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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.

[music]

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.

[music]

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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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 716 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you dramatize the untold aspects of an historical moment as a limited series? No, Craig, we’re not talking about Chernobyl again. This time, it is the assassination of US President James Garfield and the chaotic, dysfunctional political system surrounding it. We’ll also discuss personality typologies, the systems for categorizing what makes people and fictional characters tick, plus listener questions. To help us do all that, we welcome back Mike Makowsky, who joined us last time on Episode 448 in 2020.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you for having me.

John: Welcome back, Mike.

Mike: Good to be here.

Craig: Yes, blast from the past. I love this.

Mike: Yes, it was a COVID Zoom.

John: It was a COVID Zoom, yes.

Craig: Back in the COVID days, yes.

John: Back in those days. Your screenwriter, whose credits include HBO’s Bad Education, which is what we talked about.

Craig: Which we loved.

John: Which we loved. Death by Lightning is your new series, the Garfield assassination series. It’s now out on Netflix. It’s just terrific. Congratulations on it.

Mike: Thank you so much.

John: I want to talk about the production of it, the intention of writing about this obscure president and what happened there.

Craig: How dare you, by the way? Obscure?

John: Obscure. Also, just the notion of limited series because they’re increasingly hard to make. We’ll talk about that. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about coaching trees. This is an article that we found this last week, which was about which TV shows, writers’ rooms generated the most other creators of TV shows. There’s like a–

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: It’s a branching sort of–

Craig: Like Sid Caesar, our show of shows was sort of the ultimate.

John: Absolutely. That’s sort of the iconic one, but there’s many other ones along the way. Maybe just talk about what the culture is in those shows. That allows for so many writers to grow out of them. First, if anything is going to grow or change, it’s going to be in a new ecosystem because, as we’re recording this, which is sort of two weeks ago for our listeners, Netflix is apparently buying Warner Bros. Craig, how do you feel about that?

Craig: Well, it’s interesting. I work at HBO. HBO is owned by Warner Bros. I think everybody was sitting around going, “Well, it looks like David Ellison and Paramount are going to be buying Warner Bros. Then Netflix, and was it Universal? Both took a swing.

John: Yes, Comcast Universal.

Craig: Yes, Comcast Universal. Then it turned out that Netflix was the one that came out on top. Now, the thing is, we kind of don’t know. We all got the email from Netflix’s subscribers, right? They were like, “We did it.” Yes, they did it in the sense that the board of directors agreed to sell the company to Netflix, but there will be some significant regulatory issues here. Apparently, this is another horseshoe effect where the far right and the far left are very excited to join hands to try and block this sale.

John: It’s also worth remembering, like you were here with us in 2020, the universe conspires to do weird things. Anything that seems like a given or granted is just going to often not happen the way you expect it to happen.

Mike: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s far above my pay grade to be able to speculate what is going to happen here.

John: I think the only thing I would come back to as sort of ground truth is that I’m really concerned about the idea of making theatrical movies, because Netflix–

Craig: If you’re only really concerned, you’re not concerned enough. [laughter]

John: I just want to state sort of, basic foundational principles is I genuinely believe that movies, by which I’ll define as being roughly two hours of experience, of a narrative that is filmed, I think they belong in theaters first. The theatrical experience is crucial. Once they’ve made their money there, then you can release them for purchase, or for streaming. The goal should be to maximize the value out of each individual title and then reach the widest audience possible. That sounds so basic, but it seems to be so forgotten in all of this.

Craig: It’s not forgotten. I think it is rejected. I think Netflix has rejected that theory completely. They put things in theaters now for a week or two to mollify the filmmakers that they want to attract to their not theatrical experience. They do give Greta Gerwig or Rian Johnson a little taste, helps them qualify for the Oscars and so forth. Really, they just want it on their platform. I’ll make a few predictions because, unlike Mike, I do not have the humility of understanding when things are above my pay grade. These are above my pay grade, I don’t care.

John: Here to promote a Netflix show today, definitely.

Craig: Yes. Well, most shows are Netflix shows, and even more shows are about to be Netflix shows if this goes through. If it goes through, I think Warner Bros theatrical is toast. I think the only question is, what do they do with HBO? Because you don’t buy HBO to not have HBO, that would be crazy. The worst possible view is that Netflix bought Warner Bros for the library alone. Now they will just make Lord of the Rings shows and Harry Potter, which HBO is already doing. HBO is one of the only brands that means something in our ecosystem.

Prediction is that they actually keep an HBO app. It won’t be HBO Max anymore. It can finally just go back to being HBO. Well, it’s one last change. It will be a bundled app with Netflix that you get for free as part of your subscription, and HBO will live as a little island. It’ll obviously all be owned by Netflix. Then, when the Emmys come around, HBO, Netflix will win all the time.

John: All of the Emmys.

Craig: Constantly. It’s them, and then FX picks up a few here and there. That’s my prediction.

John: I can see that happening. We should acknowledge that as we’re recording this, there’s a lot of public statements about, oh, no, we’re going to maintain Warner Bros as an entity, and they’re going to still release things theatrically. They also said that about Fox. Fox exists kind of a name only. They are making movies.

Craig: That was Disney, that likes making movies.

John: They like making movies.

Craig: I think what Sarandos said was something like, yes, we’ll take a look at it, and then as things evolve, we’ll re-examine. It was sort of like, no, we absolutely won’t use this gun pointed at this head to shoot it. It’s a bummer.

John: It’s a bummer.

Craig: It’s a bummer. It’s not that I don’t like Netflix. I subscribe to Netflix. I watch Netflix. Netflix makes great shows like Death by Lightning. They make a load of great shows.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s just that I also like going to the movies, and that’s an area where I disagree with them. I know that when somebody like Ryan Johnson says, “You must give me a theatrical release,” clearly, he does too. We all want a theatrical release for things like that. I’m not stupid enough to root for one corporation over another. They’re all corporations. It will be interesting to see. It’s going to take, what, 18 months? Is that what they’re saying?

John: Yes. It’s going to be a while before we sort of know how this sorts up.

Craig: This will be the fourth corporate parent that I’ve experienced at HBO since I’ve been there. I’ve only been there since 2015.

John: That’s crazy. All right. We will not be able to resolve the Netflix of it all, but we can talk about something much more local, which is the Scriptnotes book. As we’re recording this, we don’t have the actual sales figures, so we don’t know how it did its opening week, but it did really well. We’re really happy with the launch of it. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered it. Thank you to everyone who bought it the first week. Thank you for everyone who came out to our live show to buy it there. Everyone who posted about it, that’s awesome. Drew has been reposting a lot on the Scriptnotes Instagram.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. Basically, anytime I open up the app, there’s five or so people who have posted about it, which is great.

John: Yes. We’re resharing their stories. Thank you to everyone who’s left a review on Goodreads or Amazon, because those help us get the word out about the book. One thing that’s come up frequently, and Mike, you have your copy of the book in front of you, people say it’s lighter than you expect it to feel, that it feels light in your hand. Do you notice this?

Mike: So light. I have to compliment the binding as well. It’s a beautiful-looking tome here.

John: It is a gorgeous book. I want to talk a little bit about why it feels lighter in your hand, because it’s one of the most consistent things we’ve heard. Craig’s like, “Oh, did they make it out of balsa wood? Is there something strange about this book?” I went down a rabbit hole, and I did the math. I did some research on it. It actually weighs about what it should. If you compare it to another hardcover book that’s the same size, so I Have Atomic Habits, which is a bestseller that’s also the same number of pages, it weighs more than that, which it should because it’s physically wider than that. It’s 24% bigger by volume, but only 13% heavier.

It’s a little bit different than should you expect. Mostly, the effect is that it’s called the size-weight illusion. It’s what makes your brain make predictions about how much it thinks something should weigh. This is actually a documented phenomenon. I’ll put a link in the show notes to it. Craig, you like psychology. This is certainly up your alley.

Craig: I love psychology.

John: Your brain makes predictions about how much something should weigh so that as you’re reaching for it, you have an anticipation about how much force you’re going to use to lift something. That’s based upon visual information. What you see, it’s size, it’s thickness, it’s apparent material. It’s based on semantic clues. You have a sense that a brick should weigh more than a book should weigh. Then, just prior experience with similar objects. I think that’s mostly what is throwing people off about it is because it looks more like a textbook, and we have a sense of how much a textbook should weigh, and it just weighs less than a textbook.

Craig: Why does it weigh less?

John: It’s a different paper stock. I think it’s mostly what it is. This is the standard hardcover book paper stock, whereas opposed to a textbook has that glossy paper and that glossy paper just weighs more. There’s an area called expectology, which is the expectation factor. When you make a prediction error about how much something should weigh or what it should sound like or feel like, you get this moment of cognitive dissonance. I think that’s what’s happening with the book.

Craig: To me, it still feels like when you pick it up, that it’s one of those fake books that you open and it’s hollow, and then you put your keys in it or something.

John: Absolutely. You store your hooch in there. You store your sippets.

Craig: Also, who needs a heavy book? Holding a book actually is annoying after a while when you’re reading it. Where do you think people are going to read this, John? Physically, in space, where are they reading this?

John: As we talked about from the very start, I think it’s an ideal bathroom book.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’re sitting there–

Craig: You’re on the toilet, and you’re getting smarter.

John: Yes, as you’re doing it.

Craig: Yes, I always wanted to be one of those books.

John: Yes, so good. For me, growing up, my D&D manual is one of those books.

Craig: Do you know who we had in our bathroom growing up? Reader’s Digest.

John: So good.

Craig: Yes. Did they even make that anymore?

John: I suspect Reader’s Digest still exists. I remember there was the word power. It pays to increase your–

Craig: Then there was Laughter is the Best Medicine. It was so clearly meant for old people because there were ads in it, and I recall they were always for pheniment or aspergum, basically just arthritis medications. I’m like an eight-year-old sitting on the toilet reading books for 80-year-olds. It was nice, though. I learned.

Mike: They do still exist in print, but it seems like it’s a bigger, it’s like a magazine size. I remember them being smaller.

John: It should be a little folio size. Oh my gosh, that breaks my expectation, and therefore I hate it.

Craig: Yes, therefore I hate it.

John: We also have some follow-up about Orange Books. Mick wrote in. On a recent episode, you referred to the Scriptnotes book as The Orange Book. As a former Nickelodeon writer, producer, and longtime listener, I feel a duty to mention that on my first day at the network in 2001, the creative director handed me a copy of The Orange Book. This incredible tome is a creative guide to all aspects of Nickelodeon’s brand. It’s legendary amongst Nickelodeon writers and producers, and it takes its title from the famous orange splat logo. I fear that you may be served a cease and desist order by the Bikini Bottom business and legal affairs team over your claims to the term The Orange Book.

They sent through a photo of The Orange Book, or a copy of The Orange Book, which still remains. I couldn’t find a copy of a PDF of it online, but I found some other material referring to it and drawn from it. It looks like a really good brand design book. I will say that Nickelodeon, at its peak, you clearly understood what Nickelodeon was. It was a very consistent sort of space, the same way Disney is very consistent branding. Good on them, but also don’t sue us.

Craig: I don’t think I’ve ever reflected on how odd it is that the cable children’s channel that was, I guess, at one time, the best, or the peak, was Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon is the most old-timey word ever.

John: It’s also a word I can never spell properly. I keep wanting to do it like a C-H rather than a K, or the L-E as opposed to the E-L.

Craig: That’s Nickelodeon. That’s different. Yes, but Nickelodeon?

John: It’s a word like chariot, where it’s just lost all reference to what it was really meant to stand for.

Craig: Yes, it’s a very strange thing. It’s something that they would never do now, but see, it worked. Children don’t know what an actual Nickelodeon was, which was, what, the five-cent thing that you would play the silent movie in while you stuck your face in it. In 1920, I guess.

John: I also feel like they, at some point, just shortened it down to Nick, and that they don’t say Nickelodeon very often anymore.

Craig: Nick, Nick.

John: Nick Jr. There’s Nick at night.

Mike: We have more follow-up about breaking into your 30s. Anne writes, after spending my 20s and early 30s working in a rock and roll concert production, I was in need of reigniting my creative side. With a stack of writing samples and a surprising number of contacts I’d unearthed, I moved to Hollywood at the age of 35. To support myself as I navigated this new world, I began temping at the studios as an assistant and quickly discovered that my age and experience were an asset. I became known for being able to parachute into high-level executive offices and keep everything flowing smoothly.

I found my home in the Disney Touchstone film division, where I rotated through executives while I inhaled the script database and watched the movie-making machinery in action. I don’t know if what is left of the studio still uses temps, but if so, this is an avenue that the person who wrote it earlier should explore.

John: Temping is a thing we didn’t talk about in that, and it does make sense. I think the original writer was saying, “Oh, I want to get a writer’s assistant job. I want to do this kind of thing.” I said, that’s a challenging way in. What Anne’s describing, which is being that temp who actually knows what they’re doing and can just show up on the day and make stuff work and happen, that’s great. I would say a lot of these companies do have internal temp pools or floating workers, and that feels like a really smart choice.

Craig: That was the first couple of jobs I had were temp jobs. I think we’ve talked about. Do they still have the Friedman agency, the temp agency just for entertainment business? I think it still exists.

John: Live Google.

Drew: F-R-E-I-D?

Craig: Yes, Friedman.

Drew: Yes, Friedman Personnel Agency. It seems to still exist.

John: Yes. A place like that could make a lot of sense and also give you a chance to just see a bunch of stuff. If you’re just at one desk at one studio, you’re not seeing a bunch, but if you’re floating around, you can have a chance to read a bunch of things. Also, the expectations of ability to do stuff as a temp are pretty low. Basically, just keep the lights on is probably a lot of it, so that may help.

Craig: Yes, you can easily exceed expectations.

John: All right. On the subject of exceeding expectations, we have Mike Makowsky here. Your show is delightful. It details the assassination of James Garfield and the man who assassinates James Garfield. Spoiler, he’s going to die. I want to first just start with a fundamental question. Why make this show? It’s based on a bestselling nonfiction book. It’s not called Death by Lightning. How did it come upon your reading list, and what made you want to make it?

Mike: About seven years ago, I was at the Grove Barnes & Noble at the Buy 2 Get 1 Free table, and I needed a third book. I picked up this book about the Garfield assassination. Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard. First, I obviously made sure it was the proper weight. I made sure that from a semantical perspective.

John: It looks like a book. In your hand, it felt like a book.

Mike: Yes. It wasn’t orange. It didn’t conflict with Nickelodeon or anything.

Craig: It sounds nice to be honest, they’ll get sued.

Mike: I read the back cover, and I think I had known that James Garfield had been assassinated. I dimly recalled that fact.

John: It feels like Jeopardy information.

Mike: That’s the reason I bought the book. I was like, I think I want to be on Jeopardy one day. Let me educate myself. I felt very embarrassed that I knew nothing about our 20th president. To me, James Garfield, his name evoked a little more than a very anonymous bearded portrait on a wall sans any real context. The book sat in a pile for a couple of months to get up the juice to read the James Garfield book. It wasn’t necessarily a priority for me. I wound up reading the book eventually in one sitting, which was atypical for me.

I found it not only propulsive, but very moving and tragic and crazy and absurd. I kept having to go to Wikipedia every five pages to make sure that this historian in Kansas wasn’t making all this shit up because it seemed way too crazy.

John: I will say that the show is absurd, but also it’s funny in ways that you wouldn’t expect it to be.

Mike: I found myself laughing a lot at this book that’s not written with any real explicit levity or mirth, but there’s a deeply ingrained situational absurdity to virtually all of the proceedings.

John: This man should never have been president.

Mike: He was nominated for president against his will, ostensibly. James Garfield shows up at the 1880s Chicago convention for his party to nominate an entirely different candidate. His speech is so profound and presents such a strong vision for the future of our country that someone stands up in the rafters and shouts, “We want Garfield.” Which is so crazy. In many ways, Garfield was this poster boy for the American dream. He was a Civil War hero. He was this outspoken progressive advocate for civil rights and civil service reform, and universal education.

He was largely self-taught, grew up in abject poverty, just the right man for the job. He was not a popular figure prior to stepping on that stage and delivering an Obama in 2004 level speech, where everyone’s just like, who the fuck is this guy? Eventually, the voting reached a deadlock because no one could agree on a candidate. There were a lot of warring factions within his party at the time. On the 36th ballot, Garfield is accidentally nominated for president.

John: There’s a version of that which is essentially Conclave because that’s the underlying–

Mike: It’s very much like an American Conclave. I wrote the show long before Conclave existed, but I remember seeing that in theaters last year and being like, “Oh, that’s just like, it’s very similar.”

John: You’re reading this book, and you have to make a decision like, okay, you want to do something with it, but when did you know, like, oh, this is probably a limited series versus a feature? What were your next steps after reading the book?

Mike: Yes, I think instantly. Again, I read the book. I found myself laughing a lot. That’s not normal for me, but my tone tends to be a little bit more darkly comic. I think the fact that I was laughing a lot led me to believe. I think that this is indicative of my voice and my perspective. I don’t know that other people would necessarily receive this story in the exact same way. I think I should try and pursue this thing. I ended up getting the historian, Candace, on the phone and pitching my heart out to, “Please let me adapt this.” She was like, “Yes, okay.”

I ended up optioning the rights to the book myself because there wasn’t anyone that was going to pay me to write a James Garfield show anytime that I told, whether it was my agent or executives that I was friends with, that I wanted to write a limited series about the Garfield assassination, they were like, “Good luck.” [crosstalk]

John: Let us know when you actually want to work.

Mike: My agent was just like, “Do you despise me? Do you hate me?”

Craig: At the same time, you probably understood that that’s why the show could work because nobody’s expecting anything. Then you go, surprise, there was this entire thing under your nose that is extraordinary. You’re sitting on a gold mine. That’s a good feeling, actually.

Mike: The great joy of Chernobyl was obviously very instructive for me in a lot of ways. It was a five-episode limited series about a subject that, on the surface, most people probably wouldn’t think that they would be terribly interested in. Then they would assume that any telling of that story would be a little bit dustier, didactic, like a history lesson. To be able, as a writer, to create an interest where there was none before. I have absolutely no illusions that most people are going to want to readily watch a James Garfield show or learn a ton about James Garfield.

Certainly, in the 150 years since his death, there hasn’t been a ton of interest in him.

Craig: That’s good news, though. That’s good news.

Mike: It’s a sort of tabula rasa where you’re like, you actually get to present, hopefully in a compelling enough way, a story that people really don’t know anything about.

Craig: I think it’s wonderful.

Mike: That’s so exciting.

Craig: It is exciting. When we think about the choices of what we’re going to do, it is true that if you say, I want to do a story about James Garfield, everyone’s going to either laugh or make fun of you.

Mike: There’s a lot of jokes about him hating Mondays or my agent loves lasagna. Keeps calling him Andrew Garfield by accident, so I just stopped correcting him.

Craig: That’s all fine. The problem is, if you say, I want to adapt blank, and it’s something that they would be excited by just because of the subject, it’s been done. It’s been done a million times. What’s the point of saying, “You know what I want to do? I want to do a story about Vietnam.” Oh, yes, the Vietnam War. I know about that. That’s a thing that people like. That’s why we made 400 movies and shows about it. Finding something like this that is this little hidden gem, and we know that oftentimes these are the things that just seize people. I’m thinking of Scott Frank’s Queen’s Gambit. I want to make a show about people playing chess.

Mike: The metrics for how few people who engage with the Queen’s Gambit have actually even played chess before is pretty fascinating. Again, you’re creating an interest where there was none before. From a marketplace perspective, these are, as I know you know, from Chernobyl, incredibly difficult propositions. No one’s lining up. There’s no ready-made comps for what you’re trying to achieve. You’re not trying to make the next Stranger Things that ends up being a pale imitation of Stranger Things. It is a wholly original proposition, and that is really scary. It ends up being incredibly difficult.
99 times out of 100, you don’t get to actually follow through with it, which is heartbreaking. It feels in many ways like we got to pull off this incredible heist by getting this show made.

John: You’re saying we, but you were just off writing this by yourself. What happened next?

Mike: I spec’d the pilot script, and it was immediately–

John: You didn’t say pilot, but you knew it was going to be four episodes, five episodes?

Mike: I originally intended for it to be six, and for a number of reasons, it ended up becoming four prior to ever being written. I wrote the pilot script as a proof of concept because, again, anytime I told people I wanted to make a darkly comic and subversive take on the Garfield assassination, they were just like, “No, fuck you.” I wrote the script. I was super proud of it. Then just through the different machination, it took about a year, but it ended up getting in the hands of our mutual friends and the producers of the show, David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bernie Caulfield, who gratefully fell in love with it and were able to champion it at Netflix, and at least get Netflix to agree to let me write a second episode.

It was a development process that lasted about three, four years, ultimately, because I had to jump through every conceivable hoop imaginable over there. I wrote a 70-page bible after the second episode. I ended up writing four more episodes, then condensed those back down to two more episodes. We had a director. The director fell out. We got another director. We had to cast the two leads. We were in Budapest scouting for the show, backing into a start date, and we weren’t actually greenlit yet. Again, I feel like we just slipped in under the wire on this thing.

Craig: I was going to congratulate Netflix on their impressions and their risk-taking. Now, I’m going to pull back a little bit just because it does sound like they really put you through it. Then again, HBO put me through it, too. Nobody’s just going to casually go, yes, here, make this thing that’s probably just going to run in social studies classrooms. They are going to put you through it, which I understand. I have to assume, based on Budapest, that budgetarily, you did not have a lot of wiggle room there, I’m guessing.

Mike: Yes. Whenever people ask me how the show got made, I hold up the one Dr. Strange finger from the Avengers. I don’t know that there were multiple pads to get this James Garfield show made in 2024 when he shot it. I’m extraordinarily grateful to Netflix. I don’t know that anyone but Netflix would have made this show at all. We had a slate of executives who were also extremely passionate and grew extremely passionate about the show. Even that only really gets you so far. No, we had to pass a lot of litmus tests in order to ever see the light of day.

John: Can we talk about Budapest? One of the things I was surprised about, but I realized I have not seen that era of American history very much on screen. Budapest, I suspect, had buildings and places that actually looked like that in a good way. I’m sure there was a lot of visual effects to create the depth behind things. It looks great, and you also have scenes with 500 extras in them, which is just very difficult to do in the US or even in Canada to get that sense of scale. That’s all really helpful. It’s also challenging just being in Budapest for six months or so.

Mike: Yes. It was funny. I got married, and two weeks later, I was in Budapest for five months. Now I’m getting divorced. No, we’re good. She’s finally out of that here on air now. No, Cara got a line in the show, which she was thrilled about. She’s crowd woman number one. She came out for one week, and she was treated as a queen.

John: Boo. Well, congratulations on the show. I’m just so happy that it exists and that it got made. I remember Dan and Dave talking about, like, oh, yes, we’re doing this crazy Garfield thing. They didn’t say it’ll never get made, but it was clear this is going to be a hard lift to get it there.

Mike: I’m not sure anyone but them could have really mounted it.

Craig: I love that they did that. Mike and I would pass each other in the halls over at Formosa Sound, where I was mixing the second season of The Last of Us, and he was mixing Death by Lightning. That’s where I found out that this was a show about Garfield. I was just to give a little salute to my dearly departed dad. He was an American history teacher, and he loved Garfield. He loved Garfield. He thought Garfield was one of the only good presidents of that era. Also, just as a musical fan, I love Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and Charles Guiteau’s song is the best song in the show. It’s the best.

John: I need to go back and re-listen to it. I’ve seen Assassins, but I don’t know it off the top of my head, so I–

Craig: Because he’s crazy.

John: Yes.

Mike: Charles Guiteau is the guy that assassinated Garfield, who is a very fascinating character in his own right and is this perverse funhouse mirror image of Garfield in many ways. These are two guys who operate at opposite ends of the American social spectrum. On one end, again, you have this poster boy for the American dream who falls upward accidentally to a presidency just based on strength of character and merit. Guiteau, who also grew up in abject poverty, but worshipped Garfield. As soon as he heard about Garfield, he was like, “This guy gets it.”

Craig: I deserve a job from him.

Mike: Right. I need to do everything in my power to get this man elected because once he’s elected, he’s going to see that the two of us are kindred spirits, and he’s going to appoint me to an ambassadorship to Paris. Guiteau, unlike Garfield, had failed abjectly at everything that he had ever attempted. He was a failed lawyer, failed public speaker, failed newspaper editor. He had spent a couple of years at America’s first-ever free love commune, the Oneidas, and he was kicked out. He was the one guy who couldn’t get laid at the sex commune.
He refused to do the manual labor required of him, so the women on the farm would call him Charles Get Out.

Craig: Charles Guiteau.

Mike: Once Garfield is elected, it’s the first time in Guiteau’s life that he’s ever put his energy into something and succeeded in some warped way, and derive so much of his own self-value from Garfield’s. There’s this weird, toxic parasocial obsession quality that feels so modern.

John: It feels incredibly modern. It feels like it’s a pre-social media time, but you recognize, oh, I see there’s that. Rather than retweeting him, he’s like, I’m going to shake his hand, and therefore we are best buds, and I know him. It’s interesting to watch that.

Mike: Once he’s rebuffed by the Garfield administration, he just descends into madness and becomes convinced that his way to matter and to etch his name in the annals of American history in a positive way is to save the country from James Garfield.

Craig: Well, he’s etched his name into the annals in the strangest way. We all know the name Charles Guiteau, just not for the reason you wanted. I’m very glad that you made this show. I hope it’s doing well. I would urge people, as they’re listening to this, if you have something that you’re obsessed with in history, I hope that you’re pulling out of this. The most important thing that I think Mike said about the genesis of this is how he became passionate. He felt like, “Ooh, I can’t wait to tell people about this.” If you start telling people about these things, and they go, “Oh, you got something.”

If you start telling people about these things and they’re like, “No, that’s pretty much as boring as I thought it was,” then you don’t. Follow that, at least that initial thing is very exciting to find something that we haven’t seen a million times.

Mike: James Garfield was my Roman Empire for about seven years. To anyone that would listen on the street, I would pull them up with the lapels and be like, James Garfield’s the most fascinating story you don’t know. I had a birthday cake one year that my parents made for me with Garfield’s face on it. They were just like, “When are you going to stop talking about James Garfield?” What a privilege to be able to help reintroduce this man to modern audiences. In the process of my research, I went to Ohio.

He’s the only president who is not interred or cremated, or buried. His coffin and his wife’s coffin are on twin pedestals in their crypt in Cleveland at their memorial. Anyone can go and spend time with Garfield. Obviously, the coffins are behind broad iron gates. You can’t touch the coffins. I went there in 2019 when I was first starting to do research on this. For the full hour that I was down there, I was the only visitor, which felt crazy to me.

Craig: That sounds about right.

Mike: No. To you, it seems crazy, but to everyone else listening, like, no, that makes sense.

Craig: I’m routinely the only person at Buchanan’s grave. That just happens. It’s just standard.

Mike: Buchanan, that’s not a good one.

Craig: No. It’s not. It’s just fully bad.

Mike: As a bonus, I also get to tell the story of Chester Arthur, who is Garfield’s vice president, or [crosstalk] Nick Offerman. Yes, our buddy Nick Offerman, who is just such a dream. Of all of the characters in the script, I wrote Chester Arthur with Nick Offerman’s voice in my head the entire time.

Craig: Which makes it so easy. I was just saying this the other day. If you can just sit there in your mind and go, well, it seems to me that you’re not, and you just start slipping into the cadence. You’re like, I know what to write. I know how to do this.

Mike: It does help. He was so great. I’m so glad that he said yes.

John: Mike, the first time I met you was on Zoom because you came on for HBO’s Bad Education. Then, post-pandemic, you and I met up for coffee, and we got to talk a little bit. At that coffee, we were having a conversation about your writing practices, your thing, how you do stuff. I think I noticed this in the Bad Education script is that we talk about how much things look on the page, how you want a good-looking page. Your pages were, all the margins were exactly identical. Each line was the exact same length.

There was a precision that I worried was a little bit overkill because you’re not making the best choices on words if you’re actually worried about the character length. I asked whether you’d ever consider talking with somebody about your writing practices and things like that. We had a little conversation about that. How much are you comfortable sharing what you’ve done in the meantime?

Mike: I didn’t know we were going to be talking about this. We had coffee a few years ago. You guys have done however many episodes of Scriptnotes. It’s 714.

John: 16, yes.

Mike: 16. I have a very, very specific way of writing. I think it’s a low-grade OCD where a lot of people don’t like orphans or orphan lines. I think I’ve taken it to an obsessive level. I think I showed you a sample page from something that I was currently working on, I think probably Death by Lightning. I was like, have you seen this before? You looked at it for about 30 seconds, and then you looked up at me, and you were like, “Are you in therapy?” [laughter] I was like, I’m not. You ended up introducing me to my therapist, who’s also a frequent guest on this podcast as well.

John: Dennis Palumbo, Episode 99. A famous episode for our listeners, which we talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and specific things that writers may benefit from therapy. Was it helpful? Again, as much as you feel like sharing or don’t feel like sharing, I’m curious because I feel like we have other listeners who probably have similar sort of things that they’re working on.

Mike: Here’s how I feel about writing. I probably spend about 50% of the time that I write making sure that the lines fit correctly for me. Sometimes that means sacrificing a really great line, but it also leads me to over-scrutinize every word in a way that I think actually does ultimately improve the writing. Nothing about my writing process is passive, and it needs to fit a specific way. The one sheet that I do, I don’t fuck with margins at all, but sometimes I will reduce the space between two words from a 12 to a 10 just manually.

I spend a lot of time obsessively just making sure that the dialogue looks like blocks and that there’s not just one or two words hanging over. I didn’t always used to be this way. It’s actually grown more cute as I’ve gotten older, which I think is a little bit worrisome. It’s also become almost like a good luck talisman. I want to present the best-looking aesthetic version of a script because I do believe that there is a subconscious quality to reading a script. If it just looks sloppy on the page, at least for me as a reader, it does sometimes affect how I read.

Craig: I wonder if, as I listen to you, I think a couple of things, that one, that’s crazy, but two, so what? Because you’re good. I guess whatever helps a good writer write. We are not perfect. We all have our things. As you mentioned, maybe there is a theoretical, better version of a script you write that is less concerned about these things, but you don’t write that script because you are concerned about those things. If the script is good and you need to not use the letter Q for some reason, what do I care? We’re all crazy.

What we do is a kind of insanity, and we all have our weird things. It sounds to me like maybe you’ve made your peace with it and you accept that it’s part of your process and it’s a good thing for you.

Mike: Yes, it’s never felt crippling. Then once you get into production and there’s just the realities of talking about the actors, and then you’re like, you know what? I don’t think I’m so hobbled by it, but I do think in those early drafts that it does help my process to over-scrutinize and be a little bit obsessive with the words that are in the script. Yes, I’m probably insane. When I first spoke to Dennis, my therapist of about three years now, I showed him a sample page, and he was just like, “Do you feel like it helps you? Do you feel like it makes you better at doing this?”

I think at least in the short term, it does. In the long term, we’ll see. For right now, I think it leads to a more thought-out product and one that I do think, from an aesthetic perspective, it is helpful to be presenting something that looks clean.

Craig: It may not really matter to anyone but you, but that’s fine.

Mike: It does matter to you.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I want to go back to my initial instinct when I saw your page. My concern was this may be getting in the way of you doing the best work that you know how to do. To hear you articulate that you feel like this is a helpful way for you to get that best draft that you feel good about that feels like it is your work, then I totally respect that. It sounds like Dennis provided a perspective on, is this helping or is this getting in your way? That would be the crucial question. Is this helping you do the work that you want to do, or is it a thing that is stopping you from doing the work or distracting you from doing the work?

It sounds like you believe at this moment, it’s helpful, but you’re also mindful that at some point, it could be not helpful.

Mike: It has to be. I’ve never run a writer’s room or really been in a writer’s room. When you’re collaborating with other writers, yes, you have to throw that in the garbage immediately, that notion that your script should look like someone else’s. At moments, I’m not that crazy.

John: Also, there are a lot of people who are listening to this podcast who are looking at their own scripts and their own pages. Listening to the three page challenge, and we’re talking about how it looks on the page. We’re talking about widows and orphan some, but also just how lines are broken up and how this all feels.

I want to make sure that in the conversations that Craig and I have about the pages that we’re looking at, no one is taking it to an unhelpful extreme. No one’s being so obsessed with it. They’re not actually focused on what the words themselves actually are. Which is, it sounds like it is for you, a tool to really help you inspect what are the word choices you’re making, not just is it exactly 60 characters long?

Mike: I know, I think every word has a cost to it, so hopefully it leads to a tighter draft.

Craig: It leads to a draft. That’s the–

John: It leads to a draft. That’s a crucial thing.

Mike: As long as it leads to a draft.

Craig: It’s how it comes out. That’s how it’s organized with you. Our brains are complicated. One of the things I’ve been really working on for myself in this area of– I don’t know what you’d call it, human growth and enlightenment, is understanding that the process that I follow to make stuff is flawed because I am flawed, and that’s okay. That’s standard. Standardish human being, not a god, flawed. It works. It’s just the flaws are part of it.

You have to accept it. You can call the flaws at that point not flaws, just characteristics. You don’t actually get to write anything if it doesn’t go through the machinery of, and I also want it to look like this. It’s the same thing. You can’t separate them. When you get to a place where you’re like, “I actually don’t like this. This is holding me back. Now it just feels like a bad habit,” then you become aware and then it is recontextualized, and perhaps it is teased apart, but if it never gets teased apart, if you spend the rest of your life turning things to make them fit, if the scripts are good, this is how you do it.

John: You said bad habits. I think I often say is that early in my career, I felt like I had a lot of bad habits, and at some point, stopped labeling them as bad. They’re just my habits.

Craig: They’re your habits.

John: They’re the way I do things, and that’s actually okay.

Craig: That’s part of it.

John: Some of my procrastination is just my habit, and I can’t fix it because it’s actually just how I work. That’s also okay. If at a certain point it does get in the way of how I work, then I need to really stop and examine them and see if there’s a thing I can do to not fall into that pattern again.

Mike: It’s actually incredibly helpful to talk about this with you guys. In no way would I recommend that anyone else do what I’m currently doing.

Craig: No one else is going to.

Mike: I’m not preaching the gospel here.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like fun.

[laughter]

Mike: No.

Craig: It sounds like you.

Mike: To me, it’s a version of problem-solving and puzzling in a way. It’s an added component to the way that I write. I think that at times it ends up leading to something beautiful. Other times, I do have to sacrifice my first blush best line, and maybe I find something better. Hopefully, if I’m ever on this podcast again, we can check back in, see if I’m still doing it. Right now it’s proved I would say mostly helpful and not too benevolent.

Craig: It seems like it’s been incredibly helpful, actually. Sometimes people will talk about these issues, and they will put them under, “Oh, I know I seem a little OCD about this.” We tend to concentrate on the O, which is obsession. I think it’s the C, it’s compulsion that is far more frequent among people who do what we do in a large sense, because we’re compelled to do it in the first place. It is compulsory. Then there are these kinds of compulsions that occur as part of this compulsory behavior of writing.

Mike: I think all screenwriters are bound by this. We’re all compulsive, we’re all a little crazy. We’re all neurotic. We’re all in our heads, locked ourselves in rooms, and written these things in a vacuum. There is a compulsion there. Sometimes that comes out sideways, like in my case. We all have different processes, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about it, especially with two guys like you.

Craig: You are not alone. To say that we are all idiosyncratic in our own idiosyncratic ways would be an understatement. This is actually great for people at home who may feel sometimes like they’re weird. Yes, writing is a weird thing to do. Imagining that you’re 12 different people who are all disagreeing with each other is a weird thing to do, coming up with these scenarios all the time, and what we do is weird.

It is neurologically weird. How could you not, as part of the neurological weirdness, have quirks? To the extent that you can accept those quirks as long as John says, they’re not things that you don’t– if you don’t feel a great need to get rid of it, then you and Mike Makowsky have something in common, and me, and John.

John: Next thing I want to talk about is typologies. This came up because my husband, Mike, I was describing to him this person I needed to work with and some frustrations I was feeling about our working relationship. Mike said like, “Oh, well, she’s a questioner.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” It’s like, “Oh, Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies. There’s a questioner.”

He brought this up before, and he is like, “I will show you the chapter on how to deal with a questioner.” He showed me the chapter in the book. I’m like, “Oh, wow. That is exactly right. You’ve precisely diagnosed why I’m having a challenging time with this and what the best strategies are for getting into consensus with this person.” I want to have a general conversation about personality archetypes, the ways we saw people, both in the real world and also our fictional characters.

I think there’s this instinct that you should be able to neatly categorize all these people and their personalities and their types. Craig, you and I have talked about Myers-Briggs before. In addition to Myers-Briggs, there’s Enneagram, the Big Five, you hear about the four behavioral types from DiSC, and the four tendencies from Gretchen Rubin.

Mike: I remember I read a book in high school when I was buying all the screenwriting books called The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits.

Craig: Sure.

Mike: I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of that one.

Craig: Is it Orange? Does it–

Mike: I’m sorry. I’m frantically–

Craig: Is it light?

Mike: It was blue.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I’m frantically trying to Google it right now, but maybe we can-

Craig: Blue books are out, orange books are in.

John: Absolutely. I remember an early book I read was The Gods in Everyman, or The Goddesses in Everywoman. Basically, it was talking about personality types that way. I’d love to have a discussion about to what point is it useful and to what point is it just astrology, and you’re just randomly assigning labels to things.

Mike: Oh gosh. I don’t–

John: You don’t think of your characters in terms of a bundle of attributes that sort of fit neatly together?

Mike: I don’t think so. I tend to adapt. I adapt a lot of true stories. I definitely gravitate to characters that have similar misguided impulses to one another, but I wouldn’t say that I try to be too prescriptive by sorting them into boxes.

John: Craig, have you ever tried to do Myers-Briggsy on any of your characters or how they approach things?

Craig: Hell, no. Everybody goes a phase where I don’t know– Melissa’s family was super into Myers-Briggs, but I never thought that it was particularly interesting. There’s probably a character type called person who likes character types, and they get value out of this.

John: I bet there’s a large number of our listeners, or at least a sizable percentage, who really want to neatly be able to categorize things.

Craig: You can’t.

John: That’s part of their process.

Craig: You can try, but-

John: You can try.

Craig: I personally don’t think this is a good– because it’s post, it’s not pre. Writing is about creating somebody. When you are introducing characters to an audience or a new relationship and a story to an audience, they need to see the birth of it, and they need to see people discovering each other. As they discover each other, they should be changing each other. We tend to look at people when they’re in moments of change. These things are sort of this is who you are, not changed. It’s simple, and they tend to go over the same things. Really, as far as I could tell, these things exist to sell books.

John: To sell books and to do workshops to understand your coworkers and things like that.

Craig: Here’s the thing, I’m fascinated by people who aren’t like me. I’m also fascinated by people that are fundamentally not like me. It is interesting. I don’t necessarily know if the people I’ve liked the most as I’ve gone through my career have been a certain type. My guess is no, I think generally what I seem to be attracted to is intelligence. There are intelligent people in all of these. You and I are not the same personality type. Did you know that?

[laughter]

John: I did notice that. Somehow over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed that. It’s funny. Yet we do have significant degrees of overlap in terms of our desire for logic, our desire for-

Craig: Also, you’re smart. Bottom line is you’re smart. That’s what I go for. I like smart. I like smart people who are so wildly different on only scales. When I meet somebody that has my characteristics, who’s just dull, I don’t need to hang out with them.

John: There’s a thing we’re developing internally for– so we made a writer emergency pact, which is, as you get stuck in a story, ways to navigate out of a jam. A thing we’ve been working on is a version that is more character archetype-sy, but rather than being expose facto, ways of thinking about if someone has these two characteristics together, what character would have that?

What would a nurturer or explorer feel like? What kind of character is that? Useful storytelling thinking tool, but it’s not meant to be, “Oh, you have to have this exact mix of characters in order for it to work properly.”

Mike: To what end do you think D&D character classifications?

John: I feel like I am constantly referring to characters as chaotic neutral. The alignment charts, yes.

Craig: Alignment charts are fun, but again, post-facto fun in and of themselves, they’re pretty blunt tools. There’s also quite a bit of fuzziness between some of them.

John: Here’s where I imagine it could be useful. None of us traditionally work with a group of other writers, but I could imagine, as you’re having a conversation about a character or a new character you’re introducing, how it fits together, rather than trying to apply an exact label to them, look at some of the spectrums that they lay out there. To what degree are they introverted or extroverted? To what degree are they rebelling against external expectations, or are they intrinsically motivated to do certain things? How agreeable are they? To what degree do they want to challenge authority? Those are useful conversations to have, but rather than reduce them to one little label, I think you’re probably better off.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions. What does Julia in Oxfordshire ask us?

Drew: I’m a novelist who teaches creative writing. I would be interested in your views on what someone with IP, like a popular novel, should look out for when people start circling. What’s the ideal journey from page to screen, and what’s the nightmare?

John: I’ve had a couple of adventures with adapting books, or you’re dealing with a property that’s becoming popular. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with authors in that situation. I won’t talk about the bad experiences. My Arlo Finch books came out at the same time that Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi came out. It’s been interesting watching that development cycle because that came out in 2017, and the first movie version has only coming out next year or 2027. It’s like a 10-year journey.

Looking through the number of times it got set up and then fell apart and then got going again, as the author, I used to say, you just cannot know when a thing is actually going to happen, when it’s all going to come together. Mike, you bought this woman’s book, optioned this woman’s book, and it took years. At no point did it seem like a certainty that it would ever actually make it to the screen, even two years out or a year and a half out.

I would say that talking with authors whose books have been optioned or purchased for adaptation, you have to treat it as this will probably never happen and make peace with that. You won’t have the kind of control over it that you do over your own book. It’s just like your kid is going off to college, and it’s just going to become its own thing.

Mike: Yes. I think a lot of authors have really challenging relationships with the eventual product, and so many other times. Some of the greatest books of the last 10 years, books that maybe in a different era would have readily been ripe for assassination or-

Craig: Wow.

John: For assassination. [unintelligible 00:52:50]

Mike: -for adaptation. I recently went on a big Barbara Kingsolver kick over this past year, and reading books like The Poisonwood Bible or Demon Copperhead where you’re just like, these are some of the best books of all time. Why hasn’t this been made as– You weren’t the first person who ever thought of doing it. It’s hard to get things made. Yes. It’s just really, really, really difficult.

John: I would encourage Julia Nostrachir, if someone’s circling your book, you might think, “Oh, a director would be fantastic.” Directors attach themselves to 19,000 things, and none of them ever happen. If a Mike Makowsky approaches you, who’s a writer who’s obsessive, who can actually do the thing, it’s generally a better choice.

Mike: I tend to classify myself more as compulsive than obsessive.

John: I’m sorry about that, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Well done, sir.

John: I don’t want to mislabel you or put you on the wrong side.

Mike: Yes. If I call you, please say yes. I agree.

John: Let’s answer one more question. Oh, here’s one from Marco about writing with a bad back. Craig, you may have an opinion about that.

Drew: I remember you mentioning back injections for pain. I’m turning 50 and right when things are finally starting to go well career-wise, my back decided to revolt. I can barely sit for more than 5 to 10 minutes without serious pain. The price of 15 plus years glued to a chair, I guess. I have scoliosis, facet joint arthritis, mild anterior-

Craig: Anterolisthesis.

Drew: There we go. Oh, boy. A couple of disc protrusions, probably the usual writer’s cocktail. Surgeons say it’s not bad enough for surgery, so I’m stuck in this frustrating in-between zone where something could be done, but hard to figure out what. Did you ever find something that actually helped? Do you have specific physio or exercises, or a special chair? Any professional tips would be a lifesaver.

John: Pretty sure many of the Scriptnotes audience might be in the same boat. Craig, you and I were talking about this just backstage right before the curtain opened at our live show, and you were about to get another injection. Did that happen? Did it help?

Craig: I had to make the appointment, but I’m going to be having it when I’m back home right after Christmas, right before New Year’s. In between Christmas and New Year’s, that’s back injection season. It’s going to be lovely. First of all, Marco, I certainly sympathize with you. Yes, you’re in your 50s, and yes, this is how it’s going, and you already had issues. Scoliosis has been there almost certainly since you were a kid and just gets worse over time.

Anterolisthesis is not fun, and any arthritis anywhere in your back, and disc protrusions, that’s really the worst of it because that starts to push on the nerves all around. That’s what the pain is. The pain is nerves. It’s not bones. It’s not the rest of it. It’s the nerves. Yes, physical therapy can help. There are some stretches that I do every morning that seem to help. I would not suggest you do those because those are for what I have, which is spinal stenosis and [unintelligible 00:55:35] and I don’t know what stretches would be good for you, but I think physical therapy, it could help.

Pretty much every single back doctor in the world suggests that you strengthen your core muscles, which I would do if I had them, but I’m pretty sure that my abs have actually dissolved. I don’t think I have abdominal muscles. [laughs] I basically don’t have a butt muscle or an abdominal muscle, and those are the muscles that they want you to strengthen, your glutes and your abs. That is something that they will always recommend.

I do use an Aeron myself, and it works very nicely for me. My body conforms to it, and it feels good. The special chair you should use is the one that makes you feel the least pain. Back surgery is a nightmare. If you can avoid that, I would avoid it. PT, for sure. Strengthen the ab, core, and butt, and find a chair that is okay. If you need to sit up in bed and write a bed, you write in bed. What can you do?

John: A friend of mine with back issues swears by peripheral nerve stimulator implants. Basically, once a year, they implant a little thing that basically keeps stimulating those nerves until your nerves just go like, “Oh, well, this must be normal. There’s actually not a problem,” but it’s a hassle to do, and you can’t get your back wet for a while, and things like that. There are other alternatives.

I would just encourage, and Craig, I want your opinion on this too, for Marco, this person says it’s not bad enough for surgery. That shouldn’t be the last person you go to. That shouldn’t be the last word on things. There may be other solutions out there. Don’t assume that you have to live in pain.

Craig: Well, as we get older, we will all be living in pain. Pain’s coming. You hear that, Makowsky? It’s coming.

Mike: Oh, no.

Craig: There are levels, of course, and there are remediations. The other thing that they sometimes will mess around with is radio frequency ablation, where they use radio waves to fry the nerve tips. It didn’t work for me, but some people have gotten relief from that. I don’t know where you live, Marco, but in Los Angeles, Cedar-Sinai has a pain center. That’s where I go, and it is a building full of doctors that are there to deal with pain.

The good news is that they have never suggested to me that the answer is opioids. Don’t worry about that. They’re not going to turn you into a junkie, but they really do concentrate on how to alleviate pain and to get to the root of it. It’s been good for me. I get basically two of these shots a year, and they work pretty well.

John: Let’s do our one cool thing. Craig, your one cool thing looks like it’s related to opioids.

Craig: It is. Opioids on my mind. I’m here in Vancouver. The guys here on the podcast who see me on my Zoom thing can see lovely gray slate rainy Vancouver behind me.

John: I want to say yes.

Craig: That is standard. Vancouver is a fantastic city. It has a brutal opioid problem. Anybody who lives or works here in Vancouver knows that there are about, I don’t know, six, seven straight blocks of East Hastings that are populated almost exclusively by people who are using drugs and primarily fentanyl and also now some sort of tranquilizer thing, like another veterinary tranquilizer. It’s bad.

The fentanyl epidemic is at this point just become the problem everywhere. There is an effort now to create a vaccine. You guys have probably heard of Narcan, which is naloxone, the thing you spray– Oh, you’re at a party. You see somebody go, and they thought they were injecting heroin. It was fentanyl. They’re dying. You spray this in their nose. It blocks all of the opioid receptors in the body and can help keep them from their central nervous system plummeting to zero. The issue, of course, is that has to be administered after the fact.

What they’re working on now is they call it a vaccine. It’s really more of a prophylactic. The idea is they inject you with something that binds to the fentanyl molecule, but along with it has a larger chunk of protein that keeps it from crossing through the blood-brain barrier. Basically, it can’t go anywhere, so it can’t hurt you. It just runs around your bloodstream doing nothing. This would be for people who are like, “Hey, look, I do use this drug, but I don’t want fentanyl, I just want heroin, I don’t want fentanyl.” It protects you against the thing that might kill you.
There are issues that this could create.

John: I could imagine.

Craig: For instance, then people are like, “I want fentanyl, I got the fentanyl vaccine, but I really want to get high off of fentanyl. I think I’ll just take twice as much as I normally did to overwhelm this.” That is a potential danger because one thing we do know about people with substance abuse issues is that they’re incredibly persistent and clever. The other issue, of course, is if you ever did need some sort of surgical intervention or something, if your blood-brain barrier is blocked from one or more methods of anesthesia, you may have a serious problem.

It does feel like, given how bad it is out there, something like this might be a good mitigation solution. It’s a very interesting thought because we do– Here’s what we absolutely know, telling people to not use opioids does not work. That is useless. We know that for a fact. Let’s see, maybe the fentanyl “vaccine” will gain some traction.

John: Great. Mike, do you have one cool thing to share?

Mike: Yes. In adapting this true story from the Annals of American History and then trying to make a show that appeals to more than just the 2% of people that would pick up a book about James Garfield, but also to the other 98% of people who are quite certain at the outset that they do not care about James Garfield and making a show with a little bit more of a modern engine behind it. There are a handful of other shows and films that have done it well, a small handful, one of which is a show called The Good Lord Bird from 2020.

It’s so good. It’s based on this incredible James McBride book, and it’s about John Brown, the abolitionist in his reign on Harpers Ferry in 1859 that, in many ways, precedes the Civil War. It’s adapted by Ethan Hawke, who plays John Brown and Mark Rashard. It’s so funny and weird and incredible. It’s one of the best adaptations that I’ve seen in a really, really long time, and I think very much is of a piece with Death by Lightning, hopefully. It’s just a show that I thought was really, really remarkable and that I wish more people still talked about because it’s great.

Craig: The Good Lord Bird?

Mike: Yes. It’s on Showtime in 2020, which was probably one of the reasons.

John: It’s probably Paramount+, I would suspect.

Mike: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I hope it’s available somewhere.

Craig: Let’s do a quick Good Lord Bird. Let’s do a little quick live Google. Good Lord Bird-

John: It looks like it’s on Prime, but I don’t know.

Mike: It’s really, really great. Would recommend it to anybody that likes my show and would want to do another historical deep dive. It’s very different from what you would expect it to be. It is rollicking and funny and strange.

Craig: Looks like it’s on Apple TV, and that’s about that. Oh, no, I see Prime Video. Yes. I think you got Amazon or Apple TV, both of which will be purchased by Netflix Warner Brothers within days.

Mike: Ethan Hawke is so, so good on the show, and Daveed Diggs is there. He plays Frederick Douglass.

John: That’s great. Again, that was peak TV, and so much was being made, it was so hard to just find an audience for anything, especially if it wasn’t on HBO or Netflix, even Netflix stuff disappeared. My one cool thing is a show that was made for Canada, made for Crave TV, is now available in the US on HBO Max called Heated Rivalry. Gay people know what I’m talking about because every gay person is obsessed with the show.

Craig: Every gay person.

John: Every gay person in Los Angeles or New York City. Basically, everyone on my Instagram knows about Heated Rivalry. What I admire so much about the show so it’s based on a book by Rachel Reed, and it’s created, produced, and directed by Jacob Tierney, who I want to get on the show at some point. The show is about professional hockey, and so it’s these two hockey players and their romance between them.

What is remarkable about it is, remember, Craig, we had Rachel Bloom on the show talking about sex on screen, and sort of like why we’re not seeing good sex on screen, and the show does it and delivers it in a really good way. There are sex scenes that are actually narratively important, really well shot, and story happens during sex scenes, which you just don’t see. It’s not just like a little bonus you put on there, it’s like, no, it’s like the sex is the point and the story purposes are happening during it. Just incredibly well made. Don’t watch it with your family, don’t watch it with your kids. [laughter]

Craig: Don’t watch it on a plane.

John: Don’t watch it on a plane. It is unapologetically smutty in a great way. I just really respect that they were able to make this show and put it out there in the world. Heated Rivalry.

Mike: Where is it?

John: It’s HBO Max in the US, and it’s just really, really well done.

Craig: Yes, so Crave is the HBO output channel up here in Canada, so typically it’s HBO shipping things to Crave, but I like that Crave is shipping something back.

John: Yes. It’s shot in Toronto, but set in many places around the world. Clearly, it made smart choices in pulling in the horniness of Challengers, the tennis show, but it’s actually making that subtext text and really nicely done. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Foster. If you’ve an outro, 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 signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. Please keep sending through those posts about the Scriptnotes book. Those are delightful. We’ll continue to repost those.

We have T-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkwear. They’re perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll 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 again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get the first emails about live shows and other stuff that’s coming up.

You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments. You get Mike’s episode from 2020. You get the Rachel Bloom sex episode, all those things, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coaching trees as sort of the growth of one show leads to showrunners of other shows. We’ll talk about that after the music. Mike Makowsky, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much for having me. It was a blast.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. This topic came from a listener, Rob G., who sent us in this article by Alan Sepinwall, who was writing for The Ringer, on which TV show has the best coaching tree. Here’s the setup. Football fans often talk about coaching trees, how so many currently successful NFL coaches used to work for Mike Shanahan, or how Bill Parcells at various points in his career employed Bill Belichick, Sean Payton, Tom Coughlin. I see you shrugging like you don’t follow football.

Mike: I don’t know who any of these people are.

Craig: John knows all of them.

John: I’m impressed I was able to pronounce these names.

Craig: The only thing John knows about sports are the names of those two guys in that hockey show.

John: Oh, really? [laughter] Hollander and Ilya.

Craig: There you go.

John: There you go. Absolutely. There are also TV coaching trees where producers or shows bring together many writers and directors who go on to have these amazing careers and, in some cases, create their own coaching trees. I’ll talk you through some of the ones they sort out, but then I also want to discuss why this may happen. The first one is The White Shadow, which I don’t really remember. Ken Howards.

Craig: I love that show.

John: John Falsey, and Joshua Brand, Mark Tinker, Thomas Carter, Tim Van Patten, Kevin Hooks all came out of that.

Mike: Well, Tim was an actor on the show.

Craig: He played Baloney. What was it? Oh, Salami. It was Salami. That was his name. Not Baloney.

John: Ken Howard is an actor. [crosstalk]

Craig: The former president of SAG.

John: SAG. He was Hank Cooper on 30 Rock. 30 Rock’s so good. Great.

Mike: He died a few years ago. When I first moved out to LA, I didn’t really know anyone, but my dad and stepmom were doing this dog charity that he and his wife were really passionate about. I got dinner with Ken Howard, and we really hit it off. He was the first person I ever met in the industry. He saw me as, I don’t know, someone that he would say [unintelligible 01:09:11] sure. Then he died three years into me living in LA.

My parents had a holiday party that year, and his widow comes to the holiday party, and she gives me this box. She’s like, “Put this in a safe place and open it tomorrow.” I was like, “Okay.” I was a little drunk. I was like, “Yes, thank you. It’s so good to see you, Linda.” The next morning, I open it up, and it’s this translucent blue and orange paperweight. I’m like, “Oh, that’s so nice from Linda Howard.” I’m like, “I’ll put this,” I don’t know.

Underneath it, there’s this note being like, “I just wanted you to know that Ken thought the world of you, so it seems only right that you would have a piece of him.” I have one-twelfth of Ken Howard’s ashes on my desk. The paperweights, it’s a company called Artful Ashes, and it’s the white shadow colors. They purposely did the white shadow colors. I see Ken every day. He’s my roommate. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: I’m thinking about who is going to get a little piece of me.

John: My instincts as well.

Craig: By the way, we now, both of us, have to send a little bit of our ashes to Mike Makowsky. He needs [crosstalk] weird collection.

[crosstalk]

Mike: My stepmom’s mother, who I was also really close with, died, and she was so inspired that she then contacted Artful Ashes, so I also have one-twelfth of Jan, and they live next– I’m collecting infinity stones, essentially.

Craig: Unfortunately, when you die, someone’s going to have to get all of your dead other people.

John: Wow.

Mike: That’s my Ken Howard story. That’s an incredible Ken Howard story. Whenever the white shadow comes up, obviously, I need to tell that story. He was such a great human being.

Craig: That’s awesome.

John: Let’s talk about that because it sounds like he was a great human being who also cared about the next generation. That’s partly what the coaching trees things were talking about. It’s like people who were apparently– they not only ran really great shows, but people developed underneath them who could take those lessons and do their own things. The Golden Girls, obviously, ran for a long time, was an accommodate institution. Mitch Hurwitz, Mark Cherry, Christopher Lloyd, all came from that. Christopher Lloyd went on to do Modern Family. Nash Bridges, Damon Lindelof, Sean Ryan, Glenn Mazzara.

Mike: Was Carlton [Cuse] on-

Craig: I believe he was.

John: I feel like they met on that.

Craig: I think that’s where he took Damon under his wing.

John: X-Files, Howard Gordon, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, Tim Minear, Darin Morgan.

Craig: Wow. Look at this.

John: Incredible. When you get to The Office, of course, we’ve had Mike Schur on the show, but Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak, but also Paul Lieberstein, Justin Spitzer, Lee Eisenberg, and Gene Stupnitsky. Incredible writers who all went off and ran things.

Craig: Your show of shows.

John: Your show of shows.

Craig: That’s the immediate thing I thought of, and it is number one on this list. This was their stacked writing staff. Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. What the hell? There’s a really interesting book about them that’s called Madness on Something Floors. It was just like the story of what that place was like with those guys when they were all, I guess, in their 20s and 30s. Neil Simon alone. Incredible.

John: The article also talks about Roseanne was not a happy place to be working, but obviously, amazing people came through there. Josh Weed, Amy Sherman-Paladino, Chuck Lorre, Norm MacDonald, Dana Jacobson, Bruce Helford. A difference, though, is that these are shows that most of these are– they ran 22 episodes per season. They had large writing staffs. There was a lot of you’re at that a lot, and so you got a lot of chance to just do stuff, and that helps you develop your craft and your career. Shows where you’re writing eight episodes, there’s just going to be less opportunity to learn from all that stuff.

Craig: Or a show like the one that Mike does where there’s nobody. Nobody learns. By the way, that’s my- [crosstalk]

John: Nobody learns. Chernobyl.

Craig: Exactly. Yes. Nobody learns, but it is interesting to look at how many shows there have been that were in this model. Quite a few shows now, even though maybe they’re not doing 22 episodes, maybe they do fewer. I’m thinking of shows like Hacks or something. There are still people on staff who are learning and growing.

John: They will [inaudible 01:13:57] it.

Craig: What it really comes down to, I think, is who’s running it and how good are they at picking talent? The people who were running these shows, Sid Caesar had choices. He was like, “All right, out of all the people I could hire, I like these people.” 100% accuracy on that. You have to look at the folks that were running White Shadow or Sopranos, David Chase. These guys had been around with some of these other people in other rooms before, but they knew, okay, I’ve been on a bunch of shows. I now have my chance to write my show. I’m taking this one, this one, this one, this one. Then those people are like, “Ooh, and you should take this one and this one.” The coaching tree is really a taste tree, I think.

John: Yes, I think that’s crucial. Thinking back to our guests, Abbott Elementary. We had Quinta Brunson on. We also had Brittani Nichols on, who’s grown season by season by season. She’s now an EP on the show. Five years from now, as we’re looking at this list, there’s going to be a ton of writers who’ve come out of Abbott Elementary who are controlling this business. It’s thanks to end the show on some happy news that sometimes things grow and change, and develop because people are good and they make good things.

Craig: Then you die, your ashes go into a chunk of Lucite, and it is sent to a guy.

Mike: To me. I will take your ashes.

John: You’ll take your ashes. On the future side, there’s less of this because you don’t have a chance to develop a staff. I would hope that I’ve had a very good run of assistants who’ve gone on to do amazing things and grown their own places. Rawson, and Dana, and Chad, and Stuart, and Drew, and Megan McDonald, and Megan– everyone’s gone off and killed in industry, which has been nice, too. That’s also a testament to you.

Craig: I’m sure you have great taste in picking assistants. You’re really good at this. As a recipient of this, I do have to acknowledge David Zucker, who taught me a lot, and Todd Phillips, who taught me a lot. Both of those guys didn’t need to include me to the extent that they did in the process of directing feature films, but they did. Without that, I would not– Those are essential things that I learned about filmmaking and writing and all of it.

John: Cool. Mike Makowsky, thank you again for being on our show.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Death by Lightning on Netflix
• Mike Makowsky on IMDb and Instagram
• Episode 448 (The last time Mike was on the podcast)
• Which TV Show Has the Best Coaching Tree? Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer
• Size matters: a single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion
• New evidence for the sensorimotor mismatch theory of weight perception and the size-weight illusion
• Friedman Personnel Agency
• Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
• The Ballad of Guiteau from Assassins
• The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
• Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein
• A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test by Emily Mullin for WIRED
• Heated Rivalry on HBO Max
• The Good Lord Bird
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Luke Foster (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.