The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 717 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. While this is, in fact, Episode 717 of Scriptnotes, it’s also Episode 277 of The Screenwriting Life, a fantastic podcast hosted by Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna, where they also talk on a weekly basis about screenwriting. Craig and I went there to talk about the Scriptnotes book, which is out there in the world. They’d read it, they’d loved it, but we also had a good, deep conversation about lots of other things related to writing and the craft and the process.
It was a really good conversation, a great chance to talk with other pros about this business that we all love. If you don’t know them, Meg LeFauve is the co-writer of the Inside Out movies, as well as The Good Dinosaur and Captain Marvel. Lorien McKenna is a writer on shows like Curious George, and a former story manager for Pixar. If you enjoy this episode, give them a follow, The Screenwriting Life. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great show for anybody who listens to our show to also listen to. One of the things I really appreciate about their show is that they talk every week.
They open up with a segment where they talk about the writing they did that week, where their successes and failures were, and their challenges. That was just great. Take a listen to this episode, and if you like them, give them a follow as well. Most of the episode is that, and then we’ll be back at the end for some boilerplate, some follow-up. In our bonus, for our premium members, we’re going to talk about the career, the life of Rob Reiner. I knew him. I knew his wife, Michele. I knew way too much about the places where this tragedy happened, but I also want to celebrate the incredible things he was able to do and to share some personal reflections on Rob Reiner. Enjoy this episode, and we’ll see you here at the end as we wrap stuff up. Thanks.
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Meg LeFauve: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I’m Meg LeFauve.
Lorien McKenna: I’m Lorien McKenna.
Meg: Today, we have a truly special show. We are talking to John August and Craig Mazin, the duo behind the Much Loved Scriptnotes podcast, which has been running for 14 years.
Lorien: John August is a screenwriter whose credits include Aladdin, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and the first two Charlie’s Angels movies. In addition to his work in film, John wrote the Arlo Finch middle grade novel trilogy and earned a BAFTA nomination for his script of the Broadway musical Big Fish. Through his company, Quote-Unquote Apps, John makes utilities for writers, including Highland and Weekend Read, along with a writer emergency pack, which is used in 2,000 classrooms nationwide. He was also a member of the 2023 WGA negotiating committee.
Meg: Craig Mazin is a multiple Emmy award-winning co-creator, executive producer, writer, and director of such shows as the smash hit HBO series The Last of Us. Record-breaking and critically acclaimed, season one became the most watched debut of any series for HBO. Previously, Craig served as creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO limited series Chernobyl, for which he won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, a Peabody, and awards from the Writer’s Guild, the Producer’s Guild, the Television Critics Association, and the American Film Institute. Currently, Craig is executive producing the upcoming HBO Esports drama Damage alongside writer, director, and executive producer Celine Song.
Lorien: Together, John and Craig have released a brand new book, Scriptnotes, a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, which distills more than 700 episodes of podcast conversations, craft principles, and no bullshit wisdom. John August and Craig Mazin, welcome to the show.
John: Oh, we’re so excited to be here.
Craig Mazin: Thank you.
Meg: All right, so the first thing that you guys have agreed to do with us today is Adventures in Screenwriting, or How is Your Week? We’ll let Lorien kick it off. Go ahead, Lorien.
Lorien: My week this week was actually really good. It started out really shitty because I’ve been so busy. What is it, Meg? The busyness is the–
Meg: The highest form of laziness.
Lorien: Highest form of laziness. So busy, so stressed. I have a project due on Monday, and so all those self-doubt, fear, all those icky things came crashing in. I had the panic moment of I have to burn it all down. Instead of that, I talked to my therapist, and we made a big list of all the things I’m doing. I have to say no to a lot of things, which is good, and prioritize my time and energy so that I’m focusing on the right things. I did that, and I feel more in control and more powerful in the right ways. I have a good plan for the end of this year and into the first quarter of next year. It’s been a good week. It sounds horrible, but cathartically speaking–
Meg: It’s a good week.
Lorien: Craig, how was your week?
Craig: It wasn’t that different from yours. My guess is if our weeks are defined by the anxiety that we experience, and then the panic that we have, and then the burn it all down, and then the, “Wait, I’m a genius,” and then, “Wait, I’m an idiot.” That’s pretty much my week every week. I’m up here in Vancouver, and we’re prepping the third season of The Last of Us. I spend my week with forced busyness. I don’t want the busyness, but they force it on me. I try, and have them divide my day. Okay, mornings are meetings, scouts, all of that stuff, and then afternoons are writing. The problem, of course, is sometimes I just don’t want to. Also, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.
The script that I’m in right now is a tricky one because it’s middle-ish, which is always hard, but there were some nice breakthroughs. I’ve just been sitting with a lot of discomfort, as my wife says, but I also had a lovely moment this week. While I was peeing, it’s not about the peeing itself, but I was peeing, and I had an idea. [laughs] It’s so amazing how often this happens where I just need to remove myself from civilization, go into a bathroom, or a shower, and then suddenly, I have an idea. I had an interesting idea that scared me. I wanted something scary, and I went, “Oh, my God, that’s scary.”
Meg: Congratulations on the pee breakthrough.
Craig: Right?
Lorien: All right, John, how was your week?
John: My week was really good largely because I turned in something last Friday. It’s weird how 30 years into this career, you’d think I would get over the joy of turning in a thing, but it just feels so nice to have a script off your desk and for not to be consuming all the brain cycles. Especially that last week where you’re trying to make all the last little pieces fit, it was a rewrite, so it wasn’t the first time through, but there were a lot of notes I was trying to incorporate. I wanted this to really reflect both what I intended, but also what the filmmakers needed to do. I had made a plan for turning it on Friday, and I hit it.
Friday morning, it was just done. It was ready to go. Drew approved it, sent it through, and I had that relief of having a thing off my plate. This week was really fun because I could just do the other stuff that kept getting delayed, and deferred because I was so busy working on that script. The main thing I was writing this week is I have to prepare for a speech for next month. It was really a chance to think through like, what do I actually think about this? What am I trying to communicate? How am I writing for my own voice? That was a fun thing to be working on. Craig and I had finished the first round of promotion for the Scriptnotes book.
It was just a chance to revel in people reading the book and enjoying the book. It was just a dream week. It was also nice to get all this stuff done before the holidays and have a sense of it’s just not looming over me. I’m not expecting any notes until January. It was a very good week for me.
Meg: Perfect. It’s perfect. It’s the perfect timing. We can’t wait to talk about the book.
John: Tell us about your week.
Meg: I will tell you about my week because it actually has a question for you guys. My week has a question, so we’re just going to dive in.
Craig: I love a question week.
Meg: My week was I’m writing a script for a studio with my partner. I’m in there doing the draft, and I’m ready to send it back to my partner because I think we’re done, and I realized, well, wait, I should go check those notes they sent us. Meaning, we had done verbal notes, and then we had taken off on the verbal notes. They were great notes. We were so inspired. We’re cutting out characters. We’re cutting out subplots. It was so fun, and challenging. Then I read the notes, and I was like, “Oh, shit, there’s more stuff in here.” There’s a big thing in here that I did not– By the way, they might have said it on the phone, and I just didn’t catch it, or in writing the notes, it came out.
Who knows? Nothing bad to the studio. I should have read the notes before taking off because in the notes, it says that the main relationship, they’re just not really connecting to them as a couple.
John: That’s a big note, Meg. [laughs]
Craig: Yes.
Meg: It’s a big note. It’s a really big note. I think a lot of the other notes are actually symptoms of this because now that’s a problem, that’s a problem. Maybe they are problems because you’re not emotionally connecting to the characters. Because I came from the Pixar school of thought, I’m like, “I have to blow it all up.” I have to blow up the whole thing because at Pixar, if you get a note like that, we’re starting over. Just [onomatopoeia] like, “Breathe, outlied.” I got very overwhelmed, called my writing partner, overwhelmed him, which was not the smartest thing to do because poor guy driving in the car, and I’m like, “Oh my God.”
My question to you is, short of blowing it up, let’s say I’m not going to blow it up because that’s, in a way, easier to just go, “Fuck everything, let’s just start over.” Somehow, to me, that’s easier because I can start blue-skying again.
Lorien: It’s a burn-it-down philosophy.
Meg: Sometimes, a lot of times, you do have to start over, so I’m totally in for it and up for it. If you guys get a note like that they’re not connecting emotionally to a character, where do you guys go?
John: I go to the first from where we first meet them. I think that so often that is a symptom of they did not meet the character in a way that they were ready to engage with them and to click with them. Something was not setting their hooks of curiosity correctly as we were first meeting this character, and that’s why they’re not seeing themselves in their situation. I fully hear the burn it down start all over again, but that’s definitely not my go-to reaction. It’s something in those first few scenes where we get to know this character are not inviting them into the story.
Craig: I will sympathize with you. The overwhelmed feeling is the worst, and it doesn’t help, but it’s so natural. It just comes and you feel like you’re drowning. It feels like, “The work that I would need to do to make this good is impossible to do in the time I have. What do I do? Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” but of course, if you could come back from the future and hand you the script that is finished, that does fix everything, it would only take you a day or two to write it after you read it, right?
Meg: [laughs] I love that.
Craig: If you know what to do, you have the time. In a situation like this, the first question I have is, this is about a central relationship. Which of those characters is the “protagonist”? One of them is, I assume, the protagonist. Why does that person need to meet the other person? It just goes to the question, what is this movie about? What’s the point of all this? If I know what the movie’s about, and I know what the point is, and I know what the problem is with this main guy, and I know what this main character needs to be at the end, which presumably is different, why is this other person the perfectly best person to send in? Why does God send this person? [laughs]
It’s a reflection, in a way. It’s what they needed to get. If you think about it like that, then suddenly, you don’t have to wonder, how do I make people care about this? You’re just going to care because you understand inherently this person’s poking right at the thing that our hero didn’t want poked.
Meg: That’s really interesting because I think what’s happening is, normally, in the past, I’ve written transformative characters that have to meet the person that’s going to poke them, help them change, help them change their view of life and themselves. These are characters who are more claiming their power. Meaning, think about Titanic, they’re not wrong, but they need each other in order to move right to the next place. Their transformation is more a claiming of who they are, and Moana’s a claiming character to me. She’s singing her song. She’s right. Her song is right. She needs to go. She’s just full of doubt, and her how is wrong.
Craig: Who does she need to meet?
Meg: Okay, you’re right. Darn it.
[laughter]
Craig: This is my point. Kate Winslet knows that she should be an independent woman who doesn’t have to marry this guy, except she’s on a boat, and she’s going to marry that guy. Who does she need to meet? What’s so delicious is that when she does meet Leonardo DiCaprio, she’s just giving him the arguments that her mother gave her. “I don’t like you. You don’t live right. I shouldn’t be with you. You’re gross. Fuck off.” We know that she’s just, okay, you’re literally afraid to do the thing. You’re so afraid you’d rather die than actually stand on your own two feet, and here comes this rakish fellow. Perfect, all handsome.
John: I love the story, class, and discussion that we’re having here, but I want to get back to, Meg, your initial comment, which is basically that you went back to these notes, you realized like, “Oh, they had this thing here which we didn’t address in this,” but at the same time, you had a call with them where they’re highlighting their main note wasn’t about this relationship. Going back through those notes, that moment of doubt was–
Meg: Yes, literally in the middle of a paragraph.
John: In the middle of a paragraph. Here’s what I’m saying is that I am skeptical that you, Meg, with all your experience, have actually done something so disastrously bad in this relationship. While it may be useful for you to think about “How to do this thing better?” I doubt that you’ve done a bad job. I doubt that it’s actually a crisis. Because if there was a crisis, these people, their notes would have been about that. That would have been the giant red flashing lights there, and it was not. I want to both honor and acknowledge that, yes, it’s so great to be thinking about how are we maximizing this relationship, and do we have the right people, but also you can rip apart things that are working beautifully with the false goal of improving something.
Meg: All right, so you guys have to come on the show every week and talk to me about my writing. [laughter] Number two, my poor writing partner basically said the same thing, and I yelled at him.
John: I see.
Meg: I was really overwhelmed. I was like, “You’re not listening,” that kind of thing.
Craig: I get that because you have to balance what John is saying, which is a general healthy self-regard with the other concern, which is that you’re just going, “La, la, la, I don’t want to hear this note,” but you wouldn’t be overwhelmed and have this feeling if you didn’t think maybe they were onto something. If I know that these characters are compelling in the way that I’ve created them for me, and someone’s like, “I’m just not compelled by them,” then I don’t know what else to do because I know I did this right. If someone says these aren’t compelling, and it’s really, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” it’s because I think deep down probably–
Meg: I think you’re right.
Craig: Yes. Now overwhelm. You’re our Kate Winslet today, Meg LeFauve.
Meg: Oh, my God.
Craig: You’re overwhelmed.
Meg: So beautiful, yes.
Craig: When you’re yelling at your writing partner, that’s you flinging yourself into the ocean. [laughter] You’re just going to turn back to your writing partner and say, “Take my hand and carry me off, and let’s do whatever the writing equivalent is of having sex in a car and storage in the Titanic.”
Meg: You can get on the door, writing partner. You can get on the door.
Craig: Yes, and you know what? We both fit on the door.
Meg: We both fit on the door. There’s plenty around.
Craig: Clearly.
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Lorien: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show. We’ve been doing this podcast for a while, clearly not as long as you two have been doing Scriptnotes, but I have this experience, I think Meg does too. We learn something every time we talk to somebody, whether it’s an epiphany about our writing or a process or just, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” or, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” When you sat down to write this book, what did it force you to face, to articulate that you’d never got the chance to do in the podcast? Specifically around, what did you learn putting this book together? What surprised you?
John: It was my idea, my team’s idea to do it because our listeners had often said, “Oh, we would love to have a book.” The theory was like, “Oh, you could just take the transcripts and print the transcripts,” and it would have been larger than an entire library. There’s just too much there, and so we had to distill it down. Then it became an issue, what are the topics, and then how do we go through the transcripts and pull everything we’ve talked about, character introductions over the course of 700 episodes to see what kind of stuff was there? I think one happy surprise is that we’ve been very consistent. From episode 20 to episode 900 or 720,-
Craig: Oh, God.
John: -we are very much the same. Our messages are the same, but distilling it down was so, so, so much harder than I thought it was going to be. I was naive. We had Drew Marquardt, our producer, Prasant, who’s one of our editors, Megana Rao, lots of folks who worked with us all throughout this process, trying to pull and distill and to get it down to one consistent voice was just really hard to do. I’m really happy how we were able to get there, but it was just a long slog to do it. Like any writing project, you sort of think like, “Oh, I know exactly what this is going to be like.” You can envision the final product, but getting there is just a much more of a journey and adventure than I was anticipating.
Craig: I learned nothing because I didn’t do it. [laughter] Here’s what I did. I showed up and talked for 700 and some odd hours, and then John and the Scriptnotes team did all the work to turn it into a book. I’ve said this many times, I spend most of my life being in charge. I’m in charge of my show, and I like it. I like being in charge. It’s hard. There are a lot of challenges. It’s exhausting, but it’s what I do. Then Scriptnotes, I am not. I love it. [laughs] It’s so awesome to not be in charge. I don’t know if you guys are– Is one of you in charge, or do you both share?
Meg: No, share.
Craig: You share. I love that. Really, the podcast was John’s idea in the first place. I’ve always been a guest on my own show. [laughter] John comes up with what we talk about, John figures out everything. My job is to show up and be as spontaneously entertaining and as informative as I can possibly be. It’s like John gets to summon me like a wizard summons a familiar. I just pop into the world completely like, “What? Huh? What are we talking about? Great. Ti, di, di, boop, boop,” and then an hour later, I go, poof.
[laughter]
Meg: That’s amazing. I love that. It’s funny, Lorien, and I had this conversation after reading your book. We were like, “Pretty much we can just tell people, ‘Go read this book.'” [laughter] You cover everything, and it’s all so good and all so insightful. We are just going to talk about a couple of the things in the book just to let everybody know, just get a taste of it, and all the great stuff inside. Obviously, we’re not even going to get in depth in even one topic because the book is so in-depth and great. You guys talk about, and I believe this was mainly Craig’s chapter, but in terms of structure, and that there are these people who are analysis people, and they create these things where this is what structure is.
You have to hit this, this, and this, and then how that is bullshit because it’s about creation, and it’s more of a spine or a skeleton inherent within the character. It’s interesting because at first, listening to it, I was hoping it would be your voices, and it’s not, but the guy’s very great.
John: His name is Graham. He’s fantastic.
Meg: Graham is fantastic. He’s now part of your ethos to me. You were talking about, Craig, how at first you were like structure’s bullshit, basically. I love structure, so I was like, “[gaps] We’re going to have a fight on the podcast because I love structure.” Structure is everything to me, but then I realized we have a different way of saying the same thing. I say it as structure is the character’s movement,-
Craig: Exactly.
Meg: -and you’re watching a human being come to consciousness about something.
Craig: Exactly.
Meg: You’re saying, and I loved your word because it helps me think of my own script in a different way, it’s, I want to make sure I get the right words right, that to you it’s a central dramatic argument, a thesis that you’re putting forward, and you use examples like men and women can’t be just friends, better be dead than a slave, if you love someone, set them free. That’s so great to take to my work and be like I think about words, I think about redemption, I think about forgiveness, but that isn’t fully a thesis yet. What do you have to say about forgiveness? My question to you, and I love this chapter, you break down Nemo. I’ve used Nemo too, which was fun.
I was a little jealous. I was like, “Wait a minute.” [laughter] I thought, okay, mind melt. How do you, and I’m asking both of you now, how do you get to that argument? When you’re writing drafts, how do you find and distill it down? Do you always not start before you have it? Do you find it as you go? How do you, even if you have a word, let’s say forgiveness, or how do you distill it into that argument or that theme that will become the structure and the character movement?
Craig: I do caution people, I think, even inside that bit to not necessarily feel like they have to start by writing down a bunch of fortune cookie things, and then what story should go on. We often start with an idea. Really, the thing that gets you excited is the thing you should start with. You have an idea for a plot. You have an idea for a cool character in a place or time. The next question I usually ask, then, is like, okay, if I have an idea for a movie, just plot. Then the next question is, who would be an interesting person to see inside of that? Then the next question would be, why did I think that that person would be an interesting person, and what is wrong with this person?
Something’s wrong with them. Otherwise, they’re fine. I don’t want to watch it. It’s not drama. What’s wrong with them? By asking what’s wrong, you will get to a place of, okay, I understand. It’s a cool idea. Shrek was a cool idea. The man who wrote the book, William Steig, is that right? He had a cool idea. I think somebody like Ted Elliott comes along, and he goes, “All right.” The character is someone who is so angry about losing his swamp. Why would anybody want the swamp in the first place? What is an ironic thing for an ogre to want? Love, right? You very quickly will get to it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.
It’s just like, boom, right there, but that’s fine. You’ll get there through examination of what the fertile soil is around the plot that you’re playing with or around the characters that are emerging.
John: Going back to Craig’s Finding Nemo chapter and this overall framing of the question, we talk about structure, but central dramatic argument is also theme. There are all these words that we throw around a lot about in screenwriting. I feel like the jargon of it all is sometimes a barrier for people to understand what’s really at the heart of this, which is that, do you have interesting characters who are trying to do interesting things, and are you creating obstacles in their way that are compelling for the audience? I think a thing that Craig and I often feel frustration about with dogmatic structure is that you’re hitting these beats, but what is the experience of the audience?
What is the audience feeling through this? How is our relationship with that character changing? How are we putting ourselves in their shoes, seeing the choices they make, and have it feel like they are really driving the story? So many “well-structured” scripts are terrible because they’re just not compelling. They’re not interesting, and scene by scene, they’re not working. So many of these books talk about these templates for things and neglect like, oh, no, you actually have to have interesting scenes that do compelling things where there’s a structure within the scene where you have conflict within the scene.
In the book, we’re just trying to tease out those things and make it clear that as a writer, you’re thinking about all of this at the same time. You’re both in the scene with the characters and sitting in a theater watching it on the big screen. That’s really the challenge of the craft that we’ve chosen is that you’re trying to do all this at once and forget that you actually know what’s going to happen next.
Lorien: Along those same lines in the book, you talk about abandoning want versus need, which I am 100% for. I think it’s so distracting for people because they write characters who articulate their need in the first 10 pages. They’re super aware. We as the audience are aware, and we’re like, “Great, I know what’s going to happen,” so it’s not engaging. Again, it’s that conversation of the different words we use for things. I try to articulate that as what does the character learn? What do they realize? Meg talks about that belief system. How is their belief system shattered? What are ways that you talk about it that is more clear to you when you’re writing specifically?
Craig: Those all sound good. I just think about myself and you mentioned therapy earlier. We don’t go to therapy to announce the insights. Also, insights themselves–
Lorien: Wouldn’t that be great though if we did? [laughter] “Here are the things I know about myself. You pay me. You’re welcome.”
Craig: Just say them back to me. As my therapist and Scriptnotes associate therapist, Dennis Palumbo, says, insight is the booby prize of therapy anyway, because just because you realize something doesn’t mean you’re okay. In fact, that’s usually the worst moment. The worst moment is when you realize you’ve been wrong, you realize the way it should be, and you have no idea how to get there. You can’t go home, and you can’t go forward, and you’re just lost in the phantom zone. That is in fact what the low point is. It’s just that in these structure books they go, “No, a low point happens. Your character’s sad.”
Why? I do think quite a bit about just the simplest things. What is this character afraid of most? How profound is their denial? I want their denial to be profound enough that they are not aware of it because that’s how denial works, but I don’t want it to be so profound that they cannot then be shown. It’s right under, but it’s got to be under, and that’s as simple as that. What are they afraid of? What’s their denial? Why would I be invested as a third party in them having the insight, and then finding the courage to move forward and become the new person?
John: If you’re making those choices, honestly, they should resonate with the audience. The audience should be able to see themselves in this protagonist. Even if they wouldn’t make necessarily the same choices, they understand why the character’s making those choices. They want that character to succeed. They are right there with them. That’s classically what you’re going for with the protagonist going through on a journey and having that transformation. I think we also really try to focus on the book is that it’s never about one character. It’s always about a relationship.
It’s always about the relationship between two or more characters, and really thinking about that relationship as its own entity, and where are we at with this relationship. We probably have a POV perspective on that. There’s one character who’s driving a little bit more, but we have to really be able to understand things from both characters’ points of view. Again, that’s a thing we didn’t see in the books that we read growing up as we were starting off in this business.
Lorien: I love it. I like the, what are you afraid of? That’s something Meg talks about Jodie Foster asking all the time. What is the main character afraid of? I think it’s such a great. Then how much, how deep in denial are they? Because we have to be in denial with them.
John: Yes, and we have to make their denial understandable and even attractive. I want to know. I’m rooting for Shrek in the beginning. I’m like, “Yes, beat it. No one likes me. The world is designed to kill me. My parents sent me away when I was eight [laughter] to be alone, and I like being alone.” He’s so happy in the beginning of the movie, but it’s not really happy. It’s just content.
Meg: I talk about this. You guys have a whole chapter on point of view, which is great and enlightening. My take on it is also emotional point of view, which you’re talking about. Emotionally, I have to agree with the denial. Who’s emotional point of view in the scene? Sometimes when I help people with their scripts, I’m like, “Just go through your script and see whose emotional point of view are we in each scene because it’s flopping all over the place and I’m never landing.”
Craig: What you just said should be chiseled onto some wall at the DGA because where I find non-writing directors struggle sometimes is very specifically with that. Who has the emotional perspective in the scene? It’s such an important concept. The emotional perspective is typically defined to me as the person with whom at the end of the scene, I go, “You. You ran this. You were in charge of this. You saw it. You get it. You learned. You changed. You influenced. You did something,” but it’s got to be someone’s. Yes, I love that. Thank you for saying that.
John: It’s always a challenge when you have parallel plot lines. You may have a protagonist, you may have a secondary character who can drive their own scenes. They clearly have storytelling power in the movie or in the series, but then you put those two characters together in a scene, and it’s not obvious to the audience who is driving the scene, who’s in charge here, who we’re supposed to follow. You as the writer, you have to make that choice because they can’t both be driving the car. That’s a fundamental thing to do. I’ll go back Harry Met Sally. The movie is largely Billy Crystal’s movie and he’s driving those scenes when he’s in them together, but they’re wrestling for control of the wheel and that’s some of the fun.
Lorien: We get asked a lot, “Which project do you focus on? How do you know?” It’s, well, who’s paying me? What are the deadlines?
John: Yes, who’s paying me? That’s a good one. [chuckles]
Lorien: Other than that, let’s say you’re an emerging writer or you have multiple things going on, what do you say no to, I guess, is the bigger question. You talk about this in your chapter on endings. You say, which one has the best ending?
Craig: Yes, my default go-to answer. It’s like, write the thing with the best ending.
Lorien: Which is this is great. In a feature, your ending has to be inevitable, surprising, satisfying. In a TV show, you need to have an ending for each episode.
Craig: You get to have an ending for each episode.
Lorien: You get to have an episode that’s ending.
Craig: It’s a gift.
John: It’s so nice.
Craig: It’s a gift.
John: You also get to have a new start at the beginning of every episode, which is so great. Back when they had commercials, you had act breaks, which is also exciting.
Lorien: You get to have an ending at the end of the season and the series. What advice would you have for someone who’s writing a spec pilot and they need to have that ending of it that makes the person desperately want to read the next episode?
Craig: For starters, for television, you have to ask an important question. The movie question is, who would I like to sleep with for a month or two? The television question is, who would I like to move in with? I want to live here for a long time. I want to be in this world and tell these stories with these people for a long time. This will be good. In fact, I have too many ideas about what happens next. My problem is, how do I break these down into a manageable amount of episodes? Definitely, there’s a big idea at the heart of it that makes you go, “Okay, yes, I need to see this now.
At the end of this first episode, I understand, the audience understands why I want to be here.” I’ve transmitted to them the moment that made me go, “Ooh, I got to do this as a TV show.” Transmitting that passion theoretically should work.
John: Yes. My next project is probably going to be a streaming series. I’ve written the pilot. We took it out. We had all the meetings. What was so great about the meetings when they’d actually already read the pilot is they could ask me questions, and I could pitch them detailed things like, “Okay, this happens next, and this happens next, and this is a typical thing. In episode 6, this is how we’re flipping it.” I wasn’t faking any of that. I’m genuinely passionate about doing it. If you’re looking at writing your own spec pilot for something, you should have that sense of enthusiasm and excitement, and that will carry through back into the pilot you’re writing.
You’ll see that you’re setting up these things, and so like, “That’s going to be so exciting to pay off.” I’ve read a lot of spec pilots where it’s like, “Oh, I can see that you delivered the premise of that, but I just don’t feel like there’s another episode there.” While the writing on the page was good, I’m not that necessarily excited about that writer because I don’t feel like they have that hunger, that zeal for continuing and actually making this as a show.
Meg: Yes, so many times the spec TV pilots, they don’t have an engine to the show.
John: No.
Meg: Do you guys have any insight into TV engines? I’m a feature writer, so I can talk about feature engines till the cows come home. When people ask me about TV, I’m like, “Ah.” What is a TV engine for you guys?
Craig: I don’t know because I don’t write that kind of show. I’ve only written shows that had endings planned. The Last of Us, it’s just a very long single story cycle that has cyclots inside of it. Each episode is a cyclot. The season is a cyclot. The series is a cyclot. I actually don’t know how to write a procedural that is meant to go on forever or even an adventure show that’s meant to go on forever. I understand it. If you put a gun to my head, I could do it. Just I’m not sure that that’s where my smarts are particularly leveled up.
John: I would go for making sure that each of the characters that you’re establishing as your series returning regular characters, that there’s interesting things that we want to see paid off that can’t be possibly paid off in the course of an episode so that over the course of a season, over the course of multiple seasons, we’re going to get a chance to see them grow and change and get somewhere closer to where they’re going to be going.
The challenge, of course, is then the reason why you have to have big brains and/or a writing staff to help you do it, is finding ways that what each of those characters is going for, what they’re trying to pay off, the stuff that’s driving them can resonate with multiple characters in the course of an episode, and that they’re in conversation with each other, that each of these plot lines really do have a reason to be intertwined in ways that are meaningful. It could be thematically. It could be the conflict that’s going to come between them, but that’s the hard work.
If you go back and look at your favorite TV shows, the ones that keep coming back, they have that in their DNA. From the pilot forward, you can see that they set up characters who can just generate a lot of story, and that’s crucial.
Lorien: Craig, when you said movies are who do I want to sleep with for the next two months, you said, and then a TV show is who do I want to live with, and I thought, “How dare you? That’s not true.” Then I quickly flipped through everything I’ve recently watched to check to see if that was real, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s mostly true.”
Craig: I’m mostly true. That’s my thing.
Lorien: Mostly true.
Craig: I’m true-ish. [chuckles]
Lorien: It’s a great generalization, though, to check because we also get asked, how do I know if my idea is a feature or a TV show? It’s a little bit of, do I want to hang out with this person for a really long time and be all up in their business, or do I want to be with them for this hot moment, intense experience, and then say goodbye?
Craig: We have met people that we can think to ourselves, “This would be a great hot moment, but oh my God, I would not want to live with you.” You have to ask when you think, is it a movie or a show? How much is really here? Is this an explosion or is this dominoes that keep going? That’s what you just have to have a sense for. God’s honest truth. The reason that so many screenwriting books are bad is because they just don’t acknowledge something brutally fundamental to what we do, and that is talent. [chuckles] Taste, talent, instinct.
There are things that you learn over time that John and I have learned over time that you guys have learned over time, and you share with people, and we share with people, but we don’t get to that if there isn’t the stuff that you cannot teach. There’s a lot you can’t teach. The Screenwriting Education, our book, it’s ultimately for people who we will find out later had what they needed to have at the start. Maybe this helps them get where they were going to go a little faster. I think is nice, but these questions, movie, television show, we’ve all sat in rooms and watched executives debate with each other because they don’t know. It comes down to us, gulp.
[music]
Lorien: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the show.
Meg: I also love the chapters in the book where you’re taking quotes from your guests. It’s really fun to see them so distilled down, and great insights from all the guests. One insight that I wanted to ask you guys, David Koepp and Eric Roth both talk about getting fired. These two penultimate writers, the icons of screenwriters, talk about, yes, getting fired sucks. Eric Roth talks about how much it hurt. To me, that’s also talking about, as writers and artists, our failure, which we want our characters to fail so they can transform. Yet, when we fail, we’re like, oh, what’s happening?
Craig: Exactly.
Meg: What is your experience, take on, it doesn’t have to be being fired, because maybe you’ve never been fired-
John: Oh, good Lord. We’ve both been fired a lot.
Meg: -or maybe failure.
Craig: A lot is strong praise, but certainly, we’ve experienced– you can’t work in this business and not. There’s the hard firing and the soft firing.
John: Mostly, the soft firing.
Craig: Mostly, the soft firing.
John: Mostly, it’s like we’re not proceeding with the thing.
Meg: They just never respond to notes. Literally, you hear from someone else, oh, they’ve moved on.
Craig: You do the drafts that you were hired to do, then they don’t really need more, and you go do something else, and then you hear that someone else is working on it.
Meg: How do you process that? What is your process? Do you immediately start something else? Do you rage? Because again, it’s approach to failure and what our characters do too. How do you guys approach it?
John: Maybe before I talk about healthy approaches, we should describe unhealthy approaches, things we’ve seen other writers do, which is just not serving them or serving anyone well. We’ve seen writers who fixate too much on one project to the exclusion of others and their entire identity becomes about this thing that it’s the next thing they’re going to make and it’s going to happen, or they got screwed over by this producer on this thing, it’s all they could talk about for years, and they don’t write other things.
That is so frustrating and debilitating when you see talented people who are getting in their own way by fixating too much on one thing. I think you have to passionately love the thing you’re writing, believe in it so deeply, and then also acknowledge at some point it could just vanish and go away, and it doesn’t diminish your experience and your love of it, but that you have so little control over it ultimately.
When I’ve written books, books exist out in the world, they’re on a shelf, I’m done, and they’re there. As screenwriters, we’re just writing this plan, this vision for a movie or a series that could be, and sometimes it’s not, it sucks, and you can grieve that, but if you fixate on it, if you let that be your defining quality, you’re going to be at the start of your tragic beginning. You’re going to protagonate on that, and that’s not a good place to be beginning.
Craig: It’s harder when you start your career because you have fewer experiences. If you get up to bat and it’s your first at-bat as a major league baseball player and you strike out, currently, you are on course to strike out every single time and be the worst player in history. You have to have a short memory. Feel your feelings. The most important thing is to not let it define you and to also remember, thank you, Dennis Palumbo, that feelings are real, but they don’t mean anything. They have no logical significance, and they are terrible predictors of the future because what we tend to do is say, I got fired, I will be fired, I’m the fired person. Now everybody looks at me as no good, I’m no good. The end. That’s in fact not what’s happening.
There’s this wonderful study that I’m obsessed with that these guys, we’ve talked about this before on the show, Kahneman and Tversky, who are these two psychologists who studied human irrationality. They were hired to look at the performance of people in the military, like in the Air Force. They were hired to basically help evaluate and teach the people teaching these people how to teach them better. They asked, well, what’s something that you guys know? They said, well, we know that when somebody goes out on a practice run, and they do really well, they come back, we praise them, the next time they don’t do so well.
When they go out, and they fail, and they come back, and we yell at them, the next time they do much better. It seems to us praising people makes them worse and punishing them makes them better, which is a perfectly human conclusion to draw, except the reality is, it’s just regression to the mean. Generally speaking, when you do really well, you’re doing better than you normally do. When you don’t do very well, you’re doing worse than you normally do. What happens when you get fired is, they could be wrong, which has happened to me before, where I’ve watched it, and I’m like, ahah, but let’s say you didn’t do as well as you normally do, that means you’ll do better because normally you do normal.
That’s the perspective that time gives you because you can’t see it unless you get fired a bunch and you succeed a bunch. There are wins that I’ve had that I didn’t really deserve. There are failures I had that I didn’t really deserve. There’s all sorts of weird things that occur, but eventually you can get to a place where at least you go, okay, if you don’t want to continue with me, that’s for the best. It’s good. It means you hired the wrong guy for what you want. It’s, you know?
Meg: Yes. I love that. It’s not a definition of you and your worth and your value and who you are forever. I think that’s great and a great example of belief systems in your characters and how we see things that are just not really, you might have to wake up through experience to that. All right. We could talk for hours and hours with you guys. It’s such a privilege. Craig and John, you have shows to go and features to write. We always ask our guests the same three questions at the end of the show. Go ahead, Lorien.
Lorien: Craig, what brings you the most joy when it comes to your writing?
Craig: When something just sings, I don’t know how else to describe it. When there’s just a beautiful harmony, and I know it’s right. You just know when it clicks, and you’re like, that is correct. It doesn’t matter if anybody in the world told me this isn’t correct, they would be wrong. This is correct. There’s no defense or argument here. It’s just humming in my bones. It’s humming the right tune. It is in harmony. That’s the most joy.
Lorien: I look forward to that happening quite soon for myself.
Meg: Craig, what pisses you off about writing?
Craig: How disconnected effort is to result. It’s remarkable. There are times where just, there it is, done. I’ve gone two weeks grinding myself over one scene because it’s just wrong, and it makes me crazy. Then, eventually, there’s a moment where I go, oh, it’s because that’s not the right scene or because of whatever. It is so frustrating to not be able to say, well, if I just work harder, if I’m building a house and I just sleep less and work more, theoretically, the house will get built faster. It just doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s frustrating. It pisses me off.
Lorien: What’s your proudest career moment to date?
Craig: Probably somewhere around the second or third week of Chernobyl airing, where it became clear that people were watching it. I didn’t think anybody was going to watch it. When that happened, and the response was what it was, I just felt great because it was legitimately after– I had been working at that point for 25 years, it was legitimately the first thing I had ever done that I wasn’t fulfilling anyone else’s request. I thought of a thing, I did a thing, I did it entirely in my own terms, and I was in charge of it. That was my proudest moment. It’s going to be hard to top that one. I don’t think I’m going to top that one. It’s a pretty good one.
Lorien: Yes, you will.
Craig: I’m still sad and anxious all the time. Don’t you worry.
Meg: All right, John, what brings you the most joy?
John: Related to Craig’s, he’s talking about how everything in the scene clicks. For me, it’s when a character surprises me. When the character does something that I wasn’t anticipating them doing, they say a line, suddenly, they just are able to do a thing that I was not conscious that they could do. At a certain point, they just become alive; they’re just doing their own things. Those moments where you feel like you are just a documentarian filming them doing their life, those are the moments that bring me real joy. Those are generally moments where I’ve passed into flow, where it just becomes easy. That’s the joy. That’s the high you’re often chasing.
One of the things I just try to remind writers is that just because you’re not in flow doesn’t mean that you’re doomed, that you’re bad. Flow often won’t happen, and yet, no one will know that you wrote that scene while you were in this magical, mystical state, versus you were just grinding through it.
Lorien: All right, so what pisses you off about writing?
John: Probably what pisses me off about writing is that there is fundamentally this impossible task we’re given that we are trying to create the experience of watching a movie just with the words on the page, and that all the artistry we can do, all the craft, all the little tricks we can do to create the visuals and the sound experience, or just the feeling of being in that world, it is fundamentally limited, and that it’s going to have to be interpreted through actors and directors and everybody else, and it’s never going to be quite the movie that I see in my head.
You have to learn to live with that and accept that. It’s never going to be quite– there’s just no direct brain connection where people can quite see the movie that’s in my head, and what’s helpful is when you remember that, you are the only person who’s ever seen the movie, you can have a little bit more patience with people who are still getting up to speed on the process, the directors who are asking 20,000 questions because they just cannot see the same movie that you’re seeing.
Meg: Last question is, what is your proudest moment in your writing?
John: Weirdly, it wasn’t a public moment, but I would say when we did the Big Fish musical. I wrote the movie Big Fish and did the Broadway musical Big Fish, and along the way, you do these readings and workshops where you’re getting it up to speed, and what’s so great about them is they’re so private. There’s maybe 20 people in the audience for some of these things, just sitting in chairs, and you don’t have props or costumes, people are at music stands. Yet, I can see, oh my God, Andrew Lippa and I made this thing that was just beautiful, and everyone’s crying in this room.
It was just great to see that you can create these really amazing emotional experiences with nothing but just words and songs. There’ve been many moments along the way in the Big Fish musical, but those small, intimate moments were some of my favorite and proudest moments.
Meg: John and Craig, thank you so much for coming on our show.
John: An absolute pleasure.
Craig: It was great. It was great to be here. Thank you, guys.
Meg: Thanks so much to John and Craig for joining us today. Their new book, Scriptnotes, a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, is out now, and we’ll link it to the episode description.
Lorien: For more support, find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and head over to thescreenwritinglife.co to learn more about our workshop program, TSL Workshops. We have a growing library of prerecorded workshops that cover craft-related topics from character want to outlining a feature. We also host two live Zooms a month where you could chat with me and Meg about projects you’re working on.
Meg: Right now, we’re running a special holiday promo. Just head to the tslworkshops.circle.so and use the code holiday25 to get 50% off your first month. The link and promo code are also in the episode description. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to thescreenwritinglife@gmail.com.
Lorien: Thank you for listening, and remember, you are not alone, and keep writing.
John: That was The Screenwriting Life. It was produced by Jonathan Hurwitz and edited by Kate Mishkin, whereas Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Our Christmas-y outro music is by Matthew Ciarlelli as well. 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram at Scriptnotespodcast.
We have T-shirts and hoodies to drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you. Thank you to all our premium subscribers, especially the folks who are joining us in this new year. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. 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 Rob Reiner. For Drew and Craig, Meg and Lorien, thanks for listening.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Okay, bonus segment. Not the bonus segment I wanted to record.
Drew Marquardt: No, I’m so sorry. As soon as I found out, I texted you because you knew Rob and Michele. It was heartbreaking for me. I can’t imagine how it was for you.
John: Yes. We were having dinner with friends, and another friend texted me and said, holy shit, Rob Reiner. I was like, yes. You quickly look at the headlines, but you don’t know what’s really happening. When I saw stabbed at his home, I was like, oh, I hope it’s not the son, and it was the son. Weirdly, Rob Reiner is, of course, an icon of a director. Looking at that period between 1984 to 1995, he was just unstoppable.
Drew: Incredible.
John: Just amazing. This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, The American President.
Drew: Incredible.
John: Incredible. Back to back to back. So many of these movies we’ve talked about on Scriptnotes over the years. Obviously, we did a whole deep dive on The Princess Bride, but When Harry Met Sally, it’s foundational.
Drew: Whenever I leave the podcast someday, let’s just do a deep dive on When Harry Met Sally. I think I’ve seen that movie more than-
John: Next week.
Drew: Next week, yes. Perfect.
John: It’s an incredible movie. We think about it as Nora Ephron’s movie, but it’s Rob Reiner who directed it. It’s because of his working with Nora Ephron that we got the movie that we got. We got that perfect trajectory-setting romantic comedy. It was hard to imagine what our rom-coms would be like if we hadn’t had When Harry Met Sally.
Drew: The American President felt like it was a constant on TV when I was growing up. That was Sorkin, right? I think wrote that.
John: It was Sorkin, yes.
Drew: He made these sort of North Star movies.
John: There’s an episode of Love It or Leave It where Rob Reiner comes on to talk to John Lovitz about just directing and other things. They talked about Aaron Sorkin, where he’s very upfront about all the cocaine he was doing when he was writing The American President. It was this 600-page script he delivered. Rob Reiner was going through and cutting out all the stuff that he did down to, here’s The American President, and all the parts that were not there became The West Wing.
Drew: That makes sense. It’s been striking to me in the last week or so, since this all happened, how many people just talk about him as a person who lifted them up and gave people freedom, creative freedom, and really bolstered people he believed in. He just seemed like the best, both professionally and then also politics, too.
John: Absolutely. I never worked with him on anything. I may have had one meeting at his company at Castle Rock at some point early on, but he was doing other stuff. I wasn’t writing anything for him. I first got to know him, recent history here. In California, we had marriage equality briefly, and then there was Prop 8. My husband and I got married during the brief window of time when we still had marriage in California. It wasn’t legal federally, but it was recognized within California. Then the same year that Obama was elected, Prop 8 passed in California, which took away marriage equality.
Mike and I were part of the lawsuit that was challenging the legality of that, which was designed to be a federal lawsuit. It was an organization called American Foundation for Equal Rights, and Rob Reiner was a big funder behind it. I went to organizing dinners and other events at their house to get this stuff started, to meet Ted Olson and David Boies, who are our lawyers behind all this. They were great and helped find us plaintiffs and helped put the whole thing together.
Over the course of years, I saw Rob and Michele a lot, and they were phenomenal. Obviously, everyone’s going to talk about Rob Reiner because he’s a legendary director. Michele Reiner was great. One detail I think is worth telling about Michele, which I’d never seen anyone do before, but was so smart. This was a pretty big dinner, and Michele said there’s going to be one conversation at the table, no side conversations, everyone participates. That was the rule, and it was a smart rule because it makes everyone be involved and no one gets pushed off in a corner. It’s like 20 people, but it’s one conversation.
Drew: That sounds like them, from everything I’ve heard about them, that making sure that everyone’s heard and everyone has a seat at the table.
John: I last saw Rob and Michele during this last election cycle. There was an event at their house that Kamala Harris was speaking at. It was right after Biden’s disastrous debate. Everyone was on edge. What is possibly going to happen? Kamala Harris just killed it. She was so competent and in charge. I remember walking away thinking, okay, Biden should pull out, and Harris should replace her. That event only worked because Rob and Michele just made everything comfortable. They just made everyone feel like, yes, everyone’s panicked, but also, we got this. We’re going to get through this. They were great, as always, and remembered me. Michele remembered me from years before, which is another great sign.
Drew: Just, oh, they sound so cool. Like adults in the room, exactly what you want a person to be.
John: It’s a great loss. Directors, everyone’s going to die. It’s going to happen. This could have happened in a car accident, and it would have been heartbreaking. For it to happen in such a grisly family tragedy way is what makes this so particularly awful and keeps it at the top of the news cycle. It’s mostly what I focus on. We lost two really good people, and it sucks.
Drew: I think that compounds the heartbreak for me. Also, you just imagine what it is to be a parent with a child who you can’t help and who you know has these huge problems. They seem like the kind of people that– I’m sure they did everything they possibly could do. This isn’t–
John: The son, Nick, was at this fundraiser, which is where I met him. He had a strange quality to him. I didn’t know his backstory, but reading about that story, oh, that tracks make sense. They could tell they loved him and that they were trying to help him out. It’s awful. It’s a tragedy. I guess I’m a little happier now that everyone’s starting to acknowledge that this is a family tragedy. There’s no greater meaning behind it. It’s a thing that could have happened at any point in the last couple centuries. It’s a thing that is specific to this family and so heartbreaking.
Mostly, I want to celebrate Rob Reiner, an incredible run of great movies, even forgetting an actor. An actor going back to– Obviously, that’s made his start. All in the Family, he came up with that initially with Penny Marshall, who also became a director. Was always guest-starring as somebody’s dad in New Girl or some other thing. Exactly who he’d want for that.
Drew: His sandwich is lettuce, tomato, lettuce, meat, meat, meat, cheese, lettuce.
John: Perfect. That’s what you want, you’re going to have it.
Drew: Never forget it.
John: Listen, I don’t believe in an afterlife or any sort of meaningful way that people, when they’re gone, that they’re watching down over us. He’s the kind of person who I hope their spirit lives on in a sense of we should all aspire to have that kind of effect on those around us.
Drew: Absolutely. I think talking about him and Michele now, everyone feeling that and feeling like that is a model for what we want to do with our lives.
John: You don’t really lose somebody if you can take the lessons and model what they would have done. What would Rob do?
Drew: I hope we keep doing that because he was great. They were both great.
John: Thanks, Drew. Thanks.
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