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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)
* [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 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/2023/a-very-special-christmas-episode).

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

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

**John:** This is a very special Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, when I say a Christmas episode, what comes to mind? What are the themes or the plots in a Christmas episode?

**Craig:** There’s somebody who’s coming home to see their family. I’m just going to Hallmark this. She’s been putting her career in front of her personal life. Then there’s that guy that she remembers from high school who’s back, and he’s raising a kid on his own, because his wife died, at 23. She’s just woken up to the possibilities that maybe she doesn’t want to be in the big city anymore, and she’s going to live here in the small town and get together and become a stepmom but still work. She doesn’t give up anything. Actually, she gets everything.

**John:** That’s a Christmas movie. That’s a onetime story that happens. I’m thinking about more a Christmas episode of an existing series.

**Craig:** Oh, a Christmas episode. Everybody does a little Secret Santa. They each give each other gifts. Those gifts prompt memories, which then go [imitates magical sound effect] and you get clips.

**John:** Remember back, like a clip show.

**Craig:** Clip show.

**John:** It’s also the opportunity for actors to sing.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** They reveal that one of them actually can sing really, really well.

**Craig:** Because they hate that.

**John:** They hate that. Never let an actor sing.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Oh, no, don’t make me. Okay.”

**John:** The other thing that’s often a hallmark, I want to say, of these Christmas episodes is A Christmas Carol. There’s some version of a Christmas Carol where they are visited by ghosts of past and present, which is actually the case for us here today, because we are visited by the ghost of producers past in the form of Megana Rao is here.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**Craig:** Yay! I know we have producers present.

**John:** Drew Marquardt is here.

**Drew Marquardt:** Hello.

**Craig:** Is a producer’s future going to show up and do that weird, creepy bone hand point to my grave thing?

**John:** We don’t have a producer future yet, but for all we know, one of the listeners is the future Scriptnotes producer.

**Craig:** That’s pretty deep.

**John:** That’s pretty deep.

**Craig:** Everyone, it could be you.

**John:** We’re going to learn some valuable lessons today-

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** … hopefully on this podcast. We are also going to do a bake-off. We’re going to talk about bake-offs, and we’re going to eat delicious cookies, and we’re going to discuss these delicious cookies in front of us.

**Megana:** I cannot wait. I won’t be able to focus on anything else.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit like Lambert, your dog. He just keeps cheating, looking over like, “You’ll pet me now, right?” Megana’s like, “I’m talking, but really-”

**John:** The cookies are right in front of Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Can we give any preview?

**John:** Please describe these cookies for us.

**Craig:** There are three cookies. One appears to be a standard good old-fashioned chocolate chip. The other one might be oatmeal raisin. Hard to tell. It’s a darker brown. Then the third, it’s a brown-black kind of color. It looks like white chocolate chips in there. Maybe macadamia. Who knows? That’s the one that’s tweaking me right now. That’s where my eyeballs keep going.

**Megana:** It looks decadent, like it’s got a good mouth feel.

**Craig:** My understanding is these are from different places.

**John:** These are different bakeries across Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Drew and Megana consulted about the best cookies we could get.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** We will be discussing this bake-off as we talk about writing bake-offs and the scourge of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Are we going to do this wine tasting style where we take a bite, chew, spit it in a bucket.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. You see the bucket in front of you. That bucket is for spitting.

**Craig:** That’s what that’s for?

**John:** Yeah. You wouldn’t actually eat a cookie.

**Craig:** No. God. Yuck.

**Megana:** Over my dead body. You will have to scrape it out of my teeth.

**Craig:** Megana’s going to eat the plate.

**John:** We’re also going to talk about Netflix, who released a bunch of viewership data.

**Craig:** You said that like the Berlin Wall didn’t just come crumbling down. This is insane.

**John:** It is insane. We will get into that. We’re going to answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment of premium members, let’s talk about gifts and the best gifts we remembered getting as a child or afterward. Let’s talk about gifts, because that’s the season.

Now, before we even get started here, Megana is here because we really wanted her to come. I texted her to say, “Hey, Megana, we had to postpone the live show, but would you want to come over on Sunday to record an episode with me and Craig?” Megana texted back, she wrote…

**Megana:** I said, “Oh, I would love to, but I think I’m going to prepone my flight. Any chance Saturday works?”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, did you say prepone?

**Megana:** I did say prepone.

**John:** That was exactly my response.

**Craig:** Now we have a problem.

**John:** I asked her, “Did you just create a brand new word?” Because you know what it means.

**Craig:** Of course. I’m using logic. Actually, in theory, it should work, although it’s a bit like gruntled, like, “Oh, I’m so gruntled to be here.” No one says that. We only have the negative. There’s only the post and not the pre version of poning something. Did you create this?

**John:** She wondered if she created it. But I turned to Drew, who was right there, and so Drew did some research.

**Drew:** Megana did not create it. It is standard in Indian English and South Asian English, but it goes all the way back to Latin.

**Craig:** Things are starting to make sense.

**John:** What is your theory now on prepone?

**Megana:** When I said it and you questioned it, it felt so natural to me. I was like, “This feels like this word has always been a part of me.” It is, because my mom uses the term a lot, as does everyone in my family. I was telling John, it makes sense to me that prepone would be a South Asian English term, because we are so fluid with time and logistics and all of those things that-

**Craig:** Interesting. It almost implies though that there’s more specificity to time. You’re pulling something forward, as opposed to pushing it later? Is that what prepone means?

**Megana:** It is what it means. But people in my family are always like, “Just prepone your flight, or prepone this, and then do that.”

**Craig:** Which means do it earlier?

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s actually great. Just like in production, we have a push, which means you’re not going to come in tomorrow at 8:00, you’re going to come in at 9:00. We also have a pull. We’re going to pull your call. But we don’t have that really for standard English or American English. We only have postpone. Prepone makes total sense.

**Megana:** It’s more efficient.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated why it emerged in Southeast Asia as an English word that I don’t think the British use either.

**John:** It traces back to the 16th century, so it was used in British English, but not very commonly. It goes back to Latin praeponere, which means to place in front of.

**Craig:** Prepare.

**John:** Yeah, prepare, or ponere would be to place something someplace.

**Craig:** Pre-place. This is fascinating.

**John:** If a character said that in a script, we would be like, “What is that?” It would jump out.

**Craig:** Word to the wise, Megana. Although I feel like we probably did it right now.

**John:** We did it.

**Megana:** We’re normalizing it.

**Craig:** We’ve normalized prepone.

**John:** Prepone.

**Craig:** I have a feeling I’m going to get a call from my agent a year from now going, “Hey, can we prepone this call?” I’m going to be like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s a buzzword now.”

**Megana:** It’s so funny that it rankles you or you immediately recognize it as strange, because it couldn’t feel more natural to me.

**John:** I’ve never heard it.

**Craig:** I have never heard it before.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** I just went da-doing. It’s not one of those words that’s offensive. I’m actually annoyed I haven’t had it. I feel deprived.

**John:** Should’ve been there. Something we also should’ve had this entire time was viewership data for the streaming services. This was a huge point of contention in the WGA strike. Of course, the SAG-AFTRA took the same basic formula. But now, this last week, Netflix released just a ton of viewership data on all this stuff. It is the hours viewed for every title original and licensed, watched over 50,000 hours. The premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film was listed on this chart, whether it was available globally. In total, this report, which they released, covers more than 18,000 titles, 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.

**Craig:** This is an insane thing. I guess question number one is do we believe this?

**John:** That’s fair. We don’t have any sort of independent way of verifying that these are the real numbers. I guess my volley back would be, what would be the reason for fudging the numbers on any given title or multiple titles?

**Craig:** Two potential reasons. One, fudge upwards to look better for Wall Street. Two, fudge downwards on shows where fudging upwards would cost them a lot, because now that the WGA made their deal and got success-based residuals of some sort, and SAG… Is their success-based slightly different than ours?

**John:** It’s exactly the same.

**Craig:** Exactly the same.

**John:** But they get paid more than we do [crosstalk 08:21].

**Craig:** That makes sense, because they have to split it across a cast. That’s my question. The number one title on this list is The Night Agent: Season 1.

**John:** Craig, you’ve seen every episode of The Night Agent. You know exactly what it is. Tell me about The Night Agent. Tell me what you love about it so much.

**Craig:** As you guys know, I love agency-based stuff, agency-based narratives, whether it’s a travel agent, a secret agent. When I have a choice of viewing, and I know, okay, this whole thing takes place during the day, as opposed to this happening at night, I always go to the night. It just looks cooler. That’s what drew me to The Night Agent: Season 1.

**John:** I think you’re getting confused though, because it’s not about an agent that works at night. It’s actually about an agent who helps you find the right night for you. It’s like a real estate agent. What is the right night for me?

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** It’s that fulfillment kind of show.

**Craig:** Buying and selling knights.

**John:** No, it’s not that at all. It’s a Shawn Ryan show. Shawn Ryan, who’s a [crosstalk 09:17] guy. It is his show for Netflix. It is by far the top title.

**Craig:** He’s destroying. Is this a crime kind of thing or a spy thing?

**John:** It’s not. Let me give you the description of it.

**Craig:** It’s like I don’t work in this biz. Literally, so oblivious.

**John:** Here’s a summary that’s on IMDb. Low-level FBI agent Peter Sutherland works in the basement of the White House manning a phone that never rings – until the night it does, propelling him into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Oval Office.

**Craig:** As they often do.

**John:** As they often do. It has no stars to speak of. The two people I recognized in the cast are Hong Chau and DB Woodside.

**Craig:** They’re both very good.

**John:** Both very good, but there’s no marquee star. That’s not either of those people. It’s based on a book by Matthew Quirk. Seven writers in the room. It seems like a very conventional show that is a giant hit.

**Craig:** It’s a giant hit. That’s my question. You mentioned no huge stars. I don’t think the star thing necessarily would connect to these hours viewed, although individual actors may make deals with Netflix that say, hey, if you hit this number, you got to pay me extra. Doesn’t sound like maybe they have, like you said, a big marquee A-lister, Bradley Cooper kind of guy. When I look at this, I just wonder. I want to believe all of this. I don’t know what to do with 812 million hours viewed exactly. I don’t know what it means.

**John:** One of the challenges with hours viewed is it’s hard for a feature to hit hours viewed, because a feature’s just two hours of film. It’s not 10 hours the way that a limited series would be.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I assume they keep track of people rewatching things, although I’m not sure how you even convert rewatchability into money when there is no advertising. If you rewatch something on a network, you get new ads. That’s money.

**John:** Ultimately, Netflix will have ads, and so that will be useful for them down the road, the rewatching.

**Craig:** What is interesting is what we don’t see on here. There’s a lot of stuff on Netflix, and a lot of hoopla around all sorts of things. Every time a new show comes out, as I like to say, Netflix announces it as the most watched show in the history of mankind. Wednesday is not surprising to see here in the top five.

**John:** We had the creators of that show on here to talk about it.

**Craig:** You, very popular, people talk about all the time. But then there are these… FUBAR: Season 1?

**John:** Don’t know it.

**Craig:** What is FUBAR?

**Drew:** It’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger show.

**Craig:** That actually makes sense. That’s kind of cool.

**John:** Ginny and Georgia I’ve heard about only in the sense that it’s a giant hit on Netflix that I’ve never heard of.

**Craig:** Same. Giant hit on Netflix, and I don’t know what it is. BEEF: Season 1, very good, I would say for that. There are shows that, now that we’re in the thick of an incredibly compressed award season because of the strikes, everything is happening in January and February, basically. The discussion is, okay, there are these shows that are not necessarily widely watched by audiences around the world, but they’re very hot in our circles. Of course, inside Hollywood, that’s where all the voters come from. Then you think, okay, BEEF, everyone talks about BEEF, everyone’s seen BEEF here, but is it a hit anywhere else? Answer: yes.

**John:** Yes, it is.

**Craig:** Yes, it is.

**John:** It’s important to note that almost all these titles, they’re showing the global hours viewed. Some of these shows may not be huge hits in the US, but they are big hits overseas. The third title listed on here is The Glory, which is a Korean show. There’s actually quite a few Asian shows that show up pretty high. There’s Spanish shows that show up pretty high.

**Craig:** La Reina del Sur. Physical: 100: Season 1, that looks Korean as well. Physical: 100: Season 1 has two colons in it, Physical, colon, 100, colon, Season 1. I’m into that.

**John:** What will be the actual impact of Netflix deciding to release this? Will it pressure the other companies to do similarly?

**Craig:** Not necessarily. Probably, if I had to guess, I would say the opposite, that Netflix is the most widely watched streaming service. If I’m Apple, I would probably destroy small countries before I would agree to put out hours viewed, because every indication is they’re not viewed anywhere near this level. Other companies may not have this hours viewed data the way that Netflix does. For instance, Max, or HBO, is still linear and streaming. Do you get the hours viewed like they do? Because that data doesn’t come in. When grandma watches it over her satellite dish, it doesn’t collect the data the way it does on a streaming service. Disney Plus I think might, if they felt they could compete with these numbers. I think Netflix is kind of smart, because they’re like, “You guys want to see numbers? We’ll show you numbers. Now you. Now you do it.” I don’t know if we’re going to see any of these anytime soon from anyone.

**John:** I guess the counter-argument to that is you can always divide the hours viewed by the actual number of subscribers you have. That’s the reason why Paramount Plus, it’s not going to have 812 million hours viewed, but based on the number of subscribers, they could show what are the hits for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s the subscribers that matter. That’s the problem. Paramount’s like, “Our subscribers watch more per subscriber than Netflix subscribers do.” It doesn’t matter, because if you have one subscriber, you’re dead, no matter how much that guy watches. I like the idea of one crazy Paramount Plus subscriber who’s just 24/7.

**Megana:** It’s me.

**Craig:** It’s you?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It you.

**John:** Megana, some insights. Are there shows on here that you’re aware of that we’re not aware of?

**Megana:** Some of these shows like The Night Agent and FUBAR my parents were all over, so I was aware of the popularity of those shows. Something I was surprised about though looking at this is very few comedies.

**Craig:** Comedies are not global. That’s the problem. That’s why comedies in motion pictures were always questionable investments and always got squeezed on budgets, because it was just hard to make back anything anywhere else, because some comedy just doesn’t travel. But is there anything on here that you’re surprised to see how low it is?

**Megana:** We only have two sheets of this, and scrolling through this whole report, it’s just endless.

**John:** It is endless. This is also January through July 2023. Stuff that’s more recent we wouldn’t actually show here. I’m always happy to see things like Never Have I Ever: Season 4 showing up. It’s on the second page, but it’s still pretty high up there. It’s a comedy in its final season. You think about like, the nice thing about multiple-season shows is, was that last season worth it for us to make, and this seems like yes, it was worth it to make that last season.

**Megana:** A huge win for Aline with Your Place Or Mine right below that.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. In what’s called the national competition, the Olympics level competition, Korea with the gold. There is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 Korean series listed here. That’s impressive.

**Megana:** I also listened to the media call that they did with this. One point that they made was that Korean series have 40 to 50 episodes. If you are watching and you’re engaged, that’s-

**Craig:** I see.

**Megana:** … a lot more hours then.

**Craig:** It’s going to rack up. Korea, it’s not a massively populated country. It’s nothing like India, for instance. Where’s India on this list? That’s what I want to know.

**Megana:** I’m not seeing a ton of-

**Craig:** I’m confused.

**Megana:** … localized Indian things.

**Craig:** There’s Netflix India. It’s not like they break it out into a different service.

**Megana:** There definitely is, and they have really great localized content for India. I don’t know. I feel like most people’s viewing patterns in India, the types of shows that they’re watching, I don’t know that everybody’s watching Netflix stuff.

**Craig:** It’s not necessarily the biggest thing there.

**Megana:** I feel like culturally, they are still going to the movies a lot.

**Craig:** Thank you, India. Somebody has to go to the movies.

**John:** We’ll see in the future what happens here. I should say that the WGA formula, which became the SAG-AFTRA formula, is that if at least 20% of the streaming platform’s US users consume a new original film or TV series within its first 90 days, that kicks off the payment, and then the bell rings again in future 90-day installments. If a scripted series shows up here in this first page or two, I think it’s a very likely chance that it’s going to kick off one of these residual payments.

**Craig:** Do we happen to know what the domestic viewership base for Netflix is?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** How do we know that we’ve hit 20%?

**John:** We know how many subscribers there are.

**Craig:** That’s what I meant.

**John:** We do. I don’t know it off the top of my head.

**Craig:** You just don’t know, I see.

**John:** We do know it.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** That’s a public figure they-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** … are proud to boast about. Cool. We’ve got some follow-up, Drew.

**Drew:** In Episode 621, John said that one of his goals for the year was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, which led to a whole discussion about words like present versus present, which Craig called homonyms. Andrew wrote in with a follow-up, wrote, “Homonyms are the intersection of words that sound the same and words that look the same. The term refers to both homophones and homographs, but in combination. Examples would be ring/ring or tire/tire. What you described as a homonym is, in fact, a better example of a homograph. That’s two words that are spelled or graphed the same but have different pronunciations and different meanings. Present/present is a great example of a homograph, so words that look the same on the page but sound different when spoken aloud.”

**Craig:** The difference between a homograph and a homonym, if I understand what he’s saying, is that homonyms sound exactly the same when spoken, they just mean different things?

**Drew:** Yes.

**Craig:** Whereas homographs look the same, spelled the same, but pronounced differently?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Thank you. You know what? I don’t recall learning about homographs. I got to be honest with you. That was not something we were taught.

**John:** No, I think we were just told homonyms.

**Craig:** Homonyms.

**John:** Which is only supposed to be the combination of the two.

**Craig:** They’ve carved off a chunk of what we were taught were homonyms and reassigned them to homographs, which is a much better word. I agree with that.

**John:** Homophone are things that just sound the same but would be spelled very differently, so eight and ate, or bear like the animal and bare like without clothes. If you have bear with me, that’s an example of a word. Bear can be a homonym in that sense too, where bear the animal and bear with me are the same.

**Craig:** Right, but a homograph would be like resume and resume.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Got it. I also have some additional follow-up I should mention-

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** … that Melissa wanted to add.

**John:** I was not surprised that we have additional follow-up to the last follow-up from Melissa.

**Craig:** This was not about cooking. Now it’s about biopic. She said, accusingly, “You said that,” there was another word I use with bio, that we don’t say bai-AH. She said, “But you do say biography. If you say biography, it’s reasonable that somebody might think you would say biopic [bai-AH-pik].” I think that’s fair. That’s a fair point. I still think if you say bai-AH-pik, you’re stupid. I want to be on record with that. It’s not as annoying as the past participle of cast being casted instead of cast. When people say casted, I don’t know what to do. I’m on a crusade. We’re going to get rid of it.

**John:** Casted.

**Craig:** We have to stop people saying casted. We have to. Why do they do this?

**John:** Because they do. You’ll never win that.

**Craig:** I’m not going to win.

**John:** You’re not going to win.

**Craig:** I’m punching against the ocean, aren’t I?

**John:** You are. You absolutely are. English I think is generally drifting towards just standardized E-D endings for everything. I think ESL learners will always put the E-D on because the instinct is there to do it.

**Craig:** ESL people are going to learn the proper way because they’re being taught. It’s the non-ESL people, it’s the native speakers of English, who just don’t care. They’re ruining our precious language.

**John:** During Ramadan, we fasted. During the storm, we lasted through the night.

**Craig:** Of course, of course.

**John:** The oil lasted through 40 days and 40 nights.

**Craig:** It turns out, unfortunately, cast doesn’t work that way. I don’t know. It’s sort of like “I putted this here.” No, you did not. You put it there.

**Megana:** But “putted this here” is so cute. I’m going to start saying that.

**Craig:** I putted this here.

**John:** It’s a very common child error.

**Craig:** Mommy, did I putted it in the right place? It is cute, isn’t it? Casted is not cute. Casted is repulsing.

**John:** Putteded, they’ll recognize that something is wrong, and so they’ll put an extra E-D on it again.

**Craig:** Putteded.

**John:** I putteded.

**Craig:** Putteded. Oh, is putted wrong? Oh, I puttededededed it. Lambert is scratching the couch in protest against casted. Correct.

**John:** We have more follow-up on coverage.

**Drew:** We talked about AI script coverage. R wrote in. R says, “I interned this past summer at an independent production company that has several movies on a major streamer. My main job was script coverage, but they would have me and other interns do random tasks during my time with them. One was training ChatGPT to provide script coverage. I asked to switch assignments after a day, because it felt like I was actively helping AI to replace me. To make matters worse, I wasn’t getting paid for it. The internship was for school credit. I do want to acknowledge that maybe they weren’t trying to replace script readers, but still, script coverage is a great way for people like me, fresh out of school, to gain experience and meet new people, and I’d hate to see that go away. Not that you guys necessarily need confirmation that companies are doing this, but hopefully this anecdote provides further insight into how other companies are using AI.”

**John:** I have some follow-up on this. I was emailing back and forth with a woman who works in script coverage. She’s a union script reader. She was talking about how in the upcoming IATSE negotiations, script coverage is paneled under IATSE, that is going to be a thing they want to talk about is-

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** … making sure that professional script analysts are in charge of the process of doing script coverage. If these tools are used, they need to have the ability to be the people using those tools. I used to do coverage. A lot of us have done coverage. Writing a synopsis is horrible. It’s the worst part of that job. If you could use a tool that would help you get through that, and you could verify that it was correct, great. It’s the analysis that I’m actually most concerned about. That’s the part that we need to make sure stays in the hands of actual human beings with taste.

**Megana:** Also, when you’re doing script coverage, a huge part of it is you being able to tell your boss, “This was good.” That just can’t be replaced.

**Craig:** That’s what they don’t know, because if you think about it, let’s say the boss is being paid a lot of money to decide what should be made, meaning what should we spend tens of millions of dollars on. They are turning to somebody who is either an intern or being paid $60,000 to tell them what they should think. The system already doesn’t make sense in that regard, so you can see how, where it’s at least exploitive, those people would be like, “I already am cheating. I’m already asking somebody else to tell me what I’m being paid to know. Maybe I’ll just have the computer tell me what I should know.” I could see dumbasses doing that.

**John:** Craig, I think what you’re describing is it’s almost like they’ve outsourced the job of reading stuff to a low-paid person. If it’s a free person, it’s not that different, so it’s like a black box of it all.

**Craig:** I remember when I came to Hollywood, I was shocked, honestly. I thought that the whole point of being an executive was you were being paid for your taste and your analysis, and then I found out, no, you’re not.

**John:** You’re being paid for your ability to communicate to the other creatives and communicate up effectively and to manage your superiors.

**Craig:** Sure, but then it’s almost like show business is show business. None of it’s real. I’m still struggling with that to this day.

**John:** Some more follow-up from Ward here.

**Drew:** Ward writes, “I wanted to thank Craig for emphasizing that even though we all know California will go for Biden, he’s still planning to vote. What people sometimes forget is that local elections can be very, very tight, sometimes on the order of tens of votes or fewer. Even in states like California, those down-ballot choices don’t always go the way that you might expect. That one vote could really end up making a difference. Your vote really does matter.”

**Craig:** That is a fact. Facts.

**John:** Facts and evidence.

**Craig:** Facts.

**John:** We’ve actually had episodes where we had… Beth Schacter was on. We had Ashley Nicole Black on to just talk through voting, elections, and local issues, just to make sure we actually understood about them. We agree. Fully agree.

On to a marquee segment here. This last week, I got a call from my agents about a project that was out looking for a writer, looking for a showrunner. It’s a TV thing. It’s based on this giant IP that everyone’s heard of, and now they want to make it into a series.

**Craig:** Is it the toilet?

**John:** No, it’s based on a very famous book series that has become a movie series that everyone knows and loves.

**Craig:** I see. We used to use the slinky.

**John:** Slinky, yeah.

**Craig:** Now I’m just down to the toilet.

**John:** The toilet.

**Megana:** That’s actually already in development.

**Craig:** It is?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the awareness. Toilet awareness is through the roof.

**John:** Almost everybody on earth knows about toilets.

**Craig:** Knows about toilet. But this is not toilet.

**John:** This is not toilet.

**Craig:** This is quite a bit better.

**John:** This is already a hugely popular, successful franchise that they now want to make into a series.

**Craig:** Based on books, made movies.

**John:** Made into a film series.

**Craig:** Now making a TV series.

**John:** [Indiscernible 00:26:24].

**Craig:** I think we know what it is.

**John:** Although there’s a couple of choices that could-

**Craig:** I think we know what it is.

**John:** It wasn’t The Hunger Games.

**Craig:** And it’s not toilet, so what’s left?

**John:** I passed on this immediately, because I did not want to be a part of it. I asked them, what is the process, how are they going to pick the person to be the showrunner. This was the game plan. They’re not going out to any writer exclusively. They’re going out to a few select writers, but no one’s exclusive. There will be a series of meetings going up the ladder, pitching a vision, so about five meetings going up the ladder.

**Craig:** Five?

**John:** Five meetings.

**Craig:** The ladder’s not that… I know where this is, and there’s not that many rungs on the ladder, so I’m very confused. Do you start with the receptionist?

**John:** Then they’ll get down to four or five writers who they’ll have write pilots. Then they’ll pick the favorite of those pilots.

**Craig:** They’ll pay them.

**John:** Yes, they will pay them. They will pay them to write pilots. They’ll pick their favorite of these pilot scripts. They see this as a 10-year commitment.

**Craig:** I would agree with them that it’s a 10-year commitment. That makes sense.

**John:** Let’s talk about the pros and cons of this. I think this is a doomed process, because no person who actually knows how to run a show will agree to go through that process in my perspective. I don’t think they’re going to be agreeing to compete with other experienced showrunners who would go through this.

**Craig:** Counterpoint.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Ego. One of the things that a lot of writers have is a belief – and I kind of feel like I fall into this category – that I know what to do, I know the answer to this. They will see that my way is correct. I think there is a little bit of hubris involved here, necessary hubris. How else could you even think to say, “Hey, I’ve thought a bunch of things and written them down. Spend a lot of money to make people see it.” Look. The best showrunners in the business I think generally are probably already running shows. The timing of having somebody roll off something that’s brilliant and then rolling onto something like this is tricky. You’re not going to get people like Vince Gilligan, the best showrunner in the business, because he only does Vince Gilligan stuff, right? There is some trickiness there. I think they will get some good people, but the thing I’m really catching on is, getting people to write pilots like that, only to be… Although isn’t that what development is? You write a pilot, and then they decide if you’re going to do it or not.

**John:** Yeah, but it feels so different to know that in the classic broadcast model, your pilots can be against all the other pilots at that network.

**Craig:** But not pilots for the same show.

**John:** Also, that feeling like, is this thing that I’m writing in my script going to end up in that other person’s script, because we’re all writing the same thing based on this. That’s what’s so tough here.

**Craig:** In support of your concern, there is something that gets a little bit weird in the water when you know you’re not competing against yourself when you’re writing, when you’re being paid to write, that there’s somebody else writing something. It almost starts to maybe corrupt your own process. You start to worry, like, “I think what would make them choose mine over that one would be if I did this or that or avoided this or that. You could start to get a lot of, as Lindsay Doran says, unsharpened pencils, just blunted, fear-based, appeal to the down the middle committee kind of vibe. Hard to say. Because of the size of it, I understand, and because of the 10-year commitment, I understand. But I don’t know. That’s a new one on me.

**Megana:** The precedent feels pretty scary.

**John:** It does.

**Megana:** To be competing and auditioning like that, because I imagine the people they’re going out to, if you had a conversation about this, are very tenured, very experienced showrunners. To continue to have to audition like that feels…

**Craig:** Maybe that’s what going to happen is that they’re going to find out just how many fish they catch with this particular trawling net, because if they’re not getting the quantity and quality of writers they want to participate in this particular winnowing Hunger Games process – it’s not Hunger Games.

**John:** It’s not Hunger Games.

**Craig:** Then they’re going to have to revise it.

**John:** We’ll see what happens here. I’m going to keep an eye on what happens with that project.

**Craig:** Ten years to work on toilet.

**John:** That’s a long time on toilet. During the strike, I went to this big event at Universal where members were bringing baked goods and competing to see whose baked goods were the best. I was one of the judges for that. It was fun. It was really crowded. Andrea Ciannavei, who came up with the idea, she gave this great speech during the time about what bake-offs are like, why they’re a scourge on Hollywood. I asked her if I could get her speech and we could draft off of that for a little bit while we do our own bake-off competition. We have three delicious cookies in front of us that Drew has brought in. I thought we would start with one of them.

**Craig:** Megana, you already ate them. There’s nothing left.

**John:** You have crumbs on-

**Megana:** Drew, where did you put the cookies?

**John:** Drew, why don’t you pick the first cookie that we’re going to taste? We’ll describe it and give it an assessment.

**Drew:** The first cookie we’re going to taste is the OG cookie. It’s the OG chocolate chip cookie on the far left there.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** This is the original chocolate chip cookie. I’m looking at this. It’s a classic chocolate chip cookie. It’s a lot of chocolate in here. It looks like chocolate chunks. It’s not greasy. It’s got an amazing smell. Craig, what’s your first instinct here?

**Craig:** It’s a little bit intimidating how much of a cookie sommelier you are. It’s flat, and there’s too much chocolate in it. I’m just looking at it. For me, there’s too much chocolate. What I do like is that there’s salt on the top. That makes everything better. It’s a chewy cookie. I can tell by squeezing it. I’m just concerned about the quantity of chocolate in this thing. Shall we?

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Oh, Megana, do you have any thoughts?

**Megana:** No. I’m excited by the salt, and it has a nice crunchy layer on top of the chewiness.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what I thought.

**John:** It’s nice and crispy on the outside, and it is chewy on the inside. It’s a solid chocolate chip cookie. I agree with Craig that it’s basically a chocolate delivery mechanism.

**Drew:** Yeah, it’s chocolate dominant.

**Craig:** It’s almost like a thin cookie-crust-covered brownie. Now, I recognize that they’ve pulled a trick here. They smashed a bunch of chips down, then put another little bit of cookie dough, then put the cookie. I don’t know if I’m the only one that has that.

**John:** I wonder if they’re maybe not chips but actually some sort of chunky chunks kind of situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a ganache almost. Confession. People get upset with me when I say this and so many things. I don’t love chocolate. Look at Megana. Megana, literally, I wish I could’ve taken a picture, and we could’ve put it in the show notes. The look of disgust on her, just utter contempt. I’ve never actually seen her look like that.

**Megana:** You know what it was? It was a moment where I was like, I thought that we were very close.

**Craig:** You’re shooketh, because it’s like, I don’t even know who you are anymore.

**Megana:** Exactly. It was a look of betrayal.

**Craig:** I am sorry. I want to assure you that I am who you know. But this is how we keep things spicy, by just occasionally going, “Oh, by the way, I have a kink.” My kink is not loving chocolate. I don’t hate it. I just don’t love it.

**John:** Drew, what’s your first read on this cookie?

**Drew:** A lot of chocolate. My gut is that it would be better if it was warm, but I also feel like we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not having them warm, because all cookies are good when they’re warm.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s talk about some bake-offs here, because I described-

**Craig:** By the way, you just assumed Megana loved it.

**John:** Am I wrong?

**Megana:** He knows me so well. I did love it. As a vehicle for chocolate, I loved it. The salt did a lot of work for it.

**John:** Yeah, it did.

**Megana:** I will say that.

**Craig:** Always good with cookies. I agree.

**John:** Bake-offs in general. I described that one TV project as a bake-off, but that’s really the exception where you’re going after these giant, established showrunners. Most bake-offs are really targeting writers who are newer to the industry. Producers are asking you to come in and pitch your take on the piece of IP that they own, or open writing assignment, and they sit back and pick the one that they like best. You’re doing this tremendous amount of work for free for them. It is both really tempting and kind of natural to approach, because it’s good practice for how to find a take on something, but you become free research and development for these projects. Oftentimes, they pick none of the above. It’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing here to make.”

**Craig:** Sometimes the winner is no one. It’s a function in part of anxiety. It’s also a function in part of just lack of trust. But having been on the other side of not writing bake-offs, but employment bake-offs, basically interviews, so we have to interview a lot of people to come and work on our show. Sometimes I’ll talk to three or four or five different, say, cinematographers. They will bring different levels. Sometimes they just talk, and sometimes they put together mood boards. Everybody has a different thing.

For me at least, I wish I could say that that process led to certainty. It doesn’t. You’re guessing before they show up, and then you’re guessing after they show up, because you realize what you’re getting is not necessarily the work that will be done. They’re not shooting something for you right now, in the case of cinematographers. Also, you’re getting their interview self. You’re just hoping, and you’re going on your gut. It’s a process designed to create certainty where certainty cannot exist and doesn’t exist, which is why bake-offs, a little bit like pretty privilege, I think bake-offs lead to room privilege. People that are good in rooms, fun, easygoing, seem like they’d be a great hang, those people have privilege in bake-offs.

**John:** In theory, you are developing the idea, and you’re coming in there, and people are responding to your idea. But they’re really responding to your charisma, your ability to sell yourself as the person. They can have confidence that you are the person who can deliver this thing. When we talk about bake-offs, we really should think about actors auditioning are really in a very similar situation too. There is that scourge where actors will go in and audition and come back in and get callbacks, but there are some rules about how many times you can call an actor back without paying them.

**Craig:** There are also now rules about how many pages they can be. We’ve been dealing with that now as we go through our audition process for certain roles. Coming out of the SAG strike, we now have a limitation on the amount of pages we can send for reads. You can’t just dump 12 pages on them, not that we were. But I think it’s five maybe total, I think, something like that, which is fair.

**John:** Which is fair.

**Craig:** By the way, same deal with actor auditions. Actor auditions, at least there’s time where somebody, you just go, “There it is. That’s it. That’s our person. Done.” I saw Bella Ramsey’s audition. I was like, “We’re done. It’s over.” You’re hoping for that. You will never get that certainty from writing bake-offs. It’s not possible.

**John:** When Bella Ramsey came in to do that thing, you saw, “Oh, that’s it.” She created that moment. It happened. A writer coming in in that bake-off situation, that’s never going to happen.

**Craig:** No, it’s not possible, given what we do, and it’s not really possible for, I think, any other job except for acting.

**Megana:** Because such a huge part of it is the revision process. That’s not something that every writer is capable of or that you would be able to know from the first pitch that they have about that project.

**John:** Craig was able to see Bella doing a version of a scene that would actually be in a thing. But if I’m going in to pitch a thing, I’m pitching a vision, but that’s not the script. They’re going to hire me, and then three months later, I’m going to deliver this script, and who knows?

**Craig:** You’re not able to show them anything like the final product, nor are you able to show them, like Megana says, how you would participate in the process of developing that. All you can show them is, hey, does this person make my skin crawl? Do they seem defensive? Are they imaginative? Do we ping-pong? Do we converse? Is there a dialogue, or is this a monologue? The bake-off process, to me, that’s the problem with it. There are some incredible writers who, I think if they were coming up now, wouldn’t even get a shot, because they don’t have, what would you call it, charisma privilege.

**John:** Let’s try our second cookie here. Drew, describe this cookie for us.

**Drew:** This is an oatmeal raisin cookie.

**Craig:** Now we’re talking.

**Drew:** It’s a brown exterior with raisins pretty solidly throughout, it looks like.

**John:** I would say softer on the outside. It’s definitely soft on the inside. Very cinnamony.

**Craig:** It smells good.

**John:** It does seem good. A lot of people just despise cinnamon raisin cookies for not being chocolate chip cookies.

**Craig:** Yeah, but that’s why I love them. This is the kind of thing I love. Megana’s so upset. She’s like, “There’s no chocolate in it.”

**Megana:** I keep looking. No, I’m enjoying it. Texturally, it’s good and interesting, because I feel like oatmeal raisin sometimes have too much texture, too much oatmeal. This is nice and gooey.

**John:** I’m not getting much oat here at all in terms of actual… I’m not a fan of this cookie. It feels a little gummy and under-baked to me.

**Drew:** It’s a little wet.

**Craig:** I love it. I’ll tell you why. Because this is my flavor profile. I love, I’m going to say, the fall spice kind of vibe. I love raisins in cookies. Everybody else is like, “What’s wrong with you?” I made a joke about it in the first season of The Last of Us. Still, I love it anyway. I also like how much you can take a molasses, brown-sugar-forward kind of vibe in this, which makes me so much happier. I ate my whole piece.

**Megana:** It was enjoyable. I just don’t think you should call it a cookie.

**John:** What would you call this then?

**Craig:** What would you call it? An abomination?

**Megana:** It was just like a breakfast item, like a breakfast pastry.

**Craig:** A flat, disc-like coffee cake?

**John:** If you take one of those Quaker Oat bars and just soften it, microwave it, it could be-

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’d eat that. This is really turning into a real Jets versus Sharks situation. I feel like we’re star-crossed lovers.

**John:** Drew, texture-wise?

**Drew:** Texture-wise, wet. But I think Craig hit the nail on the head with that molasses, and I like that gingerbread kind of flavor to it.

**John:** Let’s talk about you’re approached as a writer in a bake-off situation. Generally, your agent, your manager, somebody’s coming to you for the situation. Have you been hit by these yet, Megana?

**Megana:** Thankfully, I have not. I have not.

**John:** You’ve had to go in and meet on rooms. You’re just coming off your second room. But you haven’t had to go out and pitch on a job. Back when you were still a producer, there were projects you were going out to meet on, but were you the only person they were going out to?

**Megana:** I was going out to meet mostly on projects that I was pitching and developing, so luckily, I have not had this.

**Craig:** You haven’t had the bake-off experience.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Here’s the information you want to know from your reps before you would consider taking off for one of these things. How many writers are in the mix? You ask the question, and they need to tell you the answer. That’s in the contract, because they have to do that. You need to figure out how invested is the studio in this. Is it a priority for the bosses, or do they even know that it exists? How many people need to say yes before you get the job? One of the things I did like about this thing that the agency came to me with is they could talk through the process. They’ve asked the questions. They knew what the process was going to be.

How long has this been assignment been around, because if things have been around, floating for a long time, that’s a really bad sign, that they’ve never been able to crack it. Do they actually have the rights. I’ve heard so many horror stories where, “Oh, we’re trying to do this thing. Oh, we haven’t gotten the rights yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get the rights to this eventually.”

**Craig:** “If you tell us how to make it something good, then we’ll tell the people.” Then I’m like, “What do I need you for? I’ll go talk to them then.” Now they’re just laundering your work into IP that they would control. It doesn’t make any sense. But there are some people in Hollywood that just are not scrupulous.

**John:** Funny that way.

**Craig:** Shocker.

**John:** Shocker. The last red flag that Andrea has here, which I think is such a good point, is that if you hear something like, “The director has a preferred writer, but we’re exploring our options.”

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Dead. You’re dead.

**John:** Even if you get the job, you won’t want to have that job, because you’re not the person the director wanted to work with.

**Megana:** I’ve also heard experiences from friends who have gone on open writing assignment pitches and things. It feels like an open book test, but some people have had after-hour sessions with the teachers or something, where some friends will know exactly what that executive wants, and they just want you to repeat that back to them from a different body. It’s like, okay, so not every writer has this information.

**Craig:** It’s not a healthy or sane or principled process. It just doesn’t really make sense to me. In the case of a massive project, where a studio has invested a billion dollars and wants to make 10 billion dollars, I understand to an extent. But the process is very formalized. They come to you, and they say, “There’s going to be five steps,” and da da, bah, bah, bah. When you get what we’ll call the standard bake-off, I just feel like that is the first indication that nobody cares and that this is kind of junky, because why are they doing it like this? It means they don’t really know what they want, and they probably don’t have money for bigger writers. It’s all sketch at that point.

**John:** The alternative would be just go to a writer who has experience making movies and you know can deliver a script for you.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you’re like, “Okay, I bought this neo-noir book. I now have some IP,” why wouldn’t I call Scott Frank first? Of course I would, unless I can’t afford it. Now that means I don’t have the vote of confidence from the studio, and I’m just begging and looking. Then I need to seat seven people, because I don’t know. Problematic.

**John:** Let’s take a look at our final cookie here. Drew, talk us through this.

**Drew:** This final cookie is a dark chocolate peppermint chip.

**Megana:** Are you kidding? You don’t like mint in your…

**Craig:** I really thought it was going to be white chocolate, which I love, because I don’t like chocolate. I’m basically the anti-cookie person. It’s mint chocolate chip?

**Drew:** I don’t know. It’s peppermint.

**Craig:** Peppermint.

**John:** Those look like peppermint pieces, I think. It’s a smashed-up candy cane.

**Craig:** A smashed-up candy cane in a cookie. Let’s just say also, this thing is massive.

**John:** It looks more like a rounded brownie than a cookie.

**Craig:** It’s a mound.

**John:** You can smell the mint in it.

**Craig:** It also just looks so chocolatey to me. That’s foul. This is terrible. It’s toothpaste. I’m eating toothpaste. Megana’s like, “I’ll take yours.”

**John:** It really is a brownie to me.

**Craig:** It’s gritty.

**John:** If it weren’t for the rounded shape, I would say this is a brownie. Megana?

**Megana:** If I was closing my eyes, I would think that this was a brownie.

**John:** I’m not a fan of candy cane kind of things, but Drew, what are you thinking?

**Drew:** I’m not either a big fan of the candy cane. It has a similar amount of chocolate as the first cookie, as the chocolate chip, where it’s everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere!

**Craig:** I actually like mint chocolate chip ice cream. It’s when they put mint and chocolate together, like those Andes after-dinner, I’m like, “Gross,” because I don’t like chocolate that much. Now, it just tastes like disgusting toothpaste. I hated it. Apologize to the bakery. Literally, I’m choking.

**Megana:** Is this a new thing? I don’t remember you not liking chocolate.

**Craig:** No. Even as a kid, I was always confused why let’s say after baseball practice, the team goes to get ice cream, and everyone’s like, “I want chocolate!” Everyone was in pure agreement, chocolate ice cream. I’m like, “I would like vanilla, please.” I love vanilla. It’s amazing. It’s just never been my thing. It’s not for me, dog.

**John:** Now we’ve tasted the three cookies. Should we vote first, or should we reveal where these cookies are from?

**Craig:** Good question.

**Drew:** Let’s vote first.

**John:** Let’s vote first. I would say cookie number 1 was my choice of the three cookies.

**Megana:** I would also say number 1.

**John:** Yeah, which is a very classic chocolate chip.

**Craig:** Number 2.

**John:** Number 2, of course.

**Drew:** I would also vote number 2.

**Megana:** Drew!

**John:** Oh my god, tie.

**Craig:** Whoa. I did not see-

**John:** I did not see that-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Didn’t see it coming.

**Craig:** Wow. That is gasps from the audience. Okay, so now-

**John:** Final two contestants here. I guess it gets kicked up to the boss, the studio head, to decide between these last two contenders.

**Craig:** Right, and you know they have just a D20 that they’re rolling.

**John:** But I think you actually can pull this back to what we’re talking about with bake-offs, is that tasty is subjective.

**Craig:** Sure is.

**John:** You may have delivered the pitch that wins over that executive, but their boss may not have the same taste, and you’re screwed.

**Craig:** Also, I remember seeing on a producer’s table, when very young… I was starting out. I was coming in and pitching on something. The system brought me into the meeting room, the office. But he was on the phone. He would be right in. Right there on this desk was a list of names. Obviously, I was one of them. Next to each thing, it said a credit, and then there were dollar signs, like Yelp.

**John:** So exciting.

**Craig:** It was like one, two, three, four, because part of it is how much do you like this person, because they’re way more expensive than this one. If cookie number 1 costs half as much as cookie number 2, cookie number 1 will probably get the job.

**John:** Drew, it’s now time to reveal the cookies that were…

**Drew:** In third place-

**John:** In third place.

**Drew:** The dark chocolate peppermint cookie is from Levain Bakery.

**Craig:** World famous.

**John:** Right up the street, yeah, world famous.

**Craig:** They do have some lovely things there. I can’t hang this on them. They probably have an amazing oatmeal raisin cookie that I would love to try.

**John:** I would say all the cookies I’ve gotten from Levain have that quality of it feels like a giant ice cream scoop was used, and it never quite all the way baked down. That’s their way of doing cookies.

**Craig:** They are kind of doorstops.

**Drew:** Is that too much baking powder? I feel like there’s got to be something that’s [crosstalk 48:36].

**John:** No, it’s not risen. It’s just dense.

**Craig:** It’s just quantity. It’s quantity of dough.

**Drew:** Tied for first, but the oatmeal raisin is from DeLuscious Bakery, which was a Megana recommendation.

**Megana:** Oh my god, I betrayed the love of my life.

**Craig:** Megana!

**John:** Tell us about DeLuscious Bakery. Why was that your choice for a place to pick?

**Megana:** It was a place that I discovered when somebody sent you a gift three or four years ago. Their cookies are just divine.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Megana:** Oh, gosh. I’m betraying my team. They’re delicious. Their chocolate chip cookies are so good. They also have vegan and gluten-free cookies, which I am not, but they’re still delicious.

**Craig:** Levain also, I know for a fact, has a vegan cookie and possibly a gluten-free as well.

**John:** Excellent. My top choice, the chocolate chip cookie, is from where?

**Drew:** It is from The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World bakery, which is LA Times number one cookie in LA.

**Craig:** I’m going to challenge their name, but okay.

**Megana:** Wait, that was the name?

**Drew:** That’s the full name. I feel like a lot of cookie places have names that make me a little-

**Megana:** I thought you were just vamping.

**Drew:** No.

**John:** I thought maybe it’s for search optimization.

**Craig:** The best cookie.

**John:** Dentists will have a place called Dentist Near Me. Their actual practice name will be Dentist Near Me.

**Craig:** A lot of plumbers that are AAAA Plumber. It’s got a The Country’s Best Yogurt vibe for their name. It was, I’m sure, fine. I don’t know how to evaluate a cookie like that. It’s just not my jam.

**John:** My favorite cookie in Los Angeles is at La Provence bakery over in Beverly Hills in a strip mall. Their vegan gluten-free chocolate chip cookie is incredible. It’s better than any of these cookies here, I believe.

**Drew:** I love vegan desserts. The best brownie I ever had was a vegan brownie.

**John:** They can be really good.

**Craig:** I don’t know where you are in this, Megana, but to me, as somebody that likes to make desserts, cook, bake, etc, I support vegans, I love them, I disagree with what those two people just said. Eggs are essential.

**John:** They’re really [crosstalk 50:44].

**Craig:** Often, cream is essential, but eggs and butter. Eggs and butter, that is what a dessert is.

**Drew:** They do coconut usually in the vegan stuff.

**Craig:** I can’t stand that.

**John:** Let’s answer a listener question.

**Craig:** No, no, no, I need to get support.

**Megana:** When I have a vegan dessert that I really like, I’ll say it’s a surprise rather than an expectation.

**Craig:** Girl, boom.

**John:** Got a fist bump there.

**Craig:** Owns.

**John:** Let’s answer a question or two. I see one from Carlos that seems good.

**Drew:** Carlos writes, “What do you consider a draft? I’m sorry if the question seems a little bit obvious, but I’m new to this sort of thing. I understand that a first draft is what comes out from beginning to end with the story laid out, characters and all. Next, you take out a scene or add up some more story. If it’s just a new paragraph, is that considered a draft or a pass? How many changes are considered to make it a new draft, and what do these many color labels mean in various drafts and revisions?”

**John:** Craig, this week I was working on the chapter of the Scriptnotes books which was about script revisions and colored revisions and all that stuff, so the idea of a draft comes up here. My instinct is that a draft is any time you have a script that you’re handing to a different person that you’re saying is different. That’s a change that’s going out there. It’s not just you’ve made a change on one page. It’s just like, “This is actually a new thing I want you to read.” That’s a draft.

**Craig:** I think of draft as a pre-production term. This is my first draft. Okay, here are some notes. Beginning, the end. Here are some notes. Here are some thoughts. Okay, I’m going to go off now and do a rewrite. This is my second draft. I’m going to do a polish. This is a polished draft. It just means these are new versions of the thing from beginning to end. Once you get into production, those now aren’t drafts anymore.

**John:** They’re revisions now.

**Craig:** We will sometimes say blue draft. But really, I like to say blue revision. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, in production, if you change one word on one page, and it’s really important, and it has to go out today-

**John:** That page goes out.

**Craig:** … it’s technically a draft. It’s a page. Pink page is out.

**Megana:** It’s so fun, because I’ve been getting the updates from the Unstable: Season 2, what is it called, the distribution?

**Craig:** Yes, synchronized?

**Megana:** Yes, exactly. I’ll be like, “Oh, cool. What did they change here?” It’s like, “We have changed the hat to a visor.”

**Craig:** There’s definitely a lot of that, and sometimes one small word, like, “They walk outside. It’s raining.” Pink page, “They walk outside. It’s sunny.” That’s a very big change. I should give a little shout-out to Ali Chang, who is my intrepid assistant, but also our script coordinator on Season 2 of The Last of Us. She’s doing an outstanding job.

**John:** In this chapter, we talk through revisions mostly from the future perspective, where you and I have to be the script coordinator, because we’re the person responsible for making sure the script doesn’t get messed up. But on an actual TV show, there’s a whole person whose job it is to make sure that those revisions go out in a way so that they are sensible for everybody.

**Craig:** We have a shared folder. I say, “Okay, I believe Episode 203 blue is ready to go.” She proofreads, adds in, if need be, the production days. We do D1, 2, 3, 4, N1, 2, 3, 4, and all that, and make sure the headers and the title page, and then sends it through Scenechronize, which I think it’s owned by Entertainment Partners, that also owns Final Draft. For something that is even remotely associated with Final Draft, it works quite well. It is not Final Draft-esque in its [crosstalk 54:13].

**John:** Craig, a question for you. In the chapter that I put through, we talk about pages in that sense. I don’t bring up Scenechronize at all, because I want to make sure the book doesn’t feel like it’s too tied into one thing. But I do mention the fact that often it’s now software. On your set, how often are people looking at physically printed pages?

**Craig:** Our initial feeling for Season 2 is that we would have no printed pages, until the morning when certain people would have sides, director, showrunner, actors. Little bit of a revolt by the heads of departments. We loosened it up and allowed HODs to have printed things, because they just need them to do their work. But beyond that, we really are trying to keep it digital. Security is a thing. Once you have a show that people are really paying attention to, you do have to be careful. I know Game of Thrones went through all sorts of… There used to be this thing where they would print scripts on these red pages, because they couldn’t be xeroxed. No one xeroxes anything anymore. What’s nice about Scenechronize – so it’s synchronize but it’s Scene-chronize – is that it distributes PDFs, but they are only viewable online and watermarked and dated. If you try and take a screen cap, it’s going to have exactly your name and the time and all that stuff, your IP, blah da da blah. It’s actually quite solid for security purposes.

**John:** On the day, certain people are going to have sides, just because you have to look, like, what is this thing?

**Craig:** Of course. One of the things, I always ask for my sides to be on full-size pages, because I don’t like the little tiny pages. I don’t understand why they have to be little tiny pages. I can’t see them. There is somebody who, at the end of each day, studiously gathers those things up and runs them through the shredder.

**John:** Great. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game that we played yesterday called Clue Conspiracy. It is the game Clue, but built out in taking cues from Avalon and other sort of social deception, teamwork. It’s cooperative, but there’s traitors in your midst.

**Craig:** Pandemic kind of vibe?

**John:** Yeah. It’s really a smartly done thing. It took a bit to figure it out, but it does come with a video explainer. Drew, you liked it.

**Drew:** I had a great time. Avalon’s a good comp. It’s like Clue but White Lotus.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** You’re trying to prevent a murder, but you probably won’t prevent the murder. Then you have to figure out-

**Craig:** I bet. Avalon, they’re classic.

**John:** They’re good. We played with four, which was okay, but I think five to seven to nine would probably be the right number there.

**Craig:** More of a party game.

**John:** It’s more of a party game, but nicely done.

**Craig:** Does anyone actually die?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In real life?

**John:** Oh, no, not in real life, no. That’d be nice if it did. Megana, what have you got for a One Cool Thing?

**Megana:** I’m going to say on the baking theme, last weekend, my friend brought this spiced persimmon cake from Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person book.

**John:** Such a great book.

**Megana:** Such a great book. So delicious.

**Craig:** Persimmons.

**John:** I can’t summon the taste of a persimmon. What is persimmon like?

**Megana:** I don’t totally enjoy them, but the profile that they brought to the cake was just a little fruity, really moist, and it was just perfect.

**Craig:** It’s a milder citrus flavor, to me at least. I think they’re delicious. But a little goes a long way with persimmon. We don’t generally put oranges in cakes. You put fake orange in cake, probably. But it’s very strong, whereas lemon and lime somehow work better. Persimmon is really interesting. Spice I think is the key. You know I love my spice. I thought for a second you were going to be like, “My One Cool Thing is oatmeal raisin cookie.” That would’ve been awesome.

**Megana:** I’m also pitching this because I’m hoping that one of the two of you will… Drew, do you bake?

**Drew:** No.

**Megana:** You guys are my bakers.

**Craig:** You want me to make one for you?

**Megana:** Yes, please.

**John:** I have her book.

**Craig:** Send me the recipe. I will do it.

**Megana:** The hack that my friend did was she used butter instead of oil. I’m still thinking about it.

**Craig:** I am not a big believer in recipe hacks. I feel like you should always try it once the way the author intended, maybe because I’m a writer. What happens, I’ll look on, for instance, the New York Times, and they have some really nice recipes there, and then there’s all the comments. I like the comments, because people can say what they thought. If everybody agrees really you should probably not leave it in the oven as long as they say, okay. But inevitably, there’s five people like, “It was incredible. I loved it. I just replaced the eggplant with tuna, and instead of cheese, I used graham crackers.” People are like, “Why are you here?”

**Megana:** Have you seen the Reddit thread that’s people who have made substitutions in recipes and then get really mad that they don’t work?

**John:** That’s a perfect subreddit.

**Craig:** That is a dream. I got to go look that up, because I’m like, “Guys, how is it their fault?”

**Megana:** There’s literally one that’s like, “I substituted mayo for marshmallow fluff, and it did not work well.” It’s like, who asked you to do that?

**Craig:** Oh my god. Because they are the same color?

**John:** They’re both white, in a jar.

**Craig:** I used an old T-shirt instead of butter, and it didn’t work very well, but they’re the same color. If you send me the recipe, what I will do is… By the way, since you’ve had it, I’ll do the OG version, and let’s see what you think. Look, in general, butter is butter, but every now and then-

**John:** If Claire didn’t use butter, she’s-

**Craig:** Every now and then, there’s a reason. There really is. Sometimes I’ve even come across recipes where they do use strange substitutes for things. Some people are just like, “Look, if you’re going to do this, you’re using Crisco. Sorry. I know it’s kind of trashy, but that’s what works.” You make a pie crust, use Crisco. It’s bad for you.

**Megana:** But so is pie.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Craig, what have you got?

**Craig:** Have I talked about steaming yet?

**John:** No.

**Drew:** No.

**Craig:** You guys, I’ve become obsessed with this.

**John:** Steaming for clothes or steaming for vegetables?

**Craig:** Steaming for clothes.

**John:** It’s better.

**Craig:** It’s so much better. I get frustrated with wrinkly clothes, but I don’t want to have to constantly take it across the street to people to press it. That just seems stupid. Ironing is hard. It takes so long. I’m terrified I’m going to burn something. It’s just so long.

**John:** Setting up the ironing board and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Setting up the ironing board. There’s always one corner of a shirt that is topologically un-ironable. Then somebody, and I can’t remember who, said, “Just get a steamer.” I’m like, “What?” I watch this video of this guy doing it. I’m like, “There’s no way it’s going to work that well.” Oh my god.

**Megana:** It’s magic.

**Craig:** It’s magic! You just do it. You can watch wrinkles. Some shirts are easier than others, but even the hard ones, it’s okay, because you’re just running this thing up and down it. It just goes, not wrinkled anymore. I do it on pants. I do it on shirts. I do it on sport coats. I love it.

**John:** We went to Drew’s wedding, so we were staying in Boston. We had our suits. Things get wrinkly. The hotel room didn’t have an iron, but it had a little steamer in a little bag. You plugged it in, put the water in it.

**Craig:** Off you go.

**John:** After that point, I immediately bought the same steamer.

**Craig:** Oh, so you don’t have a standing steamer?

**John:** Oh, no. It looks just like a hair dryer, but with water in it.

**Craig:** John, if I may.

**John:** The standing steamer?

**Craig:** Step your game up, dude.

**John:** No more closet space, nothing like that.

**Craig:** You can shove it in a corner. It’s not that big. The whole thing is the size of a football, and then there’s a pole-

**John:** A pole.

**Craig:** … and a hose, and it goes in the corner.

**John:** I’m so happy with what we have.

**Craig:** I’m just saying.

**Drew:** Do you put the water in the bottom?

**Craig:** Yeah, you do.

**Drew:** How do you get it in the bottom?

**Craig:** There’s a little tank. You lift it up. Always use distilled water.

**John:** This one doesn’t require distilled water. This requires any water you got.

**Craig:** I’m super suspicious about this janky ass steamer you got.

**John:** Works delightfully well.

**Craig:** I’m just saying. I’m in. I’m in. Megana, do you have a steamer?

**Megana:** I do have a steamer. I wasn’t using distilled water, and so I got the LA water buildup. My clothes have flecks of calcium deposits on them.

**Craig:** This is what I’m saying. Distilled water, good steamer. I used to have this panic. I came home yesterday from Vancouver for our holiday hiatus, packed all my stuff into this big bag. I’m going to go to a holiday party this evening at someone’s house. I would normally be like, “I’m screwed. I’m going to take this out of the suitcase. It’s going to be wrinkly. I’m just going to look like an idiot.” I have no fear. Know what I’m doing after this? I’m going home and I’m steaming. I so enjoy it. It’s so Zen. Love it.

**John:** Drew, what do you got for us?

**Drew:** I get a One Cool Thing?

**John:** Yeah, you get a One Cool Thing, of course.

**Craig:** Yeah, you do.

**John:** It’s a Christmas episode, a very special Christmas episode.

**Craig:** Is it also steaming?

**Drew:** I should be. My embarrassing joy this year has been, I got a new-ish car, and you get a few free months of SiriusXM when you get a new car. There is a Kelly Clarkson radio station on SiriusXM that is anarchy. It’s basically like someone hacked into Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes and hit shuffle, and you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’ll go from ’40s country to ’90s RnB. It is crazy, but it’s incredibly joyful and insane. I love it. I’m going to be really sad when my free trial ends.

**Craig:** Did you just Tinder match with Kelly Clarkson in front of us?

**Drew:** I might’ve. I think she’s fantastic now.

**Craig:** That’s incredible.

**Drew:** I wasn’t a huge fan, and now suddenly, I’m all Kelly Clarkson.

**Megana:** So sorry. I have some follow-up questions. The Kelly Clarkson bit of it, it’s not just her music?

**Drew:** It’s her music sometimes, plus whatever Kelly’s influences are or she feels like playing [crosstalk 01:04:14].

**John:** But how often [crosstalk 01:04:15]?

**Drew:** Occasionally.

**Craig:** Just enough to keep you going.

**Drew:** Just enough to have that Kelly Clarkson… She’s never taking over. I’m learning all about SiriusXM. Lisa Loeb hosts the 90s on 9. Lisa Loeb has guests. She’s not that involved. She’ll just do bumpers. It’s just her feelings and her vibes. It’s super modern stuff. It’s old stuff. You’re like, “Yeah, you know what? I guess that is what influenced Kelly Clarkson.”

**Craig:** Are you into Broadway at all?

**Drew:** A little bit. I don’t keep up with Broadway.

**John:** SiriusXM on Broadway.

**Craig:** SiriusXM on Broadway with Seth Rudetsky, that’s my jam.

**Drew:** I’ll check it out.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** Drew, you very naively say as long as you have your subscription, you get it free for a while. Good luck getting rid of your Sirius subscription. They will try to hold onto for whatever.

**Craig:** You haven’t given them a credit card or anything?

**Drew:** Not yet, because I looked, and I was like, “What would this take to keep?” It’s 25 bucks a month, which-

**Megana:** Wow.

**Drew:** Insane. I’m sure they’ll try and get me offers and stuff. I’ve already got some [crosstalk 01:05:13].

**Craig:** Yes, they will. As long as they can get your credit card in some way or another, you will be unsubscribed maybe 40 years after your death. Wow, they’re good at what they do.

**John:** They are good at what they do.

**Drew:** Don’t subscribe to SiriusXM for this channel, but if you have it, check it out.

**Craig:** I think Seth is worth it myself.

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

**Craig:** Woot woot!

**Megana:** Woo!

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro is a Christmas throwback by Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where we can send some questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We were on the Cotton Bureau’s Christmas list [crosstalk 01:06:00].

**Drew:** We were front page.

**John:** Yeah, it was nice. We were front page of them.

**Craig:** You mean the front page of the Bureau?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Damn.

**John:** You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on gifts. The three of you are my gift, so thank you so much.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Drew:** Aw.

**Megana:** Aw.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The best gifts we ever received at Christmastime. Two things come to mind for me. Maybe I’ve mentioned them on the show before. I remember getting Lester, the ventriloquist dummy.

**Craig:** Oh my god, terrifying.

**John:** Terrifying. So great, so wonderful. I had my little Lester doll, which was great, and also a safe, a little child’s safe to store all my valuables in. I had a little safe.

**Drew:** I don’t know anything about Lester. Was that a mass produced-

**Craig:** Yes. Sorry, I’m just hung up on John hoarding stuff in his safe, this little kid. What were you putting in there?

**John:** Exactly. What valuable things did I have? I had a silver dollar. I had that cool rock I found.

**Craig:** A gold crayon. No one can get at it. I love that.

**Megana:** Was it a children’s safe, or did your parents give you a safe and call it a children’s safe?

**John:** It was a children’s safe. Both of these were definitely out of the gift book or the wish book. We used to get these big catalogs from department stores that had a bunch of stuff to buy. Those were the things that [crosstalk 01:07:39].

**Craig:** My first safe.

**John:** Yes, my first safe.

**Craig:** For paranoid children.

**John:** I became obsessed with safe-cracking and pretending like I had a great idea.

**Megana:** That’s so cute.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Two little dials there.

**Craig:** That’s so great.

**John:** Those were gifts I remember loving [crosstalk 01:07:51].

**Megana:** How old were you when you got this ventriloquist dummy?

**John:** Second or third grade.

**Craig:** So creepy. This Lester thing was a nightmare.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to Lester. It’s an African American, looks like a small adult, kind of.

**Craig:** Yes, like all dummies, it is both a child and man.

**Megana:** Is this where your thing against ventriloquism came from?

**Craig:** No. Ventriloquist dummies are horrifying and famously have been featured in horror movies. Yeah, there’s Lester. My issue, look at the mouth. The problem is the mouth.

**John:** It’s just up and down.

**Craig:** It’s just terrifying.

**Megana:** This is what they’re making fun of in Arrested Development.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. My issue with ventriloquism as a craft is that it’s just stupid.

**Megana:** Got it.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. You’re just not moving your mouth. Who cares?

**John:** Megana, gifts you received and loved that were life-changing, or at least in the moment were really significant?

**Megana:** I remember I was obsessed with these baby dolls that would pee.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** You would put the bottle in the mouth, and then they would pee. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that longing since. It was like, “If I have this plastic child, my life will be-”

**Craig:** Your biological clock ended with that little baby that peed, and you’re like, “I’m satisfied.”

**Megana:** I was just like, “I got to have it. I want to change its diaper,” or whatever.

**Craig:** You were teasing your mom at that point. She was like, “Yes! I’m going to have grandchildren.”

**Megana:** Yes. I was four or five years old.

**John:** She should not allow you to prepone your childbirth with a doll.

**Megana:** I got that and then pretty immediately I was like, “This is a mess. I don’t want this.”

**Craig:** It’s basically just a doll with a hole in it, that just comes out. It’s a tube. I’m pouring water in. Then water comes out.

**John:** We’re all tubes.

**Craig:** Correct, so what do we need a doll [crosstalk 01:09:49]?

**Megana:** I don’t need a plastic one to hold around.

**Craig:** I remember my sister was super into that too. She was like, “I want the doll that pees.” It was a huge thing. Nobody thought that was weird, by the way. Nobody. Nobody was like-

**John:** Natural.

**Craig:** Just all these kids want dolls that pee.

**Megana:** Literal four-year-olds.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was totally fine.

**Megana:** I have that. Then I remember I got this fuzzy diary, a blue fuzzy, it looks like a shag carpet almost.

**Craig:** Yep, that you could write all your secret thoughts in?

**Megana:** Yeah. I was just like, I’m a glamorous woman with-

**Craig:** My fuzzy blue-

**Megana:** … an interior life and-

**Craig:** A lock.

**Megana:** … a key-

**John:** Of course.

**Megana:** … for my locked diary.

**Craig:** An unbreakable lock. You’d need literally something as rare as a paper clip.

**John:** How often did you use your diary? I feel like one of those things where you maybe wrote in three pages of the diary.

**Megana:** I found it recently. I remember being like, “I don’t have the key for this. I can’t open it.”

**Craig:** Jesus. God, Megana.

**Megana:** My friend just ripped it open.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** I actually wrote in it a lot. All of the entries were about a boy named Taylor in my class and whether or not he was in school that day, because I am so cool.

**Craig:** I thought you were just a budding truant officer.

**Megana:** No. It’s like, “Today was a bad day. Taylor was sick.”

**Craig:** Taylor was sick. What ever happened to Taylor?

**Megana:** I do not know.

**Craig:** Prison.

**John:** It was Taylor Lautner. He [inaudible 01:11:19] career, but now he’s in a weird in-between place, where he’s kind of famous, but he’s not actually being cast in things.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Or casted.

**Craig:** Go get him, girl.

**John:** Taylor Lautner married a Taylor, who’s took his last name, so Taylor Lautner is now married to Taylor Lautner.

**Megana:** He used to date a different Taylor.

**Craig:** Wait, really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that true?

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s weird.

**John:** It happens.

**Craig:** I guess it does.

**Megana:** Yeah, that you would marry-

**Craig:** If you have a name that’s unisex, it doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight, you have a chance of running into somebody that is going to have… Then if they take your last name, it’s done. Now you’ve just married yourself. We’d love to invite you to the wedding of Taylor Lautner and Taylor Lautner.

**Megana:** It’s a homograph.

**John:** It is a homograph.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s actually a true homonym.

**Craig:** It’s a homonym.

**Megana:** A true homonym.

**Craig:** It’s a homonym.

**John:** It’s both written and-

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s not pronounced differently. If one of them was Taylor Lautner [laht-NUR], then we would be in homograph territory, I believe.

**John:** Exciting. Craig, gifts, what gifts are you thinking back to that were meaningful?

**Craig:** 1977.

**John:** Now, your family celebrated Hanukkah, obviously, but did you also do Christmas evenings too?

**Craig:** No. It’s hard to describe. If you grew up in a Jewish household in New York in the ’70s, it was like a war was going on. The war was between your parents and the obviously best holiday. It was like, “We will not have a Christmas tree. There will be no decorations that are Christmassy. We will actively not do any of it, because then we are destroying our faith and traditions. Therefore, we’re going to pour all of our effort into this fake holiday.” Apologies to those who celebrate Hanukkah. On the list of Jewish holidays, I think there’s 4 million, it’s probably in the 3,900,000s of importance. It just happened to line up with Christmas, and voila. For me and my sister, Hanukkah was really just a time of resentment, because everybody else would just look like they were having the best time. We couldn’t put lights up. We couldn’t put lights up, because that was Christian.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Did you have that in your family?

**Megana:** No. We fully bought into Christmas as a-

**Craig:** Well done.

**Megana:** … purely capitalist holiday.

**Craig:** As an American holiday. It wasn’t a grievance. Anyway, so yeah, we celebrated fake Christmas, basically.

**John:** Your memories of best presents, was it a birthday present? Was it also just a Hanukkah present? What was it?

**Craig:** I don’t know when I got this, but it was definitely a gift. 1977. There was a line of toys. I remember there were three of them called Shogun Warriors. They were large. I’m going to show you a picture in a second. They were very big. This is the part I didn’t expect, because usually action figures, dolls for boys, were small. They were maybe a couple inches, or maybe if it was-

**John:** A GI Joe is a large, almost like a foot.

**Craig:** GI Joe, yeah, it was like a foot, or the Bionic Man. This thing was two and a half feet tall. It was really tall.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It looked like this.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** What I did not realize until much, much later on was that this thing had a name, because I think the package may have just had Japanese on it. What was cool about him was, he’s this big robot warrior, kind of like-

**John:** It almost looks like a nutcracker to me, honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah, looks a little nutcrackery, but also you could tell that they’ve cheated a little bit from Darth Vader on the mask, clearly. This thing in his belt fired out, and his fist had missiles. There was all these little spring-loaded things. I loved this thing. I can remember the smell of the plastic, this toxic wafting fume of, I assume it was plastic. It could’ve been made of body parts. I don’t know. Loved it. Years later, I went to look it up. I was like, “Maybe I’ll buy one of these.” They are selling them. It was made by Mattel. It is currently I think on eBay for $800.

**John:** Wow.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** At the time, I assume it cost $6. They were eventually banned because of the choking problems.

**John:** I was going to say anything that shoots off-

**Craig:** Yeah. You can see these little missiles here. Those are little missiles, perfectly designed to catch in a child’s throat. The name of this Shogun is Mazinga, which is just Mazin and a G-A.

**John:** Wow. Made for you.

**Craig:** It was like it was made for me. Mazinga. Shogun Warrior, 1977, Mazinga. If you had one of these things as a kid, please write in and let us know. There were two other ones. I don’t remember their names. I did not have those, but I wanted them.

**John:** Love it. Drew, how about you? Gifts that are meaningful?

**Drew:** Christmas ’98, because I would go out with my mom every weekend, and she’d go shopping. At Pier One they had these papasan chairs, which are the circle ones.

**Craig:** Of course, the classic dorm room chair.

**Drew:** Yeah, dorm room chair. I was like, “I want one so bad.” Christmas morning, there was a papasan chair. That was the big gift. That was like, “I am an adult now. I’m eight years old. My room is like the house in Friends.”

**Craig:** You were eight?

**Drew:** I was eight.

**Craig:** You wanted a papasan chair?

**John:** Was it a full-size one?

**Drew:** It was a full-size one.

**John:** You could nap in that thing.

**Drew:** Yeah, I would just curl up basically in that, because I was a weird kid.

**Craig:** What a weird little boy.

**Drew:** I was very strange.

**Craig:** Everyone else is like, “I want Nintendo [inaudible 01:16:48].” You’re like, “I would like this poorly put together rattan chair.”

**Drew:** Corduroy.

**Craig:** “With corduroy cushions, please. I will sit in it like the king.”

**John:** I also remember gifts I didn’t get that I really, really wanted. In the first case, I was too afraid to ever ask for this gift. But whenever I was flipping through the wish book, this is the gift I really wanted. It’s Barbie, but it’s Barbie’s head.

**Craig:** My sister had one.

**John:** Makeup Barbie, where you could get that stuff. I desperately wanted that, but even then, I knew, oh, no, that’s-

**Craig:** That’s probably not going to fly?

**John:** That’s not going to fly in the household. I couldn’t ask for it. Internalized homophobia wouldn’t let me do that. I also really wanted – and Craig, you will remember this one – Big Trak. Do you remember Big Trak?

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely, I remember Big Trak. Look how ’70s that is.

**John:** It is amazingly ’70s. To describe this-

**Craig:** Incredible.

**John:** It feels like if you took an Atari and put tractor wheels on it, tank wheels on it. The idea behind this is that you punch in little buttons and set a course for it, and then it’ll go and run. It’ll drive itself around on that course, which was just revolutionary at the time.

**Craig:** Magic. Absolutely magic. With that membrane style pushing the button.

**John:** My Atari 400 computer had that.

**Craig:** The membrane keyboard, yeah.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** My sister and I had loads of board games. We would play everything. My closet was jammed full of those things. We liked Battleship, but I was obsessed with the idea of getting electronic Battleship. Obsessed. The ads made it look so incredible. I asked over and over, and every single time, my dad was like, “Why? It’s just Battleship. You already have Battleship.” I’m like, “You don’t understand. It’s like you’re in the middle of a naval battle. There’s explosions and lights.” Never flew. Never flew. Never got it. Never got it. Still don’t have it. Will never even give it to myself, because you need to have something missing, or else… The day I get electronic battleship, I’m probably just going to keel over and die.

**Drew:** Now we know.

**Craig:** Now we know. Now you know how to kill me.

**John:** Drew, you and I were talking about adults who collect toys, adults who go shopping for toys, because you were working at a company that they would actually just go out and buy toys.

**Drew:** I worked at a stop motion… I worked at the studio that did Robot Chicken. They would just be toys all the time. They would go out and get stuff. Even the people that I worked with would go. There’s so many collector places around LA. It’s a whole subculture. It’s cool for a bit, but I don’t know. People go really far.

**Craig:** There’s a weirdness to it. It gets weird to turn something so lovely and innocent into something rather serious and tense.

**Drew:** The collector aspect too sort of bothers me. My dad, when Star Wars toys came back in ’95, bought all of them, and they are still pristine in our basement in boxes. I got some toys, but he has all of them. That always drove me nuts. I can’t wait for, someday I want to just give those to a kid.

**Craig:** Until you see what they’re worth, and then you’re like, “Yeah, I won’t give these to-”

**Drew:** I don’t think they’re worth… I think everyone had that same idea.

**Craig:** I think everybody did have the same… I don’t understand collecting at all anyway.

**John:** I’m not a collector. I collect some typewriters, but I don’t know anything about the typewriters. I just collect them because they’re cool. I like them. Megana, any gifts you never got that you are still resentful about?

**Megana:** Papasan chair is actually on there.

**Craig:** What is going on?

**Megana:** I don’t know what it was, what choke hold Pier One Imports had me in, but I would beg my mom to stop by Pier One on our way home from the mall. The first time I failed my driver’s test, my dad took me to Pier One to make me feel better about it.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** But he still didn’t get me the papasan chair.

**John:** Instead, he bought some wrapping paper and some Chilean wine.

**Craig:** I know. Exactly. Baubles. Here’s some baubles.

**John:** Absolutely. Here’s a wind vane.

**Craig:** I like that when you failed, your dad tried to make you feel better instead of what I had, which was just anger on top of shame. Your dad was cool. That’s nice.

**John:** Cool dads, that’s the best gift of all.

**Craig:** Cool dads are the best gift of all. You hear that, my kids?

**John:** Thanks, everyone.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas!

Links:

* [Netflix Viewership Data](https://about.netflix.com/en/news/what-we-watched-a-netflix-engagement-report)
* [The absolutely legitimate, incredibly useful Indian English word you’re not using](https://qz.com/india/380388/the-absolutely-legitimate-incredibly-useful-indian-english-word-youre-not-using) by Diksha Madhok
* [Homographs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph)
* [The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World](https://www.theverybestcookieinthewholewideworld.com/)
* [DeLuscious Cookies](https://www.delusciouscookies.com/)
* [Levain Bakery](https://levainbakery.com/)
* [Clue Conspiracy](https://hasbropulse.com/products/clue-conspiracy)
* [Dessert Person](https://www.dessertperson.com/dessert-person-cookbook) by Claire Saffitz
* [Upright Steamer](https://pureenrichment.com/products/puresteam-pro-upright-garment-steamer-with-4-steam-levels)
* [The Kelly Clarkson Connection](https://www.siriusxm.com/channels/the-kelly-clarkson-connection)
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/623standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-christopher-nolan).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 622 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Our guest today is the writer-director of the acclaimed indie films Following and Memento. He’s gone on to make movies including The Prestige, Insomnia, Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, and The Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film is Oppenheimer. Welcome to the podcast, Christopher Nolan.

**Christopher Nolan:** Thank you very much.

**John:** We’re so excited to have you here. It’s great to finally meet you, because I’ve known your brother Jonah for a long time. He’s been on the show two or three times, but I’ve never met you.

**Christopher:** Very nice to meet. He speaks very highly of you.

**John:** Usually, when Jonah’s on with Lisa, we’re talking television, because they are mostly making television stuff. Today I only want to talk about big screen movie stuff and just stuff that’s on giant screens, stories that tell themselves in two hours or a little bit more than two hours.

**Christopher:** It’s a while since I hit two hours.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christopher:** But yes.

**John:** But also, stories that are a onetime journey, where it’s not about coming back for next week.

**Christopher:** Absolutely. No, a very different shape to things.

**John:** I want to get into that. I want to get into your history with cinema, how you think about movies, your work as a screenwriter who is going to be directing your own movies. Then we’ll look at some scenes from Oppenheimer and really look at how those scenes work on the page.

**Christopher:** Great.

**John:** Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I’d love to ask you a listener question. They wrote in with a general question, but you’re the perfect person to answer it, because they asked about dreams in movies and how dreams in movies function. You’re a person who has some experience with dreams in movies.

**Christopher:** I do, yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about that and trying to make that work, so yeah, happy to talk about it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get into it. You are five days older than me, but have a very different history going into it. When I look through the stories of Christopher Nolan as a young child, he picked up his father’s Super 8 camera and started shooting films. Is that accurate, or is that just a story that people tell? That’s how it really started?

**Christopher:** No, it’s accurate. I mean, look, at our age that was the thing. The Super 8 camera was the go-to mechanism for recording family images back then if your family was lucky enough to have one. My dad had one he was very pleased with and proud of. He lent it to us as kids, which now as a parent, I don’t know what he was thinking. We did wind up destroying it eventually. In later years, I strapped it to the bottom of a car and broke it. He was very upset with me. But that was some years later. For my whole childhood, I was always filming things and putting images together, trying to cut images together on the old Moviola, Super 8’s wonderful format.

**John:** We had to do it in film school. We had to use Super 8s. You’re literally just taping little pieces of film to the wall as you’re trying to put stuff together. It’s so barbaric and primitive.

**Christopher:** It is, but I just unboxed the brand new Kodak Super 8 camera that they’ve been promising for years to make. It’s finally a real thing.

**John:** It’s great.

**Christopher:** It keeps coming back. It’s a wonderful format.

**John:** Now, you had the technology to shoot little films, but did you have a sense of what cinematic storytelling was? Because it’s one thing to have a camera. You’ve seen movies. But when did you have a sense that there was a script before there was a movie? In trying to make those early experiments, were you writing anything, or were you just going out and shooting stuff?

**Christopher:** No, we were just going out and shooting things. I really was seven years old, eight years old, getting together with friends and doing riffs on Star Wars that had just come out. The interesting part about that as it relates to narrative is that it’s different for different writers, but for me as a filmmaker first and foremost, writing came to me over time as a way of formalizing my instinctive process of putting one image after another to create some kind of sensation of narrative. We’re talking silent Super 8 films. As these things become longer, as you move into 16 mil and you start making things that you need more structure to, need more form to, then you start writing.

That to me is always something I’ve tried to bear in mind about my own process is that when you embrace the screenplay form, as I have over the years, and come to really love it, you always have to remind yourself that the initial impulse, and therefore the thing that people are watching films for, is that string of images telling a visual narrative when we’re talking about cinema. It’s nice to have that recollection, to have that physicality of holding images in my hand, taping them together. It stays with me just as a sort of guiding principle as I’m getting lost in the words.

**John:** You talk about moving from the Super 8’s images, a series of images, to having to figure out a bigger plan for it. It reminds me of actually the history of film cinemas. The initial things, the original screenplays were just a list of shots, and eventually had to figure out like, “Oh no, it’s a little bit more like a play. We have characters interacting with each other. We actually need to find ways to portray that.”

**Christopher:** Yeah. It’s very interesting, I think, to try and analyze how screenwriting fits in with editing. As a writer-director, I do a lot of editing on the page. I very much enjoy the technology we have with word processing. It’s technology that’s been around a long time. But I wrote my first screenplay on a manual typewriter, so to me it’s still a bit of an innovation.

I love overwriting and then editing the same way I edit the images and, indeed, the dialogue and stuff when we get in the edit suite. I think the relationship between the two is very interesting, because editing is a key feature of cinema that’s not shared in other media. Eisenstein, he summarized it, “Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C.”

In the case of Oppenheimer, for example, this came into play in a very major way when I went to the Institute of Advanced Study, which is where Oppenheimer is the director. We filmed there eventually. I met the current – or he was then the director of the IAS, Robert Dijkgraaf, very brilliant string theorist, brilliant scientist. I was talking about what I was doing in the film and how I was going to try and show the thought process of a quantum physicist thinking about atoms, thinking about molecules. He said this terrifying thing to me. He said, “Of course, a lot of the scientists at the time in the 1920s were alienated by the fact that you could no longer visualize the atom.” As a filmmaker, you’re going, “Hang on. That’s the job I’m going to have to do.”

I’d written this into the script as indications of types of images and tried to do it in a relatively free form, poetic way, just to suggest to everybody what it might be. But in talking to Dijkgraaf, I started to realize that what we can do with imagery, with editing, is we can take Image A, Image B, make Thought C. If you’re dealing with, for example, the duality of waves and particles when you talk about light, to be able to show waves, show particles, have the audience combine them in their minds. I was dealing with that at script stage, but also thinking ahead technically to where that’s going to be.

I think that one of the things that I try to do in my writing at a certain point – it’s not usually with the first draft – or maybe in one area of the script or something, I’ll try to start thinking like an editor as I’m writing, and how the juxtaposition of images is going to be something more. I don’t know. I would be interested to get your thoughts. It’s intriguing to speculate, does the screenplay form sufficiently communicate the editing process, can it sufficiently communicate the editing process? I try to game the system by – in Oppenheimer I put all the black-and-white scenes into italics, for example – trying to find ways to give the reader the feeling of editing.

**John:** Greta Gerwig was in your seat a couple years ago talking through Little Women. That was a story that also jumped back and forth between a present timeline and a past timeline. For her script, all the scenes that were in the past were in red. Rather than in italics, they were in red. We talked through that as a process.

For folks who haven’t seen the Oppenheimer screenplay, if you’ve seen the movie, you know that there’s two concurrently running stories. There’s Fission and Fusion. Fission is Oppenheimer’s story more directly. It’s in color. That’s him telling his story. It’s the “I, narrator” part of that. Then there’s the story of Fusion, which is the investigation after the fact. It’s all done in black and white. In the screenplay version of it, all those black-and-white scenes are in black and white. How early on in the process of putting this together did you realize you were going to tell those two stories that way, that those were going to be in black and white, and that on a page you would delineate them differently?

**Christopher:** Really before I wrote anything, other than notes. My process has tended to be more and more one of spending months thinking about the film, thinking about the script, what it’s going to be, and almost not letting myself write until I feel like really I’m ready to go, like I really need to. Structure to me is part of that.

My first film, a film called Following, which is shot 16 mil, black and white, has a nonlinear structure. I came up with the structure before I wrote the script. That’s what I generally do. It’s three braided timelines. I decided the way I want to write the script, I’m going to write it chronologically, so that everything makes sense, and I know that it all works, base rules, and then I’m going to cut it up. In fact, then I was probably physically cutting up. Actually, I think I had a word processor for my second draft. But for the first draft, where I wrote it chronologically, I was typing it out and then cutting and pasting it to the structure. That didn’t work very well, because what I found is you then had to rewrite endlessly to try and create the flow.

**John:** Because the experience of the reader, the experience of the viewer is going to be start to finish.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** They’re not jumping that same way that you are.

**Christopher:** They’re not jumping that same way. What I had uncovered is the reason why applying an editorial structure to a project that didn’t have it baked into the script never works. The studios will go to that sometimes. It’s sort of, “How do we say this thing?” But you always feel it, because it has to be part of the script.

Now, with Following, it was written to the structure. In my mind, I’d figured it out, but I thought that I would cleverly write it chronologically, rearrange it. The amount of rewriting involved in that was such that I’ve never done that since. I’ve always now written, whatever the structure is, I write from page 1 through to page 123 or whatever, or in the case of Oppenheimer, 180.

That way, when you’re doing a film like Memento, for example, which has an inverted chronology… I say nonlinear because – it’s actually very linear – it’s very connected, but it is inverted. If you analyze that screenplay, I wrote it from the first image that the audience would see to the last, so it has a conventional three-act structure underneath, or underpinning the more elaborate temporal construction of it. I think that’s an important reason why the film worked for an audience.

**John:** When you’re writing a script, be it Following or be it Oppenheimer, who is your intended reader? Who do you visualize reading the script, or do you visualize a person who’s sitting there reading through the script, and that you are whispering in their ear to them the story?

**Christopher:** I think it depends on what mood I’m in. I think sometimes it’s the person at the studio who’s going to read it, literally, because you’re thinking about you’re selling something that you already know is worthwhile, if you like. But at other times, it’s very much for myself or for a perceived audience.

I always try to view the screenplay first and foremost as a movie that I’m watching. I’m seeing it as a series of images. I’m imagining watching it with an audience. Then I think before I ever show it to anyone, there’s a pass where I’m imagining the studio reading it. What do we actually have on the page? What works?

One of the big differences I’ve found in terms of nonlinear construction – I think right back to Following, every project I’ve done – when I’ve got into the edit suite, I have found the need to combine the first two sections of any nonlinear, segmented timeline. I did it with Following. I did it with Memento, definitely. I did it with Batman Begins, I remember. Oppenheimer, we did that.

What I’ve come to realize over the years is, because when you show someone a screenplay with a nonlinear structure, you have to teach the readers the structure right away. But movie audiences don’t respond to that. If you’re jumping around too much at the beginning of a movie, the audience just lets it wash over them, and they wait for the movie to start. They wait to find their feet. With every project, I’ve simplified the structure at the front-end so that the audience can connect with the characters and can connect with the type of narrative it is, and then you start jumping around.

I’m fascinated by these things. It’s an area where you see the inadequacy of the screenplay formatting. A lot of filmmakers have chafed at this. Stanley Kubrick famously would swap around the margins and have the dialogue run to the outside margins and the stage directions in the middle. Everyone’s struggling against, “Okay, how do I make a film on the page?” I’m fascinated by that. I don’t mind it. I enjoy the screenplay format very much. I could never write a novel. I wouldn’t know how to find an authorial voice in that way. I love the screenplay form, because it’s stripped down, bare bones. You’re writing things as if they were facts, things that happened. For me, it’s a really fun way to write, but there are these endless conundrums. Do you portray the intentionality of the character? Do you portray a character opens a drawer looking for a corkscrew?

**John:** That’s information that’s not necessarily in evidence, but-

**Christopher:** Unless they pull the corkscrew out-

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christopher:** … how is anyone ever going to know that? I started off in my early scripts being very, very rigid. I wouldn’t even use a character name until somebody had called the character by name. That was very useful for me as a screenwriter but also as a director, a writer-director, because it meant that I was always aware of the fact of have I communicated the information about who this character is or haven’t I.

The problem is you have to show the script to a lot of people who aren’t reading your screenplay as a movie. They’re reading it as a screenplay. They’re reading it for information about what character they’re playing or what costumes are going to be in the film or whatever that is. Over the years, it varied project to project, but you try to find a middle ground where you’re giving people the information they need, but you’re not violating what you consider your basic principles as a writer.

With Oppenheimer, I decided to write the script in the first person. In doing that, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t cheating, because the temptation if you start writing the first-person, start writing the, “I went into the room. I sat down at the desk,” all the rest, I love the effect that had on the writing and the relationship with the reader to the film, but I didn’t want to cheat. And so what I did is I wrote quite a few scenes at the beginning, maybe almost the whole first act in the third-person, conventionally, so that I knew that everything worked technically the way it needed to for a screenplay. Then I put it into first-person without changing anything other than the… That worked beautifully for me. That hooked me right in. I knew I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t describing thoughts that no one would be able to convey, that kind of thing.

**John:** For listeners who haven’t read through these pages yet, it’s a little shocking at first, when you first come across the “I” on the page. You’re reminded that screenplays are traditionally written in either the third-person or the second-person plural, “we hears,” “we sees,” as if you’re an audience member staring up at the screen. In your screenplay, I still feel like I’m an audience member watching, but the “I” in this is Oppenheimer. In all the places where you would’ve had to type Robert or Oppenheimer, you’re typing “I,” and there’s “mes” and there’s some “wes.” The first time you catch a “we,” you realize, oh, it’s not we as the audience, it’s Oppenheimer and another character, which is exciting and thrilling. But it does anchor us into his point of view through that whole sequence, that he is always the person driving that scene. He’s our POV character in all those moments.

**Christopher:** It was a big breakthrough for me. I knew the structure I wanted. I knew that I wanted to tell the story subjectively. But I knew that I didn’t want to use voiceover. The thing about voiceover, it’s seductive when you’re looking for a subjective storyteller, because of that first-person. I was actually stuck.

My brother Jonah and I, we were quarantining in a house together. I was writing downstairs. He was writing upstairs. Came up with this idea, and I thought, I’m not going to say anything to him. I’m just going to rewrite what I’ve done and then show him the first act, just say, “Look, just gut check, what do you think?” without drawing any attention to it, because I was very excited by it. It freed me up from feeling the need for voiceover, because I felt that the script was giving me the subjectivity in a different way. He read it and was like, “Yep, don’t know why no one’s done that before, but that works.” What he said to me made me laugh. But for years and years, I’ve written scripts where you have to read the stage directions. I’ve never found any way to get anybody to read the stage directions.

**John:** Of course.

**Christopher:** He said to me, “You finally found a way to get people to read the stage directions,” because when you put them in the first-person, people value them as information, so they read all of them. Indeed, with this script, people really did read the stage directions in a way that they never have in my other scripts.

**John:** Since we’re on medium, would you mind reading, on page 1 of the script, it’s scene 2. Basically, we’ve opened the film with this imagery that you talk about, this poetic imagery, “A vast sphere of fire, the fire of a thousand suns, slowly eats the night-time desert.” There’s two quotes. But then rather than moving into a location, we’re landing on a face. Would you mind reading us that?

**Christopher:** Yeah, Scene 2. “A face. Gaunt, tense, eyes tightly shut. The face shudders- the sound ceases as my eyes open, staring into camera: Peer into my soul- J. Robert Oppenheimer, aged 50, close-cropped graying hair. The gentle sounds of bureaucracy… Super title: ‘1. Fission.'” That’s the one time where we have Fission, and then we have Fusion.

**John:** How early on in the process did you decide to start in this moment? Through a lot of this movie, we’re inter-cutting between two hearings or two moments, two events. One is this room, 2022, this Atomic Energy Commission interview. There’s also a Senate hearing. How early in the process did you know that those were going to be keystone, anchoring moments for the story?

**Christopher:** I had to know that before I started writing the script. I can only start writing when I have the structure in place. I was adapting American Prometheus, wonderful book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, I think. It took 25 years of research and writing for these guys to produce this book. It’s this incredible resource, but it’s 700-and-something pages. It’s a massive tome. My approach was to read it, not take notes, nothing, read it again. I read it a couple of times and then just spent a lot of time thinking about what had struck me about it, about what I was interested in, what I would tell somebody about this story. Based on those notes, I started to feel out what were the things that were going to give me the structure I wanted. I knew I wanted subjectivity. In a way, to do that, I felt like I also needed objectivity crosscut with that. I needed two timelines braided together.

There’s a reference about two-thirds of the way through American Prometheus. There’s a reference to the Senate confirmation hearings that Lewis Strauss, ultimately the antagonist, we’ll reveal to be the antagonist in the story, was subjected to. As a writer, immediately grabbed that and went, oh, there’s a really interesting relationship between what happened to him in five years – I think it was five years later, ’59 and ’53 – what he had done to Oppenheimer and then what was done to him. Very, very similar. As a writer, you’re always looking for those kind of poetic echoes, those kind of rhyming relationships in narrative. I chased that down.

I went to the Senate congressional record of those hearings, went through the testimony and found some incredible things in there, and then started to create in my mind this timeline of, okay, if we keep coming back to this, we keep coming back to the greenroom, him preparing for his testimony, and then eventually we go in and we see the testimony. We see those things based on the transcript, when scientists came and testified against him in this very public way. I got really interested in the parallelism with the security clearance hearings of Oppenheimer, which were done in exactly the opposite way.

What happened to Strauss was very, very public, and it was in a very grand setting, in Washington. What he had put in place, orchestrated for Oppenheimer, was more or less a broom closet. It was the most, deny him all of the limelight, sweep it all under the rug. The contrast of the two things, that, I started to get excited about. There are all kinds of interesting parallels of what happened to him.

For example, I started to realize, while reading the objections in the Oppenheimer transcript, which is also about a thousand pages – and I made it all the way through that one, because it’s so compelling – I found things like Oppenheimer strongly and his lawyers strongly objecting to the fact they had no list of witnesses. Strauss in the congressional testimony is making the same complaint, that they’re not giving him a list of witnesses. Things like that, that as a writer, you’re like, “This is such a gift.”

Then of course, you have the fun of going into these written transcripts that have no indication of tone, of voice. They’re not giving you any information. They’re very dry in terms of the format. In a funny sort of way, not to sound massively pretentious, but you have to interpret them. It felt a bit like what my friend Ken Branagh must do when he does a Shakespeare film, where he’s having to… Yeah, the words are there, but what are you going to do with them?

That was really a fun thing, but it also felt I’ve got a responsibility, actually, because you’re taking Edward Teller’s exact words that he said about whether Oppenheimer should be given the security clearance, and then you’re editing them, presenting them to the actor, presenting them dramatically in the screenplay, saying, what did that mean? I’m pretty sure I knew what it meant, but you don’t actually get to hear them say it, because there are no recordings.

**John:** You have the book. You have your original research in two different areas, all this stuff. But we skipped over the part of why you were curious about it in the first place. This is a book that existed, that was acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning. But when did it enter into your orbit, and what made you read it the first time and the second time and the third time? When did you decide, “This is a story I want to tell. This is a movie I want to make.”

**Christopher:** Something of a long story. Oppenheimer first came into my consciousness when I was a teenager growing up in United Kingdom. The threat of nuclear weaponry was very much in the news. It was very much in the zeitgeist at the time. It was something we were all very, very concerned about.

**John:** We’re the same age. That very much was that experience. That was our anxiety source at all times.

**Christopher:** You remember the pop culture at the time, things like The Day After and Threads and these movies, When the Wind Blows, Sting’s song Russians, where he refers to Oppenheimer’s deadly toys. I think that’s probably the first time I encountered the name. Over the years, he’s a personage, I didn’t know a lot about him, but things about him would pop into my conscious, probably a lot from my brother, actually, who was very interested in these kind of things. But at some point, I got a hold of the bizarre fact that in the buildup to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists could not completely eliminate the possibility of a chain reaction that would destroy the world, and yet went ahead and pushed that button.

I included that in my previous film, Tenet, in the screenplay, because I needed a strong and understandable analogy for a very complex science fiction conceit. I think it was one of those moments of the screenplay, it always felt like it would probably come out of the finished film, because it’d be too much, too much dialogue, whatever. But when we would screen it for people, they grabbed a hold of the Oppenheimer name. It was something they knew a little bit about. Even if they’d never heard that story, they knew it was a real thing. So we kept it in the film, and it was important to us in the film.

As a wrap gift, Robert Pattinson, who’s in Tenet, he gave me a book of Oppenheimer’s published speeches from the 1950s, where he’s speaking to the issue of how to control what to do about this new technology they’ve unleashed on the world. It’s terrifying reading this stuff, reading these brilliant minds discussing how to stop the world being destroyed. It brought it all back to me, really.

Then Emma and I – Emma Thomas, my producer and my wife – we spent a weekend with our old friend Chuck Roven, who produced The Dark Knight trilogy with us. He suggested that I read American Prometheus. He knew the rights-holders. It was something he’d been trying to push forward. I read it, and it was that wonderful feeling you get where you’ve been interested in something, you’ve been trying to explore it in different ways, but not quite knowing what to do with it, and then you read this book that’s so definitive.

As a writer, when you’re working, particularly when you write on spec, because I always write on spec – I write the screenplay, and then I try to write a home for it – and so you don’t have a legal department. You’re on your own. It’s like, okay, I need authority. I need an authoritative source that I can contain myself to, just look at that, get my facts from there, and know that I’m playing in the world of credible, call it journalism, credible writing that’s been vetted over the years, so I’m dealing with the truth as best people can understand it. The different points of view are presented fairly, as they are in the book. It’s a very good book. That gave me the confidence to want to start telling the story. It started to show me what the shape of it could be. By dealing with J. Robert Oppenheimer as an individual, as a person, with all his human flaws, with all of his brilliance and all of that, how the entire history of nuclear weapons, the way in which the world had shifted and pivoted on its axis, it gives you a very accessible point of contact with that.

**John:** Yes. That’s great. Now, looking at your produced credits, this seems to be your first adaptation, or first real-life story, but you’ve gone through this process before. This wasn’t your first time tackling a historic subject to do this, right?

**Christopher:** For British people, Dunkirk is a very well-known, a very important piece of national history, or even mythology, really. As I approached it and I looked at and I researched it, I realized that to tell the story the way I felt it needed to be told, I couldn’t do that with real-life people. I needed to invent characters to take you through. It’s a slightly strange comparison, but it’s not unlike Titanic, what Cameron’s doing there, where he needs fictional characters to be able to move them through the event in such a way that you get a full understanding of the geography of it or the fact of it.

The thing about Dunkirk is it’s a story of collective endeavor. It’s a story about massive numbers of people and movements of people and how that works. There’s a tricky thing with how you approach that. A lot of filmmakers, a lot of writers have done it in very different ways. I think if you were writing it for television, it would be one approach. I think for a feature, what I felt would work – and it seemed to work well for audiences – was to create fictional characters with no backstories, no conventional character treatment.

The script was a very, very experimental document. It was very short. It was a 90-page script. The characters were really just their actions. That’s what these characters were. Some people you would show that to would get it. Some actors you show it to would be confused by that. Others would get it. But I felt that was the way to take you through that very large event and have an understanding of the geography of it, the politics of it, the thing of it. It was very minimalist dialogue. It was, as I say, no backstories for characters, things like that. It was very stripped down.

Coming to Oppenheimer, it’s a similarly important story. Dunkirk is sacred ground for British people. I think the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, these things are unbelievably important to the world as a whole, and particularly to America and Japan. You’re then looking at, okay, how do you take on something that’s so much bigger than what a movie can be, in a way, and taking the real-life person, taking the opposite approach to Dunkirk and saying, okay, this is actually his experience, and we’re going to lock into his point of view on everything.

Then the other thread, the more objective thread comes in, in order to give you the necessary exposition about what happens to him later in life, about the politics, about how his actions then interact with the establishment, and introduces this character of Lewis Strauss that I became very, very obsessed with – and Robert Downey Jr ultimately played him in the film – and their relationship. I looked at it from almost the Salieri-Mozart view from Amadeus, which is a wonderful, wonderful play and then film, about rivalry and the weirdly trivial personal interactions that can drive a very destructive rivalry.

**John:** How early in the process did you have a sense of thematically… You knew that you were talking about Oppenheimer. You had a sense that Strauss would be the other central character. But was it during the writing process that you found those thematic things that tied together? You talked about rhymes that happen. Compartmentalization as a theme, the way that you try to hold different parts of your life separate, the question of who wants to justify their whole life, which is asked twice in the course of the story, when did you know that those were going to be some of the central questions and how things would thread together? You say you hold off writing as long as you can, then you sit down to do it. But how much discovery is actually happening while you’re typing?

**Christopher:** Enormous amounts. All the things you mentioned were discoveries of actually writing. What I try to come up with is the parameters. The structure’s very important, but the parameters, what the film’s going to be, what the three-act structure’s going to be. But you have to leave room to play. I love to overwrite, as I was saying earlier.

**John:** When you say overwrite, are you writing scenes that just go on too long or scenes that you don’t need at all?

**Christopher:** I tend to not write scenes that I don’t need at all. It’s more within the scene, particularly with the dialogue, I’ll tend to overwrite. It’s almost like stream of consciousness, monologues kind of thing, that you can then winnow away, find what’s in there that’s the thing you’re trying to express.

I think with thematic connections and ideas, I’ll write notes on those, but some of those ultimately prove too self-conscious. You don’t want to get caught doing it. I’ll write a lot of those, write a lot of notes. I don’t use the outline. I don’t use the notes. I’ll write the script. If I get stuck, I’ll then go back through pages and pages of notes, to see did I miss something, was this something. Sometimes you pick things up, and you put them back in. With those kind of elements, the elements you’re talking about are the things that sit outside the narrative in a way. They comment on the narrative. They’re the meta things. They’re very tricky.

**John:** They’re tricky unless characters are introducing them in ways that are germane to the scenes that they’re in. Compartmentalization is-

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** … incredibly important within the context.

**Christopher:** It naturally starts to become a reflection or an irony that the person must oppose to compartmentalization, as Oppenheimer, and ultimately that’s what makes… It almost defines him by the end of the film. But I wasn’t too self-conscious about that. When I say tricky, I don’t mean… It’s exactly as you say. It has to be germane to the story, or it has to be absolutely necessary so you do it anyway.

There’s a line in Dunkirk that always causes me a certain amount of, I don’t know, guilt or whatever, because I have a soldier late on talk about survival and define survival. I think the line is he says, “Survival is shit. Fear and greed squeeze through the bowels of men.” That’s the thing. I always knew that that’s not a valid line to have a soldier say in the middle of a situation. It’s a very retrospective sentiment. We all have these things. The joy of being a writer-director is you do get the ultimate say onto whether or not it stays. That’s one where it’s like, it’s wrong, but I’m glad it’s in the movie, and I kept it. Luckily, nobody ever demanded I take it out.

I read, years ago, an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he talked about things that you write into a script, and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll fix that later.” Quite often, they become things. Quite often, it’s the things that don’t work or the mistakes or the things that don’t quite fit the pattern that you wind up actually valuing, that give the thing its idiosyncrasy. For my process, as I write, I’ve done a lot of thinking, I’ve done a lot of notes about those kind of elements, and then I want to forget them and try and write from the point of view of character and story and what’s really going on in the narrative, what feels necessary.

**John:** Let’s talk about what’s actually on the page, because your writing style is relatively spare. You talk about you don’t want to intrude and reveal inner character thoughts when the audience wouldn’t necessarily be able to see those. You’re not describing sets much. We’re in these places often, but you’re not giving a lot of set decoration. You’re not talking a lot about wardrobe or props, unless they are used within the moment. Has that always been your style? Has your screenwriting style changed over the last 20, 30 years?

**Christopher:** I think for me, it’s been a continual journey to try and strip it down. I enjoy that style of writing anyway, but frankly, as scripts have gotten longer and the films have gotten longer and I’m trying to stuff more and more into the sausage, you really do try to strip it down. I try to write scripts that really will be a page a minute, which if you tend to over-describe things or describe things in too literary a way, the scripts are going to get very long. Then is anyone going to trust that you’re actually… I like to be able to look at the bones of it and know when I’m describing that stained glass window that’s behind you right now, that doesn’t take any screen time. I try to write in a way that reflects screen time, that reflects the kinetic energy. Then you strip down to just the necessary beats. Has it changed for me over the years? I think I got better at it. But different films require different approaches as well.

The funny thing is when you’re in it, when you’re writing – I’m sure this is the same for you – these things seem so important and unquestionable. I remember being at a party when I was writing Dunkirk. I was talking to a fellow writer, who writes TV. I said, “I’m doing this thing, and I’ve decided I want to write it with no dialogue,” whatever, and this, that, and the other, and said a few things. Then he said, “Why?” Of course, I had no answer. It was so clear to me that that would be a good thing to do, that that would be inherently somehow positive to strip away dialogue and just go with action for this cinematic thing.

You become very, very convinced – and I think you need to become very convinced – that you’re doing it the only way that it’s possible, the only way that would ever make a good film. Of course, it’s not true, and there are a million different ways to approach things. You try and get the right approach for the film you’re going to make.

**John:** You talk about kinetic on the page. You definitely sense the editor on the page. You have a tremendous number of pre-laps and post-laps that make it really feel like this is the experience of watching the movie, that the dialogue is going to anticipate the cut, that we’re going to continue on a little bit after the cut. Things are going to braid themselves together well. Someone who didn’t know might just assume, oh, it’s the editor who moved that stuff around, but it’s very deliberate and clear on the page. You get out of scenes with energy leaning forward that tumbles you into the next scene. That’s why the movie can be the length and the size that it is, and it still feels fast and still feels like it’s moving really quickly.

**Christopher:** There’s something that’s always been very important to me. Dunkirk actually was the extreme of that, because I came up with a structure based on a musical concept of the Shepard Tone, which is this audio illusion of continually rising pitches. I’ve always been interested. I’ve used it in scores for a lot of my films, actually, and for sound effects. The sound of the bat pod in The Dark Knight is a Shepard progression. I figured out that I could apply it to screenwriting, that in that instance of Dunkirk where I’m looking for this incredibly tense experience, I could braid the storylines together in such a way that one of them is always hitting a moment of crisis. There’s no relief in the film whatsoever, which is why the film had to be short, because there’s no time to catch your breath, which is the point of it. It was very important that that work on the page.

When I talked about the script for Dunkirk, I remember I literally said to Emma at some point, “What if we did it without a script? What if we just [indiscernible 39:33]?” She quite sensibly was like, “No, you need to go write the script.” What I was aiming at is looking for a way that the script could become transparent in a way, that it could be the guide for the kinetics of the cinematic action and just show you. I knew what I needed to film in terms of the physics of what was going on and which ships were sinking and what was going on with the mole or whatever. I was trying to look at it as a real-life event and staging it and shooting it. The screenplay was all about the points and moments of energy.

In a way, it’s not that I ever could’ve made the film without the script. I don’t think you can make any good film without a script. But the script was a map for how to edit the footage together, more than any other script I’ve ever written. That was really the whole point of it. It was a map for Lee Smith, my editor on that film, to sit down and go, “Okay, this is how this all works,” and to tell us how to shoot it in a way that would accommodate that.

With Oppenheimer, it’s a more conventional approach, more traditional approach, but always, that same element is important to me, of trying to incorporate editing into the craft of writing, not because you’re trying to jump ahead, because you know where you want [indiscernible 40:47] because that’s what a screenplay needs to do, because you’re writing it for a medium that enjoys this great privilege of Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C. One filmmaker I showed Oppenheimer to early on said a really wonderful thing to me. You talked about how the film is all montage. What this filmmaker liked about that was that’s what movies do. That’s what’s unique to the medium.

**John:** That’s why you didn’t make a play. You could’ve made a play.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Your sense of those two storylines happening, you could’ve done it as a play, but it’s not a movie. It’s very different structure, very different idea.

**Christopher:** Exactly. That leads you to this, I don’t know what you want to call it, guiding principle, whatever, impulse, that says that the document of the screenplay has to embrace editing. For me, that has to be part of my writing process, or I’m not using the screenplay for what it can do fully. It’s like tying a hand behind your back. When I talk about overwriting, I’m really talking about within a scene and then all the script as a whole and then trying to winnow it down and just really use editing in a very surgical way, to strip things down, but be able to explore a lot of different ideas at the same time.

**John:** What is your writing process? When do you like to write? How much are you trying to get done in the course of a day? When you actually sat down to write Oppenheimer, what was your workflow like?

**Christopher:** I think, like a lot of writers, I like to write about five minutes before I actually start writing, and then I like to write about 10 minutes after I’m finished. I think writing’s very hard and very lonely. Like all writers, I try to find my way to trick myself into it, into whatever. I’ve learned a few things over the years.

When I went to university, I went to a lecture by Julian Barnes, a novelist, and he said a thing that stuck with me and I’ve used myself, which is, at the end of an evening or a day’s work, he’ll try to finish halfway through something, because then when he comes back the next day, he knows where he’s going, and he can get started. That’s something I’ve definitely tried to do. I try to be reasonably disciplined and then write office hours for most of it, and then not do all-nighters or crazy hours until you absolutely have to, until you’re on the case of something.

The thing that I’ve learned, that every writer needs to learn, the thing that I know absolutely, is that feeling you have that you can write something, when you know, “Okay, I’ve got it now,” you have to write exactly then and get it on the page, because that feeling will disappear like a fart in the wind. It’ll be gone. You’ll come back to the desk, and you’ll be like, “What was it?” You can write notes. That’s not going to help. You just have to sit down and write it.

With Oppenheimer, I knew what the end of the film was going to be. That was important to me. It’s always important to know where you’re going with the end, with any movie. But I woke up in the middle of the night with the whole last three or four scenes figured out. I got up in my underpants, went down, crossed the garden into my office, sat and just wrote it. I think I didn’t get my computer. I think I wrote it on a legal pad. But I wrote it as foreseen, and it never changed.

I’ve learned that over the years. It’s a really important thing for everybody to know, because the feeling is so convincing that you’ll always be able to write it. It’s like being drunk, then sobering up, or vice versa. You’re a different person the next day, and you don’t have it anymore, and then you’ve got to think your way back into it.

I also like to use music a lot. What I’ve found is if I use music repetitively in my writing process, that’s another way, it’s another shortcut to getting back into the mindset that you were in a couple days ago, an emotional mindset.

**John:** At the start of a project, I’ll generally make myself a playlist of like, this is the music that reminds me of what this movie is.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Then I can play that and like, “Oh, okay.” So if I have to come back to something six months later, “Oh, that’s right, that’s the John who was writing that,” and I can remember what that-

**Christopher:** Yeah. It’s a huge emotional connection, emotional cue. I find I’m unable to make a playlist in advance. I have to feel it out as I go try different bits of music, try to see what connects me to my excitement about the project. It’s a great shortcut for putting yourself back in a particular emotional state, because I think writing’s a very emotional process. People always view it as an intellectual process, but I actually think the actual writing is emotional. It speaks to that, when I was saying that those elements are tricky, those elements that are about or reflect on the narrative or create connections. Those are the intellectual things. They’re the things we like to discuss. But they have to be emotional. If they’re emotional in the story, then they work.

For me, I think a lot of my note-taking process and a lot of my thinking about what I’m going to do when I write, that is intellectual. I do a lot of diagrams. Big fan of Venn diagrams for different narratives or whatever. When I go to write, then I have to be in an emotional state, and I have to write from an emotional perspective.

**John:** Absolutely. You said those last scenes you wrote, they didn’t change at all, but looking through the script, I do see blue revisions, pink revisions, yellow revisions, so some stuff changed along the way. I asked because I’m working on the Scriptnotes book right now, which is due January 5th. Oh, god. The chapter I just went through was on script revision. Can you talk about what changed from the first draft to later drafts? Were they things you didn’t need, new stuff you decided to add? What was the process of changing stuff?

**Christopher:** When you’re into the color pages and you’re looking at those production revisions, that’s a complicated issue, because I’m a writer-director, so I will literally sometimes… I remember sitting on LaSalle Street in Chicago filming The Dark Knight. We flipped the [indiscernible 46:48]. I sat down on my laptop, and I wrote a scene and handed it to Gary Oldman or whatever. You’re often creating production revisions under different circumstances than they would normally track if you were in a writers’ room, for example, or if you weren’t on set. Quite often, the changes are weird little… We can’t shoot it in the barn; we’ve got to shoot it in the bar or whatever. You just change that. Then there are fundamental things.

For me, I think what changed in Oppenheimer, there weren’t enormous changes, but things evolved. This is why I very much enjoy directing my own material, being a writer-director, because things like the raindrops as an image, that wasn’t in the draft originally. That came. It’s not on page 1 of the script, because I didn’t want to put it in after the fact and pretend that it was being written that way. It was something that was indicated later in the script. Then as I came to think about it in logistic terms, it’s like, “Okay, that can play as a coda. It could play at the front. There’s things we can do with that.” It has more prominent placement in the finished film. With Jen Lame, my editor, her input, we’re saying, “Let’s try this right up front and really lead with it.”

But over the course of making the film, we started to make the correspondence between this image of the ripples and raindrops and then what he might see when he looks at a map, the circles of fire. I was getting Andrew Jackson, my visual effects supervisor, to make these things up on the spot, say, “Let’s take that raindrop footage, let’s re-project it somewhere, and let’s play around with it.” You’re developing these thematic visual ideas.

I try to use the script as an evolving document, and I try to keep it up to date, because for my own thinking, you can have a clever idea or an idea you think is good, based on what you’re shooting or what’s going on on set. But if it doesn’t work in the screenplay format, it’s probably not as good as you think, actually. I do try to keep the script up to date. I’m not trying to be mysterious with the crew and with my collaborators about how I’m going to use images. I’m trying to keep everybody up to date.

**John:** That’s great. It’s come time in our podcast where we do One Cool Things, where we recommend things to our listeners that they might want to check out. You have a book recommendation, apparently.

**Christopher:** I do. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It was recommended to me by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s a fabulous book that deals with a lot of the things that Oppenheimer deals with. It deals with these brilliant minds and all sorts of extraordinary things in history. Very readable. I highly recommend it.

**John:** Excellent. Great. We’ll put that in the notes. My One Cool Thing is called Infinite Mac. It’s this emulator that just runs in your browser. You go to the site, and suddenly it’s like you’re in a time machine. You can fire up any old Macintosh. It just gave me such a rush of nostalgia for like, “Oh, I remember what that was like.” Suddenly, you’re on the desktop of a very old Mac SE running system 5.2 or whatever. You forget how stuff used to work. You forget just how floppy disks used to work and all the apps that were so important to me in the time, that are now all gone.

**Christopher:** I don’t. I’m still using them.

**John:** It’ll be all new stuff for you.

**Christopher:** It’d be brand new.

**John:** Time travel for me.

**Christopher:** Yes, it’s time looping back on itself. I remember very clearly. I’ve always used ScriptThing, which then became Movie Magic. I remember when it went to Windows, and it slowed down tremendously. I was like, “Can you run it on DOS?” You could run it on DOS. It has a DOS emulator within Windows.

**John:** Wild.

**Christopher:** I am the ultimate Luddite. I still go back to my Royal manual typewriter and do the odd scene on that just to reconnect with it.

**John:** That’s fantastic. Then I’ll send you another One Cool Thing. Someone sent through, the app that we make called Highland, it’s a guy who types on a manual typewriter, but then you basically take a photo of the page, and it scans it in, and it makes it an editable document. It’s if you want to write on a real typewriter, and then it scans it in, so therefore then it can be an editable document [crosstalk 51:12].

**Christopher:** That, I need.

**John:** Just for you, we’ll send you that link.

**Christopher:** Please do. That sounds fantastic.

**John:** That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies that are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on dreams. Christopher Nolan, an absolute pleasure to get to talk to you about screenwriting.

**Christopher:** I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.

**John:** Cool.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Jamie in San Francisco, he wrote in to ask, “I wonder if you could talk a bit about the use of dreams in screenplays. John describes dreams as the brain doing laundry or taking out the trash. Craig attributes no meaning or significance to his own dreams. But in movies, it seems the opposite is almost always the case. More often than not, they show us the past or the future or some deeper meaning to the present. Are they a crutch? Are they overused? Are they tropey? Talk to us about dreams.” You made a whole movie where dreams play a giant role. What is your actual belief about dreams for human beings, but also dreams in movies?

**Christopher:** Dreams in movies, it’s very complicated. It took me many, many years to crack Inception, because dreams in movies don’t work, basically. They feel like a cheap… They tend to shortchange the audience. The audience has a very sophisticated mechanism for constructing the reality of a film, that when you then invalidate something, your brain discounts it from the narrative enormously. It’s something that I think studios very often don’t understand about scale and how you achieve scale in a movie. You can have crazy, exotic, wild imagery that might look good in the trailer, whatever, but if it’s subverted in the narrative by being, for example, a dream, it gets written off.

It took me a long time to crack it. I thought a lot about why are dreams problematic in movies. I think it’s because movies are already dreams. I think the way we process films is very similar to the way we process dreams. They are collective dreams in a way. When you write dreams, it’s a hat on a hat. It becomes self-canceling if not handled in the right way.

I think with Inception, I think the way I managed that was to keep dreams extremely grounded and make a big point of the fact that you don’t know you’re in a dream when you’re dreaming it, those kind of things, and constantly remind and involve the audience in the mechanics of the technology that’s using the dreams. The film rarely allows itself to become too metaphysical, too poetic, in the way that dreams often are in films. I think they’re very tricky.

As far as in real life, what are they, that’s hard to answer really. I think they’re our way of processing our lives in a different way, looking at them from a different angle. I think they’re a very healthy and necessary process. I also think, as I say, that films have a wonderful relationship with dreaming and with dreams, and they are our way of connecting. We remember films very much the way we remember dreams.

I had a very interesting experience many years ago. I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway. I had a peculiar experience. I think I was watching it on VHS at home. I did not connect with the film. I found it impenetrable. I found it boring. I almost didn’t finish watching it, because I was watching it on VHS. Put it to one side, whatever. I’d watched it on my own. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it, wasn’t particularly interested to talk about it. Then about two weeks later, I found myself remembering Lost Highway as if I were remembering one of my own dreams. I realized that however he’d done it, Lynch had found a way… I’m trying to remember which way around it. It is like a tesseract, is a projection of a hypercube, three dimensions.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Christopher:** He found a way of un-peeling the way a dream works in our brain, feeding it to us as a narrative, so that it lives in your brain as a dream. I think it’s one of the strongest examples of that connection between the way we process sights and sounds and motion pictures and the way we feel about our own memories and dreams and those confusions.

**John:** You talking about Memento leads me to another answer to Jamie’s question, is that I think so often dreams don’t work in movies because there are no stakes. There’s no consequence.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Just characters within that. What you do with Inception so well is that there are huge consequences. The whole thing is about the consequences and the plan for why this dream is happening. We as an audience know why this dream is important, why it matters, and what is at stake for the characters. Nightmare on Elm Street, we know that those dream sequences actually matter, because the character is going to die in a dream.

**Christopher:** Exactly, or The Matrix. The Matrix, it’s dreaming. It’s induced by the machines, but that simple thing of your mind makes it real and the blood coming out somebody’s nose, and you know, okay, yeah, there are stakes. Very similar to William Gibson novels like Neuromancer, where you have that concept of how you can be hurt. Is it Black Ice? I can’t remember. The internet becoming a thing that can actually hurt you, cyberspace becoming a thing that can actually hurt you. Then yeah, the stakes are there.

But the truth is, I think with dreams in particular, even introducing stakes, there’s still a real danger with the imagery of them, with the fanciful nature of the imagery, and what it buys you and what it doesn’t buy you, how it integrates into the film. You want everything you put in the film to be owned by the narrative. You want it to feel solid and valid as something you’ve paid your $15 for, bought your popcorn. Otherwise, you feel cheated.

In a weird way, it’s a little off topic, but when I showed Ken Branagh the script for Oppenheimer, he did ask me, as a fellow filmmaker – this is why it’s great to work with other filmmakers, even if they’re just acting in a film – but he said to me, “You’re never cutting away to World War II or to the War Room.”

I thought about it. It’s like, okay, I’ve seen a lot of films do that. Particularly in a CG era, those images, they tend to sit as if they’re not in the film. They actually make the film feel smaller. They’re always in there as an attempt to make the film feel bigger, but they actually shrink the world of the film, because they don’t feel valid. They don’t feel earned. As I say, in a CG era, the texture of them will be completely different to the main unit photography. I think the treatment of dreams in films, the other thing it’s like is voiceover. It can be amazing. It can be incredibly useful.

**John:** It has to be fundamental to the structure of the story.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** It has to be part of the social contract at the very start of the film.

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** Clueless doesn’t work without the voiceover, but if you try to put that in after the fact, disaster.

**Christopher:** Yes, and giving voiceover a bad name, because most often when you see it, somebody slapped it on at the end to try to make it work. But done right, planned, put into the script, that’s when it works.

**John:** Jamie did not know he was going to get you answering his question about dreams. I think Jamie’s probably very excited that you weighed in here. Christopher Nolan, thank you again.

**Christopher:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Oppenheimer – The First Three Pages](https://www.experienceoppenheimer.com/words)
* [Christopher Nolan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Nolan) on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/).
* [American Prometheus](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/13787/american-prometheus-by-kai-bird-and-martin-sherwin/) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
* [The Open Mind](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2776777) by J. Robert Oppenheimer
* [The Shepard Tone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
* [When We Cease to Understand the World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62069739-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world) by Benjamín Labatut
* [Infinite Mac](https://infinitemac.org/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([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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