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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/mystery-and-suspense).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 632 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is about mystery and suspense. It’s also a best of episode. To explain why we’re airing material from the vaults, I need to tell you a little story. So sit back, get comfortable.

Now, longtime listeners will recognize that in no fewer than three episodes of Scriptnotes, we have urged our listeners to get their flu shots. In fact, in the opening moments of Episode 5, back in 2011, Craig and I talked about it. Drew, let’s play a clip from that episode, right from the very start, because this is before we even had bloops as a (sings). Back then, I used to pick different theme music from the shows. Let’s play that now.

[Episode 5 clip]

**John:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Hello, Craig. How are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** You know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time, just because of the whole thing where there are so many different strains, and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s… Flu’s bad stuff.

[End of clip]

**Drew Marquardt:** Oh my gosh, you sound like babies.

**John:** We were so young, so naïve.

**Drew:** The 10 years of cigars hadn’t lowered your voice or anything like that.

**John:** The Trump administration, the bourbon, everything else that has happened. Here we have our first clue about what may be going on here. Craig and I were talking about the flu, so either one of the two of us or someone in our orb must have gotten the flu. And in fact, that has already happened on the show.

So back in Episode 434, January 2020, Craig talks about how he got the flu. He describes going to Urgent Care. And Craig asks me, “John, do you know how they test for the flu? They put a swab up your nose and swirl it around,” which is wild. That used to be a new thing. This is January 2020 he’s telling me this. We were just about to have COVID. We were just about to all have our noses swabbed endlessly for the rest of our lives, but this was a new thing for Craig.

**Drew:** No idea what was coming.

**John:** Nope, no idea, which brings us to 2024. Last week, it’s a Saturday evening. I am feeling a little bit achy, but I was just at the gym that morning. It’s nothing too big, nothing too pressing. We’re having friends over to play board games, so as a responsible host, I take a COVID test. I swab my nose, just as Craig had done back in 434. COVID test turns out negative, so hooray. Friends come over. We play Spyfall. We play Poetry for Neanderthals. We play Celebrity. A great time is had by all.

The guests leave, and suddenly I just feel awful. Everything comes crashing down. I’m guessing that what I was experiencing during that game night was essentially stage health, where you can feel good when you’re actually out on stage, when you’re actually performing, and then it all comes crashing down. Drew, you were an actor. You may have seen something like that in your orbit.

**Drew:** I’ve absolutely had that happen several times. Usually, the times when I was the lead, I would have full-blown laryngitis backstage and then get on and be able to project out and not know how I did it.

**John:** We were doing Big Fish in London. There was this cold that went through the entire cast. These people, they were basically invalids. They were so sick. Then you just shove them up on stage, and they could somehow do it. They’re belting, and then they can’t talk off stage. I think it was some bit of that. I just did not feel how bad I felt while people were there. But I am now so cold, I am shaking. I have a fever of 101. I take some Advil. I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well. I get too hot, too cold. I start sweating. I feel gross. I take my temperature throughout the night, and it gets up to 105.5.

**Drew:** Oh my god.

**John:** At that point, I genuinely don’t know what to do, because if I Google now, I see that over 105, you’re supposed to go to the emergency room, but it’s not like it was staying over 105. I don’t have any of the other emergency symptoms like that. I’m not convulsing. I’m not confused or delirious.

Anyway, first thing in the morning, Mike takes me to Urgent Care. I say, “I think I have the flu.” They swab my nose. They say, “You have the flu.” They send me home with Tamiflu. The doctor says, “Listen, you’re going to have three bad days, and then you’ll be okay.” The doctor was accurate, but I don’t know, he didn’t fully describe the experience. It was just horrible. I have friends who’ve had much more serious illnesses. I don’t want to downplay that. But for whatever reason and good fortune, I’ve never been this sick as an adult. I don’t want to just downplay how awful the flu was for me. It was just bad. Have you had the flu as a grown-up?

**Drew:** I don’t think I’ve had it as an adult. I’m sure I’ve had it as a kid, because kids get everything.

**John:** I’m sure I had it as a kid too. I remember things that felt like this as a kid. But your kid body is just so different. I felt like everything was just down and broken. I had fever, body aches, chills, diarrhea, but that’s it. I had none of the respiratory things. But what I had was enough. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t really sleep. I just laid there in this fugue state envisioning boxes being assembled. I couldn’t think any organized thoughts, other than just repetitive, simple thoughts. I felt like a video game that had crashed, and the screen was half pixelated, sort of broken. It was bad.

I eventually came back online. I’d have these moments where I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far,” and I still felt terrible, but it was better than I’d felt two hours before. Then a few hours later, I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far.” That was the gradual coming out of it. Now, we’re on the fifth day. Flu-wise, I feel like I’m basically through it. The last couple days I’ve been able to do some phone calls. For reasons we’ll get into, I’ve had so many phone calls. The flu sucks. That’s my takeaway from the flu.

To answer the mystery and suspense question I posed at the very start of this, the reason why this is a best of episode is because we had a bigger episode planned. We were going to have a guest host on. We had a menu of things we were going to go through. That’s going to be pushed back a week. But we have a lot of other things to talk through. This is a hybrid of old stuff and new stuff in one episode.

Takeaways, I guess, flu shot. Get your flu shot. It didn’t protect me this time. It’s protected me many other years, I’m sure. Tamiflu, sure, great. It’s not the magic bullet I hoped it would be. You see people who get the COVID drug, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suddenly feel great.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just like, oh, suddenly, the lights came on. It is crazy that we don’t have an at-home test in the U.S. for flu. They exist in Europe. They exist in Asia.

**Drew:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, they have these tests where you can swab. It’s one test that swabs for flu, RSV, and COVID. If I’d had a test like that, I would’ve swabbed my nose, and I would’ve tested positive for flu. I would’ve not had friends come over. I probably could’ve gotten Tamiflu 12 hours earlier. It’s really frustrating we don’t have those here.

**Drew:** That feels so obvious that we would have them. Now I’m very frustrated.

**John:** Apparently, the reason why we don’t have them is it was proposed years ago, and they said, “Americans aren’t ready to handle at-home testing of things,” but we are now. So just get over it. We can do it. Of my board game party group, no one is sick yet, which is great. Some of them took Tamiflu, which is smart and great. Hopefully, they’ll all stay healthy.

**Drew:** Terrible for you, but it sounds like it worked out okay.

**John:** Drew, tell us about the mystery and suspense portions you have picked out for us this episode.

**Drew:** This is an episode about mystery and suspense, but it’s not just detectives and thrillers. This is how to use mystery and suspense techniques in every story, including comedies, so really helpful. We’re going to start with Episode 269. That’s Mystery Versus Confusion. It’s about using mystery to capture an audience’s curiosity, but making sure that doesn’t tip over into confusion or frustration or just making sure it’s all very deliberate. Then we’ll go to Episode 332, which is called Wait For It. It’s about suspense and the different types of suspense and how to craft it on the page.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, you and I are going to talk about the Apple Vision Pro, which we had in the office and got a chance to test out and play around with. But before we get into any of that, we have some news. We actually had a busy news week. First, we need to start with all the agent stuff that happened this week. Agencies are always going through changes. Agents move from one firm to another. Sometimes they take their clients with them. Sometimes they shutter, and that happened this past week with one of the smaller agencies.

**Drew:** That’s right. The first one was A3, which used to be Abrams Artists Agency. An email went out on Friday, February 9th, that the agency was shutting down on Monday. It sounds like the decision to pull the trigger was made completely by the chairman, Adam Bold. Bold has that power to make that unilateral move because of an operating agreement they signed last year, which the CEO Robert Attermann and President Brian Cho have been suing Bold over. It sounds like there’s quite a lot of drama here. They did that reportedly in attempt to block Bold from selling off A3’s digital and unscripted departments to Gersh, which happened in January. And now that agency’s completely dissolved.

**John:** My recollection is that A3 represented both… I know they represented some writers, because back in the WGA agency campaign, I remember them being one of the agencies that we had to negotiate with. But they also represented other talent as well.

It’s frustrating when your agency melts away, because then you don’t know, as a piece of talent, what are you supposed to do, where are you supposed to go. I also feel bad, of course, for the agents who are suddenly without a job. Those changes do happen. That is an agency shutting down. What’s more common to happen in Hollywood is that an agent will leave an agency either taking his or her clients to a different firm or setting up a new agency. That’s what happened this past week.

So the big news in my friend group this past week has been about Verve. On Tuesday, it was announced that Bill Weinstein, who’s one of the founders, partners, and the CEO of Verve Talent, had left the firm. And as longtime listeners will know, I actually moved to Verve during the WGA agency campaign, and Bill was my primary agent. The trades are reporting that three other agents are joining him on this new venture. There could be more.

We’re recording this on Thursday, so by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday, a lot more may have developed. But Drew, it’s fair to say that a ton of phone calls have happened in the office here over the last two or three days.

**Drew:** Yes, I would absolutely say that.

**John:** It’s weird. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as it used to, because everything is now emails or text messages. But when you need real-time information, you just pick up the phone and call a person, especially when they want to talk about advice. The reason why people were calling me were mostly friends of mine who were at Verve, and just to think about, “Do I stay at Verve? Do I go to this new place? Do I go to a third place?”

One of the things I tried to talk everybody through is not to fall into the false dichotomy of only two options. There’s a sense of you either have to choose A or B. You can choose A or B or neither of those and go to a different situation, different solution.

For some people, if they have a primary relationship with an agent who is staying at Verve, it probably makes sense to stay at Verse. If they have a primary relationship with an agent who’s moving to this new firm, it may make sense to move to the new firm. But in other cases, it may make sense to look around and see where is the right place to end up. That could be at a different agency. It could be with a manager.

For me personally, as we’re recording this, I don’t know where I’m going to go. I don’t know if I’m staying at Verve or going to the new agency or going someplace else. It will be a busy couple weeks as this all sorts itself out.

**Drew:** It’s mystery and suspense.

**John:** It is mystery and suspense, Drew.

**Drew:** It is.

**John:** The second bit of business we have not covered yet on the program is OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is this new video generation tool. We’ve seen tools before that do what Dall-E did for images that created videos, but they were terrible. They were just awful. You would not believe them to be real at all. Drew, you saw these demos. What’d you think?

**Drew:** I was blown away. The physics of it is amazing. Seeing things underwater videos are incredible. There’s one I was telling you about. It’s a drone shot from 1850s California or something like that. It’s both incredible and awe-inspiring and a little bit terrifying.

**John:** The first text message I got from a friend was, quote, “How petrified should I be?” I told them, don’t be petrified. It’s a long way from these little demo clips to typing a prompt in for, “Make me a biopic about Janis Joplin in the style of Baz Luhrmann. There’s a reason why writers and other film professionals are involved to get you from that notion to an actual film that people see.

All of that said, there are important things to consider with these technologies and the impact they could have on our business. First off, the demos they showed were largely about someone typing something into a box and it coming up with a little clip. But it can also take video’s input.

So you can feed it video of a film and say, “Replace Kevin Spacey,” because Kevin Spacey’s a problematic person right now, and it could probably do a very good job of replacing Kevin Spacey in a film. And so suddenly, you don’t have to re-shoot or do anything else. If you are the copyright holder on this film, and you want to make money off this, you might replace Kevin Spacey in a film, and it can do it pretty simply.

Likewise, if you are the holder of copyright on something in your vault, and you want to refresh it and make it more palatable to modern audiences, you could do certain things like up-ressing it or you could change the aspect ratio of it. If it’s shot more square and you want it to be more widescreen, you could fill in the edges there much better with AI. You can really figure out… It’s like the Photoshop’s generative fill. It’ll have a good sense of what should actually be in the spaces that are missing. That is really useful for that.

Is it transformative enough that it is covered by copyright? That’s an open question, and that’s a thing that’s going to be wrestled with. But it raises the question of, what is a refresh of an existing film versus what is a remake, because writers and directors and other folks, we get paid for when our material is remade. If someone wants to remake Go, I get paid for that, because that’s my original thing. But if you’re just constantly rejuvenating an existing property, that gets to be a little bit murkier.

I guess, what do we call the stuff that comes out of these engines? Because some of it can look like animation; some of it can look like live action, but it’s not really either of the above. There were no actors being filmed, so it’s not live action as we think of, but it’s also not animation and the animation process. It’s just a thing that’s being generated.

As WGA writers, we want to make sure that material that comes out of a process like this isn’t defaulted into animation, because the WGA does represent animation, but not exclusively. It could be a way for studios to run around protections that we have put in place for writers. We want to make sure that there’s no loophole here where using this technology gets them out of hiring WGA writers.

Finally, you talked about the physics of the stuff that you saw. The knock-on effect that these things have had is that they have become these reality engines. They’ve ingested so much material, so much video, that they create these pretty compelling drone shots. They have a sense of how things move in space. If a character was in front of another character and it clues it, there’s persistence of vision.

**Drew:** It has object permanence almost.

**John:** Object permanence, yeah, like a baby learns object permanence. It’s just much more sophisticated than things we’re used to coming out of this. Because of it, it can actually do things like, by watching a bunch of Minecraft videos, it gets Minecraft, and it can simulate Minecraft so well that it becomes basically just Minecraft. If you can do that with Minecraft, to what degree are you going to be able to simulate off of real-world video what reality is? That has troubling implications for – not troubling, but fascinating implications for the nature of reality and how it understands the world around it.

I think it’s just really interesting to watch this space. Obviously, we’re concerned about it, because it looks like it could replace the jobs of Hollywood workers, but it could actually have broader implications even beyond that. I think it’s nothing to panic about right now, but it’s something we should be mindful of, because as of this moment in 2024, it’s just interesting. It could be much more than interesting in a few years.

**Drew:** Do you feel like there’s a next step from it almost? Do you anticipate any of that or is it all just an unknown?

**John:** Right now, they’re showing the demos, but they’re not releasing the tool for people to use. That’s because there are obvious applications of this for disinformation, for deep fakes. All of that’s really troubling. Figuring out how you would even put this in the public’s hands is a big concern.

Some people pushed back against my blog post on it – we’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post I put up about it – saying, like, “John, you ignored the fact that AI material can’t be copyrighted.” I think that’s naïve. It is a fact that right now, existing U.S. law suggests that material generated by AI by itself cannot be copyrighted, but there’s really no clear gradations there.

My example of using AI to do some film enhancements… The Zone of Interest, there are these really cool sequences which I originally thought were animation, but they turn out they were shot with this night vision camera that looked really surreal. Those cameras are not high enough resolution to create a good image on screen, but they could take that and then use AI to fix the issues in it. That’s still going to be copyrightable. You still were starting with something.

I think the degree to which you can use AI to do stuff in your film does not make it un-copyrightable. That’s all going to need to be figured out. We don’t know what the line is right now. I think, as people who are working in guilds, we need to be thinking about how do we make sure that we help draw the line, and it’s not just the studios who are drawing the line.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Before we get to the new stuff, Drew, some things we need from our listeners. First off, we’re trying to do an episode that includes some counterfactual Hollywood history. I’ve been reading this great book on counterfactual military history, so like, what happens if this battle back in ancient times had gone differently and the other side had won? Would we be speaking Roman right now? Sometimes in history, small changes can lead to giant differences of outcome.

We’d love to do that for Hollywood, if we could, for a future episode. If you have suggestions for, if this one event had gone differently, what would the impact be. For example, if the movie Titanic had tanked and was a disaster, what would be the knock-on impacts of that? Or if Iron Man had failed, would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

We’d love your questions about that. It doesn’t just have to be about movies. It could be about television. It could be about some other impact of technology or if another country had gotten to a certain thing first. But what we’d love is not too sci-fi-ish. It’s not about what if aliens had invaded at this point. It’s about flip of a coin, a thing that could’ve gone either way, could’ve gone the other way. It’s always fun to think about that. If you have suggestions for counterfactual Hollywood history, we’d love to hear those.

**Drew:** Email those to ask@johnaugust.com, and I’ll look at them all.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, let’s get started with our mystery and suspense. Which episode are we hearing first, and which one’s number two?

**Drew:** It’s Episode 269 first, and then Episode 332.

**John:** Great. We will be back here after that with some One Cool Things and to wrap stuff up.

[Episode 269 clip]

**John:** Craig, get it started. Why should we care about mystery?

**Craig Mazin:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers, we’re trying to do something, and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question, but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything? Well, because, oh, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things.

And we get maybe a little distracted by the word “mystery,” because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity, and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative.

The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story, because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them, but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?”

Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character?” or “Why did she say that?” or, “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more, because we want to see what’s happening. And so often, they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human. It’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious. We insist upon knowing certain things.

If you walk down the street, and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, there’s no decision to want to know. What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right?

So as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of the crowd outside the store and its blacked-out windows. If our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating. We would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing, which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient and sort of frustrated and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much.

That’s a thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story. Otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished, in general, because people are too busy staring at boobs, and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part. So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs, because then it’s like, “I’m confused. I’m distracted.”

So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction – and I know you’re distracted – I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery; it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story. And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then it’s not really mystery; then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows.

This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens – and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges – with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it. I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways.

I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t. So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something? Because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking.

I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening, and I don’t know why they’re happening, so now I’m getting really worried and distracted.

And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused. If I’m watching a David Lynch film and suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be… This is abstract. Okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think, “I’m not supposed to be confused right now, and I am so confused.”

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards, that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers, because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie. That can be a real thing. That can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved.

And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form, What moments were you confused in a bad way?” Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions, because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for, like, “This wasn’t intriguing; this was annoying that I didn’t know what was actually happening here.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away and that answers will be revealed, and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie. That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book, because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Every single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, “Okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful.” And what you said before about you feel like, “If I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion.”

And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery. And after you’ve seen one of these movies, you recognize, in the third act, they will confront the mystery, and there’ll be little tiny mysteries, but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour, you’re going to know who the killer is, and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long arc stories of an Alias or a Lost, where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling that you had a sense of, like, “Are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries, or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?”

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important, I think, to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies, that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that? And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment, and so very broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, “Okay, who’s her? Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do” Very simple, very easy, and then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” “Did you do it?” “I did it.” “And?” “It was hard.” What’s it? Oh, I have to know. What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun, and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our “pick a card, any card.” People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing. It’s a flashbulb. It’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that I will never solve for you.

Just like what does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you will never know, and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to. And the situations where I see it is, you enter into two characters having a conversation, and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or how the actors actually changed some words, but it makes it seem like… They’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody, and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, “Wait. Are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is?”

So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery. But if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people… When you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious. Right? You are now involved. And that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved.

There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that, personally, I love this version when I see it. And every now and then, I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something, and the character lies. And we know they’re lying, because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions, and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like, “Wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here? I’m curious what that is.”

Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this, because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all. It’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just look at the lines and you’re like, “Oh, wait, he says this on this page but this and the other page.” If you don’t somehow single out that this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap.

I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will forget, like, “Oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there. That’s a lie there.” And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides, and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, “Oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.”

So this is a case where the slyly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores that she’s a terrific liar, something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, “Remember, this is not actually the truth here.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary. It’s later on when you want to think, “Okay, maybe somebody has forgotten.” Or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, “Okay, you’re a liar. Why? I need to know.” Right? So this is a good little mini mystery. Similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or you got a camera looking. Here’s a little mystery.

At the end of Inglourious Basterds, it’s not much of mystery, because you can pretty much see it coming, but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak, actually. I think it’s a friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak. Looking up at them looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa, and they’re talking about it. And we are the perspective, so we don’t know what it is, but they’re talking about it, and then we reveal the answer to the mystery. Listen. It may seem inevitable to you, because that’s how you saw the movie. It was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do, and it’s what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information. So in this idea, someone asks someone a question, and they get an answer, and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us. And that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” And the person goes, “Yeah.” And the person asking the question says, “Thank you,” walks outside, and starts crying. Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations, and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point, that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment, like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that, because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectations. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” No. You’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means. We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do, we should do and must do everything we can to create that movie. And if that means that we are directing on the page, in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle. No. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions, because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen. So the short-term mystery. So there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?” Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person, which is okay, or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are, for some reason, slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in. Well, okay. Why are they doing that? And obviously, they’re going to light it up. But why are they going to light it on fire? And what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries, I kind of think of those as middle-of-the-movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on, and there are some characters with relationships, who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t. They know secret motivations. They know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it.

This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie, to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward. It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then. So these are good little middle-of-the-movie things.

The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident.” But typically they are slightly more interesting than that, and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term “hang a lantern on things” and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice, I’m doing something here, so yes, you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here, and I’m going to be doing something with it later on. You are marking this for follow-up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie, at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. You’ve done the right job there, because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful, and that’s a great way of… The mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie, right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or your main character has a scar, and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “Mm.” And then maybe somebody else asks, “Where did you get that?” If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar. It won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing. If I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? They are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie, like, we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of, because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about a plot mystery, and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water, which in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it, but there’s a long-term mystery in it, which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it. Yes, they’re doing it to get money but there’s clearly a specific reason and there’s a plan, but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time, much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on what their actual plan is is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do, unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

[Episode 332 clip]

**John:** All right, let’s get to our feature marquee topic of this first episode of 2018, which is suspense.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Ooh, wait for it.

**Craig:** Wait for it.

**John:** So, suspense, actually, the word itself is fascinating. So, it’s from a French word “suspendre,” which is “pendre,” which is to hang, and “sus,” above. So, to hang above. What a great image that is. It’s like something is dangling above you and you’re waiting for it to fall. That is suspense. And that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we talk about suspense as a narrative device. It is that sense of there is something that is going to happen. You see it’s going to happen. And you are waiting for it. And attention builds because of that.

I would define it in a very general sense, suspense is any technique that involves prolonged anticipation. There is a thing that is going to happen. You see it. And you are waiting for it to happen.

**Craig:** The waiting.

**John:** Waiting for it. You usually think about suspense in a bad way, like there’s a bomb ticking under the table. But suspense can also be a good thing. If you are waiting for a surprise party, there’s a good suspense, too. So it’s not just thrillers. It’s not just sort of the big action movies that have suspense. It’s a technique that we can use in all of our scripts. And so I thought we’d dig in on that today.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great idea. I believe this topic was proposed by somebody on Twitter, so thank you for that. And it’s a very crafty thing, and I like talking about these. You know, a lot of times when we discuss writing, and I think a lot of times when we go through Three Page Challenges, we’re looking for truth. We’re looking for verisimilitude. We’re talking about how as writers we can create these moments, these people, their words and their actions that ring true to us. This is not that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In general, life does not have suspense at all. This is a very artificial thing. It’s as artificial in my mind as a montage, which simply does not exist in life. And yet we find it incredibly gratifying when we experience it. And because it is this technique, a craft, it’s good for us to talk I think about how the nuts and bolts of it actually work, because it’s one of the few times as writers we get to be mathematicians. And I like that.

**John:** I think it’s also important to focus on this as a writing technique, because so often you see Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and you think about it as being a director’s tool. And it’s absolutely true that the way a director is choosing to frame shots, to edit a sequence, to build out the world of the film or the TV show, there’s a lot of craft and technique that is a director’s focus in building suspense. But none of it would be there unless the writer had planned for that sequence to be suspenseful and really laid out the structure that’s going to create a sequence that is suspenseful.

And suspense, I should point out, really is generally a sequence kind of technique. Within a scene maybe there will be some suspense, but generally it’s a course of a couple of scenes together that build a rising sense of suspense. And so that’s going to happen on the page. So, let’s dig into how you might do it.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I guess to start with, I divide suspense roughly into two categories. Suspense of the unknown and suspense of the known. Because they’re very different kinds of suspense. When I think about suspense of the unknown, I think about information that is being withheld either from the audience or from a character. Do you know what I mean by those distinctions?

**John:** I think I do. So, the unknown is like we are curious. We’re leaning in to see what is going to happen. Or in some cases, we have more information than the character who we’re watching has. So, we know there’s something dangerous in that room, and so we’re yelling at the screen like, “Don’t go in that room.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But the other broad category you’re leaving out there is suspense of the known. Because of the nature of the genre, because of the nature of the kind of story that you’re setting up, we kind of know where it’s going to go. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. We don’t know what the actual mechanics are. And that is what has us leaning in, has us curious. It’s a question we want answered. And I think almost all cases of suspense, there is that question that we want to see answered.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think suspense of the known is far more common, and it’s also applicable across every genre, comedy, romance, everything. When we hear suspense, at least initially, we think of that Hitchcockian mode, which is more of the suspense of the unknown. Or it’s a kind of a whodunit suspense. The key for me when you look inside, for instance, there is information that you, the writer…

And by the way, let me just take a step back for a second. You’re so right in saying that this is something that is important for writers to understand. We think suspense, like we think all technical aspects of cinema, like for instance, montage, is from the director. And I argue, as I often do, that that is not true. It’s not that it’s not from them. It’s that it’s from us.

The writer must lay out the montage so that it has a purpose, that it has a beginning and an end, that it makes sense for the characters. It’s there for a reason. You don’t just haphazardly decide one day on set, “I think, you know what, let’s have a montage.” It doesn’t work that way. It is intentional. And it is from the script.

Similarly, we must plan our suspense. Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for it. How the director creates it visually, we can even put some clues ourselves into the script. But, yes, certainly directors have an enormous role to play in that. So let’s talk a little bit about that situation where there is information that you, the writer, have, the director has, but the audience doesn’t have, and also the characters don’t have.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the most classic example of this is the whodunit, where the character is trying to figure out who killed the person, who is the villain in this situation. There’s a fundamental thing which you as the writer know and the audience and the lead character does not know.

So, in order to build that suspense, you’re probably laying out some clues that will help that person get closer. You will have some misdirects. You’ll have some sort of near misses. You are trying to lead the character and the audience on a path that will take them towards it, but a really fascinating path that will take them towards the answer, with a lot of frustrations and delays that are ultimately gratifying.

I mean, the best kind of suspenses are kind of like beautiful agony. It’s that moment of delayed gratificatio,n and so when you finally get there, aha, it’s there. Other cases, you know, the suspense might be you’re trying to get away from that thing, and will you get away from that villain. In those situations, you as the audience might have more information about how close the other person is than the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also another classic kind of suspense of the unknown, what I’ll call, for lack of a better phrase, mystery of circumstance. For instance, Lost. Or I don’t know if you ever saw that old show from the ‘60s, The Prisoner.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which Lost is basically riffing on.

**John:** Yeah. What is the nature of this world? What the hell is going on? And you’re waiting for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so now everyone is confused and you’re confused, and you’re confused with them. But they’re making discoveries. And episodic television has this wonderful tool of suspense, which is, “Show’s over. What will happen next week?” That’s the cliffhanger. I mean, when you talk about cliffhangers, that is literal suspense. I am suspended over a chasm.

But figuratively, these sorts of moments of suspense are happening all the time, and all of it is creating this ache to understand, because what suspense is playing on is a human fact. And the human fact is that we naturally seek to make sense of and order the world around us. So suspense is playing with that natural desire that every human… Babies have it. So, this is something that’s going right to this primal need that the audience has.

Then on the other hand, we have the other kind of suspense, which I think is more common and very useful, even if it’s not always thought of as suspense, which is suspense of the known.

**John:** So these are situations where because of the nature of the genre, because of the kind of story that you’re telling, we have a sense of where things are going. We just don’t know how. We don’t know what the path is that is going to lead them there. And we are looking for clues that will get us to that conclusion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name yet. But you start watching Call Me By Your Name and you have a good sense of some of the things that are going to happen, but you just have no idea how you’re going to get those things to connect. And that is the thrill of the movie is watching those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think that the point of suspense is not knowing. And yet when we sit down and someone says, “Oh, here’s a movie from 1998. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez. And they bump into each other on the street. And he’s getting married and she’s the wedding planner for the marriage.” And you’re like, “Well, I know how that ends.” And you do. You know exactly how it ends. In fact, you know roughly how the whole movie is going to go, don’t you? Yes. And yet if you sit down and watch it, you will begin to feel great suspense.

And this kind of suspense to me is really anticipation more than suspense. It’s a slightly different feeling. It’s the feeling from the old ketchup commercials. Well, the ketchup is going to come out of the bottle. Don’t know when. Don’t know how. Is it going to come out in a big blob? Right? So, this is like watching somebody continually pulling a slingshot back. You know they’re going to let it go, but when? When? And you start to need it. You start to need it.

So, even though we know inside of these movies, like for instance, friend of the podcast Tess Morris’s Man Up. Is she going to get him in time? Is he going to get to her in time? Is she going to believe him? Is he going to believe her? Of course. Of course. But how? And will they? And is it going to go the way that we think?

This all creates this enormous suspense. And all of it really – I think you hit upon it earlier in a beautiful way – is kind of sweetly torturing the audience. That’s the point.

**John:** Yes. And so I will say that even the examples of the rom-coms where we as the audience know they’re going to eventually connect at the end – we can see what the template basically is that’s going to take us to that place – within those beats there will be moments in which we as the audience have more information than the characters do. And that is part of the joy. Within sequences, we might know something about the other guy that she doesn’t know yet, and that is important. Or we know that there’s a secret that’s going to come out and we’re wondering when will that secret come out.

So it’s not just one kind of suspense. There’s going to be little moments of suspense during the whole time. And even in action sequences, you know, will he get past that part of the cliff before the boulder falls? There’s always going to be little small moments of suspense within the bigger moments of suspense.

**Craig:** Correct. And this kind of suspense fuels genres that we don’t necessarily think of as suspenseful, but definitely are, and in fact require suspense. For instance, comedies of error. A comedy of errors is entirely based on suspense. Someone overhears something, misinterprets it, and then what ensues is a comedy that really is about us going, “Oh my god, would you just ask him the right question? Would you just say what you want to say and then it will… Oh, do it, do it, do it.” And then they finally do it. Every episode of Three’s Company was a suspenseful episode in its own way.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s take a look at some of the techniques a writer uses in order to build suspense, both on a scene or a sequence level, but also on a more macro level for the entire course of the story.

The thing I think we’re talking about sort of fundamentally is delay. And in most of these cases, the ball could drop immediately. The bomb under the table could just go off. But suspense is the ticking. Suspense is delaying the bomb going off, or having some other obstacle get in the way that is keeping the thing from happening, which you know is going to have to happen next. So those two characters finally meeting. The explosion finally happening. The asteroid blowing up. There’s going to be something that has to happen, and you’re delaying that. And you’re finding good reasons to delay that, that are reasonable for the course of the story that you’re telling, but also provide a jolt of energy for the narrative and for the audience.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in order to create delay, we have to do things purposefully. We have to use our story and find circumstances to frustrate the characters. And we have to use our craft to obstruct. And there are different ways of doing this.

The most common way and perhaps the easiest way, but oftentimes the least satisfying way, is coincidence. Coincidence is used all the time to frustrate and obstruct people. Instead of walking into the room and seeing somebody do something, they do it, walk out just as you’re walking in, and you just miss seeing them do it. And the audience goes, “Oh!” Well, that’s coincidence.

There’s a classic axiom. You’re allowed to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble or make things harder for them. You’re not allowed to use it to make things easier for them. And that’s true. But when we’re creating suspense and we’re trying to delay things, the less you can use coincidence, the better. Because no matter how you employ coincidence, the audience will always subconsciously understand you moved pieces on the chessboard in order to achieve an effect. It didn’t happen sort of naturally or for reasons that were human or understandable. And therefore, we’re just a little less excited by the outcome.

**John:** Absolutely. If we’re talking about two events, if it’s A and then B, if A causes B, we’re generally going to be happier. If we can see that there is a causal relationship between those two things, we’re going to be happier. But coincidence, I agree, can be really, really helpful. And the coincidences that get in the way of your character achieving the thing he wants, that’s great.

And it’s always nice when the bad guy catches a lucky break, because that’s just great. And so we’re used to having our hero suddenly have this big stroke of luck. So having the hero not get that stroke, or having the villain who you despise just really be lucky, or start to tumble but then save himself, that’s great. It’s surprising. And so it’s not what we expect. It’s going to be a helpful kind of way to keep that suspense going, to keep the sequence running along.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you can subvert your coincidences, all the better. For instance, there’s a famous and wonderful moment in Die Hard where our hero coincidentally catches the bad guy. He just catches him. He doesn’t know he’s the bad guy, but he catches him. And we’re like, “Oh my god, the coincidence of that just made life so much easier for our hero.” And then the bad guy pretends, in a way that is very surprising and shocking to us, to not be the bad guy at all, but to be a hostage. And our hero believes him. And now a terrible suspense is created because now we don’t know what will happen. We know the bad guy is going to use this to his benefit. And we know that our hero is now in terrible danger. We know it. The hero doesn’t know it.

Oh, suspense of the unknown. Wonderful. So in that case, you’re actually taking coincidence and using it in your favor in a way that isn’t even coincidental. So I love that sort of thing.

**John:** Over the course of Die Hard, which is a suspenseful movie from the core, you have this moment of intense micro suspense. Because we know at some point the gig is going to be up and Bruce Willis is going to recognize what’s really going on. But will it be in time? There can even be moments with Ian, just really small, second-by-second suspense, like, does he still have a bullet left in his gun? That is a question that you don’t know, he doesn’t know. What is the choice going to be? And as long as you can sort of juggle all of those things, you are going to make a much tighter, stronger sequence.

**Craig:** As a writer, you are looking for opportunities. You are looking for targets in which to create suspense. All the time, in every genre, again, every single genre, don’t think of suspense only as when will the bomb go off or who shot Mrs. McGillicuddy. And when you find those opportunities, it’s really important for you to use them. Exploit them, because they’re little gifts.

When you have a moment of suspense – for instance, the hero doesn’t know that he’s even caught the villain, he thinks the villain is a victim – wonderful. Use it. And inside of that, now you have free rein to just torture the audience. Do not be afraid to torture the audience. Be afraid of not torturing them. This is where you want to tease them. You want to tantalize them. You want to almost have the hero figure it out and then take it away from the hero. You want to drive them crazy.

This is sort of the closest thing writers have to sexual interaction with an audience. Sorry, Sexy Craig. I’m going to be unsexy about this. But it is a bizarre, flirtatious, sweet kind of torture, all of which is designed to delay release. It is a bit like saying, “I’m going to give you an itch and I am not going to scratch it. I almost scratched it. Almost did. Oh, you thought I scratched it, but I didn’t,” until you finally do it. And in this way, something that is as expected an outcome as “itch is scratched” becomes remarkably satisfying. It is a release. And in that sense, it is a catharsis.

**John:** It is a catharsis. And so I think it’s also important to keep in mind – we talk about the victory lap, and we talk about sort of the success at the end of that – when you finally do let that person have their success, make sure you give them enough of a scene to celebrate that success. Because there’s nothing more frustrating to me when I see a movie where the character finally does it and then it immediately cuts away to the next thing. Let them actually enjoy it for a moment, because we as the audience need that moment of release as well. We need that moment of celebration, like okay, we finally got to that thing.

You know, throughout this whole sequence, maybe we’ve seen that door in the distance, or we’re running into it and we get there and it just shuts. And the thing we’ve been going to that whole time is no longer an option. Aliens is a movie of tremendous success, where there’s always a plan, and the plan is always getting frustrated. And it finally gives us those moments at the very, very end where like, okay, we’re safe, everything is down, and we can sort of go off, quote unquote, “safely into the distance.”

So, make sure that in those teases and all the misdirects, the red herrings, everything you’re doing to set that up, make sure that by the time you get them through that sequence, you do get that moment of release.

**Craig:** And to guide you on this journey, dear writer, is your best tool: your empathy with the audience. Suspense really needs to be a function of your empathy with an audience. You already know the movie. You’ve seen it. You know everything. Now put yourself in their shoes. Do it over and over and over. Weirdly, they’re the most important character in your movie, even though they’re not in the movie. You’re thinking about them all the time. And it is especially important to think about the audience when we are talking about these, let’s call them artifices, because that’s what these kinds of craft works are.

If you do, then you’ll know, okay, in the moment where you finally do the reveal and you release the tension and the ketchup comes out of the bottle, well, again, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What do I want here?” And, of course, what you want to do is just wallow in the joy of it. Just let them wallow.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what does this actually look like on the page. Because we say like, okay, obviously film and TV directors are responsible for a lot of the visuals we’re seeing on screen, but the choice of what we’re overall going to be seeing there is the writer’s choice. And so let’s look at what those techniques look like on the page, because so much of successful suspense really is the scene description. Those are the words that are going to give you the feeling of what it’s going to feel like when you see it visually.

And so it’s cross-cutting. We’re with this character, and then we cross-cut to the other person who is getting close. It’s finding honestly the adverbs and the short, clipped sentences that gives us a sense of like how close they are to each other. Or like, he’s almost at the door. But then, no, it slams shut.

These are the cases where you may want to break out that sort of heavy artillery of the underlines, the boldfaced words, the exclamation points. Maybe even double exclamation points when it really is a stopper. So that we as the reader get a real sense of what it’s going to feel like to be the audience in the seat watching that up on the screen.

And that’s also why I’m so conservative with using those big guns when I don’t need them in action and writing. Because when you really do need them, they need to be fresh. You got to have some dry powder for when you really need to sell those big moments. Like, hey, pay attention to this thing because this is what it’s going to feel like.

**Craig:** 100%. And I also think the great weapon in our arsenal when we are creating suspense on the page – and you’re absolutely right; it has to be done with action – well, if suspense is delay, and suspense is waiting, delay and waiting for us in terms of text and page is white space.

When I want people to feel as if it’s an agonizing wait, I use a lot of white space. Burn it up, because that’s what it tells you. Sometimes I’ll do three, four, five things in a row. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boom. It’s amazing how cinematic that can be when 99% of the script is just line, line, line, line, line, you know, double space, line, line, line, line.

So white space becomes essentially your timeline. It’s your way of expanding that moment to agony. And it’s not something that you can get away with more than I think once in a script. And you may not need to do it at all. But if you do have that moment where it’s the big reveal, burn up some space and let people feel it on the page.

[End of clips]

**John:** All right. That was nice to travel back in time for a moment. We’re here in 2024 with some recommendations. Earlier, I was talking about Sora, the new OpenAI thing and potential negative implications of that. My One Cool Thing is GOODY-2, which will not do anything bad for the world. Drew, I know you like GOODY-2 as well.

**Drew:** I love GOODY-2.

**John:** It is the world’s most responsible chat bot. If you haven’t played with it, it’s really fun. It looks like ChatGPT or any of the other ones. You can ask it a question. It understands what you’re asking. It will not help you out at all. It will find a way to avoid answering it. It’ll give you detailed reasons for why it’s not answering it. I think what impresses me is you could think that it would have a canned list of responses, but no. It’s clearly doing a lot of AI work to really parse what the meaning of the question is and why it’s not going to answer you. I just thought it was really, really smart.

**Drew:** I’m dying to know how they built that model, because it’s really adaptive to anything you can throw it at. That’s really fun.

**John:** My guess is that they did not have to train a whole new thing. I think they just were able to find the right parameters, so peeling under the hood here a little bit, because we’ve had to do some of this work in our own experiments. When you send in a query to OpenAI or any of the open-source models, you get the string that the user types, but you can of course change that string to be whatever you want to get the model to say back. It may be wrapping whatever you’re saying in a bunch of stuff around it that says, “But make sure that you’re not giving them anything useful or dangerous, and pad it in a lot of really protective language.” They may have found a way to do that without having to actually train their own model. It’s just really smart like that.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a wider article about the chat bot and the reason why they made it, because they’re trying to point out the importance of safeties on chat bots, but also how difficult it is to do this and how you think locking this down would be the way to solve it. If you over-lock these things down, they become parodies of themselves, which is what this is.

**Drew:** There’s also something lovely about, at least feels like a different type of large language model. The way you’re interacting with it, it feels like it expands the possibilities of what these could be.

**John:** You were saying that you and Heather were playing around with it, trying to get it to do something.

**Drew:** Heather’s like, “What’s five steps towards world peace?” It won’t get you any of that. It’ll tell you why you’re in the wrong for even trying, basically.

**John:** Good stuff. What do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Drew:** I have a much more old-school One Cool Thing. I have books. I have an author that I love. Her name is Claire Keegan. In the last probably six to eight months, I have just devoured everything she’s ever written. She writes mostly novellas, really quick books. They’re small. You can read them in an afternoon. She’s got Foster and Small Things Like These are both incredible. She’s got lots of short stories. I just love her. She’s an Irish author. A lot of it has to do with rural Ireland. It sounds like it could be a little too quaint or a little too maudlin, but they’re not. They’re perfect. Claire Keegan is my One Cool Thing.

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

**Drew:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. Drew looks through all those questions, so please send them through. Send through your counterfactual Hollywood history scenarios. We’d love both your, what if this happened, and some things you think might be the outcomes of that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Apple Vision Pro. Drew, thank you so much for chatting through this with me.

**Drew:** Absolutely. John, I hope you feel better.

**John:** Thank you very much. Matthew Chilelli, god bless you for cutting this down to make me sound somewhat coherent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Apple Vision Pro. As everybody on Earth knows, I’m sure, Apple came out with this new mixed-reality headset. It’s complete goggles that cover your face, but it still looks like you’re looking through, because it has cameras that let the video pass through. It’s super expensive. It’s indulgent. My company makes software that runs on it, so we bought one. We have it here at the house. Drew, I would love your honest first opinion of using it, not whether anyone should buy it, but what is the experience of using it like?

**Drew:** The eye tracking is pretty amazing. The way it works out is it has its primary user, which it perfectly calibrates to, and then it has a guest mode. I was in the guest mode. Even that, its eye tracking is outstanding. A lot of it feels intuitive. The clicking your fingers to click the buttons feels intuitive. I had trouble moving some stuff or figuring out placing windows and that kind of thing. But it just feels like a new language in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. It’s hard not to be optimistic when you put one of the headsets on. When you’re outside of people wearing those headsets, it looks ridiculous. But when you’re inside and you’re playing with it, I’m wrestling with whether it’s going to be useful immediately. But it’s hard not to be excited. I don’t know.

**John:** I’m excited and also temper my expectations, just because I think it’s going to be a ramp up, and we just don’t know how steep the ramp up is to get to widespread use of these kind of things or if it’ll even ever be widespread use. In terms of the UI and how they do stuff, it reminded me a lot of the first Macintoshes, because the metaphors were just so different. You had to learn how to use the mouse and the abstraction of doing this. Putting on the Vision Pro and then using your hand to do stuff, they really walk you through that quickly. I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on doing a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges comparing it to early computers is that computers were clearly just so useful for doing things we had to do other ways before. If you needed to write a paper, man, it was so much better to write a paper on a computer than it was to write it by hand or write it on a typewriter. It was just a complete game changer. It’s not a game changer for doing a lot of the productivity stuff that we do right now on our computers or on our phones or iPads. It doesn’t change that. Some of the immersive stuff it does is really just incredible and has no parallel. It’s like being there, but it’s also like being there in a way you couldn’t possibly be there.

If you have a chance to go into an Apple Store, if they’re still doing demos, you can sign up for a half-hour demo, even if you have no intention of buying it, it’s worth seeing it, I think just because you get a sense, like, oh, this is where the puck is headed. We can do this stuff now. You have to think about what impacts does that have for you. How does it change the ways we write things?

Some of the immersive demos they have, Drew, you did the dinosaurs one, where it’s like Jurassic Park, but you’re inside Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs are coming over, butterflies are landing on your finger. It was really impressive, right?

**Drew:** It’s incredibly impressive. I think you can do that because it’s 3D models, because it’s CG, basically. They can place those around you so you’re interacting with it in a really immersive way. I guess that’s really the only word for it. I’m really curious to know what human beings and storytelling is going to be like with that on. I’m not sure what that’s going to be or how that would work, other than it just being a presentation.

**John:** I’ve gone through some of the other demos. They have Alicia Keys in the rehearsal room. They also have one where you’re at this rhino sanctuary. They’re both incredibly impressive, because there are cameras that are there, and it’s like having a wide angle lens, but you’re right up in there, and so these rhinos are eating out of your hands. You’re just much closer than you probably ever would even be as a human being to one of these things.

In the case of Alicia Keys, it’s really easy to envision a play where you’re watching it in this space, because it’s not just in 3D; it’s like it’s around you. It’s like being in a theater in the round. Amazing, but also it changes how you would write and stage something like that, because you can’t perform the same way to a camera when there’s multiple cameras, when the viewer can actually move inside the space with you.

It’s really fascinating. I think there will be incredible things built for this. We just don’t know what they’re going to look like. It may be the wrong assumption to think we’re going to adapt existing media to fit this. It may be a different kind of thing that only makes sense in these spaces.

**Drew:** That’s fair. I also think it’s got to be really hard to light for a 360 video. How do you hide that?

**John:** You put the lights up high. That’s what they clearly did for the Alicia Keys thing. Also, the cameras, they are in these white towers that feel kind of 2001. They look like maybe they’re humidifiers, and you ultimately figure out those were the cameras, because they’re in the space too, and you can see where the cameras are. For sporting events, it’s going to be incredible, because you could literally put the camera in places where you could never otherwise see, which feels great and real. That’s going to be fascinating.

All the entertainment parts of it are compelling. I’ve watched some television. I’ve watched parts of movies in there. It really is great when you want to just shut the whole world out and just focus on a thing. That’s really nice, because it’s increasingly difficult to do that in these times. I was watching an episode of television, and I wasn’t also looking at my phone or also doing something else. I was just focused on the episode. That can be really nice.

**Drew:** One thing I do really like about it, that it doesn’t have those hiccups, those visual hiccups that the other VR/AR headsets have, because I remember using the Quest for the first time and then taking that off, and even in my dreams, I was starting to have that visual latency. It was really strange. But this doesn’t do that at all, which really helps.

**John:** Also, I get super motion sick, and I’ve had no issues with that at all with this. Now, the essential reason why we bought this was because we make Highland and Weekend Read and other apps that can work on the Vision Pro.

We already have Weekend Read for the Vision Pro. It’s absurd but actually kind of cool on that. I can open up the script for Anatomy of a Fall, and it can be bigger than I am. I could scale that one to be bigger. You’re scrolling through, and the fonts scale perfectly. That letter G is as big as my hand, which doesn’t seem useful, but in a weird way, you can study a text closely, because you can literally come up closer to the text.

The version of Weekend Read we have for Apple Vision Pro is the iPad version, and so all the iPad stuff basically works in there. You can highlight stuff. You can have characters read stuff aloud. It’s amazing that it just works. Is it optimized for it? No, not at all. You can envision a better way to do it. But it’s fine for what it is.

What I’ll be curious to see is whether apps like Highland, whether it really makes sense to build special versions for Apple Vision Pro, because there could be something very nice about the sense of just, you have these on, just like you’re watching a movie. You can put all the distractions away, and it’s just you and the words. You’re in your writing space. You’re in your little writers’ room, and you’re writing the script. There’s something compelling about that, because it can use an external keyboard, so you’re not typing with the little weird, floaty keyboard. You can actually type real, full-speed stuff inside it.

**Drew:** We had a listener write in who shared an article about someone who has a whole setup in the Yosemite Valley setting of the Vision Pro and writes essentially in a little snowy cabin, but they’re in their chair at home.

**John:** That makes sense. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s David Sparks, who does a Mac podcast I think I was on many, many years ago. It’s true, I can envision you build your own space, and that just becomes your writers’ room. When I was writing the first Arlo Finch, I needed to finish that first book while we were living in France. We moved to Paris during a heatwave. We had no air conditioning. I’m writing all these snowy scenes. I have to ponder this wintery valley. I would find these videos on YouTube that are just 12 hours of snowstorms and just the sound of snowstorms.

**Drew:** I love those.

**John:** Put those on my headphones, and that would be my space. Even though it was 100 degrees in the apartment, I would channel myself there. If I’d had the Apple Vision Pro at this point, it would’ve been really nice to just, again, pull up that snowy Yosemite Valley and write the scene in that place. There’s something nice about conjuring that. It could be really great.

Anyway, I’m not recommending listeners go out and buy one of these things, but if you have a chance to try it, it’s really worth trying it, because they really are some fascinating directions in which it can move us, thinking about the future. We’re definitely going to put some more stuff on it. People who do have it, we’ll announce when we’re putting out stuff that could be useful for it. I don’t know. It’s fun to see something new that’s really well designed and yet you also sense is going to change completely.

One of the things it reminded me about too was the Apple Watch was introduced. It looks like the Apple Watch of today. But if you actually go back and look at the features that were in it and what they thought was important, it was completely different. It was all about sending your heartbeat to your friend or staying in touch with your closest buddies. It was completely different. They didn’t realize this is mostly a fitness tracker that also keeps notifications. That’s what the Apple Watch is now. I think we’ll figure out in the next couple years what the Apple Vision Pro really is for and what the use cases are, and a lot of what we talk about now will seem a little bit silly.

**Drew:** I wonder if that has been the barrier for most of the VR/AR stuff is just that people don’t have the headsets. I think like you were saying, having computers in your home let people experiment with computers and figure out what that is.

**John:** Also, I will say there are much cheaper headsets out there. For a certain thing, I’m sure they’re great and probably better than the Apple Vision Pro. The rock stability of the illusion that you’re actually in that space is so good that that’s why I’m saying even if you’ve tried other headsets and been under-impressed, it’s worth it to go into guest mode on somebody else’s and just see what the world is like.

**Drew:** Yeah, definitely.

**John:** Drew, thanks so much.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion)
* [Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It](https://johnaugust.com/2018/wait-for-it-2)
* [A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/a3-artists-agency-shuts-down-1235821430/) by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years](https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/bill-weinstein-verve-talent-agency-out-1235916578/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [A few thoughts on Sora](https://johnaugust.com/2024/a-few-thoughts-on-sora) by John August
* [GOODY-2](https://www.goody2.ai/)
* [Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot](https://www.wired.com/story/goody-2-worlds-most-responsible-ai-chatbot/) by Will Knight for Wired
* [Claire Keegan](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/274817.Claire_Keegan)
* [Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2024/02/contextual-computing-with-vision-pro-my-writing-cabin/) by David Sparks
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/632standardV2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 630 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome Celine Song, a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

We will talk about that movie, but also getting staffed on a TV show, raising financing, making your first feature in two different countries. But before that, staffing on a TV show, deciding between film school versus playwriting school. We’ll answer some listener questions. It’s a great conversation. And in a bonus conversation for premium members, Celine and I discuss Zoom and other online performances, including her staging of The Seagull on Sims 4. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We have the best listeners in the world, and they came through this week.

Drew Marquardt: We had a lot of people write in about examples of the Tiffany problem, which we talked about last week.

John: The Tiffany problem, that’s where Tiffany is actually an old name, so people used to be called Tiffany, but if you use that name now, people think that just seems weird, a period film should not have a character named Tiffany.

Drew: There’s quite a few examples. Courtney wrote in, “As a birdwatcher, one Tiffany problem I know of is the call of a bald eagle. Most Americans associate a bald eagle’s call with soaring, almost echoing screech, not pretty per se, but definitely powerful and approaching majestic. Here’s an example. (bird screech) But that’s actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk. An accurate bald eagle sound is almost painfully high-pitched and typically kind of chippy, like a yapping dog.” (eagle call)

John: Wow. That is really, really different. We’ll put a link into the YouTube videos of those two, because when you see the bald eagle doing its thing, it’s like, that’s not a graceful way of making a sound.

Drew: No, not at all.

John: A perfect example of a Tiffany problem, because if you put in the real thing, people would laugh. It just doesn’t sound right. We associate the bald eagle sounding a particular way, even though it’s not the situation. Unless you’re going to call it out, I think you’d go with the wrong version. What else do we have for Tiffany problems?

Drew: Michael in Astoria writes, “My favorite reference for the Tiffany problem is Deadwood and its infamous use of profanity. When researching, David Milch discovered that while historic analogs for his character did in fact swear freely, they would use archaic profanity that is comical to modern ears, would’ve had all the characters sounding like Yosemite Sam if they’d insisted on historical accuracy. So rather than provoke unwanted laughter in the audience, he opted for modern profanity that was accurate to the spirit of how the curse words were intended, but which the characters would not have actually used.”

John: Again, a problem where historical accuracy and specificity could’ve worked against you, and so you made the choice to have everyone dropping F bombs all the time. I get it. It does change our perception of how people spoke in that time, but they just don’t have any other real, good Western examples of profanity, so it felt real to me.

Drew: Although now I’m curious what those weird swears were.

John: I want to hear what all those words were.

Drew: Kate writes, “I used to be a children’s book editor, and I once edited a book of short stories set during the First World War. One author wrote a story set at a girls’ school, and she included a scene in which one girl wrote a note to another reading, ‘See you at,’ like the at sign, ‘break.’ And I queried this use of the at symbol. And the author assured me that the at symbol had been in use since at least the 1500s. It was used that way in the early 20th century. I told her that didn’t matter; it would seem anachronistic to a reader anyway.”

John: I grew up knowing that that symbol meant at or that we used it to mean at, although I think it also could mean to or at for a quantity at a certain amount at a certain price. I remember seeing it on typewriters, but of course we didn’t really use it everyday use until there were email addresses and ultimately handles for things. I agree with Kate here. At feels strange historically. I think it could bum for some people, even though it’s accurate.

Drew: Phillip writes, “Recently, my mom mentioned rewatching her favorite film, The American President, and how it occurred to her how much paper the people in the White House are shown using. This is accurate to the time it was shot. But it was shocking to her how much digitization has changed office work.”

John: Yes, I think if you look at older things… I remember looking at broadcast news. They have to use these tapes. They’re literally carrying tapes around.

Drew: Oh my god.

John: It seems impossible. Older movies are going to have paper in them. We talked about all the kazoos in Maestro, which is basically like, yes, people would’ve been smoking a lot in that time, but it’s just distracting, because there’s just so much of it. This mention of The American President, I have to take a little sidebar to talk about, Rob Reiner was on Love It or Leave It, this other podcast I listen to, and was talking about how Aaron Sorkin’s script for The American President was like 350 pages. It was some crazy, crazy long script. Sorkin later apologized for the script being so long, but apparently, a lot of the stuff that got pulled out of the script for The American President became The West Wing. So maybe that’s an argument for writing long sometimes.

Drew: I love The American President. It’s nice and tight.

John: Nice and tight. It was not nice and tight to begin with. Examples of the Tiffany problem. What else do we have for follow-up?

Drew: We had some listeners write in about different foreign courts, because we were talking about Anatomy of a Fall. Anonymous writes in to say, “I’ll share what I know of a Russian courtroom, which will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s read stories of people charged and quickly convicted in Russia.

“Back when adoptions there were allowed, you had to go to court to get yours approved. In our region, even with the foot-high stack of stamped, embossed, certified, and Apostille documents testifying to every aspect of your interest and ability to adopt and raise the child, there was still no guarantee you would get approved. And why? The room setup gives a clue.

“While the judge presides over the court from a familiar front-and-center raised platform, what’s completely freaky is that when you walk in, you see that the entire left of the room is taken up by a prison cell made up of heavy iron bars on all four sides and the top. This is where the defendant stands during the trial, though thankfully not prospective adoptive parents. We get hard, wooden benches.

“When I asked why, it was explained that contrary to our legal principles of innocent until proven guilty, in Russia when someone is charged, it’s assumed they’re guilty and you must prove your innocence from jail. I looked it up later, and legally, this is in fact not true. But as they say in Sleepless in Seattle, it sure feels and looks true.”

John: This is an example of just the courtroom setup. Imagine that there was a scene taking place in a Russian courtroom. If, in the script, you did not actually describe what things are like, we would default to our American expectations of a courtroom, and they would be wrong. It would be a very different feel from what we actually would see in the film. This feels crucial information for a screenwriter to know if you’re going with this kind of scene. Similarly, in Anatomy of a Fall, if you didn’t know what that French courtroom was set up like and would just default to an American thing, you would be just incredibly wrong.

Drew: David in Australia writes, “I want to share my experience sitting on a jury in Australia. The biggest disappointment for me was that the jury was removed from the court any time there were matters of law to discuss. Whenever a lawyer would overstep or they needed to discuss precedent in certain areas of the case, the jury wasn’t privy to this information. The public galley could stay and listen during these moments, but the Australian system seems to think that this would taint the jurors. I guess it’s probably better than having a judge tell the jury, ‘Disregard everything you just heard,’ because let’s be honest, no one’s disregarding that stuff.”

John: I’ve been on one jury trial, and there were situations where I felt like the matters of law went to the judge’s chamber, so rather than us leaving, the judge and the counsel leaves to talk in his chamber. But yeah, it again is a structural thing. You do need to know what the differences are in a different country, because otherwise you could get this wrong in a way that would hurt your story. Let’s wrap up with, I see Lewant has a thing from the Netherlands.

Drew: To your point about defaulting to the American style, Lewant says, “A one-panel comic from a Dutch newspaper says, ‘Fulk and Zuk spend most of their student days watching TV.’ And this judge says, ‘Will you please stop referring to the stenographer as members of the jury?’ The joke is that the Dutch court system does not have a jury system, yet most of us personally witness it through U.S. media.”

John: Exactly. If you’re in one of these countries, and you’re expecting a jury trial, and there is no jury, that is very different. Again, if you’re writing a scene that is taking place in a foreign courtroom, don’t rely on your American expectations of how things are supposed to work, because it could be very, very wrong. Drew, thank you for the follow-up.

Now, let’s welcome on our guest. Celine Song is a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Celine, welcome.

Celine Song: Thank you. Hi, hi. So happy to be here.

John: We’re so happy to have you here. I really want to talk to you, of all the folks out there on awards season, because I think your experience feels probably the most relevant to a lot of our listeners, who are aspiring filmmakers, because not only is this your first feature, but you’ve made it internationally. It’s complicated between two countries. It’s a very personal story that you could’ve done as a book or as a play, but to do it as a movie felt like the right choice.

We had Lulu Wang on a couple years ago to talk about The Farewell. It felt like she was telling a story that only she could direct, and so same like you only would make sense for you to direct this. It just felt so relevant to a lot of our listeners.

I’m so excited to talk to you about not just your movie, but also the process of getting to the point where you could make that movie. Could we start back at the beginning? What is your experience or history with storytelling and with filmmaking? Where did that start for you?

Celine: To me, I went to grad school for playwriting. Then I stayed in playwriting. I was a playwright for 10 years, including my years in grad school. I was doing a lot of plays in New York City, off-Broadway. I wrote on a TV show as a staff writer, Wheel of Time. That was the first for-screen writing that I’ve done. I think it really was writing the script for Past Lives, and it really was the script that did the work of getting itself made. But I’ve been a dramatist for a lot longer. I feel like that would be the right word for it. I’ve been a dramatic storyteller.

John: Can we wind all the way back though? Because I’m really curious when you were aware of stories being told on screen. What got you to the point of, “Oh.” Because before you decided, “I’m going to go to school to learn this,” you had to think, “This is a thing that’s interesting to me.” What are those original sparks? Were there things you were seeing? Were there plays you were seeing? How did it all start?

Celine: I think when I was very young – I was like seven – I wrote a poem about a spider eating a butterfly. The poem was about how it is sad that the spider is eating the butterfly, and the butterfly is getting eaten, but what can you do about it? Because spider is really hungry. Spider has to eat. I think that really is my first foray into writing really more than anything. I really do think about that as my first piece of work, because I think that there’s something about that, what that poem is about, that I think lives in me pretty fundamentally. For example, there not ever being any villains.

John: I want to get into that with Past Lives, because it’s a story without villains. I think you said in an interview the only villains are time and circumstance. It’s fate that’s made this thing not be possible in a certain way.

Celine: Time and space.

John: Of course, your characters are able to overcome some of that because of the wonders of technology and Skype, but there’s limits to how much that can happen. But still staying on your trajectory there, you’ve written a poem. You can write a story with characters. But why go into playwriting, why go into filmmaking ultimately, rather than becoming a poet or a novelist? What was the trajectory there? At this point, were you in Korea when you were writing that story? Had you already come over to Canada? What was your history there?

Celine: I wrote the poem in Korea, in Korean. Then when I turned, I think, 13 is when I moved to Canada. I was ESL, so I was learning English. I think that was a main thing that I was doing, and keeping up with schoolwork while being ESL. Eventually though, I took Latin in school, and I became a part of Classics Club.

In Ontario, where I grew up, Ontario, Canada, there is a classics conference. There they actually have a play competition, where you write a play and you get to put it on. There’s also a filmmaking competition, both of which I wrote and directed something for. Mind you, I was still a little ESL. But I wrote a movie and directed it, and then I wrote a play and directed it. This was high school. I think that those were some of the ways that I was just doing it sometimes, doing it any opportunity I could get.

But when I went to college, I went to university for psychology, and I minored in philosophy. I think that for a while there, I thought that I was going to be a psychologist. But I never made it, because in my final year as a psychology student, I wrote two plays for the short play festival that was happening at my university. I was like, “I think I just have to write fictional things, write dramatic things.” Then I think that after that, I started applying to grad school, and I decided to go to school for theater.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are ESL, who either they’re living in the States but grew up ESL, or they’re living internationally and they’re debating between writing in their own native language and writing in English. At what point were you deciding, “I’m going to focus on English,” or, “I’m going to use the two of them.” At what point did you feel like the artistic work needed to incorporate both or one thing? What was your process there?

Celine: I think that to me, it really has to do with who the audience is. I think that if I am making something for a Korean-speaking audience, then I would probably write it in Korean. But I think because my audience that I had moved to New York City to be a part of the community for is an English-speaking audience, so I was writing in English. I think it was very much about, how do I tell the story in a way that the audience is going to come meet it? Who’s going to fill the seats? I think that really was the impetus behind it.

I think something that is very difficult about being ESL is actually less the not knowing English of it, but the lack of confidence, or the way that it is harder to hold onto the confidence, especially as a writer. To be a professional writer, the professional writer means that you are the expert, you’re the chosen expert, or you’re the expert in a community for communication and being able to use language and being able to experiment with language, all of those things.

The ESL, it is, of course, a bit of a chip on your shoulder about, “Yeah, but it’s not my native language, so how good can I be?” That’s of course something that is coming from everyone around you, who when they find out that you’re ESL – or in my situation, I have a light accent for being an immigrant – and all of those things, there is a way in which you are questioned or underestimated by people who English is a native language. But some of that, I think that of course becomes a little bit internalized. So you walk around feeling like, “If I’m ESL, how good can I be?”

But I think that something that really shifted that for me and really gave me such confidence is that, actually, I have a handle on two languages. When I think about the language of English, being able to look at it objectively or think about it objectively or from the outsider perspective, even a little bit, gives me actually more control. It actually gives me a deeper understanding of how English as a language works.

There was a really amazing feeling that I had working on a play where I was like, actually, I am in the engine of the English language, because it didn’t come naturally to me. I didn’t just show up and then English was there for me. I actually had to learn the parts of it. In that way, I can be better at it than a native speaker.

In the meantime, I also have the context of an entirely different language that works completely differently structurally, that gives me the depths of knowledge around language, generally, that it makes me actually a better mechanic in general of any kind of language too. Also, I know what the alternative is. I’m like, “There isn’t a word for it in English, and there is a word for it in Korean.”

What an amazing thing that just the way that I think about the world, the way that I think about character, story, can be just a little bit bigger, because I speak more than one language. I think that that was such a big turning point for my life as ESL. I hope that moment and that feeling of confidence comes to all your listeners who are ESL as well.

John: What I hear you saying is to avoid that tendency to apologize or to step back from the fact that you’re not a native speaker and lean into the fact that because you had to learn it, you actually recognize some things about the language, and you recognize what’s beyond the edges of what’s possible in normal English.

Celine: Yeah, and also specificity. When I’m choosing a word, I can be more specific with it, because it’s not how I have always thought about that word. I can be really specific with it.

John: I grew up in English, but then I had Spanish very early on. Spanish was my first process of learning a language and actually learning, oh, there are verbs, there are nouns, there are adjectives. I actually had to learn all this structural stuff that comes with the language. Getting that in the third grade was really early for me, but it was incredibly helpful to recognize, oh, we must have these same things in English and probably every other language too, and just give you a systematic sense of like, languages will do very different things, but they’ll still have the same concepts behind how they are organizing themselves. It made me just more curious about English, because I could see where the roots of things were. You saw how things grew together and grew apart over time.

Celine: Exactly, yeah.

John: Now, I want to talk to you about writing in English and writing in Korean, because obviously in Past Lives, characters can speak Korean, and we will subtitle it, which is great, because that’s a convention of film is that we can subtitle things. But if you’re doing a play work with Korean characters, subtitling is much more difficult. I haven’t seen your play Endlings, but in that play, are the characters speaking English and speaking Korean? How do you approach that for the stage?

Celine: They speak English. I think that something that I really found is the way that Past Lives is a script that’s written is bilingually. I would write what I wanted the character to say in Korean, and underneath, I would translate it in the way that I saw the subtitles. And of course, I knew that the subtitles is a part of the story.

For example, there’s a scene in the film where the character Hae Sung, who only speaks Korean, the character Arthur, who only speaks English, they meet each other for the very first time. If this movie was about a traditional love triangle, they would start being angry with each other. Because this is an unconventional love triangle, what happens is that Hae Sung and Arthur, they look at each other, and then the first thing that they do is Arthur says hello in Korean, in bad Korean, and Hae Sung says hello in English to Arthur, and in bad English. I

n that way, you’re seeing that these two characters are trying to speak in the other person’s language, and really choosing to speak in a language that is not comfortable for themselves. I think in that way, the movie is fundamentally a bilingual story. It’s actually about bilingualism. It’s about the way that the main character, Nora, holds two parts of herself that are in different languages and different cultures. I think in that way, I knew it needed to be written bilingually, and I am bilingual myself, so that is what I wanted to do.

Then when it came to subtitling the film, I wanted the subtitles to be a part of the picture. It’s part of the visual language of it. When the subtitles show up or the subtitles don’t was something that I wanted to be really specific about, because some part of the language has to remain a mystery, because it is about the mystery of not speaking the other person’s language or not speaking the language of the person that you’re in a marriage with, even. It had to work that way.

John: Obviously, in the childhood sections that are set in Korea, or if you’re with Hae Sung and his friends who are speaking Korean, it’s more conventionally subtitled. You’ve written English lines. You know exactly what they need to be. But it feels more traditional in the New York sections, where there are characters who wouldn’t be able to speak with each other. You’ve been much more cinematic in terms of recognizing the communication gaps between them.

Celine: Of course. Of course, some of the translation is not meant for direct accuracy. It is sometimes rewritten to express the feeling that I need it to be. I think that sometimes it’s like, the metaphor, the poetry of it in English is not going to translate to Korean and vice versa. I think that those are the things that I wanted to be deep in it with, because that’s really what the script was about, and it’s what the movie’s about.

John: Now, before you could go off and make this movie, you actually had another credit. You’re working on Wheel of Time, the Amazon series. I’m really curious, what else were you writing that got you staffed on Wheel of Time? That was your first staffing job. Could you talk us through that? Because a lot of our listeners are probably thinking about, it seems impossible to be staffed on an American show like that. What was your process getting there?

Celine: I think I just wrote a pilot. I wrote a pilot as a spec pilot. It was about professional poker players. It was just there as a sample. It was a traditional three-act with commercial breaks, kind of like a hardcore TV pilot. But the thing is, I know that this is something the showrunner of Wheel of Time, Rafe, and I talked about as the reason why Rafe hired me, which is that Rafe doesn’t play poker, but when he read my pilot, he understood poker, if not the game itself, but what poker is at its heart. Even if you don’t know the mechanic of poker, you understood why poker is fun.

That is a skillset as a writer that he was looking for, because of course, Wheel of Time is a very intricate and deep, with magical systems, fantasy show. You need a writer who is able to translate just a wall of meaning kind of story and to find something that even somebody who’s not familiar with the world can love. I think that that’s why he loved the pilot and that’s why he hired me for it. Also, I am a TV writer who had read Wheel of Time before. I think that was another part that I think was really great.

John: I realize I’m falling into a trap that so often happens in interviews where you assume that every step was deliberate and planned, so that you wrote this pilot so you could get staffed on Wheel of Time. That wouldn’t be the case at all. You’ve gone and got your degree in playwriting, right, as a graduate degree?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: But what were those years in between? What were you trying to do that caused you to make the choices you did, to write the plays you did, to write this as a pilot? When did you get your first representation? What was that process like? Because it wasn’t overnight.

Celine: No, of course not. I think that if it is overnight, I think that you pay for it being overnight somewhere else in your career. Does that make sense?

John: Yeah.

Celine: I think that’s a very real thing. But it was certainly not overnight. I graduated from my MFA program for playwriting, and then I didn’t have representation. For many years, I think I really didn’t have anything except for my plays that were getting done in smaller spaces or off-off-Broadway, or if you’re lucky, a little bit of something at off-Broadway. So much of it is about just walking around with your play and submitting your play and hanging out with other playwrights and complaining about how no one’s doing our play. I think so much of it is about working in theater and living in theater.

John: Were you teaching? What else were you doing? What other jobs were you-

Celine: I would have a day job, or it would just be like getting by on things. I had a play that was getting done in Omaha, that got done in Chicago. Sometimes those checks would come in, and that would be really great. But it’s a check for like $500, which at the time was like, “Okay, now I can pay rent.” But it is like that.

I think that in 2017 – I’d been out of school for, I guess at that point, three years – is when I got my agent. I got my agent through, there’s this program at the public theater called Emerging Writers Group. Only people without agents can apply to that program. I went there, and at the end of the two-year program, they set you up on a few dates with agents. One of the agents that I went on a date with is my theater agent now as well. He’s at CAA. Of course, because of the nature of the agent that CAA is, they have many other departments besides theater.

I met my theater agent, and then he helped me get a team together. Then I told them that I would like to staff on something or something. Meanwhile, I was talking to my current film agent. I was telling her about, I’ve been thinking about this movie, Past Lives. I think it’s happening a little bit like that. It really is the work of my agents, who both got me the staff writing gig for Wheel of Time, because they’re the ones who put my poker pilot on Rafe’s desk.

John: Before we jump on to getting Past Lives made, just a moment on Wheel of Time, because that would be a situation where you’re writing in a room. You have a bunch of other writers around you. In what ways was it similar or different to what your experience was as a playwright? Because you were apparently in a playwrights community, so you had some folks around you, but this had to have been different.

Celine: Oh, completely different. But also, I think that the thing that carries us through all of it, through every medium, is our understanding and authorship of characters, story, what we need when it comes to performance. Everything that we know about what is going to work about the script is going to be the thing that carries us through all of it: story and character. That’s it. In that way, it’s not different, because all day in a writers’ room, we’re just talking about story and character. That’s what I was doing in theater. That’s what I was doing on the set of Past Lives too.

The way that it is different is that – especially for a show like Wheel of Time, where the fans of the books themselves is the audience. They’re the primary audience. They’re the ones that we are showing up for – it’s an amazing giving kind of a process. I found it to be a very giving process, where it’s like, “I would like it to be like this.” It’s like, no, no, no, these characters exist. These characters are also dealing with already existing beyond my own personal imagination. They exist in the audience’s imagination, and then of course it all begins with the imagination of the book itself. I think that some of it is about serving the characters or serving the story, which is not necessarily how I think about writing a play, for example.

I think that’s part of it, and also working with other writers on story and character. There’s always something to learn from any writer. My whole writers’ room, I learned so much from every single writer that I worked with there, because the way that I think about story is going to be different than the way they think about story. We may go my way or their way, but either way, it’s all going to be this amazing learning process of me learning how she thinks about the story this way and I think about the story this way. What an amazing thing that there is a different way to think about the same story. I think in that way, I learned so much from it. I don’t know. It was amazing.

John: Now, with Past Lives, you’ve now written a script. You have shown it to your reps. You’re talking about, “I think this is a movie I want to get made.” From those initial conversations, was it, “This is a thing I’ve written for myself to direct.” Was that always part of the framing of it?

Celine: I think that I really wanted to direct, and I really wanted them to see me as the director for it. But I think that it’s a script being written bilingually, and myself being bilingual, or it being such a personal story that is inspired by an autobiographical moment, all of these things were great reasons for them to let me be the director. I think that I was just also making an argument with the script itself, because the script was very much a pitch document for how I imagined this movie to get made. It wasn’t just a script for its own sake. It was very much a description of what I imagined the movie to be. I think these were all things that I was stacking up so that they would really seriously consider letting me direct it. Of course, when I got to, I was so happy.

John: It’s hard to imagine someone reading the script and then meeting you, and it’s like, “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or, “She doesn’t know what this is.” Clearly, it was very close to your personal experience. Let’s talk about the process of going out and trying to find producers, trying to find money, what that was like. You have this script, but you also have yourself. Was there a reel? Was there anything else you were showing to convince people this is the vision for the movie?

Celine: There was no reel. There was no deck. It really was just a script. I think it was a script and a conversation. I think that’s the truth of it, because my studio, A24, they read the script, and they felt the things that the audiences are feeling now about the movie at the end. They cried for the same reasons that the audiences are crying about Past Lives now. I think that they were moved by it genuinely. Then it wasn’t a long process from going from there to getting the movie green-lit.

John: To bring the movie into A24, was there a producer? Was Killer Films already attached to it, or did that come later on? Was it CAA who was taking it to A24, or was there other producers brought on first?

Celine: CAA’s bringing it to A24 first, because I always knew that, especially if I wanted to direct it, they’re the ones who take the risk.

John: That felt like the right studio for it, for sure.

Celine: They’re the right studio, because they’re the ones who take the risk on first-time filmmakers. They’ll just go for it that way. I think that we always knew that we wanted to end up there. I feel like that’s one of the first conversations. I feel like when we were there, when I’m talking to them, I think that so much of it is about instilling confidence in them that I can do it.

Besides that, the thing that really opened the door, and the thing I think that, especially because this is a podcast about writing, I feel like something I want to for sure say is that the script is the thing that bursts through every door for me. This movie was going to get made because of the script, and that’s it. I didn’t have to tell them what I could do by making a reel or a short film or anything. Those things were not necessary, because the script was a movie that they wanted to make.

Then from there, even beyond that, from the producers to department heads, every single person who worked in the movie, the thing they were coming to make this movie with me for is not me or my reel, because they’re coming to this project because of the script. Usually, I could tell who was right for the project by how they felt about the script, because of course, when I was talking to my production designer, I knew she was the right person right away, because we just started talking to each other about the script. I knew that this was the right person, because I knew that she understood the script.

It’s an amazing way to also, in a way, learn if this is the right person for the project, which is, did they understand the script? Did they feel the script? Did they feel connected to the script? If they did, they were going to work on the movie. The script was the center of gravity. All I had to do was to remember that even when I didn’t know how to make the movie, because my first movie, and I don’t know how to read a call sheet, even then, I just knew that as long as I hold the key to the script, as long as I’m the expert on the script that I wrote, I’m the ultimate authority on the project.

John: A thing we’ve talked about on the podcast a lot is that the script has to serve so many functions these days. Christopher Nolan was actually on the podcast recently talking about the same thing, which is that even at his level, the script is still the sales document. It’s not just the blueprint, but it’s also embodying the feeling of what this movie’s going to feel like. And that is not only getting the studio involved – A24 in your case – but also all your collaborators, just making sure that they recognize how they can fit into this vision of what you’re trying to do.

When we were meeting with crew for Big Fish or for Charlie’s Angels, those are very different scripts, but do they connect to the vision of it? Because if they don’t connect to the vision of it, they’re not going to be the right person for it. If they don’t get the style, the feel of it, they’re not going to be the right fit, and that’s okay.

Celine: Of course.

John: It’s recognizing that some relationships are meant to work in that thing, and some relationships aren’t. Sometimes you find issues where a person is fantastic; they’re just not the right person for this specific role, this specific part in a production. Sometimes longtime collaborators will split up on a thing, because it’s just not the right fit for both of them.

Celine: I think that’s right about it being the sales document, but I also think about it as the first line of defense too, as in what the project is and how well it’s going to go or what’s going to work about it is going to be all in there. Part of the vision for a thing is coming out of that.

The vision for it, it’s like, I can make as many mood boards as I want. If the story and character and dialog, what the performance needs to be, if those things are not there, there’s no amount of mood boarding that’s going to get any director through anything. I feel like a part of the reason I know that is because I’ve been a writer for the longest part of my life. I also know that so much of it is coming from, that’s the first step towards the vision for it. It is going to completely dictate the vision for it, especially if I am the one who’s directing it. I think you’re right; it also is about collaborators. Maybe it’s just not right for them to work on it, even though they are longtime collaborators and all of that.

But I also think that it’s like, the director is the person who is the passionate core of the whole thing, the writer director, because the script is the center of gravity. And then, of course, all around it, part of how it should work is that the fire that you have, the fire that the script communicates – because that’s how it is. I know that there’s a fire in me that I’m communicating through the script. When they read the script, when they encounter the script, the people who might work on the movie, either it’s going to set them on fire, or they’re not going to understand why it is on fire. Then what you’re hoping for is everybody showing up burning to make this make this movie with you. I think in that way the document has to be damn flammable.

John: Exactly. Now, Celine, when you wrote this script though, this flammable script, you had not been through the process of casting and location scouting and directing and editing, all that stuff. You’ve now gone through all this process. As you’re looking at the writing you’re doing now and the writing going forward, how much do you think the experience of having been through this will influence the words on the page and the script you’re writing going forward?

Celine: Completely. Everything that one does is built on the things that one has done before. I think in that way, without question. I do think that there are parts of going through the whole process that I had done before. For example, casting, I had done before, because I was in theater.

Editing, I realized, I had done before, because editing is such a fundamental part of writing. Editing is something that is happening all the time. Of course, in the editing of a film, you’re also editing it visually on top of it just being text or it just being the way that a performance is going. It’s a funny thing, because those parts, I had no fear or problem around, because this is a thing that I knew how to do.

Editing I knew how to do and casting I knew how to do. Being on set, I did not know how to do. Location scouting, some parts of it, I know what it is, because at the very least, I knew when it wasn’t right, and I knew when it was right. In that way I knew. But now, when I go on location scout, will I actually be able to look at it through the eyes of someone who actually has to go and shoot it? Absolutely. There are parts of prep that I think I just feel so much more equipped for because of it. The writing of it, of course, has always been the way it’s always been. The writing of it is the same.

I do think that I am more efficient though in my second script, my script after Past Lives, because I think that I can already imagine myself sitting in the edit and being like, “Did I need to shoot that scene?” What’s amazing is now that I know what kind of resources are put into shooting a scene, it means in the case of our film, which is, of course, shot in New York, it’s about parking 20 trucks in New York City and bringing hundreds of people around New York City. The work of that, the pain of that, the effort of that, the collective, beautiful effort, the stakes that are involved in shooting a scene I think really does inform the way that I write now, as in when I write a scene, it’s always like, “Is this absolutely the scene that has to be in the film?” The answer has to always be yes, because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting in the editing, it’s like, “Look at the half a million dollars just-”

John: Burning there, yeah.

Celine: “… on the editing room floor.”

John: I made a bunch of movies before I directed my first one. I knew a lot about production and post-production and how it all fit together and worked. But by the time I was writing my first thing that I’m going to direct, I could understand what the constraints were and use those constraints in a really helpful way, to recognize, okay, these locations are going to be onerous unless I make decisions that makes it much more feasible to shoot in these locations.

Recognizing what’s hard and what’s easy in production can really help you out when it comes to making the choices in the script. That’s why we always, on this podcast, encourage people to crew up on a film, experiment, just go out there and learn how actual things get made, because it will help you figure out, in your own writing, how to prioritize if stuff is actually going to work and not get so stuck on things that may end up on the cutting room floor.

Celine: Yeah, totally.

John: We have two listener questions I think you would be a perfect person to help out with here. Drew, can you help us out?

Drew: Nikolai in Denmark writes, “I would love nothing more than to find a writing job in Los Angeles. However, I’m currently an undergraduate student studying literature in Copenhagen, and there’s 5,000 miles and two years of school before even buying a plane ticket to LA is feasible. I was wondering if you think going to a top screenwriting program in LA could be a path towards finding a job, any job, right out of college and starting a career that way.”

Celine: I think that the moving to LA of it feels pretty necessary if you want to make movies in LA. My favorite part of moving to New York City to go to school in New York is also finding the community there, because I didn’t have a community at all in New York City. When I got to go there, I got to meet my classmates, which was a built-in community that comes with the school. They themselves had communities of their own that they could share with me. In that way, I could walk into New York City with the community built in, and one that is expanding. In that way, it was a really rewarding process.

The thing that I don’t think that a MFA program necessarily does for you is make you a better writer, because I think that you walk in as a writer you are, and then you become a better writer by writing a lot in a low-stakes way, which is something amazing about these writing programs. What’s amazing is that you can keep writing and sharing it with peers and keep failing and being bad and all of those things, without there being any professional stakes or any kind of financial stakes, except for, of course, the tuition fee. That’s a stake. But as long as that’s figured out, I think you are able to fail outside of the view of anybody who is in the industry or anything for a really long time. I think through that, you become a better writer.

Of course, one can find mentorship in the professors, who have gone through the industry and the life as an artist for far longer than you have, or far deeper than you have, at least. They’re able to provide such mentorship or a sense of how to navigate certain things. These are some of the things that really work about it.

Now, if you think that you’re going to move to LA and go to school there and then you’re going to have a career outside of it when you come out of it, I think, unfortunately, that is not a guarantee, to say the least. You still got to do it yourself. Every single part of this is something that you have to do yourself. No one else can do it for you, not even the grad school program that you’re paying a lot of money to go to.

John: Celine, you and I both have MFAs. No one has ever asked to see our MFA.

Celine: Oh my god. Why would they? I wouldn’t ask to see my MFA.

John: A huge plus one on everything you said. I think it’s such good advice, that you’re going to find a community and some mentorship, and those are all good things about a film program. The downside, of course, is the cost. What is probably useful for Nikolai to be thinking about is that getting into one of these programs is a way to get his visa and get him to the U.S. and get him here for two years. That’s worth a lot, so that’s really a lot of what you’re going to be spending your money on.

If you decide to do it, Nikolai, I would just say make sure you’re really approaching this as this is your mission, this is your job. You’re coming here to do a thing, because you’re only going to get out of one of these programs as much as you put in. Really be looking at it like, “I’m full speed going ahead.” If you don’t think you’re quite ready for it right after undergrad, then take a year, just grow up a little bit, so that way you would actually come to a program, you’re ready to kick ass in it. Drew, another question from Jacob here.

Drew: Jacob writes, “My writing partner and I just finished writing the pilot for a comedy show we’re developing. We’ve begun inviting our writer and actor friends to join us for a table read, so that we can hear our script out loud and hopefully get some honest feedback. My writing partner and I are in disagreement. Do we share the script ahead of time for our writer and actor friends, or do we have them read it blind?”

John: Celine, what’s your instinct on table reads? Because you probably do this in theater as well.

Celine: Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading after reading. I actually have trouble really seeing the script that I’ve written, whether it’s a play or a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends.

My answer to this question is I think that they should read it blind, as though they are your audience, because how good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft, because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. We love actors, and we rely on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it. Sometimes that’s undue pressure on the script.

I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you would need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that the story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small group of audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry or something, but are able to read on sight.

I’m sure you can go through your list of friends, and you can find a funny list there. But I think it’s usually somebody whose main job is not being an actor and somebody who’s able to read on sight and is able to be clear in their reading, but does not have high stakes when they show up, and will talk to you, like a very first audience member, and who’s not going to be weird or mean about anything, who’s not going to be strange about it, but who’s going to be a wonderful vibe on top of everything. I think that once you find some of those people, I think they’re the folks who have to read it.

But I don’t think you should show it in advance, because you just want to see the way that the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working. If the joke doesn’t hit, you don’t want to wonder if the reason why the joke didn’t hit is because they already read the joke and they already laughed about it. You want to see if the joke actually isn’t hitting the audience or that it is actually hitting the audience.

John: Mike Birbiglia, when he is doing one of his movies, he will bring over a group of friends, and with pizza. I think he’s very deliberately, like what you say, lowering the stakes. No one is auditioning for a part. They’re just reading through the script and getting a sense of does this feel like it’s working. They can have constructive conversations. Agreed, Celine; if you bring an actress to do that, they can sell something that doesn’t really quite work. There’s that feeling that they’re auditioning for stuff, and that can just be really tough, so I think really smart advice here.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our audience that they should check out, something useful or fun. Mine is something I just find myself using all the time. I don’t think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s called Shottr. It’s an app for the Macintosh which basically just takes screenshots.

So often, there’s something on your screen that you want to take a shot of and send to somebody or remember. You have the built-in screenshotting stuff in the Mac, but then it just saves it as some randomly named file. This is an app that you hit the keyboard command, take your little screenshot, and then you can just do stuff with it. You can mark it up. You can annotate it. You can put little arrows, like, “This is the problem.” It just makes life so much easier and handier. A quick little utility. I think it’s five bucks. Called Shottr. It’s S-H-O-T-T-R dot-CC is the URL for it. Check it out if you’re on Macintosh and you take some screenshots. Celine, do you have anything to recommend?

Celine: Yes. Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s what I recommend.

John: Oh my god, it’s so amazing. We talk about it on the podcast all the time. Tell us, Celine, who are you playing as your hero, and what’s your experience in it?

Celine: I am a custom character. Her name is Faunta. Part of it is that I just treat it as a story mode dating sim a little bit.

John: 100 percent, because you’re trying to connect with all the different characters in the game.

Celine: Exactly. I think you can play it however you want. It’s one of the most in-depth storytelling, I don’t even know what to call it, storytelling thing that I’ve ever experienced.

John: Isn’t it just so well written? I’m flabbergasted how well it’s put together.

Celine: It’s beautifully written. I’m fully invested in the characters. I’m fully invested in the story. Of course it has so many things that are usually just fantasy things, like the magic. It’s because it’s so foundational to the fantasy genre, the Dungeons and Dragons of it anyway. I think that those things are all there, but I think even beyond that, I just feel so immersed in it. I really do think that these characters are living and walking around in that way. I don’t know. I’m just so moved by it. I’m obsessed with it. I play it all the time.

I think that as a storytelling thing, I’m just, you’re right, flabbergasted. I’m just totally blown away by how good it is, and how I’ll just get into a story, and I’ll be so in it, and it’ll be so complex. The characters are all responding to it in an unbelievably sophisticated way.

John: Then to recognize how many branching decisions they had to plan for, because is that character even still alive at this point? Has Astarion ever met this character? It’s wild.

Celine: Of course. The consequence is real. There are real consequences to the story. It’s not like, however you play, you’re going to all end up here. No, you may not end up there. You may have a completely different situation. Now, you cannot deal with this character that way anymore because of what you’ve done last chapter. I don’t know. I’m just so into it. My TikTok algorithm is all Baldur’s Gate right now. Anyway, it’s so good.

John: The YouTube algorithm keeps sending me videos of like, here’s the interactions you missed or when Minthara becomes a zombie. It’s all the different wild things that could happen because of choices character make.

Celine: Of course.

John: Just that sense of agency that it gives you as the protagonist, whatever your hero is in it is just really remarkable.

Celine: It’s really remarkable, yeah.

John: Basically, we have a podcast now where we talk about how good Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but it’s true. It’s really, really good.

Celine: It’s true. It is really, really good. Game of the year.

John: What’s also really, really good is Past Lives, your film. Congratulations on it. Congratulations on your nominations. It’s such a delight to see. I remember my first experience with Past Lives was I was on a long international flight, and the woman next to me was watching Past Lives. I wasn’t even sure what it was. I could see Greta Lee and just some movie there. She must’ve watched it like three times on the flight. I’m like, why are you watching this movie again and again and again? I waited and watched it in a proper non-airplane environment. But it really is so well done, so congratulations on everything you’ve achieved so far.

Celine: Thank you so much.

John: I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Celine: Thank you. It’s in movie theaters again.

John: That’s exciting.

Celine: So amazing.

John: People can see it.

Celine: So exciting.

John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. 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. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Seagull staged in Sims 4. Celine Song, absolute pleasure having you on the show.

Celine: Thanks for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: When I saw this in your bio, I knew I had to talk to you about this. You staged a version of The Seagull, the classic play, but you staged it inside Sims 4 and streamed it on Twitch; is that right?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: Talk to us about your impetus behind doing that. I also would just love to talk about this notion of theater kind of things that happen online. Tell us about how this came to be.

Celine: It was just really during COVID. The theater that I had a play, Endlings, done at, because of COVID, had shut down prematurely. We had two weeks of previews, we had opening night and then we got to do one more performance, and then the play got shut down. I was, of course, so heartbroken.

Then I think the theater was, because it is so much about people gathering and it’s about live performance, that I think there were questions about what theater community can be doing at this moment to make theater. I think that New York Theater Workshop, which is the theater that did Endlings, they asked me if I want to do anything in the virtual space, whether a Zoom play or whatever. They were like, “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. We’ll do a production of it, whatever it may be.”

I really just thought at that moment, it’s like, “I’ve been watching a lot of live performance, actually,” and a lot of live performances in the video game streaming world, where all of these characters and personalities, they were streaming video games. It’s a funny durational performance in a way, because they’re streaming for like six hours playing Overwatch or something. I was watching a lot of it. In fact, there is all the joys of a live performance in that. There’s something about it where there’s the spontaneity in it. There is a bit of like, we know what we’re going to do, but it also is a little bit unknown, we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, feeling of it.

I think that at that moment, I was like, “What if I was to stage a play in a video game?” Then a thought I had was, because The Sims is, I’ve always felt, so Chekhovian, because The Sims is about life as it is, and the difficulty of life as it is, and the pain of living as it is. Those are things that are fundamental to a Chekhov play. My favorite Chekhov play is The Seagull. It really was that the New York Theater Workshop called me, and then I think on that phone call I came up with the idea. I was like, “What if I stage a play in The Sims? It should be a Chekhov play, maybe The Seagull.” I think that’s really the process for it.

Then of course, what I really loved is that when I was doing the play, the two completely different communities came together. Then of course, there was community that had a relationship to both sides, which is the people who are theater goers, who never watch video game streaming, who don’t have a relationship to video games, and video game players and video game stream watchers, who don’t actually know anything about the classic play. Then there were those of us who were in the middle of that Venn diagram, where we are in a circle that contains both of those communities. We were like, “We know video games. We play Sims. We grew up on Sims. That’s part of our community. But also, we know what Chekhov is.” I think that all three groups of people came together.

I staged a play for two nights. I think each performance, quote unquote, was four hours each, and it happened over two nights. It started from me basically casting and costuming the characters to going through all four acts of the play.

John: That’s great. I remember during the pandemic, my daughter was in high school at the time, and she was involved with theater. Their plays got knocked to being Zoom plays. One of them was more traditional. One of them was just chaos. It was interesting to be able to experience this as a live event – a sort of live event. My mom could watch it from Colorado. People could participate in something in a way that wasn’t traditional. And yet I do feel like I associated so strongly with the pandemic and being trapped in that place that it’s hard for me to vision them trying to do that kind of thing now. And yet there was something really amazing about that new form being out there.

What do you see as things you took from that or things you’ve seen since then that we could keep doing, bringing weird communities together, or finding new ways to stage either classic things or storytelling that is meant to be streamed live, versus a classic either filmed or stage entertainment? What do you think is still entertainment in that space?

Celine: The ancient way of storytelling, which is just the setup, the revelation, introducing a character, you see the rise and fall of that character, there is certain things about storytelling that is fundamental in the bones of it. It’s always going to be, no matter in what form and no matter in what generation, is going to just work, because as a story, that just works. I think it’s about remembering that part while we are adapting and navigating the new realities, the new ways of watching things, the new ways of hearing stories, new ways of telling stories.

I think that even through all of that, what I find over and over again is that there are stories that endure, and these are the stories that have existed forever. We know that cavemen told these stories. To know that those stories are still going to be the same stories that is going to move us, that’s going to mean something to us, I think that it is to hold these two contradictory thoughts themselves. I don’t think we can stop progress or the way the technology is coming in or the way that storytelling as a form is changing all the time. I don’t think it’s possible for… It’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hand.

But I know that even through all of that, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve also learned through telling the story that is Past Lives, and to tell it globally, and to tell it to every generation, it is always that every step of the way, what works about the Past Lives story is one that would’ve worked on the cavemen too. I think it’s that. It sounds contradictory, but I know it’s not, the feeling that it’s both. It is that it is eternally traditional and conventional and ancient and that it is brand new. It’s always changing. It’s always different.

John: On this thread of classic stories or ancient stories or retold in different ways, I want to acknowledge that Sleep No More is closing in New York. Sleep No More as an experiential place, where the story was happening around you, and yet you weren’t always seeing all parts of it. In some ways is like Baldur’s Gate, in which you’re not going to catch all the threads. There’s no way to actually see all the different possible branches of it. I do think there’s room for experimentation. There’s room to try new things.

Some of our listeners who are probably so focused on, “I want to staff on a TV show,” or, “I want to go make a movie,” should not discount the possibility that there could be some fascinating way to tell a story that’s not part of those traditional buckets, and do that if it’s interesting to them, because they are more likely to find that new thing than an established filmmaker is to do it. They have the freedom and the access and the membership in a community that might be able to help them find a new way to tell a story.

Celine: Of course. Also, the truth is that everybody’s looking for the thing that worked before. I think some of it is about how we break through the risk-averseness of the industry.

John: Celine, absolute pleasure talking with you about this as well.

Celine: So fun. Thank you so much.

Links:

• Celine Song on IMDb and Instagram
• Past Lives
• The Seagull on The Sims 4
• The Wheel of Time
• A real bald eagle call vs a red-tailed hawk
• Deadwood and The American President
• Shottr
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/cork-grease).

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Episode 629 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, should you break up with a producer you like but who doesn’t seem to be moving a project forward, how should a writing team discuss their individual work, and when is it okay to say no to inclusive casting? We’ll answer these and other difficult questions, plus a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at listeners’ pages and give our honest and only semi-filtered feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll delve into some advice we’d love to give ourselves. All right, Mazin.

**Craig:** That’ll be interesting.

**John:** We got some time travel. We got some hypotheticals, all that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** But we got follow-up first. This first bit of follow-up is, Craig, you had asked last week how many of those How Would This be a Movie things that became actual movies had we recommended. I think, Drew, you did the research on this.

**Drew Marquardt:** Yep, I went through. Of the 12 that were actually made, 4 of them were ones you said could be a movie.

**Craig:** Okay. So offhand, that doesn’t seem like a great average. In baseball, it’s excellent. Now my new question is, of the eight movies that we said shouldn’t be made, how many of them were considered successful, meaning were we right anyway?

**Drew:** There are some asterisks on that, because Zola is one that you said no, but there’s something to take from it. I guess that’s not so much an asterisk. But there’s another one, the Kamiyah Mobley Story, that you had said no, not quite. That was the one where the girl realized the woman she thought was her mother her whole life wasn’t actually her mother. You said not exactly the story, but there’s a version. Then you went on to essentially pitch A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One.

**Craig:** I guess this goes to show that John and I are about as good at being movie executives as movie executives are, because I feel like this happens all the time.

**John:** We try to pick the winners. We definitely gestured in the direction of things that could get made. But actually, more stuff was able to get made than we even picked. Our little Scriptnotes studio did not choose to make those films, but other people did, so good for them.

**Craig:** Right, not bad. Batting 333.

**John:** Now, Craig, in Episode 627, Aline and I did a How Would This be a Movie without you. Sorry.

**Craig:** No, it’s fine.

**John:** But we actually had a success we didn’t know was actually a success, because one of those story topics we discussed was about this guy, a mathematician who figured out a way to game the lottery and win. It turns out there actually has been a movie that was basically the same premise.

**Craig:** That preexisted it or…

**John:** That was made two years ago. The story that we were talking about was actually 30 years old, but there’s been a recent movie that actually was largely the same premise.

**Craig:** You guys were asking if this could be a movie, when in fact it already was?

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** That’s a double asterisk.

**John:** A double asterisk. This is Jerry and Marge Go Large, which is a movie that I’ve only seen on in-flight entertainment options. It’s about a mathematician who scams the Michigan State Lottery to save the small town where he lives.

**Craig:** That is a pretty good idea.

**John:** It’s a pretty good idea. It works. One last bit of follow-up I see in the Workflowy here.

**Drew:** Chris in Oakland writes, John’s been talking about learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, and he recently started learning an alphabet that was created as a better fit for the sounds of English. “It’s called Shavian. It was created in honor of George Bernard Shaw. He wanted to get rid of silent letters and all the bizarre spelling and have something that made sense.”

**Craig:** I clicked on the link to this website and immediately started laughing, because it’s its own alphabet, and it looks so much like what I would call science fiction writing.

**John:** Yeah, or fantasy writing.

**Craig:** When you’re on an alien ship.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** This is alien writing. This isn’t going to happen. I guess that’s my biggest issue is why are they doing this? It’s not going to work.

**John:** Because you can. It’s one of those things, if you could go in from the start and actually have it make sense, this is a way that it could make sense. I spent a couple minutes going through this. I’m actually impressed by some of the choices that they’ve made, because there is a logical consistency with how these sounds work in English and what these shapes are on the page, which totally makes sense, because the IPA, for all its wonders, is a beast to read and there ends up being so many special marks on it to get the actual flow of it right. It’s hard to really read it. I think you probably could train yourself pretty quickly to be able to read this in a natural way.

**Craig:** Sure, but you won’t.

**John:** You won’t.

**Craig:** I understand why they did it, and I assume that they did it really well, but this just seems like a strange exercise, because it is impractical. It’s not going to happen.

**John:** It’s like Esperanto in the same way. It’s an artificial system that improves upon how we’d naturally do things, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever going to get used.

**Craig:** Esperanto at least has the benefit of being the first. They didn’t know that Esperanto would be a total failure when they invented Esperanto, but the people that did this know about Esperanto, so they really should know better. But I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that perhaps the people that have invented Shavian understand that really this is kind of an academic exercise. I hope that they know it’s an academic exercise.

**John:** I do recommend everyone click through the links, because it does look really cool, and it does look like all the sci-fi science you’ve seen, which I support. I enjoy that as a thing. One of the interesting choices, as I was clicking through and reading stuff, that was very, very smart in here is that… We’ve talked about on this podcast, I’m sure, that certain Englishes are rhotic and not rhotic. In America, we say water, and we actually pronounce the R’s. In a lot of the UK, it’s watta.

**Craig:** Watta.

**John:** Watta.

**Craig:** Watta.

**John:** You don’t pronounce those final R’s. Cleverly, Shavian, their symbol for that last -er, -ar, -ir sound is one glyph that marks it as that sound. If you are pronouncing this with a British accent, you just wouldn’t pronounce the R. If you’re pronouncing it with an American accent, you would pronounce the R. You don’t have to put a separate R there that is pronounced or not pronounced based on your dialect.

**Craig:** But isn’t that what R is doing, in ours?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We see an R, and we either pronounce it or we don’t.

**John:** But if you were to put the R in Shavian, then basically everything you see there is supposed to be pronounced, and so it would not be the same word for these two people.

**Craig:** We’re running into problems already. I have huge issues with Shavian, clearly.

**John:** Is it solving a problem we desperately have? Not really. We got the IPA. We got other ways to do this. I just love people who are spending the time to tilt some windmills and do some fun things.

**Craig:** I think this is where you and I find ourselves differing. You love them.

**John:** Which is fine.

**Craig:** I’m like, what is going on with you? That said, I’m also the person that sits and builds large Lego sets, and there’s no purpose for that.

**John:** Absolutely. If these were not designed to reproduce language in a way that is spoken, but were instead a kind of cipher that was used in word puzzles, Craig Mazin, you would love it.

**Craig:** The point of the cipher in the word puzzle is to decipher the cipher.

**John:** Not to use it on a daily basis.

**Craig:** Correct. I do love deciphering ciphers though, and there are so many. John, there are so many.

**John:** There are so many ciphers.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions. Often, we do these late in the podcast. Let’s start it this time with some-

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** … past questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s start with George in Berlin.

**Drew:** George writes, “How do you balance specificity versus not excluding actors for consideration based on things like race? Where do you find it important to be more general or more specific? Are these the kind of things that you would try and rewrite after a film or show was cast?

“I’m currently writing a family drama, and the way the family functions is informed by the fact that they are a white, middle-class family in the north of England. There’s a level of arrogance and refusal to change written into the family, as a byproduct of their situation. They’re white, they’re middle-class, living in a predominantly white, smallish town in the Northeast, and this has obviously massively shaped their worldview. If my protagonist were, say, the child of immigrants, and the family were members of a minority community, I think their experience of growing up in the Northeast would have been radically different. It doesn’t necessarily mean their life would be better or worse. They would just be different people objectively.

“I want to be specific. I want to hone in on the cultural nuances and the specificity of the situation, but I don’t want to write nonwhite actors out of consideration for the role just because I wrote from the perspective of a white, Northeastern English experience. If the family’s roots were Asian, Indian West African, or East African, the family and the characters would be different in each of those culturally specific situations.”

**John:** I like how thoughtful George is being here. He’s trying to balance this sense that he has written a very specific family that is attuned to the experience he needs in this story, and at the same time, he would love to be able to open roles up to nonwhite actors, and feels like it’s just not going to work because of the specificity he’s put in there.

**Craig:** I think George is being thoughtful, but perhaps too thoughtful, meaning it seems like George is writing a defense against somebody being angry with him because he wrote parts that were specifically for white people.

Now, here’s the thing. As we change the way we cast things, and try and include traditionally under-represented actors, that’s about getting rid of what I believe we’ve called default white, so that kind of thoughtless, “Okay, I’m going to write a character, and that character is plumber. Unless I say otherwise, we’ll just assume that’s a white guy.” That’s the way it used to be. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re not doing that for small characters, large characters, big characters, small. However, when we are writing characters that are specifically connected to a culture – that’s an important word, not race, but culture – then we have to write for that culture.

In this case, George, I would suggest that you don’t think about race as much as culture. You are specifically writing about white, middle-class, Northern England culture. Therefore, you may say you don’t want to write nonwhite actors out of consideration for the role, but you have. That’s what you’ve done. That’s not a crime, because this is about white culture in northern England, so that’s okay. That’s okay.

I don’t think we should be twisting ourselves into pretzels when there is an easy answer for things. If you were writing a story about Pakistani British culture in northern England, you would be excluding white actors from consideration for the role, because it’s about Pakistani British culture. This is fine. If you’re not specifically writing about that culture, then yes, I think open casting is a wonderful thing and should be promoted and celebrated. But I think you might be complicating this a little bit, George, because you’re a little nervous maybe that someone’s going to go, “Why did you write parts for white people?” Because you’re writing about white stuff. That’s why.

**John:** Sometimes Craig just answers a question so thoroughly and completely that I have nothing left to add, and that’s one of these happy situations. Craig, well done.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Chris in Glendale writes, “When Academy voters vote on Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, are they expected or required to actually read the screenplay, or are they allowed to base their vote on just watching the film?”

**John:** Easy answer. You are not required or expected to read the screenplay. I would say over the last 10 years, there’s been a much more concerted effort to make screenplays available to everybody who wants to read the screenplays. They can actually look at the words on the page. But no, you’re not required to.

Most people are not basing on that. Instead, they are basing their vote on what they perceived was the best writing, the best storytelling, the best work that was probably attributable to the screenwriter, and yet there’s no perfect way to know how much of what seems like the screenwriter’s job was that screenwriter doing that work there. You don’t know.

**Craig:** You don’t know.

**John:** In many ways, the award can also be called best film that probably had a great screenplay.

**Craig:** I think that applies to best directing and best casting and best editing, and even best cinematography, which you think is evident.

**John:** But no. Look at the acting awards. All those acting awards are also dependent on great editing and-

**Craig:** Great editing, great directing, and great writing. It’s really hard to get a Best Acting award if the script is bad, if the director is bad, if the movie is bad. These things are actually not particularly determinable. It’s all gut checks. I find it all fascinating from an anthropological and sociological point of view. But even though the word “best” is in front of all these categories for all the awards, in reality there simply is no way to determine that. Really, it’s just the one more people voted for.

**John:** One of the weird things about a screenplay though is that the absolute best screenplay of the year, if it’s not also a fantastic movie, no one’s going to pay attention to it. No one says, “Oh, that was a great screenplay, but the movie was only so-so.”

**Craig:** No one would know.

**John:** That’s never going to happen.

**Craig:** Also, the converse is true. When a movie gets the Best Director nomination, but doesn’t get Best Screenplay, how is that possible? How can you get the Best Director nomination but not get a Best Picture nomination? How is that possible? How can you get Best Actor and not Best Screenplay? How is that possible, since a screenplay was the thing that created the character in the first place and wrote all the words down that the character says? How is any of that possible? Really, if we wanted to be purists, there would be one award, and the award was Best Movie. That’s that. It’s a short ceremony, and everyone goes home.

**John:** There are awards that day. The National Board of Review is just Best Movie. They don’t give anything else.

**Craig:** That makes sense. By the way, also unnecessary, because we don’t need to say what the best movie is. The fact that everybody disagrees on what the best movie is is probably an indication that it doesn’t really make sense. Best movies, movies that made us happiest, all in favor. Same for television. But I don’t run these things.

**John:** As he’s headed off to the DGA Awards.

**Craig:** I myself am not nominated for a DGA Award, but I am rooting for Peter Hoar, who directed Episode 3 of The Last of Us.

**John:** Excellent. Another question.

**Drew:** Freshly Repped writes, “I started working with a new writing partner in August. We wrote an animated pilot that everyone seems to like, so much so that we got repped off it. First script, first submission, first agent. Both of us have been writing for years before this, but this is easily better than anything else either of us have. Now that we’re repped, my partner wants to show our agent her individual samples and the writing she’s done with her wife. I feel like this is a no-no, given that he’s trying to pitch us as a team. We have no credibility yet, since we’ve never staffed or sold a thing. My partner thinks there’s nothing wrong with bringing him other material, because we each have individual contracts with the agency, and nothing in those precludes us from working with other people. I’d love to hear your thoughts and appreciate your help.”

**Craig:** Tricky one. What do you think, John?

**John:** Tricky one. I would love to hear from some writing teams for what their perspective is, because I’ve never written as a team. You wrote as a team a zillion years ago. My instinct is that the letter writer is correct in assuming that it could confuse the situation about who they’re representing and what the voice is of this team. I think you should focus on the work that you’ve done as a team and not be showing the work you did separately at this moment in your careers.

**Craig:** Here’s the part, Freshly Repped, that is a little dicey. That is that it involves your writing partner’s wife. Look. You can certainly imagine a situation where your writing partner is at home, and she’s telling her wife, “Hey, good news. Me and this other person, we’ve got ourselves an agent.” The wife’s like, “Oh, what about the thing we did? You love that, don’t you?” She’s like, “Uh-huh.” Now, maybe she does, or maybe she’s just trying to keep her wife happy, because happy wife, happy life. I don’t know.

The other thing is, I don’t know if that stuff’s good. It may be that it’s worth having a conversation with your agent and saying, “Look. This is going to happen. I can’t stop this from happening. I don’t want to stop this from happening. That would probably be a huge fight and cause resentment. But please be honest with me when you read it. If you think it’s really, really good, then it’s good for me to know, because I kind of need to know that it’ll be a little bit of a divided attention situation. If you think it’s bad, I back you on… If you need to be polite about it, but not be super active, then we can all just play the game together quietly and politely.”

But I tend to feel like the truth is, good stuff wins; better stuff beats not-as-good stuff. If your writing partner and her wife are writing things better than you are writing with your writing partner, it’s just going to happen. There’s nothing you can do. I suspect that’s probably not the case.

**John:** No, it’s not the case. If you look at the first paragraph here, “First script, first submission, first agent. Both of us have been writing for years before this, but this is easily better than anything either of us have.”

**Craig:** I’m going to assume that, Freshly Repped, your perspective is honest and at least close to accurate, in which case, have the confidence to just… My advice would be to let it happen and just let the natural course of events take their path. The agent will not waste your time. It would be so much better for you and your new relationship with your new writing partner to let the agent say, “Guys, I’m going to concentrate on the two of you, instead of one of you and her wife.” I would just see how it goes. There’s no way to get around it, basically. That’s my feeling.

**John:** If we do have teams who want to write in with their perspective, I’m really curious what you guys would recommend, because I know it’s always challenging. People are writing separately and together. If you can offer some best practices, we’ll love to hear it.

**Craig:** I don’t love that the partner is doing this. I wish I could know if they were being coerced or not, because that does happen.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Hrothgar in LA writes-

**Craig:** Hrothgar.

**Drew:** “A few years ago, one of my scripts was featured on a script hosting service and later optioned by an actor producer. Working with this producer has been great. They have good notes, communicate regularly. They seem like a genuinely good person. But they’ve also never produced anything. It’s been several years now. And though we’ve attached a qualified director, the project feels like it’s moving forward at a glacial pace.

“Recently, another director found me online, expressing interest in the project, but only if they direct. What’s more, they claim to have financing, and based off of their resume, I’m inclined to believe it. I want to remain loyal to my original team and be patient, but I’m also deeply broke, and staying the course gets harder and harder every year I lose money being a screenwriter. I don’t want to be an asshole, and I want to make good art, but I’m also tired of selling my plasma to afford ramen.”

**Craig:** Oh, good god.

**Drew:** “How do you know when someone just can’t get a project off the ground? Is it foolish to chase the shiny offer and maybe actually get paid or does loyalty actually count for something in show business? If you do ever take a project away from a producer, how do you go about doing it?”

**Craig:** What do you think, John? Hrothgar is selling his plasma for ramen.

**John:** It’s making ramen money. For a different project I was working on, I did look up the business of selling plasma. It’s profitable-ish. It’s a thing people do. You can’t sell blood, but you can sell plasma.

Here’s my guidance for Hrothgar. I think you’re right to be independent of this director coming by and expressing interest. I think you’re right to be wondering whether this is ever going to move forward with this director and producer situation. I think it’s worth having a conversation with them about it.

You can honestly say, “Listen, guys. Another director has approached about doing this. They seem to actually have money and a plan for production. I want to talk to you about this. I don’t want to blindside you, but let’s be realistic. Are we actually going to get this thing made?”

That’s a conversation you can have. It’s also a conversation your reps can have. Nothing in your letter says that you’re repped by anybody, but the fact that this did get set up and has some stuff around it leads me to believe you might have some reps who can help you out in this situation, which is part of their job.

**Craig:** I think that’s right. There’s nothing disloyal or unethical about telling the producer, “I have good news. We may have found a director and financing.” You would be actually committing malpractice if you didn’t mention it. This sort of thing happens all the time. You’re not saying, “Hey, this director is going to make the movie, and also, you’re gone.” The actor producer stays. They stay on as a producer. It happens all the time. It’s a credit, so that gets figured out.

Now, if the director is saying, “I have financing. I want to direct. Also, no other producers,” that’s different. Then they can fight about it. But you don’t have to fight about it. You were the hot one in the bar, so let these guys beat themselves up over you. But you don’t need to… This isn’t about disloyalty. You need to pursue it if it’s a legitimate offer and situation. You owe it to yourself to pursue it. Of course.

**John:** First sentence, it says, “Optioned by an actor producer,” so there was a contract at some point that was official. It wasn’t just, say, like, “Hey, I really like this. Let’s just talk about stuff.” But it doesn’t seem like it’s significant money, certainly not enough for Hrothgar to be able to live and afford his ramen with just this money. It does make sense to have a conversation with them about this outside party. It gives you an excuse to have the bigger conversation. It’s like, is there any plan to actually get this thing produced?

**Craig:** When these things happen, sometimes there are some hurt feelings that are just mis-expressed shame, because they haven’t been able to get it going. But if you are kind and generous about it and just clean and simple, I think the producer has as much interest in you and seeing the movie get made. It’s the attached qualified director that’s going to get pinged off of there. You don’t have any loyalty to that person at all.

I apologized to that director, but this is one of the weird cultural things about Hollywood where we overindulge directors and their feelings, and routinely discount and underindulge the feelings of writers. You’re selling part of your blood to eat food, and you can’t afford to worry about this director’s feelings. They didn’t write anything. They didn’t do anything. They haven’t done anything yet. Just attaching themselves clearly wasn’t sufficient, so I think if there’s an alternative, you must reach for it.

**John:** Also, I’d say that the fact that some other director has expressed interest, maybe there’s other folks out there who are also interested, and so this could be a moment to really look at, is there an interest out there for this project in general. Yes, have the conversation with this new director, but also be looking, is there another way to get this thing actually made, because you’ve probably been so fixated on trying to make it with this one producer and this one attached director. There may be other ways out there.

**Craig:** I do admire you, Hrothgar, in that you’re even thinking about these questions and loyalty and art. When I was poor, I did not. I just didn’t feel like I should be selling my blood. I will say, maybe this will sound mercenary and counter to the far more self-care-oriented and self-regard-oriented values of Generation Z and Millennials, but I feel like getting some financial stability in your life will give you freedom to grow and be a better artist, especially for screenwriting, because screenwriting is one of the only arts in existence that doesn’t become complete until people produce it. That is its completion. Yeah, get yourself paid, Hrothgar.

**John:** Do it. Let’s do some Three Page Challenges. For folks who are brand new to the podcast, welcome aboard. Every once in a while, we do a Three Page Challenge. We invite our listeners to send through the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a feature. They sign a little release. We discuss it. We put the pdfs up online so you can read through them with us if you want to. We’ll also give you a short summary. But as a reminder, everyone here has asked for this feedback. They are coming in here with eyes wide open that we may not love everything that we see.

But this is a chance for us to really talk about the words on the page, because it’s one thing for us to describe character arcs and the importance of white space, but when we actually look at those examples on the page, we really can drill down to the specific things, the choices we’re making word by word, sentence by sentence, as we do this craft. I think it’s a thing we love to do. It’s an exhausting task for our producers. Drew, thank you for sorting through the hundreds of people who have sent these things through.

Let’s start off with Routes by Colton Miller. Drew, can you give us a summary for those folks who are listening at home?

**Drew:** It starts in suburban Los Angeles. Young sister Samantha, 17, and Brooke, 12, burst out of the front door of a house to escape the abusive chaos inside. Sam leads them to an old Chevy Impala, and they quietly escape with nothing to their name. The story then transitions to six years later, where an 18-year-old Brooke is now in the back of a rideshare in Los Angeles. She’s lost in thought. Brooke is brought back to reality by the rideshare driver, indicating their arrival.

**John:** All right. Routes, three pages here. Just taking a look at the title page, simple, straightforward. They got the email address on the bottom, so if someone wants to track down Colton’s information, they know where to email him.

**Craig:** I do like a simple title page.

**John:** Craig, I was struck by how real-time these first two pages are. It’s a lot of scene description. It felt like overwriting for me at times. I actually kind of dug it. I liked how bit by bit it was. It just felt like we were in one static camera shot of looking at this house and eventually these girls coming out and getting in the car and backing away. It was a strange use of time on the page, and yet it kind of worked for me. I’m curious what you thought.

**Craig:** I agree to a large extent that there were some beautiful moments that were very visual. I could see everything. I could hear things. I could almost smell the outside. I really enjoyed some of the description of the inside of the car. There were a lot of evocative things.

My issue is that in fact it is kind of unshootable as it currently is on the page – and we can get into why – but easily adjusted to be shootable. Then there’s just a question about how we frame the timeline, because – just a simple thing – it begins with a title that says “six years ago.” “Six years ago” is not a great title to put on a film as the first thing, because six years ago from what? Now? If it’s for now, just give me the year maybe.

**John:** Give me a year. Agreed.

**Craig:** Then give me a new year or just the word “now” when we get to now. It’s a little bit of a wonky bit. You can also not include it at all, just show the first couple of scenes, and then when we get to the next time in “INTERIOR RIDESHARE (DRIVING) – NIGHT,” you can say “six years later.” You can also wait. You can see this older version of Brooke, and then, “We’re here.” “Yeah. Thanks.” She gets out of the car, walks towards something, title, “six years later.” You could always do that as well. Let’s talk a little bit, John, about where we are having an issue maybe with time and how we’re managing time here.

**John:** The first thing I underlined on Page 1 is fifth paragraph down, “All is quiet. The car is motionless, lifeless.” All cars are lifeless. That was my first-

**Craig:** Not in the Transformers.

**John:** That’s true. It could transform.

**Craig:** Or it could be the Love Bug.

**John:** It could be. We could think of more examples of living cars, I guess. But it wasn’t necessary. The problem was that it made it think, is this a movie about a car, because all we’re talking about is this car, when really we’re just trying to set up we are looking at this house. That, I liked.

There’s next paragraph down, “Until – we hear plates crash. Muffled yelling. Shattering broken glass. O.S. from inside the house.” You would never really use O.S. that way. We understand what it means, but-

**Craig:** “From inside the house,” is redundant.

**John:** Is enough. That’s O.S. Where we’re having some time problems and some geography problems, once these girls come out, they are whispering in a wide shot, which doesn’t actually work. It feels like a closeup of feet. You’re trying to get two things in a frame that don’t actually fit together. This is where it felt like if you’re writing the novel version of this, sure, you can do that, because you’re in this imaginary space, but it doesn’t actually work here. We can stay in this wide shot. We don’t need to hear them whispering. We can see what’s happening. We see they’re sneaking to this car. And then cut to we’re inside the car and we’re in a better place.

**Craig:** Completely agree. There’s nothing wrong with starting with silence. And then it says, “Until – we hear plates crash.” Now, that’s kind of a weird start to an argument. Generally speaking, it isn’t like people are quietly talking and then someone just starts whipping plates. We might want to hear a little bit of a raised voice and then more of a raised voice, and then the plates crash, and then there’s glass, just because suddenly plates crashing out of nowhere is going to feel a little contrived, I think.

“The front door to the house swings open, revealing two girls, 17 and 12, in ratty long-sleeve shirts and sweatpants.” Now, when we have two people, you might want to be a little bit more, so it doesn’t seem like they just are wearing a uniform of long-sleeve shirts and sweatpants.

“The older girl holds the younger girl’s hand. This is young Samantha, ‘Sam,’ and young Brooke, 12.” You probably don’t need to say “young” here, because we know their age. We’re going to see them later. It’s Brooke. She’s now 18. So I don’t think we need to do the “young Sam,” “young Brooke” here.

I will read the following: “Sam and Brooke walk briskly towards the car in the driveway. With urgency but trying to not draw attention. Push in on Sam.” Let me stop there. How are you pushing in on Sam while they’re walking briskly toward a car in the driveway? That’s not a thing. You can’t. You’re moving with them, right? I assume. You’ve even called out it’s urgently, briskly. This is where I’m starting to get confused. How close are we? How far are we? Are they moving? Are they not moving? That’s where things like “push in” are tricky.

**John:** Agreed. There’s moments where we clearly have “cut to,” closeups on things, which is great and fine. “Close on Sam’s hand. Her right hand clutches Brooke’s hand. Sam’s fingers – with chipped black nail polish – wrap tightly around Brooke’s palm.” Great. Okay, we’re seeing those things. Again, in a normal script, I would say this is overwriting, but what they’re trying to do here is actually just play in real time and milk this moment. Great, go for it. I have no objections.

**Craig:** I would suggest that there’s a perfectly good version of this where Sam and Brooke say nothing, because here’s what Sam says: “Whispering to Brooke, ‘Let’s go.'” I’m pretty sure that was already said.

**John:** We get that. We get that.

**Craig:** It’s not like Brooke is going to go, “I’m going to hold your hand and walk outside, not asking any questions until you go, ‘Let’s go.'” They’ve already gone. They’re going. It’s happening. And then Brooke, “Sam?” Again, probably would’ve been like, “What are we doing?” “We’re getting the fudge out of here.” That already happened inside. I think you probably don’t need this dialog. If you’re scared, Colton, about having non-dialog pages, that’s okay. You’ve actually done such a nice job of putting all this beautiful white space on the page and giving us reportage, punchy bits. I think all that’s really good. Do you know what I really like, John?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** “As Brooke adjusts in the seat,” this is the car seat, “her bare feet,” which is interesting. I think that wasn’t indicated earlier. It should be. We’re going to notice that. “Her bare feet slide around on a pile of waxy yellow McDonald’s burger wrappers and other trash littering the floor.” That’s cool. I like that. I heard it. I saw it. It teaches me things. It was cool. I like it.

**John:** Craig, this first scene, is it day or night?

**Craig:** In my mind, it’s night.

**John:** Yeah. Look at the first page. It was day.

**Craig:** What in the world? Whoa. Mandela effect moment.

**John:** I totally saw it as a night scene.

**Craig:** How is this not night?

**John:** How is this not night?

**Craig:** How is this not night? It’s clearly night.

**John:** The question was, I was thinking, what sounds do you hear? I was thinking night sounds. You’ve got the crickets. You’ve got the city hum. Nothing’s silent, and so what does it sound like? Night and day sound so differently.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I think this is a night scene. Now, I can see what Colton’s going for. This was a day scene, and then we’re going to cut to a night scene. But in my head, I was thinking it’s night scene and night scene.

**Craig:** You can absolutely cut from night to night. Here’s why in my brain I just immediately made this night. “It’s quiet in Reseda.” Now, yes, Reseda is a suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles, but it’s a massive sprawl. There is highway noise, distant sirens, cars honking, traffic, the lawnmower guys with the leaf blowers. There’s no silence in Reseda in the day. Night, yeah.

Also, people generally don’t have these big drunken fights in the middle of the day. They do. I’m just saying it’s probably more likely… It feels more of a night thing. More importantly, if it’s day, other people are awake. That means people are hearing it. That means they’re going to come outside and see. No one is on the street in the day, apparently, to notice this or to see these two girls walk out in Reseda. Also, it’s just less dramatic, isn’t it, if it is in the day?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just cooler at night. Anyway, I think night.

**John:** If it’s early morning day, that could be great. That would be a good choice.

**Craig:** Sunrise maybe.

**John:** Gotta be specific.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line for this. We’ve only looked at these three pages, but we ask the Three Page Challenge writers to tell us what happens in the rest of the script.

**Drew:** “An adrift recent high school graduate journeys across the U.S. one summer in search of her estranged older sister who ran away five years ago, desperate to finally find her and bring her home.”

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** That tracks.

**Craig:** Completely tracks. With that in mind, another recommendation, Colton. The young Samantha, Sam, 17, is – my guess – a troubled person, because Brooke is trying to find her, which means she’s sort of lost. It might be interesting to see a little bit more than just the nail polish, just something, because by the time you get to… Nobody who’s a troubled 23-year-old was a not-troubled 17-year-old. I’m just going to go out on a limb here. There’s already a problem.

This is Reseda. It’s Los Angeles. What does a troubled 17-year-old look like? Is she pierced? What has she done to her hair? Is there a bruise? Is she cutting? Is she too thin? Is she missing a tooth? Does she have braces? Just give me a little bit of a sense of who she is, more than just this, especially if we’re going to be hunting for her and she’s not going to be in the script for a while.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at our next script. This is Megha Genesis by Priti Trivedi.

**Drew:** Megha, a 37-year-old skateboarder, confidently maneuvers through a crowd in Austin, Texas. Skating to her family home, she encounters her mother, Deepa, who enthusiastically insists on dressing her in dated power suits for an upcoming job. Amidst the fashion chaos, Megha reveals in voiceover that she’s about to have her first day at two very different jobs. We then cut to a week earlier, when Megha sits on Zoom with a recruiter and is offered a job teaching executives.

**Craig:** Stuart special.

**John:** Stuart special. Title page, clean and simple. A lot of people would put an email address on there. I think it’s a good idea, just because if someone absolutely loves this, that’s how they can get a hold of Priti to talk about how much they love the script. But now, as we get into the actual script itself, Craig, do you want to go first? Want me to go first?

**Craig:** Happy to start. A little bit of a fish with feathers here. There’s something that happens almost immediately that causes a loss of confidence. This is why the first page, the first third of a page is so important. You just want to start to invite people to feel safe as they read.

**John:** Can I guess what it is that you marked?

**Craig:** Sure you can.

**John:** “Confidently boardslides.”

**Craig:** Actually, that wasn’t it, because I had already lost faith before that point. It says, “This is Megha, 37, whose short hair and slight frame make strangers routinely confuse her for a 13-year-old.” No, they don’t. No. Nobody who’s almost 40 is confused for a 13-year-old. That’s not a thing. There are people who are almost 40 who are confused for somebody in their 20s. That can happen. 13? No. The tone is in deep question here. That really threw me for a loop. Then, yes, “Confidently boardslides down a railing, nods hello to some teens practicing flips nearby. They nod back.” Not a great ending to a scene. Nod. Nod.

**John:** Yeah, because I don’t understand, are they nodding like, “Oh, that’s cool,” or like, “Dude, you’re old.” I don’t know what the tone is here. It clearly was trying to do a tone. I also don’t know, is she skating home? Is she skating from point A to point B and she’s going through the park, or was she at the park, skating? Those are very different experiences. If it’s a 37-year-old who gets around on a skateboard, yeah, I get that, but it’s a 37-year-old who also boardslides.

**Craig:** She’s in a park, so I’m thinking that she’s just enjoying a fun afternoon of boarding. This is also an issue that there’s no reason for this, because I didn’t learn anything really, other than the fact that she can skateboard. But does she fall? Is she really good? Are people impressed? Are people not impressed? What am I supposed to deduce from this? I’ve learned nothing about the character. I’ve only learned a fact, that she can skateboard. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** We often talk about the difference between mystery and confusion. It’s not mysterious really that she’s a 37-year-old skateboarder. It’s just kind of confusing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to know about her or think about her, based on this little first chunk, which seems like we’re putting way too much emphasis on this, but again, you have to start someplace, and this was not a place that was making me feel confident to start.

**Craig:** Then she does arrive home on her skateboard, which, okay. “The windows are ringed with multicolored string lights.” I don’t know what we’re supposed to draw from that, because it doesn’t sound like it’s Christmastime. Maybe this is how they decorate their home, which is fine.

But when we get into her room, we go from her skating up to, boom, she is standing in her room, static. That’s not a good cut. When people are in motion, you generally want to go from them in motion to them in motion, or them in motion to them entering the frame. You just don’t want to pop them into, I have just teleported into a room.

More tonal issues. “Her mother, Deepa, 60s, barges in with an armful of business clothes that were stylish when she first bought them in the late ’80s,” and she starts dressing Megha. It says the following. John, I will charge you with figuring out how to direct the following. “Deepa starts draping pinstripe jackets, ruffled blouses, and pencil skirts onto Megha, who is soon engulfed in a blizzard of synthetic fabrics and shoulder pads.” How do you do that?

**John:** It’s not going to work. How do you put a pencil skirt on her? I don’t know what this is.

**Craig:** How do you do that? How do you do that?

**John:** You don’t.

**Craig:** You can’t. Why is Deepa’s mother saying the following? Priti, if this hurts a little bit, I apologize, but it’s going to help. We’ve all been here. This is important, because it’s her mother. Now, funny moms are a long and storied institution in films, but they still have to be mom, which means they talk to their child as if they’ve met them before. This is what Deepa says: “Try these on and we’ll see what fits you. Oh, I’m so glad I saved these. You always said you’d never wear a suit to work, but I knew that someday you would get a real job and make real money.”

Now, are there moms that make passive-aggressive comments about their kids finally getting a real job and making real money? Completely. Are there moms that sometimes think they’re complimenting their child by saying something like that, when in fact it’s slightly hurtful? Absolutely. But are there parents who say, “You always said you’d never wear a suit to work.” No. Parents don’t cite back to you things you’ve always said, “But … ” It feels a little ChatGPT to me.

**John:** I also had a question about, we are told that she is 60s, “Slightly taller and rounder than her daughter.” Is she native-born American or has she immigrated to America? I want a sense of culturally, where is she at? What accent is she using? These are all things I could make assumptions, because I’ve seen other shows, I’ve seen other movies, but you shouldn’t just have me make that assumption, because it’s a different experience if it’s coming from an immigrant background versus she was born in Austin, Texas.

**Craig:** There’s Megha’s cousin Bina, who’s fine. She’s hanging off the bed. I like that she calls Deepa “Auntie.” Deepa: “Oh, I forgot my pumps.” “Megha shakes off the clothes like a dog shaking off water.” That’s a funny thing to write. It’s a funny thing to read. It is not possible to do.

**John:** Both the clothes on and the clothes off, you can sort of see it in a Disney Channel kind of way. It’s just feeling incredibly broad. Maybe this is an incredibly broad story that we’re trying to tell here, but my guess is it’s not aiming to be that.

**Craig:** There’s some geographical things. We’ve got a drum kit and a recording setup in one corner of the room. Bina is on the bed. She’s hanging off of the bed. I don’t know quite what that means, backwards or just sitting on the bed?

**John:** Head hanging off maybe.

**Craig:** Head hanging off. “Looks up from her phone, bursts out laughing,” has a little exchange. Megha says, “I feel like a pomegranate.” “Bina does a rimshot on the drum kit.” How’d she get over there?

**John:** Talented long arms. Again, tone. It’s incredibly broad you’re going there.

**Craig:** Then Bina seems cool. Bina seems like she’s on Megha’s side. She’s like, oh my god, “Auntie, you’re going to drown her. Polyester doesn’t breathe.” Bina’s like, yeah, don’t wear any of that. Then Megha’s like, “Maybe I won’t wear anything,” ha ha ha. Then Bina says, “Stop! You need clothes! You need to make a good first impression.” Wait, now who’s Bina now? Did she not get that that’s a cheeky comment?

Now, clearly, Megha is going to be involved in some sort of job that is sex-work-adjacent here, because that’s what is being implied, that she’s going to be working two jobs, like a straight one and a sexy one. But why is Bina saying, “Stop!” “Stop! You need clothes! You need to make a good first impression,” reminds me of Patton Oswalt talking about Germans and their lack of a sense of humor, like they don’t understand humor, and so they just take it very, very literally. I’m confused by these characters.

**John:** I’m mostly confused that they’re the ages that they are.

**Craig:** They’re kind of weirdly old for this.

**John:** They’re kind of weirdly old. If these were 23-year-olds, yeah, I could kind of see that, but they’re not. She’s living at home. She’s 37 years old. Something has gone wrong in her life or very strangely in her life that this is her situation. By the end of Page 2, I guess I need to know more about that rather than about clothes, because there’s some fundamental premise thing I’m missing here. By the end of Page 2, I don’t know anything about Megha. I want to, but I don’t know it.

**Craig:** I would say, Priti, that when we get to Page 3, what I think you really need to work on in a fundamental way is dialog, because Daniel and Megha are both speaking in a kind of super textual way. Everything that they’re thinking, they’re saying. There’s no sense of complexity. They’re just announcing things. It just feels very wooden, and I don’t want it to be. I want there to be subtext. I want there to be feelings. I want there to be emotions. I want them to be concealing things, hiding, playing, flirting, arguing.

**John:** Agendas.

**Craig:** Agendas, passive-aggressive, making choices to not complain about something that someone just said that’s a little off, anything that you can do there. This is all super textual. I think that you’ve got some dialog issues you need to work out. You may have full, great understanding of these characters, but in the execution, we’re not getting any of it. I would focus my work on that, Priti. Great title though, Megha Genesis.

**John:** I really do like it.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** We’re inclined to like anything that reminds us of Megana Rao, our beloved producer.

**Craig:** Do you think that Megha’s pronounced MAY-guh, because it’s like Sega Genesis?

**John:** I think the title is MAY-guh Genesis. That would make the most sense.

**Craig:** MAY-guh, yeah, I think that makes more… Who knows? Maybe it’s not. But it’s a great title either way. Love that.

**John:** I love it. Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Nobody puts baby in a corner, and no one can put Megha in a box. In this comedy series, a former academic turned adventurer attempts to live the corporate life and rebel against it at the same time, all while acting as a catalyst for change for everyone around her.”

**John:** That’s not what I got off these pages.

**Craig:** Deeply, deeply confused. What was the sexy stuff? What was that? I’m so confused. Adventurer?

**John:** Academic turned adventurer. Let’s say that she was top of her class, but then she just ran around the world and just lived her 20s and 30s just crazy. She was everywhere, she was doing everything, and now she’s come back home and she’s trying to make a start of it. Great. These were not the pages to get me into that story.

**Craig:** No, nor was there any indication that there was anything adventuresome about her whatsoever.

**John:** She had a skateboard.

**Craig:** That’s not high up on the list of things that adventurers do. If she’s an Indiana Jones roaming the world, that’s a very specific kind of person. That’s an adrenaline junkie. That’s somebody who’s faced danger and death. That’s somebody who seeks out the exotic and extreme. She’s just a 37-year-old skateboarder, and then she’s just letting her mom throw clothes at her, and then she’s just having a boring Zoom. I don’t understand it.

**John:** Adventure may not mean Indiana Jones. It could mean just something like Instagram influencers before their time. She’s always just going from the next place to the next place and never having a normal job. Sure, great. Or maybe she worked in the Peace Corps. That’s not what we’re getting here. If you’re going to use a voiceover, which you are right now, let that help understand what her perspective is and why she’s a 37-year-old who seems to be just starting out.

**Craig:** Lots of issues there. Keep going. Keep working at it. Address some fundamentals. I think that’s step one here. I think step one: dialog.

**John:** Dialog, agreed.

**Craig:** Dialog.

**John:** Our third and final Three Page Challenge is Thoughts and Prayers by Eric Hunsley.

**Craig:** Good title.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** In an amphitheater during a summer evening concert, a concertgoer, Paulie, and their companion, Dawn, prepare for a picnic. Simultaneously, a clarinetist revealed to also be Paulie tunes up his instrument backstage. However, up in the lighting grid, a gunman, revealed to be yet another Paulie, assembles a rifle. The musician notices the gunman pointing the rifle down at him and freezes, and then Paulie wakes up out of the dream with Dawn sound asleep next to him.

**John:** On our first page here, Thoughts and Prayers, Episode One, so this is meant to be part of a series. We have a full grid of information with email address and phone numbers and things like that. Sure, but no one’s going to be sending you a postcard, so email address is probably fine here. Phone number used to be important. When Craig and I were starting, we didn’t have email necessarily, so people would call you. I got cold calls from producers who had read stuff. Sure. That doesn’t happen anymore. Email’s plenty fine.

**Craig:** You could get a text. People do like texting.

**John:** People do like texting. If you can text, you can email. But yeah, you can get a text.

**Craig:** The kids love texting.

**John:** They do love texting. Craig, I had to read this twice, but on second reading, I did actually quite appreciate what was going on here. I had some very specific issues and concerns, but I liked a lot of what I saw here. The thing I would want to point out is, of all these Three Page Challenges, we’ve had some good use of white space. The pages have looked nice, and so I want to call it out for all three of these entries.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It took me a bit. I think it would take everyone a bit. Then again, what I find is, if there’s a little bit of difficulty in, let’s say, Page 1… I don’t know if you had the same feeling. It was just a concertgoer off-screen. That was a tough one. I was like, what’s happening in my POV? I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I have a suggestion for how to mitigate that, perhaps. If you get to a place – and we do, on Page 2 and 3 – that makes you go, “Oh-”

**John:** “I see what you’re doing here.”

**Craig:** “… that’s interesting,” then all is forgiven. If you don’t, nothing’s forgiven. In this case, we did get to something interesting and provocative and very bait on the hook that justified a little bit of the trickiness at the beginning. Where did you start to get yourself a little bit lost?

**John:** Right at the very start, I was nervous, as we were moving into the POVs, but also there’s some repetition of words that don’t help you. “POV – concertgoer strolling on the lawn towards the stage.” We were strolling a few paces behind Dawn Berenger. The double strolling is not helping you there.

**Craig:** Double stroll.

**John:** This relies a lot on POV, but then I felt like we were popping in and out of it in ways that were not helpful. We could’ve lost the bottom half of this first scene. “How’s this?” Male voice, “Perfect.” She lays out the quilt on the grass. We don’t go in for that first matching of actions. They just go right to the clarinetist, because we’re about to set this routine where we see similar actions happening in all these places, and we’re starting to realize there’s some pattern thing happening here that’s going to be interesting. But I didn’t need it on Page 1.

**Craig:** Here’s my suggestion. It’s just food for thought, because I think it would help what you’re doing. It’s not to change what you’re doing, but to help it. That is to not not see our concertgoer, but rather to not see his face. You’re allowed to do that. We’re walking a few paces behind Dawn Berenger, 40s, and her date. We can’t yet see his face. She’s holding a picnic basket, stops, turns, hands the basket to him. This looks good. You don’t need him to say anything other than, “Perfect.” We don’t need, “Earth to Paulie. We’re gonna eat?” “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.”

“The concertgoer’s POV scans the lawn, taking in the crowd.” If that’s meant to be purposeful, it’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do. It’s just going to be an unrooted, information-less POV scan. What you want instead, I think, is to be behind him and note that he’s turning his head as if scanning the crowd, and then, “Paulie, we’re gonna eat?” “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.” Then the picnic basket hingey bit I think would work a little bit better because-

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** … there’s a human there. It’s not just a nobody. It’s not a POV camera, which is a very specific science fictiony way of doing stuff.

**John:** Agreed. You know that I was a clarinetist.

**Craig:** As was I.

**John:** We talked about this on an earlier show. Craig, you do not swab a clarinet before you put it together to play it. You swab at the end of a performance to get all the spit and the stuff out.

**Craig:** Correct. You’ve got your little spit valve, and then you do your cleaning. What you do before, maybe you put a new reed on, you put a little-

**John:** Cork grease is what I was thinking would be a better choice for what he could be doing, because as you’re assembling this thing, you have this little thing sort of like ChapStick that you’re putting on the corks to put it together.

**Craig:** I can smell it now. That white goop, I can smell it. It’s pungent.

**John:** Most people are not going to know that you don’t swab a clarinet before you put it together, but enough people will get that right. It’s going to work great. It actually makes more sense with what you’re trying to set up and do here-

**Craig:** I completely agree.

**John:** … in terms of putting a gun together.

**Craig:** Yeah, because he’s got ammunition cartridges, and maybe he’s putting rounds into a clip. Similarly, a professional clarinetist would have a few reeds. They would select one. They would put it in the mouthpiece, tighten the clamps. There’s lots of good stuff.

**John:** Craig, I have so many sense memories of what it is like, what a new reed tastes like, how dry it is, how it pulls the saliva out of your mouth.

**Craig:** Sticks on your tongue. I also have memories of what an old reed looks like, all chipped at the end like a broken fingernail.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re always picking which of the reeds is going to be good enough, because if a reed is too firm, it’s not going to work right. You start with really soft 1 reeds and you move up to 2s and 3s. It’s a whole thing.

**Craig:** I assume that you, like me, we couldn’t afford lots of reeds. My parents would dole reeds out like I was asking for a kidney. Assembling the mouthpiece, getting it ready, all that, the mouthpiece is the biggest issue. Cork grease to put the pieces together of the body of the clarinet. You got your two pieces, and then you got your mouthpiece going in the top, but the mouthpiece gets the most attention.

**John:** 100%. These are all things, small little changes, but I would say overall, I was digging this. I was a little disappointed it ended in a dream.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Because I was thinking this is going to be some sort of cool heisty thing. For all we know, then the whole sequence continues beyond this and it actually is more than this, but we have not taken a look at the log line. I would say overall, I was digging these pages. I thought they were a nice use of the reader’s attention and really rewarding the close reading of lines.

**Craig:** I completely agree. My hope – and Drew’s about to let us know – is that it’s not just a dream, and that there is something weird going on where Paulie is three different people and he’s gone through a reverse cloning machine or something. I don’t know. I guess it’s probably time to find out.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Having just closed the case of a mass shooting in his community, a police investigator must now track down a new threat. Pro-gun legislators have become targets of a serial shooter who, rather than going after the politicians themselves, hunt down their loved ones.”

**John:** Okay, so it’s not a science fictiony kind of premise. It literally was just the stress of it was making him feel this thing.

**Craig:** I’m not as big of a fan of this now, and here’s why. In a weird way, Eric, you’re kind of a victim of how interesting these three pages are. It’s such an interesting concept that you want it to be relevant beyond just, “I’m anxious about mass shootings.” Totally. Many of us are, and certainly, police officers and detectives, law enforcement officers who are charged with protecting us from these things or stopping them or finding the people who perpetrated them are even more anxious. But this is so specific and science fictiony that it’s going to be hard to just go into a straight-up political thriller.

**John:** Yeah, it is. I do wonder if Eric has written a cool short film that just wants to be its own thing, and it’s not the right way into the story he wants to tell, because I like the log line, I like these pages, I don’t think they’re the right combination is my guess.

**Craig:** Also, you don’t suck on the reed. You moisten it.

**John:** You moisten it.

**Craig:** You moisten the reed.

**John:** You let it plump up in your saliva.

**Craig:** You gotta get it soft. This has become more of a clarinet discussion.

**John:** It basically has become a clarinet discussion. But also, you do swab out your clarinet at the end of a session, but during the time, during a long rehearsal, you are also sucking the spit back in, which is really gross, but you gotta do it.

**Craig:** You just gotta do it. One last thing. This is just a formatting thing. Typically, until you’re in production, you don’t need to put scene numbers on your scenes.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** But if you do want to put scene numbers on your scenes, that’s fine. You just want them to be consecutive at that point, because on Page 3, we go from Scene A to Scene 13, which implies that scenes have been omitted, which again is fine, but that’s really only relevant to production. Typically, in production, it would say “Scenes 9 to 12 omitted.” Not particularly useful here, and certainly not a good idea, if you do include them, to have them be non-consecutive.

**John:** I will also say that I’m looking now, it’s Episode 1, so this is part of a series. As a series, this moment works a little differently than as a feature, because if this were the opening sequence to a feature film, I’d be like, mm. With a series, I can imagine this kind of thing maybe playing a little bit better, but-

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** Not for you?

**Craig:** No. It’s a tone thing. It’s giving us a big tone hit. Any time you have a dream where someone wakes up… It’s very useful to do. People have fascinating dreams. I have no problem showing a dream that somebody has, and then they wake up. I particularly appreciate that Paulie didn’t gasp awake. Thank you.

But typically, we know something about the person before, so that we understand a little bit more or we can connect with them a little bit more and their anxiety as they’re in the dream space. We also probably get a sense that it is a dream space. It’s just to meet somebody like this and have it be so…

Also, here’s the other issue. Dreams are not this cinematic. Dreams don’t cut perfectly between three different perspectives. They certainly don’t have weird POVs and then third-person views layering and cutting back and forth like that amongst the same person. It just doesn’t seem like a dream.

**John:** It isn’t dreamy, no.

**Craig:** It seems too real.

**John:** Those are our Three Page Challenges. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. Thank you to these writers, but also everyone else who wrote in with their pages to take a look at. If you have three pages you want us to possibly examine on a future episode, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf, and it goes into the inbox. If you’re curious about doing this for us, please submit. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Submit.

**John:** Submit. My One Cool Thing is a product I bought off of Instagram. I thought it was really well done. It’s called Delve Deck. It’s by a company called Boardwalk. I think I got this ad served to me by Instagram because I do Writer Emergency Pack, and we buy Instagram ads for Writer Emergency Pack, so the algorithm just always serves me things that are kind of like Writer Emergency Pack.

In this case, Delve Deck is a bunch of conversation starters. You pull a card, and it has a single question on it that you can randomly choose. It might be for a party. I was thinking it could also be for a writers’ room. I may send one of these with my kid, who’s going to be a summer camp counselor, because it feels really great for talking to a bunch of kids about-

**Craig:** Icebreaker.

**John:** Icebreaker kind of things. Nicely made. It’s a little LA-based company. If you’re curious about it, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Delve Deck.

**Craig:** “Have you ever murdered someone?”

**John:** The answer is no, but I did stop and think about that.

**Craig:** Next card.

**John:** I want to make sure that I got the answer right. I will say our bonus segment is going to be three of the cards that I pulled out of there randomly, genuinely randomly.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll answer those questions.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is a restaurant. I don’t normally do restaurant reviews. I’m always a little nervous that if I talk about a restaurant on our podcast, we’re suddenly going to start getting emails from restaurant promoters, because we sure get a lot of emails from publicity people trying to get people on our show. We’re just not that kind of show, John. That’s not what we do.

**John:** Not good.

**Craig:** That said, I did visit a restaurant here in Vancouver that I thought was so delightful and interesting. Have you ever been to a restaurant that was specifically Afghan cuisine?

**John:** I have not. That is one of our goals for 2024 is to try three new cuisines, so Afghan would be a good choice.

**Craig:** I have never myself been to a specifically Afghan restaurant. Afghan cuisine, as explained by the owner, is kind of an interesting blend of where Afghanistan sits. It’s somewhat Mediterranean. It’s somewhat influenced by Indian. It’s somewhat influenced by more Eastern Asian. It’s got a lot of things going on. This particular restaurant is called Zarak, obviously here in Vancouver, where I’m currently staying. It is family-owned. I thought it was fantastic. Really, really good. One of the best old-fashioneds I’ve ever had-

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** … which is saying something, because I’ve had them everywhere. The cuisine was outstanding. Just a really, really good time. It’s one of those things where, at 52 and living in Los Angeles, you think, I’ve eaten everything. No, I hadn’t. It wasn’t like there was anything that was served where I was like, “What is this?” But the specific way that Afghan cuisine is prepared I thought was really delicious. If you are in the Vancouver area and you’re interested in trying something new, or if you are already a fan of Afghan cuisine, check out Zarak, Z-A-R-A-K.

**John:** Excellent. I do want to make it up to Vancouver at some point while you’re up there shooting. If I do make it up there-

**Craig:** Zarak.

**John:** … I’ll hit the restaurant.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Zarak.

**Craig:** Zarak.

**John:** Love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments and advance warnings when we are going to try to do another Three Page Challenge, so sign up there. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re here on our bonus segment. Thank you to our premium members who make these bonus segments possible, and the rest of the show. As I said in the One Cool Things, I got this thing called a Delve Deck. I’ve pulled three cards out of here, and we’re going to just try to answer these questions. I looked at them earlier on, so I have some answers, but Craig, you’re good at thinking off the top of your head.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** First question. Drew, I want to hear your answers to this too.

**Drew:** Oh, no.

**John:** “If you could ask any living person a question and be assured a true answer, who and what would you ask?”

**Craig:** Wow. If you could ask any living person a question and be assured a true answer? Oh, my.

**John:** This feels a little bit like Speak with the Dead, the spell in Dungeons and Dragons, except it has to be for a living person, and they are compelled to tell you a true answer to that one question. I think there’s different classes of questions you might want to ask. Some cases, there’s one person who knows the truth, and you could ask that one person the truth and actually finally know the answer. Who killed JonBenet Ramsey, I’d want to ask John Ramsey, because he might know, or just know that the family was not involved at all. I might ask OJ Simpson.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t waste that one. He already wrote a book called-

**John:** If I Did It. The hypotheticals there. There’s another class of questions, like, what does this person truly think, truly believe? Craig, what are you thinking? Of living people, who would you want to ask a question of?

**Craig:** That’s actually a very difficult proposition, because there are certain people who might have information that is valuable, but just because they tell me doesn’t mean anyone else would know or believe me or believe that they told me that. If there were a way for me to capture, for instance, on camera, Donald Trump answering truly, do you really think that you were a good president, although he probably does.

**John:** He probably does.

**Craig:** He probably does. He probably does.

**John:** I guess focusing on something that is more objectively true, like how many abortions have you paid for, something like that, which you could capture.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting one, not that it would matter to the people who would vote for him.

**John:** It wouldn’t matter.

**Craig:** Nothing matters to them.

**John:** Literally nothing matters [crosstalk 01:07:58].

**Craig:** Literally nothing matters. I might be interested, I suppose, to ask, let’s say, I’d go with Barack Obama, because I feel like he would give a very thorough answer.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** I would ask Barack Obama, do we have solid evidence of intelligent life on other planets, and what is the nature of that evidence?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** He’s gotta know.

**John:** He’s gotta know.

**Craig:** He’s gotta know, right?

**John:** The argument that he doesn’t know is that Trump then would also know, and Trump can’t be quiet about anything.

**Craig:** I think they might’ve just hidden it from him. I feel like there’s so much stuff they just were like, “Let’s not tell him.”

**John:** Drew, what question would you ask, and of whom?

**Drew:** This is tough, because I feel like the ones that are popping in my head… What’s nice about John Ramsey or OJ Simpson is you would probably get a confession, which would do some good, whereas a lot of them, someone might just be like, “No, I had nothing to do with that,” and then it’s a waste. I might go for family drama. Maybe I would ask one of my parents-

**Craig:** If they really love you?

**Drew:** If they really love me, yeah. No, that one’s too close. Your parents especially are people you don’t have the whole picture of. You just get the pieces. I don’t know, I’d go for gossip, like, did you ever cheat on each other or something.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. Drew, you’re so dark.

**John:** I do like it though. I do like it.

**Craig:** I like it too.

**John:** Next question. What is something you’re still angry about?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Craig has had some anger and umbrage over the years.

**Craig:** Nothing but.

**John:** Nothing but. I would say that in my personal and professional life, I don’t actually have a lot that I’m actively angry about. I don’t ruminate about past wrongs that were done to me often, or if that does happen, at least I’m not able to think of them now. I tend to be angrier on behalf of other people or angry on behalf of society. I’m angry about things that happened that I don’t feel have been adequately adjusted for.

**Craig:** There’s so much that I’m still angry about. What, among the many things, is most notable from all the things I’m still angry about, hard to say. I could go for small things and big things. I guess on a big scale, I am still so angry about Andrew Wakefield and his stupid, fraudulent, non-study study that ignited a bonfire of anti-vaccine rhetoric. That guy, I don’t believe in Hell, but if I did… The misery and ruin that he has caused, and the fact that he is so unrepentant and so stupidly, stubbornly in self-aggrandizing denial, it’s infuriating. He’s a real villain. Apparently, I’m still angry about it, John.

**John:** Apparently, you are. I hear that in your tone. Drew, anything you’re still angry about?

**Drew:** Off that, I think COVID response, the way that everyone handled it. It might be worldwide too, because some countries just didn’t have any lockdowns. That felt like something that we could’ve handled, but instead, selfishness just seemed to win, or maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe that was something that was always going to be an endemic thing.

**John:** I do hear what you’re saying, that sense that obviously no one could know exactly all the information, but the people who weren’t listening to people who had the best sense of what to do, I’m angry on behalf of and because of our citizens at times. I get angry about January 6th and the attempt to pretend like it was no big deal or not acknowledge this thing that we saw live on television.

**Craig:** No, you didn’t.

**John:** No, you didn’t.

**Craig:** It was Antifa.

**John:** You can’t trust your eyes.

**Craig:** That was Antifa. It wasn’t like anybody pooped on the Speaker of the House’s desk. It’s all just insane. Have you guys seen the Herman Cain Awards, that Reddit?

**John:** It’s given to the person who dies of the thing they were making fun of?

**Craig:** Yeah, basically.

**John:** Is that the idea?

**Craig:** Yeah. When you say given to the person, it means every day, 12 people. But one of the things they do there is they will provide you with a slideshow, and it’s almost always Facebook posts from an individual mocking medicine, Dr. Fauci, vaccines, the fact that COVID even exists, masks, all of it, and then, inevitably, of course, they contract COVID, and then shortly thereafter, somebody else posts to say, “So-and-so has gone to the Lord.”

There’s this thing that so many of them say. It’s actually disconcerting, because it makes me feel like maybe they are NPCs, because it’s so consistent, and it’s so weird how they all use the same phrase. When they get COVID, so many of them say some version of, “I have COVID. Guys, this thing is no joke.” It’s like, you mean the thing that you’ve been turning into a joke for years, that thing that you’ve been making fun of? Now you want me to know it’s not a joke, because you have it, and you’re in the hospital? They, over and over, go, “Oh, this thing is no joke.” They’re shocked.

**John:** Related to that is people who, when they get COVID, they pretend it’s something else or it’s not really because of the COVID, it’s really because of something else. It’s like, no, it’s because of COVID. This syndrome that you have right now, you have long COVID.

**Craig:** It’s like homophobic relatives telling you that so-and-so died because of pneumonia. You’re like, “Your 31-year-old gay son died of pneumonia in 1983? Uh-huh. Sure, sure, Aunt Ethel, sure.”

**John:** If you could go back and talk some sense into your teenage self, what would you say? Third and final question. Time machine, magical, however you want to get back to give some advice-

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** … to your teenage self-

**Drew:** Oh, no.

**John:** … your specific teenage self-

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** … what would you say? Mine I’ve talked about a couple times on the show.

**Craig:** What would you say?

**John:** Simple one is, stop playing clarinet, and instead, stick with piano, because you will play piano the rest of your life. You will not pick up that clarinet again.

**Craig:** Put the clarinet down.

**John:** Clarinet down.

**Craig:** I’m sure that your teenage self would hug you and say thank you.

**John:** Thank you. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** It makes so much sense. Or you don’t have to go back to piano. Learn guitar. Guitar will serve you better. Then obviously, come out sooner. That’s every gay kid.

**Craig:** When did you come out? How old were you?

**John:** I was 22.

**Craig:** It was 1993?

**John:** 1992.

**Craig:** For 1992, you were pretty early there, I would say, relative to so many other people I know. Give yourself some credit.

**John:** Some credit. I could’ve come out in college. It would’ve been fine.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Could’ve. Didn’t. That’s okay. I think I would probably tell myself that despite the fact that I was not given a lot of positive feedback at home, that the positive feedback I suspected I should be getting was in fact the positive feedback I indeed should have been getting, and that I was the kid my parents insisted I was supposed to be. I wish that I knew that sooner, because it’s incredible how many years I lost as an adult to trying to get the approval of other people, when in fact that was never going to work. In the end, either you approve of yourself or you do not. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. Now, I don’t know if giving myself that advice would’ve worked. Then I would’ve hit me, just to really underscore it. “Stop hating yourself.” Punch.

**John:** “Stop hating yourself.” Punch. Let’s say you only had two or three sentences of advice. What would you actually tell young Craig?

**Craig:** At the risk of sounding sappy, “You are absolutely worthy of love and respect, and you are good enough.”

**John:** You are. There’s many men in their 40s who are still struggling with that.

**Craig:** No question. There are people in their 90s. It feels a little generic, because it seems like it’s such a problem for everybody, except when it’s you it’s not generic. Your self-loathing is incredible specific to you. That’s probably what I would do. Now, I assume that Drew is going to go back and tell his teenage self to go ask his mom if she’s been cheating on his dad, but let’s see.

**Drew:** There you go.

**Craig:** What will you do, Drew?

**Drew:** Oh, god. This one’s tough, because I feel like I was a decent teenager for a while, I was a theater kid, and then when I was a senior in high school, I became a real douchebag, because I felt like that gave me some kind of cache. I had an acid tongue, so that was helpful, especially when you’re 18. The meanest person usually wins. I still feel really, really horrible about all of that. I’m trying to boil it down to a concise thing.

**Craig:** Don’t be a douchebag.

**Drew:** Don’t be a douchebag. There’s no value in that. Carry it with you.

**Craig:** That’s one of the natural responses to not liking yourself. Suddenly, you’re mean. I’ve been mean, definitely. When you’re miserable, you’re mean. Facts.

**John:** Hurt people hurt people.

**Craig:** Hurt people hurt people.

**John:** A couple other really simple ones, just quick things younger John August should’ve known, first off, you should change your name, which I did later on, so that’s fine. That I can run. I never thought I could run, and then actually, in my 40s, I learned how to run. I was like, oh, actually I could’ve been running this whole time. That’s great. Also, to not worry about my hair. I shaved my head at 23, 22, basically the same time I came out. The best thing I ever did to stop worrying about my hair. I wasted teenage years worrying about my hair falling out. Doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I get it. Because I didn’t really start losing my hair until I was in my 20s, it wasn’t, I don’t think, as troublesome. I think if you start losing your hair when you’re in high school, it can really rattle you. It’s a fairly rarer circumstance. You’re in your 20s and you’re a guy and your hair is starting to thin out, you’re like, yeah, me and about 12 other guys. You shouldn’t blame yourself for that.

**John:** I’m not going to blame myself. But I think my advice to the younger version of myself was, it’s going to happen. There’s nothing you can do. Don’t let it occupy more thoughts than it deserves.

**Craig:** Have you, for Halloween or anything, put a wig on?

**John:** Yeah, but not a good quality wig. That’s something I would love to try to do at some point is to actually see what I would look like with really good toupees, because sometimes Instagram reels will show me, here’s this toupee thing. I’m like, “Jesus, that’s a really good toupee.”

**Craig:** I did this one episode-

**John:** For the episode you had hair.

**Craig:** I had hair, yeah. On Mythic Quest, I was playing a guy in the ’70s, and they were like, “Let’s put some hair on you.” I was like, “Fine, do it.” It was eerie. It was weird. It was weird to have hair. It felt strange. I can’t say that I was like, “Oh, I should be doing this all the time.”

**John:** Was it hot?

**Craig:** No, it wasn’t particularly hot. I sort of forgot it was there. Then when I would look in the mirror, I was like, “Whoa.” I showed a picture of it to my wife when I was in the makeup chair, but I was wearing a mask, because it was still COVID time. I’m wearing a mask, and then I’ve got hair on. I sent her the picture. She said, “Who is that?” She didn’t know it was me.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Even though you could still see from my nose up.

**John:** Drew, in your acting career, did you have to wear a lot of wigs?

**Drew:** No, I never got to wear a wig. I dyed my hair once. That’d be fun.

**John:** Alas.

**Craig:** Wig yourself. You know what? Wigs are cool, actually. I have to say, at the Emmys, there was the inevitable parade of drag queens when Drag Race wins, because they literally win every year. By the way, side note, for the television Academy, I think there should be a rule if you win five years in a row, you’re done. Mercy rule. It’s crazy. That said, still awesome to see the parade of drag queens and the wigs.

**John:** Incredible.

**Craig:** The wigs are astonishing. I was like, there’s a world where I just wear a wig.

**John:** Just wear a wig all the time.

**Craig:** I don’t pretend it’s not a wig.

**John:** Men used to wear hats.

**Craig:** Or wigs. Founding Fathers, wigs.

**John:** Wigs.

**Craig:** Wigs.

**John:** Love it. We answered our three questions here. Well done. I’ll keep this around on the desk, so if we need a future One Cool Thing topic, it’s handy.

**Craig:** Pull a card.

**John:** Pull a card. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

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* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/629standard.mp3).

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

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

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jessica Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/628standardV2.mp3).