The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-ref-with-richard-lagravenese).
**Craig Mazin:** Hi, folks. This upcoming episode does feature some naughty language, so if you are in the car with children, put the earmuffs on or wait to play this when you’re at home.
Hello, my name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is 593rd episode of Scriptnotes, which is upsetting.
John is not with me today, also upsetting, but to counteract that, today on the show we have one of the best screenwriters simply of all time, and also one of the nicest people in Hollywood, which I agree is a low bar if that’s what you were thinking, but he would be a nice guy pretty much anywhere. We welcome Richard, AKA Richie as I call, Richard LaGravenese. Welcome to Scriptnotes.
**Richard LaGravenese:** Thank you, Craig. This is great. Good to see you.
**Craig:** It’s good to see you too. We are looking at each other over Zoom. Richie and I have known each other for many, many years. I have been a fan of his for many more years than I’ve known him. I’m going to run down a short list of some of the movies that he’s written, so that you can go ahead and drop your jaw like I do when I look at it all together like this.
The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Horse Whisperer, Beloved, Behind the Candelabra. These are all remarkable, highly acclaimed films, and yet we’re not going to be talking about any of those today, nor are we going to be talking about the seven other movies that Richie has directed.
What we are going to be talking about today is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is the 1994 film The Ref. The Ref was a criminally under-seen film. That’s why I want to dig into it, because I think from a screenwriting point of view, it’s remarkable.
Then in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we’ll be talking about men without friends, how and why men should make friends, and how friendless men emotionally burden the women in their lives. That ought to be fun.
Normally, this is where John would do news and follow-up, but I simply have none. Instead, we’re just going to get right into The Ref. The Ref was released in 1994. It was, I believe, a Touchstone movie. Touchstone was one of the, I was about to say adult film arms of Disney, but that doesn’t sound right. Non-family movie wing of Disney. It was a Christmas movie, and that’s why of course they released it in March. Why would they have done that, Richie? Do you know?
**Richard:** I don’t know.
**Craig:** It certainly impacted the movie’s prospects. When it came out at the time, it was a bit of a box office bum. I think looking at how much money it made, if it came out today and made that amount of money, everybody would be dancing in the streets, but the business was different back then. The expectations were a little higher for theatrical releases. The fact that it didn’t necessarily make money right away didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to catch on as a cult hit and maybe even more than a cult hit.
The story is by Marie Weiss, screenplay by Richie LaGravenese and Marie Weiss, and directed by the late, great Ted Demme. I’ll do the quick summary, and then we’ll dive into the origin story of The Ref.
Quick summary. It’s Christmas Eve. Caroline and Lloyd, a middle-aged couple living in an affluent and very white and uptight Old Bay Bridge, Connecticut… Is that right, Old Bay Bridge? Is that the town?
**Richard:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Are having a marriage crisis. As they debate the past, present, and future of their relationship, they’re taken hostage by Gus, a thief on the run, but who has captured whom? Gus is forced to listen to their ceaseless bickering, as well as pretend to be a marriage counselor when Lloyd’s extended family arrives for the holiday, but his intervention, ultimately at the point of a gun, is what finally leads Lloyd and Caroline to be honest and open with each other.
This always struck me as a modern Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf take on Ransom of Red Chief, the old O. Henry story.
**Richard:** That’s right.
**Craig:** Is that where it began for you?
**Richard:** Absolutely. It started as a take on The Ransom of Red Chief. It was an idea by my then-sister-in-law, Marie Weiss, who was coming out of advertising and wanted to work in the movies, and her then-husband, Jeff Weiss, who is one of the producers on it.
I had a deal at Disney, because originally, Disney had bought Fisher King but didn’t make it but then put me under contract for three movies. You give them an idea. They give you an idea. They never take your ideas and usually do things off the shelf. That’s where Little Princess happened. The first thing was Widows, which just recently got made by McQueen. That was originally there.
**Craig:** Wow.
**Richard:** That was the longest development thing. That’s when Touchstone and Disney used to give you literally 16 pages of notes in development. At the time, we were making it a comedy for Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn, so it didn’t turn out that way. I was on that for months, like a year. It was terrible.
Anyway, the last deal was we brought to them this idea of The Ref. That’s how it began. She had this idea of a Ransom of Red Chief idea with an arguing couple and a family and stuff. With me guaranteeing it, she got to do a first draft, and then I came in.
**Craig:** Then you came in and you started doing what you do. The movie, I suspect, given the fact that it was 1994, which was thick in the middle of every movie makes money because it’s going to be out on VHS and DVD. I suspect that all it really needed was a star. Then along comes Denis Leary. Now, Denis Leary was a bit of a phenomenon at the time.
**Richard:** He and Teddy, they had a partnership, kind of.
**Craig:** I see. Denis Leary was, I think at that point, primarily a stand-up comic. Then he was doing some stuff for MTV.
**Richard:** Yes. Interstitials they call them.
**Craig:** Yeah, interstitials.
**Richard:** Teddy directed them. They were all Cindy Crawford-centric and really funny. When I hired Teddy, when we met on the movie, he brought in Denis.
**Craig:** One question to start with is, Denis Leary has a very specific comic persona. That comic persona is brought through here. As a character, he’s a quasi-chain-smoking, fast-talking, angry guy. That was his thing was he’s angry, he’s very verbal, he doesn’t have time. Every frustrates him. It is a perfect match, really.
The first question is, did he just pick that script up and go, “Oh yeah, if I just be me and say these lines, everything will be fine,” or did you say, “Ah, okay, now that it’s Denis Leary, I need to adjust the character of Gus to fit Denis Leary.”
**Richard:** I remember I always loved those fast-talking comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He’s perfect for that, because he’s rapid fire. I now remember there were a few drafts that were going through, again, Disney development, Disney development. Then once we had a producer on it, it still wasn’t really clicking.
I remember it was me, Denis, Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, and Bruckheimer. I rewrote the script in 4 days, bringing in 30 pages and 60 pages and reading with the actors the next day, the next day, the next day, and built it like that.
One of the greatest feelings you can ever have as a writer, it happened with Robin Williams too, is when you make someone like Denis laugh from reading the script. He was reading it cold, and he would start laughing.
Then we found the voice of it. In those four days, I think we really found the rhythm and the voice of it a lot. It’s easy to write for Denis, because he has a kind of 1940s delivery. You know what I mean?
**Craig:** “Here’s the thing. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. Hey, ho.”
**Richard:** Breathy and fast and just quick. I know there was a couple of bits he improved, like biting the baby Jesus cooking and things like that. We stuck to the script pretty much. It was a free form on the script. On the floor, we needed to come up with something funnier. That was it. It was finding the rhythm and then his ear.
I had known Denis also earlier. We went to Emerson together. We were in different groups, because I was in the theater thing and he was in the comedy thing. He started the Comedy Workshop there. I remember his shows with his little troupe. They were always really, really funny.
**Craig:** I’m fascinated by the fact that so much came out of those four days. There is this interesting intensity that can happen when you almost have a theater setting. It’s crazy. You have to deliver.
You’re working with Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, who we will discuss purely as an actor in this podcast and not deal with all the other stuff. Those two alone, what’s interesting about them is how verbal they are as actors and how they’ve maybe never been more verbal than this. I want to give a little example here.
Right in the beginning, there’s two things that happen. The first thing is you establish the town. As the credits are coming on screen, the camera moves to this town, and we learn that it is a picture-perfect place, although there’s maybe the undercurrent of an issue, like the fact that the baby Jesus is missing from the [inaudible 00:09:44] in town square.
We eventually get to a marriage counselor, played by BD Wong. He is dealing with the angriest couple in the world. As they go back and forth, I always feel like the first five minutes of a movie teaches you how to watch the movie, and it teaches you a few things here. One of them is, tonally, these people are so hyper-verbal and hyper-literate in the way they talk to each other. I’m going to give an example here, because I’m fascinated by the way dialog works like this.
**Caroline Chasseur:** You took out a loan. I mean, it was your decision, not mine. You took out a loan from Satan Mom.
**Lloyd Chasseur:** She blames my mother for everything that’s gone wrong in her life. In the meantime, she never finishes anything she starts. Photography courses, existential philosophy courses, Scandinavian cooking classes.
**Caroline:** At least I go after my dreams.
**Lloyd:** To be what, somebody who takes photographs of lutefisk to prove the nothingness of being? No wonder our son’s so confused.
**Craig:** That’s gorgeous, right? He listed three classes, and then without a pause to think or put it together, he can come up with this imaginary idiot who’s used all the knowledge of those three classes. It really teaches you how this movie’s going to function and how these characters work. They both speak like this.
Talk a little bit about dancing on the edge of… One of the classic notes is, “This line feels written.” When you have actors like this, they can do it. There’s something almost play-like about it. Talk to me a little about how you addressed the manner in which they would speak and how literate and how many words and how writerly it would be.
**Richard:** I keep thinking of those first 15 minutes of His Girl Friday, when it’s Cary Grant and Ros Russell in the room. I’ve watched that scene about a million times. The rapidity and how they cram things into their references and you know exactly what they’re saying, and they’re insulting each other, they’re undermining and they’re funny, that rhythm was in my head as much as possible.
I’ve always over-written. I like literate movies. I like movies that are a little theatrical, that are not all exactly like real life. They’re just a little heightened. I think for comedy, it works.
Comedy, like music, goes through different grooves and different rhythms and stuff like that. It doesn’t always work, but I really think the classics do still work today, because there’s an intelligence behind them.
The rhythm was always in my head. I wanted to maintain it as much as possible. I had these two great theater actors, Judy and Kevin, who knew exactly how to find those rhythms. It’s funny when there are certain actors who just don’t know how to do that, today’s actors who don’t know how to talk fast. I was lucky. I was lucky with that and Christine Baranski, of course, later on.
**Craig:** We’ll get to her. You’re bringing up an interesting thing, which is that over time… It is a little distressing to me how much time has gone by, because this movie is almost 30 years old now, which is, I know, horrifying. Over time, actors have notoriously become mumblers, kind of introverts. I think acting quality has been too associated with that kind of navel-gazing and muttering. Here is this, where it’s a little bit like… There are certain bands where the singer is… Freddie Mercury is a great example. You understood every word he’s saying.
**Richard:** Articulation.
**Craig:** Articulation. There’s something so articulated about everybody here. The articulation of everyone is remarkable. I love that.
There’s another thing that happens here. First, we briefly meet Gus as a burglar who goes a little too far in trying to empty out a safe completely, but not before he’s sprayed by cat piss, as a very strange booby trap.
When we get back to the therapy session, one of the things that you do brilliant here is, inside of this one scene, in what John and I often refer to as this precious real estate of the first 5 or 10 minutes of a movie, you deliver so much exposition through therapy and through argument.
When that one scene is over, without us really noticing that anything has happened other than terrific entertainment and quite a few laughs, I know that Caroline has had an affair, that they haven’t had sex in a really long time, that they are in debt to Lloyd’s mother, whom Caroline hates and Lloyd defends, instinctively. Their son Jesse is a budding criminal delinquent.
Shortly after, in a connected scene where they’re driving home, I also understand that Caroline wants a divorce, and Lloyd isn’t going to agree to it. That choice is really interesting to me, because after a lot of this interesting exposition, all of which we will see echoed back at us, I’m not going to lead the witness. Why was it important that Caroline wanted a divorce and Lloyd wouldn’t agree to that?
**Richard:** Because I wanted there to be somewhere to go, because him agreeing to the divorce ultimately would be like an act of love, really. Right now, it’s about who’s got power and who’s going to get their way. That kept it open, so that there was conflict, like an engine going forward. If they both agree to the divorce, they’ve been decided, nothing is moving forward on that. I guess it could’ve worked, but it was more interesting to me leaving it open.
**Craig:** I think you made the right choice. Yes, it could’ve worked. They could’ve both agreed that they were going to get a divorce, and then at the end of it, they decide to call it off.
What I loved about the choice was that it felt… She says, “We’re miserable.” It felt like, okay, they are suspended in misery. These two people are stuck in this permanent misery where one wants to leave, one won’t let her leave. They can’t stand each other, but they can’t go anywhere. If nothing happens to them, this is going to be the way they are for the rest of their lives. That’s what I felt, because that is exactly when Gus enters. He is confronted now. It’s immediate. You guys don’t hide the premise. It’s right away, boom, “What did I do?”
There’s this wonderful scene where he gets in the car with them. We have a little bit of plot logic. I want to talk a little bit about the plot logic, actually, because it’s the most annoying part of writing these kinds of movies, but it’s essential. Gus has stolen jewels from, I think he’s the amusement park king.
**Richard:** I don’t remember.
**Craig:** It’s an old Willard. I think his name’s Willard. He’s out of town. There’s something about Willard, I guess his connections or whatever, that basically the theft of his stuff leads to this state police manhunt for the guy who’s done it. Why the manhunt? Why escalating it to the state police? Talk me through that storyline.
**Richard:** I can barely remember. Obviously, these are the least interesting parts of these movies for me to write. I’d rather just have people in a car or in a room talking for two hours and Virginia Woolf-ing it the whole time.
Making up this had to do with the McGuffin of the whole thing, because what happens at the end? If people aren’t searching for him, and it isn’t that big a thing, then there’s no tension of him having to hide in the house and pretend to be a therapist until he can figure out how to escape. We had to create this outside pressure cooker for him to stay inside the house. That really was all it was.
Again, it probably could’ve been better. It could’ve been a lot more logical or I just didn’t care. That’s the problem with me. I don’t outline. I get bored with that stuff. I just, “All right, that’s fine.” [inaudible 00:18:06].
**Craig:** In its own way, it works beautifully, because it’s simple. I can’t say that I understood necessarily why the one theft here led the whole state police manhunt to happen, but also, I kind of didn’t care, because when logic is in place to help me have a good time, I don’t interrogate it too much.
**Richard:** I think if you want to take the ride, you take the ride and you accept those things-
**Craig:** Exactly.
**Richard:** … because they’re not that important.
**Craig:** The way you set up the rules, it’s really simple. I don’t have to think much about it, because you don’t want me thinking about it. He can’t leave. He’s waiting for Murray, his getaway car guy, to call back and say he’s gotten a boat for them to escape. That’s it. He’s stuck in the house until-
**Richard:** Which is Richard Bright from The Godfather.
**Craig:** It is?
**Richard:** Yeah, he was in The Godfather.
**Craig:** He was in The Godfather?
**Richard:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Who was he in The Godfather?
**Richard:** He’s one of the younger… You’ll see him.
**Craig:** Oh, really?
**Richard:** He’s one of the assassins. He was a great guy. It was Richard Bright, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was Richard Bright. He was Murray.
**Craig:** Was he the one that was in the police uniform and shoots Barzini on the steps?
**Richard:** Yes.
**Craig:** Wow. I had no idea.
**Richard:** He’s in it throughout if you see. He’s in it throughout.
**Craig:** I had no idea. Oh my god.
**Richard:** Yeah, that’s Richard. He’s in a lot of movies.
**Craig:** That’s a connection I didn’t realize. Here’s another interesting fact for those of you following along at home. This movie I think was JK Simmons’s debut on screen.
**Richard:** It might’ve been.
**Craig:** I think it was. He plays Siskel. He’s a teacher at this military academy where Jesse, the son, is. We’ll talk about him in a bit.
We’ve set up everything we need to set up. You’ve done this beautifully. In the first, I don’t know, whatever it is, 10 minutes, I know everything about this town, I know everything about their relationship, I know everything about the rules that Gus has to deal with. Now we begin this triangle of characters for a while.
I’m also fascinated by this structure, because what you do is, once he meets them, once he takes them hostage, the movie splits into two halves. The first half is the three of them, that triangle. Then the second half is the larger family coming over. Talk a little bit about why and how you did that and focused in on the three of them first for quite an extended bit before bringing the family in.
**Richard:** They’re the heart. They’re the core of it. Then it was about showing the shark that’s coming towards the house to create some suspense and anticipation for what that collision is going to look like.
It was like a three-character play almost up until… I had ideas about turning this into a play, because it’s a one-set thing. You could have the whole thing in the house, in the living room for the entire evening.
**Craig:** Would you please do that?
**Richard:** I thought of doing that. It’d be really fun to do that. It was also for cutaways, because we had to skip time for them to prepare for the house. Denis had come up with the idea, had the idea of being the therapist. The fun of seeing this family coming towards them, I thought the audience was like, “Oh god, this is going to make complications in a farce kind of way, even better.”
**Craig:** It was incredible escalation. I appreciated, in a way, the quiet time, even though it was anything but quiet, between the three of them, because there’s a really interesting thing that happens almost immediately. First, as they’re driving to Caroline and Lloyd’s house, Lloyd blows right through a stop sign, which he says he didn’t see. There is no stop sign. Then when Gus gets them into the house and he’s got them tied up, he wants a cigarette. Lloyd says, “I don’t smoke, and Caroline quit.” As a smoker… Were you a smoker?
**Richard:** Yeah. Not like Denis, but yeah, I was.
**Craig:** I was as well, and so there was something absolutely delicious about a smoker seeing right into another smoker’s brain and going, “Where are they?” He knows she has has them. He knows instantly that there’s a hidden pack of cigarettes somewhere, and sure enough-
**Richard:** There are.
**Craig:** Because he has a gun, she has to reveal if they’re there. He says something to both of them that I think is kind of magical. In the film, he’s pushed them both over. They were in their chairs tied up.
**Richard:** [Crosstalk 00:22:28].
**Craig:** He’s pushed them backwards because they were bickering and they wouldn’t shut up. He comes over them. They’re accusing each other of being a liar. Gus says to Caroline, “You said you quit, didn’t you?” because she was like, “I never said I quit.” “You said you quit.” She admits it. Then he says to Lloyd, “You saw the stop sign, didn’t you?” Lloyd admits it.
In a way, what I love about this is the brilliance of starting the two of them in a marital counseling session with a completely ineffective counselor who cannot control them, and now here a guy with a gun is starting to make it happen. Talk a little bit, if you could, about the idea, even before Gus has to pretend to be a marriage counselor, the actual marriage counseling that he’s doing right here.
**Richard:** The joy of this for me, the most fun to me, was getting inside a marriage, and having been there myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but we used to do this a lot, where you get so into bickering with each other, doesn’t matter if you’re in public, doesn’t matter who’s there, everything goes away, and it’s just about who’s winning and who’s going to win. It’s like a match. It’s the information you use and the information you hold back and what you admit to and what you don’t admit to. This is how this marriage works. I was in the midst of that myself, and it was driving me crazy.
Having a character who just puts a gun to your head and says, “Tell me. Say what it was,” it’s like ah, then you finally get the truth. That’s how the marriage can heal, because they’re not really telling the truth to each other. It’s a power thing going on. They’re trying to each save their own skin. You lose the sight of the relationship, of the marriage. I think we do that a lot inside relationships when we bicker.
That idea was so real to me, of getting so lost in the bickering that you don’t care who is there, who’s around, you just have to get your point across kind of a thing. That was the fun of writing all that stuff, and then having him just cut right through it.
**Craig:** Cutting right through it is fantastic. There’s another thing that you set up so smartly. I would say to everybody, one of the things to do here is read this screenplay. Watch the movie. Read the screenplay. What Richie does in that first scene with BD Wong, who’s the failing marital counselor, is set up a situation where the marriage counselor says, “I’m not here to take sides. Basically, I’m not a referee. I don’t blow the whistle and say who created the foul.”
**Richard:** That’s right.
**Craig:** Here’s a guy who’s absolutely doing that, whether he realizes it or not. He is a referee. He’s saying, “This is what’s true, and this is what’s true.” In doing so, you start to see what they need, which I thought was a fascinating thing.
You described the incoming family as a shark. Talk to me about this. We meet the incoming family. They’re at dinner at a restaurant. They’re eating there because they know that Caroline is going to serve them something horrible and inedible, so they’re getting food first. Talk a little bit about this family now, these other ones.
**Richard:** Again, pulling from personal experience, the idea of a rich, controlling in-law that was a matriarch that was crippling the marriage, I liked. It wasn’t exactly my situation, but it was close, in a way, about how money can infantilize adult people around them. I wanted to get back at my in-laws for doing that, so I put all of the venom that I… You know when you have to be quiet at family gatherings and you want to say [inaudible 00:26:17]. I would just put it in the movie, like nailing yourself to a cross kind of a thing.
Out of that came her never approving of Judy Davis’s character, of her over her son and being too maternal love for the son and controlling and crippling him. I saw adult people crippled by their parents because their parents had money. My parents never had money. They always had problems. My dad was a cab driver. They never had that power over me. It was the first time I had witnessed it in that family. I played with that idea.
Her other son also being a soft doughboy. No one could stand up to her. He’s married to Christine Baranski, who’s just full of resentment and is trying to get along, is trying to make it through, but then when she sees what happens with Judy and Kevin, it gives her the liberation to finally tell the truth as well. It was really just a revenge thing for me to just get back at people who were too controlling.
**Craig:** I have to ask, since so much of this has been pulled from your own marriage, your own family, your in-laws, when the movie came out, did you get any difficult phone calls or no?
**Richard:** Went right over their head. No.
**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?
**Richard:** Yep.
**Craig:** That’s amazing. People just can’t see themselves.
**Richard:** It’s I guess a good thing.
**Craig:** Were you worried about it?
**Richard:** No.
**Craig:** You knew that it would go like that. Wow. That’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie, because we’ve been with this very literate, bickering, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf trio, and then we go to this other group that is not that. They seem regular in one sense.
I think this was my first exposure to Christine Baranski. She is brilliant, because she’s so frustrated and angry about this entire situation and constantly takes it out on her kids. I think she says something like, “Be happy. It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!” I do that all the time. Every time Christmas rolls around, I say it just like her, so angry.
We also, I think, meet the antagonist here in the purist dramatic sense, Glynis Johns, who is absolutely brilliant in this movie as Mother Rose. Appears to be the antagonist. Myself, when I’m writing, I don’t necessarily think about who’s the protagonist, who’s the antagonist.
**Richard:** I don’t either.
**Craig:** I’m wondering if in retrospect you would agree that she is the villain if there is a villain.
**Richard:** Yes.
**Craig:** That comes through pretty clearly. There’s something that happens prior to the family arriving, and that is a connection between Caroline and Gus that struck me as really interesting. They have a conversation as she’s leading him upstairs to find some band-aids for his dog bite that he got when he was escaping the crime. She tells him things. She tells him that she and Lloyd weren’t always like this and that they, in fact, had a restaurant, she worked, and they had a dream, and it fell apart.
I’m curious what you were thinking, because this feels so natural to me. What drew her to him? Why does she open up to him so easily? Why does she want to take care of him like that?
**Richard:** I don’t know that she’s taking care of him. I think she respects him. He’s about the truth. There’s no lying with him. I think that’s in the line too where he turns to her and says, “What are we, girl friends?” That was when Denis laughed at the script when he read that for the first time.
**Craig:** It’s so funny. “What are we, girl friends?”
**Richard:** She starts to warm up. She needs someone to talk to, and she doesn’t have anyone. He is this symbol of… He’s all about the truth. He’s all about no bullshit. It’s life or death. I think she feels the need.
I wanted to humanize. I had to start planting what was good about what they had and how do I bring that out, so that you understand there was something there. Otherwise, they’re just bickering. What are they fighting for? I had to bring up the past any way I could figure it out. Then later on, when it all explodes and then they start saying what happened in the past, then you understand. I had to give little seeds of that, so that there was something, a dream there.
I got too sentimental with it, so he undercuts it. He doesn’t want to hear it. I think she wants to open up and figure it out and thinks he can help.
**Craig:** There’s an interesting theme that’s going through, that exists separate from… I think the main takeaway of the movie really is, in a very simple way, that communication and honesty is really the only way to salvation when you’re dealing with a relationship that is not working.
There’s this other theme going on, which is the haves versus the have-nots. It’s throughout the whole thing. It comes out here when they’re walking up the stairs, specifically because he notes that they have a shagol [ph], an actual shagol. She’s like, “If you want it, you can have it.” She doesn’t care, be presumably, it’s something that Mother Rose paid for or bought. He finds that so offensive and points out that, “You people, you probably never even worked a day.” It did strike me that she wanted his approval as well, when she says that’s not true.
**Richard:** She wants his respect. She wants him on her side, which also happens in bickering couples, no matter who’s around. Whatever witnesses are there to the bickering, you want them on your side, so I think so. I think he’s pointing to the fact that, “You don’t even know what you have. You don’t value what you have.” She’s like, “No, you don’t understand. That’s not the point. It’s the cost. Is it worth it?”
**Craig:** That is an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered, that she’s buttering up the ref. She’s getting him on her side.
**Richard:** As a friend almost, yeah, like an odd liaison.
**Craig:** That leads to this big second movement of this story, and that is when the family arrives. There is something that happens here that I think is really educational for anybody that’s writing farce, because it definitely becomes farcical, at least for a while, in a fun way.
What you do here, and again, there’s just an elegance to it, is rules. The rules are simple. Jesse, the son, has come home. They’ve tied him up and put him upstairs. No one can go upstairs. Rule number one, no one can go upstairs. Rule number two, the three of us always have to be together. That is enough. That’s enough.
**Richard:** That’s hard enough.
**Craig:** That’s hard enough. The family arrives. A question about the family. You are Italian. You come from, I assume, a Catholic background, Catholic upbringing?
**Richard:** Yep.
**Craig:** I’m Jewish. I come from a Jewish upbringing. You’re a New York Catholic. I’m a New York Jew. It’s essentially the same thing. It’s basically the same, but this family is not. My wife is Episcopalian from New England. This reminds me more of that world. Talk a little bit about how you were able to present that kind of WASPiness so accurately and beautifully?
**Richard:** I remember, I think Marie came up with, which I thought was just funny, that they were Huguenots.
**Craig:** French Huguenots. We’re French Huguenots.
**Richard:** That cracked me up when she told me that.
**Craig:** Mid-18th century French Huguenot.
**Richard:** Yeah, which I thought was really funny at the time. I’m speaking at the time, because my situation is very different now. At the time, the in-laws were Scarsdale Jewish.
**Craig:** Got it. Let me translate for everybody else, Scarsdale Jewish. It’s in Westchester. It’s fancier, richer, but still Jewish. You’ve got one foot in the old ways, and you’ve got one foot in the golf club and all that, but you’re not old money rich.
**Richard:** There still were a lot of, I want to say there were affectations, but the way things are done, how things are done, the kind of dinner parties and what you say. The contrast was, when the shit hit the fan, all that went right out the window, and they were just like Italians, emotional and brutal and all that stuff, but all the upper crust stuff. Part of it was from that. I think it was just osmosis of watching a lot of films and reading things about how those families work and the Philip Barry world of Philadelphia Story and Holiday and those kind of things.
**Craig:** It’s interesting.
**Richard:** It’s a New York sensibility too, to a certain extent, an Upper East Side sensibility.
**Craig:** I think outsiders often do those things the best, because we have been watching them. Like you say, you’ve been watching those things.
**Richard:** You absorb it.
**Craig:** It’s funny. I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and Maureen McCormick was there, Maureen McCormick who played Marcia on The Brady Bunch. I told her how my sister and I used to watch her and that show and yearn for that kind of… We thought of that as the best kind of life, this WASPy… Nobody yelled. Nobody was screaming. Nobody got hit.
**Richard:** Nobody got hit.
**Craig:** It was so wonderful.
**Richard:** No plates were thrown.
**Craig:** No plates were thrown. Your mother and father weren’t screaming at each other constantly. I love the notion of the outsider creating this but then also going, “There are worms in the dirt underneath this.”
**Richard:** Something underneath there. Absolutely. Absolutely.
**Craig:** There’s a fantastic moment in this dinner where as things devolve, and they devolve rather quickly, Mother Rose mentions, quite casually, Caroline’s infidelity, the fact that Caroline cheated on her precious son, whom she’s awful to anyway. The fact that-
**Richard:** That he told his mother.
**Craig:** That he told his mother, that fact just sends her into a rage.
**Richard:** As it would.
**Craig:** As it would. She storms off, which means that Gus and Lloyd both have to follow her. They go into the kitchen, and there’s the following exchange.
**Richard:** I love this scene.
**Craig:** This is one of my favorites. She says, “You won’t talk about it in therapy, but you’ll discuss it behind my back, with that bitch.” Lloyd says, “Hey, she’s my mother.” Gus says, “She’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.”
**Richard:** He’s telling the truth.
**Craig:** That is the best referee moment in the entire movie, because somebody has to say it.
**Richard:** Somebody has to say it. Exactly.
**Craig:** Somebody has to say, “No, I just showed up here. I have no vested interest in this fight, but I’m telling you, she’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd,” which my wife and I have been saying just as a general phrase about anybody we think is a bitch. We’ll just say, whether it’s a man or a woman, “He’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” We always just put Lloyd at the end.
**Richard:** That means so much. I love that. That’s fantastic. That makes me really happy.
**Craig:** A fucking bitch, Lloyd. It’s the ultimate referee moment. It goes by very quickly. It’s not this big, dramatic… Nor does the conversation stop. It keeps rolling. That is almost like the match that lights the fuse that eventually inevitably leads to everybody saying everything they think.
Talk about how to do that scene, where you’ve brilliantly jammed all this gunpowder into a barrel. How do you blow these things up? How do you create a sequence in one room, where no one’s really moving around that much, and yet everything explodes?
**Richard:** The event is the act of opening presents at Christmas. That’s what you hang it on, like a tree. Then the heartbeat of it was the relationship between Kevin and Judy and them speaking again as if no one’s in the room and then getting everything out. Then you have all these people now who have somewhat of an interest invested in it, which is different than what we’ve had before, so they get to throw in their stuff and bring up their own stuff. The motor is the couple. Then all these other pieces come around when the timing and the moment feels right. Example is they’re talking the gifts, and Christine Baranski shouts, “Isotoners.”
**Craig:** Slipper socks.
**Richard:** The slipper socks. I think one version was Isotoner. “Slipper socks, medium.” All the resentments start to come out. The focus was on the relationship. That was the steady. That was the through line. Then everything else could jump off of it when it felt right.
**Craig:** There is this amazing moment where after watching an entire movie of these two tearing into each other and then watching this entire dinner with them tearing into each other and then this sequence here where they’re really tearing into each other, it finally comes out that Caroline wants a divorce, and they are. He’s fine. “We’re going to get divorced.” Gary, the stupid brother, says, “Why?”
**Richard:** He was so sweet.
**Craig:** It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s so wonderfully innocent.
**Richard:** He’s very sweet.
**Craig:** So sweet. Oh my god, the look in his eyes where he looks like he was stunned by this thing. Everybody else is like, “What?” In this discussion, they finally get to the truth. What’s interesting is the ref, Denis Leary, in this sequence, says, “I don’t think anything.” He just-
**Richard:** Stands back.
**Craig:** Yes. You understood that the scam that he’s playing here, just for the purposes of the rest of the family, is that he’s posing as the marriage counselor. That’s to excuse his presence. He, as it turns out, is kind of the perfect marriage counselor. He knows exactly when to say, “You’re a liar. No, you’re a liar. She is a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” Here, it’s as if he actually gets invested. It feels like he’s invested.
**Richard:** This is the moment when it’s not about him hiding and it’s not about the robbery and it’s not about anything. He actually has been with these people all night, and he’s seeing what’s happening and is like, “No, this has to happen.” He just steps back.
He could’ve stopped it. He could’ve rerouted it, but he doesn’t, because he has heard her side of it, and he kind of is understanding Kevin’s side a little bit more. He knows this thing has to happen, and so he steps back and he just watches it. It’s an act of grace that he gives it. It’s not about him in that moment at all.
**Craig:** It’s a really interesting decision. It goes again to, I think there are a lot of movies when people are thinking about them or talking about them or when they try and write them and they’re wondering who the main character is, they will sometimes confuse main character and protagonist as the same thing.
What’s interesting is Gus maybe is the main… Denis Leary I suppose is the main character in a sense, but he’s certainly not the protagonist here. To the extent that it’s about people changing, it does feel like it’s about both Lloyd and Caroline, although I would argue ultimately, as is the case with almost every story, it comes down to one person making one choice that finally changes things.
I think for me, that moment is when in the middle of their arguing, Mother Rose says, “What does it even matter? They’re getting divorced,” and Lloyd turns to her and says, “Mother, is it possible for you to shut the fuck up for 10 seconds?” That to me is the moment where the protagonist there, I think-
**Richard:** Is Lloyd.
**Craig:** … is Lloyd.
**Richard:** That’s what the marriage needed all along.
**Craig:** All along.
**Richard:** To stand up to his mother.
**Craig:** There is this wonderful tradition in movies about psychological issues, relationship problems, and therapy, where it often comes down to one thing. I assume you go to therapy. You’re like me.
**Richard:** Been there 24 years now.
**Craig:** It would be great if therapy worked like this. In real life, it doesn’t, but in the movies, it often does come down to these little moments, like, “It’s not your fault,” or, “Mother, shut the fuck up. It’s almost like the walls come tumbling down.
**Richard:** One-word truths and then all the walls come tumbling down.
**Craig:** Everybody starts saying the truth. It is a wonderful conclusion of things. Before the family can be healed, there’s also the story of the son. What’s interesting about him, we’ve given him short shrift here, is that he is a criminal delinquent. It seems to be a reflection of the fact that his family home is broken. That’s what it feels like. He wants to go with Gus.
This is where there is this pathos to Gus’s sadness and a weight to him, even though he’s a funny character and he’s a burglar and he has the gun. We like him quite a bit, because he didn’t shoot anybody. He actually made things better. He expresses a sadness here. I just wanted you to talk a little bit about what is the story of Gus. Does it matter? Is he like one of the Greek gods that shows up in The Odyssey and then leaves?
**Richard:** It’s close to that, I guess. When I think about it, I don’t know that there was a lot of backstory. I think he had a lot of empathy for the kid. I have to be honest. This was the one part of the movie that I had… I wasn’t crazy about the casting. I like that kid, but I didn’t think he was right for the part. There wasn’t enough edge to him for me.
When I think about this storyline, I have to say, when Teddy and I hired Simpson and Bruckheimer to be our producers, because we had to pick from the Disney stable-
**Craig:** Got it.
**Richard:** We wouldn’t pick anyone that wouldn’t drink with us. Each one of the candidates we met at a bar. Teddy would lean [inaudible 00:46:08] go, “No, he’s a spy. We can’t hire him. No, he works for the studio.”
Simpson and Bruckheimer were a little bit insane. They had already had Top Gun and all this stuff. Then they made a deal. They saw this as, “Oh, Denis Leary, MTV. This is going to be a comedy for teenagers,” which was a big mistake. Don Simpson, who was a character in his own right, he detoured the script by making me do a rewrite that was all about the kid, because that was his thing. He wanted it to be about the kid.
We had the reading with the actors. The script had changed so much that Judy Davis got up and went, “This isn’t the part,” all of a sudden. I said, “I know. I agree with you. Please. I’m fast.” That’s when the four days happened, after that.
**Craig:** Oh, interesting.
**Richard:** The kid, that storyline was always, for me, a little… All I remember is we wanted to Gus to have this sort of humanity, hinting at a past, that he understood this kid in a way that his parents didn’t. I don’t know that we had any big past for him. We didn’t want to get too sentimental or too bogged down in that. He was going to help the kid in some way as well by his presence being there. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was more like a Greek god that comes in and out.
**Craig:** Yeah, or like The Rainmaker. I always think of The Rainmaker, because I love that movie and just the idea of someone who shows up with bad intentions, a con artist, a thief, and yet is exactly what is required to un-suspend the misery, basically.
**Richard:** And get the truth out.
**Craig:** And get the truth out, exactly. Finally, at the end, the family is healed. Gus escapes. There is one of the greatest lines ever in history. Lloyd and Caroline are about to kiss, finally, when they are interrupted by Lloyd’s nephew, who says, “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” It’s one of the greatest lines in history.
**Richard:** I love the way Denis did it. There’s an earlier line where he’s so upset with her, he wants to punch her. He goes, “Your husband isn’t dead. He’s hiding.”
**Craig:** “He’s hiding.” It’s so great.
**Richard:** Denis was great in that. The whole time he loses his shit.
**Craig:** [Crosstalk 00:48:34].
**Richard:** He’s like, “[inaudible 00:48:35]. Let me at her.”
**Craig:** They get it. They’re like, “We get it, but you can’t.”
**Richard:** They were holding him back.
**Craig:** They were holding him back.
**Richard:** I love that. Denis was so good in that.
**Craig:** “Mothers are supposed to be nice and sweet and patient and forgiving.” She really is horrible. With that wonderful mid-Atlantic accent, that not American, not British, kind of moneyed way of talking is absolutely wonderful.
Now, I read somewhere that the end here, which is a very happy ending, because Gus does escape with Murray on a boat, that that end was not originally the end.
**Richard:** It was re-shot.
**Craig:** Re-shot.
**Richard:** I believe we re-shot it, yeah. The original ending was Gus sacrifices himself for them in some way and gives himself up. Disney, they wanted it to be-
**Craig:** Happy.
**Richard:** Yeah. We had to re-shoot the ending.
**Craig:** It’s really interesting, because I remember those days.
**Richard:** They’re still here.
**Craig:** Studios still give notes and stuff, but there was something about the 90s. Maybe it was cocaine. I don’t know. There were so many notes. So many notes.
**Richard:** They’re still here. They’re still here. Streaming services are like that.
**Craig:** They’re still doing it. Through the crisis of writing drafts that you didn’t want to write, featuring storylines you didn’t want to feature, having Disney tell you to change the ending, all of that stuff, and then ultimately, all of it goes away in the crucible of those four days where you could just do the work.
**Richard:** Exactly, with the people that you’re doing it with, and not the executives, who are five steps removed and don’t really know how things work and don’t really know how things are made.
**Craig:** And also don’t know to release Christmas movies at Christmas. It’s the weirdest. Actually, March is the worst possible month, because Christmas happened, but it’s not a funny, ironic thing that it’s in the summer. It’s fucking March.
**Richard:** I also think we opened on the same day as Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was huge.
**Craig:** Oof.
**Richard:** Huge. I think it was the same weekend.
**Craig:** Lots of reasons why the movie initially didn’t do well, but it is something that I think adds character.
**Richard:** It was more, like I said, for a teenage MTV audience instead of an adult audience. I think that was part of the problem.
**Craig:** They must’ve been incredibly confused by that first scene, which I still think, if you understand what the movie is and who it’s meant for, is absolutely wonderful. Richie, we’re going to do a little segment now we call Drew Has A Question.
**Drew Marquardt:** I have a quick question on The Ref, because in the presents scene, I realized as I was watching it that we’re watching Lloyd do a monologue in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t feel that way. You’re hanging on every word. Very often, monologues aren’t done very well in movies. I was wondering if you could speak to how you set us up for that. Were you building to that the whole way through, or is that about following the logic of the moment?
**Richard:** I think it’s a few things. Like you said, it was building up all the way through. You want the audience to feel the way Judy Davis and Denis feel. They want this guy to blow up. They want this guy to tell the truth finally, especially when the mother enters the scene. You’re anticipating that, and you’re going, “Oh, here it comes. Now here it is.” You’re ready for it.
Another testament is that it’s just Kevin Spacey is a great actor, and he knew how to time it and he knew how to deliver it. The way Teddy directed it, with all the different characters there and their reactions and how to make it keep moving forward, keep moving forward. A lot of the energy of that is because of Kevin’s performance and everything that we set up along the way.
Finally, he’s blowing his top. In the first scene with the therapist, he’s snide, he’s sarcastic. They’re playing the game with each other of how they communicate, which isn’t the truth. It’s one-upmanship. This is finally taking the mask off. Okay, this is it.
It was revealing to me, and this happens in relationships, where everybody has their story, everybody has their side, but it’s not the whole story. Everything she said was true, but she forgot this. She forgot she wasn’t happy in that little apartment. She forgot this part of it. She didn’t understand the pressure he was under. To me, that was very honest.
It happens in all relationships, where you just get into the bickering, and you’re not really getting to how different people see things and their experiences and go, “Oh, I never thought of that. I never thought you were feeling that. I didn’t understand that. I thought it was power or something, and it wasn’t.” It was honest, and it was a lot of Kevin’s performance.
**Craig:** It’s also really interesting that you pull a little trick in that monologue, which is you don’t let him finish it. Everyone basically interrupts him, as if they’re too busy with their own crap. He has to pick up a fireplace poker and whack the Christmas tree over and over.
**Richard:** To get a symbol of why they’re there.
**Craig:** Exactly. “Shut up. I’m not done.” Then he gets-
**Richard:** The corpse has the floor.
**Craig:** The corpse has the floor. That reminds me so much of something that my dad used to say, which I won’t say on the air. It was the idea of feeling like you weren’t alive, the notion that you were being treated like a corpse that had been stuffed and stood up against the wall, not to be listened to and not to be considered.
**Richard:** Your father said that?
**Craig:** He would say something like that.
**Richard:** Wow.
**Craig:** I’ll save that for one of our confessional episodes. Richie, that was a fantastic discussion.
**Richard:** Thank you. This was great.
**Craig:** It’s amazing. I hope people do watch The Ref. I know for a fact it’s available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.
**Richard:** Is it on Disney Plus? I don’t know if they have it. Do they have it?
**Craig:** That’s a great question. I don’t know.
**Drew:** I don’t think it’s on Disney Plus, but we’ll put a link to it in the show.
**Craig:** Classic Disney.
**Richard:** [Crosstalk 00:54:43].
**Craig:** They’re still screwing this movie over. Guys, come on, put The Ref on. It’s so good. It is a fantastic Christmas, holiday tradition. We like to watch it every Christmas.
**Richard:** That makes me happy. Thank you.
**Craig:** We love it so much. Thank you for it. Now at the end of our regular show, we like to do something called One Cool Thing.
**Richard:** What’s yours?
**Craig:** I’ll tell you. I like to solve puzzles. I’m a big puzzle guy. For those of you out there who do enjoy, as I do, solving lots of puzzles, you will find oftentimes that you need to refer to the letters as number, so A as 1, B is 2, and so forth. Braille, binary, there’s something called a pigpen cipher, Morse code. You have to go around looking for all these things.
There’s an organization called Puzzled Pint. I think they’ve been my One Cool Thing before. They have, in one easy pdf, basically not all of, but a lot of the codes you would need to use, like NATO alphabet and semaphore and all the other ones I’ve mentioned, including binary, ternary, and hex. It’s incredibly useful, all in one sheet of puzzle solving, if you are, like me, a puzzle solver. We’ll include that link.
**Richard:** I love puzzles.
**Craig:** Oh, then listen.
**Richard:** I do the crossword on the subway every day.
**Craig:** Fantastic. You may find this interesting, especially if you expand into some of the stranger puzzles out there, which have begun to occupy me daily.
**Richard:** Did you Wordle?
**Craig:** Of course I do Wordle. Yes, I do Wordle.
**Richard:** I do Wordle.
**Craig:** We had Josh. What’s Josh Wordle’s actual name? Is it Wordle? It’s not Wordle. What’s his name?
**Drew:** It’s Josh Wardle.
**Craig:** Wardle. Wardle.
**Richard:** Wardle? Really?
**Drew:** Yeah.
**Richard:** Wow.
**Craig:** We had Josh Wardle on the show, who invented Wordle.
**Richard:** Wow.
**Craig:** Big Wordle fan, and also the Spelling Bee and the regular crossword as well. Do you have One Cool Thing for us, Richie?
**Richard:** Oh, man. I thought about this, and all I could think about was food.
**Craig:** Oh, we love food. Last week, my One Cool Thing was food. What’s yours?
**Richard:** There’s a place in New York, a couple of them, called Levain Bakery. Levain Bakery comes up with these cookies that are gigantic. One of them is a chocolate peanut butter. Literally, it’s a meal. You can only take little bites of it every day, because you eat the whole thing, you’re dead.
**Craig:** You’re dead.
**Richard:** It’s that big. They have a sour cream coffee cake. My mother and I always had this thing where we had to have cake, because she used to say it helps just to make the coffee go down. This is what she used to say. I had this thing in my head that I need cake to drink coffee or I can’t drink coffee.
**Craig:** It won’t go down.
**Richard:** It won’t go down. They have this sour cream coffee cake. I literally go to be at night thinking, “When I wake up, I can have the sour cream coffee cake.” I get so excited by it. It’s really good. It’s dense. It’s got all this sugar and maple stuff in the middle of it, and sour cream.
**Craig:** Oh, wow.
**Richard:** It’s a really great coffee cake. The other thing I can recommend is I discovered the benefits of celery juice. I buy this big bottle of Suji, I think it’s S-U-J-I or something, celery juice. It actually helps, because I have a terrible, terrible, acidic, nervous, ulceric kind of stomach, and it really helped. That kind of juice helps. There’s a couple things.
**Craig:** Those are both excellent recommendations. It’s Levain? Is that what it is, Levain Bakery?
**Richard:** L-E-V-A-I-N.
**Craig:** Levain.
**Richard:** Bakery. Great cookies. They deliver.
**Craig:** Do they ship?
**Richard:** Yeah, I think so. I use Try Caviar. They’re on that. I think they could ship to you. Their cookies are amazing. They have an oatmeal. All their cookies are gigantic.
**Craig:** Just like manhole covers.
**Richard:** They’re really good. They’re dense.
**Craig:** I love it. I’m going to unfortunately have to go and buy some of that stuff now. Thank you for that.
**Richard:** Thank you for this. This was really wonderful, because I don’t think anybody remembers the movie or thinks about it. Thank you. This meant a lot to me. Thank you very much.
**Craig:** I hope that we bring a whole new generation in.
**Richard:** And to Teddy.
**Craig:** Yes, and to Teddy, wherever he is, watching or listening.
**Richard:** And Denis too.
**Craig:** He’s wonderful.
**Richard:** That’s right.
**Craig:** That’s right. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro today is by Matt Davis. 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 is also where you will find transcripts and the signup for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts, and they’re great. Cotton Bureau. So soft. Highly recommend them, Richie. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we are about to record now. Richie, Drew, thank you so much for a terrific episode.
**Richard:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.
**Drew:** Thank you, Richie.
[Bonus Segment]
**Craig:** Premium members, welcome back. Little, short treat for you here. Little bonus. I want to talk with Richie about… Because we’re both middle-aged guys. Apparently, middle-aged men have problems making and keeping friends.
There’s been some really interesting articles about this. There was one in the New York Times. This one was back in November of ’22, an article by Catherine Pearson titled Why is it So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends? “American men are stuck in a friendship recession. Here’s how to climb out.”
There’s also a slightly different view here back in May of 2019. This was in Harper’s Bazaar, written by Melanie Hamlett, Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. “Toxic masculinity and the persistent idea that feelings are a female thing has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally stunted islands, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It’s women who are paying the price.”
First of all, I guess one question I have is, friends-wise… I have a lot of friends. Have you encountered the middle-age man not having friends issue?
**Richard:** First of all, I’m not a straight man. That’s one.
**Craig:** Boom.
**Richard:** That’s been a change since we saw each other last.
**Craig:** You were.
**Richard:** Not really.
**Craig:** I know.
**Richard:** I pretty much assumed everyone knew so I didn’t have to say anything. No, not really. My wife knew before we were married. It was a second coming out. Sorry, I came out-
**Craig:** Second coming is a much more [crosstalk 01:01:43].
**Richard:** I came out when I was 18, but only halfway, not with my family. I don’t know that it’s about toxic masculinity or anything like that. I do have friends. They’re mostly writers, like you, that I know. I used to have friends through the marriage. I don’t have them as much anymore.
It is hard to meet people. I also don’t like a lot of people now. The world is so fucked up. I really can’t stand people. I’m becoming a hermit. It’s hard to meet people when you’re a hermit. You meet them through work. I just directed this movie and made lovely new friends there. Again, it’s through work. I think something that women don’t understand, maybe not, this is probably wrong, but we’re defined by what we do.
**Craig:** Men, you mean?
**Richard:** Yeah. When we’re not doing what we do, we are invisible. We disappear. There’s a lot of pressure about that. I think we find friends through what we do. I don’t really have sport hobbies or stuff like that. I have a trainer, a gym guy that I love, that I talk to a lot and I’m with a lot. I don’t know. How about you? Are most of your friends in the business, or do you have outside friends?
**Craig:** Most of my friends are in the business. Most of my friends are writers. We do get an interesting built-in fraternity, I think, in a sense, because there are a lot of people that do what we do, and we’re all complainers. I find that complaining about things really can bring people together.
**Richard:** Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, writing is a solitary activity. Years and years ago, because we’re in New York and not LA, where you guys know each other and see each other more, Robert Kamen used to live here and he started this dinner thing. It was me, Robert Kamen, Tony Gilroy, and at the time Stephen Schiff, but now Scott Frank is here. We would have monthly dinners just to check in. That was really nice. We went out of our way and had a beautiful dinner, complained, drank. It was really a great thing that we did every month almost. Now that’s dissipated as well. I think especially for writers, male writers, it’s a good thing to do, to reach out and create those groups.
**Craig:** I talked about my father briefly before in the episode. It did strike me that in his later years, I never really thought about my dad and friends. It wasn’t like my dad had a group of guy friends.
**Richard:** No, my dad either. He was alone. It was all for my mother, all for my mom.
**Craig:** Exactly. It was that way until my dad died. His relationships came down to his wife, and that was it, and then family if you had to have those family holidays and things. It does strike me as sad. It is an interesting concept that men who can’t keep a friend group of men start to overburden their wife or their partner, because that’s the only person they deal with. That’s the only person who hears their problems.
**Richard:** Their only outlet.
**Craig:** There is no way to process.
**Richard:** I think that’s true.
**Craig:** Part of what they discuss here is how hard it is, like you said, for men to meet each other. You’re looking for a friend version of Grinder, basically. I don’t know what we would call it. Women do seem to just meet each other and become friends so easily.
**Richard:** Open up to each other more easily.
**Craig:** Exactly. I guess we don’t have the solution here. How old are you, Drew?
**Drew:** I’m 33. I’m getting married this fall. I’m doing the list for the bachelor party. There’s my brother.
**Richard:** Who do you want to spend time with? Who do you want to hang out with?
**Craig:** It’s happened to you.
**Drew:** It’s happening slowly, in little bits. It’s strange. I think honestly, I’m closer with women than I am with men, for the most part. It’s also interesting talking about burdening your wives too. I found a little book called Point Omega where one of the characters has a thing. He’s fresh off a divorce and doesn’t know why it fell apart. One of the characters says, “It’s because you told her everything, not because you told her anything.” I always think about that. If you burden your wife or anything with that oversharing and feeling like they have to be responsible for all your feelings-
**Richard:** That’s too much. No one person should be responsible for everything. That’s why friends are really good to have, to share other things with. We got to fix this. I don’t know how we do this.
**Craig:** I don’t know either, but I urge men to make an effort. I think part of it is just making an effort and not being afraid to say, “Hey look, I’m actually fucking lonely.” You have to show a little bit of vulnerability, because if you’re just like, “Hey, you want to get lunch?” guys are like, “No, not really.” If I hear a guy say, “Hey, listen, I’m actually having some problems and I need advice. Do you want to have lunch?” absolutely.
**Richard:** I’d be right there for them, yeah.
**Craig:** Then you start to create… You also get perspective. Richie, you were married for I don’t know how long, a long time.
**Richard:** 35, yeah.
**Craig:** 35 years. I’m getting close. I’m at 27, I think. When you can talk to other people who are in marriages that are that long, the complaining feels very good, because you realize this is normal.
**Richard:** You’re not alone. You’re not alone in it. That’s a really important thing. That’s really important.
**Craig:** Otherwise, it just feels like you’re stuck in something. You don’t realize that other people are like, “Oh, it’s fine. I feel that. It’s okay. It’s totally normal.” I don’t think we solved the problem necessarily, but at least we can urge you out there, if you are a man, particularly if you are heading into your middle ages, make an effort. It’s worth it to have some buds. Richie, thanks again.
**Richard:** Thank you very much. You’re a bud.
Links:
* The Ref on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKthobV2JU4), [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B006RXQ1EI/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110955/)
* [Richard LaGravenese](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0481418/) on IMDb
* [The Ransom of Red Chief](https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Henry_Red_Chief.pdf) by O. Henry
* The Ref’s [Opening Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAa3zP1ysqo)
* [Puzzled Pint’s Code Sheet](http://puzzledpint.com/files/2415/7835/9513/CodeSheet-201912.pdf)
* [Levain Bakery](https://levainbakery.com/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) 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/593standard.mp3).