John: I will confess that, while I was in Egypt, I did a ChatGPT question, an 03 and one of the detailed questions, “Can you compare tourism into Egypt as a share of the economy, versus specifically Los Angeles or New York?”
Craig: What did you get?
John: It’s like 20%, 25% of Egypt’s economy, tourism it’s crazy.
Craig: It’s insane.
John: It’s 1% to 2% of LA County.
Craig: No wonder there’s a rather robust tourism industry there to help people. I think it’s great. Sometimes because I hate traveling, I don’t like people that romanticize traveling and people who are like, “I just like going places and I don’t know where I’m going. I just like find things.” I’m like, “I want to know where I am.” I’ll love to wander, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to just guess. I’d like to have a vague sense of wander.
John: This sounds like an advert on ChatGPT, but I’ll tell you the one other thing I did do-
Craig: Oh my God, you’re ruining the climate.
John: We had this PDF that travel agency had put together. Like, “Here’s basically all the stuff that’s happening. Here’s the itinerary for things.” The PDF was such a nightmare to read through, where are we? I gave it a ChatGPT and it’s like, “Read this, tell me what I’m doing tomorrow.” It would come back with an answer. Like, “Here’s what happens tomorrow.” It’s like, “Thank God someone can actually just tell me the answer to this.”
Craig: Someone?
John: Someone. Someone told me. I didn’t have to ask Mike. I could ask this. This animated object.
Craig: One day Mike will be as good as this.
John: As this. I also point by the camera on my phone and say things like, “What is this thing I’m looking at?” It could tell me. God, that’s the near future here.
Craig: I am so dedicated right now to going nowhere. I think in part it’s a reaction to how much travel I do because of the show. A lot of it is this weird inside Canada travel just all over. Boy, a year of it.
John: I’ll say, I haven’t had to travel for work a lot yet. That’s probably why I actually had some buffer in me where I could sustain it. It was 25 hours of travel to get back from Egypt yesterday. That’s a lot.
Craig: Wow. Cairo flies direct to–
John: Cairo to Dubai, the wrong direction, then Dubai to LA.
Craig: Oh, that hurts.
John: It does hurt. Ouch but we made it.
Craig: You made it and you’re back home.
John: It’s great. I will say that as I said in the main episode, the tombs are great. The wonders of the world, I get why they’re a wonder of the world. Petra is gorgeous. I was in the Wadi Rahm, which is the Red Sand deserts of Jordan where they shot Lawrence of Arabia and The Martian. It’s incredible. It’s mars. It’s nowhere on earth. It’s great to be able to do that. The other thing I did on this trip, which was helpful is every day I would just write down what actually happened.
I would just write and write and write and write pages of it and actually just helped me process what had actually happened. Sometimes just a thing happened and I couldn’t even tell you afterwards, and now I actually do have a recollection if I could cross as what it actually felt like.
Craig: Oh, it’s so healthy.
John: It felt healthy.
Craig: This is what I did when I got to Madrid. I got into bed. And then at some point–
John: You brought with you your game.
Craig: My steamdeck. Oh, by the way, John.
John: Yes.
Craig: This is what this segment should have been about.
John: Please.
Craig: I’ve completed Baldur’s Gate 3 on honor mode.
John: At D&D. Before I left you were trying to do it. Congratulations, Craig.
Craig: It is now complete. I did everything. No cheating took on every boss did it all.
John: Congratulations.
Craig: Golden dice. Actually matters more to me than pretty much anything else I’ve done.
John: Craig, one thing I genuinely admire about you is that you do not feel any shame about pursuing your hobbies and interests and spending time on those.
Craig: Oh my God, no. I don’t know why I don’t do it more. Granted, a huge part of it is dissociating.
John: It’s a way of coping, but I honestly feel like even if you– you’re in a no show.
Craig: Some people get very guilty about saying that, how much time they spend on a video game. I’m like, “Why are you feeling guilty? What better way?” People don’t feel guilty about watching television shows.
John: One of the books they read on this trip was Four Thousand Weeks, which you’ve probably heard of. Four Thousand Weeks is basically that’s how long your life is just 4,000 weeks, which is scary when you think about it. It’s like, “Oh, that’s not that long.” That’s 80 years and that’s how long you have. It’s become a test of like, “Well, is this the way I want to spend one of my 4,000 doing this thing?”
What the argument the book really makes is that the thing is you’re doing as hobbies, which is you’re just doing them because you enjoy them, those are probably things you should be spending your time doing.
Craig: The stuff. Also we’re just ill-equipped to handle it. We cannot mentally handle this problem. Our own fatality just short circuits everything. Because if you really stop to smell the roses, you will go insane. If you really stopped to go, “I am present in this moment and feeling my life slipping by as time elapses and I move closer to the 4000th week,” you’re going to fall apart.
John: I did some of that though on this trip. There were times where just like, we’re on a Nile cruise and so for four days I was just looking everyone go by on the Nile. A river cruise, rivers are like trains but slower.
Craig: Slow trains.
John: What’s also different is that people build things right next to the river. People live next to the river. The trains, you’re going through places like no one wants to live next to the train.
Craig: It goes by so fast you can’t see anything anyway.
John: Here you can see like, “Oh there is some guy washing his clothes in the river. There are some kids playing. Look, there’s some goats.” That was great.
Craig: You occasionally will dock and one of the passengers will mysteriously be murdered.
John: We watched Death on the Nile in the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile which is so much fun.
Craig: First of all, amazing. Congratulations. That’s the first part of this trip I’m envious of, fully. When you say you watched–
John: I watched the old one.
Craig: Thank you. No offense to new one.
John: Michael Green and everybody else.
Craig: The old one is spectacular.
John: Just the silliest movie.
Craig: Ridiculous. So campy. Crazy.
John: Just wild. Also like Hercule Poirot has no reason to be. It’s all accidental. Doesn’t seem particularly concerned about how many people die in the movie.
Craig: Never. He’s a full sociopath.
John: The movie was actually shot at the hotel we were staying at.
Craig: Amazing.
John: We watched like the first half of it and then we had dinner and I was like, “Oh, this is right where they shot that thing.” It was so much fun. They’re like, “Oh, they’re at Abu Simbel.” We were there this afternoon.
Craig: Is that where the rock falls and smashes?
John: That was at Temple of Karnak.
Craig: Temple of Karnak. Yes.
John: Abu Simbel has the two giant Ramesses the second. It’s where Mia Farrow is crazy and he yells at them.
Craig: Mia Farrow. Boy, I love a classic Mia Farrow. I love a Death on the Nile. I love a Rosemary’s Baby.
John: It was fun. Anyway, Egypt. Jordan, great. Taking time off. Great. Love it. Huge fan of taking some time off and just doing things you want to do.
Craig: Glad you’re back.
John: Thanks.
Craig: Time to play some D&D.
John: We’ll do it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thank you. Bye.
Links:
- The Production Assistant’s Guide to the Lunch Run
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Note On Long Takes by Aidan Moretti
- Video tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza
- Donald Trump Says He’s Pursuing 100% Tariffs On Movies Produced Outside U.S. and John Voight’s proposal
- Sustainability by the Numbers by Hannah Ritchie
- Solving for Climate
- The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show by Rusty Lake
- Birdigo
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.