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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/513-writing-for-stars).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 513 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off somewhere in the Canadian wilderness this week, but I am very excited to welcome back a writer whose career we’ve followed from Saving Mr. Banks to 50 Shades of Gray, and the upcoming Venom: Let There Be Carnage. I speak, of course, of Kelly Marcel. Kelly Marcel, welcome back.

**Kelly Marcel:** Hello. Hello.

**John:** It is such a delight. And thank you so much for coming in to fill in for Craig while he’s gone.

**Kelly:** My absolute pleasure.

**John:** So last I spoke with you you were in England I think because you were working on Venom. But I talked to you this week and you are in Louisiana?

**Kelly:** Yes. I’m here in New Orleans which is an incredible city because I have a TV show that’s probably about to shoot here.

**John:** Oh great.

**Kelly:** We’re actually trying to decide whether it’s going to be here or New York. And I happen to have family in New Orleans, so in the pandemic I came here knowing that I was potentially going to be here or New York at the end of the year. And they’re very close to one another.

**John:** So I was surprised and delighted to have you in a closer time zone which makes this much easier to do. But last I texted with you or spoke with you I was asking you a very writerly question in that I had a character who needed to live in a London neighborhood. I needed to know what London neighborhood this specific character would live in. So thank you very much for weighing in on that. Because how am I going to know London neighborhoods if I don’t have great London friends.

**Kelly:** I’ll always help you with anything British-y.

**John:** Excellent. Well, you can help us out on the podcast today because we have a lot to talk through. I want to talk about the experience you and I have had which is a little unusual which is writing with and for an actor, when you know who is going to be in that role and that person is helping you work on the script.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** I also want to talk about translating action on the page to the screen, which is something that you and I have had a lot of experience with and you have had really firsthand experience with both the first and second Venom. So really going from what three pages look like in your script to what the experience is of shooting those pages and producing those.

And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk about visas for international writers. We have a blog post that’s up where we asked some writers to contribute their experiences about getting a US work visa as an international writer. And Kelly Marcel has experience on that, too. So I’m going to ask her what she can tell us about that process.

**Kelly:** That’s something I definitely have experience. I’d love to talk about.

**John:** Wonderful. Thank you so much. Unlike the people who want to listen to the back episodes, we have one episode where you and Craig and I were playing this roleplaying game where my character ended up being killed. I don’t think I will die in this episode. But there’s no promises this time.

**Kelly:** That episode was so fun and I’ll also add that we were all quite drunk.

**John:** We were. I think the ideal amount of alcohol for a Scriptnotes recording is like one to 1.5 glasses of wine. More than that was consumed during the recording of that episode.

**Kelly:** Definitely more.

**John:** But first we actually have some news to talk about. So this was in Variety, an article by Kevin Tran, where they’re looking at a report based on how theatrical movies are streaming online. Basically the movies that were supposed to go to the big screens but actually showed up on streaming services, how they really did. And the answer is they seemed to do pretty well. They actually outperformed a lot of the series that were there. And it’s the first kind of insight we’ve had into what these big movies that were supposed to go on the big screen but showed up on the small screen during the pandemic, the numbers they actually generated.

So, with Venom, you have a movie that at this point is planning to come out theatrically, but I’m sure as a producer there were discussions the whole time through about whether you were going to get your theatrical release.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I mean, look, I’ll say that I think that Tom Rothman is really sticking to his guns on this. And I kind of admire for it. I think he’s really invested in preserving and protecting the theatrical experience for audiences. And there are just some movies that you have to see in a room, on a big screen, with a bucket of warm popcorn on your lap. And, you know, he is such a cinephile and a true movie lover that I think he believes in that religiously. And so actually with Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage he has always said it will be a theatrical release.

I mean, obviously the world is changing and we’ve had to move the date a couple of times because of COVID. And we’ll see, you know, if we are able to stick to that. But I kind of love him for really, really, really holding firm on allowing audiences to see this in the theater.

**John:** Well you’ve had experiences earlier on with Cruella. So basically every writer who worked on Cruella has been a Scriptnotes guest, which I’m really proud of. But with Cruella that was both a day-and-date. So people could watch it on Disney+ as a premium entry or they could see it in theaters. And so you had the chance to do both. And you were saying you actually got to see it on a big screen in New Orleans because you got yourself a theater for it.

**Kelly:** We did. And Cruella is actually one of those movies that did well streaming. And so who knows. But I definitely wanted people that I knew to see it on a big screen. And I wanted to see it on a big screen, too. And there is this incredible little one screen movie theater in New Orleans called the Prytania Theater which is actually the oldest operating theater in New Orleans that dates back to 1915. It was the first theater to come back after Katrina. And the only theater that they had for a while. And it’s been made famous in books and it’s just this gorgeous kind of magical place.

And it had been badly hit, you know, during the pandemic because it had had to close as did everything. So, I rented it out for an evening and invited all of – this was during a period where everything was open and high vaccination rates, etc. Invited all of our friends, 50 of them, to come and see the movie on a big screen. And it was so lovely and magical to get to experience it that way in this small theater in this little part of town.

And, again, that’s an experience that can’t be recreated in your home I don’t think. And so I’m really glad that we were able to do that and I hopefully will do it again with Venom 2.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve had a chance to see some movies in the theater since started opening back up. The first thing I saw on a big screen was a test screening of a friend’s movie and that was still like really locked down and everyone was incredibly socially distanced and it was still at the time that we were putting on hand sanitizer a lot.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** But then I got to see A Quiet Place in theaters which was terrific to see there. I saw In the Heights on a giant screen at the Chinese which was just amazing and it’s a movie you want to see on a big screen. And I got to see Free Guy on a big screen, too, which was all terrific. And yet data like this coming out of this report shows that the studios are making some good money, or at least getting good viewership when they put stuff on streaming. So it’s going to be really interesting to see as we move out of this next wave which of these films sort of keep to they’re strictly theatrical and long windows and which ones go back to this 45-day window which seems to be sort of where we’re settling on now, where 45 days after the theatrical release it’s showing up on these services.

It’s really an open question how much we’re going to move back to the pre-pandemic way of releasing movies.

**Kelly:** Is it 45 days after the theatrical release that it goes to streaming? Because I thought it was a much shorter window now between the theatrical release and then putting it on streaming.

**John:** From what I understand it sounds like the Free Guy model was still 45 days, which I think they’re also trying to do for the next Shang-Chi Marvel movie. But I think there’s still open questions for that. And I think it also matters whether it’s free streaming versus the $20 whatever–

**Kelly:** Paid streaming.

**John:** Yeah. The paid streaming. And we haven’t talked a lot about paid streaming on the show, but premium video on demand, which is what Cruella was when it came out there, is a really good deal for you as the screenwriter. You got actual real money on that that you wouldn’t have gotten off of just theatrical.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So it’s an interesting balance for screenwriters as well.

**Kelly:** Yeah. And I was reading that it wasn’t so brilliant actors. I don’t know what the Scarlet thing is with Black Widow. I haven’t really followed it closely, but I’m wondering why it’s not as great for actors because box office bonuses I guess?

**John:** Yeah. Really it comes down to box office bonuses which you and I would probably have in our contract as well, but hers are a lot bigger.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** And so I say the premium video on demand is good for a WGA residual, sort of that automatically calculated thing. But her argument is that by releasing it on streaming and theatrically it lowered how much it could make theatrically and therefore she should be compensated for the money she lost out of that.

**Kelly:** Right. And I think that’s why Netflix just paid Daniel Craig a big bunch of money, right, because he won’t make those theatrical bonuses.

**John:** Those negotiations are going to be tough. And it really comes back down to knowing how many people saw this movie which the studios and streamers have been loath to sort of share. And this report that came out in Variety Premium talks through basically another way to get at those numbers which is doing kind of like what Nielsen does. It’s called T-Vision which is surveying 5,000 US households to see what they’re actually watching. And through that they can see that, oh, Raya and the Last Dragon was a big hit in terms of viewership.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** Or that Luca was a huge hit for viewership, which is not surprising. These are the animated movies that would generally be big family drivers of viewership.

**Kelly:** I’ve been hearing a lot about these short term windows that we were just talking about and wondering actually if that’s going to be good for creators because the shorter the window now between a theatrical release and streaming means that theaters will probably need more content. And so my hope, I guess, is that we see more content being needed to go into theaters. And my hope for that would be smaller indie movies going into these slots and us kind of trying to claw that back a bit.

**John:** It would be fantastic if some of these smaller movies that kind of can only now get a streaming release can find some big screen time, just because there are available screens for it. We’ll see if that happens. It’s going to be challenging. But it’s possible.

You know, if you look back to the rise of indie films in the ‘90s and sort of what happened there, it was because there was capacity. There were actually screens that they could show these on. And so the movies that would have otherwise never made out to other than New York and Los Angeles could actually make it out to deeper markets. And that’s why you have Clerks being able to shown at theaters across America which 10 years earlier would never have happened.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen, but things will definitely change as we move out of this pandemic. And it’s important that we have some people actually finding the data to see who is watching these things because obviously Disney and Netflix and HBO Max know these things but they’re not sharing that.

**Kelly:** Why don’t they share that?

**John:** Because it’s their secret sauce. Because if they were able to show how much people were watching these things you and me and Ryan Reynolds and Tom Hardy would be insisting on a bigger cut of that. [laughs] Which is a natural segue to writing for and with some actors, because this is an experience that you and I have that not a lot of friends do. Because you and I have definitely come into movies for rewrite situations where a script was written and then a star is attached and we have to sort of tailor the part towards that star. And that’s common, but you and I have had the experience of from scratch we are working on a project that we know is going to a certain actor and that actor is involved in the development process, which can be great, but it can also be challenging.

So I thought we might spend a few minutes talking through the pros and cons and best practices for writers who find themselves in that situation. For you Tom Hardy was a friend from way back, from way back in London days, right?

**Kelly:** Mm-hmm. Tom and I have known each other for nearly 20 years.

**John:** And so when it came time to work on something with him, because you came in on the first Venom, but it’s really Venom 2 was the first time you were coming in from scratch. What is that relationship like? What is that discussion like? Because he obviously knows a lot about the character, but you know a lot about the character and you know a lot about writing. How did you first sort of approach that process of figuring out how you’re going to do the sequel?

**Kelly:** Well it’s important to know that Tom and I have always been collaborators. So how we came together is he was setting up a theater company in London. He asked me to come and write for that theater company. So we’ve always worked together in this capacity. So we know it very well. Venom wasn’t the first thing that I came into rewrite specifically for him. We worked on Bronson together. We worked on Mad Max together. And he’s always been an extremely creative powerhouse. He’s always had ideas.

So when it came to Venom 1, having worked with him before I knew coming in that he would have a lot of ideas and that he would have creative input, which he does. And, you know, Venom 1 was kind of a scramble and there was a preexisting script and we were rewriting on set. And we were kind of like making that movie as we made that movie. And kind of finding out what it was along the way. So when it came to Venom 2 we really knew that it had this very strange tone, sort of this balance between comedy, kind of horror, and typical Marvel action. And we kind of knew as well what the audience had loved about Venom 1. And so we very much wanted to double down on those things.

Tom immediately sort of came to the table and said, “Look I’ve got an idea for the story for Venom 2 and a character that I would love to bring into Venom 2.” And we kind of started there. And we were breaking the story together over FaceTime because I was in LA and he was in London. So, poor guy was doing some very, very late nights. And as we started to break the story together it became obvious that this was half his story and he needed a Story by credit. And so we immediately kind of made sure that he would have that credit, which is unusual for actors. Although I think Ryan has one, right?

**John:** He does. And so he actually had a writing credit on Deadpool stuff before then. So as we started this project we’re working on now we actually negotiated for him to be a writer on the project as well as being an actor and a producer from the start, which was important for this.

But my actual first experience with writing with and for an actor was on the first Charlie’s Angels. So Drew Barrymore was attached to star and to produce. And with that, you know, she had a clear sense of the tone we were going for and really the initial conversations were all about tone and what it should feel like. And so that collaboration was very much a let’s describe the world. Let’s paint what this ultimate movie should feel like. It wasn’t so plot intensive. It wasn’t so down to the nitty gritty details of this thing. It ultimately got there, but in the blue sky stage of it she was really important because I would have probably written a different movie if it hadn’t been Drew Barrymore involved. The tone of it would have been really different. And the vision for what we’re headed for.

So that is definitely a huge advantage to having that actor, that performer, involved from the very start is because you can sort of sense what it is you’re headed towards. Having a director onboard obviously early on is also a similar kind of experience because you know what they are aiming for in terms of the movie they want to shoot and in terms of what they actually feel like they can deliver. Challenging to have both, in my experience, having both the actor and the director onboard, because their visions may not match and then whose lead you’re following can be really difficult.

**Kelly:** Yeah, that can get very confusing. And very tricky because you’re very much in the middle as the writer at that point. I think we were very lucky on Venom 2 because we sort of had the freedom to write the script first before we had attached a director. So when Andy Serkis came onboard he came onboard with a full script. And that was kind of great that there weren’t kind of two voices. Although Ruben Fleischer on the first movie and Tom I think saw the movie very similarly, so we didn’t really have any of those problems on Venom 1. But it can be like that. I’ve experienced that elsewhere and that can be very tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk some other cons of the actor being involved. Because there have been times where I’ve had conversations where someone is objecting to a thing or feeling nervous about a thing and it can be hard to suss out whether are they talking as the producer of the film, are they talking as the actor in the film. Are they talking about this character as a character or as someone they’re going to be playing? And that balance between there can be really challenging. They very reasonably see everything in the story through the eyes of their character because that’s the character they’re going to be playing. But it can challenging to sort of get them to focus on this is everything else that’s around this.

And I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, not necessarily with Tom, but on other projects which you had to come on and help. It can be challenging as the writer who is responsible for the whole movie to make sure that their focus on their own character doesn’t dominate things.

**Kelly:** Yeah, absolutely. There have definitely been rewrites on other projects where I’ve experienced that. With Tom it’s more about I think things that he thinks are going to be really fun to play. And you’re like but does it fit in the movie? And also don’t forget that Tom is seeing through the lens of two characters, not just one.

**John:** Yes. Because he’s playing both himself as the human, but also playing Venom, the actual alien symbiote who has a completely different personality.

**Kelly:** Completely different personality, which by the way, this is one of the pros of working particularly with this actor is that when I write a scene Tom is literally there on FaceTime performing it back to me, as both Venom and Eddie. It’s quite extraordinary actually watching him do it. He does both voices and he plays against himself. But it means that I immediately know if those lines are working. Or if they don’t, which is an incredible gift.

But, yeah, there are definitely things that are like oh you want to do that because that’s just really fun kind of like action, but actually you know what why not put things in that are fun? Why not go to work and actually have a great day because you got to do something so crazy and amazing? I have to say that Sony were incredibly generous with us in the freedom that they gave us to play in this Venom sandbox and this Venom 2 movie I think you’ll watch it thinking oh my god they had so much fun doing that.

**John:** Yeah. You’re making the kind of movie where you really want to have that feeling. And so that’s great that you could actually do that.

Let’s talk some downsides of writing with and working with actors or with the star. Because – and this is not necessarily about, well it can be about their involvement in the writing, but also one of the blessings of big stars is that people want to make movies with big stars. And they’re attached and that movie will get made more likely. One of the challenges of big stars is that they are so busy and they’re offered so much that the project you’re working on could get pushed and pushed and pushed until you just don’t know where you are on their dance card.

Obviously it’s better with something like this where he is the main star and there’s a huge priority to make it. And having him invested in the writing of it probably pushes it further ahead. But it’s always a thing I warn newer writers about who are like, oh, I have this star attached. I’m like, wow, that’s exciting, and could be a challenge when Leonardo DiCaprio has 10 movies stacked up that he can pick between.

**Kelly:** Right. So many friend of mine, directors, big directors and big writers who have big stars attached to their movies and have had them attached to their movies for years. And their movies keep getting pushed and pushed and pushed because these people are very much in demand. I mean, you know, we just to push a little bit on a TV show that I’m doing because it has a very, very big star in it. And he got offered a massive movie. And that movie is very – it’s not Tom – but you know that movie is very appealing.

And so he’s going to do that first and it pushes the entire shoot. We’re really lucky that he’ll definitely come onto ours next, but I’ve seen movies sit around for years.

**John:** Oh absolutely. Things that are on the edge of production and it’s about one actor’s availability, or suddenly this movie is running long and then you’re going to lose the other actor because of this thing. It becomes really challenging. And so having an actor attached is a blessing, but it can also be a curse. And you’re always asking yourself is it worth it. When is it worth it? And when do you need to move on to another actor to sort of get the thing to happen?

**Kelly:** I know. I know. And that’s always such a tricky decision because you’ve lived with the idea of this person in your head. And it’s very hard to let that go. I would say as well the power of having a big actor like Tom or Leonardo or anybody really of that caliber, and Ryan, particularly if they are involved in the creation of your movie it means that they are really, really, really attached to that movie and invested in it. And so they protect the work. And when you have a star that’s protective of the script then, you know, you’re in a really great position.

**John:** They’re invested in the movie, but they’re also invested in the movie’s success, which is hugely important, too. Because having a giant star in a movie that they don’t really care about or like does you no good when it comes time to promote the movie, when it comes time to do everything else. When you have the star who has been in there since day one making the movie work when it comes time to promote it they will promote the hell out of it. And that really pays off. I mean, there’s a reason why Ryan Reynolds is sort of marketer of the year. He’s really good and works really hard at pushing things out there in the world. And that is worth more than anything in terms of the publicity and promotion you’re able to get out of them is crucial.

**Kelly:** Yeah. He’s particularly brilliant at it.

**John:** Yeah. And not every actor is going to be that way. But let’s talk about one thing which is that I think there’s this perception that if you write something for a specific actor then that role is inevitably locked to that actor. In my experience there have been so many times where I’ve worked on something where really it was tailored for one actor and then that person can’t do it and someone else does it and it works brilliantly.

**Kelly:** Yeah.

**John:** And in some ways just the fact that one actor could play a thing makes the character work enough that you could swap somebody else in and it actually just does brilliantly.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. I mean, that happens all of the time. I don’t know about you, John, but for me it’s really helpful to have somebody in mind when you’re writing. I really love to kind of plaster my walls with pictures of who I think this character is, whether it’ll actually be that actor or not, and think about cadences and tones of voices and facial expressions and body movement and the whole sort of being of a person as I’m putting the words that they’re going to speak and the actions that they’re going to do on a page.

I did it on Saving Mr. Banks. 50 Shades of Gray. And it really, really helps me to have that visual in my head to really know who it is. And then, you know, inevitably it doesn’t end up being that actor. But I still know who that character is having sort of seen them play it out in my head if you know what I mean.

**John:** But I think it also translates to the page. There’s something about the scripts you read that really work you sort of feel like you saw the movie. If you ask two years later did you see that movie it’s like I’m not sure. Wait, did I just read it? Because with really good scripts you feel like you saw it. And it’s because there’s just a consistency of that character and you really felt like you saw an actor in that role even though there was no actor. It was just the words on the page.

So, yeah, I think it’s great to pick actors you want to be in this thing, even if they’re unrealistic choices for the small indie drama you’re going to make.

**Kelly:** Of course.

**John:** Just having the consistency of voice and tone and body movement and just approach can be really, really helpful. And so I always – I do sort of cast out my movies as I’m writing them knowing that they’re not likely to be those actors in the final roles.

**Kelly:** I think you should think big because I think those big actors that you know so well are the ones that you can imagine more easily as you write these things because you’ve seen them do a million different movies. You’ve seen the way that they walk, the way that they talk, and different characters that they’ve been able to play.

**John:** Julia Roberts has played a ton of different characters, but I do have a sense of how her face works and how her energy is. And it’s useful to be able to write to that. Same with Will Smith. I’ve gotten to work on two movies with Will Smith and I do have a sense of what is going to be funny coming out of him. But if it’s somebody else put in that role I think it will still work because there’s a consistent thought and approach to it.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know and that’s how it is with Tom. It’s really like a shorthand writing for him now because I’ve seen him do so many different things. And I kind of know his cadences and his tones and how something is going to come out of his mouth and his body as he moves it. And so it’s really a joy.

**John:** So you were working on the script from the very start and so you delivered a script, you got a director, and all that worked. But I suspect there was also a lot of writing on the set, or things that would come up. What was the relationship between you and Tom writing stuff during production?

**Kelly:** Well, it’s a really unique experience on Venom. So how Venom works is Tom starts his day in the makeup trailer obviously and then he comes onto set. And the first thing that he does is record Venom. So we have this sound guy, Patrick, who basically plays Venom back to Tom through his ear on the set. So Tom has an ear wig. And the Venom lines, which we treat, so it sounds like Venom in his head.

**John:** Oh that’s great.

**Kelly:** Are played to him so that he has himself to kind of play off of on the set. And we’ll have Venom in our cans. So everybody can hear what Tom is hearing. And then Andy will have a mic and I will have a mic. And those mics are directly connected to Tommy’s earpiece. No one else can hear what we’re saying to Tom through his earpiece.

As you know, it’s all very well sitting reading a script and reading out the lines, but you stand it on its feet and you start moving it around a set and it somehow just doesn’t work because now you’re up on your feet and now you have to put physical movement into this scene, or the blocking doesn’t fit the line, or there’s a million things that cannot work about a scene because it’s now suddenly a physical, living, breathing thing. And Tom really is a perfectionist and he wants every scene and every line to be the best line that it can be. And there’s a lot of comedy in Venom as well. So we’re always trying to beat ourselves. We’re always trying to beat the line. And so the luxury of him having this earpiece means that he has this incredible ability to follow you live in a scene and respond if you jump in with new lines for him. So, you can keep the camera rolling and I can throw new lines into his earpiece as Venom, which he’ll respond to, or give him Eddie lines so he’ll take a beat and then he’ll start the scene again with the new Eddie lines.

And we got so used to it on Venom 1 that it was kind of like second nature. But on Venom 2 when we had Andy come in and we had Bob Richardson who is this incredible DP. He’s Quentin Tarantino’s DP. Incredible.

**John:** An icon.

**Kelly:** A new producer coming in. They were like oh my god how is he doing that? And Andy would be able to say, “Tom, walk over to that draw and open it.” And then we’d plant things in there for him so that he had surprises and was kept on his toes through scenes. I really have never seen another actor do it. And weirdly there is this scene in Bronson where he does play two characters. He plays a nurse and himself and he turns his face to the makeup side of the nurse when he’s doing the nurse lines, and the Charlie Bronson side of his face when he’s doing the Bronson lines. And he did that all in one take and it’s incredible.

And so when we came to Venom it really reminded me of that scene in Bronson. And I was like, yeah, I know he can do this. Like I know he has this unique ability to switch between characters right there in the moment live and can take lines from you while he’s acting. It’s extraordinary.

**John:** That sounds great. Now my question is as you’re doing these improv bits where you’re changing stuff around, you have to make decisions about I think that worked or I think that didn’t work just in terms of coverage, right? Probably you’re doing some of that stuff in a master, but then you have to decide which of those things worked well enough that we want to make sure we get coverage on that. Was that ever a factor you had to remember, oh, we need to get more of that so we can actually make that work? Or are these really master decisions?

**Kelly:** You know, it’s sort of a bit of both. If something is really, really working and we know that it got the right response on the set then that’s the thing that we’re going to come in and collect. We’re going to collect as much as we possibly can. And so if we’ve shot something in a master and we’ve shot it a bunch of different ways and we’re going to try and shoot it again in the close-ups with the different lines as well. And he’ll just roll those out.

And by the way sometimes it isn’t live through his mic. Sometimes a scene isn’t working and you know how this goes. Then it’s a huddle in video village. Everybody is around the laptop. And we’re all there scrambling to fix a scene. Often Tom and I will write a scene three different ways and know that we’re going to go in there and shoot it three different ways and then decide having done it which one we think works best.

It’s quite fast paced this shooting of these kinds of movies. And we do find the time to be able to do it different ways.

**John:** Cool. So Venom is of course an action-comedy, but the action part of it is incredibly important, too. So I thought we might take a look at the script for the first Venom and take a look at a couple of pages early on in the first act of this. And just sort of see what an action sequence looks like on the page and talk through sort of how that translates to what we’re finally seeing on the screen. So, we’ll start with what was there in Courier and what that becomes on the day. And then where the choices that have to happen in post and sort of figuring out what the final version of this is.

So, we’re going to put a link in the show notes to just these three pages, page 31 to page 33 of the Venom script. And let’s talk through what’s happening here.

In the first movie Eddie is finding Maria, this journalist he’s been looking for. She’s in this detention cell.

**Kelly:** She’s actually the homeless–

**John:** That’s the homeless person. That’s right. So she is in this detention cell and clearly something is very wrong with her. He’s trying to break her out of this and she is actually infected by this thing we’re going to find out more about. And Eddie is also infected and doesn’t sort of know it at this point.

The action writing here is really good. And it’s kind of dense on the page and yet I’m never struggling to get through it. And all caps. You’re using italics. You’re using underlines to sort of keep us focused on what is important happening moment by moment.

“Maria LEAPS ON EDDIE, knocks him down and with surprising strength, PUNCHES HIM repeatedly in the chest and face. Maria, atop Eddie, wraps her hands around his throat, CHOKING HIM. Eddie struggles, gasping for air—“

That’s all one paragraph and yet it doesn’t feel like too much. And it probably is an accurate reflection of the amount of time we would be seeing onscreen.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So talk to us about this sequence. Were you on set for this sequence?

**Kelly:** I was on set. I was on set every day.

**John:** Every day. Tell me what you can remember about this as you wrote it, then the discussions with blocking and how this came from just the page to talking with stunts, talking with director, figuring out how to shoot this thing. Figuring out what you’re actually going to build here. Can you just describe this environment and the decisions that went into shooting this action sequence, the stuff that’s happening here in this complex?

**Kelly:** Yes. Well this was an incredible set that was built with all these kind of lasers and crazy strobe lights. And so as you can see on the page none of that is indicated. That’s all done by our incredible production designer imagining what this thing will end up looking like and working with Ruben to build that set.

We also had the amazing DP Matthew Libatique on this movie who with this movie kind of kept the camera moving the whole time. He really brought an energy to the entire movie by constantly keeping it moving. So we knew that Matty would be moving the camera around during the scene. We knew that he had all of these strobe lights going. And crazy colors. And then we also had this brilliant actress, Melora Walters, playing Maria, who worked really well with Tom.

And so they’re friends in the movie, so they have a history prior to this scene. He cares about her. We’ve established that. And as we started to talk through this scene we realized that she having been infected would be incredibly powerful. And completely different to the Maria that Eddie already knows. So we knew that there would be shock, fear. You know, Eddie is not your typical action hero either. The way that Tom decided to play him was not a tall, this big–

**John:** Dashing knight. He’s sort of not mousy but he has a–

**Kelly:** He’s scared.

**John:** Yeah. He’s scared. He’s a coward.

**Kelly:** Yeah. He was like the reality of being taken over by an alien is that you will be completely terrified. And not know what is going on. And so he gets into this very physical fight with this woman who is incredibly strong. And of course she’s winning. Because Eddie Brock is a journalist, you know. And so we definitely wanted to play with that. We definitely wanted him not to be able to win easily. We knew that Matty wanted to move in and out of whatever the action was taking place in this scene. And then once he had been infected by the symbiote we really wanted to see a complete change in Eddie’s physicality and to see that suddenly he can climb up walls. Suddenly he can run faster than he has ever run before. And climb a great, big, huge tree as well.

And so in this scene as we were writing this scene these were all thoughts that have been right there at the beginning of writing this script. And I’ll add that Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg also wrote this script. And so some of this scene preexisted and some of it didn’t. And so this is definitely a mismatch of all of our writing, as is the whole script. And those guys are amazing and they’re actually really brilliant at action.

And so I took a lot of inspiration from action that they had written for this movie, because I loved the way they write action. It’s concise. It’s clear. I really think they’re absolutely brilliant at it.

**John:** Some things I want to point out that are good on the page, too, is on page 32 about two-thirds of the way down, “The Guards drop. Eddie stands there for a moment, incredulous at his own fighting skills– “Did I just do that?!” In quotation marks and italics. And it’s a thing we talk about on Scriptnotes a lot is that sometimes you have to sort of speak the thought because that is a very playable moment. So he doesn’t need to say that, but we can see that in his face. But if can see it on his face it needs to actually be in the script. So it was so important to put that there.

**Kelly:** Yeah. You’ll see a lot of WTFs in the descriptive passages of Venom 2 if we ever get to release that script. Yeah, I really like to do that. I think it’s really helpful for the actor. I think it’s really helpful for the reader. And it’s just very clear and concise. Rather than writing a whole sentence about he can’t believe he just did that.

**John:** So let’s talk about, we’ll just go on this sequence with Maria and Eddie, just that sort of first moment. So this is where he’s breaking her out of the cage and then the first time the symbiote is sort of going into Eddie here.

On the day, or on the days because this was probably more than a single day of shooting, talk to us about how you figure out the blocking for who is going to be where. Was all that blocking done in advance? How much was handled on the set as people were first showing up? What was the decision process there?

**Kelly:** Well obviously this is stunts. So, first of all Melora is a very athletic actress. So all the way back to casting you’re thinking about casting somebody that can do the physicality of this part. It’s very important. So then Melora is brought in as is Tom and as is Tom’s double, Jacob, into fight rehearsals. And so a lot of this blocking is done not on the day but weeks prior. When you’re looking at an action sequence it isn’t just blocked in the morning and then you shoot it. It’s very thoroughly and carefully and safely worked out weeks in advance. And so what will happen generally is you will have stunt coordinators with their own stunt people doing sort of a practice version of the scene which you will then see. They will film, they’ll show it to you, or you can see it live if we all happen to be in the same building.

And then once that is signed off on by the director you, and producers, you will then bring the actors in to see what that scene is. And generally Jacob and Tom who have worked together for years, and years, and years will have their own ideas that come from character. And then they will kind of incorporate those ideas into the fight sequence. And then Melora will be there also with her ideas and then they will start to work this thing through, beat by beat. But it will take days, maybe even a week to really fully flesh out this scene from top to bottom and the fight from top to bottom which is always done in a kind of slow-mo, you know, up until the last minute when you can move it to real speed.

Then once that’s worked out they’ll bring it onto the set. And that’s when we’ll show Matty and the rest of the crew what this is going to look like so that he can then light it and decide where his camera is going to be. And obviously that’s very important because you’re in an action sequence. You know, you have to think about safety all the time. And so Matty needs to see where he can get in and where he can get out with his camera.

And we’ll run through that and block it a couple of times in the morning and then hopefully we’ve added the dialogue to it as well. And then we’ll shoot it and we’ll shoot it a bunch of different ways. And this scene is how many pages, three pages. This probably took us – I think this probably took us two full days to shoot.

**John:** There’s a lot happening here. And there’s visual effects happening here as well.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** There’s the symbiote, there’s the goo. Stuff like that is happening, too. And so on a production design decision there was probably a discussion of visual effects in terms of like what set you’re building versus what’s going to be virtual beyond a certain point. But then with all the creature effects what’s practical, what is CG, how you’re going to do this, where is the handoff between this, how much is makeup on her before she sort of fully goes out obviously. And very early on in visual development you had to figure out how you’re going to handle Eddie and Venom and the manifestation of Venom, what is that all going to look like. So all that had to happen, which is informing the decisions you’re making as you get there to shoot just this one small sequence at the top of this bigger action sequence.

**Kelly:** Yes. You have all of our effects people in there as well. There are these incredible things they can do where they sort of bring in these iPads but place Venom in a scene so you can look at the iPad and see Venom moving around the scene even though he isn’t actually there in real life. And it’s kind of crazy, but obviously we have fake Venoms and, you know, all kinds of stuff that–

**John:** You probably have folks who were in the costumes and the little tracking balls and things like that, too, for placement. So there’s lot of tools there at your disposal.

**Kelly:** Complete hysteria when the tongue gets brought in, because you have this enormous silicon Venom tongue. Yeah, and that gem really causes a little bit of shutdown on the set. It’s hilarious.

**John:** So I bring all this up because we don’t talk very much about the nuts and bolts details of shooting action sequences because it all started with the writing and then it goes into all these other decisions and yet it’s so important that you are there along with director and Tom who has been involved from the start to remember like, oh that’s right, this action sequence is actually serving a story purpose that goes all the way back to the script you started writing. And that can be one of the things I’ve found to be frustrating sometimes working on big action movies is that you sort of forget what was the actual story point we were trying to tell in this action sequence and it’s so important that you’re there to help remind those folks.

And you’re reminding them again as you go into post. Because you’ve shot this thing 15 different ways but with that same footage one editor could make a sequence that works a certain way. A different editor would make a completely different sequence. The thing we learn as writers working with editors is how transformative a skilled editor can be on the exact footage, the exact same thing that we saw being shot.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. Look, you’ve always got to be pushing story as well. But you can’t have an action sequence for an action sequences sake. And obviously we’ve seen that in movies. But this is actually a really sad moment in the movie. It’s a really upsetting moment. She dies and she’s his friend. And she infects him. This is the moment that he gets Venom. So it’s a very important scene within an action sequence. But the story is still the most important thing in these three pages.

**John:** Absolutely. So, Kelly, thank you so much for talking us through Venom, both sort of the initial kind of thinking about it, but also the really nuts and bolts of shooting stuff. It’s really cool to get that full education.

**Kelly:** Oh, my pleasure. I could talk about Venom all day.

**John:** All right. Now it is time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is a really useful but useless thing called Meet the Ipsums. So if you’ve ever done graphic design you’re probably used to Lorem ipsum text which is fake Latin that you put in as text for layouts. And so it’s just gibberish Latin that takes the place of stuff so you’re not actually reading real copy. You’re reading fake copy. And so Lorem ipsum is fine and good. But my friend Nima pointed me to a site called Meet the Ipsums which is alternate Ipsums. It’s bogus text you can put in that’s in different flavors.

And so my favorite one is called Corporate Ipsum. It’s done by Cameron Brister and SquarePlan. And it’s ridiculous and it’s just so funny. So here’s an example of a Corporate Ipsum. “Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking to further the overall value proposition. Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment.”

So it’s just paragraphs and paragraphs of nonsense boilerplate corporate nonsense. And I just love it. I just love that it exists. I love that someone took the time to actually write it and make a website so we can download it and stick it in our layouts.

We’re working on Highland for the iPad and so we have a lot of screens where we have to have bogus text in it. And it’s just been a joy to kind of half-read this in all the different Highland versions we’re working on.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I looked at it and it kind of exploded my brain. I was like oh god. I don’t know what this is.

**John:** And there’s all sort of other weird flavors, too. So you can just find something that fits the project you’re working on. Kelly, you got a One Cool Thing for us?

**Kelly:** I do have a One Cool Thing. It’s called the Loóna App. Well I guess you’ll put the link up. And it won the Apple Design Awards. And I don’t know about you, or anybody else, but I’ve found this past year, year and a half, a little bit challenging. And I’ve been going through this weird thing where I’ve been waking up at 2 and staying awake till 4.

**John:** Yeah, that’s me.

**Kelly:** What is that? It’s bizarre.

**John:** It may be the changing of seasons a bit of that, too. But, yeah, I’ve definitely felt that. Especially this last couple weeks. So yeah.

**Kelly:** I just haven’t been able to figure it out. Anyway, I was looking at meditation apps and sleep apps and I came across this thing called Loóna which is basically a sleep scape. And I like to do it in the dark. So I turn the lights off and I load the sleep scape and they basically tell you a story as you find these particular things in the sleep scape that they’ve drawn for you that is beautiful, by the way, absolutely gorgeous. They’ve designed for you. And you find each thing that they’re talking about and you tap it and it sort of comes alive.

And at the end you have this beautiful landscape that you’ve created. But you’ve also been lulled into this very kind of sleepy state. And so it’s really working for me. I think it’s beautiful. There’s one that is set in Brooklyn that I think is my favorite. And I love that story. And it’s just gorgeous.

**John:** That’s great. Previously on Scriptnotes we’ve talked about the sleep casts that are part of the Head Space App, which are deliberately so kind of boring. They cram so many details that your brain just sort of gives up and you fall asleep. But this seems very, very cool, too. I’m eager to try it out. Are you doing this before you go to bed or if you wake up at two in the morning?

**Kelly:** I’ve been doing it before I go to bed and it’s been helping me not wake up at two o’clock in the morning.

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Kelly:** That’s what you want.

**John:** Hooray. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is a classic outro by our own Matthew Chilelli. But 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 I am @johnaugust. Kelly, I don’t know if you check Twitter. Are you on Twitter?

**Kelly:** I am. I very rarely check it. But I am @missmarcel.

**John:** All right. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have our anniversary.

**Kelly:** Ah, t-shirts.

**John:** Are you wearing your t-shirt?

**Kelly:** I want a t-shirt.

**John:** Oh, well we’ll send you a t-shirt because we have our 10th Anniversary t-shirt. Our 10th Anniversary is next week. We’re so excited. So you can wear your 10th Anniversary t-shirt as you listen to the podcast.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we talk about writing things. It 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. You can listen to Kelly and Craig and I play fiasco and get a little too drunk, if that’s appealing. And other episodes where Kelly Marcel has been wise as always.

Kelly, thank you so much for joining us here on Scriptnotes. It’s so great to chat with you again.

**Kelly:** Oh, it’s so nice. So nice. It feels like it’s been forever.

**John:** It has been too, too long. So we won’t have you gone for so long.

**Kelly:** Yes, please don’t. It was great.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, we’re back. So Kelly Marcel, if people couldn’t guess by your accent you are not from the United States.

**Kelly:** I am not from the United States.

**John:** So how did you become legally eligible to work here in the United States? I assume you’re not just sneaking in.

**Kelly:** No, I’m not. I’m actually allowed to be here. So I did the visa application. I’ve been here for nearly a decade. Initially I was here on an O1 visa and now obviously I have a green card. But it is a real process. And the O1 was a lot. It’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of time and can be very stressful.

And so I think the O1 is the one that you get if you have extraordinary abilities.

**John:** So not like Venom, but extraordinary abilities as a writer, as an artist, as a unique talent.

**Kelly:** You have to prove that only you can do the thing that you need the visa to do. And, of course, with writing it is very specific to your voice, so only I can write what I write. And so with the O1 I think I had actually – had I been nominated for a BAFTA at that point? Because that really helps as well if you have any kind of nominations or awards or stuff like that. I can’t remember whether I had it or not.

But what I did have was Terra Nova. It had been sold here in the states. And another show that I had at Showtime. And I was very lucky in that I had an incredibly famous producer on Terra Nova and was able to get a letter of recommendation from Mr. Spielberg. And so that kind of did it for me on the O1.

But I’ve written those letters for other people as well. And I’m certainly not that person. And those letters have worked as well. Where you talk about somebody’s extraordinary ability. You talk about how you know them in the industry. And kind of just how brilliant and unique they are. And so that’s one way to come into the United States to work.

**John:** We get so many questions at the website about working in the US as an international writer that we decided to reach out to a bunch of our colleagues who are international writers and ask them if they could anonymously tell us about their journey and their experience getting that O1 visa which seems to be the visa that almost everybody is using to get.

Some writers will come here on student visas. And if you’re here on a student visa there’s ways you can get an extra year after your student visa which is super helpful because then you can actually get work experience and get those connections so you can actually gather together all the materials and recommendations you need to get that O1 visa.

The biggest piece of advice we got from everybody is that you have to have a lawyer do it. Because it’s just not a thing a person can do. How did you find a lawyer? Was it something that the producers you were working for could steer you towards? What was your process of finding an immigration lawyer?

**Kelly:** It was London agents, Casarotto, who have a ton of British writers who were working in the states. And this was a lawyer that they had used a number of times. I’ll email you his name so that anyone can call him if they’re looking for someone to represent them in getting a visa. He is brilliant. And he actually got me my green card, too, which was a much different process. It was actually easier to go from the O1 to the green card.

**John:** Tell us about that, because I don’t have a great sense of how green cards work.

**Kelly:** I got my green card as a result of having – so I had my O1 – I think you can have the O1 for is it three years?

**John:** And it has to be renewed every three years apparently.

**Kelly:** Yes, I think it’s three years. So it was coming to the end of my three years. You know, I was very much living in Los Angeles at the time in the house that we did Fiasco in. It was time to either renew or get a green card. And I decided to get a green card, or try to get a green card. You know, that was when I had had the BAFTA nomination and at the time I was doing 50 Shades of Gray and so quite high profile work.

And I think Alan, who is my lawyer, Alan Klein, I think really didn’t have much of a problem moving the O1 into a green card. You do have to go for these sort of in-person interviews where they ask you all sorts of questions about what you’re doing in the US. With the O1 you actually have to be in your home country to be able to get that visa. So you have to go to an American embassy. You have to have your passport stamped in my case in the UK. With the green card you don’t have to return to your country to get that done. You can do it from within the states.

It took about, I think it probably took about eight months for the visa to turn into the green card. I know it’s taking so much longer during the pandemic. I know a ton of people whose visas have been kind of stalled because of what’s going on in the world right now. So, I know it’s much, much, much more difficult unfortunately.

**John:** Now with your green card situation can studios hire you just like any American writers? Is there anything different that a studio needs to do to hire you as a writer with a green card?

**Kelly:** No, nothing. I’m now a permanent resident of the US. Well, you have ten years on your green card. And then after that you either apply to become a citizen, or you renew – I think you renew your green card. But I think if you’ve been here ten years they like you to then decide to become–

**John:** To officially become a US citizen. So at that point you’ll be on Venom 9. You’ll have a pretty big work history there and things will be set.

**Kelly:** I think it’s going to be OK. I think it’s going to be OK.

**John:** And one thing we should clarify. Sometimes I know folks who deal with casting. And there’s a process for getting actors over here for a movie, which is a little bit different than the other things. And so the advice we’re giving is for people who want to work as writers. There are other ways, sneaky ways, to do things if you’re just coming in for one thing. But it’s not quite the same process.

**Kelly:** No, it isn’t. And also, look, I would also say the pandemic has changed a lot. You know, before I would have said you have to be in LA. You absolutely have to because you do the water tour and there are so many in-person meetings. But I think the world has changed.

You know, I have a great friend, brilliant screenwriter Jack Thorne, who has a very, very active American career, but he lives in the UK, and always has, and has never moved to Los Angeles. And has continued to work consistently in America without needing a visa or a green card because he doesn’t live or work within the US.

**John:** That’s a really good point. Because I think coming out of this pandemic it became clear that needing to actually go in to sit in a room to talk with people is so much less important than it was even for you and Tom working on this script. That was a FaceTime conversation. So it was challenging to be in different time zones, but it could absolutely work.

And I think are there some advantages to being in Los Angeles at the start of your career? Yes. Is it essential? No. And certainly not as essential as it was even ten years ago.

**Kelly:** And maybe that’s different for TV writers and as writer’s rooms start to come back then I would say that may be different. But definitely for movie writing I don’t think you need to be in LA anymore.

**John:** Well Kelly Marcel I’m glad you were in LA for a time so I at least got to know you here while you were in Los Angeles. And drink too much wine at your house.

**Kelly:** I mean, having said that, I’ll always have to come in and out of Los Angeles, so I will always have a place there. But I just think for new writers and people worrying about whether that’s something they need to do, they should worry less.

**John:** Sounds good. Kelly, thanks so much for your guidance here.

**Kelly:** Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Links:

* [Original Movies Are Becoming Streaming’s Most Popular Content, Led By Disney+](https://variety.com/vip/original-movies-are-becoming-streamings-most-popular-content-led-by-disney-1235037636/) by Kevin Tran for Variety
* [Foreign Writers on Getting a Visa](https://johnaugust.com/2021/getting-a-visa)
* [Venom Excerpt](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/venom-excerpt.pdf)
* [Meet the Ipsums](https://meettheipsums.com/)
* [Loóna Sleep App](https://loona.app/)
* [Kelly Marcel](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0545150/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/missmarcel)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast), check out our special [10th Anniversary Shirts!](https://cottonbureau.com/products/for-all-time#/10278066/tee-men-standard-tee-military-green-tri-blend-s)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [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 Michael O’Konis ([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/513standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 503 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is traveling, so today I’m hosting solo. But I’m hardly alone. Later in the show I’ll be talking with WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer about her amazing series, and writer-director Lance Oppenheim about his acclaimed documentary, Some Kind of Heaven. A question I asked them both is what do you do when you don’t control the characters you’re given. Jac and Lance had very smart ways of thinking about that challenge.

But to kick things off I want to welcome back the writer-producer behind such iconic films as The Wedding Date, How To Be Single, Couples Retreat, and Isn’t it Romantic. She’s also the co-writer of the new film, Cruella. Welcome back returning champion, Dana Fox.

Dana Fox: Woo-hoo. I need my playout music.

John: Yeah. You’ve got to – you walk down, you take your seat, you pick up your mic and you wave to the crowd.

Dana: Ah, big time waving.

John: Dana, I can’t believe I’ve not seen you in person for more than a year. This is not good.

Dana: I miss your face so, so much. Sometimes I just Google you just to see you, because I miss you.

John: During this whole crazy time you decamped to Virginia, right? You’ve been in Virginia for most of this pandemic.

Dana: That is correct. We were in LA for the beginning sort of horrible sudden three children on Zoom school scenario where we were all jammed in like sardines and it was pretty intense. And we decided to come to Virginia because more space, just grass, just outdoor space. And we just told our kids to go outside and never come back. You’re wild animals now. Goodbye. And they became like feral. They stopped showering. There’s zero hair-brushing happening here at this house, including for me.

But we all just needed a little bit more space from each other. We love each other so much, but we needed a little space. Three kids under eight was intense.

John: That’s a lot. So, you were still able to manage your career though. So an interesting thing about this year is that it has sort of shown that people can be in places that are not Hollywood and still get stuff done. You had a whole second season of your show Home Before Dark. That all happened during the pandemic and you did it all from Virginia, correct?

Dana: Yeah. I mean, Home Before Dark season two, which comes out June 11, was literally almost entirely completed from a creepy room in a house in Virginia with just me being sweaty, with a lot of monitors. A lot of Apple products. A lot of whiteboards. So much laundry. So many piles of laundry all around me at all times.

But what I learned was that I’m actually weirdly possibly more efficient this way. I know it’s going to be controversial to say, but the Evercast system which allowed me to sort of watch what was going on on-set I know can be a little bit of a tricky thing for some people, but I tried to make sure that I was calling in more like compliments and cheers than anything else. And the only time I ever really called in notes was just if I had a good idea about something. I was like, oh, that made me think of a different line. Try this, because I didn’t want to use it like a creepy big brother who called in to complain from 100,000 miles away.

But it was incredibly effective because I could watch set. I could write scripts on one monitor while I was keeping one eyeball on set. I could pop into a Zoom to talk to the editors. All of a sudden I’m looking at one episode in one Zoom room and then I’m hopping into another room, watching another cut in a different room with a different editor. And like weirdly I ended up being a ton more productive.

I was also really lucky because I had this incredible woman, Margie Love, who helps me with everything. And she was like – not CJ Craig, but who on the West Wing is the one who orders everybody around and tells them what to do? The chief of staff. She’s like my chief of staff.

John: The Allison Janney character?

Dana: I don’t know who it is. I’ve seen West Wing 75,000 times and I love it so much and god forbid you held a gun to my head and told me to say what everyone’s jobs were. But truly it was like amazing because she was just sort of a chief of staff. She would sort of order me around and be like you’re going in this room next, you’re going in that room next. You’ve got 45 minutes. You’ve got to look at this script. You’ve got to do your changes on this script. So that was sort of what kept the whole train on the track. And it was weirdly I think I got a lot more done which is terrible because it becomes very man behind the curtain-y.

Like I think we all realized a lot of the like getting in your car and driving for two hours to Santa Monica to do color timing is maybe never going to happen again for me. Because I was able to do it from home. They sent me a fancy iPad. I looked at the color timing live. I could say, hey, can you brighten up that window, or hey, I feel like she’s sort of like this, and can you treat that. And, boom, he’s tweaking it and I’m looking at it from my creepy room in Virginia.

John: So Dana what I’m taking from this description is that there’s no reason for Craig to be in Calgary for all these months coming up here. And that he basically just ran away to escape me and the Scriptnotes recording process?

Dana: Literally 100%. That actually is why I was called to do Scriptnotes today. This is so awkward. Craig wanted me to come to tell you that it’s because of you that he’s gone.

John: Yeah. So, with Craig gone, this is normally the part of the show that we would talk through the news. And so maybe you could fill in for Craig on this part. Because I’m sort of struggling here without him.

Dana: I can’t possibly do as well as Craig, but please, try me.

John: So I want to roll out a new segment, it’s really a beta test of a new segment called Did You See in Deadline Where…? So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And so we should make it clear that ten years ago this would have been Did You See in Variety Where, but really Deadline has supplanted that as the thing people talk about when they go into one of those meetings. Like did you see in Deadline where.

So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And I just want to get your feedback on this headline, which may be complete news to you because maybe you aren’t following the trades the way you were before.

Dana: Hit me.

John: Are you ready?

Dana: Yeah, big time.

John: Dana, did you see in Deadline where Timothée Chalamet is set to play Willy Wonka in a new origin tale from Warner Bros?

Dana: Yes, I did. And that was one of the moments where I just Googled your face to think about you because I remember you did that movie. And I love me a Timothée Chalamet. I think he’s actually kind of fantastic for this part. And I was like, all right, I see where you’re coming from. I wonder what they’re going to do with it. What were you thinking? That’s kind of intense. You must have had some emotions.

John: I did. I mean, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made like a billion dollars and it was an origin story, so I guess there’s still new territory to explore. But Dana as the writer of Cruella I want to say you’re no stranger to origin stories, but at least Cruella only killed dogs. I mean, here you’ve got Willy Wonka going after Augustus Gloop. You’ve got some Violet Beauregard. You have Veruca Salt. You’ve got the unambitiously named Mike TV. This is like The Joker with chocolate.

Dana: Do you think we’re going to meet those people, or do you think we’re going to be like hanging out with him when he’s in his house before he gets the chocolate factory?

John: I suspect it’s before all of those people exist because they would be too young if it’s Timothée Chalamet. But it’s a good question. It could be the origin story of the Oompa Loompas, which is potentially problematic so you’ve got to find a way through the Oompa Loompa and their sort of indentured servitude to Willy Wonka. Yeah, there’s a lot.

Dana: We were always thinking of ways to sort of tease these future things when we were talking about Cruella and sort of saying well how much do we want to do nods and winks to the sort of canon. So I feel like you can do the math on Timothée Chalamet’s age and I think maybe you could watch Augustus Gloop’s parents make love and know that Augustus Gloop is coming? No pun intended. He’s like coming into the world.

You can always do the math and say well what would be the cool precursor to the thing and the thing. And so I mean I feel like I’m in for that movie. I’m intrigued by it. Who is directing it? Do we know who is directing it?

John: It is I think the guy who did Paddington if I recall correctly, who is great.

Dana: People are like obsessed with Paddington 2. Is Paddington 2 guy the same as Paddington 1 guy?

John: I think it’s the same person. I’ve never seen Paddington 1. I’ve only seen Paddington 2 and it is indeed delightful.

Now, going back to Cruella though, you know, one of the things I found so frustrating about the discourse on Cruella is this question of who is this movie for.

Dana: Oh, god, my favorite.

John: Yeah. And with this movie I guess you can ask that question. Who is the audience? If you want to see a twink navigate a chocolate river you’re probably not going to the multiplex.

Dana: [laughs]

John: I mean, that’s niche content Dana. No judgments. But you’re going to want to VPN for that.

Dana: That’s amazing. I really, really didn’t think about it that way, but now I will never, ever be able to think of it any other way. That’s really special and important.

Yeah, I feel like the question of who is it for is the number one thing I have been asked in the last three years of my career. And I keep just being like, I don’t know, I just kind of like it. I think it’s pretty great.

John: I think it’s pretty great.

Dana: You know, that’s the kind of thing that people ask when they’re scared that they don’t know exactly how much money something is going to make. And I just kind of feel like it’s fun to try to straddle the different worlds and try to say I think young kids want things to reach up to. And I think adults want to feel like kids again. So, don’t ask me that question anymore people. I’m not interested.

John: Speaking of adults feeling like kids, another casting news, did you see in Deadline where Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s The Man Who Drew God. Spacey will play a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. Spacey said he’s been researching the role–

Dana: No.

John: –for decades.

Dana: No. Are you kidding?

John: No, it’s a real movie.

Dana: That’s not what the part is about?

John: That’s what the part is about.

Dana: That’s not the part.

John: That is the part.

Dana: No, John.

John: Yes. He’s a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. That’s the confusing part.

Dana: Oh my god, John.

John: I mean, Spacey, he’s so excited to be in a film that asks the question what if a guy didn’t do what I’m accused of doing.

Dana: I have to take a minute. I actually have to maybe potentially get down on the ground. I tend to sort of go low when I feel dizzy. Are you kidding? I literally thought you were 1,000% joking.

John: No, it’s not a joke. There’s a joke around it, but that’s the actual premise of the movie.

Dana: Oh my god. [Unintelligible]. I saw the headline and I intentionally didn’t click on it because I was like I’m not OK with it. I’m not ready. It’s too soon. Possibly it will always be too soon for me. I can’t do it. Unfortunately I can no longer watch Woody Allen movies. I love a Woody Allen movie. I used to have a secret thing where in the very beginning before I felt like it was like fully confirmed I was like I’ll only watch them on planes where nobody notices I’m watching. Like I’d like get on a plane and I’d immediately look for Annie Hall and then just sort of embarrassingly check both directions and then hit play, and then just watch it on planes where I feel like it was like, look, what happens at 40,000 feet stays at 40,000 feet.

And even that I can’t do anymore.

John: There was a time which I was a vegetarian, but I would eat chicken if it was the in-flight option.

Dana: Totally. Totally.

John: That’s you with Woody Allen.

Dana: And for me Kevin Spacey is chicken, which is that I no longer eat chicken even when it’s a secret, or when nobody is going to know about it. I just can’t do it. Can’t do it.

John: Dana, what are we going to do if this movie is good? That’s my biggest worry is Spacey is actually a good actor. And so this movie could be good and then what do we do?

Dana: I couldn’t agree with you more. But I think it’s like it doesn’t matter if it’s good. I think you just can’t see it. I think people just have to say we’re just not giving – to me it’s sort of like a serial killer writing a book and making money off of it. It’s like no. You don’t get to do that. Not my money. I’m not giving you my money.

And I think he’s a great actor, but you know, I was going to make a horrible joke that I’m not going to make about murderers being like painters. Like so and so is a good painter, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if the movie is good.

John: I know who the so-and-so was, and you know what, it’s right for you not to have made that.

Dana: Exactly. Thank you. Not funny. Never funny.

John: Speaking of restraint, did you see in Deadline where John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country?

Dana: [laughs]

John: I get it. He’s got F9 to promote and China is a huge market, but still I have not seen a public figure so fully prostrate themselves to a foreign power since Craig apologized to Liverpool for misattributing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Dana: Oh my god.

John: That’s a niche joke. That’s for the fans, I’m putting that in there.

Dana: That’s literally for my husband. I’m like you’re welcome, Quinn Emmett. Please enjoy.

I have to say I know I’m supposed to be talking about the headline, but I don’t know anything about it, so I am going to say I didn’t realize you were so amazing at segues. Have you always been this amazing at super natural segues in between stuff?

John: It’s a found skill, a found art. I’m one of those mutants in X-Men who like very late in life it manifests. Oh my gosh, he can do this really unimportant thing. But I became Segue Man only because of Scriptnotes.

Dana: You’re incredible at it. It’s sort of like how Craig discovered he’s an amazing actor. Did you guys both discover that because of Scriptnotes? It’s beautiful.

John: I don’t know. I think he did a lot more voice work sort of because of Scriptnotes, so who is to say. I don’t have a good segue for this next joke though. Dana did you see in Deadline where Amazon is buying MGM for $8.5 billion?

Dana: Oh my god. They have all the money.

John: Amazon vows to keep releasing movies theatrically with the new James Bond movie due out October 8, or October 7 if you check out in the next 30 minutes.

Dana: [laughs]

John: You can throw some batteries in the cart and push it over the limit.

Dana: It’s kind of amazing. But I have to say I know I’m supposed to be cynical, and I know I’m supposed be like ugh they’re destroying the world, but I just love sunscreen and I love being able to just order as much of it as I want anytime I want and five seconds later it’s at my house. So I was like psyched about the MGM thing. I like MGM’s catalog and I like sunscreen. So I was like it’s kind of a beautiful marriage for me.

John: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are freaking out but I don’t think there’s really anything to worry about Amazon entering the movie business because look what they did for books.

Dana: Correct. Can you explain – I got the joke, but I’m moving on from it. Again, I like to order off of Amazon, I’m so sorry. But can you explain to me why people are freaking out about it? Because I didn’t totally understand why everyone was so up in arms. I was sort of like, yeah, there’s going to be a place where you can watch the movies that you couldn’t watch before this, now this other place. It’s all on your thing.

John: I think it’s just the problem of all of the consolidation in the industry. I think it’s people trying to take a do-over for Disney and Fox, which should probably never have happened. And so I think it’s just people recognizing like, oh my god, there’s going to be three buyers and you’re going to go to just the same three places the whole time.

Dana: Right. Right.

John: I think it’s just awareness of how much the industry is coalescing around these giant players.

Dana: I hear that. But I feel like if any of these places had been making these like profoundly amazing artistic films and then had been gobbled up by it I’d be like, oh trag. But, I mean, they’re kind of commercial movies. Here, go buy your batteries and watch your movie.

John: They got their Creeds. That’s sort of it.

Dana: I like that Creed. I’m not going to lie to you. That was a nice Creed. Love that Creed.

John: Finally, Dana, did you see in Deadline where in the new movie Army of the Dead Tig Notaro shot all of her scenes alone? So it was all reshoots and she’s in a bunch of scenes with actors but, nope, she was just in a green screen. It was just all Tig Notaro alone.

It reminds me that Craig was originally supposed to be in those scenes but he got too busy making his new show.

Dana: That’s amazing. That does not surprise me. And I’ll say it’s because I finished a TV show in complete Covid protocols and I was kind of amazed at – you know, in the beginning when we shut down in the middle of an episode I thought, oh, there’s going to be this fun bingo game, drinking game, that everyone is going to get to play after the end of the pandemic where you’re going to be watching your favorite TV show and then you have to drink when you see the character age by like a year in the middle of a scene.

And I thought it was going to be really complicated and everything was going to look crazy. And it’s like I watched the show and you absolutely can’t tell. We have huge crowd scenes that we just did totally safely with tiling and all sorts of stuff. We had to do a bunch of stuff like what you’re talking about. Just kind of shooting people alone so that they could be in scenes with people that they couldn’t breathe around. And so it kind of doesn’t surprise me.

And again I don’t think it’s something that we want to do in the future because I think that actors really feed off each other’s energy and I think it’s a little bit oddball to be up against a green screen for like an entire conversation. But like, OK, I’m buying it.

John: Yeah. The real question is Dana why isn’t Tig Notaro in your show? She could be in your show. What do you have against Tig Notaro that she’s not in your show?

Dana: Well now we know that there’s no reason Tig Notaro can’t be in every show. So it’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a real reckoning with that. I like Tig Notaro a lot. I think she’s great.

John: I think she’s that little bit of pepper you need to sort of spice things up. She’s great.

Dana: I think that’s right. And I think maybe–

John: She’s like deadpan pepper.

Dana: Maybe just send me the footage and I’ll see if I can work it in from the other thing.

John: Done. 100%.

Dana: Some of the green screen stuff. Let’s just stick it in my thing with a different background.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for helping me out with the headlines. I’m going to be back talking with you–

Dana: Oh, I love you.

John: –in our bonus segment about naps. And everyone check out the second season of your mystery-thriller series Home Before Dark. It appears June 11 on AppleTV+. Yay.

Dana: Yay. Oh, you’re the greatest John. Thank you.

John: Stick around because after the break I’ll be cheating with Jac Schaeffer about WandaVision and navigating the Marvel universe.

[WandaVision clip plays]

So Darcy may not know what’s happening, but luckily we have someone who does know. Jac Schaeffer is a writer-director whose credits include Time, The Hustle, and the story for the upcoming Marvel Studios’ Black Widow film. She also created and executive produced the hit series WandaVision. Welcome Jac.

Jac Schaeffer: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Now, I emailed you probably after episode two to say how amazingly well-done I thought your show was and just how much I was enjoying it week-to-week. And I’d been curious about your show really early on because as listeners will know we lost our former producer, Megan McDonnell, to your show. She was hired away from Scriptnotes to work on your WandaVision show. And I was just so excited that it turned out so amazingly well.

Jac: Yes. I’m so delighted that I got to poach her directly from you. She is extraordinary. I love her madly. And that was her episode that you were just playing. One of two that she contributed to and many other things on the series.

Yeah, I could spend this whole segment just talking about Megan McDonnell if you wanted to do that. She is very smart.

John: Well maybe we can do that off-mic. But Megan is also an absolute steel trap because she told us nothing about your show or what was happening in it. And even as it was airing she was like I can’t say anything. She revealed nothing.

So now that the show is out and done I really want to talk about the process of putting together WandaVision and we’re not spoiling Marvel secrets. I’m just really curious how it all came to be. Because I don’t have a good sense of was Marvel pitching you? Were you pitching Marvel? What were those early conversations when it came time to think about doing WandaVision?

Jac: Sure. You know, it’s unusual at Marvel. It’s unlike anything else that I’ve experienced in the industry. They have their own system and it has been very successful for them.

They typically develop their concepts in house. And the only other actually place that it’s a little bit similar to is Disney Animation, where there is a lot of dedicated in-house development time. And so when you come in to pitch on something usually they have materials for you and they sort of know essentially what the gig is going to be. And then you’re meant to come in and bring your voice and perspective to the project.

So for WandaVision it was Kevin’s idea. He wanted to blend – to put Wanda and Vision’s characters together with the history of sitcoms and sort of use that to examine her very robust and tragic backstory of loss and grief. And they had a lot of sort of – they had some little ideas. They had this idea of like a milkman who was really scary. And so they had some granular stuff. And then they had big picture stuff of is it a dome, and is it the world, and who is helping, and what’s going on. And so I adjusted all of that material and then came back to them with a pitch that sort of gave shape to all of these pieces.

John: So it feels very much like a feature, you’re also a feature writer, so it feels like situations where there’s a book to adapt, and so obviously you have everything that’s in the book and then they may be bringing you in. And then you say like, OK, here’s how I’m going to do this. This thing you’re pitching towards me, here’s how I’m pitching it back to you. This is what I think it feels like. This is how I think it might work. Is that fair?

Jac: It’s sort of like that. I mean, I haven’t adapted a book, but I’ve sort of gone down the road. And I have felt that for me it’s a different approach. Because I find books are so immersive, especially when they’re very POV driven, if they’re very first person. And so you feel kind of surrounded by a world and a voice and a tone and a character. And this is different than that because it’s so sprawling. Because what you’re pitching on is like a kernel and a tone. Because they often assign genre to their – so the most reductive thing is like, OK, we’re doing a western, we’re doing a heist. So you’re sort of buying in on what, like you know Black Widow obviously is sort of spy genre, in the Bourne world.

John: As opposed to Ant Man which is like a heist comedy.

Jac: Yeah, heist comedy. Exactly. Exactly. With a novel I feel like there’s a little bit more containment. And yes you can depart from the book, but you’re always kind of housed in whatever that original container is. Whereas on this there’s like no container. It’s just an enormous table full of materials. And some of them – it’s sort of like I would imagine, I don’t know anything about cars, but cars before they were computers. If you took apart a car and there were all of these pieces spread out over a table. One is a huge engine and one is a tiny little whatever piece. I’m going to say wingnut, even though it’s probably not that. And this metaphor has gone off the rails.

But do you know what I mean? There’s so many parts to it that – on this one in particular I had to find the sort of spine and through line of it.

John: That’s what I really want to talk about is how did you find the spine and through line, which I guess quite early on you had to figure out sort of a tone and an approach. Because one of the things I loved so much about WandaVision is you watch that first episode and second episode and you’re like I’m not even quite sure what show this is. I’m not sure what the tone is. It’s just so wild and weird and unusual.

So what was the containment device for it? You say that it’s not a heist movie, it’s not a western. What did you feel this was? This surrealist existential drama? What limits did you put on yourself?

Jac: It’s funny. When I was thinking about having this conversation with you today and I was thinking about Craig actually and how amazed I am that he wrote The Hangover sequels and then also Chernobyl, and I always really admire people who can do it all, and can dance all the different – they can do all the different dances at the ballroom competition.

But for me, I just like them all in the same spot. That is really exciting to me. The challenge of can you do the kitchen sink with the one project.

You know, my first way in, I sort of had two points of entry on this. One was I mapped – I broke the episodes according to the stages of grief. It was a very reductive framing device that just helped guide me. And it ended up – we ended up straying from it a little bit, and then kind of returning to it. And now if you look at the show it’s very evident. She is in denial for the first three episodes.

And she’s angry and kicks Monica out. And then she’s bargaining outside, the sequence that we called the hex flex, when she steps out of the hex. You know, and the whole thing was meant to culminate with acceptance. That she has to accept the truth of her circumstance. So that was like one of the ways that I approached the pitch and kind of gave shape to it.

And then the other thing was that I knew that there was a huge risk that it would just feel like parody and just feel like a gimmick. And there was such a risk that we wouldn’t care about these characters. And I just knew instinctively that if we told the linear story of Wanda goes to get Vision’s body, is denied, and freaks out and creates a dome that there’s no tension in that.

John: Yeah.

Jac: So, it was my instinct and I think it was also kind of implied in their early documents of starting inside of the world and then trying to sort of unpack that mystery. But I think their instinct was to kind of parse it early, like in the first episode reveal. And I wanted to hang onto it. And I wanted to try and create an actual sitcom. So that was the driving force is like how long can we keep the cat in the bag and create maximum tension and intrigue and interest.

John: Well tension and intrigue and interest, you’re really talking about expectation. You’re talking about where the audience is at. What does the audience this is going to happen next? How can you reward that and how can you challenge that and sort of move past it? So those first two episodes, the first episode is so very classic black and white and really arch performances and so we’re expecting is this show, and then as we move to the second episode we see the time has jumped forward. It felt like you were from a very early stage anticipating what the discourse would be like week to week and where the audience was going to be at and what the audience was expecting to happen next. Is that fair?

Jac: It is fair. It is fair. We weren’t entirely certain that it would be week to week. When we were making it it was up in the air whether or not it would be a dump and be binge-able, or if it would be week to week. And it was always my hope it would be week to week. And I was so pleased that that’s how it landed.

But, yeah, I mean, it is bizarre writing in this world because you’re not writing alone. You’re writing with the legacy of everything that came before. People say lovely things about the show and I’m delighted that it has resonated, but I also – you know, I didn’t think it would play for people who didn’t understand the Marvel universe. I didn’t think it would play outside of the states. I was like if you’re not steeped in American sitcoms this is going to be Greek to you. And of course I completely under – and it’s actually even in the story she learns English. The character Wanda learns. So I don’t know why I was so sort of shortsighted about it.

But I mean so much of the eeriness and the uncanniness is about going into it knowing that these are superheroes. And that’s part of what’s so kind of delicious about it. So, yeah, I was absolutely playing to the expectations of Marvel fans. But then, you know, I wanted people who weren’t fans to be pulled in as well.

John: Now, one of the challenges of writing these characters though is that you don’t really fully control these characters. These characters existed before you. And they will exist after you. And so you have them for this period of time. It’s like you have them for college and you can do whatever they want to do in college, but they’re going to enter college and they’re going to leave college and you only have them for that time.

What were some of the challenges of taking Wanda and Vision and all the other supporting characters you brought in from the Marvel universe and using them to your best effect, but also knowing that they would have to go on and do other things? Like how early in the conversations with Marvel did that come up as an issue?

Jac: The continuing on you mean?

John: Yeah.

Jac: Well, you know, it’s really not as much of a burden as it sort of seems on the outside. First of all, it was a real surprise to me to discover how much I enjoyed picking up other people’s story threads, especially when they’re peripheral. There’s something about the characters with less screen time that really fascinate me, because you end up being able to make a meal out of these tiny moments. And actors are amazing and they make all these little choices that you sort of pass through but then upon inspection – you know, Randall Parks’ whole thing from what I understand that the moment in Ant Man between him and Paul Rudd where Jimmy makes the mistake that he thinks that Paul Rudd’s character is asking him to go to dinner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this moment. But it’s this really charming and totally disarming moment of miscommunication between two men who aren’t friends, but it reveals that Jimmy’s character is actually seeking connection.

And it was like so pleasurable to run with that. And also his sort of little interest in magic in the Ant Man movie to then sort of take that. So all that textural stuff is very, very fun.

And then of course with Paul and Lizzie like they’re performers who really operate with an enormous amount of integrity. So they had so much to contribute and there was so much already there.

In terms of where they’re going, I mean it’s an ongoing conversation throughout making your thing, because while you’re making your thing they have an idea about what the next thing is, but it’s not rolling yet. And then once it starts rolling there are conversations. I never really felt – the only place where it sort of made me feel a little bit hemmed in is the tags. The tags are always really challenging because typically they’re iterated and iterated and iterated through the process and then really they’re decided upon so late in the game.

And that’s the handoff.

John: It’s not really wrapping up your story.

Jac: Correct.

John: It’s setting up the next one which you had nothing to do with.

Jac: Correct. Yeah. And I love the tags. I always find them to be so fun. And I’ve written a bunch that I fell in love with that then were cut because it didn’t align with the next thing, or the actor was unavailable. So that’s sort of where you handoff the baton. That’s the only place where it gets a little bit sticky. But really I have felt very fortunate that in the larger scope of whatever project I’m on you’re allowed to do what you need to do to make it the best that it can be.

John: So let’s talk about the characters you’re using, like Randall Parks’ character. How early on did you know that he was going to be a force? Was that already part of the Marvel pitch to you? And same with Darcy or other people who sort of exist in the Marvel universe. Did you need them or did they say like, oh, here’s available people we’d love you to use?

Jac: Yes, so they had a list of possibilities. And it’s funny now. I can barely remember who else was on them. Usually it’s a long-ish list. Randall and Kat Dennings were on there. And high up. And I was like absolutely. That is just an immediate yes to those two performers and to those two characters. And same with Agatha Harkness was on there as a maybe, I don’t know, maybe she’s in the mix somewhere. So those were the ones that I pulled out.

You know, we went down a road with a couple other characters that didn’t end up working out very early, because it’s also like you’re gambling on actor availability, which in the MCU usually that’s not a huge problem because they’re interested in continuing their participation. But it is a little bit tricky. And then sometimes characters get pulled into another property and that on a very small scale happened with us. On Black Widow that was a little bit more blue sky on that.

I was the first writer in on that. In conjunction with my producer on that we sort of set the table on who those characters were going to be. So, the short answer to your question is they have some ideas. It’s sort of like it’s a menu and then you can select and run at it and then if it doesn’t work often it can be modular and you can slide somebody else in.

John: Well let’s talk back to the process for WandaVision. What were the first documents you ended up writing for this project? Do you do an outline for the whole series? Did you do a pilot? What were you writing first?

Jac: Let’s see. That’s a good question. I mean, Marvel has a very extensive pitch process. So I had really detailed pitch documents. Because you pitch multiple times. So I had my pitch document which broke the whole series. And then I got notes on that which just sort of shored it up. Gave it a little bit of shape.

So the next step was putting the writer’s room together. And so when we were hiring writers they would come in and I would pitch the series.

John: So at this point you had not written a script, but you were hiring writers based on the approval of this pitch document and saying like, OK, we’re going to try to make this thing.

Jac: Correct. And it was in broad strokes. I can’t remember. Monica being kicked out. That was always there. The first three episodes, obscuring the truth, and kind of having red herrings. That was all – so I think that that kind of basic shape was there and that was part of what I was pitching to the writers. You should ask Megan. It’s all gone.

And then one of the things that you have to do is like you have to pitch over and over again because you have to pitch to the actors and then when you’re hiring the directors you have to pitch to them. So we ended up having it all on a wall. We had this really fabulous writer’s room with an enormous amount of art which was one of the things I did before the writers came in is I put all the art on the wall because it’s such a visual story and because we were telling such a multi-layered story.

So we had the wall broken by episode and then we had the art, like the posters from those classic shows above each episode. So it was this kind of wall that was a pitch document.

And then once the writers came on that’s when we started producing documents for the studio to receive notes on. And those were kind of series overviews. And then eventually once their episodes were assigned they were writing outlines that were part of the series overview. So we went really, really, really deep before anybody started writing a script.

John: So there were no lines of dialogue written until everything had sort of been signed off on, right?

Jac: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s actually true. You know, the pilot opens with the like “my wife and her flying saucers,” like that kind of stuff was in – those type of cute moments and big moments like “he was killed by Ultron, wasn’t he,” that stuff was in the outline documents.

John: OK. So you had those little moments. And it sounds like the James Cameron scriptment kind of things.

Jac: Correct. Yeah.

John: You have dialogue where you absolutely need the dialogue to sort of show how stuff works, but the scene work is not in those. It’s really showing—

Jac: Yeah, the scene breakdowns. Yeah, I guess scriptment. I mean, the way that I did it, which I don’t know if it’s any kind of formal system, was slug lines and what we planned to do. It wasn’t in Final Draft. It was in a Word document. But we broke out the scenes for everything and what would happen. Yeah, bits of dialogue here and there.

John: Now, finally you feel like, OK, we have a shape for this whole thing. We are signing off scripts. Is this your first time running a room? This is your first time working with other writers? What was that process like for you?

Jac: It was. It was my first time running a room. And it was the very best experience of my career. And I loved hiring these phenomenal people and I loved working with them. And I will keep it in my heart until the day I die. It was so wonderful and so special.

And it was a tricky thing because I needed to hire talented, inspiring, somewhat seasoned people, because I hadn’t done it before. But I also needed to hire people who weren’t going to have a problem with that. And weren’t – I didn’t have time for anyone to have a problem with my authority. I’ve heard on your podcast before that you and Craig talk about kids and having kids and the impact of family on your career. My children were two and four when I got this job. And I live on the west side and Marvel is in Burbank. So I had an hour plus commute every day.

So I was working on an extremely tight schedule. So I needed people who were just going to be in and be excited and optimistic and up for the whole thing. And so that’s who I hired. And I wanted people that I would learn from. And I wanted people who would keep the engine going if I ran out of gas. And that’s what I got. I mean, this team never quit.

And they had so much love for it. And I also chose them based on the kind of people that they are, but also because of their influences. I hired this group that just like they know film and TV in all the ways that you need them to, but the love that they have for it, and the deep cuts that were brought to the table in the room when we were breaking the show, and because it’s such a bananas show I needed those people with those super bizarro frames of reference.

John: I actually was writing down your quote, “I didn’t have time for anyone to question my authority,” because that is just such a great encapsulation of the real challenge of trying to do this job. My first experience running a TV show was this disaster called DC. It was me and Dick Wolf. And my authority was constantly being questioned at all moments. It became impossible for me to do this show because not just the question of authority for the network or the studio or Dick Wolf, but also you’re too young to be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing this.

So to hear you say that is such a smart way to approach how you’re making the decisions.

I want to know how you actually picked those writers. Were you looking for recommendations first and then reading them to make sure they were really good? Were you looking at the words first and then meeting with writers? How did you pick who would be the people in the room?

Jac: So my producer, who is my Marvel executive, Mary Livanos, who is wonderful – Marvel is really great because these executives are always doing the next move way before it’s time for the next move. Because of the way they operate, you know, they plant a flag. This is when this thing is coming out. So they just run at it and it’s kind of amazing whether or not it’s ready to go.

So I think she was reading scripts before I was hired. And also I met with some people who had been up for my job as well, because there were great people in that pool. So she was passing me scripts, things that were her favorite. I told her what my priorities were in the read which were I wanted people with original voices. It was less important to me that the specs stick the landing of whatever the show was trying to do. I just wanted ideas to leap off the page. Or I wanted comedy to leap off the page.

I just wanted it to be memorable. Because those were the brains that I needed in the room. I needed people who were going to constantly be questioning the tradition of storytelling. Megan’s spec was so good. It was such a fully realized mythology. And it was so achingly melancholy. And it had such an original voice to it.

Cam Squires’ spec was such a swing. And I remember when he came in to meet my first question was where does this series go. What even is your plan for this story? Because I can’t see it and that’s not a ding. That’s not a fault. It’s just you bit off so much in the pilot. Tell me what your plans are. And of course he had a plan and it was fascinating to hear what that was.

And I knew I needed people who could do mythology and world-building and genre and procedural. And I knew I needed people who could do sitcoms and comedy. I ended up leaning away from a lot of the straight sitcom writers, because our show was so ambitious. So I did hire sitcom writers. So Mackenzie Dohr wrote on the Mindy Project but she also wrote on Lock and Key. So she’s no stranger to fantasy and genre.

So that’s what I was looking for on the page. That was truthfully 30%. Maybe 30% of what was important to me. It was really so much more about the personality. Coming up in the industry I’ve had my share of bad experiences and being in rooms where I felt small. Whether or not I allowed myself to feel small, or I was actively made to feel small. But I was adamant that the room culture be positive and respectful and joyful. And that everyone would feel heard and valued.

So I hired people who that’s how they operate at. I hired Chuck Hayward because I invited him over to my house. I was like, OK, crack the code. Tell me how I run a room. And he painted a picture of what his dream room would look like and I was like, OK, great, because you’re hired because I need you to bring that energy into the room. I actually hadn’t even read his script. [laughs] And luckily it was great and he’s wonderful and very talented. But it was so much about a friend of mine, Micah Fitzerman-Blue who is wonderful and so talented himself, he was like you know you can write. So what you need is the people to help you break this. And you need people who will inspire you.

And my friend Chris Addison who is an incredible – he directed The Hustle and he won Emmys for Veep and is fantastic, he was like look at your room like a toolbox. You don’t need – every chair isn’t supposed to be a writer who is better than you. Every chair needs to bring something different to the table. So that was very much part of my approach.

I’ve been talking forever John because I love talking about building a room. It’s so fun. And I, yeah–

John: Well it sounds like you’re going to have a chance to do this again because just this last week it was announced you made a deal with Marvel and 20th Television to create some new shows. This is very exciting. Congratulations.

Jac: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I’m very excited about it and I feel incredibly grateful and honored.

John: So what do you see as priorities? Would you want to do traditional broadcast? Do you want to do more streaming? What do you think is really interesting in television for the next couple years?

Jac: I mean, for me I love this limited series space. I mean, that’s not to say that things can’t have another iteration, but I was so surprised at how much freedom I felt in making WandaVision. That every episode was a chance to redefine the actual show itself. In the years leading up to getting WandaVision, you know, it wasn’t my intention to go into television. That wasn’t the trajectory. But I had been watching these shows that were just blowing my mind with – especially with bottle episodes. The bottle episode of Girls, the Panic in Central Park, I was so dazzled by that episode. And it was the first time that I really sort of looked squarely at the bottle episode and what it could be.

Because prior to that in network television it had always seemed like filler or I remember my parents watching an episode – there was an episode of The Cosby Show. I think it was John Ritter who was on and his wife Amy Yazbek, is that right?

John: That sounds right.

Jac: I don’t know if I’m remembering this correctly at all, but they were having a baby and the enormous amount of show real estate was dedicated to their storyline. And I remember my dad saying, “Oh, they’re lining up a spinoff,” which didn’t turn out to be the thing. But I remember feeling like departures from the norm in network television was like filler or a detour or con. And now, you know, another one that I just couldn’t believe was Escape at Dannemora, the penultimate episode, that was very much an inspiration for the penultimate episode of WandaVision in that it’s a rewind. And you don’t know where you are when you start the episode.

That feeling of disorientation, rather than it being filler, rather than it being just like, oh, watch this instead, that you have to lean forward. I mean, that is what I am clawing after at every turn.

John: That’s how you know you’ve engaged your audience is they are desperate to figure out what’s going on. And they’re with you to solve the mystery. That’s it.

Jac: That’s totally it. That’s the juice.

John: Jac Schaeffer, congratulations again. I’m so excited to see what you’re going to make next. Do you know what that is? Is there anything you can announce yet that you’re going to be making next?

Jac: There are no announcements.

John: Nothing will be announced today on Scriptnotes. But thank you very much for coming on the show. And thank you for hiring Megan McDonnell and giving her that platform, even though we were sad to lose her. Thank you for taking a chance on her because she is a superstar.

Jac: She is. I mean, I’m the one who benefited from that. Let’s be honest. She’s the best. Thank you. Thanks so much.

John: Thank you, Jac.

Stick around because after the break I’ll be chatting with Lance Oppenheim about the writing that goes into documentaries.

[Clip plays from Some Kind of Heaven]

In that clip we hear from Dennis, one of the people in the documentary Some Kind of Heaven. The film follows four seniors living in The Villages retirement community and explores how they cope with later adult life. The film premiered at Sundance in 2020 and is now available on Hulu. And we have with us Lance Oppenheim, the film’s writer and director. Welcome Lance.

Lance Oppenheim: Hello. Thank you for having me, John. Big fan. It’s funny. The writer – I don’t consider myself the writer of a documentary, but I guess all documentaries are written somehow.

John: I want to talk about that. Because sometimes you see writing credits on documentaries and sometimes you don’t. But there’s clearly a lot of character work, a lot of story work that’s happening here. So I want to talk about how you do that in a documentary sense.

But I also want to make sure that people who are listening to this understand that your movie is actually really funny and visual and surprising. And it’s sad at moments, but also that clip might make it seem like it’s all dark and grim, and it has this really kind of weird spirit to it. So I want to make sure people don’t get the wrong idea about your movie.

How early on in the process of coming up with this movie did you know what it was going to feel like?

Lance: Oh man. I think it took a long time to know what the movie was going to be about and how it was going to do that. But I think the feeling of it actually came pretty early to me. And that came from spending a lot of time in the world. The Villages, as most people know of it from how much of a political spectacle it became this past year during the election cycle. It’s a very conservative stronghold of America.

But I think that the thing that appealed to me, I’m a Floridian. I grew up knowing about the place was that it really was kind of like The Truman Show in real life. It’s designed to simulate the 1950s, the 1960s. Kind of like an America that never really existed, but an America that I grew up with in movies, like in Blue Velvet or in Safe or in Edward Scissorhands. And Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life. The suburbia of those movies is the same suburbia of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America and it’s the same suburbia that is literally brought to life in the Villages.

So I knew that I couldn’t just make a standard cinema verité style documentary that the aesthetics of it were handheld. I wanted to find a way to bring the audience into the world and make it as immersive and make it feel as [transportive] as if you were really there, as if you had stepped afoot in the community.

John: So those choices were about the kinds of shots you’re doing. Just literally the production design, sort of what you’re showing on screen. But you also need to show characters on screen and that’s really what I wanted to dig into. Because that boundary between what is writing and what is directing and what is being a documentary filmmaker and what is sort of shaping narrative.

How did you find these people? Because I keep wanting to call them characters and they’re not characters. They actually are people. But they felt very carefully selected and edited. And over the course of your times meeting with them you are putting them in situations that can help tell your story.

So, let’s start at the beginning. How did you find these people and when did you know these were the people you wanted to follow for your film?

Lance: Well, I think over the process of making the film, it was about four trips over almost 18 months of time spent on and off in the community and filming with a lot of different folks. It only really became apparent I think at the end of our second strip who our ensemble really was. We were following a lot of people. But I think going back to the root of the question of just documentary, fiction, how we watch documentaries, how we watch fiction films. I mean, I think it’s interesting.

A lot of people in documentary – the documentary orthodoxy likes to talk about this word “manipulation” and I think it’s a word that should exist. But I think, you know, I may be stating the obvious but everything in documentaries is manipulated. The moment you put a camera and train it on anybody. And anybody that is living a life and breathing and existing, something happens. Depending on how much time you spend in a place, how comfortable, and how much that bedrock of trust exists between you, the filmmaker, and the subject that’s on camera, there may be some kind of alchemy that gets you closer to real life. But it’s a tremendous hurdle.

And even the way most documentaries no matter how observational they may seem are put together in the edit. It’s a lot of times following the tenets of a thing we call story, which is inherently I think the tenets, the touchstones of how we think about story go back to the things that you talk about so well on the podcast which is narrativizing and the way we even narrativize our lives goes back to that same thing.

So I think a lot of movies, even the film that we made, contain these manipulations. And I think for me the world, the setting of the Villages, felt perfect to drop a camera and to kind of experiment with a more heightened, more stylized way of telling real stories. I guess my process kind of involves a lot of me getting to know people, spending a lot of time with them, and then essentially riffing off of reality. Putting them in situations, as you’re saying. It’s not even a matter of me putting them in situations they wouldn’t normally be in. It’s bringing those situations to life and shooting them in a way that may feel and evoke how a narrative film looks and breathes.

John: Let’s talk about one of the characters in this. So in the initial clip here we meet Dennis. And so the first shot that we’re seeing of him is he’s in his van and he’s going through his daily life and he’s talking to us about the kind of woman he wants to meet. And it’s a character who he can seem like a grifter, he can seem like a hustler. And yet he is kind of a classic protagonist, like a shaggy dog protagonist of a story.

So, when you first meet this person as a filmmaker are you thinking through sort of like where you want to see his arc going? Or are you just observing? Because that’s really the question. So often as a writer we kind of know what track we need that character to go, and so we’re tailoring that character from the start because we need that character to achieve these things.

You as a documentary filmmaker have limited means of actually deciding how this character ends up. So when you’re first meeting Dennis do you have a plan for him?

Lance: I’d say no. I think what compels me to the process of making docs, and also the process of making a doc in this way which is maybe a little bit more unorthodox to how docs are normally made, you know, the process in the beginning is similar. It’s observing someone. I’m meeting them. They’re meeting me. We’re getting to know each other really well. We have a few drinks. We have dinner. We have more drinks. We do that process, that cycle kind of repeats several times over, as many times as possible until we feel comfortable and we are friends with each other.

And once we got to the place where we were in this movie, you know, the film is shot entirely on a tripod, right. A lot of the intention was to make our frames as composed, feel as composed, as manicured as the Villages, as the setting dictates, as the landscaping is. It’s this very meticulously crafted suburban bliss that’s there. And I wanted the camera to feel that.

But in doing that and shooting the movie entirely on tripod it really did not allow for us to be flies on the wall. For one I’m much younger than every subject in the film, including Dennis. The process of shooting it on tripod in a way immediately established this distance and the challenge with the movie was to eliminate that distance and get as close as we possibly could. In a weird way something happened where midway through our shooting, you know, there were times where this process did not feel like it was working and it felt like it was corrupting too much of reality and it felt too artificial, even though we were putting things on screen that normally do happen in their lives.

And there were a lot of times where we were just observing and kind of putting the camera in a place where we would just let it run for a long time until something would happen in the frame. But what happened over time was that in kind of embracing the artifice we got to something more real. You know, the process of shooting on a tripod made me be a lot more honest about what I was shooting, why I was shooting it, and how I was going to shoot it for the subjects of the film. So in a way our process, our relationship, didn’t just evolve – it wasn’t like a mosquito biting someone and sucking up their blood and then painting a portrait with their blood in the edit or something.

This was something far more collaborative. I’m using such a violent example for how I imagine documentaries are normally made. But I think it’s like somewhat true. You get closer, the material you end up making out of somebody’s life, and it’s a very [vampiristic] relationship. So I wanted to do something different. This whole process of shooting on tripod kind of allowed and enabled this sort of collaboration and trust and honesty. I had to be very honest about the places and situations I wanted to shoot. And I had to be just as honest about how I thought it was going to work in the edit.

So in a way these were real people but they were playing a version of themselves that was entirely real and all the things that are happening in the movie are real. The way we’re shooting them, the framework we’re shooting them in, and sometimes even the way a situation is blocked, that is very much planned. And I think that’s the kind of joy of it all is that you’re riffing off of reality. It’s like jazz and you’re trying to shoot actively unfolding things in as stylized and interesting of a framework as possible.

So to answer your question I prefer not to know where a person’s journey goes. I have hopes, I have dreams, I have wishes for where they move, and how they move through a world, but I’m never telling them what to do or how to do something. It’s really more they make a choice to do something and for me the reason I chose these folks was, one, I was interested in some ways of making a movie about relationships, so there was that subtext to each of their stories. But, two, they were actively having things happening to them when I met them.

Barbara, the widow in the film, was trying to get back out in the world again. That was something very active. There’s conflict there. Dennis is someone who is trying to find a woman to move in with. And he needs to find a home essentially. His journey is about companionship and comfort and freedom. And these things that he talks about very articulately and beautifully. And the last subjects of the film are Reggie and Anne, a married couple, who are very different from one another and are about to just experience how different they really are and how there’s so much distance in that relationship. And how she has to deal with the fact that her husband may not just be recreationally dabbling in psychedelic drugs. He actually may be losing his mind.

And to me each of those stories, it took a lot of time to find each of them and befriend them and then get to a place where they were comfortable with me putting their lives onscreen. I’m not interested in taking it I guess to that degree. What’s more interesting and more challenging to me is taking real life and creatively lensing and creatively treating it. And that’s what I think my favorite documentaries do that. And it’s a shame that not all documentaries do.

John: Well, let’s talk about trying to frame it and you’re literally framing it with your camera, but you’re also deciding what parts of their lives are going to be useful for your film to be showing. So you said that initially there were other people you were following and they did not make it into the edit, or you stopped filming them because they were not helping you tell your story. So you said there were a total of four visits, between those visits what was the process for you in terms of like this is what the movie wants to be, this is the story that it looks like we can tell here? And was there writing involved in that? Were there conversations?

Or was it just looking at what you’d already shot in the edit bay? How did you figure out what the movie wanted to be? Because that’s a question that screenwriters are facing all the time. They have all these scenes, they have this stuff, but they may not necessarily know what the movie is from the moments that they’ve found.

Lance: You know, the process of making this – for so long I had no clue what it was. And I knew that we visually found a way to lens the place in a way that felt very expressive and not just representational and that I think was exciting to me and exciting to my cinematographer who I really consider a coauthor of the film. But it was only until I brought on an editor named Daniel Garber who I consider – screenwriting in documentaries, what that really is is the editors of the films.

Daniel is someone who is really well versed in both documentary and narrative films. He edited a film called Cam a few years ago. And I owe a great deal to him. We edited the film together, but he was the person who was making sense out of the lasagna, the cold noodles of footage that was just sitting on a hard drive or sitting in a refrigerator basically forever. And I had no idea how to make sense of any of it, or how all these people, places, and things added up. And he was the person that showed me what the film needed to be.

I think the thing that was guiding him in making those choices and guiding me, after seeing material structured in a particular kind of way it guided the rest of the way we were filming. Daniel came on I think at the end of our second trip and was struggling to figure out what it was.

There was one story that we actually released as a separate short documentary that the New York Times put out. I think it was about two months ago. About one of the stories that I thought the movie was about. I thought the movie was about this little girl who was living actually outside of the Villages and the development was trying to buy her land and turn this home that has been in her family for generations into prefab cookie cutter retirement home essentially, a house in this retirement community.

And there was another thread that I really liked about the ecological devastation this place causes. Sinkholes that were forming in the bottom of the ground. I mean, just like totally unbelievable things that we just kept shooting because that place is just unbelievably insane.

I’m trying to remember how we decided it didn’t work, but I think one of the things for sure that I think I was interested in and existentially so felt when I first got there. I had just gotten out of a long relationship. I felt pretty upset about that. And I was wandering around trying to figure out how these people who are navigating their seventh or eighth decade on this planet are still together. And what romance looks like there. And do we repeat the same things – if you’re returning to a place that reminds you of your youth do you make the same mistakes that you made as a young person?

John: So what you’re describing sort of sound like central dramatic questions. And so it sounds like you didn’t know going into it – you knew what the movie might kind of feel like. You knew what was interesting about it. But you didn’t have a central dramatic question until you really winnowed it down to like these are the people we’re going to follow and these are the questions the movie is going to try to answer, which is kind of what happens – it’s not about the place. It’s about what happens when you’re at this point in your later adulthood.

Lance: Right. Precisely. I think for a long time I was interested in making something that I thought at first was going to be about the place. And I realized over time that this movie, that stories aren’t settings. That this movie didn’t want to be about the setting. It wanted to be about people going through real problems against the backdrop of this unreal place. That seemed more interesting to me and that also – when I first started making the film, before I even rolled a frame on anything, before my crew came, I lived in the community for about a month and a half. These two retired rodeo clowns I found off of Airbnb, I rented a room in their house.

And I think a lot of those central dramatic questions came from seeing how they lived their lives and who their friends were and what they were doing. One of them had leukemia and the reason they were putting their Airbnb room up was to pay for the medical bills. So immediately I was like this is so fucking dark, but also they are still clowning. There was something – the tension between those two things, something that is more tragic through the funniness of it, and more funny through its tragedy. That was really nice and interesting to me and I knew I wanted to bottle that up somehow.

John: Well let’s get a sense of who you are in this picture. Because how old were you when you started this movie?

Lance: I was 22 when I first got there.

John: So you were literally just out of film school when this is happening. You’re straight out of undergrad and you’re trying to do this thing which has got to be both inspiring and also annoying to many of our listeners who are like how can this young kid do all these things. And my guess just from interactions we’ve had is you are not shy about approaching and asking people for this. You hustle. And it’s a thing I admire just in my interactions with you so far is you seem to recognize what you need and how to very graciously approach people about getting that thing that you need. And that feels like that’s Hollywood you get your subjects for your movie. But also how you sort of get the movie out there in the world.

Lance: Yeah. I’m an annoying person. You know, I think even the process of getting this film made, it was not – as I’m sure you would imagine it was not easy. It was I think throughout the process a lot of people were constantly, even in trying just to get the money to keep going back, you know, people could see through what I was doing. They could see through that I didn’t have it figured out yet. That I didn’t have a narrative that seemed like it would satisfy all of their funding needs, especially in documentaries which is a world – financing in documentaries I think goes back to a lot of other questions about issues and advocacy and stuff like that that is important but not – that was not this film.

So, it took time and it took a lot of bullshitting I think to really figure that out. I mean, the film that I thought we were making, the film that is this short film called The Paradise Next Door, that was essentially my pitch was that here’s a movie, you have a younger person, and you have these older folks, and it’s a movie about these two people and when those worlds collide, which was complete bullshit because it never collided. So, you know, after we were able to successfully bamboozle some people, graciously this company called the Los Angeles Media Fund, they were still down for the ride even as I started realizing that that narrative wasn’t the thing that we needed to be shooting.

What we needed to be shooting was something much more intimate and interior and subjective about these people and about this existential feeling of being in a place where you’re supposed to be having the best time of your life and time is running out and tht stress of not feeling that and also when this thing you’ve invested in, this dream – what happens when it becomes a nightmare? And that’s something that I think anybody can relate to, especially anybody who grows old, which is everybody on the planet I guess.

John: Now what I hear you describing though, it sounds like you weren’t asking for permission, and you weren’t waiting to figure out all the things, you just kind of started doing it and you sort of built the road underneath you as you were going. And that applies for a documentary feature, but also applies to a lot of writing. I do feel a frustration that sometimes the questions we get in on the podcast are about like am I allowed to do this thing, is this possible, is this a good idea, and the advice I want to shout so often just like well just try the thing and see if it’s a good idea. And if it’s not a good idea you haven’t lost that much.

And it sounds like as you started to make this movie you didn’t have – you kind of weren’t risking a ton. I mean, you might be wasting your time, but it wasn’t expensive to do the initial things you were trying to do. You could just go off and do it and eventually you had some footage you could show and you could bring in another person and another person. You got to Darren Aronofsky. You could sort of keep the ball rolling by just bringing in new people who could see what you’d already done. Is that fair?

Lance: Yeah. I think that is. I mean, you know, the movie – I started working on the film like kind of [co-curricularly]. It started off as my thesis film in school and that was how I initially was able to go down there. But even when we got the financing, the process didn’t change much. In terms of shooting it still was just me, my cinematographer, and I’ve been working with him since I was like 17. My sister who has a fulltime job, not in movies, but I convinced her to come and help us figure it out. And one of my college friends who coproduced the film. And then I had the sound guys.

So it was like a crew of five basically across the journey. And then obviously on the post side and everything else things started to get a little bigger and just a lot more people to answer to. And wanted to make sure that even though it wasn’t a ton of money to make, they wanted to make sure their money wasn’t being wasted. That’s fair. I feel like all first time feature filmmakers have to go through that process of just getting people to trust you in that way.

But it’s a process of trying things and taking risks and swinging big. And when you are there, when you’re up at the plate you’ve got to swing as big as you can possibly can and be as ambitious as you can. And I think going back to the thing you just said before, like don’t worry about being annoying. No one is going to find you on the Internet and pluck your script or you movie or your short out of obscurity. The only way they’re going to find it is if you sort of get it in their face.

And I remember reading this story about like Gus Van Sant. I think he called, I don’t know if it was William S. Burroughs, so forgive me if I’m screwing up the story, but I remember he found someone he admired very deeply, his name in the phonebook, and he just gave him a call. And they became friends and then he ended up adapting his story into a movie. So I’ve always just been inspired by that and took that to heart.

John: We just spoke with Jac Schaeffer who ran WandaVision and her Scriptnotes connection was that she ended up hiring former Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell as a staff writer there. You also have a Scriptnotes connection. Do you want to tell us what that is?

Lance: I would love to. I grew up with Stuart Friedel. His father was and has been my dentist for my entire life. Stuart was the first dude that I ever knew that was working in movies. He worked for Alexander Payne and exposed me to his films. And exposed me to your films, John. Told me what the podcast was. I didn’t know what the podcast was at all at that point in time, but I had seen so many of your movies. I’d seen The Nines. I’d seen Corpse Bride. I’d seen Big Fish. So I was like oh shit I should listen to that.

And I am devoted listener. Especially as someone who is trying to make stuff that is documentary and nonfiction based but also as I’ve tried to learn and remediate myself on how to write a screenplay which is an art, a dark art that is not easy. So I’m very grateful – I feel like your podcast keeps me going, and I’m sure keeps a lot of people going when they’re trying to figure out how the fuck to do it.

John: You also have Stuart’s vocal cadences, which I find so fascinating, because I wouldn’t guess that there was a South Florida accent, but you and Stuart sound so much alike. It’s jarring.

Lance: Oh, that’s funny. Huh. We’re just two Jewish South Floridian guys I guess.

John: Maybe it’s all that Friedel dentistry on your mouth that has shaped it into a specific way. So, you made this movie, but you’re still very, very young. So, what are you doing next and are you trying to stay in the documentary lane? Are you trying to do narrative features? What’s next for you?

Lance: I don’t know. I don’t feel very young. I feel, if anything I feel weird in a way. This was the thing that I basically went as far in as I possibly could on. And there was a kind of tremendous period of just like, wow, what do I do next. And this feeling of sadness of finishing something I cared so deeply about. And the people in the film, the subjects in the film, I speak with them still once a week. We’re still very close. And I’m always like, god, I wish I could go back and keep making something there.

But I’m working on a bunch of stuff. I am interested in continuing to make docs, but I also am very interested in narrative films and seeing if I can find ways to bridge that gap. So I’m working on another film right now that’s a small narrative film that’s based on a short story that I really liked. And then I’m adapting one of the short documentaries I made a few years ago and I’m writing that right now. And Darren Aronofsky is producing that. So we’ll see. I just want to make movies and I find it so interesting how I think especially in the narrative world it’s like so much time – hurry up and wait. You work and work and work and then if you get to that place where you can set something up it just takes a million years to get it made.

So I feel like I’ll probably just keep making documentaries because at least I have more agency and ownership of the process of just going and shooting stuff. Even if it’s the wrong stuff to shoot, it still feels good to be shooting something rather than talking about it I guess.

John: We’re always big advocates on this podcast of just making the thing. And so I believe you will continue to just make the thing and you will have the frustrations of development hell and all of that stuff, but as long as you can always make some things for yourself you’ll be set.

Lance Oppenheim we can check out your movie on Hulu right now. So everyone on Hulu can see it. I’m sure internationally you can find it through all the other streaming and download places. Congratulations on your movie. And it’s great talking with you.

Lance: Thank you so much, John.

John: Stick around because after the break we’ll be talking about writing while at your day job.

OK, this is the part of the show where we normally answer some listener questions. Megana, do you have a good question for us?

Megana Rao: I do. Cautious from San Gabriel Valley would like to know “Can a company gain partial ownership of something I wrote while at work? I got a day job where I basically babysit a building and my supervisor doesn’t care if I write for the majority of my shift. I was worried when I found out through an episode of Silicon Valley that a company can sue you for ownership of your project if you worked on it on company equipment, i.e. a computer. I thought I was fine because I’m a third party contract worker and continue to write at work, but recently due to my coworker’s constant cellphone and YouTube use my company sent out a scary memo regarding computer usage.

“Though the memo may not hold up in court, I’m uncertain how to proceed working on projects at work. I don’t care if I’m fired or transferred to a different post. I just don’t someone else to already have a bite out of my apple. I’m leaning towards continuing to use company computers to write scripts and only saving in the cloud because if I do sell a script I’d have a whole production company backing in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. As for other writing projects that I might self-publish I’m just writing in a notebook and tediously typing it up at home. What do you guys think? Is the time saved worth the hypothetical risk?”

John: All right, so this gives me a big flashback to my days when I was writing my first script. I was an intern at Universal. And so the first script I ever wrote was this romantic tragedy called Here and Now. And I wrote it basically while I was at work, when I was sort of at work in my job. Mostly I had a really mindless day job sort of like Cautious has where I was just filing stuff all day and really not using my brain at all. And I would go home and I would handwrite pages and then type them up over my lunch break at work.

And I was using my own laptop, but I think the same kind of idea applies is that you’re kind of doing it on company time and the question of could they control or own that work. I think you’re possibly asking for trouble using the company computer. That’s the only thing that gives me sort of pause. I think the fact that you’re still doing your job but you’re also writing at the same time, if your supervisors don’t care it’s going to be fine.

The fact that you’re using their stuff could be the problem. Even just using a browser or saving it online might be a problem. So my instinct would be to either get yourself a cheap laptop you can work on while you’re there. Write on it using your iPhone, your iPad. Write by hand and then type it up when you get home. But I think you could be asking for some trouble just because anything that’s edited in that computer kind of feels like it is their stuff.

Megana, you used to work at Google. What was the policies when you were at Google? If you were using the company’s computer to do stuff did they own it?

Megana: Yeah. I remember this came up during orientation. So my first day they have this policy that whatever you work on Google technically owns if it’s at the office or on company computer. And I remember being so confused. And I was like, well, what if I wrote a poem. Because if I wrote like an application, sure, that makes sense to me. But why would you guys want to own a poem that I wrote?

And the person who was leading our orientation, I think they brought someone from legal counsel was like technically we would own anything like that, and so I never wrote at the office or on my company computer there because I also saw that episode of Silicon Valley and was scared.

John: Yeah. It’s probably not going to be a problem, but this last paragraph you asked I’d only write scripts there because the production company would back you up. That’s not a guarantee. Like you hope the production is going to back you up. And, again, it’s probably not going to be a problem, but it’s like getting vaccinated before going on a trip or something. It’s probably not going to happen to you, but it’s better to ease your mind and not run into those problems. So if you can find a way to not write on their stuff that’s going to be a better choice.

Megana: And something, I don’t know if this is tricky advice, but I would just research a lot while I was at work, or I would do a lot of reading. Because they couldn’t possibly own that, right?

John: No, they can’t own your research. That’s another great point. If you are researching stuff for your project that’s great. And realistically what Cautious is describing, where maybe you’re typing into Google Docs documents, it’s completely on the cloud and no one is ever going to see it. It’s unlikely to be a problem, but still why take the chance.

Megana: Mm-hmm.

John: Cool. Well that’s a good question. We’re a pretty full episode so we’ll save the rest of these questions for next week when Craig is back. But thank you for helping us out with that. Maybe you can help us out with One Cool Things. So this is the part of the show where we recommend something. I’m going to recommend a really great episode of Slate’s Working podcast where they talked to this dialect coach named Samara Bay. Really smart and great.

So she’s the dialect coach who works with actors before they’re starting a role. So they are about to go in to shoot something, a British actor who has to play American, or an American actor who has to play an Irish accent. And she’s really smart about talking through the process and really thinking about there’s not just one accent you’re going for. You’re trying to get into the space where you can inhabit that character and then while you’re in that character have all the vocal ranges and expressions that you need for it.

She compares it a lot to how a costume designer works. You are trying to really suit the voice/costume of that character and make sure it really works for that actor and works for that piece and that period. So, she was just so smart and such a great way of looking at something that’s so challenging.

Because we think about dialogue being just the words we write and sort of these are the words in the right order. But it depends so much on how they’re delivered and how much that voice fits nicely. So, if you’re someone who writes dialogue, which is probably most of the people listening to this podcast, I would definitely check out this episode of the Slate Working podcast with Samara Bay.

Megana: Cool.

John: Now what do you have for us?

Megana: Well, I feel bad because I also was going to recommend a podcast episode.

John: You can do that.

Megana: I can? OK. I also feel like I’m cheating on Scriptnotes. I feel guilty.

John: But Craig is not here and also Craig rarely has one, or fills it in at the last minute.

Megana: So I have this podcast that I really love, in addition to this one. It’s called You’re Wrong About. And it’s a podcast hosted by these two journalists and each week they examine a historical event or a person in pop culture who was misunderstood or miscast in the popular imagination. And then they recontextualize the story with research and information that we have decades later.

And because they’re journalists they’re really good at parsing out what was the media narrative and why was it that way. And then following how the information gets weaponized. So I feel like for our listeners who like the How Would This Be a Movie segment, this is the perfect sort of supplemental listening.

And it’s also really fun. The female host, I picture her as the adult Daria. She’s very sardonic and her voice sounds just like Daria. And my personal favorite episode of this is they have one on the Exxon Valdez oil spill which does not sound sexy or fun, but it is so fascinating. And that’s one I’ll link to in the show notes.

John: So my recollection of the Exxon Valdez is that we did cast a villain. The captain of the Exxon Valdez was sort of penalized for his role in it, but my guess is that’s probably not actually accurate. Correct?

Megana: Correct. And like he actually had alerted Exxon to – like he might have made some errors, but like the way that the system and the company was treating regulations had already degraded so much to that point. And he had already alerted the company to say hey the way we’re running these ships is really unsafe. And there’s like a lot of twists that have happened in the past 10 years that I think, you know, nobody is going to keep paying attention – or most people do not pay attention to a news story 10 years later. And I think that’s how a lot of corporate malfeasance happens is that they can make really huge gestures and amends immediately and then 10 years later repeal all of that work that they’ve done.

John: Yeah. I remember that happening recently. A lot of stories came out about Y2K and it’s like, oh, Y2K was overhyped and it was a disaster that didn’t happen. And just recently I’ve seen a lot of recontextualizations saying like oh yeah it wasn’t a disaster because people spent five years working their asses off to actually make it not be a problem. So it’s those things, the nonevents that were nonevents because we actually did the thing.

Megana: Yeah.

John: Don’t make it into the news.

Megana: And they have a great episode on the Y2K bug.

John: Great. I will check that out. I will add it to my podcast app. And that is our podcast for today. Scriptnotes is produced, as ever, by Megana Rao. Thank you, Megana.

Megana: Thank you.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is also by Matthew Chilelli. 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 I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting 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 the bonus segments like the one we recorded earlier this afternoon with Dana Fox which is epic and we talk about, god, we talk about everything. We talk about sleeps, and naps–

Megana: Teeth.

John: And teeth. And all sorts of things. So you’ll find out about all the secrets behind how Dana Fox kicks so much ass. So sign up for Scriptnotes.net.

Megana: it is a life-changing segment.

John: Megana Rao has already emailed to get links to all the things Dana talked about, because it could change her life and yours as well. So Scriptnotes Premium, it’s good stuff. Megana, thank you for a fun show.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

John: And we’re back and we’re back here with our initial guest, Dana Fox. And I asked you here because I want to talk about naps. So my daughter takes naps, my husband takes naps, I don’t take naps. But you know who takes really god naps? Dana Fox. Dana Fox, can you talk to me and Megana about naps?

Dana: Thank you so much for knowing that this is really one of my best skills. And thank you for having me on the show to talk about the fact that when you asked me to be on the show to talk about naps, I’m not joking I was literally napping. And I woke up and I saw your email saying can you come and talk about naps. And I was like, yup. And I am refreshed as hell and I can’t wait to do it because I just woke up from a nap.

Yes. So napping controversial. I have a lot of things to say about it. I think one of the things that has sort of unlocked, not to be like all what color is your parachute about it, but one of the things that has kind of unlocked my max productivity in recent years is not trying to be someone I’m not anymore. Just being super exactly who I am. And I’m a napper, John. I think you know this because I worked for you. I was your assistant and I slept basically every day, middle of the day. I would so much rather shovel food in my mouth at my desk while working and then use my lunch break to sleep, which is what I did and you were so nice to me.

You would like walk in and I’d be fast asleep on some couch and you would just quietly walk out and you were just the best boss in the entire world.

But for me it almost makes me have two full days instead of just one day where at four o’clock I’m non-functional. I’ve done a lot of research into sleep, because I’m obsessed with it, and I need a lot of it. I think part of it is burn really sort of brightly and spastically when I am awake. So, just being alive is sort of exhausting for me.

And the research I did on sleep is that you need so much less of it in a nap to feel refreshed than you actually think you do. And I think half the reason that most people don’t nap is because they’re like, oh, I’m going to get groggy, or I’m going to lie down and I’m going to feel all this pressure if I don’t sleep, then what’s going to happen, and then I’m going to lie there freaking out about not sleeping for 45 minutes and that seems like a waste.

So the way that I have sort of combatted that is that I have this app that – I can’t think of the name of it – but I have this app that I call Fat Bastard because he’s like a meditation guy who talks in like a very thick Scottish accent and sounds like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. And I started listening to it when I was pregger-tits because I was working on a TV show. I was a showrunner and I was super pregger-tits. And I was exhausted all the time. And I was like oh my god I have to sleep during the day or I’m literally going to die.

So I started listening to this sleep app that puts you to sleep for whatever number of minutes you have to sleep you sort of program into it. And it puts you to sleep and then it wakes you—

John: Like a digital tranquilizer dart. It just shoots you in the neck.

Dana: Digital tranquilizer dart. Full on Maui blow dart in the butt cheek. And you can do it pretty much any time of day. And you can have it put you to sleep like good night-night and it never wakes you up, or you can have it wake you up. And the key is for the naps is the wakeup. Because as I’ve discovered through my excessive research it’s about waking up not in a REM cycle.

If you’re in a REM cycle and you try to wake up it’s like coming out of wet concrete. If the app wakes you slowly out of the REM cycle and then wakes you up it’s as if – like so much energy. I wake up and I’m like bam. I bound out of bed. It’s incredible. And for me it’s a total game-changer. Unfortunately because I got addicted to the one where the guy was talking to me about being pregnant every time I take a nap he’s like, “Feel your baby in your belly.” And I’m like, mm, all right.

But by that point I’m already asleep so it doesn’t matter. It’s like the Scriptnotes thing. It goes ding, ding, ding and I hear that and I’m asleep.

John: That’s amazing.

Dana: I’ve listened to it so many times. It’s become totally Pavlovian.

John: Yeah, Pavlovian. So, you nap every day, is that correct?

Dana: I try to. But I would say I nap three weekday and both weekend days.

John: And what time do you go to bed? How much sleep do you get overnight?

Dana: Oh my god, John, this is where it’s going to get super weird where all of your wonderful listeners are going to be like she has a medical problem. She should go to the hospital immediately.

I get in bed at no later than 9:30 every night. And I read my book. Right now I’m reading about Ada Lovelace. It’s fascinating. I read on Kindle, which is a whole other conversation that will lead back to an aggressive John August compliment if you will allow me to.

John: All right.

Dana: Which is that I discovered on Kindle that I am dyslexic. I did not know I was dyslexic until I was reading my Kindle one night and I was like why do books make me so tired, why is reading so hard for me? How come reading has always been hard for me? And I was on Kindle and I pressed this button for the font that says Open Dyslexic and I was like I’ll just check out what this looks like. And it was literally like a superhero movie. I was like pow. And there was a light flash and everything was crazy.

And I looked at the book and I was like oh my god I just read 42 books. So I went from being a person who reads like maybe three books a year to I read a book a week now. I’m just a voracious reader and it’s all because of this font. And my sweet, sweet John August who has his incredible app, which is called Weekend Read, sent me an email saying that he put Open Dyslexic onto it so that I could have it. Because you’re nice to me and you like when I have nice things.

John: I do like when you have nice new things. So, the new Weekend Read has Open Dyslexic on it as a font choice.

Dana: Which was amazing. So anyway, back to the sleep thing. I go to bed at 9:30 but I read for about a half an hour to an hour maybe, ish. Sometimes I read for like seven seconds and then fall asleep, but mostly I’m asleep by 10:30 and I wake up at 7.

John: Wow. So you get a lot of sleep.

Dana: I like a lot of sleep. Yeah, it’s weird how much sleep I get.

John: Ricky Gervais apparently also needs 12 hours of sleep. Some people just need it.

Dana: Who does that?

John: And you get a lot done during the day. Ricky Gervais.

Dana: Oh, wonderful. I love that story. And I get a lot done all day. I mean, I don’t want to call it like mania, but I would say when I’m working I am an assassin. What’s next, OK. We’re doing this. I stand at a standing desk. I never sit down. I do yoga for 45 minutes every day Monday through Friday now which has like saved me during the pandemic so I didn’t murder my whole family.

And then when my whole family turns up dead you’re going to have to call the police because you’re going to have this on the thing. I’m totally not murdering my family. I love my family. They’re the greatest. But the pandemic was very stressful for all families, I’m sure. And I started doing yoga which completely saved me. But because it’s so hard it’s also another reason why I have to nap.

Oh, and John, can I tell you the other really embarrassing thing?

John: I want to hear it.

Dana: The first time I was on Scriptnotes I talked about breast pumps, so this is definitely not as embarrassing as that, which I’m so glad you made not embarrassing, because it shouldn’t be.

John: But we also tried to normalize breastfeeding. You know, screenwriters who breastfeed on the podcast. So Rachel Bloom breastfed while she was on the podcast. It’s fine.

Dana: It’s so sweet. I love it so much. It’s the best. These attitude-changing things actually super-duper matter, so I thank you for that.

But, no, this is sort of an embarrassing admission which is because of the yoga my back was hurting one day, so I started sleeping with a heating pad for my back. And now I don’t think I can give up the heating pad. It’s amazing.

John: I want to talk about all the things I now use to sleep and they’re all great, but I do worry if I were ever to be in an emergency situation and didn’t have all my things to sleep I just could never sleep again.

So, here is the things I need to sleep.

Dana: Tell me your stuff.

John: First off, I need the pillow between my knees.

Dana: Classic.

John: Because if my knees are touching each other, not doable. I need the white noise machine which has been a previously One Cool Thing.

Dana: Of course.

John: I’ve got to have the white noise machine.

Dana: Do you do the Rohm? May I ask are in the ‘70s style Rohm? Because that’s the best one I think.

John: Yeah. So the one I like so much is the one from the Wirecutter and it looks like a black little octagon or hexagon.

Dana: Oh, no, I don’t have that one.

John: Oh, I think the one you’re talking about, the one that’s sort of like a dimpled bell. Is that the one you’re thinking about?

Dana: You spin it and you can create hallow-ness based on how much air is coming out of it. It’s pretty dope. You would like it.

John: I know what you’re talking about. Yes. No, this one is digital, but it’s not looping, so it’s generating those noises. That’s important.

Dana: Oh nice.

John: But I started to need a Breathe Right strip, a nose strip, to keep my nose open.

Dana: Sure.

John: And at Scriptnotes producer Megana Rao’s suggestion I tried this mouth taping thing, where you tape your lips together so you can’t breathe through your mouth.

Dana: Oh my gosh. My father-in-law talks a lot about that. Does it work?

John: It works so well. Megana, are you still doing that?

Megana: I’m still doing it. And it really helps with my allergies because I think during allergy season I get stuffed up, so I breathe through my mouth so much more. And this kind of helps me I think regulate that. I don’t know exactly how the science works. But I wake up feeling better.

John: I wake up feeling so much better. So that plus my eye shade. So I need all of these things. And my melatonin. So I need all of this stuff and I sleep so well. But I need all of this stuff.

Dana: First of all, I support you and love you. And I know you enough to know that you’re not packing for anywhere without all that stuff. So I’m not worried you’re going to not have it. I can’t even imagine a scenario where you end up without it.

John: A mouth guard. Oh my god.

Dana: I was literally just going to say mouth guard. So I got a mouth guard and let me tell you guys, first of all, super sexy. My husband is like, yeah, this is great. But second of all I have a mouth guard that completely changed my life. Because I don’t know if any of your wonderful listeners have jaw clenching, but I was clenching my jaw because of stress. And I got this mouth guard that is different from all other mouth guards. It’s like the Passover, why is this different from every other night of mouth guards. And basically what it does that’s different. OK, this is what I learned. This is crazy.

Number one, the guy was like – I went to a specific dentist for grinding of your jaw. And he’s like do you drink sparkling water. I was like I’m a writer in Hollywood. I exclusively drink sparkling water. There is no other kind of liquid that goes in my body that isn’t a different flavor of La Croix. Like of course I drink, or La Croix, or however you’re supposed to say it. I call it the French La Croix because I’m fancy.

John: Yup.

Dana: So he was like, oh, you have to immediately cut that out because apparently sparkling water decreases something about your calcium and is like the enemy of jaw clenching. I was like that’s crazy. So I cut it out immediately and it was definitely helpful.

Then he was like I’m going to build you this mouth guard because 90% – he goes you know how everybody is probably telling you you’re too stressed out and you need to exercise more and you need this, and diet, and blah-blah-blah. And I said yes everybody is telling me that. And he said, well, it’s 10% of jaw grinding is that. 90% is tooth misalignment. And he’s like back in the day when you didn’t have dentists and you were like cavemen if something bad happened to your teeth your teeth would fix themselves. So you would lose a tooth and the other teeth would kind of like slide in to take care of it.

So really when your teeth get misaligned and don’t touch when you close your mouth your nighttime self is trying to fix your teeth for you. So all night long it’s going like let me fix it, let me fix it, let me fix it. So you’re grinding to try to fix the alignment of your teeth.

So the mouth guard I got, all it does is create a fake little tooth connection in the three places where my teeth aren’t touching. Boom. Literally night one the grinding stopped. I was about to have surgery for my jaw grinding because it was so crazy. It was so bad and like night one it was over, fixed.

Megana: I’m sorry. I am going through the same thing and I just had a dentist tell me that I’m going to need adult braces to fix it. And so this is…

Dana: But let’s talk later and I can tell you my guy. Because you’ve got to drive to Calabasas. Thoughts and prayers. But still he was amazing and he solved me because he said most people will tell you to get adult braces. And he said you can do that, but if you can solve it with a $400 mouth guard wouldn’t you rather do that? And I was like, yes, I would rather do that. And so, boom, solved.

Oh my god, we’ve got to sidebar after this.

Megana: Yeah. Well something else amazing I learned is that if you are jaw clenching it’s harder for you to get to REM sleep because–

Dana: 100%.

Megana: Your body is still moving and whatever muscles.

Dana: And do you know why? Thank you. Oh my god. By the way, thank you. I’ve never felt more understood by somebody. Do you know why?

Megana: No, please tell me.

Dana: Thank you so much for asking. The only time your jaw doesn’t do that kind of thing from when it’s trying to fix your teeth is in REM sleep. So it is literally trying to prevent you from going into this state that will make it so it can’t fix your teeth for you.

John: I mean, Dana Fox.

Dana: I mean, I’m not saying I’m an actual doctor.

John: Usually you come on this podcast to solve screenwriting issues, but here you are changing people’s lives, like people who have no interest in writing at all, but have teeth. People who sleep.

Dana: I have some other good advice, too. Some other things that have been really changing my life include color. Have I talked to you about color, John?

John: I love color. We did a whole episode on colors. But what are you doing with color these days?

Dana: Thank you so much. Well I have two different versions of it. Number one, when I’m writing a script I will put obviously like the storyline between this lady and that guy will be one color. Or the character will be one color. So I love to see color in a script because it ignites these different serotonin explosions in my brain. That makes me super happy.

Recently I had to pitch out an entire season of something and I was doing it over Zoom, which is sort of a different thing than being in the room, and I was trying to figure out like, OK, what’s my move. I’m like a good pitcher, but how am I going to do this differently on Zoom.

And what I did was I created this huge document which was very long, because it was obviously a whole season. And I was like how am I going to do this without seeming like I’m reading this document. So what I did is I went through and I took each idea and I did it in the consecutive rainbow colors. So red was the first idea. Orange was the next idea. A darker yellow so I could actually read it was the third. And then the fourth idea was a green. And the next idea was in blue.

And then every time I started a new episode I went back to red. So, I could like glance over with one eyeball and be like I know exactly where I am in this pitch, because I’m on the third thing I was going to say about this episode and now I’m like, OK, now there’s the next one and the next one. And I’m like, oh right, now I’m on the next episode because there’s red again.

John: I love it.

Dana: A delight.

John: Color. Color is good.

Dana: Color.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for solving all of our pitching problems, our sleep problems, our jaw problems. You are just the best. I cannot wait to have you back in Los Angeles.

Dana: Is it weird if I want 23 hours of my day to be on Scriptnotes and one hour of my day to be just my regular life? Is that weird?

John: That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s most people. Maybe get the premium episodes, get the premium feed. Get all those back episodes.

Dana: Just binge it. Just crack out on it.

John: I think your husband already has the premium feed, so he can share his URL.

Dana: Oh my god. I don’t believe that. I’d pay for it twice. I support artists. What are you talking about?

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Watch Cruella on Disney+
• Home Before Dark Season 2 on Apple TV June 11th
• WandaVision on Disney+
• Some Kind of Heaven on Hulu
• Didja see in Deadline about Timothée Chalamet To Play Willy Wonka In New Origin Tale, Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s ‘The Man Who Drew God’, ‘F9’ Star John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country, Amazon Confirms It’s Buying MGM For $8.45 Billion, Army of the Dead, Tig Notaro shot all her scenes alone.
• Dana Fox on Twitter
• Jac Schaeffer
• Lance Oppenheim on the web
• Slate’s Working podcast dialect coach Samara Bay
• You’re Wrong About Podcast – Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
• Dana’s nap app Positive Pregnancy with Andrew Johnson
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/opening-scenes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 493 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll take a look at opening scenes, how they work, and what writers should consider when planning them out. Then we’ll dive into the weird world of foreign levies and why our friend Stuart is getting mysterious checks.

**Craig:** I don’t want to know.

**John:** Finally we’ll discuss the rise of the megaplex and with it the past and future of movie-going.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will help a listener answer a question about clichés and conventions. This is a listener in Copenhagen, so it’s a Copenhagen question about clichés and conventions.

**Craig:** All right. We’ll get into it.

**John:** We will do it all. But, first, Craig you and I have not talked about this on mic or off mic, but if you are planning to have another kid my advice for you would be to wait until after May 2. If you can wait until after May 2 it will behoove you.

**Craig:** You would have chosen by now if you were to be having a kid after May 2. I’m definitely not having any more kids. You know what, I say definitely, you never know.

**John:** You never know.

**Craig:** You never know.

**John:** I would say that the shop is closed, but I see babies and man I like babies. If I could have a baby for like a year I would be just the happiest person in the world. It’s that toddler and sort of like – honestly it’s that awkward kid’s birthday party stage I don’t want to go through again.

**Craig:** I’m good with five to 10. That’s what I like. I like when kids are children and they’re running around and playing and they’re going to grade school and nothing really matters and they can laugh and have fun. But they also aren’t peeing and pooping in their pants. And they’re not teenagers.

**John:** Yes. I believe it’s important that writers make decisions about when they want to have kids.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that could be a little bit easier for some writers in the WGA because starting May 2 the details have just been announced that on May 2 the paid parental leave will go into effect.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So this was something that was one at this most recent round of negotiations. And it’s pretty good. And so if you are a WGA member and you have a kid after May 2, or adopt a kid, or otherwise add to your family after May 2 you are eligible for the paid parental leave. And it could be a real boon for many writers in our guild.

**Craig:** Yeah. So basically the rule is you can’t work and also receive – you need to the leave part of the paid parental leave in order to get the benefit, but the benefit is pretty solid, especially if you are a staff writer on a show. They’re trying to kind of get in near whatever perhaps minimums might be. So, $2,000 a week for up to eight weeks and they don’t need to be taken consecutively. And it looks like it also covers both birth and adoption and fostering. And placement for adoption. That’s interesting.

**John:** So if you are also a married writing couple who both of you are WGA members and you are having a kid you are both eligible for it, which was something I wasn’t sure was going to happen. So, that’s also a boon. Anyway, just some good news. It’s the first ever of its kind in the nation. The first ever sort of union paid parental leave that goes with you wherever your job is. It applies to screenwriters, variety/comedy writers as well. So, check that out if you are thinking about having kids or if you are currently pregnant try to wait till May 2 to give birth.

I was actually talking with a writer who is in that situation. Who is like my due date is May 1 but we’re trying to make it May 2.

**Craig:** It’s OK because the benefit is available for a 12-month window from the date of birth, adoption, or placement. So, you might have a couple of weeks of unpaid parental leave but then it gets paid. So, there is that. And it doesn’t have to be taken consecutively. So, you can do four weeks on, four weeks off. So that’s a terrific thing and it’s wonderful that we did get that concession from the companies as part of our collective bargaining power.

**John:** Yeah. So for follow-up. Hannah asks a question about gray areas. This is from Episode 492. Do you want to take Hannah’s question?

**Craig:** Sure. Hannah says, her question is regarding screenplay credit before it has been arbitrated. She says, “I have seen several examples now of writers being listed as the, insert big movie name, writer when the movie has not in fact come out yet. But the writer is taking credit where credit may or may not be due. Where do you come down on screenwriters taking credit and using it for personal promotional gain pre-arbitration?”

And we have talked about this to some extent before. John, where do you come down on this?

**John:** So, before credit is determined obviously if there’s a Variety story if someone was hired on to work on a thing that’s part of what you’re currently working on, so it’s totally fair game to talk about you working on it. No one has any disputes about that. Where it gets more awkward, I was actually having a conversation with another screenwriter about that, is when you’re talking about a project where you have a really minimal credit but you still talk about it as if you’re the writer on the thing. Or it’s a thing where you kind of feel like you probably won’t get credit on it, but you’re being listed for it. It’s awkward. And it’s a known awkwardness in how stuff is discussed in this town.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Hannah there’s something that might help you a little bit with the gray area here is that part of our rules are that before the arbitration happens the company does have the right to make a good faith guess of what the credit should or would be and then publicize it. Meaning they’re allowed to put the name of the writer on a movie poster before the arbitration is done. And there have been cases where there are posters with credits that then don’t reflect the final credits, so the poster changes. The idea there was we didn’t want writers to be disappeared off of things just because the arbitration hasn’t happened.

And arbitration sometimes take a really long time to get to. And they take a long time to finish. So, my feeling is that it’s perfectly fine for a writer to say, yes, if Variety is saying they worked on this to say, yes, I did work on it. That’s the way I put it. I worked on it. What I don’t think we should say is, “I wrote it,” because other people might also have written it.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think we’re trying to distinguish between employment and writing credit. And writing credit is a WGA credit. And employment, like I am working on this thing, is a thing you would say in a meeting, that’s a different beast.

Another follow-up question. Anonymous wrote in about whisper networks, which we talked about last episode. “One thing I felt was missing from that segment is that the whisper network exists to be amplified by those in positions of relative power. Those disempowered cannot convince the empowered of injustice or mistreatment because they’ve already been disempowered. So if someone like Harvey Weinstein hears from a woman that women are not his personal sex vessels it means nothing because he’s already decided that women are not worthy of full agency. It takes a whole bunch of men, people he respects, condemning him to rectify that.

“It’s hard to use Harvey Weinstein as an example here because it doesn’t seem that he respects anyone, but I hope I’m getting my point across.”

So, Craig, let’s follow up on this whisper network thing because I feel like Anonymous has a different idea of whisper networks than what you and I were talking about. So, for my conception a whisper network is like a warning system to others in a group rather than something that’s trying to systematically take down the abuser.

**Craig:** That’s my understanding, too. That is in fact why it is whispered. The point is the whisper networks, I think, would benefit from being amplified by those in positions of relative power, but they come into existence because specifically there is not a free and respected space for those opinions or information to be expressed.

**John:** So the whispering part of this is important. It’s like you’re not publically saying it out loud. But I think the network part is really especially problematic here because you have to be in the network to get the warning. So you have to – you know, a whisper network is only useful if you are actually able to hear the whisper network, or you’re part of it. And that can be the problem is that people who can be taken advantage of or having bad things happen to them is because they’re not benefiting from this network that they’re being excluded from. And that is a real issue.

And when we talk about the gray areas and sort of like when someone like you or I should speak up it’s because there are people who are being excluded from this whisper network as well that can’t get the warnings that you and I have heard.

**Craig:** Well right. So, that’s the other thing that’s important to note is that because of the nature of those whisper networks and the fact that they are typically an in-group kind of network it’s quite often the case that people who are in positions of relative power don’t know about it, because it’s being whispered. So, I did not know about a whisper network about Harvey Weinstein. I was not part of the whisper network about Harvey Weinstein for good reason. Nobody is going to call me up and say, “By the way, you need to know that if you’re going to take a job over there that you don’t want to be alone with Harvey,” because I’m not the one that’s going to be suffering there.

And so they’re actually protective of each other I think in a good way because they’re concerned that exposure will have negative impacts. That’s at least my understanding of how it functions.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Harvey Weinstein is sort of an extreme example. Let’s step back and say that for many, many years I heard people talk about how Ellen DeGeneres was mean. I think you probably had the same experience too. People would talk about Ellen and Ellen is mean and that she has a great public persona but she’s actually mean behind the scenes. And I don’t know that to be true, but I heard it a lot.

And could I have spoken up more about it? I don’t know that it would have benefited me or anyone, but also there’s a difference between what I was hearing was sort of like she’s kind of mean and I wasn’t hearing anything worse than that. And so I did nothing.

**Craig:** Well, that’s also part of the issue with the whisper networks is that they have a freedom that expressed and amplified points of view don’t have. Expressed and amplified points of view are often held accountable to fact and truth. And so that’s where you start to end up in situations where you’re saying, OK, I have heard and therefore I need everybody to know that yada-yada-yada, well we have defamation laws. And we have lawsuits and we have all the rest of it, and for good reason, because you don’t want people to just simply say – anybody can say anything about anyone, of course. So, what I find fascinating and encouraging about the whisper networks that have existed from what I can tell they have operated extraordinarily responsibly.

I know that there are some people who don’t think so. Usually they’re the people that are being knocked by some of the whisper networks. And then you have to sort of, OK, figure that part out. But, you know, one thing that has maybe not been observed enough about the era that we live in now, we’ll call it the #MeToo or post #MeToo era, I guess we’re still in the #MeToo era and we will be until that problem goes away, is that there is enormous amount of power available to somebody in a sense to take someone else down.

And it doesn’t seem to me like people are behaving poorly, or abusing that power, which is rather amazing. Because the whole thing is in response to abusive power. And so there’s a group of people that have been the victims of abusive power. They get a kind of power which is to name and shame and they don’t abuse it. They just use it responsibly and fairly and justly. That is pretty amazing. And gratifying. And encouraging.

**John:** And I will say that when you try to move from informal networks, like whisper networks, to official systematized processes for investigation and such there’s definite pros to that. There’s definitely accountability. You can actually take actions that you couldn’t take in an informal network.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But it also is really challenging to decide sort of what the rules are you’re going to make and what are the standards. It is really difficult and it is a thing we’ve seen out of #MeToo. It’s a thing we’ve seen in other efforts to hold people accountable for their actions. So just to acknowledge that it’s difficult.

**Craig:** Incredibly so. And terrifying. Because just knowing something to be true isn’t enough. And I think most reasonable people understand this. It’s not good. We don’t like it. But we know that just knowing something is true is not enough to save your abuser from re-abusing you, casting you in a different light, turning themselves into the victim, turning you into the problem. This is the playbook. In fact, we know from the Harvey Weinstein, was it Lisa Bloom? Was that his lawyer? Was essentially saying this is the playbook. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to destroy these women by dragging their reputations through the mud.

If you know that that’s going to happen then it takes a remarkable amount of bravery to get out there and say what you say. And people are going to come at you. And they’re going to come at you for all sorts of reasons. I mean, when I look at the sort of things that have been said about Rose McGowan, there’s a mountain of stuff that just gets slung their way and it’s a hell of a thing to go out there and take all the shots, know that you’re going to take all the shots, and still stand up for what fact is, and what truth is.

**John:** Yeah. So, we will not be able to solve these problems in the industry.

**Craig:** Segue.

**John:** Segue. But, 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. And so 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 a script to be in the story? Or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”

So, 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. 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.

So, 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:** It’s a great question, Martin. And I think it 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. I mean, we’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We see how that opening goes. And 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. But 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? And then the puzzle gets solved.

**John:** So, I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to sort of 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. And you look at those old trailers and you’re like oh my god this is so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all. And in many ways we now look for these opening scenes, 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 sort of 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.

So 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:** Well you have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. And you are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything is fine. But I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. And 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, there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.

**John:** Yeah. So 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. So 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. Like 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:** Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing. And challenging, which I’ve always loved. And I often look at, 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. And 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. But he’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman essentially.

And 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. And 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. But in addition I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. And 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, right? I mean, sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. But let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.

**John:** So, as you’re talking about that I’m now recalling that scene and it works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story. That there are going to be questions of identity and sort of 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. And it’s a weird way 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, and sort of dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first but then they kind of wrote a different movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** 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:** I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes, well, 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.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. And 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. And 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:** 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. And so if they were 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.

And so 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. So you really can kind of take them anywhere and you get a lot of things for free. You get some – they come in with a bit of trust. And if you can sort of 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 that you’re trying to tell.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. So 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. And 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 like…you know, they get you ready. And it can go on for a while. Because everybody knows oh my god it’s happening. Right?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So let it be happening. Don’t have it just happen if that makes sense.

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

**Craig:** That is how episode four or three opens.

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

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

**John:** Yeah. And so we don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special. That we are setting up 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 it’s an example of we don’t have context of who these characters are, sort of why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up sort of the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. And I thought it just worked really well.

**Craig:** Well thank you. So every episode needs its own beginning. And so I’m pretty sure it was the beginning of episode four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now.

But 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. And then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. And that is kind of a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of. And generally I don’t. But sometimes it’s OK 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.

And we think, oh, did they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So certainly one way to go.

**John:** So, completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, 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. And there’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. And it’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize like, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is an elaborate sequence to get this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly.

That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie. And sort of what the rules are of this movie. And the heightened kind of gravity-optional nature of this movie. And sort of what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie.

So 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 kind of go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous. And just kind of how it feels. And 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:** With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. And it’s weird to say like, OK, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s kind of 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. So, this is a good thing now. They’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next. But they are also aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.

**John:** The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. And 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. So getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and sort of setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where like 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:** 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” 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, I mean, you could have 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:** You build a funnel. Yeah.

**Craig:** You make a funnel. A logical funnel. But not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. And if you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, well, this will get better. It won’t.

**John:** No. And 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 kind of end up rereading it and sort of tweaking it a zillion times. And I do wonder if sometimes, let’s 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 sort of 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:** 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 then at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” And so you go, ah, ah-ha, in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd.

And 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. And 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 then you go, oh man, this guy.

And so that’s how you can kind of 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:** Cool. And 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 kind of 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 is actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that.

So just a note for ourselves. We will try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.

**Craig:** I think that tees us up nicely for a Three Page Challenge next week.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll try to do it. All right, next up we got a question from Stuart Friedel, former Scriptnotes producer. Do you want to read Stuart’s question?

**Craig:** Stuart, aw, writes–

**John:** We love Stuart.

**Craig:** “I just got a check in the mail from the WGA for foreign royalties for two episodes of Vampirina that I wrote. It’s the first time I’ve ever gotten anything like this. It was made out to me, not my S-Corp,” his loan-out corporation, “through which I got paid for these episodes originally. And the show is Animation Guild, not WGA. Is this normal? What’s going on here?”

John, is this normal?

**John:** It is both normal and weird. So writers get these checks all the time. But it’s not normal WGA residuals. It’s a whole special thing that I actually had to look up again because I remember it and then I forget and then I remember it and then I forget it.

**Craig:** I think we’ve done a run-through on the show at some point. It was probably years ago.

**John:** Stuart has listened to every episode, so Stuart should have known.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But we’ll give a brief recap here. So foreign levies are the fees that some foreign countries, largely European countries, they collect and they’re mean to compensate the rights holders when films or TV are broadcast or copied in things.

I remember originally it was like blank VHS tapes and blank DVDs, there was like a tax put on those thing.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, still. In fact probably the largest chunk of the foreign levies we collect are feed levied on blank disc media, disc drives. So basically the theory, it’s a lot of South American countries, too. The theory is that people are going to use blank media to copy things and watch them again. The artist should be compensated for that, but we don’t know how many times they’re watching things. So we’ll just tax the things that let them do that.

It’s a fascinating sort of thing to do. And we are not the authors of stuff here. But we are there. And that’s where it gets fun.

**John:** Yeah. It’s where it gets complicated. So under US law we tend to write these things as work-for-hire. So, we sort of pretend that the studios are the authors of the properties. But many of the countries say like, no, no, that’s actually not true. It’s the writers and the directors who are the authors. And so it became this big fight. And so in the show notes we’ll link to the history of how foreign levies came to be and how the DGA and the WGA came to collect that money. It’s fascinating and complicated. And there was a lawsuit about how the money was being distributed out.

But, the answer for Stuart is that the foreign countries are sending in that money and it is the WGA’s responsibility and the DGA’s responsibility to figure out who those people are and get the checks out to them. And so that’s a thing they do.

**Craig:** It’s not based on union work. So, the rest of the world does not have work-for-hire and they have moral rights of authors. So, France collects this money and then they turn to us and say we would like to give this to the moral – the moral authors of this movie, which we consider to be the writer and the director. And over here the studios are like but there’s no moral author. We’re the author. And so France said, nah, we’re not going to give it to you then.

And so then we had to hammer out some deal. The split between us and the studios did adjust over time. It’s been a while. It should be 100% us. So, will continue to have to broker that somehow. But then this other issue happens where they say, well, OK the WGA steps up and says we will collect all this. The other countries say, “Uh, just one thing, we’re not breaking this out by who is in your union and who is not in your union because we don’t care. We’re just going to send it all to you and you distribute it.”

And so now the WGA has this interesting situation where they’re collecting money on behalf of people that aren’t members, like for instance in this case while Stuart Friedel is the member of the Writers Guild they’re collecting money for him that he earned through the Animation Guild. Here’s another fun fact. We collect a ton of foreign levies from porn.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** So we have to find the porn directors and writers. And that is kind of how we did it. We just agreed that we would do this. And for that there is some fee, of course, some sort of administrative fee that the Writers Guild takes. This has been litigated. Members of the Writers Guild have sued over it. Other people have sued over it. It was sort of like incredibly hot potato in the 2000s and has since ceased to be that hot potato. It’s now just kind of this passive stream of money that shows up in a brown envelope, or on a brown check instead of a green check.

**John:** Yeah. So to date the WGA West has distributed $246 million in foreign levies, and including $37 million to non-members and beneficiaries.

**Craig:** Ah, yes, that’s the other thing. If someone is dead–

**John:** They still get it.

**Craig:** They have to give it to whoever controls the estate.

**John:** Yeah. So right now there’s a little bit over $9 million that can’t be matched to writers and directors. And so we’ll put a link in the show notes. There’s a way you can search for like, oh, am I owed foreign levies. And so they try to match up those funds. But it’s possible that some money will just never go to the place it’s actually supposed to go, or to the person it’s supposed to go to. So, based on the settlement at a certain point that money, if there’s any money left over, goes to the Actor’s Fund which we’ve talked about before is the charity that supports the industry.

**Craig:** Correct. And that number, $9 million, sounds high. It’s not. It used to be much higher. There was a point where it was like at $25 million. It was becoming a real liability. You can’t just sit on $25 million of other people’s money and not do something about it. So the guild has actually made really good progress on that front. My guess is that’s probably as low as it’s going to be, because there’s always going to be some stuff that comes – it’s really hard sometimes to understand these – you have governments sending you lists of taxation based on their information. Sometimes it’s not complete.

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to happen. All right. This last week I was listening to an episode of 99 Percent Invisible, and this one was one megaplexes. It was about sort of how everything changed when AMC opened up the Grand 24 in Dallas. And I realize we’ve talked about exhibition before on the show, but I think we’ve never talked about our experiences of going to the movies and sort of when movie theaters changed.

And for people who are younger than us they probably don’t remember clearly a time before megaplexes and before stadium seating and sort of what that life was like, but we saw both sides of it. So I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about our experience with that. And also the podcast episode, which was trying to make the point that the physical changes of theaters actually had a big impact on sort of what movies were getting made and then as theaters started to collapse a bit also change what movies were getting made. So I thought we’d talk about both our experience as movie goers but also what we saw happening in the industry as the exhibition itself changed.

**Craig:** I used to go see movies at the Amboy Multiplex. The Amboy Multiplex, not a megaplex like the AMC Grand 24, the Amboy Multiplex I think had eight screens which was considered insane at the time.

**John:** That was pretty big at the time. Was that the first theater you remember going to?

**Craig:** The Amboy Multiplex might have been the first multiplex. It’s in New Jersey. Well, it was. It’s no longer there. And I believe they opened in maybe ’78 or ’79. I remember for instance seeing Star Wars in just a single screen movie theater. And that was kind of what you had. The multiplex was pretty great because if you were a family my dad and I could go see Raiders of the Lost Ark and my mom and my sister could go see, you know, Max Dugan Returns or something, I don’t know. I can’t remember what was going on.

But the point is families could split up and see different things.

**John:** That was such a great point. And I had not considered it, but yes, I mean, on a single screen theater everyone is going to see the same movie and you can’t do that thing where you divide up and see different stuff starting about the same time. And that’s a huge difference. Like you’ve sold more tickets because more people can go.

**Craig:** Correct. And they also because they had that many more screens running the concessions became a massive part of it. Because now you’re not feeding the amount of people that fit into one room. You’re feeding the amount of people that fit into eight rooms. It all becomes a much bigger money maker. And you could just feel like, OK, if I’m a single movie theater and I’m showing one freaking thing, first of all if there’s a – so the blockbuster emerges out of the ‘70s out of Jaws and Star Wars.

Now, you can say we have these blockbuster films like Raiders, we can show them on more than one screen. So you’re losing money when you’re turning people away from a theater. The multiplexes didn’t have to. They said we’ll just stick it on another screen. No problem.

**John:** Now growing up in Boulder, Colorado my first experience in a theater was probably either the Base-Mar, which had two giant screens, or there was the Village 4 which were one really big screen and three smaller screens. That’s probably where I watched Star Wars. It’s where I saw 9 to 5. Or I saw a lot of early movies. I saw The Muppet Movie there.

But eventually we had – Mann built a six-pack theater with six identical size theaters and I think at about six is where you start to see some of those economies of scale. Where they can just sell more concessions. They can put the same movie on two different screens at the same time. There really are reasons they can just make more money off of things by sort of sticking a bunch of screens together.

But that was a real innovation. So, you know, the history of movie theaters were those giant sort of movie palaces that sometimes would get carved into smaller screens. But it’s still a pretty bad experience and not very efficient.

Now, something like the six-pack that I saw most of my movies in high school at that was still pre-stadium seating. When was the first time you experienced stadium seating Craig?

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I think it was when we – I’m going to say it was back in the early 2000s I remember going to a test – we were doing a test screening and it was out in like Chatsworth or something. And there was this stadium seating and I thought well this is absolutely terrible for comedies. And it is. It’s the worst. Because you laugh outwards and you basically hear yourself and some of the people behind you and that’s it.

Whereas in the old days when you were in that flat room everybody heard everybody and laughs were just so much bigger. It was like being in a comedy show. And now it’s not. Obviously it’s terrific for viewing. I get that. But I was disturbed.

And now that’s it. It’s that and nothing else.

**John:** Yeah. So younger listeners don’t have a memory of going to see movies and having to make sure you weren’t sitting behind someone taller than you. And having to look behind you to make sure you weren’t blocking somebody.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that whole experience. And what’s also surprising to folks who live in Los Angeles now is you said you went to a screening out in Chatsworth and that’s where you saw stadium seating, like LA when I moved here had the worst movie theaters.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Bad.

**John:** We had Mann’s Chinese which was like a movie palace and just gorgeous, but it actually had terrible projection and sound.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And could only show one movie at a time. It was great to see a big movie there because it was huge, but was not a good theater. And all the rest of the theaters were just terrible. They were sticky floor monstrosities. And so now we have great ones, but we were kind of late to get our great theaters.

**Craig:** It’s true. We were. And there is now a generation of parents who don’t have the joy of saying, “I can’t see!” When you would go to a theater and you would say, “I can’t see,” would your parents say some version of, “Don’t worry, when it starts you won’t even notice.” Because my parents would always say, “Oh yeah, don’t worry about it. When the movie starts you won’t even notice that that guy is blocking half of the screen.”

And they were kind of right, in a sense.

**John:** They weren’t entirely wrong. I would say because I had an older brother, it was my older brother who was mostly responsible for taking me to movies. And so he and I might switch sometimes, but that was going to be about the extent of my accommodation for my shortness growing up and going to movie theaters.

Now, let’s talk about the impact of the change in movie theaters had on the movies that were getting made, because this is a point that this podcast was trying to make and I wanted to push back against it but then I thought, OK, you know what? They actually did have a point here.

So, I remember pre-multiplexes if you wanted to see a David Cronenberg film, if you wanted to see a David Lynch film, if you wanted to see an art film you had to go to an art house movie theater. But with the rise of these bigger and bigger multiplexes it became possible to have one screen that was showing a Being John Malkovich, showing something that was – a Miramax movie. Something that was outside the realm of just the big studio blockbusters. And I think more people saw some indie movies on a big screen in their home town than would have if we hadn’t built out these multiplexes.

**Craig:** Depending on your town, I think. Obviously it’s a little easier if you’re in a city. It’s a lot easier if you’re in a city. But that’s true. And there are still theaters now that kind of pride themselves on showing you a mix of both. So the ArcLight companies for instance, they take pride in their cinematic fidelity. And part of that is not only sound and picture, but that you can see a Spider-Man film and you can also see a Jim Jarmusch movie and that’s kind of their thing.

But over time I think the big megaplexes, the AMCs, and whatever the Regal Cinemas or whatever they’re called, they’ve really adapted to the way that studios have changed, because studios used to put out a movie every week or two. And now they put out a movie every month and a half. Maybe. And what that means is that movie is just steroided-out. It’s the equivalent of the Butterball Turkey. It can barely stand on its own legs because it has been steroided and fed for size.

And now everybody has been like, oh my god, we’ve got to go see The Avengers 7, and so Jesus put it on all 28 of your screens. And so then these movie theaters kind of become like The Avengers’ movie theater for four weeks.

**John:** Now even the ArcLight which can still hold some screens for the smaller movies, but Spider-Man is going to be on eight of the 14 screens. Which can be good for an audience because it means I can actually see something opening weekend. And I do definitely appreciate that. The frustration of not being able to see a thing that you want to see is a thing. And not be part of the cultural conversation about the thing. It is great to be able to see things opening weekend and I look forward to being able to see things opening weekend as theaters start to reopen.

But, I don’t know, the anticipation was part of the experience as well. And I remember before there was reserved seating having to line up and get there in time to sort of get your seat. Yes, it was a hassle, but it also was part of the experience of going to see the movies.

**Craig:** It was communal. But another shot has been fired. It was fired yesterday. Another shot across the bow of the way movies are released and seen. And that shot was Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** So, Zack Snyder shot Justice League. He was in the middle of editing and working on it and then there was a family tragedy and he had to stop. So, the studio brought in Joss Whedon. I assume just to sort of finish and Joss Whedon was like, ah-ha, how about instead of finishing I just redo most of this.

And so he did. And it was a different movie. And people did not like it. And for many, many years there’s been this clamoring for the Zack Snyder cut. Now, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never mentioned before on this podcast.

**John:** Tell us.

**Craig:** I saw the Zack Snyder cut back when he was working on it. Because they were talking about maybe doing a week or reshoots or something like that. And so he invited two or three – I think there were three or four of us, writers, to watch the movie in the state it was in and then just have a conversation about some things that they might be able to do to tweak some things up over the course of a week of writing.

And I, you know me, I’m not like a huge superhero movie guy, but I really liked it. I liked it. I thought it was really good. I thought there were a couple things, like OK here’s some suggestions and things. And then Zack left the project. And so that was it. Literally, I think he left like the next week. And I never saw the Joss Whedon version.

But all this time while there was this fan movement for the Zack, there was like a mythologizing that the Zack Snyder cut was going to be amazing and it was going to save that movie. And a lot of people are like why would you think that? And I quietly was sort of like but it’s really good actually, like I hope that that does happen. But I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to be in the news. Because people are obsessed with this stuff.

Well, I watched it last night and it’s fascinating. First of all, it is good. I really enjoyed it. It’s four hours.

**John:** Now, was the movie you watched previously four hours long?

**Craig:** It was probably three-ish. I think he went and shot some additional material. In fact, I know he shot additional material because there’s like an entire sequence at the end that wasn’t there when I saw the film. And there was a bunch of things that I think he went and reshot and did some work on.

But by and large, yeah, the movie was the movie I saw. Except like finished and good. And what I find fascinating – and people have received it very well. It has been reviewed very well and people are enjoying it. And I think this is a new kind of thing now. Everybody is going to stop and go wait a second, so now we can do these like really long experiences and people will watch them on streaming.

And that is a new challenge to what movies had become, which was we’re going to give you the 2.5 hour extravaganzas. And now people are like, “Or, give us four hours.”

**John:** Four hours at home.

**Craig:** At home. And this is interesting now.

**John:** So, I have a counterpoint for you. We can wrap up the sequence with the counterpoint example of another superhero epic, the last Avengers movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the fan reaction to the arrival of the other superheroes at the end of Avengers.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s great.

**John:** And to hear, I mean, you’re not seeing the audience, you’re just hearing the audience and the audience’s reaction to what happens at the end there is a great reminder of sort of why the communal movie theater experience is so different and so vital.

You talk about test screenings with a comedy and how a comedy plays with a crowd, well this isn’t a comedy but the cheering you hear and the feeling you get off of people’s reaction to it is just so different and so dynamic and it’s a thing you’re never going to get in streaming obviously.

**Craig:** Correct. And I don’t think that we’re going to lose that big movie experience, meaning I think movies will return. But, I also think that there may be room now for this other thing, which is the mega-movie, gig-a-movie. You see like say Avengers, the final one, and then two years later you see this four hours version of it, where all this other stuff is happening. Some of which was cut out. And some of it is just new. Like you can keep making those movies.

**John:** Yeah. I would say basically the whole Marvel canon in a way does feel like it is already kind of there. It’s this epic movie that just sort of keeps going. It’s like a series that just keeps going and there’s always a new installment, a new chapter. And WandaVision feels like it’s a six to eight hour Marvel movie that’s in the middle of it. So, it’s exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll see where it goes.

**John:** But let’s wrap this up and talk about the megaplex experience because theaters kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and nicer, and nicer, and nicer, and I’ll be curious to see what happens next with the theater experience. And assuming we get back to just butts in seats and people are watching things, you know, I think this may give an opportunity for closing off those less performing locations and focusing on building good new theaters.

Sometimes when there is a crisis people can sort of cull things off their sheets in ways that is useful. Like Alamo Drafthouse filed for bankruptcy but I don’t think Alamo Drafthouse I will go away. I think it will just reorganize.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, bankruptcy doesn’t mean you go out of business, it just means you’re taking a pause to pay your creditors back because you need time. And, yeah, I don’t romanticize small movie theaters with terrible projection and awful sound. I think the trend towards making a movie theater more like your living room will continue. So you’ll have the lazy chair style seating and reserved seating. Ticket prices will go up.

If movie studios purchase large theater chains, and I think they’re sitting back and waiting. If theater experience comes roaring back I think we’ll see that. And then at that point you’re going to get to variable pricing on tickets. All sorts of things are going to happen.

But the theater business was remarkably stable, as much as everybody kept screaming about it, ticket sales were insanely stable for decades. And now all bets are off. I have no idea what happens now.

**John:** But, whatever does happen, MoviePass is going to be part of it. Because MoviePass is coming back. And when there’s an update we’ll see what that is. But they announced that they’re coming back, so in some version there’s going to be a MoviePass out there.

**Craig:** [laughs] Man, I’ll tell you. I want to give us a pat on the back for that, but I can’t. It was so obviously ridiculous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

**John:** You know I’m not joking? MoviePass has announced – MoviePass really is coming back in some version.

**Craig:** What? I’m sorry, no. What? Oh no.

**John:** Who knows what it’ll be. But the MoviePass account is suddenly active again. So something is happening.

**Craig:** So MoviePass is going to come back and they’re like, OK, new deal. You pay us $80 and we let you see one movie.

**John:** Craig, it will involve the block chain in some way.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** [Unintelligible].

**John:** Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. Before we get to your One Cool Thing, I’ve been asked by Megana for an update on your Upstep insoles. How are your insoles going?

**Craig:** Now, Megana, are you asking because you are also interested in some foot support?

**Megana Rao:** No. But as I was listening to the episode I was just like I wonder how that’s going.

**Craig:** I like that you’re just generally interested in my foot health.

**Megana:** The anticipation from all of that unboxing.

**Craig:** OK. It has worked great. They fit perfectly and they are very comfortable. They do this thing that all kind of orthotic inserts do which is they squeak. So when I walk it’s wah-wah-wah. I think over time that will probably stop.

**John:** Well WD40 should help.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s what you want in your shoes. But, yeah, they work great. And they are experientially identical to the ones tht cost way more that you’d have to go to the doctor for. So, I give a big thumb’s up to the Upstep insoles.

**John:** And don’t forget to use the promo code “umbrage” at checkout to save 15%.

**Craig:** CraigsFootHealth49. Yeah, I just did an ad for Upstep and I’m not getting paid.

**John:** Weird. Weird that.

**Craig:** God, my streak of not getting paid on this show continues.

**John:** Yeah. What’s your real One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** You know what? Let’s make it that. It’s really good.

**John:** Craig wasn’t prepared.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, I was a guest on another podcast this last week which I think many of our listeners would really enjoy, like the podcast overall. My episode sure, but this is the Screenwriting Life Podcast. It’s by Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna. They do it weekly. They are up to episode 35 right now, so it’s going to stick around for a while. What I really dig about their podcast is it’s very much just about talking through the writing that you’re doing each week and what the highs and the lows were. And it’s very much the emotional process of it all. So, we had a good interview and I’m sure all their interviews are great. But I really enjoyed how the two of them just talked about the work they were doing on a regular basis.

Now, Craig, you and I have referred previously on the show to you and I sort of write in our little bubbles and we just do our own writing. We don’t sort of share and don’t talk about stuff. But we have friends, especially women friends, who are involved in each other’s writing a lot. And I’ve always been really envious of that and I really appreciate the way they can just focus on what the experience is of writing on a daily basis. And so especially for aspiring writers who are listening to this I think just check out them and their advice because I really think you’ll enjoy that show.

**Craig:** It’s got to be mentally healthier than what I do, which is just curl up in a ball and shiver with fear and self-loathing. Right? It’s got to be healthier than that?

**John:** And play some videogames.

**Craig:** Oh yean. And D&D.

**John:** And D&D.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Peter Hoopes. 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, but for short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. I might be able to answer your question.

We have t-shirts. They’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting 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. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, we got a question from Julie in Copenhagen. Can you read Julie in Copenhagen’s question?

**Craig:** Indeed. She writes, “I’m currently writing my master thesis in film and media studies focusing on the meaning and use of clichés and genre conventions in Danish youth dramedy television series. I have interviewed Danish screenwriters, critics, and two focus groups of the target audience to hear how they define and feel about clichés.

“But there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut definition of what a cliché is and how it differs from genre conventions, or what the relationship is between conventions and clichés.”

Well, this is a question that is universal. It travels beyond the borders of Denmark.

**John:** Absolutely. Even places without Lego, they have clichés.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, let’s talk about that, because as she raised the question I was trying to sort through what I felt is a cliché versus what is a genre convention.

And so I went to Wikipedia to look at their definition of cliché which is pretty good. They say, “A cliché is an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.” And I think that last clause is really important there because a cliché didn’t start as a cliché. A cliché probably started as something relatively clever or sort of clever or at least new. But just through overuse it’s not that anymore and it just feels terrible. It’s an idea that doesn’t know that it’s busted.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. I think that is a valuable way to discriminate between the two. I would say, Julie, that clichés are specific things that put your teeth on edge because you’re like, uh, it’s mean to make me smile, laugh, or be shocked or something and it’s not because it’s just unoriginal. Conventions are things that just keep showing up. They’re not demanding a lot of attention. They’re just sort of baked into the structure or concept.

So, for instance a convention of a space opera is a dogfight between spaceships shooting lasers at each other. That’s just a convention.

**John:** Yeah, not a cliché. So clichéd moments can happen during it, but the idea of a space battle, fine.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, like a cliché is someone gets shots a laser into my X-Wing and I go, “I’m hit, I’m hit.” That’s a cliché. It’s like, oh, what an original moment. But the existence of the convention of the space dogfight could actually be good.

So, there was like some really cool stuff that Rian did in The Last Jedi. It’s a convention, but inside of that convention original and interesting things happen. Please don’t @ me, because I like that movie. I don’t care.

So, I would say that like in zombie movies the convention is that a lot of people are zombies and a group of people who are not zombies need to get away from them. But inside of that there could be a ton of clichés. A ton of little moments that you’ve seen a billion, billion times.

**John:** Yeah. So trying to save someone’s life in an extreme situation can be a genre convention. There’s military versions of trying to save a person’s life, like doing CPR on a person. That is a convention. That’s great. We get it. Saying, “Don’t die on me,” that is a cliché. There’s no version of “don’t die on me” that will not be a cliché. And it will ring the bells.

And the first time a character said that it was great. But then the fourth time a character said that it’s like, ugh, that’s not fresh. We know it’s not fresh. And that not fresh feeling is really what makes something a cliché.

**Craig:** That not so fresh feeling.

**John:** An example of good genre conventions, we have vampires, we have vampires drinking blood. There’s lots of things about vampires that are genre conventions that are good, sort of come for free. But the vampire flourishing his cape in front of his face that’s just a cliché. You feel like you’re in Count Chocula territory when you do that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you’ve got to be mindful of that.

**Craig:** Yes. So, a vampire speaking with a vaguely Romanian accent is sort of cliché. It’s not a convention, because vampires can be anywhere. And that’s sort of the deal. Conventions in and of themselves aren’t bad. You can absolutely do something and be unconventional in the way you do it. But you will find just as often that there are vampire conventions that are turned around because they are executed in a way that is not cliché.

So, I think we talked about Near Talk at some point.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Kathryn Bigelow’s first film.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** So good. A ton of vampire conventions in there. Sun burns you and you’ve got to drink blood. And there’s a lead vampire. But the execution, the setting, the tone, all that stuff, clearly she avoided cliché every step of the way and it’s one of the reasons that the film feels so exciting even though it’s full of vampire conventions.

**John:** So here’s a convention I want to throw your way. You’re in a western and there is a hooker a heart of gold. Is that a cliché or a convention?

**Craig:** I think it’s a cliché because the convention I always think of is connected to plot, setting, the inciting incident, the goal, that sort of thing. So a convention would be a bunch of unlikely allies in a western have to make it from one town to another while being pursued by bad buys. Well, if you are doing Stagecoach, well there’s the hooker with the heart of gold. That’s fine. It was 1930-whatever. But these days you wouldn’t do that. Because it is cliché.

You would want the individual characters to feel fresh even inside of the convention of it all. So in The Hateful Eight there’s a lot of western convention in there. But then these characters are just, whoa. Not clichéd characters.

**John:** So I would steer listeners to TV Tropes which is a great site which sort of goes through in any genre what are the clichés and conventions. And so you have to be careful to read through this to not assume that anything you see there is by default a thing you need to avoid. A lot of those things are just part of the genre. So you have to sort of understand what everyone sort of accepts as an audience and what things are hackneyed or stale.

And so you have to be a student of what’s happened in that genre before in order to avoid those clichés.

**Craig:** Yeah. So if you’re doing a romantic comedy you will want to fulfill certain conventions of the genre, most likely. But you’re going to want to avoid the cliché ways of getting them across. A girl meets a man. Girl meets a boy. Boy meets a girl. Boy meets a boy. Man meets a man. Whatever it is, then you don’t want them bumping into each other in the middle of the street and one person dropping all their stuff and the other person saying, “Oh let me help you pick that up,” and then they look in each other’s eyes and go, “Ah!” because that’s cliché.

But you’re going to want them to meet.

**John:** Yeah. They do have to meet at some point.

**Craig:** That’s the challenge. Do the convention. But be original.

**John:** And Tess Morris has been on the show to talk about rom-coms. And like, yes, again it’s always about understanding the conventions while avoiding the clichés.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a video essay talking through the makeover sequence, the makeover montage. And that transformation of essentially the female character in one of these stories and how troubling it is and how we really need to look at that sequence and think about what it is we’re trying to say through those sequences.

**Craig:** We’re trying to say that if you’re pretty you’re valuable, and if you’re not you’re not.

**John:** There’s that.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what those movies are telling everybody as far as I can tell. That until you are physically attractive by some normative definition you’re worthless and a loser. And I say that as somebody who has never been attractive in any normal sort of way. I’ve always been like but my face is weird. What about me?

**John:** Aw. Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, Craig.

**John:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Parental Leave](https://www.wga.org/members/membership-information/new-paid-parental-leave-benefit-details) begins May 2!
* [Learn more about foreign levies](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/levies-payments/foreign-levies-program/history)
* [99 Percent Invisible Podcast Episode: The Megaplex](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-megaplex/)
* [We’ve Outgrown the Ugly Duckling Transformation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa4bR5ZO3dM) by Mina Le on Youtube
* [TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VampireTropes) – Vampires
* [Listener Guide Submissions](https://johnaugust.com/guide) send in your favorite episodes from 300-500!
* [Check out the Screenwriting Life Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-screenwriting-life-with-meg-lefauve-and-lorien-mckenna/id1501641442) and this episode with [John!](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/35-john-august-on-worldbuilding-in-your-writing/id1501641442?i=1000512898141)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Peter Hoopes ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/493standard1.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/philosophy-for-screenwriters).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 483 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we discuss character’s moral codes, philosophies, and beliefs, and how deep a writer really need to go fleshing those out. Then we’ll talk about virtual pitches, attaching element, eight-sequence story structure, and how to read a script.

**Craig:** Hmm. Eight-sequence story structure? I didn’t know that there was an eight-sequence–

**John:** There’s a thing. There’s a thing.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. We’ll talk through it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will revisit our disagreement over when it’s OK to lie.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t remember what I said. But I’m sure I told the truth.

**John:** All right. So we’re recording this on January 8. It’s two days after what happened at the Capitol, so it feels weird not to talk about it, but it’s also going to have been a little bit in the past. Watching the events at the Capitol, it felt like the How Would This Be a Movie kind of flipped in reverse, in that you saw a bunch of people who were trying to act like they were in a movie and didn’t know what to do in the movie that they were in.

I had not watched that much cable news in decades. And it was just overwhelming.

**Craig:** Yup. As always these events sometimes are disturbing fodder for those of us who write because normally people are presenting themselves within a general range of behavior of social norms and so on and so forth. And in these instances they break out of it. And in breaking out of it you start to see certain bizarre aspects of human behavior that are counterintuitive. The example that immediately comes to mind is the fact that they were rioting and smashing their way into the Capitol building, but upon entry many of them chose to stay within the boundaries of the velvet ropes that would guide tour members through the halls of Congress.

It is so strange. And those details are fascinating. But, yeah, I think you kind of nailed it. They thought that they were in a movie and then they ran out of script.

**John:** Yeah. You think about if you had written any of these scenes into a movie, like the event didn’t happen but you were writing these things, the notes you would get back would say like, “Well that doesn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t just stay within the velvet ropes there. I can see them breaking into the offices, but wouldn’t they have a better plan? Wouldn’t there be an agenda?” And the fact that they had no actual idea of what to do once they got in there you saw the horrifying guy who had like the zip ties and clearly maybe did have more of a plan, but most of them had no plan. They were a bunch of older white people who needed help getting down the stairs afterwards. It was so unsettling to watch just because you didn’t know what was going to happen. And they didn’t know what was going to happen.

I remember watching 9-11 and going through that and that sinking feeling of like I just don’t understand what’s going on, how we got here. And in this case I did know how we got here, but I still didn’t have a sense of how it could resolve.

**Craig:** I think they were in part as surprised as everybody else was. That it got as far as it went. But they don’t know what to do. Their philosophy is incoherent. They are actually more chaotic than just about any other mob I’ve ever seen in the sense that mobs are always chaotic in their motion and their actions, but they have a goal. So from a writing point of view what do you want is the fundamental question we ask. I don’t know if they knew what they wanted exactly.

I mean, to have Donald Trump be president. But how?

**John:** They had slogans but less than an actual philosophy, or belief system, or a set of principles. And so that actually is relevant to what we’re going to get to today, because one of our sort of framing questions is how much work do you need to do to establish a character’s philosophy. How much do you need to think through that going into it? And this is a good example of people who cannot articulate their philosophy. They can articulate their affiliation, but it’s not actually based upon anything.

**Craig:** I think that’s spot on. I mean, it’s always a little uncomfortable to immediately relate these things to craft work and such, because people have died and our country is in chaos. But I guess in our defense I would simply say that this is how we’re going to be processing this stuff anyway. And the more you and I talk about how the news of the day is narrativized and how it could be narrativized, and how it should be narrativized, the more hopefully people can listen to the news and so forth and be a little more critical in the way they see how things are being presented to them.

**John:** And I’d also like to reflect because I think I’m the person on this show who often encourages people to think of themselves as the protagonist in the story of their life. And this might be a good counter example of that. Maybe don’t think of yourself as being the hero in Star Wars which some of these people do. And there’s a degree to which there’s like a fanboy thing happening there which is not healthy because it’s not based in reality. And so there’s a limit to how much you perceive yourself as being in a story because you are actually in real life and there are real life consequences in ways that there aren’t in fiction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, weird intersection between neo-fascist rioting and cosplay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is disturbing as you see the not just a sense of reality breaking down, but even an interest in reality breaking down.

**John:** Yeah. It was as much Comic-Con as it was a political convention.

**Craig:** Yeah. The one guy wearing the fox furs and holding his wizard staff. Just, oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** All right. So we will get back to that, but there’s a bit of follow up to get through because this is a new year. There’s new stuff to talk through. Really quickly a rundown. This whole last year we talked about the WGA campaign with the agencies. To remind everybody of what happened in previous episodes, all the agencies have signed, including CAA, except for WME. That was the last holdout.

When we last talked WME had gone to court asking for an injunction that would allow them to represent writers again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** While they were waiting for the decision from the judge they made a new proposal. WGA said that proposal was weak sauce and wasn’t going to cut it. And that they needed to basically sign the same agreement everybody else signed with some sort of side letter or something else to show how they were going to sell down to the limits that everyone else was facing.

On the 30th, right before the New Year, the judge came back and said no injunction. So WME lost in court. And that’s kind of where we’re at. So this is sort of non-update update, but basically there’s not a resolution to the WME of the agency campaign.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there are pending cross lawsuits between WME against WGA and WGA against WME that are still floating out there waiting to be entertained. Is that correct?

**John:** That is correct. And so in the previous ruling the judge had strongly urged WME and WGA to meet and figure it out.

**Craig:** Figure it out I think he said. I mean, in this case it seemed like WME was just throwing up a Hail Mary, a 2020 Hail Mary, to see if they could do an end run around that. And that was not probably ever meant to succeed.

**John:** Yeah. So I have no other news to report but I wanted to at least acknowledge that there’s still one plot line from 2020 that hasn’t resolved here. So that’s one of them.

**Craig:** I mean, since I’m always happy to criticize the WGA when I feel like they are bungling or making missteps, more than happy to do that with the agencies when they do so. This is dumb. WME is engaging in a similar kind of behavior to the people who believe that Donald Trump will in fact still somehow be president on January 21. This is delusional. It’s over. It’s over. Kind of conventional wisdom about a situation like the one the WGA was in with these various agencies. The second to last agency to sign a deal is setting the final term. There is no possibility that WME is going to get, nor should get, a better term than CAA or any of the agencies that came before CAA. None. Zero. Not possible.

I don’t know what they’re doing. I truly don’t know what they’re doing. They should just give up or sign the thing, otherwise maybe they’re just kind of pinning their hopes on this lawsuit, but by that point I think they’re going to be losing a lot of their old clients. I don’t understand.

**John:** Not to take your analogy too far, but I remember another situation in 2020 where this guy threw up a bunch of lawsuits hoping to overturn the results and they didn’t come out well for him. So, maybe the lesson is how do you resolve things quickly so you can get back to work might be the best goal here. But, anyway, I’m not here to give them business advice. But that’s where we’re at with that.

**Craig:** I am. [laughs]

**John:** More importantly – well, actually this is somewhat related because Endeavor Content is related to this, this past week it was announced that the Rubik’s Cube Movie which is often one of the things we speculate about, like what would replace the Slinky Movie, the Rubik’s Cube Movie is in development. So this is big news. Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Endeavor Content, which is part of WME, are teaming up for a big feature take on the famed global-selling brand, Rubik’s Cube.

There’s also a game show which is a separate thing, because we don’t make game shows. But we talk about feature. And so in the pitch, “The Rubik’s Cube has sold over 450 million cubes worldwide. Since 2018 amateur professional speed cubers from all over the world have faced each other and battled for the chance to prove their skills in the Rubik’s Cube World Championship Finals in Boston,” which I will say I do want to point out there’s a great short documentary on Netflix.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Love it. So I don’t want to disparage that at all because I think that was a great, great thing.

**Craig:** Beautiful.

**John:** But we need to make fun of the Rubik’s Cube Movie as a feature property.

**Craig:** Well, I’m starting to worry that they’re just listening to this show and waiting for us to come up with the next “stupid idea” and they’ll go well these guys are just pointing us towards gold. So I don’t know what our next thought is going to be. Mop and bucket, or whatever it’s going to be, the Mop and Bucket Movie.

This is not coming from a good place. I’m not going to undermine the people who take the job, especially these days.

**John:** Oh, no, not at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. You need a job, you need work, you do it. But the people who are – Hyde Park Entertainment Group and Endeavor – are engaging in an exercise that is even more cynical than the normal exercise that we all engage in in Hollywood to some extent. It just seems silly. It doesn’t matter. None of what they said matters. I doesn’t matter.

**John:** It doesn’t.

**Craig:** No. I mean, grass. You know what? People know grass more than Rubik’s Cube. Grass covers this much of the planet. 98% of people like grass. Who cares?

**John:** Yeah. So luckily we have the best listeners of any podcast in the world.

**Craig:** Yes, we do.

**John:** And our listeners are professional writers. So at least one but maybe two sets of writers sent in the pitch deck that was being sent to them. So basically when a big property like this is put out there they will contact the agencies and agencies will then go out to their clients and they’ll sort of give this is what they’re looking for.

Here was how the Rubik’s Cube Movie is being framed to writers when they are listening to them to pitch. “Our plan is to find a fresh and innovative way into the IP and develop a mythology that can speak to the scope of the puzzle’s influence. It can be anything from a world-building family adventure like Jumanji, a treasure hunt driven quest like National Treasure, to nostalgia-fueled sci-fi like Ready Player One and Beyond. Just imagine in the time it took to read this paragraph the world record holder could have solved the puzzle twice.”

**Craig:** God.

**John:** There’s also, Craig click through, because there’s a slide show deck.

**Craig:** The slide show is amazing. It’s deeply depressing. I have no problem with corporate robots speaking to each other in corporate robot language. But when they talk to us, for the love of god, this is just not good. So, they say things like “Rubik’s is winning globally,” and then there’s just a bunch of things about brand awareness and retail sales.

Then they have, “Rubik’s DNA.” DNA is a term that non-artists love to through around in front of artists because they think it’ll mean something. So, for instance, here are some of the things that would be meant to entice a writer. “A combination of colors.” Colors, John. It’s colorful. “A striking shape.” It is a cube. “It has key brand values. The key brand values are things like twisting motion. And world famous shape.” I just want to point out that before the Rubik’s Cube was introduced to the world in 1980 there were other cubes. Ice. Not the man, but the actual substance. There were ice cubes.

**John:** Bricks. Bricks are not technically cubes but–

**Craig:** Some.

**John:** They have square edges.

**Craig:** They have squares. They had cubes in all sorts of manners.

**John:** There’s a typo on the slide that you’re looking at right now. “Intelligence buidling.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s “intelligence buidling,” which is a bad typo to make. That’s a rough one. And then it says, sorry I’m laughing at this, “Rubik’s, an inspiration to creatives.” That is like saying everyone knows that the election was rigged. You’re just saying it. It’s not true. It’s just not. It’s not.

**John:** It’s not. Again, whoever takes this job–

**Craig:** No, we love you.

**John:** Take this job. Make something great from it. You know what? I hope you make the Lego Movie. I hope you find something that’s so great even though it’s a piece of dumb IP. You can still potentially make a great movie out of it. I don’t hate the player, I hate the game. So that’s a look into–

**Craig:** Yes, support your family. Buy a house. Do something fun with whatever they give you for this. We absolve you completely. In fact, we urge you to take a job that you can take when you need one. But good lord.

**John:** But let’s talk about the process of getting this job. Because right now there are 20, 30 writers or writing teams who are preparing their own pitches for this. And that’s kind of the tragedy. How much wasted work and creative work is going to go into trying to land this dumb job? And that’s what’s a little bit heartbreaking here.

**Craig:** Maybe the best you can sort of think is this is a fascinating exercise for your mind. If you can figure out an interesting solution to this you’re making your story solving muscle a little bit stronger. So nothing is a complete waste of time. But certainly the people who have presented this to you have not helped you with a phrase like “our plan is to find a fresh and innovative way into the IP.” There’s never been a way into the “IP” of this.

So, always fresh and innovative – that’s the part that blows my mind. We’re making a movie about a Rubik’s Cube. That alone should be shocking. Shocking. That’s the movie by the way. That would be my pitch. Like I would be the guy working at the company trying desperately to stop this movie from happening. [laughs] Desperate. Desperate.

**John:** Yes. Desperate.

**Craig:** Desperate.

**John:** So, talking about IP, some of the same people who sent through the pitch deck for this talked about other stuff that they’re getting sent. So there is a Lucky Charms being developed. General Mills, the cereal company, is developing a movie around Lucky the Leprechaun. So at least Lucky the Leprechaun has a face.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** And has a voice.

**Craig:** He’s a person.

**John:** That’s huge progress. So I would pitch for Lucky the Leprechaun over Rubik’s Cube just because there’s actually a character there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A character who wants something. Who is loss-averse. Like people are stealing his Lucky Charms.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** Why is he so loss-averse? Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, when Chris Miller and Phil Lord approached the task of making the Lego Movie, I mean I’ve never asked them specifically this, but I will. If there were no Legos with faces would this have been doable at all? If it were just bricks what is there to do? But the fact is that a lot of Lego, plural of Lego, have faces, and so there are little mini characters. And therefore there are little mini stories.

**John:** Yeah. But the Lego I grew up with did not have faces. I grew up in a pre-face Lego world.

**Craig:** Ditto. And that’s how I knew that I was not meant to be an architect because I would just assemble the bricks into a larger mega brick. It was disturbing.

**John:** The building but you can’t actually enter it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the other thing we often talked about in terms of what piece of junk IP we can use for the placeholder, we went for the Mr. Clean Movie. Let’s all pitch a Mr. Clean Movie.

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** And so it got me thinking, Procter & Gamble, if General Mills is going to develop a Lucky the Leprechaun Movie, Procter & Gamble, they already make soap operas. They have this character, Mr. Clean. He’s an identifiable brand. He’s got a jingle. It’s unclear to me, Craig, is Mr. Clean a genie or a sailor?

**Craig:** Oh, he’s not a genie. He’s definitely not a genie. He seems too modern. I mean, the ring is going to throw you a little bit I think. But I don’t think he’s a sailor either, to be honest. I think he’s just like a hot guy that loves cleaning.

**John:** He’s a daddy that loves cleaning.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a daddy that loves cleaning. By the way, at this point I’m getting turned on. And now I want to see the Mr. Clean Movie. The Rubik’s Cube Movie has destroyed the notion that the Mr. Clean Movie is the new bar. We have to go lower than Rubik’s Cube at this point. So now I’m thinking things like–

**John:** I think it’s going to be more on the grass frontier. Everyone in the world loves trees.

**Craig:** I think gravel. Gravel.

**John:** Sand. Sand is a foundation. Without sand you can’t get glass.

**Craig:** I know. Sand is almost too interesting.

**John:** Yeah. Actually the mathematics of sand is really complicated.

**Craig:** Because we know what they’re doing. They’re listening. So, if we seem, yeah, gravel is really boring. But, 99% brand awareness of gravel.

**John:** Everyone knows gravel.

**Craig:** Everyone.

**John:** You got skinned knees. You can use it to weigh stuff down. You can use it in place of a lawn if you’re trying to save.

**Craig:** See?

**John:** Sorry. I’m giving all this stuff away for free.

**Craig:** That’s fresh and innovative what you’re saying. [laughs] You know, the Poochie episode of The Simpsons should have killed all of that language, permanently. Permanently. And it didn’t.

**John:** Didn’t.

**Craig:** It just didn’t.

**John:** Such a good episode.

**Craig:** Edgy and in your face.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Let’s get into our discussion of philosophy for screenwriters. And this is all going to be coming out of a question that got sent in. So if our producer Megana Rao can join us, we have a lot of questions today and we need Megana to ask these questions so we can try to answer them on a philosophical level. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, of course. OK, so Nisario wrote in and he asked, “On Episode 481 you and Craig discussed the ethics of lying as they pertain to blood donations. I couldn’t help but notice that John’s take was siding more toward a deontological approach which is rule-based. Simply, the refusal to lie, even if for the greater good, emphasizes what is right over what is beneficial for the collective. Your blood type is valuable, but the rules are such that you cannot donate, thus you must oblige to the rules of the system in place, not in favor of the rules but because you do not intend to perpetuate a flawed system. It’s a bit Kantian.

“Craig, on the other hand, argues that your lie will maximize the greatest amount of good. Therefore we ought to lie as this benefits the collective. This is consequentialism, utilitarianism, where maximizing the good is the end goal. Teleological ethics. My question is how much thought do you give to your character’s philosophy and beliefs?”

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** Great. So in our bonus segment we’ll talk about specifically the lying and I’ll get more into that, but I think it’s a great question overall because I think it really depends on the project. There have been projects where I’ve hired on a philosophy professor to work with me to figure out character’s philosophical backgrounds, and other stuff I’ve written where like I couldn’t tell you what these characters believe in a general sense.

Craig, talk to me about your writing, how much does a character’s philosophy or belief system, how much do you know about that as you start to write?

**Craig:** Well, I took a good number of philosophy classes when I was in college and I deeply appreciate the distinction between the deontological and the teleological, and Nisario is absolutely correct. I tend towards the teleological in my thinking. I’m kind of a Nietzschean sort of dude when it comes to that. Not like full on bananas, but that’s kind of how I go.

But I think probably when I think about characters it never gets quite so specific and deep. It really stops right where I think most people go. Which is to say I tend to be a practical minded person. I tend to be an idealist. I tend to be somebody that is loyal to a set of beliefs and ethics. I tend to be somebody who shifts and moves depending on what it is I want.

We’re all familiar with people like that in our lives. So, philosophy will take a look at the way humans think and behave and attempt to organize that into analyzable and discussable systems. We don’t have to get that far. We can actually just stop with observing the behavior and then replicating it in characters as we choose. So I do engage in this to an extent, but not quite all the way into full on philosophy.

If I were writing something like The Good Place then I would absolutely need to because philosophy is literally a part of the character of Chidi. He is an ethicist and so that’s a huge part of how he thinks and what he says.

**John:** Yeah. When I said the philosopher I was talking about was Todd May who was the philosophy in residence, or one of the philosophers in residence on The Good Place. And so for the project I was writing it was really important to actually be able to explore some of those things.

Part of what you’re saying though, Craig, is you’re looking at what’s underpinning the motivations of characters. What’s driving them? And there is a balance between psychology and philosophy. And psychology is generally more present for us to explore as a writer because it’s driving people’s behaviors. It’s driving them sort of like moment to moment more clearly. Philosophy I tend to think of as being more deep, overall whether conscious or unconscious goals, a system by which people organize their choices and their life and their kind of moral structure. And most people I know in real life they may have affiliations, they may have belief systems that are because of their group identity, but they couldn’t articulate really their own belief system or their own philosophy in any meaningful way.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a notion that philosophy is – if you think philosophy is teleological in and of itself and has a purpose, which many of the great philosophers agree with, then the purpose of philosophy is to help people live a better life. And thus we define what better means and we present them with a path to follow.

What I suspect often happens – and this is where the philosophers would probably be very upset with me – so we have the a posteriori and the a priori – that people already have an instinct of what they want because of who they are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then various philosophies are presented to them. They pick the one that will naturally satisfy their innate desires and they “follow it.” They’re not following it. The philosophy is following them where they were already going.

**John:** Yeah. And that really is the balance between psychology and philosophy as well. They want to do a thing and then afterwards they’re justifying why they did the thing. But that wasn’t really the cause of stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to get back to the group affiliations and beliefs because a lot of times the characters in our stories are going to be a member of a group. A very classic pattern is they are born into a group and then they challenge the assumptions and the beliefs of that group and leave that group and have to discover their own new way of living.

So, their initial group affiliation might be with a religion, so like as a Catholic I believe that life begins at conception they might say. Or political affiliation, so as a progressive I believe all cops are bad. Or I believe in MAGA. I believe the election was stolen by deep state actors. They’re stating beliefs but it’s hard to say to what degree those beliefs are actually innate in that they came to that decision and realization through conscious effort versus they just took a whole bundle of beliefs that came with a group identity.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the unseemly all too human underbelly of all these discussions. People who are hurt and wounded and may simply be truly to manage shame or fear or anxiety are going to naturally drift towards certain things. We know this. It’s not quite as simple as you read a bunch of books and then you go, ah, this one makes the most sense.

For instance, did you ever read Atlas Shrugged?

**John:** Oh my god I read Atlas Shrugged.

**Craig:** Sure you did. Sure you did.

**John:** No, actually, maybe I didn’t actually finish the Atlas Shrugged. I read the Fountainhead and was an asshole for at least four months after reading it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I really thank my college roommates who told me I was being an asshole and got me past it.

**Craig:** Everyone I think of a certain kind like you and me, you’re going to read that stuff. It’s going to hit something instinctive in you that you suspect might be true. And it’s going to reinforce it. And that reinforcement will make you feel good, because the message there is you’re special. Because you’re doing well, you deserve praise. You’re special. And it’s intoxicating.

And then, yeah, and then ideally you grow out of it as fast as you possibly can because it’s also just wrong. It’s wrong philosophically and it’s wrong factually. We just know that. But that’s what a lot of this stuff is doing. It’s just sort of pointing at things and saying does this make you feel good. Well what if I said this. Does this make you feel good? And I think philosophy is an intellectualization and distancing from that process.

What we do I think is far better thought of as just living on that very human level – what makes you feel good? What makes you feel scared? What is it that you want and why? And the characters that overly philosophical in film are usually villains because the villains, we understand our rationalizing and intellectualizing to cover up the all too human truth of why they’re doing what they do.

**John:** What I think Nisario may be reaching for is you want a story, you want a film obviously to ask a question. We talk about what is the central dramatic question. What is the theme of a piece? And that theme idea really is probably a better way of thinking about philosophy. Because you’re asking a philosophical question like, you know, we think of Star Trek, the needs of the many. That question is sort of an important part of that film and that film series. So you may be asking a philosophical question and your characters will be grappling with that philosophical question, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are. So in the conception of the idea there is a philosophy there. There’s something you’re grappling with. And your characters, your protagonists, and your antagonists would naturally be grappling with that as well. But that doesn’t mean that you are necessarily cataloging all of their beliefs and having every decision that character makes really very obviously tied into that philosophy because then you are Ayn Rand and you are writing The Fountainhead. And please don’t do that.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly right. So what I call the central dramatic argument, people call a theme, it doesn’t matter what you call it, oftentimes is philosophical in nature because there is a very universal interest in these big questions of life. But the delivery system and the execution system is human and the people in the story, the characters you’re creating, are not philosophers. I mean, for instance, what Nisario is pointing out about our discussion about blood donations and your deontological approach and my teleological approach that is literally what is at the heart of The Last of Us, which is what I’m writing right now. That’s it. That’s the heart of it.

And nobody, nobody in this show, none of the characters in the game or the show are ever, ever going to speak philosophically about deontology or teleology because they’re not aware of that. That’s operating, it’s sort of like the history of whatever happens in this show 100 years later, if people are still alive a philosopher will write a history and then analyze it then. But not inside of the story.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at what are some philosophical aspects that are useful for a screenwriter to be asking about their characters.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And there’s going to be some natural overlap with psychology because that’s just how it works. But I would say idealism versus pragmatism. And I’m going to broadly talk about idealism. I have this notion of things must work this way and I’m going to stick to my guns on this thing regardless of sort of what the situation is. Versus utilitarianism or pragmatism – pragmatism is probably the better way to describe it – of just do what you can in the situation and make the best of it. Those are psychological approaches but they’re also philosophical approaches. Sort of what is the best use of the current situation that we’re in?

We might ask how concerned is this character about ethics overall. Ethics as a system, how do they deal with ethical questions that come up? Do they care about them? Do they not care about them? One thing I’ve constantly observed in films is that questions of ethics are always being asked of and by men. And you almost never see women grappling with questions of ethics for whatever reason. It’s just not a thing that we see portrayed in film very often.

**Craig:** Hmm. That’s an interesting observation.

**John:** You ask how willing is this character to lie? And how easily do they lie? How worried are they about lies? And where does it rank on their scale of sins or crimes to commit to lie to somebody?

**Craig:** I’m thinking about what you said about men and women and ethical presentations.

**John:** My counterexample which I think stuck out because I hadn’t seen this character before. Tilda Swinton’s character in Michael Clayton is deeply conflicted and flips out over decisions she’s having to make. And I cannot think of another female character in film who is grappling with things that same way. I guess to a degree Meryl Streep’s character in The Post, to a degree. But there aren’t a lot. And maybe that’s because we don’t see a lot of women in control in places where they can make these ethical systemic decisions in our films, but that’s just an observation.

**Craig:** It may also be that we in a tropey way think of men as more – I’ll just say – slightly more sociopathic in that they can be more emotionally detached and therefore intellectualize a situation and analyze it strictly in terms of bloodless value systems or ethics. Whereas the trope is that women are more feeling and connected and human and therefore have an innate morality that doesn’t need to be the product of analysis, but rather just emerges from a wellspring within. That’s an interesting thought.

There is another movie that’s coming to mind that does sort of run against that and it’s Tin Cup. When I think about idealism versus pragmatism, Kevin Costner’s character is such a good example of an idealist. He just has an ideal of what it means to play golf well, or rather correctly. And he sticks to it through the very end. And through his application and connection to that he both loses and wins. Rene Russo is his therapist and she is very much trying to pragmatically help him grow. And she is more concerned about ethics and questions of right and wrong and practicality and growing as a human being.

So, that’s an interesting possible counterpoint. But I think you’re touching on something really interesting that there is a space there for female philosophers I guess that we tend to leave to them out. And we should be bringing them in because there’s a lot of them.

**John:** Yeah. So the team owner in Ted Lasso. Your example of Tin Cup made me think of the team owner in Ted Lasso who starts off doing a very bad thing, an unethical thing, and sort of grapples with it. So there are other examples like that, but it just feels like on the big screen, in the 12 Angry Men kind of way of it, we don’t see that happening very often.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an opportunity for writers who want to pursue it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m kind of curious. Can you think of an example of that scene that we’ve seen many times where a woman is slowly pacing back and forth in front of a captured hero explaining to him why her plan to destroy the world makes sense? Have you ever seen that?

**John:** I think in a Minions movie, yes. I feel like Sandra Bullock’s character in the Minions movie kind of does a little of that. But I’m really stretching to get there.

**Craig:** I’m going to exclude animation and I’m going to exclude superhero movies. So, you have a little bit of that in–

**John:** No, in a normal live action drama? No. I can’t.

**Craig:** I’m struggling to think of one. And now I want to write one because I feel like women absolutely have the right to be just as sociopathic and insane as men.

**John:** Yeah. We have sociopathic women. We have the Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction. But where she’s justifying her actions based on her perceived wrongs, we have the scorned woman archetype. But that’s not really what you’re describing.

**Craig:** Right. Not necessarily sociopaths. Yeah. Those are like personality disorders. But the kind of bloodless sociopath who wouldn’t even be bothered with sleeping with someone’s husband. Who cares? She has a bigger method.

**John:** I think some of the villains, it’s hard to even call them villains, some of the characters in Game of Thrones might have aspects of that as well. But I really want to go for what we’re seeing in movies, I certainly can’t pick one of those.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right. It’s a challenge.

**John:** But let’s talk about heroes where you can identify some philosophical, some sort of belief system that they articulate and will come back to. And sometimes that can be helpful. So Indiana Jones, “That belongs in a museum,” that’s how he distinguishes what he does from other folks who are doing kind of the same thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I think about Miranda Priestly from Devil Wears Prada. And she very clearly articulates a philosophy that beauty has a purpose. And that what she’s doing at this magazine and fashion has meaning, so she’s able to articulate that.

Willy Wonka’s obsession with chocolate. He has that craftsman’s fascination, that artist’s fascination with the meaning that he’s in and he can speak to that very fully. So, those are characters who articulate a philosophy and it’s useful in their films to be able to do that.

So, we’re not saying don’t do that work. We’re saying it can be helpful. But I wouldn’t want – I think what I worry about is writers who would try to write a full philosophical treatise for each of the characters in their films and then struggle to find ways to actually make that fit into the film, or to articulate that in the film when it may just not be natural.

**Craig:** It would be bad. And it also robs your hero, your protagonist, of growth. It’s fine to put characters on either side of them. So, in Chernobyl I put a total pragmatist on one side of Jared Harris’s character, and on the other side I put an absolute idealist. So he gets to be pulled back and forth between them and then finds some sort of synthesis because he can see the value of both sides. And that’s interesting. You’re watching somebody make choices. The problem with philosophers as characters is they’ve already made up their minds and that is remarkably boring to watch in drama.

**John:** It is indeed. Great. Well thank you for this quick talk through some philosophical choices that writers might need to make. Write in with more stuff. I feel like on some future episode we should talk about kind of D&D alignment, because I see people trying to do that a little bit too much.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not really–

**John:** Yeah. Not so good.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t do it.

**John:** So many more questions. I want to sort of get into them. So, Megana, can you talk to us about Zoom?

**Megana:** Great. So this question was suggested by Benjamin Simon. And he asked, “My friend and I have been working on a TV show pitch and hope to ‘take it out’ soon. Checking in with a few friends about their experiences pitching during the pandemic, it seems they’ve had to make adjustments when it comes to pitching on Zoom. For example, using more visuals and slides. I’d love to hear your take.”

**John:** Great. I have done a lot of this during the pandemic, so I actually have some straightforward advice for this. So I’ve had two projects I’ve taken out. I pitched to all the streamers. I’ve also pitched to all the animation places. In a conventional pitch you would go into the room, you would sit down on the couches. You would have a couple minutes of bullshit conversation. And then you’d get into your pitch. And so you might have visuals. You might have boards presented. Or you might just be talking at them. You have to focus on who the most important person is in the room while occasionally doing the lawn sprinkler of sort of making eye contact with everybody else in the room.

On Zoom it’s sort of nice because you don’t have to – eye contact isn’t quite the same thing. Basically you’re looking at the camera and it’s like you’re looking at everybody at the same time. So that is good. I will often put a little sticky note near the camera lens on my computer just to remind me I need to look up there and not look at people’s faces down lower.

Some things I learned really early on. First off, it’s important to practice. So, set up a practice Zoom with your other collaborators, your other writer, or your director, your producers, and just practice through it just to make sure you get all the little things out and who is going to speak when. I found it to be really helpful to join the meeting both from my main computer and also from my laptop. And on the laptop, that’s the one I’ll be sharing slides off of. And that just makes it easier for me to be doing this, my left hand is moving slides around, while I’m still able to focus on the screen in front of me for everything else. So that’s been helpful for me.

If you have sound, like this animation thing had a little animatic that had sound that went with it, make yourself a note that you actually have to turn on sound when – you have to enable sound and screen sharing when you get to that part.

When I was pitching I would tend to have what I was going to say kind of written out in Highland and I would move that up to the top of the screen so that it was close to the camera lens so I wasn’t looking down, I was looking up as I was scrolling through it. And actually really liked pitching on Zoom because we could pitch three places in a day and not drive all over town. So, for that it was great.

The slides were really helpful though because it gave us something to look at while I was talking. It wasn’t just me. Craig, have you had to pitch anything during this time?

**Craig:** Not pitch per se, but I certainly had a number of conversations that had consequences. You know, implied consequences, like are we going to make your how, or should we hire this person. And so there was – I mean, I guess if you define the thing that makes a pitch a pitch is that you’re having a meeting that has a consequence, a potential consequence. So I’ve had those and I, like you, I enjoy them to the extent that I don’t have to drive around. And also there’s a consistency on my end.

So one of the things about the drive around over the course of two days and pitch stuff is you find yourself in different rooms that are too hot, too cold, too small, too dusty. You have a headache all of a sudden. It’s a whole thing. And here you don’t have that problem. You’re in your comfy chair. You’re in your comfy clothes. And you’re doing your best.

I find that one of the nice things about Zoom is that its consistent limitation is that it can’t really handle simultaneous audio very well. We all know that. So, it requires everybody to listen. And the most important advice I could give you, Benjamin, and your friend is don’t be afraid to make space for other people to talk and ask questions. And as you’re pitching build in moments to stop and say, “How are we doing? Any questions?” Because it’s good for people to have a chance, otherwise they feel they’re getting – in a room you can always interrupt. It’s really hard to do it on Zoom. And when they do interrupt it creates this awkward post-interrupt, “Wait. Did you? Sorry. Oh, I. OK.”

So give them moments.

**John:** Absolutely. Build in. That’s why it’s also important to practice is to figure out where are the natural places to stop and ask for feedback, ask for questions. You may have noticed this, too. In pitching to larger rooms I feel like the executives have asked their other people in the Zoom for their questions much more often on Zoom than in real life when I’ve been in a space with other folks. And so that’s been nice, too. I feel like I’ve had more and better conversations with the number two and the number threes in Zoom pitches than in real life. It may just be the projects, but it did feel like it was relevant.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, at some point you want to make sure that the people you’ve asked into the meeting as an employer feel like they’re there for a reason.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it is. It’s good. I like it. You know, you and I have a weird experience, a now decade-long experience, doing something that most people in Hollywood have no experience doing.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** We talk and then we stop and we listen. By the way, most podcasts really struggle with this. It’s one of the reasons I don’t listen to podcasts. You know, I hate the banter. Like the overlapping banter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See that? See what we just did that? It’s beautiful.

**John:** That big, giant silence? OK, so hopefully that helps out with pitching on Zoom. I see we have an audio question here. This is Lauren from Los Angeles. Let’s listen to what Lauren has to say.

**Lauren:** Hey John and Craig. My name is Lauren and I’m a freshly repped screenwriter from Los Angeles. Believe it or not I signed with my management company on March 13, 2020. Yes, the day of the lockdown. So, every single general meeting I’ve had since has been over Zoom and I’ve never met my agents in person. That’s completely not relevant to my question, but I felt like it was a funny thing you might enjoy.

OK, so my question is this. I’m currently working on two different projects. One is a feature pitch that’s a very commercial YA type rom-com. The other is an indie feature script that is a dark comedy revolving around a mother-daughter relationship. I’m fortunate to say that I have different producers attached on both projects. Despite them being different I have ultimately gotten the same note on both. The note is always, “Don’t leave the protagonist’s point of view.” I’m curious what your opinion is on this because oftentimes I find that I want to leave my protagonist to reveal something happening without them knowing. For example, I will leave my daughter character to show the mother doing something behind her back. Or, in my rom-com I leave my main female character to reveal the love interest setting up something to surprise her.

Many times I’ve found their POV helpful. Nine times out of ten I’ve learned that the moments do in fact hit harder when I reveal the information to the audience through the character’s perspective. So, I’m curious if there’s a time when it’s better to leave the protagonist’s point of view and what your opinions would be on this. Thanks again. I’m a big, big fan. Lauren from Los Angeles. Bye.

**Craig:** I’m a big, big fan of Lauren from Los Angeles’s question. That’s a good question. We’ve talked about perspective a lot, yeah, but I don’t think we’ve ever focused on like when do you leave that perspective.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s a great question. And I like that she half answered her own question. She says that nine times out of ten the producer’s note is correct and she shouldn’t do it. And that would be my instinct as well.

I think you’re making a contract with your audience, with your reader, about POV pretty early on in your script. And if you break POV on page 60 for the first time they’re right to say like, “Wait, that’s not the movie we signed up for.” So it feels like you’re cheating. So either you do it consistently or you don’t do it at all.

Some of my favorite movies will suddenly break POV and it’s exciting and it’s so unexpected when it happens. But they’re unusual when it happens. And, again, they tend to be movies where you go in there expecting for some sort of twist or surprise. And it feels like both of the things you’re describing don’t necessarily merit that break in POV.

**Craig:** Yeah. So first let’s sort of define this. We’re not strictly talking about who your main character, what they can physically see at any given point. But the emphasis of the scene is on your main character and how they’re experiencing something. So what you’re asking the audience to do is identify with your protagonist in this scene or sequence. In television it’s necessary to shift POV as much as possible because you are serving typically multiple storylines. And then inside those storylines there are protagonists. And so that storyline is within that protagonist POV, so it’s essentially staying inside of the notion of staying with POV.

For movies, the villain gets their own POV. You don’t want to spend too much time with the villain.

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** It’s pretty rare to have a movie where you don’t have a scene where the antagonist gets to own it and express their feelings and desires and wants. But, yes, you’re right. It can happen. But very common that you can freely and you want to break POV to give the antagonist a moment. Or two.

There are also times in comedies where side characters later on can have fascinating little POV break points, as long as the scene is brilliant. I’m thinking for instance of one of my favorite movies, In and Out, by Paul Rudnick who, you know, we’re on record as adoring for the Addams Family movies, etc. So there’s a wonderful moment later in the film where Debbie Reynolds who plays Kevin Kline’s mother, and who has been haranguing him to get married the entire time, and who had no scenes inside of her own perspective, always from Kevin Kline’s perspective, suddenly after the whole wedding blows up and he comes out of the closet and everything is crazy there’s a scene where she’s just alone with her old lady friends in the hall where there was going to be a wedding and she’s just bemoaning it all. And it’s a really funny scene where each one of those women just comes out with this fascinating secret. Like they all come out of the closet – it’s not about their own sexuality, but about things in their life. Like they start to reveal things. And it’s brilliant.

And it was a wonderful breath of fresh air because it earned its weight. So, you pick your spots. But just know, Lauren, when you do drift away it’s got to be really good. Because we’re naturally going to be like, wait, why are we over here. What’s happening? Because we know that this isn’t really advancing the story per se. So that’s the key.

**John:** Yeah. So this last week we watched Bridesmaids, or I rewatched Bridesmaids. First time my daughter had seen it. And I was struck by just what a great movie it is. It’s so, so, so well done. So Kristen Wiig’s character, it is from her POV. She is driving really every scene. Another way you may talk about this in a meeting is who has storytelling power. Basically who can drive a scene by themselves where none of the other characters need to be there? But she really is driving basically every scene. But there are notable moments where she’s not in them and so there’s a plane sequence in which we see a lot of other side conversations between characters and we continue to flesh out some characters. I think the reason why it doesn’t feel like you’re breaking POV to have those moments is at any point Kristen Wiig’s character could come in and disrupt those existing conversations.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they’re in a space where she could still be there. And so sometimes in a script you may kind of walk in the door with another character, but as long as our central character can be there and be part of the scene soon you’re not breaking the rules. It’s not going to feel like you’ve shifted the playing field unfairly.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a question of substance to those moments. I mean, there’s this wonderful moment on the plane where Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone have this incredible interaction.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s off of Kristen Wiig’s POV. It doesn’t advance the story really. Well, it kind of eventually sort of does. But it’s not deeply substantive. If you had a scene in Bridesmaids where Melissa McCarthy’s character was talking to one of the other Bridesmaids, not Kristen Wiig, and they talked about how they wanted to first go to this place to have lunch, but Kristen Wiig apparently wants us to go to a different place, and then we’re going to go over here. We’d be like why is Kristen Wiig not in this conversation? This is the whole point of us being here is to experience this discomfort through her.

So, if there is a lot of substance then, yeah, you probably want to avoid that. If it’s a fun little moment, especially in our YA rom-com, you know, why not?

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. So, our general take home advice is you should absolutely be aware of it. And if you’re getting the note about breaking POV it’s probably because something is not working right. So take a look at what’s not working and POV might be the problem, but it may also be something else that’s not working right and POV is just the thing that’s sticking out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Megana, do we have another question?

**Megana:** Awesome. So, Christina asks, “I’m taking a screenwriter class and the instructor is using the eight-sequence structure. I’ve never heard of it before. It seems to sort of map onto three-act structure, but the protagonist is supposed to have a unique want in each of the eight sequences, AKA every 10-15 pages. Is this eight-sequence structure widely used and should I be applying it to my screenwriting? Or could it possibly be derailing me from three-act structure?”

**John:** Craig, you had never heard of this, had you?

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** It’s not a thing. And I don’t mean to say that your screenwriting instructor is steering you in a dangerous place, but that person is probably doing as good a job as a screenwriting instructor can do. The idea that there are 10-15 page chunks that sort of feel a little bit different, sure. Great. Call them sequences. Call them whatever. I’m always going to push back against this dogmatic belief that there’s some magical clothesline or whatever metaphor for how the story has to hang together and that these shifts have to happen magically.

**Craig:** Christina, you know, you probably knew, somewhere in the back of your head or perhaps in the front of your head, that when you asked this question you were just going to make me insane. There is not eight-sequence structure. It’s not a thing. I mean, I’m sure it is a thing for some people, but it’s not a thing-thing.

By the way, three-act structure which is a thing-thing is also not really a thing in the sense that it’s only useful if it’s useful. But this notion that the protagonist is supposed to have a unique want in each of the eight sequences AKA every 10 to 15 pages is absurd. Your instructor is certainly making his or her way through teaching this class as they have given themselves a structure. And that’s fine. I disagree with it. I don’t think it is applicable or practical or artistically substantive or justified. And maybe if you’re not feeling it this isn’t the class for you. Because I have a feeling that 80% of screenwriting classes – and I’m being charitable – are not for anyone. That’s just my gut.

**John:** I found a link here which talks through what the eight sequences are. So, I’ll read the descriptions of the eight sequences. And it does – I’m curious what you think.

So sequence one is Status Quo and Inciting Incident. OK.

Sequence two is Predicament and Lock In. I get that. So the story gears are engaging.

Sequence three, First Obstacle and Raising the Stakes. That feels kind of generic to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sequence four, First Combination/Midpoint.

**Craig:** Hmm? That’s my favorite. No, no, I’ve got to stop there. And this is something I talked about in my how to write a movie thing. This I really loathe. It’s a midpoint. Why? Why? It just says, “If the story is a tragedy and our hero dies, then the first culmination (or midpoint) should be a low point for our character.” Why?

**John:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**Craig:** So the hell are you supposed to write it? It’s so dumb.

**John:** Well sequence five is where you get the Subplot and Rising Action.

**Craig:** Huh? Huh?

**John:** Sequence six is the Main Culmination and it’s the End of Act Two.

**Craig:** What does that mean?

**John:** I don’t know. Well, it explains what it means, but not great. Not in a way that’s meaningful. There’s New Tension and Twist in sequence seven. And then Resolution in sequence eight. So I was like, yeah, you know what it’s the things that are going to happen in a movie are going to happen just like they’re putting numbers on them.

**Craig:** You can feel the tap dancing.

**John:** I hope Christina really what you’re focusing on in this class is learning how to write scenes and scenes work. Because that’s going to be much more important. Because all this stuff about structure we’ve talked about a thousand times. Movies have a natural structure to them. There’s ways that stories want to unfold. But all the structure in the world isn’t going to help you if your scenes don’t work and if your characters are not engaging on the page. That should not be the focus of a class.

**Craig:** You know, everybody who does this stuff they come out of the gate strong on act one. Because act one is super easy to structure. Everybody knows what it means to start a story.

**John:** You got to meet your people.

**Craig:** You got to meet your people.

**John:** Figure out your world.

**Craig:** Something happens. They get stuck. They need to do a thing. They want something. And then in act two there’s just argle-bargle. For instance, this says, “The second act SAG,” that’s in all capitals, as if it’s a thing, “can set in at this point if we don’t have a STRONG,” in all capitals, “subplot to take the ball for a while.” What does that mean?

**John:** It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** Subplot? I don’t know what this means.

**John:** If you’re talking about classic one-hour dramas where there’s an A-story and a B-story and a C-story, but that’s not a feature. That’s not how these work.

**Craig:** No. I don’t know what any of this means. And I don’t know why.

**John:** And Christina doesn’t need to worry about it.

**Craig:** No, don’t worry about it. You know what? Write something fun. And by the way if your teacher who is devoted to the eight-sequence structure doesn’t like what you’ve written because it defies the eight-sequence structure, rest easy at night knowing that it doesn’t matter anymore than a 16-year-old 10th or 11th grade student defying the introductory paragraph, three example paragraph, conclusion paragraph structure of an essay, which is a terrible structure. The most boring possible way to write anything, but that’s what they teach.

So, you know, just listen to this show. We’re doing better than this guy.

**John:** All right, this last question may actually be useful and helpful for folks. So, Megana, if you’d get us for this.

**Megana:** OK, so Fulla asks, “What advice do you have for new writers about how to read screenplays as a learning exercise? That is reading screenplays of movies that have already been made. Is it good to just read them and take it all in by osmosis, or is there a particular process for breaking the script down that you would recommend?”

**John:** I have an opinion but Megana I’d actually like to ask your opinion first because you’re at a place now where you’re probably reading a lot of scripts and future screenplays, TV screenplays, when you read a script what do you do?

**Megana:** A part of the reason why I was so curious to hear your guys’ thought is I worry that I’m doing it wrong. But I just read it straight through.

**Craig:** Funny.

**Megana:** And I’m always so impressed and floored and hear my agent friends who read like ten screenplays a day, like how they get through it that quickly. And I think now that I’ve been reading screenplays for a while it’s starting to make more sense to me how to break it down and to be able to flip through and find certain things faster. Or just like keep parts of the story and identify them faster. But I think I’m still sort of reading them from page one on.

**John:** Yeah. And as a person who is trying to learn how good screenplays work, especially if you’re reading screenplays of existing movies that are good screenplays that you want to learn from, that’s how you do it. You read the scripts. And sort of as you’re reading them figure out what impact are they having for you. What’s working for you on the page? What are lessons you can take from it?

The one thing I will say I have learned to do over time is in watching a movie or reading a script I will try to take some notes to myself afterwards about what I learned from it. What I actually took and what’s useful about it. If you can do that, that’s great. But really it comes down to your own taste. And your agents who are reading 10 scripts in an afternoon, they’re skimming. They’re not really reading. And they’re not reading to improve their own writing ability. They’re just reading to plow through stuff. So that’s not really I think a fair standard to try to hold yourself to.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re doing it right, Megana. Fulla, if you are reading screenplays of movies that have been made, as you say, my advice would be to make sure you’ve seen the movie first. Watch the movie and feel, just like a regular person. Just go in there like a good old audience member. Experience the movie. Just make internal notes of what delighted you, what scared you, what interested you, what bored you. A line that made you lean in and a line that made you roll your eyes. Then read the script.

And as you read the script just start to note how the parts that you loved or hated related to the words on the page. And what you think went right and what you think went wrong. And the most valuable sections are probably the ones where there’s something that you love in the movie, you read it on the page, and you go, wow, OK, so the page, it’s there, and it works in the movie. What do I love about this so much? Why did this make me so happy? What surprised me about it? And just think about it.

The more you get into super-duper analysis breaking down, et cetera, the more you’re drifting out of the zone of somebody that makes things and more into the zone of somebody that analyzes things. The danger is you don’t want to sort of quietly train yourself to be a critic. You want to train yourself to be a creator.

So, always think about that as best you can while you’re doing this. But you’ll be fine.

**John:** I totally agree about not becoming a critic of things. And so if you are going to break stuff down, I would say break it down, like a scene, look at how that writer got into and out of that scene and sort of the choices that writer made about how they’re going to get that information out. That is so helpful to see the craftsman there. Imagine you’re looking at an amazing piece of furniture and you’re able to deconstruct it to see how the joinery works. That’s useful.

But don’t engage in film criticism. I think Craig’s exercise is great in terms of seeing the movie then reading the script. After you do that a few times I say flip it. And if there’s a movie that you haven’t seen but you can find the screenplay for read the screenplay and see what movie are you building in your head based on the screenplay. And then you can compare it to how it actually turned out. That’s a good counterexample. A realization of like how much of the movie you saw really was first reflected on that page.

So just read a lot. And I think Fulla, you versus Christina, if all the time Christina spends in that class learning about eight-sequence structure, she was instead reading a bunch of screenplays, she’s going to come out ahead.

**Craig:** No question. And pretty sure it’s a lot cheaper.

**John:** Yeah. It is cheaper. Especially now. I remember when I went to USC for film school, one of the big draws is they had a big script library so you could check out two scripts at a time and read these scripts. And it was so helpful and so useful. And now we have the Internet and just all those scripts that are there which were such a valuable resource, they are free for everybody and that’s better. That’s how it should be.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. All right, Megana, thank you so much for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you, guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing oddly is self-serving. I generally don’t do a One Cool Thing that’s actually something I wrote, but this year I wrote up my 2020 sort of year in review. Basically I wanted to take a look at sort of all the stuff I did in 2020, for my writing stuff, for the apps we build. Sort of personal stuff. You know, health and such. And actually just take an accounting of what happened in 2020. Because while the year was obviously bizarre, there were a lot of things that were still under my control and I wanted to be sort of accountable for the things I could control.

So I did sort of year-end review. It ended up being a super, super long blog post, which I hadn’t intended. But from it I was trying to really ask three questions. What went well? What didn’t go so well? And what did I learn? And it’s the what did I learn is probably the most important things, because that’s the stuff that helps inform the choices I make for 2021. So, take a look at it. If you’re inspired to, it’s not too late into January to be thinking about what you did in 2020 and really looking forward to what you want to do in 2021.

**Craig:** I assume a big chunk of that review is just about how you treated me poorly and how you’re going to get better?

**John:** How I could treat Craig better is really a part of it. I also want to credit Megana Rao, our producer, because she did a review of what happened in 2020 as well and it got me thinking like, oh wow, I tend to discount all the things that happened over the course of the year. And so when she did her listing of things like, oh yeah, that was a lot.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing. You forget. It’s true. You get a lot done. You get more done than you think. So always good to give yourself a little bit of a hug at the end of a hard year and man was this a hard one.

Here’s my One Cool Thing, and this is a wonderful hug you can give yourself. I every now and then will recommend a game on the iPad. Usually it’s because I found it to be a fun diversion. This one I truly love. I love this game. I love it on the level of loving The Room and stuff like that, although it’s very different. It’s called There is No Game. And it is an independent game that’s kind of done in the sort of ‘90s pixel style which generally I just don’t like, because I’m like we have lived through that. I don’t want to still do that again.

But it’s purposeful here. It’s very purposeful here. This is a fascinating exercise in meta-analysis of games while playing a game, and it’s also very beautiful, and then becomes rather touching. And it is also mostly narrated by its creator, Pascal Cammisotto, who is French and so you’re basically being led through this by a man with a very strong accent, which at first you’re like I’m struggling to understand a few of these words. And then by the time you’re well into it you are absolutely in love with him and his accent. And the fact that he’s making fun of his accent. And the game is making fun of his accent.

It’s brilliant. I think this game is absolutely brilliant. And I urge you to go and spend the whatever it is, the $3 or something that it is to play it. I just loved it. Really fun.

So, again, There is No Game. Technology the full title is There is No Game: Wrong Dimension. It’s wonderful.

**John:** And you’d recommend we play it on iPad if that’s possible?

**Craig:** Yes, absolutely. iPad. Well, you can play it I think via Steam. You can play it on Mac as well. But it was released for Android, which I don’t care about, and iOS just a couple of weeks ago on December 17.

**John:** Excellent. I look forward to checking that out.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Rajesh Naroth. Oh, Craig, you’re going to want to listen to this one. It’s a good Mandalorian riff.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** 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 like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. Plus you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has a lot of links to things we talk about on the show.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record online. Craig, I would not be lying if I didn’t say that this was a good episode.

**Craig:** [laughs] I have to go through the layers of negatives.

**John:** I have no idea how that actually comes out.

**Craig:** I think you said that it was a good episode. I agree.

**John:** Good. Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. Our bonus topic is on lying. And so the question that we had earlier from Nisario was follow up really on our discussion we had in the random advice episode where a listener had written in saying like, “Hey John, how do you feel about gay people not being allowed to donate blood and would you lie about being gay so that you could donate blood?” And Craig you said that if I had that rare blood type, if I had O-negative you would recommend that I do lie.

**Craig:** Strongly. Yes. I think what I said was that I would not only recommend it but I would bother you about it almost daily.

**John:** Yeah. And so I found that actually genuinely fascinating. I didn’t want to hijack the whole episode, just have a long discussion about that, but it’s a bonus segment so we can do whatever we want in a bonus segment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I found that really fascinating. And particularly coming from a guy who like the first episode of Chernobyl starts a line, “What is the cost of lies?”

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so I think there is a cost to it. And I sort of wanted to piece through this because I don’t come to it from a religious perspective. I don’t believe in a Saint Augustine kind of way I’m going to lose my immortal soul for that lie. But to me it really was important to not lie about that. And so I wanted to sort of pick through that a little bit more if we could.

**Craig:** Sure. So, the simplest way of looking at it is that lying does have a cost. One of the things that I said in the podcast we did for Chernobyl was that after thinking about this and working on that show and running over the various thought experiments in my mind, it seems to me that there is a certain amount of lying that is just built into how we exist. We actually cannot function neurologically without a certain amount of lying.

**John:** And let’s define lying. So is lying any deception? Or is it knowingly telling a falsehood? What is lying in that definition?

**Craig:** I would make it as broad as possible. I think we need a little bit of denial to be able to get through the day. Some of us need a lot of denial to get through the day, which is a kind of lying. It’s essentially a refutation of fact. Like for instance if our own mortality were on the forefront of our minds then I don’t know how we would get through it. We are engaged in a steady passive denial of our mortality all the time.

And also there is a general lying to get through the day just to be polite and kind, and to not hurt people’s feelings. When you see somebody and you don’t like what they’re wearing and they’re like, “Oh my god, what do you think?” Why? Truly it would be damaging to everyone if we just opened our brains up and spilled it all out. It’s one of the reasons why the Internet, particularly social media, has been so toxic. It’s not because social media makes people bad. It’s because social media stops them sometimes from lying. They feel free to just say exactly what they think or feel and then we begin to corrode.

So there is a certain baseline that is required. The lies that we talk about in the show are the malicious lies that are designed to give us comfort even when we must address the danger. If a doctor says to you, “You have,” like a doctor said to Steve Jobs, “Steve, you have pancreatic cancer.” And he engaged in a series of lies to himself about what that meant and about what kind of treatment would work. And he paid the price. And he found out what the cost of those lies were, which is death. And that’s the kind of stuff that worries me.

When we talk about the rules surrounding the donation of blood and gay people, that rule is based on a lie. And the lie is that the blood of gay men is dangerous. It is not. And also our ability to screen blood for things like HIV, which is why that rule came about in the first place, is very good. So it’s just based on a kind of lie. We don’t want to deal with the notion that somehow we should just proceed towards scientific truth there. Specifically scientific truth is the truth that is most concerning to me and the one that we really can’t afford to lie about.

So that’s why that’s my position on the blood donation. It’s just scientific truth that we cannot ignore or lie about. And it hurts people. That’s the cost.

**John:** Exactly. So you can frame that either way. What is the good you’re trying to do? You’re trying to save someone’s life by donating blood. And it is good to save someone’s life. Absolutely established that. And we’re talking about what is the cost of it. As I said at the start, I’m not worried about lying in the sense of like it’s going to cost me my mortal soul. I don’t believe that’s a thing.

But I do think there are other costs that you may not be accounting for. And I sort of want to talk through a little bit of that, because we’ve had other discussions even prior to Scriptnotes that involve some of this stuff. So I think that in telling a lie, in telling this specific lie saying that I am not – checking the box that I am not a gay man or have not had sex or whatever, I’m undermining trust in the blood system itself. Because if I’m willing to say, to lie on this checkbox, what does it mean that – what is to stop me from lying about the other checkboxes, or things that could be more important?

Why is the choice about what’s important to lie about and not lie about left to me, a person who is not a scientist, versus the science? You and I both agree that this ban should be taken down. The proper solution is to get rid of the ban.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But I think even the interim step of me lying on this checkbox is undermining trust in the system because if we’re saying it’s OK for gay men to lie on that checkbox well is it OK for people with other serious blood-borne diseases to be lying on that checkbox. I think it naturally undermines trust in the way that lies undermine trust.

That’s one of my objections.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that is reasonable. And there are certain systems where I think you’re right. If there is a sense that there is a mass jury negation going on then, yes, we are going to lose faith in the system. In the case of blood donations, it’s a little bit like the security question you get at the airport. Did you pack your bags yourself? Well, that’s actually of no value. It does not matter if people say yes or no. The system really can’t rely on the self-reporting of truth. It needs to independently screen. There is no reason that we should be asking anybody whether or not they engage in behaviors that might lead to their blood having a virus in it any more than they should be asking us when we walk through the airport if we’re carrying a weapon. They should just make us go through the freaking metal detector. And the same thing does – it should and also does – happen with blood, which is why the question itself is stupid.

It is putting an unfair moral burden on you that is both unnecessary and dangerous for the overall health of our society.

**John:** Absolutely. And so I think my second objection is that in telling the lie that you’re asking me to tell I’m actually perpetuating a broken system rather than fixing it. I’m allowing the system to keep going and I’m bearing the cost of the broken system rather than the system being fixed. And so I think that is – I raise that objection that it’s prolonging the system going on in its broken state.

**Craig:** 100 percent. That is a real objection, too. And I’ve got to say, if it were me, I think what I would do, if I were O-negative and gay, I think I would try and find somebody that would work with me to essentially get around the nonsense. The way that people for instance literally on a daily basis, on a minute-by-minute basis work around the euthanasia laws in our country to die peacefully and willfully. All the time. Because we should be able to. It’s ridiculous that we can’t, and so we do.

So I would try and figure out how to get around it while also fighting the system. But be able to fight the system and change it. That would be my moral compromise.

**John:** So two other points I want to make. So in telling a lie I feel like, and me having to tell this lie every time I donate blood I feel like I’m normalizing lying. That it basically – and we talk about deception and obviously some deception is naturally part of life, but if we’re saying that I should systematically check this check box that I know is untrue to do a thing it’s making lying more acceptable as a choice overall in society for function. And that that does not feel great.

The same way that cheating overall, once you see people start cheating people are more likely to cheat. I feel like lying is the same kind of thing. But I really want to focus back on myself though because you said if I were a gay man I would do these things, and I want to talk about sort of like – I don’t want to normalize lying for myself. In telling a lie I would be normalizing lying for myself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So every time you choose to lie you’re telling yourself to be comfortable being a liar. It’s like a tax on your self-esteem I think. And you’re always worried about being caught. Because here’s the thing that could happen. Let’s say I say like, oh, sorry, I was late. I was donating blood. And someone would say like, “Wait, I thought you couldn’t donate blood because you’re gay.” And it’s like, oh, sorry. Guess I’m a liar. That sucks. And that experience is an experience I’ve had through so much of my life that you haven’t had because as a gay man I’ve been asked to sustain a lie and be in the closet for the first 23 years of my life. And that really is a tremendous burden to sort of carry along.

And so I think part of my reason for why I won’t check that box is because I know how much that sucks. And how bad that is.

**Craig:** Well, that’s a great point. You have carried the burden of being forced to lie unfairly for a long time and therefore whatever additional burden you might be able to make an ethical argument in favor of is going to hurt you way more than it would hurt me. And that’s real. I mean, I would still bother you all the time, because that’s me, because I’m an asshole. And just thinking about people that need blood. But that would be kind of like, OK, you would always have your ethic—

What we’re doing right now is engaging in a really interesting bioethical debate. The only reason that we have bioethics is because there is no answer to this. There is only a weighing. There is only a balance. And your personal experience is absolutely part of the balance. No question. Has to be.

**John:** So, anyway, there’s not going to be a clear resolution to this, but I feel like in more fully airing what happens being this I would say that the experience I’ve had in terms of donating blood there’s been other situations where I’ve been asked to sort of play along with sort of like this is how we do it, and I’m always questioning the just play along with it. Because I had such a negative experience with having to carry – having to live within a lie 24/7.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That you feel it differently. So it’s a case where a person’s personal experience does impact sort of the choices that they make.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And even if you haven’t had the burden of living in the closet, which I haven’t had to have, it’s really important for anybody who has kind of had the privilege of blithely going through life saying, oh, this is who I am, to also still question and stress test every time you are contemplating lying. And asking yourself why. And forcing that ethical debate in your head to be true. And relying on your inner sense of guilt or concern.

It’s a bioethical debate. It’s a really interesting question of what you do when you’re living in an unfair system with an unfair law that is based on absolutely no valid science whatsoever. What do you do?

And this is an interesting one. I’m kind of fascinated to see what people think.

**John:** Yeah. Just so I don’t come across as the idealist who would never, ever tell a lie, I will say one of the things that annoys Mike so much about me is that I am very good at sort of the convenience sort of short-cutting lie where if I have to talk to a customer service person I will create the crafted shorter version of the thing that actually – I will describe a scenario that gets me sort of what I need to have happen rather than the actual thing that actually has happened. So I am kind of a fabulist in that way. I will pretend that a certain circumstance has passed so that I can get to the resolution I need to get to.

**Craig:** You’re an awful person. [laughs] What you’re saying is that in your house you’re actually the least ethical one.

**John:** Yeah. I’m actually probably the Edward Bloom of our house.

**Craig:** Wow. Oh my god. So Mike is really hard core.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Geez. Well I hope he’s not O-negative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve got to worry about that now.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Rejects WME Deal](https://deadline.com/2020/12/wga-rejects-wme-deal-agency-grapple-conflicts-of-interest-1234662648/), [Judge Rejects Injunction](https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/wme-wga-lawsuit-injunction-deny-writers-1234876988/)
* [Rubik’s Cube](https://www.dropbox.com/s/yjg9nfr506axedo/RUBIK%27S%20CUBE%20-%20HP%20%26%20EC%20Visual%20Presentation%5B3%5D.pdf?dl=0)
* [Mr. Clean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Clean): a sailor? A genie? Both?
* [Eight Sequence Structure](https://thescriptlab.com/screenwriting/structure/the-sequence/45-the-eight-sequences/)
* [John’s 2020 Year in Review](https://johnaugust.com/2021/2020-annual-review)
* [There is No Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Game:_Wrong_Dimension)
* [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/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/483standard.mp3).