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The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have, and they are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually.

John August: 30 minutes earlier. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 735 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What you just experienced was a flash-forward, or what we call in this podcast, a Stuart Special. They are surprisingly common in spec scripts, to a degree, they can feel cliché. Today on the show, we’ll look at what makes an effective flash-forward, when to consider them, and when to run away.

We’ll also be answering a bunch of listener questions, including some from our random advice mailbag, and in our bonus segment for premium members, how to go to Hollywood parties. Craig, if there’s one thing you and I know about, it’s how to go to parties.

Craig: I can’t wait to learn.

John: Absolutely. There are some minimums. We’re going to teach you the minimum.

Craig: We’ve been to enough.

John: We’ve been to enough.

Craig: We can fill people in who have not been to Hollywood parties on what they’re really like.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: If you ever do find yourself in one, how to behave?

John: 100%. Absolutely. One of the last Hollywood parties I think I went to was premiere for second season of The Last of Us, and I did the things I think you should do at a Hollywood party. We’ll talk through those.

Craig: Great.

John: Some follow-up. Last week and the week before, we invited our listeners to participate in a ScriptNotes survey. We asked them to click a link, go through a form, and answer some questions about ScriptNotes. 333 people, Craig, answered that survey. That’s a good number.

Craig: That’s a great number.

John: About half of them were premium members. Half of them were- our regular listeners.

Craig: I’d like to say about half of them enjoyed the podcast.

John: More than half enjoyed the podcast. What would be terrible if you put the survey like, “We hate this show. Please stop doing it.”

Craig: We’re running about a 55% right now.

John: Yes, that’s what it is. Just above the minimum-

Craig: Just above.

John: We’re higher than Congress.

Craig: Yes, we’re higher than Congress.

John: That’s our goal on this podcast.

Craig: We got all those people, and what did we learn?

John: Some top-line numbers to tell you. 82% of our listeners listen to almost every episode.

Craig: Wow.

John: That’s great. Half of them have been listening for five years or longer. 40% of listeners found out about ScriptNotes through word of mouth.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: That does make sense.

Craig: We don’t really advertise.

John: We don’t advertise. The other ways people find out about it would be like Google, or it was recommended through the algorithms on Spotify, or they saw us at Austin Film Festival, that thing. Word of mouth is probably the way. I guess tell all your friends you listen to ScriptNotes. That’s probably the only way that people are going to start listening.

Craig: You at home are our Salesforce.

John: 100%.

Craig: We do offer some commission.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: 100% of 0%.

John: Yes, exactly. How old do you think our listeners are, Craig? What percentage of our listeners are college-aged? They’re between 18, 22, 23.

Craig: I would say a curiously large number. I’m going to go with 12%.

John: 3%.

Craig: Wow, okay.

John: Small?

Craig: See, I thought 12 was curiously large, so I’m not surprised that it’s not.

John: Again, this is people who filled out the survey, so there could be some of that.

Craig: A little bit of self-selection.

John: What percentage are between 35 and 54?

Craig: That’s going to be the meat there. I’m going to go with 60.

John: 65, yes, that’s 100%.

Craig: We’re an adult podcast.

John: We’re an adult podcast.

Craig: We’re a mature podcast.

John: Absolutely. What percentage of our listeners who filled out the survey have an undergraduate degree or higher? For international listeners, that’s college.

Craig: Sure. We’ll have to deduct 3% from the kids who haven’t graduated yet. I’m going to say 78%.

John: 98%.

Craig: 98?

John: 90.

Craig: Oh, 90.

John: Nine zero.

Craig: That’s rather educated.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m not surprised.

John: If we were to have advertising, which we will never have advertising, that would be a very attractive market for them. What percentage of our listeners live in the Los Angeles area?

Craig: I’m going to go with 22%.

John: 25%.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes, see? Craig knows this stuff. What percentage work in the entertainment industry? As writers or as anywhere else in the entertainment industry?

Craig: 34%.

John: 50%.

Craig: Oh, that’s more than I thought.

John: Yes, that’s good.

Craig: Okay, that’s quite good.

John: 67% of premium subscribers gave the premium service a 10.

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

John: 90% gave it an eight or higher, which feels great. People just seem really happy in that.

Craig: I like the people who just keep paying for it, but they’re like, it’s a three.

John: It’s a three.

Craig: It’s so mid, here’s another five bucks.

John: Absolutely. I’ll never stop subscribing. We asked about some other things that I’d be interested in. Of the recurring segments, people liked most of them. There wasn’t a-

Craig: A big favorite or a-

John: Some people don’t listen to the Three-Page Challenges. “Mike, my husband, never listens to Three-Page Challenges,” which is great.

Craig: Sure. I don’t think Melissa does either.

John: No, which is fine.

Craig: Then again, Melissa mostly listens to the podcast to fall asleep. I think I’ve said this before. It’s not an insult, because I’m not around. She likes hearing my voice. Your voice apparently does not put her to sleep. My voice gives her some comfort.

John: You are her sleepcast.

Craig: I don’t think she ever makes it to the end. Then again, she rarely makes it to the end of any media before falling asleep.

John: One finding that was interesting in terms of a new thing we could try to do more of is, we could describe it as a screenplay book club, which is basically where we just talk through a screenplay. It’s a deep dive, but if we could tell people in advance that we were doing it, that we’re all reading the same script and going through it.

Craig: That’s a great idea. I think we should do that.

John: I think we should do that too.

Craig: That would be fun.

John: What we need to figure out is are we doing something that’s already been produced or an unproduced screenplay. What is the best way to do this?

Craig: I find that people tend to like things they’re familiar with. It’s a little bit abstract, I think. Probably fewer people will be interested in reading a script of an unproduced thing. What we could do is pick a script for something that’s been made that isn’t necessarily the one people talk about.

John: 100%. That makes a lot of sense. I was also thinking if there is some screenwriter who’s really good, and just for whatever reason, this thing was never made.

Craig: Well, there is that.

John: They’re willing to share it with us.

Craig: Scott Frank wants to give us that great unmade screenplay. I’d be happy.

John: Some other suggestions from the open answer sections. Someone said they would love John and Craig to get into writing phone call scenes because I always struggle with how to best represent this type of scene on the page. We should do that.

Craig: Great topic.

John: An entire episode devoted to what we could learn from the work of Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Jeremy O. Harris.

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: Yes. We haven’t done a lot on playwriting overall, and it does feel like-

Craig: Sondheim alone deserves a 750-episode podcast, and I’m sure there are some out there, but what a wizard. What a wizard.

John: I would need to do some reading, and I need to get up to speed with his workflow and the fullness of the work because I know a lot of the musicals, but I don’t know the process behind them.

Craig: Very rigorous. Not surprisingly because if you look at the lyrics, they are so crafted. I do remember reading one interesting thing about a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The show initially, when it was running, it began with this song about war. It anchored the audience in a position where they were like, this isn’t a funny show because it wasn’t a funny song. Everything that happened after that was a comedy, no one laughed at. Sondheim, in a panic, wrote Comedy Tonight. What became the opener, and nothing else changed, and everybody laughed at everything. It was just anchoring people.

John: As we get into our discussion of flash-forwards, that is actually one of the main things is whatever you introduce the audience to first, it’s anchoring them. It’s setting a frame for what everything’s happening around there. A flash-forward could do that or could mislead the audience in terms of what they’re expecting. Other last things, people suggest your episode on how to write a movie is a thing people can keep coming back to. I’ve always promised I will do my own version of that. At some point, when you’re gone, I will try to do a version of that because we have similar aims but different techniques.

Craig: Different methods. I have promised people how to write a television episode. One day, I’m going to have to do that one.

John: Maybe when you’re done writing television episodes. If it will ever happen.

Craig: My God.

John: It will end. Within a year, you’ll be done writing new episodes of this series for a while.

Craig: Yes, it will end, but until it ends, “Oh, man.” It’s a lot of words.

John: It’s a lot of words.

Craig: When I look back, and I put all the episodes together, it makes large volumes like big thick books on your bookshelf of pages. Oh, man. John, can you imagine if you did that with everything you wrote? Oh, it looked like the World Book. Hey, kids, remember the World Book?

John: No reference at all.

Craig: None.

John: Our listeners are 35 to 54, so they’ll know what the World Book encyclopedia was.

Craig: The 48 to 54’s will remember the World Book.

John: That 3% who are in college right now, they have no idea what we’re talking about.

Craig: The F is a World Book. That is not fire. Cringe.

John: Cringe.

Craig: Cringe.

John: Let’s talk about flash-forwards, or as we call them on this podcast, the Stuart Special. Craig, can you remind us who Stuart Friedel is, what his role was on the podcast, and how the Stuart Special became its thing?

Craig: Stuart, I believe, is the first producer of Scriptnotes. One of Stuart’s jobs, of course, as producer, is to select Three-Page Challenges. We came to note, I think probably because it was just very au courant among people writing screenplays, that so many of them began with a flash-forward where there would be some half a page or page, and then a title would say three weeks earlier, or one month earlier, or one year earlier. We came to call that a Stuart Special because we just figured, “Oh, Stuart loves these,” which he probably doesn’t.

John: No.

Craig: No, he’s indifferent.

John: The volume of what’s coming through, these are- the ones he’s picking, and he’s not the only person who encounters them. We have a listener question from Anonymous.

Drew: “I read for The Black List website, and as with your Three-Page Challenges, I get a lot of Stuart Specials. In my opinion, the flash-forwards generally aren’t interesting enough to get the audience excited about what’s to come, or they give away too much and take some of the suspense out of the story. What makes a strong flash-forward? I’m very interested to hear your thoughts.”

Craig: Let’s say you had a story where the hero, in the end, kills himself. You probably wouldn’t want to start anything like that.

John: Well, except they did.

Craig: Except they did, and I Stuart Specialed the hell out of it.

John: Go opens with a Stuart Special.

Craig: There you go. Here’s the deal with Stuart Specials. Like everything else, if it’s interesting, it works. If it has purpose, and if it needs to be a Stuart Special, if it really does add something, then it’s of value. If it’s just, I don’t know how to begin this thing, so I’m just going to do a record scratch, and then someone’s going to say, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then it doesn’t work because you don’t need to do it.

For me, at least, in Chornobyl, I did not want people to eventually get to the end and go, “I wonder what happens– Oh, no, he kills himself.” I’m just like, “Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s ask ourselves, why did this guy end up doing that?” I think the way ones that work, work.

John: We’ve talked about opening scenes many times on the show, most notably in episode 493. What we were stressing is that an opening scene needs to ask a provocative question and set a promise and an expectation for what the story is about to see. I talked about with Comedy Tonight, it is setting a frame for what the experience is going to be like. You’re starting that contract with the audience in terms of, give me your attention, and I will make it worth your while, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

What’s interesting about a Stuart Special is that you are essentially borrowing drama from later in the story for whatever reason. It may be because the actual chronological beginning is too quiet or too ordinary, or it doesn’t feel like where the movie’s going. That can be legitimate, but you have to really think. You are borrowing, so you’re creating a debt, and you have to make sure that you’re paying off that debt in a way that is meaningful and rewarding for the audience. Otherwise, it’s just going to feel like a cheat.

Craig: Correct. You do need to be able to tell a story moving forward that allows people to arrive at that moment again and go, “Oh, actually, now that I know what I know, I feel differently about this. I’ve learned why this was important.”
The most powerful Stuart Special I have ever witnessed is Gandhi. Gandhi begins with Gandhi being assassinated. As a kid, I was so shocked and traumatized from the jump.

Immediately, I was in a place where I felt unsafe in the best possible way, which is to say in a movie theater where you are safe, but understanding that whatever this man did, it earned him death by gunfire. What was it? In a beautiful way, you begin to forget if the story does it well, so that when you arrive there, again, you go, “Oh, no. Oh, that’s right. Oh, no. Oh, no, he’s going to die.” That’s when the Stuart Special is working well.

John: That moment where you have returned to that place that you set up in the Stuart Special, if it’s just like, “Oh, now we’re here,” that’s not so rewarding. If you’ve recontextualized that moment based on what we experienced before, now we know the characters, we know the situation, and it’s actually surprising that we got to this moment, those tend to be the ones where it really was structurally a great choice to open with that flash-forward and get us there.

We talk about the framing, Comedy Tonight, this is actually comedy, you’re supposed to be laughing. Often, a movie will get big, but if we don’t know that it’s going to be able to get big later on, those first five, 10 minutes might feel so small that it doesn’t work. I would just always urge the writer to think about, does it need to be so small to start? There may be a way to actually start with the size and scale of what the thing is going to get to in those opening moments.

Craig: Or it may be that the moment that you’re thinking of as a Stuart Special would play better if it just unfolded. Here’s an example. I love John Wick. I love that movie. It starts with a Stuart Special. I got to be honest, I’m not sure it’s necessary.

I remember seeing that Stuart Special and thinking, “Okay, well. Sure, fine.” It didn’t actually make that moment better later, and given what happens early on in the story, I don’t think I needed it. That’s really the test for me, is would this be better to just happen once or is it better if it happens twice.

John: Let’s also talk about anticipation. Because one of the things that a Stuart Special does is it creates an anticipation in the audience that we’re going to get to this moment. That can be great. It can create a sense of dread because the audience is ahead of the characters because we know that this thing is going to happen. We know the gun is going to get shot, and they don’t know they’re going to get shot.

It can also make the reader impatient because it becomes that, “When are we getting to the fireworks factory? We know that’s going to happen at some point. Come on, let’s get there now.” It can make us pay less attention to the scenes leading up to it.

Craig: Which is a good challenge for yourself as a writer, don’t let that happen. Titanic sinks. James Cameron did not let us sit there going, “Oh my God, this boat sinks. Can we just get to the sinking part?” No, he brilliantly distracted us with a lovely romance. I think that’s the challenge, right?

That’s why Stuart Specials are seductive as a writer. You’re basically saying, “I’m a magician, Penn & Teller, do this. We’re going to show you how we do this trick. Got it? Now watch us do this trick.” It’s still awesome because there’s so much sleight of hand and ingenuity that goes into it. That’s the fun challenge of a Stuart Special.

John: The last thing I’ll say about a Stuart Special is you think like, “Oh, we’re setting up the size and scale and scope of the movie,” but sometimes you’re actually just delaying the start of the movie. We’re delaying getting to know who our hero is, what their situation is because it’s all this extra [unintelligible 00:16:20] before you get there. There was a movie I watched a bit of on a plane, this was last time, with talented actors who I loved, but the opening sequence was just meant to set up the size and scale. It’s like, “I don’t care about any of these people.”

Craig: Who are these people? Why is this happening?

John: It’s not the movie I signed up for, so why are we watching this thing?

Craig: Yes. I think sometimes what happens is people make a movie, they test it, which is a horrible process. The guy who does the focus group after inevitably says, “Let’s talk about pacing. Overall, did you think the movie dragged a little bit, was pretty well paced, or moved too quickly?” No one ever says move too quickly, ever, even though many movies do. Almost always, about half the people say it was about right, and half the people say it dragged in spots because every movie will drag in a different spot for everybody. Inevitably, they will say, “It took a while for it to get going.” Correct, that’s how stories work.

Watch Star Wars, a half an hour of robots walking around in the desert. That’s how it starts, a half an hour of that and it’s slow. What do producers do? They panic, and they go, “We got to get them right away, right off the top of the bat. Take this thing, put it in the beginning, and then go three weeks earlier, and now it starts better.” No, not always. No. Sometimes, just let people, I don’t know, get there. They’ll get there.

John: They’ll get there.

Craig: They’ll get there.

John: Takeaway here, Stuart specials are not categorically bad, but if you’re going to use one, it has to really have a purpose. It has to be a purpose, not just because the start of your movie is boring. It has to be there’s a reason why you’re starting with this moment to set up the size and scale and frame of your story that is meaningful. If you’re just doing it for those things, ask yourself, could you do it with the actual present-tense start of your story? That should be your first instinct because you’re always borrowing something from later in the story, and there’s a cost to that. Sometimes the cost is 100% worth it, but so often it’s not.

Craig: It should definitely not be an excuse for you to not try to think of an awesome opening scene that would be present tense.

John: 100%. All right, let’s answer some listener questions, which is most of what we’re doing today. Do you want to start with this one about time jumps?

Craig: Yes, it feels relevant.

Drew: Michael writes, I’m writing a feature set in the late 70s that intercuts between present day 1977 and about seven months earlier. For the first roughly 40 pages, the script moves back and forth in five to 10-minute chunks, often in the same locations with the same characters. These play like different timelines more than flashbacks. My concern is clarity for the reader, especially someone skimming. The two timelines have very different tones. The present’s darker, more grounded. The earlier timeline is warmer, slightly heightened, almost nostalgic. The story really depends on tracking those shifts. What’s the cleanest, most professional way to signal these time jumps on the page?

John: That’s a common thing we run into.

Craig: That’s an extreme situation, though, because there’s so many shifts back and forth, and it’s not large jumps in time. If you go from the 1970s to the 2000s, it’ll just feel different from the way people are talking and probably what they’re doing. Seven months in time is not a lot. If it’s something really subtle like that, the choices, as far as I can tell, are– The most mundane thing is just, in your scene header, you just say what year it is. You can constantly remind people which part. I guess you’d have to go with the month if you’re just doing a seven-month shift.

John: Yes. My instinct would be, because I’ve had to do this in a couple of things, is for the things that are set further back, you put past there and don’t put present. Because the present is our present, that’d be confusing.

Craig: The present is assumed.

John: If you just put the years, I worry that you would actually– There’s two timelines, just mark one of them differently.

Craig: Seven months earlier is a weird thing to write. It’s a weird thing to write 40 times. The other big swing you could do is to just let people know right off the top of the bat, this is what’s going to happen in this script. When we’re in this timeline, it looks like a regular script. When we’re in this timeline, the font is like this.

John: Greta Gerwig does this in Little Women, and all of the past, I think, is in red.

Craig: Yes, exactly. If you can visually set it apart, then you never have to mention anything because they’ll know.

John: Because when you actually make your movie, you’re going to do things to visually distinguish those two timelines. It’s a problem of the script on the page.

Craig: This is the thing where people are, “But the rules.” I guess Greta Gerwig didn’t hear about the rules.

John: No.

Craig: You know what? There’s an interesting thing people ask, what is a common trait among successful screenwriters and as far as I could tell, the only common trait is none of us give a damn about the stupid rules. Literally none of us.

John: Related to that with Greta Gerwig, I would say that she, and this is true to every good screenwriter I know, is she actually does care about the read and she’s trying to make sure that she’s fully communicating what the movie feels like on the page.

Craig: That’s her job. That’s her job. Don’t direct on the page. Yes, do it and make sure people are feeling what you want them to feel. What you said is what she cares about is the read, not the rules.

John: Correct. Now, let’s intersperse this with some random advice. Where do you want to start with it?

Drew: Let’s start with Anais. She writes, “My oldest is going to kindergarten in the fall.”

Craig: Oh, congrats.

Drew: “Any advice for the elementary school years?”

John: By kindergarten, your kid has probably already gotten all the daycare sicknesses. Basically, they pick up all the things, which is just fine.

Craig: No one gets chickenpox anymore because of the vaccine.

John: Which is great. Listen, kindergarten is largely about learning to sit in a circle and just learning how to be around other kids and just do the things. They’ll be very basic. They’ll learn to read. They’ll learn to count and stuff. They’ll mostly just learn how to be a student and how to follow some rules and follow some structure. That should really be all your goal there.

Craig: The elementary years are the best years. This is the good news, Anais. Your child is, I assume, five or six. It’s typical kindergarten age. By the time they’re done with elementary school, they’ll be 10. Yes, some kids, especially girls around 10, will start tilting over into a different phase of life. At least five, six, seven, eight, nine, those are the best years because they’re children. They are not wrapped up in anything adolescent. They are fun and ridiculous, and they still love birthday parties. They love birthday parties. My advice to you, Anais, is, oh my God, enjoy this because, yes, man, then it gets a little crazy.

John: One luxury you have when they’re this age is that they probably get along pretty well with a lot of kids. See if you can figure out which parents you can actually stand being around because you’re going to play dates, and birthday parties, and stuff like that, where you’re going to just be around other kids’ parents a lot. If you can find friends, other parents you can stand to be around, and your kids get along, you’re happier. You’re better.

Craig: You know what? That brings to mind one last bit of advice I have for Anais. I have two kids. One is on the spectrum, one is not. Now, the thing about kids who are neurodivergent is, socially– As we know, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle socially, but children will generally struggle less socially in the elementary school years because everyone is struggling socially because they’re also young. What happens is somewhere around 11, 12, 13, what do we call the non-neurodivergent people?

John: Neurotypical.

Craig: Neurotypical kids will start to peel off and accelerate socially, and the neurodivergent kids just stay where they are, and then the gap grows, and then trouble starts. One bit of advice I have for you, Anais, is if you feel maybe your kid is neurodivergent and is struggling a little bit socially, but you’re tempted to go, “Oh, but they have friends,” keep an eye on it. Take it seriously because it’s never too early to learn skills, and it can become a significant issue for them and create a lot of stress for them and you once they hit those horrible middle school years.

John: Yes, middle school is universally bad for everybody.

Craig: Nightmare.

John: If you’re coming in there-

Craig: Absolute nightmare.

John: -with extra challenges, it’s horrible. All right, let’s go back to normal questions. Charlie in Sheffield.

Drew: “I’m very hyped for The Sheep Detectives.”

John: Congratulations on your movie, The Sheep Detectives.

Craig: Yay. In theaters.

Drew: “I noticed Craig is credited with both screenplay and screen story. What’s a screen story? Why say both? Presented like this, aren’t you just saying the same thing twice?”

Craig: It’s embarrassing. No, we’re not saying the same thing twice, but I wish we could just fold it into one thing. Here’s the brief summary. When you adapt something from source material, in this case, there is a book, Three Bags Full, written by a fantastic German author pseudonymically named Leonie Swan. I don’t even know her real name, but she’s a lovely person.

When you adapt things from source material, you get screenplay by, but if you adapt it in such a way that you create a story that is significantly different from the source material, then only through an arbitration, the Writers Guild may award the screenwriter also screen story by. The reason that’s important for us as writers is it confers separated rights, which we’ve gone through in a prior episode. If you get screenplay by and story by in an original film, they just fold it together and make it written by. Why they refuse? I’ve tried. They refuse to fold screenplay and screen story by into written by because they’re like, “Well, because written by is just for originals.” You end up with this very silly arrangement of multiple credits. I don’t like it. I apologize.

John: That’s reality. It’s one of those things which with great effort and probably a member vote, you could change. To change those credit things is elaborate and complicated. It’s a question of where do you spend your energy.

Craig: You basically have to go to the membership to get a vote, and then you have to go to the AMPTP and have them agree to make that change, also because it’s dictated by the MBA.

John: I will tell you that the AMPTP wants to say no to anything, even if it’s 100% free. It will cost them nothing.

Craig: If you offered them pizza, they would say, ” Pay us for it.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What, we’re buying it for you. No, their immediate answer is no. They love saying no. Everything you ask puts everything else you ask in jeopardy. Of course, if the Writers Guild had a– Many years ago, there was a mid-contract mechanism, called the Contract Adjustment Committee, which was somewhat controversial. The idea is that as little, tiny things would come up inside of the term, you could then go back and, without an official reopening of the contract, adjust some things. Now that our contract term is four years, there is perhaps some wisdom in considering the value of something like that. This is the thing you would do in that.

John: Totally.

Craig: It’s not a big money issue- it’s just a little friction point.

John: Absolutely. A related question that I think we may have answered on the podcast before, but sometimes a writer’s name will appear multiple times in the credit block because they did some writing by themselves. They also wrote with a partner, or they wrote with multiple partners on things. You see one person’s name mentioned three times in a credit block. It is weird and uncomfortable. You could imagine some scenario down the road where the mathematical credits should be a certain way, and the actual credit you see on screen could be slightly different than that.

Craig: It actually does work like that in those cases if the writers agree. If you have written by A and then end the writing team of A and B, if writer A agrees, and they should, but sometimes they don’t, it’ll just say written by A and B, but A will get more residuals because of that. That is possible, but in this case, not possible.

John: It wasn’t, yes. Weirdly, yes.

Craig: It looks like I just threw a tantrum and asked for my name to be on there twice, no. Anyway, I hope they enjoy the movie.

John: Let’s answer a listener question from Colton.

Drew: What is something that is undervalued yet offers the greatest return when it comes to health or quality of life?

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: I will say relationships. Obviously, having a life partner is incredibly valued, but I think people know that. I would say other relationships. Relationships outside of your marriage are really important. That you have a group of people that you can-

Craig: Friends.

John: Friends, yes. Our weekly D&D game, super important. My other friends who I see independently of Mike, super important.

Craig: Yes, especially as men grow older. There’s just so much research to show that women maintain lots of friendships as they get older and men don’t, and then they just get sad and die. The answer, I would probably say there is sleep by any means necessary. People struggle with sleep, and you can get by on less than you should get. The more you get, the better off it seems you are, unless you’re depressed. If you are feeling fairly mentally healthy, getting sleep, and if you have trouble sleeping, I’m a pro-sleep aid person as well. Whatever it takes, I don’t care. Sleep. I know they’ll say, “It’s not as good of a sleep.” It’s better than not sleeping. I just think people struggle, and sleep is huge.

John: Money spent on a good mattress, a dark, quiet room, try a white noise machine. Do the things-

Craig: Yes, blackout curtains. Although we’re all trying to be energy conscious, one thing we do know is it’s hard to sleep in a hot room.

John: Air conditioning is good.

Craig: Yes.

John: Victoria has an audio question.

Victoria: I wanted to ask a question about the problematic way that unfilmable is used. I don’t think it’s a very helpful note because I almost never see it applied to visual logic issues. It’s usually something that’s directed at– The camera can’t see it, so it’s not real. I also see it frequently criticizing a screenwriter’s use of internal character narrative. I really like to use that, and I like reading it. Not a ton of it.

One of my favorite examples of this is in the first Chornobyl script, where Bryukhanov is said to envision a very likely fate for himself. An inquiry, an arrest, a trial, a bullet. I love that because I feel it. I feel it from the script. That said, I do think there is a valid note that applies to the invisible information being laid out for the reader that the viewer has no way of getting. I guess my question is, when do you decide to add detail to a character’s internal world, and when is the information on the script readable but not legible to the viewer? Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you. That’s a good question. I’m certainly a criminal when it comes to this. I do this all the time. Victoria, to me, the big difference in what I would call a annoying and useless unfilmable and a helpful, useful unfilmable is when it informs the actor so that they can perform something because then it is filmable. Their inner thoughts, their inner feelings, and emotions come out.

Most of the time, I think good direction is not about how to say the words. It’s about how to feel or what you might want to feel here, and it comes through. It is filmable. That line, for instance, Con O’Neill made that clear in his performance. It was filmable. What I don’t particularly find useful are these omniscient, novelish narrations where a character is introduced and then the writer says, there are so-and-so who thinks they’re this and thinks that, but really they’re this or really they’re that. Well, that actually is not filmable because you’re not their writer. If it’s something the character is feeling in the moment, or thinking in the moment, then yes.

John: I would add to that, if the audience is going to experience that visually in watching the movie, then it’s not unfilmable. Sometimes you’re really portraying, if you’re talking about what this small village feels like and you’re giving description to it that may not directly match what this is, but it can be a metaphor that just helps us understand what this is going to feel like when we actually see it, and it gives information to the director-

Craig: Absolutely.

John: 100% valid.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s the [unintelligible 00:33:28] doesn’t know it is the classic, right? That’s the most cliché, horrible, unfilmable there is. So-and-so arrives, “hot but doesn’t know it.” How the hell do I know that she doesn’t know it? How is that possible that I can show that she doesn’t know she’s hot? I’m not sure. Anyone has actually ever not known they were hot anyway? Maybe some people do, but there’s only one way for me to find out. That’s for her to be shocked when somebody thinks she’s hot. Otherwise, it’s useless. It’s useless. Things like that, we avoid as best as we can, but anything that would help the actor, the production designer, the director, the costume designer, the composer making the score, anything that helps them is filmable.

John: Absolutely. I will also say there’s things you might include in an outline or a treatment that don’t make it through to the screenplay because those documents, they’re preliminary, and you can swing bigger in some of those ways because it’s not-

Craig: They’re meta.

John: They’re meta, yes. They’re talking about the scene rather than being the scene itself.

Craig: Exactly. Yes, they’re meta. Whereas the screenplay is the drama, and you can say whatever you want in an outline. You can interrupt yourself and say, “Okay, imagine this is like from Breaking Bad except blah, blah.” You can do whatever you want in an outline.

John: That would be dumb in a screenplay. It’s referencing another movie in your screenplay-

[crosstalk]

John: Yes. Final bit of random advice from Nick.

Drew: “What advice would you give to your older self?”

Craig: Didn’t we just do this?

John: We did our younger selves.

Craig: Oh, this is older self.

John: Older self, yes. I don’t know. I guess I would have to do it based on my observation of older people and things that frustrated me about them, or things I’ve seen that worked really well for them. Let’s go on the positive.

Craig: Okay.

John: Dick Zanuck, who produced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Big Fish, and many of Tim Burton’s movies, and was just an absolute mensch, I would say, don’t retire just because it’s what’s expected to happen to you. He genuinely loved working and producing movies for Tim Burton. It gave him so much joy, and so he didn’t stop just because he was old. He was loving doing it, and so why stop? He also called his sons every day, no matter where he was, and I love that for him.

Craig: Oh, how old am I?

John: You can decide.

Craig: Well, I’m going to project forward to quite old. My advice is, don’t bother doing a whole bunch of stuff to try and live longer. You’re not going to. Just keep rolling. Just keep rolling, you’re good. You’re good. No one lives forever. No one lives forever. What are you going to do? You’re going to start going to the gym every day? No, you’re not. At 80, you’re going to decide that’s when I’m going to start?

John: People don’t fundamentally change. I think that’s an important thing to remember. When I see people say, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll change.” No, they won’t change. They never will change.

Craig: No, old dog. No new tricks required. I would advise myself to eagerly go to any lifetime achievement ceremony that might come my way- because that’s actually the good sign that you’re done. That’s when you know they don’t want you anymore. They start giving you the thank you for your service awards.

John: Let’s go to another audio question. This one’s from Robert.

Drew: This one’s also follow-up from our conversation about avoidance in episode 731.

Robert: Hi. I just listened to your episode on protagonists’ motivation being driven by their desire to avoid things. I was just wondering if you have any tips for how to differentiate between a character driven by avoidance and a character that appears to have very little agency. I’ve received notes on a story that I am currently in the middle of and about half the people respond to the character positively and can totally understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, while about the other 50% of people seem to very much think that the character doesn’t have any agency, that they’re very much just reacting to everything around them and therefore is not very likable. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

John: Let’s recap what we were talking about before with avoidance. The thesis of that episode, 731, was that we tend to think about characters going off on a quest and wanting to do and achieve things, but often they’re just trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. In agency, we’re talking about a character’s ability to take action that moves them in a direction they want to move in, so they proactively go after a thing.

They’re related concepts, but they’re not quite the same. A prisoner has very little agency over certain aspects of their life. A person trapped in a bad domestic situation might have little agency over certain things. Yet, as an audience, we get frustrated by watching that person because we feel trapped there with them.

Craig: Yes. This is a bit different than the question of wanting something or avoiding something. This comes down to– Robert is describing what we would often call a passive character, which is a very easy character for people giving notes to pick on, and here’s why. Passive characters don’t seem to demand our attention because what we’re looking for in stories are those special moments in someone’s life where something important happens.

There are some art movies where you just sit there and watch someone stroll around through some random week of their life. I don’t like those. I like movies where stuff happens. When you have a character who doesn’t have agency, at a minimum, you have to give them a desire, a hope, some need. Even if you were to say, “Here’s a story about a prisoner, they’re never getting out, ever, and there’s no way to get out.”

Then the question is, how do they survive here? Can they find love? Can they find some spiritual peace? Can they figure out how to handle their own guilt or remorse? Can they seek amends? What is it that they want to do? They need something or are they just trying to stay alive, which would be avoiding death? Either way, what you really can’t do is just get pushed around and react without any goal.

John: Yes. I want to stick up for and defend two different groups. The groups who might say, well, there’s a whole range of cinema that is valid, which has passive heroes, passive protagonists. They’re just sure seeing their daily life. That’s absolutely valid. That’s not what we focus on on this podcast, which is movies where things happen, movies where people go on a one-time journey that is transformational, which can absolutely happen in a prison movie.

You’re right in saying that there has to be a point of view, a perspective that the movie has on this character and why we should be caring about this character and why we’d be so interested and invested. I want to defend the people giving these notes, saying, “I didn’t connect or didn’t relate because this character just wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t moving the ball forward. That was my set of expectations.”

Craig: That’s what I want.

John: Yes. As we said from the start, from Comedy Tonight, you’re setting a frame on why we’re supposed to be paying attention to this character and his situation, what the journey is going to be. Maybe that’s really the issue is you’re not properly establishing what it is we should be looking for in this movie with this character balling things forward.

Craig: Great. Great points. There is a genre that I would call person trapped in lunacy. Kafka writes these stories beautifully. Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil is insane and bananas. Jonathan Price is a cog in a massive machine who slowly starts to realize that he’s a cog in a massive machine. Then, of course, it changes him.

There’s also the after-hours/something wild type of story where an average Joe ends up in a series of wild circumstances that they weren’t expecting. They are pushed around, except inevitably they’re also in desperate need of this, and they fall in love. The point of the story is you need to live.

These are essential, I think, to traditional storytelling. Certainly, if you hand somebody a script that doesn’t have that, give them fair warning. This is not one of those scripts. If you don’t like stories where nothing happens, this one isn’t for you.

Drew: It’s fair. A question from Mare. I’ve been working on an original screenplay that features a nine-year-old girl. I’ve had a few professionals in the field read it and provide really helpful notes. One producer director argued that, in no uncertain terms, that unless I were to direct a film about a child protagonist, a film featuring a child would never be made and could never be sold. He suggested that if it was something I needed to write, that I should write this as a book instead of a screenplay. I’d appreciate your insight on this opinion. I can’t shake the story. Most of the stories I’m drawn to feature younger people coming of age.

Craig: John, what do you think about this producer and his interesting insight into Hollywood?

John: This producer can say, like, “I wouldn’t make this movie.”

Craig: Totally. Not a problem.

John: That’s true, and that’s valid. Is there somebody who would make this movie? Yes.

Craig: They’ve made movies about children, starring children, since time immemorial. Shirley Temple, for God’s sake. Not to mention Little Man Tate and Sixth Sense and the movie where Macaulay Culkin died from a bee sting. Spoiler alert. There’s been so many movies.

John: Home Alone.

Craig: Home Alone. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s so many movies starring, I don’t know, are they specifically nine? I don’t know. Yes. How old was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone?

Drew: Probably nine or 10.

Craig: Let’s Google that. I’m tempted to say about this producer, what an idiot. I’m going to. What an idiot.

Drew: Macaulay Culkin was nine years old.

Craig: He was nine years old in Home Alone, one of maybe the most successful family film of all time. The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have. They are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually. Ha.

John: Is it valid to say it’s harder to make a movie with a nine-year-old protagonist? Sure, but it’s hard to make any movie. Come on.

Craig: They’re all hard.

John: Every movie’s hard. The thing, Mare, you should take away from this is try to get your movie made. Also, hopefully, this script is great, and that this is a sample for you to do other stuff too. You should not avoid writing the thing you want to write because it has a child protagonist. Stand by Me.

Craig: Stand by Me, for God’s sake. I’m going to actually get angry about this. Mare, broad advice for you now for your life. Anyone who says you can never do blankety blank in Hollywood, especially when it’s something that you know you can, don’t argue. Just walk away.

John: They’re not the person for you.

Craig: Cut them out of your life. I don’t know who that producer is, but if they are successful, it’s a mistake. It’s literally a cosmic error.

John: There’s producers who would say, “Oh, you can’t make a no-budget horror film,” because it’s not a thing they don’t want to make.

Craig: Exactly. You could say, I’m not going to make it. You could definitely say it’s really hard making a movie with a nine-year-old kid as the star because the restrictions on shooting with children are very specific and very onerous.

John: Also, well-intentioned and good because–

Craig: Oh, necessary. Yes. We don’t want child labor laws to be violated. It’s tough. We have kids on our show all the time, usually in smaller parts. We just know, here’s the deal. The time they take to ride there, then the time that they’re in the makeup chair, the time it takes to take the makeup off, that plus lunch, plus their teaching time, plus their mandated rests, and they can’t work more than eight hours total anyway, including all that stuff, you end up maybe four hours shooting with them, maybe?

John: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had five kids. How challenging.

Craig: It ends up costing way more money to make the same amount of movie with a kid than it would with an adult, like you said, for good reason. Still, people do it all the time because it works all the time. I’m not saying it doesn’t fail all the time, but when I say all the time, I mean lots of the time throughout history.

John: Let’s do another audio question. This one from Sydney.

Sydney: Hey, John and Craig. My name’s Sydney. My question is craft-related. I find that in my scripts, I often describe a lot of movement in the action lines, like a character walks this way or crosses the room. I’m actually noticing I end a lot of scenes with a character leaving a room or walking away from another character if they’ve just had a confrontation. I just feel like I do that very often, especially with the ending the scenes that way. Then I don’t know how to end them.

Is it better to just end on the dialogue line or is that cutting it off too early? Sometimes it feels like that’s almost getting out too early, but maybe that’s just because I’m used to ending it with someone walking away. I’ve been looking at other scripts for movies or pilots I’ve seen just to compare what’s on the screen versus what they wrote in that scene. I did just want your guys’ input to see what you thought.

John: It’s because she’s noticing a pattern, and it’s bugging her a bit that she’s doing it. It’s valid. Listen, characters walking away in a scene, it’s a choice, but if you’re doing it in every scene, something weird.

Craig: It’s a rough choice, specifically for ending a scene. If somebody walks away with purpose, if it is shocking that they walk away, if they walk away and slam a door behind them, if they walk away and disappear into a fog, sure. If they finish an argument and then turn and walk away, you’re just watching that. Then the question is, okay, let’s imagine us in the movie theater, where are we going to put our camera? At that point, you need to really end the scene on how the person who is being left feels. That’s more important than just somebody walking away because you’re not just going to watch people walking. It’s shoe leather there at the end of a scene.

John: I would ask, Sydney, if we’re following the person who’s walking away, a good choice can often be they have the confrontation, cut, and then we find them walking away, and then we can focus on them. The reaction they don’t want to show to the other person, and what that is, that’s a chance for us to get into that space. Just look at what you’re doing there. In terms of the movement within a scene, Craig and I are both huge fans of screen geography. Let people move around, let us see where things are going.

You might worry like, oh, you’re going to box people in on the blocking, you’ll figure it out. It gives a sense of what the flow is in the space and what things are like because if it feels like two characters are just standing, talking to each other in a scene, it’s not good.

Craig: No. If you don’t know how physically it’s possible for these things to happen, you end up with directors on the day just coming up with stuff which they seem to love and which I don’t.

John: Lots of bits.

Craig: I think it’s important for the screenwriter to give everybody something real to hang onto. Then, when you get there, if it’s not quite working, you adjust. I do that to my own writing all the time when I’m directing, but at least have a basis that is set in reality. Moving people around, where are they standing, Lindsay Doran’s most important question. You say two people are standing in a bar. Where in the bar? Against the bar? By a wall? Why are they standing by a wall? Why aren’t they sitting? How did one get there so quickly from all the way across the room?

These questions are worth asking. When you end a scene, one thing that you mentioned is, okay, you can cut to the next thing. Sydney, don’t think about the ending of your scene as the ending of a scene. Think about the ending of the scene as one side of a cut. The other side of the cut tells us something about how you ended, and how you ended is going to tell us something about what you see next. If you start thinking that way, for instance, if you have somebody walking away and the next shot is somebody else walking toward us, or somebody else walking away, that’s a different person, or there’s some sort of contrast, that could be interesting.

Think about the relationship between what we call the A side of the cut and the B side of the cut.

John: If you had two walking scenes back-to-back, it could work, but it’s also going to feel weird.

Craig: It’s going to start getting a little silly, isn’t it?

John: Yes, it is. You got to think about that. What’s also good that you recognize here, Sydney, is movies are not plays. You don’t have to enter and exit characters all the time. The film does that for you, which is great.

Craig: Last bit of advice for you, I love a door.

John: Love a door.

Craig: Love a door. I am obsessed with doors. I write doors all the time. I know there are things that I do that, have you seen that Aaron Sorkin supercut where he just reuses dialogue all the time? It’s all really good. I don’t do that, I don’t think, but just giving away one of my crutches. People will have a conversation with somebody, then turn, walk away, get to a door, stop, turn back, say one last thing, and then go, and the door closes, and that’s an end of a scene. A door closing, scene’s over. I like that. It’s better than just walking.

John: We’re going to have Elaine come on the podcast shortly to talk about The Devil Wears Prada. I think I noticed in her movie, which I may not have time to bring up in our conversation, is glass doors. There’s a lot of times where people are walking– You’re able to see somebody through a glass door, but not open the door, or the decision to open a door or not open the door, and so that movement becomes really important in what they can see and what they can’t see. I love it.

Craig: Doors.

John: Doors.

Craig: Doors.

John: Helpful. Doors and windows.

Craig: Big fan of doors.

John: Let’s answer a question from Andrew.

Drew: I searched your transcripts and looked in the script notes book, but I haven’t found an instance of you two tackling best practices for cutting down your screenplay. You mentioned how vast Scott Frank’s early drafts are.

Craig: [laughs] Poor Scott.

Drew: It’s well-known to me. That’s reality.

Craig: Yes, it is. It’s quite well-documented.

Drew: My question is, how does he trim those back? Everything in my script seems so important and special. I’ve condensed many scenes, and I’ve arrived late, and I’ve left early. All right.

John: This is a great question. I think we should save it for his own marquee topic. I know you’ve written on the blog about cutting. To give you a taste of what’s to come, it’s like you can make the small changes, but ultimately, if you really need to cut a lot, you need to make big changes. You need to cut scenes and sequences rather than trying to just take all the fat out of existing scenes.

Craig: It’s definitely a topic worth its own episode, because I think if you have a lot to cut, it is either an indication of the nature of your process or a problem with the story itself and the way it was conceived in the first place, if you have a lot to cut. For some people, it is part of their process, and they are aware as they’re writing that, okay, I’m not sure if this is going to make it in or not, but I need it now. Sounds like, in this case, I like all of this. Well, okay. Then I suspect there’s actually an unseen problem here that we will dig into and diagnose at a later time.

John: At a later time. Let’s try one cool thing. My one cool thing is a blog post by somebody named Malmsbury.

Craig: Malmsbury?

John: Malmsbury. M-A-L-M-S-B-U-R-Y.

Craig: Love it.

John: What they’re doing is they’re looking back at a cookbook, Microwave Cooking for One, which is a book from the mid-1980s.

Craig: My heart just sank.

John: It garnered momentary attention on the internet as being the world’s saddest cookbook.

Craig: Honestly, most microwave cooking is for one, but that is such a profoundly sad title.

John: Well, you would think so. It’s written by Marie T. Smith, and she wrote this book, Microwave Cooking for One. What I like about this blog post is it’s going back and just resuscitating and reframing, basically, how to think about this cookbook because the author goes through and actually makes a bunch of the recipes. It’s like, this woman, Marie T. Smith, was an absolute genius. In terms of, if you take the mandate of, okay, what is the best way to cook everything on earth in a microwave oven? She just figures it out and basically, like, do this for seven seconds and this, this. She has all these techniques for browning and crisping things in a microwave.

It is basically a pay-on to the power of technology and the wonders of a microwave oven.

Craig: I get that it would be incredibly useful. It’s just the title.

John: Oh, it is.

Craig: Why did it need to be for one? You know what I mean? If she’s so good at stuff, why limit it to just– You could just say, if you’re going solo, do this. If you’re cooking for two to four, do this. I mean, for one? Oh.

John: The blog post does go into the whole, the one of it all, because also, like cooking for two, it’s more than twice as long to do it because it’s not like heating an oven or a fry pan, where you can sort of do, it’s just as quick to do it for two as for one. It actually is different. We don’t reward domestic home life optimization and stuff to where we should.

We don’t acknowledge like, oh, there’s actually, it’s like a scientific rigor applied to things you don’t normally apply it to.

Craig: Some great early life hacks.

John: Yeah, completely. It’s a person, if she had lived at the YouTube era, we would celebrate her as like, look at this woman who’s figured out how to do all this stuff.

Craig: You can’t shake the image of somebody softly crying while the little thing inside the microwave rotates and just waiting. It’s still always three minutes left. It is eternally three minutes to go.

John: Craig, I don’t know if you’ve witnessed this phenomenon where you have work crews on a site, like they’re doing stuff at your house. Sometimes they will bring a microwave oven to plug it in so that they’ll have a microwave oven on their truck, and that’ll heat up all their food, which I just find terrific and remarkable. I just love it.

Craig: Oh, a little microwave is powerful. I mean, look, we’re old enough to remember what life was like before them.

John: Absolutely. I remember our first microwave.

Craig: Yes. The first time you microwave something, you lost your mind.

John: Incredible.

Craig: I feel the same way about the air fryer. The air fryer is just incredible.

John: Yes, we don’t have an air fryer.

Craig: It is spectacular.

John: Yes, everyone knows that.

Craig: Basically, it’s like a microwave, not technologically, but practically, it’s like a microwave that takes maybe twice as long as a microwave would, but tastes 10 times better.

John: In many ways, I was reading different blog posts about technologies and what’s the earliest the technology could have been invented. The air fryer, it’s just a hairdryer mounted differently.

Craig: It’s just a massive convection air dryer thing that works so well.

John: We could have had them 30 years ago. It’s a while that it was invented.

Craig: There it is. My sister introduced me to the air fryer many years ago. We played D&D, and we had pizza. We often do. I always over-order pizza because I’m a Jew, and if you run out of food, you go to hell. We don’t even have hell, but they make hell for you. I end up freezing all these slices of pizza, and putting pizza in a microwave is sad. Putting pizza straight from the freezer, a slab, like a piece of slate, put it in an air fryer, eight minutes later, brand new pizza, like it just got made. It’s spectacular.

John: Lacking an air fryer, what we do is heat up the oven with a pan in there so the pan gets hot, and then you put it on there, 400 degrees, a few minutes, delicious. Air fryer.

Craig: Air fryer, that’s great.

John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: As is often the case, I have a game. Now, as everyone knows, I’m rather obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3. Because I love what Larian, the company that made Baldur’s Gate 3, did, I went back, and I played Divinity 2 and then Divinity 1, which were the prior games. Of course, I will play the upcoming Divinity, but I’m out of Larian games to play. Of course, I go on my Steam Deck like, “Let’s say you love Larian games. What’s like it?” The answer is, here’s something like it. It is. This is not at Larian level.

I appreciate what this company is doing. They’re very small, actually. It’s a company called Tactical Adventures. Do they have the polish of a Larian game? No. I think the entire company’s 35 people, or something, where Larian, I believe, employs hundreds of people. They made a game called Solasta II. They made Solasta I: Crown of the Magister. Then they made Solasta II. It is in early access right now, which is how Larian does their games, too. They don’t give you the entire game upfront. They give you a chunk of it. Then they’re using it to get feedback, debug, advanced features.

It works like Baldur’s Gate very much, what I really enjoy about it is that it is not just based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and encyclopedia the way that Baldur’s Gate was. It is firmly, very strictly attached to 5th Edition rules. The way we play, that super crunchy way, that’s how this works. I actually find it on that level fun. I wish them great success. I believe in little companies trying things. Not everything has to be Baldur’s Gate 3.

John: Totally. You’re playing on Steam Deck. Is it just a Steam game?

Craig: I’m playing on Steam Deck. It is available for platform. I guess it’s available on PC as well. I guess everything that’s on Steam is theoretically PC-ish.

John: I’ve not been using my Steam Deck at all recently, so maybe I’ll break that and try it.

Craig: I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with the Steam Deck. I know I could sit down and play, and I will. Look, once Grand Theft Auto 6 hits, I’m not going to be on my damn Steam Deck. I’m going to be playing on the biggest screen I have on my PlayStation, going crazy.

John: Have you hooked up your PlayStation to your big screen downstairs?

Craig: No. My home used to be owned by Kevin Williamson. Kevin had set up a Sony PlayStation down there to go on the big home theater screen, but it was an older PlayStation. When I moved in, I was like, “Ahh.” It’s such a big screen. It’s overwhelming.

John: Yes, that was my worry.

Craig: Rather than feel like I’m being punished by the game I’m playing is so big, even the sound down there is great, it’s a little bit better on just a good old-fashioned, big-ass, wall-mounted. I play upstairs in a little gaming nook. It’s my gaming nook.

John: Everyone needs a gaming nook. That’s the advice we needed to–

Craig: Everyone needs a gaming nook. Doesn’t matter how big or small.

John: Whatever your game is.

Craig: Doesn’t matter.

John: Could be a puzzle nook. Could be whatever you want to do.

Craig: Whatever. You got to have one.

John: Got to have a nook. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. If you want to include an audio version of your question, go for it. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. I just saw you put through an email that we’re on another college’s curriculum. I think it was at University of Missouri, Kansas City, I think.

Craig: University of Missouri, Kansas City. Yes. Those students have to buy the book.

John: Those students have to buy the book. That’s how we do it. One by one. Apparently, the first time they’ve ever signed a book, and the book is ours.

Craig: Well, that’s great. Thank you, university.

John: You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week.

Craig: 80% of you really enjoy it.

John: Yes, which is fantastic.

Craig: Thank you for continuing to enjoy it.

John: I think it was more like 90%.

Craig: 90% of you enjoy it.

John: That’s a very high number. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Hollywood parties.

Craig: Woo-hoo.

John: Craig, it’s always a Hollywood party with you.

Craig: Aw. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. The question was how to go to Hollywood parties.

Craig: Got to go to Hollywood parties.

John: I’m taking this as not to how to get invited to Hollywood parties because–

Craig: No. We can’t help you with that.

John: We can’t help you with that. We can talk about, okay, you’ve been invited to a Hollywood party. It could be a premiere party. It could be a for-your-consideration party. It could be some producers throwing a party at their house. It could be a friend of ours doing a New Year’s Eve party. You’re going to a Hollywood party. What to do? Let’s start with when do you arrive?

Craig: If it’s a premiere, you have to get there to see the movie.

John: Except the thing to point out is they always start late. You can get there and be waiting for an hour in the theater.

Craig: They will tell you that you have to be at the theater by 7:30 PM under penalty of death. Around 7:50, the biggest star arrives, starts walking the carpet, and doing interviews. I’ve been to some that have really gone late, but typically speaking, it’s actually not too bad. A typical premiere will start about 30 minutes after. Then there’s always a speech or two. They will close the doors on you, though. Better to be on time for those things, and what I like to do is, you get to a premiere, and the theater lobby will be choked with people all yip, yip, yip, yip to each other. Oh my God, me, me, me, me. Even at premieres for things I’ve done, I don’t know almost anyone there.

I’m like, “Who are all these people?” I just go into the theater, and I sit down. It’s nice and quiet in there for a while everyone’s, me, me, me, me in the lobby. If you like chit-chat and being smashed up against people, sure, the lobby.

John: The party would be after the screening, generally. Ideally, it’s at the same venue or an easy walk. I always hate it when there’s a premiere someplace and you have to drive to a second thing.

Craig: It’s pretty rare, but yes, typically, it’s a little walk. If it’s a bigger premiere, it’s almost always a little walk because you have to get to some larger venue, but they’re pretty good about keeping it close by. The party will start technically immediately after the end of the movie. It will take possibly an hour or two before it really gets going. I don’t know what happens in that hour or two. Where did everyone go? Did they just go somewhere else and then go to the party? I’m always befuddled.

John: I’m thinking of two different parties, party for the first Iron Man and the party for the second season of The Last of Us, which were the premiere was at the Chinese and the party afterwards was at the Roosevelt Hotel, which is great because it’s an easy walk to get over there. A gladiator, too. It’s also the same situation. Yes, it’s weird. You get there, and it’s empty. It’s like, why did it take–

Craig: Did I make a mistake?

John: Then it does fill up.

Craig: It fills up. What happens in part is when the movie ends, if you are involved in the production, as you’re walking out, 4,000 people stop you to tell you how wonderful you are. Some of them you actually want to talk to, and you haven’t seen for a while, and you’re so happy that they’re there. You don’t know. Some of them you’re supposed to know, and you don’t know, but you get stuck. Everybody gets bottlenecked and stuck. Of course, you also naturally want to talk to the people that you’ve made the show with.

If you’re a guest at one of these things, just be aware you’re going to have to weave your way around this thick chunk of people. If you feel like congratulating someone, congratulate someone that isn’t currently being congratulated or is being under-congratulated. The actors don’t need more. Go find the writer. Then make your way to the party and enjoy the fact that there’s not a big line for food, and you could probably get a drink pretty quickly.

John: Let’s say we’re now at the party. I want to stress that you may have some agenda. Just think about what your agenda is. At a party, generally, I want to congratulate the person who I want to congratulate. I wanted to stay at your party until I could see you and say, congratulations, Craig.

Craig: Exactly. Bye. [laughs]

John: Same to Favreau on the first Iron Man and through the second. Once I’ve done that, I can leave.

Craig: You can leave.

John: I can leave.

Craig: You can leave. It’s up to you.

John: Absolutely. I can stay. I can go. Even if it’s not a “congratulate the person” party, it’s worth thinking about who am I expecting to see there, because that way I can think, oh, I’ll look out for that person and be able to have those conversations. For example, I was at the Interstellar premiere, and I didn’t know Christopher Nolan at that point, but I did know Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan. Oh, they’re going to be there. I could look for Lisa. We actually just had a great time chatting there, which is great. It started our friendship really more there. That’s the good thing about one of these parties. It’s an excuse to hang out with people you actually wanted to hang out with.

Craig: Now, if you are somebody who is going to your first premiere and you’re not expecting to know many people at all, it’s perfectly fine to go there. Don’t go alone because that’ll get awkward. Go there with somebody you can talk to, and inevitably, you will bump into somebody who will say something, and you might meet somebody, and it’s just like any other party. Feel free to compliment people who are involved in the movie. If it’s a famous person or it’s the director or whatever, somebody you want to get a selfie with, it’s cool. It’s fine. What you don’t want to do is just talk their ear off.

They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t know you. They would much rather talk to people they know. It’s as simple as that. In the case of actors, other famous people love talking to famous people.

John: A good conversation starter is, “Did you work on this?” If you don’t know, “Did you work on this?” Great. What was your problem? I really like that part of it. Or if they didn’t work on it, it’s like, oh, then why are you here? What did you like? All that stuff. What’s fun for you?

Craig: What brought you here?

John: What brought you here? Always a safe bet.

Craig: How did you end up at this fun party? Then someone explains their connection. You explain yours. It just works like any other party. You described a different kind of party, though, which is what I would consider the Hollywood party, which isn’t an organized event by a studio. This is more like a producer, a director, an actor is having some big party at their big house. You know somebody who brings you. You’re going to your first–

John: Good plus one.

Craig: Yes. This is like a real party. Now what do you do?

John: Walking back through examples of when I’ve done that situation, it’s more just like a normal party, which you’re basically just figuring out what is the point of entry for a conversation to have with somebody around me who looks interesting, who I want to talk with. That’s just a basic skill that’s not always easy to do.

Craig: Certainly, you should have the awareness that unless you do know a lot of people there or you are, in your own way, a fascinating human being, nobody wants to talk to you. You have to earn people’s interest. Be cool and don’t push yourself on people. Certainly, allow people to mingle. Don’t monopolize anyone’s time. Just be nice about it. That’s all.

Here’s another bit of advice. Those parties always start much later than you say, so show up later. Here’s something that happened to me at a party. I want to give people, this is my, you’re allowed to leave. It was the Golden Globes or something like that, I think. There was this big party that CAA was throwing at the Chateau Marmont.

They have one of those big rooms that they open up. My agent was like, “You got to come.” I’m like, “Okay, I will.”

John: I feel a dread. Those upper rooms, the Chateau Marmont, lovely view, but come on.

Craig: It started well. I got in the elevator, and Tobey Maguire was there. I thought, “Oh, this is cool. I’m in an elevator with Tobey Maguire. He’s Spider-Man. This is awesome.” We get out of the elevator, and we walk over to the room, and the door opens. It was a joke. You know the Star Trek episode Trouble with Tribbles?

John: Yes.

Craig: Is that what they were called?

John: Yes, Tribbles, yes.

Craig: Yes, where they just fill every space. The door opened, and it was just humans. You couldn’t even go anywhere. It was the most packed nonsense I’ve ever seen.

John: Sundance parties can be that way, too.

Craig: Here’s what happened. I said, “Okay,” to myself, and this is like, it’s full of famous people. It’s full of executives, full of people I know. I’m just going to go in there, see my agent, show him that I came, and leave. I slowly make my way. It took me 15 minutes to get through this throng just to the outside area where I could breathe a little, hoping that he would be there.

I did see him, but he wasn’t there. He was on the other side of the room. I went, “No, I’m done.” I spent another 10 minutes walking out. I spent 20 minutes at the party, walking in and walking out. You are allowed to leave. I did not want to be there.

John: You know what? You sent a text like, “Hey, I couldn’t make it over to you.”

Craig: Oh, I told him. I was just like, “Bro, you know me. You know this, I will not do this.” If you are at a party in Hollywood that is jam-packed with people, go. My feeling is like nothing good can happen here. There’s going to be an earthquake or a fire. That’s how my mind works.

John: You’ve had experience with Hollywood parties, too. What are we missing?

Drew: A little bit. My question was, I’m in this weird pocket where someone will be like, “Oh, I have to introduce you to this person who’s the director or someone, and then they don’t want to talk to me.” You have this weird introduction where you’re like, “Oh, hi, and there’s supposed to be this excitement,” and it very quickly fizzles. When do I leave? Because I understand what’s happening. I also, there’s another person here who’s introduced me, and I feel like I need to keep the ball in the air.

Craig: In those situations, my advice would be when you get introduced to that person, tell them why you’re so happy to meet them. Say something about them and what they’ve done that you think is great, and shake their hand and say, “It was great meeting you.” Rather than, okay, you’re probably wondering who I am and what I’m about, because as you know, they’re not. Everybody likes being complimented.

Drew: I keep trying to make a human connection, and I’m like, “Actually, I don’t think this is the time for that.”

John: The person that’s trying to introduce the two of you, are they trying to get rid of you? Are they trying to slough you off, or did they come over to you and say, “Oh, Drew, I want you to meet this person?” They’re trying to be–

Drew: In my situation, it’s usually a friend is the director’s assistant or something like that. It’s like, “I would love for you to meet this person who I’ve been telling you about.” It’ll be people who listen to the show, and they’re like, “I know my boss listens to the show. They’ll be super excited.”

Craig: What are you going to do with that? It’s okay for you to say, “That’s cool. I’m good.” Because you can say, “Hey, I’ve had a lot of these,” and unfortunately, what happens is they’re like, “Oh, cool.” Then it’s just dead silence. I don’t want to do that.

Drew: Well, but I think early career, there’s that scarcity mindset where you’re like-

Craig: I should meet everybody.

Drew: -“I should meet everyone.” You never know, and make those connections. You want to follow through on that, but you don’t.

Craig: You know, really, it’s not a connection.

Drew: Oh, no, not at all.

Craig: If your friend, and I’m annoyed at your friend, but if your friend really wants you to meet somebody to get to know them because they think, oh, you two would really hit it off, well, why don’t they just have a fucking dinner party or something with eight people? That’s how you meet people.

Drew: That’s much better.

Craig: Not at some throngy event where 90% of the people who are there are there out of some weird social compulsion to be able to say they were there. That’s the thing about these parties that I find so dreadful, is that they’re not actually– Most people who are at these parties are not there to celebrate anything, nor are they there to commune with anyone. They are just there to be there so that they could say they were there. Nothing makes me less interested. I don’t go to a lot of parties, as you can imagine. It’s not my thing.

John: Yes, and we don’t throw a lot of bigger parties here. We’ll have friends over for game nights and stuff like that. We had a party for our house turning 100 years old.

Craig: That was nice.

John: It had a purpose, and we had fun activities. We had a scavenger hunt. Things people can do.

Craig: Melissa and I went on a scavenger hunt. We didn’t need to worry about getting stuck in a corner with somebody. That’s fine. It was like an open house-ish sort of style thing. I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I should have a party at my house.” Then I’m like, “Why? Just why?”

John: Friends of mine moved up in the ranks and basically bought a house where they need to start throwing the party. It’s their agents who need to start throwing parties at their house.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: It’s like, I would not want–

Craig: What does that mean?

John: There’s an expectation they’ve got to entertain and do these things.

Craig: Apparently, my house was quite the party house when Kevin Williamson ran the show over there. It’s a good house for a party. Maybe one day. Since I’m a guy who’s constantly trying to leave a party, our friend Derek throws a great party. I actually enjoy those because it’s sort of an annual event.

John: Absolutely. I will know 30% of the people there, which is great.

Craig: You run into the sort of people that you don’t even spend much time with, but you’ll see them at that party.

John: Let’s talk through people who are like, “Oh, I know I’ve met this person. I don’t know where.” It’s so tough. We’ll do that. It’s so good to see you. Obviously, if you have a Mike at your side, say like, “Oh, hey, I’m Mike. I’m John’s husband.” That’s helpful. I just feel like we need to give a lot of grace for like, I cannot summon who you are.

Craig: Everyone should say their name to everyone. I’m still dealing with the paranoia that when people who haven’t seen me in a while see me, they don’t know who I am, just because I shaved my beard off. I’ll say my name to you if you look like maybe you’re not sure. There is no crime in forgetting someone’s name, or forgetting their face, or forgetting that you’ve met them before. It is not a crime. Anyone who holds you accountable for that is jerk as far as I’m concerned. A jerk. It’s cool. You’re not that important. Nobody is.

John: We were talking about Kevin Williamson a lot on this episode. Kevin Williamson, when I met him 30 years ago, whatever, four times in a row, he was like, “Oh, it’s nice to meet you.” I got a little annoyed at a certain point, but then I realized like, “Oh, I know who Kevin Williamson is because he’s like an Entertainment Weekly famous person, and I’m not. He has no reinforcement of who I am, whereas I knew who he was before I met him.”

Craig: Or maybe he just forgets names and faces. Sometimes you will meet somebody, and they remind you of maybe four different people you might know. Now it’s like, I don’t know which one this is. That’s okay.

John: We’ll talk about this when it lands on the show, but one of the things that I really appreciate about our movie is that obviously from Andy’s perspective, Miranda was a huge influence on our life, and Miranda has no idea who Andy was. It’s so classic and relevant and true.

Craig: It is something that happens. As you get older, if you are in our business, if you have succeeded and hung on and achieved things, people will know who you are. You don’t always know who they are. Sometimes you should know who they are. I realize sometimes I’ll remember somebody that worked for me in some capacity, and I can’t remember their name. I think, is it dementia? No. There’s too many people.

John: There’s too many people.

Craig: There’s too many people. There’s long-term memory. There’s short-term memory, but there’s also mid-term memory. Mid-term memory is where I put the names of everybody on a crew. Five years from now, and if I’m working on something else, I won’t remember that because a new crew came to take the mid-term memory.

John: So often I find myself searching email like, I know this person exists. Who is this person? It’s not memory. It’s a lot of this.

Craig: You get the text from somebody, and you’re like, okay, it’s just a number. They’re like, “Hey, man, da, da, da,” and you have to scroll back and look for context clues. You’re like, “Oh, that’s who this is.”

Drew: On the iPhone, there’s that little company thing, and I use that like crazy just to do context.

John: Oh, nice. All right. Good hints from you.

Craig: Well, I probably have chased people away from some Hollywood parties. They can be very glamorous. It’s cool to see famous people. I like it. It’s fun.

John: Yes. We didn’t talk about clothes at all, which is good because–

Craig: Oh, clothes.

John: Clothes, whatever. Wear clothes. Here’s the one–

Craig: Wear clothes.

John: The one tip I can give you is that if it’s an annual thing, Google photos from the last year. If it’s a thing that’s being photographed for places–

Craig: So you get the sense of–

John: It’s like where the vibe, what the vibe is.

Drew: That said, I went to a premiere a couple of weeks ago that was for a fighting movie, and everyone there was in all black. Every dude, all black. Black sweatshirt, black baseball cap, that kind of thing. It just felt like that was the dress code that we were all doing. It felt like the default. I had a blue and white shirt.

Craig: And a pink hat.

Drew: I didn’t get the memo. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I don’t know.

Craig: It’s not. One of the great rules of life, no one’s thinking about you. You think everyone’s thinking about you. No one’s thinking about you. They’re only thinking about themselves.

Drew: Yes, it’s true. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you. Party.

Links:

• The script for episode one of Chernobyl
• Scriptnotes episode 493: Opening Scenes
• Greta Gerwig’s Little Women screenplay
• The Sheep Detectives
• Scriptnotes episode 731: Avoidance and Other Anti-Quests
• Sorkinisms – A Supercut by Kevin T. Porter
• My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury
• Solasta 2
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 667 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most screenwriters dream of getting their first movie produced. Today on the show, we are joined by a guest who just had his first two movies produced and released this year. Justin Kuritzkes is a screenwriter behind both Challengers and the upcoming Queer. He’s also a novelist, a YouTuber, a playwright. Welcome, Justin.

Justin Kuritzkes: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real honor to be on here.

John: It’s so nice to have you here. I want to talk about this past year because a bunch of stuff has happened this last year, but clearly, the last year is only the tip of the iceberg and there was a bunch of work that went behind that. So I want to get into the work that got you here. I also want to talk about working with a director, sex on screen because both of your movies are very sexy and notably more sexy than a lot of things we’ve seen recently, and get a little granular with what’s on the page, if that’s okay.

Justin: Great, yes.

John: In our bonus for premium members, I want to talk about your videos because, in addition to this screenwriter in front of us, you were an early YouTube personality person. You had a character you played. I want to talk about sort of how that tied into the rest of what you’re doing or if it even does tie into what you’re doing.

Justin: Amazing.

John: Cool. Let’s do it. Let’s get the back story on you because I’m just meeting you for the very first time. You grew up here in Los Angeles?

Justin: Yes, I grew up in the valley partially. The first couple years of my life, I was in Encino and then my parents split up and my dad moved to Santa Clarita. So I spent a lot of time there. Then my mom moved all around the West Side.

John: Parents not in the industry, what was your sense of the industry growing up in town?

Justin: No. It was kind of a weird thing in that my immediate family, like my nuclear family, is very square, which I say lovingly. It’s a family of doctors and lawyers from Queens on both sides. But I have an uncle who’s a screenwriter and a producer in features. Probably the thing that caught on the most was this movie called 3000 Miles to Graceland with Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. It was like about Elvis impersonators doing a heist in Vegas.

John: All right. Nice.

Justin: I kind of, through him, saw that a creative life was possible from an early age. But then also just growing up in LA, even though my parents weren’t in the industry, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were. So the industry was not something that felt abstract. It was very clear to me early on that movies were made by like actual people who went to Ralphs and bought their groceries.

John: Definitely. It feels like if you’d grown up in DC, you’d be surrounded by politics all the time.

Justin: Exactly.

John: If you grew up in Nashville, you’d be surrounded by country music. Even if it wasn’t your family’s business, it was part of the atmosphere that you are in.

Justin: Exactly. Yes.

John: So when did you first get a sense that movies or writing for movies was a possibility because you were writing other things, but when did movies enter into the equation?

Justin: Movies were kind of my first love. The first thing I was a fan of was movies. I was a cinephile before it was anything. Then in high school, I started writing plays because my school had like a one-act play festival with student-written stuff that other students would direct and act in. Through that, I all of a sudden became a playwright and then was just doing that all through college and for 10 years afterwards.

Then accidentally found myself writing a novel, which I thought was like a monologue at first, because that’s the way I would start a lot of my plays are just have somebody start talking and follow the thread of their voice until I wanted to have somebody else interrupt them. This guy just kept talking for 60 pages and nothing had happened. There was no story yet, but I liked the guy. So I wrote that as a novel.

Then I was in the middle of writing what I thought was going to be my second book when I got the idea for Challengers. That’s kind of how I started writing screenplays.

John: Before we get into Challengers, I want to put together some pieces that are along the way. You mentioned writing plays in high school. You went to school here, that was Harvard-Westlake.

Justin: Yes, I did.

John: Which is a good, very– I don’t want to say aggressive. Very academic. A top school.

Justin: I think aggressive is an accurate description. Yeah. In every way.

John: The reputation I always hear about Harvard-Westlake is if you don’t have one thing you excel in, you’re going to get sort of lost in the system, and the churn of Harvard-Westlake. Is that fair?

Justin: I don’t know. I really found dramatic art there. I found performance there. I don’t think I would have necessarily gravitated towards it if I’d gone somewhere else. But I think really through that, one-act play festival, and through the teachers in the drama department, who really became early mentors for me, yeah. For me, I had that, and that was what pulled me through it.

John: That’s great. Now you’re applying to colleges where you’re applying specifically to the thing. I’m like, “I’m going to go write plays,” were those the programs you were looking into?

Justin: I knew I wanted to write plays, but I wasn’t applying to theater school, or film school, or anything like that. I went to Brown, just as a liberal arts degree. I think I majored in philosophy. I was doing a lot of theater while I was there because I knew that that was the life I wanted to live.

John: We haven’t had a lot of people on the podcast talking about theater through college. We have a lot of people who like went, “I know I’m going to write movies. I know I’m going to write books,” those kinds of things. What is it like to be writing plays in college? Are you put into little groups to put on your one acts? What stuff are you doing as a person doing plays in college?

Justin: At Brown, there was this real tradition of student-run theater. There’s this place called Production Workshop at Brown, which has had people like Laura Linney and Richard Foreman and a lot of these iconic people in film and theater move through it. I was on the board of Production Workshop. And we were really left to our own devices. We had our own building on campus. They gave us a really small budget that we had to fight for every year. Then we just could do whatever we wanted, basically. So that was a real early view into producing too. The scrappiness of that was definitely something that got ingrained in me.

John: Now, someone who’s curious about studying film or studying television, they can just go out and see all the movies that are made, all the TV series that are made. How are you learning about plays? How are you learning about other plays that were happening out there? How are you learning about the form?

Justin: That’s such an incisive question because it is this really weird thing when you’re studying theater. You’re studying it all on the page, for the most part. Most of the plays that were inspiring to me or that I was taking my cues from artistically were things that I had never seen. They were things that I was just reading. I think something that stuck with me from those years of reading a lot of plays was that, in theater, there’s a standard formatting that you get taught at some point about how a play is supposed to look, but you realize when you read a lot of plays that nobody follows that.

John: No, nobody.

Justin: Every play has an instruction manual on how to read that play. Every play is developing its own vocabulary and is almost operating as a way to evoke an idea in you about how to stage something rather than a step-by-step guide. That was something that originally really daunted me about screenwriting because the form can feel so rigid and official. There’s something very strict about it. But I realized that part of the work of learning, for me how to write screenplays, was learning how to find my own language in it, and like treat each screenplay like I have to teach the reader how to read this one.

John: We had a Greta Gerwig on the podcast talking about her coming out of the mumblecore movement, which was a very under-scripted way of making a movie, of telling a story where like the improv and the figuring out as you go along was part of the process. When she actually got to write in screenplay format and realize like, “Oh, actually, I’m responsible for all these things, but I also get– it’s cool for me to actually describe in full detail what these things are like and what a character is wearing,” and kind of what the point is. Put the boundaries on things in a way that plays sort of don’t.

As I read through plays right now, I do just feel lost in terms of where are people in this space. I’m having to imagine this all myself because it’s just basically the dialogue in so many classic plays.

Justin: Yeah. A lot of my plays wouldn’t even have stage directions. They would just have characters start talking. You can’t do that in a screenplay or else people will just put it in the trash bin.

John: Absolutely. Talk to us about your first attempts to write in screenplay format. Challengers was your first attempt to write a script?

Justin: Challengers was the first script that I finished that I felt good enough about showing to anybody.

John: Let’s talk about what you’re lighting there. There you had other experiments with a form. What was it about the form that you found challenging, interesting? What broke your brain about it at first?

Justin: Maybe a really concrete example is I wrote this book called Famous People, which is my novel. That book is all written in the first person through the language and the voice of this young pop star who’s never named because he just he’s writing his memoir and we’re reading the first draft and he just assumes everybody knows his name so he never says it. And then I was turning that into a television pilot. That was one of the first attempts at writing screenplays as an adult.

John: I can imagine that’s a really daunting process because all the stuff that worked about that on the page as a book can’t translate directly.

Justin: No. You realize really quickly that so much of the experience of being famous, which is this character’s life, is that people are screaming your name at you all the time. I didn’t want to give him a name because that was thematically important to me that he’d be this every man, that he was like this idea of a pop star. I had to figure out ways in that pilot to plausibly move him through the world that he would inhabit without having people scream some name at him. That was a challenge. Often those kinds of unreasonable challenges end up forcing you to write in an interesting way.

John: We often say that it’s the restrictions that provide the shape and the boundaries for what the specific story is you’re trying to tell.

Justin: Yes. You have to give him a name for his dialogue. I ended up just calling him “the kid.” But even doing that felt like a betrayal.

John: Absolutely.

Justin: It felt wrong to me, but I had to compromise on that level.

John: Yes, absolutely. You had that experiment. Was that something you were just doing for your own kicks and giggles or had someone asked you to try to write this as a pilot?

Justin: A little bit of both. I was writing it on spec, but it was a producer was interested and I was trying to put it together. It was mostly for myself. It ended up being something that was really useful and just getting in the rhythm of writing screenplays.

John: You said you were starting to work on your second novel and when you decided you got this notion for Challengers and you put the book aside and started working on that, is that accurate?

Justin: Yes.

John: What was the spark idea in Challengers? What was the thing, like, “Oh, this is the central idea. This is a movie rather than a book,” shat was it about it that caught your attention?

Justin: It was 2018 and I just happened to turn on the US Open. It was in the middle of it. There was this match between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams in the final. There was this very controversial call from the umpire where he accused Serena Williams of receiving coaching from the sidelines. Up to that point, I had not been a massive tennis fan or a sports fan even. Tennis wasn’t a big part of my life. I just happened to turn this on.

Immediately that struck me as this intensely cinematic situation, that you’re alone on the court and there’s this one other person in this massive stadium who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do and that’s the person you can’t talk to.

John: Wow.

Justin: Immediately it just clicked for me, “Well, what if you really needed to talk about something, and what if it was something beyond tennis? What if it was about the two of you and what if somehow it involved the person on the other side of the court?” That all came like right away, but I didn’t sit down to write the movie for a long time. For a couple of years, I was doing other stuff. In that time, I became a legitimate obsessive tennis fan.

Originally I thought I was doing research, but then it morphed into just a new fandom. There’s a lot of exciting energy about being a fan of something for the first time. It felt like discovering movies for the first time.

John: Yes.

Justin: Just like when you meet a young cinephile and they’re like, “Have you heard of this movie, The Godfather?” or something. I was watching Roger Federer and Djokovic matches from Wimbledon and being like, “This shit is amazing.” I was doing a lot of research that didn’t even feel like research. It just felt like fandom, to the point that I almost didn’t even want to write the script because I knew it would ruin it.

John: Did it ruin it?

Justin: Of course. Yes, it did. I still watch the Grand Slams, but my love for tennis is not as pure as it once was.

John: For sure. When did you start writing the script for Challengers and how did you start writing it? Did you outline it? Did you know what the movie was and just sat down to create scenes?

Justin: I knew a lot about the movie. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to move. But I knew the structure because– The impulse to write the movie in the first place was that I was watching a lot of tennis and I started asking myself this question, which was, “What could I write that would be as good as tennis?” Because tennis was so good.

Then next to that, there was this question of, “What would make tennis even better?” For me, the answer to that question was, “It would be better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody.” If I could have somebody whispering into my ear, “Here’s why this point matters so much.” From that, the structure of dropping people into a tennis match and then gradually revealing why these people were looking at each other like this was so serious, even though it was this low-stakes thing, technically. That all felt like a natural outgrowth of my desire to write the thing in the first place.

John: You’re focusing on that moment between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. What was actually really happening in that moment? You couldn’t know, but as the storyteller, you could figure out motivations behind what was really happening in that match.

Justin: Yes. Of course, what happens in Challengers is nothing to do with Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. The more I read about actual athletes, the more I’m convinced that they’re very boring people, in the most part, just like writers are very boring people for the most part.

John: Yes, absolutely. But from when you first started, you knew that there was going to be a central match that we would be pinging back and forth into.

Justin: Yes.

John: Did you have a grid outline of, “This is how we’re moving forward in time,” or did that all evolve organically?

Justin: Yes and no. I knew the container of the time period. I knew that it would be roughly from 18 to mid-30s because that’s the lifespan of an athlete. If you think of an athletic career as a mini life, it starts when you’re born, when you’re 18 and you’re dead when you’re useless, when you’re 35, or 40 if you’re lucky. So I knew that would be the timeframe of the movie, but I didn’t know when I started writing exactly where I would jump back to when.

John: Let’s take a look at some stuff on the page. This is from the very first page of the script. We’ll start with this one. This is a script we found. It’s labeled 2021, but this could have been earlier than that. This is the one that ultimately ended up on the blacklist.

Justin: Yes, this is the first draft.

John: First draft. When you say first draft, this is probably the first draft of something you would actually show to a person.

Justin: Yes. This movie was weird, in that I wrote the first draft of it towards the end of 2021. Then the distance between that and us being in pre-production was five or six months, which is crazy. That’s because I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor. They quickly sent it to Zendaya because they had made all the Spider-Man movies together. She said she wanted to do it. She needed to make a Dune: Part Two in June so we had to make it before then.

John: Little window there.

Justin: There was no development process. We went into pre-production with this first draft and then ended up having what would have been the development process during pre-production.

John: Well, great because we’re going to talk about some scenes later on that changed a lot.

Justin: Great.

John: I really want to get into this. Let’s start with, we often do a three-page challenge on the podcast where we talk about the first three pages of listener scripts and talk through what’s working and what’s not working on the page.
Yours, it starts with Set 1 at the very top. Donaldson 0-0, Zweig 0-0. Exterior, a tennis court in New Rochelle late afternoon. Would you read us through the character descriptions for these three main people we’re going to be here?

Justin: Sure. Yes. Tashi Donaldson, 33, Black, a former player, sits looking out at the court where two men stand across the net from one another, looking like they are about to fight to the death. Patrick Zweig, 32, Jewish, scrappy, ranked 201 in the world, has the face of a man who’s been beaten down by this sport one too many times. He wears a mishmash of clothes from different companies. He’s got no sponsorship deal, though he has somewhat haphazardly ironed to his shirt the name and logo of a random Italian company, Impatto. Art Donaldson, 33, Wasp, good-looking, is the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. His shocking presence at this rinky-dink tournament is the sole reason why the modest venue is packed with locals, tourists, and anyone living in the vicinity of New Rochelle who is even remotely interested in tennis. He wears a pristine Nike outfit that practically glistens in the hot summer sun.

John: Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this page that we’re talking through. These three character names, they’re all bold-faced. People can see right now, these are our three main characters. I think it’s the only bold-facing you’re doing of characters in the script, basically.

Justin: Yes.

John: This is your trio. This is who you’re following here. These are chunky descriptions, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that’s not filmable, and yet feels really crucial. We often talk on the podcast about what’s cheating and what’s not cheating. There’s stuff here that we can’t quite know. We can’t know that he’s the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. We can’t know that as an audience watching this but we’re going to find it out soon enough. It’s going to become clear as we go through stuff.

You’re also giving us physical details that do help us see the difference. We can see Patrick’s scrappiness. We can see the difference in clothing level here. We get some sense of what this is.

Let’s jump ahead to the For Your Consideration script because you’ve made some tweaks to this. You were talking with Amy Pascal, Luca, and other folks here, and you maybe made some adjustments about what you’re really going to see.

The first description of Tashi is she’s two years younger. She’s wearing sunglasses now, which became iconic, became very, very important. The description of Patrick is a little bit different between the two. He’s now ranked 271 in the world. We’ve gotten rid of the, “Beaten down by the sport too many times.” We still have this idea that his clothes have no sponsorship deal. In both cases, he’s ironed on this logo for Impatto.

What else do we notice the difference between? Art is pretty much the same here. You’re still giving us this story of why people are here that’s not quite filmable, but we’re going to figure that out over time. Looking at these two pages, do you remember typing any of these changes?

Justin: Every one of them. Yes, of course. It’s the difference between– I think a screenplay is always two things. It’s always supposed to be a meaningful and exciting reading experience, but then it also becomes this very practical document that serves as an invitation for hundreds of different people to do their jobs.

John: Yes.

Justin: When you get into pre-production with a script, you’re really starting to realize that you have to put everything in there that someone’s going to create. Then that gets informed by the knowledge and the artistry that everybody else is bringing to it. For example, the sunglasses. By the time I had done these changes, we had already done the costume fittings. Jonathan Anderson, our costume designer, and Luca had put Zendaya in these amazing sunglasses for this opening scene. So I wanted to put that in the script to make sure we didn’t forget that those were going to be there because she was also going to have business with them and take them off and signal where she was at emotionally through what she was doing with her sunglasses. In a way, it was like this armor that she had.

John: Yes, 100%.

Justin: I made them all the same age for a number of reasons. I think it’s a tricky movie to cast in that the characters have to go from teenager to 30, and we didn’t want to cast two sets of actors. That idea was floated for a second before even Luca came aboard, Amy and I talked about it. We quickly realized we shouldn’t go down that road. Making the ages slightly lower made it so that we could cast people plausibly.

What else changed? 271 in the world, that’s a note from our tennis consultant, Brad Gilbert. If you follow tennis, he’s a legend in the tennis world. He used to be Andre Agassi’s coach. Most recently, he coached Coco Gauff when she won the US Open. When I explained to him and when he read the script, the position of Patrick in the world of tennis and how down on his luck he was, Brad was like, “Well, 201’s not that bad, but 271, then you’re getting into the territory that you want this guy to be in, where it costs more to drive to the tournaments than it does to win the tournament.” That was really the scrappy world of the lowest rungs of professional tennis that I wanted to show with Patrick.

John: Talk to us about your tennis expert here, because reading through the Blacklist script, the tennis is good. I totally believe the tennis. It’s probably written as a person who’s been watching a lot of tennis, but what were some of the things that the tennis expert could say about the 201 versus 271? What are some other things along the way that became important?

Justin: There’s countless things, but I’ll tell you some of the ones that are at the top of my mind. For example, I had in the Black List script, the first draft, that two weeks before the US Open, Art was at the Winston-Salem Open, and Brad read the script and went, “The schedule wouldn’t work out. It’s too close. Atlanta would work, but Winston-Salem, he wouldn’t be able to drop out and get a wild card in this other tournament.” Stuff like that is big.

Then probably the most useful thing that I did with Brad is that before we went into pre-production, Brad and me, and this guy, Mickey Singh from ESPN, went through every point that gets played in the script. Mickey’s job is to notate highlight reels. He breaks down points as a script, basically, so that the editors for the highlight reels know what to do. Mickey went through the script with me and broke all my points. Brad would critique them and go, “He wouldn’t go inside in there, he would go inside out,” or, “He’d go down the line,” or stuff like that.

John: Now, were these people also involved on set in terms of figuring out the tennis that was being played and the simulation of the actual matches?

Justin: Brad was essential for all of that because Brad was also the person who found us our tennis doubles. He was the person who brought those guys to Boston and then had real tennis pros play through the points so that Luca, our DP, and me could go around and Luca could shot list. We really treated the tennis in the movie like we were shooting fight sequences, like an action film. When you watch the movie and Luca’s doing 100 setups for a tennis point, that’s all storyboarded. That was only possible because we had these real tennis pros playing through everything. Brad was amazing for that.

Then also connecting us with real lines people and umpires. Everybody you see in the movie who’s working the match, that’s their job.

John: Great. That helps. Let’s go to a scene that didn’t change as much between the two drafts, but it also, I think gives a good example of you have a scene on the page, but then actually as you shoot it, things just drift and change a bit.

Justin: Great.

John: Here we actually have audio that we can play.

Justin: Amazing.

John: This is a scene early on in the movie. Patrick Zweig is trying to check into a hotel and his credit card is being declined. Let’s take a listen.

Patrick Zweig: I’ve been driving all day. I’m exhausted.

Motel Receptionist: If we gave out a bed to every tired person who walked in here asking for one, we’d be a homeless shelter, not a business.

Patrick Zweig: Listen, I’m a tennis player. You know the tournament down the road?

Motel Receptionist: Oh, that thing at the country club.

Patrick Zweig: Right, you get $7,000 if you win and you get money just for qualifying. I need a place to stay tonight so I can rest before my first match.

Motel Receptionist: I’m sorry. I need a card on file.

Patrick Zweig: What if I signed a racket and gave it to you?

Motel Receptionist: Sir? Sir, I don’t know who you are.

Customer 1: Look at this guy. He’s a disaster.

Customer 2: I don’t know. I think he’s kind of cute.

Customer 1: Carl. He smells.

Patrick Zweig: The racket alone is worth like $300.

Motel Receptionist: We need a card that works.

John: All right. We’re looking at a scene. It’s on page 10 of the original script in the blacklist version. Could you read just this Scene 13, give us a setup for where we are?

Justin: Yes. The actual–?

John: Yes.

Justin: Interior roadside motel, New Rochelle, same time. Patrick is standing at the reception desk in a soul-crushingly sad motel lobby, the kind of place you pass on the highway and wonder who stays there. It’s about as far as you can get from the fancy hotel room we just left. His card has just been declined.

John: Fantastic. Really great descriptions of what this feels like. You’ve, of course, broken the cardinal sin. You said the word “we” in the scene description, which we fully applaud. People will say that you should never say “we”.

Justin: Yeah, I never got that memo.

John: “We” is fully appropriate. We as an audience, as a movie, we’re just at a place and now we’re here. Craig and I both strongly believe in saying we here, we see, we are.

Justin: Me too.

John: Yes. It makes sense. The scene that is in the Blacklist, it’s the same basic content, but it’s not the same lines. Things are in some different orders. Why I picked the scene is because it’s clear that this is– Is your film a comedy?

Justin: I think it’s funny, yes.

John: It’s funny but it’s not hilariously ha-ha funny. It’s not joke funny but it’s funny. This is an example of the movie is funny. You’re putting people in situations that are familiar and uncomfortable. Getting your card declined, we understand what he’s trying to do and we also see the comedy around it.

Justin: Right.

John: This is the original version. Now let’s take a look at the for consideration, which is not quite the scene that we just heard either. There’s some changes that must have happened after that point.

The addition of the guys who come in,–

Justin: The couple.

John: The couple who come in later on, which in the for consideration, they don’t have dialogue, also they got some dialogue on the day.

Justin: It’s insert dialogue. It was stuff that I had written for them on the day or before the day. I don’t know what your philosophy is with putting that stuff in a script. I think for the flow of reading a script, it often doesn’t feel right to put that stuff in there because it’s not the main drive.

John: What’s so interesting is that because we’re pulling this out of the For Your Consideration script, it’s a question of should the For Your Consideration script accurately reflect the actual movie that’s on the screen-

Justin: Totally.

John: -or what the intention was? There’s no clear consensus on what it’s supposed to be.

Justin: It’s a very particular fake document, right?

John: Yes.

Justin: Because a shooting script is a script. It’s a practical document in some way, but that doesn’t often translate to the best reading experience.

John: 100% because there were scenes that were added or omitted. There’s all these blank little pieces.

Justin: Yes, there’s stars all over the place. It’s gross.

John: Yes. But then if you think of the ideal sort of For Your Consideration script would reflect– If scenes moved around, those scenes should move around in the script too so it reflects that. In this case, that couple that was added in or the other changes that happened, what do you remember about why those things shifted and how they shifted?

Justin: The couple was something that– Luca is always trying to give texture to everything. Even in a relatively straightforward scene in any of his movies, there’s always five things going on. He shoots a lot of inserts of a prop or of a piece of set dressing that you wouldn’t think should be highlighted. Then because it is, it all of a sudden puts the whole scene into this different context. Those guys, when we were building the world of that motel, we were talking about who could be populated in there. He offhandedly said there should be a gay couple road-tripping across America. I took that and wrote those lines for those guys with it.

Then, I think I had COVID when they shot that scene so I wasn’t on set. Then when they were editing it, I wrote some more like ADR lines for them for when they’re off-screen where they’re complaining about, “This place doesn’t look like the description online,” and all of that. It’s like a little pocket of a movie where you remind yourself that there’s a world going on that doesn’t care about these characters. For somebody like Patrick, that stuff is especially important because so much of his experience of moving through the tennis world is that nobody gives a shit. He’s always inconveniencing people with his existence because that’s what it’s like to be ranked 271.

John: Let’s talk about the scene and its importance overall in understanding Patrick and his motivation. It feels like it’s a scene you could cut. But if you did cut it, I would understand less about him. What’s nice about the scene is he has a clear motivation. He’s trying to get a room for the night and it ties into his bigger motivation, which is basically, “I need to be part of this tournament. I need to win.” He’s already envisioning himself winning this thing, or at least placing high enough that he’s going to have the money to do this thing. It tells us a lot about him in a short as a one page, and change scene.

Justin: If it’s a movie about two sides of a rivalry or two sides of a match, where those people are coming from is really important in establishing what’s at stake for each of them, and the texture of them ending up facing each other. I think also with Patrick, at this point, you don’t know that he comes from wealth either, it’s a bait-and-switch in some way in that you think, “Oh, this is a really down-on-his-luck broke guy.” Then you learn later on that, actually, he could end this misery in a second if he just called Mom and Dad.

Maybe this is true for you too, that you get inspiration from unexpected places and the genres that you wouldn’t think about when you’re– With this movie, even though it’s a sports movie, with Patrick’s story, I was thinking a lot about Inside Llewyn Davis.

John: Oh, yes.

Justin: I was thinking of Patrick as Inside Llewyn Davis of tennis.

John: First time I saw Oscar Isaac was in that movie. Yes, so good.

Justin: There’s something about that guy because he has so little of a handle on his own life, he’s always like pissing off everybody who shows him kindness.

John: You mentioned Inside Llewyn Davis, but what other movies resonated for you with this? Because I was thinking Broadcast News in the sense of there aren’t a lot of movies I can point to that are three-handers where it’s not just this main couple, but it’s the interplay of the three of them. What were the other things that were touchstones for you?

Justin: Carnal Knowledge and just Mike Nichols’ work in general was a real touchstone for me with this, Closer to some extent. Then there’s the great history of movies about love triangles like Y Tu Mamá También or The Dreamers or Band of Outsiders, or Jules and Jim, which came in to some extent.

In terms of sports movies, I think the ones that ended up meaning the most to me when I was thinking about this movie were movies like He Got Game, where, if you think about the final game of that movie, it’s a game between two guys who, if somebody was walking by on the street and they saw them playing, they would think this was just a pickup game between a father and son, if they even knew that much. They would have no idea that their whole lives were at stake.

I think for me, that’s always so much more interesting and dramatic than a movie about the NBA Finals. If I wanted to experience the drama of the NBA Finals, I would just watch the NBA Finals and it’s going to be better than a movie about the NBA Finals. Stuff like that. Bull Durham.

John: Bull Durham, another great reference because you have–

Justin: And another great three-way triangle movie.

John: Absolutely, there’s a sexual component to it that feels specific. Let’s talk about three-way sexual encounters. A scene that’s not in your Black List script, but it’s sort of iconic in the movie itself, which is the teenagers all get together in the boys’ hotel room and they have their kiss. What is the origin of that scene?

Justin: So Luca read this script. Amy was on board, Zendaya was on board. Luca was like this dream director for us. We sent it to him and he read it and we talked on the phone towards the end of 2021. Then like a week later I was on a plane to Milan to just spend some time with Luca and see if we could be in the trenches together right away because we knew that was how we were going to have to make this movie. We were going to have to really be comrades right away.

During those first days in Milan, we were talking about the script and one of the first conversations we had was that Luca said this thing that was really phrased beautifully, which is that, in a love triangle, all the corners should touch. When I heard that initially, I thought, “Well yeah, they do. These people are all very involved in each other’s erotic, emotional, and psychological lives. They’re really deep in each other’s shit, all these people, so they’re touching.”

John: But literally touching.

Justin: Yes, exactly. Luca was like, “No, no, no, literally.” The moment I heard that, I was electrified by it, I thought it was an incredibly exciting idea. My task then became finding a way for that to happen that felt organic and earned and that felt like it was coming out of the characters and the situation that was already there and not like something that I was imposing on them, for sensationalist sake or something. Then it became a process of figuring out where, how, and what kind of runway I would need to give that so that it felt like it had always been in the movie.

John: I thought it had always been in the movie. As I was reading through the blacklist script, I kept waiting for, “They had this scene at the party and this, and why did they omit that?” It felt missing. It felt like you already had the runway there. You just hadn’t put the plane on there to take off.

Justin: That came out of lots of conversations with me and Luca and then with our producers. Eventually, when I landed on putting the scene there and having it be an outgrowth of when they first met each other when they were kids, it felt so natural. It was a 20-page addition to the script.

John: It’s about seven pages is the actual scene-

Justin: The actual scene.

John: -but it becomes a hugely important part of a big chunk of the early section of the movie. We should note that your blacklist script is 128 pages, but the final shooting script is quite a lot shorter. Obviously some stuff got cut, but this was a huge addition. Let’s talk through this addition. Did you just go off and write up a scene and send it through and say this is the plan? What was the conversation?

Justin: when I was in Milan, I wrote a first pass at that scene in a different place and Luca and I were both really excited about the scene, but the more we looked at it, the more we realized that where I had put it, it’s like a bomb that you’re dropping in the movie and it can really throw into a disarray the delicate structure of the rest of it. We knew we didn’t want to change that. We wanted to keep the structure of the movie as it was. I needed to find a place to put this that didn’t throw everything out of balance. This finally felt like the right place for that.

John: Great. Had you tried to put it earlier or later? Where were you trying to slide it?

Justin: Later.

John: I could see why that wouldn’t work. It feels like what’s good about the scene is that it has that teenage energy. It has that each of them on the time, be an energy, which is they’re very horned up. There’s a woman here who’s willing to be there with them.

Justin: What’s important about it being where it is that they don’t know, or they don’t have the tools to know the consequences of what they’re doing. They don’t know the implications of what this is going to do to their lives together. Because it’s coming from this place of innocence and from this place of genuine excitement and curiosity about each other. They don’t have a sort of adult judgment of each other or of themselves.

It was also exciting realizing if I put the scene here, because part of my hesitation with having the scene in the movie, even though I was excited by the idea of it, part of my hesitation with it for people who’ve seen the film is that I always thought of the ending as the consummation of their relationship. That that was finally the moment when they all come together. I didn’t want to take the wind out of that. I didn’t want to zap the energy out of that. Every other place I thought about putting this scene felt like it did, but somehow putting it at the very beginning made that feel like a return.

John: It makes it feel foundational, like part of the journey that they’re going on.

Justin: Yes, exactly.

John: They had this thing. The scene itself feels like a play. It feels like you could actually stage this as a little one-act, one-scene thing because it’s just the three characters in a room. They’re having a conversation. There’s builds, there’s developments, there’s things that happen along the way. At any point, someone could pull the rip cord, but they don’t pull the rip cord. It feels like your playwriting background kicks in there. It’s also just a really long scene. Did you get any pushback from movie people or from the Amy Pascals of the world of, “This is a really long scene”?

Justin: No, Amy was amazing in that respect. She really wanted the scene to be as whatever it had to be. Strangely we had no pushback. Then I think the way that Luca ended up shooting the scene, it’s still intensely cinematic.

John: Oh yes. This is your first collaboration with Luca, but then you ended up going on into doing Queer. Talk to me about the transition between Challengers and Queer and how those two things came to be.

Justin: We were on set for Challengers and working very closely together, me as the writer and him as the director. One day Luca gave me the book for Queer and just said, “Read this tonight and tell me if you’ll adapt it for me.”

John: It’s a novella. It’s a short and it’s–

Justin: It’s about 100 pages, the book.

John: It’s a Burroughs book that was published much later than it was actually written. It’s set in 1950s Mexico, but came out in 1985?

Justin: Yes, exactly. He wrote it in the ‘50s, it got published in the ‘80s and Luca had read it in the ‘80s when it came out in Italy, as a teenager and he had been wanting to make this book into a movie since then. I felt this tremendous honor, but also this tremendous responsibility to write him the movie he had been dreaming about. Which was heavy.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Justin: I read the book that night and immediately said yes. Then after saying yes, figured out how I was going to do it.

John: Those are good experiences when you know you have to do a thing and then you figure out as you’re doing it, you’re building the plane to do it. What was the writing process for that? He loved it. He must have come in with some ideas of what was important for him, but he also needs to give you the space to actually write a movie, movie. What was the process?

Justin: It was really different from Challengers, obviously, because that was a movie I wrote on spec before I knew Luca and before I knew any of the people who made it with me. Queer before I even started putting pen to paper, Luca and I got to talk about it a lot because we were on set together, we were hanging out a lot and we would just talk about Queer and the cinematic possibility of the book. We got to work out a lot of the vision for how this was going to be different from the book and how it was going to honor the book before I even started writing. Then I started writing the bulk of the scenes while we were on set for Challengers and then really finished it right after we wrapped.

John: Like Challengers, it had a lot more on-screen sex than we’re used to in movies these days. I want to talk about that because in both cases we’re sort of used to seeing sex on streaming series. We’re used to seeing sex on our own TV screens. We’re not used to seeing it in a public place. Seeing Challengers on the big screen with an audience, it was fun because people are gasping like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that this thing, this thing is happening.” There’s that nervousness of like, “Oh my God, sexy things are happening on this big screen while I’m around all these other people.”

It’d be so uncomfortable to see it like with your mom sitting next to you.

Justin: I was at the premiere next to my stepmom.

John: Absolutely. It’s good stuff. It’s perfect. Was your stepmom also at Queer, the screen–

Justin: She was, yes, but I didn’t sit through.

John: That’s a challenging one. Talk to us about like what your, what your instincts are about terms of showing sex on screen and, in both cases, there’s– what I liked about what you’ve done in both movies is that you’re showing us the awkwardness and the transition moments between we’re all in our clothes and now we’re actually doing this thing. It’s not cut two and now we’re underneath the sheet.

Justin: I grew up starting to really watch movies in the ‘90s when there was a tradition in action movies of the sex scene would happen and the music would start to play and it would have no dramatic point.

John: A little saxophone.

Justin: A little saxophone, or take my breath away or whatever. It’s sexy and almost just felt like it was a montage that was a placeholder. That feels completely cinematically dead to me. In the case of both Challengers and Queer it was really important to me that any intimacy that was on screen was always revealing of character. That drama was happening there. There was something at stake for people there because then it feels essential, it feels like the movie is still going on, you’re not watching a break from the movie. As long as that’s the case, then anything is worth taking the time to show, but otherwise, it’s not.

John: Some of my movies have sexual content on the go, have some sexual content and that’s fun. It’s always so awkward to write and discuss and have the conversation about this is what I see happening here. This is how it’s all going to go into play. Then you have to have a conversation with the director about it and then with the actors about it, how this is going to play. What I think is so important about what you’re describing is the characters have agency within the scenes. The characters are making choices within the scenes. It feels like it’s a natural thing that would have happened next, and yet they’re still alive. They’re not these robots going through it. That’s tough.

Justin: In terms of writing the description of it, I agree. It’s completely embarrassing to write that, but at a certain point, you have to feel like, “I’m going to ask people to perform this, and I’m going to ask people to light this and there’s going to be a guy holding a boom mic for this, and Luca’s going to have to shot list this.” So if I’m asking all of those people to very practically make this happen, I can’t take comfort in being vague on the page. It’s not just cowardly, but it’s irresponsible.

John: It is.

Justin: It’s really irresponsible to give people a vague sex scene and go, “Have at it.”

John: There was a script I was handed early in my career to do a rewrite on and it was a movie that had cars throughout it. There was a bunch of car racing and car chases in it. At a certain point, halfway down a page, the screenwriter of that script would say, “Now it’s the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen. I won’t bother describing it because it wouldn’t do it justice, but it’s really, really awesome.” I’m like, “You have abdicated your fundamental responsibility here.”

Justin: Yes. It’s like, “Fuck you, man. What do you want us to do? We have to go into production with this.”

John: Yes, absolutely. We need to know what is actually happening here. I think both in your tennis and in your sex scenes, I respect that they’re telling you what’s really going to happen. Obviously, everyone can bring their own expertise to it, but you get to see what is actually going to be happening on screen.

Justin: Yes, but that’s the dance you always have to walk in a screenplay, which is give enough information that people can see the movie in their minds when they read the script because the movie is happening visually. If you don’t put that information in, you’re not writing the script. But also leave it open enough that people can bring themselves to it and their own artistry. That’s a thing that took a while for me to figure out. It is something I’m always negotiating every time I’m writing something.

John: We have one question from our listeners, which I thought was especially appropriate for you. Drew, could you help us out here?

Drew: Yeah, of course. Jeremy writes, “A frequent conundrum in my writing is when I need characters to talk through a conflict. I’m decent at knowing my character’s objective and having their actions work towards those objectives, but I struggle having them navigate towards those objectives via dialogue. I’m not an elegant debater or salesman, and it makes sense that my characters, by extension, are not either. My absolute worst-case scenario would be writing a character trying to seduce someone. How do you get your characters to employ social graces or charms that you yourself don’t have?”

John: I can think of both in Challengers, there’s a lot of discussion debate, and trying to pull persons to one side or the other. Then also in Queer, Daniel Craig’s character is trying to seduce Drew Starkey’s character and fumbling at it and really having a hard time knowing where he’s at with that. Think about what are the challenges of figuring out that negotiation from inside a character’s point of view. How are we doing that?

Justin: With Challengers, I think it’s a movie that essentially only has three characters, which I think was a carryover from my experience being a playwright for so many years. You get it ingrained in yourself that you should only write parts that you feel really great about asking somebody to show up 100 times to perform, which is why there are so many plays with only three or four characters. So when there’s a movie with only three characters, the whole movie operates on the different ideology and philosophy and way of moving through the world of those people and how they rush up against each other, and sometimes, sympathetically and sometimes antagonistically.

I think ideally before you even start writing dialogue, you know enough and the audience knows enough about where everybody’s coming from so that by the time they open their mouths, we already know their point of view. We already know what’s at stake. We already know why they’re in opposition. For me, that’s why I spend a lot of time describing what somebody’s wearing in the opening page of a script, because you get a lot of visual information for free in a movie, right at the top that sets you up so that when a character opens their mouth, even if they’re saying something as banal as the kind of things you have to say in tennis like, “Let’s go,” or “Come on,” because that’s the limit of sports vocabulary because you’ve done all this work that’s not about dialogue, that dialogue means something and you know where they’re coming from when they say that.

I think it’s really tough in a movie to work through who somebody is through dialogue as a starting place because you just don’t have the space for it. Ideally in every scene, by the time somebody is talking, that’s the last piece of information we’ve gotten about who they are.

John: I think you’re exactly right. It’s that you can’t know what the dialogue is until you actually really know what’s happening behind the scenes. What are those inner gears that are turning?

Way back when, when I did my very first TV show, which was a disaster, mind you, but an exercise I did for myself, that was really helpful was, of the five main characters, I would write paragraphs about how they thought about a certain topic. I would give a topic and I’d just write in their voice how they thought about that topic. It gave me a sense of how their brain works, what their priorities are, what their intentions are when discussing a thing, and got me closer to what their voices are, what their speaking voices were like because I understood what their philosophy was like behind the scenes.

Then when I have the characters in scenes together, it felt natural for them to be going back to their principles and how their brains work that’s creating that dialogue. The challenge is you both want it to feel completely understandable how they got there and still surprise your audience. You still need them to say things that are interesting and provocative and surprising. It’s making sure that people don’t just feel like they’re on their rails, but they really are live in that moment, and that that’s the balance that Jeremy, I think, is struggling to find.

Justin: That’s what’s difficult about screenwriting.

John: That’s the hard thing about screenwriting.

Justin: I feel that’s something I think every screenwriter is always dealing with. You don’t get to choose which parts of it come easily to you. I think screenwriting is one of those forms where it’s all right if some part of it is really difficult for you because everybody has one part of it that’s really difficult for them and they’re all equally important. I think dialogue is actually less than 10% of a screenplay. For me, I’m thinking a lot more about structure than I am about dialogue. Maybe that’s because structure is harder for me and dialogue is easier.

John: We’ve had a lot of people in your seat who are in the same situation or they can write dialogue all day, but they really struggle to figure out how stories fit together. Other people have got really good puzzle pieces fit together, but it’s harder for them to individualize different characters’ voices. It sounds like Jeremy’s in that second bucket, but that doesn’t make you a bad screenwriter. It just means that some stuff’s harder for you than others.

Justin: Not at all. There are moments writing where I would trade a great dialogue scene for being able to figure out a structural problem that’s been plaguing me for three weeks. We don’t get to choose our fate in that way.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a really unimportant, but this is something you may have noticed as you were driving around Los Angeles this week is, sometimes you pass by a strip mall or mini-mall and the signs look like they were on fire. It looks like they’ve been burned. They’re brown and yellowed and like, “What happened?” I got curious, and so I Googled and it was actually hard to find the answer, but I actually now know what’s happening is that it’s not the lighting behind it. It’s the actual, the vinyl, and the plastic that they’re printing on. They’re printing on a cheap plastic.

I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this Australian article that’s talking about what’s actually happening to the signs. Basically, it’s just sunlight damage that is breaking them apart. Now that I’ve mentioned it, if you were in Los Angeles or some other sunny environment, you’re going to see this constantly. Where it’s cheap signs and it’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon. If you, like, signs that have been up there for 10 years–

Justin: The way they used to make signs was more craftsmanship.

John: Absolutely. They swapped out to sometimes a cheaper plastic and it’s just disintegrating. Now you know what’s happening with all the weird burnt-brown signs in Los Angeles.

Justin: I feel like that’s a really real thing that the way things used to be built was better. I think that’s been true forever, but that’s just a product of globalization.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think somebody found a cheaper way to make those signs. It was like, “Oh great, it looks really good,” not realizing like, “Oh, it’s going to fall apart in a year.”

Justin: Of course. But then they’ll have to order more signs. Keep the gravy train going.

John: Justin, what do you have for us?

Justin: My one cool thing is a podcast that’s run by some friends of mine called Know Your Enemy. They’re pretty left-leaning journalists guys. They do deep dives on conservative thinkers throughout the years. Sometimes it’s very contemporary people who are a part of making really major decisions that will have big ramifications for people right now. Sometimes it’s really far in the past and doing a deep dive on the theory of some important conservative thinker. I’ve found that really useful for myself.

John: Know Your Enemy, a podcast.

Justin: Know Your Enemy.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for a weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and such. 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 YouTube and other video things. Justin, thank you so much for coming in.

Justin: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Justin, so one thing we allotted in your description of all the work that you were doing before this time is in addition to all your writing, you were also doing these little YouTube videos. The first one was Potion Seller. Talk to us about this character and what the idea was behind these.

Justin: Those I started making when I was in college, I was in the middle of writing my senior thesis, which ended up being the first play that I did off-Broadway. I was working really hard on this thing and treating it very seriously. Then at night when I was exhausted from that, as a way to blow off steam, I started playing around with the photo booth app on my Mac. And I noticed that if you use the facial distortion thing, you could do more than just one goofy face. You could actually create multiple characters. Coming from the world of theater, that felt to me like it had some relationship with mask work or improv.

I just started messing around on it and then was uploading the videos to YouTube because that was the easiest way to share them with my friends. Then–

John: What year would this have been?

Justin: This would have been 2011 is when I started and I was doing it all throughout that year and then would keep doing it every once in a while. They caught on in a very small way among my group of friends and their satellite of friends. Then a year after I posted one video called Potion Seller, it ended up on a Reddit forum or something. It all of a sudden went semi-viral. Then all of a sudden, millions of people were watching these videos. At that time when that was happening, I had just moved to New York and I was an off-Broadway playwright who was working for months or years on things that if I was lucky, a couple hundred people would see.

The dream that– you’re doing great if 100 people see your work as a playwright. Then I was making these things in five minutes and uploading them that night and they were being watched by millions of people.

John: Was it inspiring or dispiriting?

Justin: No, it was really freeing. It was really amazing because it put everything into perspective for me and made it also simultaneously impossible for me to take myself seriously as a writer or an artist or something because there was this stuff online that was going to be there forever, that completely threw a wrench into that. I really embraced that and made a decision very early on that I was never going to make those videos on any schedule or I was never going to make that into work. That that was never going to be a job. I was never going to cultivate my online content.

John: You were coming into online content manufacturing at a time before there was the TikTok, before there was all those things before it became really possible to commercialize what you were doing. Therefore you’d never had to think of it as work. It was just this thing that you were doing off-on. It was just a side project and a way to blow off steam and just do your own thing. If you were starting now, do you think it’d be easier or harder to put those characters out there in the world, and what would be different?

Justin: What’s funny about those videos now is that sometimes people will reach out to me about them and they’ll talk about when I started making those as the golden age of YouTube. For me, I’m like, “That was only 10 years ago. It’s not that long ago,” but the life of the internet is really fast.

John: It is.

Justin: I think part of the freedom that I felt in making those was that YouTube at that time was like the Wild West, kind of. It felt like the early days of the internet.

John: People didn’t know what to do with it. The first YouTube video is a visit to the zoo.

Justin: There were plenty of people who were doing really interesting things with video online since the beginning of streaming video online.

John: I know Ze Frank, Ze Frank was doing those very early explainer things in the pre-BuzzFeed era. It was himself, but it as a character talking about things. But it was all new.

Justin: It felt like there was no expectation and there was no standard of professionalism. Now there’s a sort of sheen that a lot of the content has. There’s conventions of how those forward-facing videos-

John: Absolutely.

Justin: -work and look and how they’re edited. None of those conventions mattered at that time.

John: Absolutely. Your Potion Seller, it would be a vertical video now. It’s just horizontal because that’s what it was on your laptop.

Justin: It would be vertical. You would keep it under one minute so it can get in TikTok and be on the algorithm or be a YouTube short or whatever.

John: What I do find fascinating is I think there’s– you talk about the conventions, there’s storytelling genres that exist only in an online video and that sense of the space within this one video, but how it pertains to everything else in your grid and how it pertains to this ongoing character is really interesting or reaction videos where it’s like, this is my reaction to what this other thing is or me building upon this other thing. It’s fascinating to watch all those things grow. We have this instinct that we want to tie them back into what we make in film and television. And I think that’s probably the wrong instinct.

Justin: There was a moment when like in a very well-meaning way, my reps would be like, “Make a pilot about the world of Potion Seller or something.” I would like, think about it or try and then quickly realize that’s exactly not the point. The point of this thing is that it’s doing nothing for me professionally, and the point of this thing is that it’s not polished. It exists only in the space that it occupies.

John: Two friends from very different parts of my world. One of whom works with a bunch of online creators who are so good at being able to talk to their audiences and make really amazing things super cheap. They just have all this vocabulary for doing what they do and another friend who has made classic big film and television and the guy who does the online videos, his creators want to bridge over into that space and to tell more sophisticated stories, longer stories, and all that stuff. I’m trying to get them to talk and interface with each other so that they can learn from each other.

But I had to warn both of them, you have completely different words for the same thing. Just make sure you’re defining everything clearly at the start because your instincts, while it’s both telling stories with a camera, everything about it is different. The nature of how you’re approaching this stuff is different. They’re not used to having any gatekeepers at all. It’s so challenging to get them to be on the same page about what it is that they’re trying to do. Yet the online people have a ton of money and so they can do a bunch of stuff.

Justin: For me, it’s all part of the same impulse, I really try not to think of them as separate categories of a creative life. I think they’re all– I enjoy being that confusing to people and to myself. I think it’s a good antidote to a lot of the dark possibilities for the heaviness of this kind of work.

John: For sure. Cool. Justin, thanks so much.

Justin: Thanks for having me.

Links:

• Justin Kuritzkes on Instagram and YouTube
• Challengers and Queer
• Justin’s novel, Famous People
• Challengers – Production Draft
• Challengers – First Draft
• Queer by William S. Burroughs
• Potion Seller
• 3000 Miles to Graceland
• Why does my sign look like it has been burned? by Perth Graphics Centre
• Know Your Enemy podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/is-this-person-going-to-ruin-everything).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 635 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, sometimes on this podcast we talk craft. Sometimes we talk business. Today on the show, it’s half and half. On the business side, how do you make sure that person you’re hiring for your movie or casting on your show, Craig, isn’t an absolute monster?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We’ll talk through best practices on vetting people. And on the craft side, how do write for characters whose native language is not English? We’ll look at and listen to examples for how to do it right and some pitfalls to avoid. We’ll also answer some more listener questions. And Craig, for a bonus segment, something I don’t think we’ve ever talked about enough on this podcast: cults.

**Craig:** Oh, god, I hate cults.

**John:** I love cults so much.

**Craig:** Why did it have to be cults?

**John:** Why did it have to be cults? Now, I joined the Zoom late, but I think you and Drew were already talking about this first item of business here, which is you love word games, but I was playing the new New York Times beta version word game, and I suspected, this is not gonna be Craig’s thing. I’m talking about New York Times Strands.

**Craig:** Strands. What a nice way for them to just rebrand word search, the dumbest of all puzzles. It’s not a puzzle. It’s just searching.

**John:** It’s a word search with a theme you have to discover, unlike a classic word search where a word can be either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Here, they can go around in various permutations, because it’s all done digitally.

**Craig:** One of the things that Dave Shukan, my frequent solving partner, and I often discuss when we are going through puzzle suites, you will see certain types of puzzles emerge over and over, because that’s pretty standard. Acrostics, for instance, is kind of a slog. I don’t know if you’ve ever done an acrostic. The New York Times used to run them and just stopped running them online for some reason no one can fathom. But they’re a bit of a slog. Word searches are the ultimate slog.

One of the things that Dave often remarks is, he’ll say, “This is a puzzle, but it isn’t any fun.” I agree with that. Word searches are just simply not fun. They’re just the busy work of puzzles. You just sit there, and you isolate a letter and then look around and see what other letters connect to it, and then you just keep going. But there’s actually nothing to solve. You’re merely just looking.

**John:** I’m not a huge fan of this. I’m still playing it every day, sort of out of inertia. What I will say is the fact that you don’t know quite what the theme is and what the unifying themes are, then once you actually discover, oh, this must be the pattern, then you actually can start looking for words you think might be there. My standards are lower than yours.

**Craig:** Listen. If people enjoy it, I’m not taking it away from them. And I don’t want to be a puzzle snob about it. I’m not snobby. There are certain versions of word searches that can be inventive. Foggy Brume, who makes the Panda Magazine puzzle suites, will often do word searches where there is some fascinating little gimmick inside of it. And discovering the gimmick and how it functions is the fun part. The word search itself is fairly easy. You’ll start to see words right away and then wonder, but what does this have to do with anything? And then you realize, oh, I see. If you take the end of this word over here and the beginning of this word over here, they spell a country name. Aha. What does this mean? There’s solving to do. This just looks like find a bunch of words and see what they are. Strands, I’m out.

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** No, thank you. I think when it comes to a bunch of words that are then unified by a theme, my prior One Cool Thing, Squeezy, far more fun for that.

**John:** I thought we might start with a question here as an amuse-bouche, because we have two big topics, but sometimes the questions get shunted way to the back of the episode. Drew, can you start us off with a question here?

**Drew Marquardt:** M.R. writes, “Yesterday I gave notes on a script and called out what I’ve always heard is script cheating, which is a piece of information that’s written but it’s unfilmable, like an action like saying something like, ‘Kate enters. She’s the sister of Jess,’ or, ‘Mike sits at a desk. He thinks a lot of himself.’ Kate entering and Mike sitting are filmable, but the descriptors are not. And you can’t tell an actor, ‘Just act like Jess’s sister,’ or, ‘Think a lot of yourself.’

“I called out a very similar situation in said script and received this email back: ‘Hey, M.R. I went through some of the notes, and I just want to let you know that your script is supposed to have voice. I don’t think it’s wise for you to give people notes saying script cheating, which is not anything I’ve ever heard of. I think you may be hurting other writers with some of your feedback. Just be careful with notes like that.’ Obviously, every script has a voice, but was I wrong to give this script a cheating note?”

**John:** Neither side here is completely perfect, but I think there’s some balance and subtlety.

**Craig:** Everyone’s wrong.

**John:** Everyone’s wrong. There’s some balance here that I think we need to find. Let’s start with the second person, like, “I’ve never heard of that as called cheating.” I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast as cheating. There’s things you could put on a page that if they’re genuinely unfilmable and they’re not actionable in a way – there’s pieces of information you could put on a script that there’s no way for the audience to have that piece of information – that is cheating. There can be an issue with that.

It also feels like M.R. may be going overboard in what he was considering cheating, because as we’ve talked about on the podcast before too, there are times where you want to give some flavor, some texture, some tone on the page that lets you know what this feels like, even if it’s not directly something you can aim a camera at.

**Craig:** Look. This is why writing groups and such are problematic at times. We don’t know M.R., so we don’t know the tone. We don’t know if this is the final straw, if this is something that happens all the time. We don’t know if everyone’s like, “Oh my god, M.R., why are you so mean to everybody?” I don’t know. We don’t know the context. All we know is this.

In this isolated bit, script cheating is the nice way of saying bad writing. This is already the nice way, because it’s bad writing to say, “Kate enters. She is the sister of Jess.” That’s bad. It’s bad because it is short circuiting the writer’s obligation to inform the audience in a creative way that Kate is Jess’s sister, which I assume happens in the script at some point, and so the cheating is probably not even necessary.

But yeah, script cheating is a perfectly fine… Honestly, if you can’t handle that, I don’t even know what to tell you about what you’re facing in your career, should you have one. John and I have sat in rooms and been just obliterated. Especially when you’re starting out and you don’t have enough credibility for people to even respect you when you walk in the room. You walk into a room, the knives are out before you even sit down. Yeah, you’re gonna hear some stuff that’s harsh.

Look. John, you and I are old. We’re of that generation. And I know the new generation really doesn’t like this stuff. But as far as I’m concerned, script cheating is a perfectly fine way of saying that’s just bad.

I’m more annoyed by somebody saying, “I don’t think it’s wise for you.” You could always just say, “Hey, you know what? Thank you for that. I have to tell you it kind of hurt. I know you didn’t intend to hurt. I’m just letting you know it did and that maybe if there was a kinder way for you to say that next time, it would just make it easier for me to hear, and it would be more productive for me. But thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** I’m thinking back to notes I’ve given to writers. At times, I’ve been overly… They’ll send me the script, and I didn’t ask the question first, like, “What do you want? Do you want me to tell you how great it is or to give you constructive feedback or to be really, line by line, diligent about things I’m noticing here?” There have been times I’ve over-corrected on the page, and that was a problem.

In the situation of, let’s talk about, “She is Jess’s sister.” There may be times in a perfectly fantastic script where, on a first introduction of a character, you might say, “Tina, Jess’s sister, comes through the thing.” We’re establishing that they’re sisters, and we’re gonna find that out really quickly anyway. But as a service to the reader and figuring out what the context of all this is, it’s really genuinely helpful. I do find sometimes writers get obsessed with these “have to figure out everything from first” principles, like you can’t put anything on the page that wouldn’t be immediately visible to the audience. That’s not doing anybody a favor either, because again, the script is meant to approximate the experience of being in that movie theater. But in that movie theater, you’re going to say, “Oh, those two characters look a lot alike. They’re probably sisters.” Sometimes you need to give that information on the page, that you would not need to give in the actual film.

**Craig:** That is true. In those instances, sometimes what I will say is, “Kate enters. We’ll find out shortly that she’s the sister of Jess.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** To help the reader there get a few things that might be pretty evident on screen, but you’re also telling them, “Hey, you will find out. This isn’t the only time that the information will be available to you here in an action description in a script. Just trust me, you’ll find out, but for now, FYI.” Perfectly fine thing to do. But I don’t know, tone policing here. It feels a little tone police-y to me.

**John:** Yeah, it does. It does a bit.

**Craig:** That said, if M.R. is a total jerk and everyone hates M.R., then all the people listening to this are like, “Oh my god, why are you enabling M.R.?” I hope M.R. is not a jerk. I really, really do.

**John:** I hope so too. It’s not also clear from this context whether the person who was writing back was talking about their own script or maybe they’re part of a group that were looking at some other third person’s script. We don’t know what the whole context of this is. But just again, be cool. As you’re giving notes, make sure you’re understanding the context the person’s asking for the notes, and think about how you would receive those notes as a writer.

**Craig:** Can I give a guess?

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I think that the person who wrote M.R. is not the person who wrote the script, but rather, that person’s friend. The person who wrote the script complained to their friend about it, was upset, and then the friend said, “I’m gonna go tell M.R. to not do that anymore.” That’s my guess.

**John:** Hey, Craig, in our actual real life, there have been times where one of us has had to go to a third person and say, “Hey, this is a thing to be aware of.” That’s a scenario that happens in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes you need to be an intermediary. And when you are, it always goes best if you feel like a neutral intermediary, where there aren’t judgments involved, but rather, just facts and requests. I think the problem with this is, “I don’t think it’s wise. I think you may be hurting people,” and then an imperative, “Be careful.” Not, “In the future, it might be helpful if.” For somebody who’s concerned about hurting people with feedback, this person didn’t seem too concerned about hurting M.R. with feedback.

**John:** The last little point about voice is there are times where you’re gonna put something in a script that it’s not filmable, you’re never gonna see it, but it just helps give the reader a sense of who that person is, what the space is like. You can describe how it smells. Listen. You’re not gonna actually ever smell that, but it gives us a sense of what it’s ultimately gonna feel like and sound like anyone else to. You say, “Oh, that’s cheating.” It’s not really cheating, because you’re providing context that is gonna be helpful for the reader to understand what this is ultimately gonna look and sound like.

**Craig:** And for the actors as well.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** They can perform smelling something. They can perform having sweaty armpits. We probably won’t see it, but they know what it feels like. No question. As always, our advice is follow the rules but don’t necessarily follow the rules. The only rule we have is write well.

**John:** Write well.

**Craig:** Write well.

**John:** Podcast done. 635 episodes, we’ve reached our conclusion.

**Craig:** We got there.

**John:** We got there.

**Craig:** We got there in two words.

**John:** Now, Craig, as we’ve established previously on this podcast here, one of my goals for 2024 has been to become better at understanding and appreciating the differences between accents and dialects in English. This is a thing that you have a very natural talent for. You’re very good at performing different accents. I can hear it. I don’t have trouble writing it. But it’s not in my bones. It’s not in my brain to quite the same degree. And so I’ve been studying it. I’ve been working with an instructor on that. I’ve been working through, first off, the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then really learning different native accents in English, so going through the British Isles and other places to really figure out what are the differences here, what is the musicality and changes between these different dialects and accents.

But one of the things we’ve been working on more recently is folks for whom English is not their native language and what are the common characteristics we see, what are the, not just mistakes, but just the structural changes they’re gonna make, what are the sound changes you’re gonna hear throughout that.

This is a thing that I think probably most of our listeners are gonna encounter at some point, is you have a character whose native language is not English. How do you write them on the page? Because you’re not obviously going to go crazy and try to approximate their accent. But they are gonna make different choices. I want to talk about the actual choices that’ll be reflected in the written dialog that you are doing to understand how a person whose native language is not English might be communicating their ideas.

**Craig:** This is an area where I think people used to blithely stumble about. And in their blithe stumbling, they may have conveyed intention well, but for people who were authentic speakers of that dialect or that accent or that language, they may have thought, “This is just ridiculous,” because we, all of us, I think, just used to just do stuff with less consideration for other people.

If you could look back at some of the scripts that were floating around when you and I started, people would routinely write Black characters with a Black dialect, AAVE, African American Vernacular English, and in doing so, just bungle it, or it just felt weirdly insulting if they were not Black themselves, and it just felt a bit foreign. That’s understandable.

What’s happened is there’s been a correction. But in the correction, I think a lot of writers – and we are always writing people that we are not – are kind of afraid to make a mistake. Writing out of fear is not helpful either.

**John:** What I want to talk about today is really looking for and listening to the changes in the musicality and the word choices that are gonna be likely for people coming from certain other native languages. And so we have some good examples here. Before we even get into the examples, I just want to talk through some things I’ve observed that are probably helpful if you’re thinking about a character whose native language is not English.

Most other languages are gonna have a different thinking word or sound. In English, we do an “um” or some sort of stalling word. Every language is going to have their own version. People tend to revert to their native thinking sound if they’re speaking English or some approximation of that. Be thinking about what that sound might be. You and I both have been in situations where, other countries, and we are reaching for a word. We kind of know what that word is, but we can’t quite get it. Your characters are gonna be doing the same thing. Be thinking about the pauses they’re taking, the approximations of the word they may try to get to.

If you’re speaking a language and it’s not your native language, you’re probably going to have reduced variation in how you’re forming structures in sentences. Non-native English speakers are gonna probably reach for the simple past rather than “he had” or “he did,” because we have so many ways to create the past in English. Other languages do too, but they’re gonna probably go for the simplest version of that. They will tend to go back to recycle the same word rather than go for synonyms and variety the way that we might, because they’ve found that one word, they’re gonna keep using that one word.

**Craig:** There is always a risk that you’re going to make your character sound dumb. Part of the counteraction is to show the frustration, if somebody does not speak English natively and they aren’t very good at it or they’re still learning, that there is a frustration, because I’ve felt that frustration trying to speak another language myself, where you’re like, “Okay, I know exactly what I want to say, but I’m struggling to put it into the words that I have available to me.” There’s also even the recognition and embarrassment that other people are looking at you and thinking you’re not doing very well. All of that stuff is good human work to think about when this is happening, so it isn’t just a convenient immigrant patois that we have seen many, many times, where people just say, “Me going to store,” and it just becomes Tarzan.

**John:** Sometimes when I’m speaking in French, I feel like, “Crap, I’m like a third grader here,” because I don’t have really simple stuff, and yet I have really complicated vocabulary, because I have cognates in English I can reach for. I could say some really complicated things pretty easily, complicated terms, but I can’t stitch together really simple things. I can go into a store, and I can’t describe the ice cube tray holder, maker thing. I don’t have that, but I have “lugubriousness” or I can reach for bigger words. But I don’t have simple things at my grasp. That’s a real frustration.

**Craig:** I kind of like the idea of you walking into a store, saying, “I need object for the making of ice. I apologize for the lugubrious nature of my request.” How confused would that guy be?

**John:** So bewildered. Another common feature would be overgeneralizing a rule. This is a thing that happens as people learn English. We make plurals by adding S’s to things, except when we don’t. We have “mice” rather than “mouses.” Those things are going to happen.

If the person’s native language doesn’t use articles the same way, like Russian doesn’t use most articles, they will drop them out. And so you’ll hear that in nonnative speakers, where we would put an “a” or a “the,” and they just plow through without them. That’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Interestingly, also, I’ve noticed the opposite. Ksenia Sereda, who is our director of photography here on The Last of Us, is Russian. I watched as her English has improved dramatically over the year since she started with us. She speaks about eight languages. She’s just this remarkable polyglot. Her English was good in the sense that she could absolutely communicate, but she had a few phrases. She loved the phrase “such as.” She would struggle at times to get things across, or there were those simple mistakes. For instance, when she would refer to the character of Joel, she would call him “the Joel.” Maybe in Russian, there is something that works that way. As the years have gone on-

**John:** I think she’s overcorrecting is probably what I suspect.

**Craig:** It may have been. She may have been overcorrecting. There are all these wonderful little things that over time she… When we switch a lens, like we’re on the 27, and we want to go to the 35, she would say, “Switch on 35.” One day I said, “I’m regretting saying this to you, because I love listening to you say, ‘Switch on 35,’ but for switching a lens, we would say, ‘Switch to 35.'”

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I do regret telling her that, because I miss it. I miss, “Switch on 35.” But it has been amazing watching somebody’s English improve so wildly and so impressively over the course of just a couple of years.

**John:** That gets back to our prepositions. Language is language. There’s just not gonna be a one-to-one match. Anybody who’s had to suffer through “por” and “para” in Spanish, it should be clean, how it does it, and some things just don’t work right. Some things don’t fall directly that same way.

Same thing happens with the verb tenses, and particularly in terms of how we’re dividing time. Very near future, far future, recent past, further back past, we have ways that we do it in English that just don’t match up with other languages, and there’s never gonna be a one-to-one match. Our present progressive, there are equivalents in other languages, but they’re probably not gonna get there very quickly as an ESL speaker. You may be stuck in the present rather than present progressive or the near future, because it’s what you have handy for you.

Lastly, I would say a thing you’ll often notice is, if a character is doing reported speech, so like, “He said to me this and this,” that’s really challenging to flip into that, because I’m staying in the present, but I’m reporting something that happened in the past. I have to get prepositions right for how all this fits together. Reported speech is often a place where you’re gonna notice inconsistencies. That’s often an opportunity to reflect the difference and difficulty of trying to communicate these ideas in English.

**Craig:** Native speakers will even struggle with that. That’s also part of recognizing it. There is this other thing when we’re trying to write people speaking English who don’t natively speak it. What they do speak and where they are from also should influence how they sound.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** If you listen to, for instance, comedians are so helpful for this, because so many comedians who are first-generation Americans will talk about their family and talk about their parents and do impressions of their parents. Listening to that gives you this incredible insight into the specificity of the pattern. It’s different. Koreans who have learned English sound different than French people who have learned English, because the root language is always there. The root patterns, the intonations, musicality, tempo, rhythm, all of that stuff bleeds across.

Here’s some really controversial advice here, folks. When you are writing someone from a country who is speaking English as a not first language, talk to people who know, if you are not one of them, and have them look it through. Have them advise. They will help you. They will make it so much better if you do.

**John:** Absolutely. Last, I would say always consider when that character started learning English, because that will not only affect the accent down the road, but also their facility with the language. For my dialect class, I was going through some Japanese speakers of English, and there were these diplomats whose English was just so spectacularly good, and there were also folks who had learned it much more recently. You could really hear the differences and how in their bones it was, and also, which English did they learn. You can definitely hear some of them learn British English versus American English. Those changes carry through.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s listen to some examples here. We’re gonna start with a clip from Anatomy of a Fall, the amazing Sandra Hüller here. This is a really amazing performance, because it’s all in France, and yet she is a German woman who is much more comfortable speaking English than speaking French. Some of her most pivotal scenes take place in English. Let’s listen to her in Anatomy of a Fall.

**Sandra Hüller (as Sandra Voyter):** You complain about the life that you chose. You are not a victim. Not at all. Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner. You’re incapable of facing your ambitions, and you resent me for it. But I’m not the one who put you where you are. I’ve nothing to do with it. You’re not sacrificing yourself as you say. You choose to sit on the sideline because you’re afraid, because your pride makes your head explode before you can even come up with a little germ of an idea. And now you wake up and you’re 40 and you need someone to blame. And you’re the one to blame. You’re petrified by your own fucking standards and your fear of failure. This is the truth.

**John:** Just so, so great. You could listen for her accent and her dialect, but really I want to focus on the word choices. A native English speaker probably would not have constructed those phrases in that way. I think she goes through a phrase, and then she repeats the end of that phrase in a way that feels kind of German to me. But Craig, what’s your telling on that?

**Craig:** It’s difficult to separate it from the accent, because the accent does add a certain… You just start to think this is definitely a German person talking. It doesn’t have the backwards syntax, or I suppose what Germans would call the non-backwards syntax, forward syntax. German syntax is very Yoda-like to us when we learn it.

**John:** The verb at the very end.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t have that. What’s also of interest here is that the person writing this, who is now an Oscar award winner for their fine screenplay, was also not a native English speaker. There’s all sorts of possibilities going on here. There’s a clipped nature to the pronunciation of the words that is wonderfully German. If you were to remove the accent using some horrible AI de-accentifier, you would notice. I think you would notice something would be strange. You just wouldn’t be able to put your finger on it.

**John:** If you look at the words scripted on the page – I haven’t gone back to the script to see exactly whether she’s saying word for word what was on the page – you would not guess that this is an American speaker. It doesn’t have an American way of putting stuff together. I could hear the same thing with an RP British accent. I could feel that working more, but it’s not an American accent. There’s a musicality to it. It’s really what I’m trying to get to. It’s that the order of the word, how it fits together, it feels specific to this character and this world, and it’s not some generic American accent.

**Craig:** There is a formality to it. Even the fact that the pronunciation is so careful. Even though there are words where it’s supposed to end in a D and it sounds like it ends in a T or something like that, which is typically German, or I believe she says, “Germ of an idea,” and she pronounces it “cherm.”

**John:** “Cherm.”

**Craig:** There is nonetheless a kind of over-pronunciation of some words, whereas, you’re right, a native American speaker would be eliding and slurring a bit more of the pronunciation there.

**John:** She’s speaking passionately and very quickly, and yet every little phoneme is coming through. That feels very specific as well.

Let’s jump through it. We don’t have the clip for it here, but we actually have the pages in this case. This is Past Lives. We had Celine Song on the podcast earlier. Here I want to take a look at, this is a scene happening in the East Village bar with Hae Sung, Nora, and Nora’s husband, Arthur. Just Hae Sung’s dialog here, he’s not a comfortable English speaker at all, and so his first line here is, “When I was 24 year, I… ” That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. The idea of 24 years old is a complicated thing. “When I was 24 year” is probably the Korean way of constructing how old you are.

**Craig:** There’s a video I saw floating around that a Korean American did, basically he was having a conversation with himself, like two people on a phone. The idea was what a conversation would sound like if Koreans just spoke English but in a perfect translation of what the Korean was. It’s remarkable. It is nothing at all like what we would understand the translation to be. It is very specific. Way fewer words are being used than you would use in English. It’s more compact. It’s more efficient. But it is very, very different. There’s a lovely extraction of that here. Listen. Oscar award nominee, Celine Song.

**John:** When we had her on the show, we didn’t have the script in front of us. I do like seeing how Nora’s dialog here when she’s talking to Hae Sung, the Korean comes first, and then there’s a slash and then what the subtitles would be come after it, which is a very natural, native way to do this. It feels really great.

Just going back through to Hae Sung’s English dialog, “But. Military, work, it’s… same.” Just as written on the page, you can sense he’s searching, he’s trying to find a way to communicate this idea. “There’s overtime pay, stuff like that here, right? In Korea, you work overtime all the time, but there’s no overtime pay.” He’s found the words. He’s keeping to the words he actually has and that have worked before. He’s staying with these simple patterns.

**Craig:** Phrases like “all the time” are easy to remember. But then later down, when she asks him, “It’s hard physically, or mentally?” he says, “Both. Definitely physical. Hard. And… ” She says, “Mentally?” And he says, “Mentally, I… strong,” which is probably how I would… If I were thinking about that in French, I would be like, “Je,” and then if I was just emotional, I would just go, “Fort.” Because “I am,” “je suis,” and then yeah, it just falls apart there at times.

What’s fascinating here, and Celine understands, when you’re talking with somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you will naturally reply back with what they’re saying but in the correct format, almost as if you are teaching and confirming. “You’re strong mentally,” she says. And he says, “Yes, right.” There’s an appreciation there of, okay, good, you understood me, because part of the discussion between a person who speaks natively and a person who doesn’t is a confirmation that one is being understood by the other.

**John:** Absolutely. So crucial. The next clip is something that Drew found for us. This is from Irma Vep. The context here, we have a Hong Kong actress shooting a movie in France, and like Anatomy of a Fall, English becomes the British language between these two characters.

[Irma Vep (1996) clip]

**Zoe:** And you went to see the Batman, you know?

**Maggie:** Batman?

**Zoe:** Yes. No, not Batman, for with all, you know, Catwoman?

**Maggie:** The Return? The second one?

**Zoe:** Yeah.

**Maggie:** Oh, yeah.

**Zoe:** And you liked it?

**Maggie:** No.

**Zoe:** I thought, you know what, it was completely crap. I just went because Rene was mad and he said to me, “You have to go there to understand the film.” But I think it’s a movie for the fans, you know.

**Maggie:** The first one was bad enough, right?

**Zoe:** Yes.

**Maggie:** I don’t know why they’d make three.

**Zoe:** That’s true.

**Maggie:** But I think Catwoman was all right.

**Zoe:** Yes, it’s true. I like Catwoman. She’s nice. You know, I tell you everything, and then you can know me a lot. I mean, I don’t like American films. No.

**Maggie:** Right. I know what you mean.

**Zoe:** Yes? Everything is too much decoration, too much money. You agree with me?

**Maggie:** Sure.

**Zoe:** And all this money, this big money, big-

**Maggie:** And they’re so lucky to have so much money.

**Zoe:** Yes, but why? For what? For this? Or this? Nothing, you know.

**John:** Again, here we have two characters who are obviously seen in the film that they are looking at each other to try to get confirmation, like, do you actually understand what I’m saying, are we talking about the same things. Their levels of English are approximately the same. The French actress has a stronger French accent. But again, I think you could read it on the page and understand that these are characters communicating at 100 percent because they are trying to cross this bridge.

**Craig:** They’re using very simple phrases, a lot of questions. A lot of questions to make sure that the other person understands what they’re saying. This is an inherent insecurity of people that do not speak English as first language. They’re making sure that the other person gets it. Luckily for these two characters, they’re discussing something that everybody around the world shares, which is a ridiculous hatred of American movies that they all seem to watch over and over and over.

French people hate McDonald’s. They’re like, “Get out of our country, McDonald’s.” I’m like, McDonald’s would totally get out of your country if you stopped eating at McDonald’s. It’s a business. This is kind of amusing in that regard. It almost feels like a French textbook discussion. “Do you like American movies?” “No, I do not like American movies.” “Do you agree?” “Yes, I agree.”

**John:** Getting back to the question of, “Do you agree?” Do you answer that question with an affirmative or a negative? There’s the, “Yeah, no.” There’s all these little subtleties that we have in English. Every other language has their own specific subtleties there. When it’s not native in your bones, you’re going for the simplest way to make sure that the other person understands that you hear them and you can follow what they’re saying.

**Craig:** Yes. And if these people were speaking their native language, the discussion would be even more obnoxious, because it would be full of brilliant examples and wonderful moments. And there would also probably be much less agreement, because it’s too hard to disagree when you’re struggling to find the words. “I don’t like those movies, but I like Catwoman.” “Yes, I also like Catwoman.” Do you? Sure. At this point, now you’re just trying to have the conversation, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. There is a social grace to agreement. Disagreement requires subtlety, care, a lot of small discrimination between words, some of which will push things into a bad place, some of which will push things into an interesting discussion place. If you don’t have the instantly accessible toolkit for that, you may just default to agreeing.

**John:** I would say even though they’re both ESL speakers, I can imagine on a page that their voices still can read differently. Zoe, the French speaker here, the choices that she’s making and the small mistakes she makes feel French to me. The musicality feels specific to it. Maggie’s, who’s from Hong Kong, who has a more British background, also feels specific. I suspect even on the page, you can really read them as two very different voices, even though they’re still nonnative English speakers.

One of the most difficult exercises I had to do for my dialect class was take a scene that I’d already written, that was supposed to have two American speakers, and have one be Irish and one be Scottish. Really tough for my brain to switch between the two of those, because they’re distinct sounds, but in my brain they’re hard to hold apart.

**Craig:** What’s interesting, John, one of the things I admire about you is that you find these areas that are challenging for you and you just steer your boat right into them. Accents are fun for me. I enjoy them. That exercise you just described, I would actually look forward to. I don’t think it would be too much of a challenge for me. But there are things in my life that are incredibly challenging, like for instance, drawing. I am so bad. I have such a zero ability to naturally create realistic looking things, perspective, any of the fundamentals. The thought of taking a class to try and get better just makes me pee my pants in fear.

This is a honest question for you. My concern is, I would put a lot of time and effort in to become as good as somebody who had talent was when they were in kindergarten, because you either do or you don’t have that thing. What is your goal here?

**John:** With drawing, for example, that was one of my earlier areas of interest. I spent a year and I learned how to draw. I learned how to see and how to draw. I’m much better at it than I was. I’m not doing my practice every day or anything like that. But I got much better at it. But I also realized that, as you said, I’m only gonna get up to a level who was a 6th grader who was pretty good at drawing when they started.

With this, this is actually useful for me to be better at, because if I can hear these voices distinctly in my head more clearly, then it’s gonna be easier for me to write those characters and really hear their voices in my head clearly before I’m putting them down on the page. This is genuinely useful for me, I feel.

Again, recognizing what your weaknesses are and striving to improve them is fun to do. I picked up running, and so I can run really far now, which is surprising to me. Again, it just took practice and recognizing that you’re going to give up some other things in order to spend the time running.

**Craig:** There’s a topic for us to discuss maybe in a future podcast, if we continue to do the podcast. What episode are we on now?

**John:** 635.

**Craig:** That seems like a good round number. In any case, let’s say we were to keep going. That is about help, the concept of help, and recognizing as you move through your career where you’re going to need help. Even if you’re trying to shore those areas up, there are places that you identify.

I’m gonna give you an example right now for me. As I go through production, as I’m directing, one of the areas I know I need help with is – because, again, I have a very good sense of composition, but what I struggle with is just the very simple notion, as we’re shooting, of eye lines and which side of the shoulder you should be on. I need help with that. I have a fantastic sense of how things edit together. I understand where one shot should die and where another shot should pick up. I understand what kind of coverage I’m going to need. But oftentimes, I really do need help trying to figure out, wait, so in this shot, when they’re looking across the room from this one to that one, should the camera be over on this side or that side. I have help. I have camera [crosstalk 00:38:43].

**John:** You have help.

**Craig:** I have a script supervisor. I have a DP. There are all sorts of areas where at some point you just have to say, no matter how hard I’m trying, here are the following areas were I need help. But that’s a topic for another time.

**John:** Absolutely. I guess the last point about why I learn new things is that I enjoy being bad at things and struggling and being a newcomer at things, because it also just makes me feel young. I remember when I was young, things were hard. It was like, “Oh, I can’t figure this out.” Then you get better at it. It’s like, “Oh, I feel young.” It’s nice being a beginner at things sometimes.

**Craig:** I do enjoy the horror and excitement of being a level 1 character in D&D or starting a new video game that’s level-based, where you’re level 1 and basically one punch takes you out. You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and where you should go. You’ve barely mastered anything. It is like growing up all over again. It’s fun.

**John:** Let’s segue to our next topic, which can rely a bit on our experience of not being complete newcomers to things, which is on vetting. This past week, Craig, you and I were talking about a producer who had done terrible things. We were both surprised to learn about this, and shocked. But I also was reading this article in Slate talking about what they called Mean Too, so the extension of the Me Too movement, which is just like, oh, these people are assholes, and now we actually are going to identify these famous people as being assholes. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

A point they made in this article is that once you’ve hired a star, once they’re in wardrobe fittings, that star has a lot of power and control, and that you’ve ceded some of the power and control to a person who may not be a great person. I texted you, Craig, because as we were talking about this producer, you are a person who’s hiring a ton of people. You’re hiring actors and crew and everybody else. I want to ask you, how concerned are you about not just can this person do this job, but are they going to be a monster either on set or do something off set that’s going to reflect badly on the show?

**Craig:** It’s an enormous concern. The tricky part when you’re dealing with actors, there is a lot of information floating around out there. A lot. Now, there are actors that people just say, “It’s gonna be worth it.” There are actors – and it could be the same actor – where somebody else says, “Life’s too short.” I have a little bit more of a “life’s too short” vibe. There are certain people that have been proposed, and I would think to myself, “They would be perfect, but life’s too short.”

But when you’re talking about all these other people that you can be hiring, heads of departments and things like that, the danger is that there is an interaction gap. I typically will call fellow showrunners to inquire about potential heads of departments. It’s also a joy when I can report back to them. I texted Albert Kim just the other day to say that the prop master that I checked in with him about and hired has been doing just such a wonderful job, and that’s great.

But we, who are running things, have a certain kind of interaction with those people, because we’re their boss. What’s happening though when we’re not there, and they’re the boss in their fiefdom? How does that go on?

One of the very interesting aspects of showrunning that I hadn’t even anticipated was that if there is any kind of serious HR complaint, that the executive producers are filled in. We’re told. Thank god it does not happen frequently at all. But it is an eye opener to go, “Oh, okay, that’s surprising, because my interactions with that person were of this kind.” Apparently, once the cats were away, the mouse was mean. That’s a little nerve-wracking. It’s harder to get a read on that by checking around.

**John:** Let’s talk about vetting, because when you are considering hiring a person, be it an actor, be it a crew person, you’re going to look at their references, but hopefully you’re gonna find somebody who you can go to to say, “Hey, can you tell me honestly what it was like working with this person?”

When I get those incoming emails, I will say, “Yes, let me call you about them,” unless that person is just so spectacular that I will just email back, like, “This is the best person in the world. You should absolutely hire them.” The phone call is your friend here, because people will be honest and direct in a phone calls in ways they will, for reasonable reasons, won’t want to put down in an email.

Your point about, yes, ask showrunners, but if you could find somebody else to ask, that’s also going to help a lot too, because you get a sense of who are they like to assistants. There have been cases where I’ve called up folks who were assistants to people, said, “Tell me about them. What was it like to work with them?” Because if I’m just asking the people who hired them, they could be really good at managing up and managing their bosses, but absolute a monster when it comes to the people working for them. I don’t want that in my life.

**Craig:** No, you don’t. But there’s only so much you can do. That said, do all the things you can do as best you can. There are going to be errors. As you try and figure out who should be joining your crew, whether it’s as an actor or as a craftsperson, do your best, ask your questions. Just understand some people will be lovely and yet not a good fit for the show, in which case a change is made, and sometimes some people will be very talented but nightmares for various reasons, in which case there must be a change. But you’re hoping for that beautiful thing where what you expected is what you get. We don’t tolerate what we used to.

I myself have become way more aware of my own anger levels. I’m angry all the time. I’m like the Hulk. I wake up angry. I go to bed angry. But my anger is not at people. My anger is not this irrational whatever. My anger is entirely about trying to figure out how to get the stuff that’s in front of me to be like the stuff that I want to be in front of me.

There are times where I get frustrated, because, let’s say… They make me go to meetings, John. I go to a lot of meetings. I don’t want to go to the meetings, but I go to the meetings, because they tell me it’s really important, because I have to answer the questions so people know what to do. I will go to a meeting and I will get asked a question and I will answer it. Then there’s like three more meetings that feel very duplicative to me, and the questions get asked again, and I answer them again and again. And then I show up on the day, and the answer I gave 12 times in meetings has not occurred. This is enormously frustrating.

I’m just very aware that the frustration can be expressed, I can express it firmly, but volume is kind of a thing. Also, I’ve become aware – this is something like, if I taught a showrunning school, this would probably be lesson of day 1. You as a showrunner may think of yourself as – you may have a low self-esteem. You may have a lot of core shame. You may think of yourself as a schlub. You may have imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter. When you interact with all of these other people, they are looking at you as the person who can fire them. You have this enormous influence on their lives. If you loathe them, not only will they get fired, but people are gonna call me, and then they’re worried that I’m gonna tell them that they’re no good. There’s a lot of just built-in fear. You have to remember what it was like talking to the big boss. You have to remember how intimidating that was, before that person even opened their mouth, before they did anything.

That lesson in awareness of your own power is really important, because I think a lot of people in Hollywood with power don’t feel like they have it, and so they don’t act like they have it. You have to just remind yourself that you have it.

No one’s perfect. There are moments. But we are hearing quite a bit about some people for whom it seems the moment of awareness will either never come or has yet to come, and no matter how many times people have officially complained, they don’t seem to care.

**John:** We’ve talked about Scott Rudin on the podcast before. There was a person who – it was like this weird badge of honor to have survived working in his office. That was incredibly screwed up. We completely misunderstood the assignment in terms of how to think about having survived in a difficult office. I think and hope we’ve moved on a bit from that and that we have come to understand, both as employers and as employees, the social contract we’ve made there cannot be about subjugation and control.

**Craig:** That’s right. We will always be a strange business in that we are empowering artists with a lot of money and a lot of control, and that means writers, directors, actors, as well as other artists, like cinematographers and production designers. Artists aren’t necessarily the most rational, calm-headed people in the world. It’s one of those things. There’s brains that work a certain way. Everybody accepts a certain amount of that. There are things that I think showrunners or directors or actors do, that if you did in an escrow office, you’d probably be shown the door almost immediately.

**John:** Oh my god, the number of conversations I’ve had with Mike where he’s like, “I cannot believe that this is permissible in your industry,” because he’s coming from a more corporate setting. He’s like, “How is that even possible?” It’s how it all works.

**Craig:** It is possible because you are dealing with very specific brains. You’ve gathered a lot of people together who are artists. There is a case to be made that extreme artistic talent and mental illness are very hard to distinguish from each other, that there’s probably quite a bit of overlap. People understand a little bit of it.

Also, specifically with actors, there is this understanding that no matter what we’re all doing, they’re the ones on screen, which means if they’re having a day, you gotta figure it out, because we can’t have the scene, which will exist forever in fixed form, be bad because they were having a day and everyone else said, “That’s unacceptable.” Then of course, you don’t want to necessarily encourage them to have their days. You have to figure out how to make it all work, and we generally do.

**John:** That’s very familiar to anybody who’s a parent. It’s like, how do you get through this tough situation without creating a pattern in which this is how you’re gonna deal with these situations all the time.

**Craig:** Showrunning and parenthood are remarkably similar. Remarkably. When you were raising Amy, I’m sure you and Mike at some point turned to each other and said, “She’s gonna be complaining about us in therapy, what, in about 10 years,” because you can’t help it. You can’t help it. It’s gonna happen. It’s just gonna happen. I know that there are probably people that have complained about me to their therapists, because I’m in charge.

Do you remember when you were starting out, the people that were in charge, it didn’t matter who they were, that one thing that everybody could bond over is either making fun of or complaining about the boss. You hope that you can be as close to, “You know what? He’s a great guy. He just has his weirdnesses.” That’s the best you can hope for.

**John:** That’s the best you can hope for, for sure. 100 percent. As we wrap up this topic, it’s easy to think about red flags. Let’s talk about some green flags. This is something, if you’re seeing these patterns, that’s a good sign.

One thing I always look for as a green flag is they repeatedly work with the same people again. They’ve worked with that director, that producer time and time over. There’s something there that’s working, and they’re willing to work together again. That’s generally a green flag for me.

**Craig:** Agreed. Also, what is their personal life like? It’s not anything that’s determinative. But if somebody is clearly going through a phase in their life where they have a relationship that’s falling apart, they are being sued, they’re getting into bar fights, they’ve become unreliable, that’s a problem.

Best practice, green flag, somebody whose life appears to be rather stable. They’ve got good people around them. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been married for 30 years to the same person. It just means that there’s a certain stability in terms of their management, their friendships, their living situation, the way that they comport themselves. That’s always a green flag to me.

**John:** When people say spontaneously, “I love them,” you get a sense, oh, people love them. They didn’t have to say that. It’s not just they love their work. They actually love being around that person. Green flag.

**Craig:** Huge green flag. The thing is, we want to love people. When you hear that, you’re like, what a relief. The best information is exactly that: “I love them.” I’ve said to people – they’ve asked me about an actor or they’ve asked me about a crew person, I’m like, “I would take a bullet for this person.” The best recommendation you can get, the best green flag is, “I absolutely love this person. You may not hire them when I need them.” That’s the best green flag there is.

**John:** Red flag/green flag combo here. If you’re looking at their social media and they seem like a not stable person on social media, they’re not gonna be a stable person in your actual life. The green flag version of this is, you look at their social media, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I get this person. I get what they’re into. They’re posting some dog photos. They are also talking about things in a rational way.” That’s a green flag for me.

**Craig:** Yes. When it comes to actors, I have to say I’m old-school in the sense that I believe that backstage is backstage. What we want people to see are the characters that the actors play. That’s what we want. Obviously, there’s enormous interest in actors’ personal lives, and people are always gonna be asking questions.

But if social media feels a little bit like, “Hey, once the cameras are off, my reality show begins,” that’s a red flag for me. Green flag, like you said, once the cameras are off, the things that I put on social media are not that different from what anyone puts on social media, that implies a certain stability and maybe possibly the absence of extraordinary narcissism, which is always a red flag.

**John:** Probably – this is something you actually texted me – one of the best handers-out of red flags and green flags is your casting director, because casting directors, they know all the actors. They know the actors who they’ve seen over the last 20 years and the interpersonal relationships between those actors. They get a sense of that. You said casting directors. I said other actors. Those are folks who know what these people are actually like.

**Craig:** Yes. If I had a choice between asking an actor or a casting director, and I can only pick one, I would pick the casting director, because actors can have remarkable on-screen relationships with actors who are nightmares everywhere else.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** But casting directors hear back from everybody. They hear back from the directors and the producers, so they get the feedback. And they have been tracking people over the course of years. And they also saw those people when they were starting out. They can also say, “This person’s become a monster,” as opposed to, “This person has been just a solid human being from the very, very jump, and they continue to be.”

Our casting director this year is Mary Vernieu, and she was so helpful in that regard for a lot of the people that we’re bringing on. I have to say it’s been fantastic. Every choice, we’ve been rewarded. Green flags everywhere. Very, very excited.

**John:** Let’s answer one more question. I see one here from Steve about Dungeons and Dragons, so of course we have to answer this question.

**Craig:** Oh, gotta answer this question, yeah, obviously.

**Drew:** Steve writes, “My son Elliot is big into the Dungeons and Dragons world. He watches the movies, loves the 1980s cartoon, reads Monster Manuals from the library. Now he wants to play the actual game. However, it’s recommended for 12 and older, and he’s only 6. This hasn’t stopped him from designing dungeons,” he has a little image attached here, “and using monopoly dice to create characters. I’ve looked for junior versions but haven’t found any. Do you have any recommendations for a 6-year-old who desperately wants to be 12, so that he can better understand D&D?”

**John:** Oh, god, I’m so happy for Elliot. I’m so happy for Elliot’s dad, Steve, who’s gonna contribute to his love of Dungeons and Dragons. Googling around, I found a link I’m gonna put in the show notes here – it’s on Everhearth Inn – about how to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids. It gives some suggestions for here’s how you scale down the experience so it actually is appropriate for younger kids. It goes down to six. It goes down to Elliot’s age in terms of how you do that and how you get the sense of, okay, I am playing this character who’s doing this thing. Some simplified rules, so it’s very straightforward, but also fun for a kid that age.

**Craig:** It’s a tough one, because I think, Steve, probably Elliot is special. A six-year-old who is reading the Monster Manual and is designing dungeons and using Monopoly dice to create characters is pretty advanced. The issue is, who is he gonna play with? You know your son better than we do, Steve. If you feel like your son is particularly advanced and can do this, then my suggestion is, perhaps there’s a world where if you play, Steve – I hope you do – that maybe you can build a little one-shot for you and maybe a couple of your friends who play and also Elliot. Then maybe if Elliot has a friend that really, really wants to play, then now there are two kids who want to play. But six is very young. It’s exciting, I think, for Elliot. But I think he’s probably a rarity.

**John:** My friend Quinn has a kid who also loves to play D&D and started really young. Quinn’s frustration was that it’s hard to find other kids his age who can actually do stuff. They got a little school group together, and they eventually started doing it, but it’s a challenge.

I think Craig’s instinct, where you, Steve, are gonna be the DM, and Elliot and hopefully some other friends or some other adults are going to play through a little bit with him, feels right, and you’ll find ways to have it make sense.

I love that he is really into the actual Dungeons and Dragons game, so I don’t want to send him into a video space, but there are some video game versions of D&D or things that are like that, that could scratch that itch for a while before he has the ability to sit down and roleplay with others. I’m just nervous about it because I don’t want to lose this ability to imagine worlds in his mind and the reading of it all to be looking at a screen.

**Craig:** The video games unfortunately will probably not be content-wise appropriate for him at six. Certainly would not steer him towards Baldur’s Gate 3.

**John:** Not Baldur’s Gate 3.

**Craig:** That would be bad, although, boy, I love that game. But no, he’s six. He’s so young. He’s so young. It really is about providing a fun environment for him, and also, no matter how special he is, making sure that the adventure or the nature of it is short. Anything beyond an hour is going to seem like a thousand years to him.

**John:** Or it might be he might want to play for six hours, but again, you have to be the parent who’s structuring this. I want to talk about Elliot’s dungeon here, because look at how great this is. It has a gibbering mouther in it, a mimic surprise, some flameskulls.

**Craig:** I would say gibbering [said like jibbering], by the way.

**John:** Jibbering, gibbering. I like jibbering. I like jibbering.

**Craig:** You like jibbering? I don’t actually know how that is pronounced.

**John:** We’ll look it up.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s jibbering. Yep, it’s jibbering.

**John:** Okay. But it’s great. The fact that he’s into this, that his handwriting is actually pretty good for a six-year-old too.

**Craig:** It’s outstanding. It’s so much better than mine was. Again, to reiterate how bad I am at drawing, this right now is about what a map I would draw would look like. But I love that he understands some basic concepts. For instance, it looks like there’s some sort of water in the beginning. And then there’s an arrow, which I love, that says turn to the right. And then there’s a huge room with the gibbering mouther. Obviously, that’s not an easy two words to have as a kid. Then mimic surprise, he corrected his spelling of “surprise,” which a lot of adults fail to do. I love that he understood what the point of the mimic was. It looks like he might’ve drawn a T for trap there.

**John:** I think it’s a trap, yeah. But he’s got his door symbols there just right too.

**Craig:** He’s got flameskulls.

**John:** Who doesn’t love a flameskull?

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:00:09].

**John:** Adventurers don’t.

**Craig:** It also says “the end dungeon,” so I suspected that there’s more planned.

**John:** There’s more.

**Craig:** Elliot is terrific. I will say this, Steve. Your son will be a DM. He has big DM energy.

**John:** He has DM energy. It’s true.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** He’s also very lucky to have you as a dad, because you’re trying to figure out how to help him do what he wants to do.

**Craig:** Thank you for not being a total monster.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ronan Farrow – it ran in The New Yorker this last week or maybe the week before – on RuPaul. The article’s title is RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business, which I think is just great. If you ask RuPaul how are you doing, RuPaul says, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” which I think is just the best answer.

**Craig:** Oh my gosh, that’s great.

**John:** I watch Drag Race. I’ve known of RuPaul for forever. Never met them in person. I thought the article was great and really dug into the weird contradiction of a very public face who’s incredibly private and is always trying to draw out, “You gotta reveal the real you,” from the drag queens who are competing on the show, and does not want to reveal the real him very much at all. Of course, this is all in service of a memoir that’s coming out. It’s just really good writing by Ronan Farrow, just a really good profile of an important media figure, RuPaul.

**Craig:** This goes exactly to my earlier comment about in front of the curtain and behind the curtain and, especially when you think about somebody who has specialized in bringing drag to the forefront, how presentational and performative that is – not performative like the fake performative, but performance-oriented – and how there is a backstage. Even on Drag Race, which shows you the backstage, that backstage is on stage. There’s a real backstage that you never get to, which is correct.

He says something in this article that is so – I don’t know if he’s been to therapy, but it sure sounds like it. “Feelings are indicators. They’re not facts.” That’s a fascinating way of putting it.

**John:** That’s very therapy, yeah.

**Craig:** Very therapy and a wonderful thing. Also, the thing about RuPaul that’s always been evident is how smart he is. Reading this, it just sounds like… We do profiles of people that do these things that seem overtly funny and frivolous and silly, and then when you meet them, you realize how smart, because again, or awards should only be won by people that do comedy, and Drag Race is comedy.

**John:** Also, you recognize that what RuPaul wants contestants to be able to do are not things that RuPaul himself could’ve done coming up. The expectations, the levels have gotten so high that you have to be able to be an amazing designer, an amazing performer, an amazing dancer, amazing everything. And that’s just the table stakes to start playing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also love how much of a businessperson he is. But you can’t make a show like that without being a very rigorous, serious person. Comedy is serious. I’m gonna read this. I’m fascinated by him. I really am. I just think he’s such a force. I’m so tired of us taking people who pretend to be serious seriously. I like taking people who pretend to be not-serious seriously. I think that’s far more interesting.

**John:** In our last episode we talked about counterfactuals. The counterfactual where we didn’t have RuPaul, where RuPaul wasn’t born or didn’t do drag or did some other thing, we would be at a different place. There would be drag 100 percent. But would we have the popularization, the mass platform of drag that we have now? I don’t think we do.

**Craig:** I don’t think we do. I think he’s an incredibly important person in that regard. There’s just an entire vocabulary we wouldn’t have. I think we know this for a fact, because until RuPaul came along, that culture existed.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** But mainstream wasn’t looking at it. Just wasn’t. Even when it popped through a little bit, like, what was the documentary, Paris is Burning?

**John:** Yeah, Paris is Burning. Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It popped out, and then it popped back down again. It’s not the same.

**John:** We always had drag performers. We had [unintelligible 01:04:32]. We had that gay camp sensibility. But it wasn’t all put together in a way like this.

**Craig:** No, and it wasn’t also unapologetic. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, it always seemed like we were laughing at the drag performance, and now we laugh with the drag performance. It’s very different.

I’m not a religious watcher of Drag Race, or any television show for that matter, as you know, but when I see it, it’s incredibly entertaining, and it’s so funny, but it also feels very authentic. Even though I know it’s reality television and a lot of it’s drummed up and not, you do feel like you are seeing the authentic culture happening in front of you. The people that they pull from are real. They’re not finding people and saying, “If you would be willing to start dressing up in drag, it would be great.” They are who they are.

**John:** Also, having been on the air for so many years, the queens who are competing now grew up with RuPaul’s Drag Race existing, and so they’ve been swimming in this water the entire time. Not just the expectations of performance but also the culture has changed too. In early seasons, contestants who were trans were hiding it, because it felt like that’s cheating to be trans and be on Drag Race. That seems absurd now, but things move pretty quickly.

**Craig:** Things move pretty quickly. I think RuPaul is at the center of it all. Also, he’s 9,000 feet tall. I wanted to go up and say something to him at the Emmys, because he’s at the Emmys every year, because he wins every year. I show up every four years, I guess. Maybe I’ll never show up again. But when I do show up, there’s RuPaul. I’ll tell you why I didn’t go up to him. Can you guess why I didn’t go up to him?

**John:** Intimidation?

**Craig:** Yes. Terrified. Terrified. In looking at the Ronan Farrow article here, I feel vindicated. I think that he would be like, “Get the eff away from me. I don’t know you.” But I would love to. I’m such an admirer of him as a creative force.

**John:** Craig, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a game. There’s a company called Glitch Games. I’ve definitely promoted them before on the show. They make escape room, puzzley type point-and-click games for iOS typically. I think it comes out maybe on Android, but who cares. This latest one, I can’t tell if I like it or if I loathe it. I’m putting it out there for people to see what they think.

**John:** It’s a $4 game, so it’s not a huge burden.

**Craig:** It’s a $4 game, so it’s worth the $4 bet. It’s just like their other games in that you’re in a facility and you have to figure out how to get out and there are a lot of puzzles, but the gimmick is that this facility was working on some sort of time loop thing. It’s an increment of time that you can set, I think, between 3 minutes and 10 minutes. It sends you back to the beginning and undoes most of what you’ve done. You solve puzzles. You figure out how to proceed. Then it goes schwoop, you’re back to the beginning, which means you have to re-solve a bunch of puzzles – not hard to do – to get further. I gotta be honest. I found it incredibly frustrating and I quit. But the puzzles are quite good, and I do love their game in general. People who have a little bit more patience than I do may actually really, really appreciate it.

**John:** Recursion.

**Craig:** Give it a shot. Recursion by Glitch Games.

**John:** Give it a shot.

**Craig:** It’s four bucks.

**John:** That was our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Woo-woop.

**John:** … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Wop-wop.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. 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’ll find the show notes to 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.

Thank you, a little shout-out to our Premium members, because it just keeps growing, which is fantastic. This last year, we were able to not just pay for Matthew and Drew, but we also were able to give some money away. We zero out our balances every year. We were able to give away some money to some really good charities. Thank you very much for our Premium-

**Craig:** You and I also got to buy really nice beach houses.

**John:** That’s what it is. It’s the beach houses plus that. For clarification, we get no money ourselves out of this. It all gets donated away.

**Craig:** Yeah, no beach houses.

**John:** No beach houses for us. But thank you again to our Premium members. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, Drew and I both just watched a documentary series on HBO Max called Love Has Won, which is about a Colorado cult. Drew, you saw it most recently. Tell us what you liked, what freaked you out about it.

**Drew:** Everything freaked me out about it. I always have a terrified feeling that I’m somehow susceptible to cults, even though I’ve never actually run into one. Love Has Won is about the cult of Mother God.

**Craig:** She’s the one where they just left her body in the room?

**Drew:** Exactly. It starts with you seeing the body cam footage of the cops coming in and finding basically her mummified corpse, and then it goes from there.

**John:** Then we go back in time to follow it. But what’s so fascinating about this documentary is – because it’s all very recent, there are still members in that cult right now – they were online all the time. They were also posting YouTube. They have so much footage of just inside the cult while it was just doing this normal stuff. It’s not all recreations or just talking head testimony. It’s a lot of just actual real footage of what it was like being inside this cult.

I love cults. I just think they’re great story fodder, because you have charismatic leaders, you have people who are devoted to it, who are sacrificing other things. There’s that sense of a mission that is so cinematic. There’s something just really appealing to me about cults. I don’t ever want to join one. I don’t want to ever start one. Maybe Scriptnotes is a cult. I don’t know. But I dig them.

**Craig:** We’re the worst cult ever.

**John:** We’re the worst cult. We don’t make any money.

**Craig:** I’m just fascinated by where cult leaders come from. In this case, Amy Carlson, prior to becoming a cult leader, was a manager at a McDonald’s. Being a manager at a McDonald’s is probably very hard to do. But I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the skillset required there and running a cult.

**John:** The documentary would actually push back about that, because she was a manager at McDonald’s, but a rising manager. She wasn’t just managing one store. She was moving up the corporate chain a bit.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** She was able to really motivate her employees in a way that feels like has analogous skills to getting people on your side and following you to believe that you are the incarnation of God.

**Craig:** I see. Do you think that her belief that the Jews wanted everyone to do the work and they would take the money was part of how she got them to do their jobs better? Why is it always the Jews? I don’t know this lady.

**John:** A fair criticism of the documentary, which I think you can look at both ways, is that in trying to really look at the cult from its own perspective and emotionally connect inside the cult, they did leave out a lot of their crazier conspiracy beliefs and their QAnon stuff and all that kind of stuff. They really were focusing on what it felt like personally in there, rather than their bigger belief system. But it’s funny to me how once you believe yourself God, you do look for villains, and funny how they often become Jewish.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know why it always happens. I like that their belief is that Adolf Hitler’s intention was to serve the light. I think he was pretty clear about his intentions, actually. I don’t think we have to guess there, do we? He wrote a whole book.

**John:** He did, yeah.

**Craig:** He wrote a whole book.

**John:** Of his struggle. Thinking to cults in general, they’re easy targets for cinematic stories, for villains, because they’re sinister, they have dark motivations. You and I grew up in a time of panic over Satanic cults and these people who were sacrificing babies. That never happens.

**Craig:** That just doesn’t happen.

**John:** It doesn’t. Instead, we have a lot of people who believe themselves to be incarnations of God and to have divine messages, and the people who follow them believe they are doing right for the world. They believe that they alone can save things.

**Craig:** It does seem like the Catholic Church and the Baptist Church and Pentecostal, all the big traditional Christian movements, big ones, do think that there’s a lot of these Devil-worshiping cults out there. And maybe there were in the, I don’t know, 1400s, but now, that’s not a problem.

Every now and then, some town will want to put up some sort of religious thing, and then they’re saying, okay, the court said you have to let every religion do it if they want, and then the local Satanist group shows up, and they’re just a bunch of dorks that like to wear black. They’re always like, “We’re really actually very nice.”

It’s this kind of New Agey baloney. It’s baloney. A lot of baloney about energy, past lives, and all that stuff. And a lot of the things that I think a lot of people believe, but in a perfectly innocuous way, some people take so seriously. That plus the cult of personality leads to these extraordinary situations, where people are so deep in, there’s no way out, because once you start picking at one thread, the whole thing falls apart, and they’re so brutal about you leaving. Once you’re in, you get love bombed, and only they understand you, and only they care about you, and then you’re stuck.

**John:** The obvious reflection is like, what is the difference between a cult and religion? Religion has structure around it that lives on beyond its creator. Obviously, so many of our religions, if you look back in the early phases of them, look a lot like our cults. But I’m curious about secular cults, cults that don’t go for any grand or religious view. They still have to have some perspective on what’s next.

I imagine there will be some kind of AI cults coming up here. Some of our charismatic founders of these corporations are very analogous to cult leaders. People will follow them to the ends of the earth.

**Craig:** Elon Musk feels culty.

**John:** Yeah, it does feel culty. I’ll be curious to see what that looks like. I guess in some way, Elon Musk, there was an expectation like, no, you need to sleep at the factory in order to make sure this all works right. The people who were working for him were not just working for that paycheck. They truly believed in the mission.

**Craig:** Yes. Donald Trump clearly is a cult leader. There’s no way to argue he’s not. That is a cult. They behave in the most cult-like way possible. All of these movements seem to collapse when the cult leader dies. They are ultimately about the person. They cannot exist past it. This woman, Amy Carlson, she dies in 2021, and that’s the end of that.

**John:** Actually, it’s still dribbling on a bit. Her people, they still believe what she believed, but they haven’t all held together.

**Craig:** It’s gonna fall apart. It just doesn’t work. L. Ron Hubbard died pretty early on in Scientology. It was David Miscavige who really continues to be the hub of that wheel. I don’t know how old he is, but one day he won’t be here. He will go the way of all mortal beings, and then we’ll see what happens to Scientology too.

**John:** We’ll see what happens. Did it jump past that initial needing to have the charismatic founder where it can keep going with its own energy? Maybe. But we won’t know until we see.

**Drew:** I feel like LA is lousy with those centering cults though. Scientology is probably the most prominent of that. But there’s the workout cults. There’s all those certain workout gyms. There’s one right now that will give you money off your membership if you get a tattoo of the brand.

**Craig:** That’s disgusting. That’s insane.

**Drew:** Isn’t that crazy?

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**Drew:** All the acting stuff too. Those are all little mini cults.

**John:** Oh, god, yeah.

**Craig:** No question. No question. They’re built around people.

**Drew:** That’s fair. And an idea of better… It’s all that, yeah.

**Craig:** Life improvement?

**Drew:** [Crosstalk 01:17:46].

**Craig:** Yeah, life improvement.

**John:** Exception proving the rule, QAnon, it feels like a cult. There is an entity who’s supposedly Q, but there’s no actual person there. There’s nothing you can point to. Q could be anybody, anything. It feels like it’s now dying down. But I was surprised it was able to be as successful as it was without any visible figurehead there.

**Craig:** There was Q. That’s why the QAnon movement was so pernicious, because there isn’t a single person that you could pick apart and point at as having feet of clay. It was this thing that would just show up, like receiving messages from the sky. It was actually quite brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s floridly stupid. But again, people, once they dig in and they believe it… And it does appear that Q was the son of the guy that owns 8chan or whatever that thing was, and then other people probably posed as it. It’s kind of remarkable how they did a little end-run around having a person be around.

**John:** Getting back to the main episode, how do you make sure the person you’re gonna hire is not actually a cult leader? Check their social media. Do they claim themselves to be God? That’s a red flag.

**Craig:** Do they have a lot of people following them around? If you’re like, “Yeah, we’re thinking about casting you,” and they’re like, “Great. One request is that my entourage of 80 people come with me, and also no one can wear the color blue,” and blah, blah, blah. You’re like, “Oh, no.”

**John:** There are some celebrities who have those entourages. Maybe we have to watch out for them as being cult leaders.

**Craig:** There are celebrities who could, in a second, make a cult. Thank you, Taylor Swift, for having some restraint. If Taylor Swift wanted to install herself as the head of a religious movement, she could, within a day. It would be massive, and it would be serious. Thank you. Once again, I should say, thank you, Taylor Swift.

**John:** Let’s leave it there. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Bye, guys.

Links:

* [Strands](https://www.nytimes.com/games/strands) from the New York Times
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLqgK_LQKS4)
* [Past Lives by Celine Song](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Past-Lives-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Irma Vep – Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VY5vfWIjYE)
* [Is This Hollywood’s #MeanToo Moment?](https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/hollywood-me-too-mean-toxic-bullying-tv-film-jonathan-van-ness-ellen-degeneres.html) by David Mack for Slate
* [How to play Dungeons and Dragons for kids](https://everhearthinn.com/articles/how-to-play-dungeons-and-dragons-for-kids/)
* [RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/11/rupaul-doesnt-see-how-thats-any-of-your-business) by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
* [Recursion – Glitch Games](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recursion/id1658817293)
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* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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