Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/back-in-the-fyc).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 625 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s finally here. It’s awards season. We’re so excited. What does awards season mean for you, Craig?

**Craig:** It means losing to Succession a lot.

**John:** Yeah, that’s probably going to happen.

**Craig:** It’s going to be quite the blitzkrieg, and well deserved. It would be tougher probably if I didn’t love Succession and I also didn’t know Jesse Armstrong and know him to be a fantastic person and an amazing writer and leader of his whole staff. It’s their final season. I think we’re all getting swept under the tide. I’ll cry onto the lapels of Mike White, or perhaps he’ll cry on mine, or maybe a shocker.

**John:** Yeah, it could.

**Craig:** But I doubt it. We’re going to be at the Golden Globes. Because of the strikes, everything got squished into… We’re going to be at the Golden Globes and then a week later, AFI, which is nice, because it’s not a competition. Then Critics Choice, and then the Emmys. It will be one crushing loss after another.

**John:** Smear of awards.

**Craig:** I’ve been trying to practice my face when they announce that I lose multiple times. What do I do with my face? Because I’m worried that somehow-

**John:** You’ll have to have a reaction.

**Craig:** … my sadness will leak through, although I’m not sad. But I also don’t want to be a goof about it. You have to practice a very neutral…

**John:** That makes sense.

**Craig:** “Well done, Jesse.” That’s going to be my face. “Well done, Jesse.”

**John:** Absolutely. For folks at home who cannot, of course, see this, because this is an audio medium, there’s a little nod there. It’s a good acknowledgement. “That makes sense.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “That’s about right. Yeah, that’s about right.”

**John:** Now, for 99% of people who listen to this podcast, they don’t have to worry about their faces during awards season. They get to enjoy the movies and the TV shows and read the scripts or take a look at the scripts that were behind all these amazing achievements.

**Craig:** Via your app, I believe.

**John:** Yeah, so all these things are available in Weekend Read, but I also will put links in the show notes to the original pdfs. I think it’s sometimes good for us on this podcast to look at the pdfs, to look at what they were like on the page, literally the layout on the page, because we talk about this a lot in the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Everybody’s different. It’s always interesting to see how people do things.

**John:** We’ll be taking a look at a lot of the For Your Consideration scripts to see what lessons and trends we can learn from the movies that got made this past year. We’ll also answer some listener questions about writing routines, shared credits, and more things like that. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, how do we feel about lab-grown meat, and would we eat human flesh if it were created in a lab? Craig is laughing, but we’ll get the real answers only in the bonus segment for premium members.

**Craig:** I’m laughing and suddenly hungry.

**John:** Strange, that.

**Craig:** Mm, humans.

**John:** We recorded this before the calendar has flipped to January, but some of the last news coming out of December was the possibility that Paramount is up for sale or that Shari Redstone had considered selling Paramount. Warner’s has apparently had a conversation about it. I don’t feel good about Warnamount.

**Craig:** Very good portmanteau.

**John:** I didn’t create that, but I hear it being said.

**Craig:** Para Bros.

**John:** Para Bros. Para Bros.

**Craig:** Para Bros.

**John:** I don’t want Warner’s to buy Paramount. I don’t want another Disney-Fox situation. I don’t know how that avoids happening.

**Craig:** I’m not sure Warner Bros shareholders want this either.

**John:** The stock prices were down after, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bit confusing, because so much of what’s been going on post any of these mergers is that the company that acquires the other company then has to manage all the debt, because these are all leveraged. Apple, I suppose, could do it. Everybody else needs to borrow money to buy these companies, with the understanding that it’ll pay off in the end. But in the short term, you do get saddled with a lot of debt. Discovery bought Warner Bros and then was saddled with a lot of debt. It seems counter-intuitive that they would want to buy someone else. The upside, I suppose, of buying Paramount is you also get CBS.

**John:** Yeah. That’s one of the unique situations is that basically you’re not allowed to own two broadcast networks, but Warner’s doesn’t own a broadcast network.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** They’re one of the few existing studios that could legally conceivably buy Paramount/CBS.

**Craig:** They could buy it. There are a lot of great Paramount… Star Trek alone-

**John:** It’s great. It’s a good franchise.

**Craig:** … has been kicking off a trillion dollars over the last decades. Look, I don’t understand, because I don’t buy companies or sell them. But Paramount seemingly has been on the block forever. The thing that I wonder about, and it’s the same thing I wondered about with Disney and Fox, is the lot itself. What happens? Fox is a smallish lot.

**John:** But it’s incredibly prime real estate.

**Craig:** Prime real estate, but it’s smallish. You could argue, let’s keep it, and let’s use the sound stages and all the people that have offices there. Paramount is massive.

**John:** Warner’s is massive.

**Craig:** So is Paramount.

**John:** You were saying what was a small lot?

**Craig:** Fox.

**John:** I think Fox is a huge lot.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think of it as a small lot.

**John:** I think of it as a much bigger lot than Paramount, actually.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I do.

**Craig:** Can you quickly scan this up and let’s see?

**John:** Let’s take a look. We’re going to look at Google Maps here.

**Craig:** In my brain, Paramount just goes on and on and on.

**John:** But having picketed at Paramount a ton, you really can walk around. You can’t walk around the north perimeter of it, because it backs up against the cemetery.

**Craig:** I’m looking up sizes here. Paramount Studio, their lot is 65 acres.

**John:** 65 acres.

**Craig:** 65 acres. Now, let’s talk about Fox lot by size. The Fox lot is 50-plus acres, so Paramount is bigger.

**John:** It’s bigger.

**Craig:** It’s bigger. Now, 65 acres, by the way, or 50 acres, in the middle of either Hollywood, like Paramount, or Culver City-

**John:** The west side, yeah.

**Craig:** … or I guess West LA, like Fox, that’s worth a gazillion dollars. There is another argument, which is you’re buying real estate, incredibly valuable real estate. That’s terrifying, because it’s our history. It would be so sad to see one of the great studio lots torn down and parceled out into condos.

**John:** Yeah. Getting back to beyond the real estate, I was concerned about Disney buying Fox. It felt like there’s just one less place to sell a movie-

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** … one less place to sell a TV series, and that it should never have been able to go through. I didn’t see Fox really struggling that much. They still had franchises. They were still able to do stuff. I also see Paramount doing stuff. I’m frustrated that it feels like we’re setting these impossible standards for what a studio is supposed to be able to kick off and generate, and ignoring the fact that there’s cycles and ups and downs, and there’s hits and misses, and Paramount could be on the uptick.

**Craig:** It’s possible, although as a movie studio, it has felt a bit more abundant over the last 10 years even. When you and I started, Paramount was a full buyer like anyone else. Over the last 10 years, it just felt like their output dwindled down to Transformers, occasional Star Trek, not a ton else, Indiana Jones.

**John:** But now Indiana Jones is Disney.

**Craig:** Now it’s Disney, yeah. It did feel like it was shrinking. I agree with you that any time there’s one fewer buyer, that’s bad news. On the other hand, it is counter-balanced by the fact that there are all these other buyers that didn’t exist before, so Apple, Amazon, Netflix.

**John:** A24.

**Craig:** A24.

**John:** The other thing I would say is CBS as a brand is really good. It’s still an incredibly powerful broadcast networks. The shows I actually watched are broadcast shows: Survivor, Amazing Race, Big Brother. Those are all CBS shows. They tend to skew older.

**Craig:** Also sports.

**John:** Sports. It’s got huge sports.

**Craig:** The sports alone is a pretty big deal. If your argument is, hey, if you’re a big studio, you should have a television network, yeah, I guess that makes sense, but I don’t understand. The one thing that people have suggested is maybe the government would thwart it. Doesn’t seem like they ever thwart it.

**John:** This FTC I don’t think would’ve allowed Disney and Fox to go.

**Craig:** I don’t know. They’ll probably push on it and challenge it and delay it, but it seems like they never stop anything.

**John:** They actually just stopped Adobe from buying Figma.

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is.

**John:** Adobe was trying to buy-

**Craig:** What’s Figma?

**John:** They are one of the big design software places.

**Craig:** Then okay, something there.

**John:** The push for the FTC is always whether consolidation is bad because it hurts prices or does it hurt competition overall within the industry. I think that consolidation could hurt worker power.

**Craig:** It’s a little tricky, because hurting worker power is probably not enough, although that’s certainly our interest. There are still a lot of competitors in Hollywood, whereas Adobe buying Figma maybe reduced the pool of… If it increases their market share to 80%, now you’ve got a problem. But nobody has 80% market share. The only company in Hollywood that would even be whiffing at some kind of monopolistic market share would be Netflix.

**John:** Yeah, agree. If Netflix were to try to buy something, I think there would be-

**Craig:** Netflix would not be able to buy something. I can’t imagine that would go through.

**John:** Some follow-up. A couple of sessions ago, we talked about that I was going to start learning the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s actually really interesting. I’m working with a tutor but also going through some books and learning some stuff. There’s just things you never think about. The “huh” sound, we have “huh,” but we also have “wh,” and so the different between “who” and “hue” is really strange. I’m actually really enjoying learning all that stuff. In particular, there’s a chart you can see, which shows all the sounds that are in all the languages, basically where they fit into the mouth. There are sounds that humans can make that for whatever reason don’t show up in any languages, which I think is really interesting.

**Craig:** Maybe they just weren’t considered valuable for some reason or another. Obviously, some languages have clicks and things like that, but no one really has [odd, indescribable mouth sound]. Nobody does that, which is probably for the best. There are certain sounds in other languages that we can copy, even though we don’t use them without too much difficulty, like [clicks tongue], like that one. Then there are certain sounds, for instance in Icelandic, where you’re like, “I don’t know how to do that. That’s a hard sound to make if you haven’t been raised natively.”

**John:** They can be hard sounds to make and also hard sounds to hear. Classically, if you’re not raised in a tonal language, it’s very hard to hear the tones and stuff if you’re trying to learn Mandarin as an adult.

**Craig:** You can hear them, but you can’t hear the shades in between them. It’s hard to discriminate. It’s that thing where someone’s like, “No, no, no, I said this, and you said this.” You’re like, “You just said the same thing twice.” “No, I didn’t.” I can understand. There’s also these funny things that happen, particularly with British English compared to American English, where a lot of British people will drop the Hs, famously, so, “‘Ow are you doing?” But then they will add Hs or aspirations where we don’t. Instead of “HBO,” a lot of people in Britain say “haych-BO”. “Haych-BO” is kind of incredible.

**John:** Or classically, also adding the aspirated H before a W, so “h-where.”

**Craig:** “H-where.”

**John:** “H-where.”

**Craig:** “H-where are you going? H-what?”

**John:** “H-what?” We’re making up accents. There’s clearly patterns of things that go together. The thing I’m also, was a little bit brain melting – I think I’ve mostly gotten the way through it – is the two TH sounds in English.

**Craig:** “Th” /ð/ and “th” /θ/.

**John:** Yeah, which you think you understand fully, and then you realize almost the same word can have a different thing. As you’re writing stuff out in phonetic things, are you using the theta, or are you using the other one to show it.

**Craig:** “With” or “this.”

**John:** “Withdrawn” doesn’t have the voiced.

**Craig:** “Withdrawn.”

**John:** You could say “withdrawn.”

**Craig:** You’d be wrong. “The” is the simplest one. It’s not “the.” If someone said “the,” it would actually be kind of incredible.

**John:** Imagine you’re a speaker who doesn’t speak a language with those sounds.

**Craig:** It’s bizarre.

**John:** How do you tell those apart?

**Craig:** That’s the con of learning English. On the plus side, the easiest conjugations ever.

**John:** Love it. So good.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** If you learn the sounds of English, you can get through a lot of other languages pretty easy.

**Craig:** Also, if you’re not a native English speaker, and you say, “I would like the bagel,” no one’s going to be like, “H-what?” They’ll say, “Got it. Here’s the bagel.” It’s not that far off.

**John:** I’m also just always impressed by deaf people who learn spoken English and just how challenging that must be to figure out what all the sounds are without being able to have the feedback mechanism.

**Craig:** It is fascinating to see where the difficulties are, because there are certain things that we apparently need aural, A-U-R-A-L, feedback for to get. Typically, when deaf people are first learning to speak out loud, it’s very nasal, and certain sounds are just clipped or not there, because there’s not a feedback loop. Nasality is a really interesting thing that you just, I don’t know, I guess hearing, you auto-correct. Strange.

**John:** Strange stuff. That was one of my goals for 2024 was learning that. But Mike and I made a joint list of goals for things, like 24 things we’re going to do in ’24.

**Craig:** You guys are so organized.

**John:** We’re so organized. I would just encourage people to think about that. It’s good to set couple goals stuff and things like we’re going to do bar trivia at least four times in 2024. I love bar trivia.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** We’re going to see at least two shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Make a list of not homework stuff, but things like, “Oh yeah, let’s actually make it a plan to do those things.”

**Craig:** That sounds great. Did you ever read the story of that couple that was like, “For this year we’re going to have sex every day.”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t do that. That just seems like too much, because sometimes I think couples are like, “We should do it. We should do the sex every day.” I feel like I would probably make it eight days and be like-

**John:** We did it for a month.

**Craig:** You did it for a month?

**John:** For a month, and it was a lot.

**Craig:** Around Day 22, was it like, “Time to make the donuts.”

**John:** I think it was actually a useful thing for us to do, just as a reminder, a prioritization of that.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty interesting notion.

**John:** It’s sort of like those folks who do Whole30, where they don’t eat any refined sugars or any of that stuff for 30 days. You do actually come to appreciate other things because of it.

**Craig:** I guess you can do anything for… You know what I’ve stopped doing?

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** I stopped biting my nails.

**John:** Good. That’s terrific.

**Craig:** I have a friend who has a habit that she’s trying to break. It’s a similar sort of habit. Just to be an ally, I was like, “I’ll do it with you.” I had been biting my nails my whole life. Every now and then when I find my nails resting on my tooth, and I’m like, “Nope,” and I take it out. But I’m having to learn how to use nail clippers. I thought maybe it would just get it all in one shot, but it doesn’t. You have to go around.

**John:** Yeah, like the rest of us.

**Craig:** I’m like a little child learning to walk, with my nail clipper.

**John:** You’ve stopped the auto-cannibalism of biting your fingernails.

**Craig:** We will discuss that in the bonus segment.

**John:** In the bonus segment. Let’s take a look at some of these scripts that are now available For Your Consideration. I remember when Big Fish was out for awards stuff, it was just at the early days where they were starting to really send out the scripts and have people read the scripts. They would mail printed copies of the script or the bound things. I had a pdf on my website for stuff, but pdfs weren’t as big of a thing to be shipping around. Luckily, now, in 2023, 2024, basically any script that’s award-eligible is going to have the script out there, which is great resource for people.

These are all theoretically the final shooting scripts. But let’s talk about that for a second, because they sometimes are, and they often aren’t. If you were on set, shooting the last day of that production, versus the script that we’re reading, it’s probably not the same thing. It probably doesn’t have those color change pages or the partial pages. Stuff will have changed.

**Craig:** Sure, and probably more will change then in the editorial process. One of the things that we have to do when we’re putting our stuff together is say, “Okay, do we leave this scene that we deleted? Do we leave it in? Do we leave this longer version of the scene in?” Generally, I do. The stuff that I will amend to conform it to the final edit usually has to do with things that involve meaning, or if there were things that I was just like, “It actually wasn’t that good. I’m glad I took it out. It doesn’t need to be in the script.”

**John:** Or if you reshot something, and it really does not resemble the final version of that. In Go!, there were reshoots and whole sequences that are no longer.

**Craig:** Exactly. For a movie it’s much easier, because there’s just less of it. You can spend the time conforming it. You can make it almost a transcript version of the final cut. For television shows, it’s a little more annoying. My general thing is go with the shooting script, do a version where you unlock the pages. Maybe I take off the scene numbers. They’re not particularly useful for people. Remove the asterisks and the production headers. Then here or there, make your choices about whether or not you want to conform it.

**John:** A friend of ours worked at a studio. One of his jobs every awards season was to go through and put together that final script that would actually go out there, because sometimes there were little changes or things that were in the final movie that weren’t in this. He had to conform those things. That’s a tough job. You’re literally going through scene by scene, watching it and then making sure the script matches it.

**Craig:** That’s right. If there is a line that happens on the day, because the director and… Let’s hope the writer is there, although usually not. But let’s say it’s the writer-director. Let’s say Rian Johnson says, “Oh, I have an idea. Instead of saying what I wrote, say this instead,” and they do. That has to now be written into the script or else it just doesn’t have that great line. “Here’s Johnny” in The Shining was not in the script that day for him to do, but you’d want to have that in the script.

**John:** You would want to have that in the script. The only time it’s come up in my arbitration experience, there was one project I worked on where the script had gone through a lot of drafts, and other writers had touched it, and I saw a cut of the film, and then I got the final shooting script for the arbitration process. I had to go back to the Guild and say, “This is not the movie. This is not the movie I actually saw. There’s a ton of scenes that are in this script that are not in the movie at all.” They went to the studio, and the studio agreed, and so they created a new script, which was much more a transcript of what the film itself was.

**Craig:** A reflection of what it was. There’s this thing that when you arbitrate for credit, what the arbiters are asked to do is credit the final shooting script. That’s what the credit is for. Sometimes there isn’t one, because people just started doing stuff or figuring things out on the day and not writing it down, or I do this all the time when I’m editing, where I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to add a line and just put it on this person’s back, and we’ll loop it.” What about all that? Yeah, you do need a conforming process, especially for credit.

**John:** The scripts we’re looking at, some of them may be closer to what was actually shot on the day. Some of them are combined, optimized versions of what the plans were. But I think they’re all really useful. They do reflect the writers’ original intentions behind these things.

I broke these down into a couple categories. I wanted to start with scripts that just do a great job of establishing the setting. When we do the Three Page Challenges, we’re always looking at, do I know what kind of movie this is, do I know what the world is like.

I thought we might start with The Holdovers by David Hemingson. If you take a look at this first three pages here, “Day – December 18, 1970.” Credits on the top. Then we’re going through a sequence of scenes that are establishing this boys’ school on the East Coast. The Choirmaster is leading the kids through Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. I just thought it did a brilliant job of establishing the world of a 1970s boys’ prep school and what the feeling and the time and the season was.

**Craig:** Yes. As you go through, I really appreciate the fact that there is specific music that is called out. The music itself gives you a signal that as you move through these moments, you’re not moving through against dead nothing. It’s amazing how even in our minds, if I just took that line out, even if I just said, “The Choirmaster gives each boy his note, and they sing,” and I didn’t say Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, the rest of this would be very just eh. But now I can hear it, and I’m moving around, and I’m seeing everything that he wants me to see, and I understand the tone of it, which is that it’s set against this choral music. Very well done.

**John:** It’s a great start here. By the end of our three pages here, we’ve met our main hero, our main antagonist. We’ve met Crandall, who’s the main kid we’re going to be following. We’ve met the teacher, Paul, who’s Paul Giamatti’s character. We have a sense of what this world is like. There are some surprises they don’t want us to spoil in the film. But we get a really good sense of the world this film is going to be taking place in.

**Craig:** You know my obsession with wardrobe, hair, and makeup to describe characters. I’m just going to read the description of Miss Crane. “Miss Crane, a bright-eyed, middle-aged secretary, holding a plate with a napkin over it.” Now, I don’t know much other than age and bright eyes. But then, “She smiles, lipstick on her teeth.” Yes, yes, I can see her now. The thing is, we don’t have to describe everything. We just have to describe the stuff that we think will matter to the reader to get the essence of who a person is. There is something about a bright-eyed, middle-aged secretary with lipstick on her teeth where I go, “There’s about a thousand different people who could play you, but I see all of you.”

**John:** Having seen the film, I don’t remember that lipstick being on her teeth, and it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter.

**John:** It gives us a sense of who she is as the reader, who doesn’t get the visual otherwise.

**Craig:** It helps you with casting. We’re going through quite a bit of casting right now. When we look at auditions and things, we’re not looking for the scene. We’re looking for the intangible stuff, the little moments that go, “They’ve captured the essence of something.” Now, once we cast somebody, it’s new, and now we change things. There may be somebody that didn’t need the lipstick on the teeth.

**John:** Next up, we’re taking a look at All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh. This did, again, I thought a really good job of establishing a place, a time, a setting. It’s modern day. It’s London, but we’re outside of London. We’re looking back at London. This script goes a very long time before a character speaks, and so we’re just watching Adam going through his day, trying to write, not really writing. We’re establishing the world inside of his apartment, this bubble that he’s sealed himself in. “His flat is comfortable and well-looked after. Furniture is all carefully selected and the shelves are lined with books, DVDs and records. Adam lies still for a while, more than a while, watching the light fade from the room. He sits up, switches on a lamp. His stomach grumbles.” We’re just getting a sense of place, time, space in these initial pages.

**Craig:** Then hallelujah, some sound. The final paragraph of this second scene is, “He looks down at his hands resting on his belly and rubs his thumb gently against his finger. The room is quiet enough to hear the sound of skin stroking skin, such a strange, sensual sound.” Thank you. Then the transition is, “Adam opens the fridge door, the ‘buzz’ of the appliance loud in the silence.” This makes me so happy. Anybody out there who’s still doing the whole, “Don’t direct on the… ” Yes, yes, direct. Direct, and use sound as much as you can.

**John:** The first dialogue occurs between our two main characters, Harry and Adam, on Page 3 here, which is this initial very important meeting. Very awkward dialogue. But Haigh does this thing where he does explain what’s happening inside of Adam’s head, which is always a debate, how much do you offer up here. Page 4 here, “Harry lifts up the bottle. He really does seem fucked. Adam wants him gone.” “Adam wants him gone,” that’s a playable thing. It’s totally appropriate to have it there. I know there’s screenwriter teachers who would say, “That’s not a thing. You’re inside of his head.”

**Craig:** Why shouldn’t you be in his head? I’m in my characters’ heads all the time. The important thing is whatever you say either should inform them about what they’re feeling and thinking or give them a motivation. But it’s perfectly fine to give them something that they don’t… It’s not a want or an action. It’s just context, because then it maybe helps. Instead of putting in parentheses, “Lying but trying not to be caught,” have a little bit of space in there, like, “This is a lie, and no one is going to realize it’s a lie until blah blah blah.” Whatever you want to do, as long as it helps them get context and removes questions. Otherwise, there’s a lot of questions. When there’s a lot of questions, there’s the danger that somebody that doesn’t know will answer them incorrectly.

**John:** It’s also important to look at, this initial conversation, the scene description is breaking up the conversation a lot, which is giving you a sense of what the pace of this is. This is not a rat-a-tat-tat, we’re zooming through here. There’s a lot of pausing and reconsidering on both sides.

**Craig:** Yes, and these pages also look good. If you have all this dialogue without any commentary in between, it feels amateurish, and it feels like there are missing opportunities. It just feels like talking at that point.

**John:** Next up, let’s take a look at May December. Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik have the story credits. Samy Burch has the screenplay credit. I like these pages a lot. A lot is established and set up very, very quickly. We are meeting our central characters, the two woman who we’re going to be following throughout the story. We don’t know context behind who Elizabeth is talking to in these initial scenes, but we get a sense of what Savannah, Georgia is going to feel like. “Shady oaks drooping with Spanish moss frame historic blocks of Georgian and Victorian townhouses. American flags hang from exteriors. A high school marching band assembles near a park block.” We’ve established this butterfly imagery that’s going to be happening throughout here.

**Craig:** Theme.

**John:** Theme, theme.

**Craig:** Theme.

**John:** Once we actually get to Gracie Atherton-Yoo’s house, there’s a party being set up here. We get some sense of what Gracie’s like. One of her first bits of dialogue I really love is that, so her husband, “Joe takes a beer from the fridge and heads out,” and Gracie calls out, “That’s two.” You know something about the relationship from that very first little exchange. Once he’s out barbecuing, “Joe mans the grill. There are so, so many hot dogs.” Great. Love it. I really enjoyed setting stuff up for these initial pages.

**Craig:** What can we say? Good writing is good writing. Part of what good writers do is manage to use every ounce of every page without filling it with text. Every page looks balanced. It is not blanketed in words, and yet so much information is being imparted in such clever and interesting ways. It’s incredibly visual. You can kind of smell it. You can kind of hear the chirr of the insects outside. You are drawn in, because it is providing you with the… Like a puzzle that’s at the exact right level of difficulty, even though you may not know what’s going on, you know the movie knows you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s okay, so you feel like, “Ah, yes, take me along on this journey. You will reward me.” It’s just good writing.

**John:** The experience of watching the film is very much like the experience of watching the script. You are a little bit confused, and you’re also confused how much do characters really know about each other, like what do they know versus what I do. That’s thematically what the story is about, so it’s completely appropriate.

**Craig:** It’s funny how often people do get hung up a little bit on, “I don’t know what’s going on.” It’s changed over time. If you watch movies that are from, let’s go back to the ’80s, you’re almost never confused about anything. Everything is really explicit. You go back earlier, it’s absurdly explicit. It’s just, “I am now going to the store. That is my so-and-so.” We’ve gotten way more sophisticated with that stuff, and people are keeping up just fine.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. In the spirit of keeping up, Saltburn, Emerald Fennell, really jams through a lot in its first couple pages here. Just stark imagery. Cigarette cases. Match striking. A man’s mouth. “I wasn’t in love with him,” is the first line spoken, which becomes a repeating theme. We are zipping through a bunch of flashback scenes establishing Oliver and Felix, the object of his affection, getting a sense of what this world is like, the college quad, just how stunning Felix is, and what a magnetic focus he is. We’re zooming through a lot, and then by the end of Page 3, we’re going back to the question, “But was I,” quote unquote, “‘in love’ with him?” And then making it clear that this must be some retrospective, something bad has happened, that we are narrating the story.

**Craig:** We’ve got a little prologue. The prologue is letting us know who the problem is, the object of desire. It is also these kinds of voiceover prologues I often think of as Holden Caulfield prologues, where the narrator is trying to tell you something, and already you kind of suspect he’s just lying, he’s not telling the truth, or he’s spinning it to himself and you at the same time. You don’t trust him already, which is great. Even though people say, “She was also directing it,” lots of direction on the page. Tons of direction on the page, as well there should be.

**John:** We have a whole category for the “we ares” and “we sees.” This is a “we are” and “we see” script.

**Craig:** Side note, Oliver Quick is the best Charles Dickens name that Charles Dickens never wrote. It’s up there with Oliver Twist. I want there to be an Oliver Quick and Oliver Twist movie.

**John:** I would also say Oliver Quick is the name you can get away with if you’re setting up in that first couple pages, but if halfway through a movie you’ve made a character named Oliver Quick, you’re like, “Wait, what is this?”

**Craig:** “Hold on a second. I’m sorry. Did you say Oliver Quick?”

**John:** You would stop if you met somebody like, “My name’s Oliver Quick.” Like, “No, it’s not.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Let’s bring it down a notch there, Quick.” But it’s tonal. You do get it right up front, even if no one’s saying it out loud. You get it. You the reader get it. It’s a delicious name.

**John:** I set up that we’re talking about “we hears” and “we sees.” Let’s go to Eric Roth, a well-known, established writer, and a Martin Scorsese. Never heard of that.

**Craig:** I don’t know either one of these guys. Who?

**John:** Killers of the Flower Moon is their film. As we look at the shooting script here, Page 1, we’re establishing two-column dialogue, which is a choice you can make when you have things that are going to be subtitled, and it’s important that you have things in both languages. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once did the same kind of thing with its Chinese dialogue. Here, we’re establishing these places and the initial setup for our story here. First line of scene description, “We see eyes through cracks and openings of the bark.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** “We see slices of faces peering in.”

**Craig:** Wait, no!

**John:** “We hear-”

**Craig:** No! You can’t. Reddit says you… Oh, wait. For the 4 millionth time, if you hear someone, if we hear someone say you can’t see “we see,” “we hear,” “we” anything in a screenplay, print the script out. Don’t hit them on the head, but threaten to. We don’t want you to cause violence. But nothing wrong with instigating a little bit of fear. If anyone’s like, “It’s okay. They’re established,” here’s the bigger point. It’s not that Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese are established. God knows they are the definition of established. It’s that no one cares. No one cares. There is no more attention paid to “we see,” than there is, I don’t know, the word “exterior.” It’s just not relevant to any of us. Stop talking about it. Who do we talk to?

**John:** We don’t even talk to anybody. I think we talk to ourselves-

**Craig:** We talk to ourselves.

**John:** … on a weekly basis, and eventually, people will learn about this.

**Craig:** We talk to ourselves. I’m also really interested in this numbering system.

**John:** Our numbers are here, P1, P2, P3.

**Craig:** Is that prologue?

**John:** Maybe this is prologue, because it does get back to 1 eventually.

**Craig:** That’s what it is.

**John:** This prologue does look different.

**Craig:** You know what I suspect happened?

**John:** This was added on?

**Craig:** Yep, because if you start a script and you number it, then you lock the numbers. Oh my god, if you change a scene number-

**John:** Oh god, no.

**Craig:** … the entire system falls apart. Now someone’s like, “I have an idea.” I’m going to try and be Martin Scorsese. “I have an idea. I have a great idea. We should do a prologue.” We have a prologue that’s going to have a ton of little scenes. Normally, if you put a scene in front of one, you don’t call it Scene 0, you call it A1. Then the next one would be B1, C1, D1. Too many damn 1s at that point. I actually feel like using this method makes total sense. I’ve never seen it before. But I suspect that’s what happened.

**John:** I suspect that’s the case, because also these are formatted differently than the rest of the script, because these have, instead of scene headers, it’s, “Cut to Osage Princess Contest.” Wow, this is a really strange screenplay format. Then once we get to Page 5, it’s much more conventional.

**Craig:** This looks a little bit like a first AD went into maybe what was considered three scenes, because what happens is P1 is an interior, P3 is an exterior, P2 and all the other Ps are non-scene headers typically. They’re more “cut to, cut to, cut to.” But a first AD knows, “I got to treat each one of these as a scene, because they’re in different places with different people, so I’m just going to go through and number these myself.”

**John:** Scrolling ahead, there are cases where things that we would normally do an interior/exterior scene header are just big uppercase sections. I’m looking at Page 13, where Scene 12 is listed as, “Mollie emerges from Beaty’s office. Ernest goes to her.”

**Craig:** Right. There are other indications that maybe this is the combination of different people doing it. For instance, on Page 10, Scene 6, the scene header is underlined; Scene 7, not. You have Eric Roth, great writer who has his druthers. You have Martin Scorsese, who has his way of doing things. And then I really do think there was a third person working here to help transcribe ideas. This is an example where format is not relevant at all, because guess what? This thing’s been nominated for 4 billion awards.

**John:** What I don’t want listeners to do is to over-learn lessons from this thing, where it’s like, “Oh, I can switch up my scene headers all the time, chaotically.” No one set out to do this.

**Craig:** There’s no advantage to it. But on the other hand, no one’s going, “Sorry, I got to Page 3, and one of the scene headers was underlined, so we’re passing on Killers.” No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think you are.

**John:** I was very excited to finally see the script for Barbie, which is Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. We’ve had them both on the show before. They are absolutely terrific. I love the opening to Barbie and how it set up why Barbie matters and what an iconic change she was on the landscape. We see how they write up the 2001 sort of homage to this. Again, “we hears,” “we sees,” and it’s very much captioning the experience what it would feel like to see the movie. It’s not afraid to show things that are not in evidence, because they help us understand how things feel.

**Craig:** I will say again, the whole thing, the reason we harp on the whole “we see,” “we hear” is not because people use it and other people say don’t use it and it’s just annoying to us. There’s value to it. This, “We go,” “We see,” “We see,” “Finally, we see,” “We float-”

**John:** “We float above the Barbies.”

**Craig:** I understand what’s happening. The point is, the camera is a point of view. A lot of directing is figuring out where do you put the camera. And a lot of figuring out where to put the camera is whose perspective is this from? Who matters here? Do I want to imply isolation? Do I imply etherealness? Do I want the audience to feel voyeuristic? Do I want it to be somebody’s clocking of things? “We” is the indicator that it is us.

**John:** It’s the audience getting to see things through the camera, through where we are.

**Craig:** The camera is moving in a way that is for us, like we’re ghosts that are moving through and around, being steered by an invisible hand, to show us things. That’s valuable.

**John:** “Barbie takes her slide down to the pool. Because she can!” Exclamation point. “Barbie’s Dreamhouse. Kitchen. Day. She eats a nothing breakfast, drinks a big glass of nothing. Barbie Margot stands at the top floor of her house, waves to her friends and then improbably sails through the air and lands in the driver’s seat of her car.” It’s just giving you a sense of what this is going to feel like and what the tone is. Conveying tone in a script is absolutely crucial. It’s the relationship of the filmmaker to the audience and the writer to the reader. They have to mirror each other.

**Craig:** It’s a very clever way of imparting the rules of this world without explaining the rules of this world. I’m not a big fan of scenes that explain the rules. Sometimes you have to. In The Matrix, it was so nuts, somebody had to say, “Here’s a rule. If you die in the fake world, your body dies in the real world, because the mind can’t live without the body.”

**John:** You have to say that, because otherwise-

**Craig:** But it doesn’t even really make sense, but it doesn’t matter. They needed stakes, and it works, and I love the movie. But you had to say it. Here, once Margot Robbie steps out of the heels and reveals her feet, we’re like, “Okay, I get it,” because there’s so many different ways of saying a doll is going to be represented by a person. What I learned from this is she is a person, she is flesh and blood, but also, she follows general rules of actual Barbieness, which is, I can teleport if a kid teleports me, and my feet are fixed, and I don’t really eat or drink, and that’s part of the fun.

**John:** For sure. I want to take a look at two scripts that are just really complicated setups and seeing how they’re conveying a ton of information on the page. Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham. We take a look at these pages here, they are establishing in a sequel, basically characters we’ve already met before, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening here. This initial sequence is Gwen Stacy on the drums, establishing what’s happened with Miles Morales is the time before this, “Miles watching his uncle Aaron die… Miles’s dad Jeff unwittingly pulling a gun on his own son.” There’s so much happening that’s really complicated, and yet it’s making clear this drum sequence is going to get us through all that backstory and getting us up to speed with where we’re at in Gwen’s world and Gwen’s dimension of Earth-65.

**Craig:** While already creating mystery with the repetition of, “He’s not the only one.” We understand there’s more coming here, especially when somebody says, “You think you know the rest. You don’t. I thought I knew the rest, but I didn’t.” That’s a really good way of warning the audience to expect the unexpected. It’s also a very clever way of saying, “Hey, we have to undo finality.” Sequels are hard, because a good ending feels final, unless it’s really meant as like Chapter 1 of the continuing episodes. Dune sort of ends like that, because we understand there’s more book to tell. It doesn’t have to conclude. But the Spider-Man multiverse movies, Across the Universe [sic] concludes. So now you have to unwind it without making the audience feel like they got baited and switched. What they’re doing is saying, “Hey, empathize with her. She got baited and switched. Let’s find out how and why.”

**John:** On Page 2, there’s a choice to… Em Jay has, “Gwen! Gwen! Yo! Def Leppard!” The first “Gwen” is tiny font. Then it gets a little bit bigger, little bit bigger. Sure.

**Craig:** Do it all the time. I do it all the time. Love it.

**John:** Then we’ll get to Oppenheimer. We had Christopher Nolan on the show. He was delightful to talk through his process and his writing process on this. We talked a bit about, he had to find ways to describe these impossible-to-visualize things of quantum mechanics. There are sequences in the script that really reflect a jumble of images that get you to what that point is. A thing we didn’t get into too much on the episode was that he doesn’t like to reveal anything that the audience wouldn’t directly know. If you look at the script, they’re very spare. There’s not a lot of description of settings, of wardrobe, hair, costumes. There’s not a lot of that. It’s very, very spare and efficient. Even places that we’re going to come back to a lot, like these two interview rooms, we’re not seeing a lot of details here. It works for this movie.

**Craig:** It works for him particularly because he’s in complete control of the process from beginning to end. Now, what it means is that Christopher Nolan is going to have to have some very long meetings with his department heads to explain what he sees. There are probably a lot of conversations with the actors.” But that must be part of his process. There is value in saying, “Look, actually, this information that I need you to know, I’d prefer to impart one-on-one, individually with you guys.” The other thing is, it saves space. This is a 195-page script. Now, right off the bat, what I notice is between scene headers there is not-

**John:** A second line.

**Craig:** … a second line. You can feel him trying to fit this into 200, because he is like, “Look.” He knows this is going to ultimately be a very long movie. If I make a choice to fully describe things, it will be 500 pages.

**John:** He was sitting in your chair. He said, “Listen.” He looks at a screenplay as a way to get his thoughts on paper and make it clear what it is he’s trying to do, but it’s also a sales document that he has to give to somebody and then see, “Okay, I understand what you’re trying to do here, and I’ll give you the money to make this movie.” If it had been a 250-page script versus cut off the A and B pages and it’s only 180 pages, but still, it’s long-

**Craig:** It’s a Scott Frank sized script, and that’s fine. Look, the movie is a long movie, but if it holds people’s attention, that’s great. Part of it is like, “Hey, you’re going to be here for a while reading. I’m not going to bog you down. You just won’t make it, so I’m going to save a lot of this.” It’s a very efficient way of doing it, which I think probably was necessary.

**John:** Something you probably don’t realize yet is that instead of third-person or second-person plural, it’s written first-person. Oppenheimer in the “I” in this. It’s strange when you first encounter it. Then you eventually understand, “Oh, I get why he’s doing that,” because he’s always the POV character in these things. In the scenes that he’s in, it saves him from typing Oppenheimer 5,000 times in the script.

**Craig:** Very long name. It also adds this kind of Doctor Manhattan style wistfulness, because he’s not narrating; he’s living it. But yet you feel like he is watching his own life and he is just describing what he does to us all in this slightly numb way. “I drop a beaker. It shatters.” That’s very Doctor Manhattan.

**John:** Yeah, it is. Last one I want to talk through is Cord Jefferson’s script for American Fiction. These are great-looking pages. They’re very much I think what we are talking about when we describe what looks great and classic and normal in a Three Page Challenge is that the pages are inviting, they’re very clean to read. We get right into the story too, from that very initial scene, when you’re like, “Oh, this is going to be about a Black professor confronting race,” and we know what the central theme and question of the movie is going to be.

**Craig:** Sometimes I see things. I’m like, “Oh, do I want to steal that or not?” Stylistically, Cord does an interesting thing. He capitalizes not only names as he’s introducing people, but of course, like we often do, capitalizes things. What we does in the capitalization of these things – typically they are for people – is he bolds that. I’m kind of interested in that.

**John:** It makes it easier to find where a character first appears.

**Craig:** It is interesting. Sometimes I look at stuff like that. Now, he also bolds and underlines his scene headers. I just bold mine.

**John:** It depends on the script. I’ve done it both ways. There’s something nice about the bold and underlined, because it just makes it really clear, like, here’s the next thing. It can look good on the page. He doesn’t need to do it.

**Craig:** You’re right. The pages lay out exactly as I would expect. It’s just well-written. You could tell.

**John:** You never flip to a page and like, “Oh Jesus, that’s a lot of text for me to tackle.” Some of these scripts do have just a lot of words on the page, and it’s a lot. In Cord’s script, you never get to a page that’s like, “Oh my god, I don’t have the strength to get through that page.”

**Craig:** Right. Also, American Fiction is a comedy. It’s not a raucous physical comedy, but it is a comedy, so you want a certain lightness in speed and pace. One of the things I like is this first scene is one and a quarter pages.

**John:** Yeah, not long.

**Craig:** It’s not long at all. It tells us so much about who Monk is.

**John:** And what the mood is in 2022, 2023 when this is happening.

**Craig:** And it’s funny. It’s really funny. It just cuts right to the heart of things. It’s just tight. It doesn’t need to dwell.

**John:** Let’s compare this to the first script we looked at, which was The Holdovers. It needed to establish this is what 1970s New England prep school feels like. Here, we don’t need to establish what the campus is like. We don’t need to see-

**Craig:** We just need to know he’s in the situation that we know about. You just get it right away. Also, the subsequent scene where he’s called on the carpet by his bosses and colleagues, again, funny and zippy. While this is happening, and Cord’s teaching us, okay, we’re actually in our world, this is incredibly topical and current, also, this is who Monk is, and it’s not like, oh, he’s just a victim of circumstance. He does have a problem.

**John:** He is creating his problem.

**Craig:** What I really thought was interesting about this second scene, you can see it across Page 2 through 4, is you don’t necessarily root for him. You want to root for him at first. Then you’re like, “I don’t know if I… ” There’s this great exchange where he says, “You’re under the impression that time spent with my family will take the edge off. I’m fine.” “You’re not fine. I saw you crying in your car last week,” which is really great and sort of makes us wonder if maybe Monk is actually problematic. He is, but not politically problematic, not philosophically problematic. He’s emotionally constipated. It is interesting to see how that unfolds.

**John:** We talk about how important it is to figure out where to come into a scene and when to exit a scene. On Page 2 here, we’re coming into this conference room scene quite late into it, which is great, but we automatically catch up to where we’re at. The first line is, “Well, it made some of your students uncomfortable, Monk.” The other 20 minutes that happened before this were not important.

**Craig:** There’s also a really smart choice. Sometimes you get to a point in a scene where you’re like, “Uh-oh, someone just started trouble,” and then you have to write the trouble. Now, what happens here, and Cord’s very clever about this, so Monk is a professor. He’s written a Flannery O’Connor title on the board that includes the N-word, but spelled out. A white student has a real problem with that, even though Monk is Black. Here’s what she says. “Well, I just find that word really offensive.” He says, “With all due respect, Brittany,” I wish I could talk like Jeffrey Wright, “With all due respect Brittany, I got over it. I’m pretty sure you can too.” She says, “Well, I don’t see why.” “Monk, who has been affable up until now, casts an icy stare at Brittany.”

Now, what Cord chooses to do is then cut to her storming out crying, and him shouting out, “Does anyone else have thoughts on the reading?” We know something went down in there. It’s better that we didn’t hear it. If we heard it, we might actually really start to not like Monk more than we don’t want to not like him. We might get confused about whose side we’re on. But right now, what’s important is, in our minds we go, “Okay, this guy’s got a problem. He’s a little hard on the students. But also, Brittany is kind of ridiculous.” It worked. It was a great elision.

**John:** Yeah. It also establishes our trust in the storytelling. This person knows what they’re doing. They’re going to lead us through a story. We’re in good hands. Hopefully, these were useful lessons for people. You don’t need to ape any one person’s style. You can see there actually is a range of really good scripts out there to read. It’s just important to read them and process them and see what actually fits for your own personal style.

**Craig:** Completely. Of note is probably that all these individual styles are expressions of something internal going on in each one of these writers’ brains that is unique, specific to them. That’s why some people want to do it this way and some people want to do it that way. It’s just how it fits with the way their mind works.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s tackle maybe two listener questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have a question from Tim L., who asks, “When do you write? Do you have a set routine or just when the mood hits you?” Craig, you’re in the middle of a lot of writing right now. What is your writing routine these days?

**Craig:** These days I’m being very productive, because we’re on a little holiday hiatus, so I’m back here in LA. I don’t have 500 meetings every day to go to for prep, so suddenly I’m like, “Wee!” I’m getting a lot done. We’re pulling into the station with just about everything for the whole season being done writing-wise. But typically, my process is to wait until I know what the scene is and what I’m supposed to write and what the beginning and the end is and what the turns are. I really wait until I know what it is. Then I wait until I’m so ashamed that I have to write. I am not a set time of day person. It’s incredibly unlikely that I will wake up and just start writing. That’s not how it works for me.

**John:** My writing routine, right now I’m mostly just doing the Scriptnotes book edits. It’s different writing than usual, but still, it’s getting the work done. It’s getting through that. I tend to have two or three writing sessions in a day. If I can write for an hour, I’ll write for an hour, go away, come back, write for an hour, go away. Doing the Arlo Finch books was the most routine I actually really had to establish, because if I didn’t hit 1,000 words a day, those books would never get finished.

**Craig:** You weren’t going to get there.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where I mostly learned, okay, this is just how I get the work done. When it’s stuff on my own for whatever, there’ll be moments where I know how to do this thing now, and I will stop everything and get that written down. In my 20s, that was a lot more possible to stay up all night and just follow the inspiration. I can’t do that now. It doesn’t work the family, but also doesn’t work for me. I’m ruined for a couple days if I don’t get a good night’s sleep.

**Craig:** I need to sleep. If I don’t, I’m a mess. I think we’re all a bit of delicate flowers. People that just go, “It’s 9:00 a.m.,” (imitates typing sounds) and then, “It’s 4:30. Kaching, I’m done,” suspicious. Deeply suspicious.

**John:** But we both have friends who can do that, and God bless them.

**Craig:** It’s terrifying, but I salute them.

**John:** Second question, Single Card writes, “I’m a UK writer with a question about shared writing credits. I’m the third and, fingers crossed, final writer on a film that is due to shoot in spring. The initial agreement was for me to share a written by card with the other two writers, but the work I’ve done on the script since that agreement is substantial enough that the producer has agreed to renegotiate on that point. He has offered a separate written by card for me, which would follow a shared written by card for the other two. In this instance, is it preferable to go first or second? Is there anything else I could be asking for regarding the credits to make it clear that I am the writer who made, by far, the biggest contribution to the script? This would be my first major credit, and I’m eager for this to be as reflective as possible of the work I have done on the script.”

**Craig:** Single Card, you are definitely a UK writer, as this is not something that happens here. The WGA litigates all credits and comes up with a single writing credit that may include multiple names, but it would always be on one card. In this case, it would be written by you and, A-N-D, so-and-so, ampersand, so-and-so, if they were a team, or three A-N-Ds. That is the maximum credits allowed for a screenplay would be three names. There would never be two different cards. Also, it would never be up to the producer. This is a very foreign concept to us.

**John:** The theories we can apply here from our experience is that in general, the writer’s name that’s listed first is considered the person who contributed the most. If we’re going through an arbitration, and we have to determine the order of, is it Writer C, then Writer B, then Writer A, whatever the first name that appears is, in the belief of the arbiter, is the person who contributed the most to the finished screenplay.

**Craig:** Correct. Nobody in the world notices or cares. It doesn’t really matter. I suppose if you were concerned about the ordering and where the prestige is, typically the closer you get to the final credit, the more prestigious it is. The Writers Guild, for instance, negotiated many years ago to get into the second-to-last position. It used to be writers, then producers, then directors. Now it’s producers, writers, directors, so we’re the second to last. Director is always the final credit.

But I got to tell you, Single Card, I’m not judging you here, but it is clear that this is your first major credit, because you’re dwelling on all of this. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. Here’s the way it works. Nobody cares what the order is. Nobody cares that it’s on a separate card. This will get hashed into an IMDb thing. That’s what people will see. Also, unless there is some sort of awards or things like that, in and of itself, it’s only going to matter to the business. Most people aren’t really paying attention. The business pays attention. You can certainly get more opportunities. But the ordering, separation of cards, you’re focusing on the wrong thing right now.

**John:** Yeah. Now, Craig, on the podcast, we’ve established why the US is an exception, that we are actually a true labor union for the writers of America. I guess what I’m confused about is whether any other international groups have come together to figure out writing credits for themselves, because there’s nothing that would stop a volunteer organization to come together to do this, the way the PGA credit is. Producers Guild is not an actual union, but they actually come together to determine the PGA producing credits on things.

**Craig:** Yes, but they only are able to do so because the companies allow them to. The companies and the academies basically said, “We’re going to outsource this dispute to you guys. We are allowing you to decide.” I’m not aware of any other organization around the world that adjudicates credits in a way that is legally binding per a contract with the companies. There are droit moral and first writer rights and things like that that exist as a function of law. I don’t know if anybody else does it like us. Our system is infuriating, but preferable to going hat in hand to a producer, because in this case, Single Card, I’m just going to take her or him at their word that they did do the vast majority of the work. But let’s say they didn’t, because writers say that all the time. We know as arbiters, we read those statements, and someone’s like, “I clearly did everything,” and then I read the scripts, I’m like, “You didn’t do anything.” Sometimes we get delusional about our contributions. If you’re buddies with the producer, if that’s your pal, does that mean you’re more likely to get credit, somebody else gets screwed over? It’s not good.

**John:** Not good at all. If you are a listener who actually does have information about how other international bodies may be determining credits, I’m just curious what’s out there.

**Craig:** It would be good to know, even if it’s an arrangement like the kind the PGA has, where it’s just a studio, or maybe like the BBC goes, “Yeah, we’ll let you guys figure it out.”

**John:** I could totally imagine something like BBC might have its own credit determination process.

**Craig:** It may very well, as it is a government.

**John:** Our animated projects that are not WGA-covered, they do have their own process, which is not always great.

**Craig:** Their own process is the producers decide.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, what is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I guess it’s a little late, because this is coming out in the new year, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It would’ve been good for you guys to know about this during the holiday season. But you know what? The holiday season keeps going. It’s a fun game that you can play with kids, families, large groups of parties, even eight, nine people. It’s a website called Gartic Phone, G-A-R-T-I-C phone dot-com. It’s just a twist on the good ole game of Telephone. The idea is, instead of somebody whispering something into someone’s ear, and then they pass it along, you draw a picture. Everybody draws a picture. Then the game figures out, okay, I’m going to send each one of you one of the other person’s pictures. You are going to write a caption that you think is what this picture meant to say. Then I’m going to send that caption to another person, who’s going to draw what they think that caption should be. It keeps going. Then at the end, it shows you the evolution of these things. It’s hysterical. It’s fun. It’s the kind of thing that is so absurd and silly and yet a delight. It’s totally free. You can do it on your phones, iPads, laptops. Fun for all ages. Gartic Phone.

**John:** Gartic Phone. The physical version of that that I play is called Telestrations. There’s these little whiteboard notebooks. The same idea, where on one page, you get a card with a prompt. You have to draw that thing, and you pass it to the next person.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Always a good game to play. Mine is also a game. It is Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Craig Mazin, for the last three years, coming on four years-

**Craig:** God.

**John:** … has been hosting a session, often weekly, playing D&D, of Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is an established campaign setting world. It takes place underneath Waterdeep, in Halaster’s tomb of madness.

**Craig:** Domain.

**John:** Domain of madness. We started on April 7, 2020. I looked back through.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I have an Apple note that just goes through session by session what happened in a session.

**Craig:** We literally started like, “It’s the pandemic. Let’s do this.”

**John:** Craig, I want to thank you, because you were the person who made this all possible. Pandemic happens. We’re like, “Oh crap, are we still going to be able to play something?” Craig figured us out Roll20, which is the system which we are all looking at the same map. We’re all on Zoom. We started playing this game. It was an absolute lifesaver. That group stayed together. We added a few members over the while. I can’t believe we are finally finishing it. By the time this episode comes out, we will have finished the Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

**Craig:** The final battle is upon you. What are we, 100 and some odd sessions?

**John:** 113 sessions.

**Craig:** 113 sessions. That’s a whole lot of DMing.

**John:** That is.

**Craig:** I’m looking forward to it. My hope is that we keep going, that we find another game. I would love to play. As much as I enjoy DMing, it would be nice to play as well.

**John:** We’ve obviously done this podcast for 625 episodes, so we have a sense of doing things every week for a very long period of time is natural to us. Did you have any anticipation that it was going to take this long to get through this?

**Craig:** No, because I played it as part of a group, and that group was just faster. I think every group is different. You guys were way more deliberate and liked to look everywhere. That group would be like, “Oh, we found the way down. Let’s just go. We don’t care. Next.” You guys, which is great for me as DM, you love looking in every corner. There were very few things where I thought, “Aw, they missed this cool part.” You guys kind of did everything, which was great. Obviously, I homebrewed a bunch of it. There were some things that I knew were boring that I got rid of or made exciting. But by and large, it was an incredible dungeon crawl. You guys milked it for all it was worth. There’s this other thing. Middle-aged men are notorious for not having friends, and then they die. Having friends-

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice.

**Craig:** … is important. Having this ongoing group is important. It is a stellar group. We have some pretty famous people in it.

**John:** We have some heavy hitters in there.

**Craig:** Everybody is distinguished in one way or another, and while we were doing it, became more distinguished. Kevin Walsh became a five-time Jeopardy champion while we were doing this. There’s all these things that are just happening. It’s been great, and I’m looking forward to the final fight.

**John:** I just wanted to acknowledge the years of work and also the fact that obviously you created and are showrunning this massively expensive TV project, but for the eight of us who get your world-building week after week, I want to thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you. It was a joy. It was a great thing to do. There were times where I was running sessions out of my trailer while we were shooting, at night. This was as much fun for me, and I’m glad it was… Advice for DMs out there: make the game fun for your players.

**John:** Crucial.

**Craig:** Crucial. You can’t baby them. They got to be a little scared. It’s okay that they get frustrated. But ultimately, if they don’t want to come back, you must be doing something wrong.

**John:** I think I’ve told you this before, but our neighbors moved in during the pandemic, and so we only met them a year after they moved in. They asked, “Why is that one light on in the second story of your guesthouse only on Thursdays, but until midnight?” It’s like, “It’s because I’m playing D&D.”

**Craig:** “Because I’m awesome.”

**John:** Because I’m awesome.

**Craig:** That’s why.

**John:** That is the reason. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on lab-grown meat.

**Craig:** Lab-grown meat. What a great name for a band.

**John:** I would be shocked if it’s not already.

**Craig:** It’s got to be.

**John:** It’s got to be there.

**Craig:** Got to be there.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so a thing I’ve noticed over really the last year but maybe a little bit longer is I see you eating more fake meat.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not necessarily an ethical choice, although I think it probably is more ethical. But I like it. I don’t need it to be like, “Oh my god, it tastes just like regular meat.” Sometimes I want a burger, and sometimes I think I’ll go for the Impossible Burger, which is quite [indiscernible 01:04:31]. Also, I love Morningstar chicken nuggets, like a child. They’re good. They taste good.

**John:** They taste good. All the things we’re describing so far are just synthetic versions of things, like pea protein.

**Craig:** Tofu, pea protein, seitan, etc.

**John:** Rearranged into things. But have you had any of the stuff that’s actually animal cells but put together in a lab?

**Craig:** I don’t believe I have.

**John:** I don’t think I have either.

**Craig:** Is it out there?

**John:** No, I don’t think there’s any commercial applications. It’d be at some special restaurant that might have it or something.

**Craig:** But they’re working on it?

**John:** They’re working on it.

**Craig:** They’re working on growing meat in labs.

**John:** I’ve not eaten beef or pork or lamb, any mammals for 30 years.

**Craig:** For ethical reasons?

**John:** I became a full vegetarian in college. It was just for economic reasons. We were just broke, and so we would just eat lentils all the time. I wasn’t eating meat, and so I just stopped eating meat. Eventually, I started eating fish again, and I started eating chicken. Then I just stopped there. It’s been 30 years since I’ve had any red meat. I need to think about, would I eat fake cow grown in a lab. Maybe, I guess. I have no great ethical issue with it.

**Craig:** You can afford it, and it’s not hurting anything, so probably worth a shot. You might go, “Oh my god.”

**John:** “Oh my god.”

**Craig:** At some point, what’s the difference? If they can make it exactly the same, why not?

**John:** Right, which raises the question of, if they take human cells and put them together in that way, is it cannibalism?

**Craig:** I would argue it is not cannibalism any more than shooting someone in a video game is murder. But the thing is, would I want to? Supposedly, just based on the composition of humans, it’s not supposed to taste good. We don’t have a good distribution of fat and muscle and stuff. The fat sits on top of the muscle. I don’t think we’re going to be good. Pigs are the most delicious animal, I have to tell you.

**John:** I wouldn’t know.

**Craig:** Listen. As a Jew, I can tell you, we got that one wrong.

**John:** I guess what is cannibalism comes down to, is the prohibition because you’re doing harm to a human being and eating them? Doing the harm would be the murder. Doing the other thing… Or is it like not eating pork, like it’s wrong to do it?

**Craig:** It doesn’t feel like there should be anything in between. There’s no consciousness there. They’re just making meat. If they were cloning people to be eaten, no, that would be terrible. But I think growing it, it’s just protein and stuff, and no one suffered. No one was deprived of anything. No opportunities were lost. No life was removed.

**John:** In our stories, we often look at cannibalism like alive, or there’s a plane crash and there’s dead bodies, do you eat the dead body, or post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** The old religions would occupy themselves with this question. In the Jewish faith, I can’t remember what the term is in Hebrew, but it basically means you have a duty to keep yourself alive and healthy as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. For instance, you are supposed to fast on Yom Kippur to atone for your sins. However, if you are physically frail and fasting would damage you, you’re not allowed to. It’s not just so you don’t have to. You’re not allowed to. I would imagine that they would be like, “Look.” I’m sure it doesn’t say this, but-

**John:** You really need to.

**Craig:** The Bible is very flexible. Among the various rules of how to purchase and sell slaves, I’m sure there is some sort of… Oh, the Bible.

**John:** Oh, the Bible.

**Craig:** Oh, Bible.

**John:** Save it for another bonus topic.

**Craig:** Yeah, that one will go over great.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Vultures Are Circling: Who Will Walk Away With Paramount?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-sale-shari-redstone-suitors-1235778461/) by Alex Weprin for The Hollywood Reporter
* [The Holdovers by David Hemingson](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Holdovers-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2dtdybqjrehxv9cwx9t4c/All-of-Us-Strangers.pdf?rlkey=g30scn7qf9nlspf49en2g7tub&dl=0)
* [May December by Samy Burch](https://film.netflixawards.com/assets/cms/films/May-December/Script/MAY-DECEMBER-Final-Script.pdf), story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik
* [Saltburn by Emerald Fennell](https://amazonmgmstudiosguilds.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Saltburn_Script.pdf)
* [Killers of the Flower Moon by Eric Roth & Martin Scorsese](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Killers-Of-The-Flower-Moon-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Barbie by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cd2bym23kd0kwsrysdpvi/barbie_final_shooting_script.pdf?rlkey=g3zc8e6vep6vf351p01zul6xt&dl=0)
* [Across the Spider-Verse by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller & Dave Callaham](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Spider-Man-Across-The-Spider-Verse-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b7a0udq0942rrbllaf0av/Oppenheimer.pdf?rlkey=frfag98w0o361drdhg36vhlo9&dl=0)
* [American Fiction by Cord Jefferson](https://amazonmgmstudiosguilds.com/app/uploads/2023/09/AmericanFiction.pdf)
* [Weekend Read 2](https://apps.apple.com/in/app/weekend-read-2/id1534798355)
* [Gartic Phone](https://garticphone.com/)
* [Dungeons & Dragons – Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage](https://dnd.wizards.com/products/waterdeep-dungeon-of-the-mad-mage)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Zach Lo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/625standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/creating-empathy-for-your-characters).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 624 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I were both traveling through the holidays, so we asked producer Drew Marquardt to dig through the archives and compile a character compendium. So Drew, what have you got for us?

**Drew Marquardt:** We’ve got three character-related segments that all kind of do with getting into a character’s head space and bring the audience along with them, and really focusing on scene work.

**John:** That’s great. This is probably top of mind for you, because I know you were just working on this characters chapter or chapters for the book.

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly. These are ones that just sort of popped out to me. We talk a lot about character on the level of the entire movie or the entire show, but it was really fun to dig into the specifics in the scene.

**John:** That sounds great. What’s the first segment we’ll hear?

**Drew:** First is a segment on point of view, from Episode 358. That’s, again, point of view for the whole story and also for the scenes and how to play with point of view and use it to your advantage.

**John:** That’s always a good lesson. What’s after that?

**Drew:** Next is the character’s inner emotional states from Episode 472. That’s finding the emotional truths in a scene and thinking about using verbs versus adjectives in terms of what a character’s doing.

**John:** That’s great.

**Drew:** The way watching someone cry doesn’t make you cry necessarily, but watching someone try not to cry and try and do something else can bring out a lot of emotion.

**John:** That sounds good. I remember that discussion of verbs versus adjectives is so useful in talking with actors, but it’s a good way to think about the characters on the page as well.

**Drew:** It’s a very actorly segment, but it all has to do with writing.

**John:** That sounds great. I see the third segment here is all the way back to Episode 151, so quite far into the vaults.

**Drew:** It’s one we don’t do a lot, because Craig’s audio in it is a little bit wonky, if I’m honest. But it sounds like he’s on the phone. It comes through really well, and everything he’s saying is gold, so I had to include him.

**John:** That’s great. It’s on secrets and lies, so why it’s important for your characters to be liars. Your point on audio is well taken. We’ve always prided ourselves on audio on this podcast, but I feel like over the last two or three years, people’s expectations of audio on podcasts has dropped in a weird way.

**Drew:** Interesting. Have you heard it in other places?

**John:** I have. Things that used to be good double-ender conversations where they would send an audio engineer to have a microphone there at the place, now they’re just doing it on Zoom. Even on The Daily, I hear some audio there that I can’t believe they’re getting away with. So I won’t feel so bad about Craig’s audio on this one.

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Our character theme continues with our bonus segment for premium members. Is that right?

**Drew:** Yeah, we’ll do a segment on single-use characters from Episode 467, including the greatest single-use character of all time, which is, of course, Edie McClurg in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s get into it. I will be back here at the end for the credits. Everyone else, enjoy.

[Episode 358 Clip]

**John:** Let’s jump ahead. Let’s go to our big topic of point of view. So this is a craft topic that I said we would talk about in some future episode. This is the episode we’re going to talk about it. So point of view I’m going to define as which characters in a story, movie story, a book, have the ability to drive scenes. Basically, that they can be in a scene by themselves and you will follow them. They can be a scene with strangers and you’ll still follow them. And in some stories it has a single POV, so only the hero can drive a scene.

Harry Potter is a classic example of, both in the books and in the movies, essentially, every scene has Harry Potter in the scene. And so you don’t get any information that Harry Potter doesn’t know. Other stories, you could follow anybody in them. So classically, an Altman film. Anybody who wanders through the frame, the camera could follow them and they could be in their own story.

Most films are going to have a mix of point of view. You’re going to have obviously scenes driven by your hero, but perhaps you’re able to cut off to the villain and see the villain do stuff and see scenes that are just driven by the villain, or a supporting character, a love interest. So there are different choices. But the choices we make have to be deliberate. And they really help tell the audience how to watch your movie.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. I always think about point of view as an answer to a question. With whom am I supposed to identify with in this scene? And by identify with, I don’t necessarily mean I want to be like them, or they are like me, but rather I’m with them. Even if it’s a villain, sometimes I’m with the villain because the villain is considering the glorious possibility of so on and so forth, and I am with them and their ambition or their desire.

The big thing that I think a lot of early writers and, frankly, a lot of not early writers, a lot of practiced writers, make the mistake of doing is not choosing a point of view in their scene. To me, there is no possible way to create a successful scene if you do not know whose point of view you’re asking the audience to follow.

We are, I think, only capable of having one point of view in a scene. One. That means everything that transpires ultimately is about one person’s eyeballs, essentially. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have other people feeling things and wanting things and doing things, but it’s from one person’s perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I think you make a distinction here which I think was important to call out is that we can talk about point of view for an entire work, so the course of an entire movie, the course of an entire book, so this book has a certain character’s point of view. It’s told from a certain character’s point of view. But every scene is like a little movie, and every scene is going to have a point of view as well.

And so you may have scenes in which two different characters, we’ve followed them separately, and we’ve seen them have separate scenes, they can do stuff, but once we’re in a scene with them together, you’re going to have to tell us which character’s point of view this scene is from. And sometimes you see writers not making that choice, or the writer may have made that choice, but as it was directed, as it was staged in front of you, it wasn’t actually done from that character’s point of view. And that is a real challenge.

And so that’s a thing, even at this last Sundance Labs I saw. I’ll describe this project in broad terms, because it’s not a movie that’s out there for people to see yet. It was a story that follows two young boys who have an encounter when they’re kids. Then it jumps forward 30 years. You see these two people as adults. We follow one’s person story. And then we cut to the other person’s story. And we know, because we’ve seen movies before, that eventually they’re going to meet. And in fact, they do meet. But the question is, when they meet, who is driving that scene. And interestingly, as the story was structured, as I was reading it, it had gone back to the first character before the two characters met. And so I was saying that I think it’s from this character’s point of view, because he controlled the last scene. The last person we saw driving a scene is the person we’re going to assume is driving the next scene.

And so we talked about like, well, if we took out that scene it would shift, and we would still be in the point of view of the second character. And that’s a crucial distinction. We know they’re going to meet, but literally, who are we going to meet first? Who is driving the scene?

**Craig:** Yep. Absolutely. And it is an important distinction to understand that there is the macro and the micro. And honestly, I find point of view to be the most useful thing to discuss when you are in the micro. Generally speaking the large questions are answered. Who is the star of the movie? Who is the protagonist? Who is the hero? And so on and so forth.

But then you have these little moments inside of movies where you have a real choice to make. Harry Potter is certainly, you’re right, it’s from the perspective and the point of view of Harry Potter. But then here and there you have these moments, things like a scene where Ron Weasley is watching Harry and Hermione together, and he gets jealous. That’s from Ron’s point of view.

A lot of times, the audience will make certain assumptions based on the way the scene unfolds. And one of the simplest assumptions they make is “The first character I see is going to be the person through whose point of view I will be experiencing this scene.”

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of Harry Potter, in most scenes we’re going to probably see Harry first and then we’re going to see the supporting characters. Granted, over the course of eight movies we’re going to be used to sort of seeing a different one of those characters first. But you’re not going to have any scenes that are just one character or the other character. There may be shots or little action sequences where we’re only following one, but in terms of bigger sequences, Harry is going to be around for all of those things.

If you are figuring out how to tell one story point from the book, you have to figure a way to visualize this information and keep Harry still centerpiece to all this stuff. There’s a great example in Goblet of Fire where quite late in the story, Harry is captured by Voldemort. And there’s sort of an information dump that Voldemort needs to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s an information dump that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily need to do for Harry Potter, but it’s very important for us as the audience to understand. And it’s important that Harry be part of that information dump, because he is our way into this world.

**Craig:** Correct. And in the writing of that section in the book, and then by extension, in the writing of the screenplay and the film that we saw, there is not just a metaphoric point of view but an actual point of view. An actual perspective. And this is a very useful thing to think about as well. When you’re writing these scenes, if you decide that this… I always start by like, “Okay, emotionally, whose point of view should we be honoring here?” And then once I have that understanding, then I start thinking about physical points of view, not just through eyesight but also through sound.

So, for instance, a slight variation on the first character you see. You may see a character first, and then we pull back to reveal that someone is watching them. Clearly, there the point of view is with the watcher. You may be on a person’s face, and you hear sounds, and you know that they’re listening. But the actual physical point of view, point of sound is really important in scenes. It’s important because ultimately that is a huge part of how the director directs.

There’s no other way to make those scenes work unless you understand point of view, because a lot of directing, just at least from the physical position, is angles. The question is what are the angles? Where are we looking? Where does the camera go? Who is it looking at? And why?

**John:** Last week we talked about the scene from Aliens. And if people watched the scene, you’ll see that even though Burke is doing most of the talking, the scene is very clearly from Ripley’s point of view. She is the one watching and trying to process what he’s saying. And the camera work shows that. It’s really favoring her, and it’s favoring her reactions to his lines rather than him talking. So it’s still her scene even though he’s the one providing the information and bringing what is new to the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can play games with point of view. You can make it seem like the point of view is one person’s and then it’s another. The great example of that is in the brilliant third act switcheroo in Silence of the Lambs where you think Starling’s point of view is one thing and it turns out it’s another and vice versa. There are scenes where two people have a long discussion, and you’re not quite sure whose point of view it is. And then they get up and they leave and then we reveal that a person has been listening, and they weren’t even in the scene, but it was their point of view retrospectively.

Also, point of view gives you an opportunity as a writer to shake things up. If you have a scene that maybe feels a little perfunctory or a little cliché, but it fits nicely into your story and solves a lot of problems, then maybe the answer for spice is point of view. How can you change that point of view? How can you make the point of view of that scene somebody that you wouldn’t expect? Suddenly, the scene becomes so much more interesting and fresh.

Here’s a cliché scene. An 11-year-old kid is called in on the carpet by the principal. So it’s the principal yelling at the kid scene. Maybe it’s from the point of view of the principal’s secretary or assistant. Maybe it’s from the point of view of another kid who is waiting to go in next to be yelled at. You find fun, interesting ways to make these things happen.

Also, maybe the answer to that scene is, 9 times out of 10, it’s from the point of view of the kid, because the kid is getting yelled at, and we identify with the kid. What if it’s from the point of view of the principal? What if we’re identifying with the principal as they struggle to try and make this work, and then the kid leaves and we stay with the principal after?

And that’s what point of view and those decisions get you. It makes you think about what the beginning and the end of the scene will be and who your eyes should be on and who their eyes should be on. It’s an indispensable way of approaching scene work. And I think we honestly just saved a lot of people a lot of money for film school stuff.

**John:** So let’s talk about the specific example you gave for a kid in the principal’s office and what if it’s the secretary’s point of view or the principal’s point of view. Those are all really great, fascinating choices. And if it was the first scene of your story, it would be really interesting and unexpected, because we expect it from the kid’s point of view, and it’s actually from the principal’s point of view or the secretary’s. But if it was the kid’s story, if it was about the 12-year-old boy, we sort of couldn’t stay with the principal’s point of view unless that principal is going to ultimately have storytelling power later in our movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the moment you decide to stick around with a character who is not established to be a major character, who is not established to have a storytelling power, you’re suddenly elevating that person. You’re saying like, oh, this is a person that we now have an expectation that we’ll be able to come back to and see independent individual scenes.

There’s maybe like 5 or 10 seconds where you can hold on a character after the main character has left before that character goes like, “Okay, there’s something bigger there.” There’s some expectation you’re setting.

Just yesterday I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This is not a movie review. The movie is nuts in a way that I had not anticipated. I really enjoyed it. Partly because it does really odd things. And one of the odd things it does is, there’s a young girl character who is not really established. You don’t see her. But suddenly, like 20 minutes into the movie, we’re cutting to her and her POV and she’s driving scenes by herself. And it sort of threw me at first. It was like, what is this movie? And then I remembered that the Jurassic Park movies always sort of cut to minor characters. They were always elevating these minor people who could suddenly do things by themselves. And this movie takes that and runs with it very fully.

But it becomes interesting later on in the story where she and other characters meet and it does get a little bit murky for me, who was in control of the story at that point, because it wasn’t clear whose POV we really were in in some of those scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great point you’re making that point of view, more than line count or screen time, determines the importance and the salience of any particular role in a story. The more point of view you afford a character, the more important they are, the more elevated they are in the tale. And you’re right. You can actually have quite a few people doing this. But when they all get together, then you do have a problem, because, again – I’ll just say it’s my rule – we as human beings really can only have one point of view at one time. And maybe it’s just the narrative is reflecting the biological. We have one field of vision. We have one field of sound. We can’t see two things at once, and we can’t hear two things at once. We hear a combination of things, or we see a combination of things, but that’s it. And it’s just our one view.

So in those conglomeration scenes it’s really important that the screenwriter make sure to figure out who is the point of view person here, because I need to make it really clear in that moment, or else the scene will feel very trifurcated, quadfurcated, and so on and so forth.

Sometimes the best thing to do with those characters that you’ve given point of view to is, before you get to that conglomeration scene, kill them. Wayne Knight in the first Jurassic Park has wonderful point of view scenes, and then he dies, because who needs him later?

**John:** This again I don’t think is a spoiler, that Henry Woo, the character played by B.D. Wong in the Jurassic Park movies, shows up in this movie again. And it was strange to me that he didn’t seem to have POV. For a character who has been established through the whole franchise, he’s not allowed to drive any scenes by himself. And it felt like he had sort of earned that. But also, if you look at the course of the actual movie that we’re watching, he shows up kind of late. And so it might have felt strange to give him that power so late in the movie, to elevate him to a place so late in the movie.

When you do shift POVs and we do unexpected things with POVs, you do get a real jolt of energy. So I think back to Gone Girl. So Gone Girl as a book, which I loved as a book and was dying to write the adaptation of that, is told as alternating chapters between the husband and the wife. And for reasons I don’t want to spoil in the story, that structure would not continue necessarily, but then when it does continue in ways you couldn’t imagine being possible in the movie, it’s so thrilling that we’ve changed POV midway through the movie. Our fundamental rules of how we watch the movie change halfway through. It was a great adaptation of a really great story that was told from a specific point of view and had to change its point of view in order to work as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s jarring. And when it’s done well, it is as exhilarating as any car chase, because you are creating a kind of emotional free-fall in people. And one of the thrills we get, I think, from going to movies and watching television shows is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s point of view, somebody else that’s wildly different from us. Frankly, that’s what we do as writers all day long, right? But when we receive it passively, it can be, because it’s surprising, it’s awesome.

And it can really wobble the ground beneath you for a bit in a fun way, as long as it is done expertly and you feel like you’re caught. When it’s not, then it just feels clunky or confusing, or you start to say to yourself, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel here or why.” These are the things that we want to try and avoid when we’re shifting points of view radically.

It also occurs to me that sometimes when we talk about stock characters or when we see a movie and we complain about a character that feels cliché, that they aren’t really getting a proper point of view. Rather, they are only existing in someone else’s point of view, and therefore they exist to serve a function.

Okay, so you’re going to be the judge in the trial. Well, you’re never going to get a point of view. You’re just there to go, “Overruled,” so that the prosecutor whose point of view we’re living in or the defendant whose point of view we’re living in can see it and hear it. And one way to avoid those kind of cliché stock characters is to consider that perhaps maybe they deserve some point of view. But then you got to make space.

**John:** Yeah. You got to make space and make sure that you’re not creating an expectation with the audience that your movie will not be able to match.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. It’s tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk about general guidelines for when it makes sense to limit point of view and when it makes sense to broaden out point of view. So, some benefits to limiting POV is it does make your audience identify very closely with whoever that central character is. Generally, if you’re limiting your point of view to one character, like in a Harry Potter situation, you’re going to identify very closely with Harry Potter because he’s in every scene so it’s driving everything.

And particularly, if you have a character whose experience may be different than sort of your audiences, it can be great to limit POV, because then you’re seeing everything through his or her eyes. And so if you have a tale of racism and you’re seeing it through this Black character’s eyes, I think an audience might be able to understand and empathize with it in ways they wouldn’t see otherwise, because we so closely identify with this central character. That’s a huge advantage to that.

It really focuses your storytelling, because you’re only providing information that that character can actually get to. And so that’s helpful. So anything that the audience wants to know, the character needs to know too. And so you’re following in his or her footsteps as they’re going out and trying to do these things. And so we identify very closely with characters if we limit the POV to those characters.

On the other hand, if you broaden POV, suddenly your movie can feel much more expansive, because suddenly you can cut to Egypt, you can cut to Morocco. You can see all these different parts of the world, and so you establish new characters when you want to establish them. That’s hugely helpful too. If you’re the kind of bigger, epic-scale story, that makes sense. If you’re Game of Thrones, you don’t want to limit it to one character’s point of view, because you have to be able to jump around and have different characters be the hero of one story and the villain of another.

**Craig:** Perfect thing to mention, Game of Thrones, because when people talk about George R. R. Martin’s books, they literally refer to point of view characters. So, generally speaking in his chapters there is a character that is sort of the point of view. And they get an inner life. They have an inner voice. And the events unfold through their eyes and their experience. And you’re absolutely right. Any kind of epic story demands it, I think.

And you should kind of know, I think, from the sort of story you’re telling, whether or not you want to be expansive in your points of view or you want to be limited. But some other things to think about beyond just scale is how much your character is meant to know. If there’s certain kinds of mystery, or if there’s a certain sense of powerlessness, generally speaking, it’s great to side your perspective with characters that have less power and less knowledge, because then there’s more to learn, and there’s more to know. And that’s interesting. And it’s instantly sympathetic.

We don’t really want to share the POV of people that know a lot or are in control. We don’t need Morpheus’s POV really ever. We just don’t need it, except maybe, for instance, in the scene where he needs to break free from the agents and run and jump. We are in his perspective, because at that moment he is very powerless. He is weak. And he isn’t really sure he’s going to make it or not. There you go.

**John:** Yeah. A crucial example. So most of what we’ve been talking about has been sort of movie point of view and the things about which character the camera is on. Those are sort of movie conversations. But point of view is always a part of fiction. It’s always been one of the classic things we talked about. Going back to Pride and Prejudice, we are at Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view and not Darcy’s point of view. And we see the story through her eyes rather than his eyes.

Sometimes, just like in movies, it’s good to change point of view. It’s good to change point of view in books as well. The first Arlo Finch book is entirely from Arlo’s point of view. We only know information that Arlo knows. And if there’s information I had to get in there, I had to have Arlo be present for that information to come out.

The second book, for reasons that become clear when you actually read the second book, we do break POV at one point in the story. And my editor was really nervous about this, but then as we talked through it, it actually makes sense that we break POV, and suddenly the rules of sort of who we’re allowed to follow in the world shift a bit. But hopefully by that point, you are comfortable enough with the characters that I’m breaking POV to that it makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t remember which Harry Potter book began with an entirely different POV of somebody coming home and finding Voldemort in his house or something. It fills the world out. And partly, it also creates a complex reading experience, because we are asked as readers to build little walls in our mind. Like, “Okay, I just learned something and saw something, but the character whose POV I’m going to be following for the rest of the book has not been there or seen that. I’m going to put a little wall between them. They don’t know that stuff.” And then ideally, the story at the end will link it together, and then they will learn it, and in the learning of it, will learn something else and so on and so forth.

But it’s exciting. You just have to do it really deliberately. That’s the thing. We always say everything is about being specific and being intentional. As long as you know what you’re doing and why, it should work.

**John:** It should work. And exactly the scenario you described, where a story starts with a different character’s POV before going back to the hero, that’s a very classic movie thing as well. So how many movies have you seen that start with some rando people you’re never going to see again? They’re establishing some nature of the world or some nature of the fundamental problem before we get to our main characters. That’s classic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beginning of Scream, for instance. We never see Drew Barrymore again, but it’s entirely from her point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s teaching us how to watch the movie. So don’t feel like you’re breaking POV just to do that introduction to the world thing. That’s very classic. Or the tag at the end. That’s also well established.

**Craig:** Yep. I really do believe that honestly that’s worth one year of film school.

**John:** Done.

[Episode 472 clip]

**John:** Let us shift gears completely, because I want to talk about a very crafty kind of issue here. The project I’m working on right now has characters who are experiencing some really big emotions. You and I, Craig, haven’t talked a lot about the inner emotional life of characters. We talk about sort of the emotional effect we’re trying to get in readers and viewers, but I want to talk about what characters are feeling, because what characters are feeling so often impacts what they can do in a scene, how they would express themselves, literally what actions they would take.

And so to set us up I wanted to play a clip from Westworld. And so this is Evan Rachel Wood. I think this was from the first season. And what I love about it is that she’s so emotional, and then because she’s a robot, she can just turn it off.

**Craig:** What would you know about that?

**John:** I set myself up for that.

**Evan Rachel Wood:** My parents. They hurt them.

**Jeffrey Wright:** Limit your emotional affect please. What happened next?

**Evan:** Then they killed them. And then I ran. Everyone I cared about is gone. And it hurts so badly.

**Jeffrey:** I can make that feeling go away if you like.

**Evan:** Why would I want that? The pain. Their loss. It’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me. Like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.

**John:** I’ll put a link in the show notes for that too, so you can see what she’s doing in the scene. What I like so much about that is you look at how she is at the start of that scene and she’s so emotional. She has a hard time getting those words out. And then when she’s told stop being emotional, it brings her way back down, and she can actually speak the words that she couldn’t otherwise say. And that’s so true, I find, both in my own real life – as I get in these heightened emotional states, I can’t express myself the way I would want to – but also in the characters I write. I feel when I know what a character is going through inside their head, it completely changes how they’re going to be acting in that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a pretty great clip. Evan Rachel Wood is an outstanding actor. And one thing that’s fascinating about that is that Jeffrey Wright, who is playing there against her, who is also a spectacular actor, what he says is, “Limit your emotional affect,” not eliminate it.

Because she’s a robot, she can dial it from an eight to a three. By the way, what he’s doing there essentially is what directors are doing all the time on a set. They walk over to an actor, “Great, let’s just roll it back. Let’s just pull it back five points and see what that’s like.” Because then what happens is you’re still feeling emotion. She still has a quavering in her voice. You can still feel her pain. But it’s like she experienced it three hours ago, and now she’s starting to get a handle on it, as opposed to she’s in the middle of it.
First things first when you’re thinking about your character’s emotional state is ask why are they experiencing these emotions and how distant are they from the source of it, because that’s going to be a huge indication to you about how you ought to be pitching them.

**John:** Absolutely. So one of the things you learn as you’re directing actors is to talk about verbs rather than adjectives. Gives them a thing to do rather than sort of a description of how they are supposed to be feeling, because it’s very hard to feel a thing. And what I might describe as being happy is a thousand different things. But if I describe, “Invite the other character into the space. Share your joy with them,” that’s a thing that an actor can actually play.

Be thinking about sort of not only what is causing this emotional state but what is the actual physicality of that emotional state. What’s happening in there?

And it’s not rational. And that’s a hard thing to grasp is that we always talk about what characters want, what characters are after. This isn’t really the same kind of thing. It’s an inner emotional drive. Something they cannot actually control. It’s more their lizard brain doing a thing.

So what may be useful is imagine that you’re at a party, and how differently you’d act or speak if, for example, you were terrified of someone in the room, or if you were ravenously hungry, if you were ashamed about what you were wearing, if you were proud of the person this party was about, if you were disgusted by the level of filth in the room. Those are all sort of primal things that are happening.

And if you’re experiencing those emotions, the affect is going to be different. You’re going to do different things. You’re going to say different things. You’re going to position yourself in the room differently. So getting an emotional register for each of the characters in a scene can be super important in terms of figuring out how this scene is actually going to play out.

And I do want to stress that we really are talking about scene work here. It’s not overall story plotting. It’s not even sort of sequence work. It’s very much, in this moment right now, what is going to be the next thing the character says, the next thing the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also what people came for. You’re absolutely right to distinguish between the normal acting place and the normal writing place as one of intention. I want something, so I’m going to figure out how to get it, whether it’s to get your attention or have you fall in love with me or stop the bomb from exploding, whatever it is. That’s the rational stuff that actors go through. And that’s the rational stuff you’re writing in there. That is the plot.

But what people come for is the emotion, because the emotion is when the character doesn’t want anything. They are simply expressing the truth about what they are experiencing in the moment. And that is the part we connect with. We do not connect with the intricacies of disarming a bomb. We connect with fear. We connect with the anticipation of terrible loss, the foreshadowing of grief. That’s what we imagine.

If you’re a parent, you know this feeling. You put your kid on a bicycle for the first time, and whether you realize it or not, your heart beats a little bit faster, because you are anticipating them falling and getting hurt. So that’s the truth. And that’s what we all experience. That is the universal nature of this. That’s the part people come for.

So our job is to understand very realistically what somebody would be feeling in that moment, because while audiences will forgive things like… The first movie I ever had in theaters was a movie called Rocket Man. Not the Elton John story. This was 1998 silly children’s comedy, Rocket Man. And the director, I didn’t get along with. I just didn’t appreciate his creative instincts.

And one of the things he did, I guess, when he was shooting was, there were all these scenes were these astronauts were walking around on Mars, and the visors and the helmets were causing reflections from the lights, so he said, “Let’s just remove those visors, and we’ll put them in later with visual effects,” because he thought that would be easy to do. And then later, Disney was like, “This movie’s not even that great. We’re not spending more money on it.”

So there are scenes in the finished movie where they are walking around on Mars and there’s no visor in their helmet. And audiences will forgive that, because they know on some level these people aren’t really on Mars and who cares. But here’s what they will never forgive. An inappropriate emotional response. Because they know what feels real and what doesn’t. That’s where they will kill you.

So our job is to be as realistic as possible in those moments to avoid the extremes of melodrama, where things start to get funny because they’re so wildly too big, or to avoid the constraint of, I guess we would call it unnatural emotional response, where things don’t connect right or simply aren’t there at all. Is it better to underplay emotion than overplay? Usually. Can you underplay emotion to the point where it’s just not there and the whole thing feels kind of dead and battened down with cotton? Yup.

**John:** Oh, we’ve seen those movies. We’ve seen those cuts where it just got too stripped down. It sounds like we could be talking about actors and how actors create their performance. And this is not a podcast about acting. But there is such a shared body of intention here. And it doesn’t even necessarily go through the director. Because we are the first actors for all of these characters. And so we have to be able to get inside their emotional states and be able to understand what it feels like to be in that moment, you know, experiencing these things, so we can see what happens next.

And so often when I find things are being forced, or when I don’t believe the reality of stuff, I feel like the writer is dictating, “Okay, this is the next emotional thing you’re going to hit,” rather than actually putting themselves in the position of that character and seeing what happens next and actually just watching and listening to what naturally does happen next.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s always a balancing act there.

**Craig:** The mistake I think a lot of writers make is to think, “I want the audience to feel sad, so let me make my character sad.” That’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** There are times when the character should be sad, but that’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** Absolutely. And so often the lesson you learn is that if you want the audience to feel emotional and sad, limiting what we see of that character feeling that way or how that character externalizes that thing is often more effective. The character holding back tears generally will generate more tears from the audience than the character who is actually crying, because we put ourselves in that position and we are sort of crying for them.

**Craig:** Yes. And sometimes there’s a situation where the actors, the characters may not be feeling an enormous amount emotionally, but what they’re doing is something we can empathize with so deeply that it makes us cry.

There’s a moment in Chernobyl where Jessie Buckley’s character is with her husband, who is a firefighter, and he is dying, clearly, evidently, and disgustingly. And she’s right next to him, and she tells him that they’re going to have a baby. Obviously, she knows this. She’s not super emotional in that moment. And he sort of just takes her hand, and he’s not super emotional. He’s just pleased with this news. But I cry when I look at it, because I feel such terrible empathy for them.

And it’s hard to even explain, to parse out exactly why that makes me so sad. Is it that she’s smiling and he’s smiling and they’re experiencing this moment of joy and hope, even though he’s perishing in front of her? Is that what it is? It’s hard to say.

But what I do know is that if I try to make people cry then it just gets dumb. So you find your moments. For instance, Jessie, who is a spectacularly good actor and just has amazing instincts, there are moments in the show where she is very emotional. And I don’t necessarily feel emotional in that moment. What I feel is alignment with her, like, “Yes, I’m glad you’re angry. Yes, of course you’d be scared. Yes, of course you’re upset.”

**John:** That comes back to empathy, because you successfully placed us as the viewer into her position, so we are seeing the story from her point of view. And that is not just the intellectual point of view, but the emotional point of view. And that’s why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. We are identifying with her.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But let’s talk about sort of how writers can be thinking about these emotions. I want to get back to your example of you’re the parent whose kid is riding off on the bike for the first time and you know they’re going to fall. That is such a specific example. And the reason you were able to summon that is, when that happened, you were probably kind of recording that. A little red light went off in the corner, “Okay, this emotional thing that I’m experiencing, this is real. This is a thing that I can hold onto. It’s in my toolbox right now.”

A thing I’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic is I started doing Head Space, the meditation app. And one of the things it forces you to do is to really evaluate what are you feeling right now at this moment. And when you get good at being able to analyze what are you actually feeling, you can start to think like, “Okay, what would it feel like to be proud of this moment? What would it feel like to be angry or fearful?” And you can start to distill what that emotion is like independent of the actual cause. And sometimes as a writer, you have to be able to do that. So you actually say, “Okay, what is the moment,” back to Evan Rachel Wood, “with a little bit more fear dialed in? What is this moment like with a little bit more dread or curiosity dialed in?”

Because with that, you’re like a musician putting together the chords and figuring out like, okay, what is the best version of this moment, this scene, this character’s experience in this moment because of the emotions that I’m aware of and able to apply.

**Craig:** That’s right. Then you have the difficult job of figuring out how that would work within the tone of whatever you’re doing. Because every piece has a different tone. And over time, the way we generally make and then absorb culture changes. When you watch action movies from the ‘80s, what you will generally see are a lot of people behaving in ways that are emotionally insane. Just insane. You know, stuff blows up and they’re just like, “Wow, should have worn my sunglasses.” Whatever the dumb crap is.

I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger would quip after murdering people. Who does that? You just murdered a human being. I mean, he deserved it. He was a bad guy. But you killed him, and then you have a little snappy joke that’s a pun based on the manner in which you killed him. That’s the tone of that.

As we’ve kind of gone on, things do change. And generally speaking, our culture has become more emotionally expressive and in touch. I think it’s generally a good thing, of course. And we are, all of us living in a post-therapy age, where many people have gone to therapy, or they’ve just read books like Chicken Soup for the Soul or whatever it is. We’ve been absorbing certain things.

And so now when we write this stuff, part of what has to happen is, you, the author, cannot be afraid of your own emotions. And you can’t be afraid to confront how you felt in moments. And that means being honest with yourself and understanding that when we go to the movies… So forget about you wanting to project some image of yourself to the world. It would be cool to project John Milius to the world, because John Milius is super cool and everything. But I’m not John Milius. And I just don’t write tough like that. I just don’t. I kind of do the opposite. And so you have to kind of forget about projecting some perfectly strong, invulnerable sense of yourself to the world, and instead recognize that everybody who is sitting in there wants to feel comforted by a created human being’s weakness and their triumph over that weakness, because that’s inspiring to them.

And if you want to look at one genre that encapsulates that the most, the embracing of the emotional self, particularly the emotional male self, it is Marvel movies, because superhero movies were about these sort of emotionally distant people, because they were perfected. And now they’re tormented, which reflects Marvel.

**John:** Now it’s about Tony Stark’s relationship with Peter Parker. It’s very specific character interactions is why we go to these superhero movies, especially the Marvel movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you have to get it right. That’s the challenge. This is I think probably where writers will fall down more than anywhere else, because they actually don’t understand their own selves, so they don’t know what a character should feel. How many times in our Three Page Challenges have we said, “Why is this person speaking in a complete sentence when somebody has a knife to their throat?” You can’t. You just can’t. There’s a lack of emotional truth.

**John:** Yeah. And so as you’re talking with actors, and they can be frustrated, like, “I don’t know how to do this scene. This isn’t tracking for me,” a lot of times, what it is, they’re saying, “I don’t know how to get from A to E here. You’re not giving me the structure to get from place to place.” And maybe you just didn’t build that, or maybe there’s a way there that you didn’t see before.

As writers, we’re not documentarians. So we’re not necessarily creating scenes that are completely emotionally true to how they would happen in real life. There’s going to be optimization, and it’s going to move faster, and people are going to have to make transitions within the course of a scene that they probably would not do in real life. But that’s the art of it. That’s how you are sanding off the edges and getting there a little bit quicker. But you have to understand what the reality would look like first before you try to optimize it.

**Craig:** Correct. That is absolutely correct.

[Episode 151 clip]

**John:** So Craig, what motivated this talk of liars and liars in scripts?

**Craig:** I’m working on a movie right now. Essentially, it’s a whodunit. And when you start to investigate the world of whodunits, you… I’ve been reading a ton of Agatha Christie. I’ve always been a Doyle fan. And I’ve always been a Poe fan. Poe is really the kind of inventor of the modern whodunit detective story.

For this kind of movie, I felt that Agatha Christie’s genre was the most appropriate, and so I’ve been just reading a lot of Agatha Christie. And one thing that I’ve noticed is all of the characters, with the exception of the detective, are liars. Part of the fun of a good mystery is that when you ask the question whodunit, the answer is any one of these people could have done it.

And we think that they could have done it in part because perhaps they all had motive, they all have opportunity, but more importantly, they are all lying. And it’s lying that makes us suspect them.

But as I started to think about this, I realized, in fact everyone is a liar to some extent or another. All humans are liars. Lying is part of the human condition. But there are different kinds of liars. And there’s different kinds of lying. And when we talk sometimes about new writers who are writing and the characters, we’ll say, “Oh, everything seems on the nose,” or, “There’s not enough subtext.” In a weird way, I think sometimes the mistake people are making is that they’re writing people, and those people aren’t lying. They’re writing truth-tellers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s just less interesting. So I wanted to talk about how useful it is to think of your characters as liars, but also the different grades or categories of lying and lying characters that you’ll find.

**John:** I think it also feeds into our concept of motivation. Why a person is saying the things that they want other people to believe is key to understanding who they are in a scene and overall in the film itself.

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea of drama and of experiencing a narrative where humans move through it and transform is that they are not at the end who they were in the beginning. And if they were just truth-tellers in the beginning, naturally, they’re simply going to say, “Well, here’s the situation. I’m very scared of this. I’m scared of growing up, and I’m scared of telling you that I love you, but I do love you. And I’m hoping that by behaving better, I will in fact grow up, and whether I get you or not, I will be a better person.” [Yawns] Movie over. Everyone has to be concealing something in some way. But then there are characters who are lying for other reasons. Maybe not such understandable or empathetic, or sympathetic, I should say, reasons.

So, let’s talk about some of the different kinds of lying there is. The most useful kind to me is self-deception. I think every protagonist to some level or another is engaging in self-deception. We’ll say the character has an arc. It is a bad character, a dramatically unsatisfying character who has complete access to his or her emotional states, weakness, flaws, and can pinpoint them perfectly, and then throughout the course of the movie, go about and achieve them.

One of my favorite examples of this, because it was done so cannily, is Jerry Maguire. I honestly think that Cameron Crowe pulled off one of the most brilliant self-delusional moves of all time. We’ll see sometimes in comedy, “Hang a lantern on it.” If you have something that seems a little wonky in your story, just go for it and embrace it, and people feel like it’s intentional.

**John:** Yeah. Call it out to the audience, so the audience knows that you recognize that it’s there.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, what does he do with this character of Jerry Maguire? The movie begins with a man who, in a moment of frustration, writes a manifesto about the kind of person that is a good person. But he is still engaged in a very high level of self-delusion. He is in fact not that person. Even the writing of that manifesto is a manifestation of his self-delusion. He’s actually a bad person. The manifesto itself is really more of a temper tantrum, and nothing that he actually thinks he should or could do.

As a result of writing that manifesto, he loses his job and all of his clients except for two. And actually, really what it comes down to is one. And then must struggle over the course of the movie, clinging all the while to his self-delusions, to finally get to the place where he realizes, “Oh my god, I’m supposed to be the person I wrote about in that manifesto.” That’s how strong self-delusion is. Even when you can write down the truth of yourself, you do not believe it.

**John:** Self-delusion is commonly the starting place for a movie where the journey is for the character to come upon emotional honesty, emotional authenticity. And so when we talk about how useful it is for a character to lie, that’s not that the movie should be lying. It’s that the character needs to have progress from this inauthentic state to an authentic state at the end, and Jerry Maguire is a great example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think all protagonists to some level or another have a self-delusion. If they have an arc, it means they have a self-delusion. Going into the world of animation, the character of Marlin in Finding Nemo, he is honest to himself to a point. He honestly believes that he must take care of Nemo at all costs. But he’s deluding himself, because somewhere down there is access to a truth, an inherent truth, that this can’t last. The boy will grow up. He must let him go.

**John:** Even in movies that are more action-based or sort of have more classically sort of like here’s the hero protagonist, you often see that the hero at the start of the movie is really kind of a series of poses. It’s acting the part of the hero, but it doesn’t actually have the stuff inside him, because he hasn’t been tested in ways to really show what it is that matters to him.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** What it is that is sort of unique to his own journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, in fact, that can start to give you a clue. Everybody is afraid of the second act, but this gives you a clue to your second act. What situations should this person go through so that their own delusion can be laid bare to them.

**John:** Their normal way of doing things and the normal person they’re presenting out into the world is called out in a way or is ineffective in a way, and they’re forced to find a new identity.

**Craig:** Right. And this works in part because it is the function of drama to… Why we are attracted to drama is because it illuminates our lives. All of us are delusional.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everyone on the planet is delusional. We are all walking around either ignoring something in ourselves, willfully or subconsciously, or simply misunderstanding ourselves. No matter how much therapy you go through, there will always be a glitch in the system, because we’re made of meat. We are rational to a point, but the part of us that is irrational is not accessible by the rational, so therefore it’s happening out of our control.

**John:** I would also question whether if you got rid of all your self-delusions, if you got rid of all of the lies, would there even be a person left underneath there? I think so many cases, our personalities and sort of who we perceive ourselves to be is a narrative that is carefully constructed based on experiences, based on our hopes, based on our dreams. And you are sort of a story. And a story is made up of some fabrications.

**Craig:** That’s right. Just as you can’t step into the same river twice, every new realization you have changes your mind. It changes who you are and gives birth to a new level of potential self-delusion. One hopes that you can improve your life. Know thyself is a great goal. But you’re right, it’s actually an impossibility to truly 100% know yourself. Let’s get really heavy for a second. Are you familiar with Gödel’s theorem?

**John:** I don’t know Gödel’s theorem. Tell me.

**Craig:** First of all, a great book. This is my One Cool Thing for every day. Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an incredible book. Douglas, I want to say it’s Douglas Hofstadter I believe is the… He wrote this I believe in the ’80s, this brilliant, mind-boggling book that goes into mathematics, artificial intelligence, logic, and ranges from Alice in Wonderland to the music of Bach, to the drawings of Escher, and then interestingly in to the work of Gödel.

And Gödel had this very famous mathematical theorem. And essentially what it said is, for any given system of mathematics… In math, I don’t know if you remember, you can prove things.

**John:** Yes. Absolutely. That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Do you remember that? Right. So you have a system of rules, and then somebody gives you an assertion. And then you can create a proof of that assertion using the rules, and you can prove that it is true, and that’s important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** What his theorem said was, for any system of mathematics, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. And that’s kind of mind-boggling in and of itself. And it gets to this whole idea of recursion, all the rest.

But what it really comes down to is our brains are closed systems. There will always be things that are true that our brain in its current state simply can’t prove. You’re right; self-deception is inherent to the human condition. So, wonderful thing to think about as you’re creating your character.

**John:** And if you go in further, if you actually were to strip away everything you think about yourself, your entire narrative… I’ll put a link in too. Datura. I may be pronouncing it wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** But you know that drug?

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** It apparently just lays you completely bare, and you sort of see yourself and your wholeness and all of your flaws. And very few people can withstand that sort of spotlight of scrutiny.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** When you lose yourself, you lose all of your lies.

**Craig:** Precisely. And that’s why the journey for a character that is struggling with their self-deception is difficult. See, bad screenwriting teachers will always talk in terms of bloodless structure, because that’s all they understand. So, they’ll say things like, “It’s important that your hero face obstacles.” Why? Why? Let’s just start with these really fundamental questions.

I remember I took a philosophy class in college, and the professor asked a question. “It’s good to know that things are true, but why? Why is truth better than not truth?” [laughs] Then you go, “Huh, I guess I should probably think about that.” Why obstacles? Because if there are no obstacles… The obstacles aren’t the point. The obstacles are the symptom of the difficulty of undoing your self-deception. It’s hard.

**John:** All right. So, self-deception is a key thing. What other types of lies do you think are fundamental for storytellers?

**Craig:** So, that’s the first, and that’s the most common class. Then there’s this second class that doesn’t apply to every character. And I call this the manipulators. These are people who lie for a purpose. They’re lying for an external purpose. And we can break them out into two subgroups. There is the protective manipulators, and there are the manipulators who are lying for gain. So, protective liars are people that lie in order to avoid pain or hurt or to maintain some lifestyle that is their best option.

**John:** So, they’re not trying to deceive themselves. They’re trying to deceive other people, to either protect what they have or protect the things they love.

**Craig:** Right. And you and I have both written movies that have this. Big Fish, Edward Bloom, he’s a protective liar. He is lying because it’s helpful to him. He’s certainly lying more than the average person. He’s not lying to get rich.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And he’s not self-delusional. He’s lying purposely, but in order to protect himself on some level.

**John:** Yeah. I would push a little bit back on protect himself. The only thing he can pass on is his vision of how the world should be, so he’s attempting to use these fabrications in order to create an idealized world, a vision for what he wants for his son.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I actually think that that’s consistent with protecting yourself, in the sense that if you don’t do it, then you feel inept as a father, that you’ve somehow failed, that this is something he needs to do for his son.

In Identity Thief, the character of Diana lies because she is lonely and unloved, and the only way she can survive is by constantly lying. Constantly. It’s become a crutch. And these characters can be very sympathetic, actually. They’re frustrating. They’re frustrating, and that’s fun. They create conflict, which we love, of course. And they also keep the audience guessing, which we love. And then, of course, they have the audience begin to connect with that person. The audience naturally tries to make sense of things. It’s part of what we do as human beings.

So, don’t try and make sense of why this person is doing it, and now they’re doing your work for you. They are engaged. And your job when you finally explain why is to explain why in a way that is satisfying to them, that does make sense.

**John:** Absolutely. So, you’re describing the character’s secrets and lies, which is really the same thing. There is something that they’re not showing. There are cards they are holding back. And that’s a way of engaging the audience’s curiosity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And anything that makes your audience lean in to the story rather than sit back is a very good thing.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, the second sub-heading under manipulators are the people who lie for gain. And these are typically villains. Sometimes, however, they’re heroes. For instance, Danny Ocean lies constantly for gain. He’s a thief. But, you’ll take a look at a villain like Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Wonderful liar. Wonderful, brilliant liar, and lying for gain. He also too is a thief.

These people who lie for gain are oftentimes much better liars than the people who lie to protect themselves or conceal a personal secret. And they’re definitely better liars than people who are simply self-delusional. They’re professional liars. So, you get to write somebody who is not only screwing with the people around them, but screwing with the audience, and this is important.

**John:** When you say they’re lying for gain, it’s not just necessarily monetary gain. If you look at Jeff Bridge’s character in Jagged Edge, that’s a character who is lying with a very specific agenda. He’s trying to protect himself, but he gets so much more by establishing and maintaining this lie. It’s his natural way of going through the world is that lie.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes the reason, the gain is actually quite noble. Flick, the ant, goes and gets these guys to help save the village, but they’re just circus performers. And this lie has to be maintained until finally it’s laid bare.

There are all sorts of ways that people can lie for gain, but when they do so, they have to do so with some skill. And therefore, as a writer, you have to actually think like a manipulative liar here who is trying to get something. The truth is no longer important. What’s far more important is what you have to say. And the audience shouldn’t always know.

One of the great things about Ocean’s Eleven is that they lie to each other. They lie to Matt Damon. Not everybody knows what’s going on. And then the movie lies to us through their perspective, because we think we’re seeing something we’re not, and then they reveal how they’ve lied. So, that gives you so many opportunities.

**John:** I think the challenge for a screenwriter is recognizing when it is good to let the audience in and see the liar doing his work, because that can be really rewarding to see somebody be really good at the thing they’re doing, and when you’re better off holding back and keeping the audience in the same point of view as all the other characters, where they’re being manipulated as well.

**Craig:** Yes. And the revelation of their lies should have the punch of some kind of climactic feel, because if you reveal it too soon, you’ll simply lose interest. I mean, we understand the basic lie of Hans Gruber fairly early on, but there’s this other lie that he’s hiding from his own guys, of what’s going to happen with that last bit of security lock. He hasn’t told them, which is actually kind of great. I mean, because look, realistically if you were leading a gang of henchmen into a building to rob it, and you knew that there were seven things you had to get through, and the last one was an impossible-to-break electromagnetic seal on the vault, you would say, “Don’t worry. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stage a terrorist attack. Eventually, they’ll follow the handbook, turn off all the power, and that will open the thing for us. You ask for a miracle, I give you the FBI.” But he doesn’t tell them.

**John:** You like at Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects, and you know that he is manipulative, you know that you can’t trust him, but you didn’t know that everything you’re experiencing was a lie. And it was the right choice to save that reveal to the very, very end. The punch line to the joke is the revelation of this last lie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m sure those decisions, he probably went back and forth about like, “If we revealed a little bit earlier, then we would have the tension about will he get caught.” And this was the decision like, nope, that the whole movie has to be set up to this point.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s a great segue to our next category, because Keyser Söze is a perfect example of somebody that manipulates and lies for gain. He’s also a very bad person. But his badness isn’t his lying. His badness is that he’s a murderer. The lying is done to get him gain for his other badness, which is murdering.

But then there’s the last category of liar, and this is the worst liar, and these are always villains. And these are some of the scariest characters you can create. They are bad, bad people. These are the chaotic, pathological liars.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** These are the people that lie because they love trouble. And they lie to create strife and drama. They can’t control their lying. I don’t think they’re alive unless they’re lying. I don’t think they even know what the truth is.

So the character that often comes to mind in this case is the latest incarnation of the Joker, the Heath Ledger Joker. One thing that I thought was just – I think everybody thought it was pretty amazing – in Dark Knight was when the character the Joker explains how he got his facial scars. And it was very scary, very revealing confession of a trauma.

**John:** It made you almost sympathetic for a moment.

**Craig:** It did. And then there is another scene later where he explains to somebody else how he got his scars, and it is just as compelling, and just as terrifying, and just as true feeling, but it’s a completely different story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s when you realize this man is just a liar.

**John:** Yeah, he’s truly a sociopath. A psychopath. I mean, all he can sort of do is lie. It’s the air he breathes. If he says hello, that’s a lie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And these characters are very difficult to write, because for the most part, we aren’t them. I mean, occasionally – god help us – we will run into these people.

**John:** I worked for a person. I worked for one of those people.

**Craig:** There you go. And part of the problem is that they’re so good that you don’t really know for a while what’s happening. And then eventually, it becomes clear, and then part of the struggle is it’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that another person is actually… You, like the audience, want to make sense of them. But you can’t, because they are operating in a way that is… Frankly, they don’t even care about their own destruction, you see?

The Joker doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He has no interest in that. He loves chaos. He loves the chaos that lying can bring. And you’ll see these characters sometimes in noir. These characters will skew towards female, because when you put it in a man you immediately start to think, “My god, he’s going to just start stabbing, shooting, killing, and all the rest,” whereas women can maybe just scramble your brain and make you second guess your own name and all the rest of it. And then finally, Bogart sends you up the river.

But liars, pathological liars are very scary people. And if you’re going to write one, you just have to know that the movie will be deeply infected by them, that they are going to take over.

**John:** It’s a movie that hasn’t come out yet, but Kristen Wiig is terrific in a comedy I saw – I guess you’d call it a comedy, kind of a comedy, kind of a drama – called Welcome to Me. It should be out later this year. And she’s not a psychopath, but it’s one of the rare cases where I’ve seen just a chaotic, manipulative person really at the center of a film, where she is supposed to be the protagonist, but she honestly kind of can’t protagonate in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really challenging task for a writer and for an actress to put that person at the very center of a movie and not have that person be the villain.

**Craig:** Of course, because the protagonist at some basic level is trying to achieve something. We ask simple questions of our heroes. What do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? What scares you? This or that. What does the pathological, chaotic liar want? Trouble.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s what they want. They want trouble. So, the only person I’ve written like this, and I loved writing him, was Mr. Chow.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Mr. Chow is a chaotic, pathological liar. He does not care if he lives or dies. In fact, he thinks it’s awesome. He just loves trouble. But because he’s so comic, and also embodied in this kind of very small, physically frail man, it’s funny.

**John:** But if you tried to have the Mr. Chow movie, good luck. It’s very, very challenging to put that person in the center of a movie and have them do any of the kinds of things you want a person at the center of a movie to be able to do.

**Craig:** Absolutely. In fact, Todd and I talked for a bit about the idea of what a Mr. Chow movie would look like. And it was totally different, because it was the darkest thing imaginable. And I remember we had this one idea for a scene that sort of sums it up. Mr. Chow comes home to see his elderly father. And he walks in, and his old, old father looks up at him and says something like, “Leslie, you returned to us. You came back.” And Mr. Chow walks over to him and then cuts his throat.

And as his father is dying, his father looks up at him and says, “Good job,” because that’s the only… That’s how Mr. Chow is born. It’s just pure awful chaos and darkness, willful self-destruction. The only goal there is is to blow up the world.

**John:** Yeah. Those characters are almost un-human, because they don’t work in our normal ways. Crispin Glover and I had a few conversations about taking his Thin Man character from the Charlie’s Angels movie and just doing his own movie. And ultimately, nothing will ever come of that probably. But it’s a fascinating character, but such an incredibly challenging character to put at the center of anything, because he is chaos. He’s like chaos and death in ways that’s very hard to… He’s a challenge. It’s very hard to have insight into that character, because deliberately, they’re supposed to be opaque, and you just can’t know them.

Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin is a similar situation, is where she’s just this lioness. There’s just not a human. There literally is not a human underneath that. It makes it very challenging.

**Craig:** Right. It essentially doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. There needs to be somebody in opposition to it, or they need to not be human, and that’s sort of the point, and then the purpose of the movie is to illuminate the difference between humans and non-humans. But they will infect your movie, and you have to write them carefully. They can kind of get in your head. And by all means, if you run into one of these people, go the other way.

[Present]

**John:** And hey, it’s John back again in 2024, which seems impossible to be real. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a replay by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. 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 give you on single-use characters. Thanks.

[Bonus Segment: Episode 467 Clip]

**John:** OK, so Craig, this last week I was writing on a scene and I recognized that this was a scene where I created a character who is essentially single-use. This character only appears in this scene. He’s very memorable and distinctive and hopefully very funny within this scene, but story-wise this character is never going to reappear again. And not only is there not a natural reason for them to reappear again, they really can’t reappear again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it got me thinking about the situations in which I do have a single-use character and times when I want to make sure the characters can come back, and what our expectation is as writers and as readers and audiences when there’s a character who appears in only one scene.

**Craig:** And generally, we’re going to try and avoid this, meaning when we do engage a single-use character, we’re doing so very carefully and very intentionally, because every actor that we bring on board, that’s an expense to the production, and somebody has to get wardrobed and costumed. And it also demands the audience’s attention. They are just going to presume that when they meet people, those people are in the movie. And the more people they meet who show up once and leave, the more frustrated they get. You keep throwing new people at them, they’re just going to stop paying attention, because they’re like, ah, none of these people are going to stay around, so why am I bothering?

**John:** Yeah. I think people create a mental placeholder for them. And I find as I read scripts, often I’ll circle the first time a character shows up just so I can keep track of, oh, this is that person. And if I find myself circling a bunch of characters, like, oh wait, how many people are in this movie? I think you’re saying that expectation is that this person might come back, so I need to remember something about them.

In some cases, especially if the scene is very dramatic or very funny, there’s kind of a misleading vividness, where it feels like, oh, this person must be important, because look how much screen time or look at what a big moment they had. And that can be a trap in and of itself.

So, looking back at the scene that I wrote, I know it was the right choice to do it, and this was a scene which in its initial conception was going to have a group of people speaking, and then it became more clear that like, oh no, it should just be one person driving it, because it was going to get too diffuse if I had a bunch of people speaking in the scene.

But what I was able to do is, because this scene takes place in a specific set that the hero is going to, and there’s not an expectation that they’re going to come back to it, I think I was able to make it pretty clear we don’t have an expectation that that character is ever going to be seen again. So by having it be a destination and not part of the regular home set in a way, I don’t think we’re going to plan on seeing that thing again.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the ways you can inoculate the audience against thinking that they’re going to keep seeing this person is… Very common use of single-use characters is they die. So, we’re not worried about them. They’re not coming back. I’m thinking of the very opening scene of the first episode of Game of Thrones. There are a bunch of guys we don’t see again. They all die. It doesn’t matter who they are. They die. That’s the point.

Another way we can inoculate the audience is by making sure that our single-use character is rooted by circumstance into a position. So, we have a main character moving through a space, whether it’s an airport, or it is a department store.

**John:** A DMV.

**Craig:** A DMV. Somebody is stuck in their job. They’re not going anywhere. Your character moves in and then leaves. And we understand that character can’t go anywhere else except where they are. I mean, one of the greatest single-use characters of all time is Edie McClurg playing a rental car saleswoman in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And she’s perfect.

**John:** We wouldn’t want any more.

**Craig:** You couldn’t ask for a better foil for Steve Martin losing his mind. And we know we’re not going to see her again, because she lives and works behind that counter and does not exist anywhere else.

**John:** Another thing I think you need to keep in mind with these single-use characters is, always ask yourself is my hero still driving this scene, because so often you have this funny idea for a character, this funny situation, but if my hero can only react to that situation, they’re not actually in charge of it. So what you describe of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the scene is not really about her. It’s about his frustration and what happens, what he does in response to her. It’s not about her. And so making sure that if you are going to use a single-use character, they’re not just going to take over the scene and just leave your hero, your star just facing them as an obstacle and not doing anything themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. There may be a tendency among new writers to try and jazz up a scene by having a waiter come over and be wacky. Nobody wants it. Nobody.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Every now and then, for instance, here’s a for instance. Bronson Pinchot created a career for himself with a single-use character in Beverly Hills Cop.

**John:** Beverly Hills Cop, yeah.

**Craig:** And it was so good. It was so fascinating and so weird that you kind of wanted more of him. And you didn’t get more of him, because he was single-use. And you wanted more of him, and you got more of him eventually. Bronson Pinchot went on to do other things, because I think that was before he did Perfect Strangers, I think. I think it was. I’m sure somebody will write in and tell me I’m an idiot, which I often am.

But the point is, every now and then you will get something like that. But don’t aim for it, because it almost never happens. And you really do want to design these single-use characters as functions for your main character. They are obstacles. They are information. They are omens. They are distractions. But they are rarely the person who is supposed to be drawing the audience’s attention.

**John:** Yeah. So in certain circumstances, your waiter example is exactly right. Because you would say like, oh, you want every character to pop. And it’s like, yeah, but you don’t necessarily want that waiter character to pop. If the waiter needs to be there, but it’s not actually the point of the scene, you kind of want that character to be a little bit background. You want that character to be helping inform the setting, but they are kind of scene setting. They’re not actually the point of it.

And they should be a little bit more like set decoration than the marquee star, because they’re going to probably pull focus away from what you actually want to be focusing on, which is probably your hero and what your hero is doing in those moments.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** So as you look at your script, if you have a lot of single-use characters, there may be something wrong. It’s not a guarantee that something is wrong, but there might be something wrong. So if there’s four scenes in your script that have major single-use characters who have multiple lines and are really doing a lot, ask yourself why. And not necessarily there’s a problem, but there could be a reason why. Maybe these characters should be combined or there’s some way in which they can come back. And you may not be spending your script time properly.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s worth policing through. And every now and then you might find a way to maybe collapse them into one. If you have two scenes, you may be able to get away with just combining those two characters into one character. But yeah, be aware of it and try to avoid. And by the way, when possible ask yourself does this person need to talk at all.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because the difference between a person who says one word on camera and a person who says nothing is a lot of money and also a lot of attention.

**John:** A lot of time actually shooting, just to come around to film their lines-

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** … is hours on the day.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 358 – Point of View](https://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 472 – Emotional States](https://johnaugust.com/2020/emotional-states)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 151 – Secrets and Lies](https://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-and-lies)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 467 – Another Word for Euphemism](https://johnaugust.com/2020/another-word-for-euphemism)
* [Gödel’s incompleteness theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/624standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/how-would-this-be-a-bio-pic).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** It is Episode 621 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

The past few weeks have offered up a lot of big personalities in the news, with some of these individuals dying or being fired or removed from Congress. Today on the show, we ask the most important question, of course: how would this be a biopic?

**Craig:** Thank you for saying BAI-oh-pik and not bai-AH-pik.

**John:** A film that is a biographic is a BAI-oh-pik, but sometimes it’s written out as without a hyphen, and it becomes bai-AH-pik. That’s not a thing.

**Craig:** That’s not a thing. I think people are confusing it with myopic, which is understandable, but also not understandable, because it’s not like we refer to people’s bios as bai-AHs.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So BAI-oh-pik, everyone.

**John:** BAI-oh-pik.

**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.

**John:** We’re making a strong stand here for that.

**Craig:** Damn right.

**John:** We also have some follow-up on AI and inner monologues. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, I want to pontificate about which event in history has had the biggest negative impact on human civilization.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah, so some college stoner talk here.

**Craig:** Woo! Okay.

**John:** Maybe think about some alt histories there. We also have some news. We have a live show coming up, this Sunday, December 17th, at 4:00 p.m. The show’s going to be sold out by the time you’re listening to this.

**Craig:** Of course. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** It’s going to be at Dynasty Typewriter again. There will be some streaming tickets available. If you’re listening to this on the Tuesday that the episode drops, check the link in the show notes for our live show at Dynasty Typewriter. We’re going to have some great guests. It’s our holiday show. It came together kind of last minute, but we’re very excited to do it.

**Craig:** Who is it benefiting this time?

**John:** This time it’s benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Fantastic, which does excellent work supporting veterans and the writing community in general. Just so people know, it’s not the Writers Guild. It is the charitable nonprofit arm of the Writers Guild, vaguely associated.

**John:** We’ve done a lot of shows with them, for them over the years. It’s nice to be back doing one for them. Now, before we get into the work follow-up here, apparently there’s an important bit of Melissa follow-up about Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** We are recording this on December 3rd. It is Melissa’s birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, Melissa.

**John:** Happy birthday, Melissa.

**Craig:** She said, “I have follow-up for you.”

**John:** We should say that Melissa Mazin is your wife.

**Craig:** She is my wife, and has been for quite some time. She said, “In your last show about Thanksgiving, you said that the women,” meaning her and our friend Beth, “were not allowed to cook,” that Josh and I were the only ones who were allowed to cook. She said, “That’s not accurate. We chose not to cook.” Now, I’m going to say, in follow-up to that follow-up, we haven’t ever gotten to the place where we would need to say to her, “You’re not allowed to cook.” If she chose to cook, there would have to be a discussion. But she wanted it to be clear that she didn’t need permission. She simply wasn’t interested.

**John:** That’s a fair distinction there. I think many cases in life, you can see, was that actually a choice, did she actually have the ability to choose to cook, and was that denied from her.

**Craig:** She feels she had the choice. There’ll be follow-up to this one on a subsequent podcast.

**John:** Apparently so. It’s nice to know that Melissa does listen to the show.

**Craig:** Religiously.

**John:** That’s great. By religiously, you mean that she listens with votive candles burning around her.

**Craig:** With my face on them. Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s get to some less controversial follow-up. We’ll start with David. This is back to Episode 620. We were talking about visual effects and digital doubles and AI. David writes, “The bad crowd work mentioned in Prom Pact, that was meme-ified as, quote, ‘Disney put AI people into this crowd.’ That wasn’t AI. That was just cheap VFX, likely done at the last second.”

**Craig:** That sounds right. In looking at it again, they did seem like were sort of the kinds of people we see in previs stuff. We used to just have storyboards, and now for complicated sequences, we can do previs, where you do get these horror-looking humans. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not meant to be seen by anybody except for you, for planning purposes. I think David’s probably right there.

**John:** I would also say that the differentiation between this is AI versus VFX is increasingly irrelevant. A lot of visual effects are going to have AI components built into them. The fact that it looks terrible doesn’t… Whether it was done with visual effects or AI, it’s not actually so important. It’s the fact that they put something on screen that look like human beings, that were not human beings. That’s the concern.

**Craig:** If we get used to it, if we normalize it, as the kids say, we’re in trouble. Reasonable distinction to make.

**John:** You want to take Alana here?

**Craig:** We’ve got some follow-up from Alana. She is commenting on Episode 611, where I apparently mentioned a screenwriting format that’s divided into two columns, one for what you see and one for what you hear, and that it might make more sense for screenwriting than the current standardized format. “In Mexican telenovelas, the two-column format has been used for decades as the standard screenwriting format, though apparently in recent years, people have turned to the standard format that’s used in most places.” I wonder if perhaps the folks writing the Mexican telenovelas may have gone backwards here, because I think that makes sense. I think it makes sense.

**John:** I was trying to find an example of Mexican telenovelas in the two-column format, because I’m familiar with two-column format, which is often used in commercials.

**Craig:** Commercials.

**John:** Other things, you see it there. Left-hand side is the visuals. The audio, and including the dialogue, is on the right-hand side. Yes, it does kind of make sense overall. I think our current screenplay format, which it’s all one big flow, it reads really well. You can actually read and get a sense of what’s happening very cleanly and smoothly in our current version. There’s trade-offs to doing that two-column format.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think maybe the two-column format might be best used by production. There are times where it’s hard to create simultaneity. We can do it in dialogue, with double dialogue, which I just sort of hate doing anyway, because it just sends the actors into a shouting over each other tizzy. But what’s almost impossible to do is simultaneous action and dialogue. You can do a little bit of it. But even then, if you put it in parentheses, it’s still like there’s a temporal thing. It’s a bit linear. The two-column format does allow for something that’s simultaneous. But I agree with you. It is easier to read. Maybe not as useful for production, but more useful for reading.

**John:** Going back to simultaneity, even in dialogue, when Greta Gerwig was on the show, she was talking about how in her dual dialogue, she had very specific points where she wanted the actors to be overlapping and how things fit together. She put these little slashes in to indicate where these things are supposed to fall. That is the kind of micro-control you would love to be able to have. You’re always going to bump up against the hard limits of how you can portray speech on page.

**Craig:** At some point, you are going to have to explain it to the actors and make sure they understand that this is a technical thing you’re aiming for. I find that actors in general appreciate it if you put it in that context. If you say this is actually going to be a bit technical, then they get it. If you try and convince them that this is about art, then I think reasonably, they’re like, “No. This is not how I would do it. Humans wouldn’t normally do this.” But if you put it in technical terms…

**John:** Follow-up from Joe in New Zealand talking about Episode 615, called The Mind’s Eye. He says, “The discussion about inner monologues hit home for me, because my lovely wife has a primarily outer monologue.”

**Craig:** What?

**John:** “She goes about her days speaking aloud near constantly-”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “… whether she’s in the room alone or in a room with me.”

**Craig:** Oh, Joe, no.

**John:** “Early in our relationship, it caused confusion, because she’s mostly unaware of it. To her, it feels like going from silence to talking when she addresses me, but my attention filter doesn’t always pick up on it. I thought of it as a singular quirk until we visited her family. I found myself in the living room with her, her brother, her father, and her mother, four adults all wandering around, playing with a dog, going about their business, talking constantly.”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Not to each other, not engaging, not questioning or responding, just a stream of conscious thought flowing out of each of them. It was so funny and so charming in the moment, but I definitely lied about why I was smiling and chuckling. It’s still a minor source of confusion 18 years later, but ever since then, the music of her chatter from the other side of the house is simply one of the many joys of our home.”

**Craig:** This is the most kiwi thing I’ve ever read in my life. Joe, the good news is that your wife, who I will refer to as Mrs. Joe, found the best possible husband. The fact that you consider it a joy is why you are still married 18 years later. I would go insane. I love a quiet house. I don’t know about you.

**John:** I like a quiet house too. It’s nice.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. I will admit that there are times where I have an outer monologue, and those times are very specifically when I’m working on puzzles. I will start to talk. Melissa will say, “You’re sitting there saying things like, ‘But what is that about? Why would that be there? Oh, okay, so this is absolutely this kind of… Okay, so if I do that…'” I just do it because I’m working weirdly. But if I were to do that constantly-

**John:** You’d be divorced?

**Craig:** No, I’d probably be the victim of a accident.

**John:** This is reminding me of some interview I saw with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They’re talking about their producing partner who apparently had a bit of this, and if they were driving someplace, would have to read aloud every sign that they saw, that they passed. It’s a thing. They have to externalize that stuff.

**Craig:** Just going to have to just bear with them, I guess.

**John:** To some degree, I am talking. I definitely talk to my dog a lot if it’s just me and Lambert.

**Craig:** Everyone talks to their dog.

**John:** Because they’re such good boys.

**Craig:** Lambert is such a good boy. We got some follow-up from Greenhorn from back in 615. Greenhorn says, “My thanks to John and Craig for their helpful advice.” Oh, I remember this. This was the second unit director who was trying to claim co-writer credit.

Greenhorn says, “The pushy second unit director backed down in trying to claim co-writer credit. He said a production company wanted to see a script. I said that I’d need to be paid to write a draft, and then that would also clear up any confusion over our roles. I am the writer, writing a project for you to direct. He accepted this. In his trying to squeeze writer credit, either he as a second unit director thus far was just ignorant of what was fair, as Craig suggested, or he was trying his luck. If the latter, that does not bode well for a working relationship, but I’m so keen to get my break that I’m kind of taking the view that if swimming with sharks is what it takes, so be it, so long as I can protect myself.

“Now, the director said he relayed my response, which is, ‘Pay me for a draft then,’ to the production company, and they replied that they didn’t have a development budget. This company makes $100 million movies, so it’s hard to believe that they can’t afford to pay a writer to write up a script for a project they’re interested in, or is this standard practice in the US?

“I’m a London-based British writer, and happily, I’ve started to get paid to write outlines and scripts, but only today I’ve had a reputable US producer put a writing brief to me. I’ve offered a take on it, which he likes, but he says he’d need a spec, not an outline. I said, ‘I’m being paid to write scripts now, so I’m not looking to write on spec.’ The UK producer I’m speaking with on other projects gladly seem to get this, but this guy just repeated that he’d need a script. It feels wrong and, frankly, insulting that he’s expecting me to give weeks or months of work without any kind of pay or commitment, or is that something that US producers can get away with when a writer hasn’t broken in yet and indeed join the WGA?” Oh, there are some facts we can lay out here, John.

**John:** Yes, there are. Greenhorn, it’s good that you are being paid to write stuff in the UK. You should be paid to write stuff everywhere. Writing something on spec for somebody in a situation you don’t control is not a good practice to get into. For, certainly, a US-based producer, someone who’s a WGA signatory, they should not be doing that at all.

**Craig:** It is a violation of our contract, very specifically, a violation of our minimum basic agreement, our collective bargaining agreement. It also is a violation of the WGA working rules. You are not allowed to write anything on spec for a signatory. You can pitch stuff, but you can’t write. Now, of course, Greenhorn is British. Greenhorn is not in the WGA. This US producer is fully aware of what the deal is. Can they get away with asking a British person to do this? Sure, but it’s wrong. I’m not sure that I would use the word reputable in front of this US producer’s name. If you’re reputable, you don’t ask for this, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** As a reminder, when we talk about writing on spec, this is a thing where you as the writer are choosing to write a project. Ideally, it’s something you own and control. It’s entirely your thing. Now, there could be situations where a producer comes, is like, “I really want to do a movie set at McDonald’s in space.” It’s like, great. You could go off and write that movie, and that person could be interested in your thing, but you control this fully. You cannot do that situation where that producer somehow owns this thing without having paid you money to write it.

**Craig:** That’s right. If you hear an idea and think, “That sounds amazing. I really want to write this,” the deal is that producer is going to attach themselves and maybe just be a dead weight on it. But it’s yours. You own it. They don’t own the copyright. You wrote it. By the way, you shouldn’t write an outline either. You should write nothing unless you have an employment agreement.

Now, that’s how we do it here with WGA writers in our business. The British system is not as protective as ours, which is odd, because they don’t have work for hire. And yet, as we’ve said many times, in exchange for giving up copyright, we get all the protections a union can afford, and it’s clear that they don’t quite have that in the UK.

**John:** Let’s get to our main topic this week, which is how would this be a biopic.

**Craig:** It’s not bai-AH-pik.

**John:** Not bai-AH-pik. It’s a BAI-oh-pik. We had a whole series of deaths happen recently. People who live long lives are just fantastic. We love people living a long time.

**Craig:** Rosalynn Carter.

**John:** I thought we’d start with Sandra Day O’Connor. Sandra Day O’Connor, for folks who are younger or not American, she was our first female Supreme Court justice. She died recently at 93 due to complications related to advanced dementia. She’d been public about the fact that she had dementia coming on.

**Craig:** Yes, so she has not been-

**John:** In public life.

**Craig:** … in the public eye for many, many years.

**John:** She obviously was an inspiration to a generation of female lawyers, as this pioneer there. She grew up in Arizona. She was a graduate of Stanford, went to Stanford Law School. She was dating William Rehnquist while she was there.

**Craig:** So hot.

**John:** So hot. A belated chief justice. But then she went on to marry another classmate, John O’Connor.

**Craig:** Well done. It has to have been an upgrade.

**John:** When she graduated from Stanford Law School, she was turned down by law firms, because she was a woman. She had to start her own firm with her husband. She was an Arizona state senator, first female majority leader. She became a judge through the Arizona system and then was appointed by Reagan to the Supreme Court. She was a deciding vote in a lot of crucial cases. She was a conservative, but she also voted with liberal majority on other situations, in controversial cases.

Probably the thing she’s most noted for is Planned Parenthood versus Casey, about a woman’s right to abortion and the term “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Undue burden felt like a good phrase to hang around a story told about her. Craig, how would this be a movie? Is there a movie? What are some comps that you’re thinking in your head?

**Craig:** I think there is a movie. They made a movie about Ruth Ginsburg.

**John:** Yeah, On the Basis of Sex.

**Craig:** Correct. I actually think there may be a more interesting movie to be made about Sandra Day O’Connor. The reason why is, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a progressive firebrand who served faithfully and brilliantly for many, many years, doing exactly what she said she would do. It was one of those stories where somebody is principled, and they stay principled. They face people, obstacles and things in their way. They surmount, and they thrive. Sandra Day O’Connor was far more sneaky. She’s an interesting case of somebody who came up through what you and I knew to be Republicans. That party’s no longer in existence. Might as well call it a different name.

The party of Reagan. In the “only Nixon can go to China” thing, Ronald Reagan, being the first president to appoint a female Supreme Court justice, did so under the aegis of, “This isn’t about women’s lib stuff, of course. She’s a good, staunch conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold.” Like many Supreme Court justices, including some that we have today, she began to surprise people, because while many people disagree with the lifetime appointment clause, what it does is it lets people just do what they want.

**John:** It’s like tenure.

**Craig:** It’s tenure. Sandra Day O’Connor showed an evolution and a wisdom and began to change the way the court was thinking. I love the fact that she dated William Rehnquist. That’s really cool, because then they’re on the court together. That’s fun. There’s cool moments and scenes like that, and also ,somebody wrestling with their own conscience and wrestling with their own principles. The fact that she had to take her husband on just to get a law firm, it’s…You can see somebody compromising until they didn’t have to anymore. That’s really interesting.

**John:** The question of any biopic we’re going to wrestle with a lot-

**Craig:** BAI-oh-pik.

**John:** BAI-oh-pik, gotta say BAI-oh-pik. The question is always where are the edges of this, where do you start the story, where do you end the story. There’s that temptation to do cradle to grave, which I think is generally a mistake. Those are not going to be the most interesting moments of a life. Once you do decide what the more limited window is, do you stay within it, or do you jump out to trace other things? You’re trying to thematically fold this all together.

I can imagine a Sandra Day O’Connor movie that is essentially just about the decision to appoint her and her going in through this moment and surviving that little crucible. I don’t recall her nomination process.

**Craig:** Very smooth.

**John:** So probably not that.

**Craig:** Ronald Reagan had full control.

**John:** He had control of everything.

**Craig:** The Republican Party was a corporation back then and ran like one. The thing I would need is actually information about her marriage, because at the heart of it, you do want that relationship. You want some sort of love story. Same thing that happened with the Ginsburg story. I think also there is something brutal about the greatest minds succumbing to dementia and fading away and what that means for the person who loves her and loved her all that time. That I think is valuable, but it’s also a story of legacy, and that’s really interesting to me. There is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg without Sandra Day O’Connor.

**John:** Absolutely. Depending on where the edges are of the story you’re telling, she was the first, but then Ginsburg is the second woman, I think, on the court.

**Craig:** That sounds right.

**John:** That sounds right. After she’s broken this through, what is it like to have a second woman, once you’ve actually been through there, and how do you-

**Craig:** A woman who’s from, quote unquote, the other side. That’s where it gets interesting. The Supreme Court is notable for very odd bedfellows, weird friendships that form. Kavanaugh, fascinatingly, has become a slightly weird swing vote at times. No one can seem to predict what happens when people get on the court.

**John:** Yeah, because important to recognize that you are appointed because they believe you’re going to have one set of facts, basically that you’re going to be the same person. But of course, people do change over time. That’s why stories are interesting.

**Craig:** Absolutely. When you watch Supreme Court hearings, they are a study in political non-commitment. Everyone knows what’s going on. The job is to be slippery without seeming like you’re slippery, until we all vote yes, and then you’re going to do whatever you want.

**John:** Next up, not controversial at all, Henry Kissinger died recently at 100 years of age.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think this is going to be too… Yeah.

**John:** 100 years old. Actually, you listened to audio this last week of just him at events, coherent and talking at 100 years old, which is great. Statesman, war criminal. Movies have to make choices about how they’re going to portray the complexity of a man’s life.

**Craig:** Kissinger is going to be a movie. That will be a movie.

**John:** 100%. A movie or a mini series. That’s worth talking about.

**Craig:** Movie or a mini series.

**John:** I feel like Sandra Day O’Connor is a movie.

**Craig:** Movie. Kissinger probably you could do a mini series. I’m sure it’s in development already. He falls into the category of monumentous people, for better or worse. He was just this fascinating character, working for a president that openly detested Jews. Here was Henry Kissinger, the most Jewish of Jews.

**John:** Born in Germany. Born Jewish in Germany, fled-

**Craig:** Fled.

**John:** … with his family to New York.

**Craig:** But notably, never lost the accent. He was always an immigrant. For Jewish people, there are levels of assimilation, like there are for any ethnicity in the United States. Having that accent, it’s just remarkable to me. That Nixon-Kissinger relationship is fascinating. There are moments, I think, where Kissinger probably did good, in the way that Lindsey Graham, in his bootlicky way, probably kept Trump from doing some terrible, terrible things. I think Kissinger probably did halt some horrible things. There were some things where he didn’t let Nixon get on the phone because he was drunk. Having somebody that is such an outsider be so inside is fascinating, from a dramatic point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. I was going through the incredibly long Wikipedia article on him, pulling out some little moments. He became a US citizen after he joined the Army to fight in the war. There was a moment which he was just a private during the American advance into Germany and was put in charge of administration of the city of Krefeld, because he was the guy who could speak German, and actually, apparently, did a really good job. It’s just those weird moments of, oh, now we’re fighting the Germans, and you speak German, and that is the moment where you can pick up and shine. That feels like the kind of thing that is in the longer version of this, which is probably the mini series. I don’t know that this fits into the movie.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s why you do want it to be a mini series, because for somebody like Kissinger, you want to walk away… It’s a little bit like the way Sorkin ended Social Network. You feel like you’ve known the spirit of somebody, but you also pity them and loathe them all at the same time. There’s just a core of something that’s sad there. But you can’t make a mini series merely to say, “Bad. This person bad.” That’s not the goal, I don’t think.

**John:** We have some insight into his character, obviously. He gave a lot of interviews. This one interview I wanted to pull out was with an Italian journalist. He writes, “The cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. This amazing romantic character suits me precisely, because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like it, my technique, together with independence. It’s very important for me, and conviction. I’ve always been convinced I had to do whatever I’ve done.”

**Craig:** Yes, which a lot of terrible people also have. Certainly, Kissinger did not lack any conviction. But I would suggest that that is bravado, in that everybody has a dark midnight.

**John:** What does he fear? That’s a thing I don’t think we have a sense of yet, but what the movie or mini series would have to get into.

**Craig:** Given the decisions he was making and the lives that he destroyed, particularly in Cambodia, but all over Southeast Asia, there had to have been moments of doubt, had to, because ultimately, it didn’t work.

**John:** Thinking about the edges of this mini series – it’s going to be a mini series – I think you have to pick an exit point, because he ended up staying in governmental life and policy life up until months ago. He was always an advisor to people. But I don’t think that’s going to be interesting. I don’t think that’s relevant.

**Craig:** Agreed. The meat of it ends with the fall of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Then I think you jump ahead to him much, much later in life and see him trying to rehabilitate or defend or whatever, and yet still, again, there is that last moment where you have to ask, where is the humanity of this person, and what happened? How does it feel?

**John:** So question of how many actors. Where do you break up his life? Is it three actors? Is there a 20-something, is there a 40-something, and then an old man version? Where are the splits?

**Craig:** If I were doing it, I would probably want just one actor, if I could. If he’s very young in the war – I don’t know how old he was when he was in World War II – then it’s hard. Then you want two. But if he’s a full adult, then I think… Because also, you’re going to need to do some prosthetic work and makeup on somebody to play Kissinger. Nobody’s just walking in the room looking like him. You don’t necessarily want to drift into the whole Saturday Night Live, “Look, I look exactly like the guy.” We had to deal with this with Mikhail Gorbachev in Chernobyl. It was a tricky thing. I feel like you could probably get away with one really, really good actor, because the great bulk of the work is going to be-

**John:** The Nixon era.

**Craig:** … 60s and 70s.

**John:** I’m surprised there’s not a movie out there yet. There’s a documentary Alex Gibney did, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The comps I was thinking about for this, it’s obviously Oppenheimer, a recent version, which was focused though on one moment in his life. I think we’re expanding beyond just the one focal point. It also made me think of, there’s a Michael Jackson biopic coming out. It reminded of just like, wow, you are walking into a minefield there. Talk about someone who’s a hero and a villain.

**Craig:** Yes, and you have to go in knowing that people are going to be critiquing this heavily no matter what you do. There’s no way that you put this out and everybody goes, “Yeah.”

**John:** “Yeah, that’s good.”

**Craig:** “We all agree.” It’s not as simple as something like Frost/Nixon, for instance, where Nixon’s clearly the villain, and really the hero journey there is, will David Frost get this guy to spill it or not. This is different. It’s also different than, the other thing I was thinking about was the John Adams mini series, Paul Giamatti. The point of that was that John Adams, crusty and grouchy and miserable as he was, was perhaps the most important Founding Father. That’s not the case here. This is something else.

**John:** Simpler story perhaps, Rosalynn Carter passed away recently, also in her 90s. She was the First Lady when her husband, Jimmy Carter, was the president. Born in Plains, Georgia, married Jimmy Carter, was politically active during her husband’s entire governorship and presidency. She was very involved as a First Lady. She was in cabinet meetings in ways that was controversial at the time, although there’s precedent for that before then, of course. Active with the Equal Rights Amendments. One of the first modern feminists who was in the White House there. Portrayed as a Steel Magnolia, sweet and loving but spine of steel.

**Craig:** Tough.

**John:** Tough. Criticized for lack of attention paid to fashion, which I think is an interesting thing, the sexism that goes in there. Hard to point to achievements in and of herself. It’s hard to imagine the Rosalynn Carter story that isn’t largely about Jimmy Carter, although I would say a comp for me would be Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, which is looking at the wife of Elvis, rather than that whole story.

**Craig:** But even there in Priscilla, the point is she was a child, that we have forgotten that Elvis essentially was a pedophile, I guess, by modern standards.

**John:** Yeah, by modern standards.

**Craig:** It’s funny. Melissa went to the Stevie Nicks concert last night. Apparently, Stevie’s still crushing it in her 70s. I was like, “Did she play Edge of Seventeen?” “Oh yeah, of course.” I’m like, “That’s about a boy who’s 16, so I guess technically it’s still pedophilia by today’s standards.”

In the case of Rosalynn Carter, to me the story is probably about the relationship between Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter. It’s a little bit more like Johnny Cash. I don’t know. It just feels like on her own… By the way, in a weird way, on Jimmy Carter’s own, even though he was president, I’m not sure there would be enough there. But their relationship was fascinating, so long-lived and so beautiful and decent, and the way that they both just walked the walk. Also, the two of them defined a kind of Christianity that is what I would think of as actual Christianity.

**John:** When you look at the Habitat for Humanity work that Carter was doing later on in his years, it’s literally building houses for people, just like, be a carpenter.

**Craig:** Following the teachings of Jesus and giving and giving and giving. You’d like to think that, in part, that’s why they both made it so far in life. They were fulfilled with each other and by life and their good works, which is in stark contrast to some of the people that we now deal with, these social media-baiting idiots. It’s almost like a different species of person. The sadness of her death to me was more in the context of end of an era.

**John:** I worry about lack of conflict. I don’t know where the source of the conflict is. The conflict doesn’t feel like it’s between the two of them. Who is the antagonist here, and how is she growing and changing? I don’t have a sense of that yet. Any movie is going to need to figure out what that is, because right now, it’s almost Hallmarky in the sense it’s just smooth sailing.

**Craig:** One of the things that drama struggles with is to portray decency, steady, reliable decency, because it’s not interesting. We simply aren’t entertained by it. Neither one of them seemed interested in interesting anyone. They just wanted to do good things. I do think a Rosalynn Carter biopic would be a challenge. Jimmy Carter, you know that he was involved in this insane nuclear accident?

**John:** No, I don’t know anything about that.

**Craig:** Not that he caused it, but he was a nuclear engineer. He worked on nuclear submarines. There was an accident at a reactor. Jimmy Carter and his team was sent in to clean it up, and they did. It was Chernobyl-ish in the fact that they were exposed to quite a bit of radiation and all the rest of it. He was an heroic guy, and I think more than any other president, has received a little bit of historical rehabilitation, at least any other from my lifetime.

**John:** Going back to the whole issues of conflict and where is the conflict in this story, I am aware that we on Scriptnotes are always talking about the hero’s journey, the sense of, oh, this is the character who grows up in a place, leaves the place, is transformed, goes through these trials. That’s not the only way stories can work mythologically. There’s things called the heroine’s journey and other alternative ways of thinking about what a central character’s journey might be. We’re trying to put together an episode talking through these alternate ways of thinking about that.

**Craig:** Listen. Anything that interests people, I think, is the goal. It doesn’t have to be from one perspective or another. What’s fascinating to me is that, as varied as world cultures are, storytelling and mythologizing are incredibly similar. The Hero’s Journey ultimately really was just saying that. The word hero was applied to all genders. It is kind of incredible. It makes me wonder if this way we think about storytelling, it’s just imprinted in the brain. It’s not necessarily cultural. The brain has a way of organizing drama. But that said, I’m open to anything. If it makes people sit forward and engages them, yes.

**John:** I think some of the overlooked stories in mythology would be Demeter’s story, or the kidnapped woman who has to adapt and survive in a place, Medea as a woman who is not a classic protagonist story, yet is a part of foundational.

**Craig:** Great story there.

**John:** It’s a great story though.

**Craig:** Those kids die.

**John:** They do.

**Craig:** She’s angry.

**John:** She’s very angry.

**Craig:** Oh, man, does she get angry.

**John:** You know who else is angry?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** George Santos.

**Craig:** The Pope, George Santos?

**John:** Pope George Santos. For folks who are listening to this years after we recorded it and are going, “Who is George Santos?”

**Craig:** “Who is George Santos?” George Santos, I believe he was the Pope. He was a Jewish, not-Jewish, astronaut, physicist, professor. I think he was the president and also none of those, just a liar.

**John:** George Anthony Devolder Santos we believe is his full name.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Spent his early life in Jackson Heights and also in Brazil. He was elected as a US Representative from New York City as a Republican, openly gay. Everything that basically he ended up saying turned out to be a lie.

**Craig:** Lie.

**John:** This was all revealed after he was elected. The New York Times reported how much of his life was misrepresented. There was really a sense of failure of journalism to have not investigated any of this stuff earlier on. He was the sixth person ever kicked out of Congress.

**Craig:** Congress is enormous. 535, I think, people. Over the course of 200 and whatever many years, he’s number six. He not only was a serial fabulist, who for instance eventually would say, “I’m Jew-ish.” He also was a fraud. He was misusing campaign funds to buy fabulous things. We’re talking about him like he’s dead. He’s still alive. He is fascinating.

**John:** Yes. I think he’s a great character.

**Craig:** He is. I love listening to him, because it’s like somebody coming out and saying, “And now, the dumpster fire show.” It’s weirdly funny.

**John:** It’s funny because you recognize he actually has no power. With Trump, it’s terrifying, because like, oh shit, people are actually going to vote for him. Everyone recognizes this is absurd.

**Craig:** It is a remarkable clown show. You’re right. He does feel vaguely innocuous. He did misuse campaign funds, and that’s a crime.

**John:** That’s a crime. He’s indicted. He will probably go to jail.

**Craig:** He will go to prison, as well he should. I hope he does. But he’s also kind of ridiculous. Even when Saturday Night Live would make fun of him, it seemed like they were enjoying it.

**John:** Absolutely. Bowen Yang’s portrayal of him was delightful and funny. You’d worry, oh, it’s softening him too much, but not really. It’s not like the thing you worry about with Trump, where you’re making him likable. You’re not making him likable, because he’s absurd.

**Craig:** He’s absurd and he was ejected from a Republican-controlled Congress, and he was a Republican. He is now starting to accuse other people of things. He’s like, “Okay. If you kick me out, I’m going to say that one’s gay and that one did this and that one beat his wife.” There’s a great exchange where he accused a guy of beating his wife. The problem with George Santos is he’s like the kid who cried wolf times a thousand. Who knows what anything coming out of his mouth-

**John:** You can’t believe anything, I think-

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** … which is part of the fun. Looking for comps with this, Shattered Glass, in terms of a fabulist, is just watching it all come crashing down. What’s so weird though is, in the movie Shattered Glass – Billy Ray wrote and directed that – it’s over the course of one day, it just all comes crashing down. Here, the story comes out, but it just keeps going and going and going.

**Craig:** It just keeps going.

**John:** It reminded me a little more of Tiger King, where it’s just like, you’re an absurd character here, and somehow the world has to go around.

**Craig:** Great comp. That’s a great comp. That’s why a documentary that would follow, if it had followed George Santos around-

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** … and picked up his reaction and his bizarre lies and then showing how he was lying with a simple edit from what he says to what is real would’ve been amazing. Shattered Glass, Billy portrays Stephen Glass as a tragic figure who wants applause and love and can’t get it. Peter Sarsgaard does such a beautiful job of playing somebody who beats himself up for getting suckered.

Everybody knows. There’s no conflict. Everybody knows. He knows. He knows he’s lying when he’s lying. He’s basically saying, “I’m lying.” There’s a great clip from Fox News where someone asks him something, and he gives an answer, and she goes, “You just can’t tell the truth.” That is literally on Fox News. No one ever believed anything he said, and then that’s it. Then he got kicked out.

**John:** There is a movie in development.

**Craig:** You’re kidding me.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** It’s HBO. It could be really fun.

**Craig:** It’s on HBO? Who’s doing it?

**John:** It’s written by Mike Makowsky, who came on Scriptnotes. He’s the guy who did-

**Craig:** Oh, I remember.

**John:** … Bad Education.

**Craig:** He’s a good writer.

**John:** Good writer. Episode 448, he was on for that. Here’s the write-up that we have so far. “The film tells the story of a seemingly minor local race that wound up a battle for the soul of Long Island and unexpectedly carved the path to the world’s most famous and now disgraced Congressman. It follows the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on the truth, and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American dream.”

**Craig:** I wish Mike all the luck. I don’t know how I would do… I also don’t know how to do a lot of things. Then I see them and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.”

**John:** It feels like the HBO movie is the right way to go. It’s Frank Rich who-

**Craig:** It’s a movie?

**John:** Yeah, a movie.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It looks like it’s a movie.

**Craig:** You said Frank Rich?

**John:** Frank Rich. Veep and-

**Craig:** Now I’m in.

**John:** … Succession.

**Craig:** No offense to Mike. He’s a really good writer. But Frank Rich just simply to me, he doesn’t just signify quality, he creates quality. I can’t imagine that anything involving Frank Rich will be anything less than excellent.

**John:** Now you’re excited.

**Craig:** Now I’m sitting full-

**John:** Now you’re on board.

**Craig:** I’m going to watch this.

**John:** The last one is Sam Altman and OpenAI. The short version of this, we’re recording this the 3rd of December, 2023. Who knows what the next-

**Craig:** Week or two will bring.

**John:** New stuff always happens. Essentially, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which is one of the big AI companies as of 2023. His rise to this position, at 19 he founded Loopt, which is a location-based social networking mobile application, raised $30 million in venture capital, ultimately sold it for $43 million. Was president of Y Combinator, the big venture startup, and then OpenAI, which was founded by him, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, other folks in there.

**Craig:** Veritable rogues gallery.

**John:** Absolutely. You’ve got some really fascinating personalities in there. Then of course, the big thing that happened recently for us was that OpenAI’s board, which is a nonprofit, which is really confusing, voted to oust him. His employees rose up and said, “No, you can’t get rid of him,” and so he came back in.

**Craig:** Now, in the traditional version of this story, what happens is the evil board decides to push AI into dangerous territory to make more money, and the courageous CEO, backed by his faithful workers, rebel. It is the opposite of what has happened here. What appears to have happened is the board was worried that things were getting pushed too far, and Sam was like, “No.”

**John:** We don’t honestly know. One of the things that’s so fascinating about this moment we’re in right now is that we don’t know they actually fired him, because they’ve been so, so vague.

**Craig:** I guess maybe I’m saying a rumor.

**John:** You’re saying a rumor. It’s been so, so vague. The best explanation I’ve heard most recently is the board realized they couldn’t control him. It wasn’t about a worry of a specific thing. They just figured out, “Oh, we have three votes. We could oust him.” They just did it without thinking through stuff.

I think my question is, when a version of this story is told, which I think probably will be told, again, where are the edges of this? Do you just really focus on those few days and all of the drama around it? It’s a really tight thing, like Margin Call, which is really a tight, little story, or do you go bigger and broader? Because we’re still in the middle of it, we don’t know what is actually going to happen with OpenAI. I think that’s probably a mistake. I think you do need to put some edges on it.

**Craig:** We should ask ChatGPT what it thinks.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I feel like it’s a sequence in a movie. I don’t think in and of itself, a board ousting somebody and then putting them back in feels… I wouldn’t tune in.

**John:** It feels like part of an episode of Succession. It doesn’t feel like enough of a story in itself.

**Craig:** In fact, it’s part of seven episodes of Succession.

**John:** It’s happened a few times on Succession.

**Craig:** Just a few. The board voting and getting rid of somebody and not getting rid of somebody, we’ve definitely seen that. It does work as a dramatic device in fiction. In reality, in some of the Apple movies, they’ve said, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of Steve Jobs. Oh, we’re going to put Steve Jobs back in.” But it’s never the focus of the movie.

**John:** The other comps obviously are Social Network, Blackberry, which I really enjoyed.

**Craig:** I want to see Blackberry. I haven’t seen it.

**John:** Blackberry’s fun. It’s like, “Oh wow, we’ve built this amazing thing.” Then the iPhone comes out, and everything comes crashing down in ways that are delightful.

**Craig:** Yeah, and they’re Canadian.

**John:** They’re Canadian. It’s a thoroughly Canadian movie.

**Craig:** So Canadian. I love that.

**John:** It’s so good. The appealing thing about trying to do this movie is it gives you a chance to also include a bunch of other famous people. Peter Thiel and Elon, Satya Nadella. There’s lots of people you can stick in there.

**Craig:** So many people that will sue you.

**John:** Let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** Thiel’s going to sue you, for sure.

**John:** Thiel, he’s already sued-

**Craig:** He may sue us for even talking about him.

**John:** Absolutely. We have no criticism of Peter Thiel on this podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** But I will say, let’s talk about who can sue you of the people we’ve talked about’s things. The nice thing about the dead people is they can’t sue you.

**Craig:** Dead people can’t sue you.

**John:** Santos is going to have a hard time suing you.

**Craig:** Santos, he could try, but he doesn’t have the money anymore, and he’s going to go to prison probably. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can sue you in the blink of an eye, and in doing so, wreck you if you fight back, because obviously, they have essentially unlimited resources. That’s terrifying. It is one of the reasons why we need an independent, free, and thriving press in this country, because the press really is protected in ways that individuals aren’t. I’m sure that any company making something like this would be a little concerned. Elon and Peter certainly have been litigious before.

**John:** Of the biopics we talked through today, which ones do we think are going to actually happen? You were pretty thumbs up on Sandra Day O’Connor.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that Sandra Day O’Connor feels like it could be a decent movie.

**John:** Henry Kissinger?

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** 100%. Multiple versions of it probably.

**Craig:** Yes. That’d be a good HBO mini series, I would imagine. Limited series, I should say.

**John:** Rosalynn Carter?

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** I don’t think so either. I think you’d have to find a very specific way into it. George Santos is actually already happening.

**Craig:** It’s happening.

**John:** It’s happening.

**Craig:** Frank Rich.

**John:** Frank Rich.

**Craig:** Mike Makowsky.

**John:** Sam Altman, I don’t think yet.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** People are trying to do it. I know there’s people milling around.

**Craig:** He’s also just now emerged as a name people know because of this. Prior to that, he wasn’t TV famous.

**John:** He’s also young. There’s a lot of runway ahead for him.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I assume that he, like all of the Silicon people, uses a blood boy to refresh his blood.

**John:** A thing I didn’t talk about is, in addition to OpenAI, he has that service that’s scanning people’s eyeballs for identity and cryptocurrency.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t wait to-

**John:** Can’t wait for that.

**Craig:** … see what’s coming on the horizon.

**John:** Nothing ominous about that.

**Craig:** Nope. Going to hide in my house.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which I’m now learning, because I’ve never learned it. The IPA is a way of describing all the sounds in human languages. It’s a very distinct system for how you write that down. I’ve always seen it, and I’ve never been able to interpret it or understand it. I’m writing my flashcards, and I’m just learning how to do it.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It is really clever and cool. You recognize the similarities and differences between languages and between dialects and accents, because the same word in English, based on different accents, would have very different written versions in IPA.

**Craig:** Notations.

**John:** Notations in IPA.

**Craig:** I just did a puzzle recently where part of the deal was you had to use one of the IPA diacritics, a single dot, two dots, or a line, to change the pronunciation of a word-

**John:** Oh, neat.

**Craig:** … in the clue to be able to solve the answer. Then later, when you looked at all of those things, the dots and the dashes form Morse code letters.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** It was fun to sit with the IPA notation there and do that. It’s very cool for nerds.

**John:** For nerds. For nerds.

**Craig:** For uncool people like us.

**John:** But also, those are homonyms. What’s one-

**Craig:** Homophone?

**John:** When a word has two different pronunciations, but it’s written the same way, that’s a homonym?

**Craig:** That is a homonym, right.

**John:** Homonym.

**Craig:** Homophones are the ones that sound the same but mean different things.

**John:** Present versus present. They track those differently. It’s not just where the emphasis is. Literally, the vowel sounds have changed.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. I’m with you. I support your One Cool Thing. I think it is cool.

**John:** Every January 1st, I try to have an area of interest for the new year.

**Craig:** That’s very John August of you.

**John:** IPA is going to be my area of interest.

**Craig:** I did a variety writers thing a few days ago, and Nathan Fielder was one of the other writers on the panel. He listens to our show.

**John:** As does Bowen Yang, who played George Santos.

**Craig:** Bowen listens to our show?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s a genius. I’m obsessed all the way back to his lip syncing videos. You’ve seen those, right?

**John:** Oh, 100%.

**Craig:** They’re amazing.

**John:** That’s where I first became aware of him.

**Craig:** He’s amazing. Okay, so Bowen, hi. Come on our show. You’re awesome. Nathan wanted me to pass along hello to you. He also said, in his Nathan, he’s like, “I feel like John August is a very organized guy.” Then he said, “I don’t mean to say that you’re not organized. I just feel like, you know.” I was like, “No, you nailed it. He’s a very organized guy.” You’ve organized your new topic for 2024.

**John:** Yeah. I’m prepared.

**Craig:** Well done. My One Cool Thing is a trailer for a television series that just came out, I believe two days ago, as of this recording. It is for the show Fallout.

**John:** I’m excited to see Fallout. Our friends have made that show.

**Craig:** Fallout is executive produced by Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who have been on our show before. Jonah, I believe, directed the first couple of episodes. I don’t think they’re the showrunners. I just know them. I’m so sorry to the showrunners. We’ll get you in the show notes, I promise. After The Last of Us, there seemed to be this, I don’t know, epidemic of sudden development of video games into shows and movies and things. I suspect quite a few of them are not going to work very well.

What I loved about the trailer for Fallout was the vibe, which I think is different than tone. Tone is sort of like, what kind of comedy, what kind of drama, is it melodramatic, is it realistic. Vibe is this other stuff. It’s just like, did you capture the soul of something. As a Fallout fan, I watch that trailer, and I’m like, “Yeah, they got the vibe.”

Now, I can’t say anything yet about the story they’re telling. They have to create a central character, because when you play, it’s just you. You don’t have a name, and you don’t talk. We’ll see how that works. The vibe, that retro futuristic thing, and how they smartly knew to say, “Okay, the power suits have to look exactly like that, but the ghouls don’t have to look like the ghouls in the game. We want to maintain Walter Goggins’s face so that he can act.” These are the decisions you have to make when you’re adapting video games. So far, from what I’ve seen, looking awesome.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s on Amazon.

**John:** Feels like Amazon. We’re guessing. It’s on a streamer.

**Craig:** Amazon? It’s Fallout. Whatever. It’s Fallout.

**John:** I’m excited to see it.

**Craig:** Yeah, very much so.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from James Llonch. It features Craig Mazin ranting about his least favorite screenwriting app.

**Craig:** Which one? Oh, yes, that one.

**John:** That one. If you have an outro, you could send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We always love to hear your outros. That’s also the place where you can send questions and follow-up. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. They ship in time for Christmas, so get those.

**Craig:** Great Christmas gift-

**John:** Great Christmas gift.

**Craig:** … for the dork in your family.

**John:** Also, Christmas gift, Arlo Finches are still out there for the kids out there.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Finches is… I want to make it different. I want to give you a different pluralization.

**John:** Arlos Finch?

**Craig:** Arlo Finchae.

**John:** Finchae?

**Craig:** I like Arlo Finchae.

**John:** All right. They’re good. You can get them signed. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Writer Emergency Pack, they sell really big on Amazon. Craig-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s weird making a seasonal product, because literally, our chart is just like a straight line up. It’s like a hockey stick. It’s a gift. People give it.

**Craig:** I don’t think people who don’t sell things understand what Christmas is really about.

**John:** It is crazy.

**Craig:** Christmas is an economic phenomenon.

**John:** 80% of the money we make on Writer Emergency Pack is holidays.

**Craig:** You are hardly the only business that does.

**John:** You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net. Also, a good gift, you could get somebody a Scriptnotes gift. At scriptnotes.net, you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on which event in history had the most negative impact on civilization.

**Craig:** Heavy.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This Bonus Segment topic I’m stealing from Electoral Vote, which is a website I read every day about what’s happening in US government. It’s a good site for that. Their question was, which single event at any time in history has had the biggest negative impact on civilization? They had good suggestions from their own listeners, but I wanted to hear from you, what you were thinking about. We also have to discuss, what is a single event? Is this a thing that happens in the course of a day, or can it be over a couple years? Is World War I an event?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, sure.

**Craig:** Sure. You could, if you wanted to, just squish it down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which kicked it off.

**John:** Yeah, but there would still probably have been a World War I. It was going to happen.

**Craig:** It was a pile of gasoline-soaked rags.

**John:** I’m saying the African slave trade is not an event. That to me is too broad of a thing.

**Craig:** It is not an event. We’re looking for an event. That’s a tough one. It also eliminates things like disease, which has had a greater impact on us than anything.

**John:** The Black Death.

**Craig:** Bubonic plague, smallpox, all of these things. The adoption of Christianity by the Romans and the transformation of this-

**John:** Theodosius, I think, was the-

**Craig:** It was Constantine. I believe it was Constantine.

**John:** The Romans, they were taking this, what essentially was a kind of obscure cult, and making it the state religion.

**Craig:** Just made it the state. I thought it was Constantine, but I could be wrong. Either way, whoever did it suddenly turned this cult of sacrificial, the worship of the poor, and made it imperial. The Holy Roman Empire then spread and essentially took over all of Europe and went to war with the Ottoman Empire, and also imparted what the Americans called manifest destiny, a religious aspect to the concept of domination, dominating other cultures because they were not appropriately religious. The Holy Wars were incredibly costly. Then the sectarianism, where the church had a schism, and that created wars, all the way through to what was happening in Ireland. That, I think, as an event, it’s… Listen. There’s another way of looking at it, which is if the Romans hadn’t done that, and they spread the Roman mythology across, that it still turns out terrible.

**John:** There’s plenty of alt histories, which is basically like, what if they hadn’t done that? We’re living under a more standard Roman mythology of stuff. That would be weird as well.

**Craig:** We worship Jupiter.

**John:** Exactly. Along the thread of conquering the world, you also have Genghis Khan and say his birth or his rise out of that place. You look at the transformation of Asia and the fact that some astonishing number of percentage of people have Genghis Khan’s DNA because of what happened there.

**Craig:** You could point to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In terms of hard-to-comprehend numbers of deaths, maybe 20 million people. Numbers that we really can’t get our arms around.

**John:** Columbus visiting America. Would Europeans have gotten to America at some other point? Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But Columbus’s arrival and then subsequent voyages and having the Crown behind him and the resources to really annihilate indigenous peoples.

**Craig:** Annihilate them largely through disease, although I would still trace that back to the notion of we must spread Christian values to the world of nonbelievers and pagans.

**John:** I don’t have a good sense, honestly, of when the missionaries actually became part of it, because I perceive it as being a gold rush at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah, the missionaries were right there. The conquistadors. Everybody went under the banner of Christ. Everybody was there to spread the word. Justin Marks, we’ve had Justin on the show.

**John:** I think so. He was on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s got Shogun coming out, which also looks fantastic. I love Shogun, by the way. One of my favorite novels. The Jesuits were there in Japan in the 1800s. They go everywhere. The missionaries find themselves all over the world. That was the tip of the spear of colonialism and the slave trade and all sorts of terrible things. Oh, man, one event.

**John:** The burning of the Library at Alexandria.

**Craig:** Brutal.

**John:** Brutal, brutal loss. It’s a little unclear how much those were the only copies of those documents and how much other stuff could be found.

**Craig:** Why didn’t they back it up in the Cloud?

**John:** Come on. Cloud storage, man.

**Craig:** Guys, it’s Cloud storage. It’s free.

**John:** Absolutely. Dropbox.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it have been cool to go back and say, “You guys can back this up in the Cloud.” They just look up.

**John:** Let’s talk about inventions. The steam engine, obviously, as an instrument of war. A lot of these things, you could see there’s the pro and the con. The printing press allowed for misinformation and the Bible, but it also allowed for literacy and development of culture.

**Craig:** One of the great events that transformed the world, I think again, probably for good and for bad in equal measures, was industrialization, the concept of the assembly line. In the Revolutionary War, Americans kind of invented assembly lines to create arms, to create armaments. It was one of the reasons we won. You could certainly point to gunpowder as being a huge problem.

**John:** Or the first mass-produced revolver was 1836. That’s a huge change. Before then, you’re making a gun one at a time.

**Craig:** Exactly, and you’re firing one shot at a time and loading in your things. Yes, all absolutely true. Then there’s the open question of nuclear weapons.

**John:** Is Hiroshima the event?

**Craig:** There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese deaths and more American deaths. There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the Soviet invasion of Japan, and then the Stalinist oppression of that country. Then of course, there are people who say, “Sorry, you just murdered tens and tens and thousands and thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with this war. They were just civilians.” But also, notable, we haven’t had a world war since the invention of nuclear weapons, because it seems untenable.

**John:** Maybe some future topic we’ll talk about the good things, the single best things that have happened, because I can think of a couple off the top of my head. The contraceptive pill changed society for the best.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Just the ability for women to head to the workforce and have control over their fertility.

**Craig:** Vaccination.

**John:** Vaccination.

**Craig:** Vaccination on its own is a miracle. A miracle. So of course, idiots have to blame it for things. It’s unbelievable.

**John:** It’s the worst. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Sandra Day O’Connor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Day_O%27Connor)
* [Henry Kissinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger)
* [Rosalynn Carter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalynn_Carter)
* [George Santos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos)
* [Sam Altman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman)
* [What happened at OpenAI? The Sam Altman saga, explained](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/20/openai-sam-altman-ceo-oust/) by Rachel Lehman for The Washington Post
* [International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)](https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/)
* [Fallout – Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kQ8i2FpRDk)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/621standard.mp3).