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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 627 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the OG Scriptnotes guest host, writer, director, showrunner, producer, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m so excited to be here. There are so many people I need to thank. Oh, wait. That’s not the right place to do it.

**John:** You have to comment on how surprisingly heavy the award is.

**Aline:** Oh, it’s so heavy. I’m going to put it down. I’m just going to put it down.

**John:** You put it down and then pull out your notes of people you need to thank.

**Aline:** It’s going to mess up the line of my dress.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Today, I would like to talk about agency in the sense of characters and what characters are doing in our stories, but also in real-life people, about making choices about what they want to do next. Then you’ve seen in the Workflowy, we have another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we discuss stories in the news and thing about how we would adapt that into quality filmed entertainment. Aline, have you stretched? Are you ready for this?

**Aline:** I’m really ready. I’m ready for a word I’ve never heard before.

**John:** Yes, which is… How are you going to pronounce it?

**Aline:** Agentic?

**John:** Yeah, agentic. It’s a word I saw a ton that week, and so I thought we’d talk about that. It’s agency as applied to real people, kind of. It’s a word.

**Aline:** I plan to use and misuse this word liberally.

**John:** Yes. At the end of the day, it’s how you use catchphrases to fill things in. Do you remember “at the end of the day”? Do you remember when you first heard that? Because it was during our careers that that became a thing.

**Aline:** “At the end of the day” is an industry term?

**John:** I think it’s an industry term.

**Aline:** Interesting. There’s so many circling backs and touching of bases. I feel like the lingo and the jargon has gotten so much worse as the business has gotten more corporatized, because you used to go to meetings, and there could be a guy smoking a doobie, with his feet up on the couch, just talking about whatever and maybe telling you about his marriage. And now when you go in, everyone is so official. They have all of these bits of jargon that clearly came from a retreat. We once sat down with someone who, I was asking him about what they were looking for, and he said, “Regionality is something that we take into consideration when we look at our buckets.”

**John:** Oh, buckets is a thing, yeah.

**Aline:** Buckets.

**John:** Buckets is a big thing too.

**Aline:** Buckets is a big thing.

**John:** We’ll get into all of those choices that we make. Coming out of COVID, a lot of times where you’re meeting with executives, you’re still meeting with them on Zoom. The small talk is also different on Zoom, because there’s less of that getting in a room and getting comfortable. You’re still asking about what people did over the weekend or where they are, but you’re also in their homes, which is a different thing too.

**Aline:** It’s really weird. I try not to scan the background too extensively. At the beginning of the pandemic, how many bedrooms did you see?

**John:** So many.

**Aline:** So many. I was like, guys, just turn it around. Sit on the bed would be my thought, so I’m not looking at the bed. I saw a lot of beds, basements, guestrooms, pets.

**John:** Vacation homes.

**Aline:** Vacation homes, yeah.

**John:** A lot of people who moved to Colorado, never moved back, all those. In our bonus segment for premium members, Aline and I are going to talk about the experience of being empty nesters, because we have both sent our kids off to college, and so what we’re looking forward to, how we’re adjusting, how many more dogs we’re going to get, the process of becoming empty nesters.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, Aline, we’re recording this on the day that Oscar nominations are due. Have you submitted your Oscar nominations already?

**Aline:** I have. I have, indeed.

**John:** For folks who are not voting in this, I thought we might just talk through what the process is, because it’s not what you would think. It’s no longer a form. It’s a website you go to. You and I are both members of the writers’ branch. Tell us about what you went through as you picked your entries.

**Aline:** It’s interesting. You vote for your branch and Best Picture. Then in the second round, you vote for everything. When you’re nominated, it really is your peers, because it’s your branch that’s choosing. I’ve heard people advocate for the technique of really listing all five or six. I think it’s five. But then some people will say that if you really love a movie and you think it doesn’t have a lot of chances of being nominated, that you just vote for one.

**John:** I would say that having filled it out earlier this afternoon, because you’re ranking them, I think that there’s much less of a problem with filling out the rest of the card. I don’t think it’s going to be as big of an issue. Fill out the rest of the card.

**Aline:** This was an extraordinarily good year.

**John:** I want to say the same thing too.

**Aline:** So many good movies. I don’t know what is the trend that resulted in this, but sometimes the awards movies can have a spinachy, homework vibe to them, and I felt like this year there were so many that were wildly enjoyable, like Holdovers and Poor Things, that were just packed with entertainment and fun. We stayed home over the break, and I really enjoyed watching all the movies that were out.

**John:** Yeah, I did too. There have been years where I feel like I’m scrounging to get those last, the fourth and fifth filled in there. No, I had multiple choices I could’ve put in as other really good movies to nominate. I’m really curious. By the time this episode comes out, people will have seen what the nominees are. There’s really good movies out there. I would just encourage people, if there’s movies that are nominated that you haven’t heard of yet, they really are good, and they really are worth seeking out.

**Aline:** I always vote for a straight-up comedy-

**John:** Same.

**Aline:** … because it’s such an under-represented genre, and as discussed many times on this show, it’s just as hard, if not harder, to write. I always find a couple of straight-up comedies that I like and throw them in there.

**John:** Comedies and also animation for me. It’s making sure that we’re recognizing the writing that goes into animation, because a lot of times, those animated films aren’t written under Guild contracts, so they’re not eligible for WGA awards, but they are eligible for other Oscars and stuff.

**Aline:** We are righting wrongs with our votes. We are really-

**John:** That’s what we’re doing.

**Aline:** … administering justice.

**John:** Another thing that happened this past week is I got an announcement for Final Draft 13. I make Highland, so of course, I don’t really use Final Draft. But you write in Final Draft, don’t you?

**Aline:** I do. I tried another program, but the people that I collaborate with revolted. It was like everybody had to get it or nobody. Nobody wanted to change. It’s the devil you know. I don’t know that I’m super up on every update. I got to say, I don’t know that I update until it becomes impossible-

**John:** Exactly.

**Aline:** … not to update. My general feeling about updates – and I’m not alone here – is I approach them with dread, as I almost always find it’s a worsening. Like this new iPhone update, where to get a GIF going, you got to go through several… I’m tapping a lot of stuff to get to my kittens with a ball of yarn.

**John:** Give Aline her kittens.

**Aline:** That’s right. I’m wondering, what does Final Draft have at this… The way I use it is so simple that-

**John:** You’re using it probably the same way you’ve used it for the last 15 years. You have a very set workflow way to do it. To the degree I sympathize with Final Draft is they are selling a product where they sell it once and then they have to convince you to keep buying the new version of it, so they have to keep adding new features to it. But the features, to my eyes, are not particularly rewarding. I would be curious if listeners write in and say, “Oh, I actually do use these new features.” Tell us about it. There are these ribbons and these cards and all these other things. Aline, you’re a person who uses this every day, but I suspect you’re not touching any of those things.

**Aline:** Ribbons, I don’t know what that is. Cards are those slug lines or slugs?

**John:** No. They actually look like little index cards. It takes your whole script and it breaks it down into little index cards.

**Aline:** Oh, right. Here’s the thing. I’ll mess that up. Whatever that is, I will change it to a point where I will then have to text my son and ask him how to undo things. You want a simple… Unless it could do stuff like tell you to get up and go for a walk or make your lunch for you, which would be amazing, because just the constant drumbeat of what’s your lunch… If Final Draft could assemble a turkey sandwich on focaccia, that is a-

**John:** Game changer.

**Aline:** … update I would pay for.

**John:** Absolutely. So many of the features that apps and Final Draft and other ones add, they feel like productive procrastination. It’s like, oh, it’s a different way to look at your thing, or it’s, oh, I’m filling out all this stuff. I’m just here to tell you that you and me and no other professional writers we know of really use all those things.

**Aline:** Are you still doing longhand?

**John:** I still write longhand for scenes, starting out, yeah.

**Aline:** You do? I know other people who do that. That’s so interesting. It’s the same if you’re doing it with a rock and a chisel. You just got to get stuff on paper, although I don’t mind things that get you in the mood. As you and I have discussed, the project of writing is a lot like getting into cold water, where you’re splashing little bits of it on your arm to acclimate yourself. What’s interesting to me is some people really, really use those features to really, really outline. For me – and I think you and I are the same – it will kind of kill my fun. I think it’s probably better for people who really love to have it all completely worked out.

**John:** Writing is one of those weird things where it’s the overall imagination to figure out what the shape of the story is, but it’s also what is literally at the cursor, what is the next letter in this word, what is the next word in this sentence. It’s that kind of work. I don’t see these tools helping you very much in doing that real, actual, granular writing work.

**Aline:** You can spend a lot of time without pages.

**John:** I guess my sympathy for Final Draft and these apps is that they’re not making any money unless they can convince you, Aline Brosh McKenna, to spend another $199 or whatever the upgrade fee is for Final Draft to buy it again. That’s a tough thing for them.

**Aline:** Don’t they do that by making the old versions unusable?

**John:** Eventually, they’ll stop updating them, so they won’t work with the new versions of Mac OS. Then you have folks who don’t upgrade their machines for forever. That’s also a challenge. It’s bad.

The main topic I wanted to get into today is actually kind of related, because it’s about taking control of your circumstances. We’ve talked before about main character energy. I think you actually had some follow-up conversations about main character energy, what protagonists in general want and what they’re doing. But usually, when you hear about agency, it’s usually about lacking agency. Aline, when someone says, “This character lacks agency,” or, “We need to see more agency out of this character,” what do they mean? What is the note behind that note?

**Aline:** An expression that I like is pulling levers, because I think that’s a very nice visual, where sometimes you’ll have a character who’s not affecting the outcome of the story enough, and so they’re serving more spice or frosting, as opposed to being the main course or being something which really moves the story forward.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot with female characters, especially in big, bombastic genre movies. You’ll sometimes find the woman who is the, quote unquote, scientist. All she does is sort of spit out a bunch of lingo. The poor lady was trying to memorize in her chair. But that’s not actually pulling the levers in the story. It’s really important.

It doesn’t mean you have to do it all the same way. Some characters can be moving a story forward by being absent or being passive in some way, although that’s probably higher degree of difficulty. But making sure that your characters are involved in every turn, so that the turns don’t happen without them, and if there is a coincidence or if there is a dropping into their lap of something, that it’s justified by what you set up before.

I don’t mind a happenstance. A lot of times when you tell your friend a great story, it’s like, “And then I turned the corner in Cost Plus and there was John August looking for a throw pillow.” Sometimes coincidences are fine, but if you find that your character is not the one controlling the puppet strings, then it’s something to look at. I’m really an advocate of making writers’ lives easier. The more active your character is in pushing things forward, the easier it’ll be.

**John:** Yeah. I think when I hear that note about, oh, it feels like the character lacks agency, it seems like they’re reacting rather than acting. They’re responding to things that other people are doing, rather than doing the things themselves. They feel like they’re corks floating along in the water and just being moved by the waves. We want to see them having the ability to make choices, and actually making those choices. We’re going to talk about the term “agentic” in just a second. Agency, I think to me, is the ability to make choices, and agentic is making those choices. You’re actually seeing the characters take that initiative, take those actions and do those things.

Before we dive into it, I do wonder whether our notions of agency tend to be a little bit gendered and culturally loaded. We have a sense of agency as the hero with the sword who runs and does the thing, whereas having agency in a story may look different for a female character in another cultural situation.

**Aline:** I think good storytelling requires protagonists who you’re engaged with, and you’re engaged with their decision tree. What’s interesting to me is sometimes we rename these things as main character energy or agentic or whatever. They’re all kind of the same thing. It goes back to our Final Draft discussion. These are elemental. You’re making bread; you need flour, water. There’s a few things you need. I think giving it another name… I’m looking forward to the first time I’m in a meeting and someone says “agentic.”

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Aline:** I will text you instantly. I think that the reason that people will grab at certain bits of jargon like that is that you can have a shared conversation about what’s important in storytelling. The thing about main character energy is just our idea of what a main character is or does.

In Poor Things, for instance, she’s got diminished capabilities in certain ways, but she’s, I’m going to say, wildly agentic. She’s constantly going, “Oh, I want to go over there,” and it’s very disruptive to everyone around her, making big choices and big swings.

I think that’s part of what makes, to me, a story entertaining. I tend to be less entertained by movies where people are being buoyed by fate. But that’s a genre also. That’s a certain type of storytelling too. It just feels very different from what I do. I really like things that grab you with putting you on a story towrope right away.

**John:** Absolutely. This term “agentic,” I found it in a bunch of… I fell down a rabbit hole looking at these blog posts which were using this term and linking to each other talking about the term. It relates to grind and hustle culture and that sense of doing all the things to put yourself ahead and put yourself first, about taking risks professionally and socially. It also ties into that sense of seeing yourself as the protagonists in this story and not being afraid to take up space and demand attention.

**Aline:** Now, you’re talking about stories or life?

**John:** Both. As I was reading these blog posts, I was seeing people writing about themselves as characters, basically taking a look outside themselves and saying, “What should this person, who is me, do in this situation in order to achieve those goals?” Just like heroes have their “I want” songs. They’re basically giving themselves permission to sing their “I want” songs and actually pursue those things and not stop earlier in the process, not settle for mediocre or okay, but push themselves. I guess mostly, I want to talk for a little bit about real-life people, because I think our listeners are also heroes in their own stories. There’s pros and cons to acting more agentic themselves.

**Aline:** That’s where I think you do get into different sort of people feeling entitled to be more agentic than others. Something I think I’m quite annoying about when I work with women is reminding them that they just asked for permission to do something or they just apologized before they did something or they just apologized before they pitched something.

I’ll often find that men will use humor to cover very aggressive behavior. They’ll say, “I fired that agent.” They did something very aggressive, and they’re proud of it, and they think it’s funny. With women, not always, but it can be a very tortured path just toward saying what you want and going to get it. Obviously, it’s because there are social repercussions to that. It can be not a cute look.

I think you’ll find that women put a lot more exclamation points in their emails. I’m not the first person to say that. We were talking the other day about the devastatingness of when you’re texting someone and then they throw in an “xo.” I don’t know what that means to men, but for women that means I’m done now talking to you. This conversation is done. It’s an “xo.” It’s a firm hug and a kiss of farewell.

**John:** As you’re saying this, I’m thinking back to our text conversations, and how do you and I decide when that thread is done. It can be tough to know asynchronously. I don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I’m doing, whether we have the moments to really engage in that. Finding a nice way to close a text conversation can be challenging. But I agree with you that it is often, there’s a gender and a power level aspect of that. You just don’t know, not even permission, but you don’t even know how it’s going to be received if you clearly state what it is you would like.

**Aline:** You have to be, I don’t know if aggressive is the right word, but you have to be forthright to get anything. You wouldn’t go up to the counter of In-N-Out and be like, “I was thinking, I don’t have to have it. It would be nice. I don’t totally have to have it. I could have something else. I do have a car, so I could go somewhere else, but it would be nice to have a burger. I would love cheese on that. If you don’t have cheese, we don’t need to do… ” That is something that women are taught, not directly take a class in that, but we’re definitely taught to lubricate our asks.

I do think that I modeled myself in certain respects on my father, my brother, and my mom is French. She does not need to lubricate her asks, for sure. I think I modeled myself on a lot more forthrightness. The combination of French and Israeli is two of the most forthright folks. But I do find that women, I’m often saying to them, you don’t need to ask for permission to specifically take up space.

**John:** A classic tenet of this, being agentic, is asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Basically, assume a yes, and also don’t be afraid of hearing no. If you hear no, welcome the rejections, basically. One of the guys here talks about having a Google Doc basically, like, “Here’s all the people who’ve said no to me,” and here’s the rejections you’ve gotten, and taking those as a mark of like, then you actually asked. You actually did. You went up, put yourself out there to ask those questions.

**Aline:** There’s something I’m fascinated with, which is, I think, a spin on agentic, which is I know several people – and they’re men – who are powerful by virtue of not engaging, so they won’t answer the text or they won’t answer the email or they’ll let it slide. I think one time somebody said to me, “Aline, you don’t have to hit every tennis ball back over the net. You’re making yourself very tired doing that.”

I do think if you’re following up with everything, if you’re answering every email, there is a low status to that in a funny way. If you’re just saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I’m not interested in that,” I feel like you can be too forthright and add an extra level of communication. I’ve been working on letting things slide a little bit more and not responding to absolutely everything and being a little less scrupulous about that. I think there’s a funny way where that is agentic in a way.

**John:** It is.

**Aline:** You don’t have to. I shared an office with a male writer who was really helpful with me. One time I called somebody, and I thought maybe I hadn’t said the right thing. Then I was like, “I’m going to call him back and say, ‘I didn’t mean this, but I could mean that. I’m sorry I said this, but really,'” da da da blah and da da da. He was like, “Just stop. There’s a lot of power in just stopping.” It’s interesting. I think it’s more about knowing what your goal is and what the steps are to get it, as opposed to resolving to just talk all the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about strategy here. You and I both have assistants. Part of the reason why we’re not responding to every email is because we have assistants who filter stuff down to us. As something becomes important, Drew will tell me, “Oh, this is a thing we actually need to pay attention to.” But I’m not worried about every bit of schedule and the 19 times to reset a meeting. The time when Drew was off on his honeymoon, and I suddenly had to do a bunch of that stuff, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is actually really annoying.” I’m glad to have Drew there.

What I do see some of these people who are pitching agentic talking about is, really think about how to be a good assistant to yourself. If you had a great assistant, what would that assistant be doing for you? How would they be filtering stuff down? Amy, my daughter, was just home over the Christmas holiday, and she needed to call and cancel this appointment she had, and she’s like, “Daddy, can you just do it?”

**Aline:** Yeah, it stresses her out.

**John:** It stresses her out. She doesn’t want to do that. She’s like, “It’s weird. I could totally do it for a friend, but I can’t do it for myself.” That’s I think the skill you have to learn is just pretend you are your own assistant and just do the thing.

**Aline:** Man, my assistant, the wonderful Kari O’Hara, happens to be here with me, sitting next to Drew. Big plug for Kari. What’s up? High five. One thing I do is, when I tell assistants that I may not be flowery in my responses, because I do think they’re accustomed to women who are like… If she’s saying, “Do you want to do coffee or lunch?” I think they’re accustomed to women saying, “Oh, thank you so much for asking. Coffee would be great,” blah blah blah. Sometimes I’ll just text back, “No lunch?” or, “Lunch?” or, “No coffee?” One time we ordered lunch in the writers’ room and someone’s lunch was missing. I was in the middle of running the room and talking, so the only words I managed to squeak out were, “Phoebe no lunch.” Then we called the group text Phoebe No Lunch.

One of the things is to try not to lard up all your communications with… Again, I’m back to lubricant. I don’t know what’s happening this morning. Just to be able to find people that you can communicate with directly and simply and that they don’t need everything to be sprayed with cologne before they receive it. I think for women, that’s…

As you get older as a woman and you start to drift towards battleax, which is a wonderful place that I hope to be eventually, where you feel like after a certain age… This is where women, I think, beat men. A really old woman. My mom’s 93. She can say and do whatever she wants. She can ask however she wants. We’re all drifting past that, whereas I think men are going to fall into cranky old man waving a cane.

But I think one of the things about growing up as a lady is learning to get what you want and using softer tactics if you need to, but then also finding people to work with who are comfortable with your directness, so that you’re not always apologizing to the furniture.

**John:** Absolutely. I cherry-picked a bunch of little strategies, different blog posts I’ve listed here. Evie Cottrell has a bunch of them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. One of them is, put a big premium on doing something now rather than later, so don’t leave enough time for motivation to fade, which seems like smart advice for writers, but also for anybody who just needs to get some stuff done. My One Cool Thing actually has a little bit more about that. That sense of, “Oh, there’s going to be a better place or time. I’m not ready for it yet.” Waiting is generally not helpful for almost anybody.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing, and I’m sure he got it from a business book or something. But there’s a principle called now, soon, later. It’s things you need to do right away, things you can do soon, and things you can do later. It sounds so simple. But sometimes, breaking that into like, “Hey, if I want to make a hair appointment for Thursday, I got to do that now. Then I need to call the upholsterer. I could do that later.” Just really breaking those down in your brain.

I do think there’s a value sometimes in taking a second and making sure. I’m the king of the random text, of the random reach-out. If anything, I’ve tried to take a breath before I do that and make sure it’s an important communication, especially if I’m reaching out to someone really busy. Then my other thing is, I really used to send people a lot of TikToks, and I’ve lately decided that I’m just sending them homework, unless I write below it. Can’t send a naked TikTok anymore. You have to say, “John, I’m sending you this because it’s about the word agentic.” Don’t just send me a cold TikTok.

**John:** Context.

**Aline:** I’m the worst offender with those, but I’ve just realized that you’re going to… If you’re going to send me a reel, which is obviously a TikTok that was from four weeks ago, you got to tell me why you’re sending it to me.

**John:** That’s fair, because you’ve been on the receiving end of those reels/TikToks. You got pulled out of whatever thought train you were in, because Aline’s texting me, there must be something important. And no. It’s a very cute chihuahua, but it’s not relevant.

Reaching out to people is actually part of the set of advice, which is figuring out what you need and figuring out who can help you get it and then asking for it. Those are things that are challenging to do, that you feel like there’s power imbalances. These agentic people will tell you, just get over your fear of doing that, because you can get no answer, you can get a no, but you’re actually not going to be burning things as much as you suspect you will.

**Aline:** I would say, because we’re almost all communicating now electronically – a lot of people are still in letter-writing age – I think it’s okay to send an email that goes, “Hey John, so-and-so is in town and wants to know if you want to have dinner,” bloop. People still send things with lots and lots of words in it. I always think of Craig’s thing of like, the return key is your friend. Also, I think because of texts, when people get to emails, they really roll out the folderol.

**John:** Short emails are fine. Love them.

**Aline:** Delightful.

**John:** Delightful.

**Aline:** Don’t need a greeting.

**John:** “Hey.”

**Aline:** “Yo.”

**John:** Cut the first two paragraphs. Go right into the heart of it. As I said before about thriving on rejection, so writing down those rejections. Apply for jobs you don’t think you’ll get, because at least you’ll actually have experience of what it is like to interview for those places. Rejections are evidence that you’re actually exploring and trying things.

We’ve talked a lot on the show about luck. The way this blog post was phrasing it was to, “increase your surface area for serendipity,” which is putting more places out there where people can find you and recognize, like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. This is a smart writer.” We talk about how you’ve written that script that’s fantastic. No one is going to read that script unless you put that out there in the world for people to read. The same applies for any other profession you’re doing. If you’re a coder, an artist, whatever, you have to put stuff out there so people can see, and see, oh, this is a person who knows what they’re doing.

**Aline:** For certain. You have to eat some embarrassment. My older son is in the workplace. I think sending a cold email or a cold call or reaching out to someone you don’t know that well, that might be a help. I think that’s really hard when you’re young, because it feels like you don’t have the portfolio. You’re not standing in the right shoes. I remember that being the hardest thing. When you get more experienced and people are like, “I know who John August is, so if he’s emailing me about this thing… ” You’re going to be treated with certain respect. It’s eating the embarrassment of someone going, “Who is this?” or, “Don’t send this to me.”

One time early on in my career, really early on, my agent was someone that I had been friends with, and I didn’t really understand the lines between friend and work friend. Those can be hard to figure out. I had found a piece of material that I thought was really interesting, and I called him on the weekend. Again, it was someone that I was friends with, so I thought that was okay. I called him on the weekend, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?” He was really angry. He was really angry. He said, “How dare you call me on the weekend when I’m home with my family and talk to me about work?”

You know when something embarrassing happens, your body floods with adrenaline, your brain starts printing Polaroids? I can remember where I was sitting in my kitchen, at the table that I had bought at the flea market, the Pasadena City College Flea Market, and painted myself. I can remember where I was sitting. I was so deeply humiliated that I had disrupted him and that I didn’t know what rule.

What I did and what I do a lot with uncomfortable work things is I convert it into something funny. I tend to save those things up as little stories to then tell other people. That is the way that I pop the pimple on my embarrassment.

You’re going to do that when you’re young. You’re going to go somewhere. That’s why every time, when you’re a young person, it’s like, “We’re going to be networking,” then you just have a clenching of the sphincter, because it just sounds like it’s going to be awful. You will have awful interactions, but you might meet your best friend after something where you tried to pitch yourself to someone.

I had, when I was young, a couple things where someone thought I was someone else. I just recently told her this story. I once met with a producer. We were walking in, and the executive said, “Are you ready for this meeting?” The gentleman said, “I’m always ready for a meeting with my favorite writer, Jenny Bicks.” Then we all stood there, frozen. Then the poor executive had to say, “This is actually not Jenny Bicks.” I then had to have a meeting with someone who very clearly didn’t really know who I was, probably hadn’t read my stuff. Again, got to eat embarrassment and just go. It’s like, “You know what? This is still an opportunity. This is still a great producer. Maybe something will come from it.” My second meeting with that gentleman, by the way, he was wearing a wet bathing suit. Continue.

**John:** Oh, good lord. Talk about lines being transgressed. He felt no shame.

**Aline:** None.

**John:** You felt shame about your moment there. Going back to your story of you called the executive on the weekend and realized, oh, I crossed a boundary there that I shouldn’t have crossed, yes, you hold onto those moments, not because you want to fixate and ruminate them, because as a writer, you actually can use them. While it did not directly lead to any scene in Devil Wears Prada-

**Aline:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** … that experience is something that carries through to her character.

**Aline:** Prada was so resonant for me, because I had completely failed as a magazine writer. I remember calling New York Woman with my then-partner. I was trying to leave a message, a query message, but it kept beeping and beeping and cutting us off. It was like, “Hi, we’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’re really excited to write for New York Woman, because we think,” beep.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Aline:** It’s like, do you call back? Do you call back? And if you call back, are you starting from scratch? What do you do? Are you starting from scratch, or are you saying, “Sorry, I think I got cut off. I’m Aline, and I wanted to,” and then I got cut off again.

**John:** You’re in the swinger state at this point.

**Aline:** I then wanted to abandon ship, but I thought that’s worse.

**John:** She changed her name so they could never track her down again.

**Aline:** This editor from New York Woman, wherever you are, I’m really sorry for the six half-tries that I left on your machine. But again, trying to laugh about the rejections. I think even if you’re taking a more serious tact to it, yeah, it’s at bats, man. The best baseball player… What’s a great baseball average? 380. Oh, wow, John’s even worse than I am. You guys? What’s good? Oh, wow. We’re in a show biz room. There’s not a person in here.

**John:** As established in last episode, baseball is not my thing. I will guess basketball.

**Aline:** I think high 300s is a good baseball, which is you failed over 70% of the time.

**John:** We’ll wrap up this topic with-

**Aline:** 60%. Keep going.

**John:** Wrap up on a… I love a good metaphor. This was called the moat of low status. Cate Hall has a blog post about it. She says when learning a new skillset, it requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time in which you are actually bad at a thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. It’s a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side, but also because it gives anybody who can cross it a real advantage. Sometimes, these really awkward moments, it’s recognizing, this is the moat, I’m in the moat. It’s going to suck, and you’re going to be floundering and half drowning. When you get to the other side, you’re like, oh, you actually did cross over. In some ways, I feel like we always talk about the wall around Hollywood or breaking in, but really it’s swimming across that moat is really I think a better way of thinking about what it’s like to enter into this industry.

**Aline:** That’s where relationships really are helpful. When you and I met, I think I was pregnant or I just had a baby. It was 20 years ago. You are definitely ahead of me in terms of getting rewrites and talking to people about those things. I can remember conversations. That was not that long before the strike. I can remember I was having conversations where I would say to you, “How do you do this?” or, “How do you initiate that?” I do that for people too. I always encourage them to call me, because sometimes it’s learning how to make that approach or how to dig yourself out of whatever hole. That’s why I think it’s still important to live here, honestly, more than anything else, is just not to meet…

Young people often think they’re here to meet the important folks. You’re not. You’re there to meet your peers, Drew and Kari sitting on a couch later when we ask them for jobs. It’s important to create those things, so that you can call people who are on and about your level. A step below, a step above are the most helpful people, because they’ll also remember what that was like, getting an agent, taking meetings with agents, what was a good meeting, what wasn’t, is this person good or not. To me, the little floats across the moat are these relationships. I treasure those peer relationships that I had when I was a young person so much.

**John:** It’s also important to remember that we swam across the moat in a different era, and the moat has changed. That’s why it’s important to have people who are in the same struggle that you’re in.

**Aline:** That’s right. What I do now when young people come to town, they want to talk to me, is I get the assistants together in my office and their friends to talk to them, because if you want to know how to break in in 1991, I can really help you if you got a time travel machine, but it’s so, so different now. It’s much more useful for young people to find other young people than to talk to me, because I just have different moats. The moats never end. I think it’s also important to say that the moats never end.

I was talking to someone who has a movie in contention in the awards season. What always happens is it coalesces around a couple things. It’s like the Oppenheimer bulldozer is coming, and so for other movies, even though they’re in this amazing conversation and they’re doing panels and events, walking through those things knowing you’re not going to win anything is dispiriting. I was trying to say to this person, “You’re doing great,” but they were feeling bad. They were feeling like they were in a moat, because they were now going to go to 20 events where they were going to watch the same people win over and over. Not all moats are the same, but we all have them.

**John:** Let’s go on to our other marquee topic, How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite things we’ve added over the years. This first article comes from Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris writing for Slate. It’s called Never Use Alone. It’s about Jessie Blanchard. She’s an operator and education director for Never Use Alone. It’s this hotline designed to reduce the risk of overdose for drug users who are alone. Basically, you call this hotline when you’re about to use drugs, heroin or whatever. She stays on the line with you. Before you actually use, she’s like, “Unlock the door. Tell me where your address is.” Then if she hears you overdosing, she will call for emergency services.

The story follows one specific call with Kimber King, who’s recently out of rehab, and highlighting post-rehab life there, and also gets in a bit of Blanchard’s personal journey there into harm reduction. Aline, what did you make of this article? Is there a movie there? Is there a character there? What do you think is the story here?

**Aline:** I don’t know if that’s a whole thing, but it’s a really good kick-off, I thought, for a thriller or a murder mystery or something. Again, I don’t want to minimize the important life-or-death work that these folks are doing. It’s a great idea. I’m really always in favor of things that treat people as they are and not as we hope they should be. But I do think it’s because it’s over the phone, because there’s someone silently listening, it almost made me think of Blow Out, the De Palma movie with Travolta on the bridge. It seems like you could stumble into some sort of mystery, criminal conspiracy by listening through on the phone. I don’t know if it’s about drugs and people who traffic drugs.

PJ Vogt has a new podcast. Have you listened to Search Engine? He has an episode about why fentanyl is in everything. It seems like it could be a good jumping-off point for a story about that world of drugs and availability, but also could kick you into maybe a genre piece that had a mystery or a thriller.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s always that issue of, if it’s a two-hour movie, it’s a one-time story, there has to be something remarkable about this out of all the things. This is the happenstance that kicks into this specific story, that’s not a thing that happens all the time. I think she’s potentially a really interesting character, because her background is a nurse, her own family lost to addiction, and trying to walk this line of wanting to help people, but realizing that in helping people, she may be prolonging their addiction. That is really interesting. But I agree that there has to be some inciting incidence beyond just what’s usual.

**Aline:** For sure. The other thing is it could be someone’s job inside of a thing, where let’s say you have an emergency response team and they do suicide intervention, if you wanted to do something with several people. It could be a job that someone has, because there’s this aspect of silent witness and overhearing. Those are good Hitchcocky-feeling things.

**John:** Another possibility would be to actually just do the origin story of how she came to do this, so it’s the first time she’s doing this thing. Basically, after a loss in the family, she’s doing this for the first time, because she doesn’t want this thing to happen.

**Aline:** It’s going to have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to go someplace.

**Aline:** It would have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to be. Who are the obstacles? Who are the people who are telling her no? What is she overcoming? What is the journey that she’s going through?

**Aline:** She somehow gets connected to her cheating ex-husband and doesn’t call 911 when she should.

**John:** Maybe.

**Aline:** That’s not this exact woman, but that could be a different character.

**John:** Second up, we have an article by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times. This one is looking at cases of silicosis, which is an incurable lung disease that’s happening among California workers, particularly those who are cutting and polishing engineered stone, silicon kitchen countertops. It’s affecting workers at much younger ages. People in their 20s and 30s are getting a fatal, incurable lung condition. The story follows particularly Leobardo Segura Meza, a 27-year-old father diagnosed with silicosis. This is a California story for this one, mostly Los Angeles County, and the questions of what controls or safeties things we’re going to put here.

**Aline:** Man, that was distressing.

**John:** Yeah, it was distressing. My first thought is it’s an Erin Brockovichy thing. Whenever bad things are happening to people and no one’s paying attention, that it’s an Erin Brockovichy kind of story, where you have somebody coming in to recognize the situation and fight for them and to help them. That’s one option. But I’m also wondering if there’s a way to have the people that are being affected be more the drivers of the story.

**Aline:** It’s so funny, I had the exact same thought, which is those “someone from the outside is the savior” stories apart from occasionally feeling inauthentic, I think have been done so much. Could it be a story about people who have to organize, who have never organized before? I was really distressed to hear that there are interventions with water and other equipment that they could use to make it better, but they won’t.

I don’t know that this one jumped out at me as anything other than a background piece. It feels like there’s a lot of businesses which can be shady, based on how they’re implemented, not inherently shady, but how they’re implemented. To me, this just made me think of how really venally consumerist and bottom-line-based our economy has become, that the idea that you would protect workers and that you would have those things in place to protect them is just not a first thought. I just think we’ve gotten increasingly like, if you make a buck, then that’s all that matters. Getting the water probably costs money, and getting the right equipment probably costs money.

I would see it more as like, if you were doing a movie like The Big Short or something, and one of the businesses that you stumble across is someone who’s just rampantly killing people when he could be doing something else. But it didn’t jump out at me as its own piece.

**John:** I didn’t get the sense that the countertop manufacturers were… They could be negligent, but they weren’t evil. Sometimes it was just the ignorance, that they didn’t know what was happening there, and sometimes it was people who were just not trained to do this thing or that weren’t aware of what the actual problems and dangers are, because apparently, it’s different than cutting other stone. If you’re cutting granite, you’re not going to have the same issues as you are these special things.

**Aline:** Yeah, it’s those composites. A friend of mine’s mother called her and said, “I’m thinking of having my counters replaced, because we have this stuff that’s harmful.” We were saying, “It’s already in there.”

**John:** It’s the cut.

**Aline:** When you cut it up to get it out, you might be creating the very thing that you’re protesting.

**John:** It’s not a problem existing there in a space. Like you, I’m not sure there’s a full movie here. It felt like this is the context background for a Law and Order episode. It’s a thing that’s happening, and we’re meeting a bunch of people because of that situation, but it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily driving the whole thing.

The other way you could get into this is that it’s a story about this family, and the patriarch of the family, the young father of the family is going to be dying at a young age because of this thing. That’s an interesting story that I haven’t seen before.

**Aline:** He learns how to represent himself as a lawyer, and he takes the case.

**John:** Even if the court case is in foreground or the sense of what is it like to be a young father who knows he’s going to die of an incurable thing, like an old man’s disease, that could be an interesting story, whether he’s the central character or he’s the father of the protagonist.

**Aline:** One of the things that’s happened – this happens also when people send me books – is that Hollywood swings back and forth between doing things that require special handling in the sausage factory. It has swung back and forth many times since you and I have been doing this. TV and movies like to take turns doing this. In the word of Super Mario Bros being the most successful movie, I don’t know that this is commercial. Again, that’s why I tend towards genrefying these, because if there’s a murder or an extortion or a way to make it Night Agent, because otherwise, we’re not really engaging with how commercial things are. But right now, there’s such an emphasis on things that are super commercial. I look back on things like Erin Brockovich, just wondering who would make that.

**John:** I still think you can make Erin Brockovich, but it has to be a more seasoned movie.

**Aline:** With a big star.

**John:** With a big star. You wouldn’t put it out in the summer. You’d put it out in December, to get a bunch of awards. That would be driving it.

This might be more commercial. This is called Loyalty Testers. It is Gina Cherelus writing for the New York Times. It looks at this service called Loyalty Test, where they hire these, quote unquote, “Testers” to flirt with people’s partners online and assess their loyalty. It tracks Caden Redmond, who’s a college student who charges $100 per test, which involves starting a conversation on TikTok or Instagram and gauging their response to those romantic advances and then reporting back to the person who hired them whether they got something out of it. There’s people who do it freelance, but this service has recruited a bunch of Testers and about 1,000 customers, and they’re going on through it. Aline, this feels like it’s in a relationship space. I can see a rom-com version of this. What are your instincts with Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** There’s always some rom-com version of this floating around, whether you go on dates and you try and do this. Now, it’s sort of catfishingy online things. This is a TikTok genre. There’s a couple people who do this on TikTok, and they’ll show you the texts. It has an unpleasantness to it that I think as a romantic comedy, I think if it was sharper, more edgy, more like Bottoms or something, where it was a little bit more irreverent and anarchic, because you’re dealing with shitty behavior from both the person who’s fishing and the person who’s been fished, although I don’t know that this always means that people want to cheat or if people are excited to have been flirted with. It is kind of shocking in those TikToks how fast particularly men go to, “Yeah, I’m going to be in Phoenix next week, so what are you doing? I’d love to get a drink.” I don’t know. It depressed me.

**John:** I wonder if it’s the jumping-off place. You have a person who is a Tester, who has become so jaded and cynical about love, and they’re the person who has to be finally won over that there are actually goodhearted people that cannot be tempted or pulled away. That’s probably the best way in there. There’s a non-rom-com version of this as well, of course, which is that you think you’re doing one thing, but it actually spirals way out of control, and someone’s life is put in danger because of this flirting.

**Aline:** Or it’s Bill Clinton, or somebody says, “I want you to test this person,” but what you don’t realize is it’s Putin. I guess you could play with that a little bit. No Hard Feelings, which I really enjoy, had an aspect of somebody’s hired to do… Somebody’s hired to do a something is a genre on its own. I wrote one of those. That’s Three to Tango. Someone hires someone to do a something, and it leads to unintended consequences is a genre of which I thought Bottoms did a fun job of. It turned into about four different movies along the way. I thought that that contributed to the fun, anarchic spirit of it, that they have a very tiny germ of an idea, and then it leads them hither and thither. If you’re going to do something with a satirical edge in the way that this has a satirical edge… Pain Hustlers is the movie I think of recently. It’s scammy people. Then it feels like it’s got a satiric aspect to it.

**John:** Don’t sleep on No Hard Feelings. If you’ve missed it in theaters, it’s worth a watch. It’s really well done.

**Aline:** The funniest scene of the year.

**John:** The fight on the beach?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I love it. It’s so good. Next up, we have Zachary Crockett writing for The Hustle. This is about a man who won the lottery 14 times. Stefan Mandel, who is a Romanian mathematician, exploited loopholes in various lotto systems to buy every possible combination. If you have to guess six numbers, there’s only a certain number of variations, and you can actually just buy them all up. The formula basically works out. If it’s worth it, if it’s three times the amount of money you’re going to spend, you should absolutely do it, because it can pay off. The challenge, of course, is that logistically, it’s absolutely a nightmare to buy all those tickets. But you can do it. He won the Virginia Lottery and some other ones, got quite rich off the Virginia Lottery. Ultimately, the story continues, went through bankruptcy. There were lawsuits and other things. He’s now living a quiet life in Vanuatu. A lottery movie, is there a thing to do here?

**Aline:** The one thing that jumped out at me was, you know when you’re watching a heist and they’re putting together a group of guys? It felt like one of the group of guys has retired to Vanuatu, and this is his claim to fame, and so they’re putting together… They need someone who crunches the numbers, and it’s this guy. I would pitch the guy from this season of Fargo who plays the hitman. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

**John:** I haven’t seen it.

**Aline:** I will find out what the name of that actor is. But someone really enigmatic and interesting, with a foreign accent, who made a killing doing something abstrusely mathy like this, and then retired to an island, but they have to bring him back for this heist on a casino. That’s what I pictured. That’s not a whole movie, but it’s a really fun backstory for somebody.

**John:** It’s good you bring up heists, because this thing has a heist feeling, because they’re not breaking the law, but logistically, it’s just so challenging to do what they’re doing. They have to convince so many people. The social engineering of it all was a huge factor as well. There’s just mechanics of doing this thing, but there needs to be a larger purpose. That’s why I think you going to they’re pulling somebody in to do this one extra job makes more sense, because if it’s just like, “We want to make a bunch of money,” nobody cares. That’s not actual real stakes. You have to do it for… There’s something that he’s actually really going for here. Originally, he’s doing it so he can escape from Romania. That feels a very great purpose.

**Aline:** Did you see BlackBerry?

**John:** I loved BlackBerry, yeah.

**Aline:** It kills. What I loved about it is everyone is there for a different reason. Glenn’s character really does not care about what they’re doing or why.

**John:** He just wants a hockey team.

**Aline:** He just wants a hockey team. What I loved about that character piece was that he was such a jerk, but then he was so good at being the exact guy they needed in that exact moment, and then somehow it’s a version of the Peter principle. It itched some part of his brain which caused him to completely take his eye off the ball and just grind on the hockey thing, which was so funny. That single-mindedness, the character who’s single-minded to the point of being socially inept, it feels like one of these. I bet Noah Hawley could do something with… I could see a season of Fargo where they do something like this.

**John:** Glenn’s character in BlackBerry is agentic.

**Aline:** He’s the most agentic.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Aline:** He and Emma Stone in Poor Things, quite agentic. I would say that Barbie’s pretty agentic.

**John:** Barbie’s agentic too, yeah. None of them are afraid to make fools of themselves. They’re happy to pick up the phone to get an answer. They know what they don’t know, and they’re not letting that get in their way. Let’s look back through these things and see which of these might actually be movies. Also, we should talk about which of these things do we need to get those specific rights, or is it just the general story space. Never Use Alone, is there anything here?

**Aline:** I don’t know how widespread that is. If it’s just this one lady, then it’s different from if that’s been adopted as a widespread practice. There are many movies about suicide hotlines, and this is a zhuzh on this. It’s very topical, and it’s a thing people are interested in. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s an interesting space. I could see the indie film version. I could see the Sundance movie that’s in this space.

**Aline:** You would then get her life rights?

**John:** Maybe, because then it’s nice to be able to have her as a person, as not just a resource, but also as part of the, you want to say market of the movie.

**Aline:** The narrative around a movie. That’s a really good point, John, in that for the smaller movies, the narrative around the movies is sometimes just as important.

**John:** I think that could be helpful. Her goals, in terms of keeping people from dying alone of overdoses, would be served by this movie existing.

**Aline:** That too.

**John:** Countertop cancer? We don’t think there’s a movie here.

**Aline:** No, not really. It seems like it’s an element of something.

**John:** Absolutely. The article’s interesting. You don’t need to buy that article. I think it’s a backdrop for something, but there’s nothing here specifically you want to hold on to. The Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** It’s been around for a long time. Those ideas of “I test your spouse’s fidelity” twas ever thus. Just finding a new spin on it, I-

**John:** I feel like there’s probably a Cary Grant movie.

**Aline:** Here’s the issue though. Some of the funniest things that happen in your life now happen with your hand out, and you looking like you’re telling people a hilarious story. The visual is you lying in bed just looking at your phone. We have so many virtual interactions now, and this type of thing is quite a virtual experience.

Romantic comedies are one of the genres where using electronics… I’m not sure, but I feel like one of the reasons Holdovers was set in 1971 was so that… It’s an awfully short movie if someone can just call an Uber. I think sometimes technology can make these things a little dry. There’s literally not much to look at.

I would rather do a movie about somebody who hires themselves out to go to Rome and find out if the King of Denmark will cheat on the Queen before they get… The Queen of Denmark hires you to go and flirt with him and see if he will… That idea of testing fidelity is a better, almost Shakespearean idea than the specifics of how you’re doing it now.

**John:** I think if you are going to try to do something like this, you have to look at Zola or other movies that are-

**Aline:** Oh, god, I love Zola. Yes, you’re right.

**John:** Really good at-

**Aline:** Great.

**John:** … finding ways to manifest what that online conversation looks like.

**Aline:** Great call. Great call. They did that really well there. But the other thing is people get in trouble a lot with Instagram messages. People are messaging people they’re not supposed to on Instagram after a stranger reaches out to them. It just goes to show that human desire for connection or lust or whatever it is really overrides the logic button.

**John:** I have friends who are absolute strangers who met on Instagram and are dating for years.

**Aline:** Through the DMs.

**John:** Through the DMs.

**Aline:** Slid into the-

**John:** Slid in the DMs.

**Aline:** I don’t like the expression “slid into the DMs.”

**John:** It does feel filthy.

**Aline:** Back to our lubricant conversation.

**John:** Finally, the lottery winner. Is there a lottery winner movie?

**Aline:** Not per se, I don’t think.

**John:** Yeah. I like your notion of taking a piece of that, an idea of that character and bringing it into something else. I think if you’re going to do the story, I think you’re going to probably want something to back this up on. If there’s really good original reporting on this stuff and somebody who has the real scoop on all this stuff, great, but I’m not sure that you necessarily need it. Obviously, if Craig were here, he would say, if it’s all true facts, nobody owns history.

**Aline:** If it’s reported, for sure, if that’s been reported. That’s different from whether you’re going to do a first-person story about what it feels like to live in Romania and how you find these things, as opposed to using that and that math and those statistical things for a different character.

**John:** Do any of these movies get made?

**Aline:** I don’t see you following up on this batch, but really interesting to think about. One of the reasons I really like that you do this is because people struggle to find ideas. I remember one of my early writing teachers was like, “Take the New York Times and put it in front of you, and there’s 100 movies in there.” That really is true. I think what’s harder to do, and which you do your whole career, is figure out why does this speak to me, and what do I really want to talk about here.

It’s interesting how much an idea or a book or something will resonate with you, and you don’t really know why. An example is my most memed of movies, We Bought A Zoo. I really wanted to write that. I really resonated to it. I really had to have it. I really had a clear vision of it. It wasn’t until well into writing it that I realized my dad, who’s an Israeli guy, an engineer, we moved to a house in New Jersey that had nine horses and a bunch of ducks and chickens, and so here’s this guy who’s an engineer and really just works with his brain all of a sudden having to muck out stalls. But I didn’t even think of that when I grabbed that story.

Similarly, sometimes people submit me things, and they’re perfectly great, but they don’t light up the little light board in the brain that you need to follow your interest through the project.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Aline, what do you have for us this week?

**Aline:** Sometimes I just do really not useful ditties, but this time… I have a thing that many, many women have, called melasma, which is when… Look at John’s [crosstalk 00:56:54]. You get discolorations on your face. They’re hormonal. I used to have it really bad after I had babies. It’s just subject to hormones. Your face will have these brown patches. They’re usually on your cheeks or over your lip. They’re also enhanced by sun.

I’ve tried to treat it for a really long time. I’ve done lasers and various creams. Then I was influenced by Instagram. Was it Instagram or TikTok? One of those. But there’s a company called Musely, M-U-S-E-L-Y. You get on the website, and you describe what your skin looks like, and then you send them a picture, and you show them where it is on your face. They concoct a thing for you that has bleaching agents and tretinoins and different things. I’m sure that none of what I said was right, but something like that. They put a cocktail of skin stuff. First, they send you a peel, depending on what you need. They sent me this thing called the Spot Peel. You walk around for 12 hours with what looks like toothpaste on your face. Then you wash that off, and then you follow it up with a cream. I was highly skeptical, but it really worked.

**John:** That’s good.

**Aline:** My right side of my face is really almost totally cleared up. My left side, which is the driving side, which is where the sun damage always is, still has a patch here. You know what? They have really good customer service. It comes right away. They tell you when it’s coming. They make the refill process really good. Sometimes people have a good idea for a business, but the interface is not… I’m not breaking any news here, but the interface is not good. The interface of Musely is really good. You get communications from them, and they explain to you why they’re sending you this thing. The instructions are good. Is it a scam? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it except that it worked for me.

**John:** Good. You had a good customer experience there.

**Aline:** I had a good customer experience and good results.

**John:** Love it. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Adam Mastroianni called “So you wanna de-bog yourself.” It kind of ties into some of the things we talked about in terms of being agentic. He’s talking about those situations where you just feel like you’re stuck in a bog, and you just never can get out. You’re just trapped in the mud. I always love a good metaphor for things. He has a lot of really good metaphors for the stories you tell yourself about why you can’t get out or the frustrations you feel. Gutterballing, which is basically you’re moving the right direction, but you’re already in the gutter.

**Aline:** I thought that was really funny.

**John:** No matter what you do, you’re still not going to strike. Waiting for the jackpot, when someone says, “Here’s a solution.” It’s like, yes, but that doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s not magical. The mediocrity trap, stroking the problem. Some really good-

**Aline:** Stroking the problem felt NSFW [unintelligible 00:59:37].

**John:** It does. It does. That’s basically where you’re acknowledging the problem and you’re talking about the problem and you’re poring into the problem without actually trying to solve the problem.

**Aline:** John, I’m going to pitch an alt to agentic.

**John:** Please.

**Aline:** Pageantic. I’m just going to act like I’m in a beauty pageant all the time.

**John:** You’re going to do that elbow, elbow, wave, wave?

**Aline:** The elbow, elbow, wave, wave. I’m going to divide every meeting into a swimsuit, interview, talent. Pageantic.

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** What do you guys think of pageantic? They love it. No, I’m just telling you.

**John:** Applause all around.

**Aline:** It’s just a different way of doing-

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** Big hair and a sash.

**John:** 2024, my word is pageantic. 100%.

**Aline:** I would love John coming in with a sash, just a sash that says Mr. Hancock Park.

**John:** One of your One Cool Things originally was a sling for your iPhone. If that was a sash rather than a sling, two things killed at once.

**Aline:** Can you still believe they didn’t send me one free bandolier?

**John:** Come on.

**Aline:** Come on, guys.

**John:** You started that whole trend. We all know it started here.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** I love it all. The last bit of this blog post I thought was really smart was the difference between diploma problems and toothbrushing problems.

**Aline:** Oh god, yes.

**John:** A diploma is something you get once, and then you’re done. A toothbrushing is basically, you got to do it every day. Some people confuse the two things.

**Aline:** I hate that. I hate the eating and the sleeping and the thing that you have to do all… Especially, you know what’s the worst is working out. Let me just work out for an entire day once a month, instead of the… It’s the constant drumbeat. Anything that’s a constant drumbeat. I’m not a routinized person. My husband really is, and I’m really not. The constant drumbeat of the feeding the dog, the brushing the teeth, things that have to be done every day, don’t like it.

**John:** You have three dogs now. Are you brushing your dogs’ teeth?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, of course. That was a 100% honest yes. Everyone will know that she of course-

**Aline:** Everyone who knows me knows that Jimmy the dog, you can’t even put a leash on him, so the idea that you’re brushing his teeth… I’ve got one of those little adorable snarl balls, a little chihuahua. There’s many popular ones on TikTok. He’s just basically a little dust of snarl most of the time, interrupted with some kisses and cuddles.

We put some stuff in their water, and then we have a treat that we give them, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good… Then every once in a while, we have a lady come over and wrestle them to the ground. Swear to god, because I don’t want to anesthetize them, because I know someone whose dog died being anesthetized for dental. I would really feel bad. We found somebody who will just wrestle your dog to the ground with a bunch of towels and non-consensually brush their teeth.

**John:** Lambert luckily is a very happy tooth-brusher. You just open up his mouth and just go to it.

**Aline:** That’s a really August thing to be, like a very, “Yeah, I got to do this. It needs to get done.” I’m still laughing about the day that Mike broke all his habits, because he had like 60 things, where he was on Duolingo and his running app. He had like 50 things where he was competing for these fake electronic rings of success. I feel like having a dog that… Your dog probably has an app where after you brush its teeth, it logs it.

**John:** It doesn’t yet. I’ve definitely wanted to get those little buttons that dogs can push.

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** “Toothbrush.” But then I feel like-

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** … they’re just training me to do stuff, so no. “Treat. Treat. Play.”

**Aline:** “Get another dog.”

**John:** No. No more dogs. That’s our show for this week.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Very exciting. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech.

**Aline:** Woohoo.

**John:** If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Inneresting exists because of Aline Brosh McKenna making fun of how I don’t put the T in “interesting.”

**Aline:** Me, make fun of someone? I would never.

**John:** Never, ever. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Aline keeps pitching-

**Aline:** Guys, I want to make a workout set. If we make a Scriptnotes workout set, it doesn’t even need to be a Lycra one. It can be a T-shirt and leggings. Something for the ladies. Something specifically for the ladies.

**John:** The legs is basically an overlooked thing. The challenge is Cotton Bureau doesn’t make sweatpants or leggings. We’re looking for a vendor. We have pretty high standards.

**Aline:** I know. Your stuff is good. I know. I looked into it, and I couldn’t find anything, but I feel like a viewer will have-

**John:** Maybe our incredible listeners-

**Aline:** Also, I’d wear a Scriptnotes onesie.

**John:** Sure, 100%. Love it. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like me and Aline talking about being empty nesters. Aline, it’s never an empty nest when you’re here with me.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. It’s just so nice chatting with you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is our bonus segment for our premium members. We love our premium members. Aline, you’re a premium member.

**Aline:** I am. Of course I’m a premium member. I love having all the episodes at my fingertips. I recommend them to people frequently.

**John:** Thank you very much. I just put my daughter on a plane back to school. She was here on Christmas break. I’m once again an empty nester. You’ve had this experience for a little bit longer. How are you feeling about your life without children in your house?

**Aline:** It’s been a really interesting transition. My first guy left, and then I had another kid at home. They’re three years apart. When Charlie went to college, Leo was 15, 16, so we still had a lot to do with college and a ton of friends. Then during the pandemic, I was incarcerated with them, which was wonderful and every parent’s dream, despite the horribleness of it. But you’re raising them to send them into the world, to be independent, happy people. That’s what you’re doing. I comfort myself with that. But man, I really miss them. We really miss them. This weekend, Will wanted to go see Beekeeper, which I’m obviously not the biggest audience for.

**John:** You’re not a Jason Statham completist?

**Aline:** He’s a Statham completist, as are my kids. He really turned to me and said, “Man, I wish Charlie could go see Beekeeper with me this weekend.” Then Leo, my younger son, is a Scrabble player. When he’s home, we play Scrabble every day. Do I want them to be at home with their mother playing Scrabble and going to Beekeeper? No. They need to be out in the world.

When Leo left, he went to college in September, and two months later I was shooting a movie. I was so busy during that time that I actually felt relief, because I would’ve been letting him down. I wouldn’t have been very available, so I’m glad it didn’t happen in his senior year.

Then when that wore off, we’ve had to become more entertaining to each other. When you notice that’s happening, you start to look at your partner and say, “We should make a list of shows and things.” Will’s gotten really into cooking, and so that’s been really nice. There’s a freedom there to be able to go and pop off and do whatever you want and go take a trip. I try and value that.

There’s this oft cited statistic that you see your kids for 18 years, and then the rest of your life you’ll see them for a year cumulatively. That’s a scary thing. But we talk to them all the time. The really lucky thing for our generation is texting, because nobody really wants to call their parents. I remember really avoiding that myself, just because it’s a big energy shift to be on the phone with your parents. But texting, the ability to send the TikTok or send the funny article or fam chat. Our text thread was ablaze with what happened with Sweet Lady Jane. It’s fun to have those conversations keep going as a whole family or individually. You learn to have the relationship evolve in the next phase.

That said, I have many sad moments. I remember once, one of our mutual friends said that somebody was complaining about taking their kid to a birthday party in kindergarten, and she said, “I would run someone over with my car to be at a kindergarten birthday party with my son just one more time.”

There’s definitely a lot of things that I miss, but I try and think like, they’re where they should be. You don’t want them to be dependent on you. You want them to be independent in the world. But John, they’ll never really appreciate how much you love them until they have their own kids. I didn’t appreciate how much my parents loved me until I had my own kids. It’s their job to live in a blissful feeling that you’re there for them but you don’t have excessive needs.

**John:** I’m going to stop you there, because there are so many things stacked up for me to respond to. For listeners outside of Los Angeles, or listeners in Los Angeles who aren’t aware of it, Sweet Lady Jane is a fantastic bakery you always got your fancy cakes from. It was default, like, “Oh, we need a fancy cake. We’ll get one from Sweet Lady Jane.” They spontaneously closed. It looked like they were going to expand, and they suddenly closed. I don’t think we know why they closed.

**Aline:** It turns out they were being sued for wage exploitation.

**John:** That’s not good. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, Sweet Lady Jane, the secret story of Sweet Lady Jane. Your earlier point about you’re trying to raise them to be successful adults, Mike will often say, “You’re not trying to raise a child. You’re trying to raise an adult.” The fact that they’re off in college now, doing their own thing, it’s like you successfully raised an adult. Congratulations. They’re out there.

But it also just means that all the time that you spent hands-on parenting them is now free, and you have to figure out other ways to do that. A productive way to do that is to really think about, what is it that you used to do as a couple or you’d want to do as a couple that you couldn’t before. I mentioned on the podcast last time, Mike and I have our 24 for ’24, 24 things we want to get done in 2024, which means seeing the shows and committing to game nights and bar trivia and just making sure we’re getting out there doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. You’re heading to New York to see four shows.

**Aline:** Yes, I’m seeing a bunch of plays.

**John:** That’s a thing you do.

**Aline:** It was a spur of the moment thing. Charlie’s actually going to come down from Boston and meet me for a couple of those. Also, I think they don’t owe you. They didn’t ask to be born. They don’t owe you. I think people get into a thing of… It’s so funny, because moms will say to me, “How often does your son call you?” I call them. They’re incoming. They’re in the incoming. When I’m elderly, I’ll be in the incoming. But right now, they’re building their lives, so I don’t wait for them to reach out to me. I reach out to them. I try not to guilt them.

Also, I’m always marketing Will and I. “We got sushi. We can pay for sushi. We might be able to take you skiing.” We try and make it appealing and attractive and interesting to spend time with your parents, as opposed to it feeling like homework and obligation. I always said when they were little, you’re not there to be their friend, but when they’re out of the house, you are.

There’s this study that shows the only thing you can really control about kids is how much they like you. If Amy’s coming home to fun game nights and dinners and, in my case, a dog and a half – as soon as anyone leaves, I get another dog and a half – it sounds fun, as opposed to coming home to people who are staring at you and trying to suck your blood, trying to vampire your life.

**John:** What was interesting over this Christmas break was recognizing and figuring out the boundaries between, okay, you’re a college student doing college student things, but you’re also under our roof now, and what that balance is and what is a fair expectation of you being home.

**Aline:** That means we have dinner with the dads, and then we take the car, and we’re out until 1:00 seeing our other friends. That’s what that means.

**John:** That is what it means. Are we going to bed not knowing where they are, which in college-

**Aline:** You don’t know where she is.

**John:** In college, you don’t know.

**Aline:** I know. I know. Isn’t that a funny thing?

**John:** It’s a strange thing. I definitely appreciated that growing up with my mom. I was like, “It’s so frustrating that you have these concerns when I’m thousands of miles away.”

**Aline:** My god, in college, your poor mother had to call you on a phone that was like beep, boop, beep, boop, ring, ring, ring. When would she get you? She was not sending you a little text that said, “Hey, our neighbors got divorced.” We’re lucky because we can communicate with them.

**John:** We are both very lucky. Aline, I’m always lucky to have you come back on the podcast.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [How to be More Agentic](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic) by Cate Hall
* [What’s Stopping You?](https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/44-agency) by Neel Nanda
* [Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tnpp3cyEHMGthjGAf/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic) by Evie Cottrell
* [“Agency” needs nuance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acyfmFTN3cNgwnYw6/agency-needs-nuance) by Evie Cottrell
* [The Woman on the Line](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html) by Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate
* [California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone) by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times
* [Would Your Partner Cheat? These ‘Testers’ Will Give You an Answer](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/style/loyalty-test-infidelity-cheating.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) by Gina Cherelus for the New York Times
* [The man who won the lottery 14 times](https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times/) by Zachary Crockett for The Hustle
* [Musely](https://www.musely.com/)
* [So you wanna de-bog yourself](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/so-you-wanna-de-bog-yourself?publication_id=656797&post_id=140270094&isFreemail=true&r=3dw6x) by Adam Mastroianni
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Brosh_McKenna)
* [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 Larry Douziech ([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/627standard.mp3).

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

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, it could.

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

**John:** Smear of awards.

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

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

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

**John:** That makes sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Strange, that.

**Craig:** Mm, humans.

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

**Craig:** Very good portmanteau.

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

**Craig:** Para Bros.

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

**Craig:** Para Bros.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Warner’s is massive.

**Craig:** So is Paramount.

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

**Craig:** Fox.

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

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I do.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** 65 acres.

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

**John:** It’s bigger.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Of course.

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

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

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

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

**John:** A24.

**Craig:** A24.

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

**Craig:** Also sports.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is.

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

**Craig:** What’s Figma?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** “H-where.”

**John:** “H-where.”

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

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

**Craig:** “Th” /ð/ and “th” /θ/.

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

**Craig:** “With” or “this.”

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

**Craig:** “Withdrawn.”

**John:** You could say “withdrawn.”

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

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

**Craig:** It’s bizarre.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s the best.

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

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

**John:** Oh yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** What’s this?

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

**John:** Good. That’s terrific.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Theme.

**John:** Theme, theme.

**Craig:** Theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wait, what?

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

**Craig:** Wait, no!

**John:** “We hear-”

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

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

**Craig:** We talk to ourselves.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Is that prologue?

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

**Craig:** That’s what it is.

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

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

**John:** This was added on?

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

**John:** Oh god, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** A second line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, not long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

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

**Craig:** God.

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

**Craig:** Domain.

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

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

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

**John:** 113 sessions.

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

**John:** That is.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Crucial.

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

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

**Craig:** “Because I’m awesome.”

**John:** Because I’m awesome.

**Craig:** That’s why.

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

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s got to be.

**John:** It’s got to be there.

**Craig:** Got to be there.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I don’t believe I have.

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

**Craig:** Is it out there?

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

**Craig:** But they’re working on it?

**John:** They’re working on it.

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

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

**Craig:** For ethical reasons?

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

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

**John:** “Oh my god.”

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

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

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

**John:** I wouldn’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** You really need to.

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

**John:** Oh, the Bible.

**Craig:** Oh, Bible.

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

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

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly.

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

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

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

[Episode 358 Clip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Done.

[Episode 472 clip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Episode 151 clip]

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, god.

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

**Craig:** The worst.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Present]

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

[Bonus Segment: Episode 467 Clip]

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** A DMV.

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

**John:** We wouldn’t want any more.

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

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

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

**John:** Oh yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** … is hours on the day.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 358 – Point of View](https://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 472 – Emotional States](https://johnaugust.com/2020/emotional-states)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 151 – Secrets and Lies](https://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-and-lies)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 467 – Another Word for Euphemism](https://johnaugust.com/2020/another-word-for-euphemism)
* [Gödel’s incompleteness theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
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* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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