The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/realistic-but-distracting).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** And this is Episode 626 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what do you do when reality is distracting? As writers, we aim for accuracy and specificity, which generally help stories feel authentic, but those very qualities can sometimes paradoxically pull viewers out of the story while trying to find the middle ground. We’ll also answer some listener questions about writing during production, period details, and whether or not to read the script before watching the movie.
**Craig:** Oh, there’s an answer to that one.
**John:** Give us a spoiler. What’s your answer?
**Craig:** No.
**John:** I think you often should. We’ll discuss and debate this.
**Craig:** Before you watch the movie?
**John:** Yeah. As a person who wants to learn about writing, the craft.
**Craig:** Oh, that.
**John:** That.
**Craig:** Oh, I thought you meant just as a person that was watching a movie, the way we would hope that they would watch it, without knowing what’s happening.
**John:** We’ll dig into that. In our bonus segment for premium members, how can you tell when someone is just being nice? We’ll discuss techniques for differentiating actual interest when it comes to scripts and in real life.
**Craig:** Give away all my secrets.
**John:** This show is about revealing Craig Mazin’s secrets. That’s really what it’s all-
**Craig:** Going to have to get new secrets.
**John:** Get some new secrets. We have some follow-up. Drew, help us out with some follow-up.
**Drew Marquardt:** Robert writes, “I thought this might be of some interest to John. The first baby born in Ireland in 2024 was named Arlo.”
**Craig:** Is that a fairly popular name in Ireland?
**John:** It is not a very popular name in Ireland or even here. My book series, Arlo Finch, I picked the name Arlo Finch in 2016. Back then, it wasn’t even in the top 500 names in the U.S., but it has grown quite a lot. It’s now around 150 in the U.S. It’s nice. Nice to see Arlo catching on.
**Craig:** The only Arlo I’ve ever heard of prior to your books was Arlo Guthrie, of course.
**John:** I think I have a pretty good handle on picking names before they become popular, because in my TV series D.C., the brother and sister characters were Mason and Finley, and those were not in the top thousands of names, and they’re now common names.
**Craig:** Finley.
**John:** Finley.
**Craig:** Finley.
**John:** Could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name.
**Craig:** I know there’s been a billion Masons. When I play MLB The Show-
**John:** MLB The Show is a basketball game for PlayStation?
**Craig:** MLB The Show is a baseball-
**John:** Major League Baseball.
**Craig:** As opposed to, say, the NBA, which is basketball. You were close.
**John:** I was close. It was a sports game.
**Craig:** It was a sports game. I wish you could see John’s face.
**John:** The Show could’ve been a rap battle, so you were playing a rap battle.
**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. MLB The Show, which is a baseball video game, they have this thing where you can customize. You build a player, and then you can customize their name. They have a billion first names and also a billion last names. But of course they don’t have Mazin. Nobody ever has Mazin. But they do have Mason, which is close enough.
**John:** That’s pretty close.
**Craig:** I can make a character named Craig Mason, with the exception, also, I guess the name is slightly different, and also, my baseball player can play baseball very well, but I cannot.
**John:** Small differences.
**Craig:** Yeah, those are the only-
**John:** The simulation is almost completely appropriate.
**Craig:** Dude is huge.
**John:** Speaking of names that are similar to your own name, you cast somebody in The Last of Us, and their last name was so similar to yours. Who is this?
**Craig:** We announced all sorts of casting this week. We announced Kaitlyn Dever, who’s going to be playing Abby. We announced Isabela Merced, who is playing Dina. And we announced Young Mazino, who is playing Jesse. Young Mazino, for those of you who have seen Beef, he plays the younger brother of Steven Yeun’s character. The first time I met Young, I said, “You’ve stolen my rap name.” That was it. I was going to be Young Mazino.
**John:** Now you can’t be.
**Craig:** He took it, by being named Young Mazino. I’m still puzzled over it.
**John:** I guess there are Mazin variations you could go, because sometimes there’ll be a URL that we really want, and we can’t get that URL, and so we go for something that’s close to it or something.
**Craig:** Right, but there was only one name I was ever going to be. I’m out of the rap game now. I can’t drop my next cut.
**John:** Yeah, for MLB The Show, which is an amazing rap battle simulator, and everyone loves it. It’s really popular.
**Craig:** I like that you were just like, “I’m going to wing it here. Basketball.”
**John:** Basketball.
**Craig:** “Screw it.”
**John:** I made a guess, and I just stuck with it.
**Craig:** That was great.
**John:** More follow-up from Iceland now.
**Drew:** Rut in Iceland writes, “It made me a tiny bit sad to hear that Craig is certain he would never be able to pronounce Icelandic words properly, because I’m sure he can. Both of you. Being Icelandic myself, and given the topic on lab meat in the episode, I thought of the Icelandic word for a cannibal, which is mannæta.”
**Craig:** Mannæta.
**Drew:** Mannæta.
**Craig:** Mannæta.
**Drew:** “Icelandic is a very literal language, and mannæta literally means an eater of man, or a man-eater-ish. The thing is, all those weird noises, it’s a trick. Act like you’re always freezing a bit due to the harsh weather in Iceland and like you’re always a tiny bit in a hurry because you’re running away from the volcanoes. Try saying mannæta like you’re freezing and in a bit of a hurry. You never know if you’ll end up in Iceland, in some meat lab in the future, trying to opt out of the human experience.”
**Craig:** I’m going to try it. Here we go. Mannæta.
**John:** Yeah, a little bit. It also had a little bit of a little Japanese quality to it.
**Craig:** Mannæta.
**John:** One of the things in the dialect lessons I’ve been doing about IPA, it’s a helpful thing with dialects is by where they’re putting the “uh” sound, the resting “uh” sound in the mouth. It’s how far forward it is and how far back it is. That’s an easy way to get you closer to where the vowels are and where the accent would fall.
**Craig:** “Ah” as opposed to “ah.”
**John:** Our American English, our “uh” is here, but in British English, it moves a little bit further, like “eh” or “eh.”
**Craig:** Oh, yeah.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Sure.
**John:** Sure.
**Craig:** Yeah.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Yah.
**John:** Drew had to do a bunch of that in acting school, I’m sure.
**Craig:** You did a bunch of just pronouncing the word “yeah?”
**Drew:** Yeah. Yeah.
**Craig:** Yah.
**John:** Yah.
**Drew:** Yah.
**Craig:** Yah.
**John:** We have more Mazin follow-up here. This is going back to the Christmas episode about our favorite childhood gifts.
**Drew:** That’s right, because you had mentioned that you got the Mazinga toy.
**Craig:** I knew somebody was going to write in about the Mazinga toy.
**Drew:** We had a few people.
**Craig:** Here we go.
**Drew:** Lamar writes, “I’m basically the same age as Craig, and those giant toys were also my favorite childhood gifts. I remember there being seven of them.”
**Craig:** Whoa.
**Drew:** “Five robots I stared at longingly in the Sears catalog as they stood side by side in a classic heroes shot, and then two kaijus, Godzilla and Rodan. I remember Mazinga being marketed as the one to have. And as Craig was describing him, I was thinking, ‘Mazinga, Mazinga!’ even before he said that name.”
Then, Richard in Boston wrote in to say, “The origins of Mazinga are in a 1972 manga and 1973 anime called Mazinger Z, with the design of the helmet, thus in fact predating Darth Vader by a few years. Shogun Warriors was Mattel’s American release of an assortment of different anime-related characters, including Mazinger Z. It was trying to ride on the wave of popularity of other Japanese giant robot properties that got rebranded and released for the American market, such as Transformers and Voltron.”
**Craig:** I am so glad that nobody wrote in in the comic book guy persona, like, “Actually, it’s pronounced muh-ZAIN-guh, and you were incorrect.” I at least had that little bit right. I did not know that there were five of them and then two monsters. I only thought there were three. I was lied to.
**John:** You were lied to, or maybe you didn’t get the full wish book catalog to see what those options were for you.
**Craig:** Yeah, Sears catalog.
**John:** Which catalogs did you have? We had Sears, Montgomery Ward’s, and J.C. Penney’s were the ones I remember.
**Craig:** I don’t recall us getting any catalogs. Our family apparently was not catalog-worthy. We never ordered anything. We would go to Sears, where my mom would buy the horrible winter coat. You know the horrible winter coat.
**John:** 100%, yeah.
**Craig:** Orange on the inside, blue on the outside, fake fur.
**John:** I have a cranberry-colored one of those that I see in some photos, and I look at it longingly.
**Drew:** Those are fashion now.
**Craig:** Oh, god. There’s probably some good vintage ones out there from the ’70s.
**John:** Yeah, but vintage is all being scooped up by people like my daughter, who just only thrifts.
**Craig:** There’s a lot of thrifting amongst the children.
**John:** They really are.
**Craig:** It’s ironic to them. “Ha ha ha.”
**John:** “Ha ha ha.”
**Craig:** “Ha ha, look, idiots wore this. Lol.”
**John:** But now you’re wearing it, so who’s the idiot now?
**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we probably had lice in that thing, so lolol.
**John:** We did wear it. We also got rid of it. And now you’re picking it up.
**Craig:** Exactly. Stupids.
**John:** Stupids. Our main topic this week, I’ve been watching a lot of screeners, going to see movies, but also seeing some screeners. This past week I watched Maestro, which I really liked. It tells the story of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet.
**Craig:** I have.
**John:** I was so distracted by the kazoos, because this is a period film about a musician, but man, there were so many kazoos in this movie.
**Craig:** Where is this going?
**John:** Listen. For folks who haven’t seen the movie, I thought I’d play a clip. This is a clip from Maestro. This scene we’re about to hear is Carey Mulligan and Sarah Silverman, who’s great in the movie. I loved seeing Sarah Silverman in a serious role. They’re just having a conversation, but even in an audio medium, I think you can figure out why I found this distracting.
[Maestro clip]
**Carey Mulligan:** Seems I’m attracted to a certain type.
**Sarah Silverman:** Listen. You know Lenny loves you. He really does. He’s just a man, a horribly aging man, who cannot just be wholly one thing. He’s lost.
**Carey:** I’ve always known who he is. He called me, you know.
**Craig:** What is this?
**Sarah:** And?
**Carey:** He wants us all to go to Fairfield together for two weeks. He sounded different.
**Sarah:** Felicia.
**Carey:** No, let’s not make excuses. He didn’t fail me.
**Sarah:** Felicia.
**Carey:** No, it’s my own arrogance, to think I could survive on what he could give.
**Craig:** What is this?
**John:** There weren’t literal kazoos. But what was pulling me out is they smoke in every scene in this movie, and it pulled me out of some scenes in this.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**John:** The kazoos are moments in which the cigarettes are appearing in the frame.
**Craig:** Okay, I see what you’re doing. You’re making a point.
**John:** I’m making a small little point here.
**Craig:** I see your point. Yes, it’s true. Melissa and I watched it together. When it was over and we were discussing it, she said, “Oh my god, they were smoking so much.” I was like, “I haven’t seen that many people smoking since Chernobyl,” in which everyone was smoking.
**John:** There are moments in which it’s acknowledged, and where she was like, “Oh, you have some ash on you.” She’s pulling ash off. But the cigarettes are so close to each other’s faces through a lot of it. It’s a deliberate choice. Bradley Cooper can make the choices he wants to make. But for me as a modern audience watching that film, I’m like, “They’re just smoking all the time.”
**Craig:** It is part of the period charm, I guess. Leonard Bernstein did die of a smoking-related cancer, esophageal or something like that. He had emphysema. His wife, as depicted in the movie, died fairly young from breast cancer, which oftentimes correlates to smoking. It was thematic. What I remembered when I was watching it, because when I do see people smoking in a movie a lot of times, I note it, but it reminded me of how much smoking was going on around me as a kid. My parents and my grandparents who lived with us all smoked all the time, inside. That’s kind of actually correct.
**John:** It’s why I want to get into this topic, because it is correct, it is accurate, but it’s also distracting. Sometimes as writers and as filmmakers, we’re making choices that are the accurate choice, yet to an audience looking at it, it may pull away from story that you want them to pay attention to, because that accuracy gets in the way of people being able to relate to what’s actually happening here.
Smoking is one of those things. We’ll spend a few minutes on smoking, because I think the reason why smoking seems so weird to us now is that we actually, as an industry, made choices about not showing smoking, and people stopped smoking so much. We banned smoking indoors. The number of people who smoke has just dropped tremendously in the United States and Europe. We’re just not seeing smoking so much in real life. Also, we deliberately don’t see stuff in films and television, because we made choices not to portray it.
**Craig:** I don’t know if we can necessarily say there’s a correlation between our artistic restraint and what’s going on out there. Obviously, during the time that Maestro takes place, so the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, we were just catching up to the health impacts of smoking in the ’70s and ’80s. The ’80s was when it really started to take off. There was the National Smokeout Day and all the rest of it.
**John:** Absolutely. 1970 was the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned advertising for cigarettes and tobacco.
**Craig:** It banned advertising for cigarettes, I think, on television.
**John:** On television, yes, and then eventually-
**Craig:** But they were in every magazine-
**John:** Of course.
**Craig:** … and at sporting events, and billboards.
**John:** Then it was 2007, which is pretty recently, that the MPAA said studios should eliminate smoking from all youth-rated films, and then Netflix said it was going to not have any cigarette smoking in anything aimed for TV-14 or younger.
**Craig:** I believe Universal has a thing where they just won’t show smoking at all, I think, or maybe if it’s rated R, they let you do it. But otherwise, any movie that’s not rated R, they don’t do cigarettes, I believe.
**John:** I get that. A weird thing that’s happened is you said it reminds you of back then people used to smoke cigarettes. Also, when I see cigarettes being smoked on screen, I assume, oh, that must be period. It automatically evokes period, because that’s not right now. Watching Saltburn, it’s interesting, because it’s the UK, and I’m not quite sure what year we were in, but there’s smoking in it. It’s only at the end you realize that was actually 2006, because we jump forward to present day. Smoking was appropriate for when it was there.
**Craig:** I guess post-apocalyptic things are sort of a period. They’re like a future-looking period. We made a choice in The Last of Us to show some people smoking. It’s not a lot, because it’s just harder. They’re all homespun, home-rolled cigarettes, and they’re probably not very good. But they’re still there. They’re still kind of currency, the way that they are in prison and things like that. Chernobyl was crazy. They were constantly… It’s part of it, I guess. It’s an interesting thing.
Bradley Cooper makes Maestro, and he has to make a choice. I don’t know how you make a biopic – or as many people would say, a bai-AH-pik – about Leonard Bernstein without showing constant cigarettes. He was infamous for having a cigarette in his hand all the time. Now, the fact that everybody else is constantly smoking, I suppose, is part of the choice. I didn’t notice it after a while. It just sort of became part of it.
**John:** Going back to Chernobyl, the cigarettes that are smoked in Chernobyl, how many of them are on the page versus in the actual staging of it, and you’re like, “Oh, this character will be smoking in the scene.”
**Craig:** I believe they were all on the page. I call it out specifically. If you don’t, the problem is you start getting into a lot of production meeting questions: “Are they smoking? Where are they smoking? Is there an ashtray? Is there a lighter?” Then the prop people are like, “Which cigarettes, this or this?” I do specify it. I certainly specify it in The Last of Us, and I specified it in Chernobyl. I made a choice that in Chernobyl, for instance, Khomyuk would not smoke; Legasov would smoke a lot. Not everybody smokes, but some people definitely do.
**John:** Related to smoking, drug use in films. When I see a film that has characters using cocaine, I don’t know how much cocaine that is. I don’t know how to even process that sometimes. Those characters who would be using a drug, and it was either historically accurate or it would be accurate to the period or accurate to the kind of movie it is, it can be distracting if I’m thinking about that drug use and not understanding what that is in the context of the film.
**Craig:** Drug use on camera has always had these extremes. People that are snorting stuff on camera are either immediately overdosing and dying or just wild and crazy. My guess is it’s probably somewhere in the middle. Actually, there’s a moment with cocaine in Maestro. I noticed something really interesting about it. Leonard Bernstein and a few other guys are snorting coke. I’ve never used cocaine. I don’t know. But here’s my impression of everybody in every movie ever snorting coke. You ready? (Aggressively snorts.) It’s super fast. These guys were like (calmly snorts), but just a nice, casual-
**John:** Casual.
**Craig:** To me, I was like, “I bet that’s how it really works.”
**John:** My stereotypical doing a line of cocaine in a movie is you do it fast and then you tip your head back and shake once or twice, because you’re feeling that rush. Notably, I think one of the interesting things about the cocaine scene in Maestro is that Bradley Cooper does a line, and then he holds up the tray to this other guy. He’s trying to pass it off, but then the guy just does a line on it, and so then he does it to the next guy over. It’s just like, “I guess I’m just the person who holds up the tray now.” It ended up having a little character moment, which was nice.
**Craig:** I thought it was cool. It seemed more realistic. It seemed. I don’t know for sure.
**John:** Thinking back to if there is drugs being portrayed in a movie, either it’s a cautionary tale, like this is going to end badly, or that this person is wild and crazy, one thing I enjoyed about Fire Island – and we had Joel Kim Booster on to talk about Fire Island – is there’s drug use in that movie, and it’s not a crisis. It’s not like the world is going to end because of characters using drugs.
**Craig:** Which is hard for people, because nobody necessarily wants to put out a message that drugs are fine. But here’s a difficult, weird fact. Most people who are recreationally using drugs – I’ll leave injectables out of this – don’t die of an overdose and just are functional. There’s a lot of functional recreational drug users out there, and alcohol is one of them. There are a lot of functional alcoholics. There are a lot of people that aren’t alcoholics; they just are able to recreationally use alcohol as a drug and then just be fine. That’s not a very dramatic proposition, is it?
**John:** It’s not. They did a thing, and nothing happened.
**Craig:** Bad story.
**John:** Bad story. Not a substance seen on screen, but the N-word in historical things. You have characters. Drew, I think you’re bringing up Meek’s Cutoff.
**Drew:** Meek’s Cutoff, which is a Kelly Reichardt movie. You ever seen that?
**Craig:** I have not.
**John:** It’s set in what period of time?
**Drew:** It’s pioneer women moving across the Great Plains in an Oregon Trail thing. They use the N-word in a very casual way, in a very conversational way, not directed towards a Black character, but just as a-
**Craig:** As a reference term?
**Drew:** Yeah.
**Craig:** It’s the word they were taught.
**Drew:** Yeah. “I’m slaving away over this cooking,” or something like that. It pulls you out.
**Craig:** I could see that. We certainly have greater sensitivities to that. There are obviously movies about race where… Tarantino is infamous for this, either movies about race, like, say, Django Unchained, or movies that have nothing to do whatsoever with race, like Pulp Fiction, but the idea is that this is just how people talk in the world, which is often true. It’s not always true. But our sensitivities have increased dramatically.
To me, it’s a little bit like nudity. It’s a thing. You can say it shouldn’t be a thing. I always love it when filmmakers are like, “Why is it a thing that the woman is nude? It’s natural. It’s just a human body.” I’m like, “You know why.”
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** You know. Go ahead and take your dick out at a press conference and see how natural it is. It’s not. Or leave the door open when you go to the bathroom. You don’t. I’m not saying that there should never be nudity on film, but we shouldn’t act like it’s not a thing. It is. We do notice it. It can distract. You have to be aware of that, for sure.
**John:** I think what we’re leading up to is, the fact that it is accurate that nudity exists or that they would use the word in that context doesn’t mean that it’s the right choice to use that in the film and television that you’re doing, because you have to recognize that it’s going to be interpreted a certain way. That may not be the interpretation that you want.
**Craig:** Even if it’s interpreted exactly as you want, it’s still going to jolt people. Violence used to do that. We became so saturated in it that now it doesn’t. It’s a rare thing. I remember as a kid being horrified by blood on screen. My kids have never been horrified by blood on screen. They just didn’t care. They just bought in that it was fake. But I remember being very, very scared of it.
**John:** Along the lines of needing to be aware of how the audience is going to take a thing, we said the N-word, but there’s other words that just have shifted in meanings from when it was put out there. When you say prejudice, like in Pride and Prejudice, that doesn’t mean racial prejudice. But prejudice now just means racial prejudice. It’s very hard to use that word without that secondary meaning.
“Discrete” and “discreet”, homonyms are a thing you have to just be really aware of how a person’s likely to hear that word. Even if it was the word the person actually said in real life in that moment, it may not be the word to say on screen.
**Craig:** You’re gauging your audience’s knowledge, depending on what you’re making. If you’re making a movie for a family, for children, you probably don’t want to use a word like “discrete,” because they’re not going to know either version of it. For adults, sometimes it’s interesting to hear people say words that you don’t know, and to go run back to the dictionary.
I remember “sedulous.” Was that a word that was used in The Matrix 2? Something like that. There was a series of words that the architect delivered that were like, wait, what? The point was, this guy is incredibly smart and didn’t even care that you didn’t know the word. The only thing that bothered me about that was that Keanu Reeves didn’t go, “Wait. Stop. I don’t know that word,” because he definitely didn’t, because nobody did.
**John:** Maybe he had a program downloaded into him that actually gave him a full dictionary.
**Craig:** “Tank, I need the Oxford English dictionary.”
**John:** “Unload it. Put it in there.”
**Craig:** “Find out what sedulous means.”
**John:** I am looking forward to… I don’t want the internet implanted into my head, but if I can have a little thing that I could immediately know those kind of facts – and I think that may happen during our lifetime – I would take that.
**Craig:** Look who’s reporting to Elon Musk’s research center.
**John:** After it’s been tested on many, many other people, I will consider that. This is, to some degree, outside of the writer’s control, but I want to talk about accurate but distracting accents, because that can be a big-
**Craig:** Yeah.
**John:** Everyone who attempts an Italian accent will be raked over the coals for the Italian accent.
**Craig:** Except for Mario. Oh wait, actually, no, I don’t even think he tried to do… I didn’t see the Super Mario… Did Chris Pratt do a Mario accent or no?
**John:** I think in my opinion, it was actually a pretty successful version of what it is.
**Craig:** Nice.
**John:** It felt like a lighter version of a Mario accent.
**Craig:** Oh, okay, so a little, “It’s me.”
**John:** But then you look at Lady Gaga and being raked over the coals for House of Gucci. I don’t know how that character actually spoke. Maybe she really spoke exactly that way. It was bizarre to watch on screen.
**Craig:** Accents are tough, and they can be distracting. Sometimes the best you can hope for is that people buy in quickly and forget about it. That was the Chernobyl method. That’s for sure. The only thing you really want to try and avoid is demanding that your actors perform an accent that they can’t do. That is the equivalent of bad hair. It’s always there. It’s ruining everything all the time.
My wife is from the Boston area. Oh my god. 98% of portrayals of the Boston accent on film or television have been dreadful. If you’re not looking at any of the Afflecks or Matt Damon, odds are it’s going to be bad, or a Wahlberg. But most people actually don’t specifically know how that accent works, and so they let it go.
But there are accents we all know. And then there are accents where, like, “Okay, I’ve never heard that accent before, but it just sounds wrong.” It sounds comical or goofy, and you’re stuck with it. It’s one of those terrifying choices you make when you’re making something, and there’s no way that… What are you going to do? Dub the whole movie? You can’t. You’re screwed.
**John:** Again, going back to realistic but distracting, an actor might come in with, like, “Oh, you’ve actually nailed the accent for that exact real-life person, and yet if we put this in the movie, it is going to be so incredibly distracting that you’re doing this thing. You may need to scale back from that.” That’s the choice you make. Or that you’re doing this incredibly realistic accent, no one else in the rest of the movie is approaching that, and then you need to find some sort of common ground where you’re all in the same film.
**Craig:** Yes, that would be very bad. I have this strange fear response to thinking about these things, because any time, you can do something and then go, “You know what? Good theory. Didn’t work out. Let’s switch it up. Wear this shirt instead. Stand over here instead. Say the line like this instead. Hold this in the other hand.” But when you’re dealing with accents, and you’re 20 days into production, and someone rings you up and goes, “I’m sorry, none of this sounds good,” you’re like, “That’s what we’re doing.” Can’t change in the middle.
The other thing about accents is they’re a little bit like actor bait. It’s a trap for actors. They love them, because they have some control. “Finally, I can study and prepare and really get something that’s exactly right.” But the problem is now that’s where their mind is, and it’s not on the stuff that ultimately matters, which isn’t that at all.
**John:** Yes, which is the emotional essence of this moment.
**Craig:** Am I connecting with you? Do I believe you? Are you moving me? It’s tricky.
**John:** Probably last big area for realistic but distracting would be everything related to technology. There’s how stuff really works in the real world and the speed at which things could connect and how quickly we can track that thing down, which if we do it in movies, may not feel real. It may not feel accurate. A counterexample, watching Past Lives, one of the things I really loved about it is they are talking by Skype, and suddenly I heard all the sounds of Skype. We used to do this podcast over Skype. (Sings Skype sounds) as you connect, those moments are delightful.
**Craig:** It’s great nostalgia. (Makes Skype sound effects with mouth.)
**John:** But you want to pick those moments carefully, because otherwise, the audience may not know you’re doing, and you may be eating up screen time. It may not feel real.
**Craig:** On the other hand, there’s the oversimplification of technology, which also makes us laugh, and stinks. Any time somebody is hacking into anything, it’s just wrong. It’s just like-
**John:** “I’m in.”
**Craig:** … a graphical interface of a Pac-Man chewing its way through firewalls. Whoever taught the first studio executive the term “firewall” should get the opposite of the Nobel Prize. We should have an anti-Nobel Prize. Boo.
**John:** The Ignoble Prize.
**Craig:** The Ignoble Prize.
**John:** It actually exists, for some sort of bad scientific discovery.
**Craig:** I like that. The Ig-Nobel Prize.
**John:** Ig-Nobel Prize.
**Craig:** Ig-Nobel. I remember in the ’80s there was this rash of movies where people were always dealing with computer viruses or hacking, except it was always portrayed as a graphical battle between a laughing skull and a target.
**John:** “Ha ha ha. Aha, I’ve got you now.”
**Craig:** Yeah, like, what is [unintelligible 00:28:16]. We know that. We all know that now. Definitely, enhance, enlarge, track, trace. No, none of it.
**John:** Some takeaways here. I think we’re wanting to find a balance between what is fully accurate and realistic versus what is believable, because they’re not necessarily the same things. You have to err towards believability for the audience, because if you lose believability in the audience, it doesn’t matter that you were right. That has to be the first connection.
**Craig:** You have varying degrees of latitude depending on your tone. The broader your tone, the more latitude you have, the more grounded you are. You can get down to almost no latitude. You have to gauge that. You have to know, basically. Depending on how accurate you are to anything in the world, that should spill over to these things as well, but I do think we need to be extra careful about the things you’ve listed.
**John:** Also just be aware of distractions. Be aware of things that are pulling focus from what you actually want the audience to be focusing on. Craig, you’re on set, and you see background players moving in the background. You will have to do another take, because that background player, maybe it was realistic for them to cross the street that way, but it doesn’t actually work for what you need.
**Craig:** Nine times out of 10, or maybe more, that distracting background performer is either eliminated in the edit anyway or no one ever notices. There are these compilations on YouTube of background actors doing dumb crap, except they’re in the movie or the show. There are movies I have seen a million times and never noticed it. People that are pretending to answer a phone but not picking up the phone, people who are doing the most bizarre stuff, and I’ve never noticed, because no one’s actually paying attention to the background people. But when I’m directing and I see somebody in the background doing something dumb, yeah, I go again. I go again.
**John:** Back to realistic but distracting, if two characters are walking towards camera on a sidewalk, and there’s other pedestrians around, they’re going to have to move around other pedestrians. There’s going to be crosses in there that are just not going to be cinematic. Everything’s optimized for their passageway to us, and hopefully, if the scene’s working, you’re not going to notice that. But there was a lot of choreography that happened behind the scenes to get that thing to look natural, even though it’s not how things would really work.
**Craig:** The classic shot of you’re pulling as two people are walking down a busy New York street, talking, so you’re leading them. Often, the camera is on a dolly track, and nobody can be behind a camera, because they’re going to get run over. You have people moving mostly on one side, kind of, as opposed to the other side, because that’s where they probably have a little bit of an offset with the camera. There are things that we just have to deal with. There’s nothing we can do about it, and that’s fine. I think everyone is incredibly forgiving of this.
I have to remind myself, as we head into production again, not to get too caught up over the silly extra. In the old days, when our monitors were terrible, we literally couldn’t even see it that well. Then you would cut the movie together, and sometimes you still wouldn’t be able to see it that well until the very end, because even your edit was this low-res thing.
**John:** You’re not going to see it on the Moviola.
**Craig:** Right. Then you’d get to the premier, and you’d be like, “Wait, what? What is that back there?” Nobody cared.
**John:** The other thing you recognize when you’re actually on set is that what the lens sees and what is reality is not the same at all. Actors who had seemed like they’re moving in a straight line or actually walking, they’re taking a curve in order to get to a place, that they’re not behaving to the actual geography of the space itself, but the camera doesn’t see it that well.
**Craig:** That’s part of the dream of compressing time and space.
**John:** We love it all. Some questions, Drew.
**Drew:** I have a question that’s kind of related to what we were just talking about. Taylor S. writes, “I’m working on a comedy-drama pilot set in 2007, where some technology and trends of the time are important to the plot and themes. Almost immediately, the hilarious Bojack episode set in 2007 came to mind, where the entire joke is that they crammed as many random 2007 references in as possible. But my question is, how can I avoid doing the bad version of that, while still being fun and entertaining, without devolving into 22 minutes of, ‘Hey, remember this?'”
**Craig:** This was not what I expected from Taylor Swift for her first question to our podcast.
**John:** She’s had highs; she’s had lows.
**Craig:** This is a low.
**John:** This is a low.
**Craig:** This is a low. She’s writing into a screenplay podcast to get a tip on writing.
**John:** She’s working on a movie. She’s directing a movie now. She wants to do it right. Apparently, her movie’s set in 2007, or her pilot. She’s actually shooting a pilot in 2007.
**Craig:** We got a scoop. We got a scoop.
**John:** We got a scoop.
**Craig:** It’s a good question.
**John:** It is a good question. I think, Taylor, you are doing the right thing to think of and list all the stuff that you can possibly know from that era, partly because you don’t want to get anything wrong. You want to include anything that was too late for that, and then just be very judicious about what actual things you’re going to bring into the story, because yes, the Bojack Horseman episode is really funny, because-
**Craig:** Makes a point.
**John:** It’s over-crushed, and it can get away with that, but you and your pilot probably can’t.
**Craig:** They certainly wouldn’t have done that in the pilot for Bojack Horseman, for instance. Practical advice for you, Taylor, is feel free to put as much 2007 stuff you want in, while it’s in the background. While it’s in the background, it’s like background actors. There’s color, and there’s light and movement, but our focus isn’t there. When anyone is picking something up, when your key cast is interacting with something, if they’re picking up a cellphone, then we’ll notice it. You don’t have too many of those. But one of the things that the Duffer brothers did so well with Stranger Things is put it in the ’80s, but just not ’80s, ’80s, ’80s all the… It was just things that were there, that they didn’t have to make a point of, that were just sort of there.
Also, the other thing about period stuff that’s really important is, if you’re making something that takes place in 2007, most of the items will be from 1995 or 1999. We go through this all the time in our show with cars. The world ends in 2003 in our show. I’m like, “Most of the models are going to be from the ’80s and ’90s. Not everything should be 2003.” That’s the other thing. Back up from where you are, because most stuff is not new.
**John:** 100%. There was a project I was considering doing that was set in the ’10s, based on a true story set in the ’10s. It was actually really hard to think about what were the 2010s like, just what are the highlight moments. They don’t feel that different from 2024 in most ways. The phones couldn’t do quite as many things, but people still had phones, and so figuring out what that balance is. Also, if I were to do this project, how do you teach people what was different about then than now, because there’s some important different things there.
**Craig:** What’ll happen is craftspeople will get very excited about anything, any period piece. They get super excited. They’re like, “This was the hot fashion at the time.” Not everybody will be [OH kur-AHN 35:30]. Most people will be, again, behind. But there’s varying levels. The other question is, which one of my characters would be interested in being new or fresh or modern, and which one would not change things, and which one would be trying too hard. Think about it that way. But more than anything, just don’t make any of that stuff try too hard.
**John:** I went to a screening of The Holdovers, and the actress in the film, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, was talking about how the art director and set decorators on that movie would be so thorough that if she just opened a random drawer, everything in there would be historically accurate, and that it was great for her. She felt like when she was on set, she was completely in that time and place, which is fun.
**Craig:** Yes. To the extent that you can do that, do it. That’s really advice more for filmmakers, as opposed to writers who are not directing, because they will not be picking those things or filling the drawers. But I love that stuff, personally. I like filling the space in as much as possible for the actors. Obviously, if you’re calling out a shot of something in a drawer, you’d have to prepare it. But for the actors, give them as much as you can.
**John:** Taylor, the last bit of advice I have for you is, there may be reasons why you want, at times, to teach the audience about 2007 or what was different, but be really mindful that you’re not creating a scene that you just do that, because that’s never going to make it into your final thing. If it’s not helping to tell the story, it’s not going to stay in the script. It may stay in the script, but it won’t be in the movie.
**Craig:** Exactly. “There’s a lot of discussion of the upcoming election next year. I wonder what will happen now that George W. Bush won’t be president anymore, because it’s 2007, everyone.”
**John:** We just finished The Crown. The Crown ended. I loved The Crown. That’s obviously a show that went through a tremendous number of time periods but never felt obsessed about, like, this is the newest, latest thing. They do have a TV at a certain point. They do have some things that come up along the way. They are eventually using cellphones. But it never felt like it was hitting you over the head with like, this is the year that we’re in.
**Craig:** Sometimes the lack of change is indicative of itself. The Queen, I imagine, probably was very set in being the Queen, and it’s all about tradition and longevity and connection to the past, and so she wouldn’t be running out to get the new top-loading VCR device in 1977, so that makes sense.
**John:** Another question.
**Drew:** Greg writes, “I’m trying to expand my film knowledge and watch more stuff, but also, as a writer, I realize I should probably be reading scripts of movies as well. Do you have a suggestive strategy for reading and watching the same movie? Should I read it first and then watch it, the reverse, or both at the same time?”
**John:** Greg is a listener, but he’s also a friend. He’s writing to me specifically for advice I’m putting on the podcast, because I think it’s good general advice. He’s a writer who was wondering, “Should I be reading these For Your Consideration scripts first or watching the movie?” My advice to him was to do both. Sometimes watch them and then read them afterwards; sometimes read them first and see what the choices on a page, how they’re reflected on the screen.
**Craig:** Certainly, if you have the opportunity to do both, that can’t hurt. If you have to choose, I would probably still choose to watch the movie first, then read the script.
**John:** Why is that?
**Craig:** I think that it’s easier for you to see what the writer was intending with the words, because you’ve seen it, and you can say, “Ah, I see how they painted this, and that’s what it became,” or sometimes you could see, “Oh, that’s incredibly vague, and then a lot of this other stuff happened.” It’s an interesting thing to connect the two things together. It’s also interesting to see what was deleted, knowing it was deleted. It’s marginally more instructive. But I agree with you; going back and forth in both directions would probably be useful.
**John:** There have been times where – I’ve done this very rarely – but watch the movie while I have the script open and see what they’re doing scene by scene, as stuff’s happening. You get a sense of what that play is back and forth. When you watch the movie first, and then you read the script, obviously, the pictures you’re seeing in your head are going to be the movie you just saw. You can see, “Oh, do these words match that?” The scene description can be very minimal, and you say like, “Oh, that still got us there, I guess.” When you read the script first, you’re having to build the whole movie in your head first, and then you watch the final movie, and you’re like, “Oh, that was what I was seeing. It wasn’t what I was seeing. Did the script do a great job of building out this world for me?” I think that’s useful.
**Craig:** I guess it depends on the movie and it depends on the writer and how thorough the screenplay is, because there are writers that are much more, I guess, minimalist. Also, writers that are writing for themselves to direct sometimes are doing things in a way that… Was it a Bigelow script we read that was… Was it Near Dark?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** It was super spare. It’s really cool. But that’s one where if you read the script first, I’m not sure you would even know what to think, without having seen the movie. But there are a lot of scripts where, yes, reading it first probably would be great.
**John:** Drew, you’ve been preparing a lot of the scripts for Weekend Read. Of the scripts you’ve been going through, which ones of them do you feel like, “Oh, I can completely see the movie on the page.” Are there examples of that you can think of?
**Drew:** The horrible truth is I probably read about the first 10 pages-
**John:** To make sure it’s formatted properly?
**Drew:** … to make sure it’s formatted properly, and then I walk. Definitely in film school we would read first and then watch. There would be the heartbreak where you would fall in love with a specific moment, and then it would just be completely either cut or you would just visually see it and it’d be gone. You’re like, “That was the turning point.”
**John:** The exercise that Greg wants to do I think is good no matter which way you get to it; is recognizing that the screenplay was what got you to the film, but the film is not the screenplay, and that things changed along the way. You can get a sense of what those changes were. Obviously, with the For Your Consideration scripts, as we talked about in this episode, a lot of times those are cleaned-up, perfected versions of things, so they’re really reflected in the final, what’s on the screen, rather than what was the shooting script when it went into production.
**Craig:** There have been times where I’ve done a credit arbitration as an arbiter, so I had to read lots of the scripts, and then I saw the movie, and I was just bummed in general. The thing is, it’s inevitable. Maybe it is because you make your own movie in your head. But that’s the movie your brain wants to see. If you don’t have that, then somebody else’s movie is the one that you do see. I think to myself sometimes, a movie that I love, what if I had read the script first, made my own movie of it? Would I still love the movie the way I do? I bet not. I bet not.
**John:** I remember reading Natural Born Killers as a script well before the movie was in production and just loving it. I saw a sort of movie, and then I got to work on that movie, and it was just not at all the movie that was on the page. I had to deal with, not the grief – I didn’t care that much – but acknowledge that the thing that I saw in my head was never going to exist.
**Craig:** Exactly. Better to have nothing in your head.
**John:** Greg, the advice is, don’t become a screenwriter. Just stop. Just enjoy movies, because reading scripts will break you.
**Craig:** Empty your mind.
**John:** Empty your mind.
**Drew:** Make It Australia writes, “Recently, my wife asked a colleague what she was doing on the weekend, and the colleague answered, ‘I’m going to see the Wonka biopic.’ Hilarity and mirth ensued. On a reflection though, and in light of your recent discussions about the pronunciation of biopic and the fluidity of language generally – you know, preponing – I wondered, is it possible that the term biopic might reasonably be applied to a film about a fictional character?”
**Craig:** No. No.
**John:** Yes.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Yes, I think it absolutely can be, but you might even say a fictional biopic. Basically, it’s doing the things that biopics do about centering a character and seeing the journey of their life, but in a fictional context.
**Craig:** No. First of all, Wonka is not a biopic. I don’t care. No biopic is a musical. Let’s start with that.
**John:** Oh. Huh.
**Craig:** Name one.
**John:** I’m thinking. But keep going.
**Drew:** Rocket Man.
**Craig:** Is that a musical?
**Drew:** Yeah.
**John:** Yeah. All the singing happens… No, that’s not true.
**Drew:** [Crosstalk 00:43:47].
**Craig:** It’s not a musical.
**Drew:** Yeah, it is, because it starts with him as a child singing The Bitch is Back.
**Craig:** But a musical is where lots of people join in and sing the songs.
**Drew:** Yeah, there’s definitely full choreographed numbers.
**Craig:** Oh, there is? I didn’t see it.
**Drew:** Clearly.
**Craig:** Other than Rocket Man-
**John:** Other than Rocket Man.
**Craig:** I don’t think that we should be doing this to our precious language. I don’t think so. I think a biography is of a living person, because at that point, is Star Wars a biopic? Isn’t every movie about someone a biopic, because it’s about them and their life and stuff?
**John:** I get that, Craig. You make a good point. I would just say that we have a sense of what a biopic does and what the shape of a biopic is. It’s not hard to imagine a fictional biopic that is doing biopic-y stuff deliberately, the tropes of a biopic, and apply it to a fictional character.
**Craig:** That’s different. That would be a mockumentary, so a biopic style, but being intentional. By the way, there’s a thousand people who are going to send a thousand, like, “Here’s musical biopics.” Please don’t.
**John:** Citizen Kane is a fictional biopic.
**Craig:** Right, except it’s not. It’s a movie about a guy.
**John:** Yes, but all the biopics we’ve seen after that, they’re Citizen Kane about a real person.
**Craig:** I guess. I don’t know. Was there not biopics before Citizen Kane? You think biopics are modeled after Citizen Kane? So much stuff is. I suppose it’s possible. I think it’s just the term. It’s not a good idea. No one wants to see the Luke Skywalker biopic. I don’t want to see the Bruce Wayne biopics. There have been so many Bruce Wayne biopics.
**John:** The Bruce Wayne biopic.
**Craig:** So many.
**Drew:** We have a question from Kat, who sent in an audio question.
**Kat:** My apologies if this particular word has been discussed on the podcast before, but I’ve been hearing this new word, “comfortability,” more frequently. It doesn’t surprise me that people find their way to this word. If something’s durable, it has durability. If someone’s able, they have the ability. But those words don’t break down into a prefix and suffix in English, unlike “comfortable,” which expands upon “comfort.”
The context I’ve heard it in makes comfortability a synonym of familiarity or facility, as in, “I have a comfortability with the subject matter.” Do you think people seek to use “comfortability” because they feel “comfortable” has a different connotation than “comfort?” You would say, “I’m comfortable with the subject matter,” but that doesn’t mean the same thing as, “The subject matter gives me comfort.” Maybe something along those lines. I’m just curious if this word has crossed your paths yet. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question.
**John:** Craig’s eyes are bulging here. He does not like the word.
**Craig:** No. It’s just a mistake. That’s all. It’s just a mistake. It’s a mistake. It’s like adding N-E-S-S to something to nounify it when you didn’t know there was already a noun. The word you want when you say “comfortability” is “comfort.” That’s the word you want. It’s a perfectly good word. Shorter and faster is better. It’s just an unnecessary complication.
Sometimes we do have to invent nouns for adjectives. Famously – I can’t remember which president it was, Coolidge maybe or Hoover – somebody came up with “normalcy.” It was a president. There was no word. There was no noun. There’s “normality,” which is different.
**John:** It is different.
**Craig:** He just invented “normalcy.” It’s kind of useful. “Normalcy” is useful, and it became a word. We don’t need “comfortability.” That’s just dumb.
**John:** I agree with Craig that it’s probably a mistake. It’s probably a frequently made mistake that I think will become an accepted word. It fits enough patterns that we’re going to hear it more and more.
**Craig:** On accident?
**John:** Yeah, brought in by accident, because it fits a pattern, and so people get comfortable using it.
**Craig:** It’s incorrect.
**John:** In general, as we talk about on the show, English tends to want to become more regular, and so we move away from our dramatic words into our Latinate words. It’s a natural progression.
**Craig:** Yeah, but all the more reason why you don’t want to see “comfortability.” What you’re describing is an entropy of language, where things are moving towards whatever they call it, absolute zero heat death. But the universe is not designed to spontaneously make things complicated. Even evolution is trying to simplify by addressing problems.
**John:** I’m arguing that it’s a way of simplification.
**Craig:** Right. The problem is that “comfortability” isn’t actually simplifying anything, because we already had the word. It’s just that people made a mistake. They just were adding a whole bunch of… You could just as easily say “comfortabilitization.” We don’t want to do that instead of “comforting.” It has to stop somewhere. This is where I draw the line. Hyah, and no further!
**John:** When I was doing the edits on Arlo Finch, one of the words that came up was “kneeled” versus “knelt.” Both were acceptable, but “knelt” is fading away, and “kneeled” is rising, because it just fits the E-D pattern more often.
**Craig:** I would’ve definitely gone with “knelt,” but I’m an old fuddy-duddy. I think we’ve established this.
**John:** “Weaved” and “wove.”
**Craig:** The answer is “wove.”
**John:** But “he weaved between the trees” versus “he wove between the trees,” they’re actually different.
**Craig:** Yes. “Wove” I would think of more as-
**John:** Fabric.
**Craig:** Fabric, exactly. That’s sort of like the “dived” thing or the “hanged” and “hung.” That’s a big one that people struggle with.
**John:** I think we have one last one. Helena, who’s writing about writing during production.
**Drew:** Helena writes, “My first movie’s going into production in a few weeks. It’s for Amazon, shooting in the UK. I’m British. I’m wondering what my role is in terms of the script once the camera starts rolling. You just mentioned in your show that with movies, it’s the writer’s job to keep on top of the script and be the script coordinator. Do you mean with every change? And how can you do that if you’re not on set? Does someone just feed back to you on the phone?
“I can’t be on set because I’m writing the sequel, which is a lovely problem to have, but now I’m concerned about how much day-to-day work I’ll have on the first movie while I’m trying to write the second. I guess I’m just wondering how the mechanics of it all will work. I suppose I can ask my producers, but I’m trying not to look too green, so I thought I’d give it a shot to ask you guys.”
**Craig:** I hope the producers aren’t listening to this, because then they’re going to know.
**John:** It’s Helena. Maybe that’s not her real name. But it’s an Amazon movie shooting in the UK that already has a sequel.
**Craig:** “Do you think it’s our Helena?” “No.”
**John:** “No.”
**Craig:** “No.”
**John:** “Our Helena, she would never be intimidated to ask these questions.”
**Craig:** “No, no.” Darling, listen. First of all, congratulations. That’s what you should be thinking about, although this is an indication that Helena is a real writer. She’s working. She’s got a movie. She’s not sitting here going, “Look at me. I’m awesome.” She’s like, “Oh, god, my stomach.”
**John:** She’s Megan McDonnell-ing here, where it’s like, “Things are going fantastically.”
**Craig:** “And I’m in trouble.” First of all, practical thing. Most of the time, writers of movies are not on the set. This is why so many movies go so awry. When it comes to the changes, they are usually changes that are happening because they are requested of you by the director or producers, so you won’t have to worry about what those are. There will be people to make incidental changes along the way. Generally, those aren’t generated in page form.
It’s a little different in the UK. I’m not sure how it goes there. But in the U.S., if somebody’s writing stuff down on a piece of paper, unless it is what we call an A-through-H exception, which is basically defined as incidental, non-writing writing, then somebody has to be hired and paid. That’s part of the union thing. If it’s significant work, they’re going to call you, and they’re going to ask for it.
You may also find yourself on call, where they may pick up the phone in the middle of the day and say, “We have a problem. It’s just not really working,” or, “Can you replace this line?” or, “Can you come up with a better idea?” or something, or someone’s throwing a tantrum. Then you just race in like a firefighter, but from your seat. Don’t panic. They’ll let you know.
**John:** I was recently going through the Scriptnotes book, and we have a chapter on writing your production and really talk through what the writer’s role is in pre-production and going up. We go through script stages and when you lock pages. We get really detailed about that. When the book comes out in 2025, you’ll be able to read this. That’s not going to help you right now, Helena.
I think what you need to do is actually ask the producers, “Hey, when you go into production, how can I help? What do you need from me? How is this going to work?” because what Craig describes as the incidental changes, which is basically like, this time it’s happening in a grocery store, and now it’s in a hardware store, you don’t need to generate new pages for that. They probably won’t care about that, and you’ll be fine.
There may actually be a script coordinator on your movie whose job it is to actually put out those pages and such, if things do happen. If a scene needs to be rewritten, they’re going to hopefully come back to you – they should come back to you – and talk to you about the problem, and you’re going to generate a new page that goes in there. If you’ve never done that before, it’s intimidating, because it’s weird. You’ll figure it out.
**Craig:** There’s going to be somebody in the production that’s pushing the new pages out, through usually Scenechronize. Somebody is covering the technical end of it. It would be good, I think, for you, Helena, to, as John said, reach out to the producers, but also, let them know you’re on call, even though you’re writing the sequel. Of course you’re invested in the quality of this movie, and you’re on call if they should need help. You are available. Then you just do it.
As nervous as you might be about doing something for the first time, like production rewriting, there is nobody on earth that is more qualified to do the production rewrite here than you. I know this because they’ve already hired you to write the sequel, which is a very good sign.
**John:** It is a good sign.
**Craig:** This must be good. Wonder what it is, when it comes out.
**John:** There’s already a sequel in development. Thank you for the questions. Time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a card game that I started playing this last week called Regicide. It is a cooperative card game. If you’re playing with multiple players, you are working together to try to do this thing, basically to overthrow this monarchy. You have your own hand, and you’re playing cards out of your own hand in turn to make things happen. Really smartly done.
It uses a standard deck of cards, so you don’t have to get their fancy deck, but their deck is actually a little bit better for it. There’s a Solitaire version that you can also get on iOS or Android. Just a really smartly designed game. It was a Game of the Year two or three years ago, been recommended on some of the blogs I’ve read. But a really good game. It’s regicidegame.com if you want to look up the rules. Again, you’ll play with a standard deck of cards, but the deck they sell you is also really good.
**Craig:** You watched The Crown, and then you played Regicide.
**John:** Indeed. It’s all been royalties for me.
**Craig:** Interesting.
**John:** Interesting.
**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is a bunch of One Cool people to me. The Creative Arts Emmys were on just a few days ago, really, I think this past Sunday. Was very happy to see The Last of Us, our crew did great. They won a combined total of eight Emmy Awards.
**John:** That’s fantastic.
**Craig:** I am so proud of them. If the downside of being the showrunner is that you become the strange adoptive father of a thousand people, the upside is you get to feel the pride. They have done so well, and they worked so hard. I just want them all to know, nominees and winners, how proud I am of them. Happy to report that I think everybody that won will be with us again.
**John:** That’s great.
**Craig:** Congratulations to our hardworking crew. They are the best.
**John:** Wonderful. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
**Craig:** What, what.
**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Say.
**John:** Outro this week is by Sudarsham Kadam. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on knowing when someone’s just being nice to you.
**Craig:** Aw, that’s great, John. I’m really excited for that.
**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Hello, premium subscribers. Thank you very much for being premium members.
**Craig:** We love you guys. You’re great.
**John:** We love you. Start of the new year, we just wanted to tell you that.
**Craig:** This is genuine. We really love each and every one of you.
**John:** We genuinely do love it. It makes the show possible to do. We got a question from one of you named Spencer. Drew, help us out.
**Drew:** “When you finish a draft and send it to trusted readers for notes, how do you know if they’re just being nice? I recently sent my script to a couple of writer friends who were extremely complimentary and gave only minor notes. My ego loved it, but there is a part of me that just can’t believe they’d like it that much. How have you found ways to decipher politeness from genuine interest, or does that come down to just having good people skills?”
**John:** Spencer, you sent it to your writer friends, so writer friends who hopefully know what they’re talking about, and it’s good that they liked it. But I think you’re right to be wondering whether the lack of specificity and volume of notes indicates that there actually is more of a problem than everything is fantastic.
**Craig:** It can be. There are two kinds of scripts that people give no notes on. The first kind is a work of genius, and the second kind is an absolute wreck, because there are some times where it’s like the note is, “Stop writing.” But nobody’s going to say that to a friend. Now, I don’t think that’s what’s happened here. I think they really did like it. But they are going to err on the side of positivity.
This is a moment for you to say to them, not, “Hey, I don’t trust you,” or, “I’m suspicious,” but rather, “Thank you. This has been great. Now, I’m going to give you permission to only say negative things. Give me five, six, seven, if you have, things that you didn’t like or that didn’t connect for you, because I need access to that. I’m giving you a clear runway to not worry about my feelings, but just go ahead and spit some of that stuff out. It would be helpful for me.” Then they might.
**John:** A mutual friend of ours, if I am giving her a script to look at, she’ll ask, “Do you want me to tell you how smart you are or to point out all the problems?” which I think is a great way to frame it from her side. They didn’t do this ahead of time, so maybe you need to give them permission to pull the threads that may be uncomfortable for you to be pulling.
It may also help for you to go in with a set of questions, because you may have things that you’re considering doing. If they are smart writer friends you actually trust, say, “This is a thing I’m thinking about doing. I’m going to talk you through what I’m thinking about doing, and we can figure out whether this is going to work.” That may unlock other ways for them to be pointing out stuff that didn’t really work for them.
**Craig:** In general, it’s probably a good instinct to wonder if people are just being nice. It’s hard when you are not yet a professional, because as we’ve often talked about on the show, the only way you know that somebody actually really, really likes something is they give you money. Until they give you money, they don’t. They don’t like it enough to give you money.
**John:** But if they’re not a person who gives you money, what they’ll do is ask, “Can I show it to somebody else?” They’ll ask to pass it along.
**Craig:** Something will happen. Something will happen that basically indicates they are willing to do effort of any kind, which is a big deal. But it’s harder when you are aspiring, because you really are, at that point, at the mercy of friends. We’re all socialized to be kind to each other and to not simply say, “That shirt’s stupid. I don’t like your haircut.” Nobody does that. It’s rude. If somebody gets a new haircut and says, “What do you think of my new haircut?” the answer is, “I love it. It’s great.”
**John:** Yes, exactly.
**Craig:** Women understand this; some men don’t. When you give people a script, it’s like you’re saying, “Hey, what do you think of my new haircut?” “Love it! It’s great. I love this and this. Oh, this part over here, I wonder if next time they could do this. But all around, it’s fantastic.” Then they walk away, and they’re like, “Oh my god, it’s like she lost a fight with a lawnmower.” But you have to give people permission, or they’re going to be nice.
**John:** There are times where people don’t have a lot of notes, but they really are genuinely like, “I think this is fantastic.” I had that with my script for Go!, people just like, “This is great. I love it.” They would ask follow-up questions. They were curious about things, not trying to point out problems.
We did an episode called Patterns of Success, where we talked through how to tell when someone’s going to make it and how we’ve noticed that someone’s going to make it. With my previous assistants, it was always when they found out that someone’s passing along on their scripts without telling them. They would get a call from somebody who they didn’t know, saying, “I read your script. It was great.” Like, “Oh. Bye. You’re not going to be my assistant much longer.”
**Craig:** There’s also compliment inflation. Until somebody is almost over the top with their praise, it’s almost not really praise. You’re waiting for someone to go, “I read it. I am blown away. This is so incredible. I need to talk with you about the things I loved here.” You’re like, “Oh, this feels real.” If someone says, “What a great read. I kept turning the pages. I thought it was really interesting,” that sounds like a compliment, but there’s compliment-flation going on, and so it’s not really a compliment. It’s sort of minimum.
**John:** It’s the writer’s equivalent of when you saw your friend in a play and like, “Wow, I just can’t believe you did that.”
**Craig:** “You did it. You pulled it off.”
**John:** “You pulled it off. Wow. What you were able to achieve up there was great. You only had how much rehearsal? Wow, that’s crazy.”
**Craig:** “Good job.” That’s tough. I know I’m a tough reader. I know that. When people give me things to read, I always offer them the options. I never give them the, “Do you want me to tell you you feel smart, or do you want me to tell you,” whatever that was. I just basically say, “Mild, medium crispy, extra crispy? What do you want?” I’ll gauge it. There’s no shame in going for mild whatsoever. But I’m a tough read. Every now and then, when I do say, “This is really good,” that means I actually really, really think it’s really, really good. Reading things that people write is treacherous. Even when people tell you, “Give me both barrels of the shotgun,” sometimes they really don’t want it, and they get their feelings hurt.
Also – and I’m very aware of this, and I say this every time – I’m just a person. There are movies that everyone loves that I don’t like. What if that person gave that movie to me? I would be like, “No.” I could be wrong.
**John:** I’m always envious of friends of ours who have relationships with other writers where they’ll freely show everything, and they’ll work on stuff together, they’ll help each other out. I’ve just never had that, that sense of just like, “This is really rough. I just want to get a quick read on that.” I don’t have that.
Christopher Nolan was saying that he sent the first 40 pages of Oppenheimer upstairs to his brother Jonah to say, “Does this make sense at all?” Jonah’s like, “Oh yeah, this totally makes sense. I see what you’re doing.” I don’t have anybody in my life who I can feel quite that close to. I definitely have Drew and folks who have done Drew’s job before, who are reading early stuff, but also, they’re on the payroll.
**Craig:** Yeah, they’re on the payroll, but I think they probably also feel fairly safe, hopefully. They shouldn’t, as you have your hand on the lever that leads to the trapdoor that leads to the whirling blades.
It would be very cool to have Jonah Nolan be your brother, because then you’d just say, “Hey, brother Jonah Nolan, you’re my brother.” It’s also like, “You can’t really hurt me that bad. You’re my brother.”
I do have friends that I can show things to. I’m pretty private about my writing. I keep it within the writing family. But cuts of things, that’s something where I can bring somebody in. Certainly, I’ve had friends who have shown me things. We do talk about stuff like that. I’ve also had times where I was like, “Oh, I’m stuck with a problem. I’ve got a story problem here. I think I’m going to pick up the phone and call Scott Frank, or I’ll pick up the phone and call Alec Berg, and we’ll talk it through.”
Chris McQuarrie once called me. It was the first Mission Impossible movie he was doing. It was the middle of the night in London. He was like, “Here’s the problem.” Then he laid out the problem, and we just talked through its possibilities. As is often the case, as I recall, it wasn’t like I said, “Do this and this and this,” and then he did it. It was more that he just needed to talk it through, to go, “Oh, you know what? I posed the question to a friend, and they said, ‘That’s an interesting question, but maybe you should be asking this question,’ and that led me somewhere else, and now I know what to do.” So many of those conversations, whether I’ve been the person that they called or I’m the person calling, ends with the person going, “Wait, stop. I got it. I know what to do. Thank you. You’ve done your job,” by just having me move my mouth and think about it in a different way.
**John:** You are a friend with a pickup truck. Basically, they needed to move from one place to another place, and you were the guy with a pickup truck. They didn’t need you. They just needed the pickup truck.
**Craig:** They needed the truck.
**John:** That’s what you were there for.
**Craig:** Sometimes that’s the most valuable thing is somebody saying, “I know that you’re asking me to solve this problem for you, but I think you’re looking at the wrong problem.” There’s something that Alec Berg [unintelligible 01:05:37]. There was a guy that he worked with who was infamous for saying, “There’s a problem here, and this is the problem. Can you help me figure it out?” People would be like, “Okay, what about this?” “Yeah, no, I thought of that, but the problem with that is… ” “Okay, what about this?” “I thought of that, but… ” No matter what anybody ever said, he would, “Yeah, I thought… ” “Okay, what if the planet turns inside-out, and everybody that is a human becomes a squirrel, and all the squirrels become humans?” “Yeah, I thought of that. The problem… ” You’re like, “No, you haven’t thought of this. No, you have not.”
**John:** It’s tough. Someone was describing it as an XY situation, where people are looking for a solution for X, when really the problem is Y. They come to you, be like, “Help me figure out a solution for X.” That’s actually not the problem. The problem is Y. You’re trying to do the wrong thing.
**Craig:** We have the benefit when we’re not inside of a problem to have none of the weight of the grounding of that problem. We get rooted in a problem. We create false parameters for ourselves. We think what we have to do is figure out how to get through this brick wall. Then a person comes and goes, “Walk around the wall. See, it’s open over here.” We just get blinkered. That’s the good part of talking things through with people.
**John:** I think it’s one of the reason why our Amazon writer here, who may not be on set, may be so valuable in post-production, when seeing that early cut of the thing, recognizing, “This isn’t working for these reasons,” because she’s not so close to it. She’s not so familiar with like, that actor was a nightmare, we lost that location, all that stuff. She’s just seeing, “This is what’s in front of me.”
**Craig:** Stuff.
**John:** Stuff, and feels free to cut it.
**Craig:** Good editors are certainly also great. Editors are very frustrating that way. They just don’t care, and they don’t have to. They don’t care. They’re like, “Oh, was that hard? Well, it didn’t turn out, so anyway, I did this instead.” You’re like, “That thing that we just shot as just a little afterthought?” “Yeah, it’s really good, and it’s going in.” You’re like, “Oh, god. Fine.”
**John:** You’re saying the best editors are the ones who are not just being nice?
**Craig:** Oh, do not get yourself a nice editor. Pleasant is different than nice.
**John:** Yeah, pleasant.
**Craig:** They’re pleasant. They should be pleasant. That would be terrific. But you need editors to tell you the truth. You need an editor to turn around and look at you and go, “Okay, if you really want to do that, but here’s why I don’t think you should.” Then you listen. You don’t always have to agree. There are people, when they push back, I’m like…
I always say to my actors, “Your red flags are my red flags. It doesn’t matter I have direction and I think you should do this.” They’ll be like, “Okay, I’ll try it, but I don’t… “ I’m like, “Let’s all pause for a second. You don’t have to explain why you think this is incorrect. You just feel it. You’re the actor. Let’s honor this and come up with something else. It doesn’t have to be logical.” It’s good to just accept people’s instincts and work with them that way.
**John:** Yeah. Thanks, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
Links:
* [First baby of the new year arrives at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2024/0101/1424306-new-year-baby/)
* [Mazinger Z](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169473/)
* [Regicide](https://www.regicidegame.com/)
* [The Last of Us Comes in First at Saturday Creative Arts Emmys](https://www.emmys.com/news/awards-news/creative-arts-news-240106)
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