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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/halfway-there).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.

First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.

**Craig:** Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?

**Megana Rao:** I identify with Gen Z.

**Craig:** You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …

**Megana:** I’m old, I get it.

**Craig:** Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.

**Megana:** I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.

**Craig:** Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”

**John:** My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.

**Craig:** Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.

**Megana:** Yeah. My cold bones.

**Craig:** You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.

**Megana:** I already am.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-

**Craig:** You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.

**John:** Going to be great.

**Craig:** Just to get meta.

**John:** First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.

**Craig:** Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-

**John:** 99% of all COVID in North America is that.

**Craig:** It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.

**Craig:** The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.

The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.

**John:** Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.

**Craig:** It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.

**John:** This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.

**Craig:** Of course, that’s the rule.

**John:** That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.

I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.

**Craig:** I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.

I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.

**John:** Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?

**Craig:** It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.

**John:** We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.

**Craig:** I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.

**John:** Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?

**Megana:** Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.

I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”

**John:** I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.

**John:** Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.

**Craig:** No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.

**John:** What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?

**Craig:** That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.

**John:** Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.

**Megana:** I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.

**John:** I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.

**John:** Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?

**Craig:** It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.

**John:** Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.

**Craig:** It’d be a bummer.

**John:** That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.

**Craig:** I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**John:** This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**Craig:** A run-in?

**John:** I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.

What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.

**Craig:** I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.

**John:** All that meta data was buried into the file system.

**Craig:** You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.

**John:** I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.

**Megana:** When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …

**Craig:** You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.

**John:** I don’t want to Command I.

**Craig:** Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.

**Megana:** Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.

“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”

**Craig:** Yes. Amen, Jules.

**John:** Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.

**Craig:** Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?

The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.

I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.

**John:** It’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.

**John:** The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.

I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.

**Craig:** I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.

**John:** Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.

The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.

I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.

**Craig:** I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.

**John:** Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?

**Megana:** Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”

**Craig:** What’s up with that?

**John:** What’s up with that?

**Craig:** What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-

**John:** It’s a magic thing.

**Craig:** Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.

**John:** We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.

I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.

**Craig:** Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.

**John:** Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.

**Craig:** A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.

**John:** Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-

**Craig:** Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?

**John:** We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have questions.

**John:** First question is, what is your refund policy?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.

**John:** This is just all-

**Craig:** It’s all bad.

**John:** It’s all umbrage bait.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.

**Craig:** Aw. Come on.

**John:** Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?

**Craig:** I call it both, slug line and scene header.

**John:** It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.

**Craig:** Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?

**John:** “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”

**Craig:** It’s rare, but I’ve done it.

**John:** It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.

**Craig:** “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.

**John:** Sometimes it’s really helpful.

**Craig:** Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?

**John:** Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.

**John:** Craig is requesting his refund.

**Craig:** I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?

**John:** Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?

**Craig:** Yeah, help us out.

**Megana:** John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?

**Megana:** I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.

**Craig:** Script throwers.

**Megana:** They just have to pick that back up.

**Craig:** Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.

**John:** We do know what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”

If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?

**Craig:** No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.

**John:** I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.

**Craig:** No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.

**John:** This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.

**Craig:** Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.

**John:** I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.

**John:** They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.

**Craig:** At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.

**John:** We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.

**Craig:** Yeah, new stuff.

**John:** Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.

**Megana:** JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”

**John:** What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is answerable.

**John:** Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.

**Craig:** JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.

One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.

**John:** We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?

**Craig:** I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.

This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.

**John:** While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?

**Craig:** No, it’s 19-A.

**John:** That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”

**Craig:** We just call it 19 Apple Apple.

**John:** Apple Apple.

**Craig:** That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.

**John:** Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.

**John:** Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”

**Craig:** What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.

**John:** I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.

**Craig:** There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”

**John:** Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.

**Megana:** Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”

**John:** Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** That’s mom of the year. Best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.

There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.

I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.

**John:** I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.

**Craig:** Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.

My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.

**Craig:** I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.

**John:** I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.

**Craig:** This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”

**John:** Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-

**Craig:** “Do we have to know dates?”

**John:** … for this to work.

**Craig:** My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?

**John:** I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.

**Craig:** Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.

The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.

**John:** It feels like a perfect device for it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.

**John:** Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.

**Craig:** Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.

**John:** They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.

**Craig:** No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.

**John:** Ethereum.

**Craig:** China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.

**John:** I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.

One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.

**Craig:** All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Boogle?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that it, Boogle?

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** Beeple.

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** I like Boogle better.

**John:** He was a previous One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.

**John:** Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s different.

**John:** It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-

**Craig:** The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.

**John:** Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?

**Craig:** Copyright.

**John:** Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.

**Craig:** No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.

**John:** They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.

**Craig:** There is. There is.

**John:** What’s that?

**Craig:** The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.

**John:** Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.

**Craig:** JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?

**John:** Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.

**Craig:** Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?

**John:** Apparently not.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.

**John:** We can Google this now.

**Craig:** It’s $3 million.

**John:** $3 million.

**Craig:** They spent $3 million.

**John:** Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.

I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.

**Craig:** It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?

**John:** I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.

**Craig:** I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “

**John:** Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.

**Craig:** It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.

**John:** You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.

**Craig:** It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.

**John:** Doesn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.

**Craig:** Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s [MOTHER Script](https://twitter.com/extspace/status/1482482121335734273?)
* Script University’s [20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order](https://www.screenwritersuniversity.com/pages/20-script-rules-1)
* Read Aloud Software Suggestions [Table Read](https://www.tablereadpro.com/), [ZoomText](https://www.zoomtext.com/), [JAWS](https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/), [VoiceDream](https://www.voicedream.com/)
* DnD for kids [Level 1 Geek](https://www.level1geek.com/dnd-for-kids-guide/) and [Being a Dungeon Master for Kids](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/being-dungeon-master-kids)
* [Flee](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430054/) animated film
* [Wikipedia Timeline Game](https://kottke.org/22/01/wikipedia-history-timeline-game)
* [Papers, please](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please) by Lucas Pope
* NFT Articles [Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excited-about-web3/) by Tim O’Reilly, [My First Impressions of Web3](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html) on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, [Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are](https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/) by Molly White
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Phillipson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/534standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/main-character-energy).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 535 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, as screenwriters we’re constantly looking for ways to expose a character’s inner states, but what happens when real-life people start performing with main character energy?

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ll look at the issue from both the perspective of writers creating characters and 21st century humans trying to function in a society.

**Craig:** We live in a society, John.

**John:** We live in a society. If everyone’s the main character, society probably doesn’t function. We’ll also have Follow Up and lots of new listener questions, and in a bonus segment for Premium Members, we will talk about population, speaking of society. Craig and I grew up in a time of Malthusian predictions of overpopulation. You remember that, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, ’70s.

**John:** Oh, ’70s, and now there’s just not enough ’80s. We’ll talk through that.

**Craig:** Depending on where you live.

**John:** Depending where you live. It’s a very situational and very local thing, but also the trends are pretty clear. We’ll get into some of that. First, Craig, this is pretty huge news. It was hard to sit on the whole week. We almost put out a special episode, but we didn’t. Fans are suing Universal Pictures because the 2019 movie Yesterday did not include Ana de Armas. I was aware she was not in the movie, but I wasn’t aware of the controversy around this, because Ana de Armas is in one of the trailers for the movie, but she does not actually appear in the movie itself. Fans have taken it on themselves to actually sue Universal Pictures over this. Craig, you are the legal expert on the show. Medical expert, legal expert, expert in puzzles. Can you help us figure out what is the likelihood that this lawsuit will go through and that these fans will be justly compensated for the lack of Ana de Armas they got?

**Craig:** It depends on whether Universal wants to make an example of these people or just settle and give everybody a five-cent coupon for something. It’s pretty silly. Obviously the defense is simply that she was in the movie when they made that marketing material. They do put together trailers before the movie’s finalized. Then they creatively came to the conclusion that she didn’t need to be in the movie, and so they removed those scenes. This happens all the time. I remember when I was in high school, my friends and I were very excited to go see, I think it was Nightmare On Elm Street: Dream Warriors is the name of number three.

**John:** (sings)

**Craig:** (sings) Yep. Was that Tesla or Dokken? In the commercials, not just the trailer, in the television commercials, every single commercial, at some point Freddy Krueger would go, “How sweet, fresh meat.” We thought this was the funniest line, and we couldn’t wait to go to the movie and smoke the 1980s weed, which is the equivalent of nibbling one 19th of a gummy today, and then sitting in the theater, and when that line would come, we would go, “Yay! How sweet, fresh meat.” Then he never said it. What we did was we sued.

**John:** That’s how you raised the nest egg that let you become the successful screenwriter you are now.

**Craig:** We live in a society. Basically, so this is ridiculous, either Universal goes, “Yeah, we just want to make a point of never having anyone do this ever again,” which is what I will suspect, they will just fight this to the bitter end, because even the people are asking for $5 million. This is a class action, I presume. $5 million spread out over affected viewers in their home states. Even if Universal lost and had to pay every dime these people wanted, whatever. This is ridiculous. I think they’ll fight it all the way. There’s always the possibility they just settle and everybody gets, like I said, 20 cents, a 20-cent coupon for something.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes that lets you see the trailer that actually has Ana de Armas in it. Apparently she plays another guest on a talk show when the guy, the hero of Yesterday, is playing a song. There’s some sort of spark between them. It’s not even clear that it’s beyond the one scene. I do just hope that the end result of this, whether it’s found in Universal’s favor or the fans’ favor, is that it’s really found in favor of Ana de Armas, who needs to be in all movies, because she is one of the most delightful things about the recent Bond movie. She’s so fantastic in Knives Out. We need more Ana de Armas. If this lawsuit is what it takes to bring this awareness to the general public, I think it’s worth it.

**Craig:** Seems like the general public is saying that she is so compelling, the only reason they went to go see a movie with Beatles music in it was to see her, and no other reason.

**John:** No other reason.

**Craig:** No other reason.

**John:** I’ll say, even the movie without Ana de Armas in it, I really enjoyed the movie. I don’t think people talk enough about Yesterday, because I thought it was actually a really well constructed movie, and took a very high-concept premise and ran with it well. I wish good things upon the movie Yesterday, even if it doesn’t star Ana de Armas. If we get the Snyder cut that has Ana de Armas back in it, maybe that’s the best of all possible worlds.

**Craig:** That sounds good.

**John:** Yeah. Now Craig, you texted me last night asking about, “Hey, can we pull this Scriptnotes podcast that you and I record off of Spotify, because,” you said, “F Spotify.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Spotify has been in headlines lately. Neil Young pulled his catalog off. I think Joni Mitchell just did the same in solidarity with him, because Spotify is the main patron and platform for Joe Rogan’s podcast. I don’t have anything against Joe Rogan the person. I don’t watch his podcast or listen to the show.

**John:** To be clear, you don’t listen to any podcast.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Including this podcast.

**Craig:** That’s right, so that’s not a judgment.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Stipulated it’s a thing that one could watch or listen to. Therefore I don’t. But I certainly have read enough transcripts and quotes from him that indicate that he’s not on what I would call the right side of the science when it comes to epidemiology and COVID-19 and public health and vaccination. I think it’s fair for these people to say, “Look, Spotify is … ” I think they made a $100 million deal with him. They don’t like the things he says. They’re not asking Spotify to kick him off Spotify. They’re not asking Spotify to censor him. They’re just saying, “I don’t want to be at that party. If that guy’s talking like that at that party, I don’t want to be there.” I think that’s reasonable. I don’t want to be there either. Now we don’t make any money off of Spotify. Did we get $100 million from Spotify?

**John:** We did not get $100 million from Spotify.

**Craig:** I just wanted to check real fast before I said no.

**John:** Here’s what’s confusing about this is that in terms of a podcast versus a song on this, like Neil Young or Joni Mitchell pulling their catalog off, that means that Spotify cannot play their things anymore. Joe Rogan’s podcast is a Spotify Exclusive, so you can only listen to his podcast through Spotify. Scriptnotes is a free and open podcast for the whole world to enjoy, so people can choose to use Spotify to listen to it, but our files are not actually ever on Spotify. People are choosing to listen to it. Scriptnotes is like a webpage that you could go to in Firefox or Opera or Safari or whatever else. We could theoretically somehow block Opera from opening our page, but that’s not really how the internet works. It’s just an RSS feed. We’re not getting any money from them. The only thing we did recently is we made it so that our Premium subscribers, if they’re using Spotify as their main app, they can now subscribe within Spotify, but it’s not Spotify paying us money. It’s just that they can go to the webpage for everyone else who wants to pay us five bucks a month to listen to all the back-episodes.

**Craig:** Does Spotify put ads on us or anything like that?

**John:** No. Just a podcast player. Just like opening a PDF in Acrobat versus Preview or-

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Something like that. It’s just an app. It’s not actually a thing that’s paying us any money.

**Craig:** It sounds like if we said to Spotify, “You can’t do that,” they would feel nothing, and nothing would change for us either. That’s what I’m hearing.

**John:** I think if our listeners want to choose to not use Spotify, that’s their choice to not use Spotify, and should not pay Spotify their money. I’m not paying Spotify any money.

**Craig:** I don’t either.

**John:** Easy for me to stop. You know what? Last week on the show I talked through my experience of coaching a friend, like, “It’s time to leave your reps,” and his career improved. We have a Follow Up question from that from a person named Frustrated. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana Rao:** Frustrated wrote in, “I’m a mid-level TV writer who has written/produced several episodes of television. I’ve only ever had a manager and no agent. In the last few weeks it’s become clear to me that my manager has got to go. It was on a new show, my second, when COVID hit, and we went virtual for several months, but eventually the plug got pulled and it never went into production. Since then I’ve tried everything, pitching on open writing assignments, writing new material, pitching original ideas, networking, etc. I’ve had lots of good feedback, but ultimately no paid work. It’s been a year and a half with nothing to show for it. My question is, can you talk more about actually firing your reps? Do you simply send an email? Should I try to find new ones before firing the old ones. How do you sell yourself to new reps when you’ve been out of work for a long time? Are agents or managers better for someone in my position at this point?”

**John:** All good questions.

**Craig:** Great questions.

**John:** Let’s talk about first firing your old rep before getting a new rep. My instinct is that you can start the process of looking for the new rep and get those initial conversations happening. It doesn’t really matter that much if you fire the first one before you start hiring the second one. It’s all going to work out the same.

**Craig:** I’m going to-

**John:** You disagree?

**Craig:** A little bit, because it’s a small town, for being such a big town. The one thing that managers seem to be good at and agents seem to be good at is hearing that other managers and other agents are sniffing around their clients. In fact, they seem to have way more attention paid to that than, for instance, getting their client’s work. What happens is you can find yourself in a weird middle ground where you head out there, you start talking to people, your manager finds out, yells at them about poaching. Managers and agents do poach from each other, but they’re careful about how they do it, because they don’t want to get into open warfare. The new people might back away. Your current manager is super pissed off. Now you’re stuck in a house with somebody that’s not talking to you. Other people feel like, “Okay, just come back when you fire that person,” but it’s gotten weird.

It’s better to go out clean, I think, but before you go out clean, I think the person you need to talk to, Frustrated, is your lawyer. I’m going to presume you have a lawyer, because you say you’re a mid-level TV writer, you’ve had work, you’ve got credits. Your lawyer will be able to give you a decent sense, because they’re the ones who talk to business affairs, about where you stand, and ultimately where you might be able to go. Your lawyer is also able to, in an intermediate fashion, talk to some of the agents or managers that she or he knows, and whisper, if say something was going to happen, and get a sense, a little preview of what the world is like out there. If it’s bad, if generally there’s not a lot of interest, you got to get something going and then walk, but if there is, then I think you cut it clean. I think you can send an email or you can phone call. It doesn’t matter. Maybe they have some sense of what is fair. Who cares? They’re fired. Fire them. Then go out there and start talking to new people.

As far as agents versus managers, as someone better for your position at this point, I am so old-fashioned, and I think that agents are better options, because they don’t mingle production in with representation. It is also true that often, depending on where you are on the ladder, managers may have more time to focus on you.

**John:** Craig talks about the important stuff, discussing this with your lawyer. I think the other people you should really involve in this conversation are the other execs you’ve been interacting with. Say you’re pitching writing assignments, you’re doing this stuff, there’s people that you’ve connected with. I think it’s worth asking if you have any relationship with them, like, “Hey, what is my manager like? Is my manager actually doing a good job? What do you think? Do you have any better suggestions for me?”

Same with you were on this room writing the show, those are other writers who have reps. Talk to them about your experience and what their experience has been, and they’ll give you a good sense of is this manager doing a good job for you, which it probably sounds like they’re not, and who might be the better people suited for you, because I remember as I left my first agent, went to my second agent, that was really part of the discussion is who was the right person for me to even be going to. You will find those answers by talking with folks who are working with those people all the time.

**Craig:** That’s a good point, that Frustrated has been in rooms. He or she knows other writers. They have reps. That’s a good place to start. When you’re a feature writer, you interface with executives all the time. When you’re a television staffer, you generally don’t. There may not be that person to go to, but then you have the availability of all these other writers that you’ve been with, and who knows, maybe they have a sense of things. I think you’ve identified a problem when you say, “It’s become clear to me that my manager has to go.” Trust that feeling. It’s not going to get better.

**John:** Yep. Agreed. All right, some more Follow Up here. Two episodes ago we were just talking about the 100-year-old screenplay format and how frustrating it is that some certain things are hard to include in it. Clint wrote in to point us towards Script Hop, which is a service that can package up your scripts, along with supporting material, so visuals, audio notes, music, and things like that. It feels like something that’s designed for pitching your project to places. It’s not necessarily the kind of format that would be useful for a production, for something to represent the whole project for a production, which is I think more what Craig and I are looking at, but sure, different people are trying different things.

Script Hop is owned or seems like it’s created by Script University, which makes me shudder a little bit, but it feels like the kind of thing where people are trying to do experiments around the edges of that. Great, experiment with it, but I think we are both still looking for what is that service or format that it’s going to be a great way to say, “Here is the script, the text you’re going to be shooting, but here is important stuff that goes with it,” that goes beyond just my suggestion of just like, here’s the deck that the company sent.

**Craig:** I’m looking at this, and it absolutely does seem like a pitch. They’re literally saying pitch content. That’s what they’re calling it. The Premium fee here is $8 a month. You can create as many packets as you need. This is not exactly what we’re talking about, but it looks pretty. From the demo here, it looks snazzy.

**John:** Some more Follow Up on We Hear and We See. Alex in Liverpool, England wrote, “I do see the value in avoiding we see/we hear [inaudible 00:14:24] for the sake of brevity. Why have, ‘We see a woman walk into the room,’ when you can simply have, ‘A woman walks into the room.'”

**Craig:** Oh my god, I never thought of it that way. Oh, I have. We have. We’ve talked about it literally four billion times, Alex. That said, big fan of Liverpool.

**John:** We love Liverpool. Let’s talk about we hear and we see though, and why it’s useful in situations where you can’t just literally just have the clean sentence there, because, “A woman walks into the room,” yes, that is correct. For me, we hear/we see is most often a case where the cause of something isn’t known, so it’s happening off screen. We experience it as an audience, but the characters in it aren’t there. You can describe a thing that’s happening, but there’s not a verb that goes with it, or if it’s a stand-in for the camera. Really I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s a way of not talking about cameras and shots and angles. It’s really like folks in the audience’s attention on something without calling out the camera does a thing.

**Craig:** Those are all excellent practical reasons. In addition, philosophically, brevity, this kind of extreme brevity is not the goal. We see and we hear also has a psychological impact on the reader. It is immersive. It means you are immersed. You are feeling and experiencing something in this moment, the way that a character would if they would be right next to it, or the way you would if you were right in the middle of it, which is very different than if you don’t. If the six characters, five letters and a space, gets that done, and gets it done that efficiently, why not? Just brutal, spartan brevity is a style, I suppose, but it is not the holy grail.

**John:** Two examples I was trying to come up with. Here’s the first one. We’re falling through an emerald void. All around us we hear crackling sounds, like ice shattering. You could do that without the we’s in those cases, but it’d be hard and brutal. The we’s really give you the sense that we as an audience are falling through this space, that we are hearing these things, and it’s not dependent on this character hearing the things. This is what the experience is like in the theater.

**Craig:** How else would you do it? An emerald voice. Crackling sounds like ice shattering. That doesn’t tell me much, including falling.

**John:** It doesn’t tell me the experience we’re getting. It’s like pointing at things. Here’s a second example. While Tom is digging through his pack, we see a shadow move across the headlights.

**Craig:** Tom does not see that shadow, but we do.

**John:** That’s the important thing.

**Craig:** Oh sweet, fresh meat, I assume is what the next line would be.

**John:** 100%. That is exactly what I had planned. Literally, you reached into my mind and pulled the words out before I could even say them.

**Craig:** I love that commercial. I’m going to sue. The example that Alex gives us, why have, “We see a woman walk into the room,” when you could have, “A woman walks into the room.” “A woman walks into the room,” that feels like, I don’t know, a very dull man is telling a story, “A woman walks into the room.” Wait, does everybody notice that a woman walks into the room? Are we really close to her when she walks into the room? Are we really far away when she walks in? “We see a woman walk into the room,” I already have an idea. The camera’s pointed toward the door, I’m going to say a wide shot here, because we see her walk into the room. We don’t see at the door, a woman enters frame. There’s lots of information here. That’s why I think we get so frustrated by this whole, “Don’t say we see or we hear,” not because it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt.” It helps. It’s incredibly helpful. There we go. I think at this point we should just change the name of this podcast to the We See Cast.

**John:** That’s what we do. One useful exercise for people who still are bucking up against we hear and we see is to go through some of the screenplays that we’ve mentioned, like some of these award-nominated screenplays from this past year, and look for situations where the writer was using we hear or we see, and try to rewrite those sentences without them. I think you’ll find it’s a little more difficult than you would’ve guessed.

**Craig:** Or not as good.

**John:** Or not as good. Honestly, probably just not as good. It’s not to say you have to use it. Many screenwriters do not use it, and that’s absolutely their choice, but I think it’s a useful tool, and to take it out of your belt unnecessarily is dumb, in my opinion. Aaron from New York writes, “I’m pretty certain I first read the instruction that discouraged the use of we see and we hear in David Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible,” which was first published in 1994 and Aaron read back in 2004. “I’m not sure if it matters. I’m not sure if Trottier himself started it.” I think it predates that, because, Craig, I think I remember a prohibition on we hear and we see from when I first started in film school, which would’ve been ’92. Do you have a sense of when you first heard this as a quote unquote “rule?”

**Craig:** It was on the internet somewhere.

**John:** Yeah, I guess, early internet, because you were in a film school situation that would’ve discouraged that.

**Craig:** No, late ’90s or early 2000s I think maybe. Who’s Dave Trottier? Trottier?

**John:** I recognize that name. I think he’s still a person who does stuff about-

**Craig:** I’m looking him up. Tell you what, not to be a jerk about it, but go ahead and everyone out there just choose who you think you should listen to. I’ll just leave it at that. How about that? Not being a jerk. I’m just saying-

**John:** Not being a jerk.

**Craig:** You have choices in to whom you listen.

**John:** Now another thing we’ve discussed in a previous episode I think was a listener question talking about how this person’s partner, spouse was not supportive of his screenwriting, he was feeling frustrated. I think you and I actually had a good back and forth about how supportive that partner needs to be. Some Follow Up that Megana can read for us.

**Megana:** Once Felt Neglected Too wrote in and said, “I’m a recently produced screenwriter. The film has some serious household name actors in it. While the film was in production, I started dating someone. This person was lovely, with a regular, non-creative office job, who only displayed a mild, passing, supportive, light interest in this accomplishment and a general disinterest in my career choice and abilities as a whole. I would be lying if I didn’t feel some disappointment when I wanted to express something about a project and was met with a superficial support one might give a child about their 5,000th drawing. This attitude persisted even when we were exiting the movie theater after watching the first screening of my film. My head knew they were a good person and supportive in their own ‘I support you as a person’ way, but my heart felt it was death by 1,000 ambivalent cuts I tried my best to ignore. This all became very clear one day when an old college crush had seen the movie and I met them for coffee.”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** “They expressed such awe about the film and what I had done.”

**Craig:** Of course they did.

**Megana:** “It felt like I had touched their soul. I remember thinking if my partner had looked at me for just five minutes like this person across the table had for a couple hours that day, I might still be with them. It’s one thing to be recognized on a surface level. It’s another to be wholly and completely seen by your companion.”

**John:** Craig, this person’s having an emotional creative affair with this other person. That’s what it is. Someone is looking at you with those big eyes, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I want to feel this desirable.”

**Craig:** It feels great, obviously. Those of us who write or create, any artist of any kind, we all are making things for others. It is a rare artist who is so self-sufficient in their motivation that they legitimately don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, good or bad. Certainly for those of us who are trying to make movies and television, which is a fairly popular artistic kind of pursuit that is entirely driven by audience, yeah, we’re looking for applause. That’s our dream. Our dream is we write something and everyone just looks at us and goes, “Oh my god, you’re incredible,” and then you win awards and you do your speeches. That’s our dream.

When your old college crush met you for coffee, which is quite a commitment on their part, and expressed such awe about the film and what you had done, which must’ve taken an enormous amount of effort on their part, yeah, it felt like you touched their soul and maybe they really liked the movie, but also here’s the thing. Not everyone loves movies that way, and yet maybe they do other things for you that this college crush couldn’t. Look, practical advice for Once Felt Neglected Too. John, you’ve read Love Languages. You’ve read Love Languages.

**John:** I’ve not read Love Languages. I’m sorry. I know the term, but I’ve not read it.

**Craig:** There’s a book, I think it’s called the Five Love Languages. It’s a staple of couples therapy, but it’s also great for anybody in any kind of relationship, friends, whatever, coworkers. It’s incredibly useful. The basic thesis is that people experience love in different ways. For some people, when someone spends a lot of quality time with them, that’s what makes them feel loved. For some people, receiving gifts from people is what makes them feel loved. For some people it’s very much a physical thing. For some people it’s words of praise. Now I think a lot of screenwriters experience love through words of praise.
I think it is useful, Once Felt Neglected Too, to say to your partner, “I’m not asking you to be a different person. I’m not asking you to care more about this than you actually do. What I’m telling you is the way I experience love most viscerally is through words of praise. If you love me and you want me to feel loved, that’s how it works. I’m not asking you to lie. I am asking you to figure it out. Then I think it might work better. I just feel so sad at the thought of someone’s solid relationship with a human being that would look after them when they were sick and back them up and defend them and stay with them and be faithful and loyal, all going to hell because they just also didn’t super love movies or know how to express love for a movie, because I got to tell you, people can say stuff like that over coffee and it means nothing. Nothing.

**John:** You don’t want a relationship with a fan. This coffee date was a fan. That’s not a strong foundation to build a relationship with. Now it’s entirely possible that your relationship, sounds like it broke up with this partner who wasn’t as supportive as you needed, maybe that was not a right relationship for you either. I’m not saying you need to go back to this person or that was the end all, be all of things, they should sacrifice what you want out of this for that relationship, but yes, there’s levels of support. It wasn’t like this person was standing in your way or telling you to give up your writing career or mocking your writing career or doing anything to hinder you. They just weren’t as rah rah, enthusiastic about it as they could be. Maybe you need rah rah enthusiasm. That’s fine. Maybe that’s why the relationship doesn’t work. To compare it to the super fan is only going to be at your detriment.

**Craig:** I couldn’t agree more. Let’s get personal for a second, shall we?

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Has Mike ever just not really loved something you’ve done? I’m not talking about a script. I mean just the movie comes out, or the show, and he watches it and he’s just like, “Okay. Yeah, not for me, but great. Good for you.”

**John:** Yes, but I would say that in those situations it’s also been a thing where I wasn’t incredibly delighted with how it turned out either. I think there’s also recognition that there’s genres and things that I will like that he will not like. I think we know each other well enough to know that I’m not going to be expecting wild praise about those things. Same with you and Melissa?

**Craig:** Very much so. It’s always been surprising to me, the things that have grabbed her that she’s loved and the things that were like, “Meh, not so much,” because it wasn’t an easy thing to predict. Then again, that’s the least surprising thing of all, because people are unique. They like different things, even within genres. It’s never been the kind of thing where I thought, “If you don’t understand what I tried to do here, then you don’t see my heart,” because there’s an us that is beyond and separate from the work we do. That’s really important to differentiate. Megana, in your extensive life, I’m keeping you as young as I can.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Megana:** I’m very young.

**John:** The few years that you’ve been out of high school.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** In the few decades you’ve been out of high school.

**Megana:** In my youthful experiences.

**Craig:** In your youthful experience.

**Megana:** I was telling John that this … A couple of things. The dynamic that this person is setting up with wanting to feel like they’re touching their partner’s soul, that doesn’t feel like an equal partnership to me. They want someone who is going to make them feel like this really visionary auteur. I think that it goes back to something you guys have been talking about in recent weeks, that success often feels like failure. You also can’t expect to be receiving that external validation from the people closest to you. It just seems like the dynamic and the expectation is off.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great way of putting it. Look, if you guys are farting in front of each other, how much worship can you expect.

**Megana:** The other thing I was telling, because John and I were talking about this yesterday, was that it would be so stressful for me to be in a dynamic like this, because I feel like professionally for myself, and I have reps and all of these other people invested in my project success, to also have my partner invested in that would really freak me out. It would feel like way too much pressure. I think the creative process can be messy. None of us are always producing great work. If I felt like my partner’s support of me was contingent upon that, that would be horrible.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

**John:** Craig and Megana, I have some advice that could change your life, so if you just want to take a seat, because it sounds simple, but it may actually bring about some changes for you.

**Ashley Ward on TikTok:** You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character, because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed, so take a second and look around and realize that it’s a blessing for you to be here right now.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** That’s main character energy, Craig. That is main character energy. That’s our marquee topic for today. I think it’s good that we have Megana on here as the Gen Z Millennial cusp person to talk us through this, because it’s not quite what you might at first expect, because we have main character on the internet, which is not this at all. Main character on the internet is the villain that Twitter chooses every day for everyone to pile onto.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** Main character energy is that sense of life is a movie and you are the central character and you just start acting like the central character in your movie.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** It’s different from I think a thing that I’ve advocated a lot on the show, which is treating yourself as a protagonist and recognizing the protagonist struggle. This is really almost more about an aesthetic series of choices that you’re making about how you’re going to present yourself and how you’re going to perform as the character in a movie. Looking into a little bit of the history of how this came to be, but hopefully also really look at how screenwriting invented this problem and the weird way in which we now have characters who are aware that they are characters in a drama and are living their lives this way. Emily In Paris is an example of a character who has main character energy and she’s actually the main character of a show. I want to grapple with this a bit.

**Craig:** Is that where that is from, that clip you just played?

**John:** It’s not, no. That was actually from a TikTokker from this last year. Some really good things we will put in the show notes that link to it, there’s an essay by Coco Klockner. They have a really good overview of the philosophy of main character energy. Here’s an example from Lauren Is Oversharing. “It’s drinking out of a wine glass and looking over a balcony so everyone on the beach knows I’m the main character.” You get that. You get that feeling?

**Craig:** This is crazy.

**John:** This is from Coco Klockner’s essay, “Main characters have an impeccable magnetism to them. They’re creative. They don’t play by the rules. They’re a little ugly, but in a hot way. They’re full of themselves, but humble in the right moments. They’re self-aware, but unanxious. They’re not perfect, but if they stumble, a lesson is learned. Perhaps foremost, a main character emerges as someone who can pull of the paradoxical feat of conveying interiority in a world of surfaces.”

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** “Main character energy is not a matter of being individualistic or singular, but rather a matter of being extremely legible.” What I think they’re pointing to here is that it’s projecting interiority, it’s projecting an inner life, only through these surface manifestations. What as screenwriters we’re trying to do is trying to expose an interior life through what we can see on a film and TV. In this case it’s real-life people trying to present that they’re having this interior life just through all the outward trappings and through the Instagram stories and the trips they’re taking with influencers. It’s this weird thing that’s happening that I want to grapple with a bit.

**Craig:** I’m horrified. I’m legitimately horrified by this. I guess maybe movies and television just got too clever for their own good, because what we’re supposed to be doing is creating … Drama is not meant to be life at all. In fact, that was the point. When they created drama, back in … They created Western drama in Greece. There was certainly drama predating Greece. The idea was we’re all aware this is not life, right? Get it? There’s a stage. Or you’re sitting in a room watching a fricking piece of glass on the wall. It’s obviously not real. In this unreal representation of the world, you will learn some interesting things that might actually be thought-provoking or make you think about stuff in your regular life, or maybe they’ll make some sense of things in your life, or maybe you’ll just feel like you’re not alone in your emotions and that other people have felt the things you have felt. In no way, shape, or form should anyone ever want to live their lives like a, quote unquote, “main character.” That’s insane. You’re not a character. Help.

**John:** Let’s let you stew on that for a little bit.

**Craig:** Help.

**John:** We could talk about movies, which is a easier way into it, because there are characters in movies who seem to be aware they are characters in movies and are living their life that way, so Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off seems like he’s aware that he’s a character. He’s performing with main character energy, because he’s literally stirring stuff up and creating adventure around him at all times. Emma Stone in Easy A has main character energy, and it’s not just because she’s narrating. I think narrating is an important part of this. She’s also presenting herself on video in a pre-TikTok way and communicating what her arc is and what her change is, what’s going on. Fight Club has it. Emily In Paris we talked about before. The whole series Search Party is all about I have to be the central character driving the story. Girls is about that. We had Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge on to talk about Deadpool and Fleabag. Those are both characters who are aware that they are characters and aware that they were being watched and how they’re being perceived by audiences.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re all characters. If you actually met somebody like Fleabag, you would be repulsed and go running, because that’s awful. It’s amazing when you watch it on television. The reason why, and Phoebe’s a genius, because what she’s done is create an externalization of the inner ticker tape in her mind, the hamster wheel that runs, the self-commentary that we go through, but we never go through it in the moment. Normally we go through the day, we have these encounters. Then we go home and then we get into bed and then we start thinking about them and rummaging them over and over and over in our heads and reliving them and thinking, “I should’ve said this,” or, “That was weird.” She takes it, because she can, inside of art and makes it happen all in the moment contemporaneously as it’s happening. It’s fascinating to watch. It’s a really cool way of showing the way the human mind and heart function. If you act like that actually in your life, you’re nuts and you’re awful. This just feels like a very fancy way of saying be a pointless, empty narcissist.

**John:** Narcissism is a interesting word for it, because you’re staring at yourself, but also we are all living in the Truman Show anyway, at least a generation is living in the Truman Show, because they are constantly performing and presenting themselves on YouTube, on TikTok, on social media, to present themselves as a certain kind of way. Megana was talking about people she knows who are especially, I don’t know if you want to say adept, or entrenched in this means of self-identification through self-promotion. Megana, you have one great quote, which I want to make sure you get credit for here.

**Megana:** I have some friends who are self-professed aspiring Instagram influencers. I was telling John, I was like, “Why is everyone always on a boat?”

**Craig:** Why is everyone on a boat?

**Megana:** Why are they always partying on a boat? I don’t get it.

**Craig:** What’s special about the boat?

**John:** Because the boat photographs well.

**Megana:** You can shake champagne.

**Craig:** They’re all doing the same goddamn thing in the same way. I don’t even think anybody at this point is like, “Oh, influencers, I want to be like them,” because people want to just be like influencers to influence other people. They don’t actually want to, “Oh, that influencer came up with a great way to do makeup.” They don’t even care about makeup. They just want to be the person that’s doing the makeup on the camera that other people think about the makeup for.

I do have to believe that these people who are extremely online and who are obsessed primarily with how they present to the world are experiencing some very serious issues when the camera is off, and that as time goes on, it is fascinating to see how reality simply doesn’t go away, it just waits for you and catches up. You cannot keep that up if this divorce between who you actually are and who you want to show the world, because you’re not a real person but a character, that’s a recipe for ruin.

**John:** When I was doing my Arlo Finch book tours, I was visiting a whole bunch of schools, I would give the same presentation twice a day, sometimes three times a day for groups of 6th to 7th and 8th graders mostly. One of the things I tried to stress towards the end is that … We were talking about heroes and what heroes in stories do, what protagonists do in stories. Protagonists are always struggling. They’re growing. They’re changing. They’re facing obstacles. They’re overcoming adversity, but it’s tough. They’re creating change by changing themselves.

I tried to just turn that around and say, “Listen, if you think about yourself as the hero of the story of your life, you’re going to face obstacles. Heroes also have principles, they have codes, they have things they learn to live by, they have rules they set for themselves. Most importantly, they have allies, they have people who were on their side and they are an ally to somebody else.” What I find missing in a lot of this main character energy discourse is forgetting about the other people, forgetting that we live in a society, forgetting that we live-

**Craig:** We live in a society.

**John:** That you have relationships with people. It goes back to our previous email about the guy who wasn’t getting support from his partner. It’s like, yeah, but you’re thinking about yourself as only the main character and not recognizing that your partner also has needs and stuff too. You’re not acknowledging those.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting. There are lots of different kinds of characters. It seems like this main character energy is really focusing on poorly written characters. The quote that you played about romanticizing your life, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the exact opposite thing that I think about everything, than that quote. You can go ahead. Go ahead, start romanticizing your life. We’ll wait, because here’s the thing. Life is not romantic. You’re a big sack of slowly decaying meat that will eventually stop functioning. Everybody that you know and meet and love will eventually die. You are going to be sick. You are going to ache. You are going to have moments that are wonderful, moments that are terrible. You also don’t deserve everyone’s attention. You almost never deserve anyone’s attention.

The best thing that you can do with your life, other than fulfilling yourself and feeling like you’ve achieved something you wanted to achieve, is helping someone else. Go ahead and make a life or help a life or nurture someone or something, teach someone something or something. You know what’s not romantic? Teaching. This romanticization is just really superficialization. That’s what it is. You don’t want to be a main character in a good thing. You want to be a main character in a soap opera that holds wine and looks out over the balcony or the boat railing. Megana, what is going on?

**Megana:** I think that example is sincere, but a lot of the other examples that I see on social media are funny and tongue-in-cheek. I think it’s because there is this awareness of constantly curating and filming your life and playing with these tropes. There is a self-aware humor to it. I’m curious also how that affects how you would write people who are grappling both with their own presentation of image versus themselves in film.

**Craig:** I’m just not interested in those people. I got to be honest. I’m not.

**John:** Here’s a great example though of a character predating social media. This is from Sleepless In Seattle, which is a great script, Nora Ephron’s script. Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell are talking. Rosie O’Donnell’s line to her is, “That’s your problem. You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” Nora Ephron, thank you very much for that-

**Craig:** Good quote.

**John:** Good insight. Good quote. It’s the unrealistic expectations of how life is supposed to be, that life is supposed to be like a movie, that things should be as extreme, as beautiful, as perfect as that. It’s that desire for impossible perfection. It’s like some sort of body dysmorphia disorder applied to your life, where you don’t actually see things as they truly are.

**Megana:** Have you seen Bo Burnam’s Eighth Grade? I think it’s just such a brilliant depiction of that.

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous because it confronts what Nora Ephron was getting at here, you want to be in a love in a movie. She’s literally saying you want main character energy. You want to be the main character. If the movie ever got this right, it was The Graduate. It’s the last shot of The Graduate. It’s brilliant. It’s the most wonderful thing. It still remains just like a little miracle to me.

**John:** He’s done this big dramatic thing that is such main character energy.

**Craig:** He stopped a wedding. He stopped a wedding by banging on glass and, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” and stopped a wedding and comes up to her, and she goes, “Yes,” and leaves the stupid guy that she shouldn’t be marrying. She runs off with him. They run out. All the adults are like, “What’s happening?” These crazy kids, they’re in love, and it’s the most romantic thing ever. They get on a bus and they sit down, full of just this romantic energy, and then the camera just stays with them, and you see the reality of what they’ve done slowly sink in.

**John:** As the adrenaline fades.

**Craig:** The adrenaline fades, and now, “Where are we getting lunch?” and, “I guess we need an apartment,” and, “Yeah, I don’t have a job.”

**John:** This has been on my mind, partly because the thing I’m writing right now has characters who are struggling with main character energy and presentation and public shaming and all the things that wrap up in that. It’s a thing that’s going to be there. I just want to make sure as we’re wrapping up the segment is that we don’t be afraid of having your protagonists protagonate, but those are actual actions and choices and difficult things that they are doing to achieve the thing that they want. The thing that they want is probably not to be a character in a movie. Hopefully they want something that is actually tangible and real that they need to pursue for their own inner being, and that as screenwriters, it’s our job to externalize these internal thoughts, but make sure the characters have internal thoughts and have internal drives and desires, because otherwise they’re going to just feel like empty puppets running around, which is what I think Craig and I are worried about, some of these Instagram influencers are just feeling like empty puppets running around.

**Craig:** They tell you they’re empty puppets. They just say it. It’s wild, man. It’s wild.

**John:** It’s wild.

**Craig:** You know what? The kids are all right. They’re going to be fine.

**John:** They’ll sort it out.

**Craig:** I just think that the internet has essentially become the playground of people with extreme personality disorders, that yes, main characters have an impeccable … Most main characters, if you really study them, have personality disorders.

**John:** Ferris Bueller is pathological.

**Craig:** He’s evil. The things that he does, it’s evil. He’s a terrible villain. Anyway, thank you for this. I’m stunned and horrified, but hopeful that everybody knows, like Megana says, a lot of it is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It’s like the new version of big dick energy. I get it, but also I feel like for people like the lady that said you have to start romanticizing your life, deromanticize your life, and then you might actually get a chance to live an interesting life.

**John:** Use your drones to spy on people, not to photograph yourself. That’s what they’re really made for.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right, we have time for two listener questions. Let’s listen to questions from Bex and Alex. Megana, can you start us off?

**Megana:** Bex asks, “I’ve taken a particular online screenwriting course from a writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, and I learned a great deal, but he said to be careful about submitting your work to agents, managers, or studios too soon, because if the writing isn’t good, your name goes on a do not read this person’s work ever list. That list is maintained and shared by all, or at least a majority of the industry. Once you’re on that list, you’re blackballed from ever having legitimate industry people look at your material, no matter how improved your work is. My question is, is this true? Does the industry share and maintain such a list of blackballed unknown writers? The writing instructor says he’s seen the actual list.”

**John:** No. The simple answer is no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Here’s the answer with a little bit more subtlety is that within a certain agency, they will keep a database of who they’ve read, just so that if one agent has read and passed on a thing, that they won’t keep reading it, the same person again and again, if it’s not for them, but the idea that there is an industry-wide list of like, “These are all the upcoming writers, the ones we’re not going to pay attention to,” is absurd, because not only would it be collusion, no one would make that list. It’s just not actually helpful to anybody.

**Craig:** They’re not even competent enough to maintain a list like this. This falls under the Bush did 9/11 heading. Do you really think Bush was smart enough to do 9/11? No. He couldn’t even figure out how to plant weapons of mass destruction in the middle of a desert. I don’t think he did 9/11. Similarly, Hollywood is just not organized enough to even keep anything close to a list like that, nor would anybody care. Here’s the thing. Unknown, unproduced writers, who have never worked before, nobody knows who they are. Nobody’s going to sit there and make a list of names. You know how much time it takes? You know how quickly I could figure out if the script is good or not? Three pages.

**John:** Three pages.

**Craig:** Who needs to look at the list?

**John:** I do like the idea that there’s a anti-Franklin Leonard out there somewhere, who’s making a list of all the unrepped writers, all the unproduced writers who are just trash, who should never be produced. That’s great.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** That’s a great James Bond character, but no.

**Craig:** You get ranked from negative one to negative 10?

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** I love it. No, that’s crazy. To the writing instructor who teaches at UCLA, stop it. That’s just not true. You think that she or he is doing it as a scare, oh he, that it’s a scare thing, like, “I’ll just motivate you by-”

**John:** I want to be generous in interpretation. I think that perhaps the writing that he’s reading right now, he knows it’s just not at a level to be getting work, and so he doesn’t want these people, writers he knows will improve over the next year or two, to go too hard too fast and try to get their stuff out there, because they’re just going to hit a meat grinder. He sees potential in them and he wants their potential to be-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Better.

**Craig:** It’s like parents telling their kids that Santa knows if they’ve been naughty or nice.

**John:** Yes, that’s what it is. How about Albert’s question, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. Albert writes, “I’ve been writing for about three years now, and I always have this internal battle about using ing in my screenplays. After writing my first script, I was heavily criticized for using ing words by a professional screenwriter after submitting it to a screenwriting feedback service. When I looked it up on Google, I keep coming across, quote, ‘Screenplays are written in the simple present tense.’ Is this correct? Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards? I appreciate the time and hope to hear an amazing reply soon.”

**Craig:** Amazing reply forthcoming.

**John:** Forthcoming. I’ll put a link to a blog post I did about this at some point, because what you’re really talking about is simple present tense was like, “I kicked the ball,” versus present progressive, like, “I am kicking the ball.” Screenplays are largely in the simple present tense, but Craig and I both use ing forms, the present progressive, in times where action needs to be interruptable, where you’re showing simultaneity of things. There’s reasons to use the ing version of things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. This is very similar to the let’s save a little bit of page count by removing we see. There’s something that’s happening while I’m doing something. Doing something. As John is loading the gun, Craig comes up behind him and hits him in the head with a golf club.

**John:** Jesus. Craig, what did I do to you? First off, where did I get this gun? I’m not a gun [inaudible 00:49:27].

**Craig:** We’re going to get into what happens next, because then it goes, “Three weeks earlier.” John loads a gun. Craig comes up behind him and hits him on the head with a golf club. That means the gun got loaded.

**John:** It’s finished.

**Craig:** Then I came up and I hit John in the head with the golf club. You can see that once again, I know this is crazy, the full breadth of the English language is valuable when writing in the English language. If you were, underline, heavily criticized for using ing words by, and then you put it in quotes, “pro screenwriter,” all I can say is you may have just been using them way too much.

**John:** That’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** Make sure that when you use them, you’re using them purposefully, because they are not as elegant inherently as the standard form. I’m fascinated by this final question, “Did the dude punch me upwards or downwards?” Wouldn’t that depend on who that guy is and who Albert is?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** If Albert is royalty, then the guy punched upwards. Are you a prince?

**John:** Is he punching or did he punch? That is a simple question. Is he still punching?

**Craig:** Is he still punching?

**John:** Is the action interrupted? I agree with Craig’s generous interpretation that maybe you were using it too often. Any time you’re using one, it’s worth a look, like do you need that present progressive or could just a simple verb work? If a simple verb works, use a simple verb.

**Craig:** There is an answer to that question. There is always one form that is more accurate to what you want to show on screen than the other.

**John:** Yep. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The Afterparty, a new series on Apple TV. Plus created by Chris Miller, produced by our friends Lord and Miller. It’s delightful. It’s a comedy. It’s a murder mystery. Each episode follows the same crime from a different character’s point of view. Terrifically done, as you expect from these. Craig, in this workflow here I have two pieces of artwork from this. This is the movie within the show. The character who dies, this is not a spoiler, his name is Xavier. He is I think a musician and an actor. The poster I want to point to is Private Eyes: The Hall and Oates Story. As you look at this poster, so much of it is fantastic, as Channing Tatum plays Oates. Yeah, Oates. I have an issue with the credit block. Can you tell me what my issue is with the credit block?

**Craig:** Yes. In the credit block for a film, these days it would go, at the bottom, reading left to right, producer, then writer, then director. In the old days it would go writer, then producer, then director. This one, for some reason, doesn’t even … Does it have a director?

**John:** Yeah. It says A Stephanie Preston Film before Private Eyes, but no, there’s no director listed.

**Craig:** There’s no director. For some reason also, it says executive producers are listed last, when in movies the producer would be way more important than the executive producers. There doesn’t appear to be a producer. We have to talk to Lord and Miller about this. This is just a disaster. I can’t recommend the show anymore.

**John:** Hopefully there is time to go in and do the post-work on the poster that’s on the wall and put that in there. I would also point out the written by credit is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, and there needs to be something between those two, unless the person’s name is-

**Craig:** Karen Tate Wallace Doe.

**John:** Unless this one writer’s name is Karen Tate Wallace Doe, there’s either an and or an ampersand between those names.

**Craig:** That is correct. There are so many problems with this. We have to talk to them. This can’t happen again.

**John:** This is the only flaw I saw in the first episode of the show, which I think is actually just delightful. It stars a bunch of talented folks, including Ike Barinholtz. Your golden girl pal Tiffany Haddish is the central investigator there.

**Craig:** Did you say my golden girl pal?

**John:** Yeah. I’m sorry. Your Golden Globe pal.

**Craig:** Oh, my Golden Globe pal. She was my Golden Globe pal. She’s fun.

**John:** Yeah, you had that weird, awkward moment there on the stage with Tiffany Haddish.

**Craig:** It wasn’t awkward for me. Her feet were hurting. She took her shoes off and just leaned on me. It was fun. That’s what happens on those shows. “My feet hurt. Can I lean on you?” “Absolutely.”

**John:** From that moment forward, the Golden Globes really went down. It was really the highlight of the Golden Globes. From that point forward they realized, “We cannot top this. We need to stop the Golden Globes all together.”

**Craig:** They keep on rolling. I was lucky enough many years ago, so this has been in development by Chris primarily for the longest time, and many years ago I actually went and saw a staged reading of this one. I think it was a movie.

**John:** I think [inaudible 00:53:49] was originally a movie. I’m sure it was great as a movie. I think it works much better as this series, because you can just do more. You’ve got time.

**Craig:** I think almost everything does at this point. An additional fun bit, and you know what, maybe I’ll make this my One Cool Thing. I’m going to tack on to yours. I had another thing that was technical. I’ll get to that next week. In addition to The Afterparty being a delight, no surprise, and featuring posters that are visually hysterical, but in terms of credits, absolutely horrible, the show The Afterparty also includes quite a few hidden hints, clues, and puzzles that were developed by my wonderful, magical friend David Kwong, and my wonderful, magical friend Dave Shukan, who is a puzzle master and indeed was one of the primary puzzle creators of the MIT Mystery Hunt, which I think was my One Cool Thing last week.

**John:** Nice. The character that Sam Richardson plays in The Afterparty is an escape room designer, which feels exactly in your wheelhouse there, Craig.

**Craig:** Probably modeled after me. One would think.

**John:** Actually, yeah. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Julia Hostetler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes, more often than not now, @clmazin.

**Craig:** I’m around.

**John:** I’m @johnaugust. You could find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Our whole main character energy thing came from Chris Csont’s newsletter about main character energy, which was in Interesting. Thank you, Chris, for putting that together. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also get the hoodies now. The hoodies are so comfortable. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on population. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, can you help our younger listeners understand how we thought about population in the 1970s?

**Craig:** Sure. In the 1970s we were constantly warned about two problems that were going to come and kill all of us. Sorry, three. Three problems that were going to come kill all of us.

**John:** Let’s see if I can name them. Nuclear war.

**Craig:** Four problems that were going to come and kill us.

**John:** Oh wow. Nuclear war was not even one of them.

**Craig:** Yep, sorry. Four.

**John:** Wow. Nuclear war was my only go-to. Obviously population was going to be one of them. Population and famine, those are really related, right?

**Craig:** Population and famine, connected. Nuclear war.

**John:** What were the other things we were worried about?

**Craig:** People snatching you off the street with a van.

**John:** That’s entirely true, because that happened a lot.

**Craig:** It didn’t. It actually didn’t.

**John:** No, seriously, Craig, it happened all the time.

**Craig:** It did not.

**John:** That’s a thing.

**Craig:** It did not. Gary Gulman has an amazing bit about this in his show The Big Depresh or The Great Depresh. Basically a guy went on TV and said there are 50,000 kids being pulled off the street every year. Everyone lost their minds. Three years later he came back and he was like, “It’s 3,000 kids.”

By that point, when we grew up, Megana, so John and I would go to school and we would have milk, because you had to drink milk when you were a kid in the ’70s or you would die apparently. On the milk cartons were pictures of missing children. Gary Gulman has this amazing bit about how, “What were we supposed to do about it? We’re eight. Are we supposed to be out on the hunt? What?” “Have you seen this child?” “I’m in third grade!” It was horrifying. You would have to drink milk from a carton with this sad kid staring back at you like, “I don’t drink milk anymore.”

**John:** We have men in white vans stealing children.

**Craig:** Men in white vans, nuclear war, overpopulation and famine, and acid rain.

**John:** Oh yeah, I remember acid rain.

**Craig:** Eventually the rain was going to come down and melt the skin right off your bones.

**John:** Here’s the thing. We actually got some of the acid rain taken care of to some degree. The hole in the ozone layer was probably a little bit later than that. We actually dealt with that in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah, unfortunately, because the ozone layer is holding in all the carbon dioxide. Everything’s working out great for us.

**John:** Everything’s working out fantastic. Let’s just solve the population problem, because China took it upon itself to actually solve the population problem. This is a thing that I remember learning about in grade school was the one-child policy, which is basically a couple can only have one kid. I didn’t understand how math worked, because I was in third grade. They explained, “Okay, so when the mom and the dad die, that one kid will replace them.” That’s only half people, but then you realized they actually have grandparents too, and so it all works out. It sounded like they took care of it, but it didn’t work out so good.

**Craig:** There aren’t many examples of grand social architecting that does work out.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Particularly when you’re interfering with basic biological functions like how many children do you have and how much do you eat. What we know now is that Malthus, the father of this fear, Thomas Malthus, who was doing his best in the 18th century, and in the 18th century, there was this very rampant population growth within urban centers. You could see London transforming and these other places. People were dealing with crowding in a very specific way in the West. There’s this fear that the more people you had, you would eventually run out of food, because industrialization hadn’t occurred yet, and so our ability to feed ourselves was not as advanced as it would be even 50 years later.

**John:** We would have to turn to cannibalism at a certain point.

**Craig:** At some point we would eat ourselves.

**John:** That was always part of the stories, like, “Oh, and eventually we’ll have to start eating people, because that’s what happens.”

**Craig:** Yeah. “We’ll start with grandma, because she’s got to go.” By the time it got around to us, obviously the United States is spatially enormous, although they kept talking about overpopulation, even in the United States, which is bizarre, since no one lives in Wyoming, for instance, or Alaska. There certainly were places in the world, and there still are places in the world, that deal with overpopulation, including China at the time certainly, India, Indonesia.

There were famine issues, because in the ’70s we didn’t realize, because we were children, how close we were to the ’40s and ’50s. Kids who are growing up now don’t realize how close they are to the ’90s. The famine that was happening around the world in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was astonishing. It made sense that people were scared of this. No one talks about the Bengal famine. The Bengal famine was one of the worst famines that ever, ever happened ever, on any planet, as far as I’m concerned. Two to three million people died in 1943 in Bengal.

**John:** I agree with you. In the ’70s I associated overpopulation with famine as being the same thing, not understanding famine is actually caused by many things. It could be crop failures, but more often it’s just actually poor government. There’s a reason why democracies don’t have famines. It’s all about power and control. That was the problem. Let’s fast-forward to today.

**Craig:** By the way, just to back you up on that, ultimately the cause of the Bengal famine probably was Churchill. You’re right, it was not just as simple as too many people, not enough food.

**John:** This one-child policy in China went on for 35 years. They eventually took their foot off the brakes a little bit. It feels like they should’ve been aware of it more quickly, because you look at what happened in Japan. I remember hearing about the stories in Japan 10 or 15 years ago about, “Oh crap, we are so far below our replacement rate, we’re going to have a bunch of old people, and no young people to look after them.”

One of the findings that came out of Japan is really it comes down to once you educate women, once you give women opportunities, that they’re going to choose to have fewer children. You don’t have to have a government policy about it. You just make it so that they don’t feel the need to have large families, because if you’re not in a agricultural society anymore, they’re going to have smaller families. Depopulation is now more of a concern to most certainly Western countries, but really countries around the world.

**Craig:** Yes. Depopulation is becoming a serious problem in Europe, a very serious problem in Russia. Depopulation is one of the driving factors behind the rise of nationalism, white supremacy, because as traditionally majority white countries depopulate, there are labor needs that have to be filled, and the gap is filled by immigration. Now Russia just won’t let anyone in. Russia’s just like, “Nope! We’re white people only!” Let’s see how that goes for them.

In standard Europe, as we’ll call it, there’s been a lot of immigration. The immigration is necessary, because as traditionally white countries just cannot keep up a replacement rate of birth, then yeah, you’re going to need more people. What one would hope is that most people would understand that what it means to be English or Swedish or German is not, “Let’s start with white.” It’s not. Their culture is not skin color. Also, of course, America has, in our finest moments, has shown that there is a proper melting pot and that cultures can collide together and make something beautiful.

There’s this panic that’s going on because it’s the great replacement theory, that they’re panicked. The truth is the tenets of the great replacement theory, they’re not there yet. I think the white paranoia is extreme. You are in fact seeing issues of depopulation in non-white countries as well. What does humanity do as it no longer is I guess what a net positive human creation.

**John:** Yeah. You run into problems of how do you keep a standard of living going for a country when there aren’t enough people to actually do the work, to do all the things that need to be done, how do you take care of older people. These are all real challenges. I’m curious for Megana, who’s coming into this whole conversation 20 years later, going through school, did you hear about population being a crisis one way or another way? How does this land for you?

**Megana:** I feel like when I was in school they told us about overpopulation and some of the same fears that you guys described having, being taught in school were still in our curriculum.

**John:** When you were visiting your family in India, did you perceive that India perceived population as being a crisis, a problem? What was that experience like for you?

**Megana:** It’s interesting. It’s just so overwhelmingly crowded, as an American going back to visit. I don’t know that that came from my Indian family or Indian relatives that this place was too crowded, but I do think it came from the white people I grew up around in Joplin, Missouri, who would be like, “Oh, you’re from India. That place is overpopulated and it’s a Third World country.” That sort of mentality I think I internalized. I think that came from my experience of being an Indian immigrant in America and what older white people said to me.

**Craig:** As you were growing up, the rate of population change in India was starting to slow. There is still a net positive growth in India. There’s still a net positive growth in the United States, but it’s very tiny. India currently, population growth rate is 1% annual change. The United States it’s .4%. Now let’s take a look at Russia. This ought to be good. Russian population growth, yeah, so they’re minus. They’ve gone into minus territory. They were as low as minus .5% in 2000. They are currently at minus .2. They are losing population, and that will probably accelerate, which is bad, and they’re going to have to figure that out.

**John:** Let’s talk about what solutions governments and societies, because we live in a society-

**Craig:** We live in a society.

**John:** Let’s look for what are the things that can be done to address this. Obviously first and foremost is creating policies that actually make it easier for people to have children, because we have so stripped away a lot of the support systems that should be there for families to just begin to have families, to have a kid, but much less two or three or four kids. It’s funny that we used to think about poor families would have a bunch of kids, and now it seems families of a certain means are the only ones who can afford to have a certain number of kids, because they worried about educating them, food is cheaper than it’s ever been and clothing is cheaper than it’s ever been, but that there’s still all these expenses that come with a kid. If we’re not creating policies that make it possible, both financially and time-wise, it’s just not going to happen.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think if a country is concerned with maintaining its population so that the functions of its structure are functioning, then it has to make this a priority. In the United States in particular, it’s like, “Screw you. You want to have a kid, fine, go, do it, but we’re not paying you. We can fire you. We’re not giving you time off. If you’re a dad, you get nothing.” Also maybe you don’t have health care. There’s no child care. We don’t have extended families here. It’s not like there’s grandmas and aunts and uncles. Basically, yeah, lol. It’s hard. It was hard when we had a kid. When we had our first kid, it was hard. Melissa wasn’t working. It was hard.

**John:** It’s challenging. The other obviously thing to address is immigration, because the other way a society can function if it’s not creating enough people of its own is to import people from other places. Certain countries can afford to import a lot of people here and bring them into the fold. America has had a tradition of being a country that can take in groups from other places and make Americans and change America’s identity to include new people. We need to remember that and ber better about it.

**Craig:** We’re terrible.

**John:** Easier said than done.

**Craig:** We suck. The celebration of immigration was part of my education in the ’70s. We used to celebrate it. The poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty was a big deal. Now it’s just like, do you remember that idiot Pat Buchanan?

**John:** Yeah, I do.

**Craig:** Pat Buchanan used to be considered a loony, and now I think he would be actually probably not conservative enough. “America first.” There have been idiots saying, “America first,” forever.

**John:** It was always up against the Italians or the Irish or whoever the new group was coming in.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. Boy, if they were that pissed off about white people showing up … We’ve always had this fricking problem. I’m like, isn’t it a sign that you’re doing well, that people want to come to your shop? People want to live here, on purpose. This is great. We have massive, massive stretches of land and resources. We have more than we need, way more than we need. What happened? What happened to who we … We should be celebrating immigration as much as we can.

**Megana:** I do remember that as a distinct shift, because I was in the fourth grade I think when 9/11 happened. I remember in elementary school feeling like, “Oh, I am a super-American because I am a child of immigrants.” I think after 9/11 it was no longer a thing that was necessarily celebrated in school.

**Craig:** This country lost its goddamn mind on 9/11. Lost our minds.

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Lost our minds.

**John:** Absolutely. It did. We didn’t solve anything, but at least discussed it.

**Craig:** I think we convinced people earlier that they can use we see, so there’s that.

**John:** There’s that. If we all think of ourselves as the main character in this story, as main characters we need to solve the issues of population and immigration and really family rights.

**Megana:** Yeah. I think the other thing you guys mentioned is having more progressive policies instead of shaming and blaming young women.

**Craig:** This is the thing. We live in a society.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Men only understand one mode. That is control women, force them to have babies, that’s how we’ll get babies. That’s it. They don’t know any other way. They can’t think. They cannot possibly fathom any other way to encourage birth. Pregnancy and birth.

**John:** It goes straight to Handmaid’s Tale.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically.

**John:** On a future bonus segment I want to talk to you about your show and the post-apocalyptic, I guess you consider your show post-apocalyptic, and that sense of when population drops so low, just that certain functions cannot be fulfilled anymore, because I find it so fascinating. I feel like we explore that in fiction all the time, but we will actually experience some of that in real life.

**Craig:** Until next time.

**John:** All right. Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Fans Are Suing Universal Pictures Because a 2019 Movie Didn’t Include Ana de Armas](https://www.ign.com/articles/ana-de-armas-universal-lawsuit-yesterday-cut-scenes?utm_source=twitter)
* [How Sweet Fresh Meat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2I897TyglY) clip on YouTube
* [Ashley Ward’s original Main Character TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/foryou?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=6831269918864870661#/@ashlaward/video/6831269918864870661)
* [Main Character Energy: Interiority in a world of screens](https://reallifemag.com/main-character-energy/) by Coco Klockner for Real Life Mag
* [We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/we-all-have-main-character-energy-now) by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker
* [Rediscovering ‘The Truman Show’ in the age of Main Character Syndrome](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/rediscovering-the-truman-show-in-the-age-of-main-character-syndrome/) by Mischa Anouk Smith for Far Out Magazine
* Gary Gulman’s [The Great Depresh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1L08I5gjQI) Kidnapping Hoax
* [Main Character Energy and Narcissism – Inneresting Newsletter](https://mailchi.mp/johnaugust/inneresting-2556884?e=5f1449ed84) by Chris Csont
* [The Afterparty](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/the-afterparty/umc.cmc.5wg8cnigwrkfzbdruaufzb6b0) on Apple TV from Lord Miller, [First Ep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P07_FHcRNEU) on YouTube
* Puzzle pals [David Kwong](https://www.davidkwongmagic.com/) and [Dave Shukan](https://www.geffenplayhouse.org/people/dave-shukan/)
* [Malthusianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Julia Hostetler ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/535standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/mistakes-of-yes).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John August:** This is Episode 532 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at how you move from scene to scene. That’s right, transitions. It’s a clip show where we listen back to past John and past Craig as they offer their advice, which for all we know, is better than our current advice, because we were younger then, and fresher.

**Craig Mazin:** So much younger than today.

**John August:** Now we actually got an email in from a listener recently saying like, “Oh, I went back and listened to your early episodes, expecting it to be different, that John and Craig would’ve grown and changed a lot.” She said, “No, actually, you know what? It was the same. Your microphones weren’t as good, but it was the same show,” which I was heartened by.

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, I think it might’ve been a man.

**John August:** Oh. It could’ve been either one.

**Craig Mazin:** I think based on that name I think it’s a guy, but either way, I wanted to say to that fellow that no, of course we weren’t great at that then, and we have gotten better. Maybe it’s just that we found something where we weren’t accountable to anybody at all. Sometimes the key is that if you have something where you’re completely free within it to do whatever you want, how you want to do it, without any accountability whatsoever, and no expectation or ambition or anything, then there is a purity to it, and people who are going to like that purity are going to like it. If you dig Scriptnotes Episode 500, yeah, you’ll probably like 1 through 10. If you hate Episode 500, I guarantee you’ll hate 1 through 10. We’ve said a lot.

Don’t get fooled by the way things look on the other side of stuff. Here, hopefully you just listen to me talk about how ashamed I am all the time and how I feel bad about myself, and I try and work on that really, really hard. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Basically in your letter you said, “To be honest, I was hoping that you guys weren’t as good at the beginning. It would’ve given me hope to get better myself at my stuff.” You have plenty of hope. You’re doing a hard thing. You’re trying to do a hard thing. You’re going to move at the speed you move.

**John August:** Yeah, and I always also say at the beginning we were new to podcasting, but we weren’t necessarily new to screenwriting and offering advice to screenwriters. That was a not a new thing for us to do. It was just sticking a mic in front of us was the new aspect of it.

Let’s travel back in time and look at transitions. These are three conversations we’ve had over the years. We’re going to start with Episode 446: Back To Basics, where we talk about the origin of screenwriting, opening scenes, what a scene is, what it means, and the difference between formatting and transition versus the psychology of what a transition actually does, like how you’re moving from scene to scene versus the actual words you’re using.

In 493 on our Opening Scenes conversation, we talk about how you begin a screenplay, the process for thinking about opening scenes, the rules and expectations. We talk about Chernobyl some. It feels like a lot of what we’re talking about in this is really relevant to transitions, basically how are we going to get the story started and how are we going to get the audience moving with us into the plot.

Finally, we’re going to go back to Episode 89, which is probably, wow, eight years ago?

**Craig Mazin:** Peesh.

**John August:** Yeah. We’re looking at technical approaches to different types of transitions, so literally what are the words on a page that is signaling to the reader that this is how we are going to be moving from this scene to that scene. Literally it’s the right-hand margin stuff we’ll get into in that last
segment.

Three segments here. We’ll also put a link in the show notes to some blog posts where we talk about transitions. If you’re a Premium member stick around, because when we come back at the end, we are going to be discussing how to get out of a conversation, so it’s really the transition between I am talking with you right now and I don’t want to be talking with you any longer. We’ll be discussing how to end conversations, both in person and online.

Now let me make a transition out of this opening segment into our three pre-recorded bits. Craig, can you help me out with this transition?

**Craig Mazin:** No.

**John August:** Perfect.

All right. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, and so I thought we might actually take this time in Episode 446 to define screenwriting and what screenwriting actually is, because I don’t know if we’ve actually talked about it in actually that much depth, weirdly, over the course of this, because Craig, you did your solo episode about how to write a screenplay. That was really fundamentally 101 the things about writing a screenplay, but I wanted to do some backstory about the origin of screenwriting and how screenwriting began to what it’s become now and what those transitions were.

I have three things I want to keep in mind as we talk about what a screenwriter does and what screenwriting is, and maybe tease them apart a little bit, because I think especially newer people who are approaching screenwriting, which we have a bunch of new people listening, just because they watched Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge last week, really talk about what the screenwriter does and what screenwriting is about.

**Craig Mazin:** I hope that my understanding of it is correct. I’ll be very embarrassed if I’m wrong.

**John August:** I think you will probably be very, very correct. Let’s talk about the origin of screenwriting, because screenwriting as an art form is only about a century old, because movies are only about a century old. When the first motion picture cameras were aimed at things and it went beyond just photographing a train coming into a station, to actually trying to tell a story with a camera, at some point people recognized, oh, you know what, it would help if we wrote down the plan for what we’re going to do before we actually shot this stuff. Those initial things that would become screenplays were just a list of shots, or a plan for how you’re going to do the things. When we talk about screenwriting being like architecture, that’s what we’re getting to is that sense of like it’s a plan for the thing you’re going to make. It is a blueprint for what the ultimate finished product is going to be, which is the finished film, the thing that a person is going to watch, which is not the literary document or not the paper document that we’re starting off with. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those first screenplays, but they don’t closely resemble what we do now.

**Craig Mazin:** No. I think that when people say a screenplay is a blueprint, I always get a little fussy about it, but in this aspect of it, that’s exactly what it is. Part of a screenplay, a screenplay is many, many things at once, one of the things a screenplay is and has always been, going back to those first ones, is essentially a business plan. It is an outline of where you need to be and how long you need to be there and what needs to be seen. There’s not a lot of art to it. It really is more of an organizational thing, and the modern counterpart to it I guess would just be sometimes a director will come in and make a little shot list for the day. That is appropriate to blueprint.

**John August:** Yeah, or agenda. It’s basically these are the steps. This is how we’re going to do it. Because it’s written on eight and a half by 11 paper and it’s done with words rather than a flowchart, it feels somewhat literary. The words you pick matter a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. It’s basically as long as you’re going to be able to communicate what your intention is to the other people who need to see this document, that’s all that really matters.

**Craig Mazin:** That tradition carries through to this day when a screenplay still uses interior, exterior. Every scene must give you blueprint information that is not literary information. There is nothing literary about exterior, house, day, rain, or whatever you say there. The literary part comes in this other stuff that started to emerge as our craft of filmmaking and writing evolved.

**John August:** Now, that evolution, I’m not enough of a student of the history of cinema to tell you exactly when the screenplay became more what we talk about today, but often you’ll hear Casablanca referenced as a turning point between this list of shots to something that’s more like a modern screenplay in the sense of it’s a document that you can read, and in reading this document, you get a sense of what the actual film is supposed to feel like. It’s not just the pure blueprint. It’s more like this gives you a sense of where you are, what’s going on. It gives you a preview of what the film is actually going to look and feel like, versus just a straightforward list of these are the things you’re seeing.

**Craig Mazin:** This is not necessarily historically … You can’t call me a professor here, by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding when I look at the early stuff is that it was the American movie business that was very blueprint-y and shot list-y. There is a pretty famous … You’ve probably seen the silent film A Trip to the Moon.

**John August:** Oh yes, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, remember where the moon gets shot in the eye.

**John August:** The Brothers Lumière.

**Craig Mazin:** Exactly. George Méliès. Méliès? Méliès? Méliès? If you look at the script for that, it actually feels quite modern. There is a literary aspect to it. It’s more descriptive. I think in Europe probably there was a little bit more of a literary aspect to this much earlier than there was in the United States, but eventually by the time you get to films like Casablanca you’re fully in the swing of a literary screenplay that is combining two things at once, a non-literary production plan and art.

**John August:** Now, in both the literary form and in the blueprint-y construction plan form, the fundamental unit that you come back to is the scene. Even novels have scenes, that sense of there is a moment in space and time when generally characters are saying something or doing something. It’s one carved out moment of a place and a time where things are happening. That idea of a scene you see in both the really clinical early versions of screenplays and you see them in modern screenplays. That sense of like this is a chunk of time in which these things are happening.

I want to suss out three different kinds of things we mean by scene. First is that moment of space and time where characters are doing a thing. That’s scene version A. Scene version B is the writing of that scene. By the writing I mean this is what the characters are saying and doing. It’s where we’re coming into that moment. It’s how we’re getting out of that moment. It is the words we’re using to describe the world in which the characters are happening, the actions they’re taking, basically everything we call scene description, which you compare to stage plays, which is the other natural version of this, the scene description in stage plays tends to be incredibly minimalist. It’s much more robust in screenplays, because you are trying to really visually describe this world in which the characters are inhabiting. That’s an important transition. That’s version B is really the writing.

The third version of a scene I want to distinguish between is all the formatting stuff. All the basically the grammar of screenplays that we use that make them, the conventions that make it easier for people who read a lot of screenplays to understand what’s actually happening. The same way that commas and periods become invisible to a reader, people who are used to reading screenplays, they don’t even see INT and EXT and DAYS. Your brain just skips over those things and is able to concentrate on the meat of those. All that other information is there, but it’s invisible to a person who is used to reading them. Being able to understand those conventions and use them properly really does affect how a person perceives a screenplay. That formatting, that syntax choices and all that stuff, is really a different thing I would say than the words you’re using to describe stuff. It’s really grammar versus the actual creative act of writing.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah, and that grammar is eventually going to be analyzed by a grammar specialist known as the First AD, who along with the production managers, are going to be taking those scene headings and asking, “Okay, are these scene headings accurate to what we think we’re going to be actually doing in terms of the locations we found? How can we group them together? We need to make a timeline, night, day.” All those things have huge production implications. None of them have to do specifically with art. You’re guessing at what you think the ultimate grammar will be, but then you make adjustments once you get into production. Individual first ADs will have different ways of adjusting that grammar.

You’re right that for most people reading it, those things serve weirdly as just paragraph breaks. They’re paragraph breaks, which are incredibly helpful. It’s one of the reasons why my formatting preference is to put two lines before a new scene, because the scene, the EXTERIOR or the INTERIOR, is serving as a break in the visual flow of the reading, so I make it one, because I agree with you. I think that that’s really what it’s doing. If you took out all the interiors and exteriors and just mentioned those things in action lines, the script would become a book and it would be harder to read.

**John August:** Yeah. In thinking about scenes in three different waves, so there’s the visualization, the imagination of what’s happening with those characters in space and time, that is a thing that a screenwriter does, but it’s also the kind of thing a director does. It’s a thing that other creative people can do. It’s a thing an author does, is envision people in a place and a time doing a thing or saying a thing. Directors often do that scene version A a lot. They’re really imagining what that scene is like. They’re thinking about it through their own specialties. They’re imagining it’s like, “Okay, so I’m envisioning this scene, this moment happening,” and then they’re thinking, “Okay, where would I put the camera? What are the opportunities I have here? How would I use my tool set to make this happen best? What am I going to tell the cinematographer about what I’m looking at? What am I going to tell the editor about how I imagine this being paced? What are the costumes? What are all the things that I will need to be able to describe to other people about this moment?” That’s a version of crafting the scene.

The screenwriter has to do all that stuff, but then take a second level abstraction, thinking, “Okay, having thought through all that stuff, what are the words I’m going to use to describe what’s most important about this moment? Because I could describe everything, but that would be exhausting, and it would actually hurt the process of being able to understand what’s important. How am I’m going to synthesize that down to the most important things for people to understand if they’re reading this scene about what it’s going to feel like, what’s important, what they need to focus on?”

Most of what Craig and I really are talking about on the podcast is this second level, is the B version of that scene, which is how do we find the best way to describe and tell the reader what they would be seeing if they were seated in a theater watching this on a screen, how are we going to convey that experience, what it feels like to be watching that moment on the big screen. That’s mostly what we talk about on this podcast.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. There’s a weird kind of psychological game we’re playing with scene work, in the way that Walter Murch wrote this book about editing, I think it’s called In the Blink of an Eye, where he says we’re cutting in the pattern of people’s blinks, that we blink in normal moments. We’re kind of predictable this way. We have a rhythm. We’re editing slightly on that basis. Editing feels like music. It’s all about timing. You just know, there, cut there, that’s the spot.
It’s kind of the same thing with scenes. What you’re doing is feeling a psychological impact and then there’s a blink, a story blink, that just needs to happen. We have reached a point where something should happen and the story should blink and reset, and in a different place or a different time or with a different person, a different perspective. That to me is where the scene begins and ends.

Inside of the scene, we may have additional slug lines or scene headers, because we’re giving that blueprint information, that nonliterary blueprint information, to our production friends. For the purpose of being artistic and literary, the scene is the psychological unit. I don’t know how else to describe it other than something blinks and the story moves.

**John August:** Here’s an example. Imagine you could take a real life thing that’s happening. We’re in a room. There are people talking. Imagine we’re at a cocktail party. There’s a cocktail party happening. It’s maybe six people in this room. There’s discussions happening. We could invite three screenwriters in and have them see all of this, and then each of them goes off and writes their own version of this scene. There would be three very different scenes, because those screenwriters would be choosing to focus on different things.

Even though we all encountered the same moment, we’re writing different scenes, because we are choosing to focus on different things and we want to direct the reader’s attention to different moments. It’s what snippets of conversations we’re using. It is who we’re choosing to focus on. The same way the director is choosing where to put the camera, we are choosing where to put the reader’s attention. That is mostly what we talk about on this podcast is how as a writer you make the decisions about what you’re going to emphasize and what you’re going to ignore about a moment that is happening in front of us as an audience.

**Craig Mazin:** It’s one of the reasons I stress transitions so much. We have a podcast we’ve done about transitions. I can’t remember offhand the number, but we’ll put it in the show notes. Transitions help the audience demarcate the blink, the beginning and end of the scene, because inside of scenes, once you get away from the page and you’re just watching a television show or a movie, there is the montage effect, which is essentially, in the old sense of the word, not the, “We’re doing a montage,” but rather when you show something and then you cut to something else, we understand that time is continuing even though we have moved the camera and cut. These things are constantly happening. So how do you know when one thing begins and one thing ends? Since it’s all cut cut cut cut cut, why does one cut signal the beginning of something, and why does one cut signal the end, and why do others feel like they’re just part of a continuity? Transitions. They let you know when the scene has begun, and they let you know when it’s over.

**John August:** Absolutely. That’s a great segue to really this third version of what I’m describing. It’s this scene which is all of the formatting and the standard conventions and grammar that we’ve come to expect out of screenplays. It’s different from the transition that Craig is talking about, because Craig is really talking psychologically what are we trying to do by ending the scene there and getting to the next scene. That will also have a reflection in literally the words and how we’re formatting that moment to get us from one scene to the next scene. All the stuff that your screenwriting software does for you, that is the technical details that makes screenplays look so strange and different.

As I was reading through all these entries for the Three Page Challenge, picking them for the episode we’re recording tomorrow, I was struck by many of our listeners really get it, they know exactly what they’re doing, but some of them are actually still struggling with that third kind of scene writing, which is basically understanding how standard screenplay conventions are so helpful in letting the reader understand what’s important in this moment. Some of them are still struggling with that stuff. That’s the kind of thing I think you can actually teach and be taught. The best way to do it is to read a ton of screenplays and see just how it is, just so it becomes really natural. You read a bunch, you write a bunch to try to match up to that thing, but you will very quickly get a sense of how screenplays are formatted and how to make that feel effortless, make it feel like it’s not in your way but it’s actually helping you. What’s much harder for us to try to teach you is that second part, that part of how to very naturally convey what a moment feels like. I want to make sure we keep that distinction clear, because being able to type “cut to” and understand how to get down a page is a different thing than being able to really shape what a scene is going to feel like for the reader.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. Literally anyone can put something into a screenplay format. It’s never been easier. saying “cut to” and then “exterior such-and-such” will make something look like a scene has ended and a new scene has begun on the page, but it actually will not translate whatsoever to the actual viewing experience. The only thing that you have in your arsenal to demarcate that for the viewer is creativity. A sense of rhythm. A sense of conclusion. A sense of propulsion. A sense of surprise. Contrast. All the things that we talk about when we think of transitions that have nothing to do with formatting, because alas, there is no sign flashing in the movie or on your television set that says, “New scene has begun.” This is the craft part. Man, if I were teaching a screenwriting class at USC or UCLA or one of those places, I think honestly I would just begin with that. I would just begin with please let’s just talk about the art of letting people know something has begun and something has ended.

**John August:** Yeah, because “cut to” is not when a scene ends. The scene ends when the scene is ending. So often you feel like, okay, that scene is over, but there’s a couple more lines. When you actually film that you’re going to realize you don’t need this extra. You recognize that that moment is over and therefore the scene should be over. It’s a hard thing to learn until you’ve gone through it.

**Craig Mazin:** That is where the talent and instinct is. Obviously experience helps as you go on, as it does with everything, but there is an innate sense that something has concluded. Even for those of us who have been doing this for a while and we’re professionals, we will often make a mistake of going a little bit too far or not far enough, and then somebody will come and say, “I feel like maybe the scene ended here.” The key is that when somebody says that, you can look at it and go, “No, it hasn’t, and here’s why,” or, “Yeah, you’re right. That’s where it ended.” There is a sense.

**John August:** Having written the Arlo Finch books, one of the great advantages to traditional literary fiction is that if you’re lucky, you have a publisher, and that publisher provides an editor, who is going through that work and doing some of this actual checking with you. Whereas I might send Craig a script and he can say like, “Oh, I think your scene really ended here,” the editor’s job is much more clinical, saying, “Okay, now I’m … ” She’s actually cutting some stuff, saying, “No, you’re done here.” Sometimes you’ll get to a line editor or a copy editor who is going through and actually fixing your mistakes.

Screenwriters generally don’t have anybody like that, so we are responsible for doing all of that ourselves. I do sometimes wonder if sometimes there are people who are really pretty good at that stage A of writing a scene and stage B of writing a scene, but are really kind of terrible at stage three, that stage C of writing a scene and doing the actual making it work right as a screenplay kind of thing, would just be so helped out by having someone who could just go through and make it read better, make it read more conventionally on the page, so that we can really see what the intention is, versus being hung up on the strange mistakes they’re making.

**Craig Mazin:** I was a guest for a webinar, a Zoominar. A Zoominar through Princeton University. I did it yesterday. They open it up to members of that community. I don’t know, there was 100 people or something like that watching, which is kind of fun to see all the little Zoom faces. Someone asked a question and it essentially went to this, which was, when you look at how screenplays work as opposed to a novel, there are so many other things that you have to be thinking about. In a novel you’re just thinking about what people are saying and doing and thinking. In a screenplay you’re managing all this other stuff, like time and the camera and the visual space and how it will be structured and when things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, that’s true. If you want to be a good screenwriter, you’re going to have to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife. It’s very hard to be a good screenwriter but only be good at one thing.

Every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re bringing them in, but they’re doing a character pass.” I’m like, what the hell does that mean? What’s the difference between character and story? They’re exactly the same thing to me. They’re interwoven. I don’t know how to separate these things. Or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re bringing somebody in to do a comedy pass.” Okay, so is that just like somebody’s going to stop in the middle of the movie and do some standup? The comedy has to come out of who they are and what the situations are. We have to do all of it at the same time, which is why it’s so hard. It’s really, really hard. There are, I don’t know, 4,000 times as many successful novelists as there are screenwriters.

**John August:** That is true. What I will say though about the Princeton question is the things that student was asking about, like, oh, you have to do all these other things, those become really automatic and much simpler with experience, so you stop having to worry about them so much. The same way like once you really learn how to use a semicolon, you can just use a semicolon. A lot of the detritus and the weird things about our modern screenplay format, once you get used to it, you stop thinking about it, it becomes less of an obstacle. I’m never, as a screenwriter, frustrated by like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a screenplay format.” It just becomes really straightforward after a time.

**Craig Mazin:** It does take time, but eventually … It’s like touch typing. I don’t think about where the W is. My finger just goes there.

**John August:** What we can do is talk about really specific crafty things, which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. This actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of the script to be in the story, or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”

Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge, and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script, so we’re really looking at these opening scenes, and yet because we’re only looking at that scene, we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie. I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.

**Craig Mazin:** It’s a great question, Martin. It I think has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ’50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. We’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we see how that opening goes. Then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins. These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad, which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on? What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? Then the puzzle gets solved.

**John August:** I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to present day movies in how openings work, because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. You look at those old trailers and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is just so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all.” In many ways we now look for these opening scenes and opening sequences to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to reward you for like, thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention, because this is what’s going to happen.

Let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences, they don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story-wise, plot-wise, or character-wise in these scenes?

**Craig Mazin:** You have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. You are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything’s fine. I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. There is the indication of a thing, and it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see, or if they do see it, they’re looking at it from a different time, this is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, that there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.

**John August:** Yeah. From a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character, you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. In that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence, but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie. You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece and what it feels like to be watching this movie, the setting of this world, how the movie kind of works, and some of the rules of this world. If you’re in a fantasy universe, is there magic, how does gravity work, what are the edges of what this kind of movie can be, because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching, so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that, because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing and challenging, which I’ve always loved. I often look at the very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned, but it’s the opening they ended up with. Neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator, and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. He’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman, essentially. You have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. Then the man, feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions, kills the investigator.

What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up, and a promise that it will make sense later. In addition, I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty. Sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. Let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.

**John August:** As you’re talking about that, I’m now recalling that scene. It works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story, that there’s going to be questions of identity and existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction, if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important.
Now Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say, “This is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie.” It’s a weird thing to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like, they just don’t start right, they start on the wrong beat, or as you dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first, but then they kind of wrote a different movie, and they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?

**Craig Mazin:** I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes it’s hard to hit that mark, because nothing else has been written yet, so it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it, but the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. The opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies, or in any particular episode of television, where the audience will forgive us a lot. It’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road, but in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.

**John August:** Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. If they’re going into a movie theater to watch it there, they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie, whether they love it or they don’t love it. In those first minutes, they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there, but their expectations are very malleable at that start. You really can take them anywhere. You get a lot of things for free. They come in with a bit of trust. If you can honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you, they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well, they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story you’re trying to tell.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. Don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting, and then the lights go down. It’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are! Let’s go!” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of wah.

They get you ready. That can go on for a while, because everybody knows, oh my god it’s happening. Let it be happening, don’t let it just happen, if that makes sense.

**John August:** Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and what our experience was for this. I’m going back, thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, if I recall correctly, opens with an old woman and a cow.

**Craig Mazin:** That is how Episode Four or Three opens.

**John August:** That’s right. It was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?

**Craig Mazin:** The first image of the first episode is a couch with an afghan type thing of a deer, and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.

**John August:** Yeah. We don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special, that we are setting up a thing, the past, and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth. I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is that it’s an example of we don’t have context for who these characters are, why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. I thought it just worked really well.

**Craig Mazin:** Thank you. Every episode needs its own beginning. I’m pretty sure that’s beginning of Episode Four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now. That was designed to be a bit confusing, because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there, and we’re not sure what his orders are, and we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is, and we don’t know he’s just standing there, and so this goes on. Then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. That is a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of, and generally I don’t. Sometimes it’s okay to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world, and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about. We think, oh, do they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening? Certainly one way to go.

**John August:** Completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie. Of course, again, you’re establishing a place and a time and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored … We’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. There’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. It’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is this elaborate sequence to get this guy, this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly. That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie and what the rules are of this movie and the heightened gravity-optional nature of this movie and what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie. Nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense, the fact that they could go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous, and just how it feels. It was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end, because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.

**Craig Mazin:** With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. It’s weird to say, okay, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly, the old woman and the cow, you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline. You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. This is a good thing. Now they’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next, but also they are aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.

**John August:** The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds, a real world and a story world, that there are two protagonists, and that both of them have storytelling power. Getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where if I didn’t have that opening sequence, the movie just couldn’t have worked, because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.

**Craig Mazin:** This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care. I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word precious real estate about, or phrase, a thousand times, you need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says, “I will keep watching.” If it’s just kind of meh, then you could’ve done anything there. The moment you have an opening, you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.

**John August:** You build a funnel.

**Craig Mazin:** You make a funnel, a logical funnel, but not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. If you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, “This will get better.” It won’t.

**John August:** No. Weirdly, it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at, just because by nature we’re going to end up rereading it and tweaking it a zillion times. I do wonder if sometimes, let’s just talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story? Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene, because so often you can be trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene, but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.

**Craig Mazin:** 100%. If you do know what your end is, it would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl, because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with, I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens, and at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” You go, “Ah, aha!” in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd. I like that. I like the sense that you catch up and you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.

Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic, and down to nothing but dialogue and performance, two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. At the very, very end of the movie, he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end, and you go, “Oh man, this guy.” That’s how you can think about these things. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.

**John August:** Cool. Now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward, let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up, because that’s really a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script, but let’s also be thinking about what movie we think it’s actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that. Just a note for ourselves. We will start, try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.

Let’s talk about transitions, because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.

**Craig Mazin:** One thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page, “Don’t tell the director what to do.” Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read, so that they can see a movie. Part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page, but you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind, because it’s really important to them. Frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect. Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.

**John August:** Let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. One is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO or TRANSITION TO or FADE TO or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting. We’re only half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were originally taught to do. You can tell first-time screenwriters because they will always use a CUT TO. In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing. Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is … You want a scene to flow into the next scene. That’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, why we’re coming into this scene at this moment.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. This is a very nuts and bolts craft thing. They’re techniques. I wrote down a few techniques, which I’ll run through, and you tell me what you think.

**John August:** Great.

**Craig Mazin:** The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time. Just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected in their own way.

**John August:** Let’s talk about what that actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie, obviously. If you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you are going to get into some fairly close coverage there. If it’s just it’s about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something something something, that is a big size transition. Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d see, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scales there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.

**Craig Mazin:** It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. It’s just real simple things like that. Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room, they’re chitchatting, and then over the sound of hip-hop we are, and now we’re South Central LA, rolling down Crenshaw, just to help the reader understand there’s a connection here. Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and the next thing we hear is a siren. By the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. Something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times, because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. If it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.

**John August:** Absolutely. There are times where we want that really smooth, legato flow from one thing to the next thing, and there’s times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and there’s brand new information going to be coming your way.

**Craig Mazin:** Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call a misdirect transition. A guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” or whatever, and he’s got a gun. We go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.

**John August:** Exactly.

**Craig Mazin:** Little tricks, basically.

**John August:** Yeah. Again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that 10 times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.

**Craig Mazin:** Probably, unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s like a, I don’t know, a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.

**John August:** Yeah. I was going to say the Asian action films might do that more often. Yeah, if that’s your style, then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much. A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will, they’ll pre-lap the character. They will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut, that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene. It’s very clever how they do it. That’s a way of misdirecting you comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.

**Craig Mazin:** Exactly. Exactly. I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. Two people say, “That didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. Over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard TV-ish thing, but it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky. Another tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.

**John August:** Exactly.

**Craig Mazin:** Where someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth,” and the next shot is a woman smiling. It doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer, in other words, but just that the transition itself is giving us information.

**John August:** That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the, “We need to find a witness who can,” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that, or like, “This is the question we need to have answered.” You ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.

**Craig Mazin:** Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat, drunk.

**John August:** In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head, and so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way. Thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. You’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition. Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that seems to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to get people across the bridge there.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. They’re generic, because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story, but really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here, that there’s something that helps move us through, little tiny things. It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. Frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.

**John August:** I would agree. Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. Don’t paint a big, giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be straight, simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing, we as the reader will notice, okay, something big and different has changed here.

When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile … The first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word, because it’s all a new form to you, but after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They just skip past you. You can sometimes jump back to them if you’re curious, but you’re really just looking for the flow of things, and so most times you’re just jumping over that. You don’t really know or care where you are. Even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky. Save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really need that reader to stop and slow down and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.

**Craig Mazin:** Well said. Well said.

**John August:** Great.

All right, we are back in the present, which in our case is 2021, but by the time you’re listening to this it’s 2022. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig forgot to do a One Cool Thing. He forgot to have a One Cool Thing, so he’s hopping on a phone call while Megana and I are going to do our One Cool Things.

My One Cool Thing is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I love me a good fallacy. I think I’d heard of this fallacy, but never had it described to me before. Basically it’s why, when you have a whole bunch of data and you are looking for patterns in the data, you can find things that really aren’t there. The actual description of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is like, “Oh wow, look, this person hits the bullseye every time.” If you’re shooting at a barn, basically if you shoot first and then paint the target afterwards, you’re going to find patterns there that aren’t really there. I just really like that as an idea.

It reminded me of, this is something that Megana knows what I’m talking about, but I’m going to be a little vague here, I went in to pitch a project at a studio or a streamer, and they said, “Oh, we decided looking at the data we no longer do that genre of project, because it’s not successful.” I’m 100% convinced it’s really a Texas sharpshooter fallacy, that basically they looked at all their data and said, “Oh, this thing doesn’t work for us,” but I think they’re really after the fact trying to find a pattern for a couple failures that really don’t make sense.

**Megana Rao:** Just so I’m clear, because I haven’t heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, so it’s that you paint the target after you already have …

**John August:** Yeah, basically you’ve taken all the shots. Basically you have all the data there, and then you are trying to paint the target after the fact. You’re basically picking a small subset of the data to describe what the bigger thing is, and you’re saying, “Oh, this is the finding, the conclusion we’ve had,” but you didn’t actually have a hypothesis, a thesis going into it, so you weren’t really looking for anything. You noticed something and said, “This must be significant.” It’s a problem whenever you have a large big batch of data, it’s very likely that you’re going to some subset of the data that indicates a certain thing, but if you weren’t actually systematically looking for that thing, it’s not probably a valid result.

**Megana Rao:** It’s how you guys talk about screenwriting structure, screenwriting books.

**John August:** Oh yeah, absolutely, because if you’re looking at all these things and you’re trying to say, “These are the patterns that are in there,” it’s like, are they really the patterns that are in there or are you basically just deciding that’s a thing you’re going to look for, describe being in there, but that was never the intention, that was never the actual goal behind it. When this studio or streamer says, “Oh, this genre does not perform well for us,” it’s like, okay, did you go through and systematically say, “Okay, let’s take a look at all of the examples of this genre we’ve ever done,” and then seeing how they performed, or you’re just saying, “Of the five biggest disappointments of movies we’ve made in the last couple years, were they in the genre?” You’re being choosy with what data you’re letting in and letting out of that criteria.

**Megana Rao:** Very cool.

**John August:** Now since Craig doesn’t have a One Cool Thing, Megana, can you pinch hit for him?

**Megana Rao:** Yes. In our last bonus segment where we talked about New Years Resolutions, I talked about data privacy and data rights and trying to be more digitally hygienic. My One Cool Thing is this movie Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is delightful and funny and has a lot of themes about data privacy that I think are accessible and rendered in a family-fun way.

**John August:** Cool. I saw that mostly [inaudible 00:57:26] bus board advertisements. I never actually saw a trailer for it. When I actually looked at the trailer for it, it looks delightful and definitely worth checking out. Now I see it’s on all the … I got a screener for it, so I know that they’re going for the typical awards for it.

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. It felt really fresh. Zach Galifianakis voices the robot, and he has this really flat affect that is so funny. I was just watching it by myself and chortling, laughing, chuckling. It’s a fun movie.

**John August:** Cool. Ron’s Gone Wrong.

**Megana Rao:** Yep, Ron’s Gone Wrong. I think it’s on Disney Plus and some other places too.

**John August:** Fantastic. That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with one segment produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig Mazin:** Of course.

**John August:** Our outro’s by Henry Adler. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You’ll get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting out of a conversation. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

**Craig Mazin:** Thank you guys.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you.

**John August:** All right, Craig, thinking back to times when you were at a party with actual people around you … Actually that last time I think I saw you in a party situation was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly, who was running at that time for Senate in Arizona. That was a party filled with people I knew and some people I was just getting to know, but it was a lot of small conversations, and I needed to get into and out of those conversations. Is that an experience you recall from that night?

**Craig Mazin:** Sure. That’s a pretty common thing. You’re at a party and you start talking to people, and then sometimes it gets boring or it gets awkward or you run out of things to say. I try the best I can to not think about who else I should be talking to. I try as best I can to be as present as possible for the person I’m talking to, no matter who they are, because the notion of, “Oh I should be talking to that person,” or, “That person would be more fun to talk to,” oftentimes turns into utter disappointment anyway. My general rule is if I’m enjoying a conversation with somebody, whether it’s the most important person at the party or a waiter, I’m going to keep talking to them because it’s rare enough to enjoy a conversation.

If things are going a bit boring or slow or sluggish and it seems like the other person doesn’t feel the same, or maybe does, either way, that’s a great time to just simply say, “You know what? I’m going to go grab myself a drink, but I’ll be back around,” or I’ll say, “I’m going to run to the restroom,” or I’ll say, “I just got to go find my wife.” That’s always a good thing if your spouse, partner is there, or I’ll somebody and be like, “Oh my gosh, I promised that person I would catch up with them. I do have to, but this was so much fun talking to you.” I’ll say something like that. Of all the things I have shame on, and there are so many, that’s not one of them, and I try not to calculate how to have conversations at parties.

**John August:** I would say I’ve gotten much better at this over the years and I’ve done all the techniques that you described, and certainly having someone that you can use an excuse to go on to the next thing is great. The other technique is the handoff, which is basically someone who’s passed, who you’ve already had a conversation with or you know, you can say, “Oh hey, have you met Bill?” Then you introduce the two of them and then you can make your exit out of there. That can be a very useful way out of it. I will say this, honestly doing a lot of the WGA stuff where I’d be in these rooms where I’d have to have 50 conversations over the course of an evening, I got much better at basically being very present in a conversation and giving 100% full attention. It was clear I’d addressed that issue. I could just really make a clean exit, like, “It was great talking with you. Thanks for coming out,” and move on to the next thing. That’s more of a work function than a social function. It feels honest that I’m not looking for an excuse and basically saying, “This was great. I value our conversation. Now I’m taking two steps over this direction.”

**Megana Rao:** Are you guys sure that you want to be giving away all of your secrets for-

**Craig Mazin:** It’s not really a secret. I’ll tell people. I’m just like, “Yeah.” Look, it’s not like if I say I have to go to the bathroom at a party, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, he hates me now.” Sometimes I really have to pee. If they don’t see me go, if I don’t leave and go to the … By the way, when I say I have to go to the bathroom, I always go. I don’t not go. That would be horrible.

**John August:** Yeah, even if it’s just to shut the door and check his phone for a few minutes, he will go to the bathroom.

**Craig Mazin:** By the way, I’ll do that sometimes anyway. When I’m at a party, at some point I’ll hit a little bit of an overload. I’ll go to the restroom, close the door. It’s like when I’m on a plane. Sometimes I’ll do that, just to be alone. Just for one lovely minute I’m alone. It’s so nice. I try and be as honest as I can. When there are situations like when we would do live shows, after the show is over, there’d be a lineup of people that want to talk to us. They all have comments or questions, or sometimes they want a selfie or whatever it is. We’ll do those things, and I have no problem at some point saying, “I want to answer some of their questions too, but thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it,” so that I can just say the truth, which is I have a limited amount of time and I have to talk to these people too. The same thing would happen if I were on a panel at the Writers Guild, which occasionally I have done. Same deal. Afterwards you talk to people. At large parties, honestly I have no problem, if I get cornered by somebody and they’re awesome, I’ll talk to them all night. I don’t care. All night. I do not care. I have no FOMO when it comes to party conversations. 99% of them are just air.
What about you, Megana? It sounds like you don’t want to give away your secrets, but how do you handle let’s just say the mixing, the mixing around?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, I think the same bathroom, drink technique. What I’m more curious to hear about is, I don’t want to shame anyone else or give away too many details, but the situation if you’re at a dinner party or a place where you’re more fixed, and the conversation is just unbearably boring, like you’re hearing about somebody’s pandemic hobbies that are just … I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about anybody making sourdough starter. I don’t care. I have no interest in it. How do I transition out of that conversation where I can’t easily move around?

**John August:** It’s tough when you’re locked in place and you didn’t actually have a choice or you just made a wrong choice about who you sat down next to. It’s always tough, because you don’t know if it’s the kind of situation where there’s going to be one conversation for the table or if it’s going to be like there’s a conversation on your left and a conversation on your right, and if you turn to your left, then you’re shutting out the person on your right. It’s tough. I find myself trying to ask a question that will just get us off the horrible track, if possible.

**Craig Mazin:** Some people are nothing but horrible track generators. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. They will ruin everything with their monotonous, banal point of view, their rambling stories that go nowhere. This is why if there’s something where I’m fixed in position, a dinner party for example, I need to know that I know enough people there where I can’t get stuck alone with somebody that’s not doing it for me. Ideally there’s somebody I know will sit next to me. You have to protect yourself going into those situations. If you are single, you still need a friend. That friend can be somebody that you’re interested in. It can be somebody that’s just friend friend. It doesn’t matter. You need somebody you can anchor yourself to, who can help you and rescue you. Also if I get invited to a dinner party and I get stuck next to a super boring person, that goes into my ledger, and I’m not going back there ever again. Life is too short.

By the way, I will also just leave. I’ll leave. I don’t care. I’ll leave, because here’s the thing, everybody’s got limited time. I’m not saying because we’re all busy. I’m saying we’re going to die. Sitting next to boring people all night while other people are having fun five feet away from you, it’s brutal. No, I’ll just fucking go. I don’t care, because if I go home, I can do all sorts of things that are wonderful. I have video games and puzzles and television that I can catch up on. You know I’m really down to it if I’m doing that. I don’t have to stay there. Why? You know what? Shame on the party host, the dinner party host, for putting anyone at that table that that’s boring. The only time that I honestly get stuck is if sometimes if Melissa says in advance to me, “You need to do the following thing.” I’ll say, “Okay,” but she’ll be there, so I’ll be fine.

**John August:** Many dinner parties will separate spouses so that you have-

**Craig Mazin:** Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t do it. By the way, everyone knows. I’m sort of famous in my little town for not showing up, for leaving early, for going, “I don’t do crap like that,” because I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t like small talk. I like big talk. I like to really get into it with people. I don’t just bland-

**John August:** Two things that I really respect about my husband is first off he’s the only person I’ve seen who can in real life click the ignore button, where someone is trying to engage with him, and I see this floating ignore button, he’s hitting that button, it’s like, “You don’t exist to me.” I love that he’s able to do that. The other thing is he’s very honest about, “We don’t want to go to your dinner for this charity we support. We will write a check. We’re delighted to write you a check. I have no interest in actually going to the event.” Where I can happily go to the political fundraisers all the time, he’s just like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” I respect that. He is the Craig Mazin of our relationship on that whole-

**Craig Mazin:** By the way, they don’t want you at the dinner anyway. They just want your money. If you give them money and don’t show up to the dinner, you’ve given them extra money, the money that they would’ve had to spend to feed you. No one cares. I’ve been a host of multiple political fundraisers that I did not show up to.

**John August:** Yeah. There was one at your house, which was great, but it did feel like a rare exception for us to be at your house to do this thing.

**Craig Mazin:** Definitely, yeah. That was Beto O’Rourke. That was way, way early in his run, so early that indeed he was showing up to the likes of my house. It was smallish, but it was nice and we had fun people there. It was an interesting conversation. That was that. As things have gotten bigger and larger and so on and so forth, I just … God bless Billy Ray, our colleague Billy Ray, that does a lot of fundraising and is always collaring me for that stuff. Sometimes I’ll end up with my name on the hosting … By the way, so-

**John August:** You’re not going.

**Craig Mazin:** No. People, if you ever get an invitation to a political fundraiser and it lists a bunch of hosts, that doesn’t mean that they’re all sitting there figuring out who’s going to cook what. It means they all gave a certain amount of money. That’s what that means. That’s all it means.

**John August:** All right. Let’s transition to talking about not in-person gatherings, but text threads and text messages and that stuff, and how you end a text conversation, because I’ve found myself sometimes where we’ve been texting back and forth for half an hour, and sometimes it can be awkward, it’s like who’s going to end the conversation? My default move is the tap back, which is basically the thumbs up, the whatever, saying that’s it and it’s mentioned, and this conversation is done here. Is that what everyone else is doing? Megana, what are you doing when a text conversation has run its course and you need to make it clear that I’m not going to be answering your next text?

**Megana Rao:** I feel like either that or sometimes, “Hey, I’m about to hop in the shower, but I’ll answer when I’m back out.” I think the cadence with millennials is a little bit different. It’s fine if somebody doesn’t respond to my text for days or hours. I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me and it’s fine if the conversation fades.

**John August:** Being left on read doesn’t kill you?

**Megana Rao:** If it’s just a friend, a close friend that I’m texting or a friend that I’m catching up with, no.

**Craig Mazin:** Maybe I’m a millennial, because I feel like that’s the whole point of text is … Mostly. Sometimes I will think, “Oh, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say here,” but I don’t want to send some sort of formal, “It was lovely chatting.” Then I’ll think, “Will they be upset?” Then I remember, no, no one gives a shit, because if I send you a text in a conversation, and the thing doesn’t ping back, I’m not upset. I’m relieved. It’s over. We can all move on.

**Megana Rao:** It’s almost more awkward if … The example that I even gave before is not something that I do. It’s something that some friends will do to me. It’s more awkward if you acknowledge that the conversation is ending.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah, like can’t we just be cas and just talk to each other and not have to worry about that? Text to me, sometimes for fun, what I will do is I’ll just go, “Byee.”

**John August:** Yeah, I’ve gotten a byee.

**Craig Mazin:** I love byeeee. That’s fun. I like to do that. Basically every text conversation I have at some point will devolve into GIFs and then it’s over.

**John August:** Yeah. Fair choices.

**Megana Rao:** I do feel that I have acquired a very specific skill of knowing exactly when John is done talking, in person, via email, or via text.

**John August:** My sentences do get shorter. It goes down from three sentences to one sentence to two words and then the conversation’s done. Even in emails I do find it sometimes there’s a bounce back and forth, and I thank you, you thank me, and then it’s all resolved, because in text it’s not quite a conversation, it’s not quite an email conversation, it’s just this weird middle ground and you don’t quite know whether you’re done talking. Megana, do you find it happens in Slack? I don’t as much, but what are you finding?

**Megana Rao:** You and I aren’t casually texting that much. I only text you when I really need your attention. We casually Slack sometimes. That’s the same thing where-

**Craig Mazin:** Sounds gross.

**Megana Rao:** I’m in communication with John all the time, so I don’t really think of us having a cadence there, because I’m talking to you at all times of the day.

**John August:** Basically.

**Craig Mazin:** I feel like even though Bo and I are together every day, I probably text with her more than talk. We text all the time. Oh yeah. We’re besties. We’re texties. We’re like beep beep beep beep beep GIF lol. Yeah, we’re two 12-year-old girls. It’s wonderful.

**John August:** The advantage of texting or Slack or whatever is that you can also scroll back and get to that thing. If I said something to Megana in person, she’d have to remember it, but if I text it to her, then it’s there for her to be able to look back at and confirm.

**Megana Rao:** I do remember everything you say, but yes, I hear your point.

**John August:** You consult with everyone else about, “What did John actually mean when he said that thing?” Now if you don’t mind, I got to go to the bathroom. It’s been great talking with you both.

**Craig Mazin:** Byee.

**John August:** Byee.

**Megana Rao:** Bye.

Links:

* [A Good Life is Painful by Sean Illing](https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/12/13/22811994/vox-conversations-paul-bloom-the-sweet-spot)
* [The Sweet Spot](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=33090880733218) by Paul Bloom
* [Crazy Italian chocolate cake (egg free chocolate cake)](http://chelseawinter.co.nz/egg-free-chocolate-cake/) by Chelsea Winter
* [Baba is You](https://hempuli.com/baba/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Owen Danoff ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/532bstandard.mp3).