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.
[music]
[applause]
Craig Mazin: Look at this beautiful crowd.
John: It’s lovely.
Craig: Beautiful.
John: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Scriptnotes, a podcast and now a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Craig: Yes.
[applause]
John: For folks listening at home, we are at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles. It is our book launch party. Craig, how are you feeling?
Craig: I feel very grateful because I believe everyone here is here because they bought a book.
John: They got a book.
Craig: Thank you.
John: This is the most books you’ll ever see in one place for Scriptnotes. Everyone has an orange book in their hands.
Craig: Yes. Cut to 400 years from now-
John: Absolutely.
Craig: -and our book is The Constitution of the New Country.
[laughter]
John: It’s the new Bible.
Craig: Yes. It’s Little Red Book.
John: Little Red Book.
Craig: Yes.
John: We have an amazing show for you today. We have Julia Turner here. She’s going to interrogate us about the Scriptnotes book.
Craig: Yes.
John: We’re also going to talk about Craig’s favorite topic, which is criticism.
Craig: Yes, I love it.
John: Love it.
Craig: Love it.
[laughter]
Craig: Can’t wait to talk with her about that.
John: Ashley Nicole Black will help us make a meal of leftovers.
[applause]
John: We’ll have audience questions. Craig, just this morning, you worked out a whole new game.
Craig: Yes. I love a little Christmas quiz. It’s a brief one. We’ll do it in between Julia and Ashley Nicole, I think. Just a little trivia quiz. I believe we’re going to need three contestants.
John: We’re going to need three contestants. You are already contestants. You just don’t know it yet. If you have a book in your hands, open it to where we signed it. If you have a star on that page, you are a contestant. Raise your hand if you have one of the starred books.
Craig: There’s a starred book.
John: There’s one. We have one.
Craig: Oh, there’s two.
John: There’s two. First, Craig, let’s have a seat.
Craig: Great.
John: The Scriptnotes book is finally out in bookstores. As people are hearing this episode, they will have gotten their preorders. They’ll be able to buy it at their local bookstore. We often talk on the podcast about starting a new project, but we don’t often talk about finishing, and just being done with a thing, and saying goodbye to a thing, because the Scriptnotes book is now done, it’s out.
Craig: It’s out.
John: We’re finished.
Craig: Yes.
John: Talk to us about how you feel about finishing a project, finishing a movie, saying goodbye to something.
Craig: It’s always sad. I get sad. We throw the term postpartum around, which I think is a bit insulting to people that actually go through postpartum depression. That’s a very serious thing. There is a postscriptum depression. There’s a thing that happens when it’s over because it’s been in your mind for so long, and when it’s done, and I mean done done, not necessarily like, “Oh, we’re on our third revision,” or something, you do feel like you’ve sent your kid off, and now it belongs to everyone. You just have to let it go, and it’s not yours anymore.
John: Yes. With movies, once you go to a premiere and it’s like, “Oh, it’s so exciting.” You’re seeing all this stuff. You’re doing press. Then at a certain point, it’s just its opening weekend, and it’s there. It’s no longer your movie, it’s the world’s movie. Their reaction to it is what’s going to keep it going or not going. I’ve had a bit of this experience with the three Arlo Finch books because I had the launch of the first one, great, but there was always a second one, and then the third one, and eventually, like, “Oh, wow, I’m no longer the person writing Arlo Finch books.”
It’s a weird thing to be done with it. It’s nice that it’s actually physically a book, that it’s actually a thing that sits on a shelf. So often we talk about scripts we write, and they get pretty fantastic, but if they don’t, all that energy, all that effort is just trapped in 12 Point Courier.
Craig: Yes. In a way, I think psychologically, I prefer that. There’s a world where the best outcome is you write a script, you perfect it, and then you encase it in Lucite,-
[laughter]
Craig: -and it is never read by anyone.
John: No.
Craig: It will never be tainted by their dirty eyes.
[laughter]
Craig: I love that, but the postscriptum that I’m really fearing is when I eventually get to the end of The Last of Us because we’re talking about years and years at that point. Now it’s like, “Hey, that’s a chunk of your life, and that’s going to be interesting.” I will either be terribly, terribly sad or wonderfully, wonderfully happy.
[laughter]
Craig: I’m rooting for the second, almost certainly the first.
John: A question people ask, like, “Oh, do you go back and read your Arlo Finch books?” Like, “Oh, God, no, I’m not going to read that.” People ask, “Do you watch your movies?” The answer is I really don’t. Unless I’m doing a special event for something, I don’t go back and watch old movies. I can understand why people would think you would because, “Oh, aren’t you so proud of it?” It’s not like your kid is going out to college or something.
[laughter]
John: It’s just like, “No, it’s there. It’s for other people. It’s not for me anymore.”
Craig: I can now watch clips online that occasionally go viral for the weirdest reasons from Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.
[laughter]
Craig: We’re talking about whatever, 20 years. A couple of decades go by. Yes, I’m watching it like anyone else now. It’s gone. I can do that. I’m going to have to wait about 20 years per thing, and then I feel, yes, I could look at that.
John: The Scriptnotes book isn’t quite cold yet. Because it’s so awkward for us to talk about a book, we thought we’d bring on somebody incredibly smart to ask us questions about that. Our first guest is a longtime co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest. She’s also a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. She’s also plotting some new media thing we’re not supposed to talk about.
Craig: Yes. Apparently, she’s got a scheme.
John: She’s got a scheme.
Craig: -to launch some sort of new digital journalism thing. It’s going to be based here in LA.
John: There was a Vanity Fair article about it, though.
Craig: I think a squib.
John: A squib.
Craig: A squib in Vanity Fair. I’m curious. We asked her backstage what it was called, and she said, “Fuck you, I’m not telling you.”
John: Yes.
[laughter]
John: Which I think is a brave title.
Craig: Amazing title.
John: I think it’s really good.
[laughter]
John: I’m going to have dinner for that.
Craig: Very catchy.
John: Welcome back to the program, Julia Turner.
[applause]
Julia Turner: Hello.
Craig: Hello.
John: Julia Turner.
Julia: Hi.
John: Oh.
Julia: Hello, everyone.
John: Hi. Before we fully hand over the reins to you, people may remember you because you hosted a conversation with us for our 10th anniversary of the Scriptnotes Podcast, which is excerpted in the appendix of the book. This is very meta to have you back here to talk about us.
Julia: Very full circle. I’m going to ask you mostly about that appendix.
[laughter]
Julia: How’d I do? Can we just stipulate that I’m the official journalist of Scriptnotes, I’m your official interrogator?
Craig: I have no problem with that.
Julia: All right.
John: 100% endorsed.
Craig: Your competition is literally no one else.
[laughter]
Julia: It would have been really embarrassing if you said no-
Craig: Yes, it would have been rough. [laughs]
Julia: -you need to think about it. [laughs]
Craig: Yes. Oh. Yes, we’ll take that under management. All right, official journalist of Scriptnotes, lay it on us.
John: We cede our control to you.
Julia: Okay. Let’s see where I can take this. I have listened to your show for more than a decade. I have spent so many hours in both of your company, mostly nodding in agreement, marveling at your stage wisdom, deeply amused, occasionally shaking my fist at you.
Craig: That’s me, right?
[laughter]
Julia: Both of you.
Craig: Okay.
Julia: More you. We’ll get to the part that I shake-
Craig: Yay.
Julia: -my fist at later. I have also heard you say many, many, many times that script-writing books are a crock and no one should buy or read them.
Craig: Correct.
[laughter]
Craig: I am consistent with that.
Julia: How did we get here? [chuckles] What made you want to write this book?
John: Yes, let’s talk about that.
[laughter]
John: Craig, have we changed our opinion on books about how to be a screenwriter?
Craig: No. I have not changed my opinion at all because, as far as I can tell, the only book that exists about how to write screenplays or write for movies and television that is written by two people or a person that has repeatedly done that job for decades is this orange book. It is unique. I don’t know of any other book like that. Most of the books are by people that did it once, or never did it, or were more analysts. I don’t think of this as inconsistent with my belief that screenwriting books are a crock. I think this book is a refutation of other screenwriting [chuckles] books.
Julia: [laughs]
Craig: I hope that people do find it useful. That said, if they don’t, then we’ve just added one more pile of the crock.
Julia: [laughs]
John: Another thing I’ll say is that the subtitle in the book is A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters. It’s a book about screenwriting. It’s not a how-to-write-a-screenplay book. It’s about the craft and profession of screenwriting. It was a chance for us to share everything we talked about on the show, but also for the 25 interviews with other screenwriters in there talking about how they do their work. That, to me, felt like a valuable addition to the literature on screenwriting.
Julia: Yes. There’s a lot of expertise besides just the two of yours in there, but there’s a lot of the two of yours as well. I’m curious, when you first came up with the idea to do this book, were there particular moments from the show that you remembered that you thought, “That has to go in? I don’t care what else is in, but we’ve got to make sure this part is in there.”
John: Craig has a standalone episode called How to Write a Movie, which is such a pretentious title for an episode.
Julia: [chuckles]
Craig: Oh.
John: It’s him giving his lecture on what writing a movie is like to him. It’s so specific to his point of view that it became pretty clear that’s just a chapter in and of itself. Literally, it’s the text of that episode. Very lightly edited, it becomes that one chapter. To me, it was talking through pushing back against the idea of what structure is, and that structure is something you impose upon a story. The structure is really instead something natural that evolves out of story. The structure is characters doing things.
Those conversations we kept coming back to about specificity, about pitching, about notes, and trying to make sure that the book was full of the kinds of things we talked about on the episode, but most of the chapters are not the one episode we did about that topic.
Craig: Right. I think that as, honestly, John and our excellent team did the vast majority of curation here, there’s, I think, a really good job of gleaning out those very practical moments from the podcast over the years where we’re like, “Okay, here’s something just about transitions from scene to scene. Here’s what conflict, different kinds of–” those things are very useful to people, I think, particularly useful to people who are good enough to be screenwriters.
Ultimately, you’re writing a book for people that are interested in screenwriting and screenwriters from a objective point of view, or who want to be and will be. It hopefully would help them along, but I also love the choices of the interviews with the guests that we’ve had over the years because it’s quite a startling group of people when you look at it in the aggregate.
Julia: When you guys read the early drafts, I think you’ve spoken about this, Craig, that one of the joys of podcasting is you can just talk and talk and talk, and it’s not quite the same as writing something down. It doesn’t have quite the same weight. You can be more exploratory. You can be more conversational. Also, at least in my experience as a long-time podcaster, sometimes you just forget what you said. You’re talking into the ether.
Craig: I forgot what we said when we got out here.
Julia: [laughs]
Craig: Yes, you remember nothing.
Julia: Was there anything that surprised you when the corpus of your work was brought back to you with the help of your assistants? Were there any things that you had said or that each other had said that you were like, “What the hell? I don’t believe that at all.”?
Craig: No, I don’t think there was anything where I was like, “Oh, no, John,-
Julia: [chuckles]
Craig: -I never said this about the Holocaust.” It was nothing like that.
[laughter]
Craig: It was amazing to go through it and read it and think, “These guys sound pretty good.”
Julia: [laughs]
Craig: It’s impossible to remember those moments. There’s so many of them. We’ve done a game where Matthew reads us quotes of things we’ve said. I think we did it at Austin, and he’s like, “Which one said it?” We don’t know.
John: [chuckles]
Craig: It’s how many years?
John: Yes, about 15 years.
Craig: 15 years of talking.
John: One of the real decisions we had to make with the book was, clearly, it’s not going to just be the transcripts, but are John and Craig going to speak with individual voices in it, or is it going to be one collective voice? We tried it with some breaking into John says a thing and Craig says a thing. It just did not work at all. We had to go through and strip all that out and make it just one consistent us voice throughout it.
What was good about it is that even though Craig and I will disagree some on the show, mostly it’s a conversation, and mostly we’re rowing in the same direction. There’s a lot of times where it’s a paraphrase of something Craig said or I said, but it makes sense as one’s collective voice in the book. It was challenging to make it read right, but it wasn’t challenging to make all the opinions fit together the right way because,-
Craig: We tend to agree.
John: -yes, 90% of things about the process of writing, we agree on.
Julia: It is interesting because it does feel new. As someone who’s listened to all these episodes, it’s fun to encounter this synthesized voice. I’m curious. I’ve heard you say that before, that the back and forth didn’t work. What didn’t work? What was bad about it?
John: It was jarring to get halfway through a page, and then Craig says a thing, and then John says a thing, and then we’re back. Whose voice are we in when we’re back? It just felt really, really strange, and so it didn’t work. It was nice visually on the page to break stuff up, but it never worked quite right. We had to either do a lot of it or do none of it. We just took it all out.
Craig: It’s also transcript-y and we provide transcripts. In a way, you’d feel like you just are selling me the transcripts.
John: The only section in the book that’s still transcripts is the section with you at the end.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: It’s the appendix.
Craig: And the index.
John: Then, when we did the interview chapters with our guests, we basically cut ourselves out of it, so it was just their words and did that light passage. It feels like it’s just them talking. Occasionally, you might see me or Craig pop in there to pull a point out, but it’s not really that feel.
Julia: Do you guys think that if you had read this book at the beginning of your careers, it would have changed how you approached anything, saved you from any mistakes or follies?
Craig: Absolutely.
Julia: Which ones? How so?
[laughter]
Craig: This is all I had when I started. Really, the answer is all of it because all I had was a line graph from Sid Field that was 30 pages, first act, 60 pages, second act, 30 pages, and then midpoint. What the fuck good is that? I remember sitting there. There’s 21-year-old Craig sitting there, wherever, on a park bench, making lines for these ideas I had. It’s useless. I didn’t have anything like, “Okay, let’s talk about dialogue, let’s talk about conflict, let’s talk about scene work, let’s talk about transitions, let’s talk about structure as a function of relationship, dramatic argument,” any of that. All of that just had to be instinctive and then learned. I do think it would have helped me dramatically.
John: Craig and I both came up as solo screenwriters, essentially. Craig had a writing partner for a while, but essentially, we were just doing all the work by ourselves. We weren’t in a TV writer’s room where we had other people to bounce ideas off of and see, “Oh, this person tried this thing, this didn’t work. How do we make this?” We didn’t have that back and forth to see how it feels to grow a story.
We just had these bad books to start with, and screenplays to read, but there weren’t as many available screenplays for us to read. It was harder to get up to speed. Hopefully, this gets people up to speed and makes people think, “Oh, okay. Now I get what it would be like to be a screenwriter.” Hopefully, a lot of them will say, “I don’t want to be one,” and then they can move on to something else.
Craig: Perfectly fine.
John: Absolutely fine. If it scares you away–
Craig: That’s actually an incredible outcome.
John: It’s a gift.
Craig: Saved you a lot of time and misery, and you can proceed forth to cure cancer, which is what you’re supposed to do.
John: [laughs]
Craig: If you are only interested as a student of film, then I just think it’s interesting without being practical.
Julia: Speaking of all the people who should not become screenwriters and go cure cancer, I’d be curious to hear you guys talk about the moment that we’re at in Hollywood right now. I feel like the vibe in this town,-
[laughter]
Julia: It’s a little like, “Are we Detroit?”
John: Yes.
[laughter]
Julia: Is this going to still happen?
Craig: Detroit’s doing better, I think, currently.
Julia: Detroit has a long and beautiful trajectory. I spent a lot of great time in Detroit, but I think you know what I mean.
Craig: Yes.
Julia: I’d be curious to hear you guys– I have this, too, in journalism. Sometimes young people come to me and say, “Oh, how do I become a journalist?” I wonder, is the only responsible answer to give them run for the hills?
I’d be curious to hear you guys both talk about how the industry feels to you right now as compared with your previous decades working, and what it means to publish a book that’s inviting people into this trade at a moment like this.
Craig: What an insinuation.
[laughter]
John: We were very mindful of the fact that this book, we want it to feel eternal. Even though it’s capturing this moment, it’s not really so specific about the US film and TV industry as it stands right now. That it should hopefully feel like if you’re writing scripted entertainment, if you’re writing narrative with characters who are doing things, this should still apply. A lot of these lessons would apply for theater and for other kinds of writing.
I do think that we’re probably at a transition point where this next generation that’s rising up is going to make a new, different thing that is as different from the existing film and television as what the ’70s were in terms of how they upended our film culture, just because the gatekeepers are not letting them make the things in their system, so they’re going to make stuff outside of their system.
That new generation will find a new way to do stuff. Hopefully, some of the stuff that we’re talking about here in terms of thinking about how characters are driving the story, thinking about how theme emerges from conflict, those should hopefully be universal ideas that will continue.
Craig: Goes back to the Greeks. So far, so good for that. Yes, Hollywood has its ups and downs, and it also has chaos, and it has always been hard to break in as a writer. If it is twice as hard now, you’ve gone from a 0.02 chance to a 0.01 chance, it doesn’t impact you. I guess this is the message that I would give to people is don’t be disheartened by the chaos of Hollywood. No one knows who will own Warner Brothers next year. No one. It’s madness out there. Also, continue to make an enormous amount of television, they continue to spend a lot of money on content, billions of dollars every year. The chaos of them is theirs.
We don’t run Hollywood. We don’t own it. Not my problem. My problem is to do the thing that people like us have been doing forever for audiences, which is to entertain them. That’s what we do. The people who run this business, whether they are hair on fire, falling down, selling to each other, falling apart, and yet the audience will still need to watch stuff and to experience things. I guess the answer is it doesn’t matter. As long as people want to continue to watch things, then the people who write them are fine. It’s the people sitting in the boardrooms that, “Hmm, that must be fun these days.”
Julia: I think one broader question out of that that I also would love to hear you guys on is, why should people be screenwriters? Why should people do this thing that people have been doing since the Greeks, and probably before?
Craig: Don’t think should is the right. The problem is you need to. People who end up doing what we do do it because they have to do it. It’s a compulsion. It can’t possibly be a choice. If you have to choose every time, you’re actually going to choose no every time in a row because it’s hard at all phases. I don’t know why people become stand-up comedians, but clearly they must be compelled to do it because it is brutal. Brutal. That’s the best answer I can give.
John: I’d say that there’s–
[laughter]
Craig: You’re trying to figure out why you do this?
John: I’m trying to think why I should try it.
Craig: Quit.
[laughter]
John: I’m allowed to stop?
Craig: [laughs]
John: I think there’s a compelling– Craig and I often talk about how we were the kids who just sat around in our rooms and just imagined things all the time. I get paid just to imagine stuff and write those words down. That happens. It’s exciting that that’s my job, just to imagine whole worlds of things. There’s always going to be folks who are skilled at writing, who are skilled at sitting down and creating something new that wasn’t there before.
What’s different about screenwriting is that you’re doing it as the first step in a plan that is going to involve hundreds of other people to make a thing. The mechanics behind that will probably change, and they have changed a lot over the years, but I think that’s still a very universal idea. I think if you’re a listener to the show or someone who’s reading the book who says, “Yes, I want to do that thing because I have that drive,” there’s still going to be a way to do that no matter what happens in this crazy structure we have.
Julia: I have a question for you about AI.
Craig: Sure.
Julia: This book does not encompass AI. Makes sense.
Craig: Written by AI.
[laughter]
John: It was not written by AI.
[laughter]
John: Wait. I was very mindful as we were finishing up this book, like, “Oh, shit, a year from now, could an AI take all of our transcripts and generate something that’s–”
Craig: A year from now? Oh, that shit’s happened already. That boat sailed, yes.
Julia: Yes. I was going to ask, actually, if you had AI alongside your assistants scrape the corpus and see what it thought was important.
Craig: No.
John: Really, the scraping of the transcripts happened three years ago. If it were happening now, of course, you would throw it all into Gemini or something and say, “When did John and Craig talk about this topic?” It could pull up all those references. Instead, it was Drew and Chris and our amazing interns just googling our transcripts to find out when we talk about those things.
Julia: You guys, I think of you both as being technophiles and tech curious, not being Luddites, not being avoidant. Also, I feel like I’ve observed you both, even Robot John, being repulsed by some of what AI is bringing us. I feel like in my own life, I’ve seen, I don’t know, two different paths. I feel like there are people in my life who are like, “I’m never going to try it. I’m not using it.” Then I feel like the people who start to play with it. “What feels right? What’s the right way to play with it? What’s the wrong way?”
I’m curious, if this book is the staple of screenwriting schools that you hope, I assume it will be, and you’ve got to re-release it in four or five years with a second edition, what would the chapter about AI say? Are you guys AI curious, AI loathsome?
John: I don’t think a second edition would ever have an AI chapter because it would be automatically out of date. There’s no way to keep up to that level.
Craig: That’s just an apology to our AI masters.
John: Absolutely.
[laughter]
John: Will an AI ingest this book? Absolutely. It already has ingested this book, I’m sure, because the e-book will be out there someplace. You’ll ask questions. It’ll have some of our answers in there mixed into it. That’s also just culture. It’s just everything does get recycled and repurposed and put back at you. It doesn’t happen at the speed that we’re used to with it now.
Craig: I just find it gross. I don’t turn away from AI because I’m a technophobe. I love technology. I just find it to be crap. I think it’s crap technology. I think it’s boring. When I look at what people will show me that AI has done, I find it boring and flat and dead. That’s not surprising because it’s entirely built on the bits and pieces we’ve put out there, or in the case of language, just language. Not the stuff that language emerges out of, just the language.
I think I’ve shied away from it because it’s like, “Okay, I’m a carpenter. I like working with my hands and building something that’s beautiful,” and own the road, there’s a factory that just goes stamp, stamp, stamp, smash, smash, IKEA table, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with IKEA tables. God knows I’ve attempted to build so many of them.
[laughter]
Craig: My prior fear about AI, which is that it was just going to swamp our humanity and take over everything, new fear about AI is that it sucks, and our economy is about to take a huge dump because it has been built around the idea that it doesn’t, except I think it does. We’re going to find out, everyone.
[laughter]
Craig: Either way, we’re fucked.
John: Coming back to you,-
[laughter]
John: -the word we say way too often on the show is specificity, and specificity as in how is something unique to the writer’s own experience. That’s a thing that an AI just is never going to have. AI doesn’t have a point of view on anything because it doesn’t have any internal logic. It’s never in a space. It’s never in a body. It’s never that stuff. That’s why Craig and I were talking about doing a New York Times editorial and stuff, and we decided against it.
The thesis would have been screenwriting will survive AI, if anything. It survives AI because our job, weirdly, is to imagine a place, put ourselves in it, describe what we’re seeing, what it feels like, what’s actually driving, to be inside those characters, and that’s a uniquely human experience. Will there be AI-generated screenplays? Of course. Will there be good art made out of this? I don’t think so. I do feel some safety just because of the things that these systems are designed to do. I wanted to turn back a little bit towards you. Now, I do want to have a little discussion about cultural conversation and criticism.
Julia: Who will say in the future if the art is good? Segue man?
John: Absolutely. Oh my God, she stole the segue from me.
[laughter]
Craig: Dude, listen to the show.
John: Absolutely, as critics, on Slate Cultural Gapfest, which everyone should listen to. It’s phenomenal. By the way, Scriptnotes is completely ripped off from the Slate formula where they have–
Craig: We are?
John: Yes.
Craig: Oh, I gave you so much credit for this.
Julia: [laughs]
John: They have endorsements. We have One Cool Thing. The idea.
Craig: Oh my God. We stole it all?
John: Yes.
[laughter]
John: It’s really very similar.
Craig: The credits work the same.
John: The setup of what we’re going to talk about on the episode.
Craig: My innocence.
[laughter]
John: The fact that we have some structure and it’s all not just one rambling conversation, that comes from Slate.
Craig: Thank you, Slate.
Julia: Slate invented it. No one else had ever done it before.
John: Every week, though, you have three topics. You’re picking what things in culture you want to talk about. Is it harder now? In the age of this infinitely generated artificial stuff, has it changed?
Julia: I don’t think we are yet beset by actual AI content. The content, the art that we’re talking about, the movies, the television shows, is written by humans for humans. I feel like one of the things that is a perverse possible upside of the rise of AI is that it forces us to really think about and understand what it is to be human, and what the point [chuckles] of it is, and what’s amazing about it, and to seek out and value the best part of it.
That’s what I love about art. I feel like most art is grappling with the question on some level of what is it like to be human, and some aspect of that, and some subset of that. The opportunity to consume it every week and talk about it with smart critics and try to understand what it means, and whether it’s good, and if so, why, and if not, why not, it feels like a real privilege and really fun.
John: Craig, you classically are not such a fan of-
Craig: Criticism.
John: -criticism. Talk to me about when Julia says that they’re grappling with, is this good? Is it resonating? What does it mean?
Craig: It means they’re figuring out if they like it or not. Who cares?
John: Isn’t there some meaning in how this fits into the larger picture of the art form?
Craig: Yes, there is. What you said that made my heart sing was, in a world where there’s a bunch of AI crap, maybe it’s going to make us appreciate the fact that all these things that are made by humans, there are things about it that are good or striving for something. It’s essentially looking for the positive impulse. I think a lot of times people presume that the only impulse behind certain things would be make money. People are like, “Cash grab.”
Somebody, the writer, almost certainly was really trying, even when other people were like, “Hey, we’re offering you a job, and you got to pay your bills.” That person tried to do something good. I think following that is a wonderful thing. My issue with criticism really does come down to the notion that some people have a privileged opinion. Really, it just means if you like something or not. If you do, you do.
I like watching critics fight with each other because I’m like, “There. There it is. There. They don’t agree.” In short, what is the purpose of it? Now, the purpose may be to find people that if you articulate a point that I agree with, that’s fun. Especially if I don’t like something, it’s disturbingly fun to watch somebody else beat up someone you hate, but it certainly doesn’t help the artists, I know that much. It has created a culture where everyone is now Roger Ebert. Everyone is looking for that fun thing to put on Letterboxd, and usually it’s a dunk. I don’t think that’s good for us.
Julia: Okay, wait.
Craig: Sure.
Julia: I have been having this argument with you at home by myself for a decade, Craig.
[laughter]
Craig: Here’s your chance.
Julia: I have to say, I really value your opinion so much. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I used to take homeopathic medicine when I thought I was getting a cold, and I don’t anymore-
Craig: Yes.
Julia: -because of how laceratingly, how viscerally, how trouncingly you demolished the idiocy of homeopathy.
Craig: I am okay with criticism now.
[laughter]
Craig: Honestly, that’s a huge win for me.
Julia: Generally, I find you so persuasive and right. Then, on this, I find you so wrong. Obviously, I have a stake in it because I am a critic, or at least I play one on a podcast. I think the thing that strikes me about your take on it is that you seem much more focused on the verdict.
Craig: Yes.
Julia: The idea that the point of criticism is a verdict, good, bad, up, down. To me, the point of criticism and the value of it, both as a practitioner and as a reader and follower of criticism, is the dialogue, is the conversation, the interpretation, the search for meaning. I think criticism is important because art is important. It would be weird if there was Congress and no one covered it, or said what was happening, or said if it was good, or bad, or surprising, or new, or breaking a norm.
Craig: We have too much of that, I think, as well.
Julia: [chuckles]
Craig: I understand what you’re saying, and you’re right, I do focus on the verdict, but the reason I do that– First of all, there are critics who are smart and thoughtful, and you are one of them, whether I agree with you or not.
Julia: Have you ever listened to my podcast?
Craig: Not your podcast.
[laughter]
Julia: You just presume it because I seem like I’m going to be in conversations. That’s fine.
Craig: I’m a little bit of a transcript reader.
Julia: [laughs]
Craig: The listening takes too long. I can read so fast. There are critics that I respect in terms of their analysis and stuff because I think they’re really thoughtful, whether I agree with them or not. Walter Cha, for instance, has written things about movies I’ve done where I’m like, “That’s amazing,” and he loves it, and also, “That’s amazing,” and he hates it.” That’s an interesting thing.
The reason I focus on the verdict is because that’s what the rest of the world focuses on. I think critics can say to themselves, “Oh, it’s all about everything right up to thumbs up, thumbs down,” but no one else is really listening. They’re going for thumb up, thumb down, and then they’re combining that into a huge tomato.
[laughter]
Craig: That’s the only thing anyone looks at. That’s what’s happened.
Julia: You are judging criticism by the worst commercial output of it and not what the critic is doing, which is engaging with the work.
Craig: That’s how gun manufacturers talk a little bit.
[laughter]
Craig: No, I’m serious.
[laughter]
Julia: God damn it.
Craig: You can’t ignore how the product is used.
[laughter]
Julia: It’s interesting, though. We are living in a world with less and less criticism. Alan Sepinwall isn’t at Rolling Stone anymore. There will be fewer paid television critics reviewing season three than season two, and season two than season one.
Craig: I’ll miss Alan, whether he liked season one better than he liked season two.
Julia: He’s a great critic.
Craig: He’s a thoughtful guy. I read all of that because I was interested in his–
John: Wait, Craig, you read it?
Craig: Yes. There are a couple of people I read. I’m very specific about it. There isn’t less criticism. There’s less paid criticism. The critic industry almost orchestrated its own demise by propagating and popularizing the verdict. Now everyone’s a critic.
Julia: That’s just opinions. That’s not criticism.
Craig: Oh, well, tell that to all the people that are opinionating.
Julia: Don’t pay attention to them. I have no desire to be a screenwriter, thank God.
[laughter]
Julia: If I were making art in the way that you guys make art, the good critics would be important to me. I feel like not following them or reading them would be like making a phone call and having no one pick up on the other end of the line, which is not to devalue the experience of the audience, which is they’re moved by your thing, and they take the ride of your thing, and they have feelings about your thing. What the good critic does is assess why it moved you and how it did that.
Craig: Or why they hate it, and why it’s stupid, and why it shouldn’t have been made.
Julia: You’re just not reading the right critics. It’s so beautiful.
Craig: That’s not beautiful, I assure you.
[laughter]
Craig: The experience of reading, sometimes it is so personal, and so mean, and such an exercise, and, “Hey, let’s just be a dick.” It really is. I understand that you practice a different sort.
Julia: Or advocate for, at least. I wouldn’t put myself up with the truly great critics of our age.
Craig: Some of what we call the truly great critics of our age, I can do a nice tight 40 on why Pauline Kael’s most overrated voice in cinema history and should have never been listened to by anyone.
[laughter]
Julia: [unintelligible 00:35:51] 40 minutes of the show.
Craig: [crosstalk] That’s the tightest 40 minutes I could do.
[laughter]
John: My natural instinct is to be the peacemaker who makes everyone happy at the end, but I’m not going to do that now because I’ve learned in this book that conflict is good.
[laughter]
John: I thought we don’t have to.
[applause]
Craig: So good.
John: Yes, we don’t need to resolve this thing-
Craig: Damn, this is good.
John: -because this is an open, ongoing fight between love-
Craig: [unintelligible 00:36:14]
John: -and is a perfect time to segue to something that Craig likes much more than rallying on critics, which is a game.
Craig: A game.
John: Craig has a game.
Craig: I have a game.
[applause]
John: We have at least two people out there who have starred books. Raise the house lights if we can. Did the third person find their star?
Craig: Yes. Great.
John: We’ll have the three people with stars come up these stairs.
Craig: Come on up these stairs here or those stairs there-
John: Is there a stair there? Yes, any stairs.
Craig: -and join us on stage.
John: [unintelligible 00:36:39] over here. Drew has a stool.
Craig: Ah. [crosstalk]
John: Hello. What’s your name?
Kayla: I’m Kayla.
John: Hi, Kayla. Hi.
Kayla: Hi.
John: Kayla, take a step by the stool. Hi, Kayla. And?
Valeska: Valeska.
John: Valeska. Valeska, very nice to meet you and hi. Sita. Oh my gosh, we have an amazing– All right.
Craig: Right.
John: Craig, you guys are going to be gathered around this one stool.
Craig: Gather around the stool.
John: This stool.
Craig: You’re going to want to be close to that bell.
John: If you have the answer, you are going to hit that bell.
Craig: Let me ask you a question, guys. How are we with Christmas movies? Okay.
[laughter]
John: As a reminder to our audience, don’t shout out the answer if you know it. Craig will tell you the answer at the end.
Craig: Yes. If you guys don’t have it, we can open it up to the audience. It’s no big deal. I’m just going to read. There are five quotes from Christmas movies. Each quote is from a real Christmas movie. It is exact. They’re a little odd in their own way. They’ll go from not so odd to odder and odder. If you know the name of the movie that this quote is from, you hit the ding dong. All right? Do you want to practice?
[bell dings]
Craig: So gentle.
[laughter]
[bell dings]
Craig: Even gentler.
John: Yes, absolutely.
[laughter]
John: You can hit it hard. Don’t worry about it.
Craig: Yes. Find the inner winner, the person that wants to take the other two down.
[laughter]
Craig: First quote from a movie. “Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe.”
[bell dings]
Kayla: Polar Express.
Craig: That is correct.
John: Nicely done.
Craig: Way to go.
[applause]
Craig: We won’t have an 0 for 5 situation. This is great.
John: They got it.
Craig: Here we go. Next one. “If this is their idea of Christmas, I got to be here for New Year’s.” We’ve got some people who know out there.
John: I’m going to give you a hint. This was the subject of a Deep Dive episode.
Participant: 500 episodes. [chuckles]
John: [chuckles] Absolutely.
Craig: Fair point.
John: It’s in the book as well.
Craig: I’m going to turn to the audience.
John: It’s in the book.
Craig: You want to guess one? Then I’m going to go to the audience.
[bell dings]
Valeska: Die Hard.
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes, Die Hard.
[applause]
John: One and one.
Craig: This one’s really weird. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”
[bell dings]
Kayla: It’s a Wonderful Life.
Craig: No.
John: Ah, [unintelligible 00:38:52].
[laughter]
Craig: No.
[laughter]
Craig: No. It’s a hard one. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”
[bell dings]
Valeska: The Grinch.
Craig: No.
Kayla: Nightmare Before Christmas.
Craig: No. Now we’re just saying titles.
John: Yes.
[laughter]
Craig: I’m going to turn it over to the audience.
Participant: Miracle on 34th.
Craig: That is correct. Miracle on 34th Street.
[applause]
John: We’re still tied one and one.
Craig: Yes. I love this one. Ready? “Come here, little one. Papa wants to see you.”
[laughter]
[bell dings]
Kayla: Elf.
Craig: Yes, it is Elf. Last one. Longest one. My favorite one. Many of you are going to know it. Don’t say it. “Next to me in the blackness lay my oiled blue steel beauty, the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received–“ I’m registering that. You can ring it, and I’ll finish it. Yes.
Valeska: Christmas Story.
Craig: It is Christmas Story.
John: Christmas Story.
Craig: “Gradually, I drifted off to sleep, pranging ducks on the wing and getting off spectacular hip shots. Hip shots-“
John: “Hip shots.”
Craig: -are the last two words of Christmas Story. Now–
John: We’re going to tie two and two, so we’re going to do a tiebreaker.
Craig: Okay. Well, the tiebreaker question is, what interesting fact unites all of these quotes? They all share one thing in common. It’s not that they’re in Christmas movies. Yes?
Audience Member: The writer’s Jewish?
[laughter]
Craig: It’s a good guess. It’s a callback, and I like that a lot. That’s a very good guess. I wasn’t going to do that two years in a row. That said, probably yes. No, I don’t believe the writers were all Jewish.
John: Did you have a guess?
Audience Member: Were they all men?
Craig: Oh, hey. Maybe, but that’s not what I was looking for. We’ll go past white, male, Jew. No, something about their connection to the movies themselves, the context within the movies themselves. They’re all doing something similar in their movie. Yes?
Audience Member: They’re all said by the protagonists?
Craig: No.
John: Oh, I think I know the answer.
Craig: Okay, don’t say it. I’m going to give you three one last chance. One last chance. Yes.
Audience Member: The last lines?
Craig: The last lines of the movies. Each one of those was the last line of their movie. You know what? Good job, you guys. I think they did great. John, tell them what they won.
[laughter]
John: All right. Often when you’re putting out a book, you are creating extra merch for the book. For the Scriptnotes book, we have Scriptnotes stickers, but the stickers were there on the table as you came in. I have done three books before this. I did Arlo Finch merch, which I still have sitting on a shelf. You guys get Arlo Finch merch. As the winner, you get to pick your pick of these three things. Tell me what you get.
Craig: I got to tell you, you can’t miss on these. Each one of them, life-changing. First, we have an Arlo Finch neckerchief. Yes. Everyone’s Christmas dream. An Arlo Finch towel. By the way, I wish people could see their faces. They are either crying with joy or deep disappointment. Finally, an Arlo Finch water bottle because you can never have too many big, dumb water bottles.
John: Which would you like?
Audience Member: I’ll do the water bottle.
Craig: Yes, there you go. Congrats.
Audience Member: I want the towel.
Craig: Hey, that’s good news. You got the neckerchief, the one you wanted. Thank you, guys. Thank you for playing. I was really surprised by the writers were all Jewish, and I don’t know why. I should have seen that coming. All weird last lines. Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all as the last line of Miracle on 34th Street. It is the subject of debate to this day. You’ll see a lot of threads on Reddit. Why does he say this? What does this mean?
John: What does it mean?
Craig: I don’t know.
John: I thought they were all voiceovers. They’re not voiceovers?
Craig: No, they are not all voiceovers. Our next guest I’m so excited for, she’s a writer, comedian, performer whose credits include Ted Lasso, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Bad Monkey, and Shrinking. Welcome back to the program, Ashley Nicole Black.
[applause]
Craig: Hey. I hope you enjoyed watching Julia and I beat the fuck out of each other for about 10 minutes there.
Ashley Nicole Black: It literally took everything in me not to run out on stage and join the fight.
Julia: On which side?
John: Whose side did you fight on?
Ashley: Mostly Craig’s.
Craig: Oh, wow. All right. I’m so happy about that, but I would have been okay if you had gone– I mean, I like fighting.
John: Ashley, we’re in the Thanksgiving weekend. This episode will come out later on, but this is the Thanksgiving weekend, and often there are people gathering together, but there are discussions, debates around the dinner table. It can get a little bit heated. It’s not uncommon to have some heated words there.
Craig: Thanksgiving drama.
John: Did you have a good Thanksgiving, most crucially?
Ashley: I had a great Thanksgiving. I’m from here, so my whole family’s here. It’s really the best. I lived in Chicago and New York for a long time, then I would see my family once a year. It’s such a treat to be like, I can just see them whenever I want. Me and my uncle can get tacos. It’s pretty cool.
Craig: I love that you love your family, and you became a writer even though you–
Ashley: Well, my family is Black, and I do think that it’s a different thing. I think there is the stereotype of a writer as like, I was so sad and my parents didn’t talk to me. I just wrote in my room. I think Black people are just like, yes, I had cool shit to say. I wrote it down.
[laughter]
Ashley: Our problems are external for the most part.
John: Ashley’s book is going to be so much better than ours. It’s like, you have funny shit to say, write it down. It’s a simple book. She sold it.
Craig: I’m just terrified at how accurately you summed up my childhood with that mean voice.
Ashley: I work with a lot of writers.
Craig: You were tortured. Uh-huh. Well, all right. Congrats.
John: Ashley, you have your own chapter in the book. Thank you again for coming on the show. We are now a chapter in the book where we talk through your stuff. When you first came on the show, I remember dropping off with Mike at your apartment. Meeting your great dog, Gordy. Now you have a house. You’re a homeowner yourself. You’ve kept chugging along, series after series.
I’d love to talk to you about being that middle-of-your-career writer because so often we have the writers who are just starting out. You are consistently working on show after show. What is your life like? As you’re on a show, do you always know what the next thing is? What is it like?
Ashley: It’s so weird because when you’re young– and I was cute. I was so cute.
Craig: You were so cute?
Ashley: I was so cute.
Craig: You were cuter?
Ashley: You’re on set, and you’re a baby producer, and you’re like, oh, my God. This wallpaper, it’s not right. Oh, my God. The showrunner’s going to kill me. Do you mind changing it? They’re like, “Oh, you’re so cute. We’ll change it.” Then you get to a certain point, and you just have to be like, so this doesn’t work, and it does need to change.
I can’t blame it on anyone else because I’m a VP, and no one would believe that my boss was going to kill me at this point in my life. It’s just such a weird thing to be like, I have the answer to the question, and I am going to have to say it. People don’t like it when that happens to women, but I have to say it. It’s just such a weird position to be in.
Craig: The boss.
Ashley: But not, right?
Craig: Right. Sort of the boss.
Ashley: Yes. Sometimes you’re in meetings, and you’re like, oh, it should look like this. Then, “Oh, well, we’ll see what Bill says.” It’s like, I said it.
Craig: We don’t need Bill.
Ashley: I did it.
John: Since we’re coming out of Thanksgiving, we’ve been answering a lot of questions for the book, and we have a lot of leftovers. I thought that because we’re in leftoverville, you could help us answer some questions that came from our Reddit AMA and from other times where people were asking us questions online. Your answers are just better than ours.
Ashley: Do I answer as if I were a woman, correct?
John: No, we want your real answer here.
Craig: Wait, that’s an option? Kind of.
John: This is a question from Jeff A. When was there a time that has held you back from writing, from sitting in a script, going to a meeting? How did you get over or not get over that fear?
Ashley: Wait, say that again?
John: What was a time that a fear held you back? And what worked for you?
Ashley: I would say not a meeting or writing, but as an actor. A lot of times you come onto set. We were talking about Vince. The first scene that I shot on Bad Monkey, I literally had flown, arrived, put my things in a hotel room. Then we shot that scene at two o’clock in the morning, and it’s me and Vince.
You’re a very low-level actor who hasn’t slept in 48 hours, and you’ve never been on this set before. You’ve never met any of these people. The first thing you have to do is try to be funny next to Vince Vaughn. I would love to meet the sociopath who’s not fearful in that moment. I think the way you get past it is just to act as if it’s already happened.
A weird thing about being an actor is you can get fired at any time. It’s not like, oh, I got the job. I deserve to be here. No, you can get yanked literally at any point. It’s like, “Your manager’s on the phone.” Oh, did she want to congratulate me? “No.” You just have to go in and be like, we are in this scene together in this moment, so I’m going to act as if we are both top-level actors, and this is what’s supposed to happen.
I will say the great thing is that most of the really crazy high-level actors I’ve worked with will do the same thing. Just be like, “Yes, we’re supposed to be in this scene together. Let’s go.” You just do that until you get past that initial moment, and then do it.
John: That’s great advice for anybody going into a room to pitch, or you feel like you’re not supposed to be in this place. This is beyond where you’re supposed to be at. You just say, no, of course I’m supposed to be here. This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.
Ashley: Yes, I am here.
John: You are here, so change the fucking wallpaper because I’m in charge.
Ashley: Wallpaper was the worst example. It was the hardest thing to change.
Craig: It really is hard. Yes.
Ashley: He’ll say curtains.
Craig: Easier.
John: Haley Huang had a question. What is your favorite genre to watch, and what is your favorite genre to write? I’m curious if they match up for you or not.
Ashley: No, my favorite genre to write is comedy, hands down. I really got into this to make people laugh. I’m really curious about how drama writers work because what is the point of a scene if not to get a laugh? I will say that I watch a lot of drama and crime, and I probably watch a lot more of that than comedy.
Craig: I think I’m probably the flip. I like writing drama because it means I don’t have to worry about the punchline, the button, any of that misery. Did it. Don’t want to do it anymore. Watching comedy to me is– that’s what’s fun.
John: I love watching comedy. We’ll do our third rewatch of 30 Rock, and it’s just so amazing, but I just could never do that. I just don’t have the stamina or the brain that creates that level of joke density. I just can’t do it.
Craig: Kind of why we enjoy it, right?
John: It feels like magic.
Craig: Probably is why all the Oscars should go to comedies.
Ashley: Also, by the way, no one does. In a room of 10 people who are creating that joke density, no one person does that.
John: Again, I feel like I should be able to do it. I feel like Tina Fey could do that. I’m, of course, comparing myself to a team of experts who spent years doing it. Noah L. asks, when you were first learning how to screenwrite– Screenwrite as a verb is just weird. No, don’t like it.
Craig: Do not like it.
John: Who were the writers you looked up to and whose voices really inspired you? Ashley, any screenwriters inspire you as you were coming up?
Ashley: Yes, Shonda Rhimes, for sure. I think Grey’s Anatomy came out when I was in college, and it was the first show that looked like the world that I lived in. When I was younger, Kevin Williamson, I loved Scream and Dawson’s Creek, and those just highly verbal, Aaron Sorkin, very writerly writers, and I still have the issue of overwriting to this day, thanks to my love of those writers.
John: Craig, did you have any screenwriters you looked up to?
Craig: I definitely remember seeing Ocean’s Eleven and saying, okay, I need to know who this Ted Griffin guy is. I remember seeing Out of Sight and thinking, I need to know who this Scott Frank guy is. I read the script for Jerry Maguire, and Cameron Crowe blew my mind, even more so than he had already blown my mind prior with Fast Times, and then also Sorkin. I think a lot of people giggle a little bit because he’s so prolific, and because there’s that super cut of him reusing dialogue and stuff, but it’s great dialogue.
Ashley: Our legs went all the way up to here.
Craig: Yes, exactly, but it’s great dialogue, and he’s written– that whole A Few Good Men thing, I just– Oh, my God. Yes, so good.
Ashley: I think it’s also– maybe because you said A Few Good Men, it’s very theatrical in the sense that as someone who started as an actor, I like it when characters are trying to get a response from the other one. It’s so weird to me in comedies where the actors don’t laugh at the jokes. In real life, like I’m in a room here with you, I would like to make you laugh, and you know that that’s my goal. It’s weird to pretend that characters aren’t trying to get something from each other.
I feel like Aaron Sorkin’s characters are always directly pursuing tactics in a way that–
Craig: The whole opening of Social Network, just watching that ping-pong. Apparently, I think it’s true that scene was, I don’t know, 14 pages long. Fincher was like, “Aaron, I can’t open a movie with 14 minutes of two people talking.” Sorkin was like, “No, it’s four minutes. You’re reading it too slow.”
[laughter]
Craig: Fincher was like, “Okay, record it for me at the pace you want it to be.” He did, and Fincher, apparently on the day, was with the script supervisor, like, “Are we on pace?” Then when you watch it back, the clip is insane. Oh, so good.
John: In answering this question, I would say there’s always movies I admired, and eventually at some point I realized, oh, people wrote those movies. I didn’t know that people had wrote those movies.
Craig: They screen wrote them.
[laughter]
John: Once you actually start reading screenplays, which are so much more available now. I remember reading Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers and going to the last page and like, holy shit, and going back to page one and re-reading it again. You realize like, oh, that’s what you can actually do on the page.
Reading James Cameron’s script for Aliens. It’s like, oh, that’s what a movie looks like when it’s in courier. It was just so revelatory. That thing, I think, is so much better now is that because of the internet, you can just read all the scripts, and you need to read the scripts and not just watch the movies. Let’s do one more little side dish of a question here. What do you got, Craig?
Craig: This is a multi-parter from Clara A. “I’m an extremely long-time listener who, by happenstance, has found herself in a weekly writing group with local sweetie Megana Rao for the past couple of years.”
John: Megana’s the best.
Craig: “My question, what is your favorite thing about Megana?”
John: She’s not even here to defend herself. She’d be so embarrassed.
Craig: “Alternatively, Craig, do you still love millennials?” I don’t remember professing that.
John: Yes, I think you’ve said it on certain transcripts.
Craig: I do. Well, let’s talk about it. I’ll do another question because I don’t know if you have a favorite thing about Megana. That seems unfair.
Ashley: I feel like she’s got great hair.
Craig: She does have great hair.
John: Great. Absolutely true. Yes, we’re incredibly thankful for Megana, but it’s a very specific–
Craig: Yes, the kindest and most positive person around. Just such a great person. Yes, I still love millennials. I like zillennials. I think that’s my groove. There you go.
John: We got a few of those.
Craig: If you’re 28, 29, 30, 31, that’s a good crew. Nitzen has a good question.
John: Nitzen has a good question. Do you want to try Nitzen’s?
Craig: Yes, sure.
John: Nitzen asks, “As a beginner, is a credit for a bad movie better than no credit at all? What if that movie involves problematic people? Ashley, what’s your opinion on this? Julia, I’m going to open this to you as well. Do you think it’s better to have no credits or a bad credit?”
Ashley: I’m curious what you guys will say. I really don’t know. I think I would lean towards it’s better to have a bad credit because the people who care about credits are the other people who work in the industry, and people who work in the industry know that the way the movie turned out is not the writer’s fault, particularly when it’s an early career writer.
I think having had the credit and the experience is a good thing. No one’s looking at that going, “Oh, he must be a terrible writer because the movie turned out bad.”
John: Absolutely correct. Julia, do you think about credits? As you’re talking about something on, say, [unintelligible 00:56:32] are you always mindful of the things they’ve written around it or are you just looking at that one piece of work, generally?
Julia: Well, a professional critic with some expertise would look at what the person has made in the past and think about how this fits into the history of their career and the genre and the actors. There’s different levels of comprehensiveness in that. Yes, I don’t think you would look at an early credit and be like, and thus everything they make from there on must also be bad. You take the work on its own terms, but I think the rest of the surrounding history is context.
Craig: What about this idea, what if the movie involves problematic people? That doesn’t seem like something that I would– It feels like writers really don’t get– We get blamed for things in reviews that weren’t our fault all the time. Of course. These actors did the best they could with a bad script. I’m like, oh my God. No, they didn’t.
It doesn’t feel instinctively like when you see movies that come out and there’s hints of some problematic people involved, does it taint the whole thing or–
Julia: We’re going to do art from the artist, the whole thing, right now?
Craig: Sure.
Julia: Yes, I don’t know. Yes, I think problematic is a word that can do a lot and go a lot of directions there for this question, but yes, I think you take the work as the work.
Craig: The work as the work.
Julia: I think also people know that writers don’t get to choose who’s in the movie. It’s really interesting because we do get blamed for things that we didn’t do or don’t have any control over, and then we also don’t get credit for the things that we do.
Craig: Unerringly.
Julia: The number of people asking a director, when did you guys decide when the character would do this in this episode? It’s like, he wasn’t hired yet. What are you talking about? We never met that guy when we made that choice.
Craig: There’s a whole booklet that tells him what to do. It is amazing.
John: He followed the instructions well.
Craig: Yes.
John: All right. Those are some questions that were leftovers. Thank you so much for helping us out with the leftovers. It is time for our one cool thing. All right. Julia Turner, do you have one cool thing to share with us? I will say this is completely stolen from the Slate Culture Gabfest because they do their endorsements.
Julia: I do and I’m going to say it on this show instead of on my show. Okay. I hosted Thanksgiving this week. I had some beloved family over. We made some pies. They brought some cakes because there were also some Thanksgiving week birthdays. One of the cakes they brought was the Tom Cruise coconut cake.
Craig: How does everyone know what this is?
Julia You don’t know about the cake? Has anybody here eaten?
Ashley: I’ve tasted it.
John: I remember hearing about this, but I don’t know what–
Craig: I feel so alone right now.
Julia: My knowledge of this comes from Matt Belloni, who to your point about specificity, he has such a good eye for the detail that makes you feel like he was inside a room that you weren’t. Although he’s very clear that he also is not on the list of people to whom Tom Cruise sends a particular white chocolate coconut bundt cake for Christmas every year. Has anybody in this room actually from Tom Cruise received this cake?
Craig: Yes, there’s not going to be a big chance of that.
John: For [unintelligible 00:59:53] it’s just in case.
Julia: I’ve gone down to Rabbit Hole. They send it to the whole staff of–
Craig: I think they’re still raising more lights like I know there’s one person. No, weirdly none of us got the–
Ashley: Tom Cruise repels in.
Julia: I’d heard about this. I never tried the cake. It’s from a bakery called Dones in Woodland Hills. Apparently, legend has it– This anecdote does not meet my journalistic standards of rigor. It comes from a light Google. According to a light Google, apparently, at one point, Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton proposed a contest where they would each present Tom Cruise with a cake, and then he would pick which one he liked better.
Diane Keaton brought him this cake from Dones in Woodland Hills, and he chose Diane Keaton’s cake. Now he sends it to everybody for Christmas, and you can get it on Goldbelly. Ashley Nicole, you’ve had it. What do you think of it?
Ashley: It’s really good. It was so good. Everybody says it is, and you’re like, oh, yes, well, you got a cake from Tom Cruise. No, it actually is really good.
Julia: Also, white chocolate is a big no-no for me. You tell me white chocolate is in something, and I’m like, forget it, I’m not a bunch.
Craig: You liked it.
Julia: This cake is delicious.
Craig: Wait. It’s not called Tom Cruise Coconut Cake, I assume.
Julia: It is called White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake, and you can either go get it at Dones in Woodland Hills, or you can order it on Goldbelly. It’s excellent. We were talking about things with problematic auspices, but I just can’t lie, this cake was excellent.
John: D&D next week, we’re having the– yes, absolutely.
Craig: Yes, I got to get on this right away.
John: I’m a big believer in, you’re making a feast, you’re cooking all the entrees, the sides, buy dessert. Desserts are delicious.
Craig: Oh, yes. No one’s upset with you when you show up with dessert.
John: You’re not going to be able to top that pie.
Craig: Melissa just texted me. Thank you, Melissa. We have gotten one of those cakes.
Julia: Oh, from Tom Cruise?
Melissa: I don’t know if it was from Tom, but it was from Dones.
John: All right. We have live updates. Craig’s wife, Melissa, is here. She reports that that cake was actually eaten in the Mason household.
Craig: Did I like it?
Melissa: It was delicious.
Craig: Of course it was. Well, that’s a little insight into how my life goes. I’m like, “I’m alone.” And I’m the only one here that ate it.
John: Yes. Ashley Nicole Black, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?
Ashley: Yes. I may have shared this on the pod before, but I’m on a board of a charity called Letters to Santa. It is Christmas time. Every year, we raise a bunch of money and we buy kids their Christmas presents, but we also give grants of substantial amounts of money to their families. We also did letters to Altadena after the fires. Our idea is that the solution to poverty is money, so we just give people money.
Craig: That’s interesting.
John: We’re going to send some money to the charity. Yes.
Ashley: You can go to letterscharity.org and just donate money if you want to do that. Then closer to Christmas time, I will be posting wishlists of the kids. There’s nothing more pleasurable than having a glass of wine and buying a kid you’ve never met a bike. It’s the absolute best. Follow me, I’ll be posting those wish lists, and you can buy kids their presents if you want.
Craig: You’re a good person.
John: That’s a good person.
Ashley: It’s the one thing.
Craig: It’s a big thing though.
Ashley: Then I’m just walking through the streets, sticking out my foot, and tripping people.
John: Ashley and Nicole Black, we should all follow you on Instagram, which is where I follow you, and because we both follow the same person on Instagram, I can see when you’ve liked a post. We need to talk about Simon Sits.
Ashley: Oh, my gosh.
John: We’re both going to start crying now.
Ashley: I cry every morning now.
John: This is a woman who basically fosters dogs and has the most charming stories, but then she adopts them away. You’re like, but what’s going to happen?
Ashley: Oh, no. Then I follow those dogs. I now follow those dogs in all their new homes. Everybody’s doing great.
John: Everyone’s doing great. Simon himself has a disorder, but it’s hopefully going to be okay. Craig, what do you have for a wonderful thing?
Craig: I’m going to go with a little nerdery.
John: I love it.
Craig: This fall/winter, as I often do, I am working with some friends to solve Puzzle Boat, I think it’s Puzzle Boat 12, which is put out through Panda Magazine. If you love very hard puzzles, go subscribe. One of the puzzles referenced something called Day of the Tentacle. There we go, dork. Okay. You’re my kind of nerd. I actually was not familiar with it because when I was growing up, I didn’t have a PC. I just had Macs. There were a world of games that were just PC only, the pixely games that I missed out on. One of them was called Day of the Tentacle. It was published by Lucas Arts, sort of by the same team that was famous for Monkey Island and so forth.
Well, turns out you can play Day of the Tentacle now on everything, including your iPad. Writers Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Ron Gilbert, Gary Winick. It is adorable. It’s a lovely concept that involves you three different friends who are sent into three different time periods, who can send stuff back and forth to each other through their little time thing. It’s dork funny, nerd funny, which I love. It actually looks really good. I think they updated the graphics for the iOS version. If you’re looking for something, I don’t know, probably costs like $6 or something like that, and you like that kind of point and click classic ’90s adventure, check out Day of the Tentacle.
[applause]
John: My one cool thing is actually the very back page of the Scriptnotes book that you all have in your hands right now, which is the thank you page. So often you read through a book and there’s the thank yous at the end and you’re like, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they did. We try to be very specific about who these people were and the work they did that made the Scriptnotes book possible.
That, of course, starts with our incredible producers over the years who not only made the show happen, but also got our transcripts together, which without the transcripts there was never going to be a book. The whole team at Crown was fantastic from buying the book in the first place, but getting it through all the stages of production and getting it into your hands.
Jody Reimer, who sold the book for us, is incredible. We had just amazing people the whole time through. Including our audience the whole time through. If we didn’t have people who were writing in every week and providing questions for us to answer, letting us know that it was actually worthwhile for us to be doing this for 15 years, there wouldn’t be a book either. That’s why I think the final thank you is really to our whole audience for making Scriptnotes possible.
Craig: Without you, we’re nothing.
John: Thank you very much.
Craig: Thank you.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you very much. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our intro or our outro this week. Thank you to Raven up in the booth, Mary, Dax, Brenna, Dan, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you, Pamela Christlieb, Patty Lombard, and everyone at Chevalier’s Books, our official bookseller for this event.
Chevalier’s Books is on Larchmont, and we signed some extra books. If you’re listening to this podcast at home and you’re like, man, I wish I had a signed book, they have some there at the large font location of Chevalier’s Books. Thank you to Matt Inman, Mary Motes, everyone at Crown Publishing for making tonight possible. Thank you to Julia Turner and Ashley Nicole Black.
[applause]
John: Who out here is a Scriptnotes premium subscriber? Any premium subscribers? A little over a hand. Thank you so very much. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. Thank you all very much for coming out this afternoon for our live show. Thank you.
Craig: Thanks, folks. Have a great Sunday.
[Bonus Segment]
John: We have an audience full of people who may have some questions here. We’re going to bring down a little microphone or raise some house lights, and I’ll answer a couple questions from our listeners now. If you want to ask a question, let’s have you line up in this isle here.
Ashley: These people got up fast. These questions are burning.
John: Hello. Can you tell us your name and what your question is?
Jonathan: Hi, my name is Jonathan. My question is, if you’re working on a script that overall is serious in tone, say like a grounded action thriller, but you have an opportunity to inject some humor into a scene, how do you use your internal barometer to know when you’re keeping it engaging and realistic versus when it’s overall messing up the tone of the overall project?
John: It’s a great time to also bring up the observation that we don’t make comedies anymore, but all the movies are funny. Everything has to be funny, but we just don’t actually make comedies anymore. The Marvel movies are full of comedy, but they’re not supposed to be comedies. Craig, what’s your instinct when you have, there’s an opportunity for a comedy moment, but it’s not the overall nature of the–
Craig: Ideally, if it’s the sort of thing that someone’s going to say something that’s funny, you want that person, that actual character to be witty enough or naive enough or proud enough or whatever their specific characteristic is to actually say that thing. The worst situation is what I just call quipping, where people are just constantly quipping at each other, and nobody believes that.
Things that emerge naturally that make you laugh, that’s a good sign. If you’re manufacturing it and there’s some sweat coming down your head because you’re trying to figure out how to engineer the plumbing, probably not a good situation.
John: Our next question.
Santiago: Thank you. My name is Santiago. I teach filmmaking to high school students. Going back to what you guys were saying about AI, I’m sorry, everyone. I guess part of my job is to introduce these students as they’re learning how, from script writing all the way to editing and the full production, how to involve technology and everything in their work and I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on that because as it changes, it’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about.
John: Santiago, thank you for the question. Thank you for teaching. Teaching is great. You obviously have students who want to learn about film and filmmaking, and the technologies will keep changing. I think there’s that uncomfortable line between where you’re using the tool that helps you do the thing, like an online editing software, that’s not cheating.
If it’s generating scenes or cutting scenes for you, that feels like, oh, are you really learning how something works? That’s the uncomfortable thing.
Craig: You know how we had to learn how to add and multiply, then they gave us calculators? If you just start with the calculator, you are missing some fundamental education. Maybe, considering I’m sure that Santiago, your students are very interested in using these things, to use them in a way where you can talk about after they used it, what pleased them? How did this thing deliver what they hoped it would, and how did it fail to deliver what they hoped it would?
What could they do that would, in their hearts, be better than what this thing did, so that you can put it in some context?
Ashley: I would say no. I taught for a long time before I started doing this. For me, one of the jobs as a teacher is to create space to be uncomfortable because learning is so uncomfortable. Writing a bad script is so uncomfortable. Wanting to do good acting and then watching the tape back and finding out you’re trash is so uncomfortable, but that’s part of the learning process.
You can’t become a better writer until you’ve written a lot of bad scripts and you’ve sat in the discomfort of the distance between the movie you see in your mind and the movie you’re currently able to create. If the idea of AI is that it’s going to close that distance, then where is the learning if you’re not sitting in that space?
[applause]
Ashley: The feeling of like, oh, I can perfectly picture this moment in my mind. I have to figure out how to write it properly, I have to figure out how to describe it to all the department heads properly, I have to figure out how to make it work on the bodies of the actors who are their own individual people. Gosh, I wish I could just push a button and get the scene out of my brain.
That’s the work. The work is all of that communication. I would err on the side of–
John: What Ashley said is exactly right. Hopefully, you’re teaching your students how to write a scene, which is what she’s describing, and not a prompt. It is so hard, it’s uncomfortable when you’re having conversations, but the things that we’re talking about in the book and in this podcast are about, well, who is in it? What is the conflict? What are they trying to do? Those things are not AI-able things.
Those things are great discussions to have and then figure out what tools you need to actually use to generate anything out of that. The scene is still the crux of everything.
Ashley: There’s also the discoveries of the process. We’re shooting a scene, and two of the actors went to walk out the door at the same time and bumped into each other. It was so funny. Then it just informed the annoyance these characters have with each other. It’s like a moment that you discover that changes the scene because you’re doing the process of doing it.
John: A question.
Katie: Hi. My name is Katie and because things have been too peaceful, I have a question about critique and film criticism. I wanted to know your thoughts on the difference or the line between criticism and analysis. If film criticism brings out, maybe evokes more personal feelings than other genres like books or just anything else that involves empathy and projecting yourself onto the script.
I was wondering if there were any parameters that could help maybe delineate where those lines between analysis and critique comes into play, just like journalism and yellow journalism. Is there a way that we could delineate between opinion and critique or analysis?
John: Great. Thank you, Katie. Some of what you’re asking there is my instinct was, oh, I need to try to make peace and sort this all out and define, oh, no, you really have more overlap and agreement between things. I’m going to see if I can do a little of this. Analysis, someone who’s taking, oh, let’s look at the films of the ‘90s and what the patterns are that emerged from that.
Who were the filmmakers and where things go to versus a thumbs up or thumbs down on this movie. Craig, I think you feel– is that analysis worthwhile potentially?
Craig: Certainly. I’m curious to hear what you think about this because in my mind, under your question, I wonder if there’s this sub-question of how do we delineate what you guys do, which is what I would call thoughtful, qualified analysis/critique versus other people who just saw a movie, hated it [onomatopoeia].
Julia: The sound effects are very crucial, I think, there. I think all good criticism is analysis, contains analysis and interpretation and judgment. To be making art today and have the possibility that Wesley Morris at the New York Times might look at it and think about it, he is such an extraordinary critic and you should listen to his new podcast, Cannonball, which is excellent.
It seems much more fun to make art with that potential wise, deep, empathetic, generous, knowledgeable, interpretive audience in mind. To me, all good criticism contains analysis and soul. I think maybe Craig’s just reading the wrong stuff. I think thumbs up-thumbs down, here we are in the Coliseum, everybody go kill that guy, that’s not criticism to me.
Craig: Literally, the most famous film critics did that. Literally.
Julia: Okay, but when we go see– Yes, that was the schtick for their show to get an audience, but if you go back and read all of Ebert’s old reviews, we can argue about Pauline Kael later, I’m not a particular Kael stan, but when we go see stuff at the Arrow or the New Beverly, to go back and read the contemporary reviews, often from Ebert himself because he wrote about everything, it’s so fun.
It’s fun because sometimes he’s really brilliant and smart. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to have gotten it and it isn’t that useful. Nobody bats 1,000 and you get a sense of how it landed at the moment. It’s also a record of how the stuff was received. That criticism of the past is valuable to me and so is the criticism of today.
John: Thank you for your question.
Ashley: Thank you.
John: I’ll take one last question here. What is your question?
O’Neill: Hi, my name’s O’Neill. I have ADHD, not the fun kind, but the kind that’s very debilitating. My mind moves a million miles per second, but I write very slowly. I’m about a page a day-er. My question for you is how should I manage all of these thoughts when my physical typing limitations are so slow?
Craig: Okay, we have something for you and it’s called learning how to type. Now, that in and of itself may be an arduous task, particularly if you have a debility or a neurological disorder, but learning how to type will speed you up dramatically because I also think fast and I type fast. I think if I could not type, it would be a real problem for me.
I feel the pain. Learning how to type is worth it. There are a gazillion ways to do it online. It will be uncomfortable. The learning will be uncomfortable.
Ashley: Oh, no. You get a Mavis Beacon who says she taught me good.
Craig: By the way, you know that she doesn’t exist, right?
Ashley: I know. They don’t teach kids to type anymore.
Craig: No. There is no Mavis Beacon. They invented Mavis Beacon.
Ashley: Oh, I know.
Craig: I didn’t know that. I believed in Mavis Beacon forever and then he told me and I was like, oh my God, and what else are you going to take away from me?
Ashley: Will you guys make the Mavis Beacon movie?
Craig: There’s no Mavis Beacon.
Ashley: There’s a documentary.
John: Crucial IP that’s being underserved.
Craig: See, by the way, whatever works for you, it will be annoying and frustrating. Give yourself because it’s magic. When it finally starts happening, you can’t believe it. It’s magic and it will make a huge difference for you.
John: I fully endorse the typing of it all. We did a Reddit AMA yesterday and we were answering a ton of questions. Craig was typing as fast as he could, but I could answer faster because I was dictating. The dictation software has gotten really good right now. It’s worth trying it. Again, it’s uncomfortable at the start because you feel like I’m talking to myself and Drew’s hearing me talk to my computer a lot.
For things like emails and stuff like that, it’s much faster. I can’t use it for real screenwriting, but for getting all that shit out of your head and onto a screen, it’s really good. It’s good for generating material, but also just silencing some of that noise could also be really helpful for you.
Craig: Which do you use?
John: The one I’m using right now is called Aqua Notes. It’s Aqua Voice.
Craig: They’re listening to our voice. They know.
John: I’ve been trying to Google it myself.
Ashley: That’s a level of fandom that is frankly a little scary.
Craig: Also dissapointing like Aqua.
John: I think it’s worth– in addition to typing, because I think typing is really important software to help just get stuff out of your head. It’s going to be really helpful as well.
Ashley: I would say also, do you outline? For me, because I have ADHD also, I do so much writing before I start writing. All that stuff that’s in my head, I just write it all down in a Notes app, anywhere, just to get it out of my head and then outline. Then it’s like you’re just getting more and more specific up to the point of actually writing the script.
Then I think also it’s working with your brain the way it works. Sometimes I write the punchline before the setup. I was in a writer’s room once where I was up on the screen. They were like, “Did you just write the punchline first?” I was like, yes, that’s how my brain works, so I have to get it out in time.
I think instead of feeling like you have to start at the beginning of the first scene and work your way through the script, write what you know, write the punchline, write the last line of the scene if that’s what you have, and feel free to go back and fill in.
John: Thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thank you for the great questions.
Links:
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Julia Turner
- Ashley Nicole Black on Instagram
- Arlo Finch series
- Slate Culture Gabfest
- Episode 516 – 10 Year Anniversary
- Dynasty Typewriter
- Bad Monkey
- The Tom Cruise coconut cake from Doan’s Bakery
- Letters to Santa
- @simonsits on Instagram
- Day of the Tentacle
- Chevalier’s Books
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
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- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Mathew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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You can download the episode here.